Inc. Magazine, in its own words:

For 35 years, we’ve been the premier publication dedicated to entrepreneurs—the most innovative, most courageous, and most essential business leaders in America. In that time, Inc. has won widespread recognition for maintaining the highest editorial standards as we’ve documented that world.

How did it improve overnight?

They hired me as their latest columnist! Today marks my first piece, “How I Wish Business School Had Taught Me Leadership.”

First time here?

My editor tells me I may see more readers than usual, with Inc.’s 1.57 million Twitter followers. If you’re new here, the links below give you an idea of what to find here. If you like it, subscribe to my newsletter with the purple button at the top right.

• The archive of my nearly 2,100 posts
• My online leadership course (testimonials on my teaching)
• My swim across the Hudson River (pictured above)
• My series on
  • Daily habits
  • Burpees
  • Cold showers (yes, I’m serious)

Who is Joshua Spodek?

From my bio:

Joshua Spodek earned such praise as “Best and Brightest” (Esquire Magazine’s Genius Issue), “Astrophysicist turned new media whiz” (NBC), and “Rocket Scientist” (Forbes Magazine and ABC News) with success in such diverse fields as science, invention, entrepreneurship, art, leadership, coaching, and education.

A Professor at NYU, he holds five Ivy-League degrees, including a PhD in Astrophysics and an MBA, both from Columbia University, where he studied under a Nobel Laureate. He helped build an X-ray observational satellite orbiting the Earth as part of a multi-billion-dollar decade-plus mission led by the European Space Agency with NASA. He left academia to co-found a venture, Submedia, to bring to market his invention—a technology to show motion-pictures to subway riders moving between stations—starting the field of commercial in-tunnel motion-pictures. Submedia has grown worldwide to install dozens of displays in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia. He holds six patents. He co-founded and helped lead several education ventures, including partnering with New York City Public Schools. He has taught art at Parsons the New School for Design and NYU-Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

Fascinated and surprised at how well business schools taught leadership, which he had previously thought unteachable, he studied it, soon becoming a leadership and executive coach for Columbia Business School’s Program on Social Intelligence (and to private coaching clients). He leads seminars in Leadership, Creativity, Sales, Strategy, and Motivation at institutions including Columbia Business School, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, NYU-Stern School of Business, INSEAD Singapore, the New York Academy of Science, and in private corporations. As one of few people in the world to have visited North Korea twice, he has lectured on North Korean strategy at Columbia University and in South Korea and China. He wrote a book on North Korean strategy reviewed as “a very thought-provoking read that may totally change how you interpret the country.”

His coaching clients include start-up founders as well as employees of McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, UBS, Bear Stearns, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, American Express, Blackrock, DE Shaw, the IMF, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, Google, Yahoo!, Sony, IBM, Oracle, Honda, Carnegie Hall, SOM, Lionsgate, William Morris, Creative Artists, Time Magazine, CBS, Universal McCann, Proctor & Gamble, ExxonMobil, the U.S. Treasury, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Army, and others.

His clients include graduates of Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Cornell, Princeton, Duke, Dartmouth, University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, Indian Institute of Technology, Northwestern, NYU, the U.S. Naval Academy, and others.

He has been quoted and profiled by ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, Fox, NY1, CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USAToday, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The New York Observer, The New York Daily News, The New York Post, Newsweek, Forbes, Worth, Esquire, The Guardian, Nikkei Shimbun, The South China Morning Post, The Taipei Times, The Village Voice, Artlog, PSFK, Metropolis Magazine, Salon, Gothamist, Slashdot, and more.

As an artist he has shown large public art installations in New York City’s Bryant Park and Union Square and Amsterdam’s Dam Square. He has had solo shows in New York City, group shows across the country, and has shown in museums, Art Basel Miami Beach, MTV, and more.

His work won an Obie Award for Design Excellence and reached the semifinals in the Adobe Design Achievement Awards.

He finished six marathons and counting (3:51 best), competed at the World and National level of Ultimate Frisbee (with teams ranked #5 at College Nationals, #8 at Club Nationals, and #11 at Worlds), including captaining his college team as well as playing at the first Ultimate Tournament in Pyongyang, North Korea. For fun he swam across the Hudson River and has jumped out of two airplanes. He has visited 26 countries on six continents, including years in Paris, Ahmedabad (India), and Shanghai. He lives in New York City’s Greenwich Village and blogs daily at www.joshuaspodek.com.

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