Meikles & Dimes

193: How To Make Work Meaningful | Tamara Myles, Positive Psychology Instructor at the University of Pennsylvania

Tamara Myles is an instructor of Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and is an accomplished consultant, trainer, and international speaker. She is a leading global authority on meaning at work and she is the author of the book, "Meaningful Work.”

Tamara's work has been featured in FastCompany, Business Insider, and Forbes, among other publications.

In this episode we discuss the following:

• Given that we spend one third of our time at work, it’s hard to feel like life is meaningful if work isn’t.
• Sometimes it just requires a mental shift to make work meaningful. For example, a data center worker realized she wasn’t just connecting wires, she was connecting people, and even saving lives given all the industries that depended on the data center.
• When a young guest at the Ritz Carlton left their stuffed animal behind, the workers didn’t just return the stuffed animal. They also took pictures of the stuffed animal enjoying an extra-long vacation at the resort.
• To make work meaningful, strive for community, contribution, and challenge. And then try to help others experience meaning as well.

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192: Former Google Executive Jenny Wood | Shamelessly Go After What You Want

Jenny Wood is a former Google executive who ran a large operations team that helped drive billions of advertising revenue a year. And she also created one of the largest career development programs in Google's history. Jenny is also the author of the book, Wild Courage.

In this episode we discuss the following:

• I love Jenny’s advice to be shameless: have the courage to stand behind our efforts and abilities. And go after what we want.
• What a great example of shamelessness when Jenny chased her husband-to-be off the subway to give him her business card.
• In the workplace, it’s hard to be noticed if we don’t stand out. But many of us default to not self-promoting enough. Yet as a manager at Google, Jenny loved getting a shameless Monday morning email from a small number of her direct reports who told her what they had accomplished and what they were going to do next. 

 

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191: Harvard Professor Iris Bohnet on Fairness

Iris Bohnet is a Professor of Business and Government and the co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. As a behavioral economist, she combines insights from economics and psychology to improve decision-making in organizations and society, often with a gender or cross-cultural perspective. She is the author of the award-winning book, What Works and co-author of the new book Make Work Fair.

In this episode we discuss the following:

• If we’re concerned about fairness, it cannot be a program. It has to be a way of doing things. For example, DEI trainings are programs. And the research shows that they don’t change behavior.
• When Astrid Linder collected data on car accidents, she learned that women tended to have worse injuries than men because the crash test dummies that had been used to inform the cars’ design had been made to represent a prototypical male. Designing crash test dummies that are more representative of women is an example of doing things that make life more fair.

 

190: Sundays With Tozer Episode 21 | Tozer Helps Me Get Recruited & We Discuss Oppenheimer

In this episode we discuss how Tozer helped me get recruited out of high school, and we discuss the movie Oppenheimer, given that Tozer spent more than a decade at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

189: Sundays with Tozer Episode 20 | Tozer and Zairrick Wadsworth

In this episode of Sundays with Tozer, we talk with Zairrick Wadsworth, one of the great wrestlers from Idaho, and one of the great coaches in Idaho, who likely would have never attended college if not for Tozer. 

188: Sabina Nawaz, former Microsoft Executive | How Pressure, Not Power, Corrupts

Sabina Nawaz is a former executive at Microsoft and a coach for C-level executives at Fortune 500 corporations. During her fourteen-years at Microsoft, she led the company’s executive development efforts for over 11,000 managers, advising Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer directly. She has written for, and been featured in, Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, NBC, and Nasdaq. She is also the author of the book, You're the Boss.

In this episode we discuss the following:

• As a leader, it’s important to use your “shut up” muscle. Don’t over participate, don’t over speak. Instead, let others speak first. For Sabina she tries to be the third, or later, to speak.
• Don’t treat delegation like an on/off switch, but rather treat it like a dial which is calibrated to people’s readiness and ability.
• Our behavior as leaders gets amplified on the way down, and peoples’ responses get muted on the way up. But by reacting to feedback kindly, and consistently asking for specific feedback, we can amplify the volume of the responses coming back to us

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187: Teach People How to Treat You | Melody Wilding, Professor & Executive Coach

Melody Wilding is an award-winning executive coach, keynote speaker, and author of Managing Up. Named one of Insider’s “most innovative career coaches,” her clients include CEOs and managers at Google, Amazon, Walmart and JPMorgan Chase, among others.

A human behavior professor at Hunter College In New York City, Melody’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and dozens of other media outlets. She is also a contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Psychology Today and Forbes.

In this episode we discuss the following:

• We’re always teaching people how to treat us.
• We may be prone to over-apologize. But rather than over-apologize, we can simply say, “Thank you for your patience.”
• Rather than prefacing a comment with, “I don’t know if this is a good idea,” we can say, “I believe we should try X.”
• When setting boundaries, rather than just saying, “No” to a request, we can say, “I’m happy to make an exception this time.”
• Rather than always trying to get to the point, we can share anecdotes and stories that will be much more memorable.
• To make sure we’re working on things that our managers value, we can ask questions like, “What do you wish you had more time to work on?” or “What could I do to make your job easier right now?”

 

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186: Harvard Business School Professor Rebecca Henderson | Focus, Embrace Change, & Treat People Well

Rebecca Henderson is a professor at Harvard Business School and is 1 of only 25 professors at Harvard given the distinction of University Professor, which is the highest honor a professor can receive at Harvard. She is the author of the book Reimagining Capitalism which explores how the private sector can help build a more sustainable economy.

Rebecca is also a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a fellow of both the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also sits on the boards of several companies, including AMGEN.

Rebecca earned a degree in mechanical engineering from MIT and a PhD in business economics from Harvard.

In this episode we discuss the following:

• I love the story Rebecca shared about the book contract she had lined up. She was going to write a book about how we are prone to take on too much stuff, and then she had to cancel the contract because she had taken on too much stuff.
• Finding the right balance between staying focused and embracing change is a never-ending struggle. Rebecca worked with Nokia, Kodak, and Motorola. All of them were at the cutting edge of technology and poised to dominate the cell phone and camera market. But none could adapt quickly enough to the changing technology.
• I thought it was fascinating to hear how some firms got superior results to other firms, even though they had the same inputs. The economists hated the finding because the research showed that leadership and management practices could make such a difference. The best firms took care of their people.

Here are two of Rebecca's papers:

Innovation in the 21st Century: Architectural Change, Purpose, and the Challenges of Our Time

Moral Firms?

And here is a link to her book website for Reimagining Capitalism. 

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185: Jon Schmidt of The Piano Guys | Turning His Life Over To God

Jon Schmidt is an American piano composer and member of the musical group The Piano Guys, which has more than 2 billion views on YouTube, and more than 7 million subscribers.

In this episode we discuss the following:

• Jon didn’t want to be a musician. But he and his wife adopted the principle of, “Turn your life over to God, and he’ll make more out of it than you’d ever be able to.” And it was that decision that guided Jon back to music.
• When I asked Jon what he’d say to his kids if they didn’t believe in God, I loved Jon’s response…that he doesn’t think God gets uptight about how we think of him. So whether people believe in an embodied God or just a higher power, it’s the intention to try to make the most of our lives that matters.

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184: Author Elaine Lin Hering on Unlearning Silence

Elaine Lin Hering is a speaker, facilitator, and writer, and she is the author of the USA Today Bestselling book Unlearning Silence. Elaine has taught executive education programs at Harvard, Dartmouth, Tufts, Cal Berkeley, and UCLA and served as a Lecturer at Harvard Law School. And her clients include American Express, Capital One, Google, IBM, Merck, Nike, Salesforce, Shell, Pixar, and the Red Cross. Elaine has B.A.s in Political Science and Music from Cal Berkeley and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

In this episode we discuss the following:

• Silence is a learned behavior. We’re endlessly influenced by culture and society, so it’s important to question assumptions, and ask ourselves: In what ways do we self-censor and in what ways do we silence others?
• Just as there is no one best time zone, there is no one best way to speak, to look, to act.
• We should always seek out data, but remember that it’s not definitive.

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