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Leadership Odysseys

Leadership Odysseys

By: Kirsty Gee
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Summary

Leadership Odysseys is a space for people in the middle.

The middle of careers.
The middle of decisions.
The middle of becoming.

This podcast shares real leadership journeys.
Not straight lines.
Not highlight reels.

Each conversation explores what happens behind the scenes.
The fear. The doubt. The quiet discipline.
The small choices that shape a life over time.

Our guests are leaders who have walked their own paths.
They speak honestly about what it takes to keep going.
Their stories offer perspective, not instruction.

Leadership Odysseys exists to make the messy middle visible.
To help you embrace the journey.
To think long term.
To take one small step for your future self.

Hosted by Kirsty Ghahramani (Kirsty Gee)

If you are building something.
Questioning what comes next.
Or redefining what leadership and success mean to you.

You belong here.

Listen in.
Pause.
Embrace the journey.

Copyright 2023 All rights reserved. Economics Leadership Management & Leadership Personal Development Personal Success
Episodes
  • Brooke Hill: What Wonder and Curiosity Actually Do for Leadership

    Brooke Hill: What Wonder and Curiosity Actually Do for Leadership
    5 Oct 2026

    Brooke Hill was the kid inside with a typewriter while everyone else played in the street. She built a career telling other people's stories, from magazines to London to brand leadership, until a redundancy a few weeks after her first child was born took the plan away completely. What started as one freelance copywriting job became Wonderthink, an award-winning content agency, and a way of leading built around the imagination she'd let slip away. Her second book, Spark Wonder at Work, makes the case for bringing awe, curiosity and optimism back into how teams think and work.

    Highlights:

    • The typewriter kid. Brooke started work at 14, wrote a poem to land work experience at Cleo, and walked floor to floor at ACP Magazines handing editors her CV in person. An internship at Harper's Bazaar led to her first proper job, at the Australian Women's Weekly, straight out of university.
    • The redundancy that changed everything. A few weeks after her daughter was born, Brooke was made redundant from a senior marketing role. She says it happens more often than people think, and that it forced a question she'd never had space to ask: what did she actually want her work and her life to look like?
    • The confession most leaders won't say out loud. Brooke admits she isn't sure she was ever a great leader in her earlier corporate roles. She'd been handed teams and titles without ever working out what leadership meant to her. When the business outgrew her, that doubt, along with the burnout culture she'd seen in agencies, made her resist becoming one.
    • The reframe that changed her mind. One question unlocked it: what if it didn't have to look like that? She committed to learning to lead properly, from delegating to building a team that's high performing without burning out. It started with her first hire, Beth, who's still with the agency today.
    • Wonder and curiosity as leadership tools, backed by research. Spark Wonder at Work grew out of interviews with leaders across industries and the science behind awe, curiosity and optimism. Brooke shares data showing employees feel their organisation helps them be creative just 14% of the time, down from 25% during COVID.

    Brooke's parting words of wisdom: keep coming back to the what if. Take time to look back at the through lines in your own career, because that's where your unique value as a leader sits. Then use that question to carry it forward.

    Connect with Brooke Hill: LinkedIn | Instagram | Website

    This episode is brought to you by: Cell Wellness Co | Naturally Glutenfree

    Connect with Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee): LinkedIn | Instagram | Website
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    50 min
  • Si Elliott: Happy Accidents, Behavioural Science and Keeping Business Human

    Si Elliott: Happy Accidents, Behavioural Science and Keeping Business Human
    7 Sep 2026
    Si Elliott has spent more than two decades in marketing leadership, and his conclusion is not what most of the industry wants to hear: businesses have become very good at reaching people, and increasingly poor at understanding them. As co-owner of Nottingham creative agency Diversity and founder of behavioural science consultancy Fabricx, Si has built his career at the intersection of human psychology and brand experience, watching the industry he loves chase metrics at the expense of the people those metrics are supposed to represent. His first book, Customer Experience Thinking, draws on 34 behavioural biases and 8 core customer experience principles to make the case that the future of leadership and marketing belongs to those who stop optimising for conversions and start designing for people. In this episode of Leadership Odysseys, Si traces the path that took him from an accidental start at a Nottingham agency to leading a management buyout, founding a consultancy, hosting his own podcast, and publishing a bestseller — all while watching his own daughters grow up in the digital world his industry helped build. Key Highlights The management buyout — and the choice he didn't have to make When the founders of Diversity stepped back, Si already held equity. He could have kept it. Instead, he structured a management buyout specifically to put shares in the hands of the people working inside the business. He's direct about why: "I could have sat and gone, 'I've got it all for me,' but I wanted to share the opportunity out to other people." That decision, he says, became the flywheel for everything that followed — and it tells you more about his leadership than any title ever could. The Kahneman lightbulb — discovering what had been happening beneath the surface all along It was Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow that cracked it open. Si describes the moment he understood that less than 5% of human decision-making happens in the conscious brain as a reckoning with his entire career: "All my career I've been playing to what I thought was everybody's 5% page, but there's so much happening beneath the surface." It didn't make the previous decades feel wasted. It made everything that came next feel urgent. The robot surgeon — where AI ends and humanity begins Si doesn't frame AI as the villain. He frames it as a power tool, and argues the industry's mistake is treating the tool as the carpenter. His robot surgeon analogy is worth sitting with: if you're under general anaesthetic, a statistically accurate robot is fine. The moment you come round, anxious and disoriented, what you need is a person who can see that you're panicking and put a hand on your shoulder. That distinction — between the moment that doesn't require connection and the moment that demands it — is where he believes every business needs to draw its own line. The effort heuristic — why his typo-filled LinkedIn posts outperform the polished ones Si uses his own feed to illustrate one of the behavioural biases at the heart of his book. A perfectly structured, three-point post signals AI. A post with his natural sentence structure and the odd typo signals a person who sat down and actually thought. People scroll past the first. They stop at the second. He puts it simply: sending a handwritten letter versus an email carries the same information, but a very different weight. In a world where AI removes the effort, effort itself becomes the differentiator. The daughters, the book, and why it had to be written Si has two daughters, 11 and 14, growing up inside the world that his industry helped build. He was honest about what he saw: "Is this as good as the world I entered into? And in a lot of cases, I don't feel it is." The book wasn't a career play. It was a response to watching what metric-driven, digital-first marketing has done to genuine human connection — and a decision to do his part in pulling it back. For every copy sold, he plants a tree. Not because it scales. Because it has to live up to what the book is actually asking of people. Si's words of wisdom to close: the pursuit of getting the thing is what you will enjoy most — not the having of it. For someone who spent two decades building something real, shared equity he could have kept, wrote a book he wasn't sure he had the right to write, and planted trees for every copy sold, that's not a polished closing line. It's what the whole conversation was actually about. Si Elliott is proof that the most interesting paths are rarely the ones you planned — and that the willingness to stay curious, stay human, and share the upside with the people around you is what makes a career worth looking back on. Connect with Si Elliot: LinkedIn Fabricx: LinkedIn | Website This episode is brought to you by: Cell Wellness Co | Naturally Glutenfree Connect with Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee): LinkedIn | Instagram | Website
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    58 min
  • Ash Ghahramani: How to Build a Business That Outlasts You

    Ash Ghahramani: How to Build a Business That Outlasts You
    24 Aug 2026

    Nine months to learn a new language. Eighteen months of knocking on doors before anyone called back. Twenty years building a business with the same business partner, without ever needing to be seen doing it. Ash Ghahramani didn’t learn discipline from a book.

    Ash Ghahramani is the co-founder and managing director of Naturally Gluten Free, one of Australia’s first purpose-built, HACCP-approved gluten-free manufacturing facilities. He arrived in Australia at eleven, having spent his early years in Iran, with almost no English. He is also my husband: 21 years married, 7 before that, which means recording this one meant asking questions I’ve never had to ask out loud in 28 years of knowing the answers. Finding the right partner in life is the most important decision you’ll ever make. I made mine at seventeen, and I’d make it again.

    The Highlights

    A new language in nine months.

    Ash arrived in Australia having lived through war as a child, knowing little more than hello and thank you. Nine months in an intensive language centre later, he walked into mainstream high school able to read, write and hold his own. The curriculum he’d already survived in Iran had quietly prepared him to finish a year ahead.

    The job that rerouted everything.

    University was never a question in a family of academics, until a job at McDonald’s at fifteen answered one Ash hadn’t known he was asking. He didn’t fall for the job. He fell for the people, and for the particular satisfaction of running something well. Every business he’s built since is an extension of that first instinct.

    One sentence. One decision. Twenty years.

    Retailers laughed when Ash said his bread needed refrigeration. Looking for the science to back the decision, he found one sentence: the most common bakery preservative is also used to disinfect hospital equipment. He closed the browser. No preservatives, ever. He’s never reopened that question since.

    Walking away from Coles.

    Every small food brand wants the call from a major supermarket. Ash and his business partner got it, then walked away, refusing to absorb the rebates and shrinking margins the deal demanded. The retreat became the turn. Food service relationships with chefs that, in some cases, have now outlasted entire restaurant careers.

    What success actually means.

    Not the house. Not the car. Walking down the road for a coffee on his own time. A holiday that doesn’t have to be big to count. Being present for the people he loves, rather than just providing for them.

    The legacy that isn’t the business.

    Ask Ash what he’s most proud of after two decades of building a company from nothing, and the answer isn’t the factory, the contracts, or the twenty-year partnership. It’s two kids he calls his legacy.

    ~~~ In His Own Words

    “We will never use preservatives. We’ll just have to work on the mindset that it’s okay to keep real bread in the fridge, because that’s how it was made a hundred years ago.”

    “Finding the right partner in life and raising two beautiful kids that are going to be our legacy, that’s probably the biggest thing I’m proud of.”

    ~~~

    I have had the front-row seat to all of this for over twenty years. The early mornings. The long days. The pressure he carried without needing to say it out loud. The business was never a means to an end for him. It’s the thing he and his team built with their own hands, to a standard he’d feed his own kids. That care is exactly why it lasts, and exactly why it was never separate from the rest of what we built together.

    He’ll tell you the proudest thing he’s built is us.

    I believe him.

    Connect with Ash: LinkedIn

    Connect with Naturally Glutenfree: LinkedIn | Website

    This episode is brought to you by: Cell Wellness Co | Naturally Glutenfree

    Connect with Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee): LinkedIn | Instagram | Website
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    1 hr and 13 min
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