Chapter 4
Wednesday: Leverage the Power of Difference
Whatever problem you're tackling, you'll solve it better with people who think differently than you do. Wednesday focuses on inclusion-creating conditions for people to thrive because of their differences, not despite them.
Inclusion delivers substantial competitive advantages, from improved recruitment and retention to increased innovation and better decision-making. The unique contribution part is crucial-getting people to share what they know that others don't know is key to winning.
The "common information effect" explains why diverse teams sometimes underperform homogeneous ones: humans naturally focus on shared knowledge rather than unique information. However, inclusion cancels this effect by giving access to everyone's unique information. When we build teams that are both diverse and inclusive, we expand the available information dramatically.
This distinction between diversity and inclusion is critical. Many organizations get stuck at diversity-recruiting difference without managing it effectively-generating frustration about DEI efforts. Research shows it's inclusion, not just diversity alone, that boosts performance metrics like stock prices.
A culture of inclusion has four progressive levels that cannot be skipped:
1. Safe: People feel physically, emotionally, and psychologically safe regardless of who they are.
2. Welcome: People can bring an authentic version of themselves to work without penalty.
3. Celebrated: People are rewarded for contributing their unique perspectives because of who they are.
4. Championed: Inclusion permeates the organization as an ethical and competitive imperative.
Safety is foundational. If colleagues don't feel safe at work, it's your human, moral, and institutional responsibility to take action. Safety is rarely equitably denied, which is why protection efforts should prioritize those most vulnerable-female workers, people of color, and LGBTQ+ employees face higher risks of harassment.
Psychological safety-the ability to speak up without fear-is equally essential. Google's Project Aristotle found it to be the underpinning of all other performance drivers. Yet it's rarely equitably distributed, with men and white employees typically experiencing higher psychological safety than others. Those who are "the only" in their identity group often feel less psychologically safe.
Once safety is established, the next challenge is ensuring everyone feels genuinely welcome, including those representing visible differences (like race) or less visible ones (like religion, disability, or family status). Most organizations need to improve their entire HR lifecycle-recruitment, development, promotion, and retention. Companies like Duolingo have achieved impressive diversity by changing their recruiting strategies, such as only recruiting from universities where women represent at least 18% of computer science programs.
The next milestone is celebrating people because of their uniqueness-where a colleague isn't just welcomed despite being "quirky" but valued specifically for being themselves. People typically experience celebration within teams, often clustered around exceptional managers who simultaneously set high standards while showing deep devotion to their team members.
The final frontier is when celebration of difference becomes institutionally ingrained-where people feel championed for their uniqueness consistently across all teams and functions. At this stage, the focus shifts to building a culture of inclusion. Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Fruergaard Jrgensen focused on cultivating shared conviction in inclusion's benefits while addressing fears that some would be left behind: "We're not down-prioritizing Danish men in light blue shirts... We are giving everyone the same opportunities... It's actually making all of us stronger."
Chapter 5
Thursday: Craft Your Change Narrative
Most organizational change efforts fail-over 70 percent by some measures. But with a solid foundation built earlier in the week, Thursday focuses on storytelling to activate the organization. The mission is crafting a narrative so powerful and compelling that it unleashes the company's energy toward change.
The foundation of persuasive communication is understanding something so deeply that you can describe it simply. T-Mobile exemplifies this principle with their "un-carrier" turnaround strategy. By deeply understanding their position, they distilled their entire approach into a single word that captured their commitment to being everything the wireless industry wasn't.
Change storytelling should begin by looking backward, honoring company history and identifying what shouldn't change. This approach acknowledges the concerns of organizational "gatekeepers"-those with long institutional memories who worry about what might be lost. When Dara Khosroshahi became Uber's CEO, rather than positioning himself as a savior, he committed to "retain the edge that made Uber a force of nature" and even honored his predecessor with a standing ovation.
If trust has been broken with stakeholders, rebuilding it requires acknowledging painful history. Leaders must combine optimism about building a better tomorrow with honest accountability for past mistakes and their human costs. Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria's 2014 apology for the school's historical treatment of women ("The school owed you better, and I promise it will be better") exemplifies this approach.
After opening your audience's hearts by honoring the past, you must provide a powerful rationale for creating a different future. Domino's turnaround under CEO Patrick Doyle exemplifies this-he shocked the system by publicly showcasing scathing customer feedback about their terrible-tasting pizza on billboards in Times Square. Rather than downplaying criticism, they embraced authenticity by taking full responsibility. This bold approach generated 10% same-store sales growth in less than a year and sent the stock price soaring.
The third part of your change narrative must describe how the organization will change-your Very Good Plan that resolves the tension. This requires balancing two critical signals: rigor and optimism. For rigor, reinforce the logic pillar of your trust triangle by detailing your change strategy and operating plan. For optimism, share your genuine enthusiasm as a self-appointed "chief change evangelist." As Ursula Burns reflected during Xerox's pivot from manufacturing to services: "Telling people the reality and giving them hope by providing the vision for what it's going to look like when we get through this is fundamental to having people follow you."
Don't limit yourself to words-consider visual storytelling like Jan Carlzon's comic-style book for Scandinavian Airlines' turnaround, which used a cartoon plane to communicate the company's strategy. Similarly, Momofuku CEO Marguerite Zabar Mariscal created beautifully designed pocket-size "guidebooks" for employees when the company reached 1,000 people.
Change leaders need to communicate far more frequently than they think necessary-likely 2-3 times more often. Repetition calms anxiety, ensures understanding, and enables "absence leadership" where others can act confidently without your oversight. Former Ford CEO Alan Mulally exemplified this by relentlessly communicating his "One Ford" plan at every meeting and distributing it on wallet-size cards to all employees.
Emotions are an underexplored yet crucial element of change leadership. Evolution has taught us to pay careful attention to others' emotions, particularly those with power over us. This unconscious vigilance means leaders' emotions-whether optimism or anxiety-are highly infectious throughout an organization. Self-awareness is key to using emotions effectively without letting them sabotage your change story.
Chapter 6
Friday: Accelerate Through Empowerment
On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a powerful speech about "the fierce urgency of now," warning that "there is such a thing as being too late." This captures Friday's essential message: the opportunity for change is finite, and timing matters as much as action.
Having built trust, made allies, and crafted your change story, you've earned the right to move with urgency. This isn't about "hustle culture" but about cutting through organizational complexity to address problems that deserve immediate attention.
The fastest way to speed up an organization is to empower more people to make decisions. When only one person makes all decisions, speed becomes a direct trade-off. Even slightly widening the decision-making aperture can dramatically increase organizational tempo.
General Martin Dempsey demonstrated this with "Mission Command" in the US Army, teaching subordinates to make battlefield decisions independently where conditions constantly shift. For leaders implementing their Very Good Plan, this means clearly communicating which execution decisions won't require their approval.
Operational empowerment, like Ritz-Carlton's policy allowing employees to spend up to $2,000 per incident to solve guest problems without manager approval, delivers both speed and other benefits. Though franchise owners initially threatened to sue over this policy, most incidents are resolved with much less expense while creating enormous customer loyalty.
The "impossible triangle" of construction-cost, quality, speed-illustrates that you can only reasonably expect two of these three attributes. To prioritize speed, you must deliberately deprioritize something else. Southwest Airlines exemplified strategic trade-offs by deliberately being "bad" at certain aspects of the flying experience (no meals, assigned seats, or bag transfers) to achieve faster plane turnaround times.
Every successful change campaign shares an acute awareness that time is a precious, perishable resource. This culture of urgency is created by leaders committed to shared beliefs that inform their actions. FedEx exemplifies this culture of speed. In 1973, facing bankruptcy, a frontline employee named Diane saved the company by tracking down a customer's wedding dress and chartering a Cessna to deliver it without asking permission. This bold action caught the attention of executives at the wedding who became customers, driving enough new demand to save FedEx.
We spend a third of our working hours in meetings-three times more than just a few years ago-and most of that time is wasted. Instead of simply banning meetings, we must get better at them. Claire Hughes Johnson advises investing in preparation: determine why you're meeting, what your objectives are, who needs to be there, and how you'll spend your time. With minimal effort, organizations can transform hour-long meetings into productive 20-minute sessions-the simplest way to build speed.
Little's Law reveals that start-to-finish time equals work in process (WIP) multiplied by cycle time. This means you can increase speed either by working faster or by reducing the number of projects in progress-and the latter is usually more effective. When Josh Silverman became CEO of Etsy, he discovered nearly 800 business development projects suffocating an organization of fewer than 1,000 people. By eliminating half these initiatives, Etsy gained critical speed.
Many organizations develop mechanisms to prioritize critical initiatives. Etsy implemented "ambulances"-high-priority projects that could bypass normal processes. These simple product fixes, like adding reassurance about credit card security, were implemented in days rather than months and quickly boosted revenue. Researchers Amy Edmondson and Ranjay Gulati call these "agility hacks"-methods that allow teams to speed past bureaucracy without disrupting the rest of the organization.
Conflict avoidance is a major obstacle to speed, creating what team expert Liane Davey calls "conflict debt." Nearly 60% of people find workplace disagreements unpleasant, and many avoid them entirely, slowing progress and eroding trust. Skilled conflict management is essential for acceleration. Research shows high-performing teams often have high levels of productive disagreement, and innovation requires what Linda Hill calls "creative abrasion"-the healthy debate of different ideas.
Chapter 7
The Sustainable Path Forward
After a week of transformative work, it's time to rest. Peak performance researchers Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz emphasize that "the real enemy of high performance is not stress... the problem is the absence of disciplined intermittent recovery." The expanded playbook is to move fast, fix things, and rest.
The journey toward Accelerating Excellence-creating high and rising stakeholder value while maintaining creativity and energy-is ongoing. Most organizations find themselves in Responsible Stewardship (high trust but slow) or Reckless Disruption (fast but damaging), or possibly even Inevitable Decline, lacking both trust and speed.
The central insight of Frei's work is that the trade-off between speed and care is entirely false. The most effective leaders solve problems rapidly while also taking responsibility for their stakeholders' success and well-being. They understand that trust is the cultural architecture that enables sustainable speed-the more trust they earn, the faster they can create enduring change.
This playbook works regardless of your specific organizational challenge, with the core premise that your problem is fixable on a much shorter timeline than you think. The fastest way to fail at change leadership is making it about yourself rather than empowering others to be great. Your mission isn't fixing everything, but convincing yourself and others that everything is fixable.
When you're ready to begin again, remember that at the center of any problem is a wobbly relationship that needs fixing, and the moment that matters most is now.
Chapter 8
Becoming a Trust-Building Leader
The ultimate lesson of "Move Fast and Fix Things" is that leadership is about creating the conditions for others to thrive. It's about building organizational trust and creating possibilities people believe in because they experience them firsthand.
Patagonia represents the gold standard of organizational authenticity, consistently aligning words and actions for nearly forty years. From donating 1% of revenues to environmental causes since 1985 to its founder Yvon Chouinard transferring ownership to entities dedicated to fighting climate change, the company has earned extraordinary trust by walking its environmental talk.
Microsoft's turnaround under Satya Nadella and Kathleen Hogan demonstrates how inclusion can drive performance. They transformed performance evaluations to value impact on others alongside individual contribution, creating a culture where people could bring their whole selves to work.
While Mark Zuckerberg's original "Move fast and break things" philosophy correctly identified how companies slow down from fear of mistakes, Frei argues you don't have to choose between speed and stability. Zuckerberg himself eventually pivoted to "moving fast together"-operating with urgency while "taking care of our company and each other." Such pivots shouldn't take ten years; they should happen much closer to a week than a decade.
The book's framework-Monday (identify your real problem), Tuesday (solve for trust), Wednesday (make new friends with different perspectives), Thursday (tell a good story connecting past, present and future), and Friday (empower everyone to execute at accelerated pace)-provides a practical roadmap for leaders at any level who want to drive meaningful change.
By investing equally in building trust and building speed, we create organizations capable of moving fast and fixing things-organizations where people want to work, customers want to buy, and communities want to support. In today's rapidly changing world, this balanced approach isn't just nice to have-it's the only sustainable path forward.
