Brain for Business Brain for Business

It is now almost 20 years since the first podcast was launched, and if the available statistics are anything to go by, podcasts are definitely having a moment, with a reputed 2.5 million podcasts listed in Apple podcasts.

When we think about who listens to podcasts, data from the US indicates that podcast listeners are 68% more likely to have a postgraduate degree, and 45% of podcast listeners have a household income over $250,000.

And why do people listen to podcast? Apparently 74% of people listen to podcasts in order to learn new things.

To discuss podcasts in more detail, and in particular consider how leaders can leverage business podcasts to enhance organizational performance, I am delighted to be joined by Professor Jake Waddingham.

Jake Waddingham is an Assistant Professor of Management at McCoy College of Business at Texas State University. Jakes research explores how organizations and entrepreneurs manage stakeholder perceptions and his research has been published in the Journal of Management, Journal of International Business Studies and Business Horizons amongst others.

Jake can be contacted via one of the following sites:
• Google scholar - https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=XFWZXWYAAAAJ
• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwaddingham/

The Business Horizon’s article referenced in the discussion is:Insights on the go: Leveraging business podcasts to enhance organizational performance by Jacob A. Waddingham, Miles A. Zachary, David J. Ketchen Jr. It is available to access here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339444655_Insights_on_the_go_Leveraging_business_podcasts_to_enhance_organizational_performance

The podcast statistics quoted above are from this site: https://nealschaffer.com/podcast-statistics/

The various podcasts mentioned during the discussion include:
• Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman – https://mastersofscale.com/
• The Indicator from Planet Money - https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510325/the-indicator-from-planet-money
• Worklife with Adam Grant – https://adamgrant.net/podcasts/work-life/
• Business Wars with David Brown - https://wondery.com/shows/business-wars/
• Freakonomics with Stephen Dubner – https://freakonomics.com/series/freakonomics-radio/
• Econtalk with Russ Roberts - https://www.econlib.org/econtalk/
• Axios Sports with Kendall Baker – https://www.axios.com/authors/kbaker

We all know that to a certain extent cultures differ between countries. When we travel or work with people from different backgrounds we often gain unexpected insights into different traditions and different ways of doing things. Yet what is “culture”? How can it be understood? And how can leaders strengthen their Cultural Intelligence and that of the organisations they lead?

To dig a bit deeper into these questions I am delighted to be joined on the programme by Professor Eimear Nolan of Trinity Business School.

Eimear Nolan is Assistant Professor of International Business and Director of the Flexible Executive MBA at Trinity Business School in Dublin. She gained her PhD in International Management from the University of Limerick, where she investigated the cultural adjustment and fit of internationally trained doctors working in Ireland.

Prior to joining Trinity Business School Eimear held academic positions in the UK and the USA.

Eimear is a co-country investigator (for Ireland and the UK) on the world renowned GLOBE Project 2020. Her research interests are in expatriate adjustment, cultural intelligence, recruitment and retention strategies, ethics, and the health care sector.

You can find out more about Eimear’s work here:

- Culture Shocked Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/3bD8L2mrm66hcfmxPkmqJG
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eimear-nolan/
- The Globe 2020 Project: https://www.globeproject.com/

While often seen as discrete and distinct phenomena, could it be that creativity and innovation are just variations on the same theme? Absolutely yes, says Dr Zorana Ivčević Pringle, and what is more rather than being purely logical and rational processes, both creativity and innovation are impacted by emotions in ways that many of us fail to recognise. Starting with a deceptively simple definition of creativity, this episode of Brain for Business charts a course from personal creativity and problem solving through to the role of leaders in supporting greater creativity and innovation in the teams and organisations they lead. Along the way, we discuss innovation in a hospital context and the creativity of some of history’s great artists, not to mention the important role played by emotional contagion and leader self-compassion.

Dr Zorana Ivčević Pringle is a Senior Research Scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.
Zorana studies the role of emotion and emotional intelligence in creativity and well-being, as well as how to use the arts (and art-related institutions) to promote emotion and creativity skills.

Zorana has published her research in journals such as Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of Personality, Applied Cognitive Psychology, Creativity Research Journal, Journal of Creative Behavior and others. Her work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, ArtNet, US News, Education Week, Science Daily, El Pais, and others, and she is a regular contributor to Psychology Today and Creativity Post.

You can find out more about Zorana's work at these links:
Personal website: https://www.zorana-ivcevic-pringle.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zorana-ivcevic-pringle/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ZoranaPsych

Whether we like it or not (or recognise it or not!) in recent years we have all been subjected to various conspiracy theories. Whether it is claims that COVID-19 was developed in a lab and released on purpose, or assertions that the world is run by some kind of “Deep State” shadow government, erroneous conspiracy theories have had a significant and dangerous impact. This has been made all the worse by social media which has allowed conspiracy theories to grow and multiply almost exponentially.

To explore this further I am delighted to be joined on the Brain for Business podcast by Professor Henrich Greve.

Henrich Greve is the Rudolf and Valeria Maag Chaired Professor of Entrepreneurship at INSEAD.

Henrich’s research interest is strategic change in organizations, mostly from a learning perspective, and includes examining how networks of organizations change, how organizations and communities are related, and how innovations are made and spread. Henrich has published over 80 articles in journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Management Science.

More recently, in an article published in American Sociological Review with co-authors Hayagreeva Rao, Paul Vicinanza and Echo Yan Zhou, Henrich examined Online Conspiracy Groups: Micro-Bloggers, Bots, and Coronavirus Conspiracy Talk on Twitter.

Henrich’s blog and general reflections are available here: https://www.organizationalmusings.com/
Some general thoughts from Henrich on how conspiracy talk helps people make sense of the world are available here: https://knowledge.insead.edu/strategy/how-conspiracy-talk-helps-people-make-sense-world
The article from American Sociological Review discussed in the podcast can be accessed here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00031224221125937?journalCode=asra

The transition from individual contributor to manager is never easy. New managers need to take responsibility not just for their own performance, but also for that of team. They need to place less emphasis on doing, and much more on the essential skills of leading, influencing and communicating. Core to this is the development of a “leadership mindset”. But what is a leadership mindset? And what steps can managers and their organisations take to better develop the right mindset and perspectives for leadership?

To discuss this I am delighted to be joined on the Brain for Business podcast by Professor Bret Crane.

Bret Crane is an Associate Professor of Leadership at the Jon. M. Huntsman School of Business and the Executive Director of the Stephen R. Covey Leadership Center at Utah State University.

Bret’s research focuses on leadership mindsets. As a respected authority and researcher on topics related to leadership, management, and organizational behavior, Bret has published articles across a variety of journals including Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of World Business, Business & Society, and Human Resource Development Review.
Before joining the faculty at the Huntsman School of Business, he was a Visiting Professor at the George Washington School of Business in Washington DC.

As a consultant, Bret works with organizations to improve their leadership, teams, organizations, and culture. His clients have included American Express, Honda, Lowe’s, General Mills, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Biogen, USAA, and others.

Bret’s USU homepage is accessible here: https://huntsman.usu.edu/directory/crane-bret
Bret’s Business Horizons article - Leadership mindsets: Why new managers fail and what to do about it - is available to access here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0007681321000987

“Human beings live in the realm of the possible as much as they do in the here and now of daily experience. We dream, hope, anticipate and create, exploring news spaces of possibility for ourselves and for others. These possibilities are not always appealing or exciting, however. Having too many options can be disorienting, innovating in unsustainable ways harmful, and spending time in virtual realities compete with less satisfying real encounters. And yet, engaging with the possible is, ultimately, what makes us human. Understanding how, when and why this is the case has been a topic of interest for the human and social sciences since their inception. And their exploration led to a variety of answers.”

So argues our guest on the Brain for Business, Professor Vlad Glaveanu of Dublin City University.

Vlad Glaveanu is Full Professor of psychology in the School of Psychology, Dublin City University, and Professor at the Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology, University of Bergen. He is the founder and president of the Possibility Studies Network (PSN) that brings together academics, researchers and practitioners from centres, laboratories or societies dedicated to the study of human possibility, its antecedents, processes, limitations and consequences.

Vlad’s work focuses on creativity, imagination, culture, collaboration, wonder, possibility, and societal challenges. He has edited a number of books, including the Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture (2016) and the Oxford Creativity Reader (2018), co-edited the Cambridge Handbook of Creativity Across Domains (2017) and the Oxford Handbook of Imagination and Culture (2017).

Separately, he has authored The Possible: A Sociocultural Theory (Oxford University Press, 2020), Creativity: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2021), and Wonder: The Extraordinary Power of an Ordinary Experience (Bloomsbury, 2020), and authored or co-authored more than 200 articles and book chapters in these areas.
In Vlad received the Berlyne Award from the APA Division 10 for outstanding early career contributions to the field of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts.

You can find out more about the Possibility Studies Network at this link: https://possibilitystudies.net/

Some of Vlad’s recent writings on possibility studies are available to access here:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/27538699221127580