A Conversation With Seth Kahan
A Conversation With Seth Kahan
Meet Seth Kahan
Seth Kahan worked at The World Bank for 13 years including leading four international change initiatives and working with President Jim Wolfenson. He is the author of four business books, including the bestseller, Getting Change Right: How Leaders Transform Organizations from the Inside Out. He worked with 100+ nonprofit CEOs and led two international change initiatives at Royal Dutch Shell.
Seth launched five “Grand Challenges” taking on intractable problems to improve society: Healthy Nurse Healthy Nation, Thriving Earth Exchange, Center for Financial Planning, Inteleos Medical Ultrasound Grand Challenge, and Stop Stigma Together that is eliminating the stigma around mental health and substance use disorders on a national scale.
Meet Your Host, Alan Weiss
Alan Weiss is one of those rare people who can say he is a consultant, speaker, and author and mean it.
His consulting firm, Summit Consulting Group, Inc., has attracted clients such as Merck, Hewlett-Packard, GE, Mercedes-Benz, State Street Corporation, Times Mirror Group, The Federal Reserve, The New York Times Corporation, Toyota, and over 500 other leading organizations. He has served on several boards of directors in various capacities.
His prolific publishing includes over 500 articles and 60 books, including his best-seller, Million Dollar Consulting (from McGraw-Hill) now in its 30th year and sixth edition. His newest is Your Legacy is Now: Life is not about a search for meaning but the creation of meaning (Routledge, 2021). His books have been on the curricula at Villanova, Temple University, and the Wharton School of Business, and have been translated into 15 languages.
Get to know AlanShow Notes
People may think of a “Grand Challenge” as an exceptionally worthy and difficult problem to solve, and they’d be right. But it’s also representative of a more formalized and impressive approach to what appear to be intractable societal issues.
Seth Kahan specializes in these, his most recent being to remove stigma in mental health issues. This involves a farrago of interested parties, from television writers who want to depict the issue realistically and correctly to pharmaceutical companies which seek to develop the proper medications and police departments which need proper responses.
These challenges can be about education reform, immigration reform, climate safeguarding, reproductive rights, and other such vast issues. They tend to be nonpartisan. The correct approach to mental health issues, for example, benefits a wide range of society, from treatment to facilities, from crime deterrence to cures.
Learn where the funding comes from, how varied organizations become involved, and the timing needed for these initiatives to make a difference while successful along the way—sometimes 20 years or more.
And looking back, from women’s rights to civil rights, such movements have existed, being formed out of necessity. We also discuss great leaders (Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Churchill) who were successful because they purposely created these Grand Challenges—not just to improve civilization, but to save it.
Alan Weiss’s The Uncomfortable Truth® is a weekly broadcast from “The Rock Star of Consulting,” Alan Weiss, who holds forth with his best (and often most contrarian) ideas about society, culture, business, and personal growth. His 60+ books in 12 languages, and his travels to, and work in, 50 countries contribute to a fascinating and often belief-challenging 20 minutes that might just change your next 20 years.
Introduction to the show recorded by Connie Dieken
