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Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 456, featuring an interview with the author of Better Decisions Faster: Unshakable Confidence When You Need It Most, Paul Epstein. In Better Decisions Faster, Paul draws from the green-light wisdom of Fortune 500 CEOs, Olympians, Shark Tank entrepreneurs, world-record holders, Ivy League professors, and Navy SEALs to reveal a revolutionary new system for maximally efficient and confident decision-making. Paul shares how to make better decisions using the Hands Equation, which is Head + Heart. This equation taps into the three most primal and powerful aspects of our humanity to make better, faster decisions.
 
Paul Epstein is a former high-level executive for multiple NFL and NBA teams and the bestselling author of “The Power of Playing Offense” and “Better Decisions Faster”. In 2022, he was named one of SUCCESS magazine’s top thought leaders who get results—alongside Tony Robbins, Brené Brown, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Mel Robbins—and his work has been featured on ESPN, NBC, Fox Business, and in USA Today.
 
In nearly 15 years as a leader in the world of pro sports, Paul helped take NBA teams from the bottom of the league in revenue to the top two, broke every premium sales revenue metric in Super Bowl history while in the NFL’s league office, opened a billion-dollar stadium, and founded the San Francisco 49ers Talent Academy, where he was known as the “Why Coach”.
 
As an award-winning keynote speaker, Paul’s impact continues off stage providing leadership development and culture transformation programs for companies and teams including Amazon, Disney, Johnson & Johnson, NASA, Los Angeles Lakers, and Dallas Cowboys.
 
He’s also the founder of the Win Monday community (an elite personal and professional development network) and host of the Win Monday podcast, where he interviews high-profile guests who reveal their secrets of confidence and work-life mastery.
 
Get Paul’s book here: https://www.paulepsteinspeaks.com/better-decisions-faster-book
 
Check out the Confidence Quiz: https://www.paulepsteinspeaks.com/confidence-quiz
 
Here are some free gifts for you:


Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/OverallApproach
 
McKinsey & BCG winning resume free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf
 
Enjoying this episode? Get access to sample advanced training episodes here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo
 

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 455, featuring an interview with the author of Ping Pong Leadership: 18 Principles to Succeed at Any Table in Business, Sports, and Life, Justin Bookey. In this book, Justin distills lessons from a beloved global sport into 18 actionable and unforgettable “Pong Principles.” Justin has spent decades as a competitive table tennis player, trained with national and world champions, and won medals at the US Open. He is an Emmy-nominated content creator and strategist, and he’s worked with leaders at global companies to accomplish their business goals. As these two worlds overlapped, Justin realized that the core principles he learned while training to compete at the table also apply to success in business and leadership. Ping Pong Leadership is a powerful guide to success at any table.
 
Justin Bookey is a former lawyer, an award-winning marketing strategist, and global ping pong player. He’s had the good fortune of learning from some of the best and brightest in several arenas while working with leaders at Disney, Sony, Honda, Qualcomm, XPRIZE, and more. After practicing communications law for several years in Washington, DC, he transitioned to web content development. He’s earned Emmy nominations for feature documentaries he produced, and Telly, Viddy, and ADDY awards for digital marketing campaigns he spearheaded. 
 
Upon moving to LA, Bookey stepped up his training with Olympian and world-class table tennis coach Wei Wang. His efforts with her and other national/world champions helped him win medals at the US Open and the US national championships. He learned different leadership cultures while studying in India and teaching in Japan, and has played table tennis on seven continents. He grew up in Seattle, Washington, and now lives and works in Santa Monica, California, where he also runs PongFit, a nonprofit that builds fitness and community through ping pong.
 
Get Ping Pong Leadership here: https://rb.gy/wbgkae
 
Here are some free gifts for you:


Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/OverallApproach
 
McKinsey & BCG winning resume free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf
 
Enjoying this episode? Get access to sample advanced training episodes here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo
 

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 454, featuring an interview with the author of Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality, Benjamin Shestakofsky. This book draws on nineteen months of participant-observation research inside a successful Silicon Valley startup, and examines how the company was organized to meet the needs of the venture capital investors who funded it. Investors push startups to scale as quickly as possible to inflate the value of their asset. Benjamin Shestakofsky shows how these demands create organizational problems that managers solve by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by these companies are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. Shestakofsky compellingly argues that we must focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it.
 
Benjamin Shestakofsky is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is affiliated with AI at Wharton and the Center on Digital Culture and Society. He is the author of Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality (on sale March 19, 2024, University of California Press).
 
Shestakofsky’s research centers on the relationship between work, technology, organizations, and political economy in the age of AI.
 
Articles based on his research for Behind the Startup have been awarded the 2021 Star-Nelkin Paper Award from the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology and the 2019 W. Richard Scott Article Award from the ASA's Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work. His research has been supported by the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy and the UC Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. His work has been featured in the Financial Times, Axios, and in a publication of the World Economic Forum.
 
Author website: https://www.benjaminshestakofsky.com/

Book website: Behind the Startup: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520395039/behind-the-startup

X/Twitter: @bshestakofsky
 
Here are some free gifts for you:


Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/OverallApproach
 
McKinsey & BCG winning resume free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf
 
Enjoying this episode? Get access to sample advanced training episodes here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo
 

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 453, featuring an interview with the authors of Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy, Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, and Nancy Levit. This book explains that the system that governs our economy—a winner-take-all economy—is the root cause of these myriad problems. The WTA economy self-selects for aggressive, cutthroat business tactics, which creates a feedback loop that sidelines women. The authors, three legal scholars, call this feedback loop “the triple bind”: if women don’t compete on the same terms as men, they lose; if women do compete on the same terms as men, they’re punished more harshly for their sharp elbows or actual misdeeds; and when women see that they can’t win on the same terms as men, they take themselves out of the game (if they haven’t been pushed out already). With odds like these stacked against them, it’s no wonder women feel like, no matter how hard they work, they can’t get ahead.
 
Naomi Cahn is the Justice Anthony M. Kennedy Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, as well as the Co-Director of the Family Law Center. Cahn is the author or editor of numerous books written for both academic and trade publishers, including Red Families v. Blue Families and Homeward Bound. In 2017, Cahn received the Harry Krause Lifetime Achievement in Family Law Award from the University of Illinois College of Law and in 2024 she was inducted into the Clayton Alumni Hall of Fame. 
 
June Carbone is the Robina Chair of Law, Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota Law School. Previously she has served as the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri at Kansas City; and as the Associate Dean for Professional Development and Presidential Professor of Ethics and the Common Good at Santa Clara University School of Law. She has written From Partners to Parents and co-written Red Families v. Blue Families; Marriage Markets; and Family Law. She is a co-editor of the International Survey of Family Law.
 
Nancy Levit is the Associate Dean for Faculty and holds a Curator’s Professorship at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law. Professor Levit has been voted Outstanding Professor of the Year five times by students and was profiled in Dean Michael Hunter Schwartz’s book, What the Best Law Teachers Do. She has received the N.T. Veatch Award for Distinguished Research and Creative Activity and the Missouri Governor’s Award for Teaching Excellence. She is the author of The Gender Line and co-author of Feminist Legal Theory; The Happy Lawyer; The Good Lawyer; and Jurisprudence—Classical and Contemporary.
 
Get Fair Shake here: https://rb.gy/r2q7rw
 
Here are some free gifts for you:
Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/OverallApproach
 
McKinsey & BCG winning resume free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf
 
Enjoying this episode? Get access to sample advanced training episodes here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 452, featuring an interview with the author of The Problem with Change: And the Essential Nature of Human Performance, Ashley Goodall. Drawing on two decades spent leading HR organizations at Deloitte and Cisco, Ashley Goodall reveals in his book why change is not the same as improvement, and how, by prioritizing team cohesion (instead of reshuffling teams at will), by using real words (rather than corporate-speak), by sharing secrets (not mission statements), by fixing only the things that are truly broken (instead of moving fast and breaking everything in sight, and more, leaders at every level can create the stability that people need to thrive.
 
Ashley Goodall is a leadership expert who has spent his career exploring large organizations from the inside, most recently as an executive at Cisco. He is the co-author of Nine Lies About Work, which was selected as the best management book of 2019 by Strategy + Business and as one of Amazon’s best business and leadership books of 2019. Prior to Cisco, he spent fourteen years at Deloitte as a consultant and as the Chief Learning Officer for Leadership and Professional development.
 
Get The Problem with Change here: https://rb.gy/sa4fe2
 
Here are some free gifts for you:


Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/OverallApproach
 
McKinsey & BCG winning resume free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf
 
Enjoying this episode? Get access to sample advanced training episodes here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 451, featuring an interview with an award-winning marketer, TEDx speaker and authority in harnessing the instinctive mind to accelerate brand and business growth,  founder and CEO of Triggers, Leslie Zane. Leslie is the author of The Power of Instinct: The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life. In her book, Leslie shows that to grow a brand, business, or even a social movement, traditional persuasion tactics fall short. Instead, you must connect to the instinctive mind. And to do this, you need to understand the science of consumer choice and employ techniques that work with a person's brain, not against it.
 
Leslie Zane is an award-winning marketer, TEDx speaker and the foremost authority in harnessing the instinctive mind to accelerate brand and business growth.   
 
In her early career at P&G and Johnson & Johnson, Zane championed the position that what people say is unreliable and that telegraphic cues are more powerful than direct communication, but her unconventional thinking was often disregarded. In 1995, she founded Triggers®, the first brand consulting firm rooted in behavioral science, where she continued to champion the primacy of the instinctive mind in brand decisions.
 
With her groundbreaking discoveries in boosting salience, the Brand Connectome® and Growth Triggers®, Zane and her team have delivered over $20 billion in incremental revenue for Fortune 100 clients. 
 
Today Triggers’ strategies are evident in diverse fields from consumer-packaged goods, health care and insurance to fighting anti-Semitism, showcasing its versatility. 
 
An alumna of Yale, Harvard Business School and Bain & Company, Zane is a recipient of the Congressional Women of Distinction and the Ogilvy Award. In 2021, she coined the term “Covid-stasis” forecasting the pandemic’s lasting psychological and behavioral effects.  Zane has been published in prestigious publications including Knowledge@Wharton, Harvard Business Review, World Economic Forum, Newsweek and Ad Age. Zane is a board member of El Centro Hispano, the leading non-profit empowering Hispanic immigrants with skills to thrive in the United States.
 
Get The Power of Instinct here: https://rb.gy/l3ofdo
 
Here are some free gifts for you:
Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/OverallApproach
 
McKinsey & BCG winning resume free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf
 
Enjoying this episode? Get access to sample advanced training episodes here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo