All in Career

Life-Sparring Podcast - Round 13: Prof. Elizabeth George & Prof. Prithviraj “Raja” Chattopadhyay - Identity (Re-)Search

Round 13 of the Life-Sparring Podcast is an ambitious one. With Professor Elizabeth George and Professor Prithviraj Chattopadhyay, I face not just one but two academic heavyweights in the virtual Life-Sparing ring, and our topic is nothing less than the eternal question “Who Am I.”

As Professors of Management, both Elizabeth and Raja have spent large parts of their professional lives researching and teaching what makes organizations run. The social and personal identity of employees is a recurring theme of their research. In our almost one-hour-long discussion, we cover many aspects of Elizabeth’s and Raja’s Identity (Re-)Search.

How to define identity? What role does identity play in our lives? How does Social Media or working from home influence our identities? These and a lot of other questions we are trying to answer in our discussion.

Life-Sparring Podcast - Round 9: Fabian - Shadowboxing April 2021 - The Ring

Shadowboxing rounds are solo episodes, where I, Life-Sparring host Fabian Gruber share “what’s On and Poppin” in my life, what current books provide “Food for Thought,” and what else is going on. No interviews, just a bit of solo rambling and occasionally some bad singing.

In this round of Life-Sparring Shadowboxing: truly awful singing and an attempt to explain it, a first review of the Oura Ring health monitor and reviews of Laura Huang’s book “Edge” and the late Clayton M. Christensen’s book “Competing Against Luck.”

Life-Sparring Podcast - Round 8: Simon Klaiber - Are You OKR?

OKRs, Objectives and Key Results - After the Life-Sparring Podcast has been heavy on health and fitness topics recently, it is time for an exciting business and personal productivity round.

Our guest, Simon Klaiber, is not just a successful business agility consultant and coach from Frankfurt, Germany; he also runs two Podcasts (in German) on business and personal agility. In episode 21 of his Personal Agility Podcast, Simon shared his experience using OKRs for personal goal setting.

Introduced initially at Intel in the late 1970s, early 1980s by then legendary CEO Andy Grove, OKRs were later popularized by Intel staffer turned private equity investor John Doerr. Doerr brought OKRs to the young team at Google and several other Silicon Valley start-ups, from where the concept diffused into the broader tech industry.

Today OKRs are a widely used method to set goals for an organization and create alignment, transparency, and accountability across different corporate levels.

Together Simon and Fabian explore the advantages and pitfalls of OKRs and how a tool originally designed for big corporations can be helpful to achieve your personal goals.

Life-Sparring Podcast - Round 3: Fabian - Shadowboxing January 2021

The first two rounds of the Life-Sparring Podcast were well received, but a few listeners' feedback was that they wanted to hear more from me, the host, and not just from the guests. Be careful, what you ask for, your wishes might come true. Here we go with the first solo shadowboxing round. Topics covered in this round: Story of Life-Sparring, Clubhouse, Urine Analysis, Keto Diet, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.