Breakfast Leadership Show
The Breakfast Leadership Show, hosted by leadership consultant and burnout expert Michael D. Levitt, is a globally ranked leadership podcast exploring how executives build stronger organizations, better leadership systems, and healthier workplace cultures. Each episode features conversations with founders, executives, and industry experts on topics such as leadership operating systems, leadership decision making, executive leadership consulting, organizational leadership systems, and leadership burnout prevention. Listeners gain practical insight into how leadership teams improve performance, reduce burnout, and design the structures that drive sustainable growth. The show covers leadership strategy, workplace culture, decision clarity for leadership teams, leadership infrastructure, and the systems that help organizations operate at a higher level. With actionable lessons drawn from real executive experience, the Breakfast Leadership Show helps leaders move beyond management tactics and focus on building high-performance leadership systems that scale. Interested in being a guest on the show? Visit: https://BreakfastLeadership.com/Podcast Note: Some episodes may include sponsored guest appearances. In those cases, guests may have provided financial compensation to participate in the podcast.
Episodes
AI is moving faster than any technology wave most executives have lived through, and marketing sits at the front of it. Michael D. Levitt talks with Michael Cucchi, Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Hydrolix, a real-time analytics platform built for internet scale. Both worked in IT through the dot-com era and Y2K, and they use that history to put the current AI moment in perspective.
Key Takeaways
- The martech stack...
Ganzorig Ulziibayar spent twenty years as a CEO, starting as a staff member and rising through the ranks before founding his own business. He is now chairman of a financial group made up of three insurance companies, an asset manager and an investment bank, and he is the author of Strategy as Attitude. He arrived at that title after watching a great many brilliant people fail.
What he found was that failure had nothing to do with pe...
Episode Overview
Michael Levitt sits down with Ilene Fischer, a former chemical engineer turned organizational change consultant who spent ten years working alongside Peter Senge at Innovation Associates and eight years with Tom Peters. Ilene's new book, Innovation Ecosystems: A Dynamic Blueprint for Organizational Success and Engagement, publishes October 22nd through Hachette, with a foreword written by Peter Senge himsel...
Summary
Mike Sullivan is co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at OneDigital, an insurance and financial services organization with roughly 6,000 people across the United States and Canada. He is also co-author of the bestselling book Workforce Intelligence. He came on to talk about what three years of deploying AI inside his own company actually taught him, and the answer is not what most executives are being sold.
The turnin...
GUEST BIO
Stephanie Houser is a former Fortune 500 executive turned consultant, entrepreneur, and speaker. After 12 years in corporate leadership, she now runs a consulting practice focused on process, risk, product, and technology development for growing businesses. She also operates a self-publishing company that helps writers publish their books, and she is building an asynchronous ed tech tutoring platform. Stephanie speaks and...
Dr. Santarvis Brown, educator, pastor, author, and Chief Education Officer at ProQ, joins Michael D. Levitt on the Breakfast Leadership Show for a powerful conversation about leading with purpose. With over 20 years in education and 15 years in pastoral ministry, Dr. Brown brings academic rigor, spiritual grounding, and practical business insight to every leadership conversation.
The Leader You Have to Lead First: Yourself
In his boo...
Most books about life after a career transition are written after the author has figured it all out. Geoff Curtis wrote his while still inside the uncertainty. That intentional choice is at the heart of "Embracing Your Own Purgatory," and it is what makes his perspective so rare and so honest.
After 30 years in biotech and pharmaceutical communications, Geoff exited his company and found himself in the disorienting in-between that s...
What You Will Learn
In this episode, you will discover how the most powerful experiences are engineered around a single shared emotional trigger that lives in both the audience and the brand simultaneously. You will learn why most corporate and museum experiences entertain without transforming, and what business leaders must do differently.
Guest Bio Bob Rogers is the founder of BRC Imagination Arts, a globally recognized experienc...
Kathy Solberg Book Discussion
Michael welcomed Kathy Solberg to discuss her background and book. Kathy shared her career journey from academia to running a leadership program and starting her own consulting company, Common Unity Consulting. She mentioned her upcoming book "Practical Tools for Workplace Transformation" releasing September 10th. The conversation touched on how Kathy's diverse experiences across academia, consulting, ...
Barry Rosen has spent decades at Interaction Associates, a firm he joined in 1984 after being drawn to their focus on making meetings more effective. He began his career training teams at Ford, Dow, and DuPont during the early era of quality initiatives, teaching engineers and project managers how to facilitate meetings and navigate interpersonal dynamics. He went on to lead the training division at Interaction Associates for a dec...
Episode Summary Employee engagement and mental health are often treated as separate line items on an HR dashboard, but they are actually two sides of the same coin. With global engagement falling to just one in five employees and stress levels rising, CEOs must recognize that disengagement is frequently a symptom of unaddressed psychological strain. In this episode, we dive into why traditional "wellness perks" aren't enough and ho...
Episode Summary
In this episode of the Breakfast Leadership Show, host Michael D. Levitt sits down with Brent Stewart, owner of Stewart Law Offices, a personal injury firm serving North and South Carolina that has been in practice for thirty one years. Brent shares what drew him to personal injury law, how his firm handles tractor trailer and trucking accident cases, and why the emotional weight of closing a case can rival the weig...
Steve McKinney spent the first thirteen years of his career in the athletic footwear industry, where he oversaw a five thousand person Reebok factory producing 1.2 million pairs of shoes a month and later led global product development for Adidas. In 2001 he founded McKinney Consulting in Seoul, South Korea, an executive search and leadership consulting firm. Steve is a master coach and an early graduate of proactive agility as a l...
Episode Overview
In this episode, Michael D. Levitt speaks with Melissa Robinson-Winemiller about the role of empathy in modern leadership and why it is no longer optional.
Drawing from Melissa’s research and Michael’s real-world leadership experience, this conversation reframes empathy from a soft skill into a measurable leadership strategy that directly impacts retention, performance, and organizational outcomes.
The ...
The "Deep Dive" into global expansion and AI adoption, featuring insights from Dr. Shan Nair on the Breakfast Leadership Show, centers on the idea that operational infrastructure, rather than strategy, is the true bedrock of successful scaling,,.
The Core Thesis: "Automating Failure Faster"The primary risk for modern organizations is not the failure to adopt technology, but the decision to automate broken processes,. Dr. Nair, a f...
Episode Overview
In this episode, Michael D. Levitt speaks with Antoniette Roze, speaker agent, podcast host, and voice strategist, about what separates average speakers from those who actually create transformation.
This is not about stage presence.
It is about using your voice as a leadership system to drive action, clarity, and change.
The Core Problem: Most Speakers Deliver Information, Not Impact
The majority of speakers ...
In this episode of the Breakfast Leadership Show, Michael D. Levitt speaks with Shan Nair about the realities of international business expansion, global compliance, AI adoption, and operational infrastructure.
Dr. Nair shares his remarkable journey from nuclear physicist to international accounting and compliance expert, helping technology companies expand into global markets while staying legally compliant and operationally effec...
In this episode of the Breakfast Leadership Show, Michael D. Levitt sits down with Chris Miller to discuss how entrepreneurs and business owners can use legal tax strategies to preserve wealth and strengthen long-term financial stability.
Chris shares insights from decades of experience helping clients navigate tax mitigation, financial planning, and wealth protection during uncertain economic conditions. The conversation explores ...
In this episode of the Breakfast Leadership Show, I sit down with Tom Vorselen, founder of The Study Coach, to tackle a topic that impacts every leader, professional, and lifelong learner: why we were never actually taught how to learn. We unpack the hidden flaws in traditional education, why so many high-achievers struggle with certifications and new skills, and what science really says about improving memory and retention.
Tom sh...
Breakfast Leadership Network is proud to introduce the Breakfast Leadership AI Advisory Service, a new offering built to help executives and organizations translate artificial intelligence from a buzzword into a working advantage.
The service pairs proven leadership frameworks with practical AI implementation guidance, helping leaders identify where automation and intelligent tools can strengthen decision making, reduce operational...
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