Disengaged – Details, episodes & analysis

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Disengaged

James A. Seechurn

Business

Frequency: 1 episode/15d. Total Eps: 16

Disengaged asks why most people feel detached from the work they do, and what it would take to change that. Organizations meet almost every problem with more control: more process, more measurement, more incentives. That response deepens the problem it was meant to solve, since control is what suppresses engagement in the first place. Each episode brings together writers, researchers, and practitioners in conversations about motivation, autonomy, pay, job design, and performance management, and about what it takes to build a workplace on a foundation of trust rather than control.

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Data updated on 13/09/2026

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https://startuppeoplesummit.com/
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https://www.fndn.com.au/
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https://fndnseries.fndn.com.au/p/how-to-become-a-hr-consultant
2 shares

https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewmcfarlane/
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http://linkedin.com/in/dylan-soopramania-5a439223
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https://amzn.to/4x4FAZ6
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How to Get Pay Right with Matt McFarlane

Thursday, September 10, 2026 • Duration 01:15:21

Matt McFarlane and I met earlier this year on opposite sides of a debate about pay for performance. His team argued in favor and won the audience vote 62 to 38, and a week later he published a piece saying he had never been a fan of it. That opening carries the rest of the conversation: what pay for performance sets out to do, why the mechanism breaks at nearly every link in the chain, and what companies use instead once they stop treating an annual rating as the engine of everything.

Matt runs FNDN, a compensation consultancy for startups based in Australia. He built the pay structures at Oyster that carried the company from 200 to 600 people across 70 countries, and he now hosts the FNDN Series podcast and newsletter and runs the Startup People Summit, a one-day APAC event for people leaders inside high-growth companies. We cover the companies that have taken negotiation out of pay entirely, the grip that benchmark data holds over compensation decisions, the tension between fairness and individual pay in collaborative work, what happens to the manager's role as AI absorbs more of the coordination, and the practical side of leaving a salaried job to consult.

What we covered

Why Matt argued for pay for performance in a debate and against it a week later
The three percent merit budget, and what the annual salary survey roundups tell us
Rewarding a standout year with money, or using it to raise the standard across a team
Why Matt left the job he enjoyed most in his career to build a compensation practice
How his client window moved from 50 employees to 100 or 150, and what breaks at that size
Benchmarking as a source of cognitive closure, and the living wage argument underneath it
Runn's single rate per role, and the salary trajectory that made their people harder to poach
Carta, 37signals, Buffer, and PayPal as models that remove the negotiation
Fairness as a relative judgment, and how quickly a good salary becomes an unfair one
Why US companies resist narrow bands, and what wide bands say about trust in hiring
The bad hire label, the myth of the A player, and where responsibility for performance sits
The player coach, the stretched leader, and ClickUp's million-dollar salary bands
What Matt tells anyone thinking about leaving a salaried role to consult

People
Matt McFarlane, founder of FNDN
Rowan Savage, co-founder and CTO of Runn
Andrea LaRowe of 37signals, a previous guest on this show

Books
Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

Articles
"How to Become a HR Consultant," Matt McFarlane, FNDN Series #7
https://fndnseries.fndn.com.au/p/how-to-become-a-hr-consultant

Organizations
FNDN, Startup People Summit, Oyster, Runn, Carta, 37signals, Buffer, PayPal, Zappos, ClickUp, Buurtzorg, Gallup, Radford

Find Matt
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewmcfarlane/
FNDN: https://www.fndn.com.au/
FNDN Series podcast and newsletter: https://fndnseries.fndn.com.au/
Startup People Summit: https://startuppeoplesummit.com/

Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

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Protecting the Potential of the Idea with Dylan Soopramania

Thursday, September 3, 2026 • Duration 02:18:44

Dylan Soopramania is a creative director and consultant whose work spans the UK, Australia, and North America, with campaigns for Coca-Cola, EA Sports, KitKat, Hellmann's, and Google. He designed the covers for all three of my books and the branding for this podcast. We have known each other for thirty years, and this is the first episode recorded in person and the first under the Disengaged name.

Advertising is the one industry where creativity is the product, which makes it the sharpest test of the argument in Close the Gap. Dylan's rule for creative leads is to protect the potential of the idea: push it to the point where you and your trusted partners feel uncomfortable, because ideas get killed in internal conversations long before anyone learns where they could have gone. The same problem sits inside every business that needs to innovate. If people do not feel safe suggesting things that might get shot down, they play it down the middle. Dylan's account of what happened when I stopped chasing him on the cover, that the more I backed off the more responsible he felt, is the whole book in one sentence.

What we covered:

What a creative director does, and why brands rent a creative's tone of voice
How the Close the Gap cover came about
Good briefs, bad briefs, and Hellmann's sneakers made from food waste
Presenting irrational ideas to rational people
Mad Men is dead: culture now informs marketing
Protecting the potential of the idea
Pixar's brain trust and the Overton window
Culture fit as hiring people who look and sound like you
Why the modern company still runs on a hierarchy inherited from the church and the factory
The KitKat catapult
Focus groups, market data, and the sea of sameness
The manager as emulsifier
Trust, control, purpose, and tension
Why asking people to keep doing what they do well kills the spark
Freelance versus full time
Leaving Dylan alone: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in one example
Proactive work, gold wall sessions, and 3M's fifteen percent time
Executive pay, the C-suite, and the role of profit

People: Steve Hey (Dylan's creative partner), Dart Lindsley (Work for Humans), Jessie Zwaan (job, career, calling), Amy Wrzesniewski, Aaron Dignan, Rensis Likert, Abraham Maslow, Joseph Overton, Paul Buchheit, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs

Uncertainty and Closure with Arie Kruglanski

Wednesday, July 29, 2026 • Duration 01:27:11

Arie Kruglanski is one of the most cited social psychologists alive, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and a co-founder of START, the national center for the study of terrorism. He gave the field two ideas that shape this conversation: the need for cognitive closure, our drive to resolve ambiguity and settle on an answer, and significance quest theory, the claim that the need to matter sits beneath much of what we do. This episode takes both into the workplace.

We start small, with a question that sent James to Arie's work in the first place: why do companies cling to performance ratings, job titles, and job architecture when the evidence against them is overwhelming? Closure is the answer, and Arie explains why noise, fatigue, and time pressure make people more certain rather than less, and why premature closure has been the mother of great mistakes, from Pearl Harbor to organizational change. From there we move to significance: the oldest complaint in history, the road that took Arie from architecture to psychology, and why pay has become the emblem of how much we matter. We close on the hardest problem of all, how anything changes, and a personal question about holding confidence and uncertainty at the same time.

What we covered

Cognitive closure, and why difficult conditions produce false confidence rather than better thinking
Seizing and freezing, belief perseverance, and why information that was available still gets ignored
The Italian postal workers, and why people resist the idea of change more than any specific change
Careers as closure: why we follow available jobs over real passions, and Arie's own turn away from architecture
The quest for significance, from terrorism research to the workplace where most people earn their worth
Pay as significance, the CEO pay ratio, and the insatiability that comes with a bigness-oriented culture
Bigness and Smallness, the reciprocal model of significance, and love as merit times appreciation
Competitive individualism, Arachne and hubris, and whether significance requires winners and losers
Weber, Calvinism, and the roots of the American work ethic
Psychological safety, loss aversion, and why change must start small
Religion as an ancient antidote to hubris, and what fills the vacuum when it recedes

The Employee Advantage with Stephan Meier

Thursday, July 16, 2026 • Duration 01:24:59

In this episode of Disengaged, I'm joined by Stephan Meier — behavioral economist, Professor of Business Strategy at Columbia Business School, and author of The Employee Advantage — to explore why the next great shift in business is from customer-centricity to employee-centricity.

Stephan's argument is that business has made this journey before. Companies moved from a product-centric to a customer-centric model, building tools along the way — segmentation, journey mapping, personalisation — to understand and delight customers. Those same tools can now be repurposed for employees, and the companies that do it will create an advantage rivals cannot easily copy. As Stephan puts it, hard is good: a culture where people are engaged, motivated, and innovative takes years to build — and that is exactly what makes it difficult to compete with.

What we covered:

The evolution from shareholder value to customer centricity to employee centricity
The zero-sum fallacy — Amazon's Harry Potter gamble and Costco's employee-first economics
Where money works, where it stops moving the needle, and how a $5 favour destroys a friendship
Purpose — Kennedy's single mission for NASA and the janitor who wasn't mopping floors
The engaged coach — clear direction with real empowerment
Eli Lilly applying customer journey mapping to female talent progression
H-E-B's cult following and the four-star truck driver
Haier's RenDanHeYi model of autonomous micro-enterprises
Buurtzorg's self-managing nurse teams
Just right tasks — why the reward for good work is more good work
AI-powered internal talent marketplaces at MasterCard, MetLife, and Unilever
The workforce of one — segmentation and personalisation through one-on-ones

People

Stephan Meier — author of The Employee Advantage
Alfie Kohn — author of Punished by Rewards
Dart Lindsley — host of Work for Humans
Jessie Zwaan — value beyond price
Megan Bernard-May — people experience design
Uri Gneezy — Stephan's co-author on incentives

Purpose and Work with Jessica Zwaan

Thursday, July 2, 2026 • Duration 01:20:30

In this episode of Disengaged, I'm joined by Jessie Zwaan — VP of People Strategy and Operations at Leapsome and author of Built for People and Purpose and Work — to dig into the gap between the purpose companies advertise and the work people actually live.

Jessie's argument cuts against a lot of HR orthodoxy. Most people don't come to work for the company mission, and pretending they do creates a dissonance employees feel but rarely voice — an Emperor's New Clothes problem she traces through the anti-work movement, which she reads as a funhouse mirror held up to HR. Drawing on Joe Pine's experience economy, she places work on a spectrum from service to experience to transformation, and argues most workplaces are experiential, and that this is fine. People are motivated by connection, autonomy, and creativity far more than by mission — so design work around what you can genuinely offer instead of selling a purpose no one believes.

What we covered:

Work as a product — the three symbiotic products every company runs, and why employee experience behaves like a subscription
Pine's experience economy applied to work, illustrated through a cup of coffee, and where most workplaces actually sit
Wrzesniewski's job, career, and calling orientations, and why performance doesn't differ across them
The purpose gap, and how to close it without overreaching
The anti-work movement as a funhouse mirror of HR
Leveling guides and job architecture as systems of control — cognitive closure, familiarity bias, and why bare-bones wins
Whether AI will fix decision-making and performance management, and why the answer is mostly no
The T-shaped employee, and applying deep expertise broadly in an AI era
The perception of laziness across generations (Dickens wrote fifteen novels and never worked afternoons), and the shift from individual to collective measurement

People

Jessie Zwaan — author of Built for People and Purpose and Work
Dart Lindsley — host of Work for Humans
Joe Pine — the experience economy
Amy Wrzesniewski — job, career, and calling
Peter Fader — author of The Customer Base Audit
Stephan Meier — employee segmentation
Arie Kruglanski — need for cognitive closure

37signals with Andrea LaRowe

Thursday, June 4, 2026 • Duration 01:33:36

In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Andrea LaRowe - Director of People Operations at 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and Hey - to find out how a high-trust, low-control company runs day to day.

Andrea's core argument: stop tying pay to performance and you strip a layer of politics out of work. 37signals benchmarks salaries once a year to the 90th percentile of the San Francisco tech market, with no negotiation and no manager involvement, and rewards tenure through a profit share. Reviews still happen, on each person's anniversary, but they're a check-in rather than a lever for pay. What drives the work is intrinsic motivation - and a small, flat, bootstrapped company built to support it.

What we covered:

How pay works - benchmarking to Radford's 90th percentile, no merit cycle, no negotiation, and why managers stay out of it
What reviews are for once pay is off the table, and why staggering them by anniversary beats an annual scramble
The five-level structure - why level three (senior) is the baseline, why level five (principal) is reserved for people moving the industry forward, and how judgment separates people at the top
Profit share based on tenure rather than individual output, and why it doubles as retention
How a high-trust company handles a low performer - visibility, honest conversation, skill problem vs engagement problem, and why PIPs rarely earn their keep
The "manager of one" - hiring people who seek out problems without waiting to be told
The 2021 decision to draw a line on political conversation at work, the roughly twenty people who left, and what it revealed about when leadership steps in
Why staying private and bootstrapped for 25 years let the founders decide what the company is for, and why equity isn't the draw people assume
Self-determination theory - autonomy, competence, relatedness - and how 37signals delivers all three
Work as a product - treating work as something employees choose to buy, not something handed down
Six-week cycles, kickoffs and heartbeats - the light mechanisms that stop a decentralized company splintering into silos
Advice for anyone stuck inside a pay-for-performance cycle

The People Experience with Megan Bernard-May

Friday, May 15, 2026 • Duration 01:27:52

Episode description

In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Megan Bernard-May - founder of Pollinate XD, co-creator of the PX Dojo, and the person who led people experience at the BBC - to dig into what it means to treat the experience of work the way a UX designer treats a product.

Meg's core argument: people experience is another flavor of experience design. Traditional HR builds around policy, compliance, and risk management. A people experience approach starts somewhere else - finding the overlap between what's good for people, what's good for the business, and what's good for customers, then designing solutions inside that overlap rather than treating them as trade-offs.

What we covered:

Why traditional HR keeps shipping best-practice solutions that don't solve the problem, and what a design-led discovery process looks like instead
Meg's path from architecture to UX to people experience, including the master's in organizational psychology she did to round out the work
Why corporate environments resist experimentation in HR even though product teams A/B test routinely, and what makes an experiment "successful"
The BBC and what productivity meant there - why getting clear on that question first matters more than any solution
Pay complaints as symptoms - what's usually underneath them when benchmarking already says you're paying the market
A case study from a credit analyst team where dissatisfaction with pay turned out to be a job-design problem
Why dual career tracks still funnel people into management to chase money, and what flatter pay structures unlock
Self-determination theory as a stress test for any HR change - does it add autonomy, competence, and connectedness, or remove them?
Handelsbanken, Spotify guilds, and Haier as examples of decentralized models that lend themselves to a people experience approach
Where people experience should sit organizationally - outside HR, as a guild that runs across the business
Three things any HR practitioner can start doing tomorrow: ask better problem questions, stop asking for permission, document the work

People referenced

Work as a Product with Dart Lindsley

Thursday, May 7, 2026 • Duration 01:29:40

In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Dart Lindsley - founder of 11Fold, host of the Work for Humans podcast, and former head of business architecture for HR at Cisco Systems - to dig into the idea of work as a product.

Dart's core argument: companies have spent a century misclassifying their workforce. Employees fit the definition of customers, people who choose every day whether to keep buying the product called "your job." That reframe rearranges almost everything downstream - recruitment, onboarding, what managers do, how work gets allocated, and what good performance even means.

What we covered:

The category error at the root of modern management, and why scientific management's framing of people as factors of production still shapes practice today
How employees fit the definition of customers in a multi-sided business, and the route Dart took to that model through business architecture work at Cisco
The limits of autonomy, mastery, and purpose as a design framework, and what Dart found after asking thousands of people what job they hire their work to do
Negative transformation - the ways work changes us into people we don't want to be - and why that belongs on the cost side of the ledger
What it looks like when teams co-design their own work, including the four-dimensional bubble chart Dart uses to reallocate tasks based on what each person finds rewarding
Managers as brokers optimizing flow between two customers, the paying customer and the working customer
Common pushback on the model: does it scale, is it anti-capitalist, and why bother if the existing system seems to work
Plus a short detour into the night Dart climbed the Golden Gate Bridge

People referenced

Dart Lindsley - founder of 11Fold, host of Work for Humans
Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theory
Clayton Christensen and Bobby Moesta - Jobs to Be Done framework
Joe Pine - experience and transformation economies
Daniel Pink - autonomy, mastery, purpose
Alfie Kohn - critique of behaviorist management ("pop behaviorism")
Antonio Damasio - on emotion and reason in decision-making
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton - the knowing-doing gap

Punished by Rewards with Alfie Kohn

Wednesday, April 29, 2026 • Duration 43:44

Alfie Kohn has spent decades dismantling the assumption that rewards work. His research across education, parenting, and the workplace remains some of the most rigorous and underread work on human motivation - required reading for anyone serious about how people actually behave. Punished by Rewards is the place to start, and it should sit on every compensation professional's shelf.

In this conversation, Alfie joins me to examine why behaviorism still dominates corporate management, what B.F. Skinner got wrong, and why financial incentives so reliably erode the intrinsic motivation they're meant to amplify. We dig into the role of promotion as a control mechanism, what the pay gap signals about corporate culture, and how the sales function exports extrinsic logic into the rest of the organization. We close on the cycle that keeps reward systems entrenched and the difficulty of moving colleagues past it.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Alfie Kohn's work and books
07:12 B.F. Skinner and behaviorism
15:34 The role of promotion in corporate America
22:07 The impact of the pay gap on corporate culture
33:27 The vicious cycle of rewards and motivation

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The Equity Dilemma with Robyn Shutak

Friday, April 24, 2026 • Duration 01:29:39

Robyn Shutak is a Partner at Infinite Equity and one of the sharpest minds in equity compensation. She joins me to talk about what happens when equity stops working the way it was designed to - and whether it was ever designed well in the first place.

We get into underwater equity and the real cost of doing nothing about it. Vesting schedules built for a tenure reality that no longer exists. The gap between telling employees they are owners and what the cap table actually says. Why equity in VC-backed companies functions more like a lottery ticket than an ownership stake. And whether giving employees structured choice within their equity grants can close the gap between perceived value and actual value.

We also explore a harder question: if equity compensation depends on stock price cooperation to feel real, what does that tell us about the instrument itself?

Takeaways

Underwater equity is not a passive problem - inaction sends its own signal and concentrates retention risk among the people you can least afford to lose
Vesting was designed to protect the cap table, not retain employees - and there is little evidence it does
Most employees in VC-backed companies hold less than 20% of shares collectively - calling that ownership is a stretch
Structured choice within equity programs can increase perceived value without increasing spend
Equity works best when companies treat it as trust, not control

Chapters

00:00 Understanding Underwater Equity
42:23 Equity Compensation and Volatility
51:21 Employee Ownership in VC-Backed Companies
01:20:52 The Skeptical Side of Equity Ownership

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Disengaged – Details, episodes & analysis

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Disengaged – Details, episodes & analysis

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