In Action with Wendy

Erick and David are West Coast CTOs and Advisors with an extensive background in negotiating. From Options to Lawyers, they have a well rounded strategy to ensure everyone wins in the deal. 

Episode Breakdown:

0 — introductions

5:00 — leadership and teams

8:15 — importance of negotiation beyond salary

9:15 — how to think about negotiation (“win win or no deal”)

12:30 — focus on goals

13:30 — Are these options valuable?

17:15 — Adjusting for market

19:40 — Changing perspective on where you add value

24:00 — when to bring in an attorney

26:00 — Losing fear of hearing “no”

28:00 — What does an unreasonable ask look like?

David Subar

 David has served as at Chief Technology Officer and Chief Product Officer at several companies, including at Break Media (as CTO), before its merger with Alloy to become Defy Media, and at Zest Finance, where he served as CPO.

David has served as an interim CTO/CPO at a number of companies, including Lynda.com (sold to LinkeedIn for $1.5B), PlutoTV, AirMedia and a major studio, where he has advised on product development, recruiting, architecture and security.

 David has led teams of greater than 100 and has built products of over 600MM page views/month and greater than 1MM video views a day on mobile and a similar number on the web.

Erick Herring

 Erick has been building internet-based systems since before the advent of the commercial Internet. He has held executive roles for the last 15+ years and led teams of 100+ in the development of systems for Privlo, Local Corporation, Feedback, WebVisible, Toyota, LRN, California Federal Bank, Ticketmaster.com, Variety.com, Dell Computer, and many other Fortune 1000 and startup companies.

 In addition to his mainstay role as CTO (usually including responsibility for Product), Erick has served as Chief Technology & Marketing Officer (Privlo), Chief Security Officer (Digital Evolution/SOA.com, Zenith Insurance), General Manager (Adapt Technologies - sold to WebVisible - and Feedback.com), and Founder (Townloop, Adapt, Feedback.com).

What started as a discussion between some folks about the VW scandal, became inspiration for this episode about ethics.

Related Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath

http://www.agilemanifesto.org/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dark_side_of_the_Force

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_law

Uncle Bob is a software developer, speaker and author. He has been writing code for 50 years and has written several books about software craftsmanship.

Uncle Bob is a software developer, speaker and author. He has been writing code for 50 years and has written several books about software craftsmanship.

This is a great episode if:

You want to be a better developer

You want to better support your development team

You need a push to write better code and say "no"

What you will hear about:

Common mistakes developers make

The ethics of being a software developer

Impact of the fast growth of the software industry

Related Links:

Clean Coders

Randy Rayess is the co-founder of VenturePact, a service that helps companies build remote software teams and execute on software projects. He is passionate about remote work, outsourcing and software development. He previously worked in private equity at SilverLake Partners, in machine learning and in payments. 

This is a great episode if:

You are researching your offsite/offshore options

You want to understand how to ensure a good ROI from offsite teams

You want to understand how to mitigate the risks of offsite teams

What you will hear about:

The impact of cultural differences

The value of investing in the team

Ways to ensure alignment

This is a great episode if:

You are a leader who wants to create a strong culture in your company

You want to perform user testing in a sustainable and valuable way

You are looking to outsource a project

What you will hear about:

Thoughtbot culture, history and process

User Testing

What happens when you invest in your people

Related Interviews:

Robert Richman

Debbie Madden

Jean Barmash is currently VP of Engineering at Merchantry, an eCommerce Technology startup.  He has over 15 years of experience in software industry, and has been part of 4 startups over the last seven years, 3 as CTO / VPE and one of which he co-founded.  Prior to his entrepreneurial adventures, Jean held a variety of progressively senior roles in development, integration consulting, training, and team leadership.  He worked for such companies as Trilogy, Symantec, Infusion and Alfresco, where he consulted to Fortune 100 companies like Ford, Toyota, Microsoft, Adobe, IHG, Citi, BofA, NBC, and Booz Allen Hamilton.  Jean is passionate about raising the level of technical leadership, and for the last five years has been organizing CTO School meetup, an organization he co-founded and grew to over 1,600 members.  Jean speaks frequently at conferences, meetups, mentors at startup accelerators (ERA, Techstars), blogs (infrequently) at http://hellofoobar.com, and tweets almost just as infrequently at @jbarmash.  Jean lives in NY with his awesome and supportive wife and two hilariously-funny kids. 

This is a great episode if:

You are a technical leader who works with offshore teams

You want to ensure your team(s) are aligned with business priorities

You are looking for new ways to measure success

What you will hear about:

Off-shore teams

Tactics to align with business goals with team processes

Batman

Links:

Cynefin

Related Interviews:

Ken Judy

Jessica Barnett

Esther Derby is an expert in organizational dynamics and a leading thinker in bringing agility to organizations, management, and teams. She has spent the last twenty-five years helping companies design their environment, culture, and human dynamics for optimum success. In addition to this work, she’s written over 100 articles, and co-authored two books–Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great and Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management.

Relevant audience:

You are a technical leader who cannot get the resources, people or buy in you need.

You want your teams to learn and make decisions independently

Your team(s) are having trouble collaborating

What you will hear about:

Tactics to gain influence

Retrospectives

Experiential Workshops

Training and Learning with Esther:

Problem Solving Leadership (http://estherderby.com/workshops/problem-solving-leadership-psl)

Monthly teleconferences (http://www.estherderby.com/qa-teleconferences)

Agile Retrospectives (http://amzn.com/0977616649)

Related Podcasts:

Dan Mezick - http://bit.ly/1q3lZ5W

Robert Richman - http://bit.ly/1u6eIUJ

Joseph Benson is a brand strategist with over thirty years of experience.  He defines and expresses the brand strategies for financial services, educational institutions, non-profits, healthcare, high technology, entertainment, and retail clients.

Joseph also trained as a filmmaker. His films have appeared in over a dozen festivals and have been licensed to HBO. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 1982.

You can find out more by visiting:

www.bensonbrandstrategy.com

www.linkedin.com/in/josephbensonbrandstrategy

Notes From Interview

Becoming the “Clear Choice” 

Differentiate clients/customers in minds of customers 

Understand occasions of choosing company

Center message around a single word

Client Profile

Statistics and demographics

Look at the “stories they tell themselves about themselves”

Understand how they make decisions and why they chose competitors

The Best Stories

Tells the consumer their need will be fulfilled

Come in many forms — pictures, colors, fonts, sounds, words

You have to define the story, not the customer

The Discipline of Market Leaders 

The narrower the focus, the stronger the brand

Overcoming a Bad Story

Standup and admit the mistakes

Hold leadership accountable

Create new clear policies and live up to them

Americans believe strongly in second chances

Robert Richman is a culture architect and was the co-creator of Zappos Insights, an innovative program focused on educating companies on the secrets behind Zappos’ amazing employee culture. 

Robert built Zappos Insights from a small website to a thriving multi-million dollar business teaching over 25,000 students per year. Through his work, Robert has been responsible for improving the employee culture at hundreds of companies like Procter & Gamble, Whole Foods and Amazon. 

Previously a Zappos spokesperson and authority on employee culture, Robert is a sought after keynote speaker at conferences around the world and has been hired to teach culture in person at companies like Google, Toyota, and Eli Lilly. He has pioneered a number of innovative techniques to build culture, such as bringing improv comedy to the workplace.

His new book, The Culture Blueprint, is a systematic guide to how a workplace can help people grow, inspire amazing service, and ultimately drive revenue through amazing culture.

More information is available at his website, www.RobertRichman.com. 

Culture

Culture exists when there are more than 2 people in the room.

Culture is about beliefs. 

Impact beliefs by experience. 

Strong vs Weak Culture

Not good or bad cultures — strong versus weak cultures

Weak culture is one in which there is not alignment between actions and values folds

Strong culture you can walk in and see the values in action without anyone telling them the story

Improv

Not improv for performance, but applying principles to a group

Agree and take to the next level

Start with the smallest of acts

Practice failing

Costs of Weak Culture

Unfulfilled promises to employees and customers

Lack of trust to bring best self to table

Subtle discomfort and insecurity

Results of Cultural Experience

Emotional Honesty — gives way to open communication

when someone is real with you, that’s when you can trust them

The Book

Improv and open space work best when culture already strong

Book is about getting tight into vision and values

Basic elements of culture — on boarding, creating leaders, teaching customer service

Successful Onboarding

Extend time for on boarding

Have several people start at same time

Create two-way conversations around expectations and what’s needed for success

Why Open Space?

Culture ownership needs to be on the leaders and the people

Open space is team building and strategy session at same time

Unlocking creating potential of company

If a place like Zappos who usually gets 10-20k calls a day can take a day and turn off phones to work on themselves, other companies can as well.

The Power of Stories

Story telling is “cultural currency”

getstory.com — power of somebody seeing themselves in the story

Related episodes: Ken J, Dan M