Provocateurs-logos

Thinkers50 in collaboration with Deloitte presents:

The Provocateurs:

Profiles in Leadership

#TheProvocateurs podcast series

Provocateurs offer fresh insights, novel perspectives and unique ways forward in the face of uncertainty. In a new series from Thinkers50 in collaboration with Deloitte, every month we will present a Provocateur in conversation.

A collaboration between Thinkers50 and Deloitte, the monthly Provocateurs podcast gives you direct access to the thoughts, experiences, stories and insights of remarkable leaders from around the world. The aim is simple: to provoke you to think and act differently through candid and thought provoking conversations with fantastic leaders.

Are you ready to be challenged?

Hosts:

Stuart Crainer

Stuart Crainer

Co-founder, Thinkers50

Biography

About Stuart Crainer

Des Dearlove & Stuart Crainer are the founders and directors of Thinkers50. For two decades, they have been the recognized masters of finding and promoting the most accomplished and promising business and management thinkers worldwide. Internationally recognized experts on business ideas, they are the authors of more than 15 books available in 20 languages, editors of The Financial Times Handbook of Management, and are both former columnists to The Times. They advise thinkers and organizations worldwide.

Des Dearlove

Co-founder, Thinkers50

Biography

About Des Dearlove

Des Dearlove & Stuart Crainer are the founders and directors of Thinkers50. For two decades, they have been the recognized masters of finding and promoting the most accomplished and promising business and management thinkers worldwide. Internationally recognized experts on business ideas, they are the authors of more than 15 books available in 20 languages, editors of The Financial Times Handbook of Management, and are both former columnists to The Times. They advise thinkers and organizations worldwide.

Kulleni Gebreyes

Deloitte US Consulting Life Sciences and Healthcare Industry Leader and US Chief Health Equity Officer

Biography

About Kulleni Gebreyes

Kulleni is the US Consulting Life Sciences & Health Care Industry Leader and US Chief Health Equity Officer. She holds an MD from Harvard Medical School and an MBA from Johns Hopkins. Dr. Gebreyes has developed and implemented strategies for population health management and value-based care, physician alignment and patient activation, diversity, equity and inclusion, and the drivers of health. She is an active advocate for vulnerable and underserved communities. She is also a physician leader with more than 20 years of experience in the health care industry across the commercial and public sector. She drives care delivery transformation for health care organizations pursuing financially sustainable strategies for consumer centric care models that are data driven and digitally enabled. She has also developed strategies for population health management and value-based care that address payment reform, physician alignment and patient activation. In partnership with providers, payers, and employers, Kulleni has successfully developed and implemented clinical analytics tools and applications that reduce operating costs and promote appropriate utilization of resources.

Steve Goldbach

Sustainability, Climate & Equity Leader, Deloitte

Biography

About Steven Goldbach

Steven Goldbach leads Deloitte’s Sustainability practice in the US. This practice serves the complex and novel challenges our clients face across issues such as climate change, DEI, and other challenges associated with creating a more sustainable future. We help clients make measurable progress on all dimensions of these challenges by bringing to the table all areas of Deloitte’s expertise.

Prior to assuming the leadership of this practice, Steve served as Deloitte’s US Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) for 8 years. Over his time as CSO, the US firm made a major pivot in strategy, focusing on winning as an integrated firm. Prior to joining Deloitte, Steve was the head of the New York Office at Monitor Group, and head of strategy for Forbes. 

Steve has co-authored two bestselling books – Detonate: Why – and how – corporations must blow up best practices (and bring a beginner’s mind) to survive (Wiley, 2018), and Provoke: How leaders shape the future by overcoming fatal human flaws (Wiley, 2021). Thinkers50 has nominated Steve as a finalist for the 2019 Distinguished Achievement Award in Strategy and in 2021 for the Distinguished Leadership Award 

Steve holds degrees from Queen’s University at Kingston, where he serves on the Global Advisory Board of its Smith School of Business, and Columbia Business School. He and his wife live in Manhattan with their young daughter.

Geoff Tuff

Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Biography

About Geoff Tuff

Geoff has almost 30 years of experience consulting to some of the world’s top companies on the subjects of strategy, growth, innovation, and adapting business models to deal with change.  Currently, he is a Principal at Deloitte and holds various leadership positions across its Sustainability, Innovation and Strategy practices. Prior to this, he led the innovation firm Doblin and was a senior partner at Monitor Group, serving as a member of its global Board of Directors.  He is currently based in Deloitte’s Boston office.

Geoff’s work centers around helping clients transform their businesses to grow and compete in nontraditional ways. Over the course of his career, Geoff has worked in virtually every industry and he uses that breadth of experience to bring novel, cross-sector insights about how things might operate to clients stuck in industry conventional wisdom. Geoff has a particular strength in using facilitation and personal intervention to help clients make hard choices and take action. 

For his entire career, Geoff has focused exclusively on helping companies grow. He has been instrumental in developing many of Monitor’s – and now Deloitte’s – core methodologies related to driving profitable topline growth for clients.  His expertise spans the domains of design-driven innovation, new business model development, product launch and growth strategy, and business transformation. 

Geoff is valued for his integrative approach to solving problems. He combines deep analytic and strategic expertise with a natural orientation towards approaches embodied in design thinking.  His belief that human behavior is still – even in the digital age – the fundamental driver of economic value for companies allows him to bring a unique perspective to his clients struggling to shift their business models.  

He is a widely sought-after speaker and writer on the topic of growth through innovation.  His writing has appeared in journals such as Marketing Management and Harvard Business Review and as a regular contribution to HuffPost. He is also co-author of the National Bestseller Detonate: Why – and How – Corporations Need to Blow up Best Practices (and Bring a Beginner’s Mind) to Survive, released in May, 2018. His new book, Provoke: How Leaders Shape the Future by Overcoming Fatal Human Flaws launched in September, 2021 and quickly became a Wall Street Journal Bestseller. In 2019, Thinkers50 named Geoff as a finalist for the Distinguished Achievement Award in Strategy; in 2021, they did the same for the Leadership Award.

Geoff grew up in Canada and the UK, and came to the United States for university.  He received his B.A., with honors, in English literature and creative writing, from Dartmouth College.  He also holds a MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was an honors student.  He currently lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts with his wife, Martha, and four sons.  

Inspired by the book Provoke: How Leaders Shape the Future by Overcoming Fatal Human FlawsWiley, 2021.

THE PROVOCATEURS: EPISODE 20

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Reflections

What did we learn from our provocateurs in 2023? Who provoked us to think again and act differently? Which stories remain with us?

The Provocateurs podcast series gives you direct access to the ideas, experiences, and insights of remarkable leaders from around the world. In 2023, in collaboration with Deloitte, Thinkers50 hosted an inspiring mix of guests in thought-provoking conversations.

The topics that were discussed and debated ranged from The Inside Track on Growth with Tiffani Bova to Radical Candor with Kim Scott. Along the way we unpicked branding and the metaverse with Martin Lindstrom, learned how to play our cards right with Annie Duke, and normalised anxiety with Morra Aarons-Mele. Chip Bergh told us his story of rescuing Levi’s, Shelley Zalis gave us the state of play on equality in the workplace, Jim Stengel dived into activating purpose, and we marched to a different drum with Sunny Bonnell and Rare Breeds.

In this episode, Stuart Crainer, Des Dearlove, Steve Goldbach, and Geoff Tuff share some of their key take-aways from Provocateurs 2023 and introduce new co-host for 2024, Kulleni Gebreyes.

#TheProvocateurs

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.

THE PROVOCATEURS: EPISODE 23

Guest starring:

Neri Karra Sillaman

Neri Karra Sillaman

Professor of Practice and Entrepreneurship Expert, University of Oxford

Stuart Crainer

Stuart Crainer

Co-founder, Thinkers50

Kulleni Gebreyes

Deloitte US Consulting Life Sciences and Healthcare Industry Leader and US Chief Health Equity Officer

Neri Karra Sillaman: From Refugee to Fashion Revolutionary

At age 11, Neri Karra Sillaman’s world was turned upside down when her Bulgarian-Turkish family was forced to flee their home country. Driven by a hunger for education and a better life, Neri grabbed an opportunity to study business management at the University of Miami, where she became interested in how businesses – in particular, businesses founded by immigrants – are created and sustained.

She has subsequently become an expert in international and ethnic entrepreneurship, researching how the unique capabilities and mindset of immigrants create businesses that last. She received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge and her own 25-year-old leather accessories company, staffed by a workforce largely made up of people from disadvantaged backgrounds, has been recognised by B Corp as a social innovator.

In this Provocateurs podcast, Neri chats with fellow immigrant Kulleni Gebreyes, the US Consulting Life Sciences and Health Care Industry Leader and US Chief Health Equity Officer at Deloitte, and Thinkers50 co-founder, Stuart Crainer. She explains how she ended up in the fashion industry almost by accident and reveals the secrets behind sustainable companies, from building a resilient workforce to “frying in your own oil.”

Neri is a member of the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2024, a professor of practice and entrepreneurship expert at the University of Oxford, and author of Fashion Entrepreneurship.

#TheProvocateurs

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.

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THE PROVOCATEURS: EPISODE 22

Guest starring:

Marcus Collins

Clinical Professor and Author, For the Culture

Stuart Crainer

Stuart Crainer

Co-founder, Thinkers50

Steve Goldbach

Sustainability, Climate & Equity Leader, Deloitte

Marcus Collins: Culture, Connections, and Community

Marketer extraordinaire, Marcus Collins is a clinical professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. A former advertising executive who worked on iTunes + Nike sport music initiatives at Apple, Marcus contends that what we wear, what we eat, where we work, who we date, and just about every facet of our social living is informed by our underlying culture. And the primary goal of all industries is to “get people to move”, whether it is to buy, to click, to watch, vote, or subscribe.

In this intriguing conversation with Steve Goldbach of Deloitte and Stuart Crainer of Thinkers50, Marcus discusses his latest book, For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, And Who We Want To Be, and explains that his work is really just about connections – “connecting things that are normally disparate, so they come together and create new and novel things.”

He also describes how he came to lead digital strategy for Beyoncé, the influence of Émile Durkheim on his ideas, and the power of collective effervescence.

Marcus is the recipient of the Thinkers50 2023 Radar Award and his book, For the Culture, features on Thinkers50 2023 Best New Management Booklist.

#TheProvocateurs

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.

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