Corporate Wellness and Military Human Performance: Flipped Interview with Newton Cheng

MOPs & MOEs

On this episode we welcome Newton Cheng back to the podcast, but this time he's taking over hosting duty! In his previous episode we focused on what military human performance could learn from corporate wellness, but he wanted to turn the tables and find out what corporate wellness could learn from military human performance.

Newton is a father, world-class powerlifter, engineer, and Google's Director of Health and Performance. In his work, he leads a team with the mission to support the physical, mental, social, and spiritual health and well-being of Google's global workforce. At the time this episode is publishing, he's also just a few days out from competing in primetime at USAPL raw nationals. If you're curious to learn more about his (impressive) powerlifting, check out his Instagram page.

This wide ranging conversation is all about helping someone with an outside perspective understand how the military approaches human performance, including both the good parts and the bad parts. We hope this will become a continuing conversation, since we have a lot to learn from each other in this space.

In our discussion about spirituality we recommended Soul Boom by Rainn Wilson, which you can find here.

In our attempt to define both corporate wellness and military human performance we cited several sources, those are:

Human Performance Optimization: A Framework for the Military Health System

Booz Allen's Human Performance Training for Military Missions

RTI International's Military Health and Human Performance

Human Performance Resources by the Consortium for Health and Military Performance (CHAMP)

Bureau of Labor Statistics' What attributes characterize a successful corporate wellness program?