One of the questions we always ask our guests on the podcast involves how they turn a group of individuals into a high-performing team whose members share more than a business card with the same logo. We asked Infosys Consulting CEO Andrew Duncan the question and his answer was game-changing, a lesson any leader would do well to remember. “When…
Andrea Fairchild remembers the moment in Brazil as though it was yesterday. “It was early in my career and I was traveling with Nike as the company was preparing for the World Cup,” she recalled. “It was scary and daunting — the kind of situation I’d never been in. I’ll never forget stepping into a room with very senior marketers…
Leave it to a former college football player to feel better after he’s gotten a win under his belt – even if it means getting up at the crack of dawn to log some road work before heading off to serve as the leader of 20,000 staff members at P.F. Chang’s. But that’s how Damola Adamolekun likes to begin his…
If you had a hunch that the world of commercial cruises was hyper-competitive, you’d find confirmation from industry veteran Tom McAlpin. The former executive of Disney Cruise Lines, which he helped launch, and now the CEO of Virgin Voyages, McAlpin used the same playbook to help design two iconic brand spaces despite the fact they serve two very different customer…
Many of Jesse Cole’s warmest memories include two things: his father who raised him after his parents divorced, and baseball, which the two of them played in the backyard and Jesse played competitively through college. When he got the chance, the son bought a baseball team of his own in Savannah, Georgia. The Savannah Bananas have sold out every game…
A lot of businesses bill themselves as “customer-focused” or “customer-centric,” while other companies emphasize their “team-first” approach to leadership. Jim Buie, the president and CEO of Involta, an IT service and consulting firm, thinks an effective leader should be able to compartmentalize the two key stakeholders in any company and serve both. How? By asking both groups lots of questions–and…
