Let Go & Lead with Maril MacDonald

Divya Demato , CEO and co-founder of GoodOps , joins Maril to discuss the intersection of supply chain sustainability and operational resilience. With over two decades of experience, Divya explains how business leaders navigate global disruptions and rethink their physical operations. She highlights the importance of maintaining strong, collaborative relationships with suppliers. She also explores...

Mary Berner , president and CEO of Cumulus Media Inc. , joins Maril to discuss transforming a toxic company culture into a major corporate asset. Drawing on her extensive background in media, Mary shares her journey of stepping into a struggling organization and using radical transparency to rebuild trust. She details how open communication, regular employee surveys and vulnerability at the leader...

Tim Gabel , President and CEO of RTI International , joins Maril to reflect on leading a mission-driven scientific organization through growth, disruption and profound change. Drawing on more than four decades at RTI, Tim shares how purpose, transparency and disciplined decision-making shape his approach to leadership. Tim explores the responsibility of moving from peer to CEO, the balance between...

Mick Ebeling , Founder and CEO of Not Impossible Labs , shares his journey from filmmaking to human-centered innovation. He talks about creating technology for real people and building teams around purpose rather than expertise. Mick touches on egoless leadership, the power of storytelling and why solving for one person can unlock scalable impact. He also explores failure, change and how leaders c...

Dr. LuAna Boykins , transformation officer of Triple-S , the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Puerto Rico, joins Maril to unpack what real change leadership looks like in healthcare operations. Drawing on her US Army background and years in service and pharma roles, LuAna approaches transformation with discipline, clarity and care for people. LuAna explains how standards create stability before creativit...

Stephanie Kramer, chief human resources officer of L'Oréal North America, discusses leading with empathy and rigor as work practices change fast. She explains how her background in chemistry and marketing shapes a data-informed HR lens that keeps people first and results clear. Stephanie and host Maril talk about building leaders, empowering managers and designing processes that reduce friction an...

Adrian Popa, associate professor of Gonzaga University, joins host Maril to discuss resilience, community and the deeper dimensions of leadership. Drawing from his experiences as an immigrant, clinician, researcher and educator, Adrian explores how leaders can navigate uncertainty with existential courage and servant leadership while fostering transformation at both personal and organizational lev...

We speak with Jody Ono, faculty director of leadership programs at Hitotsubashi ICS, Hitachi University Business School. Jody has lived and worked in the US, Sweden and Japan, teaching MBA students and business leaders from around the world. Maril and Jody explore how leadership is shaped by culture, how authenticity is interpreted differently across contexts and what it means to connect with othe...

Geoff Woods, author of "The AI-Driven Leader," joins Maril to discuss what it means to be a leader in the AI space. He explains how AI can be used to grow businesses, sharpen strategy and rethink how we lead. Geoff shares how working with AI as a thought partner helps us solve bigger problems, ask better questions and create more value. He also walks through how mindset, clarity and collaboration...

Margery Kraus , founder and executive chairman of APCO , reflects on 40 years of leadership. She shares how APCO grew from a small team into a global advisory firm rooted in trust, values and innovation. Margery discusses building a culture that thrives across borders, letting go of control to develop future leaders and applying lessons from motherhood to business. She also looks ahead to what's n...

To survive over the long term, businesses must constantly innovate and transform. All too often, however, forces inside companies stifle this change.   Greg Larkin has built a career as an internal disruptor. In his view, anyone who seeks to innovate from within, to transform a legacy company, naturally comes into contact with obstructionists — with people who, for different reasons, act as barrie...

From the U.S. Air Force to higher education, General Jay Silveria's leadership career has been as wide-ranging as they come. After leading pilots into combat and going viral for the anti-racist speech he made while Superintendent of the United States Air Force Academy, Silveria now serves as the Executive Director of Texas A&M University's Bush School of Government & Public Service. The thread ben...

In a world where so many M&A activities fail to deliver their promised results, Umayma Abubakar has firsthand knowledge of how to buck the trend, and truly create something new and better through all the change.   Starting in 2017, Abubakar helped lead one of the largest mergers in history, when Mubadala Development Company combined with International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC) to form wh...

Resilience is something Bonnie St. John knows in her core. The Harvard grad and Rhodes Scholar became a Paralympic medalist by getting up after she'd fallen down in a very literal way, and since then, she has helped leaders and businesses understand the power in that truth. Over a wide-ranging conversation, she and Maril discuss how there is no one right way to be a leader; why purpose is so impor...

Work has been in a chaotic flux since COVID-19 began, but as Julia Hobsbawm reminds us, it wasn't going that well before the pandemic, either. The author, Bloomberg columnist and futurist of work has been researching connectivity, social health and humans' relationship with technology since before the age of hybrid work. She talks with Maril about the ways work is changing — from new office models...

At the heart of Chick-fil-A's iconic culture is a simple but consistent focus on studying and developing good leaders. Mark Miller, the former Vice President of High Performance Leadership at Chick-fil-A, was there decades ago as the company first asked what it takes to be an effective leader. He was also there leading the charge as they worked to scale the learnings they found. He and Maril discu...

In a world increasingly driven by technology and data, is it possible to preserve the health of the human experience and the broader planet?   One of the first 100 employees of Netflix, Kate O'Neill has long innovated at the intersection of technology and humanity. In the view of O'Neill and her signature "strategic optimism," the future is still ours to shape, and businesses have a bigger role to...

In Pulitzer-nominated sportswriter Sally Jenkins' experience, great leaders are less in the business of winning than the business of teaching.   Over a wide-ranging conversation, Maril and Sally explore the leadership lessons Sally has learned from a career interviewing and writing about the world's great athletes and coaches.  They discuss why discipline is something that leaders can't impose, bu...

For Vada Manager, everything comes back to relationships. Throughout a career serving on countless Boards of Directors and advising everyone from Nelson Mandela to Nike founder Phil Knight to the New York Yankees' George Steinbrenner, Manager has accumulated more than 14,000 contacts in his rolodex, and he's quick to tout this number with students and mentees. Relationships, he says, come full cir...

For researcher, professor and author Zach Mercurio, "mattering" is not a new buzz word: it's a primal human survival instinct embedded in our brains from 6 million years of programming, and something businesses need to take very seriously. Zach is an expert in what makes work meaningful, and to him, the facts are clear: Meaningfulness is not developed through a program or initiative — it's develop...

Ann Powell, Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Bristol Myers Squibb, talks with Maril about her leadership journey. The culture of "radical inclusivity" Powell has shepherded at BMS has allowed the company to continuously and successfully transform the past several years, and Powell has learned a lot through the work. She and Maril discuss the evolution of HR from an administrativ...

Leadership expert, Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer and bestselling author of Friendly Fire Scott A. Snook discusses what he's learned over his time in the military and academia about what it takes to lead. Snook, a decorated veteran and victim of friendly fire himself, studies these incidents of tragedy as a way to make sense of — and ultimately prevent — organizational dysfunction. Among...

In this episode of Let Go & Lead , Maril talks with bestselling author, world-class coach and CEO and Co-Founder of Disruption Advisors Whitney Johnson. After a successful career on Wall Street, Whitney had an epiphany: she wanted to apply the immense knowledge she'd gained from modeling and analyzing stock performance to see if the same rules could be applied to people. Over a wide-ranging conver...

In this episode of Let Go & Lead , Maril talks with bestselling author and lauded employee engagement expert Mark Crowley. Over 25 years, Crowley drove unprecedented success as a leader in the financial services industry by focusing on a simple but powerful idea: when human beings thrive, organizations thrive as well. He and Maril discuss the unprecedented opportunity leaders have right now to rei...

In this episode of Let Go & Lead , Maril talks with lauded author, scholar and Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, whose pioneering research into psychological safety has massively impacted the world of work. Amy breaks down what psychological safety is, what it isn't and three key things leaders need to do to foster it.   Over a ranging conversation, she and Maril discuss the immense...