Lead From the Heart

  As a professor in NYU’s prestigious Stern School of Business, Alison Taylor spends a lot of time with the next generation of business leaders. In her new best seller, “ Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World,” she tells us that her MBA students are not hoping to have careers working for ethical companies. They now expect to. For decades, organizations largel...

  Human beings are social creatures. We’re hard-wired to connect deeply & intimately with others. We want to feel valued, supported, & needed. And this makes connection a fundamental aspect of our existence. But in our busy, technology-driven lives today, we have fewer friends than people did in past generations, we interact less with our neighbors, & the majority of interactions...

  In his new bestseller, “The Geek Way,” Andrew McAfee makes the fascinating case that the most important technological revolution of our time isn’t what companies make, it’s in how they’re being managed. And by his definition, being geeky isn’t a pejorative but rather a clear description of leaders who are perennially curious, not afraid to tackle hard problems or embrace unconventiona...

  When we think about the highest performing people in all disciplines of life, they all commonly share the ability to think clearly, stay focused & shrug off setbacks all while under very high levels of stress. In their most critical moments, in other words, they know how to maintain intellectual clarity & emotional control – which allows them to consistently perform at exceptional l...

  Every organization is plagued by what Stanford University Business School professor, Bob Sutton, calls “destructive friction:” forces that make it harder, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done. In Sutton’s language, “the convoluted, time-consuming & soul-crushing gyrations that drive people crazy and undermine organizational performance.” Along with his co-author,...

  The expression, “emotional intelligence” is seamlessly embedded into our common vernacular – but it was Daniel Goleman’s groundbreaking book a quarter century ago that first coined the idea & brought it to a mass audience. In his #1 bestseller “ Emotional Intelligence :  Why It Can Matter More Than IQ ” Goleman revolutionized how we think about human intelligence. Along with Rutgers Uni...

  Workplace managers are often told to define their leadership purpose & authentic self, & that this personal introspection & self-reflection will guide their leadership journey. But research on how adults actually learn shows that the logical sequence – “think, then act” – is reversed in a personal change process such as what’s involved with becoming a leader. In other words, we...

  Michael Gervais is a high-performance psychologist who has helped some of the world’s most successful athletes overcome mental & emotional obstacles on their way to excelling in their sports. He was on the sidelines when the Seattle Seahawks won a Super Bowl, when beach volleyball players Kerri Walsh & Misty-May Treanor won Olympic gold – & when daredevil, Felix Baumgartner set...

  Professor of Marketing at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, Dr. Marcus Collins, believes culture is the most powerful vehicle for influencing human behavior. In his words, “if you want to get people to move, there’s no vehicle more powerful or influential than culture. Full stop. Culture is how we inspire people to act. Culture implies social forces – both subtle & o...

Many of the world’s wisdom traditions teach that we humans all have a core purpose – a gift uniquely assigned to us by the universe. Eastern religions call this “dharma,” and we also know it as “an inner calling. ” What’s intriguing about this idea is that we know so many people are unhappy in their jobs. And, even after many of us have achieved some sense of career success, wealth and status in o...

  As an entrepreneur and CEO, Ron Shaich has had one truly remarkable career. He’s the founder and former chairman and CEO of Panera Bread, a groundbreaking restaurant brand that today has more than 2,400 bakery cafés, 120,000 employees – and nearly $6 billion in annual sales. Under Shaich’s leadership, for multiple years, Panera generated annualized returns of over 25 percent, and in the sam...

  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 s...

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 th...

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 Edmond...

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 missin...

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 & Jo...

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, &...

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 whethe...

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...

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...

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 Selig...

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. W...

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 wi...

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...

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 alway...