Beyond the Case
A podcast where global leaders from the Harvard Business School Owner/President Management (OPM) community join in a personal capacity and share the real decisions, failures, and mental models behind building enduring companies. This podcast is independent and not affiliated with Harvard Business School.
Episodes
A single sentence from his mother "If you go to the US, you may never come back… and it may be too late” rerouted Pramod Maheshwari’s life. In that moment, ambition met responsibility. He stayed back in Kota, not with a grand plan, but with a quiet resolve to honor relationships and make his choice worth it. What followed is a story of turning uncertainty into purpose and a relentless commitment to excellence tha...
What if you could hear, firsthand, from an international sportsperson about the emotional journey that follows a loss?
Not loss as failure, but loss as a teacher: the kind that strips away ego, demands honesty, and forces you to confront your preparation, your mindset, and your emotional control. Hari Kiran has lived this cycle—on the badminton court, on global stages, and in the unforgiving world of regulated industri...
Jeff Cronkshaw doesn’t talk about leadership in theory — he talks about it 40 meters underwater, in zero visibility, when failure isn’t abstract and panic kills.
Across this conversation, Jeff draws a powerful parallel between scuba diving and entrepreneurship: both place you in inherently risky environments where control is an illusion, preparation is everything, and calm is a leadership obligation. You don’t discover...
Optimism isn’t just a personality trait in this episode - it’s a discipline. Gustavo Reichmann frames life as forward motion: the future should feel bigger than the past, even as you age. He credits that mindset to watching his 95-year-old grandmother still think about what’s ahead, and to the kind of “dream big” mentality that shaped his career. It’s a reflective throughline for everything else he shares: reinventing...
Hoffman Media, a founder-led niche media company, raised private equity capital in the mid-2000s to fund acquisitions and organic growth. The firm entered the 2008 financial crisis with a PE partner holding a large minority stake (~40%+) and remained investor-backed for eight years.
By 2012, the typical PE-backed outcome would have been a full sale or recapitalization allowing founders to take liquidity and move on. Ma...
Vishwajeet Vishnu’s journey isn’t built on privilege, pedigree, or perfect timing. It’s built on persistence.
Forced to drop out of college after 12th grade due to financial hardship, Vishwajeet entered the workforce early and educated himself the hard way through books, workshops, lived experience, and relentless curiosity. Over the years, he read hundreds of books and sought mentors to avoid mistakes he couldn’t affo...
He wasn’t supposed to be an entrepreneur—at least not by design.
Sameer Jain never set out with a business plan or the intention to build a company. After experimenting with the early internet in India he quietly bootstrapped Net Solutions into a global services firm. Sameer shares how HBS OPM reshaped the way he thinks about data, decisions, and growth—and why he now believes that success, more than failure, can be th...
Orit Pollak is a second-generation industrial leader based in Peru and a participant in Harvard Business School’s OPM 67 program. She leads her family’s manufacturing group, including Rayemsa, one of Peru’s main manufacturers of 200-liter steel drums, and a second factory focused on natural colors, ingredients, and spray-dried powder products. Born in Peru to Eastern European parents who survived World War II and comm...
“You don’t have to ask a hero where she comes from—you have to understand how she thinks.”
Carolyn Deng’s journey is shaped less by titles or geography and more by the evolution of her judgment. Raised in China’s highly disciplined education system, she developed rigor, endurance, and respect for structure. At Harvard, she encountered a different intellectual model—one that rewarded independent thinking, pattern recogn...
“The best feedback a parent can ever get is when a child says: I want to be like my mom or dad.”
Shailu Tipparaju says this knowing his sons still tease him for being “boring” and overly philosophical — yet they’re inspired enough that their friends follow the same values they see lived at home. That tension between teasing and imitation defines how Shailu thinks about leadership: people don’t follow what you say, they...
India’s business ecosystem is undergoing a profound reset. Failure is no longer viewed as a lasting stigma for entrepreneurs, private equity has firmly entered the capital stack, and regulatory reforms have steadily improved the ease of doing business. At the same time, public sector banks remain cautious, politically sensitive “hot potatoes,” limiting risk-taking and the development of a deep restructuring market.
“Rumi says you have to live life like it’s rigged in your favor.”
For Faisal Charania, that mindset is inseparable from his belief that small business in America is the best business in the world. As he puts it, small businesses generate ~70% of U.S. GDP, a level of economic diversification that every other country is trying—and failing—to replicate.
This episode explores how that conviction shaped Faisal’s journey...
After 19 episodes of Beyond the Case, it finally happened - someone from OPM 67 actually said “BATNA” out loud. (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement)
More importantly, this conversation is crucial listening for young entrepreneurs and business owners who rarely get early exposure to the mindset behind selling a business. Most founders focus on building and scaling, but very few are taught how to think about exit...
Grant Collard, Founder and CEO of Redstone Residential, shares his unconventional journey into entrepreneurship and real estate. Raised in a non-entrepreneurial environment, Grant initially pursued pre-med before realizing his true interests lay in building, finance, and independence. He entered real estate just before the 2008 financial crisis, experienced job loss, and started Redstone in 2009 while broke, living in...
Iman Mutlaq is a self-made, belief-driven, high-agency leader whose identity was forged by early responsibility, sustained by discipline, and expressed through fearless execution - without waiting for permission from culture, circumstance, or convention.
What makes Iman especially rare is not just that she built a global business, but that she is now choosing to disrupt it from a position of strength.
What happens when a founder steps away early and the next generation is handed responsibility without a roadmap? Jaber Abdul Wahab, Group CEO of the diversified Bridgeway Group, talks about leading a global family business not as a traditional second-generation heir, but as a “1.5-generation leader.”
Founded in 1974 as a trading company, Bridgeway expanded across unrelated industries— logistics, education, real estate,...
This episode opens with an unfiltered conversation about entrepreneurial burnout, mental health, and the deep loneliness of building companies—a place nearly every entrepreneur has found themselves at some point, even if few speak about it openly. Michael Jang Parker, founder and CEO of Illumen, shares how the relentless pressure of entrepreneurship pushed him into severe burnout and hospitalization, forcing him to co...
One important question didn’t make it into the conversation: why do doctors have such bad handwriting? After hearing Ritika’s journey, the best explanation seems to be that when someone spends their life healing faces as a maxillofacial surgeon, building hospitals, raising a family, and leading thousands of people, perfect handwriting simply isn’t high on the priority list.
In this episode of Beyond the Case, Ritika Kh...
Sam Patel, founder of Astra Culture & Looped shares that storytelling isn’t marketing fluff - it’s how people emotionally decide to buy. He is a Chicago-based MD/MBA who built and scaled multiple medical clinics (eventually reaching 12 locations) before shifting toward consulting and healthcare software.
Patel traces his “builder” identity to his immigrant parents’ entrepreneurship and emphasizes that real learnin...
Born and educated in China, MiuMiu Miao's university major, computer science was assigned by the Chinese government, not chosen by her. By her second year, she realized it wasn’t her path, dropped out, and discovered her true calling through an internship in international trade. That decision set her on a journey to build Baobabtrees - a multi-million-dollar, cross-border supply chain business spanning Africa, Eu...
Popular Podcasts
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by Audiochuck Media Company.
Two Guys (Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers). Five Rings (you know, from the Olympics logo). One essential podcast for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. Bowen Yang (SNL, Wicked) and Matt Rogers (Palm Royale, No Good Deed) of Las Culturistas are back for a second season of Two Guys, Five Rings, a collaboration with NBC Sports and iHeartRadio. In this 15-episode event, Bowen and Matt discuss the top storylines, obsess over Italian culture, and find out what really goes on in the Olympic Village.