Productivity Mastery

In episode #117 of Productivity Mastery, not only that we officially start SEASON 3 of the podcast, but we welcomed Rob Napoli - an energetic and inspiring individual with whom we talked about How you can Leverage Your (Personal) Brand as a Founder. Rob shared a lot with us, including: 💡Founders should have a personal AND a company brand, 💡 Engagement in social media is more important than content creation for you, 💡 Many tips and ideas on how to reach out to people, 💡 The three most important things for a successful personal brand, and much more! Rob Napoli is an accomplished trainer, speaker, entrepreneur, podcast host, and Amazon Best Sellers List author based in Brooklyn, NYC. Rob's journey has taken him from the Midwest to New York City by way of Milan, Italy, where he received his Master's, scaled a global startup, and coached professional American Football. Rob is a continuous learner who creates engaging keynotes, programs, workshops, and curricula and is on a mission to find the best whiskey bar in Manhattan. Enjoy listening and stay #productive! #personalbrand #startupfounder #productivity

In this special bonus episode on the Productivity Mastery podcast, Stoyan Yankov presents the keynote titled "Why Caring for People is Good for Your Company" from his participation at the PODIM Conference (2022) in Maribor, Slovenia.  Podim is a nonprofit platform founded in 1980 to change attitudes towards innovation. Based in Slovenia, Podim has evolved into the most influential startup & tech event in the CEE region, where innovation meets business opportunities and capital, as well as knowledge and experience. It is a key regional platform for enabling learning and networking in the most valuable and time-efficient way. Podim aims at equipping founders and innovators with the right tools to solve the most meaningful challenges of society. Enjoy this special episode!

In episode #115 of Productivity Mastery, we present to you Ieva Treija! If you have ever felt invisible or that your business can never be noticed by the world and more importantly, the press, Ieva has some great advice for you. With her experience with PR, tech companies and journalism, Ieva provided us with valuable lessons, including: 💡 The first steps in PR for a business, 💡 The hate between startup founders and journalists, explained 💡 How to build relationships with the media and the press, 💡 Different PR approaches and strategies, and much more! Ieva Treija, a PR & Communications Consultant for Tech Companies, has been studying journalism, and later - also marketing. After working 10+ years in marketing, she came back to creating content - but this time for her clients, not the media. Although Ieva is doing PR and communication consultations, her work sometimes appears also in the media. Ieva is an active participant in the local startup community and editor of "Labs of Latvia" - an online platform that is focusing on local startup success stories as well as technologies, science, and commercialization. Ieva is also a Certified Facilitator in the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® method. Enjoy listening and stay #productive! #productivity #publicrelations #startupfounder

In episode #114 of Productivity Mastery, we welcome Masami Sato - a radiating and inspiring personality with a mission to help businesses around the world make a positive impact through their daily business activities. Masami Sato shared a lot with us, including: 💡 How to create a community with a shared mission, 💡 What are the foundations of a giving and caring world, 💡 What are some secrets of Japanese efficiency, 💡 Japanese leadership styles, and much more! Masami was born in Japan, but her desire to expand her horizons took her on a global journey. She became deeply concerned about the inequalities and other challenges that existed in the world. Since then, she has endeavored to create real WIN-WIN connections across all cultures, people and organisations to realise a different world. She has been a serial entrepreneur since 2001, starting and running several commercial enterprises, all aiming to transform the way businesses are operated today. And by taking a completely new look at the power of giving, she founded B1G1 (Buy1GIVE1) in 2007. Masami’s approach to life is very different. She brings a new, almost upside-down strategy to everything she does. And she also radiates it through her writing and speaking. She has authored four books including, ‘JOY - The gift of acceptance, trust and love’, ‘GIVING BUSINESS – Creating the maximum impact in the meaning-driven world’ and ‘Better Business, Better Life, Better World’. Masami’s career has followed her diverse talent and skills having been a teacher, translator, natural food chef (and a farmer!), author and award-winning entrepreneur as well as a mother of two teenage children. She is a two-time TEDx speaker and is frequently invited to international events, podcasts and interviews. Tune in! 

In this special bonus episode on Productivity Mastery, Stoyan Yankov, the co-founder and co-host of The Leaders Who Care podcast and community platform, interviews Jakob Modéer, Regional Manager of the Swiss Entrepreneurship Program. Tune in and discover:  ✔️ Opportunities and challenges in the Balkan region from the Western perspective, ✔️ The role of culture in the country’s economy, ✔️ Why an economic system would need plurality, ✔️ Using the entrepreneurship as a vessel to massively help, ✔️ How to practically support less developed countries, and more! Swedish by origin, American/British by education, and Balkanite by marriage and life! 30+years of living, working, failing, surviving, and succeeding in southeast Europe. Factory-owner, exporter, job creator, motivator, storyteller and now, startup ecosystem supporter with the Swiss Entrepreneurship Program. Being born and raised in Sweden, a country that scores in the top 10 of any global development index, made for a wonderful and worry-free childhood. As a teenager, with restlessness with life in a society of collective conformity and completion, Jakob applied to study for a high school year in the US, which was followed by BA studies at Lewis & Clark College out in Oregon. At the American university, Jakob was struck by the openness of the discourse, the closeness of the professors and their push for well-argued cases to improve the status quo, and the equal rejection of unsupported complaining. Graduation coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rush for societal change in East Europe and the USSR. Jakob got a job in Moscow, constructing the first golf course in the USSR. The encounter with the negative effects of totalitarianism and the planned economy was eye-opening. Finding a way to operate and get a job done in a completely different culture was an incredible challenge, a learning journey that Jakob now treasures very much. Today, 30+ years later, he recognizes that those months in the Soviet capital were his watershed moment, he knew at that moment, that this is where he wanted to be – on the front lines of the re-introduction of individual freedoms, free market, and free-thinking. During the last three decades in the lands of southeast Europe aka The Balkans, Jakob has started and failed as a factory owner, succeeded as an exporter of multiple products, worked as a consultant on job creation programs, and advised national and local governments on the art of creating jobs (often in deprived geographical areas) and most recently managing a program which puts entrepreneurs first, as the primary change agents, in a transitional society. Enjoy this special and very insightful episode, and learn more about the podcast via theleaderswhocare.org!

In episode #112 of Productivity Mastery, we meet with Naveed Syed who is a global, experienced strategist, connector, and facilitator with business success in driving growth through innovative service excellence. He is a strategic systems thinker who excels at identifying high-impact opportunities, devising actionable solutions, and driving results through cross-functional excellence. Naveed is also a creative strategist with strong negotiation, interpersonal and communication skills with the ability to see the “big” picture to facilitate key decision-making processes and revenue generation. Naveed is recognized as an innovator consistently capable of creating new ideas and solutions to meet the most complex and ambiguous client needs and challenges. He quickly crests the learning curve of unfamiliar subject matter, disaggregating problems and developing /executing strategies for solutions that add value to clients. During our conversation with Naveed, he shared some curious stories with a focus on topics such as: 💡 Managing and nurturing relationships, 💡 Building sincere connections with your future clients, 💡 Mastering the art of networking with people we don’t know, 💡 Cultural awareness in the world of business. Tune in!

In episode #111 of Productivity Mastery, we welcome on the podcast John Paul Rollert who teaches classes in leadership, ethics, and politics at Harvard University and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. In this episode, the main topic centered around whether Leaders Are Born or Are They Created, and John Paul shared plenty of fantastic leadership techniques, valuable practices, and fascinating insights, including the following: 💡 Why empathy is important in leadership, 💡 How is leadership similar to learning how to ride a bike, 💡 3 lessons on leadership from working with Barack Obama, 💡 Why leadership is not for everyone, what is your personal leadership capacity, and much more! John Paul Rollert teaches classes in leadership, ethics, and politics at Harvard University and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and his research focuses on the intellectual history of capitalism, the ethics of leadership, and the application of empathy to law, business, and politics. 2 Rollert has been published in The Business and Society Review, The Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities, Raritan, Common Knowledge, Critical Inquiry, and the Yale Law Journal Online. Rollert has also worked with the former President of the United States, Barack Obama, during his election campaigns in 2004, 2008, and 2012. In addition to his academic work, he frequently writes on business, law, and politics for a variety of popular publications. He writes the In-House Ethicist, a featured column for the Chicago Booth Review, and his work has been featured in The New Republic, Harper's, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Slate, Fortune, and The New York Times. For writing featured in The Atlantic, he was recognized by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers in its 2017 Best in Business Competition. A graduate of Harvard College, Rollert earned his JD from Yale Law School and a PhD from the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He serves on the Board of Directors of two start-ups, Envel and Global Alumni. Tune in!

Raya Drenski is a brand strategist, mentor and co-founder of a startup consultancy and several consumer brands. She believes that a better elaborate brand helps a company or a person thrive! So she devised the Brand Like a Girl workshop to help more people fight biases and better describe their inner richness. Tune in!

In episode #109 of Productivity Mastery, we go to the Space & Beyond of entrepreneurship, so buckle up! Space holds much more job and economic opportunities (including for you!) than you can imagine, so we invited a real Space Economy Advisor to broaden our perspective. Anilkumar Dave shared a lot with us, including: 💡 The state Space Economy is in right now, 💡 Space technologies are all around us - let’s explore, 💡 How can we save our planet through the Space work, 💡 Space might need your competencies, and much more! Anilkumar (everybody calls him Anil) started his career as ICT Projects Manager between Italy and India before moving to EU-funded R&D and Tech. Transf. (TT) initiatives representing public and private entities and focusing on the interaction between Res. and Ind. He has worked in sectors spamming from textile/clothing to footwear, from logistics to households, and from FMCGs to Agrofood. After his assignment as the “SMEs Innovation and TT policies” officer at the Institute for Industrial Promotion (aka Italian Min. of Econ. Dev.) he designed and led the “Research, TT and special projects” department for the largest innovation agency in Italy, thus helping SMEs accessing European and public funds (25+ M€) through collaborative innovation projects. During his tenure at the Italian Space Agency, Mr. Dave launched and directed the “Innovation and TT” Unit working on New Space Economy themes: start-ups, risk finance, IPR, tech transf., and later appointed Open Innovation advisor to the president. During his role as senior partner for the innovation hub INFINITE AREA he launched the first Italian advisory firm on Space Economy targeting non-Space companies. At present Anil is a member of the advisory board for the GLOBAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP NETWORK SPACE and senior advisor to policymakers, start-ups, and research centres on Space Economy themes and fundraising. Tune in!

In episode #108 of Productivity Mastery, we welcomed to the podcast the dynamic co-founder duo, Mario Calderón & Victor Sánchez. We talked about Making Culture a Priority from Day 1, and also about the origins of SkillMapper! Mario and Victor shared a bunch of practical lessons and stories, including: 💡 Teaming up with the right person - and why, 💡 How they deal with F-ups in the company, 💡 Methodologies vs. Reality, 💡 How to build a company culture that even competitors want to join, and much more! Mario Calderón is the Co-Founder & CEO of SkillMapper, an AI-powered ed-tech building the bridge between education and employment for young professionals. Mario has believed that education is the ultimate equalizer, and has always had an entrepreneurial mindset. Thus, his transition from the corporate world to an ed-tech founder became very natural as the world was amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In early 2021, he co-founded SkillMapper with a mission to empower young professionals to achieve their full potential through education. Before SkillMapper, Mario worked in Data Science and Partnerships for nine years at Meta (former Facebook). He was among the first Peruvians to join this juggernaut in 2012 and worked across various teams during his stints, from operations to partnerships. Mario holds a Double Master’s Degree in Marketing Research and Management from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and BI Norwegian Business School, Norway. Mario was born and raised in Lima, Peru, and resides in Paris, France. Víctor Sánchez is the Co-Founder & CTO of SkillMapper, where he covers all the start-up’s technology and product development sides. Previous to SkillMapper, Victor has worked in TATA Consultancy Services and LATAM Airlines, specializing in strategy, analytics, and operations. Through these experiences, he discovered the world of Data, Business Intelligence, and Analytics. Since then, he has been passionate about surfacing data insights and building architectures for big data projects. His last stints before joining SkillMapper were aligned to what later became SkillMapper’s ethos and AI-driven approach. After completing his Master's Degree, he joined a computer vision start-up as a Data Scientist. Victor holds an Informatic Engineer degree from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Victor used to be an e-gamer in his free moments, and he’s passionate about football and martial arts. Tune in!