Wes Schroll is a serial entrepreneur who started his first company at 14-years old. After two small start up ventures, he wrote a business plan for what would one day become Fetch Rewards during his sophomore year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In March of 2021, Fetch closed its Series D round of financing with $220 Million led by SoftBank. Fetch is a bonafide “Unicorn” with a valuation of over $1 Billion. On this episode, we discuss some of the lessons Wes has learned along the way, how it felt for him to realize the Fetch Rewards app has more daily users than there are residents of New York City, and his trouble with productivity advice. Finally, Wes shares his approach to hiring leaders in his organization and why the two most important things he looks for are how well they understand the product and whether or not they can give and receive feedback.
The Best Advice Show of 2021
Happy holidays! As we prepare to enter the new year, we thought it would be a good time to pull together some of the best advice that we received from our podcast guests in the past year. This episode includes the advice that our guests from our most downloaded episodes shared with our audience. The guests include a New York Times best-selling author, a Broadway producer, a Fortune 500 C-suite member, and more!
Reflecting on Time Well Spent
As we approach the new year, we wanted to share a short reflection on the time we’ve spent with you as listeners since we first launched the Learn to Lead Podcast only twenty-one months ago. Host Matt Confer encourages you to think a little about time passing using a short anecdote about great movies, time travel, and the moon landing (trust us!). We are incredibly grateful to get to share the airwaves with you and look forward to sharing new and exciting lessons from our guests in 2022.
Innovative Leadership Challenges (and Rewards)
Rita Gunther McGrath is a best-selling author, a sought-after speaker, and a longtime professor at Columbia Business School. She is widely recognized as a premier expert on leading innovation and growth during times of uncertainty. Rita has received the #1 achievement award for strategy from the prestigious Thinkers50 and has been consistently named one of the world’s Top 10 management thinkers in its bi-annual ranking. Rita is the author of the best-selling The End of Competitive Advantage. On this episode, we discussed her new book, Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen, and its implications for learning leaders. Rita also shared her thoughts on the challenges and opportunities of innovation and what people often get wrong when thinking about it. Finally, Rita shared what makes her optimistic and what she’s most curious about heading into the new year.
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Difficult Conversations, Constant Learning with Eric Pliner
For this episode, I interviewed Eric Pliner, CEO of YSC Consulting, a global leadership strategy consultancy headquartered in London and focused on the styles, dynamics, and cultures that enable successful achievement of strategy. He advises CEOs and Boards across industries and sectors; for nearly twenty-five years, he’s worked in leadership development, organizational change, and strategic…
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Constantly Learning Through Change
Eric Pliner is the CEO of YSC Consulting, a global leadership strategy consultancy headquartered in London and focused on the styles, dynamics, and cultures that enable successful achievement of strategy. On this episode, we discussed Eric’s recommendations for effectively managing difficult conversations at work, the lessons Eric’s learned as a leader in the last year (hint: it involves constant learning!), and how he manages to keep two days each week completely empty of meetings.