The U.S. Army is not really the place you would think of to find innovation, but at the Army Research Labs, it is an important part of their mission and how they operate. Innovation is infused into the DNA of the entire organization, and Dr. Philip Perconti joins me to share some insight into this unique part of the U.S. military.

You’ve probably had the experience of working in a team where everyone’s energy made the task at hand feel fun and easy. On the flip side, you might have encountered working with people who just exude negative energy, and that makes everything a challenge. The truth is, energy has a lot to do with your business success. Chris Barez-Brown joins me to dive into how you can get your energy right, so you can get your extraordinary on.

I’ve always believed that communication is critical to innovation. If you have the best ideas in the world but nobody is listening, you can’t make a difference. Steve Woodruff, a.k.a., King of Clarity, joins me to dive into how best to get your ideas heard AND the science behind why it works.

Did you know that being innovative is one of the most human things you can do? It is one of the fundamentally human things that we do all the time, but how are personality, intelligence, and creativity (or being innovative, as I like to call it) all interconnected? Dr. Rex Jung joins me to dive deep into the mind about how this is all related to creative problem-solving and critical thinking.

‘Innovative solutions’ is a phrase that gets used a lot. But what exactly does that mean, and what does it take to stay ahead of the curve and not fall behind? How can you gauge a client’s appetite for innovation and disruption, and implement it in a way that allows for learning from failure? That’s where Pam Maynard, an expert in innovation and incubation, comes in.

Pam is the CEO of Avanade, an IT consulting and global technology company created as a joint venture between Accenture and Micros

Technology is changing and moving extremely rapidly, particularly in the cybersecurity space, so how can you stay ahead of the curve? How do you find the opportunities in the gaps in constantly evolving industry, and create a business in these niches? Kristina Bergman, an expert in cybersecurity, has insights into just these topics.

How do you create a high-performing team where people are leaning into you as the leader, rather than you leaning into them? As a leader, what can you do to ensure you are creating an environment where your team thrives? There’s no better person to tap for insights than a former commander of a nuclear submarine, David Marquet.

In this episode, we’re diving into the three critical phases of innovation — startup, scaleup, and screwup. That’s not a mistake — repeat guest on the podcast, Jurgen Appelo, has authored his second book with just that title and he explains just what that means.

As a business, how do you figure out what your customers need, and how do you apply that customer-centric viewpoint to your internal processes so that it's infused into everything that you do? Jeff Gothelf joins me to dive into why it’s so important for us to understand customer behavior to create success for our businesses, and how to ask questions that really get to the core of your customers' minds and hearts.

In recent years, there has been a massive shift in the business world from brands and businesses being a passive stage for culture, to one where they are active challengers of culture. The role of business in people's personal lives is very different than it was — the relationship between consumer and brand, and what we expect from businesses has changed. How does this change the way we think about the businesses and brands we lead? Alain Sylvain is just the expert we need to hear from on this topic.