326 Zeynep Ton: Figure It Out

06/20/23 • 42 min

1 Listener

Disrupt Yourself Podcast with Whitney Johnson

When sales are down and overhead costs are skyrocketing, what’s the instinct? Cut costs, maybe? Fire some folks? Trim down, get leaner?

Zeynep Ton says that instinct is shortsighted. It’s outdated. More than just old, it’s a deadly cycle, because cutting costs continues to come at the expense of the foundational unit – the employee. Zeynep is a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, and her new book – The Case for Good Jobs – is out next month. By turning almost 40 years of Jack Welch-ian thinking on its head, Zeynep builds the argument that the only way to grow in those crucible moments is to spend more – on the employee.

Shortsightedness will kill us, Zeynep says. Nothing beats a good job.

When sales are down and overhead costs are skyrocketing, what’s the instinct? Cut costs, maybe? Fire some folks? Trim down, get leaner?

Shortsightedness will kill us, Zeynep says. Nothing beats a good job.

Previous Episode

325 HRH Ambassador Reema Bandar: Architects Should Be Forgotten

Representation is the basis of our political system. We can’t get everyone’s vote on every issue – folks are busy, and that would take way too much time. So we pick someone we trust.

Have you ever represented someone else? It's terrifying. You have to make decisions on behalf of all those people, and those decisions could impact their home, their business, their politics, their whole way of life.

But in that way, representation can be one of the highest callings a human can achieve. Our guest today has put the representation of others at the center of her life. Her Royal Highness, Ambassador Reema Bandar is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s representative to the United States. In every conference room and congressional office, she’s speaking for about 38 million people. From a museum curator to a champion of women's rights, the ambassador has learned to center her own voice, and in the process, the voices of millions.

Next Episode

327 Sudha Ranganathan: A True Practitioner

If this show was about medicine, we do a lot of classroom learning. But today we’re going to hear from the equivalent of a front-line Army medic, hitting the ground to get an idea of how all these theories about leadership actually get used.

Sudha Ranganathan is the Director of Product Marketing at LinkedIn. In that role, ecosystems are at the heart of what she does. She creates the conditions that allow these ideas like the s-curve thrive in the ecosystems she builds. From the University of Mumbai, she’s brought her systems-engineer mindset to Singapore, to San Francisco, to companies like Proctor and Gamble and Paypal.