The Bending Steel Podcast: Conversations with Leaders Shaping the Future with Dr. Antonio Oftelie

In this season-closing episode of The Bending Steel Podcast, Dr. Antonio Oftelie is joined by colleague Lauren Hirshon to reflect on the leadership lessons that defined 2025 and to celebrate a year of learning alongside leaders from across sectors. Drawing on insights from The Public Safety Summit, The Human Services Summit, The Supply Chain & Operations Reinvention Summit, and The Kresge NextGen Frontline Innovators cohort, the conversation highlights a shared reality leaders faced throughout the year: extraordinary pressure to improve outcomes, build trust, and lead change amid sustained uncertainty.The episode distills the season’s insights into an encouraging leadership framework centered on sensing the future, building organizational capabilities, evolving culture, and strengthening personal leadership capacity as the force that brings it all together. Through hopeful, real-world examples, the conversation emphasizes progress, possibility, and the discipline of action in uncertain times. As the season comes to a close, the conversation invites leaders to reflect on what has been learned, what has changed, and what it will take to sustain momentum in the year ahead.

In a time marked by relentless volatility, rising uncertainty, and a sense of “perma-crisis,” leaders are searching for ways to stay steady, clear-headed, and connected to what truly matters. Today’s challenges demand not just sharper strategic thinking, but also deeper emotional grounding. It’s not just the mind, but the heart that has to lead.In this episode, Harvard Business School professor and historian Dr. Nancy Koehn joins host Dr. Antonio Oftelie to bring these concepts to life. Drawing from her book Forged in Crisis and her research on figures like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and civil rights figures, Dr. Koehn shares how great leaders confronted turbulence, grew their capacity in real time, and guided others through uncertainty. Together, they reflect on practical approaches for cultivating resilience, communicating with honesty and hope, and sustaining oneself while offering grounded insight for anyone striving to exercise leadership today.

Artificial intelligence is moving rapidly from promise to practice — no longer just a potential tool, but a true partner in how organizations operate. Supply chains, once considered back-office cost centers, are now at the forefront of strategy, resilience, and growth. Together, AI and supply chain reinvention are reshaping how companies adapt to disruption, make smarter investments, and prepare talent for the future.On this episode, Patty Riedl, Managing Director – North America Supply Chain and Operations Lead at Accenture, shares her perspective from the front lines of this transformation. She explores how AI can function as a teammate to human leaders, what it means to build adaptive and autonomous supply chains, and the skills leaders need to thrive in this new landscape. From preparing the next generation of supply chain talent to reimagining boardroom conversations, Patty offers both a vision of what’s coming and practical insights leaders can act on today.

In this episode, we explore what it takes to launch and sustain a high-stakes transformation inside a global company with our guest: Tamer Abuaita, Global Chief Supply Chain Officer and President of Industrial at Stanley Black & Decker. Tamer shares his experience leading a team of more than 33,000 employees on spearheading one of the most ambitious supply chain overhauls in the company’s history, while balancing the demands of operational excellence today with the vision required to build the supply chain of the future.This transformation began at a moment of crisis. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, Stanley Black & Decker was struggling to meet demand, prompting new CEO Don Allan to call for sweeping change. He made clear that without a bold reinvention of the supply chain, the company’s broader goals—simplification, innovation, and stronger customer relationships—would be out of reach. Tamer reflects on how he and his team responded, the progress they’ve made, and the pressures they now face as they navigate an increasingly uncertain global landscape.

In this episode, we sit down with Mayor Tim Keller to explore how Albuquerque became a national leader in public safety transformation. Confronted with a federal consent decree over police misconduct and the urgent calls for change following the 2020 social justice movement, Keller and his team launched the Albuquerque Community Safety (ACS) department — a first-of-its-kind initiative that sends trained, non-police responders to behavioral health, homelessness, and substance use crises.Mayor Keller shares how his team reimagined what was possible, took bold risks, and built an entirely new model of emergency response — all while maintaining day-to-day city operations. This candid conversation reveals the challenges, breakthroughs, and lessons from one city’s ambitious effort to redefine public safety.

In this special kickoff episode of Bending Steel, host Dr. Antonio Oftelie flips the script and becomes the guest. Interviewed by longtime collaborator Lauren Hirshon — Director of Learning and Development at Leadership for a Networked World at Harvard — the two explore the vision behind the podcast and why now is the time for bold ideas in the public and social sectors.Together, they reflect on the urgent need for new frameworks, principles, and leadership tools in a world teetering between potential progress and persistent challenges. This introductory episode sets the tone for the season ahead — one designed to help leaders navigate complexity and drive meaningful change.

Leading a ground-up transformation is hard. Coming into an organization and doing it as an outsider is even harder. The challenge of forging relationships, understanding the community, and fostering a change in culture and mission is difficult enough when the stakeholders know you. That challenge when you’re a newcomer? Monumental. Yet that’s exactly where this episode’s guest found herself.In this episode, we’re talking with Dr. Cynthia Croom, Executive Director of the Metro Action Commission (MAC) in Nashville, Tennessee. Dr. Coom was charged with turning MAC around, and to “break the cycle of poverty in our community.” Cynthia and all the people in the organization had to reinvent their services and programs, collaborate in new ways, and most importantly – grow their capacity to sustain long-term innovation and change.

Breakthrough outcomes often need a catalyst – a way to see not only challenges on the horizon, but also solutions that will make the world better. A case in point is the “Live Well San Diego” initiative in San Diego County California, which helped officials respond to the COVID-19 pandemic in novel ways and created a platform to improve equity and health in the future. In this episode, we’ll learn from Nick Macchione, Director of Health and Human Services for San Diego County, about his leadership experience during the pandemic, and how he and other leaders built the systems, structures, and overall collaboration of the Live Well San Diego Initiative.

Evolving an organization is easier said than done. The noise and distraction of a highly changeable and uncertain environment can make it a challenge to get much done at all, let alone stay focused on what matters or create new ways of doing things. As a leader, how can you harness this moment to drive positive change? How do you bring everyone—employees, customers, partners—along on that growth journey?In this episode of the Chief Growth Officer Podcast Anaplan CEO Frank Calderoni, and Adobe CFO John Murphy discuss how to keep a company moving forward in a period where the safe play appears to be waiting out the storm.  These two transformational leaders share their tools and strategies to ensure their organizations continue on a successful trajectory.

Growth is one thing. Purposeful growth another. Can the two be linked? And what does it take to move not only an established firm but also its people to embrace the required change?  One thing is certain – it’s not easy. Can we learn how to approach purposeful growth by applying lessons learned from a top innovator?In this episode of the Chief Growth Officer Podcast, Adobe CFO John Murphy discusses how he and his colleagues stay innovative by systematically working with customers to learn and sense what’s on the horizon, moving ideas through a framework that shakes out the winners from the losers, and harmonizing the organization’s capabilities and culture in order to best deliver results. 

The world is constantly changing and at a rapidly accelerating rate.  And a breakthrough technological transformation can quickly propel an organization into the future expanding its growth and financial capital exponentially.  How does a company continuously balance the need to drive innovation while at the same time managing the risk? How does a leader of an organization create the culture necessary to embrace rapid change? In this episode of the Chief Growth Officer Podcast, Don Allan, Executive Vice President and CFO of Stanley Black & Decker discusses the importance of the CFO as a Chief Transformation Officer.  He shares his thoughts on moving innovation along not only internally but also through partnerships and ecosystems. He discusses how his special forces teams are working to accelerate innovation while balancing both current and future demand. 

Leaders often need to shape their mission while balancing the demands of stakeholders, building a team that embodies this mission and ensuring the outcomes they seek remain in focus.  For over 20 years, the mission of Joe Jones, Founder and CEO of the Center for Urban Families (CFUF), has been to invest in the whole family. His overarching goal has been to lift up and empower fathers and to ensure that they are receiving the guidance and resources they need to become and remain an integral part of their family. In this insightful podcast, Joe candidly shares his vision to “dismantle poverty” and opens up about some of the challenges he’s faced, barriers he’s had to break through and the valuable lessons he’s learned along the way. 

To effectively build capacity for future challenges and opportunities, leaders must often seek out new ways to co-create solutions through partnerships with other organizations, coalitions, and network-building. This form of collaboration is a keystone of Catalyst Miami, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to build social and economic mobility for individuals and families in Miami-Dade County.In this podcast, Catalyst Miami CEO, Gretchen Beesing, opens up about the strides she’s made leading the organization, as well as how the organization is looking to take on the impact and inequities of climate change. Gretchen shares the organization’s unique approach to co-creating policy and outcome goals for the community and building a robust platform of services for the future. 

A major pivot in any organization takes time and unwavering commitment.  And it takes adaptive leadership to create an environment that can start and sustain transformation.In this podcast episode, Kirsten Lodal, founder and former CEO of LIFT shares leadership insights on the organization’s transformational journey.  Kirsten started LIFT, a national nonprofit organization that works to break the cycle of poverty for young families, in 1996. As the organization evolved and grew over a decade, they wanted to improve their outcomes and impact – particularly around racial equity. As a result, Kirsten took a hard look at LIFT’s mission, practice model, and organizational design, and with her team built a model for the future.

Organizational transformation is a tall order in today’s turbulent world. In policing, it’s even more challenging. Yet, there are powerful examples of progress that show how leaders can create an environment for innovation and guide people and stakeholders through to successful transformation.In this episode of the Chief Growth Officer Podcast, Scott Thomson, former police chief of Camden, New Jersey shares his unique perspective on what it takes to move a policing organization through phases of innovation and change, and how lessons learned can be applied to organizations of all types. His insights and experience will spark responses to the following questions:How do you balance responding to urgent daily needs, while creating a new organization?Are there ways to pace innovation so that people and teams can sustain progress?How can you build a new mindset and culture over time?What do leaders need to do to prepare themselves?