Lead with Purpose

Episode descriptionWarren Kornblum ( Brand & Business Advisor, Author & Founder, Share Of Heart™ Advisory | Former Global CMO, Toys“R”Us) was global CMO of Toys R Us starting in 1999, when the Big Toy Book still landed in tens of millions of homes. He is now the author of Notes from the Brand Stand and the creator of Share of Heart, his answer to share of mind and share of wallet: the emotional connection that makes a customer forgive you when you slip. Ron and Warren compare notes on the brand from both sides of its private equity buyout, from the song and Geoffrey the giraffe to the website Warren believes should have been “the Disney of retail toy stores” and the store bathrooms that told you everything about the company.They also cover Rooms To Go, why trust comes from caring, and why every CEO should put on a customer service headset. Warren explains why a brand needs a spike in the sand rather than a positioning statement, what Sears and Kodak teach about brands that lost their stand, and why AI is table stakes for marketers. His case is that the human work is deciding what to do with the last few cards after the machine has dealt most of the deck.Full Podcast available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.Ron Boire and The Upland GroupWebsite: https://www.ronboire.com/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RonBoireLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronboire/Warren Kornblum and Share of HeartWebsite: shareofheart.comBook: Notes From the Brand Stand  https://www.amazon.com/Notes-Brand-Stand-Emotional-Attention/dp/B0GHTBKZ4JLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/warrenkornblum

Episode summaryJen MacLean started as a teenage playtester at Microsoft, rose through AOL, Comcast, Amazon, and Microsoft's Xbox, and is now co-founder and CEO of Dragon Snack Games. Ron has known her for more than 25 years, since they met at Columbia Business School. He is also a friends and family investor and angel advisor to Dragon Snack. Jen walks through the state of the games industry: North American layoffs after the COVID investment boom, why players in the West recoil from AI while players in Asia embrace it, and what Grand Theft Auto VI, which Jen estimates could earn $7 to $15 billion in its first week, says about the business.The second half is about building. Jen describes the 2024 conversations that pushed her to leave Xbox, including Ron's question about a line on a resume versus a line in a eulogy. She explains why she and her co-founders chose to hire only when it hurt and to assume no more money was coming. When a $10 million budget shrank to two to three million, they cut scope and told the team the truth. She also covers keeping a remote-first team of eight connected, why humans must stay in the loop with AI, and Farhaven, the cooperative steampunk fantasy game where nobody competes and everything you do benefits the people you play with. Dragon Snack's Kickstarter launched October 1, and the game is slated for release in Q2 2027.Full Podcast available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.Ron Boire and The Upland GroupWebsite: https://www.ronboire.com/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RonBoireLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronboire/Jen MacLean and Dragon Snacks GamesLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenmaclean1/Dragon Snacks Games: https://www.dragonsnacksgames.com/Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonsnacksgames/farhaven-not-an-mmo-a-friendmoSteam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4922250/Farhaven/

Guest bioRahim Hirji is the author of SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI. He spent years in education technology, including building a business in China teaching soft skills to teenagers, and now speaks and advises on how leaders and organizations navigate the shift AI is driving. His framework covers seven skills, among them curiosity, global adaptability, principled innovation, and the augmented mindset.Episode descriptionRahim Hirji's book opens with his great-grandfather getting on a boat in Gujarat, bound for East Africa, at a time when one in three boats made it across and pirates worked the route. It was a calculated risk against a hand-to-mouth life, and it started four generations of skill changes: survival skills, then street skills, then vocational skills, then soft skills. Rahim's argument is that we are in the next one, and it took him ten years to see it clearly.Ron and Rahim get into what that means for leaders right now. Why AI strategies almost always start with process, cost, and revenue, and get to augmenting humans last, often without the chief people officer in the room. Why the tool question is the wrong question. Why the leadership principles that mattered ten years ago still matter, and why the most forward-thinking companies are the ones that do not put AI at the center.

Episode descriptionJoAnn Garbin is the first returning guest on Lead with Purpose. She led innovation work on the data center of the future at Microsoft, co-authored the bestselling The Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft, and now runs Regenerous Labs, where her team designs data centers meant to be positive for the company, the community, and nature.Ron and JoAnn work through the fight happening in towns across the country. A Gallup survey found Americans would rather live near a nuclear plant than an AI data center, a result JoAnn calls a contradiction, since a gigawatt campus is asking for roughly what a nuclear plant provides. They dig into what water neutral actually means once you count power generation upstream and paved ground downstream, why eighty percent of a data center's water footprint sits in the grid rather than the building, and why software companies pretending to be power and construction companies keep learning expensive lessons.Full Podcast Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.Ron Boire and The Upland GroupWebsite: https://www.ronboire.com/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RonBoireLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronboire/JoAnn Garbin:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joanngarbin/Link to Book: https://www.amazon.com/Insiders-Guide-Innovation-Microsoft-ebook/dp/B0DLX2PF5J

Episode descriptionCaroline Webb spent her first career as an economist, forecasting the US economy for the British government at the Bank of England. She left because the work kept pulling her away from the human center. What followed was twelve years at McKinsey, where she stepped off the partner track to build a leadership practice from scratch, and then made partner anyway.Ron and Caroline discuss the distinction at the heart of her new book, Leadership Intelligence: experiential wisdom, which comes from years in the chair, and deliberate wisdom, the set of critical thinking habits anyone can build at any stage. The catch is that experience cuts both ways. The more of it you have, the heavier your blinkers, and the smartest and fastest leaders are often the most exposed.Ron Boire and The Upland GroupWebsite: https://www.ronboire.com/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RonBoireLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronboire/Caroline WebbBuy the Book: https://carolinewebb.co/books/leadership-intelligence/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolinewebbauthor/