Frances Frei

Well, one is being disciplined enough to really get to the nitty gritty of that ordering of attributes, most important to least important.

That's the first thing.

The second thing is we tend to be a generous grader to ourselves, right?

And a really harsh grader to the competition.

So we overestimate what we look like in the eyes of the customers and we underestimate what our competition looks like in the eyes of the customers.

So particularly in highly competitive industries where it's the Coke versus Pepsi, Coke is great, Pepsi is bad, or Pepsi is great, Coke is bad.

Oh my gosh, don't listen to anybody on the inside about how well you think it's going.

You got to go get market research because we think we're great at everything and we think they're bad at everything.

Or does it?

Yeah.

So this, I think, is the most common question that we get when we do this exercise with organizations, which at some point when people find like they struggle to get it, they want to be great.

They don't want to be bad.

And then at some point there's the breakthrough of, oh my gosh, in order to be great, we have to be bad.

And then the light bulb goes off and they're like, wait a minute.

Does this apply to me too?

And it turned out it explained everything because even though we teach companies around the world, we were getting it wrong at home.

So when we started studying working moms, and we could line up the performance of working moms that were killing it to working moms that were just one missed handoff away from a catastrophe.

You can see it in the drop-off line.

You can see it so clearly.

I mean, I used to joke that the tell is, are your roots done?