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hi I'm Laura Huang and assistant professor in the management department here at the Wharton School I'm here
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today with Kelly Leonard and Tom you're in authors of yes and from the second
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city so I'm gonna start with you Kelly I'm gonna kind of ask this this book had
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me kind of laughing and cringing and taking notes all at the same time you know there are so many useful kind of
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tidbits in there and also some really humorous kind of anecdotes can you tell us a little bit about the motivations
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for writing this yeah I think if 15 years ago you'd say Second City was going to put its name on a business book
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we would have been like you're insane but when Tom started with the company which is that's 16 years ago he brought
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with him a kind of a fresh light to the way Second City was working with clients
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and and really expand upon the business and so the collaboration here was interesting because I'm I've been at
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second city 26 years and so it's really staged meets business because tom has a
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business career and I'm a sort of a theater guy and what second city is all right we're a 56 year old theatre but
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what we really are is an innovation laboratory because over that 56 years we have had groups of people working
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together to create something out of nothing we are a content creator and we never
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stop and they keep doing in these groups and we're very very successful at it and
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a certain point you go that's got to be translatable look at all the famous people who've left from the stages to
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the screen it's not just I'd like to think it's my great eye for talent but
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it's not because I wasn't there when alan arkin started I was there when Tina
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Fey started but there's this long sort of tradition of building talent out of
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these groups to have success and then when we started taking it into businesses and having more and more
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success we kind of turned to each other there's like two three years ago and
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said yeah we're idiots if we don't write this book yeah absolutely I think for me
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business is an act of improvisation it's for all the planning and all the controls and all the governance and all
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the things we try to do to keep the variables down business doesn't cooperate you know the world is a great
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place and this improv toolkit that we talk about is really important it's never been more important than it is now
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so that was all part of the motivation for writing the book yeah and you hear so much about you know teaching students
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and business and and all of these kind of hard skills right accounting and models
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and that sort of thing what I was really struck by was kind of the way you were able to to put this framework around
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teaching these soft skills yeah right and so can you talk a little bit about these soft skills and and what is it
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about it that you're able to teach and how were you able to actually do that
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well it's funny you know I don't think in any part of my education everyone
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anyone ever taught me to listen and listening is kind of important turns out in fact it's vital especially the key
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chapters of your because people are practice it and when you improvise you do practice it you have to so there are
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specific exercises we offer in the book that that people can take home with them
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listening exercises but you got to put it into practice I mean I think everyone understands the need to go to a gym to
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work out your muscles but where do you go to work out your social skills and so improvisation is yoga for your social
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skills it puts you in a mindful present place where you're concentrating with
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eye contact of the person in front of you you're not thinking about before or
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about after and when you're operating yes and which is title of our book you're not saying no you are in
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agreement and affirming and you're building something with someone else and the way you feel after you do that
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especially after like a three-hour improv class is the best and so if we can bring that best self into our
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workplace everything gets better yeah and I we talked about the the soft skills that separate the stars from the
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also-ran in business it's how to listen how to read a room how to work collaboratively on teams how to respond
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to failure how to be nimble and agile and adaptive when the unexpected happens those are really foreign skills to many
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people you could have all the quant skills and you could have all the strategy skills and and all that other
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stuff and they're important skills to have make a mistake but unless you can
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work well with an ensemble and create something out of nothing and respond to the unexpected you're
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only going to go so far in business yeah I like that you kind of mentioned this ensemble nature right and and the two of
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you are in in a sense this ensemble that kind of created this this very comedic artistic work and a lot of it touches
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upon this innovation question that you you brought up have you seen innovation changing over time you've both been a
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part of this for a long time has that definition changed for you over time and can you talk a little bit about what
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innovation is meant in the past and what it means now yeah it had it has changed
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and luckily the the world has kind of come to us so if you think about what second city is good at we are good at
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short form content and interactive content we create the shows with our audience
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well welcome today that is the world completely in vogue in the thing oh and also our work is rooted in games so the
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idea of a gaming sort of mindset so all these things that are completely sort of
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taking over the innovation sphere are the stuff that we've been cooking and playing with for 56 years and we've only
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recently begun to codify it because we're a baby art format 56 that's you
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know and that's really American style improvisation really started with the compass players our predecessors so it's
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60 years ago so that's really changing than that I want to touch on what you
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talked about with ensembles because we a good point of this and Tom will elaborate but we don't use the word team
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we use the word ensemble and the late great Sheldon Patinkin one of our great mentors had a great phrase that you
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often hear the phrase you're only as good as your weakest member he changed it he said you're only as good as your
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ability to compensate for your weakest member so the onus goes back on the ensemble because at any given time one
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of us is going to be the weakest member and wouldn't you want someone else to
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kind of pick you up when you're that member yeah and a time back to your innovation question I think about you
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know because I spent 20 years on the other side of the desk I was the clients that we now serve before I came to
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Second City and and there's a million innovation methods with you know the registered trademark in the seven step
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process and all that so that's all fine that's great we think one of the
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greatest barriers to innovation period is this we talked about this this idea of respecting things but not revering
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things when you're so reverential about a product a company a leader a category
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you're not willing to see its failings you're not willing to see what's
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incomplete about it and so respect what you work with but ultimately don't hold it
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in such a reverence that you can't imagine it being something different so all the process in the world is only so
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good if you're willing to actually challenge the status quo in the first place I think that's such a great point
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one of the things I really loved from the book was when you talk about failure and how you know success is kind of the
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series of failures and successes also you know failure is embedded in in kind of in kind of success and and yet we
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live in a country that says no failure and we live in a world where business like you can't fail but the reality is
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we all fail every day and we're gonna fail and especially the people have success every success story right is
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rooted in these all these little failures so what we at Second City do is we have a failure methodology we have a
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failure format the to act scripted review that you pay your good money to see everyone's going to love and they
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laugh because we've tested it out the place we've tested it out is in the
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third act which is free it's late at night many people leave a lot of college
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kids line up to come see it that's our improv set that is our failure laboratory we try out material it
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doesn't work it's okay I didn't pay anything and and that is a failure model
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in the it's not just that we have this to test out with the audiences but for
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the employees in this case the actors they get to model failure they get to survive failure they get to fail and
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bring something back and so learning how to fail elegantly and learning how to incorporate failure into your daily
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activities so it doesn't beat you into the ground you know you're not gonna
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meet your sales goals are eaten in the ground it's like know that that happens
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this is a process and so we have that model so what we recommend for businesses is find your improv so places
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where you can fail fast and we can fail free of fear and you know not everyone has a stage but you can create things
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like a stage inside your business yeah you know so I work with a lot of early-stage startups right and this
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failure is kind of intrinsic in what they're doing so the question is also how do you know when you should continue
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pivoting on your failures or when you should kind of throw in the towel and say this is not working it's time to
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move on to something else let's try something new altogether yeah that's a
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tough one I mean and there's no stocking to that I think especially in a startup
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world a lot of other factors did you run out of money sometimes there are things
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outside of outside of your own control that kind of dictate where you need to go but I think for us we we are more
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resilient and we are more willing to go the next step and try it again and give it another shot so I think when you
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think you should bail try it another time or two and see what happens before you throw in the towel and if you create
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if you create in a model where you're yes handing at the start which every idea gets a little loved you have an
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abundance of ideas so that means the the failure can move much faster because you
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can throw away throw away throw away and no one is holding on the things in such
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a precious precious manner so really if you act out of yes and early create abundance then you might not have that
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problem you might get to the truth and the good idea more quickly I want to talk a little bit and just piggy an idea
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came in my mind was just saying that dishonesty in business and I don't mean
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like malicious intentional dishonesty I mean petty unintentional dishonesty and that is where you know where we refuse
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to acknowledge a failure where we all kind of walk past it and pretend it didn't happen and whitewash over it and
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still put the slogan up and you know we get together in the the All Hands meeting and clap but we're not really
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acknowledging what's broken and when companies do that when organizations do
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that it causes everyone else to check out because they know there's BS going
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on and there's a high cost to not being real and not being authentic so we talk
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about failure it's not like we are is kind of reply FLE saying yeah it's okay
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to fail we're a very high performance culture we have high standards and we don't like to fail any more than anyone
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else but we know that it's okay to talk about it we want to create conditions
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where people feel it's okay to be open about it because then they'll keep
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staying in the game they'll stay fully engaged and you're good to go yeah I
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think that's a great point it kind of reminds me of one of the examples you had in the book where about Superman
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yeah and can you tell us a little bit about you know that failure and how that failure turned into this immense success
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yeah so there's these classic scenes from the second city archives and one of
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them is the Superman scene and it was shortly after Christopher Reeve had fallen off the horse and was paralyzed
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tragic tragic situation and the cast really wanted create a scene around that and the idea
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they came up with was that they were set in a sort of cartoon world and there was
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an evil villain and then Superman came out but he was in a wheelchair and the response that the audience gave was
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groans if not worse Martin Short came to a preview and just yell no when he saw it it wasn't working
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and so the director took it out of the show the - the - actually I'll put it
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back in the improv set the place where we can fail and it's okay because it's
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late at night when we in trouble and was playing around with it still wasn't
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working and then finally came up with an idea of writing a song for Superman that
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he could sing about how he wished he could fly again and it was kind of a lovely bookend that when he put it back
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in the scripted show we still got that terrible groan but after he sang the song everyone's like oh I'm okay with it
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and it became this iconic well-reviewed classic scene the director was Mick Napier the actor was Richard Heller Eko
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and it would never have happened if we hadn't had this little failure module to
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fool around with it because we want a risk and we want to create content that is challenging and edgy but it doesn't
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work if everyone is upset they could be upset for a little bit but we want to bring them around again so a lot of our
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work is testing you know the edge and we talked about this in the book which is you know a lot of people are practicing
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comedy without a license you know we we have studied this stuff we have we've
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you know researched and modelled it and all that but everyone else thinks they know how to do comedy and that's why
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everyone gets in trouble on Twitter you know you got to understand your context and so being a part of the book is also
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talking about that for businesses is that if you want to use comedy there are kind of rules that you might not want to
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own another one you didn't want to use those in power using comedy to belittle
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those with less lesser status it doesn't go over so well punch down yeah don't punch down there's a few like
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that yeah I think that the practical exercises in the book really hit a lot of those concepts home so you know I
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personally really liked the string the pearls yeah one where you give one phrase and another phrase and the two
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are not connected and you have to get from one to the next do you guys have a favorite Tom do you have a favorite yeah
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we do a lot of work with listening skills and business because it is so unpracticed
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and an exercise that we cite in the book and we use very successfully something we call last word response where we
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instruct people at pair up talk about anything have a conversation doesn't matter what you're talking about
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the only stipulation is you have to use it when you respond to me you have to use the last word in my line as the
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first word in your response and you go and you have these conversations and sometimes they're funny and nonsensical
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and it doesn't much matter the point of that exercise is it's difficult to
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listen all the way through because we are generally taught in business critical thinkers are taught to listen
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to respond not to listen to understand and we draw that distinction we think it's really important to listen to fully
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understand someone you might miss some information you might miss a meeting if you check out halfway through what
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they're saying so you can prepare a response yeah and Kelly how about you yeah here's
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here's the thing I think people should do take one day and don't say no the
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entire day so even if you're in a situation where you have to say no you have to find another way to get there it
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will change your your view it will change how you feel it's hard it is not easy I have done it and it is
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problematic especially but it is ultimately very rewarding because you have put yourself out in a far more
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positive way and the other thing is you start to you know make that list of how many times you would have said no and
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it's a lot and you recognize that really out of the 25 times that I would have
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said no 23 of them I didn't need to and and and the people around you notice
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that notice it as well when we were working on the book I would come in in the morning early in Wright's like from
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8 a.m. to like 10 a.m. and my ensemble members my staff around me always said they knew when I was working on the book
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because I was a much better leader and because I was modeling it I was putting in practice I was saying and I was
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writing it I was touching it and they were like it's remarkable like that we
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all know now we have this game to catch you when you come out of a writing thing
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because at that point we're gonna be able to make things happen that's interesting alright so one thing I'm
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just curious about so Stephen Colbert said that at least half this book is going to be good because he knows one of
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you so was he being facetious or does he only know one of you you notice him he doesn't know me what
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are you gonna do yeah Stephen was in my very first cast as a producer at Second City
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he was my wife's roommate in college we got engaged at his rehearsal dinner he's
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a great old friend and an amazing second city success story and someone who so embodies this work Tina Fey is another
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they both really believe in improvisation and took it with them so Colbert if you look at his staff it's a
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lot of second city people same with Tina when she's on 30 rock and Kimmy Schmidt
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I mean there's there's a lot of second city people so it's one of the things
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that's interesting about second city is that we let talent go when we talked
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earlier about ensembles in an ensemble that's just fine because the ensemble is
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always there sometimes when it's teams like out the team falls apart it's like
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no this is never falling apart and we've never closed for 50 56 years that we've
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never closed the show has just kept going on and morphing into the next second City Ensemble and that's why so
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many people who are so proud of calling themselves alumni of the second city know that's every rare group that
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they're a part of but my mom liked the part I wrote so she liked half of it as
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well she sounds mom Colbert you know yeah well thank you so much Tom and Kelly for being here I just such an
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fascinating glimpse into the world of improv and the the lessons that we can take from that into the business world
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so thanks again thank you you