In our every day experience at work, we attend innumerable events – team meetings, orientations, employee recognition events, etc.) – that all have the potential to become really tedious & uninspiring simply because they feel routine & therefore joyless. But there’s an extremely powerful way of reinvigorating these kinds of events & making them truly meaningful to people. According to Harvard Business School professor, Michael Norton, adding rituals “can convert ordinary acts from black & white to technicolor.”  Rituals are symbolic actions or ceremonies that h ..read more

  Saul Perlmutter, Nobel Laureate 2011 for Physics, in his office. There’s a lot that’s remarkable about the new book, Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense, starting with the fact that one of its three co-authors is a Nobel laureate who earned the Nobel prize in physics for discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe. One might imagine that UC Berkeley professor, Saul Perlmutter could have written this book on his own, but instead, he intentionally collaborated with two people way outside of his own discipline: John Campbell – a philosophy pro ..read more

    Nearly two decades ago, Stanford University psychologist, Carol Dweck, introduced the groundbreaking idea that human flourishing can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents & abilities. In her classic book, “Mindset: The New Psychology Of Success,” she taught us that some people have a general belief that their talents and intelligence are predetermined, & largely unalterable (hence, “fixed mindset”), while others believe their talents & abilities can indeed be nurtured and developed (hence, “growth mindset”). Dweck’s research proved that peo ..read more

  As a professor in NYU’s prestigious Stern School of Business, Alison Taylor spends a lot of time with the next generation of business leaders. In her new best seller, “Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World,” she tells us that her MBA students are not hoping to have careers working for ethical companies. They now expect to. For decades, organizations largely committed themselves to doing whatever was legally allowable to maximize shareholder value – a singular focus that’s proving to be no longer viable. Taylor’s book easily could have been titled, “How ..read more

  Human beings are social creatures. We’re hard-wired to connect deeply & intimately with others. We want to feel valued, supported, & needed. And this makes connection a fundamental aspect of our existence. But in our busy, technology-driven lives today, we have fewer friends than people did in past generations, we interact less with our neighbors, & the majority of interactions we have with people are now held virtually – not face-to-face. Many of us are even working remotely some days of the week, further limiting the number of other human beings we see & interact ..read more

  In his new bestseller, “The Geek Way,” Andrew McAfee makes the fascinating case that the most important technological revolution of our time isn’t what companies make, it’s in how they’re being managed. And by his definition, being geeky isn’t a pejorative but rather a clear description of leaders who are perennially curious, not afraid to tackle hard problems or embrace unconventional solutions. Those few assertions alone piqued our interest in having Andrew as a guest; and then we learned The Economist and The Financial Times named “The Geek Way” one of the best books of 2023. Accord ..read more

  When we think about the highest performing people in all disciplines of life, they all commonly share the ability to think clearly, stay focused & shrug off setbacks all while under very high levels of stress. In their most critical moments, in other words, they know how to maintain intellectual clarity & emotional control – which allows them to consistently perform at exceptional levels. While we might believe that people like this are born into the world with uncommon abilities, the truth is they’re not innate talents at all; they’re 100% learned. So, this episode is dedicate ..read more

  Every organization is plagued by what Stanford University Business School professor, Bob Sutton, calls “destructive friction:” forces that make it harder, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done. In Sutton’s language, “the convoluted, time-consuming & soul-crushing gyrations that drive people crazy and undermine organizational performance.” Along with his co-author, SBS professor, Huggy Rao, Sutton spent seven years studying the ways in which companies unintentionally create maddening friction – from mazes of red tape, to clueless leaders who pile on needless c ..read more

  The expression, “emotional intelligence” is seamlessly embedded into our common vernacular – but it was Daniel Goleman’s groundbreaking book a quarter century ago that first coined the idea & brought it to a mass audience. In his #1 bestseller “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ” Goleman revolutionized how we think about human intelligence. Along with Rutgers University psychology professor Cary Cherniss, Goleman has just taken a fresh look at how emotional intelligence has evolved over the past few decades, & has written,“Optimal: How To Sustain P ..read more

  Workplace managers are often told to define their leadership purpose & authentic self, & that this personal introspection & self-reflection will guide their leadership journey. But research on how adults actually learn shows that the logical sequence – “think, then act” – is reversed in a personal change process such as what’s involved with becoming a leader. In other words, we only increase our self-knowledge in the process of making changes. We try something new and then observe the results – how it feels to us, how others around us react – & only later reflect on and ..read more