Beauty At Work

Kristine Braden is a global banker with 30 years’ experience working in Europe, Asia, the US, and Latin America. She worked for 26 years with Citigroup outside the US in a variety of senior roles, most recently as Europe Head, CEO and Board Member of Citibank Europe Plc in Ireland and CEO and Management Board Member of Citigroup Global Markets Europe in Germany.

She currently serves as a Board Director at Vontobel Holdings, an international investment firm with Swiss roots. She is also an Independent Director on the Board of KBC Group NV, a pan-European bank-insurance group headquartered in Belgium.

In this second part of our conversation, we talk about:

1. Dealing with major global disruptions from Europe: Brexit, COVID-19, and the war in Ukraine
2. Human resilience, compassion, and the mobilization of support during the Ukraine invasion
3. The value of empowerment and "coattailing" talented leaders
4. Beauty of mentoring women leaders
5. Kristine's real challenges at work and the beauty behind it
6. Role of faith and prayer as a lifeline for inner perspective
7. Beauty in the diversity of board governance roles
8. Creating a fulfilling career in finance

To learn more about Kristine Braden’s work, you can find her at: https://www.vontobel.com/ 

This season of the podcast is sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.

Support the show

Beauty is not a word most of us would associate with the world of finance. I mean if you wanted to spend a career pursuing beauty, Wall Street probably wouldn’t be top of your list. Banking is seen as a world of spreadsheets and regulations, of long stressful hours and high stakes, and since 2008, as an industry that has had to seriously earn back our trust.

But what if finance may be one of the most creative industries there is, not just despite its constraints but precisely because of them? And what if a bank, of all places, could be the vehicle to fulfill one’s desire to see the world and to make it better?

My guest today spent her entire career inside that world, and she sees it very differently from our stereotypical view of banking.

Kristine Braden is a global banker with 30 years’ experience working in Europe, Asia, the US, and Latin America. She worked for 26 years with Citigroup outside the US in a variety of senior roles, most recently as Europe Head, CEO and Board Member of Citibank Europe Plc in Ireland and CEO and Management Board Member of Citigroup Global Markets Europe in Germany.

She currently serves as a Board Director at Vontobel Holdings, an international investment firm with Swiss roots. She is also an Independent Director on the Board of KBC Group NV, a pan-European bank-insurance group headquartered in Belgium.

In this first part of our conversation, we discuss:

1. Kristine's childhood memory of beauty at the peak of California's high Sierras
2. How wanderlust and curiosity for different cultures shaped her vocational path
3. The choice to pursue global banking
4. Navigating major financial crises
5. Finding beauty in a sense of accomplishment within regulatory constraints
6. The sense of craftsmanship in the world of banking
7. The challenges of a cross-border environment

To learn more about Kristine Braden’s work, you can find her at: https://www.vontobel.com/ 

This season of the podcast is sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.

Support the show

What would it take to make your work environment more beautiful?

Many of us might instinctively think of adding something. Or we might treat the work environment as a backdrop and beauty as an accessory to it, not realizing how our spaces shape us. My guest today will help us rethink these tendencies.

Dr. Leidy Klotz is a behavioral scientist and engineering professor at the University of Virginia who studies how and why humans design.

He has written for the Washington Post, Fast Company, Scientific American, and Harvard Business Review.

He is also the author of Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less and his recent book, In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive.

In this second part of our conversation, we talk about:

1. Leidy's experience of learning the history of Memorial Gym at UVA as a source of beauty
2. Exercising agency within constrained physical spaces
3. Why we gravitate toward trivial decisions over complex, high-impact ones
4. The value of a "beauty audit" for noticing what we love in our spaces
5. How thoughtful environmental design fosters connection and belonging
6. Sense of collective agency in workspaces
7. The legacy of "Josie's Way"
8. Practical steps listeners can take to put themselves in a good place

To learn more about Leidy Klotz’s work, you can find him at:

https://leidyklotz.com/ 

Books and resources mentioned:

Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less (by Leidy Klotz)

In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive (by Leidy Klotz)

This season of the podcast is sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.

Support the show

What would it take to make your work environment more beautiful?

Many of us might instinctively think of adding something. Or we might treat the work environment as a backdrop and beauty as an accessory to it, not realizing how our spaces shape us. My guest today will help us rethink these tendencies.

Dr. Leidy Klotz is a behavioral scientist and engineering professor at the University of Virginia who studies how and why humans design.

He has written for the Washington Post, Fast Company, Scientific American, and Harvard Business Review.

He is also the author of Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less and his recent book, In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive.

In this first part of our conversation, we discuss:

1. Leidy's experience of beauty watching his son's soccer team
2. His career arc from professional soccer to behavioral science
3. Subtraction neglect and why our minds add before taking away
4. Simplifying complex physics down to the essence
5. Why jam-packed itineraries persist
6. The balance bike as a prime example of subtractive product innovation
7. How our physical surroundings shape our behavior, motivation, and well-being
8. The importance of agency, growth, and connection in the spaces where we live and work
9. The "space before screens" concept

To learn more about Leidy Klotz’s work, you can find him at:

https://leidyklotz.com/ 

Books and resources mentioned:

Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less (by Leidy Klotz)

In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive (by Leidy Klotz)

This season of the podcast is sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.

Support the show

This is the closing panel of our international symposium "Can beauty save the world?" held at McGill University, Oct 24-25, 2025, and focuses on ritual and spirit in the age of disenchantment.

We open with a song from singer-songwriter Tiffany Thompson.

Ayodeji Ogunnaike (McGill), Julian Carrón (Sacro Cuore, Milan), Matt Miller (Dzeici Theater), and Mauro Magatti (Sacro Cuore, Milan) called for the recovery of spirit as essential to beauty’s saving power. Deji drew on Yoruba philosophy, where character is beauty and truth may be transformative rather than pleasant. Fr. Carron asked whether beauty can help us open our whole selves to reality instead. Matt reflected on how beauty matters for change of state vs. change of being. Mauro argued that beauty saves only if we rehabilitate spirit as a structural dimension of human thought— resonant, decentering, transcendent, and mysterious.

The panel was moderated by novelist and theologian Tara Isabella Burton, who also offers closing remarks.

The event was sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.

Learn more at www.canbeautysavetheworld.com and www.beautyatwork.net

#beautyatwork #beauty #music #ritual #spirit #theology #yoruba #transformation

Support the show

This is a panel on the transformative power of art and architecture as part of the international symposium "Can beauty save the world?" held at McGill University, Oct 24-25, 2025.

The session begins with poetry from Olivia Wood, who moderated the panel.

Anjan Chatterjee (University of Pennsylvania) examined our vocabularies to express aesthetic experience and the relationship between transformational experience and third-person rendition. Alberto Perez-Gomez (McGill) noted that the value of architecture has always been its beauty, which orients us toward justice, festivity, and the common good. Stephen Legari (MMFA) shared how collective awe, experienced through slow looking and hospitality, can heal and connect. J.F. Martel distinguished between the beauty of the geometers vs. ecstatic beauty, and how art matters for both.

The panel was sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.

Learn more at www.canbeautysavetheworld.com and www.beautyatwork.net

#beauty #art #architecture #museum #arttherapy #philosophy #neuroscience #neuroaesthetics #philosophyofart

Support the show

In this panel during the international symposium "Can beauty save the world?" held at McGill University, Oct 24-25 2025, Jean-Sébastien Vallée (McGill), Katie Bank (Birmingham), Rebekah Wallace (Oxford), Ian Corbin (Harvard), and Jonathan Berger (Stanford) explored the transformative power of music. The panel was moderated by Stephen Bullivant (St. Mary's London).

We began with a performance by an acapella quartet from the Schulich School of Music (McGill).

Jean-Sébastien described the conductor’s task as creating a sonic space where sound becomes meaning—a community where difference becomes harmony. One of his singers, who had just lost her husband, came to perform because “singing with my choir is the only way I can breathe right now.” Katie and Rebekah described how early modern thinkers saw music as acting on the whole person, not as external stimulus but as an activity of the soul. Ian reflected on the relevance of music to our longing for wholeness, which passes through failure, undoing, despondence. Jonathan discussed his fascinating research on the sonic signatures of sacred spaces, and how the balance between clarity and blur in sound transforms acoustics into awe.

The event was sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.

Learn more at www.canbeautysavetheworld.com and www.beautyatwork.net

#beauty #music #transformation #philosophy #musicology #spirituality

Support the show

This is the opening panel for the international symposium "Can beauty save the world?" held at McGill University, Montreal, Oct 24-25, 2025.

We begin with introductions from Dan Cere (McGill), Brandon Vaidyanathan (Catholic University of America), Charles Taylor (McGill), and Tara Isabella Burton (Catholic University of America), followed by a panel discussion between Sean Kelly (Harvard), Elaine Scarry (Harvard), and Richard Kearney (Boston College), moderated by Bill Barbieri (Catholic University of America)

Sean Kelly reflected that beauty moves us beyond ourselves. It saves us from the flattening of meaningful differences. To encounter beauty is to order one’s life around the object of love. When we long for others to share in that recognition, we glimpse beauty’s political potential—it calls us into conversation rather than conflict.

Elaine Scarry deepened that insight, reminding us that the opposite of beauty is not ugliness, but injury. Beauty and justice both arise from a sense of fairness and the desire to repair harm. Beauty’s lasting impact, she noted, is generative—it makes us want to create.

Richard Kearney drew on Gerard Manley Hopkins’s image of the “pied” world—speckled, varied, alive with difference. Beauty, he said, is not pure symmetry but aftering: it often arrives through suffering and loss, reconciling the universal and the particular.

And Charles Taylor reminded us that beauty cannot be defined apart from itself. Its relation to truth is reciprocal, not hierarchical. To understand one, we must hold the other in view. “That,” he said, “is how beauty can save the world.”

The symposium was sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.

Learn more at www.canbeautysavetheworld.com and www.beautyatwork.net

#beautyatwork #beauty #aesthetics #philosophy #philosophyofbeauty

Support the show

Helen and Dave Edwards are co-founders of the Artificiality Institute, a nonprofit research organization that helps people stay human in the age of AI. They explore how AI changes the way we think, who we become, and what it means to be human. Through story-based research, education, and community, they help people choose the relationship they want with machines, so they remain the authors of their own minds.

Before founding the Artificiality Institute, they co-founded Intelligentsia.ai, an AI-focused research firm acquired by Atlantic Media. Helen previously led large-scale technology and transformation efforts in critical infrastructure, while Dave spent years shaping creative tools at Apple and investing in emerging technologies as a venture capitalist at CRV and an equity research analyst at Morgan Stanley and ThinkEquity.

In this second part of our conversation, we talk about:

1. Rethinking intelligence as something layered, embodied, and expressed in different forms
2.  The “SaaSpocalypse” moment on Wall Street
3.  The “Dust Bowl” metaphor and the risk of automating complex human systems too quickly
4.  Transition from the attention economy to the intimacy economy
5.  Dave and Helen’s reflections on what is lost when we use AI
6.  How AI systems uncover hidden structures in language, science, and the natural world
7.  Practical ways creators can decide where AI belongs in their creative process

To learn more about Helen and Dave’s work, you can find them at:

https://artificialityinstitute.org/ 

Books and resources mentioned:

The Artificiality, AI Culture, and Why the Future Will Be Co-Evolution (by Helen Edwards)

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

Support the show

Artificial intelligence is not only changing what we can do, but may be changing how we think. As AI systems increasingly participate in writing, reasoning, and decision-making, it becomes more urgent to ask what it means to retain human agency and ensure we're not losing our fundamental capabilities.

My guests today, Helen and Dave Edwards, have been working seriously on this question.

Helen and Dave Edwards are co-founders of the Artificiality Institute, a nonprofit research organization that helps people stay human in the age of AI. They explore how AI changes the way we think, who we become, and what it means to be human. Through story-based research, education, and community, they help people choose the relationship they want with machines, so they remain the authors of their own minds.

Before founding the Artificiality Institute, they co-founded Intelligentsia.ai, an AI-focused research firm acquired by Atlantic Media. Helen previously led large-scale technology and transformation efforts in critical infrastructure, while Dave spent years shaping creative tools at Apple and investing in emerging technologies as a venture capitalist at CRV and an equity research analyst at Morgan Stanley and ThinkEquity.

In this first part of our conversation, we discuss:

1. Helen and Dave's early childhood experiences of beauty
2. The origin of the Artificiality Institute 
3.  How AI is already reshaping the way we reason, write, create, and make decisions
4.  What happens to human reasoning and decision-making when AI becomes part of our thinking process
5.  The difference between “drift” and intentional authorship when working with AI
6.  Cognitive sovereignty as the central challenge of the AI era
7.  How can people use AI deeply and skillfully
8.  The concept of symbolic plasticity and how AI can reshape the frameworks we use to understand the world

To learn more about Helen and Dave’s work, you can find them at:

https://artificialityinstitute.org/ 

Books and resources mentioned:

The Artificiality, AI Culture, and Why the Future Will Be Co-Evolution (by Helen Edwards)

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

Support the show