Episodes

Frances Frei (left) is a tenured professor at the Harvard Business School, and two years ago, was an extraordinary guest on this podcast when we discussed her brilliant understanding on how to build, retain and restore trust. Listeners should note that she also gave a remarkable TED Talk on trust that shouldn’t be missed. Frances returns to the podcast to discuss a wonderful new book that she & her (also brilliant) life & professional partner, Anne Morriss, have written. Unlike Meta CEO, Marc ...

Our drive to create change, have impact & solve problems all comes from emotional energy. Who we become – how dynamic & powerful we are as people & leaders – depends upon our learning to work with this energy. Leaders may feel as if they don’t control this energy, that it’s just a product of the world around them & the forces bearing down on them. But that’s just not the case. A through-line of this podcast is the thesis that we humans are nowhere near the rational beings we’ve long believed we...

What comes to mind when you think about failure – specifically, a failure of your own? Intellectually, we may all agree that failures are great teachers, but deep down the idea of failing at anything in life tends to produce some distressing emotions & feelings. The truth is, most of us (try as we will) would just assume not ever fail. According to Harvard Business School professor, Amy Edmondson, we’ve always tended to think of failure as being the opposite of success – an erroneous belief tha...

In what might seem to be the least likely workplace imaginable to implement this, automaker BMW now has five generations of people working under one roof in their factories collaborating & contributing their unique skills and perspectives. If, by chance, you’re wondering how older workers could possibly keep up with the rigorous demands of building cars on an assembly line, you may be missing one of the most important societal trends of the moment: people today aren’t just living longer than eve...

Very few people know their life’s purpose at an early age, but as a young college student, Ed Catmull started dreaming of making the world’s first computer animated movie. He went on to nurture that dream by earning a Ph.D. in Computer Science before forging a partnership with George Lucas (of Star Wars fame) that led to his founding Pixar Animation Studios with Apple founder, Steve Jobs & John Lasseter. In 1995, Pixar ultimately fulfilled Catmull’s dream by releasing “Toy Story,” & in the nearl...

What makes for a happy life? A good life? In 1938, Harvard University researchers launched what’s now become the longest in-depth longitudinal study of human life ever done. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed the lives of two generations of individuals, from the same families, for nearly 85 years. And the conclusion from all these decades of inquiry is that human thriving, & even longevity, are predicated on having meaningful connection with others. In other words, the stronger ...

Seemingly overnight, the COVID pandemic caused a massive societal transformation — a structural change in how and where people work and live. And while we may be hearing that CEOs is general still have dreams of having all of their employees back in the office five days a week as they once did, the truth is that nothing is going back to normal. Perhaps because it’s long been uncertain as to whether or not remote working would endure, organizations have yet to fully embrace the new reality and ad...

One of the through lines of this podcast is the idea that the COVID pandemic profoundly and permanently changed how people think about work – not to mention the value exchange we now expect from it. Consequently, in a post-pandemic world, our common and traditional ways of motivating human performance in our workplaces instantly lost any remaining viability, and now must be replaced with practices that inherently demonstrate to workers that they are valued, appreciated and respected in the most...

As life today seems to be becoming more complex & unpredictable by the minute, it sure would be nice if we had a crystal ball to see into the future. And, while seeing into the future with any degree of certainty is, of course, a fantasy, there are trends occurring in the world that some informed observers can determine with reasonable certainty are poised to impact our future lives. And this episode’s guest is one of the best at spotting those things – & the title of his new bestseller, “The F...

The post-pandemic world we’re all living in sure seems to be more volatile, more toxic, more stressful and more subject to radical change due automation, downsizing, and globalization than ever. And that just means it’s become much harder for any of us human beings to truly flourish in our lives. As if the past three years of COVID related challenges didn’t already make us feel weary! Martin Seligman is a University of Pennsylvania professor & the former president of the American Psychological...

When hybrid cars first became mass produced over a decade ago, Honda and Toyota had two different strategies. Honda chose to produce a hybrid version of its wildly popular “Civic,” believing brand familiarity would help customers feel more comfortable with its brand-new technology. Toyota not only decided to produce an entirely new model car, they intentionally designed it so it would stand out. Which of the two models do you think ended up outselling the other one on a grand scale? According...

When you think about our world today, “turbulent” might be the first word you use to describe it. After a three-year long COVID pandemic fatigued us all, we’re now bewildered by a surprising number of employee layoffs occurring in all industries, & equally uncertain about how disruptive the AI-GPT technology will be to our work & careers. A crisis in Urkraine continues with no end in sight; it’s still undetermined where people will work most days – & unrelenting inflation is adding financial str...

When Bob Chapman was thirty years old, his father died of a sudden heart attack – instantly making Bob CEO of a small, unprofitable manufacturing company his dad had only recently purchased. For the next two decades, leveraging an MBA from the University of Michigan, and a few years’ experience as a senior level accountant to prepare him, he led his company as most CEOs of his era did. He squeezed his workers as much as he could, and laid them off in times when the business’s profits were challe...

Our most precious resource isn’t money. It’s time. We’re all given the same twenty-four hours a day – &, for most of us, that never feels enough. We flatter ourselves for being “so busy” in our jobs, yet end our days feeling depleted & without enough time to get to the gym, read the books we want to – or spend dedicated time with the people we love. And often, the recognition that we always feel “time poor” makes us resentful and unhappy. Social psychologist and professor at UCLA’s Anderson Sch...

According to PepsiCo’s award-winning, and first, Chief Design Officer, Mauro Porcini, “our world is radically changing, and is forcing us to innovate as never before. And, we are entering a new, modern renaissance fueled by the reborn, humanistic necessity of putting people at the center of everything.” And when Porcini says, “put people at the center of everything,” he’s not just referring to the human beings (consumers) for whom companies design products and services, but also explicitly for a...

You might not think a book on philosophy could be a bestseller these days, but the title of MIT professor, Kieran Setiya’s new book, “Life Is Hard” clearly has wide appeal. We’ve just come out of a two-year global pandemic, have experienced record inflation due in part to a seemingly endless war in Ukraine – and are heading into a recession that could put many workers’ jobs in jeopardy. And these are just the headline issues that make our lives especially difficult today. It’s rather confirming...

For our 100th episode – and our final episode of the 2022 season – we bring you a guest who is the true embodiment of the Lead From The Heart philosophy. Bill George is formerly the CEO of Medtronic – a Fortune 200 medical device company which has 90,000 employees across 120 countries. And, for the past twenty years, he’s been a professor at the Harvard Business School where he’s long insisted that workplace managers at all levels possess a “moral compass” to guide their actions. He believes ‘th...

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” ~ Mother Teresa. Social belonging is a fundamental human need, hardwired into our DNA. And yet, 40% of people say that they feel isolated at work, and the result has been lower organizational commitment and engagement. I suppose we should throw “quiet quitting” in there too — a sign workers today feel less connected to their colleagues and unconvinced that they matter much to their organization, team or manager....

Are you someone who would love to make a positive change in the world? Could you be an influential change maker? University of California, Berkeley Haas Business School professor, Alex Budak believes all of us have the potential. And he created a wildly popular class called “Becoming a Changemaker,” which has quickly grown into one of the most highly-rated courses anywhere on the CAL campus. The popularity of Budak’s class very strongly hints at the underlying desire all of us have – as Steve ...

Leadership is full of paradoxes: Should we build close relationships with our employees or keep a suitable distance? Should we trust our staff, or keep an eye on what’s happening? Are we best to display self-confidence – or is humility a greater power? For many of us, these competing & interwoven demands are a source of conflict. Since our brains love to make either-or choices, we choose one option over the other. We deal with uncertainty by asserting certainty. The problem is that once we ...

Being a CEO at any of the world’s largest companies is among the most challenging roles in business. Billions, and even trillions, are at stake – and the fates of tens of thousands of employees often hang in the balance. Yet, even when “can’t miss” high-achievers win the top job, very few prove to excel. According to the New York Times & Wall Street Journal bestseller, “CEO Excellence,” “Thirty percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are booted from their jobs in three years or less, and two-out-of-five ne...

Tiffani Bova is the global growth evangelist at Salesforce and the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book “GROWTH IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business.” She’s been named to the latest Thinkers50’s list of the world’s top management thinkers. Along with Columbia University and Stanford University, Bova recently authored a study which averaged data from 1,000 brick and mortar stores of a major American retailer (Walmart? Target? She can’t reveal). And...

Uncertainty in life is, ironically, certain. Amid a pandemic, the past two years have been no exception. None of us needs to think very hard to recall the unprecedented and sudden need we had to move employees en masse to their homes to work, the lingering fears we all had around an unknown virus, and the challenging decisions we later faced about the future of the office in light of the Great Resignation. Over the course of his career as a professor at the prestigious Insead business school in...

Alan Murray is the CEO of Fortune (Magazine) Media. He’s the former president of the Pew Research Center & the Deputy Managing Editor – & Washington Bureau Chief – of the Wall Street Journal. And, for decades, he’s had tremendous access to the world’s top CEOs. In his new book, “Tomorrow’s Capitalist: My Search For The Soul Of Business,” Murray makes the clear & direct assertion that senior business leaders are suddenly discovering a moral compass. He says we’re living through a moment of profou...