Talent Matters: “Are you able to tell yourself the truth so you can get to the next stage?”
AJ Thomas is chief chaos officer with Google's secretive innovation lab: X, Moonshot Factory. She talks to Rosanna Cooney about setting personal moonshots and using simple certainties to chart a path through the unknown. Talent Matters is a podcast series digging into some of the biggest issues facing employers today. This series is in association with Talent Summit and sponsored by Employee Financial Wellness.
“The health system doesn’t have the funds or the resources to offer maternity health education”
Brian McGovern has been building businesses since college. Now, he has co-founded The Baby Academy to plug the gap in antenatal and postnatal health education globally. With one million registered users, he talks to Rosanna Cooney about the mercy of failing fast and his philosophy of ambitious frugality.
“Isn’t a government’s primary responsibility the socio-economic welfare of society? Or is it only the economic welfare?”
Through the Aura Holohan Group, Gar Holohan runs the largest health and fitness group in the country. After four decades in the business, he has seen the same mistakes be repeated over and over again. He talks to Rosanna Cooney about flipping the negative attitude to investing in social infrastructure in Ireland.
“A Russian government can’t turn off the wind while it might be able to turn off the tap, so the answer is renewables”
Ronan Doherty was a co-founder of ElectroRoute in 2011 and remains the chief executive of the Letterkenny-headquartered energy trading company following its full acquisition by Mitsubishi last year. The business boasts over 10 per cent of Ireland's electricity supply capacity under management, trading its mostly renewable production across Europe, and is now expanding into Japan. Doherty tells Thomas Hubert why he believes ElectroRoute is an essential cog in the system that will wean us off fossil fuels.
“The price of gas and therefore electricity is falling at the moment. However, it is still unclear as to whether we will have enough gas for next winter”
GridBeyond is an Irish company helping businesses around the world manage their energy input using a combination of consumption management, on-site equipment such as batteries and solar panels, and supplier contracts. Its chief executive Michael Phelan gives Thomas Hubert some tips on how to navigate the volatile electricity market and discusses the impact of the ongoing energy crisis on the much-needed transition to low-carbon power.
“To understand how to secure stable housing for as many people as possible, you want to talk to the providers of it and understand how they make their business decisions”
Meredith Greif is a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, USA. Her work focuses on the symbiotic relationship between tenants and landlords. "The point of my work," she told Sean Keyes in this week's podcast, "is to show that caring about landlords is important because it means caring about tenants. Landlords' behaviour is so consequential that if you want to help the renter, you have to think about what's happening to the landlord. And it's not condoning or looking away from bad landlord behaviour".
“Living in line with your values often means being self-employed”
Seven years ago, Sinead Doherty read the tea leaves and predicted that the future of work would be impermanent, flexible, and based on a contractor model. Her company Fenero, which offers tax and payroll solutions for contractors and freelancers, has since reaped the benefits. In this podcast, she talks to Rosanna Cooney about expanding into India and accountancy's digital transformation.
“The balance between public spending and tax cuts has overwhelmingly been on the side of public spending.”
Theresa Reidy from UCC and Gary Murphy from DCU discuss the last two years of this government as Leo Varadkar returns as Taoiseach and why these years may be the ones that define Varadkar as a politician.
In episode 6 of Energy Matters, Ian Kehoe is joined by Jonah Goldman, founder of North Cascades Strategies, an organisation that works with innovators, advocates, and governments to invest in a net zero future.
Jonah was previously CEO of Breakthrough Energy, a Bill Gates-backed venture designed to accelerate innovation in sustainable energy.
Jonah discusses what needs to be done to reach net zero, what technologies need to be invested in, and where we are falling down on that journey.
This series is sponsored by Pinergy.
“Really, I don’t know bad stories of French investment in Ireland. They’ve always been quite successful”
French businessman Richard Dujardin lived in Ireland for eight years and won the first operating contract for the Luas. He now chairs NetworkIrlande, the cross-border business group that recently held an awards ceremony in Paris to highlight companies taking part in the current boom in trade and investment between the two countries. Thomas Hubert was there and he spoke with Dujardin as well as two of the winners, Danone Ireland’s managing director Killian Barry and Martin O’Donnell, commercial director with the ag-tech start-up Terra NutriTech. They discussed silver linings from Brexit, shifting export patterns and perceptions between the France and Ireland – as well as the value of the Irish pub to business diplomacy.
“You have to imagine that building, it was like being in prison and everyone wanted to get out”
David Donoghue headed the Irish side of the Anglo-Irish secretariat. His book One Good Day details the negotiations and tensions on the way to the Good Friday Agreement. In this podcast, he talks to Dion Fanning about how the personalties were as important as the policy, as well as the threats made on his own life.
