Episodios

  • 562. Decoding Digital Transformation Then and Now feat. David Rogers

    562. Decoding Digital Transformation Then and Now feat. David Rogers
    Jul 4 2025
    It might sound counterintuitive but digital transformation is not about technology. So, what does it mean for companies to keep up in an ever-evolving digital age? Well, according to today’s guest, it’s about having a “strategic imagination.”David Rogers, an instructor at Columbia Business School, is an OG thinker on digital transformation. His books, The Digital Transformation Playbook: Rethink Your Business for the Digital Age and The Digital Transformation Roadmap: Rebuild Your Organization for Continuous Change, laid the foundation for an entire strategic approach to taking companies into the digital age. David and Greg delve deep into the misconceptions about digital transformation, emphasizing that it's not merely about technology but about strategic imagination and continuous organizational change. They discuss the evolution of digital transformation over the past decade, the importance of a well-defined strategic vision, and the roles of agile methodologies, hypothesis-driven experimentation, and cohesive leadership.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Digital transformation is about contexts56:33: The question of digital transformation. It is not about bolting technology onto an existing company. It is about—really, it is about—how do we adapt an organization so that it can thrive in a digital context, right? The digital is actually about the context, not about what you are doing, even necessarily per se, inside the business. And to me, the most defining characteristic of the digital era is this accelerating change and accelerating and growing uncertainty that organizations have to cope with.What makes an effective leader?25:16: Effective leaders do not orient their job around making decisions primarily. What they are primarily trying to do is to define what truly matters, to then communicate that to others, achieve that kind of alignment and clarity that we are pulling in the same direction, and then to empower others—to enable the rest of the organization to do it.Digital transformation is not about technology10:28: Digital is not about the technology inside your company. It is not about the behaviors of the market and the customers. But it is more the context we are in, which is one of—not a change that happened in 1994 to 1996, or some other change. Oh, the shift to mobile. Oh, the shift to this. Let’s shift to the cloud. It is just one after another, and each wave of technology change is catalyzing the next. It is not just, “Oh, why are they each coming?” Well, each one is building on the one right before it. And so we are dealing with this pace of change and level of uncertainty; therefore, in your context, for any organization, that is unprecedented and certainly not what big organizations were built for and organized for in the 20th century.Strategy as thinking discipline34:39: Strategy is something you need to embed in every level of organization as a thinking discipline, which is about defining: what are we trying to achieve? What do we believe is a way—or the best way—to achieve that at this point in time.Show Links:Recommended Resources:James Hackett Daniel KahnemanPraveer Sinha, TataSteve BlankBob DorfGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Columbia Business SchoolProfessional WebsiteProfessional Profile on LinkedInNewsletter on SubstackGuest Work:The Digital Transformation Roadmap: Rebuild Your Organization for Continuous ChangeThe Digital Transformation Playbook: Rethink Your Business for the Digital AgeThe Network Is Your Customer: Five Strategies to Thrive in a Digital Age
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    1 h y 1 m
  • 560. Mastering Distraction at Work and in Life with Nir Eyal

    560. Mastering Distraction at Work and in Life with Nir Eyal
    Jun 30 2025

    Being easily distracted by the latest technologies has been a consistent feature of the human race since the time of Plato. But is the technology to blame? Or is the key to being more productive and present in life have to do with forming healthy habits around the technology?

    Nir Eyal, writer, consultant, and former lecturer in marketing at Stanford, is the author of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life and Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. In his work, Nir explores the psychology behind habit-forming technology.

    Nir and Greg discuss the positive applications of habit-forming technologies, the timeless nature of distraction, the importance of forethought in combating impulsiveness, and practical strategies for becoming “Indistractable.”

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

    Episode Quotes:

    The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought

    15:32: Studies have found that 90% of your distractions are not external triggers. They do not come from the outside world. Ninety percent of the time you check your phone, you check your phone not because of a ping, ding, or ring, but because of an internal trigger. Because 90% of distractions begin from within. They start because of these internal triggers. What are internal triggers? Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states—boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. This is the source of 90% of our distractions. So what that means is, when you let those impulses take over, right? The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. When you allow yourself to check social media or watch something on the news or whatever it is that is not what you want to do, because of an immediate sensation, that tends to be, 90% of the time, the source of the problem. That is when it becomes something of, “Oh my gosh, what was I doing? I wasted the whole day worrying about somebody else's problems online,” as opposed to what I really need to do. Whereas if you plan that time in advance, it is fine. There is nothing wrong with it.

    How do you become indistractable?

    50:42: The first step to becoming indistractable is mastering internal triggers, or they will master you. So you can have the best tools, the best life hacks, the best—all that stuff. But if fundamentally you do not know how to deal with that sensation, you do not know how to process boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety—if you do not know what to do with that sensation—you are always going to find a way to escape.

    Humans adapt and adopt with every new technology

    07:29: The solution is not to abandon the technology. The solution is to make it better, to do what we as Homo sapiens have always done. We have always done two things in the face of dramatic technological innovation. What we have done is to adapt and to adopt, right? We adapt our behaviors. We adapt to new social norms. We adapt to the downsides of these behaviors by changing our manners, and then we adopt new technologies to fix the last generation of technologies.

    Show Links:

    Recommended Resources:

    • Akrasia
    • Paul Virilio
    • Peter Gray
    • Amy Edmondson | unSILOed
    • Robert D. Putnam

    Guest Profile:

    • Official Website
    • Professional Profile on LinkedIn

    Guest Work:

    • Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life
    • Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
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    51 m
  • 559. Modeling Persuasion and Connectivity: From Pandemics to Finance feat. Adam Kucharski

    559. Modeling Persuasion and Connectivity: From Pandemics to Finance feat. Adam Kucharski
    Jun 27 2025
    There is a shift happening in the complex world of proof. Simulation and probabilistic approaches are increasingly accepted as ‘good enough’ in areas traditionally dominated by exact proofs. Persuasion depends on the degree of certainty needed.Adam Kucharski is a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and also the author of three books, Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty, The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread--And Why They Stop, and The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling.Greg and Adam discuss the versatile concept of 'proof', examining how it applies differently across mathematics, law, medicine, and practical decision-making. Adam discusses the challenges of proving concepts under uncertainty, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the role of intuition versus formal modeling in various fields. They also explore the crossover of epidemiological principles into finance, marketing, cybersecurity, and online content dynamics, illustrating the universal relevance of contagion theories. The episode highlights how simulation and probabilistic approaches are increasingly accepted in areas traditionally dominated by exact proofs.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The gap between science and policy09:25: One of the challenges we had in COVID is this dimension of a problem where all directions had a lot of enormous downsides, and countries were having to make that under pressure. And even one of the things that I think I did not really appreciate at the time was, even later in the year, when a lot of these questions about the severity, a lot of these questions about transmission, had really been resolved because we had much better data. We still had a lot of this tension demanding, "Oh, we cannot be sure about something," or "You know, we need much, much higher evidence." And I think that is the gap between where kind of science lies and where policy lies.It’s not the content, it’s the contagion37:59: I think a lot of people think about the content, but obviously it is not just, "It is something goes viral." It is not just about the content. It is not about what you have written; it is about the network through which it is spreading. It is about the susceptibility of that network. It is about the medium you use. Do you have it that lingers somewhere? Is it just something you stick on the feed and it kind of vanishes? So, there is a direct analogy there with the different elements and how they trade off in ultimately what you see in terms of spread.What human networks can’t teach us about machines46:35: One thing that is really interesting about computer systems is the variation in contacts you see in the network is enormous. You basically get some hubs that are just connected to a huge number of computers, and some are connected to very few at all. So that makes the transmission much burster.It is not like—so humans have some variation in their contacts—but most people have about 10 contacts a day, in terms of conversations or people they exchange words with. Some more, some less, but you do not have people generally have like 10,000 contacts in a day, whereas in computers you can have that. So it makes the potential for some things to actually persist at quite low levels for quite a long time because it will kind of hit this application and then simmer along, and then hit another one and simmer along.Show Links:Recommended Resources:EuclidGeorge E. P. BoxWilliam Sealy GossetP-valueRonald RossJonah PerettiDuncan J. WattsAmazon Web ServicesMonty HallGuest Profile:AdamKucharski.ioFaculty Profile at London School of Hygiene & Tropical MedicineSocial Profile on BlueSkyGuest Work:Amazon Author PageProof: The Art and Science of CertaintyThe Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread--And Why They StopThe Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of GamblingSubstack NewsletterGoogle Scholar PageTED Talks
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    55 m
  • 558. The Psychology Behind Morality and Empathy feat. Kurt Gray

    558. The Psychology Behind Morality and Empathy feat. Kurt Gray
    Jun 25 2025
    How do individuals navigate moral typecasting? What is the dual nature of empathy in the context of human pain and suffering? When is there a disconnect between the perceptions of what is right and what is moral?Kurt Gray is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he directs the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding. In the autumn of 2025, he will join the faculty of the Department of Psychology at Ohio State University. He’s also an author, and his books are titled Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground and The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters.Greg and Kurt discuss Kurt’s work at the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding. Their conversation covers key topics such as how moral disagreements are rooted in differing perceptions of harm, the impact of evolutionary psychology, and the role of empathy in bridging divides. Kurt also shares insights from his classroom experiences on fostering understanding among students.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How can pain and suffering change your view about empathy?43:00: There are two ways, right? That pain and suffering could change your views of empathy. And I should say there are some people who do experience a lot of pain and suffering and then do not feel sympathy...[43:16] Everyone suffers. Just like, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, dust yourself off and get hard, get tough. But for the most part, if you suffered a lot in life, you can kind of recognize that it's tough sometimes to be a human being and that you have more sympathy for others, at least more so than people who never suffered in their lives, right? But I think the way that pain causes you to have less empathy is if you're in pain right now. Right? So if you are standing in, you know, a pile of razor blades, it's hard to be really empathic for someone—you know, someone's situation, right?—because you're so focused. Like, pain just overwhelms your entire consciousness. So never try to get empathy from someone who is actively in pain, but I think instead, reach out to people who, you know, have gone through a similar thing.Moral understanding begins with human contact40:46: The more you have sustained contact with people who are different than you, you show more moral understanding.When recognizing pain depends on perception27:13: When it comes to the ability to suffer, pain like that is ultimately a matter of perception. Like, you can, you know, agency—someone is intending—you can see that more on the surface, right? Like, I am going to think and I will do something—that is agency. But if you start crying, like, are you a method actor? Are you actually in tears? Are those crocodile tears? So, questions of pain are easy to accept when it is your family or your friends. Perhaps when someone is very different than you, or maybe you are locked in a conflict with someone and they are crying, right? It is much harder to take their pain as authentic.Understanding starts with stories not arguments30:53: Stories are a way of sharing one true thing, shall we say, right? This thing happened to me, and it's not a talking point I heard on the radio. It actually happened to me, and let me tell you about it so that you can better understand me. I think it's powerful because it's not the thing that you're going to use to persuade in policy, let's say—although, often, stories are persuasive in policy—but instead it's a way of saying, here's where I'm coming from. Can you understand where I'm coming from? And that's a great place for a conversation to start. Right now, I understand you're a person, I'm a person, and let's explore our perspectives rather than argue about complex policy issues.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Jonathan HaidtMoral Foundations TheoryDaryl DavisLuigi MangioneDavid GogginsDaniel KahnemanGuest Profile:KurtJGray.comDeepest Beliefs LabThe Center for the Science of Moral UnderstandingProfile on LinkedInSocial Profile on InstagramSocial Profile on XHis Work:Amazon Author PageOutraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common GroundThe Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It MattersAtlas of Moral PsychologyGoogle Scholar Page
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    48 m
  • 557. Beyond The Myth of Silicon Valley’s Origins feat. Margaret O’Mara

    557. Beyond The Myth of Silicon Valley’s Origins feat. Margaret O’Mara
    Jun 23 2025
    You know what they say — Silicon Valley wasn’t built in a day, nor was it built by just a small group of tech gurus. In fact, the origin story of the Valley is a complex story involving government, industry, and academia.Margaret O’Mara is a history professor at the University of Washington. Her latest book, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America gives an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the making of the tech empire, and how it’s grown into an economic engine. Margaret and Greg discuss the significant role the government played in the early days of Silicon Valley, key historical figures in the region’s rise to prominence and factors that set it apart from other tech hubs like Boston, and how the ecosystem has evolved alongside politics, technology, and cultural shifts. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How storytelling built Silicon Valley’s legacy31:59: I think there's the story of the products, and then there's the story of the place, the story of the guys in garages. The story of this entrepreneurial genius, and that's a great, great story. It's part of the story. It leaves out this bigger landscape of government and society and people who are non-technical people, the Regis McKenna’s of the world, who are so instrumental in making all this happen. But it's—I mean, I know as a historian—storytelling is powerful. That's how you help people understand and relate. And so Silicon Valley has been such a good storyteller.Why everyone should understand tech history04:27: It's really important for all of us as users of this technology to have a way to understand it and understand its history. Even if we don't know, even if we aren't programmers ourselves.Meritocracy alone hasn’t changed the face of power53:16: We're seeing the people at the very, very top of power and influence are more homogenous than ever, which is showing that this meritocracy, this idea, just doesn't—only goes so far. So understanding the history kind of helps, I think, is really important in kind of getting why. Okay, why has this not changed? Why is this so baked into the model? But it also doesn't mean that we should just throw up our hands and say, well, this is the way it is.Federal research grants built founders not just labs11:57: Research money for universities is not only seeding basic research in labs and then seeding spinoff companies and commercializing technologies from those labs, but it's also educating people. When you look, kind of dollar for dollar, about, you know—when you look at Stanford, for example, if you just look at the tech space—I think biotech is different. Medical sciences are different because you have more of that kind of pipeline from lab to startup in that space. But when you're looking at computer hardware and software, it's more about the people that went to Stanford that went on to found companies, right? Everyone from Hewlett and Packard to Brin and Page and everyone in between. That is, it's kind of a people factory, so that's part of it. And that federal money is paying for people for science and engineering programs. So that's a really important component.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Frederick TermanVannevar BushRegional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 by AnnaLee SaxenianRobert NoyceBurt McMurtryTerry WinogradBill DraperPitch JohnsonRegis McKennaWilson Sonsini Goodrich & RosatiGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of WashingtonProfessional WebsiteGuest Work:The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
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    52 m
  • 556. Rewriting Your Personality and Overcoming Anxiety feat. Olga Khazan

    556. Rewriting Your Personality and Overcoming Anxiety feat. Olga Khazan
    Jun 20 2025
    Are there ways to change your personality? What traits are easier to change than others? How does environment and life events tend to influence the Big Five traits of your personality?Olga Khazan is a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine and also the author of the books Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change and Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World.Greg and Olga discuss the concept of personality change, focusing on the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Olga shares her personal journey of attempting to modify her own traits, the challenges faced, and the various techniques used, such as meditation, improv, and volunteering. They also talk about the implications of personality change in different environments, the heritability of traits, and the broader significance of these changes for personal and professional growth.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The case for volitional personality change12:03; Everyone will change slightly, even if they do not do anything. So you can just, like, buckle up and enjoy the ride, I guess. The maturity principle — like people become less neurotic, more conscientious over time — so those are positive changes, and most of us will kind of enjoy those. But volitional personality change, which is what my book is really about, is trying to make a more pronounced change in a shorter period of time. And the kind of type of thing I am talking about is, like, starting therapy. Like most people, if they have a problem, they do not kind of sit back and say, "This problem will eventually go away, so I am not going to get therapy." You know, they are like, "I want to go see a therapist because I want this process to resolve faster — like, want to get over this problem sooner." And so, it is similar with volitional personality changes: you are noticing a problem in your life, and you are taking steps to change it faster than it would change naturally.Why extroverts are often happier22:40: Extroversion is important. Most studies show that extroverts are happier. That's just because they have more social connections... There's just something about being seen by other people, feeling like you're part of a community, feeling like you matter, that is really beneficial for health and can't be replicated by reading a book or watching a TV show.Neuroticism and safety vs. risk25:37: Neuroticism will keep you very safe because you will never do anything. But you have to ask yourself whether you want a life where you've never taken any risks. 'Cause that's also part of it.What improv can teach you about being open20:37: What improv is really good at is, if you are someone who is very controlling of situations or likes to be in control, it completely breaks you of that immediately because there is absolutely no way to control what's happening in improv. Everything is so made up and so confusing, and so you have to like to be in the moment and just pivot on the spot with whatever's happening. And for me, that really helped with extroversion, but also kind of just some of the parts of me that were kind of not willing to be extroverted.Show Links:Recommended Resources:NathanWHudson.comPersonalityAssessor.comBrent RobertsWilliam JamesBrian LittleDale CarnegieHow to Win Friends and Influence PeopleGuest Profile:OlgaKhazan.comProfile on LinkedInWikipedia ProfileSocial Profile on XSocial Profile on InstagramHer Work:Articles in The AtlanticAmazon Author PageMe, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality ChangeWeird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider WorldSubstack Newsletter
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    42 m
  • 555. Happiness As Evolution’s Best Tool feat. William Von Hippel

    555. Happiness As Evolution’s Best Tool feat. William Von Hippel
    Jun 18 2025
    Could the key to a happier life be found with our most ancient ancestors and the way they depended on community over autonomy? In a modern world built to encourage independence, how do we find the right balance between connectedness and autonomy? William Von Hippel is a retired professor of psychology from the University of Queensland and the author of The Social Paradox: Autonomy, Connection, and Why We Need Both to Find Happiness. His research, also found in his first book The Social Leap and countless articles, focuses on the evolutionary science behind happiness.William and Greg chat about how evolutionary science can offer guidance on living a happier, more fulfilled life, the psychological and physiological impacts of social connections, the historical context of human relationships, and the role of modern technology and societal changes in our well-being.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why loneliness hurts more than we realize28:38: Loneliness is really hard on your health. We know that it kills you at rates higher than cigarettes once you get older, and you're more vulnerable. And so the feeling of loneliness doesn't guarantee you don't have people around, but it does mean that you don't feel part of it.You feel somewhat excluded. And of course, feeling excluded should hurt because our ancestors who couldn't see that they're about to be excluded are the ancestors who kept misbehaving and therefore got excluded. When you look at hunter-gatherer societies, they all follow the same pattern of exclusion, whereby before they actually give you the heave-ho, first they kind of tease you. And if you don't respond to this teasing, well, already, you're a little bit too thick-skinned, because that's meant to bring you back in line. If teasing doesn't work, then they start acting like you're not even there. They talk around you and not responding to you. Almost everybody, when they get to that point, starts to feel terrible. It feels like physical pain because our ancestors, our potential ancestors who weren't bothered by that, took the next step and woke up one morning either dead or all alone. So, the system makes perfect sense that it really hurts. Happiness is one of evolution's best tools04:06: Happiness is one of evolution's best tools. It motivates us to do things that are in our genes' best interest, not necessarily ours as human beings, who may or may not want to do those things, but it motivates us to do what's in our genes' best interest—typically by making us happy when we do those things.The tradeoff between autonomy and connection06:34: We enter relationships which are super important to us and our happiness; we're a gregarious species. When we enter those relationships, we have to sacrifice some degree of autonomy to do what our friends want some of the time, or at least at the time they want, et cetera. And when we decide to pursue our autonomy, usually in pursuit of skills and self-development, we have to sacrifice our relationships to some degree, because that means we're spending time honing our own skills and not socializing or helping others.Why wealth doesn’t guarantee happiness19:47: The things that made us happy, as far as the social connections, were also the things that made us reproductively successful. And they, in some ways, they very much still are. So if I'm famous or rich, I'm high in status, and then I'm attractive to members of the opposite sex or whoever I prefer. And I'm attractive to people who I want to be in my coalition. I have the sort of social accolades that actually make me feel good. And I think that's actually the basis of the Eastland Paradox—this notion that as societies get wealthier, people don't get happier. But richer people are happier than poorer people.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Daniel KahnemanShigehiro OishiRobert Trivers ÖtziJohn T. CacioppoJanice Kiecolt-GlaserSheldon CohenGuest Profile:Professional Profile on LinkedInProfessional WebsiteHis Work:The Social Paradox: Autonomy, Connection, and Why We Need Both to Find HappinessThe Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy
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    58 m