Curious Minds at Work

When it comes to risk, confidence, and stress, who handles them better, men or women? Believe it or not, just asking this question shows we have a lot to learn. Turns out it is not about better, but about different. And while conventional wisdom often has us thinking women are indecisive, risk averse, and fragile, those perceptions are far from what research reveals. In her groundbreaking book, How Women Decide: What Is True, What Is Not, and What Strategies Spark the Best choices, Therese Huston, founding Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning at Seattle University, clues us in. Armed with a doctorate in cognitive psychology from Carnegie Mellon, she is a contributing writer for The New York Times and Harvard Business Review. Therese pinpoints what the research reveals around perceptions of women. Perhaps even more importantly, she discusses several research-based strategies for overcoming these misperceptions. In this conversation, we talk about: How we misunderstand female decision making The mistake parents make when dealing with daughters on the playground The bias in the term risk averse and the term that should replace it Two traits that make the top 10 list for men but not for women Who pays a higher price for failure The risks women take when they speak up A dating app with unique features for women Confidence as a dial we need to turn up or down, depending on the situation Which gender has the more appropriate level of confidence Two things women can do to overcome negative perceptions of self-promotion How men and women differ when under pressure to make a crucial decision Strategies to avoid being nervous before an important event Why failure trumps regret Episode Links @ThereseHuston Daniel Kahneman The Honest Truth about Dishonesty by Dan Ariely Chip and Dan Heath Pew Research Center 2015 Study on What Makes a Good Leader Barbara Morrongiello What Women and Men Should Be by Deborah Prentice and Erica Carranza Victoria Brescoll We Are Way Harder on Women Who Make Bad Calls by Therese Huston The Center for Advanced Hindsight Siren dating app and CEO Susie Lee OkCupid Linda Babcock If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

If you are searching for your natural talents, think again. Award-winning psychologist, Anders Ericsson, is reshaping our conception of innate ability versus learned skills. Anders has spent decades unearthing the secrets of expertise, and his research shows that the experts sitting at the top of most fields do not have more innate ability than their peers, they have more time spent in guided practice. Anders shares his fascinating findings in his book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Along the way, he corrects our misconceptions around 10,000 hours of practice, and helps us see how we can master just about any skill at any age. He also points out how important it will be to understand high performance as we change jobs and careers with increasing frequency. In this conversation, we talk about: The myth of the prodigy or naturally talented performer Choosing a goal and pursuing it rather than waiting to find a particular gift or talent The advantages for children when parents enjoy the skill they are teaching How gaining expertise in one area helps us gain expertise in other areas What high performers do that is different from the rest of us Differences in our brains as we shift from amateur to expert The difference between what experts and novices do with information How hard it is to get good by yourself and why nothing beats an expert teacher Anders plans to spend more time learning about the kind of concentration involved in deliberate practice. He hopes to develop ways for us to find the time and energy to engage in the kinds of training and to develop the kinds of habits needed to perform at the highest level. Episode Links Improvement in Memory Span by Pauline Martine and Samuel Fernberger (1929) William G. Chase The Knowledge London cab drivers test Alexander Alekhine Mental representations Top Gun Project Guitar Zero by Gary Marcus If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

We like to think that cheating is limited to criminals and other wrongdoers. But what if it were true that the majority of people cheated most of the time? That is exactly what has been revealed in the extensive research of Dan Ariely, Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University. Dan has found that not only do most people cheat, but that it is true even of the service providers that we trust the most, such as our accountants and our doctors. Even more surprising, traditional deterrents, such as harsher punishments, do not have any effect. His work has profound implications for our work, our families and our society. Founder and Director of the Center for Advanced Hindsight, Ariely is the author of the bestselling books, Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, Irrationally Yours, and the book we discuss in this interview, The Honest Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone -- Especially Ourselves. In this conversation, we talk about: How dishonesty is a lot more common than we think How most punishments do very little to eliminate dishonesty Why conflicts of interest, like team or company loyalty, make it harder to be honest The role creativity plays in dishonesty Why it is so important to get a second medical opinion The reason the slippery slope of dishonesty is so frightening How a good cause - a charity or a loved one - can cause us to cheat even more The important role simple rules can play in keeping us honest Dan also shares his theory on what may actually have caused the Volkswagen emission crisis, and he talks about the topic of his most recent work - hate. Episode Links @danariely danariely.com Mensa Enron Gary Becker and Simple Model of Rational Crime (SMORC) Cost-benefit analysis Mortgage-backed security Prada Harpers Bazaar Signaling Coach Donald Sull and Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World The Dishonesty Project documentary Joseph M. Papp cyclist Volkswagen Yael Melamede of Salty Features Pilates If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Steve Case, co-founder of America Online, believes that Internet companies have grown in three successive waves. Tech entrepreneurs spent the first wave getting us on the Internet. They spent the second wave connecting us to the apps and platforms they built on top of it. Now, in the third wave, innovative partnerships and policies will help entrepreneurs rethink large parts of our daily life, such as healthcare, food, and education. That is the argument Steve makes in his award-winning and bestselling book, The Third Wave: An Entrepreneurs Vision of the Future. Steve was the co-founder of America Online, the first Internet company to IPO, and Chair, Founder, and CEO of Revolution, a DC-based investment firm. In this interview he talks about the challenges early tech entrepreneurs like him faced, and he paints a picture of the challenges and opportunities to come. He also talks about the power of entrepreneurship to support ongoing innovation in the kinds of sectors that impact the lives of millions of people around the world. In this conversation, we also talk about: How Steve got his start as a tech entrepreneur Key differences between entrepreneurship today versus decades ago The story behind AOL Lessons learned from the TimeWarner acquisition Why entrepreneurs need vision and thoughtful execution to succeed Key factors and skills that will set Third Wave entrepreneurs apart Possibilities for healthcare, education, and food industry disruption The important role government will play in the Third Wave What Steve means by the Rise of the Rest for Third Wave entrepreneurship Why Steve gets so excited about food entrepreneurship The power of impact investing for companies, employees, and investors Why he chose to write a book about the future instead of the past Steve plans to spend the next 10-15 years of his life making the ideas of the Third Wave a reality. He believes his book offers a framework and that it is up to leaders like him to support the kinds of diverse people and companies who will put that framework into action. Episode Links @SteveCase The Third Wave: An Entrepreneurs Vision of the Future by Steve Case The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow by Alvin Toffler Agricultural Revolution Industrial Revolution P&G Pepsico Atari Modem AppleLink Apple IBM Sears RadioShack White Label product Time Warner Microsoft Thomas Edison The Creators Code by Amy Wilkinson Khan Academy MOOCs Snapchat Drones Driverless cars Total addressable market (TAM) Revolution Foods Sweetgreen Impact investing BlackRock Bain & Company If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

While bitcoin and blockchain may sound like something from science fiction, they have become powerful tools to help us rethink banking and finance. What began as a cypherpunk vision has become a viable model of currency and exchange for everyone with access to a Smartphone, from the unbanked in Afghanistan to the urban hipster in New York City. Eager to learn more about where bitcoin and blockchain technology has come from and where it is headed, co-authors Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna researched and wrote the bestselling book, The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and the Blockchain are Challenging the Global Economic Order. In this interview, Michael J. Casey, Senior Advisor to the Digital Currency Initiative at the Media Lab at MIT and former global finance columnist for The Wall Street Journal, shares what they learned and why we should care. In this episode, we talk about: Connections to science fiction, cryptography, and cypherpunks The blockchain and bitcoin origin story What it means to decentralize the banking system The mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto Trust and the huge role it plays in launching a new currency How it all started when someone bought a pizza What bitcoin and blockchain mean for us as customers and as business owners How blockchain and bitcoin can upend industries from medicine to music What this tech means for the poor and unbanked How mobile tech, bitcoin, and blockchain are empowering millions Ways Wall Street is already co-opting ledger tech for its own purposes How this tech will govern the economy of the future Episode Links @mikejcasey http://www.michaeljcasey.com/ Satoshi Nakamoto Cypherpunk Cryptography Michel Foucault Hyperinflation Deflation Casa de cambio Laszlo Ripple Ethereum MIT Internet of Things Micropayment www.dougrushkoff.com Oliver Luckett The Audience If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Productivity strategies do not work if we are focused on the wrong things. What we really need is an effective system for determining what is absolutely essential and the discipline to work on that thing. We need criteria that empower us to select our highest priority, and a strategy for eliminating everything else. My guest, Greg McKeown has designed this system, and he has written about it in his award-winning bestseller, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. In addition to his writing and speaking, Greg is CEO of THIS, Inc., a Young Global Leader for the World Economic Forum, and a lecturer at Stanford University. In this interview he shares incidents in his own life that led him to develop this system, as well as the elements that make the system powerful. In this episode, we talk about: How we forget our power to choose How our language shapes how we view the world How our priority became priorities and what that means for our lives Non-essentialism as a form of malware that has infected all areas of our lives How the smartest, most driven, capable, and curious people are the most vulnerable to non-essentialism Why we need to retire in our roles in order to gain perspective and get our lives back How a list of 6 can get us to our number one priority A game-changing way to use our journals as reflective, proactive tools The power of small wins The downside of email-to-email living Why technology makes a good servant but a poor master What it means to protect the asset in order to lead an essential life The unimportance of practically everything How discerning what is essential gives us the courage to push back on what is not Teaching young people how to focus on what is essential The three historical waves of non-essentialism or how we got here Why you want to be an essentialist before the busyness bubble bursts The trade off between our highest contribution versus what we got done today Greg also talks about how he is making a deliberate choice to hold off on his second book in order to focus on his highest contribution. He explains how challenging it is to do that and how aware he is of the trade offs he is making along the way. Episode Links @GregoryMcKeown http://gregmckeown.com/ Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown Panem - bread and circuses World War II Facebook Tulip mania Deep Work by Cal Newport @JaniceKaplan2 http://www.janicekaplan.com/ If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

We may believe that successful entrepreneurs possess innate abilities that set them apart, but what if those skills are just the result of practice and experience? That is the conclusion of Amy Wilkinson, bestselling author of The Creators Code: The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs. She performed five years of interviews with the founders of organizations such as LinkedIn, eBay, Under Armour, Tesla Motors, Spanx, Airbnb, and PayPal. The result? She learned that these entrepreneurs share six common skills that made them successful. Perhaps more importantly, she contends that these are things that any of us can learn. Wilkinson is a strategic adviser and lecturer at Stanford Business School. Her career spans leadership roles with McKinsey and J.P. Morgan. She has served as a White House fellow, special assistant to the U.S. Trade Representative, and as a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. In this episode, we talk about: How successful entrepreneurs seek not to be first, but rather, to be only Why creators hold the key to a new economy The importance of finding the gap between what is and what can be How we can train ourselves to spot problems and see them as opportunities How Starbucks built its success on the concept of lift and shift Ensuring success by looking forward versus looking back Why you might need to fire yourself in order to innovate How nostalgia holds us back What the OODA Loop can teach us about entrepreneurship Why we all need to build a failure ratio into our work in order to grow The power of networking minds to solve big problems How you can be creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial within your current organization Episode Links @amywilkinson AmyWilkinson.com Elon Musk and Tesla and Zip2 Kevin Plank and Under Armour and the University of Maryland and the Terrapins Howard Schultz and Starbucks Nascar Driving School Chris Guillebeau and Born for This: Find the Work You Were Meant to Do Andy Grove of Intel Gordon Moore of Intel John Boyd and OODA Loop and Paypal Billpoint Palm Pilot Youtube Yelp Digg Founders Fund Clarion Capital Palantir Jessica Herrin and Stella and Dot InnoCentive BP Oil AOL If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Fear of job obsolescence ranks higher for most people than their fear of dying! Only half of workers today believe their skills will be valuable three years from now, and of this group, only a third feels their companies are providing the kinds of training they need to do anything about it. That means the learning is on us, and we need strategies for navigating this strange new world. Karie Willyerd has answers. Karie is the author of Stretch: How to Future-proof Yourself for Tomorrow’s Workplace. She is the Workplace Futurist for SuccessFactors, an SAP company, and the co-author of The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrows Employees Today. Her articles and blogs appear regularly in Harvard Business Review, and she has been a Chief Learning Officer for five Fortune 500 companies. In this episode, we talk about: How, no matter where we work, it is on us to manage our professional learning What our professional learning has to do with Al Capone Why millennials really are not that different from everyone else The one thing that 83% of executives agree on Five practices we can use to stay current The power of a diverse network What it means to: learn a living A powerful system for reflection with a triple loop for learning What a reverse mentor is and why we each need one Why we need new experiences in our work When to throttle down on productivity in order to learn new skills Why bouncing forward is so much better than bouncing back What it means to become an enhanced employee Karie also shares insights on the power of virtual reality for learning and building relationships. Episode Links @angler Gallup Report - Employee Engagement Findings SAP Oxford Economics Al Capone Sell-by date David Kelly and IDEO Farai Chideya and The Episodic Career Mark Granovetter and the concept of weak ties Adam Grant and Give and Take Harvard Learning Innovation Labs New York Times New Work Summit NFL Disney If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Named one of ten most influential thinkers in the world by MIT, Doug Rushkoff asks some seriously big questions on this episode of Curious Minds. The biggest one is: what if an economy predicated on growth is unsustainable? Growth at companies like General Electric (GE) used to mean jobs for hundreds of thousands of people. That same growth, at companies like Facebook and Google, yields, at most, tens of thousands of jobs. As growth-oriented tech companies absorb more jobs through smarter tech and automation, is this an opportunity to rethink the nature of work, jobs, and the overall economy? Doug Rushkoff asks us to consider that topic in his latest bestselling book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. Rushkoff is a professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens College, CUNY. He is the bestselling author of a dozen other books, including Present Shock, Program or Be Programmed, and Life Inc. In this episode, we talk about: Why Doug sees growth as the culprit in our current economy The unmet promise of technology and the long tail for artists and creatives How big data analytics reduces unpredictability and, thereby, innovation Ways more of us can take ownership of the platforms putting us out of work How it is not the job we want but the meaning, purpose, and material benefits work gives Money as a verb How currency tools like blockchain can help us rethink power and authority Twitter as a textbook case of tech success but growth company failure How digital distributism can trump digital industrialism The shift from tech as energizing to energy sucking Ruskhoff also talks about how he thinks about technology use in his own life, including which tools he chooses to use and why. Episode Links @rushkoff www.rushkoff.com Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus by Doug Rushkoff eBay Etsy Operating system Bazaar Crusades Burning Man Acquisition IPO Wired Chris Anderson Long Tail The Long Tail by Chris Anderson Free by Chris Anderson Mondo 2000 Boing Boing Ponzi scheme Alan Greenspan Taylor Swift Power law dynamics Distributism Venture capital Capital gains tax Blockchain Bitcoin PGP - pretty good privacy Distributism Marxism Capitalism Marshall McLuhan Peer-to-peer economy Lendingtree Fintech Faustian bargain Private equity Flip this house Michael Dell The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Technology and globalization are reshaping work, but what can we do about it? What approaches should we take as organizations do more with fewer employees? How can we think about our careers as we hold more jobs over the course of our lives, often from different fields? What skills do we need and what mindsets should we hold? Farai Chideya, author of The Episodic Career: How to Thrive at Work in the Age of Disruption, helps us answer these questions. Through her research, reporting, and work experience, she offers insights into what has changed and what we can do. Farai is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York Universitys Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, an award-winning author, journalist, professor, and she frequently appears on public radio and cable television, speaking about race, politics, and culture. In this episode, we talk about: The most important step you can take before starting a job search Counterintuitive ways to find local jobs and to use your social network How a learning mindset can ensure greater career success Why emotional resilience is the new superpower The upside of an episodic career Why a tech-informed mindset is a must-have no matter your job Farai also shares her curiosity about American life and the American dream and how a changing world of work is influencing these things. She wonders how new technologies will change how we live. Episode Links @Farai http://www.farai.com The Episodic Career: How to Thrive at Work in the Age of Disruption by Farai Chideya New York University Journalism Institute Facebook Google Virtual reality Artificial intelligence Robotics Automation Data journalism Farai and the FiveThirtyEight Blog Decision tree Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford Encore.org CRISPR If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!