To Be Great, We Must Dare To Be Bad, Say Frances Frei And Anne Morriss
Anne Morriss and Frances Frei are partners in work and life, co-hosts of the great TED Conferences podcast Fixable, and two of the most influential thinkers shaping how we understand trust, leadership, and organizational repair, through Frances' role as a professor and administrator at Harvard Business School and Anne through her work at The Leadership Consortium and in their books and advising. In this newsletter I’m drawing from highlights of my own interviews with them (this week's Anxious Achiever features an interview here), as well as from their own research and work over the years.
Their temperaments are quite different, and Frei identifies as neurodivergent. I asked what they've learned from each other. Frances told me Anne taught her to use her words—to externalize what she’s processing instead of assuming others can track it internally. Anne laughed and added that she learned the same lesson in reverse: “Passive aggression doesn’t work with a neurodivergent partner. I can’t send clues. If I’m not okay, it’s my grown-a** adult responsibility to say that.”
Clear expectations are the best!
When I asked how this plays out at work, Frances described watching Anne lead teams with a kind of reverence. “Anne is the best boss I’ve ever seen,” she said. “She sets the conditions for people to do amazing work. I’m much more transactional. The rest doesn’t always occur to me unless someone points it out.”
And together? Anne put it this way: “Who we are individually is dramatically better in the presence of the other. We each get to operate at a level that’s impossible alone.”
Fitting In Leads To Mediocrity
Frances later connected this directly to leadership and excellence. “Fitting in is one of the most dangerous things you can do if your goal is excellence,” she said. “Fitting in leads to mediocrity.”
One of Frei’s superpowers probably makes her less vulnerable to the anxiety that leads many of us to fit in. It’s one of the most liberating leadership superpowers I’ve ever heard articulated: she experiences rejection not as a verdict, but as a moment in time. An introvert who feels most calm on a stage in front of thousands (like me!), Frei understands herself as multifaceted rather than contradictory. She told me she was rejected by Harvard repeatedly: as a teenager, as a PhD applicant, as a faculty candidate, the first time she came up for tenure, and the first time she applied to be senior associate dean. And yet she never internalized those no’s as permanent or destabilizing. Instead, she translated them into “not now.” That mental shift changed everything. Rejection became information, not identity; fuel, not failure. It freed her to persist without brittleness, to keep offering more data about who she was and what she could do, until the fit became obvious to everyone else too.
Frances’s superpower isn’t fearlessness; it’s the ability to metabolize loss, extract insight, and return stronger. And as Anne Morriss points out, that power isn’t innate or rare—it’s a mental decision, available to all of us, if we’re willing to loosen our grip on the idea that rejection means stop.
”I wasn't in a pristine package coming outta the gate,” Frei told me. I didn't get a lot of the secret memos. I was just figuring it out along the way. But I had really good stuff on the inside.” Frei’s experience as an athlete helped, too: “losing is a part of life. It's a part of sport. And so I'm not devastated by any particular loss, but wow, am I gonna squeeze every ounce of insight into it and watch the film and figure it out and get better the next time.”
Obviously, Harvard came to its senses and hired Frei. At Harvard Business School, where Frances has led major administrative initiatives, she questioned assumptions. Once, when she was told a program was “full,” and that this was economically detrimental, she walked the halls, looked into classrooms, and noticed they were half empty. Full, it turned out, meant “we’ve hit the number of dorm beds.”
Her students feel that wiring too. Frances described the classroom as a place of unusually high standards and deep devotion. “If you’re devoted,” she said, “you get to have even higher standards.” Her neurodivergence allows her to lock in completely—to filter out the noise and give students her full attention. “It’s not a burden,” she told me. “It’s a superpower.”
That word—superpower—came up again when we talked about boundaries. Frances doesn’t do meals. Not networking lunches. Not dinners. Not cocktail hours. It’s not a preference—it’s a boundary. And she’s learned that boundaries only work if they’re real. “If you compromise occasionally,” she said, “people receive that as compromising always.”
Frei and Morris are big on storytelling. And so, Frei develops a narrative around her “do dinner” policy. She explains the why and practices the language until it lands. “I only have purposeful interactions.” “Meals are too much for me.” “Let’s do a 15-minute brainstorm instead.” I love this because I’m from the generation of headship advice that included aphorisms like “never eat alone.” I love to eat alone but I’ve always been scared to do so!
Anne added something crucial here: no one is going to protect your energy for you. Leaders—especially anxious, conscientious ones—often wait for permission to rest, to slow down, to draw a line. That permission doesn’t come. Excellence requires recovery, and recovery has to be treated as non-negotiable.
Think how many of us exhaust ourselves trying to lead around our wiring instead of with it. Now: What’s your narrative to get what you need? Leadership is about saying: This is how I work. This is how you work. Now let’s build something better than either of us could alone. But when you're a different thinker, you often need to show people a vision of the possible, and a powerful narrative is the best way to do that.
But To Be Excellent, You Need to Be Bad
Strategic underperformance is also what makes us great. Wait… WUT? Yes. Frei and Morriss both agree: “We all must have the courage to be bad at some things.” Frei says, “It sounds like it's a path to mediocrity or a path to laziness, but the truth is we need to make sacrifices in one area in order to make progress in another. And so we want to be as intentional about that which we're gonna be great at as that which we're gonna be bad at.
Frei’s research shows that in order to excel where it matters most, organizations need to be willing to underperform in some areas, too. “And the key is to be very intentional about those other areas as well. Have five things that you wanna make investments in.”
Take the MacBook Air, introduced 20 years ago. Steve Jobs and his team of incredible designers, they imagined this machine that had never existed before, right? That was the lightest laptop ever, with this beautiful design. And in order to deliver on this thing that they wanted most, right? This radically lightweight, beautiful design. They had to give up some other things typically perceived as necessary in a laptop.
Two of the most important parts of strategy, says Frei, are “What am I not gonna do? And what am I not going to do well? It's much more difficult to do something poorly than to not do it at all.” Or, consider the “impossible triangle”: you can get cost, quality, speed. Pick two, but you can’t get all three.
And so leaders must have the courage to dare to be bad and to own it without defensiveness. Frei and Morriss tell the story of Herb Kelleher, who built Southwest Airlines by being ruthlessly clear about what the company would not do. In a brutally competitive industry where every airline transferred bags when switching planes, Southwest at first refused—and Kelleher once explained that decision in a thoughtful letter to a frustrated grandmother who depended on flying to see her grandchildren. He didn’t dismiss her or hide behind policy. Instead, he offered what Frances calls an “empathetic no,” explaining that transferring bags would slow aircraft turnaround times, and that even a 30-minute delay would erase the airline’s entire annual profit. He reminded her— and everyone at Southwest— that Southwest was about inexpensive travel, that’s why its customers loved it, and that adding benefits would make seats more pricey.
The thing is, no one wants to be bad at anything, especially us achievers. We spend our whole lives trying to be good enough. But those of us, especially those of us with different brains, must let go of trying to be good enough at everything. It won’t work and it drains us.
Frei says, “People want to be great, they don't wanna be bad. And then at some point there's the breakthrough of, oh my gosh, in order to be great, we have to be bad. And then the light bulb goes off and they're like, wait a minute. Does this apply to me too?” Yes, it does!
And if you’re neurodivergent, it must, because your battery is very expensive to run, your abilities might be spiky, and something’s gotta give.
How can you choose what to be bad at in 2026? My vote goes to the task or assignment that taxes you, stresses you out, and which you will never be good at, no matter how hard you try.
Morra
P.S.: You can listen to me interviewed by Frances and Anne on Fixable