Boards often deal with the issue of how fast their company can realistically pursue and achieve its goals. But they also deal with the tradeoffs they will have to make as well as the potential costs. A recently published book can help boards and management navigate this issue, and its insights contrast sharply with the conventional wisdom emanating from the tech world.
In a Business Insider article by Henry Blodget, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg famously directed his team to “Move fast and break things”, reportedly also saying, “Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.” Such intentional destructiveness might seem to be a necessity in our era of rapid and constant technological change. However, Move Fast & Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems, a book by Harvard Business School Professor of Technology and Operations Management Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, a serial entrepreneur and Prof. Frei's wife, suggests that it is equally possible — in fact, preferable — to be expeditious and constructive, rather than necessarily destructive for the sake of speed.
Their book, published in October 2023 by Harvard Business Review Press, lays out a detailed path for management teams — and the boards that oversee them — to identify key issues that may be limiting success; understand and articulate the opportunities that addressing these issues will provide; and pursue goals in a highly structured yet expeditious manner. In particular, the authors point out that it is unnecessary to “break things” to achieve ambitious goals and, in fact, that it is quite possible to “fix things” along the way. They illustrate that to “move fast and break things” is to be “recklessly disruptive,” with all the risks that such actions create. It is their view that the purportedly adverse alternatives of either “moving fast” or being a responsible leader with respect to one's stakeholders — a characterization they attribute to the aura surrounding Silicon Valley — is an unnecessary choice into which to force oneself.
The authors provide a 2×2 matrix showing on one axis a company's relative degree of trust it has engendered with its stakeholders and on the other axis the speed with which a company moves. Low trust and speed are associated with “inevitable decline,” higher speed without an increase in trust is associated with “reckless disruption,” high trust with low speed is associated with “responsible stewardship” — which may sound like an attractive attitude, but will detract from progress — and high speed paired with high trust is associated with “accelerating excellence.” The latter strategy is the authors' recommendation.
To help business leaders and boards better understand exactly what they should be doing and when, the authors organize their approach into a one-week analog, with details about specific tasks to be pursuing each day:
- “Identify your real problem” (Monday)
- “Solve for trust” (Tuesday)
- “Make new friends” (Wednesday)
- “Tell a good story” (Thursday)
- “Go as fast as you can” (Friday)
Each of these subheadings is intended to help management and boards organize their plans and take concrete steps. For each “day,” the authors provide helpful lists of impediments that will likely be encountered and how to overcome them. The biggest theme of these impediments is inertia — the various types of resistance that can arise when seeking to change anything. As I often say in my guest lectures, “The only animal that likes change is a wet baby.”
In a brief interview with Prof. Frei, she characterized the book as a “secret memo” for management teams and boards on how to do things, and pointed out that by day five — “Friday” — one can go fast. It is a particular pleasure to write this review, since I published a review of the authors' previous book, Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. The authors have succeeded again in publishing a book that is readily accessible and of great potential value to management teams and boards.