Making Business Art

Do you feel you are fulfilling your purpose? Or do you feel unclear and searching for it? For many of us, discovering and aligning our lives with our purpose is no easy feat.  My returning guest, Lisa Morris, spent over two decades in corporate consulting leadership roles focused on business and organizational transformation before she got clear on her purpose and changed her work life to be more...

Have you ever felt disengaged or burned out at work? Many of us have, and the efforts to fix this in organizations like spending a lot of money on flashy events or retreats does not fix this problem. Returning guest and co-founder of The Design Gym, Andy Hagerman, discovered that designing moments for authentic human connection and building community within organizations is more efficient and effe...

How many meetings have you been in lately where you felt engaged, got a lot done, and thought it was time well spent? Chances are your answer is "not many" or "none." My returning guest, Adam StJohn Lawrence, thinks we can supercharge our productivity and get a lot more out of our meetings by infusing them with what he calls Doing, Not Talking. Adam is a master facilitator, author, and educator wh...

Are you trying to foster innovation in your organization, but team meetings end up feeling like an uninspired replay of previous ones? Many leaders face this challenge. They have smart team members, but unleashing their team's creative genius seems unattainable. Fortunately, social neuroscientists like our guest, Caroline Szymanski, Ph. D., can offer us science-backed insights and strategies to bo...

Two questions that are top of mind for most leaders are: 1) How can my team perform better? and 2) How can we grow our business? My guest and co-founder of The Design Gym , Andy Hagerman , works with leaders of Fortune 500 companies to bridge the gap between these questions. Andy's work focuses on helping leaders shape more collaborative, creative, and healthy team environments that unlock fresh a...

Have you ever felt stuck, blocked, or that something you can't quite put your finger on is preventing you from getting the business and personal outcomes that you desire?  My returning guest and Business Healer, Marte Siebenhar , struggled with overwork and burnout for years.  As she sought and applied a variety of tools to help herself, she developed insights into how our unconscious mental and e...

Do you ever feel like chaos in your organization is getting in the way of teams being more effective at work? My guest and founder of SmartTribes Institute, Christine Comaford, has developed an approach that blends applied neuro-science and ancient wisdom to help leaders and teams cut through chaos and fear to build emotional engagement that increases performance, collaboration, and talent retenti...

Most of us want to be more influential, creative, and able to build key relationships in and out of work. But this isn't always easy to accomplish, and sometimes it seems it's because someone is standing in our way. But that someone, more often than not, might just be ourselves.  For this minisode I'm bringing back business ethnographer and empathy trainer, Karen Faith, to discuss a powerful appro...

What if instead of thinking of you as an employee, your boss and workplace treated you like a valued customer? My guest and HR transformation expert, Dart Lindsley, knows that industrial-age management practices are not working. He champions a new approach to how we design our work in organizations by treating work as a product that every organization builds and sells to their employees. Dart beli...

Most of us have sat through a mandatory class, training, or presentation at work that was pretty terrible. Worse yet, we probably felt like a hostage waiting to escape. Going through this type of experience hinders our individual ability to learn and causes teams to struggle to adopt new skills and ways of working.  Fortunately, my guest and global learning leader for Amazon, Mark Boccia , is dedi...

Ever heard the idiom "It takes two to tango"? For service design facilitator and executive coach, Renatus Hoogenraad, the spirit behind this idiom has a more literal meaning. As a former professional ballet dancer and someone trained in applied improvisation, Renatus pays special attention to how we show up and use our bodies at work. He thinks of work as an ongoing choreography where a form of da...

Life at work can feel dull, transactional, and exhausting. Fortunately, it does not have to be that way. In fact, our work can be turned into a vehicle for transforming how we relate and connect with others, while making other areas of our lives feel bright, inspired and nourishing.  For this minisode I'm bringing back innovation and leadership development expert, Chris Baer , to discuss "working...

Henry Ford once said that "if there is any secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from [their] angle as well as from your own." What Henry Ford was talking about is practicing "cognitive empathy" also known as "perspective taking." My guest and founder of Others Unlimited, Karen Faith, teaches people in organizations how to be more successf...

New technologies enable fresh opportunities to connect with visitors in physical spaces. But connecting with people in a way that feels authentic, trustworthy, engaging, and enduring takes a whole lot of passion, collaboration, and a deep love of story and craft. My guest and Emmy-award winning creative executive and entrepreneur, Josh Goldblum, has spent over 20 years honing his craft at the inte...

If we want to be an effective leader, team member, and problem-solver, we must be skilled at understanding what is really going on with ourselves and others. My guest, entrepreneur and author, Michael Ventura, spent years refining an approach to help leaders and teams develop valuable perspectives that can be applied to solve problems internally and for their customers. Michael calls this approach...

If you could reinvent your organization and your career, what would you do? After many years of working with executives from prominent organizations, Tim Leberecht recognized and wanted to support people's desire to feel a sense of belonging, dream bigger, stretch their wings and transform how they lived and worked. After publishing his first book, The Business Romantic , Tim took the leap to rein...

Keeping up with the accelerating pace of change and complexity in our world can feel daunting. Fortunately, there are people like global improv consultant and comedy teacher, Belina Raffy, who can show us how to re-energize how we relate with our teams and bring more joy, creativity, and connection to our organizations. Belina makes the case that practicing improv is the gym to strengthen our abil...

Big complex problems don't necessarily have to be overwhelming. My guest and applied anthropologist, Ellie Snowden, harnesses the power of small stories to help people in organizations turn big intractable problems into manageable ones. She argues that one-size-fits-all solutions don't work. Instead, we can create much more impactful interventions by quickly gathering many small and granular stori...

Is there an aspect of your work you find beautiful? While we might not think of beauty as a property that arises in many domains of work, my guest and sociology professor, Brandon Vaidyanathan, is finding beauty at work in unexpected places. After unexpectedly stumbling into the topic of beauty at work during research projects, Brandon is now devoting time to explore how we might expand our unders...

Have you ever thought about what gets in the way of teams achieving the results they want? My guest, Andres Marquez-Lara, makes the case that it's not due to a lack of tools or technology, but rather due to miscommunication, misaligned agendas, ego and conflict. Or, as he calls it, "messy human stuff." Andres is a leadership development and collaboration expert who combines his training in clinica...

Most of us have been disenchanted with the world of work at some point in our careers. But what if the culture of our organizations actively encouraged better communication, creativity and experimentation in pursuit of creating much better solutions for the people we serve? My guest and creative leadership consultant,  Arne van Oosterom , is sought after by leaders who seek to foster that environm...

What is a restaurant, or product, or a hospitality experience that you love and would highly recommend to a good friend? What was it about that brand that really hooked you, and what would you say about it to somebody else?  My guest and branding strategist and storyteller, Cheryl Farr, points out that a brand is not so much about what we say about ourselves, but what other people say about you. O...

What do you think about emerging technologies with Artificial Intelligence? It's a topic that some people find distressing, others are cautious or curious, and some, like my guest Rick McCawley, see enormous potential for creativity and productivity. Rick believes that AI can help us do away with boring grunt work while amplifying our creativity, productivity, and our ability to express ourselves....

For many of us work is a place where we *have* to go. But what if it was a place we *wanted* to go? What would have to be true for work to be a better place for all of us?  My guest and employee experience design expert, Lisa Morris, is passionate about designing ways to make the world of work a much better place for people.  In this conversation Lisa and I discuss her perspective on shifts in the...

As the pace of change and complexity of our world keeps accelerating, it is increasingly necessary for us to develop the leadership skills to navigate the demands emerging from shifts in markets and society.    My guest and leadership development and culture consultant, Chris Baer, observes that some leadership approaches that worked in the past are no longer adequate to meet the demands of our em...