Tag: new speaker

What does it really look like to recognize—and improve—an unhealthy workplace? Jamie Fiore Higgins, author of the acclaimed memoir Bully Market, has firsthand experience from her 18 years at a toxic Wall Street company. Today, Jamie draws on her experience to show us what it takes to change our workplace cultures, promote inclusion and diversity, and ensure that everyone at our company can not only belong, but flourish.

Jamie spent almost two decades at Goldman Sachs, climbing from a nervous intern to Managing Director, a title that only 8% of employees earn and one of the most elusive roles on Wall Street. Its work environment did serious damage to her morale and health until she broke out of it. Now, she’s using her years of experience to show us what a truly healthy company cultures look like, and how we can all work together to build them.

Jamie’s memoir Bully Market is a “brave and vivid portrait” (Booklist) of her time at Goldman Sachs. She recounts in stunning detail the toxic workplace practices that she encountered, offering a look at the damage that unhealthy workplaces can do, as well as reimagining what a better future for our companies could look like. “With Goldman in my rearview mirror,” Jamie says, “I want employees to learn from my experiences, and feel empowered to help create workplaces they want to be a part of.”

Watch Jamie discuss her experience and memoir on TODAY:

Drawing on her original psychology and neuroscience research, Tracy makes the case for embracing this secret superpower. She’s the bestselling author of Future Tense: Why Anxiety is Good for You (Even Though It Feels Bad). In it, she argues that anxiety is our brains’ response to uncertainty: it arises when there’s potential for bad, but also great potential for good.

By embracing anxiety as a feature, rather than a bug, of being human, we can use our worries to imagine, plan, and persevere through our uncertain (but hopeful) futures. “Anxiety is actually a useful part of being human,” Tracy told Lavin. “We can build skills in a virtuous cycle of anxiety—it just takes practice.”

Watch Tracy explain three steps that we can take to leverage our anxiety:

If we want to innovate and develop fresh ideas, we need to break out of the same conventional mold—but not just any rebellion will do. Psychologist and author Todd Kashdan has a scientific manual for how to rebel the right way: with principle and conviction. His new book The Art of Insubordination is a guide to using principled dissent for creativity and new ideas. Kirkus called it “a useful primer for those determined to make waves for a good cause.”

Todd is an award-winning psychology expert whose work has been cited more than 35,000 times. With over 200 published scientific articles, he received the American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. His writing has appeared in the Harvard Business Review and National Geographic, among others, and his research is featured regularly in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, and TIME. 

Todd is also the author of four other books in addition to The Art of Insubordination, including The Upside of Your Dark Side and Curious?, which Arianna Huffington called “one of those rare books that can make you rethink how you see the world.” 

Watch this exclusive interview with Todd, where he outlines how the principled dissent of the 1960s/70s gay rights movement made them effective activists, and how we can learn from their example to make real change. 

Roe v. Wade was overturned last week — and the ripple effects will be enormous for the country, the justice system, and democracy as a whole. “I can’t think of anything bigger than this Supreme Court decision in my lifetime,” Mary Ziegler says. As one of the foremost nonpartisan authorities on the Constitution and our reproductive rights, Mary is uniquely positioned to make sense of this moment of great uncertainty, and give us a realistic way out of deepening polarization. 

Mary is a law professor at the University of California, Davis, as well as the author of four books on the history of Roe v. Wade, and how it’s affected our laws, our justice system, and our politics. She has a thorough understanding of the tangible consequences of the fall of Roe, like inter-state politics and data privacy concerns, as well as the intangible consequences such as how Americans view our institutions. 

Mary believes we can still move beyond polarization to build a kinder, more nuanced dialogue around our democracy. “More people are talking across differences on this issue,” she says. “That’s often the way you begin to get to a less polarized, potentially more promising, solution.”

Watch Mary discuss how this moment of instability is pushing people to create a better dialogue for us and our future: 

The simple act of telling your story can create radical change. George M. Johnson knows that better than anyone—their powerful memoir-manifesto All Boys Aren’t Blue, a New York Times bestseller about growing up as a Black queer boy, has inspired readers worldwide to “be themselves unapologetically.”

As we grapple with big questions about inequality, and racial justice, Michelle Coles says we can find strength, inspiration,  and answers from the heroes who’ve come before us. 

Michelle is both an accomplished civil rights attorney with a focus on social justice and the author of an award-winning YA novel on the forgotten heroism of Black Americans after the Civil War—she knows better than anyone how coming to terms with our past will help us to understand our present and fight for a better future. In her eye-opening talks, Michelle gives us a larger awareness of how oppressive systems are created and upheld, and inspires us to fight for justice no matter who we are.

Michelle is the author of Black Was the Ink, which Kirkus calls “a dynamic look at how the past informs the future.” The book follows a Black teenager who travels back in time to Reconstruction-era America and witnesses the achievements of Black statesmen fighting for freedom, after a traumatic experience of being racially profiled in the present day. Michelle wrote the novel to help her young sons make sense of the America they’re growing up in, and to show us that when we take ownership of our actions, we have the ability to be a powerful force for change. 

Watch Michelle explain how forgotten heroes leave their mark here: 

In new keynotes, Salman Khan explains how learning through video (coupled with more traditional means) can reshape the way we teach, share information, and organize classroom time. One of Khan’s breakthrough moments was his TED talk last year, after which he was interviewed onstage by Bill Gates. The two discussed something close to their hearts: the future of education—and the role of new technologies in shaping it.

Here, Khan explains the intrinsic advantages of using videos to teach students:

They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person. And once you get over the backhanded nature of that, there was actually something very profound there. They were saying that they preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin. At first it's very unintuitive but if you look at it from their view, it makes a ton of sense. You have this situation where now they can pause and repeat their cousin, without feeling like they're wasting my time. If they have to review something they should've learned a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a couple of years ago, they don't have to be embarrassed and ask their cousin; they can just watch those videos. If they're bored, they can go ahead. They can watch it at their own time, at their own pace.