Iconic business leaders share lessons and strategies that have helped them grow the world's most fascinating companies. Founders, CEOs, and dynamic innovators join candid conversations about their triumphs and challenges with a set of luminary hosts, including founding host Reid Hoffman.
A legal secretary who volunteered her way into KCRW spent 16 years as the founder's deputy, then took over. Her playbook for a mission brand: honest taste, community over content, and never being boring.
Hershey's CEO explains why relevance is a daily job, why GLP-1 users stay in the candy aisle, and how AI now ranks each sales rep's store stops.
Codie Sanchez says most small businesses fail because owners "cowboy" it instead of running a system, and that AI only speeds up what is already in you. Her fix is a 12-lever profit system and a bias toward buying over starting.
The Valkyries president explains why she made brands wait, why she built for the 90% rather than the 10% who cross over from men's teams, and the hiring bet she wishes she had made faster.
Mercy Corps' CEO explains why she pushed through a 40-year-old rebrand in the middle of a funding crisis, and why "we're not aiming high enough" became her actual growth strategy.
Brené Brown says courage is a teachable skill, not a trait, and lays out the specific armor leaders reach for when they're scared, plus why AI-era leadership needs a soccer player's sense of timing.
Axios CEO Jim VandeHei argues AI is making work more complex, not less, and lays out the three-step system his own leadership team uses to ruthlessly cut meetings, products, and habits that don't earn their place.
On's co-CEO explains why the running brand chose to be premium rather than the biggest, how a garden hose prototype and a hot glue gun idea became two of its defining products, and why he brought himself back into daily operations after five years of hands-off, partnership-style leadership.
Autodesk's CEO breaks down the exact test he used to kill or keep dozens of product lines, why he moved money into the "boring" back office before building anything new, and the leadership framework that ties courage to empathy instead of treating them as opposites.
A sports business journalist unpacks how the NFL keeps growing revenue by fragmenting where fans have to watch, targeting new audiences deliberately, and managing a safety narrative even as the underlying science gets worse, a case study in monetizing a mature product without losing the people who love it most.
The psychologist who made "grit" famous now argues that willpower is only half the story: the situation you put yourself in often decides the outcome, and small, deliberate changes to it beat trying harder.
Shopify's COO shares live data on the agentic shopping shift, why structured product data doubles agent conversion, and how an internal Slack agent that took 15 million actions in five months rewired how the company works.
The man who invented infinite scroll explains why his best intentions were irrelevant against the market's incentives, and offers PMs a concrete method (possible vs probable, red team and yellow team) for seeing the harm a product will cause before it ships.
Austan Goolsbee, president of the Chicago Fed, tells Bob Safian why this is one of the most dangerous inflation environments he's seen, why a favorite jobs metric stopped being trustworthy, and why he's a grim optimist on AI even as the hype keeps outrunning the results.
Ford CEO Jim Farley explains why he watches the used car market more closely than the new one, why Ford killed its high-end EVs to double down on affordable ones, and why the company built a Model T style platform outside its own system entirely.
James Daunt turned around both Waterstones and Barnes & Noble using nearly the same playbook, strip out centralized data control, trust local booksellers' judgment, and let trends like BookTok spread with zero marketing budget.
Hayden Brown on why Upwork avoided blaming AI for its own layoffs, what actually happens when clients hand real work to AI agents, and why the jobs report is hiding as much as it reveals.
Everyone hears the same episodes.
Few can do what they describe.
