It’s December of 2024, and what a year this has been for The bluEPrint Podcast!
This time last year we were celebrating our first year as a regular weekly podcast, and our YouTube Channel was only a few months old. We were very proud, and we put together two ‘best of’ collections in 2023 to showcase interviews we wanted to give people another chance to enjoy that they may have missed the first time around.
Now as 2024 draws to a close we look back at more than 100 new episodes —almost all of them in both video and audio formats— and we are in the process of transitioning even further from a twice-a-week format to publishing as much as we can as soon as we can.
We have content relevant to all of our industry events, and we even did some interviews that speak to larger business topics not on any particular program or agenda at the moment.
In all the excitement, we never got around to doing a 2024 retrospective, but just before we take a well-deserved break before gearing up for 2025, now feels like the right time to look back and shine a spotlight on some of the episodes we are still thinking about and talking about and sharing with people.
Let’s start by celebrating all of this year’s Speaker Roundtable episodes in this related post, freeing us up to highlight interviews here.
As we mentioned last time, there really isn’t one valid set of criteria for which interviews we should include. We especially want to avoid taking our episodes and trying to prune things to fit a ‘Top Ten’ or what-have-you where things would be on or off the list for the sake of having enough contrast between what we want to share again.
Instead, we will use three reasonable guidelines: First, the conversation has to have been published this year. Second, a reasonable yardstick for greatness is, “Have we sent this to upcoming interviews as an example?” That quickly sets the standouts apart. Finally, if the point of this list is to give further attention to some of the work of which we are most proud, why not make a point of focusing on the interviews we have mentioned to friends and family outside work?
Recent. Excellent examples. Worth Sharing even outside our working life.
Even then, we had to make some tough choices to keep this list down to a reasonable length. Here’s the twelve we most want to share again with you. We hope you enjoy them!
IKEA US’s Forward-Thinking Talent Attraction, Development, and Retention in a Time of Rapid Growth
(We have had a lot of great conversations about how companies think about talent attraction, development, management, and retention. IKEA’s example is something every company should be interesting in learning about and thinking about deeply.)
(For this interview we read Data-Driven Talent Management and then interviewed the author, an active-duty Colonel in the U.S. Army whose work can be applied to any large organization.)
(While we always enjoy speaking to experts onsite at our events —and we did another episode with Paul later in the year in person— sometimes the virtual interview is the best way to do it for any number of reasons. This may be our favorite virtual interview with a service or solution provider in 2024, and it is absolutely the example we will use as we line up more in 2025.)
Cynthia Kaiser of the FBI — Updates on the Evolving Cyber Landscape
(In the run-up to NAISS24 we interviewed the FBI’s Deputy Assistant Director, Cyber Division. How can you have a retrospective on 2024 and not include something this episode?)
(Compliance Architects is one of our favorite consulting groups to interview because of the breadth and depth of issues and ideas they work on in the Life Sciences. The biopharmaceutical space is so incredibly exciting right now, and Teresa Gorecki’s enthusiasm is irresistible. Even if you work outside the space, this episode is worth your time if only to give you a sense of the promising future of medicine coming into sharp focus.)
(This interview is a great example of the sort of content relevant to every senior executive in our network that we would probably never build into one of our agendas because it is not industry-specific enough. In podcast format, it is a wonderful piece of content everyone should take something valuable away from and apply to their own working lives.)
(This episode stands out in our mind as perhaps the best example of what sounds like a very specific topic that turned into an incredibly interesting conversation with a subject matter expert who more people should have access to, which of course is one of the great things about running a podcast. For a great example of someone making the technical understandable and bringing clarity to a complex concept, give this interview a listen!)
(We could do another whole retrospective on interviews that touched on AI. In this one we sought out an expert at the very forefront of making AI a reality in both business and academic contexts and let him tell us in great detail what is and isn’t real, what is and isn’t coming, and what we should all be doing to get the very best out of the next generation of data analytics tools the popular imagination is embracing as Artificial Intelligence.)
Dr. Kelly Richmond Pope — Fraud, and What Finance Professionals Need to Know About It
(The BluEPrint Podcast is not a True Crime podcast, but this interview is as close as we will likely ever be, and it definitely deserves a spot on our best episodes of the year.)
(This is another great example of content we would never build into one of our events’ agendas but is applicable to the vast majority of the senior executives in our network. So many of our delegates and speakers sit on boards or otherwise contribute to not-for-profits. How can they maximize what the do with their volunteering efforts? We interviewed the host of a podcast that speaks exactly to that.)
Cynthia Lapointe of Kerry — Work-Life Balance for Manufacturing Leaders
(This is the kind of interview we want to do even more of in 2025. We asked a member of our speaker faculty what they would want to talk about that would be interesting to an audience of their peers, and then we made time onsite at an event for them to have the discussion they wanted to have in a way that would be relevant and valuable to others. It was also just a great conversation.)
Hari Pujar of Tessera Therapeutics & Flagship Pioneering — The Future of Medicine
(We will end this year’s highlight reel with one more interview about the future of medicine, which is an exciting topic well-worth giving a spotlight to from time to time. This episode stands out in our minds because of how it offers context to how everything fits together in a way that is understandable without sacrificing detail. It is a terrific note to wrap up a terrific year!)