Lead From the Heart

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 s...

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 notic...

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 Wh...

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...

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 work...

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...

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...

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 lea...

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 a...

“Burnout” may be one of the most talked about workplace topics these days, & for good reason. According to a recent survey of people in over 40 countries published in the Harvard Business Review, 90% of respondents said their work lives were getting worse during the pandemic – & more than 60% felt they were experiencing burnout often or very often. And while it’s easy to blame COVID for al...

Hubert Joly   is the former CEO of Best Buy – a large American electronics retailer – who orchestrated his company’s spectacular turnaround by changing the rules of executive management. His uncommon philosophy was to pursue a noble purpose, put people at the center of his business, create an environment where every employee could blossom, & treat profit as an outcome, not the goal. And for an...

Time Magazine named Martin Lindstrom one of the “World’s 100 Most Influential People – and “Thinkers50” named him one of world’s top 20 business thinkers. He’s the author of 7 New York Times best-selling books including his newest, “ The Ministry Of Common Sense.” Lindstrom runs one of the world’s leading brand & culture transformation companies – serving a “Who’s Who” list o...

Anyone who’s worked from home this past year knows the experience brought many joys & also many sorrows. The upsides included nonexistent commute times, the freedom to dress as we liked, the constant companionship of our pets – and more time spent with our family members (just as long as they lived in our same dwelling). But the downsides have been compelling too. Many of us felt lost, i...

Years ago, research by Harvard Business School professor, John Kotter found that when major companies sought to initiate any kind of major organizational change, most ended up failing. Kotter & his team of graduate students watched many leaders simply abandon their change initiatives after concluding there was no viable road to success – despite a lot of time spent trying. Anymore, it’s hard t...

Do you have a voice in your head that operates like an inner critic & saboteur – one that undermines your success by calling you a loser or a failure, one that insists you’ll never be any good at something (e.g. math, relationships, golf, et al), or one that asserts that you’re somehow unworthy as a human? According to award-winning psychologist & professor at the University of Michigan’s...

While making coffee one morning, a man passed out in his kitchen and fell onto a travertine floor. After being taken to the hospital, doctors discovered broken ribs, a punctured lung – & a blood clot so close to the man’s heart that 16 different attending physicians wrote in their notebooks, “patient not expected to live. That patient was the host of the “Lead From The Heart” podcast, Ma...

Do you have what it takes to excel in times of high stress & ambiguity – even during a crisis? Are you able to succeed no matter what conditions you face? While we might imagine that people who perform optimally under duress share a unique set of talents &  skills , f ormer U.S. Navy Seal team Commander, Rich Diviney discovered that what truly differentiates them are unique attributes. Dur...

“ In her excellent & very timely new book, “Uncharted,” Margaret Heffernan stresses that while the forecasting business has made its ‘experts’ very rich, it is also based on a fallacy: the idea that the future can be extrapolated from the past.” This is how the Financial Times announced it had chosen “Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future” as one of its 2020 best business boo...

While none of us could have predicted that the arrival of a global pandemic would fundamentally reshape our lives in 2020, stunning research by Wharton Business School professor, Mauro Guillén, shows that a series of once-in-a-lifetime events is about to profoundly reshape our culture, economy and the world by the end of this decade.  And at least this time, we’re being given some advance notice a...

Dr. Jim Loehr is the co-founder of Johnson & Johnson’s Human Performance institute & the author of 16 books. He’s a performance coach to some of the world’s greatest athletes including professional tennis players Jim Courier & Monica Seles , pro golfers, Mark O’Meara & Justin Rose , Olympic gold medal speed skater, Dan Jansen , National Hockey league greats, Eric Lindros &amp...

It’s part of the human condition to wonder if we can truly make a difference in the world, & whether our personal talents & experiences are unique or special in any meaningful way. In her book , The Power of Onlyness, Nilofer Merchant says yes, emphatically, & we couldn’t need that kind of encouragement any more. When Nilofer was 18 years old, her Indian mother arranged for her to be m...

As co-executive Chairman of the Carlyle Group, one of the world’s most successful private equity firms – & host of his eponymous podcast on Bloomberg – David Rubenstein has had unparalleled access to many of the world’s most influential leaders. Over the past 5 years, he’s sat down with corporate heads including Eric Schmidt, Phil Knight, Jamie Dimon and Tim Cook – and also with uncommonly acc...

A recent Fortune Magazine survey shows that nearly two-thirds of American CEOs have committed to taking meaningful action to advance racial equity within their organizations . Just this week, JPMorgan Chase CEO, Jamie Dimon, committed $30 billion dollars in support. But, it’s not just money that organizations must spend in order to attain greater diversity and fairness, of course. Facebook,...

“Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh An underlying objective of all leaders is to help maximize the full human potential of every person they manage – to effectively coach them and elevate their overall effectiveness. But in an era where many people are working...

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended our work lives. It’s forced many of us to work from home, away from our bosses, and has us worrying about the long-term security of the jobs we hold. And all these sudden changes have us asking ourselves, “How do I make sure I’m seen as indispensable at work?” For decades, Bruce Tulgan has been studying “go-to” people, those workers who are most consistently value...