Blog Alexis Monville (en)

Tag: leadership

  • This is Season Three of Le Podcast!

    This is Season Three of Le Podcast!

    Season 3 of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership features interviews with experts on leadership and related topics.

    In the first episode, Jared Kleinert, the CEO, and co-founder of Offsite and the founder of Meeting of the Minds, discusses the importance of meeting in person in the future of work, the process and considerations for organizing offsites, the role of facilitation in building and deepening relationships. He also provides hiring advice from a serial entrepreneur.

    The second episode features Laurence Duarte, a global management consultant who helps businesses protect and grow their reputation. The episode discusses the concept of reputation, its importance for a company, reputational risks, and steps for managing those risks. Laurence also discusses the importance of building a shield to protect against reputational risks and the critical trait of a leader.

    In the third episode, Jurgen Appelo, a serial founder, successful entrepreneur, author, and speaker known for pioneering management practices to help creative organizations succeed in the 21st century, discusses his work on agility, innovation, and leadership, and provides insights on how to foster innovation in organizations and develop oneself as a leader.

    The fourth episode features Ashley Freeman, a writer, facilitator, and coach. The episode covers Ashley’s work creating Flourishing Work and discusses topics such as developing a personal brand, building trust, the importance of continuous learning through book discussion clubs, and the essential traits of a leader.

    The fifth episode features Philippe Coullomb and Charles Collingwood-Boots, who design processes for bringing individuals together to collaborate and solve complex problems. The episode discusses the factors that are important when bringing people together to work on complex issues, the role of facilitation in successful collaboration, the importance of context setting and engaging sponsors in collaboration efforts, the challenges and differences between hybrid and virtual collaboration, and the importance of the physical space for enabling successful collaboration.

    The sixth episode features Joseph Jacks, the founder and General Partner of OSS Capital, a fund that focuses on investing in early-stage commercial open-source companies. The episode discusses the benefits of investing in open-source projects and companies, the motivations of people who contribute to open-source projects, and the importance of a key leadership trait in the open-source world.

    In the final episode of the season, the BEPS framework is introduced as a tool for understanding a leader’s different roles and responsibilities and focusing on key areas for success. The BEPS framework consists of four axes: Business, Execution, People, and System. OpenAI interviews Alexis Monville, the creator of the BEPS framework.

  • 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!

  • The 67 days of the leadership challenge

    The 67 days of the leadership challenge

    The compilation of all the LinkedIn posts published over the summer of 2022 with the hashtag #67daysofleadership.

    The-67-days-of-the-leadership-challengeDownload

    Thank you for your support during the challenge.

    My initial idea was to list the names of all people who shared, reacted, and commented on the posts. I realized it was a pretty challenging task – as it continues to move daily, even on old posts – and that it will not bring much value to the reader. You know who you are. Thank you.

    At the end of the challenge, Jérôme Bourgeon was the first one to ask if I had reached my goal. The goal I set for myself on Day 1 is to share and learn about leadership daily.

    The answer is nuanced.

    Yes, I want to continue to learn about leadership every day. The situations I face daily are good opportunities for that. Writing about those is helpful to thinking and consolidating the learnings.

    No, I don’t want to have the pressure to share daily.

    Furthermore, I had no expectations about the metrics: the number of views, shares, reactions, and comments.

    But, it is very addictive.

    I learned through the comments a lot. It sparked some fantastic conversations with people I was not expecting to have. So, I wanted more comments so that I could have more of those conversations.

    I looked for the validation and support of the reactions. I discovered there were more choices than likes during the challenge (I know, it was probably there in front of me the whole time, and I had ignored it.)

    I learned that shares could extend the reach of your message to an entirely different network sparkling new connections.

    I was disappointed with the LinkedIn algorithm. Some posts were viewed more than 30,000 times, while others collected just a bit more than 100 views. The algorithm picks winners and losers every minute based on criteria that are still unknown to me. Even my wife, Isabel Monville, who is an executive coach, and could have been interested in them, and would have certainly supported me, was not seeing them. She knows better ways to support me daily than through LinkedIn. Maybe that’s why the algorithm chose not to put my posts on her feed. 

    Early engagement on a post, the reaction from the people mentioned, the content itself, keywords, emoticons, pictures, videos, and links are probably factors, and I still don’t understand them.

    Even if I try to remind myself that metrics were not the point, sharing and learning were. It still frustrates me a bit.

    Overall, it was a great experience, and I feel blessed and grateful for all it brought me. Thank you!

    What I intend to do:

    • I continue to write. Writing to think and consolidate learnings.
    • I connect with people. People I already know, people I don’t, so that we discuss and learn together.
    • I share from time to time on my blog or LinkedIn. Sharing to create conversation opportunities.

    Let’s talk!

    Enjoy your journey!

    [edit on Sept 8, 2022]
    I woke up this morning with a notification of a new post on LinkedIn from Michael Doyle. He created a cover for the pdf I assembled with all the posts. Thank you, Michael!

    Michael also shared the whole process of creating your ebook. Check it out here.

  • 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

  • Invest a few hours to excel at public speaking

    Invest a few hours to excel at public speaking

    A few months back, I was doing some research on public speaking, and I stumbled on this short video of one of the world’s experts in public speaking Conor Neil. What I learned in the video changed forever the way I envision starting and finishing a talk.

    Yes, there is a grownup way to say: Once upon a time…

    Funny enough, I found a reference to Conor in a post from Michael Thompson which gave me the courage to send emails to people I don’t know to thank them for their great work. Something you may want to try!

    Michael, the co-author of I am a Software Engineer and I am in Charge, told me that even when you are not keen on public speaking, you can always use the improvement to make an impact when the moments arise, like saying something poignant at a birthday party, or maybe setting the best tone possible when meeting someone new.

    Speaking about meeting someone new, I recommend using the One-on-one Discovery technique and/or prepare The Story of Your Life in 5 words as recommend in the episode of the podcast Hidden Brain.

    I think there are many ways to use public speaking skills beyond the fear laden speaking in front of 300 people that most people think about (well at least I do) when we utter the words “public speaking”.

    Michael Doyle

    You may need more to be convinced that you can excel at public speaking. What about you try the MIT Course in which Patrick Winston teaches How to Speak.

    Then you can get to work on how your talk sound with Julian Treasure. His TED talk, How to speak so that people want to listen, has more than 45M views! In his talk, you will learn about: register, timbre, prosody, pace, pitch, and volume.

    Once you learn from those world experts, you have to seize all the opportunities to practice. In the next meeting, the next internal lunch and learn, the next internal conference, maybe a meetup about something you are passionate about, or even submit your first talk? You can also join a local Toastmaster?

    I experimented with the teaching from those world experts in the last talk I gave at the Tech Leadership Conference. Happy to hear your thoughts about what I should improve!

  • Emile wants to solve consistency the open source way

    Emile wants to solve consistency the open source way

    Do you remember Igraine from the Primary Team story? Igraine leads the EMEA region of a global company. Bob, Igraine’s manager, told the Field Leadership Team that he wanted to get more consistency from the three main regions and that Igraine, leading EMEA, Yun, leading APAC, and Aileen, leading Americas, should come up with proposals. Bob wants to drive more consistency to scale the business and avoid duplicating efforts in the three regions.

    At this point of the story, Igraine invited Emile, the consultant passionate about Leadership and Organizational Development, to discuss how to solve the challenge. Emile built a rapport with Igraine when he dared to discuss the Tribal Leadership stages with her. Find more about that in Are you at the right table?

    Emile is super excited about the opportunity. He heard noises from the grapevines that the pendulum was about to swing from decentralization to centralization. Some even say that there will be complete top-down control from the global organization over the regions.

    Emile has another idea in mind to solve the consistency and duplication of efforts issues. He reached out to Veronica, the head of the Sales Operations team in EMEA, to get a sense of the concrete problems and evaluate his idea.

    As the three regions grew independently, they put processes and tools to support their sales team. The global team at that time has no interest in standardization and was ready to invest in more people to solve the reporting issues caused by the inconsistency between the regions.

    How to solve that?

    Emile wants to solve consistency and duplication of efforts in the open source way.

    The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration, meaning “any system of innovation or production that relies on goal-oriented yet loosely coordinated participants who interact to create a product (or service) of economic value, which they make available to contributors and noncontributors alike.”

    Levine, Sheen S.; Prietula, M. J. (2013). “Open Collaboration for Innovation: Principles and Performance” Organization Science.

    Emile proposes to identify the top 3 processes that are the most time-consuming for the teams. And then, Emile offers to engage the three regions in staffing cross-functional teams with people from the three regions to make the processes consistent and select the tooling. Veronica is onboard with the idea! She is ready to join forces with Emile to convince others that the open source way will be better than centralization like for software development.

    Emile imagines that with three successes, they will select the next three and even have a more open approach to get people to volunteer to contribute to the selection and the resolution of the next challenges.

    When Veronica and Emile go to Heiden, who leads the finances team for EMEA, he took a good 30 minutes to poke the holes in the approach.

    After that, he pauses and laughs. Veronica and Emile are puzzled.

    Heiden, just says: “okay, you are really serious about it, and I agree that we should try.” He then continues waving the book Humanocracy in front of the webcam: “Like Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini said in the book, central planning, and central control is the model of the old USSR, not the model an innovative company should embrace, right?”

    Let’s propose the open source way!

  • Blessed, Grateful, and Human

    Blessed, Grateful, and Human

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I’m joined by Avi Liran, Chief Delighting Officer at Delivering Delight.

    Avi has been a CMO several times, an entrepreneur, a trade commissioner, and an investor. He also shares something rare in leadership conversations: he made a lot of money three times and lost it all three times. Those experiences shaped his decision to focus on what he calls a “delightful workplace” where people can lead others to success.

    When I asked Avi how he was doing, he answered:

    “Like every day, I feel blessed and grateful.”
    — Avi Liran

    That answer looks simple. It carries a whole worldview.

    Delight starts with authenticity

    Avi’s first ingredient for delightful leadership is not charisma, and not being liked.

    It is authenticity.

    Leaders don’t need to perform. They don’t need to become someone else. They can have bad days. In fact, Avi connects delight to a deeper definition of happiness: sometimes it is the ability to be sad and still be supported, or supportive.

    Know your values, know your why

    Avi repeatedly comes back to values. He asks leaders to identify them clearly, and many people need time to answer.

    Values are not a nice poster on a wall. They shape why you lead, how you decide, and what you believe about people. That belief matters: if you believe people are good, you lead differently than if you believe trust must always be earned first.

    Avi also invites leaders to look back:

    • who were your best leaders, peers, employees
    • what adjectives describe them
    • and what kind of leader you want to be, so others will follow you

    The delightful leaders he has met share something in common:
    they are focused less on what they get, and more on creating success for others.

    The power to ask

    One of the most practical parts of the conversation is about asking.

    Avi argues that many situations do not change simply because people do not ask directly. Fear of rejection and fear of “no” keep people silent, indirect, or overly explanatory.

    His approach is blunt and kind: ask for what you need.

    It sounds obvious. It isn’t common.

    And it connects with another idea he repeats throughout the episode: build a better relationship with the word no.

    “No” is rarely the end

    Avi suggests listening carefully to what comes after a no.

    “No” often means:

    • not now
    • I’m busy
    • come back when you’ve upgraded your approach
    • you’re asking the wrong way
    • you’re missing something

    If you listen and adjust, you can return stronger.

    He also adds a useful stance: when you ask for help, come as a giver, not as a taker. Relationships grow when you bring value, not when you extract it.

    Toxic people, boundaries, and staying yourself

    Avi does not pretend that leadership is always positive. He acknowledges toxic colleagues, bosses, and customers.

    His framework includes:

    • empathy, compassion, and kindness when possible
    • and when it isn’t possible, a surprising tool: pity

    Pity, for him, is a way not to take toxicity personally. It becomes a reminder:
    it’s not about me, it’s about their pain.

    He also insists on boundaries, not as self-protection only, but as clarity for everyone.
    Boundaries prevent the minefield.

    Engagement is your brand

    One of Avi’s strongest points is about engagement.

    He argues that disengagement is a choice, and that choosing disengagement hurts your brand. Even in a difficult environment, you can choose to:

    • learn
    • contribute
    • build capability
    • prepare your next move
    • stay the best version of yourself today

    It is not naive optimism. It is personal leadership.

    Leading on a bad day: “Blessed, grateful… and”

    The episode closes with a practical method Avi uses when people are having a bad day.

    He reframes the reality of life: we tend to focus on what is missing, but many foundational things are already there. From that place, you can be authentic without pretending.

    Avi’s final formula is simple and powerful:

    Blessed, and grateful, and sad.
    Blessed, and grateful, and angry.
    Blessed, and grateful, and frustrated.

    It makes space for real emotion, without losing perspective.

    And it creates psychological safety for others to do the same.

    References mentioned in the episode

    • Avi’s TEDx talk (mobile phone analogy): Can you train yourself to deal with difficult times?
    • Chip Conley
    • Everlasting Optimism: 9 Principles for Success, Happiness and Powerful Relationships by Lenny Ravich
    • Marina Bay Sands
    • WildCard Conference
    • Mojo Session with Emily Chang (The Spare Room)
    • Tony Hsieh

    Listen to the episode here:

    Here is the transcript of the episode

    Alexis:

    Hello, Avi. Can you tell us a little bit more about you?

    Avi:

    Bonjour, Alexis. Hello from Singapore. A little about me. Well, I was made in 1962 in Tel Aviv. My parents had a radio and a sofa. Since I like to sing, I think I know where they made me. As an Israeli, I’m a little bit aggressive and creative. I was an officer in the army, an economist, MBA in entrepreneurship and marketing, and I was a CMO of two companies.

    Avi:

    Afterwards, I joined the government. I was a Deputy Director in the Foreign Trade Administration. Then, I went to be the trade commissioner in Singapore. Created two funds between Israel and Singapore, then worked with Singapore Telecom to invest in nine companies in Israel. I made lots of money three times. Lost it all in the dot com in 2008 and another time that was pretty embarrassing to come to your family and say, “Oh. We made so much and we lost it all.”

    Avi:

    In 2006, I got a book that is called Everlasting Optimism that made me laugh and changed my life course to go and add value to other people, because I realized that I’ve been through so many things and I still managed to keep my spirit, make other people delighted. I say, “Why not we going to go and have a delightful workplace, where people are going to wake up, and they’re going to be able to lead their teams to success?”

    Avi:

    We started to research it, because when we started the first workshop, people started to change. We were crazy about it. How is it possible?

    Alexis:

    That’s quite impressive. I will have a lot of questions about all that, coming after that. First, how are you today? Seriously?

    Avi:

    Like every day, I feel blessed and grateful.

    Alexis:

    Okay. You’re delivering delight and you are blessed and grateful. There’s something that is missing for me. What does it take to be a delightful leader?

    Avi:

    Well, I think the first thing is you need to be authentic. The last two and a half years, we’ve been embarking on the research about first time leadership. We interviewed 220 leaders in 37 countries, in six continents. More than 50 percent of them are ladies, because when we thought about leadership, we were under the impression that you need to be likable in order to get promoted, in order to be successful.

    Avi:

    What we found is that, if you ask any good leader, “Do you want the people that you promote to be likable?,” they actually said, “Absolutely not,” because they may compromise on making tough decisions. They may be pleasers, which will make them do the wrong decisions, because they’re going to go for short term.

    Avi:

    Interestingly, instead of that, they say, “What we expect them to be is authentic.” That is the first prerequisite. People want you to be you. People don’t want you to be fake. People don’t want you to be Bill Gates. People don’t want you to be Steve Jobs. You are the version of yourself and you are entitled to have a bad day.

    Avi:

    Researching about positive psychology and happiness, the first thing that I could tell you about being a delightful leader is, for yourself and for others, sometimes happiness is the ability to be sad and being able to be supported or supportive to people that are sad.

    Avi:

    That’s the beginning of where we start. Be authentic. That’s the first ingredient. In my program, there are two parts. The first part is the why of becoming a delightful leader. Then, I take you and I bring you to explore your values. I’m going to ask the audience, “Do you know what are your values?” Surprisingly, when I ask this questions, nine out of ten people need time to think. They can’t tell me immediately, “Number one. Number two. Number three. Number four. Number five.”

    Avi:

    The second interesting thing, that nine out of ten will tell me integrity, or honesty, or trust as the first or second value. Nine out of ten will stop at three. The reason is, they have so many other values to bring, and only two left.

    Avi:

    The first thing I’ll encourage you, if you want to decide to be a leader, you need to know, “Why do you do the things that you do?” That’s where your values are. Also, I must say that where your beliefs are. If you believe that people are good, you are going to behave in a different way than if you believe that everybody is bad. If you believe that everybody needs to earn your trust first, or you’re a more trusting person, or somewhere in the middle. This will affect your why.

    Avi:

    The second thing that they do over there, is I ask questions about your experience. Who were your best leaders? Who were your best peers? Who were your best employees? I ask you to draw the adjectives and try to portray what kind of leader did you enjoy the most. Interestingly, chances are that that is who you want to be, so other people will follow you.

    Avi:

    We have many exercises to really try to find, “What is your leadership credo?” Why do you do what you do? Why do you want to lead people? The delightful leaders that I’ve met, thousands of them, have something in common. They are not looking for what is there for themselves. They are looking, as delightful leaders, how to create success for others. That is something that is common to all the delightful leaders that I’ve met.

    Avi:

    The second part of the program that I lead is about the how of delightful leadership. How do you become a delightful leader? I can expand later on.

    Alexis:

    When you ask the question, “What are your values?,” I paused for a second. That reminded me of an exercise that we did with Chief of Staff, that was identifying our values and see where the connections between the values that we had. Interesting what you said, because we all needed some time to answer that question. That was not one person needed some time. That was all of us. I’m not surprised with the nine out of ten. Who do you look up to as a leader?

    Avi:

    I’m inspired by everything. I have a tendency to be very jealous of successful people. I use the energy of jealousy in order to learn from them. For example, when I was doing research, I found a gentleman named Chip Conley. He was the founder and CEO of Joie de Vivre hotels. Later on, he became the Chief Commercial Hospitality Officer of Airbnb, as a modern elder. He was responsible to let them understand what hospitality means.

    Avi:

    I saw what it did and I tried to get to connect to him, because I wanted to learn from him. I managed to pass his secretary and they were very nice. He finally gave me five minutes of his time. He said, “If you want to meet me, come to San Francisco.” I bought a ticket. I flew to San Francisco, stayed in his hotel for one hour to meet him.

    Avi:

    That hour became a relationship of mentorship. He came to Singapore. I arranged for him to perform for my clients, who learned immensely from him. Then, I managed to read all his book, learn about his program, watch him delivering, understanding.

    Avi:

    One of the things that I would recommend, just think about who impresses you. Just try to get to them. Don’t take no as an answer. About no, this is something very Israeli that people may wish to know. Number one, a lot of people would like to give you what you want. You just need to get to them. Number two, when you go to ask someone to help you, come as a giver, not as a taker.

    Avi:

    I managed to get gigs for cheap, that made thousands of thousands of dollars for him, that he saw that I’m not a taker. I’m not there to get something just from him. Have a new relationship with the word no. When you receive a no, whether you’re trying to sell something, whether you’re trying to get something, no usually has something after the word no. No, which means not now. No, because I’m busy. No, because you need to upgrade yourself before you come to me. If you listen to the things after the no and upgrade yourself, you can retry.

    Alexis:

    It made me think about something that one of my friend’s told me last week, I think. I was trying to ask him something. At some point, he paused and he said, “Okay. I’m interesting with what you are saying, but you know what? One thing that could be helpful is, when you want something, ask it directly. You spoke for five minutes to explain to me all the rationale behind what you wanted to do. I was listening. It was interesting, but I trust you. I don’t need all that. If you need something from me, ask directly. It’s okay. If I need to know more about it, I will ask you. Don’t worry.” I said, “Oh. Okay. That’s interesting.” Why I do that?

    Avi:

    You mentioned a very human phenomenon. When people feel that you want to ask something, they don’t want you to go around the bush, because they don’t like to be manipulated. They could see through you.

    Avi:

    Interestingly, one of the features … We have more than 30 features of how you become a delightful leader. What I do is, I make an analogy to the mobile phone operating system. I call it Delight Operating System. I ask people to imagine that they could switch on and off options on their phone, like flight mode, or flight mode off. I say, “Flight mode or delight mode?”

    Avi:

    One of the settings of becoming a delightful leader is the power to ask. I suggest to people, ask for what you need. Let me do an experiment with you. Alexis, would you help me now? I would like to ask you to give me a raving round of applause right now. Would you do that for me?

    Alexis:

    Of course. With great pleasure. I would like to try that. I will do my best to do it. Of course, it’s just me.

    Avi:

    Fantastic. If you’re listening to me at home, please do that as well. Okay. Now, why did you do that?

    Alexis:

    Because you asked.

    Avi:

    Exactly. Now, if it was so easy to ask and receive, why do people don’t ask for what they need?

    Alexis:

    I don’t know. They are afraid to be rejected. They are afraid of receiving a no.

    Avi:

    Why do most people don’t ask for what they need, if it’s so easy? When I ask this question, someone in the audience will say, “Because we are afraid.” Then I ask, “Why are you afraid?” Then the answer is, “Afraid of rejection.” I would say, “That’s okay. You’re going to be rejected many times in your life.” That’s, again, the relationship that you have with no.

    Avi:

    A very interesting story, when I worked with Marina Bay Sands, we work with them for seven months. When we started to work with them, they got a very bad review. 140th place on TripAdvisor. Within seven months, they went to 36th position. At the end of the first workshop, a gentleman called Evo, who was one of the top managers, arranged for us a banquet. It was a fantastic party with champagne and everything. It was really fantastic.

    Avi:

    Then, he wanted to buy the book of Everlasting Optimism. We asked him, “Why would you like to spend your own money? Why don’t you ask your boss to buy it for everyone, so you don’t have to buy it?” He immediately went to the boss, he asked, and he got it. He was so enthusiastic, because he immediately applied the power to ask.

    Avi:

    Next to him was Sonja and Michael. There was a refrigerator of Coca-Cola. Sonja looks at Michael and says, “You know how many times I asked to get this Coca-Cola fridge for my team?” Michael say, “But you didn’t ask me.” She said, “Michael, may I ask you to have this fridge?” He said, “Yes. This fridge is going for your team.”

    Avi:

    Sometimes, people are so happy to give it to us as much as we are happy to give to us. If you are a parent, many times people are just waiting for the kids to ask them for advice, ask them for something. A lot of people are waiting to give you what you want. At the same time, the engine of delight will be very helpful for you, because when you deposit so much things inside, people will love to give you whatever you wish for.

    Alexis:

    Maybe it doesn’t feel as real. It doesn’t feel really possible for everybody, because sometimes you really deal with people that are really toxic. That could be a toxic colleague, or a toxic boss, or a toxic customer. It doesn’t fit that picture that you draw just before. How do you deal with that?

    Avi:

    I’ll give you a theory and a story. In one of the chapters in my book, I talk about your universe. I ask you to draw your solar system, and put on your solar system, you are the sun of your own solar system. Alexis is the sun of Alexis’s solar system. Avi is the sun of Avi’s solar system. I’m a planet on your solar system and you’re a planet on mine.

    Avi:

    I ask people to decide what are the orbits and name the orbits. It’s family, and close friends, and less close friends, and colleagues, and so on. We have rules for each one of these orbits. I ask you to write down, “What are the rules? What are the expectations that you have from each one of the orbits?”

    Avi:

    Then, I ask you to put the people that are most important to you and place them on the orbits. If there is a mismatch between the expectation that you have, with the orbit that the person is, sometimes what you need to do is to take that person and put them on a more remote place. On that remote place, you have less expectations. You’re going to give less and you’re going to be much happier.

    Avi:

    You need to, first, align your solar system. What you’re talking about, about toxic people in our life, I make an analogy for them that they are black holes. When you see someone is a black hole, you have to be careful. Either you place it a very remote orbit or, alternatively, first you can talk to them.

    Avi:

    To your question about toxic bosses, I hear this a lot, and I will give you an interestingly unconventional answer. I usually suggest to leaders to deal with people with empathy, compassion, and kindness. However, not always it works.

    Avi:

    Now, the first assumption that I have is that every person that I meet has pain, has experienced problems in their life, have been humiliated in the past, maybe have been abused. Maybe they have, at home, a kid that is suffering from severe autism or maybe there is someone that just passed away. Maybe they have a terrible health condition that they are not able to tell to someone.

    Avi:

    Once you make the assumption that whoever sits in front of you has a pain in their life, I’ve yet to see a person that does not have any pain in their life. Separation, death, loss of money, loss of friends. I didn’t see yet, the perfect person that doesn’t have pain in their life.

    Avi:

    If you could have the first three of empathy, compassion, and kindness, and you can manage with that to not get into a problem or a heated discussion, you’re a winner. Sometimes, the toxic people would be beyond repair and you will not be able to affect their life with your kindness. At that time, I think the secret weapon that I call it pity. The minute that I have a pity for a person, that person is not anymore in my level. It’s like looking at the drunk person. If a drunk person was going to tell me, “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” I don’t pay attention to that, because I know that that person is drunk. I classify that person that is drunk.

    Avi:

    Instead of taking the toxicity from that person, I just bend and let it go above my head. That’s basically helping me not to take it personally. Here is something that I put in my head as a mantra. It’s not about me. It’s about him. It’s about her. It’s her pain, not mine. She or he is trying to inflict their pain on me. Sorry, it’s not my pain. I will want to stay myself. I have a brand. I’m Avi. I’m kind. I don’t want to go and become toxic to the toxic.

    Avi:

    Having say that, I am enjoying making something that is called boundaries. Again, a lot of people think that making boundaries is to protect myself. I say no. Putting boundaries is to help everybody, because beyond the boundaries, there is a minefield. When you cross the boundaries of someone, you’re definitely going to go and explode. By me putting a sign, “This is my boundary,” if you’re going to cross that boundary, everybody going to explode. You’re going to explode and I’m going to explode.

    Avi:

    This is kindness, because when you don’t tell people where the boundaries are … Two stories. One about Major Biran. He told me I’m never going to be an officer. I’m going to be an officer over his dead body. I was frustrated. I really wanted to become an officer in the army.

    Avi:

    Then, one of the reservist guys, his name was Efi. He came to me and he said, “Avi, can you put your hand on your shoulder?” I did and he said, “Imagine that the pigeon has pooped on you.” Then, he showed me how he scratches it, and push it away from the shoulder, and take it out. He said, “That’s what you need to do as shit is being dropped on you. What you don’t do, Avi, and this is what you did. You took the shit in your hands and put it on your face, and then you tried to talk to everyone. I am shit. That is not helpful. Just take it away. It’s not for you. Anybody that would have walked there would get the shit. It’s not for you. It’s not about you. It’s about the bird. The bird has shit. That’s it.”

    Avi:

    That was extremely helpful when someone tried to insult me. I am a human being. Sometimes, I’m going to get upset and that’s okay, because I’m human. Most of the time, I will either use empathy, compassion, and kindness. If we have time, we’re going to talk about the differences. If that doesn’t work, I’ll use pity.

    Avi:

    Seriously, when you pity someone, you can’t get angry at them. They’re like a cripple. They’re like a child. You don’t go and judge them, and you keep your brand, and you keep who you are up.

    Avi:

    The second story is, after being CMO, where everybody listened to me, I have teams that I say, “A, it’s A. B, it’s B.” I got paid very well. I joined the government. I got 20 percent of the paid. I got employees that are totally disengaged. I got a toxic boss.

    Avi:

    By the way, I saw that engagement or disengagement is a choice. A lot of people say, “No. How you can be engaged when your boss is toxic, when the environment is like this?” I said, “You chose to be here today. If you don’t like it, why don’t you find another place? Make yourself the best talent that you can. Hunt for another job, but today you are here. Make it a great day. Be the best version of yourself. Get to learn something new.” It doesn’t make any sense to be disengaged, because you’re hurting your brand.

    Avi:

    What I managed to do is, I managed to interest my team, that was absolutely disengaged, to understand what they do, why they do, and the impact that they do. For example, we had the First Minister from India came to Israel. I told them about all the things and about the excitement. I taught them everything that I learned about India. They were so excited with me, because we were creating history together. Suddenly, I had a team that were much better.

    Avi:

    With my toxic boss, I ended up to be his boss. If you are handling people, believe in yourself and be your own brand, and you’re going to be able to overcome as long as you are there.

    Avi:

    One last story. On the first day of officer course, they throw us in the desert. Minus three degrees. The winter of 1983. We didn’t have good clothes. We didn’t have food. We didn’t sleep. They were really making us tired and exhausted, and they were bullying us as a part of the first week.

    Avi:

    Now, 78 of 80 were miserable. Two out of the 80 were extremely happy. Why? Because the same time will go if you suffer or if you enjoy. It’s the same no food. It’s the same no sleep. It’s the same harassment. If you keep your smile, and you help each other, you create comradery. The best time to get relationship is the time of tough time. You see who you are really in tough times. Not when everything is great. Some of my best friends are from exactly that time, when we had hardship.

    Alexis:

    I first saw you in a conference you gave at The World Conference. I had the pleasure to be invited by some of the organizers, Simon Jaillais and Jerome Bourgeon. I’m really grateful. I need to thank them. I hope I did. This was really an interesting conference.

    Alexis:

    I joined that conference and I’ve seen the mobile phone analogy. I was thinking, “Yeah. In reality, this is exactly that. This is exactly what I’m trying to say.” I’m trying to say that to myself and I’m trying to say that to others, that at some point, you’re making the choice. You cannot change the circumstances, but you can change how you deal with that.

    Avi:

    Actually, we are living great life. I totally agree with you. Thank you very much for the compliment. I try every day to learn new things, and to hone what I do, and see more research, so when I speak to you and speak to others, I can give them more example, more rigor, more research, more studies, so when I tell you, “This is what I suggest that you consider,” it’s based on measurement. It’s based on something that they see that really works.

    Avi:

    What I notice is that people that make these choices have three things that they always have. Number one, they make everybody around them more successful. Number two, they are true investors in other human beings. As investment means, there is a return on investment. They get 10 times fold more than what they give, because they sow seeds like farmers. From seed to tree, there’s a lot of investment, but the tree gives you so much yield. The best time to invest in people is when they need you. That, they’ll remember forever. The third thing that happens, when you make everybody more successful, when you invest in people, you’re also so much happier. People love to follow you. People trust you.

    Alexis:

    Beautiful. In a way, this is putting pressure on yourself to do things, but it’s something that you can do. That’s not something unreachable. That’s not, “I want to be like someone else.” You mentioned that before. That’s more, “Yeah. I can do something to help people that needs it around me. I always can do something that’s not something impossible to do.”

    Avi:

    What I found in my life is that, being likable, being loved, being trusted, being happy, when we set them as a goal, we’re going to fail and we’re going to miserable. If we’re going to do the right things, if we’re going to be loving, people will love us. If we’re going to be contributors, people will trust us. If we’re going to do it consistently and unconditionally, that will happen. We’re going to be likable if people will see that we are congruent and authentic. We deliver and we care for them. These are all results. They’re not goals.

    Alexis:

    That’s the consequence of what we are doing.

    Avi:

    Yeah. If you just focus on, “Why do you lead?” If you lead and you just want everything for yourself, you’re going to struggle, because all the time you need to feed yourself and to feed your ego. I have a theory about the ego that it’s very, very thirsty. When the ego wants to take is when you screw it up, but when the ego gives, you get everything.

    Avi:

    I want to change the definition of self interest. If you want to be successful, it is your self interest to delight other people, not the other way around. If you’re going to try to delight yourself … You know, I love Tony Hsieh. Rest in peace. The one that created the culture of Zappos. He became a multi-millionaire. He made a very happy company. He was obsessed with happiness, to the extent that he was not happy himself.

    Avi:

    That’s where I caution all the delightful leaders. Happiness is not pursuit. Don’t run after it. Create it for yourself and others, and invest in yourself, and make sure that when you talk about the how of delightful leadership … The first thing that I do with a leader is talk to them. Make them go through, “How are they going to understand their own well being and their own resilience?” The second is how they communicate effectively with clarity, and joy, and care. The third one, how to lead with positivity.

    Avi:

    With all of the things that we’re going through, there’s a lot of fun things that we do. There’s a lot of rigor of studies that shows you that exactly when you do that kind of a thing, you really get things out of that.

    Alexis:

    The WildCardConf was a conference organized for charity. I heard that you are doing also other things for charity purpose.

    Avi:

    I do it for me. I don’t believe that there’s anybody on earth, including of Bill Gates, that do this for others. When we do it for others, we are admittedly nourished. We are physically and emotionally wired for contribution. We are wired for giving.

    Avi:

    The minute that you are kind to someone else, you give a dosage of significance to someone else, what happens in your brain is the hippocampus releases oxytocin, which is the love hormone. It makes you feel loved. It’s the same hormone that the lady exudes when she delivers a baby. That immediately kick starts the reward circuitry in your brain releases dopamine, that makes you happier. You get a cocktail that comes with serotonin, that makes you feel a sense of belonging.

    Avi:

    What happens, three people enjoy. The giver, the receiver, and even the witness. What happens when I give to somebody else? I become happier with myself. I have higher self esteem about myself. I say, “Avi actually is a nice guy.” I see myself in a better light. My confidence goes up. My happiness goes up.

    Avi:

    I don’t give bullshit to other people that I do things for others. I actually do it for myself. I enjoy it. When you’re going to smile, when you’re going to get the value, when you’re going to get value from this podcast, I’m going to be extremely happy, because I felt I got a new friend. This is fabulous.

    Alexis:

    I was also grateful that you invited me to one of your module sessions. The one with Emily Chang. She shared about the spare room idea. The idea that you always have a spare room. If someone needs it, you can welcome them to your place. That was her thing to offer. Not everybody would want to have someone at their place, but she is able to do that. She can be a host, and she has a spare room, and she can welcome people and help them when they need to. That was her offer to the world.

    Alexis:

    I really like the way she framed that. Thank you. Thank you, Avi, for organizing that. It was really good.

    Avi:

    The one that is coming up this month, with Dalia, really absolutely gorgeous story of transformation. Lead Like a Girl. It’s a great thing for the months of the World Women Day.

    Alexis:

    Sometimes people will ask me that question and I cannot fake that I’m really having a bad day. How can I still be a delightful leader, delight the people around me, when I’m really having a bad day? How can I handle it?

    Avi:

    I got this question first time seven years ago, from a lady called Rawa in a HR conference. She was the HR director of the University of Dubai. I asked her, “Rawa, tell me. When you are on a bad day” … And I said, “When people ask you, ‘How are you?,’ what are you saying?” I opened it to the audience. The audience say, “Good. Okay.” Some of them even say, “Great. Fantastic.”

    Avi:

    I told them the different between what you feel and what you say is the energy that’s going to be evaporated from you at the end of the day. If you need to pretend that everything is great, you’re going to be exhausted at the end of the night. I ask them, “Okay. If I’m going to give you two words plus one, that every time you’re going to say them, you’re going to feel better, the people around you are going to feel better, and you’re going to be authentic, and you’re going to be able to tell everybody exactly how you feel, while uplifting them.” If I’m going to tell you that, would you be happy, Alexis?

    Alexis:

    Yeah. Of course. Of course, I would be happy.

    Avi:

    What I would like to ask you, and the audience that is listening, I would ask you to put your hands next to your eyes, as if they were blinders for horse. You put them for the horse to see only the way straight. You can imagine, as you put your hands there, that when you wake up in the morning, the only thing that you see is what is not there. You see your errands, the problems that you have, the things you need to solve, your schedule, your to do list, the people that harassed you, the people that are trying to get you, and so on. That is primarily majority of what happens now in your life, what you need to do. But is that really the life that you have?

    Avi:

    Now, what I’m asking the audience at this point of time, I say, “Every time you’re going to say yes, I want you to say it loud.” I will need your participation, Alexis, for that. At the same time when you say it, I’d like you also to move your hands one inch to the side and one inch up, every time you’re going to say yes. Are you ready?

    Alexis:

    Yes.

    Avi:

    Okay. Did you sleep on a bed?

    Alexis:

    Yes.

    Avi:

    Okay, so you put your hands one inch to the side and one inch up. You know that many people did not have a bed. Millions of people sleep on the floor. Do you have a place to live in?

    Alexis:

    Yes.

    Avi:

    Okay. Another inch to the side and up. Over a billion people don’t have a place to stay. Do you have running water?

    Alexis:

    Yes.

    Avi:

    Yes. You know that over a billion people need to walk more than a kilometer to get water. Are you living in a free country?

    Alexis:

    Yes.

    Avi:

    Yes. There are many people that live under oppression. Do you have a job?

    Alexis:

    Yes.

    Avi:

    Yes. Do you have people that you love and they love you?

    Alexis:

    Yes.

    Avi:

    Yes. The list go on and on. By this time, if you said yes to everything that I asked, you may have your hands like a Y from the YMCA song. They are open towards the sky. If you have all this, this is the reality that you live in. Not what you don’t have. This is the reality that you have at this moment. If you have all this, are you blessed?

    Alexis:

    Oh yes.

    Avi:

    If you are blessed, can you be grateful?

    Alexis:

    Absolutely. I should be grateful.

    Avi:

    What I ask you to do is take your hands, and put them in namaste position, and say, “I’m grateful.”

    Alexis:

    Yes. I’m grateful.

    Avi:

    Alexis, please ask me, “Avi, how do you feel on a bad day?”

    Alexis:

    Avi, how do you feel on a bad day?

    Avi:

    Blessed, and grateful, and sad. Blessed, and grateful, and angry. Blessed, and angry, and frustrated. I understand that 90 percent of my being is blessed and grateful. The 10 percent is a temporary negative feeling that I experience. I have no issue expressing that, because what it means as a leader is that I’m authentic. People understand that this is a tough time for me. I still understand the context of my life, that 90 percent is working.

    Avi:

    Today, I heard a story of a brave father that has to take care of a kid that is dysfunctional at age of 12. It’s amazing how much that leader helps the wife and the kid, and still manages so much. He is smiling and he feels blessed, grateful, and extremely concerned for my son. That’s okay.

    Avi:

    By having this blessed and grateful mentality, you’re going to be authentic. You’re going to be empowering other people to show the true feelings. You’re going to create this psychological safety for people to tell you, “I don’t feel good, but I understand that I’m blessed and grateful.” Then you can say, “You know what, Janet? Why don’t you rest for an hour. I’m going to take your duties for the next one hour.”

    Avi:

    Actually, it happened to me today, because Kim, who is my PA, she is on medical leave. What I asked her to do is, “Please don’t work. You need to rest.” Delightful leadership is exactly about that. Be authentic and put your money where your mouth is. It’s so easy to tell Kim, “We have so many things to do,” but I take over. That’s a delightful leadership. That’s investment. That’s understanding that other people have their days and so are you.

    Avi:

    Maybe a story within a story. I was one of the youngest basketball coaches in my country. Actually when I was 18, I could dunk, even though I’m just 186 centimeters. On the last leg of coaches school, we were trained by the deputy head coach of the number one team in Israel, which was also the champion of Europe, is Maccabi Tel Aviv.

    Avi:

    What he did, he made us all play on the first day of the camp from 8 o’clock in the morning until 12 at night. We were scrimmaging. It was crazy. We were so exhausted. The next morning, all of us had a smell of Bengay. You know the cream that you put when you have cramps all over?

    Avi:

    He told us on that morning, “We did it to you on purpose. We want you to feel how it is. When you’re going to be a coach, you’re going to be tempted to put your star to play from the minute the game start until the end, so you’re going to get the most points. You don’t understand that you’re going to kill that person. You’re going to make them injured. We wanted you to feel, so you’re never going to remember in your life. You are outside. They’re in the trenches. You are asking them to do things. You need to understand their limitations and you need to take care of them. They are your responsibility. If you’re not going to do that, they’re going to end up exactly like you now.”

    Avi:

    That was a lesson of leadership that I know … As a delightful leader, taking care of your team is your number one responsibility. Delightful leadership is a responsibility, not a privilege.

    Alexis:

    Thank you very much, Avi. That was a perfect way to end that discussion. Thank you for joining the show today. Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to blog-blog-alexis.monville.com for references mentioned in the episode and to find more help to increase your impact and satisfaction at work. Drop a comment or an email with your feedback, or just to say hello. Until next time, to find better ways of changing your team.

    Photo by Kenny Krosky 

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One

  • Build the Right Product, with Gojko Adzic

    Build the Right Product, with Gojko Adzic

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I’m joined by Gojko Adzic. Gojko is an AWS Serverless Hero, a long-time product builder, and the author of Impact Mapping (a book I still use constantly, especially when working on OKRs) and Specification by Example.

    We talked about building products, avoiding waste, and creating a shared understanding of value across business and technology.

    “If you are not keeping score, you are practicing, not playing.”
    — Gojko Adzic

    “The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.”
    — Fred Brooks

    The story behind Impact Mapping: great code, zero value

    Gojko wrote Impact Mapping after a brutal experience: a team that was technically excellent, ahead of its time in automation and delivery, and still delivered no value.

    They built with high quality, high speed, and high confidence. They also burned through the budget.

    That moment forced a shift: technical excellence matters, but it is not enough. Product decisions, assumptions, and value validation have to be part of the work, and engineers need to engage with product thinking, not as gatekeepers, but as collaborators who can help challenge ideas and shape better decisions.

    What Impact Mapping is

    Impact Mapping is a simple visual method to connect:

    • a business goal
    • to actors (who can influence that goal)
    • to impacts (behavior change)
    • to deliverables (what we build)

    The key idea is the middle layer: impacts as observable behavior changes. Impacts give teams a shorter feedback loop than business outcomes like revenue or market share.

    If we change the product and people:

    • stay longer
    • complete tasks faster
    • make fewer mistakes
    • adopt a feature
    • return more often

    …then we have evidence we are moving in the right direction.

    Impact Mapping creates a bridge between the “problem world” and the “solution world” through measurable behavior change.

    Simple is not always easy

    Impact Mapping is simple to explain quickly. It is not always easy to do well.

    But the point is not perfection on day one. The point is to create a shared map that reduces uncertainty, helps prioritization, and supports learning as the team iterates.

    Scoreboards, leading indicators, and accountability

    Gojko connects Impact Mapping to execution discipline: focusing on what matters, measuring leading indicators, and revisiting decisions frequently.

    The message is practical:

    • do not measure only outcomes you’ll see in 6–12 months
    • measure what helps you decide what to do next week
    • make the “score” visible to the team
    • build a cadence to inspect value and adapt

    This is how you avoid the trap of delivering what someone asked for and calling it “valuable” just because it was requested.

    Pair programming, quality, and sustainability

    Gojko also shares how he works today across two products:

    • one built with continuous pair programming for shared context and quality
    • one built solo to maximize flow and creative immersion

    Pair programming can be demanding. It can also be a powerful way to produce a better product, avoid corner-cutting, and design more thoughtfully, especially in very small teams.

    “If you are not keeping score, you are practicing not playing”

    Gojko Adzic

    Conflict, alignment, and the power of examples

    When collaboration becomes tense, Gojko relies on two patterns:

    • provoke clarity by offering an option people will react to
    • bring the conversation back to concrete examples

    Examples cut through ambiguity across roles. They create shared reference points that business, design, engineering, and testing can all discuss.

    This connects directly with the spirit of Specification by Example: examples are not only about tests. They are first a tool for understanding.

    The industry evolves in an upward spiral

    Gojko ends with a broader reflection: the software world moves in cycles, but progress is not purely repetitive. It’s an upward spiral.

    When one bottleneck is solved, the next becomes visible. Teams improve development, then testing becomes the bottleneck. Teams improve delivery, then product discovery becomes the bottleneck.

    We keep returning to Brooks’ point: deciding what to build remains the hardest part.

    “The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.”

    Fred Brooks

    Listen to the episode here:

    Here is the transcript of the episode

    Alexis:

    Hey, Gojko, glad to have you here. How are you and can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?

    Gojko:

    Hey, wonderful to be on the show. I’m a developer, currently working on two products. I’ve worked as a consultant, I wrote some books, effectively, I really like coding. And since I started on a developer job 20 something years ago, I realized that in order to do good coding, I have to learn how to do good testing, how to do good product management and a bunch of other things. And my interests seem to be going around in a spiral, I tend to learn a lot about doing some coding thing. And then that leads me to making more complex product so I need to learn more about how to test it well. That leads me to figuring out well, how do I reduce the amount of things I need to do in order to do all of this well, so I need to learn more about product management, and then it gives me more capacity to do more development and start new products. It’s kind of going on in a spiral and every time I touch one of these subjects, I end up writing a book about it, I guess, is a way of doing a memory dump so I can free more random access memory for myself.

    Alexis:

    I love that. I love the way you are describing that. And I love the fact that it’s a virtuous spiral that is leading to more books, because I already enjoyed reading your books. So that’s a really good news. Of course, one of those books that I’m using radio a lot is Impact Mapping. Can you tell us a little bit more about what led you to that book? And probably what is impact mapping? You will need to explain that once again.

    Gojko:

    What led me to the book is I was CTO of a company that basically ran into a wall and spent all the money that it could spend. And it did that in the worst possible time where kind of 2008, 2009 it was almost impossible to get any good investment, and we ran out of money. And I was a minority investor in that company as well so I didn’t take any salary. And I was left almost without the money to pay the rent next month, that’s how stupid I was. And we were incredibly, incredibly efficient in terms of software production. It was by far the best team I’ve ever worked with, even till today, in terms of technical competence. And we were doing things that became buzzwords later before they had a name. So we were doing stuff like continuous delivery before people knew the continuous delivery buzzword, we were doing cloud based deployments back then, we were doing almost 100% automated testing. And it was wonderful. The code quality was wonderful, but we delivered no value.

    Gojko:

    And because we were really, really efficient, we efficiently burn through our core budgets. And as a CTO of that company, I was really embarrassed when it came to the point that I had to admit to myself what we’re doing is wrong. Because I thought we were doing so well. Up until then I really focused on on the technical quality of what the product is. And I’ve realized that there’s a lot more and as a technical person, I need to engage a lot more with product people. Not in a sense of not trusting them, but in a sense of being able to more efficiently challenge their ideas and help them make better decisions, and help facilitate a discussion between technology and product. And that led me to a lot of research and trying to figure out what we did wrong. And I started studying the emerging discipline of product management in software and how to kind of people do product management and deal with assumptions. That’s, I think, roughly around the time when the Lean Startup came out, and the software world really started awaking to how much we waste on stupid work and stupid products.

    Gojko:

    And one of the really wonderful things about software for me is it’s almost like magic. You literally turn ideas into products. You sit and drink coffee and turn something you have in the back of your head with some magic words. We don’t use Abracadabra, we use const value, and for each and things like that, but that’s magic, create products out of nothing. But at the same time, if what we build is missing the point, then you can spend a ton of cash and it just vaporizes, it disappears in thin air. There’s nothing to show for it. And the research I was doing back then to figure out what we did wrong and how would I never repeat that mistake in my life led me to learn about this technique called effect courting that the E news agency in Sweden was developing. And I just saw how incredibly wonderful that is for facilitation.

    Gojko:

    And the reference book for what they were talking about then was in Swedish day, there was an English version of that book, but wasn’t that popular. And I have very high respect for E News people and I don’t want this to sound like I’m kind of disparaging them, but I don’t think the book was accessible to the average software developer or the average software stakeholder. And I decided that I’m going to just try this out, and trying it out I saw how good it can be. And then decided to kind of write a book that will make this technique more approachable to people, especially doing interactive software delivery. And that’s basically the story of the book.

    Alexis:

    Excellent. I love the story. And I love it. It’s anchored in something that is really important to you. People always love to talk about their successes and how great they were, nut it’s always interesting to learn about something that didn’t really work well in the end, and what you can learn from that is really important. So I love the story behind the book.

    Gojko:

    Yeah. I think there’s so much wasted potential today in what we do as an industry. I mean, if you look at how much software gets produced and how much energy and how much effort people spend building these things, and then you look at the results of some of these efforts, most of it is just going to mediocre, most of it doesn’t go anywhere, a lot of it is kind of pointless. And it’s very difficult to even know in the short term if what we’re delivering makes sense or not. One of the best examples of this, a few years ago there was a project that the British Broadcasting Corporation where it was shut down, it was a personalization project for the video player, and it was shut down after a few years when they spent something like, I think 75 million pounds, can find the link and send it to you so that you can attach it in the podcast. I don’t remember exactly now. I think it was about 75 million pounds, something like that. It was shut down because it delivered no value.

    Gojko:

    And because this is a publicly funded cooperation, it’s a public broadcast that the government Office of National Audit got involved to figure out how can you possibly spend so much money on software and deliver no value. And the conclusion at the end, I’ll send you the link to that you can put it in the podcast links for your audience, was they could do it because it was urgent. And what that meant is that every month what they delivered, somebody was evaluating to say, well, is this good? Is it bad? Is it valuable? And the stakeholders were deluding themselves where they were making the decision if something was valuable or not. And it was basically somebody in the company told some developers, “Well, I want this feature.” They deliver the future and say, “Well, is it valuable?” They say, “Well, yeah, that’s what I asked you to do.” And it’s completely pointless. It’s just running around in circles and having no way to actually understand if we’re going in the right direction or not.

    Gojko:

    And I think impact mapping is the easiest solution I found to that problem. It’s not the best solution, there are probably better solutions out there but they’re very, very academic, very difficult to apply. The most popular process for goal driven requirements engineering in the academia is something called the iSTAR. And the basic book on iSTAR is about six or 700 pages. You must provide some wonderfully precise way of measuring value, but I don’t think any of the people I ever worked with would understand that and have time for it, where impact mapping is something that you can explain in 10, 15 minutes to business stakeholders and one afternoon later they will already have an impact map. And that’s why I love about the practice. It’s it’s kind of fast, it’s collaborative, and it really helps people solve an actual problem.

    Alexis:

    Can you explain impact mapping in a few minutes for us?

    Gojko:

    Absolutely. So impact mapping is a visualization technique that helps developers, business stakeholders, product representatives, analyst, UX people, people from different backgrounds, have a really good conversation on how the plan or a proposed deliverables connect to the value and how do we know that we’re going in the right direction, what is the value of what we’re going to deliver. And they help people visualize the big picture for what needs to be achieved and create a good way of measuring if we’re going in the right direction or not. Impact mapping does that by connecting the business goals through impacts, through changes to the users behavior or changes to the customer’s behavior, and to the deliverable. So it presents this middle layer that helps us measure change in a short term. What’s really wonderful about that is that behavior changes are observable on a shorter timescale. So if we change some software over there, and people start staying longer on the website, or they start interacting better with their friends, or they can administer Linux systems easier, or they can create larger server farms faster, then we’re delivering value. And behavior change is something that can be measured in the short term, it can be measured with a trial population of users, it can provide a leading indicator of value. And that’s why it’s so important.

    Gojko:

    And I remember reading Michael Jackson’s book, of course the consultant architect not the singer, I don’t think the singer wrote any books, about problem frames probably 20 years ago, or even more. And he said that one of the biggest problems in software delivery is creating a connection between the problem machine and the solution machine. And impact mapping creates a connection between the problem world and the solution world through these impacts and behavior changes and allows us to see where we’re going, allows us to measure that what we’re doing makes sense and allows us to focus on solving problems instead of just delivering solutions.

    Alexis:

    That sounds really easy said this way. And I think it’s exactly why the approach is so useful. It’s because it’s really easy. And once you started asking yourself the questions, it really helps you to do exactly that; connect the impact you want to achieve with the solution you want to break. And that’s really, really helpful. I love that.

    Gojko:

    So one of the one of the books I really love, I read this book a few years ago and I’m really sorry I’ve not discovered it a longer time ago, is Four Disciplines of Execution. For people that have been doing a good product management or can do delivery in a good way, there’s nothing revolutionary new in the book, but they’ve explained things so well it’s amazing. So I think even if you are the total expert in your field, it’s worth reading that book because the book is so well written and the ideas are so well explained that it’s totally amazing. And they boil down the difference between organizations that are excellent in executing their plans, compared to organizations that are not who they execute in their plans to kind of four big differences. The first big difference of the first kind of discipline of execution is focused on the wildly important, which is really keep your eyes on the ball and focus on the ball and work towards that. Impact mapping helps with that, because you have this one goal at the center of the map, and you’re really focusing on delivering that.

    Gojko:

    I’ve worked with organizations where once we start creating an impact map and have 50, 60 ideas in a backlog connected to a single impact, and the first two epics deliver the impact, then we can just say, “Look, we don’t have to do the other 48, we focused on the goal. We’re not focused on delivering the solution, we’re focused on delivering the results. And we’ve delivered the results so let’s move on.” The second thing they talk about is focus on leading metrics of value, on leading indicators of value. They say that every organization can very easily measure at the end if an initiative succeeded or failed. If you start something to increase your market share, or increase revenue, or increase profit, six months after you finish or a year after you finish, you will be able to know if you did it or not. Very easy. The measurements are there. But those measurements are irrelevant, really, for knowing what should you do next week. Like if you have 50 user stories that address the same impact, which of these user stories should you do and which you shouldn’t do? You can’t know that if you only measure the results six months later. If you’re like, the BBC in the eye player project, and four years later you wasted 75 million pounds, that’s game over. We need leading indicators of value.

    Gojko:

    And impact mapping helps incredibly with that because it provides this glue layer in between that is these impacts that we can start measuring, are we going in the right direction or not. And there’s a wonderful story from Mark Schwartz in his book, The After Business Value, where they talk about this project they’ve done at the US Immigration Services, where it was a massive, massive government project but they looked at how many cases a human case worker can process per day. And that’s a leading indicator of value that then you can focus on. And they were measuring the behavior change for these people. So every time they deliver a piece of software they were measuring if humans are processing more cases per day. If yes, we are delivering value, if not, what we deliver is incomplete, pointless, damaging whatever. And impact maps help amazingly with that. The third discipline of execution that they talk about in the book is to create a team scoreboard. Create a way for the team that delivers to know are they going in the right direction not. Not to have to wait on external feedback from some third party that three years later says well, this is valuable or not. But look at really focusing on providing value to the people that providing information to people that deliver so they can make better decisions.

    Gojko:

    And they have a wonderful quote in the book, I love it. They say if you’re not keeping score, you’re just practicing, you’re not playing. And for a lot of organizations, we throw some software against the wall, we have no idea if it delivers any value or not. And again, impact maps help with that because they make it clear, well, this story is related to this impact. Our scoreboard, the way we measure the score, should be is this impact happening or not. And this opens up some really, really interesting discussions that can happen. There’s a wonderful piece of research, and I’ll give you the link, I think it’s interesting for your readers to understand as well, from Microsoft, where a guy called Bronco Harvey went to analyze if the stuff that was promised in PowerPoint actually came through for some initiatives. And his conclusion was that about 1/3 of initiatives that they looked at actually moved the numbers that were supposed to move in the right direction, about 1/3 actually created no statistical impact on the numbers that were supposed to improve, and about 1/3 actually damaged the numbers they were supposed to improve.

    Gojko:

    Microsoft is a pretty good software development company, and if you look at it from that perspective, they don’t get things always right. And of course, they don’t get things always right because the business people are not clairvoyant. They don’t have a crystal ball, they don’t control the competition, they don’t control the market. And writing the scoreboard allows us to actually see in a shorter cycle are we delivering or not. And the fourth discipline of execution they talk about is creating a good cadence of accountability. The last discipline they talk about in the book is creating a cadence of accountability. And really, that means reviewing the plans as we’re going along very frequently, and being honest about are we delivering value or not. Being honest about is what we’re doing providing what we expected it to provide. And if not, then there’s something unexpected going on. Then we need to do a bit more research, we need to inspect whether there’s something blocking our users from realizing the value we expected. Or maybe the ideas we have they’re just bad ideas. And from that perspective, impact mapping really helps connect all these things together. And it’s a wonderful visualization technique that’s really simple.

    Gojko:

    And you said it was easy, I think there’s a nice distinction we need to start making between simple and easy. I think impact mapping is simple as a way we can explain it in 15 minutes. I don’t think it’s incredibly easy to do, there are some challenges about doing it. It’s not too difficult to do, but it’s much, much easier to do than a lot of other very complex bureaucratic things. And that’s why I love it.

    Alexis:

    Yeah, that’s true. It’s simple to understand, it can be hard to get to a map that you really like. The thing is, it’s easy to start, you can have something really fast, it will not be perfect but if you accept that you will keep that map and you will continue to improve it, you have something you can work on, and you can improve it. And it’s convenient to visualize it. And it really helps with prioritization and saying, okay, we will focus on that particular impact now. And that’s good. We are good with that. So yeah, you’re right. It’s simple, it’s not necessarily easy.

    Gojko:

    One of the things I think helped me a lot was reading that habits book on how to measure anything. That’s kind of when I was doing this research for my benefit on how do we get good business metrics out, I came across that book, and it’s a wonderful book. And in the book, he talks about how lots of people discovered metrics that are not perfect, because they don’t totally eliminate uncertainty. And he says that good metrics don’t necessarily need to eliminate uncertainty, it’s really difficult to eliminate uncertainty. But good metrics help reduce uncertainty. So I think impact mapping is one of these things where it will reduce uncertainty and the more you do it, the more it will reduce uncertainty. And even if you start and you don’t get the perfect map, you don’t get the totally mathematically correct thing you need to do, it’s useful, as you said, because it’s better than what people were doing before. So it reduces it a bit.

    Alexis:

    Yeah, exactly. Exactly. When we scheduled the call, you told me that you were available before a certain time in the day, because after that you were programming. And of course, I’m very interested in collaboration and in close collaboration like pair programming. Is it something that you are always doing, pair programming? Or is it something that you’re doing just for the moment for a specific product you’re working on?

    Gojko:

    I work on two products at the moment. One is relatively kind of successful and more stable. We’ve been developing that since 2013. And there are two people working on that product, There’s me and a colleague of mine, David, and we pretty much pair program all the time on it, because that allows us to share the knowledge of what’s going on. And that allows us to create a better product, that allows us to keep each other honest, and not cheat and not cut corners. And it genuinely leads to much better design, because we can have two pairs of eyes looking at something instead of one pair of eyes. And we develop this product that basically stands on its own, it doesn’t require almost any support. And it allows me to travel around when there’s no Corona and the planes are flying, and it allows David to do his own things in his time.

    Gojko:

    So it’s very important for us that the quality of the product is allowing us to work at a sustainable pace. Because there’s only two of us, we cannot spend time fielding customer support calls or fixing bugs and things like that because then we’re not producing value on the product. So what comes out has to be really, really good. And I think pair programming is absolutely critical for that. Having said that, I honestly enjoy programming more on my own. I find a lot of joy in programming. Programming is one of the best things I can do to lift my spirits up and enjoying my day. And pair programming can be brutal, it can be very difficult because you’re always having to explain everything you’re doing. And I found that I cannot get really immersed in the problem, I can’t get in the flow if I’m pair programming. As I said, it does produce a better product. And from a product development perspective, it’s the right thing to do. From a enjoyment perspective, I also like spending a long period of time just on my own, listening to music and very quietly being immersed in a problem and trying to solve it. And that’s kind of what brings me into the flow.

    Gojko:

    The other product I’m building is a very young one, I kind of literally launched it commercially less than six months ago, I think in October. It launched commercially in April last year, it launched as a betta. It’s a video editing tool that is saying that people who are not video editing professionals and they want to very quickly create a video from assets such as images or screenshots, and it does. For developers and techie people in particular it’s really good because it allows you to convert a markdown file into a video, which means you can have video on the version control. And it helped me a lot doing stuff for the previous product, actually. That’s how I came with the idea. Because there’s only two of us, we have to do programming, we have to do support, we have to do sales, we have to do product management. And one of the things I ended up doing is creating videos for users to learn how to use the product. And then every time we changed something small on the screen, I have to re record everything again. And because I’m not a video editing professional doing a five minute demo video takes me two or three hours or took me two or three hours.

    Gojko:

    So I started looking for ways to automate that. And then I figured out well, I can just automatically compose screenshots into video and even integrate with text to speech engines that have improved significantly over the last five or six years. And they can do English better than I can. I mean, I can’t get rid of my accent so if you hear me speak in a video, that’s not as nice as hearing a nice gentle voice that speaks in a perfect English accent. And I can do that with machine learning voices now. So basically you get the markdown document, you compile it, and it gives you a video. And then I realized, when I automated for this other thing, there’s a product here. So I’ve kind of extracted that into a separate product and launched it. And for that, I’m programming on my own. And I enjoy that immensely. So I can spend 10 hours immersed in a problem and not notice how much time has passed. And I realized if I work on my own, I enjoy it a lot more. But pair programming creates a better product.

    Alexis:

    This is excellent. So the first product is Mind Map, right?

    Gojko:

    Yes, the first product is Mind Map. It’s a mind mapping tool mostly used by schools and universities. We have some kind of project management cases and also some people are using it for describing the testing plans and outlining books and writing, but it’s mostly used in educational setting.

    Alexis:

    And the second one is Naraeet?

    Gojko:

    The second one is Narakeet. Yes, exactly. Thank you very much for investigating so much. That’s amazing.

    Alexis:

    Yeah. I have to admit that I’m really excited about Narakeet because I wanted to have a short video to explain something. And now that I know that I can even just create a slide in Google slide and start from there, I’m really excited about it. I’m working on it right now.

    Gojko:

    Thank you very much. Yes. So it started this a bunch of shell scripts actually to get everything editing. I don’t know, I have this flaw in my mind where if I see something that I do five times, because I’m lazy in a good way. I don’t like repeating myself. And if I see something I do five times manually, I cannot have an urge to automate it in shell scripts. And this thing actually started as a shell script, and then evolved into a nice web service for people. So I’m really glad you can use that as well.

    Alexis:

    This is really good. This is really good. I have a question for you. When we are in close collaboration with someone, it’s sometimes a little bit difficult to get things across in the right way. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with the potential conflict? How do you deal with not being on the same page when you work so closely with people?

    Gojko:

    So I have two techniques I tend to apply to resolve situations like that. One is, I don’t know who I stole this idea from, so I can’t really give you the exact source of this. But I think I stole it from Michael Bolton, the tester not the singer, of course. The idea that I phrase it like now, I think he phrased it slightly differently, is that it’s much easier for people to complain than to tell you what they want. So if I’m working with people and I can’t really get them to say what they actually want, I throw something that I know that they’re going to complain about. Like I propose something idiotic, and then we get to a good conversation that actually makes sense. The other technique that really helps me clarify things is to offer realistic examples. And I think, examples of how something is supposed to work, examples of how we might want to use something, are again, concrete enough for people to really understand that there’s an additional case here, or we’ve not covered everything, or we need to discuss something in a better way.

    Gojko:

    And examples are a wonderful technique. This goes back all the way to I think Jerry Weinberg’s work on exploiting requirements from 1989, or even longer, on giving people something that is concrete that everybody can agree on. In a complex organization that delivers a product, you have people from lots of different backgrounds, and they all use different sources of truth and different forms of explaining information. UX designers use wire frames, developers use code, testers use some kind of testing scripts, business people use PowerPoints. And it’s really difficult for all of them to agree on anything. But everybody can talk about realistic examples. And that’s something that has turned out to be an almost universal tool for good communication.

    Alexis:

    Excellent. Is this the route ideas that lead to write the book Specification by Examples?

    Gojko:

    I think so, yeah. Spec by Example, again, came out of a slightly different journey for me, where I was working for a company where they had lots of database developers who only looked at Oracle PL SQL code, and application developers who looked at Java back then I guess, or C# wasn’t out yet properly. And business analysts wrote all these kind of log documents where nobody was reading them. And I was really trying to figure out how do we avoid the long testing cycles? And how do we avoid getting stuck in something that we deliver and at the end it turns out it was the wrong thing. And that led me back then to discover, I think, fifth from what coming home and fitness that came around that time. And I started thinking about this from a perspective of this is going to help us automate testing. But I realize there’s so much more to this. And it’s actually kind of a good communication technique. And test automation really becomes secondary, once you have a good understanding. It’s easy to test, but kind of the tests almost become secondary. So the book Spec by Example came out to kind of that learning journey.

    Gojko:

    I told you earlier, I think, once I remove a bot with me doing code, I realize something else is a bottleneck. And in that case, testing was the butt link so I had to learn how to do testing. And that led me to this whole idea of what was back then, example driven development or acceptance test driven development. Behavior driven development as a phrase didn’t exist yet back then. I think Dan North came up with that phrase around the same time. And most people would call that stop behavior driven development now, but there was a very interesting situation where we actually… I think XP, when XP became popular or started becoming popular, early 2000s, developers were the first to jump on the train. And then we remove the bottleneck, lots of organizations removed the bottleneck from development. And then they all realized, well, the next bottleneck is testing. And as Jerry Weinberg says, once you solve your number one problem, your number two problem gets a promotion. I think the community that invested a lot in solving this kind of developer tester communication gap and that’s what led me to examples and Spec by Example.

    Alexis:

    Yeah, it’s excellent. I love the idea of looking at the world process and looking at the bottlenecks. You remove the first bottleneck on development, you have a bottleneck on testing. And then you can say, “Oh, yeah, we need to deliver.” You solve the bottleneck on delivery, although it’s absolutely perfect. And then you realize that you are not delivering the right product. And you are going back to the beginning saying, “Okay, what is the missing link between the users and the value they want and the definition of the product itself?” And you solve that also a problem. It’s interesting how you connected all those dots. I love it.

    Gojko:

    Yeah. I think it’s not cyclical, I think it’s an upward going spiral. You solve one problem and then it takes you to another problem. And I think our industries is very cyclical but the cycles are quite long. If you look at what’s happening now in the technical infrastructure space, in essence, we’re almost back to the time of mainframes, or the time of mainframes is coming back again. In the 70s and early 80s before the PC revolution, people were renting, effectively, CPU cycles from mainframes with timeshares and things like that. And now you have people renting CPU cycles from Amazon, or Google or Microsoft, either using virtual machines or using severless functions now. And in a sense, it’s a much better mainframe and much more accessible mainframe than it was before, but it’s timeshare, we’re coming back to that. And-

    Alexis:

    Exactly.

    Gojko:

    … really interesting after this timeshare, there’s going to be the new equivalent to the PC revolution or something like that, where we go back to client server software in some new way. But my best guess is it’s going to be client server software on very small devices like IoT, or things like that, that’s kind of emerging. And we’re going to end up in in really silly situations and some wonderful situations. You can really see some examples of that. I think there was an outage at Amazon in the US East one region, that’s kind of the first Amazon cloud that went up in North Virginia. There was an outage a few months ago where the message distribution system, Kinesis, that they use, brought down a bunch of other services. And there were people locked out of their homes because they had these smart lock devices that were talking to the Amazon cloud. And now you have this mainframe going down, and people can’t go into their homes. And that’s ridiculous. So after the mainframe, we’re going to go back to smarter clients. Because if the cloud goes down, you still still need to go back to your home, obviously. So cyclical, but the cycles are slow and people don’t really notice that much.

    Alexis:

    Yeah, I think during the PC revolution people were mocking the, I don’t remember who was the person at IBM that said we will probably need five computers in the world at the beginning of the computer story. And people were mocking those saying, now you can see how many computers we have now, but from a big mainframe perspective, we are probably on our way to have five big computers in the world.

    Gojko:

    There is three computers that, maybe four computers really matter. I don’t know enough about the Asian market. But really, we have Amazon, and Microsoft, and Google. And I think, unfortunately, IBM missed the game. It’s incredible how IBM kind of totally missed the mobile, and the web and the clouds. And it’s very interesting to see if they will catch up. Oracle is trying to build their own cloud, but I don’t know anybody who’s using that. And you effectively have three computers that matter. And maybe there’s Alibaba or somebody like that in China, I’m not really sure about that market. I think that’s an emerging markets. And I need to learn more about that. But yeah, we’re coming back to three or four computers effectively, and everybody else having down terminals that connect to that.

    Alexis:

    Yeah. And the smart computer at the edge, that’s exactly that edge revolution, because the example you mentioned about not being able to go back to your home, that’s exactly what you don’t want when you have a car and the intelligence should be in the car and some of the data should be in the car because you want the car to be able to break or find its way to some places without the need to even connect it to the network.

    Gojko:

    And things are so so connected that it’s ridiculous now. I remember, two or three years ago, Amazon S3 went down for a couple of hours, I think. And it took down half of the internet with it, it took down Reddit, it took down about a bunch of other services. So everything is connected to everything else now. And that’s amazing, because you have this kind of information distribution that anywhere you go in the world, you carry all the world’s knowledge in your pocket effectively. But because everything is connected to everything else, crucial service like that going down for a couple of hours might mean yeah, car stop working now, and that’s ridiculous. So yeah, we are going back to those cycles. But the reason why I mentioned this, I think is we’re having the same type of cycles, I think, in the software development world as well. Because we unlock one bottleneck as a community and that changes the context, and then we go and unlock another bottleneck. And then at some point it comes back. So I fully expect at some point that programming will become the bottleneck again, and then we’ll have to come up with much, much better techniques for programming or better languages or better ways of doing things.

    Gojko:

    And whether that’s because everybody settled on JavaScript, that is the worst possible language you can think of in terms of language design. But it’s incredibly productive for people, and it turns everywhere. So now we have these monstrosities like TypeScript that’s trying to kind of fix it, and WebAssembly that’s trying to allow compilation of JavaScript and other things. And maybe when it comes back to that, we’ll have better languages, finally, to work that run everywhere. Who knows? But it is a cyclical thing. And I think it’s worth reading stuff that happened in the previous cycle. When I was trying to figure out how to improve the developer testing cooperation at this large company, I was reading stuff that people were writing about in the 80s and 70s. And there’s lots of good material there. People today, chase the current fad, and always look at whatever next shiny thing gets invented. But we tend to… Software industry is not really old but it’s already gone through a couple of these cycles. And it’s really worth looking at what people were writing about in the previous cycle to figure out what ideas can we take from that and apply in the new context.

    Alexis:

    Yeah, I agree. You, if you look at Frederick Brooks or Melvin Conway, you can see those things that oh, yeah, they exactly describe the problem I have now and it was 40 or 50 years ago.

    Gojko:

    Fred Brooks said the most difficult problem in software is deciding exactly what to build. And look at where most people are now, or at least people I have worked with as a consultant. The bottleneck is not in programming, the bottleneck is not in testing, the bottleneck is in product management for a lot of people. So we came back to the most difficult thing being deciding what to build.

    Alexis:

    Exactly. It’s really an interesting conversation. I’m really grateful you accepted to join the podcast today, Gojko. Is there’s anything else you want to share today?

    Gojko:

    Well, I don’t know. Let’s leave it at this, I think. It was a really enjoyable talk. And thank you very much for inviting me.

    Alexis:

    With great pleasure. Thank you, Gojko.

    Alexis:

    Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to blog-blog-alexis.monville.com. For the references mentioned in the episode, and to find more help to increase your impact and satisfaction at work. Drop a comment or an email with your feedback or just to say hello. until next time to find better ways of changing your team.

    Photo by ThisIsEngineering from Pexels

  • Are you at the right table?

    Are you at the right table?

    In Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, Tony Hsieh, the former CEO of Zappos, shared how he learned to play poker out of boredom. Poker is not like the other gambling games played in casinos with odds stacked against you. With Poker, you don’t play against the casino. You play against the other players. So, if you know the rules and you understand the statistics, then you can win. The question then is to pick the right table to play.

    “Act weak when strong, act strong when weak. Know when to bluff.”

    ― Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

    Do you want to compete with excellent players with no money on the table? Or do you want to play with not so strong players with a lot of money on the table? It depends on your motivation behind playing.

    Two big learnings from that experience in Poker:

    • Know the rules of the game you play,
    • Pick the right table.

    All that brings a question: Are you at the right table?

    Let’s bring back Igraine from the Primary Team story. As you may recall, Igraine is a fictional character who leads the global company’s EMEA Field Organization.

    Emile is one of the consultants in that organization. Emile is passionate about Leadership and Organizational Development. He joined the company mainly because of its higher-purpose communication.

    He thought he had found one of the rare “Stage 5” organizations to use the denomination of the book Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization.

    Organization stages from Tribal Leadership

    STAGE ONE
    These are tribes whose members are despairingly hostile—they may create scandals, steal from the company, or even threaten violence.

    STAGE TWO
    The dominant culture for 25% of workplace tribes, this stage includes members who are passively antagonistic, sarcastic, and resistant to new management initiatives.

    STAGE THREE
    49% of workplace tribes are in this stage, filled with knowledge hoarders who want to outwork and outthink their competitors on an individual basis. Each employee is a lone warrior.

    STAGE FOUR
    The transition from “I’m great” to “we’re great” comes in this stage where the tribe members are excited to work together for the benefit of the entire company.

    STAGE FIVE
    Less than 2% of workplace tribal culture is in this stage—where members who have made substantial innovations seek to use their potential to make a global impact.

    https://www.triballeadership.net/

    Emile is frustrated with some aspects of the current organization. He sees the stages as:

    1. Gang: Life sucks. Life is constantly threatened. You have to join a gang to survive.
    2. Dictatorship: Your life sucks. You are under the pressure of an authoritarian boss.
    3. Individual Greatness: People say: “I am great.” They hoard information in one-on-ones to outthink their competition. They made jokes at the expense of others to demonstrate their greatness.
    4. Organization Greatness: People say: “We are great.” They collaborate to outpass the competitors.
    5. Life is Great Culture: People say: “Life is great.” They collaborate and cooperate inside and outside the organization to create a positive impact on the world.

    Emile believes that the individual incentives, the individual awards, not speaking of the crazy number of one-on-ones, prove that the organization is at stage 3 at best, far from the promise of stage 5.

    Furthermore, when he shared to one of his mentors about his willingness to develop leadership in the organization, the response came as a shock:

    “I understand that you want to develop leadership in the organization, but is it the kind of leadership the organization wants?”

    Emile’s anonymous mentor

    Do you believe Emile has to leave the table to find another one?

    The first thing to realize is that similarly as human development stages present simultaneously in all of us:

    • baby: me,
    • child: us,
    • teen: all of us.

    The same applies to organizations. Part of the organization, or even people in the organization, could be operating at one stage while others operate at another stage. So, what can be observed in one part of the organization is probably not true somewhere else.

    “A great question for coaches to ask is this: “What triads, if built, will fix this problem?” The “black belt” version of the question (most useful in stable Stage Four cultures) is “What triads will help us spot and fix problems so big we can’t even think of them?”

    ― Dave Logan, John King, Halee Fischer-Wright, Tribal Leadership

    The second thing to realize is that your influence level in driving behavioral changes is more important than you think. If you adopt new behaviors, like having one-on-ones only for getting to know people or for development purposes, and stop having one-on-ones for “problem-solving” or “influencing” (the classic “information-hoarding” of stage 3). Then, you can start a movement because other people witness the efficiency of the approach.

    The third thing to realize is that it could be the right table to play at if you play according to the rules of the stage. You cannot play “stage 5” with people at “stage 2”. But you may start to play “stage 4” with people at “stage 3” who realize that something has to change in their organization.

    With all that in mind, what proposal Emile can make to Igraine?

    Assume Igraine is at stage 3; based on the previous story; it is probably not changing everything in her way of working.

    Emile wants to identify one thing that a triad could fix (to use the terminology of Tribal Leadership). Shifting from one-on-ones to a group of three people who can, by connecting, build momentum and bring lasting change.

    Because people at stage 3 complain about the lack of time, Emile has to pick one thing that gives back Igraine time.

    And because people at stage 3 complain of the lack of drive of people reporting to them to solve problems, Emile has to pick a crucial problem for Igraine and the organization. Something that improves the balance on the BEPS Axes of a Leader.

    Emile has to bring the idea in a typical “stage 3” way: many one-on-ones to make sure the idea has chances to get through. Emile has to pick the right table, in which he plays the rules of the game even when the goal is to change the rules.

  • Hiring and Diversity Without Dropping the Bar

    Hiring and Diversity Without Dropping the Bar

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I had the pleasure to welcome Lucinda Duncalfe, serial entrepreneur and Founder and CEO of AboveBoard, an inclusive hiring platform focused on executive and board roles.

    We explored the overlap between hiring, diversity, and the top of organizations. The conversation is full of practical hiring insights, but also deeper reflections on leadership and team building.

    “Being a leader is about setting out a future for people and then bringing them together to reach that future.”
    — Lucinda Duncalfe

    Why start at board level?

    Lucinda explains why she chose to focus on boards and executives. Change can happen bottom-up, but it is often easier to shift systems from the top. Diverse boards tend to drive:

    • better business performance
    • more holistic decision-making
    • stronger alignment with customers

    Boards shape what organizations value, who gets promoted, and what becomes possible.

    Diversity is not a pipeline problem

    Lucinda shares a pattern she has heard many times:
    “We’re doing nothing wrong. It’s just the pipeline.”

    Then she gives two examples of hiring practices that quietly reduce diversity:

    1) Comfort questions
    A question like “Would you like to have a beer with this person?” screens for familiarity, not capability. Humans naturally feel more comfortable with people who resemble them.

    2) Showmanship in interviews
    Live whiteboard coding tests can favor a certain style: instant performance under pressure. That can penalize people who are excellent problem-solvers but work better with reflection and time.

    And then comes the biggest barrier: when candidates meet a team that looks identical, they often receive an implicit message:
    “This company is not for you.”

    Lucinda’s approach was direct: candid conversations, clear commitment, and getting a few people over the hurdle so momentum could build.

    The job description trap: too many bullets

    Lucinda confirms something many hiring teams observe:

    Women and underrepresented candidates often apply only when they match every requirement. Many men will apply when they match a few.

    Too many bullet points can create an artificial “pipeline problem” you designed yourself.

    Move from CVs to capabilities

    AboveBoard aims to shift hiring away from brand-name CVs toward an assessment of competencies:

    • What do you need this person to be able to do?
    • What have they actually accomplished?
    • What capabilities can they demonstrate, with examples?

    This changes everything downstream, because interviews can become structured around specific competencies instead of a free-flow conversation that mostly confirms first impressions.

    Leadership and building teams like a stew

    Lucinda’s definition of leadership is clear:

    • leadership is not authority or title
    • leadership is about envisioning a future and bringing people together to reach it

    When building leadership teams, she starts with hard skills, but then deliberately designs for complementary profiles.

    She uses a simple metaphor: a stew needs variety. Adding the same ingredient repeatedly makes it boring.

    She even builds a table to track what a team has and what it lacks, across dimensions like:

    • pace-setters and risk balancers
    • extroverts and thoughtful voices
    • celebrators and improvement seekers

    Diversity is one of those dimensions. Not a separate “nice to have”, but part of building a better team.

    “I don’t want special treatment”

    This part matters.

    Lucinda highlights a tension: top performers do not want to be hired as a quota. They want a fair shot as the best candidate. The goal is not a handout. The goal is to remove the invisible filters that prevent fair access in the first place.

    And she challenges a common objection:
    “I don’t want to drop the bar.”

    Her response is sharp:

    • why assume diversity means lower quality?
    • why isn’t diversity part of the bar, like any other dimension that makes a team stronger?

    Mentoring is a network

    Lucinda reframes mentoring as a set of relationships over time, not one formal mentor. Different people teach different things at different stages.

    One advice to grow as a leader: intentionality

    If Lucinda had one principle to share, it would be this:

    Be intentional.

    • set an intention for your week
    • reflect after meetings
    • act deliberately
    • review what worked and what didn’t

    She believes the difference between people who progress and people who sleepwalk is intentionality.

    A final image: skiing and risk

    Lucinda closes with a simple mindset:
    “What’s the worst that can happen?”

    Fall. Fail. Learn. Try again.

    Here is the transcript of the episode

    Alexis:

    Hey Lucinda. Great to have you here. Can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?

    Lucinda:

    Absolutely. It’s great to be talking with you today, Alexis. So I am what is known as a serial entrepreneur in the tech world. So I have founded and/or led a number of venture capital backed technology companies, high growth firms. I started doing that when I was quite young and I’ve been doing it for 25 years now. My most recent company is one that is called AboveBoard, which is an inclusive platform for hiring at the executive and board level.

    Alexis:

    Excellent. Thank you, Lucinda. Inclusive platform. That means I will be able to ask you questions about diversity and hiring? Right?

    Lucinda:

    exactly. That’s the world I live in, is the overlap between three circles in a Venn diagram: hiring, the executive and board level, and diversity. Exactly.

    Alexis:

    Why do you think it’s important to start at the board level?

    Lucinda:

    So, I think when I was younger, I probably thought that sort of power to the people and you can change things from the bottom up. And I still do believe that you can do that. I’m a little older and wiser now, and I know it’s actually a lot easier to change things from the top. And so if we start at the board level that then will flow down through the organizations. I have a very deep belief, which is backed by data, that first of all, companies that have more diverse boards of directors have better business performance. And we can talk about why that is. You know, I think you get a diversity of perspectives, you’ll tend to get a better answer. You’ll have a board that tends to look more like your customers, and therefore you’ll align the company better with your customers. So that is really key, is that you’re going to drive performance.

    Lucinda:

    Also, if you turn and look down the other way, if we think about legacy, I have also a very strong belief that diverse boards of directors make more holistic decisions. And that that ultimately is better for the world. You know, I’m an American. I went to business school, I’m a capitalist. And I think that the reality is the way businesses operate is one of the most powerful drivers of what we do in society. So to the degree we can increase diversity, we’ll have more perspectives that the board will, as I said earlier, have better performance. And then we’ll also have boards that are making better decisions in terms of the world and our society on it.

    Alexis:

    That reminds me of a conversation I had with the leadership team that was in engineering and software engineering. As you can guess, the great diversity we add in our teams, it was not great at all. We were discussing in the leadership team about diversity and basically one of the member of the team said, “We are doing nothing wrong. That’s just how it is.” And I said, “Okay, so we are all white, all male, and we are doing nothing wrong?” So how do we expect the situation to change?

    Lucinda:

    Yeah, I mean Alexis, so the last company I ran was a large software company. And when I first joined, I joined a CEO in a more mature company. We had the same exact symptom, the same exact situation. And I’ve heard the same exact thing from the team. It’s a pipeline problem, this isn’t anything we’re doing. Well, when you dig into that, I’ll give you two specific examples of what the team was doing and it was ineffective. One was that a question in the wrap around a candidate, so we’re sitting around and talking about them, was “Would you like to have a beer with this person?” Well, how is that relevant to what they’re doing in their work, right? It was about comfort. And as humans, we tend to be comfortable most with people who are most like us. And so we were screening out great candidates there.

    Lucinda:

    The second, which is maybe more subtle, but I think actually maybe even more damaging, is part of the interview process was a live code test. So literally here’s a problem. Let’s code it together on the whiteboard. And what was happening there was there a certain cultures where that was just difficult, right? The showmanship required, the instantaneous response versus folks who maybe were even better problem solvers in a more thoughtful, quiet way. So we changed those two things and it did start to change. The biggest challenge once those two were knocked down was that candidates who weren’t straight white males came and saw the team and got the implicit message, “Oh, this company is not for me. Not only is there no one here who looks like me, there’s no one here who is different at all.”

    Lucinda:

    And so then it got to be hard to hire them, to actually get offers submitted. And the way we handled that was, I just had personally very candid conversations with them. So that if we got a candidate who would add some diversity to the mix, I would literally reach out to them and I would tell them here’s what the deal is, and we’re completely committed to this, and we got a couple of them over the hurdle that way, and then it took off. But it’s very challenging and it starts with the recognition that there’s a problem.

    Alexis:

    Yeah. I think that’s a really big thing in our world is that we have a problem. It’s not that we are doing intentionally something wrong, but in reality, we are doing something wrong.

    Lucinda:

    Exactly, exactly. And you know, that’s a typical human thing. And leadership, you have to be careful because people feel badly about being accused as they feel of doing something wrong. So it’s more about diagnosing the process or the culture and depersonalizing it so that people are more open to looking at it in a different way.

    Alexis:

    I had a really interesting conversation with one- of the talent acquisition that I was working with. I was hiring for a position and a tendency, usual tendency, laziness. I asked for the previous job description for that position. And I started from that page that was not blank. That was more comfortable. And I discussed with the talent acquisition that was working with me. And I explained what I wanted of inducing more diversity in our teams and so on. And she looked at the description and she told me, “Okay, there’s a few things that you need to fix.” Of course, I was thinking about the gender on things and I said, “There’s nothing on this.” No, there’s a problem. You have eight bullet points in the requirements. That will never work. You will only have one type of people that will look at that list and say, “Oh yeah, I’m covering two of them. I’m good.” But you will miss all the others. So you need to be already careful with that.

    Lucinda:

    That’s right. We see that over and over again. We actually see it in the statistics on AboveBoard itself, is that women and underrepresented minorities will only apply for a job if they have every single one of those bullets, whereas men will generally look at it and say, “Oh, I have two of those. I can do this.” And so you’re setting up a pipeline problem for yourself that way. That’s exactly right.

    Alexis:

    Yeah. So I was already impressed of that. So in what you are doing with AboveBoard, are you also advising your customers in changing those kinds of things? In addressing those kinds of things?

    Lucinda:

    Yes, we are. There’s a few things that we’re doing. One is that we’re pivoting away from a typical CV and towards an assessment of capabilities. So if you think about it, you’re looking for people and in our world, for example, they’ve been at Google and Facebook and you think, “Oh, perfect. This people are awesome.” But the reality is you don’t know how good they were at Google or Facebook. What did they actually accomplish? And so if you instead frame the need in terms of competencies, what do I need this person to be able to do? Not what places have they worked, or what roles have they held? But rather what have they done at those? What competencies have they grown and shown? Then you can change the conversation downstream so that people start to interview or use other assessments against that specific set of competencies. And that’s our long-term goal is to be able to map competencies against roles, assess competencies for individuals, and then be able to match the two.

    Alexis:

    So it means in the interview process, the customer will have to work on himself to say, or herself, to make sure that they are assessing for one competency and they are looking for examples, illustration, of how those candidates demonstrate those competency.

    Lucinda:

    That’s exactly right. And so you’re asking all those same, giving you an example, when questions. You’re asking those questions against a very specific list of competencies that you’re looking for.

    Alexis:

    Yeah. I really try to do that now, but I have to admit that for a long time, that was just a free flow conversation. And I enjoyed the conversation with some people that was leading to more interesting questions. And at the end I had a good time and I was really happy with that candidate. And for other candidates, the first 15 seconds, I knew that I did not want to work with those people and I was done.

    Lucinda:

    That’s right. You know, that’s just, really, honestly, that’s a more sophisticated version of the would you like to have a beer with them approach.

    Alexis:

    Exactly. Yeah. That’s exactly that. That’s how to fight your first impression that could be really good or really bad, but you don’t know nothing about the person if you stay on that first impression.

    Lucinda:

    Exactly.

    Alexis:

    It’s interesting. So you work with a lot of leaders. You’ve worked with a lot of leaders in the past, and you are working currently with a lot of leaders. What does being a leader mean to you?

    Lucinda:

    Oh, this is such a big question, and books and books and books written about this question. So I think to start with what being a leader does not mean to me, it’s not about authority. It’s not about a title or a position in an organization. Being a leader is about setting out a future for people and then bringing them together to reach that future. So it’s about how do we motivate and organize? How do we create the structure within which people can be successful? It’s about being a pace setter.

    Lucinda:

    I sometimes use the analogy, you know, in the world I live where speed is of the essence, I talk about driving, and I will admit I maybe drive more quickly than I should, but I always feel like I’m in more control when I’m going a little bit faster than everyone else. And it’s because I’m able to lead. I’m able to set a path through the traffic versus sitting and following somebody else. That’s great too, and required, but I don’t think that’s leadership. So I think that’s what it is. Now, there’s a whole array of things that come underneath that. I think there’s always an interesting conversation about what’s leadership and what’s management. I think they’re quite different. I think someone can be a great manager and a poor leader and vice versa. I would say that I was a better manager when I was earlier in my career, and I’m a better leader now that I’m later in my career. So that’s what I think it is. It’s about how do you bring people together to drive towards a future that you’ve envisioned.

    Alexis:

    Excellent. And when you build a company, I think you have to assemble different leaders that will form that company, that will drive that company. How do you form those teams? How do you assemble those characters together?

    Lucinda:

    So the first thing, which is not particularly interesting, but it is the first thing, is hard skills, right? So you’re putting someone in a role. Do they know how to do that? Do they have experience? And back to the point I made earlier, the competencies, have they proven competencies in terms of how you manage a function or manage whatever it is that they’re going to be given? Because in corporate life, you don’t get to just lead. You have to manage as well. So that’s table stakes. I then think about it always as a stew. So to make a stew, we’re going to need a variety of ingredients, right? You keep adding the same thing. It’s going to be pretty boring. So I think of it in terms of, because it starts with me typically, right, as an entrepreneur, what am I missing?

    Lucinda:

    So I’ll give you a really concrete example. You know, Alexis, the way you and I first met was because I was looking for a chief of staff. And the reason I was looking for a chief of staff is that I am very, very good at big picture, at visioning and strategy. I’m good at selling. Really not so great at making the machine work. I’m really just not good at it. I can sort of do it in a pinch, but it’s not my thing. And so I needed someone who was balanced to me, who could do those pieces. So could understand and work with me and challenge me and be a sounding board in terms of those bigger picture issues and selling, and who would be crackerjack at making the machine actually run. And that continues. So as you add more people, I think you can make the list more comprehensive and you start to look for adding different personality types.

    Lucinda:

    Adding some people who are more run and guns, some who are much more thoughtful. You want some people who are sort of extroverted and are going to celebrate, and other people who are the ones who are going to be constantly looking for what’s wrong and how to improve it. And what you’re doing there is really thinking about diversity in all of its guises. So it is completely true that someone who is a different gender or ethnic background, they are de facto going to have had different life experiences and bring something to that stew. That’s one of the many dimensions that you’re looking for, how the pieces fit together.

    Lucinda:

    The challenge with that is to balance it with a foundation that is commonly held. And the way I think about that is value set. So, in the case of AboveBoard, you want really clear mission alignment. You have to care about what we do, it has to be important to you. And then values like integrity, like quality. You have to have a set of people who have these core things in common so that you can all work together, and above that bring very different things, soft, hard, personality skills, all these things, so that you can get the maximum possible packed into a leadership team.

    Alexis:

    Excellent. This is really an interesting job to do, to balance those different aspects. That you are balacing those different aspects, right?

    Lucinda:

    It’s so much fun. This is really my favorite thing. And there’s more art to it than science, but I do think there’s science to it. So I will literally, as I’m building a team, make a table that has the people or the open functions across one axis, and the other axis is the things that I think are most important to this business in terms of the softer side. So I won’t hire anyone who I don’t think is at the very top of the game in their function. Then once you have that, what are the other things I’m looking for? And try to spread the check marks in the boxes in that table, across the team, right? So you want someone who’s more of a rah rah person and someone who’s more risk averse. And so you’re looking across each one of those and making sure that somebody is filling that box in.

    Alexis:

    Yeah. So that means that you are really looking into it consciously, and looking at the gaps that you want to fill, not only on skills, but also on personality types, or kind of things. Yeah. That’s really interesting.

    Lucinda:

    Yeah. And I think actually that dovetails in to a discussion about diversity. Because I spend most of my days talking to people about this and how to actually action adding diversity at the most senior levels. One of the things that I think is very difficult for the folks who are the driving, you know, the straight white middle-aged males who hold most of these positions today, they will often say to me, “Well, I don’t want to drop the bar.” Which, first of all, candidly is a little insulting. So for those people who are listening, right, this presumption that in order to add someone who’s not that is going to drop the bar. Why would you make that assumption?

    Lucinda:

    The second thing that I really try to get people to think through, at least as a challenge, is why is bringing some piece of diversity not part of the bar? Why is that a separate thing? Why isn’t it that if you were making a stew, for example, is why I use that analogy, and you already had meat, would you go get more meat? Or would you add some vegetables or herbs? You’d want some vegetables or herbs to make a stew better, right? So the requirement when you go to the grocery store, isn’t the best possible grocery. It’s the best possible carrot or the best possible thyme.

    Lucinda:

    And I think that if you start to think about team construction in the way I described, diversity is one of the axes that you need to think through because different people bring a different perspective, and that’s additive to the entirety of the team. It makes the whole team better because you’re going to have more valuable perspectives in the room. And you’re therefore going to make better decisions as a team. Whereas adding one more person who doesn’t have that, they’re going to be helpful in terms of hard skills and whatever else, but they’re not going to add something that’s going to lift the rest of the team up as well.

    Alexis:

    Exactly. This is very, very, very important. And about dropping the bar, that comment, I did not realize, for example, one time that when we were looking at female engineering leader in the organization. We were lacking females at all levels, but especially after a few years, we were seeing really a gap in leadership, so that there was something missing. It seems that we were losing the female software engineer before they were going into a leadership position either as manager or as individual contributor. That was really concerning. And we were trying to understand why, what was happening, and so on. And I told one of them that was in a leadership position that we should encourage and help them and so on. And she looked at me and said, “I don’t want a special treatment.”

    Lucinda:

    Yeah, that’s right.

    Alexis:

    And I was really struggling with that thing. I think it’s not a special treatment, but if I’m not giving you a special treatment, what I’m doing? And she looked at me and said, “I just want all people to be treated fairly.” And if you look at it, why people are leaving, they are leaving because they feel they are not treated fairly. The others have promotions before them. And they think it’s unfair. So they are okay to wait for one more year, and after some point they leave because they think their future is somewhere else.

    Lucinda:

    That’s right. Yeah. Alexis, this is one of the most critical things for people to understand is the very best performers, the last thing they want is a handout. They don’t want to have a job because they were the best Black candidate. They want a fair shot at the job as the best candidate. And I think what you’re seeing today, at least in the US, is there is such a focus on this topic after the murder of George Floyd in particular. The best performers are allergic to being hired in because of a program or that sort of thing. It’s the downside of quotas. Now, I think there’s a place for quotas.

    Lucinda:

    If you look at what’s happening in some European countries and California within the US, on boards, as there are requirements to have a certain number of women, that breaks it open. And I think in a case where the numbers are so terrible that’s probably the only way you can start, but I sure hope we can drop them soon, and realize that you just want the best directors, and “Oh, women actually brings something special to the table.” And so it’s completely fair and right to consider the special thing that they bring to the table. What we don’t want is to be brought on only because of that. If that makes sense. It’s a little bit of a duality. You have to keep both of those things in your mind at the same time.

    Alexis:

    Exactly. But I think that’s really an important point. I spoke about leadership and I’m curious, what do you look up to as a leader or learn from, are inspired from? And why, of course?

    Lucinda:

    Yeah. Yeah. So this is, I think, such a hard question to answer because it’s so many people in so many ways. So the first thing I would say, and I think this is really valuable, maybe for other people as a way to think about this, is I don’t look at a single person and say, “Wow, that’s the leader I want to be.” Instead, I look at people and I’ll talk about them and think about something specific that they do that I want to emulate or learn from. And I think that’s really important because you can only be an authentic leader if you’re yourself. And every one of us is completely different. So we can’t copy who somebody else is as a leader and be successful. Rather, I think we need to look at them and say, “Oh, that is a fabulous way to do that, or approach, or attribute. I want to do that.”

    Lucinda:

    And so in answer to this question, it’s not really that I look to any one person. It’s rather what I’ve learned from so many through the years. I think one that comes to mind is a man named Carl Moreno, who was early in my career, I was probably in my late twenties. And he was a leader within the company I was working for. I was working in a financial services company and he was at the time general counsel and then moved over into other roles. And what I learned from him was about clarity and trust. So he was great at being really clear with what we were trying to get done. And I don’t mean that in a very tactical way. I don’t mean in terms of goals. More on a strategic level, here’s what we’re trying to do, here’s how it fits in, and then supporting while letting me and others run free.

    Lucinda:

    So we ended up getting this alignment, getting the very best from people, because we were so excited about where we were going and we felt both trusted and supported, right? I think sometimes people tend to either throw somebody in the deep end or micromanage. The trick is how do you give people the free reign to be their very best, while at the same time knowing that you always have them as a backstop. So no one would know who Carl is. He’s just been a CEO of a few companies now, but he was probably the earliest leader who I had personal contact with, who I have tried to emulate in that and many other ways.

    Lucinda:

    And then I pull other pieces out. So one of them that I’ve been really thinking about recently is Martin Luther King, specifically for his prowess in public speaking, right? I’m talking about issues now that he talked about, and there’s a style and a drive coming out of the Black church in America that I look at and think, how do I inspire people to be willing to think about this differently than they have before? How do I support the people who are our members and simultaneously change the minds of people who I think should be hiring these people? So those are two examples and I could go on and on.

    Lucinda:

    Oh, there’s one other story I wanted to tell. I’m a member of a group called the Conscious Capitalism Group, which is about why it’s good from a pure shareholder perspective and how to think across more than just the shareholder perspective. It’s mostly big companies, CEOs, and I was originally invited as a program like let a few venture backed kids come. And so it literally felt like that. There were four of us and we show up and it’s the CEOs of fortune 100 companies. And these four of us running $5 million, little companies. And we’re sitting at a table and felt like were the kids’ table.

    Lucinda:

    And there was a guy who had come in as CEO of Home Depot, who talked and he gave the story about how he came in. The organization at the time when he came in was really in trouble, super dysfunctional. And he started off making all these changes. So he’d spend his day having meetings with sets of people and making decisions and moving to the next thing. And he was very open about the whole thing. And he said, he was feeling like he was doing this great job because he’s making all this change and driving through. And you had a director working with him on these things, young and post-MBA kid. They had one of these meetings, they’re maybe six weeks into this or something, and the meeting ends and the kid sticks his head back in and says, “Can I talk to you for a second?”

    Lucinda:

    And he said, “Sure.” And he’s sitting at his big desk in his big office. And the kid looks at him and said, “You are really screwing this up.” Taken aback he said, “What do you mean I’m screwing this up? I think I’m doing great.” He said, “You know, you’re managing 250,000 people. You make these changes at your level. You’re making six of them a week. They drive all the way through to the floor level in the stores. And the poor guy who’s stocking shelves, it’s like, one day it’s this, then it’s this, then it’s this, it’s too much. You can’t manage a company like this.”

    Lucinda:

    And it so impacted me for the following reasons. First of all, here’s the 60 plus year old white guy, you know? And I was, I don’t know, however old I was, in my forties at the time. It was the first time I ever had interacted with a CEO who I did look up to and think, “Oh, I want to be like him.” And he’s not demographically like me, but he had the same value set, right? Authenticity, his openness, his drive. I just thought I could be that. And I had really thought before then that I didn’t want to ever run a big company because you couldn’t be those things. So that was really meaningful and opened me up to his message.

    Lucinda:

    The second thing was his authenticity. So here he is in front of a pretty big deal audience of his peers, telling a story about this kid being the one who gives him the feedback. And having established a culture where the kid felt free to do that and how important it is to have that openness to the people who are working for you. As a CEO, you tend to get in this bubble, and as much as you want feedback, people don’t give it to you. So thinking about how he did that and how you manage people and interact with people in a way that they’ll give you the real feedback. And then very tangibly, it was a big lesson for me in terms of the difference in pace in an organization.

    Lucinda:

    I later had a conversation about it with the president of Comcast, Comcast NBCUniversal, really big company. And he told me that, yes, he really can’t make more than a decision a quarter. And really it’s better if it’s once every six or 12 months. Because the reality is the size of those decisions are so huge. And the ripple effects through the organization are so meaningful that you have to be very careful picking. Contrast that to a company like AboveBoard. I’m making decisions multiple times a day that change direction because I’m running a little PT boat versus a big, giant cruise liner. He’s the other one who I would call out as very specifically having been very meaningful to me in those ways.

    Alexis:

    Really, really great example. And I’m making the connection with what you said at the beginning with the competencies, because what you are looking at, it’s really how those people behave, and what kind of specific things they have that you want to emulate and would want to learn. That makes me think about mentoring and hearing regularly that people should have a mentor, or should mentor others? And I’m thinking that it’s more network of mentor that people should have. What are your thoughts about mentoring?

    Lucinda:

    Yeah. I think what you just said, Alexis is exactly right. Is that you need people who will help teach you different things at different stages, have different perspectives on you. I think that’s been really critical. I used to say, I didn’t have any mentors. People used to ask me this. And I had a model in my head of a person who takes you under their wing and teaches you. And I really never had that. On the other hand, I had many people who taught me really important things and were supportive and helpful to me. And those change over time, right? Because you grow, the situation changes, and they need to be different.

    Lucinda:

    I think those kinds of relationships are very important for both people in them. And so it typically is really fun for the mentor to have an impact, to pass on what you know, and impactful from the mentee. I’ve never been in one of those formal programs. I don’t have a sense of whether they work. My guess is it’s a little hit or miss. Great when it does, there has to be some personality match, you have to actually enjoy it on both sides. So maybe it helps to drive those, but certainly they’re fun for the mentor and incredibly rewarding for the mentee. And yes, I think you need a whole set of people through a career.

    Alexis:

    Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. I guess that my other question would be the kind of advice, let’s say, if you had one advice to give to people who want to develop themselves as leaders, what would that advice be?

    Lucinda:

    Oh, by far I’ve been talking about people in general. This is the advice I try hard to give to myself all the time is intentionality. So I think what separates people who are really successful, by which I don’t necessarily mean making money or whatever, being successful is accomplishing the things that you want to accomplish, including things like a balanced life or whatever it is, are intentional about what they do. Too many people, I think, sleepwalk through life, they just sort of take the next thing that comes. And I think if you decide that’s how you want to live your life, that that in fact is being intentional, but in a professional environment, think about what it is you’re trying to do. Think about what it is you’re trying to do for your organization, for yourself. I take this probably to an extreme, I walk out of almost every meeting, unless I’m really, really rushed, I walk out of every meeting and think, “Okay, how could I have done that better? What went well, what didn’t?”

    Lucinda:

    I look at my calendar for the week and have an intention about what I’m trying to do this week, and do maybe something very tangible, like I want to close that deal, or it may be really intangible, like I need to get more space for thinking strategically, or maybe I’m feeling tired, I better back off some this week. So I think it’s about being very aware of what you’re trying to do, setting that intention, acting deliberately against that intention, and then assessing whether you accomplished it or not. I think that is foundational difference between people who succeed, more or less.

    Alexis:

    It is excellent. I think I will reuse that way of explaining that. I love it. This is really good. I’m wondering what are the things that are really giving you energy, and what are the things that are draining your energy?

    Lucinda:

    I will share this. I find, especially if I was doing sort of an in-person talk, I’m pretty high energy and people often assume that I’m an extrovert, and I am absolutely not an extrovert. I’m an introvert. I love those sorts of environments. And I really love working with a team of people that I know. I get energy from that, but ongoing interaction with humans is actually also really draining for me. And so when I think about what gives me energy right now, it’s about the mission and purpose of what we’re doing. If I’m on a sales call or a partner call, I get really amped up and excited. And then it also was exhausting. So it’s a little bit of a yin and yang in terms of people both giving me energy and exhausting me.

    Lucinda:

    The foundational drivers, the things that really I think give me energy is I love to build things and I love to see things come together. I get so much energy from that and it can be honestly, anything. Doesn’t have to be a work thing or a company thing. I really get energy from building. And then the other thing I’d say that is apropos nothing professionally, but I just love kids. Just being around kids makes me tremendously energetic. So I live in New York City, and one of the things I love about it is, my kids are older now, but you’re just constantly seeing kids and interacting with kids. And so I find that’s one of the things that really works for me. I am a city dweller, so I know nature is supposed to be the key thing, and I do love nature, but I don’t need that. Let me walk through the street. I will literally absorb the energy of New York City. So those are the things that come top to mind.

    Alexis:

    That’s a very, very good one. I love that. And that can resonate with me a lot. That’s always difficult for me to admit, that as interacting with people, I already like that, I you like the exchange of ideas and working with them, but at some point I need some time for myself.

    Lucinda:

    Exactly, exactly. Enough, enough. I need to unplug, exactly. And it never fails. A startup, it’s such an intense life, so many hours. And it never fails when I sort of just find 45 minutes in the middle of my day to do whatever it is, [inaudible 00:36:31], and somebody calls me. And I always answer. Not always, but almost always answer. And I’m always fine afterwards, but it is funny how, as one of the things as a leader, I think is you have to give of yourself, right? You have to be willing to just constantly, actually not just willing, want to give of yourself. And I say, that’s one of the rare moments as a CEO when I’m like, “Ugh. Okay. Now I have to do this thing.” Mostly I’m just energized by it. But sometimes it’s a little much.

    Alexis:

    Excellent. Last question. Is there something you’ve always dreamed of doing, but never dared to?

    Lucinda:

    So I wouldn’t say never dared to. The closest I can get is I’ve yet to be to Antarctica. And I’d really, really like to go to Antarctica. It’s just a time and priorities thing I haven’t done. I actually think one of the things that I’m really lucky about is I have a pretty balanced way of viewing risk. So I’ll give you an example I use a lot, is I learned to ski really late in life. I didn’t start skiing until I was 48. And I’m a pretty good skier now. And yet, still, I get to the top of a hill. And you know when you’re at a very steep slope and you’re standing at the top, if there’s other skiers and your tips are just out over open space. And from that perspective, it looks basically like it’s just a straight drop. Of course it isn’t, but that’s how it feels.

    Lucinda:

    And I always stand there and think to myself, and I go through, “Oh, can I get on the lift and go back down? Is there another way to get down from here?” And I’m going, “Okay.” I just think to myself, and this is the point of this story, I think to myself, “Well, what’s the worst thing that’s going to happen?” Worst thing is I’m going to fall. I’ve fallen all the time, right? It’s fine. And then I go. And so I think about almost everything in life that way. Is what’s really the risk? And so it’s not hard to quote unquote dare myself to do things. When I think, “Well, what’s really going to happen?” I’d fail. Okay. I fail, I fall, or whatever. Which means I’ve been pretty lucky because most of the things that I’ve wanted to do, I’ve done.

    Alexis:

    It’s really inspirational. I loved it. I love the way you end on that question. I have to admit that’s typically the question I would have trouble to answer myself, but I love the way you did it.

    Alexis:

    That was really great to have you on the show, Lucinda.

    Lucinda:

    Oh, it was so much fun to talk with you. Thank you for asking me.

    Alexis:

    Thank you for listening to this episode of the podcast. Go to Alexis.Monville.com for the references mentioned in the episode and to find more help to increase your impact and satisfaction at work. You can also check the episode with Ally Kouao for more about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Drop a comment or an email with your feedback, or just to say hello. And until next time, to find better ways of changing your team.

    Photo by Tim Mossholder

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