Work And Life With Stew Friedman

Jason Thacker is a Senior Vice President of TD Bank Group and Head of Credit Cards and Unsecured Lending. Prior to his current role, Jason served in various executive positions at TD Bank. He started his career in brand management at Procter & Gamble as the company's youngest global expatriate, leading priority brands in both the US and Canada. Jason holds an MBA from The Wharton School and an HBA from the Ivey Business School. In recent years, Jason has been recognized as one of Canada's Top 40 under 40, The Wharton School's 40 under 40 and P&G's Global Alumni under 40. In this episode, Stew talks with Jason about his career, how he applies lessons learned years ago in Stew’s Total Leadership class at Wharton, his recent paternity leave and its impact on his work and most important relationships, the impact of fatherhood on his career, and much more.  Here then is an invitation for you, a challenge, after you’ve had a chance to listen to this episode:  If you know someone who is t

Lauren Smith Brody is the founder of The Fifth Trimester and author of the bestselling book The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom’s Guide to Style, Sanity, and Success After Baby. Lauren’s book was a simultaneous best-seller in the Amazon categories of motherhood, women and business, and cultural anthropology. She writes regularly about the intersection of business and motherhood.  She is also on the board of the early education nonprofit Docs for Tots. A longtime leader in the women’s magazine industry, Brody was previously the executive editor of Glamour magazine.In this episode, Stew talks with Lauren about the practical advice she gleaned from her research about working mothers’ experiences following their children’s arrival, including tips for building strong relationships with the most important people in your life.  They discuss how the pandemic has both highlighted and exacerbated the challenges working mothers face and what public policy can do to move us faster toward an egalitarian society

Jason Harrisis is CEO of the creative agency Mekanism, which has been named to Ad Age's Agency A-list and twice to their Best Places to Work. He’s the author of a recent book called The Soulful Art of Persuasion. Jason works closely with brands using a blend of soul and science to create provocative campaigns that engage audiences. Those iconic brands include Peloton, Ben & Jerry's, MillerCoors, HBO, and the United Nations. He’s been named in the Top 10 Most Influential Social Impact Leaders, as well as the 4A's list of "100 People Who Make Advertising Great." His methods are studied in cases at Harvard Business School.In this episode, Stew talks with Jason about building a trusting workplace culture and strengthening your reputation and your market power through persuasion, though Jason’s take on persuasion is not what most people think about when they picture what it means to be persuasive.  He demonstrates with enlightening examples how the ability to persuade -- which we need in all parts of our

Liya Shuster-Bier is the founder and CEO of Alula, a radically honest platform for cancer patients, caregivers, and survivors.  She is a cancer survivor herself.  Prior to Alula, Liya built a career in community development and impact investing, partnering with mayors and governors across the country to create innovative financing solutions that improved community outcomes. She started her career at Goldman Sachs, on the corporate currency derivatives team. In addition to receiving her MBA in Entrepreneurial Management from The Wharton School, where she was a student in Stew’s Total Leadership course, Liya is a proud Dartmouth alum, a native of Queens, NY, and an immigrant.In this episode, Stew talks with Liya about the story of her experience as a caregiver during her mother’s fight against cancer and about her own journey from the discovery of her own cancer to her current life as a survivor.  With compelling examples, Liya vividly describes the trials and tribulations -- the physical, social

Erica Dhawan is author of Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection No Matter the Distance.  She is also the Founder and CEO of Cotential, a global organization that helps companies, leaders, and managers leverage 21st century collaboration skills and behaviors to improve performance. She’s also co-author of the bestselling Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence. She was named by Thinkers50 as “The Oprah of Management Ideas” and featured as one of the Top 20 Management Experts around the world by GlobalGurus. She has degrees from Harvard University, MIT Sloan, and The Wharton School, where she took Stew’s Total Leadership course.  (And when he wasn’t able to receive in person the Thinkers50 award for distinguished achievement in the field of talent, he asked Erica to do so on his behalf -- they’ve been friends for a long time.)In this episode, Stew talks with Erica about her latest book, written before the pandemic but even more important now that so many are work

Katy Milkman is an award-winning behavioral scientist and the James G. Dinan Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She hosts Charles Schwab’s popular behavioral economics podcast Choiceology and is the co-founder and co-director of The Behavior Change for Good Initiative, a research center at the University of Pennsylvania with the mission of advancing the science of lasting behavior change.  This work is being chronicled by Freakonomics Radio. Katy  has worked with or advised dozens of organizations on how to spur positive change, including Google, the U.S. Department of Defense, the American Red Cross, 24 Hour Fitness, Walmart and Morningstar. In this episode, Stew talks with Katy about her new book, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. Katy shares her very practical advice about how to craft a way to get things done that is tailored to your own particular stumbling blocks whether it is failure to launch, impulsivity, p

Jordan Shapiro is the author of Father Figure: How to Be a Feminist Dad.  He is a senior fellow for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and Nonresident Fellow in the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. His previous book, The New Childhood: Raising Kids To Thrive in a Connected World, focused on parenting and screen time. During the week, you can find him in the classroom at Temple University, where he teaches in the Intellectual Heritage Program and developed the online version of the university's core curriculum.In this episode, Stew talks with Jordan about fatherhood in the modern world and the dilemmas fathers face at work and at home, stigmas that undermine divorced fathers, why patriarchy is harmful to men and to women, the importance of being a feminist, and what it takes to become a feminist dad -- critical consciousness, responsive fathering, removing locker-room gender essentialism, and rigorous inclusivity.  Jordan offers practical advice on how fathers

Joann Lublin was management news editor for The Wall Street Journal until she retired in April 2018, and she is still a regular Journal contributor. She shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for stories about corporate scandals and was awarded the 2018 Lifetime Achievement from the Loeb Awards, the highest accolade in business journalism. Her new book -- Power Moms: How Executive Mothers Navigate Work and Life -- explores the emotional and professional challenges women face as they try to move forward in their careers while raising a family. She’s also the author of Earning It: Hard-Won Lessons from Trailblazing Women at the Top of the Business World. In this episode, Stew talks with Joann about what she learned about what it takes to find harmony among the different parts of life from her own personal experience and from interviewing trailblazing women in her own cohort (Boomers, that is), their daughters, and executives who are mothers now.  She describes the profound shifts that have occurred across th

Susan McPherson is the author of a new book -- The Lost Art of Connecting: The Gather, Ask, Do Method for Building Meaningful Relationships. In it she brings to bear 25+ years of experience in marketing, public relations, and communications.In this episode, Stew talks with Susan about the very best question to ask -- How can I help you? -- to build relationships of any kind, at work or elsewhere. They discuss the various types of communication modes and how they can be used effectively to strengthen bonds.  Susan describes and illustrates her systematic approach to building networks of support, what she calls the “gather, ask, do” method, demonstrating in this conversation how connection is her superpower.Here then is an invitation, a challenge, for you, once you’ve listened to the conversation. In an upcoming conversation today or tomorrow, lead with the magic question, “how can I help you?” and see what happens.  Share your reactions to this episode and ideas for future episodes with Stew by writi

Tsedal Neeley is the Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, an accomplished scholar and author, and award-winning teacher. Her new book, Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere, could not have arrived at a more auspicious moment.  Her previous book, The Language of Global Success: How a Common Tongue Transforms Multinational Organizations, chronicles the behind-the-scenes globalization process of a company over the course of five years. Tsedal has also published extensively in leading scholarly and practitioner-oriented outlets about virtual work and large scale change. Her HBS case, “Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems”, is one of the most used cases worldwide on the subject of virtual work.In this episode, Stew talks with Tsedal about the pros and cons of remote work -- for performance, well-being, and relationships in all parts of our lives -- and what we’ve learned about these pushes and pulls during the disorienting world of&n

Darby Saxbe is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California’s David and Dana Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Darby has two principle, interrelated lines of research: the impact of family environments and family transitions on parents and the impact of family environments on children. Her ongoing Hormones Across the Transition to Childrearing (HATCH) study, funded in 2016 by a five-year CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, follows first-time expectant parents from pregnancy across the first year postpartum in order to understand the factors that predict successful adjustment to parenthood. She has a bachelor’s degree in English and Psychology from Yale University, and a PhD in Clinical Psychology from UCLA. In this episode, Stew talks with Darby about the implications of her research on what happens to men and women when they become parents, how the quality of marital relationships affect children, the importance of social support for new parents

Julie Kashen is the director for women’s economic justice and a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive independent think tank that fights for economic, racial, and gender equity in education, health care, and work. Julie has spent her career working for more just and equitable public policies -- including women’s economic justice issues -- in federal and state government, including as Labor Policy Advisor to the late Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy and as Deputy Policy Director for former New Jersey Governor Jon S. Corzine. She has helped to draft and build momentum for three major pieces of national legislation: the first national paid sick days bill (the Healthy Families Act), major child care legislation, and the national Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. Julie holds a master’s in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a bachelor’s with highest honors in political science from the University of Michigan. She also serves as a senior policy advisor to the Na

Anne Driscoll and Chris Schultz are co-founders of an organization called Launch Pad. Anne serves as CEO and Chris is the Chief Community Officer and they are a married couple. Launch Pad was started in New Orleans following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Anne was a long-time Silicon Valley Executive. She was an early Google employee and post-Google she has taken her expertise to the Valley’s high-growth startup scene, championing emerging ecosystems and creating platforms to support small businesses such as Ning, Dwolla and GoDaddy. Chris was born in Nigeria to American parents (working in the Peace Corps) and he was inspired by the hustle, grind, and entrepreneurship he saw daily at the Nigerian marketplaces of his youth. He’s an active angel investor and has spent 15+ years bringing together the “doers” of the world—startups that have raised over $160 million in venture capital and created 5,000+ jobs.In this episode, Stew talks with Anne and Chris about how and why they started Launch Pad, the comm

Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he specializes in the theory of distributed systems. Cal is a New York Times bestselling author who writes for a broader audience about the intersection of technology and culture. He's the author of seven books, including Digital Minimalism and Deep Work, which have been published in over thirty languages, and about which he talked with Stew in earlier episodes (# 7 and # 111)  . He's also a regular contributor on these topics to national publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Wired, and is a frequent guest on NPR. His blog, Study Hacks, which he's been publishing since 2007, attracts over three million visits a year.  Cal is the only guest to have made three appearances on the Work and Life radio show in the eight years it’s been on air.  In this episode, Stew and Cal discuss his new book, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. Cal reviews t

Martin Davidson is the Johnson & Higgins Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business and he currently serves as their senior associate dean and global chief diversity officer. He holds degrees from both Harvard and Stanford and was on the faculty at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth prior to arriving at Darden in 1998. His book, The End of Diversity as We Know It:  Why Diversity Efforts Fail and How Leveraging Difference Can Succeed, introduces a research-driven roadmap to help leaders more effectively create and capitalize on diversity in organizationsIn this episode, Stew and Martin discuss the reasons the diversity and inclusion efforts often fail. Martin reviews ways that leaders can create diverse and inclusive organizations that work by, among  other things, embracing the weird. He describes a proven, practical model for seeing real sources of difference, understanding them, and engaging in experimentation to create positive change

Erik Peper, a professor in the Institute for Holistic Health Studies at San Francisco State University, is an internationally known expert on workplace health, stress management and holistic health. His book, co-authored with Richard Harvey and Nancy Faass, is Tech Stress: How Technology Is Hijacking Our Lives, Strategies for Coping, and Pragmatic Ergonomics.In this episode, Stew and Erik discuss how to cope with ever-present technology in ways that reduce stress and strain. Erik describes and illustrates, with Stew as his subject, some ergonomic strategies -- how to position our bodies at our workstations, for example -- and ways of re-framing our thoughts and feelings about how we work with the aims of increasing energy and avoiding burnout. Here then is an invitation, a challenge, for you, once you’ve listened to the conversation.  For just one hour of your next work day, try stopping for a minute every 20 minutes or so, to breathe or stretch and to take stock of how you’re working.  What do

Lindsey Cameron is an Assistant Professor of Management at Wharton whose research focuses on how changes in the modern workplace -- as algorithms/machine learning, short-term employment contracts, and variable pay -- affect work and workers. She recently completed a four-year ethnography of the largest employer in the gig economy, exploring how algorithms are reshaping the nature of managerial control and how workers navigate this new workplace. Previously, Lindsey spent over a decade in the U.S. intelligence and diplomatic communities as a technical and political analyst and completed several overseas assignments in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. She holds a PhD in Management from the University of Michigan, an MS in Engineering Management from the George Washington University, and an SB from Harvard University in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She also studied Arabic intensively at the American University of Cairo.In this episode, Stew and Lindsey discuss the gig economy; how the pa

Dr. Kristen Shockley is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Georgia. She has been studying how companies adapted during the pandemic, or how they haven’t adjusted, to meet the needs of worker productivity and well-being. She’s also been looking at how couples forced to handle childcare, housework, and their day jobs have divided the responsibilities.  Kristen has conducted research aimed at understanding organizational initiatives to help employees manage competing life demands (like flexible work arrangements); the relationship between work-family conflict and health outcomes, including eating behaviors and physiological indicators of health; and understanding how dual-earner couples balance work and family roles. She also studies career development, mentoring, definitions of career success, and the consequences of career compromise. She received her BS in Psychology from the University of Georgia and has an MS and PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the University of Sou

Eve Rodsky is the author of Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (And More Life to Live).  She received her B.A. in economics and anthropology from the University of Michigan, and her J.D. from Harvard Law School. After working at J.P. Morgan, she founded the Philanthropy Advisory Group to advise high-net worth families and charitable foundations. In her work with hundreds of families over a decade, she realized that her expertise in family mediation, strategy, and organizational management could be applied to a problem closer to home – a system for couples seeking balance, efficiency, and peace in their home. Eve was born and raised by a single mom in New York City and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their three children.  In this episode, Stew and Eve talk about what led her to create a practical, now widely-used solution to the ubiquitous problem of inequality in our home lives, our most important organization, as Eve reminds us.  They talk

Dr. Amina Gautier is an associate professor in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Miami. Professor Gautier is a graduate of Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania. She’s taught at Penn as well as Marquette University, Saint Joseph’s University, Washington University in St. Louis, and DePaul University. She’s published one hundred and twenty-nine short stories, including three award-winning short story collections -- Now We Will Be Happy, The Loss of All Lost Things, and At-Risk: Stories. Among her many honors, she’s been the recipient of writing awards, prizes, and fellowships. Her critical reviews and essays on 19th-century writers have been published broadly.  Amina is a Brooklyn-born native New Yorker who currently divides her time between Chicago and Miami. In this episode, Stew and Amina talk about how her impoverished childhood, in which she split time living in two different parts of Brooklyn, affected her decision to become a writer.  Amina describes he