Episode 217 · 24 July 2025 · 45:46

What makes a better boss? With The Economist’s Andrew Palmer, host of Boss Class Podcast

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Intro: The Derby car factory and what makes a better boss
intro#management #leadership #production
Meet Andrew Palmer, Bartleby columnist
interview#journalism #economist #liz-truss
What makes a better boss? Reid Hoffman's poetry and prose
interview#boss #reid-hoffman #management
Does company size change how you manage?
interview#company-size #management #leadership
Interviewing leaders you've never been managed by
interview#interviews #leadership #startup
Kahneman, fast thinking, and reflecting on behaviour
interview#kahneman #fast-thinking #behavior
Liz Reid, Google Search, and the 'loud voice'
interview#google #liz-reid #leadership
The silence that kills debate and zero tolerance is not the way
interview#silence #debate #zero-tolerance
The Palmer jerkiness continuum and what distinguishes all toxic cultures
interview#toxic-culture #jerkiness #continuum
What Andrew has learned about teams
interview#teams #management #learning
Toyota: 14,000 suggestions a day
interview#toyota #suggestions #production
Does national culture shape leadership?
interview#national-culture #leadership #management
AI and the future of management
interview#ai #future #management
What Andrew changed in his own management style
interview#management-style #change #self-reflection
Top 3 takeaways
interview#takeaways #management #podcast

Show notes

What Makes a Better Boss? — with Andrew Palmer, Host of Boss Class

Guest: Andrew Palmer — Bartleby columnist and senior editor at The Economist, host of the Boss Class podcast.

Andrew Palmer has spent the last year in conversation with the people running some of the world's most admired companies — Stripe, Netflix, LinkedIn, Google, Toyota, IKEA, Unilever — asking one deceptively simple question: What makes a better boss?

The answers are rarely what you'd expect. The best leaders don't try to win the room — they create space for others to think. Trust is built slowly and breaks fast. There's no single "right way" to lead, but there are patterns worth stealing.

Al and Leanne sit down with Andrew to unpack those patterns — including why a car factory in Derby deliberately stops production, how Shopify killed the meeting, and what Toyota's 14,000 daily suggestions can teach us about listening. Plus: why great management is like poetry and prose, and what AI really means for the future of the boss.

Top 3 Takeaways

Great bosses know when to shut up. The best leaders don't try to win the room. They create the space for others to think — and listen before they speak.
Trust is built slowly and breaks fast. The CEOs who lead well focus less on controlling people and more on designing systems that earn trust every day.
There's no "one way" to lead. From the founder of Patagonia to the CEO of Toyota, styles vary wildly. What they share is a clear sense of purpose — and an ability to reflect on their own behaviour.

Connect With Us

Get in touch, book a call, or find Al and Leanne on LinkedIn — all in one place: truthliesandwork.com/connect

Mental health support: findahelpline.com — UK: Samaritans 116 123 · Mind 0300 123 3393 · Mental Health at Work: mentalhealthatwork.org.uk — US: 988 — Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14

Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.

Full transcript

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Al ElliottThere's a car factory in Derby, England, where workers deliberately stop production multiple times every single day, and the managers love it. There's a very senior exec at Stripe who has produced a manual outlining exactly how to work with her. And there's an aircraft manufacturer that scores pretty low on innovation, yet employees are happy, engaged, and fully committed to the mission.

Leanne ElliottSo why do these counterintuitive ideas work? Well, our guest today is going to explain this and more. He's interviewed some of the world's most successful leaders, and that factory story is just one of many stories he has uncovered which could make you rethink your own workplace culture.

Al ElliottOh, and by the way, fun fact, Andrew's also the guy who came up with the comparison between Liz Truss's time in office and and an iceberg lettuce. But more importantly, he's discovered that the best managers aren't the loudest voices in the room.

Leanne ElliottAndrew has interviewed leaders from Netflix, LinkedIn, Shopify, Stripe, Google. You name a company and he has probably covered it. And he has some strong opinions of his own. He argues that middle managers, often seen as bureaucratic deadweight, are actually the most crucial people in any organisation. And he's found that some of our most celebrated genius jerks, like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, might not be as bad as we once thought.

Al ElliottAnd in a world where AI threatens to replace human managers with dashboards and algorithms, Andrew warns we're about to lose the most important thing leaders do— actually talking to their people.

Leanne ElliottHello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne and I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist.

Al ElliottMy name is Al, I'm a business owner.

Leanne ElliottAnd we are here to help you simplify the science of work.

Al ElliottAnd after this really short break, we'll discover why great management is like poetry and prose, why multiple interruptions a day creates the world's best culture, and Andrew's surprising defence of people others might call jerks.

Leanne ElliottSee you in a sec.

Al ElliottThe dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scattered across 3 teams and 4 systems And in our case, it's about 216,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it.

Leanne ElliottWhat you should be doing is using HubSpot, because why? HubSpot connects it all. Every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation into one platform every team can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already knows the full story. And when you know more, you grow more.

Al ElliottNice. Check out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

Andrew PalmerI'm Andrew Palmer. I'm the Bartleby columnist for The Economist, which means absolutely nothing to anyone who doesn't subscribe. So what that means is I write on management and the workplace, and I also host a podcast for us called Boss Class, and we've just finished the second season. So that is, I think, what I'm most famous for. There's one other thing I should mention. Do you remember Liz Truss and the lettuce?

Al ElliottMm-hmm.

Andrew PalmerSo that was based on a leader that I wrote in The Economist. So what happened, I wrote the lettuce line and then the Daily Star, to their everlasting credit, got hold of that and turned it into the famous webcam with the lettuce decaying and Liz Truss's premiership also decaying in a kind of battle for the ages. So that's my real claim to fame.

Al ElliottI feel like with the amount you've written and recorded on management, we have to ask you the question early on. What do you think a great manager is?

Andrew PalmerSo I'm going to borrow a line which Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn, gave to me in response to that exact question. And he himself borrowed it from a Stanford professor of his. And the definition they both gave was that great management is a combination of poetry and prose. And the poetry is the ability to motivate and to inspire, to kind of reach the human, if you like, to elevate people. And the prose is the kind of practicalities of management. So how do you organize the processes, the structures, the rhythms of the workplace so that stuff gets done effectively as you want? And so there is something in that combination, I think, which adds up to a great manager.

Al ElliottLet's stick with Reid for a second then, because he's obviously quite a famous sort of startup guy. Is there a difference between someone who's perhaps a sort of like a manager for IBM or someone like Reid who's started, you know, a big startup and actually then gone on to lead?

Andrew PalmerI think that's right. Scale of company has to make a difference to how you manage and how you think about your role. We'll probably come on to this this conversation again a bit later, but one of the most recent interviews we did was with someone called Ilkka Paananen, who's Finn, who is the co-founder and the boss of a big mobile games company called Supercell. And they were founded on a principle of kind of radical autonomy, a very decentralized way of thinking about things. You sort of push decision-making down. As the company has got bigger and bigger, and as the games have sort of started to gather in audiences of tens of millions, the types of things the company has to do have changed. The types of management structures have changed. So scale does bring a need for more process, more structure, and middle managers often are kind of a curse word, but actually deserving of a lot of respect within organizations and beyond it become much more necessary and much more important. So definitely there's a difference.

Al ElliottOn your show, I think you've interviewed a lot of what people would call good managers. Do you find there are any kind of behaviors or traits or commonalities that show up from those people who are perceived as great managers?

Andrew PalmerYeah, so I interview people but have never been managed by them. So there's always a little sort of trigger and little sort of alarm bell in my head. How great are they really? But they're certainly successful. And I do think that there are some common behaviors for people who sort of climb the ladder and think a lot about management. So thoughtfulness is a kind of, is a filter in itself, right? Someone who actually has a theory. So I would say the ability to sort of articulate clearly And repeatedly what it is that is important to them and their company matters. So one behavior is like these people can say what the mission of the company is or what it is they're trying to achieve, like instantly. There is absolutely no doubt in their mind what the values and the priorities of their organizations are. They are able to say it without appearing bored. And that sounds flippant, but I think it's actually quite important as a skill. especially if you're leading a big organization, you've basically got to say the same thing over and over again for years on end. I mean, it's that incredibly dull if you think about it, but they manage to do it without, as though they believe it. So they're passionate about it the whole time, slightly less flippantly. And on this point about them thinking about things, there's a high degree of self-awareness across most of the people that I talk to. So they have a sense of how they come across to people. So in talking about this with Emma Walmsley, who's the boss of GSK, very big drugs company, she's completely aware that her interactions with people elsewhere in the organization had the potential to kind of either turn a day into a triumph or a disaster for those people, and that she had to show up in a certain way. all of the time. So was very aware of that. And similarly, people like Claire Hughes Johnson, who's an American manager, chief operating officer of Stripe, which is a payments firm until recently, has a manual which it's called Working with Claire, where she writes down what it is like to work with and for her. So it basically is an expression of her Her working preferences. How does she like to receive information? Does she take decisions quickly? How much data does she like to have? That kind of thing. She sends checks with people around her. Is this a fair representation? And then uses that with all of her direct reports. And it's not a kind of like, this is the way it must be. It's just a sort of, it's an expectation-setting device. It's also a way of holding up a mirror to herself. And it's like an interesting way of thinking about, like, do I work efficiently? Is this the best way for me to take decisions? Um, am I providing psychological safety? People think about it in different ways, but they definitely think about it. And that, I think, is probably the common thread.

Leanne ElliottThere are some quite surprising ideas here, Al.

Al ElliottYeah, but what Andrew does brilliantly is not only summarize the idea well, but he also really thinks through the implications of it.

Leanne ElliottTalking of thinking about things, Andrew told us about interviewing Danny Kahneman, who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, and it is a masterclass in decision-making, which we'll get into right after this very short break. Did you know that the UK's number one management podcast— that's us, by the way— and the UK's number one marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network?

Al ElliottWe actually have a lot in common. We both use behavioural science to help people do better at work.

Leanne ElliottAnd we both had to wrangle Rory Sutherland on an episode.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)And 2 out of 3 of us are devilishly good looking.

Al ElliottAnd you're not gonna say which. Phil, host of Nudge, UK's number 1 marketing podcast. It's brought to you— we need to do this in 3s—

Leanne Elliottthe HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

Andrew PalmerSeamless, seamless.

Al ElliottTell us about your latest episode, Phil.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)Uh, we've just done an episode on fake fandom and how New York indie bands are paying agencies to create fake TikTok videos about how much they like their work. And we talk about the behavioural science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff and do some big things about how this affects the world of politics, business, and brands as well.

Leanne ElliottIt is. It's such, it's such a good show. Of course, you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about how to grow your business by using behavioural science in your marketing. But there's also just some really interesting episodes that'll be right up your street. Personally, I enjoyed Can Balsamic Vinegar Make Beer Taste Better?

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)It can.

Leanne ElliottAnd are we all just status-seeking monkeys?

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)I am.

Al ElliottGo and listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

Leanne ElliottBut come back.

Al ElliottYeah, come back.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)Definitely come back because Nudge isn't as good as this. So come back.

Al ElliottI'll cut that out.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)Keep that in.

Leanne ElliottWelcome back. Let's rejoin the interview where Al asked Andrew about managing great teams, falling in love with the solution, and why Steve Jobs might not have been the jerk boss that he's known as. But let's start with what Daniel Kahneman taught Andrew about thinking fast and slow.

Andrew PalmerI mean, his thesis is that humans are really bad at making decisions. That's not quite— that's a little unfair, actually. But lots of the decisions within organizations are subject to cognitive bias, human flaws in decision-making. So, the more algorithmic that you can get in the way that you set up decisions around hiring or whatever it might be, The better. That was relatively well known to me and is in his book and he explained it beautifully. But the thing that stuck from the conversation was actually at the end, he both acknowledged that he was subject to all these same flaws despite being the single person on the planet who's thought most about it, but also recognized that those flaws could occasionally be useful. And his example there was startup founders. So, you know, an unreasonable degree of optimism and a lack of realism were absolutely critical to the biggest companies being set up and changing the world. So what I liked about that, apart from the point itself, was that this was someone who, you know, was towards the end of his life. He sadly passed away subsequently, had thought about this for decades, but had the kind of humility and curiosity to kind of think about things differently, recognize where his theories didn't work. He was super interested in what AI would mean, both very, very worried about it, but also, you know, very curious about what it would mean for humanity. So there was something about an expert with humility, which is just endlessly appealing.

Al ElliottSo that was a conversation that stuck with you. Is there anything else that, like, any other conversations you've had which have just, like, blown you away, or you've gone like, oh, that's such a great point, never thought of it this way?

Andrew PalmerSo I think probably one that sticks in the mind is a recent one with Liz Reid, who's the head of search at Google, who was talking about how that company thinks about innovation and in particular talking through their process for developing AI. So we all now see these AI overviews when we do a Google search sort of at the top of the screen. So that was a super interesting conversation just in terms of how they how they think about things. The one line that stuck was this line, which was, fall in love with the problem, not the solution, which was advice that she had been given as a young product engineer and now sort of recites to her teams and is meant to kind of encourage a problem-solving mindset within the company, which allows for people to sort of pivot, change direction, recognize when something has not worked and you might park it and change course. I just think it's a really nice little aphorism to latch onto whether you're trying to innovate or just trying to solve a different kind of problem entirely. The first answer or the one that occurs to you may not be the right one. So again, sort of have the open-mindedness to change course if it turns out that you are wrong. I mean, I think it's not like, it's not fall in love with any problem. It's fall in love with the problem as opposed to the solution. So, you know, it's important that you define a problem that matters. So lots of user research, you know, common sense will tell you like, is there an issue with how this product is working or is there a need that isn't met? But once you identify the problem, approach that with an open mind rather than, okay, and this is the way we're going to solve it. Because you will often have like meeting one, someone with a large salary and a loud voice will say, this is the way I think we should solve it. And potentially that's the end of the discussion. So ways to sort of avoid that problem are important. And I just like that phrase as a way of thinking about it.

Al ElliottYou say loud voice, which immediately when someone thinks of a boss, They tend to think loud, booming voice. Some of the people who have had the, not necessarily volume-wise, but the loudest voices have been the likes of Jobs, have been the likes of Musk. But by all accounts, they're not amazing managers and not great leaders. So does that mean that we can say, if you are loud, you are not a great leader? If you are quiet, you are a great leader? It's not as simple as that, is it?

Andrew PalmerIt totally isn't. So, but by loud, I really mean the one that kind of silences debate before it's happened. Yeah, I think that Steve Jobs is a sort of problem because he sort of gets wielded as this ace card in any kind of story or debate. And he was both a kind of one-of-a-kind genius and apparently a bit of a jerk. And so neither of those things are particularly helpful in a normal workplace. Most people are not going to invent the iPhone. Their range of achievement is going to be slightly less high. And most workplaces could, I mean, maybe we should talk about jerks because I think actually you can get, zero tolerance of jerks is not good, but that's definitely not code for you should behave badly. So Jobs got away with it because of what he'd done. And I'm not sure that's a useful lesson for anyone.

Al ElliottYou just said zero tolerance is not the way. That sounds odd to me. I would've thought you don't want any horrible people or jerks in your organization.

Andrew PalmerOkay. So I'm going to, like, I don't want to be the person who's sort of arguing publicly for horrible people, but I think there are a couple of issues. One is the definition. of a jerk, right? It's subjective. So one person's jerk might be another person's kind of sort of grit in the oyster, truth to power kind of person. So I, you know, most of my columns are about trolling my colleagues, so I won't actually mention anyone, but there are people here who I can think of who are kind of exceptionally useful in the workplace. Because they're willing to say things in a way which is kind of, if not confrontational, at least provocative. Some people might regard that as jerk-like behavior. Actually, I think it's extremely useful. So the subjectivity is a problem. Who gets to define who's a jerk? And the second is like the jerkiness, if that's the word, may be coming from a particular place. It may be that that person is just not in a great, in the right job and needs to be somewhere else. It may be that person is absolutely brilliant, but shouldn't be managing people or should be locked in a home office and not allowed to come into work. So I think there's probably a lot of kind of square pegs, round holes, which leads to jerky behavior. And you can solve that with lateral moves. People can be good in different positions from the one that they're in. And goodness doesn't just mean competence. It can also mean behavior. So for the record, not a big fan of jerks. Don't think horrible people is where, you know, you should put all your hiring effort. But zero tolerance for jerks strikes me as a bit like, you know, it's a bit Salem. It's a bit like, you know, that's a jerk. Let's get rid of him or her. Um, and I, it's often not that simple.

Al ElliottSo on this Palmer jerkiness continuum that we've just invented, at what point do we go, we are not accepting this behavior? Where does someone go from, They're maybe in the wrong role, or perhaps they're just a bit under stress to absolutely, this person is just, we don't want them anymore.

Andrew PalmerWell, there are certain types of behavior which are just plainly unacceptable immediately, and that's, you know, then they're gone. But there's a gray area which is, you know, difficult to work with, really spiky, gets involved in arguments, leaves people feeling bruised where you might Rather than, okay, I'm sorry, we are gonna have to part company. You might think about it in a slightly more intentional way. What is going on? Do you even realize you're being a jerk? I mean, some people are kind of unintentionally unpleasant to people. They just don't realize how they're coming across. So I just, zero tolerance, I don't think, I just don't like ever, I don't think as a phrase. It just seems thoughtless. And Plainly, there are some types of behavior where that's appropriate, but lots of jerky behavior is a bit more ambiguous. I think at least giving someone a chance, telling them, you know, you're behaving in a way which is upsetting. Are you aware of it? And seeing if they change, that's a reasonable first step.

Al ElliottYou've spoken to so many different organizations. You've been exposed to so many different types of culture and they're all very different, I'd imagine. What are the commonalities? What does a great culture have to have?

Andrew PalmerSo there are certain types of behavior which kind of distinguish all bad cultures, the toxic culture. So a kind of institutionalized incivility or worse is just bad for everyone. No one really enjoys being harassed, bullied, or shouted at. I mean, that's so, so that's one commonality. But I think more interestingly, the sort of good culture, it's very hard to define one good culture because people are different and strategies are different and cultures will therefore be different. So the example I like to give is there's an organization in the States which is called CultureX, which basically trawls through the reviews that employees leave on Glassdoor and other sites. And it basically looks at unstructured data. So the comments and then pulls it together. And what you will see there is in the aerospace industry, 2 firms which are rated above the industry average for their culture by their employees. One is SpaceX and the other is Lockheed Martin. Now they score highly on totally different things. So SpaceX scores super high, as you might expect, for innovation perks, because you get to see rockets taking off and a sense of being at the cutting edge. Scores terribly on work-life balance, right? I mean, basically they're all just sleeping in the office the entire time. And then Lockheed Martin has a very different profile where it doesn't score highly on innovation at all. scores really well on work-life balance and some of those more classic working from home sort of employee satisfaction measures. But both do well. So I think what I'm trying to say at incredible length is that different cultures can be good for different people. So it's not, I think it's very hard to define one good culture. The common thread though is among managers who have created a good culture or in companies where it exists is again, thoughtfulness. And I think this is just the thing that always comes out from these interviews is that they know exactly what their culture wants to look like and they very systematically embed it. So there are tons of levers that you can pull to make a culture live, and it's not painting abstract nouns on the wall of the cafeteria and hoping that if someone reads the word integrity, they're going to be honest. It's much more systematic than that. So all of their hiring, all of their promotion, yes, the repeating of the mission statement, all of their performance management and more, sometimes some of their organizational structure is designed to reinforce the values that they regard as most important to their companies.

Al ElliottWhat is it you've learned about teams from the people you've interviewed?

Andrew PalmerYeah, those examples, the Shopify was really just like, everyone hates meetings. How the hell can we sort this out for people? So that was a kind of less teams, more kind of like everyone in this spiral of despair about meetings. But broadly, you know, the number one characteristic of a well-functioning team is psychological safety. And so that's the— Google famously did this Project Aristotle research on the components of a successful team, and that was the most important one. So that can be embedded in many different ways, but a nice way of working out if you are the boss, whether you've got a problem or not, and this is the advice of Amy Edmondson, who literally wrote the book on this, is ask yourself, when was the last time that you heard dissent? So if you are the boss, that's the question you should be asking yourself. And if you can't remember, you've definitely got a problem. And if actually it's a struggle, then you've probably got a problem too. So that's one example, one component, psychological safety. Role clarity really matters. So this is what I do, this is what the other person on the team does, et cetera, et cetera. And so being clear about that without having kind of like turf wars is important. And the Netflix example is a sort of interesting one there. That's more of a sort of entire company as a team sort of problem that they were trying to solve for. But what they did, especially when they were a young company, was they would get every single employee. This was sort of relatively small at that point and make sure that they understood everything about the P&L and take real time to explain the way in which the job that they did fed through into the bottom line. So, If you're in customer service and you solve a problem that is basically, and that person retains, that is pure profit, et cetera, et cetera. So just taking the time to explain how each role laddered up into the organization's mission and financials was something that they were very hot on. And it does make sense because you can often feel completely disconnected to the health of the company and not quite understand why it is what you're doing. So if you can articulate that for people, that's really good. And then autonomy is the other thing. So people generally like autonomy. They like not being micromanaged. And again, to come back to Supercell, which was the mobile games company, their founding principle is that games teams kind of have the whip hand In quite unusual ways. So, you know, these small teams can spend months, even years developing a title, and it is in their gift at any point to say, we're canning it. It's not good enough. So you can literally spend years of company money. And if you feel like the quality is not good enough, then you can say no. There's a point when the game is out there in the world And it's not in your gift anymore. And it's not that there are no management structures at all, but there is a very, very unusual degree of decentralization and autonomy at Supercell to the extent that one of the teams that was working there has decided to move out of the main office, is in a separate office in Helsinki, and the CEO doesn't have a key. So cannot get in. And that's a sort of like just slightly bizarre, but very vivid example of what autonomy looks like to them.

Leanne ElliottAt the start of the episode, we teased you with a story about a factory where the production line was intentionally shut down multiple times a day. That factory is, in fact, the Toyota factory in Derby, England. Yeah.

Andrew PalmerSo, one of the visits that we did for the second season of Boss Class was to the Burnaston car plant, which Toyota runs in Derby. And Toyota is famous around the world for lean management and the principles that it has around continuous improvement and so on. But if you go into the plant, you see this come alive just immediately in a way which is unmistakable. It's sort of visible and audible. It's the It's the way people talk, right? You have people sort of with snatches of Japanese in kind of Derby accents is just a kind of strange auditory experience. But when you are in the assembly plant, their principle at Toyota is this idea that everyone is empowered to come up with ideas for how to improve the carmaking process. This kaizen, continuous improvement. And every factory employee is expected to come up with 2 a month. And so you're getting up to 20,000, something like that in a month. They have these famous andon cords, which is by each workspace as the body of the car is moving through the assembly plant. There's a cord that hangs down a bit like a clothesline, and you can pull that cord at any point. And that is a signal. Sometimes it's a signal of something very trivial, but that can also be a signal of something is wrong and we need to change it. And what happens is that gives your supervisor, the supervisor has something like 2 minutes to get down there and sort it out. And if they can't, then the whole line stops, but that's fine because what they want to do is encourage people to identify and surface problems. And the guy I was talking to said that when new people come onto the line, their first and natural reaction, if you think about this, right? Here's this cord. If you pull this cord, you're potentially going to stop the entire factory and you're signaling to your boss that I've got a problem and I can't solve it. So that is quite countercultural, right? I mean, it's sort of like you could imagine, especially young people coming into the workplace, wanting to impress their bosses, like, am I really going to pull that cord? So they spend quite a lot of time socializing people to understand that it's important. So the first shift they get everyone round, the new person is there and is encouraged to pull the cord. And everyone does this football chant crescendo. So, woo, kind of thing. And they pull the cord and a big cheer. But everything is geared towards that. And I'm going to give you a little test here. So there's in this plant, there are There are— how many people are there? 2,000 people who work there. And I want you to guess how many times this cord is being pulled in a day.

Al ElliottI would guess somewhere between 5 and 7. So 6.

Andrew PalmerI said 20, and the real answer is 14,000.

Leanne ElliottWhat?

Andrew PalmerYeah. So it's just completely Completely off the scale. I mean, like you just would have no idea. Now, as I say, some of those pulls are, you know, you're kind of, you know, there's a slight, you need a break for whatever reason or something like that. But even if you strip those away, there's this very, very high volume turnover of kind of, you know, observations or this is a thing we ought to think about that then translates into a smaller number of suggestions for improvements that then goes through a process. at the company in general of kind of like, do we do this? Do we not? Some of those improvements are plant-specific. Some of them get rolled out around the world. And that number was just like mind-blowing to me. It's like I had, I was so out on the guess. And clearly they're very used to that. They know that people are kind of being low single digits as a sort of first approximation. So that was one very clear example of a lived culture.

Al ElliottSo just to get these numbers right, 2,000 people there, 14,000 times a day. That's an average of everyone pulling it 7 times a day.

Andrew PalmerThat is right. Now, I am going to, like, I will check this afterwards. So you'll hear from me again if I've got that, but that's my memory. I think the important thing is the difference between, you know, You are at 5 or 6. I was at 20. The real number is ludicrously higher. And as I say, that number does include things which would be kind of, you know, I need to take a break or whatever it is, right? Sort of, so can you fill in for a minute? The important thing is that this is some sort of extremely kind of well-functioning feedback machine. that is also operating within the assembly plant, and the two go together.

Leanne ElliottAndrew's podcast is packed with examples just like this.

Andrew PalmerSo, there's a medical tech firm called Stryker, which is based in Kalamazoo, and that's in Michigan. And it's a weird place because you have, the divisions are named after body parts. So, you know, you can start off in knee, but if you're lucky, you might get promoted to pancreas or something like that. It's all very, it's a weird sort of place. But the reason that it's interesting is that they have, again, a very clear sense of what culture they want. They want basically performance-driven, low-ego kind of underdogs. That's what they just want, this sort of hunger. So it's very, it's quite, it's not a particularly cuddly place, I don't think, but it's driven by achievement. And this is the point on levers that they, the guy I spoke to there is the CEO called Kevin Lobo, who sort of can articulate this for himself, but then has it driven through the entire company. So one sort of example, which I hadn't come across before, was just structural. So when their divisions grow to a certain size, they split them in 2. And so at that point, you are back to you're no longer number one in your market and you've got to grow again. So they're very, very keen on organizationally constantly sort of requiring you to think about growth and being the top dog in a market is not helpful for that. All of their hiring, all their performance management is based around that quite hard-edged way of thinking about things. So if you you're in sales and you're 99.9% of your budget, you missed your budget. That's it. So it's that kind of, but as I was talking to him, you know, and he went through absolutely everything in the company, it was clear that they had just lined up all of these things in a way that transmitted the same message. And that was super effective. So Novo Nordisk, which is the company that makes Wegovy and Ozempic in Copenhagen has a process called facilitations. And facilitations is, they don't like this word, but it basically is a cultural audit. And what that is, is basically sort of experienced employees, some of them full-time, some of them not, have the job of sort of going around departments, divisions around the world and around the company. They spend time with those units. They interview the bosses and the people within them. And the goal is to try and work out whether the values of the company are genuinely being lived. And then all of those cultural auditors come back and report into senior leadership. So there is some kind of independent monitoring of whether the culture exists when the CEO is not there, which is a good definition of culture. And that's their way of kind of ensuring that actually things are working as they should.

Al ElliottYou just mentioned it was very Danish. So do you think that culture is perhaps affected by where you are? Like if you're Japanese or Danish or American?

Andrew PalmerYeah, completely. So I don't think culture necessarily has to be a prison. So Toyota, which is a very sort of, you know, you'd sort of associate Japanese society with a kind of hierarchical way of behaving. That hierarchy definitely exists. It definitely came off the company when I was there, but they just managed to make that coexist with a culture of feedback and what they like to call the inverted pyramid. So manager's job was to support the workers rather than give them instructions. So I don't think culture has to be a prison, but it definitely has an impact. So actually, Novo are interesting on this because the bosses there spend a lot of time with the scientists. They want to have sort of back and forth. They want to understand what's going on. And they're quite into— it's a Dutch sociologist called Geert Hofstede has these measures of defining national culture. And one of them— is to do with your willingness to challenge basically sort of hierarchy, levels of hierarchy. And people from different nationalities can find it kind of more or less comfortable to be expected to go in and sort of talk and challenge the big cheese at a company. So culture definitely has some kind of impact there, but there are ways around it. Again, being Being thoughtful about these things definitely helps.

Leanne ElliottAI. We cannot have any conversation about the future of management without talking about AI. Here's Andrew's take on it.

Al ElliottYou mentioned earlier that Daniel was both simultaneously terrified and fascinated by AI. I want to hear what you think about AI. Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? How's it going to change culture, teams, management?

Andrew PalmerI find that really hard to answer, Al. I, you know, The sort of ranges of possible outcomes are so big and the tech is moving so fast that I'm not sure that I could give you a really sensible answer. I could tell you the things that I worry about, which is that the incentives are strongly to look for efficiencies and cost savings, and particularly in that middle management layer that we spoke about. Earlier. So you could well imagine, and we are seeing it in some of the tech giants already and some of the language that's coming out of Duolingo, Amazon, Klarna, and others, that there's a sort of layer of what is being labeled as bureaucratic fat that can be slimmed down quite radically if you've got AI doing certain things. I would be really worried about that, partly because it sort of just reinforces an existing problem, which is that managers already often have to do another job as well as manage. So they're kind of already, so by slimming them, you're not solving that problem. But also some of the kind of behaviors which are bad are likely, I think, to be reinforced. So I don't, AI summaries of meetings are in theory good. In practice, if that's going to be used for performance management as a way of kind of like, what's the level of engagement? What percentage of time did you spend talking during this meeting? And that's somehow going to feed into a dashboard. We're going to have even more people talking for no good purpose in meetings in order to appear on a dashboard. So there's all those sort of unintended consequences from quantification, which sort of just worry me. I mean, you definitely want to know if people are unhappy, dissatisfied with their work, not engaged. And I don't think that 6-monthly surveys are the answer, but one-to-one meetings is the most effective way to get at how people are talking. And it's as opposed to occasional surveys or always-on panopticons that are sort of trying to work out your emotional state at any time. So I think there is quite a kind of well-defined and effective way of working out what your team is feeling, but it does require you to meet them. So, and another problem with AI is that incentive to stay at your desk and not to talk to your team is going to go up. If you can just look at a dashboard and it's going to tell you, oh, well, team engagement is okay, it's like in a range, fine, I'll just sit here and not go out. And I'll come back to Toyota because they used this phrase which was really new to me and striking, which is they talked about the right to digitize. And they're very, very keen on something the Japanese is genchi genbutsu, which is basically sort of, it's the idea of management by walking around. You go to the place and if you can sit at your desk and the data comes to you, the incentives to go out, talk to workers, talk to employees, see what's actually happening, um, is muted. And I could see AI doing that like in a massive way. You know, why would I ever talk to anyone?

Al ElliottIs there anything that you've come across in the, in this, in this 2 seasons you've done that you've actually applied in your own work?

Andrew PalmerYeah. So I have, I was managing in the first season and not in the second. And I tried, I don't know. I mean, I think people probably who I was managing found the whole thing laughable that I was dispensing advice on how to be a good manager. What do I use? I mean, I think they're kind of just little sort of heuristics actually, which are just useful. So if you're in a meeting, Emma Walmsley has this DIA framework. Are we here to make a decision? Is it an input into a decision or is it for awareness? And so whatever framework you use, just understanding, okay, this is what the meeting is for, and articulating that is really useful. And almost anyone can do that. Even if you're not running the meeting, you can sort of ask the question upfront. I had an excruciating experience at RADA being trained on how to present, and it was Like massively uncomfortable, but quite useful. And, you know, I'm not gonna challenge for awards, but I definitely, there were a couple of tips there that were quite useful in terms of presenting. One thing which I haven't done very well in this conversation is slowing down. So, you know, pauses are really important. Another is like when you carry yourself, this is like an acting tip. I dunno if you've ever acted, Al. I never did. So you're supposed to imagine that there's a golden thread that runs from the top of your head, the very top of your head, and stretches up for infinity, but is holding you up. And weirdly, once you sort of visualize that, your posture does sort of change. You start to see, there you go. You know, you start to hold yourself very differently, but not unnaturally. So there are certain things like that. And then the jaw is vital, absolutely vital apparently. So all of your kind of emotion comes through vowel sounds. And it's really important to have an open mouth in order for the vowel sounds to come across and to be rich. And so there's a lot of sort of self-pummeling that goes on before presentations by people who've gone through these courses where they're sort of, you know, massaging their jaws and slapping themselves in the face in order to be able to kind of articulate properly. So anyway, that was quite useful, certainly diverting.

Al ElliottThat was Andrew Palmer from The Economist, the Bartleby column, and host of Boss Class podcast. 3 key takeaways, I think. Number one, great management is both poetry and prose. You need to inspire and organise. Middle managers aren't bureaucratic fat. They're the crucial connecting tissue in every single organisation. And thoughtfulness beats loudness every single time.

Leanne ElliottAnd Andrew's insights are backed by research from Google's Project Aristotle on psychological safety. to Danny Kahneman's work on cognitive bias. Plus, those concrete examples like Toyota's 14th hour and daily interruptions and Claire Hughes-Johnson's working manual show you exactly how to put this into practice.

Al ElliottSo if you're struggling with difficult team members or wondering how to build a real culture, or maybe you're just worried about AI replacing human management, Andrew's just given you a framework for thinking differently.

Leanne ElliottThe best managers aren't the ones with the loudest voices. They're the ones that think most carefully about their impact.

Al ElliottYou can find Andrew's Boss Class podcast wherever you get your podcasts, and you can read his weekly Bartleby column at The Economist. We're going to put links in the show notes.