Adi Ignatius

speaker

699 appearances 13 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 5d ago

Adi Ignatius’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 5.

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HBR IdeaCast · What It Takes to Make Progress When the Future Feels Out of Control · 15 Sep 2026 podcast

Agency, The Psychological History of Human Progress.

Here's our conversation.

So I love the ideas you're exploring in the book about agency, about progress.

I also want to talk about how businesses and individuals can think about and apply these findings.

But, you know, let's start with agency.

Agency

So if you define agency as you did, it's efficacy, optimism, and imagination.

If you were advising a CEO, which of those three do you think organizations are most deficient in?

So, you know, this has profound implications

how do leaders encourage optimism without, you know, creating a culture of sort of unreal, unrealistic confidence or wishful thinking that is also uncalled for?

So if you were in charge of, let's say, redesigning a corporation specifically to maximize the kind of human agency that can lead to progress, what would you change?

How would you think about this organizationally?

I want to get back to the question of how you set up organizations that can achieve the right level of agency.

You know, this is a question that companies face all the time.

To what extent do you empower people

You talked about hiring the right people and trying to make them less pessimistic, teaching them to be less pessimistic and to see possibilities.

But there are also some basic questions about what is the right level of agency to – people look to leaders to provide answers, but it may be that a leader's most important job is

is really to make other people feel they can affect outcomes, that they have that kind of agency.

So how do you think about that interplay between, you know, the agency of the leader versus empowering people at all levels to have that same kind of agency?

How do you, I mean, at some level it's the paradox of management.

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