Disengaged

In this episode of Disengaged, I'm joined by Stephan Meier — behavioral economist, Professor of Business Strategy at Columbia Business School, and author of The Employee Advantage — to explore why the next great shift in business is from customer-centricity to employee-centricity.

Stephan's argument is that business has made this journey before. Companies moved from a product-centric to a customer-centric model, building tools along the way — segmentation, journey mapping, personalisation — to understand and delight customers. Those same tools can now be repurposed for employees, and the companies that do it will create an advantage rivals cannot easily copy. As Stephan puts it, hard is good: a culture where people are engaged, motivated, and innovative takes years to build — and that is exactly what makes it difficult to compete with.

What we covered:

• The evolution from shareholder value to customer centricity to employee centricity
• The zero-sum fallacy — Amazon's Harry Potter gamble and Costco's employee-first economics
• Where money works, where it stops moving the needle, and how a $5 favour destroys a friendship
• Purpose — Kennedy's single mission for NASA and the janitor who wasn't mopping floors
• The engaged coach — clear direction with real empowerment
• Eli Lilly applying customer journey mapping to female talent progression
• H-E-B's cult following and the four-star truck driver
• Haier's RenDanHeYi model of autonomous micro-enterprises
• Buurtzorg's self-managing nurse teams
• Just right tasks — why the reward for good work is more good work
• AI-powered internal talent marketplaces at MasterCard, MetLife, and Unilever
• The workforce of one — segmentation and personalisation through one-on-ones

People

• Stephan Meier — author of The Employee Advantage
• Alfie Kohn — author of Punished by Rewards
• Dart Lindsley — host of Work for Humans
• Jessie Zwaan — value beyond price
• Megan Bernard-May — people experience design
• Uri Gneezy — Stephan's co-author on incentives
• Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer — meaningful progress
• Jos de Blok — founder of Buurtzorg
• Joseph Overton — the Overton window
• Dan Gutman and Stuart Gibbs — the just right books

Books

• The Employee Advantage — Stephan Meier
• Punished by Rewards — Alfie Kohn
• My Weird School series — Dan Gutman
• Spy School series — Stuart Gibbs

Organisations

• Amazon, Costco, Starbucks — customer centricity case studies
• Eli Lilly — employee journey mapping
• H-E-B — the employee-centric grocer
• Haier / GE Appliances — autonomous micro-enterprises
• Buurtzorg — self-managing nurse teams
• MasterCard, MetLife, Unilever — internal talent marketplaces
• Novartis / Sandoz — one-on-one personalisation

Find Stephan at stephanmeier.com, where you can subscribe to his newsletter on the human-centric future of work — each edition comes with an original stop-motion Lego movie.

In this episode of Disengaged, I'm joined by Jessie Zwaan — VP of People Strategy and Operations at Leapsome and author of Built for People and Purpose and Work — to dig into the gap between the purpose companies advertise and the work people actually live.

Jessie's argument cuts against a lot of HR orthodoxy. Most people don't come to work for the company mission, and pretending they do creates a dissonance employees feel but rarely voice — an Emperor's New Clothes problem she traces through the anti-work movement, which she reads as a funhouse mirror held up to HR. Drawing on Joe Pine's experience economy, she places work on a spectrum from service to experience to transformation, and argues most workplaces are experiential, and that this is fine. People are motivated by connection, autonomy, and creativity far more than by mission — so design work around what you can genuinely offer instead of selling a purpose no one believes.

What we covered:

• Work as a product — the three symbiotic products every company runs, and why employee experience behaves like a subscription
• Pine's experience economy applied to work, illustrated through a cup of coffee, and where most workplaces actually sit
• Wrzesniewski's job, career, and calling orientations, and why performance doesn't differ across them
• The purpose gap, and how to close it without overreaching
• The anti-work movement as a funhouse mirror of HR
• Leveling guides and job architecture as systems of control — cognitive closure, familiarity bias, and why bare-bones wins
• Whether AI will fix decision-making and performance management, and why the answer is mostly no
• The T-shaped employee, and applying deep expertise broadly in an AI era
• The perception of laziness across generations (Dickens wrote fifteen novels and never worked afternoons), and the shift from individual to collective measurement

People

• Jessie Zwaan — author of Built for People and Purpose and Work
• Dart Lindsley — host of Work for Humans
• Joe Pine — the experience economy
• Amy Wrzesniewski — job, career, and calling
• Peter Fader — author of The Customer Base Audit
• Stephan Meier — employee segmentation
• Arie Kruglanski — need for cognitive closure
• Rensis Likert — participative management
• Andy Whitlock — The Human Half
• Huw Slater — Oli
• Teresa Amabile — the progress principle
• Barry Schwartz — critique of rational choice

Books

• Purpose and Work — Jessie Zwaan
• Built for People — Jessie Zwaan
• What Pay Costs — James Alexander Seechurn
• The Customer Base Audit — Peter Fader
• Come Up for Air — Nick Sonnenberg

Organisations

• Leapsome — where Jessie leads people strategy
• Intuit — finding purpose within a constrained mission
• The Human Half — Andy Whitlock's consultancy
• Oli — Huw Slater's company
• Modern People Leader — collaborators on Jessie's Substack, PL Build

In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Andrea LaRowe - Director of People Operations at 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and Hey - to find out how a high-trust, low-control company runs day to day.

Andrea's core argument: stop tying pay to performance and you strip a layer of politics out of work. 37signals benchmarks salaries once a year to the 90th percentile of the San Francisco tech market, with no negotiation and no manager involvement, and rewards tenure through a profit share. Reviews still happen, on each person's anniversary, but they're a check-in rather than a lever for pay. What drives the work is intrinsic motivation - and a small, flat, bootstrapped company built to support it.

What we covered:

• How pay works - benchmarking to Radford's 90th percentile, no merit cycle, no negotiation, and why managers stay out of it
• What reviews are for once pay is off the table, and why staggering them by anniversary beats an annual scramble
• The five-level structure - why level three (senior) is the baseline, why level five (principal) is reserved for people moving the industry forward, and how judgment separates people at the top
• Profit share based on tenure rather than individual output, and why it doubles as retention
• How a high-trust company handles a low performer - visibility, honest conversation, skill problem vs engagement problem, and why PIPs rarely earn their keep
• The "manager of one" - hiring people who seek out problems without waiting to be told
• The 2021 decision to draw a line on political conversation at work, the roughly twenty people who left, and what it revealed about when leadership steps in
• Why staying private and bootstrapped for 25 years let the founders decide what the company is for, and why equity isn't the draw people assume
• Self-determination theory - autonomy, competence, relatedness - and how 37signals delivers all three
• Work as a product - treating work as something employees choose to buy, not something handed down
• Six-week cycles, kickoffs and heartbeats - the light mechanisms that stop a decentralized company splintering into silos
• Advice for anyone stuck inside a pay-for-performance cycle

People referenced

• Andrea LaRowe - Director of People Operations, 37signals
• Jason Fried - co-founder and CEO, 37signals
• David Heinemeier Hansson - co-founder and CTO, 37signals
• Dart Lindsley - 11Fold, host of Work for Humans; "work as a product"
• Luke O'Mahoney - SapienX; "work as a product"
• Megan Bernard-May - Pollinate XD; "work as a product"
• Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theory

Books

• Rework - Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
• It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work - Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
• First, Break All the Rules - Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
• What Pay Costs - James Alexander Seechurn

Organizations, podcasts and websites

• 37signals - bootstrapped company behind Basecamp and Hey
• Basecamp - project management software; Basecamp 5 launched recently
• Hey - email software
• Radford - compensation survey used for benchmarking
• Rework - 37signals' podcast
• The 37signals employee handbook - on their website
• Semco - Ricardo Semler's company, upward-feedback model
• Haier, Handelsbanken and Buurtzorg - decentralized organizations referenced

Episode description

In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Megan Bernard-May - founder of Pollinate XD, co-creator of the PX Dojo, and the person who led people experience at the BBC - to dig into what it means to treat the experience of work the way a UX designer treats a product.

Meg's core argument: people experience is another flavor of experience design. Traditional HR builds around policy, compliance, and risk management. A people experience approach starts somewhere else - finding the overlap between what's good for people, what's good for the business, and what's good for customers, then designing solutions inside that overlap rather than treating them as trade-offs.

What we covered:

• Why traditional HR keeps shipping best-practice solutions that don't solve the problem, and what a design-led discovery process looks like instead
• Meg's path from architecture to UX to people experience, including the master's in organizational psychology she did to round out the work
• Why corporate environments resist experimentation in HR even though product teams A/B test routinely, and what makes an experiment "successful"
• The BBC and what productivity meant there - why getting clear on that question first matters more than any solution
• Pay complaints as symptoms - what's usually underneath them when benchmarking already says you're paying the market
• A case study from a credit analyst team where dissatisfaction with pay turned out to be a job-design problem
• Why dual career tracks still funnel people into management to chase money, and what flatter pay structures unlock
• Self-determination theory as a stress test for any HR change - does it add autonomy, competence, and connectedness, or remove them?
• Handelsbanken, Spotify guilds, and Haier as examples of decentralized models that lend themselves to a people experience approach
• Where people experience should sit organizationally - outside HR, as a guild that runs across the business
• Three things any HR practitioner can start doing tomorrow: ask better problem questions, stop asking for permission, document the work

People referenced

• Megan Bernard-May - founder of Pollinate XD, co-creator of PX Dojo
• Adam Axton - co-creator of PX Dojo, based in Melbourne
• Dan Pink - "take pay off the table" framing
• Luke O'Mahoney - "table stakes" framing of centralized HR
• Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theory

Books

• Purpose and Work - Jessica Zwaan
• What Pay Costs - James A Seechurn
• Drive - Daniel Pink

Organizations and resources

• Pollinate XD - Meg's consultancy, helping organizations move people experience out of HR and into the leadership function
• PX Dojo - three-month cohort program for HR practitioners, structured white-belt to blue-belt
• Humani - online HR community in Australia where Meg moderates an experience design circle and runs a book club
• Handelsbanken - Swedish bank, decentralized operating units
• Spotify - the guild model for cross-cutting disciplines
• Haier - the marketplace model of the organization

In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Dart Lindsley - founder of 11Fold, host of the Work for Humans podcast, and former head of business architecture for HR at Cisco Systems - to dig into the idea of work as a product.

Dart's core argument: companies have spent a century misclassifying their workforce. Employees fit the definition of customers, people who choose every day whether to keep buying the product called "your job." That reframe rearranges almost everything downstream - recruitment, onboarding, what managers do, how work gets allocated, and what good performance even means.

What we covered:

• The category error at the root of modern management, and why scientific management's framing of people as factors of production still shapes practice today
• How employees fit the definition of customers in a multi-sided business, and the route Dart took to that model through business architecture work at Cisco
• The limits of autonomy, mastery, and purpose as a design framework, and what Dart found after asking thousands of people what job they hire their work to do
• Negative transformation - the ways work changes us into people we don't want to be - and why that belongs on the cost side of the ledger
• What it looks like when teams co-design their own work, including the four-dimensional bubble chart Dart uses to reallocate tasks based on what each person finds rewarding
• Managers as brokers optimizing flow between two customers, the paying customer and the working customer
• Common pushback on the model: does it scale, is it anti-capitalist, and why bother if the existing system seems to work
• Plus a short detour into the night Dart climbed the Golden Gate Bridge

People referenced

• Dart Lindsley - founder of 11Fold, host of Work for Humans
• Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theory
• Clayton Christensen and Bobby Moesta - Jobs to Be Done framework
• Joe Pine - experience and transformation economies
• Daniel Pink - autonomy, mastery, purpose
• Alfie Kohn - critique of behaviorist management ("pop behaviorism")
• Antonio Damasio - on emotion and reason in decision-making
• Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton - the knowing-doing gap
• Ricardo Semler - Semco's participative model
• Bart Houlahan - co-founder of B Lab, partner at Irrational Capital
• Sandra Loughlin - EPAM, on data architecture and AI
• Semmelweis, Pasteur, Koch, Lister - the germ theory paradigm shift, used as analogy for how slowly new management ideas spread

Books

• Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness - Richard Ryan and Edward Deci
• The Transformation Economy - Joe Pine
• Descartes' Error - Antonio Damasio
• The Knowing-Doing Gap - Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton
• Drive - Daniel Pink
• Punished by Rewards - Alfie Kohn

Podcasts and websites

• Work for Humans - Dart's podcast, 190+ episodes
• 11fold.com - 11Fold's site, including a curated Discord community and an AI search across the Work for Humans back catalogue
• PX Espresso - Luke O'Mahoney's podcast, where Dart appears as a guest
• Irrational Capital - the ETF Dart references that tracks how employees feel about work at the companies they invest in
• AeroPress - the world's best coffee maker
• Connect with Dart on LinkedIn

Alfie Kohn has spent decades dismantling the assumption that rewards work. His research across education, parenting, and the workplace remains some of the most rigorous and underread work on human motivation - required reading for anyone serious about how people actually behave. Punished by Rewards is the place to start, and it should sit on every compensation professional's shelf.

In this conversation, Alfie joins me to examine why behaviorism still dominates corporate management, what B.F. Skinner got wrong, and why financial incentives so reliably erode the intrinsic motivation they're meant to amplify. We dig into the role of promotion as a control mechanism, what the pay gap signals about corporate culture, and how the sales function exports extrinsic logic into the rest of the organization. We close on the cycle that keeps reward systems entrenched and the difficulty of moving colleagues past it.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction to Alfie Kohn's work and books
• 07:12 B.F. Skinner and behaviorism
• 15:34 The role of promotion in corporate America
• 22:07 The impact of the pay gap on corporate culture
• 33:27 The vicious cycle of rewards and motivation

Robyn Shutak is a Partner at Infinite Equity and one of the sharpest minds in equity compensation. She joins me to talk about what happens when equity stops working the way it was designed to - and whether it was ever designed well in the first place.

We get into underwater equity and the real cost of doing nothing about it. Vesting schedules built for a tenure reality that no longer exists. The gap between telling employees they are owners and what the cap table actually says. Why equity in VC-backed companies functions more like a lottery ticket than an ownership stake. And whether giving employees structured choice within their equity grants can close the gap between perceived value and actual value.

We also explore a harder question: if equity compensation depends on stock price cooperation to feel real, what does that tell us about the instrument itself?

Takeaways

• Underwater equity is not a passive problem - inaction sends its own signal and concentrates retention risk among the people you can least afford to lose
• Vesting was designed to protect the cap table, not retain employees - and there is little evidence it does
• Most employees in VC-backed companies hold less than 20% of shares collectively - calling that ownership is a stretch
• Structured choice within equity programs can increase perceived value without increasing spend
• Equity works best when companies treat it as trust, not control

Chapters

• 00:00 Understanding Underwater Equity
• 42:23 Equity Compensation and Volatility
• 51:21 Employee Ownership in VC-Backed Companies
• 01:20:52 The Skeptical Side of Equity Ownership

ICYMI Kim Minnick, Kim Rohrer, and I lost a debate on pay for performance recently. We were debating against Mark Frein, Jessica Zwaan, and their team captain, Matt McFarlane. The whole thing was moderated by the amazing Jessie Schofer.

So we regrouped to chat about what we might have done better, discuss some of the reactions, and we meandered into other areas too.

We got into the history of how pay for performance became the default - how individualism got baked into compensation design, why corporate culture reinforces it, and what it would actually take to change it. We talked about legal personhood and how the way we define corporate success shapes everything downstream, including how we pay people. We got into bias, social media's role in calcifying bad management orthodoxy, and whether systemic change is even possible given the structures most of us are working inside.

If you enjoy this and other episodes of As Discussed... please remember to subscribe, to like, and to share it with a friend that might enjoy listening - this helps tremendously.

Stefan Gaertner has been thinking about pay equity longer than most people have known it was a problem. He's a long-time friend, colleague, and one of the sharpest minds in the field - so when I get him on the show, we have a lot to talk about.

In this episode, we get into the uneven global landscape of pay equity legislation and what that patchwork means for multinational employers trying to build coherent compensation programs. We talk pay transparency - what it's actually changing inside organizations versus what companies say it's changing. From there, we dig into the mechanics: point-factor job evaluation, salary band design, and why the methodology underneath your pay decisions matters more than most HR leaders want to admit.

We also spend real time on flat organizational structures and what happens to pay equity when you strip out the career ladder - and whether that's a feature or a bug. Then we close on AI: what it can genuinely do to support pay equity analysis, where human judgment is still non-negotiable, and why handing compensation decisions to an algorithm is a different kind of equity problem.

Chapters

• 00:00 The State of Pay Equity
• 08:06 Pay Transparency's Real Impact on Business
• 23:06 Point-Based Job Evaluation Systems
• 34:47 Salary Bands and Pay Fairness
• 43:03 Flat Structures, Career Decisions, and Pay Equity
• 1:10:33 AI's Role in Pay Equity

Luke O'Mahoney is the founder of SapienX, a platform of content, courses, and community for what he calls the "post-HR generation." His central argument is that People teams should operate like Product teams - designing, measuring, and iterating on the employee experience rather than administering it through siloed functions.

We dig into the limitations of the Ulrich model - the framework that split HR into Business Partners, Centers of Excellence, and Shared Services decades ago and has dominated ever since. Luke makes the case that those silos have produced systems that serve the function rather than the people, and that product thinking offers a way out.

We explore the Jobs to Be Done framework applied to HR, the difference between enabling performance and trying to drive it, and why reverse engineering problems matters more than jumping to solutions. I push back on some of the measurement assumptions embedded in product thinking and whether it risks falling into the same traps that broke performance management.

Whether you're a People leader feeling like the current model isn't working, or a compensation professional wondering why your systems aren't producing the outcomes you expected, there's a lot to chew on here.

Contact Luke O'Mahoney:

LinkedIn: Luke O'Mahoney

Website: sapienx.co.uk

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction and Post-HR Generation
• 15:42 Adopting a Product Operating Model
• 26:27 Shifting to a Product-Centric Approach
• 33:49 Implementing Product-Centric Thinking
• 45:06 Challenges of Traditional HR Models
• 55:29 Cut the Cape Request
• 01:03:05 Measuring Success
• 01:18:24 Pushing Back and Asking Questions