From Plateau to Progress: Eduardo Briceño on Building a True Learning Culture

0:00If we're only focused on improving the products and the organization and not ourselves, not to better our person, then that's the distinction between a growth mindset culture and not. Like in a growth mindset culture, part of what we're doing is collaborating on continuing to evolve ourselves, to grow ourselves, to increase our understanding and our skills.

0:24What would happen if we just told the truth? Welcome to TruthWorks, where we dig into the nitty gritty of leadership and work. And what needs to change? I'm Jessica Neal. And I'm Patti McCord. Our journey together started in HR, but trust us, it's evolved into something wild, honest, and well, a bit rebellious. So throw out the handbook. We're here to redefine rules to work for us, not against us. Let's dive into another episode.

1:01Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of TruthWorks. I'm Jessica Neal. I'm solo again because Patty's still recovering from surgery, but I have a very, very, very, very exciting guest today. Many of you have probably read his book, seen his TED Talks. His name is Eduardo Brasigno, and he's the author of an amazing book. And if you haven't got it, you need to get it. It's The Performance Paradox, Turning the Power of Mindset into Action. His TED Talks have over 10 million views, which is just kind of crazy to me. But welcome, Eduardo. Tell us about all of it. Like, how did all this happen?

1:45I'm curious. You are in San Jose, California, and you write a book, and then you're like a famous TED Talk person. Well, Jessica, it's great to be here. Thank you for the invitation. I look forward to our conversation. How did I get here? Totally unexpected. I would have never thought that I would be doing what I do right now. You know, I grew up in Caracas, Venezuela. Everyone I knew just lived there, which is a great place to live. But I never thought I would move to the U.S. My dad kind of unexpectedly got transferred to Tulsa, Oklahoma when I was in high school, finished high school there, ended up going to college here.

2:21And I grew up not really interested about anything in particular. So I would just do what else was expected of me and just try to pass the tests. You're a good kid. I was pretty good. You know, I also tried to fit in and the groups that were highest status were troublemakers. So I tried to balance the troublemaking with the try to get by and ended up studying in college finance and chemical engineering because I thought they would be kind of safe jobs. But I wasn't particularly interested in those things. I did investment banking for two years in New York and then venture capital for five years here in Silicon Valley.

3:01Interesting jobs. But at the end, my body broke down. I got into a pretty significant repetitive strain injury called myofascial pain syndrome. And at that point, I was at risk of becoming disabled and not being able to use my hands. And I was 27 years old. And I learned a lot of things. One of the things I learned is that I was treating my body as if I was in a marathon and a sprint, sorry, in a sprint all the time, just super physically tense all the time on purpose so that I could perform as best as I could. And I learned a ton of things about nutrition, but also realized that I wasn't particularly passionate about the work that I was doing.

3:42At the time, I was the youngest person in my VC fund for a couple of decades. I didn't have operational experience and, you know, everybody was really kind, but I was supposed to like I was on boards advising CEOs and just was pretending to know what I was talking about when I didn't. And that was very stressful to me. And and at that time, my wife, Alison, had had a few jobs in advertising and media and technology. And she then became a teacher in East Palo Alto. And I saw a change in her that I hadn't seen in any other job transition. She really found, you know, something that she was passionate about, that she was she cared so much about her kids and their families.

4:25And I said, I want that for me. I want to figure out what that is for me. So I went to grad school interested in social entrepreneurship and in education. And I studied education and got an MBA. And there I was introduced to Stanford professor Carol Dweck and learned about her work, read her book. and she was interested in finding someone with a business background to partner with to help bring growth mindset out into the world. This was back in 2007. And we co-founded a company together called Mindset Works. And I never thought I would become an entrepreneur. I didn't know any entrepreneurs growing up.

5:03My dad worked in the same company for over 30 years. But I learned a little bit about entrepreneurship when I was in VC. And so Stanford was a new world. I then I thought that I would be like I grew up extremely introverted so I'd be an introverted entrepreneur working in my office in my computer while other people went out to schools and districts to do professional development and curriculum development which was not my background and a couple of years in one of my board members Ellen Konar sat me down she said look we're trying to evangelize growth mindset we're trying to bring growth mindset out into the world as the CEO people need to know who you are.

5:43You need to go out there and speak and evangelize, basically. And that was very uncomfortable for me. And I was so busy. We bootstrapped the company like we were under-resourced. But a couple of months after that, Carol was asked to do a TEDx talk, and she couldn't do it. And I thought, okay, maybe this is a great opportunity for us to get a message out there. It could potentially get out there and reach a lot of people. so I worked it was six weeks away I worked really hard on the script and then on practicing you know I was in Carol's office practicing with her getting feedback and from a lot of other people and it was 10 minutes you know I was very uncomfortable I'd never done any public speaking before but I thought this is 10 minutes I can memorize this I can go on stage and my strategy on stage was I will not look at people's eyes I will just look at the back wall with lights so that I don't forget what I'm supposed to say.

6:37And that worked. And then I started getting asked to do more speaking in districts and eventually in businesses. And surprising to me, I love that. I became really good at it. And that's what I do full-time now is I particularly speak in leadership summits in large enterprises that are trying to foster a culture of learning, a growth mindset culture, and do either kind of keynotes or workshops or other bigger programs to help them along that journey. it's that's just fascinating i i myself also hate speaking publicly like i'm okay like that like having a conversation like this but in front of a big audience i used to have to do it all the time at netflix in front of thousands of employees and i too would just practice practice practice so that it just and i was not looking at anybody in the eye because i mean and thank god the lights are so bright it's hard to see yes you know like the first maybe couple rows you can see but behind that you can't see anybody's faces which is great it's it's terrifying to do that yeah it was and it was for me i i was it was terrifying the first time in that tedx talk i didn't feel nervous the day before but i am pretty bad at noticing my emotions and so my wife allison was like take NyQuil tonight to make sure you sleep well.

7:55I was like, no, I don't, I don't need it. I don't like taking things. I didn't take it. And like at 3am in the morning, I was like, I have to sleep and I took it. And then I was a mess the next morning. Luckily I wasn't until, I wasn't until last one, but the lights were a blessing the first time. But now I appreciate when I can look at people and, and the conversations and, and, and kind of can feel the energy in the room and, work with it. So I do really enjoy it now. But it's been definitely a journey to get there. Yeah. So talk to us about your work, and this idea of learning and performance.

8:33And what I, what I really love about your message is that when you're in certain modes, things are amplifying other things, things are taking away from other things. And, And if you're always in a performance mode, you're not learning, right? And then you plateau. But can you talk to us about your research, how you know these things? And some of the stories that you talk about in the book and then also in the podcast are just very, very interesting in general. So maybe we can unpack some of those examples as well. Absolutely. So, you know, when I was in venture capital, a lot of what was valued and what people talked about, what CEOs talked about, one of the things that people were looking for was, people who could execute and perform and that's a good thing but i've realized that that can be confusing too i also grew up and in my career just thinking that the key to success was effort if i just work hard and if people just work hard then we will we will succeed and what i've learned working kind of with carol and other researchers around what how what makes somebody great at something and what develops skills is that there's really like two kinds of efforts and two kinds of strategies and structures.

9:50One set is to perform and to get things done, but the other is to improve and they're very different. And sometimes we get confused and we're not crystal clear about how to approach our work or our life. And so I think that a great way to understand this is to take ourselves out of our everyday context and examine people who are fantastic at what they do in an objective way, they're just super skilled. And so for example, in sports or in the performance arts, you know, I like tennis. And so if I look at a tennis player working, playing in, you know, US Open, for example, or Wimbledon or whatever, what I'm seeing them is I'm seeing them performing and their sole goal at that point is to win the match.

10:34And so what are they going to do? They're going to be doing the things they know best. They're going to try to minimize mistakes. They're just going to do whatever is going to help them win that point. And so if they're having trouble, for example, with a particular move, like a top spin serve, they're going to avoid that move during that match if they can. But then after the match, they're going to go to the coach and say, coach, I'm having trouble with this move of top spin serve. Let's work on that. And so their attention is totally different. It's like, let's work on this thing that I tried to avoid when I was performing.

11:04Now that's what I'm going to focus on deliberately to try to improve. And that's the difference between what I call the learning zone, it's when our goal is to improve, and we're using strategies to improve, and the performance zone, which is when our goal is to get things done and to get the results that we want immediately, right, in this moment. And what often happens is that when we reflect on these two things, we realize that we are out of balance, right, and we are over-indexing on one side or the other. Most people realize that they're over-indexing on the performance zone because for a number of reasons, I mean, psychologically, we tend to over-value the present and under-value the future.

11:45That's a present bias. And there's all kinds of structures in society, like Wall Street, for example, that just values current earnings. And so all of that leads us to not invest sufficiently on improvement at the benefit of future performance. We just want to exploit our current skills to do the best we can right now. But the problem is that if that's all we're doing, then we're stagnating. We're not growing our performance over time. Yeah. I mean, when I just think about what we valued and pushed for at Netflix, for example, we really did talk a lot about performance and high performance and execution and being better and better and better.

12:26We tried to build in learning as well. It was something that was important to us, but I always struggled with the traditional learning platforms or programs that you would find at traditional companies. I never thought that those moved the needle and made any bit of difference. Like, you know, employees didn't walk away. Like if you sent people to management training, they weren't better managers. They, you know, were doing the same thing that they were doing before. And so Reed and I sort of got to a place where we were debating this and, and where we kind of settled is that, okay, well, if we could better the person, right, like, then we would better the leader, better the employee, right?

13:13And so that's where we started to think about like pushing people on thinking more broadly. Right. And so we started to I'm sure you've heard of the Aspen Institute, but we were sending a lot of our executives to the Aspen Institute. And they weren't really talking about business. They were talking about ethical and societal things. And and so we started to weave that type of learning into the company. And it did really ignite some things in our leaders. And also, I think that they valued that we were investing in them in this different way than what a typical organization would do because their horizons were broadened in a sense.

14:01They had to grapple with things that they hadn't grappled with from a human perspective, right? And they weren't talking about the Netflix P &L. They were talking about, you know, the letter from Birmingham jail, right? And Margaret Thatcher's letter. Those were some of the things we were reading. So what do you think about how do you get learning into your organization and what really works and what doesn't? Sure. And I agree with everything you've said. And I love the Aspen Institute. I've done the executive seminar there. And I have a fellowship from the Aspen Institute. And so it's for the listeners who are not familiar, a lot of what Jessica is talking about is like values-based leadership.

14:38So reading those things can help you reflect on what are my values and how does that mean in terms of how I lead and how I perform. And I love what you said about bettering the person. I think that's reflective of a growth mindset principle. And so growth mindset is the belief that we can change, that we can evolve our abilities and our qualities. And so that's what better the person is. And so what I would invite the listeners to think about is when we are focused on improvement and performance improvement at work, if we're only focused on improving the products and the organization and not ourselves, not to better our person, then that's the distinction between like a growth mindset culture and not.

15:22Like in a growth mindset culture, part of what we're doing is collaborating on continuing to evolve ourselves, to grow ourselves, to increase our understanding and our skills. And what you're saying, Jessica, yeah, a lot of programs are detached. They're not in contextualized. There is hard to integrate them afterwards because you go to class and then you come back to being full of tasks in your every day. And so I think that the biggest opportunity in the workplace to embed more learning and improvement into what we do is to embed it into the way we work so that we learn while doing, not just separate from doing.

16:02because we spend so much time doing, we can get a lot of things done with not just the objective of getting them done, but also with a second objective of how can we learn along the way? How can we develop insights? How can we experiment? How can we learn more from our customers, something more customer-centric, learn from one another about how we're working together, what's working, what's not working? And that is easier to do by putting it into structures rather than teaching people and then letting them remember and have willpower to do these things. And so one thing that I'm curious about that I would love to explore with you is, what do you think are some of the structures that you use at Netflix that led not only to getting things done, but also to improving how to get things done better and to evolve yourselves and become better people over time?

16:51Yeah, well, let's see. I mean, we did, we did, We experimented a lot. So there was that. And I think that Reed was a learner himself, right? Like he was a person that was just in his DNA to constantly be learning. And so I think from a foundation, when he was setting up the organization, like he, that mindset just was there. and we for good or not good we didn't really talk about our successes um very often it was we were not very celebratory it was like okay yay uh but what can we have done better right and so that that question and like criticalness right of like okay yeah we we did it but what what should have been different what should have been better what do the customers want How can we test more?

17:48How can we experiment more? That was sort of just day to day in the operations. And then with the more sort of formal learning things and exploration things, we tried a bunch of stuff that didn't work, that was maybe more traditional. But then we ended up building our own learning center, like a seminar place. We hired the guy that ran the Aspen Institute to come run our Aspen Institute. And we would send all of our executives, and this was director and above, away for one week. So really, they were gone four days because it was a day of travel. and they would go away together and we curated this seminar.

18:36And it, again, was very values-based, like the Aspen Institute. And we would curate the group of people that would be together, right? And we had people all over the world and we wanted to make sure that different functions, different regions were all kind of coming together. and then they would also make a movie together every weekend because we're Netflix. And, you know, people walked away from the week having learned how to do production, right? Which was a big thing for us because we were becoming the largest entertainment company in the world. And we are making content all over the world and having people understand how that's done, right?

19:18and how hard it is and how challenging it is to write a script, to film, to get the shot right, to, you know, whatever. And then, you know, having these value-based conversations. And so they would walk away from the week just feeling unlocked, grateful, and just having a completely different perspective than they did when they walked in the door. And so that was sort of when we got to the idea that this was going to be good for us, then it was like, okay, let's go buy a property. Let's go build a whole place where we can just dedicate time to this. I guess similar to like what GE did back in the day.

19:57So a couple of things that come to mind there for me that I want to call out. One, that exercise of immersing people in the production of movies, which is what you do. One of the things that it does is it helps us develop kind of systems thinking of like, how is what I do play into a bigger system of what Netflix does and how Netflix interacts with the world? And so that facilitates more cross-functional collaboration and more holistic problem solving, right? Rather than siloed problem solving, we can collaborate more with others to come up with better solutions. You talked about maybe, I don't know if you under-celebrated success.

20:42Maybe, maybe not. But you definitely talked about what could we do better. Right. And I think that Netflix also and Reid is a fantastic learner and he's always been like a great funder of learning and education. He funded a fellowship that I have done called the Pajara Aspen Fellowship. And so he's a great model of all this. And I think one of the things that you all did that you nodded to was when people make mistakes, you encourage them to share that with the whole company and share the lessons learned. A couple of other things I love your thoughts on. One thing that I think you did that I love is kind of farming dissent.

21:22How does that tie into learning? Yeah. Well, this kind of goes back to how critical we were. Farming for Descent was a big part of our culture, and it came from being critical. We were always trying to tease out the tension and why not to and what to invest in and where not to. And the aspect of challenging one another was there. There wasn't, you know, I think what sometimes you see, especially in organizations as you get higher up, a lot of people question less, right? Because, you know, the head of the, you know, the C-level person said, we're going to do this. And there wasn't really a lot of challenge to those ideas or that strategy.

22:10And I think Reed always wanted that, especially for himself, right? Because he was like, I don't know. I mean, I'm pretty smart, but I'm not always right. And, you know, the idea is to challenge, to question so that we're really thinking and being incredibly thoughtful about the things that we're executing and doing before we do that. And so that was kind of always pervasive in the culture. But and at some point it got a little too much. Right. So when we were, I don't know how many thousand people we were, maybe like four thousand through maybe more than three for sure. We were getting a lot of people having the freedom to farm for dissent and question things and challenge the ideas.

23:01But then it was like a little too much and leaders were a little bit like confused on like, well, what do I do? And then it was like, oh, gosh, oh, no. Are we going to be consensus? Are we going to slow down? And so that's when we also added in, of course, you're farming for dissent and people can have input and challenge. But also there's an informed captain and that informed captain can then decide when that challenge is enough and they have enough information to go forth and make the call. And then they're responsible for that call. But it really amplified our ability to be extremely thoughtful about what we were executing and why.

23:40But also, people think that it might slow things down, but it actually sped things up. Great. So, you know, I love I didn't know that's where the the informed captain came from, but that's fantastic. I love it. And and, you know, so farming for dissent, you know, in a lot of companies or even as individuals, we come up with a great idea and we run with it. Right. It's like this is awesome. Let's go do it. Let's go execute. and sometimes that might be appropriate but farming for dissent when we say hey like what what is what am I missing here you know what what is a different perspective that's a structure and a principle that makes us smarter right that helps us become smarter about the decisions we're making become more aware become and improve what we're doing and then but maybe what I'm hearing is that at that point that was leading to too much learning like maybe maybe a little bit of imbalance in the learning and performance yin yang where you weren't over indexing on the performance you were in over indexing on the learning side and that was preventing you from performing and getting as much things done in the performance zone and so the informed captain is a way to say this is how we shift more toward the performance zone we need somebody who makes the calls and and says how much when do we have enough information but so so along with farming this for descent, I would say, you know, I think you had a principle of leading with context of leaders, you know, saying kind of what are the goals, what's the context, and then people being empowered to act and to make decisions.

25:14That is, I think, another learning zone strategy and performance zone strategy that makes the organization more agile, it makes the collective intelligence to come alive and for people to be thinking and acting more closer to the customers. You also have 360 reviews right where i understand you know a lot about netflix i i love uh i love like the culture you built in netflix it's really legendary and um yeah and i mean i understand reed had like a spreadsheet where he would he would solicit feedback from the whole organization that was visible to everybody transparency is also really important and it was a principle as well so i think you had a ton of principles to foster both learning and performing and sometimes at times you even found yourself too over-indexed on the learning side and had to figure out how do we then shift more to a performance zone.

26:07Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting because I never really thought about that as, I thought about it more of how we operated, which is true, but you're right. That's a learning. That was part of our learning. And, you know, one of the other things that Reed did, which I thought was pretty fantastic. He also, he would ask for feedback all the time and he would get feedback, but he once a year would send out a note and mostly to like the directors and above to say, what would you do differently if you were CEO? And it would be like wild. some of the things that he would get, which were like, he's definitely not going to do that.

26:53But then there were, um, there were valid things that like he had not considered, um, that he should do. And, and that's another way of farming for a descent, you know? Yeah. Farming for descent, farming for ideas using the collective intelligence. Absolutely. Yeah. Um, and so I think maybe what some of the listeners should take away from this is that there's the formal way of learning, like having a learning program. Maybe that's helpful, but there's natural ways to have a learning culture that fit into how you operate and how you're structured, which is what you're sort of alluding to. Yeah, absolutely.

27:33And I think that when you said that you had a high performance culture, and I agree with that, but the length was probably not this quarter. It was like, how do we perform to become an amazing, much bigger company and these amazing goals? And that lens of medium and long-term goals and how do we get there, that involves a mix of learning and performing today and investing and getting better rather than extracting everything that we can to maximize this quarter's performance. I am glad you brought that up because I think many companies operate in that way. I wonder how you feel about this because I'm always conflicted, but I feel like OKRs and KPIs keep you pretty short-term focused.

28:21We never did them at Netflix, and we've done them at some of the companies that I've been on the board for. And I was at Coursera. We had OKRs. And the OKRs were, in my opinion, very distracting because they were short-term focused. And then the team would be coming back to the board and to the C-levels halfway through the quarter being like, we have to change everything because it's not, you know. And they were more managing this presentation and these things that were not necessarily the right things, right? And you learn that as you go because when you're doing things that nobody's done before, I mean, it's hard to know month to month what you should focus on.

29:03You're kind of, that's the journey. You're learning and making mistakes and changing and evolving. But at Netflix, we never did those things. We really had very long-term focused goals. And generally, it was around subscribers, right? And so, you know, we were at 5 million subscribers. And then the next goal would be 10 million, right? And then we were at 10 and then it was 20 million, right? And so, they were big lofty goals. But we knew that in order to get to 10 million, to get to 20 million, to get to 50, to get to 100. and way past that, we had to make the best content in the world. We had to have the best product in the world.

29:41People had to be able to find the things that they wanted to watch quickly, right? And so everybody kind of knew how to anchor up into that. But how do you feel about OKRs and do they help you learn? Do they help? I don't know. So I think certainly the long-term goals, I think, are really, really important and whether kind of OKRs can be helpful, I think probably depends on the organization. So something that you have said before that I completely agree with is, you know, companies shouldn't just copy what another company did, right? You need to figure out what makes sense for you and be creative about, you know, how it fits your culture and the work that you do.