Celebrating 10 Years of Cold Call

ROBIN PASSIAS: Hi, it’s Robin Passias, Cold Call producer here, popping into the studio to record this special episode with host Brian Kenny.

BRIAN KENNY: Hi.

ROBIN PASSIAS: And audio engineer Craig McDonald.

CRAIG MCDONALD: Hello again, Robin.

ROBIN PASSIAS: We are re-sharing some of our favorite episodes from 2024. We thought it would be a fun way to kick off year ten of Cold Call, before we dive into all new episodes starting later this month.

So, one of my favorites aired in March, featuring Professor Frances Frei and case protagonist Paul English. The episode is called, How to Bring Good Ideas to Life: The Paul English Story. And I really like how they explore questions like, what’s the difference between a good idea and a bad one? And what’s the best way to develop new ideas quickly? Frances ties some of the findings into research from her book, Move Fast and Fix Things, you heard that right, fix, not break, that encourages experimentation, but also enduring success. Here’s a clip:

FRANCES FREI: I’m a very impatient person, which can be a curse, but it can be a blessing. And so I was impatient with progress, and so we started looking around at, well, who’s able to move fast? What we found, unfortunately, is that the corollaries, anytime you say move fast to someone except Paul, they think you’re going to be reckless. And that’s because of Mark Zuckerberg made famous move fast and break things. And then, Elon Musk, well, he doesn’t say it, he just does it, the move fast and break things. And the problem with that is not only that going fast means you break things and the collateral damage is it’s often human, but it’s how many people were scared into going slow and what we call responsible stewardship. And that’s the most polite way we can say going slow. And I found it tragic. I find it tragic that in the face of important challenges, we are encouraging one another to go slow out of fear of being reckless.

PAUL ENGLISH: I think that speed is misunderstood. Some people think speed is recklessness. It’s not necessarily that. Sometimes speed means you have the process fine-tuned. The example I always give, if you watch Formula One Racing and you watch the pit crew at how fast they can change tires.

FRANCES FREI: Beautiful.

PAUL ENGLISH:

They make a mistake, someone dies. So they’re really, really good at changing tires. They’re incredibly fast and they’re perfect at it. So for me, going fast sometimes means, if it’s a repeatable process, just get really good at that process.

FRANCES FREI: This is indeed what is inherent in the move fast and fix things. And I do think it’s practically genetic in you. There is nothing reckless about what you do and you do it with such reverence for process and systems and the repeatable nature of it. I love the Formula One example, but even today, we have never met anyone who did something successful in change who has ever said, “I wish I had done less,” or has said, “I wish I had taken longer.” And yet, go down the corridors of any organization and you will hear people trying to seduce one another into going slower and doing less. And so the audacity and that lack of recklessness, that’s why we wrote the book. I want more Paul Englishes in the world. I want more problems to be solved at more pace.

ROBIN PASSIAS: Over to you, Craig.

CRAIG MCDONALD: Thanks, Robin. One episode that really stuck out to me this year is from August. It’s called, Angel City Football Club: A New Business Model for Women’s Sports. It was with senior lecturer Jeffrey Rayport, and case co-author Nicole Keller. And one of the protagonists, which I know is one of Brian’s favorite things to have the guest available for the show, club co-founder Kara Nortman. Since its airing in August, we found out that Angel City Football Club has a valuation of $250 million, which is considered one of the most valuable women’s professional sports teams in the world. It’s pretty incredible considering its three female founders who came from outside of professional sports. I was also impressed by their ultimate goal of greater pay equity in women’s sports. This clip is about how they used more of a non-traditional way of funding the team than we’re typically used to hearing about. Hope you enjoy it.

KARA NORTMAN: The backgrounds were, we came out of tech, we came out of startups, we came out of Hollywood, so we could tell stories, but we also weren’t afraid to question assumptions and execute, and execute quickly and make mistakes, but also really deeply grounded in mission. And we knew where to prioritize not making money to be authentic in mission. And that’s something that I think is a huge differentiator for us at Angel City as well.

BRIAN KENNY: How does that mission-driven focus, impact the way that you run the organization? What are you trying to achieve and what are some of the ways those things are manifesting themselves?

KARA NORTMAN: Yeah, well, first of all, just to kind of talk through how we set this up, because the way a team is capitalized and structured allows you to make harder decisions. And in the beginning, we were looking for a control owner that would own the whole thing and fund the whole thing, because that was how we were told it was done in sports and we couldn’t find a traditional control owner. We couldn’t find the billionaire who wanted to give us money. So I like to say, we got 99 nos and then we did raise a million dollars with a substantive amount of it coming from Alexis Ohanian’s fund initialized just before COVID to own 15% of the team. And then Julie, Natalie and I own the other 85%. So, we structured it as a C corp in the way you would structure a startup.

This may be the first and last time that’s ever done in sports, but because of that, we had a board where the founders had essentially a voice the way Mark Zuckerberg would have a voice at Facebook, where we could show up and just execute without a lot of interference. And this is how it’s done in sports and mission was just part of why we started it. Natalie and I started working with the US Women’s National Team Players Union on their pay equity fight and their early name and likeness revenue. And so it started from the perspective of how do you get the players paid? And so when we rolled out models like our sponsorship model, we rolled out models that would give back to community.

And so I can go a lot more deeply into it, but every step of the way, we have an investor who doesn’t align with our mission, what do we do? What do we say? Can we get that investor to leave? What is the bathroom situation at the stadium? Are there rooms for women to nurse or to breastfeed? And so we talk about a lot of the bigger topics in the case and our 10% sponsorship model, but there were little things that happened every single day that Julie and Natalie and I spoke about without a heavy-handed kind of influence in the room.

CRAIG MCDONALD: Brian, you’re up. What have you got for us?

BRIAN KENNY: Thanks, Craig. Hey, can we just stop for a minute and just reflect on something that Robin said in the very beginning, which is that this is part of our kickoff year to celebrate our 10th anniversary of Cold Call. That’s a big number for a podcast. So a lot of our listeners obviously listen to other shows. We’ve been around for a long time. I don’t think we’ve ever missed a drop. Every two weeks for the last ten years, we’ve been delivering an episode of Cold Call. It has been one of my great pleasures that I love doing in my job and I love working with you guys like a terrific team. And I feel like we should just reflect on that for a sec.

ROBIN PASSIAS: I completely agree. It’s been such a joy to produce this podcast. We learn so much from our incredible faculty and from each other just working together so closely to bring you, our listeners, a new episode every two weeks. It’s fabulous.

BRIAN KENNY: I didn’t want to let this episode go without mentioning that. So I’ll get into my work now, because Robin’s given me the evil eye so I better get moving. Those are both terrific episodes and really interesting case studies. And I have one that I wanted to share. I’m often asked what my favorite episode of Cold Call is, and I’m being truthful when I say, I don’t have a single favorite episode, but I have categories of episodes that I really like. I love the business history cases like the one we did about IBM choosing to stay in Nazi Germany back during the World War II, the one that we did about the United Fruit Company at the turn of the century in the 1900s and South America. Those are wonderful episodes. You can learn a ton from history. It has a lot to teach us. But the other category that I really like are the ones that we do about people.

At the end of the day, most of our cases are about people. And we’ve done cases about people that we know well, like Muhammad Ali and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King, of course. But we also do cases about people who aren’t household names, and that’s one of the cases that I want to recommend today. So I want to invite everybody to listen to an episode that we did last year featuring senior lecturer Tony Mayo, discussing the resilient leader and Harvard Business School alumnus Ray Jefferson. Ray sadly passed away this year, but his story is absolutely remarkable and compelling. The episode is called How One Leader Overcame Career-Ending Adversity, and it traces Ray’s personal and professional journey from upstate New York to the US Military Academy at West Point and eventually to the Obama administration. His resilience and vulnerability really shaped his leadership style, and I think we have a lot to learn from his example. So, here’s a clip:

BRIAN KENNY: Now, to this point in his life, he’s had some adversity. He’s had the troubled marriage with his parents, but the adversity is about to really get much worse. So maybe you can talk about what happened in Okinawa.

TONY MAYO: To talk about Okinawa. We probably should talk a little bit about what got him there to begin with. So when he was at West Point, he graduated, he joined the presidential honor guard and as part of that, he had to go to Ranger School, which is this huge grueling experience for him. And one of the things he wanted to do there is to get this Expert Infantry Badge, which is one of the most difficult badges you need to get. And he ended up having to take this navigation course, got lost, had to call Ranger Control.

BRIAN KENNY:

It’s not what you want on your navigation course.

TONY MAYO:

No, not what you want. It’s super embarrassing. But I think the reason I say, the story is that this is another sense of defeat where he comes in last in this navigation course and then the following year he comes in first. He’s able to figure this out, to move forward. And so eventually, he passes Ranger School and he ends up in Okinawa and in the best physical shape he’s been in. He’s revered by his teammates. In fact, a couple of service members asking him to actually lead their particular group. It’s a great experience. And one of the things he was doing in Okinawa, they were testing stun grenades. And one of the things when you do with a stun grenade is when you pull the pin out and you hold it in your hand, nothing’s supposed to happen. When you release your hand and you get ready to throw it, you hear a whoosh of air and then you’ve got a few seconds to throw it out before it detonates.

And so he’s testing these as part of this critical mission that they’re getting ready for, and he pulls the pin out and he hears a whoosh instantly, which you’re not supposed to hear if you’re holding it in your hand. So he’s thinking, Oh, my God, I’ve got a defective grenade. And he’s thinking, What do I do? And so if I could throw it up in the air, it may not come down, or it may come down too fast and I could blind myself or blind others. If I throw it close proximity to where I am, there are other teammates there, they could get hurt.” So, it’s option, reject, option, reject, trying to figure out, “What do I do?”

BRIAN KENNY: All within seconds.

TONY MAYO: You get four seconds. So this is like four seconds, longer than what I’m telling to explain it. And then he takes it in his left hand, he presses it against his thigh and it explodes and he loses all of the fingers on his left hand and most of his palm, and he severely injures his thigh and he figures in that particular moment, my life is over. And it has as I know it, it’s over. In a matter of seconds, everything has changed for him.

ROBIN PASSIAS: Thanks again for tuning in today for a quick walk down memory lane. Listen for new episodes starting next week and some special video content and live events this year as we celebrate ten years of Cold Call.

BRIAN KENNY: Yay!

ROBIN PASSIAS: We appreciate your loyalty and would love to hear from you. Please email us at coldcall@hbs.edu.

BRIAN KENNY: Thanks, Robin. Echoing Robin here. Thank you so much for joining us. We hope that you join us for each and every episode. We couldn’t do it without you, our listeners. I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR podcast network. Happy 2025.

If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts, After Hours, Climate Rising, Deep Purpose, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, Think Big, Buy Small, and Women at Work. Find them on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you got your podcasts. And if you could take a minute to rate and review us, we’d be grateful. If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, email us at coldcall@hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us. I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR podcast network.

Click here to read article