What would happen if a business-minded Encylopedia Brown entered the busy line of movie patrons waiting impatiently for soda and popcorn?

This perspective guided Clarke Ching in writing his latest book, The Bottleneck Detective. It offers a straightforward and enjoyable reading experience, focusing on identifying bottlenecks and understanding their subsequent effects on bottleneck detection.

Mark explores Clarke's FoCCCus framework and whether bottleneck detection is a learned skill or an innate talent.

World of Work Experts on the People and Performance Podcast
Interviews with experts and business leaders focused on ways to inspire employees.

Are you fan of Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely, or Richard Thaler? Have you enjoyed books like Fooled by Randomness, Factfulness, or Thinking in Bets? If so, you may want to read Jaime Lester's new book, Pause to Think, about cognitive biases.

Jaime's concise book is engaging, memorable, and accessible. It features over thirty mental and conceptual models. This discussion explores some of these concepts, including fast and slow thinking, sunk costs, satisfaction, and randomness.

World of Work Experts on the People and Performance Podcast
Interviews with experts and business leaders focused on ways to inspire employees.

Glenn Hopper's newest book is AI Mastery for Finance Professionals, but the content is also for CEOs, board members, and all other organizational leaders. We keep the topics pragmatic, applicable, and example-centric in this conversation. We'll also discover what Glenn means by saying, "AI will not replace people. People who use AI will replace those who don't use AI."

World of Work Experts on the People and Performance Podcast
Interviews with experts and business leaders focused on ways to inspire employees.

One of the best books I've read on leadership in several years is by a former big-company CEO who is now a professor. Willie Pietersen's third book is Leadership - The Inside Story.

In this fast-moving conversation, we hear about how Nelson Mandela learned, unlearned, and relearned the central tenets of philosophy and leadership well before his vision of a unified country could become a reality.

We also learn how a diamond is formed and how those three forces apply to leadership. The question that won a war is profound, as is finding out what happens when an elder dies.

World of Work Experts on the People and Performance Podcast
Interviews with experts and business leaders focused on ways to inspire employees.

When I think of HP, three things quickly emerge in my mind: Deskjet and laser printers, the 12C calculator, and David Packard's The HP Way.

The HP Way is one of my top 25 books written by CEOs. In this conversation, we're rolling with a book club format with a special guest who writes book summaries on his blog. Dan Lebrero is a software engineer based in Spain, and he'll help us unpack concepts such as MBO, management by walking around, profit-sharing plans, corporate offsites, growth frameworks, and philosophies on debt management. 

World of Work Experts on the People and Performance Podcast
Interviews with experts and business leaders focused on ways to inspire employees.

Cat Mulvihill is becoming a rising YouTube star with her video content focused on communication and presentation skills, including technology, Zoom, and personal knowledge management systems.

This conversation teaches us what sets the best professionals apart from the rest on their Zoom calls. We gain insights on the best mics, videocams, and other technologies to use. We also wrap up the visit with simple ways to kill our filler words.

World of Work Experts on the People and Performance Podcast
Interviews with experts and business leaders focused on ways to inspire employees.

If you work for yourself or would like to, have you ever thought about whose shoulders you are standing on, especially if you decide to have no employees?

Ben Waterhouse is a professor and faculty director at the University of North Carolina. His research interests include deciphering how self-employment became a key to personal fulfillment, a central topic in his newest book, One Day I'll Work for Myself.

In this conversation, we explore some of history's most pivotal stories that led to the plateau of big business starting in the late 1800s and reaching its peak in the 1970s. We learn why the move to self-employment became a potential remedy to professional and personal relevance in Ben's engaging style. 

World of Work Experts on the People and Performance Podcast
Interviews with experts and business leaders focused on ways to inspire employees.

Have you ever wondered how Amazon, Netflix, and Starbucks started their customer personalization programs? What was the starting point? What were the costs? Who was involved?

The co-authors answer these questions in the very readable Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI.

Mark Abraham and David Edelman explain that personalization is not email or glorified loyalty rewards programs. Instead, this cross-functional activity starts with a few simple questions in their 5 Promises framework, a launching pad for creating a customer personalization journey. 

World of Work Experts on the People and Performance Podcast
Interviews with experts and business leaders focused on ways to inspire employees.

If you were to ask me about my favorite book on private equity, I would say The Private Equity Playbook by Adam Coffey. The book is easy to read, the math is simple and impactful, and the stories are based on a former CEO who understands the intricacies behind private equity.

Adam has released the second edition of this book, which is about 20 percent longer with new material. This conversation addresses the continued growth of private equity, committed capital, Adam's 70-30 rule, and a funny locksmith story.

World of Work Experts on the People and Performance Podcast
Interviews with experts and business leaders focused on ways to inspire employees.

As a financial leader, I want to know every aspect of business. While quarterbacking my share of ERP implementations, I had only once heard the term PMO (short for Project Management Office). Accordingly, I wanted to learn more.

After reading Laura Barnard's new book on PMOs, I quickly realized she is probably the global thought leader on this subject.

Laura's new book is The IMPACT Engine: Accelerating Strategy Delivery for PMO and Transformation Leaders. We spend most of our time unpacking her IMPACT Engine System, which has a 100% success rate. In the lightning round, we cover MVPs vs. prototypes, perfectionism, lovers and haters, outcomes vs. outputs, and 30-90s. 

World of Work Experts on the People and Performance Podcast
Interviews with experts and business leaders focused on ways to inspire employees.