Raj Sisodia has spent his life asking one question: Can business make people's lives better instead of draining them?

He holds a PhD in Marketing and Business Policy from Columbia University, co-founded Conscious Capitalism with John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods Market, and has advised global companies from Tata Group to AT&T. But his path started in a factory in Bombay, earning a hundred dollars a month, before he built one of the most influential ideas in modern business thinking.

"I didn't like biology, so I became an engineer. I didn't like finance, so I became a marketing professor. But business turned out to be about head and wallet — nothing about heart or spirit."

That realization led him to study companies that people love working for and trust buying from. The result became Conscious Capitalism — a way of running a business that joins purpose, profit, and care.

"Profit is the oxygen that keeps you alive. But no human lives just to make red blood cells. In the same way, no company should live just to make profit."

Raj's research showed that companies built on four simple pillars — Purpose, Stakeholders, Conscious Leadership, and Caring Culture — outperformed the S&P 500 by nine to one over a decade. They made more money precisely because they cared more.

When he met Bob Chapman, a manufacturing CEO from Missouri, Raj saw these ideas come alive. Chapman bought a failing plant, promised no layoffs, and told workers they would figure it out together. Men who had once been laid off without warning wept as they told Raj their lives had changed.

"I had sixty dollars in the bank and a new baby. That job saved my family."

From that came the book Everybody Matters. Chapman told him, "Leadership is the stewardship of the lives entrusted to us." Raj calls such companies healing organizations — places that reduce suffering and bring more joy into the world.

Now, with artificial intelligence reshaping work, Raj argues that AI will amplify our intentions:

"A knife in a surgeon's hand saves lives. The same knife in another hand can end one. AI is the same — it depends on who we are when we use it."

He believes the leaders who thrive will be those who bring consciousness to technology, not fear.

1. Define a higher purpose. Ask, "Why do we exist beyond making money?"

2. Make everyone win. Measure success by how you touch the lives of people.

3. Use AI with awareness. Let it amplify compassion, not just efficiency.

4. Lead with care. "Leadership is stewardship of lives."

5. Grow to serve, not to consume. "When business heals, people and profits both rise."

"You cannot have a healing organization without a leader who heals themselves first."

When capitalism grows a conscience, it outperforms the old model and gives people back their dignity at work.

Get Raj's book, Conscious Capitalism, here: https://tinyurl.com/yp2r8a2r

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Byron Loflin, Global Head of Board Advisory at Nasdaq and co-author of CEO Ready, explained on the Strategy Skills Podcast why many talented executives never make it to the top.

" Because you perform well isn't going to automatically get you the job."

Boards are looking for more than results. They look for humility, curiosity, and authentic relationships across stakeholders. Byron shared a personal lesson from riding with Ronald Reagan before he was president:

"He was genuinely interested in others. And that surprised me. I didn't get the sense that he was a pompous or aristocratic kind of person. He was genuinely interested in identifying what are you interested in? What makes you tick?"

He also warned that unchecked ego is one of the biggest risks to leadership:

"Ego is a powerful motivator when it's focused properly. But when it becomes dominant in one's personality and drives inappropriate types of responses to the needs of others… Ego can become a significant problem."

To counter ego, he recommended building close, truth-telling relationships. This is what Byron said about conversations with his children:

"I listen to them very closely when they speak to me and I invite them to speak truth into my life."

And he reminded us that succession is political:

"Surprise is the enemy. Structure is your friend."

Finally, boards now expect leaders to be fluent in technology and disruption:

"The expectation of management delivering understanding on the relevancy of AI to your organization with the emphasis on relevancy."

Actions you can take now

1. Seek feedback aggressively. Create a circle of truth-tellers: colleagues, mentors, even family, who will tell you the truth.

2. Check your ego daily. Build humility into routines by asking: "Am I genuinely interested in others, or focused only on myself?"

3. Engage all seven stakeholders. Byron identified investors, employees, vendors, customers, communities, regulators, and the environment as decisive. Map your relationships and strengthen the weakest link.

4. Signal reliability to boards. Remove surprises. Show discipline in how you work and how you communicate.

Become AI-fluent. Don't chase every trend. Focus on the relevancy of AI and digital disruption to your business and be prepared to explain it clearly.

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John Campbell, Professor of Economics at Harvard University and co-author of Fixed, joined the Strategy Skills Podcast to explain why the financial system often works against ordinary investors and how to make better personal-finance decisions.

After decades studying markets and investor behavior, Campbell saw a pattern: even educated, high-income earners routinely make avoidable mistakes in housing, saving, and investing.

"Once I started looking at how people actually behave, I became more and more aware of how pervasive mistakes are, people are just leaving money on the table."

Those mistakes compound over time, widening inequality.

"It's what economists call a cross-subsidy, from the poor to the rich. My co-author Tarun and I feel that this is really outrageous and we should be concerned about it."

Five Key Insights

1. Financial Mistakes Compound Inequality Campbell's research shows that even when borrowers start on equal terms, inaction and misunderstanding drive divergence.

"Black borrowers are paying maybe as much as half a percentage point more on average than white borrowers… and that's just because they haven't refinanced."

Behavioral gaps like failing to refinance when rates fall transfer wealth upward.

2. Housing Choices Are Often Poorly Understood Many treat property as guaranteed wealth rather than a productive asset.

"It's a huge mistake to buy a bigger house than you need, or even more so to buy a place and then let it sit empty… you're effectively buying an asset and then throwing away the dividend on that asset."

Unused or oversized housing drains capital that could compound elsewhere.

3. Early-Career Risk-Taking Is Underrated

"Most people, when they're young, have a very large hidden asset, their earning power. For most people, that earning power is far safer than the stock market."

Because human capital is relatively stable, young investors can afford higher equity exposure and should taper risk only as retirement approaches.

4. Target-Date Funds Don't Go Far Enough

"Most target date funds are not aggressive enough early in life, and they taper down the risk taking too gradually."

Campbell argues these default products should adjust risk more sharply and reflect each investor's actual wealth trajectory.

5. Complexity Creates Confusion and Inequality

"This profusion of accounts leads to confusion. People throw up their hands. And the access to these accounts is unequal."

The U.S. system's overlapping account types favor large employers and the financially literate, leaving others behind.

Actions You Can Take Now

1. Maximize any employer match immediately.

"Certainly any kind of employer match, you want to maximize that right away."

2. Save aggressively through tax-favored accounts.

"You should be saving aggressively and you should be maximizing your use of tax-favored accounts."

3. Manage your mortgage strategically.

"Managing your mortgage is also a very important thing for people in the middle class and upper middle class."

4. Consider adjustable-rate mortgages as efficient leverage if you can manage the risk.

"The cheapest way to lever that portfolio and be involved in risky markets actually in many cases is to use an adjustable-rate mortgage… a cheap way to take leverage."

5. Use home equity as flexible credit.

"Home equity is a valuable source of credit."

6. In retirement, spend your assets, don't hoard them.

"Many people hang on to their financial assets too long and are too reluctant to tap home equity. The right way to manage retirement is a mix of annuities and reverse-mortgage borrowing… so that you can enjoy it."

7. Avoid oversized or idle property.

"If you buy an asset and then throw away the dividend, you should not expect it to deliver a high return."

8. Take more financial risk when young; scale back later. Treat your earning power as your built-in "safe asset."

9. Build an emergency fund before investing.

"It should be a priority to have an emergency fund in a safe and liquid form so that you stay out of high-cost debt."

10. Support simpler, fairer financial design.

"We think the financial system is very important for the market economy and the unpopularity of finance is really bad. We're trying to save the financial industry for itself."

Get John's book, Fixed, here: https://tinyurl.com/bdhj5zvd

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Phil Gilbert led one of the most significant cultural transformations in corporate history, as IBM's General Manager of Design, he helped the 400,000-person company reinvent how it thinks, listens, and builds products.

In this in-depth interview, Phil shares the playbook behind "Irresistible Change", his approach to scaling design thinking, transforming culture, and helping teams adopt new ways of working that actually work.

If you've ever wondered how to lead large-scale transformation that doesn't collapse under politics or mandates, this conversation will show you the operating system behind lasting change.

About Phil Gilbert Phil is the author of Irresistible Change and is best known for leading IBM's twenty-first-century transformation as its General Manager of Design. His work has been profiled in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and numerous case studies on corporate reinvention.

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Bob Chapman, CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, explains how he built a $3.6 billion company by placing human dignity at the center of leadership. He describes the moment he recognized that "our history does not give us the future that we deserve," and how this led to a disciplined focus on balance, diversifying customers, industries, and technologies to create a stable enterprise.

Bob recounts the insight that reshaped his philosophy: every team member is "somebody's precious child," and leadership is stewardship, not control. Caring, in his view, is an economic principle: "The greatest act of charity is how you treat the people you have the privilege of leading."

Key insights include:

• The role of business-model design in protecting people,
• Why pricing should reflect market value rather than internal cost,
• How trust and relationships outperform transactional approaches, and
• Why growth often emerges from navigating adversity

Chapman argues that today's crisis is not financial but a "poverty of dignity," and calls for leaders to build organizations where people know they matter.

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Scott Levy spent two decades as an investment banker at firms like J.P. Morgan, advising corporate boards and senior executives on risk, growth, and capital decisions. Then he pivoted, serving on a public school board, teaching at Harvard, and writing Why School Boards Matter.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How Levy broke into investment banking and the lessons that carried him through twenty years on Wall Street

• What he learned about resilience, risk-taking, and long-term thinking at the highest levels of finance

• Why he left a successful career to focus on public education and democracy

• How business principles can, and cannot, be applied productively to education

• What executives misunderstand about AI, and the questions they should be asking

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Lynn Smith, former national news anchor for NBC News, MSNBC, and CNN Headline New, and now executive communication coach, reframes public speaking as an internal leadership skill, not a performance. She identifies the recurring obstacle as the "brain bully", the inner critic that turns preparation into paralysis, and shows leaders how to retrain it so that clarity, calm, and connection become repeatable outcomes.

This episode translates decades of live television experience into actionable communication tools for high-stakes settings—from boardrooms to keynotes to broadcast media.

Key takeaways:

• Name and neutralize the "brain bully." "It's that inner saboteur saying, 'You're not good enough' or 'What if you say the wrong thing?'" Smith explains. She traces these patterns back to early experiences and teaches clients to "control–alt–delete our prehistoric code" so fear no longer drives performance.

• People don't want perfection, they want resiliency. Recalling a keynote where she froze on stage, Smith says, "I had to stop and tell the audience, 'I'm so sorry, I'm failing at this.'" That failure became the basis for her coaching framework. "People don't want perfection, they want resiliency. They want to see people overcome."

• Replace over-scripting with intentional structure. "Executives spend hours memorizing, but the result is robotic. The big revelation is… it has nothing to do with your prep; it has everything to do with your mental game." Instead, she recommends bullet-pointing key ideas for authenticity and flow.

• Drill down, don't dumb down. Smith's "Goldilocks effect" balances preparation, "not too much, not too little", so communication stays sharp and digestible: "If you communicate everything, you communicate nothing."

• Make voice and presence technical. Drawing from broadcast training, Smith advises projecting "from your diaphragm, not your chest," and using "the power of enunciation" and pauses to improve recall and connection.

• Manage energy deliberately. "Everything is energy," she notes. High-frequency energy, calm, clear, positive, creates magnetism. "When you're vibrating at the level you want others to meet you at, people lean in."

• Model resilience for the next generation. Her children's book Just Keep Going distills the same mindset for young readers: that fear and failure are not endpoints, but steps toward growth.

For executives preparing keynotes, investor meetings, or media appearances, this conversation provides a research-informed playbook to quiet the inner critic, align mindset and message, and lead with authentic, repeatable presence.

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Is capitalism still working, or is it due for an upgrade?

In this must-watch episode, authors Seth Levine and Elizabeth McBride discuss insights from their book Capital Evolution, sharing what they learned from interviewing top CEOs, including Jamie Dimon, Dan Schulman (PayPal), Peter Stavros (KKR), and others who are helping to reshape the social contract of business.

They explore:

• Why Jamie Dimon led 200 top CEOs to declare that companies should serve more than just shareholders.

"If you ask Jamie Dimon, are you a capitalist? Because we asked him that, he said, I'm a rapacious capitalist." – Seth Levine

• Why the old model of shareholder primacy is failing

• How economic mobility has collapsed:

"50 years ago, if you were born in the bottom 25th percentile of wealth, you had about a 25% chance of dying in the top 25th... Today, it's about 5%."

• Why ownership, not just wages, is key to the next phase of capitalism:

"Ownership is a key to this new future that we see."

• How businesses, not just governments, must now lead on economic reform:

"We believe in this current environment that businesses have the largest power and some responsibility to reshape the norms."

🎙️ Featuring stories from PayPal, KKR, Apollo, and others, this conversation is packed with ideas for business leaders, investors, and citizens alike.

📘 Pre-order the book: https://thecapitalevolution.com

🎥 Hosted by Kris Safarova at StrategyTraining.com

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"Most people can't remember the last time they went to bed and thought: today was fun."

In this conversation with Bree Groff, author of Today Was Fun, we recenter the conversation on joy, pleasure, and meaning at work. Bree shares why her mom always said, "I have the best days," what it taught her about how we spend our lives, and why fun is not frivolous, it's the driver of creativity, performance, and belonging.

We also dive into the future of work and AI:

• "If the AI is a train speeding up behind you, don't try to outrun it. Step off the tracks. Be the most human version of yourself."

• Why we should measure success not only in revenue and customers, but in whether our companies create good days.

• Why Mondays are not a renewable resource and how leaders can treat each day as a responsibility.

As Bree says: "The pain is optional, and the fun is free."

📘 Bree's book: Today Was Fun

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What does it really take to go from working as a gas station cashier to leading a billion-dollar company?

In this Strategy Skills Podcast episode, host Kris Safarova speaks with Shirin Behzadi, author of The Unexpected CEO and former CEO of Home Franchise Concepts, where she scaled the business to nearly $1B in sales across 12,000 cities.

This is a remarkable entrepreneurship journey and CEO story filled with powerful leadership lessons, proof that resilience in leadership is a superpower, and insights into how to do well despite adversity.

You'll learn:

• How to define a vision and reverse-engineer your career growth

• Why asking for opportunities (even when it feels risky) can change your life

• The "secret sauce" of scaling a company to nearly $1B

• How to build personal growth through adversity

• What the future of leadership looks like with AI in business

📖 Get Shirin's book: The Unexpected CEO

🌐 Connect with Shirin: shirinbehzadi.com | LinkedIn | Instagram

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Vik Malhotra, McKinsey senior partner and coauthor of CEO Excellence and A CEO for All Seasons, examines the strategic pressures that now define the CEO role: a "30- to 40-year tech revolution," intensifying geopolitics, shifting consumer behavior, and demographic change. As he notes, "every business at some level is a tech business," and this multipolar, fast-changing environment places a premium on leaders who can "thread the needle" between paradoxes, short-term delivery versus long-term reinvention, legacy versus disruption, and analysis versus decisiveness.

The conversation connects these macrotrends to practical leadership mechanics, how to set direction, allocate scarce resources, and design institutions that can learn, adapt, and scale without losing their core.

Key strategic insights and takeaways

Set an audacious, persistent north star. "The very best leaders set bold, some might say audacious, aspirations early in their tenure," Malhotra explains. Through downturns and market noise, they "persevere" and repeat a few priorities "until the organization internalizes them." Consistency, not novelty, creates credibility and followership.

Treat resource allocation as a hard choice. "Capital, expense, and talent, it's a zero-sum game," he recalls from his interview with Jamie Dimon. Great CEOs "starve something" to fund their boldest bets and resist spreading resources "like peanut butter."

Make culture operational and selective. Effective leaders focus on one or two levers that reinforce strategy, Satya Nadella's emphasis on a growth mindset at Microsoft being a prime example. They design rituals, incentives, and role modeling that embed new behavior.

Build a star team, not a team of stars. As one CEO told Malhotra, "This is not about a team of stars, it's about a star team." Complementary strengths, mutual accountability, and candor matter more than individual brilliance.

Institutionalize continuous learning and reinvention. Exceptional leaders avoid the "sophomore slump." They systematize learning—internally by seeking dissent and externally by "looking around corners." "You can never be complacent," Jamie Dimon told him. "You've got to keep pushing forward."

Operate as a technology-native company. "Every company is a tech company," Malhotra insists. Technology must be business-led, embedded in cross-functional product teams, and scaled deliberately beyond experimentation, especially in AI.

Anticipate nonmarket shocks. Leading teams now run geopolitical and demographic scenarios "to understand how the company might have to pivot." This preparedness extends to smaller firms "thrust into geopolitics" for the first time.

Distinguish between experimentation and bet-the-company decisions. Leaders should allow "rapid, cheap failure" to learn quickly, but apply exhaustive risk management to the few "truly consequential, bet-the-company" decisions.

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