People with a best friend at work are *seven times* more likely to be engaged in their jobs. Yet most leaders spend zero budget, zero strategy, and zero intentional effort on workplace friendships.

Tom Rath has done the research to understand the power of friendship at work, and how leaders can better foster it.

Topic Highlights:

– Why Gallup's employee engagement prompt "I have a best friend at work" is its most predictive

– The exact number of close relationships we actually need, despite high-achievers chronically under-building this number

– Why Tom thinks his book about work friendships is his worst seller

– The psychological barrier that’s creating a friendship recession for men in midlife

– The "one coffee pot in the office" approach to designing workplaces that create connection

Guest Bio:

Tom Rath is a workplace researcher, author, and one of the most widely-read voices on human wellbeing of the last two decades, with over 10 million books sold worldwide.

Episode Links:

Books by Tom Rath

The Start-Up of You by Reid Hoffman

True North by Bill George & Peter Sims

Little Bets by Peter Sims

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Here’s a scorching hot take: modern workplaces make it nearly impossible for employees to forge real connections. But according to third space culture expert Adam Tanaka, it’s not the connections themselves that are impossible – it’s the space where they’re (not) happening in.

So we took this episode into a wood-fired Finnish sauna pop-up on the Brooklyn waterfront to test his theory.

Topic Highlights:

– The power of physical space design to create real human connection

– The case for wellness as infrastructure, not luxury

– What the "dinner party rule of six" tells us about why most meetings and offsites fail

– The analog advantage: why real human experience offers an exponential premium in an AI-saturated world

Guest Bio:

Adam Tanaka is the COO of Therme Group US, a global wellness infrastructure company. Adam holds a PhD in urban planning.

Episode Links:

Therme Group

Culture of Bathing (Substack)

Building a park in the sky (Robbie Hammond’s TED Talk)

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No one loves a genuine truth bomb more than kids – unfiltered, no social contract, no concern for how it will land.

Ginny McCormick has spent her career figuring out what that kind of radical honesty, and the play that produces it, can teach the rest of us.

Turns out the principles that work in the playroom work just as well in the boardroom. We just forgot them somewhere along the way.

Topic Highlights:

– Why "clarity always wins over complexity"

– The "first pancake" ritual: a team practice for normalizing failure that actually works

– Why structured gamification at work is inauthentic and what real play actually looks like in an adult environment

– What children's unfiltered feedback reveals about the feedback loops most organizations are missing

– The one parenting skill that every leader should be stealing right now

Guest Bio:

Ginny McCormick is the Chief Experience Officer (CXO) at tonies, a screen-free children's audio platform operating in over 100 markets globally. She is a veteran of Disney, Mattel, and Hasbro.

Episode Links:

tonies

Play by Stuart Brown

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