What does it take for a person to change? BJ Fogg, founder of Stanford’s Behavior Design Lab, says the key to behavior change isn’t what we’ve always been taught. In Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything Fogg draws upon true experiments--from his lab and his life--to outline a system...

Stacey Vanek Smith has reported on business and the economy for over 15 years now, first for public radio’s “Marketplace,” and as the host of Planet Money’s daily podcast “The Indicator.” Over that time, she’s seen the same barriers blocking advancement for women in the workplace again and again. Re...

Throughout his life, Chad Sanders found himself having to navigate white culture; at school, in the tech industry, and eventually in his career in entertainment. He learned to cope with the frustration of having to do that by writing, and he wrote his first screenplay at a cafe just across the stree...

When Ken Hicks became CEO of Foot Locker in 2009 the company didn’t have a leg to stand on: the economy was in a recession, sales were down almost a billion dollars, and the brand was widely expected to collapse along with indoor shopping malls themselves. How Hicks used a commitment to better story...

Josh Silverman built Evite and turned around eBay. Then, in 2017, Etsy came calling. The online marketplace for creative goods was in deep trouble. Growth had plateaued and the company was on the verge of being sold. Josh stepped in as CEO and got the team focused on one simple metric that made all ...

Since 1992, Kim Scott has worked in almost all levels of management—from a diamond business in Moscow to startups in the Silicon Valley to leading teams at Google. Along the way, she developed a management philosophy called “radical candor” that calls for “caring personally while challenging directl...

Over a career spanning four decades, Roger Martin has been a management consultant, an influential  business strategy thinker and author, as well as the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto. He advises CEOs of global companies such as Ford, Proctor & Gamble, and Lego....

When Peter Cuneo joined Marvel as CEO in 1999, it was a struggling publishing house teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Ten years later, Disney bought Marvel for $4.5 billion. Cuneo tells his unlikely origin story and how he became the "turnaround superhero."

In 2001, Campbell's Soup was in freefall: the company's value had halved and employee engagement was at an all-time low. Doug Conant knew he could salvage the iconic company, but first, things were going to have to get worse. How he used self-taught leadership, diversity, and inclusion to energize h...

Back in the 1980s, Stephen R. Covey anticipated a new kind of leadership with his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It wasn't the table-pounding, charismatic kind of leadership, but an empathetic one, which prioritized listening and collaboration. Guy speaks with Covey's son Stephen M.R...

Carl Bass, a renegade and reluctant executive, took the helm at Autodesk and steered the company out of the global economic crisis. At one point, he was so sure it would fail that he was desperate to find a buyer. Instead, he put his own money at risk to try a whole new business model.

Jeremy Zimmer was not supposed to be heading one of the "big four" talent agencies in Hollywood. As a child, he struggled in school and eventually dropped out of college to become a parking lot hustler, making money running schemes as a valet and spending nights partying. But that all stopped sudden...

Terry Lundgren, former CEO of Neiman Marcus and Macy's, has been instrumental in shaping the American retail landscape, but the road to bringing two notoriously competitive retail giants together wasn't easy. How he merged famous department rivals, double-downed on retail, and turned Macy's into the...

How a New Orleans native turned around a cruise company sinking from a public relations disaster... to one of the most valuable brands in its industry. When Arnold Donald took over Carnival Corporation and the nine cruise lines it operates, one of the biggest things he did was build a new leadership...

Mixing business and social justice isn't a strategy most companies are willing to adopt, which is why Dan Schulman's actions as CEO of PayPal have garnered so much attention. In 2016, he canceled a plan for an operations center in North Carolina after the state passed its infamous "bathroom bill." S...

Beth Comstock is comfortable with change. In college, she wanted to be a doctor, but organic chemistry wasn't her strong suit, so she shifted to journalism. When journalism didn't work out, she started working in publicity. So, when GE bought NBC in 1986 right as Beth was starting her career in adve...

For years, it was a secret: the family that owned Lego was actually losing money on the company. The man who built the company back up into one of the biggest toymakers in the world, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, reveals his controversial plan that led Lego back to profitability. It leaned on something that...

General Stanley McChrystal was born into a military family: three generations of men in his family were officers in the armed forces. He followed the family tradition and eventually rose up the ranks to become a General in the Army. While serving as the commander of Allied Forces in Afghanistan in 2...

After one of the most deadly disasters in the history of space flight, Ellen Ochoa was a leader in NASA's recovery. She fixed the technical things that went wrong, but the most critical changes, she says, were human. Why she thinks it's important to make sure that naysayers always have a voice, and ...

For over a decade as CEO of direct-sales giant Avon, Andrea Jung was one of the most powerful women in the cosmetics industry. During her tenure, Jung saw striking success, but also faced daunting challenges with a failed product rollout and massive restructuring. Since 2014, Andrea has brought her ...

It's not an understatement to say that Jim Collins is one of the most influential business writers in modern history. Collins, however, thinks of himself more as a researcher than an author. Each of his books, which includes Good to Great, Built to Last, and his newest, BE 2.0, requires five or six ...

After becoming the CEO of PepsiCo in 2006, Indra Nooyi became the first woman and immigrant to run a Fortune 50 company. From Chennai, India, to Yale's School of Management, Nooyi worked her way up from The Boston Consulting Group, Motorola, and ASEA Brown Boveri before eventually landing at PepsiCo...

In 2012, to say there was a crisis at Best Buy — is an understatement. In January, Forbes published an article with the headline: WHY BEST BUY IS GOING OUT OF BUSINESS. And then, in March, the company reported a loss of $1.7 billion. In April, the CEO resigned because of an "inappropriate relation...

Black Entertainment Television helped make the first Black billionaire in the US and was the first Black-owned business traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Debra Lee, a young lawyer drawn to the company's mission, was pivotal in turning the small, revolutionary cable station into an industry stap...

Gordon Bethune took an unlikely path to becoming a leader in the airline industry. A self-described "hoodlum," Bethune dropped out of high school, joined the Navy, and became an airplane mechanic. With that experience, he gave Continental Airlines a tune-up, pulling it out of bankruptcy and guiding ...

How Ajay Banga ran one of the world's largest companies with an unusual leadership philosophy... something he calls "the decency quotient." And how he turned Mastercard from a credit card company into a company that's known for technology, innovation, data, analytics, and A.I.

Cheryl Bachelder decided to go into business after an early setback derailed her potential career in music education. She became President of KFC years later, but a job that started as a major opportunity wound up being a massive failure. How Bachelder learned from her failures and went on to turn P...

General David Petraeus took on a uniquely complex leadership challenge in Iraq in the aftermath of the U.S.-led war there. He oversaw the training of a new and entirely Iraqi army. He says that the key to leadership is first getting the big ideas right, then constantly refining them, and communicati...

As a child growing up in Ibadan, Nigeria, Dara Treseder was often told to get her head out of the clouds. But her mother encouraged her to dream big and to follow her ambition if it would lead her to contentment. For Treseder, that meant moving across the world to attend both Harvard and Stanford, a...

Today, Marvel is one of the most substantial forces in American media, but when Peter Cuneo joined the company as CEO in 1999, it was a struggling publishing house teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Ten years later, Disney bought Marvel for $4.5 billion. Cuneo tells his unlikely origin story and h...

Marvin Ellison took the tough jobs nobody wanted, and it got him from retail security guard all the way to CEO of two Fortune 500s. Now, when things are precarious, companies like JCPenney and Lowe's call him in. Marvin Ellison says that limiting failure limits success. Find out exactly what he mean...

When Gap was failing, Mickey Drexler didn't just increase sales. He made it into a pop culture staple of the 80s and 90s. But that wasn't enough to keep him from getting fired. At his next job, he was not just the CEO. He bought stock with his own personal money to bolster J.Crew.

Margaret Heffernan is an entrepreneur, CEO, executive leadership coach, and author of six books. Her often counter-intuitive insights on collaboration, consensus-building, and decision-making have earned her a reputation as a smart thinker who challenges conventional business wisdom. In her latest b...

Strauss Zelnick has a real knack for saving companies in crisis. A Hollywood wunderkind, he's led major film studios, record labels, and gaming companies since his early 30s. How he turned a small, self-financed Zelnick Media Capital into an industry powerhouse and why he thinks developing relations...

How do you get from the cubicle to the C-Suite? George Scangos started out doing scientific research, but he says his people skills got him all the way to the CEO's office at one of the biggest biotech companies in the world.

When Keith Krach first heard of Docusign, he knew it could be huge. He was convinced it would capture one of the biggest markets ever seen. He also knew exactly the play he needed to run to get it there, based on his decades of experience in the C-suite. He shares the secrets he collected over the y...

Why growth isn't always good, and how to infuse integrity into a toxic company culture. Zenefits was on its way to a multi-billion dollar valuation but, behind the scenes, it was all about to come crashing down. When Jay Fulcher was called in to save the company, his first job was laying off almost ...

When Bill George was a kid, he didn't dream of becoming a pro-athlete or an astronaut or a famous musician. Instead, he imagined the Fortune 500 companies he would lead as CEO. He achieved the dream when he took a medical technology company called Medtronic from a fledgling operation to a Fortune 50...

Jeff Jones is no stranger to crisis. From the 2013 Target data breach to a tumultuous period at Uber, he's helped navigate companies out of some tough situations. So, when Jeff became the President and CEO of H&R Block in 2017, he was prepared. How a young man from West Virginia went from being ...

Steve Mollenkopf started working as an engineer at Qualcomm right out of college. After ascending to the top of the Engineering division, Mollenkopf thought that he'd reached his peak promotion in the company — that is, until he became CEO and led the company through some of its highest and lowest m...

Dave Ramsey learned about debt the hard way: he'd made money, lost money, and declared bankruptcy, all before his 30th birthday. How he went from selling books out of his trunk to becoming a best-selling author and financial advisor to millions.

When Ken Hicks became CEO of Foot Locker in 2009, the company didn't have a leg to stand on: the economy was in a recession, sales were down almost a billion dollars, and the brand was widely expected to collapse along with indoor shopping malls themselves. How Hicks used a commitment to better stor...

Jason Fried, the CEO and co-founder of Basecamp, doesn't want you to come to meetings. He insists that you work no more than 40 hours a week; 36 in the summer. He doesn't really want you coming to the office either... and this approach has helped make Basecamp hugely successful. In this episode, Fri...

There are a few dirty little secrets about the way modern ice cream is made, but Graeter's ice cream is different. They use a process that's well over one hundred years old, even though that means the company has to stay small. Richard Graeter is part of the fourth generation to run this family comp...

Beth Comstock is comfortable with change. In college, she wanted to be a doctor, but organic chemistry wasn't her strong suit, so she shifted to journalism. When journalism didn't work out, she started working in publicity. So, when GE bought NBC in 1986 right as Beth was starting her career in adve...

Terry Lundgren, former CEO of Neiman Marcus and Macy's, has been instrumental in shaping the American retail landscape, but the road to bringing two notoriously competitive retail giants together wasn't easy. How he merged famous department rivals, double-downed on retail, and turned Macy's into the...

Today, Marvel is one of the most substantial forces in American media, but when Peter Cuneo joined the company as CEO in 1999, it was a struggling publishing house teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Ten years later, Disney bought Marvel for $4.5 billion. Cuneo tells his unlikely origin story and h...

Back in the 1980s, Stephen R. Covey anticipated a new kind of leadership with his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It wasn't the table-pounding, charismatic kind of leadership, but an empathetic one, which prioritized listening and collaboration. Guy speaks with Covey's son, Stephen M....

When David Cote started working in manufacturing, he was a self-described "wrench turner, the lowest on the totem pole." He worked his way up through the ranks of GE, and was eventually offered the helm of mega conglomerate Honeywell. At the time, Honeywell was losing employees, struggling with moun...

Cliff Hudson's childhood was marked by instability. At a young age, he watched his family struggle to recover after his father's roofing business collapsed. So, after college, he was determined to find a safe and stable job. In 1984, Cliff was hired to be a lawyer at Sonic Drive-In. Then, in 1995, h...

In 1963, Bob Rosenberg became CEO of his father's company, Dunkin' Donuts, at age 25. About a decade later, after an overly-ambitious expansion put the company in jeopardy, the board almost threw him out. But Bob matured into his leadership role, developed Dunkin' Donuts into an international succes...

When the COO of Chase Bank told Jacqueline Novogratz that she had the potential for a high level career at Chase, she knew she had to quit her job. She continued to use the skills she learned from investment banking to change the way the world sees capitalism and philanthropy. Today, Acumen has deli...

Mixing business and social justice isn't a strategy most companies are willing to adopt, which is why Dan Schulman's actions as CEO of PayPal have garnered so much attention. In 2016, he canceled a plan for an operations center in North Carolina after the state passed its infamous "bathroom bill." S...

Jim Perdue wasn't that interested in becoming a third-generation head of the family meat processing business. Still, he became CEO in 1991 and his leadership turned out to be pivotal for building Perdue Farms into a nationwide brand. How Perdue navigated changing consumer habits and corporate manage...

For as long as Diane Hoskins can remember, she wanted to be an architect. It began with Legos as a child, and eventually led her all the way to architecture giant, Gensler— an unusual company with two CEOs. One CEO is based in Los Angeles, and the other CEO, Hoskins, is based in Washington, DC. Toge...

Gordon Bethune took an unlikely path to becoming a leader in the airline industry. A self-described "hoodlum," Bethune dropped out of high school, joined the Navy, and became an airplane mechanic. With that experience, he gave Continental Airlines a tune-up, pulling it out of bankruptcy and guiding ...

Josh Silverman built Evite and turned around eBay. Then, in 2017, Etsy came calling. The online marketplace for creative goods was in deep trouble. Growth had plateaued and the company was on the verge of being sold. Josh stepped in as CEO and got the team focused on one simple metric that made all ...

Cisco was growing at breakneck speed when the tech bubble burst in 2001. As an industry veteran, CEO John Chambers knew firsthand that no company was immune to failure. Anticipating the need to transition, and using a '100 year flood' as an opportunity to rise to the top of the market.

What does it take for a person to change? BJ Fogg, founder of Stanford's Behavior Design Lab, says the key to behavior change isn't what we've always been taught. In Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything, Fogg draws upon true experiments — from his lab and his life — to outline a...

Jeremy Zimmer was not supposed to be heading one of the "big four" talent agencies in Hollywood. As a child he struggled in school and eventually dropped out of college to become a parking lot hustler, making money running schemes as a valet and spending nights partying. But that all stopped suddenl...

When Sylvia Mathews Burwell was appointed Secretary of HHS in 2014, Health and Human Services — the agency responsible for administering Obamacare — was already under intense scrutiny. And the crises just kept coming: a government shutdown, unaccompanied minors at the border, Ebola and Zika. How she...

Leadership strategist and business speaker Greg McKeown is the author of two New York Times-bestselling books: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less and Effortless: Make It Easier To Do What Matters Most. The core of McKeown's philosophy of "Essentialism" is to identify what is absolutely es...

Running the world's wealthiest charitable foundation is all about tough choices. During her meteoric rise at Microsoft, Melinda Gates never guessed she'd spend decades trying to solve global problems. Learning to give by asking the right questions and accepting the limits of your own impact.

Dr. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture and of African and African American Studies at Harvard. Early in her career, she became fascinated with what she calls "back-turned paintings"--the paintings which artists keep turned around in their studios, thereby...

Why isn't Intuit dead? The key was transforming it into a "36 year old start up," says former CEO Brad Smith. Giving people the chance to make an impact, he says, is vital to energizing a workforce. How he lost $40 million and got promoted, and why vulnerability and failure are intrinsic to good lea...

In this special live episode, how David Coleman leveraged criticism to revamp the SAT, revive the College Board, and introduce new ways to battle education inequality. The ACT was fast becoming the college entrance heavyweight when he came in to lead the College Board, and the SAT was on 'the brink ...

Shellye Archambeau knew as a teenager she wanted to grow up and become a CEO. But when Shellye started as an undergraduate at the Wharton School of Business in 1980, there were just two female CEOs of large corporations, and none of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies were Black. Despite the lack of r...

Greg Wasson was an aspiring pharmacist with dreams of building his own pharmacy, but before he'd even finished his degree, he found himself climbing the corporate ladder at Walgreens. Bigger opportunities at the company opened up, and he continued to climb, until he eventually reached the CEO chair ...

Carl Bass, a renegade and reluctant executive, took the helm at Autodesk, and steered the company out of the global economic crisis. At one point, he was so sure it would fail that he was desperate to find a buyer. Instead, he put his own money at risk to try a whole new business model.

David Novak has been a driving force behind brands like Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, and he co-founded YUM! Brands Inc., one of the biggest players in the quick service restaurant industry. He's written bestsellers including Taking People With You, The Education of an Accidental CEO, and his latest, c...

When Lou Gerstner became the CEO of IBM in 1993, he had never worked for a technology company, and IBM was in big trouble: competitors like Microsoft, Dell, and Compaq were eating up market share. Gerstner took the challenge head-on by reimagining IBM's structure and culture, and eventually helped I...

Explorer, writer, and publisher Erling Kagge was the first person to complete the Three Poles Challenge ⁠— reaching the South Pole, the North Pole, and the top of Mt. Everest ⁠— on foot. He talks about what a life of extreme exploration has taught him about silence and the value of failure.

Black Entertainment Television helped make the first Black billionaire in the US and was the first Black-owned business traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Debra Lee, a young lawyer drawn to the company's mission, was pivotal in turning the small, revolutionary cable station into an industry stap...

Yahoo had been churning through executives when Marissa Mayer became its 7th CEO in just over 5 years. She left a track record of success at Google to take on a floundering company faced with obsolescence. How she infused value into Yahoo on the eve of its acquisition and why failure should be embra...

In 2016, Maria Ross realized that she was trying to teach her son that empathy was a way to success, when the world around them seemed to be sending the exact opposite message. So she took her years of experience as a management and brand consultant to make the case for empathy not as a moral impera...

Customers crave simplicity, Dan Hesse figured out early in his career, as he streamlined phone bills at Sprint. He saved 2 billion dollars, just by taking better care of customers in a few key ways. Plus, just how hard Sprint had to work to get the iPhone on its network, and the movie he hoped would...

What does it take for a person to change? BJ Fogg, founder of Stanford's Behavior Design Lab, says the key to behavior change isn't what we've always been taught. In Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything Fogg draws upon true experiments - from his lab and his life - to outline a syst...

General David Petraeus took on a uniquely complex leadership challenge in Iraq in the aftermath of the U.S.-led war there. He oversaw the training of a new and entirely Iraqi army. He says that the key to leadership is first getting the big ideas right, then constantly refining them, and communicati...

How a New Orleans native turned around a cruise company sinking from a public relations disaster... to one of the most valuable brands in its industry. When Arnold Donald took over Carnival Corporation and the nine cruise lines it operates, one of the biggest things he did was build a new leadership...

Sanjiv Yajnik is no stranger to taking risks and adapting to change. In fact, he was a marine engineer for more than a decade before deciding to move from India to Canada to pursue an MBA. Since leaving the open sea for the C-suite, he's become known for his purpose-driven leadership and nimble appr...

When Gap was failing, Mickey Drexler didn't just increase sales. He made it into a pop culture staple of the 80s and 90s. But that wasn't enough to keep him from getting fired. At his next job, he was not just the CEO. He bought stock with his own personal money to bolster J. Crew.

Over a career spanning four decades, Roger Martin has been a management consultant, an influential business strategy thinker and author, as well as the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto. He advises CEOs of global companies such as Ford, Proctor & Gamble, and Lego....

Cheryl Bachelder decided to go into business after an early setback derailed her potential career in music education. She became President of KFC years later, but a job that started as a major opportunity wound up being a massive failure. How Bachelder learned from her failures and went on to turn P...

When Robin Ganzert joined American Humane as it's new president and CEO, she thought she was helming one of the oldest and best known animal welfare organizations in the US. What she didn't know was that American Humane was $12.2 million dollars in debt following the 2009 financial crisis. By runnin...

For over a decade as CEO of direct-sales giant Avon, Andrea Jung was one of the most powerful women in the cosmetics industry. During her tenure, Jung saw striking success, but also faced daunting challenges with a failed product rollout and massive restructuring. Since 2014, Andrea has brought her ...

There was a devastating data breach, a failing foray into Canada, and they were losing US customers fast. In 2014, Target seriously needed a win—Brian Cornell was that win. He'd turned around plenty of other retailers like Safeway, Michael's, and Sam's Club, but this time he was thinking bigger. Pla...

As a young management consultant at Boston Consulting Group, Morten Hansen regularly put in long hours–up to 90 a week. The highest performer in his office, however, was a colleague who clocked significantly less hours and rarely came in on weekends. This experience helped inspire Hansen's research ...

Margaret Heffernan is an entrepreneur, CEO, executive leadership coach, and author of six books. Her often counter-intuitive insights on collaboration, consensus-building, and decision-making have earned her a reputation as a smart thinker who challenges conventional business wisdom. In her latest b...

Ivan Seidenberg worked his way from splicing cables for the phone company, all the way to being the CEO of Verizon. During his career, he helped the company weather not one but two tectonic changes: the breakup of Ma Bell's monopoly, and the shift from copper lines to wireless broadband.

In 2001, Campbell's Soup was in freefall: the company's value had halved and employee engagement was at an all time low. Doug Conant knew he could salvage the iconic company, but first, things were going to have to get worse. How he used self-taught leadership, diversity, and inclusion to energize h...

Marvin Ellison took the tough jobs nobody wanted, and it got him from retail security guard all the way to CEO of two Fortune 500s. Now, when things are precarious, companies like JC Penny and Lowe's call him in. Marvin Ellison says that limiting failure limits success. Find out exactly what he mean...

Jon Acuff is the author of seven best-selling books and the host of the podcast "All It Takes Is A Goal", becoming widely known for his humorous approach to leadership and Christianity. Son of a Baptist minister, Jon worked as a copywriter throughout his twenties, but in 2008 his blog "Stuff Christi...

Mark King has a reputation for turning businesses around by moving fast on innovative, and sometimes expensive, endeavors. Before his current tenure as CEO of Taco Bell, Mark served as president for Adidas' long-stagnant North American division, reinvigorating the brand with major athletic sponsorsh...

How Ajay Banga runs one of the world's largest companies with an unusual leadership philosophy... something he calls "the decency quotient." And how he turned Mastercard from a credit card company into a company that's known for technology and innovation and data and analytics and A.I.

Throughout his life, Chad Sanders found himself having to navigate white culture; at school, in the tech industry, and eventually in his career in entertainment. He learned to cope with the frustration of having to do that by writing, and he wrote his first screenplay at a cafe just across the stree...

General Stanley McChrystal was born into a military family: three generations of men in his family were officers in the armed forces. He followed the family tradition and eventually rose up the ranks to become a General in the Army. While serving as the commander of Allied Forces in Afghanistan in 2...

Kenneth Chenault learned early on to only worry about the things he could control, this helped him when life—and business at American Express—threw unpredictable events his way. He broke barriers as the company's first African American CEO and helped turn AmEx from a traveler's check company into a ...

David Epstein is a science writer and investigative reporter. His articles have spanned a wide range of topics from crime and violence to athletes using steroids to the intersection of science and the Olympics. And, he's the author of The Sports Gene and Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specializ...

Growing up in a small town in India, Leena Nair overheard her mother say it was too bad her daughter was born a girl, because it meant her smarts and talents would go to waste. But Nair went on to join Hindustan Unilever, becoming the first female manager to work on a factory floor, the first woman ...

Listen again. After becoming the CEO of PepsiCo in 2006, Indra Nooyi became the first woman and immigrant to run a Fortune 50 company. From Chennai, India, to Yale's School of Management, Nooyi worked her way up from The Boston Consulting Group, Motorola, and ASEA Brown Boveri before eventually land...

Listen again. As a child growing up in Ibadan, Nigeria, Dara Treseder was often told to get her head out of the clouds. But her mother encouraged her to dream big and to follow her ambition if it would lead her to contentment. For Treseder, that meant moving across the world to attend both Harvard a...

Joe Keohane is a longtime journalist and editor who believes that talking to strangers can not only help people feel happier and more empathetic, but can actually make the world a better place. In his first book, The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting In A Suspicious World, Joe talks to ...

After one of the most deadly disasters in the history of space flight, Ellen Ochoa was a leader in NASA's recovery. She fixed the technical things that went wrong, but the most critical changes, she says, were human. Why she thinks it's important to make sure that naysayers always have a voice, and ...

Ken Coleman calls himself "America's Career Coach." In his syndicated call-in show, and in books like The Proximity Principle and One Question, Coleman helps people think about what kind of work they would find meaningful, and how they can connect with people that will help get them into that work. ...

In 2012, to say there was a crisis at Best Buy — is an understatement. In January, Forbes published an article with the headline: WHY BEST BUY IS GOING OUT OF BUSINESS. And then, in March, the company reported a loss of $1.7 billion dollars. In April, the CEO resigned because of an "inappropriate re...

Stacey Vanek Smith has reported on business and the economy for over 15 years now, first for public radio's "Marketplace," and now as the host of Planet Money's daily podcast "The Indicator." Over that time, she's seen the same barriers blocking advancement for women in the workplace again and again...

Ryan Holiday is one of his generation's most influential thinkers. Many people - from rappers to NFL quarterbacks to corporate CEOS and entrepreneurs - credit his writing for introducing them to the teachings of the stoic philosophers. Holiday's books like The Obstacle Is The Way, Ego Is The Enemy, ...

Sarah Robb O'Hagan is brutally honest about the many, many times she messed up on the way to transforming Gatorade. She was a rabble-rouser at Virgin, which ended with her getting fired. She took a job at Atari, even though she hated video games. How those disasters made her into the right executive...

After becoming the CEO of PepsiCo in 2006, Indra Nooyi became the first woman and immigrant to run a Fortune 50 company. From Chennai, India, to Yale's School of Management, Nooyi worked her way up from The Boston Consulting Group, Motorola, and ASEA Brown Boveri before eventually landing at PepsiCo...

As a child growing up in Ibadan, Nigeria, Dara Treseder was often told to get her head out of the clouds. But her mother encouraged her to dream big and to follow her ambition if it would lead her to contentment. For Treseder, that meant moving across the world to attend both Harvard and Stanford, a...

It's not an understatement to say that Jim Collins is one of the most influential business writers in modern history. Collins, however, thinks of himself more as a researcher than an author. Each of his books, which includes Good to Great, Built to Last, and his newest BE 2.0, requires five or six y...

For years, it was a secret: the family that owned LEGO was actually losing money on the company. The man who built the company back up into one of the biggest toymakers in the world, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, reveals his controversial plan that led LEGO back to profitability. It leaned on something that...

From the creator of How I Built This, stories of crisis, failure, turnaround, and triumph from some of the greatest leaders in the world.