Doug Utberg

Doug Utberg is Host of the ‘People First Leaders’ podcast where he meets with business leaders who put people and the planet ahead of profits.
(Not ‘instead’ of profits … just ahead of them)

With all that said, let’s be straight … the show is about keeping it real with business folks who are decent humans.

Prior to starting his Podcast, Doug worked in the High-Tech industry for 20 years, holding a multitude of job roles in Finance and Information Technology.

All of this came to an abrupt end on April 20, 2020 when the new Chief Information Officer at his company abruptly scheduled a 30-minute meeting with no subject. 30 seconds after joining the call, Doug learned that his role was being eliminated. One minute into the call, Human Resources joined and five minutes after that his network access was Terminated.

At this point, Doug was unemployed (Along with 40 million other people during COVID) with an mortgage, a family, private school tuition due and absolutely no income for the household. The anxiety and self-doubt that resulted from this event inspired Doug to make his action about helping to prevent other people from experiencing the same career displacement that he went through.

This is what resulted in the ‘People First Leaders’ podcast where Doug shares the stories of business leaders who put their people and the planet ahead of profits

As if all this wasn’t enough, Doug went through Chapter 13 bankruptcy a few years down the road when he was dealing with another round of layoffs and failed in trying to fund a startup.

What he learned from this experience is that ‘Failure is Not Fatal’ and that risk of loss should never prevent bold action.

During his process of recovery, Doug engaged in deep study of Tao, Buddhism, Zen and the dynamics of human emotions. This triggered a shift in his personal ambitions away from unbounded wealth accumulation toward the notion of creating genuine value. In practice, this means that everything we do needs to be aligned with elevating the people we work with and the environment we live in.

As it turns out, the planet and environment are pretty important. To date, humanity hasn’t done a very good job figuring out how to beneficially coexist with the planet. Doug feels like this is a problem we need to figure out how to solve.

In the end, Doug is driven and the desire to create value for everybody he meets, and is looking forward to meeting you and learning how we can bring value to each other’s business and life.