[MUSIC PLAYING] HELEN RILEY: Hello, everyone
and welcome to Talks at Google. My name is Helen Riley. I am CFO of X and a devout
fantasy and sci-fi nerd. And I'm absolutely delighted
to welcome Jennifer Bagdonas and Naomi Aaker today to talk
about their new book, "Humor, Seriously". If you have any questions
for Naomi or Jennifer, I encourage you to
submit them since we will be taking audience
questions later in the talk. And with that, let me
introduce our two guests. Dr. Jennifer Aaker is
General Atlantic Professor at the Stanford GSB
and a leading expert on how purpose and meaning
shape individual choices and how technology can
positively impact well-being. Her work has been
widely published in leading scientific
journals and featured in "The Economist",
"The New York Times", "Wall Street Journal"
among others, and she's the co-author
of several books, including the award-winning
"The Dragonfly Effect". A recipient of the Distinguished
Scientific Achievement Award, Jennifer counts
winning a dance-off in the early 1980s among
her greatest feats. So welcome, Jennifer. Naomi Bagdonas is an experienced
designer, executive advisor, and leading expert
in the intersection of humor and business. She teaches at Stanford's
GSB and facilitates interactive sessions for
the boards and leadership teams of Fortune 100
companies and nonprofits. Versed in behavioral
science, human perception, and professional comedy,
she advises executives and celebrities on events
ranging from appearances on "Saturday Night Live" and
"The Today Show" to company all hands meetings and
political campaign speeches. Her work has been featured
in "The New York Times", "Wall Street Journal",
"Harvard Business Review", among others, and on
her mother's fridge. In her spare time, Naomi
runs a teaching program teaching improv comedy in
San Francisco's county jail and fosters a revolving door
of rescue dogs whom she adores and who systematically
destroy everything she owns. And with that, welcome, Naomi. NAOMI BAGDONAS: Hello. Wonderful to be here. JENNIFER AAKER:
Great to be here. Also, your accent makes us sound
all very fancy and important. HELEN RILEY: That's
what everybody tells me. And with that, let's
dive straight in. So what prompted you
to write this book? I read the book. I absolutely loved it. But it's a non-obvious
topic, so I'd love to hear what
prompted you to write it. NAOMI BAGDONAS: Yeah. Well, Jennifer and I
came to this body of work from very different angles,
sort of opposite angles. So for me, I always grew up
obsessed with humor and comedy, and I spent my
career essentially straddling the worlds of
business and improv comedy. And all the while, I sort of was
keeping these worlds separate because I figured no
one in the comedy world thought that work at a
corporate job was very cool, and no one in the
corporate world thought that working nights
and weekends doing improv was going to be very impressive. So I essentially
realized in my mid-20s that I was totally
leading a double m that it was unsustainable, and
I was pretty unhappy and not making friends at work. So I personally
started on this mission to merge those two selves,
to have more fun at work and hopefully be more
successful as well. And through that, I
realized, oh my gosh, humor is not just something that
makes me feel more authentic, but it actually can be
incredibly powerful for me at work. So that was my journey
to this body of work. Jennifer's was kind
of the opposite. JENNIFER AAKER: Yes. Not only did I not really ever
think that humor was important, I always felt that humor
was-- so I had no double life. I had a single life. And it was just so focused
on research and the work that I do. I have friends. It's not like I'm humorless. But certainly I never
thought that humor was a really important thing,
and definitely not in work. I started changing the
way that I viewed humor and how important it might be,
especially in a work context, but more generally because
I worked with many people who had leukemia about eight
years ago after my husband and I wrote this book,
"The Dragonfly Effect". We ended up helping kids
that had leukemia try to find matches in the bone
marrow registry or outside the bone
marrow industry for that, and in that process, just
met a wide swath of people. One of them was a guy named
Amit Gupta, and he had leukemia. There was no match in the
bone marrow registry for him. He needed to find one. But here's the thing. He used humor to do it. His friends had this
incredible sense of humor. They brought in comedians like
Aziz Ansari and Chris Pratt. At the time, he was less of an
actor and more of a comedian. And they would do
PSAs to get people to be motivated to give
a spit about cancer and be put in the
bone marrow registry. They would have
bars, parties where they would bring their
South Asian friends and have them give a spit
and get into the bone marrow registry. So everything he
approached was with levity. And he found a perfect match
in a very short period of time. And just through his
actions, and his approach of humor and levity to find
a hopeful match for himself, he ended up finding
a match for I think over 250
people in the year after he found a perfect match. So it just made me
start reflecting on how humor can
actually drive action, it can mobilize
communities, and it can shrink the
distance between people so everyone can feel like
they're on the same page. And that's what started
me on my humor journey. HELEN RILEY: Definitely you both
have very different approaches that brought you to this topic. I have so many questions
already for both of you based on those intros. So Naomi, maybe if I
can start with you, I know there's actually an
extraordinary little story in the book about this
sort of dual life, effectively, that
you were leading. And I think someone actually
put a mirror up to you. So I'd love for you to
expand on that story. But it also leads me
to sort of the question of this false dichotomy
between gravity and levity, because
the reality is so many of us have been conditioned in
our early professional careers to actually separate these
two sides of our lives, partly because we've lived
with this false impression that humor compromises
whether we're taken seriously or not, when in
reality, I think, one of the things you say in the
book is the balance of the two is what gives power to both. So I'd love to hear
about that story, and then also hear your
reflections on this topic. NAOMI BAGDONAS: Yes. This was my
horrifying realization about the kind of life
that I was leading. And I was maybe 24, 25. And remember, I was doing
improv nights and weekends. I was having so much fun,
and I was doing so well at my job, which was at
a large consulting firm. I was climbing the ranks
faster than expected, and I just felt like I was
really doing great at work. And so I had this
client named Bonnie. And Bonnie and I had been
working together for months. We'd probably spent 100 hours
side by side working together, and she knew me
really, really well. And it was a Friday
afternoon, and we were about to part
ways and bantering. And she said, by
the way, Naomi, I bet I know exactly what you
do with your Friday nights, which is objectively a
weird thing for a client to say to you. But again, we had
sort of grown close. So I said, OK, Bonnie,
what do you think I do with my Friday nights? And she said, well, I bet
that you go home by yourself, you watch History Channel
documentaries with your cat. And you re-iron your
blouses for next week. Now this is not a
bad Friday night. This is fine. If anyone has this Friday night
out there, that's awesome. This was just so
backwards from my life. And so it was this moment-- JENNIFER AAKER: Naomi
irons but doesn't re-iron. Just want to be clear. NAOMI BAGDONAS: I
don't even iron. I steam. Why does anyone iron? Steaming is so much easier. Yeah, it just wasn't my life. And I pulled this out of
her, and she basically told me that she didn't
think I had a sense of humor. And so it was exactly
what you said, Helen, where she held
this mirror up to me and made me realize that the
person who was showing up at work each day was not someone
who my friends would recognize, was not someone who my
family would recognize. I was kicking butt at
work, but I was just having absolutely no fun. And it led me to
this exploration of why is it that we believe
we have to be a certain way, we have to have a
facade at work, when in reality, the research tells
a completely different story, that if we're able
to bring more levity, if we're able to bring a
fuller range of ourselves and have more fun,
then we'll actually be more successful in the process. HELEN RILEY: That is so true. Go ahead. JENNIFER AAKER: I was
just going to chime in. First of all, steaming. Noted. I still have an iron. HELEN RILEY: Lesson learned. JENNIFER AAKER: But Naomi's
story is not unusual. And as she said before,
once she actually started bringing humor more into
the work life, she, and we all, become even more effective
in a surprising way. I remember we had Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright come into our class at Stanford,
and she told us about the time the Russian government
had bugged the US State Department, which
is a serious breach in international diplomacy. And so after learning
about the bugging, though, what Secretary
Albright did was she arrived at her
next meeting with the Russian foreign minister
wearing an enormous bug pin. Like it was ginormous. And he couldn't help but smile,
and the energy in the room shifted. She shared how the conversation
completely shifted. And the story, I think,
illuminates two things. One is humor is a
choice, one that we can make in these small
moments, but also big ones, and that as you said,
the balance of gravity can give power to both. So even in the most
serious of moments, when you bring a sense of
humanity and levity and humor to it, it often shifts
the entire course of how conversations can go and
the outcomes can be revealed. HELEN RILEY: Well,
exactly to that point, I think that's one
of the things that's most powerful about the
story you told about trying to raise money for
cancer, and actually, that it was the power of humor
that was able to be the most powerful way to
influence people, to grab people's attention than
potentially any other methods. So exactly to that
point, you actually talk in the book about
how humor benefits us in so many different ways, not
just in our personal lives, but it makes us happier. It makes us less stressed. But it also brings
a ton of benefits in negotiation and in
business on a number of different dimensions. So can you actually
help us understand more what is it about humor
that conveys higher status, it can make us seem smarter,
it can unlock creativity. Help us understand how
something like humor can have so many positive
effects on so many dimensions. JENNIFER AAKER:
Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, just
some basic stats. Leaders with a sense of humor
are seen as 27% more motivating and admired, any sense of humor. Their employees are
15% more engaged. The teams that
work for them tend to be twice as creative because
tension is often diffused, and you can take greater risks. And as you mentioned, they
can even make more money. So in one of our
favorite studies, the researchers showed that
even adding a lighthearted line at the end of a sales pitch,
like my final offer is x and I'll throw in my
pet frog makes people willing to pay nearly 20% more. Really let it sink in
how bad that joke is. The bar is so low. And that is an
enormous effect size. And part of it's chemical. You ask, like, why
is this happening? People often think
that what humor does is a psychological phenomenon. But it's not. It's really neurochemical. When people laugh
together, our brain releases this
cocktail of hormones. So we release endorphins,
which gives us something similar to a runner's high. Our cortisol decreases, sort
of similar to a meditative feeling. And we also release
dopamine, which is the same hormone
released during sex. So in essence, as far as
our brains are concerned, laughing together is similar
to exercising, meditating, and having sex all
at the same time, but logistically much easier. And what's also important is
that when our brain shifts, it doesn't just impact how we
see ourselves and how we act, but it also impacts
how others see us and how others end up acting. And so the reasons why
creativity can be accelerated, or productivity
oftentimes can as well, or people see you with greater
sense of competence or status is largely, in part, due to this
kind of neurochemical effect as well, and then the ripple
effects that come from it. HELEN RILEY: But to
that point, if there is this positive
neurochemical effect, why are we censoring
it out of our lives? It almost seems
counterintuitive that we're not relying more heavily on humor. Why do you think that is? I mean, one of the
most depressing things that you talk about in the
book is the humor cliff. We have so many laugh
out loud experiences when we're young kids, and
then that just drops off when we enter the workforce. And yet you're talking about
all of these positive benefits. So why are we
self-censoring ourselves? JENNIFER AAKER:
First of all, that's awesome that you have a list
of all of the depressing things in our book. and what's more depressing
things among the large number of depressing facts. I just wanted to
comment on that. NAOMI BAGDONAS: Bring it on. I could not agree more. Yeah, I mean, we delve into
these four myths in the book. What are the myths that
exist that hold people back from using humor? One of them, of course, is
the serious business myth. That's the idea that if you
take your work or your mission seriously, the presence of
humor betrays that mission. And as Jennifer
shared with the stats, we just find in the research
that this is not true. There's also a
cultural component to this, where we teach
a course at Stanford called A New Type of Leader,
Anchored on Purpose, Fueled by Humor. And the thesis of
that course, is that traditional models of
leadership are shifting, and that it used to be that
leaders needed to be revered. Now they need to be understood. So we need to have leaders that
have more vulnerability, that have more authenticity,
that balance approachability with status. And one really powerful
way to do that is humor. So I'll say first,
there's a cultural shift that's happening in the forms of
leadership that are effective. And the second thing is-- you asked why this happens. Well, one big reason
has to do with status. When we are lower in
status in an organization, we have to prove
credibility before we can show humor because
of course, if we show up and we just have humor and it's
not balanced with some cred, then people are
going to downplay our abilities and our status. And so like I did in my early
20s, I entered the workforce and I thought, oh my gosh, I
can't have any sense of humor here. I need to be completely serious. And then as we rise in
status in an organization, we don't rethink that model. And so what we find is that
managers and leaders are now deeply ingrained-- it's now become deeply
ingrained in them that they need to be serious
all the time to be successful. And in fact, that
model shifts, that when you rise in status
in an organization, a sense of humor, a
sense of vulnerability, approachability becomes
more and more powerful, more status-enhancing,
more beneficial for your orgs and your teams. But we don't necessarily
shift our mindset as we shift in status. HELEN RILEY: Yeah. That definitely
resonates with me. I think one of the
things, as you rise up through an organization,
is those competing sort of desires, on the one
hand to be taken seriously and credibly, but as you put
your serious face forward, it also results in potentially
less approachability. And I think that
this is something that a lot of leaders,
and particularly women, struggle with. Can you talk about
ways, therefore, in which leaders can address
some of these tensions that they feel to actually
create more rapprochement with the people
that they work with and sort of increase
that approachability? JENNIFER AAKER: Totally. Oh, go ahead, Jennifer. HELEN RILEY: You're muted. NAOMI BAGDONAS: You're muted. JENNIFER AAKER: So what you
do is you first mute yourself, and then you start on a really
impressive sort of-- actually, one of our dear friends and
someone who teaches with us, who is the co-CEO of a large
nonprofit called Merit America, has used humor in
a very similar way. So as a leader,
just understanding it can be done in small,
easy, free, intentional ways, just like I did,
is part of this. So Connor Diemand-Yauman, he's
the co-CEO of Merit America. He teaches with us. And it was about a year, year
and a half ago, early 2020, just weeks after the world
went into quarantine. And he was leading his
first virtual offsite with his entire organization. And people are
exhausted and scared. It's tense. So he's sharing a few
slides, and before passing to a teammate to
speak, he intentionally leaves his screen share on. And the entire team,
thinking it's a mistake, watches as he closes
down his PowerPoint, he opens up Google
Chrome, and he types in "Things inspirational
CEOs say during hard times." And everyone laughs. It's this beautiful
moment, and it had a real upside
for Connor because of all of the statistics
we just shared with you. Not only shifted
how they viewed him as actually greater in
status, but also authentic. But it also empowered them to
use humor and levity as well. So one answer to that
question is just knowing it's not necessarily about
being funny per se. It's really about using humor
in small intentional ways at the right moment to diffuse
tension, read the room. Naomi, what were you going
to say with your mute? NAOMI BAGDONAS:
You were perfect. Oh, no, the timed lights
in the office went out, so I had to grab
pieces of tissue and throw them
across the room so that the sensor would go off. So that's what I was doing. HELEN RILEY: Got to
reset that sensor. NAOMI BAGDONAS: So if you
see me just like frantically doing something like this,
I'm just throwing tissues. JENNIFER AAKER: Actually,
what Naomi's doing right now, which was not planned,
is like another thing, is just as a leader
at parlor bridge, just calling it, just
calling the truth, because everyone's been
in these situations. And so just calling it is a
second concrete little tip. HELEN RILEY: Yeah. Maybe we can hear
more of those tips. As you said, I think a lot of
people freak out about the idea that they need to be funny. You've worked with
world-renowned comedians on your journey to understanding
what it means to be funny. Are there more tips that
you can share with us about finding our funny? NAOMI BAGDONAS: Yes. OK, so biggest
tip is if you want to have more humor in your life,
don't look for what's funny, just look for what's true. So become an observer
of your life. Look for a little oddities
or incongruities, or the fact that you're on an
important call right now and you're throwing issues
across the room, whatever it is that's a little bit weird
and ridiculous about your life. It's there. Just start noticing it. So what we have our
students do is write down observations at the end
of each day for one week. And these can be really
simple things like how exhausting socializing is. I was noticing the
other day that I don't know how to leave a
conversation because there's no leave button, right? So you sort of are
like, OK, you know, I've now become a lingerer. So this is just a true
observation about myself. Other observations. Ants cannot be destroyed. I don't know how they
do it, but they can't. I'm not currently wearing
shoes, and I'm not currently wearing pants. So there you go,
some observations. That one maybe isn't true. But all you do is you
just look around your life and notice these
simple true things. And that's the first
route to humor. The reason that we have
our students do this, and the reason that I recommend
that every single person starts, at the end of each day,
writing down five things that are just remotely
humorous, a little bit interesting or humorous,
is that this is really not about becoming a comedian. It's about navigating our
lives in a different way and looking at the world
in a different way. There's a
psychological principle called the priming
effect that says our brains are wired to see what
we've been set up to expect. So in essence, we find
what we choose to look for. And when we navigate our lives
on the precipice of a smile, instead of being frustrated
by the tissue throwing, being a little bit delighted by
it and sharing it with someone, then it changes the way
we interact with the world and it changes the way
that people interact back. So that's my single
biggest tip, is write down innovations that are interesting
or a little humorous. JENNIFER AAKER: And Google has
such a great history of this, too. Sarah Cooper, who comes
into our class every year, she was at Google. And a lot of the comedic
work that she did, also, was kind of
borne of observations that she made in these
large tech companies. HELEN RILEY: Definitely. One topic we haven't
touched on yet is the benefits to
creativity of humor. So I know that you
interviewed and worked with Astro Teller,
who, of course, I work with really closely at
X. And he actually talked about his bad idea brainstorms,
which I participate in and absolutely love. But maybe you can tell
us a little bit more about what makes
these brainstorms such a powerful tool
for unlocking new ideas. And you interviewed
so many leaders, it would be really
helpful for us to share more about other best
practices from other leaders that we can all benefit from. JENNIFER AAKER: Sure. So a quick anecdote about Astro. And he's such an
intuitive scientist at unlocking and leading with
some of the basic premises that the class was just
a joy to observe him. But he would comment
on things like, if he would tell the group, go
brainstorm good ideas, for example, people would
think, oh my god, everything I need to say has to be
perfect, or at least good. And even just using the word
good put limits on the way his team would think. But if he said, this is
a bad idea brainstorm, and the silliest, stupidest
ideas are fantastic, that is, in fact, the goal,
people would come up with these crazier and
often better solutions. And these brainstorms would
have, often, ludicrous ideas, but oftentimes those were the
ones that actually made it in. And part of this is
just diffusing pressure, making it OK to be normal, and
that would unlock these more creative selves. A small anecdote. Naomi and I took
this to an extreme. When we started working on
our book proposal, inspired by Astro, we called it a really
shitty book proposal just to lower the bar. And then-- NAOMI BAGDONAS: As context, it's
kind of intimidating to write a book proposal. It's got to be 50
pages long, and you start with a blank page. I mean, it's-- yeah. So we were really
intimidated, and then-- until this. HELEN RILEY: Well,
but that's definitely going to get people's attention. JENNIFER AAKER: We did. We kept it on. We kept the title on. And then the book took off,
and the rest is history. So I think the moral of the
story is bad idea brainstorms and really shitty drafts
are the way to go. NAOMI BAGDONAS: The small hiccup
here is, so Jennifer and I, we had a Google Doc that we
wrote our entire proposal. We actually wrote our
entire book in a Google Doc. And so we had this Google Doc. And just internally,
we're like, you know what, let's call it
a really shitty proposal. And it'll lower the
bar for ourselves. We'll make it fun. Well, when we shared the
proposal with our agent, we forgot to retitle the
document because we just shared the Google Doc. So our agent gets
this proposal entitled A Really Shitty Proposal. And she's like, OK. Turns out, she loved it so much
and she thought it was funny, that she submitted
it to the publishers with the title A
Really Shitty Proposal. And our book got
eventually picked up by a publisher with that title. So that was how a totally
ridiculous inside joke turned into a selling a book. HELEN RILEY: I absolutely
love that idea. Did you worry at all that
it might backfire, though? How do you juggle that fear of-- on the one hand, it is
absolutely hysterical, what you just described,
but at the same time, people can look at it and
think, what are they thinking? JENNIFER AAKER: I think
the humor actually attracts like-minded people. So for example, the
publisher we worked with, she had the same instincts. And then she encouraged us,
definitely supported us. It became a really
shitty chapter one, a really
shitty chapter ttwo, a really shitty chapter three. And I think humor
bonds people, right? We never even met her, but she
thought it was actually funny. And it shrinks the distance
between two people, these inside jokes
or these similar ways of viewing the world. This was a big long
reach, but I remember I had the title of a talk
called Beyond Crack Cocaine. And Andy Berndt at
Google found it. He was like, we must
have this at Google. So if it was like, On
Happiness and Productivity, it wouldn't have
gotten any attention. But Beyond Crack
Cocaine was helpful. Yeah. So we're very inspired by
Astro and what Google has done, and X, and many of the things
that you practice, Helen. HELEN RILEY: Yeah, absolutely. Well, you've talked a
little bit about leaders and what they can do to bring
humor into their lives that makes them more approachable. It just makes them more
respected as leaders. But Naomi, you have hosted
a fabulous workshop at X with my team, and there were
some great suggestions and tips for anybody just to bring
more humor into their lives and into their work environment. And actually, some
of my teams now begin their meetings
with a haiku accompanied by some
very creative and often self-deprecatory means. Can you talk more
about other tips that you can share with
everybody who is on this call just about how we can be more
proactive and make that choice, as you said earlier, of bringing
more humor into our lives more generally, and into
our work lives specifically. NAOMI BAGDONAS: Totally. So there are all
these small hacks that our former
students have come back and said are really
meaningful to them. One of them is so small. And it is what word you use
to sign off your emails. So Helen, what did you use
to sign off your emails before we came and spoke at X? HELEN RILEY: A pretty
boring one-word thanks. NAOMI BAGDONAS: Right. So thanks, best,
kind regards, warmly. And so people kind
of skim over them and don't even notice them. One really simple hack is sign
off your emails with anything but. So you could sign off
with, throwing tissues to activate the light sensor. You could sign off
with pet frogs, or with levity and
Lysol, or whatever it is that's relevant
to, especially, you and your relationship
with the person. And it completely
changes the dynamic. So everyone who's
listening right now, the next email you send, I want
you to sign off with anything lighthearted. And if you get an
awesome response, then please forward
it to us because we love hearing those stories. So that's one. And then another one
that we see teams do is hanging levity
on existing rituals. So oftentimes a
manager can think, oh gosh, well, I have to do
something totally big and bold to have some levity here. And actually, sometimes the
more effective way is to say, what are the rituals
you already have? Are there team
communication channels? Are there all hands or
daily standup meetings? And how do you bake a little
bit of humor into those? So at Merit America,
for example, at the beginning of
every all hands meeting, they spotlight two
employees and they ask them to do two truths
and a lie with everyone. And so it's a great way
to get to know them, to get to know some
details about them. And it just is a lighthearted
way to start the meeting. And then my other
favorite recent example is teams doing what's
called comedy roulette. So in comedy roulette,
every member of the team submits a two-minute video,
work-appropriate video to a person who's
compiling them. And then at the beginning
of every meeting, until they run out
of videos, the person plays one of those
videos, and everyone has to guess who
submitted that video. And so it's this
really fun way to get to know each
other's humor styles and to have humor without it
feeling so high stakes where someone needs to be funny. So those are just
a couple examples, a couple of hacks and ways
that other people are doing it. But I think the main
thing is figure out what feels authentic
to you and your team and just start prioritizing it. JENNIFER AAKER: And Helen,
can we ask you a question? Of course you can't say no. You had three or four pages
of margin-to-margin notes based off that workshop. What was one thing that
you remembered or deployed, or the team has
used and has effect? HELEN RILEY: Yeah. No, I actually
polled my team, what actually stuck in their minds? I mean, there's two or
three things that I do. Whenever I'm sending
notes to my team, they used to be very dry and
boring and very sort of factual and summarizing a topic. And now I've just inserted memes
and just fun pictures And it just, as the first
thing that they see before they even read, just
to sort of shake things up. And I've been very
creatively coming up with haiku or like
six-word stories for things and just inserting them. And honestly, it completely
changes the tone. And I also think it's changed
people's perceptions of me as a leader as well. So I have to say
that the workshop was incredibly valuable. I certainly encourage
others to spend time with Naomi and Jennifer. I think another example is
I was reading your bios. It's kind of cool that
one of your biggest feats that you remember from
your life, Jennifer, is a dance-self in the '80s. And Naomi, it sounds like
your house is getting totally destroyed by dogs. I think that's another
great tip which I know stuck in the minds
of so many of my team, just to add that
one-liner which is such a huge differentiating factor,
if you're applying for a job, or whatever it is that
you're trying to do, just to differentiate
yourself and just inject a little bit of fun. So actually, lots
of things stick, and I did promise you
I'd send that list. So I have compiled it and
I will send it over to you. But on that point I'd
love to hear more ideas. I have the privilege of
working really closely with Ed Catmull from Pixar. He now works with us at X. And
there's lots of great stories that you talk about from Pixar. But taking it a little
further, people playing pranks on one another. But I guess there's two
parts to this question. First of all, I'd love to
hear more of those examples, like why they worked
so well at Pixar. But secondly, how do
you actually make sure that you're not crossing over
into sort of a gray area, because humor fails
are also very real. And so I'd love to hear your
perspective on that, too. JENNIFER AAKER: Yeah. On the Pixar thing first,
we were so blessed. Ed Catmull, the former
president of Pixar, he not only wrote our foreword,
but he also titled our book. Naomi was having dinner with
him a couple of years ago. And I think we were
going to call it "Humor is Serious Business"
or something like our class. And he's like, humor seriously,
just seamlessly, and boom, there was the title. But he really describes in
the foreword of the book, especially, just how
important it was not just to have these pranks
and these moments of levity at Pixar, but how important it
was for him to actually endorse them and be involved in them. There were so many
difficult and serious financial and cultural
problems that he was facing. And in those moments,
he says that those were the exact
times where what he said as a leader didn't matter. Those words just
washed over everyone. But what people grabbed
onto was how he behaved. And that means a
few things for him. For one, it meant admitting
failures and taking actions that really demonstrated
real values, but also doing so with
this healthy dose of humor. And that would also create this
perspective, garner empathy, and I think just put the
mistakes that were made or the challenges they had
in this bigger context. And he found it to be so
important that he, I think, also said, when you bring humor
to the most dire situations, the most challenging
parts of the job, you actually create greater
meaning at work as well. And the important thing here is
that words matter very little, but it's your behaviors, those
pranks and those moments, that actually are
remembered and matter. And so we've, again,
been so inspired by that. In our class, there's definitely
pranks, water balloon pranks and dress-up pranks
and things like that. And they tend to be
memorable and defining, and the students just feel like
they're part of the culture, and it creates that
culture of trust. NAOMI BAGDONAS: By
water balloon pranks, she means on the last day
of class one year, all of our students-- because
we're totally like, listen, if you want to play pranks
in this class, go for it. If you have a weird idea,
bring it to us and we'll do it. We want to create the
culture that we're telling you that we believe in. And so on the last day of
class a couple of years ago, all of our students--
we didn't know this, but they had a
trigger word that they were waiting for us to say. And as soon as
they did, they all have these full water
balloons in their bags that they pulled out and
threw at me and Jennifer in the front of the room. And the kicker was that they
hadn't filled them up enough, and so none of the
water balloons broke. It was basically like they were
just pelting us with sandbags. So it was truly delightful. Yeah. And then the one
thing I just want to add on to that is, Helen, you
asked a great question, which is having humor and pranks
and all of these things, how do we make sure that
we're keeping things safe? How do we make sure that
we're not crossing a line? And the three things
that our students have found most
helpful are number one, start by recognizing
it's not about you. So don't ask, will this
make me sound funny? Instead ask, how will this
make other people feel? And you will catch
80% of the things that aren't going to go
well or are going to cross a line if you
just flip that framing. Not how is this going to
make me look, but instead, how is this going to
make other people feel when I throw this out there? The second one is
never punch down. So that means never making fun
of someone of lower status. And of course, this
means that as you rise in status in an
organization, your playing field changes. So this is why we see some
leaders getting into trouble, making jokes that maybe would
have worked when they were poking fun at someone
who is more senior, but might not work when
they're the leader. And then the third thing
is check your distance. So how close are you personally
to what you're making light of? I can make fun of my mother,
but not Jennifer's mother, who I hear is wonderful. JENNIFER AAKER: She is a saint. Thank you for knowing that. NAOMI BAGDONAS: But checking
your personal distance to what you're making
light of, and just making sure that you have
the personal lived experience to be making light
of that thing. HELEN RILEY: So you've described
a little bit about what it's like in the class. I'm actually really
curious, how did you persuade Stanford Graduate
School of Business to actually be OK
with a class on humor? And how do you grade your
students, especially if they're pelting you with water bombs? JENNIFER AAKER:
Well, they all fail-- if they do really good water
balloons, then they pass. But you know, when the water
balloons are not filled up-- so Stanford's incredibly
entrepreneurial. And we just got a great
set of deans that really are very open to proposals. And in this case, it
just really came down to the research, which
is clear on three things. First, humor has this
transformative effect on both our behavior
and our psychology. Our mental health, which
has been on the decline, not just in the last couple of
years, but also more generally, is something to really be
thinking about systematically and thoughtfully, not
to mention creativity and productivity and feelings
of closeness with others. And humor is really
this secret weapon that fuels all of these
things, and we're not studying the science of it. Second, it's completely
under leveraged at work. As Naomi mentioned,
a lot of people that used to use humor,
maybe, when they were lower levels of status now
feel like they can't, and in the culture that
we're living in, often find that we're
living in a humorless world. And it's just not true. Just better
understanding that we all have different humor styles. It's not like you're
either funny or you're not. Everyone has a different
humorous style. And when you understand
everyone's humor styles, not to mention your own, and
you understand the advantages of each style and the risks
associated with each style, you can start to navigate
the world in really pretty nimble, adept ways. So our workplaces don't
need to be so humorless. And then third, it's
a teachable skill. Most people believe that you're
either humorous or you're not. Untrue. It's a teachable skill,
and these small shifts in behavior and attitude are
sufficient to shift the way people not just
experience work, but life. So that was compelling, I guess. And they said yes. HELEN RILEY: And how
are you grading them? JENNIFER AAKER: Well, there's
the water balloon quality as well. But no, actually,
there's a lot of things that we do in our
class that are highly quantitative and experiential. And we really don't go into
why you passed or failed. We kind of grade on
a pass/fail basis. But what's surprising about
it is A, how many hours they put into each quarter. So we always monitor
hours invested in homework and the readings and the
videos and all of that. And our students are operating
at surprisingly high levels just in terms of
investment in the class and what they seem
to get out of it. NAOMI BAGDONAS: And credit,
that they get the same credit for our class
about humor as they do for financial accounting. HELEN RILEY: I love that. That's fantastic. All right. I think we're going to open it
up for some audience questions. All right. Here we go. It's our first
question from Molly. How do you encourage
people to develop, manifest their senses of humor in large,
diverse global environments like Google, where
different people groups have very different
conceptions of what is funny? NAOMI BAGDONAS:
Love that question. JENNIFER AAKER: Yeah. You go first, Naomi. NAOMI BAGDONAS: The
jokes are not universal. Laughter is universal. And so instead of
going for jokes, go for little moments
of levity where you show a broader range of yourself. Yeah. There's this idea that laughter
is a fundamental melody of human conversation. We all recognize it, we all want
to jump in and sing the tune when we hear it. And so that can be
really effective. Tactically, what we
tell people to do, especially when they're
working across cultures, is to get to know the
humor style of the culture that you're working with. So we have one manager we
work with who does quite a bit of work in Singapore. And what this woman chose
to do was she reached out to her local Singapore
team and she said, I want everyone from
the team to submit either a meme or a video or just
something that you find funny. And then she took those
examples of humor, and during her
team meetings, she would use their examples of
humor during her presentation. So rather than imposing on them,
this is what I think is funny, she was sort of saying,
hey, I hear you, and I want to understand
your sense of humor and bring that to
light during meetings. JENNIFER AAKER: Yeah. And the only thing I'll add is a
lot of the different executives or students we
work with, they'll find that when they understand
their humor style-- so there's the standup, and then there's
the magnet and the sniper and the sweetheart-- there's
four different styles. And so if you want to
understand your style, you just go to
HumorSerously.com, fill out a two-minute quiz, and
it reports back this report. And then they have their
teams do it and they share out the results. And all of a sudden you
start to realize, oh, Naomi, she is a magnet, which is
more charismatic, sometimes a little silly, a little
goofy, lights up a room when they enter in. But she also can shift styles. But you start to learn,
oh, Naomi's a magnet. So when she says
something, or when she leads in a certain way,
or she suggests a certain way, that lens of
understanding where she's coming from authentically
colors the way that you interpret her words. And it becomes so much
easier to communicate, to get on the same
page, to create an inclusive environment. That's useful. I even make my kids do the
humor quiz once a quarter because their humor
style might change. And it's really been
transformative even from a family perspective,
just understanding what makes you laugh,
what is your style, and what is the style
of others around you. HELEN RILEY: And what's
your style, Jennifer? JENNIFER AAKER: I've
always been a sniper. But I had a significant humor
fail, especially earlier on-- well, a couple times in my life. There's scarring, right, Helen? If you've ever bombed
and offended someone, it can stay with you. And that's what
happened to me early on. And so I just really
shifted to a sweetheart, which is more understated and
honest and more inclusive. And it's less about you and
sort of more about the others. It's not necessarily
known as being funny. It's a very different
kind of humor style, but it's one that's really
effective when you have higher levels of status, too. HELEN RILEY: Well,
you and me both. I took the quiz
and I was squarely in the sweetheart camp. OK. Let's bring up another
audience question. OK. From Teddy, when humor
is met with crickets, what do you do next? NAOMI BAGDONAS: I
just want to say I love the vulnerability
of this question. My humor is met with
crickets frequently. OK. So yeah, it's a great
question, Eddie. What do you do when you fail? And I would say there are
two different types of fails. One is the it's totally
appropriate in a work context, you say a joke, and
it totally fails. What do you do then? The most effective
thing, oftentimes, is to lean in and just name it. So say something like,
well, that didn't work. Or thanks, I'll be here all day. Just naming the fact that
you didn't get a laugh will often cut the tension
enough to get a laugh, or at least show your
self-awareness that you know that that didn't quite go well. When you cross a line or you
do something inappropriate, that's a very
different scenario. And we have a whole chapter
in our book about what to do when you cross a line. But the most important thing
is genuinely acknowledge it. Get curious about what
was your blind spot? What didn't you understand? Where was the empathy fail that
led you to this humor fail, so that you can learn
from it and not make the same mistake in the future. HELEN RILEY: Anything
you would add, Jennifer? JENNIFER AAKER: No. I thought that was fantastic. It is such an important
question, though. We have a couple of different
frameworks to think about-- truth, pain, distance. As you analyze why there
might have been crickets or some uncomfortability,
you can analyze it, from was it too soon, or
was I not close enough to the subject of which
I was making fun of? More practically, having
a set of trusted testers, a couple of people in
the organization that might actually allow you to
get warm feedback on how you use humor is something
that's practically, actually, quite good. Even if you do land something
and it's met with crickets, just kind of isolating one
trusted tester or one trusted person in the meeting to
do kind of a follow-up is an easy way to approach that. HELEN RILEY: That's a
really great suggestion. Let's bring up another
audience question. OK, from Bora. I notice that people often
use self-deprecating humor. Does this type of humor have
the same positive effects that you've mentioned, or
is it counterproductive? NAOMI BAGDONAS: I
love this question. JENNIFER AAKER: Both. NAOMI BAGDONAS: Both, yeah. So this is such a great
question, and it relates to, Helen, what you brought
up earlier, which is women leaders in
particular can sometimes hold back their humor. So self-deprecation is this
really interesting form of humor where when
you are lower status, it can actually diminish
perceptions of status because people code
you self-deprecation, or they can code
you self-deprecation as genuine lack of confidence. But once you get to
be higher status, it's an incredible
superpower because people will code your self-deprecation
as you're confident, you're not taking
yourself too seriously, you're giving other
people permission to use their sense of humor. And so Bora, the answer is both. And the one thing I will say
as it relates to gender, Helen, to your question
earlier, is we tend to find that our
female leaders can over index on self-deprecation
in particular. This goes to sort of how little
boys and girls play differently on the playground, how
we're raised differently, a longer conversation and
a whole book about that. But the general wisdom is if
you are a sweetheart or a magnet style, you might be
prone to over indexing on self-deprecation. And so that can be
a pitfall for you, and it can take away status
if you do it too much. Jennifer, anything
to add to that? JENNIFER AAKER:
No, it was perfect. NAOMI BAGDONAS: What? JENNIFER AAKER:
It was beautiful. It was a piece of art. I taped it. I did, actually. HELEN RILEY: I was
going to say, you'll have the recording
to revisit it again. All right, let's bring up
another audience question. OK. Jenica. How can you foster
a sense of humor on a team that is very serious
when your humor isn't responded to in kind? JENNIFER AAKER: Oh, that
is such a good question. How can you foster
a sense of humor on a team that's very serious
when your humor isn't responded to in kind? I'll take a whack at it
first, and then Naomi, I'm super interested in
what you might say. I'm going to go with first,
this is not about being funny. It's not about even
humor at some level. It's first about trust, and
how do you create that trust in a team, especially
if you're going to start playing with humor? So again, it's really been
really useful, at least for me and a lot of the
people we work with, to understand what
is your humor stle and what is their humor style
because, for example, snipers, they tend to be really smart. They're dry and sly. They're the masters
of the unexpected dig. So like Bill Burr, for example,
or Michelle Wolf is a sniper. A lot of times when
people are snipers, so they appreciate humor but
they're very hard to smile. So you're reading the room
and no one's laughing, and you think humor might
not be their valued, or it might not be your type. Well, it just might be
that they are a sniper. It's very hard to make snipers
laugh, in sharp contrast to magnets, for example. So I find this idea of
understanding their humor style and sharing your own to
be a good way to start. NAOMI BAGDONAS: I
totally agree with that. So I had an experience
with a colleague who I will call Shelly. And Shelly and I-- she actually was on my team. And I remember it was
so important to me that we had humor together,
that we were laughing together. And so I'm a magnet style. So I would come in and be
goofy and silly with her, and I would get nothing. And my reaction to
that was to be goofier and to be sillier with her
to try and draw her out. And then I went on this
trip with my sister, and we were traveling
to Lithuania. We did this heritage trip
and went to all the countries that our families are from. And I remember this
moment during the trip watching an American try
and talk to a Lithuanian at the train station. And this Lithuanian person
didn't speak English, and the American did that thing
that sometimes we Americans do that's so aggravating,
where instead of opening up a translation book
and trying to get out some phrases in
Lithuanian, they talked louder and louder in English. And I had this moment
watching this American make this incredible
faux pas that oh my gosh, that's exactly what I'm
doing to Shelly because here I am, a magnet. She's not responding, and so
I'm speaking louder and louder in magnet humor to her. And so I got back from my
trip and, I know about Shelly that she loves cats
and that she always talks about how her cat
has a really big head. So I went out and I
bought a little cat, like a human with a
cat head bobblehead. And I didn't say a word to her. I just went and
left it on her desk, and then I quietly
went back to my desk. And she burst out laughing. And it became this little
joke where she would hide it on my desk, and
then I would quietly hide it back on her desk. And by me recognizing
her humor style and taking a step
in her direction, it was able to unlock
humor in our relationship in a way that was
totally not possible had I kept going in my own style. HELEN RILEY: That raises
an interesting question is, when you're meeting
someone for the first time, you don't have a good gauge
of what their humor style is. So how do you
approach making sure that your humor style isn't
going to become overwhelming or isn't going to
put people off? Like do you try tentatively? Do you just go for it? I'm just curious how you
deal with your humor style when you're meeting
complete strangers. JENNIFER AAKER: Well,
it kind of goes back to what Naomi had said before. It's not about being funny,
so don't worry about that. Just decrease the pressure. It's just about what
does the room need? What does the other person need? How do you make others feel? So especially in the early
moments of meeting someone, kind of leaning into that
more than anything else. And then a second
tip, I think, beyond don't go in for the
fast joke necessarily, it's just about
being more human. So thinking about
Secretary Albright wearing a bug, which kind
of invites a conversation. It's not in your face. That's the second way
of thinking about it. HELEN RILEY: That's helpful. All right, I think we have
one more audience question. All right, from Amanda. What if you get feedback
that your humor is more of a distraction than help? NAOMI BAGDONAS: Then you
might be a magnet style. JENNIFER AAKER: Buy
a cat bobblehead. NAOMI BAGDONAS: There you go. No, it's a great question. And it points to
this important point that each of the humor
styles is predisposed to a different set of risks. And so self-awareness
around your humor style can help you mitigate
that kind of feedback. So for example, I
know, as a magnet, that I can over index on
silliness, on goofiness, and that I can get
feedback that that's detrimental to the goals of the
session if I do it too much. Each of those styles has upsides
and has potential downsides, which we don't have time to
go into all of them right now. But I would guess,
Amanda, that you might find yourself a magnet
if that is an issue for you. And it's just really
about recognizing what are your strengths,
what are your pitfalls, and recalibrating
based on the context. HELEN RILEY: All right. Well, I thank the
audience for the questions that they put forward. I think we've got three
or four minutes left, so I'd love to just get into
some rapid fire questions to end. So "Schitt's Creek"
or "Ted Lasso"? JENNIFER AAKER: "Ted Lasso". NAOMI BAGDONAS: "Ted Lasso". HELEN RILEY: All right. That was pretty definitive. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm
a big fan of "Schitt's Creek". I know. I've got to get Apple TV. Favorite comedian. JENNIFER AAKER:
Chloe Fineman on SNL. NAOMI BAGDONAS: I
have far too many. I'll name one person I'm loving
right now, Bowen Yang, also on SNL. HELEN RILEY: OK. Who's the person that
inspires you the most? JENNIFER AAKER: Leslie
Blodgett is a dear friend and complete inspiration. I know this is lightning round
so I won't go into details. NAOMI BAGDONAS: Again,
too many people to name, but someone who I met
recently, Hrishikesh Hirway, who creates Sound
Exploder and has an incredible, incredible Ted
Talk that will be coming out soon about how we can
listen to each other more fully and more compassionately. HELEN RILEY: OK. Where is your favorite
place to think? JENNIFER AAKER: So it's
not so much a place as much as it is a position. So I can think really
well laying down looking up at the sky,
or looking up in general. So laying down anywhere. NAOMI BAGDONAS: For me,
in the back country. I go on two big backpacking
trips a year totally out of service, and I do
my best thinking there. HELEN RILEY: All right. Clean desk or messy desk? JENNIFER AAKER:
Obsessively clean. NAOMI BAGDONAS:
Obsessively messy, which really comes in handy
when you need something to throw to put on
the light sensors. HELEN RILEY: The
tissue is there. NAOMI BAGDONAS: There are
plenty of things in reach. HELEN RILEY: Perfect. And last but not least, what is
your favorite never fail joke? JENNIFER AAKER: OK. So all right. A guy walks into
a doctor's office, and his doctor's there with him. And he says, I have
two pieces of bad news. Bad news, not good
news, bad news. And the doctor
says, what are they? And first answers, the
first piece of bad news is that you have cancer. And then the
patient asks, what's the second piece of news? And the doctor says, the second
piece of bad news is that you have Alzheimer's. And the man laughs and
says, well, at least I don't have cancer. That's pretty good. It's a little dark,
but it's good. NAOMI BAGDONAS: OK. Mine is participatory, and
it's actually pretty serious. So if everyone could
participate, that'd be great. OK, so I want everyone to
point up to the ceiling and make a circle
with your finger as if you're drawing a
perfect circle on the ceiling. And go faster and faster. Ye, everyone's doing great. As fast as you can. Knock knock. Everyone's going to need to
be off mute for for this. AUDIENCE: Who's there? NAOMI BAGDONAS: Woo. Woo hoo. We did it. Good job, everyone. Way to go. My deepest apologies for that. Thank you for being game. HELEN RILEY: Happy to
participate any time. And with that, thank
you both so much. Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you, Naomi. Fabulous talk. I really enjoyed it. I so appreciate all the
insights that you've shared. I strongly encourage
everybody to read the book, which I absolutely loved. And I think with
that, it is a wrap. NAOMI BAGDONAS: Thank you
so much for having us. And thank you all-- JENNIFER AAKER: Sorry. We created a little
three-week boot camp, and we'll give you a
little bit more details. But we're giving
you all a discount. We are so appreciative
of your time. And I think it'll be really
fun for the group, too. NAOMI BAGDONAS: Totally. And then also just thank
you personally, Helen, because you embody this
work every single day with your team. And it is an inspiration to see. And we need more people
like you in the world. So thanks for being out
there and doing exactly this. JENNIFER AAKER: Yeah. HELEN RILEY: Appreciate
that, and we've got to get your message
out to more people. So it really works. Thank you. JENNIFER AAKER: Bye, Helen. Thanks. [THEME MUSIC]
