The Gartner Talent Angle

*This podcast is excerpted from the full podcast released in 2016. Mark believes that finding something important and meaningful in your life is the most productive use of your time and energy and that living a good life is about giving a $%@ only about the things that align with your personal values. Every life has problems associated with it and finding meaning in your life will help you sustain the effort needed to overcome the problems you face. 

Imagine an environment where you can bring your whole self to work? Imagine a workplace where great leaders build honest relationships with each of their employees, allowing their employees to know exactly where they stand.   Believe it or not, hierarchy discourages honest feedback which leads to dysfunctional relationships and businesses. Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, and Jason Rosoff, CEO of Radical Candor, teach us how to care personally and challenge directly to create a culture of honest feedback in order to love your work. Kim and Jason walk us through ways in which you can adopt the basic principles of Radical Candor to become a great leader.

*This 20 Minute Spotlight was edited from our hour long podcast from season 1.  Gen. Stanley McChrystal, author of a Team of Teams, discarded a century of conventional wisdom and remade JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) into a network that combined transparent communication with decentralized decision-making authority. The walls between silos were torn down. This shift has far reaching implications for leadership both inside and outside the military.  For more information on the McChrystal Group go to McChrystalgroup.com

Netflix’s Former Chief Talent Officer, Patty McCord, doesn’t believe in Chief Happiness Officers, does not see hard work as enough, and believes HR should simply scrap policies that do not work for them. Patty McCord, author of Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, joins us to discuss her experience as Chief Talent Officer at Netflix and her fringe ideas that led to establishing the multi-billion dollar tech giant everyone knows. From performance reviews to challenging policies, Patty joins the Talent Angle on this episode to share insight on equity in the workplace, how to make HR a strategic function, and ultimately how to build employees who are proud of the company they come from.

*This podcast was excerpted from our hour long conversation with Lazlo in season 2. Laszlo Bock believes that giving people freedom and supplementing our instincts with hard science are steps on the path to making work meaningful and people happy.   After working at McKinsey and General Electric (GE), Laszlo Bock spent 10 years as Google’s senior vice president of People Operations, with responsibility for attracting, developing, retaining, and delighting “Googlers.” During his tenure, Google received over 100 awards as an employer of choice. He told us about non-stop recruiting, improving training while cutting costs, and a very simple management rule. At the center of it all is an employee with power—and responsibility. 

How can you compete with companies that, combined, have a GDP the size of France, garner the best talent in the world, are controlling the gateways and are accumately vast amounts of data? NYU Stern professor Scott Galloway breaks down the success of The Four and distills how companies need to think differently to compete against the 800 pound gorillas of the internet age. 

Everyone knows that timing is everything. But we don’t know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending stream of “when” decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork. Timing, it’s often assumed, is an art. In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Pink shows that timing is really a science. Drawing on a rich trove of research from psychology, biology, and economics, Pink reveals how best to live, work, and succeed. How can we use the hidden patterns of the day to build the ideal schedule? Why do certain breaks dramatically improve student test scores? How can we turn a stumbling beginning into a fresh start? Why should we avoid going to the hospital in the afternoon? Why is singing in time with other people as good for you as exercise? And what is the ideal time to quit a job, switch careers, or get married? In When, Pink distills cutting-edge research and data on timing and synthesizes them into a fascinating, readable narrative packed with irresistible stories and practical takeaways that give readers compelling insights into how we can live richer, more engaged lives.

Why certain brief experiences can jolt us and elevate us and change us—and how we can learn to create such extraordinary moments in our life and work. While human lives are endlessly variable, our most memorable positive moments are dominated by four elements: elevation, insight, pride, and connection. If we embrace these elements, we can conjure more moments that matter. What if a teacher could design a lesson that he knew his students would remember twenty years later? What if a manager knew how to create an experience that would delight customers? What if you had a better sense of how to create memories that matter for your children? This book delves into some fascinating mysteries of experience: Why we tend to remember the best or worst moment of an experience, as well as the last moment, and forget the rest. Why “we feel most comfortable when things are certain, but we feel most alive when they’re not.” And why our most cherished memories are clustered into a brief period during our youth. Dan Heath dan@heathbrothers.com Dan Heath is a Senior Fellow at Duke University’s CASE center, which supports social entrepreneurs. At CASE, he founded the Change Academy, a program designed to boost the impact of social sector leaders. Dan is the co-author, along with his brother Chip, of three New York Times bestsellers: Decisive, Switch, and Made to Stick. Amazon.com’s editors named Switch one of the Best Nonfiction Books of the Year, and it spent 47 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list. Made to Stick was named the Best Business Book of the Year and spent 24 months on the BusinessWeek bestseller list. Their books have been translated into over 30 languages. Previously, Dan worked as a researcher and case writer for Harvard Business School. In 1997, Dan co-founded an innovative publishing company called Thinkwell, which continues to produce a radically reinvented line of college textbooks. Dan has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from the Plan II Honors Program from the University of Texas at Austin. One proud geeky moment for Dan was his victory in the 2005 New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, beating out 13,000 other entrants. He lives in Durham, NC.

85% of breakdowns in companies are traceable to internal root causes. Only 13% of people working in business in North America feel any connection to their company’s purpose. These surprising statistics lead us to ask, why do some companies lose their soul, age prematurely, and stall out while others sustain profitable growth? Chris Zook, best-selling author of The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth, and partner at Bain & Company, discusses how the most successful companies maintain the founder’s mentality—an insurgent’s clear mission and purpose, an unambiguous owner mindset, and a relentless focus on the front line. Based on 5 years of research, visiting 40 countries, conducting 150 interviews, and creating a database of over 8000 companies, Chris teaches us how leaders can overcome the predictable crises in a company’s lifecycle and set it on a path of sustainable and profitable growth.

It’s usually the rule breakers who turn into millionaire entrepreneurs. Insurance sales people would make successful Navy Seals. Nice guys don’t finish last. These are just a few of the latest findings from behavioral science that Eric Barker, founder of the blog Barking Up The Wrong Tree, and author of The Wall Street Journal bestseller Barking Up The Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong, references to redefine success. Through extensive research and narratives, Barker provides guidance on how to both identify signature strengths, and how we can turn weaknesses into strengths by placing yourself in environments that will reward your uniqueness in order to be optimally happy, productive, and successful in your career.