Welcome to Part 2 of Everything We learned at Harvard Business
School. In our last episode, we talked
about the hard skills that Jean learned at HBS, which includes
strategy, finance, product and marketing.
In today's episode, we're going to go over the soft skills, some
of the skills that HBS is really known for and famous for, like
leadership and networking. Harvard Business School is
renowned for creating leaders and a lot of times people say
that the true value of the education at HBS is learning
your your own leadership style and then also all the networking
that you do. I'm Cherie.
I'm Jean. And we're the Tiger sisters.
If this is the first time you're meeting us, here's a brief
introduction. Jean is my older sister.
She graduated from Harvard Business School in 2017, and
she's had a kick ass career well before that as well.
So she worked in finance as her first job.
Coming out of undergrad. She was at Goldman Sachs and
then she transitioned her finance career into tech.
She was a product manager at the gaming company Zynga, and then
she went to Business School. After Business School, she LED
product augmented reality monetization at Snapchat, and
now we're working on our entrepreneurial journey
together, trying to make all these institutions and
industries that we worked in a little less gate kept so more
people can learn more about them.
I'm Cherie. I just recently graduated from
Stanford's Business School back in June, and we're now in this
new chapter of our left together.
So we hope you enjoy this episode and check out all of our
other videos in this season and also in the past seasons of
Tiger Sisters. And we're going to get started
right after this break. Hey guys, quick break to let you
know that we now have merch on sistersmatcha.com.
We have sweatshirts and T-shirts that we designed ourselves.
Go check it out and please rate US five stars on Spotify and
Apple Podcasts. These ratings are so important
for the distribution and survival of Tiger Sisters
Podcast. Thank you for your support.
OK, now let's get started on leadership.
It is one of the biggest pillars at HBS, if not the biggest
pillar. We studied all sorts of
leadership theory at HBS, from the classic command and control
style to the more modern servant leadership style.
And we're going to dive into the top styles of leadership today,
how they affect different companies, walking through
examples of different leaders at different companies, and also
kind of talk about how you can apply it in your life too.
I am so excited to talk about this because it seems kind of
like squishy, you know? But there are 4 common
leadership styles that we're going to outline.
And it's like actually really important because different
leadership styles directly impact the culture of a company
that you work for, how people think about performance and how
they grow in their career. So this is actually really
important to talk about. And performance translates to
stock price. To enter the chichi.
Enter HBS. Chichi sound a fact.
Yeah. So the first style leadership
we're going to talk about is servant leadership.
Gene, why don't you kick us off? So the idea of servant
leadership is to actually sort of flip the idea of leadership
on its head and kind of subverting the hierarchy where
when you're the leader, you approach leadership as serving
everyone who actually works for you.
So what does that mean? One really good example, we used
Starbucks in our previous episode.
Let's use Starbucks again. So Howard Schultz, who was the
CEO, longtime CEO of Starbucks, left.
They brought him back like he's kind of a legend, iconic.
He's iconic, and he's also iconic for sort of being the
star of a lot of HBS cases actually.
But Howard Schultz is a pretty famous instance of servant
leadership. And he really employed servant
leadership not only in the way that he actually led his
employees from the day and day-to-day, but also in how he
structured the policies of his company.
So he was one of the very first people to give benefits to even
part time baristas. And that was very much aligned
with the company values and the company culture of creating,
creating the idea of 1/3 space. So he wanted to create a third
space not only for his customers, but he wanted his
employees to feel that as well. And he was like, they can't feel
that, and they can't create that sort of comfort, comfortable
space for customers unless they also have amazing benefits.
Yeah, I feel like this is the epitome when people are like
leaders eat last, like this is the actual.
People say that. It's the name of a very famous
book. But also people say, like,
people who are talking about certain leadership are like,
leaders should eat last. And a lot of my classmates who
came from the military actually have this mindset as well.
Like, I think a lot of military folks come out of their training
and they're like, OK, this is the type of there's the
leadership where you're like up in the front, like leading
people. But then also it's actually more
empowering at times when you're like leading from the back to
because then you're empowering your employees or your team to
drive forward your mission. Like, you don't even have to be
at the front and like be, you know, dictating anything.
Yeah, it's actually very powerful when employees,
especially a lot of employees see you doing the things and see
you also like changing the printer cartridge or like doing
simple things that sort of illustrate, hey, I'm in here in
the trenches with you guys. Like, I'm not above anyone task
just because I'm your boss. I'm here doing it with you too.
It's actually the type of leadership that I enjoy the
most. Yeah.
Like when I was working with my engineering team and my design
team at LinkedIn, it's not like I was just like telling people
what to do. I was doing it with them.
So we're like like Co creating together.
And actually one of my bosses at LinkedIn, Albert, he also
employed servant leadership and as like a gift to me when I got
promoted is that he gave me two terracotta soldiers like, you
know, like the like from like from China.
They were, they're at home here somewhere.
But like they're like these small miniature shoulder
soldiers that like one was standing up and one was like
kneeling down and he's like, I give these to you.
Congratulations on your promotion.
Like remember, certain leadership is how we serve what
I know. So like.
Such good lore. This is like I.
Don't even remember. I don't think you've ever told
me this story. And I had it on my desk for the
longest time out at work. So it's this is actually very
meaningful for me. So I'm.
Such AW boss, I know. He's such a good.
Boss he gave you. He gave me two terracotta
soldier statues, like literally miniature and they sat at my
desk to remind me of like servant.
Leadership. Oh, that's so beautiful.
So I think it's also like a really hot phrase nowadays.
So if you're taking anything away from this episode, like you
should know, like servant leadership is a kind of like
very buzzy and people are excited about it.
Yeah, it's a good term to like throw into the conversation
actually, if you're talking came about leadership, service
leadership. But back to the example of
Starbucks. Not only does servant leadership
help foster a better environment for the employees, where servant
leadership also comes in for the bottom line is that once you
have employees who are more invested in the company, they do
a better job at their job. They also go above and beyond at
creating a better customer experience, which then in turns
translates to more profit and a better bottom line.
So think increased brand loyalty and increased revenue growth.
Yeah. So if the experience is better
for the employee, like the outcome is like 10 times greater
for the customer itself. So this is really a great
leadership style to lean into. This is a good example where it
translates pretty directly Starbucks.
That's why I like this example. OK, so the second style of
leadership is called transformational leadership.
Sheree, can you tell us about that?
So the. Classic example for
transformational leadership is thinking about a leader who just
has like the most insane vision and is like super compelling and
you're like OMG, I definitely want to follow this person.
A classic example is Steve Jobs. If you guys have seen any of
his, you know, on stage product announcements, he is just like a
visionary that people think. Obviously he's really great at
speaking, really great at presenting, but he's also really
gifted at creating a compelling vision that everyone wants to
buy into. His vision definitely energizes
employees and helps them dream up what they could possibly
achieve together. Yeah, and I think in turn it
also translates into a cult following of fans, right?
Like what other brand has so much cachet and brand power and
loyalty aside from Apple? Yeah, people love, I mean people
love their Apple products like nothing else compares.
Yeah, and also part of it is the idea of like the cult of the
leader. That really plays into it too,
right? People like back in the day, I
don't know if people remember this, but people used to line up
for hours, like overnight, waiting for the new iPhone to
come out. And it wasn't just because the
iPhone was so revolutionary every time.
It was because people wanted to be the first to get their hands
on whatever Steve Jobs had dreamed up.
He was really special and amazing and drove not only a lot
of that innovation, but also kind of the concept of the
entire company was like really wrapped up in him, yeah.
I mean, it's not even just the customers.
I think the employees like this is like leadership,
transformational leadership for the employees.
I think people like were really afraid of him but also so
enamored by him. Yeah, People would talk about
how he was so magnetic and when he, like, looked you in the eye,
he could compel you to do anything like, just by like,
looking at you in the eye. And you'd be like, Steve, that's
not possible. I cannot possibly make that
deadline. He would look you in the eye.
Be like Sri. Yes, you can.
I believe in you. Hey, I'm over here.
I was. Looking into my camera.
But then people would make the impossible happen.
Yeah. And then a more like modern day
example of this. A lot of people say that working
for Elon Musk also felt the same at times.
And he's kind of created that sort of help following within
his own company as well. But there are downsides.
Yeah. I mean, there are downsides
because like, for example, with Steve Jobs passing away, I think
there's a big question mark of like, when that happened, who
would take over and would they even have the same effect?
On the company, Tim, Apple doesn't have the same legs.
Some apples a little bit different you, don't you?
Don't get that Steve job. He doesn't hit the same, but I
mean, Apple is still a very wildly successful company.
But I think as that chapter ended with Steve Jobs stepping
away, stepping down, a part of the company changed as well and
I'm sure for the employees on the inside.
So the last take away is that transformational leaders spark
massive innovation and they can change entire industries, but
they must have strong management teams behind them in order to
maintain stability. OK.
So the third style of leadership we're going to talk about is
transactional leadership. Gene, can you let us know a
little bit more about? This yes, transactional
leadership is kind of the tried and true classic standard of
leadership. It's also sometimes called
carrot and stick leadership, and I think the most famous original
example is Jack Welch at GE in the 80s and the 90s.
And what this leadership style is, is creating very clear
rewards structures and penalties.
Jack Welch was one of the very first CEO's to implement what he
called a rank and yank system where the bottom 10% of
performers were let go every single year.
And then he also rewarded out performers in an outsize way.
So if you were the top 10% performers, you got a major
bonus way more than anyone else you know was not in the top 10%.
This worked really, really well. GE was massively successful in
the 80s and 90s, outperformed a ton, and that's why this kind of
became the standard for a lot of different companies.
So I worked at Goldman, Sri mentioned right out of
undergrad, and that's what we did at Goldman.
The bottom 10% of people were let go every single year.
And I thought it was normal because it was my first job out
of school. I mean, The thing is, I don't
know how I feel about the style of leadership because the
culture that it creates, it's like extremely cutthroat.
It can be a very successful method to incentivize and reward
people for doing the best work. But yes, it's incredibly
cutthroat and competitive. Yeah.
And I would say like a lot of financial industries, like
working in investment banking, private equity, sometimes
consulting, it is like an upper out system instead of yes, rank
or yank. Like the new phrasing is up or
out is up or out. Like you either get promoted or
you got to go, you're fired. I think it puts a lot of stress,
especially on young people. Like when I was like fresh out
of school and my friends were working investment banking, they
were so nervous about their like performance review, if they were
going to be promoted or not. Didn't that make them work
harder and it made them perform? Better Yeah, and they made them.
It made them hate their Co worker like their Co workers.
At the expense of their mental. Health.
Yes, exactly. The thing is like my initial
reaction is to label this as toxic and like that's just like
me being like Gen. Z, like Oh my God, that's such a
toxic work environment. But I do think this works for
certain industries because even in tech, the sales org within,
if you have like a sales team within your tech company, which
many of them do. Like if you're working in B2B
SAS like a lot of sales orgs have, or out rank or rank or
yank type of structures. Do you incentivize salespeople?
Well, yeah, I mean. Purely the numbers driven.
In a sales org, the the main saying is you, you kill what you
eat or you eat what you kill. Have you ever heard that?
No. Oh, really?
Yeah. Oh, you eat what you kill.
So basically everything you do is accretive to you, but you
don't really get any necessarily, like, benefit of
the doubt. Otherwise it's like bring in the
money or leave. Like the reason you're here is
to hit your quota or exceed your quota.
It's just like so numbers driven that at the end of the day they
haven't hit their. Metrics, yeah, or closed.
A certain number of deals. Yeah, there's just no like
allowance for I guess extenuating circumstance.
Yeah, the way that I feel like other organizations within a
certain company might have. Yeah, I think also you know why.
It's because in other parts of the org, like in product or
engineering or whatnot, they work on much longer term
projects which take longer than 1/4, can take longer than two
quarters, can even take multiple years to see results.
So it's harder to judge them on such discrete metrics versus a
lot of times, most of the times sales orgs are judged within the
quarter. Yes, that's right, it's within
the. Quarter, so you have you live
and die by your numbers. Yeah, at LinkedIn and at a lot
of companies that have sales teams, the top like 1%, I think
of people of top performers would have an incentive and it's
called club and they would bring like top performers.
This is just the lore. I've obviously never been, but
my friends who worked in sales like would tell me about you
weren't in the club. I wasn't in the club.
She literally was not in the club.
I wasn't on the sales team #1 so.
She wasn't in the club. And many people who were in the
sales team were not in the club anyways.
Just like you, but they would bring.
Them to like Bali or something or like something crazy, it
would go to club. Yeah, yeah, it was kind of
similar at Zynga. The number one performing studio
each quarter would get a massive reward.
So the entire studio, it would be like 60 to like 120 people
would all go on a trip together. So that's why I went to Hawaii
multiple times with my team as a reward trip.
We went to Vegas multiple times as reward trips, went on ski
trips together. But that doesn't.
Really happen as much anymore. I feel like people clamp down on
it. But anyways that glory days are
over. I have one more kind of lore
story. Is that at Snap, at the very
beginning, we sold ads at SAP and at the very beginning, the
way that the incentive structure was was that salespeople would
literally get 1% of what they sold, which is insane.
Like, if you just run the numbers, some of those sales
leaders made out like bandits, like did so so well for
themselves. But that is very, very much back
to what we were saying. Carrot and stick, the ultimate
carrot. You get to keep 1% of the
revenue of your ad sales. Yeah.
You literally eat when you kill. It's it's actually like very
powerful. Money, money, money, money,
money. So yeah, so that is
transactional leadership. Shitty.
Now we shake hands. So the last and final form of
leadership we're going to talk about is laissez faire, also
known as hands off leadership. I thought it was pronounced
laisse faire, Laissez faire, laissez faire, laissez faire,
laissez faire. Laissez.
Faire Anyway yeah this is actually a very controversial
leadership style and it's basically the idea that there is
no official hierarchy and everyone in the team will self
organize around the most important goals and those will
be self identified and that's what people are going to sort of
gravate gravitate towards and work on and so one really famous
example of this is this company called valve.
There's definitely HBS cases written about them.
I did a case about them I. Learned about this at.
Stanford as well with an HBS case.
Probably we at Stanford's cases are all HBS cases.
OK, so Valve is the video game developer behind Steam, and the
idea behind them doing laissez faire leadership is that they
think it unleashes a massive amount of creativity.
And the idea that people can sort of socialize and put their
energy into whatever projects they deem the most important,
that kind of creates this, like, massive, you know, explosion of
creativity. And people are doing all these
things that never would have been sort of come up with if you
had ahead of time done like a major strategy exercise and, you
know, sort of had top down leadership deciding what people
focus on. Yeah.
So it's pretty controversial, I think.
Yeah, my two cents. Nobody asked my two cents.
What? Are your two cents.
My two cents on this leadership. I'm like, when I first learned
about this, I was like, this is dumb.
I was like, why would anyone do this?
Obviously it's worked well, but I think it's just so dependent
on the company at the company culture, obviously like the
style leadership effects the culture, the culture effects the
leadership. But like it really requires like
fast moving people and people who take extreme ownership and
want to like, if you know, if there's no one telling you what
to do, you need the type of personalities working at the
company who will then take the initiative and take it on.
I think coming from a big tech company, my experience is that
like it can feel very complacent.
And if you don't have people on the team who are like willing to
step up, rise up and take responsibility, then it like
everyone's kind of looking around and be like, what do we
do? And so like I've worked on teams
like that and I'm like, I just don't see this happening on like
the teams that I've worked on. However, like in a different
circumstance, different people, different industry, it could
come together, but my initial reaction was like what?
Nothing would get done. She said rise up, rise up, rise
up. On your knees.
You rise up. Anyway, I think I can take the
devil's avid devil's advocate to.
The. Devil's, I love, I love the
Devil. In smaller teams, it can work
really, really well. Smaller teams where you have a
lot of trust and there isn't any hierarchy.
And what I'll say is maybe in our company, in a lot of ways,
we are laissez faire leadership. Yeah, a company of two people.
I agree. Yeah.
But like, it's not like I am in control of what you do and
you're in control of what I do. So if you expand that even
beyond us, like let's say there were six more people in our
company that were sort of equivalent to you and me where
we have the same level of trust, sure, in their competence.
And we're we can say like, hey, this is your area of ownership
and go ahead and run at it. You could see how this could
eventually expand. This takes extreme extreme.
Trust. And extreme trust and extreme
delegation. And I think it is extremely
fragile. There's no delegation.
The point is that there's zero delegation.
You just delegate yourself. Sorry.
Then I think back. In collaboration, I guess.
No, I guess extreme delegation is is what I mean.
But I I see your point where I'm just like, I'm not going to
handle this. You handle it and then they go
running with it. But I wouldn't even be telling
someone to handle. It it's not delegation, it's
ownership. Yeah, it's extreme self
ownership. This makes me want to throw up.
She's so big techified. I know she's so all she knows
are is structure and she just wants to be told like how do I
excel? And she wants everyone to just
play their role. Well, actually, I don't think
that's quite it. I think it's more that I'm just
cynical. I think I've just seen a lot of
people rest and vest. And so if I were working on a
smaller team where everyone's in it and everyone's collaborating
and has as much to win and to lose, I would feel much more
safe. I've worked with people who are
just like. Who made her feel unsafe?
Complacent. And I'm like, we're not hungry.
I'm I'm freaking hungry to like win and to get it.
And if you're not hungry, then I'm like, then this is not going
to work. She hates complacent people.
Complacent people. Show yourselves.
I mean this. Is just who I am and if you want
to work with Tiger Sisters AKA. You want to work with us if you.
Want to work with Tiger Sisters AKA Sisters Worldwide AKA
Sisters Matcha? You come to me on the day of my
daughter's wedding. Anyways, we're going.
We're going. Now, OK, no one thing I will say
is that the way that this is presented is it's very black or
white, which is also not the case in the real world, right?
Sure. I will say a lot of companies
will have elements of laissez faire leadership within the
company. And I actually think when I
worked at Zynga, there were a lot of elements of laissez faire
leadership. And I've said before that the
company motto at Zynga would be your own CEO.
And the, the way that the company was structured is that
there were a lot of different gaming studios.
So each game had its own GM. So basically each game had its
own president under the CEO. And so all of these different
studios were run completely separately.
They had their own GM, they had their own CT OS, they had their
own head of product, like chief product officer within the,
within the, the studio. And so that in some ways is sort
of laissez faire applied in a different way.
Yeah, I can see that. I think it's just laissez faire.
It unleashes a lot of creativity, yes, gives a lot of
ownership to the individual team, but it also requires a lot
of self-discipline and a lot of self management.
OK, so the main take away of all of this is that there are many
different styles of leadership and it's not like A1 size fits
all. As you can see, Jean and I, as
we're talking through each style, we're like, oh, we've
seen some of this, we've seen some of that.
Like sometimes it's a combination of all these
different styles, styles put together.
Different styles call for different approaches, and
sometimes the best leaders are able to weave all these
different styles together to create a culture and approach of
their own. Yeah.
And I think the point of actually learning about this
framework of all these different styles is so that you can draw
from each of them and pull in which elements make sense to
you, which one works for your company culture that you're
trying to create. And I think the other thing to
keep in mind is that it's not one-size-fits-all for even the
company, right? So depending on what stage your
company is in, let's say you're a really early startup like
Cherie and I, it actually makes sense to be laissez faire,
right? Like we don't need to create,
create some crazy structure between the two of us because
when's my bonus coming? What you kill because it's just
the two of us. But once we start growing and we
have more people, then maybe we do want to transition to
transactional because then there's actually a rubric and
people understand what they have to do in order to be perceived
as or to be measured as successful, right?
And then maybe from there, that's what sets up the base
where you can actually have transformational leadership come
in, right? That's when you say when people
really understand what their roles are and what they're
supposed to do, then you could say this is what we're aiming
for. Like we are sort of aiming for
the stars. This is we're trying to do
something that's never been done before.
And we need you guys to actually go above and beyond what is
stated in your roles in order for us to all do that together.
So yeah, depending on the stage of your company, depending on
the industry of your company, depending on your own personal
style, the idea is to take all this, what you've learned, and
then use it for yourself. OK, Now moving on to our next
section, which is networking. Networking is often considered
the biggest intangible benefit of an MBA, especially at
Harvard. The idea is that at HBS or at
GSB or wherever you are, you're surrounded by peers who are all
investors, future leaders, operational kind of experts, and
you're just building these organic relationships with them.
And the idea is that you kind of start building together in the
future. I mean, a lot of people go to
get their MBA because of the network.
And this is like, I'm going to give you kind of one example of
how that might play out and how it has played out with our
Startup Tiger Sisters podcast and Sisters Worldwide, which is
what we're building together. When you're going to get your
MBA, there are like 3 things you should think about if especially
you are starting a company of your own.
First is the network of your classmates.
The second is the network of the faculty and professors you're
surrounded by. And 3rd is the network of alums
and potential investors. So for the first category of
like network is like your classmates.
These are, like Jean mentioned, like brilliant people who have
been like so highly vetted and have done amazing things in
their career before coming to Business School.
Like, for example, since I started this podcast, the idea
of podcasting when I was in Business School, I was able to
ask my classmates to be on my first ever podcast, which was
Cherise Corner before we had Tiger Sisters.
And because of that, like I was able to figure out the kinks of
podcasting. I was able to reach out to my
community of classmates as my first like beta testers for my
podcast before, you know, we hit the big leagues.
They were so helpful, so kind, and each time I iterated with
them, I was able to learn something new so that Jean and I
are able to now work on this full time relatively seamlessly.
The second network. That is.
Super helpful and useful. Actually invaluable at Business
School is faculty support and also professors.
So in my last few quarters of Business School, there's like 2
examples that come to mind. Like, one, I was able to ask
these incredible lecturers and professors, Joel Peterson, Glenn
Crayman, who are iconic professors of mine who I've had
the privilege to learn from, but they were on my podcast, which
was so amazing. And also, the second example is
that I worked with another professor, lecturer at Stanford,
Alison Kluger, whose specialty is in media and entertainment.
And so she and I were able to work really closely over my last
few quarters as I pitched her the idea of, you know, working
with my sister in entertainment after graduating.
And so they were their advice, their experiences.
Like, I don't know how else I would have been connected to
such amazing industry professionals outside of
Stanford's Business School program.
And the third type of networking that people usually do at
Business School is with alums and investors.
Many times the alums are the. Investors.
Yeah. Another example that happened
just last week is that recently some companies have reached out
to Shree and I with different business opportunities of ways
they want us to collaborate, work with them together.
And they were in industries that candidly we know nothing about.
As you guys know, you know, we have sisters Matcha, but that's
all been totally new to us. Neither of us have ever worked
in CBG or made anything remotely that you can hold in your hand.
So last week I actually was like, who do I know that's in
this industry? And I realized one of my really,
really good friends is, I want to say one of the foremost
experts in this kind of new ish industry.
And I literally just texted her and I was like, hey, can I show
you this contract that they sent us and get your thoughts on
this? And like, this is what they
offer. This is what they had in mind.
This is what seems weird to me based off of my business
intuition. This is what I think I'm
surprised by. This is what?
And I just, we just basically texted, she looked it over.
She even made a tiny little spreadsheet for me in like 5
seconds and sent it over. And she was like, hey, this is
how I think the math would work out.
And I was like, wait, so you did like they didn't include this
and the like the prophet aspect. I'm not telling the story well,
but the whole point is that I was able to text her and she
came back to me and she was like the most valuable advisor I
could have possibly had in the world.
Like, it's just so cool. And I was like, Oh my God, thank
you so much. This is so, so helpful.
And she's like, yeah, no problem.
Like I'm sure I'll ask you for for help sometime in the future
too. And I'm like, yeah, I'm sure you
will. I mean, I think it's also not
only just having access to this network too, it's really how you
kind of make used use of it and not only like you receiving
help, but also providing help to the network as well.
And so it's like awesome to hear that you and your friend have
kept in touch and are able to lift each other up in in
different ways. Yeah, totally.
And I think it's not just access, it's very casual access,
right? Like this person that I texted,
she's my good friend, and I didn't really think twice about
texting her. I wasn't like, oh, like, should
I reach out? Should I not reach out?
I was like, hey, dude, look, what do you think?
You know, and it's actually fun to help each other with areas of
your own expertise. Like if somebody texted me
something and I was the exact perfect person to help them with
their problem, I would be really excited to lend my expertise to
them. You know, it's actually like
really fun to help your friends out and fun to help them succeed
and vice versa. So it's it kind of goes back to
remember when we interviewed Imran Khan and he said, you're
not really my friend unless I can just text you.
Yeah, unless I have your phone number and I can text you
anytime and you respond to me pretty much right away.
Yeah, I was. That's kind of the case here.
I think that's also why it's powerful.
It's like not just having these people in your like second third
degree network. It's having all these people
that are really impressive and amazing and just being able to
reach out very easily and casually and knowing that it's
reciprocal. Absolutely.
OK. So, Cherie, can we get a little
bit tactical here? So how do you actually go
through the process of, I guess, like networking, even if you've
met these people, how do you be more intentional, intentional
about maintaining your relationships?
Yeah, I think networking is all about intentionality.
It's like so easy to kind of sit back and just like, wait for it
to happen, but you have to like be very mindful of how you go
about it. And it's honestly one of the
things I really enjoy, which is kind of like sick of me, but
like, I really like it. So like.
Whenever it's her personality. Kind of my personality, like
whenever. I have like I'm really.
I'm whenever I'm reading an article and I was like, Oh my
God, this would be perfect for Glenn Craymon.
Like my, my one of my lecturers who I'm like super close with.
He was the former editor of the New York Times for like 3637
years. Yeah, dude, I love Glenn
Craymon. He's so bad.
He's generally so cool. I've only met him once but I
love. Him, he's like legendary in so
many ways, but like if I like read an article, I'm like, oh,
this is interesting. Glenn would love this.
Like I'll send him that article and in that vein, like when I'm
sending him in that article, it's like a correspondence where
I could be like updating him on some of the stuff that my sister
and I are working on. I mean, I do that all the time
for the professors that I stay in contact with just because
like they're my friends. And like I'm constantly like
reminded of ways that I'm like, oh, he would find this
interesting or she would find this interesting.
But like it takes that like little extra step of
intentionality, not only having the thought, but whenever you
have the thought, just like go and do it and send an e-mail.
And it doesn't have to be like 20 minute exercise where you're
reading your e-mail over like 15 times.
Be like, Oh my God, should I written this?
No, just be like hi like dear so and so like like was reading
this article and I thought of you.
Thought you might like it for this reason.
Then just wrap up the e-mail and send it.
Yeah, this is Cherie is very, very good at this.
I think like naturally it also, I think it's a skill that can be
built and it's a muscle that can be built up over time.
So if you do it a few times, then you kind of get into the
habit of doing it and it doesn't feel like scary each time.
Yeah, I think it's more natural to you than me because for me,
I'm, I'm probably a lot of people out there.
It's more, I think I, I feel like I have to think more about
the e-mail and like, make sure it's like written the right way
so that I create this barrier for myself to even send it.
What I could do is maybe just have a more casual mindset about
it. I mean, unless you're emailing
like the Prime Minister of Norway, we kind of like, you
know what I mean? I'm like, hey, kind of how
actually kind of how your e-mail, you're texting your
friend. Yes.
Is the mindset that you should approach these, like,
intentional networking discussions?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
I think that's actually a great way to look at it.
And I'm, I'm trying to do that more is to just treat more
people like they are your friends.
Because I think generally people want to be friends with you.
And if you just treat people as your friend, then they'll treat
you as their friend. I love it.
OK. So last question on this topic
is that how could you replicate this without having an Ivy
League degree or without actually going to Business
School? Yeah, I think the most important
principle is to make sure that you're offering help first
before like receiving help. That is like one of the most
important things about networking.
I think it networking gets such a bad reputation because in, in
my mind, like a lot of people are like take, take, take, take,
take, take, take and like that is not what networking is at
all. Networking is so much more about
giving than it is about receiving.
You have to be willing and open to give help and open up your
own network, open up your own resources before you even
receive help at all. It's kind of how I think about
mentorship as well. A lot of people I think go into
mentorship being like you're so and so you're amazing please
mentor me. But mentorship is very much a
two way St. and before you ask someone for help, you also have
to give help. Someone who's watching this
might be thinking like, well, I'm just lilo me, like what do I
have to offer? Like how can I actually help
this person that is, you know, 5 steps ahead of me in their
career? And one example I would give is
like even for you sending an e-mail, you know, of like, hey,
I read this article. I think you would really enjoy
it for XYZ reasons. That's already kind of an
overture. That's like offering help to
someone in a way that anyone can do, right?
Like Glenn Cremon doesn't actually need you to like for
anything. No, but actually.
This this this really worked out because I read.
An article Yeah. Wait, this is such a good story
so. Glenn Cremon, one of my writing
professors at Stanford, he has a class on like LinkedIn and like
how to make your LinkedIn, how to spruce it up, how to have the
right LinkedIn introduction, all this stuff.
And there was like an article that was written about like
LinkedIn, specifically the topic that he like talks about in his
lecture. And so I read the article and I
sent it to him and he responded within like 15 minutes.
He's like, thank you so much. I'm going to include this in my
next lecture. Like, you know, it was just
that. Was called professor.
It have such an. Easy way to OfferUp help and
OfferUp the hey, I'm thinking about you and it made a tangible
difference in how he runs his life.
Yeah, I mean, that's such a good example because like you could
be like, oh, what could you know, Sharia's her, his former
student possibly offer this like world renowned lecturer who was
also a world renowned. Times.
Editor, New York Times editor. And like, literally, you helped
him with his Lesson plan. Exactly, exactly so.
And it wasn't like I like moved mountains or like I like
completely like chained turned his world upside down.
It was just like a little little thing and it helped.
And that's, I think just it builds goodwill.
I wasn't even trying to build goodwill.
I was like, hey I thought of you, this is helpful.
Yeah, I love that example. It's such a good example.
Yes, love you, Glenn. OK guys, that's pretty much
everything I learned at Harvard Business School about leadership
and networking in 30 minutes. What a good overview and the
fact that you paid over $250,000 but you guys get it for free and
in 30 minutes is great. And if you guys haven't seen, we
have another episode. It's Part 1 where we talk about
more of the hard skills that Gene learned at Harvard Business
School and we go all over that in that episode.
Please check it out. Yeah.
And also we did say this is everything I learned in 30
minutes. It's not literally everything.
It's a good summary. It's a good summary.
But we could also probably create like 20-5 more of these
and they would all be a creative and you guys would learn a lot
from it. So tell us your questions, like
let us know what areas you want us to dive into more and what
specific questions you have, what you want to learn about and
maybe we can answer them. Yes, and Please remember to
like, comment and subscribe and share this episode with someone
who would find it helpful. We read all the comments, let us
know what questions you have and we'll see you next time.
Thanks. Bye.
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