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181: Find Your Edge (And Collect 10 No's to Pass Go) with Laura Huang

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(Recorded 2/12/20) Laura Huang is a professor at Harvard Business School who studies interpersonal relationships and implicit bias in entrepreneurship and in the workplace. In this conversation, we’re talking about her new book Edge: Turning Adversity Into Advantage.

You’ll learn about her framework: Enrich, Delight, Guide, Effort — and how she recovered from almost getting kicked out of Elon Musk’s office within the first two minutes of their meeting.

Check out full show notes from this episode with links to resources mentioned at http://pivotmethod.com/181

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Laura is a professor at Harvard Business School. She has spent her academic career studying interpersonal relationships and implicit bias in entrepreneurship and in the workplace. Her research has been featured in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, and Nature, and she was named one of the 40 Best Business School Professors Under the Age of 40 by Poets & Quants.

Previously, she held positions in investment banking, consulting, and management, for organizations such as Standard Chartered Bank, IBM Global Services, and Johnson & Johnson. She received an MS and BSE in electrical engineering, both from Duke University, an MBA from INSEAD, and a PhD from the University of California, Irvine.

Topics Covered

  • Petitioning at times to rename soft skills as core skills or even power skills. You can’t really be successful without them

  • Recovering from a rocky start in her meeting with Elon Musk

  • Being over-prepared is not always a good thing; can be a constraint

  • Edge stands for the framework: Enrich, Delight, Guide, Effort

  • Principle 1: Hard work should speak for itself. (But it doesn’t.) 

  • Principle 6: Before people will let you in, they need to be delighted. Delight: verb means “to give joy;” noun is “something that affords gratification” — something surprising, unexpected

  • How Crazy Rich Asians director asking for rights to Yellow by Coldplay and turning a no into a yes

  • Principle 9: “Being yourself” entails guiding others to all the glorious versions of yourself. 

  • We are all diamonds — all diamonds have flaws, all diamonds have angles from which they shine really brightly — depends on the lighting, the angle, the environmental conditions.

  • Find where you shine the brightest, how you enrich and provide value. What are those core 2-3 things, or superpowers, that you’re really good at? Who are you at your essence? 

  • Go for directionality: if you know what your basic goods are, your superpowers, start heading in that direction. 

  • Embrace constraint. Constraints provide opportunities. 

Find Your Edge with Laura Huang (And Collect 10 No's to Pass Go)

Listen below or on iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, Overcast, Stitcher, or Google Play Music:

Resources Mentioned

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