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Topic: Company culture
Podcast: Must Listen

How great cultures are built and rebuilt

Burberry & Apple’s Angela Ahrendts, Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi & Google & Schmidt Futures’ Eric Schmidt

Recorded live at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, three legendary culture-setters sit down with host Bob Safian to discuss how they’ve built and rebuilt great cultures at Apple, Uber, Google, and more.

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Podcast: Episode 132: Must Listen

Build your culture like a product

HubSpot’s Dharmesh Shah
Your company's culture is the bedrock of everything you do. So you can't afford to just let your culture emerge — you need to build it with the deliberate approach of a product designer. Then you need to bring that culture to life by winning buy-in from your team. This is exactly what Dharmesh Shah did at HubSpot — as laid out in the famed HubSpot Culture Code. This living document continues to inspire founders and business leaders to adopt a product design approach to building their own vibrant and adaptable company cultures. In this episode, Dharmesh talks through the inspiration behind the Culture Code, and reveals how he built and rebuilt some of its most inspiring elements — all while keeping his team invested.
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Podcast: Rapid Response

Live with urgency

The Urgent Life’s Bozoma Saint John
Being authentic defines strong leadership. Bozoma Saint John has continually challenged expectations, moving purposefully across multiple roles, from Uber’s chief brand officer to Netflix’s CMO, from Pepsico to Apple, from working for celebrated director Spike Lee to working for iconic Hollywood talent agent Ari Emmanuel. The wall between the personal and professional is artificial, Boz argues, and a barrier to leading what she calls The Urgent Life in a new book. The best leaders tap into their emotions and listen to their instincts, she says, which helps to drive a team and a business forward.
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Podcast: Rapid Response

Stay versatile

Lululemon Athletica’s Calvin McDonald
While many retail businesses have struggled to cope with a wave of disruptions — from pandemic to supply chains to inflation — Lululemon has continued to scale, even when retail sales elsewhere dipped. CEO Calvin McDonald shares how mid-term strategic planning, control over inventory, and a culture that climbs mountains together has fueled agility and versatility. When it comes to brand-building and community building, Calvin says, it’s critical to lean into listening, so you can amplify what makes your business truly distinctive.
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Podcast: Episode 8: Must Listen

Why culture matters

Netflix’s Reed Hastings
A strong company culture emerges when every employee feels they own the culture — and this starts before the first job interview. Netflix's outgoing CEO Reed Hastings built a high-performing culture at Netflix by being upfront about who Netflix is, in the company’s famous culture deck. It won’t appeal to everyone — and that’s the point. If you can define your culture, while resonating with a diverse group of employees, you have a winning formula.
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Podcast: Must Listen

How to unite a team around a shared mission: A story from Spark & Fire

Silk Road Ensemble’s Yo-Yo Ma
What can an entrepreneur learn from a world-class musician? How to create a world-class team, and unite around a clear mission. In this special crossover episode with our sister podcast, Spark & Fire, you’ll hear world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma tell the story of co-founding The Silk Road Project — a musical collective that brings together musicians from wildly different traditions to write and perform original music.
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Podcast: Rapid Response

Why design matters more than ever

PepsiCo’s Mauro Porcini
Design is more than aesthetics. It is an essential competitive tool for an age of perpetual disruption. PepsiCo Chief Design Officer Mauro Porcini shares his 5-point system for sparking creativity at scale. Author of the new book The Human Side of Innovation, Porcini explains how anyone can deploy a designer’s mindset to improve their business and organization. Sharing stories from 3M to Mountain Dew, Porcini emphasizes the imperative of excellence and why innovation is "an act of love."
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Podcast: Episode 120: Must Listen

Think like an intrapreneur

Mach49’s Linda Yates
Innovation is the lifeblood of the start-up — from product to processes and culture to creativity. But innovation is just as essential for scale companies. So how do you keep the innovation flywheel spinning at all levels of scale? The answer according to Linda Yates is to seed every level of your company with an intrapreneurial mindset. As CEO of Mach49, an incubator for large global companies, Linda shares her vast experience and strategies for injecting intrapreneurial thinking and bias-to-action across hundreds of large-scale organizations.
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Podcast: Rapid Response

Mastering the hybrid workplace

The Art of Gathering’s Priya Parker
Hybrid, remote, in-person, a little bit of everything? Work has transformed into a giant experiment. Priya Parker, expert facilitator and author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, shares her advice on how to manage the new hybrid workplace. Where to start? Focus first, she suggests, on making your meetings better.
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Podcast: Bonus

5 ways to build your tolerance for risk

Taking risks can be the catalyst for immense scale or dire straits. Avoiding taking any risks at all leads to stagnancy and empowered competitors. The key is to know which risks are worth taking, and when and how to take them. This episode highlights the best conversations we’ve had recently about taking advantage of risk and how fortune favors the brave.
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Podcast: Episode 119: Must Listen

Why mission matters more than products

Noom’s Saeju Jeong
For truly sustainable long-term growth, you must prioritize your mission over your product — even if that means letting your product go. Noom founder and CEO Saeju Jeong has repeatedly turned his back on successful products in the name of his mission to help as many people as possible live healthier lives. In this episode, Saeju brings to life many of these make-or-break moments, and how his dedication to mission has driven his scale journey.
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Podcast: Rapid Response

Flipping your strategy in a volatile market

Zillow’s Susan Daimler
When markets are in turmoil, you can’t rely on business as usual, but that doesn’t mean you should panic. As the housing climate has turned volatile, rest estate marketplace Zillow has been forced to rethink some priorities, while doubling down on others. Zillow president Susan Daimler talks about the importance of a strategy focused on the future, despite layoffs and pullbacks, and how maintaining a clear shared mindset has enabled forward progress in a challenging climate.
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