August 23, 2024 – Time-Tested Leadership Willie Pietersen and Squirrel’s Tech Radar Douglas Squirrel

School for Startups Radio

Willie Pietersen – MultiBillion Dollar Brand CEO, Columbia B-School Professor and Author of Leadership—The Inside Story: Time-Tested Prescriptions for Those Who Seek To Lead

Everything we do as leaders has got symbolic fallout. We need to be very
intentional about our behaviors so that others can respond accordingly.

Willie Pietersen was raised in South Africa and received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. After practicing law, he embarked on an international business career. Over a period of twenty years, he served as the CEO of multibillion-dollar businesses such as Lever Brothers Foods Division, Seagram USA, Tropicana and Sterling Winthrop’s Consumer Health Group. In 1998, Willie was named Professor of the Practice of Management at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He specializes in strategy and the leadership of change, and his methods and ideas, especially Strategic Learning, are widely applied within Columbia’s executive education programs, and also in numerous corporations. He has served as a teacher and advisor to many global companies, including Aviva, Bausch & Lomb, Boeing, Chubb Corp., Deloitte, DePuy, Electrolux, Ericsson, ExxonMobil, Henry Schein, Inc., Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta, Novartis, Salt River Project, SAP, UGI, United Nations Federal Credit Union and also the Girl Scouts of the USA.
Douglas Squirrel – Founder of Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter douglassquirrel and squirrelsquardron.

You should be practicing your own conversations. If we did that, we could
make an awful lot more money out of our technology people.

Douglas Squirrel has been coding for forty years and has led software teams for twenty. He uses the power of conversations to create dramatic productivity gains in technology organizations of all sizes. His experience includes growing software teams as a CTO in startups from fintech to biotech to music, and everything in between; consulting on product improvement at over 200 organizations in the UK, US, Australia, Africa, and Europe; and coaching a wide variety of leaders in improving their conversations, aligning to business goals, and creating productive conflict. He lives in Frogholt, England, in a timber-framed cottage built in the year 1450. He is the author of Squirrel’s Tech Radar, Decoding Tech Talk, and Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture, co-authored with Jeffrey Fredrick.