Most businesses assume their biggest branding challenge is awareness. Warren Kornblum thinks that's almost the wrong problem to solve.

Most people treat self-esteem as a by-product of events, rising after a win and faltering after a setback. Alan Weiss argues the opposite: self-esteem doesn't decline because of what happens to you - it declines out of neglect. Despite decades of positive psychology, Weiss makes the case that most of us have quietly surrendered the internal resource that determines whether we succeed consistently, and that recovering it requires something most leadership conversations quietly sidestep: courage.

In this episode, Nigel speaks with Alan Weiss - consultant, speaker and author whose clients have included Merck, GE, Mercedes-Benz and the Federal Reserve. They cover why self-esteem in business is not therapy culture repackaged, and what it actually takes to sustain it.

What listeners will take away:

Alan's new book, The Courage of Your Talents: How to Build Your Self-esteem, Trust Your Own Judgment, and Constantly Succeed in Business (and Life), is published by Productivity Press in October 2026. More details can be found on Alan's website.

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Leadership looks straightforward until it isn't. When conflict is sitting in the room, when your natural style is the wrong one for the moment, when you have to be both tough and fair at the same time — that's where most leadership development leaves you on your own.

In this episode, Nigel Ridpath speaks with Dr James Walsh: US Air Force veteran, retired Department of Defense civilian, lecturer at Park University, and author of You're a Leader — Now What? Build Trust, Inspire Teams, Drive Results (Business Expert Press, August 2026). James draws on nearly fifty years in and around military leadership — including time at the Pentagon — to address the questions that frameworks rarely answer: how do you distinguish constructive from destructive conflict? When should you intervene, and when should you let things run? And how do you adapt your leadership style when your instincts are pointing you in the wrong direction?

Also in this episode: the One Minute Rant takes aim at AI content tells and the homogenisation of online voice; and the Superhero of the Week goes to a politician who chose to solve the problem over owning it.

Most conversations about gender fairness in the workplace start from the assumption that it's primarily a women's issue — or worse, a compliance one. Brad Johnson and David Smith start from somewhere different. Their argument, grounded in decades of research at the US Naval Academy and Johns Hopkins, is that the current structure of most organisations fails men and women in different but related ways, and that fixing it is a straightforward business decision.

Brad is a clinical psychologist, former US Naval officer and Professor of Leadership and Psychology at the US Naval Academy. David is a Professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and co-founder of the Gender and Work Initiative there. Together they run Workplace Allies. Fair Share, published by Harvard Business Review Press in June 2026, is their third book on this subject.

In this conversation:

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You can find their book - Fair Share on Amazon here.

Pest control is not the first industry most people look to for business insights. That's rather the point. Tim Witt spent 30 years rising through corporate leadership in one of the most consistently recession-resistant, AI-resistant sectors in the economy, before starting his own company from scratch in rural Oklahoma — during the 2008 financial crisis, when most sensible people were heading in the other direction.

In this conversation:

Infested is available now on Amazon.

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In Part 1, Johan Roos introduced the central tension of Human Magic: every professional is navigating either an amplification curve, where AI sharpens their human capabilities, or an erosion curve, where it quietly atrophies them. Part two gets more specific — and considerably sharper.

The MIT Project Iceberg study modelled 150 million workers across 32,000 skills. Its conclusion — that what organisations are experiencing now is only the visible tip of AI's disruption — sets up the question this episode addresses: when every organisation converges on the same AI-generated strategy, what actually differentiates you?

In this episode:

Johan's underlying optimism is worth holding onto. He's not arguing the machines are coming for us. He's arguing that whether AI amplifies or erodes what makes us capable is, ultimately, a choice.

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Johan's book can be found here: Human Magic: Leading with Wisdom in an Age of Algorithms

While writing The Time Traveller's Guide to Management, a persistent worry surfaced for Nigel: the management frameworks he'd spent years teaching were developed decades before AI started doing some of the work those frameworks were designed to support. Johan Roos turns out to have been asking the same question, for considerably longer.

Johan is a management scholar, co-inventor of the globally adopted Lego Serious Play methodology, and Professor and former Chief Academic Officer at Hult International Business School. His new book, Human Magic: Leading with Wisdom in an Age of Algorithms (Routledge, 2026), argues that the real competitive advantage in the age of AI is irreducibly human.

This is part one of two — the second half digs into specific capabilities and what leaders actually need to do.

In this episode:

Part two is, in Nigel's words, the sharper half. Subscribe so you don't miss it.

Nigel's book - The Time Traveller's Guide to Management - can be bought here.

Most of us end the day having been relentlessly busy and yet not entirely sure what we achieved. Personal effectiveness generates a lot of noise, but Melissa Swift's research cuts through to something more useful: the question isn't how much you can do, it's whether you're doing the work that actually counts.

Melissa is founder of Anthro Insight, a former practice leader at Mercer, Korn Ferry and Capgemini, and a columnist for MIT Sloan Management Review. Her book Effective is the practical follow-up to her debut Work Here Now, aimed squarely at how individuals and teams can do their best work despite conditions that often make it surprisingly hard.

In this conversation, Nigel and Melissa cover:

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Melissa's book can be found on Amazon here.

If a buyer cannot tell you apart from your competitors, they will default to price, brand or whoever replied fastest. None of those is a durable basis for business. This episode is about changing that — not by working harder in the same category, but by moving out of it.

Nigel uses his own experience in the keynote speaking world to make the point concrete. Competing as a motivational leadership talk puts you against former Olympians and celebrity entrepreneurs. Competing as a practical storytelling framework for leaders is an entirely different conversation.

The five-part checklist:

There is also a practical rewrite exercise: take your LinkedIn headline, your website opener or your 30-second introduction. Remove your name. Ask whether it could belong to anyone else in your sector. If yes, rewrite it using the structure covered in the episode.

Also in this episode: the One Minute Rant targets the "quick chat?" message — no subject, no context, a calendar ambush that is never five minutes and never has an agenda. The Superhero of the Week is a bicycle tool tree at a French railway station — allen keys, tyre levers and a pump, tethered and usable, put exactly where the problem shows up.

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