Disengaged asks why most people feel detached from the work they do, and what it would take to change that. Organizations meet almost every problem with more control: more process, more measurement, more incentives. That response deepens the problem it was meant to solve, since control is what suppresses engagement in the first place. Each episode brings together writers, researchers, and practitioners in conversations about motivation, autonomy, pay, job design, and performance management, and about what it takes to build a workplace on a foundation of trust rather than control.
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Données mises à jour le 26/10/2026
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“When they say let’s take the emotion out of the decision, that’s even an emotional decision.”
Louis Roden is the founder of Inspire Consulting Group, an international leadership development consultancy, and has spent more than two decades in organizational development and service culture across hospitality, logistics, and finance. His book Everything Is Personal: Embracing Stewardship in the Workplace and Everyplace argues that leaders who hide behind “it’s just business” erode the trust their people need. We cover the phrase “it’s business, not personal,” stewardship, why work feels neutral for so many people, how leaders build trust day to day, and why the golden rule gets it wrong.
What we covered:
The COVID lockdown and the nudge from his wife that got the book finished
Mark Twain’s “Be good and you will be lonesome” and Following the Equator as the first travel blog
Why nobody says they loved a job because they were well managed
Work as a gray, neutral 80 percent of waking life
Why Louis can’t stand the phrase work-life balance
Stewardship of the people who hand a leader a big piece of their lives
Layoffs, hard feedback, and the trite cover of “it’s not personal”
Why no one can take the emotion out of a decision
Frederick Taylor, scientific management, and work as a negative good
Rational and irrational anger, and empathy for joy as well as sadness
Trust built in small moments and eroded by paper cuts
The bartender whose smile disappears when the bar gets busy
Thirty authentic seconds over a scheduled one-hour one-on-one
The weekly check-in as a box to tick
Flipping the golden rule: treat people the way they want to be treated
The Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya’s sword, and anyone selling a magic bullet
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Right Kind of Wrong with Amy Edmondson
jeudi 15 octobre 2026 • Durée 51:09
“In a novel context, a context like science or R&D or innovation or entrepreneurship, mediocrity would be no failures.”
Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. Her research made psychological safety a core idea in modern management, and she is the author of Teaming, The Fearless Organization and Right Kind of Wrong, which won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year in 2023. We cover the failed hypothesis that launched her career, why bad is stronger than good, the three types of failure, Toyota’s Andon cord, near misses, whether failure is a privilege, and what leaders can do to build psychological safety.
What we covered:
The 1990s hospital study where the better teams seemed to make more medication errors
The realization that those teams were reporting more of their errors
Awfulizing, then a looking-out-the-window moment in a 15th-floor PhD office
Interpersonal risk and why psychological safety matters most in knowledge work
Why we notice negatives faster than positives
Going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm
Basic, complex and intelligent failures, and the five criteria for an intelligent one
Astro Teller at X: if you’re not failing, you’re not taking the right risks
Rewarding teams for shutting down failing projects
The fundamental attribution error, at work and at home
James Reason’s Swiss cheese model in aviation and healthcare
Toyota’s Andon cord, from loom machines to a San Francisco trolley car, and why most pulls never stop the line
Near misses as good catches, and the case for a near miss day
Why failure is a privilege, and how leaders can level the failure playing field
Whether encouraging failure means celebrating mediocrity
Three moves to build psychological safety: frame the work, ask questions, respond productively
People:
Arie Kruglanski, psychologist and previous guest on this show
Roy Baumeister, social psychologist
Teresa Amabile, Harvard Business School professor
Astro Teller, head of X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory
How to Build HR That Works with Jessie Schofer
jeudi 8 octobre 2026 • Durée 01:12:42
"You kind of sell your soul, it's like blood money a little bit."
Jessie Schofer is the founder of Stakkd, a database that helps HR teams find their way through a crowded technology market. She came to HR from projects and transformation work, led people strategy and change inside hyperscaling unicorns, and this year moderated two debates I took part in, and lost. We cover what she saw from the moderator's chair, why people arrive at a new job engaged and lose it within months, why HR keeps falling short, and why she has been saying HR is dead for years.
What we covered:
Why we still need managers in a world of AI, from the debate moderator
The scale-ups where every team wrote its own operating manual
Poor relationships at work as the root of Jessie's most disengaged years
Beautiful mission statements at companies that are still hard to work for
Ricardo Semler's diseconomies of human scale, and Dunbar's number
Zapier welcoming candidates who pull out of its hiring process
New hires who were sold a story and ask, "What did I sign up to?"
Calibration meetings and the five-out-of-five rating
AI performance ratings as scientific management 2.0
Tiny teams, the pizza rule, and splitting teams before they grow too big
Why individual pay for performance discourages admitting mistakes
The director of comp Jessie told not to join
Why HR is burnt out, and the growth playbooks she wants to throw out
Renaming HR as organizational success
Maslow, duty of care, and whether we will look back on disengagement as unfair
Stakkd, its HR tech database, and Stakkd 2.0
People:
Matt McFarlane, founder of FNDN and previous guest on this show
Ricardo Semler, former CEO of Semco
Robin Dunbar, evolutionary psychologist
W. Edwards Deming, management scholar
Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric
Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School professor
Abraham Maslow, psychologist
Books:
Close the Gap, James Alexander Seechurn
Anti-Consulting with Gerry Murphy
jeudi 1 octobre 2026 • Durée 01:30:44
Is it possible to run a professional services company without individual goals, without billable hours, without performance ratings? Gerry Murphy and Nua Group certainly think so...
Gerry Murphy is a co-founder and partner at Nua Group, the San Francisco firm that describes itself as the anti-consulting firm. He qualified as an actuary in Dublin, spent eight years in Europe, and was a senior partner at Mercer with earlier leadership roles at Watson Wyatt before he, Joe and Chris set Nua up ten years ago. We cover the anti-consulting model, what happens to accountability when you delete the machinery, managers who never wanted the job, job architecture as a system of control, and whether any of it survives at ten thousand people.
What we covered:
Anti-consulting as a playful poke at billable hours, sales goals and internal meetings
Clients love their consultants, not the firms those consultants work for
Two internal meetings every two weeks, and what the rest of the week is for
Nua consultants asking the partners whether they could please track their hours
The nickel and diming that comes with the hourly model
Everyone at Nua gets the same bonus, whatever their individual performance
The bonus that moves from 20 percent to 21 and pleases nobody
Four job levels on paper, two in practice: partner and consultant
Majors and minors in place of practice areas
Gerry's rules of management, starting with do nothing, ending with two blank rules
Managers who never wanted the job and took it for the pay
Mercer's manager charter, and Jensen Huang's thirty direct reports
Electing your own manager, and where Gerry pushes back on the idea
The client whose job architecture, bonuses and equity created an incredible amount of work
Whether AI makes experience and education requirements irrelevant
Stock options, RSUs, dilution and growth
The Ryland Report, and why the team asked for more financial detail, not less
Scaling to ten thousand people, and the naming of Uber Nua
People:
Joe Farris, co-founder of Nua Group
Paul Reiman, compensation consultant and previous guest on this show
Pay Differently with Paul Reiman
jeudi 24 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:27:34
"Best practice is either a product that somebody wants to sell and as a result it's common, but not necessarily proven as best."
Paul Reiman is the founder and managing partner of Novo Insights, a Chicago-based compensation consulting firm, with nearly 30 years in compensation as a consultant and in-house leader. His book Pay Differently, out October 5, argues that pay transparency exposes the shortcuts compensation teams have relied on for decades. We cover the myth of best practice, the loyalty tax, job architecture as the office refrigerator, why the offer letter draws less scrutiny than the merit cycle, and whether sales commissions survive consumption-based selling.
What we covered:
Best practice as common practice with a better publicist
The telecom sales leader who asked a 22-year-old Paul, "Best practice according to whom?"
The unproven rule of three measures in a sales plan, none under 20 percent
Why candidates who refuse to apply without a range move employers faster than legislation
The $100 toaster on sale for $50 the next day
The fintech firm that turned down a star analyst asking for a $1 million salary
The 75th percentile, and why a percentile is not a philosophy
Job architecture as the office refrigerator and its 180 ketchup packets
The manager who automates three roles and loses every direct report
The loyalty tax, and why stayers earn less than leavers
Merit budget benchmarking, and why to budget 9 percent next year
Same-store pay growth, borrowed from Starbucks
Lori the recruiter, her Coffee is for Closers mug, and fixing the front door
Self-set pay at Semco and Smarkets, and crunchy or creamy peanut butter
The printing company that replaced commissions with salary and profit share
The hand-drawn overhead transparency behind the 50/50 pay mix slide
People:
Alfie Kohn, author and previous guest on this show
Dan Ariely, behavioral economist and previous guest on this show
Andrea LaRowe, 37signals, previous guest on this show
Predictably Irrational with Dan Ariely
jeudi 17 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:06:59
Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. He co-founded Irrational Capital and has written eight books, including Predictably Irrational and Misbelief, which he wrote after a COVID conspiracy theory cast him as one of its villains.
We cover the vintage Swiss Army knife model of decision-making, the India experiments behind Large Stakes and Big Mistakes, what Fortune 500 satisfaction surveys predict about stock returns, fairness as a judgment no regression will settle, and the writing Dan is doing now about the end of life.
What we covered:
States that introduced fines for texting and driving and watched accidents rise
The brain as a vintage Swiss army knife, adequate at many tasks, built for a world we have left
Car engineers who design against human error, social media engineers who design for it
Prepaid debit against credit, weekly loads against monthly, Monday against Friday
The India experiments, where a month of pay riding on a puzzle made people worse at solving it
The brain surgeon offered $100,000 and threatened with a hitman in parking spot 33
Which survey questions predict alpha, and which predict nothing
Perceived fairness outranking salary level, and the argument Dan could not win on Wall Street
The company that spent a day celebrating failed projects and paid half a million dollars to the winner
Bureaucracy as an engine whose definition of success is nothing happening
The hospital janitor we want to stop doing their job, and what job descriptions cost us
Theory X, Theory Y, and the ancient craftsmen who spent half their time on beauty
Two years spent interviewing the people who wanted him tried, imprisoned, or hanged
Writing as a way to make sense of his mother's death, and the three books he has in progress
People:
Alfie Kohn, author and previous guest on this show
Simon Jones, narrator of Dan's audiobooks
Ed Lazear, economist behind the Safelite windshield study
Sam Glucksberg, psychologist of the candle problem experiments
How to Get Pay Right with Matt McFarlane
jeudi 10 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:15:21
Matt McFarlane and I met earlier this year on opposite sides of a debate about pay for performance. His team argued in favor and won the audience vote 62 to 38, and a week later he published a piece saying he had never been a fan of it. That opening carries the rest of the conversation: what pay for performance sets out to do, why the mechanism breaks at nearly every link in the chain, and what companies use instead once they stop treating an annual rating as the engine of everything.
Matt runs FNDN, a compensation consultancy for startups based in Australia. He built the pay structures at Oyster that carried the company from 200 to 600 people across 70 countries, and he now hosts the FNDN Series podcast and newsletter and runs the Startup People Summit, a one-day APAC event for people leaders inside high-growth companies. We cover the companies that have taken negotiation out of pay entirely, the grip that benchmark data holds over compensation decisions, the tension between fairness and individual pay in collaborative work, what happens to the manager's role as AI absorbs more of the coordination, and the practical side of leaving a salaried job to consult.
What we covered
Why Matt argued for pay for performance in a debate and against it a week later
The three percent merit budget, and what the annual salary survey roundups tell us
Rewarding a standout year with money, or using it to raise the standard across a team
Why Matt left the job he enjoyed most in his career to build a compensation practice
How his client window moved from 50 employees to 100 or 150, and what breaks at that size
Benchmarking as a source of cognitive closure, and the living wage argument underneath it
Runn's single rate per role, and the salary trajectory that made their people harder to poach
Carta, 37signals, Buffer, and PayPal as models that remove the negotiation
Fairness as a relative judgment, and how quickly a good salary becomes an unfair one
Why US companies resist narrow bands, and what wide bands say about trust in hiring
The bad hire label, the myth of the A player, and where responsibility for performance sits
The player coach, the stretched leader, and ClickUp's million-dollar salary bands
What Matt tells anyone thinking about leaving a salaried role to consult
Protecting the Potential of the Idea with Dylan Soopramania
jeudi 3 septembre 2026 • Durée 02:18:44
Dylan Soopramania is a creative director and consultant whose work spans the UK, Australia, and North America, with campaigns for Coca-Cola, EA Sports, KitKat, Hellmann's, and Google. He designed the covers for all three of my books and the branding for this podcast. We have known each other for thirty years, and this is the first episode recorded in person and the first under the Disengaged name.
Advertising is the one industry where creativity is the product, which makes it the sharpest test of the argument in Close the Gap. Dylan's rule for creative leads is to protect the potential of the idea: push it to the point where you and your trusted partners feel uncomfortable, because ideas get killed in internal conversations long before anyone learns where they could have gone. The same problem sits inside every business that needs to innovate. If people do not feel safe suggesting things that might get shot down, they play it down the middle. Dylan's account of what happened when I stopped chasing him on the cover, that the more I backed off the more responsible he felt, is the whole book in one sentence.
What we covered:
What a creative director does, and why brands rent a creative's tone of voice
How the Close the Gap cover came about
Good briefs, bad briefs, and Hellmann's sneakers made from food waste
Presenting irrational ideas to rational people
Mad Men is dead: culture now informs marketing
Protecting the potential of the idea
Pixar's brain trust and the Overton window
Culture fit as hiring people who look and sound like you
Why the modern company still runs on a hierarchy inherited from the church and the factory
The KitKat catapult
Focus groups, market data, and the sea of sameness
The manager as emulsifier
Trust, control, purpose, and tension
Why asking people to keep doing what they do well kills the spark
Freelance versus full time
Leaving Dylan alone: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in one example
Proactive work, gold wall sessions, and 3M's fifteen percent time
Executive pay, the C-suite, and the role of profit
People: Steve Hey (Dylan's creative partner), Dart Lindsley (Work for Humans), Jessie Zwaan (job, career, calling), Amy Wrzesniewski, Aaron Dignan, Rensis Likert, Abraham Maslow, Joseph Overton, Paul Buchheit, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs
Uncertainty and Closure with Arie Kruglanski
mercredi 29 juillet 2026 • Durée 01:27:11
Arie Kruglanski is one of the most cited social psychologists alive, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and a co-founder of START, the national center for the study of terrorism. He gave the field two ideas that shape this conversation: the need for cognitive closure, our drive to resolve ambiguity and settle on an answer, and significance quest theory, the claim that the need to matter sits beneath much of what we do. This episode takes both into the workplace.
We start small, with a question that sent James to Arie's work in the first place: why do companies cling to performance ratings, job titles, and job architecture when the evidence against them is overwhelming? Closure is the answer, and Arie explains why noise, fatigue, and time pressure make people more certain rather than less, and why premature closure has been the mother of great mistakes, from Pearl Harbor to organizational change. From there we move to significance: the oldest complaint in history, the road that took Arie from architecture to psychology, and why pay has become the emblem of how much we matter. We close on the hardest problem of all, how anything changes, and a personal question about holding confidence and uncertainty at the same time.
What we covered
Cognitive closure, and why difficult conditions produce false confidence rather than better thinking
Seizing and freezing, belief perseverance, and why information that was available still gets ignored
The Italian postal workers, and why people resist the idea of change more than any specific change
Careers as closure: why we follow available jobs over real passions, and Arie's own turn away from architecture
The quest for significance, from terrorism research to the workplace where most people earn their worth
Pay as significance, the CEO pay ratio, and the insatiability that comes with a bigness-oriented culture
Bigness and Smallness, the reciprocal model of significance, and love as merit times appreciation
Competitive individualism, Arachne and hubris, and whether significance requires winners and losers
Weber, Calvinism, and the roots of the American work ethic
Psychological safety, loss aversion, and why change must start small
Religion as an ancient antidote to hubris, and what fills the vacuum when it recedes
The Employee Advantage with Stephan Meier
jeudi 16 juillet 2026 • Durée 01:24:59
In this episode of Disengaged, I'm joined by Stephan Meier — behavioral economist, Professor of Business Strategy at Columbia Business School, and author of The Employee Advantage — to explore why the next great shift in business is from customer-centricity to employee-centricity.
Stephan's argument is that business has made this journey before. Companies moved from a product-centric to a customer-centric model, building tools along the way — segmentation, journey mapping, personalisation — to understand and delight customers. Those same tools can now be repurposed for employees, and the companies that do it will create an advantage rivals cannot easily copy. As Stephan puts it, hard is good: a culture where people are engaged, motivated, and innovative takes years to build — and that is exactly what makes it difficult to compete with.
What we covered:
The evolution from shareholder value to customer centricity to employee centricity
The zero-sum fallacy — Amazon's Harry Potter gamble and Costco's employee-first economics
Where money works, where it stops moving the needle, and how a $5 favour destroys a friendship
Purpose — Kennedy's single mission for NASA and the janitor who wasn't mopping floors
The engaged coach — clear direction with real empowerment
Eli Lilly applying customer journey mapping to female talent progression
H-E-B's cult following and the four-star truck driver
Haier's RenDanHeYi model of autonomous micro-enterprises
Buurtzorg's self-managing nurse teams
Just right tasks — why the reward for good work is more good work
AI-powered internal talent marketplaces at MasterCard, MetLife, and Unilever
The workforce of one — segmentation and personalisation through one-on-ones
People
Stephan Meier — author of The Employee Advantage
Alfie Kohn — author of Punished by Rewards
Dart Lindsley — host of Work for Humans
Jessie Zwaan — value beyond price
Megan Bernard-May — people experience design
Uri Gneezy — Stephan's co-author on incentives
James Reason, British error psychologist
Books:
Right Kind of Wrong, Amy Edmondson
The Fearless Organization, Amy Edmondson
Teaming, Amy Edmondson
The Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer
The Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam
Articles:
Bad Is Stronger Than Good, Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Catrin Finkenauer and Kathleen Vohs, Review of General Psychology, 2001 https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323
Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.
Books: Close the Gap and What Pay Costs (James Seechurn), Purpose and Work (Jessie Zwaan), Brave New Work (Aaron Dignan), Colin Splodge and The Sizzledodge (Steve Hey and Dylan Soopramania)
Organizations: Pixar, Coca-Cola, KitKat / J. Walter Thompson Sydney, Hellmann's / Ogilvy, Banana Boat, Google / The Hallway, 3M, General Electric, Patagonia, Buurtzorg, Nucor, Handelsbanken, Haier, AFL-CIO, MSCI
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People: Arie Kruglanski (University of Maryland, START). Referenced: Dan Raviv and Sophia Moskalenko, his co-authors; Harold Kelley; Antonio Pierro; B. F. Skinner; Alfie Kohn (No Contest); Leon Festinger (When Prophecy Fails); Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (positive psychology); Carol Dweck; Angela Duckworth; Antonio Damasio; Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (loss aversion); Amy Edmondson (psychological safety); Max Weber.
Books: Uncertain: How to Turn Your Biggest Fear into Your Greatest Power; The Quest for Significance: Harnessing the Need that Makes the World Go Round, with Dan Raviv; and the new Feeling Big, Feeling Small: The Human Yearning for Significance and Wonder, with Sophia Moskalenko.
Find Arie: through his books, and on The Quest for Significance podcast, which he hosts with Dan Raviv.
Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer — meaningful progress
Jos de Blok — founder of Buurtzorg
Joseph Overton — the Overton window
Dan Gutman and Stuart Gibbs — the just right books
Books
The Employee Advantage — Stephan Meier
Punished by Rewards — Alfie Kohn
My Weird School series — Dan Gutman
Spy School series — Stuart Gibbs
Organisations
Amazon, Costco, Starbucks — customer centricity case studies
Eli Lilly — employee journey mapping
H-E-B — the employee-centric grocer
Haier / GE Appliances — autonomous micro-enterprises
Find Stephan at stephanmeier.com, where you can subscribe to his newsletter on the human-centric future of work — each edition comes with an original stop-motion Lego movie.
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