Posts in Thought Leaders
Jack Easterby on Decision Making

Jack Easterby is one of the country’s most respected leaders in sports management and sports leadership circles. He has been a chaplain, author, consultant and frequent speaker at conferences and seminars throughout the nation. Easterby is in his 5th season as a Team Character Coach as well as a Director of Team Development for the NFL’s New England Patriots in Foxboro, Massachusetts.

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Matthew Dicks on Storytelling

Matthew Dicks is a bestselling author of fiction and non-fiction books. He uses storytelling to really create and leverage philosophical beliefs and wisdom and ideas to help us live a better life. He’s also a teacher. His content has been featured and published in Reader’s Digest, The Huffington Post, Parent’s Magazine, and more places. At his core, he is a storyteller and a storytelling champion.

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JP Nerbun on Embracing Pain to Embrace Culture

J.P. Nerbun is a bestselling author, leadership coach, and founder of TOC Culture Consulting, a leading global sports-consulting and leadership coaching business. His mission is to help leaders and their teams achieve their full potential through 1:1 coaching, consulting, and community. Nerbun has an impressive track record of guiding leaders at esteemed institutions such as Stanford University, Harvard University, University of Texas, the USGA, PWC, and Chick-Fil-A. His work spans across sports, education, healthcare, and business.

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Nita Farahany on Cognitive Liberty

Nita Farahany is a pioneering futurist and authority on laws, ethics, and technology. She’s a distinguished professor of law and philosophy and founding director of Duke University’s Science and Society Initiative. And a lot of Nita’s work is around this framework, this ideology, this thought, this concept, of cognitive liberty and how that shakes up and shows itself in a digital era, a digital environment, that we are all living in. Her insights shared from TED stages to global policy forums, guide responsible advancements in science and technology.

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Dr. Stefanie Johnson on The Power of Inclusion

Dr. Stefanie Johnson is an author, a professor, a keynote speaker, and she studies the intersection of leadership and diversity. Her research focuses on how unconscious bias affects the evaluation of leaders, and also on strategies that leaders can use to mitigate bias. Stef has a great book called Inclusify, which is all about harnessing the power of uniqueness and belonging to build innovative teams.

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Trevor Ragan on Learning to Learn

Trevor Ragan is the founder of The Learner Lab - an educational website designed to unpack and share the science of learning and development. He spends his time with thought leaders and researchers from the worlds of psychology and developmental science, consumes their research, connects the dots, and shares it with anyone that will listen. He's worked with professional, college, and Olympic sports teams, Fortune 50 companies, prisons, and in hundreds of schools across the country.

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Tiffani Bova on Growth, Experience, and Finding Happiness

Tiffani Bova is the Global Growth Evangelist at Salesforce, and the Wall Street Journal Bestsellers Growth IQ and The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth. Over the past two decades, she has led large revenue-producing divisions at businesses ranging from start-ups to the Fortune 500. She has been named one of the Top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50 twice. She is also the host of the podcast What’s Next! with Tiffani Bova.

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Erica Keswin on Intentional Connection

Erica Keswin is a workplace strategist who has worked for the past 20 years with some of the most iconic brands in the world as a consultant, speaker, author, and professional dot-connector. Her best-selling book, Bring Your Human to Work: 10 Surefire Ways to Design a Workplace That’s Good for People, Great for Business, and Just Might Change the World, was published in the Fall of 2018, and we certainly bring that book into today’s conversation. Her second book, Rituals Roadmap: The Human Way to Transform Everyday Routines into Workplace Magic, was published in January of 2021, and that book is also referenced in today’s conversation.

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Brian Levenson's Reflections from the Aspen Ideas Festivals

Today’s episode is going to be a little bit different than a lot of our past episodes because it’s just going to be me on here. I’m going to share a lot of my observations, a lot of my notes, from a festival I recently attended called The Aspen Ideas Festival. It’s really a conference, but it’s much more than a conference. It’s where some of the best thought leaders gather to share what’s on their mind, to discuss, they have all kinds of experiences, they have debates, they have panels, they have interactive experiences. I figured I would capture the four days that I spent at the conference with all of you and share it in today’s episode.

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Wendy Smith on The Power of Paradox

Wendy K. Smith is the Dana J. Johnson Professor of Management, faculty director of the Women’s Leadership Initiative at the Lerner College of Business and Economics, University of Delaware and fellow at The Academy of Management. She earned her PhD in organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, where she began her intensive research on strategic paradoxes—how leaders and senior teams effectively respond to contradictory, yet interdependent demands.

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Michael Bungay Stanier on Teaching, Coaching, and Becoming a Writer

Michael Bungay Stanier helps people know they’re awesome and they’re doing great. He’s best known for The Coaching Habit, the best-selling coaching book of the century and already recognized as a classic. His new book, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone, does what it says on the label. Michael was a Rhodes Scholar and dabbles in the ukulele. He’s Australian, and lives in Toronto, Canada.

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Jackie Insinger on Valuing Values

Jackie Insinger is a best-selling author, keynote speaker, and a sought-after leadership and team dynamics consultant. Jackie combines the science of positive psychology, which we talk a lot about in today’s conversation, with revolutionary tools and programs to help leaders increase authentic connection, performance, and fulfillment. Jackie works with teams to build a culture of trust, while guiding them to become more aligned, communicate more effectively, collaborate with ease, and support each other more efficiently.

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Annie Murphy Paul on Exploring Creativity

Annie Murphy Paul is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Scientific Americans, Slate, Time Magazine, and The Best American Science Writing, among many other publications. She’s the author of three books. Her latest book is The Extended Mind, which we get into quite a bit in today’s conversation. Her TED Talk has been viewed by about three million people.

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Dolly Chugh on Striving to be Goodish

Dolly Chugh (she/her, hear my name) is an award-winning professor at the New York University Stern School of Business where she teaches MBA courses in leadership and management. Her research focuses on “bounded ethicality,” which she describes as the “psychology of good people.” She is the author of The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias, A More Just Future, and the popular Dear Good People newsletter. Dolly’s TED Talk was named one of the 25 Most Popular TED Talks of 2018 and currently has almost 5 million views.

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Vanessa Bohns on Using Your Influence

Vanessa Bohns is a social psychologist, Professor of Organizational Behavior at Cornell University, and author of the book You Have More Influence Than You Think. She is an expert on help-seeking, social influence, compliance, consent, and why it’s so hard to say no.

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Lauren Fleshman on Good For a Girl

Lauren Fleshman is one of the most decorated American distance runners of all time. She also is a brand strategy advisory for Oiselle, which is a fitness apparel company for women. She was sponsored by Nike for many years, which she talks about at length in her book, Good for a Girl. She’s also the co-founder of Picky Bars, which is a natural food company. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Runner’s World, and many other places.

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Safi Bahcall on Loonshots

Safi Bahcall went to Harvard for undergrad and then went on to get a PhD in Physics from Stanford. After he finished up his education, he went on to work for 3 years as a consultant for McKinsey. He then co-founded a bio-technology company where they develop new drugs for cancer treatment. He led their IPO and served as their CEO for many years. In 2011, he worked with President Obama’s Council of Science Advisors on the Future of National Research. His book, Loonshots, which is his first book, has been translated into 21 languages and was selected as a Best Business Book of the Year by Amazon, Bloomberg, Financial Times, Forbes, The Washington Post, and more.

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Alex Auerbach on Elite Sport Psychology

Alex Auerbach is a Licensed Counseling and Sport Psychologist, he’s a Certified Mental Performance Consultant and Board-Certified Coach working in professional sports. He’s worked with elite teams and performers from a range of domains, including the NBA and the NFL, Olympians, Army Special Forces, Fortune 5 companies, and venture-backed start-ups. Currently, he is the Senior Director of Wellness and Development for the Toronto Raptors.

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Sherri Coale on Coaching and Writing

For 25 years, Sherri Coale served as the head women’s basketball coach at the University of Oklahoma where she is the winningest women’s basketball coach in OU history. She built a powerhouse program in Norman that appeared in 19 straight NCAA tournaments and competed in three Final Fours. During her illustrious career at the University of Oklahoma, in addition to coaching the Sooners, Coale participated in USA Basketball as an assistant coach. She is an author, a master motivator, an engaging speaker, a gifted writer, and a keen observer of everyday life.

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