Melanie Perkins is one of Australia’s most successful digital entrepreneurs. CEO and co-founder of Canva, an online platform which makes graphic design simple for anyone, Melanie and her team have grown the business to over 9 million users worldwide. I visited their offices in Surry Hills, Sydney where we talked about the power of authentic origin stories, disrupting the design industry, the challenges of building an agile culture, and the value of small teams.

What is it that makes us happy, motivated, and full of purpose? Dr Adam Fraser has been studying, writing and speaking about human performance for the last 18 years. We caught up in Sydney to chat about his latest research on what he calls, ‘Human 2.0’, the characteristics of people that thrive in complex environments, and those that fail. Many leaders today demand that their people be more innovative, but are at a loss to describe the exact behaviours that define innovation. For Adam, the key is our approach to struggle. What makes people happy, and ultimately more innovative are not more intangible nouns, but rather providing challenges for your teams to overcome, and opportunities to be creative.

What does it take to create a great culture? If anyone knows, it is Robert Richman. He wrote the book on it, The Culture Blueprint, and after embedding himself at Zappos, co-founded Zappos Insights, the program that helps leaders learn the secrets behind the online shoe company’s game-changing employee culture. Over breakfast at the Mondrian Hotel in West Hollywood, we talked about the system dynamics of what connects people, why great cultures are noisy, how Zappos is able to constantly re-invent itself, creating a startup mentality inside big companies, the power of re-imagining meetings, and why culture is like an operating system.

David Epstein is the New York Times bestselling author of The Sports Gene, an investigative journalist, and a long time contributor for Sports Illustrated where he co-authored the report that Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez had used steroids. He has also been a crime writer, has lived in the Sonoran desert, on a ship in the Pacific Ocean, and in the Arctic. Fortunately, it was in Soho, New York City that I was able to meet up with him where we talked about the intersection of sports and genetics, the physiology of elite athletes, why Kenyans are such great marathon runners, Belgian Blue cattle, the origins of cognitive ability, and how to find the world’s best fighter pilots or bob sled drivers.