The Strategy Skills Podcast: Management Consulting | Strategy, Operations & Implementation | Critical Thinking

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 460, featuring an interview with the author of Crossing the Desert: The Power of Embracing Life's Difficult Journeys, Payam Zamani.    In this episode, Payam shares the most important lessons he learned from building a record-breaking billion-dollar IPO called AutoWeb, and how it fell apart. He took those early lessons and created his current company, One Planet Group, with the “people-first” culture he wanted all along for AutoWeb. As a result, One Planet Group’s success has allowed Payam to reacquire AutoWeb and bring it back to profitability.   In Payam’s book, Crossing the Desert, readers take an intimate look at how the paths we choose, the values we embrace, and the systems we decide to participate in (or not) can make or break us, not only financially, but spiritually. Payam’s story is a timely reminder that enduring and embracing life’s most difficult journeys can lead us to a brighter future—not only for ourselves, but for the people around us, and even the world.  

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 459, featuring an interview with the author of May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases―And What We Can Do about It, Alex Edmans. In this book, renowned economist Alex Edmans teaches us how to separate fact from fiction. Using colorful examples, he highlights the biases that cause us to mistake statements for facts, facts for data, data for evidence, and evidence for proof.   Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School and an expert in the use and misuse of data and evidence. He has given the TED talk What to Trust in a Post-Truth World with 2 million views, spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and testified in the UK Parliament.   Alex served as Managing Editor of the Review of Finance, the leading academic finance journal in Europe. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Harvard Business Review, and been interviewed by Bloomberg, BBC, CNBC, CNN, ESPN, Fox, ITV, NPR, Reuters, Sky News, and

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 458, featuring an interview with the CEO of Fireflies.ai, Krish Rameni.    In this episode, Krish took us back to the early days of starting their company, Fireflies.ai, and how they stayed motivated despite the challenges. He shared valuable advice from the lessons he learned throughout his career that will be useful for individuals who are starting their careers or planning to transition into the world of startups.   Krish Ramineni is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fireflies.ai, an AI meeting assistant that transcribes, summarizes, and analyzes meetings. Named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, Krish graduated from UPenn. He was one of the youngest Product Managers at Microsoft, leading projects in customer voice and growth. He has guest lectured at Stanford on machine learning and holds patents in workflow automation. Krish is a thought leader in SaaS/AI and an active startup advisor.   Here are some free gifts for you: Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies free

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 457, featuring an interview with the author of Solving for Why: A Surgeon's Journey to Discover the Transformative Power of Purpose, Dr. Mark G. Shrime. Solving for Why is an inspiring memoir about finding the answer to life's biggest question—"Why?"—and about following that answer through remarkable, unlikely places on the road to fulfillment, purpose, and joy.   "Turning your heart toward the poor doesn't have to be on a hospital ship in West Africa. It doesn't have to be grandiose. It doesn't have to be newsworthy. It doesn't have to be what your friends, pastors, rabbis, priests, or colleagues say it should. It just has to be." Dr. Mark Shrime   Dr. Mark G. Shrime is the International Chief Medical Officer at Mercy Ships and a Lecturer in Global Health and Social Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. He is the author of Solving for Why: A Surgeon's Journey to Discover the Transformative Power of Purpose (Hachette 2022).   He previously served as the O’Brien Chair of Gl

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 456, featuring an interview with the author of Better Decisions Faster: Unshakable Confidence When You Need It Most, Paul Epstein. In Better Decisions Faster, Paul draws from the green-light wisdom of Fortune 500 CEOs, Olympians, Shark Tank entrepreneurs, world-record holders, Ivy League professors, and Navy SEALs to reveal a revolutionary new system for maximally efficient and confident decision-making. Paul shares how to make better decisions using the Hands Equation, which is Head + Heart. This equation taps into the three most primal and powerful aspects of our humanity to make better, faster decisions.   Paul Epstein is a former high-level executive for multiple NFL and NBA teams and the bestselling author of “The Power of Playing Offense” and “Better Decisions Faster”. In 2022, he was named one of SUCCESS magazine’s top thought leaders who get results—alongside Tony Robbins, Brené Brown, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Mel Robbins—and his work has been featured on ESPN, NBC, Fox

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 455, featuring an interview with the author of Ping Pong Leadership: 18 Principles to Succeed at Any Table in Business, Sports, and Life, Justin Bookey. In this book, Justin distills lessons from a beloved global sport into 18 actionable and unforgettable “Pong Principles.” Justin has spent decades as a competitive table tennis player, trained with national and world champions, and won medals at the US Open. He is an Emmy-nominated content creator and strategist, and he’s worked with leaders at global companies to accomplish their business goals. As these two worlds overlapped, Justin realized that the core principles he learned while training to compete at the table also apply to success in business and leadership. Ping Pong Leadership is a powerful guide to success at any table.   Justin Bookey is a former lawyer, an award-winning marketing strategist, and global ping pong player. He’s had the good fortune of learning from some of the best and brightest in several arenas w

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 454, featuring an interview with the author of Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality, Benjamin Shestakofsky. This book draws on nineteen months of participant-observation research inside a successful Silicon Valley startup, and examines how the company was organized to meet the needs of the venture capital investors who funded it. Investors push startups to scale as quickly as possible to inflate the value of their asset. Benjamin Shestakofsky shows how these demands create organizational problems that managers solve by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by these companies are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. Shestakofsky compellingly argues that we must focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it.   Benjamin Shestakofsky is Assistant Professor of Sociology

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 453, featuring an interview with the authors of Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy, Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, and Nancy Levit. This book explains that the system that governs our economy—a winner-take-all economy—is the root cause of these myriad problems. The WTA economy self-selects for aggressive, cutthroat business tactics, which creates a feedback loop that sidelines women. The authors, three legal scholars, call this feedback loop “the triple bind”: if women don’t compete on the same terms as men, they lose; if women do compete on the same terms as men, they’re punished more harshly for their sharp elbows or actual misdeeds; and when women see that they can’t win on the same terms as men, they take themselves out of the game (if they haven’t been pushed out already). With odds like these stacked against them, it’s no wonder women feel like, no matter how hard they work, they can’t get ahead.   Naomi Cahn is the Justice Anthony M. Kennedy Distinguis

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 452, featuring an interview with the author of The Problem with Change: And the Essential Nature of Human Performance, Ashley Goodall. Drawing on two decades spent leading HR organizations at Deloitte and Cisco, Ashley Goodall reveals in his book why change is not the same as improvement, and how, by prioritizing team cohesion (instead of reshuffling teams at will), by using real words (rather than corporate-speak), by sharing secrets (not mission statements), by fixing only the things that are truly broken (instead of moving fast and breaking everything in sight, and more, leaders at every level can create the stability that people need to thrive.   Ashley Goodall is a leadership expert who has spent his career exploring large organizations from the inside, most recently as an executive at Cisco. He is the co-author of Nine Lies About Work, which was selected as the best management book of 2019 by Strategy + Business and as one of Amazon’s best business and leadership books

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 451, featuring an interview with an award-winning marketer, TEDx speaker and authority in harnessing the instinctive mind to accelerate brand and business growth,  founder and CEO of Triggers, Leslie Zane. Leslie is the author of The Power of Instinct: The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life. In her book, Leslie shows that to grow a brand, business, or even a social movement, traditional persuasion tactics fall short. Instead, you must connect to the instinctive mind. And to do this, you need to understand the science of consumer choice and employ techniques that work with a person's brain, not against it.   Leslie Zane is an award-winning marketer, TEDx speaker and the foremost authority in harnessing the instinctive mind to accelerate brand and business growth.      In her early career at P&G and Johnson & Johnson, Zane championed the position that what people say is unreliable and that telegraphic cues are more powerful than direct communication, but her

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 450, featuring an interview with the coauthor of The Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth, Ilya Strebulaev. This book offers a transformative playbook for delivering results in a rapidly changing world from a top Stanford professor and a technology executive. Packed with entertaining stories and scientific precision, The Venture Mindset is a must-read for anyone who wants to be better equipped for the era of uncertainty when industry, company, and career can be disrupted overnight. It will teach you more than how to simply survive. It’ll teach you how to win big. Ilya Strebulaev is the foremost academic expert on venture capital. He is the founder of the Venture Capital Initiative and David S. Lobel Professor of Private Equity and Professor of Finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where he teaches a popular class on venture capital. Ilya’s research has been widely published in leading academic journals and feature

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 449, featuring an interview with the coauthor of Data Rules: Reinventing the Market Economy (Acting with Technology), Cristina Alaimo. In Data Rules, Cristina Alaimo and Jannis Kallinikos establish a social science framework for analyzing the unprecedented social and economic restructuring brought about by data. Working at the intersection of information systems and organizational studies, they draw extensively on intellectual currents in sociology, semiotics, cognitive science and technology, and social theory. Making the case for turning “data-making” into an area of inquiry of its own, the authors uncover how data are deeply implicated in rewiring the institutions of the market economy. Cristina Alaimo is an Assistant Professor (Research) of Digital Economy and Society at LUISS University, Rome. She holds a Ph.D. in Management, Information Systems and Innovation from LSE–The London School of Economics and Political Science, London. Her research focuses on the innovation b

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 448 with Martin Gonzalez and Josh Yellin. Martin is the creator of Google’s Effective Founders Project and a frequent lecturer at Stanford, Wharton and INSEAD. Josh co-founded Google's first Startup Accelerator and is presently an organizational leader at Google DeepMind.   Josh and Martin are the authors of The Bonfire Moment: Bring Your Team Together to Solve the Hardest Problems Startups Face. In this book Martin Gonzalez and Josh Yellin outline the common traps startup teams fall into, and share their powerful one-day workshop that helps teams escape those traps. The unique process of The Bonfire Moment brings colleagues together for a full day of facing hard truths, noticing hidden dynamics, and gearing up for the intense challenges of startup life. When the constant hustle feels overwhelming, a team’s Bonfire Moment pulls them out of the day-to-day intensity to reflect and reboot.   Martin Gonzalez is the creator of Google’s Effective Founders Project, a global researc

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 447, featuring an interview with the author of The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution's Original Meaning, AJ Jacobs. In The Year of Living Constitutionally, A.J. Jacobs tries to get inside the minds of the Founding Fathers by living as closely as possible to the original meaning of the Constitution. He asserts his right to free speech by writing his opinions on parchment with a quill and handing them out to strangers in Times Square. He consents to quartering a soldier, as is his Third Amendment right. He turns his home into a traditional 1790s household by lighting candles instead of using electricity, boiling mutton, and—because women were not allowed to sign contracts— feebly attempting to take over his wife’s day job, which involves a lot of contract negotiations.   A.J. Jacobs is a journalist, lecturer, and human guinea pig whose books include Drop Dead Healthy, The Year of Living Biblically, and The Puzzler. He is host of

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 446, featuring an interview with the author of Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs In Leadership and Life, Jeff Wetzler. In this book, Jeff offers a hands-on, surprisingly effective way to find out what others really think, know, and feel. Jeff brings you a powerful method called The Ask Approach™, based on a simple premise that tapping into what other people truly think, know, and feel is a game-changing superpower. Ask leads to smarter decisions, more creative solutions, and deeper relationships.    Jeff Wetzler is co-CEO of Transcend, a nationally recognized innovation organization, and an expert in learning and human potential. Wetzler combines unique leadership experiences spanning more than 25 years in business and education, as a management consultant to the world’s top corporations, a learning facilitator for leaders around the world, and as Chief Learning Officer at Teach For America. Jeff earned a Doctorate in Adult Lea

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 445, featuring an interview with the author of Leadership Shock: Using Authenticity to Navigate the Hidden Dangers of Career Success, Pete Steinberg. Leadership Shock teaches readers to view leadership as an adaptive, continuous process rather than a fixed set of behaviors. By regularly re-evaluating their leadership models, professionals at any level can evolve their principles and actions to lead with authenticity as they navigate new challenges.   Pete Steinberg is a leadership and innovation expert with extensive experience consulting with top Fortune 500 professionals. He also has more than 20 years of experience as an elite rugby coach, coaching the USA Women’s Rugby Team at two World Cups and the Rio Olympics. As a former U.S., international, and Olympic sports coach and commentator for major outlets such as CBS, ESPN, and Fox Sports, Pete has a track record of bringing teams to victory. He has won 11 National Championships with the Penn State Women, MARFU Men, and Te

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 444, featuring an interview with the author of Burnout Immunity: How Emotional Intelligence Can Help You Build Resilience and Heal Your Relationship with Work, Kandi Wiens. In her book, Kandi shares her research and discoveries about burnout immunity. After extreme stress caused a life-threatening health cri­sis in her own life, Dr. Kandi Wiens dedicated herself to understand why work was leaving millions of us sick, exhausted, unmoti­vated, and feeling stuck and ineffective. In her research, she discovered something remarkable: Despite dangerous levels of work-related stress, some people seemed to be naturally “immune” to burnout.   Kandi Wiens, EdD, MSEd, MBA is a Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, Director of the Penn Master’s in Medical Education Program and the Penn Health Professions Education Certificate Program, and Academic Director of the PennCLO Master’s Program. She often teaches in various graduate-level programs across the University of Pennsylvan

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 443, featuring an interview with the co-author of Persuade: The 4-Step Process to Influence People and Decisions, Andres Lares. This book deliver a concise and insightful take on how to transform your ability to persuade others regardless of the setting. Persuade is perfect for executives, managers, entrepreneurs, and other business leaders who negotiate or influence regularly. It is an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to improve their persuasion or deal-making abilities.   Andres Lares is the Managing Partner at Shapiro Negotiations Institute. Lares' expertise ranges from coaching live negotiations for sports clients, including the Cleveland Browns, Brooklyn Nets, and more, to developing online content for facilitating real estate, advisory, media, banking, and pharmaceutical programs. He is a guest lecturer on negotiation and influencing at various universities, including Ohio University, and annually teaches a sports negotiation course at Johns Hopkins University. L

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 442, featuring an interview with the author of The Illusion of Innovation: Escape "Efficiency" and Unleash Radical Progress, Elliott Parker. The Illusion of Innovation tackles the problem with innovation inside big companies, having activities that feel like innovation but lead to value destruction, not progress. This book explains why meaningful innovation naturally emerges from deliberate inefficiency and how large corporations can harness the power of small teams—startups—to drive radical change through systematic experimentation.   Elliott Parker is the founder and CEO of High Alpha Innovation, a venture builder that partners with corporations, universities, and entrepreneurs to co-create startups that solve compelling problems. He built his career in strategy consulting at Innosight, the firm founded by Clayton Christensen, in corporate venturing, and as an entrepreneur bringing new ideas to market. To date, he has launched over 40 venture-backed startups. Originally fr

For this episode, let's revisit a Strategy Skills classic where we discuss how to know what is corporate strategy.   Subscribe to FIRMSconsulting's YouTube channel: http://bit.ly/Firmsconsultingsubscribe   Here are some free gifts for you: Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/OverallApproach   McKinsey & BCG winning resume free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf   Enjoying this episode? Get access to sample advanced training episodes here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo