Disrupt Yourself Podcast with Whitney Johnson

Do you know that feeling when you’re cooking, and you’ve got all your ingredients chopped and ready to go, spices measured, oven pre-heated? All that’s left is for you to spin your magic as a cook. In the kitchen, the French call it mise en place, everything in its place.

In that same vein, to disrupt yourself, your strategy and support need to be in place. You need to give yourself the room to roam, so to speak, to realize your full potential.

Our guest today is all about creating spaces that let you realize that potential. Chip Conley is the former founder of Joie De Vivre, a boutique hotel chain. He’s worked with AirBnB as a quote unquote modern elder, and now Chip’s turning his attention to the potential of midlife – a word so laden with stigma, he’s building regenerative horse ranches to change that.

His new book, "Learning To Love Midlife", is out January 16th.

Today, we’ve got a special episode, one of my personal heroes––Alan Mulally.

You’ve probably sat in a Boeing 777 before. He was the chief engineer on that plane. You might have a Ford sitting out in your driveway. He’s the reason Ford was the only major American car company that didn’t take a bailout in 2008.

Alan Mulally has sat in many seats — President and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, President and CEO of Ford — but you have to hear it from him personally, how you put together four million plane parts, hundreds of thousands of employees and even more shareholders, to create an airplane that can deliver people point-to-point, non-stop, halfway around the world. Funnily enough, it all comes down to love.

Link to Alan's Working Together Principles

P.S. We just heard from John Coe, one of our listeners who said, "Your conversation with Alan gave me GOOSEBUMPS. Whoa! He has a greater understanding of human dynamics than just anybody alive today...Perhaps your all time best."

Growing your people to grow your organization – it makes sense, right? But what about approaching the problem from the other direction – growing your organization, to grow your people?

When’s the last time you looked at the state of your org chart? And how willing are you to experiment with it?

Today, I want to bring back an old episode. In 2020, we spoke with Alex Osterwalder about his idea of an invincible company – one that is constantly reinventing itself to stay on the bleeding edge of disruption.

Alex, along with his mentor Yves Pigneur, is one of the top-ranked management thinkers in the world – as of Thinkers50 2023, which just wrapped up, the duo is number 8 on that list.

I hope you enjoy.

Today our guest is Stew Friedman, an organizational psychologist at Wharton. He's one of the most influential management thinkers in the world, as named by Thinkers 50, one of HR Magazine’s most influential thought leaders, and one of America's most influential men who have made life better for working parents according to Working Mother Magazine.

And this is the subject of his latest book, Parents Who Lead, which he co-authored with Alyssa Westring, a management professor at DePaul University. Because for anyone who has become a parent, you will know that parenting is a very big disruption, but if you will let it, it will help you slingshot into who you want to, and can be.

We form teams every day. Boarding a plane, figuring out the best place for overhead bags. On the highway, we form impromptu caravans to squeeze through traffic. There are the more formal teams, too, the ones we occupy at work or at home.

We’re all teammates. So how can we be better?

David Burkus has the answer. The best-selling author of Leading From Anywhere and Friend of a Friend is out with a new book – Best Team Ever, The Surprising Science of High-Performing Teams. NASA, Adobe, everyone wants to know what David knows about good teams.