The Unlock Moment: The Inner Shift That Changes How You Lead

As a boy, Jamie Ramsden sat at the foot of the tallest rollercoaster in Europe, too afraid of heights to get on - until he realised the fear was something he’d built himself. That moment became the idea his whole career rests on: most of the limits we run into are self-imposed, not structural. Jamie is an award-winning former CEO, an executive coach, and the author of Let’s Go: How Great Leaders Shape the Future. Over two decades he’s coached hundreds of Fortune 500 C-suite leaders, and developed the Ad Astra leadership model for building leaders who perform sustainably. In this episode, Jamie shares the Unlock Moments that shaped his thinking - from a bohemian childhood watching his musician parents play the pubs of Devon, to the night he challenged a billion-dollar CEO who turned out to be trapped in a life everyone else envied. We talk about why so many brilliant leaders feel imprisoned at the top, why imposter syndrome takes hold, and the simple audit he runs that gives CEOs back as much as twenty hours a week. And we get to his core belief, learned the hard way turning around the worst-performing supplier in his industry: no one is coming to save you - and no one is going to stop you. A conversation about choosing exhilaration over fear, and building a life you’re not trying to escape.

Jennifer McCollum spent twenty-five years climbing toward a seat she wasn't sure she'd ever reach. Then a single phone call changed everything by telling her exactly what she didn't want. Jennifer is President and CEO of Catalyst, the global nonprofit working with many of the world's most powerful companies to build workplaces that work for women, and only the sixth leader in its sixty-year history. She's the author of In Her Own Voice and, most recently, Men at Work: The Road Map to Gender Partnership, launched this year at the New York Stock Exchange, and a member of Marshall Goldsmith's 100 Coaches community. In this episode, she shares the Unlock Moment that redirected her career, and why clarity of action begins with a harder question than "what do I do next?" We cover the scrappy childhood that shaped her drive, the two layoffs and the sabbatical that made her stop and reassess, and why getting clear on what she didn't want freed her to find the work she was made for. We also get into the heart of Men at Work: why workplaces were never designed for women, why they aren't serving men especially well either, and what it really takes to build organisations that work for everyone. A conversation about ambition, clarity, and the choices leaders can make right now rather than waiting for the culture to catch up.

Some leaders sense change early. Far fewer know what to do with it. Rita McGrath has spent her career studying the moment the ground shifts under a business ... and why so many brilliant, well-resourced companies miss it completely. She's a professor at Columbia Business School, ranked among the world's top ten management thinkers by Thinkers50 and winner of their number one award in strategy, and the author of The End of Competitive Advantage and Seeing Around Corners. In this episode, Rita takes me inside her "flops file" ... a collection of corporate disasters so expensive you have to lose fifty million dollars to make the list. We talk about why the old rules of strategy have stopped working, why treating failure as learning is so hard for experienced operators, and how the best leaders manage the one resource they can never get back: their own time and attention. She shares the idea of strategic centering ... working out what your organisation is truly grounded on ... and why a scientist running a science company, or a technologist running a technology company, now has an advantage the generalist CEO does not. And she makes the case that we are living through a genuine turning point, where the old world is fighting to hold its place and the new one is already taking shape for those with the courage to see it. It began with a teenager from Rochester stepping off a plane into a New York City she'd been warned was dangerous ... and choosing curiosity over fear. That instinct became a whole way of thinking about strategy. This is a conversation about paying attention to the future before it arrives.

Every day, most of us drive around the car park of our own brain looking for the closest possible space ... the easiest answer, the fastest shortcut, the machine that will do the thinking for us. Mohan Nair thinks that habit is costing us something we haven't begun to measure. Mohan is a speaker, author and transformation leader who has spent decades working at the intersection of business, innovation and human experience, as CEO of Emerge, former Chief Innovation Officer at Cambia Health Solutions, and an adjunct professor at Kellogg. He is also a musician, a former TV talk show host, and, by his own description, the first healthcare executive to audition and lose at America's Got Talent. In this episode, Mohan takes me inside his new book Unreachable, and his argument that insight is biological, not technological ... something a machine can describe but never feel. We talk about the three signs you have become AI-obsessed, why editing your work is a different act from creating it, what "inconvenient learning" is and why the best leaders are forged by it, and the story of a ninety million dollar contract that turned on his refusing to hear a demand literally, which is exactly what AI would have done. It started with a teacher telling a sixteen-year-old boy he was a disgrace to his family. What Mohan did with that moment ... and what he thinks all of us must now do to stay human in an age of intelligent machines ... is the heart of this conversation.

Close to half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants. Eighty per cent of billion-dollar startups have an immigrant founder or executive. And businesses founded by immigrants statistically outlast the ones founded by everybody else. Nobody had properly asked why ... until Dr Neri Karra Sillaman did. Neri stood at a border at the age of eleven with her nine-year-old brother and her parents, who carried two suitcases and nothing else. She is now a professor at Oxford, the founder of a global luxury brand, and the winner of the Thinkers50 Radar award for the world's most promising emerging management thinker. In this episode, Neri takes me inside the research behind her book Pioneers ... eight principles she found in the founders of Chobani, Moderna and Calendly, none of whom put profit first. We talk about why the usual paths are often closed to outsiders and what they build instead, why raising money too early can kill a company before it starts, and what happened when the war in Ukraine hit her own business ... and Prada picked up the phone. Twenty years ago, in a seminar room in London, Neri was told that altruism is not real in business. This is what she found out.