Category: Le Podcast – Season Three

  • The best framework to grow yourself as a leader

    The best framework to grow yourself as a leader

    This is Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership. Today’s episode is a little different.

    For this recording, OpenAI is the host. Just for today. The regular host shared the BEPS framework with OpenAI and asked for questions to ask.

    Emma Monville impersonated OpenAI for the recording.

    Now that this is clarified, let’s continue.

    The BEPS framework: four axes of leadership growth

    BEPS is a framework designed to help leaders and managers broaden their impact. It maps leadership responsibilities across four axes:

    Business
    Understanding the business and the ecosystem your organization operates in. It includes developing a clear vision and understanding the reasons behind your solutions, products, features, and services.

    Execution
    Delivering work and achieving results.

    People
    Hiring, growing people, managing performance, and self improvement.

    System
    Understanding the system formed by people, organization, processes, and tools, and removing obstacles to great work.

    The framework is simple on purpose. It creates a shared map to talk about where a leader invests time, what they neglect, and how they can grow.

    Why BEPS exists

    Alexis created BEPS while helping teams move from a function based organization to cross functional teams.

    In that shift, managers started questioning their role. Many saw management as primarily about pushing execution, often through micromanagement. BEPS helped them turn around and see the full space of leadership: business clarity, people growth, and system improvement, not only delivery.

    The common trap: execution everywhere

    In Alexis’s experience, most leaders overinvest in Execution and underinvest in everything else.

    Sometimes it looks productive: more tasks, more activity, more tracking, more pressure.

    But without Business understanding, you can deliver the wrong thing. Without People focus, you burn out or lose talent. Without System work, you keep fighting the same friction again and again.

    The framework makes this imbalance visible.

    BEPS as a self improvement tool

    The simplest way to use BEPS is personal reflection.

    Look at your past week and ask: how much time did I spend on each axis?

    Then do it again for several weeks. Patterns show up quickly. Not all weeks are the same, so Alexis recommends looking at a longer period, and recognizing that some activities have a cadence. For example, career conversations may happen monthly or quarterly, not weekly.

    The point is not perfect balance every week. The point is awareness, then deliberate adjustment.

    BEPS to assess a team or organization

    BEPS also works at a team level.

    If a team’s priorities are entirely framed as activity and delivery, the framework invites better questions:

    • What do we know about our business and our ecosystem?
    • How do we know we are building the right thing?
    • How do we grow and retain people?
    • What are we improving in the system to make delivery sustainable?

    A healthy set of priorities touches all four axes. If everything sits in one axis, blind spots are likely.

    Why System must be separate from Execution

    Alexis explains why he does not merge System into Operations.

    When System and Execution are mixed, people tend to default to Execution and neglect improvement. BEPS keeps System visible.

    Alexis connects this to Deming’s idea: a bad system will beat good people every time.

    How BEPS relates to other leadership models

    BEPS is not meant to replace other frameworks. It is a map that helps leaders locate their growth edges.

    Alexis mentions:

    • Servant leadership, especially when managers shift away from micromanagement and toward enabling teams
    • broader models like Strategy People Operations, where BEPS adds clarity by separating System from Execution
    • habits and practices that can be used to grow along each axis

    How the framework evolved

    BEPS did not start as BEPS.

    It started with three axes: Business, Execution, System.

    The People axis came later.

    Alexis shares this openly and explains why: early on, the teams he worked with associated people practices with bureaucracy and box ticking. He wanted first to shift how they saw the organization and the system. Then, when the time was right, People became the fourth axis.

    The two qualities behind the framework

    To use BEPS well, Alexis highlights two key qualities:

    • curiosity: learning, listening, exploring beyond your default area
    • humility: accepting you do not know everything, and being willing to adjust

    Together, they create the conditions for real growth across all four axes.

    OpenAI

    Alexis, how would you describe your role to someone you just met?

    Alexis

    I am the Chief of Staff to the CTO at Red Hat, an enterprise software company with an open source development model.

    OpenAI

    What inspired you to develop the BEPS framework?

    Alexis

    I was really looking for something that would be able to help people get out of the corner of the room they were stuck in. I was trying to help teams. I was trying to mentor people and help them see the full spectrum of their role, and they seemed to be blocked somewhere, stuck somewhere in the corner of the room. So for me, the BEPS Framework represented an opportunity to help them turn around and see all the available space for them to grow themselves and grow their organization or teams.

    OpenAI

    How did you develop the four axes of the BEPS framework (Business, Execution, People, and System)?

    Alexis

    It all started with working with a team and especially the managers of the team we were trying to really transform the organization from an organization that was built by functions. So you had product management, engineering, quality assurance, and support. All those organizations should work together to develop a product, but they were a little bit fighting with each other, trying to justify their lack of results. We were trying to change the organization and build cross-functional teams. The managers were wondering what their roles would be because they saw their roles as really focused on one aspect of the work, not looking at all the other axis. So, showing them the four axes was a way to tell them: Oh, okay, there’s more to my role than just micromanaging the people already doing the work.

    OpenAI

    In your experience, which of the four axes do leaders and managers often neglect or underinvest in?

    Alexis

    It’s really interesting because I believe the axis people love to be involved in is Execution, and they usually neglect all the others. So. It’s not necessarily one of them. It’s more all of them except execution. And they focused on execution, but in the wrong way. I’ve seen people already focused on really doing their work but forgetting about everything else. I’ve seen managers focused on getting people to do work, do work, do work, do work, do work, do more activities, and more work, more work, more work, and really micromanaging the activities but not looking at the other axes and not looking at the impact of that work and missing the whole point.

    OpenAI

    How can the BEPS framework be used by leaders, either individual contributors or managers?

    Alexis

    I believe a framework is first of all a self-improvement tool. It’s really, looking at it and reflect on what are your contributions. One way to do it is simply to look at your past week and reflect on how much time did you spend on each axis. If you look at the definition of the axis, what do you know about the business axis for example? What do you know about the industry you are in? What do you know about your competitors? What do you know about your partners? What do you know about your own business? Do you know how your company is making money? Do you know what are the really important forces at play there? Ah and if you have all the answers. That’s great. You can use all your knowledge about that business axis to improve on the three other ones. If you know nothing, there’s probably an opportunity for you to develop and an opportunity for you and your team to grow, work with your peers on so on and so on. So, first of all, a self-reflection tool that can help you be more effective.

    OpenAI

    Can you give an example of a situation where the BEPS framework helped a leader or team to be more effective?

    Alexis

    That’s really interesting because, in many mentoring sessions I did, people were usually a little bit stuck on execution. They wanted to get to the next promotion. In a way, they wanted to get to the next level. But they were missing the point about how to get there. The BEPS framework was an interesting tool to show them: Okay, where are you already working on? What are you really working on? And for example, if I pick the system axis for example, what are you doing to really improve the processes and the way the organization is set up? A lot of time, the leaders put that responsibility on their manager. Asking them: Really? That’s only on your manager to improve the organization, the system, and the processes. You have no role in that, and of course, by asking a few questions, they realized that they could do many things. They were the ones dealing with that system on a day-to-day basis, providing the experience to people. So that was a way for them to realize that they could be more effective. We can go to the other axes and have the same kind of conversation. So. It’s really an opportunity for people to see other aspects of their roles, other facets of their roles.

    OpenAI

    How can the BEPS framework be used to assess the focus and priorities of a team or organization?

    Alexis

    Yeah, it’s definitely that!  Where do you put your focus on? How do you define your priorities, and if your priorities are to deliver a list of activities and to tick all the boxes I’m asking you? Okay, but what do you know about your business? How do you improve your knowledge about your business? How do you know you are right? How do you know you are wrong? How do you know you’re developing the right things to serve your customers or users of your product or services? How do you help your people grow? How do you keep them in the company? Keep them engaged. So, If you look at the priorities of a team or an organization, there should be something on all of the axes. If everything is focused on one, you’re probably missing the point. So that’s a great tool to look at how people define their focus and priorities and help them reconsider, then move things away from their default axis.

    OpenAI

    How do the four axes of the BEPS framework relate to other common frameworks or models of leadership and management, such as servant leadership or the seven habits of highly effective people?

    Alexis

    Oh yeah, that’s a really great question. I was looking for a framework that is simple enough to explain and will cover all aspects without being too simple. For example, I’ve heard many times that the only framework you need to have is Strategy People Organization. No, Strategy People Operations more exactly. But you’re missing the point there because strategy, I can say, okay, that’s my Business axis. People, Okay, that’s my people axis. But Operations is Execution and System; usually, when you mix the two, people focus on the execution. They forget about improving the system, and as William Edwards Deming said: a bad system will beat good people each time. So you really want to have all those axes together.

    If I consider Servant Leadership, it’s a really interesting one because basically, the managers I was helping when we changed the organization from functions to cross-functional teams with people in charge end to end of delivering something, the managers were looking for a new role because they were not supposed to micro-manage people and focus only on execution. So their role was already moving to that servant leadership role, so we helped them see that, and we used some of the servant leadership principles to help them reconsider their role, and it really worked well. And, of course, the 7 habits are well-known for many people, so that’s also simple training to have simple things to do, which helped them realize that they were not really working on the other axes. So, we use the other frameworks to help people grow on the four axes. BEPS is a simple way to help people discover all the facets of their roles and responsibilities.

    A bad system will beat a good person every time.

    William Edwards Deming

    OpenAI

    Can you share any tips or best practices for how leaders and managers can effectively balance their time and focus across the four axes of the BEPS framework?

    Alexis

    The first one is knowing what we are doing—knowing what you are doing and where you invest your time. So if all your time is focused only on one axis or you’re imbalanced, that’s a problem. But how do you know that? You only know that when you can track where you invest your time during the week, and you can do that in several weeks to have a good balance. So, of course, not all the weeks are exactly the same. Let’s say you’re doing that for four weeks, and you look at all the different aspects of your work, and each Friday, you take some time and tag. You say, okay that was really business, that was more execution, that was more already working in the system, that was more already working on the people, and so on and so on. You look at how balanced or imbalanced you are, and maybe you reconsider how you will invest your time in the following week or following weeks. I believe that’s this way. Ah, you can really have a better picture or a better balance. Of course, the things that you will probably do, and let’s say every month or quarter, you need to do that for a longer period to have a good picture of your balance or imbalance. For the people aspect, growing people or managing their careers, that’s maybe not a conversation you have every week. That’s maybe a conversation you have monthly or even sometimes quarterly only, so there’s a cadence to find and a balance to find on a quarter. That would be a good setup.

    OpenAI

    How has the BEPS framework evolved or changed since you first developed it?

    Alexis

    The beginning of the framework, and I’m a little bit ashamed of that. To be honest, there were only three axes. That was Execution, of course, and there were the business and the system axes. I really wanted people to connect their knowledge of the business with the execution, with the day-to-day work. I was focused on improving the system so you could see what was missing. And that’s why I’m ashamed of it. There was just a small missing piece. I forgot that people were maybe an interesting aspect of that framework. So, of course, I added that later. But just as an excuse for that, to try to justify me a little bit. The people I was working with really saw all the HR things as really bureaucratic and just ticking-the-box exercises, and I didn’t want to fight that battle upfront as a starting point. I already wanted them to reconsider the organization and all the processes involved first. So we started with those three axes, and then we added the people axis when it was the right time to do it.

    OpenAI

    In your opinion, what are the key qualities or characteristics that a leader or manager should possess to be successful using the BEPS framework?

    Alexis

    There are probably two qualities or two characteristics. It’s curiosity and humidity. I believe the two are really needed. You need to be curious. You need to learn to listen to others, and you need humility to reconsider things and accept that you don’t know everything. You probably don’t know how wrong you are or how right you are. Until you really see all the perspectives of the people of an organization. So Yeah, I would say curiosity and humility are the key qualities.

    OpenAI

    Alexis, you are the Chief of Staff to the CTO at Red Hat. Thank you for joining me today.

    Alexis

    Thanks for having me!

  • Invest in Open Source with Joseph Jacks

    Invest in Open Source with Joseph Jacks

    Over the last years, we moved from innovating in secret labs to innovating in the open.

    Open source has become a key way to shape standards, accelerate adoption, and build software ecosystems that compound over time. In this episode, I’m joined by Joseph Jacks, founder and General Partner of OSS Capital, a fund focused exclusively on early-stage commercial open source companies.

    Joseph’s perspective is clear: open source companies are not just proprietary software companies with a different license. They are a different species, across many dimensions.

    What Joseph does, in plain words

    Joseph invests in entrepreneurs building companies around open source technology.

    He explains open source as a licensing approach that gives anyone permission to use, download, modify, and participate around a piece of software. Many people interpret that as “free”, but the more important dynamic is permissionless participation and the ecosystem it enables.

    OSS Capital operates in private equity, specifically venture capital: investing in startups early, building a portfolio, and holding investments for a long time rather than trading.

    Why start OSS Capital

    Joseph came to venture after being an entrepreneur and working inside an early open source company. Along the way, he noticed two things.

    First, many venture firms describe their focus in vague terms. If you survey funds, the message often sounds like: “we invest in great people building great companies.” Joseph found that lack of focus confusing.

    Second, he developed conviction that open source companies are categorically different from proprietary software companies. Not in one way, but in many.

    The combination of those observations led him to build a fund with a clear mandate: commercial open source, early stage, focused thesis.

    Investing in projects before teams

    One of the most distinctive ideas in this episode is Joseph’s approach to sourcing.

    He says he does not spend his days meeting founders in pitch cycles. In most cases, OSS Capital starts differently:

    • develop a point of view on a market and where disruption is happening
    • identify a specific open source project that stands out
    • contact the creator of the project only after conviction is built

    This flips the typical VC dynamic. Instead of being pitch-driven, it is thesis-driven.

    A large part of the work is separating signal from noise. Joseph describes a data-driven diligence approach using public signals in the open source world, including what can be learned from GitHub and ecosystem traction.

    It resembles, in his words, some of the initial diligence patterns of public-market investors, even though venture holds are long-term.

    From project to company

    When OSS Capital invests, it is often at the earliest stage, sometimes when the company is being incorporated.

    Joseph describes early help in several areas:

    • team formation and early hiring
    • shaping a business plan and monetization strategy
    • understanding competitive dynamics and ecosystems
    • facilitating knowledge transfer through co-investors and advisors

    He emphasizes a network effect: bringing experienced builders of open source companies into rounds and relationships, so founders can learn directly from people who have already navigated the same terrain.

    Why commercial open source can be more capital efficient

    Joseph addresses a claim on the OSS Capital site: commercial open source companies being more capital efficient.

    His core argument starts on product development.

    Open source can accelerate feedback loops and improvement because the project is built in the open. More people test, adopt, contribute, and stress the technology earlier. That can reduce the cost and time needed to reach maturity compared to building privately.

    Then there is go-to-market.

    By the time an enterprise buyer is involved, the company may already have internal users and advocates. That changes the sales dynamic: adoption can pre-exist the sales conversation, lowering friction.

    Joseph also shares a longer-running hypothesis: some open source companies historically raised more money than they needed to reach key milestones. One part of his mission is to help open source companies be understood and built in ways that improve capital efficiency.

    Will open source keep growing

    Joseph is strongly biased toward “yes.”

    He points to a simple dependency claim: most professional software engineers rely heavily on open source, to the point that without it, modern software development would grind to a halt.

    He also makes a motivation argument.

    People often ask why engineers contribute without being paid. Joseph frames this through intrinsic motivation: contributing because it helps others, because it helps learning, and because it sustains the system that contributors themselves depend on. That intrinsic engine keeps the flywheel turning, even alongside extrinsic incentives.

    The leadership trait that matters most

    When I ask Joseph about leaders he admires, he answers: humility.

    He observes that people who have accomplished a lot are often surprisingly humble. They separate what they built from who they are. That humility, combined with self-awareness, makes collaboration and problem-solving easier. It is also a trait he says he is still working on himself.

    Closing thought

    This conversation connects investing, ecosystems, and leadership in a useful way.

    Open source changes how technology is built, how trust is earned, and how companies can grow. And behind the models and the markets, Joseph brings the discussion back to something very human: humility, and the ability to keep learning in public.

    Listen to the episode:

    You can listen to this episode on your favorite platform: Anchor, Spotify, Breaker, Google, Apple

    Here is the transcript of the episode:

    Alexis

    This is Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership. I am Alexis Monville. Over the last years, people have moved from innovating in secret labs to innovating in the open, and open-source became the way to define industry standards. Today, I am pleased to have Joseph Jacks on the podcast to explore the open-source world. Joseph is the founder and General Partner of OSS Capital, a fund that exclusively focuses on early-stage commercial open source companies.

    Hey Joseph, how would you describe your role to someone you just met?

    Joseph

    Well, I invest in entrepreneurs building companies around open source technology, and if you don’t understand or if you’ve never heard of open source. It’s basically a way of licensing a piece of software a piece of technology in a way that anyone can use or download or modify or really participate in the commercial opportunities around that technology and so it kind of gives you this permissionless dynamic a lot of people think of that as free. Free to use, free to modify.

    Alexis

    Interesting so investing in entrepreneurs, how does it work. Are you doing that by yourself?

    Joseph

    That’s essentially what I do. I have a venture capital fund. There’s a part of the world called private equity. So there’s public equity. A lot of people might be familiar with public stocks like if you look at Apple or Microsoft or Walmart or whatever public company that’s kind of called public equity and you can buy and sell shares of those companies as an individual retail investor in whatever country you happen to be living in. You have a few dollars sitting around and then there’s the world of private equity where private companies manage their businesses without the scrutiny and regulation of being a publicly traded company. So private companies operate with a lot less public oversight and government oversight but at the same time, they really produce, I believe, the vast majority of innovation and economic breakthroughs in the world. And so in the technology industry, there’s a part of the private company sector called startups and you know there’s a lot of different definitions for the word startup and sort of what that means. But startups essentially refer it to a group of people could be one person building some type of technology that solves a critical problem. An interesting problem for the world and addresses some critical pain points, could be around automation, could be around giving people more insights into some information or data, making some business processes more efficient, a lot of different things. And there’s a specific type of startup that I focus on investing in and it’s a startup where the creator Is focused initially on building an open source technology of some kind and so typically is a project that is built towards addressing some problem for developers and or is built in the open transparently and allows people to see the technology in its entirety. You can read basically the entire ingredients and source code around that technology if you’re interested and want to you can actually modify and change that technology yourself.

    Joseph

    For example, if you’re a consumer of an early product that might launch on Kickstarter or maybe a big company. Maybe a new Apple product or something and you wanted to be able to contribute and change and modify that product or technology in some kind of way. It would really be either impossible or very very difficult to do that unless that technology was open source. The interesting thing about the startups that I invest in through my fund which is basically a venture capital fund. We invest money on behalf of others, limited partners. It’s really all of my money and also other people’s money that I manage and basically, our fund makes investment decisions in early-stage startups that basically fit our investment thesis and so. Going back to our investment thesis, we basically identify and develop a point of view around open source technologies that we think can really be the basis for overtime very large and impactful businesses.

    Alexis

    So tell me about the pivotal moment that led you to start OSS capital?

    Joseph

    Well, I was previously an entrepreneur for a number of years I started a couple of startups that really resemble our thesis and there were companies building a business, building a commercial opportunity. For the founders and investors of those businesses as well as the ecosystems they were operating in around some open source technology of some kind and so I developed a pretty strong understanding of this approach for a few years just as an entrepreneur. And I also got to know a bunch of people in the venture capital industry and in that kind of category of asset management and a lot of the observations that I developed around that motivated me to start OSS capital and so specifically what I learned there were a few structural things that I learned about venture capital. The main ones is that venture capitalists, very few of them have a clear focus mandates. In other words, if you were to survey maybe the top ones or even maybe the top 50 capital funds, they really just, the extent to which you can get a sense of their focus boils down to “we like to invest in great people building great companies” and so it’s really difficult to get a sense of what they actually focus on. At least from my standpoint that’s one aspect I was always kind of confused by. When you learn about open source in the context of building a product or a business it’s really the fundamental thing. It’s kind of you’re building the entire product or business around some core open source technology. What I developed as a point of view over many years from working at pretty early open source company called Talend which originally started in France and worked at a couple of other companies after that were fully proprietary software businesses is, and I developed the point of view that though those companies were different kind of they’re just like a different species of company right? There’s sort of unique on their own, on a lot of different dimensions. Not just one dimension but many many dimensions and those observations really stuck with me and so the combination of first noticing that there was very little focus in venture capital as an issue and then that combined with there’s really kind of No one types of technology companies. There’s ones that are just a fully proprietary technology behind the scenes and you’re commercializing and monetizing that somehow as compared to a sort of a type of company where the core technology behind the company is an open source project of some kind is a very different kind of company. I really started to believe and just that belief kind of continued to intensify over the years that building a commercial open source companies or open core orientiented companies and we really have to kind of invent new language to really describe why these companies are very different in many different aspects but basically those observations, the fact that I felt, and I still really largely feel that venture capital has very little focus and then being that open source companies are really fundamentally different and maybe they deserve their own unique kind of focused structure, really motivated me to start out as capital. I guess the one piece that gave me the confidence to do it was I felt at the time and maybe I feel this slightly less. So now I still probably feel this a little bit but maybe a healthy dose. I felt extremely unqualified to try to basically, solve this problem in a way that would require basically starting my own venture fund and going out and raising money from people and making investments and proving out the thesis. Until I noticed that no one else was really doing it. I had sort of made some assumptions that other people might jump into this and build a fund focused exclusively on investing in open source founders. But after getting to know a bunch of folks in the venture world, it quickly became apparent that was most likely not going to happen, not because people didn’t feel like it was a good idea. Good idea or not but really that required a very deep amount of conviction and belief that open source companies are sort of categorically different, qualitatively different and could actually grow into a large meaningful category on their own over time right? And so this is like 2017 2018 kind of timeframe. So yeah, that’s basically why I started the fund and yeah been a fun journey since then.

    Alexis

    Yeah, then I can imagine. It’s different If you’re a fund and you want to invest in IP and you don’t you don’t have any Ip or not the way that people think about Ip in the more traditional way. So it’s of course a default focus and I like the fact that draw really focus on something or gone he wanted to say something.

    Joseph

    Yeah, that’s true.

    Ah, no, no, no I think you’re exactly right? it requires a change in mindset and to revisiting a lot of previous assumptions and points of view on on how intellectual property works for sure.

    Alexis

    Um, so tell me what you are looking for when you meet with startup founders.

    Joseph

    Well, I don’t meet with any startup founders. Really I mean I focus exclusively on this world of open source technology and it’s interesting like most of our investments I would actually say probably 95% of our investments have been made by developing point of view. And then secondarily developing a thesis around a project that exists in the world and then sort of a none step contacting the creator of the project introducing ourselves. And telling them that we really like what they’re doing really a lot of the hard work and probably most of the hard work is in developing conviction that the person or the people the team behind creating the project are also the right people to start a company that you know can raise millions of dollars and go and potentially build a large business and so we spend a lot of time investigating whether the creators of the project can also be potentially great founders of building a company. And a lot of the time we don’t believe that’s true and we just don’t invest. But sometimes when the stars align then we invest. It’s quite different from the traditional venture capital approach where you’re sort of getting pitches all day and you’re sitting through pitch meetings and you’re taking introductions or whatever like we’ve certainly been introduced to a handful of people and we made some investments that way but I would say the vast majority of the time is we’re really just looking at a lot of data in the open source world developing a point of view about which markets are getting disrupted over others. And which categories can be created at what points in time we’re looking at changes in the software industry, the rates of growth in different areas like new categories that exist that didn’t exist before and we really start to kind of understand does open source have an advantage in a particular area for whatever reason and if it does the really interesting thing about open source is there’s so many implementations it’s kind of this cambrian explosion of implementations and approaches that starts to happen. Once it’s pretty clear something could work. Have a lot of people really trying to work on proving that out in the open source world. So a big part of our job is really just trying to understand from separating all the signal and the noise what stands out. What’s actually really interesting from a growth standpoint, from an engineering quality standpoint. There’s a lot of things that you can determine and understand by really just looking at Github and looking at the data. That is publicly available really to anyone and so it’s actually extremely fascinating doing what we do as a private seed stage venture capital investor has a lot of similarities to the way hedge funds manage public equity investments, at least in terms of the way they do some of the initial diligence I would certainly say it’s very different terms of how we hold the investments. We hold them for a very long time and we never we’re not selling and trading in and out of them like hedge funds, but the data-driven aspect is very intensely prominent in the way we actually, basically develop an investment thesis and a point of view about specific investment.

    Alexis

    Yeah, it’s’s really interesting to see that. Of course, it’s building the open so you can do the due diligence by yourself. So How do you help those project people to go from the project to building a company.

    Joseph

    Well a lot of the time I would say almost all the time when we lead or are the co-lead of a round we are involved when the company is incorporated or we actually help incorporate the company. And so it’s pretty much at the very earliest of the stages like when the project is at a point where the creators have decided and they’re interested in building a business around the open source technology and they appreciate that the purpose of that business is to invest and continue to grow the open source technology and just really continue to do what they’ve been doing the main things that we are helpful with when we make an investment are kind of multifaceted but I’d say the main things would be the formation of the team of the people that basically comprise the company and join the company. The formation of an understanding of a business plan and a monetization strategy whether that’s executed immediately or over time over the course of many years. We help a lot with thinking about competitive market dynamics understanding the broader ecosystem understanding kind of how the ecosystems coming together. A lot of people would maybe say this is the main contribution that we bring is we really make sure that it’s not only on an advisory basis. But a co-investment basis that other really great individuals who’ve built hugely successful open source companies from the last thirty you know 15 20 30 years actually come along the journey with us. It’s not that we like to be alone and we don’t mind being alone and we have a lot of you know, very high conviction in pretty much every investment that we make but, we really want to create a mechanism for doing knowledge transfer. We talked about this a couple of days ago but we have this kind of network of people that join us as angel investors in rounds a lot of them are our investors in our fund a lot of them are just advisors to companies that we’ve worked with. And they’re really great people I mean they’re individuals who basically from the idea stage and as founders built really amazing companies like Red Hat, Confluent, Github, Mongodb, Elastic, many really great open source companies that you think of today. A lot of those people can be really valuable and helpful, partners to new founders that are really just trying to figure out a lot of things that they’re encountering for the first time but other people may have already developed different points of view and and have encountered in the past already. So we really try to do this kind of knowledge transfer process where bringing other people onboard as co-investors as Angels and as advisors in really any kind of capacity really just to help these founders that we work with be more successful in whatever they’re dealing with whether it’s like hiring or building their community in a certain way or, even raising their next round of funding or should they raise the next round of funding. You know the different points of view on different other investors just a lot of different topics and so. Those are the kinds of things that we tend to help with early On. Because the companies are so early they’re all sort of facing similar challenges around like how to how to manage the growth of their communities, how to make their first or 10 hires, how to think about Market dynamics and their business Model. We tend to kind of cross-pollinate a lot of the ideas across the portfolio and also connect the founders with each other so they can kind of learn from each other as well and it’s actually reasonably easy to do that because all the companies are, kind of somewhat somewhat homogenous and similar and at least in terms of their fundamental structure. They’re all building companies and businesses around some core open source projects. They tend to learn from each other pretty pretty rapidly.

    Alexis

    Oh yeah I love that idea of leveraging the the power of the community to really build other companies I like that I read on your website that commercial open source software companies are 50% more capital efficient. Did I read that correctly? How would you explain that?

    Joseph

    Yeah, that’s something that we put up on our website. Actually our website currently today I think today’s June Thirtieth 2022 I think it’s the same website, we’ve actually had on on the internet since September Twenty Eighteen so we’re we’re actually pushing out a brand new website pretty soon I wouldn’t say that to correct the statements on the website. I think they’re all pretty accurate. Still 50% I think is low as a rough estimate. There’s a reason why I really deeply believe that open source businesses, commercial open source businesses are more capital efficient than other types of businesses and really the main reason is the following. So like if you think about a company that is building a totally proprietary product in isolation, in a cave, or in a closet or whatever metaphor you want to use. The energy required to build that product is a function of how much time and resources you need to invest in order to get that product delivered to the market or into some state where you can actually start seeing adoption and and typically you’ll really see a couple of a couple of things like the cost for doing that will either be subsidized by the individuals behind that technology themselves so they’ll sort of be self-funding that it will be through other sources of financing. You might have to raise money to sort of build that initial technology and prove that out or or another company could be funding it somehow you could be doing it nights and weekends on the side but by the time you launch something you kind of typically already spent a lot of time and energy into building that out. So it really just is is a lot more expensive to do that. With open source, it’s very very very different. The open source you have this kind of idea, you start building in the open from the beginning a lot of projects don’t quite do this and they they build in private and they have a lot of engineering cycles invested before sort of quote unquote flipping the switch on a repository and making it public. I Guess from that standpoint you could say that they’re very similar I mean you still have to make the investment in building out the project and building out the technology but with with open source because you have this dynamic where the project can actually benefit from an accelerated feedback input from many more people than possible if it was built in private and it was sort of a closed Beta and you had a wait list or whatever. It just makes the product and the technology better at a faster rate and as a consequence it reduces the cost to bring the technology to a state of stability and maturity and development velocity really that would otherwise be possible with a proprietary approach and so as a result by the time that we invest in a company around an open source technology. Most of the cases show that the project already has, a sort of an equivalent amount of adoption testing QA, development and really contribution from a lot of people that otherwise you’d have to kind of raise many millions of dollars to produce if you were building a fully proprietary technology company and that’s just on the research and development sort of core technology side of things if you look at customer acquisition and revenue and building a business. Lot of the things that we’ve seen as well are that capital efficiencies are even greater in in that area. So with open source projects, you have this developer community that could use the technology in a lot of different ways, and in many different flexible contexts and lots of use cases. They could be building out and by the time you sort of navigate to a buyer inside of maybe an enterprise organization an it or a line of business or a CTO organization, a lot of the time they might actually already be users of your technology and they might already be advocates and they could in fact, they could just survey their developer community and sort of recognize wow we’re actually already using your technology and everyone loves it. So by the time that we want to start negotiating a contract or you know understand what your product or your services were already sold like there’s no need to sell us and at that point it starts to become much easier and the friction starts to to drop dramatically for the startup or for the company wants to sell something that thing efficiently and sell it with the least amount of friction possible and so instead of the old way of selling software. This is actually not necessarily the old way I think this is actually largely still how it works in sort of proprietary saas world is you have a lot of customer acquisition dollar spent to just get in front of the customer and get users and get adoption and then you have another big wave of dollars spent to convert those um those users into paying customers and so that’s why I think we have in in this kind of saas category we have all these terms like viral coefficients and all the conversion rate heuristics. All these different things that are really optimized around. Okay, you’ve spent a certain amount of dollars to just get the adoption wheel flywheel going and then you have another amount of dollars that you spend to figure out how to convert those users and I’m not saying all those things go away completely. Obviously you still have to invest time and energy and sort of navigating how to convert all of your of your adoption into a business of some kind, fractionally or marginally speaking. But with open source has a sort of phenomena that helps not just with distribution and marketing. It also helps with quality of the product, innovation rate of the product, trust of the product and so many other things. I believe the 50% capital efficiency percentage that you’re that you’re pointing to on the website there is pretty low and in fact, I think that percentage amount was actually referring to something a little bit more specific and so I can kind of explain what it is in like 30 seconds or so but it’s basically pointing to there’s a cohort of open source businesses in the last kind of first years that reached 100M or more in revenue what I was referring to in that percentage was that on average those businesses went out and raised I believe about a quarter of a billion dollars to reach that level of revenue.

    Joseph

    Meaning that they went out and raised a seed round a series a, series b, a series c, and in some cases a series d to reach a 100M revenue business and I would argue and and this is a long-running hypothesis that we’re actively testing with OSS Capital.

    Alexis

    I Get this.

    Joseph

    And hopefully, we’ll see what the data looks like in the next 5 years or something, but I would argue that in all, not some all of those cases, those companies raised too much money that they did not need to raise in order to reach the same outcomes and the same revenue milestones, in, in fact, the same amount of time. So, as a result, you can say those companies were overfunded or they raised money unnecessarily, however, you want to express that is basically part of our mission with OSS Capital is to change a few things about the way open source businesses are built so that they can be better understood from a fundamental standpoint and basically run more capital efficiently.

    Alexis

    So based on all that we can expect that we will have more people creating open source software in the future right? Do you see that really growing?

    Joseph

    Well, this is an interesting question There’s a lot of research and reports that I can point to, maybe you can include them in the show notes, that show the rate of open source. Some people point to it as declining, some people point to it as growing. tend to be very biased in thinking that the rate of open source is only expanding and growing. One proxy for that would be looking at Github’s data. They’re going to reach something like 100M registered users pretty soon I think when Microsoft acquired them in 2018, they were around 30M users. So they’ve grown quite a lot over the last few years. It’s not to say that every registered account on Github is someone creating open source I don’t think that’s true. It’s probably a fraction of that 100M that we’re about to see on GitHub actually creating open source projects, but one thing that I do think is true in a broader sense is more humans are becoming aware of the fact that sort of the highest leverage and the most impactful professional career. You can pursue is in software development, software engineering and more specifically building software products and I believe that building software products will over time become more and more automated and humans will need to learn fewer technologies and fewer languages to build complex innovative products, but I do not subscribe to the point of view that the ai is going to be writing all the code for us I do not believe that is true, and so I think more people, more humans will need to learn how to program and write code for computers because with the way computers are currently built, we need to express very precise instructions to that computer in order for the computer to do what we want it to do and I don’t believe that the the Ai models today can generate the level of precision and nuance needed to build complex software products that do very arbitrarily complex things for humans whether it’s infrastructure software, database, software application, software what have you? there are too many wide encompassing aspects of the technology stack that need to be fine-tuned and tweaked and implemented using code and software largely stitched together, managed, or written by hand via humans and so as a result I can only be most confident in the fact that as the software and that sort of this digital technology career starts to become more compelling and interesting to more people because this is really where the highest leverage and the highest compensation is in in the tech industry, more people will realize in order to be the most differentiated you really have to learn. You have to learn how computers speak and as a result you have to learn how to program and I think as that happens if you look at all of the software engineers today, all the professional software engineers, there’s a lot of debate we can do around this but like I think largely speaking most people would agree, there’s somewhere in the order of 20 or 30M software engineers in the world like professional software engineers. Some people say 50M, so let’s say it’s somewhere between 30 and 50M. I would argue, and I think most people would agree that 99.9 of all of those software engineers heavily heavily depend on open source, and it’s not a question of how much they depend on open source. It’s really they fundamentally depend on open source like without open source technology and tools and infrastructure. They would not be able to do their jobs period like that. They would not be productive like imagine as a developer that you went to your computer, and instead of using millions of projects that exist, that you can readily access on the internet for free and pull together in your application to be productive and build something for the World. You had to write your own custom compiler from Scratch. You had to write your own programming language from scratch. You had to write your own application server from Scratch. You had to write your own development framework from Scratch. You know you had to write your own networking stack from scratch and your own database runtime from scratch and a long list of things. You would never get anything done. It would take you decades of your life to get anything done if you were very talented in the modern world, and so I think that there there’s this. There’s this leverage that exists with open source that is unquantifiable and immeasurable, and as a result, software engineers really greatly appreciate that. And they continue to participate in that movement. This is an interesting kind of Phenomena that non-technical people. People who do not code or do not understand how computers work. They just don’t understand how it works. A lot of time when I’m talking to our investors who, in a lot of cases, are non-technical institutions or other individuals and they do that. They’re not familiar with open source. They’ll often ask this question. Why is it that humans continue to invest so much of their time in this open source thing when they’re not getting paid and they don’t have any economic benefit and. It’s kind of interesting that people ask this question because it’s very revealing of the lack of appreciation for, how much benefit and Leverage engineers get from helping other engineers. Right? There’s this really interesting tribal aspect where engineers are very motivated to help other engineers and the way that they do that most efficiently and effectively is by contributing to open source and sharing their project and sharing their their insights with others. And that just perpetuates the growth of this community and so I think as more people come into the tech industry and appreciate that software engineering is the highest leverage discipline.Then they become software engineers. They realize that the only way they can continue to benefit from all the things that come with that is to really contribute to open source and to give back to that community. I think that just continues to expand the flywheel of open source and it continues to accelerate the fundamentals. Another aspect that people don’t really appreciate is there’s really two types of motivations in the world. There’s motivation to do something for an extrinsic reward sort of like an extrinsic motivation I’m doing something to get paid some monetary or some measurable reward. Or you’re doing something intrinsically you have you have this intrinsic motivation you’re doing it out of the goodness of your heart or in order to learn something new or to have a good feeling about participating in some positive system and that’s really what open source is all about people do it for the intrinsic reason that helping others sort of overrides all the other motivations. And they want to do that specifically because they’ve benefited from all these infrastructure that already exists and so I think it’s kind of a counterintuitive thing. It’s a little bit difficult for non-technical people to understand. But I think it’s pretty profound and I believe that’s the the kind of the main reason open source will continue to grow and be be a huge force. Overtime in the future and actually furthermore I have a much more kind of aggressive point of view around this which is that I think open source will not only just continue its current pace. But as people realize more how powerful this approach is for building technology I think that we’re going to see open source disrupt and transform pretty much every category in the at a minimum, the digital technology world which is all of software all of consumer applications, pretty much anything digital that you can imagine.

    Alexis

    Wow that this is really impactful and speaking about intrinsic motivation, changing the world is a good one. I love it. Joseph, you worked with a lot of leaders among those who you admire what’s the one trait that stands out to you.

    Joseph

    I would say the main trait that stands out to me is humility. Um people who have accomplished a lot and are extremely successful at what they do tend to have humility and it’s one thing that I’ve noticed. And that has really stood out to me and something that I’m still personally working on. I can definitely have a lot of arrogance and hubris a lot of times. So developing humility I think is a really important attribute that I really admire and it’s actually something that is easy to forget like when you’re really trying to identify the absolute best people in whatever area that you’re looking into and you’re trying to find the best insights and the most skilled people who have just a level of depth that is hard to express, because it’s kind of experiential or some individual has accomplished some massive outcome or built something really huge. I would say the vast majority of the time people who have accomplished really huge things if you really sit down with them and get to know them. They’re very humble and in fact, they’re so humble that they sort of look back at everything that they’ve built and they think, they almost think very little of it. They sort of think I learned a lot from that but I don’t think that’s what defines me as a human and it’s an interesting quality that I appreciate a lot. Probably the main quality. The reason I’m so interested in this is I’d say there some leaders who don’t have that quality where they may actually be very accomplished and may be extremely good at what they do, but they don’t have this humility that comes with a level of self-awareness that becomes very valuable in conversations when you’re partnering with them or you’re collaborating with them or you’re trying to solve a problem and that’s probably the number one thing that I pay attention to these days.

    Alexis

    Excellent, Really really beautiful and inspiring. Thank you very much Joseph for having joined the podcast today.

    Joseph

    Thank you Alexis for having me.

    Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

  • Collaboration by Design with Philippe Coullomb and Charles Collingwood-Boots

    Collaboration by Design with Philippe Coullomb and Charles Collingwood-Boots

    The challenges facing humanity are growing in complexity.

    Collaboration is one of the ways we can respond: by bringing diverse minds together and designing conditions where they can actually work through complex problems.

    In this episode, I speak with Philippe Coullomb and Charles Collingwood-Boots, co-authors of the book Collaboration by Design. They both describe their work in a similar way: designing how individuals and organizations come together to solve or navigate complex problems. Often through workshops, sometimes through smaller conversations that help people make sense of complexity.

    From a client booklet to a 360-page book

    The origin story of the book is practical.

    They were approached by a client in Singapore who wanted a training. Philippe and Charles designed it, and created a participant deliverable: a booklet of around 100 pages. People in their network saw it and reacted with a clear message: “This is what we need. There isn’t much written about the practice.”

    So they decided to turn it into a book. What they thought would take a few weeks became a year. The booklet grew into a 360-page publication, expanded topic by topic, until they forced themselves to stop adding.

    Charles adds an important point: people often saw a “simple workshop” but did not understand the depth of intent and practice behind it. The book is, in part, a way to codify that depth.

    The iceberg of facilitation

    One of the most useful images in the conversation is the iceberg.

    What we see in a workshop (facilitator, group, activities) is the tip.

    Below the surface is what makes the visible part meaningful and seamless: the sponsor work, the design work, the political and relational work, and the careful choices that prevent predictable failure modes.

    That is why Philippe and Charles resist the idea that “the facilitation in the room” is the most important part. It matters, but it depends on what happened before.

    Sponsor engagement is not optional

    For Philippe, the first critical step is sponsor selection.

    You need the right group of sponsors who represent enough perspectives and carry enough leadership to co-design the session. Selecting them is not trivial.

    Then comes the engagement work: a series of conversations that clarify context, objectives, and constraints. Mechanically it sounds simple. In practice it is tricky, because those conversations surface contradictions, ambiguities, and stakeholder dynamics that sponsors may ignore or hope to avoid.

    As Philippe puts it: whatever you identify, you must make explicit and address. If you bury it, you will pay for it later.

    Context setting is part of the craft

    Once the workshop begins, Charles places primacy on participant engagement.

    The goal is to create the conditions that allow people to explore, challenge, ask questions, and make sense together. That starts with context setting: participants need to understand why they are there, what the sponsors expect from them, what the journey is, and what role the facilitator will play.

    This is also where facilitation includes coaching sponsors. Sponsors do not always know how to open a workshop well. Helping them find the right posture and tone is part of the job.

    A workshop can feel dull for simple reasons: people are unsure what they are doing, activities feel disconnected, and no one explains why the perspectives in the room matter. Context setting fixes that.

    Virtual is similar, but harder

    Both Philippe and Charles are clear: the core principles stay the same online.

    Sponsorship still matters.
    Design still matters.
    The right questions still matter.

    But virtual collaboration often loses intensity. It takes more effort, more time, and often a larger delivery team than people assume. Philippe challenges a common belief: that digital delivery should be leaner than physical delivery. In his experience, it is not.

    There is also the relationship to content. In person, the physical act of drawing on a whiteboard makes iteration easy and creates shared energy. Online tools can approximate that, but the dynamic changes, and adoption becomes a real hurdle.

    Charles adds a sharp design point: you cannot design a virtual workshop the same way you design an in-person one. Energy, attention, and cognitive load are different. Online also creates more barriers to engagement: camera off, mute on, side distractions. Modules and activities need to be adapted to that reality.

    Hybrid is the hard mode

    Hybrid workshops introduce another layer of complexity.

    Charles calls it plainly: hybrid is very, very challenging. Tech becomes central, not peripheral. You need reliable audio, video, and collaboration tooling that supports cross-platform engagement, not two separate experiences.

    Philippe adds a vivid example: even a delivery team of seven collaboration professionals (five together, one remote, one remote) naturally formed “5 + 1 + 1.” The on-site group did not put enough effort into the digital channels, because their in-room collaboration felt easier. If that happens among experts, imagine what happens across multiple participant groups.

    The takeaway is simple: the technology may exist, but most clients underestimate what it takes to set it up well at scale.

    Space is a facilitation lever, not logistics

    When we speak about collaboration, we often reduce space to logistics.

    Philippe and Charles argue the opposite. Space is part of the design. It shapes the quality of attention, the mood, and the seriousness of the work.

    Charles describes space as an enabler of both effectiveness and experience. Philippe highlights a common client trap: putting space in the same bucket as catering and transport. But you cannot lock people in a windowless hotel room and expect them to invent an exciting future.

    There are universal attributes that matter: daylight, plants, space, line of sight. And then there is the next level: choosing a location and a space that is meaningful for the purpose of the workshop, so the environment reinforces the intent. When you have that alignment, the event gains wholeness.

    The workshop is a moment, not the end

    A workshop is not a purpose in itself. It serves something else.

    Charles describes facilitation as walking a tightrope between the plan and the reality of the participant group. A great facilitator is not executing a script. They are responding to a living system: sensing energy, listening closely, and adapting in real time.

    This is where the delivery team becomes essential. If the agenda needs reshaping, you need support to pivot fast.

    And after the workshop, the real question becomes: who will do what with what emerged?

    Philippe describes two categories of follow-through:

    • tangible outcomes: decisions, artifacts, documents that enable action
    • intangible outcomes: momentum, alignment, leadership energy, relationships that need to be nurtured

    Some sponsors will naturally leverage the workshop’s potential. Some will not. Part of the facilitator’s responsibility is to assess that and help sponsors maximize the value created.

    Closing thought

    This episode is a reminder that meaningful collaboration is designed.

    It is not only a workshop agenda. It is sponsor selection, context setting, facilitation craft, space as an enabler, and thoughtful follow-through that turns a moment into momentum.

    Here is the link to find the book Collaboration by Design. The book is available in English and French.

    Listen to the episode:

    You can listen to this episode on your favorite platform: AnchorSpotifyBreakerGoogleApple

    Here is the transcript of the episode:

    Alexis

    This is Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I am Alexis Monville. The challenges facing humanity are growing in complexity. Collaboration is offering us to tackle more complexity by getting diverse minds to work together. How to gather people to facilitate successful collaborations?

    Philippe Coullomb and Charles Collingwood-Boots design the way individuals come together to create innovative and sustainable outcomes to address complex issues.

    Alexis

    Hello Philip and Charles. That’s great to have you on the show.

    Philippe

    Hello.

    Charles

    It’s great to be here.

    Alexis

    So Philip. Ah, let’s start with you. What is your role and how would you describe it to someone. You just met.

    Philippe

    If I only I knew after all these years. I sort of defined myself as a collaborative designer. So in a nutshell my role is to design Collaborative Journeys to solve complex problems or make complex decisions in a multi-stakeholder context and most of the time it takes the form of workshops but not only.

    Alexis

    Thank you. Your turn Charles same question: What is your role and how would you describe it to someone you just met?

    Charles

    So I don’t know whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing but I have the same challenge as Philippe but if I come from a so similar background the way I describe my role is: I design the way individuals and organizations come together to solve or navigate complex problems and just like Philippe a lot of the time that involves workshops but sometimes it’s designing simple conversations to make sense of complex problems.

    Alexis

    it’s really interesting, I’m excited about that conversation! Can you tell me what was the pivotal moment that led you to write the book collaboration by design?

    Philippe

    It’s actually a funny story. We got approached by a client in Singapore who wanted a training so we designed the training and we thought that we needed deliverable for the training. And that it would be great if the deliverable was co-written with the participants. So we produced a sort of booklet or 100 pages booklet ah primarily aiming for the participants to that training and then everyone else in our in our network who saw that booklet. Said look. It’s amazing. We really need something like that. There’s nothing written about the practice, could you make that available and while we couldn’t because this was a client artifact we thought okay we have something pretty good. Let’s put in a few weeks of work to make it a little bit better and let’s turn that into a book. And then of course Charles and I being who we are we thought it was a few weeks and it ended up being a year. We turned a hundred pages booklet into a 360 pages book and every time we would touch a topic we would come with a list of 10 things we believed, that had to be described or illustrated and then we went on and on and on until someday we thought, Okay we have to stop here. We cannot keep adding so initially it started from basically making a prototype and people around us loving it and asking us for more.

    Alexis

    That’s really beautiful. That’s really serving the needs of people!

    Charles

    And maybe just add on to that. People often didn’t fully understand the way that we did things and the intent behind it so to some extent it was about trying to codify what people saw as a simple workshop. But in a way that really drew out the depth of practice and procedure that sat behind it.

    Alexis

    Excellent. So when I think of facilitating successful collaborations I picture the facilitation that happened during the gathering would you say it is the most important aspect.

    Philippe

    You want a good child.

    Charles

    Yeah, So my perspective it’s one part of it and certainly a great deal of emphasis needs to be placed on the Workshop. You know the manifestation of all the work but certainly it’s not I wouldn’t say the most important. For me, It’s the process leading up to it. It’s the work with the sponsor or the owner of the problem or indeed the solution that you’re trying to work towards and really unpacking with them and facilitating the process by which they come to understand the problem. And then starting to design from there. So The facilitation at the front of the room is an aspect but I wouldn’t say it’s the most important.

    Philippe

    To build on that at the beginning of the Book, we take the analogy of the iceberg and I think it’s quite telling what you see, the part of the workshop that you see which is a facilitator a group and a set of activities is on the visible side, the tip of the iceberg. And under that is a lot of pre-work and a lot of background work to make the experience meaningful and the delivery seamless.

    Alexis

    So, what happens before the gathering is really important. You spoke about engaging the sponsors. Can you tell us a little bit about what it means? What are you doing when you are engaging the sponsors?

    Philippe

    Yeah, sure. The first thing is to select the sponsors and make sure that you’re working with the right group of people that represent enough perspective that together show enough leadership so that you have the right conversation partners to co-design the session.

    Philippe

    And that’s not a small task selecting the right group. When you have them, the process is both quite straightforward and quite complex. Quite straightforward because all you can do is have a series of conversations so you schedule a number of conversations through which you will unpack the context clarify the objectives and then progressively develop convictions on what to do and how to do it in the workshop and quite complex because through those conversations you usually uncover a whole lot of contradictions ambiguities, complex stakeholder dynamics that either the client is not aware of or is aware of but closing a blind eye on and you cannot afford to just bury that under the carpet. Whatever you identify you have to address you have to make explicit and then address, otherwise you’ll pay the price later so that’s it, a straightforward process in terms of mechanics but conversations that are quite tricky.

    Alexis

    And that’s what will really change the dynamic during the gathering. So, when I read the book, to be honest, I realized some of the things that happened to me during some workshops or meetings, clearly, I realized that it was linked to that preparation before the meeting. So during the gathering now that you’ve engaged the sponsors and you designed the gathering. What is really important to you?

    Charles

    Obviously through that preparation you’ve developed an understanding of the client of the problem and enough of an understanding around the content to navigate the conversation. But for me, the primacy is engagement with the participant group. Creating the right conditions at the start of the workshop that enable an open conversation. A freedom for the participants to explore to challenge to ask questions to make sense. For me, it’s important to really set the right context up front and your position as part of that group in navigating and facilitating them through the journey that you’ve set out in the agenda.

    Alexis

    So setting the context that’s part of what the facilitator will do and part of what the sponsors will do.

    Charles

    Correct. Your role as a facilitator in that moment in that time needs to be clear. People need to understand what they can expect of you. The role that you will part play and you need to establish yourself in that position across the course of the workshop. But equally the drivers behind the workshop the work that they’re doing the expectation of the sponsors on the participant group to engage in the best way possible to get the best outcome is a key part to so setting that conversation or the dialogue up front with the sponsors and the group is all part of setting the right scene or creating the right conditions for participants to engage because we’ve all been through those workshops where it’s a very sort of dull and dreary experience where you’re not really sure what you’re there to do and.

    Charles

    Sometimes the activities are a little bit disconnected or you’re not too sure what they’re about, so enabling the participants to be confident in the journey that they’re about to embark on even if it’s a little bit unknown and confident in you as a facilitator to lead that and why they’re there. And why their perspective is important.

    Philippe

    And the even for the part that is on the Sponsor’s Shoulder. We do have a role to play. It’s not always natural for the sponsors to know how to properly set the context for such a workshop. So we need to coach them through that, to make sure that they adopt the right posture and convey the right messages sometimes it will be evident to them sometimes not and we need to check if it is and if it’s not we need to help them find the right tone.

    Alexis

    Okay, that’s simple, I Love it. With the pandemic, a lot of things had to happen remotely virtually and when I picture facilitation or collaboration I think of people in your room. What are the main principles to observe when you design and facilitate a virtual gathering? What are the things that are changing with all the things that are the same? Philip, do you want to start?

    Philippe

    Well, I’m not I’m not sure I want to because I’m not a huge fan of virtual collaboration. But I guess like all of us have done, I’ve done a fair bit and I think what doesn’t change is the absolute imperative to get the sponsorship right and to get the design right. So, however, you deliver the experience, making sure that you’re looking into the right questions in the right way is an imperative and you follow the exact same process to achieve that. The main difference is in the intensity of the experience and in the interaction with the content. I didn’t experience yet the same intensity of interactions between participants digitally and it takes a lot more effort to get to intense interactions aid thought and time to get to intense interactions digitally than it takes physically so you need to take that into account when planning the time scheduling the time of your different activities and sizing the delivery team it does take work we have for whatever reason that image that a digital delivery should be leaner than a physical delivery and I don’t think it is and content-wise there’s a completely different way to relate to content to relate to ideas.

    Philippe

    So in the physical world, we have whiteboards and there’s this sort of physical connection to the idea and we draw something It’s extremely easy to iterate. Everyone’s engaged. You can feed from everyone’s energy. This doesn’t happen online and again the digital collaboration tools like Mural, Google Jamboard all of these, offer the possibility to collaborate on the same objects and, but the dynamic is slightly different so you need to take that into account again in your design and of course, there’s the adoption of the tools that can be a real nightmare. No one needs an explanation to grab a marker and use a whiteboard. The adoption of a Mural board as simple as it may seem to some of us can can be a big huddle to others.

    Alexis

    Oh yes.

    Charles

    The big thing from my experience is you cannot design a virtual workshop through the same means as you would an in-person workshop. The demands of  energy of mind space are completely different in person than it is virtually. in addition, there’s a hundred, here’s a myriad of more barriers that people can create for themselves that create a limitation to engage. The simple act of putting yourself on a mute or taking your camera off. All these things create a distraction from each other in the content in the workshop. So the way you design needs to be very different the activities modules or tasks that you put in place need to be different. They don’t have the same effect in person as they do virtual. Now I would guess sort of one of the upsides of covid is the fact that the tools at our disposal are getting much better. And they’re becoming more effective in driving greater engagement on participants through these workshops and some of the micro improvements in the tools themselves and the functionality are getting better. So, much like Philippe I will take an in-person workshop over virtual any day. However, the nature of our work and I guess the nature of work more broadly sees a more distributed participant group quite often and the demand from the client or the expectation for the client is for us to support a virtual session. So we need to lean into it more we need to develop a greater skill around virtual but also hybrid workshops. You know where you have some virtual and some in-person that’s at a whole another layer of challenge and complexity. But yeah, again, more for us to learn and adapt our craft in pursuit of meaningful collaboration in multiple contexts.

    Alexis

    Tell me more about that hybrid setup where people are either joining in the room or joining remotely I Assume that with some people coming back to the office and some wanting to stay home it will happen more often and what other things to take into account when it’s hybrid?

    Charles

    I guess the first thing is it’s really hard. It is very very challenging. So that my experience is the role of technology in support of cross-platform engagement. The platform I mean those virtually in those in the room. The way you design and configure the discussions needs to be carefully considered, it is very easy just to default well those online are one group or have one type of discussion and those in the room have a different one. To ensure that you get a cross-pollination of thinking and perspective you need to weave the two together. A lot of the time that’s enabled by good tech that you have in the room. So either the polycom multi-directional mics and cameras to support in breakout in the room and virtual breakout discussion. There’s sort of different bots or sort of sort of mobile virtual participant devices that you can get these days but again the technical support and prowess required to manage that it is really important because otherwise there’s isn’t another potential fault or fault line in the work that can really derail the conversation and make things more distracting they need to be.

    Philippe

    I would totally emphasize the point on tech, you can totally have 4 people in a room and 1 person remote that completely works. But then if you have a workshop of 50 people and you have 10 groups like that in parallel. What is the technological ability of the client or the event to have ah ten spaces in a row a seamless audio input seamless audio output seamless video inputs seamless video outputs and seamless and digital collaboration boards. So, the technology exists but the setup it takes for thirty fifty or one hundred people to collaborate effectively in an hybrid mode. Most clients are not willing to put in the price. The main challenge is the continuity or the integrity of the experience. People in the room are in a different energy from people at home. they do not feed from the group they do not get that sense of momentum they do not feed from that and I have an example that illustrates that I did a session, I think maybe was 2 three weeks ago and it was just at the level of the team we were a team of seven delivering the session. 5 team members were colocated in Italy and I was the lead facilitator from Malaysia and the graphic facilitator was in the UK so team of 7 but in reality, we really felt that it was 5 plus one plus one the 5 people in the room delivering the workshop had a quality of collaboration that did not extend to the other two that were in different locations and even worse because they had that quality of on-site collaboration. They were not putting as much effort as they should have in the digital communication challenge channels that we had put in place with the Uk and with Malaysia so this is at the level of a team of professionals who are experts at collaboration. So imagine if you replicate that in 5 7 ten groups in parallel with people who are not professionals of collaboration.

    Alexis

    Yeah, I can totally empathize with that I remember switching from one team to the other and one team was already at ease with all the electronic tools and they were already. They had a way of working when they were using chat channel for the team, using that as a back channel for all their conversation within the room when the meeting happened. I switched to a team where the habits of that team were really different. They were using one on one back Channels. And so I knew there was something happening. because I could see their face changing and they could see people speaking about things that had not been discussed before and it took me some time to realize that just that habit of having one on one back Channel using text messages or chat was really hurting the dynamic of the team and it took me really a long time to realize that, so I can imagine just the use of the technology or the ability to use it could be a big problem to deal with.

    Philippe

    Yeah.

    Alexis

    I really wanted to cover that part of hybrid or remote meetings because that’s part of our reality as Charles mentioned but I agree with both of you I would prefer for in-person interactions all the time. I agree with that dynamic. Do you believe that companies will realize that and invest more in off-sites to get to the perfect space to ensure a good collaboration. Do you feel the space is also important when you are in person?

    Charles

    Ah, 100%! I think the space is a key facilitation lever that needs to be designed just as much as the agenda because it enables meaningful effectiveness and pleasant experience for those in the room. To the point around do I think clients or organizations are looking will revert back to in-person I think so not necessarily because they understand the value of in-person collaboration. But. Simple fact that as a community as a society. We’ve been so disconnected from each other this simple act of being in the room which was once probably overlooked, people will understand just how good it is having human interaction human connection, so I do think that’s going to be a key consideration and the speed at which our clients sort of go. Yes let’s all be in the one room together and we’ll fly people out or invest it in that way. I think that’s good. We’re gonna see a return to that. That being said, the fact that we’ve been collaborating virtually inverted commas in collaborating engaging virtually effectively across covid people who see it as equally as a means to just work continue to work that way. So yeah I think there’s a balance. We need to strike there.

    Philippe

    And regarding space. Yeah, of course, I couldn’t agree more with what Charles said and I think one of the things that makes it particularly challenging is that for us space is part of the design exercise. So we know how much choosing and setting up the right space for the job is absolutely essential often in the head of our clients space falls in the logistics bucket so it will fall in the same type of consideration as scattering as transport and so on so they usually don’t instinctively realize that space matters and that no you cannot ask people to look themselves up in a windowless room of an average hotel in the suburbs of a city and then from that place invent an exciting future for the next five years there’s a profound dissonance and while it seems obvious to us, it’s not always obvious to our clients. So there is a challenge for us to help the clients realize that space is in service of the business intent as is in service of the objectives of the session.

    Alexis

    Yeah, it’s interesting it reminded me, I had the chance to organize a gathering of something like 300 people in Boston and I was lucky to work with someone in the event teams that was really engaged in trying to make the experience really good and she found a space that was incredible because it was at the top of the building and the room had windows on both sides and the first person who entered the room said but how will we present anything? But she she used the screen that was a LED screen so we had a perfect presentation, perfect visibility of the content in a room with window all around. That was absolutely an amazing experience and compared to all the things we had before in those ballrooms in hotels where you are in the dark for the full day that was absolutely amazing. So it’s an interesting small thing about space to dig into. 

    Philippe

    And actually to build on that, of course, there are some universal minimum attributes that you would want from a space for workshops. You want a lot of daylight you want plants, you want space, you want line of sight so you can always see through the entire room and feel the energy through the entire room. Those attributes regardless of what you’re going to do you want people to be at their best create a space that’s conducive of that. But then the next layer and we seldom have that opportunity. But when we do. It’s absolutely amazing is First, you define the objectives and the high-level design and then you find a space that is meaningful in relation to the design and then the space becomes that and it’s when I say space. It’s space and location the choice of the city or the choice of the neighborhood or the country or the type of building. Then everything about the space is in service of the intention and that’s when you have a sense your event starts getting a sense of wholeness where everything speaks and everything about as you experience where you are what you eat What you see what you feel is in service of ah of a specific goal And when you have that luxury. It’s just amazing.

    Alexis

    Wow! So that’s totally different than going back to the office and having a meeting. Okay, perfect. So let’s say we did it. We engaged the sponsors properly. We designed the perfect agenda we find the perfect location the perfect space. The gathering is done. Ah so we’re done or what’s next?

    Charles

    Well then we begin? So the workshop itself is almost like walking a tightrope between what you plan to do and the reality of that plan in the face of the participant group. There’s only so much you can develop ah in terms of insight or perspective. The real test is when the people you’re designing for engage with that agenda and sometimes the agenda fits well and the conversation goes just as you had imagined only it’s more richer and has greater depth because of the different perspectives that are being fed in. Other times, not so many other times what you thought to believe what you thought to be true isn’t and you need to adjust and pivot as you go, so your connection to the content your connection to the agenda your connection to the energy needs to be extremely close. you need to sense What’s going on, you need to feel what’s going on. You need to listen and all the while it’s this balancing of that tightrope between what you had planned to do, what you’re hearing and what potential impact or shift that might need to happen. Sometimes it’s a small thing you change the language in some assignments or some activities other times it requires a reshuffling or reshaping of the agenda itself. So the facilitation isn’t just a simple act of following a script. The agenda it’s being acutely present in the group in what’s being said and constantly testing and refining as you go and my perspective is That’s what really differentiates between a workshop that has an agenda and you’re simply executing on the agenda and a workshop that is responding to the living system or the living participant group and as a result gets the right outcome based on on the desire and ambition that emerges from the group. So it’s it’s it’s never over even when it’s all you know everyone sort of had their celebratory drinks and head off into the world wherever they might be going to.. There’s always sort of more to be done because the reality is the workshop is just a moment in time and something needs to happen. With all the hard work and content that emerges from those workshops. So yeah, the preparation is just that it prepares you for the moment. But your role as a facilitator is a demanding one if you do it well, but also very rewarding one in the end.

    Philippe

    And that’s when having a team take all its meaning because to be able to do what Charles is saying you need to be supported by a team that has the agility to pivot. if the changes you make are marginal you might be fine on your own. But if you’re realizing that you need an entire shift of the agenda. There’s not a chance you can do that without a team and that also explains why and again it takes time to convince sponsors about that, why your workshop for 40 participants can have a team of 4, 5, 6 because you’re basically you’re buying the creativity and the agility to pivot and respond to everything you sense from the group.

    Alexis

    Excellent and what comes after the gathering you mentioned just before the booklet that was the origin of the book. So I assume that there’s something important that comes after the workshop after the gathering.

    Philippe

    Well, the workshop is never a purpose in itself. A workshop is in service of something else. So you have to ask your question. Do you have to ask yourself the question, how do I feed back the outcome of the workshop into whatever is coming next. Usually what’s coming next is some form of action because the outcome of the workshop needs to be implemented. It can be part of a project a program part of a strategic direction but actions have to be taken so at the end of the workshop. You  simply ask yourself. Who is going to do what with what came out and as a result, what are the most useful artifacts that we need to produce to enable them to facilitate their work going forward sometimes it’s going to be super sleek things with a communications purpose. Sometimes it’s going to be pretty rough documents because they’re going to be iterated the next day by the same people, but it’s all a matter of creating what’s the most useful that’s for the outcome part for documenting the outcome part then, of course, there’s also the same way we’ve been working responses to prepare them to the session. We need to work on responses to help them fully leverage the potential they’ve created so of course part of that potential is tangible outcomes. We made the decisions x y z we produced outcome x y z and of course, this is valuable. But there’s also questions around leadership momentum alignments more intangible outcomes and these need to be nurtured by the sponsors and again some sponsors will do that naturally some will not. You need to assess that as a facilitator. And if they don’t do that. Naturally, you need to find ways to help them. Um, help them do it in the best possible way to maximize the value for them.

    Alexis

    Philippe Coullomb and Charles Collingwood-Boots are the authors of the fantastic book Collaboration by Design. I highly recommend to all of you. Thank you Charles and Philip for having joined me today on the podcast and having written that book. Thank you.

    Philippe

    Thank you very much.

    Charles

    Thank you very much.

  • The Path to Purpose with Ashley Freeman

    The Path to Purpose with Ashley Freeman

    Some conversations leave you with a simple feeling: clarity.

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I speak with Ashley Freeman, founder of Flourishing Work, about purpose, trust, and the kind of leadership that helps people grow.

    Ashley’s story begins in medical research, where she experienced both great and not so great bosses. That contrast sparked a question that stayed with her: what makes good leaders good?

    She went on to study leadership formally, but the real turning point came when she became a people leader for the first time. That is when she saw theory become practice, and practice create results: teams flourishing and business outcomes improving together. Within six months, she knew what she wanted to do for the rest of her life: lead, and help others learn how to lead.

    Leadership is taking care of people

    Ashley anchors her view of leadership in a definition she aligns with Simon Sinek: leadership is taking care of people.

    The best leaders she experienced invested in her development and offered opportunities before she felt ready. One example stayed with her: as an administrative assistant, she was invited into meetings and projects far beyond her job description. Not by accident, but by intention. The goal was growth.

    That is also why Ashley insists leadership is not about title. You don’t need direct reports to lead. You can take care of people in any role.

    Continuous learning, made real

    Ashley keeps learning in a very concrete way: she runs a book discussion club every Saturday morning.

    It started early in the pandemic with two participants. It grew. It then found a steady rhythm with a core group of five to seven people who still meet regularly. The club is not only about reading. It becomes a space to analyze concepts, apply them to real life, and hold each other accountable.

    As I told Ashley, one of the most surprising parts of a book club is realizing you did not read the same book as the others. People notice different things, keep different quotes, interpret ideas through their own experience. The discussion doubles the learning.

    And there’s a second effect: when a group is counting on you, you actually read.

    Personal brand and trust

    Ashley also works with leaders on personal brand, and she frames it in a grounded way: everyone has a brand, whether they manage it or not.

    Your brand is what you are known for. It’s the blank in the sentence: “What a ___ they are.”

    The useful part is this: you can influence that blank through choices and touchpoints. Which meetings are you in. What topics you show up for. What people hear you speak about. How you introduce yourself. How others introduce you.

    And yes, it connects to trust.

    Ashley’s point is not about forcing sameness. It’s about clarity: when you are clear about what you value, you attract people who can trust you because they understand what you stand for. You can be very different and still share core values such as respect. That shared core makes trust easier.

    Difference, conflict, and better work

    Ashley is also a Myers-Briggs practitioner and uses personality work with teams. She finds it especially useful because teams constantly do two things: take in information and make decisions.

    When teams are very similar, they move fast and enjoy each other, but share blind spots. When teams are diverse in preferences, they can experience conflict and misunderstanding. Ashley’s approach is to help each side see the value the other brings.

    Efficiency without relationships creates friction over time.
    Empathy without outcomes creates a different kind of frustration.

    The work is not to make people identical. The work is to build appreciation for why the difference matters, and how the combination creates better results.

    The book: finding your career purpose

    Ashley’s upcoming book is called The Path to Your Career Purpose.

    She shares two beliefs behind it:

    1. everyone has a career purpose, a unique combination of passions and talents
    2. everyone deserves good leaders when they reach their dream job

    The book is about moving from where you are today toward work that is both practical and meaningful. Ashley is careful not to dismiss the need to pay bills and provide for family. Her point is that both can be true: stability and purpose.

    And she connects it back to leadership: if we help people reach purposeful work, we also need environments where they can flourish once they get there.

    Closing thought

    Ashley’s definition stays with me: leadership is taking care of people.

    Not as a slogan. As a practice: development, opportunity, clarity of values, continuous learning, and the courage to work with difference instead of avoiding it.

    Listen to the episode here:

    Here is the transcript of the episode

    Alexis

    Hey Ashley, how would you describe your role to someone you just met.

    Ashley

    I Am the owner and founder of Flourishing Work which is a company based here in the US that provides facilitation and coaching services to leaders of all walks of life.

    Alexis

    Okay, okay, but tell me more What was the pivotal moment that led you to fund flourishing work.

    Ashley

    Oh great question. So my background is in medical research supporting the efforts of academic medical researchers and through that experience, I like everyone had good and not-so-great bosses and it just gave me a real passion for wanting to understand what makes good leaders good and what makes those leaders that aren’t as great. You know that way as well. And so  I ended up getting an MBA in leadership to really understand and study this topic further and it. But it was really when I started managing a team for the first time when I became a people leader for the first time that everything completely changed for me so I was able to see that the lessons we were learning in the classroom and the theory could actually be put into practice and do some amazing things to help the team really flourish and the business outcomes to match that level of productivity and that was it that when I about six months into being a people leader I said this is what I want to do the rest of my life I not only want to lead but also, more importantly, share how to lead and not just lead people literally but also just interpersonal skills like navigating difficult conversations. For example, I just wanted the rest of my life to be able to coach and teach people on those topics and it’s the best job in the world.

    Alexis

    Okay, okay, okay so you are a leader yourself. You worked with a lot of leader. So among those you admire? What’s the one trait that stands out to you.

    Ashley

    When I think about what a leader is I align with one of my favorite authors Simon Sinek’s definition which is taking care of people. So the best leaders that I ever had who led me were very invested in my development and giving me opportunities really before I even felt ready for them and made sure that I was okay and that I understood what my role was and that’s it. It’s It’s just taking care of people and that’s why I say you know in my opinion you don’t have to have direct reports to be a leader you can lead anyone. That’s definitely what stands out is that they just take care of their people regardless of who they are.

    Alexis

    Okay, okay, so that’s that’s really important because the taking care of people is something that you described if I understand well as growing them helping them to grow and identifying opportunities that help they believe you be good for that. That’s something around those lines.

    Ashley

    Yes, the best boss that I ever had brought me into a lot of meetings and projects that were well outside my Immediate job description. I was actually just an administrative assistant at that time and I say just because you know those projects and those meetings had nothing to do with organizing his calendar and booking his travel and some of the things that I was directly responsible for and yet he brought me into these opportunities for the express purpose of helping me to grow and I will never forget that.

    Alexis

    So really an important! How did you decide to develop yourself as a leader what was the one action you have in mind that was really, the One action you take you’ve taken in the past to develop yourself?

    Ashley

    Oh, that’s a good question I think I have kind of a vague answer to that because for me I really wanted to understand the theory behind what I knew who a good leader was and who a not so good leader was but I didn’t understand why. And for me, I really wanted to understand the principles behind what made good leaders good and so for me and in my case, it really was a lot of studying so I read dozens of books I still to this day lead a book club every Saturday morning I never stop learning. I just wanted to have that knowledge so that I could then apply it because I didn’t know what to do without that knowledge.

    Alexis

    I need to I need to ask a follow-up question on one thing you just said a book club a book discussion club every Saturday morning tell me more. Why are you doing that and I guess it will inspire people to do the same.

    Ashley

    Absolutely, you don’t have to have any experience I certainly didn’t it started in the very beginning of the pandemic and we just picked a book and set out some dates and when it was over. We didn’t want to stop and ah you know the first one I only had 2 participants and then the group grew significantly so we had probably I would say too many maybe eleven or twelve something like that, which was a little bit difficult on the virtual mechanism to really have that space to have discussion. It was just a few too many people. So then we found our stride in the third book and hit around say five or seven people and that group. That core group has been meeting ever since then which as of today what is that about None ars and two months and so why do we do that I mean it’s you know every to know that we have this core group of friends and colleagues every week that we can. We can learn together but more than that we’re we’re not just reading a book. It. It certainly provides enrichment beyond what you might read in a book itself. But more than that we become like I said friends and colleagues and we can really guide each other through the process of growing together and. Implementing and understanding analyzing some of the concepts from the book into our everyday lives and even hold each other accountable to improve our lives and our work.

    Alexis

    I love it. I definitely love it reminded me you know that the one book discussion club I went to and I that was one of the first ones so I was really really taking notes about the book to be sure that I will really have something to discuss and really really precise in all what I was doing and then the first person starts to speak and I’m thinking to myself: “it seems we didn’t read the same book”. And it was really fascinating the things that were already standing out for that person were totally different from me and I was looking at my notes and I was thinking that’s quite crazy. That’s really incredible. Of course, there were some commonalities. There were some things that we had in common but there were a lot of things.

    Ashley

    Um, yes.

    Alexis

    So That thought that I did not even saw that or look at that in for me, it was not really as important so I learned a ton just doing that just showing what you think is important. Showing how you articulate those learnings and listening to the others and you say Wow That’s the next level! That’s something yes and you remember the book and the learnings probably the book crazy well in doing that. That’s also that’s what’s really cool.

    Ashley

    Um, it’s I totally agree. It’s an incredibly enriching experience. It’s almost doubling the learning and the content that you’re taking in and even more than that you know that these people are counting on you to read this book. So you read a lot more books than you actually might otherwise because you know that you have that dedicated time so can’t recommend it enough when I first started I thought they were for I thought book clubs were for kids but ah here I am None years later still doing it every week

    Alexis

    Ah, I read on ah on your website that you are helping people on their personal brand.

    Can you tell me more about that or about that idea of personal brand.

    Ashley

    Absolutely you know we all have one. We all have a brand whether we’re managing it or not whether you’re a leader or not whether you work or not whatever you do you have some sort of brand which is sort of how you come across to other people. And what you’re known for if you will and the work that I do in that particular area is around managing one’s brand because you have a lot of control over how people think about you and it’s It’s such a gift to know that because it.

    Ashley

    It can seem like well we can’t you know control Other people’s thoughts or whatever. But when you think about it. You really do have so many opportunities and touch points and ah places where you put information about yourself or meetings you attend or so many opportunities when you really think about it. To showcase what you want to be known for which can bring all kinds of opportunities from either promotions or even just getting into the right groups of people whether it’s colleagues or in your personal or professional life who have the same values as you. Ah, so so one of the things As an example, you let’s say you’re in sales but you really want to be known more for marketing Well which meetings are you included on and not included on. Are you. Are you in the marketing meetings If not, you probably want to get in on them because people can’t read your mind. Um, you have to showcase what you want to be known for. Are you on the emails on that topic if not how can you be copied on them or you know how do people introduce you. Or what do they talk about when you’re not in the room if they say oh everybody was talking about you the other day. They just said what a blank you are well whatever the blank is that’s your brand and I just love that the blank doesn’t have to stay where it is. It can be whatever you want. Um, and there are so many opportunities to manage that.

    Alexis

    It’s interesting. Do you believe that when people know what their brand is it helped them to develop trust with people around them?

    Ashley

    I do and the reason why is because when we’re clear on what we stand for and what we value what we like and what we don’t like we naturally attract people who have those similar values and just to be clear I’m not advocating against diversity ah particularly of thought in this case because I think that that’s incredibly enriching. Um, but to develop. Trust you can you can have someone who’s very different than you but yet you both really value something like let’s say respect.

    Ashley

    And so you can you can develop a level of trust with them because you know that about each other whereas if you weren’t making that clear or you weren’t even sure yourself kind of what your brand was or what you care about then it’s pretty hard to find other people who share those same values.

    Alexis

    So showing who you are and being clear about the values that are important to you That’s building that trust, building that relationship at the at a deeper level in a way.

    Ashley

    Yes, yes, much deeper than you know we have the same job title or we live in the same neighborhood. It’s much more… It’s much deeper than that. It’s we we we care about the same things even though we may disagree on many other things. Ah, the core of who we are and what we care about is very similar and almost ironically I guess that actually opens up the opportunity to get to know people who are very different than you or who you might not naturally think that you would get along with or want to work with and yet you realize that. At the core you actually do value the same things and it becomes much easier to build trust that way.

    Alexis

    You mentioned diversity and the way you talk about the topic reminded me of a quote from Lincoln and I will paraphrase because I don’t remember it exactly but it’s something along those lines. It’s I don’t like that man much. I need to get to know him better.

    Ashley

    Yes I love that yes I want to jump up and clap I absolutely love that mentality I think you know I see it a lot in the personality work that I do I’m a Myers-briggs practitioner and there’s actually it’s not just something that I’m personally interested in the research shows that I’ve seen anyway that when you have that that completely different perspective on the same team working together your work product is better.

    Alexis

    Yeah I used MBTI before and other kinds of personality profile tools with teams and it’s really incredible to see that with some teams I worked with everybody was nearly on the same side of the of the disk or the quadrant or things like that and in other teamsm It was very very well-balanced.

    Alexis

    And you can see the result on what the team is able to do definitely. It’s quite incredible. You are using MBTI with teams.

    Ashley

    Oh yes, I think any personality assessment is very helpful because it’s it helps you understand yourself and how you’re different or similar to others and those insights are incredibly valuable. That particular one I find works best with teams because it looks at how clearly you prefer different ways of taking in information and making decisions about that information or coming to conclusions about it and if you think about those things taking in information and making decisions with that information is that not what teams do all the time and so it really sort of gets to the core..

    Alexis

    Um, yeah.

    Ashley

    You know where we get conflict in teams and to your point without fail when I have a team that is more similar of thought and personality type. They have the same blinds spots they get along great. They enjoy each other’s company and they get things done very quickly because they all agree on everything but they also have the same blind spots and so when you have the team that is less similar. They tend to come to me because they’re having either communication or conflict issues and when we break it down. It’s really a very touching moment really in this corporate setting where you wouldn’t expect it to be touching. But once we get all of the personalities sort of up on the screen and we start to just see the bigger picture of how we’re different and how we need each other. You just see the light bulb go on where it’s not just oh I don’t like that person because they’re not like me or they don’t think like me or they’re always so annoying you start to realize not only why they’re like that. But how much you need that different perspective to do better work. It’s really cool. It’s a very cool moment.

    Alexis

    So when you have those people in the room when you help people collaborate or work with each other I can imagine that it can become really intense and could even reveal conflict. How do you handle conflicts and how do you help the conversation move forward?

    Ashley

    Yeah, it. So from that perspective it really comes down to helping both sides see the value that the other one is bringing. So for example with in this particular context with Myers-briggs I’ll often see a dichotomy between those who are very efficient and effective versus those who are very people oriented and empathetic.Not to say that we can’t be both It’s just for whatever reason I am coaching clients tend to go into those buckets and so with the ones that are very efficient and effective. Once we start looking at the yes that’s incredibly important and what a gift that strength is because you know the rest of us would never get anything done without you. Thank you at the same Time. Um. Listening is really important and developing those relationships actually becomes more efficient and effective in the long term because those people that you’ve built relationships with and that you’ve listened to really carefully want to work with you and go out of their way to work with you and trust you to your point earlier. Um. You know, whereas on the other side. Maybe if they’re really focused on building relationships and listening to people and being empathetic and if that’s their strength then they may not get as much work done as their colleagues would like them to and then they get this perception of something you know back to our point about personal brand. Maybe it’s a brand of they I don’t know aren’t effective or so. Whatever the brand is and it’s in those conversations. Ah, where you start to see that that person is not just ineffective or hard driving or whatever the perception is it’s when you start to see what their strengths are and why you need them that it’s not necessarily that you just love working with them because they’re so different than you but you start to get an appreciation for why you need that other perspective to get the job done Better. It’s in the combination that we succeed not in the collective blind spots where it’s more comfortable and more fun to be.

    Alexis

    Yeah, that’s really exciting because that gives a sense of where you are going how do you interact with people. When you when you are coaching them or when you are facilitating conversations. So I am I really like the way you are framing all that you have something very exciting coming I need to speak about that so you worked on the book for the last two years something like that right.

    Ashley

    Yeah, one year and a half!

    Alexis

    And so the book is coming ready right now.

    Ashley

    Um, it is we are hoping to target a mid-July publication date.

    Alexis

    Excellent. So tell us more about the book.

    Ashley

    Absolutely And I’ll tell you in the frame of putting the pieces together that we’ve talked about and how it translates into why I care about this topic because it’s a little bit different than what we’ve been discussing and the way that pieces tied together is that the book is About. It’s called the path to your career purpose. So finding purpose in one’s work is something I’m very passionate about the way that connects to what we were talking about earlier in terms of leadership and coaching and facilitation is that. I have a couple of beliefs one is that I believe we all have a career purpose something and what I mean by that is we have a set of unique passions. Things that we’re very passionate about doing. And also a unique set of talents or skills that we have sort of our tools in our toolkit to carry out those passions in the world and that no 2 people have the same combination of those 2 things. So It’s very one of my passions is bring whatever that is for any individual on the planet out into the world because what I’ve seen in my work is that too many people are doing work that just provides for the family or pays the bills and that’s very important I’m not diminishing the importance of that. But what I’ve found in my journey is that you can do both. You can pay the bills you can provide for your family. You can you know build the lifestyle that you need and want to have and do work that is incredibly fulfilling and so that’s that’s what the book teaches the reader to do is go from wherever you are today to living a life of the fulfilling work that I would call you what you were meant to do

    Ashley

    And again back to the connection to what we were talking about so that was one belief the second belief I have is that we all deserve to have good leaders waiting for us when we get to whatever that dream job is and in the book I talk about you’ll have many dream jobs over the course of your career. They’re just kind of one point along the journey. But when you get there. Whatever that is whether that’s being a stay-at-home parent. That’s a job whether that’s working in a corporate setting whether that’s nonprofit whatever that is for you retirement. Whatever your job is um I just think that we all deserve to have good leaders there who will help bring out the best in us and so that’s how those pieces connect is that I’m bringing out what these unique gifts and passions are out of people through this book and then and then I’m teaching workshops and doing executive and leadership coaching to help people become those leaders and again I don’t define that as having direct reports just taking care of other people. So when you get to that dream job using the methodology in my book. You have the supportive environment that you need to flourish in your work which is the name of my company.

    Alexis

    I Love it. So the okay the book is on my reading list. That’s absolutely critical so you convinced me I Love the energy I Love the passion about that and I understand way better now where you are saying a leader is someone who takes care of people I Love it.

    Alexis

    Thank you very much Ashley for joining the podcast today.

    Ashley

    Absolutely, it’s been my pleasure.

  • Agility, Innovation, and Leadership with Jurgen Appelo

    Agility, Innovation, and Leadership with Jurgen Appelo

    What does it take to help organizations stay innovative, adaptive, and human as complexity keeps rising?

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I sit down with Jurgen Appelo — author, speaker, and entrepreneur — to explore the stories behind his books, the communities he helped grow, and his perspective on leadership in modern organizations.

    Jurgen is best known for Management 3.0, which emerged from a practical question he faced as a CIO: what is the role of the manager in an agile organization? At the time, agile focused mostly on team practices. The leadership part was missing. Jurgen chose that gap as his niche and wrote into it.

    The leadership trait he returns to: experimentation

    When I ask Jurgen what leadership trait matters most, he refuses the simplistic answer. Social systems are complex. There is no single magic trait.

    And still, one idea keeps coming back: experimentation with fast feedback loops.

    The core of agile thinking is learning quickly through small experiments. Jurgen argues that the same logic applies to managers and leaders. Leaders also need tight feedback loops — and often their “customers” are the employees. Retention, engagement, and trust become central signals.

    Community as belonging, even for introverts

    We revisit a shared memory: the first Agile Lean Europe event in Berlin more than ten years ago. Jurgen reflects on how communities matter, especially for someone who is introverted and spends much of his time reading, writing, and building things alone.

    Community provides belonging. Across Europe, weak ties stay alive. You see familiar names in different constellations, and events feel like homecoming.

    Management 3.0, Happy Melly, and other initiatives are, for Jurgen, subcommunities inside a broader ecosystem of agile and lean oriented people.

    Every book is a different baby

    Jurgen’s books each had a different origin story and process.

    • Management 3.0 took years and required deep research.
    • How to Change the World was a self-publishing experiment.
    • Managing for Happiness was intentionally designed as a full-color, horizontal, practical book.
    • Startup, Scaleup, Screwup came from a publisher request and was built through interviews and travel under a tight timeline.

    And then he drops a detail that makes me smile: his fifth book will be a novel. Yet another experiment.

    Teacher and practitioner are different roles

    One of the most honest moments in the conversation comes when Jurgen explains that he is a better writer and speaker than practitioner.

    He uses analogies from music and sport: great teachers aren’t always great performers. Great performers aren’t always great teachers. Different talents.

    Jurgen’s role, as he sees it, is often a 30,000-foot view. He spots patterns and builds models. That makes it easier to propose frameworks, but it also means he doesn’t spend his life inside large organizations as a consultant. He gets his “feet in the mud” mostly through his own ventures and experiments.

    It is a refreshing stance, and it clarifies what kind of value he aims to provide.

    What makes a great talk

    Jurgen describes his style as infotainment. Not fluff. Not slides full of bullet points.

    A great talk requires:

    • understanding the audience before you start
    • choosing the right stories for their reality
    • making people laugh
    • delivering takeaways

    “No bullet points” is a rule he repeats. Stories, humor, and relevance do most of the work.

    The pandemic, travel, and painting walls

    Like many speakers, Jurgen’s business collapsed when events were canceled in March 2020. He watched the dominoes fall and had to experiment with new models.

    But he also made a discovery: he does not want to return to the old rhythm of travel. In 2019, he traveled around 250 days a year. Too much.

    During the pandemic, he bought a house and learned to paint it himself. The satisfaction of looking around and seeing what you built with your hands stayed with him. He wants more of that kind of life.

    So he chooses hybrid. Back to stages, back to people, back to cafés across Europe, but not at the same cost.

    One action to develop as a leader

    Jurgen’s personal development habit is simple and consistent: podcasts.

    He listens while walking, commuting, traveling — and he deliberately draws inspiration from domains far from management. Economics, medicine, design, science. He mentions listening to a Nobel prize winning economist who pushed field experiments, and he recognizes the same logic as agile.

    Learning, for him, is cross-pollination.

    Closing thought

    Jurgen’s message is not “copy me.” It is “keep experimenting.”

    Small loops. Fast learning. Broad inputs. Strong communities. Honest self-positioning.

    And a reminder that leadership in complexity is less about a single trait and more about building the conditions to learn and adapt.

    Listen to the episode here:

    Here is the transcript of the episode

    Alexis

    Hey Jurgen, what is your role, and how would you describe it to someone you just met?

    Jurgen

    Ah, my role I usually describe that as I am an author and speaker and also an entrepreneur on the side.

    Alexis

    Excellent, What was the pivotal moment that led you on that trajectory?

    Jurgen

    Well I think the pivotal moment would be the release of my book Management 3.0. I have been a manager for a good number of years. In my younger days, originally a software engineer, I studied at the University in Delft, but my interests were much broader than just programming. I was never really a geek or nerd, if you could say that. I was interested in marketing and finance and lots of different stuff.

    Jurgen

    So it was sort of obvious that I became manager, team leader, manager etc… And then the chief information officer. In that role, I introduced agile practices in the organization where I worked, I introduced scrum and had to figure out what is the role of the manager in an agile organization because at the time this was not really addressed. It was mostly team practices I’m talking 2001 to 2010 here. So I sort of claimed that as my niche and I wrote a book on it: Management 3.0 and that became a bestseller. Even before it came out, I quit my job because I already got requests for events workshops that I started to develop. From that moment on I have been acting independently doing lots of things cool stuff and first for seven years focus on Management 3.0 and licensing around it and then I went in other directions experimenting with other ideas.

    Alexis

    So it’s it’s really interesting to me I feel that in the twenty first century there’s a lot of things that changed and are changing and we continue to change. What do you think is the main leadership traits people should care to develop.

    Jurgen

    Well this is the typical question. What is the 1 best thing while the actual answer is always. There is no one most important thing because we’re working with complex systems and social systems. They are too too complex to to just summarize everything in one sentence. But, that being said, a couple of things come to mind. First of all, experimentation, fast feedback loops, that also applies to management and I would say this is perhaps the core of agile thinking: fast feedback loops so you learn quickly and with small experiments figuring out what the customer wants, what the customer needs, how they respond to ideas. Exactly the same applies to managers and leaders when they want to create better organizations. The customers often for them are employees they need to make sure that people don’t leave and this has become more and more important nowadays.

    Alexis

    Excellent. Thank you for that! I was lucky enough to meet with you in person during the first ALE event in in Berlin. I guess it was more than ten years ago

    Jurgen

    Oh cool. Yeah, that was a special one. The very first one. It is always nice to have memories of the very first time an edition of the event takes place.

    Alexis

    Yeah, the feel of the event was really of community and friendship. I would like to ask you what is the place of communities in your life in your work.

    Jurgen

    Wow good question. At the time I was sort of responsible for that event Agile Lean Europe. At least I came up with the name, I even came up with a logo of Agile Lean Europe and then other people took over and started organizing the event in Berlin that you refer to.  Of course I very much felt at the center of that community and still do. I’m happy that there’s a new event being organized this year in Toulouse apparently. It’s especially for someone like me who’s actually an introvert and loves being on his own day after day thinking and reading and writing and creating stuff. It is important to feel part of something, to have a sense of belonging. For me, that is the agile lean community in Europe. I know so many people because I have attended hundreds of events across the continent in almost every country I think. I follow people and they follow me online so we can chat on Twitter or Linkedin or Facebook or whatever. There’s always these weak connections that no matter what the distance is across Europe you feel connected with each other. That’s a good feeling, especially as I said for people such as me who do a lot of things on their own remotely. It feels like homecoming when I am at an event and I see friends and followers and people that I know from across ah Europe. I feel okay this is the place I belong these are the cool people that I want to hang out with. That is I think the purpose of of community to to give you that place of belonging even when most of the time you travel around the world and you sit alone in coffee bars or hotel lobbies.

    Alexis

    Yeah I feel in your different businesses or in in the the work that you are doing that communities are always really present like with management 3.0 or with the Happy Melly we can see a lot of people gathering with each other to achieve a greater purpose. Is it really something that is real or is it my perception of it.

    Jurgen

    No, that’s just people gathering together around a specific topic like indeed there is a Management 3.0 Community. Of course there are other communities that I am either responsible for or involved In. But for me, they’re all part of a larger community out there as I said which is agile and lean oriented people. They sort of gather together in these subcommunities in different constellations. So you keep running into the same people and basically and which subcommunity you find yourself in and that’s nice and I think that’s important to have that.

    Alexis

    You mentioned already the management 3.0 book. You wrote several books. How to change the world was already a nice small one that you offer for free on your website. I will put the link to that and. The experience with Managing for Happiness was probably an interesting one. And the latest Startup, Scaleup, Screwup. What is that experience of writing books. You’ve said you want you like to be on your own thinking, writing, reading. What are the different experiences you had with those books.

    Jurgen

    Well, it’s a cliche but it’s true. Every book is like a different baby  in a sense. They’re all different kids with different personalities and different histories. So Management 3.0 took me several years to write. A lot of research went into that, a lot of reading of popular science books and articles etc. That was a very different project compared to the last one for example, startup scaleup screw up where basically the publisher said can you please write another book doesn’t matter much about what it is but we want to sell another one that was sort of a compliment of course because when publishers want another book. It means that they earned money with your previous one.

    Alexis

    Um, yeah.

    Jurgen

    I thought at the time. Okay, well, if I were going to write another book I want it to be about the stuff I’m doing now which was I was leading a startup at the time and trying to make that work so that seemed like a good combination. In that case, the creation of the book took me, I think, about eight, nine or ten months. It had to be done within a year and I traveled a lot. I spoke with a lot of people across Europe startups and scale-ups so I did quite a quite a few interviews. There were very different process for that one a very different kind of book. But I enjoy each of one of them. Indeed as you said how to change the world was a very small one that was a self-publishing experiment. And managing for happiness is again different. It is horizontal book, not vertical, very colorful. That was my requirement with a publisher at the time that I wanted a full color book so they’re all different and the the fifth one is going to be a novel so that’s again, a completely different book that I am working on now and that’s and that’s fun I’m I mean always trying something new that I haven’t done before.

    Alexis

    I’m glad that you’re working on the next one. I will be interested in reading that novel. That’s excellent. You’ve been recognized by Inc.com in the top 50 management and leadership authors. And I know there’s a story behind that. There’s probably hundreds of writers in the field of leadership and Management. What makes some of them more successful than others is is it their expertise as practitioners or what?

    Jurgen

    Interesting that you say that, I just published the blog post today actually with my learnings of the last three years of running a lot of experiments and one thing that I realized is that I’m a much better writer and speaker than practitioner when it comes to management and leadership. This sounds weird, but if you compare it with other disciplines – for example, the best teachers of music are not necessarily themselves the best musicians and vice versa, the best musicians are not necessarily good teachers of making music. It’s the same as sports if you have great sports coaches. The best in the world. It doesn’t really mean that they themselves are really good in the field as athletes and also great athletes are not necessarily good coaches. So there’s a difference between being a teacher of something and being the practitioner of something there. Actually different talents and that’s something that I have noticed myself I love the teaching aspect of it I like creating workshops. I like writing about things. I like talking about stuff and yes I am also as I said an entrepreneur on the side because I also like the practical experience. But it doesn’t mean that I’m the best manager or leader out there. In fact, I would say I’m a mediocre one for sure. Don’t hire me as a manager because I happen to write books on the topic. That’s it’s very different like. The top rated Nobel winning economists are probably really bad at running companies because it’s something different observing and writing about it really understanding how field works is very different from operating in that field and being successful as a practitioner that’s something that I had to realize in the last three years where I sort of found out. Well actually I suck in some areas but then I have great insights because of my learnings and I’m able to write about it and then I inspire other people who are practitioners and they can use my input and so that’s win-win I suppose. That’s why I say first I am a writer and speaker and I do some entrepreneuring on the side because it’s fun to have practical experience and to fail and sometimes succeed. I will never be the best entrepreneur out there but the best entrepreneurs out there are actually pretty bad speakers and writers so we all have our own roles I suppose.

    Alexis

    Yeah, exactly and I really like the fact that you are looking into that and you are still doing Experimentation. You’re still working on different projects. So You can also test Idea yourself um and not only inspire people I think the 2 things are already useful and I’m I’m always always a little bit worried about the people that are only doing the teaching part.

    Jurgen

    Yeah, for sure I agree there sorry to interrupt but, and and my approach is slightly different from others because there there are plenty of authors and speakers out there who are coaches or consultants. They go into companies and they help managers and leaders or or other kinds of employees doing their stuff and that’s great. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s just a different approach and I am not like that. I have a different role I often say I operate at a thirty thousand feet view. I have more of an abstract understanding, I see patterns across the world that also makes it easier for me to come up with new models and new insights. On the one hand, that’s a benefit. On the other hand, the drawback is that I do not have the deep experience of observing what happens inpecific companies on the inside. So I don’t really stand with my feet in the mud so to speak, except for my own little companies where I run experiments and that sort of compensates for me for the lack of direct experience I have with large corporates or whatever because I’m not very interested in coaching in consulting, I would not be there. Definitely not be the best person to do that.

    Alexis

    Thank you. You’re already a very successful speaker. How would you describe what you bring as a speaker and what are the key to success for a really great speech.

    Jurgen

    It is infotainment. You need to make sure that you have a message that there are takeaways. You need to understand the audience. So I always ask my clients: what kind of people are there in the room? Is it only engineers, or is it across the company, or is it mostly management and things like that. How many? So I usually have an intake before an event so that I know what kind of audience I Encounter. You need to entertain people. You need to make them laugh and tell interesting stories and experiences and not just show models or bullet points. Definitely no bullet points. That’s basically it. Tell stories, be funny and make sure you understand what the situation is that the audience finds themselves in so you can relate and make the right connection because I have a vast library of content stuff I can talk for hours. Literally I’ve done that a few weeks ago when I recorded a course for a client in Brazil. The recordings were in London and I just used my existing materials. I thought, my god, I have so much I talked for 5 hours and I was still by far, not through everything that I had.

    Alexis

    Whoa.

    Jurgen

    Ah, so I have quite a bit of stuff that I can make selections from. Understand the audience, be funny, share stories, and that will take you 80% towards success, I suppose.

    Alexis

    Thank you. Do the pandemic and that shift to a hybrid world of work affect your work as a speaker? Will you go back to events or will you do everything from your home?

    Jurgen

    Well, first of all the pandemic was terrible of course for my line of business. I just looked it up yesterday I had my last trip home from Melbourne Australia where I had done a workshop on the fourth of March of 2020. So exactly seven days later the world health organization named the Covid Virus a pandemic officially. So, I was home just in time and then all events in my calendar were being canceled one after the other it was like dominoes they were falling over and I was like oh my god what is happening here. All my income for the rest of the year was evaporating basically. Never waste a good crisis as they say so I experimented I came up with alternative ideas I ran online meetups and and workshops and it became other business models. I actually learned from that experience that I don’t want to go back fully like the way things were because in 2019 I travel I think about maybe two hundred and fifty days per year and that was absurd that was a lot, and I don’t want to be away from home that often anymore I have a wonderful house. We bought a house two months before the covid pandemic hit coincidentally. Just in time, interestingly enough and that was a great coincidence. The house needed quite a bit of painting, so I developed a new skill I am now really good at painting walls and painting doors and everything and it turns out I enjoy that I enjoy being able to do something with my hands and make the space that I live in look beautiful that is so satisfying and I would never have experienced that if if there hadn’t been the pandemic. I would just have paid a professional painter and that would not have been the same thing now I sit in my chair and look around me and I think cool I did that and I’m I’m very happy with that. I want to be home more in the house that I, to a large extent, painted myself. So for me also it it is a case of I will be in a hybrid situation I do want to go back to travel because I miss the coffee bars in Stockholm and the people in Warsaw and etc etc. But yeah, not two hundred and fifty days per year anymore a bit less.

    Alexis

    Yeah, that’s good to find that balance but I’m glad that you’re back to events because I’m eager to hear you speak again. So it’s perfect!.

    Jurgen

    Yeah, it would be awesome! I have a trip to Prague upcoming and then from may I have quite a few trips scheduled across Europe mostly and I very much look forward to that to be on stage again.

    Alexis

    Perfect I think a lot of people are waiting for that to! You worked with many leaders and among those you admire? What’s the the one treat that stands out to you. And how is that treat is important to you in the way you see leadership.

    Jurgen

    So well, that’s interesting. Actually, you’re the second person who asked that question this week, and I was also not able to answer it last time because I read many articles, I listen to many podcasts, lots of books. There are many sources where I draw my inspiration from, and to be honest, there is not one single person who inspires me most. There are dozens if not hundreds for different reasons. I could name one random person. Richard Branson I admire him for the way he manages his companies and and the message he gets across: Be there for your people first, the people come first and then they will take care of your customer. They make sure that the customer comes first I totally agree with that message and it’s amazing that he built like 400 virgin companies all under one umbrella. But that’s completely different from others who I don’t know who have been active in complexity science or something where I admire the likes of I don’t know, Stuart Kaufman who wrote amazing books on explaining how life evolves and I have drawn inspiration from that for complex systems such as organizations. And yeah, so the many people I’m not able to come up with with one name. Also, I don’t think it would be fair to come up with the one person that I admire the most. It’s is heavily context dependent on what kind of topic we are talking about and. So if you narrow it down to a very specific topic then it would be easier to come up with names.

    Alexis

    Yeah, it’s and it’s ah it’s interesting and I love that you picked something that I think is important for leadership that idea of people first is something that is important. So you picked one thing there. Ah yes I know it’s random, but it’s an interesting one. What’s one action you’ve taken in the past to develop yourself as a leader and what did you learn from that.

    Jurgen

    I listen to podcasts, as I said. Just today as well, I think an hour or something because I had a long walk through the city from my home to a coffee bar that I enjoy and back. Ah, and I tried to use that time of walking around and sitting in public transport and I amlooking forward to the traveling then I can do even more podcast listening and those moments that you stand in a security line or sit in a taxi on the way to the hotel and things like that. For me, that’s a great way to encounter new ideas that I have not heard before or just being inspired by thoughts from very different domains I listened to a Nobel prize-winning economist today who got his nobel prize for the very agile idea of running experiments, field experiments because he said that most of economy was a lot of theorizing coming up with theoretical models of how the world is supposed to work. But he said very few actually went out of their offices into real life just running experiments on businesses and people to see how they behave in response to which interventions and that was very new for economy and perfectly obvious in Medicine,  for example, you do controlled trials you have random blind tests and everything but that was a new idea in the economy. You got a nobel prize for that and that what I listened to was it sounded really agile. So I thought that was super cool. Super interesting and that’s what I do to be inspired I watched the podcast and there were obviously a lot of reading but that is one tip that I can give people just subscribe yourself to lots of fascinating podcasts out there and being inspired by what happens in completely different domains because you can learn from Economy. You can learn from Health Care. You can learn from design or whatnot.

    Alexis

    Excellent I love the advice. Thank you very much.
    Jurgen Appelo is a serial founder, successful entrepreneur, author, and speaker.

    Thank you for having joined me on the podcast today.

    Jurgen

    It was a great pleasure. Thank you Alexis.

    Photo by Afta Putta Gunawan from Pexels

  • Reputation: What You Don’t Own

    Reputation: What You Don’t Own

    What is reputation? Why does it matter? And why do so many companies only start thinking about it when it is already too late?

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I talk with Laurence Duarte, who defines herself as a business fixer and a protector. For the last six years, she has developed expertise in criminal risk and in protecting what she considers the most important assets of any company: people, property, proprietary information, and reputation.

    Laurence has a gift for making reputation simple to understand, without making it simplistic.

    You don’t own your reputation

    One distinction sits at the heart of the conversation:

    • Brand is what you own.
    • Reputation is what people think about you.

    Reputation is perception. And perception lives outside your control.

    That is why many leaders avoid the topic until a crisis forces it into view. But by then, rebuilding trust can become painfully slow.

    Why reputation matters

    Laurence explains reputation as the “willingness” of stakeholders to:

    • buy from you
    • invest in you
    • work with you
    • believe you

    A strong reputation supports:

    • faster recovery during crises (reputation equity as a buffer)
    • ability to attract better employees
    • premium pricing and stronger loyalty
    • higher market value
    • credibility when you communicate

    In other words: reputation is not a soft topic. It shapes hard outcomes.

    Two examples: Facebook and Spotify

    We explore how reputational events can trigger very different reactions.

    When Alexis heard about Facebook and election manipulation, he closed his account. It was emotional. Not perfectly rational. But real.

    With Spotify, he noticed something else: in conversation with friends, he found himself defending Spotify, despite concerns. Laurence points out something important: reputation works at multiple levels, and loyalty behaves like relationships. The longer the relationship, the harder it is to leave.

    This is where reputation equity shows up: past goodwill can delay the break, even when present choices are questioned.

    Reputational risks and the reputational gap

    Laurence introduces the idea of a reputational gap: the distance between what people expect and what you can actually deliver.

    A company can have:

    • too much love (high expectations that reality cannot sustain)
    • too much hate (perceptions that exceed the reality of what is happening)

    Both are risky.

    And a dangerous version of the gap is the one many consultants recognize instantly: values written on the walls, fear visible in the people. When words and reality diverge, trust collapses.

    Laurence also highlights other drivers of reputational risk:

    • criminal or hostile actions: cyber attacks, counterfeiting
    • toxic environments
    • shifts in societal expectations
    • stakeholder pressure (media, regulators, NGOs)
    • weak signals from employees that go unnoticed or get hidden

    A key idea: companies are no longer black boxes. They are glass boxes.

    Employees as the first shield

    Laurence is explicit: employees are not just stakeholders, they are often the first reputational shield.

    In a crisis, employees will either:

    • protect the organization, or
    • confirm what outsiders suspect

    A healthy culture is not only “nice.” It is protective. It shapes what gets reported early, what gets fixed early, and whether weak signals are allowed to surface.

    Reputation shields: what protects you over time

    Laurence describes a framework built on anticipation and protection:

    • identify and monitor risks early
    • build reputation shields that reduce damage and accelerate recovery

    Two shields apply to every company:

    1. People and culture
    2. Trust (earned through consistency between what you say and what you do)

    She adds that sustainability is increasingly a shield too, because expectations have changed. It is not enough for a product to work. People want it to feel right.

    Everyone owns the responsibility

    One of the most practical reminders in the episode:
    Reputation is not only a communication topic, or a legal topic.

    Everyone contributes:

    • supply chain
    • product
    • leadership
    • operations
    • HR
    • engineering
    • customer-facing roles

    Reputation is the accumulation of decisions, not a department.

    The leadership trait that matters most: self-awareness

    When I ask Laurence what trait stands out in the leaders she admires, her answer is immediate:

    Self-awareness.

    Because what happens inside a leader drives decisions. And success can carry the seeds of future failure if leaders stop questioning themselves.

    She links self-awareness to:

    • better decisions
    • less blame and self-pity when things go wrong
    • stronger integrity and authenticity
    • more courage
    • more responsibility for consequences

    She also shares her own development path: learning about emotions (fear, guilt, shame), and exploring embodiment as a way to notice what the body is signaling.

    Closing thought

    Reputation management is not only about avoiding scandals.
    Done well, it becomes:

    • situational awareness
    • strategy seeking
    • a competitive advantage
    • and a leadership practice grounded in truth

    Listen to the episode here:

    Here is the transcript of the episode

    Alexis

    Hey Laurence what is your role and how would you describe it to someone. You just met.

    Laurence

    I like to define myself as a business fixer. So most of the time my clients call me because they don’t know what to do and so my job is to help them to protect their company and to grow. Sometimes we need fresh eyes and that’s why I am here. So yes I think this is how I like to define myself as a business fixer and as also a protector, I like to protect business. That’s why for the last six years I developed an expertise in criminal risk and how to protect the most important assets of a company. The most important assets of any company are property… people. I should have started by people. Of course, it’s people first after you have properties you have proprietary information and of course reputation, I think it’s where why we are here today to talk about reputation.

    Alexis

    So tell me more about that. Why is corporate reputation really important?

    Laurence

    I mean um because it’s ah what will define as a willingness to your cop consumer but also your investors your um, your employees to work with you to buy from you. Ah, it’s ah how is it perceive you and so that’s why it’s um, it’s so important reputation. It’s um, ah, it’s yes, it’s how they will their willingness to work with you.

    Alexis

    So tell me a little bit more about what is reputation and what difference you make between the brand and the reputation?

    Laurence

    Most of the time the issue comes from this. We think we own reputation and actually, we don’t own reputation we own brand. It’s us. It’s like you Alexis. You are Alexis and what people think about you. It’s your reputation and this is what it is. It’s a perception and so that’s why we don’t own reputations. That’s why it’s sometimes very difficult for people and that’s why they don’t really want to talk about reputation. You know they wait for to meet reputation in bad situation and suddenly it’s like oh my goodness I have a reputation but most of the time it’s a little bit too late because it’s very difficult to grasp and to control and we know how much we love to control things, especially in the business field. But. Fortunately, they are ways to understand to monitor and in a way to I would say not control but at least to protect from reputational risks because reputation has so much impact in company. The first thing that most of the time we think about reputation, is reputation equity when you have a crisis, it will be some kind of a goodwill and it will act as a buffer so you have a crisis that suddenly, because you have a good reputation. It will help you to recover far more quickly. But it’s not only about that as I said, it will help you to attract a better employee. It will help you to achieve premier premium prices, to retain higher customer loyalty, and also to have better market value and also which can be a really huge advantage it will help you with the credibility of your communication. So see, when you talk about a good reputation, It’s like you are welcome everywhere and it’s really something that matters a lot.

    Alexis

    Let’s take examples. I would like to pick 2 examples and tell you how I felt about those company and their reputation and you can help us with that. So when Facebook… We heard about what they did to help manipulate elections. That’s my understanding of it, I closed my Facebook account and I said okay I don’t want to have anything to do with that company anymore. I’m not saying it’s rational. That’s what I felt that’s what I did.

    Laurence

    Yeah.

    Alexis

    That is what happened now when Spotify more recently. There was all that the discussion around Spotify and what they were doing and what they were not doing I realized that I was in a conversation with friends and I was advocating for Spotify. And I was thinking. That’s really interesting. What is going on there? What is happening is that reputation equity that you’re talking about.

    Laurence

    Yes, so thank you for sharing these 2 examples and to see how mature I would say a conscious consumer you just and you are not the only 1 more and more you have a change in the culture and the society because of hyper transparency the fact that now we know everything very quickly and suddenly we have to if the company is not able to make a clear choice. We will make the choice. In terms of Facebook, It’s exactly what you decided to. Do you decide? No, I don’t want to put some money in a way even if it’s free. We know that as they use our data so it’s not free and you decided to close. For Spotify, It’s another example and it’s a tricky one because, reputation works at several levels. It’s also, it’s like how you like the company and it’s like being in love. So if you are just in love for two days it will be easy to drop. But if you have been in love for a long time. It will be of course more difficult to drop I have the same issue with Spotify like you. It’s like I was thinking I should stop because I don’t like what they do but I am so used to Spotify so I feel that I don’t know what to do is it easy to switch to another company and it’s really where we stand as a consumer with our consciousness and also with our activism and it’s exactly what the company needs to monitor where we stand. And that’s why it’s very important to know one part of understanding our how I can say it risk exposure. It’s like you have to understand what is going on in the society. And so it’s good to see the expectation of your consumer and how we change over time as well as ah, knowing the outrage most of the time we think that it’s not our concern like outrage like we have metoo movement. We have black lives matter. We have the climate youth movement. You can’t say that you haven’t seen them coming. So, of course, like for Spotify. They knew that at some point it will come and so if they have this type of very armful content, violent content for many people they have to do something about it. And so if they don’t do something about it. Suddenly it’s our responsibility and I am not sure that we really like to take this responsibility because we buy a service and we don’t want to have more disruption from this service about our ethical behavior.

    Alexis

    So companies can work on that, companies and individuals can work on that to look at their reputational risk. Okay, what are those determinants of the reputational risk?

    Laurence

    The reputational risk. First, the main thing it’s like you need to check your what we call the reputational gap and it’s like as I like to define that as is if your true character exceeds your reputation. It’s like too much love or too much hate or, high expectation or lower expectation, and at some point, it has to. it’s like the 2 polarities and so you need to be sure that what the people are expecting from you is what you can offer. And so it’s not if it’s not the case and sometimes we may see oh they really love ah so much and so this is good.

    Laurence

    It might be not good because if it’s not a reality at some point they will feel betrayed and if a consumer feel betrayed, especially the most supportive one, there is no comeback from that. The backlash is far more violent for this type of consumer. So this is the first thing it’s what we call the reputational gap. Then there is another thing that you have to check. It’s like a criminal attack because it’s how your reputation can be harmed as well. So if you have cyber attack. If you have counterfeiting projects, if you have a toxic environment. It will create a lot of bad conditions to create in a way reputational risks. So it’s the same. It’s necessary to be seen then as we talked already, it’s important to check as well as the change in the beliefs, of your consumer and what they are, what they want from you. Before we wanted just to have a product that works well that’s it. Now we want a product that is guilt-free and that it’s not it has to work well, it has to feel right. It’s exactly what happened is in a way with Facebook and Spotify. You don’t want to use or to buy products that can harm the planet that can harm other people so it’s what are the most important things to check. And of course, it’s also important to see what people are thinking about you in terms of stakeholders. It’s not just about your consumer It’s also about, your usage of the media, the social media. It’s also about the government, the regulators, the ngos. Can be a really good signs kind of even if most of the time we think that ngos bother us but actually they are not, because they will show you where you have to work in order to build up and protect your reputation.

    Alexis

    This is really interesting that you look at all the stakeholders I can always imagine that we can draw an impact map looking at all the stakeholders Do you include in that analysis of the reputational risk the employees themselves of the company.

    Laurence

    Oh yes, employees are very very very important and you can see, it’s like tons of little weak signals, it starts always by small signals and it’s like are you able to catch them before it’s too late or not. So when you are able to catch them. Employees are very important. Of course, we have an issue. For example, it’s what we call a reputation company bias. So, if you’re in a company that is most of the time very aggressive, very competitive and they don’t allow failures they will hide a lot of things so it will be always everything is okay, everything is all right. I am working for the best of the best of the company. The problem with that, it’s not the case, most of the time it’s not the case we always have some issue here and there, and the fact that we can’t see it’s like you protect a toxic environment, you protect failures, you protect mistakes and missteps, management missteps and at some point, it becomes too loud and as we know a company is not a black box. It’s a glass box so everyone can see inside the company but it’s too late. It’s too late. That’s why it’s important to check and create a healthy culture in a company because as I say employees are the first reputation shield when you have a crisis. You know they will be the first to protect the company. So it’s better to have a healthy culture in the company because it will help you at so many levels.

    Alexis

    This is really fascinating. So ah I’m really interested in looking at that gap, the gap between reputation and reality, and if I take that from an employee’s standpoint I remembered working with company as a consultant where there was on the walls really inspiring statement about transparency and great really great values. But when you were looking at the people. Ah, they were all, in a way scared. They were really managed under high pressure and lot of fear. So It was completely disconnected from what was written on the walls. Ah, that’s those kinds of gaps between what the company wants to say and reality?

    Laurence

    Yes, I mean how you build trust I like that because trust it’s also another major reputational shield. But trust you don’t buy it. Trust you have to prove trust and so it’s this. You don’t have to have a gap between what you say and what you do and it’s very important to know that and I think it’s it depends on the true character of people. But of course, it starts with people, a company is nothing without their people. So It’s unfortunate that what I call posture slashing. It’s like you have all this bright things, you all this bright content, all this beautiful communication. And suddenly you have a crisis or suddenly something happened and you can really see that actually it was just like a posture and there is nothing. You know it was empty words and we can’t have that now in our society. During this time people with just empty worlds. It will not Work. You will be called out and of course, for you as a consultant, you have seen that because you can see a discrepancy between what was written on the wall and the reality of the leadership and the management and it’s very unfortunate because it creates a lot of damage in terms of leadership and this is not good.

    Alexis

    So that’s not only what you say that’s of course what you do, but it’s also what people expect from you.

    Laurence

    Exactly! You know it’s like that’s why you have to be sure that your consumer, your stakeholders what is going on in the society because it changed so that’s why. Sometimes, people say, oh I am doing all the right things, so it’s enough. It’s not enough. You also have to create some kind of environment that enables to see what is going on in order to adapt. That’s why I think most of the time people think about reputation risk and management as a cost. It can be also a very good competitive advantage because you know what is going on. You have a lot of data. A lot of intelligence and if you are able to understand and to seize the issue before your competitor in a way and to add that in your strategy in order to fix and to develop you will protect but also grow your business far better and in a far more sustainable way than others that didn’t do the same type of work. So it’s like strategy seeking as well as situational awareness you know it’s both the 2 ways that need to be implemented.

    Alexis

    You mentioned it just before and also in your latest report, you talk about reputation shields in companies. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

    Laurence

    Yes, I found that we need to implement some anticipatory issue management. This is very important. You have to see and to anticipate, to identify, evaluate and monitor the risk and then you also have to have the reputation shield and there are 2 that are the same for everybody. The people, your culture that will work as a very good reputational shield when you have some crisis. It will help to what I noticed studying all the criminal risk, It always comes from people. So if you have a good culture, a good culture and your employee will protect you, will protect your business. Then Trust, you need to build. Trust you need to build transparency. You need to have at every step of your company people who say okay I say that I do that and I prove and you can see you can verify that I did it. So This is very important and then it will adapt. You know of course sustainability. It’s very important. It’s another reputational shield and in my latest report because it was a beauty industry I Also said that the fact that you communicate a definition of beauty that is non-competitive non-hierarchical, non-violent is a very good reputational shield because it’s what the women consumer want and it’s what they need and they will call out if you don’t do that.

    Alexis

    This is really really interesting. That means all your relationships with all your stakeholders including of course your employees. That’s the shield that you can build and that will protect you in case of crisis. And that’s not only the convenience of having a job or using a service that’s really building that shield over time that will really protect you.

    Laurence

    Yes, and as well as I think what is the most important thing for people who listen to this podcast. It’s like they need to see as leader that everyone have a responsibility for the reputation of their company. Most of the time what I have seen is like: we think that reputation belongs to Communication, It belongs to the legal affair but actually, it’s not the case, everyone has a say and has a responsibility. Even the people who are in charge of the supply chain, for example, they have a responsibility. Because when you build the global supply chain, it’s the same. You will have to choose some countries and you have some countries that might be better in terms of accountability but might be a big risk in terms of reputation and so that’s why I really think that everyone has to be aware and understand their role in the reputation building.

    Alexis

    Excellent and so you work with CEOs and Leadership Teams to help them manage that reputation shield.

    Laurence

    Yes, so the first thing is to understand what is reputation, then to implement a framework to be able to monitor the reputation and to see the risk. To understand the risk and to mitigate them of course to prepare when you have some crisis because I mean you always have some crisis, especially in a big company. It can happen. And to build the reputation shield, so it’s a lot of awareness that I am developing with CEO and the leadership team around this issue. Because what people tend to forget, It’s like 90% of the market is made by intangible assets that are brands and so you can imagine the damage of crisis of scandals, the disruption, the loss of market value when you are hit by a scandal and so suddenly you suffer from a bad reputation.

    Alexis

    That’s excellent and speaking of leadership and helping leaders, you worked with a lot of leaders and among those you admire, what’s the one trait that stands out to you. And how is that trait important to you in the way you see leadership.

    Laurence

    I would say Self-Awareness. I really think it’s the base. The base of the base. You can’t be a good leader if you don’t know what is happening inside you. Because what is happening inside you will drive your decision and sometimes you will have good decision or bad decision. And I have seen that so many times we CEO at the big company and suddenly, It’s not suddenly actually, because of their success and I always think that in the success you have the seed of Failure. So If you’re vulnerable to see and to continue to ask some questions like why, why and to avoid as much as you can the blame and self-pity when bad things happen and so for that you need to be self-aware. You need to ask a question from the inside. What is happening inside? What are my drivers? How do I feel about this and that and to be able to take a step back and to think and to see what is at play? I think we take far better decision and we realize that our actions have always consequences and that’s why I mean it’s strategy seeking in a way. So but it’s very important and then it’s I think it’s it goes far better far beyond that skills. I think Self-awaness. It’s very important because It’s a source and when you have this source after you know you will have authenticity you have Integrity. You will have honesty, you will have courage and so on.

    Alexis

    Beautiful. Ah, tell us one action you’ve taken in the past to develop yourself as a leader and what did you learn from that?

    Laurence

    I think self-awareness. Ah I think it’s ah, always important to see what’s going on. So my action has been to work around that you know to learn, to read books about what is happening inside, to understand more about emotions, where does it come from. For example, shame, guilt, and fear. And the checking. I found the embodiment movement. Very interesting. It’s like suddenly you realize that you have a body and so the body has some information for you and most of the time we cut from the body and I think it’s interesting to see oh I am feeling fear at the moment. Why? And so it helps to balance and it helps also to be more conscious as a leader it creates a level of consciousness and I think when we raise the level of consciousness we take better action and I think we are more free and so I think happier.

    Alexis

    really interesting and I guess a lot of food for thought there. I assume ah people will think about that pain in their back or in their neck in a different way now. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you for having joined me on the podcast today Laurence.

    Laurence

    Thank you very much Alexis.

    Photo by Jess Bailey Designs from Pexels

  • Offsites: The Missing Ritual of Remote Work

    Offsites: The Missing Ritual of Remote Work

    With the pandemic, many companies got “proof” that work could continue remotely. Less commuting. Fewer offices. Lower travel costs. But a deeper question remains: if we can do so much online, will we still need to meet in person?

    Jared Kleinert is the CEO and Co-Founder of Offsite, a company that provides end-to-end retreat planning services and software for remote and hybrid teams. In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, we explore why in-person gatherings still matter — and how to make them truly useful.

    The future of work is not one-size-fits-all

    Jared’s view is nuanced: many people want remote or hybrid work for flexibility, autonomy, and quality of life. At the same time, he believes intentional in-person time remains powerful.

    The key word is intentional.

    Instead of “office by default,” Jared advocates a cadence of gatherings:

    • executive teams may meet quarterly
    • whole-company gatherings may happen once or twice per year
    • and the purpose should be clear: relationships, alignment, strategy, skill-building, shared experiences

    Offsites, done well, create momentum that carries into the remote day-to-day.

    Before the offsite: plan early, plan with people

    A successful offsite starts long before anyone boards a plane.

    Jared shares practical planning horizons:

    • 10 people: start 2 to 3 months ahead
    • 10 to 100 people: start 3 to 6 months ahead
    • 100+ people: start 6 to 9 months ahead, sometimes a full year

    Before locking in venues and logistics, he recommends gathering input:

    • travel constraints and blackout dates
    • dietary preferences
    • inclusion and safety considerations
    • what people want from the agenda
    • a baseline engagement signal (for example an eNPS-style question) to compare before and after

    Early planning also creates leverage:

    • better venue choices
    • more negotiating power on room blocks and meeting space
    • fewer hidden surprises (fees, taxes, Wi-Fi, outlets, room setup constraints)

    During the offsite: facilitation changes everything

    Jared is direct: facilitation matters.

    A skilled facilitator helps teams:

    • stay on schedule
    • invite healthy debate
    • ensure participation (not just the loudest voices)
    • make difficult conversations workable
    • turn time together into decisions, alignment, and progress

    Even without an external facilitator, teams benefit from facilitation notes, templates, and clear session design. In other words: offsites don’t succeed because you booked a nice hotel. They succeed because the conversations are well held.

    After the offsite: don’t waste the momentum

    Many companies drop the ball after the gathering.

    Jared suggests three key moves:

    1. Run a post-offsite feedback form within a week
      Ask what worked, what didn’t, and re-ask the same engagement/connection questions you asked beforehand.
    2. Translate decisions into execution
      If strategy and priorities were discussed, move them into the tools people actually use (Asana, Notion, your wiki, your delivery system).
    3. Start planning the next one
      A cadence creates something to look forward to, and it sustains connection in remote contexts.

    Relationships: a life and leadership advantage

    Jared is known for relationship building, and his framing is simple:
    the quality of your life is shaped by the people you meet and what you learn from them.

    He shares his networking framework in three layers:

    • connect with yourself (clarify where you want to go, what you can offer)
    • connect with others (outreach, introductions, real conversations)
    • connect at scale (newsletter, podcast, community, one-to-many value)

    A key theme: networking works better when you start by giving.

    A leadership trait Jared admires: entrepreneurial mindset

    When I ask what he notices in leaders he admires, Jared points to an entrepreneurial mindset:
    people who don’t wait for a rulebook, who act on problems, who take ownership, who build.

    In a chaotic world, that posture matters.

    Listen to the episode here:

    Here is the transcript of the episode

    Alexis

    Hey Jared! What is your role and how would you describe it to someone you just met?

    Jared

    My role I’m the co-founder and CEO of Offsite. Offsite provides end-to-end retreat planning services and software for remote and hybrid companies. As the CEO, I wear many hats. So some days I’m selling some days I’m fundraising other days I’m managing the team. At a high-growth company that means recruiting, it means keeping everyone engaged and happy, it means getting everyone aligned on the company’s direction. It’s an all-encompassing job and every day is pretty unique.

    Alexis

    Excellent, What was the pivotal moment that led you to start Offsite.

    Jared

    I’ve been a remote worker my entire career. I’m 26 at the time of recording. I was fortunate to start my entrepreneurial journey at a young age at 15 and not that anything that I started in my teens really got anywhere but I was able to work for a VC-backed startup in Silicon Valley from 16 to 18. That company was called 15Five. Today they’re over 300 employees. They are an employee engagement and culture management software product that powers 40000 different teams around the world with employee engagement and retention and I got to be there when they were less than 10 people working directly under the 2 cofounders and so. That was a really exciting experience because I was working remotely from South Florida in the United States where I grew up and I was working for this Silicon Valley startup the only way I got to meet the co-founders and the rest of the team was by going to these team retreats or off-sites and so just the experience of being at a high-growth company in its early days being able to attend these offsites as an employee and understand the impact that had on the rest of my day-to-day work when I wasn’t seeing my colleagues, participating in zoom meetings weekly when we weren’t meeting quarterly for these offsites. Yeah, that was just overall a very formative experience.

    Jared

    So after I left 15five I took like a 7-year speaker author consultant turn where I was started a few small businesses: a marketing consulting business, an event business where I was hosting entrepreneurs once a quarter for these similar types of offsites but they were more of a mastermind with entrepreneurs getting together and helping each other grow their businesses. I wrote a couple of books. I was a TEDx speaker and did some corporate speaking so all these ideas sort of came together. What is seemingly like a very disparate and chaotic like career path has all sort of come together for building a company like Offsite.

    Alexis

    It’s really interesting that you already speaking about the kind of chaotic career path and you are only 26. It’s a little bit funny that you already have more than 10 years of experience. It’s quite impressive. I have a question about that new world of work. We heard a lot of time that with the pandemic companies that wanted to reduce travel and expenses received absolute proof that everything could be done remotely. I wonder if the new world of work would already spare the commute and costly offices and if it happens will we ever need to already meet in person.

    Jared

    And yeah I mean I think the future of work is different for everybody and so I would guess or bet that the vast majority of people want to work remotely or in some sort of hybrid setting where they don’t have to commute. They can spend more time with family they can travel and bring their laptop and work wherever they want when they’re traveling be able to go to doctor’s appointments or work out in the middle of the day if they want to, really optimize their schedules. But there will be some people that enjoy an office environment and don’t get me wrong I love meeting my team members in person here and there I’m more than willing to get on a plane and meet potential investors or clients I love going to conferences and events. And so I think how we work will be different for everyone but at a company level, I don’t think we will have a lot of companies that choose to have an only in-person company experience if they can avoid it there are a lot of benefits to having a remote-first or hybrid company and so that’s sort of where we’re going.

    Jared

    At the same time as you mentioned there is a huge benefit to getting people together in person but doing so very intentionally. Again I’m biased. But that’s where the idea of an offsite comes into play and having a cadence of these in-person experiences where you’re able to bring people together. Maybe once per quarter or as in the entire company together once or twice a year have. Two or three days of programming where you are deepening relationships with your team. Maybe you’re doing some skill-building. Maybe you’re doing strategic planning for the quarter ahead or the year ahead. But you’re also having fun and you’re having just a unique shared experience. Unique shared experiences that build relationships and so I think that’s the wave of the future. It’s something that if you look to the past the top remote or hybrid companies have been doing for a decade like 15Five or the company that owns WordPress which is called Automattic or Buffer, Zapier, Basecamp, or Gitlab. They’ve all been doing this for the last decade.

    Jared

    What we’re trying to do is just create software to make the offsite planning process easier because there has never been software to solve this really painful and expensive problem for whoever’s planning the offsite which is typically a chief of staff such as yourself. It’s someone who’s a people leader at a company a department leader. Maybe even a CEO of smaller company. They shouldn’t be spending their time planning an off-site but at the same time, It’s very important to plan offsites regularly if you’re remote or hybrid. So I think that’s part of the future of remote work and it may change. It may be in 20 years we’re all taking meetings in the metaverse. I have no idea but I do think it will be unique for everyone.

    Alexis

    I hope not to be honest! You mentioned the gathering and the idea of scheduling them in advance and add think a cadence of them I Really like that. What needs to happen before the gathering to really ensure success and what are the successful patterns and maybe the common mistakes people are making.

    Jared

    Yeah, so planning a successful offsite happens in advance as you were saying and so considering your team size if you’re planning an executive team meeting of 10 people, you could probably start planning that two or three months out of time. If you’re planning for 10 to 100 people just to simplify the conversation, you might want 3 to six months. If you’re planning anything over 100 people like an all-hands meeting, you may want six to nine months to plan that ahead of time or you might even take an entire year to plan that. In the planning process, you want to facilitate a couple of pre-off-site feedback forms that will include getting the basics from employees of travel information, dietary preferences, any blackout dates, maybe someone has an important life event that they can’t get out of or if there’s a certain executive that you need to have at your meeting, you have to make sure that they’re available before you’re starting to book an offsite these are some of the basics you need to get. Before you start planning but you also can use the opportunity to start having a conversation with your team about what would make this an amazing offsite for them or what are they hoping to cover on the agenda at the offsite. You might ask a question like an employer net promoter score or an E-NPS Score to be able to track the engagement of someone at your company both before and then maybe even after your offsite and see if that grows over time. Hopefully, it’s trending in the upward direction. And these are the conversations you want to have well before the off-site occurs from a logistics standpoint you also want to think about where you’re having the off-site and ideally book your venue well in advance if you plan ahead of time then you can have a lot of negotiating power with a hotel or a meeting space, be able to choose the best option for you logistically, but also negotiate your room block and negotiate discounts or concessions on meeting space on food and beverage make sure that there are no hidden fees, that the taxes are clear. So these are all the things that you want to start thinking about well ahead of schedule you want to put it on people’s calendars so that they can plan to travel you want to encourage them to book their flights ahead of time to save money or possibly even book those flights for them.

    Jared

    And then you free yourself up to focus on the agenda and make sure that you’re scheduling an offsite that really maximizes your time together and so if you’re planning ahead of time then you can develop an agenda with your team’s input that really accomplishes your business objectives for having the offsite while also allowing plenty of flex time for breaks and for team building for fun activities. You could even then share parts of that agenda with your team to encourage them to do pre-work or sort of preparation ahead of the offsite so that when you’re having certain debates or making certain decisions or doing certain training at the offsite, people have already thought in advance about what you’re discussing and they’re not just hearing about it for the first time when you’re together. So  I could go on for another 30 minutes but these are all the things you can consider if you’re planning ahead of time.

    Jared

    The challenge is that a lot of people aren’t used to planning offsites. They may not have the expertise to plan an amazing offsite you might be an amazing department leader like a sales leader or you might be an amazing executive assistant but you might not be a world-class offsite planner. It’s a totally different animal and so you may not have the expertise to plan this. You may not know how to best negotiate with hotels and other vendors. You may not know all the nuanced details that you need to consider like the number of outlets in your meeting space or the wi-fi speed. At your meeting space or dietary considerations from your team any travel sensitivities from maybe minority groups and making sure you’re going somewhere that everyone is going to feel included in safe there’s a lot of details that go into planning these offsites and so. The earlier you plan the more time you afford yourself to work through some of these challenges the better prepared you can make your team and likely you’ll save money as well compared to planning at the last minute not having as many of your team members showing up and then not. Using the time together most effectively.

    Alexis

    Yeah, that’s true that covers a lot of different skills. It’s not only the event Planning. It’s the content of it and getting the input from the team and building something that will make the time together already Meaningful. So There are a lot of different aspects. When I think of facilitating successful collaborations I already picture the facilitation that happens during the gathering as a really important aspect. Do you feel the facilitator or the facilitation of the event is something important?

    Jared

    Absolutely, I’ve been hired to facilitate executive offsites at the fortune 1000 level before I started Offsite. That’s another experience that leads me to want to start a company like this and grow it. It depends on what type of offsite you have and the team dynamics. But for most teams and for most companies bringing in an outside facilitator who is skilled in that ability will allow you to stay on schedule will allow you to have important conversations. With empathy and with a healthy debate encouraged with participation courage from everyone present and so yeah, we definitely believe in the power facilitation part of what we’re building at offsite is a marketplace of hotel partners that we have and part of the marketplace is not just hotel partners that you can have your offsite app but also various facilitators that you can hire that we’ve already screened for you that we’ve prenegotiated rates with so that you can trust who you’re hiring know what their fees are going to be ahead of time and then simply book them and invite them to your offsite and so we’re definitely encouraging more teams to consider facilitators.

    Jared

    We also have an agenda builder feature that we’re creating. In that agenda builder feature, you can think of it as sort of a template series of templates for your meetings, and once you start with one of our templates, there will be notes for whoever’s planning the offsite on how to facilitate those sessions themselves. So even if you don’t hire a facilitator you already have the programming notes and the shorthand notes on how to actually facilitate a session by yourself because to your point, facilitation is very important and so if you’re not going to allocate a budget for hiring a facilitator. We want to make sure you still have a great experience and that is a wholly unique skill set and so with a little bit of coaching and notes where we’re making sure that companies are having better offsites than they would have without us.

    Alexis

    And I imagine that in the agenda builder if you hire an external facilitator, the external facilitator will have also the opportunity to enter the agenda builder and to help you use the default Modules in the best way. We covered before the offsite, during the offsite and there’s after the offsite, after the gathering. Could you tell us what needs to happen after.

    Jared

    After the offsite I think is a missed opportunity that a lot of companies have is not doing a post offsite feedback form. You want to make sure within the week of your offsite you’re sending feedback form to your team asking them for feedback on certain sessions to share ideas that they gathered from the offsite that could have a positive impact on their role, their team, their company. You certainly want to ask them how they are feeling about their colleagues, and whatever questions you prompted them with beforehand such as an Employee Promoter Score or a one out of 10 about how connected they feel to their colleagues. You want to ask that same question after the offsite and see if the gathering made a difference or not. And then you want to ask them when they want to do it again and where they where they want to have their next offsite and so I think establishing a cadence of these offsites is important so that you constantly have something to look forward to as an employee working at home or working at a coffee shop. Maybe you’re lonely one day and instead of starting to look for other jobs or sort of losing productivity having another offsite to look forward to makes a big difference on the day-to-day front.

    Jared

    Another thing that companies sort of drop the ball on is actually leveraging any of the ideas or next steps that can come from an offsite and so if you’re doing strategic planning during your offsite. How are you translating the ideas that come from your offsite to your project management tool like Asana or to your Notion, wiki, or whatever you’re using to run your company. How are you taking the ideas and the decisions that you make during the offsite and translating that into your day-to-day work and so you want to think about. How you’re going to leverage the offsite and continue benefiting from it afterward and you want to continue the conversation by doing a post offsite feedback form asking for how the offsite went how it could be better next time and then starting to plan your next offsite immediately afterward.

    Alexis

    You have been named by USA today, the most connected millennial, and of course, I’ve watched your TED talk. That’s really impressive. Can you tell us why you believe it is important to build relationships?

    Jared

    I think the quality of your life is a direct result of the people you meet and how much you learn from them and so that all translates to networking and relationship building being mindful about who you spend time with how you go about. Strengthening those relationships, staying in touch with people, and until we are all in the metaverse and until we’re all sort of part cyborgs I think the human connection we have with each other is is one of if not the most important things that determines our life.

    Jared

    I believe there are even scientific studies that talk about longevity and one of the sorts of top predictors of longevity is the amount of friendships you have. It’s not necessarily whether or not you smoke or how much you drink or how much you exercise, but it’s about the quality of your relationships and, so it has an overall impact on your health, your wealth, your career trajectory and so I’ve just spent a lot of time thinking about how to build relationships, how to how to deepen those relationships and how to ultimately, do meaningful things with that access whether it’s writing books that inspire others or get the opportunity to do keynote speeches or Ted talks that others will view or create companies or communities. I’ve just sort of leaned into the whole networking relationship-building thing. Ah, it’s probably the only thing I’m good at. I am not good at anything else. I’m not a technical founder of a startup. I’m decent at marketing. But I wouldn’t say I’m a world-class marketer but I am world-class at ah, yeah, building relationships and bringing diverse perspectives together to hopefully accomplish bigger things for society.

    Alexis

    So we will benefit from your world-class skills there. What would be the critical advice to someone who wants to develop their network to build those relationships?

    Jared

    I actually have a book that is about to come out called Networking. I break the book into 3 parts. The first part is connecting with yourself. The second part is connecting with others and the third part is connecting with others at scale. The best place to start is connecting with yourself and that means a few things first it means understanding where you want to go in your career, in life and so there are various exercises in the book like a vivid vision exercise where you write down like in journaling where you want to be in 3 years and in all aspects of your life, romantically with money with your career where you live etc and start to chart an intentional path for your life 3 years out you also want to think about a relationship action plan. What types of people do you want to meet in order to accomplish some of your goals on that vivid vision exercise and then you want to think about what you can do to provide value to those types of people. So what actions can you take to deepen relationships whether it’s sending a birthday card or calling someone on their birthday or sending someone a congratulatory text message after you see a career update or making a valuable introduction for someone to a new client or investor or employer. These are all specific actions. You could take to deepen the relationships. You also want to think about, just what’s going to make you stand out whether it’s credentials whether it’s, unique personality traits or experiences or views of the world, different communities. You can introduce other people. Thinking about where you want to go, who you want to meet, and ultimately how you’re going to build and deepen relationships with them. That’s all the work that needs to be done before you go and connect with others. So that’s the connecting with yourself category.

    Jared

    Connecting with others. That part of the book talks about how to send cold emails effectively how to ask for and receive warm introductions and just all the different tactics you can use to go about building your network. If you don’t do the connecting with yourself work. It’s going to be much harder to build relationships when you start going out into the world and connecting with people and you’re going to have a challenging time, actually keeping those relationships going. Yeah because there’s there’s no sort of goal in mind for deepening those relationships or no purpose

    Jared

    So then it’s connecting with others at scale and we’re talking about yeah things like podcasting where you can offer value to your network in a one-to-many fashion or having an-mail Newsletter. We’re starting a community whether it’s in-person or online. There’s all these sorts of more advanced tactics where now that you have a really big network. How do you continue staying top of mind? How do you continue providing value? How do you leverage that network whenever you need support. There’s a  lot to it and I’ll probably keep updating the book once or twice a year because I’m sure some of the tactics around networking will change especially with new social media channels or new ways of working. But at the end of the day. It’s sort of connecting with yourself and then going out and connecting with others in a very intentional way where you’re looking to provide value upfront and then sort of leverage the relationships respectfully and intentionally as you develop though.

    Alexis

    Yeah, and it’s very interesting because of the way you frame it. Some people think of networking or building a relationship as a way to get from others and the way you are framing it is thinking about what you can give. And I Really like that because then when you are clear about where you want to go and what you can offer to the world then you can connect with people. So that’s a fair summary of what you said?

    Jared

    Yeah, great job.

    Alexis

    Do you believe that it has to happen in person?

    Jared

    No. I definitely think the in-person connections allow you to deepen a relationship maybe more quickly than doing it online but I have plenty of yeah, online friends or virtual friends that I’ve never met in person. Or I’ve been able to, build relationships with over, 8 years and maybe finally just met them in person a few weeks ago for the very first time. But yeah, this can all happen online I do recommend trying to use Zoom or use some sort of video platform as much as possible because the sort of best type of connection is going to be in person in my opinion then it’s going to be a video chat then it’s going to be audio like a phone call. And then it’s going to be your email or sort of social media exchanges and text messages are probably last yeah text is not great. But it’s really about the quality of interaction and being willing to just  explore deeper facets of that conversation with someone. This is we’re like we’re not talking about the weather here or we’re not talking about sports we’re talking about things that we’re passionate about and we’re going to resonate with each other because of that and yeah, that’s going to carry our relationship for yeah months even if we didn’t speak again for another three months for some reason we’ll look back at this conversation say wow that was a really interesting conversation and I learned a lot. Those are the type of interactions that I try to have with people where I’m not wasting time with them. But rather we’re having these deep and meaningful interactions and that allows us to develop a very rich relationship over time.

    Alexis

    Really important. You worked with a lot of leaders and among those you admire? What’s the 1 treat that stands out to you?

    Jared

    And well the one trait that stands out of yeah I guess an entrepreneurial passion or like a mindset of entrepreneurship. There’s a lot of problems in the world. And many of those problems are growing exponentially and I think the only way we solve a lot of those problems is to get more people to act on their passions in life and be entrepreneurial and then unite in solving those big pressing problems and so I wrote a couple of books where I was profiling top-performing millennials from business owners, to olympians, to actors, to nonprofit founders. I’ve been fortunate to consult New York Times bestselling authors and small business owners that have built successful companies. And whether they’re business owners or they’re they work in corporate or they’re athletes like they all have a sense of entrepreneurship about their careers and lives or even in solving problems. Like a nonprofit founder where they’re not sitting back and asking if someone else is going to solve a problem but they’re actively taking steps to better their own lives, better their careers, solve problems that they’re passionate about and so I think that’s really important and it probably extends even to my hiring practices like I overwhelmingly have tried to hire entrepreneurs at my company or people that have a side hustle or some sort of entrepreneurial spirit about them because I don’t want them to sit around and wait for directions on how to solve a problem. I want them to just go and solve the problem. And I think we need more of that because there is no rulebook anymore. The world is so chaotic that there are no safe institutions anymore we have to figure out how to solve these problems or we’re doomed. I would use another word but I don’t know if we’re allowed to use it.

    Alexis

    Yeah, let’s keep that for the imagination of people. Jared, you are the CEO and Co-Founder of Offsite. He is also the founder of Meeting of the Minds, as well as a TED speaker, you are an award-winning author, and as I mentioned before the “Most Connected Millennial” according to USA Today. 

    Thank you for having joined me today.

    Jared

    Yeah, thanks for having me appreciate it.

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