Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems

Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems

By Frances Frei and Anne Morriss

Released October 3, 2023

Speed has gotten a bad name in business, much of it deserved. When Facebook made "Move fast and break things" an informal company motto, it fueled a widely held belief that we can either make progress or take care of people, one or the other. A certain amount of wreckage is the price we have to pay for inventing the future.

Leadership experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss argue that this belief is deeply flawed—and that it keeps you from building a great company. Helping executives and entrepreneurs solve their toughest problems over the past decade, Frei and Morriss learned that the trade-off between speed and excellence is false. The best change leaders solve hard problems with fierce urgency while making their organizations—employees, customers, and shareholders—even stronger. They move fast and fix things.

Based on their work with fast-moving companies such as Uber, Riot Games, and ServiceNow, Frei and Morriss reveal the five essential steps to moving fast and fixing things. With a one-week plan to fix your problems on a fast cycle time of one step per "day," this book is your guide to maximizing impact and reinventing your approach to change. By the end of the week, you won't just have a road map for solving your company's toughest problems—you'll already be well on your way, improving your company at exhilarating speed.

Frances Frei is a professor at Harvard Business School. She served as Uber's first Senior Vice President of Leadership and Strategy, helping the company navigate its crisis in leadership and culture. Frei regularly works with companies embarking on large-scale organizational transformation. Her TED talk on the topic of building trust has had over six million views.

Anne Morriss is an entrepreneur, leadership coach, and founder of the Leadership Consortium, a first-of-its-kind leadership accelerator that works to help emerging leaders thrive. Her collaborators have ranged from early-stage tech founders to Fortune 50 executives to public-sector leaders building national competitiveness.