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Episode 49 &#8211; Guest: Emma Seppala 
Guest: Emma Seppala
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Kelly talks to scholar and author Emma Seppala about the connection between happiness and a successful career.

Guest Emma Seppala

Episode 453 &#8211; Guest: Todd Rogers 
Guest: Todd Rogers
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Kelly talks to Harvard Professor Todd Rogers about his book “Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World”  that he co-wrote with Jessica Lasky-Fink.
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<h3>I didn’t expect this book to be so practically useful in the sense of it makes you rethink all your communication – like the use of CAPS.</h3>
&#8220;The book is about how to write so busy people read, understand and respond. And that means writing in a skimmable way. I think the caps thing is interesting. As you know, we talk about it in the book. It&#8217;s different for different people. Some people interpret caps in different ways. Some people think you&#8217;re yelling at them. Some people think you&#8217;re emphasizing something important. And then some people think you&#8217;re just trying to draw attention to this as opposed to everything else.”
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<h3>People don’t really talk about the vast amounts of ways we communicate today – it&#8217;s not just email.</h3>
&#8220;Especially as we move into the world of the future of work where we are a little more remote, a little more asynchronous. There&#8217;s just a lot more writing. And I think we need to have just explicit discussions: How do we write stylistically? Structurally? What modes do different things get sent? What gets sent on teams, what gets sent by text, what gets sent by email? What could be sent as a report? And then we also have other questions about timing and things like that. But I think it&#8217;s worth having explicit discussions about these things that we just have never even bothered to have.”
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<h3>I was reading all these terrible company mission statements, and they are long and convoluted, and they are frustrating to read.</h3>
“The median US adult reads in the fiftieth percentile. One half of US adults read at a ninth grade reading level or lower, which means they really struggle to read long sentences. Those mission statements are totally inaccessible. If we want to write so more people can read it, we should write these short, accessible sentences. But also, people who can read those things, you and me and many of your listeners who are totally comfortable reading long, convoluted sentences. It&#8217;s just unpleasant and requires a lot of effort.”
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Guest Todd Rogers

Episode 449 &#8211; Guest: Mary Murphy 
Guest: Mary Murphy
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Kelly talks to Mary Murphy, professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University and the founding director of the Summer Institute on Diversity at Stanford University. Her new book is called “Cultures of Growth.&#8221;
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<h3 id="">One of the fascinating aspects of your work is that it focus on the growth mindset of teams rather than individuals.</h3>
&#8220;If we can really focus at that team level, you know, we can make a lot of progress in people&#8217;s everyday experience, which is ultimately their reality. And so, I think that there&#8217;s a lot of focus there. And I talk about this a lot in the book where you can have a whole organization or a group that has a macro, maybe a fixed-minded culture of genius. But you can have these micro cultures of growth within the organization. And those micro cultures are really the places where people experience the most motivation, belonging, trust and commitment over time. And so that &#8211; I think &#8211; is the place that we really need to focus on when we&#8217;re actually creating institutional transformation: it&#8217;s got to start at the local level with people&#8217;s experiences and their teams.”
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<h3 id="">Specifically, can you tell us some of the ways a culture of genius is less desirable than a culture of growth?</h3>
&#8220;It is really what makes the culture of genius actually less competitive, less productive, less likely to be successful in the long run, right? Because, what it&#8217;s doing is it&#8217;s relying on this handful of geniuses who are really counted on to make the biggest impact. But we know that, when it comes to innovation, collaboration will happen in these cultures of growth. It&#8217;s where the high performers want to be because they know that in a culture of genius &#8211; where you have it or don&#8217;t &#8211; you&#8217;re always focused on maintaining your status and reputation. You&#8217;re looking over your shoulder all the time, because a new star is being born. And so, you&#8217;re always competing rather than being able to focus on the work at hand.” 

<h3 id="">Can you tell us about stacked ranking – which is a total culture of genius thing.</h3>
“The idea is that you line everybody up. You do your evaluation. You line every single person up in the organization. And then the bottom 20% Are taken right out of the organization and fired. What that means is the rest of the 80% have got to scramble and worry between now and the next quarter when they&#8217;re doing their next evaluation and hope that they are not in the bottom 20%. What does that do to the individual? It&#8217;s a theory of motivation. The theory is that in these harsh, proven, performed environments those that are smart, those that are competent, they will rise to the top. and the rest. Well, maybe we don&#8217;t want them there. but internally, what it does is it makes everybody on my team my competition. And that&#8217;s right. That&#8217;s right. And it taught, I mean, how more clear could it be the fixed mindset belief? You either have it or you don&#8217;t look to your left. You look to your right. Only a couple of you will be here at the end of the year. Right? This is how we build in these structures that communicate these fixed minded beliefs on the part of the organization.”
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Photo Credit: Christine Baker

A Leader’s Destiny

Episode 455 &#8211; Guest: Jo Boaler Math-Ish 
Guest: Joe Boaler Math-Ish
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Kelly welcomes Jo Boaler back to the podcast. Jo is the Nomellini &amp; Olivier Professor of Education at Stanford University. She is the author of nineteen books and numerous research articles. Her latest book is called “Math-Ish: Finding Creativity, Diversity, and Meaning in Mathematics.”
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<h3>It seems inconceivable that you would become a target of the right wing because you want more people to be taught math well.</h3>
“I was one of the writers of the California math framework, which was proposing some really reasonable changes in the way we teach math and paying attention to all students. And it was targeted by the people who are targeting other things. It was called ‘woke math.’ Tucker Carlson put my picture on his show and said, this woman&#8217;s bringing social justice into math &#8211; which, of course, prompted multiple death threats. And it sort of went on from there that this group decided to target the framework. And then they thought, or it seemed, that if they could bring me down personally, then everything else would fall.”
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<h3>And you aren’t backing down, are you?</h3>
&#8220;It&#8217;s hard to stop, because we know that there&#8217;s a better way. We have tons of evidence that there&#8217;s a better way and I have seen so many people become kind of unlocked and ready to embrace math and do really well in it. So yeah, it&#8217;s hard to give up on that when you know that you can help people with it.”
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<h3>The problem you identify is what you call “Narrow Maths.” What is that?</h3>
“Narrow Maths is really what&#8217;s in schools everywhere. And it&#8217;s those short, closed questions where one method is valued and teachers are looking for one answer. And it&#8217;s very procedural. But math doesn&#8217;t have to be like that. For any question in math, we can open up the question and invite different ways of thinking about it, different ways of drawing it, visualizing it. So, what I&#8217;m proposing is not different math. It&#8217;s exactly the same math. It&#8217;s the same algebra. It&#8217;s the same geometry. But just opening up those questions, making them more rich, exciting, more inspiring for students.’”
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Photo Credit: Robert Houser Photography

Guest Jo Boaler Math-Ish

Episode 454 &#8211; Guest: Jessica Calarco 
Guest: Jessica Calarco
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Kelly connects with Jessica Calarco, a Sociologist and Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. to discuss her latest book &#8220;Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net.&#8221;
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<h3>I didn’t not know that the US once offered universal childcare. This happened during World War 2.</h3>
&#8220;It took a long time. Congress sort of dragged its feet in actually putting this program in place but once it did, they were wildly successful. These kind of centers offered in some cases 10 or 12 hours a day of high-quality childcare that was usually less than $10 per day &#8211; in today&#8217;s dollars &#8211; for families. Many places also offered after school care and summer care for kids who were older. And this sort of high-quality system existed across the US. And that helped to raise the employment rate among mothers of young children from one in 30 to one in 6 by the end of the war. And certainly, you know, we have to ask, ‘Well, where did this go? Why don&#8217;t we still have this today?’ And essentially, we dismantled it almost as soon as it began. Unlike many of our European allies who used this as a chance to build out an even more robust and permanent childcare center; We shuttered those childcare centers because we wanted to make sure that the jobs that were available in the US could be given back to the men who were returning from war.”
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<h3>The line that drew me to your work was something like, “The rest of the world has a social safety net, in the United States, we have women.”</h3>
&#8220;Yes, fortunately, other countries have invested in social safety nets to help people manage risk. They use things like taxes and regulations, especially on wealthy people and corporations, to protect people from falling into poverty, and to give people a leg up in reaching economic opportunities, and just to help people live with dignity, regardless of how much money they earn. In the United State, we&#8217;ve taken a different path.”
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<h3>You use the term DIY society. What do you mean by a Do-It-Yourself society?</h3>
“What I talk about is our DIY society, which means: keeping taxes low, slashing huge holes in the safety net that we do have, and telling people if you just make good choices, everything will turn out okay, and you won&#8217;t actually need government support at all. But the problem is, you can&#8217;t actually DIY society. Forcing people to manage that much risk on their own has left many American families and communities teetering on the edge of collapse. And yet, we haven&#8217;t collapsed, because what we figured out is that that we can get women to hold it together. We can get women to fill in those gaps in our economy, and gaps in the kind of threadbare safety net that we do have. Which means women being the default caregivers for children, for the sick and for the elderly, and also the ones who fill the lowest paid jobs in our economy. Women hold roughly 70% of America&#8217;s lowest paid jobs, and those jobs are often too labor intensive to be profitable or highly paid.”
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Guest Jessica Calarco

Episode 456 &#8211; Guest: Matt Bane 
Guest: Matt Bane
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Kelly connects with Matt Beane, University of California professor, to discuss his new book: “The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines.”
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You highlight in the book that the biggest problem with AI is when the technology gets in between the expert and the novice.
“What we&#8217;re talking about is not formal training. It&#8217;s not classes; it&#8217;s not written down. It&#8217;s like learning by osmosis, by working with somebody who knows more. We don&#8217;t even have names for that in English, because we all take it for granted. Anyway, yeah, that that&#8217;s the trouble: that there&#8217;s nobody who&#8217;s, you know, on the hook for noticing or who even has the professional vocabulary to notice it. ”
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And one of the things you note is that learning – when it’s working – is uncomfortable.
&#8220;The world has become a padded playground in certain senses. The research is just super clear on this. And I found this in every study I&#8217;ve done. You must be uncomfortable, performing not at your best, and focused and like sweating in the console to be learning. You are not satisfied. You are not relaxed. You are not having fun in the capital F sense of the word. And that&#8217;s how you know you&#8217;re learning. If everything is too straightforward written by the book, by a manual and easy then you&#8217;re depriving people of the challenge that they need to learn and grow.”
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Are the robots going to be taking our jobs?
“What&#8217;s going on now for let&#8217;s just say 2.7 billion adults in the world is not that they&#8217;re going to lose their job, but they&#8217;re going to have to change how they do their job. The stats show that they are. And change costs money and time. It’s difficult because you have to learn new skills to handle the new way to do your job. So, the best models out there &#8211; and they&#8217;re very conservative &#8211; suggest that 80% of working adults are going to have to change between 10 and 15% of how they do their jobs these days because of Chat GPT. How are they going to learn those skills? Who&#8217;s going to teach them? We&#8217;re all just taking for granted that they&#8217;re going to learn through that process that we were talking about earlier. And we&#8217;re nuking that process right now at the worst possible time. That is a trillion-dollar problem.”
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Photo Credit: Jon Chomitz

Guest Matt Beane

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