Leadership and The Importance Of Playing To Your Strengths

April 16, 2018
Hosted by Whitney Johnson

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Guest Information

Episode Description

True leadership in disruption involves knowing about and playing to your distinctive strengths. My guest this week is leadership expert Sanyin Siang. Sanyin helps leaders launch and create value by focusing on mindset, behavioral change, and team and culture building. Sanyin is a CEO Coach, Author, and the Executive Director of the Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership & Ethics (COLE). Prior to Duke, Sanyin worked at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest federation of scientific and engineering societies, and publisher of Science. Her initiatives explored the ethical, social, and legal implications of technological advances before they became reality. Her book The Launch Book: Motivational Stories for Launching Your Idea, Business, or Next Career, uses behavioral science principles to help readers build the mindset for addressing major change.

Disrupt Yourself Live

Archives Available on VoiceAmerica Business Channel

Change is necessary, even desirable, but when it happens so fast, it feels like it is happening to you, not for you. That’s scary. But it shouldn’t need to feel this way.

What Whitney Johnson has learned, having been an analyst on Wall Street, and co-founding an investment firm with Harvard’s Clayton Christensen, is that the framework of disruptive innovation, that we apply to companies, is, at a high level, a framework for managing change, beginning with the individual.

She’s spent the last five years researching and codifying a framework of personal disruption, so that whether you are scaling a business, trying to get your people to be more innovative, or just trying to manage your career you have a structure for doing this.

Tune in to Disrupt Yourself Live with Whitney Johnson on VoiceAmerica Business for stories from the front lines and practical tips on how to not only cope with but harness and ride the waves of change.

Whitney Johnson

Whitney Johnson was named one of the world's thirty most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50 in 2017. She is the author of Build an A Team (Harvard Business Press, 2018) and the critically-acclaimed Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work (2015). Publisher's Weekly described it as "savvy, often counter-intuitive, superb" while the Boston Globe called it the "What Color is Your Parachute?” career guide for the entrepreneurial age.

Through writing, speaking, consulting and coaching, Whitney works with leaders to effectively lead through change. She formerly was the co-founder of the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Harvard's Clayton Christensen. She was involved in fund formation, capital raising, and the development of the fund's strategy. During her tenure, the CAGR of the Fund was 11.98 percent v. 1.22 percent for the S and P 500.

She is also formerly an award-winning Wall Street analyst. She was an Institutional Investor-ranked equity research analyst for eight consecutive years and was rated by Starmine as a superior stock-picker.

Whitney is a frequent contributor for the Harvard Business Review, she has over 1.2 million followers on Linkedin, and her LinkedIn course The Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship has 1 million plus views. She is a member of the original cohort of Marshall Goldsmith's top 100 coaches.

Episode Directory

April 2018



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