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| Titre | Date | Durée | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How the Attention Economy is Redefining Traditional Marketing with Emily Ross | 29 Jan 2025 | 00:35:12 | |
Welcome to the UNLEARN Podcast! Today, we’re joined by Emily Ross, co-author of Just Evil Enough and a leader in brand strategy and creativity. With a career spanning tech innovation, marketing, and even circus performance, Emily approaches challenges from unconventional angles. As Director of Brand Strategy at X (formerly Twitter) for EMEA, Emily also serves as an Advisory Board Member at SXSW and GoGreen Routes, an EU funded, pan-European research project on nature-based connectedness, as Co-founder of Resonance Festival (Resonance-Lough Derg), and a mentor to startups across Europe. In this episode, she shares her approach to subversive marketing, reframing obstacles as opportunities and using bold tactics to achieve extraordinary results. Drawing inspiration from disruptors like Tesla, Emily reveals how creativity and curiosity can transform business outcomes. Whether you’re looking to reimagine your marketing strategies or disrupt the status quo, Emily’s expertise is an invaluable guide. Key Takeaways:
Additional Insights:
Get ready for a fascinating conversation with Emily Ross on rethinking traditional approaches, embracing creativity, and crafting strategies that disrupt the status quo! Episode Highlights: 00:37 - Introducing Emily Ross "Emily is a powerhouse in brand strategy, creative leadership, and co-author of Just Evil Enough. She’s reshaping how global brands stand out in noisy markets." 03:15 - Lessons from the Circus The Power of Attention "I spent years as a fire performer, and it taught me that attention is a superpower. Learning to capture and hold attention is a skill every marketer needs." 05:14 - Subversive Marketing Tactics Explained "Subversive marketing is about being bold, counterintuitive, and creative. It’s not growth hacking, it’s about playing the long game to stay ahead." 09:47 - Turning Bugs Into Features "The famous Space Invaders bug is a perfect example of how flaws can create differentiation. As the game progressed, it got faster, making it more exciting." 15:10 - The Product-Market Fit... | |||
| How Product Managers Can Avoid Startup Failures and Drive Growth with John Cutler | 15 Jan 2025 | 00:47:59 | |
Welcome to the UNLEARN Podcast! Today, we’re joined by a thought leader and prolific voice in product management and organizational design, John Cutler. With a unique ability to navigate the “beautiful mess” of product development, John has spent his career exploring the complex overlaps of product, UX, and strategy. Currently serving as Head of Product at Dotwork, John has previously held impactful roles such as Senior Director of Product Enablement at Toast and Product Evangelist at Amplitude, where he collaborated with thousands of product teams worldwide. His extensive experience spans B2B SaaS giants like Zendesk, Pendo, and AppFolio, as well as B2C, ad-tech, banking, and media industries. Known for his insightful writing, John has authored nearly a thousand posts across various platforms, captivating readers with his deep understanding of product dynamics. Whether you’re seeking to level up your product thinking or gain practical tips on team enablement, John’s expertise offers unparalleled insights. Key Takeaways:
Additional Insights:
Get ready for a thought-provoking conversation with John Cutler on embracing complexity, fostering innovation, and mastering the art of unlearning! Episode Highlights:00:36 - Episode Introduction "I don't think we need a product manager for every 4 to 7 people. A software as a service company is much more of a service ecology." 01:15 - Introducing John Cutler "John is one of the most insightful voices in product management, with a career spanning roles at Toast, Amplitude, and beyond." 03:46 - Discovering the "Beautiful Mess" of Product "I’ve always been fascinated by the overlaps—where product, UX, and strategy collide in unpredictable ways." 11:27 - The Importance of Writing and Sharing Ideas "I realized that writing wasn’t just for others—it was for me to process and refine my thinking." 15:59 - Finding Your Path Through Experimentation "Everybody finds their way if you're willing to experiment and try. It's like software—the rate of iteration and the velocity of creation allow you to refine and... | |||
| Brand Safety & Platform Integrity at Spotify, TikTok and Google with from Dave Byrne | 28 Aug 2024 | 00:48:05 | |
Leadership in digital ecosystems requires a commitment to safety, trust, and ethical practices. Our guest today, Dave Byrne, founder of Trust Raise and a member of the Irish Digital Board, shares his journey from major tech giants to establishing a company dedicated to improving the integrity of digital platforms. Dave Byrne has had an illustrious career, holding significant positions at Google, TikTok, and Spotify, where he spearheaded initiatives in brand safety and platform integrity. Now, as the founder of Trust Raise, he focuses on helping smaller companies navigate the complex landscape of digital safety. His work is driven by a deep commitment to creating ethical digital ecosystems that prioritize user needs and improve industry standards. Host Barry O'Reilly invites Dave to discuss his career journey, the challenges of maintaining digital safety in a rapidly evolving industry, and the inspiration behind founding Trust raise. Dave shares valuable insights into the importance of adaptability, the evolving role of AI in digital safety, and how smaller companies can leverage his expertise to build safer digital platforms. Key Takeaways:
Additional Insights:
Episode Highlights
“This career in Google, TikTok, Spotify was not at all planned whatsoever... I actually ended up in Google because I lost a student union election in Trinity College."
"The Adpocalypse... Brand safety became something that YouTube started caring about, Meta started caring about."
“ we're eroding brand perception of our customers. Again,... | |||
| Making Quality Decisions with Diana Kander | 20 Jan 2021 | 00:35:12 | |
Diana Kander is a New York Times Bestselling Author, an entrepreneur, and keynote speaker. Barry O’Reilly likes to reference her Ted Talk and $1 experiment in many of his videos. Diana has spent her career challenging assumptions and asking thought-provoking questions. Barry welcomes her to this week’s show as they discuss tips and tricks that lead to innovation.
The Road to Innovation
Her parents’ ability to essentially create something from nothing fed Diana’s urge to get into entrepreneurship and innovation. Her immigrant parents had to work hard to provide for the family. Through their hard work, they were able to build their own business.
New Mindset, New Growth
One of Diana’s biggest unlearning experiences happened while starting up her own business. She gives an anecdote of her interaction with a high growth program leader. She talks about having to change her mindset and approach to business due to that interaction and how it grew her company 1000% in one year! Barry adds that breaking free of existing behaviors within that frame and thinking big but starting small can help a business grow.
Saying No and Letting Go
“Good strategy means you say no, even to customers you know,” Barry says. Customers you go after are the customers you will get, Diana emphasizes. Sales from larger companies will take longer to get, but the return is worth it. She says that you should say no to companies that can prevent you from going after the kind of business you really want. She cites her experience of letting go 90% of her own customers so she could have more growth and profitability. Barry iterates that being serious about your business growth means sometimes letting go of existing customers.
Quality Decision-Making
Making decisions on a 1 to 10 scale allows you to make higher quality decisions. Diana says that many people are misguided on how to say yes to things because they think about decisions as a yes or no binary, rather than on a scale of one to ten. In the business decision-making process, it’s important to have people around you who can help you find ways to work through hard decisions.
Pivot Indicators
Diana calls the things we monitor to inform our decisions, ‘pivot indicators.’ There should be systems in place - such as a decision-making rubric - that monitor the outcomes of our decisions and help people make progress in uncertain situations. Diana says that your decision-making rubric is a living document that will evolve as you do new things and experience what works. She adds that she has a decision diary for when she’s making tough decisions, with a checklist for those decisions. “50% of decisions are probably wrong because you have limited information,” Diana expresses.
Looking Ahead
Diana is currently focused on leading people through innovation, creating an environment that helps them get through an innovation project, and big transformation within a company. Diana’s tips to managers are to create pivot points within their work environment, give employees their space to do their tasks, and trust their employees to achieve the business’ desired outcomes.
Resources
Diana Kander | Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Website | |||
| Enabling Agility by Being Agile with Annette Gabriel | 06 Jan 2021 | 00:36:39 | |
This week’s guest, Annette Gabriel, is enthusiastic about helping leaders and teams adopt higher performance practices. Annette is a former Senior Director of Human Resources at Pepsico. Barry O’Reilly describes her as “one of the people who just shines when you hear her stories.” Annette and Barry discuss the framework of agility, and how to let teams lead.
Agility Mindset
Leaders who adopt an agility mindset are eager to explore the world around them. Annette says that she views each job as a learning opportunity and a new experience whether she ends up liking it or not. Barry comments that trying and even failing is part of the process: you just have to recalibrate when things don’t go as you planned. If more people adopted an agility mindset, they would be open to trying new ways of working.
Unlearning Moments
Barry asks Annette to relate some of the mistakes she made along the way, and what she had to unlearn. “Trying to do too much at once whilst still trying to influence the leadership layer of the company,” she begins. She gives an anecdote of going at the leadership layer with working programs that failed because they were too complicated. She was still learning the programs while trying to share and develop them, so she should have taken more time to fully understand them before presenting to company leaders. Barry comments that leaders often find it hard to just get out of the way and let front line staff have more authority. However, when they start to see the values and principles come to life and the positive outcomes of them, it becomes easier for them to trust the process.
Being Agile
“There is no one way to be agile,” Annette remarks. “Being agile is actually pivoting and adjusting for what you need at that moment, at that time based upon what you've learned, what information you've gathered and what you've learned from testing,” she continues. It’s a common misconception that processes have to be standardized to be successful, Barry comments. A better approach is a localized one: focus on equipping teams to adapt based on the context.
First Follower Concept
“A champion can bring [the team] along a lot more quickly if you give that champion the license to take the team through [training],” Annette says. She advocates the importance of ‘first followers’. “A first follower,” Annette explains, “is that champion who is going to make the extra time investment and go deeper on things, when they try to pull a group into an exercise or facilitate a discussion.” She reiterates that these individuals are influential in reaching more people and bringing them onto the new plans and directions the organization may take.
The Team Leads The Way
Barry expresses that at times senior level management believe that they have all the answers and that this can create challenges within the organization. He adds that processes designed to make things work often keeps progress back because those processes rely on one or two people signing off a document. It is better to empower the hundreds of frontline workers - who deal with the issues and know what exactly the problems are - to come up with the solutions. Annette agrees and adds that a well-constructed team with all the right capabilities will be experts at resolving issues.
Looking Ahead
Not knowing what’s ahead is what excites Annette the most. She’s looking forward to her ‘next great learning experience.’ Her advice to leaders who may be struggling with unlearning: play along and see what happens, you may not always like the result but it will always be a learning experience.
Resources
Annette Gabriel on LinkedIn | |||
| Unlearn Season Two Finale: Ask Me Anything with Barry O’Reilly | 23 Dec 2020 | 00:34:06 | |
Welcome to the Unlearn Podcast’s second Ask Me Anything, something that is fast becoming an annual tradition. This episode is a kind of retrospective, a chance to not only answer questions from listeners all over the world but a chance to reflect on the year that has happened - the challenges as well as the opportunities.
Here’s to 2021 – and now, 10 answers to 10 questions.
· What has been the most important characteristic that has helped you lead through COVID?
· As a leader, what advice would you give your younger self for managing such an accelerated period of change?
· What was the biggest shift for you personally in your approach to leadership this year?
· What are the key traits and habits that leaders need to adopt to lead in this new world of work?
· You often talk about collaboration fit — can you elaborate on it?
· What’s been your most interesting video conference experience in 2020?
· What are your principles of work?
· What one change have you made to help you for 2021 and beyond?
· What’s the most interesting research you’ve discovered this year?
· What’s your favorite book you read this year?
Further Listening:
Role Modeling Culture Transformation with Christian Metzner
Product Management For Large Scale Innovation with Secil Tabli Watson
Help Others Win with Steven Leist
Resources:
How to be an Anti-Racist
Strong Towns | |||
| Helping Others Win with Steven Leist | 09 Dec 2020 | 00:44:24 | |
Steven Leist is the Vice President for Customer Technology at American Airlines, the world’s largest airline. He is a technology leader who is intentional about creating a culture that cares for his team members. Barry and Steven discuss building employee relationships, becoming better leaders, and developing culture within organizations in this week’s Unlearn Podcast.
Helping Others Win at Work
Over time, Steven has adopted the concept of helping others win at work. He tells Barry that it comes down to people within an organization, and stresses the importance of culture as the driving force behind his leadership. Helping others win changes people's mindset. "I think some of the challenges we hear at times are that folks feel constrained by policies, and so we worked really hard to try to listen to our frontline employees and really try to put them in a situation where they can actually help the customer," Steven comments. He tells Barry that he had to unlearn how to let go as a leader, and that he did not have to be the smartest person in the room.
Thinking Big and Starting Small
One of the challenges many companies have is that they think big but don’t start small. Steven shares an example where he and his team became frustrated with a project at work because they thought big and started big to complete it faster. He expresses that this is a common management issue "because they have to see the big picture and they've got to get the revenue results". The pandemic allowed American Airlines to pivot and start attacking the new problems presented by it, within the parameters of thinking big and starting small. "I think this capability and mindset - and behavior really - you've built of thinking big but starting small, means teams are constituting small things, and there's opportunities for leaders to see small progress, small steps, small mistakes and then course correct and grow into these bigger solutions that have profound impact across your company," Barry remarks.
Trust Culture
Barry asks Steven to give some advice to persons wishing to embark on the journey of building culture within an organization. "You have to have a culture that's built on trust," Steven answers. It’s important to have leaders who are willing to step up and advocate for the team, he adds. Leaders should also be humble enough to let the team figure out their own way of handling problems such as including them in decision making and helping them build camaraderie. Another key factor is having the right relationship with the right business partners. Taking all these steps can develop the trust culture within the organization.
Looking Ahead
American Airlines is moving towards better product management and building a stewardship concept in terms of how product management is done. Steven believes it is vital to continue the dialogue on diversity and inclusion and bring in new perspectives to enrich the company’s culture. He wants employees to be better connected to their customers and have direct feedback with them.
Resources
Steven Leist on LinkedIn
Steven Leist on Twitter | |||
| Building for Tomorrow with Sara Wood | 25 Nov 2020 | 00:49:38 | |
Sara Wood is the CEO of Kaluza. She is a product leader, non-executive board member and a “builder at heart” who has even helped the UK with its Covid systems. Barry O’Reilly welcomes Sara to this week’s show as they discuss changing technology and the effects of the pandemic on the energy sector.
Transitioning Across Domains
Sara’s wide-ranging experience has enabled her to go from place to place through the lens of “what is interesting here, what’s interesting about the technology there”. She is essentially “a builder at heart”, she says. Barry asks her what advice she would give to someone who wants to transition from one domain to another. She responds, “I think the combination of really being curious about the world around you, about where technology is going, and adaptable to what you find on the other side of that.”
The Platform Play and Supply Chain
Sara learned supply chain in the fashion industry at Gap. She moved to Farfetch because she was impressed with that company’s platform play, particularly the impact it would have on supply chain. At Kaluza, she sees technology and data as the platform that would enable the transition in the energy industry. What we do now with regard to the climate crisis will inform the future, she points out. She laments that the existing data and technology is not being put to use as they should be. To her, she tells Barry, a platform approach is about “how do we empower people in their homes who are just living a normal life to both understand how they participate in the energy ecosystem and adapt behavior?” She finds that using the technology and data to empower customers and give them more choices is fueling demand for sustainable energy.
Platform Thinking
Trends and data that exists within the teams she works with, are all information Sara pools together into her platform. Barry applauds this “platform thinking.” Sara says that she jumps into a new industry with a fair amount of curiosity. She believes that product leaders who adopt this mental model are the “CEOs of the future” and are building a system to “create conditions for success.” Her teams have since adopted her approach.
Going Remote
As a platform technology company, going remote due to the pandemic was relatively easy for Kaluza. The company’s pace of growth has continued. Additionally, during the lockdown, Kaluza was able to fully migrate one of its customers into its newly updated platform.
Pride of Work
People need to feel connected to the job that they’re doing. For example, Barry says, the workers at Tesco light up when they see how they’re able to help customers. Small acts of kindness and recognition can have a great effect, and leaders should ensure that their teams are able to see the benefits of their hard work.
Looking Ahead
Sara is looking forward to applying her skills and experience to making energy simple, cheap and safe. She is anticipating that the world would rely less on things that are damaging to the environment.
Resources
Sara Wood on LinkedIn | |||
| People-Centric, High Performance Culture with Rick Weil | 11 Nov 2020 | 00:36:18 | |
Barry O’Reilly welcomes Rick Weil onto this week’s show. Rick Weil is a Head of Global Product and Analytics at Amazon. He started off as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, then worked at General Dynamics and Microsoft before his current position at Amazon. Rick and Barry discuss key human-centered approaches to unlocking team motivation and performance. [Listen from 00:34]
A Positive Culture
“When you can create this culture where everybody wants to help each other towards a shared goal, you've unlocked some incredible opportunities for performance,” Rick comments. He is focused on creating a positive culture in his working environment where peers selflessly help each other excel versus competing with each other. He stresses taking time to listen to his employees and their concerns, as well as deliberately stepping back at times to let team members address challenges on their own. This is especially important when managing ‘managers of managers’ and dealing with internal conflict. [Listen from 6:51]
360° Feedback
Barry asks Rick some of the things he noticed about himself that have evolved over time. One of the many things Rick has learned at Amazon is the power of “taking check x-rays” and using 360° feedback to identify leadership patterns to pay attention to. This helps us know what levers to pull to improve team culture and performance. Rick also talks about the importance and power of genuinely caring for people in the workplace over following scripted leadership behaviors. “Just because I can read all these books on leadership and follow the recipe doesn't make me a good leader,” Rick comments. As a leader you need to find ways to effectively sense how your teams are doing at the human level and connect the personal needs and motivations of your team to business goals to drive organizational change. “Mission First, People Always”, Rick says. [Listen from 14:00]
Leadership and Relationships
Being a transformational leader is rooted in building strong relationships with the people you lead and work with. One way to do this is through intentional question asking. We often use questioning to assess the health of work operations, yet the true power (and intrinsic leadership fulfillment) comes from getting to know people at the human level, teaching, developing, and being part of your teams’ career journeys. Ask how your team members are doing (and mean it). Get to know about their aspirations and what’s important to them. And for leaders where this genuine, human-centered approach may not come natural, Rick urges them to give caring a try. “Care about people. That will change your perspective, it'll impact your mindset,” Rick expresses. When you look at leadership as a platform for positive human impact and not as a position of individual power, it changes the way that you think about life and work, and directly correlates with the performance of your team. [Listen from 21:00]
Looking Ahead
Barry asks Rick what he’s looking forward to. He responds that he is looking forward to his partnership with the Project Management Institute (PMI) and developing a product, called Kickoff, which is an intuitive, web-based guide to project management. There are so many resources available for project and program management practitioners, but few for non-PMs who need to know how to better get project work done, essentially to know PM “as a skill”. Kickoff starts with basics, includes helpful templates and examples, and is aimed at helping individuals get acquainted with the fundamentals of project management. This product has the potential to fundamentally enhance how work gets done for millions of people, from students putting together class projects to start-ups creating new products and support functions tenured PMs who need project support from other, non-PM team members [Listen from 33:58].
Resources
Rick Weil on LinkedIn | |||
| Product Management For Large Scale Innovation with Secil Tabli Watson | 28 Oct 2020 | 00:48:45 | |
Barry O’Reilly is pleased to welcome Secil Tabli Watson, Executive Vice President for Digital Solutions for Business at Wells Fargo. In this week’s show, Barry chats with Secil about the techniques she uses to drive innovation in both retail and business banking environments. She shares the lessons she unlearned in the process and how to bring product management principles into a large organization in a way that drives innovation.
First Lesson: Speak The Customer’s Language
Secil’s first assignment as a digital channel manager 18 years ago was to make Wellsfargo.com into a buying site. She focused on language that was customer-focused, rather than the bank-centric. “We brought in the capabilities and the competency of doing user research and understanding customer tasks and understanding their behaviors and motivators and really putting that into the language,” she says. In addition, they transformed the architecture of the website so that it was more customer driven. [Listen from 1:55]
Staff People to Outcomes Not Products
If you’re struggling to move from project-based teams to outcome-based ones, Secil advises that you reframe how you think. This was a critical unlearning for her, she remarks. She shares an example of how she recast her thinking about a project from product to outcome, as a result of which her team was able to see themselves as responsible for a broader outcome, and partner with other departments to make it happen. She advises listeners to break the project into phases with quick wins, and gives insight into how to create cross-functional teams with as little awkwardness as possible. “If you ask a little bit at a time from people, they're more willing to help,” she points out. [Listen from 6:50]
B2B Customer Relationships Are Deeper
Businesses with B2B customers can develop deeper relationships with them. Because their B2B customers are fewer in number, Secil says, they are able to communicate on a more intimate level over a longer period of time. She asks her B2B customers, “How do you feel?” because it elicits deeper answers. “And I'm also then able to ask the question, Why?” Secil remarks. “I can ask the question as many times as I want to try to get down to a deeper meaning and a deeper need or a desire or a business problem that the customer may be having.” She and Barry discuss why co-creating with your customers - as counterintuitive as the idea appears - is their favored approach. “It builds more trust and actually derisks more of your relationship,” Barry comments. [Listen from 15:20]
It Only Takes 10
“...it doesn't take more than 10 people to do things but you have to get the right 10 people,” Secil argues. Her job, as she sees it, is to figure out what to do differently so she can identify those 10 people quickly in her large organization environment. Barry comments that if more companies adopt this approach they would see greater success. [Listen from 29:35]
OKRs are not for Compensation
Secil and Barry agree that while measuring performance is important, performance metrics should not be tied to compensation, as pay for performance inhibits innovation. Secil believes that the team should win together and learn together; they should not compete against one another. “There is nothing more we could do to make a better team other than enable them to learn,” she says. [Listen from 36:00]
Looking Ahead
Secil is excited about the current trend to apply product management principles and skills in atypical areas, such as for thinking through outcomes and tactics for diversity and inclusion efforts. Barry comments, “I think everybody can take these principles and methods and apply them to build better experiences for people.” [Listen from 43:35]
Resources
Secil Tabli Watson on LinkedIn | |||
| Role Modeling Culture Transformation with Christian Metzner | 14 Oct 2020 | 00:44:45 | |
This week’s guest is a leader who role models change. Christian Metzner is Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Volkswagen Financial Services UK. Barry O’Reilly describes him as someone who is “constantly staying curious and getting outside his comfort zone; and you only have to spend time with him and his team to realize how much his actions inspire others.” Christian and Barry discuss the role of leadership in inspiring organizational culture.
Initiating Change
Christian has learned to step out of his comfort zone and reflect on what other leaders and cultures are doing better. Emphasizing that the one with power needs to initiate the change, he says, “If you are the one in the position with the power, then you need to open up first. You can’t expect others to change if you’re not leading the way.”
Hacking Culture
Innovation is often the result of challenging yourself and pushing your boundaries. “You don't come to innovation if you only go one mile faster every day,” Christian points out. “You have to push boundaries... Try to find the 5% to 10% where you can challenge your behaviors, where you can challenge people who might be stuck in their thinking.” He advocates using cultural hacks - low effort steps that can be implemented quickly, but which have high emotional impact - and shares examples of cultural hacks that he successfully implemented. Barry comments that these small changes often create ripple effects throughout an organization.
Being a Leader
“My simple understanding of leadership is... to remove your blockers and to make you better on a day-to-day basis.” Christian sees learning from competitors and his team as key to creating a culture of innovation: an environment where everyone is on the same playing field. “IT is - next to the capital market - the single biggest threat to an organization like ours,” he points out. “And we need to get our job... absolutely right to enable our commercial colleagues to come up with great products and services for our real end customers.”
Trade-offs in Decision-Making
Barry commends Christian’s ability to take “a little bit of information and make a decision and then getting more information…” He asks Christian to describe his process and the trade-offs of this approach. Christian responds that transparency, engagement, and iterating in short cycles are the key elements in this approach. The current crisis demands different behaviors, he argues. “We’re not playing the game big fish against small fish anymore,” he says. “We're playing big fish against fast fish, and that requires a different behavior.”
Build Systems Around People
“It's less the individual [than] the systems and the structures that are in place to help them succeed,” Barry comments. “If more companies started to recognize that they’re designing systems around people to make them successful… that’s a massive transformation that... would have a huge impact on their company.” “Let's bring people into a role where they can flourish, where they are allowed to bring in their strengths,” Christian adds.
Looking Ahead
Christian says that he wrote a framework in the early days of the COVID crisis that has guided the company’s decision-making. The framework focuses on three dimensions: decisiveness, simple communication, and taking care of one another. He speaks of dealing with the pandemic in phases: they are entering the phase of renewing the company, so they are using what they learned in the previous phases to inform their approach. In particular, he is excited about how the company will maintain pace and flexibility so that they can provide the best possible customer experience.
Resources
Christian Metzner on LinkedIn | |||
| Intentional Leadership with Katie Anderson | 30 Sep 2020 | 00:36:43 | |
Katie Anderson is a leadership coach consultant and author, best known for inspiring individuals and organizations. She started off in public health research then moved to Japan in 2015. Barry O’Reilly welcomes her to the show as she shares the lessons she learned in Japan on how to deepen your leadership skill.
Learning Lean at the Source
Her life in Japan inspired Katie to learn lean at the source as she had already been applying Toyota production principles in the healthcare system. Moving away from academia and research was her big pivot as she transitioned from public health into her own consulting practice. [Listen from 2:30]
Leading With Intention
Katie advocates leading with intention and orienting your actions in the direction of the behaviour that will achieve your desired purpose. Now that she was in a position where she had to help other people solve problems, she realized that her mindset and approach needed to shift. She needed to show up in a different capacity: she had to be a model and guide instead of simply going in and doing it all on her own. [Listen from 6:25]
Effective Leadership Role
People need alignment: they need to know what the target of the organization is in order to meet that target. If leaders don’t have clarity on what the target is, it is unlikely that the employees will. Barry comments that if employees don’t know what direction has been set by leaders, that’s a failure of the leadership team. You can have activity without vision, but not in a meaningful direction. [Listen from 13:00]
Hoshin As a Tool
Hoshin is about identifying the top strategies in the organization, and how the next level down contributes to achieving those strategies. It is anchored in the scientific method, and a deep process of reflection. It provides the organization with the real data, whether positive or negative and allows for the leadership team to make better and accurate decisions based on that data. [Listen from 21:45]
Looking Ahead
Katie is looking forward to hearing listeners’ reflections on her stories and experiences. She is excited to continue to amplify her message. She is also committed to continue helping individuals connect with their intention and their purpose, in order to achieve their desired goals. [Listen from 34:25]
Resources
KBJAnderson.com | |||
| The Business Value of IoT Innovation with Daniel Elizalde | 16 Sep 2020 | 00:42:30 | |
Daniel Elizalde is the VP and head of IoT for North America at Ericsson. He’s spent more than 20 years working in industries, from manufacturing to aerospace and energy. Today, Daniel also teaches courses on the decision framework that he’s created. Barry O’Reilly welcomes Daniel to this week’s show to discuss how much the concepts of IoT have changed, and the impact of technology on the current world.
The Evolution of IoT
Once Daniel learnt of the IoT concept and recognized it in the way he did his work, he started cataloguing and creating frameworks and approaches. With the advancement of technology, you can now plot a system of sensor data points on a graph, which would have taken a year to put together previously. The advancement of technology also led to the scaling back of employees and time. Daniel encourages adapting the product psyche and learning what you can do today so that you can take advantage of the technological curve in the future. [Listen from 1:50]
Looking the Other Way Around
“Building relationships is the most important part to get things done,” Daniel says. Barry parallels the IoT system with the people working in a well-functioning unit: the technological idea and the people idea is what drives the performance. Daniel talks about introducing new ways of application to Ericsson, and helping the company to unlearn some of its long held strategies to adapt to the current times. Daniel says he’s always looking the other way around to determine feasibility and what the customers really want. [Listen from 15:00]
Building Capability
Driving results, for Daniel, involves discovery and getting more projects from other units in order to apply their concepts to Ericsson. Daniel describes what has worked for him in terms of expanding technology in the company. He discusses monetizing 5G networks as they emerge, focusing on customers’ problems and adding value. “Your capability is the knowledge you’re accumulating in your organization, and making good decisions based on what you’re learning,” Barry comments. [Listen from 23:25]
Looking Ahead
Daniel is excited to see how 5G is applied in the coming years and how it will level the technological playing field. He is looking forward to individuals being able to build on 5G just like the Internet. He is also looking forward to seeing the things people had talked about ten years ago becoming a reality in the not too distant future. [Listen from 41:05]
Resources
Daniel Elizalde on LinkedIn
Daniel’s blog & podcast: danielelizalde.com
D-15 IoT Studio at Ericsson: https://www.ericsson.com/en/about-us/experience-centers/d-fifteen/d-15-iot-studio | |||
| Cracking The Code For A Career in Cyber Security with Former FBI Special Agent Dave Mahon | 14 Aug 2024 | 00:42:31 | |
Cybersecurity is an ever-evolving field that requires continuous learning, adaptability, and a deep understanding of both the technological landscape and human behavior. Today’s guest, Dave Mahon, a seasoned cybersecurity expert with extensive experience in both the private and public sectors, shares his journey from the FBI to leading global cybersecurity efforts in the corporate world. Dave Mahon served as a Senior Advisor for Deloitte, where he was instrumental in developing and executing strategies to safeguard information, technologies, and data. Prior to Deloitte, he was the Global Chief Security Officer for CenturyLink, now Lumen Technologies, and also served as a Special Agent for the FBI, focusing on federal crimes involving cyber threats, terrorism, and more. In this episode, Dave discusses the critical thinking skills he developed over his 20-year career in the FBI and how he applied them in the private sector to tackle emerging cybersecurity challenges. Host Barry O'Reilly invites Dave to explore his career journey, the lessons he learned, and the importance of mentorship, team building, and strategic thinking in cybersecurity. The conversation delves into the nuances of transitioning from public service to corporate leadership, the evolving nature of cyber threats, and how businesses can better prepare for future challenges. Key Takeaways:
Additional Insights:
Episode Highlights
"There's a couple of key parts of everybody's life... because it starts to set the foundation for how you think about your life going forward and how you're going to make the decisions."
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| Finding Your Leadership Voice with Diana Stepner | 02 Sep 2020 | 00:28:01 | |
Diana Stepner is the VP for Product Management of Innovative Learning Solutions at Pearson. She enjoys building product experiences that customers love as well as weaving innovation, experimentation, and technology into actionable product visions and roadmaps that accelerate growth. Barry O’Reilly welcomes Diana to this week’s show as they discuss finding her voice and why a product management approach to leadership is valuable in these times.
Finding Her Voice
Barry comments, “We often figure out what we want to do as we do things and learn our way through them.” Diana explains that she had to unlearn the notion that a leader must be the loudest person in the room and know all the answers. A point from an article she read - that great leaders spend more time listening and asking questions than talking and giving answers - helped her realize that her natural leadership style was indeed valid. Encouraging others to contribute, bringing people into the conversation who might not have felt comfortable to speak before, was the right way for her.
The Power of Pausing
Pausing to think, to process and analyze information before responding, helps you make better decisions. Diana says that she had to unlearn making snap decisions and jumping to conclusions. “What I've had to do,” she says, “is take a step back when I've got a lot of information that I need to synthesize; to open up more towards other ways of addressing an approach; think about a more broad perspective; and then evaluate a couple of different opportunities initially, test them out and then be able to determine what's the right way to proceed.” Pauses are ok, Barry emphasizes, and we should make more space for them in communication.
A Period of Unlearning
Many companies are going through a sense of unlearning, Diana says. She and Barry discuss the changes that are happening in companies currently: they are realizing the power of having diverse representation so they are listening more. Diana remarks that those companies that make the effort to have these changes stick will benefit in the long run. “If you don't define the outcome, if you don't make the data available, if you don't look at the reality of what's happening and make changes to move towards the direction you want, nothing is going to change,” Barry adds. While change may be difficult and uncomfortable, good can come from it.
Advice for Leaders
Barry asks Diana to share advice for leaders who want to adopt her leadership approach. She gives several tips including:
Expect change.
Learn from those around you.
Find ways to empower those you work with.
“I think it’s by the creation of a space where people feel comfortable to speak up and to share their voice, where you can truly have a tremendous amount of impact,” she says.
Looking Ahead
Diana says that she tries to find the good in everything that is happening right now. She is excited to see the acceleration of trends: things that we thought would happen in the future are happening today. More companies are encouraging a culture of experimentation now to get an insight into the future, she says. Barry comments that he is glad that more people are realizing that no one person has all the answers, and that our best bet moving forward is to learn our way through together. Diana hopes that we continue to normalize remote working as the pandemic has proven that we can be productive outside of the workplace.
Resources
Diana Stepner on LinkedIn | |||
| Designing Invincible Companies with Alex Osterwalder | 19 Aug 2020 | 00:49:06 | |
Barry O’Reilly is delighted to welcome Alexander Osterwalder, famed author of The Business Model Canvas, The Value Proposition Canvas and most recently The Invincible Company. Alex is also an entrepreneur and speaker, and one of the world’s leading experts on innovation and entrepreneurship. In this exciting episode, they discuss some of the aspects that help innovation and entrepreneurship flourish, including how business leaders can identify what they have to unlearn to be successful in the future.
Failure is a Door to Opportunity
Oftentimes we overstate failure, and we don’t look for the opportunities that come out of it. Alex relates how failure often turned out to be a door to new opportunities for him. “I think you just have to be ready to embrace the surprises that life gives you and learn from every failure,” he says. He advises listeners to own their failures and don’t blame others. “If you focus on the positive, all of a sudden you know how to instrumentalize failure.” Entrepreneurs distinguish between reversible and non-reversible decisions, so they can make calculated bets. While failure is never the goal, it is an inevitable consequence and a good thing. You can become more dispassionate about failure if you view it as experimentation, Alex posits.
You Get Better Over Time
You get better at innovation and entrepreneurship over time. Most successful entrepreneurs are 40 years and over, and have been through several startups. They learn what not to do through practical experience. However, Alex says, you also need to learn the technical aspects of entrepreneurship and innovation.
Stay Humble
“No company is invincible,” says Alex, “but companies that constantly reinvent themselves because they don’t believe they’re invincible, those are the ones who are going to stay ahead.” Staying humble and keeping the mindset that there is always something new to learn, some new way to reinvent your company, is the difference between growth and stagnation. Barry adds, and Alex agrees, that successful leaders are always creating scenarios that take them out of their comfort zone. Alex shares an exercise he does with leadership teams to help them visualize their current state, and recognize what they need to do differently.
Create the Environment for Innovation
“As a leader you don’t pick the winning ideas; you create the conditions for the winning ideas and the winning teams to emerge,” Alex remarks. Research shows that only four out of every 1000 projects will succeed, so leaders need to foster an ecosystem for those winning ideas to surface. He describes a practical system companies can adopt to incrementally fund winning ideas. He emphasizes that innovation and execution must work in harmony to enable each other. Barry comments that entrepreneurs should ask, “How quickly can we get these ideas in front of people to see? Should we build it and then test? Can we execute it?”
Alex and Barry discuss why innovation is a moral obligation for companies. “My belief is innovation is almost a moral obligation - not to create more money but actually to create more stable jobs,” Alex says.
Looking Ahead
Alex is excited about the boost of distributed work that the pandemic has accelerated. He loves that the software tools being adopted are leveraging human creativity, and sees huge opportunities coming out of this difficult period.
Resources
AlexOsterwalder.com
The Invincible Company: How to Constantly Reinvent Your Organization with Inspiration From the World’s Best Business Models | |||
| Radical Alignment with Alexandra Jamieson and Bob Gower | 05 Aug 2020 | 00:31:37 | |
Barry O’Reilly welcomes authors Alexandra Jamieson and Bob Gower to this week’s Unlearn Podcast. They are the co-authors of a new book which details their practical system to have difficult conversations in a productive manner. The book is entitled Radical Alignment: How to Have Game-Changing Conversations That Will Transform Your Business and Your Life.
How the System Originated
Alex and Bob describe how the Radical Alignment system started. It was a tool they used in their own relationship and that they taught to others. Often people would reach out to them afterwards about implementing the tool in other contexts. It soon became apparent that they had something valuable that they could share with the world.
Four Simple Steps
The heart of the Radical Alignment system is four simple steps, Alex points out. “As a couple, or even as an individual or as a team, you share your intentions, concerns, boundaries and dreams.” Bob explains that they usually constrain the system to a topic and he illustrates how the system would work in the context of the current pandemic. Barry comments that he finds the system practical and applicable. “I felt like it was very explicit about what things matter, what was I going to do, and I could act on it straight away,” he says.
How To Have Difficult Conversations
Conflict often develops because there’s a missing conversation, according to Fernando Flores. “More often than not,” Bob adds, “the missing conversation is just some key little piece of context that you don't have, that really explains the person's behavior.” He shares an example of how context changed his perception from annoyance with his neighbor to acceptance. Alex remarks that this system brings structure and ease to her communication. “For me the most valuable thing about this structured conversation is that it gives me a way to organize my emotions and my thoughts and my desires.”
The Goal is Binding People Together
Radical alignment essentially is about binding people together. Although the first three steps are vital, they can be somewhat utilitarian, Bob comments. The fourth step - talking about your dreams - is inspirational. He describes the physiological effects of sharing dreams, which results in binding people together as a group. Alex emphasizes that there are important rules for having these conversations: no cross-talk, no arguing points, you must listen to each other. The objective is to develop tactical empathy, which is simply understanding where each person is coming from.
Other Important Lessons
Barry, Alex and Bob share some important learnings and unlearnings about being radically aligned:
People want to have difficult conversations but don’t have the tools to do so.
Alex says, “Don't talk about anything important when either of you are hungry, angry, lonely or tired. We adapted that to be AHA - angry, hungry or alcohol.”
Reason and emotions are intimately intertwined.
“Teams fall apart because people can’t get along, because people don’t understand each other,” Bob comments. “...The big lesson of the last few years is how much I need to actually listen and to take on somebody else’s perspective before I have an opinion about it.”
People may not understand how useful a tool is unless they use it.
Trust is a lubricant that helps diverse people work together.
Looking Ahead
Alex is excited about how their tool is helping mom entrepreneurs. Bob wants to see people bring their whole selves to work. He hopes that this tool, that has been so impactful in their lives, can impact many others.
Resources
Radical Alignment: How to Have Game-Changing Conversations That Will Transform Your Business and Your Life | |||
| Designing our Work with Susan O’Malley | 22 Jul 2020 | 00:49:58 | |
Susan O’Malley is an expert at building high performance teams and culture. This is the passion that influenced her work at Google, as well as her current position of Senior Director at IDEO. She joins Barry O’Reilly on this week’s show to share her inspiring story.
Being Open to Following Your Heart
Few people approach new opportunities with the openness that Susan displays, Barry comments. She credits her mindset to a love of learning and the ‘harmonizer’ role she embodied as a middle child. It deepened when she joined Google in its early years. “I literally saw the product changing the world and changing people’s business models,” she says. “…And it gave me this tremendous sense of optimism around what technology can do, not just for the big guys, but actually for the little guys and the guys in the middle. That was a really, really inspiring thing.”
What Makes Great Leaders
Susan looked to the great leaders around her for traits she could cultivate in her own life. From her observations, great leaders were charismatic, fair, intentional and they succeeded at whatever they put their hand to. Barry adds about great leaders, “...they all seem to be working in a different field than they originally trained, and yet they really cultivated this capability to continuously adapt to changing circumstances. And they build systems that allow them to explore uncertainty very intentionally; they build a lot of fast feedback mechanisms into things. They're very curious to get outside their comfort zone.”
The Value of Authenticity
Authenticity is about being yourself. Susan says, “It helps other people be attracted to what you’re trying to do. It helps us communicate. It helps us produce amazing results in other people… Our job is to cultivate companies and teams where we have a great mix of people, and where people can really be themselves so that we can all find this energy and find this collaboration that's gonna take us to the next level.” Barry comments that being inauthentic demands energy, while just being your true self gives you energy.
Living Your Values
Performing at your highest level as an organization demands living out your values. Susan relates that she had to unlearn several ideas when she joined IDEO, including how to embrace ambiguity and how to work with designers. She now teaches these lessons to her coaching clients. “It’s not about your performance, and it’s not about what you know,” she tells her clients. “It’s about the things that everybody can make together.” Creating this kind of high performance environment means knowing your culture, she points out. She describes how leaders and teams can create the culture they aspire to.
Focus on the Process Not the Outcome
High performance is more about perfecting the process rather than the outcome, according to Susan. Barry adds, “The result is secondary to figuring out what's the real problem here and having a good process to explore it. And if we do that well, we're gonna be taken to the direction that we should go, that's probably not where we thought we would be at the start.” Susan shares practical tips including the Hierarchy of W’s and having Torque Partners.
Looking Ahead
Susan is coming to understand more and more how important culture change is in building an organization that will succeed. She is delving into talent design: helping organizations identify, retain and develop the talent they need to win.
Resources
Susan O’Malley on LinkedIn
IDEO.com
Books referenced:
Nine Lies About Work - Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall
Dying for a Paycheck - Jeffrey Pfeffer
Building Microservices - Sam Newman
Unleashed - Frances Frei and Anne Morriss | |||
| Driving Corporate Innovation with Tendayi Viki | 08 Jul 2020 | 00:39:07 | |
This week’s guest, Tendayi Viki, is an Associate Partner at Strategyzer. A prolific author, he has written three books and is a regular contributor to Forbes magazine. His most recent book, Pirates in the Navy: How Innovators Lead Transformation, is a manifesto on how to drive corporate innovation in large organisations. He and Barry O’Reilly chat about how he helped organizations drive and scale innovation, including key unlearning moments along the way.
Good Enough Is Better Than Perfect
In an interesting twist of fate, Tendayi ended up in Stanford’s Graduate School of Business under the tutelage and mentorship of innovators like Steve Blank. He says that this was the turning point for him to converge his psychology training with entrepreneurship and innovation. He recounts two major unlearning moments, the major one of which was his tendency to over-edit. Barry describes this as a classic trap: we want our product to be perfect before we publish, but the better approach is to make it good enough, put it out there and start the conversation. In the academic world, Tendayi points out, your ideas evolve in private; but the innovation world is the opposite as your ideas evolve in public. This makes you vulnerable and takes courage, but the feedback you receive makes your product better.
Earn the Right to Criticize
You have to earn the right to criticize, according to Tendayi. People will only follow you when they see you as a partner on their journey, when they feel that you understand their struggle and have their best interests at heart.
Helping Successful Ideas Evolve
There’s no way to tell which of your ideas will succeed, so invest in many ideas and see which ones pan out. Tendayi remarks, “The fundamental theory of innovation is the theory of an entrepreneurship ecosystem… and in that ecosystem the evolution of successful ideas is actually pretty random. We don't know what's going to succeed and what’s not going to succeed. What we do is just throw things at the wall: we invest in a whole bunch of stuff and then we see what succeeds and what fails.” He emphasizes that you cannot choose winning ideas yourself on day one. He tells leaders that they have to provide the context for the best ideas to bubble up. Double down once you see what works.
Coaching the Team
Training is not enough: build organizational habits that allow the training to become a repeatable process within your organization. Tendayi explains why he uses this approach when working with large organizations. Coaching the team - both the leaders and employees - involves helping them incorporate this new mindset into their daily routine. Leaders in particular need to be deliberate about what they say and the questions they ask. Their questions should help to bring out the best in the team.
What Lean Startup Is Not
Lean startup is not a way to make any idea you have work. In fact, the majority of times it will tell you what doesn’t work. “What lean startup does is it allows you to find things that don't work, quicker and cheaper, so you can stop working on that stuff and double down on the things that work,” Tendayi says. He shares practical tips for incorporating the lean startup culture into a large organization, including creating artificial scarcity, which instills the discipline of focusing on what you need to do to be successful.
Looking Ahead
Tendayi is working on completing ongoing projects, including the Insight Strategyzer tool and a new book entitled Right Question Right Time. His next step, he says, is to return to his academic roots to research the psychology of uncomplacency.
Resources
TendayiViki.com
Pirates In The Navy: How Innovators Lead Transformation | |||
| Behavior Design and Tiny Habits with BJ Fogg | 24 Jun 2020 | 00:37:09 | |
Barry O’Reilly talks with social scientist and author of Tiny Habits, Dr. BJ Fogg on this week’s Unlearn Podcast. BJ is a Research Associate at Stanford University and creator of the Fogg Behavior Model in which he teaches people how to adapt their behavior based on the challenges they want to solve. His students include the co-founder of Instagram, as well as several other product, app, and service developers who create solutions using the models and methods he teaches.
A Natural Experimenter
“There’s a real skill about recognizing different patterns and seeing a trend and bringing it all together to create a new field,” Barry comments. He describes BJ as a natural experimenter, as he was able to converge his love of rhetoric with scientific study to create the new field of persuasive technology. BJ points out that it’s not a straight path: “You kind of stumble into learning and unlearning moments—you find what works and what doesn't; and certainly do by being curious to explore new paths, design experiments and get insights through research.”
How To Make Change Sustainable
Lasting change has these two characteristics, according to Fogg: Will it help you do what you already want to do? Will it help you feel successful? These two maxims are foundational to Fogg's systematic approach, Behavior Design, that helps people make the sustainable changes they are aiming towards. BJ describes how he discovered this new domain by setting himself up to be free to pursue his goals in the way he felt was best. Once you have a little support to independently sustain yourself for a while, he says, you realize that you can take more risks than you thought before. Barry adds, “Our ability to continuously adapt our behavior and thinking to changing circumstances is probably the most important skill we may need.”
Just Get It Out There
“Design the experiment. Crank it out. The first you're gonna mess up on. So just do it, learn, change and then do the next one,” BJ advises. Instead of trying to get it perfect, just get it done and put it out. The market will tell you what you need to improve and how to iterate. This is a key tenet of Behavior Design, BJ says. He illustrates this idea with an interesting story about how he forced his students to create a Facebook app in a seemingly impossible deadline. An important lesson he took away from that experience, he says, is that simplicity is key. It was the simple apps that really took off: “10 weeks later it engaged over 24 million people on the Facebook platform and some of them were making lots of money.”
Looking Ahead
As BJ looks to the future, he comments that now is the critical time for behavior change. He feels a responsibility to help people get through the current pandemic and social justice issues using his behavior change system. It’s a system that you can apply to any problem, so he wants to teach people to use the system to tackle these challenges. He also talks about the focus mapping tool that he is launching to help users match themselves with new habits or behavior changes that are right for them.
Resources
BJFogg.com
TinyHabits.com | |||
| How to Be Forever Employable with Jeff Gothelf | 10 Jun 2020 | 00:41:08 | |
Barry O’Reilly and Jeff Gothelf have been best friends ever since Jeff reviewed Barry’s first draft of Lean Enterprise and told him it sucked. They have worked together as co-authors of the Lean series, and as consultants to Fortune 50 clients. Jeff joins Barry on the Unlearn Podcast this week to talk about his new book, Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You.
Push vs Pull
The higher up the corporate ladder you climb, the fewer the jobs and the fiercer the competition. You have to constantly push your way through. Jeff woke up on his 35th birthday and made the unsettling realization that he would soon be battling younger, better-skilled people for a job. He understood that this was untenable, so he vowed that he wouldn’t look for jobs anymore, rather he would have jobs look for him. He tells Barry that pulling job opportunities means telling the world explicitly who you are, where you could help them, where people can find you and what problems you can solve for them.
First Steps
Why do you exist? How can you help people become successful? Being forever employable involves self-assessment. Jeff says that the first step he took was to examine what he was good at and what value he had provided up to that point. Then he thought about his audience and where the market was trending. “...if you're going to plant a flag somewhere you want to plant it in a growing market rather than ... one that's shrinking,” he points out.
Your Personal Brand
You have a story to tell that no-one else has: storytelling is how you differentiate yourself. Jeff tells listeners that we all have a unique perspective, and it’s how we build our personal brand. He and Barry talk about sharing their stories and fighting the impostor syndrome. “People massively underestimate themselves,” Jeff says. He coaches people how to find the self-confidence to pursue their goals, a trait that is critical if you want to be successful. Barry says that doing something you enjoy gives you confidence because your passion shines through.
Catching The Wave
Recognizing a problem, tracking the trends, then adopting a position and sharing it, orients you to catch the wave of new opportunities. Jeff describes how sharing his ideas attracted many unforeseen opportunities. “All of a sudden this conversation goes global and that begins the pull,” he shares. “All of a sudden I start to attract new opportunities because the story and the conversation and the sharing has become so powerful. Giving all this stuff away starts to attract all these new opportunities my way.” He shares how each new opportunity gave him the confidence to take another step, until he could confidently transition into full-time entrepreneurship. Barry comments, “One of the things people also need to unlearn is this isn't like from 0 to 100% overnight.” It takes small, continuous steps and a constant process of experimenting, evolving and reinventing and growing the things you already do.
Counterintuitive Leadership
A great leader does not purport to have all the answers, Barry says. Instead, it’s someone who is authentic and vulnerable and willing to learn. Jeff says that he is unlearning the fear of becoming vulnerable in public. He finds that his personal struggles resonate with people. He is becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable, which Barry notes is the mark of a successful leader. Jeff is driven by enthusiastic skepticism as coined by Astro Teller: there’s always a better way to do something the next time around.
Looking Forward
Jeff is looking forward to the launch of Forever Employable and the new opportunities it brings his way.
Resources
JeffGothelf.com
Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You | |||
| Break Up With The Job For Your Dream with Kanika Tolver | 27 May 2020 | 00:35:04 | |
Barry O’Reilly welcomes Kanika Tolver to this week’s Unlearn Podcast. Kanika is the bestselling author of Career Rehab and founder of a consultancy business of the same name. She has coached hundreds of clients, helping them discover opportunities to do their best work and to find higher performance roles that are better suited to them.
How To Break Up With Your Job
Despite fear and anxiety about job security, especially in this COVID-19 pandemic, Kanika says, that you shouldn't be afraid to seek the right job or to break up with the wrong one. She and Barry discuss practical advice:
Turn your anxiety into accomplishments. For example, you can upskill by getting a new certification, and expand your network. Connect with recruiters or hiring managers who can help you get a new position.
Join a new online community. Apart from learning new skills, you may be able to connect with experts.
Fearlessly resign when you know you’re prepared. To prepare, think about what you need to do to get ready, what you can learn, and who you can connect with or who you know that can refer you. Taking these small steps builds your confidence to fearlessly resign.
You Are The MVP
Whether you're thinking of changing careers or starting a business, think of yourself as the product. The first step is a Career Rehab Diagnosis, a self-assessment of what is and isn't working in your career. Make adjustments based on what you discover. Next, Kanika says, list your career, education and personal goals. The next step is to think about financial goals and culture fit.
Barry comments that it takes so much unlearning for people to recognize that they deserve to have a fulfilling career in a place where they’re recognized for who they are and what they bring to the table. Kanika cites Barry’s book about reevaluating past behaviors. We need to stop thinking that we should conform to fit the company culture. Instead we must recognize that we’re the MVP (minimum viable product), and negotiate job offers with this mindset. She remarks, “They should be just as happy to have you as you are to have them. So I think when we shift our mindset to looking at ourselves as products and services - we have unique offerings - then it changes the direction of the conversation. Instead of you just praising the company, no - praise yourself and then get with the right company.”
Divorcing The Job For The Dream
Innovating your behavior is imperative to live your dream. Incorporate continuous feedback as it helps you to continuously improve. Another key point is that you should never settle in your career or your business. You have to be resilient in order to be successful.
Kanika also shares the following advice:
You have knowledge and skills from your job that you can transfer into your new business.
Start creating your personal brand: you need a track record before you can divorce your job and marry your dream.
Don’t overthink it. Just do it.
Consistency is all it takes.
Looking Ahead
Kanika is excited about the future of the workplace. The current crisis has proven that workers can still add value working remotely, so she expects more companies to transition into remote. She is also looking forward to more virtual events so new speakers can get an opportunity to spread their message. Information sharing and online networking is being normalized, she believes, and she is looking forward to seeing how businesses and careers pivot during this period, as people develop new communication skills.
Resources
Website: KanikaTolver.com
Book: https://www.amazon.com/Career-Rehab/dp/1599186519/ | |||
| Cultivating Serendipity with Michael Bungay Stanier | 13 May 2020 | 00:37:46 | |
Michael Bungay Stanier is the bestselling author of The Coaching Habit. He is part of the Thinkers 50 and has been named the number one Thought Leader in Coaching this year. Michael joins Barry O’Reilly on the Unlearn Podcast this week to share insights, including how to measure success and pivotal lessons that shaped him.
An Unconventional Career Path
There is a saying that inspiration is when your past suddenly makes sense. Certainly, several experiences in his early career showed Michael that he needed to work for himself in order to be at his best. He recounts that the turning point for him was 20 years ago when he was fired from the last company he worked with. That’s when he started his own business.
Three Memorable Lessons
Barry asks Michael about the lessons he’s learned over the years. Michael responds with the three pivotal lessons that he remembers to this day:
You need to understand who you work best with. He is a great leader to his ideal clients, Michael says. “I'm great at having people's backs; I'm great with people who take responsibility and accountability; I'm great with people who have just been waiting... for the wind beneath their wings… In terms of figuring out who influences and nudges and helps shape people's journeys, you’ve got to get the right match between the right people.”
The power of No. “Part of what I've learned is that the more courageous I can be about what I say no to and the fewer things that I say yes to, the more likely it is I'm going to make a difference in the world.” A lesson that stands out for Barry from The Coaching Habit is that if you’re going to say yes to something, that means you have to say no to something else. There’s great discipline in being able to say no.
Be careful about what you measure as success. Barry and Michael talk about the insidiousness of vanity metrics: sometimes the metric becomes the target and you do anything to achieve it, oftentimes destroying the bigger win that you’re looking for. Michael says that how he measures success is to constantly keep in mind “the bigger game.” He describes how he used this principle with his book.
Serendipity or Intention?
Is success intentional or serendipitous? How do we create success? Barry posits that it starts with systems: when you have big aspirations you need to think big but start small. Michael agrees that “intentionality is what allows serendipity.” Taking steps towards your goal is what prepares you to notice opportunities that you can capitalize on.
Advice That Has Shaped Michael’s Life
A question from his Latin teacher helped Michael decide to become a Rhodes Scholar. Commendation from a past employer helped him see himself as a force for good. And a frustrated directive from his friend to focus helps him “find the focal point that allows [me] to play but also creates the boundaries in which [I] play so that there's a coherence to the stuff that [I] do.” Barry adds that we all need to have a system for who gives us feedback and helps us become aware of our blind spots. Michael comments that the deepest level of feedback is to speak to a person’s being rather than their doing. “To speak to somebody's inherent qualities as to how you see them and how you experience them is a very powerful active leadership,” he remarks.
Looking Ahead
Michael has launched a podcast called We Will Get Through This, where he talks with interesting people about building resilience at the personal, team and organizational levels. He says that he is still figuring out how he will serve next, but he is disciplining himself to say yes less so that he has the space to see what emerges.
Resources
MBS.works
TEDx Talk: How To Tame Your Advice Monster
Michael’s new book The Advice Trap is out, and it's pretty good.
Don’t forget to get his international bestseller, The Coaching Habit. | |||
| Game Thinking For Product Innovation with Amy Jo Kim | 29 Apr 2020 | 00:44:11 | |
Barry O’Reilly is excited to welcome Amy Jo Kim to this week’s Unlearn Podcast. Amy is a game designer, startup coach, and author of Game Thinking. She has worked on the early design teams of games such as Rock Band and The Sims, and has helped many companies, including Netflix and eBay, find their customers to help them scale.
A Cooperative Designer
Amy describes herself as a social game designer. She is enthusiastic about teamwork, having learned many lessons about creating a collaborative environment from working in music bands and modeling great bandleaders. One of those lessons that she now teaches in her Team Accelerator program is how to “make everything gel so we don't even remember whose idea it was… just getting the work done in a really focused yet creative way.”
Many opportunities opened up for her Amy when she found a tribe of like-minded people. She tells Barry that she found mentors that she could click with and saw a way that she could contribute immediately to a much larger team.
Go After The Early Beachhead
“...If you're innovating you can't just go after your average customer in that market,” Amy posits. “You have to capture this narrow early beachhead market first.” As early as 1961, Everett Rogers of Bell Labs found that innovations always start by capturing the early market before going into the early and later mainstream. Amy has taken these insights from innovators like Rogers, Jeffrey Moore, and Will Wright, and made them accessible through a step-by-step program. She shares how these principles were lived out in building out The Sims, and in companies such as eBay and Netflix. “...There's so much you can learn and get out of iterating ideas with [your early beachhead] that it gets you to a point where you can get a vector in the direction and build out for the next layer of people around them,”Amy adds.
Early adopters or beachheads have these three characteristics:
They actually have the problem that your product solves;
They know they have the problem and are willing to try anything that might help;
They're taking actions that demonstrate they're trying to solve the problem.
Game Design Is About Customer Journey
The best game designers create a customer journey and then use mechanics such as gamification to deliver that journey. While shaping behavior with rewards - the basis of gamification - may deliver short-term lift, it does not provide long-term engagement. Barry comments that tapping into intrinsic motivation is a delineation towards game thinking. Step one in designing for intrinsic motivation, Amy says, “is understanding that the best use of any game mechanics or progression mechanics is to support a journey.”
The framework Amy details in her book gives a synthesized approach to building an engaging customer journey. The core, she says, is how your product transforms the user into the person they want to be. “If you think about creating a product that gets better as the customer becomes more skilled, you'll be really getting to the heart of it.” Barry comments that Amy’s work is about helping the person to be the best they can be, realizing that struggle is part of the journey. “All the best things we do in life,” Barry says, “requires to test our character, to cultivate skills and behaviors in ourselves that we don't have, to grow as individuals.”
The mental model - the story that’s unfolding in the customer’s head - is at the heart of intrinsic motivation, Amy points out. She advises mapping out the story building up in the customer’s mind to understand their point of view. This will drive retention, she says.
Looking Ahead
Amy is excited about the explosion of creativity that’s being unleashed because of the pandemic. She says that it’s “so much good that’s happening for the planet.”
Resources
GameThinking.io
https://amyjokim.com/
https://twitter.com/amyjokim
https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyjokim/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9jS5pCo5v8MoF6GjpGiXBw | |||
| How Teamwork Drives Success with Rob Smedley, Founder of Smedley Group | 31 Jul 2024 | 00:46:19 | |
Innovation and Inclusivity in Motorsports are about breaking barriers, fostering innovation, and making the sport accessible to all. Today's guest, Rob Smedley, founder and CEO of the Smedley Group, shares his journey from Formula One engineer to entrepreneur, revolutionizing the motorsport industry. Rob Smedley is known for his work with top Formula One teams like Ferrari and Williams. Using data technology to drive innovation, Rob has now embarked on a new venture to create a global karting league, making motorsports accessible to a wider audience. His career is marked by his commitment to innovation and his belief in the potential of young talent. Host Barry O'Reilly invites Rob to discuss his path from a disengaged student to a top engineer and now an entrepreneur. Rob shares valuable lessons on embracing discomfort, committing to goals, and continuously innovating. The conversation highlights the importance of inclusivity in motorsports and the exciting future of the Global Karting League. Key Takeaways:
Additional Insights:
Episode Highlights
"Commit to something, don't be scared and figure it out as, as you go along."
"I wasn't a great student at school. I absolutely was a terrible student."
"If you're not uncomfortable, you're probably not trying hard enough."
"Innovation is just embedded in the business of Formula One."
"We've taken about 95 plus percent of the costs out of it."
"I've had to unlearn coming into what I would call the outside world."
"What I'm most excited about is team work, | |||
| How To Achieve Collective Success with Temi Ofong | 15 Apr 2020 | 00:34:24 | |
Barry O’Reilly is excited to welcome Temi Ofong to the Unlearn Podcast. Temi is the Chief Operating Officer for Corporate Investment Banking at Absa, South Africa’s most influential bank and one of the largest banks on the African continent. Temi describes his journey to his present role as an incredible learning curve. He shares the lessons he learned and unlearned throughout his career, in particular, the importance of putting people first to achieve success.
Empathy As A Superpower
“If you're not able to connect with the person's journey and history and context, it's very difficult to get the best out of them because you don't really understand what motivates them,” Temi points out. Barry calls empathy a superpower. People who develop empathy always get the best information which informs how they behave and helps them to be successful in different environments. “Ultimately business is about people,” Temi adds. “Life is about people… The biggest thing you’ve got to unlearn or learn… is people and what motivates people, what makes them tick…” He illustrates how this principle helped him in the build out of their corporate banking business.
Unlearning A Common Leadership Myth
One of the most common myths about leadership is that a good leader does it all on his or her own. However, Temi points out that his biggest breakthrough actually came as a result of his coach. Many times the attitudes and behaviors that brought you success thus far, are not the same ones that will take you further. The right coach, he argues, can lead you on a journey of unlearning which will help you enhance your performance. Barry says that getting a coach helped him accelerate exponentially.
Leaders also need to unlearn:
How to be vulnerable;
How to harness EQ;
What motivates their people.
The Notion of Collective Success
A leader’s job is to create the environment for other people to succeed. “Ultimately it comes down to the notion of collective success,” Temi adds. People need to feel that they are part of the team, that their work is contributing to the success of the organization. “It’s about trying to create as many points of connection and collaboration where everybody feels that together they can achieve more,” Temi says.
Temi shares insights about what led to his bank’s successful multi-year transformation program:
It was a bank wide effort.
There was a specific deadline.
The team was willing to use a new approach.
They trusted one another.
They revamped how they tracked success and how they dealt with failure.
They started with one project, then iterated.
They invested in training colleagues.
Frequent Evidence of Success
Nothing builds trust faster than seeing evidence of a new way of working, Barry says. When they see regular progress, leaders feel more confident about new methods. This kind of collaboration builds trust, momentum and rapport. “That’s where you see real transformation in organizations, where people go through an experience together and deliver something beyond their expectations,” Barry comments.
Looking Ahead
Temi says the next step is to take what they learned in this project and implement it throughout the bank. Now that they are emerging from this multi-year project where they were focused internally, they have to make up any ground they lost in the market and accelerate past the competition. “The pieces that I focus on are the human parts,” he says. “I see my job as being to help them think through problems but without diminishing their accountability… it's a team sport and in that team we all play our part and I think that's a very important perspective to have as a leader.”
Resources
Temi Ofong on LinkedIn | |||
| Product Management Thinking For Policy and Governance with Karen Tay | 01 Apr 2020 | 00:43:17 | |
Karen Tay, Smart Nation Director for the Prime Minister's Office of Singapore, is on a mission to transform Singapore into the world’s leading smart nation, where technology is used for maximum public good.
She chats with Barry O’Reilly about how she is helping to modernize government by applying product development thinking to policy, organizational and talent development. She shares how this is changing the way the Singaporean government works.
[note: this was recorded before the coronavirus outbreak in the US. If you want to chat about how these insights pertain to Government management of the coronavirus, Karen is happy to chat]
User-Driven Design
In charting directions for a country, being responsive to citizen sentiments is important, but there is also a place for Governments to exercise leadership in decision-making, eg. the decision that investing in preschool education is critical to social mobility, decisions on how to manage crises such as the coronavirus.
Regardless, how the central government implements their decisions should be driven by user behavior. Karen points out that using an iterative process is beneficial in many cases. She relates that they combined user research and iterative testing for policies in the Ministry of Education and found that stakeholders felt more engagement and ownership of the new policies. You have to be willing to listen to what your educators need and want from your product, and change it to something they are willing to implement, Karen says. Barry agrees that you should use user data to reframe your problem, then look at ways to improve.
Make Customers Feel Valued
Karen and Barry discuss several unlearning moments in Karen’s career. She points out that in government it’s not about what ideas you have, rather whether you can execute them. She says that she was surprised by how little she needed to get something done. She found that it was often as simple as listening to her potential customers’ needs and designing around them, instead of feeding into prevailing assumptions. “You want to make [your customers] feel that you thought about them when you designed the product,” Karen says.
Go Deep First
When you’re trying to build a policy or product, you must “go deep first,” Karen says. “You need to really get to know the people you're trying to serve… Focus on building that relationship and that trust with the community. Everything else - the dividends - come later.” As you respond to those needs, you learn more about how to scale later on. Barry agrees. He argues that a one-size-fits-all solution never works because each company and culture is different. “The way to scale innovation is actually to descale it, to start with a small group of people. Go very deep with a narrow focus and demonstrate new behaviors. Show what works and doesn't work in your context,” Barry emphasizes.
It’s All Relational
Building talent pipelines and communities is all relational. Magic happens when you get to know people as human beings, Karen says. You achieve outcomes by connecting on a human level: people feel inspired to change when they have an emotional connection to the change you’re trying to make. Barry comments that the most successful leaders role model the behaviors they want their employees to adopt.
Looking Ahead
Karen outlines several differences between engineering culture and management culture. She wishes that more hierarchical organizations would adopt the hands-on approach of engineering culture. This is the experience economy, she argues: people want to feel that your company is thinking about them, that they are valued. In fact, you should see all your customers and your employees as ambassadors. As such, you should treat them well and create an amazing experience for them.
Resources
Karen Tay on LinkedIn | |||
| Being Your Best In A Crisis with Eric McNulty | 18 Mar 2020 | 00:35:54 | |
This week’s guest on the Unlearn Podcast is Eric McNulty, head of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative at Harvard. Eric is a crisis leadership expert who has worked on crises such as the Boston Marathon bombing, Hurricane Sandy and Deepwater Horizon, the BP oil spill off the coast of Mexico. He offers valuable insights about making decisions in crisis situations, in light of the Coronavirus pandemic that has gripped the world.
A Helpful Decision-Making Tool
The leaders who respond best to a crisis are those who can weave several disciplines together to see three-dimensional patterns others miss. Such leaders see what’s missing, and can make connections between different domains to come up with a new solution. Host Barry O’Reilly says that it’s important to recognize the effects of your decisions. He asks Eric about tools to discover potential obstacles when implementing decisions during a crisis. Eric says his colleague, Peter Neffenger, created the Situation Connectivity Map for this very purpose. This tool helps you map out secondary situations that may arise, and allows you to connect the dots and get a richer picture of the overall impact. He says, “You think you're solving for problem X, but around that are different stakeholders, different aspects of that, and the extent you can map them... and to say What's gonna play off in this? How are they connected? Who are the stakeholders? Then you begin to really figure out where you need to put your attention.”
How Can We Be Our Best?
This is a time to be aspirational, Eric says. Your old bureaucratic process will keep you from innovating, and actually prevents you from doing right by your customers. Ask yourself, “How can we be at our absolute best right now?” He encourages leaders to make changes, to rise above the situation to come out better and stronger. Barry adds that when you empower people to be their best, you will be amazed by what you can achieve together. Eric shares some interesting stories of resilience and innovation that he saw during crises.
It’s About Creating Order
In a crisis, Eric says that he is “completely uninhibited about asking stupid questions.” He wants to understand why things are done in a certain way. Sometimes, his questions help others open up to doing things differently. He always asks these questions first:
Who or what has suffered here? Are they being taken care of?
Who should we have helping us who’s not here?
He says that failure often happens when you try to control everything. However, the very nature of a crisis is that it’s partly beyond your control. As such, you should aim to create order, not control. You only impose control when it brings more order, he says. He advises leaders to trust their people and delegate as much as possible. That’s how you give yourself space to contemplate the bigger decisions and understand the potential unintended consequences.
Looking Around the Corner
“If you're looking around the corner what's coming next actually is pretty obvious,” Eric says. He gives some practical tips to help leaders look ahead during a crisis:
Think about what’s likely to happen and the future consequences, based on the evidence you have;
Micro-journal your decisions and the information that led to them.
Resources
Eric McNulty on LinkedIn | |||
| Pretotyping to Build the Right 'It' with Alberto Savoia | 04 Mar 2020 | 00:38:56 | |
Alberto Savoia had a successful career as Chief Technology Officer in major companies such as Sun Microsystems, SunLabs, and was Google’s first Engineering Manager. As an entrepreneur, however, he realized that building the right thing was more important than building things right. He chats with Barry O’Reilly about the pivotal unlearning moments in his life and his new approach to product development.
The Beast of Failure
You work hard to create a great product, you launch it and the market rejects it. That’s one of the most painful experiences for any software developer. Alberto relates his first experience with ‘the beast of failure’: even though the market told them “if you build it, we will buy”, they did not actually buy. Alberto says that this failure felt as if someone had pulled the rug from under him.
However, it was also a seminal unlearning moment for him. The first lesson he took away was that if you’re building the right ‘it’, you will find a way to succeed in the market. The second lesson was that you have to own your failures before you can move forward.
Unlearning Market Research
There is an 80% chance that the original version of any idea will fail. As such, Alberto now goes into a venture expecting failure, and the market has to prove him wrong. Optimizing to be wrong rather than to be right, flips traditional market research on its head. Barry comments that it’s at the heart of the scientific method since you have to conduct experiments to invalidate your hypothesis; if you can’t invalidate it, then it’s probably a good hypothesis.
Alberto’s most important experiment to test his ideas is his ‘skin in the game meter’. Asking the market if they will buy if you build is due negligence, he argues; that’s just promises and opinions. Instead, he tells them, “If you buy, we will build.” The ultimate demonstration that someone wants a product is when they put down a deposit. Money is the ultimate skin in the game, as Elon Musk’s example proves.
Pretotyping
Engineers usually know whether a product can be built. The uncertainty lies in whether it should be built. Alberto says that when he looked at how creators approached this problem, he saw many examples of pretotyping. A pretotype is something you build before you start to build something that works; for example, how Jeff Hawkins developed the Palm Pilot. The only data that is valuable, Alberto says, is YODa - Your Own Data. Just as Hawkins did, Alberto only counts YODa that is backed up with skin in the game. Barry adds that YODa has the ability to shift mindsets. He has found that the people who own their results, and are continuously learning and unlearning to enhance their product, get exceptional results.
Change Takes Time
Logic does not convince people to change their age-old thinking. It takes time and dedication to get people to buy in to new ideas and methods. Start with one project, Alberto advises, and incorporate some traditional techniques. Let them experience the results firsthand: that will start to open their minds up to a different way of thinking and acting. Barry agrees that logic is not enough to change minds or behavior. “You have to act your way to a new culture,” he says. “You start to see the world differently when you do things differently, and that’s what challenges your mental model and shifts it.”
Looking Forward
Alberto has written a book to teach entrepreneurs and innovators about pretotyping, so they work on ideas that are likely to succeed. He advises them not to depend on luck and to assume failure. If you iterate enough, however, you will find the idea that succeeds, he says. That is how to play in a systematic way. “Unlearning is learning. It just takes courage to flip it around.”
Resources
AlbertoSavoia.com | |||
| Creating Sustainable Inspiration with Jen Grace Baron | 19 Feb 2020 | 00:33:52 | |
For 20 years, Jen Grace Baron has sought to discover the secrets of sustaining inspiration. Her findings are the subject of a book which she co-authored with Allison Holzer and Sandra Spataro, entitled Dare To Inspire: Sustain the Fire of Inspiration In Work and Life. She chats with Barry O’Reilly about his interesting topic in this week’s show.
What makes it worthwhile?
In entrepreneurship, as in life, there are going to be tough days. Jen says that she and her co-authors asked each other, “What is the difference that we want to make that will make bad days worthwhile?”
Inspiration is a muscle and a resource
Jen’s research proved that the traditional view of inspiration is erroneous. Inspiration isn’t something that happens to you. In fact, it can be generated: inspiration is a muscle that you can build and it’s a resource that organizations should manage. She outlines three ways we get inspired:
We inspire ourselves;
We are inspired through, with and by others, mainly in relationships;
We’re inspired through situations.
Jen adds that there are predictable pathways, or engines, that people use to inspire themselves.
Rituals and culture
Barry and Jen talk about how simple ‘reset rituals’ spark inspiration and prepare us for success. Systematized rituals are essentially the building blocks of great culture. Culture, Jen says, is the hardest thing you’ll ever build in your company, but it’s the most precious. Barry adds that exceptional leaders role model the behaviors they want their people to adopt. Sustained change does depend on leaders, Jen agrees, which often means unlearning past beliefs and behaviors. The desire for the change has to be stronger than the fear of changing, she says.
Am I inspiring?
Many leaders believe that they are not inspiring, or that being inspiring is the same as being charismatic. Jen describes the strategies and tools she uses to help her clients see their strengths and uniqueness. Barry comments that our capabilities are often our blind spots because they come so naturally to us. However, we inspire others just by being ourselves. Inspiration is about being authentic; it’s about knowing our strengths and how to use them, Jen adds. Situational leadership is also an essential element of inspiration as leaders today must be agile.
Some engines of inspiration
We’re inspired by people who share their fallibility and vulnerability with us. Jen comments that just needing other people, and expressing that, is magnetic and inspiring. She shares an important unlearning story from her own life. It was humbling, difficult and uncomfortable, she says, but it taught her how to be a better leader. Another engine of inspiration is overcoming adversity. Past constraints have motivated and inspired many people to succeed. Jen explains that a surprising engine of inspiration is failure, loss and grief. She shares the story of Dr. Joe Kasper to illustrate that grief can be a deep source of inspiration and can be channeled for good.
Finding your inspiration
If you can reflect on traumatic events, failure, loss or grief, Jen says, and find ways they can serve you, you will grow stronger. This is called Post-Traumatic Growth. Barry asks the best way someone can figure out what will inspire them. Jen responds that inspiration helps you have your best days more often. As such, write down what your best day looks like for you, and why.
What’s next for Jen
Jen wants to work with companies to measure inspiration and build inspiring partnerships to increase it.
Resources
Dare To Inspire: Sustain the Fire of Inspiration In Work and Life | |||
| Testing Business Ideas with David J. Bland | 05 Feb 2020 | 00:43:54 | |
Testing Business Ideas with David J. Bland
David Bland’s work includes the product death cycle, a classic anti-pattern innovators and entrepreneurs fall into when trying to create a new product. He highlights that building what customers say they want is not the way to be successful; instead, ideas need to be tested to see what they need to succeed. In this week’s show, Barry O’Reilly and David discuss his new book, Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation, including what it takes to do experimentation right.
Stick To Your Vision or Walk Away?
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful something looks, or who you think your customer is, if they don’t want it they don’t want it.” His early experience in a financial services startup taught David this valuable lesson. He says that at some point you have to decide whether to stick to your vision and pivot to another segment, or walk away. Having the market reject your hard work is humbling because you personally attach yourself to what you’re creating. However, David comments that the way to move forward is to listen to the data.
Being Open To Being Wrong
Your vision may need to be tweaked in some way for you to be successful, David says. As such, leaders should adopt the mindset that they’re testing their vision against reality and that they might be wrong.
Unlearning Ideas About Experimentation
Barry asks David to comment on what organizations need to unlearn about experimentation. David responds that much of it boils down to leadership mindset. People usually become leaders because they are experts in some area and have proven that they can produce results. It’s an ego-driven path, David says. If you’re not careful, you can become a CEO who still thinks that it’s all about you. Building a culture of experimentation means however, that you have to create more leaders around you. Barry adds that so many leaders are used to managing to output-based measures of success. Asking them to measure outcomes seems an alien concept, so they are resistant to the idea.
David says funding is another area organizations need to unlearn. He contrasts the traditional method of annual budgeting for projects with the concept of internal VC funding, and explains why the latter is better suited to experimentation.
Big Leadership Questions
Technology is changing the world so quickly that organizations need to be able to adapt. The static business model that can run for years without change cannot survive in today’s market and economy, David comments. A very important question leaders need to consider is, What would happen if a startup is created today that would make us obsolete? Barry adds that another question leaders should ask is, What would stop us investing in this idea? It’s not enough to optimize only for the happy path; pairing it with metrics that tell you when to kill an initiative creates a clearer picture of what success would look like.
Start Manually
David shares the story of an SMS dating app to illustrate that you can use manual processes to test the validity of a business idea without building sophisticated features. You can use what you learn to find a strategy or automate a process to scale. It also de-risks the process, Barry comments, as you find out if anyone cares about your product, if anyone would use it, and if you should build it. Starting manually makes for safe experimentation since you’re only investing your time, but you learn so much.
Looking Ahead
David hopes to influence change in funding startups, as he believes that it should be based on evidence rather than emotion.
Resources
Testing Business Ideas book
David Bland on Twitter | |||
| How Empathy Drives Innovation with Dr. Gail Lebovic | 22 Jan 2020 | 00:37:21 | |
Dr. Gail Lebovic is a surgeon and entrepreneur whose work has made a great impact on the healthcare space, particularly by devising innovative surgical techniques and developing medical devices aimed at improving the lives of women with breast cancer. Host Barry O’Reilly describes her as a world leader with a passion for problem-solving and for thinking outside the box, which makes her unique in the highly structured field of surgery.
Challenging The Accepted Culture
Surgical thinking is founded on achieving good outcomes and avoiding risk. Very few surgeons would think about trying a different procedure if the accepted way is working. Gail, however, knew that there had to be a better way to do breast cancer surgery. She felt that when a surgeon performs a mastectomy, he or she should also be doing a reconstruction. This was a radical idea at the time. Eventually, she sought out Dr. Donald Laub as her mentor and together they explored how to make this idea happen. Barry comments that everything pushes against you when you’re trying to innovate, especially in highly regulated, high consequence scenarios.
Breakthrough
Even with a sought-after practice, and data to support her methods, Dr. Gail still found herself marginalized by the mainstream surgical community. Nevertheless, she focused on helping her patients and became involved in medical technology. She realized that she could impact many more people by creating technology and teaching others how to use it. Her MammoPad invention has now been used by over 100 million women. Another step she took was teaching surgeons her techniques. One surgeon can impact more than 250 cancer patients a year, she points out. To date, she has trained over 1000 surgeons around the world, escalating the opportunity to impact many more women than one on one. She created a post-graduate course that has hosted more than 18 conferences thanks in part to a grant from the Mary Kay foundation.
Recognizing Opportunity
Barry asks Gail to describe how she recognizes an opportunity, including the steps she takes to determine if it’s worth pursuing. He quips that most Silicon Valley entrepreneurs start with a solution that’s looking for a problem! For Gail, it’s just the opposite – it begins by recognizing a problem or a basic need - for example, how to help more women get life-saving mammograms. Then you have to diligently research many different aspects of the problem as well as the potential solutions you may have. Then you can start prototyping. Ultimately, choosing the right prototype is a complex problem, but in the end you have to rely on gut instinct, she says. “That’s the key moment that ultimately will drive adoption.”
Critical Thinking Skills
People tend to optimize for the happy path, and very rarely do they think about unintended consequences, Barry comments. He finds that critical thinking is often a missing component in product development. Gail says that successful product development takes a cohesive team. You can’t get married to an idea just because you like it. The objective is to keep critiquing your designs and anticipating the risks until you have a prototype that you feel confident in. Barry adds that leaders should role-model accepting criticism of their own ideas; it's one of the most powerful things you can do, he says.
The Value of Empathy
Automating manual processes is great, but technology cannot replace the human touch. The medical process is both an art and a skill, Gail points out. Empathy is what drives the identification of needs, which inspires creation of technology products that save people’s lives and provides an avenue for compassionate care along the way.
Resources
Dr. Gail Lebovic | |||
| People-Centered Leadership at NASA with Dr. Ed Hoffman | 08 Jan 2020 | 00:46:47 | |
Barry O’Reilly opens Season 2 of the UnLearn Podcast by commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing. He welcomes special guest Dr. Ed Hoffman, NASA’s first ever Chief Knowledge Officer. Ed is a Senior Lecturer at Columbia University School or Professional Studies, and serves as Strategic Advisor for the Project Management Institutue. In these roles he works with industry leaders to develop capabilities in leadership, projects, teaming, and future of work dynamics. He is a sought-after consultant and speaker, and the co-author of Shared Voyage: Learning and Unlearning from Remarkable Projects.
Knowing Why
Knowing what you’re doing is important, but it’s also critical to know why. Ed has always believed that NASA’s work contributes to the good of humankind. His thoughtful response to the interesting test Deputy Administrator Dr. Hans Mark put him through during his internship, proved that he knew why he was there. Barry comments that we can achieve amazing outcomes when we are connected to mission, when we know why we’re doing what we’re doing.
It Starts With The People
The best organizations have thoughtful, effective leaders; they build teams who are themselves leaders; and they share a common mission. Ed says that when you work with people that you respect and care about, when you have a sense of purpose, and you feel that your skills are being utilized, then work feels like a special place. Barry asks how leaders can build such high-performance teams. Ed responds that the best leaders create - and are part of! - the best teams. “It starts with the people aspect,” he says. A sense of pride, appreciation and gratitude, and commitment to the dream are components of the best teams. Only then should the management part come in, Ed says.
A Lack of Communication Leads to Tragedy
Ed relates how a lack of communication and collaboration at NASA led to the 2003 Columbia tragedy. When you’ve had a period of success, it’s common to feel pressure to produce faster results. Communication between teams often suffers and that’s when danger happens, Ed says. The Discovery mission six years later was successful because of the high level of communication and collaboration. The psychological safety to talk about anything is the most important ingredient in teamwork, Ed insists. Barry adds that information-sharing is crucial because making good decisions depends on having high quality information.
A Process of Unlearning
Putting yourself in an uncomfortable environment, where you have to actively learn, synthesize information and present it back for feedback, is a form of iterating, and a powerful mechanism for personal and team growth, Barry says. Ed had to go through this process of unlearning when he assumed the leadership of NASA’s Program Project Management Initiative. What he had in his favor, he says, was that he knew what he didn’t know. He has learned that knowledge is profoundly social: the answers are out there in the community, so the best teams learn from each other. Ed says that he is in awe of his technical and engineering colleagues because they’re doing work that he can’t understand. Enjoying the people you work with, appreciating them and the work you do together helps the whole team grow. Be in tap with what you enjoy, Ed advises. “It’s not work when you love something,” he says.
A meaningful interaction with a mentor was another powerful unlearning moment for Ed. Thanks to his mentor, his approach to finding solutions now involves setting up boundaries to know whether something is working, as well as the tools to recover. All of this has to do with an emphasis and commitment to building reflective leadership skills for learning and unlearning.
Resources
Dr. Ed Hoffman | |||
| Season Finale: AMA with Barry O’Reilly | 24 Dec 2019 | 00:33:39 | |
In this finale episode of Season 1, Barry O’Reilly takes the time to answer questions posed by listeners. He reached out via social media and allowed his followers to ask him anything about himself, the podcast, or things they might want to learn and unlearn. Here are several of the questions posed and Barry’s answers:
Q: What takes up too much of your time? (Helen, Melbourne AUS)
A: Noisy notifications. Non-specific interruptions that disrupt my flow are frustrating for me. I don’t like interruptions or context switching because it limits my progress.
Q: How do you measure success for the podcast? (Caroline, New York USA)
A: I’m more interested in outcome-based measures of success. I know it’s going to be a great show when a guest says “I’ve never shared this story before,” or “I never thought of it like that.” Those authentic conversations, and getting feedback from listeners that they feel they’re part of them, are really powerful for me.
Q: What has been the single best day of 2019, and why? (Prithi, Bangalore IND)
A: Being sent a photo of Serena Williams reading Unlearn. It was especially poignant because watching her story on TV was a major unlearning moment for me. It forced me to acknowledge that there were things I needed to adapt in myself to achieve the outcomes I wanted. Seeing her reading my book was inspiring and felt like a closed feedback loop.
Q: What’s the most counterintuitive skill to unlearn? (Simon, San Francisco USA)
A: Definitely the concept of coaching. We seem to think that only people who are underperforming need coaching. However, the highest performing persons have and actively seek out coaches to help them improve. Coaching has certainly been one of the best investments I’ve ever made in myself.
Q: Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable is nearly impossible for me. What do you do to actively get uncomfortable? (Kirstie, Helsinki FIN)
A: Actually, I feel uncomfortable if I’m not doing something uncomfortable! Trying new things, embracing counterintuitive ideas challenges your thinking and your belief systems, but it also gives you evidence that either supports your original beliefs or the new idea. I encourage you to think about one small step you can take on the edge of your comfort zone. How can you improve by even half a point? Get someone you trust to rate you in that area at the beginning, then at the end of one week.
Q: It’s often said that the biggest blocker to success is fear? How do you unlearn fear? (Adrian, Johannesburg, SA)
A: By thinking big but starting small. Taking small steps lets you find out what works and what doesn’t. You being to feel successful. As you continue to take those small steps, you improve and gain momentum. You start to see change happening. This is the antidote to fear: small wins create belief, show evidence and make it safe to fail.
Q: What’s the best piece of advice you have been given? (Yuko, Tokyo JPN)
A: That you don’t only get one shot at success, there are actually many. Entrepreneurship for me is about life and life is about growth through learning experiences. When things don’t go the way you want, the trick is to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get ready for your next shot. As my cousin Phillip would say: “if you’re still breathing you haven’t failed. Make sure you learn something for the next spin and go get inspired and do it again.”
What To Expect in 2020
Barry says that in the next iteration of the Unlearn Podcast, he will be interviewing guests from a broader range of industries, not just technology. He’s excited to hear about their journey to unlearn. | |||
| Using Vision, Mission and Data To Transform Organizations with Tanya Cordrey | 11 Dec 2019 | 00:50:59 | |
Tanya Cordrey started her career as a journalist for a road haulage magazine. Today she serves on several boards and consults with many leading organizations. She has led teams and international expansions in companies such as BBC and eBay, and oversaw the transformation from print to digital media at The Guardian Media Group in her role as Chief Digital Officer. She joins host Barry O’Reilly to discuss her role in leading difficult change in often very traditional organizations.
Doing Something Different
Doing something different can lead to new and wonderful opportunities. Tanya’s unconventional decision to do an MBA to pair and contrast with her literary arts degree resulted in creating the opportunity for her to lead a strategy team at the BBC and later to be recruited as part of the European executive team for BabyCenter. Barry comments that many people don’t realize the challenges involved when you’re trying to do something different. Tanya says that she seeks out high-paced environments. She takes calculated risks that she believes will yield good results, like the MBA and working with technology. Both decisions gave her in-demand skills and an advantage in the market.
Identifying Scalable Opportunities
Convincing stakeholders to grasp new opportunities is often a difficult task. However, being clear on your vision and giving them a taste of the expected results makes the task easier. A little survival anxiety can help as well!
Tanya and her colleagues wanted to convince eBay to introduce fixed price selling—her data supported it. They were turned down initially but were later told that if other countries wanted it, they could give it a try. The international partners were all interested. At the time, Amazon was talking about launching its marketplace, which spurred the decision-makers to see fixed price selling as a defensive maneuver. The project was eventually rolled out, to phenomenal success. Within a few days of seeing the results around the world, eBay US also rolled out fixed price selling. This experience taught Tanya to think big, and use data to support her beliefs. She says that it was the first time one of her ideas led to such a huge impact on revenue. By leveraging external competitors to accelerate action, and collaborating with many different stakeholders, she was able to cause a huge transformation.
Shaking Off Existing Paradigms
Leading change, especially in traditional companies, involves unlearning your tried and true methods and learning what works in the current context. Having spent several years in purely digital companies that were largely data-driven, Tanya found that using charts and logical arguments derived from the data didn’t really work at The Guardian.
Tanya learned that she had to appeal to hearts as well as heads in order to persuade the media giant. Barry agrees that you need a well-constructed value hypothesis grounded in evidence and data, as well as an aspirational vision and mission to show people where you want to go.
Three Phases of Change
Tanya’s says The Guardian’s transformation fell into three phases:
Phase 1: Changing as much as possible, as quickly as possible.
Phase 2: Communication.
Phase 3: Cross-functionality.
Resources
Tanya Cordrey on LinkedIn | Twitter | |||
| Scaling The Heights of Human Performance with Annastiina Hintsa, The CEO of Hintsa Performance | 17 Jul 2024 | 00:37:47 | |
Leadership is about embracing sustainable practices, fostering continuous improvement, and aligning personal values with professional goals. Today's guest, Annastiina Hintsa, CEO of Hintsa Performance, shares her insights on achieving peak performance in both business and sports. Annastiina Hintsa is the CEO of Hintsa Performance, a world-leading evidence-based coaching company that helps top athletes and business professionals achieve sustainable success. Driven by science and guided by people, their methods have been tested in some of the most challenging business and sporting environments. Annastiina's journey began with her father, Dr. Hintsa, whose pioneering work with athletes like Haile Gebrselassie laid the foundation for their holistic performance model. Annastiina has expanded this legacy, working with over 50% of Formula One drivers and Fortune 500 CEOs, ensuring they reach and maintain high performance. Host Barry O'Reilly invites Annastiina to discuss her journey and the impact of Hintsa Performance. From her early involvement in the company to her leadership role today, Annastiina shares valuable lessons on balancing professional and personal well-being. The conversation covers the holistic nature of high performance, integrating physical activity, nutrition, mental energy, and more. Annastiina emphasizes the importance of defining personal success and maintaining perspective through life's challenges. Key Takeaways:
Additional Insights:
Episode Highlights
"I worked with my dad early days. I was employee number three in the very, very early days..."
"when my father got sick. So he was, uh, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2015, passed away 16 months after. And it was a turning point for... | |||
| Pioneering the Cloud and DevOps Paradigm with Stephen Orban | 27 Nov 2019 | 00:38:49 | |
Stephen Orban found an old TI-99 in his uncle’s attic when he was eight years old. The first thing he did, he says, was take it apart to learn how it worked. Soon he was writing programs to make things move around on the screen. He knew since then that he wanted to work with computers. Throughout his career he has brought exponential technology to many traditional organizations, such as Bloomberg and Dow Jones. He is now leading a new initiative in Data Analytics at AWS.
Killed by Traditional Technology
It was during his tenure at Bloomberg that Stephen became infatuated with cloud computing. He relates to Barry O’Reilly that they were experimenting to create new businesses. However, the traditional method of trying to build best-in-class technology was making the process slow and expensive. We were building too much into disaster recovery and business continuity for things that might not even be there tomorrow, he says. He recognized that cloud computing would allow them to test and scale on demand, only using the resources they needed. When he moved to Dow Jones he pushed towards using cloud technology and dev-ops methodology, which allowed them to create a more agile organization.
Unlearning Leadership
Massive technology changes come with people changes. Stephen soon realized that the way he led at Bloomberg would not work at Dow Jones. Barry comments that it’s almost a reflex to use the behaviors that brought us success in the past. However, those same behaviors may not yield success in a new context. Stephen says that he failed as a leader for the first six months. His advisor told him that there’s no glory in being the only one at the finish line. From that day, he says, he learned to be more empathetic and open instead of the top-down leader he previously was. He wanted his team to buy in to his vision.
In order to share their wins, he increased communication with employees from quarterly to monthly town hall meetings. Team members were invited to share what they were doing and how it was aligned to the broader vision. Barry says that when you recognize that you’re not driving the outcomes you want, the first step is to acknowledge it. He commends Stephen for the subtle but impactful changes he made.
Building Cross-Functional Teams
When Stephen decided to change the siloed IT functions into two cross-functional teams, he expected everyone to be as excited as he was. Each team was responsible for a measurable customer outcome. This required unlearning silos and learning cross-functional team behaviors. Stephen relates that the engineers were not pleased. It was hard for them to understand this new paradigm, and Stephen comments that it was hard for him to lead through the change. Barry comments that a first step is to help people feel successful as fast as possible. If they have some quick wins, they would be more willing to embrace the new behaviors.
To reinforce the paradigm shift, the IT department was renamed Dow Jones Technology. Respected persons in the company started to share positive stories about the impact of the new changes, and the metrics showed that the new methods were working. Barry agrees that metrics paired with local success stories leads to breakthroughs.
Looking Forward
Stephen now works at Amazon, an organization that has a very high performing, well-prescribed culture and operating model. He is excited about the pace of innovation that’s going to happen. Those who can’t move fast enough will feel the impact on their profitability, he says. Don’t be stuck in analysis paralysis, he advises; there are lots of opportunities to start and learn what works and what doesn’t for your organization. You can’t think your way to a new culture, Barry adds, you have to act your way there. | |||
| How Alignment Scaled a Unicorn with Kim Atherton | 13 Nov 2019 | 00:42:53 | |
As a trained occupational psychologist, Kim Atherton has worked with leaders and organizations to understand how they create high-performance teams. She joined Ovo Energy - a green energy tech company in the UK - when it was just 50 people in a barn, and helped to scale the company to 2,500 employees. During her time at Ovo, she recognized that misalignment was a problem for companies, which inspired her to found Just3Things, a startup that helps organizations improve alignment at scale.
Alignment With The Vision
In 2012 Kim was in the final interview stage at a large bank. It was a great career move on paper, but the thought of getting out of bed every day to do succession planning for a big bank just didn’t excite her. About that time she met the founder of Ovo Energy, who told her that he needed someone to help him build the world’s best company, someone who would be willing to unlearn traditional HR practices. Kim jumped at the opportunity to help scale Ovo as she believed in its vision. [Listen from 1:45]
The mission and values of a company are more important than the compensation and prestige, Barry comments. A transformative purpose pulls people together: you’re willing to put up with more when you know it’s for the greater good. It keeps you going through the tough times. [Listen from 3:45]
Aligning Values With Behavior
Human beings pick up on behavioral cues almost unconsciously. Creating a company culture that aligns with your vision often means unlearning traditional practices, and being intentional about using processes that result in desired behaviors. Ovo knew their success depended on being nimble and agile, so they eschewed traditional competency-based interview practices in favor of interviewing based on learning agility. Kim says that you can always upskill an employee if they don’t have a certain programming ability, but you can’t train learning agility - you either have it or you don’t. [Listen from 6:50]
In the fast-paced world of a startup company, full transparency and good communication are vital. You want to create an environment of psychological safety to empower your team to experiment and learn. Reiterate the vision often and embed activities around values to remind your team that we’re all part of a bigger purpose, Kim advises. [Listen from 12:15]
Learning and Unlearning Employee Incentives
Barry finds that the highest performing companies are those who experiment and figure out the right practices for their context. Kim agrees that experimentation and an efficient feedback loop enabled Ovo to learn what works best for them. For example, their experiment with removing the holiday policy taught them that, trendy though it was, it wasn’t ideal for them. We need guardrails, they learned, otherwise it’s really hard to do our jobs. At Just3Things, Kim finds that they’re unlearning all the time. Feedback from customers often challenges their assumptions and they have to rethink some aspect of the product. [Listen from 19:55]
A Golden Thread
Just3Things was inspired by the need for a goal-setting tool for cross-functional teams. Kim describes it as a simple and transparent tool where teams could see how the outcomes they are working on align with company strategy, then link their day to day tasks to the outcomes, forming a golden thread through the entire process. It started as a manual process at Ovo, but was developed into a digital tool when the concept proved useful in recouping lost productivity time. Kim describes how she discovered the need in the market for her product, and how she founded Just3Things to answer that market need. Barry comments that when you understand how your effort is aligning to positive customer outcomes, its an unending tap of motivation and experimentation. [Listen from 30:00]
Resources
Just3Things.com | |||
| If We’re Not Winning We’re Learning with Martin Eriksson | 30 Oct 2019 | 00:31:48 | |
Barry O’Reilly is pleased to welcome Martin Eriksson to the Unlearn Podcast. Martin is the co-founder of ProductTank and the Mind the Product conferences that have scaled and sustained themselves around the world.
Learning From One Another
When he started ProductTank in the back of a London pub, Martin never imagined that his small meetup of 25 product managers would be the genesis of a community over 150,000 strong from 180 cities, or that they would be hosting 5 conferences around the world. Their goal was simply to learn from one another so they could be better at their jobs.
That initial meetup took on a life of its own because many others had the same need. All of their growth has been inbound, Martin relates: people come to them for help in setting up local ProductTank chapters. Martin embraced those opportunities, seeing that the more the community expanded, the more people they could meet and learn from.
Recognizing Opportunities and Gaining Momentum
When you recognize that you’ve built something of value that your customers love and want more of, naturally, you want to grow. Martin’s approach was to think about the next step and move in that direction. ProductTank was continuing to expand to more cities and countries, so they decided to launch a conference to get big names from the US to share their expertise.
Barry remarks that the power of momentum is often underrated. As you continue to do reps, you build momentum and eventually a movement. In the case of ProductTank, they were learning valuable lessons as they continued to meet and grow, such as how to work together and get the best out of one another. Soon Martin recognized the global potential of their fledgling company.
Making A Great Experience for Everyone
A successful conference prioritizes great experiences for everyone. The needs of attendees, speakers and vendors have to be catered for, and ample time must be given for people to learn and network. Barry asks how Martin ensures that these great experiences are part of every conference, especially as the company scales. It’s really all about people, Martin responds. They closely screen people who want to organize local ProductTank chapters or conferences to make sure that they share the same purpose. This is what has driven the strength of this community, he says. If you have the right people you can trust them to build on that experience.
Mission and Shared Values
One of the hallmarks of great business is that your mission statement centers around your customer as opposed to your business. Mind the Product encapsulates this in its mission statement: “Our mission is to make other people more successful by coming together to further our craft.”
Barry notes that these principles should be codified as you grow to not only attract the right people, but so that they behave in a way that protects the community and the essence of what you're trying to create. Some of the team values that guide Martin’s company are:
We are an empowered and autonomous team;
We should be excellent to each other;
If we’re not winning, we’re learning;
Hard work should be rewarding.
Unlearning and Next Steps
Two important lessons Martin would unlearn if he had the chance to start over would be to think bigger and embrace the opportunity sooner and to understand his brand and the market better. Building connections among regional and international communities is a powerful part of their mission going forward. There is a wealth of talent all over the world and we can learn so much from each other, Martin says. He sees it as his personal mission to reach out into his network and lift up stories and different ideas and ways of working. That sense of curiosity and willingness to learn empowers and motivates him.
Resources
MartinEriksson.com
mindtheproduct.com | |||
| Brave Narratives for Bold Change with Thaniya Keereepart | 16 Oct 2019 | 00:39:40 | |
This week’s guest is Thaniya Keereepart, Head of Product, International at Patreon. Thaniya joined Patreon after working with Major League Baseball (MLB) and TED, moving into the digital space.
Raising Your Hand
Some people gravitate towards structure, but people like Thaniya thrive on unstructured paths. She says, “The through-line of all of my turning points has been that I have a habit of raising my hand to volunteer to do things I don't really know how to do.” She credits her bravery to learning through doing: she understands how to iterate so she puts guardrails in place to learn what works and be flexible and adaptive when unintended consequences occur.
She relates how her Game Day program crashed in the opening MLB game, with four million users online. That scary moment taught her how to handle live events. Something admirable about that environment, however, is that when anything broke, everyone came together to fix it. Barry notes that high-performance cultures focus on solving the problem and improving the system, rather than blaming an individual. This allows everyone to feel comfortable and give their best.
Building an Inclusive Team
When you’re building products for the masses, you want your team to reflect the diversity of your consumers. The best performing teams are usually the most diverse. Both Barry and Thaniya had to unlearn a great deal when they started working in diverse environments. Thaniya was used to working largely with males in college and at MLB, so there was a culture shock when she started at TED, but it opened her eyes to what it’s like to work in an environment with people of various backgrounds, cultures and genders. Barry says that he never saw the problem of a lack of diversity and inclusion until he started to work in San Francisco. He was in a bubble of sorts at Thought Works, his previous workplace since it was the norm to have a diverse workforce. He felt a call to action to share the values he learned at Thought Works in his new, male-dominated workplace.
Sharing a Beautiful Vision of the Future
It’s important to share a vision of the future. Thaniya believes in creating big change in small chunks, creating value that can be seen and felt immediately. She involves the teams that will benefit from the change in the product development phase. These teams then become champions of the new product. When you start small, Barry adds, you create evidence of the future you’re trying to build; you build trust and confidence that your big vision can come to life. It’s also important to anchor the big change with a beautiful narrative, says Thaniya.
Engaging Customers
Part of re-platforming includes building a change management system to set customer expectations. It’s unwise to have big changes foisted on your customers suddenly. Thaniya’s strategy at TED was to create excitement around the coming changes by inviting customers to be part of a beta program. They felt that they were helping to build TED’s new platform, which engaged them and made them champions of the coming change.
Resources
Thaniya Keereepart on LinkedIn
Why Diverse Teams are Smarter - Harvard Business Review
Diversity + Inclusion = Better Decision Making at Work | |||
| The Lean Startup Pivot with Eric Ries | 02 Oct 2019 | 00:43:24 | |
Barry O’Reilly is excited to welcome Eric Ries to the Unlearn Podcast. Eric is an entrepreneur who currently heads the Long Term Stock Exchange. He is best known, however, as the author of the international bestseller: The Lean Startup.
The principles of Lean Startup were birthed from seeing many startups and Silicon Valley companies fail for lack of customer engagement, slow iteration, and long feedback cycles—experiences that inspired Eric to think about different ways to work. He shares how he discovered, and subsequently helped people unlearn many of the methods that were holding them back, and relearn counterintuitive methods to help them succeed in situations of high uncertainty.
Pioneering ChangeIn his early days at IMVU, Eric found himself constantly explaining why his new methods had merit. At one point he had to decide whether to continue to advocate for his ideas or agree to work the conventional way. He chose to advocate for what he believed in. He reflects that had he not had the courage of his convictions he would never have found out who his ideas resonated with.
Counterintuitive ideas cause frustration and difficulty for people. If counterintuitive thinking is key to the success of your business culture, then you need to help people rewire their brains. To have reform, and move people to the next steps, you must find the sweet spot between familiarity and novelty: you can't be too radical, or too conservative.
Principles and Long-Term VisionBusiness strategy must be guided by principles in the context of a long-term vision. Barry commends Eric for the iterations he made to his business over time, which were guided by a continuous loop of customer feedback and testing new features in small batches. Eric shares the many pivots he had to make noting that you can always change strategy, but keep the vision.
Opening Minds Through EmpathyEric says that he has spent years trying to understand what would it take to change public companies from being short-term focused on multi-stakeholder long-term focused organizations. He would often face vehement opposition from officials when he promoted his ideas. He notes that when people vehemently oppose an idea, method or technique but their reasons are poor, it’s usually a signal that they’re reacting emotionally, trying to protect the status quo. Barry adds this is a behavior he also sees a lot when people don’t deeply understand why they’re doing what they are doing, missing underlying principles instead of sticking to the only practice they know.
Eric is sympathetic because he understands: they’re trying to do a difficult, often thankless job, using the tools and techniques they’ve refined over years. He represents a threat to their comfort zone. He tries to understand what they care about so that his plans and ideas are compatible with their values. They appreciate his respectful approach and work with him to find a comfortable compromise. Empathy, he finds, is the path to greater effectiveness.
Barry agrees that empathy is key. It leads to mutual understanding. If you are willing to listen to people and they feel that they're being heard, the quality of information that you get just skyrockets. When you have high-quality information and a good decision-making process, you have a better chance of getting the results you want.
Changing the WorldOur grandparents built the institutions that were needed in their world, with the institutional infrastructure that their time demanded. Our world today is very different, and those institutions - hotels, hospitals, unions, schools and universities - are all collapsing at the same time. Eric says that we need to establish the institutional infrastructure that our time demands. If we fail in our responsibility to confront these problems on our society’s behalf, we will soon be replaced.
ResourcesEric Ries | |||
| Embracing Failure to Create the Future with Snehal Kundalkar | 18 Sep 2019 | 00:49:49 | |
Snehal Kundalkar, Senior Director of Engineering at Reddit, grew up in a world of dualities. On the one hand she was taught that her place as a woman was between the kitchen and the kids, but on the other hand she was encouraged to embrace uncertainty to solve complex problems. She was naturally attracted to engineering and she channeled her anger at the injustice of her situation into creativity. She didn’t see herself in the expected role of home provider, so after completing her Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, she left her home country to pursue her Masters in the US. She longed to find the adventure she needed in her adopted country.
Celebrating Failure After a little bit of success, failure feels unwelcome”. Don’t let that be you. Embrace it as a natural yin yang of the journey. It takes a lot of patience and grit, but you have to learn to expect and even embrace that some of your efforts will fail. Innovating, building things that have never been built before, is a highly unpredictable situation with loads of unknowns.
What Snehal learned from her time at Apple was to break down your big vision into smaller sets: make small things that are almost as good as the big thing, then combine them together to build momentum. Failure is good information: it tells you what didn’t work. It's regrettable that our culture stigmatizes failure as bad instead of focusing on what you learned and how that’s going to help you move forward. Barry points out that in reality, you’ll never be able to predict the future, so you need to test the future: you need to fail as much and as quickly as possible to learn what works and what doesn't.
Make Decisions Quickly. It’s natural to be scared when making decisions in a high-stakes, uncertain environment, but the trick is to make decisions fast and stick to them. If your strategy doesn't work, then make another decision fast. Soon enough you'll have a successful process. Encourage all members of the team to come up with their best solution within a limited timeframe. Bring them all to the table and choose the best idea/solution.
Unlearning Is Not Forgetting Barry reminds us that unlearning does not mean forgetting everything you know. Your experience stays with you but you recognize that the behaviors that work in one context may not work in another. This is what Snehal experienced when she transitioned from the Apple ecosystem which she knew, into Reddit whose culture was totally different. At the same time, however, she was able to successfully introduce some of the behaviors she learned at Apple.
A leader needs to be flexible when introducing a new culture. You may have big aspirations, but you can’t force culture, you have to be patient. Consider your previous knowledge and experience as tools in your toolbox: you don't necessarily have to use all of them at the same time, just the ones that work in your present context. This is what learning and unlearning means to Barry: helping people adapt to their particular context and find the right methods to achieve their desired outcomes.
What’s Next for Snehal? Role models like her 71-year-old father, who recently completed his degree in music, inspire Snehal’s unlearning journey. She says that no one is born great, you continuously develop your skills into greatness. She's excited about being part of Reddit’s foray into conversation AI, as well as the company’s expansion into new international markets.
Snehal Kundalkar on: LinkedIn, Medium | |||
| Design Sprint Your Defaults with Jake Knapp | 04 Sep 2019 | 00:35:32 | |
Creativity can come in a variety of forms, and for Jake Knapp, author of Sprint and Make Time, it was a mixture of painting, artistry and old school programming. Jake finds creative satisfaction in trying to figure out how to design, optimize and improve everything from the default settings in his own life, to how people run meetings and design products. Sometimes, having an outsider’s view can be quite useful. What’s holding us back? We’ve all had times when we feel like we haven’t gotten enough done, or we haven’t gotten done the one thing that would have helped us make real progress. Jake talks about how experiencing moments of intensity helped him understand and prioritize the outcomes from his life he really wanted. Looking at and thinking about the outcomes he wants, and then gathering data that allows him to review his behavior in light of these outcomes is one of the keys to Jake’s success – and perhaps one that can be replicated, even by people who don’t see the world as he does—as code. Listen from 6:15 Failure actually… sucks. You’d think that tech startup founders are handed a script before being interviewed, outlining how they should mention that they absolutely love failure. It doesn’t bother them in the slightest. Most of us don’t feel quite that way about it. Unlike the popular ideology would have you believe – screwing something up sucks. It hurts, it’s embarrassing, it impacts other people and it can feel terrible. The thing to do with failure isn't to pretend you like it, but to actively and intentionally learn from it as part of the coping process. Listen from 12:00 Principles have to be learned to be unlearned. There are certain assumptions we make when we start to gain experience and expertise in our fields, especially when we’re leaders. One of the most critical things Jake had to learn was that other people’s ideas and contributions were as likely to be the best ones as his own. The idea of not selling or pitching your idea to your team goes against most of what we’ve been taught about working in companies. It's a skill set that can be totally unrelated to the problem you’re trying to solve, and it’s better for the best idea to win, not the loudest or most popular person. Jake shares a story about the development of what would eventually become Google Hangouts – and what it taught him about collaboration. Listen from 21:00 The value of the supporting the Decider role. There are people whose job it is to come into a situation and make the call—the deciders. It’s important to have some empathy for that role – even though it may not result in the decisions you personally would make. You can support leaders and decision-makers by giving them the tools and resources they need to make the best possible decision. It’s not always a democracy, but if you do the groundwork to minimize the possibilities of bad options, then great things can happen. Listen from 28:45 What’s next for Jake? Something helping Jake learn and unlearn right now is writing a science fiction novel. He’s not sure when it will be finished, but creating it and using the process he’s refined in other areas of his life, gathering and analyzing data to help optimize for outcomes, is playing a role in how he writes. Listen from 33:00 | |||
| Outcomes For Human Systems No Matter The Business with Mark Graban | 31 Jul 2019 | 00:41:06 | |
You always want to look back on your life and say that your path from point A to point B was linear. It almost never really is. Today’s guest on the Unlearn Podcast is Mark Graban, author of Lean Hospitals and Measures of Success, who started out as an engineer for General Motors. It’s been quite a journey. Today, he and Barry O’Reilly will be talking about how that kind of a shift can happen, and what he learned and unlearned along the way.
Clashes of Culture You might not think that the worlds of manufacturing and healthcare have much in common, but having worked in both, Mark thinks they have plenty in common - especially when it comes to culture. People aren’t machines, but the culture of many hospitals and clinics echoes what you’ll find on the factory floor - especially in institutions that haven’t done much to modernize the way they manage and lead people. Barry points out that there are similarities in tech as well: every industry thinks it’s unique, but it’s all human systems and people working together to drive outcomes.
Unlearning Your Whole Career When you’ve invested years or decades into a career, you often feel like you need to stay in it. Having made a major career transition, Mark knows that doing so allows you to bring fresh insight into an organization that may not be expecting it, and when you’re in a wholly new environment, you’re in a better position to avoid the curse of expertise. Looking back, Mark wishes he’d unlearned top-down style management earlier - the benefits of engaging people in change are so many and so valuable.
Seeking and Finding Clarity Before you start optimizing for, or worse, applying a solution, you have to be exceptionally clear on what the problem really is, and what outcome you want to achieve. Mark and Barry discuss the ways this can manifest in different kinds of organizations, and the framework for problem-solving that Mark uses to help healthcare providers make changes to their operations with input from people working at all levels. The process is one that listeners will be familiar with: unlearn, re-learn and breakthrough!
The Courage to Change It’s easy to tell when something isn’t right, but it's harder to create a moment where people are open to truly unlearning and making changes. Mark notes that looking outside of your area of expertise takes a fair amount of courage - but many people are highly skilled in their specific profession and not in the other areas of running a business or managing a team. This is often problematic because when we’re faced with things we don’t know, or feel scared and threatened - our higher-order brains shut down. There is never going to be a ‘perfect’ time for a major change, so you might as well just get started.
What are the Top 3 Reasons to Do This? Management from the top-down usually doesn’t usually provide the results companies are looking for. It’s much more effective to lead as if you had no authority - by seeking input and finding out what makes people tick, and why they think the way they do. Something that Mark had to unlearn over the course of his career was that you can’t just tell people what to do, even if you’re wildly excited about helping them. Change has to be based on feedback and engagement with the people it affects. Mark has some insights on what makes people more open and receptive to change and leaves us with the thought that it’s okay to struggle with change. It doesn’t make you a bad person or a bad manager - it’s just something to figure out.
Resources Lean Hospitals Measures of Success | |||
| The True Story of Struggles and Success Of A Startup CEO with Teresa Torres | 17 Jul 2019 | 00:38:16 | |
Entrepreneurs tend to talk about the success, the fun and excitement of running a company. Fewer talk about struggles. Today, on the Unlearn Podcast, Barry O’Reilly talks to Teresa Torres, Product Discovery Coach at Product Talk. They get into what’s hard about the path to success, and at the end of the day, what really matters.
No One Has All The Answers Like many young CEOs and founders, Teresa found herself working with people who were older, more experienced, and with access to more resources than she did as a leader. She shares a key unlearn moment about discovering that no one really has all the answers - and how that gave her the confidence to start trying things to see what worked. Barry points out that trying is a learned behavior, and Teresa discusses how education and experience in design-thinking instilled in her the idea that your first attempt won’t always work: iteration is the key to achieving your goals.
A Process for Decision-Making Very little about being a CEO is black and white - and coming from an environment where situations were more granular was a challenge for Teresa. She says sales is a lot like product development and gives us some insight on the similarities, and how she brought an outcome-based focus into her work as a product leader and later as a CEO. Every process has parts, and those parts can be modeled, measured and optimized.
Our Defaults Can Be Unhelpful When people are working under stress, they tend to revert to the skills, strategies, and habits that they are the best at - it feels good, and more importantly, it feels productive. Barry and Teresa talk about how this tendency can actually work against people whose roles are less about producing, and more about helping other people produce, or taking a bigger picture view of the growth and direction of a company. This is especially challenging when every situation feels extremely high stakes.
Letting Other People Help You Teresa recalls the scenario her company was navigating through during the economic downturn, and how critical it was to let her team play to their own strengths and be responsible for their outcomes - and importantly, create a space for them to be transparent with her about her work and responsibilities. During a particularly fraught time, Teresa wasn’t going to make payroll and ended up offering team members the option to become owners in the company. This had several beneficial outcomes and ended up giving her employees a unique learning experience, as well as company stock.
Defining Success on Multiple Levels After being a CEO, Teresa had to decide what came next. She experimented with different projects and determined that what she wanted to tackle was the waste of time and talent endemic in many startups, founding a new company to do so—Product Talk. Barry brings up how, as a solopreneur, it can be difficult to handle loss-aversion, and constantly feeling like you have to take every opportunity that comes along. Teresa’s answer to this is to try and make sure you have only awesome options to choose from and shares some examples of how she’s made that a part of her working life.
What Feels Fun That Helps? Teresa used what she calls a divergent-convergent process to try many different options to help weed out what she didn’t want to do. Barry and she discuss how this applies to both business and to life, and why embracing an abundance mindset can help you identify and create many amazing options for yourself—therefore improving the options you end up selecting to succeed.
Resources: Product Talk| LinkedIn | |||
| CEO School and the Future of Work with Stephane Kasriel | 03 Jul 2019 | 00:36:05 | |
CEO School and The Future of Work with Stephane Kasriel
In this episode of the Unlearn Podcast, Barry O'Reilly speaks with Stephane Kasriel, the CEO of Upwork—the world’s largest freelancing platform where businesses and independent professionals connect and collaborate remotely. Upwork is driving the future of work conversation, and discovering what it really means along the way.
Creating Capability To Continuously Change Stephane feels one of the most exciting aspects of the tech industry is how quickly it changes— a key competency he believes people must develop is adapting to that change, learning continuously, and unlearning what is no longer useful.
He talks through two specific changes Upwork has experienced: the switch from traditional waterfall development to remote agile teams, and sourcing and clarifying Upwork’s values from within.
Secrets To Distributed Agility Several years ago, no one believed that agile could work in teams that weren’t co-located, but Upwork—along with other companies like GitHub and Automatic—has demonstrated it can. It takes an open mind, strong culture of feedback and honest personal evaluation to understand if working remotely is a fit for you.
Making this clear during hiring is crucial. Not everyone will be passionate about or motivated to work in a distributed manner—and that’s okay. It’s better to discover it as quickly as possible because it means the people who join your organization are aligned with the opportunities and affordances of distributed work. They’re happier, more productive and stay longer.
Challenges Transiting To The Top Transitioning from one role to another can be challenging, but the transition to CEO is unique. There’s no CEO school. Stephane shares how he found his way by applying many of the strategies that made him successful as a product and engineering leader. Actively learning from the people around him—wherever they are in the hierarchy—helped guide this approach to lead the company forward.
In the tech industry, where so many founders are CEOs, knowing where to step up and step back is key in creating a healthy culture within leadership teams. Stephane shows how he’s tried to let the smart people bring their skills to bear.
Unlearning At The Global Level There are a handful of things reshaping the economy: automation technologies, the acceleration of the rate of technological change and innovation, and the geographic mismatch between where jobs are being lost and where they’re being created. Stephane talks about how these forces are causing changes in the labor market and how you need to approach learning to stay current.
It’s the people who can be in the habit of doing new things, and consistently adding new small skills who are ultimately going to be successful. Stephane adds that if we can’t embrace change, we’re doomed. We’re part of the future that’s coming; we can be a part of making it happen, or let it happen to us.
The Power of Remote Work Upwork is focused on making remote work possible, and that’s not just about profitability. When the cost of living becomes unbearable in the big tech centers, but other towns are dying for a lack of good jobs—the best solution can’t be for everyone to move to expensive cities. Responsible tech leaders need to abandon the idea of having their entire workforce in a single building in a big city. Many jobs do not need to be on-site, and they shouldn’t be. Society as a whole will be better when we start making growth and success inclusive of more people.
It’s not a good outcome for the world to have a huge part of the population unemployed or underemployed. One of our most precious resources is the human mind, and we shouldn’t be wasting it. | |||
| Leading with Servant Leadership and Gratitude ft. John Marcante, Vanguard’s former CIO | 03 Jul 2024 | 00:36:15 | |
Leadership is about embracing the process of unlearning outdated practices, fostering a culture of continuous improvement, and aligning your team with visionary goals. Today's guest, with his esteemed 29-year tenure at one of the largest asset managers in the world, Vanguard, shares how he successfully navigated this journey. John T. Marcante is a renowned technology and business executive with expertise in digital transformation, business strategy, financial planning, and cybersecurity. He is the US CIO in Residence at Deloitte, providing strategic guidance to clients and leadership. Previously, John was the Global CIO at Vanguard, where he led digital transformation and drove growth to $9 trillion. He modernized Vanguard's technology and promoted an inclusive workplace. He also developed Vanguard’s global advice platform, making financial planning accessible to millions. John has contributed to the WSJ CIO Journal and Harvard Business Review. His awards include Business Insider Top 50 CIOs and ORBIE CIO of the Year. He holds degrees from The Pennsylvania State University and Saint Joseph’s University. Host Barry O'Reilly invites John to share his journey at Vanguard and beyond in leadership, culture transformation, and gratitude. Inspired by his father's legacy in technology, John discusses how he aligned tech with business goals at Vanguard. Barry highlights John’s approach to direct client engagement and open feedback. They also explore John’s commitment to servant leadership, maintaining company values, and his future goals of mentoring new leaders and giving back to the community. This episode offers personal insights into what drives effective leadership with gratitude.
Additional Insights:
Episode Highlights: 00.00 - Introduction to the episode 02:58- John's reflections on recent thoughts and his father's influence on his career "I think the... | |||
| Solving Problems Safely with Mary and Tom Poppendieck | 19 Jun 2019 | 00:47:05 | |
Barry O’Reilly has had many mentors over the years, and among them, Mary and Tom Poppendieck have been some of the most inspirational. In today’s conversation, they talk about challenges the Agile community faces, debunk the myths of scaling agility, and finally, Mary and Tom reveal how they have stayed relevant for decades as they continue to coach, mentor, and help others.
About Mary and Tom
Neither Mary nor Tom started with software. Mary was an engineer who worked with problems that had life and death ramifications, and Tom was a physics teacher whose students contact him decades later to say ‘thank you - you made a big difference.’ They’ve written many of the seminal books and contributed much to the Lean and Agile movement and have seen fads and trends come and go. Barry asks them what has been their key insights over the years.
When did you discover agile?
Agile developed as a reaction to what was happening in the software industry in the late 1990s. Agile has to grow up, to no longer be reactionary when bad things happen, but to determine how to create GOOD software engineering from the start. She draws on her experience as a traditional engineer and shares a lesson about how proxies between engineers and people with problems are a bad idea. It’s a matter of trusting professional judgment.
Tom observes that, too often, Agile tries to solve problems with processes. But the problem isn’t usually the process; it’s architectural. He talks about the different structures, from software to the leadership teams, that can lead to dysfunctional situations. If you want to solve a problem, you need to fix the structure.
How Agile Can Grow
There’s no simple answer to this, Mary points out because it depends on where you’re at. You can understand all the fundamental steps needed but if your team isn’t well-integrated, it will get you nowhere. She shares an experience with a company who had accepted a big contract they weren’t ready for. Mary recommended the ‘sync and stabilize' method and taught them how to use it. It didn’t just save their contract; it changed how they looked at their whole company.
Tom highlights the non-technology component of software, the ‘wetware,’ or what happens with people. He points out that money isn’t the issue; it’s the shortage of passionate, creative people - especially in isolated IT departments that are treated as cost centers. Tom believes you should give them challenging problems and get out of their way.
Teams Tailored to Problems
Mary loves to talk about how organizations such as AWS and T-Mobile handle their organizational structure and customers. When there is a customer problem, a team is brought together to solve it and integrate it into the rest of the services so everything works. That team is given a lot of autonomy, including trading immediate profits for better customer experience AND have accountability to ensure they are also adhering to operational excellence and profitability of their service. Ultimately, better customer experiences drive bigger profits.
Tom makes an important point: scaling isn’t possible after a certain point. At some point, complexity dominates future gains and wipes them out, so you have to descale. In other words, you have to do things in ‘little chunks’ that are independent and don’t require strict coordination. Tom uses the example of a city and how it functions.
Final Thoughts
Part of what helps Tom and Mary stay current is that they are truly agile. Mary points out that she’s never seen anything in technology last two decades and remain current. Agile has been around for about that long, but has it been changing and adapting?
Resources
https://twitter.com/mpoppendieck
http://www.poppendieck.com/ | |||
| Living Your Leadership Principles To Learn and Unlearn with Joe Norena | 05 Jun 2019 | 00:36:15 | |
Joe Norena is the Managing Director at HSBC and the Global Markets Americas COO. From corporations to startups to corporate digital, his experience has run the gamut of organization. Joe has led a life of unlearning, and every new thing he learned he has applied to the next situation. In this episode, Joe and Barry talk about the pivotal moments in his career that brought him where he is today.
Unlearning Starts Early...
From the beginning of his life, Joe has been surrounded by people who modeled the type of behavior that would shape his success. His father, an immigrant who didn’t speak the language, began work in the mailroom of Citibank and retired as the Vice President. His mother always encouraged him to ‘just go and try it.’ Joe shares a funny story about nearly drowning when he tried out for the swim team in grade school.
...And Continues Through Life
During his time at Citibank, Joe continued to have powerful role models. First among them was Michael, a senior trade manager. Michael was willing to sit down with the most junior of employees - even graduates - and open his mind to new ways of thinking, doing things, and techniques. He was a true ‘unlearner’ who modeled that behavior for everyone around him.
Joe’s time at Bridgewater taught him another very important lesson: having a voice based on principles rather than the desire to be right. Understanding that success might be revealed through another lens, or way of thinking, helps a company grow and remain sustainable. The debate then becomes about what the real issue or problem is, and what is the right thing to do. Unlearning Moments
You need to be comfortable with being uncomfortable; it’s the hallmark of a life-long unlearner. Joe experienced this several times during his career. First among those was the huge mind-shift he had to make when moving from being a trader to a COO. A trader knows whether he was an asset to the company at the end of the day; he only needed to look at profit/loss. But when Joe became COO, it wasn’t that obvious. It took 3-6 months before he knew if he was succeeding or not.
The second unlearning experience for Joe was at the hedge fund startup. Every day he had to deal with and make decisions about situations he had no experience in. He was also used to having many people to help him, but in the startup, he only had himself. In the end, they had to close the startup, but Joe brought all the new learning with him.
Joe’s time at the startup taught him about the need for lean startup principles, and he was able to apply that learning at HSBC. In effect, while leading a team of 30 people on a limited budget Joe looked at an experiment as being successful if it failed because he learned something. From those ‘failures’ came some of the greatest successes.
Organizational Learning
Learning comes from the bottom up, but if you don’t have support from the top, it becomes very difficult. The message from the top should be ‘we want to change, we want to try this out, and it’s okay.’ This doesn’t mean that C Suite managers need to know exactly how the change will occur or be a daily part of it; the tone they set will be the change maker or breaker.
A Principle for Business
In any decision that you make, it has to be about building a sustainable business model, which means it goes far beyond your own career. Joe admits it’s not easy, especially when you don’t know if you’re making the right decision for the future. He likens it to raising children. Another is that if you don’t speak, you lose an opportunity for teaching and learning. Joe shares how his office is set up to mirror that belief.
Resources
LinkedIn | |||
| Keeping Skills, Strategy and Structure Unstuck with Katri Harra-Salonen | 22 May 2019 | 00:27:36 | |
Have you ever felt boxed in based on your job description?
Join us today as Katri Harra-Salonen, the Chief Digital Officer of Finnair Oyj, shares what she’s learned and unlearned throughout her career of mixing industries, mixing roles, and being comfortable with being uncomfortable.
The Un-comfort Zone: By design, Katri actively puts herself in situations where she has to grow, and calls this being in the Un-comfort Zone. When you put yourself in a place that challenges you, you become energized, you’re able to be curious and explore, and you learn new things, not just about the situation, but about yourself as well. Katri has gone from the consultancy world into the airline world, which has meant a lot of discomfort, learning, and unlearning. But there is so much that the two worlds - consultancy and airline - can learn from the other, so she believes in building bridges between different kinds of companies and different kinds of thinking. That’s where creativity stems from.
Inspiration: Working with other countries is strategic. But for Katri, there are intangible benefits as well. For example, they work with a lot of exciting Asian companies, which gives them insight into how mobile services are developing, what’s happening in the digital world, and how they can possibly incorporate this into a European country. For example, many cities in Asia are cashless societies, whereas Europe has been slow to adapt to digital money. But studying Asia, you can see how people behave and what it means, and insights like these can help embrace development.
Best of both worlds: Katri is a third-generation engineer, and at one point in her career, she worked for a design company. How did she bring those two worlds together? Don’t put people in boxes. “Boxes are for dead people.” You need to be able to change perspectives in order to be creative, so don’t limit yourself to the box that’s been given to you. Just because you’re an engineer by profession, that’s not all you are and all you can do. Thinking you’re locked in does nothing to help you move forward. Katri believes in lifelong learning and unlearning. You want that exchange of disciplines and perspectives.
Collaboration and building bridges: Katri shares about an experiment they conducted where the employees themselves designed their office space instead of hiring a design firm. It was done in five batches, and the teams were a mix of people from different departments. People collaborated, learned about how different teams work, and were learning and unlearning at the same time. Structures: Structure follows strategy. And when the strategy changes — as it does, because it needs to be agile — it’s so important that the structures are alive as well. Be aware of the structures you create, and think of them when you think of serving your talent best. For example: how can you build collaboration into the structure of your organization? Many departments are siloed from one another, but to innovate and move things forward, people need to be able to work together across disciplines.
The future of technology: Technology is everywhere, and Katri is looking forward to it solving the big issues today. What do we need to do so we can create a setting where technology is working for the benefit of the world?
Resources: Katri Harra-Salonen (LinkedIn)| https://twitter.com/KinStockholm | |||
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