Anne and Frances are experts in how to fix, grow, and lead companies and help leaders manage high-stakes, fast-moving change. Frances is a professor of technology and operations at Harvard Business School, and Anne is a serial entrepreneur and in-demand leadership coach.
When companies want help reaching their most ambitious goals, Anne and Frances get called in to help. Their clients have ranged from Fortune 10 companies to tech founders to political leaders working to build national competitiveness. Frances famously took a leave of absence from HBS to join the Uber team in 2017 when the company was going through its very public crisis in leadership.
Anne and Frances are the authors of Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business (2012), Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You (2020), and Move Fast & Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems (2023). They have each delivered viral TED talks and are hosts of the breakthrough TED podcast Fixable.
Anne and Frances have been recognized by Thinkers50 as among the world’s ten most influential business thinkers. You can learn more about their work at www.anneandfrances.com.
When we work with leaders to build resilient, ambitious organizations, we start with trust because it’s the foundation of everything that happens next. There’s a myth that once you lose trust, you can never get it back, but the opposite is true. We are constantly building and losing trust with each other, and the process of repair often strengthens relationships.
The most practical thing a leader can do is to understand how trust works and then lean into the challenge of rebuilding it skillfully. Trust in leadership is a byproduct of logic, authenticity, and empathy. Once you figure out which of these three trust pillars has been damaged, then you can do the intentional work of restoring it.
On the surface, our collaboration works because we share a set of core values but bring distinct and complementary perspectives to problems. The musical metaphor is harmony. We hit different notes that sound good together.
The deeper answer is that our partnership is built on deep love and respect, even awe at who each of us can be out in the world. We don’t think that’s required for professional collaboration, but it certainly helps. We also spend a lot of time trying to make each other laugh. That may be the true unlock.
We are very interested in the everyday inputs of extraordinary leadership, what it takes to get to exponential impact rather than incremental or even linear impact. We are living at a time when the complexity of our shared challenges -- and the speed at which those challenges are coming at us -- are going to require something new and different from our leaders. We are trying to understand this problem deeply enough so that we can describe it simply and help people solve it.
Curiosity, about each other and the world.
Too many to name. Some women we admire who are also influencing the way we think in this moment: Lisa Su, Tina Brown, Orna Guralnik, our dear friend and colleague, Amy Edmondson. We are also deeply impressed with so many of the female comedic voices who are taking up space right now, including but not at all limited to Wanda Sykes, Varna Garg, Michealle Buteau, Leanne Morgan.
Dogs.
The return of empathy.
Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film adaptation of Henry V. At a formative age, it exposed us to the unstoppable forces of great leadership and gorgeous storytelling. When you combine the two, the impossible becomes possible.
