In Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union speech, he called out the need to train 100,000 STEM teachers in 10 years. Hearing that call, Talia Milgrom-Elcott started 100Kin10 and made it her mission to transform President Obama’s vision into reality. Using the insights she shares in this episode, she hit that goal in eight and a half years. 

Understanding that complex problems have interconnected roots she took a network approach, bringing together people already working on the key problems to collaborate and apply their collective knowledge to bear to break new ground. Along the way she created a methodology of identifying high leverage “keystone challenges” where efforts will have the most impact. 

Today, Talia has expanded the vision to Beyond100k, where she is working to end the STEM teacher shortage by 2043. She also opened up the Starfish Institute where she advises other nonprofits such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Bloomberg Philanthropies and many others to solve tough systemic problems. 

Beyond100K website: https://beyond100k.org/

The Starfish Institute website: https://beyond100k.org/

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What does the word “refugee” mean to you? Poverty? hardship? Misfortune? What about entrepreneurship, innovation and opportunity?

Patricia Letayf is the Executive Director at Five One Labs, a groundbreaking organization that empowers refugees to become entrepreneurs in places like Kurdistan, Iraq and Barranquilla, Colombia. Starting with $15,000 in seed money won in a pitch competition in graduate school, it’s become a global force for entrepreneurship. 

Through incubators, accelerators and a global network of mentors and experts, the organization has supported over 130 startups and awarded nearly $1 million in seed funding to founders since 2017. 

On this episode, Patricia shares her inspiring story and how she and her co-founders turned an idea into an engine for economic growth, and why investing in refugees isn’t just an act of goodwill—it’s an investment in the future of the communities and countries that welcome them.

Five One Labs website:  https://fiveonelabs.org/

Five One Labs LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fiveonelabs

Five One Labs Annual Report: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64b8d2eaacd68b3c353279d7/t/65cc6a078281c75008d6ee06/1734738647141/Annual+Report+2023.pdf

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When Jeff Softley joined Experian’s consumer division ten years ago, things looked bleak. The business had endured 16 quarters of declining revenues. It was being disrupted by venture backed fintech startups that didn’t need to turn a profit for years—if ever.

How do you run a business charging customers for what other companies are giving away for free? How do you compete against companies that don’t need to earn money?

That, in a nutshell, was the challenge Jeff Softley was facing.

The key to his salvation—And Experian’s—was understanding that they needed to change. You can complain that the competition is unfair all you want. But unless you can create new value, you’re toast.

So Jeff and his team set out to find how they could create a new business model that served consumers well. There were no easy answers, but they worked the problem and iterated until they got it right.

Today, Jeff Softley runs a $1.5 billion business serving 70 million customers

1. “Mobilizing people is only useful if you can channel it to influence institutions.” — Greg Satell
2. “Disruption teaches you that you’ve always got to be looking for what you can do that others cannot.” — Jeff Softley
3. “We didn’t tell anybody—we started with a test because tests are not threatening.” — Jeff Softley
4. “A new idea is like an ugly baby—you don’t take it to a biker bar and leave it to fend for itself.” — Greg Satell
5. “We clarified a North Star: we were going to build products that were first to market, best in market, or the only place on planet Earth you could get them.” — Jeff Softley

• Experian Boost – experian.com/boost
• Greg Satell’s Book, Cascades: How to Create a Movement That Drives Transformational Change – Amazon Link
• Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc. on Leading Innovation – Amazon Link

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Bob Sutton is among the most influential business scholars today. One of Stanford’s Business School’s most distinguished professors, a bestselling author of seven books including, most recently, The Friction Project, he has advised CEO’s ranging from Pixar’s Ed Catmull to IDEO’s David Kelley.

Yet his career didn’t start out in an ivory tower, but in a pizza shop smoking pot. It was through a series of relationships, starting with the woman who would become his wife, that he found his path. Along the way he built the bonds that led to penetrating insights about how organizations function.

In this episode, Bob shares his thoughts on how leaders do—and don’t—create the conditions for their organizations to succeed and shares personal anecdotes about famous CEOs, the founding of Stanford’s “D-School” and much more. 

Bob Sutton’s website: https://www.bobsutton.net/

Bob’s new book: https://amzn.to/40gaDTH

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One of the most basic responsibilities of a government is to keep its people safe. In a city, that first line of defense is the police. They are trained to investigate crimes, handle violent criminals and put them in jail.

Yet police departments also spend a lot of time on repeat nonviolent incidents. They manage domestic disputes, mental health episodes and sometimes just people who are down on their luck.

This realization led to the creation of Endmonton’s HELP program, which has been highly successful in reducing police calls and overall crime rates. Perhaps most importantly, it’s improving the lives of Edmonton's most vulnerable citizens. 

Enyinnah Okere, Edmonton Police Service’s Chief Operations Officer Joins us to tell us the story of how it all developed as well as his own incredible journey.

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Whitney Johnson was one of the top analysts on Wall Street. Yet when she met Clayton Christensen, she realized her fate path would lead somewhere else. As she would later write in a landmark in Harvard Business Review, she would disrupt herself and leave her top job at a Wall Street firm.

Today, Whitney is regularly ranked as one of the top 50 business thinkers in the world and is one of the most widely sought after executive coaches. Where she once climbed the ladder as a woman in the male-dominated world of Wall Street, now she focuses on empowering others to climb their own s-curve from novice to mastery. 

Yet she also learned something else along the way: To truly embrace disruption, you must first find safety. It is only from a sense of security and well being that you can embrace the risks you need to reach your full potential!

Whitney’s Website: https://thedisruptionadvisors.com/

Whitney’s “Disrupt Yourself” article in Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2012/07/disrupt-yourself-3

Whitney’s “Thinkers 50” profile: https://thinkers50.com/biographies/whitney-johnson/

Whitney’s latest book: https://www.amazon.com/Smart-Growth-Grow-People-Company/dp/1647821150/

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We are in the midst of an upskilling crisis. Rapid industrial changes and an increasingly competitive global environment, with countries like China and India emerging as technology superpowers, mean millions of workers need to upskill to remain economically viable.

Community colleges play a crucial role in this transformation. Aspen Award winner Russell Lowery-Hart, Chancellor of the 50,000-student Aspen Community College system, believes educators must move beyond being mere gatekeepers. 

He believes that educators need to love their students to success.

If this sounds idealistic or naive, consider Russell’s impressive track record. As President of Amarillo College, he boosted completion rates from 19% to 62% in just five years. Now at Austin, he faces an even greater challenge: preparing the workforce to meet the skill demands of one of the world’s leading technology hubs. 

Russell’s Biography: https://offices.austincc.edu/chancellor/biography/

About the AustinCommunity College system: https://www.austincc.edu/about-acc/

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As a professional rugby player for Europe’s top team, Aidan McCullen knew the value of showing up. He wasn’t born with the most talent, but he made sure he had the most discipline. 

Yet his biggest challenge was to overcome the disruption of ending his career, to shed his rugby identity and become something else.

Today, Aidan helps some of the world’s top organisations to do the same—overcome disruption by shedding old identities to allow them to do something new and different, increasing their competitiveness and tackling new challenges. 

Aidan McCullen’s website: https://aidanmccullen.com/

The Innovation Show: https://theinnovationshow.io/

Aidan’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Undisruptable-Permanent-Reinvention-Individuals-Organisations/dp/1119770483

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What do you do when you achieve your dreams…and then lose it all.

At the age of 25, Yassmin Abdel-Magied was an unbridled success. She achieved prominence at a young age, garnering awards and recognition as a teenager in Australia. She had been a successful engineer, author and TV personality. Her TED talk had millions of views and was named one of the top ten ideas of 2014.

Then it all changed in an instant. Ambushed by a Senator attacking her religion on live TV, she lost her cool and the video went viral. That was followed by a few ill-advised words on her personal Facebook page and suddenly she was a pariah. Vilified by Internet trolls and hounded by death threats, she left the only country she had ever really known.

Her shaming was so complete that her name became a verb. To be Yassmin-ed in Australia today means to be “canceled” as a woman of color. Yet she didn’t let it break her. She moved to London, continued to write and became a global force for inclusion, inspiring others to overcome adversity that the world so often subjects so many. 

Yassmin’s website: https://www.yassminam.com/

Yassmin’s TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/yassmin_abdel_magied_what_does_my_headscarf_mean_to_you?subtitle=en

Send us your questions at: [email protected]

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Every successful changemaker thrives on connection. It is their ability to connect to different people, places and institutions that makes it that much more likely that they will come across that seemingly random piece of information or insight that helps to crack a really tough problem.

Nobody personifies that more than Robert C. Wolcott. As Co-Founder & Chairman of The World Innovation Network (TWIN), he leads a global community of 4,000 innovation and growth leaders from over 30 countries that meet and connect to tackle some of the world’s toughest problems. It is through these connections that Rob formed the vision that became his new book, Proximity.

Rob is one of the most talented and engaging people you can imagine and we learned a lot from our conversation with him. We know you will too.

Links:

Robs biography: https://www.twinglobal.org/twin-global/speakers/robert-c-wolcott

Rob’s LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-c-wolcott-4a624a/

The World Innovation Network (TWIN): https://www.twinglobal.org/

Proximity: How Coming Breakthroughs in Just-in-Time Transform Business, Society, and Daily Life: Www.proximitybook.net 

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