Aug 31, 2026
Brian discusses W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician his own country ignored for three decades while Japan rebuilt its entire industrial base around what he taught. In 1950, Deming brought his ideas to Japanese executives who had nothing left to protect. Japan named its national quality prize after him...
Aug 28, 2026
Brian discusses a framework he has taught on this show and from the stage, and the part of it he now believes was incomplete.
There is a certain kind of operator almost every entrepreneur has encountered. They read the room better than anyone. Their plan holds up under pressure. They are not performing, and what you...
Aug 27, 2026
Brian discusses the meeting mechanism Jeff Bezos built at Amazon in 2004, when he banned PowerPoint from senior leadership meetings and replaced it with something almost nobody outside the company was doing: a written narrative memo, read in total silence by everyone in the room before a single word of...
Aug 26, 2026
Brian discusses a question Simon Sinek's recent commentary on friendship left him with: why do we build entire industries around romantic relationships and almost nothing around the friendships that carry us through life? Somewhere between building a business, raising a family, and filling a calendar, most people watch...
Aug 25, 2026
Brian discusses a twenty-year-old field experiment at a university call center where turnover ran around 400 percent a year and nothing management tried moved the numbers. Then a researcher brought in one person for a five-minute conversation, and a month later the same people, working from the same script for the...