Radio Free Leader

Innovation requires creativity. And Todd Henry knows something about creativity.

Todd is the founder and CEO of Accidental Creative, a company that helps creative people and teams generate brilliant ideas. He regularly speaks and consults with companies, both large and small, about how to develop practices and systems that lead to everyday brilliance. Todd’s work has been featured by Fast Company, Fortune,Forbes, HBR.org, US News & World Report, and many other major media outlets.

In this episode, we talk about Todd’s book, The Accidental Creative: How To Be Brilliant at a Moment’s Notice which offers strategies for how to thrive in the creative marketplace and how to lead creative teams.

Cynthia A. Montgomery is the Timken Professor of Business Administration and immediate past head of the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School, where she’s taught for over twenty years. For six years she led the strategy track in the School’s highly regarded Owner, President, Manager Program (OPM), attended by top managers of mid-sized companies from around the globe. Currently, she is a core faculty member in the School’s Advanced Management Program.

In this episode, we discuss Cynthia’s new book The Strategist: Be The Leader Your Business Needs. Cynthia boldly redefines strategy and issues a call to arms for leaders to take back their rightful claim to be Strategists of their own organizations.

Max McKeown is a a new breed of business guru. He works consultant, researcher and writer focused on innovation and strategy. He is the author of two recently published books: The Strategy Book andAdaptability. In this interview, we discuss both books and why the best strategy for the future might just be adaptability.

Scott Eblin is the co-founder and president of The Eblin Group, Inc., a leadership development and strategy firm that supports organizations in ensuring the success of their executive level leaders. Through his work as an executive coach, leadership strategist, speaker and author, Scott has become known as a thought leader in identifying the behaviors that executives need to pick up and let go as they transition into new and larger roles. In this episode, we discuss Scott’s book The Next Level: What Insider’s Need to Know About Executive Success.

Bob Frisch, managing partner of The Strategic Offsites Group, has worked with organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to German mittelstand family businesses to the U.S. Department of State. Bob’s work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, theWall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Fortune. In this interview, we talk about the difference between senior management teams and kitchen cabinets, why he hates matrix organizations and his new book Who’s in the Room: How Great Leaders Structure and Manage the Teams Around Them.

David A. Owens is professor of the practice of management at Vanderbilt’s Graduate School of Management, where he also directs the Executive Development Institute. Specializing in innovation and new product development, he is known as a dynamic speaker and is the recipient of numerous teaching awards. In this interview, we discuss his new book Creative People Must Be Stopped.

Creative People Must Be Stopped shows how individuals and organizations sabotage their own best intentions to encourage “outside the box” thinking. It shows that the antidote to this self-defeating behavior is to identify which of the six major types of constraints are hindering innovation: individual, group, organizational, industry-wide, societal, or technological. Once innovators and other leaders understand exactly which constraints are working against them and how to overcome them, they can create conditions that foster innovation instead of stopping it in its tracks.

Marcus Buckingham is a key soloist in the strengths movement choir. He is a best-selling author, popular keynote speaker and business consultant who champions the idea that people and organizations reach peak performance by leveraging their strengths.

In this interview, we discuss his latest project, StandOut, a combination book and strengths assessment that uses an innovative new research methodology to reveal your top two “strength Roles.” StandOut goes beyond description to give people practical strategies that fit their strengths, and provide managers with quick insights on how to get the best from each member of their team.

Dr. Hurley is a Professor at Fordham University and President of Hurley Associates. Dr. Hurley consults with organizations on leadership development, top team development, coaching, managing transformational change and developing and implementing strategies to maximize customer value. He has published over 30 articles or book chapters. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, California Management Review, and Harvard Business Review. He is the author of the new book The Decision to Trust.

In this episode, we talk to Dr. Hurley about the importance of trust, how the decision to trust is made and how leaders can become more trustworthy.

Les McKeown (not the one from the Bay City Rollers) is is the President & CEO of Predictable Success. He has has started over 40 companies in his own right, and was the founding partner of an incubation consulting company that advised on the creation and growth of hundreds more organizations worldwide. Since relocating from his native Ireland to the US in 1998, Les advises CEOs and senior leaders of organizations on how to achieve scalable, sustainable growth. His clients range from large family-owned businesses to Fortune 100 companies, and include Harvard University, American Express, T-Mobile, United Technologies, Pella Corporation, The US Army, Microsoft and the NSA.

In this episode, we welcome back Les to the podcast and discuss his new book The Synergist, which focuses on getting executive teams to work better together.

Kevin Oakes is co-author of The Executive Guide to Integrated Talent Management. He is the CEO and founder of the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), the fastest growing and largest corporate network focused on the practices of high-performance organizations. Kevin has been a leader in the human capital field for the last two decades, and was previously the Founder and the President of SumTotal Systems, the largest provider of talent and learning solutions in the world.

In this interview, we discuss the problem of silos in talent management, including what some of the world’s foremost thought leaders recommend and what leading practitioners are doing to fix it.