Mark and my second conversation it about happiness, pleasure, meaning, and purpose, though it sounds like it's about personal growth, food, and environment. In our first conversation, he didn't really connect on the environment at the start. This time you'll hear it resonates with him, largely through health and food. I see the pattern over and over: people protect themselves from saying the environment means much to them but when they talk about it, they care deeply. I think mainstream strategies to act on the environment---"try this one little thing," "if you don't, you're destroying the Earth," facts, figures, doom, and gloom . . . none of which do I call leadership---lead to people protect themselves from revealing how much they care. Making it moral,…

Outside the MBA world, not everyone knows McKinsey. Within it, and at the upper echelons of business and government, McKinsey advises some of the largest and most influential organizations, including governments and the world's largest companies. If a company wants useful advice, it has to share everything, which means McKinsey is privy to the secrets of the most influential people and companies. McKinsey is hierarchical. After business school people start as consultants, they move up in management to partners. Later directors. Eventually you end up at Global Managing Director. Today's guest, Dominic Barton, was the Firm's three-time Global Managing Director. Since effective leadership is fundamentally about influencing people's behavior, Dominic influenced the influencers of the most influential people and organizations, where the stakes were highest…

Nadya and I mostly talk about business and sustainability. She describes what she saw growing up in the dissolution of Kazakhstan, where she saw the opposite of sustainability. I can't describe what she saw, but you'll hear the craziness of collusion, economic collapse, political collapse, and so on. She talks about how business works best when sustainable. I tend to agree. Tangential to what Nadya and I covered, when companies influence government to distort a market -- say with subsidies for fossil fuels, paying for a military to maintain supply lines that everyone pays for, roads that I agree I benefit from but don't use nearly as much as others yet I pay for, and farm subsidies for meat, I could go on -- unsustainable…

Proctor and Gamble produces a lot of plastic and waste, which makes them very interesting to me. An old me would protest. The leader me sees the opportunity to support change if they aren't changing and help motivate it if they are. Not just reduce waste---also to help increase the joy, meaning, and purpose in the process---what the "leadership" part of this podcast's title alludes to. Steve Sikra has worked there nearly 30 years. He knows their history and practices backward and forward. He's very enthusiastic. He talks about systemic change and overall reduction. I'm not sure it's P&G's main goal. Or rather, we see the relevant systems differently. One of my main discoveries in environmental action is the difference between raising efficiency and lowering…

Mark seeks transitions---what most people avoid, certainly around leadership and the environment---and loves them. He shares them with the world. Listening to his podcast and reading his results, they're working. Change can make for a great life, as much as most people prefer to do what they always have. You'll hear him embracing challenges, learning, seeking understanding. He seeks action and people who act. He's just over 21, but I hear experience beyond those years, I think because of the challenges, and doing them publicly. Putting yourself out there forces accountability on you, which gets the job done. I recommend it. On personal change, he recognizes that emotion, not the outside world, is usually the biggest hurdle. This view, applied to environmental leadership, points to…

Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of D-Day. This post is about being a part of something greater than yourself, than all of us, benefiting us all, and benefiting yourself -- one of the great feelings and experiences available to humans. I happened to read four documents around the same time that illuminated each other and our attitudes toward acting on the environment. Our complacency in the face of a danger threatening many times more lives than Hitler is all the more glaring when compared to the honor and service of the men who defended the free world storming Normandy. The documents were 'I count myself lucky': D-day remembered on the 75th anniversary, a compilation of interviews of D-Day survivors in The GuardianThe Uninhabitable Earth, a…

I subscribe to almost no newsletters or video channels, but I subscribe to Dr. Greger's Nutritionfacts.org. More than subscribing, I promote it. Watching his videos is a highlight of my Sundays, when his newsletters go out, and I've watched hundreds of them. Regular listeners know that food began my move toward environmental leadership, as well as loving fresh vegetables, fruit, legumes, and food without packaging nor its fiber removed. I've never eaten food so convenient, inexpensive, social, and, most of all, delicious. Several years ago I started finding videos from Nutritionfacts.org, hosted by a medical doctor on a mission to make nutrition information simple to understand and act on for everyone. The videos present digested but not dumbed-down medical research on nutrition-related topics, generally peer-reviewed…