World Reimagined

New digital tools can allow us to combat loneliness as the world transitions to a predominately remote workplace. But can technology create an experience where people feel a deeper source of connection with one another? Can it mimic the face-to-face environments of the past? One thing we do know: The only way we will be able to overcome this pandemic is if we do it together. But in a time of such intense isolation, how do we reclaim togetherness to solve the problems that plague us?

In this episode, host Gautam Mukunda is joined by President Biden's nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, and Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and award-winning author, Dr. Tsedal Neeley to discuss how humans will thrive in the post-pandemic, new world of work.

"Deep human connection is built not through grand gestures, but through those small moments when we stop by and look into someone's lives, allow them to glimpse into what is happening in our lives, and through those moments of authenticity, of transparency, we forge a deep connection."

— Dr. Vivek Murthy

Follow @GMukunda on Twitter

Books Referenced:

Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, by Vivek Murthy

Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding From Anywhere, by Tsedal Neeley

The Language of Global Success: How a Common Tongue Transforms Multinational Organizations, by Tsedal Neeley

Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World, by Karim R. Lakhani and Marco Iansiti

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, by Sebastian Junger

Braving the Wilderness, by Brené Brown

Trust: America's Best Chance, by Pete Buttigieg

Guest Info:

Dr. Vivek Murthy was confirmed by the Senate in 2014 to serve as the 19th Surgeon General of the United States and currently serves as co-chair of the President-elect's COVID-19 Advisory Board. A renowned physician, research scientist, entrepreneur, and author of the bestselling book Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, Dr. Murthy is among the most trusted voices in America on matters of public health.

As "America's Doctor," Dr. Murthy helped lead the national response to a range of health challenges, including the Ebola and Zika viruses, the opioid crisis, and the growing threat of stress and loneliness to Americans' physical and mental wellbeing. Prior to his tenure as Surgeon General, Dr. Murthy co-founded VISIONS, a global HIV/AIDS education organization; the Swasthya Project, a rural health partnership that trained women in South India to become community health workers and educators; TrialNetworks, a technology company dedicated to improving collaboration and efficiency in clinical trials; and Doctors for America, a nonprofit mobilizing physicians and medical students to improve access to affordable care. His scientific research has focused on vaccine development and the participation of women and minorities in clinical trials. And as an internal medicine doctor at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Murthy cared for thousands of patients over the years and trained undergraduates, medical students, and medical residents.

Raised in Miami, Dr. Murthy received his bachelor of arts degree from Harvard, his Master's in business administration from the Yale School of Management, and his MD from the Yale School of Medicine. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Dr. Alice Chen, and their two children.

Vivek Murthy

@vivek_murthy on Twitter

Dr. Tsedal Neeley is the Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Her work focuses on how leaders can scale their organizations by developing and implementing global and digital strategies. She regularly advises top leaders who are embarking on virtual work and large scale-change that involves global expansion, digital transformation, and becoming more agile.

Tsedal heads and teaches in the first-year required Leadership and Organizational Behavior course in the MBA program that focuses on how to lead effectively; the curriculum addresses group behavior and performance, organization design, change, and how to align people behind a common vision. With Bill George and Krishna Palepu, she co-chairs the executive offering, Leading Global Businesses, which helps top leaders develop emerging and mature market strategies in a global and increasingly digital economy. She also teaches extensively in executive programs such as Harvard Business Analytics Program. Tsedal is a recipient of the prestigious Charles M. Williams Award for Outstanding Teaching in Executive Education and the Greenhill Award for outstanding contributions to Harvard Business School. She serves on the Board of Directors of Brightcove, Brown Capital Management, Harvard Business Publishing, and the Partnership Inc.

Her forthcoming book, Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere (2021, Harper Collins Business), provides remote workers and leaders with the best practices necessary to perform at the highest levels in their organizations. Her award-winning book, The Language of Global Success: How a Common Tongue Transforms Multinational Organizations chronicles the behind-the-scenes globalization process of a company over the course of five years. She has also published extensively in leading scholarly and practitioner-oriented outlets such as Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Management Science, Journal of International Business, Strategic Management Journal, and Harvard Business Review, and her work has been widely covered in media outlets such as BBC, CNN, Financial Times, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. Her HBS case, Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, is one of the most used cases worldwide on the subject of virtual work.

Prior to her academic career, Tsedal spent ten years working for companies like Lucent Technologies and The Forum Corporation in various roles, including strategies for global customer experience, 360-degree performance software management systems, sales force/sales management development, and business flow analysis for telecommunication infrastructures. A sought-after speaker with extensive international experience, she is fluent in four languages. She holds a patent for her software simulation on global collaboration and is a member of Rakuten's Advisory Board.

Tsedal received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Management Science and Engineering, specializing in Work, Technology, and Organizations. Tsedal was named to Thinkers50 2018 On the Radar list for making lasting contributions to management, honored as a Stanford Distinguished Alumnus Scholar, and was a Stanford University School of Engineering Lieberman award recipient for excellence in teaching and research.

Dr. Tsedal Neeley

@tsedal on Twitter

Risk: the tug-of-war between innovation and the looming prospect of failure that is behind the scenes of every business and industry. And few industries see greater tension between innovation and failure than that of motion pictures. So, how do we innovate and transform a risk-averse industry, especially one that shapes our culture and how we see ourselves? In this episode, Gautam Mukunda is joined by the Founder and CEO of the Black List, Franklin Leonard, to discover what can be learned from his experience taking big risks in the film industry, which can lead to losses but also to monumental pay-offs.

"You are always performing your way to freedom when the resources necessary to do what you do are so considerable."

— Franklin Leonard

Follow @GMukunda on Twitter

Books Referenced:

The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David W. Blight

Guest Info:

Franklin Leonard is a film and television producer, cultural commentator, and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of the Black List, the company that celebrates and supports great screenwriting and the writers who do it via film production, its annual survey of best unproduced screenplays, online marketplace, and screenwriter labs. More than 400 scripts from the annual Black List survey have been produced as feature films earning 250 Academy Award nominations and 50 wins including four of the last thirteen Best Pictures and eleven of the last twenty-four screenwriting Oscars. Franklin has worked in feature film development at Universal Pictures and the production companies of Will Smith, Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, and Leonardo DiCaprio. He has been a juror at the Sundance, Toronto, Guanajuato, and Mumbai Film Festivals and one of Hollywood Reporter's 35 Under 35, Black Enterprise magazine's "40 Emerging Leaders for Our Future," and Fast Company's "100 Most Creative People in Business." He was the recipient of the 2019 Writers Guild of America, East's Evelyn Burkey award for elevating the honor and dignity of screenwriters. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, a Board member of American Cinematheque, and a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). His TED talk has been viewed more than 1.6 million times.

The Black List

@FranklinLeonard on Twitter & @theblcklst on Twitter

@FranklinJLeonard on Instagram & @theblcklst on Instagram

In the face of our ever-changing working environments, the stories we tell ourselves will change the way we see the world. Focusing on our strengths and finding meaning in what we do will unlock our best selves and allow us to lead and succeed even when the going gets rough, even when it seems like success and integrity are at odds. In this episode, Gautam Mukunda is joined by serial entrepreneur, author, and co-founder of the Happiness Studies Academy, Tal Ben-Shahar, and blog writer and author Eric Barker to discuss how creating a meaningful narrative can change our experience.

"One of the biggest insights of all of social psychology is that the situation is often more predictive of behavior than individual personality traits. So, leaders need to frame the new experience of work from home."

— Eric Barker

@gmukunda On Twitter

Books Referenced:

Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment, by Tal Ben-Shahar

The Joy of Leadership: How Positive Psychology Can Maximize Your Impact (and make you happier) in a Challenging world, by Tal Ben-Shahar

Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong, by Eric Barker

Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl

The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem: The Definitive Work on Self-Esteem by the Leading Pioneer in the Field, by Nathaniel Branden

Daniel Deronda, by Mary Ann Evans aka George Elliot

On Becoming a Leader, by Warren G. Bennis

The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done, by Peter F. Drucker

Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut

Guest Info:

Tal Ben-Shahar is an author and lecturer. He taught two of the largest classes in Harvard University's history, Positive Psychology and The Psychology of Leadership. Today, Tal consults and lectures around the world to executives in multinational corporations, the general public, and at-risk populations. The topics he lectures on include leadership, happiness, education, innovation, ethics, self-esteem, resilience, goal setting, and mindfulness. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and have appeared on best-seller lists around the world. Tal is a serial entrepreneur and is the co-founder and chief learning officer of Happiness Studies Academy, Potentialife, and Happier TV.

@TalBenShahar on Twitter

Eric Barker's humorous, practical blog, Barking Up the Wrong Tree, presents science-based answers and expert insight on how to be awesome at life. Over 345,000 people subscribe to his weekly newsletter and he has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, and the Financial Times. Eric has given talks at MIT, Yale, Google, United States Military Central Command (CENTCOM), and the Olympic Training Center. His first book, Barking Up The Wrong Tree, is a Wall Street Journal bestseller.

@bakadesuyo on Twitter

A rapidly-changing world is putting leaders—and their organizations—under stress as never before. In this episode, Gautam Mukunda is joined by former Navy bomb specialist Daniel (Danny) Glenn and biomedical researcher Aleksandra (Sandra) Stankovic to explore human performance in extreme environments and how to lead when the stakes are increasingly high.

Danny is a former Navy Special Operations Officer who was the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Commander for the Special Operations Task Force in Iraq. After the Navy, he was a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University and the CEO of a major family office in California. Sandra is an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine. She is an aerospace psychologist, human factors engineer, and spaceflight biomedical researcher who studies human performance in extreme operational environments.

"It's not necessarily strength you want to build, but resilience. The ability to rebound back and forth from periods of intensity." — Aleksandra Stankovic

@gmukunda On Twitter

Books Referenced:

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't, by Jim Collins

An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything, by Chris Hadfield

The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien

Guest Info:

Dr. Aleksandra Stankovic is an aerospace psychologist, and a human factors engineer and spaceflight biomedical researcher working to optimize high-level human performance and sustained behavioral health in extreme operational environments, much like the ones Danny was in disarming bombs. Human factors engineering, for those who don't know, is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to improve the design of systems and technologies in a human-centered way through the application of principles from psychology, physiology, and engineering, and she'll tell us more about it as we get into the conversation. Sandra was previously an Assistant Professor in the Space Medicine Innovations Laboratory at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and has recently joined the Neural Systems Group of the Department of Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where she is starting up a new research lab focused on human performance.

@AeroAleksandra on Twitter

Daniel Glenn served in the United States military for a decade, acting as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy's elite Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit, where he was deployed to Iraq and other hotspots around the globe. He was awarded a Bronze Star for his work in countering the terrorist group ISIS. He studied International Relations at the United States Naval Academy before earning a Master's degree in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland. He was also a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he earned his second Master's degree. He was hired in Silicon Valley as a turnaround CEO and is now working in the private sector.

Truth and trust are the cornerstones of U.S. democracy. How can the United States, and its leaders, resurrect those central ideas to ensure a viable future for the country and its people?

In this episode, Gautam Mukunda is joined by three-time Pulitzer Prize recipient and prolific author, Thomas Friedman, to discuss weaknesses in American democracy and how to repair them, and what the Biden administration can do to set the U.S. on a trajectory of long-term sustainable growth.

Throughout his career, Thomas Friedman has held various foreign and domestic positions with the New York Times, including Foreign Affairs Op-ed columnist and White House Correspondent. Friedman is the author of seven bestselling books, among them From Beirut to Jerusalem and The World Is Flat, and is a recipient of the National Press Club's lifetime achievement award.

"We need to go back now and really look at all the things in our society that have been normalizing and monetizing the erosion of truth and trust because without that our democracy is not sustainable." — Thomas Friedman

@gmukunda On Twitter

Books Referenced:

From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas Friedman

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Friedman

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – And How it Can Renew America, by Thomas Friedman

Strangers in Their Own Land, by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy, by Hal Harvey, Jeffery Rissman, and Robbie Orvis

The Politics of Innovation: Why Some Countries Are Better Than Others at Science and Technology, by Mark Zachary Taylor

A Promised Land, by Barack Obama

Guest Info:

Thomas L. Friedman became the New York Times Foreign Affairs Op-Ed columnist in 1995. He joined the paper in 1981, after which he served as the Beirut bureau chief in 1982, Jerusalem bureau chief in 1984, and then in Washington as the diplomatic correspondent in 1989, and later the White House correspondent and economic correspondent. Mr. Friedman was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (from Lebanon) and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (from Israel). He also won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Mr. Friedman is the author of From Beirut to Jerusalem, which won the National Book Award in 1989. He has written several other books, including Hot, Flat, and Crowded, an international bestseller.

Born in Minneapolis, Mr. Friedman received a B.A. degree in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University in 1975. In 1978 he received a master's in modern Middle East studies from Oxford. His column appears every Sunday and Wednesday.

@TomFriedman on Twitter

A leadership podcast for a changing world. Host Gautam Mukunda explores what it takes to lead through times of change and crisis — featuring unexpected conversations with global leaders across different fields and industries.