Most people don't burn out because they're working too hard—they burn out because they’re performing at a pace they were never built to sustain, chasing goals that don’t align with who they are. Matt Granados joins David Rice to unpack why the language we use around productivity—high performance, hustle, passion—is misleading at best, and actively harmful at worst.

They get into the mechanics of optimal performance, the difference between consuming and contributing, and why fulfillment requires more than vision boards and vague inspiration. If you're leading people in an age of AI, distraction, and burnout, this conversation offers a clear path forward—one rooted in structure, intention, and personal agency.

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In a world where AI is eating the routine work and career ladders look more like Escher paintings, what does leadership agility really mean? In this episode, I sit down with David Jones, CEO and Partner at Mercer Assessments, to explore how leaders can ground themselves in productivity, positivity, people, and purpose while rethinking the broken systems we’ve inherited.

We dig into why organizations don’t actually have a leadership shortage—they have a followership problem. From the dark matter of astronomy to the dark matter of organizational life, David makes the case that 93% of performance depends on the people who don’t sit in the spotlight. We also examine how AI is reshaping careers, why assessments should be GPS systems for skills, and why employers may need to stop outsourcing education to institutions that are years behind reality.

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We’ve all heard the pitch: “Hybrid work is the future.” But dig beneath the slogans and you’ll find wildly different realities—some thriving, others quietly imploding. In this episode, I sit down with Lynette Caruso, a PhD candidate at Australian National University, to unpack her field research across public and private sectors on what makes hybrid work succeed—or fail.

From the power of casual coffee chats to the pitfalls of hot desking, Lynette shows how flexible policies often collapse under rigid cultures. If you’ve ever wondered why your “flexible” workplace feels anything but, or why your team can’t seem to find its rhythm under hybrid rules, this conversation will help you cut through the noise.

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