We had Mark Mirra on the podcast this week and within minutes he dropped a hot take. Mark runs a negotiation training firm called Aligned. He works with companies, training teams across functions like sales, procurement, and leadership on how to approach negotiation more strategically. His hot take: Preparation is overrated. Which is a bold thing to say when he literally teaches preparation for a living. But he’s not saying wing it. He’s saying people hide behind preparation because it feels...

Hi friends, This week on Gentle Power (YouTube | Spotify | Apple), we sat down with Kenko Ueyama, cofounder of Tsubasa AI, an AI advisory agency that helps enterprise companies figure out their AI strategy and then helps them build it. Kenko is also a senior advisor at Harvard’s Applied AI Institute, helping create AI course material and run workshops that trains executives on how to lead companies in the age of AI. Our conversation spanned Kenko’s long career, from his early days working at...

Hi friends, In one of our recent podcast episodes (YouTube | Spotify | Apple), I (Alex) pointed something out that Gerta does frequently. When we were chatting on the podcast about negotiating rent, hotels, or flights, we were recounting Gerta’s call with a hotel’s customer service rep while I was sitting nearby overhearing the conversation. I then noticed a small move that Gerta does almost every time on these calls. At some point during her calls with customer support, Gerta will ask the...