Work From The Inside Out Tammy Gooler Loeb

Odd fact: I was the sports editor on my high school newspaper for a time. One assignment I had was to interview and write an article about a classmate who was emerging as a top boxer, headed for the Junior Golden Gloves competition. Fast forward 45 years later, the subject of said article, , tells me he almost skipped the interview because he felt unsure about doing it. I’ll admit that I felt intimidated because Chris seemed like a pretty tough guy and we hung out in very different crowds. The article won an honorable mention at the Columbia Scholastic Journalism Conference and it gave Chris a confidence boost in ways neither of us could ever have imagined. Gathering at our 45th high school reunion this past October, I learned that Chris was going to be installed in our hometown of Bay Shore, NY’s Hall of Fame for his achievements as a highly innovative and accomplished plaintiff attorney. After high school, Chris worked as a carpenter and continued to pursue boxing, but stopped competing in his early 20s. Working in New York City, he walked by Hunter College regularly. Chris decided to take a class, did well and decided to enroll as a degree granting student, discovering capabilities he never realized he had. Law school followed immediately afterward. Chris started his law career as a corporate defense attorney representing the interests of big business. Struck by the imbalance of power between corporations and the individuals harmed by them, he left to become a plaintiff attorney. A founding partner of , Chris is known for multidistrict mass torts and class actions involving drug injury, toxic injury and personal injury. His practice also handles product liability, property damage, antitrust, third-party payer litigation, and consumer, insurance, and securities fraud. Chris has led complex litigations in the U.S. representing plaintiffs and achieving landmark settlements in cases including the 3M Combat Arms Earplug Litigation, National Prescription Opiate Litigation, NFL Players’ Concussion Litigation, Volkswagen “Clean Diesel” Litigation, Vioxx Litigation, and Syngenta AG MIR 162 Corn Litigation. In this week’s  learn more about Chris’s journey: Chris is regularly quoted in the New York Times, Wall St Journal, Washington Post, LA Times, USA Today, AP, Bloomberg, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN, and ESPN. Whether working on a class action involving thousands of people against a multinational conglomerate or an individual case protecting one client’s rights, Chris fights with the same passion and conviction.   Learn more and connect with Chris here:   

is a Clinical Associate Professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. She teaches a course, Personal Leadership Insights, and serves as the Director of Kellogg’s Women's Leadership Program. Ellen is an independent board director on three company boards and runs her own leadership advisory consulting, speaking, and coaching business.​ Growing up as the fifth of six siblings, Ellen recalled dinner table conversations where her father engaged them in brainstorming about his entrepreneurial challenges. Ellen loved those discussions, saying they influenced her interest in business. Her parents always told her and her siblings that they could do anything with an education, hard work, and a vision. At the same time, Ellen witnessed and experienced the financial instability of her father’s business pursuits. This was not discussed openly, as her parents maintained a never-ever-quit philosophy. While Ellen cherished her parents’ positive belief in herself and her siblings, she recognized the value of bringing more transparency into the conversation with her own children.​ Ellen spent 25 years at Fortune 500 companies in top brand management posts within PepsiCo, Royal Caribbean, and Whirlpool Corporation. In her recent award-winning book, , Ellen offers her vast experience to help women understand and navigate internal and external obstacles to create the careers and lives they desire. ​In this week’s  learn more about Ellen’s journey: Ellen has shared her insights on leadership, careers, advancing women, and inclusion through her writing and speaking in Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business Insider, Washington Post, Bloomberg, and Kellogg Insight. In 2019, she delivered a TEDx talk, . Learn more and connect with Ellen here: 

Gena Scurry has dedicated her career to fostering human connection. She is a self-proclaimed introvert, and while she loves people, her alone time sustains her. Gena says she is quirky, and it takes a lot of effort to be social and be herself.  Gena’s formative years differed from most of the other kids in her Texas neighborhood. Crossing the border daily from her home, she attended a Montessori school in Mexico. Later, her thirst for adventure led her to take a year off from college and travel the world, camping and rock climbing. Gena loved rock climbing and traveling and was not sure what else she wanted to do with her life, so she worked hard outside of her classes to save money to support her trips. After completing her degree in Spanish, Gena embarked on her entrepreneurial journey with just $5 and a bicycle, teaching adults to speak Spanish. It started with one person asking her to teach them the language, and her business grew over the next 17 years, with a team of employees and contracts with large companies, which gave her steady revenue. Yet she felt terrified about income most of the time. Gena also got married and started a family during those years.  Nine years ago, Gena went through a major life transition, a divorce. She began meditating and focused on the question,  “What’s next in my life?” The answer: “Build a game.” It felt right to her. Eventually, Gena created , a card deck-based game designed to create deeper connections between people. The game challenges players to ask deeper questions on a variety of topics, integrating random verbs to enhance listening skills.  In this week’s learn more about Gena’s journey: Gena hosts monthly potlucks in her home and invites everyone to join in, embodying her mission to reconnect humanity with each game played. Originally designed as a bilingual board game, Gena tested it for years and determined it would be best to release an English version as a card deck initially. Learn more and connect with Gena here: 

Ludmila N. Praslova, Ph.D., SHRM-SCP, is the author of . She is a Professor of Psychology and the founding Director of Graduate Programs in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at Vanguard University of Southern California. Born in Moscow, Ludmila grew up in a blue collar area where textile mills and farming were predominant, yet, she shared, there was a strange mix of high culture blended in with visits to museums and trips to the theater. She enjoyed reading college text books as a child and writing poetry. Her parents pressed her to use her hands to sew, garden, and play a musical instrument, all of which felt impossible to her.   Ludmila graduated from the Russian State University of Humanities with a 5-year specialist degree in organizational management processes and human resources. She chose this focus  because it was a compromise between something she enjoyed studying and a path that could lead to stable employment. Ludmila was still figuring out her career and did not plan to work in education—she was focused on organizational practice. She went on to build and lead successful intercultural relations programs in global organizations.  Ludmila’s areas of expertise include organizational culture assessment and change, workplace justice and civility, productivity and well-being, and training and training evaluation. She is the editor of the book . Her current consulting focuses on supporting organizations in creating systemic inclusion informed by an understanding of neurodiversity.  In this week’s learn more about Ludmila’s journey: Ludmila is a member of the Thinkers 50 Radar Class of 2024 – a global group of management thinkers, recognized as most likely to make an impact on the world. As a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, she is the first person to have published in Harvard Business Review from an autistic perspective. She also writes regularly for Fast Company. Learn more and connect with Ludmila here:  

Ehab Bandar is a sought-after product design consultant for startups and fintech. What's amazing about his career is that he's managed to do it while being both an outsider and an insider in remarkably distinct ways. Ehab attributes credit to his early life as an immigrant to the US from Lebanon at the age of six. His family moved yearly until he was in seventh grade. Ehab was a shy kid with a stutter, yet he was also a natural observer and listener, taking in different cultural norms and personalities. He recalls endearing himself to fit in with new people by throwing a joke into random conversations, noting how fortunate he was to be warmly received as he started the year at each new school. Ehab describes these characteristics as shy self-reliance while being quietly engaged. Ehab had to invent his own career to become a design leader himself. Educated as a city planner, Ehab started his career as one of the youngest technology managers at Wells Fargo. He then left corporate and went on his own to advise and lead design at fast-growing startups in Silicon Valley, digital agencies, and corporate giants.  Ehab uses city planning tools and curiosity to hone his craft in the tech world. He explains how a quarterly print newsletter he started in grad school out of boredom led him to work in the dot-com boom and how being an outsider as an immigrant from Lebanon made the act of observation and discovery a daily habit.  Today, he's the founder of , an experience-led design agency that partners with product teams to build human-centered designs at scale. They merge hands-on product knowledge, customer insights, and experience strategy to transform ideas into a tangible product vision.   In this week’s learn more about Ehab’s journey: Ehab conquered his stuttering by joining the radio station in college as a news reporter. He has helped dozens of organizations, including Charles Schwab, Wells Fargo, Bank of the West, Boost Mobile, Intuit, and Airbnb, design new digital products and successfully launch them into the market. Learn more and connect with Ehab here:     - by Lorne M. Buchman  

makes it easier for us to communicate at work. He helps experts talk to non-experts, teams talk to executives, and much more. Chris's practical methods are used in organizations like Google and NATO and have appeared in the Harvard Business Review. Helping people retain and apply what he teaches led Chris to write the book . He has also authored multiple books on communication and training that have been translated into 15 languages. Chris grew up in what he describes as a traditional nuclear family in the UK. As our podcast interview unfolded, he shared that his parents worked hard to provide sufficient food for their family. As a child, Chris was unaware of how careful they were to ensure there was enough food. He thought all parents put dates on their canned beans. At age 7, he was awarded a scholarship to attend a private school. Chris saw the distinction between his life and that of his classmates. Adding to his experience of differences, he was elevated two grade levels to a class with students who were 9-years-old.  Chris always did well in school without much effort. Then his perspective changed. At 15, he was struck by a car, sustaining serious injuries. After that, he took nothing for granted. Attending university, he majored in aeronautical engineering, and worked 2 to 3 jobs to support himself. Throughout his engineering career, Chris leveraged his problem solving skills by applying them to challenges wherever he saw a need. He was especially drawn towards translating communication between technical and business teams. Chris’s ability to translate and communicate is the common thread in his work today. When he left full-time employment to start his own business, Chris moved into communication, bridging the gap between technical and business teams and between experts and non-experts. In this week’s  learn more about Chris’s journey: Chris attended flight school with the intention to join the Royal Air Force, but he realized he did not like being told what to do. When he was a university student, he also competed in target rifle shooting, an expensive sport, which he supported by his multiple jobs. Learn more and connect with Chris here: