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Future Ready Podcast

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Upskill with the world’s most influential books in bite-sized lessons.

Insights On Leadership

Insights On Personal Development

Financial Management

Insights On Communication

Business Essentials

INSIGHTS FROM BEST-SELLING BOOKS

Upskill with business leaders, subject matter experts and faculty from top universities.

Leadership Essentials

Lessons On Personal Development

Lessons On Communication

Business Planning

Lessons On Productivity

INSIGHTS FROM FACULTY & EXPERTS

Partnerships are never easy, even if you have a shared vision. But often, when two people bring out the best in each other, behemoths get created.

Business Partnerships That Changed The World

Bill Gates and Paul Allen forged more than a friendship in school. They set the foundation for a partnership that benefited from their contrasting skills, and a shared love for programming.

Maintain an open discourse with your business parter but stick to your respective competencies.

Magic was created when Disney's Michael Eisner and Frank Wells-- one an innovator and the other a dealmaker-- decided to join forces.

A succesful partnership is built on honesty, complementary skills, effective communication, and a focus on individual responsibilities.

Charlie Munger wanted to be a lawyer but was convinced by Warren Buffett to come on board at Berkshire Hathaway. That started a partnership that would fuel the growth of the investing major.

The foundation for a successful partnership is mutual respect. This allows the organization to benefit from their complementary thinking.

The teaming of Oprah Winfrey and Jeff Jacobs is legendary. How did their paths cross? Why did she trust a new manager? From a highly paid employee to the owner of a multi-billion dollar empire, find out how Jacobs masterminded her stellar rise.

A successful partnership requires a clear brand and clear manager. Partners must bring their own unique skill sets but work together to grow their companies.

Patrick Lencioni's The Advantage gives you an edge over your competition, helps maximize productivity, and achieve organizational health. This series delves into the Four Disciplines Model to build powerful leadership that seeks to accomplish all this and more. Stay tuned!

Get a competitive advantage over rivals with the Four Disciplines Model that focuses on enhancing organizational health. This episode details what The Advantage has to offer in helping businesses outperform competitors.

Leaders know the importance of organizational health but seldom pay heed to improve it. The Advantage shows how overcoming these three biases can make leaders back a thriving work culture.

The three biases of leadership are 1. Sophistication, 2. Adrenaline, and 3. Quantification. While the impact of organizational health cannot be measured, improving it has a ripple effect on other functional areas.

The first step in the Four Disciplines Model is developing a cohesive leadership that embraces key behaviors. This episode looks at building trust and mastering conflict.

Building A Cohesive Leadership Team – Part 1

Sharing backstories and past hardships help build trust. Conflict mining acknowledges tension and seeks honest opinions to bring out small disagreements before they blow out of proportion.

After trust and conflict, Lencioni's organizational health model shifts focus to commitment, accountability, and results. Learn how they affect the company and what you can do as a leader to iron out the kinks.

Building A Cohesive Leadership Team – Part 2

Take out time at the end of meetings to emphasize the decisions made for clarity. Leaders have to commit to a common cause even if they disagree and adopt a goal-oriented approach.

Since clarity is key to successful leadership, ask these six questions to maximize your impact. From idealism to identifying your values, this questionnaire reflects on the core guiding principles that drive you.

A clear definition of roles covers critical areas of business while reducing confusion and potential conflict. Identify the core values of the company by employees who represent what is best in your organization.

Simply communicating with clarity is not enough, says Lencioni, you need to overcommunicate to make values stick. Creating a ripple effect by reiterating the message is vital to drive home its importance.

Cascading communication is effective because it is authentic as it is 'word of mouth', and employees see alignment when they hear leaders saying the same message.

Good communication is key to organizational health. Leaders need to reinforce this clarity despite busy schedules. This also means delegating it to team members, such as the human resources department. Learn how to reinforce clarity time and again.

Some ways to reinforce clarity include 1. Hiring of the right individuals, 2. Incorporating values during orientation sessions, 3. Performance management systems, 4. Compensation and rewards programs, and 5. The firing process.

Cluttering your agenda with too many issues makes meetings long-drawn, boring, and unproductive. Meetings are essential, just make sure you segregate which of the four types you set up.

The four kinds of productive meetings healthy organizations hold are 1. Daily check-in meeting, 2. Tactical staff meeting, 3. Ad hoc topical meeting, and 4. Off-site review meets

This Emeritus Insights video series is focused on the theme of ‘Being A Corporate Diplomat’. In this series, Adam Pacifico chats to Allyson Stewart Allen who has helped over 250 global businesses. She’s an author, broadcaster, global educator, and Non-Executive Director. Allyson is a regular commentator for the main news channels, and she has been on all four series of the BBC’s The Apprentice. Let’s be honest, if you are not proactively working on your personal brand, someone else is and you may not be ageable with the results. This video series focuses on what is a corporate diplomat and why is it important to be a corporate diplomat and the leadership challenges around it.

Be A Corporate Diplomat – With Allyson Stewart Allen

What is a Corporate Diplomat and what are the critical ingredients of the role? Leaders must understand how to build and protect their own personal brand, which for many is inextricably linked to their organization's too.

Self-awareness is critical along with balancing the ability to be authentic whilst assimilating the important external signals.

Leaders must grasp the importance of being a Corporate Diplomat in order to understand how they are being received by others.

The Importance Of Being A Corporate Diplomat

Embrace the variety and diversity of those you lead and interact with. What is appropriate in one setting may not be in another setting. Being in tune with your environment will allow you to get the best from everyone.

Allyson provides some choice examples of companies getting it wrong on branding from her 'cupboard of curiosities.

These powerful examples show how important it is to research, engage, and truly understand the environment you are operating in whilst balancing the global vs local challenges.

Understand what not to do as a company and how bigger organizations face bigger challenges with Allyson sharing another powerful example.

Why Do Organizations Make Branding Mistakes

The bigger a company, the more fragmented it becomes and the harder it becomes for the dissemination of critical know-how to be shared.

The episode explores how can we link the role of leadership and being a Corporate Diplomat.

The Role Of Leadership In Becoming A Corporate Diplomat

Leaders need to unify an organization and create consistency around culture, managing risk, and sharing understanding, and translating the strategy into bite-sized pieces.

Leaders must be able to transfer the challenge of being a corporate diplomat into their own personal branding, but how?

How Is Diplomacy Relevant To Personal Branding

You need to manage being yourself whilst demonstrating your values and humanity through your behaviors that remain respectful and appropriate to the environment you are operating in.

The world has become a smaller and interconnected place which means companies must manage the global vs local tensions.

Striking a balance is an ongoing dilemma to be assessed in real-time and not once a year.

Corporate storyteller and author Paul Smith explores different aspects of change in this series, with one over-riding conclusion. It is not only necessary but vital to growth. Smith is a speaker and leadership trainer specializing in storytelling techniques and has authored books such as Sell with a Story and The 10 Stories Great Leaders Tell.

Learn how to make your managers change from one of the greatest corporate leaders of the 20th century: GE’s former chairman and CEO Jack Welch.

The first obstacle that leaders face in driving change is getting people to accept that change is needed. Delivering a reality check is one way to do it.

Here's how you can be a catalyst for change by telling stories that inspire empathy and connect on a human level.

The human reason for change can prove to be a more compelling catalyst than product information or cost savings.

What if it is not change that bothers people but the fear of not being prepared for it?

The more leaders help team members prepare for change, the less they are likely to fear it.

What is the most effective strategy to invite change? Make it impossible not to!

Come up with ideas that drive definitive behavior shifts, the advantages of which are noticeable by people and make change impossible to resist.

Turn barriers to change into agents of change. See how P&G leader Tarang Amin built a new spin on a negative report to make it a rallying cry for change.

To turn a demoralizing event into a change agent, don't hide from it. Publicize it—make it a tool for change and galvanize people around it.

Jack Straight From the Gut is the autobiography of one of the most iconic CEOs of General Electric, Jack Welch. Watch this series to see how Welch introduced a radical new management style that helped turned an elephantine, hierarchical behemoth into an agile, nimble and efficient powerhouse of corporate innovation.

Jack: Straight From The Gut By Jack Welch

Jack: Straight From The Gut traces GE's legendary CEO Jack Welch’s journey as he reshaped a bureaucracy-ridden company into a lean, nimble and extremely profitable business whose processes are seen as a model for executives and organizations all over the world.

All great leaders are different but they all possess one key quality—self-confidence. Understand its importance and learn how to build your team’s confidence such that they are self-assured and constantly learning and growing together.

It is important to build and engender self-confidence in your team. It gives them the courage to take risks and achieve far beyond the realms of possibility.

When Jack Welch took over as CEO of GE, he found himself signing expenditure requests that 16 people had already approved. This video explains how he eliminated unnecessary layers of management and streamlined operations such that he never had to sign any such request in his tenure as CEO.

Large companies often have needless hierarchies that hamper flexibility and speed of operations. Build lean organizations that are agile, adaptable and high-spirited.

Early on in his tenure, Welch decided that the best way forward for GE was to only focus on businesses that would pay off in the long term. Find out how Welch worked out a rule of thumb to eliminate superfluous businesses and focus on operations that would lead GE to unprecedented growth.

Unless you are a market leader, your profitability does not count in the long run. It is good to take stock of where you may be lagging in the market and refocus your resources on ventures that will provide enduring growth.

Welch argues that it is important to evaluate and reward people according to their abilities and performance. This also includes making the tough call and sacking those who are not up to par. Find out how to sack people in the most humane and amicable manner possible.

Exceptional performers should be rewarded so they continue to push the envelope, while poor performers need to be removed from the talent pool to effectively streamline the workforce and ensure consistent growth.

One of the toughest asks of leadership is to let people go. Find out how to sack people in the most humane and amicable manner possible.

Avoid any element of surprise when firing an employee. Ensure your workplace is built on constructive criticism and feedback and you are expressing your disappointment on performance where necessary.

Jack Welch classifies managers into four broad types depending on their ability to deliver on commitments and whether they share the values of the company. Find out how to use this classification to decide who should stay and who should go in this video.

True leaders energize and inspire rather than control and direct. A manager who typically forces performance out of people rather than inspires it needs to be let go.

Jack Welch was a great believer in cultivating leaders from within the company. Learn how he created an entire training program at GE’s Crotonville institute to train leaders in-house.

Leadership is all about nurturing others within your team to become good leaders. Not only does this ensure smooth transitions within organizations, but also keeps people motivated.

When a company’s performance starts to energize employees, it’s a sure-fire path to growth. Learn how Jack Welch made this a reality by tying rewards to GE performance.

Consider tying rewards to company performance to get employees to start viewing the company’s overall growth and goal as their own.

Learn how Jack Welch adopted Six Sigma processes to reduce error and get as close to perfect efficiency as possible.

Relentlessly measuring, evaluating and improving performance in every function should be a core part of any business, as it brings you as close to 100% efficiency as possible, enabling you to grow your business.

'The Hard Thing About Hard Things' tells the story of how computer science graduate Ben Horowitz came to be regarded as one of the world's most respected techpreneurs. Based on his varied experiences, from how to run a start-up to wisdom about dealing with uncontrollables, this 9-part series is an entrepreneur’s guide to survival.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things By Ben Horowitz

When Ben Horowitz gets real about the 'hard things' any business leader has to face, you have to listen. It won't always be easy but he can show you how to thrive.

Watch Horowitz guide chief execs on how to accept situations that are out of their sphere of control.

Fine tune your radar to pick up early signs of brewing trouble. When trouble comes, accept it, decide what to do, and act fast.

If you have made the first mistake in your endeavor, worry not, Horowitz has the answer. Find out how to get your act together as soon as you realize your mistake.

To bounce back from major struggles in their business,leaders must focus on winning back their employees' trust and reigniting clarity in their vision.

The success story of an organization is written by its people. Perfect the rules of hiring with Horowitz who drives home the point with a personal example.

There are two rules of smart hiring: Choose for strengths, rather than rejecting on weaknesses. Match experience to the size of the company.

Culture impacts and drives the performance of any business. Learn how to design the culture of your workplace.

You can figure out solutions by learning the hard way. Or you can build a network of seasoned, successful people and ask them how they did it.

Build a network of experienced, successful people. Then listen to them.

How CEOs react to errors in judgement can make all the difference. A mistake is not failure. Learn to deal with it head-on and chalk it up to experience.

Mistakes are not failures. They are lessons that you learn to become better at your job.

CEOs need to change their tactics just like any military general. Go on a war footing when the stability of the company is under threat but ease up when the going is good.

The hardest thing for any entrepreneur is to give up control or ownership of the business they have created. How will you know if it is the right time to bite the bullet?

The hardest thing for any entrepreneur is to give up control or ownership of the business they have created. Know when it is the right time to bite the bullet.

In today’s fast-moving, matrix organizations, titles don’t guarantee influence. Andy Lopata shares how to earn respect, radiate energy, drive action, and build loyalty — the four pillars of real influence. Discover how these qualities help you inspire commitment and shape decisions without relying on formal authority, creating trust-based collaboration.

Influence Without Authority by Andy Lopata

Emotional intelligence goes beyond simply focusing on your own emotions. Behavior analyst Kerry Goyette explores the neuroscience behind emotional intelligence and offers advice on how to use its power to lead in today’s complex business environments. Stay tuned to learn how to manage change, improve your decision-making skills and shape your organizational culture.

The Non-Obvious Guide To Emotional Intelligence: Kerry Goyette

It is important to recognize your weaknesses, observe and listen to others and see how they react to emotional triggers and then use these identifiers to create the right environment and build effective relationships.

He is the most successful football manager in modern football. Sir Alex Ferguson propelled Manchester United to football history through 26 glorious years. In Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography, he dispels myths and keeps score of what successful managers have in common.

Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography By Alex Ferguson

What makes football managers tick is also the essence of any great leader. As ManU flounders in the post-Boss era, knowing how Sir Alex would have tackled the team today is on everyone's mind. Zero in on the leader's mindset with his tips.

How to take a team that is evidently the underdog and effect a turnaround? Sir Alex demonstrates why setting sights on the moon is what keeps you aiming higher.

Consider your ambition in terms of destinations. The moon should be your target.

The manager is three roles rolled into one, writes Sir Alex. Knowing when to give feedback is vital. Protect team members in public but don't shy off pulling them up for mistakes in private. Understand the three key questions employees ask about their bosses.

A leader plays many roles. Within each role, deliver communications carefully and protect your team from external pressures.

Giving the last push in a game is all about timing, says Sir Alex. Learn how he masterminded crucial reversals in the last quarter-hour, game after game, reaping results that spoke for themselves. Have you given your all to the game today?

Anticipate crises and train for them. Practice techniques and actions for turning potential losses into wins.

ManU perfected the art of rising from the ashes under Sir Alex. Playing with the minds of the opponents earned him a tough attitude that begs mirroring.

Devise techniques for distracting your competition. Make them play your game, rather than the game they planned.

Being down does not mean being out. Manchester United did not always win but each defeat gave Sir Alex reason to revisit his strategies. Teams follow a life cycle after which they need reinvention, one that course corrects and spots new talents. What did you learn from failure?

A team or project has a natural lifecycle. Accept defeat as an opportunity to regenerate and begin again.

When he came into ManU, Sir Alex knew who the boss was. He was! He had to power and lead the whole team, so while he cheered good performance, churlish and superstar attitude had no place on his watch.

Every organization has only one boss. To stem a crisis, show team members that boss is you.

Concentrate on the goal and let the rest slide as they keep you from performing at your optimum best. Find out what made the Class of '92 stand out. Yes, it starred David Beckham, and therein lies another lesson Sir Alex wanted his team to prioritize.

Don't let small issues distract from your goals. Lasting success requires a constant focus on core strengths.

Despite some progress, years of conditioning has impacted how women are treated and tend to treat themselves in professional spheres. Over time, women have developed habits that have helped them reach a certain level at work. But after a point, these habits become hindrances to their growth. Tanveer Naseer, a principal at thoughtLEADERS, LLC explains these unconscious learned behaviors covered in How Women Rise and offers actionable advice that can help eliminate the traits that hold women back from success.

How Women Rise By Marshall Goldsmith And Sally Helgesen

Many studies have established how women face unique challenges in their career paths. How Women Rise talks about what behaviors get in the way of their success. Learn from leadership coaches Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith as they explain why women resist change and how if they don’t unlearn some habits and embrace change, they risk remaining stuck.

How Women Get Stuck And What To Do About It

The first must-stop habit that Helgesen and Goldsmith insist women must shake off is the tendency to not claim their achievements. This episode explains how to get rid of the fear of appearing like braggarts or the belief that great work gets noticed on its own.

Habit 1: Reluctance To Claim Your Achievements

Neuroscience has shown that our brains are quite malleable, so it is not as hard to change a habit as we might think. The key is that we should be consistent about changing the behavior we want to shake off.

How do you go about making sure your work gets noticed without coming off like a self-absorbed jerk? Find out in this video.

Habit 2: Expecting Others To Notice And Reward

In order to get self-clarity and have others notice you for your work, develop an elevator pitch that covers what you do now, what you plan next, and what makes you the best fit for that role.

Although studies indicate that women are better at building relationships, they rarely look at getting value from the ties they build. This video offers four points that women should consider to get value from their relationships to rise up in their career.

Habit 3: Building Rather Than Getting Value From Relationships

Getting value from relationships should be seen as a means for mutual support and growth. When you ask for something, you should also offer something in return so both parties benefit from the interaction.

Many women quickly rise up the corporate ladder but then plateau at a certain level in organizations. Learn how this stagnancy is bad for both their own professional as well as organizational growth and how women can overcome it.

Habit 4: Putting Your Job Before Your Career

Staying in a job for too long due to some misplaced sense of loyalty lowers your self-worth and may even leave you without a job soon. It is important to develop a healthy self-interest for self and organizational growth.

Years of gender-based expectations drive women to work harder and try and attain perfectionism at their jobs. Yet, it is this precision that sometimes traps them in a trajectory where growth gets overlooked.  Learn why it is not always important to be perfect in this video.

Your attention to detail and drive to precision is an advantage, but only to a degree. You sometimes need to take a broader view and prioritize things in order to attain your goal.

Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith insist that women must give up the deeply ingrained habit of always trying to please everyone. This video explains how it is detrimental in more ways than one and how to shake it off.

People pleasers, who hesitate to delegate for fear of burdening someone, can shake off the habit by reminding themselves that they have been able to grow because someone else was willing to delegate to them and they now have the opportunity to do the same for someone else.

Changing habits is challenging. How do you let go of behaviours which in the past have led you well in your career bringing you to where you are today? Find out in this video.

Once you’ve identified the “must stop” habit, you want to break, find one person you trust and ask them to watch your back and prevent you from falling back into old patterns.

Being a better thinker can improve your relationships, your work, and your emotional intelligence. In this course, Alyssa Lowery Ph.D., a philosophy instructor at Vanderbilt University, will walk you through her very best advice on ways to improve your thinking, including what to do and what not to do when tackling a complicated idea, problem, or conversation.

How To Improve Your Thinking By Alyssa Lowery, PhD

Being a better thinker can improve your relationships, your work, and your emotional intelligence. But “improving your thinking” is so abstract; it’s hard to know where to start, or what starting would even look like. In this course, you'll learn how to do just that from Alyssa Lowery Ph.D., a philosophy instructor at Vanderbilt University.

We often think of thinking as an isolated, solitary activity. But after this lesson, you'll be able to recognize the way in which thinking happens with other people.

Being a great thinker starts before you ever crack open a book or enter a conversation. After this lesson, you'll be able to begin cultivating the virtue of open-mindedness.

Our cultural emphasis on efficiency is often in tension with what makes for great thinking: patience and care. After this lesson, you'll be able to take your time with an idea or question, setting yourself up for a thought you can be proud of.

Some of the most critical tools in your thinking toolkit are distinctions. After this lesson, you'll be able to deploy one essential distinction to avoid being swept into a haze of messy ideas.

A place where vagueness often slips into thinking or conversations is in confusing descriptive and normative sentences. After this lesson, you'll be able to use this distinction to this more carefully about these important concepts.

When you're already inclined to think something, it's easy to be satisfied with the first argument for it that you hear. But after this lesson, you'll be able to look for the strongest argument to keep your thinking sharp.

You might already be skeptical of Wikipedia, but what makes for an actually trustworthy source of information? After this lesson, you'll be able to trace an idea to its source and then make sure it meets your standards.

Generalizations are both fast and useful, but sometimes they become a way to avoid thinking carefully about a topic. After this lesson, you’ll be able to use generalizations effectively, and avoid them when necessary.

Now, what's this really about? After this lesson, you'll be able to use the philosophical trick of "thought experiments" to clear away the fluff and get to an idea's core principles.

Perhaps the most famous philosopher of all time, Socrates, opened almost all of his conversations with one question: "What is that?" After this lesson, you'll be able to avoid being stumped by this simple question and instead provide a clear account of your subject matter.

When you already know you're right, it's really easy to dismiss your opponents. After this lesson, you'll be able to use the principle of charity to make sure you give those who disagree with you their proper due.

One of the most familiar fallacies is the ad hominem. But after this lesson, you'll be able to point out this fallacy accurately and avoid a common mistake: making the ad hominem fallacy's evil twin.

A common phrase is "begging the question." But for philosophers, this phrase has a very particular meaning. After this lesson, you'll be able to use the phrase in its philosophical sense and avoid the fallacy to which it refers.

Answers are overrated! After this lesson, you'll be able to ask two key questions to get to the heart of any issue, problem, or conversation.

Some of our most popular ideas rely on untenable claims about truth as a whole. After this lesson, you'll be able to avoid these often contradictory claims and speak more confidently on one of the most fundamental questions.

It's tempting to think that thinking alone can solve all of your problems, but sometimes you need to use a different approach. After this lesson, you'll be able to recognize situations where thinking might come up short and deploy another strategy instead.

Now that you have finished the course, how do you ensure that you get the best out of these lessons? Learn in this lesson.

In this series, learn about the importance of design thinking, and how design thinking activities can link to an innovator's experience. In addition, discover 6 key phases that are crucial to an innovator's journey.

Experiencing Design By Jeanne Liedtka, Karen Hold, And Jessica Eldridge

In this episode, get to know author Jeanne Liedtka, and understand the thinking behind the book, Experiencing Design: The Innovator's Journey.

Why Is It Important To Experience Design?

Learn why design thinking may come off as easy, but in reality is quite a challenge to do right. In this episode, discover the design thinking phases and what it takes to master design thinking.

Deepening Your Design Practice - What Does It Take?

Take a deep dive on the design thinking phases and the shifts in mindset and skillset that takes place with each phase.

Mindsets And Minimal Viable Competencies (MVCs)

Learn about the key steps involved when creating a Personal Development Plan (PDP).

Learn how  mindsets and Minimal Viable Competencies (MVCs) look like for the first stage of design thinking. In this episode, you'll  examine the obstacles that prevent an innovator from experiencing the Immersion Phase.

Discover the  actions that an innovator might take to deepen their experience of the Immersion Phase, and lead others in their design thinking journey.

Explore the Sensemaking Phase and the MVCs that accompany it. Examine the obstacles that prevent an innovator from  experiencing the Sensemaking Phase completely.

Learn about the specific actions that help to deepen the experience of Sensemaking Phase.

Review the details of the Alignment mindset shifts and the MVCs that accompany them.

Explore the actions that allow an innovator to deepen the experience of Alignment.

In this episode, you'll review the details of the Emergence Phase.

Learn about the actions that allow an innovator to understand their experience of Emergence.

Review the details of the Imagining Phase, and the MVCs required for this phase.

Learn about the actions that guide and support an innovator's experience of Imagining.

Review the details of the final phase of the innovator's journey - Learning in Action, the MVCs required for this phase, and the obstacles that may prevent from experiencing Learning in Action.

Learning In Action Mindsets And Practices

Originals By Adam Grant

Originals By Adam Grant

Originals By Adam Grant

Episodes

1. Unusual Truths

2. Don't Let Success Hold You Back

3. More Work Leads To Great Work

4. Winning Over The Skeptics

5. Do Dawdle

6. The First Mover Disadvantage

7. Enemies Over Frenemies

8. Make Fear Your Friend