Boss Level Podcast

For this episode, my guest is Henrik Kniberg. Henrik is a prominent figure in the agile community. If you’ve seen the video on Spotify engineering culture, that video is created by him. He has also authored several books on agile.

Henrik is also one of the early guests of the the podcast and the previous episode we did was about two years ago. Back then we discussed Henrik’s agile coaching work at Lego and Spotify and how he helped his kids win a robot battle against experienced programmers.

But now, recently, he has shifted his professional focus towards something more important. He’s focusing on reducing the impact of climate change.

We talk about how to be climate neutral, how to invest in climate projects, the community Henrik is running called Climate Crisplet, and how companies should deal with climate change.

Today Boss Level Podcast is covering one of the biggest problems in the world, poverty. My guest is Leila Janah who runs two companies aimed at helping the extremely poor by giving them work.

One of her companies, Samasource, provides digital work in developing countries, and the other, LXMI, is an organic and fair trade skin care brand employing women.

In addition to talking about businesses, we discuss how companies can measure impact.

I’m interviewing Bjarte Bogsnes. Bjarte is one of the key people behind the adaptive management model called Beyond Budgeting. If there’s one person you want to learn about Beyond Budgeting from, it’s Bjarte.

Bjarte is one of the key people who have been leading Statoil’s journey from traditional corporate budgeting to a completely new management style. Along the way, he’s authored books on the things he has learned.

What’s good to know before we get started is that despite the name, Beyond Budgeting is not only about getting rid of budgeting. It is a new approach to management that emphasizes empowerment and adaptivity.

Beyond Budgeting’s 12 principles cover topics such as purpose, values, transparency, autonomy, targets and resource allocation. It is much larger than just budgets.

This is my interview with Harri Valpola. Harri is the CEO of Curious AI, a Helsinki-based 20 person startup that’s aiming to build a general artificial intelligence. Now that’s a pretty bold goal when Facebook’s head of AI research just recently said that in terms of general intelligence, we’re not even close to a rat.

Harri is a respected researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. He knows his stuff. The previous company he founded, ZenRobotics, builds robots so that’s pretty cool too.

We talk about what general artificial intelligence would be like, whether we should try to simulate the human brain or not and how curiosity is a great guide in life.

Today’s guest is Bengt Holmström. Bengt is Finnish, but he’s spent the last 40 years living in the US. Currently he’s a professor of economics at MIT.

Bengt was recently awarded the Nobel prize in economic sciences together with his Harvard colleague Oliver Hart for their contribution to contract theory.

Essentially, Bengt has spent decades studying incentives and trying to figure out how to design better incentive structures. This has been a recurring theme on the podcast so I’m sure you can appreciate how excited I am to have Bengt on as a guest.

We talk about what it feels like to win the Nobel prize, incentives (obviously), and how transparency isn’t necessarily always a good thing.

Today’s topic is machine learning and I’m talking to one of the brightest minds in the field, Hilary Mason. She’s the founder of Fast Forward Labs, a machine intelligence research company. She also advises startups through Accel, a prominent venture capital firm.

If you’re interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning, I’m pretty sure you’ll love this episode.

While I was in Australia in June to keynote the Agile Australia conference I had the privilege to interview Troy Magennis. When I first heard Troy speak at a conference years ago I remember how impressed I was with his deep understanding of the mathematics involved in forecasting. After listening to this episode I think you’ll be equally impressed.

Troy is the founder of Focused Objective, a consultancy that helps companies with forecasting, portfolio planning, risk management and metric selection.

We talk about why 3 to 7 recent samples is often better than thousands of samples from last year, how we need several opposing metrics to prevent local optimization and how we’ve lost the art of post mortems.

Troy has a ton of resources that are freely available for you to download and try out. For example, you might like the team dashboard Troy has built. After listening to the episode you can use his tools to take your forecasting to the boss level.

My guest today is Katri Saarikivi. Katri is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Helsinki. She studies empathy in digital environments. Essentially she’s trying to figure out how we could better express ourselves in digital conversations.

Today, I’m chatting with Sara Öhrvall. Sara is the Co-founder and Senior Advisor at Mindmill Network. Mindmill helps companies understand how digital technologies impact their business. Before Mindmill Sara was the Senior Vice President of R&D at the Bonnier Group.

Sara sits on several boards. For example, she’s on the board of SEB, a Nordic corporate bank and Investor, the leading owner of Nordic-based international companies.

She also writes a column for Dagens Industri, which is the financial daily of Sweden.

In 2017 Sara was selected for Wired’s list of 50 most inspiring female influencers from across Europe. She’s one of the best and brightest women in technology.

We talk about the impact technology will have on people and businesses and how our companies should adapt to that change.

John Seddon is the inventor of The Vanguard Method. The Vanguard Method is a way of helping organizations move from command and control towards systems design. Seddon is the author of books such as Freedom from Command and Control and The Whitehall Effect. He’s currently working on a book titled Beyond Command and Control. Seddon’s work has provoked a lot of thought and has significantly deepened my understanding of how organizations function.

We talk about organizations as systems, value and failure demand, incentives, system conditions, budgeting and how the system drives behavior.