Stanford Entrepreneurship Videos

Before Shirzad Chamine found his calling as a coach to today’s top CEOs and executive teams, he was a charismatic entrepreneur who turned into a hyper-critical tyrant without even knowing it. That dark chapter ignited his journey to understand how to conquer our self-sabotaging sides and live in the light of “Positive Intelligence” — the approach Chamine developed for mastering the mind and finding true happiness and success.

Di-Ann Eisnor, director of growth for Waze, explains how the term “authenticity” can be code for “outsider” in homogenous industries like tech. She talks about harnessing uniqueness and turning it into a strength, as well as going beyond respect for diversity and actually relishing different perspectives. Rallying the team behind a common mission and quashing territorial behavior are also key, Eisnor notes.

Shirzad Chamine, founder and CEO of executive-coaching program Positive Intelligence, shares the lowest point in his professional life and how it became the pivotal moment that propelled him to learn why people become so self-destructive and what strategies we can adopt to think and behave more positively. He describes how founders often end up standing in the way of their own success in the tech-startup world.

Waze’s Di-Ann Eisnor discusses the humble and “imperfect” beginning of the real-time navigation app and how minor flaws that still remain, like typos, reflect the direct and genuine input of users. She discusses the duty to reciprocate the fierce loyalty felt by Waze’s community of users by being available for them when problems arise, as the app’s success ultimately rides on crowdsourcing.

Leadership coach Shirzad Chamine, author of the bestselling book “Positive Intelligence,” compares the two opposing sides of the brain: the left, where negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, shame, guilt and regret originate; and the right, which is responsible for positive feelings like curiosity, empathy, joy, resolve and gratitude. “Your highest performance is going to be through the path of positive emotions,” Chamine explains.

Di-Ann Eisnor, director of growth at Waze, describes how the origin of the real-time navigation app is one of prototyping and its evolution a story of iteration. She explains how the company, now owned by Google, would release different features and look for frequent engagement among subsets of users, dropping more frivolous aspects like the cupcakes and candy that made Waze seem like a video game.

Positive Intelligence Founder and CEO Shirzad Chamine shares a simple exercise that can be done anywhere to get the mind into a meditative state, which his research has shown to increase a person’s “positive intelligence quotient.” Called “PQ” for short, this quotient is a score developed by Chamine that indicates the percentage of time that your mind is serving you as opposed to sabotaging you.

Waze’s Di-Ann Eisnor addresses the topic of identifying high-crime locations to users of the real-time navigation app. It must still serve people who live in those areas and avoid scaring away potential customers from local businesses, according to Eisnor. She says Waze gets crime data from trusted organizations and notifies users within the app when they approach a dangerous neighborhood.

Executive coach Shirzad Chamine discusses what he calls “Saboteurs,” the negative inner voices in our heads that helped with our physical and emotional survival as children — but that hold us back as adults. One Saboteur in particular, the Judge, is the one that torments you about your flaws, finds fault in others and causes stress and unhappiness. Negative emotions and reactions are natural, but should be seen as harmful and quickly dismissed, Chamine says.

To illustrate the point that no amount of success can satisfy someone as long as the inner judge rules the mind, Positive Intelligence’s Shirzad Chamine reads the anonymous confessions of CEOs and others who he has trained. One admitted, “My air of confidence is false. I have no plan in life.”

Returning to the low point in his career described at the start of his talk, Shirzad Chamine explains how high performers find the opportunity in every crisis, and how those moments confront people with the important choice of moving forward in fear and frustration, or with courage and curiosity. The choice you make infects the rest of your team and sets in motion a self-fulfilling prophesy, Chamine says.

Dave Evans, co-founder of the popular Life Design Lab at Stanford University, discusses the key concepts and exercises that guide students in their quest to figure out what they want to do in life. He underscores the importance of accepting who you are and connecting that to what you believe and do, while attacking dysfunctional notions like the one that dares you to be the “best version of yourself.” Can’t we have more than one?

Dave Evans, co-founder and lecturer at the Stanford Life Design Lab, points out some popular misconceptions that can be counterproductive when figuring out one’s career. He explains how your major in college doesn’t necessarily indicate what you’ll do after graduating, how your passion isn’t immediately evident, and how unrealistic the notion is that people should know their true calling by the time they’re adults.

Dave Evans, co-founder of the Life Design Lab at the Stanford d.school, summarizes how the steps of the design-thinking process can be applied to the unique and messy problems in life, starting with “step zero,” which is accepting the problem exists. Evans co-authored the 2016 bestseller “Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life” with Bill Burnett, also co-founder of the Stanford Life Design Lab.

Dave Evans of the Life Design Lab at Stanford talks about how to prototype an idea for trying something new in work or life, and how the exercise should be fast, cheap and, most of all, a learning process. He explains that this type of prototyping takes two forms — talking to other people and trying things out — and likens the concept of “networking” to the innocuous task of asking someone for directions.