Why do we do this?
We interview great leaders, review the books they read, and speak with highly influential authors who study them.
How we do this?
#1 We interview great leaders.
#2 We review the books great leaders read and write.
#3 We have fun!
Aug 7, 2019
Ori Brafman, multiple New York Times bestselling author, co-founder of the Fully Charged Institute, Distinguished Teaching Fellow and UC Berkeley and co-founder of Vegan.org, joins the show and talks about his latest book, Radical Inclusion. He examines the latest changes in the landscape of leadership, and explains the plasticity of thinking when it comes to the writing process, and why decentralized organizations work best.
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The Leadership Podcast is proud to announce a new initiative with thoughtLEADERS to provide very short podcasts called “chalk talks.” They’re “bitesize” hacks on common (but challenging) leadership issues.
You can only access the Chalk Talks by subscribing to our mailing list at The Leadership Podcast.
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In addition, listen in to learn how 10 of you can apply to be selected to participate in the March 2020 Self-Reliant Leadership Crucible and Podcast Guest Reunion in Austin, Texas! It’s an exclusive event only for past Crucible participants and Podcast Guests, so this is a very unique opportunity.
If you want to be one of the ten lucky listeners who will get to attend this event… click on the link below to send in your submission. We will make our selection on Veterans Day (11/11/19) so get your submission in by November 8th, 2019.
The only other way to participate is through corporate sponsorship. If that’s of interest, please send a note to info@selfreliantleadership.com.
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Key Takeaways
[5:53] Ori wrote The Starfish and The Spider in 2006, Sway in 2008, Click in 2019 and Chaos Imperative in 2013. Each of these books has a running theme on how people structure their organizations, and how seemingly small factors affect very large decisions and important long term relationships.
[9:27] Ori saw very different cultures firsthand, going from Tel Aviv to El Paso, to Silicon Valley.
[11:03] When we choose to surround ourselves with people of all different viewpoints and perspectives, we get what Ori calls the “ping pong of ideas”, serving them back and forth to each other. Ori found the creative tension of picking writing partners with different views from his own helped make the content richer.
[20:23] The more distributed an organization is, the more powerful. People can organize around a common cause without having a top-down hierarchy, and can regenerate if one sector falls short.
[25:58] When we try to control too much as a leader, we miss out people making a difference by their own contribution.
[27:15] Radical inclusion is about creating a sense of belonging, and an attachment and understanding of the organization's narrative.
[34:58] Providing people with more organization in a structure isn’t always the answer. Often times, we need to look at things from a systems approach.
[38:58] Ori feels one of the best ways to fix the divide is to organize in a way where we have radical inclusion, be clear on who makes the decisions, and what the expected outcomes and consequences are in these human interactions. He started to bridge together UC Berkeley and the army with these very same principals.
[51:40] Great leaders energize people, and raise others up around them.
Quotable Quotes
- “Hold your views lightly.”
- “There will be atrophy in organization if it’s overly dependent on a single person.”
- “Information does not change behavior.”
- “It’s about the human interaction in the same room. I trust in that.”
- “We can’t do it alone, we have to do it with each other.”
- “A leader's job is to improve the energy of those around them.”
Albert Einstein Medical Center
UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business