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“When they say let’s take the emotion out of the decision, that’s even an emotional decision.” Louis Roden is the founder of Inspire Consulting Group, an international leadership development consultancy, and has spent more than two decades in organizational development and service culture across hospitality, logistics, and finance. His book Everything Is Personal: Embracing Stewardship in the Workplace and Everyplace argues that leaders who hide behind “it’s just business” erode the trust their people need. We cover the phrase “it’s business, not personal,” stewardship, why work feels neutral for so many people, how leaders build trust day to day, and why the golden rule gets it wrong. What we covered: The COVID lockdown and the nudge from his wife that got the book finishedMark Twain’s “Be good and you will be lonesome” and Following the Equator as the first travel blogWhy nobody says they loved a job because they were well managedWork as a gray, neutral 80 percent of waking lifeWhy Louis can’t stand the phrase work-life balanceStewardship of the people who hand a leader a big piece of their livesLayoffs, hard feedback, and the trite cover of “it’s not personal”Why no one can take the emotion out of a decisionFrederick Taylor, scientific management, and work as a negative goodRational and irrational anger, and empathy for joy as well as sadnessTrust built in small moments and eroded by paper cutsThe bartender whose smile disappears when the bar gets busyThirty authentic seconds over a scheduled one-hour one-on-oneThe weekly check-in as a box to tickFlipping the golden rule: treat people the way they want to be treatedThe Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya’s sword, and anyone selling a magic bulletPeople: Mark Twain, authorDaniel Goleman, psychologist and authorSimon Sinek, authorFrederick Taylor, father of scientific managementDart Lindsley, previous guest on this showRené Descartes, philosopherAntonio Damasio, neuroscientistErnest Hemingway, authorJohn Steinbeck, authorBooks: Everything Is Personal, Louis RodenFollowing the Equator, Mark TwainEmotional Intelligence, Daniel GolemanDescartes’ Error, Antonio DamasioOf Mice and Men, John SteinbeckThe Grapes of Wrath, John SteinbeckOrganizations: Inspire Consulting Group, Gallup, StarbucksFind Louis: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louisroden/ Website: https://inspirelsc.com Book: https://everythingispersonal.org Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

“In a novel context, a context like science or R&D or innovation or entrepreneurship, mediocrity would be no failures.” Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. Her research made psychological safety a core idea in modern management, and she is the author of Teaming, The Fearless Organization and Right Kind of Wrong, which won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year in 2023. We cover the failed hypothesis that launched her career, why bad is stronger than good, the three types of failure, Toyota’s Andon cord, near misses, whether failure is a privilege, and what leaders can do to build psychological safety. What we covered: The 1990s hospital study where the better teams seemed to make more medication errorsThe realization that those teams were reporting more of their errorsAwfulizing, then a looking-out-the-window moment in a 15th-floor PhD officeInterpersonal risk and why psychological safety matters most in knowledge workWhy we notice negatives faster than positivesGoing from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasmBasic, complex and intelligent failures, and the five criteria for an intelligent oneAstro Teller at X: if you’re not failing, you’re not taking the right risksRewarding teams for shutting down failing projectsThe fundamental attribution error, at work and at homeJames Reason’s Swiss cheese model in aviation and healthcareToyota’s Andon cord, from loom machines to a San Francisco trolley car, and why most pulls never stop the lineNear misses as good catches, and the case for a near miss dayWhy failure is a privilege, and how leaders can level the failure playing fieldWhether encouraging failure means celebrating mediocrityThree moves to build psychological safety: frame the work, ask questions, respond productivelyPeople: Arie Kruglanski, psychologist and previous guest on this showRoy Baumeister, social psychologistTeresa Amabile, Harvard Business School professorAstro Teller, head of X, Alphabet’s moonshot factoryJames Reason, British error psychologistBooks: Right Kind of Wrong, Amy EdmondsonThe Fearless Organization, Amy EdmondsonTeaming, Amy EdmondsonThe Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile and Steven KramerThe Hidden Brain, Shankar VedantamArticles: Bad Is Stronger Than Good, Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Catrin Finkenauer and Kathleen Vohs, Review of General Psychology, 2001 https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Econometrica, 1979 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1914185Organizations: Harvard Business School, X, Google, Toyota, MicrosoftFind Amy: Harvard Business School: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6451 Website: https://amycedmondson.com Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

"You kind of sell your soul, it's like blood money a little bit." Jessie Schofer is the founder of Stakkd, a database that helps HR teams find their way through a crowded technology market. She came to HR from projects and transformation work, led people strategy and change inside hyperscaling unicorns, and this year moderated two debates I took part in, and lost. We cover what she saw from the moderator's chair, why people arrive at a new job engaged and lose it within months, why HR keeps falling short, and why she has been saying HR is dead for years. What we covered: Why we still need managers in a world of AI, from the debate moderatorThe scale-ups where every team wrote its own operating manualPoor relationships at work as the root of Jessie's most disengaged yearsBeautiful mission statements at companies that are still hard to work forRicardo Semler's diseconomies of human scale, and Dunbar's numberZapier welcoming candidates who pull out of its hiring processNew hires who were sold a story and ask, "What did I sign up to?"Calibration meetings and the five-out-of-five ratingAI performance ratings as scientific management 2.0Tiny teams, the pizza rule, and splitting teams before they grow too bigWhy individual pay for performance discourages admitting mistakesThe director of comp Jessie told not to joinWhy HR is burnt out, and the growth playbooks she wants to throw outRenaming HR as organizational successMaslow, duty of care, and whether we will look back on disengagement as unfairStakkd, its HR tech database, and Stakkd 2.0People: Matt McFarlane, founder of FNDN and previous guest on this showRicardo Semler, former CEO of SemcoRobin Dunbar, evolutionary psychologistW. Edwards Deming, management scholarJack Welch, former CEO of General ElectricAmy Edmondson, Harvard Business School professorAbraham Maslow, psychologistBooks: Close the Gap, James Alexander SeechurnArticles: The HR Infrastructure Gap No One Is Talking About, FNDN Series with Matt McFarlane, 2026 https://fndnseries.fndn.com.au/podcast/s/fndn_series/the_hr_infrastructure_gap_no_one_is_talking_about_with_jessie_schofer_founder_at_stakkdOrganizations: Stakkd, Semco, Zapier, General Electric, Haier, Mondragon, Handelsbanken, FNDNFind Jessie: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessieschofer/ Stakkd: https://stakkd.tech Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

Is it possible to run a professional services company without individual goals, without billable hours, without performance ratings? Gerry Murphy and Nua Group certainly think so... Gerry Murphy is a co-founder and partner at Nua Group, the San Francisco firm that describes itself as the anti-consulting firm. He qualified as an actuary in Dublin, spent eight years in Europe, and was a senior partner at Mercer with earlier leadership roles at Watson Wyatt before he, Joe and Chris set Nua up ten years ago. We cover the anti-consulting model, what happens to accountability when you delete the machinery, managers who never wanted the job, job architecture as a system of control, and whether any of it survives at ten thousand people. What we covered: Anti-consulting as a playful poke at billable hours, sales goals and internal meetingsClients love their consultants, not the firms those consultants work forTwo internal meetings every two weeks, and what the rest of the week is forNua consultants asking the partners whether they could please track their hoursThe nickel and diming that comes with the hourly modelEveryone at Nua gets the same bonus, whatever their individual performanceThe bonus that moves from 20 percent to 21 and pleases nobodyFour job levels on paper, two in practice: partner and consultantMajors and minors in place of practice areasGerry's rules of management, starting with do nothing, ending with two blank rulesManagers who never wanted the job and took it for the payMercer's manager charter, and Jensen Huang's thirty direct reportsElecting your own manager, and where Gerry pushes back on the ideaThe client whose job architecture, bonuses and equity created an incredible amount of workWhether AI makes experience and education requirements irrelevantStock options, RSUs, dilution and growthThe Ryland Report, and why the team asked for more financial detail, not lessScaling to ten thousand people, and the naming of Uber NuaPeople: Joe Farris, co-founder of Nua GroupPaul Reiman, compensation consultant and previous guest on this showDan Walter, equity compensation specialist and the first guest on this showJack Stack, who led one of the most leveraged employee buyouts in US historyJensen Huang, CEO of NvidiaBooks: Close the Gap, James Alexander SeechurnArticles: Are CEOs Paid for Performance? Evaluating the Effectiveness of Equity Incentives, Ric Marshall and Linda-Eling Lee, MSCI ESG Research, 2016 https://www.msci.com/research-and-insights/blog-post/are-ceos-paid-for-performanceOrganizations: Nua Group, Mercer, Watson Wyatt, Radford, Irish Pensions Trust, Morning Star, Nucor, Handelsbanken, Buurtzorg, Nvidia, Gallup, MSCI, StripeFind Gerry: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerrymurphynuagroup/ Website: https://www.nuahr.com Email: [email protected] Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

"Best practice is either a product that somebody wants to sell and as a result it's common, but not necessarily proven as best." Paul Reiman is the founder and managing partner of Novo Insights, a Chicago-based compensation consulting firm, with nearly 30 years in compensation as a consultant and in-house leader. His book Pay Differently, out October 5, argues that pay transparency exposes the shortcuts compensation teams have relied on for decades. We cover the myth of best practice, the loyalty tax, job architecture as the office refrigerator, why the offer letter draws less scrutiny than the merit cycle, and whether sales commissions survive consumption-based selling. What we covered: Best practice as common practice with a better publicistThe telecom sales leader who asked a 22-year-old Paul, "Best practice according to whom?"The unproven rule of three measures in a sales plan, none under 20 percentWhy candidates who refuse to apply without a range move employers faster than legislationThe $100 toaster on sale for $50 the next dayThe fintech firm that turned down a star analyst asking for a $1 million salaryThe 75th percentile, and why a percentile is not a philosophyJob architecture as the office refrigerator and its 180 ketchup packetsThe manager who automates three roles and loses every direct reportThe loyalty tax, and why stayers earn less than leaversMerit budget benchmarking, and why to budget 9 percent next yearSame-store pay growth, borrowed from StarbucksLori the recruiter, her Coffee is for Closers mug, and fixing the front doorSelf-set pay at Semco and Smarkets, and crunchy or creamy peanut butterThe printing company that replaced commissions with salary and profit shareThe hand-drawn overhead transparency behind the 50/50 pay mix slide People: Alfie Kohn, author and previous guest on this showDan Ariely, behavioral economist and previous guest on this showAndrea LaRowe, 37signals, previous guest on this showStefan Gaertner, Syndio, previous guest on this showDaniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, psychologistsTeresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, researchersBoris Groysberg, Harvard Business School professorLouis Kelso, economistPhilip Slater, sociologistJerry Colletti, sales compensation consultantBryan Briscoe, Paul's longtime co-presenter Books: Pay Differently, Paul ReimanChasing Stars, Boris GroysbergThe Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer Articles: Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Econometrica, 1979 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1914185 Organizations: Novo Insights, 37signals, Semco, Smarkets, Haier, Morning Star, Nucor, Handelsbanken, Spotify, Salesforce, Starbucks Find Paul: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulreiman/ Website: https://www.novoinsights.com Book: https://paydifferently.com Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. He co-founded Irrational Capital and has written eight books, including Predictably Irrational and Misbelief, which he wrote after a COVID conspiracy theory cast him as one of its villains. We cover the vintage Swiss Army knife model of decision-making, the India experiments behind Large Stakes and Big Mistakes, what Fortune 500 satisfaction surveys predict about stock returns, fairness as a judgment no regression will settle, and the writing Dan is doing now about the end of life. What we covered: States that introduced fines for texting and driving and watched accidents riseThe brain as a vintage Swiss army knife, adequate at many tasks, built for a world we have leftCar engineers who design against human error, social media engineers who design for itPrepaid debit against credit, weekly loads against monthly, Monday against FridayThe India experiments, where a month of pay riding on a puzzle made people worse at solving itThe brain surgeon offered $100,000 and threatened with a hitman in parking spot 33Which survey questions predict alpha, and which predict nothingPerceived fairness outranking salary level, and the argument Dan could not win on Wall StreetThe company that spent a day celebrating failed projects and paid half a million dollars to the winnerBureaucracy as an engine whose definition of success is nothing happeningThe hospital janitor we want to stop doing their job, and what job descriptions cost usTheory X, Theory Y, and the ancient craftsmen who spent half their time on beautyTwo years spent interviewing the people who wanted him tried, imprisoned, or hangedWriting as a way to make sense of his mother's death, and the three books he has in progress People: Alfie Kohn, author and previous guest on this showSimon Jones, narrator of Dan's audiobooksEd Lazear, economist behind the Safelite windshield studySam Glucksberg, psychologist of the candle problem experimentsDouglas McGregor, originator of Theory X and Theory Y Books: Predictably Irrational, Dan ArielyMisbelief, Dan ArielyThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams Articles: Large Stakes and Big Mistakes, Dan Ariely, Uri Gneezy, George Loewenstein and Nina Mazar, The Review of Economic Studies, 2009 https://academic.oup.com/restud/article/76/2/451/1594205 Organizations: Duke University, Center for Advanced Hindsight, Center for Advanced Bureaucracy, Irrational Capital, Harbor Capital, Alphabet's X, Safelite Find Dan: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danariely/ Website: https://danariely.com Substack: https://danariely.substack.com Bureaucracy: https://bureaucracy.danariely.com Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

Matt McFarlane and I met earlier this year on opposite sides of a debate about pay for performance. His team argued in favor and won the audience vote 62 to 38, and a week later he published a piece saying he had never been a fan of it. That opening carries the rest of the conversation: what pay for performance sets out to do, why the mechanism breaks at nearly every link in the chain, and what companies use instead once they stop treating an annual rating as the engine of everything. Matt runs FNDN, a compensation consultancy for startups based in Australia. He built the pay structures at Oyster that carried the company from 200 to 600 people across 70 countries, and he now hosts the FNDN Series podcast and newsletter and runs the Startup People Summit, a one-day APAC event for people leaders inside high-growth companies. We cover the companies that have taken negotiation out of pay entirely, the grip that benchmark data holds over compensation decisions, the tension between fairness and individual pay in collaborative work, what happens to the manager's role as AI absorbs more of the coordination, and the practical side of leaving a salaried job to consult. What we covered Why Matt argued for pay for performance in a debate and against it a week laterThe three percent merit budget, and what the annual salary survey roundups tell usRewarding a standout year with money, or using it to raise the standard across a teamWhy Matt left the job he enjoyed most in his career to build a compensation practiceHow his client window moved from 50 employees to 100 or 150, and what breaks at that sizeBenchmarking as a source of cognitive closure, and the living wage argument underneath itRunn's single rate per role, and the salary trajectory that made their people harder to poachCarta, 37signals, Buffer, and PayPal as models that remove the negotiationFairness as a relative judgment, and how quickly a good salary becomes an unfair oneWhy US companies resist narrow bands, and what wide bands say about trust in hiringThe bad hire label, the myth of the A player, and where responsibility for performance sitsThe player coach, the stretched leader, and ClickUp's million-dollar salary bandsWhat Matt tells anyone thinking about leaving a salaried role to consultPeople Matt McFarlane, founder of FNDN Rowan Savage, co-founder and CTO of Runn Andrea LaRowe of 37signals, a previous guest on this show Books Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin Articles "How to Become a HR Consultant," Matt McFarlane, FNDN Series #7 https://fndnseries.fndn.com.au/p/how-to-become-a-hr-consultant Organizations FNDN, Startup People Summit, Oyster, Runn, Carta, 37signals, Buffer, PayPal, Zappos, ClickUp, Buurtzorg, Gallup, Radford Find Matt LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewmcfarlane/ FNDN: https://www.fndn.com.au/ FNDN Series podcast and newsletter: https://fndnseries.fndn.com.au/ Startup People Summit: https://startuppeoplesummit.com/ Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

Dylan Soopramania is a creative director and consultant whose work spans the UK, Australia, and North America, with campaigns for Coca-Cola, EA Sports, KitKat, Hellmann's, and Google. He designed the covers for all three of my books and the branding for this podcast. We have known each other for thirty years, and this is the first episode recorded in person and the first under the Disengaged name. Advertising is the one industry where creativity is the product, which makes it the sharpest test of the argument in Close the Gap. Dylan's rule for creative leads is to protect the potential of the idea: push it to the point where you and your trusted partners feel uncomfortable, because ideas get killed in internal conversations long before anyone learns where they could have gone. The same problem sits inside every business that needs to innovate. If people do not feel safe suggesting things that might get shot down, they play it down the middle. Dylan's account of what happened when I stopped chasing him on the cover, that the more I backed off the more responsible he felt, is the whole book in one sentence. What we covered: What a creative director does, and why brands rent a creative's tone of voiceHow the Close the Gap cover came aboutGood briefs, bad briefs, and Hellmann's sneakers made from food wastePresenting irrational ideas to rational peopleMad Men is dead: culture now informs marketingProtecting the potential of the ideaPixar's brain trust and the Overton windowCulture fit as hiring people who look and sound like youWhy the modern company still runs on a hierarchy inherited from the church and the factoryThe KitKat catapultFocus groups, market data, and the sea of samenessThe manager as emulsifierTrust, control, purpose, and tensionWhy asking people to keep doing what they do well kills the sparkFreelance versus full timeLeaving Dylan alone: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in one exampleProactive work, gold wall sessions, and 3M's fifteen percent timeExecutive pay, the C-suite, and the role of profitPeople: Steve Hey (Dylan's creative partner), Dart Lindsley (Work for Humans), Jessie Zwaan (job, career, calling), Amy Wrzesniewski, Aaron Dignan, Rensis Likert, Abraham Maslow, Joseph Overton, Paul Buchheit, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs Books: Close the Gap and What Pay Costs (James Seechurn), Purpose and Work (Jessie Zwaan), Brave New Work (Aaron Dignan), Colin Splodge and The Sizzledodge (Steve Hey and Dylan Soopramania) Organizations: Pixar, Coca-Cola, KitKat / J. Walter Thompson Sydney, Hellmann's / Ogilvy, Banana Boat, Google / The Hallway, 3M, General Electric, Patagonia, Buurtzorg, Nucor, Handelsbanken, Haier, AFL-CIO, MSCI Find Dylan on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/dylan-soopramania-5a439223 and on Instagram at @dyl_soop. KitKat catapult: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD3DUt4eZZw. Close the Gap: https://amzn.to/4x4FAZ6 Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH

Arie Kruglanski is one of the most cited social psychologists alive, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and a co-founder of START, the national center for the study of terrorism. He gave the field two ideas that shape this conversation: the need for cognitive closure, our drive to resolve ambiguity and settle on an answer, and significance quest theory, the claim that the need to matter sits beneath much of what we do. This episode takes both into the workplace. We start small, with a question that sent James to Arie's work in the first place: why do companies cling to performance ratings, job titles, and job architecture when the evidence against them is overwhelming? Closure is the answer, and Arie explains why noise, fatigue, and time pressure make people more certain rather than less, and why premature closure has been the mother of great mistakes, from Pearl Harbor to organizational change. From there we move to significance: the oldest complaint in history, the road that took Arie from architecture to psychology, and why pay has become the emblem of how much we matter. We close on the hardest problem of all, how anything changes, and a personal question about holding confidence and uncertainty at the same time. What we covered Cognitive closure, and why difficult conditions produce false confidence rather than better thinkingSeizing and freezing, belief perseverance, and why information that was available still gets ignoredThe Italian postal workers, and why people resist the idea of change more than any specific changeCareers as closure: why we follow available jobs over real passions, and Arie's own turn away from architectureThe quest for significance, from terrorism research to the workplace where most people earn their worthPay as significance, the CEO pay ratio, and the insatiability that comes with a bigness-oriented cultureBigness and Smallness, the reciprocal model of significance, and love as merit times appreciationCompetitive individualism, Arachne and hubris, and whether significance requires winners and losersWeber, Calvinism, and the roots of the American work ethicPsychological safety, loss aversion, and why change must start smallReligion as an ancient antidote to hubris, and what fills the vacuum when it recedes People: Arie Kruglanski (University of Maryland, START). Referenced: Dan Raviv and Sophia Moskalenko, his co-authors; Harold Kelley; Antonio Pierro; B. F. Skinner; Alfie Kohn (No Contest); Leon Festinger (When Prophecy Fails); Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (positive psychology); Carol Dweck; Angela Duckworth; Antonio Damasio; Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (loss aversion); Amy Edmondson (psychological safety); Max Weber. Books: Uncertain: How to Turn Your Biggest Fear into Your Greatest Power; The Quest for Significance: Harnessing the Need that Makes the World Go Round, with Dan Raviv; and the new Feeling Big, Feeling Small: The Human Yearning for Significance and Wonder, with Sophia Moskalenko. Find Arie: through his books, and on The Quest for Significance podcast, which he hosts with Dan Raviv.

In this episode of Disengaged, I'm joined by Stephan Meier — behavioral economist, Professor of Business Strategy at Columbia Business School, and author of The Employee Advantage — to explore why the next great shift in business is from customer-centricity to employee-centricity. Stephan's argument is that business has made this journey before. Companies moved from a product-centric to a customer-centric model, building tools along the way — segmentation, journey mapping, personalisation — to understand and delight customers. Those same tools can now be repurposed for employees, and the companies that do it will create an advantage rivals cannot easily copy. As Stephan puts it, hard is good: a culture where people are engaged, motivated, and innovative takes years to build — and that is exactly what makes it difficult to compete with. What we covered: The evolution from shareholder value to customer centricity to employee centricityThe zero-sum fallacy — Amazon's Harry Potter gamble and Costco's employee-first economicsWhere money works, where it stops moving the needle, and how a $5 favour destroys a friendshipPurpose — Kennedy's single mission for NASA and the janitor who wasn't mopping floorsThe engaged coach — clear direction with real empowermentEli Lilly applying customer journey mapping to female talent progressionH-E-B's cult following and the four-star truck driverHaier's RenDanHeYi model of autonomous micro-enterprisesBuurtzorg's self-managing nurse teamsJust right tasks — why the reward for good work is more good workAI-powered internal talent marketplaces at MasterCard, MetLife, and UnileverThe workforce of one — segmentation and personalisation through one-on-ones People Stephan Meier — author of The Employee AdvantageAlfie Kohn — author of Punished by RewardsDart Lindsley — host of Work for HumansJessie Zwaan — value beyond priceMegan Bernard-May — people experience designUri Gneezy — Stephan's co-author on incentivesTeresa Amabile and Steven Kramer — meaningful progressJos de Blok — founder of BuurtzorgJoseph Overton — the Overton windowDan Gutman and Stuart Gibbs — the just right books Books The Employee Advantage — Stephan MeierPunished by Rewards — Alfie KohnMy Weird School series — Dan GutmanSpy School series — Stuart Gibbs Organisations Amazon, Costco, Starbucks — customer centricity case studiesEli Lilly — employee journey mappingH-E-B — the employee-centric grocerHaier / GE Appliances — autonomous micro-enterprisesBuurtzorg — self-managing nurse teamsMasterCard, MetLife, Unilever — internal talent marketplacesNovartis / Sandoz — one-on-one personalisation Find Stephan at stephanmeier.com, where you can subscribe to his newsletter on the human-centric future of work — each edition comes with an original stop-motion Lego movie.

In this episode of Disengaged, I'm joined by Jessie Zwaan — VP of People Strategy and Operations at Leapsome and author of Built for People and Purpose and Work — to dig into the gap between the purpose companies advertise and the work people actually live. Jessie's argument cuts against a lot of HR orthodoxy. Most people don't come to work for the company mission, and pretending they do creates a dissonance employees feel but rarely voice — an Emperor's New Clothes problem she traces through the anti-work movement, which she reads as a funhouse mirror held up to HR. Drawing on Joe Pine's experience economy, she places work on a spectrum from service to experience to transformation, and argues most workplaces are experiential, and that this is fine. People are motivated by connection, autonomy, and creativity far more than by mission — so design work around what you can genuinely offer instead of selling a purpose no one believes. What we covered: Work as a product — the three symbiotic products every company runs, and why employee experience behaves like a subscriptionPine's experience economy applied to work, illustrated through a cup of coffee, and where most workplaces actually sitWrzesniewski's job, career, and calling orientations, and why performance doesn't differ across themThe purpose gap, and how to close it without overreachingThe anti-work movement as a funhouse mirror of HRLeveling guides and job architecture as systems of control — cognitive closure, familiarity bias, and why bare-bones winsWhether AI will fix decision-making and performance management, and why the answer is mostly noThe T-shaped employee, and applying deep expertise broadly in an AI eraThe perception of laziness across generations (Dickens wrote fifteen novels and never worked afternoons), and the shift from individual to collective measurementPeople Jessie Zwaan — author of Built for People and Purpose and WorkDart Lindsley — host of Work for HumansJoe Pine — the experience economyAmy Wrzesniewski — job, career, and callingPeter Fader — author of The Customer Base AuditStephan Meier — employee segmentationArie Kruglanski — need for cognitive closureRensis Likert — participative managementAndy Whitlock — The Human HalfHuw Slater — OliTeresa Amabile — the progress principleBarry Schwartz — critique of rational choiceBooks Purpose and Work — Jessie ZwaanBuilt for People — Jessie ZwaanWhat Pay Costs — James Alexander SeechurnThe Customer Base Audit — Peter FaderCome Up for Air — Nick SonnenbergOrganisations Leapsome — where Jessie leads people strategyIntuit — finding purpose within a constrained missionThe Human Half — Andy Whitlock's consultancyOli — Huw Slater's companyModern People Leader — collaborators on Jessie's Substack, PL Build

In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Andrea LaRowe - Director of People Operations at 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and Hey - to find out how a high-trust, low-control company runs day to day. Andrea's core argument: stop tying pay to performance and you strip a layer of politics out of work. 37signals benchmarks salaries once a year to the 90th percentile of the San Francisco tech market, with no negotiation and no manager involvement, and rewards tenure through a profit share. Reviews still happen, on each person's anniversary, but they're a check-in rather than a lever for pay. What drives the work is intrinsic motivation - and a small, flat, bootstrapped company built to support it. What we covered: How pay works - benchmarking to Radford's 90th percentile, no merit cycle, no negotiation, and why managers stay out of itWhat reviews are for once pay is off the table, and why staggering them by anniversary beats an annual scrambleThe five-level structure - why level three (senior) is the baseline, why level five (principal) is reserved for people moving the industry forward, and how judgment separates people at the topProfit share based on tenure rather than individual output, and why it doubles as retentionHow a high-trust company handles a low performer - visibility, honest conversation, skill problem vs engagement problem, and why PIPs rarely earn their keepThe "manager of one" - hiring people who seek out problems without waiting to be toldThe 2021 decision to draw a line on political conversation at work, the roughly twenty people who left, and what it revealed about when leadership steps inWhy staying private and bootstrapped for 25 years let the founders decide what the company is for, and why equity isn't the draw people assumeSelf-determination theory - autonomy, competence, relatedness - and how 37signals delivers all threeWork as a product - treating work as something employees choose to buy, not something handed downSix-week cycles, kickoffs and heartbeats - the light mechanisms that stop a decentralized company splintering into silosAdvice for anyone stuck inside a pay-for-performance cycle People referenced Andrea LaRowe - Director of People Operations, 37signalsJason Fried - co-founder and CEO, 37signalsDavid Heinemeier Hansson - co-founder and CTO, 37signalsDart Lindsley - 11Fold, host of Work for Humans; "work as a product"Luke O'Mahoney - SapienX; "work as a product"Megan Bernard-May - Pollinate XD; "work as a product"Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theory Books Rework - Jason Fried and David Heinemeier HanssonIt Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work - Jason Fried and David Heinemeier HanssonFirst, Break All the Rules - Marcus Buckingham and Curt CoffmanWhat Pay Costs - James Alexander Seechurn Organizations, podcasts and websites 37signals - bootstrapped company behind Basecamp and HeyBasecamp - project management software; Basecamp 5 launched recentlyHey - email softwareRadford - compensation survey used for benchmarkingRework - 37signals' podcastThe 37signals employee handbook - on their websiteSemco - Ricardo Semler's company, upward-feedback modelHaier, Handelsbanken and Buurtzorg - decentralized organizations referenced

Episode description In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Megan Bernard-May - founder of Pollinate XD, co-creator of the PX Dojo, and the person who led people experience at the BBC - to dig into what it means to treat the experience of work the way a UX designer treats a product. Meg's core argument: people experience is another flavor of experience design. Traditional HR builds around policy, compliance, and risk management. A people experience approach starts somewhere else - finding the overlap between what's good for people, what's good for the business, and what's good for customers, then designing solutions inside that overlap rather than treating them as trade-offs. What we covered: Why traditional HR keeps shipping best-practice solutions that don't solve the problem, and what a design-led discovery process looks like insteadMeg's path from architecture to UX to people experience, including the master's in organizational psychology she did to round out the workWhy corporate environments resist experimentation in HR even though product teams A/B test routinely, and what makes an experiment "successful"The BBC and what productivity meant there - why getting clear on that question first matters more than any solutionPay complaints as symptoms - what's usually underneath them when benchmarking already says you're paying the marketA case study from a credit analyst team where dissatisfaction with pay turned out to be a job-design problemWhy dual career tracks still funnel people into management to chase money, and what flatter pay structures unlockSelf-determination theory as a stress test for any HR change - does it add autonomy, competence, and connectedness, or remove them?Handelsbanken, Spotify guilds, and Haier as examples of decentralized models that lend themselves to a people experience approachWhere people experience should sit organizationally - outside HR, as a guild that runs across the businessThree things any HR practitioner can start doing tomorrow: ask better problem questions, stop asking for permission, document the workPeople referenced Megan Bernard-May - founder of Pollinate XD, co-creator of PX DojoAdam Axton - co-creator of PX Dojo, based in MelbourneDan Pink - "take pay off the table" framingLuke O'Mahoney - "table stakes" framing of centralized HREdward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theoryBooks Purpose and Work - Jessica ZwaanWhat Pay Costs - James A SeechurnDrive - Daniel PinkOrganizations and resources Pollinate XD - Meg's consultancy, helping organizations move people experience out of HR and into the leadership functionPX Dojo - three-month cohort program for HR practitioners, structured white-belt to blue-beltHumani - online HR community in Australia where Meg moderates an experience design circle and runs a book clubHandelsbanken - Swedish bank, decentralized operating unitsSpotify - the guild model for cross-cutting disciplinesHaier - the marketplace model of the organization

In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Dart Lindsley - founder of 11Fold, host of the Work for Humans podcast, and former head of business architecture for HR at Cisco Systems - to dig into the idea of work as a product. Dart's core argument: companies have spent a century misclassifying their workforce. Employees fit the definition of customers, people who choose every day whether to keep buying the product called "your job." That reframe rearranges almost everything downstream - recruitment, onboarding, what managers do, how work gets allocated, and what good performance even means. What we covered: The category error at the root of modern management, and why scientific management's framing of people as factors of production still shapes practice todayHow employees fit the definition of customers in a multi-sided business, and the route Dart took to that model through business architecture work at CiscoThe limits of autonomy, mastery, and purpose as a design framework, and what Dart found after asking thousands of people what job they hire their work to doNegative transformation - the ways work changes us into people we don't want to be - and why that belongs on the cost side of the ledgerWhat it looks like when teams co-design their own work, including the four-dimensional bubble chart Dart uses to reallocate tasks based on what each person finds rewardingManagers as brokers optimizing flow between two customers, the paying customer and the working customerCommon pushback on the model: does it scale, is it anti-capitalist, and why bother if the existing system seems to workPlus a short detour into the night Dart climbed the Golden Gate BridgePeople referenced Dart Lindsley - founder of 11Fold, host of Work for HumansEdward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theoryClayton Christensen and Bobby Moesta - Jobs to Be Done frameworkJoe Pine - experience and transformation economiesDaniel Pink - autonomy, mastery, purposeAlfie Kohn - critique of behaviorist management ("pop behaviorism")Antonio Damasio - on emotion and reason in decision-makingJeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton - the knowing-doing gapRicardo Semler - Semco's participative modelBart Houlahan - co-founder of B Lab, partner at Irrational CapitalSandra Loughlin - EPAM, on data architecture and AISemmelweis, Pasteur, Koch, Lister - the germ theory paradigm shift, used as analogy for how slowly new management ideas spreadBooks Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness - Richard Ryan and Edward DeciThe Transformation Economy - Joe PineDescartes' Error - Antonio DamasioThe Knowing-Doing Gap - Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert SuttonDrive - Daniel PinkPunished by Rewards - Alfie KohnPodcasts and websites Work for Humans - Dart's podcast, 190+ episodes11fold.com - 11Fold's site, including a curated Discord community and an AI search across the Work for Humans back cataloguePX Espresso - Luke O'Mahoney's podcast, where Dart appears as a guestIrrational Capital - the ETF Dart references that tracks how employees feel about work at the companies they invest inAeroPress - the world's best coffee makerConnect with Dart on LinkedIn

Alfie Kohn has spent decades dismantling the assumption that rewards work. His research across education, parenting, and the workplace remains some of the most rigorous and underread work on human motivation - required reading for anyone serious about how people actually behave. Punished by Rewards is the place to start, and it should sit on every compensation professional's shelf. In this conversation, Alfie joins me to examine why behaviorism still dominates corporate management, what B.F. Skinner got wrong, and why financial incentives so reliably erode the intrinsic motivation they're meant to amplify. We dig into the role of promotion as a control mechanism, what the pay gap signals about corporate culture, and how the sales function exports extrinsic logic into the rest of the organization. We close on the cycle that keeps reward systems entrenched and the difficulty of moving colleagues past it. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Alfie Kohn's work and books07:12 B.F. Skinner and behaviorism15:34 The role of promotion in corporate America22:07 The impact of the pay gap on corporate culture33:27 The vicious cycle of rewards and motivation