In a world of hundreds of decisions every day, how do you reconcile your ethics and biases? Max Bazerman, award-winning author, distinguished educator, and Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, discusses his book, Better, Not Perfect . He shares how to become aware, honest, efficient, and smart about the decisions we make while not seeking the unrealistic standard of perfection. The framework he made outlines how to reach sustainability and maximum ...
Jul 24, 2021•46 min•Ep. 32
Two-thirds of executives say their organizations are incapable of supporting their strategies. In this episode, Paul Leinwand, Adjunct Professor of Strategy at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management and PWC Global Managing Director, talks about his book Strategy That Works . The author shed light on how successful companies like Lego and Ikea bridged the gap between strategy and execution. Join Paul and Greg as they discuss how these ideas permeate actual execution within the company's cult...
Jul 21, 2021•43 min•Ep. 31
What is it about the color blue that appeals to people around the world? Why is yellow and green disliked so much? According to Sally Augustin, Ph.D., author and environmental design psychologist, sensory experiences affect the way people think about spaces. This episode highlights the ways she integrated science-based insights into the design of work and living spaces. Sally and Greg discuss insights to help listeners understand what people want from their homes and workplaces. She touched on h...
Jul 19, 2021•47 min•Ep. 30
Strategies that have the greatest likelihood of success are also the most likely to fail. In his best-selling and critically acclaimed book, The Strategy Paradox , Deloitte Managing Director Michael Raynor stresses the need to redefine strategy and confront uncertainty to resolve this paradox. In this episode, Michael and host Greg La Blanc discuss his views on strategic commitments, weighing risks, diversification, and assumptions. Listen to his insight on the division of labor within the organ...
Jul 16, 2021•52 min•Ep. 29
Do individual traders and institutional investors suffer from psychological bias? This episode features an interview with Terry Odean, Rudd Family Foundation Professor and Chair of the Finance Group at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. He shares his journey from dropping out of a seminary to hitchhiking in Afghanistan, driving a cab in the 1970s, to starting his own statistical software company. Discover what Nobel economics laureate, Daniel Kahneman , has to...
Jul 10, 2021•49 min•Ep. 28
How do you raise successful children? T.R.I.C.K. them! No, it's not what you think. Esther Wojcicki, Woj to her friends, wrote about the T.R.I.C.K. technique in her book How To Raise Successful People: Simple Lessons For Radical Results . If you want to know what it stands for, you'll have to listen to the full episode. Don't miss the parenting tips the journalist and educator shares from her own experience raising three daughters and grandchildren. One of which is Youtube's C.E.O., Susan Wojcic...
Jul 07, 2021•55 min•Ep. 27
In today's business world, where everything happens at super speed, how does a company survive these accelerated changes? Author of the book Adaptive Space and Amazon Web Services Vice President for talent and Development, Michael Arena, discusses how creating Adaptive Spaces in the workplace can help build agile teams. Over the years, agility has been one of the keys that help companies survive the rapidly changing market. Listen to his conversation with host Greg LaBlanc about finding the righ...
Jul 05, 2021•53 min•Ep. 26
Humans have intuitive and reflective beliefs. Often, these affect how we weigh and process our arguments and views. Listen to Hugo Mercier, Cognitive Scientist and Author of Not Born Yesterday , as he shares provocative findings from his books. In this episode, he and host Greg LaBlanc have fascinating conversations on what kind of environments shape our biases and what we choose to believe in. Don't miss their discussion on when and how to assess good and bad arguments to better our lives. Fina...
Jul 02, 2021•49 min•Ep. 25
What are the benefits of interdisciplinary research for educators in terms of gaining a deeper understanding of the larger issues that affect their field? The noted literary critic Gary Saul Morson and leading economist Morton Schapiro discuss how humanities, especially literature, offer economists ways to make their models more human, their predictions more accurate, and their policies more effective and fair. Their book Cents And Sensibility provided critical insights and lessons during this e...
Jun 28, 2021•45 min•Ep. 24
Despite its decentralized governance and vulnerability, why does Blockchain excite even the most powerful companies and governments? Associate Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics at Wharton, Author, and Founder of Supernova Group Consulting Firm, Kevin Werbach dives into the details of his book, The Blockchain And The New Architecture Of Trust . Listen as he discusses with host Greg LaBlanc how we can put ourselves in the position of confident vulnerability and how the different tru...
Jun 23, 2021•53 min•Ep. 23
How do companies and firms become unstuck to pursue sustainable competitive advantage? Best-selling author, globally renowned strategic advisor, and Columbia Professor, Rita McGrath has an in-depth conversation with host Greg LaBlanc on sustaining a culture of innovation and strategy. Their chat revolved around her two books: The End Of The Competitive Advantage And Discovery-Driven Growth . The episode covers interesting points on how to avoid having a whipsaw reaction when major external event...
Jun 21, 2021•50 min•Ep. 22
How can artificial intelligence benefit your business? Ajay Agrawal, Author and Geoffrey Taber Chair of Rotman talks about A.I. and how it generates predictions. In this episode, Ajay and Greg unpack the book Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics Of Artificial Intelligence . The episode focused on how A.I. predictions require enough data. As more data becomes available, it becomes easier to find critical relationships, leading to better forecasts. In the past, data analytics was limited to t...
Jun 18, 2021•47 min•Ep. 21
What are the steps to fostering collaboration in the academe, firms, industries, and organizations? Professor Richard Lyons, UC Berkeley's Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer, talks about his new position and new learnings. He discusses how the university is working to create an interface zone where ideas can be co-developed into commercial applications. Hear how the university's Changemaker project encourages critical thinking, collaboration, and communication as essential factors in ...
Jun 16, 2021•54 min•Ep. 20
Is Venice east or west of Naples? Our perception of an environment is often influenced by how we categorize things by proximity. Often, we associate words with the way humans think, but we tend to overlook actions and movements. Language is important, but pictures are better remembered than words. In this episode, Stanford Professor and member of the governing board of the International Union of Psychological Science, Barbara Tversky discusses how gestures, motion, scenes, and events become the ...
Jun 15, 2021•56 min•Ep. 19
When markets are dynamic, it’s important that firms become dynamic too. Listening and understanding what's going on in the environment, outlining what the opportunities are, what the threats are is extremely important. Host Greg LaBlanc and Organizational Economist, David Teece unpack his Dynamic Capabilities Framework. In this episode, David and Greg tackle the importance of making sense of the organization’s learning, formulating a view of what this means for your investment behavior, quickly ...
Jun 11, 2021•49 min•Ep. 18
What is the extent to which good fencing makes good neighbors? How much of your innovation process should you make public? Henry Chesbrough, the developer of the term Open Innovation, discusses open innovation processes in practice. The author provides examples from companies like Microsoft, AWS, and P&G using open innovation within the company. During his discussion with Greg La Blanc, he delved into concepts on how companies can maintain both exploitation and exploration through innovation...
Jun 09, 2021•51 min•Ep. 17
Women from different species, including humans, who had better help and support have better chances of survival. What can we learn from mother nature? Sarah B. Hrdy professor emerita at the University of California Davis, and Associate in the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard talks about her books: Mothers And Others, The Woman That Never Evolved , and Mother Nature . Listen to Greg and Sarah as they discuss allomotherhood and alloparenting, foundational concepts that ensured...
Jun 07, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 16
Can overconfidence harm you? Despite popular belief, psychologists and experts state that overconfidence can also lead to failure. Avoiding a different perspective can limit your judgment. How much confidence is good? How do you make sure you're not underconfident? Don Moore, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Berkeley Haas talks about his book called Perfectly Confident: How To Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely . Together with host Greg, they unpack ways people can weigh their options properl...
Jun 04, 2021•54 min•Ep. 15
What happens when you confine an animal in a box with nothing to do but push a lever to disperse food? According to a study by the American psychologist B.F. Skinner, he discovered that the caged animal would most likely press the lever vigorously. How does this relate to human work environments? Barry Schwartz, psychologist, author, and professor analyzes and dissects factors that affect people's motivation for satisfactory work in his book entitled Why We Work . Barry and host Greg LaBlanc exp...
Jun 02, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 14
Taking a one-sided approach to entrepreneurship and business won't work. The key to success in business is to put different skill sets from your toolbox into play. But how do you apply that in real life when a lot of things happen all at the same time? Are there things that business school didn’t teach you? Jay Barney, Presidential Professor of Strategic Management, and Pierre Lassonde Chair of Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business unpacks his new nove...
May 31, 2021•38 min•Ep. 13
What clues can carry trading give us about the past two decades of international economic downturns? Kevin Coldiron is a Lecturer at UC Berkeley's Haas Business School. He’s also the is the co-owner of Algert Coldiron Investors. After 25 years in quantitative finance, Coldiron has a new book called The Rise Of Carry: The Dangerous Consequences Of Volatility Suppression And The New Financial Order Of Decaying Growth And Recurring Crisis. In this episode, we’ll hear more about the four characteris...
May 28, 2021•48 min•Ep. 12
How does the First Amendment really work? Why is it important to understand the difference between free speech and free action? What role, if any, should social media companies like Twitter or Facebook play in policing the online speech? Stanley Fish is a literary theorist, legal scholar, and New York Times best-selling author. He is also a professor of law at Florida International University and a visiting professor of law at the Cardozo School of Law. He explores all of these questions in his ...
May 26, 2021•53 min•Ep. 11
A Demon Of Our Own Design is a provocative title for a first book. But that's just the kind of work Richard Bookstaber does. Richard has been a practitioner in the world of finance for many years. He is currently the Head of Risk at Fabric RQ, and previously worked at Bridgewater, Morgan Stanley, Solomon brothers, and was the Chief Risk Officer at the University of California. These roles have put him at the center of some of the critical crises of the last three decades – working with portfolio...
May 24, 2021•51 min•Ep. 10
Publishing a book with no graphs is quite the feat in the world of economics. But that’s part of Charles Wheelan’s mission: using storytelling to get his point across. In this episode, Charles Wheelan joins host Greg LaBlanc. Charles is a senior lecturer and policy fellow at the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College and teaches courses on education policy, health care, tax policy, income inequality, and related topics. He is also the author of numerous books, including Naked Money, Naked Stati...
May 21, 2021•58 min•Ep. 9
Stanford health economics professor Jay Bhattacharya has said that the coronavirus is one of the biggest failures of the economics profession. And whether or not that’s an exaggeration, it’s true many economics have stayed quiet throughout the course of this virus. But not Joshua Gans. Joshua Gans is a Professor of Strategic Management and holder of the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto (with a cros...
May 19, 2021•58 min•Ep. 8
In 2020, venture capitalists invested about $150 billion into U.S. start-ups, according to the data company, Crunchbase. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, local startups in Southern California are securing more investment dollars in a single quarter than they used to get in an entire calendar year. This surge of capital is not necessarily a new trend, but it has shifted power from the investors to the entrepreneurs. Perhaps no one knows this better than Scott Kupor. The entrepreneur turn...
May 17, 2021•42 min•Ep. 7
Although it’s usually associated with teenagers, psychologists and economists have long understood that “peer pressure” is not limited to adolescence. When we grow up, we want our kids in the best schools, we want beautiful homes, cars, and weddings even though none of those things are directly related to happiness. In his new book, economist and author Robert Frank explores how social influence is a two-way street. Our environments encourage undesirable behavior, but perhaps we can also use tho...
May 14, 2021•54 min•Ep. 6
How can the distinct habits of chimps and bonobos inform us about human evolution and behavior? Today we speak with Richard Wrangham, a research professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. For more than three decades, the English anthropologist, primatologist, and author has studied primate behavior as it relates to human social behavior, evolution, and warfare. Richard Wrangham is also the founder of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project. In this episode, we’ll hear more from ...
May 12, 2021•49 min•Ep. 5
Terry Burnham is a Professor of Finance at Chapman University, and an author whose works include Mean Genes and Mean Markets And Lizard Brains. But he was also in the military, a former Goldman Sachs employee, and founded a startup; all experiences which lend to his unique perspective on biology, economics, and psychology. In this episode of unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc, we talk about his time at Harvard Business School, using biology to make sense of human behaviors, and the very human concept of...
May 12, 2021•40 min•Ep. 4
The average life expectancy of a company on the S&P 500 is less than half of what it was 60 years ago. How have some companies managed to adapt and evolve while others have gone by the wayside? Today we speak with Charles O’Reilly, professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is also the co-author of several books including Lead And Disrupt: How To Solve The Innovator's Dilemma . In this episode, we’ll hear more from Charles about what makes a successful leader, how large compan...
May 10, 2021•41 min•Ep. 3
