Category Archives: Leadership

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477: Why Work is No Longer Working and What Do To About It with Seth Godin

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Today is a real treat for me (and for you), as I get to welcome—for the third time—the person I consider to be one of the world’s greatest thinkers and authors. He’s certainly had a huge impact on me and my life.

seth godin

That thinker and author is the one and only Seth Godin. He’s written his twenty-first book, and today is the day we get to welcome it to the world.

It’s called The Song Of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams.

Seth argues that real value at work is no longer measured by easy indicators of industrial productivity, but by effective personal interactions, innovation, creative solutions, and resilience. In a world ruled by remote work and artificial intelligence, leaders must disentangle themselves from the pervasive industrialized management system created in the early twentieth century and adopt a new leadership style that places humans at the forefront.

The futility of commanding people to care and managing for short-term results has become clear to
everyone. Instead, leaders must aspire to create the best jobs their employees have ever had while
creating conditions for systemic change. The emotional labor of employees who truly participate in an organization’s mission is the competitive advantage that all businesses need and what the exceptional ones produce.

In The Song of Significance, Seth provides a roadmap for the business leaders who are willing to
create a meaningful future while bravely rejecting the outmoded management models that are no longer serving us. As he writes, “Choosing significance is to dance with fear, and choosing fear
requires belief that what we’re doing matters.”

I hope you’ll click the play button below to learn more about Seth and his work. For a summary, just keep scrolling.

Join in on our chat below

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476: Choosing Greatness and Achieving Exceptional Outcomes with Christina Curtis

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Today’s guest is not only a podcast guest, she’s also the first guest expert inside the new premium tier of my online Read to Lead Community called Read to Lead+.

christina curtis

Her name is Christina Curtis, and she’s a thought leader on motivation and goal attainment, and regularly contributes to the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Psychology Today.

Her new book, released earlier this month, is called Choosing Greatness: An Evidence-Based Approach to Achieving Exceptional Outcomes.

I read it from cover to cover and nearly ran out of ink in my highlighter while doing so.

Christina asks questions like, “Do you yearn to achieve more? Do you want to make more? Do more? Well, you are not alone. We are all drawn to the irresistible sensation of accomplishing great things and succeeding mightily.

Yet despite our best efforts, ultimate success and joy can seem so elusive. Why? All too often we are running on autopilot, repeating past behaviors, and achieving the same results.

In Choosing Greatness, Christina combines her decades of practical experience in business psychology and her conversations with some of the greatest leaders of our generation—Richard Branson, CEO of the Virgin Group; Javier Rodriguez, CEO of DaVita Inc.; Jonathan Johnson, CEO of Overstock.com; Teena Piccione, executive at Google; Lara Merriken, founder of LÄRABAR®; and more—to teach you how to unlock the full potential of the greatest change agent imaginable: your own mind.

In the space between instinct and outcome, between reflex and reflection, between ordinary and extraordinary, lies choice, she says. Her book provides clear, easy direction on how to live more consciously in that space so you can push your brain to operate with peak efficiency and precision.

I hope you’ll click the play button below to learn more about Christina and her work. For a summary, just keep scrolling.

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475: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most with Adam Alter

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You may recall that in the first episode of 2023, I spelled out the six books I was most looking forward to in the first half of this year.

adam alter

Today, I’m thrilled to be able to feature the fourth of those six books. That book is Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most.

Adam has spent the past two decades studying how people become stuck and how they free themselves to thrive. Here he reveals the formula he and other researchers have uncovered. The solution rests on a process that he calls a friction audit—a systematic procedure that uncovers why a person or organization is stuck, and then suggests a path to progress.

The friction audit states that people and organizations get unstuck when they overcome three sources of friction: HEART (unhelpful emotions); HEAD (unhelpful patterns of thought); and HABIT (unhelpful behaviors).

Despite the ubiquity of friction, there are many great “unstickers” hidden in plain sight among us and Alter shines a light on some exceptional stories to share their valuable lessons with us. Getting stuck, Adam says, is a feature rather than a glitch on the road to thriving, but with the right tweaks and corrections we can reach even our loftiest targets.

I hope you’ll click the play button below to learn more about Adam and his work. For a summary, just keep scrolling.

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472: Arguing for the Good in Bad English with Valerie Fridland

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If you’ve ever wondered if I geek out over anything besides books, today you get your answer.

valerie fridland

It’s a related topic, as it involves a form of communication. Language.

Mind you, I was not a particularly strong language student in school (though I could diagram a sentence pretty well). But I scored a measly 405 on the language side of the SAT (okay, so I also got a 405 on the math half). Yep, a whopping 810. Yikes!

But my love for language, or at least learning about it as an adult, dates back at least 20 years when I read a book by John McWhorter called Doing Our Own Thing.

I remember thinking to myself at the time, “I don’t personally know a single other person who would enjoy this book the way I have.” 🙂 Us language nerds are weird that way, I guess.

But if you’re anything like me—and I’m guessing you because you enjoy this show—you’re in for a real treat today. My guest is Valerie Fridland. She’s written a book called Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English.

Language change, Valerie argues, is natural, built into the language system itself, and we wouldn’t be who we are without it. Her book celebrates the dynamic, ongoing, and empowering evolution of language, and it will speak to anyone who talks, or listens, inspiring them to communicate dynamically and effectively in their daily lives.

I hope you’ll click the play button below to learn more about Valerie and her work. For a summary, just keep scrolling.

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471: The Microstress Effect with Karen Dillon

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One of my favorite authors is Clay Christensen, who has written books like The Innovator’s Dilemma, Competing Against Luck, and How Will You Measure Your Life?.

karen dillon

One thing several of his books have in common is a coauthor by the name of Karen Dillon. She’s now cowritten another new book, this time with Rob Cross, called The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems—and What to Do About It.

Karen says there’s a force we encounter every day that we aren’t aware of—and it threatens to derail otherwise promising careers and lives: microstress.

This hidden epidemic of small moments of stress has insidiously infiltrated both our work and our personal lives with invisible but devastating effects. Microstress doesn’t trigger the normal stress response in our brains to help us deal with it.

Instead, it embeds itself in our minds and accumulates daily, one microstress on top of the other. The long-term impact can be debilitating. Unregistered microstress weighs us down, damages our physical and emotional health, and contributes to a decline in our well-being. What’s more, microstress is baked into our lives. The source is seldom a classic antagonist, such as a demanding client or a jerk boss. Instead, it comes from the people with whom we are closest: our friends, family, and colleagues.

The good news is that once you understand microstress, you can fight back. Rob and Karen share the secrets of a small set of people who’ve endured their share of microstress but have still managed to cultivate relationships that enable them to thrive both at work and in life.

I hope you’ll click the play button below to learn more about Karen and her work. For a summary, just keep scrolling.

Join in on our chat below

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