Matthew Syed is the acclaimed author of six-best selling books on high performance, including his celebrated Black Box Thinking and more recent Rebel Ideas - both of which are some of the best-thumbed books on the Newton bookshelf.

In this debut episode of Newton Talks, Matthew sits down with Brad Jennings, Newton’s “Change Guru”, to dig even deeper into cognitive diversity, the subject of Rebel Ideas. He argues that once we start to see conflict and disagreement as a contribution to the dynamism of a team, the sooner we can break free from group echo chambers and aid the benefits of cognitive diversity in solving complex problems. Possibly one of the world’s most famous mindset experts, Matthew brings insights from psychology, anthropology and data science, whilst drawing on a dazzling range of intriguing case-studies, reveals his pick of the world’s best meeting hacks, explains how to work out if your office is an echo chamber and uncovers the best-kept secrets of the world's most successful teams.

PLUS, Matthews tells Brad the surprising subject of his next book... and how to win your next game of table tennis. His work with leading organisations has helped those including Premier League footballers build a mindset of continuous improvement and he is the host of new BBC audio series Sideways.

Newton Europe is an implementation-focussed consultancy with a difference, brimming with people who have a passion for cracking really tough challenges. Find out more about the way we work at newtoneurope.com, join the discussion with #NewtonTalks by following us on
Linkedin.

Kim Scott is the author of ‘Just Work: Get Sh*t Done Fast and Fair’ and Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want By Saying What you Mean’. Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics and Twitter plus a faculty member at Apple University and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. 

Kim joins Newton’s Rosanne Furniss to discuss why leaders shouldn’t have to choose between being direct and being compassionate. The phrase ‘radical candour’ can inspire fear at first hearing, with many concerned that people will use the principle as an excuse to act “like a jerk”, as Kim says. But in reality, it’s a principle that should be used as a guiding compass, allowing you to hit the sweet spot between caring personally and challenging directly.

In this episode, Kim explains how to introduce radical candour as a navigational framework into your organisation; how to create a shared vocabulary so that people are comfortable differentiating between radical candour and obnoxious aggression; the struggles around being radically candid when working remotely; and how radical candour can help you and your team bring your whole selves to work.

Newton is an implementation-focussed consultancy with a difference,  brimming with people who have a passion for cracking really tough challenges. Find out more about the way we work at newtoneurope.com, join the discussion with #NewtonTalks by following us on Linkedin.

Sara Sanford’s TED talk “Designing gender bias out of the workplace” has been watched over 2 million times. Sara’s groundbreaking research at GEN (Gender Equity Now) has identified 212 cultural levers within an organisation that can foster or counter the impact of gender in the workplace. These can be as simple as the position of a gender tick box on a job application form, or introducing thinking time in meetings. Understanding and pulling these levers creates business results. By integrating the top five set of inclusive behaviours, tech companies, for example, have ended up creating 18% more patents per year.

In this episode of Newton Talks, Sara speaks to Newton’s Camilla Wigmore about how companies can do more than make pledges to address gender equity, and use data to drive meaningful action to tackle gender bias, why over-representation is the real problem we should be talking about, and in turn create positive commercial impact.

Sara also explains to Camilla, and us, what ‘designing gender bias out of the workplace’ means in practice, why every company already has the tools to do it and why treating gender equity like any other business critical function is the only way to walk the equity walk.

Newton is an implementation-focussed consultancy with a difference, brimming with people who have a passion for cracking really tough challenges . Find out more about the way we work at newtoneurope.com, join the discussion with #NewtonTalks by following us on Linkedin.