The Strategy Skills Podcast: Strategy | Leadership | Critical Thinking | Problem-Solving
FirmsConsulting.com & StrategyTraining.com
CEOs and business leaders, management consulting senior partners, ground-breaking professors, thought-provoking writers and journalists, record-setting athletes and coaches, and award-winning actors and celebrities discuss the key issues facing the business world and broader society.
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Get free access to our newsletter, Monday Morning at 8 am, along with sample episodes from our training programs on www.strategytraining.com. Go to https://www.firmsconsulting.com/promo.
Episodes
Mentioned books
13 snips
Mar 25, 2026 • 54min
639: Growth at Scale in the Age of AI (with McKinsey's Marc Canal)
Marc Canal, a McKinsey Global Institute partner and author of A Century of Plenty, explores how AI, demographics, and productivity shape long-term growth. He talks about consulting as a trust-driven practice, why deep relationships beat broad exposure, and how organizations are messier than they seem. He highlights AI reshaping skills and the rising value of judgment, leadership, and practical AI literacy.
17 snips
Mar 23, 2026 • 49min
638: How to Lead and Live with Less Stress and More Joy (with Former C-Suite Executive and Advisor to Fortune 100 Leaders, Amy Leneker)
Amy Lenneke, former C-suite executive and advisor to Fortune 100 leaders, and author focused on reducing stress and boosting joy. She challenges the idea that stress is the cost of success. She breaks stress into individual, relational, and systemic levels. Practical topics include five types of work stress, simple tactics to reduce schedule and sudden stress, prioritization, boundaries, and when organizations need system-level fixes.
10 snips
Mar 18, 2026 • 54min
637: Growth and Innovation at Scale, with Former IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce Executive Jason Wild
Jason Wild, former executive at IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce and co-author of Genius at Scale, shares lessons from scaling growth, capital discipline, and building repeatable innovation. He discusses treating capital as scarce, aligning incentives with long-term value, simplifying operations to reveal true performance, and decision-making with incomplete information. Practical leadership tactics and storytelling sharpen the conversation.
13 snips
Mar 16, 2026 • 46min
636: Dr. John La Puma on the Hidden Health Costs of Indoor Living
Dr. John La Puma, physician and NYT bestselling author on nutrition and lifestyle medicine, explains how indoor living, light exposure, and screens create ‘cognitive drag.’ He highlights simple morning and midday sunlight habits, contrasts calming blue spaces with immune-boosting green spaces, and offers practical tips to reduce indoor light, screen time, and digital overload to protect sleep and cognition.
Mar 11, 2026 • 54min
635: McKinsey Senior Partner Chris Bradley on The Real Drivers of Long-Term Economic Growth
Chris Bradley, Senior Partner at McKinsey and director at the McKinsey Global Institute, explores themes from his book A Century of Plenty. He argues long-term prosperity comes from sustained investment, strong institutions, and technological progress. He also discusses resource abundance, demographic challenges, and how AI could reshape productivity and work.
10 snips
Mar 9, 2026 • 52min
634: BCG's Julia Dhar on Why 70% of Major Change Efforts Fail
Julia Dhar, Harvard-trained behavioral scientist and BCG managing director who founded BCG’s Behavioral Science Lab. She discusses why about 70% of major change efforts fail. Short, practical ideas include separating facts from assumptions, focusing on the how not just the what, addressing emotions and incentives, designing precise behaviors and routines, and creating optimism, agency and clear expectations.
20 snips
Mar 4, 2026 • 55min
633: The Invincible Brain with Johns Hopkins Professor Dr. Majid Fotuhi
Dr. Majid Fotuhi, neurologist and Johns Hopkins adjunct professor who studies brain aging, outlines five pillars for cognitive resilience. He discusses how exercise, sleep, nutrition, stress management, and brain training shape the aging brain. Short, actionable habits and mindset shifts can produce measurable change. The conversation reframes later life as a period for growth and sustained cognitive vitality.
10 snips
Mar 2, 2026 • 55min
632: Building Healthier Workplaces Through Attuned Leadership (with Nidhi Tewari)
Nidhi Tewari, a licensed therapist and wellbeing speaker who advises leaders on burnout, trauma, and communication, shares practical tools for healthier workplaces. She explores how burnout shows up in the body, nervous-system regulation, and the RESET framework. She also explains EMDR, setting boundaries, attunement skills, and how relational intelligence matters alongside AI.
22 snips
Feb 25, 2026 • 53min
631: How Elon Musk Thinks (with Charles Steel)
Charles Steele, former private equity and banking professional who advised Tony Blair and now writes about creativity and leadership. He describes pivoting from finance to making things, the discipline of rewriting and reframing difficulty, why curiosity should guide careers, and how Elon Musk’s worldview, first-principles thinking, and civilizational goals shape Tesla, SpaceX and XAI.
10 snips
Feb 23, 2026 • 53min
630: Business Innovation and Strategic Growth Advisor, Lorraine Marchand, on Sustaining Growth Through Innovation
Lorraine Marchand, startup CEO, advisor, and business-school faculty with pharma and product-development chops, shares how disciplined experimentation sustains growth. She discusses reframing failure as structured learning. She explains a 70/20/10 portfolio for protected innovation. She outlines rituals like “Fail Free Friday” to normalize candid reflection and how AI should assist, not replace, critical thinking.
