The Second Curve an evening with Charles Handy

Charles Handy is one a giant of contemporary thought. His books on management – including “Understanding Organisations” and “Gods of Management” – have changed the way we view business.

His work on broader issues and trends – such as “Beyond Certainty” – has changed the way we view society. 

In “The Second Curve”, he builds on a life’s work to glimpse into the future and see what challenges and opportunities lie ahead.

He looks at current trends in capitalism and asks whether it is a sustainable system. He explores the dangers of a society built on credit. He challenges the myth that remorseless growth is essential. He even asks whether we should rethink our roles in life – as students, parents, workers and voters – and what the aims of an ideal society of the future should be. 

Provocative and thoughtful as ever, he sets out the questions we all need to ask ourselves – and points us toward some answers.

I was fortunate to spend an evening with Charles in his home in London. He is an incredible man with an intriguing view of things. This was a memorable moment for me as I met a personal hero.

We discuss:

  • Disruption
  • Efficiency v Effectiveness
  • Management v Leadership  
  • Purpose
  • Shamrock Organisations
  • The Doughnut Projects
  • Communities in Organisations
  • Education
  • Parenting and so much more

The End of Mental Illness with Dr. Daniel Amen

Today’s episode introduces New hope for those suffering from conditions like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, addictions, PTSD, ADHD and more.

Though incidence of these conditions is skyrocketing, for the past four decades standard treatment hasn’t much changed, and success rates in treating them have barely improved, either. Meanwhile, the stigma of the “mental illness” labeldamaging and devastating on its owncan often prevent sufferers from getting the help they need.

Today’s guest is an innovator in his field, a Brain specialist and bestselling author on the forefront of a new movement within medicine and related disciplines that aims to change all that. Today, we will draw on the latest findings of neuroscience to challenge an outdated psychiatric paradigm. It will help us all take control and improve the health of our own brains, minimising or reversing conditions that may prevent us from living a full and emotionally healthy life.

The End of Mental Illness will help us discover:

  • Why labelling someone as having a “mental illness” is not only inaccurate but harmful
  • Why standard treatment may not have helped you or a loved oneand why diagnosing and treating you based on your symptoms alone so often misses the true cause of those symptoms and results in poor outcomes
  • At least 100 simple things you can do yourself to heal your brain and prevent or reverse the problems that are making you feel sad, mad, or bad
  • How to identify your “brain type” and what you can do to optimise your particular type
  • Where to find the kind of health provider who understands and uses the new paradigm of brain health

It is a great pleasure to welcome Dr. Daniel Amen, multiple bestselling author, changemaker and author of “The End of Mental Illness: How Neuroscience Is Transforming Psychiatry and Helping Prevent or Reverse Mood and Anxiety Disorders, ADHD, Addictions, PTSD, Psychosis, Personality Disorders, and More”.

More about Daniel here http://danielamenmd.com/

and his free 6-week brain course is available here:

https://endofmentalillness.com/brainhealthchallenge/

The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company with Steve Blank

It is known as the bible for startups and the best investment a startup can make.

A startup without customers is like a day without oxygen, and the Startup Owners Manual helps founders get it right and shows you how to get, keep, and grow customers, literally every step of the way.

This manual walks entrepreneurs step-by-step through the proven, world-renowned Customer Development process for getting startups right the first time.

The Customer Development process was developed by a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur-turned-educator and based on his eight valley startups, four of which IPO’ed.

He joined with serial entrepreneur Bob Dorf to build the Startup Owner s Manual as a sequel to his first book, which sparked the Lean Startup movement.  The Startup Owners Manual lays out the best practices, lessons and tips that have swept the startup world, offering a wealth of proven advice and information for entrepreneurs of all stripes.

We also discuss innovation within larger, established organisations.

The manual:

  • Guides startups of all types in their search for a scalable, profitable business model
  • Explains the 9 deadly sins startups commit most often and helps you to avoid them
  • Incorporates the business model canvas as the starting point for any startup
  • Provides separate paths and advice for physical versus web/mobile products
  • Explains how to test and iterate your companys road to product/market fit
  • Details strategies and tactics for how to get, keep and grow customers
  • Teaches a new math for startups — metrics that matter
  • Includes detailed checklists at every step of the process
  • and provides hundreds of ideas, watch-outs and how tos for founders and innovators

I am delighted to welcome the pioneer of the Lean Startup movement, the legendary Steve Blank

Zest: How to Squeeze the Max out of Life with author Andy Cope

‘ZEST’ equates to zing, enthusiasm, energy, gusto, eagerness, zeal and fervour.

It also suggests a tang, a sharpness. It’s the opposite of bland.

Today’s book called ZEST is not just a book on personal development. There are an awful lot of those.

Zest is a catalyst, a spark that ignites your remembering of what makes you, in a word, you.

It drives you to rethink, rejuvenate and reinvent. It also contains a touch of the revolutions.

Have you, as a grown-up, fallen into the trap of becoming a Groan-up?

You know you should try to make the best of things, but oftentimes you don’t know what your “best” is anymore.

It’s strange.

You used to know. What happened?

Was it the years of social conformity?

There is a whole beige generation out there – a generation that has lost its identity and forgotten who they once were – buried under the crushing, stifling facades of adulthood.

If only there was a way to unearth your passions, recover the zest for life you once had. Maybe there is.

Zest is a wake-up call for you to explore the formative moments that define your life. It challenges you to believe that your best days are still ahead, to search your soul, to shake things up and bask in the warmth of glorious individuality.

Today’s episode will help us:

  • Explore the pivotal, defining moments in your life
  • Examine both the good and bad experiences that define you
  • Reconnect to the essence of who you are Embrace your quirks, qualities and peculiarities
  • Determine to be the person you always wanted to be Zest is your permission to play, your licence to wreak the right kind of havoc.

It’s not about pretending to be someone you’re not, it’s about squeezing every drop out of who you already are.

We welcome, the Author of Zest: How to Squeeze the Max out of Life, Andy Cope

The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity with Daniel Z. Lieberman

Why are we obsessed with the thing as we want – only to be bored when we get them? 

Why is addiction perfectly logical to an addict? 

Why does love change so quickly from passion to indifference? 

Why are some people, die-hard liberals and others hardcore conservatives? 

Why are we always hopeful for solutions even in the darkest times—and so good at figuring them out? 

The answer is found in a single chemical in your brain: dopamine.

Dopamine ensured the survival of early man.

Thousands of years later, it is the source of our most basic behavioUrs and cultural ideas—and progress itself. 

Dopamine is the chemical of desire that always asks for more—more stuff, more stimulation, more surprises.

In pursuit of these things, it is undeterred by emotion, fear, or morality.

We welcome the author of “The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity—and will Determine the Fate of the Human Race.” Daniel Z. Lieberman

More about Daniel here:

http://www.danielzlieberman.com/

Catching fire: How Cooking Made Us Human with Richard Wrangham

Today’s guest argues that it was cooking that caused the extraordinary transformation of our ancestors from apelike beings to Homo erectus. At the heart of this episode lies an explosive new idea: the habit of eating cooked rather than raw food permitted the digestive tract to shrink and the human brain to grow, helped structure human society, and created the male-female division of labour. As our ancestors adapted to using fire, humans emerged as “the cooking apes”. Covering everything from food-labelling to sexual division of labour to raw-food faddists, Catching Fire offers a startlingly original argument about how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. A fundamental question that every culture answers in a different way, but only science can truly decide and one today’s guest deeply explore is What made us human? Our guest’s work proposes a new answer. He is a true changemaker, driven by curiosity and believes the transformative moment that gave rise to the genus Homo, one of the great transitions in the history of life, stemmed from the control of fire and the advent of cooked meals. Fire was our first technology. Cooking increased the value of our food. It changed our bodies, our brains, our use of time, and our social lives. It made us into consumers of external energy and thereby created an organism with a new relationship to nature, dependent on fuel.

Brave New Work Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? with Aaron Dignan

The way we work is broken. It takes forever to get anything done. Meetings and emails are incessant. Bureaucracy stifles talent and creativity. Is this really the best we can do?

Aaron Dignan teaches companies how to eliminate red tape, tap into collective intelligence, and rethink long-held traditions that no longer make sense.

In “Brave New Work”, he shows you how to revolutionise the way you, your team, and your company works forever.

Have fewer but better meetings


Create a culture of honesty, transparency, and trust


Cut down on rules to be more efficient


Be more agile and adaptive


Reignite passion and energy throughout your organisation

We welcome Aaron Dignan the author of “Brave New Work, Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?”

More about Aaron here: https://www.bravenewwork.com

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth – Amy C. Edmondson

This episode offers practical guidance for teams and organisations who are serious about success in the modern economy.

With so much riding on innovation, creativity, and spark, it is essential to attract and retain quality talent—but what good does this talent do if no one is able to speak their mind? The traditional culture of “fitting in” and “going along” spells doom in the knowledge economy.

Success requires a continuous influx of new ideas, new challenges, and critical thought, and the interpersonal climate must not suppress, silence, ridicule or intimidate. Not every idea is good, and yes there are stupid questions, and yes dissent can slow things down, but talking through these things is an essential part of the creative process.

People must be allowed to voice half-finished thoughts, ask questions from left field, and brainstorm out loud; it creates a culture in which a minor flub or momentary lapse is no big deal, and where actual mistakes are owned and corrected, and where the next left-field idea could be the next big thing. Today we explore a culture of psychological safety and provide a blueprint for bringing it to life.

We explore the link between psychological safety and high performance Create a culture where it’s “safe” to express ideas, ask questions, and admit mistakes nurture the level of engagement and candour required in today’s knowledge economy How can we fertilise creativity, clarify goals, achieve accountability, redefine leadership, and much more.

Psychological safety helps bring about this most critical transformation.

We welcome the author The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth and the mother of the concept of Psychological safety, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Amy C. Edmondson

More about Amy here: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6451

Master Your Mind: Counterintuitive Strategies to Refocus and Re-Energise Your Runaway Brain with Roger Seip

Today’s episode offers a bit of perspective and a lot of insight for anyone seeking long-term success. Success in business is spelled M-O-R-E: better results, faster growth, more revenue, greater efficiency. Do more. Make more. Achieve more. And do it now.

Eventually, ambition turns to stress, then to frenzy, then to emptiness as once-ambitious workers endlessly trudge the hamster wheel chasing the next promotion. While top-level performance is the holy grail of business at all levels, there is another, much better way to achieve it: slow down.

Yes, you read that right–S-L-O-W. This is your permission to jump off of the hamster wheel. Slowing down is not a luxury, it is a necessity. A frenetic brain simply doesn’t perform at optimal levels. By maintaining a snail’s pace, you actually achieve better results–at rocket speed–because you’re firing on all cylinders. You’ll think of new things, approach old problems from new perspectives, and breathe a breath of fresh air into everything you do.

This episode shows you how to achieve this state of steady, sustainable fire, and how to get further by crawling than you ever did while attempting to fly. Learn how slowing down can lead to better, faster results Achieve optimal performance thought patterns Enhance your creativity and effectiveness Build energy, revenue, and good health in a self-sustaining way You know you’re capable of more, but the stress is eating away at your body, your brain, and your soul. Relax, take a deep breath, and buckle down. Clear your mind, and then put it to work.

Stop juggling and start doing. Master Your Mind shows you how to supercharge your trajectory by taking it S-L-O-W.

More about Roger here: https://freedompersonaldevelopment.com

AI for Marketing and Product Innovation with Dr A.K. Pradeep

Today’s episode offers innovators, entrepreneurs creatives and marketing professionals a non-tech guide to artificial intelligence and machine learning —twin technologies that stand poised to revolutionise the way we exist in business and life.

The future is here, and we are in the thick of it; AI and ML are already in our lives every day, whether we know it or not.

The technology continues to evolve and grow, but the capabilities that make these tools world-changing for marketers are already here—whether we use them or not.

 

Today we will touch on how we can take advantage of AI’s unparalleled and rapidly expanding power. 

 

We will look at

  • How we can use AI and ML in ways that speak to the human spirit?
  • How to we translate cold technological innovation into creative tools that forge deep human connections?

Written by a team of experts at the intersection of neuroscience, technology, and marketing the book we will discuss today is a must have for anyone looking at where innovation, marketing, branding and creativity is going next.

We welcome the author of AI for Marketing and Product Innovation: Powerful New Tools for Predicting Trends, Connecting with Customers, and Closing Sales, Dr A.K. Pradeep

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