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The Most Powerful Force In Business With Marcus Buckingham – This Week’s Thinking With Mitch Joel Conversation

Episode #1042 of Thinking With Mitch Joel is now live.

This conversation with Marcus Buckingham gets into a word that most business leaders rarely use seriously, even if they spend their entire careers trying to create the conditions for it: love. Not love as sentimentality. Not love as corporate wallpaper. Love as a measurable force in performance, engagement, experience and growth. Marcus has spent more than three decades changing how organizations think about people, leadership and work. As one of the pioneers of the strengths movement, his research has shaped millions of managers and helped redefine the conversation around employee engagement and organizational culture. After beginning his career as a researcher at Gallup, he became one of the most influential voices in modern management through books like First, Break All the Rules, Now, Discover Your Strengths, Go Put Your Strengths To Work, Love + Work and many others.

His latest book, Design Love In – How To Unleash The Most Powerful Force In Business, pushes that work into surprising territory.

Marcus argues that love is not simply a personal emotion or a soft ideal. It is one of the most powerful drivers of productive human behavior. The challenge is that most organizations have been designed around transactions, controls, compliance, incentives and efficiency. They measure almost everything except the experiences that make people say, “I love that.” That is where this conversation gets really interesting. Marcus makes the case that leaders are not just managers of people or operators of systems. They are experience-makers. Every policy, meeting, product, service interaction and customer moment either drains energy or creates it. In a world increasingly shaped by AI, automation and surveillance, that human experience layer may become even more important, not less. In this conversation, we talk about why so many organizations have become increasingly transactional, why experience intelligence may soon matter as much as financial or operational intelligence, and why attention, control and harmony shape the way people connect with their work. We also get into AI as a design partner, the interplay between employee love and customer love, and why the future of leadership may depend on designing experiences people can actually care about. Mostly, this is a conversation about one of the least discussed competitive advantages in business. The ability to create work, products, services and experiences that people do not just use, tolerate or comply with… but love.

The episode is now live. Listen to my conversation with Marcus Buckingham here: The Most Powerful Force In Business With Marcus Buckingham – TWMJ #1042.

Before you go… ThinkersOne is a new way for organizations to buy bite-sized and personalized thought leadership video content (live and recorded) from the best Thinkers in the world. If you’re looking to add excitement and big smarts to your meetings, corporate events, company off-sites, “lunch & learns” and beyond, check it out.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.