Disrupt Yourself Podcast With Whitney Johnson

Today, we wanted to bring back a conversation I had with Michael Bungay Stanier back in 2018, where we explored what it really means to be a coach. His self-published book The Coaching Habit had only been out for two years, and it had already sold 300 thousand copies. Bringing the philosophy of coaching into our lives can be one of the most personally disruptive and rewarding projects we take on. It changes and strengthens how we support others in our lives, and the support we receive in return. Michael breaks this down in such an accessible way that we felt a re-air was more than worth it.  

So much of what we talk about on here is change – navigating change, embracing change, creating change. I think it’s fair to say that if you’re listening, change of some form is on your mind. We’re no strangers when it comes to figuring out how to get from A to B. But what happens when we have to change… how we’re changing? What happens when we plateau with our progress, and the old models of learning just aren’t sticking anymore? What does jumping to that new S Curve look like? That’s where our guest today comes in. Eduardo Briceno is the co-founder of Mindset Works, a firm dedicated to bringing Carol Dweck’s growth mindset to workplaces world-wide. He’s out now with The Performance Paradox, a book dedicated to that question of changing how you’re changing. From Caracas, Venezuela to the Stanford Business School, Eduardo has navigated all kinds of change, even a fear of public speaking. So what do we have to learn from him?  

This week we’ve got a special episode, a longer one than we normally do. But when you have an opportunity, to talk to the person who built the Rotman School of Management into the powerhouse it is today, you have to use every minute you get.  Roger L. Martin was told that the Toronto’s Rotman School wasn’t worth his time, that it was a quote – cesspool of intrigue. Roger himself will say that he didn’t do much in his 15 years as dean, just tinkering and prodding. He’s a bit of an understated enigma, as you’ll soon find out. But when Rotman’s prestige today ranks up there with Stanford and Harvard, you can’t really argue with his results.   There’s so much to mine in this conversation, we thought it would be a shame to cut it down and fit it within our normal episode length. If you have the time, I’d love for you to give it more than just one listen.  

Ask a thousand people how to make a house a home, and you might get a thousand different answers. Some will say it’s family; others say it’s all in the interior decor – neighborhood pride, or a furry friend, maybe.  Regardless of how you answer the question, you can’t just sit back and wait for it to become a home – everyone agrees that something needs to be done.  Our guest today is an expert on making that transition from house to home. Moving every 18 months or so, Ruth McKeaney raised five kids alongside her husband. Move into a fixer-upper, fix it up with the family’s help, sell it, rinse and repeat. It was only a matter of time until Ruth’s ability to structure her family’s systems came to the attention of book publishers. Hungry for Home is Ruth’s manual on building a home, everything from home restoration to frozen cookie dough.  

How many of us have mastered the skill of looking busy, at some point in our professional lives? It’s an art, really – moving from one tab to another with lightspeed, peering at the screen and making that face that you think communicates determination, drive, intent.    Our guest today says that it’s nothing to feel bad about. When a portion of the population moved from factories to cubicles, they still brought that factory-floor mentality with them. Look good in front of the boss, keep working, don’t stop moving. Cal Newport calls this pseudo-productivity – the art of looking busy.   Cal says there’s a way out, though. He calls it Slow Productivity – also the title of his new book, out now. How can we accomplish our dreams without the emotional and physical burnout that so many industries seem to take for granted?  

Many of us feel comfortable navigating a city. Whether it’s New York or Kyoto, the rules remain mostly the same. Count the amount of blocks you’ve walked, remember that the E train runs express to Manhattan, if you see the Duane Reade, you’ve gone too far. We can get lost, for sure, but there’s a joy in knowing that you have the freedom to get lost. A wrong turn could mean your new favorite Chinese spot, or a new friend. Now think about how you navigate the internet. We don’t explore and get lost as much as we stay within one small neighborhood – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn.  Our guest today is fighting back against this centralization of our virtual city. Chris Dixon has been a partner at Andreessen Horowitz since 2012, most recently in charge of its crypto investing wing. From that birds-eye view, Chris has taken the charge on reimagining how we interact with the internet.  And now he’s out with a new book, Read Write Own, all about the Web3 revolution on our doorstep. So – a lot of buzzwords, an

In this episode, we wanted to bring you a redux of a conversation I had back in 2022. As a new mom, Brooke Romney left behind her roots on Capitol Hill to move to a new community, new friend –– a new S Curve.    But instead of making new connections, a normally extroverted person, Brooke found herself withdrawing from the community. Why? Well, she was surrounded by successful people, and Brooke fell into one of the most human traps there is – comparing yourself to others, and feeling she was coming up short.   As the new spring rolls around, this is a perfect episode to remind us to stop comparing. That little voice in our head can convince us that we’re coming up short, and only that little voice – your voice– can convince you that you are worthy, unique –– one of a kind.   

What makes a good story? Characters, plot, setting, sure – you can boil it down to those elements – but what makes a good story? Is it the moment where you’re up all night burning the midnight oil, because you’re dying to find out how it ends? Is a good story one you believe in? Our guest today believes in the power of stories. Donald Miller is the CEO of StoryBrand, a creative firm that specializes in clarifying a company’s message. In other words, taking a good story and figuring out how to make it great – how to make it one customers can genuinely believe in. Now Donald’s out with a new book, Coach Builder, all about how newly-minted coaches can write their professional story and succeed in the industry. Link to Coach Builder promo: www.coachbuilder.com/disrupt  

“True transformation, begins with a broken heart.” It’s something you’ll hear our guest today say a couple of times, this idea that a real crucible moment begins when something inside you breaks. When a force fundamental to you and your soul says – no more. Jerry Colonna has taken that message and run with it throughout his entire career, from the hallways of venture capital to his current venture in coaching. Today, he’s out with a new book on healing that break, titled Reunion: Leadership, and the Longing to Belong. But how do you harness the power of a broken heart in the first place? How do you turn that into fuel for true transformation?

When’s the last time you felt out of place? I’m sure a lot of us have sat with that feeling, whether that’s professionally or personally. It can hit you just as easily in a boardroom meeting as when you’re out with friends. So now that you feel like an alien that’s crash-landed, what do you do? Our guest today has built his career around finding community for these so-called “black sheep.” Peter Sims is a former corporate investor who became disillusioned with the high-powered world of finance and left to form his own creative firm – appropriately named, Black Sheep. It’s also the name of his new book, out in May, subtitled The Quest To Be Human In An Inhuman Time. What can we take away from Peter’s journey, to help us better navigate those moments when you feel the need to find a new tribe?

At DA, we’re all about discovering and harnessing disruption, but sometimes, disruption finds you. It’s a fact of life – our car skids on ice we didn’t see on the road up ahead. Your boat hits a reef at night. A business deal falls through out of nowhere, and there’s nothing you can or could have done. Now that your car’s in a snowbank, what’s next? Our guest today has been there and back. After the company she worked for collapsed while she was on maternity leave, Carol Fishman Cohen decided to leave the workforce for 11 years to raise her children. Today, she’s the CEO of her own company, iRelaunch. Carol’s had to fight through the nitty-gritty of getting back into the office, remembering and trusting in her capabilities, and today her company helps others make the same jump. Her story is, quite literally, a case study in how people disrupt themselves in response to being disrupted.

When we talk about robots, machines, artificial intelligence, it’s usually within the context of something theorists call the singularity. That’s the moment when AI figures out how to upgrade itself, and leaves us in the dust. After all, it can learn a library in an instant – the AI doesn’t need to stop for a snack and a nap.  In the world of the Terminator, it took Skynet a single day to become self-aware, destroy most of human life, and then send Arnold back in time to make sure no one could stop it. But in the end, The Terminator is one person’s vision of the future – a vision that’s also designed to sell well at the box office. Isn’t it just as possible to write a different version? Our guest today is spending his time doing just that. Paul Allen, the co-founder and former CEO of Ancestry.com, is asking instead – what if we saw AI as an ally, not an arms race? With his new venture, Soar, Paul is writing a different story, one where the robots aren’t sent back in time to strip away our humanity, but rather

“If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” Famous words by Bruce Lee, sure, but when we’ve felt like a stone our whole lives, what does becoming water actually look like? How do we learn to be more malleable in difficult situations? And how can we be confident we’re flowing in the right direction? Samantha Cooprider is the senior director of global leadership development at Meta – formerly Facebook. Today, Sam’s shaping leaders at a corporate level, but her path to the top has been anything but straightforward. She’s had to learn how to flow from a Midwestern childhood, through the non-profit world, and into the C-suites of Tesla, Meta and Google.  So how does Sam keep her mission top of mind when she’s moving from one cup to another?  

After 49 days fasting under the Bodhi tree, Siddhartha Guatama was struck by an idea. We suffer because we are attached to things, to people, to desires. When we can’t have it, we feel an emptiness. But what if we never wanted it in the first place? Guatama taught his philosophy for the next few decades, and centuries after that his followers would give him a new name – the Buddha. Total, complete elimination of your yearnings was called Nirvana. In our networked world, where we broadcast on social media what we want others to see of us, Nirvana can seem far away. But our guest today says that the yearning to belong shapes our behaviors in ways we’re not often conscious of. Dr. Michael Gervais is host of the podcast Finding Mastery, where he pulls on his experience as a high-performance psychologist to draw out what makes these top athletes and board room professionals tick. He’s out with a new book – The First Rule of Mastery, Stop Worrying About What Other People Think Of You.

When’s the last time a customer service phone menu left you… genuinely angry? We build these systems to make things easier, layer systems on top of other systems, but who’s doing the gardening and pruning – the upkeep? Our guest today calls this phenomenon friction. Robert Sutton has taught at Stanford since 1983, in that time covering everything from psychology to business management. Now he’s out with his 8th book, The Friction Project. Bob and his co-writer Huggy Rao took on this idea of a maddeningly-frustrating phone menu to nail down where friction comes from – and how to treat it. But also, how can friction in our organizations actually be a force for good?

What does it take, day in and day out, to lead a group of people effectively? It’s not easy, that’s for sure. On a very granular level, leading is balancing a thousand decisions, huge and small, every day. So what guides your hand? Republican Governor of Utah Spencer Cox is an anomaly in a time of waning bipartisanship. His vice chair in the National Governor’s Association is a Democrat – and a close friend at that. He’s also been a bit of an anomaly in how he’s charted his life, too, turning down Harvard and a cushy lawyer job for his family farm in Fairview. But Governor Cox is an anomaly we can learn from. How do you build a belief system as a leader – and strengthen it, when it seems like the political winds are blowing against you?   

We find ourselves compromising every day – it’s how things get done in a society where we all want something else. But what’s the root of compromise? Isn’t it this idea that solving the issue, whatever it is, is more important than checking off everything we want? It can seem that those ideals have been left by the roadside in the past couple years, but the issue of honest compromise has crept into our boardrooms, too. Our guest today is working to instill that idea of meeting folks halfway back into our political culture. Keith Allred is the executive director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse, a DC non-profit dedicated to pushing through bipartisan legislation. What can we take from the House of Representatives into our own C-suite?

In middle school physics, we learned that an object at rest has potential energy – an amount of currency it has to spend, if it wants to move. When you pull back an arrow, the potential energy flows from your muscles, to the bow, to the string, and then the string pays all that money in one go to propel the arrow – turning potential into kinetic energy in a single motion. Our lives are organized around those same flows of energy, too. We dream, we store energy, and then we trade in potential for kinetic. Ashley Smith has made a career out of translating these flows of energy – and showing others how to do it, too. It’s in her dance studio, turning emotion into movement. It’s in her partnership with her husband, Ryan Smith, the executive chairman and co-founder of Qualtrics. And it’s in her love for the state of Utah, flowing from Ashley’s love for community, downstream, to ownership of the Utah Jazz basketball team with Ryan. How can we better understand the flows of energy in our own life, and in our bodi

Do you know that feeling when you’re cooking, and you’ve got all your ingredients chopped and ready to go, spices measured, oven pre-heated? All that’s left is for you to spin your magic as a cook. In the kitchen, the French call it mise en place, everything in its place. In that same vein, to disrupt yourself, your strategy and support need to be in place. You need to give yourself the room to roam, so to speak, to realize your full potential.  Our guest today is all about creating spaces that let you realize that potential. Chip Conley is the former founder of Joie De Vivre, a boutique hotel chain. He’s worked with AirBnB as a quote unquote modern elder, and now Chip’s turning his attention to the potential of midlife – a word so laden with stigma, he’s building regenerative horse ranches to change that. His new book, "Learning To Love Midlife", is out January 16th.  

Isn’t it frustrating when we feel like a passenger to our own thoughts and actions? In Buddhist thought, we’re supposed to watch our thoughts pass by like clouds in the sky… but that’s the ideal, after all. It’s a hard truth to swallow, that the human mind is much more mysterious than we’d hope it to be. So for today’s episode, we wanted to bring back a conversation I had back in 2020 with the neuroscientist and author Dr. Tara Swart. She’s spent her career tinkering with our brains, as both a doctor and an executive advisor, figuring out how we can harness this mysterious power we have. The machinery of our minds might be unknowable, but the way it adapts is not.  So what can we learn about not being a passenger to our own thoughts, about taking the wheel? I hope you enjoy.