unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

We live in an age where uncertainty lurks around every corner, but what if uncertainty didn't have to be an anxiety-inducing, uncomfortable part of life?  The Upside of Uncertainty: A Guide to Finding Possibility in the Unknown, by INSEAD professor Nathan Furr and entrepreneur Susannah Harmon Furr, presents strategies and tools to embrace uncertainty and turn it into opportunity.  Nathan, Susannah, and Greg discuss why humans are naturally wired to avoid the unknown, and how our capacity to face it can be strengthened through learnable tools. The conversation covers some of the strategies described in the book like creating “islands of certainty” through rituals and support systems, maintaining a portfolio of personal options instead of going all-in too early, and focusing on what's within one's control while pursuing other meaningful goals, internally.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The golden space of uncertainty 26:59: [Nathan Furr] The American can-do attitude is it was this kind of illusion that we control the world. And most people who have been through something hard recognize it is not totally in our control. We sure we influence it, we nudge it, but a lot of things are outside our control. And so the people who are able to approach uncertainty with greater calm also kind of said, you know, what is in my control? I will focus on that, and what is outside of my control, or partially outside of my control, I am not going to obsess about that. And so there is this kind of golden space where you are focused on what are my internal goals, being the best, doing my best, making a contribution in the world. And I recognize that, there is some element of, in this complex, ambiguous world that I do not control, and so I am just going to focus on the things I can control and let the other pieces go. That leads to a much calmer view of the world. The video and audio are not synched On being comfortable with uncertainty 11:42: [Susannah Furr]: All of us could have cooler and more brilliant lives if we just tried a little bit more, if we got a little bit more comfortable with uncertainty. It is good to know, like, Ooh, I do not like risks. And we have a tool for that. Like, know what risks you have affinities and aversions for, but definitely do not just decide, Nope, I do not do uncertainty, because you are, you are missing out. The real danger isn't risk 18:29: [Nathan Furr] The real danger is not that you are going to go all in on the uncertain thing, it is that you are probably going all in on the certain thing, and you are not bringing that thing you care about, that thing you dream about, into the portfolio of options in your life. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Ben Feringa  World Uncertainty Index  Sam Yagan  Martin Seligman  Kathleen M. Eisenhardt Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Guest Profile: Nathan Furr Faculty Profile at INSEAD Nathan Furr on LinkedIn Susannah Harmon Furr Profile at INSEAD Susannah Harmon Furr on LinkedIn The Uncertainty Possibility School Guests' Work: The Upside of Uncertainty: A Guide to Finding Possibility in the Unknown The Innovator's Method: Bringing the Lean Start-up into Your Organization Leading Transformation: How to Take Charge of Your Company's Future Innovation Capital: How to Compete--and Win--Like the World's Most Innovative Leaders Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What happens when you start thinking of time as a scarce resource? What practical strategies can you use to protect it from being passively spent or hijacked so that you can spend the time you have in more fulfilling and meaningful ways? Cassie Holmes is a professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, and also the author of the book Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most. Greg and Cassie discuss how to use time more intentionally to increase both day-to-day joy and overall life satisfaction. Cassie explains how even though these happiness questions are timeless, they have become newly urgent due to modern distractions, cell phones, productivity culture, and the pandemic's effects on time perception, anxiety, burnout, and workplace engagement. Cassie describes exercises such as tracking one's time and rating activities to identify what is personally most joyful and meaningful, noting common low-happiness activities (commuting, work, housework) and how individuals can find variation within them. Cassie opens the window on some of the examples of this within her own life through her regular coffee dates with her daughter and a prearranged commitment device that allows her to count on date nights with her husband. They also cover bundling chores with enjoyable activities, selectively outsourcing tasks, and the tradeoffs of pricing time in money, emphasizing that better time management enables more meaningful and satisfying life activities, not simply doing less. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why being busy doesn't make you fulfilled 08:46: The unhappiness comes from when you have been busy and have spent your time and are looking back on it, feeling unfulfilled, like it got spent without you having invested in anything that ultimately matters to you. Whether it is things that give you that like true sense of joy and enjoyment, oftentimes through our interpersonal relationships, but also even that sense of satisfaction when you are making actual progress on whatever your project is, whatever that endeavor that you are sort of working towards is in line with your purpose, whether it is your personal purpose, which is really what my focus on is in the book, is the individual, and then ideally it is aligned. Your personal purpose is aligned with the sort of purpose of the work that you are doing. What is time poverty? 40:31: What time poverty is, it is this feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. It is a feeling of being limited by the resources, in this case, time that you have available to achieve what you set out to do. Why isn't more enough, when it comes to happiness? 20:22: Not recognizing the role of hedonic adaptation is sure that first half hour, like, yes, that is the delight, right? You have your glass of wine, and you finally can kick back. But once you press, next episode, and you are three hours into your watching TV that night, you see on the happiness ratings that it, your enjoyment goes down over time. So that is also really helpful information, right? Because if we are trying to optimize using your optimization, sort of discipline and thinking, then we will, well, actually, we should spread out those positives, like my TV watching. This is also where intentionality comes into play. Like instead of zoning out for like many hours every night, just watch that first half hour. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Happiness Hedonic Treadmill Intentionality Marie Kondo George Shultz Time Poverty Katy Milkman Guest Profile: CassieHolmes.com Faculty Profile at UCLA Anderson School of Management LinkedIn Profile Guest Work: Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most TEDx Talk | Finding Happiness in Ordinary Moments Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What makes for a good entrepreneur in today's start-up landscape? How do you work to scale and when is it right to go from bootstrapping to seeking funding? How are the roots of innovation now fundamentally different than the dot com era? Lori Rosenkopf is a Professor of Management and also the Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School, San Francisco campus. She is also the author of the book Unstoppable Entrepreneurs: 7 Paths for Unleashing Successful Startups and Creating Value through Innovation. Greg and Lori discuss Lori's focus on Wharton's student and alumni entrepreneurial ecosystem, and she explains how entrepreneurship skills overlap with the innovation inside large organizations and universities. Lori describes seven entrepreneurial pathways and six “Rs” that reflect an entrepreneurial mindset, emphasizing that many successful entrepreneurs first build industry experience in standard careers rather than launching ventures immediately after school.  Their conversation covers how Wharton's curriculum has evolved over time, adding majors and coursework in entrepreneurship, innovation, analytics, and now AI; experiential learning; venture pitching for credit. Greg asks how the Venture Acceleration Lab helps expose students to scaling alumni ventures. Lori and Greg discuss different stereotypes of entrepreneurs, and Lori touches on why alumni and industry-affiliation networks remain powerful, how innovation increasingly happens through ecosystems, partnerships, and acquisitions rather than in-house R&D, and the continuing importance of universities in basic science commercialization, including Penn's Pennovation initiative and strong biomedical startup activity. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The stereotype of a unicorn founder 17:18: I think that we have grown accustomed to a stereotype, which is, let us name them out, college dropout. Young. Venture capital backed tech, unicorn, great personal and commercial wealth. And now we are depending on them for philanthropy. We can have a whole discussion just about whether that is a good thing or not. But that is sort of the image. Is there a way people can cultivate their resilience? 32:00: Resilience, it can come from being in love with your problem and wanting to solve that so deeply. Now it has to be a problem that enough of the marketplace shares that they are willing to think about your solution. But people who want to solve a problem are going to claim lots and lots of different ways to attack it. And this is what entrepreneurs are constantly dealing with, negative feedback and challenges. In many cases, it is very rare that companies of ventures first offering is something that everybody falls in love with. What has Lori learned about information diffusion over 30 years of research? 11:17: I think that as we have gone to where more digital products and services, that it gives us the opportunity to build up these bigger ecosystems where different parties are collaborating in a variety. So it might be as extreme as acquisitions. And that is not just happening when Apple, that is CPG companies are buying little startups where people have developed new grants that are cool. They are partnering in many cases, so they may not be a full on acquisition, but there will be a contractual set of arrangements and maybe a conformance to a standard, as well. So that has become more and more common, and the idea that any one firm can invent everything in house, I think it does feel a little bit passé, you know, like rate of change is getting quicker and quicker. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Patrick T. Harker Entrepreneurship Venture Lab | University of Pennsylvania Max Weber Bell Labs Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Wharton Business School LoriRosenkopf.com LinkedIn Profile Guest Work: Unstoppable Entrepreneurs: 7 Paths for Unleashing Successful Startups and Creating Value through Innovation Google Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In today's world where every imaginable product can appear at your doorstep with the click of a button, the art that goes into manufacturing those products is increasingly overlooked.  Tim Minshall is a professor of innovation at the University of Cambridge and the author of How Things Are Made: A Journey Through the Hidden World of Manufacturing. As head of the Institute for Manufacturing, Tim is shaping the future leaders of manufacturing and reinforcing the critical role manufacturing plays in today's world.  In this conversation, Tim and Greg discuss the disconnect happening between modern-day consumers and the products they buy, plus the misconception that manufacturing has declined. They also delve into the complexity and fragility of manufacturing systems, the role of education in manufacturing, challenges in reviving manufacturing, and the future of manufacturing and software integration.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Bridging the gap between idea and implementation 08:09: The narrative has got a bit confused. This idea that there is a thing called innovation where you have got all the great science and technology and all this cool stuff happening, and that is brilliant. And then there is a bit, which is now implement, or we can call that manufacturing and, as you say, not without its challenges to scale and support software at scale. It is a non-trivial challenge. But if you are scaling up the production process for a new cell therapy to treat cancer or scaling up the production of, a novel semiconductor approach using, I do not know, compound semiconductors, there is, as you say, massive physical challenges involved there, so, but to me that is all part of the same innovation story. You go from the idea and the market opportunity all the way through is part of the innovation story. There is not this neat line in the middle which goes, yes, we have done with the innovation, now we manufacture. Have we become disconnected from how manufacturing happens? Every single thing we can see, unless it is a plant, a rock, an animal, or another human, has been manufactured...All of these things have been manufactured, and so there has been a slight worrying thing that has happened, certainly in the UK, and I suspect a little bit in the US as well, which is we have become disconnected from how that happens. And the more we become disconnected from it, the less we appreciate how incredibly clever it is. What are one of the biggest challenges facing manufacturing? 16:39: One of the biggest challenges facing manufacturing is. Getting good people to want to work in factories. Surely step one is making it visible. If you do not know it and you have not seen it, you are unlikely to just go, oh, I want to get involved in manufacturing. You need to have seen it. Repositioning manufacturing as the thing that drives solution 23:24: We have to reposition manufacturing as the thing that drives solutions. It is the thing that pushes us to deal with the energy transition. It allows us to deal with our multiple healthcare crises. It is what allows us to deal with sustainability challenges, all of these, it allows us to deal with the defense challenges. Geopolitics at the moment is pointing to extremely important role for manufacturing. We would rather not be in this situation, but it is an absolute truth. Show Links: Recommended Resources: I, Pencil Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang  Why Isn't the Whole World Developed? Lessons from the Cotton Mills by Gregory Clark Jeff Immelt | unSILOed John Taylor Ha Joon Chang | unSILOed Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at University of Cambridge's Institute for Manufacturing Professional Profile on LinkedIn Profile on X Guest Work: How Things Are Made: A Journey Through the Hidden World of Manufacturing – A Guide to Sustainable Innovation - US Your Life Is Manufactured: How We Make Things, Why It Matters and How We Can Do It Better - UK  Google Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is the impact of land reform on economic development? What are the implications of property law when a financial crisis hits? This episode offers a comprehensive look at how land has shaped socio-economic landscapes.Mike Bird is the Wall Street editor at The Economist and the author of the new book, The Land Trap: A New History of the World's Oldest Asset.Greg and Mike discuss the historical and contemporary importance of real estate as an asset class, its undervaluation in modern investment strategies, and its critical role in the financial systems. Their conversation explores the distinction between land and other assets, and how mortgage-backed securities have revolutionized real estate finance. Mike lays out the history of land financing from colonial North America to present-day reforms, touching on the influence of key historical figures and economic theories. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How land reform fueled economic growth41:29: These sort of moments of expropriation are really focused on land quite tightly. They do not spread over into sort of general expropriation attitudes. They can have seemingly really positive impacts. So lots of people credit land reform in Japan in particular with sort of establishing the basis of a democratic society, of massively accelerating the education boost in Japan. If you are a tenant farmer and you are given land yourself, you are able to actually invest in it. And you want to make the most of it because it is no longer the landlord taking it from you. The surplus you create is your own. Most of those people used the extra money they made to massively accelerate the education of their children. This generation of people in Japan becomes a more educated one, which fuels the economic development that happens, you know, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. So the spillover effect from land reform is really quite large.ETF vs home ownership psychology50:15: I would say, I think half the answer here is behavioral and slightly irrational and social, and half of the answer is deeply rational and makes sense to any student of finance. The side that is irrational is home and land ownership has a reputation and a status that other asset ownership does not have. You have people who say they do not want to form a family until they can own a home. That is a fairly common sentiment in large parts of the world. Nobody says, I have got to own $300,000 in my S and P 500 ETF, or I am not starting a family. It is not a common thing. There is a sense of status security, middle class belonging that comes through owning a home, which makes it very unusual. And I think this digs into a deep historical thing about freedom from feudalism, from living under a landlord, from living, in sort of someone else's pocket.Why housing isn't diversified54:52: Obviously what you cannot buy unless you are buying an extremely well diversified REIT, for example, you cannot buy a US house, right? It has to be somewhere. You are plugging into the opportunities and rewards or punishment of a local economy, and so on, I am not enormously surprised at that. I think the thing that is unique in the US relative to the rest of the world is just how well you can do and have done historically investing in listed equities, investing in risk assets and getting the compounded returns relative to home ownership, which I think is massively to America's credit. This is not true in other large portions of the rest of the world.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Samuel AdamsHernando de SotoZamindarHenry GeorgeProgress and PovertyGeorgismLeasehold EstateDuke of WestminsterWolf LadejinskyCase–Shiller IndexGuest Profile:MikeBird.coProfile on The EconomistLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on XSocial Profile on BlueSkyGuest Work:The Land Trap: A New History of the World's Oldest Asset Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What if a company could deliver high quality products at low cost, improving the value for customers and giving it a competitive edge, all while offering higher pay and career growth opportunities for its employees and not hurting the bottom line?Zeynep Ton is a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, president of the Good Jobs Institute, and author of The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone's Work. Zeynep joins Greg to explain the interconnected components of the “good job strategy,” such as standardization, empowerment, cross-training, simplification, and the incorporation of slack in schedules. She emphasizes that companies should view their workforce as value drivers rather than costs to be minimized, advocating for investment in employees for better productivity and sustainable company growth.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The ‘good job strategy' requires systems thinking43:47: A lot of organizations operate in silos, and ‘the good job strategy' requires systems thinking, interconnected decisions, and all the decisions coming back to: how do we create value for the customer and how does this interact with other choices to deliver that type of value? And as long as we do the AB testing and requiring on, rigorous, and I do not think it is rigorous, it is, yeah, it is math, but it is not rigorous logic, it will be very difficult to adopt this.Standardization is a gift28:51: Standardization is a gift because there are so many things I do not even have to think about. So, think each of these choices is helpful to say what are the mindsets that are driving the choices, when used that way, and standardization is not just about work, [but also] standardization of management practices.Why ‘the good job strategy' creates competitive advantage13:02: I can see a lot of companies in the same industry using ‘the good job strategy' as long as they have a differentiation in the eyes of their customers and they're improving their value, continuously using the strategy. It's not good jobs that differentiates. It's the customer value that is a source of competitive advantage.Why unmet basic needs drive employee turnover17:02: You ask our students what motivates people. Everybody is gonna talk about is a sense of belonging, achievement, meaning, recognition. Of course, those things are the motivators. But so many people do not have their basic needs met. And there is tremendous lack of awareness. And those are, oftentimes, the biggest reasons for employee turnover that I have seen in many organizations that I work with.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Good Jobs Institute Toyota Production SystemJohn Paul MacDuffieCharlie MungerQueueing theory“How CEOs Manage Time” by Michael Porter and Nitin NohriaBob NardelliPete StavrosGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at MIT Sloan School of ManagementProfessional WebsiteProfessional Profile on LinkedInGuest Work:The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone's WorkThe Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When did society change from matriarchal to patriarchal, and why? What was the advice on fatherhood from Plato and Aristotle, and how did other writers on the subject put one philosophy of fatherhood on the page but live a very different one in practice?Augustine Sedgewick is the author of two books: Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power and Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug.Greg and Augustine start by discussing the lesser-explored history of fatherhood. Their conversation get into why the history of fatherhood may be understudied, the societal and cultural shifts impacting the role of fathers, and how historical figures like Saint Augustine, Rousseau, Jefferson, and even Thoreau have shaped modern perceptions of fatherhood. They also touch on Augustine's first book, Coffeeland, for the economic and social structures underpinning the coffee industry, emphasizing the role of capitalism in shaping labor conditions, and Augustine reflects on his own personal journey through fatherhood and the influence of his historical research on his understanding of the subject.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Patriarchy is not a loss for men05:48: Obviously there has been some really great work on patriarchy. A lot of that has come from feminist historians. As a result, I think a lot of the greatest work on the history of patriarchy has been the history of the consequences of patriarchy for women, much fewer, much less work on the history of patriarchy and its consequences for men. I have come to believe that that is, we are in a moment where we hear often about the crisis of men and boys. And I actually think it is the best thing that men could do for themselves, be to learn something about the history of patriarchy and masculinity. Like, that would not be a loss for men. That would be an incredible gain if we could begin to understand where those ideas originate, how they have changed over time, and what they have cost us. I will say.Fatherhood as a system of power05:24: I think you could argue that fatherhood is the most widespread and arguably enduring form of social inequality and metaphor for power that we have in human societies.Why father knows best was never humanly possible18:22 There is almost plasticity built into that God-like mandate of father knows best, I will protect and provide, if you do what I say. Because I think what is interesting about that set of edicts and mandates is that it is impossible for human beings to fulfill. No one always knows best. No one can always protect; no one can always provide God-like jobs because they cannot be fulfilled by actual human beings. And so the process of fatherhood, historically, has been exactly negotiating the distance between those promises and the reality. Plasticity has been the required element there.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Simone de BeauvoirPatriarchyPater familiasPlatoAristotleAugustine of HippoJean-Jacques RousseauThomas JeffersonGreat Father and Great MotherSally HemingsHenry David ThoreauSigmund FreudGuest Profile:AugustineSedgewick.workGuest Work:Amazon Author PageFatherhood: A History of Love and PowerCoffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What challenges come with taking a marketing strategy global, and what strategies can be created to account for and even take advantage of differences from one market to another? How are differences in Japanese culture reflected in the buying practices of the population?Katherine Melchior Ray is a global marketing executive and consultant, who also teaches global marketing at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, and is the author of the book Brand Global, Adapt Local: How to Build Brand Value Across Cultures.Greg and Katherine discuss the importance of both maintaining global brand consistency and adapting to local cultures. Katherine explains the history and evolving definition of marketing, the balance between data-driven strategies and creative intuition, and the necessity of cultural intelligence in global business. Throughout the conversation, Katherine shares anecdotes from her diverse career, offering insights into the challenges and strategies for successful global marketing.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What does it mean to be a global brand?13:51: Just because you can access it on a global level does not mean it is going to be relevant to you in your culture. And this is where it is tricky. So we have gone way beyond the Ted Levitt era, where you have global brands, but in order for them to connect, create meaning, which is where value lies, and ultimately loyalty with consumers in different cultures, they need to do both. And this is where the book title came, Brand Global. Be a global brand, hold certain things very consistent, but adapt local, and that is tricky. It is really tricky. Which aspects do you want to hold the same, and which aspects are you willing to flex?What is cultural intelligence and why is important in leadership39:21: We all know about emotional intelligence, and I think we have come to realize how important that is in leadership. Well, cultural intelligence takes us one step further. It relies on a lot of the aspects of emotional intelligence, but it adds culture on top of it. And basically, it is the ability to see and, and bridge cultural differences. So you do not have to be an expert in every culture. You do not have to know how to code, I guess, in technology. But you have to have a couple qualities that help you learn how to see what is often not actually being explicitly said with words.The notion of balance in brands18:52: When you think of a brand, the strongest brands actually do play simultaneously in opposite, seemingly opposite, directions, but really, those two seemingly opposed directions are complimentary, right? One might be the traditional side, and one is the innovative side. One might be the classical side, and the other is the trendy side. But actually, that duality gives the brand elasticity; it gives it range. So it can reach a lot more customers, and it gives it this inherent dynamism, tension, and excitement.Story is important for expansion20:20: The reason story is important is for expansion. You cannot control every aspect of a brand as you expand, right? Because the same people, like if you think of Steve Jobs, he could review every aspect of the computer as it was being designed. But as it was being marketed in different markets, in different countries, in different stores with different salespeople, you cannot control all of that. And so the way to create a form of consistency is by telling the same internal stories, and then those stories go externally so that everyone understands why certain things are in the way that the company operates and the brand shows up in products and services.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Louis VuittonPhilip KotlerTheodore LevittPark Hyatt | Masters of Food & WineSotheby'sXiaomiGuest Profile:KatherineMelchiorRay.comLinkedIn ProfileFaculty Profile at UC Berkeley Haas Business SchoolSocial Profile on ThreadsSocial Profile on XGuest Work:Brand Global, Adapt Local: How to Build Brand Value Across Cultures Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How do bad leaders persist in current-day environments, and how do they use factors like fear, rewards, and the natural difficulty of uprooting entrenched authority to their advantage? Despite the challenges inherent to speaking out, what duty and role do followers play in identifying and addressing bad leadership?Barbara Kellerman is the founder and a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and the author of many books, addressing many different aspects of leadership. Her latest works are Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers, LEADERSHIP: Essential Selections on Power, and The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America.Greg and Barbara discuss Barbara's critiques of the leadership industry, highlighting its focus on 'good' leadership while often neglecting the study of 'bad' leadership and the crucial role of followers. She argues for a more nuanced understanding of leadership that includes the contexts and followers that shape and are shaped by leaders. Their conversation dives into the complexities of trust in leaders, the need for rigorous education and credentialing in leadership akin to doctors or lawyers, and the significance of managing both leadership development and organizational design. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The three-part leadership system06:25: The leadership system is slightly more complicated than just leadership, but only slightly. It's got three parts, each of which is of equal importance. One is the leader. None of this is to say that leaders are unimportant, but equal importance. This is—think of it as an equilateral triangle—the leader is one point, if you will. One of the two other points are the followers, the constituents, the stakeholders, whatever language. If you do not like the word follower, we can do all the euphemisms. I tend to use follower because in English, it is the only natural antonym of leader. So let's say, for the purpose here now, one part of the triangle is the leader, the other part is the followers, and the third part, again of equal importance, is the context—or better put, are the contexts, 'cause it is always plural within which leaders and followers are situated.There is no leader without followers29:55: We tend to obey. We do not tend to disobey. So the idea that this broad thing called the field of leadership pays such inadequate attention to the obvious other side of the coin—leadership is, after all, a relationship. You cannot have a leader without at least a single follower. Why is that other, by definition, so much less consequential? The answer is they are not, but the field pays that other virtually no attention.Does being a good leader automatically make you ethical?15:45: The word bad is so complicated. And it is adverse good that I have found it practical in my work generally to divide bad and good into two categories. One is a continuum of ethics, so you're a good leader if you're ethical. You're a bad leader if you're unethical. And the other continuum is effectiveness. You're a bad leader if you're ineffective, and you're a good leader if you're effective.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Deborah RhodeMartin WinterkornVolkswagen Emissions ScandalHippocratic OathGroupthinkList of prime ministers of the United KingdomNiccolò MachiavelliJeffrey PfefferMarco RubioGuest Profile:Personal WebsiteProfile on LinkedInWikipedia ProfileCenter for Public LeadershipGuest Work:Amazon Author PageLeadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad FestersLEADERSHIP: Essential Selections on PowerThe Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed AmericaWomen and LeadershipProfessionalizing LeadershipThe End of Leadership: A Provocative Reassessment of Leadership in the Digital Age—Questioning Beliefs That Are Dangerously Out-of-DateFollowership: How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing LeadersBad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It MattersReinventing Leadership: Making the Connection Between Politics and BusinessThe President As World LeaderLeadership and Negotiation in the Middle EastBad Leadership – Why We Steer ClearTEDx Talk: What do we do about bad leaders? Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There's no instruction manual for how to be a CEO, and that role has undergone massive change in recent decades. So how do the leaders of great corporations today prepare themselves to make the hard decisions?Jeff Immelt, former CEO of GE and now current instructor at Stanford University, shares some of his top lessons on leading a major corporation in his book, Hot Seat: What I Learned Leading a Great American Company.Jeff joins Greg to reflect on his long career at GE, discussing his sense of belonging and the changing nature of career expectations, especially among today's youth. They delve into the intricacies of being a CEO, the differences between traditional and modern management practices, and the importance of both depth and breadth in business expertise. Jeff shares insights on organizational design, the importance of listening, and the critical role of teaching and continual learning in leadership.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What actually makes people stay, grow and perform in a company.07:36: Every company I work with, you know, I said, why do people leave? Right? Because there is a finite number of options and all this other stuff we can give people. And basically money counts for sure. But the second reason why people leave is I have a bad manager. The third reason why people leave is I am not getting any better. I am not getting any training, I am not getting any coaching. I am just like a work unit, and so those are the things we have to solve for. I think if we really want to turn back on the productivity engine of the next era.Every job looks easy till you're the one doing it38:41: Every job looks easy till you are the one doing it, right? So when you step in, do not come in and say, “This person stunk. I am the new sheriff. Everything is going to be great.” Just keep your mouth shut and do your job.Every good leader has three voices39:42: One of the things, Greg, that I teach, particularly founders, on is I say, look, every good leader has to have three voices, right? You need to be able to have the all-employee meeting, right? You need to be able to stand up to 400 people and communicate to 4-0-0 people. You need to be able to run a meeting, and you need to be able to give one-on-one feedback. And you know, those voices, the vocabulary is very different, right? In terms of how you motivate people in those three settings. And I try to give them examples of, you know, what they can work on, and, and very few people are really good at all three. But a lot of people give up at one, and it is hard to be a good leader. It is hard to be a good leader if you cannot traverse those three settings.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Inside Crotonville | GEDavid L. JoyceSam Bankman-FriedBill RuhStephen A. SchwarzmanLean Six SigmaAT&T LabsRoss PerotGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford UniversityProfessional Profile on LinkedInGuest Work:Hot Seat: What I Learned Leading a Great American Company Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What are practical strategies to avoid overload and exhaustion in today's digital world? What norms can organizations create for tool usage, and how can finding offline activities that provide a mental contrast to digital work?Paul Leonardi is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara, a consultant and speaker on digital transformation and the future of work, and an author of several works. His latest book is called Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life.Greg and Paul discuss the complementary nature of his two most recent books: the first focuses on harnessing digital tools, and the second on mitigating the overwhelm they can cause. They also explore teaching technology management, including the importance of understanding technology's impact on people and organizational processes. Paul explains the 30% rule, emphasizing the need to understand digital tools well enough to use them effectively. They also explore the concept of digital exhaustion, the subject of his most recent book, its symptoms, and how to manage it, both at work and in daily life. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How can we reduce exhaustion?41:29: One easy way of reducing our exhaustion is to match the sort of complexity of the task that we are trying to do with the affordances or the capabilities of the technology. And I say match, not over exceed, because we also have the problem where, like me, I am sure you have been in many, many meetings that should have just been an email, that there is not the need. And so what we have done in that situation is we have overstimulated people, right, in a setting with, you know, 15 other folks, and we have taken an hour out of their day and maybe the travel time to get there. And that has created other avenues for exhaustion when, if we had just perceived this information via email, we could not have had the meeting. So you do not want to overmatch, you just want to like match to the complexity of the task. And that is the key to reducing our exhaustion.It's not just distraction that exhausts us18:28: I think we have failed to look at how it is not just being distracted that is a problem, but it is the act of switching itself across all of these different inputs really is a significant source of our exhaustion.Inference is a big driver of exhaustion32:45: Inference is really a big driver of exhaustion. And I would say the place that it most shows up, although not exclusively, is in our social media lives. Because, of course, people are curating their lives in terms of what they post, whether that is LinkedIn or TikTok or Instagram, that does not really matter. And we are constantly not only making inferences of them, but what I find is that we are also very often making inferences about ourselves because we see a past record of all the things that we wrote and all of the things that we posted. And then we are also making inferences of what we think other people think about us based on all the things that we post.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Human MultitaskingTask SwitchingFatigueUnsiloed Podcast Episode 612: Rebecca HindsGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UC Santa BarbaraPaulLeonardi.comWikipedia ProfileLinkedIn ProfileGuest Work:Amazon Author PageDigital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your LifeThe Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AIExpertise, Communication, and OrganizingMateriality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological WorldCar Crashes without Cars: Lessons About Simulation Technology and Organizational Change from Automotive DesignGoogle Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What changes happened in the histories of Europe and China to create two economies that developed so differently? How did different forms of local cooperatio influence state development, rule of law, and economic progress?s?Guido Tabellini is a professor of Political Economics at the University of Bocconi in Milan, Italy. He is also the author of several books, most recently co-authoring Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000.Greg and Guido discuss the historical divergence in prosperity between Europe and China, exploring when and why it began, and whether it arose from cultural or institutional phenomena. Guido also emphasizesthe contrasting roles of corporations and clans in both regions, the impact of state capacity, and the lasting effects of these differences on modern economic and political landscapes. Their conversation touches on the historical process of cooperation across regions and its implications for modern development economics.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What are the political origins of corporations?31:55: So, we should not think of the corporation just as a firm, as a way to organize production that is important, but actually comes at the later stage. And the very important role of the corporation is also to have a political role, to govern a city, to represent a city in parliament, in China. The role of the corporations, when they emerge. Instead, it is purely economic. You do not have self-governing city, and even at the level of monasteries, you do have Buddhist monasteries, which are important, but each one of them is organized as an entity. You do not have a congregation of monasteries like the Cluny monastery or like, eventually, the church. Reframing the conversation on the Great Divergence02:34: Rather than talking about great divergence, we actually like to talk about great reversal in the book because it has been a reversal. So even before starting to debate when the divergence begins, meaning that Europe gets ahead of China, we should acknowledge that the opposite was true, that China was ahead of Europe at the turn of the first millennium. The high stakes of clan adjudication49:05: In China, the demand for external enforcement was probably less, evident because the clan needed less of an external enforcement. They were smaller communities, they had stronger reciprocal ties. The reputational mechanism within the clan was much more important because if I cheat on my clan member, I am kicked out of the clan. And if I am kicked out of the clan in a society which is organized around clans, I am on my own and I die. In Europe, of course, reputation is very important, but the penalty of cheating is not as harsh. So the altruistic value ties are weaker, and the penalty of cheating is also weaker. And so you have a stronger demand for external enforcement. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Great DivergenceCharles TillyClanCluny AbbeyConfuciusGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Brocconi UniversityWikipedia ProfileCEPR.org ProfileGuest Work:Amazon Author PageTwo Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000L'Italia in gabbia: Il volto politico della crisi economicaThe Economic Effects of ConstitutionsPolitical Economics: Explaining Economic PolicyFlexible Integration: Towards a More Effective and Democratic EuropeMonetary and Fiscal Policy: PoliticsGoogle Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Where did the concept of management as a profession come from, and how did it develop? Why do bureaucratic practices persist? How can companies break free from those constraints to unlock greater potential and adapt more effectively to the relentless change and competition in today's business world?Gary Hamel is the founder of the Management Lab, a professor at the London Business School, a visiting professor at the University of Oxford, and the author of several books. His recent titles include Humanocracy, Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them, What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation, and Competing for the Future.Greg and Gary discuss the evolution of Gary's thinking on management over the years and the detrimental effects of entrenched bureaucratic systems in organizations. He argues that bureaucracy stifles innovation, efficiency, and human engagement, leading him to suggest that organizations need to adopt more human-centric, dynamic, and decentralized models. He also points out the eventual trajectory of all companies that don't follow this path.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why organizations stop being technical and start being bureaucratic08:29: I don't think administrative skills are any more a competitive advantage. You need them, but they are not much of a differentiator. So far as I can see, they are not really a source of competitive advantage. And yet, given that history of them being so rare, we basically turned our organizations into administrative aristocracies . And so what that meant practically was, once you reached a certain level in an organization, a fairly low level, the only way to advance your career was to become a manager. And that is still true in most organizations. People tend to compete for those jobs because, and I have young friends, and kids and so on who, very capable people worked in organizations, and however capable you are technically, you reach a point where they are coaxing you into an administrative or managerial role as the only way to grow. And the desire to keep great employees and to pay them well means that those positions proliferate. We create more managerial roles because that is the way of rewarding people and escalating their salaries.The radical shift from static hierarchy to dynamic power39:04: I am all for having a hierarchy, but I think it needs to be highly dynamic depending on the issue, and the hierarchy needs to be able to shift also. When people in power are no longer adding value or whatever they need to, you need to be able to fire those people from below.Why traditional leadership programs create administrators, not leaders47:18: In survey after survey, by Fortune, by McKinsey or others, the vast majority of executives do not think leadership development is producing positive returns or noticeably positive returns. And again, I think the reason for that is what we call leadership development is, first of all, almost done completely in the bureaucratic frame. We are not trying to find people with genuine leadership, natural leadership capacity. We are not trying to find people who understand how to mobilize and catalyze others to do things that people thought were impossible. Our leadership training is basically training people to take on bigger administrative jobs and stratified just like the pyramid: managing yourself, managing a team, managing a unit, managing a function, managing the organization. So number one, we have that problem. It is simply replicating, and it is creating better administrators. I do not think the data says that it is creating leaders.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Thomas PaineMax WeberMcKinsey & CompanyJames G. MarchHerbert A. SimonDisruptive InnovationKKR & Co.Open Strategy: Mastering Disruption from Outside the C-SuiteDominic BartonJeffrey PfefferBarbara KellermanLeadership DevelopmentManagement DevelopmentPeter DruckerGuest Profile:GaryHamel.comLinkedIn ProfileWikipedia ProfileHumanocracy.comThe Management LabSocial Profile on XGuest Work:Amazon Author PageHumanocracy, Updated and Expanded: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside ThemWhat Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable InnovationCompeting for the FutureThe Future of ManagementThe Corporate Lattice: Achieving High Performance In the Changing World of WorkLeading the RevolutionBringing Silicon Valley InsideGoogle Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When are meetings the best way to coordinate and make decisions and when do they make things worse?? How do you use the two-pizza rule to hold effective meetings and what happens when you start including too many people in a process?Rebecca Hinds is the head of the Work AI Institute at Glean and the author of Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done, a book outlining the way to address one of the ways productivity is lost in organizations.Greg and Rebecca discuss the importance of intentionality in information flow within organizations, the common pitfalls of meeting culture, and practical strategies to improve meeting efficiency. Rebecca emphasizes the use of data and AI to measure meeting effectiveness and reduce 'meeting bloat', while sharing insights from her experiences at Asana and her studies on organizational collaboration. They also explore the evolving collaboration between HR and IT departments in the era of AI and the necessity for both tech and HR professionals to exchange and enhance their skills.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How ‘visibIlity bias' fuels endless meetings[07:28] We know that humans have a bias to associate presence with productivity. And so what I find to be often the case is people start to associate more meetings with more importance and status within the organization, and so when you're stuck and not sure how to make progress or you're worried about productivity, a meeting becomes a knee-jerk solution to solve that. You might not accomplish anything meaningful in the meeting, but at least you've sat together and shown that some progress or perceived progress was made. And so I think at the core of this, is this pervasive productivity theater that goes on in organizations, this visibility bias where we associate meetings with importance within the organization. There are a host of other problems, but at the core, I think that's the fundamental problem that we're dealing with.The pressure ingrained in our calendars and meeting cultures[09:37]  As soon as someone extends a meeting invite. They're establishing this social contract where you feel like you have to reciprocate. Even when we think about terminology around, it's a meeting invite. You either accept or you reject. You start to feel like you're not just rejecting the meeting, but rejecting the person. And it's taken very personally. AI tools can help reveal participation imbalances in meetings[22:59] If you're seeing that leaders are consuming 70%, 80% of the airtime, that's an opportunity to course correct and improve your meeting effectiveness. And often when it comes from an AI tool or an objective analytic tool, it's much more effectively received than a less powerful person trying to voice that takeaway in the meeting and try to veer influence that way.Are we socially conditioned to hate meetings?[28:48] Humans have what I call a meeting suck reflex, right? For a multitude of different reasons.When we hear the word "meeting," we have this negative, visceral reaction. So much so that you know when you're asked to evaluate your meetings in public versus private, you tend to rate your meetings much more negatively when you're around people in public as compared to privately, because we think that we should hate meetings. We've been socially conditioned to feel such, and there's few things that bond coworkers more quickly than bonding over a bad meeting that could have been a five-line email, right? And so to avoid that, assessing whether a meeting was worth your time helps to level set. Everyone has an intuitive sense of whether a meeting was worth their time. Is there something more productive they could have done with that time or not? And so that tends to be a good gauge for you as an organizer.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Asana, Inc.Parkinson's lawSteven RogelbergLaw of TrivialityAmazon's Two-Pizza TeamsROTIRobert I. SuttonGuest Profile:RebeccaHinds.comThe Work AI Institute at GleanLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on X for GleanGuest Work:Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Whether in markets, organizations, or the universe itself, today's guest is a master at navigating complex systems where existing models have stopped working, and new ones must emerge.Geoffrey Moore is a consultant in the high-tech sector and a prolific author, with titles including Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets, and, most recently, The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality. Geoffrey and Greg discuss his transition from Renaissance English scholar to high-tech strategist, why narrative is critical in business, the challenges of disrupting industries, and what “The Infinite Staircase” reveals about life's meaning and human purpose. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The importance of sales and the failure of business schools09:32: It's absolutely a travesty that business schools don't teach sales. It's, it's crazy. And there are a bunch of people that have made that argument before. But the reason why academics didn't like sales is it felt too much like Glengarry Glen Ross: sleazy, you know, closers, "coffee is for closers," and all the kind of stuff the academics hate. But the point about it is that, particularly in contemporary B2B sales, that's not what a salesperson does anymore. You have to help the customer find the use cases and the ROI that validates why they're gonna buy this thing, which means you have to be intellectually curious about their business and not just yammer about your own business. And so it is, it's actually a really interesting profession if you approach it, you know, in a kind of more in-service-to-the-customer approach, as opposed to, "I'm going to make my commissions and go to the club," although that's also a big motive among salespeople.Venture capital is literary criticism06:10: Venture is a form of literary criticism prior to investment. And then, as you invest, you start to figure out, now how can I verify? How can I validate? And eventually, the analytics and the numbers become very important. But not at the beginning. At the beginning, it is really about the story.Venture Capital vs. Corporate metrics38:11: Venture capitalists do not fund performance. They fund power, but everything in a venture model is about becoming more powerful, not becoming more performant. When we exit, then they'll become performant, but not now, and that idea is still very hard to land in a large corporation.The correct sequence for success33:51: The correct sequence has to be customers first, employees second, investors third. Any other sequence doesn't work, not for sustainable success.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Regis McKennaAlfred D. Chandler Jr.Edmund SpenserGreat chain of beingClayton ChristensenSatya NadellaNorthrop FryePhilip SidneyGuest Profile:Professional WebsiteProfessional Profile on LinkedInProfile on XGuest Work:The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and MortalityCrossing the ChasmInside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth MarketsDealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their EvolutionLiving on the Fault Line, Revised Edition: Managing for Shareholder Value in Any EconomyThe Gorilla Game: An Investor's Guide to Picking Winners in High TechnologyZone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is the real importance of understanding architectural history, and how is its teaching different from the histories of other disciplines? How can good design influence business decisions?Witold Rybczynski is an emeritus professor in the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the author of several books on architecture and its history. His most recent titles have been The Driving Machine: A Design History of the Car, Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History, Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays, and The Story of Architecture.Greg and Witold discuss Witold's extensive work on various topics, including the present state and histories of architecture, urban planning, and design. Their conversation covers the cultural valuation of architecture versus fine arts, the historical impact of city planning and urban design in the United States, and the unique characteristics of American cities compared to how cities and urban planning happens in European countries. They also get into the interplay of style and function in car design based in the research from Witold's new book.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What was the role of experimentation in early science? How did past scientific paradigms continue to influence current scientific discourse? What is the utility of understanding the history of science for modern scientists?Peter Dear is a professor emeritus of history at Cornell University, and the author of several books, including The World as We Know It: From Natural Philosophy to Modern Science and Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution.Greg and Peter discuss the evolution of science from natural philosophy, addressing how scientific progress is not simply a linear journey towards greater knowledge. Peter talks about the transformative periods like the Renaissance and the scientific revolution, and the debate over the definition and significance of terms like 'scientific revolution.' They also explore how today's scientific practices are deeply rooted in 19th-century developments. Their conversation also covers the historical context behind Newton's and Darwin's work among other famous scientists throughout history.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The two “registers” of science09:50: Science nowadays, and through the course of the last, well, developing over the last two centuries, really in the 19th and 20th centuries, science is still talked of as if it were a naturaln actual philosophy, even if that term is not used very much anymore. Science is sometimes regarded as something that is about understanding the universe, understanding the natural world as if it is an intellectual enterprise and just an intellectual enterprise. And at the same time, it is also regarded as something that is practically useful, practically valuable, and these two different registers for talking about science, I think, sort of ride alongside one another and switch back and forth depending on how it is that people want to represent any particular kind of knowledge.The birth of experimentation22:23: One of the things about experimentation, is that it was a matter of developing practices, procedures for generating knowledge claims about nature that were different from the ways in which experience had been used, particularly in Aristotelian or quasi-Aristotelian context, to talk about the behavior of nature. Experiments are a particular way of understanding what experience is useful for in making sense of the world.The twin dimensions of science40:30: I think all scientists have always relied on the twin dimensions of science, the fact that science can be regarded as an actual philosophy when it's talking about the way things are, and the fact that science can be regarded as, or talked about in terms of, instrumentality. When you are focusing on the capabilities, the practical capabilities, the particular ideas and procedures enable you to do, and at different times and places, scientists will sometimes play up the natural philosophy side of things and at other times play up the instrumentality side of things, depending on what it is interested in talking about at the time. But I think everyone, all scientists, regard those as both essential elements, so to speak, of what scientific inquiry is all about.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Scientific RevolutionFrancis BaconParacelsusAristotleNicolaus CopernicusGalileo GalileiIsaac NewtonRené DescartesRobert BoyleTaxonomyCharles LyellAlbert EinsteinThomas KuhnGuest Profile:Academia PapersProfessors Emeriti List at Cornell UniversityGuest Work:Amazon Author PageThe World as We Know It: From Natural Philosophy to Modern ScienceRevolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge in Transition, 1500-1700Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific RevolutionThe Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the WorldMersenne and the Learning of the SchoolsResearchGate Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

While evolution is often thought to be conducive to perfect adaptation, there are plenty of reasons why we never get there. Laurence D. Hurst is a professor of evolutionary genetics in the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath. His book, The Evolution of Imperfection: The Science of Why We Aren't and Can't Be Perfect is an expansive look into the imperfections of the human genome and why humans seem to be predisposed to so much bad genetic luck. Laurence and Greg explore the evolutionary constraints that lead to imperfections, how population size affects mutation rates, the advancements in gene therapy, and why imperfection could be key to a deeper understanding of evolution. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why humans have such bad genetic luck07:13: We have good reason to think that humans are far from being as fit as they might be. We have a very high mutation rate. We've got one of the highest mutation rates going, for example, and most mutations are deleterious. Most of the time, five to 10% of us will have a rare genetic disorder, for example. And we could be better. We could be a lot, lot, lot better.Medicine is anti-evolution47:17: Medicine is anti-evolution. Evolution is why we keep on having these genetic diseases, and medicine goes, well, you might have them, but we are going to stop them having their effects.Childbirth is more dangerous than the most dangerous job in America12:13: Childbirth is, for humans, a spectacularly dangerous pursuit. There was a lovely survey done by Forbes Magazine of America's most dangerous jobs, and it turns out nothing comes close to childbirth. Childbirth is an order of magnitude more dangerous than America's most dangerous job.Show Links:Recommended Resources:10 Most Dangerous U.S. Careers Heading Into 2025, Study Reveals | ForbesNearly neutral theory of molecular evolutionHe JiankuiGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of BathProfessional WebsiteMilner Centre Profile on XGuest Work:The Evolution of Imperfection: The Science of Why We Aren't and Can't Be Perfect Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How can organizations make more equitable changes to their internal norms and structures, to promote fairness over merely seeking profit? What are alternate ways to tackle the difference in agreeableness that underpins many professional gaps between men and women?Cordelia Fine is a professor in the history and philosophy of science department at University of Melbourne, as well as the author of several books, including Patriarchy Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality and Why Men Still Win at Work, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, and Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society.Greg and Cordelia discuss the complexities surrounding gender equality, including the contested reasons for wage differences and occupational gaps between men and women. Cordelia critiques the traditional and evolving gender norms, explains her stance on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) strategies, and advocates for more nuanced, context-aware approaches to addressing gender disparities. She challenges oversimplified evolutionary psychology narratives and underscores the importance of understanding the cultural evolution of gender roles. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why valuing women isn't enough52:52: You can say pretty words about valuing the feminine. Oh, you know, women are great. They're so wonderful. They're so empathic and collaborative and participative, and they're really good at building people. But you can't just say that—you have to actually change your organizations so that you literally put your money where your mouth is, so that is what is actually being rewarded.Redefining patriarchy10:37: There's a sort of assumption that when we talk about patriarchy, we're just talking about the harm to girls and women. Its long been recognized, I think, in feminism that often men and certain groups of men do also face harms in that kind of system that's keeping some men on top.Why our ideas about sex differences often get it wrong20:58: I do think we have to be careful about looking at our—first of all, making assumptions about what sex differences actually are—because they're often, you know, a huge amount of overlap, contingent depending on the context and the cues. But also, to then project that back into our ancestral past without taking a kind of wider look at societies beyond the weird populations—Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Cecilia L. RidgewayCailin O'ConnorThe Making of the Modern FamilyDavid BenatarLeonora RisseHILDA SurveyNancy FraserGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the University of MelbourneCordelia-Fine.comWikipedia ProfileLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on InstagramGuest Work:Amazon Author PagePatriarchy Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality and Why Men Still Win at WorkDelusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create DifferenceTestosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and SocietyA Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and DeceivesGoogle Scholar PageRelated Unsiloed Episode:Claudia Goldin - Understanding the Gender Wage Gap Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Despite its long-held place in history as the lynchpin of America's recovery from the Great Depression, what if the New Deal did more to hinder the country's recovery than help it? George Selgin is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Georgia and former director of the Center on Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute. His books like, False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery and Floored!: How a Misguided Fed Experiment Deepened and Prolonged the Great Recession, examine macroeconomic theories through the lens of key moments in monetary history. In this conversation, Greg and George dive deep into the inner workings of The Great Depression, covering the biggest misconceptions surrounding the New Deal's role in ending the crisis, why many of President Roosevelt's policies were counterproductive, and how pre-existing, international factors impacted the U.S.'s recovery.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The myth of New Deal wisdom47:17: The thing that people have to remember when they are inclined to think, oh, you know, we need to look back at the New Deal and all the wonderful things they did to end the Depression. They knew so much, you know, they had all these experiments. No. We know a lot more about how to fight recessions and depressions than they did because we know that fiscal and monetary stimulus are our best hopes. And those were two things that the Roosevelt administration did not put much, if any, emphasis upon. And that, of course, just hearing that should give a lot of people second thoughts about how helpful the New Deal was. They did a lot of stuff, but they did not do the main thing we rely on now. The main things, they did not promote monetary stimulus, and they did not promote fiscal stimulus except somewhat, reluctantly.Keynes vs. the New Dealers59:39: I certainly believe that if Keynes's advice had been followed instead of what the New Dealers did, that the Depression would have ended much sooner than it did in the United States. The downside of "bold experimentation"35:56: Roosevelt made two statements that were probably the least, the two main unambiguous things he said, one of which turned out to be a very accurate description of what his administration would end up doing. And the other one of which would be a very inaccurate statement. This is all in the course of the campaign. The accurate statement was when he said that his administration planned to go about addressing the Depression through bold experimentation. And that is absolutely true. There was a lot of trial and error. And the problem is, as I say in my book, you know, the problem with bold experiments is they often fail.On war clouds and gold flows45:41: What keeps gold flowing in for the rest of the decade, and more and more of it as time goes on, is Hitler's rise to power and the, the gatherings war clouds that eventually have many, many Europeans thinking, I do not think this is place, this place is safe for our gold. And as long as they could, taking it and shipping it to the United States, where now after the suspension of the gold standard and the devaluation, the treasury alone is buying all the gold.Show Links:Recommended Resources:John Maynard KeynesFranklin D. RooseveltHerbert Hoover Henry Ford Alexander J. Field James Bradford DeLong Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of Georgia Professional Profile at the Cato InstituteProfessional Profile on LinkedInProfile on XGuest Work:False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947 Floored!: How a Misguided Fed Experiment Deepened and Prolonged the Great RecessionMoney: Free and Unfree Less Than Zero: The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing EconomyThe Menace of Fiscal QE  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How does our legal system treat children today, and how do policies affecting their parents and communities cascade down to shape their lives? What forces create a pipeline to criminalization, and what would it take to break that cycle for the children who come next?Adam Benforado is a professor of law at Drexel University and the author of two books titled A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All and Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice.Greg and Adam discuss the deep-seated flaws in the US legal system, including cognitive biases and heuristics affecting legal professionals, and how historical assumptions about human behavior shape legal decision-making. Their discussion explores why the legal system is resistant to integrating behavioral sciences, and the impact of punitive criminal justice policies on society, especially children. Adam highlights the juxtaposition between overparented, affluent children and under-resourced, marginalized youth, advocating for evidence-based, preventative approaches to social issues rather than reactionary legal interventions. There are broader societal implications of legal practices and Adam stresses the importance of prioritizing children's rights now for a more equitable future.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:A different way to look at crime16:49: I think there's a really different way to look at crime, which is that everything is situational. It's a result of genes and environment. And of course society can play around with those things and make crime go up or go down. And so, you know, I think in this book, one of my hopes with doing it was honestly to provoke people to try to think about things that they think they know so well. And crime is one thing we think we know so well in our lives, but I think here we have to understand different countries, different people over time have taken very different approaches. And it is not that somehow, you know, people living in these cultures are fundamentally different. I've been to these other countries, and I would say humans actually are surprisingly similar. And what's different though in our country is how we approach it.Judges are human too07:30: I think the social science that we've accumulated literally over decades now tells a very different story, which is that judges are human beings, like all the rest of us. And so we need to be just as aware of potential biases that are coming into their judgments and decision making as everyone else.Where you're born shapes who you become43:12: We promise economic, socioeconomic mobility. But if you look at it, right, if you're in that bottom quintile of family income versus that top quintile of family income, in many ways your trajectory, no matter how inherently smart you are at third grade, a lot of that's already tracked out simply based on all of that investment that wealthy parents are gonna make over the course of that young person's childhood. And that's both positive enrichment, but it's also when kids, a lot of kids get into trouble. Something doesn't work, they're struggling in math, or they hit a kid in school, or they get sick. What happens, right? If you have wealthy parents, those problems get addressed and you get many second chances. If you're a poor kid, you don't.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Jon D. HansonConvention on the Rights of the ChildEmily OsterTrial by OrdealGuest Profile:AdamBenforado.comFaculty Profile at Drexel UniversityProfile on LinkedInSocial Profile on XGuest Work:Amazon Author PageA Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us AllUnfair: The New Science of Criminal InjusticeGoogle Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Is the point of life to minimize suffering, or to understand and embrace it on some level? How do different belief structures view the ideal human response to negative situations? Is there a degree of suffering that would be bearable in order to enable something pleasurable that could offset it?Scott Samuelson is a professor of philosophy at Iowa State University and also the author of several books, Rome as a Guide to the Good Life: A Philosophical Grand Tour, The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone, and Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering: What Philosophy Can Tell Us About the Hardest Mystery of All.Greg and Scott discuss the universal accessibility of philosophy, the role of suffering in human life, and the balance between fixing and facing suffering. Scott shares his experiences teaching philosophy in prisons and how men in prison viewed suffering from different perspectives. He also explores the philosophical implications of thinkers like Epictetus, Nietzsche, and John Stuart Mill. Their conversation touches on the themes of modernity, the significance of facing suffering, and finding meaning in both joy and pain. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Philosophy begins with wonder and deepens through suffering04:26: I think there's a kind of built-in wonder in all of us. But I also think, and this goes to the suffering book, that another thing that tends to make philosophers out of everyone is suffering. There's something about suffering that kind of blows our minds. I mean, a certain amount of suffering seems to make some sense. I mean, it makes some sense that my hand, you know, feels pain when it gets near a fire so that I protect myself. But almost everyone has experiences where someone dies prematurely, or where perhaps they suffer pain that just doesn't add up, like a migraine headache. Or we look at the world and see great injustice, and it's hard not to be a human and start to ask philosophical questions in the face of that—to start to wonder what's going on here. You know, why is this happening? Sometimes, why me? And as I've had a chance to teach a really wide variety of people over the years, I've found that they all—it's without exception—people feel these questions quite deeply inside them.How philosophy provides us space to face life's hard questions05:27: One of the beautiful things that philosophy can do is provide a space that kind of dignifies that part of us that is asking these questions and thinking about it. And so even when philosophy can't necessarily provide all the answers to the questions, there's something powerful just about being in that space where you're facing those questions.Why suffering is part of being human10:38: We, of course, are going to kind of combat suffering in some ways, shape, or form. But at the same time, it seems like we have to learn to face it and be open to it and to accept it and to see it as just a part of life rather than as a foreign invader of what it means to be human. And that when we do that, we open ourselves up to the adventure of being human. We had opened ourselves up to, you know, the possibilities of real growth and finding meaning. And a lot of people, when they come out the other side of difficult experiences, have a kind of weird sense that that was a very valuable and important thing, even something they're grateful for. Even though, at the same time, it's not that they wish that it happened, but they're grateful that it has become part of their story and their life. And so when we can do that, I think we're kind of living better lives overall.Show Links:Recommended Resources:William JamesPlato's ApologyAlexis de TocquevilleAleksandr SolzhenitsynSusan NeimanEpictetusStoicismBeing MortalJohn Stuart MillUtilitarianismWhen Breath Becomes AirFriedrich NietzscheEichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of EvilGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Iowa State UniversityScottSamuelsonAuthor.comProfile on WikipediaGuest Work:Amazon Author PageRome as a Guide to the Good Life: A Philosophical Grand TourThe Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for EveryoneSeven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering: What Philosophy Can Tell Us About the Hardest Mystery of All Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What are the nuances of organizational design and risk-taking? What are the roles of both curiosity and trust in fostering an environment ripe for innovation? How can you create serendipity intentionally, and harness its power for your organization?David Cleevely is a British entrepreneur and international telecoms expert who has built and advised many companies, principally in Cambridge, UK. He is also the author of the new book Serendipity: It Doesn't Happen By Accident. Greg and David discuss the concept of engineered serendipity, which involves designing environments and life trajectories that optimize the occurrence of fortunate coincidences. David explains how places like Cambridge, Silicon Valley, and 18th-century Birmingham fostered innovative ecosystems. They explore how engineered structures can increase the likelihood of beneficial outcomes, the role of key individuals in creating networks, and the importance of interdisciplinary interactions. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How can we engineer serendipity?04:23: The thing that we need to do is look at how did those things actually happen? Why did they happen? And is it possible to get some general principles out of this, some insights, so that instead of just relying on chance to do it for us, we can change the odds. And really, serendipity does not act by accident. It is about changing the odds.Randomness in strategy29:09: You need an element of randomness in strategy. So you need to have things that are highly focused, and you need some things that are going to be cross-disciplinary and completely wacky. And you will need different proportions of those.Creating environments for good things to happen02:27: I think we need to do some research, and it's properly cross-disciplinary, 'cause it involves network science, it involves behavioral psychology stuff, all of these things that we need to understand how this stuff actually works. We've been taking this stuff for granted, and actually we need to not just go, oh, that's interesting, and then move on. No, actually we need to investigate this stuff and think, how can we actually create environments in which good things are more likely to happen?Show Links:Recommended Resources:Lunar Society of BirminghamFriedrich HayekStuart KauffmanSanta Fe InstitutePriestley RiotsNapoleonic WarsCambridge WirelessCambridge AngelsACAMSteve JobsDunbar's NumberNicholas ChristakisPride and PrejudiceJohn Maynard SmithGuest Profile:Chemify LimitedWikipedia ProfileLinkedIn ProfileCleevely & PartnersTrinity Hall ProfileCambridge Ahead ProfileGuest Work:ConductingSerendipity.comSerendipity: It Doesn't Happen By Accident Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If ideas and knowledge are the software, then books have always been the longest-running hardware.Author and former publishing executive Joel J. Miller's latest book, The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future, delves into the history and evolution of books as a physical technology for idea transmission.Joel and Greg discuss the book's origins from ancient times with Socrates and Plato, to the development of the codex, and the impact of modern digital reading. Joel also shares insights from his experiences in the publishing industry, the importance of physical books in shaping thought, the role of metadata in organizing knowledge, and predictions about the future of books in an increasingly digital world.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Books are hardware for knowledge09:09: I read someone say essentially this definition of a machine, that it is an assembly of parts that are, you know, designed to produce a particular end. And I do think that there is both institutional and cultural kind of degradation of that. And I thought that is what a book does. A book is a thing that is designed to help produce a particular outcome, which looks like a number of things, but one of them is to develop elaborate schemes of thought that would not be able to exist outside of that physical format. If you did not have the physical thing, the hardware, like you said, if you did not have that, the software would not matter because you do not actually have the ability to take all these elaborate thoughts that we have and hold them in our minds. Our working memory is too short, the ability to go back and revisit and revise is non-existent more or less. And so writing enabled us to develop ideas, and we access those through books.Books as vessels of ideas13:24: Ideas live in books. Whether they're arguments, like it's history, it's someone explicating a topic, or it is a novel where somebody is accessing, you know, a kind of a window on another self or things like that. The book is always there to do that for us.On metadata, organization, and libraries as knowledge systems25:16: Data is every bit as wild and unruly, and humans have been trying to figure out ways of getting it under control since the beginning, because we create more information than we can even use. We always have. And the ability to go use a library effectively requires some kind of scheme of organization in order to make it, to make things findable. And so we see that not only in the micro case of a single book, but we can see it blown out across an entire library where people have discovered ways of making ideas findable within them. And at every stage, as the technology has advanced, the job has gotten more complicated and also more interesting because the solutions emerge from that technology that enables us to get even better solutions to the problem.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Maxwell PerkinsHenry Regnery SeptuagintJustin MartyrI. A. RichardsIrenaeusGalenHernando Colon (Ferdinand Columbus)Paul OtletVannevar BushGuest Profile:Staff Profile at Full FocusProfessional WebsiteFocus on This podcastGuest Work:The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How did the US Dollar become the dominant currency internationally? What keeps other currencies, fiat or crypto, from displacing the dollar's role? Does the aggressive use of sanctions by the US Government put the dollar's role at risk?Paul Blustein is with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as well as an author and journalist. He has written several books including his latest work King Dollar: The Past and Future of the World's Dominant Currency and previous works, Off Balance: The Travails of Institutions That Govern the Global Financial System, And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out) Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina, and Laid Low: Inside the Crisis That Overwhelmed Europe and the IMF.Greg and Paul discuss the reasons behind the US dollar's dominance in global finance, its historical roots stemming from the Bretton Woods Agreement, and the challenges posed by international crises and economic policies. Paul also discusses the role and limitations of the IMF, the geopolitical implications of using the dollar as a financial weapon, and the potential impact of emerging currencies and digital threats. The episode concludes with insights into the phenomena of dollarization and how various economic strategies, including those of China and Russia, intersect with the enduring power of the US dollar.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How the U.S. discovered the power of financial sanctions21:00: No longer was it just going to be the drug lords and, you know, in Colombia and places like that, it was now the government was gonna crack down on terrorists. And so the Treasury, OFAC, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, began doing some of that. And they realized that by cutting off banks abroad from access to the dollar system, that correspondent banking system we were just talking about, that, you know, things could really go boom. They could pose a death sentence on banks. And as they began to realize the power of that, they then applied it in the case of North Korea in 2005. And they were absolutely astonished to discover that this really worked. You could really have a big effect on North Korea's financial system by cutting off banks. It was—they went after a bank in Macau that had been—and then they were off to the races. They could use this similar kind of weaponry on Iran and other adversariesResponsible vs irresponsible use of dollar power25:29: You have this power with a dollar; if we use it responsibly, it can be a very good power. And if we use it irresponsibly, it's a bad power. And that's the way I like to look at it.How U.S.–China sanction scenarios are actually gamed out51:59: Some of the hawks in, you know, you don't hear so much from these guys anymore, but the hawks in Congress have tried to game some of these out. You know, I go into this in one of the chapters of the book about how they, you know, they had a red team and a blue team, and they thought, well, we can, you know, we just have done this—imposed drastic sanctions on Russia. So if there's an invasion of Taiwan, here's what we do. And they, I think, have discovered that if you have a really knowledgeable red team playing the Chinese Communist Party, they can come up with a lot, a lot of things that, it preserves Taiwanese democracy but doesn't have us at each other's throats.Show Links:Recommended Resources:United States DollarEuroRenminbiReserve CurrencyNetwork EffectBretton Woods SystemJohn Maynard KeynesHarry Dexter WhiteHerbert SteinFederal ReserveInternational Monetary Fund (IMF)SWIFTEuroclearFiat MoneyXi JinpingShadow FleetGuest Profile:PaulBlustein.comProfessional Profile for CSISLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on XGuest Work:Amazon Author PageKing Dollar: The Past and Future of the World's Dominant CurrencyOff Balance: The Travails of Institutions That Govern the Global Financial SystemAnd the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out) Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of ArgentinaThe Chastening: Inside The Crisis That Rocked The Global Financial System And Humbled The IMFMisadventures of the Most Favored Nations: Clashing Egos, Inflated Ambitions, and the Great Shambles of the World Trade SystemLaid Low: Inside the Crisis That Overwhelmed Europe and the IMFSchism: China, America, and the Fracturing of the Global Trading System Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Unlike some other academic fields, the study of business has always had the challenging task of striking a balance between theory and practice. How can theoretical concepts aid business practitioners in real-world situations? And how can business academics expand their understanding of theory through that real-world application?  Jay Barney is a professor of strategic management at the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business. His work, including numerous books, journal articles, and textbooks, has shaped the field of strategy and entrepreneurship for decades. His most recent book is The Secret of Culture Change: How to Build Authentic Stories That Transform Your Organization.Jay and Greg discuss the evolving role of academia in the business world, the historical and current perceptions of business education, and the various theories that underpin strategic management. Barney delves into resource-based theory, the importance of organizational culture, and the intersection of strategy and practical business applications. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What really makes a strategy hard to imitate44:56: You're going to have a strategy that's likely to be a source of sustained advantage; you have to figure out how that leverages resources, or capabilities that are socially complex. Why? Because that's harder to imitate, stuff that's developed over long periods of time. That's path dependent. Why? Because that's hard to imitate, or stuff that's costly and ambiguous. Well, you don't know how to develop those capabilities because that makes it hard to imitate. And I can make some empirical predictions that socially complex resources and capabilities should last longer. As long as their value is retained, they should last longer than non–socially complex.Why entrepreneurship is so hard to theorize39:22: Entrepreneurship, one reason that it's under-theorized as a field is because the theory is really hard, because many of the assumptions and attributes that make it possible to theorize in non-entrepreneurial settings do not apply in entrepreneurial settings. And so then we're stuck with this Knightian uncertainty and difficulties associated with that.How strategy escapes the tautology problem46:25: I think that we can avoid the tautology problem by identifying the characteristics that resources and capabilities need to have in order to be sources of sustained advantage. And then, then empirical predictions come out of that. But they do not come out of the tautology, but by definition.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Jay Barney “The Lessons They Didn't Teach You in Business School” | unSILOed Modigliani-Miller TheoremHawthorne EffectNicholas BloomMichael PorterDavid TeeceWilliam H. MecklingMichael C. JensenJensen and Meckling article 76 JFEGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of UtahProfessional Profile on LinkedInWebsiteGuest Work:The Secret of Culture Change: How to Build Authentic Stories That Transform Your OrganizationWhat I Didn't Learn in Business School: How Strategy Works in the Real WorldOrganizational Economics: Toward a New Paradigm for Understanding and Studying OrganizationsGaining and Sustaining Competitive AdvantageStrategic Management and Competitive Advantage, Concepts: Concepts and CasesJay Barney | Google Scholar Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Why might ‘bring your whole self to work' be terrible professional advice, and what should we be thinking about instead? Why does authenticity come into play more now than in previous generations? Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of business psychology at University College London and Columbia. He is also the author of several books, including Don't Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated (and What to Do Instead), Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?: (And How to Fix It), and The Talent Delusion: Why Data, Not Intuition, Is the Key to Unlocking Human Potential, I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique.Greg and Tomas discuss the overemphasis of authenticity in professional and personal settings, the nuanced insights from sociologist Erving Goffman on impression management, and how emotional intelligence often aligns with strategic impression management. Their conversation gets into the impact of AI on human potential and workplace dynamics, as well as the complex interplay between organizational culture and individual behavior, particularly among leaders. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why do people believe authenticity naturally leads to wellbeing and success?03:08: In a world that is obviously not very authentic, pretending that we value authenticity or encouraging people to just be themselves might be quite fitting. I think it's not very authentic advice to tell people, "Oh, just be yourself. Oh, just bring your whole self to work. Oh, don't worry about what people think of you." But then, if somebody is silly or naive enough to follow that advice, the repercussions for them are not very positive.Self-awareness requires paying attention to others13:33: Professional success and personal development and self-awareness can only be achieved if you are receptive to what other people think of you. So, by the way, as I say in the book [DON'T BE YOURSELF], the notion that, I mean, you know, one of the mantras of authenticity or to authenticity advice, which is "ignore what people tell you," ironically,  the advice is trying to tell us how to behave, right? So you cannot ignore what people tell you. And the difference between somebody who has achieved basic emotional maturity and psychological maturity and somebody who still behaves like a child is that the psychologically mature person pays attention to what other people think of themselves, which doesn't mean being a sort of weak, feeble, conformist sheep. It means being a highly functioning member of society, of work, of community, not being trapped in your own narcissistic delusion.How do you achieve self-awareness?12:20: Self-awareness is actually achieved by internalizing the feedback from others from a very, very early age. We learn about ourselves from internalizing or incorporating the feedback we get from others. So your teachers, your aunt, your uncle, your parents, your older siblings, your friends will tell you, you are good at this, you are bad at that, you are funny. And then you understand that you are funny, right? It's obviously problematic if they're lying to you and then you realize, Ooh, outside my family, nobody laughs with my jokes, right? But there's no answer to who we really are. But the best way to understand who we are in the eyes of others is to not be self-centered and to actually be open to feedback. And that's something that people with high emotional intelligence do very well. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Erving GoffmanCore Self-EvaluationsEmotional LaborEmotional IntelligenceSelf-MonitoringElon MuskDavid Bowie360-degree feedbackCharles Horton CooleyDale CarnegieHenry FordJeffrey PfefferPope FrancisRobert HoganMachiavellianismMax PlanckAmos TverskyDaniel KahnemanJohn Maynard KeynesGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University College LondonWebsite | DrTomas.comLinkedIn ProfileWikipedia PageSocial Profile on XGuest Work:Amazon Author PageDon't Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated (and What to Do Instead)Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?: (And How to Fix It)The Talent Delusion: Why Data, Not Intuition, Is the Key to Unlocking Human PotentialI, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us UniqueConfidence: How Much You Really Need and How to Get ItPersonality and Individual Differences, 3rd EditionThe Future of Recruitment: Using the New Science of Talent Analytics to Get Your Hiring Right (The Future of Work)Personality and Intellectual CompetenceThe Psychology of Personnel SelectionPersonality and Individual DifferencesConfidence: Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, Insecurity, and Self-Doubt Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How do evangelism and business go hand in hand? Well, for today's guest, evangelism is the purest form of sales. Guy Kawasaki is the Chief Evangelist at Canva and former Chief Evangelist for the Macintosh Division at Apple. He's a prolific author, speaker, and podcaster, with hit books like Think Remarkable: 9 Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference, Wiser Guy: Life-Changing Revelations and Revisions from Tech's Chief Evangelist, and Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.Guy and Greg discuss his evolving career path, why his work's focus has shifted over time from how to succeed in business to how to succeed in life, the practicalities of sales, evangelism, and the overlooked necessity of these skills in business education. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is evangelism the purest form of sales?42:25: I believe that sales is a very necessary and important skill. I would say that maybe evangelism is the purest form of sales. The difference between evangelism and most sales is that in evangelism, you have the other person's best interests at heart, not just yours.Remarkable doesn't mean reach and famous24:45: Remarkable does not mean rich or famous, although you can be rich or famous and remarkable. But it's really about the impact you've made on the world. And I don't mean you have to sell 300 million iPhones or 300 million computers; it's really what have you done?Stop chasing passion, start pursuing interest14:15: So the bar is so high for a passion. So a lot of people are saying, oh my God, I'm 22 years old, I haven't found my passion yet, what's wrong with me? I'm an underachiever. And what I think you should do instead is have your eyes open, you should have your brain open, i.e., a growth mindset. And whatever interests you, you should pursue it until you can discover if you really like it; maybe then it'll turn into a passion. But to look for Passion, capital P, out the gate is doing yourself a disservice.The three general qualities of remarkable people27:29: I've noticed that remarkable people have three general qualities. First of all, they have the growth mindset of Carol Dweck. If you have a growth mindset, you better back that up with a grit mindset of Angela Duckworth, because if you have a growth mindset, you're going to try things like surfing and hockey that you're not good at for years. So you need to persevere and have grit. And then the final thing you need is a grace mindset. So it's growth, grit, grace.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Dr. Robert Cialdini | Remarkable People podcast Dr. Robert Cialdini | unSILOed podcastInfluence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition by Robert CialdiniIf You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit by Brenda UelandCarol DweckAngela DuckworthGuest Profile:Professional WebsiteRemarkable People podcastGuest Work:Think Remarkable: 9 Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a DifferenceWiser Guy: Life-Changing Revelations and Revisions from Tech's Chief EvangelistEnchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and ActionsThe Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting AnythingRules For Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and ServicesThe Macintosh Way Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What practical advice could leaders and managers implement right now in their organizations to increase productivity and decrease friction between disparate elements of their companies? How can managers reexamine legacy processes that have remained in place simply because they were, and reimagine them for the specific challenges of today's business environment?Donald C. Kieffer is  a lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the founder of consulting firm ShiftGear Work Design, and the author of the new book There's Got to Be a Better Way: How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff That Gets in the Way of Real Work.Greg and Donald discuss the concept of dynamic work design. Donald shares stories of challenges in work design across various industries, including healthcare, banking, and software. He also explains how dynamic work design focuses on understanding and improving human work by making the invisible elements of work visible, reducing inefficiencies, and promoting incremental improvements. With a bit of attention to detail and careful setup, systems and processes can be honed to better serve their businesses. Donald points to mistaken beliefs that senior managers often hold about work processes and emphasizes the importance of regulating work to maintain flow, avoiding the political dynamics that arise from inefficiencies, and managing by observing and understanding the real work, allowing organizations to work smarter and harder. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Injecting discovery into work09:15: If you're firefighting to run the day-to-day business, you have no time to think about the future, to even think about the strategy or think about what's happening. So, we're much more about improvement, about incremental improvement. What we are about is discovery. So the idea is that every action that you take in business, be it at whatever level, at the strategic level or the frontline level, is based on the assumptions that activity will cause an improvement. And so we run it as an experiment and say, instead of measuring the plan, we measure: did the activity actually do what you thought? And if it did, great, let's do more. If it didn't, why not? And so we inject discovery into the whole idea of doing, of human work against the target at every level.If you can't draw the work you can't fix it16:14: I have a saying I use all the time that I love, which is, if you can't draw the work, you don't understand it, and you certainly can't fix it. And it comes from... [16:46] And I think we ask leaders all the time, can you draw it? Can you show it? They can't do it. They think they do it in their head. And this is the thing—why these tools, like A3 and different problem-solving tools, work—is that when you have to write down the problem statement, or when you have to draw the work, it moves it from that pattern-matching part of your brain, where you think you know it, to the rational part of your brain, where it shows you, I'm not really sure.Why we blame people instead of the work design the work36:53: If you see a problem, you tend to blame the person who's nearest the problem, even though it could have been caused way far away, because most of the time there could have been something they did, they could have done to keep it from happening. But you know, if there are like 500 opportunities per problem to happen, one or two of them are gonna get through, even though they're not that person's fault. So I think it's just something very human in us, which is why we call this work design. This is not about people; this is about the design of the work that's usually been ad hoc.On helping people do good work57:23: People want to do good work, meaningful work. Go find the stuff that's getting in their way, even if it's stuff you've put in the way, and get out of the way. Help them. Help them with the design of work. I know it's good for business. There are stories galore in the book about how points on the board, but I'll tell you why I do it when I should be sitting on the back porch collecting Social Security and drinking beer. It's because of the look on people's faces. We can actually go to work and be productive no matter what their level is and feel like they're part of something good and doing.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Takashi TanakaRoss PerotHarley-DavidsonClayton ChristensenDaniel KahnemanFrederick Winslow TaylorJugaadSteven J. Spear PodcastWilliam S. HarleyFive WhysNUMMISeagull ManagementGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at MIT Management | Sloan SchoolShift Gear Work DesignGuest Work:There's Got to Be a Better Way: How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff That Gets in the Way of Real WorkGet Work Back on Track With Visual Management | ArticleHow to Rescue an Overloaded Organization | Article Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What if you could find a strategy for gaming the systems all around to work more in your favor? If you did, then things like coveted restaurant reservations, scarce concert tickets, landing the dream job, or even admission to top colleges could become much more in reach. Judd Kessler is a professor of business economics and public policy at the Wharton School and the author of Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need to Get More of What You Want. The book acts as a guide for not only participants in the everyday markets that shape our lives, but also the designers of those markets. Judd and Greg discuss the hidden markets that dictate restaurant reservations, concert tickets, college admissions, and even dating. They explore different market design strategies like allocation mechanisms, centralized clearinghouses, and signaling.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why some markets don't play by price rules03:51: So many of the markets that we play in do not resolve themselves with the price rising. Either the price stays low because the seller wants it that way, and there's going to be excess demand—more people that want the thing than there are units available at that price—or we have decided as a society that we're not going to use prices to do the allocations, that it would be fundamentally unfair, or it would be fundamentally inefficient because we don't think your willingness to pay truly captures how much you value it.How market participants get ahead by knowing the rules01:33: When you are a market participant, you can do better by understanding the market rules and thinking about how to play in them.The three E's of a good market13:59: A good market will achieve the three E's: efficiency, equity, and being easy for market participants. And so what you've just tapped into is efficiency. And that's what makes this subfield of economics interesting, that there is no mechanism that satisfies all three of those perfectly all the time.Show Links:Recommended Resources:LabubuBetter Online Tickets Sales ActAlvin E. RothNational Resident Matching ProgramAmerican Economic AssociationDonald Mackenzie | unSILOedGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Wharton School of BusinessProfessional WebsiteLinkedIn ProfileX Profile Guest Work:Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need to Get More of What You Want Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What strange thing happens when a neuron is left alone? Are there ways to moderate stress and anxiety, and even channel them into productive and helpful signals there to assist you in making good decisions? How can you develop initiative, and what has to change in today's education landscape to accomplish this? Angus Fletcher is a Professor of Story Science at Project Narrative of Ohio State University. He also teaches screenwriting and is a screenwriter, as well as the author of several books including Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know, Storythinking: The New Science of Narrative Intelligence, and Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature.Greg and Angus discuss the intersection of story science and philosophy, emphasizing the importance of mythos and narrative thinking as opposed to logos, the purely logical, data-driven approaches in areas like decision-making and leadership. Angus outlines how neurophysiology and the brain's natural restlessness contribute to human intelligence and explores the practical applications of narrative cognition in fields ranging from military operations to education and business. He highlights the role of literature in developing imagination, perspective, and emotional intelligence, arguing for its integration into educational systems and other training programs to cultivate better leaders, thinkers, and problem-solvers.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why fear and anger are the two most powerful emotions41:50: I worked a long time with operators on this, and we particularly worked on fear and anger because those are our two most powerful emotions. Those are our fight-or-flight responses. Fear is flight, and anger is fight. And you know what is going on there? Well, what is going on there is your brain has a bias to action. Your brain always wants to be doing something. The moment that your brain is sitting still, it feels extremely vulnerable, so it always wants to have a plan. And when your brain experiences a severe threat and it realizes this threat is so new, so different, that it does not have a plan that it has confidence in, it does not know what to do here—that is when your brain starts to feel scared. That is when you feel fear. So the question is, why is fear the emotion that your brain evolved? Why did it not evolve some other emotion, like curiosity or whatever? And the answer is just because fear makes you incredibly susceptible to outside influence. The more scared you are, the smarter other people's suggestions sound.Emotion is the smartest thing in your brain41:06: Emotion is the smartest thing in your brain. If you're not using your emotions, you're severely limiting your intelligence. And the reason that we know emotion is the smartest thing in the brain is it's the oldest form of intelligence in the brain, so it's been keeping you alive for hundreds of millions of years.Stories help us imagine alternatives13:11: When you tell someone a story effectively, it allows them to imagine themselves in that position. And then what they do in that position is they imagine, what could I do? And when that's done effectively, what it allows them to do is imagine alternatives—not just alternatives from what they themselves are doing in their own lives, but alternatives to what the individuals did in that situation.Why modern life produces so much anxiety46:21: Why is it that so many people are experiencing over-anxiety in our modern world? Well, the first thing is that too many people spend their time inside these artificially stable environments where they're just not used to anything being unstable. If you spend all your time in the suburbs, and bananas are always there, even in the middle of the winter when you go to the supermarket and the whatnot, you know, then you're not ever coping or having to engage with even a mild amount of instability or volatility. So the moment you encounter any of it, you immediately freak out and think that something must be wrong.Show Links:Recommended Resources:MythosLogosDaniel KahnemanDual Process TheoryI. A. RichardsWilliam ShakespeareCase StudySteve JobsMike TysonRonald CraneNew CriticismPostmodernismPost-StructuralismSchadenfreudeThe Chicago SchoolAeschylusSophoclesFight-or-Flight ResponseGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Ohio State UniversityProject Narrative Profile | Ohio State UniversityAngusFletcher.co | WebsiteAngus Fletcher | Wikipedia PageProfile on LinkedInSocial Profile on InstagramGuest Work:Amazon Author PagePrimal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You KnowNarrative Creativity: An Introduction to How and Why (Elements in Creativity and Imagination)Storythinking: The New Science of Narrative Intelligence (No Limits)Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of LiteratureCreative Thinking: A Field Guide to Building Your Strategic CoreComic Democracies: From Ancient Athens to the American RepublicScreenwriting 101: Mastering the Art of StoryEvolving Hamlet: Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy and the Ethics of Natural SelectionAngus Fletcher | IMDB Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How has rational choice theory come to dominate both our understanding of the world and our view of good judgment, and why is that a problem? What are the benefits of remembering to zoom in and out to get a better picture of problems and solutions? Why do we prefer reducing things to numbers even if that abstracts useful levels of data?Barry Schwartz is a professor Emeritus at Swarthmore College and the prolific author of many books. His latest titles include Choose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision-Making and Wisdom: How to Discover Your Path in Work and Life.Greg and Barry discuss the limitations of rational choice theory, the importance of practical wisdom, and the role of judgment in making decisions. They also touch on the broader implications of rational choice theory across various fields, the history of economic and social science paradigms, and the necessity of incorporating ethical considerations into people's decision-making. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The way we think about the world changes the world10:47: The argument in the book [Choose Wisely] was, the way we think about the world changes the world. And it is true that the way we think about the world changes the world, but it changes the world materially. It does not just change the world because of the ideas we have running around in our heads; it changes the material world. Yeah. The factory did not exist, and then it did. And as a result, what it meant to work changed. That was not in our heads. That was, you know, a structure that was out in the world that made demands on the people who walked in the door every day. So it was not idealism. The argument was that ideas change not just how people think, but what kinds of things people are able to do. And I think the same thing is true with rational choice theory, though it is a bit more abstract. You know, you cannot do a rational choice analysis without being able to quantify.Why we can't game the way to design incentives14:16: People somehow think that there is a bulletproof way to design incentives, so that they will not distort why they gave us the incentives they are designed to encourage. And, the bad news is there is no such thing, and there is no system that cannot be gamed.How economics changes the way we think07:22: There is a general, more general problem in social science, which is that, unlike planets, people are affected by claims that are made about what they are like. And so, the more we read social science, and the more economics, the king of the social sciences, dominates the news, the more inclined we are to think like and act like economists. So, does this tell us that the economists have discovered something? No. I mean, maybe. But it is just as likely that what economists have done is create something. They have created a way of approaching decisions and value assessment and so on that is consistent with their framework and changed people as a result.What we miss when we measure everything42:15: Rational choice theory is not neutral about what stays in the frame and what goes outside it. Things that go outside the frame are the ones that are most difficult to quantify using the same scale that you are using for everything else. And so, in the case of the price of a pound of beef, you could add the amount of money that our taxes contribute to subsidies. You could factor in the costs of the fertilizers that enable the corn to grow enough so that the cows can get fattened up. How do you quantify exactly the cost to human health? You can do it. How many more dollars do we pay per year because of antibiotic-resistant bacteria? But does that capture the cost in health? No. It only captures the dollar cost in health.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Rational Choice ModelDaniel KahnemanReinforcement LearningB. F. SkinnerReflexivity (Social Theory)Karl PopperGeorge SorosGoodhart's lawThe Omnivore's DilemmaAnnie DukePhronesisTelosSwarthmore CollegeAdnan KhashoggiGuest Profile:Wikipedia PageFaculty Profile at Swarthmore CollegeProfile at The Decision LabSocial Profile on XGuest Work:Amazon Author PageChoose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision-MakingWhy We Work (TED Books)Wisdom: How to Discover Your Path in Work and LifeBrilliant: The Art and Science of Making Better DecisionsThe Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Revised EditionPractical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right ThingAre We Happy Yet? Happiness in an Age of Abundance (Cato Unbound)The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is LessThe Costs of LivingThe Battle for Human Nature: Science, Morality and Modern LifeRelated unSILOed episodes:Barry Schwartz - Why We Work: Breaking Down the Psychological and Economic Factors of a Great WorkplaceDonald MacKenzie - Trading at Light Speed: The Impact of Ultra-Fast Algorithms on Financial Markets Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For organizations that are tempted to throw out the classic organizational management handbook in favor of a structure with no managers – think again. Nicolai J. Foss is a professor of strategy at Copenhagen Business School and the co-author of Why Managers Matter: The Perils of the Bossless Company. The book pushes back on the notion that the key to breakthrough success for organizations is through flat, leaderless structures akin to today's trendy startups, and makes the case for why companies need hierarchies to function. Nicolai and Greg discuss the feasibility and realities of operating without traditional hierarchies, why these models often rely heavily on exceptional founders and are not suited for all business types, and the essential roles managers play in coordination, cooperation, and maintaining effective workflows, especially during times of crisis. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:We still need managers41:33 [Managers] They're doing a lot of good stuff. They are coordinating, and they are cooperating at the most abstract level. I mean, activities need to be coordinated in the sense of, we have to figure out what those activities should be, how they should change in response to outside disturbances. Activities have to be linked. Activities have to be rethought. And once we have figured all that out, which is, of course, an ongoing struggle, then people have to be motivated to cooperate inside those, and actually carry out those activities in the best possible way and in a dynamic reality. This is a never-ending quest.No human system run itself11:44: No human system works itself or runs itself. It has to be supported, maintained. There has to be support, scaffolding, or whatever you want to call it. Same goes for firms—and perhaps all different ones.Organization is about coordinated cooperation02:40: At the end of the day, organization is about coordinated cooperation, and the right question to ask is, what exactly is the role of managers in bringing about coordinated cooperation?Boselessness is not for every company20:43: [Bosslessness] It works for some companies, typically those that have a more modular kind of underlying technology, where there is no high need for mutual adaptation between units or activities or processes. But it works much less well for a traditional industrial company.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Organizational theoryPrincipal–agent problemFirst, Let's Fire All the Managers by Gary HamelJensen HuangElon Musk by Walter IsaacsonCan you run a company as a perfect free market? Inside Disco Corp Morningstar, Inc.Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them by Gary Hamel and Michele ZaniniValve CorporationThe Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (film)Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Copenhagen Business SchoolProfessional Profile on LinkedInGuest Work:Why Managers Matter: The Perils of the Bossless Company Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How have politics changed from the  Bill Clinton era to that of  Donald Trump? How have identity politics diverted attention from economic issues, and how have the educated elites derailed activism?Fredrik deBoer is the author of both fiction and nonfiction works, including The Mind Reels, The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.Greg and Fredrik discuss the American political left and why the left-right dichotomy fails to tell the complete story.  Fredrik provides a critical examination of the internal divisions within the political left, identity politics, and the impact of social media on political engagement. He argues that the left's preoccupation with symbolic issues often undermines its ability to build broad-based coalitions, and suggests a return to class-first politics as a more effective strategy. They also touch on the role of nonprofits, the evolution of meritocracy in education, and the challenges of achieving genuine economic and social justice.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How social media turned politics into identity performance45:28: What makes all of this particularly more pernicious in the 21st century is, it's not just now your immediate peer group of people you see face-to-face. You've got to answer to a couple thousand people on social media who know your name and who know where you work, and who will yell at you if you have the, quote-unquote, wrong position. Right? And this is a thing that has happened all over the world of the left, which is, cultural issues began to be foregrounded above economic issues to an extreme extent. There was a development of a very narrow sort of list of approved opinions that you could hold on cultural and social issues. They came to be seen as sort of outside of the realm of politics, and without anyone actually intending for it to happen, what the sort of default young Democrat in politics was shifted over time in an extreme identitarian direction.When politics becomes a team sport, everyone loses nuance29:18: I think we are just training generations of young people who do not understand politics as anything other than a sort of blood sport, organized around a very simplistic binary.The heart of politics is empathy, not ideology07:23: I have a very long list of disagreements with Bill Clinton, but he was a political genius, and everyone knows, his signature phrase is, I feel your pain. And to me, that's the heart of politics. It's saying, I understand that you need something, and I'm here for you. In that sense, the identity politics on the left in the last 15 years has been about telling large groups of people that they do not have real problems, right? So, if you go show up to a university campus and you start to talk about some of the problems that afflict, for example, the white working class, you'll be told quite directly, oh, to center the white working class, right, is to privilege racism and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? It's saying directly to these people, your problems are not real problems. And so, like, that's the perfect example of where you are sacrificing potential allies for a benefit that I just do not even understand.Show Links:Recommended Resources:SocialismMarxismProgressivismSingle-Payer HealthcareBill ClintonDonald TrumpAdolph L. Reed Jr.Paul IngrassiaOccupy Wall StreetIron Law of OligarchyRobert ReichBarack ObamaGuest Profile:FredrikdeBoer.comWikipedia ProfileFredrik deBoer SubstackGuest Work:Amazon Author PageThe Mind ReelsThe Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social InjusticeHow Elites Ate the Social Justice MovementRelated UnSILOed episodes:Michael Spence - A Deep Dive into Signaling and Market Dynamics Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How will AI change the size, shape, and structure of companies? Where will we see new leverage points in the AI economy? How does AI mobe beyond task automation and into coordination of tasks? How does a manager keep from becoming just a cog in a system of automations?Sangeet Paul Choudary is a senior fellow at UC Berkeley, a consultant, and the author and co-author of several books. His latest work is titled, Reshuffle: Who Wins When AI Restacks the Knowledge Economy.Greg and Sangeet discuss Sangeet's latest book, as well as the work he co-authored, Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You. Sangeet emphasizes how AI's transformative impacts extend beyond automating tasks to fundamentally altering industry structures, competitive advantages, and corporate strategies. The conversation also covers even broader implications of continued AI adoption like modularity in business, the shifting roles in professional services, and the creation of new economic control points. They provide a comprehensive look at how businesses can realign their strategies around AI as an engine driving innovation and competitive advantage for the future.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:AI as a tool vs. AI as an engine22:28: The idea of using AI as a tool versus AI as an engine is that a tool is typically something that you bolt onto your existing workflows—pick a tool from the toolbox, and it helps you speed up a task, perform it faster, better, cheaper. But if you're really using an engine, you're constantly thinking about how to redesign your entire workflow and your entire organization, your business model, around the capabilities of the engine.Bridging the gap in AI through storytelling and narrative54:19: Storytelling and narrative, in general, are such important skills today because we are in an age where we are information-rich but attention-poor. And the way to harness that attention is to have compelling storytelling and narratives that bridge that gap.How is the basis of competition shifting?29:09: The impact of AI does not play out only at the level of tasks—tasks that are inside workflows. So workflows get transformed. Workflows are organized through organizational mechanisms, so new organizational systems will have to come into place. And organizations, essentially, compete in an ecosystem. They help firms compete in an ecosystem. And so the starting point would be to ask ourselves—with AI coming in and with other forces at play—how is the basis of competition shifting? What was the basis on which firms previously competed? What was our basis of differentiation and competition? And does that change? Do some of those assumptions no longer hold true? And on that basis, if we can lay out some clear hypotheses and heuristics on what's changing in terms of the basis of competition, what does that mean in terms of the capabilities we need to have in place?...All of those need to come into question and need to be evaluated.Show Links:Recommended Resources:WalmartSheinPlatform EconomyLarge Language ModelTikTokSocial GraphThe Open Graph protocolErik BrynjolfssonGeneral ElectricPerplexity AIOpenAIBest BuyAmazon AlexaGuest Profile:Profile on Platform Thinking LabsProfile on LinkedInProfile on WikipediaSocial Profile on XGuest Work:Amazon Author PageReshuffle: Who Wins When AI Restacks the Knowledge EconomyThe Fast Future Blur: Discover Transformative Interconnections Shaping the FuturePlatform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for YouPlatform Scale: How an emerging business model helps startups build large empires with minimum investmentMediumSubstackRelated unSILOed Episodes:Geoff Parker | Will Every Business Become a Platform Business?Marc Levinson | How the Container Changed the World Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How does code, like language, shape the way we see the world? How can we rediscover enchantment in our technology?? How can we determine the half-life of knowledge as we continue to learn and discover new things?Samuel Arbesman is a scientist in residence at Lux Capital, a fellow at Case Western School of Management, and the author of three books, The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World—and Shapes Our Future, Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension, and The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date.Greg and Samuel discuss Samuel's newest book, The Magic of Code, and how programming languages have evolved and continue to evolve over time. Samuel explores society's enchantment and disenchantment with technology, the evolution of programming languages, the intersection of computer science and humanities, and the ongoing shift towards more democratized software creation. They also go over Samuel's  earlier works, highlighting the temporary nature of facts and the continual necessity for adaptive learning in a rapidly evolving world.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Reenchanting technology through humanities 03:24: I think the larger perspective of the book [The Magic of Code] is to also recognize that, in addition to this wonder and delight, also recognizing that when we think about computing competition, it doesn't need to just be this branch of engineering or this thing of computer science. It really is this almost humanistic liberal art that, when you think about it properly, should connect to language and philosophy and biology and art and how we think and the nature of reality and all these different kinds of things. And for me, those are the windows and the lenses that allow us to actually kind of re-enchant, not even just computing, but in turn many aspects of our own lives, and hopefully can repair at least a little bit of that kind of broken relationship.On the magic of code06:31:  We actually have this weird information stuff that can actually work in the real world. That's amazing. And we should pause at least and say, wow, that really is incredible.Why democratizing software is powerful26:56: This idea of being able to democratize software creation is incredibly powerful. And actually, in going back to the analogy with magic, I mean, yes, in many of the tales of magic, it did require a great deal of effort. You had to apprentice, or you had to, I don't know, go to Hogwarts for seven years or whatever it is. But there also were stories of magic for everyone; there were spells that could be used by people if they, like in the Middle Ages, had lost their cattle and needed to recover it. And I think we need that same kind of thing in the software realm as well, which is, we need spells and code that can be used by everyone. And now, with this ability, it's unbelievable to see.Ideas are always in draft form53:41: A professor of mine, when I was in graduate school, told me this story. This was already after I had left grad school. He was telling me this story that he was teaching some course, came in on Tuesday, and gave a lecture on some topic. Then, the next day, he read a paper that invalidated the lecture he had given the day before. So he went in on Thursday and said, “Remember what I taught you on Tuesday? It's wrong. And if that bothers you, you need to get out of science.” And I think that kind of idea—that science, or what we know, is constantly in draft form—is a very powerful idea.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Max WeberDuneiPhone (1st generation)ChatGPTH. P. LovecraftFantasiaGuido van RossumLarry WallSapir–Whorf HypothesisList of Programming LanguagesBrainfuckFortranPerlVibe CodingRobin SloanVIC-20Pierre-Simon LaplaceVannevar BushDon R. SwansonLuis Walter AlvarezMarc BenioffThe Unaccountability MachineIsaac AsimovGuest Profile:Arbesman.netProfessional Profile for  LuxCapitaLinkedIn AccountSocial Profile on XGuest Work:Amazon Author PageThe Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World—and Shapes Our FutureOvercomplicated: Technology at the Limits of ComprehensionThe Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration DateWired ArticlesSubstack - Cabinet of Wonders Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Is it time to overhaul the way we study and teach ancient history? Are we limiting our ability to understand fully how the past informs the present in ways like inequality if we keep these disciplines siloed?Walter Scheidel is a professor of humanities, classics, and history at Stanford University. He's the author of more than a dozen books, including What Is Ancient History? and The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century.Walter and Greg discuss methodological divides between departments studying ancient history, the relevance of the Classics today, and the case for a new discipline on “foundational history.” They also explore the origins of inequality and how war, plagues, and technological advancements are the primary drivers for equality shifts. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How ancient innovations still shape the modern world13:37: People face similar challenges, and they should be studied accordingly. And we should try to understand how people, at the time of many thousands of years ago, put all kinds of innovations in place and bundled them together in very specific ways that really create our world—in terms of material culture, in terms of social arrangements, institutions, cognitive frameworks, if you will. Writing and literature and world religions and other belief systems, and so on, are still very much with us. They really shape everything that we do today. So the world we inhabit today is like a supercharged version of what people set up in this formative period. But they did it all over the place.Why ancient studies need a paradigm shift10:08: Unless there is some major paradigm shift or some major other shock to the system, there's really no sufficient force to reconfigure the way we approach the study of the ancient world.Redefining ancient history beyond Greece and Rome03:03: If you're a historian, you may want to ask, well, why isn't ancient history, like Roman history, part of our history patterns more generally? And to go beyond that, what do we mean mostly by Greece and Rome when we say ancient history? I think we mean two things when we evoke ancient history. One is Greeks and Romans, maybe Egyptians and Nas if you're lucky, but not, you know, Maya or early China and that sort of thing. Or, more commonly, you refer to something you think is irrelevant and obsolete. You say that's ancient history whenever you want to dismiss something—it's like, that's ancient history. So my book is about both of these meanings and why neither one of them really does any justice to the subject matter and to what our understanding should be of this particular part of history. I want to redefine it as a truly transformative, foundational phase—not so much a period, but a phase of human development that unfolded on a planetary scale and needs to be studied accordingly.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Gini coefficientBranko MilanovićKuznets curveGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford UniversityProfessional WebsiteProfessional Profile on XGuest Work:What Is Ancient History?The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)Part of: The Princeton Economic History of the Western World (55 books)The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy (Cambridge Companions to the Ancient World)Part of: Cambridge Companions to the Ancient Athens (17 books) The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World by Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, et al.The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford Studies in Early Empires) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When it comes to the concept of The West, its scope and principles have been criticized both contemporarily and historically. How did the West emerge as a coherent concept, and what has it meant over time?Georgios Varouxakis is a Professor in the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London, where he is also the Co-director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought. He is also the author of several books, and his newest book is titled The West: The History of an Idea.Greg and Georgios discuss Giorgios's new book, 'The West: The History of an Idea,' and explore the origins, evolution, and various interpretations of the concept of 'the West.' Their conversation covers some popular misconceptions about the West, reasons behind its historical development, and the roles nations like Greece, Russia, and Ukraine have played in shaping the West's identity. Giorgios emphasizes how the West has been a flexible and evolving idea, open to new members and continuously redefined through history. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The two myths of the West's origins03:06: The popular conceptions are that the West must have always existed. People take for granted that at least since the ancient Greeks, there is a West that has resisted the invasion of Asia through the Persian Empire and that in the Battle of Marathon, the West defined itself and defeated. A projection of things that people later imagined. In this sense, ancient Greeks saw themselves as Greeks. They did not see themselves as West or Europe or anything else. The other end of the spectrum is that the West must have begun with a Cold War, that surely the West is a creation of the post–First World War situation where the United States leads a group of peoples versus the Soviet Union, and that is the West. These are the two popular extremes. Popular conceptions that I consider, the two ends of the spectrum.The West as an open-ended idea17:14: The West had inherent from its inception an open-endedness that was not based on just ethnic descent or just religion.Richard Wright: The gadfly of the West37:14: [Richard Wright] says, "I'm Western, but I now realize I'm more Western than the West. I'm more advanced than the West. I believe in the Western principles and values, and constitutional and political and other philosophical ideas. I was taught, I believe in freedom of speech, separation of, and the of. These are not necessarily practiced much of the time by Western governments and elites. So he becomes literally like Socrates was the gadfly of Athenian democracy. Richard Wright becomes the gadfly of the West, saying, 'I'm criticizing you because you're not doing the Western thing. You're not Western enough.' Literally, he says, 'The West is not Western enough.'"Why the West should be improved, not abolished47:48: My argument is peoples and their leaderships make decisions, and they may change allegiances. They may adopt institutions, alliances, and cultural references that their ancestors did not have a century or two ago, come from a country that. An experiment in that these experiments may change. You know, things may change, but I do not think anytime soon Greece will join some Eastern or whatever alliance. So to the extent that what anyone can predict, the attractiveness of the West is exactly this combination of, and an entity. As we keep saying, it should be criticized and improved. So it is not abolishing the West that I would recommend, it is improving the West and making the West live up to more of its aspirations and principles.Show Links:Recommended Resources:John Stuart MillAuguste ComteOttoman EmpirePeter the GreatCatherine the GreatGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelAhmed RızaOliver GoldsmithJean-Jacques RousseauGermaine de StaëlThomas MannFrancis LieberDonald TrumpSteve BannonOswald SpenglerWestern CivilizationWalter LippmannW. E. B. Du BoisRichard WrightFrancis FukuyamaGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Queen Mary University of LondonLinkedIn ProfileGuest Work:Amazon Author PageThe West: The History of an IdeaLiberty Abroad: J. S. Mill on International RelationsMill on NationalityVictorian Political Thought on France and the FrenchPhilPapers.org Profile Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Why is historical context so important when looking at topics from the past? What role does a broader appreciation of the humanities play in understanding contemporary issues?Darrin M. McMahon is a professor of history at Dartmouth College and the author of several books. Recent titles include Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea and the Divine Fury: A History of Genius book.Greg and Darrin discuss Darrin's intellectual journey and his approach to longue durée intellectual history. Darrin provides insights into his books on happiness, genius, and equality, exploring themes like the evolution of concepts over time, the intersection of words and ideas, and the roles of intellectual historians. Their conversation examines the connections between religious traditions and modern concepts, the interplay of born versus made attributes, and the historical perspectives on the concepts of happiness and genius. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Are genius, happiness, and equality born or made?41:06: Are geniuses born, or are they made? You know, can you play the guitar for 10,000 hours, à la Malcolm Gladwell, and become a Beatle? Or, you know, is there just something in you? And that turns out to be a kind of central conflict all the way back to the ancients. Same, as you say, with happiness, right? Is happiness just in our genes? We know some people are wired to just be cheery in the morning. Right? I'm not one of those people. Or does it happen to you? Right? Or can you make it? Right? Can you control your life in such a way so that you can bring about happiness? And the same with equality, right? Are we born equals? Are we made equals in political circumstance? Are we intended to be equal? This too gets tied up with debates around it, around the concept from very early on. And they never really entirely go away. So again, it's a nice way of kind of pointing out continuities, but then also marking points of departure and change.Why equality creates inequality29:37: Equality always serves, or always brings into being, new forms of inequality. That very assertion of equals then creates the space then for thinking or measuring others against that standard, and relegating to place.Intellectual history teaches us how to love49:28: Intellectual history teaches you to get inside the minds of others who see the world in radically different ways from how you do. And that is what love is all about: trying to get inside the mind of a person who sees the world differently from you, and to empathize even when you do not agree, to understand even when you do not condone. That is crucial. It is a crucial human endeavor, and I think intellectual history teaches that very well.The arc of equality isn't as straight as we think30:29: Equality leads to us, and then it's going to spread, and, you know, spill down to more and more people. It will expand and get wider. I grew up in California. I was born in 1965 with that kind of vague idea, and no one said it was going to be easy. Martin Luther King certainly knew it was not going to be easy, and yet, as you say, the arc of history bends towards justice, bends towards equality. We're gradually extending equality to wider and wider circles of people. And that's just how it will go. And I think we were deceived by our own rhetoric. And it was really a rude awakening in 2016 to wake up and realize, oh gosh, you know, it does not quite work that way. And as rude an awakening as that's been, I think it also provides an opportunity then to go back and examine a concept like equality that we thought we knew in some ways, but that really turns out to be much more complicated and fraught than I think we fully appreciated.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Longue DuréeRobert DarntonArthur Oncken LovejoyAnglo-SaxonsPlatoSubjective Well-beingJeremy BenthamThe Happiness HypothesisAge of EnlightenmentSocratesDaemonDoctor FaustusMichelangeloMichel FoucaultMemento MoriFascesTeresa BejanMartin Luther King Jr.Tall Poppy SyndromeChristopher BoehmBranko MilanovićKarl MarxJean-Jacques RousseauArthur SchopenhauerFriedrich NietzscheThomas CarlyleAugustine of HippoPresentismGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Dartmouth UniversityDarrinMcMahon.comWikipedia ProfileGuest Work:Amazon Author PageEquality: The History of an Elusive IdeaHistory and Human FlourishingDivine Fury: A History of GeniusHappiness: A HistoryEnemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There is a misconception that liberalism lacks a vision of ‘the good life,' but liberalism is more ingrained in society than often recognized. It affects media, education, and personal beliefs of those in society both directly and indirectly.Alexandre Lefebvre is a professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney in Australia, and the author and editor of several books.  His latest work is Liberalism as a Way of Life.Greg and Alex discuss the historical and philosophical critiques of liberalism, discussing whether liberalism needs a theory of ‘the good life' to remain relevant and compelling. Alexandre argues that liberalism has permeated various aspects of modern life, contradicting the common view that it is merely a procedural framework. They also explore John Rawls's philosophy, particularly his concepts of the original position and reflective equilibrium, and examine how these ideas can serve as spiritual exercises for cultivating a liberal ethos. Alexandre highlights the need for liberals to live up to their principles and examines the future challenges and opportunities for liberalism in a pluralistic society.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What are the goods of the liberal way of life?36:14: What are the goods of the liberal way of life? I do think that they are real goods and, at the heart of it, I would say. I mean, I think any conception of the good life kind of parks two or three virtues, kind of limit at four, I know, at the heart of what it means to live well. And then they have kind of derivative qualities and virtues flowing out from that. So, I take liberals at their word that the two major commitments they have are, let's say, to liberty and liberality, or to freedom and fairness as a kind of interpretation of what it means to be generous. And out of that comes a whole personality structure. That's what I believe. A whole psychology emanates from that. And it behooves us as liberals to cultivate that, not just because it makes us not jerks and not hypocrites, but because living according to those values and those virtues is intrinsically rewarding and joyful. [37:09] So, that's the first thing I want to say: that the liberal personality isn't just a political thing. I want to say that it disseminates into all aspects of our life, from how we deal with our wife or our husband, our romantic partners, how we raise our kids, to the kind of jokes we laugh at, the kind of stuff that makes us upset, et cetera, et cetera.Why liberalism needs more than rules09:14: If liberalism can't compel ethical assent and robust commitment, then what are we talking about? We're done for, we can't campaign forever on just a set of rules, however noble they are. There has to be a there, there.Why do people reject liberalism?34:27: I think that a lot of people saying no to liberalism, it's not because they can't live up to its demands, but because they look at the ideals and say, no, not for me, that this is not the kind of life I want. And that the vision of the good life and the good quality is in a different direction. And I think that those are principled rejections of liberalism that make, for me, a lot of sense. And that if we want to understand the attraction of illiberalism, postliberal, all that stuff, we can't just think that these people are either cowards or afraid, or that their leaders are just motivated by the goods of tyranny—kind of sex, power, money, all that stuff. That is part of the picture, no doubt, but they're motivated by genuine ideals that liberalism crowds out.Liberalism as a way of life27:16: Philosophy is a way of life. And what I try to do in my book [Liberalism as a Way of Life] is suggest that liberalism could be seen, sort of, in the same vein.Show Links:Recommended Resources: LiberalismJohn RawlsAdrian VermeuleKarl MarxSøren KierkegaardEpicureanismLiberal DemocracyA Theory of JusticeAlexis de TocquevilleLast ManJudith N. ShklarMisanthropyPierre HadotIris MurdochDave ChappelleHannah GadsbyPatrick DeneenFrench RevolutionCult of ReasonGuest Profile:AlexLefebvre.comFaculty Profile at the University of SydneyLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on XGuest Work:Amazon Author PageLiberalism as a Way of LifeHuman Rights and the Care of the SelfHuman Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson's Political PhilosophyThe Image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, SpinozaFreedom: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1904–1905Interpreting Bergson: Critical EssaysThe Subject of Human RightsHenri BergsonBergson, Politics, and ReligionWant more like this? Give these episodes a listen:Helena RosenblattSamuel Moyn Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Business leaders need to be versatile, critical thinkers capable of questioning the status quo while integrating actionable frameworks to drive innovation. How does this align with the principles today's business school graduates are learning and will they be capable of integrating actionable frameworks to drive innovation in the future?Scott D. Anthony is a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and the author of several books. His latest work is titled Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World.Greg and Scott discuss Scott's latest book, Epic Disruptions, as well as his previous works, including Dual Transformations and Eat, Sleep, Innovate. Their conversation examines the intricacies of disruption theory, its need for an update, and the complexity of business models in today's ecosystem-focused world. Scott shares insights from his extensive research and consulting experience, touching on historical examples like the iPhone, Tesla, and Julia Child, and emphasizing the importance of adapting mental models to navigate uncertainty. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Innovation is predictably unpredictable39:59: Scott: Randomness is absolutely a feature of every innovation story that you'll study. And the conclusion I drew from the research is that innovation has become more predictable, but it's not perfectly predictable. So I called it predictably unpredictable in that—Greg: Now, is it more predictable because we have better tools and better frameworks?Scott: I think so. I think A, we have better tools and better frameworks, and B, we really have learned the discipline of scientific method applied to strategy through lean startup, emergent strategy, and so on. So that does not mean that we can predict exactly. It does not mean that we know what is going to happen beforehand, but it means that we can confront the uncertainty in a more practiced, more methodical sort of way, so we can manage it in a different sort of way. I think that is a huge change in the innovation world. So, a combination of two things: better understanding, better research, which gives us better tools and frameworks, and then an active way to go and chip away at the things that we still will not know. But still, there is lots of unpredictability in it.Disruption changes the game08:52: The important thing about disruption is it changes the game, and by changing the game, it drives explosive growth.Why business schools must teach wisdom, not just tools44:28: There is a fundamental question of how do we make sure that it is connected to the modern world and what it needs to do? And second, technical tools are pretty easy to learn, and tools like ChatGPT, et cetera, can take it really well. We need to make sure that our students are critical thinkers that are really able to be what we are aspiring our students to be—wise, decisive leaders that better the world through business. We need to teach wisdom. We need to teach curiosity. We need to make sure that people go out with the right mindset, and that is really hard. That is not an easy thing to do in traditional classroom settings with case-based methods. I think there is still a huge role for that, and a role for simulations, experiential things—things that really push people to uncomfortable places where they learn and give them the humility, the wisdom to be able to confront an incredibly challenging world.On Florence Nightingale as a disruptor36:17: She [Florence Nightingale] goes and opens up nursing hospitals, enabling a broader population to be nurses. And like nightingales, they fly through the world. So she comes up with a really clear vision that is communicated clearly. She gives people step-by-step instructions, and she creates a cadre of people that can go and follow those instructions. And by doing so, she drives massive system change. This is disruption in healthcare—enabling a lesser-trained, lesser-skilled group of people to provide high-quality care, moving from treating bad things to preventing them from ever happening. So I love the story, because you think of her as a nurse. You think of her as somebody who helped people in a dire situation. Yes, she did all of that, but she also used data, used words, used teaching and training to change the world. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Clayton ChristensenDisruptive InnovationAlixPartnersSteve JobsAndrew GroveENIACiPhoneRita Gunther McGrathhttps://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/1156427Julia ChildFlorence NightingaleFrancis BaconScientific MethodBethlehem SteelDBS BankWilliam FarrCase MethodGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Tuck School of BusinessInnosight ProfileLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on XGuest Work:Amazon Author PageEpic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern WorldThe Innovator's Solution, with a New Foreword: Creating and Sustaining Successful GrowthEat, Sleep, Innovate: How to Make Creativity an Everyday Habit Inside Your OrganizationThe Little Black Book of Innovation: How It Works, How to Do ItDual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the FutureThe First Mile: A Launch Manual for Getting Great Ideas into the MarketBuilding a Growth FactoryThe Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain TimesThe Innovator's Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to WorkSeeing What's Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How did political and social pressures affect public health decisions during the pandemic, and how did media reporting amplify those effects? What is the cost when experts detach from evidence-based medicine for policymaking and defer decisions to those without the proper expertise?David Zweig is a journalist, novelist, and musician. He is also the author of An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.Greg and David discuss David's journey from working on a different book during the pandemic to documenting the school closure policies and their implications. They cover various topics, including public health, expertise, the state of science, partisanship, tribalism in academia and the public sector, and how those factors influenced the policy and decisions during COVID. David talks about the decision-making processes behind prolonged school closures despite falling hospitalization rates, the role of media coverage, the politicization of public health recommendations, and the long-term impact on children's education and mental health. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The failure of the expert class30:39: One of the reasons that I felt motivated to spend years writing this book [An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions], and just painstakingly trying to create a document. So I am hoping that, if I am not too big for my britches here, I hope in a decade, or a couple of decades or more from now, people will look back at the book and use this as a tool to understand: How does something like this happen, where science and evidence are ignored? And not only is it ignored, but it is ignored by the people who ostensibly are the experts who should know better. I do not spend a lot of time criticizing Trump, or, you know, Alex Jones, or conspiracy theorist people, because that's boring. I already do not expect them to know what is going on, but I do expect people with advanced degrees. I do expect physicians, I do expect these public health experts. And my book, in many ways, is a study of how those people—it is the failure of the expert class.Intuition over data15:28: Real-world, like empirical evidence, was ignored almost entirely. And when it was acknowledged, even in a minimal way, it was dismissed with a bunch of really contrived reasons that were based again on the expert's intuition. None of this was based on any evidence or data.When models reflect privilege01:07:54: It's quite important to note that the people who made the models also tended to be the people who did the best in the pandemic. That's what this guy Eric Berg's philosopher, who I interviewed, pointed out to me many times. Like, boy, that's pretty ironic that the people who chose how to create these models, they were the ones who were in comfortable homes. They were the ones who had their kid. They probably had one or another parent at home with the kid to help them with their studying. Maybe they could pay for a tutor. Maybe they went to their vacation home somewhere. If the people designing the pandemic response were in a studio apartment in the Bronx with four children, with one absent parent, and with one of the kids sick and with a learning disability, I'm pretty darn sure that their recommendations would have been quite different if those were the circumstances they were living in.Show Links:Recommended Resources:COVID-19Andrew CuomoAnthony FauciDonald TrumpCenters for Disease Control and PreventionThe New York TimesMegan RanneyWired (magazine)Graham AllisonEvidence-Based MedicineMIS-CVladimir Kogan ProfileEmily OsterDeborah BirxGuest Profile:DavidZweig.comProfile on WikipediaSocial Profile on XSocial Profile on FacebookGuest Work:Amazon Author PageAn Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad DecisionsInvisibles: The Power of Anonymous Work in an Age of Relentless Self-PromotionSwimming Inside the SunArticles for The AtlanticSubstack Newsletter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How does literature enrich our understanding of ourselves and of others, in ways that STEM fields and other forms of knowledge cannot? What is contained within the language of reading that you don't encounter with other art forms like painting or film?Arnold Weinstein is a Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Brown University and the author of several books. His latest two publications are The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing and Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books.Greg and Arnold discuss how literature offers unique and invaluable insights into the human experience, bridging historical and cultural divides. Their conversation examines the connections between literature and self-discovery, the challenges of teaching literature in a contemporary academic setting, and the enduring relevance of classic works from authors like William Faulkner, William Shakespeare, and Mark Twain. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Life doesn't come in disciplines01:02:54: Literature helps you see history. That philosophy, et cetera, needs a good dosage of literature, which is why we created that course and let the disciplines—not the people, the disciplines themselves—do battle with each other. And there's no obvious answer here. There's no winner or loser. But the students were confused. They wanted to get what's the right take on this. Well, has anybody ever offered the right take on reality? Universities come packaged in disciplines. Life doesn't. It doesn't. All of our major problems cannot be solved with any single discipline, including economics and, you know, and coding.Literature makes us more human09:25: It's a good workout to read literature. It makes us more generous, as being able to award the notion of humanity to other people. Because I do not think you can kill them. You cannot stamp them out if you do not think back.Why great books leave you uneasy30:13: We are supposed to exit literature course, not exactly being more confused, but more embattled in a sense to see that other ways of being, as well as other ways, other values that people might have, is a kind of absolutely basic "meat-and-potatoes" element of human life. You cannot just live in your own silo, in your own scheme, even though you are locked in it. That's the point. We cannot exit ourselves.History isn't a fairy tale40:51: If we read the books, it only tells us what we want to know, which is what we are headed towards in this society today with the current political scene. Any text that is critical of American history is considered broke and therefore removed. And I'm worried that we are going to get a generation of people who think that American history is a fairy tale, which it is not, and no amount of rhetoric can change that. That we can police and prohibit these certain kinds of texts can take over the Kennedy Center, but we cannot, in fact, change what all of that is about, which is that we are still paying the bill for the history of racism and slavery in this country. It is not solved. We can just try to put it under the rug, but it is not solved by any means. So it is in that sense that the discomfort is required. If it simply massages us, say, "oh, this is terrific," then I think we are reading the wrong book.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Harold BloomFranz KafkaThe MetamorphosisSøren KierkegaardWilliam FaulknerMark TwainAdventures of Huckleberry FinnJamesBenito CerenoBlaise PascalWilliam ShakespeareKing LearHamletOthelloIagoToni MorrisonNaked LunchGuest Profile:Profile at Brown UniversityWikipedia PageProfile at Roundtable.orgGuest Work:Amazon Author PageThe Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, KnowingMorning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through BooksNorthern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art, from Ibsen to BergmanA Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About LifeRecovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, MorrisonNobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLilloThe Great Courses - Classic Novels: Meeting the Challenge of Great Literature

What does the female body itself contribute to the story of human survival and development, and how does it differ from other animals and specifically, other mammals? These contributions include but are not limited unique attributes for gestation, childbirth, and lactation.Cat Bohannon is a researcher, scholar, and the author of the book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.Greg and Cat discuss the significant role of the female body in human evolution. Cat shares the origins of her interdisciplinary approach to writing the book. Their conversation explores the evolutionary importance of maternal and infant health, the implications of sex differences in biology, the historical intersections of gynecology and sexism, and the deeply ingrained cultural norms around reproduction. Their discussion also touches on the origins of patriarchy and the impact of modern medical advancements on child-rearing and fertility trends.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The deep story of mammals is reproductive investment06:13: “Eve,” [the book] in so many ways, was just—it's like a giant thought experiment, right? Like, okay, what if we do take this seriously? What if we say, what if sex differences do matter? What does the current science say about where they might and what that might implicate? And how does that change the story of ocean? You know, because like the big story, like you say, of mammalian evolution is reproduction. It's reproduction. I mean, it's cool that some little bit of a quasi-reptilian jaw broke off and now we have inner ear bones, but that's not a really interesting story in evolution. You know what I mean? 06:53: You know, that's not the deep story of mammals. The deep story of mammals is reproductive investment.Why are female bodies always regulated across cultures?59:52: We seem to, in every human culture, create rules that regulate access to female bodies. One way or another, we may have a subset of rules that are more liberal—that is distinct to our culture. We may have a set of rules that are more what we would call conservative or more controlling. That is distinct to our culture. It just depends on which culture you are in. What we all do have is these damn rules.Lactation is a two-way communication system55:40: We have to think of lactation then as this kind of two-way communication platform between the maternal body and the offspring's body, right? So whether that kid's getting stressed and there's more cortisol in its saliva, or whether the mothers experiencing a stressful environment, then they are effectively biochemically communicating that to one another through that bi-directional transfer point of the damn nipple, which is one incredibly cool. There's nothing like that in the animal world. Two. Oh, okay. So then we have to think of lactation as a thing that's more than simple caretaking. It's actually a major foundational thing that happens in mammals that have nipples.Why women store special fats in their hips and butt45:28: One of the things that is really interesting is that on the maternal body, different fat depots seem to have slightly different chops... [45:48] So this gluteal femoral fat, that is your upper thighs, your hips, and your butt — those fat deposits seem to specially store different kinds of stuff. There are these long-chain fatty acids, LCFAs — long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids. Our bodies are not good at making them from different parts. [46:26] For females, we mostly seem to store them in our butts. We start storing them in childhood, and then we keep going, and it turns out they do seem to be really important for building baby brains and baby retinas, which, by most accounts, are just an extension of your brain anyway.Show Links:Recommended Resources:PlacentaMalariaPlasmodiumEpidural, see Tina Cassidy's unsILOed Podcast episodeBruce EffectSolomonAlloparenting, see Sara Hrdy's unsILOed Podcast episodeKatie HindeUpsuck HypothesisGuest Profile:LinkedIn ProfileAlumni Profile | ButlerSocial Profile on InstagramWikipedia Entry for EveGuest Work:Amazon Author PageEve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

How does status infiltrate all of our decisions, and how is status allocated in a networked society?Toby E. Stuart is a professor at the Haas School at UC Berkeley and also the author of the new book called Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World.Greg and Toby discuss the influence of social status on various aspects of life, including consumer behavior, resource allocation, and decision-making. They explore the concept of the Matthew Effect (how status leads to more status), the interplay between status and merit, and the implications of prestige in different fields such as academia, venture finance, and entertainment. The episode also examines the role of status in creating inequality and the potential benefits and challenges of implementing measures to reduce the impact of status in decision-making processes.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The big shift why we trust the painter over the painting12:17: What do you do when you have to make a choice about something, but you have no real ability to evaluate its quality? Right? And, you know, that is true of so many things. Like, it is true of a hotel room you have never seen before, or a restaurant you have never been to before, or, like, you know, which of these things are going to be good? And in the book, I make the argument that what you do—I call it the Big Shift—is, if you walk into a museum, say, and you see a piece of art on the wall, I mean, you know it is in the museum, but you do not know whether it is high quality or not. But then you see the artist's name, and what you do know is, it is a Picasso, and I have heard of Picasso, and he is a very famous artist. And, in theory, he makes excellent art. And because of that, this is a very good picture. This is an amazing piece of art. But what you just did there is you took the identity of the artist and you assigned it to the art itself.Status exists only in relationships08:41: Status is a resource that is created in a social system. So individuals and groups give status to members, but it does not exist absent the social relationship. And right there, you can see the link to social networks, because flows of deferences are forms of relationships.Born on third base privilege and status56:16: So there is still today the prosperity gospel, and people who are successful often believed that it was a form of pre-ordination, like they were destined to get whatever they have, you know. But the other part of it is, you know, is best summed up by, you know, this quote I have always loved. I think, you know, the providence is occasionally debated, but it is often attributed to Barry Switzer. You know this one, and it goes: he refers to someone and he says, like, “You know, that guy was born on third base, and he has always thought he hit a triple.” Right? And that is what we call privilege these days—where you have all of these advantages. You were born with the advantages, you did not earn them, but you think you did, and therefore you attribute your status to your own merit. Versus what actually happened is you were born on third base; you did not ever hit the triple.Status on steroids in the digital age42:19: What happens when we have these digital platforms? When we have digital platforms, like anybody can get onto Spotify or Pandora or Apple Music or whatever, and they can find any piece of music literally created. Just like, you know, 99.9% of all recorded music exists on these platforms. And so you can find anybody's music. And so anywhere in the world, you can listen to the oboist—that one oboist who is the greatest in the world. So the globalization of the audience changes the nature of what happens in the marketplace, so to speak, and in a radical way. And then, if you have a cumulative advantage process which pushes people up to the top, that unfolds on steroids if you are looking at a global digital marketplace versus the way the world used to work.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Matthew EffectNetwork TheoryRobert B. ParkerWine RatingJohn Strutt, 3rd Baron RayleighRichard Wrangham - UnSILOed Episode 5Alexis de TocquevilleCaste SystemJohn D. RockefellerReformed ChristianityGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Berkeley HaasTobyStuart.comLinkedIn ProfileBerkeley ExecEd ProfileSocial Profile on InstagramSocial Profile on XGuest Work:Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most WorldGoogle Scholar PageResearchGate Page

Many business leaders craft successful companies but only a few elevate that to the level of a masterpiece. What is it about some companies and leaders that allows them to achieve this status? How does the vision of ‘the good life' differ across corporations, large and small?Charles Spinosa is a management consultant and the author of several books. His latest book is called Leadership as Masterpiece Creation: What Business Leaders Can Learn from the Humanities about Moral Risk-Taking.Greg and Charles discuss Charles's vision of business leaders as artists and creators who shape organizations into masterpieces, rooted deeply in humanities and philosophy. The conversation covers various business leaders, including Jeff Bezos, and how their leadership styles create distinctive moral orders within their companies. Charles connects principles from Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and Machiavelli to modern business practices and explains how leaders can cultivate courage and virtue within their organizations. They also explore the differences between founders and inheritors of businesses, the role of leaders in shaping corporate culture, and the implications for leadership education.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The three questions behind masterpiece leadership18:05: My three questions are: What always goes wrong here? That tends to be an easy question for 80% of them to answer. What would you love to do instead? That is the hard question. That is the one you think is easy, but what would you love to do instead? That is hard because these men and women are geniuses at managing around what always goes wrong. They have been rewarded for managing around it, and they are good at it. And then, once we can get to “What would you love?”—what risks do you need to take to do what you would love? And that is where we begin to work out the kinds of risks, the hard risks they are going to take. Because when they make these changes, if they do not succeed, they are going to be seen as not just foolish, but actually evil. They have gone out and harmed people in careers and so forth. So we have to figure out those, and then we have to put them in a kind of strategic order. But that is, in short, my masterpiece-building strategy. Leadership as a moral masterpiece03:10: Masterpieces are not just attractive and compelling aesthetically. Masterpieces give us a distinct new way to live that we consider a good life. They are moral masterpieces, and they are morally distinctive.Cultivating courage in organizations42:34: It is not that hard to build a company that cultivates courage. When you realize that part of courage is realizing that you figure what you think is right, and then you compose a way for people to hear it.Why leadership calls for admiration22:15: I can admire Google, and I can admire Amazon. A lot of people cannot. I have had people walk out on me when I say that about Amazon. But choose another company—choose The Body Shop, choose Zuckerberg's company, Meta—quite different from Amazon. Again, if we can admire different companies, we do not have to embrace everything we admire, and that gives us a sense of different good lives that we can admire. And I want that to be the virtue that we develop, which is a step above tolerance. I mean, really, with tolerance, which is the modern virtue for dealing with difference, we tolerate things that are different that we cannot eliminate. They are too powerful. We do not consider them quite as good. We tolerate them, but it is never a happy tolerance.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Friedrich NietzscheJeff BezosWilliam ShakespeareOthelloIagoHamletJack WelchMartin HeideggerLorenzo ZambranoJames C. CollinsAmy EdmondsonIliadStanley MilgramNiccolò MachiavelliGuest Profile:Profile on Vision.comLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on InstagramGuest Work:Amazon Author PageLeadership as Masterpiece Creation: What Business Leaders Can Learn from the Humanities about Moral Risk-TakingKellogg on Advertising and Media: The Kellogg School of ManagementA Companion to HeideggerKellogg on Integrated MarketingPhilosophical RomanticismThe Practice Turn in Contemporary TheoryHeidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Vol. 2Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of SolidarityResearchGate Page

It's not hard to find critics of capitalism in the current moment but this has always been true: as long as we have had capitalism we have had critics of capitalism. What are the recurring themes of these critiques and how have they helped to shape the economics profession and capitalism itself?John Cassidy is an author at the New Yorker magazine and also the author of several books. His most recent two are Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI and How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities.Greg and John discuss the multifaceted and varied criticisms of capitalism throughout history. Over the course of the conversation, Greg recounts how John's books have investigated economic crises, the behavioral finance revolution, and the diverse critiques of capitalism from both the left and right. John brings up several examples of historical economic figures, from Adam Smith to Marx, and examines how crises have shaped economic thought and policy. Greg and John also make a point to highlight lesser-known critics and movements, underscoring their unsung importance of economic history.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:When both the left and the right turn against capitalism04:05: In 2016, when Trump was running for the Republican nomination and Bernie Sanders was running for the Democratic nomination, I thought, if you go back into history, it's a long time since we've had sort of major candidates running for office as critics of capitalism from the right and the left. Bernie, of course, has always been a critic of capitalism. He's independent socialist—I'd call him a social democrat, but we can get into what those terms mean if you want. But what's really new was Trump, running from the right with a critique. I mean, people have sort of forgotten now, but when he started out, he was criticizing the banks. He was criticizing big businesses for offshoring. He was running with a critique of capitalism from the right. So that got me thinking about maybe there's a book in how we got here. How can America, sort of world capital of capitalism and always very supportive of the system, come to this state of affairs where the two major candidates are running against it basically?A historical approach to capitalism12:21: Capitalism means anything involving large-scale production on the basis of privately owned assets. Private means of production. And if you adopt that broad definition, then mercantile capitalism, slavery, the plantation economies is a form of capitalism.Why economists often miss the real economy09:51: I realized in sort of maybe the late nineties, early 2000s, that if you want to speak to an economist about what was going on in the economy and what's happening in Washington, there really wasn't much point in calling up Harvard or MIT or Chicago or whatever, because the economics department would say, "Well, we don't really have anybody who covers that. You need to go to the business school, or you need to go to the business economists." So I think maybe there's been a backlash against that since the Great Financial Crisis. I know there's been a lot of efforts inside various universities, especially in Europe, to make the syllabuses more relevant, more sort of real-world based. But I still think at the higher levels of the subject, it's still extremely abstract.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Adam SmithDot-com BubbleGreat RecessionNeoliberalismKeynesian EconomicsMilton FriedmanKarl MarxRosa LuxemburgIndustrial RevolutionCapitalismLudditeWilliam ThompsonRobert OwenThomas CarlyleGlobalizationDependency TheoryAnna WheelerFlora TristanJoan RobinsonRobert SolowPaul SamuelsonJ. C. KumarappaKarl PolanyiGuest Profile:Profile on The New YorkerWikipedia ProfileSocial Profile on XGuest Work:Amazon Author PageCapitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AIHow Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic CalamitiesDot.Con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold

How can lawmakers and public servants design policies which benefit from continuous learning?? How will government offices that learn and adopt agile practices be able to achieve better outcomes for the public?Jennifer Pahlka is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, founder of Code For America, and the founder of the US Digital Services under the Obama administration. She is also the author of Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.Greg and Jennifer discuss why the government struggles with adopting modern digital practices such as agile and waterfall methods. She explains the disconnect between policy-making and implementation, emphasizing the need for a more integrated and feedback-driven approach. They explore other topics such as the over-reliance on contractors, burdensome procurement rules, and the essential role of user research in creating effective digital services. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How feedback loops can make government more agile06:07: Turns out that when you implement this policy in the way that you are telling me, we get a really perverse outcome. If there is no feedback loop to send that information back up to the decision makers, you get a lot of wasted money, you get a lot of perverse outcomes, you get a lot of angry people. But, you know, when the architects can say, or the builders can say, actually no, you can go into a discussion about that, then you have not just an agile development process, but you have a more agile government process.​​The system, not the people, is broken30:37: It is not that public servants are lazy or stupid. It is that the system that they are working in is just ill-fit, it is just ill-suited to the job we need it to do.Why government keeps building concrete boats30:58: So you are referring to the story I have in the book of this guy at the Veterans Administration (VA), which, by the way, has gotten so much better. He is kind of a leader now. But I am questioning him about this project that we are working on at the USDS, sort of what was pro-USDS before. It was one of the first engagements that were sort of testing out the thesis of the USDS. And I kept asking. This guy was a senior leader in technology in the VA. Like, why is it built this way? Why did you make this decision? And over and over, he says, that is not my call. You have to ask the procurement people, or the program people, or the compliance people. He just did not have answers. And I asked him why he was so deferring on all these. And he said, if they ask us to build a concrete boat, we will build a concrete boat. And I said, why? And he said, well, because that way when it does not work, it is not our fault. And that speaks to the incentives. Your incentive is to make sure that when it does not work, it is someone else's fault.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Department of Government EfficiencyCode for AmericaAgile software developmentWaterfall modelYadira SanchezGrace HopperBrooks ActPaperwork Reduction ActOffice of Information and Regulatory AffairsCharles WorthingtonEzra KleinGuest Profile:Niskanen Center ProfileWikipedia ProfileJenniferPahlka.comLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on XSocial Profile on InstagramGuest Work:Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do BetterSubstackMedium

What does it mean to ‘know' something, and what does it mean specifically when stated by a scientist? What is the role of debate in driving scientific progress, and how does progress get built on the bones of science that we later find to be incorrect?James C. Zimring is a professor of pathology and immunology at the School of Medicine at the University of Virginia and also an author. His latest books are What Science Is and How It Really Works and Partial Truths: How Fractions Distort Our Thinking.Greg and James discuss the complex nature of scientific thinking and the philosophical underpinnings of scientific practices. James emphasizes the discrepancies between the idealized version of science and its messy reality. They explore the critical distinction between phenomena and theoretical claims, the social constructs within scientific methodology, and the importance of understanding what it means when scientists claim to 'know' something.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What science is and isn't03:18: My goal here was really to try and provide non-scientists with, as you pointed out, a more realistic assessment of what science is and what it means when a scientist says they know something. Because the hyperbole around scientific claims, although exciting, right, has also destroyed a lot of scientific credibility. The best way to lose credibility is to make a claim that you cannot possibly live up to. And at the same time, science is epistemically distinct. When a scientist says they know something, it means something different than other knowledge claims in other areas of thought. I am not a scientific imperialist. It does not mean something better, but it really means something different. And the failure, I think, to make that distinction is very damaging to how we navigate the world.Science is not about being right14:14: Science is not about being right. Science is about getting closer and closer to rightness. But scientists, we try to kill theories. That is what we do.Science is messy and sloppy1:00:45: Science is messy and sloppy, and this is what it means when a scientist says they know something, and it is very different from when anyone else says they know something. But it is quite different from what, historically, we say it means.Why is common sense thinking toxic to scientific progress?23:48: Common sense thinking is toxic to scientific progress because things that are common sense are often wrong. I mean, they are really helpful if you are wandering around the savanna trying to survive as a nomadic human. But when you are in the laboratory studying science, those things that work so well on the savanna are categorically incorrect. Unlearning millions of years of evolution of cognitive psychology is part of what it is to be a scientist, as you point, learning that we do not observe causality, learning that there are these confounders, learning that common sense things that are obvious may not be, is a large part of the scientific enterprise. And that is where it differs from what you are talking about—normal everyday thinking, especially statistics and other things.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Thomas KuhnRichard FeynmanKarl PopperA. J. AyerWillard Van Orman QuineNational Institutes of HealthBerengar of ToursTransubstantiationCharles Sanders PeirceConfoundingPaul FeyerabendMichel FoucaultPeter MeijerGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the University of Virginia School of MedicineLinkedIn ProfileGuest Work:Amazon Author PageWhat Science Is and How It Really WorksPartial Truths: How Fractions Distort Our ThinkingTransfusion Medicine and HemostasisGoogle Scholar PageResearchGate Page

For much of America's history, the promise of greater economic opportunities in new places was an intrinsic idea to the country's identity. But in recent decades, it's become increasingly difficult to pack up and chase that American dream. Why? Yoni Appelbaum is a deputy executive editor at The Atlantic and the author of the book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity which explores the significant decline in geographic and economic mobility in the United States over the past 50 years.Yoni and Greg analyze the historical context of mobility trends in America, the role of zoning laws, the influence of homeownership policies, and the changes brought about by millions of moves within American society. They also discuss possible reforms and a generational shift towards embracing growth and community development.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How America got stuck in a mobility decline16:00: For almost all of American history, when a place was thriving economically, we threw up new housing to accommodate all the new arrivals who would flock toward that opportunity. And then, 50 years ago, we pretty much made it impossible to do that. And so, as a result, when people are in a place today with declining opportunity, they really are kind of stuck—the places that they could move just can't accommodate them.The hidden costs of not building30:09: If you do not build housing that is affordable, if you do not build new luxury housing that rich people move into, thereby letting the older housing stock become available to people on, on more limited incomes, if you are not building, then you are shutting out those people. And so, it is not just the crisis of homelessness, which is a real crisis, it is also that lack of mobility.Why newcomers make communities thrive06:45: Loneliness is good, aloneness is bad, but loneliness is like hunger. It is a spur to action… [07:09] It is that loneliness of the new arrivals in town that has traditionally spurred people to form social relationships. You are much likelier to join something if you are new in town. And then, there is the other part of it too, which is that a community that is full of new arrivals will have a much more vibrant civic life.Geography as a tool for reinvention08:26: Everything that mattered about you was defined at your birth. You inherited your spot in the social hierarchy, your religion, often your father's occupation, your prospects, your identity — all of that — and largely your geographic location, right? You lived on the land your family had lived on for generations and where you expected your grandkids and your great-grandkids to live. You were defined at birth. What America did by allowing people to choose their own communities, by giving a legal right — and this was a bit of a legal revolution — the chance for people to move where they wanted to, we gave people the chance to decide who they wanted to be through their physical geography, through those serial relocations. Because Americans did not just move once, maybe not 40 times, but by moving repeatedly through their lives, Americans were able to continually reinvent themselves and to fashion their own identities. All of these things became matters of choice.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Opportunity AtlasOkie Jacob RiisGuest Profile:Author Bio at The AtlanticProfessional Profile on XGuest Work:Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

The evolving economic landscape makes institutional reforms in areas like finance, planning, and public infrastructure, a necessity. AI is capable of causing an economic shakeup similar to the transition from horses to steam, with far-reaching ramifications throughout the world's economies.Jonathan Haskel is a professor of economics at Imperial College Business School, in London, and also the author of a few books, including Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy and Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy.Greg and Jonathan discuss how traditional institutions, intellectual frameworks, and measurement disciplines are struggling to adapt to an economy increasingly dominated by intangible assets such as software, data, and branding. Jonathan explains the complexities of valuing and measuring intangibles, the role of venture capital, intellectual property laws, and the impact of AI and general-purpose technologies. The episode also covers the necessity for institutional reforms in areas like finance, planning, and public infrastructure to better support the evolving economic landscape.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The two boosts of productivity31:30: When you have a general-purpose technology, which is also an invention, method of invention, you get two boosts to productivity. The first boost to productivity is in the invention sector itself—what I would call the intangible sector itself, as in the R&D and the software and all that—you get a boost to productivity there. And then the second boost to productivity is when all of those new inventions—now think of steam—start spreading out to the economy as a whole, to be used in the transport sector, in companies, in firms, and all that kind of thing.The intangible things the new economy makes03:23: What does the new economy make? It's people writing software. It's people writing movie scripts. It's people trying to think of new ways to market their product or publicize their brand or rearrange their organization. Those are all very intangible things.What makes the intangible economy unequal?18:39: We first got into this. We were thinking that spillovers would be the predominant economic force, and therefore a more intangible economy would be, in some broad sense, a more equalized economy…[19:04] But that, of course, goes against people's intuition. We think the economy, in some sense, has become more unequal. And we changed our mind during the writing of the book, actually, and ended up thinking that the forces of synergies are a force, of course, for making it more unequal.The human edge in a world of intangibles55:01: Once you start thinking about the task of coordinating the synergies and getting all these people together—guess what—that needs people, people. And scientists might be really good at that, but artists and poets and historians and students of ancient Greek—they might be really good at that as well. So, I am optimistic, actually, that the future could admit people with all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of skills into this new world.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Diane CoyleBaruch Lev BooksIntangible AssetSoftware DevelopmentPaul RomerIntellectual PropertyDataThomas PhilliponDouglass NorthAbundance by Ezra KleinGeneral-purpose technologyEric BrynjolfssonRobert GordonGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Imperial College Business SchoolWikipedia ProfilePrinceton University Press ProfileBank of England ProfileSocial Profile on XGuest Work:Amazon Author PageCapitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible EconomyRestarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible EconomyMeasuring and Accounting for Innovation in the Twenty-First CenturyNBER PageGoogle Scholar Page