Lead with Purpose

Episode description

Dima Negodiuk ran a real business in Ukraine, with sales, marketing, and customer support teams. He started over in New York in 2022 and now runs six businesses with no employees, using AI agents for most of the work. He had never written code. Ron and Dima get into how he built it: an Amazon store run by an AI marketing team, an AI call center that sold a pallet of granite pavers, a custom CRM replacing HubSpot, and a system for a dental office that reads the screen and enters patient orders for approval.

They cover the habits behind it: a fifteen-person AI board of directors that votes on decisions, a clone trained on his own writing so nothing sounds generic, and layers of review so no single model gets the last word. Dima never lets AI touch money without his approval. He also explains why he doesn’t trust any model blindly, how overnight goals keep agents working while he sleeps, and what he tells a company of fifty people that hasn’t started: automate the most boring task first, then find your money leaks.

Full Podcast available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.

Ron Boire and The Upland Group
Website: https://www.ronboire.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RonBoire
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronboire/

Dima Negodiuk:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dima-negodiuk/

0:00 Ron introduces Dima Negodiuk and agentic AI
3:31 The $50,000 a month team he could not afford
7:28 Six businesses, zero employees, two hours every morning
9:49 Learning with screenshots, and the granite paver business
12:49 Version fifty-seven of the AI call center, and the first sale
14:43 Building his own CRM instead of using HubSpot
20:09 The board of directors skill: fifteen AI personas that vote
31:59 Choosing Claude, and the goal command for overnight work
37:35 The clone: an AI trained on his own life
41:28 The GPT Zero test: zero generic AI
44:20 Never letting AI send anything involving money or people
52:10 The dental office system: reading the screen, approving orders
1:00:48 Voice coding replaces vibe coding
1:07:54 The twenty dollar argument
1:17:13 The Telegram chief of staff
1:25:16 The kids’ clothing marketing farm
1:35:42 Advice for a company of fifty: automate the boring thing, find the leaks

Episode description

Warren Kornblum ( Brand & Business Advisor, Author & Founder, Share Of Heart™ Advisory | Former Global CMO, Toys“R”Us) was global CMO of Toys R Us starting in 1999, when the Big Toy Book still landed in tens of millions of homes. He is now the author of Notes from the Brand Stand and the creator of Share of Heart, his answer to share of mind and share of wallet: the emotional connection that makes a customer forgive you when you slip. Ron and Warren compare notes on the brand from both sides of its private equity buyout, from the song and Geoffrey the giraffe to the website Warren believes should have been “the Disney of retail toy stores” and the store bathrooms that told you everything about the company.

They also cover Rooms To Go, why trust comes from caring, and why every CEO should put on a customer service headset. Warren explains why a brand needs a spike in the sand rather than a positioning statement, what Sears and Kodak teach about brands that lost their stand, and why AI is table stakes for marketers. His case is that the human work is deciding what to do with the last few cards after the machine has dealt most of the deck.

Full Podcast available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.

Ron Boire and The Upland Group
Website: https://www.ronboire.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RonBoire
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronboire/

Warren Kornblum and Share of Heart
Website: shareofheart.com
Book: Notes From the Brand Stand  https://www.amazon.com/Notes-Brand-Stand-Emotional-Attention/dp/B0GHTBKZ4J
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/warrenkornblum

Episode summary

Jen MacLean started as a teenage playtester at Microsoft, rose through AOL, Comcast, Amazon, and Microsoft's Xbox, and is now co-founder and CEO of Dragon Snack Games. Ron has known her for more than 25 years, since they met at Columbia Business School. He is also a friends and family investor and angel advisor to Dragon Snack. Jen walks through the state of the games industry: North American layoffs after the COVID investment boom, why players in the West recoil from AI while players in Asia embrace it, and what Grand Theft Auto VI, which Jen estimates could earn $7 to $15 billion in its first week, says about the business.

The second half is about building. Jen describes the 2024 conversations that pushed her to leave Xbox, including Ron's question about a line on a resume versus a line in a eulogy. She explains why she and her co-founders chose to hire only when it hurt and to assume no more money was coming. When a $10 million budget shrank to two to three million, they cut scope and told the team the truth. She also covers keeping a remote-first team of eight connected, why humans must stay in the loop with AI, and Farhaven, the cooperative steampunk fantasy game where nobody competes and everything you do benefits the people you play with. Dragon Snack's Kickstarter launched October 1, and the game is slated for release in Q2 2027.

Full Podcast available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.

Ron Boire and The Upland Group
Website: https://www.ronboire.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RonBoire
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronboire/

Jen MacLean and Dragon Snacks Games
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenmaclean1/
Dragon Snacks Games: https://www.dragonsnacksgames.com/
Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonsnacksgames/farhaven-not-an-mmo-a-friendmo
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4922250/Farhaven/

Guest bio

Rahim Hirji is the author of SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI. He spent years in education technology, including building a business in China teaching soft skills to teenagers, and now speaks and advises on how leaders and organizations navigate the shift AI is driving. His framework covers seven skills, among them curiosity, global adaptability, principled innovation, and the augmented mindset.

Episode description

Rahim Hirji's book opens with his great-grandfather getting on a boat in Gujarat, bound for East Africa, at a time when one in three boats made it across and pirates worked the route. It was a calculated risk against a hand-to-mouth life, and it started four generations of skill changes: survival skills, then street skills, then vocational skills, then soft skills. Rahim's argument is that we are in the next one, and it took him ten years to see it clearly.

Ron and Rahim get into what that means for leaders right now. Why AI strategies almost always start with process, cost, and revenue, and get to augmenting humans last, often without the chief people officer in the room. Why the tool question is the wrong question. Why the leadership principles that mattered ten years ago still matter, and why the most forward-thinking companies are the ones that do not put AI at the center.

Episode description

JoAnn Garbin is the first returning guest on Lead with Purpose. She led innovation work on the data center of the future at Microsoft, co-authored the bestselling The Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft, and now runs Regenerous Labs, where her team designs data centers meant to be positive for the company, the community, and nature.

Ron and JoAnn work through the fight happening in towns across the country. A Gallup survey found Americans would rather live near a nuclear plant than an AI data center, a result JoAnn calls a contradiction, since a gigawatt campus is asking for roughly what a nuclear plant provides. They dig into what water neutral actually means once you count power generation upstream and paved ground downstream, why eighty percent of a data center's water footprint sits in the grid rather than the building, and why software companies pretending to be power and construction companies keep learning expensive lessons.

Full Podcast Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.

Ron Boire and The Upland Group
Website: https://www.ronboire.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RonBoire
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronboire/

JoAnn Garbin:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joanngarbin/

Link to Book: https://www.amazon.com/Insiders-Guide-Innovation-Microsoft-ebook/dp/B0DLX2PF5J

Episode description

Caroline Webb spent her first career as an economist, forecasting the US economy for the British government at the Bank of England. She left because the work kept pulling her away from the human center. What followed was twelve years at McKinsey, where she stepped off the partner track to build a leadership practice from scratch, and then made partner anyway.

Ron and Caroline discuss the distinction at the heart of her new book, Leadership Intelligence: experiential wisdom, which comes from years in the chair, and deliberate wisdom, the set of critical thinking habits anyone can build at any stage. The catch is that experience cuts both ways. The more of it you have, the heavier your blinkers, and the smartest and fastest leaders are often the most exposed.

Ron Boire and The Upland Group

Website: https://www.ronboire.com/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RonBoire

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronboire/

Caroline Webb

Buy the Book: https://carolinewebb.co/books/leadership-intelligence/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolinewebbauthor/

Dina Consolini Dommett is Director of Partnerships at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, where she designs and runs executive programs including the Ukrainian Veterans Leadership Program with the Victor Pinchuk Foundation. She has spent more than twenty-five years in international executive education at Columbia Business School, NYU Stern, London Business School, the London School of Economics, and Oxford's Saïd Business School, with stints in the London offices of Marconi plc and the Monitor Group. At Columbia she designed and launched EMBA-Global, the joint executive MBA with London Business School. She holds a PhD in Italian from Yale and a BA from Boston College, and she was a Fulbright scholar in Rome.

What We Cover

In the late 1990s, Ron Boire walked into an office at Columbia Business School hoping to talk his way into an executive MBA with no undergraduate degree. The woman across the desk told him the program he came for was wrong for him, pulled a bar napkin out of her drawer, and sketched something that did not exist yet. That napkin became EMBA-Global, the joint degree with London Business School; Ron was in the first class, and nearly three decades later the program is still running. Dina Dommett is the woman with the napkin: the youngest of six, daughter of a union carpenter in central Connecticut, who had never been on an airplane before she flew to Rome at twenty-two on a Fulbright, took a PhD in Italian at Yale, walked away from the professor track when she decided the field was not meeting the moment, and built a career instead at Columbia, London Business School, the LSE, and Oxford.

Ron Boire and The Upland Group
Website: http://www.ronboire.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RonBoire
Executive Coaching: https://www.ronboire.com/executive-coaching
Keynote Speaking: http://www.ronboire.com/keynote-speaking
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronboire/

Dina Consolini Dommett

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dina-dommett/

About Stefan Pagels Christensen

Stefan Pagels Christensen is the founder of IMPROV Communication, an international leadership and team development consultancy based in Helsingør, Denmark, specializing in psychological safety and emotional intelligence delivered through applied improvisation. A Danish child actor from the age of twelve, he performed in more than eight feature films and appeared at the Royal Danish Theatre at sixteen. He trained at the iO Theater in Chicago and became the first European invited back as a teacher, then founded Improv Comedy Copenhagen in 2016. IMPROV Communication works with global organizations across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the United States.

What We Cover

Ron and Stefan cover the full arc: fame before the brain is ready for it, battling addiction, ADHD as stigma and then as a tool, why prohibition creates the gateway rather than the drug. Then they get into the work: why one-off team training is a waste of money, what Stefan's survey of 402 participants revealed about the voice in people's heads, why psychological safety has nothing to do with being nice.

Ron Boire and The Upland Group
Website: http://www.ronboire.com
YouTube:    / @ronboire  
Executive Coaching: https://www.ronboire.com/executive-co...
Keynote Speaking: http://www.ronboire.com/keynote-speaking
LinkedIn:   / ronboire  

Stefan Pagles Christensen

• Stefan Pagels Christensen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefanpagelsimprov/
• IMPROV Communication: https://improv.eu
• The Judge in the Room, the free field report Stefan references at : https://improv.eu/the-judge-in-the-room
• IMPROV Communication monthly newsletter: sign up at https://improv.eu
• IMPROV Communication on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/improvcommunication/

About Paul Spitale

Paul Spitale spent twenty-five years at Sony Electronics, rising through the ranks from regional sales associate to senior vice president. After Sony, he led a successful turnaround of a struggling paperboard company in New Jersey before joining Colt's Manufacturing in 2015, one of the oldest and most iconic firearms companies in America. At Colt, Paul served as Chief Commercial Officer and was instrumental in rebuilding the commercial business, modernizing the product line, revamping distribution, and reintroducing the legendary Python revolver to the market. Under his leadership, Colt went from heading into bankruptcy to generating over fifty-three million dollars in EBITDA before being acquired by CZ, a fellow firearms manufacturer. What made Paul uniquely suited for Colt was something very few executives in the industry could claim: he was an active shooter himself. Paul competes in IDPA, the International Defensive Pistol Association, where he has won local matches in New York and Connecticut and captured the IDPA State Championship in Pennsylvania twice. His hands-on experience as an active competitor gave him a credibility and product instinct that set him apart in an industry where most senior executives do not actually shoot. Today Paul lives on a ranch in Michigan where he creates content for his YouTube channel, Paul at the Ranch, which has grown to over sixty-two thousand subscribers. The channel covers shooting, hunting, outdoor skills, fitness, woodworking, and ranch life, all taught with the same values-driven approach Paul brought to every leadership role in his career. Ron Boire and Paul Spitale have known each other for thirty years, first meeting at Sony Electronics in Boston in the early 1990s.

What We Cover

Ron and Paul trace thirty years of friendship and professional overlap, from a tiny Sony sales office in Newton, Massachusetts to the boardrooms of Best Buy, Colt, and beyond. They tell the story of Mike London, the legendary merchant at Leechmere who mentored both of them in ways that shaped everything that followed. They dig into what it takes to turn around a company in bankruptcy, why values-driven leadership works in any industry, how Paul took Colt from near collapse to acquisition, and what made him walk away from the executive world to build something of his own on a ranch in Michigan. Along the way they talk about the 1911, the Python, servant leadership, AI in the workforce, win-win deal making, and the particular kind of authenticity that makes a YouTube channel worth watching.

Ron Boire and The Upland Group
Website: http://www.ronboire.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RonBoire
Executive Coaching: https://www.ronboire.com/executive-coaching
Keynote Speaking: http://www.ronboire.com/keynote-speaking
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronboire/

Paul Spitale
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Paulattheranch
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulspitale/

Guest: Troy Rice, President and CEO of PGA Tour Superstore
About Troy Rice

Troy Rice is the President and CEO of PGA Tour Superstore, the largest specialty golf retailer in the United States, owned by Arthur Blank, co-founder of Home Depot and owner of the Atlanta Falcons and Atlanta United. Troy brings nearly four decades of retail leadership experience across some of America's most iconic brands, including Home Depot, Toys R Us, Office Depot, and Total Wine and More, where he served as CEO. He began his career working in his stepfather's grocery store in Beaman, Tennessee, a formative experience that shaped his lifelong belief in human connection, servant leadership, and the power of knowing your customer. Troy and Ron Boire first met at Toys R Us in 2006 and have remained close for twenty years.

What We Cover

Ron and Troy trace Troy's remarkable journey from a small-town Tennessee grocery store to the CEO chair of one of the most experiential retail concepts in America. Along the way they dig into the Toys R Us collapse and what it really teaches about leadership failure, the cultural breakdown that followed Bob Nardelli's arrival at Home Depot, why AI is accelerating rather than replacing the human connection in retail, and what it takes to build a team where trust flows in every direction. Troy also shares his philosophy on first-time CEOs, servant leadership, collective intelligence, and why getting it right matters more than being right.

Ron Boire and The Upland Group
Website: http://www.ronboire.com
Executive Coaching: http://www.ronboire.com/executive-coa...
Keynote Speaking: http://www.ronboire.com/keynote-speaking

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronboire/

Troy Rice Info:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/troy-rice-b78aaa1/

PGA Tour Superstore: www.pgatoursuperstore.com