The Gartner Talent Angle

Why certain brief experiences can jolt us and elevate us and change us—and how we can learn to create such extraordinary moments in our life and work.

While human lives are endlessly variable, our most memorable positive moments are dominated by four elements: elevation, insight, pride, and connection. If we embrace these elements, we can conjure more moments that matter. What if a teacher could design a lesson that he knew his students would remember twenty years later? What if a manager knew how to create an experience that would delight customers? What if you had a better sense of how to create memories that matter for your children?

This book delves into some fascinating mysteries of experience: Why we tend to remember the best or worst moment of an experience, as well as the last moment, and forget the rest. Why "we feel most comfortable when things are certain, but we feel most alive when they're not." And why our most cherished memories are clustered into a brief period during our youth.

Dan Heath is a Senior Fellow at Duke University's CASE center, which supports social entrepreneurs. At CASE, he founded the Change Academy, a program designed to boost the impact of social sector leaders.

Dan is the co-author, along with his brother Chip, of three New York Times bestsellers: Decisive, Switch, and Made to Stick. Amazon.com's editors named Switch one of the Best Nonfiction Books of the Year, and it spent 47 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list. Made to Stick was named the Best Business Book of the Year and spent 24 months on the BusinessWeek bestseller list. Their books have been translated into over 30 languages.

Previously, Dan worked as a researcher and case writer for Harvard Business School. In 1997, Dan co-founded an innovative publishing company called Thinkwell, which continues to produce a radically reinvented line of college textbooks.

Dan has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from the Plan II Honors Program from the University of Texas at Austin. One proud geeky moment for Dan was his victory in the 2005 New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, beating out 13,000 other entrants. He lives in Durham, NC.

85% of breakdowns in companies are traceable to internal root causes.

Only 13% of people working in business in North America feel any connection to their company's purpose.

These surprising statistics lead us to ask, why do some companies lose their soul, age prematurely, and stall out while others sustain profitable growth?

Chris Zook, best-selling author of The Founder's Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth, and partner at Bain & Company, discusses how the most successful companies maintain the founder's mentality—an insurgent's clear mission and purpose, an unambiguous owner mindset, and a relentless focus on the front line. Based on 5 years of research, visiting 40 countries, conducting 150 interviews, and creating a database of over 8000 companies, Chris teaches us how leaders can overcome the predictable crises in a company's lifecycle and set it on a path of sustainable and profitable growth.

It's usually the rule breakers who turn into millionaire entrepreneurs.

Insurance sales people would make successful Navy Seals.

Nice guys don't finish last.

These are just a few of the latest findings from behavioral science that Eric Barker, founder of the blog Barking Up The Wrong Tree, and author of The Wall Street Journal bestseller Barking Up The Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong, references to redefine success. Through extensive research and narratives, Barker provides guidance on how to both identify signature strengths, and how we can turn weaknesses into strengths by placing yourself in environments that will reward your uniqueness in order to be optimally happy, productive, and successful in your career.

What if you could direct your brain? While most believe you are at the mercy of your brain, what if we actually had the ability to control it? Scott Halford, CEO of Complete Intelligence and author of Activate Your Brain: The Neuroscience of Success, discusses how we can activate "brain hacks" to refresh our brain, increase stamina and momentum, and exterminate negative feelings in order to make the best decisions in our daily work life. Begin living a life today that activates the thinking, inventing, and loving part of your brain.

Nobody likes to work with a jerk. But what if YOU are one?

We talk with Bob Sutton, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University and author of the newly released A**hole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People that Treat you Like Dirt. We talk to Bob about "jerky behaviors" that result from being in a hurry, use of social media, being in a position of power, and exhaustion. Bob describes how toxic these behaviors can be to culture, and gives specific tactics we can use to deal with jerks in our everyday lives.

Play keeps us in the moment. It is unpredictable and fun, and it keeps the attention of people. So why not play in the workplace?

We talk to Elizabeth Cushing, the President and COO of Playworks, an organization that works with children in elementary schools to play in a socially and emotionally intelligent way.

In this episode, Elizabeth shares how to use play tactics like her organization uses with children in order to promote a healthy, profitable organization.

• We don't talk about love in the workplace. But what if we told you the best leaders are realizing the importance of self-awareness, love, and "going deep" in order to be a great leader?

Bob Rosen, global CEO advisor, organizational psychologist, and bestselling author talks to us about how the best people "go deep" within themselves to determine their story.

In this episode we talk about the four components that determine our story: genetics, family relationships, events and experiences, and our sense of ourselves. By connecting with these, we can rewrite our story, get rid of baggage that may be holding us back, and change how we see the world.

Bob Rosen founded Healthy Companies International over 20 years ago to help top executives achieve their leadership potential and build healthy, high performing, and sustainable companies. He was awarded a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, where he interviewed over 400 CEOs in 50 countries.

Bob graduated from the University of Virginia and earned a PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. He teaches in executive education programs around the world, and is a faculty member in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at George Washington University's School of Medicine.

Culture is increasingly becoming a pivotal part of organizational strategy. Red Hat is one company that uses their culture of open decision making as a strategic advantage for their business,where they use an open source framework to make decisions in the organization.

Join us as we talk to Red Hat Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer DeLisa Alexander about how Red Hat works with both leaders and employees to include characteristics of transparency, inclusivity, collaboration, community focus, adaptability, and agility into their culture through open source decision making.

DeLisa Alexander leads the organization responsible for global human resources including Red Hat University. The organization's mission is to be a strategic partner to the business in acquiring, developing, and retaining talent and to enhance the Red Hat culture and talent brand.

Reconcile how AI, analytics, and machine learning effect humans and the future of talent with Guru Sethupathy, Head of People Analytics at a Fortune 100 company and former engagement manager at McKinsey Global Institute. Guru talks to us about the value of people analytics, and how we can overcome the siloed nature of companies to use predictive and prescriptive analytics to help the business achieve its goals.

He was the former Chief Economist and Director of Product Development at Opportunity@Work, a civic enterprise based at New America. Prior to joining Opportunity@Work, Guru was an engagement manager at McKinsey, serving clients on topics related to human capital.

Before McKinsey, Guru was an assistant professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University. His research agenda focused on how globalization and technology are changing labor markets, including productivity, employment, skills, wages, and inequality. Prior to becoming an economist, Guru also spent some years in the hi-tech and investment banking worlds.

Guru has a B.S. in computer science from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University.

How does naked leadership lead to better decision making?

Chris Fussell, former Navy SEAL Officer and Partner at McChrystal Group, talks to us about "naked leadership," and how he worked in the military with senior leaders to expose themselves to uncertainty on a daily basis. We then dive into techniques that retain the strength of bureaucracy, while moving at the speed of decentralized networks. Later, Fussell takes us through his model of strong leadership and culture: credibility = proven competence + integrity + relationships.

Listen to Part Two of this two-part series.

Chris is an author of the 2015 New York Times bestseller, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, and his new book, titled On Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams.