Stella Bugbee:
My main goal was to create a space where the people working on that project could say whatever they wanted to say in the tone they wanted to say it in.

Adam Moss:
And then they said, “Bob wants a cover.” I said, “Bob wants a cover. We have dogs on the cover.”

Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are and what they’re thinking about and working on. To mark the end of 2024, on this episode, we’re going to hear excerpts from interviews Debbie did with magazine editors in the past year or so.

Adam Moss:
I had no experience. I mean zero experience.

Scott Dadich:
We left no digital signatures. We checked in with that hotel and we waited.

Speaker 3:
For many years now, Debbie has been interviewing designers, artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, people in pretty much every creative field. In the past year or so, it just so happens that she interviewed some of the best magazine editors in the business. In this episode, we’re going to hear excerpts from those interviews. First up, Stella Bugbee, the Styles Editor at the New York Times since 2021. Before that, Stella Bugbee was the editor of New York Magazine’s website, The Cut.

Debbie Millman:
You started working at the New York Magazine‘s The Cut as a consultant in 2011, first to help relaunch New York Magazine‘s digital vertical. You ended up agreeing to join as the editorial director the next year, and in the 10 years you were there, you essentially reconstructed what was originally a Fashion Week blog and created a full-fledged magazine brand in its own right. What gave you the sense that you could do that aside from just always wanting to be in charge?

Stella Bugbee:
Well, so New York Magazine has actually a precedent for a project like this, and that is Ms.

Debbie Millman:
Ms., Ms Magazine.

Stella Bugbee:
And Adam Moss, who was the Editor at New York Mag, I think that he thought there was space to push this whatever he was calling it, we were calling it a women’s vertical or whatever, into a vital internet publication. I stress the internet part of it because I think there was this permissiveness to give somebody maybe untested a chance, and that was the writers, that was the editors, that was the photo team. It wasn’t a whole bunch of experts coming in who’d already done a bunch of stuff. It was a bunch of young people and we didn’t necessarily know exactly what the rules were, so that was good. I’m not sure that I had the confidence necessarily to come in and do that, but there was a lot of interest in pushing things and Adam was very experimental. And I had worked with David Haskell, who is now the editor-in-chief of the magazine On Topic, which was his project that you mentioned earlier. And then when we worked on topic, I remember thinking, I just actually want to be picking the topics.

It was Rob, Jean, Piccho, and me and David. And while I was of course interested in the design, I was so much more interested in thinking about assigning stories for a specific topic or picking the topic and then thinking about how to represent that. So David, he knew that that’s where my interests lay. Plus, I’d been working in fashion then for a year at that point before that, and it just was a strange job, and I had a strange resume, and it enabled me to pull upon everything I’d done up to that point. It let me pull the branding and the art direction and the editorial ideas and put them all in one place, which lucky, so lucky to be able to use all these weird experiences that didn’t necessarily add up to anything until that moment. So it wasn’t necessarily that I had the confidence, just I had a really strange group of skills that applied in this particular instance, and then I ran at it head on.

Debbie Millman:
I found this quote, something that Adam Moss said about you when he hired you. “The very unusual thing about Stella is that she has this big important editorial job and has never been an editor before.” He went on to state that he would’ve been unlikely to appoint a design director to run The Cut had he not already gotten to know you when you consulted. And he stated, “What we saw then was that Stella was a natural editor with a crystal clear vision and incredible sense of story and great news judgment.”
Stella, what I love so much about this is that you succeeded by creating a magazine and a brand that you’ve described at various times as a “smart, funny, clear-eyed look at fashion, beauty, and issues that matter most to women that also blends a literary feeling with a punk feminist sensibility.” What could be better than that? How were you able to figure it out and then sell it in such a clear-eyed way? I mean, that’s what he said, in a clear-eyed way.

Stella Bugbee:
My main goal was to create a space where the people working on that project could say whatever they wanted to say in the tone they wanted to say it in. So it was always very much about the community. I used to make this arm motion where I put my arm in a circle and I said, “I’m just keeping the space open so that we can do what we want and say what we want, and that we’re not being forced into a silo by some advertising category.” I think that’s, really, if you look at most magazines, they were created for the purpose of advertising categories.

Debbie Millman:
And you created this for a certain sensibility, it feels, like an attitude almost.

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah, psychographic, I say. But I firmly believe that there were people who wanted to talk about serious things and silly things at the same time in the same place, and that was fine. And I defended that urge more than anything, and it changed dramatically year over year over year. And so it wasn’t just that I had that vision from the beginning. It was like a, “Well, I got that done. What else can we do and how else can we grow? And who else can we bring on and what other voices can we put forth and what other challenges and ideas?” And while that was all happening, the magazine was also feeding me incredible pieces. And I was working with the people who worked making the print magazine all the time and the editors on that. And I had an incredible partner in Lauren Kern who’s now at Apple News, and she was my editorial partner on the magazine on the print side.

And once that came about, when she joined, I think that we all saw the real potential for it to be something very impactful. And again, we just all ran at it. For me, I didn’t want to squander that opportunity ever at any moment. I thought, what if no one ever gives me this opportunity [inaudible 00:07:31] run at this? And I wanted to give everybody else that sense that we got to run at this because we don’t know that this is a guarantee that we’ll always have a place to say and think and be ourselves, even with the precedent of Ms. having come out of that publication, which is really powerful. And I was operating a lot on other publications’ backs. I think you mentioned Mirabella, the actual Mirabella.

Debbie Millman:
Right. Grace’s [inaudible 00:08:00].

Stella Bugbee:
[inaudible 00:08:00] was incredible magazine. Fassi, there was a precedent for some of what we were doing.

Debbie Millman:
Remember New York Woman?

Stella Bugbee:
New York Woman, yeah. And in fact, I met with the editor of New York Woman early on in my time at The Cut because Pam [inaudible 00:08:14] knew her. We went out for lunch. And it was important to me to note that we were part of a pretty healthy legacy, actually, and we were just doing it on the internet for a new audience and building an audience in that space. But a lot of people have tried to do what we were trying to do. And in fact, I have the very first issue of Mirabella and I got it when we were relaunching The Cut in 2018, just as a reference. And I couldn’t believe how contemporary it was and how it felt like it could literally be running now.

Curtis Fox:
Stella Bugbee, she mentioned her editor at New York Magazine, Adam Moss. Debbie interviewed Adam Moss in May of this year, and they talked about how he reshaped New York Magazine and then about the family of magazine websites created under his editorial direction.

Debbie Millman:
You left the Times in the early aughts, but not after more accolades, awards and increase in readership, a whole different way of really assessing the magazine. And you went on to New York Magazine as editor, and you were brought in again to remake it by then owner Bruce Wasserstein. And I read that you approached it as a restoration project as opposed to a re-imagination, and you wanted to bring back some of the values of the original co-founders, Clay Felker and Milton Glaser, while still pointing it to the future. What were the values you deemed most important to restore?

Adam Moss:
Well, one of them was both Clay and Milton had a perspective that what the magazine was really about was not New York City, but a New York City way of looking at the world. And that there was a filter that could be applied to Washington, could be applied to Hollywood, could be applied overseas to London, other places, that it was really a magazine of the cosmopolitan world. New York Magazine inspired a lot of city magazines, but it actually never was a city magazine. And the owners of the magazine before Bruce took it over very much remade it themselves in the mold of the magazines that were imitators of New York. So I was trying to go back to that original idea, which I thought was bigger and more interesting and more adventurous, and to remake the magazine in 2004 to feel like it was a magazine of 2004, but it had the values that animated its founding.

Debbie Millman:
Adam, we could do a whole series on Design Matters about the relaunch of New York Magazine, but I do want to get to your glorious new book. Suffice it to say that since the redesign and relaunch in 2004, New York Magazine has won more national magazine awards than any other publication, including the Award for General Excellence in 2006, ’07, 2010, 2011, 2014, 2016, as well as the Society of Publication Designers Award for 2013 Magazine of the Year. Most recently, the magazine won a George Polk Award in magazine reporting for the Bill Cosby Rape Investigation, and it’s also been awarded several Pulitzer Prizes.

Adam Moss:
Many after I left, I just should say.

Debbie Millman:
Okay. [inaudible 00:11:36].

Adam Moss:
But yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Congratulations.

Adam Moss:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
You not only re-imagined the print magazine, you also embraced the magazine killer called the internet and new digital-only brands, five of which, Vulture, The Cut, Intelligencer, The Strategist and Grub Street are now considered heavyweights in modern online editorial. And New York Magazine is now as much of a digital company as it is a print company.

Adam Moss:
Absolutely, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
When so many editors couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt their publications to the digital world, what gave you the sense that this was going to be the game changer it ended up becoming?

Adam Moss:
It wasn’t that I thought it was a game-changer. It was that I thought that it was interesting. And I had come from the New York Times just recently, which had, they were making a few mistakes, but basically they were getting it right about how to create a digital newspaper. And I found that very exciting. And there were several experiments even at the very early newyorktimes.com that I did with the magazine that were exciting to me. I wanted to bring that spirit. I just wasn’t scared of it. And also, the owners of New York Magazine were not scared of the internet for reasons that really, I’ve told this story too many times and it’s boring, but they were making money on their own digital site for arcane reasons, but they were so that became a business imperative too. And really, I just keep saying this not because I’m an economist, but you need the right conditions on the ground to do anything creative really.

And in all these instances, the right conditions, the right economic conditions enabled the creative things that we were able to do, but I was just crazy interested in it. And each experiment we did trying to build out a satellite, not a satellite, but a constellation really of digital magazines, was interesting to me and interesting to my colleagues, and it spurred us on to do more and more and more. We started with this thing called Grub Street about food. And then we realized, well, okay, if these things were vertical as opposed to horizontal, which is to say about one subject, that could be wonderful, and maybe the voice should be the same voice as the print magazine, but sped up for digital purposes and gave a lot of license to the early writers who helped create the voice.

Grub Street became Intelligencer, which eventually became Vulture on culture and entertainment, and Intelligencer went through several iterations, but eventually became a news site, and then The Cut, which was a women’s magazine, but a very different women’s magazine than had never been made before. And lo and behold, we had this fleet of magazines that were built for the internet and had the DNA of New York in them, and that proved to really work.

Debbie Millman:
In 2019, after 15 years of nonstop growth and innovation, you decided to leave New York Magazine. At that point, you had also somewhat secretly taken a painting. Did your new fine arts pursuit influence your departure?

Adam Moss:
No. I don’t think so. I had always loved the visual parts of magazine making, and I have a house in Cape Cod that used to be an art school just by coincidence. And there is just a feeling of being there that you can see the ladies with their bonnets painting on plein air on the dune, and I found that interesting. And then one summer I just decided to try to do a painting a day. I had no experience, I mean zero experience doing this, and I just started to experiment. Started painting at 3:00 and ended at 5:00. Whatever it was, it was. And that was crazy fun to me. Then when I got back to New York, someone made a gift of giving me an art teacher, and that was the first time I got a teacher. But I was still working in New York at the time.

No, I left New York because I felt that I could only edit the magazine for myself and that I was no longer the reader. I had seen the ways in which an editor who didn’t have themselves as a compass could screw up a magazine and how it could become contagious. I just didn’t want to do that. So I had to get out of the way. So I left without any sense of what I’d want to do, except as you’ve mentioned before, to try to do something with less ambition. It was more like, okay, let’s see what happens without any true sense. But I did enjoy painting enough that I thought, well, maybe I should paint full-time. And I had a problem, which is that I actually was good at the beginning. My first six months, I would say, painting, I was a much more successful painter than I ever was again.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Adam Moss:
Because I was looser, because I was naive. I didn’t know better. Really, I can’t believe how thematically consistent this all is. And then as soon as I did know more, as soon as I took more classes and that kind of thing, my work started to just stiffen up and fall off a cliff. So that was deeply, deeply upsetting to me, and though I enjoyed it, it scared me.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Adam Moss:
Because I really wanted it and I didn’t know how to get there, and I didn’t have any roadmap whatsoever to get there. I mean, I could acquire skills, but I was already, I think, aware that skills training wasn’t the problem. I mean, I did lack skills, but you can always get skills. I really felt that there was a way of thinking as an artist and a degree of courage and risk-taking that I did not have in solo activity. I’d had it in a group because the group is safe, and the group eggs you on and making something together in a group is really still the greatest thing in the world to me. But here I was alone and not making enough progress. So that’s really when I realized that I just wanted to talk to people who were successful at making art, and by art I mean any art, novels and poems and visual art.

And then I was afraid that they wouldn’t be truthful with me, they wouldn’t know how to be truthful with me because so much of the process of making art secretive and people are afraid of jinxing the muse so they develop a set spiel. And that’s how they talk about their art, and it’s about the project and all of that stuff. But that’s not what I wanted to know. I really wanted to know how something is made and what goes through a person’s mind when they’re making it, and what goes through a person’s emotional makeup. What kind of person is successful at this? So that’s when I devised this idea of concentrating on a single work from each of these people and asking them to trace the evolution in as many different layers as they could, both practically what they did, but also very much their emotional journey.

And then also part as a go to help them remember truthfully, and also just because I love this stuff, to accompany it with a gallery of the artifacts of the making of the thing, the notes and the sketches and the doodles that were their tools, making the work. Then I looked at all that, and I had a book, or I had a structure of a book, or I knew what the book was.

Curtis Fox:
Adam Moss’s book is called The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing. David Remnick has been the editor of the New Yorker Magazine since 1998. Debbie spoke with him in March in front of a live audience at the On Air Festival in Brooklyn.

Debbie Millman:
It took three years, but the magazine has actually been profitable since 2001.

David Remnick:
Look, I will say this, our business changed a lot. The old style of all magazines was subscriptions were very cheap so that it would get in a lot of hands, and so advertisers would reach as many people as possible of a certain audience depending on what the magazine was or newspaper or television network or whatever it might be. The nature of advertising has changed and is completely and utterly dominated by Google and Facebook. I don’t know what the real numbers are, but something like 75% of the ad market is to that, and the rest is scraps. And the result has been, in addition to other factors like Craigslist and so on, has been the decimation of mid-level newspapers. I mean, there’s really only a few exceptions to this, and magazines, and it’s tragic. It’s tragic. Not that every publication that’s been lost or diminished is perfect, but the changed landscape is deeply, deeply, deeply worrying for all kinds of reasons that we can talk about.

The only other alternative that I know of at the moment is subscriptions. Same thing that television’s discovered. And luckily enough, fairly early we changed our emphasis and we basically said to you, readers of the New Yorker, without saying it, that I can’t give this away anymore. You have to pay more than a cup of coffee a week to have this extraordinary thing in your hands or on your phone or whoever you choose to read it. And the New Yorker, in fact, gives you a great deal more per day, per week than when Mr. Sean was editing it. But the subscription model, now that we’ve had a lot of success with it for a while, now, the subscription model is facing challenges too, because you’ve all had this discovery. You’ve all woken up and go, wait a minute, I have Netflix, I have Paramount+, I have da-da-da. And then there are even apps now to get rid of or shave down your subscriptions.

Debbie Millman:
Which was the original cable system.

David Remnick:
Exactly. So we’re in a time of real flux, and editors spend a lot more time thinking about business than they probably, if they’re being honest with themselves, would like to. They want to be thinking about writing and graphic design and all kinds of things, but if you don’t have your eye on business, and this goes with public radio or look at what’s happening in the podcast business, we have the New Yorker Radio Hour with my colleague David Krass. Now, we have a terrific time doing this. We’re thinking about how to develop it, make it better all the time, but we also have to pay attention to economics. Otherwise, you wake up and something terrible’s happened.

And I’m determined. We are going to celebrate a 100th anniversary next year at the New Yorker. I don’t want that to be an occasion for us to show off at a museum of ourselves. There’ll be some of that to be sure, but I want people in this room and their children to be reading the New Yorker that is a lot better than the one that we have now in the future. So I think about that kind of thing all the time.

Debbie Millman:
The last thing I want to talk to you about is music. In your latest book, Holding the Note: Profiles in Popular Music, you state that there’s no one who has meant more to you than Bob Dylan. In 2004, you were hoping to get an exclusive excerpt of his recently published memoir in the New Yorker. You almost had it in the bag.

David Remnick:
Yeah, I got screwed with my pants on.

Debbie Millman:
Dylan wanted the cover. Dylan wanted the cover of the New Yorker.

David Remnick:
Let’s just say that Bob Dylan has remained unmoved by and unimpressed by my hero worship. It doesn’t keep him up nights. Apparently, I’m not alone. So what happened was I had heard that he was writing a memoir and that it was good and that it wasn’t like Tarantula, which is a, I don’t know, surrealist experiment. And I was summoned. I said, “Well, send the manuscript to the publisher.” He said, “I can’t send the manuscript. It would be like sending the Dead Sea Scrolls to my apartment.” So I went to the Dylan office, I won’t even tell you where it is, but you have to press a button that says, I don’t know, “AB Cube carpets.” It’s like a CIA thing. And you go up there and it’s just Dylan everything, Dylan tote bags and Dylan albums and Dylan this and Dylan that.

And if I had gone when I was 16, my head would’ve exploded into 1,000 pieces. And they sit me in a little room with a bare table and a manuscript and a glass of water, and I sat there and read the book straight through, Chronicles [inaudible 00:24:51]. And it was terrific. And I said to the publisher and the Dylan Guy, nice people, “I’m in. Don’t call Rolling Stone. That’s not your audience anymore.” I don’t know, whatever bullshit I told them. I was trying to get it for the New Yorker. I’m a competitive person. And we made an agreement and we made a handshake agreement. Okay. And it still pisses me off.

Debbie Millman:
I know.

David Remnick:
It was many years ago. John Kerry was running for president. Half the people here weren’t born yet, and it really pisses me off, this thing. And it got to the summer and they call and they say, “Okay, we’re about to publish it.” And I said, “Great. 7,000 words. The New York bit in the beginning. We’re all set. We’ll try to figure out what to do about fact-checking and copy-editing. Bob doesn’t necessarily have to be completely involved,” and so on and so forth, whatever shit I was slinging. I just thought, everything’s going to be great. And then they said, “Bob wants a cover.” I said, “Bob wants a cover. We have dogs on the cover or a bowl of fruit or a joke, or a Barry Blitt making fun of whatever. We don’t do that. We don’t have photographs on the cover.”

And I thought I’d changed their mind. And there was a pause and they said, “Bob wants a cover.” And it was like talking to your parents at your worst, “Bob wants a cover.” I said, “I can’t do it.” I said, “I’m sure we can find some way to work this out.” “Bob wants a cover.” And that was it. They went to Newsweek, and by that time Bob looked like Vincent Price with the little mustache and the cowboy hat. And I thought, they’re never going to put Bob Dylan on the cover.

Debbie Millman:
It’s an election year.

David Remnick:
It’s the middle of a presidential race. They put on the cover and they ran this excerpt and apparently Bob Dylan survived the experience of not being published in the New Yorker. And then another thing happened, I saw that he had these paintings. He’s a painter. He also makes whiskey and iron gates, a man of parts.

Debbie Millman:
He’s got range.

David Remnick:
He’s got range. And these paintings, some of them are good. And there was one, a painting of Katz’s Delicatessen, the pastrami capital of the world, and it’s pretty good. And it’s a good New Yorker cover. It’s a New York scene. I make an arrangement. We’re all set to go. Two weeks out, I get a phone call. Bob doesn’t want to do it. So I feel our relationship is not on an equal level somehow.

Curtis Fox:
David Remnick. Scott Dadich is a designer, a filmmaker, and a magazine editor. He went from creating the tablet edition of WIRED Magazine to becoming the magazine’s editor-in-chief for several years.

Debbie Millman:
Some of your biggest accomplishments at WIRED were the collaborations you forged with guest editors and your exclusive interviews, and somehow you were able to get an exclusive sit-down interview with Edward Snowden in Moscow, and you wrote this about the experience. “Just a few people on Earth know where I was and why in Moscow to sit down with Edward Snowden. It was a secret that required great efforts to keep. I told co-workers and friends that I was traveling to Paris for some work, but the harder part was covering my digital tracks. Snowden himself had shown how illusory our assumption of privacy really is, a lesson we took to heart, that meant avoiding smartphones, encrypting files, holding secret meetings. Scott, how did you get that interview in the first place?

Scott Dadich:
That was a process that took probably the better part of eight or nine months. My very dear friend, Platon, long-time collaborator dating back to my earliest days at Texas Monthly, and I had talked about this as a get. This is a thing, and we thought in first terms of the visual, and we thought in first terms of the cover, very much in a George Lewis condition, like we need to make an iconic cover, and this is a moment and an individual who would deserve such a treatment. Then came the very real practicalities of what he had or had not done, and the arguments in the newsroom about our obligation to cover his actions, whether we agreed with them or not, whether we could reach him or not. But it was my responsibility as the editor of WIRED to reach out and to find a channel appropriate to find him.
We were looking at news reports and wire clippings and the access that The Guardian was getting and what we’re seeing on channels like social media and Twitter. So we had some indications, but ultimately got a connection that Platon and I had raised to an individual who knew his lawyer. And so we got a communication over to him, and we waited and we checked in and we waited and we checked in. I don’t remember the exact date, but we got a communication back that if I were to be in Moscow on such and such a date at such and such a time at such and such a hotel, maybe conditions would be right for a meeting.

Debbie Millman:
And you and a photographer went, I believe?

Scott Dadich:
Yeah. So Platon, the photographer, we packed up some cases and his assistant and our photo editor we all met in Moscow. And the secrecy and the skullduggery of it seems over the top, or maybe to some seemed over the top at the time, but I did have to communicate to a couple of my colleagues at Conde Nast. And I also sought the advice of several of the other editors-in-chief that I had trusted very deeply and have very strong relationships given my previous work with them. So I just sought some advice and it turns out that a couple of them, and one of them in particular had been over in Russia and had been hacked and had his smartphone compromised, and banking details and all the things that you can imagine would be really terrifying to encounter. So there was a very real cautionary tale about why the secrecy was going to be required. Whether it was from people chasing Snowden or other actors or government officials, we just didn’t know, and there was a lot to be careful about.

Debbie Millman:
Did you know for sure he was going to show up or was it, were you just hoping he’d show up?

Scott Dadich:
We really didn’t, and we were hoping. And I did, we stopped in Paris, and I met Platon at Charle de Gaulle at the gate, and I had sent my iPhone back in a FedEx packet back to Amy in San Francisco. And so I was phoneless until we got to the Moscow airport. Platon and I bought burner phones and no one knew those numbers. No one knew how to reach us. We were there. We did not bring computers. We were not online. We left no digital signatures. We checked into that hotel and we waited. We sat and we waited, and sure enough, the phone rang and it was Ed himself. And this voice on the phone at the pre-appointed time called out and said, “I understand you’re in room so-and-so and I’ll be there in about an hour.” And sure enough, there was a knock at the door about an hour later, the longest hour of my life waiting to see if that was going to happen, and he ended up showing up.

Debbie Millman:
Scott, as an interviewer, I need to ask this question. It might not be as interesting to my listeners as it will be to me, but I can’t resist. How did you prepare for that interview?

Scott Dadich:
Well, obviously, we had just read everything we could get our hands on, stayed as current as we could on news events, on government positions and what the Obama administration was doing. Obviously, we have an incredible amount of opinion and reporting background from our colleagues in the newsroom, so you feel pretty well-prepared. I was there not only to meet with him, oversee the photo shoot, and then facilitate the interview for Jim Bamford, our incredible journalist who’s going to write the profile. Jim was also there and meeting with him the next day. But Platon and I ended up having the very first interaction with him in that hotel room, which lasted about four hours that afternoon.

Curtis Fox:
Scott Dadich. You can hear the full interviews with all four of these editors on designmattersmedia.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The Editor-in-Chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

The post Design Matters: Best of 2024 with Editors appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
Move fast and break things. This was an informal motto at Facebook for many years and it exemplified an ethos in Silicon Valley about how to aggressively conduct business in a rapidly changing world. Move Fast and Fix Things is the title of the latest book by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss who argue that the equivalence between speed and business excellence is false. The subtitle of their book is The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems. Frances Frei is a professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School and a business strategist for companies like Uber and WeWork. Anne Morriss is a CEO and author. They’re married and together they host the podcast Fixable, which like Design Matters, is part of the TED Audio Collective. Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, welcome at long last to Design Matters.

Frances Frei:
Yay.

Anne Morriss:
Thank you. We’re so delighted to be here.

Frances Frei:
Really delighted.

Debbie Millman:
I am just thrilled. And listeners, we are at the TED Conference in a podcast studio and so that’s why it might sound a little bit different than it might usually when I’m doing a podcast in my studio. So Anne and Frances, ordinarily, for my first question, I like to ask my guest, or in this case guests, a question that might surprise them. I do this to break the ice, so to speak, and hope the question and the answer will put my guests at ease. But in doing my research for the show, I discovered that you both have a go-to question for your guests on your podcast.

Frances Frei:
We do?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Frances Frei:
Wow.

Debbie Millman:
I’ve heard it a number of times and it was too juicy an opportunity to pose the question to ask you both. So here it is. What was your favorite breakfast as a child?

Anne Morriss:
Yeah, we do ask that frequently out in the world. It’s so revealing because you can’t answer the question without giving away a lot about your childhood.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Anne Morriss:
My favorite breakfast was Golden Grahams with half-and-half.

Debbie Millman:
Half and half?

Anne Morriss:
Because that’s what my mother used to eat at her most playful.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Anne Morriss:
I would sneak it as a snack, I think to connect to that part of her. She was a single mom and that wasn’t always what she was leading with. But the Golden Grahams and half-and-half, which is an extraordinary choice, would give away-

Debbie Millman:
At any age.

Anne Morriss:
Would give away that side of her.

Debbie Millman:
Frances, what about you?

Frances Frei:
A bacon sandwich.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Now, I understand that you had to have it made very specifically. It was two pieces of lightly toasted bread with a little bit of butter and bacon.

Frances Frei:
Yes. And the bacon couldn’t be too crisp.

Debbie Millman:
That’s the part that really concerned me.

Anne Morriss:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Why not crisp bacon? Is there anything better in the world than crisp bacon?

Anne Morriss:
It’s such a good followup. It’s such a good followup.

Frances Frei:
Crisp bacon almost needn’t be consumed.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, Anne.

Anne Morriss:
What kind of a statement is that?

Debbie Millman:
That’s a deal breaker. I can’t believe you married this woman.

Anne Morriss:
Well, she’s never said this before. It’s been 20 years and she’s now feeling safe enough to confess.

Frances Frei:
Well, it’s also why whenever bacon is delivered, we never fight over any of the pieces. You take the well done and I take the less well-done. And it’s not like I like anything else less well done. All meat has to be enormously well done for me to consume it, but bacon is meant to be chewy just like the soft bread is meant to be chewy.

Anne Morriss:
Okay. Let’s move on. This is a controversial interview already.

Debbie Millman:
Now I have a bonus question for you both because I had my original icebreakers before I discovered the breakfast question. Frances, you first. Is it true that it’s difficult for you to imagine 48 hours going by without consuming some standup comedy?

Frances Frei:
Impossible. There has never been a 48-hour period where I haven’t consumed some standup comedy.

Debbie Millman:
Who are your go-to comedians?

Frances Frei:
Well, I go through them very quickly, as you can imagine. I metabolize them so I’ll consume literally everything they have and then I’m done with them and then I go on to the next one. So recent meals, Leanne Morgan, who is a late-in-life comedian, maybe started in her mid-40s. Kathleen Madigan is another one I’m consuming right now.

Debbie Millman:
Well, what is it about comedy that you like so much?

Frances Frei:
It’s super smart, it’s unexpected, and the quality-per-unit time is through the roof. Some people who like poetry, I don’t know how to consume it, but if I didn’t know how to consume things, I would like poetry because of the quality-per-unit word. And there is almost nothing like it for comedy. They will practice for five years and then show us the best 60 minutes from it. It is a love letter to us.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I think it’s in many ways a microcosm of how we all behave in our culture.

Frances Frei:
Say more.

Debbie Millman:
Well, just that they’re so astute about pointing out things that we might take for granted or might not even know that we know that we behave in a certain way or certain prejudices or certain biases they point out. If they’re really good, point out so succinctly.

Frances Frei:
And they’ll have had the thought and then literally will test it in front of a thousand audiences before I ever consume it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Frances Frei:
Well, that’s unbelievable. My question is why aren’t others watching it?

Debbie Millman:
Well, sometimes people don’t want to face what they need to face, I think. But going back to poetry. After this podcast, I am going to send you five poems that I think will change your mind about poetry.

Frances Frei:
I would love to have my mind changed about poetry. I have always wanted to be able to consume it. I just never have been able to.

Anne Morriss:
What are the five?

Debbie Millman:
Well, my go-to favorite poem of all time is a poem by Charles Olson called Maximus to Himself, which is why Roxanne and I named our dog Maximus Toretto Blueberry Millman Gay. And that poem starts out with the line, “I’ve had to learn the simplest things last, which made for difficulties.” So that’s definitely one of my go-to poems.

Frances Frei:
I know I will already like poetry better if it’s read to me.

Debbie Millman:
I’ll send you a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke called The Panther. I will send you … I don’t know. I’ll have to pick one of many written by Ellen Bass who lives in Santa Cruz and is frequently in the New Yorker and she is remarkable. I will likely send you something by Marie Howe, H-O-W-E, who’s also remarkable. And then I think I might throw in a surprise. A surprise fifth.

Anne Morriss:
I’ll read all of them to you, baby.

Debbie Millman:
There we go. Anne, your turn. Is it true that you spent a lot of time imagining that you were fighting in the American Revolution as you were growing up? That one was so juicy I could not give it up even with the breakfast.

Anne Morriss:
Yeah. You dug deep. An extraordinary amount of time. I-

Debbie Millman:
One question. Why?

Anne Morriss:
I assume you have many followups. I don’t know why. I’m a believer in the examined life, but I don’t think I’ve spent any time on this one. It’s among the most vivid memories of my childhood, and I would spend a long time in the woods.

Debbie Millman:
By yourself or with other people?

Anne Morriss:
This wasn’t a game that a lot of other people wanted to play.

Debbie Millman:
Surprising.

Anne Morriss:
So it really was in my head. It has been reported to me by my brothers that I also went through a period of sleepwalking and their most vivid memory was me in the middle of the night standing at the top of the steps reciting the “give me liberty or give me death” speech. Nathan Hale, obviously. And I don’t remember that, but it tracks with my other waking choices.

Debbie Millman:
Now, I’m going to volley back and forth by topic, so I’m going to talk about your upbringing now, and then I’ll go to yours. And so I don’t want you to feel left out that I’m just going to focus on Anne for a few minutes.

Frances Frei:
She’s my favorite topic. I’ll never feel left out.

Debbie Millman:
Well, and vice versa when I get to you. Okay. Anne, you were born without a heartbeat and the medical team at the time was not optimistic you would make it and actually told your parents that you were unlikely to have full cognitive functioning. How did you end up having a heartbeat and surviving that birth?

Anne Morriss:
Yeah. My APGAR scores, which are a measure of your vitality at birth at, I think it’s one minute, five minutes and seven minutes on a scale of one to 10. So I might be a little bit off, but I think I’m directionally right on the scale. But I was zero at birth, zero at one minute, and a one at either five or seven minutes, whatever the next number is. So it was not looking good. Somehow the medicine at the time, the technology at the time pulled me back from the brink. So I have no memory of that. Although, as friends know, I’ve been increasingly intrigued by the category of birth trauma. But I think what probably impacted my earliest years more is I think the family didn’t know what direction this was going, and so my mother has shared with me that she didn’t want to overwhelm me with conventional toys, and so she would give me a spoon to play with rather than a-

Frances Frei:
Teddy bear or something.

Anne Morriss:
A doll or something. And there’s something so delicious about the idea of me sitting on the floor with a spoon just like, “What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?”

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I mean I read that she had a fear of overstimulating you, but I wondered why playing with spoons and making the sort of noises that you can with spoons would be less stimulating than cuddling with a teddy bear.

Anne Morriss:
No. I think it’s probably more stimulating.

Frances Frei:
You have gotten to the ultimate riddle of Anne’s upbringing.

Anne Morriss:
And then I think a developmental specialist lived down the block and so came for a visit and I think my mother asked for some guidance on what kind of informal testing she might do and at the time there was this idea of a pincer test, so if I could pick something up with my two fingers, it was a sign that I was on track. And so according to the mythology, she spread some raisins out on the floor with my spoon. I guess I had to put my spoon down and not only did I pick up the raisins, Debbie, I ate the raisins and I think just settled the discussion.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you ended up having exceptional cognitive functioning, and I understand when you graduated from Harvard Business School, your mom wanted to find the doctor that delivered you to show him how you turned out. Did she actually find him?

Anne Morriss:
I honestly don’t know. But it does reveal how much it got embedded in her own psychology, this question of whether I was going to be okay. And I think that question hung over the household a little bit.

Debbie Millman:
Your dad passed away when you were two years old, but before he passed, he taught constitutional law at West Point and was famously involved in banning the practice of mandatory chapel for cadets and was accused by some at the time of killing God.

Anne Morriss:
Killing God at West Point at least.

Debbie Millman:
Post Nietzsche, but nevertheless. Do you think you got your rebellious nature from him?

Anne Morriss:
I do think I inherited some peace of that on the personality front. I mean, the other feature of the household is we all grew up with this mythology of this great man who was formative, three brothers, two I grew up with in the same house. So this story of my father was everywhere, but he physically was absent. And so I think that had a big impact on me, how I thought about what a meaningful life meant. And I think the idea of not accepting the status quo as static and that you had a certain obligation to make the world a more just and righteous place, I think I definitely took that away from the story of his life.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I read that I think Frances considers you as a young girl as a justice warrior.

Anne Morriss:
Yeah, it’s a very Frances phrase. And maybe that was part of the American Revolution. The version of that story that so captivated me was a story of justice warriors refusing to accept

the status quo.

Debbie Millman:
Your mom raised you and your siblings in Cincinnati, Ohio as a single mom. You’re the youngest of siblings and the only girl. Frances, you grew up on Long Island and you were the youngest of six. Your mom had four girls and two boys by the time she was 25 years old.

Frances Frei:
Which is just-

Anne Morriss:
It’s so astonishing.

Frances Frei:
It’s so old school.

Debbie Millman:
Now, you said that being the youngest of six is a superpower. How so?

Frances Frei:
Oh, because Anne and I joke that every year around taxes time, we’re like, “Did you do the taxes? Did you do the taxes?” Only the youngest gets to do that. The oldest did the taxes did with all of the-

Debbie Millman:
I was the oldest of four, and so I totally, totally understand, but I think being the oldest is a superpower. I think it’s the middle kids that just get screwed.

Anne Morriss:
Can I just say for the record, we have always filed our taxes. It’s just sometimes been a rush.

Frances Frei:
For the record, I have never participated. So if you ask which one of us really embodies the youngest, it’s me.

Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting because I know you really are a numbers person and Anne is more of a words person, and so I would’ve thought that you did the taxes.

Anne Morriss:
Yeah. It’s not an ideal distribution of labor, Debbie.

Frances Frei:
But Anne is more responsible.

Anne Morriss:
Okay. Frances, growing up you were extremely gifted in math and at sports. Otherwise, you didn’t really feel comfortable and you stated this: “I felt like I didn’t get a lot of secret memos and everyone would come to the table and everyone knew something that I didn’t. My whole life I was like, ‘There’s another secret memo I didn’t get.'” And secret memos came up a few times in my research where you’ve said that in other instances, and so I’m wondering what gave you that impression and what did you imagine was in the secret memo?

Frances Frei:
Oh, I can give you just the highlights, but we’ve just signed our next book, which is going to be called The Secret Memos because I feel like the greatest gift we can give to people is distribute the secret memos.

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God, I love that.

Frances Frei:
Yeah. So we’re-

Anne Morriss:
We’re breaking news.

Frances Frei:
Breaking news. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Exclusive on Design Matters at 10.

Frances Frei:
I remember. So youngest of six, but the fourth girl. As an example, when I got my period, it scared the shit out of me. I had no advanced warning. You’re looking at me like no one ever talked to me about it. That’s what it’s like to not get a secret memo. And I had that experience all the time.

Debbie Millman:
So instructions for living.

Frances Frei:
And then it’s instructions for learning and instructions for life. I remember on Anne’s fifth reunion when you had a lot of friends come and stay over and you went to the fifth reunion at HBS and they all appeared before we were going to go, and they all came down wearing appropriate things and I was like, “How did everybody know what to wear?” And everyone was wearing … It was all in a set of acceptable ranges. I was like, “Did you guys talk about it?” And she said, “No.” Somebody gave somebody a secret memo at some point. I have never been on the distribution list of any of those things, and so I am-

Anne Morriss:
You were sure that was a conspiracy?

Frances Frei:
I was totally sure it was a conspiracy.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Of course.

Frances Frei:
So the way I embody being a justice warrior is that I try to correct the memo. I am just distributing pamphlets, secret memo pamphlets everywhere I go.

Debbie Millman:
Do you still feel left out by not being privy to the secret memos?

Frances Frei:
All the time. Now, I admit that I’m probably not as accurate, but I am so prone to the conspiracy theory of being left off the distribution list of the secret memo. It is now instinctual.

Debbie Millman:
You were also very ambitious and you said that you weren’t the smartest, the funniest, or the most creative in your family, but you were the most ambitious. Where did that competitive spirit come from?

Frances Frei:
I don’t know, because certainly not with anyone else in my family. There wasn’t any ambition anywhere. I don’t know. I’ve always been gnaw-off-a-limb competitive. I don’t know where it comes from. Maybe it was a way to get out. And also I feel like I was … It’s not that I was underestimated, it’s just that no one else had any ambition for me either.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, maybe that’s what it is.

Frances Frei:
And so I had to have the ambition.

Debbie Millman:
I’m so ambitious that it scares Roxanne, my wife. We play Scrabble a lot. We love playing Scrabble with each other, but she says very accurately that I’m both a sore winner and a sore loser.

Anne Morriss:
What does being a sore winner look like?

Debbie Millman:
Then I get guilty. I feel guilty that I’ve won, and then I accuse Roxanne of letting me win.

Frances Frei:
Oh my gosh. Oh my god.

Anne Morriss:
Ouch. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I know. It’s so screwed up on so many levels. It’s amazing that she even plays a game with me.

Frances Frei:
It is amazing.

Debbie Millman:
It truly is amazing.

Frances Frei:
I guess that is what love is.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. That is what love is. Absolutely. Anyway, by the time you were 12, you had a job. You worked from 8:00 AM almost to 12 AM, I think, every day you didn’t have school.

Frances Frei:
Yeah. Well, the four-hour block, so from 8:00 AM to noon.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, the four-hour block. Okay.

Frances Frei:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You were making $1.25 an hour. What were you doing and how on earth were you only making $1.25 an hour? I mean, even when I … And I’m older than you. When I started working, minimum wage was like six bucks an hour.

Frances Frei:
Yeah. It was below minimum wage. I remember going down to the corner store, which was just at the bottom of the hill. It was a gross little town grocery store where everyone came to get their newspaper and coffee and sandwiches. Buttered roll because it was Long Island. I’m not sure that the rest of our listeners will react the way that you and I just non-verbally did, but if you know, you know.

Debbie Millman:
You know, you know. There’s nothing else like it.

Frances Frei:
So I made a lot of buttered rolls. And when I went down there and I asked for a job and the store owner said, “Well, when do you want to work?” And I said, “From 8:00 to noon every day I don’t have school.” And he said, “How much do you want to make?” And I said, “$1.27 an hour.”

Debbie Millman:
He was like, “Hired.” Child labor lawyers be damned.

Frances Frei:
I remember I didn’t make minimum wage until I came back and worked there when I wasn’t at basketball camps in college. I would come back and work there, and that’s when it got raised to minimum wage. I didn’t become a good negotiator until later in life, and I’ve never been a great negotiator for me. I became a great negotiator when I negotiated on behalf of others, and then I’m super fierce and awesome, but I’ve never been a very good negotiator for me.

Debbie Millman:
Anne, you also started working early. You got your first leadership job when you were 14 in South America where you were volunteering with an organization called Amigos, which is sort of a mini Peace Corps you’ve described it as. What kind of work were you doing? How did you find a position like that and how long did you do it for?

Anne Morriss:
Yeah. I actually wasn’t 14, but we had volunteers that were that young.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, okay.

Anne Morriss:
I was a little bit older.

Debbie Millman:
How old were you?

Anne Morriss:
I did it in the summer. I started working with the program the summer after my freshman year in college.

Debbie Millman:
Okay, so a bit older. Yeah.

Anne Morriss:
So I was a bit older. I did find my way to Latin America, Haiti actually, through a different program when I was … I think I was maybe 14 or 15. And I do think part of that was just hunger to see the world beyond Ohio. I had a dear friend across the street whose mother was Venezuelan. And in English, she was a fairly reserved woman, and then she would get on the phone to her family and speak this magical language and turn into a completely different human being. And the rules of my household were fairly typical WASPy. The range of permissible emotion was relatively narrow. And I was totally captivated by this magical language, this whole region, and I think from a young age started plotting ways to get down there and experience a different way of living, a larger emotional spectrum, a different relationship with life, a different relationship with vitality, a different relationship with the body. I think all that stuff was really captivating to me. And so public health was an industry that was willing to hire unskilled labor, and so I ended up working in rural communities on simple health projects. Typically, they were being run by local governments. It was more an exchange program than a public health program, but that was the framework. And I had an extraordinary run with this experience, got very interested in the idea of leadership, the idea of human capacity, what happens to human beings when you push them into experiences that they don’t think they can handle. Finding shared humanity with people whose life experiences were radically different from mine. All the things that are deeply energizing to me at this point in my life, the seeds were all planted in those experiences.

Debbie Millman:
I read that you spent your summers working in Ecuador, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil, and you ended up eventually working at Amigos headquarters as the regional director for South America and the Caribbean. And you’ve stated that it was a profound privilege to be part of the volunteers’ transformation and to help a young person evolve into their better future self at sometimes astonishing speed and it was completely addictive. And when I read that, I felt like,

oh, there was the birth of Anne Morriss, the entrepreneur and leadership coach and consultant.

Anne Morriss:
Yeah. I think that’s where all the conviction was born around human beings’ ability to change, the speed at which they can change, just the profound impact of being exposed to different points of view, different life experiences, the alchemy of those differences coming together. I mean, for sure it all started there and I think probably back in Mrs. Fitzgerald’s kitchen where she would transform into this other person, which was really just all these parts of her that were relatively dormant in a suburb in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Debbie Millman:
So you were working in Latin America. Frances, you were working in a little grocery store. What did you both think you wanted to do professionally with your lives at that point?

Frances Frei:
I didn’t know anything that I was going to do. I remember even in applying for college, it was such a haphazard thing and I ended up sending drafts in instead of the actual things and I mean, it was a disaster of all of the application process. And I ended up going to a college. I went to Brandeis University for my first year. I don’t even recall applying to it. I don’t-

Debbie Millman:
You didn’t visit it beforehand. I know that.

Frances Frei:
No. Never.. and then didn’t, for example, know that it was a Jewish school, which didn’t matter except for it is and it’s knowable. That was the level of what the secret memos I didn’t have even of what I was applying to. I didn’t know how to apply. And then going to college, I couldn’t imagine what I was going to major in. The only thing I could do was math, so the major was fine, but then you had to have a minor and I was like, “Oh my gosh. How am I going to do that?” I wasn’t thinking very far ahead on the chessboard. It wasn’t until after playing college basketball where I knew I was going to be a basketball coach. By that time I had worked coaching basketball every summer, working basketball camps. So that was the thing I was sure I was going to do, but I got dislodged. My competitive instincts dislodged me from that. I had friends who … I hated school when I was in college.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I read that when you went to Brandeis, it was the first time you felt misery.

Frances Frei:
That is true. I don’t even know how you knew that. I don’t recall ever saying it. It was the first time I ever felt misery. And I had a rough childhood, but I’d never felt misery. But Brandeis was a horrible experience for me. And then I transferred to Penn. I don’t even know how that happened. And it wasn’t as miserable, but I hated school. I hated school. I hated going to class. And so imagine my surprise when I applied for graduate school.

Debbie Millman:
And then a PhD.

Frances Frei:
And then a PhD.

Debbie Millman:
And then becoming a teacher.

Frances Frei:
All of these things surprising me among everyone else in my life when they were surprised and it all happened because I had friends who were doing it. What I was going to do, lose-

Debbie Millman:
In the grand scheme of things, I wish I had felt that competitive school-wise rather than having it all sort of projected into Scrabble, but nevertheless.

Frances Frei:
I feel like I stumbled into all of these things. All of them.

Debbie Millman:
Now, if you were really interested in becoming a basketball coach, what would a PhD in math do for you in that regard?

Frances Frei:
Well, it’s a very good question. My friends were all going to get PhDs in English. Obviously, I was very fond of the English majors.

Anne Morriss:
She has a type, Debbie.

Frances Frei:
And as Anne likes to remind me, it doesn’t always appear that it’s my first language, but it is my only language. I couldn’t major in English and so the only thing I could major in was something applied math. And so I went to business school for operations management, which is applied math essentially. So I got my PhD in the only thing I could possibly get my PhD in. So it wasn’t that I had any grand scheme or grand plan. In fact, my plan was to go be a college basketball coach, but there wasn’t anything else I could do. And also, I wasn’t a very rigorous thinker at the time. There must have been places you could go to college for gym or whatever one goes to. I don’t know what one-

Debbie Millman:
PE?

Frances Frei:
PE. There must’ve been somebody doing something somewhere, but it never even occurred to me. In fact, where did I go? I went to Penn as an undergrad, so I went to Wharton, which is in the same university. I wasn’t a very broad thinker. I was ambitious, but not specifically ambitious.

Debbie Millman:
You started teaching while you were getting your PhD at Wharton, and I think it’s there that you started to feel that being in the front of the class-

Frances Frei:
That changed everything.

Debbie Millman:
Was where you belonged.

Frances Frei:
That changed everything. I would teach review sessions for a class. There were, I don’t know, maybe 800 students in the Wharton program and they would take this class and then I would hold review sessions and very quickly people maybe wouldn’t go to class, they would just go to the review sessions. And so I figured it out and I knew I hated going to class. Hated it. And so I wanted to give people a compelling reason to go to class. And I provided the secret memos. Well, it turns out that those are two key elements for teaching. And then a faculty member got sick at the last minute once and so I actually taught the class, not just the review sessions, and that was the first time I thought, maybe it’s not going to be basketball, maybe it’s going to be this other academic thing. Although I had no idea how I was going to actually get my PhD because the thought of how I would write a paper, none of that seemed possible to me.

Debbie Millman:
What did you write your thesis on?

Frances Frei:
I showed it to Anne when she came into the office the first time.

Anne Morriss:
First date.

Frances Frei:
I was in a field where everyone studied manufacturing and that was what operations was. I hated manufacturing. I was interested in services, which was 70% of the economy. And so I studied service operations. What I would call it is I studied everything you couldn’t drop on your foot and it’s just how things work. And then, like now, I thought everything was fixable, and so I would just look at where people had conventional wisdom that this would happen and I just showed when it didn’t. That ended up being … I think every single paper I wrote, my dissertation, all of it was questioning conventional wisdom.

Debbie Millman:
You joined the University of Rochester Simon School of Business. After completing your PhD. How did you begin to develop your teaching style? And as a very popular teacher at Harvard Business School and having been in your class, you have a very distinct, very charismatic teaching style. How did you develop that?

Frances Frei:
I do think it was the mixture of the secret memo and compelling reason to come to class. I hated class. I mean, I can’t describe how uncomfortable I felt in it. I didn’t feel like I learned when I was there, so I would have to go teach myself elsewhere, which turned out to be a useful skill. But I learned math through textbooks, not in a classroom, and I didn’t want other people to have to do it. The charisma, I’m not even sure I know what it means in that setting, although I am-

Debbie Millman:
You sparkle in the front of a room.

Frances Frei:
Well, I do feel most comfortable one-to-many, so I’m at my least comfortable one-to-one. Sorry, baby.

Anne Morriss:
20 years and I have all the information.

Debbie Millman:
She’s looking at Anne, not me. She’s looking at Anne, not me.

Frances Frei:
I feel most intimate when it’s one-to-many. In fact, the larger the audience, the more vulnerable I’ll be, the more human I’ll be. When you were describing the wider range of emotions, I have the wide range of emotions, the more permission I have. So there is something about if the bigger, the better that just works for me.

Debbie Millman:
Anne.

Anne Morriss:
Mm-hmm.

Debbie Millman:
What did you want to be as you were traveling all through Latin America, helping people find themselves?

Anne Morriss:
I think I figured out that public health was not a good fit for me. The premise of that world is that it’s not a move fast and fix things and it’s a community of extraordinarily talented and committed humans that are working on very long-term problems. And I knew that wasn’t the right fit for me. I loved being in motion. I loved trafficking in human potential. And I didn’t know what that could possibly translate into in terms of a career. Where I ended up migrating was into the economic development branch of the development space. That felt like a better fit for me. I started working on the issue of how do you create environments where entrepreneurs can thrive in places that weren’t designed perfectly for entrepreneurship? Silicon Valley is designed perfectly for entrepreneurship. Boston is designed almost perfectly for entrepreneurship. Sao Paulo Brazil is not. What are the levers that you can push on in terms of policy, in terms of capital that start to create an ecosystem where small vulnerable companies can start and can ultimately thrive.
Now, the most interesting thing [inaudible 00:35:42] part of small vulnerable companies to me are the human beings inside them. And so I knew when I got into that world that I was starting to circle something that could potentially turn into a career. And then I was working in a startup in that space where it was also clear to me that the human beings running the place were these big variables, particularly at that stage of the company, in terms of whether the enterprise was going to succeed or not. And that question and those combinations of questions was very interesting to me, which is how I ended up on the MBA track because it was a program and environment that took those questions seriously.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you started out at Brown University. You got a Bachelor of arts degree, which really surprised me because you then went on to Harvard to get an MBA. What inspired you? From what I understand, you applied to one business school and it was Harvard. That’s chutzpah.

Anne Morriss:
Well, I didn’t know if it was the right path and I thought that-

Frances Frei:
And you’re a snob.

Anne Morriss:
I am. I can’t totally deny that. But part of the calculus for me is I don’t know if this is the right path. I’m going to give it my best shot and I was pretty good at getting into things. I only applied to one undergraduate school as well. And so I knew how to apply to things and so I thought, okay, I’m going to do my thing and if it’s the right fit, this institution will respond and open its doors. And it did and it was a great experience. And we overlapped on campus. For the record, Frances was never my teacher, but I did first see Frances on a stage.

Frances Frei:
The one to many.

Anne Morriss:
In this one to many. And the translation to one-on-one was confusing in the beginning, baby. It’s like, wait, wait.

Frances Frei:
Where is she?

Anne Morriss:
Where is she? And I was an older student. It was really fun to go back to school. The learning model’s really fun. It’s much different than being a more passive undergraduate. But what I studied at Brown was the history of the Americas and the evolution of the societies and the clash, blending creative friction of all of these different human elements, that is a through line from standing at the top of the stairs and saying give me liberty or give me death. So that part wasn’t a surprise to anyone around me. The business school left turn was a surprise. And if you had told my 15-year-old self that I would end up at Harvard Business School and now be in the game of helping capitalists be better at capitalism, it would be an absurd ending to the story.

Debbie Millman:
I’m more in Frances’ camp of applying to things and … Actually I’m sort of in the Venn diagram of both of you because I also only applied to one graduate school but didn’t get in. And so I did quite a lot of that in my 20s. I would pick one thing that I thought I wanted to do, not really designating it as a sign, but just this is what I want to do. But always was one after another rejected from that one option. Frances, you applied to Harvard five times. They said no to you when you applied to go to college, when you applied for your PhD. You got turned down you applied to be on the faculty for the first time and when you went up for tenure. What kept you persisting in the face of so much rejection?

Frances Frei:
I do-

Anne Morriss:
The snob in me wants to clarify that you were ultimately tenured.

Debbie Millman:
Oh yeah. Of course, of course. Yes. Let’s be clear. And you’re a distinguished professor. Absolutely. And of won many prizes for the best professor.

Anne Morriss:
I recall. I was like, we’re not losing this one, honey. Let’s go.

Frances Frei:
I don’t ever let the decisions of others influence my life’s trajectory. So saying no to me is not the same as saying no to Anne Morriss. Like you say no to Anne Morriss, it’s one strike and you’re out. She will never revisit you. If you say no to me,

I just hear not now. I don’t take it seriously. I think I probably could have presented myself better. A different person will be making the decision. And I had a feeling, and it just became clearer and clearer and then it turned out to be right, that it was the right place for me. And it has turned out to be the right place for me.

So I just had an instinct that it was the right form of being a very practice-oriented school. And so for example, I love bringing everything I know to students, whereas many colleagues at many other business schools like bringing everything they know to colleagues, so they’ll read each other’s academic journals. If I write a paper, I want it to be read by students. I mean, yes, I’ll have it go into a publication, but still my main consumer are executives and students. There’s lots of great schools, but Harvard is the number one school in that dimension. We call it being very close to practice. So I just knew it was where I was supposed to be. And unlike Anne, I don’t know how to get in. I never got the secret memos. I still now, if I applied for something, I would have no expectation I would get in. I consider that Anne applied for tenure for me the second time.

Debbie Millman:
Anne, the first step you took to starting your own company was from an ominous phone call you got a few days after you and Frances had your first child. A man on the phone called and asked whether your baby boy, just a few days old and sleeping peacefully in the next room, was still alive. When you responded, “Yes, he’s still alive,” he asked you to go check and confirm and then come back to the phone.

Anne Morriss:
Yeah. That happened.

Debbie Millman:
What happened next? That’s just unthinkable.

Anne Morriss:
Yeah. Our oldest inherited a rare metabolic condition called MCAD deficiency. MCAD deficiency means he is essentially missing the enzyme that converts fat into sugar that you can use when your body runs out of sugar. It’s a very important part of your metabolism. And in infancy, your sugars are all over the place, so it’s actually quite easy to sleep past the amount of sugar you have in your body. So by the miracle of newborn screening, that little heel prick that most parents get to forget about that happens within the first few hours of a kiddo’s birth, the data came back, and it was pretty clear that his levels were off. I think they ran the test again to make sure. There was a little bit of a lag, so we had gone home, and I can remember where I was in the apartment, I can remember what I was wearing, I can remember the floor.
And it was not my doctor. It was this voice from the state of Massachusetts. And this voice said, “Well, is your child still alive?” And I said, “I think so. I just put him down for a nap.” And he said, “Can you go check and then come back to-“

Frances Frei:
I’ll hold.

Anne Morriss:
I’ll hold and then come back to the phone. And the thing in retrospect, having immersed ourselves in so many systems, that’s so painful about that moment, not for us per se … I mean, our son’s doing great and I’ll fill in the blanks, but I’m sure that’s a protocol that they came by the hard way.

Debbie Millman:
And your son is 15 now?

Anne Morriss:
Yeah, he’s 16.

Debbie Millman:
16.

Anne Morriss:
He’s doing extraordinarily well. On this list of rare diseases, it’s kind of the one you want. He essentially outgrows it. But the first couple years we had to feed him around the clock every couple hours. And those were just high anxiety times. And then when he would get sick with something else, which is metabolically stressful, the flu or kids get sick all the time, so we would go and fight it off with a special IV to keep his sugars up. And so there were a couple of years there where there was a hospital bag packed by the door and we were in and out of Children’s Hospital just keeping this kiddo alive.

Debbie Millman:
You decided to start a company aimed at reducing the odds of having an unhealthy child when using donor sperm. Tell us more about that decision.

Anne Morriss:
Yeah. Well, we have this kind of fix-it, can-do lesbian spirit. I’m sure it was also a way to metabolize, for lack of a better word, my own experience in those years. But one of the things that was shocking to us was how much further advanced the genomic science was than clinical practice. And what had happened was … I mean, this was 16 years ago, but at the time the scientists and clinicians had kind of stopped talking to each other 20 years previously. They’re motivated by different things. So the two branches of genetic science, the clinical science and the research science, went in different directions and they had different vocabulary for the same things. It really was a dramatic break. And I was convinced that I could just get everyone in a room and reintroduce everyone to each other and realize we all wanted the same things.
And there was a real opportunity to make the screening protocols for donor sperm and donor eggs much better because really where the risk lives is at the combination of the two parents. It’s actually very, very rare that an individual donor is passing on disease risk and doesn’t somehow know it and isn’t somehow sick themselves. It’s really what happens when the biological parents come together. And so I started a company with an extraordinary scientist named Lee Silver, who had invented a way to see that disease risk at much higher resolution. And we knew we had a better way of doing things and he’s kind of set out down this path. And we underestimated the complexity of changing clinical practice in America.
You have to bring patients along, doctors along, the payers and insurance companies along, and then you have to bring the venture capitalists with you and they have to literally run the numbers and be convinced that you’re going to solve all of these problems on a timeline that’s going to work for their own investors. And we started down the path, and I think we all looked at this mountain and realized just the probabilities. Probabilities of any business hitting it out of the park are low. It’s a portfolio play. But I think we had a great run. The whole experience was six, seven years of building this company, but it just ultimately didn’t make sense to the people writing the checks and I understand. I was super frustrated because we had-

Debbie Millman:
You had figured it out. You had the thing.

Anne Morriss:
Yeah, we had the thing. We could have saved a lot of kids.

Frances Frei:
Getting that phone call.

Anne Morriss:
Many fewer families would’ve gotten that phone call. It didn’t work.

Debbie Millman:
I believe you sold the science though, didn’t you?

Anne Morriss:
Yeah, we did. The science did find a home, and I don’t know where it landed, but it is not in clinical practice today.

Debbie Millman:
You must have been able to learn so much that you can bring into your own work now. I mean, I think the most valuable thing that I bring to my students are overcoming the obstacles that have stood in my way. I couldn’t be the teacher I am if I didn’t have that experience.

Anne Morriss:
It was a big lesson for me in the gifts of what we label failure and frustration and plan A not working out. So much of what I learned in that ride … Thank you to all the venture capitalists who paid for my education in this regard. But so much of what I’ve learned, I’ve been able to pass on to other entrepreneurs and it deeply informs the work we do, helping people work through the challenges of leadership and building their own organizations.

Debbie Millman:
In 2018, you founded the Leadership Consortium, so tell us what the goal of that organization was when you first started it and what you’re doing with it now.

Anne Morriss:
Yeah. Well, it was deeply informed by Frances’ experience. She took a timeout from the Harvard Business School with the school’s blessing to go work with Uber at the height of its leadership crisis. And you got a very first-hand look at some of the patterns of where underrepresented leaders were getting stuck in their trajectory in Silicon Valley. And the pattern was really clear in that small investments in learning, exposure, peer-to-peer network, all of these things that were getting in the way of people having the careers and the impact that they wanted in these organizations were very solvable problems. And so we designed this program really for anyone who is interested in accelerating their careers. And we bring in … Many of them are friends of Frances. Fantastic professors. To work with students for just a couple months at a time. And really what we’re trying to achieve in terms of the metric of success that we care about is greater confidence at the end of the program than when people started. And we have a pretty reliable hit rate.

Frances Frei:
Oh, it’s an amazing hit rate. I mean, we learned so many things, but one, the power of education and all of the other things that we do, but it’s also, it brings us to the current DEI debate. As you were just speaking, I was like, yeah, this is one of the reasons where I get so enraged when I hear overconfident, under informed people talking about DEI. Like the reason that DEI exists is because there were demographic tendencies associated with who thrived. And we saw people being artificially held back. You could see the profiles. It was unmistakable. And so we’re removing the artificial obstacles that were getting in the way, which is I think what brought every single person to DEI to the table. It wasn’t to give unfair advantage, it was to remove unfair disadvantage. And so then when I hear people saying, “I want to blow up DEI,” I’m like, you want to go back to there being demographic tendencies associated with who’s permitted to have a chance of thriving.

I don’t believe it. But that’s where it came from. And it was so clear to me in Silicon Valley, not just at Uber, but I had a chance to go to all of the companies. And once you had that lens on, you couldn’t not see it. So when he left, and I had taken a two-year leave from Harvard, but it only took a year to turn around Uber. And so then I was like, “Well, I can go back early.” And then we had a conversation, we were like, “We have this observation. Do we think it’s going to get addressed if we don’t do it?” And we estimated the probability of it being addressed at zero. And so that’s what we did. And the nice thing about the companies that we now bring people together across company, and that has been the magic of it. And so amazing companies that typically don’t learn together, they all have very insular learning programs that they might send one person to, they send a cohort to us at a time, and so we get to really work with their companies to help accelerate them.

Debbie Millman:
You and Anne and another writer wrote a really powerful op-ed in the New York Times back in January. I believe it was January 24th. And for anybody that is interested in learning more about and Anne and Frances’ viewpoints on this topic, I would suggest that you look up that article and we’ll have it in some show notes. You’ve since gone on to write several best-selling books together. So you live together, you have a business together, and you write together. What is it like sharing your life on so many different dimensions with each other every day?

Frances Frei:
Unbelievably rich. Richer for it. Richer for all of it. And anytime we’ve had anything less than that where one of us was doing something without the other, it didn’t feel as fulfilling and it certainly wasn’t as high quality. I can speak for myself. My doing anything in the presence of Anne, one plus one adds at least a zero and sometimes two zeros. It’s just so much richer the more we get to do together and the conspicuous absence of it, so I genuinely can’t imagine doing anything without her.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk about your most recent book, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems. And I believe that the seed of the book was inspired by Mark Zuckerberg’s five word motto, move fast and break things, which you’ve said you think is terrible advice.

Frances Frei:
It’s terrible advice. And of course, a 24-year-old boy came up with it. The harm I originally thought it did is that it gave people permission to break things, but then it wasn’t until the larger harm revealed itself to us that we were moved to write the book, which is the deep harm is that it gave speed a bad name. So many well-intentioned people go slowly out of fear of breaking things. And when I say so many, I’m going to round it off to everyone.

I mean everywhere I go every day, I see people giving each other license to go slower in the name of some virtue. And I feel like I have the secret memo that going slower will give you lower quality with certainty, and yet everyone is inducing everyone else to go slower as a virtue. And so what we’re trying to do is spread the word that the increased metabolic rate is what actually allows you to go further. It’s a momentum thing. And that what is breaking things is not the speed, it’s the other things you’re doing, like breaking trust. All of the reasons that people want to slow down. Things don’t get better when you slow down. They get better when you fix the other things. You can fix those at pace. But we keep telling each other to go slow, so now we just have people going slow and leading to mediocrity. It is an epidemic around the world. And so this is to me a classic example of a secret memo that needs to be distributed around the world.

Debbie Millman:
Early on in the book you state “A cornerstone of our work is that leadership is the practice of imperfect humans leading imperfect humans. If you accept this as a reasonable starting point, then it follows that any collection of us builds imperfect organizations.” Is that okay to have an imperfect organization? Do you suggest that we feel more comfortable being imperfect?

Anne Morriss:
Well, no. The idea with that statement is to forgive yourself for the imperfections. I feel like so much of our emotional energy goes towards the question. We’re trying to say, it’s a given. You didn’t get it right.

Frances Frei:
And you could be a better version of yourself tomorrow than you are today.

Anne Morriss:
And so instead of worrying, did I get this right or not, let’s assume you didn’t because none of us do. So now that’s the jumping off point of curiosity to go out and figure, well, can you make it better tomorrow than it was today? And we’re trying to invite people into that orientation that’s going to allow them to make progress and build organizations where other people have a reasonable chance of thriving.

Frances Frei:
We know that rate of improvement matters so much more than wherever you are today and yet there are so many organizations that are so protective of where they are today and they have stopped improving. They’re doing things the same way they were doing yesterday and last year and 10 years ago and without shame. It’s actually with pride. And I’m like, you have denied yourself a learning opportunity for 10 years and you’re proud. I don’t understand. I genuinely don’t understand it.

Debbie Millman:
There’s also, I believe, an epidemic of people being really unhappy at their jobs. I listened to an interview that you did with Chris Anderson where you talked about how 70% of the workforce in the United States is unhappy in their work.

Frances Frei:
And yet we are super proud of how we’re doing things and we don’t feel an urgent need to be better versions of ourselves tomorrow than we are today. That is the part that doesn’t make any sense. And every single time we’ve gone into an organization that has said we want to be on an improvement journey, they get on it, they get on it quickly and steeply. And so it’s all also so possible. And so this is, I think, simply a storytelling problem, which is why storytelling figures so prominently in this book, which was a surprise to me as-

Anne Morriss:
Applied math.

Frances Frei:
As the applied math, and we just have to figure out how to do it. And yet that was not enough. And then that’s where I think Thursday was born in our book.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I mean, I think what’s so inspiring about the book is that it’s both a playbook and a journal. You learn how to do things differently, but you also are able to learn through seeing other people experience changing their behavior and what results when you’re able to do that. So many leadership books are about how to lead others and in many ways, I felt like your book is about how to change your leadership style to inspire others. It’s not about getting other people to do better work. It’s about you doing better work that inspires other people to follow your lead. The book helps people understand how to build their business and learn quickly while avoiding very costly mistakes and the narrative arc of the book is inventive. The methodology is based on a five-day work week, which you also talk about, Anne, in your TED Talk. What made you decide to organize the book in this way?

Anne Morriss:
I’m trying to remember if there was a decision point. I mean, I remember that we proposed it to our editor as a five-day plan to improve your organization, and she was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s a great metaphor.” We were like, “No. We’re fucking serious.” There’s a lot you can do in a week.

Frances Frei:
There’s so much you can do in a week. And I do think it comes that we would go with organizations. We’re always trying to get them to be more ambitious and to take less time. It’s always what we do. And when they are more ambitious and they take less time, they accomplish more. So a secret memo that needs distribution is stop asking for incremental change over a long period of time. You’re better off not doing it. So we knew it had to go faster, and so we’re constantly coaching people to go faster and faster. And then a month was too long, and so then the week was the next unit of analysis. A quarter was way too long because you can do … When you were asking Anne about the astonishing rate that people can change, change can happen in an instant. Do you know how many instants are in a week?

A lot of instants. There’s also, when we look at the actual work that’s done, if you just stack it all, 40 hours is a long time. I mean, that’s a long time. And what we encourage people to do is take out all of the downtime and just stack all of it together. Now, we have become, I think, less bold in saying … We’re like, “Look, it’s going to take longer than a week.” But honestly, what we think in our mind is it shouldn’t. But we have learned in polite company to say, “It’s going to take more than a week, but please don’t think about it as six months or a year.”

Debbie Millman:
I’m sorry to ask you to do this because I know it’s really sort of performative, but I really think it would be helpful for our listeners to take us through the five steps, even if you want to do it really quickly, but Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

Frances Frei:
Sure. On Monday you have to identify the real problem. If anyone who listens to Fixable where people call in with their problems, you’ll realize we end up solving a different problem than they call in every single time. Well, that’s true in organizations too. So the presenting problem is never the problem you have to solve, and there’s a very systematic way to do it. So that’s Monday. Because you will spend an infinite amount of time solving the symptom. And so we get that there. The goal of Tuesday is to come up with just the first pass at a plan. We call it a good enough plan. And for sure if you have a problem and it involves people, you have lost trust and so we have to rebuild trust. So that’s part of having the good enough plan.

Debbie Millman:
Let me just interrupt you because I do have a question about that. If a leader in an organization is looking to build trust, which is so important now more than ever, what would be the first thing that you would recommend that they do?

Frances Frei:
Understand that trust is actually a summary statistic of three component parts and the three component parts are authenticity, logic and empathy. And if I am struggling to build trust with you, I shouldn’t try to solve for trust. I should figure out do I have an authenticity, logic or empathy problem and solve for them. And so much of the unproductive effort is that I’m using an authenticity solution for an empathy problem, for example. So get down to the component part. Trust is so solvable. You’re right, it is the biggest problem and it is so solvable at the individual and organizational level.

Debbie Millman:
Wednesday is a fun day. Wednesday you’re making new friends.

Anne Morriss:
Wednesday is the best day. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Talk about Wednesday.

Frances Frei:
On Wednesday, whatever you’ve done, you’ve done it by somewhat traditional means on Monday and Tuesday. You’ve gone to the usual suspects, you’ve gone to the usual things, and that’s great, and do it. And then on Wednesday, take note of everyone you didn’t talk to who could possibly be helpful and bring them to the table. And so by make new friends, it’s the clarion call to who could possibly have a stake in this that you haven’t brought to attention. The example I often give is that at the Harvard Business School, we are proud that when we talk about our promotion rate. We’re like, “Oh look, it’s so stingy. We’re so selective.” But I see it as an unimproving operating system. We have never gotten better over decades and we’re not ashamed. We’re proud. And I know why, because the senior faculty get together all the time and talk about junior faculty without the junior faculty present.

Well, that’s because we skip Wednesday. We don’t make new friends. And imagine if we brought in the perspective of junior faculty, we could then improve the promotion rates and we could actually have an improving operating system. So Wednesday, I think is the fun day. It’s the invite everybody to the table that you haven’t yet. You don’t have to feel guilty about not having them before, but now is the day. Who’s not there? And then once you invite them to the table, realize that they’re going to say things to please you in the beginning. And so what we have to do is convince them that we don’t want to dwell on what they know in common with us. We want to know all of their uncommon thoughts. And so Wednesday is make new friends and get their unique insights. And then your good enough plan just adds a zero. Now we’re going.

Debbie Millman:
For somebody that’s been at a company a long time, you recommend that they reach out to someone who started last week to get more information and learn more about what they don’t know that they don’t know.

Frances Frei:
You want to get someone that is still saying, “We do things like what?” And it’s before-

Anne Morriss:
I mean, our ability to adapt is one of our great superpowers as humans. But before-

Frances Frei:
Before that … Yeah.

Anne Morriss:
Before you have truly adapted, you want to get the insight of someone who just showed up and is looking around.

Debbie Millman:
So Thursday’s about telling a story.

Anne Morriss:
Yeah. I mean, as human beings, we think in stories and learn in metaphors. One of our observations, we do a lot of work around change and changing organizations, is that the power of storytelling is underutilized in that it’s often an afterthought and when you center it and really bring intentionality to it, it’s a way to activate the entire organization, not just in your presence but in your absence. It’s about literally putting language to where were we? Why are we moving somewhere else? And what is it going to feel like when we get there? Even the most sophisticated organizations in the world are deeply hungry for this. We push all kinds of teams on this one, and it’s a really, really profound lever for progress.

Debbie Millman:
Friday is about going fast.

Frances Frei:
That’s my favorite day.

Debbie Millman:
I’m not surprised.

Anne Morriss:
All the tension gets released on Friday.

Debbie Millman:
And so what does it mean to have that tension released and to go fast? I think it’s the day of action, right?

Frances Frei:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
That’s when you put into play-

Frances Frei:
It’s when you get to do all the things. And if you put Friday … I mean move fast and break things is bringing Friday to Monday or to Tuesday or to Wednesday. So you have to do it on Friday, which is why it takes a whole week. So there are so many things we do to go slowly and you just have license to break through them. So some of my favorite are when people try to be great at everything. If you want to go fast, you have to articulate, this is what I’m going to be great at and this is what I’m going to be bad at.

Debbie Millman:
It’s a sacrifice.

Frances Frei:
It’s a sacrifice. And you have to be articulate about it, otherwise we’re each going to make our own private decisions. And then you might’ve made progress from eight to nine and then over here I’m going to bring us back from nine to 10. And so another one of my favorite ones is that conflict occurs and most of us avoid conflict. So conflict will happen. We avoid it, hoping it will go away.

Debbie Millman:
Magically.

Frances Frei:
Magically.

Debbie Millman:
Poof.

Frances Frei:
Turns out not only does it not go away, it grows without our attention. And so now the problem that I could have trivially solved today, it’s a bigger problem in a week. It’s a gigantic problem in a month, in six months. So leaning into conflict is what we do on Friday. Friday is just a whole list of delicacies, of how do you remove the speed bumps so that you can go fast. And it’s so liberating. And the reason it animates me so much is I get to watch people. It’s where you teach people how to have good meetings. You teach people who to invite to meet. You just unlock all the things on Friday. It’s the best day of the week.

Debbie Millman:
I think we could have a whole separate conversation on how to teach people how to have good meetings, so watch the space-

Anne Morriss:
Oh, that’s a whole podcast.

Frances Frei:
I’m quite evangelical about it. Anytime. Anytime.

Debbie Millman:
In tandem with the book’s launch, you also launched Fixable, your wonderful podcast, giving advice on workplace challenges. What has this new medium and realm been like for you?

Frances Frei:
Audio only is … I got captivated by it over the pandemic and started teaching cases on Clubhouse. Because I didn’t think you could do anything and I didn’t listen to podcasts before. And then I was like, oh my gosh, audio only is better. It’s more intimate. I’m not distracted by the visuals, particularly if I put a headset on. I’m never more present. So it’s this superpower that’s within plain sight for us. So I love that part of accompanying people intimately around the world. And then we get to practice what we preach. We can reach people anywhere and we think you can solve hard problems in 30 minutes and so that’s what we do. And it’s like flying without a net. I mean, every one of the episodes, Anne’s the host, I’m the co-host. But I hear the description of the problem and I’m like, what are we going to do?

Anne Morriss:
This is the one.

Frances Frei:
This is the one. We’re not going to solve this.

Anne Morriss:
It’s not fixable.

Frances Frei:
It’s not fixable. And then-

Debbie Millman:
Do you think that’s going to happen though? Do you think you’re ever going to be confronted?

Frances Frei:
I think it at the beginning of every single call. And every single call, Anne brings us to a place where she figures out what the real problem is and presents it as a layup and then we can solve it. No, I don’t think it’ll ever have. I think we can solve every problem, but I can tell you I can’t alone. I could never do it without Anne.

Debbie Millman:
My last question is about something I heard you say on Arnav Roy’s podcast. You said that one of the things you have in common is that you both like to go towards burning buildings, not away from them. I’m wondering how do you manifest that kind of courage?

Anne Morriss:
Well, you find a friend. That courage is possible for me to access with Frances standing next to me and it’s much harder when I’m alone. So phone a friend, find a buddy can be part of it. I also think the burning building metaphor for us is not about us. It may present as courage, but it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like a possibility to have impact and play a role in helping people get out of their own way. Most people are very hungry for that permission and it often takes someone from outside the story to come in and make the invitation and it’s the total privilege to be able to play that role.

Frances Frei:
It doesn’t feel like courage. It feels like the only thing we can’t provide is the will to change. Well, the burning building provides the will. I wish we didn’t need burning buildings. I wish people were more proactive. I want people to be more proactive. But with certainty, the burning building does it. And so the reason I go towards it doesn’t have courage at all, is I know what’s on the other side of it and that impact is assured when you go there.

Anne Morriss:
And the other thing we love about the burning building is people are collectively at a point where they’re open and willing to change, and you kind of hit that willingness at a scale that makes rapid change possible and that’s what is really animating for both of us.

Debbie Millman:
Anne and Frances, thank you so much for making so much work that matters and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. Frances Frei and Anne Morriss’ podcast is called Fixable, and their most recent book is titled Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems. You can read lots more about the work they do at anneandfrances.com. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

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Ever since I got my hands on a copy of the book User Friendly, I’ve been trying to make sense of it.

Namely: How the hell is it so cathartic?

Over the years, a lot of books have come through the Design Matters and PRINT offices—and I’m loathe to admit that it’s easy to become jaded. But then, every so often, a book like Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant’s shows up. As we look forward in January 2020, User Friendly made me momentarily look back.

Years ago, when I first started writing for PRINT and other professional arts publications, the great cliche that haunts the field was there to welcome me to it, a right of passage:
“What’s graphic design?” my parents asked.

(As my father wrote me, “I perused your new magazine today. Fancy production, but if somebody asked me what kind of magazine it is, I couldn’t tell them.”)

It was a worthy initiation, and as time went on I’d find myself trying to define to any number of people everything from industrial design to information architecture. And then there’s that most indefinable of design subsets: User Experience design, further muddled by the term “UX,” and frequently paired with the equally befuddling “UI.”

As Fabricant dedicates User Friendly: “To my family and friends. Hopefully this will explain once and for all what I do every day, and why it matters.”

The astounding thing about the book: It does. In fact, it does to such a degree that I bought a copy for my father.

Perhaps the key is that it reads nothing like you might expect a book on user experience to read. It’s touted for uncovering the story of the discipline for the first time and, yes, it does that with a stimulating amount of discovery. But it’s in how it does that that’s so remarkable. User Friendly often reads like thrilling narrative nonfiction, beginning with its case study of the Three Mile Island incident. From there, the authors connect the dots and, case study by case study, from the historical linchpin of Henry Dreyfuss to Disney’s innovative RFID MagicBands, build out an extraordinary history of not just user experience design, but so much design at large. Paul Rand famously gave us the quote “Design is everything. Everything!” to ruminate on—and this book might be the most accessible evidence of that yet.

The secret to it all? The authors.

Kuang’s on-scene reporting and narrative flair is instrumental, as is his graceful distillation of otherwise dense topics. Years of experience writing for the likes of Fast Company, ID and Wired—not to mention his current day job as a UX designer at Google—brilliantly preceded the text. Fabricant, meanwhile, spent 15 years innovating at Frog before co-founding Dalberg design.

For those who know what user experience design is, User Friendly deepens. For those who do not know, it reveals—and for anyone discovering user experience design for the first time through this book, I am envious.

As Allan Chochinov writes at Core77, “There are also syntheses in the book that are beyond astute and likely to be quoted by designers and philosophers for years to come.”

He is exactly right.

So to ring in this new episode of Design Matters With Debbie Millman, here is a collection of 21 turns of phrase and bon mots.

Enjoy.

—Zachary Petit, Design Matters Media and PRINT Magazine Editor-in-Chief

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“Design presumes that we can make objects humane, but doing so requires a different way of seeing the world.”

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“Design thinking is now marshaled to solve myriad problems at every scale. What was once a niche profession more commonly associated with chairs is now talked of as a solution to the world’s ills, simply because of a shift in perspective.”

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“Technology should become simpler over time. Then it should become simpler still, so that it disappears from notice. This has already happened with stunning speed, and that transformation is one of the greatest cultural achievements of the last 50 years.”

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“It’s no surprise then that the reasons a bad app drives you crazy have a direct relationship to the reasons that Three Mile Island almost melted into the earth. The problems that caused Three Mile Island are similar to the ones that frustrate you when you’re trying to turn off the notifications on your smartphone; the inscrutability of a poorly designed light switch shares the same cause as your inscrutable cable box: a button that seems misplaced, a pop-up message that vanishes before you can figure out what it means, the sense that you did something but you don’t know what.”

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“Forty years after Three Mile Island, feedback is more than just what makes machines intelligible. When feedback is tied not merely to the way machines work but instead to the things we value most—our social circles, our self-image—it can become the map by which we chart our lives. It can determine how the experiences around us feel. In an era when how a product feels to use is the measure of how much we’ll use it, this is everything.”

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“The world of everyday life is so densely layered with information that it can be hard to realize how much information—how much feedback—we have to recreate in the world of design. And yet feedback is what turns any man-made creation into an object that you relate to, one that might evoke feelings of ease or ire, satisfaction or frustration. These are the bones of our relationship with the world around us.”

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“Designers, by aligning consumer design with business incentives, thus became high priests of the faith that better goods meant better lives all around. Such faith remains the unspoken message embedded in how new products are invented today.”

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“We live in a sandbox of someone else’s design, made more clever because the information on offer on our phones, on our computers, in our cars confines us within a simplified version of the world.”

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On Paul Fitts: “At the time, having a doctorate in the nascent field of experimental psychology was a novel thing, and with that novelty came a certain authority. He’s supposed to know how people
think. His true talent is realizing that he doesn’t.”

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“The magic of a well-designed invention is that you seem to know how it will work even before you’ve used it.”

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“Whether we’re communicating with a human or a machine, the goal is to create a shared understanding of the world. That’s the point behind both the rules governing polite conversation and how a user-friendly machine should work.”

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“Metaphors accomplish something essential to human progress: They don’t just spur us to make new things; they inspire the ways in which those things will behave once they’re in our hands.”

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“In digesting new technologies, we climb a ladder of metaphors, and each rung helps us step up to the next.”

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“The story of technology’s advance is also the story of metaphors bending to their limits, then breaking.”

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“Apple’s rise is nothing more or less than the story of three interfaces: the Macintosh OS, the iPod click wheel, and the iPhone touchscreen. Everything else has been fighting about how the pie would be divided up among competitors and copycats.”

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“User-friendliness is simply the fit between the objects around us and the ways we behave. So while we might think that the user-friendly world is one of making user-friendly things, the bigger truth is that design doesn’t rely on artifacts. As my collaborator Robert Fabricant likes to say, it relies on our patterns of behavior. All the nuances of designing new products can be reduced to one of two basic strategies: either finding what causes us pain and trying to eliminate it, or reinforcing what we already do with a new object that makes it so easy it becomes second nature. The truest material for making new things isn’t aluminum or carbon fiber. It’s behavior.”

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“User-friendliness has redefined nearly every minute of our waking lives.”

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“Sometimes, designers get called on to make better versions of things that already exist, but they spend most of their time trying to create things that never existed before. When something hasn’t existed before, how do you make it easy to use? And even after that new thing makes its way into the world, how do you improve it enough so that it disappears into daily life?”

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“We now expect that the tools we use to diagnose cancer or to identify a problem with an airplane engine will be as simple to use as Angry Birds.”

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“There may be no greater design challenge for the 21st century than creating better, tighter feedback loops in places where they don’t exist, be they in the environment, health care, or government.”

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“This was a designer’s way of looking at the world: the sense that if our better selves are within easier reach, then of course we’ll be better people.”

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Coming soon.

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Chip Kidd has never been bashful about his admiration of Chris Ware’s work.

As Ware told Publisher’s Weekly, “Chip called me one day out of nowhere, offering endless and embarrassing words of kind praise for the first three issues of my comic The Acme Novelty Library, and invited me to design an invitation for a talk he was giving. He paid me $1,000—at that point more than I’d ever been paid for anything—and wrote ‘nude modeling’ in the memo line of the check to embarrass me when I deposited it at the bank. We’ve been very close friends ever since.”

Kidd, entrenched at Pantheon, brought Ware’s brilliant opus Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth to the publisher in 1999 (dubbing Ware “the James Joyce of comics,” and Jimmy Corrigan his “Ulysses”). The book would go on to win a slew of awards, including a Harvey and an Eisner, and become Ware’s breakout, with the author going on to create such works as Building Stories, and his latest, the acclaimed Rusty Brown. 

Kidd, meanwhile, had become a design pillar over the years for his jacket work—from the iconic Jurassic Park cover that defined the book and film series to his covers for Cormac McCarthy and Huraki Murakami—and for his own books, including Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design, The Cheese Monkeys, The Learners, Batman: Death by Design and more. Dubbed “a pioneer in book cover art” by Booklist and “the closest thing to a rock star” in design by USA Today, his impact on the field and its evolution cannot be understated.

In the latest episode of Design Matters With Debbie Millman, these two minds converge and converse—making us, and anyone who has ever read one of their books, profoundly thankful that Kidd found his way to Knopf as a junior assistant in 1986 and that Ware posed for Kidd’s veritable figure-drawing class so many years ago.

To ring in the episode, here are 19 stray strands of their wisdom—clues to their personalities that interlock like puzzle pieces.

—Zachary Petit, Design Matters Media Editor-in-Chief

“As an art of reproduction, comics always returns to its status as trash, which I think is key to its being seen clearly and read critically; it has none of the innate prestige of writing or painting and so has to earn its stature on its own terms, every time.” —Chris Ware

“I’m no expert on haiku poetry, but it is a very, very strict form of getting a lot of information and emotion across in a very minimal, crystallized way, and I think the front of a book cover also does that.” —Chip Kidd

“I don’t think of myself as an illustrator. I think of myself as a cartoonist. I write the story with pictures—I don’t illustrate the story with the pictures.” —Chris Ware

“My job was to ask this question: ‘What do the stories look like?’ Because that is what Knopf is. It is the story factory, one of the very best in the world. We bring stories to the public.” —Chip Kidd

“Comics are the art of memory, and every word, picture, gesture, idea, aim, regret, etc. that's gone into the story has somehow filtered through my recollection and selectivity, so it's all somehow autobiographical.” —Chris Ware

“Clarity or mystery? I'm balancing these two things in my daily work as a graphic designer, as well as my daily life as a New Yorker every day, and they’re two elements that absolutely fascinate me.” —Chip Kidd

“For the reader as well as the artist, comics are already something of a paper mirror.” —Chris Ware

“I just observe what people are doing, and I do something else. I go against it. This is one of the things one of my teachers at school told me: Find out what everyone in the class is doing, and then do something completely different. And that has always made perfect sense to me.” —Chip Kidd

“One of the most valuable things one of my teachers said to me was, ‘Don’t be upset by criticism. Value the fact that at least someone noticed what you did.’” —Chris Ware

“She said: ‘No one’s ever done a book to teach graphic design to kids. I think someone should do it and I think it should be you.’ I was utterly floored. I said: ‘I don’t know anything about kids. I don’t know how to talk to them effectively. I don’t have them. I don’t even like them. This puts me out of my comfort zone. And so I’ll give it a shot.’” —Chip Kidd

“I knew Rusty Brown would be a long book, but as in the embarrassing cases of my other experiments, I never thought it would go on as
long as it has, or metastasize into such a sprawling mess. Then again, sprawling messes are what I aim for, since they most accurately reflect real life.” —Chris Ware

“Graphic design, if you wield it effectively, is power. Power to transmit ideas that change everything. Power that can destroy an entire race or save a nation from despair. In this century, Germany chose to do the former with the swastika, and America opted for the latter with Mickey Mouse and Superman.” —Chip Kidd

“I very much believe that one of the most important things we can do is to try as hard as we can to imagine other people’s lives, with the ultimate aim of understanding and empathizing with everyone we possibly can. We already do this unconsciously when we dream, or consciously when some jerk cuts us off on the highway, but fiction can act as an assisting rudder; books can’t tell us how to live, but they can help us get better at imagining how to live.” —Chris Ware

“‘Jurassic Park.’ That will be the first line of my obituary, and I’m extremely proud of that. I have absolutely no regrets.” —Chip Kidd

“At a recent conference with my daughter’s teacher, I expressed my frustration with the increasing lack of time for her to draw in school, and her teacher said that the new Common Core standards not only didn’t include it, they didn’t allow for any extra time for what are considered ‘non-literate’ endeavors. … I’ve encouraged her to still take one of her sketchbooks to school regardless of what her teacher says. Maybe it’s even good to have something to ‘work against’ at her young age.” —Chris Ware

“Would I design a cover for Ann Coulter or Bill O’Reilly? Absolutely not! It’s one thing to design a cover for a novel that’s not Ulysses, it’s another to design a cover for a book that basically teaches people to think like an asshole.” —Chip Kidd

"I was listening to a lot of Brahms at the time—sorry, this sounds so pretentious, but it's true—and I remember feeling that I wanted to produce that sensation on the page, with a large image, and then something much more lyrical and textural, and then into a sweeping passage, and then focusing down into a point. I feel that music does that better than anything; it captures that weird sensation of writing one’s thoughts, that course of consciousness." —Chris Ware

“Just do the best possible work you can do, and then, whether that’s going to change the world or not, is kind of up to the world.” —Chip Kidd

“Of course I’m writing for people who are not born yet. Why else would you make anything?” —Chris Ware
 

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