Making Business Art: Recent Episodes
Ezequiel Williams
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.
Do you feel you are fulfilling your purpose? Or do you feel unclear and searching for it? For many of us, discovering and aligning our lives with our purpose is no easy feat.
My returning guest, Lisa Morris, spent over two decades in corporate consulting leadership roles focused on business and organizational transformation before she got clear on her purpose and changed her work life to be more fulfilling. She realized that her purpose is to help people clearly express who they are in creative ways.
Today Lisa blends her business and design skills to work with entrepreneurs and mission-driven organizations to develop their offerings, brands, and business strategies in ways that genuinely connect and resonate deeply with the people they serve.
In this episode, Lisa and I reflect on what gets in the way of connecting with our purpose, ways we can distinguish and unblock old beliefs that no longer serve us and get in our way, and learning how to recognize and listen to our purpose so it can inform our choices and make our life feel much more fulfilling.
If you have a story to share about lessons learned in recognizing your purpose and living a more fulfilling life, please write to us. Share in the comments if you are on YouTube, or click on the link in this episode description to share your story.
Share your story here:
https://forms.gle/CF65QsSJZJLGokGe7
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Lisa Morris is a multidisciplinary designer, strategist, and visual artist who partners with bold visionaries to shape brands, solve complex challenges through human-centered practices, and create visual work that resonates with audiences. As an integrative creative, she brings clarity and direction by bridging intuition and analysis, creativity and structure, soul and strategy. With over two decades of experience—including nearly 20 years at Accenture and a decade within boutique design firms—Lisa brings a rare blend of soulful creativity and structural rigor to her work.
As the founder of Studio L, an independent, female-owned boutique studio, Lisa helps leaders navigate the evolution of their ventures with clarity and confidence. Her holistic approach integrates research-driven strategy, human-centered design, and evocative visual art to craft solutions that are functional and emotionally resonant. Throughout her career, Lisa has been a catalyst for mindset shifts, facilitating collaborative problem-solving to deliver measurable results across diverse industries.
Driven by a mission to enrich lives through purposeful design, Lisa specializes in shaping brands and crafting human-first services and experiences. Whether facilitating learning or creating bespoke fine art, she remains committed to the transformative power of creativity and the seamless alignment of form, function, and impact.
Studio L: https://www.studio-l.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisagmorris/
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about making business and its offerings a source of inspiration and connection for ourselves, our teams, and the people we serve.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I work as an innovation strategist and facilitator who helps brave leaders and teams co-create new ways to win over and keep customers and talent. Join me in deep conversations about creating powerful connections with the people we serve, while making art out of our business and life.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
Have you ever felt disengaged or burned out at work? Many of us have, and the efforts to fix this in organizations like spending a lot of money on flashy events or retreats does not fix this problem. Returning guest and co-founder of The Design Gym, Andy Hagerman, discovered that designing moments for authentic human connection and building community within organizations is more efficient and effective at increasing engagement, creativity and productivity. In other words, this approach provides a powerful strategic advantage for organizations.
In this episode, Andy shares how designing for human connection helps people feel more engaged and invested in their work. He tells us about how designing and hosting thoughtfully curated and facilitated industry dinners was a game changer for building client relationships, and also shares examples of the positive impact of connection experiences he's designed for client teams.
We discuss how to foster trust, engage employees, and leverage human-centric strategies to activate change, even in the face of challenges with remote work and the emergence of AI. If you've been seeking innovative ways to connect with and inspire your team or clients, this episode is definitely for you.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Andy is passionate about creating workplaces where people thrive. Andy Hagerman is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of The Design Gym, helping organizations align strategy with culture. His expertise in design strategy, ethnographic research, and facilitation brings a novel approach to traditional people and change challenges, and has helped him to drive transformation at major clients like HP, Patagonia, Capital One, Pfizer, and Marriott. He's an avid fly fisherman, pizza maker, husband, and dad to a 2-year old girl. He lives in Beacon, New York.
How many meetings have you been in lately where you felt engaged, got a lot done, and thought it was time well spent? Chances are your answer is "not many" or "none." My returning guest, Adam StJohn Lawrence, thinks we can supercharge our productivity and get a lot more out of our meetings by infusing them with what he calls Doing, Not Talking. Adam is a master facilitator, author, and educator who works with private and public sector organizations around the world. He weaves together techniques from the world of psychology, design, improv, and theater to offer a unique approach to help teams open more channels of communication beyond talking and get a lot done very fast.
In this episode Adam and I unpack what Doing, Not Talking looks like, how we can accelerate communication, alignment, and work within a team, the power of "building to think," how what he calls "investigative rehearsal" supercharges our work, and why running small experiments is one of the best ways to reduce risk.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Adam StJohn Lawrence is a customer experience consultant, comedian and actor with a background in psychology and the global automotive industry. For years he has been using expertise gained in the world of theater, film, stand-up comedy and storytelling to help organizations influence and impress their customers and partners.
Adam is co-founder of WorkPlayExperience, and co-initiator of the Global Service Jam - the world's biggest ever service design event (so far). He is a co-author of the top selling book, "This is Service Design Doing." Past clients include adidas, Swisscom, Telekom Shop Vertriebsgesellschaft, Ernst & Young, E.ON, BASF, and the Federal Government of Australia.
Find out more about Adam here: https://linktr.ee/adamstjohn
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about making business and its offerings a source of inspiration and connection for ourselves, our teams, and the people we serve.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I work as an innovation strategist and facilitator who helps brave leaders and teams co-create new ways to win over and keep customers and talent. Join me in deep conversations about creating powerful connections with the people we serve, while making art out of our business and life.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
Are you trying to foster innovation in your organization, but team meetings end up feeling like an uninspired replay of previous ones? Many leaders face this challenge. They have smart team members, but unleashing their team’s creative genius seems unattainable. Fortunately, social neuroscientists like our guest, Caroline Szymanski, Ph.D., can offer us science-backed insights and strategies to boost team creativity and performance.
Caroline earned a Ph.D. focused on social neuroscience and team collaboration from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. She went on to apply what she learned in her doctorate program as part of the teaching and coaching team at the Hasso Plattner Institute School of Design Thinking in Germany.
In this episode Caroline breaks down insights and practical tips on team facilitation, activating brain circuits to help teams synchronize their brain waves for better performance, avoiding common mistakes that lead to group-think or team discouragement, the importance of building and sustaining trust, reducing the impact of stress on teams, and much more. We also touch on Caroline’s passion for helping people cultivate relationship intelligence for couples and parents of young children, and why she founded Relationship-holidays, a retreat center based in the Azores islands that offers rest, adventure, and programming for strengthening relationships and parenting skills.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Caroline Szymanski, Ph.D., is co-founder of Kandoee Innovation and a strategic facilitator, qualitative researcher, and expert in the neuroscience of team collaboration. For more than a decade, she has helped global teams define and launch innovation by synthesizing human needs into actionable design and strategy.
Caroline honed her expertise as a lead coach, lecturer, and project manager on the core teaching team at the Hasso Plattner Institute School of Design Thinking (2012–2024). Her approach is informed by a Ph.D. in Social Neuroscience and Collaboration from the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
Carolina’s consulting experience includes leading complex remote projects for organizations such as GIZ, Kiron, and Helios Clinics. A polyglot who works in German, English, French, and Italian, she brings a culturally adaptive lens to her strategy and qualitative insight generation for international service design.
In addition to her consulting work, Caroline is passionate about helping people cultivate relationship intelligence for couples and parents of young children. She channeled her passion into the founding Relationship-holidays, a retreat center based in the Azores islands that offers rest, adventure, and programming for strengthening relationships.
Two questions that are top of mind for most leaders are: 1) How can my team perform better? and 2) How can we grow our business? My guest and co-founder of The Design Gym, Andy Hagerman, works with leaders of Fortune 500 companies to bridge the gap between these questions. Andy’s work focuses on helping leaders shape more collaborative, creative, and healthy team environments that unlock fresh and sustainable ways to drive business growth.
In this conversation Andy and I discuss his transition from a traditional business career at a “big four” consulting firm to learning how to apply a human-centered approach to his consulting work; his journey to co-found The Design Gym in New York City and its evolution over time; the transformative power of design thinking in building healthier, more sustainable work environments; insights into “facilitative leadership” and the power of effective “problem framing”; and how his experiences as an avid traveler and musician have shaped how he approaches his work today. Andy shares lessons he learned about the importance of slowing down to speed up, creating healthy and stable work environments for teams, and how fostering genuine human connection is key for sustainable growth.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Andy is passionate about creating workplaces where people thrive. Andy Hagerman is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of The Design Gym, helping organizations align strategy with culture. His expertise in design strategy, ethnographic research, and facilitation brings a novel approach to traditional people and change challenges, and has helped him to drive transformation at major clients like HP, Patagonia, Capital One, Pfizer, and Marriott. He’s an avid fly fisherman, pizza maker, husband, and dad to a 2-year old girl. He lives in Beacon, New York.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about making business and its offerings a source of inspiration and connection for ourselves, our teams, and the people we serve.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I work as an innovation strategist and facilitator who helps brave leaders and teams co-create new ways to win over and keep customers and talent. Join me in deep conversations about creating powerful connections with the people we serve, while making art out of our business and life.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
Have you ever felt stuck, blocked, or that something you can’t quite put your finger on is preventing you from getting the business and personal outcomes that you desire?
My returning guest and Business Healer, Marte Siebenhar, struggled with overwork and burnout for years.
As she sought and applied a variety of tools to help herself, she developed insights into how our unconscious mental and emotional blocks influence and limit the results we produce at work. Eventually she developed a way to heal and release what was holding her back while transforming her relationship with and performance at work. Today she works with high-achieving professionals to help them overcome burnout and amplify their success while working fewer hours with greater joy and purpose.
In this episode Marte and I discuss how she blends her professional experience with ancient spiritual practices into a unique approach to healing the relationship with ourselves and our work, why it’s useful to identify and heal our internal blocks to prosperity, how to reduce overwork and burnout, how she integrates skills she learned in her previous life as a professional classical musician into her work today,
and how taking action and developing a consistent process is the most powerful approach to manifest something in the world.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Marte Siebenhar founded The Business Healer, pioneering a blend of traditional business strategy with energy healing practices. After launching a fundraising strategy business in 2019 and experiencing remarkable success, growing 4x and mobilizing over $21 million in client funding, Marte then shifted her focus to executive coaching, business healing, and group programs as The Business Healer.
Drawing on 20 years in nonprofit arts leadership and 25 years as an energy practitioner, Marte now helps organizations and leaders thrive through her distinctive healing-centered approach. Her background includes roles at Carnegie Hall, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Bakehouse Art Complex, and New World Symphony. She is an Associate Certified Pranic Healer (with full certification expected in May 2025) and a Certified Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique Level 2 Practitioner. A double graduate of Manhattan School of Music, Marte is on a mission to normalize energy work as an essential tool for business transformation and workplace healing.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marte-siebenhar/
Web: https://www.thebusinesshealer.com
Insta: https://www.instagram.com/the_businesshealer
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@the_businesshealer
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about making business and its offerings a source of inspiration and connection for ourselves, our teams, and the people we serve.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I work as an innovation strategist and facilitator who helps brave leaders and teams co-create new ways to win over and keep customers and talent. Join me in deep conversations about creating powerful connections with the people we serve, while making art out of our business and life.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
YouTube: @MakingBusinessArt
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/making-business-art
Do you ever feel like chaos in your organization is getting in the way of teams being more effective at work? My guest and founder of SmartTribes Institute, Christine Comaford, has developed an approach that blends applied neuro-science and ancient wisdom to help leaders and teams cut through chaos and fear to build emotional engagement that increases performance, collaboration, and talent retention.
In this episode Christine and I discuss the early days of her career in the 1980s working with tech companies like Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple; starting her own businesses; her current work at SmartTribes Institute and how she blends her extensive business acumen with applied neuro-science and ancient wisdom; how acknowledging and regulating emotions and fostering a supportive work environment can turn dysfunctional and fearful teams into cohesive, motivated, and successful groups; and her volunteer role as a death doula and what she has learned about what really matters at the end of our life journey.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
For over 35 years Leadership and Culture Coach, Serial Entrepreneur, and New York Times bestselling author Christine Comaford has helped leaders navigate growth and change. She specializes in applied neuroscience, which helps her clients achieve tremendous results in record time. As an entrepreneur she built and sold five companies with an average ROI of 700%, and she was a software engineer in the early days of Microsoft and Apple. Christine is a human behavior expert, and the New York Times bestselling author of SmartTribes and Rules for Renegades, and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Power Your Tribe.
What you may not know about Christine is that she was a Buddhist nun from age 17-24 years old, and has been a volunteer Death Doula for hospice patients. Over the past 27 years she has walked 66 people through their death process, helping them to find peace, closure with their loved ones, and gratitude for a life well-lived. Her hospice work continues now as she expands her work to include non-verbal children with neurodegenerative diseases. She sees all of her patients as dear friends and generous teachers.
She is also a shamanic practitioner who has studied indigenous wisdom with tribal leaders over the past 40 years. She brings their earth-honoring wisdom to her workshops, her retreats, her coaching so all she interact with feel truly seen and honored as the courageous and remarkable people they are.
Connect with Christine:
SmartTribes Institute
YouTube
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about making business and its offerings a source of inspiration and connection for ourselves, our teams, and the people we serve.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I work as an innovation strategist and facilitator who helps brave leaders and teams co-create new ways to win over and keep customers and talent. Join me in deep conversations about creating powerful connections with the people we serve, while making art out of our business and life.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
YouTube: @MakingBusinessArt
Most of us want to be more influential, creative, and able to build key relationships in and out of work. But this isn't always easy to accomplish, and sometimes it seems it’s because someone is standing in our way. But that someone, more often than not, might just be ourselves.
For this minisode I’m bringing back business ethnographer and empathy trainer, Karen Faith, to discuss a powerful approach to listening, communicating, and relating she calls the “Unconditional Welcome."
In this conversation Karen and I discuss what Unconditional Welcome is, when and how to apply it, and recognizing how our judgements limit us. We also talk about why it can be a game changer for building trust and improving collaboration, creativity, and innovation in organizations. Karen invites us to be more accepting of ourselves and others, and discover the many possibilities that open up for us when we embrace Unconditional Welcome.
Check out episode 26 if you’re curious to learn more about Karen’s work as a business ethnographer, her background in music and performance art, and how she pulls all of these experiences and skills together to teach leaders and teams how to be more successful by learning and practicing “cognitive empathy.”
*A special thank you to Chris Baer for his voicework and creative contribution to this episode.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Karen Faith is Founder and CEO of Others Unlimited. She is an ethnographer, strategist, and creator of the Others curriculum. Her findings, talks and workshops have guided initiatives at Google, Indeed, Intuit, Applebee’s, The NBA, The ACLU, Blue Cross Blue Shield, The Federal Reserve Bank, The Nelson- Atkins Museum of Art, and more. Karen is an alumnus of the Hyper Island Business Transformation course in Stockholm, Sweden, and a recipient of the Dwight Conquergood award for ethnographic research at Performance Studies International in London. She has taught her approach to students at Penn State, Juilliard, Chapman University, University of Michigan, Kansas State University, and the National University of Singapore School of Design. She’s presented at SXSW Interactive in Austin (2018 and 2022), DesignUp in Bangalore (2019), HOW Design Live in Chicago (2019), and the 4As Stratfest in NYC (2019, 2021, and 2023). Her TEDx talk on Unconditional Welcome has received over 2M views.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about making business and its offerings a source of inspiration and connection for ourselves, our teams, and the people we serve.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I work as an innovation strategist and facilitator who helps brave leaders and teams co-create new ways to win over and keep customers and talent. Join me in deep conversations about creating powerful connections with the people we serve, while making art out of our business and life.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
What if instead of thinking of you as an employee, your boss and workplace treated you like a valued customer? My guest and HR transformation expert, Dart Lindsley, knows that industrial-age management practices are not working. He champions a new approach to how we design our work in organizations by treating work as a product that every organization builds and sells to their employees. Dart believes that by treating work as a product and employees as customers, organizations can build and deliver work that makes employees feel alive while delivering better results for all stakeholders.
In this conversation Dart and I had a wide-ranging discussion that includes his re-frame of work as product, how this approach opens new possibilities and benefits for people and organizations, the problem with the “working dead,” lessons learned from over 25 years of working in people operations functions at Cisco Systems and Google, his background as a student of literature and how he applies what he learned from literature and writing to his corporate roles, and more. Dart thinks deeply about the world of work and how to bring more humanity and satisfaction to our work life and beyond.
*A special thank you to Karen Faith for her voicework and creative contribution to this episode.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Dart Lindsley is the CEO and Co-founder of the work experience design firm 11fold. Previously he led Global Process Excellence for People Operations at Google, and HR Transformation at Cisco Systems. With a unique background spanning two decades in literary arts and business architecture, he is the author of the Harvard Business Review article "Reimagining Work as Product" and host of the "Work for Humans" podcast. In his work, Dart argues that work is a product to which employees subscribe, so all companies are multi-sided with employees forming one side.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about making business and its offerings a source of inspiration and connection for ourselves, our teams, and the people we serve.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I work as an innovation strategist and facilitator who helps brave leaders and teams co-create new ways to win over and keep customers and talent. Join me in deep conversations about creating powerful connections with the people we serve, while making art out of our business and life.
Most of us have sat through a mandatory class, training, or presentation at work that was pretty terrible. Worse yet, we probably felt like a hostage waiting to escape. Going through this type of experience hinders our individual ability to learn and causes teams to struggle to adopt new skills and ways of working.
Fortunately, my guest and global learning leader for Amazon, Mark Boccia, is dedicated to designing learning experiences that engage people and make learning stick. Mark balances pragmatism and business acumen with a human-centric lens to create educational programs that connect with people’s heads and hearts.
In this conversation Mark and I discuss his approach to making learning effective, insights on creating memorable learning experiences, the importance of empathy and storytelling, and pragmatic advice on being clear on business priorities, managing stakeholder relationships, and overcoming organizational barriers.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Mark Boccia is a visionary Senior Learning and Development Leader who garners the highest engagement across all levels of the workforce. He has held senior leadership roles at global marquee brands including Marriot, Royal Caribbean, and Amazon.
Throughout his career, Mark has been sought out based on his success as an intuitive partner and internal consultant. He is adept at 1:1 leadership conversations that translate strategic objectives into learning solutions for complex business issues and opportunities. As a cross-functional leader, Mark has cultivated and built trusting relationships and invested in frontline employees to C-level executives for immediate and long-term results.
Mark is recognized for maintaining expertise and performance as a coach and mentor.
Ever heard the idiom “It takes two to tango”? For service design facilitator and executive coach, Renatus Hoogenraad, the spirit behind this idiom has a more literal meaning. As a former professional ballet dancer and someone trained in applied improvisation, Renatus pays special attention to how we show up and use our bodies at work. He thinks of work as an ongoing choreography where a form of dance is happening in the interactions among team members.
Renatus’ perspective is a refreshing counterbalance to what many of us have been trained to do at school and work: live in our heads. We are led to believe that relying on our intellect will help us succeed while downplaying intuition, emotion, and relational skills that are key to achieving meaningful breakthroughs in any domain. If you look into the lives of legendary innovators, you will find that their breakthroughs were not solely a byproduct of thinking, but that other human faculties were key to their achievements.
In this episode Renatus and I explore his approach to being more embodied at work, how to unlock better creative collaboration through greater embodied awareness, and how he applies learnings from his previous life as a professional ballet dancer to helping people be more connected and in sync at work.
I hope this conversation inspires you to explore what being more embodied at work is like for you, and sense into what transformation you may be able to unlock for yourself and how you relate with others.
*A special thanks to Karen Faith for her creativity and voicework in this episode.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Renatus Hoogenraad, formerly active in the world of Performing Arts, now enjoys helping organizations develop the human-centric aspects of "working better together," creating a culture that people care for. Specializing in service innovation facilitation, combined with coaching, emotional intelligence, and leadership training, he finds fulfillment in witnessing people become world-class facilitators of co-creative work processes.
He is passionate about developing authentic and charismatic people and teams at all levels who use human-centric work approaches for the benefit of their organizations and their lives.
Born and raised in the Netherlands, Renatus speaks English, French, Dutch, and enough German to order a beer. He studied Business Administration and Performing Arts and is an accredited Coach.
Learn more about Renatu’s work at Sparks Sàrl.
https://www.sparks.ch/
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
Life at work can feel dull, transactional, and exhausting. Fortunately, it does not have to be that way. In fact, our work can be turned into a vehicle for transforming how we relate and connect with others, while making other areas of our lives feel bright, inspired and nourishing.
For this minisode I’m bringing back innovation and leadership development expert, Chris Baer, to discuss “working with love,” a key foundation of his leadership development work through his Mandala Institute. Chris’ work focuses on helping leaders develop more relational skills so their organizations can have better culture, more wellbeing, higher performance and growth.
In this conversation we unpack how “love” is not soft or about little pink hearts, but a powerful and demanding force that helps us grow and engage more deeply with our teams and other people in our lives. Developing the inner skill of working with love will transform your life at work and elsewhere.
If you are looking for inspiration to reimagine approaching a process of transformation to make work and other areas of your life feel bright, inspired and connected, this conversation is for you.
If you want to hear more about Chris’ backstory and thoughts about developing “inner skills for outer results,” check out our conversation in episode 14. You can find Mandala Institute online at mandala.institute.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Chris Baer is the founder of the Mandala Institute, an organization that helps leaders create humanistic and innovation culture in teams and companies. He is an expert on innovation strategy, engaging and growing talent through coaching, as well as design methodologies.
Chris is also a co-founder of Sunstone Therapies, an early-stage medical company dedicated to alleviating emotional distress in patients through trial psychedelic therapies. Chris also played a key role in the creation of the Bill Richard’s Center for Healing, a state of the art facility designed expressly for psychedelic therapy in the medical setting.
Prior to Mandala and Sunstone, Chris served as Vice President of Global Leadership Development and Learning Experience at Marriott International overseeing talent and executive development. In other Marriott roles, Chris led customer experience initiatives encompassing brand and digital consumer product development. Contributions included brand creation (Moxy), brand revitalization (Marriott Hotels), and customer experience strategy and execution (the Ritz-Carlton), as well as the development of Marriott’s enterprise innovation framework.
Prior to Marriott, Chris led an international marketing firm, and consulted to Fortune 100’s on digital strategy, product management and user experience.
Formally trained as an industrial designer at RISD, Chris employs design methodologies to business challenges and has brought design thinking to executives and their product teams globally.
Chris holds a leadership coaching certification from Georgetown University’s Institute for Transformational Leadership (cohort 45), and coaches top executives seeking to bring forth transformation within themselves, their enterprises and beyond.
An internationally acclaimed artist, Chris is also a contemporary abstract painter and creates works in glass and mixed media.
Chris lives in Washington DC with his family.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
Henry Ford once said that “if there is any secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from [their] angle as well as from your own.” What Henry Ford was talking about is practicing “cognitive empathy” also known as “perspective taking.” My guest and founder of Others Unlimited, Karen Faith, teaches people in organizations how to be more successful by learning and practicing “cognitive empathy” to achieve better results in communication, trust, culture, collaboration, and many other benefits.
In this conversation Karen and I talk about different types of empathy, her empathy training curriculum, the benefits of practicing “cognitive empathy,” the importance of personal boundaries, developing what she calls “unconditional welcome,” self awareness, practicing ethnography, and the arc of Karen’s professional journey from musician, to performance artist, to the present day, and the influence of her training in the arts on her work with organizations. Karen also shares her reflections on making business into an art form and how she has transformed deep personal pain into gifts she uses to help people change and grow.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Karen Faith is Founder and CEO of Others Unlimited. She is an ethnographer, strategist, and creator of the Others curriculum. Her findings, talks and workshops have guided initiatives at Google, Indeed, Intuit, Applebee’s, The NBA, The ACLU, Blue Cross Blue Shield, The Federal Reserve Bank, The Nelson- Atkins Museum of Art, and more. Karen is an alumnus of the Hyper Island Business Transformation course in Stockholm, Sweden, and a recipient of the Dwight Conquergood award for ethnographic research at Performance Studies International in London. She has taught her approach to students at Penn State, Juilliard, Chapman University, University of Michigan, Kansas State University, and the National University of Singapore School of Design. She’s presented at SXSW Interactive in Austin (2018 and 2022), DesignUp in Bangalore (2019), HOW Design Live in Chicago (2019), and the 4As Stratfest in NYC (2019, 2021, and 2023). Her TEDx talk on Unconditional Welcome has received nearly 2M views.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
New technologies enable fresh opportunities to connect with visitors in physical spaces. But connecting with people in a way that feels authentic, trustworthy, engaging, and enduring takes a whole lot of passion, collaboration, and a deep love of story and craft. My guest and Emmy-award winning creative executive and entrepreneur, Josh Goldblum, has spent over 20 years honing his craft at the intersection of art, technology, and culture to create amazing technology-enabled experiences for cultural organizations and brands.
If you have visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, or the MIT Museum, chances are you experienced the work of Josh’s award-winning experience design agency, Bluecadet.
In this episode, Josh and I talk about Bluecadet’s collaborative approach to working with clients, what it takes to create new experiences that resonate deeply with audiences, building teams and communities, his early influences, and more. What I enjoyed most about this conversation is learning about Josh’s passion for fostering deep, authentic connection with people and the lengths that he will go to do it. Josh’s stories highlight how, regardless of the tools available to us, focusing on human connection is the secret sauce to produce exceptional work.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Josh Goldblum is an Emmy-award winning creative executive and entrepreneur working at the intersection of art, technology and culture.
He serves as the CEO of Bluecadet, an award winning experience design agency that has overseen signature projects for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nike, The MIT Museum, the Smithsonian and Google. He curates and hosts Futurespaces, an interview series focused on exploring innovation in contemporary experience design.
Josh is a frequent speaker and moderator. He is available for select consulting projects in experience design and organizational transformation in the cultural sector.
His accolades include the Emmy, Webby, FWA, MUSE, IXDA, FastCompany, One Show, and more.
Check out what Josh is up to here:
https://www.bluecadet.com/
https://futurespaces.com/
https://artwrld.com/
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
If we want to be an effective leader, team member, and problem-solver, we must be skilled at understanding what is really going on with ourselves and others. My guest, entrepreneur and author, Michael Ventura, spent years refining an approach to help leaders and teams develop valuable perspectives that can be applied to solve problems internally and for their customers. Michael calls this approach “Applied Empathy,” and even authored a book with that title. This approach focuses on getting to know others and their challenges by actively engaging with them and applying what we learn to developing more effective and satisfying solutions.
In this conversation Michael and I discuss his journey in founding his award-winning strategy and design firm, Sub Rosa; how he developed the Applied Empathy approach; why and how he started a traditional medicine practice based on traditions of qigong and Nahua shamanic practices from Mexico; how his consulting work and traditional medicine work are connected; reflections on how to foster deeper connection with others; and the life lessons from his dog and how that led him to join the founding team at Kismet, a dog food company founded by celebrity couple John Legend and Chrissy Teigen.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Michael Ventura is an accomplished leader, practitioner, and educator. As the founder of strategy and design consultancy Sub Rosa, he advised influential organizations from the American Civil Liberties Union, Goldman Sachs, Google, Microsoft, and Nike to well-respected institutions such as The United Nations and the Obama-Biden Administration. Alongside his thought leadership work, Michael serves as faculty at the Esalen Institute and in private practice working with individuals seeking personal growth and mentorship. His book, Applied Empathy (Simon & Schuster 2018) explores the intersectionality of these two worlds (leadership and self development) through the practice of empathy for each of us as individuals, for others, and for society at large.
He has served as a board member and advisor to a variety of organizations including Behance, The Burning Man Project, The Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, the United Nations' affiliated Tribal Link Foundation, and a variety of growth-stage businesses. He is a visiting lecturer at institutions such as The University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, Princeton University, and the United States Military Academy at West Point. An ardent steward of personal and professional development, Michael is frequently engaged as an advisor to leaders, teams, and corporate boards at moments of transformation and change.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
If you could reinvent your organization and your career, what would you do? After many years of working with executives from prominent organizations, Tim Leberecht recognized and wanted to support people’s desire to feel a sense of belonging, dream bigger, stretch their wings and transform how they lived and worked. After publishing his first book, The Business Romantic, Tim took the leap to reinvent his career and life. He co-founded The House of Beautiful Business, a unique company that helps humanize organizations and build a more beautiful future. Today Tim is sought out by leaders of Fortune 500 companies and organizations across sectors who are seeking to develop a new playbook to align their work with a deeper sense of purpose and human connection.
In this conversation Tim and I discuss the work he does through The House of Beautiful Business; how his time as a musician and recording artists influences his work today; lessons learned as a C-suite executive; how to create beauty in business; the importance of cultivating imagination and conviction; and how the future of business might be outside of business.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Tim Leberecht is a German-American entrepreneur, curator, and author, and the co-founder and co-CEO of the House of Beautiful Business, the global network for the life-centered economy. Previously, Tim served as the chief marketing officer of NBBJ, a global design and architecture firm. From 2006 to 2013, he was the chief marketing officer of product design and innovation consultancy Frog Design.
He has spoken at numerous conferences worldwide including AI Masters, DLD, HSM Expo, New Cities Summit, Online Marketing Rockstars, Re:publica, SXSW, The Conference, The Economist Big Rethink, The Next Web, Unleash, Thinking Digital, WOBI, and the World Economic Forum. His TED Talks “3 Ways to (Usefully) Lose Control of Your Brand” and “4 Ways to Build a Human Company in the Age of Machines” have been viewed more than 3 million times to date.
Moreover, Tim has delivered keynotes and workshops for many leading global brands, including at high-profile senior executive forums for Adobe, Airbus, BCG, Cap Gemini, Daimler, Deloitte, Galp, Google, IBM, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Merck, Porsche, SAP, Siemens, Sky, UPS, and others.
Tim served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Values from 2013 to 2016. He is a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader.
He is the author of the book The Business Romantic (Harper Business, 2015), which has been translated into ten languages to date, and The End of Winning (Droemer, 2020). He is currently working on a new book about curation. His writing regularly appears in publications such as Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, Inc, Psychology Today, Quartz, and Wired. He is the co-publisher of the Book of Beautiful Business (2019), and the co-host of the Next Visions podcast with Porsche as well as the Tangier Memos podcast.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Keeping up with the accelerating pace of change and complexity in our world can feel daunting. Fortunately, there are people like global improv consultant and comedy teacher, Belina Raffy, who can show us how to re-energize how we relate with our teams and bring more joy, creativity, and connection to our organizations. Belina makes the case that practicing improv is the gym to strengthen our ability to deal with complexity.
In this conversation Belina and I discuss the benefits we can derive from practicing applied improv at work and other areas of our lives, improv’s triangle model, the distinction between serious and solemn, how to let go of being constrictive and embrace being more expansive, genuine vs. toxic positivity, teaching activists stand up comedy to help them reach and connect with audiences, and the genius of her friend Tolu and how he devised a program to train CEOs through his office cleaning service.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Belina Raffy is a global improv consultant, climate comedy teacher, and giggler, helping people and organisations to bring more love, expansiveness, and ability to engage with complex systems into our responses to climate and social issues. She has worked with many organisations including the science accelerator lab Frontier Development Lab (a collaborative partner with the European Space Agency and NASA), giz (a German sustainable development organisation), and the Inga Foundation (which applies a scientifically proven, organic agroforestry system that helps farmers thrive).
Belina has been designing and facilitating different forms of improv workshops for people working in sustainability since 2008 to help build collaboration, engagement, and our ability to engage with complex issues. She was on the board of the Applied Improvisation Network for six years, co-chaired many of their international conferences, and initiated a collaboration between the Applied Improvisation Network and the Red Cross Climate Centre. Belina wrote a book, ‘Using Improv to Save the World (and me)’ about her experience of letting go of having a home and travelling to 11 countries around the world to facilitate applied improvisation workshops. And since 2015, Belina has been delivering one of her favourite brainchildren - ’Sustainable Stand Up’ - a course which teaches people working on climate and social issues how to use a loving form of humour to think more expansively about the issues they care about, and to communicate them in a more engaging way. In June 2023, Belina became a facilitator of the powerful peer-coaching tool the Flow Game, so she could help people gain clarity about their work and lives in a deeper way. Belina is based in Berlin, Germany and giggles a lot because she loves what she does.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
Big complex problems don’t necessarily have to be overwhelming. My guest and applied anthropologist, Ellie Snowden, harnesses the power of small stories to help people in organizations turn big intractable problems into manageable ones. She argues that one-size-fits-all solutions don’t work. Instead, we can create much more impactful interventions by quickly gathering many small and granular stories related to a complex problem and then bring together multiple expert perspectives to envision the best path forward. The approach employed by Ellie and her colleagues is helpful in identifying what is truly needed to effectively address a big complex problem while opening fresh possibilities for the future.
In this conversation, Ellie and I discuss her unique approach to work at The Cynefin (pronounced kuh-nev-in, it’s a Welsh word) Company; how she uses a software tool called SenseMaker to gather stories and facilitate collaborative problem-solving work; how studying medical anthropology, yoga, and massage has shaped her approach to her work; and her take on embodied knowledge, humanizing business and doing meaningful work.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Ellie Snowden works at the Cynefin Company as a senior research consultant focused on enabling clients to make use of distributed ethnography (SenseMaker®), and participatory sense-making methods. The Cynefin Company is a centre for applied complexity: bridging principles from the natural sciences, with narrative inquiry.
Ellie's academic background is in the anthropology of social development and transformation, with a specialism in medical anthropology. After working as a qualitative researcher in public policy and employment research, she found herself coming back to her roots and joining the Cynefin Centre in 2016.
Ellie currently leads development of the Centre’s Health Programme. Some of her more recent projects include: identifying drivers of child and early forced marriage with the Women’s Refugee Commission in the Philippines and Zimbabwe; an oral history of Nurses experiences during COVID-19 with the Royal College of Nursing (Northern Ireland and Scotland). The work currently in development is focused on how best to support the healthcare workforce in the years to come.
Ever a proponent of embodied knowledge and exploring the epistemological and ontological possibilities of different modalities of health and healing, Ellie is also a trained massage therapist and yoga teacher.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
Is there an aspect of your work you find beautiful? While we might not think of beauty as a property that arises in many domains of work, my guest and sociology professor, Brandon Vaidyanathan, is finding beauty at work in unexpected places. After unexpectedly stumbling into the topic of beauty at work during research projects, Brandon is now devoting time to explore how we might expand our understanding of beauty and how it shapes us in our work and personal lives.
In this conversation Brandon and I discuss his Beauty at Work project, how it got started, his journey into sociology, and how he is bringing people from different disciplines together to explore how beauty works and what it looks like in the workplace.
If you find some aspect of your work beautiful and want to share, tell us about it here:
https://forms.gle/wcPUEc6bXVaUEZNWA
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Dr. Brandon Vaidyanathan is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Director of the Institutional Flourishing Lab at The Catholic University of America. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Business Administration from St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia and HEC Montreal respectively, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Vaidyanathan's research examines the cultural dimensions of religious, commercial, and scientific institutions, and has been widely published. He is author of Mercenaries and Missionaries: Capitalism and Catholicism in the Global South (Cornell University Press, 2019) and co-author of Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion (Oxford University Press, 2019). He is also the founder of Beauty At Work, a media platform which includes a YouTube channel and podcast exploring how beauty can both foster and inhibit our flourishing in a variety of domains, such as science, food, business, religion, justice, and more.
Website: www.beautyatwork.net
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@beautyatwork
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
Have you ever thought about what gets in the way of teams achieving the results they want? My guest, Andres Marquez-Lara, makes the case that it’s not due to a lack of tools or technology, but rather due to miscommunication, misaligned agendas, ego and conflict. Or, as he calls it, “messy human stuff.” Andres is a leadership development and collaboration expert who combines his training in clinical psychology with his background in improv and theater to create connections that help people come together and get past the barriers that get in the way of accomplishing great work.
In this episode Andres and I discuss how he works with leaders and organizations to navigate the “messy human stuff” that gets in the way of team engagement, trust, alignment, and the achievement of organizational goals. We also talk about how he learned to use skills from improv and theater to build community, how creating trust is an ongoing activity, the importance of self-awareness for leaders, the lessons he learned through his experience as an immigrant, and his book writing experiment using Chat GPT.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Andres Marquez-Lara is Founder and CEO of UFacilitate. He helps high-performing teams in nonprofit and philanthropic institutions deal with the “messy human stuff” that creates silos that put their mission at risk by breaking down barriers to collaboration across people, departments, and organizations.
Andres is Adjunct Faculty at the Executive Master in Policy Leadership (EMPL) and Master of Policy Management (MPM) at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy, Adjunct Faculty at Georgetown University Institute for Transformative Leadership and a Guest Lecturer at the Georgetown University’s Latin America Leadership Program (LALP). He is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Excellence in Public Leadership (CEPL) at George Washington University, and an Advisor at the Emergence Project for Purposeful Entrepreneurship at Stanford University.
He was named one of the emerging social innovators of the year in North America by Ashoka and American Express back in 2014. He also received the George C. Askew Award from the American Academy of Certified Public Managers for his exceptional curriculum when he worked at the DC Department of Behavioral Health. He earned a BA in psychology from Duke University, and a graduate degree in clinical community psychology from the Universidad Catolica Andres Bello in Caracas, Venezuela. He lives in the triangle area in North Carolina with his wife and two young children.
Download Andres’ book “Facilitating Leadership” here: https://www.ufacilitate.com/book/
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
Most of us have been disenchanted with the world of work at some point in our careers. But what if the culture of our organizations actively encouraged better communication, creativity and experimentation in pursuit of creating much better solutions for the people we serve? My guest and creative leadership consultant, Arne van Oosterom, is sought after by leaders who seek to foster that environment for their teams.
In this conversation Arne and I discuss how he helps leaders and teams stretch the boundaries of what they think is possible. We explore Arne’s path to becoming the entrepreneur and creative leadership consultant he is today, including how dyslexia shaped how he engaged with the world, how he learned to overcome the fear of failure, and how he incorporated what he learned as a musician, visual artist, photographer, and comedian into businesses he founded. Arne’s story is an example of how the skills and tools from the world of art can help us transform ourselves and how we show up and lead in the world of work. My hope is that, like me, you find Arne’s story a source of inspiration that helps you reframe any personal limitation, recognize your different abilities and talents, and find ways to bring them together into a more creative, integrated and more satisfying expression of yourself.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
As an accomplished creative facilitator, leadership coach, trainer, and keynote speaker, Arne van Oosterom has devoted his career to sparking inspiration and empowering individuals and organizations worldwide. In 2006, he founded DesignThinkers Group and DesignThinkers Academy. Today, these organizations stand at the forefront of the innovation landscape, with thriving teams spanning over 25 countries. Aiming to push boundaries even further, Arne launched Blue Sky Republic in 2020. This initiative serves as a nurturing sanctuary for change agents, innovators, generalists, misfits, and open-minded thinkers, all collaborating to redefine the realm of possibilities. His expertise commands attention from a broad spectrum of clients, including startups, governments, and industry titans like Under Armour, Coca Cola, Volkswagen, BOSCH, Philips, SAP, ING Bank, Estée Lauder, Cartier, and L’Oréal. Arne’s mission is to inspire, educate, and build connections, challenging traditional thought patterns and paving the way for a brighter, more innovative future.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
What is a restaurant, or product, or a hospitality experience that you love and would highly recommend to a good friend? What was it about that brand that really hooked you, and what would you say about it to somebody else?
My guest and branding strategist and storyteller, Cheryl Farr, points out that a brand is not so much about what we say about ourselves, but what other people say about you. Or to echo the words of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, a brand is what people say when you are not in the room.
In this conversation Cheryl and I talk about how she helps teams create brands people trust and love, and her path to learn and get really good at her craft. Her journey reminds and teaches us how we can connect the dots among our different passions and experiences to create a work life we love while helping others put their best foot forward. Cheryl brings a rare and refreshing depth of care, commitment, insight and wisdom to her approach to brand creation and strategy. This conversation is peppered with insights and tips, and I hope you come away with as much inspiration and takeaways as I did.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Cheryl Farr is the Founder and Chief Strategist for SIGNAL Brand Innovation, a brand consultancy and strategic design agency dedicated to creating and activating brands people love. She founded the firm in 2009 to help organizations and leaders align their brands with their business strategies and take great leaps forward. Her success stories include Fairmont Hotels and Resorts where she helped position the brand for expansive worldwide growth, the Polti Group where she led the creation of an innovative new consumer trending methodology to guide product and marketing innovations for the nation’s largest homebuilder, and Cornell Hotel Society where she crafted the ultimate rallying cry for the world’s largest and most influential hospitality alumni network.
Cheryl has led multiple brand development and repositioning initiatives as part of mergers and acquisitions, most notably in the technology space. She is a former travel writer and editor for recognized guidebooks like “Frommer’s,” “for Dummies” and Travel + Leisure.
Cheryl holds master’s degrees in business and history from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration and Columbia University. She is a writer and a public speaker on topics related to branding and creating winning experiences for customers and employees. She is also passionate about mid-century architecture and design and lives in the mid-century modern mecca of Palm Springs, California with her husband, Tony, and their talkative Shih Tzu, Harry Carson, who incidentally has his own Instagram handle, “@HarryCarsonSpeaks.”
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
What do you think about emerging technologies with Artificial Intelligence? It’s a topic that some people find distressing, others are cautious or curious, and some, like my guest Rick McCawley, see enormous potential for creativity and productivity. Rick believes that AI can help us do away with boring grunt work while amplifying our creativity, productivity, and our ability to express ourselves. Since the release of a number of AI-based tools to the public in 2022, Rick has racked up thousands of hours applying AI to his expertise as photographer, designer, professor, and author.
In this episode Rick and I discuss how he is integrating AI into his work, the distinction between AI as a tool and what it really takes to make work that connects with and moves people, his thoughts on how we can benefit from AI, and lessons he is passing on to his students and sharing with the broader community. I believe that showing is greater than telling, and Rick’s growing body of work with AI truly does show us the door to broader horizons. I was inspired by this conversation and I hope it sparks your curiosity to explore how these tools can help you make your work more meaningful and enchanting for yourself and the people you serve.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Rick McCawley is a Photographer, Design Thinker, and Senior Professor of Graphic Design & Photography at Broward College in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida for the past 23 years.
During his 13-year tenure as a staff photographer for the Miami Herald (1980-1993), Rick’s assignments included covering the first space shuttle launch, photographing four Presidents, and the Pope. He was part of the Miami Herald’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team for public service in 1993. His photographs have been featured in prominent publications worldwide, including Time magazine, Bunte, The New York Times, and numerous others.
Rick is an accomplished publisher with more than 28 books on Graphic Design, Photography, and Fine Art to his name. His latest works include the "Top 100" book series, covering categories such as Underwater, Travel, Photojournalism, and Fine Art.
As the head of his consulting firm, Digital Renaissance, Rick specializes in providing training and developing digital arts curriculum for universities in the Southeast U.S. Furthermore, Rick is a founding member of The Miami Street Photography Festival and frequently serves as a lecturer at the events.
He holds an MA in Photography from Barry University and an MFA in Graphic Design from Florida Atlantic University.
You can learn more about Rick’s work at: https://bit.ly/m/RickMcCawley
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
For many of us work is a place where we have to go. But what if it was a place we wanted to go? What would have to be true for work to be a better place for all of us?
My guest and employee experience design expert, Lisa Morris, is passionate about designing ways to make the world of work a much better place for people.
In this conversation Lisa and I discuss her perspective on shifts in the workplace in the last 30 years, discovering human-centered design and shifting her professional focus to employee experience design, mentorship, distinguishing between technical expertise and true leadership, deep listening and making a connection with each other at work, the importance mindset plays in enabling people to design effective solutions, how studying typography helped her be a more effective consultant, the workplace as community, how to make work a better place for people and more.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Lisa Morris has over 25+ years’ experience at the forefront of brand, organizational behavior, and human-centered design. As founder and CEO of XPLOR, she has become a leading expert in EX design and service design. Her innovative approach has helped clients in a range of sectors bridge design and execution to create engaging and memorable experiences for their customers and employees that create lasting value.
Before starting XPLOR, Lisa served as a Senior Director at Sparks Grove, where she led the Global Employer Brand and Employee Experience Practice and co-led the Service Design Practice. During her tenure, she helped some of the world's most prominent brands, including Coca-Cola, Red Hat, and Johnson & Johnson, tackle complex employee engagement challenges.
Prior to Sparks Grove, Lisa spent nearly 20 years at Accenture, where she worked with a diverse set of global clients, including Accenture itself. Her educational background includes an undergraduate degree in Mass Communications and a graduate degree in Organizational Behavior and Communication from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Additionally, Lisa holds advanced certificates in Employer Brand Strategy, Graphic Design, Human-Centered Design, and Service Design, and is a certified Human-Centered Design Instructor and Facilitator.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
As the pace of change and complexity of our world keeps accelerating, it is increasingly necessary for us to develop the leadership skills to navigate the demands emerging from shifts in markets and society.
My guest and leadership development and culture consultant, Chris Baer, observes that some leadership approaches that worked in the past are no longer adequate to meet the demands of our emerging reality. Instead, Chris believes that it is more important than ever to lead with heart, develop greater discernment and key “inner skills” that help us produce “outer results.”
In this conversation Chris and I discuss the lessons he has learned in nearly three decades of navigating waves of disruptive technologies, his role as a global innovation leader, his work developing leaders, teams, and winning innovation cultures in organizations, and his latest initiative, the Insight Leadership Accelerator. We also explore Chris’ insights into human development and teamwork, his role as co-founder of Sunstone Therapies*, a healthcare company conducting research on psychedelic-assisted therapies, his passion for abstract painting and DJing, and how he has adapted and applied the lessons learned from these creative pursuits in his work accelerating growth in leaders and teams.
*See Sunstone Therapies featured on ep. 2 of the Netflix docuseries “How to Change Your Mind”
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Chris Baer has spent over 25 years working at the intersection of brand, digital technology and innovation, and has a particular passion for leadership development. His experience spans founding start-ups to helping power global brands, and he has consulted across healthcare, hospitality, real estate, insurance and other industries.
Chris presently leads design at A&MPLIFY, a global agency advising clients aiming to employ AI to serve customers and support employees. He is also founder of Mandala, a consultancy offering innovation and leadership programs that rapidly upskill leaders and teams.
Chris is a co-founder of Sunstone Therapies, a healthcare company bringing trial psychedelic therapies to treat depression, anxiety and PTSD in the medical setting.
Previously, Chris looked after global leadership development and talent experience design at Marriott International, where he developed a global innovation blueprint, oversaw worldwide talent and customer experience initiatives, digital product innovation and talent and executive development.
Chris is also a fine artist working in oil paint and glass. His work is in private collections and has been featured in the United States embassies abroad.
Chris holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial design from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he has been a guest lecturer. He also has co-taught innovation at the University of Virginia’s Batten Institute executive MBA program.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
Have you ever felt the urge to take off and travel the world? My guest Lauren Rathvon did just that – and then went on to build a travel business that takes people on meticulously curated and crafted tours that aim to connect travelers with places and people in deeply personal ways. Lauren teaches us about the value of building trust with the people we serve, how to deliver excellent service and craft experiences that some of her clients have called the “trip of a lifetime.”
In this conversation Lauren and I talk about the importance and art of delivering great customer service, lessons learned in her career, the unintended consequences of being good at what you do, the value and craft of creating trust with customers, the launch of her travel business, designing truly memorable travel experiences, healing and the power of placebos, her experiences at Taco Bell around the world, making friends with street dogs, and her favorite song by The Muppets.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Lauren Rathvon is the founder and owner of RetreaTours, a small travel company with a focus on Around the World journeys, as well as cultural experiences, wildlife safaris, and Buddhist pilgrimages (all of which are triple carbon offset). She has been living on the road for over a decade, researching and creating travel itineraries year-round with her husband BJ Graf.
Lauren specializes in making the "daunting" more accessible to her guests with patience and humor. Prior to her life on the road, Lauren was an Acupuncture Physician and Doctor of Oriental Medicine with a passion for treating stress and anxiety. On the road she enjoys taking photos, exploring exactly what "Mexican" food means around the world, and spending quality time with each and every street dog she encounters.
You can find Retretours on Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, TikTok and at www.retreatours.com.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we draw lessons and inspiration from creative leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and scientists about making a beautiful business and life. We have conversations about how to create a powerful connection with the people we serve while making our craft an engine for personal growth.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
Bringing scientists and artists together to collaborate on projects may seem counterintuitive, yet it can have transformative results. Although we might think of scientists and artists as being quite different, they both share and participate in the act of observation and asking questions that open the door to exploration and discovery.
My guest Claudia Schnugg is a scholar, curator, and consultant who specializes in exploring new ways of employing artistic strategies in a wide variety of scientific organizations.
In this conversation Claudia and I discuss her experience researching and working with science-based organizations and artists, the benefits of multi-disciplinary approaches to problem-solving, how art can contribute to wellbeing among workers in organizations, and much more.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Claudia Schnugg, holds a PhD in social and economic sciences and is an independent researcher and curator developing methodologies for innovation and meaningful interaction with the arts, science and technology. Her academic expertise builds on social, economic, and cultural sciences.
She has been producer and curator of artist-in-residency programs, and catalyst for numerous international artscience projects. This includes projects with partners such as Helmholtz Center Munich, Accenture, Science Gallery, European Space Agency ESTEC, Johannes Kepler University, Pro Helvetia, and also with individual scientific projects, independent galleries and artscience spaces. Her most recent book is Creating ArtScience Collaborations (2019), published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Claudia is currently based in Wels, Austria, and can be found online at www.claudiaschnugg.com
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we draw lessons and inspiration from creative leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and scientists about making a beautiful business and life. We have conversations about how to create a powerful connection with the people we serve while making our craft an engine for personal growth.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
Few things bring people together like shared genuine laughter or a compelling story. While we might typically associate these and other elements from the world of performing arts with entertainment, they can also be powerful tools that enable people to come together and collaborate effectively in solving complex problems in novel ways. My guest and customer experience consultant, Adam Lawrence, borrows techniques from the world of theater, comedy, improv, design, and psychology to help teams in the private and public sector tackle difficult challenges and deliver value in ways that deepen connection with customers.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Adam and I discuss his experience applying techniques from theater, comedy and improv to facilitating innovation projects around the world We also cover the value of using laughter to bring people together; the magic of the “common breath;” what makes a facilitator effective; balancing structure, freedom, fear and trust when working with teams; the distinction of “being” versus “doing” in facilitation and design; taking smart risks and embracing different ways of solving problems; the difference between facilitating and “difficultating;” the benefits of allowing ourselves to be childlike; Adam’s medieval hobby, and praise for Kate Bush.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Adam Lawrence is a customer experience consultant, comedian and actor with a background in psychology and the global automotive industry. For years he has been using expertise gained in the world of theater, film, stand-up comedy and storytelling to help organizations influence and impress their customers and partners.
Adam is co-founder of WorkPlayExperience, and co-initiator of the Global Service Jam - the world’s biggest ever service design event (so far). He is a co-author of the top selling book, “This is Service Design Doing.”
Find out more about Adam here: https://linktr.ee/adamstjohn
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we draw lessons and inspiration from creative leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and scientists about making a beautiful business and life. We have conversations about how to create a powerful connection with the people we serve while making our craft an engine for personal growth.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
Have you ever been in a situation at work where people are not communicating clearly, feel stuck, and are disengaged? What if I told you that type of situation could be turned around with...LEGO bricks!
While LEGO may have been a cherished part of your childhood, it turns out that we can still use LEGO as grown ups to improve how we work while adding more play to our work lives along the way. My guest Brandon Wetzstein is the founder of In8 Create and team performance consultant who employs a method known as LEGO Serious Play to enable teams to align and communicate more clearly, define and build culture and strategy, and use the power of metaphor to tell stories that transform how they work and achieve their goals together.
In this episode Brandon and I talk about his journey from working in corporate operations at Fortune 100 retailers to starting his own consulting business, his early experiments bringing improv into his corporate teams. the joys of PowerPoint Karaoke, how leaders and teams can dramatically improve communications through LEGO Serious Play, stories you can tell with a LEGO duck, how just six pieces of LEGO can yield thousands of build variations, and how making conversations visual and tangible can exponentially amplify the level of communication, understanding, and alignment among groups of people.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Brandon Wetzstein is an innovator, entrepreneur, and lifelong learner who enjoys finding ways in which we can be our best selves. After many years in the retail industry with multiple Fortune 100 companies, he started IN8 Create- A firm that designs and facilitates custom workshops aimed at unearthing the potential of teams and organizations.
Brandon loves to read and is especially interested in human behavior. He also enjoys cooking, gaming, being in nature, and the joy of a wonderful nap.
In8 Create
Instagram: @in8create
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we draw lessons and inspiration from creative leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and scientists about making a beautiful business and life. We have conversations about how to create a powerful connection with the people we serve while making our craft an engine for personal growth.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
Many of us may think of laughter as great medicine. But what about laughter as a source of deep insight about consumer behavior and human nature? My guest Rajiv Satyal takes the concept of “funny ‘cause it’s true” and turns it into a hilariously powerful approach to learn about what truly resonates with people. Rajiv learned to blend what he learned as a marketer at Proctor & Gamble with the skills he has honed as a professional comedian for nearly two decades.
In this episode Rajiv and I talk about what he learned working at Procter & Gamble, the difference between being a “perfectionist” and an “excellentist,” his journey going pro as a stand up comedian, observations on creative process and making comedy accessible for audiences, the difference in mindset between getting laughs and giving laughs, his disagreement with Yoda, transforming failure into gold, his approach to applying “Funny ‘Cause It’s True” (FCIT) with brand and marketing teams, and how we can make work more enjoyable and meaningful.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Rajiv Satyal is a Los Angeles-based comedian, host, and speaker. His TV-clean act has made him one of the most versatile comedians working today. He has performed stand up and spoken to audiences in over 100 colleges and at Fortune 500 companies. His corporate clients include P&G, GE, Google, General Mills, Quaker, Toyota, Cisco and more. Rajiv has shared the stage with comedians including Russel Peters, Tim Allen, Sebastian Maniscalco, Jo Koy, Kevin Nealon, and Dave Chappelle. He has written and performed three one-person shows, developed his podcast The TanGent Show, and his talk show What Do You Bring to The Table? where he interviews guests including Hasan Minhaj, Aasif Mandvi, Preity Zinta, and Deepak Chopra. His videos have amassed 100 million online views, including his massively viral video I am Indian, which has been seen over 50 million times, shared by Bollywood stars, and used to introduce the Indian Prime Minister in Shanghai and Dubai. Rajiv is the first (and only) person to perform standup comedy on all 7 continents. He performs regularly at the major comedy clubs in LA, including the Hollywood Laugh Factory, The Hollywood Improv, and The Comedy & Magic Club.
You can find Rajiv on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and at www.funnyindian.com.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we draw lessons and inspiration from creative leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and scientists about making a beautiful business and life. We have conversations about how to create a powerful connection with the people we serve while making our craft an engine for personal growth.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Innovating is much more than the act of creating something new or different. At its heart, innovating is really about how we relate to each other, collaborate, and bring forth our creative uniqueness. This is the view of my guest, Leon Segal, who sees innovation as highly personal because when we learn and practice innovation as a craft, what we learn touches and influences all our relationships and interactions. Leon’s perspective is shaped by his decades of experience guiding innovation projects and consciousness expanding practices.
In this episode Leo and I discuss his journey from studying engineering psychology, to working at NASA in the early ‘90s , and then being recruited by IDEO, one of the best known innovation consultancies in the world. We also discuss a wide range of topics including lessons learned as a jazz musician, reflections on the pros and cons of remote work, establishing an appropriate process for innovation in organizations, the importance of developing a mindset for innovation, his experience learning about working with psychedelics and other consciousness expanding practices, an ideation process Leon designed to be used with cannabis called FreeStorming, and how consciousness expanding practices can be game-changing for leaders.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Leon founded Innovationship in 2012 after over thirty years in human factors, product innovation, and experience design, including leading an IDEO office. His work on empathy and design and his insight that “innovation begins with an eye” are cited in several bestselling books. He has practiced and taught at leading institutions around the world, and his experience across industries and cultures, combined with his hands-on style of teaching, give him a unique perspective on the practice of innovation.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we draw lessons and inspiration from creative leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and scientists about making a beautiful business and life. We have conversations about how to create a powerful connection with the people we serve while making our craft an engine for personal growth.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
If you have ever endeavored to reach out and connect with people, you have probably come across advice like “know your audience.” Although there are many ways to approach that advice, one of the most powerful approaches to get an insider perspective on your audience is immersion. My guest Vyjayanthi Vadrevu has been practicing immersion and connecting with audiences most of her life as a dancer, anthropologist, writer and actress.
In this episode Vyjayanthi and I discuss her journey into classical Indian dance, business anthropology, and acting. Our conversation includes the benefits of studying and applying anthropology in the business world, the value of conducting immersive practices like in-depth interviews, ethnography, and deep listening in business research, how immersion and walking in someone else’s shoes can be the secret sauce to understanding how to make your business secret sauce, the perils of overthinking and how to overcome it, authenticity, and lessons learned from the rich world of classical Indian dance and acting.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Vyjayanthi Vadrevu is an actress, writer, and dancer based in Los Angeles. She is the founding anthropologist and strategist of Rasa.nyc where she leads research on projects ranging from social impact design to corporate technology innovation. Vyjayanthi is trained in several genres of classical Indian dance including Bharatantyam, Kathak, and Odissi, and uses movement and choreography to connect to the deepest parts of the human experience.
Instagram: @vyjayanthi_vadrevu
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we draw lessons and inspiration from creative leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and scientists about making a beautiful business and life. We have conversations about how to create a powerful connection with the people we serve while making our craft an engine for personal growth.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
Emotions play a crucial role in our lives. Sometimes we speak of emotion as something that gets in our way, but emotions are actually key to our experience of being alive. Neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio are deepening our understanding of how emotions evolved to help us make sense of the world, adapt, and survive. Think about what your life would be without emotions like joy, admiration, awe, romance, among others.
My guest Robin Krieglstein applies behavioral science to help people change habits and make better choices at work and in their personal lives. And he knows that emotions are a key element of achieving and sustaining behavioral change.
In this episode Robin and I discuss his journey into computer science and exploring the psychological impact technology has on people, how he applies behavioral design to drive better business outcomes, game-based design and the importance of connecting with people emotionally, why it’s crucial to design for emotion, the importance of humility and awareness of our biases when problem-solving, and the cognitive costs of restructuring organizations. Robin emphasizes that we can overcome the limitations of our cognitive biases while problem-solving by taking an approach based on cycles of testing and iteration, and making evidence-based decisions.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Robin Krieglstein has been pioneering the application of behavioral science to design large-scale positive behavior change programs for over two decades.
Robin is the CEO and founder of Live Neuron Labs, a firm which specializes in behavior change for social good. Their work spans health, fitness, education, sustainability, emotional wellbeing, financial wellbeing, and more. Robin has designed dozens of behavior change solutions for leading brands including Amazon, UnderArmour, American Heart Association, LG, Spectrum Health, Kaiser, United Healthcare, Oracle, Walmart, and the American Medical Association. His design work has spanned everything from software to wearables, devices, toys, video games, board games, voice interfaces, events, print, video and more.
Robin launched the first gamified, behavior-change social network in the 1990s and later founded the Design Group at LeapFrog Educational Toys. He was a guest researcher at the Stanford Behavior Design Lab with Dr. BJ Fogg, and is currently president of the Action Design Network, a nonprofit with international reach dedicated to promoting the application of behavioral science, behavioral economics, and psychology to the development of products, services, programs, and public policy.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we draw lessons and inspiration from creative leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and scientists about making a beautiful business and life. We have conversations about how to create a powerful connection with the people we serve while making our craft an engine for personal growth.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
Did you start your career with the aspiration of one day doing work that is deeply meaningful to you? Many of us do, but as the years pass we might struggle with truly fulfilling that desire. Yet, as my guest Uday Dandavate shares with us, we can start transforming what work means for us by shifting our perspective and what we look for. In Uday’s case, he shifted his approach to work from making objects to deeply understanding people’s experience of life, and then shifting from “selling” to co-creating value with others.
In this episode Uday and I talk about his life as a designer and travels to learn how culture influences people’s choices, his first experiences with participatory design, co-founding his company SonicRim in San Francisco in the late 1990s, how he shifted his mindset from selling products to co-creating value with others, why he invites clients to express the purpose of their designs in a poem, and his experience teaching at Carnegie Mellon University’s Integrated Innovation Institute.
Uday invites us all to look at things differently and explore the world through the eyes of others.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
A design activist and ethnographer of social imagination, Uday Dandavate is also CEO of SonicRim, a San Francisco based design research company specializing in co-creation. He has traveled extensively around the world, studying and connecting with all kinds of people and cultures, and watching and participating as they change over time. In his professional capacity, as well as through blogging, poetry, teaching, speaking, and facilitating, Uday provokes fresh perspectives that help to humanize technologies and democratize design.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we draw lessons and inspiration from creative leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and scientists about making a beautiful business and life. We have conversations about how to create a powerful connection with the people we serve while making our craft an engine for personal growth.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt
Have you ever been in a situation where you liked your job in principle, but the conditions within your organization made doing your job difficult, or maybe even soul-crushing? If you can relate to that, you know what a bad employee experience feels like.
Fortunately, there are people like my guest, Christophe Martel, who are working to make the world of work a much better experience for everyone. Christophe is the co-founder and CEO of two tech companies focused on improving the employee experience by taming the jungle of redundant policies, processes, functions, and workflows that, frankly, just suck the joy out of work and life while creating waste for organizations.
In this episode Christophe and I discuss the difference between employee engagement and employee experience, the Great Resignation and the shifting expectations about the experience of work, leadership and the challenges of HR leaders, bringing intentionality to designing the employee experience, the benefits of a better employee experience for an organization, and the importance of combining data with great storytelling.
I resonate with Christophe’s desire to bring more joy to work and agree with his position that we can do so by bringing the same focus and intention we might use to design a great service to the design of work itself.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Christophe Martel is the CEO and co-founder of TI People Inc. and Fount, two companies that help large organizations enrich people’s experiences at work by unleashing the power of experience data intelligence.
Prior to TI People, Christophe held a variety of leadership roles at Corporate Executive Board (CEB) (now Gartner), most recently serving as Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO) and member of the Executive Committee, following many years as the Executive Director for Europe, MIddle East, Africa region (EMEA). Prior to joining the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), Christophe held business leadership roles in the software industry in Europe, North America, and Asia. Christophe holds a MSc and DEA in Geophysics from ENSG in France.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we draw lessons and inspiration from creative leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and scientists about making a beautiful business and life. We have conversations about how to create a powerful connection with the people we serve while making our craft an engine for personal growth.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
https://www.instagram.com/makingbusinessart/
Have you ever met someone who inspired you to rethink your approach to work and life? Maybe that person modeled ways of creating more freedom, fun, and meaning at work. If you met someone like that, did it change you in some way?
I met Scott Heaps in 2003. Looking back I can see how he was an early influence on me in thinking more seriously about becoming an entrepreneur and Making Business Art. I loved the name of Scott’s digital company, Gravity Free, and his creative mindset which inspired it. You’ll hear more about that in the episode. I was inspired by the intention and creative spirit with which Scott approached his business and life. He showed me how we can prioritize happiness and run a prosperous business that serves and brings joy to others.
In this episode Scott and I have a wide ranging conversation that spans teaching himself to code and his first experiments with e-commerce in the 1990s, lessons learned while building his company, his approach to fostering a creative, collaborative, fun and joyful work environment, and thoughts on Making Business Art through the lens of his experience making and playing music with a band. We also touch on why Scott has a half-pipe for skateboarding in his garage, and his unique approach to raising his twin boys.
I had a lot of fun learning more about Scott’s story and the lessons he learned along the way. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Scott Heaps is the founder of GravityFree, a boutique digital agency that's been defying gravity for over 25 years by building and marketing out-of-this-world websites for florists. His team helps multi-generational floral businesses dominate their local markets and keep the national order gatherers at bay.
Scott leads a team of diverse and incredibly passionate people who genuinely care about everything they do. They have a wide range of interests, and when they do things, they invest their hearts and souls. The team is made up of musicians, travelers, photographers, cross-trainers, boaters, farmers, a professional comedian, filmmakers, gamers, and more comic book connoisseurs than you can shake a stick at.
They jam together, cook together, try new restaurants together, and they always manage to have a great time doing it. And because of that close connection, they have an incredibly collaborative environment.
https://www.gravityfree.com
https://www.instagram.com/gravityfreestudios
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we draw lessons and inspiration from creative leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and scientists about making a beautiful business and life. We have conversations about how to create a powerful connection with the people we serve while making our craft an engine for personal growth.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
https://www.instagram.com/makingbusinessart/
How clear are you on what you really want to do or be? For most of us, that is a lifelong journey of exploration and discovery. In fact, this is a pursuit with deep historical roots – many ancient wisdom traditions urge us to “know thyself” as a core principle for living a good life. It often takes many experiences and trails for us to start discovering who we truly are and muster the courage to live more authentic lives. Miles Davis once said: “Sometimes you have to play a long time to play like yourself.”
That quote applies to music as much as it does to life, and my conversation with Marte Siebenhar resonates with it.
In this episode Marte and I dig into her journey as a classically trained musician and orchestra performer, teacher, arts organization executive, and entrepreneur. We explore lessons she learned along the way including how process beats goals, pitfalls of getting what we want, discovering who we really are and what we want, creative approaches to becoming “qualified” for a new job, developing our intuition, and lessons in personal transformation.
Marte’s story reminds us of the value of taking creative risks, that change is inevitable and that we benefit greatly from seeking change “on purpose.”
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Marte Siebenhar is a professional musician, strategy consultant and the Founder and Principal of Cultured Innovations. Through her firm, Marte develops a deep understanding of each client’s purpose, mission, and work that translates to abundance and opportunity. Her approach, which she calls Practical Creativity, seeds innovation through imagination and play. She is often called in to help clients navigate periods of high-stakes growth, change, and transition.
Marte is a classically trained professional musician and an alumna of the Manhattan School of Music. She was a Fellow with the Kennedy Center and The Miami Foundation. As an arts manager, strategic planner, nonprofit executive, and marketer, she held roles at Midori & Friends, Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Bakehouse Art Complex, and New World Symphony.
In addition to her work with Cultured Innovations, Marte is also an Adjunct Faculty at Watson Institute, and a Level 2 practitioner of the Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique or QHHT. She recently founded Quantum Healing Miami as another vehicle to harness her passion for helping people transform their lives. Marte is also the author of an inspiration card deck, Messages from the Heart: Cards for Inspiration, Reflection, and Empowerment, which is available on Amazon.com.
https://www.culturedinnovations.com
@culturedinnovations
https://www.quantumhealingmiami.com
@quantumhealingmiami
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we draw lessons and inspiration from creative leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and scientists about making a beautiful business and life. We have conversations about how to create a powerful connection with the people we serve while making our craft an engine for personal growth.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
https://www.instagram.com/makingbusinessart/
Have you ever been so inspired by a character in a movie or TV show that it shaped your life in some way? And, have you ever thought about how much preparation and craft it took for the actor or actress that played that character to connect with and move you? There is a lot of inspiration and technique we can draw from the craft of acting to lead teams in any sector and make our work much more engaging and enchanting.
In this episode Sam Buti and I dig into his journey and lessons learned as a stage and voice actor, and his current work as a podcast producer and consultant.
We discuss what engages an audience, parallels between the craft of acting and leadership, and reflect on lessons from the world of acting that we can apply to leading any team. We also talk about taking risks and “walking on the knife’s edge” – meaning how for something to really engage and connect with people it has to have the potential to fail. That is true about leadership, innovation, or any other creative pursuit.
I had a wonderful time speaking and learning from Sam, and hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Sam Buti helps professionals use their voice to cut through the noise and be heard. He has over a decade of experience working as a commercial voice actor on TV and radio, teaching voice over and speech training, and producing podcasts. Sam’s experience includes managing and elevating a top ranked Apple Podcast in the business category; selling a podcast as exclusive content to Audible; and producing and editing over 200 podcast episodes. He is a recipient of a Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival National Commendation for Direction, and is currently a Guest Artist in the Creative Arts Department at Siena College in Upstate New York.
www.samuelbuti.com
https://twitter.com/samuelbuti
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we draw lessons and inspiration from creative leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and scientists about making a beautiful business and life. We have conversations about how to create a powerful connection with the people we serve while making our craft an engine for personal growth.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
https://www.instagram.com/makingbusinessart/
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we draw lessons and inspiration from creative leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and scientists about making a beautiful business and life. We have conversations about how to create a powerful connection with the people we serve while making our craft an engine for personal growth.
This is a very short episode to introduce the show and share the backstory of how this podcast came to be.
Have you ever thought about how we might live our days expressing ourselves more authentically, feeling more connected to others, engrossed in a craft that is engaging and meaningful, and feeling more fulfilled?
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we draw lessons and inspiration from creative leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and scientists about making a beautiful business and life. We have conversations about how to create a powerful connection with the people we serve while making our craft an engine for personal growth.
Tune in to Making Business Art on your favorite podcasting platform.