The Lost Art of Disagreeing Agreeably: Van Jones on Modern Workplace Culture | S3 E1

Welcome to Workplace Weirdness Season 3! 

Maya Kadar Kovalsky kicks off the season with a special guest, VAN JONES, a political commentator, social entrepreneur, CNN host, Emmy Award-winning producer, bestselling author, and founder of Dream Machine Innovation Lab and Rapport.  

Join a fascinating conversation about working across radically different environments, from the rules of working in the White House to Silicon Valley to the future of AI in the workplace. Van and Maya explore why psychological strength matters more than psychological safety and why the best managers need better tools to navigate a diverse, distributed, and divided workforce.

If you manage people, lead teams, or just want to understand how humans actually work together, this episode is packed with practical insight and motivation.

Chapters:

00:00 - Disagreeing agreeably

04:28 - Workplace slogans: Keep It, Kill It, or Fix It 

09:47 - Can we be apolitical at work?

14:41 - Psychological safety versus psychological strength

18:18 - The three D workplace: diverse, distributed, divided

19:55 - Why Rapport exists and what problem it solves

25:47 - Why managers need help interpreting people data