Hear me share on Paul Smith’s Lead With a Story podcast how the company I co-founded, Submedia, locked me out of the office as the final nail of ousting me.
More precisely, after ousting me from the CEO position, owing to Submedia’s running out of money — I won’t argue it being a fair reason to switch CEOs — the new team moved offices and didn’t give me a key to the new one. There’s more to the story and it took me over a decade to share it openly, to the extent I can share it.
Paul Smith brought the story out from me in the episode of his podcast. If you enjoy hearing inside stories of a grown man brought to tears (not in the episode but in that period of my life), you’ll enjoy the episode.
From the show notes:
Joshua Spodek has five Ivy League degrees, including a Ph.D. in physics and an MBA from Columbia, is a bestselling author, and a professor at NYU.
So, of course he had to try his hand at entrepreneurship as well. And one of his first attempts was both a huge business success, but at the same time a bitter personal failure — a failure he didn’t truly recognize until his new investors decided to move the company to a new building, and didn’t give him a key.
That kind of rude awakening is bound to lead to some serious introspection and, hopefully, some lessons to learn from it. And that’s exactly what Josh did.
In my podcast this week, Josh joined me to share the story of that rude awakening and some of the lessons he learned from it, much of which is summarized in his new book, Initiative: A Proven Method to Bring Your Passions to Life (and Work).
Click the play button above to listen. And you can find out more about Josh and his work at joshuaspodek.com.
Click these links to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or Stitcher, or Podbean.
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Paul Smith is one of the world’s leading experts on business storytelling. He’s a keynote speaker, storytelling coach, and bestselling author.
Connect with him via email here.