Motivated to Lead Podcast - Mark Klingsheim

This week, we revisit our interview with Pamela York. Pam is an investor and serial entrepreneur with extensive success from launch to exit in technology-based companies. She's the co-founder and Managing Partner of Capita3 Ventures, an early-stage venture capital group investing in women-led startups with game-changing health innovations. Over her career, she's been involved in more than 50 new company launches, with a dozen acquisitions or IPOs to date, and serves on numerous boards. Previously, Pam pioneered three technology platforms that were successfully commercialized and co-founded two VC-backed startups, each with an exit, including one with a highly successful IPO. She also led the University of Iowa's technology commercialization foundation, where she oversaw a portfolio of 1000 technologies concentrated in life sciences and built a startup pipeline from scratch, attracting hundreds of millions in venture capital financing and numerous exits to date. Pam has 20 years of training in transformative leader growth. She applies awareness-based leader training to develop founders into top CEO's, featured at TEDx in 2018, and also delivered to healthcare leaders and innovators at Mayo Clinic. Pam is a mentor or advisor for Techstars, Revolution, NSF I-CORPSTM, Medical Alley, and others. She has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois and completed private equity financing at Wharton.

This week, we welcome back Dave Sparkman to the podcast to discuss his new book, Your Character Is Your Culture.

Dave is the founder and managing director of SPARK Your Culture, a corporate culture advisory firm focused on helping organizations build healthy, high-performance cultures. Previously, Dave served as SVP of Culture at UnitedHealth Group, where he spent more than nine years leading culture and values initiatives across an organization of more than 300,000 employees.

Before UnitedHealth Group, Dave was a partner at Arthur Andersen, leading the West Region Human Resources function. He also serves as Executive Director and Board Chair of Crossroads Career, a ministry dedicated to helping people navigate career transitions.

In this conversation, Dave shares insights from his new book and explores the powerful connection between character, leadership, and organizational culture—and how the character of leaders can shape the culture and performance of an organization.

This week we revisit our interview with Susan (Sue) Ashford, who is an award-winning scholar and Professor at the University of Michigan, Stephen M. Ross School of Business. She is the author of "The Power of Flexing: How to Use Small Daily Experiments to Create Big Life-Changing Growth".

Sue's passion for helping people to be maximally effective in their work lives has driven her teaching and research work on self-management, proactivity, change from below, and leadership and its development.

Her research has been summarized as advice for managers in the Harvard Business Review, the Harvard Business Review blog, New York Magazine, and The Conversation. Sue is a Fellow of the Academy of Management. She was awarded the prestigious Career Achievement Award for Distinguished Scholarly Contributions to Management by that Association in 2017 and the OB Division Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020.

Sue is a native Californian and the daughter of two native Californians. Sue lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with her husband, also a University of Michigan faculty member, with whom she raised three daughters.

This week, we revisit our interview with Steve C. de Baca, the Executive Vice President and Chief Patient Safety & Quality Officer at Royal Philips, who brings more than 30 years of experience in quality and regulatory affairs across the medical technology industry.

Before joining Philips, he led QRA at Cardinal Health, supported global orthopedic and regulatory operations at Zimmer Biomet, and held senior leadership roles across the Danaher Diagnostics platform and Boston Scientific. Steve has also served as an industry board member and instructor for the Regulatory Affairs master's program at St. Cloud State University. He holds both an engineering/industrial technology degree and an MBA from Cal State Long Beach.

Based in Minnesota, Steve has been married to his wife Katherine for over 24 years, and they're proud parents of their son Carson, currently studying at Northeastern University.

This week, we revisit our interview with Kara Goldin, the Founder of Hint, Inc., best known for its award-winning Hint® water, the leading unsweetened flavored water, and the author of Undaunted.

Kara has been named among Fortune's Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs and Forbes' 40 Women to Watch Over 40. She is an active speaker & writer and hosts the podcast The Kara Goldin Show, where she interviews founders, entrepreneurs, and other disruptors across various industries. She lives in the Bay Area.

This week we're joined by Dr. Tom Mahoney, an experienced educational leader, executive coach, and speaker with more than three decades of leadership experience. Tom spent 33 years in public education, including 14 as Superintendent of Oregon CUSD 220, where he built a culture of continuous improvement, leadership development, collaboration, and measurable results. Under his leadership, the district earned the state's highest financial rating, and Oregon High School received national recognition from U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, and The Daily Beast.

Tom's influence extends far beyond his district. He has served on major state and national leadership initiatives, presented at conferences across the country, and twice earned the IASA Superintendent of Distinction award. After retiring in 2024, he founded TM Coach LLC, where he coaches superintendents and senior leaders as a trusted thought partner who challenges assumptions, sparks insight, and helps leaders turn reflection into meaningful action.

A Millikin University graduate and Hall of Fame student athlete, Tom continues to invest deeply in the Millikin community and was selected as the university's 2025 Commencement Speaker. Across every chapter of his career, his philosophy remains simple: be of service—always, in all ways.

This week, we revisit our conversation with John Hironimus, CEO of Origami Surgical and a seasoned medical device executive known for bringing breakthrough technologies to market. Over 25 years, John has helped scale innovations that improve care for patients, clinicians, and providers—always with an entrepreneur's instinct and a commitment to building world-class teams.

John began his career at United States Surgical Corporation, supporting surgeons as they adopted advanced procedures. He later built the domestic and international commercial engine for Salient Surgical Technologies, driving growth from $40M to more than $350M and ultimately leading to the company's acquisition by Medtronic in 2011. Since then, he has led commercial organizations at Outset Medical and Dilon Technologies, continuing to champion technologies that elevate clinical outcomes.

Today, as CEO of Origami Surgical, John is focused on scaling novel surgical solutions and shaping the future of minimally invasive care. He is a graduate of Indiana University, where he earned a degree in Public Financial Management.

This week, we revisit our interview with Karen Davis. Karen is a seasoned executive coach, speaker, and author with over 25 years of leadership experience in the B2B tech sector. She brings nearly two decades of coaching mastery to high-performing executives, entrepreneurs, and fellow coaches.

Karen is the co-author of How to Get the Most Out of Coaching: A Client's Guide for Optimizing the Coaching Experience, a go-to resource for making coaching more effective and transformational.

Known for her intuitive and heart-centered approach, Karen helps leaders uncover blind spots, reclaim clarity, and make bold, aligned decisions.

This week we revisit our conversation with Shayne Hughes, President of Learning as Leadership and one of the leading voices in building high-trust, high-performance cultures. Shayne has helped organizations like NASA, Shell, Capital One, and Fairchild Semiconductor transform the way their teams communicate, collaborate, and lead.

He is the co-author of Ego Free Leadership, written with former Encore Capital CEO Brandon Black, which chronicles the real-world transformation of a public company executive team using LaL's tools. Shayne has taught leadership at UC Berkeley, Michigan's Executive MBA Program, and UVA's Darden School, and his writing appears in Forbes, Diversity Executive, the Huffington Post, and Harvard's Du Bois Review.

He has also been profiled in Psychology Today. Fluent in French, Shayne earned his B.A. from UC Berkeley and completed graduate studies in group facilitation at the University of Tours in France.

This week, we revisit our conversation with Dr. John Lowry. John is a recognized authority on negotiation through his experience as a lawyer, management consultant, entrepreneur, negotiation coach, and university administrator.

His results-focused, systematic approach to negotiation has been successfully implemented by thousands of professionals across the United States. John teaches negotiation at the top-ranked Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution at Pepperdine University's Caruso School of Law and lectures in Vanderbilt University's Master's in Management in Health Care program.

John serves as president of Thrivence, a new management consulting firm affiliated with Barge Design Solutions. In addition to leading the firm, John counsels clients on leadership, executive team effectiveness, strategy, revenue growth, and conflict management. He also provides negotiation training and coaching for governmental entities, healthcare organizations, and other businesses. John is a popular keynote speaker and leads multiple executive retreats each year including the opening retreat of the Nashville Health Care Council Fellows program. John earned his bachelor's degree in speech communications from Pepperdine University and master's degree in religion from Abilene Christian University. He received his juris doctorate degree from Southern Methodist University's Dedman School of Law. He has also completed graduate work in dispute resolution at the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution at Pepperdine University's Caruso School of Law and in public policy at California State University, Sacramento.

John resides in Nashville, TN, with his wife, Melissa, and their three children.