Maarten Ectors is the Chief Innovation Office at Legal and General. He has helped companies like Amazon launch new services and disrupt markets. At the time of the interview, he was focused on disrupting insurance from the inside. In this conversation, we explore some very interesting ideas around disruptive innovation. There are few ideas that stood out for me in this conversation: If people are sleeping in the streets for the competitor’s product, you might need to rethink your offering. Maart...
Jan 15, 2019•27 min
Alyson Schafer considers herself to be a modern-day parenting expert. Her general message is that a lot of what we think is common, may not necessarily be right. One of the most interesting things about Alyson is that she is the third generation of parenting educators. Although she is the first to do it as a full-time job, she comes from a long tradition of Adlerian psychology and psychologist who have always been doing some form of educational parenting. The core message I took away from our co...
Dec 01, 2018•43 min
In order to walk, you need two feet. For Kate Sunderland in order to achieve your Big Hairy Audacious Goal, you need both the rational mind and the intuitive mind. Her goal is to make inner work as universal as cooking pots. So much of our world focuses on the rational mind and minimizes the role of intuitive mind. It is in the space that Kate Sutherland spends most of her time. She does the kind of work that many people shy away from. She calls it inner work – working on the intuitive mind. For...
Nov 15, 2018•33 min
David Grayson has worked in Corporate Responsibility before there was a term for it. As a former Proctor and Gamble employee, he has taken his skills from that world and applied to the third sector. Today he is an author, educator, and consultant. In this episode, David talks about how Corporate Social responsibility needs to move away from a lens of mitigating risk, to one of opportunity maximization. In this episode, he referenced a quote from Peter Drucker in which he said, “every global prob...
Nov 01, 2018•40 min
John Robinson is a sustainability professor at the University of Toronto and the Copenhagen Business School. In this episode, he and explore his perspectives on sustainability and the wonderful insight has gained after a lifetime of trying to disrupt sectors and systems. For John, the big challenges in sustainability are not technical or economic. Although they may appear so, his experience has taught him that many of the barriers to sustainability are actually institutionally mixed with some at...
Oct 15, 2018•37 min
Travis Kimmel is the CEO and one of the co-founders of GitPrime. A company that provides data to help software engineering teams measure and improve productivity. Said another way, if a developer is stuck, it is often difficult to tell if they are just busy working on a problem or if they are stuck on a problem and need help. GitPrime helps managers identify when a developer might be stuck. Disrupting a developer to ask them if they are stuck can be very expensive since they are often deep into ...
Oct 01, 2018•35 min
Seyi Fabode is one of LinkedIn’s TopVoice in Technology. In this episode of Disruptive Conversations, we talk about many of his perspectives on disrupting sectors and systems. In my conversation with Seyi, he attributes a major part of his success to bringing his whole self into all that he does. In his experience, he found that by being honest with himself and in showing up completely and fully, he has greatly transformed his personal and professional life. He loves writing and has been able to...
Sep 15, 2018•48 min
Marc Winn is on a mission to make Guernsey, a small island in the English Channel between France and the United Kingdom, the best place to live by 2020. His goal is audacious, but his lessons and approach are powerful. Firstly, Marc is bringing his mission to life one coffee meeting at a time. He calls it making change at coffee scale. An approach that resonates with my own approach that assumes that changes happens by changing the conversation. Coffee is one of the hallmark spaces for great con...
Sep 01, 2018•34 min
In this episode, you meet Chris Hooper. Early in his life, Chris began to see accounting as the language of business and despite having had success as an accountant, he realized that his business could not scale beyond him. The company he is building is called Accodex. Accodex is disrupting what some describe as the most boring profession in the world, Accounting. He is building a company to avoid what he calls the Accounting Apocalypse. Chris noticed that just as the innovation of the double en...
Aug 15, 2018•37 min
At Accenture, one of the world’s largest business consulting firms, there 45000 people who have volunteered to take a 50% pay cut so they can volunteer in a developing country. It all started with Gib Bulloch this week’s guest. It all started when Gib read an article in the Financial Times that inspired him to volunteer, as a business consultant, in a developing country. Until then, he had always thought of international development as being outside the purview of someone with an MBA. He had alw...
Jul 29, 2018•35 min
Tendayi Viki is one of my favourite innovation thinkers, authors, and educators. In this episodes, we hear his wonderful insights on innovation and strategy. One of the comments that stood out for me in this episodes was, “it is that it is better to be lucky than to be smart.” I suspect that Tendayi love of this quote is driven by his observation that the moment you start winning, you start losing. It is insights like these that make Tendayi one of my favourite innovation thinkers. Another examp...
Jul 15, 2018•32 min
In this episode, you will learn about some of the challenges of the future of work. This episode has a lot of great content and is hard to summarize. The future of work is full of possibility and there are new ways of collaborating that can be transformative for future workers. This episode is a recording of a panel I attended earlier this year. Below I took some time to capture all the organizations mentioned throughout the episode. There are many examples of innovation throughout this episodes...
Jun 03, 2018•1 hr 5 min
What does it mean to live in a world where we struggle to find funding for programs that help children find their humanity? After my Disruptive Conversation with Mary Gordon, founder of Roots of Empathy, this is the question I was left with. If you have never heard of Roots of Empathy, it is a nonprofit organization whose long-term goal is to build the capacity of the next generation for responsible citizenship and responsive parenting. In the short term, Roots of Empathy focuses on raising leve...
May 15, 2018•50 min
(Chapter 5) In this mini-series, we explore how patient-generated data is being used to redefine the patient experience. This mini-series if funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and is a partnership between Reos Partners and Disruptive Conversations. In this mini-series, we explore three examples, or use cases, of how patient-generated data is being used to redefine the patient experience. Patient-generated health data refers to data that is collected by a patient. A patient can collect ...
May 02, 2018•28 min
(Chapter 4) In this mini-series, we explore how patient-generated data is being used to redefine the patient experience. This mini-series if funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and is a partnership between Reos Partners and Disruptive Conversations. In this mini-series, we explore three examples, or use cases, of how patient-generated data is being used to redefine the patient experience. Patient-generated health data refers to data that is collected by a patient. A patient can collect ...
May 01, 2018•44 min
(Chapter 3) In this mini-series, we explore how patient-generated data is being used to redefine the patient experience. This mini-series if funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and is a partnership between Reos Partners and Disruptive Conversations. In this mini-series, we explore three examples, or use cases, of how patient-generated data is being used to redefine the patient experience. Patient-generated health data refers to data that is collected by a patient. A patient can collect ...
May 01, 2018•31 min
(Chapter 2) In this mini-series, we explore how patient-generated data is being used to redefine the patient experience. This mini-series if funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and is a partnership between Reos Partners and Disruptive Conversations. In this mini-series, we explore three examples, or use cases, of how patient-generated data is being used to redefine the patient experience. Patient-generated health data refers to data that is collected by a patient. A patient can collect ...
May 01, 2018•30 min
In this mini-series, we explore how patient-generated data is being used to redefine the patient experience. This mini-series if funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and is a partnership between Reos Partners and Disruptive Conversations. In this mini-series, we explore three examples, or use cases, of how patient-generated data is being used to redefine the patient experience. Patient-generated health data refers to data that is collected by a patient. A patient can collect this data in...
May 01, 2018•29 min
Andreas Demichelis is as an entrepreneur as you can find. Simply put, he is going up against Google. He is trying to use a search engine as a way of funding water projects in the developing world. The idea is simple, each time you use his search engine, Elliot for Water, you will help him bring safe drinking water to developing countries! Although I could not see this project as not being in competition with Google, one of the world’s largest companies, Andreas reframed this for me. He point out...
Apr 29, 2018•37 min
If you own technology, you produce data, and that data is very valuable. OWN is working to help you take control of that data. Mitzi László and her colleagues are working to help you own your data. This conversation is particularly relevant in a week where Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have been dominating our news cycle. Cambridge Analytica was able to hack and manipulate Facebooks data, and its algorithm, to build digital personas and then send targeted marketing messages to those personas....
Apr 01, 2018•42 min
When most people think of the word disruption, they think about software. Some of the most of interesting innovations are what I refer to as analog innovations. These are innovations that are not connected to software but have to do with process and people. These offline innovations are perhaps the most interesting innovations to come. Shannon Downey is disrupting patriarchy through embroidery. In a past life, Shannon ran a digital marketing agency. She found that she was always connected, alway...
Mar 17, 2018•42 min
In this episode of Disruptive Conversations, I interview Kishau Rogers, founder of Big Think and many other software related companies. In this episode, Kishau and I geek out on systems thinking and find many overlaps in our own work. As a listener you will enjoy the many nuances she presents on thinking and problem-solving. Her general premise is that people need to think before they act. Kishau helps people find solutions through software. For her, too often people have not thought about the p...
Feb 16, 2018•44 min
Sun Drews is a Funeral Director who is rethinking that way we approach end of life care. Although she is at the start of her journey, her experience as a Funeral Director has convinced her that we need a cultural shift around death and dying. For many people, the experience of a loved one's death can be a disjointed and confusing time. Sun’s observation is that people get passed through a disjointed system with little guidance or warning of what they might expect, or how decisions they make earl...
Jan 17, 2018•34 min
Mark Zekulin is disrupting what used to be an illicit market and is now a regulated market. He is the president of the largest cannabis company in the world, Canopy Growth Company. It is valued on the Toronto Stock Exchange at about three and a half billion dollars. In this episode, we talk about his journey as an entrepreneur who moved from a safe comfortable job as a lawyer to someone who fumbled with the question what do you do. In the early days, sometimes he would answer I work in pharmaceu...
Dec 15, 2017•22 min
In this episode, I speak with Adam Kahane, author of the book, Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don't Agree with or Like or Trust. Adam is a full-time disruptor, he spends his time completely dedicated to helping people address their most important and intractable challenges. Adam is a pioneer in the in the lab space and has written several books related to systems change. He argues that we spend a lot of time focusing on what other people should or ought to be doing. Fo...
Nov 15, 2017•40 min
Charles (Chuck) Mahron of the Strong Towns interviews me on this episode of Disruptive Conversations. In this episode, I open myself up to the audience for the first time thanks to some comments from listeners. A few listeners emailed and asked me to get someone to interview me. I asked Chuck Mahron from to interview me in this episode. In this episode, I turn the microphone on myself and share my own perspective on disruptive conversations. In this episode, I share for the first time, why I sta...
Oct 22, 2017•57 min
This is part 2 of my conversation with Letizia Reato. Letizia Reato or Zia trains wild or feral horses. In this conversation, she demonstrates the complexity of addressing the problem of feral horses in the United States. As much as she loves horses, she understands that the solutions to these problems are full of paradoxes. She has come to understand that to save these horses she must take their freedom. Although she loves horses, she thinks that part of the solution could be that some horses w...
Oct 15, 2017•27 min
Letizia Reato or Zia trains wild or feral horses. In this conversation, she demonstrates the complexity of addressing the problem of feral horses in the United States. As much as she loves horses, she understands that the solutions to these problems are full of paradoxes. She has come to understand that to save these horses she must take their freedom. Although she loves horses, she things that part of the solution could be that some horses would need to be euthanize while others can be put to w...
Oct 08, 2017•34 min
Courtney Martin is an author, cultural critic and storyteller. She describes her publications as books she felt like she needed to read. Her articles for the Onbeing publication are also a breath of insight and fresh air. Within the context of disruption and disruptive conversations, her most recent book challenges the notion of the American Dream. In our disruptive conversation, we covered a variety of topics. The most salient conversations revolved around Courtney’s most recent book, The New B...
Sep 24, 2017•48 min
Sheeza Shah goal is to improve lives and improve the environment. She founded a crowdfunding company called UpEffect. UpEffect works to support sustainable, high impact revolutionary products that are making a difference in people's lives. Her platform as a 100% success rate because they work with these companies to help them market their idea. Other crowd funding platforms have high rates of failure because the people using these platforms do not realize the work it takes to bring these campaig...
Sep 17, 2017•35 min
