Wisdom From The Top with Guy Raz

By NPR

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What's Wisdom From The Top with Guy Raz about?

From the creator of How I Built This, host Guy Raz invites you to listen in as he talks to leadership experts and the visionary leaders of some of the world's biggest brands. Along the way, you'll hear accounts of crisis, failure, turnaround, and triumph, as the leaders reveal their secrets on their way to the top. These are stories that didn't make it into their company bios, and valuable lessons for anyone trying to make it in business.

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Effortless: Greg McKeown

09.28.2022

Leadership strategist and business speaker Greg McKeown is the author of two New York Times-bestselling books: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less and Effortless: Make It Easier To Do What Matters Most. The core of McKeown's philosophy of "Essentialism" is ...

Wisdom From The Top with Guy Raz episodes:

09.28.2022 Effortless: Greg McKeown Leadership strategist and business speaker Greg McKeown is the author of two New York Times-bestselling books: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less and Effortless: Make It Easier To Do What Matters Most. The core of McKeown's philosophy of "Essentialism" is ...
09.21.2022 Gates Foundation: Melinda Gates Running the world's wealthiest charitable foundation is all about tough choices. During her meteoric rise at Microsoft, Melinda Gates never guessed she'd spend decades trying to solve global problems. Learning to give by asking the right questions and accepting the ...
09.14.2022 The Rise: Sarah Lewis Dr. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture and of African and African American Studies at Harvard. Early in her career, she became fascinated with what she calls "back-turned paintings"--the paintings which artists keep turned ...
09.07.2022 Intuit: Brad Smith Why isn't Intuit dead? The key was transforming it into a "36 year old start up," says former CEO Brad Smith. Giving people the chance to make an impact, he says, is vital to energizing a workforce. How he lost ...
08.31.2022 College Board: David Coleman In this special live episode, how David Coleman leveraged criticism to revamp the SAT, revive the College Board, and introduce new ways to battle education inequality. The ACT was fast becoming the college entrance heavyweight when he came in to ...
08.24.2022 Unapologetically Ambitious: Shellye Archambeau Shellye Archambeau knew as a teenager she wanted to grow up and become a CEO. But when Shellye started as an undergraduate at the Wharton School of Business in 1980, there were just two female CEOs of large corporations, and ...
08.17.2022 Walgreens: Greg Wasson Greg Wasson was an aspiring pharmacist with dreams of building his own pharmacy, but before he'd even finished his degree, he found himself climbing the corporate ladder at Walgreens. Bigger opportunities at the company opened up, and he continued to ...
08.10.2022 Autodesk: Carl Bass Carl Bass, a renegade and reluctant executive, took the helm at Autodesk, and steered the company out of the global economic crisis. At one point, he was so sure it would fail that he was desperate to find a buyer. ...
08.03.2022 YUM! Brands: David Novak David Novak has been a driving force behind brands like Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, and he co-founded YUM! Brands Inc., one of the biggest players in the quick service restaurant industry. He's written bestsellers including Taking People With You, ...
07.27.2022 IBM: Lou Gerstner When Lou Gerstner became the CEO of IBM in 1993, he had never worked for a technology company, and IBM was in big trouble: competitors like Microsoft, Dell, and Compaq were eating up market share. Gerstner took the challenge head-on ...
07.20.2022 Silence: Erling Kagge Explorer, writer, and publisher Erling Kagge was the first person to complete the Three Poles Challenge ⁠— reaching the South Pole, the North Pole, and the top of Mt. Everest ⁠— on foot. He talks about what a life of ...
07.13.2022 BET: Debra Lee Black Entertainment Television helped make the first Black billionaire in the US and was the first Black-owned business traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Debra Lee, a young lawyer drawn to the company's mission, was pivotal in turning the ...
07.06.2022 Yahoo: Marissa Mayer Yahoo had been churning through executives when Marissa Mayer became its 7th CEO in just over 5 years. She left a track record of success at Google to take on a floundering company faced with obsolescence. How she infused value ...
06.29.2022 The Empathy Edge: Maria Ross In 2016, Maria Ross realized that she was trying to teach her son that empathy was a way to success, when the world around them seemed to be sending the exact opposite message. So she took her years of experience ...
06.22.2022 Sprint: Dan Hesse Customers crave simplicity, Dan Hesse figured out early in his career, as he streamlined phone bills at Sprint. He saved 2 billion dollars, just by taking better care of customers in a few key ways. Plus, just how hard Sprint ...
06.15.2022 Tiny Habits: BJ Fogg What does it take for a person to change? BJ Fogg, founder of Stanford's Behavior Design Lab, says the key to behavior change isn't what we've always been taught. In Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything Fogg draws ...
06.08.2022 General David Petraeus General David Petraeus took on a uniquely complex leadership challenge in Iraq in the aftermath of the U.S.-led war there. He oversaw the training of a new and entirely Iraqi army. He says that the key to leadership is first ...
06.01.2022 Carnival Corporation: Arnold Donald How a New Orleans native turned around a cruise company sinking from a public relations disaster... to one of the most valuable brands in its industry. When Arnold Donald took over Carnival Corporation and the nine cruise lines it operates, ...
05.25.2022 Capital One: Sanjiv Yajnik Sanjiv Yajnik is no stranger to taking risks and adapting to change. In fact, he was a marine engineer for more than a decade before deciding to move from India to Canada to pursue an MBA. Since leaving the open ...
05.18.2022 GAP: Mickey Drexler When Gap was failing, Mickey Drexler didn't just increase sales. He made it into a pop culture staple of the 80s and 90s. But that wasn't enough to keep him from getting fired. At his next job, he was not ...
05.11.2022 When More Is Not Better: Roger Martin Over a career spanning four decades, Roger Martin has been a management consultant, an influential business strategy thinker and author, as well as the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto. He advises CEOs of global ...
05.04.2022 Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen: Cheryl Bachelder Cheryl Bachelder decided to go into business after an early setback derailed her potential career in music education. She became President of KFC years later, but a job that started as a major opportunity wound up being a massive failure. ...
04.27.2022 American Humane: Robin Ganzert When Robin Ganzert joined American Humane as it's new president and CEO, she thought she was helming one of the oldest and best known animal welfare organizations in the US. What she didn't know was that American Humane was $12.2 ...
04.20.2022 Avon: Andrea Jung For over a decade as CEO of direct-sales giant Avon, Andrea Jung was one of the most powerful women in the cosmetics industry. During her tenure, Jung saw striking success, but also faced daunting challenges with a failed product rollout ...
04.13.2022 Target: Brian Cornell There was a devastating data breach, a failing foray into Canada, and they were losing US customers fast. In 2014, Target seriously needed a win—Brian Cornell was that win. He'd turned around plenty of other retailers like Safeway, Michael's, and ...
04.06.2022 Great at Work: Morten Hansen As a young management consultant at Boston Consulting Group, Morten Hansen regularly put in long hours–up to 90 a week. The highest performer in his office, however, was a colleague who clocked significantly less hours and rarely came in on ...
03.30.2022 Uncharted: Margaret Heffernan Margaret Heffernan is an entrepreneur, CEO, executive leadership coach, and author of six books. Her often counter-intuitive insights on collaboration, consensus-building, and decision-making have earned her a reputation as a smart thinker who challenges conventional business wisdom. In her latest ...
03.23.2022 Verizon: Ivan Seidenberg Ivan Seidenberg worked his way from splicing cables for the phone company, all the way to being the CEO of Verizon. During his career, he helped the company weather not one but two tectonic changes: the breakup of Ma Bell's ...
03.16.2022 The Campbell Soup Company: Doug Conant In 2001, Campbell's Soup was in freefall: the company's value had halved and employee engagement was at an all time low. Doug Conant knew he could salvage the iconic company, but first, things were going to have to get worse. ...
03.09.2022 Lowe's: Marvin Ellison Marvin Ellison took the tough jobs nobody wanted, and it got him from retail security guard all the way to CEO of two Fortune 500s. Now, when things are precarious, companies like JC Penny and Lowe's call him in. Marvin ...
03.02.2022 Soundtracks: Jon Acuff Jon Acuff is the author of seven best-selling books and the host of the podcast "All It Takes Is A Goal", becoming widely known for his humorous approach to leadership and Christianity. Son of a Baptist minister, Jon worked as ...
02.23.2022 Taco Bell: Mark King Mark King has a reputation for turning businesses around by moving fast on innovative, and sometimes expensive, endeavors. Before his current tenure as CEO of Taco Bell, Mark served as president for Adidas' long-stagnant North American division, reinvigorating the brand ...
02.16.2022 Mastercard: Ajaypal Singh Banga How Ajay Banga runs one of the world's largest companies with an unusual leadership philosophy... something he calls "the decency quotient." And how he turned Mastercard from a credit card company into a company that's known for technology and innovation ...
02.09.2022 Black Magic: Chad Sanders Throughout his life, Chad Sanders found himself having to navigate white culture; at school, in the tech industry, and eventually in his career in entertainment. He learned to cope with the frustration of having to do that by writing, and ...
02.02.2022 General Stanley McChrystal General Stanley McChrystal was born into a military family: three generations of men in his family were officers in the armed forces. He followed the family tradition and eventually rose up the ranks to become a General in the Army. ...
01.26.2022 Radical Candor: Kim Scott Since 1992, Kim Scott has worked in almost all levels of management—from a diamond business in Moscow to startups in the Silicon Valley to leading teams at Google. Along the way, she developed a management philosophy called "radical candor" that ...
01.19.2022 American Express: Kenneth Chenault Kenneth Chenault learned early on to only worry about the things he could control, this helped him when life—and business at American Express—threw unpredictable events his way. He broke barriers as the company's first African American CEO and helped turn ...
01.12.2022 Range: David Epstein David Epstein is a science writer and investigative reporter. His articles have spanned a wide range of topics from crime and violence to athletes using steroids to the intersection of science and the Olympics. And, he's the author of The ...
01.05.2022 Unilever: Leena Nair Growing up in a small town in India, Leena Nair overheard her mother say it was too bad her daughter was born a girl, because it meant her smarts and talents would go to waste. But Nair went on to ...
12.29.2021 PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi Listen again. After becoming the CEO of PepsiCo in 2006, Indra Nooyi became the first woman and immigrant to run a Fortune 50 company. From Chennai, India, to Yale's School of Management, Nooyi worked her way up from The Boston ...
12.22.2021 Peloton's Dara Treseder Listen again. As a child growing up in Ibadan, Nigeria, Dara Treseder was often told to get her head out of the clouds. But her mother encouraged her to dream big and to follow her ambition if it would lead ...
12.15.2021 The Power of Strangers: Joe Keohane Joe Keohane is a longtime journalist and editor who believes that talking to strangers can not only help people feel happier and more empathetic, but can actually make the world a better place. In his first book, The Power of ...
12.08.2021 NASA: Ellen Ochoa After one of the most deadly disasters in the history of space flight, Ellen Ochoa was a leader in NASA's recovery. She fixed the technical things that went wrong, but the most critical changes, she says, were human. Why she ...
12.01.2021 The Proximity Principle: Ken Coleman Ken Coleman calls himself "America's Career Coach." In his syndicated call-in show, and in books like The Proximity Principle and One Question, Coleman helps people think about what kind of work they would find meaningful, and how they can connect ...
11.24.2021 Best Buy: Hubert Joly In 2012, to say there was a crisis at Best Buy — is an understatement. In January, Forbes published an article with the headline: WHY BEST BUY IS GOING OUT OF BUSINESS. And then, in March, the company reported a ...
11.17.2021 Machiavelli for Women: Stacey Vanek Smith Stacey Vanek Smith has reported on business and the economy for over 15 years now, first for public radio's "Marketplace," and now as the host of Planet Money's daily podcast "The Indicator." Over that time, she's seen the same barriers ...
11.10.2021 The Obstacle is The Way: Ryan Holiday Ryan Holiday is one of his generation's most influential thinkers. Many people - from rappers to NFL quarterbacks to corporate CEOS and entrepreneurs - credit his writing for introducing them to the teachings of the stoic philosophers. Holiday's books like ...
11.03.2021 Gatorade: Sarah Robb O'Hagan Sarah Robb O'Hagan is brutally honest about the many, many times she messed up on the way to transforming Gatorade. She was a rabble-rouser at Virgin, which ended with her getting fired. She took a job at Atari, even though ...
10.27.2021 PepsiCo: Indra Nooyi After becoming the CEO of PepsiCo in 2006, Indra Nooyi became the first woman and immigrant to run a Fortune 50 company. From Chennai, India, to Yale's School of Management, Nooyi worked her way up from The Boston Consulting Group, ...
10.20.2021 Peloton: Dara Treseder As a child growing up in Ibadan, Nigeria, Dara Treseder was often told to get her head out of the clouds. But her mother encouraged her to dream big and to follow her ambition if it would lead her to ...

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