This week we’ve got a special episode, a longer one than we normally do. But when you have an opportunity, to talk to the person who built the Rotman School of Management into the powerhouse it is today, you have to use every minute you get.  Roger L. Martin was told that the Toronto’s Rotman School wasn’t worth his time, that it was a quote – cesspool of intrigue. Roger himself will say that he didn’t do much in his 15 years as dean, just tinkering and prodding. He’s a bit of an understated...

Ask a thousand people how to make a house a home, and you might get a thousand different answers. Some will say it’s family; others say it’s all in the interior decor – neighborhood pride, or a furry friend, maybe.  Regardless of how you answer the question, you can’t just sit back and wait for it to become a home – everyone agrees that something needs to be done.  Our guest today is an expert on making that transition from house to home. Moving every 18 months or so, Ruth McKeaney raised...

How many of us have mastered the skill of looking busy, at some point in our professional lives? It’s an art, really – moving from one tab to another with lightspeed, peering at the screen and making that face that you think communicates determination, drive, intent.    Our guest today says that it’s nothing to feel bad about. When a portion of the population moved from factories to cubicles, they still brought that factory-floor mentality with them. Look good in front of the boss, keep...

Many of us feel comfortable navigating a city. Whether it’s New York or Kyoto, the rules remain mostly the same. Count the amount of blocks you’ve walked, remember that the E train runs express to Manhattan, if you see the Duane Reade, you’ve gone too far. We can get lost, for sure, but there’s a joy in knowing that you have the freedom to get lost. A wrong turn could mean your new favorite Chinese spot, or a new friend. Now think about how you navigate the internet. We don’t explore and get...

In this episode, we wanted to bring you a redux of a conversation I had back in 2022. As a new mom, Brooke Romney left behind her roots on Capitol Hill to move to a new community, new friend –– a new S Curve.    But instead of making new connections, a normally extroverted person, Brooke found herself withdrawing from the community. Why? Well, she was surrounded by successful people, and Brooke fell into one of the most human traps there is – comparing yourself to others, and feeling she...

What makes a good story? Characters, plot, setting, sure – you can boil it down to those elements – but what makes a good story? Is it the moment where you’re up all night burning the midnight oil, because you’re dying to find out how it ends? Is a good story one you believe in? Our guest today believes in the power of stories. Donald Miller is the CEO of StoryBrand, a creative firm that specializes in clarifying a company’s message. In other words, taking a good story and figuring out how...

“True transformation, begins with a broken heart.” It’s something you’ll hear our guest today say a couple of times, this idea that a real crucible moment begins when something inside you breaks. When a force fundamental to you and your soul says – no more. Jerry Colonna has taken that message and run with it throughout his entire career, from the hallways of venture capital to his current venture in coaching. Today, he’s out with a new book on healing that break, titled Reunion:...

When’s the last time you felt out of place? I’m sure a lot of us have sat with that feeling, whether that’s professionally or personally. It can hit you just as easily in a boardroom meeting as when you’re out with friends. So now that you feel like an alien that’s crash-landed, what do you do? Our guest today has built his career around finding community for these so-called “black sheep.” Peter Sims is a former corporate investor who became disillusioned with the high-powered world of...

At DA, we’re all about discovering and harnessing disruption, but sometimes, disruption finds you. It’s a fact of life – our car skids on ice we didn’t see on the road up ahead. Your boat hits a reef at night. A business deal falls through out of nowhere, and there’s nothing you can or could have done. Now that your car’s in a snowbank, what’s next? Our guest today has been there and back. After the company she worked for collapsed while she was on maternity leave, Carol Fishman Cohen...

When we talk about robots, machines, artificial intelligence, it’s usually within the context of something theorists call the singularity. That’s the moment when AI figures out how to upgrade itself, and leaves us in the dust. After all, it can learn a library in an instant – the AI doesn’t need to stop for a snack and a nap.  In the world of the Terminator, it took Skynet a single day to become self-aware, destroy most of human life, and then send Arnold back in time to make sure no one...

“If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” Famous words by Bruce Lee, sure, but when we’ve felt like a stone our whole lives, what does becoming water actually look like? How do we learn to be more malleable in difficult situations? And how can we be confident we’re flowing in the right direction? Samantha Cooprider is the...

After 49 days fasting under the Bodhi tree, Siddhartha Guatama was struck by an idea. We suffer because we are attached to things, to people, to desires. When we can’t have it, we feel an emptiness. But what if we never wanted it in the first place? Guatama taught his philosophy for the next few decades, and centuries after that his followers would give him a new name – the Buddha. Total, complete elimination of your yearnings was called Nirvana. In our networked world, where we broadcast...

When’s the last time a customer service phone menu left you… genuinely angry? We build these systems to make things easier, layer systems on top of other systems, but who’s doing the gardening and pruning – the upkeep? Our guest today calls this phenomenon friction. Robert Sutton has taught at Stanford since 1983, in that time covering everything from psychology to business management. Now he’s out with his 8th book, The Friction Project. Bob and his co-writer Huggy Rao took on this idea of...

What does it take, day in and day out, to lead a group of people effectively? It’s not easy, that’s for sure. On a very granular level, leading is balancing a thousand decisions, huge and small, every day. So what guides your hand? Republican Governor of Utah Spencer Cox is an anomaly in a time of waning bipartisanship. His vice chair in the National Governor’s Association is a Democrat – and a close friend at that. He’s also been a bit of an anomaly in how he’s charted his life, too,...

We find ourselves compromising every day – it’s how things get done in a society where we all want something else. But what’s the root of compromise? Isn’t it this idea that solving the issue, whatever it is, is more important than checking off everything we want? It can seem that those ideals have been left by the roadside in the past couple years, but the issue of honest compromise has crept into our boardrooms, too. Our guest today is working to instill that idea of meeting folks halfway...

In middle school physics, we learned that an object at rest has potential energy – an amount of currency it has to spend, if it wants to move. When you pull back an arrow, the potential energy flows from your muscles, to the bow, to the string, and then the string pays all that money in one go to propel the arrow – turning potential into kinetic energy in a single motion. Our lives are organized around those same flows of energy, too. We dream, we store energy, and then we trade in...

Do you know that feeling when you’re cooking, and you’ve got all your ingredients chopped and ready to go, spices measured, oven pre-heated? All that’s left is for you to spin your magic as a cook. In the kitchen, the French call it mise en place, everything in its place. In that same vein, to disrupt yourself, your strategy and support need to be in place. You need to give yourself the room to roam, so to speak, to realize your full potential.  Our guest today is all about creating spaces...

Isn’t it frustrating when we feel like a passenger to our own thoughts and actions? In Buddhist thought, we’re supposed to watch our thoughts pass by like clouds in the sky… but that’s the ideal, after all. It’s a hard truth to swallow, that the human mind is much more mysterious than we’d hope it to be. So for today’s episode, we wanted to bring back a conversation I had back in 2020 with the neuroscientist and author Dr. Tara Swart. She’s spent her career tinkering with our brains, as both...

What does it mean to have a friend? What does it mean to be a friend? Someone you can rely on. Someone who understands you, not just the “you” that you project into the world. A friend is someone who knows they can rely on you, too.  How many times a week, a day, do you lean on your friends when you feel like you can’t stand on your own? Our guest today has built his career on the power of those friends – and being a friend, too. Ken Woolley is the founder of Extra Space Storage, those...

When’s the last time you got caught in the expectations others had for you? One person wants one thing, one version of you – another needs you to be someone else entirely… And who do you want to be? Do you even have time to think about that? The things people expect from us has a profound effect on how we act – we are social beings, after all. We aim, to please. Our guest today says that the burden of those expectations in the workplace fall unfairly onto women. Jennifer McCollum is the...

There’s an allure around the idea of sales. It’s the same allure they packaged so neatly in the show Mad Men, all confidence and charisma. But take it from the other perspective – have you ever had such a pushy car salesman, that you just left the lot? Our guest today says that’s because charisma isn’t a sales strategy. There’s no room for building trust in your solution when you’re focused on the close. Scott K. Edinger is a sales consultant to Fortune 50 companies, including AT&T, and...

Growing your people to grow your organization – it makes sense, right? But what about approaching the problem from the other direction – growing your organization, to grow your people? When’s the last time you looked at the state of your org chart? And how willing are you to experiment with it? Today, I want to bring back an old episode. In 2020, we spoke with Alex Osterwalder about his idea of an invincible company – one that is constantly reinventing itself to stay on the bleeding edge of...

Coaching often involves speaking a truth the other person doesn’t really want to hear. Even when we’re lost for direction, being pointed in the right way can feel like this indictment on being lost in the first place. But a lot of clients will describe this idea of the unlock – the a-ha – when that self-doubting voice fades, and the voice of the coach comes into focus.  How can we prime ourselves to receive these messages? Our guests today have a new book out on exactly that question....

It’s just the nature of our show that we often talk to folks in the mastery part of their professional S-Curve. It’s easy to talk to a CEO about leadership. It’s also another fact that our guests tend to be older – at least, out of college. But it is rare that we come across an entrepreneur in that very first launch point of their career. A person that put college on hold to pursue an idea, a person willing to put their dreams on hold for an hour to talk to us. Austin Hillam is the...