Page 207 - HBR's 10 Must Reads 20180 - The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review

PROKESCH

float in the stomach and one that would adhere to the stomach
wall. After conducting a feasibility study, they chose to pursue the
floating option and figured out what major issues would need to be
solved—and then Langer largely bowed out. “After that, I don’t tell
people what to do,” he says. “From grade school to high school and
college and even to a certain extent graduate school, you’re judged
by how well you answer somebody else’s questions. That gives you
a grade on a test. But if you think about the way you’re judged in
life, I don’t think it is by how good your answers are; it’s by how good
your questions are. I want to help people make that transition from
giving good answers to asking good questions.”
Gary Pisano sees this philosophy as key to the lab’s success. “The
tendency would be to say, ‘I’m going to tell you what to do so that
you can do better and the lab will do better,’ ” he explains. “But if you
do that, you create a different place—people are going to say, ‘OK,
Bob, you tell me what to do.’ He doesn’t want that kind of lab. His lab
is one where people solve their own problems, and that’s why they
wind up being great professors and scientists in the business world.”
At the same time, Langer makes sure that researchers know they
can count on him and on the people in his network if they run into
trouble—an approach that Aimee L. Hamilton, an assistant professor
of management at the University of Denver who has studied Langer
Lab, calls “guided autonomy.” His responsiveness is legendary. His
iPad seems glued to him, and he uses it to answer e-mails within
minutes. Cato T. Laurencin, a University Professor at the Univer-
sity of Connecticut who earned his PhD under Langer in the 1980s,
recalls that a student of his once dug up Langer’s cell phone number
and called him with a question about a paper Langer had written.
“He called her back from Finland 10 minutes later.”
Langer also goes out of his way to help people leaving his lab get
good jobs, and he stays in touch with hundreds of alumni, providing
assistance if needed. (In his farewell meeting with James Dahlman,
he offered to go over Dahlman’s grant applications.) He is deeply
connected to those in his network. For instance, he refers to many
of the venture capitalists who have financed his start-ups—a group
including Terry McGuire, of Polaris; Noubar Afeyan, of Flagship;

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