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Episode Summary
Mark Miller joined Chick-fil-A as a teenager in 1978, when founder Truett Cathy personally interviewed him and the company had just 15 corporate employees. Over 45 years he started the company's corporate communications, quality and customer satisfaction, organizational effectiveness, and leadership development functions. In this conversation, Mark explains why so many capable leaders lose their edge, why short-term thinking starves organizations of real insight, and why questions may be the most underused tool a leader has.
About Mark Miller
Mark Miller is a bestselling author, speaker, and leadership researcher. For roughly 30 years he led research teams at Chick-fil-A that asked one question on every major topic: what is universally true? The answers, drawn from studies involving thousands of people across multiple countries, became a library of books on execution, teams, engagement, culture, and talent, including The Secret, co-authored with Ken Blanchard and now published in 32 languages, and Smart Leadership.
What You Will Learn
How "quicksand" quietly erodes leadership effectiveness at every level of an organization.
Why choices, not skills, determine how fast a leader gets unstuck.
How a long-term perspective produces better decisions and better research.
Why an abundance mindset led Chick-fil-A to share its leadership research with the world.
How to use questions to prepare, lead, and learn more deliberately.
Episode Highlights
Mark describes leadership quicksand as a toxic mix of busyness, distraction, complexity, fear, fatigue, and sometimes even success. When a leader is in it, the focus shifts to survival, and nobody is thinking about engagement, customers, or the future. Worse, a stuck leader cannot pull anyone else out, so entire teams sink together.
His research found that the leaders who rarely get stuck, or escape quickly, are not more skilled. They make different choices, and one of the most important is fueling their own curiosity.
Mark's practical tactic is "Ask, Don't Tell." Leaders will always need to give direction, but the bias should lean toward asking. He recalls Jim Collins challenging thousands of leaders to double the number of questions they ask each day, and then double it again.
Mark practices what he teaches. Before a four-hour strategy session, he prepared 26 questions. Before any budget presentation, his team drafted at least 50 questions they expected to face and prepared the answers in advance.
Michael and Mark also discuss why outside perspectives sharpen performance, why most companies lack the patience for multi-year research, and why Chick-fil-A, in Mark's words, was an overnight success that took 45 years.
Connect with Mark Miller
Website: https://leadeveryday.com
Mark's services include coaching, training, workshops, keynotes, and leadership resources.
Mobile (shared at Mark's request): 678-612-8441
Take the Next Step
If quicksand sounds familiar inside your organization, find out where your leadership system is losing traction. Visit https://www.breakfastleadership.com/leadershipos to schedule your company's Leadership Diagnostic.
YouTube Tags: Breakfast Leadership Show, Mark Miller, Chick-fil-A leadership, Smart Leadership, leadership quicksand, leadership effectiveness, leadership development, asking better questions, curiosity in leadership, executive leadership podcast, Ken Blanchard The Secret, Jim Collins leadership, long-term thinking in business, workplace culture, Michael D. Levitt
Note: The Breakfast Leadership Show includes occasional paid partner episodes, in which the guest has paid to appear.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
AI is moving faster than any technology wave most executives have lived through, and marketing sits at the front of it. Michael D. Levitt talks with Michael Cucchi, Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Hydrolix, a real-time analytics platform built for internet scale. Both worked in IT through the dot-com era and Y2K, and they use that history to put the current AI moment in perspective.
Key TakeawaysCEOs, CMOs, product and marketing operations leaders, and IT and security leaders deciding how fast and how safely to adopt AI.
About the GuestMichael Cucchi is Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Hydrolix. He began in IT, including leading a government data center during the dot-com era, and now leads a marketing and product team that builds with Claude Code and Claude skills.
Connect with Michael CucchiAI changes the tools, but results still depend on leadership, structure, and team habits. Visit https://www.breakfastleadership.com/leadershipos to schedule your Leadership Diagnostic for your company.
Note: The Breakfast Leadership Show includes occasional paid partner episodes, in which the guest has paid to appear.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Ganzorig Ulziibayar spent twenty years as a CEO, starting as a staff member and rising through the ranks before founding his own business. He is now chairman of a financial group made up of three insurance companies, an asset manager and an investment bank, and he is the author of Strategy as Attitude. He arrived at that title after watching a great many brilliant people fail.
What he found was that failure had nothing to do with pedigree, school, an MBA, IQ or EQ. Through fifteen years of productivity psychology research he concluded that psychology accounts for more than seventy percent of what determines a person's productivity, and that the deciding factor sits in the subconscious. He reached the same conclusion a second time from a completely different direction, as a practitioner who once managed 120 executives at a multi-billion dollar bank and watched capable people fail for one reason: they preferred themselves. He describes diagnosing those leaders as deaf, unable to hear customers, staff or colleagues even with reality in front of them.
His answer is three attitudes latent in everyone and suppressed by modern education and individualism: being a giver rather than a taker, taking the customer's perspective rather than your own, and being productive rather than merely saving cost, time and energy. He explains why a selfish person can never articulate a strategy, why a product is by definition something given to someone else, and why he ranks customers first, staff second, shareholders third, executives fourth and the CEO fifth. Michael and Ganzorig also get into where companies are getting AI wrong, why strategy is the work AI cannot take, and what it means that more than half the Fortune 500 from the year 2000 no longer exists.
What you will learnGanzorig Ulziibayar is a practitioner strategist who spent twenty years as a CEO, starting as a staff member and rising through the ranks before founding his own business. He is now chairman of a financial group comprising three insurance companies, an asset manager and an investment bank. He has led as many as 120 executives at a multi-billion dollar bank as well as startups of twenty to thirty people, and has spent fifteen years researching productivity psychology. He is the author of Strategy as Attitude, and of a history book.
ConnectNote: The Breakfast Leadership Show includes occasional paid partner episodes, in which the guest has paid to appear.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Michael Levitt sits down with Ilene Fischer, a former chemical engineer turned organizational change consultant who spent ten years working alongside Peter Senge at Innovation Associates and eight years with Tom Peters. Ilene's new book, Innovation Ecosystems: A Dynamic Blueprint for Organizational Success and Engagement, publishes October 22nd through Hachette, with a foreword written by Peter Senge himself.
The conversation covers why systems thinking has gone from a nice to have to a have to have, why most AI deployments fail because they get layered onto broken processes instead of fixing them, and why the single highest leverage move in any organizational change effort is making people feel heard. Ilene and Michael both draw on real client cases, including a private equity roll up of eight home health and hospice companies and a healthcare insurance client that grew operating margin from 15 million dollars to 52 million dollars in a single year using her WOW Teams methodology.
Key TakeawaysIlene Fischer began her career as a chemical engineer and the first woman engineer at Raytheon in Andover, before moving into quality management and eventually organizational change consulting. She spent a decade working directly with Peter Senge at Innovation Associates and eight years with Tom Peters, and she developed the WOW Teams methodology used to align strategic goals with frontline execution.
Her book, Innovation Ecosystems: A Dynamic Blueprint for Organizational Success and Engagement, is available for pre-order on Amazon now and releases October 22nd. Peter Senge wrote the foreword. Ilene is hosting a launch event on October 22nd featuring Peter Senge as a speaker.
Connect with Ilene:
Website: https://sophianetwork.net
Email: [email protected]
To bring this same systems thinking to your own organization, visit https://www.breakfastleadership.com/leadershipos to schedule your Leadership Operating System diagnostic.
Note: The Breakfast Leadership Show includes occasional paid partner episodes, in which the guest has paid to appear.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Mike Sullivan is co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at OneDigital, an insurance and financial services organization with roughly 6,000 people across the United States and Canada. He is also co-author of the bestselling book Workforce Intelligence. He came on to talk about what three years of deploying AI inside his own company actually taught him, and the answer is not what most executives are being sold.
The turning point was a single sentence. When OneDigital stopped thinking about AI as technology and started thinking about it as talent, and began hiring it, everything changed. Their people mentor the AI, teach it the job, and then hand it the work it genuinely does better. Each AI coworker has a name and a personality, and it becomes the repository of institutional knowledge that used to walk out the door when a 35-year employee retired.
Mike is direct about the condition that makes any of this work, which is trust. You cannot lay off ten thousand people in the name of AI and then tell the survivors you are all in on them. He also names the question almost nobody has answered yet: when a growing share of your workforce is AI talent, who manages it, and how do you measure a blended workforce? Michael and Mike also get into the disappearing bottom rungs of the corporate ladder, why Gartner expects a wave of companies to table AI projects over missing ROI, and why Mike now jokes that his father, a union ironworker from Buffalo, would finally call him pro-labor.
What you will learnMike Sullivan is co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at OneDigital, an insurance and financial services organization operating across the United States and Canada with roughly 6,000 employees. He is co-author, with Vinay Gidwani, of the bestselling book Workforce Intelligence, written deliberately for non-technical leaders who are trying to run companies through AI adoption without losing the trust of their people.
ConnectNote: The Breakfast Leadership Show includes occasional paid partner episodes, in which the guest has paid to appear.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
GUEST BIO
Stephanie Houser is a former Fortune 500 executive turned consultant, entrepreneur, and speaker. After 12 years in corporate leadership, she now runs a consulting practice focused on process, risk, product, and technology development for growing businesses. She also operates a self-publishing company that helps writers publish their books, and she is building an asynchronous ed tech tutoring platform. Stephanie speaks and serves on boards, bringing a cross-industry, problem-solving lens shaped by careers in writing, education, corporate leadership, and entrepreneurship.
Stephanie and Michael return repeatedly to staying the course.
She uses the image of turning a cruise liner, which takes three nautical miles of advance planning, to describe how leaders must commit to a long-term direction and resist shiny object syndrome, the short-term distractions that feel exciting but pull an organization off its planned path. Michael shares a cautionary example of a well-funded organization that lost its way chasing shiny opportunities instead of holding to its plan.
They also discuss shrinking attention spans. Stephanie notes that undivided attention today lasts about 47 seconds, down from just over two minutes in 2004, so a message needs to be repeated rather than delivered once.
She points to the marketing rule of seven as a reminder that repetition, not length, makes information land.
The episode closes on personal development as an ongoing discipline. Stephanie encourages leaders to listen more than they speak, admit when they are wrong, spotlight the people doing good work, and learn to say no with confidence, backed by reasoning rather than a title.
Note: The Breakfast Leadership Show includes occasional paid partner episodes, in which the guest has paid to appear.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Dr. Santarvis Brown, educator, pastor, author, and Chief Education Officer at ProQ, joins Michael D. Levitt on the Breakfast Leadership Show for a powerful conversation about leading with purpose. With over 20 years in education and 15 years in pastoral ministry, Dr. Brown brings academic rigor, spiritual grounding, and practical business insight to every leadership conversation.
The Leader You Have to Lead First: Yourself
In his book "Leading While Limping," Dr. Brown challenges leaders to confront their own "bang-ups and hang-ups" without filters or masks. When you avoid that internal reckoning, you risk inflicting your unresolved issues onto the people you lead. Authentic leadership begins with radical self-honesty. As Michael puts it, you will spend more time with yourself than with any other person on earth. Working through whatever you find within is not optional for any leader who wants to create lasting impact.
Impact Over Title
During his tenure as the top education official for the Seminole Tribe of Florida's Department of Education, a young student wandered to the executive floor looking for homework help. Dr. Brown pulled up a chair and helped him with his reading. When the boy's mother arrived, the student looked at her and said simply, "He's a teacher." That moment crystallized the principle Dr. Brown carries everywhere: your title comes and goes, but your impact remains.
The Story That Became a Chapter
Dr. Brown shares a defining story from "Leading While Limping." A university student he mentored went silent one evening, breaking from his usual enthusiastic greeting. Dr. Brown turned around in the parking lot, took the student to a nearby Denny's, and had a conversation about everything and nothing. At 1:30 a.m., the student sent an email with the subject line: "You saved my life." He had been on the verge of ending it rather than returning home without finishing his degree. Dr. Brown was on campus at 5:00 a.m. the next morning, and together they secured the funding needed to get him to graduation. Nearly 20 years later, that student still introduces Dr. Brown to everyone with the same words. The lesson: sometimes you are the aspirin to someone else's headache while carrying a migraine of your own.
Human Connection Is Not Optional
Leaders who isolate themselves behind titles miss the very thing that makes people want to follow them. Genuine presence, curiosity, and interest in another person are not soft skills. They are the foundation of any leadership worth building.
Growth as a Problem: The Chaos Tax
ProQ, founded on the book "Don't Walk Off a Cliff in Business" by Thomas McDonald, operates on a simple principle: predictable, scalable, reliable progress. Dr. Brown explains that not all growth is good growth. When growth outpaces process, businesses pay a chaos tax in inefficiency, burnout, and lost leadership bandwidth. ProQ helps organizations grow incrementally and intentionally so that progress becomes sustainable. As Dr. Brown puts it, businesses fail today not because they lack opportunity or know-how, but because they lack process.
Connect with Dr. Santarvis Brown
Learn more about ProQ at ProQSystems.com https://www.proqsystems.com
Connect directly with Dr. Brown at [email protected] and subscribe to his YouTube channel, The Leadership Doctor SB (https://www.youtube.com/@TheLeadershipDoctorSB), where he diagnoses leadership challenges every week.
Schedule Your Leadership Diagnostic
Visit https://www.breakfastleadership.com/leadershipos to schedule a leadership diagnostic for your company today.
Note: The Breakfast Leadership Show includes occasional paid partner episodes, in which the guest has paid to appear.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Most books about life after a career transition are written after the author has figured it all out. Geoff Curtis wrote his while still inside the uncertainty. That intentional choice is at the heart of "Embracing Your Own Purgatory," and it is what makes his perspective so rare and so honest.
After 30 years in biotech and pharmaceutical communications, Geoff exited his company and found himself in the disorienting in-between that so many high-achievers are completely unprepared for. He had the freedom. He had the resources. What he did not have was a roadmap for who he was without the title, the team, and the daily structure that had defined him for three decades.
In this episode, Geoff and Michael explore why leaders who spend their careers focused outward on results, teams, and growth are often the least equipped for the inward work that a major transition demands. Geoff makes the case that rushing to the next thing, whether a board seat, a consulting engagement, or a new venture, is often a way of avoiding the more important question of who you actually are beneath the role you played.
The conversation covers the uncomfortable reality that early career success can become a liability later in life, why men in particular are reaching out to Geoff after reading his book to share stories they have never told anyone, and how getting comfortable with uncertainty is not a sign of weakness but a prerequisite for genuine self-discovery.
Geoff also discusses what he learned from observing young physicians who took time away from their careers to travel and returned as better clinicians, and why he believes the leaders who do this kind of reflective work in their 40s and 50s are better positioned for whatever comes next than those who never slow down long enough to look inward.
If you have recently exited a company, are approaching a major career transition, or simply feel like your identity has become too entangled with your professional title, this episode will give you permission to sit with that discomfort a little longer and do the work that actually matters.
Book: "Embracing Your Own Purgatory"
Topics covered: Career transitions, business exits, identity after leadership, retirement planning, self-reflection, biotech and pharma industry, vulnerability in leadership, personal growth, purpose after work, life after business ownership
Note: The Breakfast Leadership Show includes occasional paid partner episodes, in which the guest has paid to appear.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
What You Will Learn
In this episode, you will discover how the most powerful experiences are engineered around a single shared emotional trigger that lives in both the audience and the brand simultaneously. You will learn why most corporate and museum experiences entertain without transforming, and what business leaders must do differently.
Guest Bio Bob Rogers is the founder of BRC Imagination Arts, a globally recognized experience design firm with 44 years of work spanning presidential libraries, cultural institutions, and major brand homes. His projects include the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Jameson Distillery experience in Dublin, and the nine-story Johnnie Walker Princes Street experience in Edinburgh. Rogers began his career in the magic shop at Disneyland, an experience that permanently shaped his philosophy on identity transformation. His forthcoming book, Deep Story, distills decades of award-winning methodology into a practical framework any leader can apply. Website: BobRogers.com | Company: BRCweb.com
Episode Summary Bob Rogers joins Michael Levitt on the Breakfast Leadership Show to discuss his forthcoming book, Deep Story, releasing September 8th. Rogers traces the origins of his approach to his days in the Disneyland magic shop, where he discovered that the most meaningful part of a demonstration was not impressing the audience but shifting their perception of what they themselves were capable of.
For 44 years, BRC Imagination Arts has been designing permanent experiences for iconic institutions and brands. The defining question his firm asks is not whether visitors were entertained, but whether the experience changed what they do next.
The conversation explores the core mechanism of Deep Story: finding the same pre-existing emotional trigger in both the audience and the subject, then building the entire experience around that common thread. Rogers argues this is what separates experiences that permanently alter behavior from those that simply produce a pleasant afternoon. The most resonant experiences cause people to feel that their own inner life is being articulated more clearly than they could manage themselves.
Rogers also reflects on why he wrote the book, citing mentors such as Marty Sklar and Buzz Price, Disney Imagineering giants who invested in him early. He describes the book as paying that generosity forward to the next generation of leaders.
Key Insights Transformation requires a target. Most organizations spend enormous resources creating experiences without defining the specific behavioral change they want to produce. Deep Story begins with that definition and works backward.
The shared emotional trigger is the architecture. It is about locating the same emotional truth that already exists in both the audience and the brand, then making that overlap the structural foundation of everything.
Identity shift is the highest outcome. The most powerful thing an experience can do is cause someone to see a new possibility in themselves.
Entertaining is not transforming. Memorability and enjoyment are not the metric. The metric is whether the visitor leaves prepared to act differently.
Resources and Links BobRogers.com | BRCweb.com | Deep Story releases September 8th
Call to Action If this conversation shifted the way you think about how your organization shows up for its customers, share it with a colleague responsible for customer experience, brand, or culture. Subscribe to the Breakfast Leadership Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, and visit BreakfastLeadership.com for more leadership resources.
Note: The Breakfast Leadership Show includes occasional paid partner episodes, in which the guest has paid to appear.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Kathy Solberg Book Discussion
Michael welcomed Kathy Solberg to discuss her background and book. Kathy shared her career journey from academia to running a leadership program and starting her own consulting company, Common Unity Consulting. She mentioned her upcoming book "Practical Tools for Workplace Transformation" releasing September 10th. The conversation touched on how Kathy's diverse experiences across academia, consulting, and running peer groups for various professionals have allowed her to accumulate valuable tools and skills that she uses to help others.
Kathy explained that many change management efforts fail because complex solutions are applied to complex problems without properly addressing existing systems and infrastructure. She described her "unweaving" process, which starts with noticing and clarifying current systems before acting, emphasizing the importance of understanding what works before implementing changes. Kathy noted that leaders often try too many different approaches without giving previous efforts enough time to succeed, leading to broken trust and employee exhaustion.
Michael shared his experience from government healthcare panels where doctors were often excluded from planning discussions, leading to failed implementations when doctors ultimately rejected the proposed solutions. He drew a parallel to current AI deployments, warning that many AI initiatives will likely fail by 2027 due to lack of proper oversight and understanding of standard operating procedures. Kathy agreed and added that many organizations struggle with creating meaningful strategic plans without proper human interaction in the process.
Kathy explained that her book, which took over three years to write, was inspired by her frustration with people wanting to return to pre-pandemic normalcy and her desire to share insights about creating a better future. She described the book as a gift of simplified systems and tools, including 302 worksheet pages that will be available for free on her website when the book launches in September.
Kathy discussed creating a book focused on workplace boundaries and control, which started as a personal project but evolved into a workplace-focused publication. Michael shared his experience with conference notes and learning resources, emphasizing the challenge of implementing new knowledge due to limited staffing. They both discussed the importance of applying learning to both personal and professional settings, with Kathy noting how her book addresses the connection between personal and workplace behavior.
Michael and Kathy discussed the promotion and release timeline for Kathy's book. They agreed to release promotional content gradually over a few days to build anticipation, with Michael's team handling the editing and distribution process. Kathy provided her website kathysolberg.com as the place for people to learn more about her work and the book.
Note: The Breakfast Leadership Show includes occasional paid partner episodes, in which the guest has paid to appear.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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