On Your Mic

What happens when you become successful at something that no longer feels right for you? Many professionals eventually face that question, and it gets harder to answer when a reputation and a comfortable position are at stake. Eric Hoffman spent 20 years as a trial attorney before leaving that career at 47 to build a legal technology company. His journey challenges the idea that entrepreneurship b...

Many organisations are full of talented people, yet very little gets done. Meetings happen and emails keep coming, but meaningful progress stalls, and the cause is often how people are led rather than who they are. Julian Chapman has decades of experience in leadership and organisational development, and a career as a Brigadier General in the Canadian Armed Forces. He challenges the idea that effe...

Growing businesses often become harder to manage as they succeed. In the early stages, doing everything yourself can feel like the fastest route, but as the business grows that habit turns into a limit. Neal McLeod is the founder of CTK Industries and a business systems architect. He helps businesses turn operational bottlenecks into scalable workflows through automation and AI. In this episode, C...

Most people interact with the legal system only when something has already gone wrong. They think about protection after a dispute begins, asset planning after wealth has been created, and constitutional rights only after they feel those rights are under pressure. By then, the options are narrower and the cost is higher. In this episode, Collins Victory Odabi sits down with Evan — a former Wall St...

Creativity is evolving alongside technology, and the pandemic showed how quickly the creative industries can be disrupted. Many artists struggled to find opportunities and connect with audiences. Rachel Vancelette's career brings together contemporary art, fashion, digital platforms and technological innovation. Her art and puzzles initiative mobilised more than 180 contemporary artists, raisi...

Some businesses begin with a big idea. Others begin when someone meets the same problem so often that they decide to fix it themselves, spotting wasted time, failed communication and inadequate systems that outsiders miss. Carson Cloud started with drone services and aerial surveying, then built businesses in solar surveying, artificial intelligence and field operations. Along the way he lived out...

Building wealth often comes at the cost of personal well-being. Hard work matters, but effort alone does not guarantee progress, and ambition needs a workable strategy behind it. Ash Shukla arrived in the United States from India in 1989 with $20 and no knowledge of English. He now works as a holistic business consultant, combining business strategy, financial principles and personal development i...

Every organisation talks about culture, yet the culture leaders describe is not always the one employees experience. People learn what an organisation values from everyday decisions about who is promoted, whose opinions count and who is repeatedly overlooked. Abi Adamson began her career in film, where she saw talented people miss opportunities because of connections rather than ability. That expe...

Adopting AI does not automatically make a company more efficient or competitive. Some organisations invest heavily in new tools without meaningful results, while others use the same technology to rethink how they operate. Ankit Gordhandas is a former founding member of Zapier's AI team and founder of Aigenomic, an AI transformation company. He also developed the Business Operations Real Eval,...

Faith does not always disappear in a moment of crisis. Sometimes it weakens quietly. The person keeps attending church, reading scripture and practising familiar routines, yet their faith stops shaping how they make decisions or respond to difficult situations. Timothy Allen is a pastor and prison chaplain with more than 20 years of ministry experience. He is the author of Before the Fall and the...

Many experienced professionals spend years building expertise, earning trust and developing valuable networks. Yet when they decide to build something of their own, they often struggle to turn that experience into a new source of income. The problem is not always a lack of knowledge. Sometimes the value they have built remains difficult to package, communicate or sell. Lauren Erickson is a marketi...

We often measure commitment by presence: we attend meetings, answer messages and spend time with people. But being physically present does not always mean being genuinely engaged. A leader can sit with a team without listening, a business can communicate with customers without understanding them, and in our personal lives we can become so distracted by daily demands that we stop paying attention t...

Starting a business is often presented as the hardest part of entrepreneurship, but starting is only the beginning. A company can attract customers and generate revenue while still depending too heavily on its founder, growing quickly without becoming more stable and looking successful from the outside while the systems underneath remain fragile. Gregory Shepard has spent more than two decades bui...

Many people wait for the perfect opportunity, enough money or complete confidence before making a move, and waiting for certainty can quietly become an excuse for standing still. David Selley's life suggests the alternative: make informed decisions, take calculated risks and learn from what happens next. David left England for Canada at 16 with a one-way ticket and a belief that something bett...

Limitation is often treated as a fixed definition: you have a disability, so certain things are assumed closed to you; you have survived trauma, so your future is expected to look different from the one you imagined. Sometimes a limitation is real. The mistake is assuming that a limitation in one part of life determines the limits of the whole life. Born with cerebral palsy, Win Charles became an...

Healthcare is often designed around the moment a patient enters the doctor's office: a scheduled appointment, a diagnosis, 15 minutes with a clinician, a treatment plan, then home. But chronic conditions do not stop when the appointment ends, and most of a patient's life happens in the 365 days between visits. Seth Merritt spent roughly 15 years inside major healthcare organisations, inclu...

Businesses have access to more powerful AI than ever, yet many still struggle to turn that capability into meaningful results. The problem may lie less in the technology than in how organisations think about it. Kavita Ganesan has more than two decades of experience across technology, healthcare, manufacturing and government, including AI initiatives involving eBay, 3M and GitHub. She has seen pro...

In business, humour is often treated as entertainment, or as a risk to professionalism. Its real value may lie in what it creates before and after the laugh. Conor Cunneen built his career on the link between humour, communication, trust, sales and employee engagement. He does not argue that everyone should become a comedian, only that appropriate humour makes communication more human and memorabl...

A conversation with Scherrie L. Prince, attorney and founder strategist specialising in ownership, governance, succession, and exit planning. Most founders are wired for growth — traction, revenue, momentum. What gets ignored is structure: who owns what, who makes decisions, what happens when things change. Those decisions don't break a business immediately. They sit quietly in the background unti...

Most people spend years chasing success without ever stopping to ask what that success is building towards. The promotion, the credentials, the income, the recognition — from the outside, everything looks correct. But underneath, many people are operating on inherited definitions of achievement they never consciously chose for themselves. In this episode, Collins Victory Odabi sits down with Alber...

Most interventions around gender-based violence focus on behaviour, awareness campaigns, education, and policy. But very few ask the more fundamental question: what is the environment doing? It's not the conversation around the issue, but the actual physical spaces people move through every day and what those spaces quietly permit. In this episode, Collins Victory Odabi sits down with Christopher...

A conversation with Dr. Christian Komor, climate innovation advocate and independent candidate for Governor of Colorado. The dominant climate narrative asks people to accept sacrifice — higher costs, restricted industries, slower growth. The implicit contract is that the environment and the economy are in tension, and that solving one means damaging the other. In this episode, Collins Victory Odab...

Most writers assume that if a story starts strong, readers will naturally stay. But attention doesn't work that way. Readers don't commit to a story once — they recommit at every page, every scene, and every shift in tone. What determines whether they stay has very little to do with the idea itself. In this episode, Collins Victory Odabi sits down with Susan to explore what actually holds a reader...

Most founders know exactly what is working and what isn't in their business. The blind spot isn't operational — it's physical. The sustained pressure, the intensity, the load that gets normalised because the business is still growing and nothing has visibly broken yet. In this episode, Collins Victory Odabi sits down with Josh Chernikoff — education entrepreneur, founder of the 3E Method, and the...

Most people still think of AI as something you open, prompt, and close. A layer sitting alongside the tools they already use. But that framing is already becoming outdated — because what's actually shifting isn't capability, it's the interface itself. In this episode, Collins Victory Odabi sits down with Matthew White, founder and CEO of Qebot and Platypus OS, to explore what that shift actually m...