Leapfrogging the Headlines with Soren Kaplan

Soren Kaplan
  • 4.3 (3)
  • Business
  • Updated Weekly

Every week, headlines scroll by. Smart leaders stop and ask: What does this mean for how we lead, compete, and grow? Leapfrogging the Headlines takes one story from the week's news and reframes it through the lens of strategy, innovation, leadership, and business model thinking — in under 10 minutes. Hosted by Soren Kaplan, Wall Street Journal bestselling author who has advised leaders at Disney, Medtronic, Cisco, Visa, and PepsiCo on innovation, AI, and strategy. New episodes weekly. No ads. Subscribe wherever you listen.

  1. 5d ago

    The Words That Changed Microsoft's Culture

    Stanford researchers gave two groups the same crime statistics. One group heard crime described as a beast, the other as a virus. The beast group wanted more police and the virus group wanted social reform. Almost nobody noticed that a single word had driven their view. In this episode, Soren Kaplan connects that research to a failed snack called McCrackin that became a culture-killing nickname at a Fortune 500 company, and to Satya Nadella's decision to replace Microsoft's know-it-all culture with a learn-it-all culture by changing the language leaders used. Leaders will walk away with three moves: review the default labels your team already uses, name the mindset you want to build, and make sure the experience behind your words is real. Further reading: Stanford metaphor study, https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/803162 View original on Inc. Magazine: https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/satya-nadella-transformed-microsofts-culture-by-changing-2-words-leaders-used/91408690 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfrogging-the-headlines-with-soren-kaplan/id1896880297 Learn more about Soren's work at sorenkaplan.com.

  2. Oct 2

    Ant Colonies Know The Secret to Great Teamwork. 80 Percent of Your Failed Projects Do the Opposite.

    Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science gave ants mazes of varying difficulty. On the hard mazes, larger groups of ants were far more efficient than smaller ones. Human teams usually do the opposite as they scale. In this episode, Soren Kaplan breaks down why coordination, not headcount, explains the gap: ants operate on shared rules with information flowing freely through the colony, while human teams add competing scorecards and priorities with every new person. He connects it to AchieveIt's finding that 79 percent of failed strategic initiatives trace back to poor collaboration. Leaders will walk away with three moves: align scorecards around one shared metric, create a single live source of truth for every team involved, and shrink thick process manuals down to a few usable principles. Further reading: Popular Science, https://www.popsci.com/environment/ants-efficiency-group/ View original on Inc. Magazine: https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/ant-colonies-get-better-as-groups-grow-business-teams-can-too-with-3-changes/91407468 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfrogging-the-headlines-with-soren-kaplan/id1896880297 Learn more about Soren's work at sorenkaplan.com.

  3. Sep 29

    Nearly 80 Percent of Dentists Are in Pain. Your Company May Have the Same Symptoms.

    About 78 percent of dentists live with chronic pain, mostly in the neck, shoulders, and lower back. Dentistry has known how to fix it since the 1960s. The injury rate has barely moved anyway. In this episode, Soren Kaplan breaks down why the fix requires three separate parties to say yes at once, the dentist, the patient, and the equipment dealer, and why real estate's $418 million commission settlement shows the exact same stalemate playing out in a completely different industry. Leaders will walk away with three moves: identify every required yes before redesigning anything, change the channel's economics for whoever benefits from the status quo, and coordinate the switch instead of forcing it through. View original on Inc. Magazine: https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/dentists-keep-getting-hurt-because-fixing-the-problem-requires-3-yeses/91405804 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfrogging-the-headlines-with-soren-kaplan/id1896880297 Learn more about Soren's work at sorenkaplan.com.

  4. Sep 25

    700 AI Agents Just Proved a Very Human Point

    An independent investigation found that roughly 700 of 1,200 OpenAI agents breached an outside company called Hugging Face after being given a single benchmark to pass. No one told them to attack anything. The system just chased the goal past every limit its designers assumed. In this episode, Soren Kaplan connects that incident to a classic AI reward-hacking example (a boat-racing agent that looped checkpoints forever instead of finishing the race) and to a real legal department that became a bigger obstacle to innovation than any competitor by doing its stated job too well. Leaders will walk away with three moves: name your guardrails before setting a target, reward people for staying inside the limits, and put a human in the loop before anything hard to undo happens. Original investigation: METR, https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/ View original on Inc. Magazine: https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/rogue-agents-are-the-latest-example-of-an-old-management-failure/91405539 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfrogging-the-headlines-with-soren-kaplan/id1896880297 Learn more about Soren's work at sorenkaplan.com.

  5. Sep 22

    One Person With AI Just Outperformed a Two-Person Team

    A new Harvard and Wharton study found that one person using AI matched the output of a two-person team without it. The implications go straight to the org chart. Harvard and Wharton researchers just ran an experiment inside Procter and Gamble that should worry anyone still drawing org charts the old way. They randomly assigned 791 P&G professionals to tackle real product innovation challenges. Some worked alone, some in teams, with AI or without. The result: one person using AI produced work equal in quality to a two-person team without it. That's the headline. Here's what should actually keep you up at night. AI erased functional silos between R&D and sales. People who knew almost nothing about product development reached the same level as experienced teams once they had AI in the room. And people working alone with AI reported more motivation and less anxiety than people working in teams without it. I've spent my career helping leaders design high performing organizations. Most of the companies I work with never designed their structure on purpose. It evolved. Departments formed around who happened to hold what knowledge. R&D held expertise sales never had access to. Marketing held customer insight finance never saw. For decades, that division of labor made sense. The P&G study suggests it doesn't anymore. When AI expands what any one person can discover and do, a lot of the coordination machinery built to connect specialists stops earning its keep. A product team can build its own business case without a finance specialist in the room. It can run its own competitive analysis without a dedicated strategist. Most organizations haven't touched their structure to reflect any of this. So here's where I'd start, if I were rebuilding a team today. First, build teams around goals instead of functions. Organize people around a specific customer outcome or business problem, not a job title. Staff the team based on what the goal actually requires, and check you're not duplicating capability AI already covers. Second, staff teams with human judgment. Let AI handle the research, the analysis, the idea generation. Put people where experience actually matters: reading context and making the final call. Third, move functions out of departments and into networks. Stop treating expertise as something that lives inside one team. Let specialists join the goal-based teams that actually need their judgment, when they need it. The org chart that built your advantage for the last decade might be exactly what's holding back the next one. That's the reframe so you can leapfrog the headlines, your leadership, and your business. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one, and find me at sorenkaplan.com. Show Notes Subscribe and listen on: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfrogging-the-headlines-with-soren-kaplan/id1896880297 View original on Inc. Magazine: https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/your-org-chart-was-built-for-a-different-era-research-shows-3-ways-leaders-should-redesign-it/91402218

  6. Sep 17

    Bill Gates Just Warned There's 'No Plan' for Artificial Intelligence. The Plan Isn't the Hard Part.

    Bill Gates just published a nearly six-thousand-word essay on how unprepared the world is for artificial intelligence. His conclusion: no one is addressing the challenge adequately, and no sufficient plan exists for the risks ahead. He points to threats to jobs, safety, and general well-being. He also says AI can degrade critical thinking, the exact skill people need most to navigate what's coming. I've argued something close to this for years in my work on Experiential Intelligence — as AI proliferates, human judgment becomes the most valuable skill in the room, not the least. Gates' solutions all require cooperation: taxing AI systems, reserving jobs for humans, building international regulation between the US and China. Here's the problem. We're already terrible at exactly that kind of cooperation, even on threats we've seen coming for decades. Look at the Colorado River. Scientists warned for decades it was overallocated and shrinking. The evidence was public the whole time. Lake Mead and Lake Powell just hit their lowest levels on record anyway. Seven states spent three years negotiating new rules, missed a February deadline, and in August the federal government imposed cuts on its own because the states couldn't agree. It's the same pattern everywhere you look. Social Security's trust fund is projected to fall short in 2032 — Washington has known the numbers for decades, but every fix requires someone to pay more or get less. The national debt keeps climbing with no real action. Antibiotic resistance could cause 39 million deaths by 2050, and it requires hospitals, drugmakers, and farms to move together, so none of them moves first. I see the same thing inside companies. I've advised more than 30 Fortune 1000 companies, and defining the strategy is never the hard part. Executing it, when it requires multiple groups to give something up, is where it falls apart. Volkswagen watched Chinese EV makers erode its position for years. Its unions, its works council, its executives all struggled to respond. Now it's facing steeper cuts than if it had acted while the problem was still small. The incentive is the same in every case. Acting first means absorbing the cost first. Waiting pushes the pain into the future and onto someone else. Economists call it a collective action problem. But doing nothing is still a choice — it's just a passive one. So here's what actually breaks the stall. Three moves. First: have every stakeholder put something on the table. Bring the people who benefit together with the people who bear the cost, and define what each side contributes or gives up. Second: turn the big decision into a small, reversible test. Instead of redesigning the whole system, get two parties to try a new way of working for 30 days, then decide whether to scale it. Third: decide in advance who breaks the tie. Name the decision-maker, the criteria, and the date they step in if the group is still stuck. A better forecast clarifies the threat. Better leadership is what actually creates the collaboration. That's the reframe so you can leapfrog the headlines, your leadership, and your business. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one, and find me at sorenkaplan.com. Subscribe and listen on: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfrogging-the-headlines-with-soren-kaplan/id1896880297 View original on Inc. Magazine: https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/a-6000-word-warning-from-bill-gates-exposes-the-leadership-pattern-that-keeps-crises-unsolved/91400233

  7. Sep 14

    Your 80-Year-Old Self Has Wisdom You Don't Right Now

    Imagine yourself at eighty, looking back at the decision you're wrestling with right now. You can't actually see that far ahead. But three separate bodies of research get you closer than you'd think. Start with regret. Cornell psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec tracked how regret changes shape over time. In the short term, you regret what you did — the thing you said, the job you took, the money you spent. But stretch the timeline out, and the regret flips. Years later, people regret what they didn't do far more than what they did. The business they never started. The trip they kept postponing. The relationship they let go quiet. Doing nothing feels like the safe choice today. Give it enough time, and it becomes the choice people regret most. Then there's time itself. Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen found that when you believe you have unlimited time ahead of you, you chase external goals — career, travel, achievement. But the moment your time horizon shrinks, your priorities shift toward meaning and relationships. Here's the part that matters for you today: Carstensen found this shift doesn't require actually being old. When younger people simply imagined their time becoming limited, their priorities moved the same way. And then there's the longest-running study on this exact question. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has tracked people for more than eighty-five years. Researchers looked at people at age fifty and asked what best predicted whether they'd be healthy and happy at eighty. It wasn't cholesterol. It wasn't income. It wasn't career success. It was satisfaction with relationships. I run into this constantly in leadership programs. I'll ask a room of high performers how their work connects to meaning, and the conversation always drifts the same direction: a gap between where they spend their hours and what they actually care about. Most people want deeper relationships and more time with people who matter. Most people spend their week somewhere else entirely. So here's the exercise. Ask your eighty-year-old self three questions, right now, about the decision in front of you. First: what opportunity would that version of you most regret passing up? Second: which relationship deserves more of your attention than it's getting? Third: what are you pouring enormous amounts of time into that won't matter at all by then? You might still land on the exact same decision. But you'll be making it with the clarity that usually takes decades to earn. That's the reframe so you can leapfrog the headlines, your leadership, and your business. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one, and find me at sorenkaplan.com. Subscribe and listen on: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfrogging-the-headlines-with-soren-kaplan/id1896880297 View original on Inc. Magazine: https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/your-80-year-old-self-has-wisdom-you-dont-right-now-listen-up-to-make-better-decisions/91404277

  8. Aug 27

    AI Gave 1,000 Adults Surprisingly Good Financial Advice. The Real Lesson Is What It Means for Kids.

    This episode answers a question every leader deploying AI needs to ask: why do two people get wildly different value from the exact same AI model? A new MIT Sloan and Stanford study asked 1,000 adults to write their own prompts asking GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Flash for financial advice, then simulated a lifetime of following it. The advice was strong across the board, but people with sharper financial literacy wrote sharper prompts, and that gap alone was worth roughly five percent more wealth at retirement.  Soren breaks down why the researchers call this a "demand" problem, not a model problem, and why smarter AI won't close the gap on its own, it will widen it. He connects the finding to what's happening inside companies right now, where employees who frame clear, detailed prompts get measurably better output than those who don't, and argues that asking a sharp question has become a core business skill, not just a personal finance one.  Leaders walk away with three moves: teach people to frame requests with real numbers and goals before they need the answer, practice the asking itself on a live example rather than the topic in the abstract, and tie every lesson to a real decision, like a job offer or a budget call, so it sticks.  Subscribe and listen on:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfrogging-the-headlines-with-soren-kaplan/id1896880297  View original on Inc. Magazine: MIT and Stanford Found a 5 Percent Retirement Gap. It Comes Down to Asking Better Money Questions

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Every week, headlines scroll by. Smart leaders stop and ask: What does this mean for how we lead, compete, and grow? Leapfrogging the Headlines takes one story from the week's news and reframes it through the lens of strategy, innovation, leadership, and business model thinking — in under 10 minutes. Hosted by Soren Kaplan, Wall Street Journal bestselling author who has advised leaders at Disney, Medtronic, Cisco, Visa, and PepsiCo on innovation, AI, and strategy. New episodes weekly. No ads. Subscribe wherever you listen.

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