Podcast Themes

Wendy Smith speaks about 3 common responses to Either / Or problems. Rabbit Holes (going deep into a strategy), Wrecking Balls (over compensating and swinging hard to the other side) and Trench Warfare (not listening to cues from the world and finding reasons to double down on our beliefs)

Wendy Smith speaks about the paradox between exploring new possibilities and exploiting existing strengths. She explains that while leaders often frame this as an Either/Or choice, enduring success comes from continuously balancing both—doubling down on what works today while simultaneously investing in learning, experimentation and preparing for tomorrow. She argues that the goal is not to divide time equally between the two, but to remain committed to holding both tensions over time.

Hitendra asserts that we are not fixed personalities but bundles of capacities — the same manager who is “not empathetic” at work might tenderly hug their child at home. The real skill of leadership, he avers, is not acquiring new traits, but intentionally activating the right states we already carry within us.

Bill Burnett speaks about the fact that there is no one pathway but many possibilities that can unfold for us. Letting go of that “this is what I am meant to be doing” can be liberating.

Bill Burnett speaks about his early years, some of the hard-wired elements of his operating system and how he has navigated his career across various pursuits including designing Star Wars toys, Product design at Apple and teaching Life Design at Stanford.

Jaspreet Bindra speaks about how he has thought about being intentional about cultivating his personal identity (more than a brand). He states that in a world where each individual will work for multiple corporations (unlike one company having multiple people), he states that it is paramount that we have a Brand that people know us by.

Jaspreet Bindra speaks about how he thought about “flipping the donut” in terms of the mix of earning and learning. He also speaks about how he got provoked in one of the leadership workshops about how he was wearing his work identity too tightly.

Tackling self-limiting beliefs – Ricardo Sunderland speaks about how we can deal with our self-limiting beliefs that we are often blind to that can hold us back.

Stephen MR Covey speaks about how he initially focused on the business side of things while his father was the “larger than life” thought leader. He speaks about how, over time, his insights around the high cost of low trust have emerged and how he has found his voice a thought leader over time.

Raghu Ananthnarayanan speaks about his journey on three fronts as an action researcher – Understanding how Systems work, Study of Yoga in depth with Krishnamachari, Process work with Prof Pulin Garg. He also speaks about how he has experimented and engaged with institutions like the Murugappa Group, TCS and Core Healthcare. He speaks about how he has used some of these organizations as a laboratory to try and develop some leadership development and culture building approaches that have been tried and tested.

Ayelet Fishbach speaks about the link between our approach to optimizing or satisficing in a certain domain and our identity. She goes on to say that our identity often helps us prioritize across different choices and the extent to which we push ourselves in a certain domain.

We normally think of empathy when we think of the way we connect with others. Ayelet Fishbach speaks about how we could build a deeper connect with our future selves and how that can act as an inspiration for us to make meaningful choices in the present. She speaks about the discount rate we apply on the future and how that can lead to us either over-indexing on the future or ignoring it depending on what we do.