Leadership is about influencing others towards achieving common goals. Understanding leadership is akin to exploring a vast and diverse landscape, where each theory and style offers unique insights into how we can inspire, guide, and evolve with our teams.
The Multifaceted Nature of Leadership
The concept of leadership has been dissected and redefined through various lenses. Leadership styles range from autocratic, where decisions are made singularly at the top, to democratic, which involves team input and consensus. Then there’s transformational leadership, which seeks to inspire and motivate, creating significant change in individuals and the organization’s culture.
Emerging Leadership: A New Paradigm
As our understanding of leadership continues to evolve, a new paradigm has emerged: Emerging Leadership. This concept challenges the traditional hierarchy and fixed roles, advocating for a dynamic, adaptable approach to leading. Emerging leadership is not confined to designated leadership positions but is an attribute that can manifest across all levels of an organization.
This form of leadership emphasizes emotional intelligence, adaptability, and the capacity to foster innovation and collaboration. It’s about creating an environment where leadership is a shared journey, encouraging individuals to step forward and lead in moments that call for their unique skills and perspectives.
The Benefits of Emerging Leadership
Emerging Leadership offers numerous benefits to organizations, including enhanced agility, a more engaged workforce, and the capacity to innovate continuously. By recognizing that leadership can come from anywhere within the organization, we unlock a powerful source of energy, ideas, and motivation. It leads to a more resilient organization capable of adapting to change and seizing opportunities in today’s fast-paced world.
A Call to Embrace Emerging Leadership
The call for Emerging Leadership has never been louder. It’s an invitation to rethink our approaches to leadership, recognize the potential in every team member, and build environments where innovation, collaboration, and adaptability are encouraged and embedded in our organizations’ very fabric.
Through my upcoming book on Emerging Leadership, I aim to delve deeper into this transformative approach, offering insights and practical strategies for leaders and organizations ready to embrace this change. Leadership is not a static concept but a dynamic and evolving journey. By adopting the principles of Emerging Leadership, we can ensure that this journey is as impactful and fulfilling as possible.
If you’re intrigued by the potential of Emerging Leadership and eager to explore how it can transform your approach to leadership, I invite you to subscribe to the newsletter. You’ll stay informed about the progress of my upcoming book on Emerging Leadership and learn how you can engage in the writing process. Your insights, experiences, and perspectives can enrich our collective understanding and application of these principles. Together, we can shape a future where leadership is more dynamic, inclusive, and impactful.
In my latest reading journey, I revisited a cornerstone of strategic thinking, “Good Strategy Bad Strategy” by Richard Rumelt. This masterpiece, which I’ve always held in high regard for its insightful analysis and practical advice, struck a new chord with me, illuminating facets of strategy with even greater clarity. My return to Rumelt’s wisdom was serendipitously timed with Lenny Rachitsky‘s latest podcast episode, where he engages in a thought-provoking conversation with Rumelt himself, diving deep into what makes a strategy truly effective. I highly recommend listening to this enriching discussion, which is available here.
The Essence of Good Strategy
Rumelt’s delineation of a good strategy as a coherent blend of policies, actions, and resources uniquely designed to tackle fundamental challenges is more relevant today than ever. The “kernel” of a good strategy, composed of diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent actions, is a robust framework for leaders at all levels. Reflecting on my experiences, I’ve not witnessed often the transformative power of a well-crafted strategy. It’s not merely about the resources at one’s disposal but how effectively they are aligned and mobilized to overcome obstacles and seize opportunities.
The Pitfalls of Bad Strategy
Rumelt’s identification of bad strategy through its hallmarks – fluff, failure to face the challenge, mistaking goals for strategy, and bad strategic objectives – offers a critical lens for evaluating our strategic approaches. As a leadership coach and organizational consultant, I’ve encountered these pitfalls and worked alongside teams to avoid them, emphasizing the importance of clarity, realism, and actionable objectives. Regrettably, I have experienced organizations stumbling into some, if not all, of these pitfalls firsthand.
“Good Strategy Bad Strategy” remains a seminal work for anyone serious about understanding and applying strategic principles in today’s dynamic world. My recent rereading, coupled with the enlightening conversation between Rumelt and Lenny, has reinforced my conviction in the power of strategic thinking to shape successful, resilient organizations and leaders. As we navigate the complexities of leadership and organizational growth, let us lean on these insights to craft strategies that are not only effective but truly transformative.
To redefine leadership and organizational growth, looking beyond conventional metrics is essential. Recently, while discussing Pearlside‘s value proposition, I encountered a thought-provoking question regarding our milestones for growth at different scales – 50, 500, and 5,000 people. This moment of surprise sparked a deeper reflection on my true aspirations for growth and impact, leading me to share insights inspired by the renowned design firm Pentagram.
A Vision Beyond Numbers
Pentagram represents a collective of world-class designers, each a leader in their field, united by a desire for greater opportunities, learning, and impact. This model, far from focusing on arbitrary numerical milestones, emphasizes collaboration, innovation, and nurturing a network of excellence.
At Pearlside, we are not chasing the numbers. We aim to assemble partners passionate about enhancing leadership and management skills across various levels and sectors. We envision a community where partners can thrive, learn from one another, and collectively contribute to a broader impact. Whether choosing to work independently, collaborate, or lead specialized offices worldwide, the essence of our growth is qualitative, not quantitative.
Learning from the Best
The Pentagram model teaches us the value of surrounding ourselves with top-tier talent. We elevate our collective expertise by fostering an environment where partners can exchange feedback and learn from each other. This approach aligns with the belief that you are the average of the company you keep, pushing each member of our network to strive for excellence and, in turn, amplify our collective impact.
Flexible Paths to Impact
Our vision of growth is flexible and adaptable, acknowledging that the path to impact varies for each partner. Some may prefer to work alone, others in collaboration within or outside Pearlside, and yet others might wish to establish specialized offices focusing on specific markets or regions. This flexibility ensures that our approach remains inclusive and broad-minded, catering to our community’s diverse needs and aspirations.
An Invitation to Reflect
I invite you to join this conversation, sharing your insights and experiences on redefining growth beyond the conventional metrics. Let’s explore together how we can shape the future of leadership and organizational development in a way that prioritizes meaningful impact over numbers. Please use the comments on the YouTube video or the LinkedIn post.
Outcome-based leadership is everywhere in theory. In practice, it often collapses into two familiar traps: goals become tasks, or goals become top-down control.
In this episode, I spoke with Tim Beattie and Bella Bardswell, co-founders of Stellafai, about what it actually takes to build an outcome-focused culture that improves collaboration, increases autonomy, and keeps teams aligned without crushing initiative.
Their perspective is shaped by decades of experience in consulting and transformation, and by the reality of building a product company from scratch.
When OKRs trigger people, it is usually not about OKRs
One of the most practical parts of our conversation is how Tim and Bella handle the strong reactions people have to OKRs.
Many leaders say they “hate OKRs” because what they experienced looked more like classic management-by-objectives:
top-down cascading goals
pass-fail grading
goal setting as performance management
little room for experimentation
metrics used as pressure rather than learning
Tim and Bella’s answer is not to defend a framework. It is to bring the conversation back to first principles:
clarity on the outcome we want
evidence that tells us whether we are getting there
experiments that help us learn what works
a shared rhythm that keeps outcomes alive
And if the term OKR is a blocker, they change the language while preserving the mindset. Same approach, different words. Goals instead of objectives. Measures instead of key results. Experiments instead of tasks.
Collaboration first, frameworks second
Tim’s core message is simple: collaboration is the foundation.
Before metrics, tooling, or structure, leaders need to create the conditions for real conversations:
between technical and business people
between teams that depend on each other
between leaders and the people closest to the work
Getting people in a room, visualizing the work, and arguing about the words is not a distraction. It is the work. That is how shared understanding forms.
This is also why tools like impact mapping can be powerful. Not because the artifact is magic, but because the mapping forces the conversation: actors, behaviors, impacts, and outcomes.
The hidden cost of growth
We also touch a pattern many leaders ignore: communication complexity rises sharply as teams grow.
Add just a couple of people, split across rooms or locations, and suddenly alignment disappears. Nothing “important” changed, except everything did. Teams need systems that scale clarity and coordination, not just more meetings.
This is where outcome rituals can help. Not big yearly launches. Not glossy presentations. Small, recurring check-ins where teams look at the measures and ask:
are we on track?
what do we change?
what should we stop?
Over time, this becomes a way of working rather than a process.
AI as a team member, not a replacement
Stellafai’s use of AI is deliberately framed as supportive.
Their aim is not to replace coaching or human interaction. It is to add an “extra team member” that helps teams start thinking:
suggesting measurement ideas
proposing experiments
nudging teams toward better options
reducing admin so time goes to the conversation that matters
The value is in acceleration and better prompts, not in outsourcing leadership.
Inclusion as a built-in practice
Tim and Bella also share a clear stance: you cannot retrofit inclusion later.
They treat diversity and inclusion as something you build into your values, your hiring, and your daily practices. Simple facilitation patterns (structured turn-taking, visible participation, safe ways to contribute) matter because they give people a real voice. Inclusion is not a statement. It is a set of habits.
Advice for emerging leaders
Their closing advice lands in three moves:
Collaborate: create the conditions for real conversations
Prioritize outcomes: narrow the focus and make it measurable
Make it enjoyable: leadership is a long game, build a culture that people want to be part of
Alexis: [00:00:00] Welcome to Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership. I’m your host, Alexis Monville. Today, we are thrilled to have Tim Beattie and Bella Bardswell, the co founders of Stellafai, a company pioneering in outcome focused approaches to team collaboration and leadership in the tech industry.
Tim, with his deep expertise in agile and lean methodologies, and Bella, known for her transformative work in cultural change, bring a unique perspective to the table. We’ll explore their journey in co founding Stellafai. The challenges and triumphs of emerging leadership and their innovative strategies in the tech world.
Welcome to the podcast on emerging leadership. Could you each share a bit about yourself and what led you to cofound Stellafai? Maybe Tim you want to start?
Tim: Yeah, sure.
Thanks Alexis. Thank you for having us on your podcast. My name’s Tim Beatty. I. Spent the majority of my career working in [00:01:00] consulting large consulting organizations including PWC, IBM, Deloitte a couple of smaller boutique consulting organizations.
So I’ve always worked in the world of services and delivering professional services to clients. Most recently I worked for Red Hat where I met you, Alexis. And I was responsible for a part of Red Hat called Open Innovation Labs. Open Innovation Labs was a slightly different services model in that the focus was all around enablement.
It was all about enabling customer teams to get the very best out of, in this case, red Hat technology. the focus on on successful enablement. It was all about ways of working, all about culture. Practices mindset a little bit about the technology, but you know, to technology is sometimes the easier part.
It’s more about the ways of working around the technology. my time at Red Hat was very re rewarding. I loved learning more about open source and open organizations and it felt like a really good blend [00:02:00] to the work that I love, which, and I’m passionate about, which is all about business agility and lean and agile and, and frameworks like that. so I spent five years really switching away from being a delivery consultant into an enablement consultant. And that really I found very rewarding. I, I look back on the teams that I helped kickstart the organizations that I helped transform.
And once I got a bite for that, that that felt like that’s, this is, this is the kind of world I want to, to, to live in. This is the kind of career I want to continue. So I co-founded Stellafai with Bella a little under two years ago. And again, that was building upon this idea of enablement. It was about how can we help organizations really achieve their outcomes, their measurable outcomes.
And we’ve done that. We’ve, we, we had some great ideas when we, when we paired up on this of, of some software that could help with that of an alternative model to to [00:03:00] coaching in a more asynchronous, contextual way. And, and we wanted to leverage the, the work that we’d done in our previous 20 to 25 years.
So we brought all of that together to form Stellafai. And I think we’ve come up with something really exciting and I, I love being a part of it.
Alexis: Excellent. Thank you Tim. And I still remember the, the first time I really met you in person. That was, I believe at A gile New England, in Boston. And, see you showcase what was happening in an open innovation labs residencies. You showcased in a one hour long session what was happening in a whole week of engagement and even more than a week. So that there, that was very, a lot really a lot of fun. But before I, I recall my memories.
Maybe Bella, you want to, to say a few words about yourself.
Bella: Yes. So my, my background on, on a quick glance looks quite similar to Tim, but we’re actually, we’ve had very different, different experiences, which I think is why our partnership works so well. We were able to bring that together with the. Enough common [00:04:00] ground that took us in the sort of shared direction and vision.
So I, most of my career was in IBM big, big digital transformation programs, and I’ve done most roles along that journey. So business analysis, business architecture, change management, business change program management, then the sort of leadership and sales sort of elements. But the sort of thread that’s gone through all of that is I did a lot, a lot of work in government and the thing that I didn’t realize at the time that made me love that so much is that real clarity over why it mattered.
You could always, you were building software, but you knew why. What it, what the reason you were doing that for. And it was really tangible and it mattered and that was. Really, really motivating. And then I started, while I was at IBM, I became familiar with Agile and that amplifies that, you know, what’s the value of what you’re doing?
What’s the why? But I often found that people were kind of somehow managing not to do that. And then I, I went from IBM to Google. And at Google, many people know [00:05:00] they’re really, really into this framework, OKRs objectives and key results. And that’s really about having a very, very clear why and then a way of measuring if you’re getting there.
And there are lots of different goal setting methodologies and they all talk about. Measurement, but very, very often no one does it. And they don’t really, they, their goal’s actually a task. And, and I started to, you know, realize I’d built up these skills and these insights, but all I could ever do was help the client I was with.
And I, I was really inspired what Tim was doing at, at Red Hat with the open innovation labs. And when we talked about it, the idea of using software to be able to. Scale us and our experience and what models could we use? Like Tim mentioned, the asynchronous model, but also bringing in AI and, and just generally technology making less admin and more visibility easier.
I was thinking this is a way that we could start to scale ourselves and, and help profoundly more people. So that was, that was really the vision, help helping. [00:06:00] Get the power of the why, but also using tech to, and different, different ways of thinking to help many more people get the benefit of that way of working.
The brilliance of understanding why you are there and why what you’re doing matters. And then also if you track things, you’re more likely to get there. So then the, the real buzz of actually achieving what you set out to is something that we wanted to help more people do. Yeah.
Alexis: Yeah. I really love it because then it it give us a, a sense of why you are doing it and not really how you are doing it. There’s some mystery about that, that I, I really like it. And of course on the podcast, I had the pleasure to welcome a lot of different people, and some of them talk about OKR.
There was Christina Wodtke w ho is the author of Radical Focus, for example or Gojko Adzic , who wrote impact mapping. And we had a discussion about OKRs. And that’s because of him that, I had a short video on OKR, on impact mapping because[00:07:00] we discussed it. We discussed impact mapping and I explained to goco, ah, that’s how I’m, I’m defining OKRs.
And he looked at me to say, no. Explained that to me. ’cause I don’t understand what you say. I said, you are the author of Impact Mapping. You inspire me to do that. And he said, no, no. Explain that to me. And I explained it to him. Say, can you, can you record a short video? I would like to share that with my partner because we never thought of it this way.
And for me it was so obvious that, that, that was really funny to, to connect the two.
Bella: Yeah.
Alexis: One of the guests, I welcome the podcast. I, I prompt her to speak about OKRs because I was all excited about it. And my surprise was she was very against OKRs on the approach of OKR. And that person is Radhika Dutt, she’s the author of the book Radical Product Thinking. A book I really like. When she spoke about OKRs, she said, oh, it’s setting big lofty goals. It’s not collaborative enough. It’s more [00:08:00] like an end of year exam that you pass or fail. And you don’t even test if the strategy really works. And I was listening to that and say, no, no. So, but tell me what you think about that.
What, what would you answer to Radhika about OKRs?
Bella: Something that Tim and I and, and this, we get this a lot, so OKRs, just like Scrum actually, we’ve noticed a lot of parallels. You get a big framework, someone writes a book like Measure what Matters or Radical Focus with Christina Watt, and suddenly you get the lovers and the haters. You know, it feels like you have to pick a side, but actually I think all these frameworks have.
Elements that are valuable, and then elements that you have to like go, that’s not gonna work in our culture for where we’re at. Let’s think about what will work. And one of the, one of the patterns we’ve seen come up a lot with OKRs is people, people’s perception of OKRs is actually much more like what happened in the sixties.
With management by objectives, which was Peter Drucker and then Andy Grove adapted them [00:09:00] to OKRs. But a lot of people go back to the principles of MBOs and management by objectives. So that means your managers tell you what your goals are. They’re very, the word cascade is used a lot. Top down your, you give them.
You have to achieve a hundred percent and it’s linked to comp, and that has all sorts of unintended consequences. If you’re not involved in figuring out what you’re going to do, you’re not committed. You’re not engaged. You don’t have a say. You’re not getting the opportunity to help people. If you said a hundred percent.
Goal, it creates pressure. There’s no space for experimentation. it’s stressful. And if you link it directly to compensation, you immediately eliminate the desire for anybody to collaborate or to do anything, but just to try and focus on what they need to do to get paid. that’s extremely damaging to culture.
All of those things are the exact opposite thing that you want to have if you wanna build great products. So. I think OKRs are often done that way. You know, someone reads a book, a manager reads a book goes, right, okay, it’s gonna take too long to do lots of collaborative workshops. So I’m just [00:10:00] gonna, for the first time, just write them and give them to them.
And then I’m not gonna think about how we’ll embed this idea of thinking and. Around outcomes into my organization. We’re not gonna use this as a way to communicate understanding and to track progress and to decide what we should do. We’re just gonna shove it in step back and expect everyone to deliver the goals.
And yeah, that doesn’t work. So elements of that happen in, or pretty much all the implementations Tim and I have, have seen in the work we’ve done, and you don’t have to use OKRs, you can just take this concept of setting a goal. Being clear about the outcome you’re trying to achieve and then figuring out how you’re gonna measure whether you’re getting there.
Coming back to impact mapping, which is why it’s so great a way to measure the impact of what you’re doing rather than just ticking off tasks, which may or may not help you get there. So I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, I think done well. They’re brilliant, but they’re often not done well.
And often people put a lot of effort up, up front and then we call it set and forget, and then they never go back to it. They don’t think about how to [00:11:00] build it into how they operate, but it’s as much as a way of working and a culture and a mindset as it is a, a framework. I mean, the framework’s pretty skinny,
a lot of people that have negative feelings towards OKRs based on experiences they have are entirely justified. But often I think it’s what still worth taking a look and, and exploring what happened in the past and whether it could, some tweaks could be made where you could get this really incredible power of everyone understanding what you’re trying to do, caring about it, being focused, aligned, and then tracking progress together.
When done well, it’s, it’s phenomenal.
Tim: Your experience Alexis with, with that lady reminded me of something that happened. Probably about a year ago I was doing some beta testing of the platform we built, and I had some time with a CTO and the CTO looked at it and he said, Tim, I can never show this to my CEO because he hates OKRs.
He got burnt by them badly, tried them in a previous company and he’s just an anti OKR. [00:12:00] Your platform set has got objectives and key results. We tried a little experiment we built a little feature, only took a, a day or two to build where we could customize just for on a per user basis some of the terminology and the naming.
And for his space alone, we changed it so that instead of creating objectives, he was creating goals. And instead of creating key results, he was creating measures. And instead of adding the activities or the tasks he was writing about experiments. So I showed him and he goes, oh, my CEO’s gonna love this, the goals, experiments, and measures.
He’ll really get that. Now. The interesting thing was our mindset, what’s under the hood, haven’t changed. We were still thinking about what is the problem we are trying to solve? What is the opportunity we’re trying to grab? What are the pain points and how can we articulate that in a really well aligned and shared view, you know, and not our goal statement or objective statement, a smart goal.
There’s lots of different ways you could do it, but in essence, [00:13:00] that’s what we were trying to do. Then we were trying to come up with a series of qualitative measures, so needles that we could see move that were going to tell us if we were making progress or not. And we were going to encourage the idea of trying different things out.
Designing experiments to see if the needle would move or not. So whether we call them, you know, to me we were still doing OKRs, right? But I could hear that there was a negative perception to OKRs, and it’s a little bit of consulting 1 0 1 here,, when you go out and you consult with a client.
You’ve got to meet them on the language that they’re comfortable about. And if there is language , which is triggering some real negative emotion, it’s okay to change that. What’s not okay is to change the mindset that we know is going to promote success and deliver success. So it’s a very interesting, and, and just as Bella says, we’ve seen it with many things over the years.
With Agile, with DevOps, with design thinking, with lean, and I think, okay, anything that goes [00:14:00] mainstream starts to get that Marmite love-hate relationship, and therefore we tread carefully with what’s the best way to introduce that under change management to organizations.
Alexis: That’s a very good point. So the language can influence the perception. We can change the language, but maintain the culture or the mindset that we want to have about the collaborative aspect of it. You both mentioned that. Top down effect of I’m setting goals.
Not saying we, we will forget about them, but if it’s not integrated in our way of working, we’ll definitely forget. What do you want to say about that collaborative aspect? And finally there , you worked in Agile and lean, you have extensive experience on those topics.
So I’m interested in how we can get people to be more autonomous, more independent, more able to take matters in their own hands, or basically make leadership to emerge in the organization. So I’m, I’m interested in what you have to say about, about that collaborative aspect.[00:15:00]
Tim: For, for me, this is all about collaboration. Collaboration is the number one focus. Whenever I’m doing coaching, what am I trying to do? I’m trying to get people to talk to each other. I’m trying to get technical people to collaborate with other technical people. I’m trying to get business people to collaborate with technical people.
I’m trying to get users to collaborate and I’m trying to get shared understanding and alignment for me. The best way to achieve the best collaboration is in a room. It, it is bringing the energy, the physical energy together, the room, the walls, the sticky notes, the visualization. I feel it sets us up.
It gives us the best chance for success. So to kickstart collaboration, getting people physically together. And reaching a point where everybody has really got that feeling of yes, that’s what we’re trying, that’s why we’re here. [00:16:00] That’s what we’re focusing on. That’s what we’re trying, that’s what we’re trying to achieve.
And almost with our arms around each other, feeling passionate about that. So I think there’s, there’s a lot of excellent practices that, that really facilitate collaboration, facilitate conversation. You, you mentioned impact mapping. That’s why I love. Creating OKRs through impact mapping because just the act of putting up those, just, just the act of getting people to, to write a goal statement and align on it and argue about it, and challenge about it and change.
Swap one word out for another word. That’s all. Collaboration and it’s achieving shared understanding and alignment, agreeing the actors and. What, what do we call those people? What do, what do we call our users? What, there’s lots of different types of users that conversation. It’s collaboration, the measurable impacts, and actually what we’re doing there, we are building OKRs.
We don’t realize we’re doing it, but we are a we are coming up with a, an aligned goal and we’re coming up with [00:17:00] a well thought out, measurable impact that we’re trying to help to get us towards that goal. But we’re doing it through conversation and visualization and energy. To me starting these in, in the room is, is just such a key foundational ingredient.
And then I think that it’s how do we maintain,, how do we not lose that? And I think that’s that’s where, the emerging leadership, you talk about Alexis,
it’s a very much a diverge, converge. Can we go away separately? Autonomously, can we come back at regular points to synchronize and, and bring that challenge back together?
Can we provide, can we get access to the support, the right level of support where it isn’t someone doing the work for you, but enabling you and just challenging you to think. So I think it’s putting that environment in place, that’s what promotes that kind of. Continuous improvement and evolving leadership so that there is a self, self controlling, self-management [00:18:00] aspect to all of these things.
I personally think that the most important thing that goals does is enable conversations and that is communication. I’ve just got so many stories and everyone I speak to sort of nods sort of slightly sort of, oh, wly when I, when I say this, but we’ve all been to those like start of the year kickoffs where all the leadership spent weeks, months figuring out strategy. And then there’s this big launch of your strategy and there’s glossy presentations and oh, this is gonna make such a huge difference to the set of the company and la, la la, and it’s all nice. Maybe there’s some wine if you are lucky enough to work to that kind of company.
Bella: And then after you leave there, it’s very nice seeing everyone. You go back and you just carry on doing exactly what you were doing before. So that is an example of a strategy, which is not going to be executed anytime soon, perhaps ever. That’s crappy communications. Like it’s the message received and the action that’s taken off the back of it, not the one delivered.
And I think it’s not just OKRs and Tim just [00:19:00] touched on lots of things. We’ve got to get better at finding ways for, for people actually to receive the message well enough that they can understand and apply it to the work they do. Strategy execution is a huge challenge for all leaders and every leader should be worried about that.
Writing some really, really crisp, clear goals that break that down and can then be decomposed through the organization. All aligning can give you a pathway right down to every single person on every keyboard working in alignment to achieve the goal. And if they then every week have a little conversation about how are they doing against their goals, that keeps that goal front of mind, that present big presentation disappears quickly from your mind.
If you are looking at the the measures every week, that’s keeping it front of mind and then you have a conversation like, we’re on track. Brilliant. What was going well? Or We’re not on track, what do we need to change up? And you are. To your point, you know, you are empowering people. You know what you need to do.
I trust you. Go do it. Let me know if you [00:20:00] need me to unblock it, unblock something or, or help you. And I think that’s incredibly powerful. But the other thing you’re empowering people to do is to say, this has nothing to do with what we’re trying to achieve. I understand what we’re trying to achieve. I think we should maybe talk about whether we should stop that and the amount of waste of pet projects and work, which has drifted from the mission and no one realized ’cause the comms weren’t there, is huge.
So that I think that empowerment and communication I. Combination that you mentioned in, in your question can make a huge, huge difference to, first of all, business success, but perhaps more importantly, all of our ability to feel connected to purpose and actually do something, actually deliver something that matters, which I think is super, super powerful.
Alexis: Focus on outcomes. I saw that a lot in your communication. There’s also that thing about AI and I’m a bit curious about that because we spoke about communication between people empowering people getting people in the room getting them really aligned, really get to that [00:21:00] shared understanding what, what AI has to do with that.
Tim: Let me tell you the story about why we put AI in, in the end of our company name. So we were drawn to the word stellify, S-T-E-L-L-I-F-Y, which means turn into a star or or place amongst the stars. There was a lot of thought behind that because we thought about outcomes in organizations are connected and particularly measurable outcomes.
This idea of, if you’ve got, say, a platform engineering team working towards measurable outcomes, they’ve got these little needles, which should start to move and if they are moving it’s connected to maybe some product teams and their needles can start to move quicker because of that connection. And if that’s successful, then it’s helping a business line and it’s helping them achieve their measurable outcomes.
And that’s helping the strategy. So we are, we’re joining the dots. We’re forming this kind of idea of a constellation of stars where, you know, there’s [00:22:00] lines and what we want is really bright stars really bright constellation lines because of those connected outcomes. And we want to be able to zoom into those stars and understand what the energy is.
So we were really taken by this metaphor. And it goes many levels deeper than that as well. But when we looked into trademarks and domain names, of course it, you know, the guy who had stellify.com wanted a hundred grand for it or something like that. So we did what every startup did, and we invented a word.
We liked Stellar ’cause Stella’s, you know, we want everyone to be stellar and our people to be stellar and our customers to be stellar. We still liked that stellify and then ai, we thought, well, AI’s coming and I’m sure AI will filter into our company at some point. We, we actually didn’t plan for it at the beginning, but we thought, well, that, let’s put it in and we landed on, on it.
Then of course about a year ago, the world went AI mad and everybody was doing chatGPT and Bart and open ai. And so we invested a sprint one [00:23:00] week. I can remember it well, November before last. One of our guys basically just did a little bit of a, a spike, bit of a prototype just to see , how could this AI help us.
It’s a great question because we have some strong beliefs. We don’t want the AI to replace coaches. We don’t want the AI to replace conversation, collaboration. What we want the AI to do is to help that. So we’d liken the, our ai, which we call Armstrong, named after Neil Armstrong.
We’d like an Armstrong to be like the extra team member. Think about the team members who’s just always great at throwing out ideas. Suggestions, just gets people talking just by, just by getting you started. When you’re drawing a blank and you can’t think, oh, let’s get some ideas. And there’s always that one person who’s just really good at getting the troops talking and throwing some ideas out on the wall, and then everybody starts talking.
That’s what AI can do. So we’ve built things like Hey, Armstrong, can you, can you suggest some ways to measure, provide measurements against this [00:24:00] goal or key results against the objective? And Armstrong won’t do that for you, but it’ll get you going. It’ll just throw out 10 ideas and people are, oh, okay.
Oh, that’s what a key result is. Oh, let’s tick those two and now let’s talk about those and let’s dive deeper or. Hey Armstrong. We’ve got this key result, but are there some open practices that might help work? You know, we’ve trained Armstrong in, in the open practice library, great open source repository, and it will just, which is a bit overwhelming ’cause there’s so many, so much stuff out there.
But Armstrong will just give you three ideas. You can take it or leave it, but hopefully it just elevates you on that little bit more. And I think. This is where Armstrong can help. It can just get you going in the right direction. It could. We don’t think individuals, we think teams should use ai in their conversations.
Let’s see what Armstrong thinks and see if Armstrong can get, get us going in the right direction and hopefully you’ll get a better collaboration. You’ll more informed or point you in the right direction thanks to the training that we’ve been able to get to our ai.[00:25:00]
Bella: It’s become a little bit of a catch phrase, hasn’t it? Like AI won’t replace humans, but a ai humans that use AI will replace humans that don’t. That’s the exact approach we’ve taken. Tim was talking about it’s not gonna replace real coaches insights, that level of context, not for a while anyway, we need generalized AI for that.
But it’s certainly, there are all sorts of ways, Tim’s given a few examples. There’s a heap of, we’ve been looking at research grants and things to go a whole load deeper about sort of some really, really fascinating kind of front edge stuff that could start to really help teams communicate and collaborate at another level with just nudges and assistance and help.
So I’m very, very excited about. How it can help all the people that we’re working with, but also just help us be more efficient and do a better job. It’s an exciting, technological frontier we’re at, I think.
Alexis: I really love that. And I tell you a story about. What happens when a team of developer really [00:26:00] work on that. I’m working with a team of, of developer , basically I’m coaching the manager of the team. We discussed, their new goals because they are really shifting where they are going with their product. And it’s very challenging for the product. It’s very challenging. For the team. And it’s also challenging for the people themselves because they will need to grow new skills.
They will need to do things, they never did. They are really experienced developers and I’m discussing both the goals for the product and the developmental aspects for each individuals. And I’m telling the manager, you should have really career conversation with all of them so they can really think, at a at time period, that fit them. That could be five years, 10 years, 20 years. We don’t really care where they want to work, what kind of jobs they want to do, and what kind of size of company and work on that really career conversation really long term. And he, he is really excited about it.
And he discussed with the first developer about that. [00:27:00] And the result was really interesting because the developer came back and listen, that was a fantastic conversation. I loved it. And look at that. I created a series of prompts because your questions were really good and I’m well thinking. Yeah, I know that. I know the questions are good. And so everybody in the team can do that following that series of prompts. And I looked at it and said, yeah, of course they are developers. They know how to talk to a machine. So of course he created really good prompts and he tested it and they all worked on that.
And the manager told me that was very funny. I, I’m chatting with one. And then the 10 others are doing that work. And now the conversation I had with them are really fantastic because they have really inspiring things to say and. All about that. So I can see how, considering Armstrong as another team member that have of course, more experience and more knowledge, and that could be really inspiring for the other team members and really enabling them to go further.
So[00:28:00] I feel that’s a very nice way to integrate AI in that context of aligning, getting people to really work with each other, collaborate with each other effectively.
Bella: Yeah, that’s one. One of the things we looked into was, again, in, in relation to the sort of the grants, is could you, could you have an AI coach facilitate? Through a, like a, a, a check-in meeting. ’cause something we’ve noticed, a real anti-patent that seems to happen a lot is check-in meetings, become a group exercise where everyone watches everyone else update the numbers.
And it’s like, yeah, but you could do that beforehand. The bit that counts is the, so what does that mean? And the discussion. So could you. Without the need to have a human, which is obviously expensive. And you have to book the human and arrange it all. You know, there’s, there’s logistics there. Could you have something that’s sort of just like you were describing, like nudging you through the conversation?
And then the brilliant thing is it can then learn and respond depending on what [00:29:00] it is and, and goes. It, it’s not straightforward. But there’s, there’s some, some things there which could. Hugely increase the quality and the the outcomes that come just from a simple half hour meeting, but not just that afterwards.
You’ve just had an AI listen to everything that happened. What was the subtext of that meeting? Were there any dynamics? Were certain people doing certain things they didn’t realize were having an impact because they were focused on the content? All that kind of stuff can be surfaced as insights afterwards potentially.
And this is where the coaching comes in, with some suggestions about what you could do to fix it. I mean, these. Complex things to do, but I think they’re not out of reach with ai, but the, the benefit that it could have, it’s just enormous. It’s so exciting. So, yeah, I, yeah, we’ll have to see. But yeah,
there’s a lot of good stuff to done
Alexis: Excellent. So a question that I usually ask to all the people who are building a product for others do you use Stellafai to, to build Stellafai?.[00:30:00]
Tim: Absolutely. Absolutely. And it’s, we learn so much from adopting it ourselves. We are our own alpha testers. Not just Stelfy, but, but OKRs. In, in, in all honesty, I have not used OKRs brilliantly before Stelfy. I, I loved the idea of them. I love the principle of them. But I, like many other people, I have not seen them work terribly well even when I tried them at previous organization.
I know, I know why I’ve learned a lot from Bella, who, who brought all of the goodness , from Google. And I can see that, that the mistakes we were making but the, the best way to learn is to do to do it on, on their own content. And as an example, we so, so we have a weekly check-in. It happens at 10 o’clock every Thursday morning.
Honestly, if we don’t do the check-in on a Thursday morning at 10 o’clock, it feels like I haven’t brushed my teeth. It’s become a ritual. We’ve done it since the beginning of the company and, and we’ve evolved. So yes, we, we use our platform. We review our key [00:31:00] results. We update them. We have a conversation.
But as Bella was saying in the last question we’ve learned actually, why are we wasting time in this, this precious time together as a team? We’ve only got 25 minutes. Why are we spending time trying to figure out the calculations and get the numbers right? We’ve, we’ve emerged from that and, we now entered before that meeting and actually something I’ve noticed just in the last few months is that the updates are happening during the week.
’cause we have a Slack integration,, we can see when anybody updates a key result or makes a comment, it, it fires out a message to the team. I think this is a transition we’ve gone through, that we’re now starting to think about what is the measure that we’re trying to move today.
And when something happens that we know it’s moved, one of our measures, the first thing we wanna do is go and update it. So it’s become less of a, of a batch thing that we do once a week or a ritual and into a continuous thing that is just a part of our. Kind of cognitive way of [00:32:00] working. And I see this with other practices.
It’s like going from fortnightly retrospectives to a realtime retrospective. You know, why? Why are we waiting two weeks to do a retrospective? We could just have a realtime one running all the time, or abandoning the daily standup because there’s such good collaborations, pairing and mobbing. You don’t need to stand up.
And I think it’s a similar thing we have used OKRs with the ritual, with the guardrails, and now we’ve been using ’em for a couple of hours. I’m now seeing the team who are, who are just naturally thinking about what’s the key result that this, that, that I’m going to move today?
And how is that gonna help achieve a goal? And what’s that goal connected to in terms of a bigger strategy? And that’s just becoming a part of default
Bella: You are what, what you’re describing and, and it’s really interesting listening to you say this ’cause we haven’t had this conversation, but what, what you are describing is like another level of outcome obsession. It’s driving everything, every micro decision all the time. Is that gonna move one of our needles?
And [00:33:00] yet, if you’ve got the needles right, which is why you need to put a bit effort into setting them, that’s
Tim: got, we got them wrong at first. Remember our first quarter, we, we got, we got them wrong. So, so we, we’ve come through that journey as well. Yeah.
Bella: Well, you let, I mean, part of that is we were new founders, so we didn’t know what we should and shouldn’t be doing, which is a whole nother podcast. But yeah, the, the yeah, like we’ve got so much better at figuring out what are the right OKRs for us. One of the things we’ve had from a lot of organizations is we’re too small for OKRs.
Like it’s, it’s not gonna be valuable for us. It is true that you get to a, when you get to a certain size, and we reckon it’s about 2050 to 20 to 50, depending on the org from the people we’ve spoken to, you get a level of communication complexity with all of the interconnections. You know, it’s a great exponentially that suddenly you need a system to help you operate and stay aligned and communicate. And one of those systems could be OKRs, [00:34:00] but it doesn’t mean that it’s not profoundly valuable at a smaller scale, it’s just that it’s not critically needed to make sure you are still able to keep moving forward. So yeah, we, we 100% use them. .
Alexis: That aspect of complexity that comes with adding people to the team that usually we completely ignore. That’s very funny that suddenly people are highly frustrated because that doesn’t work anymore. When you look at it from the outside and you, and you lived it before, it’s so obvious.
I was discussing with the founder of a company and he told me, I don’t understand why we just have two more people on the team and suddenly it seems nobody understand anything anymore and nothing changed. I told them, yeah, okay, good. Let’s look at that. Nothing changed. And they added the two people, but they took also another office because of course, two people in that previous office didn’t fit.
So now they are spread into two offices.
Look, that’s, so before it was annoying because[00:35:00] developers needed to work close to people who were on the phone calling customers, and that was very annoying. And now you split them in two rooms. And and you are surprised , that was so funny.
And of course I cannot say it this way. I’m, I’m more gentle and I’m making it emerge more gently to avoid being thrown out of the window. But that’s, that’s very interesting to, to look at it. Yeah, that’s it. So putting in place a system that will enable people to do great work is really important.
And what I like is you really thought that through and using it yourself makes, makes it better. So I really like that. I would like to touch on something slightly different. I’ve noticed you, you both have strong commitment. Diversity and inclusion and I would like to know how shape the, the culture and maybe even the strategic direction of
Tim: In our company we felt there are some principles that we have to start from the outset because it’s not [00:36:00] something you can retrofit in later. Diversity and inclusion is something, we were both passionate about. And Bella, I, I know from the work that she did at IBM , where we first met, I knew that this was going to be a really strong partnership in that.
It was something that she would really drive and something that’s really important. And that was important for me when I was, you know, seeking a co-founder that I wanted to, to work with. We probably spent about four months before we even hired anyone to write code or build start building products and things like that.
And a lot of that was about finding our why and our purpose. And we, we used practices on ourselves, like business model canvases, again, just to trigger the conversation and to get the alignment. But that was something from, from early on around around diversity and inclusion and also sustainability.
You’ll notice in pictures of us, we have a, a, a lot of our own swag. We have a lot of our own t-shirts and hoodies and things like that. Our suppliers that we use for that , had [00:37:00] good sustainability metrics because we thought we could play the card that we are an early startup, we don’t have much money, let’s just go for the cheapest thing possible.
Let’s not worry about where it’s made. But we thought that’s gonna be so hard to turn out. You know, it’s something we believe in. If you don’t follow your principles and your values from upfront, you’re lying to yourself. A lot of that comes around a, an alignment, again, alignment, shared understanding, communication, collaboration about what those principles are, and then figuring out then what, what are, what are the initiatives?
What are, what are the acts that, that we, that we can then put in place? I think we, we’ve started I think there’s probably more like everyone that you’re never done with these things, but we started and, and, it’s, it’s something that you can continuously improve and continuously evolve in, in the next chapters and the next version of the, of the company.
Bella: When we did our first sort of recruitment campaign, campaign might be too big a word. We’re only little, but we, one of the first things, so, so Tim and I do both care about this. So the very first version of our [00:38:00] website, I think I had like four pages, and one of those pages was a diversity statement and about just setting out our intent.
But I was really interested when we put our first sort of ad out, we were looking for a a junior designer. We got you. All these things are benchmarked around how many, how many responses you typically get, and of, of like certain underrepresented, underrepresented groups and the applications.
We got so many people that I spoke to often, women, maybe people that had a slightly different educational background and. Said when they, we asked them to write just an answer to two or three questions around what attracted them to Stellafai, and I’d say every single person that wasn’t like a young white male, came back with a, I was really, it was really cool to see the, the diversity statement that attracted me to your company and, and it’s a sort of.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you care about it, you’ll attract people that care about it. And then you’ll create [00:39:00] a more diverse and inclusive culture, which, you know exactly what Tim was saying. You have to do it from the get go. And we did. And then it’s also not just saying it, it’s doing it.
There’s an awful lot of kind of they call it pride washing in pride month, where, you know, all these companies change their logos to pride. But if you look at their actual way in which they, the things they do, I mean, it’s. It’s the very minimum they can get away with. They don’t actually do, do any, their actions do not suggest they care, their actions suggest they want to cash in on looking like they care.
Now, that’s not all companies, but, but like, you have to actually then do it in the organization. So the, the other thing mean, Tim and I are really lucky, like the experiences we’ve had and things like, you know, the open practice library and all these practices, design thinking, et cetera. So many of them, you know, dot voting for example, 1, 2, 4 all.
These are all things that help give everyone a voice in a non-threatening way. And so it’s how you then operate and how you work. And then [00:40:00] that’s expanded out to our, our customers and our clients as well. And we talk to ’em about know. If you want people to be engaged, you need to make them feel like they have a voice and included, and, and this extends to the role you are doing as well as some of the more, you know, traditional DEI ERG, so employee resource groups and, and things like that.
So we’ve tried to not only do it, I mean, we’re in a small company and Tim and I are pretty experienced, but we’re always learning. So we’ve tried to do all of those things, make sure that everyone has a voice, and we have lots of forums where we listen to that. But also in the work we’ve done externally, try and reinforce those values and those principles in how we run our workshops and how we advise and coach people do these things and here’s why.
The business case for inclusivity and trying to bring in a diversity of voices is like a no-brainer. But sometimes people don’t know how to make that transition and they don’t realize it’s on a, it’s everyone’s responsibility in how you operate every day, not just. The, the HR group in your organization?
We’ve seen the benefit of that in terms of [00:41:00] the talent we’ve had into organization and the diversity of people. We have 50 50 male, female, et cetera, et cetera. And but we’ve also tried to take that out and be ambassadors for those ways of working and those ways of thinking.
It’s very cool to have a partner like Tim to do that way
Alexis: I love it. And people will not see that because there’s no video. But I was smiling and nodding as you were talking, because I believe it’s very inspiring and you gave really the, the right, things to inspire leaders to really do something about what, what they can control and to make it happen.
To close , the session, what advice would you give to new leaders or aspiring leaders
Tim: yeah. Wow. I would say simply collaborate. Get your people together. I. Get, ideally get, get your people into a room and get ’em [00:42:00] talking. That naturally giving it, it builds on several answers we’ve talked about today, but it’s, let’s get everybody talking to each other and I, you’ve, you’ve got something in common.
You all work for the same organization. You are hopefully working towards a common mission. And if you’re not. By getting people talking, getting people communicating and collaborating. You will start to align. You will start to get shared view. You’ll start to identify where those slight nickles of misunderstanding are happening.
That’s the starting point. Just just getting people to talk to each other. Then I would go level Steve about, well, you know, what are we trying to do? Why are we here? What, what, what are we gonna tackle? How are we gonna prioritize? Let’s prioritize, let’s measure. That can come all afterwards, but unless people are comfortable talking to each other, collaborating, challenging, ideating.
Building upon you know, that is the foundation for success. So whatever it takes in a, to get those people into a [00:43:00] room. Good facilitation, good setup, good planning to to, to put that environment in place to facilitate collaboration. That’s what leaders should focus on doing right now at the beginning of the new year.
Alexis: Excellent. Thank you.
Bella: Predictably write some OKRs. Yeah, like that. Actually, let me rephrase that. Think about what outcomes you most want to achieve and narrow down that list till you’ve got like Warren Buffet gives us advice. He says like write your to-do list, and then scratch up everything that’s below number three. Like same thing, like lots of people say it in different ways, but, but you’ve gotta prioritize ’cause you can’t do it all.
So prioritize and, but make it measurable. The biggest mistake I made when I first started moving into leadership roles is I tried to carry on doing everything that I’ve been doing before and then take on all the extra. And that just ended up with me being like, on this very fast moving hamster wheel and just like.
Yeah, [00:44:00] it’s, it’s not a, it’s not a good place to have great insights and to be a good patient listening leader. So you’ve got to trust people to take things off you and to create time for you to reflect and think. And part of that reflection is figuring out what the priorities are and then making sure to Tim’s point that you are communicating and collaborating well to, to deliver them.
And then the last thing. I think this is, you spend a lot of time at work, you’ve gotta make it fun, like find ways to enjoy yourself, to have a laugh. Like in Stellafai on the Friday standup, we always, we all pick a random filter on these Google filters, so we all turn up as like pirates and cowboys and astronauts floating in space.
It’s a silly little thing, but find ways to make it. Make it fun. Like if you, if you know, you’re clear why you’re collaborating and you’re feeling engaged and connected, and then you are having fun as you do it, the [00:45:00] difference that makes to our working lives is pretty, pretty, pretty phenomenal. So, yeah, set OKRs, find time to reflect and stand still and, and lead , and have fun.
Alexis: I love. Thank you to, to both of you for having joined the podcast today. Have a great one
Bella: Thank you very much. It was great to do it. Thanks, Alexis
In “Poor Charlie’s Almanack,” Charlie Munger analyzes the psychological factors that lead to poor decision-making. Known as the 25 standard causes of human misjudgment, these principles provide invaluable insights into why people think and act the way they do. As a leadership coach, understanding these causes can be transformative in guiding teams and individuals toward better decision-making.
1. Reward and Punishment Super-Response Tendency
People are strongly motivated by incentives. Understanding what drives an individual or a team can significantly impact leadership and management strategies.
2. Liking/Loving Tendency
We tend to favor decisions and actions that involve people or things we like. This bias can cloud our judgment in professional settings, especially when dealing with friends or favored colleagues.
3. Disliking/Hating Tendency
Conversely, we often irrationally dislike and avoid people or things we have negative emotions towards, which can lead to poor decision-making.
4. Doubt-Avoidance Tendency
Humans naturally dislike uncertainty and tend to make quick decisions to resolve doubt, sometimes at the cost of rationality.
5. Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency
Once we’ve made up our minds, it’s hard for us to change our beliefs and actions, even in the face of conflicting evidence.
6. Curiosity Tendency
Our inherent curiosity drives us to explore and understand the unknown, which can be a powerful tool in learning and development.
7. Kantian Fairness Tendency
We are naturally inclined to act in ways that are perceived as fair by society’s standards, which can influence our decisions and behaviors.
8. Envy/Jealousy Tendency
Envy and jealousy are powerful emotions that can significantly influence our actions and decisions, often negatively.
9. Reciprocation Tendency
We feel obliged to return favors and kindnesses, which can be manipulated in various social and professional contexts.
10. Influence-from-Mere-Association Tendency
We are easily influenced by associations with past experiences or emotions, which can lead to biased decisions.
11. Simple, Pain-Avoiding Psychological Denial
Sometimes, we choose to deny reality when it’s too painful or uncomfortable to accept, affecting our judgment.
12. Excessive Self-Regard Tendency
We often overestimate our abilities and worth, which can lead to overconfidence in our decisions.
13. Overoptimism Tendency
A general tendency to be overly optimistic can skew our perception of reality and lead to unrealistic expectations.
14. Deprival-Superreaction Tendency
We react intensely to being deprived of something we already possess or believe we deserve, affecting decision-making, especially in negotiations or losses.
15. Social-Proof Tendency
We look to others for cues on thinking and acting, especially in uncertain situations, which can lead to herd behavior.
16. Contrast-Misreaction Tendency
Our perceptions are heavily influenced by contrasts rather than absolute scales, affecting how we evaluate options.
17. Stress-Influence Tendency
Under stress, rationality often takes a backseat, leading to impulsive and poor decisions.
18. Availability-Misweighing Tendency
We give undue weight to information that is readily available to us, regardless of its relevance or importance.
19. Use-It-or-Lose-It Tendency
Skills and knowledge must be regularly used and refreshed or deteriorate.
20. Drug-Misinfluence Tendency
Substance abuse can significantly impair judgment and decision-making.
21. Senescence-Misinfluence Tendency
Our mental faculties can decline as we age, affecting our decision-making capabilities.
22. Authority-Misinfluence Tendency
We tend to respect and follow authority figures, sometimes blindly.
23. Twaddle Tendency
Humans have a tendency to focus on irrelevant information or engage in meaningless chatter, distracting from important decisions.
24. Reason-Respecting Tendency
People are more likely to follow advice or instructions if they are given a reason, even if the reason is not particularly compelling.
25. Lollapalooza Tendency
Multiple biases acting together can compound and lead to extreme outcomes, for better or worse.
Conclusion Understanding these 25 causes of human misjudgment can significantly enhance our effectiveness as a leader and decision-makers. By recognizing these biases in ourselves and others, we can make more informed, rational decisions and guide our teams toward greater success.
Have a read at Talk eleven for more details: https://www.stripe.press/poor-charlies-almanack/talk-eleven
Cloud infrastructure has changed radically in 20 years. We moved from standing in line to request hardware to provisioning global resources in minutes. Yet the leadership challenges didn’t disappear. They evolved.
In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I’m joined by Michael Galloway, a platform and infrastructure leader with experience at Yahoo, Netflix, and HashiCorp. We explore the evolution of infrastructure, but also the human side of platform engineering: trust, ownership, change, and the realities of operating systems at scale.
From “tin” to cloud: speed increased, responsibility didn’t vanish
Michael shares an early Yahoo story that captures the shift: the era of physical requests, committees, and scarce resources. Virtualization and cloud unlocked a new world, but they didn’t erase complexity. They moved it.
The question is no longer “How do we get machines?” It becomes: “How do we design defaults, behaviors, and systems that make operations reliable?”
“Don’t just use the interface”
A key theme in our conversation is what happens when abstraction goes too far.
Michael learned early in his career that using an interface without understanding what sits underneath limits your ability to solve real problems. The same applies to internal platforms and infrastructure products: if teams can’t see what’s under the hood, they can’t operate their services confidently in production.
This matters for DevOps and full-cycle ownership. If the platform hides everything, it also centralizes responsibility again. And that’s exactly the anti-pattern many organizations are trying to escape.
Setting the right defaults (instead of hiding complexity)
Michael makes a distinction I find extremely useful:
Abstractions can help with the zero-to-one problem (get a service running fast).
But sustainable systems require teams to drill down, understand decisions, and troubleshoot effectively.
His closing line on this topic is simple and sharp: Predictability is more valuable than velocity.
A crisis story: ownership, outcomes, and early wins
Shortly after joining HashiCorp, Michael faced a real incident: a workflow engine falling behind at scale, with work piling up and trust already eroded. The technical work mattered, but what stood out was the leadership sequence:
Take ownership publicly People need to hear: “We own this, and we will fix it.”
Form a durable team around the problem Not a temporary war room. A team with a mandate.
Define outcomes that matter Not “deliver X,” but “stability,” “scalability,” and “confidence.”
Deliver early wins Not a 24-month plan. Evidence now, then progress each week.
That combination rebuilt credibility and made it possible to redesign the system properly.
Change at scale: the lesson of urgency
We also discuss a platform adoption challenge from Michael’s Netflix experience, and what he learned about change management: good ideas don’t spread by themselves.
Two levers made a huge difference in later roles:
A real deadline (a cliff, not a wish)
Executive alignment to keep that deadline real
Michael’s practical insight: A target like nine months is close enough to feel real, far enough that teams don’t immediately say no.
Advice for emerging leaders
Michael closes with three themes that translate well beyond infrastructure:
Understand your stakeholders deeply (including what isn’t said)
Deliver a meaningful win in the first 90 days to earn credibility
Define the purpose of your team so priorities become easier and autonomy grows
Alexis: [00:00:00] Welcome to Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership. I’m your host, Alexis Monville. In this episode, we are excited to welcome Michael Galloway, a visionary leader in the tech industry with over two decades of experience. Currently shaping the future of cloud infrastructure at HashiCorp, Michael brings a wealth of knowledge from his dynamic roles at companies like Yahoo and Netflix.
Today, he shares his journey, insights on platform engineering and the evolving landscape of technology leadership.
Welcome to the podcast on Emerging Leadership. Michael, how do you typically introduce yourself to someone you just met?
Michael: Yes. Thank you for inviting me. Alexis. The way I think I typically introduce myself is I live in California. I’ve been working in the tech industry for about 20 years. Father of two rambunctious girls and husband to a wife of [00:01:00] almost 20 years now.
Alexis: Wow. Wow, wow. I would love to unpack all those things, but maybe we’ll time for, for some of it. Let’s look at your, your journey in the tech industry. A fascinating journey. I’ve heard about your experiences both at Netflix and now at Hashicorp. Could you give us a, a snapshot of your trajectory and what drew you to that field of cloud infrastructure?
Michael: Sure. Well, like I mentioned, I’ve been in the industry for more than 20 years. I was actually part of the early two thousands crew at Yahoo. Just before the Google IPO. So that was an interesting experience to start off my career. yeah, that was you know, everything, everything was possible.
And some of the most brilliant minds that I have the opportunity to work with many years later in my career started there. In fact, my current boss at HashiCorp was also part of that crew back at Yahoo and And and, you know, it’s, [00:02:00] it’s, the Valley is ultimately very small from Yahoo. I went through a number of different ranges of companies.
So I actually did a startup in the enterprise software space, which I was fortunate to sell. I would say it’s more of an Acqui-hire but it was a great experience to go through what is a startup life like in Silicon Valley. Eventually, I landed in Netflix around 2016. And moved into the platform engineering organization. From there I led a bunch of teams in Delivery Engineering. I think the most famous part of Netflix that people may know of is the Spinnaker product that was developed for the most part between Netflix and Google. And that’s what we evolved and, and worked on. After that, that was really where I fell in love with platform engineering as, as a concept.
The whole concept of full cycle development and DevOps as we were pioneering it at Netflix was just fascinating and working with some of the greatest minds I I’ve had the opportunity to work in that space. I eventually moved to leading platform organizations [00:03:00] at mid-tier companies, and now I’m over at HashiCorp. Running the infrastructure part of the organization personally. you asked about infrastructure. Infrastructure specifically is a fascinating and evolving space. You know, I actually have experience going in front of David Filo, one of the founders of Yahoo, and making physical hardware requests.
I remember standing in line a little anecdote there as I I was we all queued up at, at, at, at these hardware request committee meetings. And David Filo is one of several members. And I was right behind this gentleman. I had just started my job. Maybe I was a month, two months in. And the, the person in front of me was from Yahoo Photos, and he goes up to David Filo and he’s making requests for several multimillion dollar filer machines that we needed for the Yahoo Photos footprint. And they discussed and, and, you know, okay, we will ultimately approve. And then my number’s called, and I, I get up and. I said, I’m, I’m looking for $300 to buy a hard drive for one of our [00:04:00] machines. And Yeah. Philo had this look on his face of like, yeah, maybe this, maybe we can do, do some efficiency improvements for this meeting.
Might not be the best use of everybody’s time. And I say, I, I really appreciated that he saw it that way. But you know, the, so I was, you know, I think a lot of us have experience with the actual tin, but now, but with the introduction of virtualization that really came out many years later, unlocked, you know, all kinds of, of capabilities like you know, immutable deployment patterns and, and real ephemeral infrastructure started to become a thing. And, and finally I think. So, so what we’re seeing is, is the outcome of those innovations and the, and the, this idea that you can allocate virtual global infrastructure in minutes. But I truly think that that’s actually just the beginning of where, where we’re headed as an industry. So it’s an exciting space to be.
Alexis: Oh, whoa, whoa. Wait, that’s, that’s very [00:05:00] interesting because yeah, with, the introduction of virtualization, basically a lot of people thought, oh yeah, that you, you don’t need to care really about cloud infrastructure anymore, and.
Michael: Right,
Alexis: Anyway, everything will be fine with, that’s just infrastructure as code and, and let’s, let’s do everything.
But that’s not really what happened. Even if we I don’t remember DevOps. It’s what, 2009? Something like that. We are still not there yet. Completely. In your, in your, during your talk at Plato Elevate you mentioned that. Cloud Infra was not about hiding complexities, but setting the right defaults.
I would like to you to discuss that a little bit more, because that will maybe tell us what, what is coming, what, what the future looks like.
Michael: Yeah. This is a very fascinating conversation. It’s, it’s something that we can quickly get into Modern applications and lose a sense of principles. So I [00:06:00] like to come at this more from a principles first approach than, than just you know, the common conversation that I hear in many platform organizations or many companies is, how do we become, should we present a Heroku environment? And I think that that’s missing some grounding. you’re talking about how to use it. As opposed to the philosophies of behavior that you want to encourage or support in an organization. So like everything else in software development, the answer is maybe The answer is nuanced, right? But let’s start with the an early, I’ll give you an early story that, that really grounded my thinking on this. It goes back to my Yahoo days actually. So I was a software engineer there and I worked on the Confabulator product. It was a Desktop Widgets product that worked on both Mac and Windows. Actually, the modern Apple widgets experience on the iPhones, as well as Netflix’s tv or Netflix’s video capabilities on tv. And, and all the modern TV [00:07:00] widgets all are actually born from some of the actual same humans that worked on Confabulator. I, I actually worked with some of those guys.
One of ’em I actually hired into to Yahoo. So just a little short history there. So all things are connected, but I was working on this and I was around much smarter minds than mine. And one of the lead engineers in the group emphasized to me, he said, don’t just use the interfaces to these libraries that, that are, you know, available to us from the, the, the TVs or from the, the OSS systems that we’re trying to operate on.
Don’t just use the interfaces. You said you need to understand What they do underneath, you need to understand those in order for you to be able to solve the real problems, the hard problems. And he was right. How often we end up grabbing a library and just using it without thought of how is it actually performing these actions.
And when you do that, and we’ve seen this in software development all the time, where you have higher and higher level frameworks, and [00:08:00] the understanding of the magic underneath is ultimately .Limited to the few that actually care to try to introspect, and some of those frameworks actually actively try to encapsulate and block the ability for you to really understand what’s under the covers. Why does that matter? Is because if it fails to do the thing I need it to do, if my application calls into an interface and for whatever reason that interface has an unexpected side effect, I now have no ability other than to just abandon that interface. To solve that problem. And that becomes really a, a limiting factor. So if you take it from that perspective and you, you, you view software platforms and you view infrastructure platforms or platform engineering platforms, they’re all the same concept, right? They’re encapsulation their abstraction. There’s the same software principles. You start to get to the point where you realize, where do you want to put The responsibility for resolving and solving problems. In a true [00:09:00] DevOps world, you ideally want to enable application teams to ultimately have the ability to understand and operate their products in production. And if you don’t, don’t enable them to be able to see below the details for how something is being done. They have no ability to perform that task. They have to rely on a central team to do it. just like if I am, if I am the provider of a framework, but they can never see into the code of that framework. If that framework fails to do the thing they need to do, they’re going to abandon it or do something different, which will create heterogeneity in the environment and more complexity. So when I think about the right experience, what I look at is Not about hiding the complexity per se. I think you can follow abstraction or present a an interface facade if you want to simplify the zero to one problem that most of the time, this is what they’re talking about. I just wanna get my application out.
I just wanna get a database. I that’s a zero [00:10:00] to one problem. Provide a simple facade. That’s where the abstraction actually can have value, but. It should be an abstraction that you can drill further down if you want to. You can go further and you can see what actually was done. How did how does this machine perform the actual instantiation of that database? What is the instance size? If it was, say, Amazon, of that database that was set up, I should be able to introspect these things because those can lead to me understanding why a failure occurred. In my production system or how better to architect. A good example of this is a situation that we just recently encountered you know in, in my current universe at HashiCorp, where one of our products has a stateful, it wants to perform in a very stateful way. Well, it is a stateful application. And stateful is a particularly tricky monster to, to from an infrastructure standpoint, right? We really, [00:11:00] very much on the infrastructure side, wanna see the world as I. As, as cattle they say not pets, right? That’s a common euphemism. And and so the idea that I can truly lose or blow away my infrastructure if I needed to and that the resiliency is actually supported both at the application tier as well as other parts of the infrastructure to support the idea that any virtual thing can fail. And the truth is, is that whether anybody likes to think of it or not, I have a lot of experience with yeah. Virtual things fail because physical things fail. So you very much need to have that. If you a stateful application doesn’t like to operate that way. It likes to believe that, that there is a permanence with the thing that it’s in. This is a really tricky problem with infrastructure systems to date. If we have a full abstraction of what is actually happening on the infrastructure tier, especially when we need to version the infrastructure underneath the covers, it can, [00:12:00] it can be a real problem for that, that application team, because they don’t understand why systems are periodically being disconnected or broken or having any predictability around it. So as a result of that, they have to offload all of the operation problems and all of the ops that are specific to their application universe, to the central and infrastructure, the central infrastructure team. And that is the anti-pattern that we all wanna avoid, that the whole point of DevOps was to move out of a central team operating applications in production as much as possible. So that was a long-winded answer. The short nugget here I would say is predictability is more valuable than velocity.
Alexis: Mm. Yeah. , I guess that that summary helps really to to understand the, the whole thing. Could you tell us about a particular challenge you, you facedworking on that realm of cloud of platform at Corp and how you approached it.[00:13:00]
Michael: Yeah I’ll give you a different challenge ’cause life’s full of those. When I joined Hashi Corp let’s see, I joined December of 2022, so December last year. So I’m almost at my one year anniversary actually. About a month and a half in, I would say, so sometime in January all these alarms started going off. It was not my fault. I had just started. That’s okay. I don’t mind if it is. But it was not alarms are going off all these, you know, 3:00 AM things blown up. And so the issue was a big portion of our System relies on a workflow. It, it’s basically, it’s a workflow engine that, that a lot of our use cases require to be operating effectively.
It’s a, it’s a, the engine’s cadence, it’s used, it’s pioneered by Uber. And temporal is, is maybe a more well known modern name is a, is a Next iteration of that workflow engine. Anyway, [00:14:00] so this thing started to blow up, and the reason it started to blow up was that it was backed by a, a single, very hard, a large database instance. And that database instance was struggling to, to keep up with. An unanticipated load. And this was not necessarily a new issue. In fact, cadence had rather this, this, nothing to say about the cadence Service is perfectly fine workflow engine, but the design was just not well des it was not well designed to be very scalable. And so as a result over the last several years, people had kind of wanted to avoid This system ’cause it was known to be problematic and it had burned people out trying to support it. So, but it had finally tipped over and, and by tipped over, I meant it actually stopped keeping up with the abil, all of the workflows coming in.
So it started building a history list. I think something on the order of maybe a million. Runs behind and it was continuing to fall behind. Yeah. So, you know, when you see that it’s, [00:15:00] it’s a downward spiral, right? It’s, it, it, and so we brought in AWS people and we performed a quick crew. I. To, to set up basically like a war room situation, to try to triage and stop the internal bleeding.
And so what’s the first thing you do? You say, okay, well let’s, let’s, if we can’t horizontally scale because we hadn’t sharded this system, let’s scale up. Right? And whenever I hear scale up, I think all of us, and especially in the infrastructure space, kind of cringe ’cause you know, there is a finite limit to scaling up and scaling up. Doesn’t actually solve the underlying problem. Ultimately it just delays the problem. yoU know so we did, there’s, again, our first focus was stop the bleeding. We scale up. It, it helped. Still some things were, were not quite as stable as we wanted. anD this is where I think the more interesting part of the story it comes in because all these kinds of technical problems in my whole 20 year experience. I’ve very rarely been [00:16:00] on what I would consider you know, a Mars landing kind of problem where you’re maybe doing something fairly novel and even that maybe isn’t as novel anymore because we’ve done it before. Uh, most problems are not, in other words, insurmountable technical problems, where there just is no answer. generally, I’ve found that 99% of problems that I’ve had to deal with are more about organizational problems. And, you know, you might even go to say leadership problems in the sense of how do you, how do you think about approaching this kind of crisis? What are the right things to do when a crisis like this happens? And so the steps we took first, the very first thing is recognize that. Upper leadership partners, customers who are relying on this thing all want somebody to say, I’m gonna raise my hand and say, I’ll take ownership of this problem. That’s the very first thing everybody needs. They need to hear you
Alexis: Mm-Hmm.
Michael: And so [00:17:00] we did. I I basically said, okay, we recognize this as a problem. I’m not gonna make up stories about this. It’s a problem and it needs to be resolved, so we’re gonna take ownership of it. And what we did was formed a permanent team around this. And that sent a very clear signal, we’re gonna own this problem.
We’re going to move it to a, a place where you can trust it. anD that was actually a really important thing, not just for the ownership aspect, but there was real lack of trust in building these, these workflows by teams because of the instability history. And so, as a result, teams started to look for alternative approaches, and that would’ve led to a much more complicated universe to manage. So it was very important that they, they knew somebody was going to own solving it. Once we did that we defined some specific outcomes towards stability and scalability that we needed to be able to achieve. It needs to be horizontally scalable, not vertically. I think that was one of the most important things that we emphasized, that the thing we did today [00:18:00] to bandaid, this is not a solution. It’s, it’s a bandaid. What we need is not to try to put all our cargo on one ship. We need multiple ships. And, and so once some of the fundamental, and these are not complicated concepts, but they are complicated to execute on because having multiple ships means a whole lot of additional complexity and logistics up front for figuring out what goes on those ships and so on.
I don’t know, I just suddenly jumped into a nautical analogy. But these, this is You know, establishing this is what we are, are, this is our success criteria, this is our strategy was critical to get out early. What are the outcomes, not the physical deliverables. The next thing we had to do deliver short-term wins. And by that I mean short term, what anybody ever cared about was stability in, in the short term, as well as enabling products to launch. So the products that we’re afraid to Right on this. We [00:19:00] immediately engaged them, prioritize, making sure that they were stable. They had the resources within the system to be reliable.
And so we enabled those product launches. And then we pumped out every week what the reliability status was, what were there any issues and any updates or communication on progress towards those outcomes that we had. This was critical. Those two things were vital for us to establish credibility and for people to actually feel like the wind had changed and that this ship was actually going to turn that built.
Confidence and trust gave us momentum. And, and as we continued to execute, this team has completely revamped the architecture, the system. They’ve migrated a bunch of the critical systems to starting to be able to Have better resource isolation, which are fundamental things in an infrastructure universe to be able to isolate workloads and manage resource consumption by each of those workloads. We didn’t have some of these fundamental abilities before. Now we’re in a state where we’re executing on the we’ve moved away from RDS and we’re bringing in. A scalable [00:20:00] backend, which is, you know, a, a Cassandra backend, which will allow us to horizontally scale. So we’re in a much different space, to the point where a leader about a week ago said to me ” not only do I no longer worry about cadence, I, I’ve basically entirely forgotten that it was ever a problem”. wHich is great except that I said just make sure that we don’t think we can remove people from this team right now. I’m glad you are confident.
Alexis: Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I, I believe that’s, that’s very interesting. The what, what you offer as a solution. If I put aside the technical solution I, we could apply that to basically a lot of different problems that we have. Having a team that is able to say, okay, we are owners of that thing. And now we own that problem and we will solve it.
Being really clear about what are the outcomes, where we are today, how we measure those ourselves compared to those outcomes. That’s very, very critical. And and [00:21:00] knowing that you will not win the trust of people by announcing 24 months plan. You will win the trust of people because you are delivering something now.
yes.
Michael: yes.
Alexis: Getting into that mindset is critical also. So I, I love what you’re saying about all that. Have I missed anything in what you, what you propose?
Michael: No, I think you sum some, summarized it exceptionally well. I will say generally this you are, I fully agree with you. This is not a unique situation. This is a pattern and a strategy for approaching a, what is, what comes up fairly often in every job I’ve taken, there is always a crisis and I’m going to misquote the person.
But it’s what I think the famous saying is, never let a good crisis go to waste.
Alexis: Yeah.
Michael: these are hugely valuable opportunities to actually have a tangible impact on the business.[00:22:00] anD you know where others may be afraid to tread. These are the opportunities that really enable you to shine as a leader.
Alexis: I, I really like that. Are there other pivotal moments in your career when, when you, you really learn something significant about change and leadershIp?
Michael: Oh my gosh, yes. Well first, if anything I’m saying here sounds at all polish, please understand it comes from the many battle scars that I have over my history of, of making mistakes and reading and learning from, from the wisdom of others, and then having the opportunity again to apply them. But yes, let me answer your question more directly.
So at Netflix .We and delivery engineering embarked on this initiative called Managed Delivery. It was a very ambitious project that is still very near and dear to my heart. It’s it’s, it’s fundamentally what it is, is delivery in [00:23:00] Spinnaker is done using pipeline, basically articulating pipelines. And what we found from From the way that we were operating where every team was defining their own pipelines. In Spinaker, I think we had about 16,000 pipelines at that time. We across about 4,000 applications, about 400 teams was about the size we were at. Platform Engineering has some challenges. One of the specific challenges was as we, we were still very VM based as we would release new base OS AMI s. That might include security improvements, patches, other things that needed to be there. We had an adoption rate of it took on the order of months to years for certain patches or updates to be rolled out. That was really problematic for us because you can imagine that there is, sure. I mean, if you did a security sev one incident, they could broadcast across the company and people might take action, but that’s a pretty disruptive thing to do. [00:24:00] What you want is, is a design that helps enable the, the bottom tier to be as evergreen as possible.
Right. But we had a, we had a problem. All the teams owning their own pipelines Spinnaker had no intelligence about those pipelines. It, it just knew, run this, it, it was a workflow engine in many ways. Right. Run this step if that step Gives me a green light. Go to this next step, go to this next step, and, and maybe some conditional logic, but what do those steps represent? And, and what is the confidence after you know, step two as to whether this, this new update is safe to roll out? All of that was opaque to the engineering system. So what we needed was a way that we could evolve our infrastructure and we could evolve our amis, we could evolve our strategies under the covers. anD do so without having to get all the teams involved. So that was one of the motivations. Another motivation was we thought it would make it easier for [00:25:00] teams to also not need to articulate or come up with strategies in their pipelines for safe delivery, right? We teams would deliver applications to multiple regions. What’s the right sequence of steps that would enable you to catch a problem and roll back the change? If, if a failure happened in, say, the second region you rolled out to, which is a very complicated problem, right? First region successful, second region fails, most of the time pipelines would just die. And now you have this very confusing universe where you have different versions of your shafter running and, and problems
can surface. So we thought, Hey, let’s take that problem away from teams two. Let’s create a declarative form of delivery that basically enables people to define the Criteria for success that would enable promotion from one lower environment to higher environments.
That was essentially the goal of managed delivery, was move them towards the description of what needed to happen as opposed to defining how it should happen. [00:26:00] Very ambitious on the size that I was mentioning, especially because Netflix culture very much operated with a freedom and responsibility concept, and so that meant that teams were never Really obligated to use a service or a new system. So imagine operating in an environment where you have lots of very smart and talented people from all around the world that are working on their problems, their projects, and you ask them, you, you need to engage them on something that they honestly would prefer to not really have to think about.
Right? I don’t con like, it, it, the water company doesn’t reach out to me to talk about Repiping .You know, pipes to my house. Like I have no interest in that conversation. If you need to do it, sure.
Go ahead. Right. It, it’s the same way in delivery, engineering and reaching out to these teams. I don’t know it, my software always continues to deliver.
It’s fine. Why do I need to care about this? thIs is a very common problem in [00:27:00] platform engineering, but also come from for library producers, API producers, anybody that’s producing something that others are consuming
you almost always have more interest in in making that happen. Than they do especially when you, the value proposition may be more on one side and the other.
And that was the key mistake I made. At that time you know, we very much wanted to take the approach of, if we built something really valuable and very interesting for folks they would adopt it. And I think there was merit to that. And so we spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, the early adopters.
We got some early successes. We got some people to enjoy it. But then we hit that classic crossing the chasm problem where we couldn’t get past the early innovators to the early adopters. And we struggled on that. What was it, was it some combination of features? Was it some combination of capabilities, something that this could do that other things couldn’t? What, what I miscalculated personally was the actual value to the business was the platform engineering side of the, the, the [00:28:00] equation platform engineering needed to see this adopted. Across the fleet for there to be real value. And so given that the strategy may not necessarily be one of slow adoption, but rather it may be more important to take a little bit stronger of, of a, of a, of an approach. And John Kotter talks about this in, in leading he has an article in HBR called Leading Change, but he has a book called, why Transformations Fail. And I will say I read that book during that time and I failed in probably at least the top three even after I read it. So it’s, I will tell you, there is a very, I, I learned how big the gap is between knowledge and wisdom. And, and, and that that gap being how wide experience needs that gap, that that which is experience is that gap, right? And how much of that you actually need. Long story short [00:29:00] you know, managed deliveries, value proposition. Very much is alive, it is moving forward. But that was an experience where I realized because our adoption was very slow, you could imagine that we did not take as an aggressive of an approach, specifically by aggressive, I mean, we didn’t establish a sense of urgency. So teams were necessarily complacent in the adoption. And it’s not no fault to them, that’s the way the culture was designed to operate. But as a result it’s getting adoption, getting that change to actually happen. It was much harder. Now I know that they are doing amazing stuff now over there in terms of, of growing it.
They, we’ve learned a lot of those lessons and the impact of that approach is really being felt. In fact, years later, I landed at HashiCorp. My peer came from Samsung. Smart Things. He recognized me and said, oh you know, managed delivery. And they apparently larger footprint than Netflix much higher traffic than Netflix.
All the iot devices right, call into their[00:30:00] and they. Overnight, basically. Maybe it’s not quite overnight, but they, they they fully adopted it and saw some of the benefits of that adoption as a result. And, and and so it was, it was a cathartic to hear or comforting rather to hear. But yes, it was a, it was a good experience in the challenges of change.
Alexis: Yeah, it’s, it’s very interesting that we are coming, going, going back to that idea of a team owns a problem and now tries to solve it. Unfortunately it’s really a problem for the business, but it’s not necessarily a problem for the other teams. thAt are consuming something from that team. And now how do you create a sense of urgency for the other team when they are not even aware that it’s really a problem for the business and you cannot count on that for them to investigate that part.
So maybe that it’s other nudge.
Michael: Well, and I have a, a story about creating the urgency because I, [00:31:00] that’s what one of the things I learned, there’s actually two pieces to that that I learned. And I applied at the next job, actually after I left Hashi after, sorry, after I left Netflix. It was a mid-tier company. We were on a, a, all the entire fleet was on a, a Heroku actually.
We were hitting problems with that platform. Going back to the ability to introspect and understand how things work, Heroku was too abstract, too high level for us to be able to operate it effectively for the things that we wanted to be able to do. You know, it got us the zero to one, but that, that hard abstraction. mAde a a, it made it impossible for us to get past that one. loNg story short, though, we needed to migrate, we decided the business decided we needed to migrate off. But even with that, we wanna migrate off like all things that happen in a business, they are good goals. They’re, they’re set, like you said, the 24 month goal.
Oh yes, we should be But how important is that? How urgent is that? I. [00:32:00] This is from my experience with managed delivery, this is what I, I learned. Okay, so two things. One you need a sense of urgency. So how do we create that urgency? You need to get a date set and that date needs to have consequences. So we talked specifically about setting a nine month target from the point that I had started that job and, and the reason for nine months is nine months. Feels close enough that it will happen, but far enough away that virtually no engineering team says no. Right? And, and and I mean this very much affectionately, we all believe that the world is possible in nine months, not three months, but nine months.
Yes. Nine months. I for sure we’ll have time. So we we got alignment that in nine months we would, we would hit this target. We made sure that the other aspect of this was we were going to shut off Heroku. We were going to actually disable and tear up the contract. And so that was the, the cliff date. [00:33:00] That’s great to have that date. And there’s a lot to unpack on the importance of setting dates, but the other bit that was vital was we needed to get executive, Alignment with that, that needed to be something that the executives would back. And by that I mean you know, the term leadership or executives is, is nebulous just someone in a position of authority at, at the right level that can basically say once you get to that three months away from landing this. That this is a date that will not move. And we, we were able to get that. And those two things ensured that this, that project very ambitious. We moved the entire fleet out and over to Azure, and we had zero service disruption. It was a, it was a remarkable feat. The, the team did an amazing job, but I truly believe having both of those factors Enabled us to do that Herculean task because the last three, three months you can imagine were brutal, stressful[00:34:00] you know we we bought lots of DoorDash for people to, to and, and, you know, and supported them as they were executing on all of this stuff. But once we landed that the entire crew, Could look back and they did and said this was an amazing thing we were able to accomplish, and there was real pride with being able to do it. So very good lessons learned.
Alexis: I love it. I love it. And once again, that’s, that’s really interesting to, to unpack the learnings about that. Yeah. You need a date and when, when people hear that. They can hear that, yeah, that’s a date, but maybe we can be late and no, that’s really a cliff that’s, there’s nothing behind. And and you need that support, that alignment.
So nobody will dare to change the date. There’s no option around that. And that’s absolutely clear for everybody. So now they can make plans. They have the time. Nine months is, is is a good one. We were thinking, yeah, it’s feasible. And, and, and I, and then, you know, thing about it, I, I realized that when you [00:35:00] were saying it, that if you would’ve said three months, I would’ve say, oh, no.
That I would’ve started to think why it was not possible. But nine months I was comfortable to say, yeah, okay. And I know nothing about the challenge, the reality of the challenge. funny. So yeah, you can start making plans. That’s a, that’s a, that’s a.
Michael: That’s right.
Alexis: What, what would be your advice to emerging leaders or who want to make a meaningful impact?
Michael: The first thing I would say is you need to understand your stakeholders. I have learned the enormous value in getting, developing those relationships and deeply understanding who your customers are who your peers are. Who and what leadership is expecting of your organization? A lot of people, I think, focus, especially emerging leaders, they focus on their team and down. I have a lot of experience in [00:36:00] doing that and failing beautifully because I misunderstood what was expected, what was not spoken, but expected by my peers and by upper leadership. And so you really need to understand not just the the surface statements of here’s our goals, here’s our outcomes. What you want to ask is what keeps you up at night You want to ask where things have failed in the past. You want to hear the, the, the reactions. More than you want to hear the thoughtful process of, of desires, right? It’s those emotional reactions, those small perceptions of your team and of what is expected of, of your organization that actually will influence whether or will, will influence whether or not you are. Well, it’ll affect whether or not you are successful because those are the micro perceptions that actually determine whether they are are, they’re going to think of your team as a team to rely upon for those next strategic steps that they want [00:37:00] to take. Right. So understand them very well, and that takes a lot of time, and there’s great books on this. But this is where it truly is around a psych the, the psychological approach far more than it is that technical execution or delivery. The next one is you need to deliver wins within the first 90 days of starting a new job. And there is a great book, first 90 Days. I think it’s a fantastic book on this topic. I Have, I’ve applied it and successfully a few times now. It very much is correct. Get that, get that win. You have to have credibility when you go into a room. You have to be able to be believed when you say we should do X or Y. Otherwise, you’re gonna stay in the tactical level always because you haven’t established that you can actually solve bigger problems. The key thing with getting that credibility in the first 90 days is you don’t need a big win. You just need something meaningful, something that addresses a concern. Peers of mine had actually mentioned this to me years before too. Don’t [00:38:00] try to run after. The biggest thing you can run after, especially when you first start, start with something. yoU, you, you can own and influence, so it’s something within your control. Don’t do something that’s gonna require a bunch of other folks to be aligned, especially when you first start. It’s challenging to do that, so it should be something for the most part, you can control. I. Second part, it’s gotta be something that matters to other people.
It doesn’t really matter what it is. It doesn’t have to be a technical solution. It could be an organizational solution. It could be an information solution. It could be a communication solution. It could be any of these things, but it needs to be something that actually addresses a, a, a fear or concern. A great example of this is just starting a monthly newsletter for your organization and ensuring the rest of the business understands even what your team does or your group does. That’s surprisingly a big problem in many places is just the awareness factor, and doing that suddenly puts you on the radar of a lot of people, and it can really, it can really move things forward.
That’s not a technical problem at all,
Alexis: Yeah.
Michael: but it is a problem and it can establish you. [00:39:00] The third thing that emerging leaders need to be taking a look at to have real meaningful impact, define The purpose for your team. And by that I mean you need to bring your team into that. But defining a purpose is one of the most fundamentally powerful actions that I have ever learned to take with my team.
And purpose is different from mission and vision. a Purpose is. It is the, it lives the lifetime of that team or that group that you are managing. And a purpose is not it, it sometimes it’s referred to as a North star. I don’t think it’s quite that. It’s not quite that right way of seeing it. A purpose.
This establishes a philosophy that everything stems from. So one of my favorite examples of this was I think he was a, gosh, and the name is gonna slip outta my mind, but he was a, a French designer actually, I think that helped establish the purpose for Disneyland and that purpose was to create happiness in the visitors. Now, if you think about that, that sounds very simple, [00:40:00] but it’s a very powerful fulcrum. Because at that point, when you have that, everything from how you name the parking lots, you name them after Mickey and Goofy, not A and B and C, the design of the trash cans, the uniforms, the decision to have very pleasing flower beds that are millions and millions of dollars of investment for each of these things. Why do you do that? Because each of these pieces maybe make somebody smile a little bit more. Establishing a purpose for your organization enables you to prioritize. It gives your teams freedom to execute and to think more broadly and it enables you to align with what your next strategic steps need to be. It it really is the guiding, you can think of it as a guiding principle. So there’s, I, I’ve written articles on this and, but there’s much better, smarter minds than mine that have, have spoken on this
Alexis: Ah, I will link to that and we will let people [00:41:00] people decide. About that . So what, what’s next for you? Any exciting projects or initiatives you, you, you want to share?
Michael: Yeah, so well with Hashi Corp I think one of the exciting things that we have coming up next from the platform engineering organization is really trying to crack this self-service nut. You know, Hashi Corp is an organization that has, we we build tools for infrastructure management, right?
I mean, we build tools for platform engineering. How do we, how do we leverage all of the, the tools that we have and the patterns and behaviors that we wanna encourage to enable self-service within our organization? So a team being able to go from zero to one. I know this is a nut that a lot of people have cracked in the sense of they’ve created, you know, IDPs, right?
In, in internal developer platforms. But I think that that’s more of a, a, a how, and I think I wanna get back to again, the principles. What should that, what, what are we caring about enabling the actual day One [00:42:00] problem of give me a service is not a hard problem to solve. It’s been solved a lot. The day two problem of now I wanna add a database to my service. That’s a harder problem. And that’s one of the ones I’m excited to see get moved forward. Yeah, so that’s, that’s, I’m looking forward to that next
Alexis: That’s very cool. So let’s talk again. Thank you very much Michael for joining. have fun solving that.
Effective communication with investors is a cornerstone of successful startup management. A well-crafted investor update does more than report facts; it actively engages your backers in your journey. This guide explores how to structure updates that not only inform but also encourage active participation and acknowledgment of investors’ contributions.
The Structure of an Effective Investor Update Email
1. Greeting and Positive Opening
Start with a personalized and upbeat opening to engage your investors from the outset.
Example: “Hello Investors! As we embark on a new and exciting year, I’m thrilled to share our latest milestones and plans.”
My example could be even better with: “Hello Alexis!” as I am more tempted to read when my first name is mentioned.
2. Highlight Major Achievements
Begin with key successes to demonstrate the positive impact of your investors’ support.
Detail the financials and growth metrics to provide a clear picture of the company’s health.
Example: “Our revenue surged to $X00,000 in Q4, marking a significant X0% growth from the previous quarter.”
4. Operational Updates
Share important updates regarding team expansions, strategic shifts, or infrastructure enhancements.
Example: “We’re excited to welcome our new CTO, John Smith, who brings a wealth of experience to our tech team.”
5. Challenges and Lowlights
Be transparent about challenges, fostering an environment of trust and collaboration.
Example: “We’re facing some challenges in optimizing our supply chain, which we’re actively addressing.”
6. Product Updates
Update on product developments, customer feedback, and market positioning.
Example: “Our latest product iteration has been well-received, with significant improvements based on customer insights.”
7. Future Plans and Goals
Articulate your vision and objectives for the upcoming period.
Example: “Looking ahead, our focus will be on scaling operations…”
8. Engagement and Calls to Action
This is crucial. Make specific requests of your investors, and include at least three actionable items, varying in commitment level. This approach increases the likelihood of engagement.
Example: “To continue our momentum, we need your involvement. Here are three ways you can help: 1) Try our latest product and provide feedback, 2) Introduce us to potential partners in the XYZ industry, and 3) Share our recent press release in your network. Any of these actions would be immensely valuable.”
9. Recognition of Contributors
Acknowledge and thank investors who have made significant contributions. This not only shows gratitude but also motivates others to contribute.
Example: “A special thanks to Jane Doe for her invaluable marketing insights, and to John Doe for facilitating key industry introductions last quarter. Your contributions have been pivotal to our success.”
10. Closing and Appreciation
Conclude with a sincere note of thanks, reinforcing the importance of their support.
Example: “Your belief in our mission continues to be our driving force. Thank you for being with us on this exciting journey.”
Conclusion
An investor update is a strategic tool that goes beyond mere reporting – it’s about creating a collaborative and engaged investor community. By clearly articulating both the achievements and challenges, and by inviting specific actions and recognizing contributions, you foster a deeper connection with your investors. This not only keeps them informed but also actively involved in your startup’s journey towards success.
A few months ago, Kevin Fishner presented me with an intriguing challenge: to list my top non-fiction books. As simple as it sounds, this task quickly unfolded into a reflective journey through the pages that have shaped my understanding of leadership, personal growth, and organizational development. But how does one confine such a wealth of knowledge and inspiration to a mere top ten? The truth is, it’s not just about ranking books; it’s about recognizing the unique value each one brings to different stages of our journey and the varied challenges we face.
In this list, you won’t find a conventional top ten. Instead, I offer a collection of books, each holding a special place in my library and my heart. These are books that have not only influenced my thoughts but have also been integral tools in my workshops with teams during my career and now at Pearlside. They are more than reads. They are experiences shared, lessons learned, and wisdom applied. From fostering an understanding of team dynamics with Patrick Lencioni’s insightful fables to navigating the complexities of global business using Erin Meyer’s ‘The Culture Map,’ each book has been a key in unlocking potential – both in myself and in the teams I’ve had the privilege to coach and guide.
Join me as I share this curated list, a tapestry of narratives and insights that have been pivotal in my journey as a co-founder and leadership coach. Whether you are at the onset of your career, leading a startup, or steering an established organization, these books offer a compass to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of leadership and personal growth.
In the realm of leadership and team development, certain books have transcended the role of mere guides, becoming instrumental tools in my workshops at Pearlside. These selected works offer theoretical insights and have proven to be practical in real-world applications. Let’s delve into these cornerstone books:
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni: Lencioni’s captivating fable delves into the heart of team collaboration – or the lack thereof. In my workshops, this book serves as a mirror for teams to reflect on their own dynamics. Through its compelling narrative, it provides a framework for understanding and overcoming common obstacles to teamwork, turning theoretical concepts into tangible actions. I wrote a post reflecting on my experience with a leadership team here.
The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni: Building on the themes of his previous work, this book offers a holistic view of organizational health. Our workshops explore Lencioni’s model as a roadmap to achieving business success through cultural coherence and leadership clarity. It’s a powerful guide for leaders seeking to cultivate a vibrant and productive workplace culture. I wrote about this here.
The Culture Map by Erin Meyer: In today’s globalized business environment, understanding and navigating cultural differences is paramount. Meyer’s book is a key resource in our workshops for developing cultural intelligence. It equips leaders with the tools to effectively manage and lead across diverse cultural landscapes, enhancing global collaboration and empathy. I used again the Culture Map in a workshop just a few weeks ago.
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Goldsmith Marshall: This book addresses the subtle nuances of personal growth and behavioral change essential for leadership advancement. In our sessions, we use Marshall’s insights to help leaders identify and rectify the small, yet impactful, habits that can hinder their progress, fostering a mindset geared towards continuous improvement. I explain how I conduct the workshop here.
Understanding A3 Thinking by Durward K. Sobek II: A3 thinking is more than a problem-solving tool; it’s a methodology to foster critical thinking and communication. I love using the approach to structuring thought processes and decision-making, enabling leaders and teams to tackle complex challenges systematically.
Reviewing the list, I realized that I used many other books in my workshops, books by Deming, Drucker, and Senge to name a few. It gives me ideas for more writing!
Here is the alphabetical list of books:
A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking
A Business and Its Beliefs: The Ideas That Helped Build IBM – Thomas J. Watson Jr.
A Little History of Philosophy (Little Histories) – Nigel Warburton
American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company – Bryce G. Hoffman
An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization – Robert Kegan
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking – Malcolm Gladwell
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (Good to Great, 2) – James C. Collins
Business Model Generation – Alexander Osterwalder
Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World – Jennifer Garvey Berger
Chimp Paradox: How Our Impulses and Emotions Can Determine Success and Happiness and How We Can Control Them – Steve Peters
Collaboration by design: Your Field Guide for Creating More Value When Bringing People Together – Philippe Coullomb
Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Clayton M. Christensen
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration – Ed Catmull
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose – Tony Hsieh
Freedom, Inc.: Free Your Employees and Let Them Lead Your Business to Higher Productivity, Profits, and Growth – Brian M. Carney
Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For – Jonathan Raymond
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t – James C. Collins
Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All (Good to Great, 5) – James C. Collins
Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow – Yuval Noah Harari
How Not to Diet – Michael Greger
How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie
Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them – Gary Hamel
I’m a Joke and So Are You: Reflections on Humour and Humanity – Robin Ince
Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization (Leadership for the Common Good) – Robert Kegan
Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love – Richard Sheridan
L’art de devenir une équipe agile – Claude Aubry
Lean Management: Mieux, plus vite, avec les mêmes personnes. – Pierre Pezziardi
Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life – James Kerr
Leonardo da Vinci – Walter Isaacson
Les mots sont des fenêtres (ou bien ce sont des murs): Introduction à la Communication Non Violente – Marshall B. Rosenberg
Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor E. Frankl
Managing for Happiness: Games, Tools & Practices to Motivate Any Team – Jurgen Appelo
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It – Chris Voss
Outliers: The Story of Success – Malcolm Gladwell
Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity – Kim Malone Scott
Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter – R Dutt
Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up – Jerry Colonna
Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness – Frederic Laloux
Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (And World Peace) – Chade-Meng Tan
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike – Phil Knight
Spiral Dynamics Integral: Learn to Master the Memetic Codes of Human Behavior – Don Edward Beck
Stupid, Ugly, Unlucky and Rich: Spike’s Guide to Success – Richard St. John
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character – Richard P. Feynman
**Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know** – Malcolm Gladwell
Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow – Matthew Skelton
The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals – Chris McChesney
The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict – The Arbinger Institute
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters – Priya Parker
The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity – Julia Cameron
The Autobiography of Malcolm X – Malcolm X
The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever – Michael Bungay Stanier
The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business – Erin Meyer
The Diamond Cutter: The Buddha on Managing Your Business and Your Life – Michael Roach
The Dream Team Nightmare – Portia Tung
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization – Peter M. Senge
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable – Patrick Lencioni
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement – Eliyahu M. Goldratt
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers – Ben Horowitz
The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work – Shawn Achor
The Lean Manager: A Novel of Lean Transformation – Michael Ballé
The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change – Camille Fournier
The Meme Machine – Susan Blackmore
The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win – Gene Kim
The Qualified Sales Leader: Proven Lessons from a Five Time CRO – John McMahon
The Rider – Tim Krabbé
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion – Jonathan Haidt
The Sketchnote Handbook: the illustrated guide to visual note taking – Mike Rohde
The Soul of a New Machine – Tracy Kidder
The Southwest Airlines Way – Jody Hoffer Gittell
The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations – Ori Brafman
The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer – Jeffrey K. Liker
Thinking In Systems: A Primer – Donella H. Meadows
Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
Training from the Back of the Room!: 65 Ways to Step Aside and Let Them Learn – Sharon L. Bowman
Unflattening – Nick Sousanis
Understanding A3 Thinking: A Critical Component of Toyota’s PDCA Management System – Durward K. Sobek II
Visual Teams: Graphic Tools for Commitment, Innovation, and High Performance – David Sibbet
When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi
When They Win, You Win: Being a Great Manager Is Simpler Than You Think – Russ Laraway
Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future – Joichi Ito
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race – Reni Eddo-Lodge
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams – Matthew Walker
Work is Love Made Visible: A Collection of Essays About the Power of Finding Your Purpose From the World’s Greatest Thought Leaders (Frances Hesselbein Leadership Forum) – Frances Hesselbein
Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead – Laszlo Bock
#Workout: Games, Tools & Practices to Engage People, Improve Work, and Delight Clients – Jurgen Appelo
The journey through these pages has been more than an academic exercise; it has been a voyage of personal and professional discovery. Each book on this list has left an indelible mark on my approach to leadership, team building, and personal growth. They have been companions and guides, challenging my perceptions, affirming my experiences, and inspiring new ways of thinking and leading. In my work at Pearlside, these books have informed our methodologies and helped shape the transformative experiences we strive to create for our clients.
In sharing this list, I invite you to view these books not just as a collection of titles, but as a mosaic of knowledge, each piece offering unique insights relevant to different stages of your journey. Whether you are navigating the complexities of team dynamics, cultural diversity, personal growth, or organizational change, these books provide a wealth of wisdom to guide you.
Call to Action:
Now, I turn the page over to you. What are the books that have profoundly impacted your journey? Which titles resonate with your current challenges and aspirations? I encourage you to share your thoughts and recommendations in the comments. Let’s continue this conversation and enrich our collective journey with diverse perspectives and insights.
In the latest episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I had the pleasure of hosting Noah Max, a visionary in the realm of classical music. Noah, a composer and conductor, shares his profound insights on leadership within the creative arts.
🔹 Creative Leadership: Noah describes his role as a composer akin to being a thought leader, constantly striving to innovate and push the boundaries of classical music.
🔹 Challenges in Classical Music: He highlights the difficulties in bridging the gap between classical music and wider audiences, emphasizing the need to communicate its relevance and vitality in people’s lives.
🔹 The Power of Art: Noah passionately speaks about the personal and almost therapeutic impact of engaging with the arts, beyond intellectual understanding.
🔹 Leadership in Practice: Sharing his experience with the opera “The Child in the Striped Pyjamas,” Noah reflects on the importance of team synergy and the challenges of leading a creative project.
🔹 The Conductor’s Role: He delves into the unique dynamics of conducting, where a blend of vision, listening, and collaboration is key to creating a harmonious performance.
🔹 Immersive Leadership Workshops: Noah discusses his innovative workshops that allow individuals to experience the role of a conductor, emphasizing self-discovery and personal growth.
🔹 Personal Development: He stresses the importance of continually challenging oneself to grow as a leader, drawing parallels to physical training.
🔹 Mentorship and Inspiration: Noah shares his experiences with mentorship, both as a mentee and a mentor, highlighting the reciprocal nature of these relationships.
🔹 Future Projects: Looking ahead, Noah is excited about his upcoming compositions, including his first symphony.
🔹 Advice for Leaders: He advises emerging leaders to tune out the noise and listen to themselves, making decisions based on what truly matters to them.
Tune in this enlightening conversation with Noah Max, where music and leadership intertwine to create a symphony of insights. Tune in to this episode to be inspired, regardless of your field!
Listen now and let the music of leadership elevate your day! 🎧
Alexis: Today, we have a truly enchanting episode lined up for you. Noah Max masterfully blends the art of music with the essence of leadership. He’s a creative artist, not only a composer and a conductor he’s an innovator in the world of classical music.
Alexis: Welcome to Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, Noah. How do you typically introduce yourself to someone you just met?
Noah: Well, it’s lovely to see you, Alexis. Thanks for having me on the podcast. I suppose I would go in with creative artist. Because that’s something everyone can relate to immediately and understand. I work specifically in the field of music. I do a number of different things within the field of music, including conducting, which I know we’re going to speak about later on.
But primarily, at heart, I’m a composer, which means I write music. And that sometimes leaves people a little bit nonplussed, because they’re not quite sure what [00:01:00] it means to create music from scratch, or You know for what context are you creating music? What does your life look like if you’re getting out of bed every morning and what writing music?
I mean, how does it work? So the way I would describe it is that I’m attempting to imagine sounds that nobody’s heard before and then notate those sounds either for existing instruments, combinations of instruments, or perhaps even inventing an instrument physically or electronically which doesn’t yet exist, in such a way, so notating it in such a way that Performers could then realize that vision for an audience.
And often for me, that’s within the context of classical music in the concert hall. Sometimes it will be for television, film, something of that description.
Alexis: Okay, that’s fantastic. So now I guess people are wondering, are, are we on a [00:02:00] podcast about leadership? And I’d say, yes, we are. And I will ask a question about how do you define leadership in that context of composing and conducting? And what are some of those unique challenges you face as a leader?
in the musical world.
Noah: I suppose there’s two ways that you can look at a question like that. And one of them is intensely creative and one of them is intensely practical. So from the perspective of composing, I suppose it’s sort of like being a thought leader or a philosopher in that you’re trying to move things forward.
You don’t simply want to repeat things that have already been done although there’s nothing inherently wrong with that but you want to bring something original and valuable to the table, which is going to in some way move the dialogue forward during the course of your creative lifetime. And then there’s the more practical side, which I suppose Through my composing [00:03:00] through my conducting, excuse me, and my other activities one gets a little bit closer to this, which is the fact that there’s a lot of worry in the classical music world that we are in a sort of declining landscape.
It’s certainly a very confusing landscape at the moment. I think there has been a great failure in the world of classical music to communicate itself to the wider world and to build bridges with the wider world. To show people who may feel no great connection in their life with classical music, contemporary classical music, romantic classical music, baroque or renaissance music it’s felt to communicate the ways in which that can be an important, an incredibly vital and, and life giving and sustaining force in, in people’s lives.
And so, you know, having failed to communicate that, no wonder people don’t necessarily feel as connected to it as maybe they could or should. And so, part of my mission in all the different things that I do is to connect people [00:04:00] with the arts in any which way, no matter what they spend their life.
doing. I would like them to have an inroad so that they can, you know, feel the beauty and the sometimes overwhelming power of these mediums in their own life.
Alexis: Wow, that’s beautiful. Ah, that’s beautiful. And I hope that will trigger the interest of people to have a taste at it without the intellectual knowledge that is coming to that. I’ve, I’ve observed times and times that people don’t Listen, or don’t watch paintings or look at it because they don’t have the knowledge that is going with it.
And I’m saying that’s, that’s like tasting food. You, you don’t necessarily have all the knowledge behind it, but you can taste it and maybe you like it. Maybe you don’t, or that could be a drink, that could be food, and that could be music, or that could be painting. Maybe just have a look at it and listen to what is happening inside [00:05:00] yourself.
That would be. Maybe your first time, don’t you think?
Noah: Oh, absolutely. And the wonderful thing with these things is that there’s no incorrect response. Including, you know, perhaps a work of art which everyone says is a great piece of genius leaves you feeling cold. And, you know, that’s fine. It’s an intensely personal thing. I think to just sit and observe a work of art or to sit in a concert hall, which feels incredibly formal and sometimes quite rigid.
And to experience a work of music over a period of time. It’s an incredibly intense experience and it’s a beautiful experience, but beauty can be terrifying. particularly if you’re not used to it, if you’re not accustomed to it immersing yourself in that beauty can be a terrifying experience, and that’s one of the reasons I’d encourage everyone to do it.
I think that’s part of the vital nature of it. But you also mentioned the intellect there, Alexis, so just to pick up on that for a minute. Often I [00:06:00] find we over intellectualize, actually, the problems in our lives, whereas accessing the creative arts is to do with intuition and the realm which is beyond the intellectual and beyond the statistical and the scientific and the measurable, although all those do come to play in their own.
special, interesting ways. But so much of what’s important is not that. And actually, I think this is the sense in which this is a life giving force. So you compared the analogy with food and in some sense that’s correct, except that we all have to eat three times a day or thereabouts in order to sustain ourselves.
So food is a life giving force in a physical sense. We need the calories in order to sustain our lives. Just like we need a roof over our heads. Et cetera, et cetera. But You might say, well, why do I need painting in my life? Why do I need theatre in my life? Why do I need cinema, for that matter, in my life?
it gives you something which is completely personal to you and which is [00:07:00] not quantifiable, no matter whether you think you’re a creative person or not. And I used to be incredibly naive and evangelical about this. I felt that everybody was creative. And I no longer think that’s True.
And I think a lot of people actually feel tremendous pressure that maybe they should be creative and actually it’s not part of their nature to produce things from scratch. And that’s completely fine. a work of art can feel as though it’s judging you, but there should be nothing judgmental about the process of appreciating art.
And I would like everybody to have their own way in, perhaps to step out of the intellect. And this is something I continually remind myself that I need to do. as well, because it’s not always the best way to solve a problem.
Alexis: I love it! Thank you for sharing that. Can you share an experience where your leadership skills were put to the test.
Noah: Well, the obvious one which comes to mind, and there might be some listeners who are aware of this, as I know you are I’ve spent the last five [00:08:00] years bringing an operatic adaptation of John Boyne’s novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. And you know this because you were at one of the instrumental rehearsals actually in London back in early January.
Can’t believe it’s so long ago already. But every single part of that process was a struggle. Writing the music was a struggle. Doing the research in order to take the entire project with the requisite seriousness was a struggle. Digging into my own family history and my connection with the topic matter was an immense.
Uphill climb spiritually and the logistics of putting on the performance, which we did pretty much single handedly myself and the Echo Ensemble, which is my orchestra, which sort of morphed into an opera production company for that project. And everything went wrong, which could possibly have gone wrong on ways to, I mean, I would.
We could just [00:09:00] sit here for an hour talking about the litany of things which went wrong and I was working all hours in a very unhealthy way. So it’s not something I would hold up as a model of good practice per se. And it’s certainly not an experience I would like to repeat. But it was in its own way, the best of times.
And the reason for that was because of the wonderful synergy in the team. And the only thing which functioned properly on that whole project. Was my team and I told them that and I even with all the other things vying for my attention. I made my priority to Nurture the synergy of that team and fortunately that turned out to be a good investment of resources.
Alexis: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s very interesting what you’re saying about the unhealthy way and all the things going wrong. I was, I was listening to the serial entrepreneur, who created several companies not all of them were [00:10:00] successful. In reality a few of them were successful and a lot were small disaster and bigger disasters.
and he was reflecting on that and he was saying, oh, you, read on LinkedIn and you believe all those people are very highly successful and highly driven and they are really good at all what they are doing and, and everything is going well for them. in reality everything is going wrong every day. And you just need to handle it. And sometimes you do it well, and sometimes you learn something in the process of, in your experience, and sometimes you don’t. And it’s even getting worse. So, there’s just a few things that matter, and that That’s how you are doing that, not all by yourself, but building a support team, you just mentored on that.
That was your team. So what happened with that team? What, what is that team and how it works [00:11:00] for you to work with the team?
Noah: Well, there are certain differences, I suppose in that making music is a process which is incredibly emotionally vulnerable. and very intimate and you have to be sharing of yourself whenever you’re doing it. I was conducting this project as well. So it was my own music that I was conducting with a team that I had hand picked.
So these were all musicians I deeply admired and. respected and enjoyed working with, but when you’re working on topic matter, that’s as dark as that for a sustained period of time, it’s just a great challenge. And the endurance is a challenge. I mean, on a personal level, what I kept reminding myself whenever I was fatiguing, which was often was It’s never going to get better than this.
So just enjoy every minute, which seems counterintuitive again, given the topic matter, but, [00:12:00] but it was necessary to get through it. And actually on the team level, I think that was reflected too, because I wanted to make sure that there was enough room for. levity and a bit of risque gallows humor, you know, because you can’t just be heavy and serious all the time.
And opera making is fun. It should be fun. It’s very interesting to me what you’re saying about the, you know, the, the, the front facing is, is always incredibly. Successful. And then, you know, generally the failures are kept private. I mean, there was just such a huge litany of failures and false starts on the road to this project.
And without the support of, I mean, the whole team, but particularly certain individuals who were attached to it for, you know, right from the start years earlier. I don’t know whether I would have pushed through all of those, but it’s just interesting as well, when you zoom out. You know, if you read the daily news feed, it’s always bad news because bad news happens in the short term.
I do, I don’t do any social media. I deleted all my social media. I do a newsletter once a month and when you zoom out And you only [00:13:00] do your news once a month, generally the news is more positive over the mid and the long term. Just an interesting thing to, keep in mind. I mean, it’s wonderful that with pyjamas, I think, you know, given that I’d never put so much energy and effort into anything in my life.
And to see it rewarded and to see my team rewarded through the reviews that we got and the recognition that the project got was, was absolutely wonderful. But that’s not an accurate reflection of what was going on under the surface. You know, the duck’s legs were, were very much tangled in the weeds there.
Alexis: you mentioned the rehearsal I was amazed of a lot of different things, but things that I still have in mind, there were the composer and the conductor. And so that was your own music. But you were already comfortable with the musician to challenge a little bit the composer or to to make fun of the composer [00:14:00] in some ways about the music itself.
And I thought it was really funny to say they are, and you are making fun of yourself or Separating yourself from the composer, from the music, because now we are trying to to play the music. it’s two different times. And I was looking at that, it was really interesting.
And there was sometimes the, the explanation of the music also. What is happening? That to give the context of, okay, we are, we are starting at that particular measure and you give the context about what is going on and you you explain what is going on what you would like to hear and and there’s a dialogue with the the musician and i i saw them taking notes on the on the score about what was going on and and you give them feedback And they ask something and I was that dialogue was fantastic in a way in my mind the music is on the score.
You just play [00:15:00] it and you’re done and that’s absolutely not what is happening Which was amazing to me Do you have some some reflection about what is going on when you are doing the rehearsal with the team?
Noah: Well, that situation was very specific. And I think being a composer who conducts creates a very specific. Scenario whereby you can offer certain insights. into the process of how something’s been created and what the thought process was behind it. Whereas if it’s somebody else’s music, you’re not necessarily in a position to do that.
Although even that only goes so far, interestingly. I often feel as British composer William Walton must have felt, there’s a possibly apocryphal story of a occasion when he was conducting his own great oratorio, huge orchestra and choir called Belshazzar’s Feast. Tremendous piece. I recommend everybody who is listening to this should go and find it on YouTube, but he was conducting a performance of it and somebody asked him a very [00:16:00] specific question of, oh, you know, you wrote this marking in this bar.
What did you mean? And he said, well, I’ve got no idea. I wrote it 20 years ago.
Not the response you’d expect or maybe hope for, but by the time we were performing that I had written the piece a year and a half ago in a frenzy of creative activity. And so much of the creative process is a mystery, even to the creator. So there were situations where people were saying, you know, what did you mean by this?
It’s like, well, you know, what did I mean then? What do I? think I might want now, and you know, are they the same thing? Possibly not, and neither of them might be right. So it’s tricky, but you know, under more normal circumstances, I, I mean, see with conducting, there are no normal circumstances. It’s an extraordinarily strange situation you find yourself in.
[00:17:00] Just to give people an idea, just the slightest idea if you’re an international conductor, say, and you are guest conducting with a series of symphony orchestras around the world, you’ll be traveling one week, one place, one week, another place, one week, another place, maybe you’ve never gone to these places before, maybe you don’t speak.
the languages in any of them, and you’re confronted with 80 people who you’ve never met before, and you’re all performing music in three days time that none of you have ever performed before, and somehow you’ve got to create a performance that is going to be spiritually valuable to the 5, 000 people who are paying to see it.
Or however many people it is. So it comes with extraordinary pressure, and it’s an extraordinarily aspirational job. There’s so much of it which is mysterious. It’s actually the mysterious elements of it which I really love. And when I’m introducing people who have no idea about conducting to it, as you know, I know you want to talk about these workshops a little bit [00:18:00] later on I think those mysterious and magical elements are the ones which are worth paying the greatest attention to, in a way.
But there is that magical synergy between the group, almost like a murmuration of birds. You know, how they know when the next one’s going to turn in that direction. It’s, it’s all just, you know, it shouldn’t be possible. It really shouldn’t be possible. According to science, it shouldn’t be possible for a string player to play their instrument in tune.
And yet everyone does. I mean, to get your finger within a nanomillimeter of whatever it is, it shouldn’t be physically possible. So, you know, what we’re doing here is the impossible. That’s what we’re talking about. And I mean that literally, not figuratively.
Alexis: and that and that’s a that’s a very interesting thing and I would like to go back to What is the level of freedom for the musicians to express themselves, express themselves when they are playing that music? [00:19:00] I thought there was a dialogue between the conductor and the musician. And so that means they have a degree of freedom in that process, individually and together.
So there’s something going on there, I believe.
Noah: Yes, I think It’s very interesting because I think a group is looking to, the leader for the vision of the whole because everybody has their part to play in the whole. So you need to present a vision of the whole but not in a way that feels dictatorial. It’s got to start with listening and assessing what’s the player’s needs are as specialists.
You are essentially a generalist as a conductor and you are there to help a group of specialists achieve something together, which perhaps they hadn’t even dreamed of possible was possible when they were just individuals in their practice room or, or, you know, whatever it was [00:20:00] sometimes an individual will have an idea which is incredibly valuable.
Sometimes the hive mind will just come out with something which, you know, you never would have thought of. Much better than anything you could have thought of. And so rather than feeling as though you’ve got to impose your vision, I think there’s always got to be a dialogue between the two. And if you are trying to convince people to do something your way then first of all, you really need to be sure about it.
But also, you know, just telling people to do it isn’t enough. You sort of need to coax them to, to sort of, to try it and explore it and, and to maybe feel as though they thought of it themselves. And there’s a little bit of You know, magic about that as well. Maybe misdirection, but
Alexis: I love that because now I can see the parallel with the world of business and all the teams that needs or so the to assemble the creativity of specialists to accomplish something bigger. [00:21:00] and speaking of that, you offer. Immersive sessions with musicians for people to understand what happens behind the scenes.
And so what inspired you to start those sessions?
Noah: that’s right. It’s an incredibly exciting journey, sort of honing these sessions into what they are now. I think I was inspired by the figure of the conductor itself, which looms large over the popular culture in a very strange way, because nobody really knows how it works. Conducting. Sort of this person who stands up on a podium and waves a magic wand, and there is that image there, that archetype of the magician, the wise old sage, and you’re sort of harnessing that power.
And that’s been an incredibly powerful icon, I mean all these films coming out now, there’s a film just coming out very soon about Leonard Bernstein who was a big force in the culture. There was a film with Cate Blanchett, the name of which I forget. [00:22:00] And you know, there was a film about 10 years ago now called Whiplash, which is an extraordinary movie with a great performance from J.
K. Simmons in that. So people sort of have these preformed ideas of what a conductor might be. What I’m very interested in is the fact that when one steps onto the conducting podium, your personality transforms. this is as true of me as it is of anyone else, and it’s as true of as it is of non musicians.
that self transformation can be, I mean, it’s incredibly volatile. But I think it can be a great vehicle for self discovery and for self actualization. And in that space where you can no longer verbalize, going back to this thing of intellectualizing, you know, when you’re confronted with a bunch of specialists who do something that you know, nothing about.
And all you can do is wave your arms at them and communicate yourself physically. Suddenly you strip away all the nonsense and you’ve got a space in which there’s this [00:23:00] embodied learning experience. And you can, oh, you can discover things through this, which I promise you, you could not discover any other way, given years and endless streams of cash.
It’s a unique experience and I recommend it to everyone. So this is part of my mission to sort of coax everyone into trying it, I suppose, and to see what it can offer them.
Alexis: you describe a little bit how it works?
What people are supposed to be doing?
Noah: So we have an ensemble and we have some music and the participants and I will do a little crash course on how you hold the stick, what the basic moves are, just get a little bit comfortable with that. And then we throw people in the deep end and we invite you up to stand in front of the group and We see what happens and whatever your starting point is, we work from there and it’s quite extraordinary because I’ve never [00:24:00] had a situation where we’re unable to make progress.
I mean, even somebody who’s never listened to a piece of classical music in their life. Sometimes people who have that actually have no foreknowledge. Often end up being the best at it, strangely. But you can make a lot of progress. And once you sort of got used to the very strange sensory overload, all these different things coming at you at once things start happening.
It’s very hard to verbalize. You know, I struggle to verbalize it. All I do in my situation as sort of mentor is I just try and again, just sort of lead people along and see if I can get them to notice the sensations within themselves and how they can modify what they’re doing to get a better more vibrant response from the musicians.
And we get the musicians feedback as well, which is It’s incredibly exciting because obviously they’ve played for many, many conductors. And I’ve heard behind closed doors from some of my players that actually some of the conducting they witness in these sessions is better than [00:25:00] some of the conducting they witness in their professional lives as performers.
So you’d be surprised at what you’re capable of, man. I mean, I don’t know. You should.
Alexis: really love that idea that people who know nothing about it able to feel it in a way. So, basically Listen to what is going on in themselves. Listen to what is the feedback they have from the team and adjust their behavior so that the result will be different. And basically that’s what we are trying to tell leaders in other fields to really understand.
How they should.
adjust what they are doing to have a different response. And that’s not, that’s not changing the others, that’s changing yourself. and look at what is going on, what is really going on. And it’s it’s very interesting that the parallel is so obvious. I am, and I’m now really excited and I would like to try that.
Noah: [00:26:00] You should.
Alexis: When the people are going through that immersive experience what do you believe they take away from that?
Noah: they won’t necessarily take away What they want, but I believe they will take away what they need. And it may not be something that they’re capable of verbalizing at the time. It will start off as a felt difference in the way they operate. And then maybe when you step away from that slightly remarkable experience and go back to your life, which is also remarkable.
I mean, everyone’s life is remarkable in its own way, but you know, it’s, it’s also repetitive and it’s the world that you know. You take the treasure back from the cave into the world that you know, and you see if there’s things you can do, optimize, streamline in order that you can find that sensation again you find out what [00:27:00] that embodied knowledge means to you.
I’m hesitant to say too much because. I don’t want people to come along thinking that they should. I mean, you might come to the session thing. Oh, I really just want to increase my confidence in front of a crowd. And, and, you know, my, my presentation skills, it could be something as simple as that, but that’s not, I mean, you’ll get that.
Don’t get me wrong. You will get that. And then some, but. it goes much deeper. There’s almost something therapeutic about it. And I’m very interested in the depth psychologists and their writings. And I’ve also, because of my, my Viennese heritage, my ancestors escaped from Vienna at the same time as the Freuds.
And they were very much in that scene, which was filled with you know, these great thinkers and artists and stuff. So I, I’m very interested in all that literature and all that thought. You know, I’m hesitant to say too much because I think it’s something deep I don’t want people to have too many preconceptions.
Alexis: But I love it. I believe that we discussed [00:28:00] enough so that people can understand that that’s an experience that you need to live and something will happen. And I, I love what you are saying about, that’s not necessarily what you want, but that’s what you need. And that’s a kind of Nanny McPhee experience.
So, sorry,
Noah: it’s funny you say that, because I, I often think of the Nanny McPhee thing, that when you, you want me, but you, sorry, you need me, but you don’t want me, I have to stay. Is this right? And when you want me, but you no longer need me, I have to go. It’s one of the tragic truths of, of life, I think.
Alexis: that’s, that’s a, that’s a very interesting, interesting one. So, how do you continue to, to grow and develop yourself as a leader?
Noah: Well, you have to do things which are going to stress you and stretch you regularly. Anybody who goes to the gym knows this. It’s, you know, relaxation is no good, and pure tension is no good. It’s a [00:29:00] cycle of tension and relaxation which creates hypertrophy. And I think the same is true in terms of the challenges one needs to take on.
So I’ve recently completed this huge challenge and I spent some time after that feeling slightly listless with a big striped pajamas shaped hole in my life. But now I’ve got myriad new challenges which are really stretching me in completely unexpected and completely different directions. So I’m flexing muscles that I hadn’t used before and I hadn’t maybe even known were there.
And I think that’s, that’s crucial.
Alexis: Excellent. I, I, I love the stress and stretch and the part with the, the gym that will really help to, to understand that. Do you have any mentors or role models who have influenced you?
Noah: Well, I, I did. In some sense I still do. But I had a mentor called [00:30:00] John Whitfield, who was a bassoonist and a conductor. He founded his own ensemble, just as I have my echo ensemble. He founded Endymion Ensemble, which was a jewel in the crown of British chamber music making in the 80s if anyone’s interested in Endymion, again, you can find their recordings on Spotify, YouTube tremendous stuff to be found there.
I met John in the last years of his life. He was very unwell. He died quite young. He was in his mid sixties when he died. He’d had health problems throughout his life, but he was a tremendous mentor and support to me. We met completely by chance at a concert. So, go to concerts, you never know who you’ll meet. it’s strange to me now, because it’s been several years since he passed away. And Stripe Pyjamas originally was his idea, actually, we, we, it came up in a conversation that we had. he would have loved to have seen it realised. And, and that made [00:31:00] me think, you know, that he was investing all this time and energy in me, knowing that he wouldn’t live to see me fulfil my potential.
But it was what he wanted to do, and actually I’m convinced that, I mean, I, I supported him with his endeavours as well, and those were life giving for him in his state. But the ability to engage with. musicians and players to arrange and orchestrate music, which he’d always loved doing. And he did some of his best work in those last few years of his life.
So he was an incredibly inspiring man, a difficult man as well. And I think he wanted me to avoid some of the pitfalls that he felt he’d fallen into. when he was my age, particularly regarding the vicissitudes of a creative lifestyle, which maybe are more volatile than if one were working in a different, slightly more stable field.
Alexis: Do you have other people now? that are that are inspiring [00:32:00] you? And the second question that is coming just after is are you are you mentoring other people yourself?
Noah: Hmm. Well, there are plenty of people I find inspiring. I find you inspiring, Alexis. But in terms of mentorship, you know, John was my mentor and I was very, very fortunate. Nowadays, I keep my own counsel and I do my own thing. So life has changed in that regard over the last few years. And yes, I do try my best to be a support to my own colleagues and to my students of whom I have a few and they’re tremendously bright and, you know, many of them conductors, some of them composers.
And so I try to just nudge them in the direction of interesting things. in order that they might shape themselves, which I think is what John did for me. And I mean, also [00:33:00] in funny sort of ways, I was a mentor to John as well, in that I encouraged him to remain musically active despite his ill health. I have a lot of friends of mine who are of older generations as well, and I occasionally try to provoke them and poke them into some kind of creative activity, which I think might be good for them and usually I’m right, so.
Alexis: Yeah, I love it. I love it. So, What are some upcoming projects you’re excited about?
Noah: Oh, well, it’s mostly writing at the moment. I’m very deeply involved in writing projects. I’m currently writing my first symphony, which is a huge undertaking, very, very different from the first opera. And that is a commission for the London Mozart players, which is a chamber orchestra here in London, tremendous group, really lovely, lovely people as well, which is a wonderful thing.
I feel very fortunate to be doing that. And that will be premiered [00:34:00] in the summer as the opening concert of the Thaxted Festival, which was the birthplace of a composer called Gustav Holst. So if you’re new to classical music, you’re getting loads of names here today. Gustav Holst is one to stick into your browser, particularly because next year will be 150 years since he was born.
So it’s sort of commemorating that happy occasion, that milestone. So, so it’s all, it’s a great honor to be doing that. And I’ve got a number of Very exciting composing projects, which are lined up for the new year as well. So it’s going to be busy for the next bit. But at some stage, I look forward to getting back to some, some carving, some conducting as well.
Alexis: Love it! there will be a lot of references to add to the companion blog post And, and finally do you have any advice for emerging leaders, regardless of their
So learning how to tune your radio set so that you can figure out a good principle on which to make decisions so that you know what it is you want to do and where it is you want to go. I think, you know, whatever kind of entrepreneur you might be. That’s useful because you could [00:36:00] invest a huge amount of your time, energy, money, other people’s money into creating something that you don’t really believe in.
And I know people who’ve done that and, you know, they always learn from it, but never ends well. if you can avoid it, then perhaps that’s a good thing too.
Alexis: that’s beautiful. love it. I will add a few links about where the people can find your work, follow your work and get in touch with you. And I’m very thankful for having you join the podcast today. So thank you very much, Noah.
Noah: Oh, well, Alexis, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for having me, and if anybody wants to know more about what I do, they can go to www. noahmax. net. That’s n o a h m a x dot net. That has my music, my paintings as well and various other things. It has a place where you can get in touch. You can also find my music on YouTube, on Vimeo, on [00:37:00] SoundCloud, and you can also, through the website, you can sign up to my monthly newsletter that I mentioned earlier.
And that’s just a monthly burst of creative energy from my part of the world. And you can find out what I’m doing. And if you want to come be a groupie then you can find out where I’m performing, what’s going on. And nine times out of 10, I will be there. So if you want to say hello, that is also really the best way to do it.
In our latest episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I am honored to feature Ioanna Mantzouridou, Co-founder & CEO of Dextego. Join us as we delve into Ioanna’s inspiring journey from her roots in HR to leading an innovative AI coaching platform.
Key Highlights of the Episode:
Journey to Dextego: Ioanna shares her transition from considering a PhD in organizational psychology to spearheading an AI-driven talent development platform.
Dextego’s Mission: Learn about her vision for reducing talent attrition through personalized soft skills training and the role of AI in democratizing leadership development.
Overcoming Remote Work Challenges: Insights into the challenges of developing talent in remote settings, especially during the COVID era.
Empathy in Leadership: Discover Ioanna’s emphasis on empathy, discipline, and a continuous learning mindset when building her team.
Addressing CEO Challenges: Ioanna discusses balancing fundraising, sales, and maintaining vision in the early stages of a startup.
Innovation Culture: How employee-driven innovation and aligning with company strategy can revolutionize workplaces.
Success Metrics at Dextego: The focus on top talent retention and the transformative impact of personalized development tools.
AI Tailoring for Career Stages: Exploring how Dextego’s AI coach adapts to individual skill levels and career phases.
Ioanna’s Leadership Evolution: Her personal growth since starting Dextego and embracing ambiguity and vulnerability.
Advice to Her Younger Self: Ioanna reflects on the virtues of patience and enjoying the journey.
Upcoming Events: Get a sneak peek into Dextego’s future events, including LinkedIn Audio and LinkedIn Live sessions, and the exclusive ‘Dextagon’ event for HR leaders.
Don’t miss this episode if you’re interested in how AI is transforming leadership and talent development. Tune in to gain invaluable insights from a visionary leader in the tech world.
Alexis: [00:00:00] Welcome to Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership. I’m your host, Alexis Monville. Today, we are thrilled to bring you insights from a distinguished guest whose dedication to enhancing leadership through technology sets her apart. Ioana Mantzouridou, a community builder, talent development strategist, and fervent advocate for applied AI, join us to share her groundbreaking journey. As the co-founder and CEO of Dextego Ioana is pioneering and AI coaching platform dedicated to revolutionizing talent development. Johanna, how do you introduce yourself to someone you just met?
Ioanna: Awesome. That’s a great question. So I would say that my name is Ioana, I’m the co founder and CEO of Dextego, an AI coaching platform for reducing top talent attrition by half. I’m from Greece, so I’ve been living in the U. S. for seven years now, [00:01:00] and really focused on leveraging technology to push human capital further.
That’s my quick intro.
Alexis: Excellent, I love it. What inspired you to start Dextego?
Ioanna: So, my background is in HR I actually thought I was going to pursue my PhD for a second on organizational psychology, but then I ended up working in startups. I was the VP of people and chief of staff at the, at the end of another B2B SaaS startup here in New York. And I quickly realized, you know, the importance of developing talent and also the challenges.
that come with this development when it is in a remote setting, because especially during COVID, you know, everyone started working from home and I saw how hard it was for us to develop entry and mid level managers. And that’s primarily because [00:02:00] soft skills like communication, collaboration and leadership take time to be developed, right?
You need life experience. You need to go through situations where you talk to multiple people, you negotiate, you handle conflict between colleagues. And so it was very hard for us to do this and talking to other, you know, HR leaders and learning and development experts. I quickly realized it was not just a struggle we faced, but the whole industry, and that the current organizational tools we had, e learning tools, learning management tools, were not sufficient enough, because they lacked the personalization needed to develop such skills and also the interaction with the learner and the experiential learning, if you wish.
Alexis: hmm,
Ioanna: That is the moment when I realized that I had to do something and I created the team around [00:03:00] Dextego to develop an AI coach that can democratize access to such skills across the organization, especially for anyone outside of the C suite that couldn’t afford an executive coach or didn’t have access to an executive coach.
And make it in a way that it can leverage also the company’s internal know how. So we can integrate with the existing systems that a company has again, whether this is a learning management system or PDFs or, you know, information they have, we can fine tune our model to that so that it can speak their language and really maximize, the value it can give to its employee to support them during their day.
So high level, that is, you know everything behind the reasoning. And for me personally, there’s another layer of equity, which [00:04:00] in my opinion, you know, people with soft skills sometimes tend to have. Access to more opportunities, whether we like it or not. Because they’re not afraid of asking for help.
They’re not afraid of meeting people. And on the contrary, you have some people, like introverts, that without the perfect pitch, they won’t go out of their way to, like, go to conferences or meet mentors. And as a result they might stay behind. And I think this is very unfair. And it shouldn’t be the case.
But the right training can equalize, you know, the playing field for, for everyone.
Alexis: Very, very, very interesting. So I love, the mission of Dextego and how it, it aligns with , your leadership philosophy. you spoke about hiring new people and growing talents. So tell me what, what qualities do you look for in team members?
Especially in those [00:05:00] early stage of of a startup.
Ioanna: Yeah, I love this question because I was just talking to a friend of mine who were talking about the fact that outside of the U. S. recruiters tend to see employee, both as a person and as a professional. But in the U S we tend to have this distinction between okay, professional versus personal, like the same thing for coaching.
Sometimes you go to a corporate coach and they just talk about how to boost your revenue. And then you go to someone that has more of the personal life coach approach and you see that the way they coach people is different. And to me, Also coming from Greece, I think the lines get blurry a little bit.
And I like to work with people, but also hire people that I can see myself spending time with outside of work. So to find this like culture [00:06:00] personal fit I think it’s very hard, but it’s the number one thing I look for. I look for people that have empathy, because when times get rough this empathy will allow us to work well together and overcome any difficulties.
I like people who are very hardworking and disciplined. So that I can count on them and I know that if they say, you know, they will be on a task, they will actually do it successfully and on time. That doesn’t mean perfectly, that just means that, you know, they, they do what they say. And I think that is something I really value, trustworthiness.
And lastly I love to work and hire people that are always eager to learn, like they want to be developed, because if you don’t have that willingness, no matter, you know, what your employer throws at you, it won’t [00:07:00] land, right? So this, I would say, is the most important part.
Alexis: So let’s let’s speak about a specific challenge that you faced as a CEO and how you managed it.
Ioanna: Very interesting. There is a lot I can think right now, but if I was to pick one, as a CEO, you know, for an early stage company, there are two main things you should focus on, and this is fundraising, if you are not bootstrapped, and getting sales in. I don’t think that what I’ll say is just specific to me, honestly, it’s probably something other founders of our states face, but I think there is always a difference between where you’re in now and where you want to get as a startup, right?
Like you have limited resources, so you do what you can today, but you have this grand vision. And so [00:08:00] that gap is sometimes. It’s very difficult to put in words and to be explained to someone that just is getting introduced, for instance, to your venture. So when I’m talking to investors or I’m talking to potential partners and companies that are super established and it’s, it could obviously be a risk of association for them to work with a company that’s new, that doesn’t have the brand awareness and recognition in the field.
I found myself many times, you know. Struggling to find the confidence. To persuade them that they should work with us now, because I know how far we can get, and that this might take some time, but if I, as the CEO, don’t speak into existence this vision today, right, to get to that level, then what am I doing?
So, it’s Someone gave me very good advice. [00:09:00] It’s the fear, you know, of overselling and under delivering sometimes that holds us back. Or, you know, imposter syndrome, all these things, different terminologies, but I cannot wear all the hats at the same time because I won’t move the company further.
Like I have to think, okay, right now, I’m selling, then I’m doing customer success. Then I’m doing investor relations. So I think the biggest thing I’ve learned. This last month since starting Dextego is how to split these roles. So don’t get overwhelmed and don’t act for the best, you know, of the company.
Alexis: that’s in a way balancing the, the needs of different stakeholders. By playing different personas and you know, yeah, that’s, that’s really hard when you need to do a lot of different things by yourself. Yeah.
Ioanna: You know, as a chief of staff, it’s the same thing, but now it’s, I would say, with more responsibility.
Alexis: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. Yeah.[00:10:00] how do you feel, how do you believe we can really foster an innovative mindset?
Ioanna: Even a time where Suddenly, the innovation doesn’t come from the top. It comes from the bottom. I think employees have so much power today to drive innovation and to speak up about what they want to see in a company. So I think, you know, the responsibility is. Spread across organization like anyone today can bring innovation, I think, to a company because we see, and I’ll speak on the L& D side, like 70 percent of employees today say that they’re willing to leave.
To go to a company that develops them. So, similarly, I feel like there is a lot of fear from leadership to not satisfy employees when it comes to [00:11:00] innovation, to leveraging AI in particular because the employees could easily go somewhere else. So to me, to drive innovation successfully, you just have, if I speak to an employee now, right, you have to understand how the outcome, the ROI of whatever solution you’re bringing in will help leadership achieve their goals.
So if you speak their language. They will say yes. I think most of the times employees find such cool tools they want to use, but they can’t make a case to actually implement them because they’re missing that piece of, okay, but how will it really help us achieve our, like, five year plan or, you know, our quarterly goals.
And at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, the leadership cares about these things because they have to report to someone else. So I would say. It’s more [00:12:00] about understanding the strategy of the company and identifying the right type of innovation rather than a question of is the company open to innovation, yes or no?
Alexis: it’s very interesting because you are looking at some success metrics that, that could be met using something. for your company, what, what success metrics do you focus on and why?
Ioanna: Yes. So we focus on top talent retention. Because no matter who, what CEO you take from what field today they really care about their top talent, right? They care about the people that can call and they know they will get it done. these are people that they’ll do anything to keep in their company.
And so when you’re able to bring them a tool that is very personalized, that it matches their needs where they are today and you help them develop for the next day. You’re able to retain [00:13:00] them, but the other part and I made a post about this is totally on the company is how the company does the right change management to explain to the company that implementing a tool like Dextego is for them.
It’s not just the checkbox. It’s something that they understand they need for their personal and professional growth, whether they’re. Working at this company or not, but as a result, the employees will become loyal because they will. be part of this company where the culture is always about personal development and moving forward and improving each other.
But today, unfortunately for, you know, the lack of technology, technological advancements in L and D for the last years, HR leaders have had the misconception that they have no power because they can’t drive revenue. They can’t drive a significant[00:14:00] you know, metric in the company. So for us being able to deliver reduction of top talent attrition by half in just a quarter makes them the heroes they wish they were all these years.
And now we can have a seat at the table and really have others understand that they can make or break a company. At the end of the day, we know without talent. You got nothing. No matter what strategy you have on paper, you have no one to execute. So, to me, it’s a very important metric, and we see it across industries from, like, consulting firms that are really suffering from attrition, to startups, to big enterprises, and it’s a way to impact, you know the workforce overall, and knowing that, It’s for their own development.
It’s, it’s a, to me, it’s a just cause.
Alexis: So you, you mentioned that the tool is [00:15:00] adjusted to the needs of the people.
Ioanna: Yes.
Alexis: what kind of adjustment are, I mean If I, if I’m early in my career or if I am a little bit later in my career, like me, for example, with over 50, how does the tool with, will adjust to our needs?
Ioanna: Excellent question. So, let’s take an example of something that will not adjust first. Like you go to a learning management system and you take the same course. On leadership that everyone else in your organization takes, for instance, right? What we do with DexEgo is the AI coach is able to understand through your answers, the way you answer to scenario based challenges, your level of skills, and adjust the level of Difficulty or the types of questions it asks you, and I’ll give you an example, to really make sure you develop the right skills.
So, [00:16:00] for instance, let’s take an example of a salesperson, and the scenario could be, hey, you have this client, that they’re throwing you this objection. How would you handle it? So you record yourself through video. The coach is your facial expressions, your tone, your pits and content of what you’re saying.
And it gives you personalized feedback back on what you did great, what you can improve. And over time, by you completing some more challenges, it understands. For instance, you might lack negotiation skills so you can close the deal. So we’ll give you more feedback and more related challenges to these till it sees that you improve.
And what we have behind the scenes to track that is our proprietary coachability index framework, which shows you. Basically, how coachable you are, how fast you’re implementing that feedback and how you’re improving your [00:17:00] skills over time. Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you start at, let’s say, 4 out of 10 in negotiation.
What matters is that you’re able to improve to 8 to 9 over time. And that’s, I think, what any employer cares about today because we’re moving into this skills culture. It’s not just what you have on paper. Can you actually learn on the spot and develop? And can we see you becoming an important part of Our company, you know, in years to come, I
Alexis: Excellent. So now I turn back the questions to you, to you. Have you evolved as a leader since starting Dextego?
Ioanna: think so. No, for sure. I think you know, in startups, we have talked about this before one year equals 10. If you will, you learn so much, you see so much, you meet so many people like every day [00:18:00] putting myself out of my comfort zone being in like a situation for the first time. I love it.
It’s super, Intriguing and challenging, but it allows for a lot of self reflection. I think the people that are following my journey can see that, you know, since the last time we meet, for instance, a lot has happened, or I’m improving, or the way I handle things is developing. So, I, I feel like I get feedback from others, and also from my self reflection, I can definitely see that growth.
I think the most challenging thing is to be okay with ambiguity, right? And vulnerability as a leader, whether you’re like a leader for the first time or the 10th time in your career, there will always be some ambiguity. And I’m definitely learning to, to handle that better than I did some months ago.
Alexis: [00:19:00] So if you, if you could give an advice to your younger self. Before starting Dextego what would it be?
Ioanna: that’s a great one. You know, my number one weakness, I’ve always said, is my patience. I’ve always said that. Since I was young, I feel like I’m very impatient. So, life has a way to Teach you to become patient or else, you know I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing now, but I would tell myself that it’s okay when, when things take time, there’s actually a beauty in it.
Cause you can. Be more excited when you get to the end result, and you can Develop more as a result as well. So I would tell myself to, to be patient and to Enjoy each moment, whether it’s tough or not. I think looking back, obviously every difficult moment in your life has made you right for who you are [00:20:00] today.
And if you took that away, you wouldn’t be who you are. Thanks. My little speech to my younger self.
Alexis: I love it. Thank you for that. Oh, can you tell us about an upcoming event? You’re particularly excited about?
Ioanna: Yes, a lot. We have three events in November on LinkedIn Audio and LinkedIn Live. We’re talking about leadership. We’re talking about why mentorship programs fail and how to overcome that. About flexibility. And then in 2024, I can say we’re preparing what’s called Dextagon. It’s basically an invite only event for HR leaders and C suite here in New York. But yeah, I, I won’t say much more. It will be very exciting and we’ll talk about human potential and how to drive us further as a human race.[00:21:00]
Alexis: Excellent. I love it. So where can people learn more about Dextego and get in touch with you?
Ioanna: They can go to our website at dextego. com. That’s D E X T and ego, dextego. com as well as our LinkedIn. And mine as well, you know, Ioana Mantzouridou and check out all our events and upcoming shows.
Alexis: Excellent. Thank you very much Ioana for joining the podcast today.
Ioanna: Thank you, Alex. Thank you very much for your time.
“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” This ancient wisdom resonates deeply through the cycles of life, reminding us how impactful the understanding and embracing of endings is to welcome new chapters truly.
So, what does it take to pause and reflect meaningfully at the closing of a chapter? Just writing a summary or takeaway? What is available currently to help us have a powerful insight to take to the next chapter? How is it related? What do we really leave behind or run away from?
In our individual interactions and experiences, we’ve been easily caught in the tapestry of human behavior. Time and again, we could notice a distinct pattern. While there’s an abundance of guidance on starting afresh, finding the new shiny thing, climbing the corporate ladder, or handling workplace conflicts, there needs to be more dialogue on a fundamental aspect of our professional journey: the ending.
So, why would acknowledging the end be so vital? The essence of it is simple yet impactful. Proper closures lead to authentic new beginnings. A hasty or unclear conclusion can often leave behind a trail of unresolved feelings and doubts and hinder commitment to new ventures. In contrast, a well-navigated closure can usher in clarity, contentment, and renewed purpose.
During one of our personal explorations, we chanced upon Daphne Rose Kingma’s remarkable book, “Coming Apart: Why Relationships End and How to Live Through the Ending of Yours.” While its primary focus was on personal relationships, the depth of its insights is undeniable. Like passing through a door, which place are we going away from, what does passing the door mean for us, and where to?
From Daphne’s work, we can understand that we look for a new identity once a personal achievement is completed. Seeking new relationships and new horizons is our way to find new personal tasks to complete for this new identity to take shape. So, what do we want to step away from, and what are we really seeking for? Since our workplaces’ perception is established with the relationship we entertain, how can we use this treasure trove of wisdom in the domain of professional life?
The challenge was evident. Adapting a deeply personal narrative to the structured realm of professions isn’t straightforward. But our shared mission is clear: to equip individuals with the insights and tools to transition through career endings with grace, insight, and resilience.
And so, our guide, “Pivoting Forward: Understanding Career Endings and Preparing for New Beginnings,” came to life. More than just a reinterpretation of Kingma’s work, it’s our sincere attempt to bridge the personal with the professional, recognizing that our careers, akin to our personal relationships, form an integral part of who we are and see ourselves.
In “Pivoting Forward,” we offer an insightful compass to help navigate the intricate journey of closing a meaningful chapter. We believe that with the appropriate perspectives and insights, every conclusion can pave the way for a brighter, more aligned future.
In wrapping up, every groundbreaking vision sprouts from keen observation, empathy, and a desire to effect change. “Pivoting Forward” is a testament to this belief. Through this guide, we hope to shine a light on one of life’s most underrepresented yet profound transitions, offering a hand to those on the brink of a new professional dawn.
On November 8, 2023, Kent Beck, an influential software engineering figure and the Agile Manifesto’s original signer, delivered a profound session at the Plato Elevate conference in San Francisco. His talk, titled “What I Learned about Coaching in the Back of an Ambulance,” offered a journey through his illustrious career and the evolution of his coaching philosophy.
In the early ’80s, Beck’s time at Tektronix Labs was pivotal, shaped significantly by his mentorship with Ward Cunningham. Cunningham, known for inventing the wiki, instilled in Beck the rhythms of engineering and a burgeoning belief in pair programming. The scarcity of terminals meant sharing one, which led Beck through an organic learning progression—from observing to correcting, suggesting, and finally, taking the lead. This experience laid the groundwork for his later methodologies.
Fast-forwarding to 2011, Beck faced a humbling moment, considering himself the “worst programmer” at Facebook. This prompted a shift towards coaching, where he dedicated himself to mastering various techniques. Beck shared an anecdote about employing the ‘mirroring technique,’ which involves repeating a person’s last word to spur their thought process. This method, often used in negotiations, proved to be a powerful tool in coaching, revealing the strength in simplicity and active listening.
However, the pressure of keeping all these techniques top of mind led to an incident that found Beck in the back of an ambulance, momentarily robbed of his speech. This experience was a catalyst for change. He emerged with a renewed approach to coaching: to be fully present and authentic. Beck emphasized the importance of preparing for each session with the intent to deliver unequivocal value, helping individuals transition from good to great.
Kent Beck’s journey is a testament to the continuous process of learning, adapting, and evolving. His latest endeavors, including his book “Tidy First,” reflect his ongoing commitment to refinement and excellence in software engineering and coaching.
For those intrigued by Beck’s wisdom, his presentation on “Tidy First” is available for further exploration on InfoQ, shedding light on the intricacies of refactoring and clean code.
In a rapidly evolving world, Beck’s reflections at Plato Elevate remind us of the timeless value found in mentorship, the iterative nature of skill acquisition, and the courage to adapt our approaches for the betterment of ourselves and those we aim to uplift.
