In 1995, a project manager at a San Francisco software company drove twelve miles into a Nevada dry lakebed because a man in a bed sheet holding a plastic flamingo told her to. She never went back. That woman was Marian Goodell. Nearly thirty years later, she is the first and only CEO of Burning Man Project. In this episode of Unbossing, hosts Rishad Tobaccowala and Drew Ianni talk with Marian Goodell about what it means to lead an organization built on radical decentralization and no bosses — when you are, in fact, the boss. Marian arrived as a command-and-control project manager, learned to let it go, and built something genuinely collective. Then her co-founder passed away. Then the pandemic came. Then the rain nearly broke the event. Then the tickets stopped selling. Each challenge demanded something different — and each time, she had to decide whether to take the tiller herself or trust the community to sail the boat. Her lesson: collaborative decision-making and consensus are not the same thing. Knowing the difference might be the most important skill in leadership today.

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When Ann Mukherjee joined Doritos in 2006, the brand was in freefall. It had gotten so bad that Frito-Lay's own truck drivers refused to stock it. She turned it around by crashing the Super Bowl with a $5 million budget—against Anheuser-Busch's $100 million—by handing the ads to consumers and trusting them to do it better.

In this episode of Unbossing, hosts Rishad Tobaccowala and Drew Ianni talk with Ann Mukherjee—former Chairman and CEO of Pernod Ricard North America—about thirty years of walking away from what she'd just mastered to learn something entirely new. From Kraft to Frito-Lay to SC Johnson to Pernod Ricard, Ann's rule was simple: when you stop learning, you're done. Each move meant unlearning the previous company's system before her old instincts could become the wrong answer in a new place. She also challenges the conventional wisdom on weakness. Don't try to fix them. Understand them, compensate for them, and use them to find what you're actually built for. Perfection, she says, is a sickness. Her last lesson: the CEO of the past was expected to be all-knowing. The CEO of today has to be all learning.

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For 33 years, Janet Foutty helped the world's largest companies reinvent themselves. Then she had to do it herself. When she stepped down as Executive Chair of Deloitte US, she didn't walk into a plan. She walked into a blank page she didn't know how to fill.

In this episode of Unbossing, hosts Rishad Tobaccowala and Drew Ianni talk with Janet Foutty, former CEO of Deloitte Consulting and former Chair of Deloitte US, about what it means to unlearn the thing you were best at.

Janet spent three decades at one firm. She knew every hallway, every decision, every person to call. Then she left and quickly discovered that map didn't work anywhere else. Her lesson: the beginner's mindset doesn't kick in until you no longer have an organization to cover for you. We're all leaders in training, including the ones who've already led everything.

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