The Gartner Talent Angle

*This interview was excerpted from our 2019 interview. Is great leadership a myth? General Stan McChrystal, co-author of Leaders: Myth and Reality, joins the Talent Angle to debunk the many myths that surround the concept of leadership. Drawing from the examples set by history’s most renowned leaders, Stan believes the lessons we commonly draw from their lives are seldom the correct ones. Listen to this episode to learn more about how true leadership can be a catalyst for achieving higher-level outcomes.

The #MeToo movement has called attention to the prevalence of workplace misconduct. In response, organizations across industries and sectors have had to confront the many risks—legal, reputational, and financial—misconduct and harassment pose to their bottom line. In her book #MeToo in the Corporate World: Power, Privilege, and the Path Forward, labor economist and award-winning author Sylvia Ann Hewlett urges companies to recognize the adverse consequences of toxic workplace cultures. She provides HR leaders and professionals with tools and strategies to create more equitable and safe workplace environments, especially for marginalized groups.

The world is changing faster and faster and the only way to thrive is to accept the inevitability of change. Blitzscaling is all about rapidly growing and scaling a business or product in the face of uncertainty. Listen to Chris Yeh discuss the techniques that digital companies like Google, Linkedin and Facebook use to scale and double in size in a short period of time.    An active angel investor, serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author, Chris is a well-known  technology expert in Silicon Valley. He has been building Internet businesses since 1995 and has a proven record of helping startups develop their strategy around emerging technologies, business scaling, growth initiatives, and digital disruption.  He is the General Partner at Wasabi Venture, a global venture fund, startup incubator, and consulting firm, former interim CEO of Ustream.TV, a platform service business for online videos, and VP of Marketing for PBWorks, which provides vertical collaboration solutions for companies. He has also helped grow numerous other companies, including Symphoniq Corporation, TargetFirst, and Juno Online Services and FarSight Financial Services (divisions of D. E. Shaw & Co., L.P.).  Chris is the founder and Chairman of the Harvard Business School Technology Alumni Association. He earned two Bachelor’s degrees with distinction from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar. 

As a growing number of companies experiment with maintaining partial or fully remote workforces, HR teams are reevaluating the need for a traditional office environment. In this replay of a 2018 Talent Angle episode, Brian De Haaff discusses how business leaders can drive and sustain high performance from their remote workforce. De Haaff, author of Lovability, believes a remote workforce can function just as well, if not better than, the traditional office workforce. Brian De Haaff, author of Lovability, is the founder and CEO of Aha!, one of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S. and the world’s #1 product roadmap software. In Lovability, Brian shares his insights from a career of founding successful technology companies and creating award-winning products. In outlining a set of principles known as “The Responsive Method”, he reveals the secret behind the phenomenal growth of Aha! and the engine that powers customer love. His two previous companies were acquired by Aruba Networks and Citrix. Brian frequently writes and speaks on driving product and company growth, and has been featured on publications such as Berkeley Innovators, Business Insider, and Entrepreneur. He is a proud graduate of both the University of California, Berkeley and Northwestern University.

Few of us work in roles designed to our personal specifications. In his new book Personalization at Work: How HR Can Use Job Crafting to Drive Performance, Engagement and Wellbeing , Rob Baker argues that employees thrive when allowed to craft their roles to fit their strengths. Baker provides HR leaders and professionals with tools and guidance to create workplace environments that empower employees to customize their jobs to meet their needs.

*This interview was excerpted from our 2018 interview. Humankind is on the brink of an unprecedented technological transformation, and people and organizations that prepare properly have a massive opportunity ahead of them. Listen to Peter Hinssen, business school lecturer, futurist and author of The Day After Tomorrow as he discusses the technological changes that will fundamentally change how we work, how we live and how we relate to each other. 

Companies are facing a “new normal”, which is testing operational and financial resilience. With nearly all industries and organizations affected, the leadership response will define an organization’s values for years to come. Martin Whittaker, CEO of JUST Capital joins the Talent Angle podcast to discuss why prioritizing all stakeholders — including employees, customers, communities of operation, and shareholders — is crucial for long-term success.

Culture change efforts often yield little more than a survey assessing current culture followed by ineffective action steps to achieve change. On this episode of the Gartner Talent Angle, Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft’s Chief People Officer, shares how Microsoft not only incites culture change, but also how they foster a growth mindset to ensure employees are comfortable learning and failing in order to grow.

Growing your business is harder to accomplish than ever before. Tune in to this podcast to hear Tiffani Bova – a Salesforce growth expert and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Growth IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business – confront this business imperative with ten straightforward paths to successful growth and develop your game plan with this simple equation: context + combination + sequence. Tiffani Bova is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Growth IQ: Get Smarter About the Choicesthat Will Make or Break Your Business. She is a top influencer in Customer Experience, Digital Transformation, the Future of Work, and Sales. Tiffani has appeared on MSNBC and Yahoo Finance and is a regular contributor to Forbes and Harvard Business Review. She was recently recognized as one of Inc. Magazine’s 37 Sales Experts You Need to Follow on Twitter and one of the most Powerful and Influential Women in California according to the National Diversity Council.

Shawn T. Smith is a clinical psychologist in Denver, Colorado, and the author of five books, including Surviving Aggressive People and The User’s Guide to the Human Mind. Aggressive people can lay a dark cloud of negative energy over any workplace, from the manufacturing line to the boardroom. Listen to this podcast to hear Shawn Smith--a clinical psychologist and the author of Surviving Aggressive People--share time-tested methods for conflict management historically reserved for law enforcement, psychologists, and other professionals working the frontlines of emotionally charged situations.