10 Gems from IdeaCast’s First 1,000 Episodes
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Welcome to the H. B. Idea cast from harvard business review. I'm Allison beer.

and i'm certainly.

Today, cut and I are in the studio together because we're celebrating a milestone. This is our one thousand episode.

unbelievable. If you are more recent listeners, you might not know that idea cast launched almost twenty years ago in two thousand six.

Hello, and welcome to the very first edition of the H B R idea cast as soon to be by weekly audio show from harvard business school publishing. My name is paul Michael len. I'm an executive editor here, and i'll be your host.

Since then, a lot has changed our host, of course, but also the thea music, the frequency, th Epace a nd c omplexity o f b usiness. And we've had lots of major world events. Does the financial crisis of september two thousand eight mark the end of an era?

Hi, i'm Sarah Green of harvard business, and that's one of the welcome to the H. P. R. Idea cast from harvard business review. I'm alison beer.

Welcome to the H B. R idea cast from harvard business review. I'm curt naki. H admitted bosses are the best even when we don't. Wow, those last two clips, Allison. Those were here and my first appearances as hosts on the show, feeling a little the stogie year and grateful.

Yes, I think both much slower in our introductions when we started. And of course, I was in a listener before I was a host, and I have such fun memories of my predecessors. So thank you to paul and Sarah for everything you brought to the show. But what really stands out for me are the guest that we featured over the years and of course, their ideas.

Yeah, that hasn't changed over one thousand episodes. Our commitment to presenting the best thinking on business management and leadership, great voices with timelessly insights.

So today, we've chosen ten episodes from across our archive that will help you super charger career. We pick them to highlight the essential skills that we all need, but they were in our first jobs, managing a team or leading an organization.

So we're going to start with a basic question, why do you work like what do you work for? A key theme that we've seen in business over the past decade is purpose is the idea that company should be more than profit machines and individuals should find more meaning in their work. So this first episode is about finding your personal purpose in the work you do and using that as a foundation on which you build your career.

This is a conversation I had in twenty nine with Nicholas peers. He is a professor at the college school of management at northwestern university. And here's how he answered the question for me on the show.

What if you don't know what your life's work is? like? how? How do you find that personal mission statement? Because finding all the right job or choosing a career, a lot of work at itself.

So we have to start asking the deep questions of purpose, an identity, in order to get to life's work. It's about the work and the impact we feel most called to make at any given point in our lives. It's the work that we cannot not do. IT is engaging in the radical act of connecting our souls with our roles.

So I love that line our souls with our roles. Um you know maybe you are working for a purpose driven company and so it's sort of easy to find that. But you can also find meaning in your own contribution, you know whether that's making customers happy or helping your colleagues or even just supporting your family. And so I love starting with this clip because nicklas is right. We have to think about work as something a little bit bigger in order to really be successful at IT.

Yeah, yeah. What I like about him is that he says that your purpose could be very simple, right? IT doesn't have to be high for luton, but you do need to understand that and that you will be happier when you do. absolutely.

So for the next clip, though, we want to get a little bit more tactical, bring IT down to the ground. And we're onna feature an episode from way back in two thousand and eight. This was our founding host, paul Michael, men interviewing holy weeks of communications consultant.

They're talking about a key scale for any career, good communication. Holy has advice for how to say hard things at work without upsetting people. SHE calls IT temporary phrasing.

It's not phrased ing the triggers, the counterpart. It's not escalating. Its not disrespecting yourself for your counterpart, it's temperature, non provocative phrasing.

So let's say that you and I are in a meeting together and I just put up my hand and offered a really dumb idea and tried to start a conversation around IT and that conversation was going to derail any chance that we were going to have an effective meaning. How do you tell me it's a dumb idea .

that is so hard that I probably wouldn't try to tell you it's not a dumb idea. And I might listen to what you say. Not, if appropriate, have any non verb response. I want that appropriate and then say, I see a differently, paul.

I really, really enjoying this this episode because he is so good at explaining how to say what you mean in a professional and clear way. He said that a lot of times when you think to yourself, when you're in a meeting, I can't say that, I can't say that to my boss. I can't say that to my coworker.

SHE says, actually, you can say that. You just can't say that that way. And SHE shares these tips on how to actually say what you mean and communicate clearly in a way that isn't offensive or doesn't derail the conversation.

Yeah, every job is going to a require difficult conversations, and you have to know how to handle them first, to advocate for yourself and your ideas, and then to become a good leader who can manage conflict on a team.

A SHE also give example of when somebody makes you an offer for like a job or raise and it's not enough money SHE was just like I would take IT if I could but is not enough for me, which is like exactly that's clear, very, very diplomatic in a way but also just doesn't shirk the conflict that hand yeah I often find that some of the best .

advice that we get for Operating in the business world also really works in your domestic life too. So definitely the next time i'm having a fight with my husband and citizen, are you crazy? I'm going to say I see that differently.

Got well, sticking with in a personal communication here. There's also a strategy aspect to communication, right? And this next episode gets at that. It's a conversation that sergey cm. Michael had with lisa rose, who was then a management professor at the size same school of business that achieve a university.

She's now in why you the title of the episode is lead authentically without over sharing, which explains IT so clearly, right? There's this belief that you should be yourself at work, and that workplaces where people can be authentic are going to be more productive. And rose shares her research about how to do that, how to model that as a leader, when to share something about yourself and how for effective .

self disclosure. We found that there's two main elements. The first IT must be genuine. That may sound like a no brainer, but you'd be surprised how often we buy managers fabricating stories with the situation budging the details.

I had one thing to say to an executive, but IT is, do not exaggerating, not make up stories. People are smart, they figure IT out, and they can do a reputable harm, unless than perfect disclosure that fits the emotion of the situation is much Better than being disingenuous ous. 嗯， the second thing I would say is that the self score sure must fit and further the task.

And that means that must include the timing, the substance in the process. IT must help the test. IT cannot be for promoting oneself or prefiling one's need for approval.

That is so insights I found, I mean, SHE basically says, you know, be yourself, but be IT carefully know all.

The research shows that leaders who show vulnerability, who behave more authentically, are more trusted and are more successful at leading their teams. So I think for anyone trying to establish strong connections at the office, you know, it's really it's so important.

So we talk to researchers like lisa rose. We also talked to practitioners. And one thing we often do on the shows, we talked to practitioners in extreme job settings, right? So the chief on the international space station, you know where you live with your co workers, right? Or in this episode, we're about to hear a fighter pilot.

And one reason why we do this is that when you hear from people in work situations where there's really no lev, there's a little time for this communication. There's a small window for negotiation. These people have often developed proven techniques that the rest of us can learn from, even if it's not late for death for us.

And that's why we publish this episode last year called how one f thirty five fighter pilot makes decisions under pressure. I talked to hazardous, and so he shared his techniques that he's developed and has been trained on, like calculating expected value before you make a decision. And very importantly, something too few of us to do and too few organizations do, is to learn from your past decision making with the U.

S. Air force calls a deep briefing. And that's something that lee says the armed service crafts really carefully and has down to a science to ensure that IT really gets the best results.

IT is a sacred place for us. We're not worried about the person were worried about the action. The base commander could be flying as a wingman.

He is in charge entire base. He is born for now twenty thirty years, and he could be deeper ef by a twenty three year old. Uh, captain. So IT really takes a lot of effort and work, but if you're able to do IT, right, i've never seen a Better tool for being able to improve decision making than the debris. I mean, if you scheduled for five minutes per gnant, be one minutes. So schedule a thirty minute block and go through how you can be Better after every project at the end of a every week, right down a few things that you can improve upon. And over the course of a year too, you'll be surprised at how much improvement you make.

So first, very cool to have in a view of fier pilot. I definitely felt some top gun bib string that episode. But yeah, he talks about that three step process for decision making.

So again, we're going from this idea how you make decisions in critical, time sensitive environments to tactics you assess, choose, execute. I think there has three steps. Debriefing, I think, is really learning how to Better assess IT really struck me.

That is something that every individual can do. Sure, you can absolutely do IT as a team. Very important to have everyone talking about what could have gone Better, but it's something all of us could do every day to make sure that we're getting Better and making Better decisions as we go along. And so when we're talking about waste to per charge your career, that sort of reflection, I think, is incredibly important.

Yeah and IT just increases your chances of getting to a place in your career where you wanted to get to, right?

yeah. So are our next episode is about how to make decisions when you're at a station or ker, when you actually feel like there aren't that many options or pava left open to you. It's called making peace with your midlife mid career self. And it's an interview I did with chip conley, a former hospitality industry, is CEO and founder of the modern elder academy, who made a very big change mid career.

And I had a bit of a season, the day moment, where I said, like cash, I I can consciously curate my life differently if I choose to. And then I had to really say goodbye to see my identities and morals and some of how I was living my life. I now call that the great midlife at IT, because the first half of your lives about accumulating, and the second half your life is about editing. IT was really helpful for me, because what IT allowed me to do in my fifties is to have a little bit more of a blank slate and say, okay, so now that I, now that I have junked all these things, know, how do I want to live my life? What is going to give me meaning in my life?

okay. So I do have to admit that I did this episode for myself because i'm deep in the bottom of what researchers called the u curve of happiness that comes with middle age. Um I read chips, spoke at a bunch of others for an essay in the magazine and on each beardie g if listeners want to look IT up, it's called, can we make middle aged less miserable? And I take away from that research, and my conversation with chip is that we can, my very favorite line from the book, which I reference in the episode, is show up so they notice your energy, not your wrinkles.

Yeah, yeah. no. I I listen to this one intently and it's funny that you said you did IT for yourself because I do have a friend who, when I told him the work idea, he said, oh, how cool.

What an amazing life hack like you get to ask questions about things that you're wondering about are struggling with in your work or your career and people help sort IT out for you fortunate we publish everything that that we we do so I get the life act but so so do listeners um I really appreciated how we talked about the opportunity you have in your my career to edit, to do things differently. He talked about sort of the future regret minimization strategy that he went through to think about what he wanted to do differently and why. And he also recognize the wisdom that comes with midlife. And I thought a lot of that was really encouraging.

Yeah, I came away with a really positive mindset. And on the regret, I have to shut out another episode that we did with the on pink talking about what people regret most at the end of life, and people regret what they don't do much more than what they do do so a bias tod action, which I think is what chip was also application for.

Yeah well, from mid career to the middle of this episode, we're going to take a quick break. And then then we're going to shift their focus to leadership, career skills we're going to hear from a legendary hollywood director, a big tech CEO and in a business ratee icon. Stay with us.

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Okay, we're back. Let's move on to the next episode. So as you said earlier, a curt, we interview a lot of professors and business leaders on the show, but sometimes we get to learn from leaders in other fields.

We already heard from a fighter pilot. We also talked to actors, politicians, athletes. And in two thousand and twenty two, I had the opportunity to speak with actor, producer, director ron Howard.

I'm sure many of our listeners will remember from the films he directed thirteen, a beautiful mind, which won the Oscar for her best picture in two thousand and two. But as a movie director, ron is also a leader, and he told me that he actually adapt his leadership style for each of the actors he works with. It's something he learned early in his career when he was working with .

the actress Betty Davis. SHE was, you know, in her seventies, but he was still betting Davis multiuser winning deva and SHE wasn't crazy about me directing. SHE thought I was this Young guy from a sitcom.

And I I really had a struggle to sort earn her respect, which I ultimately did by using a kind of creative logic of rolling up your sleeves and saying, oh, this isn't quite working. How might IT work? What should we do? What do you think? And SHE wanna have been very complementary of me by the end.

Okay, so I have to say a few things about this interview here. First of all, he grew up on movie sets, and he was just a vacuous learner. He took cues from everyone that he saw, and then he used IT to figure out how to work with people like Betty Davis. Secondly, he just had so much great advice about managing your career, seeking out new experiences, rules and responsibility I S and then managing diverse talent, including all of those big ego in hollywood .

yeah um what I liked about his interview is just the parallels between movie production and innovation and startups right? He really sounded a lot like, you know, these teams who come together very quickly where you have to work with people with a lot of different expertise and put complex groups together on on very crazy time lines.

That's one thing about idea cause I think is a show like there will be interviews with people who work in a different industry than you, but there's so much that you can learn from how people are approaching problems and solving problems. There's a lot you can steal. So even if the interviews, not with somebody who's talking about your jobs specifically, there's some to learn.

absolutely one hundred percent agree with that. But of course, we do talk to the very top leaders in business as well to get lessons from them about careers, about managing people and managing organizations. And one of the leading executives of our time as microsoft CEO, such an adela H B R editor and chief audio gni ous, interviewed him for the idea cast in twenty seventeen to talk about the choices he's made in his career that LED him to the sea weed.

At least a couple times .

in your microsoft journey, you were put into jobs that pulled your way out of your comfort zone. And i'd like you to talk a little bit about that phenomenon, both as A A managerial approach that somebody put you in that position and then as a kind of learning approach, good and bad, to suddenly be somewhere that you really never thought you would be.

you know, IT was not about. This is somehow going to be the next move I would need to make in some no grand planned to get to the corner office. That definitely he was not the case. In fact, I distinctly remember Steve saying, hey, look, you know, if you go to being in, you don't do a good job or succeeded. You might just be you, the last job.

But what at least drove those choices for me was more about, hey, what can I learn? Where can I have impact? Where can I uniquely contribute? And that is, I think, in some sense, defined who I am and more importantly than, uh, the career i've had.

Okay, so he had a tough job ahead of him, right? Microsoft wasn't perceived as the absolute leader in the tech industry anymore, but he really is best known for shifting the culture of the company towards what he was talking about in that clip, always learning, being curious. And that has not just propelled his career, obviously has. But IT has propelled the company. And I love that idea test gives us and our listeners access to thought leaders like that.

Yeah you know what we heard him say there, I think is also a really good lesson today because you know you hear people talk about herky jerky careers. There isn't just the standard way up that kind of route to advance in organizations is not as clear that may be used to be that insight about how to you know know whether something is a good move for you yeah is is super helpful.

Yeah you need to be ready for growth and you need to embrace that. So IT was cool to hear from him directly on .

that for sure. Um let's stick with the organization. Decision making here with another episode from the same year is called transcending either or decision making. And our guest was Jennifer real at the time he was a professor, the university of toronto's rotman school of business. He still teaches there, but she's now a partner in strategy designer at idea. And SHE told me through some fun examples about the film industry about innovate thinking, which is a technique to develop, strategy to innovate, kind of classic trade off thinking.

There are some problems for which making the trade off is unacceptable. If I make the trade off, I lose. If I make the stride off, it's not going to solve the problem. And IT is in that situation where you ask yourself, could there be a Better way? Could I imagine doing something either than choosing the either, or finding the barely acceptable compromise, and actually need to create a Better choice, something new that doesn't use this today?

There were great examples in that conversation from the lego movie and the toronto film festival. But what I like best was, again, how practical SHE got, you know, from this big idea. Let's move beyond either or a decision making. SHE broke down a horse ge process, get clear about the problem, compare solutions, generate new possibilities, and then test them. And I think that the world of business is so complex and fast moving right now that it's even more important than ever to think beyond the obvious work to come up with really innovative out of the box solutions when the existing options.

just like aren't cutting IT.

Another chAllenge that a lot of us will deal with, either on an individual or a team organization level if we work long enough, is managing stress and even burn out. But it's a concept that really often misunderstood. You know, research shows that it's not something we can tackle on our own.

In fact, IT has to be addressed collectively by leaders um so in late twenty twenty, amid the pandemic guy interviewed Christina maza ack, one of the researchers who actually introduce the concept to burn out back in the one thousand nine hundred and seventy to learn more about how we can help each other avoid or recover from IT. What would you say to a worker who feels like their boss isn't aware there burnout and isn't trying to prevent IT? What can that person do?

You've got to make IT a social thing, not an individual one anytime. It's just an individual and I need to talk to my manager of all to whatever you know the common response often is, well, you know what's wrong with you? What's your problem and you don't always get good traction.

You don't get something that you know somebody says, yeah well, let let's talk about and see if we can figure out, you know how we can do this Better. And so we really need all hands on deck to put our heads together and sort of say, okay, what might be some things that we might try and not try away from just the little stuff because it's the little chronic stuff. This is really the cost of her. Now.

what I loved about your interview with her is just how he talked about this as a system mic problem. He said, for instance, you know, if you are suffer burnout, a lot of the advice you go meditate, take a vacation or take a break and she's like, but why is our advice to like, leave the situation you're in? How is that? That actually doesn't solve the problem?

Yeah, as I said, this episode was recorded mid pandemic. IT was before vaccines were out and men, we were all really burned out, especially people in the health care and retail and other essential sectors. But IT was very cleared to me that the problem was building before then.

And I actually feel like it's gotten a little bit worse since in that were all trying to do more with less. We're all feeling stressed, were all a little bit overwhelming by our jobs and our lives. And i'm not sure that employers are giving people what they need, a manageable workload, autonomy, recognition, community fairness and values or meaning. And if you are a manager, you need to make sure that your teams are okay.

right? yeah. Well, with community is a big part of that solution. IT also figures in our last episode. We started talking about purpose.

We're onna kind of end with IT too, by considering purpose in the larger context of society. So number ten is a conversation from twenty eleven with harvard business school professor Michael porter titled how to fix capitalism. And porter shared the idea from his landmark article on shared value.

And he said something that really struck me. He said that all profits are not created equal. There are good profits and there can be bad profits.

Melton freemen famously argued that the social responsibility of business was to maximize its profits, and the simple act of profit maxims ation was good, and of itself, that was enough, that was sufficient. So what was good for business was sort of aimable ally good for society. But I think as we've seen the effect of business practices on things like health and nutrition and the mortgage crisis, there's example after example of where actually it's much more complicated than that. And yes, profit is not inconsistent with society y's needs. But if you think about creating economic value in a narrow way, if you don't understand really the broader and more suttles and longer term influences on the ultimate sustainability of a firm success, you can get into a situation where that profit really does come at the expensive society.

This conversation kind of highlights the shift from shareholder capital m, or you you know max M I, shareholder value, shareholder returns above all, to shared value of what we also talk about today as stakeholder capitalism.

The question is a very including this in are highlights of episodes that will help you supercharge your career because at H. B, R, we do really believe that businesses should be a force for good in society that all of us. Can push our organizations toward the goal of shared value that porter outlined, that we should choose jobs and careers that help us do that.

right? What companies do and what business does is up for debate. To be a leader today, you do need to understand that contest.

yes. Thanks for joining us for the special episode of the H. B. A cast.

Only hope that some of these ideas inspire your career and where thrill is ever to bring more of these great voices and insights and ideas to you. Meanwhile, we've just talked about one percent of our first thousand episodes. There are nine hundred and ninety other episodes in our archive full of timeless, less advice and insights to manage your team, your organization and your career. Find them all at h br, at org slash podcasts or search ge B R in apple podcast, spotify, or where, if you listen.

Thanks to our current teams, senior producers mary do and and sanny asia producer hana bates, audio product manager ian fox, senior production specialist rob ecard and our fearless leaders marine hook and audio gn tious. You don't hear these folks in our episodes, but they do so much to make our show possible every week.

We also want to acknowledge the people at H. B. R.

Who have made huge contributions since H. B. Idea cast launched in two thousand and six. You heard some of them in this episode. Former hosts paul Michael men and cea Green car Michael, founding producer adam buckhart and other key editorial and production staff like Catherine bell, eric lik and a wouldn't be here today without their hard work, devotion to this enduring show .

and our heart work, thanks to all the expert cast who have shared their knowledge with our audience over the years, they put the idea and idea cast, and more so grateful to them.

You can thank you for listening to the H. B. R. Idea cast. I'm curtaining h.

and I am a list peared.