Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems and Accelerating Change

Bestselling authors and cohosts of the TED podcast Fixable, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss reinvent the playbook for how to lead change--with a radical approach that moves fast, builds trust, and accelerates excellence.

Speed has gotten a bad name in business, much of it deserved. When Facebook made ＂Move fast and break things＂ an informal company motto, it fueled a widely held belief that we can either make progress or take care of people, one or the other. That a certain amount of wreckage is the price we have to pay for inventing the future.

Leadership experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss argue that this belief is deeply flawed--and that it keeps you from building a great company. Helping executives and entrepreneurs solve their toughest problems over the past decade, Frei and Morriss learned that the trade-off between speed and excellence is false. The best leaders solve hard problems with fierce urgency while making their organizations--employees, customers, and shareholders--even stronger. They move fast and fix things.

Based on their work with fast-moving companies such as Uber, Riot Games, and WeWork, Frei and Morriss reveal the five essential steps to moving fast and fixing things. You’ll learn to:

• Identify the real problem holding you back
• Build and rebuild trust in your company
• Create a culture where everyone can thrive
• Communicate powerfully as a leader
• Go fast by empowering your team

With a one-week plan to fix your problems on a fast cycle time of one step per day, this book is your guide to maximizing impact and reinventing your approach to change. By the end of the week, you won’t just have a road map for solving your company’s toughest problems--you’ll already be well on your way, improving your company at exhilarating speed.

Frances Frei is a professor at Harvard Business School. She served as Uber’s first Senior Vice President of Leadership and Strategy to help the company navigate its very public crisis in leadership and culture. Frei regularly works with companies embarking on large-scale organizational transformation. Her TED talk on the topic of building trust has six million views.

Anne Morriss is a highly sought-after leadership coach and the founder of the Leadership Consortium, a first-of-its-kind leadership accelerator that works to help emerging leaders thrive. Her collaborators have ranged from early-stage tech founders to Fortune 50 executives to public sector leaders building national competitiveness.

Frei and Morriss are the coauthors of the bestselling books Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business and Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. They are the cohosts of the TED podcast Fixable, on which this book is based.

Connect with Frances Frei on LinkedIn and Twitter and at hbs.edu and TED. Connect with Anne Morriss at on LinkedIn and Twitter and at Thinkers50.com.