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  • 617. Navigating Leadership Challenges: Analyzing Systems with Barbara Kellerman

    617. Navigating Leadership Challenges: Analyzing Systems with Barbara Kellerman
    2026/02/03
    How do bad leaders persist in current-day environments, and how do they use factors like fear, rewards, and the natural difficulty of uprooting entrenched authority to their advantage? Despite the challenges inherent to speaking out, what duty and role do followers play in identifying and addressing bad leadership?Barbara Kellerman is the founder and a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and the author of many books, addressing many different aspects of leadership. Her latest works are Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers, LEADERSHIP: Essential Selections on Power, and The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America.Greg and Barbara discuss Barbara’s critiques of the leadership industry, highlighting its focus on 'good' leadership while often neglecting the study of 'bad' leadership and the crucial role of followers. She argues for a more nuanced understanding of leadership that includes the contexts and followers that shape and are shaped by leaders. Their conversation dives into the complexities of trust in leaders, the need for rigorous education and credentialing in leadership akin to doctors or lawyers, and the significance of managing both leadership development and organizational design. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The three-part leadership system06:25: The leadership system is slightly more complicated than just leadership, but only slightly. It’s got three parts, each of which is of equal importance. One is the leader. None of this is to say that leaders are unimportant, but equal importance. This is—think of it as an equilateral triangle—the leader is one point, if you will. One of the two other points are the followers, the constituents, the stakeholders, whatever language. If you do not like the word follower, we can do all the euphemisms. I tend to use follower because in English, it is the only natural antonym of leader. So let's say, for the purpose here now, one part of the triangle is the leader, the other part is the followers, and the third part, again of equal importance, is the context—or better put, are the contexts, ’cause it is always plural within which leaders and followers are situated.There is no leader without followers29:55: We tend to obey. We do not tend to disobey. So the idea that this broad thing called the field of leadership pays such inadequate attention to the obvious other side of the coin—leadership is, after all, a relationship. You cannot have a leader without at least a single follower. Why is that other, by definition, so much less consequential? The answer is they are not, but the field pays that other virtually no attention.Does being a good leader automatically make you ethical?15:45: The word bad is so complicated. And it is adverse good that I have found it practical in my work generally to divide bad and good into two categories. One is a continuum of ethics, so you’re a good leader if you’re ethical. You’re a bad leader if you’re unethical. And the other continuum is effectiveness. You’re a bad leader if you’re ineffective, and you’re a good leader if you’re effective.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Deborah RhodeMartin WinterkornVolkswagen Emissions ScandalHippocratic OathGroupthinkList of prime ministers of the United KingdomNiccolò MachiavelliJeffrey PfefferMarco RubioGuest Profile:Personal WebsiteProfile on LinkedInWikipedia ProfileCenter for Public LeadershipGuest Work:Amazon Author PageLeadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad FestersLEADERSHIP: Essential Selections on PowerThe Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed AmericaWomen and LeadershipProfessionalizing LeadershipThe End of Leadership: A Provocative Reassessment of Leadership in the Digital Age—Questioning Beliefs That Are Dangerously Out-of-DateFollowership: How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing LeadersBad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It MattersReinventing Leadership: Making the Connection Between Politics and BusinessThe President As World LeaderLeadership and Negotiation in the Middle EastBad Leadership – Why We Steer ClearTEDx Talk: What do we do about bad leaders? Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    55 分
  • 616. Leading Through Learning: Lessons from Life as a CEO with Jeff Immelt

    616. Leading Through Learning: Lessons from Life as a CEO with Jeff Immelt
    2026/01/30

    There’s no instruction manual for how to be a CEO, and that role has undergone massive change in recent decades. So how do the leaders of great corporations today prepare themselves to make the hard decisions?

    Jeff Immelt, former CEO of GE and now current instructor at Stanford University, shares some of his top lessons on leading a major corporation in his book, Hot Seat: What I Learned Leading a Great American Company.

    Jeff joins Greg to reflect on his long career at GE, discussing his sense of belonging and the changing nature of career expectations, especially among today's youth. They delve into the intricacies of being a CEO, the differences between traditional and modern management practices, and the importance of both depth and breadth in business expertise. Jeff shares insights on organizational design, the importance of listening, and the critical role of teaching and continual learning in leadership.

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

    Episode Quotes:

    What actually makes people stay, grow and perform in a company.

    07:36: Every company I work with, you know, I said, why do people leave? Right? Because there is a finite number of options and all this other stuff we can give people. And basically money counts for sure. But the second reason why people leave is I have a bad manager. The third reason why people leave is I am not getting any better. I am not getting any training, I am not getting any coaching. I am just like a work unit, and so those are the things we have to solve for. I think if we really want to turn back on the productivity engine of the next era.

    Every job looks easy till you're the one doing it

    38:41: Every job looks easy till you are the one doing it, right? So when you step in, do not come in and say, “This person stunk. I am the new sheriff. Everything is going to be great.” Just keep your mouth shut and do your job.

    Every good leader has three voices

    39:42: One of the things, Greg, that I teach, particularly founders, on is I say, look, every good leader has to have three voices, right? You need to be able to have the all-employee meeting, right? You need to be able to stand up to 400 people and communicate to 4-0-0 people. You need to be able to run a meeting, and you need to be able to give one-on-one feedback. And you know, those voices, the vocabulary is very different, right? In terms of how you motivate people in those three settings. And I try to give them examples of, you know, what they can work on, and, and very few people are really good at all three. But a lot of people give up at one, and it is hard to be a good leader. It is hard to be a good leader if you cannot traverse those three settings.

    Show Links:

    Recommended Resources:

    • Inside Crotonville | GE
    • David L. Joyce
    • Sam Bankman-Fried
    • Bill Ruh
    • Stephen A. Schwarzman
    • Lean Six Sigma
    • AT&T Labs
    • Ross Perot

    Guest Profile:

    • Faculty Profile at Stanford University
    • Professional Profile on LinkedIn

    Guest Work:

    • Hot Seat: What I Learned Leading a Great American Company

    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    45 分
  • 615. Reclaim Your Life from Digital Overload with Paul Leonardi

    615. Reclaim Your Life from Digital Overload with Paul Leonardi
    2026/01/26
    What are practical strategies to avoid overload and exhaustion in today’s digital world? What norms can organizations create for tool usage, and how can finding offline activities that provide a mental contrast to digital work?Paul Leonardi is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara, a consultant and speaker on digital transformation and the future of work, and an author of several works. His latest book is called Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life.Greg and Paul discuss the complementary nature of his two most recent books: the first focuses on harnessing digital tools, and the second on mitigating the overwhelm they can cause. They also explore teaching technology management, including the importance of understanding technology’s impact on people and organizational processes. Paul explains the 30% rule, emphasizing the need to understand digital tools well enough to use them effectively. They also explore the concept of digital exhaustion, the subject of his most recent book, its symptoms, and how to manage it, both at work and in daily life. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How can we reduce exhaustion?41:29: One easy way of reducing our exhaustion is to match the sort of complexity of the task that we are trying to do with the affordances or the capabilities of the technology. And I say match, not over exceed, because we also have the problem where, like me, I am sure you have been in many, many meetings that should have just been an email, that there is not the need. And so what we have done in that situation is we have overstimulated people, right, in a setting with, you know, 15 other folks, and we have taken an hour out of their day and maybe the travel time to get there. And that has created other avenues for exhaustion when, if we had just perceived this information via email, we could not have had the meeting. So you do not want to overmatch, you just want to like match to the complexity of the task. And that is the key to reducing our exhaustion.It’s not just distraction that exhausts us18:28: I think we have failed to look at how it is not just being distracted that is a problem, but it is the act of switching itself across all of these different inputs really is a significant source of our exhaustion.Inference is a big driver of exhaustion32:45: Inference is really a big driver of exhaustion. And I would say the place that it most shows up, although not exclusively, is in our social media lives. Because, of course, people are curating their lives in terms of what they post, whether that is LinkedIn or TikTok or Instagram, that does not really matter. And we are constantly not only making inferences of them, but what I find is that we are also very often making inferences about ourselves because we see a past record of all the things that we wrote and all of the things that we posted. And then we are also making inferences of what we think other people think about us based on all the things that we post.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Human MultitaskingTask SwitchingFatigueUnsiloed Podcast Episode 612: Rebecca HindsGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UC Santa BarbaraPaulLeonardi.comWikipedia ProfileLinkedIn ProfileGuest Work:Amazon Author PageDigital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your LifeThe Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AIExpertise, Communication, and OrganizingMateriality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological WorldCar Crashes without Cars: Lessons About Simulation Technology and Organizational Change from Automotive DesignGoogle Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    1 時間
  • 614. Understanding the Great Divergence: Europe vs China from 1000 to 2000 feat. Guido Tabellini

    614. Understanding the Great Divergence: Europe vs China from 1000 to 2000 feat. Guido Tabellini
    2026/01/23
    What changes happened in the histories of Europe and China to create two economies that developed so differently? How did different forms of local cooperation influence state development, rule of law, and economic progress?Guido Tabellini is a professor of Political Economics at the University of Bocconi in Milan, Italy. He is also the author of several books, most recently co-authoring Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000.Greg and Guido discuss the historical divergence in prosperity between Europe and China, exploring when and why it began, and whether it arose from cultural or institutional phenomena. Guido also emphasizes the contrasting roles of corporations and clans in both regions, the impact of state capacity, and the lasting effects of these differences on modern economic and political landscapes. Their conversation touches on the historical process of cooperation across regions and its implications for modern development economics.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What are the political origins of corporations?31:55: So, we should not think of the corporation just as a firm, as a way to organize production that is important, but actually comes at the later stage. And the very important role of the corporation is also to have a political role, to govern a city, to represent a city in parliament, in China. The role of the corporations, when they emerge. Instead, it is purely economic. You do not have self-governing city, and even at the level of monasteries, you do have Buddhist monasteries, which are important, but each one of them is organized as an entity. You do not have a congregation of monasteries like the Cluny monastery or like, eventually, the church. Reframing the conversation on the Great Divergence02:34: Rather than talking about great divergence, we actually like to talk about great reversal in the book because it has been a reversal. So even before starting to debate when the divergence begins, meaning that Europe gets ahead of China, we should acknowledge that the opposite was true, that China was ahead of Europe at the turn of the first millennium. The high stakes of clan adjudication49:05: In China, the demand for external enforcement was probably less, evident because the clan needed less of an external enforcement. They were smaller communities, they had stronger reciprocal ties. The reputational mechanism within the clan was much more important because if I cheat on my clan member, I am kicked out of the clan. And if I am kicked out of the clan in a society which is organized around clans, I am on my own and I die. In Europe, of course, reputation is very important, but the penalty of cheating is not as harsh. So the altruistic value ties are weaker, and the penalty of cheating is also weaker. And so you have a stronger demand for external enforcement. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Great DivergenceCharles TillyClanCluny AbbeyConfuciusGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Brocconi UniversityWikipedia ProfileCEPR.org ProfileGuest Work:Amazon Author PageTwo Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000L'Italia in gabbia: Il volto politico della crisi economicaThe Economic Effects of ConstitutionsPolitical Economics: Explaining Economic PolicyFlexible Integration: Towards a More Effective and Democratic EuropeMonetary and Fiscal Policy: PoliticsGoogle Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    54 分
  • 613. Challenging Bureaucracy: Management Insights with Gary Hamel

    613. Challenging Bureaucracy: Management Insights with Gary Hamel
    2026/01/19
    Where did the concept of management as a profession come from, and how did it develop? Why do bureaucratic practices persist? How can companies break free from those constraints to unlock greater potential and adapt more effectively to the relentless change and competition in today’s business world?Gary Hamel is the founder of the Management Lab, a professor at the London Business School, a visiting professor at the University of Oxford, and the author of several books. His recent titles include Humanocracy, Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them, What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation, and Competing for the Future.Greg and Gary discuss the evolution of Gary’s thinking on management over the years and the detrimental effects of entrenched bureaucratic systems in organizations. He argues that bureaucracy stifles innovation, efficiency, and human engagement, leading him to suggest that organizations need to adopt more human-centric, dynamic, and decentralized models. He also points out the eventual trajectory of all companies that don’t follow this path.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why organizations stop being technical and start being bureaucratic08:29: I don’t think administrative skills are any more a competitive advantage. You need them, but they are not much of a differentiator. So far as I can see, they are not really a source of competitive advantage. And yet, given that history of them being so rare, we basically turned our organizations into administrative aristocracies . And so what that meant practically was, once you reached a certain level in an organization, a fairly low level, the only way to advance your career was to become a manager. And that is still true in most organizations. People tend to compete for those jobs because, and I have young friends, and kids and so on who, very capable people worked in organizations, and however capable you are technically, you reach a point where they are coaxing you into an administrative or managerial role as the only way to grow. And the desire to keep great employees and to pay them well means that those positions proliferate. We create more managerial roles because that is the way of rewarding people and escalating their salaries.The radical shift from static hierarchy to dynamic power39:04: I am all for having a hierarchy, but I think it needs to be highly dynamic depending on the issue, and the hierarchy needs to be able to shift also. When people in power are no longer adding value or whatever they need to, you need to be able to fire those people from below.Why traditional leadership programs create administrators, not leaders47:18: In survey after survey, by Fortune, by McKinsey or others, the vast majority of executives do not think leadership development is producing positive returns or noticeably positive returns. And again, I think the reason for that is what we call leadership development is, first of all, almost done completely in the bureaucratic frame. We are not trying to find people with genuine leadership, natural leadership capacity. We are not trying to find people who understand how to mobilize and catalyze others to do things that people thought were impossible. Our leadership training is basically training people to take on bigger administrative jobs and stratified just like the pyramid: managing yourself, managing a team, managing a unit, managing a function, managing the organization. So number one, we have that problem. It is simply replicating, and it is creating better administrators. I do not think the data says that it is creating leaders.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Thomas PaineMax WeberMcKinsey & CompanyJames G. MarchHerbert A. SimonDisruptive InnovationKKR & Co.Open Strategy: Mastering Disruption from Outside the C-SuiteDominic BartonJeffrey PfefferBarbara KellermanLeadership DevelopmentManagement DevelopmentPeter DruckerGuest Profile:GaryHamel.comLinkedIn ProfileWikipedia ProfileHumanocracy.comThe Management LabSocial Profile on XGuest Work:Amazon Author PageHumanocracy, Updated and Expanded: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside ThemWhat Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable InnovationCompeting for the FutureThe Future of ManagementThe Corporate Lattice: Achieving High Performance In the Changing World of WorkLeading the RevolutionBringing Silicon Valley InsideGoogle Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    52 分
  • 612. Cracking the Code of Effective Meetings with Rebecca Hinds

    612. Cracking the Code of Effective Meetings with Rebecca Hinds
    2026/01/15
    When are meetings the best way to coordinate and make decisions and when do they make things worse?? How do you use the two-pizza rule to hold effective meetings and what happens when you start including too many people in a process?Rebecca Hinds is the head of the Work AI Institute at Glean and the author of Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done, a book outlining the way to address one of the ways productivity is lost in organizations.Greg and Rebecca discuss the importance of intentionality in information flow within organizations, the common pitfalls of meeting culture, and practical strategies to improve meeting efficiency. Rebecca emphasizes the use of data and AI to measure meeting effectiveness and reduce 'meeting bloat', while sharing insights from her experiences at Asana and her studies on organizational collaboration. They also explore the evolving collaboration between HR and IT departments in the era of AI and the necessity for both tech and HR professionals to exchange and enhance their skills.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How ‘visibIlity bias’ fuels endless meetings[07:28] We know that humans have a bias to associate presence with productivity. And so what I find to be often the case is people start to associate more meetings with more importance and status within the organization, and so when you're stuck and not sure how to make progress or you're worried about productivity, a meeting becomes a knee-jerk solution to solve that. You might not accomplish anything meaningful in the meeting, but at least you've sat together and shown that some progress or perceived progress was made. And so I think at the core of this, is this pervasive productivity theater that goes on in organizations, this visibility bias where we associate meetings with importance within the organization. There are a host of other problems, but at the core, I think that's the fundamental problem that we're dealing with.The pressure ingrained in our calendars and meeting cultures[09:37]  As soon as someone extends a meeting invite. They're establishing this social contract where you feel like you have to reciprocate. Even when we think about terminology around, it's a meeting invite. You either accept or you reject. You start to feel like you're not just rejecting the meeting, but rejecting the person. And it's taken very personally. AI tools can help reveal participation imbalances in meetings[22:59] If you're seeing that leaders are consuming 70%, 80% of the airtime, that's an opportunity to course correct and improve your meeting effectiveness. And often when it comes from an AI tool or an objective analytic tool, it's much more effectively received than a less powerful person trying to voice that takeaway in the meeting and try to veer influence that way.Are we socially conditioned to hate meetings?[28:48] Humans have what I call a meeting suck reflex, right? For a multitude of different reasons.When we hear the word "meeting," we have this negative, visceral reaction. So much so that you know when you're asked to evaluate your meetings in public versus private, you tend to rate your meetings much more negatively when you're around people in public as compared to privately, because we think that we should hate meetings. We've been socially conditioned to feel such, and there's few things that bond coworkers more quickly than bonding over a bad meeting that could have been a five-line email, right? And so to avoid that, assessing whether a meeting was worth your time helps to level set. Everyone has an intuitive sense of whether a meeting was worth their time. Is there something more productive they could have done with that time or not? And so that tends to be a good gauge for you as an organizer.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Asana, Inc.Parkinson's lawSteven RogelbergLaw of TrivialityAmazon’s Two-Pizza TeamsROTIRobert I. SuttonGuest Profile:RebeccaHinds.comThe Work AI Institute at GleanLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on X for GleanGuest Work:Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    55 分
  • 611. Finding a Strategy for Life, Business, and Everything in Between feat. Geoffrey A. Moore

    611. Finding a Strategy for Life, Business, and Everything in Between feat. Geoffrey A. Moore
    2026/01/12
    Whether in markets, organizations, or the universe itself, today’s guest is a master at navigating complex systems where existing models have stopped working, and new ones must emerge.Geoffrey Moore is a consultant in the high-tech sector and a prolific author, with titles including Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets, and, most recently, The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality. Geoffrey and Greg discuss his transition from Renaissance English scholar to high-tech strategist, why narrative is critical in business, the challenges of disrupting industries, and what “The Infinite Staircase” reveals about life’s meaning and human purpose. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The importance of sales and the failure of business schools09:32: It's absolutely a travesty that business schools don't teach sales. It's, it's crazy. And there are a bunch of people that have made that argument before. But the reason why academics didn't like sales is it felt too much like Glengarry Glen Ross: sleazy, you know, closers, "coffee is for closers," and all the kind of stuff the academics hate. But the point about it is that, particularly in contemporary B2B sales, that's not what a salesperson does anymore. You have to help the customer find the use cases and the ROI that validates why they're gonna buy this thing, which means you have to be intellectually curious about their business and not just yammer about your own business. And so it is, it's actually a really interesting profession if you approach it, you know, in a kind of more in-service-to-the-customer approach, as opposed to, "I'm going to make my commissions and go to the club," although that's also a big motive among salespeople.Venture capital is literary criticism06:10: Venture is a form of literary criticism prior to investment. And then, as you invest, you start to figure out, now how can I verify? How can I validate? And eventually, the analytics and the numbers become very important. But not at the beginning. At the beginning, it is really about the story.Venture Capital vs. Corporate metrics38:11: Venture capitalists do not fund performance. They fund power, but everything in a venture model is about becoming more powerful, not becoming more performant. When we exit, then they'll become performant, but not now, and that idea is still very hard to land in a large corporation.The correct sequence for success33:51: The correct sequence has to be customers first, employees second, investors third. Any other sequence doesn't work, not for sustainable success.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Regis McKennaAlfred D. Chandler Jr.Edmund SpenserGreat chain of beingClayton ChristensenSatya NadellaNorthrop FryePhilip SidneyGuest Profile:Professional WebsiteProfessional Profile on LinkedInProfile on XGuest Work:The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and MortalityCrossing the ChasmInside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth MarketsDealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their EvolutionLiving on the Fault Line, Revised Edition: Managing for Shareholder Value in Any EconomyThe Gorilla Game: An Investor's Guide to Picking Winners in High TechnologyZone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    55 分
  • 610. Shaping Spaces: Architecture, Design, and Urban Planning with Witold Rybczynski

    610. Shaping Spaces: Architecture, Design, and Urban Planning with Witold Rybczynski
    2026/01/08

    What is the real importance of understanding architectural history, and how is its teaching different from the histories of other disciplines? How can good design influence business decisions?

    Witold Rybczynski is an emeritus professor in the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the author of several books on architecture and its history. His most recent titles have been The Driving Machine: A Design History of the Car, Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History, Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays, and The Story of Architecture.

    Greg and Witold discuss Witold’s extensive work on various topics, including the present state and histories of architecture, urban planning, and design. Their conversation covers the cultural valuation of architecture versus fine arts, the historical impact of city planning and urban design in the United States, and the unique characteristics of American cities compared to how cities and urban planning happens in European countries. They also get into the interplay of style and function in car design based in the research from Witold’s new book.

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*


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    51 分