How can organizations make more equitable changes to their internal norms and structures, to promote fairness over merely seeking profit? What are alternate ways to tackle the difference in agreeableness that underpins many professional gaps between men and women?

Cordelia Fine is a professor in the history and philosophy of science department at University of Melbourne, as well as the author of several books, including Patriarchy Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality and Why Men Still Win at Work, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, and Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society.

Greg and Cordelia discuss the complexities surrounding gender equality, including the contested reasons for wage differences and occupational gaps between men and women. Cordelia critiques the traditional and evolving gender norms, explains her stance on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) strategies, and advocates for more nuanced, context-aware approaches to addressing gender disparities. She challenges oversimplified evolutionary psychology narratives and underscores the importance of understanding the cultural evolution of gender roles. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why valuing women isn’t enough

52:52: You can say pretty words about valuing the feminine. Oh, you know, women are great. They’re so wonderful. They’re so empathic and collaborative and participative, and they’re really good at building people. But you can’t just say that—you have to actually change your organizations so that you literally put your money where your mouth is, so that is what is actually being rewarded.

Redefining patriarchy

10:37: There’s a sort of assumption that when we talk about patriarchy, we’re just talking about the harm to girls and women. Its long been recognized, I think, in feminism that often men and certain groups of men do also face harms in that kind of system that’s keeping some men on top.

Why our ideas about sex differences often get it wrong

20:58: I do think we have to be careful about looking at our—first of all, making assumptions about what sex differences actually are—because they’re often, you know, a huge amount of overlap, contingent depending on the context and the cues. But also, to then project that back into our ancestral past without taking a kind of wider look at societies beyond the weird populations—Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.

Recommended Resources:

• Cecilia L. Ridgeway
• Cailin O'Connor
• The Making of the Modern Family
• David Benatar
• Leonora Risse
• HILDA Survey
• Nancy Fraser

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at the University of Melbourne
• Cordelia-Fine.com
• Wikipedia Profile
• LinkedIn Profile
• Social Profile on Instagram

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Patriarchy Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality and Why Men Still Win at Work
• Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
• Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society
• A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives
• Google Scholar Page

Related Unsiloed Episode:

• Claudia Goldin - Understanding the Gender Wage Gap

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Despite its long-held place in history as the lynchpin of America’s recovery from the Great Depression, what if the New Deal did more to hinder the country’s recovery than help it? 

George Selgin is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Georgia and former director of the Center on Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute. His books like, False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery and Floored!: How a Misguided Fed Experiment Deepened and Prolonged the Great Recession, examine macroeconomic theories through the lens of key moments in monetary history. 

In this conversation, Greg and George dive deep into the inner workings of The Great Depression, covering the biggest misconceptions surrounding the New Deal's role in ending the crisis, why many of President Roosevelt’s policies were counterproductive, and how pre-existing, international factors impacted the U.S.’s recovery.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The myth of New Deal wisdom

47:17: The thing that people have to remember when they are inclined to think, oh, you know, we need to look back at the New Deal and all the wonderful things they did to end the Depression. They knew so much, you know, they had all these experiments. No. We know a lot more about how to fight recessions and depressions than they did because we know that fiscal and monetary stimulus are our best hopes. And those were two things that the Roosevelt administration did not put much, if any, emphasis upon. And that, of course, just hearing that should give a lot of people second thoughts about how helpful the New Deal was. They did a lot of stuff, but they did not do the main thing we rely on now. The main things, they did not promote monetary stimulus, and they did not promote fiscal stimulus except somewhat, reluctantly.

Keynes vs. the New Dealers

59:39: I certainly believe that if Keynes’s advice had been followed instead of what the New Dealers did, that the Depression would have ended much sooner than it did in the United States. 

The downside of "bold experimentation"

35:56: Roosevelt made two statements that were probably the least, the two main unambiguous things he said, one of which turned out to be a very accurate description of what his administration would end up doing. And the other one of which would be a very inaccurate statement. This is all in the course of the campaign. The accurate statement was when he said that his administration planned to go about addressing the Depression through bold experimentation. And that is absolutely true. There was a lot of trial and error. And the problem is, as I say in my book, you know, the problem with bold experiments is they often fail.

On war clouds and gold flows

45:41: What keeps gold flowing in for the rest of the decade, and more and more of it as time goes on, is Hitler's rise to power and the, the gatherings war clouds that eventually have many, many Europeans thinking, I do not think this is place, this place is safe for our gold. And as long as they could, taking it and shipping it to the United States, where now after the suspension of the gold standard and the devaluation, the treasury alone is buying all the gold.

Recommended Resources:

• John Maynard Keynes
• Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Herbert Hoover 
• Henry Ford 
• Alexander J. Field 
• James Bradford DeLong 

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Georgia 
• Professional Profile at the Cato Institute
• Professional Profile on LinkedIn
• Profile on X

Guest Work:

• False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947 
• Floored!: How a Misguided Fed Experiment Deepened and Prolonged the Great Recession
• Money: Free and Unfree 
• Less Than Zero: The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing Economy
• The Menace of Fiscal QE 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How does our legal system treat children today, and how do policies affecting their parents and communities cascade down to shape their lives? What forces create a pipeline to criminalization, and what would it take to break that cycle for the children who come next?

Adam Benforado is a professor of law at Drexel University and the author of two books titled A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All and Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice.

Greg and Adam discuss the deep-seated flaws in the US legal system, including cognitive biases and heuristics affecting legal professionals, and how historical assumptions about human behavior shape legal decision-making. Their discussion explores why the legal system is resistant to integrating behavioral sciences, and the impact of punitive criminal justice policies on society, especially children. 

Adam highlights the juxtaposition between overparented, affluent children and under-resourced, marginalized youth, advocating for evidence-based, preventative approaches to social issues rather than reactionary legal interventions. There are broader societal implications of legal practices and Adam stresses the importance of prioritizing children's rights now for a more equitable future.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

A different way to look at crime

16:49: I think there's a really different way to look at crime, which is that everything is situational. It's a result of genes and environment. And of course society can play around with those things and make crime go up or go down. And so, you know, I think in this book, one of my hopes with doing it was honestly to provoke people to try to think about things that they think they know so well. And crime is one thing we think we know so well in our lives, but I think here we have to understand different countries, different people over time have taken very different approaches. And it is not that somehow, you know, people living in these cultures are fundamentally different. I've been to these other countries, and I would say humans actually are surprisingly similar. And what's different though in our country is how we approach it.

Judges are human too

07:30: I think the social science that we've accumulated literally over decades now tells a very different story, which is that judges are human beings, like all the rest of us. And so we need to be just as aware of potential biases that are coming into their judgments and decision making as everyone else.

Where you’re born shapes who you become

43:12: We promise economic, socioeconomic mobility. But if you look at it, right, if you’re in that bottom quintile of family income versus that top quintile of family income, in many ways your trajectory, no matter how inherently smart you are at third grade, a lot of that’s already tracked out simply based on all of that investment that wealthy parents are gonna make over the course of that young person’s childhood. And that’s both positive enrichment, but it’s also when kids, a lot of kids get into trouble. Something doesn’t work, they’re struggling in math, or they hit a kid in school, or they get sick. What happens, right? If you have wealthy parents, those problems get addressed and you get many second chances. If you’re a poor kid, you don’t.

Recommended Resources:

• Jon D. Hanson
• Convention on the Rights of the Child
• Emily Oster
• Trial by Ordeal

Guest Profile:

• AdamBenforado.com
• Faculty Profile at Drexel University
• Profile on LinkedIn
• Social Profile on X

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All
• Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice
• Google Scholar Page

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Is the point of life to minimize suffering, or to understand and embrace it on some level? How do different belief structures view the ideal human response to negative situations? Is there a degree of suffering that would be bearable in order to enable something pleasurable that could offset it?

Scott Samuelson is a professor of philosophy at Iowa State University and also the author of several books, Rome as a Guide to the Good Life: A Philosophical Grand Tour, The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone, and Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering: What Philosophy Can Tell Us About the Hardest Mystery of All.

Greg and Scott discuss the universal accessibility of philosophy, the role of suffering in human life, and the balance between fixing and facing suffering. Scott shares his experiences teaching philosophy in prisons and how men in prison viewed suffering from different perspectives. He also explores the philosophical implications of thinkers like Epictetus, Nietzsche, and John Stuart Mill. Their conversation touches on the themes of modernity, the significance of facing suffering, and finding meaning in both joy and pain. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Philosophy begins with wonder and deepens through suffering

04:26: I think there's a kind of built-in wonder in all of us. But I also think, and this goes to the suffering book, that another thing that tends to make philosophers out of everyone is suffering. There's something about suffering that kind of blows our minds. I mean, a certain amount of suffering seems to make some sense. I mean, it makes some sense that my hand, you know, feels pain when it gets near a fire so that I protect myself. But almost everyone has experiences where someone dies prematurely, or where perhaps they suffer pain that just doesn't add up, like a migraine headache. Or we look at the world and see great injustice, and it's hard not to be a human and start to ask philosophical questions in the face of that—to start to wonder what's going on here. You know, why is this happening? Sometimes, why me? And as I've had a chance to teach a really wide variety of people over the years, I've found that they all—it's without exception—people feel these questions quite deeply inside them.

How philosophy provides us space to face life’s hard questions

05:27: One of the beautiful things that philosophy can do is provide a space that kind of dignifies that part of us that is asking these questions and thinking about it. And so even when philosophy can't necessarily provide all the answers to the questions, there's something powerful just about being in that space where you're facing those questions.

Why suffering is part of being human

10:38: We, of course, are going to kind of combat suffering in some ways, shape, or form. But at the same time, it seems like we have to learn to face it and be open to it and to accept it and to see it as just a part of life rather than as a foreign invader of what it means to be human. And that when we do that, we open ourselves up to the adventure of being human. We had opened ourselves up to, you know, the possibilities of real growth and finding meaning. And a lot of people, when they come out the other side of difficult experiences, have a kind of weird sense that that was a very valuable and important thing, even something they're grateful for. Even though, at the same time, it's not that they wish that it happened, but they're grateful that it has become part of their story and their life. And so when we can do that, I think we're kind of living better lives overall.

Recommended Resources:

• William James
• Plato’s Apology
• Alexis de Tocqueville
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Susan Neiman
• Epictetus
• Stoicism
• Being Mortal
• John Stuart Mill
• Utilitarianism
• When Breath Becomes Air
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Iowa State University
• ScottSamuelsonAuthor.com
• Profile on Wikipedia

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Rome as a Guide to the Good Life: A Philosophical Grand Tour
• The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone
• Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering: What Philosophy Can Tell Us About the Hardest Mystery of All

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What are the nuances of organizational design and risk-taking? What are the roles of both curiosity and trust in fostering an environment ripe for innovation? How can you create serendipity intentionally, and harness its power for your organization?

David Cleevely is a British entrepreneur and international telecoms expert who has built and advised many companies, principally in Cambridge, UK. He is also the author of the new book Serendipity: It Doesn't Happen By Accident. 

Greg and David discuss the concept of engineered serendipity, which involves designing environments and life trajectories that optimize the occurrence of fortunate coincidences. David explains how places like Cambridge, Silicon Valley, and 18th-century Birmingham fostered innovative ecosystems. They explore how engineered structures can increase the likelihood of beneficial outcomes, the role of key individuals in creating networks, and the importance of interdisciplinary interactions. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

How can we engineer serendipity?

04:23: The thing that we need to do is look at how did those things actually happen? Why did they happen? And is it possible to get some general principles out of this, some insights, so that instead of just relying on chance to do it for us, we can change the odds. And really, serendipity does not act by accident. It is about changing the odds.

Randomness in strategy

29:09: You need an element of randomness in strategy. So you need to have things that are highly focused, and you need some things that are going to be cross-disciplinary and completely wacky. And you will need different proportions of those.

Creating environments for good things to happen

02:27: I think we need to do some research, and it's properly cross-disciplinary, 'cause it involves network science, it involves behavioral psychology stuff, all of these things that we need to understand how this stuff actually works. We've been taking this stuff for granted, and actually we need to not just go, oh, that's interesting, and then move on. No, actually we need to investigate this stuff and think, how can we actually create environments in which good things are more likely to happen?

Recommended Resources:

• Lunar Society of Birmingham
• Friedrich Hayek
• Stuart Kauffman
• Santa Fe Institute
• Priestley Riots
• Napoleonic Wars
• Cambridge Wireless
• Cambridge Angels
• ACAM
• Steve Jobs
• Dunbar's Number
• Nicholas Christakis
• Pride and Prejudice
• John Maynard Smith

Guest Profile:

• Chemify Limited
• Wikipedia Profile
• LinkedIn Profile
• Cleevely & Partners
• Trinity Hall Profile
• Cambridge Ahead Profile

Guest Work:

• ConductingSerendipity.com
• Serendipity: It Doesn't Happen By Accident

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If ideas and knowledge are the software, then books have always been the longest-running hardware.

Author and former publishing executive Joel J. Miller’s latest book, The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future, delves into the history and evolution of books as a physical technology for idea transmission.

Joel and Greg discuss the book’s origins from ancient times with Socrates and Plato, to the development of the codex, and the impact of modern digital reading. Joel also shares insights from his experiences in the publishing industry, the importance of physical books in shaping thought, the role of metadata in organizing knowledge, and predictions about the future of books in an increasingly digital world.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Books are hardware for knowledge

09:09: I read someone say essentially this definition of a machine, that it is an assembly of parts that are, you know, designed to produce a particular end. And I do think that there is both institutional and cultural kind of degradation of that. And I thought that is what a book does. A book is a thing that is designed to help produce a particular outcome, which looks like a number of things, but one of them is to develop elaborate schemes of thought that would not be able to exist outside of that physical format. If you did not have the physical thing, the hardware, like you said, if you did not have that, the software would not matter because you do not actually have the ability to take all these elaborate thoughts that we have and hold them in our minds. Our working memory is too short, the ability to go back and revisit and revise is non-existent more or less. And so writing enabled us to develop ideas, and we access those through books.

Books as vessels of ideas

13:24: Ideas live in books. Whether they're arguments, like it's history, it's someone explicating a topic, or it is a novel where somebody is accessing, you know, a kind of a window on another self or things like that. The book is always there to do that for us.

On metadata, organization, and libraries as knowledge systems

25:16: Data is every bit as wild and unruly, and humans have been trying to figure out ways of getting it under control since the beginning, because we create more information than we can even use. We always have. And the ability to go use a library effectively requires some kind of scheme of organization in order to make it, to make things findable. And so we see that not only in the micro case of a single book, but we can see it blown out across an entire library where people have discovered ways of making ideas findable within them. And at every stage, as the technology has advanced, the job has gotten more complicated and also more interesting because the solutions emerge from that technology that enables us to get even better solutions to the problem.

Recommended Resources:

• Maxwell Perkins
• Henry Regnery 
• Septuagint
• Justin Martyr
• I. A. Richards
• Irenaeus
• Galen
• Hernando Colon (Ferdinand Columbus)
• Paul Otlet
• Vannevar Bush

Guest Profile:

• Staff Profile at Full Focus
• Professional Website
• Focus on This podcast

Guest Work:

• The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How did the US Dollar become the dominant currency internationally? What keeps other currencies, fiat or crypto, from displacing the dollar's role? Does the aggressive use of sanctions by the US Government put the dollar's role at risk?

Paul Blustein is with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as well as an author and journalist. He has written several books including his latest work King Dollar: The Past and Future of the World's Dominant Currency and previous works, Off Balance: The Travails of Institutions That Govern the Global Financial System, And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out) Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina, and Laid Low: Inside the Crisis That Overwhelmed Europe and the IMF.

Greg and Paul discuss the reasons behind the US dollar's dominance in global finance, its historical roots stemming from the Bretton Woods Agreement, and the challenges posed by international crises and economic policies. Paul also discusses the role and limitations of the IMF, the geopolitical implications of using the dollar as a financial weapon, and the potential impact of emerging currencies and digital threats. The episode concludes with insights into the phenomena of dollarization and how various economic strategies, including those of China and Russia, intersect with the enduring power of the US dollar.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

How the U.S. discovered the power of financial sanctions

21:00: No longer was it just going to be the drug lords and, you know, in Colombia and places like that, it was now the government was gonna crack down on terrorists. And so the Treasury, OFAC, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, began doing some of that. And they realized that by cutting off banks abroad from access to the dollar system, that correspondent banking system we were just talking about, that, you know, things could really go boom. They could pose a death sentence on banks. And as they began to realize the power of that, they then applied it in the case of North Korea in 2005. And they were absolutely astonished to discover that this really worked. You could really have a big effect on North Korea's financial system by cutting off banks. It was—they went after a bank in Macau that had been—and then they were off to the races. They could use this similar kind of weaponry on Iran and other adversaries

Responsible vs irresponsible use of dollar power

25:29: You have this power with a dollar; if we use it responsibly, it can be a very good power. And if we use it irresponsibly, it's a bad power. And that's the way I like to look at it.

How U.S.–China sanction scenarios are actually gamed out

51:59: Some of the hawks in, you know, you don't hear so much from these guys anymore, but the hawks in Congress have tried to game some of these out. You know, I go into this in one of the chapters of the book about how they, you know, they had a red team and a blue team, and they thought, well, we can, you know, we just have done this—imposed drastic sanctions on Russia. So if there's an invasion of Taiwan, here's what we do. And they, I think, have discovered that if you have a really knowledgeable red team playing the Chinese Communist Party, they can come up with a lot, a lot of things that, it preserves Taiwanese democracy but doesn't have us at each other's throats.

Recommended Resources:

• United States Dollar
• Euro
• Renminbi
• Reserve Currency
• Network Effect
• Bretton Woods System
• John Maynard Keynes
• Harry Dexter White
• Herbert Stein
• Federal Reserve
• International Monetary Fund (IMF)
• SWIFT
• Euroclear
• Fiat Money
• Xi Jinping
• Shadow Fleet

Guest Profile:

• PaulBlustein.com
• Professional Profile for CSIS
• LinkedIn Profile
• Social Profile on X

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• King Dollar: The Past and Future of the World's Dominant Currency
• Off Balance: The Travails of Institutions That Govern the Global Financial System
• And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out) Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina
• The Chastening: Inside The Crisis That Rocked The Global Financial System And Humbled The IMF
• Misadventures of the Most Favored Nations: Clashing Egos, Inflated Ambitions, and the Great Shambles of the World Trade System
• Laid Low: Inside the Crisis That Overwhelmed Europe and the IMF
• Schism: China, America, and the Fracturing of the Global Trading System

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Unlike some other academic fields, the study of business has always had the challenging task of striking a balance between theory and practice. How can theoretical concepts aid business practitioners in real-world situations? And how can business academics expand their understanding of theory through that real-world application?  

Jay Barney is a professor of strategic management at the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business. His work, including numerous books, journal articles, and textbooks, has shaped the field of strategy and entrepreneurship for decades. His most recent book is The Secret of Culture Change: How to Build Authentic Stories That Transform Your Organization.

Jay and Greg discuss the evolving role of academia in the business world, the historical and current perceptions of business education, and the various theories that underpin strategic management. Barney delves into resource-based theory, the importance of organizational culture, and the intersection of strategy and practical business applications. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

What really makes a strategy hard to imitate

44:56: You're going to have a strategy that's likely to be a source of sustained advantage; you have to figure out how that leverages resources, or capabilities that are socially complex. Why? Because that's harder to imitate, stuff that's developed over long periods of time. That's path dependent. Why? Because that's hard to imitate, or stuff that's costly and ambiguous. Well, you don't know how to develop those capabilities because that makes it hard to imitate. And I can make some empirical predictions that socially complex resources and capabilities should last longer. As long as their value is retained, they should last longer than non–socially complex.

Why entrepreneurship is so hard to theorize

39:22: Entrepreneurship, one reason that it's under-theorized as a field is because the theory is really hard, because many of the assumptions and attributes that make it possible to theorize in non-entrepreneurial settings do not apply in entrepreneurial settings. And so then we're stuck with this Knightian uncertainty and difficulties associated with that.

How strategy escapes the tautology problem

46:25: I think that we can avoid the tautology problem by identifying the characteristics that resources and capabilities need to have in order to be sources of sustained advantage. And then, then empirical predictions come out of that. But they do not come out of the tautology, but by definition.

Recommended Resources:

• Jay Barney “The Lessons They Didn’t Teach You in Business School” | unSILOed 
• Modigliani-Miller Theorem
• Hawthorne Effect
• Nicholas Bloom
• Michael Porter
• David Teece
• William H. Meckling
• Michael C. Jensen
• Jensen and Meckling article 76 JFE

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Utah
• Professional Profile on LinkedIn
• Website

Guest Work:

• The Secret of Culture Change: How to Build Authentic Stories That Transform Your Organization
• What I Didn't Learn in Business School: How Strategy Works in the Real World
• Organizational Economics: Toward a New Paradigm for Understanding and Studying Organizations
• Gaining and Sustaining Competitive Advantage
• Strategic Management and Competitive Advantage, Concepts: Concepts and Cases
• Jay Barney | Google Scholar

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Why might ‘bring your whole self to work’ be terrible professional advice, and what should we be thinking about instead? Why does authenticity come into play more now than in previous generations? 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of business psychology at University College London and Columbia. He is also the author of several books, including Don't Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated (and What to Do Instead), Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?: (And How to Fix It), and The Talent Delusion: Why Data, Not Intuition, Is the Key to Unlocking Human Potential, I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique.

Greg and Tomas discuss the overemphasis of authenticity in professional and personal settings, the nuanced insights from sociologist Erving Goffman on impression management, and how emotional intelligence often aligns with strategic impression management. Their conversation gets into the impact of AI on human potential and workplace dynamics, as well as the complex interplay between organizational culture and individual behavior, particularly among leaders. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why do people believe authenticity naturally leads to wellbeing and success?

03:08: In a world that is obviously not very authentic, pretending that we value authenticity or encouraging people to just be themselves might be quite fitting. I think it's not very authentic advice to tell people, "Oh, just be yourself. Oh, just bring your whole self to work. Oh, don't worry about what people think of you." But then, if somebody is silly or naive enough to follow that advice, the repercussions for them are not very positive.

Self-awareness requires paying attention to others

13:33: Professional success and personal development and self-awareness can only be achieved if you are receptive to what other people think of you. So, by the way, as I say in the book [DON’T BE YOURSELF], the notion that, I mean, you know, one of the mantras of authenticity or to authenticity advice, which is "ignore what people tell you," ironically,  the advice is trying to tell us how to behave, right? So you cannot ignore what people tell you. And the difference between somebody who has achieved basic emotional maturity and psychological maturity and somebody who still behaves like a child is that the psychologically mature person pays attention to what other people think of themselves, which doesn't mean being a sort of weak, feeble, conformist sheep. It means being a highly functioning member of society, of work, of community, not being trapped in your own narcissistic delusion.

How do you achieve self-awareness?

12:20: Self-awareness is actually achieved by internalizing the feedback from others from a very, very early age. We learn about ourselves from internalizing or incorporating the feedback we get from others. So your teachers, your aunt, your uncle, your parents, your older siblings, your friends will tell you, you are good at this, you are bad at that, you are funny. And then you understand that you are funny, right? It's obviously problematic if they're lying to you and then you realize, Ooh, outside my family, nobody laughs with my jokes, right? But there's no answer to who we really are. But the best way to understand who we are in the eyes of others is to not be self-centered and to actually be open to feedback. And that's something that people with high emotional intelligence do very well. 

Recommended Resources:

• Erving Goffman
• Core Self-Evaluations
• Emotional Labor
• Emotional Intelligence
• Self-Monitoring
• Elon Musk
• David Bowie
• 360-degree feedback
• Charles Horton Cooley
• Dale Carnegie
• Henry Ford
• Jeffrey Pfeffer
• Pope Francis
• Robert Hogan
• Machiavellianism
• Max Planck
• Amos Tversky
• Daniel Kahneman
• John Maynard Keynes

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University College London
• Website | DrTomas.com
• LinkedIn Profile
• Wikipedia Page
• Social Profile on X

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Don't Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated (and What to Do Instead)
• Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?: (And How to Fix It)
• The Talent Delusion: Why Data, Not Intuition, Is the Key to Unlocking Human Potential
• I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique
• Confidence: How Much You Really Need and How to Get It
• Personality and Individual Differences, 3rd Edition
• The Future of Recruitment: Using the New Science of Talent Analytics to Get Your Hiring Right (The Future of Work)
• Personality and Intellectual Competence
• The Psychology of Personnel Selection
• Personality and Individual Differences
• Confidence: Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, Insecurity, and Self-Doubt

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How do evangelism and business go hand in hand? Well, for today’s guest, evangelism is the purest form of sales. 

Guy Kawasaki is the Chief Evangelist at Canva and former Chief Evangelist for the Macintosh Division at Apple. He’s a prolific author, speaker, and podcaster, with hit books like Think Remarkable: 9 Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference, Wiser Guy: Life-Changing Revelations and Revisions from Tech's Chief Evangelist, and Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.

Guy and Greg discuss his evolving career path, why his work’s focus has shifted over time from how to succeed in business to how to succeed in life, the practicalities of sales, evangelism, and the overlooked necessity of these skills in business education. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Is evangelism the purest form of sales?

42:25: I believe that sales is a very necessary and important skill. I would say that maybe evangelism is the purest form of sales. The difference between evangelism and most sales is that in evangelism, you have the other person's best interests at heart, not just yours.

Remarkable doesn't mean reach and famous

24:45: Remarkable does not mean rich or famous, although you can be rich or famous and remarkable. But it's really about the impact you've made on the world. And I don't mean you have to sell 300 million iPhones or 300 million computers; it's really what have you done?

Stop chasing passion, start pursuing interest

14:15: So the bar is so high for a passion. So a lot of people are saying, oh my God, I'm 22 years old, I haven't found my passion yet, what's wrong with me? I'm an underachiever. And what I think you should do instead is have your eyes open, you should have your brain open, i.e., a growth mindset. And whatever interests you, you should pursue it until you can discover if you really like it; maybe then it'll turn into a passion. But to look for Passion, capital P, out the gate is doing yourself a disservice.

The three general qualities of remarkable people

27:29: I've noticed that remarkable people have three general qualities. First of all, they have the growth mindset of Carol Dweck. If you have a growth mindset, you better back that up with a grit mindset of Angela Duckworth, because if you have a growth mindset, you're going to try things like surfing and hockey that you're not good at for years. So you need to persevere and have grit. And then the final thing you need is a grace mindset. So it's growth, grit, grace.

Recommended Resources:

• Dr. Robert Cialdini | Remarkable People podcast 
• Dr. Robert Cialdini | unSILOed podcast
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition by Robert Cialdini
• If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit by Brenda Ueland
• Carol Dweck
• Angela Duckworth

Guest Profile:

• Professional Website
• Remarkable People podcast

Guest Work:

• Think Remarkable: 9 Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference
• Wiser Guy: Life-Changing Revelations and Revisions from Tech's Chief Evangelist
• Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions
• The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
• Rules For Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services
• The Macintosh Way

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.