unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

When we think about ideas like selling or marketing, we usually think of getting people to buy products. But Loran Nordgren is talking about getting people to buy into new ideas. And the biggest obstacle isn't always motivation-its often friction. Loran Nordgren is a Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. His research considers the basic psychological processes that guide how we think and act. The overarching goal of his work is to advance psychological theory and to use theory-driven insights to develop decision strategies, structured interventions, and policy recommendations that improve decision-making and well-being. Loran’s first book “The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance that Awaits New Ideas” spent multiple weeks on the Wall Street Journal Bestseller list.Greg and Loran discuss fuel based mindsets, crafting brand empathy, status quo bias, and how American football is socialist in this episode.Episode Quotes: Fuel can be positive and negativeSo we tend to think about fuel as these positive things. But the job of fuel is to simply ignite or incite our desire for change. And we often do that by dangling shiny things in front of people. So carrots, but we also use sticks. And so that kind of, yeah, the telling people, this is a limited opportunity. There's only one left. That is inciting our desire for change. It's not making it necessarily more fun, more pleasant, more intrinsically interesting. But really anything that propels, whether that's a push or a pull, we would consider fuel.How to get people to changeSo a good rule of thumb for people is anytime you're offering them one path, like you're putting one thing up in front of them, it's a good chance that the status quo is operating against you. Now, the better news is that once you see that, there are all kinds of ways that not only reduce that friction, but to take that thing and transform it in essence into fuel to make it a motivating force. Fuel based thinkingWe have this reflexive idea that the way you get someone to say yes is to elevate appeal, magnetism, attraction. And we intuitively think that if people are rejecting our offering, it's because that fuel is insufficient. And we refer to that reflex as thinking in fuel or a fuel based mindset.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Kellog School of Management at Northwestern UniversitySpeaker’s Profile at the Lavin AgencyLoran Nordgren’s WebsiteLoran Nordgren on LinkedInLoran Nordgren's Human Element His Work:Loran Nordgren on Google ScholarThe Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New IdeasThe Psychology of Desire Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Certainly not most academics, and probably not the business students they teach. The common perception around HR is that its focus is getting everyone their benefits and making sure sexual harassment trainings are completed. But there is so much more to this field. Dr. John Boudreau is a professor emeritus of management and organization and a senior research scientist with the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. With his research on the bridge between work human capital development, leadership, and sustainable competitive advantage, Dr. Boudreau’s interests are in the future of work and organization. His latest books on HR include “Work without Jobs: How to Reboot Your Organization’s Work Operating System (Management on the Cutting Edge)” and Reinventing Jobs: a 4 step Approach for Applying Automation to Work.He joins Greg to talk about how “work” is not synonymous with a “job,” trust when it comes to change, dealing with inevitable automation, and iphone upgrades as a metaphor for the changing workplace.Episode Quotes:The evolution of tasks & jobsCan I give you a bonus for being a bus boy and coming over here and helping out with the wait staff? You know, and how long is it that you do that before you say, you know what? I'm getting paid at the bus boy, but 30% of my time I'm over here helping out highly paid waiters and waitresses. You know, if you're not, don’t I get to get paid in the tips? and so - oh, wait a minute. Do we have a system that can pay you that way? Can we give you credit for the skills that you're using over there?So what is the evolution? So, basically that is kind of, this is not a dig on HR. These systems exist for everybody and they exist for a reason, but they require rethinking. Trust in changing workplacesIf we're going to be in a relationship like a worker and their leaders, or a worker in their company, there needs to be some trust that the other party isn't out to get you. Or that the other party hasn't left aside your considerations in the interest of their own.Building community in new work environmentsI think COVID has helped us to understand that there are new ways to build community. That said, it's also helped us understand that that traditional system was so embedded, that those alternative ways of being remote or being fluid are difficult. Much more difficult than just taking a job.Show Links:Guest Profile:Professional Profile at University of Southern CaliforniaProfessional Profile at USC Annenberg Center for Third Space ThinkingSpeaker Profile at Big SpeakJohn Bourdreau’s WebsiteJohn Boudreau on LinkedInJohn Boudreau on TwitterHis Work:Beyond HR: The New Science of Human CapitalRetooling HR: Using Proven Business Tools to Make Better Decisions About TalentLead the Work: Navigating a World Beyond EmploymentReinventing Jobs: A 4-Step Approach for Applying Automation to WorkWork without Jobs: How to Reboot Your Organization’s Work Operating System Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Our guest today says that the profession of programmer or coder is the most important occupation to have in the 21st century, and yet computer science is developmentally speaking, still a very young field and discipline.Rob Reich is professor of political science and, by courtesy, professor of philosophy and Education, at Stanford University. He is the director of the Center for Ethics in Society and co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and associate director of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. His books include “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot,” and “Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better.”Listen as Greg and Rob talk about computer science, the ethics of engineering, echo chambers and how social media is changing communication systems.Episode Quotes:Is democracy in opposition to big tech?When the optimization mindset becomes a kind of life outlook, rather than a particular methodological approach to a domain of technical problems, I think the engineer is led to believe that there's no particular reason to be attached to democratic decision-making as such, because democracy is so suboptimal.We need a social system, a political system that optimizes. And democracies are designed as a fair process for refereeing, contesting preferences and values amongst citizens while cohabiting together in the same social order. How social media is changing communication systems In a world of social media, the people who are signaling to us what counts as quality information are our peers, are our friends on the social graph, rather than some gatekeeper expert.And so we have what we call horizontal trust rather than vertical trust to an expert. And that has led to the spread of misinformation and disinformation that no expert has, as it were, weighed in on and tried to filter for us. Ethics & computer scienceI think while personal ethics of course is fine to have, maybe necessary, there's no such thing as a university course that will fix the human temptation to fudge the corners or to get ahead in various unethical ways. And I think the far more interesting challenge is this one to unearth the implicit value frameworks that guide our way implicitly or explicitly through moral complexity. Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford UniversityProfessional Profile at National Center for Family PhilanthropyRob Reich on LinkedInRob Reich on TwitterHis Work:Rob Reich on Google ScholarSystem Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot Digital Technology and Democratic TheoryJust Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do BetterPhilanthropy in Democratic Societies: History, Institutions, ValuesEducation, Justice, and Democracy Occupy the FutureToward a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Leidy Klotz describes himself as an “academic trespasser.” Investigating underexplored intersections between engineering and behavioral science, Leidy is in pursuit of more sustainable systems. A professor at the University of Virginia, Leidy has published over 80 peer-reviewed articles in venues that include top academic journals in built environment engineering, engineering education, and design, as well as both Science and Nature. His most recent book is “Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less.”Nationally recognized as one of 40-under-40 professors who inspire, Klotz has received multiple institution-level teaching awards for his classes and close work with undergraduates.Leidy joins Greg to discuss biases and heuristics,minimalist writing styles, modifying mental models to accommodate the new information, time famine, and hoarding.Episode Quotes:How can we give ourselves reminders in the moment of making decisions to get better at subtracting?I would say that listening to this podcast is certainly a reminder, you know, reading my book is a reminder. But also just taking some time to say, okay, where do I make important decisions? And how do I bake in a reminder for myself to consider subtracting? So it's like when you're doing your to-do list for the week, that you also consider some “stop doings.” When you're deciding, maybe it's every time you buy something off of Amazon, you also think of something to take out of your house to keep the balance.Doing less can be difficultPerhaps the most important point from the research and the book is that it's more work. If you want to create a whittled down skyscraper, that's more work. It's more steps to get to that. And it's the exact same thing cognitively, right? It's more steps.the easy thing to do is to add. And it's not that we can't subtract, but we have to think more. And I think that's where design thinking helps.Subtracting can be difficult to startMy friend Ben who was a coauthor on the research and thinks about this more than anybody, probably other than me, came to me bragging about, “oh, I said no to a department meeting, I’m taking our research to heart!” And it's like, well, that's great Ben, but you didn't actually subtract something, you just didn't add.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of VirginiaLeidy Klotz’s WebsiteLeidy Klotz on LinkedInLeidy Klotz on TwitterLeidy Klotz on TEDxClemsonUniversityHis Work:Leidy Klotz on Google ScholarSubtract: The Untapped Science of LessSustainability through Soccer: An Unexpected Approach to Saving Our World Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The notion of self awareness has been at the heart of philosophy for millenia. Now it’s the subject of research by neuroscientists, and is the focus of research at Steven Fleming’s lab, where he asks: what supports the remarkable capacity for human self-awareness? To address this question, Steve and his team combine experimental and theoretical approaches to understanding how people become self-aware of aspects of their cognition and behaviour, and why such awareness is often impaired by psychiatric and neurological disorders. Steve Fleming is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Sir Henry Dale Wellcome Trust/Royal Society Fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, and Group Leader at the Max Planck-UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. His latest book is devoted to this work, titled “Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness.”He joins Greg for an episode on metacognition. They discuss mind reading, optimal self-awareness, confidence in your own knowledge, and learning to develop metacognition.Episode Quotes:Sports coaches aren't usually the best players, but that's not their role anywayThe coach then can provide the external perspective. So it's not necessarily the coach needs to have good metacognition themselves, although that might well be true as well. It's more that they are in a sense, providing this surrogate, external self-awareness for the players performance.Confidence & knowledgeConfidence is aligned with some objective notion of accuracy. But if I walk around thinking I know everything about the economy, I don't need to read the newspaper to find out how that works and so on. Then I've got a strong confidence in my model of how the economy works and maybe I then don't go and seek out information and I try and spout my views to everybody who will listen. And that's a case where my confidence has been decoupled from the underlying knowledge base, the accuracy. And that might happen for various reasons, but we do think, and we've done some experiments on this showing that confidence acts as this metacontroller to weigh how sensitive you are to new evidence. The emerging study of metacognitionThere's this long intellectual tradition, but it was only relatively recently that there seems to be the tools starting to emerge in psychology labs that could gain an empirical foothold on how to measure and study self-awareness in simple tasks. And that's what psychologists often referred to as metacognition or thinking about thinking.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University College LondonProfessional Profile at Psychology TodayProfessional Profile at the MetaLabSteve Fleming on TwitterHis Work:Steve Fleming on Google ScholarKnow Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When we say “reflection,” what comes to mind? Is it sitting in meditation, in a meadow or a sacred space?. Or is it sitting at your desk, taking a second to look back at your life or career? Either way, its something that no one has time for these days, right?Joseph Badarocco is the John Shad Professor of Business Ethics at Harvard Business School. He has taught courses on business ethics, strategy, and management in the School's MBA and executive programs. He is also the faculty chair of the Nomura School of Advanced Management in Tokyo.Joseph’s current research focuses on what counts as sound reflection for busy men and women who have serious responsibilities and face hard, practical problems. His books include Step Back, Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose between Right and Right, and Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing.Greg and Joe talk about cultivating character in leaders, what counts as reflection, different kinds of attentional states, and having multiple role models.Episode Quotes:How people react to talking about “reflection”I ultimately interviewed about a hundred people, managers at all levels of organizations, some of them twice, it was about 150 interviews. And asked them, what do you think reflection is? And do you do it? And if so, when and how? An interesting reaction I got from a lot of them initially was along the lines of what you just said. They said, I'm sorry, but I'm really the wrong person. I don't have any time to reflect. I said, well, let's just talk a little bit further. And what became clear to me after a while was they had a image of reflection, which is a sort of a quiet, solitary, go up to the mountain sort of experience. The everyday work of managersI think we often demean the everyday work of managers and a lot of other people by saying what really matters in a company is what we're doing in our communities, the breakthrough technologies. Those things of course are important. But what you do day by day, building a stronger company, stronger organization, good jobs for people developing their skills, pride in working together and accomplishing something. You're never going to be on the cover of a business magazine, ( not that they exist anymore), but it still matters. Reflection isn't always done aloneAnother thing that a lot of people mentioned to me, these are very busy people, is it for them reflection wasn't solitary. So going up to the mountain is, thats a solitary image. But there were a couple people, either in their lives or often people at work, that they talked with fairly often, sometimes just briefly, but the sort of tone of the conversation was different. They were revealing a little more of what was on their minds.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard Business SchoolProfessional Profile at Keynotes.orgJoseph Badarocco on LinkedInHis Work:Joseph Badarocco in Harvard Business ReviewStep Back: Bringing the Art of Reflection into Your Busy Life Questions of Character​: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership Through LiteratureDefining Moments: When Managers Must Choose Between Right and Right Managing in the Gray: Five Timeless Questions for Resolving Your Toughest Problems at WorkThe Good Struggle: Responsible Leadership in an Unforgiving World Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Every generation reaches a point where they claim that discourse has gone to hell. But that doesn't mean we’re going to miss out on our chance to complain about it as well.Carl Bergstrom is a professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. Though trained in evolutionary biology and mathematical population genetics, Carl is perhaps best known for working across disciplines and integrating ideas across natural and social sciences. Recently, Carl teamed up with Jevin West to launch the Calling Bullshit project, developing a website and course materials for teaching quantitative reasoning and information literacy. That project then grew into Carl’s latest book, “Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World.”Carl and Greg sit down and talk about critical thinking, identifying misinformation in a world where it flows so freely, the psychology of debunking and teaching bullshit detection.Episode Quotes:What does the future of calling bullshit look likeWe do need to catch up to the realities of the environment that we live in and we need to adapt the way that our education system works to the way that our culture is changing. And I think absolutely we need to teach some media literacy that involves thinking about social media. We need to be deliberate in teaching critical thinking. We need to teach concepts like lateral reading so that people know how to look into that. Data driven bullshitSo much of the bullshit is data-driven today because the world is so intensely quantified both through the prevalence of all kinds of sensing in the world that we live in, ambient sensors and everything else being recorded and monitored, but also because of this intensely online nature of our lives. That generates a tremendous amount of data about what we're interested in, what we want to buy, where we want to go, who we want to date.Who can we trust for news now?Even if you know, I pick up my iPhone and hit the news app in the morning and I have a couple of intelligent analyses from various places. But, you know, as we talk about, somebody got a lip job, and then there's nine cats that look like Disney princesses, and they’re all head to head. And as good of a person as I try to be, you got to see those cats. This kind of is a race to the bottom if you will.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of WashingtonCarl Bergstrom’s WebsiteCarl Bergstrom on LinkedInCarl Bergstrom on TwitterCarl Bergstrom on InstagramHis Work:Carl Bergstrom on Google ScholarDetecting Bullshit Article on Science.orgCalling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven WorldEvolution Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, one of the biggest crises of our time was the global financial crisis. And even though that crisis passed, the underlying issues which gave rise to it have not been resolved. Anat Admati is the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, a director of the Corporations and Society Initiative, and a senior fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. She has written extensively on information dissemination in financial markets, portfolio management, financial contracting, corporate governance, and banking. Anat also co-authored the book “The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It” with Martin Hellwig.In this episode we’re diving into the world of finance, with a focus on housing subsidies in the United States, corporate finance education, and whether or not the private sector will solve our global problems. Episode Quotes:Money influences every sector So money speaks everywhere, including nonprofits and universities are not immune from that actually. Their donors, especially of business schools, are from the private sector and you don't want to annoy them. That's why the only way you're going to talk about society is to make everybody feel good about themselves and do impact investing in philanthropy and all of that. So that's sort of the winner takes all charade of changing the world sort of part of it. So academics are not immune.Change is difficult in academiaSo change is difficult also in academia and business schools especially. In the eighties there started being this mantra with Ronald Reagan, the government is always a problem, the government is corrupt and incompetent, etc. And therefore you have all these heroic CEOs, that they will take care of us because the government can't. To which my response is if the government can't, why is that? And did you have anything to do with it, with your own actions to corrupt the government basically? To weaken the government to rob it of resources in every clever way you can. And now we're all paying the price.The lack of education of corporate financeWhen I started looking into banking as a corporate finance and corporate governance expert right after the financial crisis, I was shocked. I mean, you really actually have academics writing textbooks and it's as if like the civilization of corporate finance and what we understand about the basics of corporate finance just hasn't made it there. They just have a whole other set of words that they use. And they just seem to refuse to accept it's really in the sort of domain of willful blindness. Funding & debtWe just rely too much on debt. And the debt often becomes predatory in bad terms, payday loans, and other things, and even student loans. In other words, what is it you want to fund? And how is it you want to do it? We do way too much funding by debt in general.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford Graduate of School of BusinessProfessional Profile at VoxEU.orgAnat Admati’s WebsiteAnat Admati on LinkedInAnat Admati on TwitterAnat Admati at TEDxStanfordHer Work:Anat Admati on Google ScholarThe Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It - Updated Edition Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Work used to have a rigid structure. You would punch in and out of the factory, leave your work behind at the office and go home. But as the lines between work and home blur, and all hours can easily become working hours, how can we find balance?Lynda Gratton is a Professor of Management Practice at London Business School where she directs the program ‘Human Resource Strategy in Transforming Companies’ – considered the world’s leading program on human resources. Her elective on the Future of Work is one of the school’s most popular and in 2016 she received the school’s ‘Excellence in Teaching’ award. For over ten years she has led the Future of Work Consortium which has brought executives from more than 60 companies together both virtually and on a bespoke collaborative platform.She joins Greg to talk about new digital tools that bring the workplace anywhere, what drives productivity, serendipity and the future of work post pandemic. Episode Quotes:What's the point of heading back to the office?Let me give you an example. I was talking to a senior investment banker in New York last week and she said, you know, Lynda, I've just commuted one and a half hours from Connecticut to come into Manhattan and I'm going to commute one and a half hours back. And all I've done all day, you know the answer to this Greg, she said, I've been sitting on zoom meetings. I don't know why I'm here. So if we want people back in the office. And I think most companies do for at least some of the time we have to make it a very attractive proposition. Can we recreate workplace interactions with an algorithm?The fact is that it is really great and innovative and creative to bump into people who are different from you. I mean, we know that from network theory, don't we? That those diversity ideas is what makes for innovation.So the question I think is twofold. As we go back to the office, in a physical way, how do we create more serendipity? And secondly, the point you raise Greg, which is, is the more that we can do virtually to create serendipity. And I think the answer to both of those is we can, it takes intentional design.Seeing trends in workplace culture & environmentI felt that about now, and I'm speaking April / May of 2022, people would begin to say, you know I think we could just go back to how we were. And I thought it was really important that all of us together said, no, we were not going to go back. There were many things wrong with how we worked. Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at London Business SchoolSpeaker Profile at London Speaker BureauLynda Gratton’s WebsiteLynda Gratton on LinkedInLynda Gratton on TwitterLynda Gratton on FacebookLynda Gratton on TEDxLondonBusinessSchoolRedesiging Work WebsiteHer Work:Article by Lynda GrattonRedesigning Work: How to Transform Your Organization and Make Hybrid Work for Everyone (Management on the Cutting Edge)The New Long Life: A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing WorldThe 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of LongevityThe Key: How Corporations Succeed by Solving the World's Toughest ProblemsGlow: How You Can Radiate Energy, Innovation, and SuccessHot Spots: Why Some Teams, Workplaces, and Organizations Buzz with Energy - And Others Don'tThe Exceptional Manager: Making the DifferenceThe Democratic Enterprise: Liberating Your Business With Freedom, Flexibility and Commitment Living Strategy: Putting People at the Heart of Corporate Purpose Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sharing fresh information to empower new thinking. That's the north star behind Aiden McCullen’s podcast The Innovation Show. This podcast is actually what inspired Greg to create unSILOed! Aidan McCullen is a former Ireland national rugby player and current change consultant, working with organizations to improve how they collaborate and create the environment for change. He has developed and delivers a module on Emerging Technology Trends in Trinity College Business School, ranked as one of the top Business Schools in the world, and wrote the book, “Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organizations and Life” He joins Greg to chat about reinventing himself from being a professional athlete to a successful businessperson, the importance of discomfort, how he sources guests for his own podcast to promote learning, and when to let go. Episode Quotes:Don't box yourself into one fieldI think to your point of not being an expert, I think we're moving away from the expert. The world still needs experts, don't get me wrong. We still all need a core competency. But with the speed of change of information and theories being disproved so quickly and new information being uncovered, we need to be just wary that when we get to the top of the ladder, the wall is getting higher. Or when we get to the top of the ladder that we may sometimes realize we're against the wrong wall. We don't like what we've got to the top of. And that's a shame to be stuck there because you're like, I have nowhere else to go. Discomfort is goodYou don't get a gain unless you get pain. I need the weights to be heavy enough to cause discomfort, to break down the muscle and then I need to feed it and nurture it in order for it to grow again. It's the same with any kind of learning or any kind of organization. So we talked about disruption in organizations. If there's no extrinsic pressure for me to change, I won't. Because, ultimately the brain is an energy saving machine, always looking for shortcuts. And it will create atrophies wherever it can, including in an organization. When your job becomes your identityWe cling to that persona wondering, oh, what if I don't make it if I let go. I'd rather be a prisoner to this history, this record of my past, rather than take a chance on a vision for my future. And in American football for example, so many players cling to that Jersey they become the jersey. Instead of letting go and going look, I've loads of transferable skills. I can apply them elsewhere and I can achieve elsewhere and enjoy another series of decades, series of personas because life can offer you that. Show Links:Guest Profile:Professional Profile at Trinity College DublinSpeaker’s Profile on London Speaker BureauAidan McCullen’s WebsiteThursday Thought BlogAidan McCullen on LinkedinAidan McCullen on TwitterHis Work:The Innovation ShowUndisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organisations and Life Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.