Alle afleveringen
192 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
-
People-Centric, High Performance Culture with Rick Weil
11 november 2020 · 36 min
Barry O’Reilly welcomes Rick Weil onto this week’s show. Rick Weil is a Head of Global Product and Analytics at Amazon. He started off as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, then worked at General Dynamics and Microsoft before his current position at Amazon. Rick and Barry discuss key human-centered approaches to unlocking team motivation and performance. [Listen from 00:34] Lees meer
A Positive Culture
“When you can create this culture where everybody wants to help each other towards a shared goal, you've unlocked some incredible opportunities for performance,” Rick comments. He is focused on creating a positive culture in his working environment where peers selflessly help each other excel versus competing with each other. He stresses taking time to listen to his employees and their concerns, as well as deliberately stepping back at times to let team members address challenges on their own. This is especially important when managing ‘managers of managers’ and dealing with internal conflict. [Listen from 6:51]360° Feedback
Barry asks Rick some of the things he noticed about himself that have evolved over time. One of the many things Rick has learned at Amazon is the power of “taking check x-rays” and using 360° feedback to identify leadership patterns to pay attention to. This helps us know what levers to pull to improve team culture and performance. Rick also talks about the importance and power of genuinely caring for people in the workplace over following scripted leadership behaviors. “Just because I can read all these books on leadership and follow the recipe doesn't make me a good leader,” Rick comments. As a leader you need to find ways to effectively sense how your teams are doing at the human level and connect the personal needs and motivations of your team to business goals to drive organizational change. “Mission First, People Always”, Rick says. [Listen from 14:00]Leadership and Relationships
Being a transformational leader is rooted in building strong rel… -
Product Management For Large Scale Innovation with Secil Tabli Watson
28 oktober 2020 · 49 min
Barry O’Reilly is pleased to welcome Secil Tabli Watson, Executive Vice President for Digital Solutions for Business at Wells Fargo. In this week’s show, Barry chats with Secil about the techniques she uses to drive innovation in both retail and business banking environments. She shares the lessons she unlearned in the process and how to bring product management principles into a large organization in a way that drives innovation. Lees meer
First Lesson: Speak The Customer’s Language
Secil’s first assignment as a digital channel manager 18 years ago was to make Wellsfargo.com into a buying site. She focused on language that was customer-focused, rather than the bank-centric. “We brought in the capabilities and the competency of doing user research and understanding customer tasks and understanding their behaviors and motivators and really putting that into the language,” she says. In addition, they transformed the architecture of the website so that it was more customer driven. [Listen from 1:55]Staff People to Outcomes Not Products
If you’re struggling to move from project-based teams to outcome-based ones, Secil advises that you reframe how you think. This was a critical unlearning for her, she remarks. She shares an example of how she recast her thinking about a project from product to outcome, as a result of which her team was able to see themselves as responsible for a broader outcome, and partner with other departments to make it happen. She advises listeners to break the project into phases with quick wins, and gives insight into how to create cross-functional teams with as little awkwardness as possible. “If you ask a little bit at a time from people, they're more willing to help,” she points out. [Listen from 6:50]B2B Customer Relationships Are Deeper
Businesses with B2B customers can develop deeper relationships with them. Because their B2B customers are fewer in number, Secil says, they are able to communicate on a more intimate level over a longer period of … -
Role Modeling Culture Transformation with Christian Metzner
14 oktober 2020 · 45 min
This week’s guest is a leader who role models change. Christian Metzner is Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Volkswagen Financial Services UK. Barry O’Reilly describes him as someone who is “constantly staying curious and getting outside his comfort zone; and you only have to spend time with him and his team to realize how much his actions inspire others.” Christian and Barry discuss the role of leadership in inspiring organizational culture. Lees meer
Initiating Change
Christian has learned to step out of his comfort zone and reflect on what other leaders and cultures are doing better. Emphasizing that the one with power needs to initiate the change, he says, “If you are the one in the position with the power, then you need to open up first. You can’t expect others to change if you’re not leading the way.”Hacking Culture
Innovation is often the result of challenging yourself and pushing your boundaries. “You don't come to innovation if you only go one mile faster every day,” Christian points out. “You have to push boundaries... Try to find the 5% to 10% where you can challenge your behaviors, where you can challenge people who might be stuck in their thinking.” He advocates using cultural hacks - low effort steps that can be implemented quickly, but which have high emotional impact - and shares examples of cultural hacks that he successfully implemented. Barry comments that these small changes often create ripple effects throughout an organization.Being a Leader
“My simple understanding of leadership is... to remove your blockers and to make you better on a day-to-day basis.” Christian sees learning from competitors and his team as key to creating a culture of innovation: an environment where everyone is on the same playing field. “IT is - next to the capital market - the single biggest threat to an organization like ours,” he points out. “And we need to get our job... absolutely right to enable our commercial colleagues to come up with great products and services for… -
Intentional Leadership with Katie Anderson
30 september 2020 · 37 min
Katie Anderson is a leadership coach consultant and author, best known for inspiring individuals and organizations. She started off in public health research then moved to Japan in 2015. Barry O’Reilly welcomes her to the show as she shares the lessons she learned in Japan on how to deepen your leadership skill. Lees meer
Learning Lean at the Source
Her life in Japan inspired Katie to learn lean at the source as she had already been applying Toyota production principles in the healthcare system. Moving away from academia and research was her big pivot as she transitioned from public health into her own consulting practice. [Listen from 2:30]Leading With Intention
Katie advocates leading with intention and orienting your actions in the direction of the behaviour that will achieve your desired purpose. Now that she was in a position where she had to help other people solve problems, she realized that her mindset and approach needed to shift. She needed to show up in a different capacity: she had to be a model and guide instead of simply going in and doing it all on her own. [Listen from 6:25]Effective Leadership Role
People need alignment: they need to know what the target of the organization is in order to meet that target. If leaders don’t have clarity on what the target is, it is unlikely that the employees will. Barry comments that if employees don’t know what direction has been set by leaders, that’s a failure of the leadership team. You can have activity without vision, but not in a meaningful direction. [Listen from 13:00]Hoshin As a Tool
Hoshin is about identifying the top strategies in the organization, and how the next level down contributes to achieving those strategies. It is anchored in the scientific method, and a deep process of reflection. It provides the organization with the real data, whether positive or negative and allows for the leadership team to make better and accurate decisions based on that data. [Listen from 21:45]Looking Ahead
Katie is loo… -
The Business Value of IoT Innovation with Daniel Elizalde
16 september 2020 · 42 min
Daniel Elizalde is the VP and head of IoT for North America at Ericsson. He’s spent more than 20 years working in industries, from manufacturing to aerospace and energy. Today, Daniel also teaches courses on the decision framework that he’s created. Barry O’Reilly welcomes Daniel to this week’s show to discuss how much the concepts of IoT have changed, and the impact of technology on the current world. Lees meer
The Evolution of IoT
Once Daniel learnt of the IoT concept and recognized it in the way he did his work, he started cataloguing and creating frameworks and approaches. With the advancement of technology, you can now plot a system of sensor data points on a graph, which would have taken a year to put together previously. The advancement of technology also led to the scaling back of employees and time. Daniel encourages adapting the product psyche and learning what you can do today so that you can take advantage of the technological curve in the future. [Listen from 1:50]Looking the Other Way Around
“Building relationships is the most important part to get things done,” Daniel says. Barry parallels the IoT system with the people working in a well-functioning unit: the technological idea and the people idea is what drives the performance. Daniel talks about introducing new ways of application to Ericsson, and helping the company to unlearn some of its long held strategies to adapt to the current times. Daniel says he’s always looking the other way around to determine feasibility and what the customers really want. [Listen from 15:00]Building Capability
Driving results, for Daniel, involves discovery and getting more projects from other units in order to apply their concepts to Ericsson. Daniel describes what has worked for him in terms of expanding technology in the company. He discusses monetizing 5G networks as they emerge, focusing on customers’ problems and adding value. “Your capability is the knowledge you’re accumulating in your organization, and making good… -
Finding Your Leadership Voice with Diana Stepner
2 september 2020 · 28 min
Diana Stepner is the VP for Product Management of Innovative Learning Solutions at Pearson. She enjoys building product experiences that customers love as well as weaving innovation, experimentation, and technology into actionable product visions and roadmaps that accelerate growth. Barry O’Reilly welcomes Diana to this week’s show as they discuss finding her voice and why a product management approach to leadership is valuable in these times. Lees meer
Finding Her Voice
Barry comments, “We often figure out what we want to do as we do things and learn our way through them.” Diana explains that she had to unlearn the notion that a leader must be the loudest person in the room and know all the answers. A point from an article she read - that great leaders spend more time listening and asking questions than talking and giving answers - helped her realize that her natural leadership style was indeed valid. Encouraging others to contribute, bringing people into the conversation who might not have felt comfortable to speak before, was the right way for her.The Power of Pausing
Pausing to think, to process and analyze information before responding, helps you make better decisions. Diana says that she had to unlearn making snap decisions and jumping to conclusions. “What I've had to do,” she says, “is take a step back when I've got a lot of information that I need to synthesize; to open up more towards other ways of addressing an approach; think about a more broad perspective; and then evaluate a couple of different opportunities initially, test them out and then be able to determine what's the right way to proceed.” Pauses are ok, Barry emphasizes, and we should make more space for them in communication.A Period of Unlearning
Many companies are going through a sense of unlearning, Diana says. She and Barry discuss the changes that are happening in companies currently: they are realizing the power of having diverse representation so they are listening more. Diana remarks that t… -
Designing Invincible Companies with Alex Osterwalder
19 augustus 2020 · 49 min
Barry O’Reilly is delighted to welcome Alexander Osterwalder, famed author of The Business Model Canvas, The Value Proposition Canvas and most recently The Invincible Company. Alex is also an entrepreneur and speaker, and one of the world’s leading experts on innovation and entrepreneurship. In this exciting episode, they discuss some of the aspects that help innovation and entrepreneurship flourish, including how business leaders can identify what they have to unlearn to be successful in the future. Lees meer
Failure is a Door to Opportunity
Oftentimes we overstate failure, and we don’t look for the opportunities that come out of it. Alex relates how failure often turned out to be a door to new opportunities for him. “I think you just have to be ready to embrace the surprises that life gives you and learn from every failure,” he says. He advises listeners to own their failures and don’t blame others. “If you focus on the positive, all of a sudden you know how to instrumentalize failure.” Entrepreneurs distinguish between reversible and non-reversible decisions, so they can make calculated bets. While failure is never the goal, it is an inevitable consequence and a good thing. You can become more dispassionate about failure if you view it as experimentation, Alex posits.You Get Better Over Time
You get better at innovation and entrepreneurship over time. Most successful entrepreneurs are 40 years and over, and have been through several startups. They learn what not to do through practical experience. However, Alex says, you also need to learn the technical aspects of entrepreneurship and innovation.Stay Humble
“No company is invincible,” says Alex, “but companies that constantly reinvent themselves because they don’t believe they’re invincible, those are the ones who are going to stay ahead.” Staying humble and keeping the mindset that there is always something new to learn, some new way to reinvent your company, is the difference between growth and stagnation. Barry ad… -
Radical Alignment with Alexandra Jamieson and Bob Gower
5 augustus 2020 · 32 min
Barry O’Reilly welcomes authors Alexandra Jamieson and Bob Gower to this week’s Unlearn Podcast. They are the co-authors of a new book which details their practical system to have difficult conversations in a productive manner. The book is entitled Radical Alignment: How to Have Game-Changing Conversations That Will Transform Your Business and Your Life. Lees meer
How the System Originated
Alex and Bob describe how the Radical Alignment system started. It was a tool they used in their own relationship and that they taught to others. Often people would reach out to them afterwards about implementing the tool in other contexts. It soon became apparent that they had something valuable that they could share with the world.Four Simple Steps
The heart of the Radical Alignment system is four simple steps, Alex points out. “As a couple, or even as an individual or as a team, you share your intentions, concerns, boundaries and dreams.” Bob explains that they usually constrain the system to a topic and he illustrates how the system would work in the context of the current pandemic. Barry comments that he finds the system practical and applicable. “I felt like it was very explicit about what things matter, what was I going to do, and I could act on it straight away,” he says.How To Have Difficult Conversations
Conflict often develops because there’s a missing conversation, according to Fernando Flores. “More often than not,” Bob adds, “the missing conversation is just some key little piece of context that you don't have, that really explains the person's behavior.” He shares an example of how context changed his perception from annoyance with his neighbor to acceptance. Alex remarks that this system brings structure and ease to her communication. “For me the most valuable thing about this structured conversation is that it gives me a way to organize my emotions and my thoughts and my desires.”The Goal is Binding People Together
Radical alignment essentially is about binding peop… -
Designing our Work with Susan O’Malley
22 juli 2020 · 50 min
Susan O’Malley is an expert at building high performance teams and culture. This is the passion that influenced her work at Google, as well as her current position of Senior Director at IDEO. She joins Barry O’Reilly on this week’s show to share her inspiring story. Lees meer
Being Open to Following Your Heart
Few people approach new opportunities with the openness that Susan displays, Barry comments. She credits her mindset to a love of learning and the ‘harmonizer’ role she embodied as a middle child. It deepened when she joined Google in its early years. “I literally saw the product changing the world and changing people’s business models,” she says. “…And it gave me this tremendous sense of optimism around what technology can do, not just for the big guys, but actually for the little guys and the guys in the middle. That was a really, really inspiring thing.”What Makes Great Leaders
Susan looked to the great leaders around her for traits she could cultivate in her own life. From her observations, great leaders were charismatic, fair, intentional and they succeeded at whatever they put their hand to. Barry adds about great leaders, “...they all seem to be working in a different field than they originally trained, and yet they really cultivated this capability to continuously adapt to changing circumstances. And they build systems that allow them to explore uncertainty very intentionally; they build a lot of fast feedback mechanisms into things. They're very curious to get outside their comfort zone.”The Value of Authenticity
Authenticity is about being yourself. Susan says, “It helps other people be attracted to what you’re trying to do. It helps us communicate. It helps us produce amazing results in other people… Our job is to cultivate companies and teams where we have a great mix of people, and where people can really be themselves so that we can all find this energy and find this collaboration that's gonna take us to the next level.” Barry comments that being ina… -
Driving Corporate Innovation with Tendayi Viki
8 juli 2020 · 39 min
This week’s guest, Tendayi Viki, is an Associate Partner at Strategyzer. A prolific author, he has written three books and is a regular contributor to Forbes magazine. His most recent book, Pirates in the Navy: How Innovators Lead Transformation, is a manifesto on how to drive corporate innovation in large organisations. He and Barry O’Reilly chat about how he helped organizations drive and scale innovation, including key unlearning moments along the way. Lees meer
Good Enough Is Better Than Perfect
In an interesting twist of fate, Tendayi ended up in Stanford’s Graduate School of Business under the tutelage and mentorship of innovators like Steve Blank. He says that this was the turning point for him to converge his psychology training with entrepreneurship and innovation. He recounts two major unlearning moments, the major one of which was his tendency to over-edit. Barry describes this as a classic trap: we want our product to be perfect before we publish, but the better approach is to make it good enough, put it out there and start the conversation. In the academic world, Tendayi points out, your ideas evolve in private; but the innovation world is the opposite as your ideas evolve in public. This makes you vulnerable and takes courage, but the feedback you receive makes your product better.Earn the Right to Criticize
You have to earn the right to criticize, according to Tendayi. People will only follow you when they see you as a partner on their journey, when they feel that you understand their struggle and have their best interests at heart.Helping Successful Ideas Evolve
There’s no way to tell which of your ideas will succeed, so invest in many ideas and see which ones pan out. Tendayi remarks, “The fundamental theory of innovation is the theory of an entrepreneurship ecosystem… and in that ecosystem the evolution of successful ideas is actually pretty random. We don't know what's going to succeed and what’s not going to succeed. What we do is just throw things a… -
Behavior Design and Tiny Habits with BJ Fogg
24 juni 2020 · 37 min
Barry O’Reilly talks with social scientist and author of Tiny Habits, Dr. BJ Fogg on this week’s Unlearn Podcast. BJ is a Research Associate at Stanford University and creator of the Fogg Behavior Model in which he teaches people how to adapt their behavior based on the challenges they want to solve. His students include the co-founder of Instagram, as well as several other product, app, and service developers who create solutions using the models and methods he teaches. Lees meer
A Natural Experimenter
“There’s a real skill about recognizing different patterns and seeing a trend and bringing it all together to create a new field,” Barry comments. He describes BJ as a natural experimenter, as he was able to converge his love of rhetoric with scientific study to create the new field of persuasive technology. BJ points out that it’s not a straight path: “You kind of stumble into learning and unlearning moments—you find what works and what doesn't; and certainly do by being curious to explore new paths, design experiments and get insights through research.”How To Make Change Sustainable
Lasting change has these two characteristics, according to Fogg: Will it help you do what you already want to do? Will it help you feel successful? These two maxims are foundational to Fogg's systematic approach, Behavior Design, that helps people make the sustainable changes they are aiming towards. BJ describes how he discovered this new domain by setting himself up to be free to pursue his goals in the way he felt was best. Once you have a little support to independently sustain yourself for a while, he says, you realize that you can take more risks than you thought before. Barry adds, “Our ability to continuously adapt our behavior and thinking to changing circumstances is probably the most important skill we may need.”Just Get It Out There
“Design the experiment. Crank it out. The first you're gonna mess up on. So just do it, learn, change and then do the next one,” BJ advises. Instead… -
How to Be Forever Employable with Jeff Gothelf
10 juni 2020 · 41 min
Barry O’Reilly and Jeff Gothelf have been best friends ever since Jeff reviewed Barry’s first draft of Lean Enterprise and told him it sucked. They have worked together as co-authors of the Lean series, and as consultants to Fortune 50 clients. Jeff joins Barry on the Unlearn Podcast this week to talk about his new book, Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You. Lees meer
Push vs Pull
The higher up the corporate ladder you climb, the fewer the jobs and the fiercer the competition. You have to constantly push your way through. Jeff woke up on his 35th birthday and made the unsettling realization that he would soon be battling younger, better-skilled people for a job. He understood that this was untenable, so he vowed that he wouldn’t look for jobs anymore, rather he would have jobs look for him. He tells Barry that pulling job opportunities means telling the world explicitly who you are, where you could help them, where people can find you and what problems you can solve for them.First Steps
Why do you exist? How can you help people become successful? Being forever employable involves self-assessment. Jeff says that the first step he took was to examine what he was good at and what value he had provided up to that point. Then he thought about his audience and where the market was trending. “...if you're going to plant a flag somewhere you want to plant it in a growing market rather than ... one that's shrinking,” he points out.Your Personal Brand
You have a story to tell that no-one else has: storytelling is how you differentiate yourself. Jeff tells listeners that we all have a unique perspective, and it’s how we build our personal brand. He and Barry talk about sharing their stories and fighting the impostor syndrome. “People massively underestimate themselves,” Jeff says. He coaches people how to find the self-confidence to pursue their goals, a trait that is critical if you want to be successful. Barry says that doing something … -
Break Up With The Job For Your Dream with Kanika Tolver
27 mei 2020 · 35 min
Barry O’Reilly welcomes Kanika Tolver to this week’s Unlearn Podcast. Kanika is the bestselling author of Career Rehab and founder of a consultancy business of the same name. She has coached hundreds of clients, helping them discover opportunities to do their best work and to find higher performance roles that are better suited to them. Lees meer
How To Break Up With Your Job
Despite fear and anxiety about job security, especially in this COVID-19 pandemic, Kanika says, that you shouldn't be afraid to seek the right job or to break up with the wrong one. She and Barry discuss practical advice:Turn your anxiety into accomplishments. For example, you can upskill by getting a new certification, and expand your network. Connect with recruiters or hiring managers who can help you get a new position.
Join a new online community. Apart from learning new skills, you may be able to connect with experts.
Fearlessly resign when you know you’re prepared. To prepare, think about what you need to do to get ready, what you can learn, and who you can connect with or who you know that can refer you. Taking these small steps builds your confidence to fearlessly resign.
You Are The MVP
Whether you're thinking of changing careers or starting a business, think of yourself as the product. The first step is a Career Rehab Diagnosis, a self-assessment of what is and isn't working in your career. Make adjustments based on what you discover. Next, Kanika says, list your career, education and personal goals. The next step is to think about financial goals and culture fit.Barry comments that it takes so much unlearning for people to recognize that they deserve to have a fulfilling career in a place where they’re recognized for who they are and what they bring to the table. Kanika cites Barry’s book about reevaluating past behaviors. We need to stop thinking that we should conform to fit the company culture. Instead we must recognize that we’re the MVP (minimum viable product), and negotiate job…
-
Cultivating Serendipity with Michael Bungay Stanier
13 mei 2020 · 38 min
Michael Bungay Stanier is the bestselling author of The Coaching Habit. He is part of the Thinkers 50 and has been named the number one Thought Leader in Coaching this year. Michael joins Barry O’Reilly on the Unlearn Podcast this week to share insights, including how to measure success and pivotal lessons that shaped him. Lees meer
An Unconventional Career Path
There is a saying that inspiration is when your past suddenly makes sense. Certainly, several experiences in his early career showed Michael that he needed to work for himself in order to be at his best. He recounts that the turning point for him was 20 years ago when he was fired from the last company he worked with. That’s when he started his own business.Three Memorable Lessons
Barry asks Michael about the lessons he’s learned over the years. Michael responds with the three pivotal lessons that he remembers to this day:You need to understand who you work best with. He is a great leader to his ideal clients, Michael says. “I'm great at having people's backs; I'm great with people who take responsibility and accountability; I'm great with people who have just been waiting... for the wind beneath their wings… In terms of figuring out who influences and nudges and helps shape people's journeys, you’ve got to get the right match between the right people.”
The power of No. “Part of what I've learned is that the more courageous I can be about what I say no to and the fewer things that I say yes to, the more likely it is I'm going to make a difference in the world.” A lesson that stands out for Barry from The Coaching Habit is that if you’re going to say yes to something, that means you have to say no to something else. There’s great discipline in being able to say no.
Be careful about what you measure as success. Barry and Michael talk about the insidiousness of vanity metrics: sometimes the metric becomes the target and you do anything to achieve it, oftentimes destroying the bigger win that you’re looking for. M…
-
Game Thinking For Product Innovation with Amy Jo Kim
29 april 2020 · 44 min
Barry O’Reilly is excited to welcome Amy Jo Kim to this week’s Unlearn Podcast. Amy is a game designer, startup coach, and author of Game Thinking. She has worked on the early design teams of games such as Rock Band and The Sims, and has helped many companies, including Netflix and eBay, find their customers to help them scale. Lees meer
A Cooperative Designer
Amy describes herself as a social game designer. She is enthusiastic about teamwork, having learned many lessons about creating a collaborative environment from working in music bands and modeling great bandleaders. One of those lessons that she now teaches in her Team Accelerator program is how to “make everything gel so we don't even remember whose idea it was… just getting the work done in a really focused yet creative way.”Many opportunities opened up for her Amy when she found a tribe of like-minded people. She tells Barry that she found mentors that she could click with and saw a way that she could contribute immediately to a much larger team.
Go After The Early Beachhead
“...If you're innovating you can't just go after your average customer in that market,” Amy posits. “You have to capture this narrow early beachhead market first.” As early as 1961, Everett Rogers of Bell Labs found that innovations always start by capturing the early market before going into the early and later mainstream. Amy has taken these insights from innovators like Rogers, Jeffrey Moore, and Will Wright, and made them accessible through a step-by-step program. She shares how these principles were lived out in building out The Sims, and in companies such as eBay and Netflix. “...There's so much you can learn and get out of iterating ideas with [your early beachhead] that it gets you to a point where you can get a vector in the direction and build out for the next layer of people around them,”Amy adds.Early adopters or beachheads have these three characteristics:
They actually have the problem that your product solves;
They know th…
-
How To Achieve Collective Success with Temi Ofong
15 april 2020 · 34 min
Barry O’Reilly is excited to welcome Temi Ofong to the Unlearn Podcast. Temi is the Chief Operating Officer for Corporate Investment Banking at Absa, South Africa’s most influential bank and one of the largest banks on the African continent. Temi describes his journey to his present role as an incredible learning curve. He shares the lessons he learned and unlearned throughout his career, in particular, the importance of putting people first to achieve success. Lees meer
Empathy As A Superpower
“If you're not able to connect with the person's journey and history and context, it's very difficult to get the best out of them because you don't really understand what motivates them,” Temi points out. Barry calls empathy a superpower. People who develop empathy always get the best information which informs how they behave and helps them to be successful in different environments. “Ultimately business is about people,” Temi adds. “Life is about people… The biggest thing you’ve got to unlearn or learn… is people and what motivates people, what makes them tick…” He illustrates how this principle helped him in the build out of their corporate banking business.Unlearning A Common Leadership Myth
One of the most common myths about leadership is that a good leader does it all on his or her own. However, Temi points out that his biggest breakthrough actually came as a result of his coach. Many times the attitudes and behaviors that brought you success thus far, are not the same ones that will take you further. The right coach, he argues, can lead you on a journey of unlearning which will help you enhance your performance. Barry says that getting a coach helped him accelerate exponentially.Leaders also need to unlearn:
How to be vulnerable;
How to harness EQ;
What motivates their people.
The Notion of Collective Success
A leader’s job is to create the environment for other people to succeed. “Ultimately it comes down to the notion of collective success,” Temi adds. People need to … -
Product Management Thinking For Policy and Governance with Karen Tay
1 april 2020 · 43 min
Karen Tay, Smart Nation Director for the Prime Minister's Office of Singapore, is on a mission to transform Singapore into the world’s leading smart nation, where technology is used for maximum public good. Lees meer
She chats with Barry O’Reilly about how she is helping to modernize government by applying product development thinking to policy, organizational and talent development. She shares how this is changing the way the Singaporean government works.
[note: this was recorded before the coronavirus outbreak in the US. If you want to chat about how these insights pertain to Government management of the coronavirus, Karen is happy to chat]
User-Driven Design
In charting directions for a country, being responsive to citizen sentiments is important, but there is also a place for Governments to exercise leadership in decision-making, eg. the decision that investing in preschool education is critical to social mobility, decisions on how to manage crises such as the coronavirus.
Regardless, how the central government implements their decisions should be driven by user behavior. Karen points out that using an iterative process is beneficial in many cases. She relates that they combined user research and iterative testing for policies in the Ministry of Education and found that stakeholders felt more engagement and ownership of the new policies. You have to be willing to listen to what your educators need and want from your product, and change it to something they are willing to implement, Karen says. Barry agrees that you should use user data to reframe your problem, then look at ways to improve.
Make Customers Feel Valued
Karen and Barry discuss several unlearning moments in Karen’s career. She points out that in government it’s not about what ideas you have, rather whether you can execute them. She says that she was surprised by how little she needed to get something done. She found that it was often as simple as listening to her potential customers’ needs and designing… -
Being Your Best In A Crisis with Eric McNulty
18 maart 2020 · 36 min
This week’s guest on the Unlearn Podcast is Eric McNulty, head of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative at Harvard. Eric is a crisis leadership expert who has worked on crises such as the Boston Marathon bombing, Hurricane Sandy and Deepwater Horizon, the BP oil spill off the coast of Mexico. He offers valuable insights about making decisions in crisis situations, in light of the Coronavirus pandemic that has gripped the world. Lees meer
A Helpful Decision-Making Tool
The leaders who respond best to a crisis are those who can weave several disciplines together to see three-dimensional patterns others miss. Such leaders see what’s missing, and can make connections between different domains to come up with a new solution. Host Barry O’Reilly says that it’s important to recognize the effects of your decisions. He asks Eric about tools to discover potential obstacles when implementing decisions during a crisis. Eric says his colleague, Peter Neffenger, created the Situation Connectivity Map for this very purpose. This tool helps you map out secondary situations that may arise, and allows you to connect the dots and get a richer picture of the overall impact. He says, “You think you're solving for problem X, but around that are different stakeholders, different aspects of that, and the extent you can map them... and to say What's gonna play off in this? How are they connected? Who are the stakeholders? Then you begin to really figure out where you need to put your attention.”How Can We Be Our Best?
This is a time to be aspirational, Eric says. Your old bureaucratic process will keep you from innovating, and actually prevents you from doing right by your customers. Ask yourself, “How can we be at our absolute best right now?” He encourages leaders to make changes, to rise above the situation to come out better and stronger. Barry adds that when you empower people to be their best, you will be amazed by what you can achieve together. Eric shares some interesting storie… -
Pretotyping to Build the Right 'It' with Alberto Savoia
4 maart 2020 · 39 min
Alberto Savoia had a successful career as Chief Technology Officer in major companies such as Sun Microsystems, SunLabs, and was Google’s first Engineering Manager. As an entrepreneur, however, he realized that building the right thing was more important than building things right. He chats with Barry O’Reilly about the pivotal unlearning moments in his life and his new approach to product development. Lees meer
The Beast of Failure
You work hard to create a great product, you launch it and the market rejects it. That’s one of the most painful experiences for any software developer. Alberto relates his first experience with ‘the beast of failure’: even though the market told them “if you build it, we will buy”, they did not actually buy. Alberto says that this failure felt as if someone had pulled the rug from under him.However, it was also a seminal unlearning moment for him. The first lesson he took away was that if you’re building the right ‘it’, you will find a way to succeed in the market. The second lesson was that you have to own your failures before you can move forward.
Unlearning Market Research
There is an 80% chance that the original version of any idea will fail. As such, Alberto now goes into a venture expecting failure, and the market has to prove him wrong. Optimizing to be wrong rather than to be right, flips traditional market research on its head. Barry comments that it’s at the heart of the scientific method since you have to conduct experiments to invalidate your hypothesis; if you can’t invalidate it, then it’s probably a good hypothesis.Alberto’s most important experiment to test his ideas is his ‘skin in the game meter’. Asking the market if they will buy if you build is due negligence, he argues; that’s just promises and opinions. Instead, he tells them, “If you buy, we will build.” The ultimate demonstration that someone wants a product is when they put down a deposit. Money is the ultimate skin in the game, as Elon Musk’s example proves.
Pre…
-
Creating Sustainable Inspiration with Jen Grace Baron
19 februari 2020 · 34 min
For 20 years, Jen Grace Baron has sought to discover the secrets of sustaining inspiration. Her findings are the subject of a book which she co-authored with Allison Holzer and Sandra Spataro, entitled Dare To Inspire: Sustain the Fire of Inspiration In Work and Life. She chats with Barry O’Reilly about his interesting topic in this week’s show. Lees meer
What makes it worthwhile?
In entrepreneurship, as in life, there are going to be tough days. Jen says that she and her co-authors asked each other, “What is the difference that we want to make that will make bad days worthwhile?”Inspiration is a muscle and a resource
Jen’s research proved that the traditional view of inspiration is erroneous. Inspiration isn’t something that happens to you. In fact, it can be generated: inspiration is a muscle that you can build and it’s a resource that organizations should manage. She outlines three ways we get inspired:We inspire ourselves;
We are inspired through, with and by others, mainly in relationships;
We’re inspired through situations.
Jen adds that there are predictable pathways, or engines, that people use to inspire themselves.
Rituals and culture
Barry and Jen talk about how simple ‘reset rituals’ spark inspiration and prepare us for success. Systematized rituals are essentially the building blocks of great culture. Culture, Jen says, is the hardest thing you’ll ever build in your company, but it’s the most precious. Barry adds that exceptional leaders role model the behaviors they want their people to adopt. Sustained change does depend on leaders, Jen agrees, which often means unlearning past beliefs and behaviors. The desire for the change has to be stronger than the fear of changing, she says.Am I inspiring?
Many leaders believe that they are not inspiring, or that being inspiring is the same as being charismatic. Jen describes the strategies and tools she uses to help her clients see their strengths and uniqueness. Barry comments that our capabilities are often… -
Testing Business Ideas with David J. Bland
5 februari 2020 · 44 min
Testing Business Ideas with David J. Bland Lees meer
David Bland’s work includes the product death cycle, a classic anti-pattern innovators and entrepreneurs fall into when trying to create a new product. He highlights that building what customers say they want is not the way to be successful; instead, ideas need to be tested to see what they need to succeed. In this week’s show, Barry O’Reilly and David discuss his new book, Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation, including what it takes to do experimentation right.
Stick To Your Vision or Walk Away?
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful something looks, or who you think your customer is, if they don’t want it they don’t want it.” His early experience in a financial services startup taught David this valuable lesson. He says that at some point you have to decide whether to stick to your vision and pivot to another segment, or walk away. Having the market reject your hard work is humbling because you personally attach yourself to what you’re creating. However, David comments that the way to move forward is to listen to the data.Being Open To Being Wrong
Your vision may need to be tweaked in some way for you to be successful, David says. As such, leaders should adopt the mindset that they’re testing their vision against reality and that they might be wrong.Unlearning Ideas About Experimentation
Barry asks David to comment on what organizations need to unlearn about experimentation. David responds that much of it boils down to leadership mindset. People usually become leaders because they are experts in some area and have proven that they can produce results. It’s an ego-driven path, David says. If you’re not careful, you can become a CEO who still thinks that it’s all about you. Building a culture of experimentation means however, that you have to create more leaders around you. Barry adds that so many leaders are used to managing to output-based measures of success. Asking them to measure outcomes s… -
How Empathy Drives Innovation with Dr. Gail Lebovic
22 januari 2020 · 37 min
Dr. Gail Lebovic is a surgeon and entrepreneur whose work has made a great impact on the healthcare space, particularly by devising innovative surgical techniques and developing medical devices aimed at improving the lives of women with breast cancer. Host Barry O’Reilly describes her as a world leader with a passion for problem-solving and for thinking outside the box, which makes her unique in the highly structured field of surgery.
Challenging The Accepted Culture
Surgical thinking is founded on achieving good outcomes and avoiding risk. Very few surgeons would think about trying a different procedure if the accepted way is working. Gail, however, knew that there had to be a better way to do breast cancer surgery. She felt that when a surgeon performs a mastectomy, he or she should also be doing a reconstruction. This was a radical idea at the time. Eventually, she sought out Dr. Donald Laub as her mentor and together they explored how to make this idea happen. Barry comments that everything pushes against you when you’re trying to innovate, especially in highly regulated, high consequence scenarios.
Breakthrough
Even with a sought-after practice, and data to support her methods, Dr. Gail still found herself marginalized by the mainstream surgical community. Nevertheless, she focused on helping her patients and became involved in medical technology. She realized that she could impact many more people by creating technology and teaching others how to use it. Her MammoPad invention has now been used by over 100 million women. Another step she took was teaching surgeons her techniques. One surgeon can impact more than 250 cancer patients a year, she points out. To date, she has trained over 1000 surgeons around the world, escalating the opportunity to impact many more women than one on one. She created a post-graduate course that has hosted more than 18 conferences thanks in part to a grant from the Mary Kay foundation.
Recognizing Opportunity
Barry asks Gail to de… Lees meer -
People-Centered Leadership at NASA with Dr. Ed Hoffman
8 januari 2020 · 47 min
Barry O’Reilly opens Season 2 of the UnLearn Podcast by commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing. He welcomes special guest Dr. Ed Hoffman, NASA’s first ever Chief Knowledge Officer. Ed is a Senior Lecturer at Columbia University School or Professional Studies, and serves as Strategic Advisor for the Project Management Institutue. In these roles he works with industry leaders to develop capabilities in leadership, projects, teaming, and future of work dynamics. He is a sought-after consultant and speaker, and the co-author of Shared Voyage: Learning and Unlearning from Remarkable Projects. Lees meer
Knowing Why
Knowing what you’re doing is important, but it’s also critical to know why. Ed has always believed that NASA’s work contributes to the good of humankind. His thoughtful response to the interesting test Deputy Administrator Dr. Hans Mark put him through during his internship, proved that he knew why he was there. Barry comments that we can achieve amazing outcomes when we are connected to mission, when we know why we’re doing what we’re doing.It Starts With The People
The best organizations have thoughtful, effective leaders; they build teams who are themselves leaders; and they share a common mission. Ed says that when you work with people that you respect and care about, when you have a sense of purpose, and you feel that your skills are being utilized, then work feels like a special place. Barry asks how leaders can build such high-performance teams. Ed responds that the best leaders create - and are part of! - the best teams. “It starts with the people aspect,” he says. A sense of pride, appreciation and gratitude, and commitment to the dream are components of the best teams. Only then should the management part come in, Ed says.A Lack of Communication Leads to Tragedy
Ed relates how a lack of communication and collaboration at NASA led to the 2003 Columbia tragedy. When you’ve had a period of success, it’s common to feel pressure to produ… -
Season Finale: AMA with Barry O’Reilly
24 december 2019 · 34 min
In this finale episode of Season 1, Barry O’Reilly takes the time to answer questions posed by listeners. He reached out via social media and allowed his followers to ask him anything about himself, the podcast, or things they might want to learn and unlearn. Here are several of the questions posed and Barry’s answers: Lees meer
Q: What takes up too much of your time? (Helen, Melbourne AUS)
A: Noisy notifications. Non-specific interruptions that disrupt my flow are frustrating for me. I don’t like interruptions or context switching because it limits my progress.Q: How do you measure success for the podcast? (Caroline, New York USA)
A: I’m more interested in outcome-based measures of success. I know it’s going to be a great show when a guest says “I’ve never shared this story before,” or “I never thought of it like that.” Those authentic conversations, and getting feedback from listeners that they feel they’re part of them, are really powerful for me.Q: What has been the single best day of 2019, and why? (Prithi, Bangalore IND)
A: Being sent a photo of Serena Williams reading Unlearn. It was especially poignant because watching her story on TV was a major unlearning moment for me. It forced me to acknowledge that there were things I needed to adapt in myself to achieve the outcomes I wanted. Seeing her reading my book was inspiring and felt like a closed feedback loop.Q: What’s the most counterintuitive skill to unlearn? (Simon, San Francisco USA)
A: Definitely the concept of coaching. We seem to think that only people who are underperforming need coaching. However, the highest performing persons have and actively seek out coaches to help them improve. Coaching has certainly been one of the best investments I’ve ever made in myself.Q: Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable is nearly impossible for me. What do you do to actively get uncomfortable? (Kirstie, Helsinki FIN)
A: Actually, I feel uncomfortable if I’m not doing something uncomfortable! Trying new thing… -
Using Vision, Mission and Data To Transform Organizations with Tanya Cordrey
11 december 2019 · 51 min
Tanya Cordrey started her career as a journalist for a road haulage magazine. Today she serves on several boards and consults with many leading organizations. She has led teams and international expansions in companies such as BBC and eBay, and oversaw the transformation from print to digital media at The Guardian Media Group in her role as Chief Digital Officer. She joins host Barry O’Reilly to discuss her role in leading difficult change in often very traditional organizations. Lees meer
Doing Something Different
Doing something different can lead to new and wonderful opportunities. Tanya’s unconventional decision to do an MBA to pair and contrast with her literary arts degree resulted in creating the opportunity for her to lead a strategy team at the BBC and later to be recruited as part of the European executive team for BabyCenter. Barry comments that many people don’t realize the challenges involved when you’re trying to do something different. Tanya says that she seeks out high-paced environments. She takes calculated risks that she believes will yield good results, like the MBA and working with technology. Both decisions gave her in-demand skills and an advantage in the market.Identifying Scalable Opportunities
Convincing stakeholders to grasp new opportunities is often a difficult task. However, being clear on your vision and giving them a taste of the expected results makes the task easier. A little survival anxiety can help as well!Tanya and her colleagues wanted to convince eBay to introduce fixed price selling—her data supported it. They were turned down initially but were later told that if other countries wanted it, they could give it a try. The international partners were all interested. At the time, Amazon was talking about launching its marketplace, which spurred the decision-makers to see fixed price selling as a defensive maneuver. The project was eventually rolled out, to phenomenal success. Within a few days of seeing the results around the world, …
-
Pioneering the Cloud and DevOps Paradigm with Stephen Orban
27 november 2019 · 39 min
Stephen Orban found an old TI-99 in his uncle’s attic when he was eight years old. The first thing he did, he says, was take it apart to learn how it worked. Soon he was writing programs to make things move around on the screen. He knew since then that he wanted to work with computers. Throughout his career he has brought exponential technology to many traditional organizations, such as Bloomberg and Dow Jones. He is now leading a new initiative in Data Analytics at AWS. Lees meer
Killed by Traditional Technology
It was during his tenure at Bloomberg that Stephen became infatuated with cloud computing. He relates to Barry O’Reilly that they were experimenting to create new businesses. However, the traditional method of trying to build best-in-class technology was making the process slow and expensive. We were building too much into disaster recovery and business continuity for things that might not even be there tomorrow, he says. He recognized that cloud computing would allow them to test and scale on demand, only using the resources they needed. When he moved to Dow Jones he pushed towards using cloud technology and dev-ops methodology, which allowed them to create a more agile organization.Unlearning Leadership
Massive technology changes come with people changes. Stephen soon realized that the way he led at Bloomberg would not work at Dow Jones. Barry comments that it’s almost a reflex to use the behaviors that brought us success in the past. However, those same behaviors may not yield success in a new context. Stephen says that he failed as a leader for the first six months. His advisor told him that there’s no glory in being the only one at the finish line. From that day, he says, he learned to be more empathetic and open instead of the top-down leader he previously was. He wanted his team to buy in to his vision.In order to share their wins, he increased communication with employees from quarterly to monthly town hall meetings. Team members were invited to share w…
-
How Alignment Scaled a Unicorn with Kim Atherton
13 november 2019 · 43 min
As a trained occupational psychologist, Kim Atherton has worked with leaders and organizations to understand how they create high-performance teams. She joined Ovo Energy - a green energy tech company in the UK - when it was just 50 people in a barn, and helped to scale the company to 2,500 employees. During her time at Ovo, she recognized that misalignment was a problem for companies, which inspired her to found Just3Things, a startup that helps organizations improve alignment at scale. Lees meer
Alignment With The Vision
In 2012 Kim was in the final interview stage at a large bank. It was a great career move on paper, but the thought of getting out of bed every day to do succession planning for a big bank just didn’t excite her. About that time she met the founder of Ovo Energy, who told her that he needed someone to help him build the world’s best company, someone who would be willing to unlearn traditional HR practices. Kim jumped at the opportunity to help scale Ovo as she believed in its vision. [Listen from 1:45]The mission and values of a company are more important than the compensation and prestige, Barry comments. A transformative purpose pulls people together: you’re willing to put up with more when you know it’s for the greater good. It keeps you going through the tough times. [Listen from 3:45]
Aligning Values With Behavior
Human beings pick up on behavioral cues almost unconsciously. Creating a company culture that aligns with your vision often means unlearning traditional practices, and being intentional about using processes that result in desired behaviors. Ovo knew their success depended on being nimble and agile, so they eschewed traditional competency-based interview practices in favor of interviewing based on learning agility. Kim says that you can always upskill an employee if they don’t have a certain programming ability, but you can’t train learning agility - you either have it or you don’t. [Listen from 6:50]In the fast-paced world of a startup…
-
If We’re Not Winning We’re Learning with Martin Eriksson
30 oktober 2019 · 32 min
Barry O’Reilly is pleased to welcome Martin Eriksson to the Unlearn Podcast. Martin is the co-founder of ProductTank and the Mind the Product conferences that have scaled and sustained themselves around the world. Lees meer
Learning From One Another
When he started ProductTank in the back of a London pub, Martin never imagined that his small meetup of 25 product managers would be the genesis of a community over 150,000 strong from 180 cities, or that they would be hosting 5 conferences around the world. Their goal was simply to learn from one another so they could be better at their jobs.That initial meetup took on a life of its own because many others had the same need. All of their growth has been inbound, Martin relates: people come to them for help in setting up local ProductTank chapters. Martin embraced those opportunities, seeing that the more the community expanded, the more people they could meet and learn from.
Recognizing Opportunities and Gaining Momentum
When you recognize that you’ve built something of value that your customers love and want more of, naturally, you want to grow. Martin’s approach was to think about the next step and move in that direction. ProductTank was continuing to expand to more cities and countries, so they decided to launch a conference to get big names from the US to share their expertise.Barry remarks that the power of momentum is often underrated. As you continue to do reps, you build momentum and eventually a movement. In the case of ProductTank, they were learning valuable lessons as they continued to meet and grow, such as how to work together and get the best out of one another. Soon Martin recognized the global potential of their fledgling company.
Making A Great Experience for Everyone
A successful conference prioritizes great experiences for everyone. The needs of attendees, speakers and vendors have to be catered for, and ample time must be given for people to learn and network. Barry asks how Martin ensures that these … -
Brave Narratives for Bold Change with Thaniya Keereepart
16 oktober 2019 · 40 min
This week’s guest is Thaniya Keereepart, Head of Product, International at Patreon. Thaniya joined Patreon after working with Major League Baseball (MLB) and TED, moving into the digital space.
Raising Your Hand
Some people gravitate towards structure, but people like Thaniya thrive on unstructured paths. She says, “The through-line of all of my turning points has been that I have a habit of raising my hand to volunteer to do things I don't really know how to do.” She credits her bravery to learning through doing: she understands how to iterate so she puts guardrails in place to learn what works and be flexible and adaptive when unintended consequences occur.
She relates how her Game Day program crashed in the opening MLB game, with four million users online. That scary moment taught her how to handle live events. Something admirable about that environment, however, is that when anything broke, everyone came together to fix it. Barry notes that high-performance cultures focus on solving the problem and improving the system, rather than blaming an individual. This allows everyone to feel comfortable and give their best.
Building an Inclusive Team
When you’re building products for the masses, you want your team to reflect the diversity of your consumers. The best performing teams are usually the most diverse. Both Barry and Thaniya had to unlearn a great deal when they started working in diverse environments. Thaniya was used to working largely with males in college and at MLB, so there was a culture shock when she started at TED, but it opened her eyes to what it’s like to work in an environment with people of various backgrounds, cultures and genders. Barry says that he never saw the problem of a lack of diversity and inclusion until he started to work in San Francisco. He was in a bubble of sorts at Thought Works, his previous workplace since it was the norm to have a diverse workforce. He felt a call to action to share the values he learned at Thought Works in hi… Lees meer -
The Lean Startup Pivot with Eric Ries
2 oktober 2019 · 43 min
Barry O’Reilly is excited to welcome Eric Ries to the Unlearn Podcast. Eric is an entrepreneur who currently heads the Long Term Stock Exchange. He is best known, however, as the author of the international bestseller: The Lean Startup.
The principles of Lean Startup were birthed from seeing many startups and Silicon Valley companies fail for lack of customer engagement, slow iteration, and long feedback cycles—experiences that inspired Eric to think about different ways to work. He shares how he discovered, and subsequently helped people unlearn many of the methods that were holding them back, and relearn counterintuitive methods to help them succeed in situations of high uncertainty.
Pioneering ChangeIn his early days at IMVU, Eric found himself constantly explaining why his new methods had merit. At one point he had to decide whether to continue to advocate for his ideas or agree to work the conventional way. He chose to advocate for what he believed in. He reflects that had he not had the courage of his convictions he would never have found out who his ideas resonated with.
Counterintuitive ideas cause frustration and difficulty for people. If counterintuitive thinking is key to the success of your business culture, then you need to help people rewire their brains. To have reform, and move people to the next steps, you must find the sweet spot between familiarity and novelty: you can't be too radical, or too conservative.
Principles and Long-Term VisionBusiness strategy must be guided by principles in the context of a long-term vision. Barry commends Eric for the iterations he made to his business over time, which were guided by a continuous loop of customer feedback and testing new features in small batches. Eric shares the many pivots he had to make noting that you can always change strategy, but keep the vision.
Opening Minds Through EmpathyEric says that he has spent years trying to understand what would it take to change public companies from being short-t… Lees meer -
Embracing Failure to Create the Future with Snehal Kundalkar
18 september 2019 · 50 min
Snehal Kundalkar, Senior Director of Engineering at Reddit, grew up in a world of dualities. On the one hand she was taught that her place as a woman was between the kitchen and the kids, but on the other hand she was encouraged to embrace uncertainty to solve complex problems. She was naturally attracted to engineering and she channeled her anger at the injustice of her situation into creativity. She didn’t see herself in the expected role of home provider, so after completing her Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, she left her home country to pursue her Masters in the US. She longed to find the adventure she needed in her adopted country.
Celebrating Failure After a little bit of success, failure feels unwelcome”. Don’t let that be you. Embrace it as a natural yin yang of the journey. It takes a lot of patience and grit, but you have to learn to expect and even embrace that some of your efforts will fail. Innovating, building things that have never been built before, is a highly unpredictable situation with loads of unknowns.
What Snehal learned from her time at Apple was to break down your big vision into smaller sets: make small things that are almost as good as the big thing, then combine them together to build momentum. Failure is good information: it tells you what didn’t work. It's regrettable that our culture stigmatizes failure as bad instead of focusing on what you learned and how that’s going to help you move forward. Barry points out that in reality, you’ll never be able to predict the future, so you need to test the future: you need to fail as much and as quickly as possible to learn what works and what doesn't.
Make Decisions Quickly. It’s natural to be scared when making decisions in a high-stakes, uncertain environment, but the trick is to make decisions fast and stick to them. If your strategy doesn't work, then make another decision fast. Soon enough you'll have a successful process. Encourage all members of the team to come up with their… Lees meer -
Design Sprint Your Defaults with Jake Knapp
4 september 2019 · 36 min
Creativity can come in a variety of forms, and for Jake Knapp, author of Sprint and Make Time, it was a mixture of painting, artistry and old school programming. Jake finds creative satisfaction in trying to figure out how to design, optimize and improve everything from the default settings in his own life, to how people run meetings and design products. Sometimes, having an outsider’s view can be quite useful. What’s holding us back? We’ve all had times when we feel like we haven’t gotten enough done, or we haven’t gotten done the one thing that would have helped us make real progress. Jake talks about how experiencing moments of intensity helped him understand and prioritize the outcomes from his life he really wanted. Looking at and thinking about the outcomes he wants, and then gathering data that allows him to review his behavior in light of these outcomes is one of the keys to Jake’s success – and perhaps one that can be replicated, even by people who don’t see the world as he does—as code. Listen from 6:15 Failure actually… sucks. You’d think that tech startup founders are handed a script before being interviewed, outlining how they should mention that they absolutely love failure. It doesn’t bother them in the slightest. Most of us don’t feel quite that way about it. Unlike the popular ideology would have you believe – screwing something up sucks. It hurts, it’s embarrassing, it impacts other people and it can feel terrible. The thing to do with failure isn't to pretend you like it, but to actively and intentionally learn from it as part of the coping process. Listen from 12:00 Principles have to be learned to be unlearned. There are certain assumptions we make when we start to gain experience and expertise in our fields, especially when we’re leaders. One of the most critical things Jake had to learn was that other people’s ideas and contributions were as likely to be the best ones as his own. The idea of not selling or pitching your idea to your team goes… Lees meer
-
Outcomes For Human Systems No Matter The Business with Mark Graban
31 juli 2019 · 41 min
You always want to look back on your life and say that your path from point A to point B was linear. It almost never really is. Today’s guest on the Unlearn Podcast is Mark Graban, author of Lean Hospitals and Measures of Success, who started out as an engineer for General Motors. It’s been quite a journey. Today, he and Barry O’Reilly will be talking about how that kind of a shift can happen, and what he learned and unlearned along the way.
Clashes of Culture You might not think that the worlds of manufacturing and healthcare have much in common, but having worked in both, Mark thinks they have plenty in common - especially when it comes to culture. People aren’t machines, but the culture of many hospitals and clinics echoes what you’ll find on the factory floor - especially in institutions that haven’t done much to modernize the way they manage and lead people. Barry points out that there are similarities in tech as well: every industry thinks it’s unique, but it’s all human systems and people working together to drive outcomes.
Unlearning Your Whole Career When you’ve invested years or decades into a career, you often feel like you need to stay in it. Having made a major career transition, Mark knows that doing so allows you to bring fresh insight into an organization that may not be expecting it, and when you’re in a wholly new environment, you’re in a better position to avoid the curse of expertise. Looking back, Mark wishes he’d unlearned top-down style management earlier - the benefits of engaging people in change are so many and so valuable.
Seeking and Finding Clarity Before you start optimizing for, or worse, applying a solution, you have to be exceptionally clear on what the problem really is, and what outcome you want to achieve. Mark and Barry discuss the ways this can manifest in different kinds of organizations, and the framework for problem-solving that Mark uses to help healthcare providers make changes to their operations with input from people wo… Lees meer -
The True Story of Struggles and Success Of A Startup CEO with Teresa Torres
17 juli 2019 · 38 min
Entrepreneurs tend to talk about the success, the fun and excitement of running a company. Fewer talk about struggles. Today, on the Unlearn Podcast, Barry O’Reilly talks to Teresa Torres, Product Discovery Coach at Product Talk. They get into what’s hard about the path to success, and at the end of the day, what really matters.
No One Has All The Answers Like many young CEOs and founders, Teresa found herself working with people who were older, more experienced, and with access to more resources than she did as a leader. She shares a key unlearn moment about discovering that no one really has all the answers - and how that gave her the confidence to start trying things to see what worked. Barry points out that trying is a learned behavior, and Teresa discusses how education and experience in design-thinking instilled in her the idea that your first attempt won’t always work: iteration is the key to achieving your goals.
A Process for Decision-Making Very little about being a CEO is black and white - and coming from an environment where situations were more granular was a challenge for Teresa. She says sales is a lot like product development and gives us some insight on the similarities, and how she brought an outcome-based focus into her work as a product leader and later as a CEO. Every process has parts, and those parts can be modeled, measured and optimized.
Our Defaults Can Be Unhelpful When people are working under stress, they tend to revert to the skills, strategies, and habits that they are the best at - it feels good, and more importantly, it feels productive. Barry and Teresa talk about how this tendency can actually work against people whose roles are less about producing, and more about helping other people produce, or taking a bigger picture view of the growth and direction of a company. This is especially challenging when every situation feels extremely high stakes.
Letting Other People Help You Teresa recalls the scenario her company was navigating … Lees meer -
CEO School and the Future of Work with Stephane Kasriel
3 juli 2019 · 36 min
CEO School and The Future of Work with Stephane Kasriel
In this episode of the Unlearn Podcast, Barry O'Reilly speaks with Stephane Kasriel, the CEO of Upwork—the world’s largest freelancing platform where businesses and independent professionals connect and collaborate remotely. Upwork is driving the future of work conversation, and discovering what it really means along the way.
Creating Capability To Continuously Change Stephane feels one of the most exciting aspects of the tech industry is how quickly it changes— a key competency he believes people must develop is adapting to that change, learning continuously, and unlearning what is no longer useful.
He talks through two specific changes Upwork has experienced: the switch from traditional waterfall development to remote agile teams, and sourcing and clarifying Upwork’s values from within.
Secrets To Distributed Agility Several years ago, no one believed that agile could work in teams that weren’t co-located, but Upwork—along with other companies like GitHub and Automatic—has demonstrated it can. It takes an open mind, strong culture of feedback and honest personal evaluation to understand if working remotely is a fit for you.
Making this clear during hiring is crucial. Not everyone will be passionate about or motivated to work in a distributed manner—and that’s okay. It’s better to discover it as quickly as possible because it means the people who join your organization are aligned with the opportunities and affordances of distributed work. They’re happier, more productive and stay longer.
Challenges Transiting To The Top Transitioning from one role to another can be challenging, but the transition to CEO is unique. There’s no CEO school. Stephane shares how he found his way by applying many of the strategies that made him successful as a product and engineering leader. Actively learning from the people around him—wherever they are in the hierarchy—helped guide this approach to lead the company forward.
In the… Lees meer -
Solving Problems Safely with Mary and Tom Poppendieck
19 juni 2019 · 47 min
Barry O’Reilly has had many mentors over the years, and among them, Mary and Tom Poppendieck have been some of the most inspirational. In today’s conversation, they talk about challenges the Agile community faces, debunk the myths of scaling agility, and finally, Mary and Tom reveal how they have stayed relevant for decades as they continue to coach, mentor, and help others.
About Mary and Tom
Neither Mary nor Tom started with software. Mary was an engineer who worked with problems that had life and death ramifications, and Tom was a physics teacher whose students contact him decades later to say ‘thank you - you made a big difference.’ They’ve written many of the seminal books and contributed much to the Lean and Agile movement and have seen fads and trends come and go. Barry asks them what has been their key insights over the years.
When did you discover agile?
Agile developed as a reaction to what was happening in the software industry in the late 1990s. Agile has to grow up, to no longer be reactionary when bad things happen, but to determine how to create GOOD software engineering from the start. She draws on her experience as a traditional engineer and shares a lesson about how proxies between engineers and people with problems are a bad idea. It’s a matter of trusting professional judgment.
Tom observes that, too often, Agile tries to solve problems with processes. But the problem isn’t usually the process; it’s architectural. He talks about the different structures, from software to the leadership teams, that can lead to dysfunctional situations. If you want to solve a problem, you need to fix the structure.
How Agile Can Grow
There’s no simple answer to this, Mary points out because it depends on where you’re at. You can understand all the fundamental steps needed but if your team isn’t well-integrated, it will get you nowhere. She shares an experience with a company who had accepted a big contract they weren’t ready for. Mary recommended the ‘sync and sta… Lees meer -
Living Your Leadership Principles To Learn and Unlearn with Joe Norena
5 juni 2019 · 36 min
Joe Norena is the Managing Director at HSBC and the Global Markets Americas COO. From corporations to startups to corporate digital, his experience has run the gamut of organization. Joe has led a life of unlearning, and every new thing he learned he has applied to the next situation. In this episode, Joe and Barry talk about the pivotal moments in his career that brought him where he is today.
Unlearning Starts Early...
From the beginning of his life, Joe has been surrounded by people who modeled the type of behavior that would shape his success. His father, an immigrant who didn’t speak the language, began work in the mailroom of Citibank and retired as the Vice President. His mother always encouraged him to ‘just go and try it.’ Joe shares a funny story about nearly drowning when he tried out for the swim team in grade school.
...And Continues Through Life
During his time at Citibank, Joe continued to have powerful role models. First among them was Michael, a senior trade manager. Michael was willing to sit down with the most junior of employees - even graduates - and open his mind to new ways of thinking, doing things, and techniques. He was a true ‘unlearner’ who modeled that behavior for everyone around him.
Joe’s time at Bridgewater taught him another very important lesson: having a voice based on principles rather than the desire to be right. Understanding that success might be revealed through another lens, or way of thinking, helps a company grow and remain sustainable. The debate then becomes about what the real issue or problem is, and what is the right thing to do. Unlearning Moments
You need to be comfortable with being uncomfortable; it’s the hallmark of a life-long unlearner. Joe experienced this several times during his career. First among those was the huge mind-shift he had to make when moving from being a trader to a COO. A trader knows whether he was an asset to the company at the end of the day; he only needed to look at profit/loss. But when … Lees meer -
Keeping Skills, Strategy and Structure Unstuck with Katri Harra-Salonen
22 mei 2019 · 28 min
Have you ever felt boxed in based on your job description?
Join us today as Katri Harra-Salonen, the Chief Digital Officer of Finnair Oyj, shares what she’s learned and unlearned throughout her career of mixing industries, mixing roles, and being comfortable with being uncomfortable.
The Un-comfort Zone: By design, Katri actively puts herself in situations where she has to grow, and calls this being in the Un-comfort Zone. When you put yourself in a place that challenges you, you become energized, you’re able to be curious and explore, and you learn new things, not just about the situation, but about yourself as well. Katri has gone from the consultancy world into the airline world, which has meant a lot of discomfort, learning, and unlearning. But there is so much that the two worlds - consultancy and airline - can learn from the other, so she believes in building bridges between different kinds of companies and different kinds of thinking. That’s where creativity stems from.
Inspiration: Working with other countries is strategic. But for Katri, there are intangible benefits as well. For example, they work with a lot of exciting Asian companies, which gives them insight into how mobile services are developing, what’s happening in the digital world, and how they can possibly incorporate this into a European country. For example, many cities in Asia are cashless societies, whereas Europe has been slow to adapt to digital money. But studying Asia, you can see how people behave and what it means, and insights like these can help embrace development.
Best of both worlds: Katri is a third-generation engineer, and at one point in her career, she worked for a design company. How did she bring those two worlds together? Don’t put people in boxes. “Boxes are for dead people.” You need to be able to change perspectives in order to be creative, so don’t limit yourself to the box that’s been given to you. Just because you’re an engineer by profession, that’s not all you are an… Lees meer -
Delighting Customers, in Hard-to-copy, Margin-enhancing Ways With Gibson Biddle
8 mei 2019 · 48 min
How do you figure out what works?
On this episode, we have Gibson Biddle, a speaker, advisor, and teacher who is the former Vice President of Product Management at Netflix. He’s been involved with many startup companies to help them develop products, and today we’re talking about consumer science, metrics, and experimenting our way through work and life.
Data and consumer science: “I don’t care what they said, I don’t care what it looks like, I just want to see the data.” These were a former boss’s words to Gibson and a moment of great insight for him. Consumer science is about forming hypotheses quickly, putting them into A/B tests to see which ones move the metrics, and then create a system where you can test and discover what consumers love. And though he worked for people who said they didn’t care what a focus group said (“launch it, get it out there, and see if it moves the metrics or not”), speaking to people was still important for Gibson because it gave him great ideas. It kept the voice of the customer top of mind when he generated new hypotheses.
Top line metrics and proxy metrics: Being able to measure whether you’re successful are critical. At Netflix, Gibson’s top line metric was to improve retention. But the key thing is to also develop proxy metrics to help you achieve your top line metric. One of their proxy metrics was the percentage of members who watched at least 15 minutes in a month. These proxy metrics work on a local level to impact your top line metric and define success. They also help build in a system of accountability — that ties in with freedom and responsibility — for people on the front lines. Context not control: Inventing the future is really hard, and to build and teams that can figure things out for themselves, the idea is context, not control. Success relies on testing and the willingness to experiment with ideas to discover what works. Strategy meetings would discuss hypotheses to hit proxy metrics, and while there is a certain … Lees meer -
Product Thinking for Product Management with Melissa Perri
24 april 2019 · 41 min
Melissa Perri is a champion for product management who’s built her business around helping others understand it. She now teaches product thinking for product management to all types of companies and excels at experimenting small and fast for big results. Unlearning Business Analysis and relearning Product Management.
Starting out, Melissa had no idea what she wanted to do but she knew she wanted to work with people, code and design together. After passing on Wall Street and developer jobs, Melissa found her first gig as a business analyst at Capital IQ. After numerous roles trailing developing and business analyst, Melissa landed at Open Sky, which served as a pivotal moment in her professional life. She discovered the term that truly represented what she was doing—product management. Melissa’s manager at Open Sky pushed her into teaching her personal type of product management thinking. This led to successful talks and workshops, and eventually, consulting. However, the employees she worked with weren’t allowed to execute what she was teaching, so she taught her way up to the C Suite, innovating product management into product transformation.
Recognizing and solving problems. One skill that sets Melissa apart is her natural ability to recognize, address, and fix problems within organizations. Her mantra is ‘what’s the bigger problem?’ and she follows it to the source. Melissa shares a story about working at a startup and how she had to unlearn everything that had made her successful before. It started with karaoke in Nashville and ended up with Scrum. Melissa’s next unlearning moment came after she and her product team found major success working together to figure out how to ship products sooner. They were more productive than ever before, but that came to a screeching halt when no one used a product she and her team developed. After a weekend conference for startups, Melissa was inspired and began to experiment more freely. She shares the story of how she overca… Lees meer -
Exploring Uncertainty with Kent Beck
24 april 2019 · 53 min
Kent Beck is a third-generation geek. His grandfather was a radio geek, his father, an electrical engineer, moved to Silicon Valley in the 60s, and Kent and his father built their first personal computer together. He’s the creator of Extreme Programming, alphabetically the first signer of the Agile Manifesto and most recently helped Facebook scale their engineering organization from 700 to 5,000 people. Helping geeks feel safe in the world. This is one of Kent’s creeds, and as a third-generation geek, he’s looking to help the fourth generation.
As a mentor, he encourages younger programmers not to worry so much about finding their purpose from the beginning; instead, they need to get out there and try things, investing in new experiences, then connect the dots later. And feeling scared has two sides: some situations feel scarier than they need to feel, and others should feel scary. Knowing the difference – and how to handle each – is key. Kent shares the story of how, on a consulting gig, he realized that one small tweak—rearranging furniture—was more important than sharing his virtuoso programming skills. The corner office executives were literally sitting in the wrong place. This lesson, Kent recalls, was the beginning of the course change that led to Extreme Programming.
Extreme Programming. Kent started by considering a conventional belief: programmers couldn’t be trusted to test their own code. So he began experimenting with ways to challenge that belief with automated testing. But there was a deeper disruption Kent had in mind: programmers being responsible for their own mistakes and for fixing them in real time. He and Barry dive deeper into what that really means, and how it resulted in the Extreme Programming framework and more. The truth about courage and innovation Despite what people say to and about him, Kent doesn’t believe he’s courageous or innovative. Instead, he feels that he’s just doing what he senses needs to be done. Instead of over-analyzing … Lees meer -
Welcome to the Unlearn Podcast
18 april 2019 · 7 min
Over 2,000 years ago, the Roman Empire rose to heights previously unseen, occupying more than 2 million square miles and ruling 20 percent of the world's population. Was that success due to visionary leaders? The prime location of the Tiber River? Engineering feats of roads and aqueducts? Maybe the laws of governance? The truth is, it was none of those. The Roman Empire's tactic of abandoning old practices in favor of new ones that worked better, often taken from those they conquered, is what gave them the flexibility to scale to such a massive level. My inspiration to create the Unlearn podcast came from what I frequently find to be a significant inhibitor when helping high-performance individuals get better—not the ability to learn new things but the inability to unlearn mindsets, behaviors, and methods that were once effective but now limit their success. In this podcast, we’ll dig deep into the practice of unlearning—what it is, why you should adopt it, and how you can leverage its tremendous power for yourself, your teams, and your organization. If you already feel you’ve unlearned before, great—I’ll teach you how to do it intentionally. If not, I’ll teach you to practice it deliberately. I’ll show you how to think big but start small, and why choosing courage over comfort can take you to places you never imagined possible. Lees meer