He’s been called the world’s number one CEO coach, with a client list that includes Richard Branson and Steve Jobs. What fewer people know is that Mark Thompson struggled all the way through school, with a learning and eyesight difficulty that made traditional education hard, and it took him years to understand why that mattered.

Mark has coached the CEOs and founders of Pinterest, Lyft, Fitbit and Waymo, led more than a hundred board-level succession engagements, and in 2023 became the first coach inducted into the Thinkers50 Coaching Hall of Fame. His most recent book, CEO Ready, tackles the thing nobody talks about: how you actually get the top job, and how you survive it once you have.

In this conversation, Mark takes me from the fruit orchards that became Silicon Valley, to the discovery that reshaped his life, when he realised the things that held him back in school had become his superpower. We talk about the shock of becoming a CEO for the first time and getting it badly wrong, why he treats the role as a privilege to be earned, and why he spends the first two chapters of his book trying to talk you out of the job entirely. We also get to what it really takes to lead in a world where the S&P 500 now churns in weeks rather than decades.

A conversation about readiness, resilience, and the humility to know that nobody gets anything worthwhile done alone.

The Unlock Moment is hosted by Dr Gary Crotaz, PhD — master interviewer, executive coach and author. Downloaded in over 140 countries. Sign up to The Unlock Moment newsletter at https://tinyurl.com/ywhdaazp Find out more at https://garycrotaz.com and https://theunlockmoment.com Also discover his other podcasts, The Box of Keys and Unlock Your Leadership. Follow, subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts — and connect with Dr Gary on LinkedIn for more leadership insights. Part of The Unlock Moment podcast family.

There’s a particular kind of certainty that comes from a traditional career. You have the training, the title, you know what good looks like. Starting a business feels like stepping off solid ground onto a rollercoaster you’re still building as it moves.

Recorded live at Climb 26, this is a conversation with Eve Hanks, founder and CEO of veterinary diagnostics company MI:RNA. Eve spent years as a vet and scientist before a midlife moment when she sat with her finger hovering over the “incorporate a company” button, worked out she had roughly two thousand working Mondays left, and decided that wasn’t a lot. So she packed up boxes, drove to France, renovated a house and launched a business ... during COVID ... because it had become more terrifying to stay than it was scary to go.

We get into the science that made it possible: microRNAs, a control system in the body we didn’t even know existed until recently, and how a process that once took six months now takes an afternoon. We talk about pitching a technology so new that investors asked her what a dairy cow was, what resilience actually looks like (pitching, getting no traction, crying in the bath, and getting up to do it again), and why she tells every scientist she mentors that they’re the one holding all the cards.

A conversation about counting your Mondays, betting on yourself, and turning brilliant science into something real. Find out more at mirna.tech.

The Unlock Moment is hosted by Dr Gary Crotaz, PhD — master interviewer, executive coach and author. Downloaded in over 140 countries. Sign up to The Unlock Moment newsletter at https://tinyurl.com/ywhdaazp Find out more at https://garycrotaz.com and https://theunlockmoment.com Also discover his other podcasts, The Box of Keys and Unlock Your Leadership. Follow, subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts — and connect with Dr Gary on LinkedIn for more leadership insights. Part of The Unlock Moment podcast family.

How do you stay ahead of the curve when you’ve been surfing the wave for 40 years?

Recorded live at Climb 26 as Andy Wood received the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award, this is a conversation with a man who has been present at the exact moment new ideas became whole new industries ... from the early days of the UK games industry, through computer vision and digital humans, to the AI tools reshaping creativity today.

Andy takes me back to the beginning: an adopted boy, endlessly curious, secretly taught to tell the time by the builders across the road. That curiosity carried him from making games like FIFA and Mortal Kombat ... one of them scored by Brian May ... to markerless motion capture that could do what Gollum needed without the dots, and a demo of Peter Gabriel he used to pitch James Cameron for Avatar. We talk about the game that still haunts him, the Nintendo friend who told him to hang a brass plaque reading “we make games, stupid,” and why six exits taught him to leave at exactly the right moment.

A conversation about staying curious, shipping things that are actually finished, and knowing when a chapter is done.

The Unlock Moment is hosted by Dr Gary Crotaz, PhD — master interviewer, executive coach and author. Downloaded in over 140 countries. Sign up to The Unlock Moment newsletter at https://tinyurl.com/ywhdaazp Find out more at https://garycrotaz.com and https://theunlockmoment.com Also discover his other podcasts, The Box of Keys and Unlock Your Leadership. Follow, subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts — and connect with Dr Gary on LinkedIn for more leadership insights. Part of The Unlock Moment podcast family.

Most great things don’t start with a perfect plan. They start with a moment.

Recorded live at Climb 26, this is the story of how Tayo Adebisi turned a £5,000 investment into a business turning over £5 million. Tayo didn’t come from retail, or business, or money. She came to e-commerce at rock bottom, needing something to pull her forward, and she began with a single secondhand ukulele that she bought on a bargain and sold at a profit.

From there it was £2,500 recycled at a time, car boots full of stock bought between nursery runs, and relentless research into what people were actually buying. We talk about the night three masked men tried to load her stock into a van, and the split-second decision that followed: “we’re getting a warehouse, now.” We discuss the COVID year that ended in a loss, and why that was the moment she stopped selling other people’s brands and built her own. And we get into the thing underneath it all, learned the hard way: knowing that no one is coming to save you, and that if you can’t take a risk, you stay stagnant.

A conversation about beginning before you feel ready, learning faster than the world expects, and carrying other people with you as you grow.

The Unlock Moment is hosted by Dr Gary Crotaz, PhD — master interviewer, executive coach and author. Downloaded in over 140 countries. Sign up to The Unlock Moment newsletter at https://tinyurl.com/ywhdaazp Find out more at https://garycrotaz.com and https://theunlockmoment.com Also discover his other podcasts, The Box of Keys and Unlock Your Leadership. Follow, subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts — and connect with Dr Gary on LinkedIn for more leadership insights. Part of The Unlock Moment podcast family.

As a boy, Jamie Ramsden sat at the foot of the tallest rollercoaster in Europe, too afraid of heights to get on - until he realised the fear was something he’d built himself. That moment became the idea his whole career rests on: most of the limits we run into are self-imposed, not structural.

Jamie is an award-winning former CEO, an executive coach, and the author of Let’s Go: How Great Leaders Shape the Future. Over two decades he’s coached hundreds of Fortune 500 C-suite leaders, and developed the Ad Astra leadership model for building leaders who perform sustainably.

In this episode, Jamie shares the Unlock Moments that shaped his thinking - from a bohemian childhood watching his musician parents play the pubs of Devon, to the night he challenged a billion-dollar CEO who turned out to be trapped in a life everyone else envied. We talk about why so many brilliant leaders feel imprisoned at the top, why imposter syndrome takes hold, and the simple audit he runs that gives CEOs back as much as twenty hours a week. And we get to his core belief, learned the hard way turning around the worst-performing supplier in his industry: no one is coming to save you - and no one is going to stop you.

A conversation about choosing exhilaration over fear, and building a life you’re not trying to escape.

The Unlock Moment is hosted by Dr Gary Crotaz, PhD — master interviewer, executive coach and author. Downloaded in over 140 countries. Sign up to The Unlock Moment newsletter at https://tinyurl.com/ywhdaazp Find out more at https://garycrotaz.com and https://theunlockmoment.com Also discover his other podcasts, The Box of Keys and Unlock Your Leadership. Follow, subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts — and connect with Dr Gary on LinkedIn for more leadership insights. Part of The Unlock Moment podcast family.

Jennifer McCollum spent twenty-five years climbing toward a seat she wasn't sure she'd ever reach. Then a single phone call changed everything by telling her exactly what she didn't want.

Jennifer is President and CEO of Catalyst, the global nonprofit working with many of the world's most powerful companies to build workplaces that work for women, and only the sixth leader in its sixty-year history. She's the author of In Her Own Voice and, most recently, Men at Work: The Road Map to Gender Partnership, launched this year at the New York Stock Exchange, and a member of Marshall Goldsmith's 100 Coaches community.

In this episode, she shares the Unlock Moment that redirected her career, and why clarity of action begins with a harder question than "what do I do next?" We cover the scrappy childhood that shaped her drive, the two layoffs and the sabbatical that made her stop and reassess, and why getting clear on what she didn't want freed her to find the work she was made for.

We also get into the heart of Men at Work: why workplaces were never designed for women, why they aren't serving men especially well either, and what it really takes to build organisations that work for everyone.

A conversation about ambition, clarity, and the choices leaders can make right now rather than waiting for the culture to catch up.

The Unlock Moment is hosted by Dr Gary Crotaz, PhD — master interviewer, executive coach and author. Downloaded in over 140 countries. Sign up to The Unlock Moment newsletter at https://tinyurl.com/ywhdaazp Find out more at https://garycrotaz.com and https://theunlockmoment.com Also discover his other podcasts, The Box of Keys and Unlock Your Leadership. Follow, subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts — and connect with Dr Gary on LinkedIn for more leadership insights. Part of The Unlock Moment podcast family.

Some leaders sense change early. Far fewer know what to do with it.

Rita McGrath has spent her career studying the moment the ground shifts under a business ... and why so many brilliant, well-resourced companies miss it completely. She's a professor at Columbia Business School, ranked among the world's top ten management thinkers by Thinkers50 and winner of their number one award in strategy, and the author of The End of Competitive Advantage and Seeing Around Corners.

In this episode, Rita takes me inside her "flops file" ... a collection of corporate disasters so expensive you have to lose fifty million dollars to make the list. We talk about why the old rules of strategy have stopped working, why treating failure as learning is so hard for experienced operators, and how the best leaders manage the one resource they can never get back: their own time and attention.

She shares the idea of strategic centering ... working out what your organisation is truly grounded on ... and why a scientist running a science company, or a technologist running a technology company, now has an advantage the generalist CEO does not. And she makes the case that we are living through a genuine turning point, where the old world is fighting to hold its place and the new one is already taking shape for those with the courage to see it.

It began with a teenager from Rochester stepping off a plane into a New York City she'd been warned was dangerous ... and choosing curiosity over fear. That instinct became a whole way of thinking about strategy. This is a conversation about paying attention to the future before it arrives.

The Unlock Moment is hosted by Dr Gary Crotaz, PhD — master interviewer, executive coach and author. Downloaded in over 140 countries. Sign up to The Unlock Moment newsletter at https://tinyurl.com/ywhdaazp Find out more at https://garycrotaz.com and https://theunlockmoment.com Also discover his other podcasts, The Box of Keys and Unlock Your Leadership. Follow, subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts — and connect with Dr Gary on LinkedIn for more leadership insights. Part of The Unlock Moment podcast family.

Every day, most of us drive around the car park of our own brain looking for the closest possible space ... the easiest answer, the fastest shortcut, the machine that will do the thinking for us. Mohan Nair thinks that habit is costing us something we haven't begun to measure.

Mohan is a speaker, author and transformation leader who has spent decades working at the intersection of business, innovation and human experience, as CEO of Emerge, former Chief Innovation Officer at Cambia Health Solutions, and an adjunct professor at Kellogg. He is also a musician, a former TV talk show host, and, by his own description, the first healthcare executive to audition and lose at America's Got Talent.

In this episode, Mohan takes me inside his new book Unreachable, and his argument that insight is biological, not technological ... something a machine can describe but never feel. We talk about the three signs you have become AI-obsessed, why editing your work is a different act from creating it, what "inconvenient learning" is and why the best leaders are forged by it, and the story of a ninety million dollar contract that turned on his refusing to hear a demand literally, which is exactly what AI would have done.

It started with a teacher telling a sixteen-year-old boy he was a disgrace to his family. What Mohan did with that moment ... and what he thinks all of us must now do to stay human in an age of intelligent machines ... is the heart of this conversation.

The Unlock Moment is hosted by Dr Gary Crotaz, PhD — master interviewer, executive coach and author. Downloaded in over 140 countries. Sign up to The Unlock Moment newsletter at https://tinyurl.com/ywhdaazp Find out more at https://garycrotaz.com and https://theunlockmoment.com Also discover his other podcasts, The Box of Keys and Unlock Your Leadership. Follow, subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts — and connect with Dr Gary on LinkedIn for more leadership insights. Part of The Unlock Moment podcast family.