Today’s guest is Nic Marks, CEO and Founder of Friday, the company Nic set up to track employee happiness, in order to help businesses build a more positive, productive work culture.

A statistician by trade but with a background as a therapist, Nic has a slightly weird speciality—happiness—having used it spending the last three decades creating a measure of people’s quality of life. Nic firmly believes that measuring happiness kick-starts a process which ultimately builds happiness.

In just over 6 years, Nic and the team at Friday have worked with more than 9,000 teams across 1,000 organisations, measuring and improving happiness at work. Happiness is a great proxy for quickly judging how things are in a team at a moment in time—if you’re happy at work things are likely to be going well, if you’re not happy, they’re not.

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Today’s guest is Kevin Lawrence, author, speaker, strategic advisor and coach to entrepreneurial CEOs and business leaders around the world. With his deep knowledge of the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up, combined with his own methodology developed over the last 25 years, Kevin has helped countless leaders to build high-performance leadership teams, expand into new markets, attract profitable customers, and increase productivity and profits.

More recently Kevin has written a book, Your Oxygen Mask First, which features 17 practical steps for leaders and CEOs to follow, to achieve success whilst maintaining balance in the rest of their lives.

It’s this book as well as Kevin’s other observations of CEOs that we discuss, so join us on today’s podcast:

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Today’s guests are Carla Cringle and Imogen Pudduck, co-founders of FizzPopBANG Ltd. Their tagline, “making people whistle on their way to work,” says all you need to know about these two upbeat people. They met 15 years ago when they worked together at Red Bull as Head of Brand and Head of HR.

Carla and Imogen realised that to have a truly amazing brand that consumers fall in love with, you need infectiously passionate and loyal people that drive that ethos forward. Today, a strong business “plan” is no longer good enough to drive success.

They left Red Bull to share their collective knowledge and inject a little sparkle into the working lives of others. Together they created FizzPopBANG, a small but beautifully formed consultancy specialising in brand employee engagement.

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Today’s guest is Professor Moran Cerf, a neuroscientist and business professor at the Kellogg School of Management and the neuroscience program at Northwestern University. He holds a Ph.D in neuroscience from Caltech, an MA in Philosophy and a B.Sc in Physics from Tel-Aviv University.

Moran has had a varied work history, prior to his academic career, he spent nearly a decade in industry, holding positions in computer security (as a hacker), pharmaceutical, telecom, fashion, software development, and innovations research.

Now he’s interested in how we can use the brain to leverage better business opportunities. He is currently teaching MBA students how to change behaviour, how marketing works and how people think and make decisions. He is a firm believer that social engagements are more powerful than the addictive lure of drugs or our devices, and his goal is to make the world a more optimistic place.

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Today’s guest is Aga Bajer, better known as the Culture Strategist. She helps companies cultivate a better culture in order to bring their vision to life.

Aga does this through working with organisations and teams that want to keep evolving to remain at the top of their game. She helps senior leadership teams and individual leaders to cultivate a culture that fuels great work, drives achievement of mission-critical goals and enables positive change.

Her overall mission is to help organisations harness the power of culture, to create a world where people love showing up to work.

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Today’s guest on The Melting Pot is John Housego, a proud Cornishman now living in Scotland. John’s background is in engineering and he spent 22 years with W L Gore & Associates.

During his time with the company he discovered a passion for developing employee ownership more widely as a business model for the health and welfare of the staff, but also because of the benefits it can bring to company resilience and performance. For John, personal growth at work for all members of the team is incredibly important, as is the culture within that organisation.

Throughout his time as a leader with W L Gore & Associates, he learned to become more self-aware, understood how his actions affect others and also found ways to build stronger teams through effective learning and appreciation for EQ.

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Today’s guest is Neal Gandhi, CEO of Panoply, a world-class creative technology group. Configured as a lean, fluid and ego-aside family of complementary tech-focused companies, Panoply collaborates with brave organisations, both at home and abroad, to ensure their participation in tomorrow—and beyond.

For Neal, collaboration is key to success. It is one of the tenets of Panoply—their team is collaborative to the core. Panoply assembles the right experts from across the group of companies to solve complex business problems. It help clients challenge assumptions, adapt to change, and activate technology-led innovation that ultimately drives positive and practical outcomes.

Panoply champions autonomy and individuality in its companies, whilst remaining tightly bound by their shared approach at the end of the day.

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Today’s guest is Tristan White, CEO of The Physio Co. For 10 consecutive years, The Physio Co has ranked as one of Australia's 50 Best Places to Work. Today we find out how he has achieved that. The Physio Co exists to help Australian seniors stay mobile, safe & happy, and since its inception in 2004, The Physio Co has grown from just one person with a vision to change seniors health care forever, to today where The Physio Co has more than 150 team members and delivers over 300,000 physiotherapy consultations per year.

Tristan regularly shares his journey through his blog Culture is Everything and latterly through his book of the same name, as well as his podcast, Think Big, Act Small.

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Today we talk to Andy Fletcher, a chartered accountant with a MBA from London Business School, who is also responsible for making spectacular family theatre events happen in unique spaces.

With an eclectic business path behind him, Andy shares his career to date and how he came to be responsible for In the Night Garden Live (amongst others).

In the Night Garden Live was his first production with partner Andy Collier, and it has toured the UK in its own inflatable theatre since 2009. Now in its 10th year, In the Night Garden Live is considered one of the UK’s favourite family events and with audience figures standing at well over 1 million, as well as a whopping 4.8 out of 5 stars based on 12,844 parents’ reviews, no other show holds a torch to this one.

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Today’s guest is Danielle Chiel, an Australian entrepreneur who founded KOCO (Knit One Change One). Danielle, through KOCO, is seeking to change lives one hand-knitted garment at a time.

She currently employs 200 Indian ladies from various villages in India, to hand-knit garments for her; but her dream is to expand the business and employ 10,000 women.

KOCO hand-knits garments for global fashion brands - they produce fashions and homewares that customers love, by working with women in the rural villages in the south of Tamil Nadu.

At the same time as giving these ladies employment, KOCO provides them with an education and all the training they need, in order to become world-class handknitters.

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