Frances Frei, a Harvard Business School professor and former Uber executive, shares her insights on accelerating change in organizations. She argues for the importance of 'righteous speed'—acting quickly while maintaining trust. Frances emphasizes the empowerment of teams for faster decision-making and reveals how practices like Ritz-Carlton's $2,000 rule enhance operational efficiency. She advocates reframing conflict as a form of competitive play to drive innovation and encourages curiosity to resolve workplace disagreements effectively.
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insights INSIGHT
Righteous Speed Exists
Hustle culture framed speed as permission to cause collateral damage instead of solving urgent problems responsibly.
Frances Frei argues you can move as fast as hustlers while building trust and fixing, not breaking, things.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Delegate Decision Authority
Empower more people to make decisions so the organization avoids bottlenecks and accelerates execution dramatically.
Use delegated authority instead of centralizing decision power to go 10–100x faster, Frances Frei advises.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Ritz-Carlton's Empowerment Signal
Ritz-Carlton trains staff to solve guest problems and gives them permission to spend up to $2,000 to fix issues as a signal of real empowerment.
That license plus training creates a contagious service culture and quick problem resolution.
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Frances Frei is a professor at Harvard Business School. Her research investigates how leaders create the context for organizations and individuals to thrive by designing for excellence in strategy, operations, and culture. She regularly works with companies embarking on large-scale change and organizational transformation, including embracing diversity and inclusion as a lever for improved performance. In 2017, Frances served as Uber’s first senior vice president of leadership and strategy to help the company navigate its very public crisis in leadership and culture.
Her partner Anne Morriss and her are the authors of Uncommon Service and The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. They are also hosts of Fixable, a leadership advice podcast from the TED Audio Collective, and they are recognized by Thinkers50 as among the world’s most influential business thinkers. Their newest book is Move Fast & Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems.
A lot of us assume that going fast is reckless. There are certainly times when that’s the case, but it’s also true that leaders going too slow at the wrong time can make things worse. In this conversation, Frances and I discuss how to do a better job of moving quickly when it’s time to address the toughest problems.
Key Points
Many of us believe that going fast is reckless and going slow is righteous. While there are times that is true, there are many examples where it’s not.
The fastest way to speed up your company is to empower more people to make more decisions.
Dare to be bad at something. Deciding what not to address allows you to go faster at what you’re best at.
Two key elements of completing work are work-in-progress and cycle time. Most leaders address cycle time first and miss the more substantial work-in-progress opportunities.
Create a way to fast-track projects that become important and build this into the culture of the organization.
Coaching for Leaders 