As chapter 5 shows, the Million Hours Campaign led by Pushkala Subramanian at pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca succeeded because it blended the two approaches to free up employees’ time. Top-down changes included adding steps before employees could “reply all” to more than twenty-five email recipients—users had to pause, read a warning, and do an extra click. That little speed bump saved employees from thousands of unnecessary emails.

Venture capitalist Michael Dearing fires up this way of thinking by urging leaders to act as “editor in chief” of their organizations. When Michael was a guest on our Friction podcast, he argued, much like skilled text and film editors, the best leaders are relentless about eliminating or repairing things that distract, bore, bewilder, or exhaust people.

7. Jargon Monoxide: On the Drawbacks and (Limited) Virtues of Hollow and Impenetrable Babble

“We have no idea what leaders mean by “let’s leverage our core competencies to create synergies that move the needle.” When you ask them to explain what it means for how people ought to act, it becomes clear they have no idea what they are talking about either. We also don’t know what consultants from places such as McKinsey mean by “the helix organization,” “squad-to-squad meetings,” or “fit-for-purpose accountable cells.” Of course, professors are not immune from such crimes against clarity—many of us take perverse pride in baffling our students and colleagues with highfalutin language.

Paul did a lot more at Alcoa than use powerful words. He and fellow company leaders dismissed managers who didn’t turn knowledge about process improvements into action or, worse yet, covered up safety problems. As business author David Burkus argues, the genius of zeroing in on safety is “you can’t improve safety without understanding every step in the process— understanding each risk—and then eliminating it.” As a result, hundreds of process improvements “made the plants run more efficiently,” and Paul “gradually changed the systems and the culture” so that “executives began sharing other data and other ideas more rapidly as well.” Paul was effective not only because of the powerful language he used to fire up employees and focus their attention on the details of Alcoa’s production processes. What Paul didn’t say provides an equally important lesson for friction fixers: we can’t detect even a whiff of jargon monoxide in his words after reviewing numerous speeches, interviews, and written statements.

A piece for Harvard Business Review, “Meeting Overload Is a Fixable Problem,” provided a “playbook” for “meeting resets” that we helped develop and test.