Category Archives: Leadership

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How to Go After What You Want and Get It with Jenny Wood – Episode 564 (M04)

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Our streak of highlighting female authors in 2025 continues with this month’s feature of Jenny Wood. She’s a former Googler, turned full-time author and speaker (turns out she’s amazing at both).

In her new book, Wild Courage: Go After What You Want and Get it, she poses the question:

What if the traits you need to get ahead are the exact opposite of what you’ve been told?

To be successful, she says, you need to be Weird, Selfish, Shameless, Obsessed, Nosy, Manipulative, Brutal, Reckless, and Bossy. And that takes courage.

As a former Google leader and top career coach who chased an attractive stranger off the subway and later married him, She knows her way around courage. In this book, she shatters conventional wisdom about achieving your goals. She gives you permission to ditch your fear and chase after what you want, unapologetically.  

To that end, she reclaims those nine traits mentioned above from their negative shackles and teaches you how to apply them in a savvy and sane way to supercharge your success, whether you’re trying to impress your new boss, snag a stretch promotion, or land a life-changing deal.

In short, Wild Courage coaches you to smash through your fear of discomfort, failure, and the judgement of others, to embrace your boldest self in pursuit of what you want. To be successful, you need to have courage. Wild amounts of it.

I hope you’ll click the play button below to learn more about Jenny and her new book.

Join in on our chat below

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A Holistic, Research-Backed Framework to Future-Proof Your Leadership with Paula Davis – Episode 563 (M03)

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Our third featured author of 2025 is stress and resilience expert, Paula Davis. She’s the founder and CEO of the Stress & Resilience Institute, and she’s spent her career helping people at every level—from CEOs to soldiers—to make work better.

Her latest book, Lead Well: 5 Mindsets to Engage, Retain, and Inspire Your Team, delivers actionable and science-backed tools designed to empower leaders to create a culture that values well-being as much as productivity.

In the wake of the pandemic and on the cusp of the generative AI revolution, the world of work has undergone a seismic shift. Chronic stress, burnout, and employee disengagement have reached crisis levels, and leaders are struggling to keep their teams motivated and inspired amid relentless change and uncertainty.

Paula says conventional management approaches are no longer sufficient, demanding a new leadership framework to address the root causes of these challenges.

To meet this moment, her book provides a timely and practical blueprint for a new era of leadership.

She draws on extensive research and workshops with thousands of leaders, and offers a transformative approach to building high-performing teams that can adapt and grow, even in the face of relentless change.

I hope you’ll click the play button below to learn more about Paula and her new book.

Join in on our chat below

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The Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior – Episode 562 (M02)

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It’s time to unveil our second (of twelve) books we’re featuring in 2025. That’s right. In case you’re late to the party, Read to Lead has moved from a weekly show to a monthly show. That means only a dozen books will get the spotlight this year.

The next book in our line-up is Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior by Sandra Matz. What’s it all about? Let’s dive in.

There are more pieces of digital data than there are stars in the universe, says Sandra. This data helps us monitor our planet, decipher our genetic code, and take a deep dive into our psychology.

As algorithms become increasingly adept at accessing the human mind, they also become more and more powerful at controlling it, enticing us to buy a certain product or vote for a certain political candidate. Some of us say this technological trend is no big deal. Others consider it one of the greatest threats to humanity. But what if the truth is more nuanced and mind-bending than that?

In Mindmasters, Sandra, a Columbia Business School professor, reveals in fascinating detail how big data offers insights into the most intimate aspects of our psyches and how these insights empower an external influence over the choices we make. This can be creepy, manipulative, and downright harmful, with scandals like that of British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica being merely the tip of the iceberg.

Yet big data also holds enormous potential to help us live healthier, happier lives—for example, by improving our mental health, encouraging better financial decisions, or enabling us to break out of our echo chambers.

With passion and clear-eyed precision, Sandra shows us how to manage psychological targeting and redesign the data game.

Mindmasters is a riveting look at what our digital footprints reveal about us, how they’re being used—for good and for ill—and how we can gain power over the data that defines us.

I hope you’ll click the play button below to learn more about Sandra and her new book.

Join in on our chat below

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Closing the Courage Gap with Margie Warrell – Episode 561 (M01)

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This episode marks the launch of our new release schedule. Just 12 books are being featured this year, and the first of those 12 comes from an author who has made three previous appearances on the show.

Her name is Dr. Margie Warrell. She isn’t just a bestselling author—she’s a globally respected speaker, coach, and advocate for courageous action.

Her newest book is called The Courage Gap: 5 Steps to Braver Action, and I’m thrilled you’re about to hear her wisdom on how to tackle self-doubt, take more meaningful risks, and step boldly into the life you’ve always imagined.

Margie’s perspective on living bravely couldn’t be more timely, and I know you’re going to walk away from this episode feeling challenged and inspired to close your own courage gap.

Do you sometimes hold back when you know you need to speak up or step forward?

Fear creates the gap. Courage closes it.

Margie’s powerful guide cuts through the hype to connect the ‘why’ of courage to the ‘how’ of courage.

Drawing on cutting-edge research woven together with stories that compel head and heart, The Courage Gap will help you bridge the think/do gap between what you’ve been doing and what you can do; between where you are and where you want to be—in your career, relationships, leadership, and life.

Distilling theory and hard-won wisdom spanning from Margie’s childhood in rural Australia to her decades of living around the world and coaching ‘insecure overachievers’ in Fortune 500 organizations, Margie shares a powerful 5-step roadmap to reprogram the self-protective patterns of thought and behavior that sabotage success to bring your bravest self to your biggest challenges and boldest vision.

At a time when courage seems in short supply, in a culture continually stoking insecurity and anxiety, this book will transform your deepest fears into a catalyst for your highest growth and the greatest good.

Applying the five steps will:

  • Ignite passion and unlock the potential fear holds dormant
  • Rewrite the scripts that have kept you stuck, stressed, and living too safely
  • Reset your ‘nervous’ system and embody courage in critical moments
  • Transform discomfort as a cue to step forward and expand your bandwidth for bold action
  • Reset your relationship to failure and make peace with the part of you that wimps out

For leaders, The Courage Gap provides a guide to operationalize and scale the courage mindset across your team and organization to deepen trust, dismantle silos, foster innovation, accelerate learning, and unleash collective courage toward a more secure and rewarding future.

I hope you’ll click the play button below to learn more about Margie and her new book.

Join in on our chat below

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560: Game-Changing Reads: 11 Books Every Leader Needs – Part 2

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In this two part, year-ending series, I unpack the eleven book that should be a part of every leader’s library. If there are any books on this list you haven’t yet made time for, I suggest you carve out time in 2025 for each of them.

In last week’s episode, I covered books #11 through #6. This week, I walk through the top #5.

In that there are 11 books on the list, you can dedicate a month to each, giving yourself a bit of extra time to get through the last of them as the holidays get under way in November and December.

You have two ways to engage with this week’s content. You can simply scroll down and read through the list. Or, if you prefer, click the play button below and allow me to present them to you.

Join in on the chat below

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