From The Culture

What if the most important leadership skill isn't strategy, charisma, or vision, but empathy?

This week, Marcus Collins and Amanda Slavin sit down with Kathryn Petralia, co-founder of Kabbage, a data-driven company bought by American Express that provides new lending opportunities to underserved communities. They explore how better understanding people’s needs became the foundation of a huge business. Together, they unpack cognitive empathy, building community culture at the office, hiring for self-awareness, and how the best leaders learn to see the world through someone else's perspective. Plus, Kathryn shares her personal philosophy for success.

Blake Mycoskie built one of the world's most influential purpose-driven brands: TOMS. Yet after years of success and accompanying mental health struggles, he found himself asking a difficult question: Is this all there is?

In this episode of From the Culture, Marcus Collins and Amanda Slavin talk with the industry-shaping entrepreneur about ambition, mental health, conscious capitalism, and the challenge of defining success on your own terms. Blake shares what he learned from his struggles with depression, why achievement alone is never enough, and how leaders can build lives and organizations that stay aligned with their values.

A candid conversation about purpose, fulfillment, and what it really means to be enough.

Today we dive into the expansive world of LEGO and what it means to harness the art of play to educate and build a business culture. On this episode, Marcus and Amanda talk with VP of Product Experience at LEGO Education, Andrew Sliwinski about his strategy for creating products that can inspire a diverse array of children with wide interests to learn more while bringing their creativity out in the process. They also discuss the company’s new foray into AI for children, creating products for both students and teachers, as well as how LEGO sees its role in supplementing the U.S. education system.

On this episode of From the Culture, Marcus Collins and Amanda Slavin sit down with psychologist and Good Inside founder Becky Kennedy to explore the surprising overlap between parenting, leadership, and workplace culture. Together, they unpack emotional intelligence, invisible labor, modern fatherhood, and why the skills that help people thrive at home are often the same ones that build healthier, more creative organizations.

This week on From the Culture, Marcus Collins and Amanda Slavin sit down with powerhouse executive Najoh Tita-Reid for a conversation much bigger than career advice. Najoh opens up about leaving the corporate mountaintop, raising her children abroad, learning to trust her intuition, and why she sees herself as “the canary in the coal mine” for the future of work. Together, they unpack what it means to use your gifts for something larger than a job title, and why everyone needs to hone their ‘canary’ senses to build a sustainable future for themselves and how to bring humanity with you. It’s part leadership conversation, part spiritual reckoning, part manifesto for surviving the future with our humanity intact.

This week, Marcus and Amanda sit down with global AI product leader, civil rights attorney, and filmmaker Julie Wenah to explore what it really means to bring your whole self to work.

Julie’s religious faith, love of hip hop, and filmmaking passions “outside” of work inform her roles and her life impact in technology and equity. She explains a powerful framework, the “album and the mixtape,” to explain how our professional roles and personal passions coexist to shape who we are and how we lead. Together, they unpack identity, belonging, grief, service, and the courage it takes to show up fully in spaces that weren’t built for you.

At its core, this episode is about purpose. About the unseen experiences that shape our “body of work.” And about the responsibility we carry, not just to succeed, but to serve.

This week on From the Culture, Marcus Collins and Amanda Slavin sit down with Nick Tran, a veteran brand leader whose career has taken him through some of the biggest moments of disruption in business.

After navigating company shakeups at places like TikTok and Hulu, Nick now pursues companies that need help growing through uncertainty, including in his current role as President and CMO of First Round a consortium of brands that includes Cîroc and Lobos 1707. He shares why crisis mode can create unexpected opportunity, why he never wants to lead marketing in the same industry twice, and why change can be the fastest path to growth when you know how to meet it.

They also unpack personal resilience, building capacity during stressful seasons, and how to stop fearing change long enough to use it.

If your company, career, or life is in transition, this one’s for you.

On this episode of From the Culture, Marcus Collins and Amanda Slavin sit down with Felicity Fellows, a global community strategist who has built and scaled cultural ecosystems through her work with TED, TEDx, and her fandom agency Stan—to unpack the hidden dynamics shaping workplace culture.

Starting with a striking reality, HR is overwhelmingly made up of women, yet remains one of the most undervalued functions in organizations—they explore how roles rooted in traditionally “feminine” qualities like care, empathy, and nurturing are often dismissed as soft or secondary.

From HR to community-building, the conversation reframes these roles not as peripheral, but as foundational, asking what might shift if we treated care and connection as central to how work actually works.

On this episode of From the Culture, Marcus Collins and Amanda Slavin sit down with Courtnee LeClaire, a transformational leader behind iconic moments at companies like Apple, to explore why she started calling herself a Chief “Becoming” Officer.

From launching products like the iPod and iPhone to navigating personal upheaval, Courtnee shares a deeply honest look at success, failure, and the myth of having it all figured out. Together, they unpack the tension between helping others and doing the inner work, the importance of trusting your instincts, and what it means to grow and learn while leading.

At the center of the conversation is Courtnee’s powerful reframing: we’re never “finished” we’re always becoming. And the real work isn’t perfection, it’s having the courage to keep going, even when you don’t know what you’re doing.

On this episode of From the Culture, Marcus Collins and Amanda Slavin sit down with stylist, author, and cultural thinker Stacy London for a candid conversation about feminism, identity, and how society assigns value to women.

They explore some of the reasons why patriarchal work cultures are bad for business and what it could look like to design a working world that utilizes traditionally feminine traits for business strategy and community culture. They unpack some of the ways women are often forced to navigate competing expectations just to exist, and they discuss why there’s a growing group of “older” post-menopausal women who want to stay in the workforce despite the ageism of patriarchy. The conversation also examines the role men play in building a more equitable world—and why real progress requires moving beyond shame, guilt, and reaction.

At its core, this episode is about shifting from survival to wholeness: letting go of old frameworks and learning how to show up fully, without shrinking to fit the room.