LeaderReadyCast: Recent Episodes
Harvard NPLI
A monthly podcast featuring real-world lessons, best practices, and action-oriented insights for the “You’re It” moments when you are called to lead. Each concise episode features insights from frontline leaders and the faculty of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative (NPLI), a joint program of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
About the Host Eric J. McNulty is the Associate Director of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative. He researches, writes about, and teaches leadership, crisis leadership, conflict resolution, and negotiation in graduate and executive education at Harvard and other institutions. He is a regular speaker at conferences and corporate events. McNulty is co-author of You’re It: The Pivot from Everyday to Crisis Leadership (forthcoming), Renegotiating Healthcare: Resolving Conflict to Build Collaboration, and author of numerous articles. He is a contributing editor to strategy+business magazine and past contributing editor at Harvard Business Publishing. McNulty holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an M.A. in Leadership from Lesley University.
Jarrod Bernstein is Policy Director and Council at Morrison Cohen and member of the Advisory Board at Team Rubicon. He is an alumnus of the NPLI at Harvard University.
Episode 75: Jimmy Mynatt and Daytona Erkan on One Faith-Based Organizations Response to Crisis by Harvard NPLI
Episode 74: Cheryl Nelson on Communicating Severe Weather and Disaster Science Information by Harvard NPLI
Farah Pandith is a global expert on combatting violent extremism. She shares policy prescriptions as well as pragmatic ideas to help leaders the tide on this persistent threat.
Episode 71: Madison Murphy Barney on Storytelling for Resilience and Recovery by Harvard NPLI
Episode 70: Preparing Leaders for Mis and Dis Information with Justin Snair and Philippe Borremans by Harvard NPLI
Episode 69: Preparing Leaders for Mis and Dis Information with Justin Snair and Philippe Borremans by Harvard NPLI
Marcus Coleman, Vice President of Community Resilience Strategy at United Way, discusses how leaders can foster personal, organizational, and social resilience in unsettled times. He shares wisdom reflecting years of experience leading across the US to help communities when it matters most.
Jonathan Clark, co-author of Leading Through: Activating the Soul, Heart, and Mind of Leadership, discusses how to build vibrant, thriving organizations by attending to people, purpose, and productivity. It’s a new approach for moving beyond the limitations of compliance and control to create the environment for enduring excellence.
Dillon Taylor, Chief of Staff, Virginia Department of Emergency Management discusses how to implement Swarm Intelligence during blue sky days. *Podcast was recorded several weeks prior to the recent Hurricanes.
Dr. Brian Spisak and Eric McNulty explores the impact of artificial intelligence on the thinking and practice of crisis leadership they will cover in their October 2024 workshop, Integrating GenAI into Crisis Leadership. For details, visit bit.ly/aicrisisleadership
Dr. Lenny Marcus and Eric McNulty discuss the state of crisis leadership to mark the fifth anniversary of the publication of You’re It: Crisis, Change, and How to Lead When it Matters Most. The world is more turbulent than ever. That makes the need for effective leaders all the more urgent. Marcus and McNulty explore the importance of meta-leadership to meet this need.
Episode 63: Heather Costa, Director of Technology Resilience at the Mayo Clinic, discusses a resilience approach to technology—and leadership—in a fast-evolving, high-consequence environment. You can’t prevent every adverse incident. You can, however, be ready to bounce forward to recover rapidly and grow stronger through the experience.
Anthony Amore, Director of Security and Chief Investigator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston discusses leading up, across, and beyond to create a culture of security.
Mark Dollins, founder and president of NorthStar Communications and co-author of Engaging Employees through Strategic Communications: Skills, Strategies, and Tactics discusses engaging employees through change. Every organization today is facing change. The ability of leaders to connect with and motivate employees is critical to success. Learn lessons from a pro with 30+ of experience.
Podcast with Dr. Carol Cunningham from the Ohio Department of Public Safety, Division of EMS on the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment in 2023 revealed serious public health preparedness and response issues. Discover critical insights from a public health leader involved in capturing those lessons.
The survivors of mass casualty incidents have distinct needs—and some have discovered an innovative way to help. In this episode, Dave Fortier, co-founder of One World Strong, shares insights from a decade of working with this resilient community committed to moving forward.
Disaster recovery is slow, expensive, and sometimes contentious. Yet in a time of perpetual disruption, it is a puzzle that must be solved. Dr. Samantha Montano shares her thoughts based on decades of experience and research.
Community readiness is an enduring challenge for emergency managers. In this episode, Meaghan Enright shares powerful, practical insights for building readiness from the ground up based on her experience in St. John, USVI.
Verenice Castillo and Whitney Armstrong of the Military Spouse Advocacy Network elevate informal leaders addressing critical issues members of the military and their families. They have lessons for everyone working with informal leaders.
Joseph Porcelli is Global Public Agency, Life Safety, and Disaster Response Lead for NextDoor. He shared insights on how to move the needle on community engagement to make communities better prepared for and more responsive in disasters.
Risha Grant is author of Be Better Than Your BS—How Radical Acceptance Empowers Authenticity and Creates a Workplace Culture of Inclusion. She shares her experience and insights on how leaders can foster belonging and equity for everyone.
Paul Thallner is author of Redefining Resilience: How Organizations Move Beyond Setbacks and Grow Through Challenges. He provides timely insights on fostering the courage and confidence to build a truly resilient organization.
Dr. Brian Spisak, author of Computational Leadership, explores the impact of artificial intelligence on the thinking and practice of leading and organizational performance.
Shumaene Benford, of Boston Emergency Management, and Lee Alexander, of Boston EMS, share how they have grown as leaders in the 10 years since the Boston Marathon bombings.
Ashley Reichheld shares her deep, research-based insights on what it takes to develop and keep trust. Learn how the four factors help you understand how to earn the loyalty of customers, employees, and communities.
Jay Weiser shares his five superpowers of leadership, all based on embracing the paradoxes at the heart of leading through turbulence and complexity. Find more about Jay Weiser at www.jayweiser.com.
Kelly Donithan is a senior specialist in disaster response at Humane Society International. You can learn more about HSI and the work they do every day and in the situations where it matters most at www.hsi.org.
Dr. Linda Ginzel of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business shares techniques for leading with greater insight, intentionality, and purpose from her book, Choosing Leadership.
Podcast Episode 46: Dr. Dawn Emerick joins us on this very hot topic. Trauma has become an increasing concern in organizations over the past few years. The trauma experienced by returning combat veterans, first responders, society wide trauma, the pandemic, wildfires, floods and other devastating events are now in the headlines virtually every day.
A critical responsibility for leaders is to bring people into an uncertain future with hope and confidence. Learning how to anticipate change and proactively engage with uncertainty is essential to cultivate future adaptive strategies, as foresight and design expert Donna Dupont explains.
Leading requires being in touch with yourself, your team, and the other stakeholders. Executive coach Dain Dunston shares insights on radical self-awareness that helps leaders be more agile and more effective.
Government is charged with everything from delivering basic services to tackling complex challenges. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and his former Chief of Staff, Steve Kadish share insights on how to meet those challenges from their book, Results: Getting Beyond Politics to Get Important Work Done.
In this episode, Karina de Allicon, experienced business continuity leader and mindfulness authority, joins us to discuss how age-old practices can help improve performance and bolster resilience among preparedness and response professionals and their teams.
Episode 41: Join us this month to listen to Dane Jensen; he helps leaders reset their relationship with pressure into a more productive one. Dane is the author of The Power of Pressure: Why Pressure Isn’t the Problem, It’s the Solution and CEO of Third Factor.
Brad Borkan is a decision expert and author, he shares his insights on preparing to make truly challenging choices drawing from deep historical research. He is co-author of When Your Life Depends on It: Extreme Decision Making Lessons from the Antarctic and Audacious Goals, Remarkable Results.: How an Explorer, an Engineer and a Statesman Shaped our Modern World.
She is an exemplar of innovative, systemic thinking, as well as of the determination it takes to make a difference on the ground. I think that her journey has lessons for all of us who wrestle with the thorny social issues and who work to lead for greater good is also captured.
If any topic should be top of mind right now, its risk, how we perceive it, how we evaluate it, what we do about it, for extreme weather to extreme politics. Uncertainty is a feature, not a bug of our current age. They help explore what this means for leaders.
Every major crisis has a public health component and, as has been seen during the pandemic, emergency management can greatly assist in a public health response. What can each discipline learn from the other? How can they best work together? Eric’s guest is Todd De Voe, experienced emergency management professional and thought leader.
April has been a futurist, advisor, microfinance lawyer, global development executive, more. She has worked with organizations from Airbnb to the World Bank as well as governments around the world. Through it all, April has become expert at navigating change, and that’s what I’m going to speak with her about today.
Gillian Cribbs works with global leaders and high potential executives across a range of sectors. In this episode we will be talking about the leader as coach, the coach. It is not a newly recognized skill for organizational leaders, though it remains an elusive one.
Leaders today face a risky world. In this episode, learn how take a more nuanced view of risk and how to navigate it. Our guest is Eric Jones, global manager of business risk consulting for property risk mutual insurance company, FM Global.
Chloe Demrovsky, President and CEO of Disaster Recovery Institute. DRI is the oldest and largest nonprofit that helps organizations around the world prepare for and recover from disasters by providing education, accreditation, and thought leadership in business continuity, disaster recovery, cyber resilience and related fields. We discuss what happened in 2020 and what we can look forward to in 2021.
Companies whose standard operating environment is rich with risk have been leading the way to help us better understand how to re-imagine training and education to better engage recipients and increase the likelihood of tangible positive outcomes. Our guest today is at the forefront of this transformation. Muriel Barnier, a founder of Lime Core Training and Communications headquartered in the UAE discusses with us some interesting, new ways to approach training.
Cyber security episode: while much of the focus these days is on the corona virus as well as the street protests, those with their eyes open are seeing an increase in cyber threats. And to help us understand what’s going on and what leaders can do about it, Keyaan Williams the founder and managing director of Cyber Leadership and Strategy Solutions, joins us to discuss this issue.
Recognizing cognitive bias and understanding other insights from brain science in order to get smarter than your brain. Michelle and Danielle have used that same underlying science to work with leaders in our homes, schools and communities. Michelle Palladini is a detective and school resource officer for a Massachusetts police department, as well as a yoga and mindfulness teacher. Donna Volpitta is a founder and education director of Pathways to Empower.
In his new book, best-selling author Dan Heath explores how to solve problems before they start–what he calls moving “upstream.” It is complex, difficult work though essential as we confront crises and disasters that are increasingly difficult and expensive to manage through response. Leaders need to put increasing emphasis on prevention, preparedness, and recovery in order to build more resilient, less response-dependent environments.
Michelle is founder of the Neighborhood Admins Resilience Network, a network of hyper-local Facebook Groups supporting community preparedness, response, and resilience. Michelle discusses the challenges and opportunities of “bottom up” leadership during the COVID-19 response.
Just-in-time COVID-19 leadership lessons with Greg Ciottone, Medical Preparedness Director, NPLI and Division of Disaster Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he works clinically in the Department of Emergency Medicine. He’s known around the world as an expert in disaster and crisis medicine.
Just-in-time COVID-19 leadership lessons with Regina Phelps and internationally recognized expert in the field of crisis management, continuity planning and exercise design. She’s the founder of E.M.S. Solutions Inc.
Suzanne shares with us the stories she has been collecting for several years of disaster heroes around the country.
The world is in the midst of a highly volatile situation with a Corona outbreak. Each day brings a new twist in the story as a leader. What does it take to communicate effectively right now? Gilman speaks with us about the four Fs principles to communicate in a crisis like this.
Sports venues are a truly complex environment in which to lead. You have a league and owners with a business to run. They want things to be safe but not through an obtrusive security presence that might seem unwelcoming to fans. Fans want to see a game and expect to roam freely about the stadium. Players are high-profile individuals; there are always VIPs in the house; and of course, you have a heavy media presence.
Decisions, decisions, decisions. When leading, particularly in the midst of crisis, your decisions are often how you are judged. You rarely have all of the information or time you’d like. Yet, when “you’re it,” you must decide. Given the importance of the ability to make decisions is to effectiveness when leading, it is odd that so few people are formally trained in the art and science of making the best possible decision in whatever circumstances you happen to find yourself.
Communicating well is a core competency for anyone leading others. You may be called upon to set direction, provide feedback, clarify a situation, or any of a hundred other challenges. Your ability to understand the communications need and fulfill it effectively may spell the difference between your success and failure.
Much of the attention around disaster leadership goes to response. However, a lot of what happens in response is shaped by the policy choices in mitigation, preparedness, and recovery. Alice Hill, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution where she focuses on potentially catastrophic global events such as climate change, speaks with us about leading from a policy standpoint.
The goal is laudable: save lives. And this is National Preparedness Month. In this episode we discuss the Stop the Bleed and other efforts to put tourniquets in the hands of the general public. Recent research, however, shows that it isn’t as easy as putting kits on the wall in public spaces. Training matters.
The spectacular July 4th Celebration with the Boston Pops is a tradition that began with Arthur Fiedler in 1929, and the greater Boston area has used events such as this as opportunities to train and learn. The high profile event draws crowds that swell to about a half-million people on the Charles River Esplanade with celebrants aligning parks and neighborhoods along both sides of the river. So how does the city and the MSP plan and prepare to keep everyone safe?
Today, in an instant, leaders can find themselves face-to-face with crisis. And active shooter. A media controversy. A data breach. This book takes you to the front lines of some of the toughest decisions facing our nations leaders. Leonard Marcus, founding Co-Director and Eric McNulty, Associate Director of the NPLI and two of the authors of the book provide you with some background of what you can expect from the book.
Building a powerful culture on your team and in your organization can be tough, particularly in large institutions such as government agencies and legacy corporations. Yet there are steps that anyone can take that can make an enormous difference. Chief talent officer, Patty McCord at Netflix helped create the Netflix Culture Deck that has been viewed online more than 15 million times.
Universities are microcosms of the communities in which they reside and often present health, safety, and security issues as complex as those found in major urban areas. Darryl Darnell, Senior Associate Vice President for Safety & Security and Superintendent of Police at George Washington University and Kelly Nee, Chief of Police at Boston University discuss the issue with the NPLI.
Trucks ramming into crowds. Bombs in the marketplace. Active shooters in schools and workplaces. Passive and active security measures are ever more present. Violent extremism has become part of the fabric of our lives. In this podcast we discuss combating violent extremism with our guest, Farah Pandith. She’s going to share her thinking and counter-intuitive views on how we do that and give us a preview of her new book, How We Win.
Harvard/IAEM Think Tank Discussion on Leadership During the COVID 19 Pandemic. Panel featuring: Pete Gaynor, Administrator, FEMA, DeAnne Criswell, Commissioner, New York City Office of Emergency Management; Leonard Marcus, Co-Director, National Preparedness Leadership Initiative, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and moderated by Richard Serino, former Deputy Administrator, FEMA, currently Senior Fellow, National Preparedness Leadership Initiative, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health,
Welcome to the latest episode Leader ReadyCast.
This month, the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative marks its 15 year anniversary. In this episode we are looking back at the program’s greatest hits—and looking forward at what is next to come.
Our guests are Dr. Leonard Marcus, founding co-director of the NPLI, and Rich Serino, a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the NPLI. Both have been with the program since the beginning; Dr. Marcus as one of the original faculty and Mr. Serino a participant of the NPLI Executive Education Program, Cohort I.
How do you build a culture of preparedness, educate the public—what are the limits of relying upon the public in a response, and understand the dynamics of active shooter and other mass casualty events?
Dr. Eric Goralnick, Medical Director of Emergency Preparedness, Brigham and Women’s Hospital will share with us his experiences in the Boston Marathon bombing response and expertise on the intersection of emergency medicine with disaster preparedness and response.
A continual challenge for preparedness and response leaders is communicating their story. Dr. Murray Nossel, author of Powered by Storytelling: Excavate, Craft, and Present Stories to Transform Business Communication, shares insights and examples from his 30 years of helping individuals and organizations become better story tellers. Hint: It starts with listening and emerges from “the inside out.” This is NOT about media strategy. It is a lively exploration of how to communicate more effectively and authentically with internal and external audiences.
Marcus Coleman, Jr., Acting Deputy Director of the DHS Center for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, is our guest on this episode of Leader ReadyCast. He shares his leadership experience, dispels false assumptions, and points to opportunities to increase the impact of these vital organizations through programs such as FEMA’s Voluntary Agency Liaisons.
In this episode of Leader ReadyCast we explore the evolving role of non-governmental organizations in disaster response with Jono Anzalone, Vice President for International Services at the American Red Cross. He shares his first-hand leadership experiences in both domestic and international response efforts. Anzalone is an alumnus of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative and was the recipient of our 2017 Meta-Leader of the Year Award.
Today, leaders confront declining trust and escalating risk in a time of seeming constant turbulence. In this episode of Leader ReadyCast, we discuss how leaders can prepare for and deal with these vexing challenges with Harlan Loeb, Global Chair for Crisis and Reputation Risk at Edelman, the global public relations firm. Loeb, also a professor of Crisis Litigation and the Court of Public Opinion at Northwestern University and a lecturer and Ford Scholar at the Kellogg School of Management, offers concrete insights useful for leaders in any sector.
From flu to unusual threats such as Ebola to the possibility of a chemical or other unconventional attack, public health leaders sit in a unique perch in the world of emergency preparedness and response.
Dr. Suzet McKinney, CEO of the Illinois Medical District, program faculty at the NPLI, and co-author of the new book, Public Health Emergency Preparedness explains that they must be familiar with a complex array of possible threats and, when an incident occurs, skillfully lead their peers, political officials, and the general public who may not fully understand the threat and its consequences.
In this episode of Leader ReadyCast we look back at the unprecedented 2017 hurricane season with Richard Serino, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative at Harvard, former Deputy Administrator of FEMA, and former Chief of EMS in Boston.
Serino shares what the responses to Harvey, Irma, Jose, and Maria tell us as we look forward to 2018 and beyond. We explore lessons that should be applied as communities face more extreme weather events.