Stuart Crainer:

Hello and welcome to Provocateurs. I’m Stuart Crainer, co-founder of Thinkers50. Provocateurs is a podcast which aims to provoke you to think and feel differently. This is our annual episode in which we make sense of the past year, if that’s possible, and the fantastic people we have talked with on the podcast. Joining me in making sense are Steve Goldbach, Geoff Tuff, and Kulleni Gebreyes from Deloitte and from Thinkers50, we have my fellow co-founder, Des Dearlove. And what a year we have had. The 2025 Provocateurs series featured in-depth conversations with leaders and innovators driving change across organizations, leadership, and society. We roam widely. So we have covered everything from sustainability and space exploration to digital health, public policy, and food systems innovation.

Each episode reveals what it takes to lead with purpose, clarity, and impact in an increasingly complex landscape. Our guests this year have been Weslynne Ashton, Katie McGinty, Rajendra Pratap Gupta, Karthik Ramanna, Eileen Collins, Selassie Atadika, Anke Hampel, and Natalie Nixon. Thank you to them all. Kulleni, perhaps we can start the conversational ball rolling with you. You’re vice chair and US life sciences and healthcare industry leader at Deloitte, and there’s a strong science contingent to our guests this year. You and I talked with Rajendra Pratap Gupta, who is founder of the Global Digital Health Summit and the global think tank, the Health Parliament. And there was also the astronaut, Eileen Collins. It takes science to get into space, after all, and system scientist, Weslynne Ashton. Science suddenly seems to be center stage. Do you think that’s the case?

Kulleni Gebreyes:

Stuart, it’s great to be here with you, and I can’t believe 2025 is almost over. And I would tell you, from my experience, science has always been at the center of the stage, but that goes to show you more of my background than anything else. But as I think about everything that you just mentioned, not only is science at the center of the stage, but it’s the navigation platform for all of us, as we’re trying to get through a world with so much complexity, uncertainty, and the rapid pace of change.

So when I think of science, I think of a couple of things and our leaders spoke to it, which is hypothesis-driven thinking. It is being fully committed to getting to the root cause instead of just symptoms of what’s going to happen. It’s action and reaction, not just as a unilateral or bilateral, but multilateral. And it’s also continuous reinvention. So Eileen spoke about that as she talked about the space mission and how she commanded it, which is experimentation, so that it’s not just about designing the perfect launch, but it’s learning from the failures. So that’s hypothesis-driven thinking. It’s understanding how one thing leads to another.

Rajendra said, “Listen, this is not just about population health at the industrial level. It’s looking at individual outcomes, action, reaction, what we do and how that impacts outcomes.” And then when you think about Weslynne, a natural ecologist, or industrial ecologist, who talks about systems and how the forms of capital are more than the way we traditionally think about them, but there’s multiple interaction models and ecosystem plays that we need to think about. So yes, science is at the center, we need to observe, have rigorous discipline around how we learn, and continuously reinvent.

Stuart Crainer:

I’m struck by how the boundaries between science, leadership, and society seem to be continuing to blur. So if you had to pick one scientific insight from this year’s conversations that leaders aren’t paying enough attention to, what would it be?

Kulleni Gebreyes:

It’s interesting. So whether you’re talking about science, engineering, communication theory, we often talk about the signal and the noise and how do we find the signal in the noise? That’s conventional wisdom, traditional thinking. I would say that what we’ve heard over the last year and what we’ve seen is that, instead of assuming the law of averages is the way we should go and that standardization is the answer to getting real results and better outcomes, Stuart, I would argue to say that what we’re learning today is that the signal is in the noise and the insight is in the outlier data.

Stuart Crainer:

And of course, sustainability has also been prominent in our conversations this year, such as with Selassie Atadika and Anke Hampel. Steve, you’re the sustainability practice leader at Deloitte. In the spirit of being a Provocateur, what’s one uncomfortable truth about sustainability that became impossible to avoid this year?

Steve Goldbach:

I think the thing that resonated the most and is uncomfortable with the entire sustainability movement is that human beings remain bad at focusing on things that are long-term in nature. And so in the spirit of provocation, I’ve been going out and saying, “We should be spending less time arguing about distant long-term goals.” We should frame up an ambition, to be sure, so that we’ve got some north star, but arguing over the details of whether goals are in 2050 or 2045 and then debating when people move those goals a bit, I would rather focus less on the next 25 years and more on the next 25 months. And what we need to recognize is that we learn by doing as a species and we need to drive towards action and that we should care less, perhaps, about changing the way people think and focusing a bit more on changing the way people act.

And I think our guests this year really had many different ways in which we could focus on changing action. So Selassie is doing it by creating sheer joy in her work and bringing the spices and flavors of her home country of Ghana back to the forefront through the world of chocolates. And those are actually going to be some of my holiday gifts this year, they’re so delicious. But also, not only can you change people’s action through joy and making things that are inherently sustainable, joyful, you can do it by conventional business theory.

So Anke demonstrates that sustainability is just great business. And the uncomfortable truth there, Stuart, is that you can’t separate what is a sustainability issue and what is a business issue. Sustainability impacts costs, sustainability impacts risk and sustainability impacts your ability to enhance revenue. And so we have to recognize, that in order to drive behavior, we have to have sustainability, not as this thing off to the side, but as a core business issue. But actually interestingly, the thing that I took away the most from the podcast this year and how I want to apply it in the world that I look after at Deloitte is from Karthik, who talked about how to lead in a polarized world.

And one of the things he said is that you can’t argue with people that you inherently like, or I’m getting the words exactly wrong, but there was something about just being able to try to be human with people that you might disagree with on issues. And if you can separate your disagreement from a genuine liking of the other human and make it about being able to have conversations about how to meet shared objectives, then I think we’d make a lot more progress. So my hope is that we can make this less of a polarizing issue and more something that we sit down with people that we disagree with and look for opportunities to collaborate.

Stuart Crainer:

So our third … sorry.

Steve Goldbach:

It was a surprising answer, Stuart.

Stuart Crainer:

The third part of our trio from Deloitte is Geoff Tuff, who leads Deloitte’s sustainability work globally.

Steve Goldbach:

We should totally leave that in. That was funny.

Geoff Tuff:

I just liked the fact that Stuart breaks out laughing whenever he thinks of me. So that’s Eric’s story.

Stuart Crainer:

I was carrying on. Steve was talking about joy and I had a segue …

Kulleni Gebreyes:

He felt joy.

Stuart Crainer:

Steve was talking about joy. So Geoff, joy, Tuff, and the nice segue. And then Steve carried on talking and that’s what threw me. The third part of our Deloitte trio is Geoff Tuff, who leads Deloitte’s sustainability work globally in the energy and industrial sectors. Geoff, if you look ahead based on the signals we’ve heard from our guests, what’s one emerging trend that leaders will underestimate at their peril next year?

Geoff Tuff:

Well, that got serious all of a sudden, Stuart, but I just have to reflect on the fact that Steve is my co-author in most of the writing that I do. When he talks about having to find some common ground between very different points of view, I think we’re probably a pretty good test ground for that. But I would say, so as I’ve been reflecting on the conversations we’ve had this year, actually a lot of what Steve had to say does actually resonate very deeply with me, perhaps not surprisingly, given we work so closely together, but with responsibility for the work we do in the energy space around sustainability, the key trend that we’ve seen in our business this year, and I think that we heard through a number of our different guests, is that economic value and a drive for sustainability are inseparable, and it’s absolutely critical.

We heard it from Anke, we heard it from Katie McGinty, we heard it from others, that it’s absolutely critical that if we want to be serious about sustainability, we need to think about it in economic terms and understand that there is real and immediate profitability that can be earned by driving for more sustainable solutions. Steve talked about the importance of thinking about efficiency and reducing costs with sustainability. Actually, the work that Johnson Controls and that ABB do in the world is intended to bring both better mechanical solutions to the buildings and the equipment that they manufacture, but also more sustainable and more cost-effective solutions as well. And we’re finding that, as I said, both with our guests and in the work that we do day in, day out, that those things are no longer in any way in contention. And actually, the companies that are understanding that you can go and create some advantage by adopting more sustainable solutions are the ones who are ultimately going to probably be the leaders in their industry for the foreseeable time to come.

The second theme that I think we’ve heard time and again from many of our guests is that, and this is not, I wouldn’t say this is a new thing by any stretch, certainly not in the conversations we’ve had on this podcast, but the absolute criticality of not thinking about things in isolation and instead thinking about systems. We heard throughout all the podcasts, and I’m not just talking about energy systems here. We talked about food systems, we talked about health systems, we talked about political systems, we talked about circularity systems, and I could go on, but the thing that we came back to time and again with our guests was we have to see the interconnectedness between all the various different, not only players within the industries that we’re part of, but also the cross-industry connections if we’re going to make whatever type of progress we’re trying to make.

For Steve and I, it happens to be a focus on sustainability, but there are lots of other ways that, for whatever goal any organization has, there’s lots of other ways to look towards, I’ll put it in quotation mark, “systems thinking” as a real key insight. And then the final trend that I’m surprised, I don’t think we’ve actually said AI yet in this reflection episode, but that obviously came up all the time. AI is one of the key drivers behind the activity that we’re seeing in the energy system these days.

We have, in the course of our work, we’ve shifted, over the course of the last 18 months, away from a broad scale conversation about energy transition, even though the energy transition does continue, and more towards energy expansion and energy security and energy independence in order to meet the demand boom that AI is unleashing everywhere around the world. It’s certainly true here in the US, but it’s true for virtually every region of the world. And I’m sure we’ll come back and talk about some of the themes behind AI as we get further into this conversation, but it’s impossible not to pay attention to the exponential impact that AI is having on all of our systems, whether it’s energy, food, health, what have you.

Stuart Crainer:

And finally, but not least, thanks, Geoff. And finally, but not least, my fellow Thinkers50 founder, Des Dearlove. Des was in New York for Climate Week to record an episode of Provocateurs. So Des, after experiencing the energy there, what gave you the most hope, and what caused you the most concern?

Des Dearlove:

Well, as I think other people have said, we have had some great guests and they’ve told some great stories this year, and I’m going to come at this slightly differently. I’m going to pick out three stories and then hopefully pull out some trends and some ideas from the stories. So I think we’ve mentioned Weslynne and I mean she told us a story about seaweed and rum. Anke told us the story about modulating motors and Eileen told us a story about riding rockets and each of those stories, I think, has a lot to teach us as well as being a great story. So Weslynne, as well as being a professor of environmental management and sustainability at the Illinois Institute of Technology, she specializes in small island research and the circular economy. So as I would call it, the seaweed and rum story goes to take us to Barbados.

I mean, it’s probably quite a nice place to go at this time of year. And places like Barbados are microcosms of the world. So if there’s something going wrong ecologically, it tends to become a crisis sooner, faster. So again, there’s lessons to be learned. So she was telling us about a certain type of seaweed called, I’m going to mispronounce this, but I think it’s something like sargassum. And it’s a natural seaweed, which is an ecosystem in itself where, so small fish, a number of other species need this for their growth. Increasing amounts of this seaweed are washing up onto the beaches in the Caribbean. Now that material, once it washes up on the shore, starts to decompose and so it begins to smell, so therefore compromising the beautiful white beaches of the Caribbean and particularly of Barbados.

As some of you may know, Barbados is also famous for its rum, which also produces waste. Now what they’re doing, there’s an experiment Weslynne was telling us to combine the rum distillery waste with the seaweed waste to make fuel that can power the cars on the island because otherwise they have to import all their fuel. So they’ve been running pilot experiments to run cars on compressed natural gas, which is the byproduct of the digestion process of the seaweed, and they’re also using that to create electricity and run electric vehicles. So this is a fantastic story about circularity and I think it’s the sort of story we need to hear more about because it makes it real, brings it to life.

The second story is about modulating motors and this is the story that Anke told at the Climate Week. And she’s chief sustainability officer at ABB, which is global leader in electrification and automation and based in Zurich. Moderated motors, so ABB is the biggest provider of electrical motors and smart variable drives and they are now framing the sustainability conversation around energy efficiency and collaboration rather than it’s just a good thing to do. So she was telling us a great story about motors. I didn’t realize this, maybe you guys all knew this, but most motors are unmoderated. In other words, they run 100% power even when it’s not required. So simply modulating them, retrofitting modulators can have a huge impact in terms of the efficiency of the motors. And there’s an awful lot of motors out there. And from what Anke was saying, the ROI, the return on investment can be, it’s often just a few months. So it’s a really efficient way to talk about energy transition. And it’s another great story that illustrates the point.

I could talk about Eileen Collins as well, if we’ve got time. She was just fascinating. She’s one of those people that you hope to meet once in a lifetime, I think. She was the first ever woman to pilot a space shuttle, and then she was the first ever woman in history to command a space mission. So she’s an amazing, amazing human being. She was telling us in 1999, about sitting on top of the rocket on the launchpad and they’re doing the countdown. Obviously they’ve trained for this. These astronauts have trained for this, and it goes 10, nine, eight, seven, then she said it went back up to eight. Then it went back down to seven, then it went back up to eight, then it came back to seven. She said, “We’d never seen this before in the training, so we knew there was something up.” So you’re sitting there on top of all this huge rocket with all this fuel onboard and it got down to half a second before they fired the engines up and then they stopped the countdown.

So can you imagine sitting there with that going on around you? One of the things she said was that in that situation, as a leader, you have to be prepared for either eventuality. In other words, you might just be going into space or, so you’ve got to be ready to either launch or to scrub, what they call a mode one. A mode one is when you have to get out of the vehicle as fast as you can and take a zip wire to get out before the thing blows up. So can you imagine sitting there as a leader thinking, “Well, it’s going to go one of these.” And she was saying basically that’s the essence of leadership, is being prepared, being agile and being prepared to go either way.

So three stories. I think the first one is very much about what Geoff mentioned, systems thinking. I think the second story is very much about framing and how you tell the narrative. And if you frame sustainability as efficiency, it’s a different conversation. And I think that’s part of one of the things that Steve was alluding to. And then finally, leadership, how we understand leadership, front foot leadership, being prepared for all situations and in extremists, and that was extreme, I think that’s the other great trend that I could see coming through.

Stuart Crainer:

Some of these people’s life stories are amazing, aren’t they? I mean, some of the experiences… That’s what always strikes me. Someone like Katie McGinty, who on the outside, I thought corporate executive, Johnson Controls. But then she tells her stories. She’s one of 10 children. She worked for President Clinton. She worked in government. She worked in India. She moved from being a lawyer to chemist, and it’s pretty incredible. And you feel like, what have I been doing with my life really?

Geoff Tuff:

I was about to say, who knew that being a podcast host could be so humbling?

Stuart Crainer:

There’s so many things are humbling.

Geoff Tuff:

For all of us except for Kulleni. But I mean-

Kulleni Gebreyes:

Well, I’m humbled, trust me!

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, but these people do remain grounded and humble as well. And that’s what’s amazing as well. I think the best quote of the year came from Selassie who said, “I lead through deliciousness,” which I think cut through quite a lot of stuff, really. And one thing that strikes me looking at all these conversations we’ve had is that there’s quite strong currents of positivity. And I think in the sense, I think Steve was alluding to it, that we’re making progress in tackling these big issues, but in isolated pockets, but understanding there seems to be progress. So I was feeling, listening to the episode, I was feeling more positive about life, which I find difficult at times.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah. I think that was my overriding impression of Climate Week, you were asking about Climate Week, because I came away, I mean, you, Steve and Geoff were there, I came away very positive, considering it might not have been the case, but I did take away… I had some really good conversations with people doing sustainability and I came away very upbeat.

Steve Goldbach:

Well, I think we definitely have a biased sample in the remarkable guests that we have, but I would say that the commonality is that if you’re not approaching life with a glass half full mentality, I think it’s just really hard to achieve extraordinary things if you don’t walk through life with a can do attitude. And I think all of our guests certainly reflect that. Many of them have overcome severe adversity in order to get to where they’re at. And I think what the commonality is that they’ve channeled that adversity into a positivity about the world that allows them to do the things that they have achieved. So I think it’s a good lesson for all of us that being grateful and not getting too full of yourself is often a recipe for success.

Geoff Tuff:

Well, and if I could add to that, Steve, I think part of the reason we all walked away feeling so positively about many of these conversations is it gave us a chance to go deep into some of the stories that you were talking about, Des, or some of the experiences that our guests have had. And it just shows the importance of paying attention to what’s actually happening as opposed to paying attention to the narrative. Because the times when I feel most negative about things generally in the world or whatever the case may be on any given day, it’s when I’m thinking about things at too summary a level, but it’s actually really heartening to pay attention to the progress that individuals and companies are making day in, day out if you just slow down and pay attention to those hotspots of activity.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

And as I hear you all, even though I couldn’t join in Climate Week, but I definitely will next year, the thing that jumps out at me is really also a bias for action in terms of, I mean, Geoff, you just described what I would describe as a transition from pontificating about what it could be, it should be, and why it is, or it isn’t, to prototyping and taking action. And Stuart, you know I love my quotes. As we’re discussing this, the one that jumps in my mind is the author Ash who said, “Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. ” And I think that it’s really critical for all of us to think about what’s the next step of what we need to do collectively or individually within our own organizations as leaders, and then coming together to have the kind of world that we want to live in, whether it’s sustainability from a planet perspective or longevity and health plan from a personal and human perspective.

Stuart Crainer:

And during the year, Geoff and Steve found time to write another bestselling book, Hone. Tell us more, Steve and Geoff, why should our listeners and viewers buy Hone?

Geoff Tuff:

Well, I’d like to say because it’s a good read. We have actually been hearing from people that it’s a good read, but most of what Steve and I have tried to write about over time has been, first of all, it’s been learned in the work that we do with our clients every single day. So this is not the two of us sitting back and pontificating and trying to come up with theories. It’s actually observations about the way the world is really working. And as all of my co-hosts here know all too well, this is the third in a trilogy of books that Steve and I have written that we never knew was going to be a trilogy when we set out.

And it, so far, I think, has felt to people, and Steve, you should correct me if you’ve heard differently, but the most practical set of advice about how to really pay attention to the behaviors of individuals in your organization or even outside your organization that you know are going to be the types of things that will drive success for whatever you’re trying to achieve and then using what we refer to in the book, commonly referred to as management systems in order to drive those behaviors. And it has felt, I think, to our readers, immediately applicable to whatever job they’re doing at whatever company or organization they happen to work for. So the reaction’s been gratifying, but Steve, you should definitely add to that.

Steve Goldbach:

Yeah, look, I think it has been gratifying and the core premise for the folks who are just hearing about this for the first time is that businesses are, we think, over obsessed with transformation. And the metaphor that we use for the title Hone comes from the world of cooking. And when chefs begin their preparations to cook, oftentimes the first thing they do is hone their knife. And the reason they hone their knife is because a dull knife is actually a dangerous knife. And we asked a chef why does she sharpen her knife before every cook? And we got corrected pretty quickly by Flannery Klette-Kolton, who is one of the four artisans that we profile in the book. And Flannery said, “I’m not sharpening it. I’m honing it.” And honing is totally different. It’s realigning the steel, it’s not taking away steel, it’s not destroying steel, it’s realigning it to cut the way it was meant to cut.

We think that businesses are far too reliant on sharpening their businesses through transformation, which is a destructive and … risky act. It’s costly and it fails a lot. Rather, what we should be doing is taking a first principles approach and continually honing our businesses through minimally viable moves and focusing on the behaviors we need to adapt to an ever-changing world. That’s the core thesis of the book and it can be applied, we think, to everything. I just came from a conversation a half hour ago with a client in the insurance space in the UK who was interested in becoming a learning organization.

And what we talked about was the importance of uninstalling management systems that exist in our organization that actually prevent people from taking actions that would promote learning because instead, what they do is they take actions that are predictable. And unfortunately, things that actually are real, learning actions are things that you don’t know the outcome in advance to. And what you need to do is take away all the incentives that promote us from doing things that are inherently predictable and “safer,” except they’re not safer in a moving world, than things that are less known about what the outcomes will be, but will promote learning.

I’d say the world of AI, we haven’t talked much about AI, but we have to take this philosophy to the world of AI. If companies aren’t experimenting with AI today, they are falling behind. Try new things because that’s definitely where the world is heading.

Stuart Crainer:

The talk of systems thinking takes us back to Kulleni’s point about science, to my ears.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

Absolutely. Science is center stage, right Stuart?

Stuart Crainer:

But the hone… it’s the combination of, there’s a craftsmanship feel to it as an idea, but it’s the intersection between the craftsmanship and the system.

Geoff Tuff:

Yeah. And the good news is, as Steve said, we did profile some real craftspeople, I suppose. In our book, we had Flannery, the chef that Steve talked about. We had Onne van der Wal, who’s a very well-known nautical photographer. He takes mainly most of his photos are of sailboats, but really impressively framed and shot. We had a documentary filmmaker and producer in the mix, and then we had a Canadian rock band. And so all of those things, we thought it was a neat little way to introduce some levity into the book, but we ended up learning a lot from these artisans along the way and drew some real lessons that can be applied to any business situations from each of them, even though they seem like they’re in very different careers.

Stuart Crainer:

Can you develop the Canadian rock band story, Geoff?

Geoff Tuff:

Well, I could talk at length about all sorts of rock bands. And this one in particular, Our Lady Peace, Steve and I are both originally Canadian. And Our Lady Peace was one of the original indie bands in the ’90s that came out, made it huge. They were in an era in the music world where you spent millions and millions of dollars on producing albums and you made millions and millions of dollars from those.

And they’ve actually been able to stay relevant now for 30 years and stay at, we would argue, and I think many of their listeners would argue, is at the peak of their capabilities, but they’ve completely reinvented themselves along the way as the music industry has shifted by doing exactly what we’re advocating in Hone, which is pay attention to the small things you need to do day in, day out to adapt to a changing situation. And so as I say, we had never anticipated, going into the conversation, that there would be a perfect manifestation of some of the ideas, but they ended up being that.

Stuart Crainer:

So we’re not about to change the title of the podcast to Hone at this stage. I mean, obviously-

Geoff Tuff:

Unfortunately, I’ve heard the word honers uttered a few times, which is not nearly as delightful to say as Provocateurs. So let’s stick with Provocateurs.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. So if we’re going to stick with Provocateurs for the time being, obviously we reserve the right, as Hone sweeps the world, I’m sure the three of us who aren’t co-authors are willing to go along on that particular ride. But if we’re talking about provocative ideas to carry into 2026, what’s the most provocative idea leaders should carry into next year, do you think, from our conversations this year and your own experiences during the year? What’s a provocative idea for next year?

Geoff Tuff:

So I’ll jump in since my voice is warmed up, and then I’m eager to hear from others as well. But I actually, so the last podcast that we recorded was at the Thinkers50 Gala in London, or one of the last ones that we recorded, it was with Natalie Nixon. And I thought she had a fascinating take on what AI can do to humanity that I will make sure that I take into next year and put to practice myself. And her general point was that AI can actually humanize work by freeing up time for creativity and meaning. And so I think a lot of the time when, and certainly Steve’s laughed at me watching me adopt AI over the course of the last 18 months, but a lot of us struggle with what is the impact of AI on our lives, on the work that we do.

Those of us that have grown up in an industry that is about developing and disseminating ideas, AI could, in theory, be disruptive. But actually, if you think about it as a source of freedom and, as Natalie called it, it creates the liminal space to bring what human beings can and will always bring to the table, which is creativity and deep meaning to the problems that we’re trying to address, that’s where we really start to see the power of humans working with AI together. And I’ll make sure that I keep that in mind as we carry through into the new year.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. Natalie had a great line about combining wonder and rigor, which is something to aspire to. Kulleni, provocative idea for next year?

Kulleni Gebreyes:

There are so many ways to be provocative as we think about next year, especially with, Stuart, where we started, which is science at the center. But then when you think about all the examples that Steve and Geoff have shared around creativity being actually a core way to experiment, and you just mentioned embedding wonder into everything that we do. So when I think about 2026 and what’s to come, the concept that I would say is let’s throw away the idea that we should measure twice and cut once and we should look before we leap. And really now it’s about, and Geoff, you said this in terms of starting to use AI, start before you’re ready.

And I think that each of us, instead of waiting to do analysis to understand and measuring to really feel comfortable that we should move in the midst of discomfort and that the data that we need to actually make the right decisions and the actions we need to take to get the outcomes that we want, once again, healthy planet, healthy people, healthy economy actually comes to life as we take action. So it’s looking at inaction as being the costliest strategy for a business or our individual leadership career and making sure that we’re all starting before we’re ready because what we do will actually give us the information that we need.

Stuart Crainer:

Start before you’re ready is a great line.

Des Dearlove:

Leap before you look, I like that as well.

Stuart Crainer:

A provocative idea for next year, Des?

Des Dearlove:

Karthik Ramanna was talking about, I mean, to pick up a point I think Steve made earlier about listening to voices you wouldn’t normally listen to and meeting people, it’s very hard to hate people once you know them. And Karthik talked about creating systems of active listening, literally forcing yourself, provoking yourself to go out and listen to the people you wouldn’t normally listen to and the people perhaps whose opinions you find jarring. But I think that’s a very useful exercise. I think it was Tony Blair that said the hardest part of leadership is not just listening to the loudest voices. I think possibly an even harder part of leadership is listening to the people that violently disagree with you. So I would take that away. I think we need to challenge ourselves to hear both the quieter voices, but also the dissenting voices and put ourselves in harm’s way in a certain way, so that we’re able to accommodate different points of view.

Stuart Crainer:

Does that embrace listening to Canadian rock bands?

Des Dearlove:

Potentially.

Stuart Crainer:

We draw the line there, surely. Steve, a provocative idea?

Steve Goldbach:

Yeah. The thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about is the connection and role of AI and education. And not surprisingly, I think a lot about this because I spend time as a father of an 11-year-old and watch her do her homework and how she learns and how she works. And it strikes me that the thing that is supremely different about a world with AI and the direction of travel that AI is going is that for the better part of human history, our education system has been designed primarily, I think, to teach people to have expertise in a narrow slice of human knowledge. And now, and increasingly what you do, whether it’s in the field of business or medicine or science or philosophy or art, is you become increasingly expertise at knowing that slice of human knowledge. Now we’re entering a world where increasingly that knowledge is available on demand, as you need it, and you can teach yourself that.

And I know this because, as a Canadian, as we’ve established, my daughter was doing a section on the American Revolution and I felt woefully unprepared to quiz her and help her in preparing for a test. So I went to AI and I asked it to teach me about the founding of the United States using the Socratic method, so that I would be participating in the discussion. And it did a really good job at doing it. So it made me start to wonder about if we’re living in a world where new knowledge or at least expertise is available increasingly on demand, what should be the role of education for a world where you don’t need to find a human to access that knowledge, you can do it on demand.

And it started me thinking about the way that we ought to think about evolving education to be more around creativity, more around standing on the shoulders of that knowledge to create new innovation, to create joy and deliciousness, as we’ve established, in new ways. And I don’t know the answer to it, but I’m thinking that one of the first things that will need to be provoked in the future will be what we teach our kids in a world where what they might need to know might be available much more readily than it otherwise was when we were growing up.

Geoff Tuff:

So what you’re saying, Steve, is it really was a good idea for me, 35 years ago, to major in creative writing?

Steve Goldbach:

Perhaps. It certainly helped me a lot in the last 10 years.

Stuart Crainer:

So if we’re talking about self-improvement and education, how about personally? What’s one habit, practice, or mindset that you want to hone as a leader as we step into the future? You’ve told us about Hone and the ideas behind it, but what personally do you want to hone? My personal one is, I want to hone my, I’ve really picked up the positivity and optimism from all the people we’ve had conversations with. And I think it’s something you’ve got to work at because it’s very easy to get dragged down by  uncertainty in the world. So I’m going to work on my own positivity and optimism. Kulleni?

Kulleni Gebreyes:

It’s interesting. I had an assessment done of my leadership style a number of years ago, and I was told that my score on prudence was 3% and in experimentation was 97%. But I will tell you that in my experimentation, I’ve actually always looked for the standard of what is in the middle. And so the thing that I’m going to focus on is looking at the outliers to see what doesn’t fit and what’s the lesson to be learned from there, but continuing experimentation, but looking at what doesn’t fit the pattern instead of always seeking for the pattern.

Stuart Crainer:

And Des?

Des Dearlove:

I’m sticking with the listening thing, although I’m picking up on what Kulleni is saying as well. I’m going to listen more to people at the margins and I’m going to listen to more Canadian indie bands and try to hone my knowledge so I can have a conversation with my fellow presenters.

Stuart Crainer:

The surprising thing was Kulleni said she didn’t say she was going to work on her prudence.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

Experiment more.

Geoff Tuff:

Prudence, there’s no desire there for that.

Stuart Crainer:

It’s gone down to 1% now.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

Exactly.

Stuart Crainer:

Geoff, what are you going to hone?

Geoff Tuff:

Well, my co-author will tell you that I need to be more mindful, not in the walking down the street sense, but actually to spend a little bit of time on self-reflection and meditation. And I actually agree with him on that. I have seen it do wonders for him in the way that he has been able to improve his listening and being in the present in the professional world and I need to work on that myself. So I’m pretty sure that that is my New Year’s resolution every single year, so we’ll see how successful I am. But maybe if I just start with two minutes, right, Steve? That’s all it takes.

Steve Goldbach:

Two minutes. Two minutes every day for two weeks.

Stuart Crainer:

Steve, you’ve mastered this. So what-

Steve Goldbach:

No, I’ve definitely not. There’s no ever mastering it. The thing that I’m striving to do increasingly is just make sure that the mantra I take in everything I do is to try to help the other human on the other side of the conversation. And I think increasingly if your orientation in conversations is how can I be of help, of value? And you honestly take that point of view even when it doesn’t necessarily immediately benefit you in the long run, I think that in generally it’s a good mentality and you end up getting rewarded for it. And so I’m going to try to dedicate myself more to just being of help in every situation in whatever way that is. And we’ll see how that plays out and really try to live by that philosophy.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. Helpfulness is a great thing to aspire to.

Steve Goldbach:

Yeah.

Stuart Crainer:

Great conversation as always guys. And looking ahead, we’ve got some wonderful people lined up already for the forthcoming series. We’ve got Dan Pink, Francis Frei, Andre Hoffmann, Cecile Bellio, Samuel Money, Spencer Glendon and we will also be joined, on occasion, by the Thinkers50 CEO, Mikko Leskelä, who will add Nordic wit and wisdom on demand. I believe Mikko is here to join us now.

Mikko Leskelä:

Hi. I certainly am, and not just talking about Nordic wit, it’s actually darker here in Helsinki than it’s in Steve’s background picture. I’m trying to stay positive, trying to stay optimistic and it’s easy to do that with you guys. Super happy to be joining you.

Steve Goldbach:

Is the sun coming up these days in Helsinki yet?

Mikko Leskelä:

For a couple of hours still, but I mean, it will get worse.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

It will get worse. That’s one way to look at things.

Des Dearlove:

I think that’s a good mantra.

Geoff Tuff:

That should be the catchphrase for the podcast from now on. Come here for a bit of positivity because it will get worse.

Des Dearlove:

It will get worse.

Mikko Leskelä:

There’s a lot to be looking forward to. I heard the name of Andre Hoffman, for example. I’m very much looking forward to that episode, for example. And he talked about his idea of treating human and social or cultural capital as actual capital that has a compound interest rate. I mean, having people like that lined up, it’s going to be super exciting.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. In 2026, we’ll also be celebrating the 25th anniversary of Thinkers50. So we look forward to celebrating along with as many of you as possible during the year. So many thanks for listening and watching during 2025. And thank you to Geoff, Steve, Kulleni and Des and all the people who make the podcast happen. Thank you, Mikko, and we look forward to some great conversations next year. Thank you.

Stuart Crainer:

Hello and welcome to The Provocateurs podcast. I’m Stuart Crainer, co-founder of Thinkers50. In Provocateurs, we explore the experiences, insights, and perspectives of inspiring leaders. Our aim is to provoke you to think and act differently through conversations with some fantastic people.

This is our end of year summary episode in which we attempt to draw some red threads and distill wisdom and insights from the guests we have encountered on the podcast this year.

This is a collaboration between Thinkers50 and Deloitte. So we have a full team out today. Joining me from Deloitte are Kulleni Gebreyes, Steve Goldbach and Geoff Tuff.

Kulleni is the vice chair and US life sciences and healthcare industry leader at Deloitte. Steve leads Deloitte sustainability practice in the US. And Geoff leads Deloitte sustainability work globally in the energy and industrial sectors.

Geoff and Steve are the authors of two bestselling books, Detonate, which came out in 2018, and Provoke, which inspired this series.

And joining me from Thinkers50 is my fellow co-founder Des Dearlove.

So Kulleni, Steve, Geoff, and Des. We have quite a job on our hands. Our episodes in 2024 featured Amy Chang, Marcus Collins, Neri Karra Sillaman, Jeff Wetzler, Dane Jensen, Atif Rafiq, Andrew Winston, Paul Polman, and Lisa McKnight. Some brilliant discussions and insights.

So what have we learned? What are the highlights and how have you changed your own thinking and behavior as a result of our discussions?

So let’s begin with, what were the highlights for you, Kulleni? Perhaps I can start with you. What were the highlights?

Kulleni Gebreyes:

Stuart, I would say there are three things that really jumped out at me as I thought through what were the themes that came out of the conversations that we had. And one was the power of the collective. Right?

So whether it was Paul talking about collective leadership and how if we really want to be impactful, that we have to come together in a cooperative leadership. Or Andrew talking about collective courage. And then Marcus using a slightly different language with saying, “Cultural contagion,” and how that can drive behavior. That was a core theme that came out.

Second theme that jumped out at me was that adversity could actually be a fertile ground for new insights and strength. And so that was Dane talking about the Third Factor, which after nature-nurture, it’s our disintegration that allows us to become something bigger than we are.

Neri talking about her personal experiences as a refugee and seeing discrimination to build new businesses that ran differently. And Lisa, thinking about how you reframe a brand that maybe had lost its power, but it’s coming out as something new and better because of adversity.

And then last but not least, which I think is probably what this whole series is focused on, is how curiosity is an essential ingredient in everything that we do.

So whether it’s Jeff talking about how we tap into hidden wisdom, Atif talking about how we bring people along in this collective intelligence. And then Amy, sharing how predictability is actually a source of boredom, and it’s uncertainty and the unknown that makes you curious to learn more.

So it’s the power of the collective. It’s adversity is fertile ground and curiosity needing to be present in everything that we do.

Stuart Crainer:

Brilliant, Kulleni. Marcus Collins had a phrase which he stole from Durkheim, the sociologist, “Collective effervescence.”

Kulleni Gebreyes:

Yes.

Stuart Crainer:

That did stick in my mind really nice. I have no idea really what it means, but it feels nice.

Geoff Tuff:

It’s nice to say too.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. Geoff, what were your highlights?

Geoff Tuff:

When I went back through the episodes, I ultimately came back to the core theme that each one of them talked about the individual in some way. And it’s interesting, Kulleni, to hear you talk about the collective is one of your big themes. I really focused on the individual and maybe that suggests a couple of things.

Number one, that there are really multiple different ways to interpret the comments and the input of each one of our different guests.

And number two, I’m probably falling prey to selective listening because, we won’t get into it right now, Steve and I are working on our next project. And a lot of it actually has to do with influencing individual behavior and the power of influencing individual behavior.

But as I went through, for Marcus, I did hear the collective effervescence point, Stuart. And I interpreted that as a lot of individuals coming together and each bringing their own cultural expectations and cultural beliefs into that effervescence.

He was very clear in some of the discussion that he had that ultimately, the point of marketing is to lead culture as opposed to follow culture. And I saw that as a way to use marketing to impact individual behavior as that individual relates with its culture.

Lisa talked a lot about gender confidence, especially of women, and again, that has to do with individuals. She also talked about individual health.

Dane talked about individual execution under the power of pressure, and I could go through each one of them and talk about how I saw the individual central to some of their comments.

And I apologize, I can’t remember our Reflections episode from a year ago. But I feel like one of my favorite parts of the discussions we had at that time was also about just the power of individuals, and what they can do to both change organizations and lead organizations if they’re enabled in the right way.

So I’m sure we’ll dig into each one of our different guests, but that was one of the core themes that stuck out to me, Stuart.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, I think Dane Jensen, the Third Factor was, so there’s nature-nurture, and the Third Factor is the role we play in our own moral and emotional growth. And that stuck with me. You were actually making decisions.

Geoff Tuff:

Absolutely.

Stuart Crainer:

Des?

Des Dearlove:

So many great episodes I thought, this particular year, this particular batch. Andrew Winston was brilliant, talking about what it means to be net positive from the latest trends in sustainability. A topic I know is close to Geoff and Steve’s hearts.

I thought Amy Chang was brilliant, talking about the challenge of moving from the comfort zone of a big company like Google to starting her own AI business. And I liked her philosophy based around transparency and the no-assholes policy. I thought that stuck in the memory.

Geoff Tuff:

I think we all like that one, Des. I think that’s a good rule for this podcast too.

Des Dearlove:

Lisa McKnight from Mattel talking about the transformation of Barbie, taking a big risk doing the movie. And on the other side of that, the Barbie Dream Gap social mission and making Barbie relevant to new generations.

I could go on, but if I had to pick one standout moment, and this may not surprise those of you who are in the room. It would have to be the podcast we recorded at Climate Week in New York City live on stage with Paul Polman.

There was a moment during that podcast, I had a goose-bump moment when he was asked about his biggest failure and his fears, and he talked about being able to look his grandchildren in the eye. And he said, “I can’t sit here and look at my seven grandchildren and say I’ve done a great job. Poverty’s going up, climate change is going up, inequality is going up, and we’re all sitting here saying to each other how great we are.”

And there was just a moment, it was actually quite emotionally charged. And I’m sure all of us have met lots of CEOs and C-suite people over the years, and listened to them both publicly and privately. There aren’t many times when you have a moment like that and I think people felt it in the room.

The only parallel I can think of is back in 2013 when we gave Clay Christensen the number one spot in the Thinkers50. And Clay gave an acceptance speech. And again, for a management meeting, there was just something in the room. The Financial Times reported that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Geoff Tuff:

And Des, I can tell you, and I was in the audience for your and Steve’s interview with Paul, and first of all, you could hear a pin drop probably. We had hundreds of people in the room listening. And I’m guessing there were not a lot of dry eyes at the time, including Paul’s, if I’m not mistaken.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah, no, it was a special moment. It was a special man, a special leader, but it was a special moment. So I have to say that was probably my standout moment. And sorry Steve, if I beat you to it there.

Steve Goldbach:

It’s totally fine. There is the benefit and the drawbacks of going last in these things. But certainly that was one of my personal highlights of 2024, this podcast and in general, we had a chance to speak to so many terrific leaders.

And I think if I’m building on that highlight, Des, the thing that all of these leaders I think brought to the table was a humility and an appreciation for what it is to be human. And they’re each in their own unique way.

So whether it’s Jeff’s book where he talks about the importance of just asking questions, being curious about other people around you. Not assuming that you understand the world as you see it, that is actually the power of the question.

Whether it’s Amy and talking about the role of herself and the juxtaposition of flying back from a board meeting on a private jet to her startup. And then cleaning up leftover sushi for the team because someone had to do it, and there wasn’t anybody else to do it. So she did it, and just the selflessness of that leadership. And all of what Marcus taught us was about understanding the nature of humanity.

The other theme that I wrote down, I wrote down two other words, was communication and candor. And all of these leaders exhibited a willingness to be candid about the problem. So whether it’s Lisa in talking about the challenges that the Barbie brand was having and willing to lean into that as opposed to shy away from it. And having those difficult conversations about what we’re going to say.

Whether it’s Andrew Winston talking about his own challenges personally. And how that’s fed into his reflections about the climate and his courage to talk about that. There’s just so many stories across this group of just terrific, terrific humanity, clearly with Neri and her backstory as well.

But what I felt cut through every single one of our leaders was the ability to very simply communicate a core idea. And there’s something really powerful about the ability to just say something in very simple terms that galvanizes the people around you to take action.

None of these leaders said it was them. They all gave lots of credit to everybody else. But in my view, as experiencing the story, their ability to garner that support was a testament to their ability to communicate about the challenge they were facing and what it was going to take to solve that particular challenge.

Stuart Crainer:

Do you think perhaps it’s a self-selecting group? Do you think that … You talk about the state of our leaders, displaying humility and being candid, which are not things we’ve traditionally expected of our leaders, and certainly in my lifetime. Are the leaders really changing? Is there a sense that this is a genuine change in leadership do you think?

Steve Goldbach:

I have a view, and we wrote about it in Detonate, that we wish that leaders were much more agile with their ideas and willing to change their minds with new facts and data, and learning brought to the table. It’s, I think, a very outdated model of leadership where the leader has all the answers, the leader knows everything, and every original answer the leader’s ever had is correct.

I’d much rather personally run through fire for a leader who’s willing to acknowledge when they’ve made mistakes, when they’ve learned and how they’ve changed. I don’t know, Kulleni, it looked like you wanted to come in. What do you think?

Kulleni Gebreyes:

You know what’s interesting is what jumped out at me also, and this is primarily even in the conversation you all had with Paul, is that leaders do actually want the right things. But sometimes they get stuck in short-term thinking instead of thinking about a broader-term impact.

And so, when you think about the model that Milton Friedman brought in around really just focusing on the shareholder versus understanding the total impact on all the stakeholders. Then that takes the CEO, the leader who wants to do good, narrowing their aperture and their criteria for decision-making to actually drive to false choices.

So Steve, I agree with you on the humility, the humanity and the courage that they all had. But I think what distinguishes those that are really making change and having a net-positive impact are the ones that can maintain purpose at the center of what they do. Really focus on creating value and measuring that value through a stakeholder in a longer-term lens.

Geoff Tuff:

And personally convey it, Kulleni, because I couldn’t agree with everything you just said more.

But one thing that we heard from multiple of our guests, and Atif most explicitly I think, is that leadership today is about personal engagement with individuals in the organization. It’s not about setting strategy at a high level and expecting others to go and execute on it. Yes, there is some of that you need to hold people accountable for it. But the individual engagement and the willingness to work at the individual level, to help people get their jobs done, is something we heard time and time again.

And we heard stories from every single one of our guests. I think about the way that they’ve done that in their organization. And if you think about the caricature of a C-suite executive from even two, three decades ago, that’s not what they did.

In fact, a lot of the time, you didn’t see the CEO if you worked at a Fortune 500 company. You maybe have heard of them and maybe read something in one of their analyst days, but you certainly never caught sight of them.

And that I do think is changing. Back to your question, Stuart, “Are we seeing a different face of leadership today?” I think we are.

Des Dearlove:

No, I think that’s interesting.

The other thing that I thought that stood out for me when Paul was talking. When he talked about leadership… is about working, I think he said not in the forest, but on the forest. It’s about defining the boundaries. And when he pretty much abolished quarterly reporting on the first day he was in the job and people said that was really brave.

As I recall, he said, “All I was doing was moving the boundaries so that people could behave properly.” What he was doing in other words, he was reframing the situation. And I think that’s a key part of what leaders do.

He also said that leadership’s very simple, “The more you invest in other people, the more they will invest in you.” And that’s not rocket science. I think we sometimes lose our way and get carried away with leadership theories. It really is a human connection thing.

Geoff Tuff:

Yeah. One interesting thing, and Stuart, you may have wanted to take us in a different direction. But there was definitely a theme this year and in the previous year, as well about, or not about, but the theme of people who have been very successful in their individual endeavors or in their startups having come from big corporations. And either learned things they liked or learned things they didn’t like and applying them differently.

And I jotted down some of the companies that we had represented in this year’s guest list. There are some really big, really impressive companies that are represented amongst our guests. We’ve got Viacom, we’ve got Nike, we’ve got Apple, we’ve got AMD, we’ve got eBay, Google, Yahoo, McDonald’s, Nestle, Unilever, obviously.

These are big-scaled companies who have established ways of working and established management systems that people passed through them, and came to understand what amongst those worked well and which ones didn’t. And when they started up their own companies, and when they went off into the world to do their own things, they did it their way.

Stuart Crainer:

I think we should salute Kulleni because she quoted Bob Marley. She was the first person to quote Bob Marley in this podcast.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

Was that a highlight for you?

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, that was a real highlight. But your point-

Geoff Tuff:

You don’t know how many Grateful Dead quotes I’ve thrown in here and they’ve all just gone over heads.

Stuart Crainer:

… “You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice,” Bob Marley said. And that was in the episode with Neri Karra Sillaman.

And I think it was a really, really, really good quote. And it was absolutely to the point. But it’s that strength and resilience, isn’t it? Which Neri was talking about, Kulleni.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

Absolutely. And I think that resilience actually ties, Geoff, what I was saying, from the collective and the power of the collective. But then the power of the individual. So as you’ve mentioned, each of our speakers did make a set of intentional choices about how they wanted to show up.

And when I was listening and reflecting on their comments, there are two things that popped up for me in my role as we work on serving clients who are focused in life sciences and healthcare. Which you could argue, whether it’s lifespan, health’s plan, it’s one of the most critical issues that we all need to address.

And so as leaders within the space, as we guide clients, my takeaway was there’s a huge cost to inaction. So as leaders, not only do we have a commitment and a duty to listen and to serve and to have the humility, Steve, as you’ve mentioned. But we’ve got to make choices and take action, and delaying action because of fear or uncertainty actually creates more cost. And I think Paul described the magnitude of that in terms of the economic impact as well.

And the other thing that really jumped at me, and as somebody who came from the clinical world and now joined business where I thought, “Does business have a soul?” And so what’s the value that’s created? A number of our guests also said, “The way you measure your success is how is the world better because your business existed? And what’s the problem that you’re solving?”

So in my mind that courage and resilience can actually really be fostered and cultivated by the belief in the purpose and the impact and value you’re creating.

Des Dearlove:

I think Andrew made the point, particularly in terms of climate change and sustainability, that the cost of inaction now, financially, is going to be greater than the cost of doing what we know we should do.

And there’s a very strong economic case. Maybe it’s not being made even yet as strongly as it should be. But I think we’ve reached that point where it’s not even about courage, it’s just economic common sense.

Steve Goldbach:

Geoff, I think that’s where some of the leaders that we’ve had on actually have used the power of their position to frame the conversation where that inaction becomes evident. Right? I think that what we’ve observed across all our guests is that they inherit a landscape where the cost of inaction to some extent, or the risk of not acting, is hidden.

And what they do is they change the management systems, they change the landscape in a way where there is incentive to behave to solve that longer-term problem in the short term.

And I think, as we start to look at leadership in the future, we’ll naturally see the leaders who have been the most impactful, be the ones that have been able, like Paul with guidance to the street or with other factors, tweaked what they’ve done inside their organization to change the way people view their success.

And I think that we’ll have to do that with climate change. We’re going to make compelling arguments that it’s just better because the alternative is weaker. And we have to do it against a case where people’s natural tendency is just to extend what they’re doing into the future as opposed to imagining the possibilities that could be.

Geoff Tuff:

And I think we heard pretty clearly from Andrew that that’s not necessarily going to happen automatically. We’re not just going to be able to accomplish these hard things because the economic argument becomes clearer, because the entire organization gets on board.

It does require someone to put forward some personal courage and to say the hard things about the realities of our company that may not be what conventional wisdom would suggest they are. And therefore, lead to collective courage and collective action.

But someone ultimately has to be the catalyst for that movement. And I think we heard from a lot of our guests that that’s a role that they themselves played.

Des Dearlove:

And the importance of narrative. That was one of Andrew’s big messages I think. The collective narrative that we accepted and that we managed to weave is very powerful in this situation. We have to change the narrative. And I think to Steve’s point, I think that’s what these people are doing is they are reframing, changing the boundaries around things and changing the narrative.

Stuart Crainer:

I think Neri Karra Sillaman talked about making sustainability desirable. That’s what her company was aiming toward, which is good.

Des Dearlove:

Actionable, yeah.

Stuart Crainer:

Did we talk enough about AI? Because looking through and listening to the episodes, there’s not much talk of AI, is there? I think Atif Rafiq was the first chief digital officer of McDonald’s and AI was mentioned along the way.

Geoff Tuff:

Well, it’s an interesting point, Stuart, because I think you are right about that. 

In our conversations and the things that we ultimately took away from each of our different guests, it was much more about human interaction and changing behavior and human engagement. And Jeff Wetzler in particular, I think really dove deep on what it means to have a true human interaction, not withhold information from others, understand where others are coming from in order to enable change.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

Yeah, Geoff, I would agree with you. While Atif talked about AI, his actual secret sauce, secret ingredient, was that he did the upstream work.

And so it’s thinking about, “How do you actually define the issue that you are really problem solving for and bring people along?” And being curious enough to ask the questions to get that collective intelligence to then make the decisions that you need to.

One of the things that really struck me in his interview was he said, “Start where people already are.” And I find that as leaders at Deloitte, where we’re working with organizations all the time to help reframe thinking or to help advise and guide. It’s a great reminder to say, “Start with the language, start with the purpose, the objectives of where people are.”

And whether it’s AI or any other new technology that comes out, how does that solve, let’s say for convenience, what McDonald’s wants to deliver on as opposed to AI for AI’s sake?

Steve Goldbach:

Amy did talk about AI. Naturally, she started a company that was built on the back of machine learning and AI-related technology. And she ran Google Analytics before that. And so she’s in the possibilities here.

But what was interesting was that, while her product was AI-enabled, she was doing it to solve a human challenge, which was, I was sitting in a meeting. And I was trying to make an enterprise sale, and I stuck my foot in my mouth because I didn’t realize the latest in intelligence about that company that just happened last Friday. And because of it, I missed the sale.

So I think that there’s no escaping this unfortunate reality that we have in business, which is we all need to work with human beings irrespective of more and more work being done by AI. There’s still going to need to be people to create that AI, to put the protocols in place, to drive the change.

Des Dearlove:

It was interesting how often, even the people who were connected with AI, talked about things like purpose, North Star, I think Lisa McKnight talked about due north. Paul Polman talked about how often that word purpose came up. And even as I remember when Atif was trying to explain how you move McDonald’s from being very much a restaurant company, a food company, to adopting the technology.

As Kulleni said, you talk about the core values and one of the core values being convenience. So as he said, “I can’t teach you how to make a better burger, but actually I can make McDonald’s more relevant and more convenient to our consumers.”

So it’s technology with a purpose, I think is the important thing. I think it’s what we’re all saying really. It’s not just technology for the sake of technology.

Stuart Crainer:

I suppose the mark of all these conversations is … Well, I suppose the final test is, how does it change our own behavior? And has it changed our own behavior? Steve?

Steve Goldbach:

I will say, I feel like as I try to show up as a leader in different settings, what I took away from this set of guests, and how I use it in my own practice, is to try and remind myself in the moment that it’s not about me. It’s about whoever I’m talking to and how they’re feeling, how they’re reacting, what are they up against? And the more that I can be of help in some way, the more I’m going to be able to solve …

If I can solve, as a leader, a problem that they’re experiencing in their work life, whether it’s someone on my team, a client, or someone else. If I’m solving a problem that they frame as important, then I’m going to be viewed as being helpful and desirable to work with.

If I frame it about what I need, then there’s a much lower chance that I’ll actually get what I need. And I think that that’s a model of leadership that the leaders that we’ve heard from this year have certainly espoused. And I’ve tried to take bits of it into my own practice.

Geoff Tuff:

It is a very interesting question, Stuart. And again, I know you all have heard Steve and I talk about this in the past. But you’ll know that one of our central tenets and everything that we write about is that ultimately, the only way things change is human behavioral change. And so you’re asking the right question, “Are we doing something differently now that we’ve had all these really interesting conversations and met these amazing people?”

And I’m not sure that I can say as of yet that I am. But what I can say is that, and this may be the selective listening again, as I hear from these leaders, beliefs that align with my beliefs, and takeaways from their leadership journeys that are similar to what I believe should be true in the world’s best organizations, it gives me more confidence to keep on going down that path.

At some point, it would feel all too convenient to just say, “You know what? No one else believes this. We might as well just pack up and go do something else.” But that’s not the case. We have some amazing leaders out there who do believe that hard things can get done if you engage at the individual level.

Stuart Crainer:

Kulleni, you’re a different person since you joined The Provocateurs team?

Kulleni Gebreyes:

I am. And it’s interesting because I’ll tell you, I’m a different person since I was a practicing physician. And I heard Jeff say that 60-80% of patients don’t tell their doctors the truth. I knew that, but I did not think that was necessarily true in the business world because the consequences, it’s seen less. Right?

But if you listen to his thoughts and perspectives, based on his book on how you tap into hidden wisdom, he said, “People either are afraid of negative impact if they speak and tell their truth, they don’t have the energy to do it, or they don’t have the words to express themselves.”

And so for me, I’ve actually had the realization that I need to have that same level of empathy, humility, and raising the quality questions to get the insights I need in order to not just be a good host on this set of podcasts, but just the day-to-day work and working with teams and clients.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, we’re referring to Jeff Wetzler’s book, Ask, which is really good. But one of the things Jeff talked about was that when kids are young, they ask 400 questions a day, and this falls off a cliff very, very, very quickly. And by the time they’re at work, they’re not asking many questions at all. So creating that environment to ask questions and listening, as Steve said as well.

Des, you’re a different man?

Des Dearlove:

Well, yeah, I think the thing I would say is getting to Jeff’s point about being a listener. I think trying to be a better listener, trying to hear what’s actually being said because I think we all have come with our own agendas. And I think it’s really important to push the pause button, more important than I probably realized before, to push the pause button and actually listen to people, to actually turn up the listening skills.

The other muscles that I think I’m trying to work on are that these leaders talk about relevance and resilience. And I think you need to work those muscles so that they’re strong when the time comes that you actually need them. But if you’re not using them the whole time and you’re not trying to develop them, then they’re not going to be there when you do need them.

The reframing thing, I was quite taken with that. The changing boundaries, working on the forest rather than in the forest. So that’s another thing I’m trying to get my head around.

And then the final thing, and both Andrew Winston and Paul Polman made this point, is that a lot of the technologies we need to change the world are there. These are leadership challenges now. 80% of what we need to do, we have the technology, we have the know-how, so therefore it comes down … It just accentuates, makes you realize how important the leadership element is. And we all have to be leaders.

Stuart Crainer:

When Dane Jensen talked, he quoted a Polish psychologist and the concept of positive disintegration. That you have to disintegrate and then put things together and recreate yourself to learn.

Des Dearlove:

That’s like the hero’s journey, isn’t it? That’s the classical, go back to the ancient Greeks, that in order to be transformed, you have to be reborn.

Geoff Tuff:

I think he was just using a fancy term for detonate, Stuart.

Stuart Crainer:

We’re all seeking fancy terms to describe the work you and Steve have already done. We appreciate that.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

Stuart, I would actually just in the moment of courage also, and at the risk of perpetuating a stereotype, I would say Neri also made me think as a person who identifies as going from refugee to fashion, really thinking about overconsumption.

And just taking what already exists and making sure we’re not, as consumers, advancing and propagating the over borrowing and overproduction that is a result of overconsumption. So I will say I’ve spent fewer dollars on my credit card on fashion that I don’t need over the last calendar year since talking with her.

Stuart Crainer:

To be honest, I’ve been doing that for years.

We’re out of time. A final word, Steve?

I’ve got a list of some of the people we’ve featured in this podcast series. Shelley Zalis, Dambisa Moyo, Julie Carrier, Valerie Rainford, Bob Lefkowitz, who’s a Nobel Prize winner. Charlie Camarda, astronaut. Annie Duke, poker champion. Kim Scott, Morra Aarons-Mele. Is there a link? Is there one word that sums up this amazing group?

Steve Goldbach:

Dare I say, “Provocateurs,” but that would be far too simple because it would say that we’ve had appropriate.

It’s funny, Stuart, I’m not going to directly answer that as usual, but I’ll answer it with something that I’ve been thinking about.

Sometimes they’re just good stories. Right? Sometimes there doesn’t have to be a perfect thread that runs through it. The people that we have on this show are just super interesting people who have contributed something of substance to the world and that our listeners will find interesting and will pull nuggets out of it.

So go back and listen to the back issues of The Provocateurs, and you’ll find something there, and subscribe to see what’s next.

I know that we will have someone, I won’t reveal who, but we will have someone in the very early 2025 who will be at the intersection of sustainability and AI. And so I think that that will be, certainly very topical, in the moment.

Geoff Tuff:

And Steve, what I would say is … So I agree with that point, they’re all interesting stories. But they’re stories with some common threads and not necessarily the same themes. But all of the stories have some theory of the case or clear central tenet that each of the storytellers brings to the table.

And I think, if I’m not mistaken, every single story involves an active decision at some point. And this was a really important point that Neri made in talking about her experience as a refugee as well. These stories, they don’t have a motivating force unless the actors within this story made an active decision, which I think all of our guests have.

Stuart Crainer:

Final thought, Des?

Des Dearlove:

My only thought was Neri talked about necessity entrepreneurs and why immigrant entrepreneurs tend to succeed. They succeed because they have to succeed. And I think there’s something about that, about these people that we have on The Provocateurs show is that they are necessity leaders. They really have a purpose and they know it’s important, and they rise to the challenge and the world’s a better place for them.

Stuart Crainer:

Final thought, Kulleni? Is there a Bob Marley quote?

Kulleni Gebreyes:

I’m going to save it for the next podcast. But I will give you an Angela Davis quote, which is, she said, “I used to accept the things I cannot change and now I change the things I cannot accept.” And so I think there’s a call to action that each of our Provocateurs are taking that I think follows the theme in that quote.

Stuart Crainer:

Brilliant. We’re out of time. Thanks Des, Steve, Kulleni, and Geoff. Thank you to everyone who has joined us in 2024. We had some great guests. All the previous episodes are available.

Thank you to all of our guests and everyone who’s listened to the podcast. We really appreciate your support and feedback.

We are making plans for a lineup over the next year and beyond, so stay tuned for some fantastic guests and brilliantly provocative conversations during the year. Thank you from us all.

Stuart

Hello and welcome to the Provocateurs podcast.

I’m Stuart Crainer, co-founder of Thinkers50.

This is the first episode of 2024, and one in which we reflect on the episodes we recorded last year. What did we learn? Which stories remain with us? Which of the amazing people we featured provoked us to think again and act differently in our own lives?

Joining me, we have three of the co-hosts from last year, Steve Goldbach and Geoff Tuff from Deloitte, and my Thinkers50 partner, Des Dearlove. Stacy Janiak is not here today, but was involved in some great episodes over the last two years. She’s now spending time with her day job as Deloitte Global Deputy CEO [Ed.: title corrected from the audio].

So joining us this year, we have a brilliant new co-host, Kulleni Gebreyes. Kulleni is the US Consulting Life Sciences and Healthcare Industry Leader and US Chief Health Equity Officer at Deloitte. She holds an MD from Harvard Medical School and an MBA from Johns Hopkins. But that is only part of her remarkable story. Kulleni, it is great to have you joining Provocateurs for the new series. Welcome. So perhaps we should start with your story and the question, how did you get here?

Kulleni

Stuart, I’m so excited to join you all and having listened to the previous podcasts, truly energized to be part of these conversations. So how did I get here? You know, I often describe myself as an idealist with a broken heart, which means I’m a true romantic, but I’ve learned through life that you’ve got to have strategic planning for financials to have a happily ever after, right? So I bring an idealist heart with a pragmatic mind. So my story is really what shaped who I am, which is; I’m born and raised in Ethiopia by parents who are always able to see what was possible in what seemed like impossible situations. So I grew up in a time of civil war, drought, famine. Many of you may remember Ethiopia in the 1980s; we were on the news worldwide. And that shaped who I am from day one, which meant that I understood I grew up in fortunate circumstances because we were able to immigrate to initially Europe and then the United States, where we got a chance to go to some great schools, meet great people, learn new things. And through that, I dedicated my life initially to public health, where I worked around the world with community building, infrastructure development, practiced as a clinician for over a decade in the D.C. and Baltimore area, and also once again in Asia and Africa and Central America. And then moved over to the business side when I realized that, you know what, you can have a good heart and be well-intentioned, but you’ve got to think about how does the business world and the corporate world make the world run and how do we make decisions? So I’m here today because, frankly, I have a curious mind. I’m curious about people who are making changes in the world. And I’m curious how we can understand what makes the world different and what will impact how we think in our mental models. And I look forward to sharing more of my story as we go on, over the episode.

Geoff

Stuart, let’s make sure that you don’t ask Steve and me to repeat our resumes next to Kulleni’s. Let’s just leave that. Let’s just leave that out there.

Stuart

Well, I know you’re idealistic with a broken heart as well, Geoff.

Geoff

Always.

Stuart

So, thank you, Kulleni. It’s an amazing story and we look forward to some great conversations this year.

So let’s try and make sense of our episodes from last year, which featured Tiffani Bova, Jim Stengel, Shelley Zalis, Martin Lindstrom, Annie Duke, Morra Aarons-Mele, Kim Scott, Sunny Bonnell, and Chip Bergh.

Steve, perhaps you could kick things off. What is your standout memory from those conversations?

Steve

It’s interesting, Stuart. I went back and started to listen to all the episodes.

In light of, we’re taping this during the World Economic Forum going on at Davos, and clearly all the talk there is about artificial intelligence, the ESG, geopolitics being back on the center stage. And I was struck by the consistent theme throughout our podcast was that the power of the human is still at the center of what drives successful mitigation of disruption or disruption because even as we digitize our world, even as the world goes to artificial intelligence, some human being somewhere needs to make a choice that delights a customer. And so for me, I went back to the very first episode, Stuart, that we did together with Tiffani Bova and her quote unquote light bulb moment. For some of you may not remember, Tiffani learned from being in the carnival business. So we can say this comes from Carnie’s. Okay. And where one of the folks she was working with just simply pointed up and there was one light bulb that was not lit up amongst hundreds of light bulbs. And what she was calling attention to was the fact that someone’s going to notice that instead of the amazing show we’re putting on. And so the importance of delighting customers. We saw that run through the thread of what Jim Stengel talked about, which was the importance of having a higher purpose to motivate employees. We saw that with Chip Bergh as Levi’s shifted from its focus on selling through stores to controlling its relationship with customers by becoming a retailer. And that was one of the if-to-whens that Chip saw as a disruptor. And then the last one I’ll say is that, you know, is Annie Duke, where she had the insight that the hardest thing about a human being to quit is your own identity. And I actually think that as we enter this world where we’re increasingly polarized, just understanding that all of us are coming to this world – and Kim Scott highlights this, too – with biases that sort of, to some extent shape who we are and how we view the world is a really important thing. But for me, it was the power of the human at the center, even in a world where technology is disrupting.

Stuart

The power of the human. Thanks, Steve. Now to you, Geoff. We always keep you and Steve apart, even though it was your book, Provoke, which gave us the initial impetus for this series. What have you learned from last year’s episodes?

Geoff

So you’d think that Steve and I would talk once in a while together since we are writing partners, but he and I actually did not talk in advance of this recording, but actually are coming out, perhaps not surprisingly, in a very similar place. So I also had noted down essentially the human, and the notion of humanity, at the center for every single one of our guests. And by the way, though I didn’t go back and listen to our previous reflections episode, I think the same point was very much true for the first year of recording this podcast. And I think we can probably now conclude that one of the aspects of being an effective provocateur is having a very great sense of not only humanity broadly, but who one is, who you are as a human.
I would say, as I look back at the pod, at the guests that we had, the podcasts that I was a host for, there were a few different themes that came out. The first was that every single one of the people that we spoke with, and I recorded the ones with Chip, with Sunny, with Morra, and with Martin, they had a really deep understanding of who they were, or at least they were able to convey a deep understanding of who they were and what it means to be authentic.

Every single one of them talked about bringing in their real selves, not some sort of facade, not some sort of cultured kind of facade of success, but bringing their real selves to the challenge that each of the different things, each of them faced in their businesses.

So an example of that is Chip, when he came into Levi’s, having never worked in fashion apparel before, he was very clear that he was bringing his business knowledge, but he had the humility to say that he didn’t understand the business. He wasn’t going to assume that he could apply all of the lessons that he learned after decades at Procter & Gamble to solving a different type of problem. And so what he did, much to Steve’s point, is he went out and listened to people. He listened to customers, he listened to people around Levi’s, he understood what they thought was working, what wasn’t working. And what he was doing as he was doing that, beyond just becoming smarter, was building his own self, building his own self as a person, not only in connecting with people around Levi’s, but building his own belief system around what it would take to actually fix the business. And so that humility that he brought as a person helped him in that situation.
There were other aspects of humanity that came out as well. So Morra Aarons-Mele was very clear. In fact, most of the episode was about the challenges of addressing anxiety head on and simply saying, “You know what? One of the aspects of being human is that we are anxious. It’s kind of embedded in who we are. And unless we can be honest with that and understand that we’re not unique if we feel anxiety, we are actually more human if we feel anxiety, but if we can understand it, if we can name it, and if we can address it head on, that is going to help us.”

And that then parlays into other points around personal honesty, having a really clear North Star objective for what they wanted to achieve in their various different roles. For Chip, it was to make Levi’s a direct to consumer retailer. For Martin, it was to look for extreme ideas that would have meaningful impact in what he was trying to do with his business. And, you know, ultimately I think that bringing themselves, bringing their humanity to the table, is what helped every single one of our guests, not only to succeed in their individual roles, but to be seen as provocateurs.

So I’ll leave it at that for now, Stuart, and maybe we can come back and pick up on that in the conversation.

Steve

I mean, I wonder just if I might interject for a sec. I wonder and I’d be curious what you all think about this. I do think we’re going through a phase change of how people view leadership, right? And I do think if you went back 10 years, leaders would have been viewed as needing to have the answers, needing to have clarity. And I actually think the theme that runs through a lot of what we’re hearing, in particular the focus on mental health is actually; leaders are increasingly viewed as “If I don’t have the answers, that’s okay.” And actually asking good questions and curiosity are increasingly important to leadership. I’m curious if you see the same, if you all are seeing the same tendency.

Des

You kind of took the words out of my mouth there, Steve, because my watch was, from the episodes last year, were curiosity in particular and human connection. In fact, when we asked Jim Stengel what was the essence of leadership, that’s what he said. He said curiosity and humanity, and I think you’re right, I think what we want is more curious leaders. Geoff referred to Chip Bergh as well, and the first thing he did, he said, was when he took the job at Levi’s, was to go on a listening tour. He posed, I think it was six or seven questions to the top 60 people in the organisation. And then he did interview after interview where he just talked to people. And he said, you know, the thing was just really to listen. And I think that’s kind of the superpower that perhaps we’ve underestimated in the past. I mean, you know, I think probably always good leaders have listened. But I think now it’s much more valued and we don’t necessarily expect, in fact, it’s a bit scary if leaders pretend they’ve got all the answers, I think. You know we should be kind of co-creating answers with leaders not expecting them just to hand them down from on high. The other thing that stayed with me is some of the stories. We heard some great formative stories, particularly people talking about, you know, the things that had kind of kick-started them as entrepreneurs or, you know, falling in love with brands, I think. We had Jim Stengel’s story about when he was a kid and he was renting out, do you remember this one? Renting out neckties outside the school because they had to wear ties, but he’d got all his granddad’s old ties. You know, there’s some of these big, fat kind of, you know, lairy ties and he was renting them out to the other kids until he got busted. But even at age nine, he’d started this business. Martin Lindstrom’s Lego story. You know, he was a Lego fanatic and he built himself a bed out of Lego.

Geoff

A bed, yeah, I remember that. And he came away with dimples all over his back from sleeping on it.

Des

And then, do you remember, he had a Legoland in his garden that he created, and people came from miles around to see this Legoland, including the lawyers from Lego, who abruptly told him that he really couldn’t be doing that. He couldn’t be having a theme park in his garden.

Geoff

Age 11, by the way, age 11.

Des

Age 11, that’s right. And then they, you know, very smart on their part, they actually brought him into the advisory board at age 11 to help them, you know, see their own brand through the eyes of their customer. So some really good stories that stuck with me. 

Geoff

So that triggers an idea, and that is that one of the reasons I think we heard so many stories, so many good stories, so many well-packaged stories, and I’m not trying to make them sound made up or overly packaged, but part of what has allowed all of our provocateurs to convey humanity and to be human is because they do show up with stories. And each of them have probably told the same stories multiple different times. It gives the audience, in that case, us as the host, in other cases, employees in a new company they’re coming to, but it gives the audience a real sense of the person behind the title, behind the facade, behind how they appear, and probably creates a connection that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

Kulleni

And Geoff, as you say that, and Steve, you started your question with Gen AI being top of mind. When I think about how people think about Gen AI, it has content and it has intelligence, right? But what it doesn’t have is humanity. And the theme I heard in all of your responses is what strikes me when I talk to business leaders who are now better able to articulate, especially in life sciences and healthcare, who say, you can have the facts, right?

And even when you look at the data around when new technology and drug discoveries for curative therapies come out, all those things are great, but without the caring and the heart and the human component, you actually can’t heal, right? And so if you think about an organization as a living thing that actually needs nurturing, and the workforce needs nurturing, I think for me leadership is really, and how we distinguish ourselves from AI, is how do we bring the heart and the mind together in everything that we do and how we make decisions.

Geoff

It’s really well said.

Stuart

I think there was a kind of positivity and optimism and energy behind the people we talked to, which, in these kind of challenging times, is really amazing. And the kind of, going back to Des’s point, really, the diversity of experience always strikes me. Kim Scott, who I thought was really good, and her experience, she managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and a diamond cutting factory in Moscow and wrote three novels, just along the way. And I think that, and Tiffany Bova with EK Fernandez Carnivals in Hawaii. I think that early experience and the diversity of the experience gives the people we’ve spoken to a kind of resilience as well.

And even when the, what’s the name, Shelley Zalis, who we talked to, who’s behind the Female Quotient, which is a really brilliant initiative. And she reported that the World Economic Forum did some research and they said it would take 132 years to close the gender gap. And Shelley said, “No. Seven years. That’s what I’m working to.” And I just think that kind of can-do attitude, even though it’s kind of a cliche, is still really powerful and persuasive. So it’s that kind of feeling of optimism and positivity, it’s very infectious.

Kulleni, I saw something where you were talking about, you were asked whether you were a glass full or a glass empty sort of person? What did you say?

Kulleni

You know, yes, Stuart, I did. So, you know, younger, because as I mentioned, we grew up in a bit of adversity. Our parents always taught us to think of the world as being half full, right, so that there was always something there. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve really thought to say, you know what, I’m just grateful I have a glass and I’m grateful I have water. It doesn’t matter how much water is in there or not, but the fact that I’m alive with a glass that has water is enough to be grateful for. And I think that changes your mindset of whether your happiness or your sense of accomplishment is based on a comparison to some random benchmark, or is it just kind of enough as it is? And are you enough as you are?

Stuart

Steve, I know you really liked the conversation with Annie Duke.

Steve

Yeah. I mean, if you go to, if you go, Stuart, to unique backgrounds. I mean, winning, you know, being the most successful female poker player in history prior to becoming a leading management thinker and having that be the product of, you know, an early in life health challenge that necessitated a switch. Annie, for me, was the definition of resilience. And I just, I love her ideas. In particular, I already talked about the hardest thing to quit being your identity, which I found, which, even though Annie introduces it as sort of like that’s the thing she stands on the shoulder of, I just think that that’s so true. Like if you think about combining that with the way Kim Scott talks about bias, that’s such an important and profound lesson for all of us to learn as we think about how we move through the world. That we have a set of biases and continuing to try to, if I use Annie’s terms, quit those biases or at least understand that we have them and allow other people to challenge them. It could be an incredibly important leadership lesson. And then the other one, which she talked about, was working on the hard things first. So making sure that you’re not building up the sunk cost fallacy by doing busy work until you really tackle the challenging aspect of your program, whether it’s the monkeys on pedestals example or the others that she shared. So, yeah, that one for me is a big one, Stuart.

Stuart

Yeah. She was talking about the art of quitting, wasn’t she? Which was really interesting, I thought.

Steve

Yeah.

Geoff

So that then triggers another thought in this, and that is that you could listen to the first 15 minutes of this reflections episode and conclude that all you need to do to be an effective provocateur is show up as a person, which probably is a really important thing to do. But actually, every single one of our guests has a central pillar of belief, or maybe it’s two or three different central pillars of belief that guides the decisions that they may be making.

For Annie, it may have been that you can’t quit yourself, you can’t quit your natural self.

As I think of, again, back to some of the guests that we had, Martin Lindstrom was all about the data, all about the power of data, big and small, informed by purposeful experiments based on a hypothesis to go and get something done.

Sonny Bunnell, on the other hand, was all about the power of the brand to guide the company and the importance of focusing on the brand and building the brand.

For Chip, it was listening.

For Morra, it was all about addressing the reality of what it means to be a human head on.

And so my guess is we could click through every single one of our guests, not only over the course of the last year, over the course of the last two years we’ve been doing this, and find that central belief pillar that they used, that they brought their humanity with. Because that pillar actually allows you to take action and it gives you some guidance for where to dig in on various different issues. I’d love to hear if that resonates, or? Steve, as always, you’re welcome to challenge me. That’s when this gets fun.

Stuart

How many pillars are ideal? I guess is the question. You can have too many pillars.

Geoff

Yeah, well, so my guess is one or two. Like, you know, you can’t… After you get beyond one or two, you’re probably into management theory and you’re going to, you know, overthink certain situations. But in order to remain human, there’s got to be just a couple of central things that guide a lot of your actions and then you show up as a person behind it.

Des

No, it’s interesting. I think, well, I mean, when these things… [Coughs] Talking of glasses of water, I’ve got a frog in my throat.

Steve

How full is it, Des?

[All laugh]

Des

It’s about a third full.

Stuart

Empty now!

Des

About a third full!

Though the intersection of some of these things. You’re talking about Martin’s interest in data.

It was interesting to hear Jim Stengel talk about the possibility of creating metrics for purpose. You know, purpose, which we think of as being sort of a soft thing, but he was talking about, you know, the opportunity now to create metrics and to start measuring people’s sense of purpose. That’s quite interesting, I think. That’s not the sort of thing we’ve tried to measure in the past in terms of management.

Kulleni

You know, and Steve, you’ve mentioned identity a few times. And as I think about the pillars, Geoff, I feel like how you identify yourself is a really important pillar because it sets the frame of who you are within the context of the world, whether it’s the small world, meaning your family unit, your workplace, your friends, or the world at large. And I’m curious for you all, when you think about identity, because I always wonder what matters most: Is it your family history and where you come from? Is it your demographic characteristic? Is it what you do? Is it how others see you? Because I think, depending on that center of gravity of what defines your identity that allows you to change and pivot in a way that feels comfortable because at the core, you’re still the same person doing different things, right? So if I think of a poker player, who becomes a behavioral or organizational development scientist, the fundamentals are actually the same. So is it the identity or the role that’s changing? And when I think of all the stories that you all have shared, I hear a theme of: It’s the core characteristics of that person allowing them to do net new things as opposed to vastly different identities. But I don’t know if they expressed how they see it, if it was a mutation of identity or just the manifestation of who they are changing.

Stuart

I think the episode with Morra Aarons-Mele, we talked about, and she’s the author of The Anxious Achiever, and as Geoff said, she talks about anxiety as a manageable and motivational factor, something intrinsic to leadership. And it seems to me that people are always the, kind of the pillars of belief, or the central core characteristics that Kulleni was talking about, are evolving and people are refining them and questioning them all the time.

And that perhaps creates anxiety around it.

Des

Interestingly, Amy Chang, who we spoke to, who’s coming up in a future episode, she was talking about, just to do a little tease, she was talking about unlearning. The importance of unlearning things that you’ve done in the past, and when to stop doing things that you’ve done. There’s echoes of Marshall Goldsmith’s book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. That sense of being able to self-reflect and pause, if I may say so. Apparently, there’s been quite a good article written in the Harvard Business Review about pausing. Do you know anything about that, Steve?

Steve

I’ve heard. We did, Geoff and I just did a piece on that. We’ve effectively created a name for ourselves as folks who are always wanting to have executives do something. And we challenged ourselves to say, actually, in some cases, you know, taking an active pause may be a better strategic move than plowing ahead. But we wanted to see whether those, what those specific use cases were, Des. The, you know, the thing that I think Kulleni’s question has really caused me to think, and I think that there are two things at play around identity. I think our guests, and I’m just going through the list in my mind, whether it’s Chip or Shelly, who I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with more after the podcast, and she’s amazing. They’ve gone through multiple leadership roles and journeys where they’ve had to play, they’ve had to assume very different external identities. And it’s impossible to know, but I wonder if the way they’re able to do that, is being very in touch with a grounded, internal identity and what grounds them. And I think Morra’s episode, I think, speaks to that. And so I think we are all on our own personal journeys, learning about what makes us happy, what makes us satisfied. I personally have found that has shifted for me over the last decade. But I think the challenges of leadership today require a leader to be in touch with what makes them tick internally so that they can show up differently because it’s going to require different faces to motivate human beings elsewhere. And what would work with one audience may not work with another audience. So, if you’re not in touch with yourselves, you don’t know yourself, you may not be able to shift in that moment. I don’t know. What do you guys all think?

Geoff

So you came very close to saying the phrase that was running through my mind, both when Kulleni was talking and when you said that Steve, so, because you know, the word identity, let’s just be clear, the word identity carries a lot of meaning, and maybe baggage for some, but it carries a lot of meaning in today’s society. What I heard from Kulleni, in the way that she was talking about it, is a very, very clear sense of self. And if you have a clear sense of self and if you can show up as a human, yes, in some situations, you’re going to have to shift your communication style and shift the nature of what you’re doing if your audience changes. But as long as you can stay true to that sense of self, which is another way of conceiving of identity, then you will show up as a human. And when, Kulleni, you started that comment, I started thinking to myself, “Geez, how would I describe my identity? How would I describe my sense of self?” And I immediately went to not what I look like or how I show up as a person, but what I value most. And when I’m forced to make a hard decision, what I fall back on is what I really, really care about. And I’m not going to lead us into a conversation about exploring everyone’s sense of self, but that to me is at least the way I think about that.

Stuart

So do you get promoted for having a sense of self? Is that how you get on in big organisations?

Geoff

I think you get promoted by being, this sounds very treacly as it comes through my brain and out my mouth, but by being a human. And yes, there are some people who can fight their way to the top in organizations and figure out which levers to pull. But I do genuinely believe that if you do have that sense of self, if you can show up as yourself, obviously you need to have the hard skills as well, but if you think about gaining the experiences that you value to build that sense of self, to build you as a person, I think that’s much more important for ultimate promotion than is the checking the boxes to be able to get to the next level.

Des

Interestingly, to Sunny Bonnell who wrote the book Rare Breed – A guide to success for the defiant, dangerous, and different. It’s all about, kind of, outsiders and rebels. But one of her points was that people often get fired for the same thing they got hired for. In the sense that you bring someone in who’s a bit different And then because they’re a bit different, they don’t fit. So then they get flushed away again. And she was talking about the importance of having the sort of the rebellious types in your organisation and recognising them and accepting that they’re gonna cause a certain amount of disruption, but actually organisations need a little bit of disruption if they’re gonna evolve.

Steve

Yeah, one thing I do wanna just jump in and say, cause I think it’s important to acknowledge it; a number of us come from a place of privilege where it’s a lot easier for us to bring our internal sense of self because our external, like the way the world might view us, if we’re in a diverse population, I mean, a number of us, you know, on this are white men and we therefore can show up in a way that has historically advantaged us. If you have had historical disadvantages in your organization, it’s a lot harder to show up with whatever your internal identity is, because oftentimes you feel like you’re viewed as whatever your external identity is. And as we strive towards a more equitable world, I think one of the goals ought to be like everyone can bring whatever their authentic self is and not, and that doesn’t, we just should acknowledge that doesn’t always happen with, in the way it should in the world today.

Des

Yeah.

Steve

Well, I think that was awkwardly said at best.

[All laugh]

Geoff

I mean, coming from a middle-aged white dude, yeah, it might be a little bit awkward, but I think it’s actually, it is very well said, Steve. And I can’t, I’m not, I don’t have this thought fully formulated, but it does go all the way back to our very first episode with Valerie Rainford, and you think about the story that she had. She did have difficulty thinking about bringing her authentic self, but she also had the courage and the commitment to push through that and to show up with it and to not change who she was in order to gain the success she had at the Fed and at JP Morgan, et cetera. And so the part of this that I feel like I’m in difficult territory here is, I’m not sure what the lesson there is because we can’t simply say “Be more courageous,” but I hope one of the lessons- 

Steve

She had allies. Like, she had allies and she was strong, but it was not easy, right?

Des

Well, I mean, one of the lessons for all of us is to be good allies, to try to be good allies, and to be more self-aware and aware of the biases that do operate. And I mean, and be honest about it and try to do what we can as middle-aged white men to be helpful rather than be the problem.

Kulleni

Yeah, and it’s interesting. I was at the JP Healthcare Conference just a week ago. And as we were talking about allyship, but we also talked about the difference between those who will come to you after the meeting and express support as an ally, but kind of in a one-on-one, versus the change agent and the true provocateur who will speak up during the meeting in front of everyone, right? And so I think there’s a shift in mind of what it means to be a true ally that we need to think about. You know, but what’s interesting, Steve, Des, and Geoff, is that as we talk about this courage that’s required, and I’m an ecology and evolutionary biology major, right? I love human behavior. One of the things that we’re actually all innately good at, that we don’t always realize, is knowing when somebody is being real or not. And that doesn’t matter of race, age, ethnicity, nationality. What that means is, for those like Valerie who show up in an authentic way, is you actually end up getting more allies because of your courage. It’s kind of a circular loop because people see you as you are, they believe you, and there’s more real connection. So it’s interesting, where does that begin? In terms of, where do you get the courage, or where do you get enough sponsorship or allyship to be your true self? Because that’s the only way, regardless of how we look differently or what language or what part of the country we live in, that we can have true relationship and true connection.

Geoff

So, Kulleni, I think you just made the most important point of this conversation, which is that it is actually biologically in us to understand when people are not being themselves. And you could imagine a virtuous cycle, as I think you just described it, emerging here that if you have the confidence to show up with yourself and you’re going to draw others in as allies they’re going to support you, give you more room to show up as yourself and it can only go well. And perhaps the reverse is true as well. That if you try to hide, if you try to hide your true self and if you try to dupe others, you’re going to end up in a vicious cycle down to, maybe not down to the bottom, but you’re not going to be nearly as successful, you’re certainly not going to be a provocateur.

Des

Well, there’s Kim Scott’s point about her two by two and, you know, with feedback and being radically, you know, radical candor. But, you know, if you end up in the wrong box, you’re in the place of ruinous sympathy. You know, when you’re not being honest, you’re being phony because you don’t really want to talk about the real issues. And that can be as bad as, you know, the sort of the more toxic, aggressive quadrant of her two by two. You know, we… Interesting, I saw Adam Grant was writing about this, about getting rid of the compliment sandwich, where you give some good news and then you squeeze the real feedback in the middle and then you give some more good news, which really doesn’t work. But I think we need to step away from being phony with each other. I think that’s something that’s become ingrained in organisations and hopefully we’re beginning to challenge that too.

Stuart

So have we changed our own behavior as a result of the conversations we’ve had in these podcasts? Because the idea is that they provoke us to think again and hopefully change and improve our behavior.

Steve

I will tell you one thing I’ve tried to adopt in my personal, well both my personal life and in my leadership positions.

Geoff

I’m going to keep you honest here, Steve, because you and I work a lot together. I’ll give you some feedback after this as to whether or not this is actually working.

[All laugh]

Steve

Look, I would say I have tried to just give direct feedback in an honest and caring way. And I’ve actually taken with my new team to… Take, like, literally take a phrase from Kim Scott. And I’ve told them that candor is kind. Right? Like actually, “I want to have a great relationship with you. And the only way that we’re going to do that is if I tell you the truth.” And for some, it’s been more challenging to hear sometimes, but I try to meet people where they’re at and try to do it. It doesn’t always work. I’m not that good at it yet, but I think that I’ve committed to practicing it so that what I’m not doing is building up a bunch of baggage in a relationship where then I have to spew out later on it’s like, “Look i’ve got like 14 things that have that have been bugging me.” I’m just gonna say, like, “Hey, you know, can we do this a little differently? And here’s why,” and share my logic. So that’s what I’ve tried to. And Kim, I will say I’m lucky that I got the chance to spend some time with Kim and learn from her, and I’ve really tried to implement what she’s done and taught me.

Stuart

And Geoff, you’re a totally different person now I hear.

Geoff

You know, after interacting with Steve, absolutely. But it’s been years of doing that. No, so I will take a moment to say that one of Steve’s superpowers is that he does show up as a human being in almost every single interaction. And I’ve seen him step into the new role that he’s got right now. And whether it’s talking about direct feedback or just actually having a conversation as a real, normal person, he does that really well. I won’t then reveal the other things that perhaps Steve can improve that I’m sure we’ll have a feedback conversation on later.

My answer to your question, Stuart, is I don’t know that my behavior has changed dramatically, but I definitely have learned something from every single one of our guests and it has given me the confidence to continue to show up as I am and to question things. I think every single one of the provocateurs that we’ve had on the podcast over time has questioned something on their journey. It hasn’t turned me into a skeptic or a deep skeptic of everything I hear, but it has led me to be more curious about what I see going on around me and whether it’s fit for what we’re trying to achieve. I’d say that’s something that isn’t necessarily new, but it’s gotten sharpened and I’ve gotten confidence from these very successful people we’ve had on to continue to push in that way.

Des

And I’d have to say what I learned, what I’ve taken away is I don’t put my jeans in the washing machine anymore. What Chip Bergh told us is his jeans have never been in, his Levi’s have never been in a washing machine. He did point out that he does clean them from time to time. He just doesn’t put them in a washing machine. I think he puts them in the shower or something. And that was a sustainability point, wasn’t it? The point he was making is that the amount of water that gets wasted making denim, making jeans, is not nearly as much as the amount of water that people waste by washing them, over washing their jeans. They don’t need to wash them as often as they do, unless you’re doing a manual job where the jeans are actually getting dirty. So I took that to heart, if that’s helpful.

Kulleni

And I will say I still wash my jeans. Hopefully that’s not too much of a knock on the environment. But I will say as I listened to the episodes, the thing that struck me is, you know, even as they told these stories about change and the pivots, it was rare that they dwelled on something as a failure, right? It was, I transitioned from this to this. I learned this from that experience. So for me, the compilation in some ways validates my choices in life because you’re not looking back thinking that chapter was a mistake. You completed that chapter in order to be ready for the next one. And you are also in a learning and curious mode in the new roles that you take. Right? So I think that mindset allows you to explore and be courageous, not because you don’t think you’re going to fail at something, but even if you do, you’re going to get something out of it, and it just opens new doors.

Geoff

That’s a great point. They’ve seen failure as learning, or at least challenges as learning, as opposed to real failure.

Stuart

Over the last year, Steve, you’ve taken on a new role with an emphasis and focus on sustainability. Have these conversations helped you figure out your stance in the new role and what you’ve got to do?

Steve

For sure. And one of the things I take to heart is that while this podcast hasn’t necessarily been sustainability or equity focused, which is the scope of the work that I’m now responsible for. All of the leaders we’ve had are, I think, striving for a view of business leadership as not just serving shareholders, but serving all stakeholders in business, whether it’s the environment or the people of this planet and making sure that we have an equitable future. And for me, the learning I take away is sustainability is all about the ability to continue on doing what you’re doing without exploiting some resource that you’ve got for your advantage. And I think what we’re learning, or at least what I’m learning from all these leaders is there is a real pragmatic way to succeed both in business and in doing, quote unquote, good things for the planet and its people that are not at all in conflict. In fact, I would argue, the more that I see businesses uniquely focused on making money, particularly in the short term – the more that those businesses are ripe for disruption, are not curious about delighting customers, don’t attract great employees – I think that those are the businesses that are going to ultimately be challenged as the world goes through a major transition to become more sustainable, whether it’s in how we think about the planet or the planet’s population. So for me, I take a lot out of this podcast into that role because I think we have to challenge the orthodoxy that somehow that’s a side thing to leadership. And I think that actually we will be more successful at all of it by integrating it.

Stuart

This is a good opportunity, building on that, Steve, to think about what next? What does the future hold? This is our first episode of 2024. What’s your prediction for the coming year?

Steve

Yeah, maybe I’ll build on what I said and then I’ll let others go. So I’m going to kind of reframe your question slightly, Stuart, as opposed to making this a prediction, make it a hope. And my hope is that business leaders broadly see that taking a multi-stakeholder view is not at conflict with serving the standard view of serving shareholders well. In fact, it’s a compliment. And the organizations that do that are more likely to delight customers, to delight their people, to have positive influence around the world and be a provocateur and shape their surroundings. And so my hope is that more adopt that multi-stakeholder view into their strategy, how they operate their businesses, because I think that that holds great promise.

Stuart

Kulleni, what’s your hope?

Kulleni

My hope for this year is, as we talked about, we started the episode discussing wellbeing and resilience and the ability to really stay connected to purpose. So I think, you know, 2024 gives us a huge opportunity to not just understand, Steve, all the things that you just said around the sustainability and the stakeholder mentality, as opposed to just the shareholder mentality. But for the workforce that we have and for the workforce that we are, our investment in self-care, well-being actually builds resilience for the business and our families and our communities. And that there’s a way that businesses can really support that. So we talked about the gender gap in wages. There’s also a health gap based on gender, race, income, etc. So really that businesses can expand for a healthier workforce, which is going to lead to actually a healthier business.

Stuart

Geoff, peace, love, and understanding. What’s your hope?

Geoff

Well, that’s it. You just said it, Stuart. Well, so I’m not sure I can build out much more on what Steve and Kulleni have talked about here, but if I had to express it as a hope, it is that the world, its leaders actually apply what we’ve talked about on this podcast. And I’m not suggesting that we have a worldwide listenership here. I hope it’s at least decent enough that it affects some sort of change. But the reality is, and this is at the heart of a lot of what we’ve talked about for the last two years, we are living in a world of accelerating change and deepening uncertainty. That is a reality, whether you’re talking about technological uncertainty, geopolitical uncertainty, technological acceleration, whatever the case may be. And in those conditions, we can’t sit back and expect the world to work to our favor or to work to the rules that we’ve set before. Every single one of the provocateurs that we’ve had on this podcast, and I think the general learning that certainly I’ve taken away from it, is active engagement is the only way to succeed. And only if we can actually go try to, whether it’s achieving the things that we individually want to do or achieving the things that our companies want to do, actively engaging in a way that doesn’t presume that the old rules are going to stay for the future is the only way that we will succeed both individually and as organizations. And I’d say that probably is the idea that I’d love to see anyone listening to this and anyone beyond it start to apply as we go through 2024, because all of those conditions will only deepen as we go through the year and beyond.

Stuart

And we should say that Dambisa Moyo, who appeared in our second episode, I think a couple of years ago, has been elevated to the House of Lords in the UK. And that just shows the influence of the podcast. So she’s spreading the lessons in the UK, at least.

Geoff

I’m sure she gives credit to the Provocateurs podcast. 

Stuart

We made all the difference. Her career was lagging until we got involved. [All laugh] 

Des

So to some of the points that have been made earlier, just trying to link it back to some of the people we had on last year and looking forward. I think it was Jim Stangle that talked about when you look at the world through the purpose lens, when an organisation looks through the purpose lens, it’s a much wider lens. You’re not just looking at the money, you’re not just looking at, you know, creating shareholder value. It’s a better lens for an organisation to look at the world through. I think that’s true. You know, it’s the old thing of if you do the right things for the right reasons and you’re successful that the profits and the shareholder value will flow from that and beginning to understand that.
Another thing Sunny Bonnell said; the four most important words in language are, “I have an idea.” And my hope for this coming year is that anybody… That we are able, our organisations and our leaders get better at listening to people who say, “I have an idea.” And that people come forward and say, “I have an idea.” Whoever they are, wherever they are in the organisation, whatever their identity, what they look like, what they sound like. That would be my hope. That we get better. We sharpen up the listening superpower that leaders have.

Stuart

Thank you. We’re out of time.

Geoff

We don’t get to hear your hopes, Stuart?

Stuart

My prediction, I prefer a prediction. My prediction is that we will begin to see AI as an opportunity rather than a threat and that our entire outlook on technology will change over the next couple of years. So it will be seen in more positive light and we’ll begin to unearth the power of AI in the management and the professional spheres. And peace, love, and understanding, obviously.

Geoff

That’s a given!

Stuart

So that was a great wrap-up of our 2023 episodes with some extra insights and extra spice.

We look forward to some fantastically provocative conversations in 2024 with Kulleni on board. Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Kulleni. Thank you, Geoff. Thank you, Des. And thank you, everyone, for joining us.

This podcast is part of an ongoing series of interviews with executives. The executives’ participation in this podcast are solely for educational purposes based on their knowledge of the subject and the views expressed by them are solely their own. This podcast should not be deemed or construed to be for the purpose of soliciting business for any of the companies mentioned, nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse the services or products provided by these companies.

Stuart Crainer:

Hello, I’m Stuart Crainer. I’m the co-founder of Thinkers50, and I would like to welcome you to the podcast series, Provocateurs, in which we explore the experiences, insights, and perspectives of inspiring leaders. I’m joined by my fellow Thinkers 50 co-founder Des Dearlove. And from Deloitte, we are joined by Stacy Janiak. Stacy is Deloitte’s Chief Growth Officer, so she brings deep insights directly from the marketplace and Deloitte’s global clients. And alongside Stacy, we have Steve Goldbach and Geoff Tuff. Steve is the Chief Strategy Officer at Deloitte and Geoff is a Principal with the firm. Steve and Geoff are the authors of two books. Their first best seller was Detonate: Why – And How – Corporations Must Blow Up Best Practices (and bring a beginner’s mind) To Survive. Most recently, Steve and Geoff are the authors of the book, which sparked the idea for this series. That book is Provoke, which demonstrates why and how leaders must be purposeful in shaping the future, intentionally engaging with emergent trends, not only to benefit their own organization, but also to make the world a better place.

Des Dearlove:

This episode of Provocateurs brings Stuart, Geoff, Stacy, Steve and I together to talk about what we’ve learned from our amazing guests over the last year. What are we taking away from the conversations?

Stuart Crainer:

And we have had some amazing guests, Valerie Rainford, who has championed talent and diversity in the banking world and now for her own company.

Des Dearlove:

Debbie Bial, the founder and president of the Posse Foundation.

Stuart Crainer:

The board member, author, and now member of the UK’s House of Lords, Dambisa Moyo.

Des Dearlove:

Former CEO of Best Buy, and author of The Heart of Business, Hubert Joly.

Stuart Crainer:

The trailblazer for Leading for Girls, Julie Carrier.

Des Dearlove:

Nobel Laureate, Bob Lefkowitz.

Stuart Crainer:

The astronaut, Charlie Camarda.

Des Dearlove:

And the Dutch entrepreneur and pioneer of new ways of working, Tom van der Lubbe.

Stuart Crainer:

And the author of The Quit Alternative, Ben Fanning.

Des Dearlove:

So where to start? Stacy, can you tell us what you’ve taken away from these amazing conversations?

Stacy Janiak:

Love to, Des. As I reflect on these conversations, what really jumped out at me was the role that purpose played for each of our provocateurs and how they harness that to create greatness in each of their organizations. Debbie Bial, that was mentioned, she had a great comment around the need to stay true to the mission and that oftentimes she had to say ‘no’ to suggestions or opportunities for her organization because she needed to stay grounded in its mission. And Hubert, in his book The Heart of Business, which is really talking about how do you create a different paradigm to lead with noble purpose, he shared with us the story of creating an environment where people feel like they connect with the purpose of the organization and what drives them as individuals. And so just that connection between an individual’s purpose and what they’re able to contribute to in an organization is something I found very powerful.

Des Dearlove:

You mentioned Hubert. One of the things I remember him very openly sharing is that he had a bit of a midlife, he had a bit of a wobble. When he got to the top of the organization and he got to the top of the mountain, and he found actually, there was no joy and there was no meaning to it. And that actually he kind of had to reinvent himself and discover his noble purpose. So it’s interesting. It was a real personal leadership journey for him, I think. What did you take away, Steve, from the conversations?

Steve Goldbach:

Well, on purpose, I particularly felt like everybody had some sort of more noble purpose. Ben Fanning was about getting communications out and it was ironic that we were doing Ben’s… Des, remember when he was in the middle of Hurricane Ian coming down on him. And Julie Carrier talked about the importance of purpose. Everyone’s got a central thing and very few, I can’t remember a single comment through the whole thing, through the whole year about how important financial success was. It just happened when you had purpose lined up. And I know one of our future guests, Jim Stangle, will talk about that as well, I’m sure.

Stuart Crainer:

There’s also, I think Des just alluded to it with Hubert Joly, it’s easy to lose your purpose as you progress up organizations. I think there’s some research saying that CEOs, the biggest issues they have to wrestle with are isolation and ambiguity. And I think purpose can get lost along the way.

Des Dearlove:

Geoff, what are your thoughts?

Geoff Tuff:

Let me build on the purpose thing. And in case it’s not dead obvious to our listeners or watchers, these hopefully will be the secrets of what it means to be a provocateur. So I think what the five of us are trying to do here is to reverse engineer how to actually affect change in the world. And the thing that struck me in each of the conversations that we’ve had so far is that clearly, each of our guests has a mission or a vision. And that’s connected to purpose, but I see it as being slightly different. But in the stories that they told and the growth arc that each of them have been on, if you listen to what they say, if you read some of what the conversation led us to, they all evolved that mission and that vision. The thing that they helped passionately, they evolved it in their journey through interactions with people.

It struck me that the stories they told about certain incidents or certain people who influenced their lives are the things that actually led them to have an evolved vision and an evolved mission that actually, if not completely different, quite different from where they started. So Julie Carrier, for example, I think she presented as always having been passionate about enabling leadership in young women. That has been her mission, or at least my takeaway from our conversation that has been something that she has been trying to achieve through everything that she’s done over time. But as she met young women, and we met some amazing young women on that podcast that we did with her, I think I was doing that one with you, Des, as she interacted with these young women, she came to understand that it was enabling the growth mindset that ultimately allowed them to feel they should claim that leadership and play the leadership roles. And so Julie evolved her mission from understanding that leadership was important to really focusing on the growth mindset and enabling young women to take on a growth mindset. 

Steve Goldbach:

Geoff, it goes back to some of the principles of Detonate a little bit. All these folks kind of understood that purpose was, for them, the driver of changing human behavior, right? To some extent they all understood that if they had a really amazing purpose that was clear and well communicated, that they would get people to follow them. It’s true of Lefkowitz, it’s true of van der Lubbe. They were all different, but they used purpose to change the behavior of the people in their organizations and especially Hubert who is up against some pretty tough sledding.

Geoff Tuff:

To change people, but also, and this I think is critical, they kept their eyes wide open and listened to others. They were able to be impacted by the people that they interacted with, not just the people in their organizations, but people all around them. So I think it was Dambisa who talked about the fact that – and Dambisa has always been focused on enabling human progress – but the benefit of her having not grown up in a western society of having grown up in Zambia allowed her to enter into situations where she will was always paying attention to others, to what they were saying, to the way that they saw the world. And she was reflecting on how it was different from her perspective. But it’s that sort of learning journey that I took away in all of our guests, and I could rattle through all of them, I took away as being one of the most important components of being a provocateur.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah. I remember you referenced the conversation with Julie Carrier and how we met not just the president of the school where she was piloting her program, very much leadership development for girls and young women. And we met Ella. Do you remember Ella, who was 14?

Geoff Tuff:

Who, and by the way, I wanted to hire on the spot. I need to follow up and offer her a job.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah. And Julie got in touch since the podcast to say thanks for the little bit of attention we drew to it. But also to say that now that program has expanded vastly and they’re taking leadership development into 120 different schools around the world. So that’s really exciting. The thing that I took away from the conversation was the leader identity and discovering your leader identity when you’re in adolescence and realizing that you can be a leader and that you can have this moment of revelation. And we can help people. We can grow more leaders if we let people discover their leader identity at a younger age and then we nurture it.

Geoff Tuff:

It’s funny as we talk through this, and I hadn’t necessarily thought about this coming into this discussion, but so many of these threads are interconnected amongst these guests. And while I don’t think our nine guests to date have been totally random, we haven’t purposely tried to make them connected in any way. But what you just said, Des, about Julie and what she’s done is exactly the premise behind what Debbie has been building in the Posse Foundation and the journey that she’s been on over time to first shift the change of leadership on campuses in the US but now change the face of leadership everywhere around the country, in the C-suite, in government offices, in nonprofits, et cetera. And so there’s some very tight connections. I bet we could explore this actually for hours and Steve will eventually tell me I need to stop exploring it for hours. But I’m sure there are all sorts of interconnections amongst all our guests.

Stacy Janiak:

Well, I think that we could say for all of them on purpose, is that this was not something that was a relatively recent phenomenon for them, that this was something that was just at the very foundation of how they lead. And I think that’s something for all of our listeners to take away as they think about their foundation as provocateurs.

Stuart Crainer:

Steve, what have you learned from our sessions this year?

Steve Goldbach:

So, the points I want to reflect on are two concepts that I want to connect. So the first one is the importance of diversity contributing to a team’s success. And we heard about that first and foremost from Dambisa, who talked about the importance of diversity on the board, and the importance of cognitive diversity, and different ways of thinking, and how her background and different ways of thinking has been very important to driving diversity of thought on boards – how that’s critical. And the second one is around transparency. And we heard about that from Tom van der Lubbe and the way he runs his organization referencing the Kim Scott book of radical transparency and radical candor. And that’s a way that they’ve been running their organization.

And the person who I think best connects that is Valerie Rainford, who talks about the importance of – to drive diversity, you actually have to have transparency in your data. So if you’re not sharing all your diversity data, you’re not making it clear to your executives, to the public, then it’s very hard to actually take your organization forward. You will always be stuck in the mud. I felt like there’s an interesting provocation, I’d like to get the reactions from this group on.

Geoff and I together, with a colleague of ours, Jeff Johnson, recently had a piece in HBR where we talked about the problem of the interview as the primary mechanism that the corporate world uses to evaluate talent. And what makes for a good interview? Connecting with each other. And what makes for a good connection? I find something similar about that person. You’re always searching for that connection. And then you walk away saying, “Oh, that was a great interview. We connected.” And the challenge I’ve got was that’s the least likely thing to drive diversity if you’re looking for a mini me. And we’ve proposed an idea of a minimal viable demonstration of competency, and I think it’s pretty-

Geoff Tuff:

You can blame me for that mouthful.

Steve Goldbach:

Yeah, exactly. And we want to explore different things, but we know it’s going to be difficult for corporate America to get rid of the interview. So how might we do that? Do we need to do that? I’d be curious what you all think about that.

Des Dearlove:

That’s interesting. I recall Hubert talking about the fact that they paired him, the CEO, with somebody he wouldn’t normally spend time with, somebody from a completely different ethnic background and the different experience of life. Hubert is very sort of suave and French and very sophisticated. Not to say that whoever they teamed him up with wasn’t all of those things, but in their own way. But I think deliberately inciting diversity, putting people together, and maybe there’s something in that. I don’t know how that would work in terms of replacing your interview.

Geoff Tuff:

Well, and I think in some ways as I reflect on the conversation we had with Tom van der Lubbe, his organization is a very unique organization in lots of ways, but a very unique culture. And he talked a little bit about some people who came in and they didn’t like the radical transparency. They didn’t like how open everyone was about everything that was going on at the company all the way down to actually publishing different levels of pay throughout the organization. That, in some ways, is the ultimate manifestation of what you’re talking about here, Steve.

Stuart, you’ll have to keep me honest on this because you did that interview with me. But I seem to recall that anyone was allowed to propose someone to be hired and anyone was allowed to veto a hire along the way so that if someone came through and Thomas, the CEO, loved this person, still everyone had veto power for that. But once someone gets into the organization, in some ways Steve, that is the minimally viable demonstration of competence, if they can actually live in that type of environment and deal with that radical transparency, then they’re a good fit.

Stuart Crainer:

I think the issue with transparency is often seen that transparency begins at the bottom of the organizational hierarchy. But in fact, transparency should begin at the top. And I would question how many boards actually act in a transparent way, members of the board with each other. And I think there’s an issue there in that boards are not seen as teams. They’re seen as a collection of strong individuals and the team element is actually downplayed.

Stacy Janiak:

Valerie focused on the need for this to come from the top and that you could have an inclusive environment, without an engaged CEO, but you weren’t really going to make progress in moving the needle and creating equitable policies unless you had both an engaged CEO and you had the HR leader and the general counsel and a couple of other senior leaders around that table. So to your point, Stuart, it’s about that team that can actually affect change and starting that at the top. And I think your suggestion around boards is well placed because it has to be there as well in addition to that management team.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah. I was interested in what Ben Fanning was talking about, he was singing the praises of just what we’re doing now, podcasting. And he was saying that when a CEO starts doing a podcast, they get into the ear of employees and they can actually be much more transparent and reveal their authentic selves. And obviously, he’s an advocate of podcasts, he hosts a podcast. But he was saying it’s a different medium and you can get to know the CEO and senior management in a completely different way because you’re multitasker, you can be doing other things while you’ve got them in your ear. But it can be a very interesting medium to talk to people and for them to get to know you a little bit better so that you’re not just this distant figure up on the stage or in the boardroom, but you’re actually someone they can in some ways identify with.

Geoff Tuff:

There’s so much that we’re talking about in here, which is just literally about being a human being. And actually, I don’t know if it’s vulnerability or allowing vulnerability, I think that was some of what Ben talked about as well. But just every single one of these people, first of all, they’re fascinating individuals in lots of different ways. But every single one of them presented as a real grounded human who is open to having connections not just with us, but with lots of people and learning along the way. And it’s probably going too far to say that they are provocateurs, because they have been able to express themselves as real human beings more than most. But there’s definitely something about the ability to connect and to be open with others that, I would assume, that gets others to move, as you’re acting as a provocateur.

Steve Goldbach:

Maybe just to wrap this one up, maybe there’s something about being, and this is a maybe, so please comment below because we certainly didn’t solve the-

Geoff Tuff:

I know what happens when Steve leads with a maybe.

Steve Goldbach:

Yeah, we certainly didn’t solve the interview challenge. So if you’ve got a thought on that, we’d love to see it in the comments if you’re watching on a medium that has that. But maybe the connection is that provocateurs are able to connect with people who aren’t just like them. They’re able to actually create diverse teams and build those connections with a broader group of people than those who reflect back at them the things that they like in themselves. And so maybe there’s a skill there, I don’t know. But it’s certainly worth maybe exploring as we go through the next few podcasts with our next few guests. Who’s next, Des?

Geoff Tuff:

Well actually Steve, if I could comment on that, and I’m going to comment positively. You maybe this time turned out to potentially be right and I’ll link it back to actually one of the premises that you and I wrote about in the book Provoke. And that provocateurs generally are able to recognize when an uncertainty is shifting from being a question of if to being a question of when. The book was all about how we can all act as better leaders in the face of uncertainty.

My guess is, and connected to what you just said, Steve, you can’t actually notice that phase change. You can’t understand when an uncertainty is resolving from being a question of if to when, unless you’re taking in a diverse set of perspectives and you have your ears open more than others. And the best way to have your ears open and your eyes open more than others is to take in lots of different data, lots of different points of view, and get beyond the natural blinders that are created if you’re not actually working with diverse teams.

All right. With that, who’s up next, Des? I think we need to hear from Des and Stuart on some of your reflections.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah. So failure, that’s the signal I picked up. Our provocateurs weren’t afraid of failure. That was very clear the way they were talking. You just knew that these were people, that wasn’t something that intimidated them. But what came out of, particularly the conversation with Charlie Camarda, the astronaut we spoke to, was this sense of learning how to fail well. And one of the things we try and do at Thinkers50 is to try to pick up these kinds of static, the signals that are in the ether. And I definitely pick up at the moment that this notion of how to fail well is there, it’s in the ether.

I know. I was talking to Amy Edmondson. She’s writing – her new book is going to be on the right kind of wrong, the science of failing. Dan Pink’s book, he talks about, it’s all about the power of regret and he talks about having a failure resume. We should all put our biggest failures on our resume and see what we can learn from them. So there’s some interesting ideas out there. And Charlie, our astronaut, you were on that one with me, Geoff, that was really quite fascinating – listening to him talking about… Because I should give you a little bit of background. Charlie was an astronaut candidate in 1996 and flew as a mission specialist on STS-114, which was NASA’s return flight immediately following the Columbia disaster in 2003, obviously, which claimed the lives of seven crew.

So he was responsible for initiating teams to successfully diagnose the cause of the Columbia tragedy. And the thing that really struck me, he talked about, he said NASA forgot how to fail. And then when we drew out the lessons, if you remember Geoff, and you were sort of describing it as rather than failure as how to learn and the fact that lots of organizations forget how to fail, but Charlie’s point was that you have to interrogate information and a theory to the point of destruction, otherwise you do not understand that phenomenon properly. And he was talking about the difference between research engineers and just engineers who are happy that it works; and research engineers who want to take things into the lab and just keep on testing it until it fails, because only then can you know what you’re really truly dealing with.

And I do wonder in this kind of post pandemic world, when some things went well in terms of what our leaders did and some things didn’t go so well, whether there’s an appetite now for this idea of learning to fail well and not see it as a negative, but to actually see it as a positive. So what are your thoughts on that?

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, I quite liked Charlie. I admired his dedication and I can see he’d be a difficult man to manage because he was very, very strong willed. And he said he tried being humble and a team player, but it wasn’t getting him anywhere. And what made him succeed was really a dedication to learning truth. He was a great speaker of truth and teamwork. So what I liked about him was the grittiness of his behavior. But his behavior went back to Stacy’s first point about purpose. Because he had the overarching purpose, nothing came in the way. He wouldn’t let anything stand in the way.

Stacy Janiak:

Well, what struck me in that conversation was the ability to flip failure to learning. Because I think that cognitively, whether you are failing or your team is failing – to be able to be unemotional about that and think about it as a learning process and go for the positive and what could be taking forward. Because he also said, “You should never say, ‘Well, we couldn’t do any more than we did,’ that there’s always something you could have done or tried at least to do.” And Des, I do think that there’s a different mindset after having the world go through a pandemic together and having so many leaders be uncertain and not have all the facts, clearly not have all the facts. I think that’s changed a little bit of the perspective and acceptance of failure because we were all trying and failing at things to try and move forward during such a volatile time.

Steve Goldbach:

Stacy, I wonder. One of the things that Geoff and I talk about a lot is there’s a lot of work that’s done or a lot of energy that’s devoted to celebrating failure and making it a positive thing. And I almost wish that instead of talking about some of these things as failures, it’s just reframing them. Let’s not even talk about failing, right? It’s like we got stuff wrong, but it’s… we’re on a learning journey. It’s not a failure to learn. We tried stuff and did it work out perfectly? No. But I don’t know how many tests you guys took in your life. I rarely got 100% on my tests. So does that mean I failed if I didn’t get everything exactly right? Well, no, I learned a lot of stuff on the way.

And I wonder if we stopped celebrating failure and started just saying, “What did we learn? What did we learn?” And make that the emphasis. Then we wouldn’t even be talking about things as failures. They’re not failures, we just didn’t get 100%. We learned something and we’re going to move on. I almost worry that constantly, we remind ourselves we failed and therefore, it’s like, oh, it’s a failure and then we’re sad about it. Let’s celebrate the learning process.

Des Dearlove:

Modes of thinking. It’s how we think about things. Again, reminded of Adam Grant’s book, Think Again, where he talks about thinking like a scientist, which is really what Charlie’s point was, is if you think like a scientist, it’s not a question of failure. And Adam Grant talks about an experiment they did where they took a bunch of entrepreneurs and got some of them to think like scientists. So that instead of thinking of their business as a done deal, they thought about it as a theory. So they were testing hypotheses. And actually, I think the results were quite startling. They found that they kind of created, I think it was 30 or 40 times the revenue of the control group because they were that much more open-minded. They had a different kind of thought process going on. It wasn’t the business, it was simply a series of hypotheses and if something didn’t work, you switched it around and they were more likely to pivot because they knew that it was an experiment.

Geoff Tuff:

And by definition, the scientific method is a method to learn. The one thing, and I’m not sure Charlie said this word in our interview Des, but it was pretty clear that what he was referencing was the issue that NASA had was one of hubris. And so I wonder if maybe the opposite of thinking like a scientist is thinking like a leader with little humility. I’m not thinking of the right adjective at this point. But there was definitely something in the circumstances when things went wrong at NASA was because people thought they knew the answer, they thought they knew which data to be looking at, they thought they knew that they had seen this type of issue before and they moved forward not thinking that there was a risk to ultimately something that became catastrophic. And I think the ability to act with humility and to lose the hubris as a leader is absolutely at the heart of every single one of the provocateurs we’ve spoken to so far.

Des Dearlove:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I agree with that.

Stuart Crainer:

Steve and I talked to a real scientist, Bob Lefkowitz, and he was really inspiring and he talked about failure as well. He didn’t see it as failure. He reviewed his year’s activities at the end of the year to see which ones were working well, and he was aiming for 15%.

Geoff Tuff:

Yeah, I loved that interview. I was just reading that transcript that I think earlier on today, Stuart, and 15%, he had that grad student who said, “What? 15%, that’s what you’re aiming for?”

Stuart Crainer:

But he didn’t regard any of it as failure. He regarded it as learning very clearly and was very transparent about it as well.

Steve Goldbach:

I remember in that interview-

Des Dearlove:

And he won the Nobel Prize.

Steve Goldbach:

Yeah, exactly Des. Exactly.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. Well, Des was talking about his specialist subject of failure. I’m putting my ego to one side and talking about humility. And I think humility, as you were just saying, Geoff, does come through virtually all the sessions. I think Jim Collins in Good to Great talks about level five leadership, which combines personal humility with an indomitable will and humility in that kind of framework is not a passive thing. And I think there’s a danger that we think of humility as a very passive activity, but it’s a feeling of strength and determination.

And going back to Stacy’s first point, humility, which we saw in the episodes we’ve done this year, is also characterized by, there is ambition in humility, but it’s ambition for a cause or a purpose. And you think of Bob Lefkowitz who described himself as an accidental scientist, which kind of plays down his success. He did win the Nobel Prize, and he’s affected tens of millions of people’s lives. And one of the things he said, which kind of stuck with me, was “I never gave orders to anyone. I worked by persuasion.” And he also said he’s never been the smartest person in the room. And he said, “I’m never embarrassed by not knowing something.” And he made a big deal of mentoring, which he’d done throughout his career. But he also said he learnt from those mentoring relationships.

So that’s kind of a basic humility. And I think lots of the others, like Debbie Bial, she was big on teams. It’s not about me, it’s us. Even though she was a founder of Posse, which has generated $1.6 billion in scholarships for young people, just putting themselves at the back and putting the team at the forefront. Steve?

Steve Goldbach:

Stuart, I love that point. And there’s an attitude about leaders, and we spoke a bit about it earlier, but I think it’s worth calling attention to it again. One of the longtime mentors that I’ve had has taught me all about Chris Argyris and productive interactions. And the phrase that Chris Argyris invented that he told people before he passed away, to say to themselves before every meeting to make that a good interaction was, “I have something important to say, but I might be missing something.” And that meant that they came into the meeting with the attitude that they weren’t there to be just a listener, they were there to contribute, but to also be listening because they were open minded that there was something about the world that they didn’t know. And I think Stuart, the point about humility, all of our guests came in with that kind of a mindset saying, “I could be missing something,” and valued the ability to hear from their teams, from outside perspectives, from everyone about what they might be missing. And Stacy, what did you think?

Stacy Janiak:

I’m going to connect what you’re saying because you’re reminding me of a great piece of advice I got once, which was when you’re confronted with an idea that may be different, than your own perspective, is to ask yourself internally, what if they are right? Because that causes you to then ask a lot of subsequent questions to really explore the idea in an unemotional way. But I also think it ties back to what Des was describing around failure. If you have that humility to be able to go through to make decisions that may not end with the outcomes that were intended, allows you, I think, to take the learning from that in a much different way when you approach it with a level of humility like our provocateurs do.

Stuart Crainer:

Bob Lefkowitz said he didn’t mind where great ideas came from. If he was in a room and it was an undergraduate, he’d be willing to embrace the idea, or if it’s a senior professor, he’d be willing to embrace it. It didn’t really matter because he had an overall purpose and he’s willing to, as long as ideas were willing to be shared, he was happy to go with any of them. It’s that openness, I think. There’s a nice line from Dambisa Moyo. Dambisa comes from Zambia, now on the board of Chevron, 3M and Conde Nast and actually just last week, was elevated to the House of Lords in the UK. And she said in our conversation, “I’m very much a debutante.” She was basically saying, “I go in thinking I know nothing and that revolves around listening and being willing to take on ideas from elsewhere.”

Geoff Tuff:

So it definitely feels like we’re starting to drive some themes here. We’ve got humility, we’ve got an extreme openness to learn, we’ve got the ability to have a mission, to have a vision, but to take in all that information and evolve. We’ve got a natural orientation to working with others and listening to others and actually being a human being. And we are, I think, ultimately we’re talking about a set of individuals, we have spoken with a set of individuals who really demonstrate that they have an ability to shift things in the world, to shift others because they’re able to show up in a way that is fundamentally open. So I wonder what that then means? What do you think is coming up next for our various different guests? Who should we be thinking about bringing in, who fits some of those attributes? Any perspectives?

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, I don’t think the business world has a monopoly on the things you’ve just talked about, Geoff. And I think people in the business world have always been open to learn from other areas, and I think that’s ever more so. You can learn a lot from an astronaut and you can learn a lot from a sports person or a musician. And I think that willingness to learn is actually what marks business apart as a discipline.

Geoff Tuff:

I will say it was pretty amazing in the conversation with Charlie, just how many of the lessons that he learned at NASA are directly applicable to the businesses that we serve in the jobs that Steve, Stacy and I do.

Des Dearlove:

It was interesting too, how upon the kind of management thinking Charlie was as well. He was citing Amy Edmondson’s psychological safety. So that’s what went wrong at NASA was it wasn’t psychologically safe. So people couldn’t challenge, they couldn’t ask the questions about expertise and the knowledge they had because it wasn’t psychologically safe at that time. But I think our guests should, to Steve’s point about diversity, we should be mixing it up as much as we can because people listening to this will probably predominantly be in the business world, and they really need to hear those voices from the edges, I think, from different, different disciplines.

Steve Goldbach:

I mean, the disciplines that I’m interested in exploring a little bit, there are a number of very interesting folks at the leading edge of healthcare and longevity that are really disrupting the views of whether it’s healthcare or how do we take care of ourselves, and looking very much like a scientist and saying, “What causes death? What causes your health span to decline over time? And how can we take interventions early in order to create longevity in your health span, not just your lifespan?” And it requires a lot earlier intervention than people tend to think. And there’s some very interesting thinkers in that domain that it would be really fun to explore and how those ideas might eventually disrupt how we think about healthcare around the world.

Geoff Tuff:

You’re describing something that I think is generalizable to other industries, other situations, Steve, where you’ve got a foundation of incumbent thinking that is being challenged and that is actually being assessed in a different way. And so I’m sure that as we continue to identify our provocateurs and pick our guests, it will be something about challenging the incumbent thinking that will be one of their key attributes.

Stacy Janiak:

I think it’d be interesting, so many of these challenges, I see even to the healthcare challenges, that require both a public and private approach and being able to capture some of those provocateurs that are out there on the public side, particularly from a policy perspective, even some of the lessons that we’ve collectively learned or that they’ve learned in particular in dealing with the pandemic and what’s to come in that arena.

Geoff Tuff:

I totally agree with you, Stacy. As you all know, I do a lot of work in the energy space these days, and we are not going to actually make any progress, let alone achieve some of the targets that we’ve set via the Paris Accords and elsewhere, unless we do have that public private connection and ability to work together. And there’s some super cool stuff happening in energy, especially in particular around hydrogen right now that I think is going to be an interesting manifestation of that. So maybe I’ll put that on the list of someone to find as a provocateur.

Stuart Crainer:

Would you like to work for these people? I’m just looking at the list of people we’ve spoken to and I was thinking, would I like to work for them or with them?

Steve Goldbach:

Stuart, I might take a bullet for them, let alone work for them.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah, quite.

Steve Goldbach:

They’re so inspiring.

Des Dearlove:

They’re very, very, very inspiring, I thought. Yeah, that was another characteristic.

Geoff Tuff:

I’m looking down my list here, Stuart, and I’d say some of them. Yes, I would love to work with some of them.

Stuart Crainer:

I think they’d be pretty demanding.

Geoff Tuff:

I would agree.

Stuart Crainer:

Leads onto another question. Do you get promoted for being a provocateur?

Stacy Janiak:

Oh, that’s a good question.

Des Dearlove:

I guess that depends on the culture of the organization.

Stacy Janiak:

And time and place.

Geoff Tuff:

Again, I’m looking down the list here, and I can’t think of a real promotion path story that came out in any one of these. It’s almost like they went their own direction and ended up running the organization that they were responsible for, not through typical promotion paths.

Steve Goldbach:

I think about Valerie. Valerie became a senior vice president and a senior executive at JP Morgan, at the Fed. Dambisa sits on several boards. I know that boards, someone has to put you on a board. So people chose to have her views. Debbie was a founder, Julie was a founder. But I do think provoking is situation contingent. And I think we are often asked, “Should we be provoking from the middle of the organization?” I think the answer is yes, but you have to reflect that human behavior, you have to do it in a way that actually makes your ideas acceptable to those who are in the decision making mode. And that’s why it’s a challenge. But you have to do it with an understanding of what’s going to drive the behaviors of the decision makers.

Stuart Crainer:

I think one of my favorite stories, probably the favorite moment from the series so far was Valerie’s story about, she was working in a supermarket on a checkout. And one of the customers noted she was really good with adding numbers up and said, “You should work in a bank.” And I think a lot of careers and lives revolve around those moments, which I suppose you can influence, to some extent, being in the right place at the right time and following up on it.

Geoff Tuff:

All right. So Stuart, I like that as a topic. Favorite moments is something you’ve just introduced. Maybe we can each go around and talk about our favorite moments from the various episodes. And I’m sorry Des, if I’m going to steal one of yours. But mine, hands down, was when Ella joined us with Julie Carrier. And beyond being just an absolutely inspiring young woman who had a degree of self-confidence and willingness to put her out there, that gives me great hope for the future of this world. It really brought home for me, not just how amazing all our provocateurs are, but how they can impact the people that they interact with day in, day out.

If you look at the nine people that we’ve had on the show so far, there’s no doubt that they have impacted hundreds and hundreds of lives. And Debbie Bial, for example, we know that she’s impacted, I think at this point, the Posse Foundation has supported more than 10,000 scholars through that organization. You think about that, massive people that have been impacted by these provocateurs and who bring to society all the attributes and the capabilities that we’ve talked about amongst these nine amazing people. And that truly does feel like we’re going to be shifting the face of what leadership looks like everywhere around the world if we pay attention to these provocateurs. So my favorite moment, Ella.

Des Dearlove:

My favorite moment was talking to Charlie, the astronaut. And I think at some point I said, Charlie, “I have to ask you, what’s it like looking down from space and looking down at planet earth?” And I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting him to say, “Well, I wasn’t really that bothered. I wasn’t really paying attention. I was busy doing what I had to do.” But that’s what he said. The commander of the mission had to get hold of him by the shoulder and say, “Charlie, look. Take a look at what…” And then he did say that there was some kind of meteorite or something that was quite cool and quite exciting. But how the guy could go to space and still be so intent on what he was doing to not really be paying attention to what the rest of us… Fantastic moment.

Geoff Tuff:

Yeah. That’s great.

Stacy Janiak:

Well, I would say my favorite moment was with Hubert, when he was describing the power of empowerment and putting so much in the hands of the associates out in the stores. And he talked about the story of the child that brought their toy back and the mom wanted to replace it, but he couldn’t let go of it. So the associates pretended to operate on it and to fix him and give him back to him all brand new. And it was nowhere in the store policy manual, that was how you were to address the situation. But the joy that that customer had and the joy that those store associates had was just incredible. It was an incredible example of empowerment.

Des Dearlove:

That was the dinosaur story, wasn’t it?

Stacy Janiak:

That’s right.

Des Dearlove:

That was the little boy with the dinosaur. Yeah, yeah. That was a great story.

Stuart Crainer:

I liked when we were talking to Bob Lefkowitz and he tells everyone to call him Bob, which is fantastic, really because he’s a Nobel Prize winner. It’s kind of proof that people who are down to earth can be brilliant and can change the world.

Steve Goldbach:

Yeah, Bob was amazing. And my personal moment, and I’ll start with our first episode, which was Valerie, which is – I could listen to Valerie talk for hours and hours and hours. She’s just so humble, matter of fact, but speaks plainly in the truth. And whenever I listen to her life story, and I’ve had the privilege of having it told to us for both the podcast and the book, it both brings tears of joy and tears of pain to you at the same time, to know what she’s personally gone through, but yet persevered and thrived so much. My favorite moment is that. I’m really looking forward to another year of this, guys, and doing it together. I just want to say that it’s been so much fun doing this together with you. I love these episodes, too. We got to do more of these, folks. So Stuart, over to you. Bring us home.

Stuart Crainer:

Thank you everyone for joining us, and thank you everyone who’s enjoyed any of our episodes during the last year. Thanks to Steve, Geoff, Stacy, and Des for making this good fun for us as well. But mainly, thank you to the provocateurs, the people we’ve spoken to, the people who’ve inspired us and will continue to inspire us, because I think the lessons we’ve learned from them are long lasting and important ones, personally and professionally. So we would like to thank Valerie Rainford, who’s our first guest, Debbie Bial, Lady Dambisa Moyo, Hubert Joly, Julie Carrier, Bob Lefkowitz, Charlie Camarda, Tom van der Lubbe, and Ben Fanning. And we hope we’ll have some more provocateurs next year. And thank you everyone for joining us.