Guest · Leadership, teams and talent
Minter Dial
Author, Speaker & Thought Leader, MYDIAL
Minter Dial, three-passport speaker and seven-time author, elevates the debate on leadership, brand and the empathy at the heart of AI. Sixteen years at L’Oreal, 550+ podcast episodes, four award-winning books. Brand lived from the inside out.
About
Minter Dial self-describes as an elevator. His working practice is to raise the level of the conversation wherever he goes, across leadership, brand, empathy and the ethical use of AI in business. Three passports (British, American, French), 15 country moves, and a 34-year career that spans Wall Street, 16 years at L’Oreal, two consulting practices and seven published books, four of them award winners.
Minter Dial began at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in 1987 as a Vice President in product marketing, creating the award-winning DLJ Q&A, before co-founding The Gladstone Company and then The Myriad Group, a travel and convention business for musicians and entertainers. His sixteen years at L’Oreal took him from a sales representative role in France to Product Manager, Marketing Manager in the UK, Project Manager at Kérastase International, Director of Marketing at Redken USA, VP Marketing for L’Oreal Professionnel and Kérastase USA, General Manager Worldwide for Redken 5th Ave NYC, Divisional Managing Director at L’Oreal Canada, and finally Managing Director of International Professional Development in Paris, sitting on the worldwide executive committee.
In 2009 Dial founded The Myndset Company in Paris, his consulting practice around branding and digital strategy, and in 2010 launched what is now the long-running Minter Dialogue podcast, with more than 550 episodes featuring guests including Seth Godin, Esther Dyson, Craig Newmark, Chris Voss and Dr Vivienne Ming. Minter Dialogue has been listed as a Top 15 Branding Podcast by Feedspot across multiple years, and a Top 50 Marketing Blog by LinkedIn. Board roles at lastminute.com Group, Netexplo (the new-tech observatory at UNESCO) and Scientific Brain Training sit alongside an ongoing advisory relationship with ECV Digital in Paris, and an APM expert mandate in France on empathy and AI.
As an author, Minter Dial has published seven books. The Last Ring Home (2016), a documentary film and biographical book about his grandfather’s Naval Academy ring and its 17-year journey home from a Japanese POW camp. Futureproof (Pearson, 2017), co-written with Caleb Storkey, won the Business Book Awards 2018 for Embracing Change. Heartificial Empathy (2018), on how to encode empathy into AI, won the Book Excellence Award 2019 for Technology. You Lead (Kogan Page, 2021) won the Business Book Award 2022 for Leadership. Heartificial Empathy 2nd Edition (2023) won the Maincrest Media Award 2024 for Business Management. He is working on his eighth book. Two recent padel ventures, the Joy of Padel Company and Pango Sports (both 2025), round out a career built on curiosity, conversation and courage.
Career39 years
- 2025 to now Pango Sports & Joy of Padel Company Co-Founder / Founder
- 2010 to now MYDIAL Keynote Speaker, Author & Host
- 2015 to 2017 lastminute.com group Non-Executive Director
- 2009 to 2017 The Myndset Company President & Founder
Show earlier roles: Netexplo, L’Oreal, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette / The Myriad Group / The Gladstone Company
- 2011 to 2016 Netexplo VP, Associate
- 1993 to 2009 L’Oreal Sales Rep to Managing Director, International Professional Development
- 1987 to 1992 Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette / The Myriad Group / The Gladstone Company
How Minter thinks3 convictions
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Strategy is the courage to say what not to do
Dial argues channel proliferation, data overload and constant pressure to be everywhere have produced widespread burnout across marketing and business. The cure is not more tools. It is a clearer strategic backbone that lets the organisation say no with confidence: channels to skip, customers to decline, opportunities to pass. The easy route is doing what everyone else does because nobody gets fired for it. The route that produces differentiation is deciding what matters and leaving the rest on the shelf.
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Empathy is a tool, not a weakness, and it is what AI cannot replace
Dial’s framing: empathy has two parts, the emotive (feeling another’s feelings) and the cognitive (thinking about what is felt). Machines can never have the first. They can outperform humans on the second, because they have no bias or social filter to obstruct listening. Leaders who delegate empathy entirely to AI misread the brief. The right sequence is to be an empathic organisation first, then use AI to extend that cognitive empathy at scale.
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Brand is lived from the inside out
Dial’s most quoted anecdote is the seven-second hug, introduced at Redken when he ran the brand worldwide. Longer-than-comfortable greetings based on the finding that hearts begin to synchronise after about twenty seconds of close contact. The discomfort was the filter: people who were not a fit for the tribe self-selected out. That is his argument about brand in a single image. Tribes need exclusivity as well as inclusion. Employees live the values first. Customers receive what the team already holds.
