Superpowers for Good: Leadership Lessons From—And For—the World's Great Changemakers Devin Thorpe

Devin: What do you see as your superpower?
Andrew: It's a little bit of a shoot first, ask questions later kind of thing.
“There are all these communities around the US that feel like they don't have economic development options, feel like there's resource scarcity, are lacking these things, or losing these stores both in urban areas and rural areas,” says Andrew Connor, founder and director of The Center for Community Ownership.
His observation about the need motivated Andrew to take action in support of local investing, including crowdfunding. “I started the Center for Community Ownership because a lot of communities don't know that this is an option. They lose a grocery store, and they don't know that they have any option other than to go try to find some chain store to come to town or wait for the dollar store to come to town or something like that.”

“Part of what we do is try to spread awareness and do education about the fact that community ownership is a viable option,” he says.
AI Summary
* Andrew Connor founded the Center for Community Ownership to support local investment and entrepreneurism.
* The center educates communities about community ownership models and provides technical support.
* Andrew also founded the Local Investing Action network (LIA) to support local businesses raising capital.
* Andrew founded Crowdfund Montana, a platform for investment crowdfunding in Montana.
* Andrew highlights the challenges rural communities face in raising capital.
* Crowdfund Montana has helped companies like Pink Bench Distilling achieve success in rural Montana.
* Andrew founded CCO and LIA.
* He stresses the importance of taking action to make tangible change in community development.
* Andrew emphasizes the importance of creating a network of like-minded individuals to achieve shared goals.
* Listeners are encouraged to visit the CCO and LIAN websites for more information.
How to Develop A Bias to Act As a Superpower
Throughout his career, Andrew has developed a bias to act as a superpower. Recognizing that a “shoot first, ask questions later,” attitude can be a weakness as well as a strength, he highlights some of his accomplishments as evidence of the benefits.
Andrew recently launched the Local Investing Action network, LIA, to help community leaders around the country form local investing groups.
Andrew is excited about the progress of the LIA network. The group is focused on community investment and has already made connections and laid the foundation for concrete projects. Although the group is set to last for a year, Andrew feels that it may continue beyond that.
The projects that the group is working on include community investment funds, local investment groups, education and cultural change resources, and specific community investment projects. Andrew feels that even if only a fraction of these projects are successful, it will be a worthwhile venture. He believes that the success of the LIA group came from a willingness to try something new and the power of collaboration.
Andrew, who acts largely as a coach in the LIA network, offers a tip for developing your bias to act.
“We fail to appreciate the costs we incur by not taking action,” he says. It is easier sometimes to imagine the costs of acting, but harder to see the costs of the status quo.
“Sometimes you can measure those [costs] in really specific ways in terms of opportunity costs or money lost or things that didn't happen,” he says. You can add those up. More importantly, the emotional toll of being in that plateaued or stagnated place sometimes could be greater than sort of ripping the band-aid off—trying it and failing.”
You can increase your bias to act by following Andrew’s advice and example, potentially making it a superpower that enables you to do more good in the world.
Mona DeFrawi, CEO and founder of Radivision, a streaming channel for investors and entrepreneurs, especially those engaging in crowdfunding,

“HACE, or The Hispanic Alliance for Career Enhancement, is an organization that I am honored to lead,” says Patricia Mota. “Headquartered in Chicago, national in scope, its mission since 1982 has been to positively impact workplaces by cultivating the pipeline of Latino talent and providing the community the insight, the access and the support to be successful in their careers.”
Since taking the reins eight years ago, HACE has grown more than tenfold in annual revenue, reaching five times as many people.
AI Summary
* Patricia Mota is the President and CEO of The Hispanic Alliance for Career Enhancement (HACE).
* HACE cultivates the pipeline of Latino talent and provides insight, access, and support for them to be successful in their careers.
* HACE’s programs include leadership development, coaching, mentoring, and networking events.
* The organization has a reach of nearly 100,000 individuals and nearly 200 corporate partners across the United States and 13 countries.
* Under Mota’s leadership, HACE grew revenue by over 10x and the people reached by over 5x in just eight years.
* One of HACE’s core pillars is its pipeline and leadership development programs.
* Mota believes that true impact and transformation do not happen unless through an intentional model that builds a community of trust, self-awareness, and honing an authentic self in roles.
* Patricia discussed the importance of self-awareness in leadership development, the power of networking and building strategic relationships, and launching programs even if they are not perfect.
* Mota highlights the importance of embracing diversity and building inclusive spaces.
* Individuals and companies can join HACE through their website or events.
HACE has “three core pillars,” Patricia says.
“One is through talent acquisition. So programs, services, events where we’re actively connecting job seekers to career opportunities to our employer partners, to talents, anywhere from interns to senior level talent across all business functions across various areas,” she says.
“Secondly, which has been over the last decade, our fastest growing is our pipeline and leadership development programs. These are cohort initiatives that start as young as the high school level all the way to the senior level, where we work with a group of individuals, 15 to 25 or so at a time, various cohorts at a time, going through individual coaching, leadership assessments, culturally relevant content. But what I’m most proud of, it’s enabled us to create a strong, multi-generational support network across the nation where we have executives, senior leaders and subject matter experts coming back and giving back through our programs and those in their careers doing the same not only for professionals but for our students,” Patricia says
“The third and final area, which is just as important, is what we consider thought leadership. These are opportunities that we bring organizations, employers together to share best practices, to network with one another and to shine a light on those that are doing great work that help fulfill our mission,” she says.
“We have a reach of nearly 100,000 individuals that we serve across the country, nearly 200 corporate partners. These are some of the bigger employers that we work with to support our mission and have graduates from our programs from the US and now 13 countries since we went virtual in 2020,” she says.
Patricia began her work at HACE, leading a program called Mujeres de HACE, a Latina leadership program. When she took over, it operated as a series of workshops taught in Chicago. Today, the program has over 3,200 alums from 135 cities in the US. She credits the program with helping women “not only increase their pay, increase promotions, but get into leadership roles.”
“I kind of fell into the fundraising, but because I was so passionate about the impact and the work, I was bringing in additional partners and funders,

Devin: What do you see as your superpower?
Christine: I would say it’s courage.
Dr. Christine Lum Lung, CEO of Origin Healthcare, says up to 5 million people in the United States who are currently in the hospital could be treated at home more effectively and affordably.
“We deploy the expert medical team, the equipment and the technology to patients in their homes so they can actually get all of the care they would receive in the hospital,” she says. “But now it’s in an environment that clearly is much more comfortable.”
AI Summary
* Dr. Christine Lum Lung is the founder and CEO of Origin Healthcare, which provides in-home medical care.
* Origin Healthcare uses a hybrid model of care that combines in-person visits with remote patient monitoring and telehealth.
* This model is 40% safer, 30-40% more affordable, and results in better outcomes.
* Providing care in a familiar and comfortable environment can prevent adverse events and complications that occur in hospitals.
* Patients often experience better outcomes and are at lower risk of hospital-acquired infections when cared for at home.
* Technology like telehealth and remote patient monitoring can make this model of care more efficient.
* The cost savings come from avoiding the high fixed costs of a hospital building and from lower utilization of testing and fewer readmissions.
* Christine believes her superpower is courage.
* She encourages listeners to explore Origin Healthcare and to connect with her on LinkedIn.
Christine says, “As a physician when I would round in the morning, patients would say, ‘I got terrible sleep last night. Somebody next door was yelling. My IV kept beeping.’”
“I would inevitably only be able to say, ‘I know the hospital is a place where you need the best sleep because you’re sick, but unfortunately, you get the worst.’”
Not only is sound sleep difficult, but the sorts of hospital-acquired infections patients contract in a facility are rare at home. Furthermore, data shows there are fewer falls at home.
As a result, outcomes are typically better when treated at home for things that can be treated there—about 30 percent of hospitalizations or about 150 diagnoses can be.
By leveraging technology to provide hybrid care with visiting nurses and technology, patients receive more attention at a lower cost. The patients are fitted with a watch that monitors vital signs every fifteen minutes. Paired with a tablet that connects to doctors and nurses for addressing questions, patients are never entirely alone.
One misperception lay people have is that patients receive 24-hour care while hospitalized. That isn’t the case. “In a 12-hour shift, a nurse is only physically assessing the patient for 34 minutes,” Christine says.
Christine shared the story of the startup’s launch:
We launched we officially opened as a company in 2021 in the middle of a pandemic. So there are a lot of things that went into that, a lot of good things and bad things. We were able to treat our first patient in the spring of ‘21. We're in the northern Colorado area where I worked as a hospital physician. We've actually treated over 1,100 patients in the two-plus years that we've been up and operational.
Throughout her career, Christine has developed and deployed courage as a superpower to achieve success.
How to Develop Courage As a Superpower
Christine describes her courage: “I see something, I believe in it. The path forward may not seem obvious, but I’m going to go charge down that path.”
“Stepping into the venture space,” she continues. “There are fewer females here. And so having the courage to say, ‘I believe in what I’m doing; I know that this is the right thing,’ even when other people may try to get you to doubt it. You just have that sense of conviction that keeps moving you forward.”
Christine offers a prescription for developing courage:
* See what needs to be better and believe that you are the person to make

Devin: What is your superpower?
Ben: I'm basically the most humble person you've ever met. (Laughs.)
Saving the Great Salt Lake will require “a 30 to 50 percent reduction in our water use in the watershed,” says Dr. Ben Abbott, professor of ecology at Brigham Young University, one of the foremost authorities on the shrinking Great Salt Lake.
This isn’t just a local problem. Not significantly tied to climate change, salt lakes around the globe (about 120 of them) are drying up for the same reason: humans are using the water before it gets to the salt lakes.
AI Summary
1. The Great Salt Lake is a keystone ecosystem.
2. The lake has experienced a significant decline in water levels over the last hundred years.
3. The cause of the decline is mainly due to human water use for agriculture, outdoor vegetation, and mining minerals.
4. Climate change plays a small role in the decline; water consumption accounts for 80 to 90 percent of it.
5. There needs to be a 30 to 50 percent reduction in water use in the watershed to address the problem.
6. Agricultural optimization, urban water use reduction, and targeted fallowing are potential solutions.
7. Alfalfa is a major contributor to water depletion.
8. Farmers must be compensated for reducing water use to remain economically viable.
9. A high percentage, perhaps 95 percent, of indoor water use ends up in the lake.
10. Ben Abbott’s work is focused on understanding and protecting freshwater ecosystems.
Great Salt Lake is a vital part of the ecosystem in Northern Utah. It is the largest of the salt lakes in North America. Losing the lake could create an ecological catastrophe.
Ben explains the problem in simple terms: “Great Salt Lake naturally fluctuates. It goes up and down because there’s no outlet to the ocean. But what we’ve seen over the last hundred years is a very steep decline, a decrease in the water level. This is driven overwhelmingly by one thing, extractive human water use.”
“The breakdown is approximately 80-10-10. So, 80 percent agriculture, 10 percent mineral extraction from the lake, 10 percent municipal water use the urban areas,” he says, summarizing the use of water that once flowed into the lake.
In urban settings, Ben acknowledges that about 95 percent of indoor water uses end up in the lake. After going down the drain, the water is cleaned and flows eventually to where it belongs. The water on urban lawns, however, doesn’t end up in the lake.
In agriculture, “alfalfa is the predominant crop that is using water in the watershed,” Ben says. He suggests paying farmers to fallow their fields for part of the year.
Utah received record-setting snow this past winter; Great Salt Lake has risen several feet. Ben worries this could be a problem. “We can’t get distracted this amazing snow year. It’s the biggest snow year on record. It’s a real gift. It gives us more—maybe a few months more or a year more time to implement these solutions. It doesn’t solve the long-term deficit.”
Interestingly, Ben notes that humans have lived around what is now Great Salt Lake, for about 20,000 years, since long before it was formed by the receding Lake Bonneville. “It was only in the mid-1900s when we had these big federally subsidized dam projects and canal and pipeline projects that we started to overuse, and we created this artificial surplus of water that nobody locally was paying for,” Ben says.
Ben has one overriding concern. “We haven’t come to grips with how serious an issue this is and with how hard the solution is going to be.”
“The lake responds to how much water flows into it; it doesn’t respond to the number of bills that were passed, the number of podcasts that were done on the lake or even the amount of money we spend on it,” he says.
Ben’s superpower is humility. He’s learned to focus on the lakes he cares so much about, not on getting credit for saving them.
How to Develop Humility As a Superpower
Ben has learned to

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Devin: What is your superpower?
Adrienne: One of my superpowers is being able to have difficult conversations with people, being able to talk about issues and appreciate people’s discomfort and help them see them from a different vantage point so I can reach them. Unfortunately, our society is set up with a lot of issues in a taboo arena that [make] people automatically feel uncomfortable. Being able to disarm them and connect with them such that they are ready to grow and that they feel that they can confront and tackle these issues that come across their plate—it’s really rewarding. So I would say that that’s my superpower.
Adrienne Lawrence, author and consultant for Jennifer Lawrence Consulting, works to empower companies and thought leaders to adopt workplace diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and helps them avoid trending on social media.
“I specialize in keeping people from trending on Twitter because they stepped in it,” she says, adding a key for success in this area: “Be humble and recognize that, ‘hey, I’m not going to have all the answers and I am going to step in it.’”
AI Summary
1. Adrienne Lawrence is a VP and consultant at Jennifer Brown Consulting.
2. She helps workplaces become more inclusive, and individuals become more inclusive within their work. 
3. She works in anti-racism to help organizations understand diversity’s uniqueness and value.
4. One of the fundamental principles for creating a more inclusive workplace is being humble and hungry for information.
5. She is the author of Staying in the Game: The Playbook for Beating Workplace Sexual Harassment. 
6. Her book offers guidance on navigating workplace sexual harassment. 
7. Sexual harassment in the workplace is not just a women’s issue; men can also be impacted.
8. She offers tools and strategies for individuals to navigate and combat workplace harassment.
9. Lawrence emphasizes the importance of having difficult conversations to break down barriers and improve communication. 
10. She provides information on her consulting firm, Jennifer Brown Consulting, and how individuals can learn more about her and her work.
Adrienne says we should all be aware that “There may have been things that occurred historically that our parents’ generation, grandparents or even hundreds of years before had created that situation. And the legacy lives on today. I’m not responsible for that, but I am responsible for this relationship.”
Given the essential nature of interpersonal relationships in the workplace, she says that understanding “you’re not going to have all the answers, you’re not going to see the landmines—but that’s okay. When you step in it, there is an opportunity there to mend that relationship, to grow and to exercise greater self-awareness.”
Too often, she says, people think of diversity too simply as being exclusively about race. She sees DEI as a broad umbrella covering a range of “isms,” including sexism, homophobia and transphobia. She sees sobriety status, religion and neurotype as also needing representation. “It’s all of the little things about each one of us that makes us unique.”
She sees The Walking Dead as a model for valuing diversity. Every member of the core cast had a unique skill that, combined with the others, allowed the group to fend off the zombies successfully.
Earlier in her career, Adrienne took an on-air position with ESPN. After surviving sexual harassment there, she wrote Staying in the Game: The Playbook for Beating Workplace Sexual Harassment. “The book is the first of its kind guide, largely for employees to help people understand and navigate this form of bullying,” she says.
Adrienne uses her superpower, her ability to have difficult conversations with people, to help her in her work.
How to Develop the Ability to Have Difficult Conversations As a Superpower
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Devin: What do you see as your superpower?
Paul: I'm not sure I have a superpower, but I think if I if I have a superpower, it's I love to learn. Throughout my career—I tell people who think about getting a PhD, “What's the best thing about the career is you can change careers without changing jobs.” I have looked at, over the course of my career, how businesses earn long-term profits, why some are sustainable over time—in terms of pure profitability. I've looked at poverty. I've looked at strategic risk. Now I'm looking at sustainability. These are all different careers, and I get to do it without ever changing jobs. But the key is you got to keep learning.
One of the things I did about 15 or 16 years ago was set a goal to read 30 books that year because I'd ordered a bunch of books. As a professor, I'm like an addict. Amazon is like my best friend. So I thought, I'm going to read 30 books because I have this shelf full of books that I never read. I did it, and I learned a ton. What I've done over the last 15 years is probably averaged 20 to 30 books a year about all sorts of different things.
So, on my way home from Minneapolis on Sunday, I read Daniel Yergin's new book, The New Map, which is all about energy driving the world in the 21st century. And then I read David Baldacci's book, one of his novels. I'm also reading a book right now about the future of money and what is digital currency going to be.
So, I read promiscuously. I don't draw lines about what I'll read and what I won't read, but I read a lot, and that gives you a different perspective on the world. So, I think my superpower would be I know how to learn, and I love it, and I love to learn new things and try new things.
BYU Professor Paul Godfrey was a guest on the show last to talk about his book More than Money: Five Forms of Capital to Create Wealth and Eliminate Poverty. Eliminating poverty is one of my favorite topics and a goal I share with many of you; I think we can see the end of poverty in my lifetime.
So, when Paul reached out to share his new book, Clean: Lessons from Ecolab’s Century of Positive Impact, covering one of my other favorite topics, I was excited to have him back on the show.
AI Summary
* Paul Godfrey, the 2022 outstanding faculty member at BYU's Business School and author of Clean: Lessons from Ecolab’s Century of Positive Impact, was interviewed on the Superpowers for Good show.
* Godfrey's book explores Ecolab's proven principles of sustainability and how other organizations can adopt them.
* The key principles are respect and integration.
* Godfrey sees his superpower as loving to learn and reading 20-30 books a year on various topics.
* In the interview, he discusses his book and the importance of a love of learning in personal and professional growth.
* He offers insights on how to develop a passion for learning, including admitting a lack of knowledge, being willing to go deep, and engaging with experts.
* The interview concludes with information on how to purchase the book and connect with Godfrey.
Guest-Provided Profile
Paul C. Godfrey (he/him)
William and Roceil Low Professor of Business Strategy, Godfrey & Associates
About Godfrey & Associates: Godfrey & Associates is a strategy consulting practice that helps individuals and organizations thrive in an uncertain and challenging world. 
About BYU: Brigham Young University is a privately-owned major University that provides a full range of educational and development opportunities for students.
Biographical Information: Paul C. Godfrey, the William and Roceil Low Professor of Business Strategy at the BYU Marriott School of Business, received the school’s Outstanding Faculty Member award in 2022. His research has appeared in a number of premiere outlets, including Nature Biotechnology, and the Academy of Management Review. He has authored two textbooks, one about Strat