unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Would you believe Cleveland used to be a hub for innovation? Now the Bay Area is the height of start ups and global technology.  It seems like everybody, no matter where they are around the world, is trying to create a Silicon valley back in their country or “Silicon hyphens.”  Dan Breznitz is the Munk Chair of Innovation Studies at the Munk School of Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He...

Ethan Kross says the human ability to be introspective is a super power. We can time travel in our heads. We can be excited about planning the future, and look back on our lives in nostalgia.  But what happens when that time machine gets stuck? And you're only focused the negative. Here is where the ability to harness that inner voice becomes key.  Ethan is a professor of psychology at the Univers...

What does it mean to be a philosopher? What does it mean to DO Philosophy? What are the boundaries of philosophy as a discipline? These are just some of the themes that have pervaded the work of Justin Smith.  Justin Smith is a professor of philosophy in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Paris, and he has written several books, including the upcoming “The Int...

We like to think that technology makes the world a better place and that progress moves forward in a fairly linear fashion. And yet, there are plenty of signs that show well-being does not necessarily increase along with the sophistication of technology.  This idea is explored in Edward Tenner’s books, the most recent being The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can't Do . A sequel to his previous...

Major layoffs, fake news and misinformation, as well as social media wars against the media & journalists have been hot topics in the last few years when it comes to what we consider “news,” especially in the United States.  Will Slauter consider the problems of our modern day news production, by taking a look at the past, and the history of news media that brought us to this place.  Will is a pro...

Making strategy requires undertaking major―often irreversible―decisions aimed at long-term success in an uncertain future. Are you looking to think more clearly and build transparent, functional teams that work in a better, streamlined way? Jesper Sørensen is joining us to help you out. He is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford GSB, and the author of “Making Great Strategy: Arguing...

Leo Katz’s work focuses on criminal law and legal theory. By connecting criminal law, moral philosophy, and the theory of social choice, he tries to shed light on some of the most basic building block notions of the law. He is a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of numerous articles and books including “Ill-Gotten Gains: Evasion, Blackmail, Fraud, and Kindred Puzzle...

Most people agree that nearly everything human is a mixture of both genetic inputs and cultural inputs. The question is about where the dividing line lies. Cecilia Heyes is a senior research fellow in theoretical life sciences and a professor of psychology at All Souls College at the University of Oxford. She also authored the book “Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking.” Cecilia a...

Brains arrive at the conclusion that they have an internal, subjective experience of things — an experience that is non-physical and inexplicable. How can such a thing be studied scientifically? That is just part of the mission behind Michael Graziano’s lab. He is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University, and the author of  “The Intelligent Movement Machine: An Ethologica...

How can finance professionals balance self-interest, client service, and the greater good? While finance is often portrayed as an occupation that is fraught with self-dealing and unethical behavior, it can also be an arena for promoting good and even a path to a life of virtue.  JC de Swaan argues for this idea in his latest book “Seeking Virtue in Finance: Contributing to Society in a Conflicted...

87% of digital transformation initiatives fail to meet expectations. Do we raise expectations too high or is it really a problem of a failure to implement or execute the transformation? Didier Bonnet joins us today to sort this out. He is a former executive vice president at the consulting firm Capgemini and currently a professor of strategy and digital transformation at IMD Business School. He al...

Platforms are eating the world! While not every business is becoming a platform business in the strictest sense, every company needs to re-examine its business model and consider adopting platform elements if they are to survive in the new ecosystem oriented economy. Geoff Parker is a professor of engineering at Dartmouth College, as well as a visiting scholar and research fellow at MIT. He is als...

David Yoffie has been a professor at Harvard Business School for 40 years where he has authored hundreds of cases, and a number of books, the most recent being “ The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation and Power.” He has been writing about technology and digital for a long time, and has served on the boards of numerous companies that are at the heart of th...

César Hidalgo is the director of the Center for Collective Learning at the University of Toulouse, known for his contributions to economic complexity, data visualization, and applied artificial intelligence.  His books include “How Humans Judge Machines,” and “ Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies.” César joins Greg to discuss knowledge vs know how, Services vs pr...

The short answer is no. According to Edward Slingerland our taste for alcohol is a practice found in nearly every culture, meaning that its consumption must offer benefits which outweigh its obvious costs. Edward Slingerland is a professor of philosophy at The University of British Columbia up in Vancouver, and is also the author of multiple books. His most recent being “ Drunk: How We Sipped, Dan...

Why do some great business and policy ideas make it big while others fail to take off? That's the big question behind John List’s most recent book The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale. John List is an economist at the University of Chicago, as well as chief economist at Lyft. He is also the author of The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of E...

When we first started to study the social brain as a species, friendship was considered a luxury, it didn't aid us in survival. But now studies show that friendship is vital to not only your mental health and happiness, but your immune system, your cognitive health and your overall longevity. So today we dig into the science behind friendship, with Lydia Denworth Lydia Denworth is a contributing e...

We like to think we have everything we need to make decisions based on the numbers we are presented in a data set. But any large data set is bound to have problems. And it's often the data that we are missing that can lead us off course unexpectedly.  David Hand has written many books, including The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day and the more...

Dean Buonomano is a professor of psychology and neurobiology at UCLA, and the author of Brain Bugs: How the Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives, as well as the newer, Y our Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time. He says it's impossible to overstate how important associations are for cognition, behavior learning and decisions. We’ll learn in this episode about memory capacity, cre...

You can have genetically identical siblings. They have the same genome. They lay right next to each other in the womb. They're born, and at the moment they're born, they're already different. Before any experience has accrued at all. Why shouldn't they be just the same? This question and more are discussed in today’s episode on individuality, variability, heritability and epigenetics.  Our guest i...

Intensifying competition, accelerating change, extreme disruptive events. A combination of these elements are leading to a global shift to living in constant fear and uncertainty.  But John Hagel says you can cultivate emotions that motivate you to move beyond this fear. John is a leading strategy thinker who has worked at McKinsey, and was most recently at Deloitte where he founded and is now eme...

Humans are born to create theories about the world -- unfortunately, we're often wrong and our intuitive theories keep us from understanding science and the world as it really is. Andrew Shtulman is a cognitive developmental psychologist who studies conceptual development and conceptual change, particularly as they relate to science education, and does this work at Occidental College, where he is...

When it comes to ownership, the same few simple stories are used from the playground to the courtroom. And the problem lies here, that we still have this very old, physical notion of ownership that no longer works in a digital world. Michael Heller is a professor of law at Columbia University and co-author of the classic The Gridlock Economy , and the more recent Mine! How The Hidden Rules of Owne...

As we head into year 2 of the COVID-19 pandemic, most knowledge workers are still working from home. You may be listening to this from your home office or kitchen table desk.  But before working from home became semi mandatory for health and safety reasons, many companies were very resistant to the idea of distributed and remote work.  David Burkus is an associate professor of leadership and innov...

There is no doubt that we are in a stress epidemic in our fast paced and modern world. But Daniel Keating says this may seem pretty paltry in comparison to what's coming. He predicts a full stress pandemic on the horizon, where everything needs immediate fixing or else it's perceived as an existential threat. Daniel Keating is a Professor at the University of Michigan in the departments of Psychol...