Skydeck

In April of this year, Sanchali Pal launched Joro, an app that works like a fitbit for your carbon footprint. Joro assigns a carbon score to users’ credit card purchases and then connects users with offsets they can buy to mitigate their footprint. Part of Pal’s motivation for building Joro was that she wanted a tool that would not only allow her to better measure the impact of her lifestyle on climate change, but that would also give users a step-by-step path to make a difference in the face of what can seem like an overwhelming challenge. In this episode of Skydeck, associate editor Jen Flint talks to Pal about the pandemic’s impact on both her business and on global carbon emissions, and the insight it can offer us about tackling climate change.

  In mid-June, weeks after protests against racial injustice spread globally, the Leadership Now Project—founded in 2017 by HBS alumni to fix American democracy—released the Business for Racial Equity Pledge. Spearheaded by six Black HBS alumni, the pledge asks business leaders to promise that they will pursue anti-racist initiatives in the areas of policing reform; safe ballot access and civic participation; and economic inclusion.    Among the alumni authors of the pledge is Lisa Lewin (MBA 2003), a Leadership Now steering committee member, ed tech veteran, and current cofounder and managing partner of Ethical Ventures, a management consultancy dedicated to social enterprises. In its first month, the Business for Racial Equity Pledge was signed by more than 1,000 people—half of which are either CEOs or senior-level executives.   In this episode of Skydeck, Lewin speaks with contributor April White about the impetus behind the pledge, what success might look like, and why she remains optimistic that real change is possible.

Angela Ruggiero is cofounder and CEO of the market research firm the Sports Innovation Lab, and when we spoke in May, it was the week after the Bundesliga—Germany’s premier soccer league—began to play without fans in the stands. Outside, that is, of some cardboard facsimiles of fans that were purchased as part of a pandemic relief program.  It’s an imperfect—albeit necessary—set up for fans. And Ruggiero, who is a four-time women’s hockey Olympian and gold medalist, knows it’s also not an ideal situation for athletes, who feed off of a crowd’s energy.   But for the sports leagues and the related startups that can survive this transition period—and not all of them will—it could provide an opportunity to assess and invest in the kinds of infrastructure and tech upgrades, Ruggiero says, that will make live sports both safer and more engaging on the other side.

Artist and activist Madame Gandhi got her big break in the music industry when she was invited to join the group MIA on their world tour—which launched at the same time as her first semester at HBS began. She decided she could do both, which mostly meant going to class during the week and touring on the weekends. But there was one week in November when Gandhi had to fly back and forth between Boston and New York every day—she’d be in class until noon, then on a 2 o’clock flight back to LaGuardia in time for an evening show, then 5 am back at Logan, stopping only for a coffee at Spangler before rushing to class. That was also the week she had her first cold call. But somehow, she says, she made it to her EC year. By then she had a taste for touring and decided to use the privilege of her education to elevate feminine voices in the music industry. Gandhi has released two albums of her own since graduating from HBS and is working on her third. She is also a public speaker and a 2020 TED Fellow—work that, like her music, celebrates gender liberation. She talks to associate editor Jen Flint in this episode of Skydeck about what it’s like to be an artist, navigating a world without live performances, and working alone in quarantine.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting Era of Zoom has physically changed the way we work. But according to Rachel Greenwald (MBA 1993), some of the core tenets of interpersonal communication that were important in the office remain just as important in our new digital workspaces—we just need to adjust our techniques.  Greenwald is a matchmaker, New York Times-bestselling author, and a business communication consultant, and in this episode of Skydeck, she tells contributor April White about the parallels between the business world and the dating world, the important difference between talking and connecting, and why this crisis has already fundamentally changed the way we communicate.

Sheryl WuDunn (MBA 1986) is the author of several books with her husband, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, most of which have focused on poverty in developing countries. But in the Pulitzer Prize-winning duo’s latest book,Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, they turn their lens on working-class communities in the United States—communities that have been decimated by job loss and drug addiction.   In this episode of Skydeck, contributor April White speaks to WuDunn about what led to the fragile economic conditions of blue-collar America, what solutions are being developed to address those issues, and how the current COVID-19 crisis has revealed how much the country depends on its working class.

Ayr Muir always had an interest in the environment. After HBS, he thought he’d find a job in wind power—until a friend gave him an alarming UN report detailing livestock’s impact on CO2 emissions. With the average American consuming 3.1 servings of meat daily, Muir realized that food was a place he could make a difference. In 2008 he started Clover Food Lab with the goal of making vegetables irresistible for people who love to eat meat. Now a chain of more than a dozen fast-casual restaurants in the Boston area, Clover serves an always-changing, all-vegetarian menu to a 90 percent non-vegetarian customer base. In this episode of Skydeck, associate editor Julia Hanna takes listeners behind the scenes at a Clover food development meeting and talks to Muir about Brussel sprouts, the lack of transparency in the food industry, and the iterative process that created Clover’s different look and feel.

Eric Schultz was working as an executive chairman for a tech company, and on his way home from a fundraising presentation at a venture firm when he had an epiphany. A longtime executive with a personal interest in history, he had been struggling with how to frame a new book he was working on about the history of innovation in America. But sitting around a makeshift bar with some of the other executives who had just laid out rosy scenarios and hockey-stick returns to potential investors, the truth came out. One of the executives was running out of cash. Another had a new competitor they didn’t have a few months prior. One had lost her star software developer to a rival. This, Schultz thought, was the perfect framing: Take all of the historical entrepreneurs he was focusing on for his book, and put them in a bar. Let them trade stories, tell jokes, share insights, and see what commonalities these icons could find over a few pints.  The result is Schultz’s new book, Innovation on Tap: Stories of Entrepreneurship from the Cotton Gin to Broadway's Hamilton, and on this episode of Skydeck, he and I discuss what two artists separated by more than a century can teach us about innovation, and why it’s important for business leaders to reflect on history.  —Dan Morrell

Fifty years ago, as a senior at Abington High School in suburban Philadelphia, Stephen Schwarzman got waitlisted Harvard College. So he found the number for Harvard’s dean of admissions and called him up to plead his case directly. When told by the dean that no one would be admitted from the waiting list that fall, Schwarzman told him that he was making a mistake. It was all for naught, but this chutzpah was a bit of a hallmark: A year earlier, Schwarzman spearheaded a successful effort to get Anthony and the Imperials—then one of the most popular musical acts in the country—to play at Abington High School. Today, Schwarzman is chairman, CEO, and co-founder of Blackstone, and the founder of the Schwarzman Scholars, a graduate fellowship program housed at the new Schwarzman College in Tsinghua University in Beijing. He has just written a new book, What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence, and in this episode of Skydeck, Schwarzman and I discuss the origins of his audacity, his path to success, and what he’s learned from the low points.

Amy Jen Su is managing director at executive coaching form Paravis Partners, and she’s been hearing some consistent themes in the trenches these days. Increasingly, her clients tell her, they are facing a serious time crunch while, at the same time, their organizations are becoming more global and complex. And these pressures, coupled with internal pressures to succeed, leave these executives feeling like they are getting in their own way. This chorus of executive worries led Su to write her new book, The Leader You Want to Be: Five Essential Principles for Bringing Out Your Best Self. Those principles are what she calls her five Ps: Purpose, process, people, presence, and peace. And in this episode of Skydeck, contributor April White talks to Su about how she developed those principles—and why real improvement requires a holistic approach, not just a lifestyle hack.