Lead From the Heart

Saul Perlmutter, Nobel Laureate 2011 for Physics, in his office.

There’s a lot that’s remarkable about the new book, Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense, starting with the fact that one of its three co-authors is a Nobel laureate who earned the Nobel prize in physics for discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe.

One might imagine that UC Berkeley professor, Saul Perlmutter could have written this book on his own, but instead, he intentionally collaborated with two people way outside of his own discipline: John Campbell – a philosophy professor at Berkeley – and Robert MacCoun – a social psychologist and law professor Stanford University.

Before working together on their book, the authors teamed up in developing a wildly popular UC Berkeley course, designed to teach students how to better understand the world and make informed decisions in an era of uncertainty and overwhelming data. It emphasizes how processes used in the practice of science can provide widely-applicable tools for approaching individual and collective decision-making.

One of Perlmutter’s gifts is his ability to simplify complex ideas and, in this conversation, he explains why every decision we make as leaders is really a bet – we’re rarely guaranteed that our choices will be the right ones – and why despite the fact that uncertainty makes us all really nervous and uncomfortable, we can use it in a way that allows us to have strong confidence in what we’re doing.

Yes, that’s a paradox – but what did you expect from a guest like this?

Saul Perlmutter is brilliant and relatable – and he shares some wonderful disciplines you can put to immediate use.

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Nearly two decades ago, Stanford University psychologist, Carol Dweck, introduced the groundbreaking idea that human flourishing can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents & abilities. In her classic book, “Mindset: The New Psychology Of Success,” she taught us that some people have a general belief that their talents and intelligence are predetermined, & largely unalterable (hence, “fixed mindset”), while others believe their talents & abilities can indeed be nurtured and developed (hence, “growth mindset”).

Dweck’s research proved that people who believe that their abilities are fixed are much less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset – people who do believe that abilities can be developed.

In her new bestseller, Cultures Of Growth: How The New Science Of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams & Organizations, Mary C. Murphy, a social psychologist at both Stanford and Indiana Universities, shows that mindset transcends individuals. A growth mindset culture can transform any group, team, or classroom to reach breakthroughs while also helping each person achieve their potential.

When Dweck’s book was just being published, Murphy was her graduate student earning her Ph.D. And it was then that Murphy observed that that “mindset” transcends individuals. Her thesis was that a growth mindset culture could transform any group, team, or classroom to reach breakthroughs while also helping people individually achieve their full potential.

Working with Dweck, & later independently, Murphy spent a decade researching & then proving that organizations & teams which are geared toward growth mindsets, have huge performance upsides. She found they inspire deeper learning, spark collaboration, spur innovation & build the trust necessary for risk-taking and inclusion. They’re also more likely to achieve top results.

As we discuss in this episode, Microsoft was the first company to apply “Growth Mindset” thinking to its overall leadership philosophy and culture.  And, because of their great success they went on to have tied to this thinking, they’re by no means the last.

Listen in to learn how you can create a culture of growth within your own team and organization – & how to build a workplace where everyone can thrive and achieve their potential, both individually and together.

PS: Murphy’s research finds that people are infinitely more excited to work at companies that foster a culture of growth – and that translates into them being more loyal, more engaged and more productive.

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As a professor in NYU’s prestigious Stern School of Business, Alison Taylor spends a lot of time with the next generation of business leaders. In her new best seller, “Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World,” she tells us that her MBA students are not hoping to have careers working for ethical companies. They now expect to.

For decades, organizations largely committed themselves to doing whatever was legally allowable to maximize shareholder value – a singular focus that’s proving to be no longer viable.

Taylor’s book easily could have been titled, “How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World,” because while shareholders remain unrelenting in pressuring companies to drive stock prices higher and higher, other stakeholders – customers and employees, especially – have significantly elevated their expectations of companies over issues like diversity and inclusion, fair treatment of workers, impacts on the environment, transparency and social responsibility.

Taylor’s book (the focus of this episode) shows leaders how businesses can navigate this messy paradigm shift, build trust, and achieve long-term strategic advantage in our turbulent world. And she argues, the starting point is for companies to gain new and greater clarity around their purpose saying, “a healthy organizational culture has never been a better source of strategic advantage.”

Because society itself is so divided, however, Taylor says companies can no longer hope to be all things to all people. The only realistic approach today is to define who they are – and who they aren’t – and then attract the stakeholders who want to align themselves accordingly.

In this rather timely conversation, we discuss why respect for employees is now the most important principle in organizational leadership, why transparency is a managerial essential – and why so many workplace managers are stressed out about the contradictory pressures on driving performance and supporting employee well-being.

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Human beings are social creatures. We’re hard-wired to connect deeply & intimately with others. We want to feel valued, supported, & needed. And this makes connection a fundamental aspect of our existence.

But in our busy, technology-driven lives today, we have fewer friends than people did in past generations, we interact less with our neighbors, & the majority of interactions we have with people are now held virtually – not face-to-face. Many of us are even working remotely some days of the week, further limiting the number of other human beings we see & interact with on a regular basis.

Needless to say, we’re missing out on something essential to our emotional & psychological well-being. Connection with others improves the quality of our lives, builds empathy, lengthens our lifespans & makes us less self-focused & more collaborative. It feeds our spirits.

In her new bestseller, “The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World,” Sharon Brous says we’ve reached the moment in time when we must restore our relationships with friends, family, co-workers and people in our community – all in order to honor our most basic human instinct – the yearning for real connection.

Of her book, author Daniel Pink says “Sharon Brous has crafted a profound and poetic reminder that the remedy for a fractured world is human connection. The Amen Effect is a powerful call for each of us to show up for others, see them fully, & hold them close.”

Daniel Pink’s testimonial – & another one from Wharton’s Adam Grant – is what caught my attention.

I strongly believe that our workplaces must become centers for connection, that workplace managers must intentionally foster connection – & that leaders who focus on team cohesiveness will be the big winners in the future of work.

To that end, Sharon Brous is urging us to not only invest in relationships of shared purpose, & to build communities of care, but to also “show up for one another in moments of joy & pain, vulnerability & possibility.” The word “amen” in her book’s title refers to the ancient practice of affirming another person’s life experiences by demonstrating, in body & word that: “I see you. You are not alone.” 

It’s really love that we’re all seeking and needing – & our conversation with Sharon Brous is focused on seeing how leaders can support this profound human need in order to ensure their people thrive & are able to perform optimally. You’ll be inspired.

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And by his definition, being geeky isn’t a pejorative but rather a clear description of leaders who are perennially curious, not afraid to tackle hard problems or embrace unconventional solutions.

Those few assertions alone piqued our interest in having Andrew as a guest; and then we learned The Economist and The Financial Times named “The Geek Way” one of the best books of 2023.

According to former Google Chairman, Eric Schmidt, “The Geek Way” is a book that will change the way we think about work, teams, projects, & culture – & give us the insight & tools we need to harness our human superpowers of learning & cooperation. We explore all of this in this episode.

McAfee describes a new & optimal leadership culture based around four norms: science, ownership, speed, & openness. It’s a culture that’s neither deferential to experts, fond of planning & process, afraid of mistakes, or obsessed with “winning.” And when all four of his norms are in place, he says a culture emerges that is freewheeling, fast-moving, egalitarian, evidence-driven, argumentative, & autonomous. These are cultures that intentionally leverage “intense cooperation” & “rapid learning.”

Andrew McAfee is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Initiative on the Digital Economy and a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. We invite you to listen in to this cutting edge thinker.

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When we think about the highest performing people in all disciplines of life, they all commonly share the ability to think clearly, stay focused & shrug off setbacks all while under very high levels of stress.

In their most critical moments, in other words, they know how to maintain intellectual clarity & emotional control – which allows them to consistently perform at exceptional levels.

While we might believe that people like this are born into the world with uncommon abilities, the truth is they’re not innate talents at all; they’re 100% learned.

So, this episode is dedicated to introducing you to more cutting-edge performance psychology techniques the world’s best athletes & elite military teams are known to already have mastered. This is a topic we first began exploring a few episodes ago with guest Michael Gervais & in which we now go even deeper & wider.

We believe it’s time workplace leaders were given the tools they need to master their own states of being & introduce you to Dr. Eric Potterat to provide it.

Eric is a clinical & performance psychologist who, as a US Navy Commander, helped create the mental toughness curriculum used during Navy SEALs BUD/S training. He spent several years as the director of specialized performance for the Los Angeles Dodgers & has worked with Red Bull athletes, the US Women’s national soccer team, the NBA’s Miami Heat, numerous Olympic athletes & NASA astronauts.

In Eric’s words. the difference between settling & achieving, between good & great, between contentment & fulfillment, is based entirely on our mental approach. And he’s just published his first book which teaches the requisite skills.

In “Learned Excellence: Mental Disciplines For Leading And Winning From The World’s Top Performers,” Eric distills his high-performance knowledge into five mental disciplines: “Values & Goals,” “Mindset,” “Process,” “Adversity Tolerance,” and “Balance & Recovery.”

We discuss them all in our conversation with Eric – & his methodologies are guaranteed to both surprise & enlighten you.

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Every organization is plagued by what Stanford University Business School professor, Bob Sutton, calls “destructive friction:” forces that make it harder, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done. In Sutton’s language, “the convoluted, time-consuming & soul-crushing gyrations that drive people crazy and undermine organizational performance.”

Along with his co-author, SBS professor, Huggy Rao, Sutton spent seven years studying the ways in which companies unintentionally create maddening friction – from mazes of red tape, to clueless leaders who pile on needless complexity, to hours spent in meetings to more wasted time spent reading poorly constructed and indirect communications (e-mail especially). And they’ve just published the new bestseller, “The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make The Right Things Easier And The Wrong Things Harder” in which they provide clear and proven solutions: tactics, tools, & practices to help us avert these traps & move forward.

While most friction in organizations proves to undermine and slow-down progress, the authors stress there are times when leaders are actually wise to inject good friction into the mix – for the explicit purpose of enabling teams to be more creative, develop deeper connections and trust, be kinder & more ethical, make better decisions, and prevent bad friction from building up in the first place.

On the book, Wharton’s Adam Grant says “If every leader took the ideas in this book seriously, the world would be a less miserable, more productive place.”

Bob Sutton has written seven books including the bestsellers “The No Asshole Rule,” “Good Boss, Bad Boss” and “Scaling Up Excellence,” and has long been a desired guest for our podcast.

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The expression, “emotional intelligence” is seamlessly embedded into our common vernacular – but it was Daniel Goleman’s groundbreaking book a quarter century ago that first coined the idea & brought it to a mass audience. In his #1 bestseller “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ” Goleman revolutionized how we think about human intelligence.

Along with Rutgers University psychology professor Cary Cherniss, Goleman has just taken a fresh look at how emotional intelligence has evolved over the past few decades, & has written,“Optimal: How To Sustain Personal & Organizational Excellence Everyday.”

Tied to new research, Goleman reveals practical methods for using one’s inner resources to more readily enter an “optimal” state of high performance while also avoiding burnout.

There are moments when all of us achieve peak performance: An athlete plays a perfect game; a team has record-breaking quarterly results. But these moments are often elusive, & for every amazing day any of us has, we may also have a hundred ordinary or even unsatisfying days to follow.

As isolated peak experiences clearly fail to consistently produce excellent results, Goleman’s book answers the question: How do we sustain high performance, while avoiding burnout and maintaining balance? 

His book taps into how hundreds of people have built the inner architecture that repeatedly leads them to having good days – proving that emotional intelligence holds the key to everyone’s best performance.

Building on attributes such as self-awareness, a sense of meaning, emotional balance, high concentration and ‘flow’ states, Goleman demonstrates that it is in our optimal moments that our mental clarity shines. And when workplace leaders are equipped with this knowledge, they’re able to build a culture that additionally empowers employees to sustain their own high performance.

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Workplace managers are often told to define their leadership purpose & authentic self, & that this personal introspection & self-reflection will guide their leadership journey.

But research on how adults actually learn shows that the logical sequence – “think, then act” – is reversed in a personal change process such as what’s involved with becoming a leader. In other words, we only increase our self-knowledge in the process of making changes. We try something new and then observe the results – how it feels to us, how others around us react – & only later reflect on and perhaps internalize what our experience taught us.

Tied to this understanding, London Business School Organizational Behavior professor, Herminia Ibarra titled her global bestseller, “Act Like A Leader, Think Like A Leader.”   

Herminia tosses conventional wisdom aside – the idea that managers should increase their self-awareness first – & asserts that managers must experiment by taking actions and trying new things. (“How can I know what I think until I see what I do”)? New experiences not only change how we think, they change who we become.  In other words, who we are as a leader is not the starting point on our development journey, but rather the outcome of learning about ourselves.

Herminia Ibarra is ranked among the top management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network, a judge for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award, and a fellow of the British Academy. Before moving to London, she taught at the Harvard Business School.

This is the second time Herminia has been a guest on the podcast. Her first episode, focused on her study of how Satya Nadella transformed Microsoft, is the second most downloaded episode in our five-year-long podcast series.

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Michael Gervais is a high-performance psychologist who has helped some of the world’s most successful athletes overcome mental & emotional obstacles on their way to excelling in their sports. He was on the sidelines when the Seattle Seahawks won a Super Bowl, when beach volleyball players Kerri Walsh & Misty-May Treanor won Olympic gold – & when daredevil, Felix Baumgartner set a skydiving world record for the highest-ever free fall.

In his new bestseller, “The First Rule Of Mastery: Stop Worrying About What People Think Of You,” co-written with his partner, Kevin Lake, Gervais argues that the single greatest constrictor of human potential is our fear of other people’s opinions (FOPO).

FOPO shows up almost everywhere in our lives—& the consequences are great. When we let FOPO take control, we play it safe & small because we’re afraid of what will happen on the other side of critique. When challenged, we surrender our viewpoint. We trade in authenticity for approval. We please rather than provoke. We chase the dreams of others rather than our own.

As the antidote, Gervais says the key to leading a high-performance life lies in learning how to redirect our attention from the world outside us into the world inside us. Discovering how to accomplish this – the mental skills & practices – is one of the key themes of this conversation. As you’ll also hear, so is the importance of gaining clarity around our personal purpose. 

Gervais believes valuing the opinion of others over our own creates a huge obstacle for optimal success in life. “But few want to do the hard work needed to change. The greatest, however, have a vision, & they commit to following it. They have great capacity to experience what’s uncomfortable, because they know that’s the way to self-mastery.”

What separates the boys from the men (and the girls from the women!) is the focus of this highly informative conversation. Truly one of our most interesting & compelling episodes.

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