Intro It’s no secret that continuous innovation is the key to seizing and maintaining the competitive edge in today’s increasingly challenging business environment. Unfortunately, the process for achieving this holy grail of business has been a mystery—until now. Today's book delivers a proven system for building relentless innovation into your company’s DNA. Our guest, a Professor and former Dean of Executive Education at INSEAD explores the essential practices of many of the world’s most innov...
Jan 25, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Season 19Ep. 315
In episode 4, we focus on The Mystics in an episode called "The Age of Heretics Part 4: Pierre Wack and the Origins of Scenario Planning" with Art Kleiner This is part of a longer series based on the book The Age of Heretics with Art Kleiner.
Jan 24, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 19Ep. 314
Intro It’s no secret that continuous innovation is the key to seizing and maintaining the competitive edge in today’s increasingly challenging business environment. Unfortunately, the process for achieving this holy grail of business has been a mystery—until now. Today's book delivers a proven system for building relentless innovation into your company’s DNA. Our guest, a Professor and former Dean of Executive Education at INSEAD explores the essential practices of many of the world’s most innov...
Jan 19, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 19Ep. 313
When postwar American business was a vast sea of gray flannel suits and tasteful ties, a few unorthodox individuals were not so quietly shifting the paradigm toward the breezier, Google-ier workplace of today. These change agents include a raft of idealistic social scientists as well as nonacademics. In this episode of the multi-part series, we highlight labor organizer Saul Alinsky, who pioneered the use of shareholder activism to open Kodak’s doors to more African Americans. Alinsky was the em...
Jan 17, 2022•54 min•Season 19Ep. 312
Whether you’re building your career or a business of your own, you have a big advantage: Nobody ever sees the rebel coming. The established players in any industry are always fat, sluggish, and content. You’re defiant, swift, and hungry. Because your ideas are daring (and probably defiant), you’ll blindside the competition. By the time they catch on, you’ve picked their pockets, stolen their best customers, and won the admiring press. As a rebel, you will meet resistance, but you look forward to...
Jan 12, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Season 19Ep. 311
Part 2 in this wonderful series When postwar American business was a vast sea of gray flannel suits and tasteful ties, a few unorthodox individuals were not so quietly shifting the paradigm toward the breezier, Google-ier work-place of today. These change agents include a raft of idealistic social scientists as well as nonacademics, like labor organizer Saul Alinsky, who pioneered the use of shareholder activism to open Kodak’s doors to more African Americans. Alinsky, who was literally willing ...
Jan 06, 2022•55 min•Season 20Ep. 310
Whether you’re leading an organization through new realities, building (or rethinking) your career, forging new relationships, seeking peace, or simply not sure what to do next, you’ll gain tools and insights for how to think, learn, work, live, and lead better with a Flux Mindset. Flux shows you how to slow down responsibly, identify what really matters, make wise decisions, and let go of the rest. Flux challenges your assumptions and expectations in ways that enable you to lean into the future...
Jan 04, 2022•1 hr 57 min•Season 19Ep. 309
When postwar American business was a vast sea of gray flannel suits and tasteful ties, a few unorthodox individuals were not so quietly shifting the paradigm toward the breezier, Google-ier work-place of today. These change agents include a raft of idealistic social scientists as well as nonacademics, like labor organizer Saul Alinsky, who pioneered the use of shareholder activism to open Kodak’s doors to more African Americans. Alinsky, who was literally willing to smash dishes to get attention...
Jan 01, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Season 19Ep. 308
Because the fundamental unit of growth in any organization is the individual, our starting point for talking about growth is you. Some of the questions we will answer are: • Why, despite the desire to learn, can it be so difficult to start something new and stick with it? • What does it take to gain and maintain momentum? • Once we’ve made considerable progress, why do we sometimes tire of what we’re doing and even feel we can no longer do it? Why do we outgrow things so quickly? The more you un...
Dec 29, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 18Ep. 307
Structural racism has impacted the lives of African Americans in the United States since before the country’s founding. Although the country has made some progress towards a more equal society, political developments in the 21st century have shown that deep divides remain. To bridge our divides, our guest, a renowned political scientist calls for ‘radical empathy’ – moving beyond an understanding of others’ lives and pain to understand the origins of our biases. Deftly weaving together her own e...
Dec 20, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Season 18Ep. 306
Amazon is the most extraordinary and important business story of our time. Facebook has more members and is our social network. Google sits right at the heart of the information tsunami. Apple has by far the prettiest toys. But starting 25 years ago as a tiny online bookstore, Amazon now stands astride the e-powered river of goods that flows through the many economies. It is a retailer, a marketplace, an electronic infrastructure, a publisher, an advertising channel, a distributor. It is increas...
Dec 14, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Season 18Ep. 305
Innovation is how businesses stay ahead of the competition and adapt to market conditions that change in unpredictable and uncertain ways. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, high-end cuisine underwent a profound transformation. Once an industry that prioritized consistency and reliability, it turned into one where constant change was a competitive necessity. A top restaurant’s reputation and success have become so closely bound up with its ability to innovate that a new organizatio...
Dec 07, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Season 18Ep. 304
Our first face-to-face live episode with Greg Orme. Even before the pandemic, it seemed the world was spinning so fast it’s difficult to keep up. Arguably a lot of the technological disruption that was around in 2019 simply got accelerated – remote working, digitization, and AI to name just three. Our guest today notes in his book: Two hundred and fifty years ago the Industrial Revolution replaced our arms and legs at work. The fourth Industrial Revolution is now replacing our brains. He says Th...
Dec 01, 2021•48 min•Season 18Ep. 303
Our guest today is an American psychologist who has carried out experiments on the theory of cognitive dissonance and invented the Jigsaw Classroom, a cooperative teaching technique that facilitates learning while reducing interethnic hostility and prejudice. In his 1972 social psychology textbook, The Social Animal, he stated his First Law: "People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy," thus asserting the importance of situational factors in bizarre behavior. He is the only person in t...
Nov 24, 2021•1 hr 53 min•Season 18Ep. 302
How you see risk and what you do about it depend on your personality and experiences. How you make these cost-benefit calculations depend on your culture, your values, the people in the room, and even unexpected things like what you’ve eaten recently, the temperature, the music playing, or the fragrance in the air. Being alert to these often-unconscious influences will help you to seize opportunities and avoid danger. Today’s book is a clarion call for an entirely new conversation about our rela...
Nov 17, 2021•1 hr 32 min•Season 17Ep. 301
To compete with today's increasing globalisation and rapidly evolving technologies, individuals and organisations must take their ability to learn to a much higher level. Today’s guest combines recent advances in neuroscience, psychology, behavioural economics, and education with key research on high-performance businesses to create an actionable blueprint for becoming a leading-edge learning organisation. Today’s book examines the process of learning from an individual and an organisational sta...
Nov 10, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Season 17Ep. 300
We have the real pleasure of exploring what it was like trying to innovate from within Kodak with none other than the Inventor of the Digital Camera - Steve Sasson. We discuss so many aspects of Innovation and the struggle to let go of a successful business model. In 1880, George Eastman invented and patented a dry-plate formula and a machine for preparing large numbers of plates. He also founded the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York. In 1884, he replaced glass photographic plates wit...
Nov 03, 2021•1 hr 33 min•Season 16Ep. 299
Part 2 leans more on the theories of disruptive innovation: What is Cramming? The Nypro case study The case study of RCA versus Sony Long-life learning The death of "4 in 40" and the growth of adult learning. We welcome back the author of “Disrupting Class, How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns: Michael B Horn. More about Michael: https://michaelbhorn.com...
Oct 27, 2021•37 min•Season 17Ep. 298
Part 2 coming week of 25th Oct 2021 A groundbreaking and timely prescription for education reform―from a leading expert in innovation and growth Recent studies in neuroscience reveal that the way we learn doesn’t always match up with the way we are taught. To stay competitive―academically, economically, and technologically―we need to rethink our understanding of intelligence and reevaluate our educational system. Disrupting Class offers a groundbreaking and timely prescription for education refo...
Oct 20, 2021•1 hr 20 min•Season 16Ep. 297
Human beings are primates, and primates are political animals. Our brains, therefore, are designed not just to hunt and gather but also to help us get ahead socially, often via deception and self-deception. But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise. The less we know about our own ugly motives, the better - and thus, we don't like to talk, or even think, about the extent of our selfishness. This is "the elephant in the brain". Such an introspective taboo mak...
Oct 14, 2021•1 hr 25 min•Season 15Ep. 296
The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, our guest explains, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide an understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever...
Oct 06, 2021•1 hr 24 min•Season 16Ep. 295
Today’s book is a provocation. Its goal is to help you to increase your CQ and your organization’s CQ. It encourages you to integrate both wonder and rigour into your daily life in order to produce new and novel products, services, and experiences that deliver greater value to your community and your organization. To this end, you’ll gain three major tools from this book: Catalyzing inquiry Integrating improvisation, and elevating intuition. When you build these three practices into your work on...
Sep 29, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Season 16Ep. 294
Our guest today is a learner who courageously took on challenging turnaround roles in industries where he had no prior experience. He used his rigorous French education and elite training as a McKinsey consultant to lead five companies as CEO, culminating in the transformation of Best Buy. During these years, he went through a personal transformation, from seeking to be the smartest person at the table to becoming a passionate and compassionate leader of people. By the time he became CEO of Best...
Sep 22, 2021•1 hr 19 min•Season 15Ep. 293
Today’s book is an almost anthropological examination of the nature of corporate scandal: Why do values go awry? What happens when the wrong person gets a big job? Why is it so tempting to post false profits instead of telling the truth? How distorting is the prospect of stock market riches? In retrospect, Enron did not conceal their dubious transactions from the investing public, but Enron’s brass didn’t go out of their way to point them out, but for anyone willing to wade through the company’s...
Sep 15, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 15Ep. 292
Today’s book presents a different approach to enterprise strategy and leadership. A complementary approach the author calls: pioneering leadership. Rather than simply work within existing parameters of operational excellence pioneering leadership sees you embarking upon quests. Such quests allow us to systematically explore complex and uncertain futures. We don't set goals in the hopes that a particular future will manifest — rather, we explore multiple possible futures, and prepare proactive st...
Sep 08, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Season 15Ep. 291
Incremental improvement is no longer sufficient in helping organizations navigate the complexity, uncertainty, and volatility of today’s world. Our guest today explores how to create non-linear, dramatic change in organizations. He explores the emerging science of change that teaches us about how to build organizations – from businesses to governments – that change and adapt rapidly. It is great pleasure to welcome the author of "Change: How Organizations Achieve Hard-to-Imagine Results in Uncer...
Sep 01, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 15Ep. 290
Today’s guest is widely recognized as the world’s leading expert on personal and organizational productivity. Time Magazine called today’s book, “the definitive business self-help book of the decade.” We welcome the international best-selling author of "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity", David Allen
Aug 24, 2021•52 min•Season 14Ep. 289
Digital Goddess is a book for entrepreneurial women at any stage of life who want to know what it actually takes to build a business, in a world that’s not always fair, predictable, or politically correct. It is one woman’s story—by no means universal, but common enough to be instructive. It’s about how our guest has dealt with the way things are, not the way I hoped things would be or the way I think they should be. It’s about sucking it up, making the hard choices, and dealing with the consequ...
Aug 18, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 14Ep. 288
We are living through a crisis of distraction. Plans get sidetracked, friends are ignored, work never seems to get done. Why does it feel like we're distracting our lives away? In "Indistractable", behavioural designer Nir Eyal reveals the hidden psychology driving you to distraction. Empowering and optimistic, this is the book that will help you design your time, realise your ambitions, and live the life you really want. He is a friend of the show, where we previously featured his book “Hooked”...
Aug 11, 2021•1 hr•Season 14Ep. 287
What makes your favourite nonfiction books so compelling, understandable, or enjoyable to read? Those works connect with you, as a reader. When you recognize what's happening, you can apply those same methods to your own writing. Whether you're an expert trying to communicate with a mainstream audience or a nonfiction writer hoping to reach more people, our guest offers us the insight we need to reach more people with your words. It’s a pleasure to welcome the author of "Writing to Be Understood...
Aug 04, 2021•56 min•Season 14Ep. 286
