Episodes

In 2017, ride-sharing innovator, UBER was in serious trouble. The company was facing a lawsuit from drivers that alleged the first had cheated them of pay. Various media reports described UBER as having a “asshole culture: where women were sexually harassed and the firm’s CEO, Travis Kalanick was caught on video berating an UBER driver. Seeking someone to help restore UBER’s imperiled reputation – not to mention help create a sustainable workplace culture going forward – the company selected Ha...

Who isn’t impressed by a highly confident person? Confident applicants are more likely to be hired, & self-assured politicians are more likely to be elected. Because we believe it produces a winning edge, we all strive to be self-confident. In fact, a surge of confidence can feel fantastic. It offers us a rush of energy – & feelings of invincibility – that help propel us in those moments of adversity when we’re called upon to be courageous & decisive. But surprising, extensive & eye-opening re...

What percentage of people would say they’ve ever had a really great boss? In an ideal world, most of us could recall a long list of past and present managers who fit the bill. But we know highly caring & supportive managers remain rare in most workplaces. As evidenced by consistently low employee engagement scores around the globe – & record high turnover leading up to the COVID pandemic – the signs are everywhere that too few managers possess an ability to inspire people while concurrently dri...

Author Erik Larson has written six New York Times bestselling books including “The Devil In The White City,” a National Book Award finalist. On the day we recorded this podcast, his new book, “The Splendid And The Vile” ranked as the number-one work of nonfiction on both the New York Times & Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. The Splendid And The Vile focuses on Sir Winston Churchill’s first year as England’s Prime Minister (exactly eighty-years ago) – “the year in which Churchill became Ch...

Now Is The Time To Make Employees As Important As Shareholders: For decades, businesses have deferred to the interests of shareholders above and beyond the interests of all other stakeholders – most especially employees. And according to London Business School finance professor, Alex Edmans, shareholders have long been conditioned to believe that the value any company produces is a fixed pie – and so the only way for them to retain the largest slice of the pie is to ensure the size of the pie al...

A Special Podcast! In the new era of remote working – forced upon at least a third of the world’s working population in just the past few weeks – all of our lives have been disrupted. The Coronavirus pandemic has us indefinitely confined to our homes, working away from our colleagues and offices – and attempting to home-school our children – all at the same time. Most of our routines have been upended making grief, fear and anxiety the dominant emotions of the day. And for a lot of us, we’re n...

But according to long-time Stanford Business School leadership professor, Deborah Gruenfeld, while power makes human beings act on their best and worst instincts, research shows people are consistently rewarded when they use their power in the service of others. In her new book, “Acting With Power: Why We Are More Powerful Than We Believe,” Gruenfeld says how we use power is really defined by the role we are playing at any given time. “To use power well,” she says, “we need to take each role se...

It’s been said that “sight is a faculty, but seeing is an art,” and New York University social psychology professor, Emily Balcetis, fully concurs. In her new book, “Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World” she says highly successful people tend to view the world differently – and the good news is that the “art” they apply to visual perception can be taught & learned. When it comes to setting and meeting goals, for example, we may see (quite literally) our plans, progress a...

At 32 years old, Doug Conant was fired from his job as Marketing Director for Parker Brothers Toy and Game Company – and he never saw it coming. Stunned, hurt, indignant, angry and humiliated, Conant nevertheless wasted no time working on a rebound. On the same day he was let go, he met with an outplacement counselor whose profound influence changed his life. Neil McKenna taught Conant to look forward, not back – and gave him assignments of self-discovery that helped Conant transcend his job los...

It wasn’t all that long ago when tech giants like AOL, Yahoo and Blackberry seemed immortal. Today, of course, we remember them only as fallen giants – a fate Microsoft appeared to be headed toward less than a decade ago. That Microsoft was able to fully revive itself when other first-generation technology innovators couldn’t begs the big leadership questions: “What did they do differently – what can we learn from their successful reinvention?” It turns out Microsoft made many brilliant and ext...

Harvard Business School professor, Amy Edmondson, is one of the world’s top experts on building highly cohesive, cooperative and productive teams. And much of her expertise comes from her decades of research into “Psychological Safety,” recently confirmed by Google to be the single most important quality found in all super-achieving groups. Simply put, psychological safety means that people work in environments where they feel comfortable expressing & being themselves. They know they can speak ...

We all know the primary reason companies go into business is to make money. But is it possible for organizations to thrive financially while also doing good in the world? USC Marshall School of Business Professor Emeritus, Jim O’Toole spent ten years researching companies that were founded with the uncommon ambition of driving profits – while also caring about the well-being of employees, customers & communities. This podcast is devoted to exploring all of the leadership lessons O’Toole acquire...

There’s a longstanding taboo against displaying emotions in the workplace – and it’s based on the idea that we make our best business decisions when we keep feelings and intuition out of the mix. But the time has come for us to directly question these longstanding beliefs about human effectiveness – and challenge the notion that any of us has ever really possessed the ability to shut down our emotions at the turn of a switch – and operate our lives with pure rationality. The truth of the matte...

If you’d invested $1,000 in Netflix stock just a dozen years ago, you’d have $90,000 today – quite an extraordinary return from a company that fearlessly took on the Goliath, Blockbuster Video, and won – and today has 137 million customers worldwide. It wasn’t all that long ago that Netflix was shipping out a million DVD envelopes per day to its customers. But in a deft display of risk-taking and innovation, they pivoted away from DVDs and into on-line streaming. On top of that, they launched a...

With people living longer than ever – and therefore wanting to work longer – a big question many workplace leaders are asking themselves today is whether workers in their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s can remain relevant in our rapidly changing digital world. If you have even a tinge of gray in your hair, you’ll be pleased to know that many companies are coming to realize that qualities that only come with age – i.e. humility, emotional intelligence and wisdom – are in short supply in many of their units...

Not since 1974 when Studs Terkel published his groundbreaking book, “Working,”has anyone performed a deep dive into the modern-day work experience. But with automation and digitalization poised to radically change our workplaces in the very near future – along with the jobs we all do – Boston University journalism professor, Ellen Rupell Shell spent the past eight years researching all the ways our careers are likely to be disrupted, and how we can emerge on the other side of it with work that ...

HOW DOES A LEADER TAKE THEIR TEAM FROM GOOD TO GREAT? Georgetown University business school professor, Christine Porath says we won’t make that leap until we address the incivility that’s taken over our workplaces. In preparing for her recent TED Talk that’s had nearly one million views so far, Dr. Porath asked 20,000 employees around the world what they most wanted from their leaders today. The number one answer was “respect.” A lack of civility has come to characterize most of our experience...

Is it possible that you have a pattern of behavior or a personality trait that greatly limits your effectiveness as a person and as a leader? Could you have an unconscious way of acting – particularly under stress – that unwittingly thwarts your dreams of moving up the ladder? If you consider yourself part of the human species, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re doing at least one thing that undermines your true greatness as a manager. So the goal for this podcast is to help you discover what ...

More than anything else today, what people want from their employers & leaders is to be given a safe & respectful place in which to work. That’s the conclusion of new Pew research which shows 89% of American workers rank these needs highest. Yes, employees also expect their leaders to be honest, ethical – and to reward them fairly with pay & benefits. But their ultimate happiness, engagement & sense of well-being all prove to be directly connected to how they are made to feel. And what most peo...

While we might consider the time in which we’re all living a more enlightened age, the word “heart” still carries a lot of negative associations when it comes to workplace leadership. Tied to traditional leadership wisdom, we cling to the belief that caring and supportive management is an inherently weak idea that cannot drive productivity – and so we go on leading in old & less effective ways. But recent scientific discoveries prove our understanding of how to most effectively motivate human ...

Hear the word “rebel” & we immediately think of troublemakers & outcasts – people who end up with bad reputations for being non-conformists. But after a decade of studying rebels (especially rebel leaders), Harvard Business School Professor, Francesca Gino says we’ve got it all wrong. In her New York Times bestselling book, “Rebel Talent: Why It Pays To Break The Rules At Work & In Life,” Gino says that “rebels prove to be the masters of innovation & reinvention. They’re the ones who change th...

In 2012, Gallup made the startling announcement that employee engagement across the globe was in crisis. We learned that only 30% of American workers were fully committed in their jobs – and the numbers were even worse in most other countries. So here we are six years later and we’re left to wonder: “Has engagement gotten any better?” “Did most organizations fully commit to creating more supportive workplaces?” And, “Has the employee engagement metric held up as a true barometer of organization...

If you have the chops to get accepted into an elite MBA Program at a school like Harvard, Wharton or Yale, you pretty much know that the next two years of your life will be devoted to mastering left-brain coursework – classes in analytics, statistics, accounting, economics, finance and the like. But a few years ago, top business schools like these started to reassess. Alarmed by rock-bottom employee engagement across the world – not to mention other distressing trends on employee stress, health...

Everyone has self-limiting behaviors, for the simple reason that we’re all human. But frequently, what holds women back from obtaining the next raise, promotion or job tends to be different from men. In their new bestseller, “How Women Rise,” legendary leadership coach, Marshall Goldsmith, and Sally Helgesen – the person Forbes Magazine named the world’s top women’s leadership expert – partnered up to explain which bad habits all too frequently hold back women. But in this podcast that was int...