Turning Facebook’s famous adage “Move fast and break things” on its head, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss—business and leadership authors who cohost the TED podcast “Fixable”—suggest a less destructive approach to growth. In an excerpt from “Move Fast and Fix Things,” the authors offer an alternative based on trust:
Speed has gotten a bad name in business, much of it deserved. When Meta (née Facebook) printed “Move fast and break things” on cheerful company posters, it became the most visible convert of a widely held belief that we can either make progress or take care of people, one or the other. A certain amount of wreckage is the price we have to pay for inventing the future.
We’ve spent much of the last decade helping companies clean up that wreckage, and one of the main lessons from our work is that the trade-off at the heart of this worldview is false. The most effective leaders solve problems at an accelerated pace, while also taking responsibility for the success and wellbeing of their customers, employees and shareholders.
They move fast and fix things.
How do they do it? In short, they invest as much time and energy into building trust—and, yes, sometimes rebuilding it—as they do into building speed. Speed unleashes your organization’s energy and reveals where you’re going. Trust convinces your stakeholders to come along for the ride. Think about whatever you’re building as a plane taking off for a new destination: No one’s getting on board without confidence in the aircraft, and without enough speed, you’re not even getting airborne.
