David Burkus Presents

David Burkus
  • 4.9 (11)
  • Management
  • Updated Weekly

Helping leaders and teams do their best work ever. David Burkus is one of the world’s leading business thinkers and the author of five best-selling books about business and leadership. Episodes of the show include insights, strategies, tips and takeaways from David as well as in-depth conversations with other world renown experts to contribute ideas, opinions, and insights to help you level of your own leadership.

  1. 2d ago

    Why Tesla's Robot Factory Failed — And What It Means For AI Replacing Jobs

    In 2017, Tesla set out to build a car factory so automated that people would barely be needed. The target was five thousand Model 3s a week. Across the entire third quarter, the line produced 260 cars. It remains the best-documented attempt we have at replacing people with machines at scale, which makes it the right place to start if you're worried about AI replacing jobs. The popular version of this story is a redemption arc. Musk owns the mistake, tears out the machines, puts people back on the line, and production recovers. All of that happened. It's also the least transferable lesson in the story, because the fix only worked for a reason most organizations won't have next time: the skill was still in the building. What I study is where teams actually build judgment, and the answer is almost never the training program. It's the routine, repetitive work — exactly the work that's easiest to automate. A five-page paper from 1983 explained why that's a trap, and Ford recently ran into it with AI, after years of quietly losing veteran engineers to ordinary attrition. This video covers what broke at Tesla, the research that explains it, what Ford faced next, and two questions to ask before you automate anything on your team. // NEWSLETTER Want to build your best team ever? Join 25,000+ leaders who receive these insights in my free newsletter: https://davidburkus.com/podcast // CHAPTERS 0:00 Everyone's worried about the wrong AI risk 2:44 Tesla & The Alien Dreadnought 6:57 The Ironies Of Automation 11:19 Automate Last 17:05 Ford & When The Bill Comes Due // LEADERSHIP LESSONS - Automation doesn't shrink the human role — it concentrates it into the exceptions nobody designed for - The danger of AI isn't losing the job, it's losing the place people learned to do it - Ask what someone learns from a task before asking whether a tool can do it - Treat routine work as tuition, not overhead — it's where pattern recognition gets built - A process can be un-automated in a season; a talent pipeline has to be rebuilt one person at a time - Expertise rarely leaves by decision. It leaves at a normal rate, and no dashboard reports it. If you're rolling out AI on your team, planning around retirements, or wondering where your next experts will come from, this isn't a car story. It's a warning with a checklist attached. Comment below: what routine work taught you the most early in your career? // SPEAKING Like what you heard? Learn more or find out how to bring me to your company or event: https://davidburkus.com/keynote-speaker/ // ABOUT DAVID One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David’s forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration. An organizational psychologist and professor at Columbia University, Dr. David Burkus is the bestselling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world’s top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS Mornings. David now works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David’s keynotes aren’t just entertaining and enlightening—they’re evidence-based and immensely practical, offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately. //CONNECT LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davidburkus Facebook: http://www.FB.com/DrDavidBurkus Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DavidBurkus

  2. Sep 28

    AI Can't Do All The Managers' Work

    AI might make management more efficient. But efficiency isn’t the same thing as leadership. In this video, I break down four parts of management I would never delegate to AI and why keeping them human matters more as artificial intelligence becomes embedded in the workplace. AI can summarize meetings, organize information, draft emails, analyze data, and take a lot of administrative work off your plate. That’s a good thing. But there are some responsibilities managers shouldn’t automate away. 00:00 AI can do many things...but not everything. 00:10 Meet Dr. David Burkus 01:05 Don’t Let AI Decide “What” 02:28 Don’t Let AI Judge Your Team 04:44 Don’t Let AI Outsource The Conversation 06:11 Don’t Let AI Create Meaning // NEWSLETTER Want to build your best team ever? Join 25,000+ leaders who receive these insights in my free newsletter: https://davidburkus.com/youtube // SPEAKING Like what you heard? Learn more or find out how to bring me to your company or event: https://davidburkus.com/keynote-speaker/ // ABOUT DAVID One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David’s forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration. An organizational psychologist and professor at Columbia University, Dr. David Burkus is the bestselling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world’s top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS Mornings. David now works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David’s keynotes aren’t just entertaining and enlightening—they’re evidence-based and immensely practical, offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately. //CONNECT LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davidburkus Facebook: http://www.FB.com/DrDavidBurkus Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DavidBurkus

  3. Sep 21

    How To Get A New Team To Work Together Fast

    New team collaboration breaks for a reason that looks like something else. You inherited a team, or built one, or a reorg assembled one for you, and on paper it's the kind of group you'd point to in a leadership meeting. Six weeks in, the work is slower than it was when everyone was working alone. I've told myself the same thing you're telling yourself: they just need time. It's a reasonable read, and it's how most of us were taught teams work. It's also the most expensive assumption a leader can make, because time isn't what fixes this — time is just the slowest way to deliver the two things that actually do. Every fast-forming team I've worked with had the same advantage, and it wasn't hours. Their people knew who knew what, and they knew how each other operated. Aviation research from the 1980s stumbled into the first half of this by accident, while studying something else entirely. Research on surgical teams named both halves in the title of the paper. So this is the practical version: why capable teams stall anyway, the two deficits underneath it, and the specific moves that close them in a week instead of six months — the role conversation most leaders think they've already had, the operating manual each person writes for themselves, the shared work that builds more understanding than any dinner will, and the briefing that sets the norms before the first real deadline tests them. // CHAPTERS 0:00 Introduction 1:07 New Teams Don't Have A Time Problem 5:00 The Two Conditions for Click 6:16 Get Uncomfortably Specific About Roles 7:43 Hand Out Your Manual Of Me 9:07 Build Empathy Through The Work 11:30 Run The Pre-Flight Briefing // NEWSLETTER Want to build your best team ever? Join 25,000+ leaders who receive these insights in my free newsletter: https://davidburkus.com/podcast // LEADERSHIP LESSONS -A new team's problem isn't tenure — it's that nobody yet knows who knows what, or how anyone else operates -Clarity isn't the org chart, it's decision rights: what each person can decide without asking you -Most friction diagnosed as a personality conflict is two people who each believed something was theirs -Empathy on a team isn't friendship — it's knowing enough about how someone works to disagree with them efficiently -Build the relationship through shared work, then reflect on it; the output isn't the point, watching each other think is -Launch the team, not just the project — and write the norms down, because a norm that lives only in a conversation is a memory of a meeting // SPEAKING Like what you heard? Learn more or find out how to bring me to your company or event: https://davidburkus.com/keynote-speaker/ // ABOUT DAVID One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David’s forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration. An organizational psychologist and professor at Columbia University, Dr. David Burkus is the bestselling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world’s top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS Mornings. David now works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David’s keynotes aren’t just entertaining and enlightening—they’re evidence-based and immensely practical, offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately. //CONNECT LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davidburkus Facebook: http://www.FB.com/DrDavidBurkus Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DavidBurkus

  4. Sep 14

    9 Apologies Every Leader Will Have To Make

    Making mistakes is part of leadership. Knowing how to own them and apologize for them is a leadership skill most people never learn. In this video, I break down nine (yes, nine!) apologies every leader will eventually have to make. From owning a bad decision or broken promise to apologizing for not listening, waiting too long to act, or handling a difficult situation poorly. We’ll also cover the harder apologies: taking responsibility for your team’s mistakes, addressing painful decisions like layoffs and reorganizations, and even apologizing on behalf of an entire organization. More importantly, I’ll show you what makes an effective apology actually work. Research on leadership, psychological safety, trust, and corporate apologies reveals that the best apologies don’t explain away responsibility. They acknowledge what happened, own what needs to be owned, and make clear what changes next. You’re going to get things wrong. The question is whether your response rebuilds trust...or gives people another reason to lose it. // NEWSLETTER Want to build your best team ever? Join 25,000+ leaders who receive these insights in my free newsletter: https://davidburkus.com/podcast // SPEAKING Like what you heard? Learn more or find out how to bring me to your company or event: https://davidburkus.com/keynote-speaker/ // ABOUT DAVID One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David’s forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration. An organizational psychologist and professor at Columbia University, Dr. David Burkus is the bestselling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world’s top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS Mornings. David now works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David’s keynotes aren’t just entertaining and enlightening—they’re evidence-based and immensely practical, offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately. //CONNECT LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davidburkus Facebook: http://www.FB.com/DrDavidBurkus Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DavidBurkus

  5. Sep 8

    The Best Leaders Aren't More Efficient, They're More Human with Caroline Webb

    The obvious response to AI eating more of the workday is to get more efficient — learn the tools, move faster, automate what you can. Caroline Webb, who's spent twenty-five years coaching leaders using cognitive and behavioral science, argues something closer to the opposite: the tasks AI still can't touch are the ones that actually decide whether you're a good leader, and most of us have never been taught to get better at them on purpose. Specificity over generality, humanity of technicality is what makes her five-step method for how to give feedback so effective. Not "good job." Not "be more proactive." A named observation, a named impact, and an invitation to hear the other side before you coach. It's the difference between feedback people shrug off and feedback people actually use. Deliberate wisdom, intrinsic inspiration, reasoned resilience — the three principles her new book is built around — are really one argument in three parts: as the machines get faster, the leaders who matter most will be the ones who get more deliberately human. Find out more about Caroline at https://carolinewebb.co // NEWSLETTER Want to build your best team ever? Join 25,000+ leaders who receive these insights in my free newsletter: https://davidburkus.com/podcast // LEADERSHIP LESSONS -The best leaders aren't getting faster in the AI era — they're getting more human, doubling down on judgment, empathy, and trust. -Team complaining isn't an attitude problem — it's a sign the leader hasn't redirected attention to what's controllable. -Feedback isn't about telling people what to fix. It's about being specific enough that they can act on it. -Motivation isn't built with bonuses — it's built with competence and connection. -Resilience isn't pushing through — it's making the situation feel manageable and meaningful again. // SPEAKING Like what you heard? Learn more or find out how to bring me to your company or event: https://davidburkus.com/keynote-speaker/ // ABOUT DAVID One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David’s forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration. An organizational psychologist and professor at Columbia University, Dr. David Burkus is the bestselling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world’s top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS Mornings. David now works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David’s keynotes aren’t just entertaining and enlightening—they’re evidence-based and immensely practical, offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately. //CONNECT LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davidburkus Facebook: http://www.FB.com/DrDavidBurkus Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DavidBurkus

  6. Aug 31

    Leading After A Layoff

    The people who lost their jobs are gone but that doesn’t mean the layoff is over for the people who stayed. Research shows that employees who survive layoffs often experience anxiety, guilt, lower morale, reduced productivity, and a loss of trust in leadership. And trying to rush everyone back to “business as usual” can make things worse. I’ll walk you through how managers can rebuild trust through honest communication and consistency, redistribute workloads without creating burnout, recognize employees who are carrying additional responsibilities, and give the team something meaningful to work toward. If you’re managing a team through layoffs or organizational change, your people don’t expect you to have every answer. But they do need communication, honesty, consistency, and a leader they can count on. Chapters: 00:00 There was a layoff. Now what? 00:39 Meet Dr. David Burkus 00:54 Day One After A Layoff 02:05 Be Upfront From The Get-Go 03:16 Rebuild Trust Through Consistency 04:30 Be Smart About Delegation 07:31 Give The Team Something To Work Toward // NEWSLETTER Want to build your best team ever? Join 25,000+ leaders who receive these insights in my free newsletter: https://davidburkus.com/podcast // SPEAKING Like what you heard? Learn more or find out how to bring me to your company or event: https://davidburkus.com/keynote-speaker/ // ABOUT DAVID One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David’s forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration. An organizational psychologist and professor at Columbia University, Dr. David Burkus is the bestselling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world’s top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS Mornings. David now works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David’s keynotes aren’t just entertaining and enlightening—they’re evidence-based and immensely practical, offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately. //CONNECT LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davidburkus Facebook: http://www.FB.com/DrDavidBurkus Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DavidBurkus

  7. Aug 24

    Why Pixar Deleted Toy Story 2 Twice

    In 1998, Pixar lost two months of Toy Story 2 to a stray delete command. A dozen people gave up a weekend to claw it back. Ten weeks later, four colleagues watched what they'd rescued and threw away more of it than the computer had. The interesting part isn't the accident. It's that the verdict came from people with no power to enforce it — and that's the reason it worked. Feedback research is uncomfortable here: across six hundred measurements, criticism made performance worse more than a third of the time, and what predicted the damage wasn't harshness. It was where the note landed. This is a case study in how one studio engineered its way out of that problem — the two rules that keep a hard note from becoming a referendum on a person, why stripping authority out of the room raised the quality of what got said, and what it cost the crew to learn it the expensive way. If you lead a team where someone can already see what's wrong and keeps saying the eighty-percent version of it, the fix isn't asking for more honesty. It's lowering what honesty costs. // NEWSLETTER Want to build your best team ever? Join 25,000+ leaders who receive these insights in my free newsletter: https://davidburkus.com/youtube // LEADERSHIP LESSONS -Separate the note from the power to enforce it — the moment criticism arrives with a chain attached, people defend their standing instead of the work -Ask for the diagnosis, not the cure — where someone got lost is a fact about the work, while what they'd do instead is a verdict on your judgment -Declare the bad first version expected, so finding problems stops reading as an indictment of whoever made it -Watch where feedback lands rather than how it sounds — identical words can arrive as information or as a referendum on competence -Treat candor as a price you lower with structure, not a character trait you hire for -Build the room that surfaces the problem in March, because hearing it in December is courage, and courage is expensive // SPEAKING Like what you heard? Learn more or find out how to bring me to your company or event: https://davidburkus.com/keynote-speaker/ // ABOUT DAVID One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David’s forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration. An organizational psychologist and professor at Columbia University, Dr. David Burkus is the bestselling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world’s top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS Mornings. A former business school professor, David now works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David’s keynotes aren’t just entertaining and enlightening—they’re evidence-based and immensely practical, offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately. //CONNECT LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davidburkus Facebook: http://www.FB.com/DrDavidBurkus Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DavidBurkus

  8. Aug 17

    Netflix Learned The Cost Of Silence

    What happens when everyone on your team thinks the boss is wrong...but nobody says anything? That’s exactly what happened at Netflix. In 2011, co-founder Reed Hastings made a decision that cost the company customers, millions of dollars, and a massive drop in stock price. The surprising part? Dozens of Netflix leaders suspected the decision would fail before it happened. They just stayed silent. In this video, I break down the psychology of organizational silence, why smart employees don’t speak up even when leaders genuinely want feedback, and how Netflix turned one of its biggest failures into a leadership practice called “farming for dissent.” More importantly, I’ll show you how to apply the same idea to your own team. Chapters: 00:00 You're boss just pitched a bad idea...what do you do? 00:17 What Netflix Did In 2011 01:22 The Mistake That Started It All 04:24 Research Calls This "Organizational Silence" 05:13 Reed Hastings' "Farming For Dissent" 06:45 The Lesson From The Mistake 07:21 Reed Hastings' "Socializing An Idea" 08:41 What I Hope For You // NEWSLETTER Want to build your best team ever? Join 25,000+ leaders who receive these insights in my free newsletter: https://davidburkus.com/youtube // SPEAKING Like what you heard? Learn more or find out how to bring me to your company or event: https://davidburkus.com/keynote-speaker/ // ABOUT DAVID One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David’s forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration. An organizational psychologist and professor at Columbia University, Dr. David Burkus is the bestselling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world’s top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS Mornings. A former business school professor, David now works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David’s keynotes aren’t just entertaining and enlightening—they’re evidence-based and immensely practical, offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately. //CONNECT LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davidburkus Facebook: http://www.FB.com/DrDavidBurkus Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DavidBurkus

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4.9
out of 5
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About

Helping leaders and teams do their best work ever. David Burkus is one of the world’s leading business thinkers and the author of five best-selling books about business and leadership. Episodes of the show include insights, strategies, tips and takeaways from David as well as in-depth conversations with other world renown experts to contribute ideas, opinions, and insights to help you level of your own leadership.

Information

  • Creator
    David Burkus
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    231
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © David Burkus
  • Show Website
    David Burkus Presents

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