IDEAGEN®

What if the real lever of change isn’t capital or code, but people—selected with care, backed with evidence, and trusted to lead? George and Richard Sandler open the door to a sweeping, candid conversation about education reform, philanthropy that behaves like a high-performing business, and the hard work of separating truth from a convenient narrative. We dig into the simplest—and most demanding—idea in the episode: human capital wins. Richard explains why great teachers and high expectations move outcomes across zip codes, how the Milken approach scouts for proven talent, and why disciplined funding beats scattershot giving. From the Prostate Cancer Foundation to the Milken Institute, he shares how to map a field, find what works, and then scale it with rigor. We also examine the double-edged nature of AI and information abundance: faster analysis, but higher stakes for source reliability and media literacy. The heart of the conversation confronts public mythmaking. Richard walks through three common assumptions about investigation, indictment, and plea deals, and why they often mislead in complex white-collar cases. He talks about his book, Witness to a Prosecution, and why quoting court documents and primary sources matters when reputations—and public understanding—are on the line. We round out with the values driving the Milken legacy—belief in human potential, relentless research, and future-focused execution—and Richard’s practical advice to young leaders: listen first, ask better questions, and be the adult in the room. Watch the full 2025 Global Leadership Summit here: [https://www.ideagenglobal.com/2025globalleadershipsummit/global-leadership-summit]

The stakes feel different when you’re looking out over New York during UNGA and talking about leadership that has to work in the real world. We brought KPMG’s Mark Fitzgerald to the NASDAQ stage to dig into the pressures and possibilities shaping global decisions right now: AI that’s already at scale, power grids that weren’t built for this moment, and ethics frameworks that haven’t caught up to the speed of innovation. We trace the four priorities that dominated the week—security, health, technology, and climate—and explore how they collide in the compute era. Mark shares fresh data from KPMG’s global CEO and government surveys: trillions flowing into AI, a grinding talent shortage, and a stark trust gap where 79% see agentic AI as a force for good but only 16% actually trust it. We talk through what “intelligent government” means in practice, from rethinking G2G and government-to-citizen services to building AI literacy pipelines that move beyond access toward real absorption and use. Power becomes the quiet protagonist. Data centers demand reliable electricity, yet many regions lack grid integrity, pushing innovation into a handful of markets while widening the global digital divide. We unpack an “all of energy” strategy—renewables, nuclear including small modular reactors, fossil with abatement, storage, and localized planning—and why aligning policy with physical capacity is non-negotiable for equitable growth. Alongside infrastructure, we confront the messy reality of data rights: ownership across borders, likeness and content control, provenance and watermarking, and why interoperable regulation is essential for both companies and citizens. Leadership sits at the center of these trade-offs. Mark contrasts servant and charismatic styles and argues that purpose—not personality—keeps teams aligned when decisions carry risk. We look at crisis scenarios where agentic AI can cut response times from hours to minutes, and the ethical courage required when you hand autonomy to machines. The conversation closes with a challenge: recommit to shared aspirations—call it the SDG spirit or a better successor—and act locally with measurable outcomes. Connect with Mark on LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-fitzgerald-3aa30b8/] Learn More About Mark's Work: [https://kpmg.com/xx/en/contacts/f/mark-fitzgerald.html] Watch the full 2025 Global Leadership Summit here: [https://www.ideagenglobal.com/2025globalleadershipsummit/global-leadership-summit]

A single coach who guaranteed every kid real playing time changed Kevin Dunbar’s life—and now that ethos powers CFY’s county-wide movement to remove barriers for 15,000 young people. We dig into a simple promise with outsized results: if a child wants to play, learn water safety, or pursue college, money won’t stand in the way. With an endowment that covers operating costs, every donated dollar goes straight to a kid’s fees, gear, or scholarship—turning access today into leadership tomorrow. We walk through the mechanics behind the mission: a pay-what-you-can model that preserves dignity, partnerships with schools and community policing that direct support where it’s needed most, and scholarships that send first-generation students to college with ongoing mentorship. Kevin shares how CFY scaled from three to fifteen football and cheer programs across Pinellas County by listening to local leaders, keeping metrics tight, and celebrating wins publicly so donors, families, and teams see the impact. The result is a flywheel of trust: fund, deliver, measure, and share. Technology keeps the engine humming. A robust HubSpot-powered site lets programs request grants, students apply for scholarships, and supporters plug in instantly. Social media moments—like “big check” presentations alongside championship coaches—aren’t PR fluff; they’re signals that access is real and repeatable. We also unpack how other communities can adapt this model: define your promise, reduce friction at registration, align with credible partners, and track outcomes that actually change lives. Want to be part of an approach that turns a $250 gap into a lifetime of possibility? Visit cfypenellis.org and follow CFY Penellas on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. If this conversation moves you, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review to help more people discover the power of access. Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-dunbar/] Learn More About Kevin's Work: [https://cfypinellas.org/leadership] Watch the full 2025 Global Leadership Summit here: [https://www.ideagenglobal.com/2025globalleadershipsummit/global-leadership-summit]

What if the difference between stalled change and a moonshot is your mindset? We sit down with Lenovo’s Ed Soo Hoo to unpack why the best leaders aren’t defined by titles or toolkits but by authenticity, service, and the courage to “blink first.” From four decades across startups and global enterprises, Ed maps a clear strategy for building momentum: protect the core, stretch into adjacencies, and seed the future—running all three in parallel like NASA’s Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. Along the way, he shows how cross-trained teams, shared deliverables, and the right “boosters” turn vision into velocity. We dig into the Sears cautionary tale and the JFK playbook to illustrate how over-focusing on the present can cost you the future, while smart portfolio design can unlock outsized value. Then we zoom out to two audacious, practical ideas tailored for the AI era: Energy-as-a-Service to stabilize growth amid constrained grids, and a national mental fitness initiative to rebuild resilience, attention, and judgment at scale. Ed’s take is refreshingly human—technology should serve people, not the other way around—and he makes a compelling case for reviving face-to-face connection and embracing serendipity as a catalyst for innovation. If you’re navigating rapid change, this conversation offers a blueprint you can use today: adopt a servant mindset, structure work across Now–New–Next, rotate talent to compound learning, and tell stories that move people from compliance to commitment. Ready to lead with courage and design for the long game? Follow, share with a colleague who needs this spark, and leave a review with the idea you’ll put into action this week. Connect with Ed on LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/edsoohoo/] Learn More About Ed's Work: [https://it.arizona.edu/person/ed-soo-hoo] Watch the full 2025 Global Leadership Summit here: [https://www.ideagenglobal.com/2025globalleadershipsummit/global-leadership-summit]

What if the missing piece in your biggest initiative isn’t budget or talent—but the story that carries it forward? We sat down with a true DC operator, a chief growth officer building sustainable tech, a global education leader, and a design author to map how courage, narrative, and community turn complex ideas into real outcomes. From the Hill to the boardroom, we break down how to move beyond “policy will happen to us” and into proactive influence: build bipartisan relationships early, frame your idea for the political moment, and give lawmakers a story they can retell to constituents with confidence. On the innovation side, we explore why technology only scales impact when it’s wired to social and environmental value—treating AI and sensors as connective tissue across farmers, consumers, and communities. You’ll also hear a powerful design framework—Play, Design, Tell (PDT)—that replaces fear with curiosity, upgrades “minimum viable” to “maximum valuable,” and turns scattered data into meaning that moves people. We dive into the engine of future leadership: hands-on, multicultural learning. With students from over 100 countries, real-world projects teach perspective, agility, and collaboration—skills that translate directly to coalition-building and systems change. Threaded through every segment is a simple mandate: courage is the fuel, story is the vehicle, and design is the road that keeps you moving toward impact. If you’re ready to turn ideas into policy traction, transform data into narrative, and build innovation that actually serves people and planet, this one’s for you. Subscribe, share with a friend who leads teams or policy, and leave a quick review telling us the one idea you’ll put into practice this week. Connect with our speakers on LinkedIn: [Wendy Atlin] – [https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendy-n-atlin-1528893/] [Joseph Eannello] – [https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-eannello/] [Lyle Sandler] – [https://www.linkedin.com/in/lylesandler/] [Julia Geffner] – [https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-geffner/] Learn More About Their Work: [Wendy Atlin] – [https://accel1.com/] [Joseph Eannello] – [https://capitolcounsel.com/team/joseph-eannello/] [Lyle Sandler] – [https://www.lylesandler.com/] [Julia Geffner] – [https://www.summerdiscovery.com/] Watch the full 2025 Global Leadership Summit here: [https://www.ideagenglobal.com/2025globalleadershipsummit/global-leadership-summit]

Most enterprise knowledge lives in chaos—PDFs, email threads, scans, recordings—and for years that chaos resisted automation. We sit down with Bernard Aceituno, Co-Founder of Stack AI, to unpack how generative models and agentic systems finally tackle the messy 90% of data and convert it into measurable actions. Bernard draws a sharp line between keyword search and real understanding, showing how reasoning traces and tool use enable AI to read, decide, and act—sending the email, filing the claim, extracting the clause, and updating the record. We go deep on what “agentic” really means in plain language: planning steps, choosing tools, and executing with auditable logs. From banks and hospitals to defense and civil engineering, Bernard maps where AI agents are already reducing handle time and error rates across collections, payments, compliance, and business development. He also outlines near-term constraints—accuracy under pressure and context window limits—and how retrieval, external memory, and better infrastructure are closing the gap. The conversation demystifies AGI as a reliability benchmark for specific tasks and frames superintelligence as both a risk and an opportunity frontier, especially in drug discovery and complex research. If you’re wrestling with legacy systems, data silos, or unclear starting points, this episode offers a pragmatic roadmap: target high-friction workflows, layer agents with guardrails, measure outcomes, and expand. Ready to turn unstructured data into operational advantage and move beyond demos to dependable ROI? Follow the show, share with a teammate who owns the process you want to fix, and leave a review with the one task you’d hand to an agent first. Connect with Bernard on LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/baceituno/] Learn More About Bernard's Work: [https://www.stack-ai.com/] Watch the full 2025 Global Leadership Summit here: [https://www.ideagenglobal.com/2025globalleadershipsummit/global-leadership-summit]

A wish on a tiny plush heart became the spark for one of retail’s most unexpected transformations. In this episode, Sharon Price John, President and CEO of Build-A-Bear Workshop, traces how a brand once seen as “mall-bound” reframed its identity around purpose, turned a tactile ritual into a global IP engine, and built the habits to weather everything from the retail apocalypse to a full pandemic shutdown. The throughline is simple: strategy only works when people believe in it, and belief is earned with clarity, courage, and a mission that travels. Sharon shares the pivotal meeting where she laid out an honest trajectory—eight years of contraction and a road to bankruptcy—then invited the team to choose: get on the bus or step off, but no backseat driving. That moment unlocked a new model: Build-A-Bear as a brand-led, experience-rich company with vertical retail, e-commerce, entertainment, and licensing as coordinated streams. We unpack how the “heart ceremony” evolved into stories like Glisten and the Merry Mission, why fans return year after year, and how meaning—not margins alone—guided expansion without losing soul. The conversation also goes inward. Drawing from her book Stories and Heart, Sharon makes a case for rewriting the narratives leaders tell themselves: dismantling perfectionism, flipping negative self-talk, and using setbacks as fuel. The lens widens to the toy industry at large—its role in learning, empathy, and early systems thinking—and the real-world headwinds of tariffs, tight margins, and global interdependence. From $1 a share during COVID to consecutive record years, this episode is a field guide to resilient, purpose-first leadership that audiences can feel. Connect with Sharon on LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharon-price-john-26239820/] Learn More About Sharon's Work: [https://www.buildabear.com/brand-about-story-sharon-price-john.html] Watch the full 2025 Global Leadership Summit here: [https://www.ideagenglobal.com/2025globalleadershipsummit/global-leadership-summit]

A lake that once hosted national games went dry for two decades—and then the skies opened. In this episode, Sanjay Kommera, CEO of Accel1, takes us inside Ramgad’s revival, where precision cloud seeding, advanced sensors, and purpose-built drones transformed a symbol of loss into a living system for water resilience. Alongside the technical journey, we explore how biochar, regenerative practices, and farmer-first marketplaces turn a single rainfall into sustained livelihood gains and healthier soils. Our conversation dives into the “why”: building climate intelligence at the infrastructure layer so action follows insight. We cover the failed first flight, the RF chaos of a 50,000-person crowd, and the regulatory milestone that unlocked 10,000-foot operations. From cloud microphysics and real-time analytics to seeding strategy and verification, we map the chain from sensing to decision to measurable rain. On the ground, invasive biomass is converted into biochar to hold water, reduce inputs, and stabilize yields—because precipitation without retention is just runoff. Zooming out, we explore how governments from the Middle East to Australia are leveraging granular data to guide policy and investment. Practical examples include smart street and traffic lights capturing local pollution, digital rails connecting Indian farmers to international markets, and AI that characterizes cloud fields before a drone ever launches. The goal isn’t magic—it’s probability, readiness, and systems that make better choices cheaper and faster. Ramgad becomes a blueprint for drought-prone regions from California to Africa: integrate atmospheric science, regenerative agriculture, and market access, then iterate with transparency and rigor. If this blend of engineering and stewardship resonates, follow the show, share this story with a friend who cares about water and food security, and leave a review with the one question you want us to tackle next. Connect with Sanjay on LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjay-kommera-37574a10/] Learn More About Sanjay's Work: [https://accel1.com/] Watch the full 2025 Global Leadership Summit here: [https://www.ideagenglobal.com/2025globalleadershipsummit/global-leadership-summit]

A 15-seat burger joint in Soho wasn’t supposed to become a global brand—but it did, thanks to an irresistible product and a story that couldn’t be ignored. In this episode, Julie Mulligan, CEO & Co-Founder of Black Tap Craft Burgers & Beer, sits down with Robert Reiss, Founder & CEO of The CEO Forum, to unpack how an architect’s mindset built a hospitality engine: precise systems, guest-centric design, and a relentless focus on creating “wow” moments. From winning the New York Wine & Food Festival Burger Bash to engineering the now-iconic “Crazy Shakes,” Julie reveals how craft, visuals, and consistency turn a neighborhood idea into a worldwide staple. We dive into the essentials of a great burger—fat content, searing heat, one flip, never press—and why these rules matter when training teams across time zones. Julie walks through the strategy behind iconic locations like The Venetian, Downtown Disney, and Marina Bay Sands, showing how global stages amplify word of mouth and social proof. She shares candid leadership lessons on scaling a family-sized crew into a dispersed organization, knowing when to zoom in on details and when to let trust compound. Julie also introduces Black Tap Singles & Doubles, a fast-casual format built for speed and choice, and Tender Crush, a crispy chicken concept with New York attitude. With all three brands launching at JFK Airport, we explore why airports are the ultimate proving grounds for discovery, operations, and brand love. Connect with our speakers on LinkedIn: [Robert Reiss] – [https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-reiss-ceoshow/] [Julie Mulligan] – [https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-mulligan-barish-3590165/] Learn More About Their Work: [Robert Reiss] – [https://theceoforumgroupinstitute.com/team/robert-reiss-2/] [Julie Mulligan] – [https://blacktap.com/] Watch the full 2025 Global Leadership Summit here: [https://www.ideagenglobal.com/2025globalleadershipsummit/global-leadership-summit]