People Managing People

AI promises efficiency, but the real question is what teams do with the time they get back. In this conversation from Transform in Las Vegas, Oyster’s Erin Goodey joins David Rice to unpack how global HR teams are balancing automation with human connection—especially when managing distributed workforces across countries, compliance requirements, and sensitive employee situations.

Erin shares how Oyster is using AI to eliminate repet...

Most leaders think they’re navigating another wave of disruption. Sara Loncka argues we’re in something far more unsettling: discontinuity. The old assumptions don’t just need tweaking—they’ve stopped working altogether. Past experience, the thing leaders have spent entire careers building confidence around, is suddenly less reliable as a guide for the future. And that’s creating a strange kind of friction: teams keep pushing harde...

Kyle Holm has spent 25 years advising companies on compensation, and right now he’s watching the logic of corporate hierarchy break in real time. Not because executives suddenly discovered organizational theory, but because AI is collapsing the distance between capability and influence. The old model—slow progression through management layers, credential accumulation, carefully staged promotions—is running into a technology that re...

Most companies say they’re building community. What they often mean is: they launched a Slack channel no one reads, hosted an event with a neon sign and a DJ, watched people post about it on Instagram, and called the whole thing a success. Meanwhile, the people in the room never actually connected.

In this episode, David sits down with Jessie Jacob, Culture First Community Manager at Culture Amp, to unpack why relational atrophy is ...

AI is speeding up people decisions at exactly the moment those decisions require more care, more context, and frankly, more humility. In this episode, Matt Poepsel from The Predictive Index joins David Rice at Transform to unpack the growing gap between what AI can do and what organizations actually understand about the people data they’re feeding into it. Because while everyone is obsessed with automation, agents, and productivity...

Only 10% of senior leaders admit to using AI. Which raises an awkward question: if leadership isn’t really using the tools, who exactly is teaching everyone else how to work with them? Increasingly, the answer is peers. In this conversation from Transform, David Rice sits down with returning guest Kamaria Scott to unpack why AI adoption is becoming less of a top-down transformation initiative and more of a global peer-learning expe...

Most leaders are making AI decisions in the dark—restructuring roles, cutting headcount, and chasing use cases without understanding how work actually gets done. Not the org chart version. The real, messy, task-level reality. And that’s a problem, because when you don’t understand what creates value, automation becomes guesswork dressed up as strategy.

Victoria Pelletier joins the show to challenge the prevailing top-down approach. ...

Everything is urgent—until it isn’t. When every ticket is a fire, teams don’t move faster; they burn out. In this episode, Barbara Nicholas (CEO at Polly) borrows a lesson from search and rescue: urgency only matters when it actually changes outcomes. Most white-collar work isn’t life or death, but we’ve built cultures that pretend it is—and people are paying for it in cognitive overload and constant distraction.

Barbara walks throu...

AI in HR is finally moving out of the pitch deck and into the messy reality of day-to-day operations. In this conversation, Tim Fisher sits down with Josh Rod from HiBob to unpack what’s actually changing—and what’s still just noise. The headline? Most organizations aren’t chasing some agentic, fully automated future. They’re trying to make today’s workflows less painful, faster, and marginally more effective.

But underneath that pr...

You don’t need to be using AI constantly to be hooked on it—you just need to feel relief when you do. That’s the uncomfortable premise at the heart of this conversation with psychologist and conflict expert Dr. David Zierk. AI doesn’t just give you answers; it removes uncertainty. And in doing so, it quietly rewires how you think, learn, and connect.

What starts as convenience can quickly become dependency. Leaders, in particular, a...

AI is supposed to free people up for “higher-value work.” Fine. But what, exactly, is that work? In this episode, David Rice talks with cyberpsychology researcher and psychotherapist Dr. Rachel Wood about the part of AI adoption most organizations keep skimming past: the human cost of automating too much, too quickly, without a real philosophy for what should remain deeply, stubbornly human.

Their conversation cuts through the usual...

Leaders love to frame AI transformation as a technology problem. It’s cleaner that way—tools, roadmaps, implementation plans. But what Anouk Brack lays out here is less flattering and far more consequential: this is a biological stress test, and most leadership teams are quietly failing it.

Under constant uncertainty and pressure, your nervous system defaults to survival mode. That means the very capabilities you’re counting on—stra...

Your leadership team doesn’t have a strategy problem—it has an execution problem disguised as one. The offsite went great, the vision is crisp, and the slides look expensive. But somewhere between “bold initiative” and “Tuesday morning,” nobody translated strategy into what people should actually do. That gap? That’s where most organizations quietly stall.

Tom Healy argues that L&D is the missing link leaders keep ignoring. Not ...

When turnover is low, leadership loves to call it stability. Jay Caldwell makes the more uncomfortable point: sometimes it is just fear with better optics. In this conversation, he and David unpack why “quiet staying” can become a serious organizational liability in an AI era—especially when people are still hitting goals, still showing up, and still slowly draining the place of experimentation, risk-taking, and fresh thinking.

They...

If your organization looks successful on paper but feels strangely tense in practice, there’s a good chance fear—not excellence—is quietly running the show. In this episode, David Rice talks with Brave Together author Chris Deaver about how fear disguises itself in high-performing workplaces: polished presentations, perfect metrics, and meetings where nobody laughs—and nobody challenges anything either.

Their conversation explores w...

Businesses are pouring millions into generative AI—chatbots, copilots, “agents”—while quietly ignoring the other half of the AI stack that’s been delivering measurable value for decades. Predictive AI doesn’t write poetry. It predicts who’s going to churn, which transaction is fraud, and which customer is worth contacting. It calculates probabilities and helps you act on them at scale. Not glamorous. Just effective.

In this conversa...

You were told AI would clear your calendar. Instead, you’re answering 800 chats a day and wondering what, exactly, you accomplished. Productivity is up. So is the volume. You 10x your output and somehow inherit 10x the work. Welcome to the hamster wheel.

In this episode, Eliza Jackson, COO at ButcherBox, and I unpack the real transformation behind AI at work. It’s not about learning a new tool. It’s about unlearning how you work. It...

Most employees are using about 1% of what AI can actually do. Not because they’re lazy. Not because they lack access. But because no one has shown them how to think with it. Meanwhile, somewhere in Silicon Valley, a 23-year-old is running a startup like they’ve got 28 PhDs sitting beside them—for a penny a minute. That gap isn’t theoretical. It’s operational. And it’s widening by the hour.

In this conversation, Kevin Surace and I di...

So yeah—your dashboards look great. Your team’s shipping faster, summarizing more, “getting leverage” with AI… and all the while you might be quietly trading away the one asset you can’t buy back on a subscription plan: human judgment.

In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Vivienne Ming—neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and an “AI realist” who has zero patience for utopian hype or Skynet fan fiction. Vivienne lays out a clean fork in the r...