Organization Development and Change ODC

On the Cusp is hosted by Alfred Marcus, Professor at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. His recent book is Comeback: Can Great Companies Rise Again? 

43 episodes

In Both Your Houses: Iran, America, and the Wages of Unchecked Power (Wisdom Editions, 2026), Massoud Amin confronts the war between Iran, Israel, and the United States, and the civilians caught beneath it. Writing from a dual vantage as an Iranian-born American trained to see how systems break, Amin traces the chain that led to catastrophe. Iran's thwarted democracies. The 1953 coup. The architecture of sanctions was designed to inflict economic pain rather than produce diplomacy-the destruction of the JCPOA while the IAEA was certifying Iranian compliance.

In Ctrl+Alt+Doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy Talk (Oxford UP, 2026) by Hayagreeva Rao and Henrich R Greve offer a new way to understand why conspiracy theories grow and persist. Rather than treating them as cognitive errors, psychological pathologies, or products of echo chambers, they analyze conspiracy theories as linguistic constructions, that is as stories built from recognizable semantic patterns. Drawing on cases from COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests, they show that conspiracy theorizing is a form of bricolage. People tinker with cultural fragments to craft explanations that reduce uncertainty and threat.

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