8. Fast and Frenzied: When and How to Apply Good Friction

“Putting the pedal to the metal is dangerous for organizations, too. London Business School’s Dana Kanze and her colleagues compared managers who were urged by their leaders to rush ahead, to focus on “locomotion goals,” to managers who were urged to slow down and evaluate their actions, to focus on “assessment goals.

And the LinkedIn pieces “Why Your Job Is Becoming Impossible to Do” and “How Do You End a Meeting?

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

We also learned what to make harder and slower from works including The Necessity of Friction by Nordal Åkerman, a collection of essays on the virtues of blocking, delaying, and stopping action that draws on fields including economics, organizational theory, physics, and artificial intelligence.

We think and act with a sense of urgency. I like to call this “constructive impatience.