Mark Pollard - Strategy CEO - Mighty Jungle (Full)

Note Apologies for the choppy video quality in this episode. The sound quality is good though :) It was long-distance between New York and Melbourne....the internet, unfortunately, was not on our side! However, we wanted to preserve the unedited interactions in the conversation, so we went ahead with the episode. Hope you get some new insights :)

____________________________________________

Empathy; mental health; people-/human-centric; feelings; me, myself & I — these aren't the words you typically hear in the same sentence as 'strategy' — let alone 'business strategy'.

Mark Pollard addresses how strategy should be a lot more than just conventional frameworks and methodologies.

Having this conversation with Mark was incredibly insightful and not to mention, refreshing. He breaks away from regular, filtered, "corporate speak" and finds new ways to invigorate this world of strategy that can be dominated by leaders who lead with a top-down approach rather than extending empathy and understanding of our co-workers' mental health.

In this episode, he also challenges organisations' increasing dependence on data rather than real-life, human insights.

We've learned a lot from this chat with Mark, and we believe that you would too. To help you, we've taken some notes from this conversation that we think could be useful for your reference.

The following are some of our favourite bits. Which were yours?

• 00:00 Introduction
• 06:28 Mark Pollard's inspiration to strategy
• 10:10 Strategy is critical thinking to solve problems
• 11:28 Mentalization 
• 12:23 “The Lords of Strategy” book recommendation
• 16:12 Why don't you think about strategy on yourself?
• 17:27 Stop re-writing it into the corporate-speak – let it be!
• 18:49 Businesses don't optimise for empathetic people
• 20:51 What if it's more powerful if you do see it together?
• 25:12 “Empathy imports truth from other people’s realities”
• 27:29 Insights vs data
• 32:14 "There is indeed no shame in opinions..."
• 36:57 "Looking for the human problem behind the business problem..."

Listen to the podcast version:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4PVM...

Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast...