The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

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1. 713: Ken Chenault - Leadership Lessons from 17 Years as American Express CEO: How to Earn the Top Job, Hire Great Leaders, Build Culture, Challenge the Status Quo, and Lead with Character

   2 november 2026 · 53 min

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   New Book - The Price of Becoming

   www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

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   Connect on Social: Twitter/X - @RyanHawk12

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   This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.

   My Guest: Ken Chenault was chairman and CEO of American Express for 17 years, and Warren Buffett called him "the gold standard for corporate leadership." Today he's chairman of General Catalyst. His new memoir is Equal to the Task.

   Key Learnings

   "The only thing that you can control is your performance, so focus on your performance." His father's answer whenever Ken complained about a barrier. Ken says what makes it empowering rather than harsh is that it's both accountability and control at the same time.

   "Ken, never forget that you are equal to the task." First day of kindergarten, Ken froze, started crying, and ran out of the room to hide under a bench. His father found him, pulled him out, sat him on his lap, put a hand on his shoulder, and said it. At five, Ken had no idea what the words meant. They became a measuring stick anyway.

   What his father actually meant took decades to understand. Equal to the task is a challenge, not a reassurance. You still have to work for it.

   "If you wish to be a king, you need to have followers. A king looks after his people." Ken's teacher in grade school, Mrs. Lacraw, called him down and told him that isn't what kings do. It wasn't enough to protect the hill. He had to protect people.

   That became his North Star: judge a leader on the quality of their followership. Ken is emphatic that he's all about outcomes and driving results. The question is how those results were ach…

2. 712: Matt Abrahams - How to Become a Better Communicator: Speaking With Confidence, Structuring Your Message, and Thinking Fast on Your Feet

   26 oktober 2026 · 55 min

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   www.LearningLeader.com

   New Book - The Price of Becoming

   Connect on social: Twitter - @RyanHawk12

   Instagram - @RyanHawk12

   My Guest - Matt Abrahams is one of the world's foremost experts on communication. He's a lecturer in strategic communication at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and bestselling author of Think Faster, Talk Smarter. His focus is the hardest kind of communication: not the rehearsed speech, but knowing what to say when you're put on the spot: in the interview, the Q&A, the hallway, the toast.

   This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.

   What you'll learn in this episode:

   Matt's father was quiet but not shy. A lawyer, skipped a couple of grades so he was always younger than his colleagues, a man of few words and very detailed ones. Matt says what he most wants to live up to isn't the intelligence, it's that his father believed in being truthful and trustworthy.

   His parents asked two different questions about communication, and he's still answering both. His mother taught elementary school and wanted to know how you make it engaging and how you hold attention. His father wanted to know how you organize it and make it structured and understandable. They debated it constantly at home. Attention and structure are still the two halves of everything Matt teaches.

   When You're Interviewing Someone

   The best interview question he was ever asked: "If you were an onion and I peeled back the first several layers, what would I find?" It was the CEO's opening line, before anything else. Matt's answer: "Onions make me cry." He got the job. When he asked about the question months later, the CEO said he uses it to knock people slightly off center, and what he remembered was that Matt committed to an answer …

3. 711: Seth Godin - Creating Tension, Solving Problems, the Savannah Bananas, Leading Without Authority, Using AI, Hidden Entanglements, and Getting Unstuck (The Knot)

   19 oktober 2026 · 47 min

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   The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk Lees meer

   www.LearningLeader.com

   Connect on socials: Twitter/X - https://x.com/RyanHawk12

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   LinkedIn - @RyanHawk

   My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly Best-Seller! I think you'll find it useful.

   This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.

   My Guest: Seth Godin is the author of more than 20 bestselling books, including Purple Cow, The Dip, and This Is Marketing. He has written a blog post every day for more than two decades, and it remains one of the most widely read blogs in the world. Before the books, Seth founded Yoyodyne, one of the first internet marketing companies, and sold it to Yahoo in 1998. He later created the altMBA. His new book is The Knot: Problems Can Be Solved.

   Key Learnings

   Being early is a courtesy, not a personality trait. "I don't understand why someone would willfully waste somebody else's time."

   The knot is the point. You can't have a pretzel without the knot, and if you try to undo it you end up with crumbs. Real life isn't like that. Our knots can actually be untied.

   Teach so that people teach themselves. Seth builds everything around a metaphor that gives people scaffolding, because "the only kind of learning that really happens is autodidact self-learning." Give someone the structure to figure it out and they'll never forget it.

   Name the baggage, drop the baggage, ship the work.

   The easiest thing to do with our freedom is pretend it doesn't exist. A man with nine million dollars in the bank told Seth he has to keep doing the work he's known for, because he needs to make a living. No, you don't. Same with the student three years into a four-year degree he hates who says he has to finish. You can choose to f…

4. 710: Ravi Gupta - The Anti-Dabbler's Guide to Mastering One New Skill Every Year, Why Presence Isn't Enough, Bourdain's Masterclass in Humility, and Pairing Reasonable Goals With Delusional Ones

   12 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 3 min

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   The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com Lees meer

   New Book - The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

   Connect with me on socials

   Twitter/X - @RyanHawk12

   Instagram - @RyanHawk12

   Join 10's of thousands of leaders, subscribe to Mindful Monday

   My guest:

   Ravi Gupta is the founder of RePublic Schools, whose flagship Nashville schools became the first in Tennessee to rank in the top 5% statewide for both growth and achievement. He co-founded Arena, which trained more than 7,000 political staffers, worked on the first Obama campaign, and wrote speeches for UN Ambassador Susan Rice. Today he runs The Branch, a media company fighting polarization. His new book is The Invisible List: One Passion a Year, Every Year.

   Key Learnings

   One new passion a year, every year. When Ravi left his job running schools, he decided to treat every year like a school year with himself as the only student. He's done it for seven years. Surfing, tennis, screenwriting, a novel, Italian cooking.

   Be an anti-dabbler. The seductive version is a little boxing, a little salsa dancing, a little cooking. You get fifteen years of sampling and none of the skill. Pick the thing, commit to the year, see it through even if you come to regret the pick.

   The rule that makes it work: no new thing midyear. You can maintain old passions. You cannot start a new one.

   He broke his own rule and learned why it exists. Bored one day and avoiding his cooking, Ravi walked into a Muay Thai gym on his corner. He loved the class, walked out, and told himself it was off the table until January 1. The pull wasn't interest. It was the rush of early wins, and that rush is the most convincing form of procrastination there is.

   Trying something and quitting can be worse than never trying. Once you've tasted it, you start seeing it everywhere, and you replay the version of your life where you stuck with it.

   Pair a reasonable goal with a delusional one. Ravi almost always hits the reasonable one. …

5. 709: Vanessa Van Edwards - How to Connect with Anyone, Master Small Talk, and Ask the 9 Power Questions That Deepen Every Relationship

   5 oktober 2026 · 53 min

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   The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com Lees meer

   New Book: The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

   Connect with me on X: @RyanHawk12

   Instagram: @RyanHawk12

   LinkedIn - Ryan Hawk

   Receive "Mindful Monday" (free)

   This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.

   My Guest: Vanessa Van Edwards is a behavioral researcher, Harvard instructor, and founder of Science of People. Her books Captivate and Cues have been translated into 18 languages, and her work reached more than 300 million people last year. Her new book is Conversation: How to Connect with Anyone and Make Every Interaction Count.

   Key Learnings

   Small talk is required for big talk. You can't skip it. You can do it better. Conversation is a skill with micro skills underneath it, and small talk is one chapter.

   Two traps make small talk painful. Autopilot (asking questions without actually connecting) and going for facts instead of stories.

   Awe is the best small talk ingredient. "Wow, that's amazing," or "What is that?" Positive awe is wow. Negative awe is compassion: "Everything okay? Can I help?" Both solicit stories. Both work only if you mean it.

   Awe beats a compliment. A compliment lands. Being visibly wowed by something invites the story behind it.

   Be story ready. When someone asks how you are, don't hand back good, fine, busy. Have something loaded: "Today the craziest thing happened." You break the script with your answer before anyone has to break it with a question.

   Flip your questions into story hunters. Not "how are you" but "What's been good?" or "Tell me something good." Slight change, big shift toward optimism.

   Or check in on something specific from before. "I noticed you dedicated the book to your daughters. How old are they now?" The update question does t…

6. 708: Danny Meyer - How You Make People Feel: The Founder of Shake Shack & Union Square Hospitality Group on Culture as Soil, the 49/51 Hiring Formula, and Leading With Generosity

   28 september 2026 · 54 min

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   The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com Lees meer

   My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly bestseller! I think you'll find it useful.

   Connect with me on Twitter/X: @RyanHawk12

   Instagram: @RyanHawk12

   Sign up for Mindful Monday (it's free):

   This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.

   My guest: Danny Meyer is the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group and one of the most influential restaurateurs of his generation. He built New York landmarks like Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern, and Shake Shack... He's the author of the classic Setting the Table and the new What Could Possibly Go Right?

   Key Learnings

   "Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It's that simple and it's that hard."

   "Optimists and pessimists die the same way. They just live differently." Shimon Peres. Danny prefers to live as an optimist.

   Most people respond to hope. A few will come out of a dark closet hopping on a pogo stick and a few will walk on the shady side no matter what. Most people start the day intending to make it better than yesterday, and they'll follow someone who shows them how that could happen.

   A growing business needs funding and leadership. It also needs soil. Like a plant needs sun and water and still needs something to grow in. The soil is the culture, and it determines whether anything you plant actually grows.

   Be explicit about which behaviors you celebrate and which you won't tolerate. Then be relentlessly consistent about both. That's how culture survives you not being in the room.

   Everyone is watching who gets hired, promoted, and paid. Every time you compromise on either the skills or the character, you send a message that you didn't mean any of the words. P…

7. 707: Andy Stanley & Sam Kaufman - Problems to Solve, Tensions to Manage, The 3 Questions Behind Every Great Decision, and The 7 Essentials of Enduring Leadership (What Great Leaders Do)

   21 september 2026 · 57 min

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   The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk Lees meer

   www.LearningLeader.com

   New Book: The Price of Becoming

   www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

   This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.

   My guests:

   Andy Stanley is the founder of North Point Ministries, which he started in Atlanta in 1995 and has grown into 8 churches across metro Atlanta and a network of more than 225 churches globally, serving over 200,000 people weekly. He's the author of more than 20 books, including Next Generation Leader, Visioneering, and Deep & Wide. His newest is What Great Leaders Do: 7 Essentials for Enduring Impact. He and his wife Sandra have three grown children and live in Atlanta.

   Sam Kaufman is the Chief Revenue Officer of Insight Global, a $5.3B talent, technical, and AI services firm. He started as an entry-level recruiter in 2004 and rose through the ranks to lead the company's core sales divisions. He's played a central role in Insight Global's transformation into a global talent and technical services organization, helping the company double in size over the past five years, and in 2026, he was named to Staffing Industry Analysts' Staffing 100 North America list, recognizing the most influential leaders in staffing. He has a degree in electrical engineering from Bucknell.

   Key Learnings

   Somebody saw it in him before he saw it in himself. Andy and Louie Giglio were the troublemakers in his dad's youth group. One morning after they'd disrupted everything, Mother Mary sat them down and told them they were leaders and needed to lead. Andy's reaction at the time: then I don't want to be a leader.

   She should have kicked them out, but she didn't. She kept giving them chances they didn't deserve and didn't handle well. She's about to turn 101 years old. She never had children of her own…

8. 706: Daniel Lubetzky - KIND Snacks Founder & Shark Tank Investor on Kindness, Grit, Values-Driven Leadership. and Building a Billion-Dollar Brand

   14 september 2026 · 56 min

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   The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com Lees meer

   The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly National Best-Seller!

   www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

   This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.

   My Guest: Daniel Lubetzky graduated from Stanford Law School. And then declined lucrative job offers to start his own business, only paying himself $24,000 a year for a decade. And then he founded KIND and grew it into a snack brand that Mars later valued at $5 billion dollars. Today he invests full-time on Shark Tank, and he's the son of a Holocaust survivor whose story shaped everything he's built.

   Find work that gives you energy, purpose, and meaning. If you enjoy what you're doing, you're far more likely to be great at it. And you're already winning, because you get up every morning doing something satisfying.

   The danger of loving your work is overworking. Daniel did it building PeaceWorks and KIND. You have to pace yourself.

   His father survived a death march out of Dachau. Twelve and a half when he entered the camp, fifteen and a half during the march. Six feet tall and under 70 pounds, and no shoes. The Nazis were walking prisoners up a mountain to push them off a cliff because they didn't have enough bullets.

   A snowstorm saved his life. His father, grandfather, and uncle hugged to say goodbye. The snow buried them and formed a kind of igloo that kept them warm through the night. They woke, dug out, and the Nazis were gone.

   The soldiers who liberated them were Japanese American. The 442nd, the most decorated unit of its size in American history, was made up of men whose own families were being held in internment camps back home. Daniel's family had never seen an Asian person and didn't understand what they were witnes…

9. 705: Dr. Martin Seligman - Positive Psychology, Learned Optimism, Grit, PERMA, Agency, Resilience, and Predicting the Future

   11 september 2026 · 54 min

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   The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com Lees meer

   My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly bestseller! I think you'll find it useful.

   This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.

   My guest: Dr. Martin Seligman is one of the most influential psychologists alive. He's the founder of positive psychology and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Positive Psychology Center. His research reshaped how we understand optimism, resilience, and human flourishing. His books, including Learned Optimism, Flourish, and The Hope Circuit, have sold millions of copies. His latest is Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress.

   Key Learnings

   The three parts of agency. Efficacy is the belief you can hit a goal right now, and it drives whether you try. Optimism is the belief you can hit it in the future, and it drives persistence and grit. Imagination is the range of goals you can even picture, and it drives creativity. When a culture has all three, it progresses. When they fall, it stagnates.

   "Depression and pessimism and happiness and optimism are too important to be left to happy people." Marty calls himself a born depressive and pessimist. He founded positive psychology and still wakes at 4:00 a.m. to a voice telling him he can't do the thing in front of him. What he's built over decades is the skill of arguing back, treating that voice not as truth but as a rival whose job is to make him miserable.

   The techniques don't come naturally to anyone. A small number of people are born happy. Everyone else has to learn and practice the skills, which is why Marty spent much of his career testing them rather than assuming they work.

   How you respond to good news matters…

10. 704: Strauss Zelnick - The Leader Who Greenlit Dirty Dancing, Owns Grand Theft Auto, Loves Being Coached, and Might be the Fittest CEO Alive

    7 september 2026 · 53 min

    Afspelen
    The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com Lees meer

    My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly bestseller! I think you'll find it useful.

    This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.

    Key Learnings

    All the greats have a coach. Strauss is one of the most disciplined humans alive, and he has had one since he was 30. His argument: Tom Brady is an amazing athlete, but would he have performed as well with no coach, or a lousy one?

    A great coach is objective, encouraging, smart, and experienced. They warn you of obstacles you can't see yet.

    Strauss doesn't want the Socratic method from his coach. He wants direct advice. He'll use questions when he's leading others. But when he brings a problem to his own coach, he wants to be told: "You have that wrong; you're missing this."

    So What? Strauss was avoiding a confrontation because he knew the other person would be really upset. His coach said, "So what?" He had the conversation. The person was upset. They got to the other side, and it was better than leaving it out there.

    Bad news doesn't get better with age.

    The most effective people are the most open-minded and self-critical. The ones who insist they don't need a coach are usually the ones losing.

    "Arrogance is the enemy of continued success."

    Humility isn't pretending you're not good. Strauss says claiming he's bumbling through the job would be silly, and he's proud of what he does well. The humility is in staying open. His team's description of him: strongly held opinions, freely shared, and a mind that changes when the facts do.

    "You're just a terrible speaker." Strauss was 31, newly president of Vestron, and had written an eloquent after-dinner speech he was proud of. He read it off …

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