Brain for Business

Over the last few years of the Covid pandemic we all became used to the idea of contagion and, in particular, how viruses spread through communities. But have you ever thought about how change – most especially behavioural change – spreads through networks, societies and, indeed, organisations? To explore this further we are joined on the Brain for Business podcast by one of the world's leading thinkers in this area, Professor Damon Centola.About our guest…Damon Centola is the Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group and Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. Damon’s research centers on social networks and behavior change. His work has received numerous scientific awards and, in addition to his positions at the University of Pennsylvania, is a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.Popular accounts of Damon’s work have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, TIME, The Atlantic, Scientific American and CNN, among other outlets. He is a series editor for Princeton University Press and the author of How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions and Change: How to Make Big Things Happen.Damon’s U Penn webpage can be accessed here: https://www.asc.upenn.edu/people/faculty/damon-centola-phd The Scientific American article referred to in the interview is available here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-25-revolution-how-big-does-a-minority-have-to-be-to-reshape-society/The underlying research in that article is available via this link: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aas8827 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It is now almost 20 years since the first podcast was launched, and if the available statistics are anything to go by, podcasts are definitely having a moment, with a reputed 2.5 million podcasts listed in Apple podcasts.When we think about who listens to podcasts, data from the US indicates that podcast listeners are 68% more likely to have a postgraduate degree, and 45% of podcast listeners have a household income over $250,000.And why do people listen to podcast? Apparently 74% of people listen to podcasts in order to learn new things.To discuss podcasts in more detail, and in particular consider how leaders can leverage business podcasts to enhance organizational performance, I am delighted to be joined by Professor Jake Waddingham.Jake Waddingham is an Assistant Professor of Management at McCoy College of Business at Texas State University. Jakes research explores how organizations and entrepreneurs manage stakeholder perceptions and his research has been published in the Journal of Management, Journal of International Business Studies and Business Horizons amongst others.Jake can be contacted via one of the following sites:•Google scholar - https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=XFWZXWYAAAAJ•LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwaddingham/ The Business Horizon’s article referenced in the discussion is:Insights on the go: Leveraging business podcasts to enhance organizational performance by Jacob A. Waddingham, Miles A. Zachary, David J. Ketchen Jr. It is available to access here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339444655_Insights_on_the_go_Leveraging_business_podcasts_to_enhance_organizational_performanceThe podcast statistics quoted above are from this site: https://nealschaffer.com/podcast-statistics/The various podcasts mentioned during the discussion include:•Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman – https://mastersofscale.com/•The Indicator from Planet Money - https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510325/the-indicator-from-planet-money•Worklife with Adam Grant – https://adamgrant.net/podcasts/work-life/•Business Wars with David Brown - https://wondery.com/shows/business-wars/•Freakonomics with Stephen Dubner – https://freakonomics.com/series/freakonomics-radio/ •Econtalk with Russ Roberts - https://www.econlib.org/econtalk/ •Axios Sports with Kendall Baker – https://www.axios.com/authors/kbaker Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We all know that to a certain extent cultures differ between countries. When we travel or work with people from different backgrounds we often gain unexpected insights into different traditions and different ways of doing things. Yet what is “culture”? How can it be understood? And how can leaders strengthen their Cultural Intelligence and that of the organisations they lead? To dig a bit deeper into these questions I am delighted to be joined on the programme by Professor Eimear Nolan of Trinity Business School.Eimear Nolan is Assistant Professor of International Business and Director of the Flexible Executive MBA at Trinity Business School in Dublin. She gained her PhD in International Management from the University of Limerick, where she investigated the cultural adjustment and fit of internationally trained doctors working in Ireland. Prior to joining Trinity Business School Eimear held academic positions in the UK and the USA. Eimear is a co-country investigator (for Ireland and the UK) on the world renowned GLOBE Project 2020. Her research interests are in expatriate adjustment, cultural intelligence, recruitment and retention strategies, ethics, and the health care sector. You can find out more about Eimear’s work here:-Culture Shocked Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/3bD8L2mrm66hcfmxPkmqJG -LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eimear-nolan/-The Globe 2020 Project: https://www.globeproject.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

While often seen as discrete and distinct phenomena, could it be that creativity and innovation are just variations on the same theme? Absolutely yes, says Dr Zorana Ivčević Pringle, and what is more rather than being purely logical and rational processes, both creativity and innovation are impacted by emotions in ways that many of us fail to recognise. Starting with a deceptively simple definition of creativity, this episode of Brain for Business charts a course from personal creativity and problem solving through to the role of leaders in supporting greater creativity and innovation in the teams and organisations they lead. Along the way, we discuss innovation in a hospital context and the creativity of some of history’s great artists, not to mention the important role played by emotional contagion and leader self-compassion. Dr Zorana Ivčević Pringle is a Senior Research Scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Zorana studies the role of emotion and emotional intelligence in creativity and well-being, as well as how to use the arts (and art-related institutions) to promote emotion and creativity skills. Zorana has published her research in journals such as Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of Personality, Applied Cognitive Psychology, Creativity Research Journal, Journal of Creative Behavior and others. Her work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, ArtNet, US News, Education Week, Science Daily, El Pais, and others, and she is a regular contributor to Psychology Today and Creativity Post. You can find out more about Zorana's work at these links: Personal website: https://www.zorana-ivcevic-pringle.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zorana-ivcevic-pringle/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ZoranaPsychUpdate 30th October, 2023 - Zorana has just launched a Substack newsletter which definitely worth subscribing to! creativitydecision.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Whether we like it or not (or recognise it or not!) in recent years we have all been subjected to various conspiracy theories. Whether it is claims that COVID-19 was developed in a lab and released on purpose, or assertions that the world is run by some kind of “Deep State” shadow government, erroneous conspiracy theories have had a significant and dangerous impact. This has been made all the worse by social media which has allowed conspiracy theories to grow and multiply almost exponentially.To explore this further I am delighted to be joined on the Brain for Business podcast by Professor Henrich Greve. Henrich Greve is the Rudolf and Valeria Maag Chaired Professor of Entrepreneurship at INSEAD. Henrich’s research interest is strategic change in organizations, mostly from a learning perspective, and includes examining how networks of organizations change, how organizations and communities are related, and how innovations are made and spread. Henrich has published over 80 articles in journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Management Science.More recently, in an article published in American Sociological Review with co-authors Hayagreeva Rao, Paul Vicinanza and Echo Yan Zhou, Henrich examined Online Conspiracy Groups: Micro-Bloggers, Bots, and Coronavirus Conspiracy Talk on Twitter.Henrich’s blog and general reflections are available here: https://www.organizationalmusings.com/Some general thoughts from Henrich on how conspiracy talk helps people make sense of the world are available here: https://knowledge.insead.edu/strategy/how-conspiracy-talk-helps-people-make-sense-worldThe article from American Sociological Review discussed in the podcast can be accessed here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00031224221125937?journalCode=asra Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The transition from individual contributor to manager is never easy. New managers need to take responsibility not just for their own performance, but also for that of team. They need to place less emphasis on doing, and much more on the essential skills of leading, influencing and communicating. Core to this is the development of a “leadership mindset”. But what is a leadership mindset? And what steps can managers and their organisations take to better develop the right mindset and perspectives for leadership?To discuss this I am delighted to be joined on the Brain for Business podcast by Professor Bret Crane.Bret Crane is an Associate Professor of Leadership at the Jon. M. Huntsman School of Business and the Executive Director of the Stephen R. Covey Leadership Center at Utah State University.Bret’s research focuses on leadership mindsets. As a respected authority and researcher on topics related to leadership, management, and organizational behavior, Bret has published articles across a variety of journals including Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of World Business, Business & Society, and Human Resource Development Review.Before joining the faculty at the Huntsman School of Business, he was a Visiting Professor at the George Washington School of Business in Washington DC.As a consultant, Bret works with organizations to improve their leadership, teams, organizations, and culture. His clients have included American Express, Honda, Lowe’s, General Mills, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Biogen, USAA, and others.Bret’s USU homepage is accessible here: https://huntsman.usu.edu/directory/crane-bretBret’s Business Horizons article - Leadership mindsets: Why new managers fail and what to do about it - is available to access here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0007681321000987 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“Human beings live in the realm of the possible as much as they do in the here and now of daily experience. We dream, hope, anticipate and create, exploring news spaces of possibility for ourselves and for others. These possibilities are not always appealing or exciting, however. Having too many options can be disorienting, innovating in unsustainable ways harmful, and spending time in virtual realities compete with less satisfying real encounters. And yet, engaging with the possible is, ultimately, what makes us human. Understanding how, when and why this is the case has been a topic of interest for the human and social sciences since their inception. And their exploration led to a variety of answers.”So argues our guest on the Brain for Business, Professor Vlad Glaveanu of Dublin City University.Vlad Glaveanu is Full Professor of psychology in the School of Psychology, Dublin City University, and Professor at the Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology, University of Bergen. He is the founder and president of the Possibility Studies Network (PSN) that brings together academics, researchers and practitioners from centres, laboratories or societies dedicated to the study of human possibility, its antecedents, processes, limitations and consequences.Vlad’s work focuses on creativity, imagination, culture, collaboration, wonder, possibility, and societal challenges. He has edited a number of books, including the Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture (2016) and the Oxford Creativity Reader (2018), co-edited the Cambridge Handbook of Creativity Across Domains (2017) and the Oxford Handbook of Imagination and Culture (2017). Separately, he has authored The Possible: A Sociocultural Theory (Oxford University Press, 2020), Creativity: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2021), and Wonder: The Extraordinary Power of an Ordinary Experience (Bloomsbury, 2020), and authored or co-authored more than 200 articles and book chapters in these areas. In Vlad received the Berlyne Award from the APA Division 10 for outstanding early career contributions to the field of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts. You can find out more about the Possibility Studies Network at this link: https://possibilitystudies.net/Some of Vlad’s recent writings on possibility studies are available to access here:https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/27538699221127580 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our guest today on Brain for Business has recently written that “We are increasingly living in a society of falsehoods. News can be fake. Brands can be fake. Influencer endorsements can be fake. And “facts” are often fake, or “alternative.”"Yet what does all it mean for leaders and organisations? What role does social media play? And how can we start to see through the fog of fakes and falsity?Dr Kirk Plangger is a Reader (Associate Professor) of Marketing at King's Business School at King’s College London. He is a marketing management researcher specialising in consumer led digital marketing strategy.Most of Kirk's research explores how digital technologies mediate and change the buying process and how organisations should address these technologies. Currently, he is working on projects investigating shoppable advertising, the value of live in marketing, brand transparency, alternative reality marketing, social media influencers, falsity in marketing and advertising, and artificial intelligence in marketing. Kirk publishes regularly in leading academic journals and holds a number of editorial review board positions. His research has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, UK Engineering and Physics Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), British Academy, UK Innovate, and the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).You can read Kirk’s thoughts on managing in an era of falsity here: https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/177840001/Plangger_and_Campbell_Accepted_version_Managing_in_an_era_of_falsity_Business_Horizons.pdf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“Today we stand at the precipice of not one but three converging and potentially catastrophic long-term trends: climate change, globalization, and growing inequality. On their own, each of these makes the occasional crisis worse: We might see a more destructive hurricane, a more widespread financial meltdown, or longer or more violent civil unrest. Together, though, these trends magnify challenges. The Covid-19 pandemic, for example, was not just a health crisis but an economic and political one as well.”Not my words, but rather those of our guest today on the Brain for Business podcast, - Professor John Katsos.John E. Katsos is an associate professor of business law, business ethics, and social responsibility at the American University of Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, and a research affiliate at Queen’s University Belfast. As a scholar, he has published dozens of academic and media articles, as well as reports for boards and international organizations. He has done fieldwork in Iraq, Lebanon, Cyprus, Syria, Sri Lanka, and Hong Kong and is considered one of the world’s leading researchers on business in crisis zones. As an educator, Katsos teaches undergraduate, graduate, and executive students in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa how to manage more ethical and sustainable organizations for a better world.The HBR article referred to can be accessed here: https://hbr.org/2021/11/a-new-crisis-playbook-for-an-uncertain-world Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As of 2022, the World Health Organisation estimated that More than 1 billion people worldwide are obese – 650 million adults, 340 million adolescents and 39 million children. Given that there are approximately 8 billion people on the planet that is equivalent to 12 and a half percent of the global population. This situation is made all the worse by the seeming impossibility in many developed countries of avoiding cheap, processed which is high in calories, salt and sugar, while also being incredibly low in nutrition.At the same time, evidence linking obesity and substance use disorders continues to grow, which has led to increased interest in the role of an addictive process in problematic eating behavior. To find out more about the challenges of food addiction we were delighted to be joined by Professor Ashley Gearhardt of the University of Michigan.Ashley Gearhardt is an Associate Professor of Psychology in the Clinical Science area at the University of Michigan. While working on her doctorate in clinical psychology at Yale University, Dr. Gearhardt became interested in the possibility that certain foods may be capable of triggering an addictive process. To explore this further, she developed the Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS) to operationalize addictive eating behaviors, which has been linked with more frequent binge eating episodes, an increased prevalence of obesity and patterns of neural activation implicated in other addictive behaviors. It has been cited over 800 times and translated into over ten foreign languages. Her areas of research also include investigating how food advertising activates reward systems to drive eating behavior and the development of food preferences and eating patterns in infants. She has published over 100 academic publications and her research has been featured on media outlets, such as ABC News, Good Morning America, the Today Show, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR.Further information on Ashley's research and the work of the Food and Addiction Science and Treatment Lab is available on their website: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/fastlab/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.