Founder, CEO, and president of EDWINS Leadership & Restaurant Institute Brandon Edwin Chrostowski is renowned for changing culinary and hospitality training—in and out of the nation’s prisons—while preserving French cooking traditions. His mission-driven effort to train and staff former prison inmates at his flagship French restaurant and nonprofit has created a national model for re-entry and an educational pipeline for formerly incarcerated to learn the discipline and skill of fine dining.

Under Chrostowski’s leadership, the EDWINS program boasts an extraordinary one percent recidivism rate, a testament to the efficacy of its approach. More than a CEO, Chrostowski is a catalyst for change, providing over one hundred formerly incarcerated adults with free culinary and hospitality arts training each year. Since its inception in 2007, the program has evolved into a multifaceted initiative, including Edwins Too—a culinary incubator and community kitchen; EDWINS Butcher Shop and Bakery and Diner; a Second Chance Life Skills Center with housing and wraparound services; EDWINS Family Center, a nonprofit offering free daycare to Institute students during class hours; on-site programs at Grafton Correctional Institute and Cuyahoga County Juvenile Detention Center; and a groundbreaking virtual curriculum reaching over 400,000 inmates in prisons across the country.

A culinary virtuoso, Chrostowski’s journey began with classical training as a chef and sommelier. He honed his skills at distinguished fine dining establishments in Paris, New York, and Chicago, including Lucas Carton, Chanterelle, Picholine, Le Cirque, and Charlie Trotter’s. His culinary prowess has been celebrated with numerous accolades, including being a 2022 James Beard Award Semifinalist and a 2023 James Beard Finalist. Recognition also extends to the 2023 Jim Brown Changemaker Award, IFMA’s 2020 Silver Plate, CNN’s 2016 Heroes, and the prestigious Crain’s “40 under 40” Awards.

A proud alum of CIA, Chrostowski holds an associate degree in culinary arts and a bachelor’s degree in business and Restaurant Management. He resides in Cleveland with his wife Catana and their children, Leo, Lilly, Lynx, and Lander.

A Quote From This Episode

• "It's not like you come into a kitchen, and they say, 'Listen, this is how you're going to figure it out,' they just give you a task and you gotta figure it out."

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Film: Knife Skills
• TV: CBS This Morning
• CNN Hero

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Register for ILA's 26th Global Conference in Chicago, IL - November 7-10, 2024.
• Adult Development Pre-Conference Session

About Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: The Leader's Edge
• Blog

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

Christina Helena is a speaker, playwright/performer, and founder of My Scar is Sexy, based in New York City. As one of the youngest pancreatic cancer survivors with a thirteen-inch scar across her abdomen, she is redefining the stigma behind trauma and pain with one simple thought: “Your scar is the sexiest thing about you.” Most recently, Goalcast featured Christina’s talk, “My Scar is Sexy,” on mental health, and overcoming adversity received over 10 million views.

Her story is currently in development as an off-Broadway, autobiographical solo show entitled SCAR directed by the award-winning director Larry Moss. Her TEDx talk, “Dear Unresolved Soul, It’s Not Death You Fear, It’s Life,” is about facing mortality and how death is the greatest catalyst to discovering the authentic self.

A Quote From This Episode

• "It took me many years of just asking myself, 'Why did you have that thought?' Then, again, 'Why did you have that thought?' And then, 'Why did you have that answer, and why that thought?'"

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Christina's Website
• Christina's TEDx Talk
• My Scar is Sexy Talk
• Goalcast
• Other resources/people mentioned in this episode are linked to in the episode transcript.

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Register for ILA's 26th Global Conference in Chicago, IL - November 7-10, 2024.

About Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: The Leader's Edge
• Blog

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

Colonel Matt Horner, Ph.D., is the Director of Staff of the Dean of Faculty and was recently nominated for the role of Permanent Professor for Character and Leadership Development at USAFA. He has served in multiple administrative and instructor roles in the Directorate of Athletics and is an Assistant Professor of Management, teaching courses on organizational dynamics and leadership. He is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and served as a mobility pilot on active duty. He received his doctorate in sport management from Florida State University.

Lt Col Matt Orlowsky, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Management and teaches courses on organizational dynamics and leadership. He is a graduate of USAFA and served as a force support officer on active duty. As a human resource professional, he has held responsibilities at tactical, operational, and strategic levels and has held assignments all over the globe, including the United States, Korea, Germany, Iraq, and Qatar. His doctorate is from the University of Denver, and he explored how leaders translate experiences into insights.

Daphne DePorres, Ed.D., is an assistant professor at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA), where she teaches organizational behavior and organizational development, as well as a management consulting capstone course. In addition, she has over thirty years of experience in Organization Development and Change. Before her academic career, she spent nearly a decade consulting with large and small, for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, working with them as they developed strategies, pursued organizational goals, analyzed and changed their cultures, and developed effective teams.

Dr. Dave Levy is a Professor of Management at USAFA and teaches courses on leadership, power, organization development, and change. He is a USAFA graduate and served as a security forces officer on active duty. After leaving the military, he worked as an organizational change consultant for Grant-Thornton and KPMG. He received his doctorate in organizational behavior from Cornell University and is the author of several books, including The 52nd Floor: Thinking Deeply About Leadership, Attitudes Aren’t Free: Thinking Deeply About Diversity in the US Armed Forces, Echoes of Mind: Thinking Deeply About Humanship, Evolution of Government Policy Towards Homosexuality in the US Military, and The Line: A Very Short, Short Story.

A Quote From This Episode

• "Every interaction is an opportunity to go ahead and fulfill the needs of agency, efficacy, and belonging."

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Article: Lens X: A Practical Approach to Taking Care of Your People
• Links to other resources in the transcript

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Register for ILA's 26th Global Conference in Chicago, IL - November 7-10, 2024.

About Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: The Leader's Edge

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

Dr. Stoller is Chairman of the Education Institute at Cleveland Clinic. He holds the Jean Wall Bennett Professorship of Medicine at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine and the Samson Global Leadership Academy Endowed Chair. He is a pulmonary/critical care physician in the Cleveland Clinic Integrated Hospital Institute. He serves as the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs (Cleveland Clinic) in the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

In 1979, Dr. Stoller earned a medical degree from Yale University School of Medicine and later completed an internship and residency at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. He then completed fellowships in pulmonary/critical medicine (Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Yale), clinical epidemiology (Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at Yale), and respiratory intensive care (Respiratory Intensive Care Unit of the Massachusetts General Hospital) before joining the Respiratory Institute Staff at Cleveland Clinic in 1986.

Dr. MinhTri Nguyen recently graduated from Cleveland Clinic’s Hematology and Oncology Fellowship program. He has had leadership experiences as the Associate Director of Outpatient Services at Metrohealth’s Internal Medicine Department, Chief Resident, and President of the House Officer’s Association at MetroHealth.

MinhTri has a longstanding interest in emotional intelligence and leadership, with ongoing research in both subject matters related to physician training. He is a certified coach, currently coaching resident physicians and clinical leaders. In the fall, he will be joining Stanford Health Care, where he will practice Hematology/Oncology with University Medical Partners while continuing his academic interests in leadership development for physicians.


A Quote From This Episode

• "The practice of leadership like medicine (both fields in their own right) is continuous. To be a good practitioner of medicine you need to be in tune with the practice and practice medicine. So the same thing applies to leadership you need to be in tune with the field of leadership and practice leadership."

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Coursera Course - Andrew Ng on Artificial Intelligence
• Article - The Moral Bucket List by Brooks
• Book - Better Humans, Better Performance by Rae, Stoller, & Kolp
• Books - Hidden Potential and Give and Take by Grant
• Book - The Art of the Impossible by Kotler
• Commencement Address - Don Berwick, Yale Medical School, & Ken Burns, Brandeis University

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Register for ILA's 26th Global Conference in Chicago, IL - November 7-10, 2024.

About Scott J. Allen

• Website & Weekly Newsletter: The Leader's Edge

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

Since 2005, Amy Elizabeth Fox has served as one of the founders and Chief Executive Officer of Mobius Executive Leadership, a global transformational leadership firm. For the last twenty years, she has been a leadership and culture change advisor to eminent professional services firms and Fortune 500 companies and facilitated immersive executive development programs for senior leaders.

Mobius offers top team intervention, business mediation, executive coaching, and personal mastery programs aimed at unlocking potential and building deeper trust, intimacy, and connection within a company’s top tier. Mobius also sponsors a professional development arm for maturing transformational practitioners called The Next Practice Institute and has an e-learning arm entitled Mobius Touch.

Since 2013, Mobius has partnered with the premier leadership advisory firm, Egon Zehnder, to offer sessions for leaders worldwide. Amy is the lead faculty for the quarterly Discovery program offered jointly to N-1 leaders. Further, she has guided programs for long-standing clients while overseeing the evolution and expansion of Mobius.

Amy is considered an expert in healing individual, family, and collective trauma and has been a pioneer in introducing trauma-informed development and psycho-spiritual principles into leadership programs. In addition to her work with Mobius, Amy is a senior student of mystical teacher Thomas Huebl, serving as part of his online faculty team and lead faculty for his two-year Timeless Wisdom Training. Amy and Thomas are guiding a first-of-its-kind year-long certification in Trauma Informed Consulting and Coaching. Amy is also on the African Leadership Institute's Desmond Tutu Fellows program faculty at Oxford.

Before starting Mobius, Amy worked as a trainer for Vantage Partners, as a senior executive in Wellspace, and as the Dir. of Public Affairs for the Cathedral of St John the Divine, where she supported Paul Gorman, Carl Sagan, and Al Gore in a decade long effort to engage the American faith communities in responding to climate change and environmental degradation.

A Quote From This Episode

• "Leaders have to be intentional about the self-care practices that may have been neglected in the past but are now critical to being in performance-ready shape to lead others.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Learning Event: The Next Practice Institute
• Book: Winning From Within by Erica Ariel Fox
• Television Show: Bridgerton

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Register for ILA's 26th Global Conference in Chicago, IL - November 7-10, 2024.

About Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: The Leader's Edge

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

Dr. Jonathan W. White is professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University. He is the author or editor of 17 books covering various topics, including civil liberties during the Civil War, the USS Monitor and the Battle of Hampton Roads, the presidential election of 1864, and what Abraham Lincoln and soldiers dreamt about.

Among his awards are the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Award (2019), CNU’s Alumni Society Award for Teaching and Mentoring (2016), the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Prize (2015), and the University of Maryland Alumni Excellence Award in Research (2024).

His recent books include A House Built By Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House (2022), which was co-winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize (with Jon Meacham); Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade (2023); Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves (2023); and an exciting new children’s book, My Day with Abe Lincoln (2024).

A Quote From This Episode

• "I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views." - Abraham Lincoln

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Your New Playlist by Acuff, Acuff, & Acuff
• Phronesis Episode with Dr. Laura Empson

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Register for ILA's 26th Global Conference in Chicago, IL - November 7-10, 2024.

About Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: The Leader's Edge

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

Nadia Taranczewski holds a Master of Psychology, Master Certified Coach, executive coach, keynote speaker, and author of Conscious You: Become the Hero of Your Own Story. She has worked as a coach and organizational developer since 2001.

Her company, ConsciousU, makes culture change scalable through its blended learning online-based coaching programs. By combining individual consciousness development and social learning in groups and teams, they support organizations in reinventing themselves as Conscious Tribe.

She is a curious and voracious learner and has studied with some of the best coaches and experts worldwide. Nadja lives in Berlin, Germany, with her wife, loves to travel the world by home-exchanging, and is currently working on her forthcoming book, The Conscious Tribe Playbook.

For more than a decade, Valerie Livesay, Ph.D. has been thinking about and inquiring into the phenomenon of fallback­­––when, despite our optimal developmental capacities, what we often refer to as our developmental center-of-gravity—we make meaning, feel, and act from a smaller, less complex, less capable form of mind.

As Chief Illuminator at Ghost Light Leadership, Valerie accompanies individuals through their discovery of self, using the analogy of theater to set the stage for their historical and unfolding story. Through her writing, speaking, coaching, and workshop offerings, Valerie invites the many characters that comprise the full ensemble of one’s self to dance together to better meet their intentions. She is the author of Leaving the Ghost Light Burning: Illuminating Fallback in Embrace of the Fullness of You in which she reveals both the despair and ecstasy that accompany a knowing of the fullness of one’s allowing the reader to find the fullness of themselves in the journey of development and the experience of being human.

A Quote From Nadia's Website

• "A Conscious Tribe is a thriving organization whose members engage in inner work, see the big picture, nurture deep relationships, and practice conscious rituals."

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Book: The New Comedy Bible by Carter
• Book: Venomous Lumpsucker by Beauman
• Podcast: The Rest is History

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Register for ILA's 26th Global Conference in Chicago, IL - November 7-10, 2024.

About Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: The Leader's Edge

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

Dr. Barbara Kellerman is a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. She was the Founding Executive Director of the Center, and a member of the Kennedy School faculty for over twenty years. Kellerman has held professorships at Fordham, Tufts, Fairleigh Dickinson, George Washington, Christopher Newport, and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. She also served as Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Leadership at the University of Maryland.

Kellerman received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.A. M.Phil., and Ph.D. (in Political Science) degrees from Yale University. She was awarded a Danforth Fellowship and three Fulbright fellowships. At Uppsala (1996-97), she held the Fulbright Chair in American Studies. Kellerman was cofounder of the International Leadership Association (ILA) and is author and editor of many books. Kellerman has also appeared on media outlets such as CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, Reuters, and BBC, and has contributed articles and reviews to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Harvard Business Review.

Barbara Kellerman has spoken to audiences all over the world including in Beijing, Toronto, Moscow, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, Munich, Seoul, Jerusalem, Mumbai, Berlin, Shanghai, Sao Paolo, Kyoto, and Sydney. She received the Wilbur M. McFeeley award from the National Management Association for her pioneering work on leadership and followership, as well as the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association. From 2015 to 2023, she was listed by Global Gurus as among the “World’s Top 30 Management Professionals.”

A Quote From Kellerman

• "Bad leadership is a disease. It’s not a physical disease. It’s a social disease no less invasive or destructive than its physical counterpart. Unless and until we recognize the parallel, bad leadership will remain incurable, impossible to root out in the future any more than in the past. Sad. No, tragic."

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Website: Barbara Kellerman
• Blog Post: Leadership Gender Gap: Redux

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Register for ILA's 26th Global Conference in Chicago, IL - November 7-10, 2024.

About Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: The Leader's Edge

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.