Activating Greatness: A Leadership Podcast

Alec McChesney
  • 4.9 (11)
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Welcome to Activating Greatness — the show where we dig into what it really takes to lead with purpose, inspire performance, and create lasting impact. I’m your host, Alec McChesney, and every episode, we sit down with extraordinary leaders, thinkers, and changemakers who are unlocking potential in themselves, their teams, and their organizations. Here, we talk about the real stuff — leadership that drives culture, strategy that creates momentum, and the mindset that turns good intentions into game-changing results. Because greatness isn’t a title — it’s a choice. It’s something you activate every single day. Thank you for listening, for showing up, and for being part of a community of leaders who refuse to settle for “good enough.

  1. 5d ago

    It Can Be Done: Seth Ingall on Execution, Attitude, and Why Greatness Is a Journey

    Seth Ingall spent 38 years at GEICO, rising to chief legal officer and chief claims officer, before joining Crash Champions as chief legal officer. He joins Alec McChesney to unpack why a mediocre process executed well beats a brilliant process executed poorly, how to hire for attitude, and what it takes to scale from eight body shops to 650 without losing the discipline that got you there.

  2. Sep 24

    Autopsy Without Blame: David Esposito on how great teams actually debrief failure

    Most leadership content is pump-up material. David Esposito wanted to talk about the other half — what happens when things go wrong, and what a company's response to failure actually reveals about it. He's earned the standing: a West Point graduate who led an infantry platoon with the 101st Airborne, then built a career in life sciences that includes two successful exits and, by his own accounting, two or three companies taken into bankruptcy.    In this episode of Activating Greatness, host Alec McChesney sits down with David, President and CEO of ONL Therapeutics, to get practical about failure. David walks through the after action review he carried over from the Army and the phrase his team uses now: autopsy without blame. Put it on the whiteboard. No finger pointing. Get to the facts, find the learning, course correct. He's clear that it's rarely one meeting — the real issues surface the next morning, once people have slept on it.    They also get into why he's revised the old Army line about there being no bad soldiers, only bad leaders; why what you tolerate becomes your culture; how to tell whether someone is genuinely coachable or just saying what gets them through the conversation; and the reality that the person who thrives at three people around a table often isn't the person who thrives at 300. David is candid about what it feels like to take a company over the cliff, why you have to own it, and why it doesn't have to define you.

  3. Sep 21

    We're Not Hiring Salespeople: Chad Foster on recruiting entrepreneurs into financial services

    Chad Foster grew up in Honey Grove, Texas — population 1,500 — running cattle, selling purple hull peas, working fireworks stands, and umpiring on weekends. His father rarely told him what to do. He just pointed, and let Chad think it through. The lesson that stuck: a good name takes generations to build and one decision to lose.    In this episode of Activating Greatness, host Alec McChesney sits down with Chad, Regional Director at Modern Woodmen of America, to talk about recruiting, developing, and retaining people in a relationship business. Chad's approach cuts hard against how his industry usually recruits. Most firms sell the upside — the income, the freedom, the community impact. Chad leads with the opposite: this career is not for most people, and it's definitely not for everybody. He isn't hiring salespeople. He's hiring people who want to be entrepreneurs, and he'd rather someone self-select out in week one than wash out in year two.    They get into how Chad's wife Casey pushed him to get what was "right here in my head" onto paper before the agency could scale, why he built managing director and senior advisor roles so that quitting means disappointing five or six people instead of one, and how the standard actually holds across California, Arizona, and Texas — not because Chad repeats it, but because his managers do. He also shares the advice from Modern Woodmen CEO Jerry Lyphout that reshaped how he leads: let the situation play out, be the thermostat rather than the thermometer, and let people who are better than you shine.

  4. Sep 17

    Find Work, Win Work, Deliver Work: John Worden on the KPI system behind Javara's commercial engine

    John Worden came up as an athlete, carried that into sales, and now builds commercial teams the way a coach builds a roster: clear roles, a scoreboard everyone can see, and a standard nobody is exempt from. As Chief Commercial Officer at Javara, he's spent 25 years in clinical research figuring out how to make competition sharpen a team instead of splintering it.    In this episode of Activating Greatness, host Alec McChesney and John dig into competition as a leadership engine. John explains why he won't hire the lone wolf who scores the most goals but shares nothing, how he and his team spent three to four months breaking the business into three buckets — find work, win work, deliver work — and then built roles and leading indicators around each one. He walks through the top-down, bottom-up test for whether your metrics are actually sound, and what it means when the two don't meet in the middle.    They also get into PAID, the standard John sets with every team he leads: passion, accountability, ingenuity, and dedication. He shares the story of two reps with identical targets and opposite methods — one a pure volume machine, one entirely custom — who both hit the number and then made each other better. And he makes the case that leaders should stop treating meetings as a substitute for leadership: if there's no decision, no alignment, and no action coming out of it, you don't need to be there.

  5. Sep 14

    The Magnifying Glass: Jenny Gattari on finding the strengths your people can't see in themselves

    Jenny Gattari has spent more than 30 years moving across manufacturing, R&D, supply chain, and commercial strategy — and she says almost none of it happened because she planned it. She turned down the Pfizer CentreOne role that became her favorite job. Someone else had to see it in her first.    In this episode of Activating Greatness, host Alec McChesney sits down with Jenny, Global Business Development Lead at Pfizer CentreOne, to talk about what she calls being the magnifying glass: the leader's job of spotting the strengths people dismiss in themselves because those strengths come too naturally to notice. Jenny shares the story of a clinician handed to her because the resource was free, and what happened a year later when that same person presented the operating plan better than Jenny could have.    They get into why it's easy to get people to follow you and hard to develop people who lead, how to separate strengths from job titles, why she gives assignments instead of feedback when someone resists a new direction, and how she uses team meetings to spotlight work rather than assign it. The conversation also turns to sales culture: why revenue is a team game, why compensation has to reflect that or the whole thing collapses into infighting, and why Jenny's best ideas have always come from a network of people who think nothing like he

  6. Sep 8

    Climb Bigger Mountains: How Tom Ulbrich led Goodwill of Western New York from crisis to hypergrowth.

    Tom Ulbrich became President and CEO of Goodwill of Western New York on May 1, 2020 — and inherited eleven closed stores, roughly 45 days of cash, a beloved outgoing leader, and a major funding cut on day four. He was handed the keys with a pair of barbecue tongs.    In this episode of Activating Greatness, host Alec McChesney sits down with Tom to unpack how he took an organization built for stability and evolved it — not replaced it — into something entrepreneurial, nimble, and comfortable with ambiguity. Tom explains why "we've always done it this way" was never the enemy, why his first attempt at driving change insulted 25-year employees, and how backing up the bus and reframing change as evolution unlocked years of growth.    They also get into the discipline of building a functional org chart before you place people in it, why accountability without coaching is a leadership failure rather than an employee one, and the succession conversation Tom is having about himself right now: the organization needs a builder next, not a disruptor, and he's willing to say out loud that it isn't him.

  7. Aug 31

    60% Effort, 60% Revenue: Jim Brown on the disengagement math leaders are missing

    Jim Brown has spent 31 years in boardrooms and C-suites as a trusted advisor, and his new novel The Imperfect CEO: Making the Climb to Organizational Health is the book he wrote because the same frustrations kept surfacing with every leader he worked with. In this episode, Jim and Alec McChesney get into why the playbook that worked twenty years ago has stopped working, how to make the financial case for organizational health to a board that thinks it's a $20K HR initiative, and why the four elements of the Ascent model — collaborative culture, leadership accountability, strategic momentum, and talent magnetism — map directly to the scalability, execution, growth, and people risks hiding in most businesses. Plus: what a company did to go from highest-cost to lowest-cost producer in twelve months, why WD-40 never laid off a single person in 25 years, and Jim's case that Gen Z refusing to "suck it up" is the best thing to happen to the workplace.

  8. Aug 27

    Culture Has No Value If You Don't Live It: Mike Ansay on 80 years of family business

    When Mike Ansay graduated college, his father shook his hand, said "good luck, I hope you make it," and handed him a business that was one filing cabinet and one telephone. Roughly $11,000 in commission then; north of $60 million and a top-75 national ranking now. In this episode, the second-generation CEO walks Alec McChesney through the "give to get" philosophy he inherited, the mechanics that make it real — Bike With Mike, the Wheel of Wow, monthly calls to every employee recognized for service, four paid days a year for nonprofit work — and why he budgets three full years to integrate a culture after an acquisition instead of the three months his industry expects. Also in this conversation: why relevance is a CEO's number one challenge, how he used AI to bring his late father's voice into the company's 80th anniversary, and his blunt take on the founder's pull toward micromanagement.

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About

Welcome to Activating Greatness — the show where we dig into what it really takes to lead with purpose, inspire performance, and create lasting impact. I’m your host, Alec McChesney, and every episode, we sit down with extraordinary leaders, thinkers, and changemakers who are unlocking potential in themselves, their teams, and their organizations. Here, we talk about the real stuff — leadership that drives culture, strategy that creates momentum, and the mindset that turns good intentions into game-changing results. Because greatness isn’t a title — it’s a choice. It’s something you activate every single day. Thank you for listening, for showing up, and for being part of a community of leaders who refuse to settle for “good enough.

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