The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

Is there anyone who has done more to illustrate the pathos, drama, and humanity surrounding medical diagnosis than Dr. Lisa Sanders? If you jokingly said, “Dr. Gregory House!” you’ve unwittingly acknowledged Sanders’ deep influence (her work inspired the television show *House*). As a physician, Yale Medical School professor, author, *New York Times* magazine columnist, and host of her own Netflix documentary series, *Diagnosis,* Sanders wears many hats on multiple platforms. She was, in fact, in Boston to tape a TEDMED talk, when she walked over to our studio in the Seaport.

No matter what form her stories take, they always involve empathy for the patient and a Sherlock Holmesian curiosity from the diagnostician. And in this conversation with our Jonathon Swersey she gets into all kinds of interesting topics: the limitations of today’s genetic testing , how her storytelling has educated people about medical uncertainty, the role social media can play in diagnosing patients, and the complicated theatrics of the healthcare trade.

Sanders says that diagnosis requires a good set of ears, a working heart, and a sharp imagination. “The best way to get people to talk to you is to be actually interested in what they have to say,” says Sanders. “And be able to demonstrate that by being quiet and listening to what they have to say.” Fortunately for us, Sanders was nowhere close to quiet in the conversation that follows. You’ll want to listen to it. STAT.

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kip Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

When the *New York Times’* Travel editor, Amy Virshup, announced that her section was going to “offset airplane travel by staff members on assignment,” we were intrigued. “It is, I know, a small gesture. But it’s a start,” she wrote—and we admired the way she was prototyping a real innovation in travel journalism. We were so impressed that we connected with her to see what else she had to say about the current state of travel. At the end of February, our Dustin Boutet, who leads our Travel and Hospitality Vertical, spoke with Virshup and asked not just about climate change but about experiential travel, the industry’s platform wars, editing in the age of social media, the paper’s famed “52 Places to Go” series, and the tricky issue of reclining on an airplane. We think you’ll agree that the conversation traversed some interesting ground.

Rita McGrath, a distinguished professor at Columbia Business school and well-respected author, prides herself in being able to see around corners (her most recent book : *Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen.*) Similarly, we’ve long backcasted our way through the innovation space. So when we got together, for a Resonance Test chat, numerous future-facing remarks were dropped into the mix. “A lot of times the people that see an inflection point really early are not in the Strategy Group,” said McGrath, adding: “They could be out at the periphery. They could be on a loading dock somewhere.” In this conversation McGrath thinks it out with the perspicacious Toby Bottorf, Senior Director and Head of Client Engagement at EPAM Continuum. Listen closely—what you hear today might just prepare you for tomorrow.

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kip Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Love is in the air. Pastry love, that is. *Pastry Love* is the latest volume by Joanne Chang—James Beard Award-winning pastry chef, restaurateur, author—but it’s also the motivating philosophy behind the success of her string of Flour Bakery + Cafés. “The idea of pastry love is really to try to entice people when they come into the bakery to order one of everything because we know that if you eat our pastries, you'll be happy.” In the latest episode of *The Resonance Test,* Buck Sleeper, who leads our Restaurants and Retail Vertical, talks with Chang about pastry love: how it motivates both employees and customers, how it fits between two covers, and how she brought it, reluctantly, into the digital age. This a conversation about the evolution of a business and Chang’s iterative, intelligent spirit. It’s also a very personal edition of the podcast. As our Boston studio is just a few floors above the Seaport’s Flour Bakery + Cafe, many of us are regular beneficiaries of said pastry love. Dig in!

“Organizations are fascinating because they're completely human created,” says Harvard Business School professor Gary Pisano in the just-posted episode of *The Resonance Test.* “They're not natural.” Which is to say: they are *cultural.* Pisano’s new book, *Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation,* makes it clear that innovation is a set of choices a company, a leader, may or may not make. In an invigorating conversation with our Jon Campbell, Pisano asserts that “everything about organizational life was designed in some way” and therefore it can all be *redesigned.* Listen closely, and you’ll learn some relevant business lessons, including the paradoxes of innovative cultures and the challenges of earning today’s dollar while also charting a company’s future course.

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

The world has many problems, but few solutions—too few good, effective, *scalable* solutions. MIT Solve seeks to change this. Solve, “a community of cross-sector leaders devoted to identifying and supporting solutions to actionable challenges through open innovation,” is helmed by Executive Director Alex Amouyel, who recently popped over to our Boston studio for a chat with Gaurav Rohatgi, Co-Lead of EPAM Continuum’s Life Sciences Vertical.

Amouyel explains that Solve is a “marketplace for social impact innovation,” to which Rohatgi asks: *Why* is such a marketplace necessary? In this free-flowing conversation, Amouyel talks about many topics: How her biochemistry background helps her communicate with her STEM-based network, a Solver team's cool childhood development milestones app, and the profound importance of optimism in social innovation. She also provides important details about the Challenge Design Workshop we’re co-hosting with Solve, in our Boston studio, on Tuesday, January 28, at 3 p.m. We hope you enjoy this dialogue and invite you to join us for the workshop—and perhaps a chance to have your *own* conversation with Amouyel.

Pull up a seat, sit down, and prepare to devour the first course of *Why Now,* a production of EPAM Continuum’s Resonance Test podcast. *Why Now,* which is hosted by our Megan Welker, explores the relationship between cultural trends and disruptive innovations.

Our first topic: the rise of alternative proteins. You can’t go out for a meal today without bumping into Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods somewhere on the menu. Why are meat-based meats seeing all this competition? To dig into the context, we asked Ayr Muir, Founder and CEO of Clover Food Lab, the Boston-based vegetarian food chain that’s been hawking Impossible meatball sandwiches since 2017: Why Now? Muir was refreshingly open in his responses. “We're in the food industry, and I think it's the most dishonest industry,” he said, adding that “It's a space where there's a lot of opportunity for creating real relationships. I think you have to start with trust to do that.” In the process, we learned what goes into Impossible meatballs and what they do for his business, the value of publicizing one’s mistakes, and the ways in which our food choices today are really about “voting for a certain future.” Curious to learn more? Listen to *Why Now*—now.

Host: Megan Welker

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Restaurants & Retail Vertical Lead: Buck Sleeper

What happens when a renowned futurist joins EPAM Continuum? Here’s what happens: things get *interesting.* You feel this immediately by listening to a just-recorded conversation between our new colleague, David Rose—author of *Enchanted Objects,* former MIT Media Lab savant and Warby Parkerite—and our less-new but equally articulate colleague, Toby Bottorf. What’s special about Rose? It’s not just his informed outlook on augmented reality (“The new term is ‘spatial computing,’”) or his colorful experiences in tech and business. Yes, Rose casually deploys a variety of interesting words in conversation—“the topology of your face,” “pupillary distance,” “e-com funnel,” “a Louis XV gold sapphire brooch,” “vomiting rainbows on the plane of your face” and “pre-attentive processing”—but that’s not it either. *It* is the multiple possibilities Rose’s optimistic imagination brings to our work. “I tend to think that there are more journalists, whistle-blowers, and people who are willing to be alarmist in the world, rather than people who are trying to create the desirable future states,” he says. “And so I’d like to focus on the positive valence stuff.” We’re with him! Listen up, and you just might be, too.

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Dr. Bryan Vartabedian is a pediatric gastroenterologist, or a “[g]astroenterologist to small people,” as he describes his specialization on his popular Twitter profile. Pediatrics is a complicated job, he explains, in the latest episode of *The Resonance Test.* In an intense conversation with our Jonathon Swersey, Dr. Vartabedian says: “We really serve two masters: we are morally and ethically obligated to that child who’s under our care, while at the same time we have an obligation to the surrogate or the parent who’s bringing that child in.” Listen in and you’ll hear him talk about the extreme metricization of patient experience: “As we strive to get those [patient satisfaction] numbers to link with Medicare reimbursement, there’s kind of this pressure to kind of operationalize human encounters, which is a little bit icky” and how “being a pain at times is part of the job of the parent looking after” a sick child. This honest and informed conversation will leave you with a strong sense of where healthcare is heading. “As medicine becomes more precise and more predictive and preemptive, the amount of data that’s emanating from us, via these genomic studies or imaging or what have you, is going to become greater and greater,” says Dr. Vartabedian. “And I think our role as physicians is going to be to act as a mediator or moderator of all these incoming inputs.”

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

In May 2015, Alan Rusbridger stepped down as the editor of *The Guardian.* He had managed, over the course of 20 years, to transform the British paper into a digital phenomenon—a truly global source of news. His book, *Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now,* details that transformation. In a recent *Resonance Test* conversation, Rusbridger relates how it feels to *not* to report on Brexit Era U.K. politics (“I’m really rather relieved not to have anything to do with it”) and talks about the stress involved in digitizing one’s business:

“Suddenly you say to your staff: ‘By the way, we want you to update things every five minutes, every ten minutes. We want you to do it in video and audio as well as text. We want you to be on social media. We might want you to do live events as well. And by the way, you can’t go home at 9:00 because the story keeps updating till midnight...”

Listen closely, and you’ll learn about the uncertainly of life during a digital revolution, the dangers of deepfakes, the challenges of writing a business memoir, and even the extent of Rusbridger’s non-Chopin piano repertoire: “Given enough drink, I will sit and play show tunes all evening—but that doesn’t happen very often.”