Stanford Executive Briefings: Personal Growth and Development

The Mastery of Speaking as a Leader

Terry Pearce demonstrates ways in which a leader can elevate a speech into a more powerful and ultimately productive experience for both speaker and listener. Pearce explains three rules that set the stage for consistently engaging presentations: speak on topics you care about, incorporate personal experiences, and structure your speech as a story.

Preparing for Long Life in the 21st Century

Leaders of organizations need to understand how cognitive processing, decision making, memory, and motivation change as they, their employees, and their customers age. Dr. Carstensen shares research findings on motivation grounded in the uniquely human perception of time horizons and the theory of “socioemotional selectivity,” in which our values and goals change over time.

Emotion vs. Analytics

Is it best to be emotionless and analytical in decision making? When our goal is to be decisive, the answer is a resounding No. Instead, harnessing the power of emotions is critical. Studies of the neural underpinnings of decision making show that our brains start by evaluating options analytically. But very soon—usually based on first impressions—we create an emotional front-runner.

Why Don't We Naturally Make Good Decisions?

We rarely study—much less apply—the fundamental thinking processes that should be undertaken before we make important decisions. Dr. Howard describes the elements of high-quality decisions and tells how to increase our clarity of action in the personal and professional decisions that shape our lives and organizations.

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

Tackling the serious topic of stress in his famously entertaining manner, Robert Sapolsky sets the stage on a Kenyan savannah, with a hungry lion in hot pursuit of a terrified zebra. As he explains, the zebra’s fight-or-flight response channels essential energy to its survival effort by shutting down and even damaging nonessential biological functions—in a temporary, short-term response.

The Values-Based Leader

Practical advice on how to lead while staying true to your moral compass. Values-based leadership is possible for anyone to achieve, at any point in a career, by adhering to four guiding principles of behavior.

Building Personal Networks

Networks can be powerful career tools, helping to drive performance and build influence. But they benefit organizations as well, enhancing productivity and improving communication between disparate business units and functions. Professor James Baron offers concrete suggestions for building an effective and efficient personal network.

Managing Communication in a Multicultural World

Everyone who speaks has an accent. The subtle but compelling conclusions people reach about you, based on the way you speak, result in profound economic consequences both for yourself and for your organization. Using American English as an example, Dr. John Baugh emphasizes the need to build tolerance of variations in dialect and language use.

Power: How to Get It, Use It, and Keep It

Getting a job, having control over your work, and holding on to a job all require more than simply excelling at what you do. They require an understanding of power. According to Professor Pfeffer, individual power comes from political skill, which is characterized by social astuteness, networking ability, interpersonal influence, and “apparent” sincerity. And power comes from knowing the rules of the game, recognizing the power of others, and—most of all—being willing and able to play the game.

Creating You and Company

The majority of Americans are employed, but there is a widespread sense that no one's job is secure. Temporary workers, contractors, and outsourced employees are doing the work that yesterday belonged to the organization's own full-time, long-term workers. In short, jobs as we have always known them are going away. William Bridges explains how individuals can cope--and even triumph--with a career that is not based on holding a job.

Influence: How to Build Effective Relationships and Allies

It is necessary for you to influence people at all levels of your organization in order to get your job done. Carole Robin explains how the effective use of influence helps you deliver on your promises and produce excellent results, making you one of the "go-to" people in your organization. And this in turn makes your circle of influence grow ever larger.

The Power of Persuasion

Increase your power and influence with simple, guaranteed methods you'll start using right away. In this dynamic presentation, Robert Cialdini provides fascinating insights on how to be successful in your attempts to persuade all manner of other people. This program is a "must" for managers, marketers, and manipulators of all kinds!

The Psychology of Power

While there are many benefits that come from having power, there are also many risks. Deborah Gruenfeld explains how a lack of consequences can allow powerful people to make serious errors in judgment that have far-reaching impacts on themselves and on their organizations.

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World

While an executive at Microsoft, John Wood made a life-changing decision to found Room to Read, a nonprofit organization that now provides educational access to 1.3 million children in developing nations through 400 schools and 5,000 Reading Rooms. In this engaging talk, John describes a vision for scalable solutions to world problems, including the need to focus on results and how to attract high-level of employees, volunteers, and investors. His work has been profiled by Bloomberg Television, CNBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other news publications.

The Entrepreneurial Process

Investors today are once again looking very closely before putting money into new ventures. Entrepreneurs have to be more prepared to make their case for getting a new idea off the ground. Using her own experiences as an entrepreneur, angel investor, and venture capitalist, Magdelena Yesil walks you through the steps necessary to achieve a liquidity event, including identifying a winning idea, recruiting a team, choosing financial partners, and establishing the right business development relationships.