Peter Novak: Why Confidence Beats Perfect Grammar in Global Business English

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Fort Worth, TX (Newsworthy.ai) Monday Jul 13, 2026 @ 11:00 AM Central —

The July 6, 2026 episode of You Should Know, the WRKdefined podcast on workplace leadership, features communications coach Peter Novak, founder of Strictly Speaking Group and a former 25-year professor at the University of San Francisco. Novak, who trained as a Jesuit, earned an MFA in acting and holds a doctorate in dramaturgy, joins host William to argue that strong workplace communication is not about bigger words or flawless English. It is about clarity, confidence, and trust across borders, an increasingly urgent skill as global teams grow more distributed.

Listeners get a working playbook for leading multilingual teams. Novak walks through several threads pulled from his coaching practice with executives at major corporations:

How unconscious bias, including the well-documented like-me bias, shapes who gets promoted and believed at work.
Why phrasal verbs (take off, take up, take over, take down) quietly derail non-native English speakers, and how AI prompts can swap them for stronger, clearer verbs.
What a McGill University study on foreign accents reveals about trust, credibility, and confident delivery.
How investor relations teams now run CEO earnings calls through AI to score language choice and tone of voice.

Novak repeatedly reframes inclusive communication as a bottom-line issue rather than a political one. "The best way to position it is that this is a business issue, that you need your communication to be as clear as possible to everyone, not just to a select few," he tells the host. He also pushes back on the idea that non-native speakers are the ones who must adapt, invoking a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers analogy: "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels." Non-native colleagues, he argues, are translating, interpreting, and vocabulary-hunting in real time while native speakers barrel ahead.

The conversation moves into concrete tactics. Novak describes building executive voiceprints by feeding hundreds of hours of transcripts into AI so leaders can deliver scripts that actually sound like them. He shares a 20-question intake he uses to help new executives tell their teams exactly how they want to be communicated with, from pre-reads to agenda formats. He references Yakov Smirnoff on the absurdity of English, contrasts Ernest Hemingway's accessibility with Oscar Wilde writing "for about 6 people," and notes that Latin American teams often operate trilingually in Spanish, Portuguese, and English until a monolingual American enters the room and collapses the exchange back to English. He also flags cultural intelligence lessons from his own preparation for business in Tokyo and Dubai.

About You Should Know

You Should Know is a WRKdefined podcast tackling the pivotal leadership challenges shaping the modern workplace. With a wide-ranging slate of guests and topics, it speaks to anyone invested in the evolving world of work, from frontline managers to global executives navigating culture, communication, and change. The episode featuring Peter Novak is available now wherever podcasts are heard.

This press release is distributed by the Newsworthy.ai™ Press Release Newswire - News Marketing Platform™. Reference URL for this press release is here.

Workera CEO Kian Katanforoosh: Skills Intelligence Will Replace the Assessment

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:45:00 GMT

Palo Alto, CA (Newsworthy.ai) Monday Jul 13, 2026 @ 9:45 AM Central —

The June 10, 2026 episode of You Should Know, hosted by William Tincup and Ryan Leary of WRKdefined, features Kian Katanforoosh, CEO and founder of Workera and an adjunct lecturer at Stanford University, where he teaches neural networks and deep learning. The conversation makes a pointed argument for the moment: traditional workforce assessments have earned a trust problem, and AI-driven skills intelligence is poised to replace them. With hiring, upskilling, and AI readiness dominating boardroom agendas, Katanforoosh lays out why measurement itself, not talent alone, is becoming the competitive differentiator.

Across the hour, the hosts and guest press on several threads pulled directly from the field:

The half-life of skills, now roughly 2 to 2.5 years, and its implications for lifelong learning.
Learning velocity as a new workforce metric, measuring the delta in skills between two points in time.
Bias in hiring, including SHRM's seven defined hiring biases, and whether AI is more or less biased than human raters.
The Meta versus OpenAI talent war, skills-based pay, and the idea of a verified skills passport.

Katanforoosh reframes what measurement is for, pushing back on the screening-out mindset that shaped decades of pre-employment testing. On bias, he is blunt: "I'm fairly confident, I could say very confident, that AI is less biased than humans... If someone is racist, they're not going to wake up a day and not be racist suddenly... AI doesn't take time. If you actually know what's the problem and you go and you fix it, it will change overnight by definition." Tincup argues the word assessment itself carries too much toxic baggage and should be retired in favor of skills measurement.

The discussion goes deep on deployment. Workera typically rolls out in two phases, starting with a pyramidal AI badging framework covering understanding AI, applying AI, and building AI, including GenAI and responsible AI certifications, before layering role-specific skills for product managers, marketers, and technical staff. Katanforoosh cites World Economic Forum data projecting a net 78 million more jobs created than lost by 2030, references the Meta-OpenAI poaching wave reported by Klover.ai, and floats universal basic income as a possible bridge as skill values fluctuate. He also describes Workera's product, The Sage, an AI mentor built on multimodal assessment that can speak, ask candidates to code, whiteboard, or problem-solve.

About You Should Know

You Should Know, from WRKdefined, is a podcast delving into pivotal leadership challenges in the workplace. Hosts William Tincup and Ryan Leary unpack the evolving world of work with candid, sharply reported conversations aimed at HR leaders, executives, and anyone invested in how organizations hire, develop, and retain talent. The episode with Kian Katanforoosh is available now wherever podcasts are heard.

This press release is distributed by the Newsworthy.ai™ Press Release Newswire - News Marketing Platform™. Reference URL for this press release is here.

You Should Know Podcast News

Peter Novak: Why Confidence Beats Perfect Grammar in Global Business English

About You Should Know

Workera CEO Kian Katanforoosh: Skills Intelligence Will Replace the Assessment

About You Should Know