Disrupt Yourself Podcast with Whitney Johnson

When’s the last time you felt out of place? I’m sure a lot of us have sat with that feeling, whether that’s professionally or personally. It can hit you just as easily in a boardroom meeting as when you’re out with friends.

So now that you feel like an alien that’s crash-landed, what do you do? Our guest today has built his career around finding community for these so-called “black sheep.” Peter Sims is a former corporate investor who became disillusioned with the high-powered world of finance and left to form his own creative firm – appropriately named, Black Sheep.

It’s also the name of his new book, out in May, subtitled The Quest To Be Human In An Inhuman Time.

What can we take away from Peter’s journey, to help us better navigate those moments when you feel the need to find a new tribe?

At DA, we’re all about discovering and harnessing disruption, but sometimes, disruption finds you. It’s a fact of life – our car skids on ice we didn’t see on the road up ahead. Your boat hits a reef at night. A business deal falls through out of nowhere, and there’s nothing you can or could have done.

Now that your car’s in a snowbank, what’s next?

Our guest today has been there and back. After the company she worked for collapsed while she was on maternity leave, Carol Fishman Cohen decided to leave the workforce for 11 years to raise her children.

Today, she’s the CEO of her own company, iRelaunch. Carol’s had to fight through the nitty-gritty of getting back into the office, remembering and trusting in her capabilities, and today her company helps others make the same jump. Her story is, quite literally, a case study in how people disrupt themselves in response to being disrupted.

When we talk about robots, machines, artificial intelligence, it’s usually within the context of something theorists call the singularity. That’s the moment when AI figures out how to upgrade itself, and leaves us in the dust. After all, it can learn a library in an instant – the AI doesn’t need to stop for a snack and a nap. 

In the world of the Terminator, it took Skynet a single day to become self-aware, destroy most of human life, and then send Arnold back in time to make sure no one could stop it.

But in the end, The Terminator is one person’s vision of the future – a vision that’s also designed to sell well at the box office. Isn’t it just as possible to write a different version?

Our guest today is spending his time doing just that. Paul Allen, the co-founder and former CEO of Ancestry.com, is asking instead – what if we saw AI as an ally, not an arms race? With his new venture, Soar, Paul is writing a different story, one where the robots aren’t sent back in time to strip away our humanity, but rather – they exemplify everything that’s unique about being human.

“If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

Famous words by Bruce Lee, sure, but when we’ve felt like a stone our whole lives, what does becoming water actually look like? How do we learn to be more malleable in difficult situations? And how can we be confident we’re flowing in the right direction?

Samantha Cooprider is the senior director of global leadership development at Meta – formerly Facebook. Today, Sam’s shaping leaders at a corporate level, but her path to the top has been anything but straightforward. She’s had to learn how to flow from a Midwestern childhood, through the non-profit world, and into the C-suites of Tesla, Meta and Google. 

So how does Sam keep her mission top of mind when she’s moving from one cup to another?

After 49 days fasting under the Bodhi tree, Siddhartha Guatama was struck by an idea. We suffer because we are attached to things, to people, to desires. When we can’t have it, we feel an emptiness. But what if we never wanted it in the first place?

Guatama taught his philosophy for the next few decades, and centuries after that his followers would give him a new name – the Buddha. Total, complete elimination of your yearnings was called Nirvana.

In our networked world, where we broadcast on social media what we want others to see of us, Nirvana can seem far away. But our guest today says that the yearning to belong shapes our behaviors in ways we’re not often conscious of.

Dr. Michael Gervais is host of the podcast Finding Mastery, where he pulls on his experience as a high-performance psychologist to draw out what makes these top athletes and board room professionals tick.

He’s out with a new book – The First Rule of Mastery, Stop Worrying About What Other People Think Of You.

When’s the last time a customer service phone menu left you… genuinely angry? We build these systems to make things easier, layer systems on top of other systems, but who’s doing the gardening and pruning – the upkeep?

Our guest today calls this phenomenon friction. Robert Sutton has taught at Stanford since 1983, in that time covering everything from psychology to business management. Now he’s out with his 8th book, The Friction Project.

Bob and his co-writer Huggy Rao took on this idea of a maddeningly-frustrating phone menu to nail down where friction comes from – and how to treat it. But also, how can friction in our organizations actually be a force for good?

What does it take, day in and day out, to lead a group of people effectively? It’s not easy, that’s for sure. On a very granular level, leading is balancing a thousand decisions, huge and small, every day. So what guides your hand?

Republican Governor of Utah Spencer Cox is an anomaly in a time of waning bipartisanship. His vice chair in the National Governor’s Association is a Democrat – and a close friend at that. He’s also been a bit of an anomaly in how he’s charted his life, too, turning down Harvard and a cushy lawyer job for his family farm in Fairview.

But Governor Cox is an anomaly we can learn from. How do you build a belief system as a leader – and strengthen it, when it seems like the political winds are blowing against you? 

We find ourselves compromising every day – it’s how things get done in a society where we all want something else. But what’s the root of compromise? Isn’t it this idea that solving the issue, whatever it is, is more important than checking off everything we want?

It can seem that those ideals have been left by the roadside in the past couple years, but the issue of honest compromise has crept into our boardrooms, too.

Our guest today is working to instill that idea of meeting folks halfway back into our political culture. Keith Allred is the executive director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse, a DC non-profit dedicated to pushing through bipartisan legislation.

What can we take from the House of Representatives into our own C-suite?

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

Our lives are organized around those same flows of energy, too. We dream, we store energy, and then we trade in potential for kinetic.

Ashley Smith has made a career out of translating these flows of energy – and showing others how to do it, too. It’s in her dance studio, turning emotion into movement. It’s in her partnership with her husband, Ryan Smith, the executive chairman and co-founder of Qualtrics. And it’s in her love for the state of Utah, flowing from Ashley’s love for community, downstream, to ownership of the Utah Jazz basketball team with Ryan.

How can we better understand the flows of energy in our own life, and in our bodies?

Do you know that feeling when you’re cooking, and you’ve got all your ingredients chopped and ready to go, spices measured, oven pre-heated? All that’s left is for you to spin your magic as a cook. In the kitchen, the French call it mise en place, everything in its place.

In that same vein, to disrupt yourself, your strategy and support need to be in place. You need to give yourself the room to roam, so to speak, to realize your full potential. 

Our guest today is all about creating spaces that let you realize that potential. Chip Conley is the former founder of Joie De Vivre, a boutique hotel chain. He’s worked with AirBnB as a quote unquote modern elder, and now Chip’s turning his attention to the potential of midlife – a word so laden with stigma, he’s building regenerative horse ranches to change that.

His new book, "Learning To Love Midlife", is out January 16th.

Isn’t it frustrating when we feel like a passenger to our own thoughts and actions? In Buddhist thought, we’re supposed to watch our thoughts pass by like clouds in the sky… but that’s the ideal, after all.

It’s a hard truth to swallow, that the human mind is much more mysterious than we’d hope it to be. So for today’s episode, we wanted to bring back a conversation I had back in 2020 with the neuroscientist and author Dr. Tara Swart. She’s spent her career tinkering with our brains, as both a doctor and an executive advisor, figuring out how we can harness this mysterious power we have.

The machinery of our minds might be unknowable, but the way it adapts is not. 

So what can we learn about not being a passenger to our own thoughts, about taking the wheel? I hope you enjoy.

What does it mean to have a friend? What does it mean to be a friend?

Someone you can rely on. Someone who understands you, not just the “you” that you project into the world. A friend is someone who knows they can rely on you, too. 

How many times a week, a day, do you lean on your friends when you feel like you can’t stand on your own?

Our guest today has built his career on the power of those friends – and being a friend, too. Ken Woolley is the founder of Extra Space Storage, those ubiquitous blocky buildings you always see from the highway. He’s managed airlines, developed apartments, even flipped vintage cars. But to hear him say it, none of it would be possible without that true spark of trust that comes from the friendships he’s built.

When’s the last time you got caught in the expectations others had for you? One person wants one thing, one version of you – another needs you to be someone else entirely…

And who do you want to be? Do you even have time to think about that?

The things people expect from us has a profound effect on how we act – we are social beings, after all. We aim, to please.

Our guest today says that the burden of those expectations in the workplace fall unfairly onto women. Jennifer McCollum is the CEO of Linkage, devoted to advancing the real power of women leaders through leadership development.

But how she got there has been a story of what Jennifer calls the double-bind of expectations on women. It’s a story of what she’s been called, too – a cupcake with a razor in it.

There’s an allure around the idea of sales. It’s the same allure they packaged so neatly in the show Mad Men, all confidence and charisma. But take it from the other perspective – have you ever had such a pushy car salesman, that you just left the lot?

Our guest today says that’s because charisma isn’t a sales strategy. There’s no room for building trust in your solution when you’re focused on the close. Scott K. Edinger is a sales consultant to Fortune 50 companies, including AT&T, and he’s out with a new book – The Growth Leader. With such a disconnect from their company leaders, Scott says, sales teams are left to fend for themselves in their calls with clients.

So how do you bridge the gap between the sales department and the C-suite? 

Growing your people to grow your organization – it makes sense, right? But what about approaching the problem from the other direction – growing your organization, to grow your people?

When’s the last time you looked at the state of your org chart? And how willing are you to experiment with it?

Today, I want to bring back an old episode. In 2020, we spoke with Alex Osterwalder about his idea of an invincible company – one that is constantly reinventing itself to stay on the bleeding edge of disruption.

Alex, along with his mentor Yves Pigneur, is one of the top-ranked management thinkers in the world – as of Thinkers50 2023, which just wrapped up, the duo is number 8 on that list.

I hope you enjoy.

Coaching often involves speaking a truth the other person doesn’t really want to hear. Even when we’re lost for direction, being pointed in the right way can feel like this indictment on being lost in the first place.

But a lot of clients will describe this idea of the unlock – the a-ha – when that self-doubting voice fades, and the voice of the coach comes into focus. 

How can we prime ourselves to receive these messages? Our guests today have a new book out on exactly that question. Jacquelyn Lane and Scott Osman are co-authors of Becoming Coachable, along with Marshall Goldsmith. The book was borne out of the 100 Coaches agency, which Scott co-founded with Marshall.

So what does becoming coachable actually look like?

It’s just the nature of our show that we often talk to folks in the mastery part of their professional S-Curve. It’s easy to talk to a CEO about leadership. It’s also another fact that our guests tend to be older – at least, out of college.

But it is rare that we come across an entrepreneur in that very first launch point of their career. A person that put college on hold to pursue an idea, a person willing to put their dreams on hold for an hour to talk to us.

Austin Hillam is the co-founder of ZipString, a handheld toy that keeps a string in constant motion.  It's easier to just watch than explain, here.

And we’ve got Austin today for a rare look at the phase of professional life that a lot of our guests can only reflect on – starting that first business. 

If we’re being honest, we’ve all felt the toll of going into a meeting on a couple hours sleep and a double espresso. The work can often come first, and the body comes second.

But as leaders, we can’t do our job effectively if we’re jittery and wiped. We can’t do our job if we’ve got the worry of heart disease lurking the back of your mind.

What if we could take charge of our health before any of these things happen? Not just waiting for the symptoms, but… intecepting them?

Dr. Bill Kapp realized that changing the paradigm of healthcare means taking on the Goliath in the room – the health insurance industry. A former US Air Force flight surgeon, Dr. Kapp is using his company Fountain Health to argue for a more holistic, preventative approach to living and aging, alongside Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis.

The last time you had to navigate change – real, structural change – who did you turn to? When we’re working from a place of ambiguity, when we’re stuck inside our own head, another person can make all the difference.

But let’s be honest, sometimes, painfully… that person is no one at all. We can have this instinct, as leaders, that reaching out is weakness. We can see it as this flashing neon sign that, hey, I have no idea what I’m doing. Someone, please help.

Melissa Werneck’s spent her career fighting against that stigma. As the Chief Human Resources Officer for Kraft-Heinz, she’s bringing her message of coaching as growth to an international company. Making sure everyone knows, it’s okay to raise your hand, it’s okay to feel a little lost – whether you’re a new hire or the CEO. 

We throw around this term a lot in the management profession, in the coaching profession, really everywhere in business – top thinker. 

But how often do we really interrogate that title? Because, really, wouldn’t we all like to think of ourselves as top thinkers?

In politics, it’s the journalists that hold politicians to account. In the world of management, there are two former journalists who are holding these top thinkers to account as well. Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove used to write columns for The London Times, when they realized they could have a bigger impact connecting these thinkers directly.

As the founders of Thinkers50, an organization that comes together every two years to celebrate the true top thinkers, Stuart and Des have brought their skills of commentary and curation from the front page to a much larger audience.

So what makes a top thinker, truly?