Here’s a full and frank declaration: Andrea J Lee’s one of my very favourite people on the planet. She’s as funny as she is generous as she is smart as she is innovative. She’s been hanging out at the edge of coaching and also what it means to be a thought leader for as long as I’ve know her.

She was the COO of CoachVille, then the largest coaching community in the world. She’s written several books, the most recent being Money, Meaning and Beyond. She runs large events engaging people on the quest to be a thought-leader and a successful entrepreneur. And she’s constantly practicing what she preaches as she reinvents herself and her business time and time again.

In our time together we chat about:

• How the Tiananeman Square protests – Andrea was in China at the time – helped awake one of the deepest choices about Great Work
• The power of ‘galvanizing energy’ – and how to find it
• An inspirational insight from Buckminster Fuller that will help you play your life out fully
• And why cleanliness is so much more than a good bar of soap

The doorway to her various enterprises – including her blog – is www.AndreaJLee.com and you can follow her on Twitter at @andreajlee

Listen to my interview with Andrea J Lee

Be real.

Be whole.

Be innovative.

That’s the essence of Total Leadership, and Stew Friedman is the man behind it and the best-selling book of the same title. He’s been at the forefront of evolution of leadership thinking (and being) for more than twenty year as senior faculty at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. And he’s honed his thoughts on leadership by spending time as the Director of Ford’s Leadership Develop Centre.

In our conversation we chat about:

• The “Jerry Maguire” moment in his own career, when leadership become critical
• The importance of managing the boundaries
• Why deciding who matters is one of the secrets to “being whole”

You can learn more about Stew and his work at www.TotalLeadership.org.

Listen to my interview with Stewart Friedman

I’m a big fan of Matt May’s book, In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing. It speaks to my belief that design is an increasingly critical element of everything we do. Not just for those of us in the “creative” industries, but for all of us in all we do. With so much stuff everywhere – content is free – it is through design and elegance we find solutions and create value…and do Great Work.

Matt’s first award-winning book was called The Elegant Solution, and was written after many years advising Toyota on business design and helping build Toyota University. He now spends much of his time advising corporations on how to build in elegance and design into the work that they do.

In our conversation we talk about:

• The important difference between basic vanilla simplicity and elegant simplicity
• Why you need a “To Not Do” list
• How to find the sweet spot between your skills and the challenge at hand
• And what drives Tiger Woods to succeed. (Yes, we did this interview Before The Scandal)

You can follow Matt on Twitter at @MatthewEMay and at his website www.InPursuitOfElegance.com.

Listen to my interview with Matt May

Honest Tea is not your typical beverage company. Yes, they’re the biggest seller of organic tea drinks in the US. But more interesting for me is how they got there. This is one of those “blue ocean” stories where the founders asked themselves, “What do we need to do that’s different to stand out and flourish?” I’m lucky to be speaking to one of those founders today. Seth Goldman founded Honest Tea back in 1998 with Professor Barry Nalebuff of the Yale School of Management. And in the last ten years they’ve had nothing but success. They’ve had about a 66% annual compound growth, and in 2008, Coca Cola purchased a minority interest in the company so that they’re able to get better distribution around the country.

Seth graduated Harvard in ’87, the Yale School of Management in ’95, he won Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year for the Mid-Atlantic region, and was also running his company. He  founded Bethesda Green which is a local sustainability initiative helping convert grease waste from restaurants into biodiesel.

We talk about:

• Seth’s surprise to find himself an entrepreneur and a champion of sustainable business
• The basic calculation that allowed him to take the leap to begin Honest Tea
• The dynamic of his partnership with his co-founder – and why being so different is so important
• The impact on their reputation of selling part of the company to Coca-Cola as a feisty independant.

You can read more about the company at www.HonestTea.com and on Twitter at @honesttea

Listen to my interview with Seth Goldman

I came across Chris Guillebeau when I stumbled across his terrific (and free) ebook, A Brief Guide to World Domination.  Since we recorded this interview, he’s released another fantastic (and free) ebook 279 Days to Overnight Success and continues to write a great blog on his website, The Art of Non-Conformity.  But what’s most impressive is that Chris is absolutely clear about what a good life means to him – and stands as an impressive role model on how to live that authentic, exciting and generous life.

I’m totally chuffed that Chris wrote an original piece for Do More Great Work.

In this interview you’ll hear:

• How the crisis that sparked his Great Work set the foundation for future success
• What Chris learned about focus from the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami
• What Chris’s bad habit is – and how he manages it
• An approach for setting goals

This interview is approximately 25 minutes long.

Listen to the interview with Chris Guillebeau