Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Learn more about the Unconference Mark and Maureen will be part of at https://unconferencenyc.com/. Mark’s own company has more information about his work at https://opplab.com/.

Mark’s book is Culture of Opportunity: How to Grow Your Business in an Age of Disruption. It’s in paperback at https://amzn.to/4oxilEb, and Kindle at https://amzn.to/3JecZ0w.

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, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

– Steer Your Career to the Next Tier with Tammy Alvarez

– The Job I Love to Hate with Tammy Alvarez

– Leading with Care & Purpose with Raj Sisodia & Sudhanshu Palsule

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Mark Monchek is the founder of Opportunity Lab, a strategy and leadership development firm that provides the direction, systems, and tools to take organizations to the next level of substantial growth.

Mark has worked with leaders from Google, Apple, JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Adorama, TerraCycle, Feltsberg, The New York Times, Wharton School of Business, New York University, Columbia University, NBC, Time Warner, and the United Nations.

He’s the author of the Amazon nonfiction bestseller Culture of Opportunity: How to Grow Your Business in an Age of Disruption. Mark has been featured in Real Leaders, The Better Business Book, the Organization Development Review Journal, Lifetime Network, WPLJ, WCBS, Newsday, Working Women Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Transcript
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Maureen: 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. I. As leaders, we’re navigating a world that’s changing faster than ever, and the models we’ve relied on to develop ourselves and our teams are no longer enough. That’s why I’m thrilled to be joined by Mark Manch, a visionary strategist and co-creator of Disrupted Work Reimagined. Unconference alongside Tammy Alvarez. Mark is helping to shape a new model for leadership development, one that’s immersive, collaborative, and built for the pace of today’s challenges. In this episode, we’ll explore how the unconference is reimagining the way leaders learn, grow, and lead. [00:01:00] We’ll discuss how to hack the pace of change with ai. Build communities of practice and create leadership experiences that don’t end when the event does. Whether you are a CEO, a team leader or someone passionate about shaping the future of work, this conversation is for you. Mark, welcome.

Mark: Thank you, Maureen. I’m very honored to be here after, uh, diving into your new book. After listening to some previous podcasts. I’m really excited about the things you are talking about or exactly the things that I’m talking about, I’m thinking about all the time. So, um, this is really, really an honor for me and, and important and timely.

Maureen: Thank you. And full disclosure, I am one of the participants in the Unconference, so I’m also honored to be included as, as one of the speakers I.

Mark: Yeah, and we particularly, um, know had three people, Neil Sahota, who also has done a book with you, [00:02:00] Adele Wang, who talks a lot about the emotional intelligence aspect of ai, the cultural aspect of ai. So the three of you together are actually going to be kind of the thought partners and we’re actually calling people, not speakers, reimagine guides.

Because the, the new way of experiencing learning, experiencing growth is not, I know more than you, and I’m gonna tell you what you don’t know, but it’s actually having people together who’ve had unique kinds of experiences that the leaders, and these are 75 CEOs and C-suite leaders of mid-market companies, were coming to learn together.

We’re coming to share together, and the three of you and the hacking the pace of change, AI track are really guiding the discussion, guiding the interaction. And after lunch, the 25 or approximately one third of the 75 invitees are gonna be going into what we call a business hackathon. [00:03:00] With the three of you really imagining, what can we do to use ai?

To the pace of and make it positive, not be overwhelmed and threatened by something that feels like it’s taking us over.

Maureen: You know, as you say that Neil. of our co-authors is also a co-founder of AI for Good through the un,

Mark: Yes.

Maureen: that AI isn’t taking us over. While there are certainly risks to be managed and governance challenges, there are also significant opportunities to use AI for the positive for ourselves, our businesses, and all of our stakeholders.

Mark: Yes, Maureen. Absolutely. And one of the reasons why we chose the three of you is I love the fact that you are demystifying AI taking away, you know, the, the, the. The layers of [00:04:00] threat, the layers of confusion, the layers of stories about it, and actually saying what is it, what it could be, and giving really relevant use cases of how it is being used right now.

And also how you, Maureen, are learning how to use it by improving your. Humanness, and that’s one of the things that really came across in your book and came across in the previous podcast I listened to, is how important it is to improve our abilities, to be human, to be aware, to be caring, to be empathetic, to be inclusive.

And that is kind of the partnership we need to have with AI or any technology. And also the other people were using it with.

Maureen: Thank you, mark, for amplifying that. ’cause I do think that AI presents some brilliant opportunities and it calls us as leaders to be better at some of the things that we’ve always had to do. have been able to mask. Deficiencies in many cases by [00:05:00] surrounding ourselves with people who are good. That changes when we surround ourselves by machines that are also good in some areas, but may have some deficiencies. So it does call us to lead differently than we led before and build, as you’ve said on those human skills like emotional intelligence and communication.

Mark: Yeah, being a, being a writer and having learned about the power of words since I was a little kid, I, I would prefer per, personally, I prefer the word limitations. I. Uh, than deficiencies. ’cause it deficiency. Sounds like we could be more this or more that, but I think we’re naturally limited because we are supposed to be doing things with other people.

We’re supposed to be collaborating. So the, the myth that we have learned over many centuries since Darwin and [00:06:00] past is that somehow we humans are in competition with other humans and other species, and that we have to think about life as a competitive game or a competitive exercise or what have you. I think a lot of people misinterpreted what Darwin said.

I think the reality is that we are humans because we are better at collaborating with other humans, and yet we’ve reached the point where we have limited our ability to collaborate because there’s still this other belief that we have to compete with people. And part of the mantra, I’m, I’m sure Tammy has shared this with you, my partner Tammy Alvarez from the Young Conference, one of our mantras is collaboration is the new competition.

So instead of spending a lot of time in fear of who are your competitors, we spend more time to think who are our partners, who are our strategic partners? And at Opportunity Lab we have partnerships with three companies that we’re very closely related [00:07:00] to, and we have impact far beyond our relatively small team because we have access to.

That have similar values, that have complimentary skills, complimentary relationships and resources. And man, we can do some amazing things like this. The, our Unconference team is relatively small, right? But because we have people like yourself and then you have in your network, people like Neil, we’ve been able to do some amazing things with a relatively small amount of.

Material resources, but almost an infinite number of emotional, spiritual, and other kinds of resources, business and technology and all of that.

Maureen: So that’s a great opening to start talking about the unconference, and I imagine we will continue to weave in the idea of moving from competition to collaboration a and where. those bows still fit because we will still have other firms with whom we compete often [00:08:00] compete sometimes and collaborate others. So you and Tammy are pioneering a new model of leadership development through your Disrupted conference. What are the core leadership challenges this model is designed to address and why is now the time to rethink how we as leaders learn?

Mark: Um, I’d love to answer that question, but I’d love to give you a little backstory about how Tammy and I met. ’cause it, it is very relevant to the values of the ON conference and what we’re trying to do. So, last year, just about a year ago, I went on vacation to Jamestown, Virginia and Asheville, North Carolina.

So in Jamestown, Virginia and I, I was a history major and I thought I knew something about history, but I knew nothing about history until I went to Jamestown, which is where this country actually started in 1607. So what I learned is Jamestown was [00:09:00] basically a get rich quick scheme by the first British.

Corporation, which was the Virginia company that sent 104 men and boys to find gold, silver, and spices and come back and exit their, their investment in three years. Well, guess what happened? A 34. Of those 104 were left after a year and a half, and then there were all kinds of conflicts with the Native Americans and later the slaves coming from Africa.

So as I was going through this tour, I found out from one of the archeologists that Jamestown. Will no longer exist in 50 years because it will be washed away by floods, and there is no plan by the government to avoid that. So why is that relevant to the unconference? Because I have two grandchildren and my heart literally broke when I heard that my two grandchildren, who are now five and almost three, will not be able to [00:10:00] go to the physical place where this country started.

So that made me think, I really want to do something. I wanna make the rest of my life. Where I can have an impact on how business, specifically business can make the world a better place where my grandchildren can actually live a better life than you know that I am now. And hence that really made me double down on working on impact businesses, impact to solve the environmental issues, social issues, and various things.

Um, I then met a partner who was I met 23 years ago through this process. And then we had developed a whole program to do this in Asheville, North Carolina. And five weeks later we had hurricane. Hurricane Helene was the biggest storm since Hurricane Katrina, and we then pivoted and decided we are gonna create an organization which we have called Blueprint for Impact, which we, we partnered with to help rebuild Western North Carolina.

So I’m, now I’m on this track and [00:11:00] understand that we have to bring in businesses into this because businesses are. Probably the most important impact on the ecosystem and how we, you know, how we operate in the world. Okay, back now. Fast forward to November. I get an email through LinkedIn from Tammy Alvarez who found me on LinkedIn, read my book, my first book, culture of Opportunity, how to Grow Your Business in Nature Disruption, and said, I am doing a conference in New York called Disrupted the Future of Work.

Would you be my keynote speaker? And I said, I’d love to, but I wanna learn more about this conference and more about what you’re doing. And then we started to get into these discussions and I said, you know, I loved, I loved being a keynote speaker, but I actually wanna have something that is nothing like a conference, but actually is radically different than bringing people together in a traditional way.

I wanna bring people together in a collective, immersive and experiential way to solve these problems and walk out with three things, deep insight. A [00:12:00] relationship of a community of resources and a specific framework that on the next Monday I can share with my leadership team and what I wanna have a solution, but I’ll have a direction that I did not have before.

So we literally changed the idea of the conference to the Unconference in the, in the conversations of, of a couple of months, she came to New York. We visited Luminary, which is our venue partner, which is a community and coworking space on, uh, Broadway between 30th and 29th Street in Manhattan. And it’s a women-owned, women-led space.

Kate Luzia, who was a former senior Vice president, uh, for JPMorgan Chase, founded this in 2019 to have a place that women, women entrepreneurs, women as business executive and professionals could actually feel safe, empowered, and creative. And the space is very different than any other conference space that you’ve ever been to.

It’s bespoke, it’s quirky, and it is. Fun. So that’s a little of a backstory to how we got to the [00:13:00]Unconference. And then to answer your question more directly, we decided there were three pillars or three themes that we wanted to address in, in our research with mid-market leaders. One is AI and technology, but we didn’t wanna just have AI and technology.

We actually specifically, and that’s what we brought you, Maureen, and uh, Neil, and together hacking the pace of change with AI, making very specific ai. Can be used as a tool to actually make your life feel more empowered rather than having it be a runaway train that is making you feel like you’re lost in this swamp that is just over, you know, overpowering everybody.

The second is what we call the Leadership Reset, which is obviously very much aligned with what you’re doing at the Innovative Leadership Institute. Really rethinking what is leadership today. So when you think about leadership, you think about followership and I think today’s leadership, which is what I, a lot of what I got out of your book, is not about giving people specific things to follow, but actually [00:14:00] creating a culture and environment where people feel included, their ideas are valued, and that the solutions we come up with are collaborative and immersive and emergent, not just this direction that we are gonna be.

Working towards, and that model just doesn’t work anymore. So strategic planning has been turned on its head as it has leadership. The third is culture and talent. Obviously we, technology leadership is not gonna work without a thriving culture and having the right talent. So that is the third Thriving cultures through empowering talent.

Those are the three pillars, and we have three reimagined guides for each of those pillars.

Did I answer your question? Um,

Maureen: Yep.

Mark: directly.

Maureen: Sorry, I was beep, Dan, I was taking notes so it just took me a second to get back to you. Uh, that is a beautiful description of the content and. [00:15:00] Why each piece is there, and I do say I completely resonate. While my story is different, I don’t have grandchildren. Um, I have a very close connection and close friends in Asheville, and so we were also heartbroken. To see how disrupted their lives were. Uh, and, and as we look around the country, what’s just happened with the floods in Texas and, and other places where it is more frequent that are, are literally perishing in these situations and. That we as business leaders have opportunities to make an impact irrespective of what’s happening in our government. An example, I live in Columbus and um, a EP is our power company. While the government may not maybe rolling [00:16:00] back some environmental regulations, uh, smart companies, companies with a longer time horizon. Are continuing to move forward with conscious policies they have to, that, that if we flip back and forth, our investment profile is a mess if we, if we’re flipping based on current four year administration policies. So I use them as an example to say. I am encouraged that companies are making what appears from the outside to be environmentally conscious decisions that come back to leadership.

Mark: Um, yes, exactly. And I’m, I wanna, uh, reflect on a point that you made in the interview you did with Christopher Washington about ESG, and you said that some companies. [00:17:00] SG and like it, some companies not so much. I think ESG was problematic because it was forced upon people, you should do this because you’re morally better than anybody else or, or something like that.

And while maybe that might be true or not, I, I think. Businesses do things because they have to do them. And I think they are doing them now more because they realize to have a sustainable business, they have to care about the environment. They have to care about the social lives of the communities and the people that work with them.

And there is a governance element to that too. Right? So I think ESG, or, or whatever you wanna call it, is becoming more of your business strategy. ’cause you’re realizing you’re in a world as, as you and Christopher talked about, that you can’t control anymore. 55%. Of the CEOs that you did the, you know, side of the research feel like they can’t control much of what they have to be responsible for.

Right? So wars in the middle East, wars in Ukraine and Russia, climate [00:18:00] change and, and, and all of that. And then when you talked about the trends that, when you outlined the trends for 2024, I really like the fact that you, you. Weather disruption and not climate change. Because when people think about climate change, it’s big, you know, it’s, it’s overwhelming.

Some people can, can argue with it, but nobody can argue with weather disruption. And weather disruption is the immediate impact to your business. So I thought that was very smart way to do it and not, let’s not argue about climate change. Let’s, let’s define how is weather gonna be affecting you and how is the fact that you can’t predict the weather like you used to gonna be affecting you?

Maureen: And the cost of those weather disruptions. If we look at last year and freezes in Texas that are atypical, I went to buy paint at my local Sherwin Williams store and they were out of the white base because it froze in Texas. So I realize that [00:19:00] seems pretty minor in in the scheme of the world, but for Sherwin Williams a lot of paint was destroyed because of the weather isn’t insignificant.

It’s

Mark: Yeah.

Maureen: business cost.

Mark: So I wanna get back to your question about the Unconference, ’cause you, you did, I did kind of describe, I think I. The themes, the content, the concepts, but I wanna describe the actual experience because that’s also important of what makes it different. So how we start our day and how we end our day is very important in terms of how the day actually goes.

So you talked a lot about your self-care practices, the things that you do to be a better human, to make you more resilient. Um, and I, I love that, that’s a big part of my life in this unconference. We’re gonna begin the day with music. We’re gonna begin the day [00:20:00] with personal greetings and really making people feel like they have been taken care of with healthy food, nutritious food, and an environment that is very personal.

We have Gary Malkin, who is a multiple award winning composer, Emmy award-winning composer who’s won multiple Emmys, who is an amazing experiential pianist. He’s actually created music for people who are passing. On from this life. Work with a lot of care facilities to use music to help people and the people in their lives who are continuing to be alive use music to actually be able to pass on.

He’s helped create environments in companies where people can actually reduce stress with using music. So he is actually gonna play some music. We’re gonna have music to be a theme throughout the entire day in very subtle, kind of immersive ways. Um. Drunk yoga, uh, we’re not gonna be drinking. Uh, so Eli Walker, the founder of Drunk Yoga, will be doing some [00:21:00] very short, really cool drunk yoga exercises.

So drunk yoga is symbolic of, you know, we think of yoga as a serious thing and you have to learn all these techniques. And she created drunk yoga. To actually make people feel like yoga could be fun and cool, and it doesn’t have to be so prescriptive. You could do it anytime. So there’s gonna be a few five minute, you know, kind of intervals where we’re gonna do some stretching, some yoga exercises, which will feel fun and relaxing, not, um, as prescriptive as some people think that yoga is, um, throughout the day, they’re gonna be breaks where people can, can get together with each other.

We’re gonna have a lunch up on the glass ceiling. Which is obviously appropriately named because of the woman-owned luminary space. Uh, we have skylights there. The views are incredible and the ability to connect with people during, you know, lunch is gonna be really, really fascinating. And then I talked about the hackathons, which are gonna be very immersive and collaborative.

And then at the end of the day, we are gonna have some more music. Now we have a group. Called the Bone [00:22:00] Tones, which are a CEO LED band that does rock, does rhythm and blues, and does jazz. And we met the bone tones, um, at a event that I was doing to help North Carolina rebuild, and they were playing. At the Sheraton right near the space where we were doing our event.

And so my partner, Wendy White, who’s gonna be one of the reimagined guys, you’ll meet her, heard this band and she loved the band and she went up to him and says, Hey, what do you, what do you guys do? Well, we’re, this is just a gig that we do part-time. We’re actually. We run a company called MTF Biologics, which is a $500 million nonprofit that is the intermediary between organ and tissue donors and organ and tissue recipients.

They’re a global leader in this. So I said, I said, Wendy, you gotta call up this group of people. I wanna have them play. At the event. So we, we talked to them and then we end up finding that, uh, the CEO, Joe Gino has an amazing personal story, so he is gonna be one [00:23:00] of the reimagined guides in the leadership segment.

Maureen: So I wanna dive more into the structure because you have been so deliberate in how you structure it and who participates. So the format blends, TED style talks, hackathons, and the immersive experiences. How does that structure reflect the shift in how leaders have to engage with learning and transformation today?

Mark: On several ways. So one, bringing your full self. To the workplace, bringing your hopes, your fears, your, your, uh, vulnerability, and to be able to ask for help. From whoever can give you that help, whether it’s your C-suite colleagues, whether it’s your board [00:24:00] members, whether it’s some of your employees or in my case, um, my, my daughter.

So I, I have a, I have a, a standup talk that I do called my daughter, my mentor, and ever since my daughter was about four. I started learning from her because she learned how to do certain things that I did not learn when I was growing up. ’cause I had different sets of parents. And so my daughter’s now 36, she runs a brand, uh, consultancy.

And I still, when when I get stuck, I say, when, wonder what my daughter would do because she does things sometimes a little more gracefully. So, you know, there, there’s gonna be a lot of. Immersion in meeting other CEOs and other C-suite leaders as human beings in a place that is not corporate. Literally, you’re gonna go in there, you’re gonna see the art, you’re gonna hear the music and do the yoga.

So you’re gonna bring your full immersive self, all of your five plus senses. So that’s the first element that, that is different. Uh, the [00:25:00] second element is, is that, that is different, is that we are going to be building a community as a result of gathering these, these people. The community is gonna be obviously voluntary.

We’re, we’re gonna be intending or hoping that the people who will leave say, wow, I didn’t, had no idea what we could do together in one day. I imagine, what could we do if we met once a month? If we had, if I had a group of other CEOs and senior leaders and guides who could help me? Go into this very unstable, very, very unpredictable future feeling like I’m part of a larger community that shares my interests.

Maureen: Beautiful. So I’m curious. We’ve got music, we’ve got drunk yoga, we’ve got art. I. What do you say to the executive who says, make it shorter, make it informational, and get me outta here quicker. I don’t want [00:26:00] the the stuff.

Mark: Uh, wrong conference for you or wrong unconference for you.

Maureen: Go back to a normal conference.

Mark: We’re we are. Focusing on a very small percentage of the thousands. And th there’s, you know, quite a few thousands of CEOs of mid market companies. Um, we’re not looking for the majority. We’re looking for the people who realize that. Better leaders, make better companies, make a better world.

So if you don’t want to be a better leader, if you don’t wanna be a better person, this is not the place for you. Um, if you want to buy some of the content or get some of the content from your friend who went there, great, you know, happy to share that with you. Um, but. We wanna have you feel like you are changed as a person and that you met people who you want to be in business with, in collaboration with, and you have some resources and a direction you did not have before.

And that takes work. You know, like, like you were saying, you invest a [00:27:00] lot of time in self-care, self-development. I do probably, I spent probably three hours a day in my own self-care, self-development, you know, learning and all that. And, uh, I feel like I, the more I can do, the better I’m gonna be.

Maureen: Uh, and I think that in and of itself is a paradigm shift. Uh, and again, I’m imagining some of our listeners saying, I’m lucky to get three minutes a day to brush my teeth and go to the bathroom. my work schedule the way it is right now, currently requires that. So we are inviting people to engage in a major shift in how we think about job of leadership.

Mark: Yes, it is. It is. It is a very, very major shift, and I don’t wanna minimize it. I don’t wanna simplify it. I don’t wanna say that it’s gonna be easy or it’s gonna be fast, but if you wanna use the analogy of brushing your teeth, right, people do brush their teeth because they feel yucky. If they didn’t.[00:28:00]

Right people, people would skip brushing their teeth if they didn’t feel yucky. If they Right. But they feel like,

Maureen: Yeah.

Mark: yeah, I don’t wanna go out with bad breath and my, my mouth just feels, so, I got to the point, Maureen, that I feel yucky if I leave and begin my day without actually having my mind being calm and feeling like I did something to make my body warm up and give it nutrition.

I feel yucky and I don’t. Have good days when I do that. So if we start to help people realize that time management is a just ridiculous concept because you can’t manage time, what we can manage or influence is energy, consciousness, and attention. And you see like, like your company. Can be extremely effective and extremely powerful with a relatively small number of people because you’re more intentional, you’re more collaborative, and you don’t waste time doing things that are [00:29:00]not, you know, uh, useful.

But that takes some time and planning, and that’s why I think spending that time upfront will make. The actual workday be much better and there’s a lot of work we shouldn’t be doing anyways. A lot, a lot of the work we’re doing is habitual from things we used to do, and we’re not stopping to say what are the things we shouldn’t be doing so we can do the other things that we need to be doing.

Maureen: You know, that’s a, a nice, I love the idea of managing energy, consciousness and attention, those three together, and I think of how I have been a classic workaholic and worked, I’ve done all the admin stuff at night because I’m doing all the client facing work during the day. Which led me to making a lot of mistakes.

’cause at midnight I’m just not very sharp and that’s when I was invoicing it. Managing my energy and my attention would is helpful and it [00:30:00] has taken time to get to a place where I can do yoga every day, can eat healthy, and most days it takes Attention every day.

Mark: Uh, yeah, it, it does. And a part of that is really, um, understanding our identity and belief systems that cause our behaviors. So I was a workaholic for a good part of my life and did a lot of the same behaviors that you shared, and it did take me quite a long time to change them. And I think about why is that So my father.

Was born in Brooklyn in 1909, in a 500 square foot apartment, maybe about the size of the room. You see behind me with seven siblings and two parents, nine people living in an apartment of 500 square feet with one toilet and one sink. Right. So imagine nine people [00:31:00] bathing in one sink and they went to the public baths twice a week.

If they were lucky in the summer, they could not sleep in their apartment. They have to sleep on the fire escape or the roof. And my family’s not that unusual. There’s just a lot of families, if you go back a few generations that had a lot of poverty and a lot of scarcity to deal with. So why am I telling you this in in relationship to beliefs is the belief was we had to work.

Really hard life is a struggle, and if we don’t do everything we could do, we could end up homeless, poor, or not even alive. Right? So that survival mentality really came forward. And then it got to be obviously a little bit easier, a little bit, but that’s still. That still belief is that a work hour result in some kind of impact, some kind of result.

And in order for us to actually survive into the next couple of generations we have to get away from. That’s a mechanistic way. That’s a, that’s a [00:32:00] way that happened when we created the assembly line. When we move from an agricultural society to a industrial society, we have to realize that output is not.

Directly related to input in, in other words, well, it’s not a time-based, I should say. It’s, it’s, there’s not a time correlation between if I put in an hour of work, I get an hour of output. Right. A consciousness way and, right. A really a, um, an abundant ways is to say if I am healthy, happy, enjoying myself, feeling on purpose, working with the people I wanna work with, I can do an amazing amount of things.

In a relative short time, but it’s a quality of what I do, the impact of what I do and the intention of which I’m doing it that makes it work so well. So here’s a radical concept for your listeners. You can actually have fun doing really difficult things, and I call it purpose with pleasure. [00:33:00] So the idea in my family that you could actually have fun doing difficult things would, would’ve been absurd.

I think they would’ve thought that I was coming from another planet. But I have seen, I work with people who actually have pleasure with purpose or purpose with pleasure, and there’s sometimes when to stop. Pleasure. There’s some things that are just difficult and not pleasurable and never will be.

However, there’s a lot of things that, that are pleasurable, but they are difficult. Like what we’re doing now is, you know, we’re challenging. We’re trying to create some really great content, a short amount of time I’m enjoying myself. And I enjoyed myself, you know, re researching this and kind of understanding what you do because it, it felt like it, it was a good thing to do, and it was purposeful.

Maureen: Uh, there’s a phrase, what’s hard is easy, and what’s easy is hard. So it is hard to get up at six in the morning for me and get to the gym by six 30. It would be easier to sleep late, have drinks at night so that I didn’t, you know, all the stuff. But that [00:34:00] results in lack of consciousness, lack of clarity, all the things, and makes my work harder and less fun.

Mark: So, yes, uh, makes total sense. I, I kind of shifted my routines pretty radically over the years, and I’ll give you an example. So this morning, um, I. Woke up around 6 37. Uh, I had been in Nashville. I got my flight, got delayed in, uh, Atlanta. I had two and a half hours sleep, all that. And I decided I was gonna cancel one of the meetings and I was gonna get a massage.

1. Go to take a, take a swim and really just focus on getting myself ready for a day. And I woke up this morning. I felt really, really good. I had about three hours between my, when I started work and I had my first meeting and I had preparing for this interview and a bunch of other things to do. My guide, [00:35:00] my my Wisdom guide said, spend.

As much time as possible preparing for this interview. This interview is important. Maureen has a high bar, you know, the audience is important. And I spent two hours preparing. And then after that I thought to myself, you know, maybe I should listen to another podcast episode. And then I thought, no, something’s, my body doesn’t feel good.

So I went to the gym. I literally decided on the spur of the moment, took an hour in the gym, came back, and I was ready. So I’m, I’m learning how to have a plan and then change the plan. When my body tells me differently. So I think a lot of high achieving people like us learned how to make our brains control our body.

That’s created a lot of collateral damage in the body because the body is, is part of our whole being, right? It’s not the brain, the body, separate thing. It’s one part of us. So I think when you learn to get intelligence from all parts of your body, from your heart, from your [00:36:00] gut brain, from your sensations, from your mind, then you realize you’re much more resilient.

And in today’s world, you have to be able to pivot, to change, to, you know, be very flexible. Because as Mike Tyson once said, everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. Right. And that’s sort of, you know, that’s kind of a fun way of looking at what happens when you try to over plan your day and you like routines are good as long as they’re, they’re flexible.

Maureen: you know, you used the word consciousness earlier. Manage your energy, manage your consciousness, manage your attention. Uh, and that’s what resonates as I’m listening to you, is we as leaders, many of us, by the time we get to the leadership ranks, are no longer 20. I can’t do the things I did physically when I was that age. Hopefully I am much [00:37:00] sharper and I can do more mentally. But this idea that there is a. An inner knowing. I did people use lots of different words for it. Um, still small voice. Um, some people would call it prayer, but there’s a knowing that is ever present and able to guide us if we are listening. But as leaders. just a thing we don’t talk about. And yet, if we look at some of the most successful and trustworthy leaders that I’ve worked with, they all have that quiet knowing there’s a, there’s a connection to integrity with that, that I’m in integrity with myself, with my values. And that drives my actions.

It’s not just about business success, but business success in a [00:38:00] way that’s ethical, engaging, long term.

Mark: Yeah. And I think that knowing is really, really important. And you know, when you go back to think of how did we get to be the way we are as a culture where we have this very rigid, very hierarchical way of doing things and we kind of got away from the inner wisdom that we had when we were a child. So when you know, when you’re.

Learning as an infant and going up to, let’s say first grade, you are learning with all your senses. You’re tasting, you’re touching, you’re feeling, you’re seeing, you’re moving, right? You’re learning in multiple, sensory in a multisensory way. Suddenly, if you’re in a traditional education like somewhere around first grade, you now have to sit in a chair.

Now you’re learning with your brain, not with your whole body. Now there’s a lot of, um, education, which is changing [00:39:00] a lot of that, which is great. However, a lot of us at at this age learned that the teacher knows something we don’t know, and what we have to do is learn what we don’t know instead of children know a lot.

And if you go with what the child knows and build upon what the child knows, of course they, they need to know certain things. Absolutely. Teachers are important, but we’ve gotten away from that multisensory way of learning. So to give you a very simple example, without thinking about the esoteric wisdom stuff, when I go in the swimming pool and I swim like four or five times a.

I go in, I don’t consciously go in with, with a problem, but then, you know, there’s a problem that’s, you know, lurking around in my mind that I haven’t solved. I go in the pool with a problem, I come out with a solution. I literally come out with a solution. Why? Because I’m in water. Right? Which is a very, very, you know, multisensory think like when you’re, you’re in the womb, you’re in [00:40:00]water.

75, 80% of our body is water, and then you’re moving and you have no distractions. You’re, you know, you basically have no external input except for the water itself. So you’re in that wisdom state and then you realize, wow, there’s a whole set of things. That I wasn’t aware of because of all this other confusion, this extra stimuli.

So I get to the signal from the noise when I’m in swimming. Some people do it in their in nature. Some people do it in meditation. There’s all kinds of ways to do it, but you have to have a practice to actually realize your inner wisdom is really powerful if you give it a chance.

Maureen: When I was riding, I did it at night walking, so I, until I started yoga, I would do the 10,000 steps. Typically, I didn’t get my steps until late at night, didn’t complete them, so it was after dark. I walk, I live off a ravine, so I was walking in the ravine. And it was amazing how I would say, I need [00:41:00] 2000 steps and then I’m going to bed.

I would do my 2000 steps and then sit right back down at my computer because something I had been grappling with. C was resolved. So to

Mark: Hmm.

Maureen: point, I

Mark: Yeah.

Maureen: and I wanna connect this back to the conference because I think things we’re talking about reflect what we believe leadership requires. So we have to do some of the things we did well before, like communicating like ha, having a vision, finding ways to engage with people and collaborate and how we manage ourselves. And by extension, our organization has to evolve. And the, the way you’ve structured the conference and the aspects we’re talking about reflect. How we believe the most [00:42:00] successful leaders will function. So they may not swim or they may not walk, but there is some connection to my inner knowing and using that brilliance address the situations we have, which underpinning that is agility. Uh, flexibility. You’ve talked about kind of an abundance mindset rather than fear and scarcity, and not that, not that we live in a delusion that says it’s all gonna be okay, but knowing that we have the capacity collectively to work through, innovate, through, resolve the challenges we’re facing, and I think all of those. Concepts underpin what you and Tammy and the other guides are creating for this event.

Mark: Yeah. Thank you. [00:43:00] Excellent summary. And we’ve, we’ve had so many people like yourself and Neil Sahota and Gary Malkin, literally jump on board before we even told ’em very much. ’cause they wanna be part of a community that makes the world a better place to do business. They wanna be better leaders, to make better companies, to make a better world.

So we had no problem getting people. Our, our challenge is to make sure that we, we serve you well. ’cause we also want the reimagined guides to feel like you are getting a great experience, you are getting opportunities to meet people and, and get some business that is the kind of business that you want, learn as well.

So we’re, we’re really practicing generosity and reciprocity and that, that takes some time. But, you know, I’ve, I’ve enjoyed it really tremendously. I’ve gotten so much out of just meeting some of the people like yourself and Neil and Ade and all the other folks.

Maureen: Thank you. And so, so again, you’re, you are, as you speak, I’m pulling out the principles of things like reciprocity and generosity, that we are all [00:44:00] choosing to do this and giving up other commitments to be here. And it is because of the, the principles you hold and the people you are, you and Tammy and the others, you’re, you are bringing forward that make this event something that we don’t wanna miss.

Mark: Yeah. Thank you.

Maureen: So as we’re wrapping up, you’ve emphasized that this isn’t a one day event, it’s the beginning of an ongoing partnership. What does sustaining leadership development look like in this model? And again, how is that different than a traditional, uh, leadership development program?

Mark: Great question. Uh, I guess I’ll answer the question by saying it’s not Tammy and I and our teams that are coming up with this offering or this model. We’re gonna be [00:45:00] meeting with all of our reimagined guides and you on, I believe, the 23rd of July to give you an orientation to share what we’re doing to get your ideas.

So a lot of what will come out of it will be what our reimagined guide. Community and what our, uh, we’re calling disruptors, that’s what we’re calling this, the CEO C-suite Leaders who are participants say that they want. Right now we’re thinking about three elements that will be included in this. One is community feeling like you belong to something, a group of people that you feel you share values with, you enjoy being with, and you’re learning from and giving to insight where you’re getting insight from a whole.

Diverse and wide ranging community of people and resources and technology that you wouldn’t ordinarily have and some form of execution or problem solving that is very different in, in the mindset of it, but also in the resources you have to do it. So, uh, community insight. [00:46:00] Solutions are kind of the underpinning values of this community, but they’re emerging.

’cause we, we, we we’re just learning more. We’re doing some research, we’re getting people’s ideas and uh, I’m sure by the end of the unconference we’ll have more that we have now, but we won’t have the final program, if you will. ’cause that’s gonna be emerging over the next couple of months.

Maureen: So it sounds like co-creating

Mark: Exactly.

Maureen: and we being, all of us, including the

Mark: Yes. Yes, exactly.

Maureen: because it does feel like an experiment. We’re all coming together. Learning, growing, evolving, and the approach to leadership development will also be learning, growing, and evolving.

Mark: Exactly.

Maureen: So, mark, it’s a delight to get to hang out with you for an hour and [00:47:00] learn more about you are. As one of the co-creators of this conference, and it seems important as we our time, but also as we think about, gonna be influenced by people that I would pay to go to a, an event or participate in that I would want to ensure that Energy and attention and consciousness is being influenced by people who I value, who, who I trust to learn from and learn with. And so you are sharing your personal stories from Jamestown to what you’re doing in North Carolina ideas like reciprocity and community. [00:48:00] To me speak volumes about why I’m excited to participate in the conference.

Mark: We are so honored, uh, to have you and I learned so much. For myself, just, you know, diving into your book and, and the podcast and all that. And I was like, I really wanna talk to Maureen because like the way that you shared those seven trends, I think for 2024 there were seven and then, uh, Christopher added one.

I think that was really in interesting. What useful? Um, I really enjoy. The trends, but not as these static things. I think the, the way that you talked about them was much more evolutionary and human and contextual than a lot of, you know, the things that I’ve heard about trends. So, um, yeah, I feel like I’m learning every day by just being around some really cool, smart, fun people.

So thank you for participating with us.

Maureen: So to our listeners, as we wrap up, I hope the [00:49:00] conversation sparked new ideas about what leadership can, leadership development. Can and must look like in today’s world, the disrupted work, reimagined Unconference isn’t just an event, it’s a prototype for the future of learning and leading that all of us need to be considering as we explore how we evolve. If you’re ready to move beyond traditional training and into a model that’s experiential, strategic, and deeply human, I encourage you to explore Tammy’s work mark’s work. My work. If you’re able to go to the Unconference, that’s great. Depending on when you’ve listened to this podcast, it may have passed and you may be exploring other opportunities that are similar to this one. is so crucial is that we as leaders continue to evolve who we are, [00:50:00] what we do in service and in partnership with our organizations, our communities. Our extended communities. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please like it, subscribe, and share it with others.

Mark: And unconference nyc.com. If you wanna learn about the unconference, um unconference nyc.com and it will be our URL for hopefully a long time.

Maureen: So beep. Let’s also go back and have, insert this mark, can you give us your contact information?

Mark: Sure. Um, mark Ek, uh, you can reach me email mark m@oplab.com, opp LA b.com, our website, which is a lot of rich content and is op lab.com. And, um, my book is on Amazon, so just search for culture of opportunity or my name and, uh, I look forward to. Connecting with you.

Maureen: [00:51:00] Thank you, mark.

Mark: Thank you.