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Topic: Operations

Compassion in the face of crisis

Mercy Corps’ Tjada D’Oyen McKenna

How do you stay focused and committed to putting out a fire while new fires ignite elsewhere? Mercy Corps CEO, Tjada D’Oyen McKenna returns to Rapid Response to discuss the expansive relief effort in Turkey and Syria since the earthquake, leading a grieving team, and how the org’s support strategy in Ukraine must pivot as the country enters its second year of war. Tjada also shares insights about the greater role businesses can play in societal improvement, and why altruism doesn’t mean sacrificing scale.

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ChatGPT and AI’s inflection point

Reid Hoffman and Bob Safian sit down once more to discuss how today’s hot-button stories are impacting business. And right now, there’s no hotter topic than ChatGPT and the race to bring transformative AI tools into the mainstream. So in this special AI deep-dive, Reid and Bob discuss how ChatGPT has reignited the search engine wars, how we can expect AI to transform our work and leisure, ways to see through the hype, and how business leaders should get the jump on the AI inflection point.

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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: Episode 125: Must Listen

The essential playbooks — and when to use them

Cisco’s John Chambers

All great teams need to improvise under pressure, but underpinning this should be a set of tried-and-tested playbooks that let you orchestrate and replicate winning strategies. Cisco’s John Chambers created a library of living playbooks — covering culture, acquisitions, crises, and more — to astounding effect as he took Cisco from a small tech supplier to the most valuable company on the planet.

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How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants

Faire’s Max Rhodes

Small, independent store owners have been perpetually hit by waves of disruption: from malls to big box stores to e-commerce giants. But Max Rhodes, co-founder and CEO of the $12 billion online wholesale marketplace Faire, argues that Main Street retailers are actually better positioned right now to navigate today’s stormy shopping landscape than the competition. Max digs into how Faire is using technology and data to help stores maximize their advantages — nimbleness, adaptability, and smaller inventories — and combine them with the scale benefits enjoyed by the likes of Amazon and Target.

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Podcast: Must Listen

How great cultures are built and rebuilt

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

Three legendary culture-setters come together live at Masters of Scale Summit. In the first episode from this sold-out event, Angela Ahrendts, Dara Khosrowshahi, and Eric Schmidt reveal how they’ve built and rebuilt great cultures at Apple, Uber, Google and more. With host Bob Safian, they deliver surprising stories, counterintuitive anti-lessons, and live-show energy from the stage of San Francisco’s Presidio Theatre.

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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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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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How Covid lessons get tested by inflation

Union Square Hospitality Group’s Danny Meyer

After slashing his NYC restaurant team from 2,400 people to just 45 in the teeth of the pandemic, Danny Meyer has rebuilt Union Square Hospitality Group back to its former size. But in his fifth appearance on Rapid Response since Covid struck, Danny says he isn’t yet triumphant. With inflation creating fresh challenges even at Shake Shack, Danny shares lessons on the good and bad of leading through a crisis, plus explains why he’s handed off his CEO title — and where he finds inspiration to fuel new innovations.

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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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How to stay inspired while remote? Is there a co-founder advantage?

Can a small entrepreneur make an impact within a massive, complex system, like healthcare or education? What’s the best framework to amplify the positive side of having co-founders and avoid the negatives? Reid Hoffman and Bob Safian answer these and more questions from small business owners in the Masters of Scale community. Plus: in our Need to Know segment, Reid & Bob take on a burning question: How can Black founders beat the odds and find funding?

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