ThinkersOne

Every episode of our podcast, Thinking With Mitch Joel, ends with the same question: “Tell me the one thing that made you think differently.” Because insight is interesting. Shifted thinking is transformational. This week, ThinkersOne Co-Founder Mitch Joel sits down with Cory Doctorow (author, activist, and writer of Enshittification - Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse And What To Do About It). Cory has spent years examining how digital platforms evolve… and how incentives shape the experiences we all depend on. In the conversation, Cory explores how technology hype can distract from deeper ecosystem breakdowns. How business models, not just products, determine outcomes. It’s a sharp reminder that innovation without aligned incentives can quietly erode trust, value, and long-term viability. The thread running through it all? Technology isn’t neutral. It reflects the incentives behind it. For leaders, that’s not a reason for pessimism. It’s a reason for awareness. ThinkersOne exists to help teams strengthen that lens. Our customized 15-minute video experiences bring world-class Thinkers directly into leadership moments… helping organizations move from reacting to tech trends to understanding how those trends shape strategy, culture, and growth. You can book these Thinkers to deepen the conversation with your team: Adam Alter – Behavioral scientist exploring how digital environments shape attention, habits, and performance. Kate O'Neill, CSP® – Tech humanist helping organizations design responsible innovation and future-ready strategy. Avinash Kaushik – Digital marketing authority focused on data-driven decision-making and customer-centric growth. (links to their profiles and the full episode of the podcast will be in the comments).

Every episode of our podcast, Thinking With Mitch Joel, ends with the same question: “Tell me the one thing that made you think differently.” Because insight is interesting. Shifted thinking is transformational. This week, ThinkersOne Co-Founder Mitch Joel sits down with Phil Gilbert — former Head of Design at IBM and author of Irresistible Change. Phil led one of the most ambitious internal transformations in corporate history, helping reshape how nearly 400,000 people worked, collaborated, and built products. In the conversation, Phil reflects on IBM’s missed moments in the cloud era, the hard truth about product usability, and why culture isn’t a “soft” lever… it’s a performance engine. He shares how design thinking scaled across a global enterprise, and why meaningful change must focus on people, practices, and places. The thread running through it all? Transformation isn’t an announcement. It’s architecture. ThinkersOne exists to help teams build that architecture in real time. Our customized 15-minute video experiences bring world-class Thinkers directly into leadership moments… helping organizations move from answer-driven management to thinking-driven leadership. You can book these Thinkers to deepen the conversation with your team: Adam Alter – Behavioral scientist and bestselling author exploring how environments shape decision-making and performance. Ruth Gotian, Ed.D., M.S. – Leadership researcher focused on high achievers, mentorship, and building cultures that sustain excellence. Gee Ranasinha – Marketing strategist helping organizations rethink growth, positioning, and competitive advantage in a changing landscape. (links to their profiles and the full episode of the podcast will be in the comments).

Stop answering. Start asking. Most leaders think their job is to have all the solutions. It is not. It is to ask the questions that actually unlock performance. Dr. David Burkus has spent two decades studying why some teams thrive while others just exist. He is not here for team building. He is here for team performance. If you are the Hero of your company story, David is the Guide who hands you the better playbook. He delivers the high level provocation your team needs. No week long retreat required. Just 15 minutes of world class insight. The Plan: 1. Book David Burkus. 2. Let him pose the hard questions to your team. 3. Watch the conversation shift from what is the status to how do we win. Link to book David is in the comments...

Your weekly leadership meeting is where big ideas go to die in a pile of status updates. You’ve gathered your most expensive, high-bandwidth talent in one room only to spend 60 minutes narrating a spreadsheet that everyone already ignored on Slack. It’s a staggering waste of human capital. High-growth companies don't have "meetings." They have intellectual sparring sessions. The Fix: Stop the reporting. Start the thinking. Inject a 15-minute perspective shift before the coffee gets cold. For your next Monday morning, don't just "check-in." Give your team a 15-minute reason to actually think. www.ThinkersOne.com

Most organizations say they want better decisions. They invest in data, dashboards, AI tools, frameworks and forecasts… yet still struggle when uncertainty shows up and the playbook stops working. On this week’s Thinking With Mitch Joel podcast, ThinkersOne co-founder Mitch Joel speaks with Roger Martin, one of the world’s most respected thinkers on strategy and decision-making. What emerges isn’t a critique of tools or intelligence… it’s a challenge to how leadership itself has been framed. Roger’s core idea is deceptively simple: leadership advantage no longer comes from having the best answers. It comes from cultivating better judgment. In most organizations, leaders are rewarded for confidence, speed and certainty. But certainty is often a performance, not a capability. When leaders rush to answers, teams stop thinking. When leaders over-index on data, assumptions go unexamined. And when AI enters the mix, the risk isn’t automation replacing people… it’s judgment quietly being outsourced. The real work of leadership now is helping teams learn how to think under uncertainty. That means: • Surfacing assumptions, not hiding them • Encouraging disagreement without creating fracture • Treating strategy as a design discipline, not a prediction exercise • Valuing reasoning quality, not just outcomes This is where many organizations stall. Not because they lack talent, but because they haven’t built the muscle for collective judgment. ThinkersOne exists to help teams strengthen that muscle. Our customized 15 minute video experiences bring world-class Thinkers directly into leadership moments… helping organizations shift from answer-driven management to thinking-driven leadership. Listen to Mitch’s conversation with Roger (link in comments) and ask: are you optimizing for speed to certainty… or for strength of judgment? You can also book these Thinkers to deepen the conversation for your team: Liane Davey – Practical frameworks for high-quality decision-making and team alignment. Dan Pontefract – Building leadership capacity and cultures that think together. Whitney Johnson – Strategic growth and personal renewal that keep organizations adaptive and resilient. Rishad Tobaccowala – Human-centered frameworks for navigating complexity, technology and meaningful growth. (links to their profiles will be in the comments)

Most organizations talk about creativity… but few talk about the courage it actually takes to sustain it. On a recent episode of Thinking With Mitch Joel, ThinkersOne co-founder Mitch Joel sits down with David Shing, The Digital Prophet known for his boundary-breaking approach to creativity, storytelling and design. Shingy’s perspective cuts through the familiar language of innovation and points to something more fundamental: creativity isn’t just an output, it’s a leadership discipline rooted in courage. Creative courage shows up when teams take risks without perfect data. When leaders choose exploration over safety. When organizations invite curiosity, embrace ambiguity and reward questions that don’t yet have answers. Shingy makes it clear that creativity isn’t something you “add” to a process, it’s something you allow in your culture. That matters because the environments most leaders operate in are built for predictability, consistency and control. Meetings, KPIs, forecasts and timelines dominate the day. But courage... the willingness to be wrong, to iterate publicly, to probe deeper before reacting... doesn’t schedule easily. It doesn’t neatly land on a quarterly plan. And yet it’s the invisible fuel behind breakout ideas and meaningful transformation. Ask yourself: does your organization give people permission to be creatively courageous? Or do your systems implicitly reward conformity disguised as consistency? ThinkersOne exists to help teams unpack and operationalize these subtler enablers of performance. Our customized 15-minute video experiences bring world-class Thinkers into your real team moments, sparking conversations that shift mindsets and strengthen creative capacity. Listen to Mitch’s conversation with Shingy (link in comments) and consider: is your organization designing for courage… or just for compliance? You can also book these Thinkers to deepen this conversation for your team: Robert Rose – Strategic creativity that elevates brand, content and customer value. Denise Yohn – Designing organizational systems where creativity and culture reinforce each other. Jay Baer – Turning ideas into memorable experiences that scale trust and engagement. (links to their profiles will be in the comments)

Welcome Gee Ranasinha to ThinkersOne. Here’s the uncomfortable truth many leadership teams avoid: Most don’t have a marketing problem... they have a belief problem. They believe more data guarantees better decisions. More content guarantees effectiveness. More activity guarantees growth. Gee has made a career calmly dismantling those assumptions, not with hot takes, but with evidence. He asks the questions most rooms quietly sidestep: Are we measuring what matters… or just what’s easy? Are we optimizing systems that no longer deserve investment? You don’t book Gee to do more marketing... you book him to sharpen judgment… before the next dollar gets spent. Gee is now available on ThinkersOne: custom, 15 minute spark sessions designed to change how teams think, not just what they do next. (link in the comments to book Gee)

Most leadership development programs fixate on skills and strategy… and overlook the skill of helping people become better thinkers. On this week’s Thinking With Mitch Joel podcast, ThinkersOne co-founder Mitch Joel speaks with Muriel Maignan Wilkins, executive coach and author of Leadership Unblocked. Muriel’s insight cuts through a common leadership trap: we spend too much time telling people what to do and not enough time helping them figure out how to think about what they’re doing. That distinction matters more now than ever. Muriel points out that leaders often mistakenly think motivation comes from direction or incentives. In reality, sustainable performance comes when leaders help individuals expand their own reasoning, their own judgment, and their own capacity to decide under uncertainty. That requires more listening than telling, more inquiry than instruction, and more patience than urgency. When organizations invest in this kind of leadership practice, teams don’t just execute better, they adapt, learn, and outgrow yesterday’s assumptions. This is where ThinkersOne adds real value. Our customized video experiences bring world-class Thinkers into leadership routines, helping teams develop the judgment, resilience, and collaborative intelligence modern work demands. Listen to Mitch’s conversation with Muriel (link in comments) and consider ask yourself this: Are you managing performance… or coaching potential? You can also book these Thinkers to deepen this conversation for your team at your next meeting: Whitney Johnson – Helping leaders and teams grow through discomfort without disconnecting. Ron Tite – Creativity and communication frameworks that amplify strategic thinking. Liane Davey – Practical strategies for team alignment and high-quality decision-making. (links to book these Thinkers will be in the comments)

Happy New Year... and welcome back. As teams return from the holidays and reset priorities, this felt like the right moment to re-open the conversation about focus, energy and the kinds of thinking organizations need as the year gets underway. Since our last post, ThinkersOne co-founder Mitch Joel has released four new episodes of Thinking With Mitch Joel, each exploring a different pressure leaders are navigating right now: 🎧 Navigate Hidden Markets With Judd Kessler — on finding growth where competitors aren’t looking. 🎧 AI And The Future Of Marketing With Mark Schaefer — on signal, trust, and relevance in an AI-saturated world. 🎧 Why We’re All Digitally Exhausted With Paul Leonardi — on collaboration, burnout, and the hidden costs of always-on work. 🎧 More Humane Work With Joe O'Connor — on productivity, flexibility, and designing work that actually works for people. These conversations aren’t about trends for trend’s sake. They’re about how leaders make better decisions when markets are uncertain, attention is fractured, and teams are stretched thin. 🌟 That’s also where ThinkersOne comes in. 🌟 Many organizations are starting the year by bringing Thinkers directly into leadership meetings and team sessions, not for keynote theatrics, but for focused thinking. You can book Thinkers like Mark Schaefer to challenge assumptions about marketing, relevance, and growth as the year begins. Our 15-minute customized video experiences are designed for exactly this moment: short enough to fit into busy schedules, but substantive enough to align teams, spark discussion, and reset thinking without adding another meeting to the calendar. If your team needs clarity, energy, or a sharper point of view to start the year, this is a practical place to begin. Here’s to a focused, thoughtful, and human year ahead...

Content used to be a marketing function. Today, it’s organizational infrastructure. Inside many companies, content has quietly shifted from campaign output to a signal of how clearly a business understands itself. It shapes how teams align, how customers trust, and how stories compound over time. Yet too often, content strategy is treated as something to refresh, reinvent, or abandon the moment engagement flattens. On this week’s Thinking With Mitch Joel podcast, ThinkersOne co-founder Mitch Joel speaks with Joe Pulizzi, one of the architects of modern content marketing (and author of the new book, Burn The Playbook). What emerges isn’t a new platform play or tactical trend. It’s a reframing of what content is actually for. For decades, Joe has championed a disciplined approach: build an audience you own, show up consistently, and tell a clear story long enough for it to matter. In a culture addicted to novelty, that kind of repetition can feel risky. But inside organizations, the cost of constant reinvention is becoming obvious. Storytelling isn’t about clever copy. It’s about coherence. What do we stand for? What problem do we consistently help solve? What ideas are we willing to repeat long enough for people to believe them? Repetition, in this context, isn’t laziness. It’s leadership. It’s choosing depth over dopamine and usefulness over applause. It’s recognizing that content doesn’t need to feel exciting every time… it needs to feel reliable. This is where Joe Pulizzi is invaluable inside organizations. Bringing Joe into your next leadership meeting, offsite, or team session isn’t about learning “content marketing tricks.” It’s about helping teams clarify their story, align their messaging, and commit to building trust through consistency rather than chasing the next shiny thing. ThinkersOne exists to make those conversations practical. Our customized video experiences place Thinkers like Joe directly into the moments where leaders are shaping strategy, culture, and brand direction. Book Joe Pulizzi to help your team build content, storytelling, and brand equity that actually compounds. Listen to Mitch’s conversation with Joe (link in comments) for context… Because attention fades fast... trust doesn’t.