Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Details about the energy-capturing textile Celliant are https://celliant.com. For parent company Hologenix, check out https://hologenixllc.com.

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4)
• Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First by Martha Piper & Indira Samarasekera. Paperback (https://amzn.to/3tOtzg4) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/41OYdT5)
• Jilly Truit murder mysteries by Beverley McLachlin:
  • Full Disclosure – https://amzn.to/46TxW6Q (paperback) https://amzn.to/46VDL3Q (audiobook)
  • Denial – https://amzn.to/46YCbhs (paperback) https://amzn.to/3GJc0AA (audiobook)
• Women and Leadership: Journey Toward Equity by Sherylle J. Tan & Lisa DeFrank-Cole

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Seth Casden is the CEO and co-founder of Hologenix, a materials science company dedicated to developing products that amplify human potential, including its flagship innovation CELLIANT®. In 2021, Hologenix was named to the Inc. 5000 of the fastest-growing privately held companies in the U.S. for the third year in a row.

An industry thought leader, triathlete, and world traveler, Casden is a frequent speaker at industry conferences. He has been interviewed by, and authored content for, top-tier media publications such as Forbes, Inc. Magazine, Success, Fast Company, and Thrive Global. Before founding Hologenix in 2002, Casden worked in private equity. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Pepperdine University. His mission is to bring the benefits of infrared into the everyday fabric of our lives and spaces.

Transcript
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Maureen 0:07
This is innovating leadership co creating our future. I’m your host. Maureen Metcalf, the founder and CEO of the innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready, helping us in that mission. Today is Seth Kasdan, CEO and co founder of hologenics, a material science company dedicated to developing products that amplify human potential. We’ll be talking about his personal leadership journey and the lessons he’s learned along the way. Seth, we’re really happy that you’re joining us. Hi, Maureen. I’m excited to be here as well. Thank you. Tell us a little bit about your background and your journey. Absolutely, I have by training, a degree in business administration, and I went in to work in private equity after graduating, and spent a few years cutting my teeth learning about how to invest in companies and how to value companies. Hologenics is, I think, my third or fourth company. I wasn’t really deterred by any early failures, and I really found something that I’m passionate about and love doing. What led you to form hologenics? How did you come to that? That’s a great question. I had a personal relationship with the inventor, David Hornick, and we were literally having dinner one night and talking about what he was working on, and I intuitively knew what he was working on was something I wanted to be a part of. And the human potential is such a fascinating topic. We’re approaching 9 billion people on the planet, and there’s so many sources of renewable energy. We think about solar power or wind power electric cars, but we have 9 billion people on the planet that are giving off 100 watts of energy every second, 100 joules of energy. And so to me, that was a fascinating statistic, and something that I thought we could use to combine with a technology that delivers health and wellness, so that I was hooked from the beginning and been on this journey now for about 20 years. So can we recycle some of my energy and feed it back in so I don’t need as much coffee? That’s exactly the idea, Maureen, that’s what we’re doing. That’s the sort of elegance of our technology that 100 joules of energy dissipates into the environment. When really, if we had a light bulb, we could plug it into our head, it would be on 24/7

Unknown Speaker 2:28
what selling it does the technology that polygenics has patented and markets, it absorbs the energy coming off of our body. The shirt that I’m wearing from Under Armor is filled with our minerals, and it absorbs that heat and sends it back into the body. I’m fascinated by the intersection between what can we as leaders do

Unknown Speaker 2:50
and your journey as a leader. Yes, there is so much that needs our attention. For me, what we focused on is shifting people’s thinking and their perception around fabrics and materials. We want to have a new paradigm where people think about, what does it do for my body? How does it help me physiologically improve, rather than just perform a fashion statement? So now I’m referring to our clothing as a device rather than just a fabric. I think that’s fair. You went to college, you had school, came out to do PE work. How did you go from that to running a company that does this thing? There’s been a lot of being at the right place at the right time and having a good network of friends is certainly part of it. But for me, the driving passion has been the people I work with and the style of my leadership to bring the best out of my team and individuals, whether it’s personal or professional life. For me, I think that’s what I really am passionate about, and then the fact that I’m working on a company that helps with health and wellness is just really a plus, beautiful. So what did you do to develop yourself as a leader? Yeah, it’s a great question, trying and learning what works and what doesn’t work. My leadership style coming out of that environment and private equity and venture capital very cutthroat, very intense. In the beginning, I felt like a good leader has to point out what’s right and what’s wrong, and if somebody makes a mistake, you have to almost humiliate them and point out to everyone, this is not how you do it, and we don’t tolerate that. It just creates a culture of fear. And people close down. They become less likely to share. They want to hide their mistakes if they make one, and then if you don’t catch it, and you don’t know about it, and it can become a bigger mistake. And as I’ve evolved and grown, I’ve really tried to adopt servant leadership.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
Is finding the right people, making sure they have the right things, and by and large, trying to get out of their way and then create and lead with a certain vulnerability that shows we’re all human. There is no perfect score. And create a space where mistakes are something that we talk about certainly and that there isn’t any judgment with and you really just try and discuss and learn from those things. That’s really been the last five or 10 years. What I’ve leaned into is lifting people up just try and create a space to have some self reflection and and talk about it and say, Okay, did this work? Okay, if not, and how would we do it differently? What can we do so that this doesn’t catch us off guard? Those types of things move from leading in the financing world to a servant leadership approach. What got you there? It was probably a series of having employees not work out, firing people, and you realize it’s a carousel, and maybe the way I evaluated people shifted. It’s more about their heart and their passion and their dedication and their willingness to make sacrifices when it’s needed, versus always getting every test we grew up in an education system or just graded constantly and we’re isolated or graded just on our own individual performance. And when you put people in teams, if you have a weakness, you put somebody that has a strength, there, those individual strengths and weaknesses become less important. It’s really the team’s moving in the right direction. If you really want someone to do their best, they have to feel good about themselves, and they have to accept themselves for who they are, and so by extension, I have to accept who they are, and it’s the same for me, and that’s been probably the biggest step of growth that I’ve had recently. I love the jahari window, bringing in the unknown into the known, and that model of thinking. So you referenced the Johari Window. Can you explain it? And did you know that it was actually named after two men named Joe and Harry? I did not know that was the naming. That’s very funny. So yes, the Johari Window is basically a quadrant that’s broken into four sections, and then the top left quadrant is what is known by me about me, and what others know about me. Below that is what I know about me, but I hide from others, and I just keep to myself. And if I look at the top quadrant, and I go to the right, that is what others see in me, but I cannot see in myself. And that is probably the first big sort of aha, is realizing you’ve had these conversations where people are telling you’re a certain way, and you’re saying, No, I’m not. You’re getting defensive, and then in that bottom right corner is the unknown. You don’t see it in yourself, and others don’t see it in you. It’s there. You just don’t see it. And so for me, I’m on this journey of trying to go from that top left quadrant to that bottom right quadrant. And it’s it’s hard, because when we’re incentivized, when our personal opinion of ourselves is tied to how we see something, it’s very hard to see something that challenges that and something we may not want to see in ourselves. The upper left is almost the power quadrant. As I shrink it, my power grows because the stuff that you see about me

Unknown Speaker 8:31
that I am not aware of and weaknesses that may be inhibiting me.

Unknown Speaker 8:37
For both of those as I raise my awareness, my ability to act, expands Now I may choose to do nothing, right? You may tell me I’m a jerk, and I say I’m not, and that I discover I am, as long as I’m still a jerk, it just now means I know it, but hopefully I’m able to use that information to make better choices. It’s for your benefit. It’s just to help make your life easier. When I look at the trials I’ve had and the challenges, almost every one of them is self imposed, and so I’m trying to get out of my own way, clear the path in front of me, and accept what’s being presented, obviously, with a goal in mind and a vision and trying to execute a plan and grow a business in this case, but by and large, when I start trying to overpower my environment with a very fixed, inflexible, rigid set of standards or ideas of outcome, I get into all kinds of trouble. That’s where I think, if you can, and you’re able to have that flexibility within the rigidity of your character and your ideas and your principles, because we’re not talking about sacrificing those or are being ambivalent in that regard, you can really grow and succeed. So who gives you this feedback? This is such.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
An important question, because we have trusted colleagues whose opinion we value deeply. We have passers by who may actually acknowledge and see something in us. We don’t the new employee who sees something that those who are familiar with me have just worked around me forever. They just circumvent me because I own the company and they tolerate me. Different people will see different things. Where do you personally get the feedback? For me, it starts with curiosity and a genuine interest in people and learning through shared experiences. I like to try and challenge myself that I can learn anything from anyone, and sometimes it’s easier to learn from a complete stranger sitting next to on the bus than a family member that’s known you your whole life. And there is something about people like a new employee, Malcolm Gladwell talked about that in Blink, somebody looks at something and they have no frame of reference, and they just instantly get it. And a lot of business cultures, they think you have to earn your place be able to say something. If you’re new to the team, then you don’t have a voice. You need to observe and not talk. And I think there’s just a huge missed opportunity there. Sometimes the new people that come at our company that haven’t been doing it a set way for a set time, have the best ideas or the freshest ideas, or ideas that we thought of and didn’t fully explore and just overlooked and discarded. Luckily, if you’re open to that experience, there’s really a limitless amount of universal knowledge that’s out there for us to tap into. So do you have specific routines or habits? Then that help you continue to evolve as a leader? I do. I have a lot of different ways that I try to create space for that we usually ask, like a random question from one of those dinner card games to learn more about each other, and that creates an environment where people that have maybe what they think is a hare brain idea, to have the confidence to put that forward, because the first thing is setting the stage and creating the space for those types of thoughts. And when you realize it’s you have to have the right environment for that even to happen in the first place. It’s not going to happen by sitting down and just telling someone so tell me all your great ideas. Doesn’t work that way. So it’s a formula that you want to have, I think, is the least amount of structure possible while creating an environment that allows for these spontaneous insights and ideas, but you want to create a fertile space and an environment where people can be heard and not ridiculed. So final question, if you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice when starting hologenics, what would it be Wow, learning the right question. It’s not so much the right answer, but if you don’t ask the right question by default, you don’t have a choice. I was reading about Clayton Kershaw. I’m a big LA Dodgers fan, and there’s a story about how he evolved. And the great athletes, they have this really strong internal compass that shows them I know, I trust myself, I’m going to stick to this. But then at the same time, there has to be this adaptability, because you have to be able to understand what parts of you are meant to be rigid and what parts need the flexibility. It’s not something at 20 or 25 I really knew or even understood that there was a part that I wanted to keep and protect and a part I needed to change, the more that you can develop that ability to switch back and forth at the right time with the right questions, the easier your path gets. I love that. Thank you. Seth, thank you for joining us today. How would people learn more about you? I’m on LinkedIn. Seth, Kazin, love. Love for your audience to follow or reach out, love to respond to any questions and then salient, C, E, L, L, I A N T you can go to selling.com or just Google, selling. Thank you so much. You

Unknown Speaker 14:26
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