Episode 93 – Guest: Morten Hansen
Guest: Morten Hansen

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Second City Works “Getting to Yes, And” – Rule of Three

This week we talked to professor and author Ori Brafman.

I know this is the Yes, And Podcast, but you talk about the power of saying No.

“Constraints can be liberating. Good investors in startups, for example, where I am in Silicon Valley, they do that. They start up a little team that come with some ideas and the investor would say, ‘here’s a little money, go and test it.’ If you give a startup a lot of money, what are they going to do? They’re going to start adding features to their product, they’re going to add markets to their product, they’re going to buy some fancy furniture, they’re going to hire more people then they really need and it’s going to be bloated and slow. It is almost a paradox that if you have less, you can actually innovate more.

What does the research tell us about multitasking?

“It’s very simple. Research tell us that it does not work. We think we’re listening to the debate in a meeting and we’re checking our phone or emails. That doesn’t work. You’re not really listening to the debate. And there’s a lot of good academic research on this.”

You have a great quote: “Being busy is not an accomplishment.”

“We add all these things and then we have all these metrics and we think we’re producing results. But thing about it: going into meetings, travelling on business, racking up frequent flier miles, calling customers – these are not accomplishments in and of themselves. They are volumes of activity. So we have this perverse nature of tracking volume metrics that are not necessarily the metrics that are driving results.”