Activating Greatness: A Leadership Podcast

It took Philip 30 years to articulate his purpose: helping people discover what they can do that they didn't think they could. Today he brings that purpose to his role as CEO of Viedoc, the Uppsala-headquartered e-clinical company. In this episode, Philip joins host Alec McChesney to share why he asked his board to pause on eNPS and attrition targets and focus on mission, vision, and purpose first. He explains why he'll accept higher attrition to build an engaged team and why profit is the outcome measure rather than the goal. He also shares what Swedish lagom culture taught him about consensus and decision-making, and why trust, earned rather than demanded, holds a global team together. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

When things get uncomfortable, most of us either avoid or attack. Hilary Blair, CEO and co-founder of ARTiculate: Real & Clear and creator of Fruitful Friction, says there's a better option: stay in the conversation. In this episode, Hilary joins host Alec McChesney to explain the difference between friction and conflict and why polite is the death of progress. She also explains why companies that say they want diverse ideas often reward smooth instead. Drawing on decades as a drama teacher, director, and communication coach, she shows you why your tone and intention must align and why the receiver of feedback deserves as much power as the giver. She also explains how self-awareness lets you adjust without losing who you are. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 

Lisa OBrien had never worked in construction when she joined Procore 7.5 years ago. Then her team's global construction culture research proved nearly every hypothesis she brought in wrong. In this episode, Lisa joins host Alec McChesney to explain why construction isn't going through one transformation but three at once: technology, business, and culture. She covers what that does to the executives leading it and why many are choosing between burnout and becoming a bridge for the next generation. She also gives you three shifts any construction leader can start today: listen to learn, learn for the future, and mentor every young leader. You'll hear how Procore's Culture Academy came to be and why the industry's greatest magic, building a better world, now has to include building better people. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Seth Ingall spent 38 years at GEICO, rising to chief legal officer and chief claims officer, before joining Crash Champions as chief legal officer. He joins Alec McChesney to unpack why a mediocre process executed well beats a brilliant process executed poorly, how to hire for attitude, and what it takes to scale from eight body shops to 650 without losing the discipline that got you there.

Most leadership content is pump-up material. David Esposito wanted to talk about the other half — what happens when things go wrong, and what a company's response to failure actually reveals about it. He's earned the standing: a West Point graduate who led an infantry platoon with the 101st Airborne, then built a career in life sciences that includes two successful exits and, by his own accounting, two or three companies taken into bankruptcy.
 
 In this episode of Activating Greatness, host Alec McChesney sits down with David, President and CEO of ONL Therapeutics, to get practical about failure. David walks through the after action review he carried over from the Army and the phrase his team uses now: autopsy without blame. Put it on the whiteboard. No finger pointing. Get to the facts, find the learning, course correct. He's clear that it's rarely one meeting — the real issues surface the next morning, once people have slept on it.
 
 They also get into why he's revised the old Army line about there being no bad soldiers, only bad leaders; why what you tolerate becomes your culture; how to tell whether someone is genuinely coachable or just saying what gets them through the conversation; and the reality that the person who thrives at three people around a table often isn't the person who thrives at 300. David is candid about what it feels like to take a company over the cliff, why you have to own it, and why it doesn't have to define you.

Chad Foster grew up in Honey Grove, Texas — population 1,500 — running cattle, selling purple hull peas, working fireworks stands, and umpiring on weekends. His father rarely told him what to do. He just pointed, and let Chad think it through. The lesson that stuck: a good name takes generations to build and one decision to lose.
 
 In this episode of Activating Greatness, host Alec McChesney sits down with Chad, Regional Director at Modern Woodmen of America, to talk about recruiting, developing, and retaining people in a relationship business. Chad's approach cuts hard against how his industry usually recruits. Most firms sell the upside — the income, the freedom, the community impact. Chad leads with the opposite: this career is not for most people, and it's definitely not for everybody. He isn't hiring salespeople. He's hiring people who want to be entrepreneurs, and he'd rather someone self-select out in week one than wash out in year two.
 
 They get into how Chad's wife Casey pushed him to get what was "right here in my head" onto paper before the agency could scale, why he built managing director and senior advisor roles so that quitting means disappointing five or six people instead of one, and how the standard actually holds across California, Arizona, and Texas — not because Chad repeats it, but because his managers do. He also shares the advice from Modern Woodmen CEO Jerry Lyphout that reshaped how he leads: let the situation play out, be the thermostat rather than the thermometer, and let people who are better than you shine.

John Worden came up as an athlete, carried that into sales, and now builds commercial teams the way a coach builds a roster: clear roles, a scoreboard everyone can see, and a standard nobody is exempt from. As Chief Commercial Officer at Javara, he's spent 25 years in clinical research figuring out how to make competition sharpen a team instead of splintering it.
 
 In this episode of Activating Greatness, host Alec McChesney and John dig into competition as a leadership engine. John explains why he won't hire the lone wolf who scores the most goals but shares nothing, how he and his team spent three to four months breaking the business into three buckets — find work, win work, deliver work — and then built roles and leading indicators around each one. He walks through the top-down, bottom-up test for whether your metrics are actually sound, and what it means when the two don't meet in the middle.
 
 They also get into PAID, the standard John sets with every team he leads: passion, accountability, ingenuity, and dedication. He shares the story of two reps with identical targets and opposite methods — one a pure volume machine, one entirely custom — who both hit the number and then made each other better. And he makes the case that leaders should stop treating meetings as a substitute for leadership: if there's no decision, no alignment, and no action coming out of it, you don't need to be there.

Jenny Gattari has spent more than 30 years moving across manufacturing, R&D, supply chain, and commercial strategy — and she says almost none of it happened because she planned it. She turned down the Pfizer CentreOne role that became her favorite job. Someone else had to see it in her first.
 
 In this episode of Activating Greatness, host Alec McChesney sits down with Jenny, Global Business Development Lead at Pfizer CentreOne, to talk about what she calls being the magnifying glass: the leader's job of spotting the strengths people dismiss in themselves because those strengths come too naturally to notice. Jenny shares the story of a clinician handed to her because the resource was free, and what happened a year later when that same person presented the operating plan better than Jenny could have.
 
 They get into why it's easy to get people to follow you and hard to develop people who lead, how to separate strengths from job titles, why she gives assignments instead of feedback when someone resists a new direction, and how she uses team meetings to spotlight work rather than assign it. The conversation also turns to sales culture: why revenue is a team game, why compensation has to reflect that or the whole thing collapses into infighting, and why Jenny's best ideas have always come from a network of people who think nothing like he

Tom Ulbrich became President and CEO of Goodwill of Western New York on May 1, 2020 — and inherited eleven closed stores, roughly 45 days of cash, a beloved outgoing leader, and a major funding cut on day four. He was handed the keys with a pair of barbecue tongs.
 
 In this episode of Activating Greatness, host Alec McChesney sits down with Tom to unpack how he took an organization built for stability and evolved it — not replaced it — into something entrepreneurial, nimble, and comfortable with ambiguity. Tom explains why "we've always done it this way" was never the enemy, why his first attempt at driving change insulted 25-year employees, and how backing up the bus and reframing change as evolution unlocked years of growth.
 
 They also get into the discipline of building a functional org chart before you place people in it, why accountability without coaching is a leadership failure rather than an employee one, and the succession conversation Tom is having about himself right now: the organization needs a builder next, not a disruptor, and he's willing to say out loud that it isn't him.

Jim Brown has spent 31 years in boardrooms and C-suites as a trusted advisor, and his new novel The Imperfect CEO: Making the Climb to Organizational Health is the book he wrote because the same frustrations kept surfacing with every leader he worked with. In this episode, Jim and Alec McChesney get into why the playbook that worked twenty years ago has stopped working, how to make the financial case for organizational health to a board that thinks it's a $20K HR initiative, and why the four elements of the Ascent model — collaborative culture, leadership accountability, strategic momentum, and talent magnetism — map directly to the scalability, execution, growth, and people risks hiding in most businesses. Plus: what a company did to go from highest-cost to lowest-cost producer in twelve months, why WD-40 never laid off a single person in 25 years, and Jim's case that Gen Z refusing to "suck it up" is the best thing to happen to the workplace.