Lead From the Heart

The Wall Street Journal calls London Business School professor, Gary Hamel, the world’s most influential business thinker – and his landmark books have been translated into twenty-five languages. His brand-new book, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations As Amazing As The People Inside Them, just launched as an Amazon “Number One Release” & is the focus for this special podcast episode. In a nuts...

Wharton Business School management professor, Sigal Barsade believes too many leaders focus on how employees think and behave at work & largely ignore how they feel . This is because few managers realize that human feelings matter just as much – if not more – to their employees’ commitment, engagement & productivity. And by lacking a deeper understanding of what truly motivates people in t...

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...

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...

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 pand...

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 V...

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 – a...

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 upe...

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...

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...

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 for...

Can you recall the last time you tried to talk to someone about a personal, political or work issue and quickly discovered their view of the situation was entirely different than yours? How’d that work out for you? If words like “strained,” “painful,” “awful” or “never again,” come to mind – you have company. Acknowledging that we’re living in a highly polarized world these days – many of us have...

If you’ve ever felt unseen, under-estimated or unfairly passed over in your career,  this podcast provides all the remedies you’ll need to ensure you never feel that way again! While we’d all like to believe our career growth will always be the result of a reliable meritocracy, the truth is our success at work is rarely just about the quality of our ideas, credentials, skills, or effor...

In an economy marked by downsizing, offshoring and an accelerated deployment of robots and automation technology, fears around the future of our work and careers abound. But according to New Yorker Magazine writer and co-founder of NPR’s Planet Money podcast , Adam Davidson, we needn’t be so gloomy. Tied to extensive research that went into the writing of his new book, “ The Pass...

Some of the greatest business innovations of our time were first proposed by other companies, but summarily rejected: *** Polaroid  (now gone) invented the digital camera – and then ditched it in the belief it couldn’t make money. *** Engineers at cell-phone maker, Nokia, proposed a device that had all the functionality of the I-Phone – three years before Apple made it one of the most successful p...

For decades, the commonly accepted purpose of a corporation (or any company for that matter) has been to ensure the interests of shareholders always came first. But today, we’ve finally reached a point where most leaders realize that a “profits over people” philosophy has proven to be an entirely unsustainable way to run a business. Amongst its many great harms, it’s produc...

We musn’t fool ourselves into believing that the majority of the world’s workplace managers have bought into the idea that caring deeply about people is essential to leadership success. Metrics on job satisfaction, employee well-being and, of course, engagement continue to reflect an attitude about leadership that’s anything but caring. Truth be told, many of us still believe caring is equivalent...

We live in a society today that’s obsessed with early achievement, whether it’s getting perfect SAT scores, gaining acceptance into an Ivy League school or landing an amazing job at Google or Facebook – or better yet – creating a start-up with the potential to be the next Twitter or Instagram. We see software coders become millionaires or billionaires before age thirty and think we’re failing if w...

Many of us believe that our emotions are a distraction to success in life – and that they upend our ability to make sound decisions. When it comes to leading and managing people, we carry over these same beliefs; we’re convinced making any kind of emotional connection with our employees will only hijack our effectiveness and undermine our team’s performance. But according to Marc Brackett, founder...

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...

It’s an irrefutable truth that trust is on a serious decline. And all the key pillars of society are affected. The RAND Corporation recently reported that trust in government, the media – even in our businesses and workplaces – “has reached a lower absolute level than ever before.” And they warned that such a lack of trust inherently undermines the way we operate in the world. Deep down we a...

Bill Campbell is a Silicon Valley legend. Following a career leading sales & marketing at Apple – & as CEO of Intuit – he spent nearly two decades coaching a “Who’s Who” list of world-changing executives. The list included Apple founder, Steve Jobs , Google founders, Sergei Brin and Larry Page . Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg , former Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo , former Goog...

Esther Wojcicki knows what it takes to raise successful children. Her daughter, Susan, is the CEO of YouTube. Janet is professor of Pediatrics at the UC San Francisco Medical School (and A Fulbright scholar). And Anne is co-founder & CEO of DNA testing company 23andMe. If any of us were to guess how Esther influenced all three of her daughters to become so high-achieving, the logical leap woul...

When researchers tell us employee engagement is especially low, they’re almost always referring to American businesses. But as distressing as engagement is in the United States, the truth is it’s far worse in Europe and the UK – a fact this podcast is dedicated to exploring. Just a few days before this interview with Dan Cable, professor of Organizational Behavior at the London Business School, th...

Pick up any business magazine today, and it won’t take you long to find an article that features the phrase, “ according to Gallup research.” And whether that article is about workplace management, the future of work or how to most effectively lead a team of millennials, the studies to which the author will be referring are almost always the work Dr. Jim Harter. For over 30 years, he’s led Gallup’...