Frances Frei

And I'm your co-host, Frances Fry.

I'm a Harvard Business School professor, and I'm Anne's wife.

It sounds like it's a path to mediocrity or a path to laziness.

But the truth is we need to make sacrifice in one area in order to make progress in another.

And so we want to be as intentional about that which we're going to be great at as that which we're going to be bad at.

The insight that got me tenure at the Harvard Business School was to ask you to marry me.

Let's be super honest.

If you have five things that you want to make investments in, if you invest in all of them equally, that's one strategy.

Another strategy is pick some that you want to overinvest in, but then you have to underinvest in other things.

It's almost an emotional obstacle that gets in the way.

We have forgetfulness.

So the example that brings it to life most deeply for me is the example of the MacBook Air.

I still remember when about 20 years ago, Steve Jobs strode across the stage carrying a manila envelope.

And every geek... It wasn't just the geek.

We were all paying attention to this moment.

Yeah, we were all paying attention.

And he was carrying a manila envelope and nobody had any idea what he had in that manila envelope.

None of us dared to think.

that he was going to slide out a computer from that manila envelope.

It was just unprecedented at that time.