Kath Koschel battles yet another back injury and suffers a devastating loss before founding the Kindness Factory.

As Kath Koschel steps behind the crease, she grips her bat just a little tighter than usual: she’s pushing through an annoying but minor back injury.   The next thing she sees is the sky. She’s laying flat on her back. She can’t feel her legs. Turns out that back injury wasn’t so innocuous, and Kath’s on her way to the hospital.   She doesn’t know it yet, but it’s not going to be her last operation, and it’s certainly not going to be the last curveball she faces. How does Kath, an athlete and...

Inside Kath Koschel’s mission to make the world a little kinder.

“We’re building it for the people comfortable doing mobile banking, who are living on the edge of the future,” says fin-tech entrepreneur Dom Pym. “All the things we do with Up are different than other banks. Because when you’re carrying your phone in your pocket, doing everything with your finger on your phone, or with your face or your voice, that user experience becomes so much more important than a web browser with a mouse and a keyboard. It just changed the whole game.”   Some people...

Dom Pym’s start-up star has shone on many industries, but it's the events that didn't go to plan that have made him the leader he is today.

Athlete Jana Pittman has spent her life clearing obstacles that arise out of nowhere.  Chasing down Olympics gold on the 400-metre hurdles track since she was a teenager, she’s overcome injury after injury, hounded by the media along the way.  All for that spot on the top podium to evade her.  That kind of determination isn’t uncommon among professional athletes in the heat of competition. But where does that energy go when the race is over?   For Jana, it went into pursuing her childhood...

Jana Pittman on the struggles, sacrifices and small wins behind her success.

Were we tempting fate hosting a show called Curveball?  Because it feels a little like the universe wants us to have more first-hand experience of adversity.  As 2022 began, host Kellie Riordan was champing at the bit to bring you some amazing new guests with stories of resilience.   Then the Australian floods in February ruined the Curveball studio (and most of Kellie’s house!).  So Kellie and her family had to pack up their lives and move out. We’d just got a temporary “studio” set up at...

Host Kellie Riordan has been facing some Curveballs of her own. She's back and has some adversity tales to prove it!

Gaven Morris has put his doubts aside and stepped into a leadership role at the ABC, but his trials are far from over.   While he’s trying to un-learn everything he was taught as a journalist in order to become a more open-minded, proactive leader, life starts to unravel around him.   Family illnesses and a workplace tragedy that kills several of his colleagues shatter the foundations of Gaven’s work life.   And looming large at all times is the rapidly changing media landscape. How do you...

After stepping up to a leadership role at the ABC, the pressure mounts for Gaven Morris. Illnesses in the family and the tragic deaths of multiple colleagues throw his life into chaos, and in the meantime, new media’s march into the future stops for nobody.

Gaven Morris is the man behind most of the news you consume on a daily basis. As the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Director of News, Gaven’s led many of the country’s top reporters and best-loved programs.   But now he’s stepping away from this leadership role, and reflecting on his time in one of the most rapidly changing industries.   Journalism isn’t the most logical path to leadership. When he was deciding whether or not to take a leadership role at the ABC, Gaven realised he was...

From the ABC to CNN and back again, media executive Gaven Morris has learned his leadership lessons the hard way. His struggles with the ethics of foreign reporting, family illnesses, and managing big egos have turned him into the leader he is today, and he’s using that expertise to bring traditional media into the future.

The crowd is spilling out of a Bob Geldof event, but one wily ex-reporter has tapped into her performing arts know-how to get backstage. Armed with nothing but a business card and a tiny handwritten message, she’s trying to get her name to rockstar Bono and his new venture, PRODUCT (RED).   It might sound ludicrous. And it kind of was. Greta Thomas was a marketing professional in Sydney, Australia. She had no connection to U2’s frontman Bono and she didn’t know anyone working on his PRODUCT...

“You don’t even take the tenth no. If you’re really passionate about something, there’s more than one way to get from A to B.” Greta Thomas is the master of reinvention and taking the non-conventional path. She shares her journey from ballet dance to Bono-hunter to start-up advisor.

When the ‘why’ is missing, often so is our motivation.  Something I’ve noticed about people who bounce back from adversity, is they tend to have a strong sense of purpose – and if they don’t have one when that curveball hits, it sure prompts them to find it!  Take Who Give a Crap founder Simon Griffiths – when his body gave out and exhaustion hit, his passion to make others’ lives better literally helped him get out of bed.  Or Meggie Palmer – she lived through an unfair situation in her own...

When things are challenging, it’s useful to go right back to exactly why you’re doing a project or trying a new approach.

“Education can change your life in a generation.”  When RMIT University announced its newest Chancellor would be Richmond Football Club President Peggy O’Neal, those words from her mother might just have been on Peggy’s mind.  From the tiny coal-mining town she grew up in, Peggy became the first member of her family to graduate university. Then the first woman hired by an establishment law firm. And then the first female president of the Richmond Tigers AFL club.  Now Peggy will...

Peggy O’Neal goes from first-in-her-family to graduate university, to the Chancellor of RMIT University.

Gelato Messina’s Declan Lee has been a music promoter, a DJ, a restaurateur, a physiotherapist, and a failed TV producer. But now he’s on a mission to create a lasting foodie legacy.

“The more you fail, the easier it gets. People get scared of failing. I know this is something that anyone entrepreneurial will say, but every time you lose all your money, it becomes easier. Because you know you can pick yourself up.”  Declan Lee never chooses the easy path. These days he’s one of four owners of the famous Messina gelato chain, but he's had to pick himself up a few times already.  As a music promoter, Declan once felt the full thrust of losing all his money when he booked...

Kate Vale takes you inside the famous Google hiring process and gives her take on what it takes to thrive leading digital companies.

When Kate Vale was appointed Google Australia’s first employee, she didn’t have an office or a mobile phone. She found herself answering her home landline to do business!  From humble beginnings she used her HR background to quickly build a team, and grew Google Australia to record revenues and eventually to IPO.  Ever the digital pioneer since her days managing a dot com company before the crash, Kate Vale then headed up Spotify in Australia.  Eventually she moved to California, the...

Remember when Michael Fox first joined us on Curveball? He’d clawed his way back from a bruising collapse of his first start-up Shoes of Prey to build a new company.   Fable Foods creates a meat-alternative from shiitake mushrooms and Michael and his co-founders had convinced celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal to be part of their journey.   But Covid had hit and Michael wasn’t sure his newly-established food manufacturing plant would survive the pandemic.    Michael Fox is the ultimate optimist...

Michael Fox from Fable Food on further expansion of his mushroom empire