GUEST Dan Cable is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. Dan’s research and teaching focus on employee engagement, change, organizational culture, leadership mindset, and the linkage between brands and employee behaviors. Dan was selected for the 2018 Thinkers50 Radar List, The Academy of Management has twice honored Dan with “Best article” awards, and The Academy of Management Perspectives ranked Dan in the “Top 25 most influential management scholars.” In our convers...
Jun 25, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 647
GUEST Sally Helgesen, cited in Forbes as the world’s premier expert on women’s leadership, is an internationally best-selling author, speaker and leadership coach. Sally’s most recent book, How Women Rise, co-authored with Marshall Goldsmith, examines the behaviors most likely to get in the way of successful women. It became the top-seller in its field within a week of publication and rights have been sold in 15 languages. Previous books include The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership, ...
May 26, 2021•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 646
GUEST Dr. Jennifer (Jen) Goldman Wetzler is a leading expert on Conflict and Organizational psychology. For two decades, she has advised senior leaders at global corporations in a wide range of industries as well as at large non-profit and governmental institutions. She is the author of Optimal Outcomes - Free yourself from conflict at Work, at Home and in life. Earlier in her career, she was Director of Negotiation Programs at Mediation Works Incorporated, and a facilitator at the Program on Ne...
May 07, 2021•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 645
GUEST Bill Carr is the Co-Author (along with Colin Bryar) of the recently published book Working Backwards - Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon. In Working Backwards, these two long-serving Amazon executives reveal and codify the principles and practices that drive the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known. With twenty-seven years of Amazon experience between them, much of it in the early 2000s―a period of unmatched innovation that brought prod...
Apr 02, 2021•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 644
GUEST Sanjeev Aggarwal and Hari TN have seen the "scale-up movie” in different contexts. Sanjeev was the Founder CEO of Daksh that he eventually sold to IBM. He is now an investor at Helion Ventures and Fundamentum Partnership. The have recently co-authored the book - From Pony to Unicorn - Scaling a Start-up sustainably. From Pony to Unicorn lucidly describes the X-to-10X journey that every start-up aspiring to become a unicorn has to go through. The book effortlessly narrates the fundamental p...
Mar 11, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 643
GUEST Bruce Feiler is an American writer and television personality. He is the author of 15 books, including Council of Dads, a book that describes how he responded to a diagnosis of a rare cancer by asking a group of men to be present in the lives of his young daughters. His latest work explores the power of life stories. Drawing on interviews with Americans in all 50 states, he offers strategies for coping with life's unsettling times in his new book, Life Is In The Transitions, published in M...
Feb 18, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 642
GUEST Ramesh is a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company, and a leader in the Pharmaceutical and Organization practices. He is the Global Dean of the Bower Forum, McKinsey's program for CEO learning. He is a member of McKinsey's Global Social Responsibility Council, and sits on a few non-profit Boards in the Education sector in India. He also has been through the unimaginable trauma of losing two young children to cancer. I was keen to speak to him to get his perspectives on leadership given h...
Feb 03, 2021•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 641
GUEST Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi is the president and CEO of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2020, Priyadarshi released his book "Running Toward Mystery: The Adventure of an Unconventional Life”. In the book, he speaks about his walking away from his school at the age of 10 based on some dreams he had been having from the age of 6. He speaks about the various twists and turns in his journey that has now brought h...
Jan 16, 2021•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 640
GUEST Dr. Ashley Whillans is the Volpert Family Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School. Professor Whillans earned her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of British Columbia. Her research seeks to understand the associations between time, money, and subjective wellbeing. She is particularly interested in understanding how individual, organizational and societal factors like gender, workplace policies, and income inequality predict how people value and spend time and money, w...
Dec 21, 2020•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 639
GUEST Vinay Sitapati returns to the Play to Potential Podcast on the back of his recently published book - Jugalbandi - The BJP before Modi. The book begins with the creation of Hindu nationalism as a response to British-induced elections in the 1920s and moves on to the formation of the BJP in 1980 and ends with its first national government, from 1998 to 2004. The book also traces the entangled lives of its founding leaders Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani. Vinay digs into various m...
Dec 08, 2020•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 638
GUEST Ashish Dhawan is the Founder and Chairman of Central Square Foundation (CSF) and Ashoka University. He worked for twenty years in the investment management business and ran one of India’s leading private equity funds, ChrysCapital. In June 2012, he left his full time role at ChrysCapital to focus on philanthropic work in education. Ashish is an MBA with distinction from Harvard University and a dual bachelor’s (BS/BA) holder with Magna Cum Laude honors from Yale University. Central Square ...
Nov 10, 2020•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 637
GUEST Marshall Goldsmith helps successful people achieve positive, lasting change in behavior; for themselves, their people, and their teams. He has four decades of experience of helping top CEOs and executives overcome limiting beliefs and behaviours to achieve greater success. He has received several accolades over the years. Thinkers 50 ranked him as World's most influential leadership thinker (2015 and 2011), top ten business thinker, top rated executive coach (2015, 2013, and 2011). In our ...
Oct 30, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 636
GUEST Venkat is the Founder of GiveIndia, a platform that strives to bridge the gap between two sets of people - People who want to give, who want to try and make a difference along with those that are doing phenomenal work but don’t know how to reach out to the people that want to support them. GiveIndia was born on April 28, 2000 out of the belief that equal opportunity is the cornerstone of civilization. All human beings must have the same opportunity to succeed in life, irrespective of the c...
Oct 03, 2020•2 hr 19 min•Ep. 635
GUEST Whitney Johnson is the CEO of WLJ Advisors and one of the 50 leading business thinkers in the world as named by Thinkers50. She is an expert on helping high-growth organizations develop high-growth individuals. Whitney is an award-winning author, world-class keynote speaker, frequent lecturer for Harvard Business School's Corporate Learning and an executive coach and advisor to CEOs. She is a popular contributor to the Harvard Business Review and her course on Fundamentals of Entrepreneurs...
Sep 08, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 634
GUEST Atul Khatri is one of the top Stand up comedians in the country. In his previous avatar, he used to run a successful IT Business with his brother for several years. When he got tired of the business routine, he tried his hand at DJing and Bar-tending before trying his hand at comedy in Feb 2012 as part of his new year resolution in 2012. 7 years later, he had a Netflix special featuring 47 comedians from 13 countries around the world. We speak about his journey, mid-life reflections and ho...
Aug 15, 2020•1 hr 57 min•Ep. 633
GUEST Sir Andrew Likierman is the former Dean of the London Business School. He has been researching the topic of Judgment for several years. He is the senior National Independent Director of Times Newspapers Ltd and an NED of listed insurance company Beazley Group and of Monument Bank. His former Non Executive roles have included Bank of England and Barclays Bank Plc. We initially spoke about his journey through life and his various choices including his arc of curiosity around measuring things...
Jul 31, 2020•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 632
GUEST R Gopalakrishnan is a man of many identities. A Board Member, an author, an advisor, speaker and a teacher. Apart from having an illustrious career in Hindustan Lever and Tata Sons, he has been on several Boards over the last few decades. He has authored 12 books since 2007 (that is a run rate of about a book a year if you think about it). He spends his time on Boards, as a Mentor and as a Corporate Advisor, as a speaker and as a Teacher. He is an Executive in Residence at SP Jain and a Di...
Jun 25, 2020•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 630
GUEST BJ Fogg is a behaviour scientist with deep experience in innovation and teaching. At Stanford University, he runs the Behaviour Design Lab (earlier called Persuasive Tech lab). He spends about 50% of his time to Stanford and 50% to industry innovation. On the industry side, he trains innovators to use his work so that they can create solutions that influence behaviour (focus areas include health, financial wellbeing, learning, productivity and more). He is the author of the recently publis...
Jun 13, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 620
GUEST Jennifer believes that leadership is one of the most vital renewable resources in the world. This might be more true than ever as organizations across sectors and around the world are facing an unprecedented amount of volatility and change. Jennifer designs and teaches leadership programs, coaches senior teams, and supports new ways of thinking about strategy and people with clients facing these dramatic shifts in complexity, volatility, and change in their workplaces and markets. She blen...
May 30, 2020•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 609
GUEST Raj Raghunathan is a professor of Marketing at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, where he relies on themes from psychology, behaviorial science, decision theory and marketing to explain consumption behaviour. He also studies the impact that people’s judgments and decisions have on their own happiness and fulfilment. Based on his research, he teaches a very successful online course on Coursera on Happiness (named A Life of Happiness And Fulfillment). His b...
May 08, 2020•1 hr 43 min•Ep. 597
GUEST Matthew Paul Walker is a British scientist and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the book - Why We Sleep (NY Times Bestseller, #1 Sunday Times Best seller). Previously, he was a professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on the impact of sleep on human health and disease. He has published more than 100 scientific studies and is the founder and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. A...
Mar 06, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 582
GUEST Jennifer Petriglieri is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD and the author of Couples That Work, a book on how dual-career couples can thrive in love and in work. Her award-winning research and teaching focus on identity, leadership, and career development. She is particularly interested in how people’s close relationships shape who they become professionally and personally, and how moments of uncertainty and crisis make us who we are. She was named one of the worl...
Feb 14, 2020•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 573
GUEST Lynda Gratton is a Professor of Management Practice at London Business School and is one of the World’s foremost thinkers at the intersection of leadership, the world of work and careers. Over the last 20 years Lynda has written extensively about the interface between people and organisations. Her eight books cover the link between business and HR strategy (Living Strategy), the new ways of working (The Democratic Enterprise), the rise of complex collaboration (Hot Spots and Glow) and the ...
Jan 29, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 565
GUEST James Clear is the Author of the book - Atomic Habits that has sold more than 1 Million Copies globally. He is the creator of The Habits Academy and runs the website jamesclear.com where he writes about habits and human potential. The central question he is trying to answer through his work is “How can we live better”. He has a weekly newsletter where he shares some of his ideas and this goes out to more than Half a Million subscribers who benefit from his thinking. To subscribe to his new...
Dec 30, 2019•58 min•Ep. 556
GUEST Sudhir Sitapati is currently Executive Director, Foods and Refreshments at Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL). He has just published his first book - The CEO Factory, published by Juggernaut Books. I have had the privilege of knowing him for the last 22 years right from the day we joined IIM Ahmedabad in the summer of 1997. This podcast conversation is special for a few reasons. 1) It is the first time I am interviewing a friend on the podcast 2) It is the first time two siblings have been o...
Dec 19, 2019•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 547
GUEST William Vincent Campbell Junior (Bill Campbell) was an American businessman and Chairman of Board of Trustees of Columbia University and Chairman of the Board of Intuit Inc. He was VP of Marketing and Board Director for Apple Inc and CEO for Claris, Intuit and Go Corporation. After his active career as a business executive he had a profound influence as a Coach. He worked with the who’s who of the Business world that includes luminaries such as Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Br...
Nov 12, 2019•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 536
GUEST Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist, researcher, and New York Times best-selling author. With a PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Tasha is the principal of The Eurich Group, a boutique executive development firm that helps companies—from start-ups to the Fortune 100—succeed by improving the effectiveness of their leaders and teams. Her primary areas of expertise are executive coaching, executive team development, and leadership and high potential development progr...
Oct 16, 2019•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 525
GUEST Paddy Upton is a Head Coach in Professional T20 cricket, Mental Coach to professional athletes, Executive Coach and Professor of Practice at Deakin University. Changing careers, following a second master’s degree in Business Coaching from Middlesex University (2003), and along with Gary Kirsten as Head Coach, Paddy was appointed Mental Conditioning and Strategic Leadership Coach of the Indian National team in 2008. Under Kirsten and Upton, the team attained ICC top test team ranking for th...
Sep 25, 2019•1 hr 39 min•Ep. 515
GUEST Herminia Ibarra is the Charles Handy Professor of Organizational Behaviour at London Business School (LBS). Prior to joining LBS, she served on the INSEAD and Harvard Business School faculties. An authority on Leadership and Career Development, Thinkers 50 ranks Ibarra among the top management thinkers in the world. She is the author of the best selling, Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader and Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing your Career. She writes for HBR an...
Aug 16, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 505
GUEST Matt Dixon is an Ironman University Master Coach and a former professional triathlete. He has a master’s degree in clinical and exercise physiology and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Men’s Journal, Men’s Fitness and Men’s Health. Dixon is also the author of two books, Fast-Track Triathlete and The Well-Built Triathlete, available from Velopress. Matt runs Purple Patch Fitness, an organization that provides a customized training experience for athletes of all ...
Jul 25, 2019•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 495