Work and Life with Stew Friedman

Morten Hansen is a management professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a faculty member at Apple University. Professor Hansen holds a PhD from Stanford Business School, where he was a Fulbright scholar. His academic research has won several prestigious awards and (like Stew) he is ranked as one of the world’s most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50. He was also a manager at the Boston Consulting Group, where he advised corporate clients worldwide. His other books are Great by Choice and Collaboration. Stew and Morten discuss his book Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More, which reports results and practical implications for action of a large-scale study. They talk about how time spent on work is not the best indicator of productivity or satisfaction. They explore the importance of being selective and finding creative ways to say “no”; of honing in obsessively to produce excellence in what you do choose to do; and of pursuing not just your passion, but work that has purpose and enables you to contribute value.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey is an alum of the Wharton MBA program, a former student of Stew’s, and Chief Mom and Co-Founder of Zoobean, a service that helps families discover children’s books and apps at home or their local library. Before she decided to make the leap into entrepreneurship, Jordan led teams at Google that focused on education and childhood development. As a speaker, educator, and mom, she is passionate about innovations in education, technology, and startups. She was featured on ABC’s Shark Tank and won $250,000 from Mark Cuban, and she was named one of Wharton’s 40 Under 40. Stew and Jordan talk about the challenges and insights she gleaned from starting a social enterprise with her husband, Felix Lloyd. Jordan describes how partners who work together must carve out special time to focus on themselves and their individual needs. Working with one’s wife, husband, or partner can be especially difficult because you share every aspect of life; family, work, and community. There are many ways to integrate this special combination of work and life by setting aside time for date nights, spending time with friends, and prioritizing your own health and wellness by means of exercise and self-care. Bonus for this episode: Read the transcript here.

Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University where he has taught since 1979. He is the author or co-author of 15 books, including Leadership B.S, which he talked about on this program. He serves on the board of directors of Berlin Packaging, on the advisory board for Collective Health, and on the board of the nonprofit Quantum Leap Healthcare. Jeff has won the Richard D. Irwin Award from the Academy of Management for scholarly contributions to management, and numerous awards for his articles and books. Stew and Jeff talk about his bold and critically important 2018 book, Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance -- And What We Can Do About It. They discuss the stress and strain experienced by employees and their families as a result of overwork and other sources of toxicity in today’s workplaces, and their effects: weight gain, alcohol and drug abuse, excessive smoking, cardiovascular disease, anxiety, depression, and death. They explore how to make today’s workplace environments more sustainable, providing examples of humane organizations, descriptions of needed social policy changes, and calls to action to which any one of us can respond.

Jessica Bennett is gender editor at The New York Times, where she works to expand global coverage of women and gender across platforms. She is author of Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace. The book was inspired by sexism she experienced as a junior writer early in her career. She had to learn how to work with men who were often given an unfair advantage, like getting credit for her ideas. Stew and Jessica discuss how Jessica formed the original feminist fight club, which was kept a secret at the start. The support and strength she found in this group led her to write her engaging and very practical book. Jessica uses humor, especially word play, to indicate to men when they have acted inappropriately. For example, “manteruption” occurs when a man speaks over a woman and “bropropriated” is when a man takes credit for a woman’s idea. The intent is to create real conversation infused with humanity about the many subtle, sexist actions that impede social progress toward an egalitarian world.

Ellen Galinsky is the Chief Science Officer at the Bezos Family Foundation where she also serves as executive director of a program called Mind in the Making. In addition, she’s Senior Research Advisor for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). Ellen has decades of experience identifying important societal questions as they emerge, conducting research to seek answers, and turning the findings into action. For example, in Six Stages of Parenthood she chronicled her study of how parents grow and change as adults. She helped to establish the field of work-life in the 1980s and co-founded Families and Work Institute (FWI) in 1989, and has been its President since 1996. She wrote the best-selling book, Mind in the Making; her research on young people dropping out of the learning process. Mind in the Making is a national initiative to share research on the development of young children. Stew and Ellen talk about the current state of working families in America, childcare, parental leave, and what children and parents need from employers and society. Ellen offers tips for how to help children, which can be found at VROOM, an app that has activities to do with kids during bedtime, bath time, and other times. She also describes the tools and research available at WhenWorkWorks, a greater resource for working parents.

Jenna Fisher is Global Corporate Officers Sector Leader for the executive search firm Russell Reynolds Associates and she was a student in Stew’s Total Leadership class at Wharton about 15 years ago. Jenna specializes in leading senior financial officer assignments, serving clients across various sectors, including the technology, consumer, healthcare and retail industries. Her clients include Fortune 1000 corporations, middle-market private equity portfolio companies, as well as highly visible, pre-public venture capital-backed enterprises. The majority of her work over the past ten years has been recruiting CFOs, although she has conducted numerous assignments for treasurers, controllers, internal audit executives and division chief financial officers. Jenna is also involved at the board level, recruiting financial experts to serve on Audit Committees. She is based in San Francisco. Stew and Jenna talk about what an executive search consultant does and about how to conduct a successful job search by leveraging your network, knowing what you are truly looking for in your career, finding your distinctive gift and being excellent at it, and bringing your family into your career decision-making.

Christine Porath is an Associate Professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University and author of Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace. Christine also consults with organizations to help them create a thriving workplace. She is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today, and has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Her research has appeared in many journals and books. She is co-author of another book, The Cost of Bad Behavior, and a former two-sport Division I athlete. Christine and Stew talk about the rise in incivility at work and in our society -- a serious problem, about which we can all do something. They enumerate the emotional and financial costs of rude behavior at work and how it spills over into other parts of our lives. They explore practical, evidence-based strategies you can use for dealing with slights, discourteousness, and worse at work, whether you are boss or subordinate.

Barry Schwartz, the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action (Emeritus), has been at Swarthmore College since receiving his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. He’s author of 10 books and 100s of articles and is well known for both his scholarship and his ability to bring complex sociological and psychological research to bear on the practical matters we all face in our daily lives at work and at home. Schwartz has written The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, named one of the top business books of the year by both Business Week and Forbes, and, with Ken Sharpe, Practical Wisdom, about which he gave a TED talk viewed by more than 2MM people. In this episode, Stew and Barry discuss Barry’s most recent book, Why We Work, including a brief review of the history of work. Many companies adhere to the ideology that employees only care about compensation and so that is all that matters; in this view, quality and meaningfulness of work are irrelevant. Barry’s optimism about this changing springs from his observations of the Millennials and women who are convincing companies that factors like social interactions and variety of work are just as important as compensation. Listen and learn from one of the world’s leading experts about how more enlightened philosophies of work are emerging and what this means for our future. Click here for the transcript.

Lisa Buckingham is Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Lincoln Financial Group with more than 30 years of experience in all aspects of human resources management. In addition to all HR practices and policies for Lincoln Financial Group Lisa is also responsible for overseeing the corporation’s brand and enterprise communications, consumer insights and corporate social responsibility activities. In October 2017, she was named HR Executive of the Year by HR Executive Magazine. She serves on a number of boards including the Eagles Charitable Foundation and she Chairs the Lincoln Foundation. Stew and Lisa talk about the changes and challenges facing today’s Human Resources leaders, the importance of active listening, counseling people out of the wrong job, and taking responsibility for your career and ensuring it fits with the rest of your life. They discuss real life examples. Find out more about innovations in HR and Lincoln Financial at www.lfg.com.

Kim Malone Scott is author of Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss without Losing Your Humanity. It’s a great book about how to both care for and challenge the people around you. She has held a diverse range of leadership positions that have informed her theories on what makes a kickass boss! She led AdSense, YouTube, and Doubleclick Online Sales and Operations at Google and then joined Apple to develop and teach a leadership seminar. Kim has been a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and several other tech companies. Previously, Kim was the co-founder and CEO of Juice Software, a collaboration start-up, and led business development at Delta Three and Capital Thinking. Earlier in her career, she worked as a senior policy advisor at the FCC, managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo, started a diamond cutting factory in Moscow, and was an analyst on the Soviet Companies Fund. She received her MBA from Harvard Business School and her BA from Princeton University. She is the author of three novels; she and her husband Andy Scott are parents of twins and live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Stew and Kim discuss how to give constructive feedback and avoid manipulative insincerity, ruinous empathy, and obnoxious aggression. They explain how to practice and its importance as well as the dangers of feedback debt. For more check out RadicalCandor.com.

Joanna Barsh is a director emerita at McKinsey & Company and President of the Centered Leadership Project. She has deep experience leading growth strategy, performance improvement, organization effectiveness, and leadership development projects. An in-demand speaker, she has given keynotes and workshops in over 100 companies and organizations. Joanna has also worked closely with Lean In, the International Council on Women’s Business Leadership, and other groups as an advocate for women’s advancement. She is the bestselling author of How Remarkable Women Lead and Centered Leadership. And her latest book is Grow Wherever You Work: Straight Talk to Help with Your Toughest Challenges. Stew and Joanna talk about how you actually do this. They discuss what happens if things don’t go the way you want them to, in spite of all that positive thinking and networking you’ve been doing. How do you bounce back from poor performance reviews or recover from a big mistake? And how do you answer the question posed by The Clash, not that long ago: Should I stay or should I go?

Brett Hurt graduated from the Wharton School in 1999 with an MBA in High-Tech Entrepreneurship. He is CEO and co-founder of data.world, his sixth startup, a Public Benefit Corporation and Certified B Corporation® focused on building the most meaningful, abundant, and collaborative data resource in the world. In 2017, data.world was honored on the “Best for the World” list by B Lab. Brett also founded and led Bazaarvoice and Coremetrics, which was acquired by IBM in 2010. He is also on the Board of Conscious Capitalism and in 2017 was given the Best CEO Legacy Award by the Austin Business Journal. Stew and Brett talk about conscious capitalism, how to stay true to your values, and what it takes to build a humane, compassionate workplace. Brett also discusses one of his “four-way-wins” -- helping his 13-year-old daughter promote her first book, Guardians of the Forest, proceeds from which support the Andy Roddick Foundation. For great information about and practical wisdom Brett, check out his blog at lucky7.io. And, from the vault, here is the transcript of the conversation Stew had with Brett when he was the first guest on Work and Life.

David Thomas was recently named as the new president of Morehouse College, a traditionally African American, all-male college in Atlanta. He was previously the H. Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Professor of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, where he served as dean from 2011 to 2016. His research addresses issues related to executive development, cultural diversity in organizations, leadership, and organizational change. In recognition of his arrival at Morehouse, we’re publishing this conversation from our archives, done while David was Georgetown’s Dean. Stew and David talk about the impact of his early childhood, including his first experience with race consciousness as a five-year old. David believes there is still a problem with diversity and inclusion in corporate America, specifically in leadership roles. For instance; there are less than 10 CEOs in the Fortune 250 who are African American. Unconscious bias is a likely reason for the continuing lack of diversity in American business life, and how to address it is big part of David’s lifelong professional aspiration. Stew and David talk about his powerful, award-winning book, Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America, which has had a major impact on tackling this issue, one of the most crucial in our society today.

Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he has taught since 1979. He is the author or co-author of 14 books on topics including power in organizations, managing people, evidence-based management and author of more than 150 articles and book chapters. Professor Pfeffer has won numerous awards for his scholarly research. He spoke with Stew about his latest book, Leadership B.S.: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time, and what changes are needed in the “leadership industry.” In this episode, Stew and Jeff discuss the failures of modern leaders. Instead of showing virtues like honesty, authenticity, and modesty, many leaders show only narcissism and greed. These leaders are not promoting the greater good of their organizations, let alone our society. One of the great scholars of organizations, Jeff asks challenge questions, like why are executives held accountable for their environmental impact but not for their impact on employee well-being? One relevant example discussed here is Amazon’s company culture under CEO Jeff Bezos. Click here for the transcript.

Amy Wryzesniewski is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management. Her research on how people make meaning of their work has been published in a wide range of top academic journals and highlighted in several best-selling books and popular press outlets, including Forbes, Time, BusinessWeek, Harvard Business Review, U.S. News and World Report, and The Economist, as well as best-selling books such as Drive by Daniel Pink, The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor, Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman, and The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler. Amy earned her BA from the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated magna cum laude with an honors degree in psychology. She received her PhD in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan. Stew and Amy talk about the different ways people construe their work -- either as a job, a career, or a calling -- and why the latter is most beneficial. They discuss Amy’s fascinating research on how people in almost any work role are motivated to create meaning in their work by crafting it, transforming it, into a calling, in which there is at least some element of service to others. Amy describes some ideas for how anyone can do this and thereby enrich not only their work but other parts of their lives, too.