Episodes

When Bo Seo was 8 years old, he and his family migrated from Korea to Australia. At the time, he didn’t speak English and struggled at school. But, in the fifth grade, something happened to change his life: he discovered competitive debate. It turns out the seemingly shy and introverted kid had a knack for persuasion – and he went on to become a two-time world champion debater and the coach for the Harvard College Debating Union. Seo also graduated from Harvard, earned a masters degree from Tsi...

He’s a New York Times bestselling author, a former White House advisor to four American Presidents – both Republican and Democrat – a long time senior political commentator on CNN television, and the founder of the John F. Kennedy Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University, where’s he been Director or co-Director for almost two decades. Gergen is also the author of the new bestseller, “Hearts Touched By Fire: How Great Leaders Are Made,” a book he wrote to share everything of value that ...

We’ve all been told that thinking rationally is the key to success. But at the cutting edge of science, researchers are discovering that feeling is every bit as important as thinking. All of us make hundreds of decisions every day — including what to eat for breakfast & how we should invest our money — & not one of those decisions would be possible without emotion. It has long been said that thinking & feeling are separate & opposing forces in our behavior. But as Leonard Mlodinow, author of the...

Most books about time management are written as guides to creating the perfect schedule or productivity method for cranking through as many items on our to-do list as we possibly can. Even when those methods work, they somehow still leave us feeling stressed & overwhelmed, paddling frantically against a current whose strength we can never match. The fundamental problem is that none of the typical time management books address the very grim fact that our lives on planet earth are woefully brief ...

Named by Forbes Magazine as one of “10 Must-Read Career & Leadership Books For 2022,” Roger Martin’s A New Way To Think: Your Guide To Superior Management informs us that our collective leadership thinking must stop centering around the organization & begin centering around human value. Martin is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management where he previously served as its Dean. Throughout a career of advising CEOs at some of the world’s most successful compani...

The country where people live the longest is Japan where they’ve long had a rich tradition of respecting and honoring older people. In America, & throughout the West, we have especially negative views on aging, & almost treat getting older as being shameful. In her new book, “Breaking The Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long And Well you Live,” Yale social psychologist, Becca Levy, tells us that the expectation that aging means decay is actually a major reason it so often d...

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith is routinely ranked as one of the top executive coaches in the world – & the Thinkers50 organization named him the #1 leadership thinker in the world – twice. A former Professor of Management Practice at the Dartmouth Tuck School of Business, he’s the author or editor of 41 books, which have sold 2.5 million copies. His books, “Triggers” & “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There,” have both been recognized by Amazon as being in the top 100 books ever written in their field....

Few business topics arouse more skepticism than the notion of corporate purpose – & for good reason. Too many companies have deployed purpose as a promotional vehicle to make themselves feel virtuous & look good to the outside world. The insincerity behind efforts like these are, of course, easily spotted by both outsiders & insiders (employees most importantly) leading them to feeling jaded – & to losing trust in the management team that attempted the deception. Despite all the harm that past ...

For over twenty-five years, Marcus Buckingham has been one of the world’s leading researchers on human performance, especially in our workplaces. He is the New York Times bestselling author or co-author of ten books, including the business classic, “First, Break All the Rules” in addition to, “Now, Discover Your Strengths” & “Nine Lies About Work.” You probably know that Marcus is a highly analytical, data-driven trend evaluator who left his mark at Gallup. Yet, ironically, his rigorous study ha...

“Regrets, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention.” These famous lyrics from Frank Sinatra’s classic song, “My Way,” assert the idea that it’s very easy to recover & move on from the bad choices we make in life. But in 2020, Daniel Pink launched the “World Regret Survey,” & asked 15,000 people in 105 countries, “How often do you look back on life & wish you had done things differently? And 81 percent of the respondents said regret is at least an occasional part of their lives with on...

A lot of us would like to become more influential because – all boiled down – influence is the ability to create change, direct resources & move hearts & minds. But when we think about the tactics we’ve seen other people use to influence people, we use words like sneaky, manipulative & coercive to describe them. So, this episode is devoted to introducing you to ways to grow your influence in truly profound ways – but also in ways that aren’t just powerful, they’re deeply ethical. Zoe Chance is...

There are many disciplines outside of workplace management that can elevate our leadership effectiveness, & tapping into the experiences & insights of highly creative & accomplished people is one great way of skinning that cat. This is especially true when you have a guest who has interviewed over 400 of the world’s most creative people – & who happens to be one of the most inventive people on the planet herself. Debbie Millman is an author, educator, brand strategist & Chief Marketing Officer a...

2,500 years ago, Greek philosopher, Heraclitus famously observed that “there is nothing permanent in life except change.” And anyone who’s lived just a few years on our planet knows old Heraclitus was speaking truth. Despite our intellectual acceptance of the ancient sage’s observation, we humans tend to strongly resist & even reject change – something many a workplace leader has come to discover when they’ve tried to alter a policy, introduce a new system or move a team in a new direction. D...

“Would you like vanilla, chocolate or strawberry?” When presented with simple decisions like these, most of us will instinctively pick our favorite from the three options, without ever considering that there may be many more ice cream flavors available. Columbia Business School professor, Eric Johnson is the lead researcher behind some of the most well-known and cited research on decision-making. And one of his key conclusions is that most of us give insufficient attention to what he calls “cho...

For much of the pandemic, a familiar ritual played out in workplaces around the globe. Companies set return-to-office dates, only to repeatedly backtrack & delay them due to health concerns. Apple, as one example, was set to have employees back in its offices at the start of 2022, but now has an indefinite target date. And, with COVID cases clearly on the rise again, many other companies including JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo & Goldman Sachs have moved their goal posts as well. But let’s assum...

Success in life is never a question of how many tasks we get done in a day. It’s not even a question of what we manage to achieve. Instead, it’s about knowing our life’s purpose & taking the right steps to fulfill our potential. That all sounds very nice & neat until we come face-to-face with real life, where short-term thinking, short-term gratification & short attention spans often take us off track. We also live in a society that values “busyness” & treats it as a badge of honor. And, so, wh...

As we near the two-year anniversary of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the occasion merits some acknowledgment. The stress, strain, fear & ambiguity we’ve all endured as a result of this ordeal is truly incomparable to any other time in our lives. And even more remarkable is the fact that, no matter where people live in the world, we’ve all had the exact same experience. You may have noticed during this time of great uncertainty that some people appear to be at their wits’ end as a new vir...

Longtime Wharton business and law school professor, G. Richard Shell, joins us to do double duty. It was Shell whom Wharton specifically chose to reinvent its entire MBA program curriculum, & our first objective in asking him to be a guest was to explain why one of America’s top ranked business schools intentionally became more humanistic? When we think of business schools in the past – and Wharton especially – we recall students being taught arcane accounting and quantitative analysis techniq...

We’ve all been frustrated by people who were difficult, angry & arbitrary. And we’ve all had hard-to-please bosses not to mention work colleagues who consistently got under our skin. It’s easy to point the finger at people who push our buttons – & judge them harshly. But what if there were something about our own psychology that unconsciously influenced how we reacted – & that made us more sensitive to certain people & their behaviors? What if some people trigger us because we have a blind spot...

The key benefits of working remotely are clear to all of us. Not having to commute into an office every day frees us up to get more sleep, spend more time with family & get in regular work-outs in. And left alone most of the day – separate from attending a lot of ZOOM calls – we can focus on our work & be more productive. While all this sounds great, there are some hidden downsides of working remotely that are essential for workers & managers alike to understand. And much of them have to do wit...

One of the recurring themes of our podcast series is the idea that society largely believes that all human cognition occurs in our brains & ignores the emerging science which proves human intelligence is distributed throughout our bodies – including even in our hearts. When we’re faced with a big problem or challenge, we’re urged to use our heads to figure out a solution – even though feelings that emanate from outside the brain can provide additional & valuable insight & lead us to achieving fa...

Are you a manager, coach, or teacher who aims to help other people make meaningful change in their lives? Are you someone who’s currently struggling to kick-start change in your own? If you are either of these – or both – this episode will introduce you to state-of-the-art methods that will take you from where you are to where you really want to be. Award-winning Wharton Professor Katy Milkman has devoted her career to studying behavior change – and her new book, “How To Change: The Science Of...

Microsoft founder Bill Gates recently said that every leader in the world must read “Lights Out: Pride, Delusion and the Fall of General Electric.” Written by two masterful Wall Street Journal reporters, Tom Gryta and Ted Mann, it’s an astonishingly true tale of how GE went from being one of the world’s sustainably great companies to nearly going under due to stunning failures of leadership at the top of the organization. As Gates himself wrote in a blog about the book, “General Electric is a m...

All of us are seeking greater self-knowledge, & Maria Konnikova found it through poker – literally by challenging herself to become a champion of the game despite never having played it before. And she succeeded. In less than two years, she mastered the fiercely competitive game of Texas Hold’em poker, became an international poker champion & won over $300,000 in tournament earnings. And as a skilled writer for the New Yorker Magazine, she chronicled her experience in her New York Times bestsell...