Most founders don’t have an ideas problem. They have an action problem. Jason Durkee, President of Idea Development in Tokyo, shares what it really takes to grow a business past its first success.

Jason Durkee moved to Japan for university, joined a corporate training startup while still in college, and in 2003 founded Idea Development in Tokyo. More than 20 years later, his firm serves 130+ clients a year, including many of Japan’s best-known companies. He named his company after ideas, then learned the ideas were never the hard part.

In this episode, Jason and Matt talk about:

• Why action comes before the plan, not after
• How to get unstuck when your signature offer has become a hamster wheel
• Why existing clients give you the chance to build something new
• How to sell a service clients can’t see yet
• Casting a team of specialists instead of hunting for the perfect hire
• Losing 90% of a year’s revenue in two weeks, and rebuilding
• What non-Japanese managers at Japanese-owned companies need to know about headquarters

About Jason Durkee
Jason is President of Idea Development, a workplace learning and performance consulting firm in Tokyo, and a director of ATD Japan. Since the 1990s he has designed and delivered innovation, communication, and cross-cultural programs for more than 40,000 participants across Asia.

Connect with Jason
Idea Development: http://www.ide-development.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-durkee-idea-development/

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Everyone told Mylena Maulepes not to bother applying to Harvard. She applied anyway. Now she helps companies beat burnout by fixing how the work is designed, not by asking people to be more resilient.

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Everyone told Mylena Maulepes not to bother applying to Harvard. She was Brazilian, English wasn't her first language, and she already had offers from other schools. She turned them down and applied anyway. A few months later, an email arrived at work: "Welcome to Harvard."

Mylena started out as a mechanical engineer on a truck engine line, went on to earn a master's in industrial-organizational psychology at Harvard, and came home to Brazil with a better question. Companies keep asking how stressed their people are. She asks what's making them stressed in the first place.

In this episode:
- The night she gave up the sure thing to take a shot at Harvard
- Why an engineer's habit of asking "why" became her edge in psychology
- Why well-being spending isn't moving the needle, and what does
- Crocodiles in the pond: fix the environment, not the swimmer
- What younger generations want from work, and why founders should pay attention
- Selling culture work to numbers-first buyers
- What her eight-month-old son is teaching her about leadership
- The mentor who believed in her before anyone else did

Chapters
00:00 Cold open
00:46 Meet Mylena Maulepes
04:28 The girl who wanted to fix engines
08:01 Why engineering wasn't enough to lead
11:08 When everyone says your dream is too big
13:25 "Welcome to Harvard"
18:06 An engineer in a psychology world
23:25 Stop fixing people. Fix the work.
25:46 Crocodiles in the pond
28:18 What's actually working
29:13 What clients ask for vs. what they need
32:20 Selling culture work with numbers
36:05 Becoming a mom, and a new lens on work
40:13 Why you need a mentor
45:35 Advice for your bigger stage
47:12 Where to find Mylena

Follow Mylena
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mylena-maulepes
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mylenamaulepes
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@maulepes

If this episode was useful, share it with a founder who's trying to build a team people want to stay on.

A former ABC News correspondent explains why AI didn't kill earned media — it made it the asset most founders are ignoring. T.J. Winick on how ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity now decide how you're described, the reporter's playbook for getting covered, and how to turn a crisis around in a single news cycle.

SHOW NOTES

For twenty years, T.J. Winick built stories from the inside — six of them as a correspondent for ABC News. Now he helps founders survive the same machine he used to run.

His argument in this episode cuts against the grain: AI didn't make earned media less important. It made it the asset most founders are ignoring at exactly the wrong moment. For decades, being found meant ranking on Google — SEO, a clean website, owned channels, with press coverage treated as a bonus on top. That's flipped. The people you want are now asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity the questions they used to type into a search bar, and those tools don't crawl your website or read your press release. They synthesize answers from published, credible, third-party coverage — which is earned media, and it's now the raw material AI uses to describe you to the world. T.J. calls it GEO: generative engine optimization.

From there, he opens the reporter's playbook from the other side of the desk — why a story that can't answer "why should anyone care?" in the first ten seconds dies on the spot, how to build a hook reporters can't ignore, and why authenticity beats polish every time. We get into the crisis case study at the heart of his book — the employee fired for using a weapon against a robber — and what it takes to turn a story like that around without spinning. We close on how any founder can become a genuine thought leader, and exactly how to vet and hire the right PR partner.

In this episode:

• Why AI search made earned media more valuable, not less (GEO explained)
• The client who moved a $20K/month Google Ads budget into PR — and why
• How reporters actually choose stories in the 10 a.m. editorial meeting
• The hook: timeliness, tension, data, and finding a "real person"
• The rule of seven and building an omni-channel narrative
• Newsjacking with a contrarian take to get picked up fast
• A crisis case study on empathy, truth, and the one-news-cycle goal
• How to find, vet, and hire the right PR partner

About the guest: T.J. Winick is the founder of Essex Strategies, a Boston-based strategic and crisis communications firm, and the author of Reputation Capital: How to Navigate Crises and Protect Your Greatest Asset (Berrett-Koehler), winner of a 2023 Independent Publisher Book Award. Before crossing over, he spent two decades in broadcast news, including as a correspondent for ABC News across Nightline, World News, and Good Morning America.

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📘 Reputation Capital: https://a.co/d/0dTRDwvl
🌐 essexstrategies.com
🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tjwinick/
📱 TikTok @tjwinick · Instagram @essexstrategies
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