Hear This From SXSW: Culture Changers
The Forrest Four-Cast: March 19, 2018
To maximize success, sometimes it’s as much about changing entrenched mindsets as it is updating the tools. If you missed any of these SXSW sessions on how to shake up the status quo for personal and professional profit — learn more from these full-length audio replays.
The Mediocrity Trap. Carmen Medina retired in 2010 after a 32-year career at CIA. Today, she cares about making sense of a quickly-evolving world, helping Rebels at Work, understanding meaning in a connected world, and “Yoda-ing” @GovLab fellows. She believes there’s a worldwide conspiracy for the promotion of mediocrity — and we’re all co-conspirators, witting or unwitting. But she offers a way out of the Mediocrity Trap that identifies the common ways mediocrity infuses the workplace and the tools needed to acquire the necessary skills to defeat them. This presentation shared techniques from individuals and groups who rise above mediocrity and demonstrated how all of us can adopt them. No empty slogans but practical advice.
No Ego: Cut the Cost of Drama and Drive Big Results. Hear New York Times best-selling author Cy Wakeman discuss her more than 25 years of cultivating a revolutionary approach to leadership. Wakeman’s philosophy teaches people how to turn excuses into results and transform unhappy employees into accountable, successful members of the workforce. She says, “25 years ago, I stumbled upon a discovery that caused me to develop a bold new approach to leadership. I discovered the average person spends two hours per day in drama — gossiping, complaining and arguing with reality!” In her talk, she revealed a modern leadership approach using brain science and simple tools to bypass the ego and redirect energy wasted in drama to recapture two hours per day of productivity.
How to Break an Industry. There’s a common thread linking what’s wrong in Congress, in Silicon Valley, in the media, on Wall Street and elsewhere. People tend to look at wrongdoing in these spaces as the faults of individuals, but individuals respond to the systems they’re part of, and it’s the systems that are broken. Vox co-founder and editor-at-large Ezra Klein explained how we’ve designed industries with incentives that make even good people act badly — and what we can do about it.
Leading for a Culture of Creativity and Innovation. How can you make your organization more innovative, adaptive, and creatively competitive? After studying 200+ companies, the global design firm IDEO has identified six essential qualities to drive innovation and creativity. David Aycan (pictured above), the company’s Managing Director of Products, shared how to learn more about these qualities, the data behind them, and stories of companies working hard to develop the culture, processes and habits that drive innovation. Due to extremely high audience demand, this presentation was scheduled for an additional two Encore Sessions during the event.
Find more podcast content by exploring the SXSW online schedule. When you click on a session and see an audio bar, then you’ve got your listening assignment for the day! Also, we’ve made it easier for you by recapping some of the SXSW highlights. Check out previous roundups of audio content related to Senator Bernie Sanders, The Future of Work, Improving Benefits and Building Inclusion.
Lock in SXSW 2018 prices by purchasing a badge for SXSW 2019 during our limited pre-sale, which ends at 11:59 pm PDT on Saturday, March 24.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
