Disengaged

“I am yet to meet someone who wakes up in the morning and says, the main thing I am absolutely pumped to do today is to engage with HR products and services.”

Chris Metcalfe is the founder of Red Oak and cofounder of PX as a Product, where he helps people teams think and work like product teams. Born in New Zealand and based in Dublin, he spent nine years building Workday’s core HCM product, led product and design at Docebo, and headed product for people and culture at Primark.
We cover work as a literal product, the multi-sided business, engagement surveys, the four risks every product team manages, and where a people team can start.

What we covered:

• Sourcing bathroom products in China at 23 for the family business
• Joining Workday in Dublin among its first 100 people
• Why Chris treats work as a product in the literal sense
• Labor as a negative good, and why machinery sits on the asset side of the ledger while people sit on the cost side
• Uber Eats and DoorDash as three-sided marketplaces
• The company as a platform, with employees outside it in the same way as customers
• James’s time as an Uber driver, from tier perks to drip-fed onboarding videos
• Happy deliveries as a leading indicator of customer and employee value
• Nike and durable problem spaces
• The center of expertise as the least important thing
• The four product risks: value, usability, feasibility, and viability
• Engagement surveys as “a total waste of time,” and the NPS score nobody can act on
• A Workday deployment for 40,000 people in nine months, and the job rec to paycheck journey
• Workforce planning hidden inside the job requisition process
• Starting with why the company exists
• The manager who asked James six or seven questions about what he wanted from his work
• The ski resort as a participatory product

People:

• Dart Lindsley, previous guest on this show
• Luke O’Mahoney, of SapienX, previous guest on this show
• Megan Bernard-May, previous guest on this show
• Jessica Zwaan, author and previous guest on this show
• Gerry Murphy, previous guest on this show
• Dave Ulrich, HR scholar
• Niccolò Machiavelli

Books:

• Built for People, Jessica Zwaan
• Purpose and Work, Jessica Zwaan
• The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli

Articles:

• Reimagining Work as a Product, Eric Anicich and Dart Lindsley, Harvard Business Review, 2024
  https://hbr.org/2024/11/reimagining-work-as-a-product

Organizations:

• Red Oak, PX as a Product, SapienX, Workday, Docebo, Primark, SAP, Uber, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Nike, Apple

Find Chris:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-metcalfe-red-oak/
Website: https://red-oak.agency
Coaching program: https://pxasaproduct.com
Newsletter: https://metcalfec.substack.com

Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

“When they say let’s take the emotion out of the decision, that’s even an emotional decision.”

Louis Roden is the founder of Inspire Consulting Group, an international leadership development consultancy, and has spent more than two decades in organizational development and service culture across hospitality, logistics, and finance. His book Everything Is Personal: Embracing Stewardship in the Workplace and Everyplace argues that leaders who hide behind “it’s just business” erode the trust their people need.
We cover the phrase “it’s business, not personal,” stewardship, why work feels neutral for so many people, how leaders build trust day to day, and why the golden rule gets it wrong.

What we covered:

• The COVID lockdown and the nudge from his wife that got the book finished
• Mark Twain’s “Be good and you will be lonesome” and Following the Equator as the first travel blog
• Why nobody says they loved a job because they were well managed
• Work as a gray, neutral 80 percent of waking life
• Why Louis can’t stand the phrase work-life balance
• Stewardship of the people who hand a leader a big piece of their lives
• Layoffs, hard feedback, and the trite cover of “it’s not personal”
• Why no one can take the emotion out of a decision
• Frederick Taylor, scientific management, and work as a negative good
• Rational and irrational anger, and empathy for joy as well as sadness
• Trust built in small moments and eroded by paper cuts
• The bartender whose smile disappears when the bar gets busy
• Thirty authentic seconds over a scheduled one-hour one-on-one
• The weekly check-in as a box to tick
• Flipping the golden rule: treat people the way they want to be treated
• The Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya’s sword, and anyone selling a magic bullet

People:

• Mark Twain, author
• Daniel Goleman, psychologist and author
• Simon Sinek, author
• Frederick Taylor, father of scientific management
• Dart Lindsley, previous guest on this show
• René Descartes, philosopher
• Antonio Damasio, neuroscientist
• Ernest Hemingway, author
• John Steinbeck, author

Books:

• Everything Is Personal, Louis Roden
• Following the Equator, Mark Twain
• Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman
• Descartes’ Error, Antonio Damasio
• Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
• The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

Organizations:

• Inspire Consulting Group, Gallup, Starbucks

Find Louis:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louisroden/
Website: https://inspirelsc.com
Book: https://everythingispersonal.org

Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

“In a novel context, a context like science or R&D or innovation or entrepreneurship, mediocrity would be no failures.”

Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. Her research made psychological safety a core idea in modern management, and she is the author of Teaming, The Fearless Organization and Right Kind of Wrong, which won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year in 2023.
We cover the failed hypothesis that launched her career, why bad is stronger than good, the three types of failure, Toyota’s Andon cord, near misses, whether failure is a privilege, and what leaders can do to build psychological safety.

What we covered:

• The 1990s hospital study where the better teams seemed to make more medication errors
• The realization that those teams were reporting more of their errors
• Awfulizing, then a looking-out-the-window moment in a 15th-floor PhD office
• Interpersonal risk and why psychological safety matters most in knowledge work
• Why we notice negatives faster than positives
• Going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm
• Basic, complex and intelligent failures, and the five criteria for an intelligent one
• Astro Teller at X: if you’re not failing, you’re not taking the right risks
• Rewarding teams for shutting down failing projects
• The fundamental attribution error, at work and at home
• James Reason’s Swiss cheese model in aviation and healthcare
• Toyota’s Andon cord, from loom machines to a San Francisco trolley car, and why most pulls never stop the line
• Near misses as good catches, and the case for a near miss day
• Why failure is a privilege, and how leaders can level the failure playing field
• Whether encouraging failure means celebrating mediocrity
• Three moves to build psychological safety: frame the work, ask questions, respond productively

People:

• Arie Kruglanski, psychologist and previous guest on this show
• Roy Baumeister, social psychologist
• Teresa Amabile, Harvard Business School professor
• Astro Teller, head of X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory
• James Reason, British error psychologist

Books:

• Right Kind of Wrong, Amy Edmondson
• The Fearless Organization, Amy Edmondson
• Teaming, Amy Edmondson
• The Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer
• The Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam

Articles:

• Bad Is Stronger Than Good, Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Catrin Finkenauer and Kathleen Vohs, Review of General Psychology, 2001
  https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323
• Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Econometrica, 1979
  https://www.jstor.org/stable/1914185

Organizations:

• Harvard Business School, X, Google, Toyota, Microsoft

Find Amy:
Harvard Business School: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6451
Website: https://amycedmondson.com

Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

"You kind of sell your soul, it's like blood money a little bit."

Jessie Schofer is the founder of Stakkd, a database that helps HR teams find their way through a crowded technology market. She came to HR from projects and transformation work, led people strategy and change inside hyperscaling unicorns, and this year moderated two debates I took part in, and lost.
We cover what she saw from the moderator's chair, why people arrive at a new job engaged and lose it within months, why HR keeps falling short, and why she has been saying HR is dead for years.

What we covered:

• Why we still need managers in a world of AI, from the debate moderator
• The scale-ups where every team wrote its own operating manual
• Poor relationships at work as the root of Jessie's most disengaged years
• Beautiful mission statements at companies that are still hard to work for
• Ricardo Semler's diseconomies of human scale, and Dunbar's number
• Zapier welcoming candidates who pull out of its hiring process
• New hires who were sold a story and ask, "What did I sign up to?"
• Calibration meetings and the five-out-of-five rating
• AI performance ratings as scientific management 2.0
• Tiny teams, the pizza rule, and splitting teams before they grow too big
• Why individual pay for performance discourages admitting mistakes
• The director of comp Jessie told not to join
• Why HR is burnt out, and the growth playbooks she wants to throw out
• Renaming HR as organizational success
• Maslow, duty of care, and whether we will look back on disengagement as unfair
• Stakkd, its HR tech database, and Stakkd 2.0

People:

• Matt McFarlane, founder of FNDN and previous guest on this show
• Ricardo Semler, former CEO of Semco
• Robin Dunbar, evolutionary psychologist
• W. Edwards Deming, management scholar
• Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric
• Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School professor
• Abraham Maslow, psychologist

Books:

• Close the Gap, James Alexander Seechurn

Articles:

• The HR Infrastructure Gap No One Is Talking About, FNDN Series with Matt McFarlane, 2026
  https://fndnseries.fndn.com.au/podcast/s/fndn_series/the_hr_infrastructure_gap_no_one_is_talking_about_with_jessie_schofer_founder_at_stakkd

Organizations:

• Stakkd, Semco, Zapier, General Electric, Haier, Mondragon, Handelsbanken, FNDN

Find Jessie:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessieschofer/
Stakkd: https://stakkd.tech

Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

Is it possible to run a professional services company without individual goals, without billable hours, without performance ratings? Gerry Murphy and Nua Group certainly think so...

Gerry Murphy is a co-founder and partner at Nua Group, the San Francisco firm that describes itself as the anti-consulting firm. He qualified as an actuary in Dublin, spent eight years in Europe, and was a senior partner at Mercer with earlier leadership roles at Watson Wyatt before he, Joe and Chris set Nua up ten years ago.
We cover the anti-consulting model, what happens to accountability when you delete the machinery, managers who never wanted the job, job architecture as a system of control, and whether any of it survives at ten thousand people.

What we covered:

• Anti-consulting as a playful poke at billable hours, sales goals and internal meetings
• Clients love their consultants, not the firms those consultants work for
• Two internal meetings every two weeks, and what the rest of the week is for
• Nua consultants asking the partners whether they could please track their hours
• The nickel and diming that comes with the hourly model
• Everyone at Nua gets the same bonus, whatever their individual performance
• The bonus that moves from 20 percent to 21 and pleases nobody
• Four job levels on paper, two in practice: partner and consultant
• Majors and minors in place of practice areas
• Gerry's rules of management, starting with do nothing, ending with two blank rules
• Managers who never wanted the job and took it for the pay
• Mercer's manager charter, and Jensen Huang's thirty direct reports
• Electing your own manager, and where Gerry pushes back on the idea
• The client whose job architecture, bonuses and equity created an incredible amount of work
• Whether AI makes experience and education requirements irrelevant
• Stock options, RSUs, dilution and growth
• The Ryland Report, and why the team asked for more financial detail, not less
• Scaling to ten thousand people, and the naming of Uber Nua

People:

• Joe Farris, co-founder of Nua Group
• Paul Reiman, compensation consultant and previous guest on this show
• Dan Walter, equity compensation specialist and the first guest on this show
• Jack Stack, who led one of the most leveraged employee buyouts in US history
• Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia

Books:

• Close the Gap, James Alexander Seechurn

Articles:

• Are CEOs Paid for Performance? Evaluating the Effectiveness of Equity Incentives, Ric Marshall and Linda-Eling Lee, MSCI ESG Research, 2016
  https://www.msci.com/research-and-insights/blog-post/are-ceos-paid-for-performance

Organizations:

• Nua Group, Mercer, Watson Wyatt, Radford, Irish Pensions Trust, Morning Star, Nucor, Handelsbanken, Buurtzorg, Nvidia, Gallup, MSCI, Stripe

Find Gerry:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerrymurphynuagroup/
Website: https://www.nuahr.com
Email: [email protected]

Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

"Best practice is either a product that somebody wants to sell and as a result it's common, but not necessarily proven as best."

Paul Reiman is the founder and managing partner of Novo Insights, a Chicago-based compensation consulting firm, with nearly 30 years in compensation as a consultant and in-house leader. His book Pay Differently, out October 5, argues that pay transparency exposes the shortcuts compensation teams have relied on for decades.
We cover the myth of best practice, the loyalty tax, job architecture as the office refrigerator, why the offer letter draws less scrutiny than the merit cycle, and whether sales commissions survive consumption-based selling.

What we covered:

• Best practice as common practice with a better publicist
• The telecom sales leader who asked a 22-year-old Paul, "Best practice according to whom?"
• The unproven rule of three measures in a sales plan, none under 20 percent
• Why candidates who refuse to apply without a range move employers faster than legislation
• The $100 toaster on sale for $50 the next day
• The fintech firm that turned down a star analyst asking for a $1 million salary
• The 75th percentile, and why a percentile is not a philosophy
• Job architecture as the office refrigerator and its 180 ketchup packets
• The manager who automates three roles and loses every direct report
• The loyalty tax, and why stayers earn less than leavers
• Merit budget benchmarking, and why to budget 9 percent next year
• Same-store pay growth, borrowed from Starbucks
• Lori the recruiter, her Coffee is for Closers mug, and fixing the front door
• Self-set pay at Semco and Smarkets, and crunchy or creamy peanut butter
• The printing company that replaced commissions with salary and profit share
• The hand-drawn overhead transparency behind the 50/50 pay mix slide

People:

• Alfie Kohn, author and previous guest on this show
• Dan Ariely, behavioral economist and previous guest on this show
• Andrea LaRowe, 37signals, previous guest on this show
• Stefan Gaertner, Syndio, previous guest on this show
• Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, psychologists
• Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, researchers
• Boris Groysberg, Harvard Business School professor
• Louis Kelso, economist
• Philip Slater, sociologist
• Jerry Colletti, sales compensation consultant
• Bryan Briscoe, Paul's longtime co-presenter

Books:

• Pay Differently, Paul Reiman
• Chasing Stars, Boris Groysberg
• The Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer

Articles:

• Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Econometrica, 1979
  https://www.jstor.org/stable/1914185

Organizations:

• Novo Insights, 37signals, Semco, Smarkets, Haier, Morning Star, Nucor, Handelsbanken, Spotify, Salesforce, Starbucks

Find Paul:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulreiman/
Website: https://www.novoinsights.com
Book: https://paydifferently.com

Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. He co-founded Irrational Capital and has written eight books, including Predictably Irrational and Misbelief, which he wrote after a COVID conspiracy theory cast him as one of its villains.

We cover the vintage Swiss Army knife model of decision-making, the India experiments behind Large Stakes and Big Mistakes, what Fortune 500 satisfaction surveys predict about stock returns, fairness as a judgment no regression will settle, and the writing Dan is doing now about the end of life.

What we covered:

• States that introduced fines for texting and driving and watched accidents rise
• The brain as a vintage Swiss army knife, adequate at many tasks, built for a world we have left
• Car engineers who design against human error, social media engineers who design for it
• Prepaid debit against credit, weekly loads against monthly, Monday against Friday
• The India experiments, where a month of pay riding on a puzzle made people worse at solving it
• The brain surgeon offered $100,000 and threatened with a hitman in parking spot 33
• Which survey questions predict alpha, and which predict nothing
• Perceived fairness outranking salary level, and the argument Dan could not win on Wall Street
• The company that spent a day celebrating failed projects and paid half a million dollars to the winner
• Bureaucracy as an engine whose definition of success is nothing happening
• The hospital janitor we want to stop doing their job, and what job descriptions cost us
• Theory X, Theory Y, and the ancient craftsmen who spent half their time on beauty
• Two years spent interviewing the people who wanted him tried, imprisoned, or hanged
• Writing as a way to make sense of his mother's death, and the three books he has in progress

People:

• Alfie Kohn, author and previous guest on this show
• Simon Jones, narrator of Dan's audiobooks
• Ed Lazear, economist behind the Safelite windshield study
• Sam Glucksberg, psychologist of the candle problem experiments
• Douglas McGregor, originator of Theory X and Theory Y

Books:

• Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
• Misbelief, Dan Ariely
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

Articles:

• Large Stakes and Big Mistakes, Dan Ariely, Uri Gneezy, George Loewenstein and Nina Mazar, The Review of Economic Studies, 2009
  https://academic.oup.com/restud/article/76/2/451/1594205

Organizations:

• Duke University, Center for Advanced Hindsight, Center for Advanced Bureaucracy, Irrational Capital, Harbor Capital, Alphabet's X, Safelite

Find Dan:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danariely/
Website: https://danariely.com
Substack: https://danariely.substack.com
Bureaucracy: https://bureaucracy.danariely.com

Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

Matt McFarlane and I met earlier this year on opposite sides of a debate about pay for performance. His team argued in favor and won the audience vote 62 to 38, and a week later he published a piece saying he had never been a fan of it. That opening carries the rest of the conversation: what pay for performance sets out to do, why the mechanism breaks at nearly every link in the chain, and what companies use instead once they stop treating an annual rating as the engine of everything.

Matt runs FNDN, a compensation consultancy for startups based in Australia. He built the pay structures at Oyster that carried the company from 200 to 600 people across 70 countries, and he now hosts the FNDN Series podcast and newsletter and runs the Startup People Summit, a one-day APAC event for people leaders inside high-growth companies. We cover the companies that have taken negotiation out of pay entirely, the grip that benchmark data holds over compensation decisions, the tension between fairness and individual pay in collaborative work, what happens to the manager's role as AI absorbs more of the coordination, and the practical side of leaving a salaried job to consult.

What we covered

• Why Matt argued for pay for performance in a debate and against it a week later
• The three percent merit budget, and what the annual salary survey roundups tell us
• Rewarding a standout year with money, or using it to raise the standard across a team
• Why Matt left the job he enjoyed most in his career to build a compensation practice
• How his client window moved from 50 employees to 100 or 150, and what breaks at that size
• Benchmarking as a source of cognitive closure, and the living wage argument underneath it
• Runn's single rate per role, and the salary trajectory that made their people harder to poach
• Carta, 37signals, Buffer, and PayPal as models that remove the negotiation
• Fairness as a relative judgment, and how quickly a good salary becomes an unfair one
• Why US companies resist narrow bands, and what wide bands say about trust in hiring
• The bad hire label, the myth of the A player, and where responsibility for performance sits
• The player coach, the stretched leader, and ClickUp's million-dollar salary bands
• What Matt tells anyone thinking about leaving a salaried role to consult

People
Matt McFarlane, founder of FNDN
Rowan Savage, co-founder and CTO of Runn
Andrea LaRowe of 37signals, a previous guest on this show

Books
Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

Articles
"How to Become a HR Consultant," Matt McFarlane, FNDN Series #7
https://fndnseries.fndn.com.au/p/how-to-become-a-hr-consultant

Organizations
FNDN, Startup People Summit, Oyster, Runn, Carta, 37signals, Buffer, PayPal, Zappos, ClickUp, Buurtzorg, Gallup, Radford

Find Matt
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewmcfarlane/
FNDN: https://www.fndn.com.au/
FNDN Series podcast and newsletter: https://fndnseries.fndn.com.au/
Startup People Summit: https://startuppeoplesummit.com/

Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

Dylan Soopramania is a creative director and consultant whose work spans the UK, Australia, and North America, with campaigns for Coca-Cola, EA Sports, KitKat, Hellmann's, and Google. He designed the covers for all three of my books and the branding for this podcast. We have known each other for thirty years, and this is the first episode recorded in person and the first under the Disengaged name.

Advertising is the one industry where creativity is the product, which makes it the sharpest test of the argument in Close the Gap. Dylan's rule for creative leads is to protect the potential of the idea: push it to the point where you and your trusted partners feel uncomfortable, because ideas get killed in internal conversations long before anyone learns where they could have gone. The same problem sits inside every business that needs to innovate. If people do not feel safe suggesting things that might get shot down, they play it down the middle. Dylan's account of what happened when I stopped chasing him on the cover, that the more I backed off the more responsible he felt, is the whole book in one sentence.

What we covered:

• What a creative director does, and why brands rent a creative's tone of voice
• How the Close the Gap cover came about
• Good briefs, bad briefs, and Hellmann's sneakers made from food waste
• Presenting irrational ideas to rational people
• Mad Men is dead: culture now informs marketing
• Protecting the potential of the idea
• Pixar's brain trust and the Overton window
• Culture fit as hiring people who look and sound like you
• Why the modern company still runs on a hierarchy inherited from the church and the factory
• The KitKat catapult
• Focus groups, market data, and the sea of sameness
• The manager as emulsifier
• Trust, control, purpose, and tension
• Why asking people to keep doing what they do well kills the spark
• Freelance versus full time
• Leaving Dylan alone: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in one example
• Proactive work, gold wall sessions, and 3M's fifteen percent time
• Executive pay, the C-suite, and the role of profit

People: Steve Hey (Dylan's creative partner), Dart Lindsley (Work for Humans), Jessie Zwaan (job, career, calling), Amy Wrzesniewski, Aaron Dignan, Rensis Likert, Abraham Maslow, Joseph Overton, Paul Buchheit, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs

Books: Close the Gap and What Pay Costs (James Seechurn), Purpose and Work (Jessie Zwaan), Brave New Work (Aaron Dignan), Colin Splodge and The Sizzledodge (Steve Hey and Dylan Soopramania)

Organizations: Pixar, Coca-Cola, KitKat / J. Walter Thompson Sydney, Hellmann's / Ogilvy, Banana Boat, Google / The Hallway, 3M, General Electric, Patagonia, Buurtzorg, Nucor, Handelsbanken, Haier, AFL-CIO, MSCI

Find Dylan on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/dylan-soopramania-5a439223 and on Instagram at @dyl_soop. KitKat catapult: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD3DUt4eZZw. Close the Gap: https://amzn.to/4x4FAZ6

Music licensed through Soundstripe.
Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH

Arie Kruglanski is one of the most cited social psychologists alive, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and a co-founder of START, the national center for the study of terrorism. He gave the field two ideas that shape this conversation: the need for cognitive closure, our drive to resolve ambiguity and settle on an answer, and significance quest theory, the claim that the need to matter sits beneath much of what we do. This episode takes both into the workplace.

We start small, with a question that sent James to Arie's work in the first place: why do companies cling to performance ratings, job titles, and job architecture when the evidence against them is overwhelming? Closure is the answer, and Arie explains why noise, fatigue, and time pressure make people more certain rather than less, and why premature closure has been the mother of great mistakes, from Pearl Harbor to organizational change. From there we move to significance: the oldest complaint in history, the road that took Arie from architecture to psychology, and why pay has become the emblem of how much we matter. We close on the hardest problem of all, how anything changes, and a personal question about holding confidence and uncertainty at the same time.

What we covered

• Cognitive closure, and why difficult conditions produce false confidence rather than better thinking
• Seizing and freezing, belief perseverance, and why information that was available still gets ignored
• The Italian postal workers, and why people resist the idea of change more than any specific change
• Careers as closure: why we follow available jobs over real passions, and Arie's own turn away from architecture
• The quest for significance, from terrorism research to the workplace where most people earn their worth
• Pay as significance, the CEO pay ratio, and the insatiability that comes with a bigness-oriented culture
• Bigness and Smallness, the reciprocal model of significance, and love as merit times appreciation
• Competitive individualism, Arachne and hubris, and whether significance requires winners and losers
• Weber, Calvinism, and the roots of the American work ethic
• Psychological safety, loss aversion, and why change must start small
• Religion as an ancient antidote to hubris, and what fills the vacuum when it recedes

People: Arie Kruglanski (University of Maryland, START). Referenced: Dan Raviv and Sophia Moskalenko, his co-authors; Harold Kelley; Antonio Pierro; B. F. Skinner; Alfie Kohn (No Contest); Leon Festinger (When Prophecy Fails); Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (positive psychology); Carol Dweck; Angela Duckworth; Antonio Damasio; Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (loss aversion); Amy Edmondson (psychological safety); Max Weber.

Books: Uncertain: How to Turn Your Biggest Fear into Your Greatest Power; The Quest for Significance: Harnessing the Need that Makes the World Go Round, with Dan Raviv; and the new Feeling Big, Feeling Small: The Human Yearning for Significance and Wonder, with Sophia Moskalenko.

Find Arie: through his books, and on The Quest for Significance podcast, which he hosts with Dan Raviv.