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
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.
12 snips
Feb 18, 2026 • 57min
629: Ashley Herd, Former Head of HR North America at McKinsey, on What Effective Managers Actually Do
Ashley Herd, former Head of HR North America at McKinsey and author of The Manager Method, shares a crisp framework: pause, consider, act. She talks about timely performance feedback and recognition, the balance between micromanagement and hands-off leadership, how managers shape team well-being, and the gap between AI rhetoric and everyday practice.
Feb 16, 2026 • 59min
628: Northwestern Law Professor John McGinnis on Constitutional Stability in the Age of AI
John McGinnis, Northwestern law professor and author focused on constitutional law and tech, discusses constitutional stability, public choice realism, and how AI will reshape law, education, and work. He highlights the need for entrenched constitutional design, the political realities of incentives, and how humans should pivot to persuasion, judgment, and relational skills in an AI-dominated world.
11 snips
Feb 11, 2026 • 52min
627: How Overworked Leaders Can Find Peace Again (with Dr. Guy Winch)
Dr. Guy Winch, clinical psychologist and author known for emotional hygiene work, shows why emotional wounds need urgent care. He talks about reclaiming life from chronic overwork, differentiating rest vs recharge, stopping rumination by turning it into solvable problems, and practical ways to update limiting beliefs and protect sleep and focus.
13 snips
Feb 9, 2026 • 56min
626: BCG Henderson Institute Senior Director Adam Job on Growth and Strategy in Uncertain Times
Adam Job, Senior Director at the BCG Henderson Institute who leads strategy research, explores why growth still drives value and why it is getting harder today. He discusses decision-making under uncertainty, how political risk differs from other risks, a set of strategic postures for volatile times, and the role of AI in expanding experiments but needing disciplined scaling.
35 snips
Feb 4, 2026 • 55min
625: New York Times Bestselling Author and Navy Seal Advisor Daniel Coyle on Leadership, Psychological Safety, and Flourishing Teams
Daniel Coyle, New York Times bestselling author known for The Culture Code and advising teams from Navy SEALs to tech firms, explores leadership, psychological safety, and team flourishing. He discusses vulnerability as trust-building, why safe environments beat raw smarts, and the difference between complicated and complex problems. Short practices, rituals, and attention balance for resilient, creative groups are highlighted.
33 snips
Feb 2, 2026 • 56min
624: From IQ to AQ: Agility as the New Leadership Advantage (with Liz Tran)
Liz Tran, former venture capital executive and author of AQ, studies agility as the leadership edge. She explains why adaptability beats credentials in fast change. Topics include building Agility Quotient, reframing burnout as lost agency, using AI without losing judgment, tiny daily practices to get more adaptable, and why continuous reinvention sustains career relevance.
