Eric Malka sold his car for $12,000 and asked himself the smallest possible question: what's the tiniest business I can start with this? Twelve years later, Procter & Gamble bought The Art of Shaving.

Three businesses failed before that one. The last one left him ready to quit entrepreneurship entirely, and it gave him the philosophy he's built everything on since. Start small and grow big, because starting big is a great way to grow small.

In this conversation with Lee, Eric lays out the choice he puts to every founder he advises: you can succeed in fifteen years or fail in five. He explains why most entrepreneurs he meets are ahead of their skis, what a business model actually is, and how a thousand conversations with customers in one tiny store wrote his entire brand for him.

He's also frank about the people who came after it. The supplier who demanded half the company or he'd cut off the products. The private equity firm he says deliberately wrote covenants designed to trip. The investment bank that cost him a third of his exit.

The last stretch is the one worth staying for. Eric hit every financial goal he'd set by the age of 40 and still felt anxious, and what he did about that is the part he says changed his life.

Take the free two-minute Executive Alignment Diagnostic at etw.com.

For more free videos, tools, and resources about the MIND Methodology go to https://etw.com/

A teenager watched a night of news full of leaders behaving badly and asked his grandfather, "Pops, you're a leader. Is that how you lead?"

That question became Keith Wyche's book. Keith has been President of Pitney Bowes US, a senior executive at IBM, and ran a 30,000-person region at Walmart. He's on the board of Brinks.

In this one he lays out how far trust has fallen, seven in ten people don't believe leaders tell them the truth, and government trust has gone from 73% in 1958 to 17% today, and what rebuilding it takes. His formula: trust equals character times competency times consistency.

Lee shares the moment that shaped his career, turning down a bribe from the customer that was 90% of his business, losing the account, and taking over the failing company by assuming its debt. It sold 23 years later for well into nine figures.

Take the free two-minute Executive Alignment Diagnostic at etw.com.

For more free videos, tools, and resources about the MIND Methodology go to https://etw.com/

"Priority" comes from a Latin root meaning first. So what's the plural of first?

Jay Papasan co-wrote The One Thing, which has sold more than 4 million copies in over 40 languages, and he's CEO of Productive, the One Thing Company. In this conversation with Lee, he argues that you can only ever have one priority, and that most productivity problems are clarity problems wearing a disguise.

Jay walks through the diagnostic he uses with every client. Productivity sits above the waterline, priority sits below it, and purpose sits below that. When someone comes to him with a productivity problem, he starts three levels down. He also shares the core values exercise that became his own unlock, why "should" is almost always a shame-based statement, and the weekly meeting he's held with his own goals virtually every week since September 2000.

Lee brings the other side of it, including what three spinal surgeries taught him about performing in a season that isn't your best one, and the mantra that came out of it.

Also in this one: the Day Before Vacation Miracle, why Hemingway wrote at a fourth grade level, why you can't time block a goal, and the question worth asking anyone walking into a storm.

Take the free two-minute Executive Alignment Diagnostic at etw.com.

For more free videos, tools, and resources about the MIND Methodology go to https://etw.com/

"Jobs are a silly phase that work is going through."

Rishad Tobaccowala spent four decades advising the world's largest companies, most of them as chief strategist at Publicis Groupe, and made ten predictions in India's largest business paper that all came true. In this one, he gives Lee the five tectonic shifts reshaping business, why 68% of the world already earns without a job, the demographic cliff nobody's pricing in, and the leadership crisis he summarises as: look in the mirror.

Plus the immigrant mindset, why every career has a midnight hour and the smart people leave at five to twelve, the daughter who left Google to make films, and why AI is alien intelligence, a collaborator, not a tool.

Rishad writes weekly at rishadtobaccowala.substack.com.

Take the free two-minute Executive Alignment Diagnostic at etw.com.

For more free videos, tools, and resources about the MIND Methodology go to https://etw.com/

Fewer than 1 in 10 performance reviews end with both people walking away glad it happened. Lee Benson stopped running them years ago.

In this episode, Lee breaks down the performance snapshot, the replacement he's used across eight companies: three clear goals per person, expectations defined from day one, and the review itself done in front of the whole team. It sounds uncomfortable. He's run hundreds, and it's why the process works, one person can't remember everything someone did, but the team remembers everything.

He also shares the clarity effect behind his claim that of the ten people you'd fire for poor performance, seven or eight get saved when expectations were genuinely clear from the start.

Take the free two-minute Executive Alignment Diagnostic at etw.com.

For more free videos, tools, and resources about the MIND Methodology go to https://etw.com/

Lee Benson has built eight companies from scratch. In this solo episode, he shares the framework that's run through all of them: holistic value creation, built on three buckets, material, emotional energy, and connectedness.

His core argument is that emotional energy is the scarcest commodity on the planet, and the most overlooked lever in leadership. Lee explains why the leaders who deliberately build energising environments consistently get the best results, what that looked like inside his own 500-person company, and how the framework held up when he lost over a million dollars on investments last year.

Take the free two-minute Executive Alignment Diagnostic at etw.com.

For more free videos, tools, and resources about the MIND Methodology go to https://etw.com/

Marty Cagan has spent 45 years building technology-powered products and coaching the companies everyone else copies, Amazon, Netflix, Nvidia. His books are the closest thing product management has to a bible. In this conversation with Lee, he explains why 85% of products still fail in the market, and why AI is making that worse, not better.

The two get into the distinction that separates the best companies from everyone else: building to learn versus building to earn. Lee shares the $27 million software write-off that taught him the difference the hard way, and Marty's response might surprise you: today that same lesson costs about $2,000.

Also in this one: why ROI estimates are nonsense and what good companies demand instead, the SpaceX versus Boeing story and what it proves about culture, how Trainline went from irrelevant to the UK's largest IPO, why stakeholders lie to CEOs about projections, missionaries versus mercenaries, and the AI productivity paradox, why companies are blowing through annual AI budgets in a quarter while the needle doesn't move.

Marty's work is free at svpg.com.

Serious about increasing the value of your business? Take the free two-minute Executive Alignment Diagnostic at etw.com.

For more free videos, tools, and resources about the MIND Methodology go to https://etw.com/

Most CEO peer groups work brilliantly for about six months to two years. Then they quietly stop.

Lee's been in these rooms for over 40 years, Vistage, YPO, EO, all of them. The pattern's always the same. The groups get too big. Nobody knows enough about each other's businesses to get past the surface. Process takes over, and the problem a CEO actually brings to the room is usually a symptom of something deeper that a quick lap of feedback will never touch.

So he built a different kind of room. Eight members. One full day a month. A proper deep dive into every member's business every two months. One number visible to everyone at all times, so the whole group knows whether each business is actually getting more valuable or just staying busy.

Along the way: the three buckets of value creation that earned Lee significantly higher multiples across his exits, why front-line CEO wisdom beats anything from a book, and why he treats his group like a conglomerate he's invested half his retirement in.

Serious about growing the value of your business? Learn more about EXECUTE CEO MasterMIND

For more free videos, tools, and resources about the MIND Methodology go to https://etw.com/