BRIAN KENNY: Welcome to Cold Call, the podcast where we dive deep into the groundbreaking ideas in Harvard Business School case studies. Teams are where ambition meets reality. We assemble smart, accomplished people, give them a shared goal, and assume alignment will follow. But pressure, personality, timing, and context have a way of exposing fault lines, especially when the stakes are real and the clock is ticking. Whether you work in a large organization or a startup, chances are you’ve experienced what I’m describing.
Today’s case brings us inside some high-intensity global team moments from Hanoi to Buenos Aires where dysfunction isn’t loud or dramatic at first, it’s subtle, it’s human. And if it’s not addressed, it can derail performance, strain relationships, and compromise impact. Professor LEN SCHLESINGER and guest ROB TOOMEY are joining me today to unpack this multi-chapter case and explore what’s really going on beneath the surface and what it takes to turn tension into traction.
I’m your host BRIAN KENNY, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR podcast network. LEN SCHLESINGER teaches entrepreneurship in the MBA program, and he was the faculty lead for the school’s field immersion program for three years. He was also president of Babson College, and I could go on, but I won’t. Len, welcome back to Cold Call.
LEN SCHLESINGER: It is great to be back, Brian.
BRIAN KENNY: It’s been a minute or two since you’ve been on the show.
LEN SCHLESINGER: It really has been, so I’m glad to actually be doing something substantive to warrant being on the show.
BRIAN KENNY: This is going to be fun today. Entrepreneur ROB TOOMEY is co-founder and president of TypeCoach. He is a personality type expert. And I’m wondering, Rob, as you’re looking at me, have you sized me up? Don’t give it away yet because we’re going to talk more about this, but I want to know if you can just meet somebody in a minute or two and figure out what their personality type is.
ROB TOOMEY: I’ve got a decent idea, Brian.
BRIAN KENNY: Okay. Okay. So this will be fun. I think, like I said in the intro, I think everybody who works in an organization of any size has probably encountered some sort of tension or dysfunction with the people that they work with. And I think both of these little caselets, as I’ll call them, help to illustrate how to deal with some of those things. And I think the tool that you use, Rob, will be really interesting for people to hear more about. So why don’t we just dive right in. Len, I’m going to ask you to start for us. And before we actually get into the cases, maybe you can give our listeners a little bit of context for what FIELD immersion is.
LEN SCHLESINGER: Great. I’d be delighted to do that. This is the 15th anniversary of this course. And it’s a required global immersion experience that is provided for our first-year MBA students. And what we do is actually quite special. We create six-person teams of people that don’t know each other, send them to someplace they’ve never been, to work on a project where they have no expertise, with a partner they’ve never connected with. And then watch all the fireworks begin to…
BRIAN KENNY: What could go wrong, right?
LEN SCHLESINGER: And everything that could go wrong does go wrong. And so it’s under conditions of real stress because we are also expecting them to finish research in the field over a four or five-day period, and present a full set of recommendations to the client organization before they leave the country after a weekend. So over 10 intense days, we are continuously putting these teams under stress. It’s incredibly ambiguous–by design. We give them incomplete data, we give them the context of cultural differences. They have very, very tight timelines. And it’s designed to mirror the complexity that we believe that leaders face in today’s modern organizations.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Yeah. So maybe you can talk a little bit about the patterns. Because when we talked about the case a little while back, you told me there were some clear patterns that emerged early on in FIELD. And this is kind of what prompted you to take a closer look at the team dynamic.
LEN SCHLESINGER: Over the last 15 years, we’ve dealt with the team dynamics with some measure of naivete.
BRIAN KENNY: Yes.
LEN SCHLESINGER: We’ve asked them to sit down and talk about their teams. We’ve asked them to sit down and make undying commitments to each other. We’ve asked them to talk about the leadership situations that they’re facing, and then we watch stuff blow up. So in fact, a couple of years ago, 45 teams out of the 158 teams of six that we had, required some faculty intervention just to keep functioning effectively. And so there were serious breakdowns in how many of the people work together under pressure. And that really got our attention, and quite honestly, finally a commitment to do something about it.
BRIAN KENNY: We know maybe people listening have their own impression of what HBS students are like. And of course they’re confident and they have big ideas and they want to do big things, but they’re also a little insecure. I think like most people, they find themselves confronted with situations where they just don’t feel that comfortable and they feel a little bit out of sorts. And maybe that’s some of what’s surfacing in what you’re describing, Len.
LEN SCHLESINGER: It’s exactly what’s going on and it’s exactly what we’re experiencing. Organizations invest heavily in technical capability. But generally beyond strategy and analytics, don’t do a lot in terms of really working with their people about how they can communicate effectively with each other and actually get the work done, particularly across cognitive differences and how others think and make decisions.
The reality of it is, with a quick update among a team of six, they don’t even understand the cognitive differences. They don’t explore them in any detail. They don’t do any real work on them. So no surprise, under conditions of stress, they don’t exhibit the best possible behavior. This isn’t just an academic issue, although in academia we call it interpersonal competence. We see it everywhere.
BRIAN KENNY: So the relevance for this, I want our listeners to understand that this is not just a podcast about what’s happening in the MBA classroom with our students. This actually has relevance, I think, like I said in the beginning, to anybody who’s working in any kind of an organization with others, right?
LEN SCHLESINGER: Yeah. And there’s no question about it. And our students who exemplify through our admissions process the perception of being the best and the brightest, they screw up just the same as everybody else.
BRIAN KENNY: It’s a universal thing.
LEN SCHLESINGER: And we went to Rob because he has a firm and a methodology that really focuses on how people interpret these same situations differently based on how they process information and how they approach decisions both as individuals and in a team. And we wanted to see whether focusing explicitly on teaching our teams how to communicate across the differences would ever change performance.
BRIAN KENNY: A little spoiler alert, maybe you can tell us a little bit about some of the outcomes before we actually dive into the caselets. Because this was a successful intervention.
LEN SCHLESINGER: It was an absolutely amazingly successful intervention, although we didn’t know it until it was done. Okay. The students say, “Well, we’ve done stuff like this before. We really know this stuff. I don’t like being labeled. This really isn’t my personality.” They had a whole bunch of rationales for excluding this data from the domain of possibility and for simplifying it, again, back to talking about it. The reality though is when the course was over and we went over all of the detail with the faculty, in one year, in one year of introducing these tools, we went from 45 faculty interventions to one.
BRIAN KENNY: Okay, that’s pretty impressive.
LEN SCHLESINGER: 45 to one. Same students, same project, same pressure. The simple difference was the ability of our students to recognize differences in how they communicated with others and how to adapt.
BRIAN KENNY: All right. Well, let’s talk about how we did this. Rob, you’ve been cooling your heels over there, so I’m going to turn to you now. First, I’m just curious, how does one become a personality type expert?
ROB TOOMEY: It’s a fun journey if you want to take it. So I began my career as a corporate lawyer here in Boston. And I did that for five years. But my wife and I had met in college, and the topic of personality type has sort of just been in the background for her as a psych major. And we started to see the patterns emerge among our friends and family that we couldn’t ignore. There’s really something to this. So my initial skepticism was sort of washed away in favor of the obvious patterns that we saw in behaviors. And that curiosity just stayed with us. So we started to read all the books and sort of dig into it. And then at one point, it made sense for me to leave the law and pursue this passion.
BRIAN KENNY: You were probably a good jury selector, I’m guessing.
ROB TOOMEY: Well, we did actually work with a gentleman who honed a lot of these skills in the jury selection process in Connecticut, Paul Tieger, who’s an author in this space, and we learned a lot from him.
BRIAN KENNY: So can you just look at somebody and sort of size up in a very quick way what their personality type is?
ROB TOOMEY: Absolutely. And look, here’s the funny thing. We all do that already.
BRIAN KENNY: Yes, we do. Guilty.
ROB TOOMEY: We’re just putting some terminology around it, and hopefully giving people more accurate ability to do that sort of assessment piece. More importantly, to Len’s point, then what do you do with that? How do you inform your approach to someone who you identify as quite different from you? What are the adjustments that you can make to get the message across to them?
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, And you gave me some homework before this podcast. I actually did, I went in to your tool and I took the test and it came away. So we’re going to hold off on you telling me what my personality type is until later in the conversation. But I already know based on the results that I got from the tool.
LEN SCHLESINGER: And what we can do to improve the quality of this nascent relationship.
BRIAN KENNY: There’s definitely room for improvement, I’ll tell you. So Rob, when we spoke earlier, one of the things that we talked about was your emphasis on a shift from focusing on context to focusing more on cognition. Can you talk a little bit about that?
ROB TOOMEY: Absolutely. Yeah. So I think that people, generally speaking, are pretty good at sort of being aware of the other person in terms of their experience, their seniority, the context. You treat a colleague differently than a spouse. You behave differently at a bar than you would at a funeral. Those are the contextual elements that people are pretty good at factoring into the approach that they take with others. But they’re not necessarily aware of the cognitive elements. Is this someone who likes to reflect before they respond? Is this person really looking for the long-term big picture ramifications or do they want a more sort of grounded specific perspective? And if you are aware of those cognitive elements, you can tune into the right frequency.
BRIAN KENNY: So how do you teach somebody about that? How do you get somebody to recognize that?
ROB TOOMEY: Yeah. Well, so first there’s urgency. And one of the things that the FIELD program did, and this is really Len’s brilliant idea, was a forced failure. So in this particular case, as we get into the caselets, Len provided them examples of the actual scenarios without the personality clues embedded. And they did a 30- minute exercise to try to solve, based on the person’s background, just really relying on the context. And they weren’t able to do it. And then we gave them the set of scenarios, again with the personality clues baked in, and they saw actually what was really driving the issue.
BRIAN KENNY: Okay. And self-awareness is just one part of this. So it’s good for me to be aware of myself, but unless I understand how I would interact with a different personality type than me, it’s not really all that valuable.
ROB TOOMEY: Yeah. That’s what we found. So there’s a lot of work out there in the field around sort of helping Rob learn more about Rob, but it’s not until you activate it in the context of interpersonal communication that we see the real value emerge.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. All right. Why don’t we dive into the caselets. We’re going to start in Hanoi. So maybe Rob, maybe you could set that up for us a little bit and tell us what’s going on there.
ROB TOOMEY: So this one was designed specifically based on prior years challenges, and we are focusing on style differences. So in this case, we have fictional characters. We have on the one hand, Hannah, energetic, vocal, closure focused. She’s a sort of take control style. And we have a colleague on the team, Willem, who is very thoughtful, reflective, and importantly in this scenario, someone who wants more data to emerge in the equation before he’s ready to make a conclusion. And so then the friction emerges, she’s reached the conclusion, she’s got the team ready to present the information to the client. And he’s now introducing stuff at the last minute that’s actually controversial to their original conclusions. And we set it up where he’s probably right.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. So Len, this was based on something that you’ve seen play out, is that right?
LEN SCHLESINGER: Yeah. Up to this point in the field course, when we sat down to establish teams and to get them to talk about their work, we had a cognitive exercise that they went through. Define how you’re going to provide for leadership. Define where and how you’re going to meet. And they went through a mechanical exercise, and in 45 minutes, they were done articulating all of the things that they were going to do to make sure that their team was world-class. And the part that used to annoy me each and every year, and I used to stand up in front of my group, and say, “Please don’t tell me you’re going to share leadership. Just don’t tell me that.” And two-thirds of them would say they’re going to share leadership, despite all of those assertions. So what we’re trying to do is say, “Here’s a scenario with ostensibly shared leadership with a problem in front of a team, and it blows up just the same way it’s going to happen to you. So let’s really see if we can understand what’s going on one of two ways. One is first we’ll just give you the problem and you talk about it. Two, we’ll give you the problem with data about the individuals in the group using the TypeCoach classifications and see if that helps.”
BRIAN KENNY: So what were some of the underlying issues that emerged as people go through this exercise?
ROB TOOMEY: Yeah. So I think people actually spot it pretty quickly once they sort of are taught what to look for. So they recognize in this case, we got an extrovert and an introvert, and a pretty turbo extrovert in the case of Hannah, the way that she’s characterized in the case. So what is going on is she’s like, “Well, why haven’t you said before what you’re now saying at the last minute?” And so she’s actually viewing this as a sabotage. And what we do is we often infer intent in other people’s actions when they’re very different than how we would behave. And so all of a sudden, a stylistic difference becomes an intentional crime, as if he’s gone out of his way deliberately to do this at the last second, when in fact, this is just a wiring difference.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. And this sounds like something that people can probably relate to. This sounds like a pretty common occurrence.
ROB TOOMEY: Oh, it’s everywhere. Yeah. I mean, introverts make up half the population. And the other factor that we’ll talk about is when you have that difference combined with one other difference, it compounds. So now we have two different factors going in different directions. And then as Len mentioned at the beginning, stress accentuates these differences. It makes it harder to bridge the gaps.
BRIAN KENNY: My mother, who is 89 and still doing great, took a course actually a couple of years ago at a community college near where she lives. And the title of the course was something like, “That’s not what I meant to say.” And it was all about communications breakdowns where people say something with one intention and it comes across differently to the person who’s receiving the information. And I would imagine with an introvert and an extrovert, that dynamic probably is likely to happen.
ROB TOOMEY: Oh, yeah. And across each of the variables that we look at in terms of cognitive preferences, extrovert-introvert is probably the smallest in terms of the sort of magnitude of it. But it shows up all the time. I share a great idea with you, Brian, and you sort of give me a blank stare. I assume that you didn’t like it or you’re about to disagree with me. And the answer for a lot of extroverts is “more talking,” right?
BRIAN KENNY: That sounds familiar to me, I have to say. So Len, maybe you can just describe again, what kinds of stresses are the students under when they’re on the FIELD program? Because again, I want to relate this back to people in a common work situation where we’re all facing pressure of different kinds.
LEN SCHLESINGER: So it’s really so simple, and again, one would think that we would’ve been smart enough to think about this years ago. They’re exhausted, they’re perceiving this as a major transition in their life, but they’re physically exhausted. They’re taking a 14-hour flight, going someplace strange, and within 12 hours, we’re already meeting to get to do the work. And so there’s no question people manifest themselves to being jet-lagged in different ways. People manifest themselves to being in a strange environment in very different ways. People manifest themselves in terms of getting ready to do the work in very different ways. And now, quite honestly, what we do when they get to the location, the first thing they do is revisit as a team the nature of the commitments they made when they were in Boston. Because we figured out that just the simple act of leaving Boston and going to a new location, of finishing exams and actually moving into a different time context, requires them to revisit just about everything. Virtually any team I’ve ever seen in any context requires the same level of support.
BRIAN KENNY: Okay. That makes sense. Rob, how does stress impact people in these situations? Well, how does it manifest itself?
ROB TOOMEY: Yeah. Well, you said the words earlier. So it’s fault lines. When you apply pressure, people crack in fairly predictable ways. What they do is they tend to then default back to their preferred communication style. So in the case that we’re describing here, so Hannah is going to take more control and try to reach closure earlier because closure provides peace of mind for her. And Willem, the other guy’s going to push against it harder because he feels when you’re trying to make a decision, you have to have more information. So they’re actually pushing further away from the middle ground that they need to meet on in order for anything to happen.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, yeah. I want to get to the tool at one point, but I think we should go through the next scenario, and just before we start to talk about the specifics of how the tool works, but the second scenario then, why don’t you tell us about this? It takes place in Buenos Aires.
LEN SCHLESINGER: So as we discussed, the first case really talked about processing information and trying to reach some measure of conclusions about what the data really means. This one focuses on another challenge, which is entirely new for our teams, which is in this strange team, figuring out how they’re going to organize themselves among the six people to present to the client organization, and how they’re going to do it in an influential way.
So in this case, the FIELD team is working with a restaurant group called Fatto Bene in Buenos Aires to present their market research findings to two senior leaders that they discover over time have very, very different styles. The first leader, Santi Benitez is energetic, experiential, and very present-moment focus. The other leader, Ana Romano, is structured, strategic, and more future-oriented. So the team is tasked with presenting their findings to these two very different leaders to gain buy-in from both. Our experience in the past has been most of these teams focus on the content of what they’re going to present, and spend very little time addressing the issue of who are they presenting to and what does it mean for how they do it.
BRIAN KENNY: Who are they normally presenting to?
LEN SCHLESINGER: Well, they’re normally presenting either to each other or to a faculty member or to a boss. Here in this context, you’re connecting to a stranger.
BRIAN KENNY: A stranger, and sometimes a bunch of strangers who are in leadership positions, which carries its own level of stress with it.
LEN SCHLESINGER: Absolutely.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. So Rob, what are the things that students take away from this case?
ROB TOOMEY: Well, so the fun thing for me is that people in that context typically focus on effectively influencing someone who’s like them. So they lead with what they would want to receive. The golden rule is if I was listening to this presentation, what would I want? And so what we’re forcing them to do is say, well, you’ve got two people over there who are obviously very different. How do you effectively communicate to both of those different cognitive needs? And that starts to get them thinking about a very interesting way to present.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Now, Len, I will also point out that I remember when we started FIELD all those years ago, one of the intentions of FIELD was really to put students in an uncomfortable situation, to have them take the learnings from the first year of the MBA program where they’re learning all about general management and they come out of that feeling very confident that they really understand how to run a business. But then we put them in a situation where purposefully they’re not familiar with the surroundings, they’re not familiar with each other. So in some ways we’re making this happen to them.
LEN SCHLESINGER: No question. The language we used earlier in this conversation was creating a context of forced failure. And manifesting the stress that comes from it. And then helping the students to be at their best under those conditions, which are substantially more like the kind of work conditions they’re going to face than being in a group of 90 people trying to get airtime.
BRIAN KENNY: 100% right. So Rob, I do want to talk a little bit about the tool. I mentioned earlier that I went online and I took the test, and so it’s given me a personality type. Maybe you can describe the tool and how it works, and then you can tell me what I am.
ROB TOOMEY: Sure. So the whole platform we built is step one is you go through and you learn about yourself. But we realized years ago that the questionnaire format doesn’t really do a good job of that. They’re very situational in nature. So we switched in for videos, videos and animations that explain the different aspects of personality that we talk about. And then the user makes an informed selection about his or her preferences.
Then you read multiple descriptions before you land on what you recognize as your final best fit type. And then from there, the rest of the platform unlocks. And, for the FIELD participants, access to a team report was central to the analysis that led them to insights that affected performance. And then there’s actually a tool on there that allows you to click on Sarah, who’s on your team, and get communication advice given the combination of your two personalities working together.
BRIAN KENNY: I see. So that’s the application part. So I know who I am and here’s my teammate, and I need to figure out how I interact with that teammate. That sounds pretty powerful actually. So what’s your best guess, Rob? What am I?
ROB TOOMEY: Well, so I’ve listened to a couple Cold Calls. And it’s funny because you can actually pick up a lot of clues in language patterns. And so for a new learner, so someone who’s just gone through the field program, they’re going to go through the different aspects, extrovert, introvert, and so on. For me, it’s pattern recognition. Who does this person most remind me of? And so for me, I would say you’re probably more on the extrovert side. I’d say you’re more focused on the big picture, the possibilities. But interestingly, you bring a very people- oriented approach to Cold Call. And so actually I would put you more on what we call the feeling side than the thinking side. And then you have a more playful, relaxed, spontaneous style, which I see in the mirror. That’s my style as well. So we call that on the perceiving side.
BRIAN KENNY: You’ve nailed me. He nailed me, Len.
LEN SCHLESINGER: No surprise. You’re reasonably transparent.
BRIAN KENNY: I think I am too. So why don’t we talk about this in the context of everyday situations, Rob. How should people think about the way they interact with each other? What can they do?
ROB TOOMEY: So one of the ideas that we share is that most people walk around on autopilot. They’re just walking into a situation saying, here I am, deal with me. If you switch over to a more intentional approach, and you say, what is the other person looking for in this conversation? And then you start to pay attention, not just to the contextual clues, but the cognitive preferences. A lot of that stems from what questions the other person is asking. Those are the signals for what their underlying preference is. They’re asking you the “how” questions early on in the process. That’s a signal that they want you to get into the logistical analysis and focus on the present moment as opposed to talking about the five-year vision. Now, it’s not to say that you can’t talk about the five-year vision, but you first want to land it on what’s happening right now, and then you can link it to the longer-term piece.
BRIAN KENNY: And what’s underlying all of that, I think, is you need to listen. We need to listen better, which we probably tell the students in the MBA program too. But Len, maybe you can help us think about this as it applies to leadership development. If I’m listening to this podcast, and I’m trying to become a better leader, a better manager, how would I think about this?
LEN SCHLESINGER: So 40 years ago when I was at the school, okay, I’ve been here elapsed time over 50 years, the most popular course in the MBA program was an elective curriculum course called, “Interpersonal Behavior: Understanding Another Person.”
BRIAN KENNY: There you go.
LEN SCHLESINGER: Okay. And we used to spend time talking about understanding assumptions, perceptions, and feelings, and how assumptions, perceptions, and feelings influence behavior. And how in dyads and small groups you can actually respond to that. That’s no longer popular in MBA programs. We’ve moved from teaching that kind of stuff to teaching what we call deeper academic content. And so as a consequence, all of those skill sets dissipated. They dissipated from the curriculum, they dissipated from our student body. And the problems did not go away. So it manifested itself in a desire to do a field course, which got us back to the business of helping to understand and respond to another person. We now understand that organizations assume that communications and collaboration skills are going to emerge naturally. We know, we have empirical proof, that it does not happen. So we needed to create an intervention. And this is not the case inside organizations as well. Teaching people how to recognize and work across cognitive differences is a critical skill. It requires an intervention and it improves execution, not just workplace climate. And that’s what we’re trying to do, and that’s why we’re taking it so seriously. And that’s why we’re developing these mechanisms to be able to improve it in our students and also in the people listening to it.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, we live in the dawn or maybe the late morning of the AI age. I’m not sure where we are on that time spectrum. But we know it’s moving fast. We know it’s having big implications for everybody in the workforce. And I’m wondering, Rob, if you’ve thought about this in the context of this tool and interpersonal skills, do they become more important or less important with AI having such a big role?
ROB TOOMEY: Well, my view is it becomes more important. You’re not going to be able to differentiate yourself as a leader simply based on technical skills. You’re going to need to have the interpersonal skills. And the emphasis on those is going to be more and more sort of clear as AI takes over more and more of the sort of basic stuff.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Do you think AI will ever be able to have the perfect personal interpersonal skills?
ROB TOOMEY: Well, AI is pretty good at making adaptations if you ask it to. So there’s some of that stuff emerging already. You can ask chat, “Hey, can you give that information back to me given my personality type?” Or, “Can you help me draft an email?” We actually built an AI into our platform with that goal as well. It’s going to be a sort of co-pilot, it’s going to be a helper. You’re still going to have to be face-to-face having the conversation.
BRIAN KENNY: Darn.
LEN SCHLESINGER: And by definition, it requires an acute level of sensitivity to the issue. So you actually in your prompts know what you’re asking AI to do. So an ignorant person interpersonally who uses AI will manifest an ignorant outcome.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, that’s a great insight. This has been a really fun conversation, as I thought it would be. I’ve got one question left for each of you, and I’ll start with you, Rob, because we always give the faculty member the last word in these things. But maybe you could just tell us if there’s one thing you want people to remember about these mini cases, what would it be?
ROB TOOMEY: I think if one thing could come out of this, everyone should understand that introverts do their best thinking when they have somewhere between two and 48 hours to process complex information. So give your introverts on your team, they’re 50% of the population, the agenda questions, whatever you have in advance of the meeting, and then start with them in the actual conversation. Introverts find that if they participate in a meeting early on, they’ll continue to participate. But if they don’t have the opportunity to start talking early on in the conversation, they’ll just sit in the background. So if there’s one takeaway that I can offer that’s easy for people to remember and implement, that’s a good one.
BRIAN KENNY: Sort of a follow-on question to that is do people generally get it right about themselves? Do they kind of know that they’re an introvert or an extrovert?
ROB TOOMEY: The hardest person for people to profile is themselves. So, no. We actually in the program deliberately asked them to set aside those questions, and we have them write down the names of six people that they’re going to profile using all the techniques, and then we ask them to turn the lens back on themselves. Because you see yourself in too many contexts, too many specific examples to say definitively one or the other. So after some time, people get able to see themselves.
BRIAN KENNY: So Len, I’m going to turn to you for the final say on this. What’s one thing you want people to remember about this case?
LEN SCHLESINGER: If you spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to take action without understanding the context of the individuals you’re dealing with, don’t be surprised if you fail.
BRIAN KENNY: Well, that’s an easy takeaway. Len, Rob, thanks for joining me on Cold Call.
ROB TOOMEY: Thank you, Brian.
LEN SCHLESINGER: Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun.
BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts: Climate Rising, Coaching Real Leaders, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, and Think Big, Buy Small. Find them wherever you get your podcasts.
If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you. 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.
