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Good Boss, Bad Times: Video Interview at The McKinsey Quarterly

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 I've written here about my new Harvard Business Review article on  "How to Be a Good Boss in a Bad Economy."  Right after I finished the article, I was lucky enough to be at conference where Rik Krikland had a camera crew. Rik runs the The McKinsey Quarterly and a bunch of other related stuff at McKinsey; as some of you may remember, Rik was the long time editor of Fortune magazine. Rik asked if I wanted to do an interview about something, and we both thought that the forthcoming HBR was most timely. So we did the interview, which they call Good Boss, Bad Times –you can see it for free if you follow the link.  The article contains more nuances than the interview, but Rik is such a
good interviewer that he gently guided me to provide a pretty accurate
compact summary of the ideas.

In addition to the interview, there was some interesting "inside baseball" with this interview as HBR and the McKinsey Quarterly in some ways compete for attention (although they do have different goals in many ways). But rather than getting weird and uncooperative, Rik and the new HBR editor Adi Ignatius were wonderfully cooperative about the whole thing.  They were colleagues at Time-Warner, as Adi was at Time magazine for 13 years, so that helped.  McKinsey waited to post the interview until the HBR article came-out — and the HBR article links back to the interview (They are acting just like bloggers, kind of cool to see).  My thanks to everyone at The McKinsey Quarterly and Harvard Business Review for playing so well together, and for being so fun and inspiring to work with.

Comments

7 responses to “Good Boss, Bad Times: Video Interview at The McKinsey Quarterly”

  1. John Caddell Avatar
    John Caddell

    Bob, I was reading “The Odyssey” with my son the evening after watching this interview and read this passage, which I think speaks volumes to the fact that good bosses communicate openly.
    This is just after Odysseus has learned from Circe that they will next encounter the Sirens and, after that, the twin dangers of Scylla and Charybdis:
    “At last, and sore at heart, I told my shipmates, ‘Friends, it’s wrong for only one or two to know the revelations that lovely Circe made to me alone. I’ll tell you all, so that we can die with our eyes wide open now or escape our fate and certain death together….’”

    Reply
  2. John Caddell Avatar
    John Caddell

    Bob, I was reading “The Odyssey” with my son the evening after watching this interview and read this passage, which I think speaks volumes to the fact that good bosses communicate openly.
    This is just after Odysseus has learned from Circe that they will next encounter the Sirens and, after that, the twin dangers of Scylla and Charybdis:
    “At last, and sore at heart, I told my shipmates, ‘Friends, it’s wrong for only one or two to know the revelations that lovely Circe made to me alone. I’ll tell you all, so that we can die with our eyes wide open now or escape our fate and certain death together….’”

    Reply
  3. John Caddell Avatar
    John Caddell

    Bob, I was reading “The Odyssey” with my son the evening after watching this interview and read this passage, which I think speaks volumes to the fact that good bosses communicate openly.
    This is just after Odysseus has learned from Circe that they will next encounter the Sirens and, after that, the twin dangers of Scylla and Charybdis:
    “At last, and sore at heart, I told my shipmates, ‘Friends, it’s wrong for only one or two to know the revelations that lovely Circe made to me alone. I’ll tell you all, so that we can die with our eyes wide open now or escape our fate and certain death together….’”

    Reply
  4. John Caddell Avatar
    John Caddell

    Bob, I was reading “The Odyssey” with my son the evening after watching this interview and read this passage, which I think speaks volumes to the fact that good bosses communicate openly.
    This is just after Odysseus has learned from Circe that they will next encounter the Sirens and, after that, the twin dangers of Scylla and Charybdis:
    “At last, and sore at heart, I told my shipmates, ‘Friends, it’s wrong for only one or two to know the revelations that lovely Circe made to me alone. I’ll tell you all, so that we can die with our eyes wide open now or escape our fate and certain death together….’”

    Reply
  5. John Caddell Avatar
    John Caddell

    Bob, I was reading “The Odyssey” with my son the evening after watching this interview and read this passage, which I think speaks volumes to the fact that good bosses communicate openly.
    This is just after Odysseus has learned from Circe that they will next encounter the Sirens and, after that, the twin dangers of Scylla and Charybdis:
    “At last, and sore at heart, I told my shipmates, ‘Friends, it’s wrong for only one or two to know the revelations that lovely Circe made to me alone. I’ll tell you all, so that we can die with our eyes wide open now or escape our fate and certain death together….’”

    Reply
  6. John Caddell Avatar
    John Caddell

    Bob, I was reading “The Odyssey” with my son the evening after watching this interview and read this passage, which I think speaks volumes to the fact that good bosses communicate openly.
    This is just after Odysseus has learned from Circe that they will next encounter the Sirens and, after that, the twin dangers of Scylla and Charybdis:
    “At last, and sore at heart, I told my shipmates, ‘Friends, it’s wrong for only one or two to know the revelations that lovely Circe made to me alone. I’ll tell you all, so that we can die with our eyes wide open now or escape our fate and certain death together….’”

    Reply
  7. John Caddell Avatar
    John Caddell

    Bob, I was reading “The Odyssey” with my son the evening after watching this interview and read this passage, which I think speaks volumes to the fact that good bosses communicate openly.
    This is just after Odysseus has learned from Circe that they will next encounter the Sirens and, after that, the twin dangers of Scylla and Charybdis:
    “At last, and sore at heart, I told my shipmates, ‘Friends, it’s wrong for only one or two to know the revelations that lovely Circe made to me alone. I’ll tell you all, so that we can die with our eyes wide open now or escape our fate and certain death together….’”

    Reply

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