King Dems Podcast | Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights

Your customers are not lying in your surveys. They simply do not know why they do what they do.

Cop a copy of my books NOW:
⁠https://mybook.to/TheAI-PoweredFuture⁠
⁠https://mybook.to/HumanLedFinance⁠

Host live webinars and restream them to LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook: WebinarGeek (paid link): ⁠https://webinargeek.com/product?red=kdemsc⁠

Get paid to put your expert judgement to work training AI: Ethos (paid link): ⁠https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw⁠

Earn from your professional expertise on frontier AI projects: Mercor (paid link): ⁠https://t.mercor.com/neABb⁠

Turn customer insight into a boardroom-ready deck in minutes: Gamma (paid link): ⁠https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h⁠

Automate the analytic grunt work so your team can focus on the human questions: Make (paid link): ⁠https://www.make.com/en/register?pc=kingdemspodcast⁠

Johanna Faigelman is a cultural anthropologist, speaker and the founder and CEO of Human Branding, the Toronto consultancy she launched in 2006 to apply anthropology to business strategy. She is the pioneer of Applied Anthropology Thinking (AAT)™, studied at York University and ran planning at a large advertising agency before going out on her own. Human Branding now has more than 40 people working across North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America, with clients including 11 of the world's top 20 pharmaceutical companies and brands such as Nestlé, Visa and Logitech.
She is an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2026 Ontario finalist, an EY Winning Women 2025 honoree and a 100 Women to Know Winner 2026.

In this episode:
Why Johanna works on the principle that roughly 80 per cent of decision making sits at the unconscious and subconscious level (her working rule, not a cited study)
Why she places almost zero value on the answer to a direct question
Every business problem is a human problem: why doctors who say in surveys they will prescribe a drug still do not
Applied Anthropology Thinking (AAT)™, the approach she created when she founded Human Branding
The Who Say Do principle: who people are, how they say things and what they actually do
Ten years with no holidays: the unglamorous reality of building a bootstrapped consultancy
Why saying no protects a company's vision more than saying yes
How Human Branding uses AI: a closed model built about five years ago, with Johanna reporting 30 per cent efficiency gains overall and 80 per cent on analytic grunt work
Where they differ: Ademola asks what AI will do better than humans in anthropology, and Johanna is not convinced it will do anything better, only that it frees people for the human work
Her one piece of advice to women founders: your difference is your advantage

Johanna Faigelman, cultural anthropologist and founder and CEO of Human Branding, on consumer behaviour, decision making, Applied Anthropology Thinking, bootstrapping and human-led AI, on The King Dems Podcast and Diary of a CFO with Ademola Odewade.

What is Applied Anthropology Thinking?
It is Johanna Faigelman's approach to using anthropology's methods, especially ethnography, to uncover the hidden drivers of customer behaviour and turn them into marketing and strategy. She built Human Branding around it in 2006.

Can AI replace market research?
Johanna's view is no. AI speeds up the analysis of transcripts and data, but the insight that changes behaviour depends on human wisdom that is often not captured in language at all.

More from Johanna Faigelman: ⁠https://humanbranding.com⁠ · ⁠linkedin.com/in/johannafaigelman⁠

Hosted by Ademola Odewade: chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich) and Founder of K-DEMS Consulting.
The King Dems Podcast. Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts.
This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
#BusinessAnthropology #HumanLedAI #DiaryOfACFO #KingDemsPodcast

The voice you hear when you speak is not the one your team hears.

Cop a copy of my new book NOW: https://ademolaodewade.com

Turn communication expertise into paid advisory work: Ethos (paid link): https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw

AI labs pay highly skilled experts: Mercor (paid link): https://t.mercor.com/neABb

Build your next keynote deck in minutes: Gamma (paid link): https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h

Automate the admin and spend the time rehearsing: Make (paid link): https://www.make.com/en/register?pc=kingdemspodcast

David Pope is an executive voice coach who has been based in Hong Kong for 32 years. He began in 1980s London at a Soho production company making music videos for Wham!, Dire Straits and A-ha, then joined the BBC as an assistant film editor. In 2010 he founded All Voice Talent, where he is Managing Director. He has spent more than 30,000 hours in recording studios as a producer and director, produced the English-language teen radio drama Songbirds for RTHK and now coaches leaders from law firms, financial institutions, hotels and fashion brands in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Australia, the Middle East and London.

About 20 years ago he was told that growing his business meant leaving the quiet of the studio for stages, workshops and online video. He faced that fear, made mistakes in public and built the self-belief he now teaches.

In this episode:

- The three communication mistakes that weaken executive presence: speaking too fast, a monotone delivery and filler words

- A slightly slower pace reads as authority; rapid delivery reads as nerves

- The emphasis pause before a key figure and the rhetorical question pause before the answer

- Chunking: mark a script with slash marks and stress one word per chunk, what Pope calls "audio punctuation"

- Speakers who think they paused for five seconds usually paused for half a second

- Gravitas is a balance of authority, energy and warmth, not a booming voice

- In 2012 Center for Talent Innovation research, 5 per cent of senior executives named appearance and 28 per cent communication as core to executive presence; 67 per cent named gravitas

- Pope's Voice Influence Framework: voice, presence and messaging

- Why communication becomes more valuable as AI spreads: voiceover artists are already losing work to AI, but live, bespoke human feedback cannot be replaced

- Pope says charisma can be developed; Ademola argues it is largely natural

David Pope, founder of All Voice Talent, on executive presence, gravitas, communication in the AI era and his Voice Influence Framework, on The King Dems Podcast with Ademola Odewade.

How can I sound more confident in meetings?

Slow down slightly, vary your intonation and drop filler words. Record yourself first to find out which one you need to fix.

What is gravitas in executive presence?

A voice that balances authority with energy and warmth. It is not a low, booming voice.

More from David Pope:
https://www.allvoicetalent.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/popedavid

Hosted by Ademola Odewade: chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich) and Founder of K-DEMS Consulting.

The King Dems Podcast. Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts.

Diary of a CFO. Finance leadership, unfiltered. Ranked in the global top 2.5% of podcasts.

This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

#ExecutivePresence #PublicSpeaking #DiaryOfACFO #KingDemsPodcast

Most finance teams start closing the month before the month has even finished.

Cop a copy of my new book NOW: ⁠https://ademolaodewade.com⁠

Turn audit and finance expertise into paid advisory work — Ethos (paid link): ⁠https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw⁠

AI labs pay highly-skilled experts — Mercor (paid link): ⁠https://t.mercor.com/neABb⁠

Build the design partner deck in minutes — Gamma (paid link): ⁠https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h⁠

Esther Adeogun spent over a decade in audit and assurance across KPMG Nigeria, WYZE, Sapro, PKF Littlejohn and RSM UK, working between Lagos and London. She audited multinationals with US, Canadian and Australian parent structures. She then left professional services to found Valdore Systems and Intelligence Limited (VSIL), a pre-product platform building what she calls an intelligent operating layer: financial intelligence, controls and real-time visibility embedded directly into business workflows rather than applied after the fact.

The pattern that convinced her was not jurisdictional. Across Lagos, London and multinational engagements she kept meeting the same problem. Organisations had invested heavily in software, yet finance teams still ran on spreadsheets, manual reconciliations and judgement applied outside the system. Some of her design partners begin their July month-end work in the second or third week of July in order to report to management by 4 August. That is time taken away from professional judgement and scepticism, and Esther argues the gap between activity and visibility is the thing worth closing, not the accounting concepts underneath it.

In this episode:

The one sentence she would give a Fortune 500 CEO: an intelligent operating layer embedding financial intelligence, controls and real-time visibility into business workflows
The exact shift from auditor to founder, moving from "what went wrong" to "why did the system allow this to happen in the first place"
Why real-time reporting does not overturn the historical cost concept, and what she actually means by real-time
What SAP, Oracle and Microsoft would say in response, and where the design philosophies genuinely diverge
Where AI earns its place, and the deterministic, rules-based work that should stay conventional software
"Consulting is largely constrained by people and time" and why that pushed her to SaaS instead of another consulting firm
The four eras of accounting: paper, spreadsheets, ERP, and AI-assisted decision-making
Whether the Big Four look the same in 2035, and why she thinks firms evolve rather than disappear
Nigeria rewards technical skill, the UK rewards relationships, and what that cost her to learn
Why she no longer believes progress is linear, and what experimentation replaced it with
Rapid fire: the biggest misconception about AI, the biggest misconception about accounting, and the technology she is watching
Her legacy test: not to be remembered for building software but for helping build better businesses

More from Esther:
LinkedIn (personal): ⁠linkedin.com/in/esther-adeogun-0b9118125⁠

LinkedIn (company): ⁠linkedin.com/company/valdore-systems-intelligence-ltd⁠

Hosted by Ademola Odewade — chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich), and Founder of K-Dems Consulting.

The King Dems Podcast. Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts.

Diary of a CFO. Finance leadership, unfiltered. Ranked in the global top 2.5% of podcasts.

This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

#AIinAccounting #ContinuousAssurance #DiaryOfACFO #KingDemsPodcast

Why Transformation Programmes Fail — The Inner Game of Organisations
Most transformation programmes fail because the organisation is quietly protecting the very thing you are trying to change.
Cop a copy of my new book NOW: ⁠https://ademolaodewade.com⁠
Turn transformation experience into paid advisory work — Ethos (paid link): ⁠https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw⁠
AI labs pay highly-skilled experts — Mercor (paid link): ⁠https://t.mercor.com/neABb⁠
Build the culture diagnostic deck in minutes — Gamma (paid link): ⁠https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h⁠
Zhanna Zhuravleva grew up in Georgia and lived through war as a child, then built her career across Russia, Israel and the UK. She completed two master's degrees — finance and human resources — followed by postgraduate study, and taught finance, management and philosophy at a university in St. Petersburg.
She started in industry as a Kaizen team leader and went on to lead HR and cultural transformation across organisations of more than 1,000 people in 40 countries. She is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD, has run over 3,000 sessions with leaders, and founded Awake Conscious Play, a school of conscious leadership and leadership transformation.
Early in her career she ran a textbook transformation — designed framework, defined KPIs, strong governance. Six months later almost nothing had changed. The organisation was not governed by its processes; it was governed by informal power. Everything since has been built on that finding.
The 30% improvement in employee satisfaction and 10% reduction in turnover she reports came from no single initiative — a culture hub that put interns and juniors into the improvement process, people partners trained in coaching, and one-to-ones where the feedback actually changed the next decision.
In this episode:
Change fluency — why transformation is not a project with a start date and an end dateThe "inner game": why a fintech's people-first programme stalls because the tension is giving leaders their identity
Three signals that tell you inside a week whether a culture is healthy — quality of disagreement, speed of bad news, and the gap between the official story and the underground story
Diagnosis before prescription: the first 30 days run across Ken Wilber's four quadrants, not a rush to launch programmes
Three types of values — declarative, conscious, unconscious — and which layer actually decides
Why Meta making AI token consumption a performance metric produced engineers burning tokens instead of better decisions
WEF Future of Jobs: 170 million roles created against 92 million displaced — recalibration, not replacement"AI is electricity with intelligence" — why this is an electricity moment rather than an internet one
The 4D Compass for building trust: self, soul, soft, spiritWhy engagement surveys measure compliance — a purple, tribal culture scores high on engagement and low on trust
What she protects if the HR budget is halved: leader development, and a culture diagnosis every year
The mistake founders make at 100 employees — still leading as though there are 20Zhanna's recommendation for every CEO is Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan.
Her conscious leadership programmes — including Lila, the transformational game she has adapted for leaders and runs offline and online — are at: ⁠https://awake-play.co.uk/⁠
Upcoming cohorts: ⁠https://awake-play.co.uk/upcoming⁠
Connect with Zhanna on LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhanna-zhuravleva-chartered-fcipd-03a0a622a/⁠
Hosted by Ademola Odewade — chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich), and Founder of K-Dems Consulting.
The King Dems Podcast. Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts.
Diary of a CFO. Finance leadership, unfiltered. Ranked in the global top 2.5% of podcasts.
This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Business valuation isn't a multiple of EBITDA. Cop a copy of my new book NOW: https://ademolaodewade.com
Turn expertise into paid advisory work — Ethos (paid link): https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw
AI labs pay highly-skilled experts — Mercor (paid link): https://t.mercor.com/neABb
Build the buyer deck in minutes — Gamma (paid link): https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h
Mark Mills OBE started Cardpoint plc from scratch in 2000. Two years later it floated on AIM at a £7 million valuation. By 2006 it was turning over £100 million a year on £19.8 million of EBITDA, and he exited in 2007 at £175 million.
He now sells other people's businesses. One owner was told his company was worth £3 million. Mark sold it for just over £10 million. Nothing changed in the accounts — what changed was who the business was presented to, and why they needed it.
In this episode:
- Why bids from strategic buyers don't resemble a multiple of EBITDA
- The £3m-to-£10m sale, and the buyer maths that produced it
- Rule one of any business model: recurring income — learned from a payphone business that died in the 1991 recession
- How Mark and his CFO reverse-engineered £100m of revenue onto a sheet of paper, then landed within 2%
- Why "in three years" is a useless target and "by 31 August 2029" is not
- Solving a working capital problem by finding a bank with too much physical cash
- The one metric he never ignores when assessing a company for sale
- FARM — why people work for Fun, Achievement, Recognition, then Money, in that order
- Selling to strangers, and why referrals cannot scale a business
- What AI actually changes about client acquisition and KPI monitoring
- Realistic exit timelines: 12 to 30 months, not six
Mark's book is Making Your Mark: How I Built a Fortune From £1.50 — and You Can Too.
He offered listeners a free signed copy — email him at mark@mark.co.uk with your address and he'll send one out.
More from Mark: www.mark.co.uk · linkedin.com/in/markrichardmills
Hosted by Ademola Odewade — chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich), and Founder of K-Dems Consulting.
The King Dems Podcast. Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts.
Diary of a CFO. Finance leadership, unfiltered. Ranked in the global top 2.5% of podcasts.
This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
#BusinessValuation #ExitStrategy #DiaryOfACFO #KingDemsPodcast