WorkMatters

In this episode of Work Matters, Thomas Bertels welcomes Todd Cherches to discuss Visual Leadership. Todd is the CEO of BigBlueGumball, a leadership development and executive coaching firm. He is also an award-winning professor and lecturer at NYU and Columbia University and the author of "VisuaLeadership: Leveraging the Power of Visual Thinking in Leadership and in Life." He defines visual leader...

In today's Work Matters, Thomas talks with Gordon "Gordy" Curphy about effective teamwork. Gordy is the Managing Partner at Curphy Leadership Solutions, where he helps business leaders implement major change initiatives, develop and promote leadership, and build high performing teams. With over 30 years of leadership expertise, Gordy has written numerous articles and 25 books, including the number...

In today's Work Matters, Thomas Bertels discusses Transformational Leadership with Faisal Hogue. Faisal is an advisor, entrepreneur, thought leader, and technology innovator who has developed 20+ commercial business and technology platforms. He is the founder of SHADOKA and NextChapter and has worked with GE, MasterCard, American Express, PepsiCo, and many other leading organizations. Faisal is al...

In today's Work Matters, Thomas welcomes Dr. Anna Tavis, Clinical Professor and Chair of the Human Capital Management Department at NYU School of Professional Studies. She previously held senior HR roles with Motorola, Nokia, United Technologies, and AIG, and is the co-author of "Humans at Work" (with Stela Lupushor). Anna unpacks the major trends shaping the future of work, including the rapidly...

In today's Work Matters, Thomas welcomes Ron Ashkenas, Principal at Ashkenas Consulting and Partner Emeritus at Schaffer Consulting, to discuss simplifying organizations. Ron is a thought leader in business change and transformation and the author of numerous books and HBR articles including "Simply Effective." He unpacks the symptoms of overly complex organizations that show they are ripe for sim...

In today's Work Matters, Thomas talks innovation with Greg Larkin, the CEO of Punks & Pinstripes, a network for rebel corporate executives and start up founders. He is the author of the international best-seller ‘This Might Get Me Fired' and shares his expertise for overcoming organizational obstructionism to drive innovation. Greg unpacks the great misnomer about innovation requiring advanced...

In today's Work Matters, Thomas Bertels welcomes Joe Batista, Chief Creatologist, and former Dell and Hewlett Packard executive. Joe is an innovative business and technology leader who shares how to unlock unseen assets within organizations to create value for customers. With real-world success stories, he unpacks strategies for compressing the distance from ideas to results using core competencie...

In today's Work Matters, Thomas talks with Joe Spadaford, President of J Francis Consulting, about his experience implementing work design in financial services. Joe held senior leadership roles at Citibank, First National Bank of Chicago, First Chicago Trust Company, Axa, Computershare, and AST. He shares the lessons learned when transforming large operating departments and organizations through...

In today's episode, Thomas talks with Tristin Brisbois about intrapreneurship - how to create a successful innovative venture within a large company. Tristin is the director of PepsiCo's Advanced Personalization Ideation Center, where she is building personalized digital solutions. Providing a peek into Pepsico's Aspire2Be app which uses face scan technology to reveal the biological age of consume...

In today's episode, Thomas talks with Elisabeth Swan, Continuous Improvement Consultant, Co-Founder of the Just-in-Time Café podcast, and Bestselling Author of "Picture Yourself a Leader." Recently named by the PEX Network as one of the top 50 thought leaders in operational excellence, Elisabeth Swan has consulted in the business process performance industry for over 30 years. She advises local no...

In today's episode, Thomas talks with Bryan Sander about customer experience design. Bryan is the Head of Customer Experience, Digital Product, Analytics, Market Research, and BI at AAA’s National Office - and a CXPA Board Member. Bryan reveals the main challenges to the customer experience today and how younger consumers are demanding a more values-driven approach. Sharing his digital transformat...

In today's episode, Thomas talks with Dave Bookbinder, a business valuation expert, author of two books, and the host of the 'Behind the Numbers' podcast and TV show. Dave emphasizes that employees are not an expense but assets, and unpacks the implications for business leaders. Sharing how the value of human capital is traditionally determined, he discusses best practices to increase enterprise v...

In today's episode, Thomas Bertels welcomes Dr. Frank Gallo to discuss what Western businesses can learn from China. An executive coach, consultant, and author, Dr. Gallo has lived in China for over 20 years and written several books including "Business Leadership in China," and "The Enlightened Leader." He shares how the values of collectivism, harmony, hierarchy, compliance, and customer sacrafi...

In today's episode, Thomas talks with Tonille Miller, a management consultant, I/O psychologist, and founder of EXT about designing the employee experience. She unpacks how viewing an organization as a product can increase employee engagement and drive business outcomes. Sharing her framework to build better workplaces, Tonille details the qualities a new kind of leader needs to help people do the...

In the first episode of season 4, Thomas Bertels talks with Tony O'Driscoll, a professor, speaker, advisor, and author on innovation and technology, about AI and the future of work. They cover the "routinization trap" with ChatGPT and other Large Language Models, simply using algorithms to automate workflows, replace humans, and reduce costs. Tony shares how we could improve work by combining mach...

In this episode, Thomas Bertels talks to Mike Moshier and Dave Yawman of Cresco Partners about their approach for developing high performing leadership teams. They explain how important it is in today's face-paced work world for teams to intentionally pause, build relationships and trust, and set expectations for how work gets done. Mike and Dave explain the importance of aligning on both purpose...

In this episode, host Thomas Bertels welcomes Dr. Solange Charas and Stela Lupushor, co-authors of "Humanizing Human Capital". They share how four major trends - demographics, digitization, datafication, and disintermediation - impact HR. Putting Human Capital in the context of the pandemic, the authors explain the tensions between employees and employers around remote work, surveillance technolog...

In today's Work Matters, host Thomas Bertels welcomes Niels Pflaeging. Niels is a well-known speaker, consultant, and author of "OpenSpace Beta" and "Leading with Flexible Targets." His open-source Beta Codex Network grew out of the Beyond Budgeting movement and expanded into a broader framework to drive transformation from alpha - top down, command and control - towards beta - decentralized, cell...

In this Episode of the Work Matters podcast, Thomas talks with Laurent Choain, Chief Leadership, Education & Culture at Mazars. In this enlightening conversation, Choain traces the evolution of knowledge work, explains why Mazars made 'making friends for life' a central part of their employee value proposition, unpacks the relationship between autonomy and freedom, explains the concept of the...

In today’s episode of Work Matters, Thomas Bertels welcomes Ali Cini, the managing director of BCAT partners. Explaining his Brand and Culture Alignment Toolkit (BCAT), Al unpacks how asking the incorporating question - "Who are we when we're doing our best work on our best day?" - starts the process of aligning an organization towards a shared positive role model and purpose. Al highlights the be...

One hundred years ago, James McKinsey, the founder of the well known consulting company, published "Budgetary Control" - and his framework was quickly adopted everywhere. But in today's VUCA world, the budgeting process has increasingly become an obstacle as organizations try to increase agility. In this episode of Work Matters, Thomas Bertels welcomes Bjarte Bogsnes. A pioneer of the Beyond Budge...

In this episode, Thomas welcomes Ralf Specht, the author of 'Building Corporate Soul' and 'Beyond the Start-up'. After a long career in advertising, where he co-founded and led Spark44 after senior roles with Momentum Worldwide and McCann Erickson, Ralf is on a mission to "make soulless companies a thing of the past". He shares his framework for align on purpose, behavior, and understanding to ens...

In this episode of Work Matters Thomas welcomes Oliver (Ozzie) Crocco. Ozzie is an Assistant Professor of Leadership and Human Resource Development at Louisiana State University (LSU) and his research is focused on leadership development in the global context. In this enlightening conversation, he contrasts the leadership styles in the individualistic U.S. versus that of the more collectivist cult...

In this episode, Thomas talks with Rachele Focardi, founder of XYZ@Work and author of “Reframing Generational Stereotypes". Rachele, the leading expert on multi-generational workplace dynamics, shares how organizations can bridge generational divides and harness the strengths of intergenerational collaboration. By aligning on purpose, flexibility, diversity, shared vision, and acknowledgment, toda...

In our conversation with Sergio Caredda, an innovative HR professional who focuses on improving the way organizations achieve results through their people, we explore his framework of the 'international organization': an organization that where leaders through intentional actions create alignment towards a shared purpose and consistency in how the organization operates. We discuss the importance o...