The Strategy Skills Podcast: Strategy | Leadership | Critical Thinking | Problem-Solving

Daniel Coyle, New York Times bestselling author of The Culture Code and adviser to organizations ranging from Navy SEALs to global technology companies, joins the Strategy Skills Podcast to explore what truly drives leadership, performance, and flourishing.
Drawing on decades of research into elite performers and high-functioning cultures, Coyle explains why performance alone is not enough, and why many highly successful people still experience emptiness and burnout. He shares pivotal moments from his work observing leaders, including a defining insight from a Navy SEAL commander who described the four most important words a leader can say: "I screwed that up."
The conversation challenges conventional thinking about leadership, power, and problem-solving. Coyle distinguishes between complicated problems that can be solved with instructions and complex problems that require experimentation, learning, and trust. Through examples ranging from kindergarten classrooms to professional sports teams and Pixar's creative process, he shows how psychological safety, vulnerability, and group flow enable people to add up to more than the sum of their parts.
The episode also moves beyond the workplace to examine what it means to flourish in a world that is accelerating, fragmenting, and increasingly uncertain. Coyle discusses attention, meaning, community, and the small practices that help individuals and groups create energy, connection, and resilience over time.
Key Insights
1. Leadership begins with vulnerability
"The four most important words a leader can say… 'I screwed that up.'"
Coyle explains that the best leaders are not those who appear flawless, but those who openly acknowledge mistakes. This signal of vulnerability creates trust and invites others to contribute honestly, allowing groups to solve problems together rather than hiding behind certainty.
2. Psychological safety outperforms raw intelligence
"The kindergartners outperform the CEOs… not because they're smarter, but because they're safer."
In group problem-solving tasks, children succeed because they are unafraid to try, fail, and adjust. Adults, constrained by status and fear of judgment, slow themselves down. Safety enables experimentation and learning.
3. Most leadership failures confuse complex with complicated
"Complex problems are alive. They change when you do something to them."
Coyle draws a sharp distinction between problems that follow instructions and those that evolve as you interact with them. Treating living systems like mechanical ones leads to brittle strategies and disappointment.
4. Experimentation beats planning in complex systems
"Try something, observe what happens, learn from that, and then try something else."
For complex challenges, progress comes from testing, learning, and adjusting rather than executing a fixed plan. This mindset mirrors how high-performing teams actually work.
5. Leadership is about creating energy, not pushing information
"A lot of times we think of business problems as knowledge problems, when in fact they're energy problems."
Coyle emphasizes that change fails when leaders try to impose best practices. Momentum emerges when people are invited into shared questions and feel ownership of the work.
6. Group flow requires clear goals and freedom
"You have to have a shared horizon… autonomy… and ownership."
High-performing teams operate like a pickup basketball game: everyone knows the goal, operates within guardrails, and has freedom to act. These conditions allow flow to emerge naturally.
7. Meaning is created through connection, not information
"Meaning is not about delivering information. It's about resonance and connection."
Coyle shows that meaning arises when people share stories, vulnerability, and purpose—often through simple but deep questions—rather than through data or instructions.
8. Attention determines whether life feels alive or hollow
"If you're all in the narrow, life gets really thin."
Flourishing individuals and cultures balance focused, controlling attention with open, connective attention. Too much of either leads to stagnation or chaos.
9. Community is something you practice, not consume
"Community isn't a noun. It's a verb."
Whether in organizations or neighborhoods, community forms through shared projects, constraints, and contribution—not passive belonging.
Get Daniel's book, Flourish, here: https://shorturl.at/oICpY
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Liz Tran, former venture capital executive and author of AQ, examines why agility—not raw intelligence or experience—has become the defining capability for leaders operating amid persistent uncertainty. She introduces Agility Quotient (AQ) as the capacity to adapt thinking, identity, and decision-making when familiar structures no longer apply.
Tran explains how traditional markers of success, from credentials to past wins, can quietly become liabilities when environments shift. She describes how the pandemic, rapid AI adoption, and labor volatility exposed a gap between competence in stable conditions and effectiveness under change. Agility, in her view, is not a personality trait but a practiced discipline.
Key insights from the discussion include:
Why leaders who anchor identity too tightly to past success struggle most when conditions change, and how agility begins with loosening that attachment.

How burnout often reflects a loss of agency rather than excessive workload, and why articulating a future-facing personal strategy restores momentum.

What recent layoff patterns reveal about how organizations are selecting for adaptability rather than tenure or historical performance.

How a shift from a "know-it-all" posture to a "learn-it-all" posture improves judgment, learning speed, and organizational resilience.

Why confidence is built through repeated cycles of disruption and recovery, not through mastery alone.

How leaders can use AI as leverage without eroding core human capabilities such as critical thinking, synthesis, and judgment.

Tran also reflects on how early beliefs shape leadership behavior long after circumstances change, and why agility requires examining those assumptions rather than optimizing around them. She argues that reinvention is not episodic but continuous, and that career durability now depends on the ability to operate without fixed reference points.
This episode offers a practical framework for executives seeking relevance and steadiness in volatile environments, positioning agility quotient as a core leadership capability for the next decade.
Get Liz's book, AQ, here: https://shorturl.at/o8fGu
AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That's Always Changing
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In this episode with Rishi Dave, a partner in Bain's Commercial Excellence practice with deep expertise in B2B marketing and digital marketing, he explains the concept of a "Day 1 List" in B2B sales and marketing and the three things that will get a supplier or seller on the list. Rishi also discussed what a "sales play" is, how to build it, institutionalize the knowledge within the company, and get the sales team to adopt the sales play to fulfill their potential and increase their productivity and sales.
Rishi Dave partners with CMOs and management teams to drive marketing transformations and build modern marketing capabilities. He serves as an expert on the implementation of Bain's B2B Marketing Diagnostic and Sales Play System.
Rishi has held global CMO roles at public technology and cloud companies, including Dun & Bradstreet, Vonage, and MongoDB. Prior to these roles, he served as the global head of digital marketing for Dell's B2B businesses. Rishi started his career at Bain & Company.
As a marketing executive, Rishi has built world-class marketing organizations and capabilities that have driven top-line growth leveraging the right marketing technology, data, analytics and content strategy. Rishi has driven major brand and messaging transformations, reimagined digital customer experiences, and built and scaled go-to market models.
Rishi earned an MBA in Marketing from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania as well as a BS in Chemical Engineering and an AB in Economics with Honors from Stanford University. 
 
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In this episode, we dive deep into the critical topic of self-deception and its profound impact on leadership and personal effectiveness. Mitch shares powerful insights on how self-deception can undermine our relationships and professional success, often without us even realizing it. He explains the concept of self-betrayal and how it leads to a distorted view of ourselves and others, creating unnecessary conflicts and reducing our influence as leaders. Mitch shares a valuable advice on how to rebuild trust in relationships damaged by self-deception and how to not let it happen again.
 
Mitch is the co-author of Arbinger's latest bestseller, The Outward Mindset. He writes frequently on the practical effects of mindset at the individual and organizational levels as well as the role of leadership in transforming organizational culture and results. He is an expert on mindset and culture change, leadership, strategy, performance management, organizational turnaround, and conflict resolution. 
 
Mitch is a sought-after speaker to organizations across a range of industries, bringing his practical experience to bear for leaders of corporations, governments, and organizations across the globe. Specific clients include NASA, Citrix, Aflac, the U.S. Army and Air Force, the Treasury Executive Institute, and Intermountain Healthcare. Mitch carries his first-hand perspective as a proven leader into his speeches and facilitation, dynamically bringing Arbinger's concepts and tools to life through his powerful stories and hands-on experience. His audiences leave inspired to improve and equipped with a practical roadmap to effect immediate change. 
 
In his role as managing partner, Mitch directs the development of Arbinger's intellectual property, training and consulting programs, and highly customized large-scale organizational change initiatives. He has been instrumental in Arbinger's rapid growth, including its expanding international presence in nearly 30 countries. 
 
Mitch received his B.A. in philosophy and is a licensed nursing administrator. Trained in fine art at the Art Students League and the National Academy, he spends much of his free time painting. His work hangs in organizations nationwide.
 
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Neri Karra Sillaman, entrepreneurship advisor at the University of Oxford and author of Pioneers: Eight Principles of Business Longevity from Immigrant Entrepreneurs, discusses why immigrant-founded companies are disproportionately successful and tend to last longer than their counterparts. Drawing on her experience as a former child refugee and on research that began with her PhD, she explains how longevity is built through clear vision, perseverance, community, shared value, and disciplined decision-making.
She begins with the formative role of vision. At age eleven, while living in a refugee camp, education became her "north star." That clarity helped her interpret rejection not as failure but as "not yet," a mindset she later observed repeatedly among immigrant entrepreneurs. Clear intent, she argues, allows setbacks to redirect effort rather than extinguish it.
The conversation then turns to the principles she identified through interviews with immigrant founders of companies such as Chobani, Duolingo, WhatsApp, and Calendly. These include treating rejection as the beginning of negotiation, building community as a core operating system rather than a marketing tactic, and prioritizing shared value before profit. She emphasizes that many founders focus first on contributing to customers, suppliers, and local communities, with financial results following from that orientation.
Sillaman also explains how history and heritage function as assets rather than liabilities. Rather than discarding their past, immigrant entrepreneurs draw on cultural memory and lived experience to shape vision and execution in the present. This integration of past, present, and future becomes central to how long-lived businesses are built.
Another recurring theme is luck. She notes that founders consistently describe themselves as "lucky," but defines luck not as chance, but as a capability: being prepared enough to recognize opportunity and willing to act decisively when it appears.
The discussion also addresses technology and AI. As tools become more powerful, she argues, human creativity, judgment, and connection become more important, not less. She suggests that imperfections and visible signs of human authorship may increasingly signal authenticity in an automated environment.
Throughout the episode, Sillaman challenges dominant models of ego-centered leadership. She contrasts short-lived, personality-driven leadership with approaches that place attention on the work, the community served, and the legacy left behind. Longevity, she concludes, depends not only on how businesses grow, but on how they treat people and define the value they exist to create.
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