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KARL MOORE – This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, talking management for The Globe and Mail.
Today, I am delighted to speak to Tarun Khanna from the Harvard Business School.
Humility and entrepreneurship do not strike me as characteristics you often see in corporate types. How do you find these characteristics?
TARUN KHANNA – With great difficulty.
So I agree with you, our conventional corporate hierarchies are not set up to promote either humility [or entrepreneurship].
I am less worried about the entrepreneurial attitude, because you don't need everybody to be an entrepreneur in a large corporate setting, if that is your audience in question. But you need to be searching within your talent ranks for people who on the margin display a little bit of spark on that.
That is not all, right? Because you then need to change your systems a little bit to make sure that you are rewarding that, which means occasionally accepting failure and even rewarding some degree of failure.
KARL MOORE – So in an executive, what you want is someone who is confident but who also has a sense of humility. How do you square these two?
TARUN KHANNA – I think that is right and well said. You need to have the self-awareness and the confidence that, when something goes wrong, it might be because of something that you did. But it might equally just be because the setting did not co-operate, and then [it is good] to be able to pick yourself up from that setback and then try again, and then to do it a little bit more scientifically than just randomly trying whatever comes to mind.
So it helps to have a little bit of a model in your head about what are the places that I am going into, and how do they relate in similarities and differences from the places that I have come from? It is sort of like being in a lab, as crazy as that sounds.
In a laboratory, what does a scientist do? They tweak the experimental conditions and they change one thing at a time or a couple of things at a time, do some measurements, and go back and iterate ad nauseam until something pops up.
We are in a much less convenient lab, when going into a new setting – we don't have the ability to change all the levels, but we do have the ability to measure and introspect, and I think that is the attitude that we need to promote.