The Strategy Skills Podcast: Strategy | Leadership | Critical Thinking | Problem-Solving

Robert E. Siegel, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor, venture capitalist, and former executive, shares the leadership lessons he learned working with Intel’s legendary CEO, Andy Grove, and other amazing leaders, and how to thrive in today’s era of conflicting pressures.

In this in-depth conversation, we explore the concept of the systems leader, someone who can innovate while del...

L. David Marquet, former nuclear submarine commander and author of Leadership Is Language, shares a precise, operational approach to leadership, one that replaces command-and-control with a language designed for clarity, ownership, and adaptability. Drawing on his experience turning the USS Santa Fe from one of the worst-performing submarines in the fleet to one of the best, David shows how seemingly small shifts in la...

Sarah Elk, Senior Partner at Bain & Company and global leader of its operating model work, brings a clear, pragmatic lens to why so many large-scale change efforts fail to stick. Drawing on decades of advising multinational organizations, she diagnoses the structural and behavioral traps that cause transformations to stall, and shares the disciplines that make change durable.

Elk emphasizes that transfor...

John Horn, professor of economics at Washington University's Olin Business School and former McKinsey strategist, shares a disciplined framework for understanding competitive behavior by applying game theory and structured simulations. In this episode, he explains how companies can elevate competitor analysis from basic intelligence gathering to actionable strategic insight.

Horn begins by d...

For this episode, let's revisit one of Strategy Skills classics, where we interviewed Kate Smaje, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company and Global Leader of McKinsey Digital.

In this episode, Kate offers a clear-eyed and disciplined perspective on what it takes for organizations to succeed in digital transformation. Drawing from deep client work across industries, she outlines a practical, re...

For this episode, let's revisit one of Strategy Skills classics, where we discuss when a consultant must dissent and how it should be done.

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E...

Rachelle Robinett, founder of Pharmakon Supernatural and educator in holistic health, offers a clear, science-aware framework for supporting energy, focus, and stress regulation, without defaulting to pharmaceuticals or overstimulation. In this episode, she explores how plant-based medicine, nutrition, and daily practices can be woven into practical, long-term routines that support resilience and cognitive clarity.

Vanessa Druskat, organizational psychologist and professor at the University of New Hampshire, discusses team emotional intelligence (EI) as a predictor of sustained performance. Building on her foundational work with Daniel Goleman, Druskat focuses not on individual EQ, but on the group-level norms and practices that distinguish effective teams, particularly in complex, high-stakes environments.

Druskat...

Margaret Moore, faculty member at Harvard Medical School and former biotech CEO, brings decades of experience at the intersection of science, strategy, and human development to this conversation. In this episode, she unpacks The Science of Leadership, the forthcoming book she co-authored after reviewing hundreds of meta-analyses and large-scale studies, ultimately synthesizing leadership science into a framework of nin...

In this conversation with Bree Groff, author of "Today Was Fun" and who has advised executives at Microsoft, Google, Target, and Hilton through periods of organizational change, shares specific observations about leadership blind spots in large corporations and offers practical frameworks for creating workplace cultures that drive both performance and employee satisfaction.

Key Insights:

For this episode, let's revisit a Strategy Skills classic where we discuss one important thing every consulting case study must produce.

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Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/OverallApproach

Quang Pham went from being a 10-year-old refugee airlifted out of Vietnam to becoming a Marine pilot, and the CEO of a NASDAQ-listed biotech company. In this conversation, he shares the exact lessons that guided each transition.

Key insight:

• On decision-making: “As a young officer, we were taught to make decisions… there’s n...
  

Rich Hagberg, often referred to as “Silicon Valley’s CEO Whisperer, psychologist and co-author of Founders Keepers, has advised over 1,000 executives and founders. In this conversation, he outlines why most startup leaders fail, and what the data reveals about those who succeed. Some key insights include:

“Founders, overwhelmingly, are visionary evangelists… but they’re not particularly good at execution.”...

Michael Chad Hoeppner, CEO of GK Training and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, brings a deeply practical lens to one of the most undervalued professional skills: spoken communication. With roots in professional acting and over two decades coaching executives, Hoeppner challenges conventional wisdom, arguing that most communication advice is either vague (“slow down”) or abstract (“just be confident”), and...

James Kimmel, Jr., lawyer, Yale psychiatry lecturer, and author of The Science of Revenge, joins us in the Strategy Skills podcast to explore the neuroscience and behavioral dynamics of revenge. Drawing on law, psychiatry, and over two decades of research, Kimmel offers a sobering view: revenge is not a form of justice, it’s a “pleasure-seeking behavior” that operates like an addiction, fueled by unresolved pain.

In this episode, I spoke with two highly respected global brand leaders, Katherine Melchior Ray and Nataly Kelly, whose experience spans executive roles at Nike, Louis Vuitton, HubSpot, Zappi, and more.

Our discussion centered on their latest book, Brand Global, Adapt Local, but more broadly, we explored the evolving demands of building and sustaining global brands in a world defined by cultural complexity, rapid tech...

Leslie Grandy, a seasoned executive who has led global product teams at Apple, Amazon, Best Buy, and T-Mobile, shares a deeply practical perspective on how leaders can activate creativity across functions, not just in design or strategy.

Drawing from her early years in the film industry and later executive roles in technology, Grandy explains how she developed three capabilities that proved critical in h...

In this wide-ranging and direct conversation, Bill George, former Medtronic CEO and Harvard Business School professor, offers a disciplined framework for leading in conditions of persistent volatility. Drawing from decades of leadership experience and research, George emphasizes that leadership today is no longer about managing processes, it is about confronting ambiguity, enabling experimentation, and sustaining purpo...

Central banks in major economies have repeatedly misread inflation trends by relying on models that omit a fundamental economic lever: the money supply. In this episode, economist Steve Hanke offers a detailed critique of prevailing post-Keynesian frameworks and the policy missteps that have followed. Drawing on historical and current data, Hanke underscores the predictive power of the quantity theory of money, a model...