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Dr. Wayne E. Mayer, CEO of When Everything Matters (WEMCo), is a Strategic Sustainability Consultant who advises global companies, governments, and non-profits. He helps organizations transform business models into authentic Sustainable Development partnerships. He brings over 20 years’ experience designing and leading Corporate Sustainability. Dr. Mayer helps clients embed Sustainability into governance, culture, and leadership. He works across industries and offers extensive involvement in the mining sector.

His approach tethers company practices to megatrends and positions companies as leaders in Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) practices. Dr. Mayer also works as a Duke Corporate Education Educator and serves as a Senior Fellow at the Duke University Center for International Development, and has taught for the Duke Environmental Leadership and Business & Environment programs. He also teaches graduate courses for the University of Denver’s Environmental Policy & Management and Global Community Engagement programs.

A Quote From This Episode

• “Sustainability is really a mindset as opposed to a department.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• 📗 Firms of Endearment by Sisodia
• 📗 Full Spectrum Thinking by Johansen
• 📗 The Man Who Broke Capitalism by Gelles
• 📗 The War Below by Scheyder
• 📗 Ingrained by Robinson

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Plan for Prague - October 15-18, 2025!

About Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: Practical Wisdom for Leaders
• Blog

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!
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Dr. Barrett Keene is the Senior Director of Talent Development at Stanford Health Care. He previously served as Director of Talent Development at Intuit, where he led teams that develop leaders in Silicon Valley and across the world. Before Intuit, Barrett worked at Tesla as an executive coach and the Head of Leadership and Talent Development for Tesla’s Engineering organizations. In addition to Barrett’s work as an internal Leadership and Talent Development leader, Barrett spent four years helping nine Fortune 100 companies develop their leaders and employees with Accenture Strategy and the previous eleven years as an independent leadership development consultant within more than 80 organizations.

Before joining Accenture, Barrett completed a PhD at Cornell University focusing on Transformational Leadership and Behavioral Integrity and a Master of Business Management while teaching middle school and high school in Miami and Tampa. Barrett lives with his wife and children in Palo Alto, California.

A Quote From This Episode

• “We’ve skipped over transactional leadership for too long, but without those foundations, the staircase of leadership falls apart.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• 📗 Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't by Pfeffer
• 📗 The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations by Kouzes and Posner
• 📗 Leadership Processes and Follower Self-Identity by Lord & Brown

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Plan for Prague - October 15-18, 2025!

About Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: Practical Wisdom for Leaders
• Blog

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!
⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.
➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.
📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.
🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.

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Jennifer Garvey Berger designs and teaches leadership programs, coaches senior leaders and their teams, and supports new ways of thinking about strategy and people. In her four highly acclaimed books, Unleash Your Complexity Genius (co-authored with Carolyn Coughlin), Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps, Simple Habits for Complex Times (co-authored with Keith Johnston), and Changing on the Job, Jennifer builds on deep theoretical knowledge to offer practical ways to make leaders’ organizations more successful, their work more meaningful, and their lives more gratifying. Jennifer has worked with senior leaders in the private, non-profit, and government sectors worldwide (like Novartis, Google, KPMG, Intel, Microsoft, Wikimedia, and the New Zealand Department of Conservation).

Jennifer is a co-founder and CEO of Cultivating Leadership. She has a masters and a doctorate from Harvard University. Formerly an associate professor at George Mason University, Jennifer learned about deep change more than a decade ago when she turned down the tenure offer and moved to a small seaside village in New Zealand with her husband, two kids, and the family dog. While she still considers herself a Kiwi by choice, you can find her in the French countryside, where she has bought a house with eleven friends who live in community and try to keep the dog from terrifying the cats.

A Quote From This Episode

• “My job is to admire that meaning system and hold space for that meaning system to grow a little bit. My job is not to fix it…”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• 📗 Changing on the Job (Second Edition) by Jennifer Garvey-Berger
• 📗 Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems by Adam Kahane

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Plan for Prague - October 15-18, 2025!

About Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: Practical Wisdom for Leaders
• Blog

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!
⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.
➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.
📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.
🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.

Send us a text

Cathy Carroll learned about family business leadership the best way you can – by leading her family business. After a twenty-year corporate career, she left United Airlines to lead her father’s business and instantly recognized a difference between leadership in a family business vs leadership in a large corporation.

Founder and President of Legacy Onward, Inc., Cathy Carroll is a family business leadership coach and author of Hug of War: How to Lead a Family Business With both Love and Logic. She also trains advisors serving in family enterprises, as well as coaches who maintain their credentials with the International Coaching Federation.

Cathy earned certificates in both Leadership Coaching and Executive Facilitation at Georgetown University, an MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a BA at Boston College. She is also a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) in the ICF.

An active member of the community, Cathy currently serves as Vice-Chair the Board of the Purposeful Planning Institute and co-founder & Treasurer of A Leg To Stand On which provides prosthetic limbs to children in developing countries.

A Few Quotes From This Episode

• “I have to get comfortable with disappointing people. That’s my growth edge as a leader.”
• “A polarity is like breathing — you can't inhale without exhaling. In leadership, you need both.”
• “An overused strength becomes your biggest liability.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• 📗 Hug of War: How to Lead a Family Business With Both Love and Logic
• 📗 Polarity Management by Johnson
• 📗 Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm by Buhner
  🎬 Key & Peele’s Luther the Anger Translator

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Plan for Prague - October 15-18, 2025!

About Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: Practical Wisdom for Leaders
• Blog

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!
⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.
➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.
📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.
🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.

Send us a text

Dr. Amal Ahmadi is an Associate Professor and Program Coordinator at the College of Business and Management, American University of Bahrain. She holds a PhD in management from Henley Business School. Her research focuses on leadership and leadership development, and currently revolves around investigating cognitive, affective, and behavioral mechanisms surrounding leadership and leadership development.

Dr. Bernd Vogel is a professor in leadership and the founding director of the Henley Centre for Leadership, Henley Business School, University of Reading, UK. He holds a PhD in Management from Leibniz University Hanover. His expertise is in strategic leadership to mobilize and maintain energy in organizations, multi-level leadership, leading transformations, culture and change, and the future of leadership and leadership development.

A Few Quotes From This Episode

• “Leadership programs give you a platter of fruit; the real work is choosing what to eat and when.”
• “Structured reflection shouldn’t be optional; it has to be part of our day-to-day.”
• “There’s a dormant, inactive capacity in managers that just sits there if we don’t create space for it to breathe.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Book: The Knowing-Doing Gap by Pfeffer & Sutton
• Book: Professionalizing Leadership by Kellerman
• Book: The Nazi Mind by Rees
• Podcast: How to Fail with Elizabeth Day
• Organization: Inner Development Goals initiative

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Plan for Prague - October 15-18, 2025!

About Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: Practical Wisdom for Leaders
• Blog

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!
⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.
➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.
📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.
🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.

Send us a text

Dr. Max Klau is a consultant, author, speaker, and Integral Master Coach based in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2005 with a focus on civic leadership development. He served as the Chief Program Officer at the New Politics Leadership Academy (NPLA) from 2016-2024. NPLA is focused on bringing more servant leaders into politics, and Max designed leadership programs that have graduated more than 2,500 servant leaders to date.

Previously, he was the Vice President of Leadership Development at City Year, the education-focused AmeriCorps program. He is the founder of the Center for Courageous Wholeness and his second book, Developing Servant Leaders at Scale, will be published in August 2025. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and two children.

A Few Quotes From This Episode

• “One of the reasons our world is so divided is because we’re divided from ourselves.”
• “We’ve hit the limits of how much change we can make without getting serious about owning our shadow.”
• “If we don’t confront the shadow, it controls us from beyond our awareness and shows up in the systems we lead.”
• “Service turns pain into power when we use the gifts of our struggle to serve others.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Book: Developing Servant Leaders at Scale by Max Klau
• Book: Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness by Greenleaf
• Book: Abundance by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
• Book: The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
• Organization: Inner Development Goals
• Podcast: Living Myth with Michael Meade

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Plan for Prague - October 15-18, 2025!

About Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: Practical Wisdom for Leaders
• Blog

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace

♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!
⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.
➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.
📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.
🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.

Send us a text

Cynthia Pong, JD, is an award-winning executive coach and speaker who empowers women of color leaders to advance their careers into positions of power. A Forbes Contributor and LinkedIn Top Voice for Job Search and Career, she has been featured in HBR, The Atlantic, and on NBC, CBS, NPR, and more.

As Founder and CEO of Embrace Change, Cynthia leads an elite, all-BIPOC team who provide specialized coaching and training programs for high-performing women of color up to the C-suite. Equipped with Cynthia’s strategic guidance, her clients break down barriers, lead with authenticity, and have collectively negotiated over $750K in salary increases. Her Anthem Award-winning Leadership Accelerator program has propelled women of color to prestigious fellowships, promotions, and top graduate program admissions.

Cynthia’s book, Don’t Stay in Your Lane: The Career Change Guide for Women of Color , has cemented her as a foremost voice on career advancement, negotiation, and thought leadership.

A Few Quotes From This Episode

• “I’ve coached over 350 women of color—those numbers taught me it’s never a skills gap but often a confidence gap.”
• “It’s not about a deficit in ability; it’s about being so hard on ourselves we won’t experiment or make a mistake.”
• “One-on-one tailored strategic support from an executive coach is the single best investment of your scarcest resource: time.”
• “We have to change from doing to leading—mastering tasks won’t teach you how to inspire others.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Book: Don’t Stay in Your Lane: The Career Change Guide for Women of Color
• Cynthia's Forbes Contributor Page
• Cynthia's Assessment: Cynthia's Leadership Skills Quiz
• Book: Never Split the Difference
• Website: Anton Gunn’s Leadership Works
  
  

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Plan for Prague - October 15-18, 2025!

About Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: Practical Wisdom for Leaders
• Blog

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of t

♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!
⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.
➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.
📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.
🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.

Send us a text

Jenn Zella is the Co-Founding Principal and Chief Visionary Officer of CID Design Group, an intentional design firm that creates authentic interiors and inspired brands that engage, elevate, and endure. With a deep-rooted passion for collaboration, the creative process, and what she terms Conscious Design, Jenn believes in the power of design to make the world a happier, healthier, and more beautiful place.

With over 25 years of experience and stemming from a long family legacy of design, architecture, development, and construction, Jenn has been a catalyst for CID’s growth and evolution, earning recognition as one of the Top 100 design firms by Interior Design Magazine for eight consecutive years.

As a thought leader and creative visionary, Jenn frequently speaks nationally, sharing insights on future-forward and human-centric design, leading with heart and purpose, building a culture of trust, and coaching creativity. She has championed the intersection of design and well-being, creating spaces that support individuals in becoming their best selves. She also embodies this philosophy by integrating well-being into CID’s Blue Zone Certified workplace, including a dedicated Wellness Studio that prioritizes holistic health, mindful movement, and self-care.

With a team based in 11 states and 30 cities, CID has taken a bold approach in the design industry, embracing a predominantly virtual creative workplace, redefining how we design, collaborate, and fuel culture leveraging deep tech and high trust.

Jenn believes in leading and creating with love, with an open mind, and in collaboration with others. None of us are as smart as all of us.

A Few Quotes From This Episode

• “Having fun is elemental to being our best and to enjoying the journey together.”
• “Engage, elevate, endure—that’s our mantra for everything we create.”
• “Physical presence in a seat at a desk does not equate to accountability.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Book: The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Plan for Prague - October 15-18, 2025!

About Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: Practical Wisdom for Leaders
• Blog

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can

♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!
⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.
➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.
📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.
🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.