Rethink Culture

“We ‘re a service business that just happens to to collect waste. I never get out of the bed in the morning thinking I’ m in the waste industry. Never, ever, ever. I don’t go to the waste management trade shows. Personally I can’t think of anything worse to do. It doesn’t inspire me. But I will read every book about the service industry. I wanna know what’s the best service industry in Asia. I wanna know what’s the best service industry in the US. What’s the latest thinking in service? And then apply them to our little waste industry.”

S01E09 of the Rethink Culture podcast shines the spotlight on Gene Browne, the founder of The City Bin, a leading waste management company and a five-time winner of the ‘Deloitte Best Managed Company’ in Ireland. 

Gene recounts how City Bin started in 1997 as an experiment in service quality, out of his passion for creating amazing customer experiences. How his entrepreneurial journey was part luck and part naivety, especially when ruthless competition burned his warehouse to the ground. The lessons of expanding to the Middle East, and seeing how middle management struggled to adapt to the company’s autonomous culture. 26 years later, his unflinching attention to customer service has become deeply rooted in the company; like treating his customers the way he would like a business to treat his parents; tying  employee bonus to customer satisfaction to align employee actions with company values; and even apologising for bad service to customers by sending them flowers. Gene talks passionately about avoiding aspirational values, in favour of those principles that are as unique to any company as a fingerprint is to any person. And about giving his staff the gift of education, with a pledge to help the 80% of his less educated workforce to achieve their lifelong education goals.

Listen to Rethink Culture wherever you get your favourite podcasts, including: 
(Spotify)  https://open.spotify.com/show/4BLXQ8CgFHvYG6UoIQazj9 
(Apple podcasts)  https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rethink-culture/id1655123154
(YouTube)  https://www.youtube.com/@rethinkculture
Further references: 
Gene Browne on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/genebrowne100/
City Bin: https://www.citybin.com/
Books references:
Good strategy Bad Strategy, by Richard Rumelt https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11721966-good-strategy-bad-strategy
Building the Happiness-Centred Business by Paddi Lund [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10088113-building-the-happiness-centred-business
Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16120.Mastering_the_Rockefeller_Habits

“The first thing that I needed to do was to start creating a safe space for my staff to challenge me. The harder part was for my staff to fail. And sometimes when they failed, we lost clients. And that was really bitter, bitter pills to swallow. But I realised very quickly that if I was to create the safe space, I had to stop micromanaging. Because the minute I started micromanaging, the space was no longer safe. “

S01E08 of the Rethink Culture podcast shines the spotlight on Dillon Jeary, a Cape Town based serial entrepreneur with empathic leadership. Dillon is the founder of Kilowatt, a live events production company, 180 digital, an animation and digital content creation business, Three Peak Studio, for virtual broadcasting, and Circle Forward, a consultancy for team building events.

Dillon is a micromanager turned empathic leader with an open mind and a wide open heart. He talks about the importance of creating a safe space for his staff to make mistakes, to challenge him, and to share their feedback. Why “culture is what happens when no one else is watching” and how he came to realise the importance of culture only once his company hit 30 people. How he audits the culture of his companies, and has a committee of company representatives to solve the most important culture issues. How he gives factory workers flexible work hours, something unheard of in his industry. Why he thinks that mental health is extremely important for his staff, and how he makes his people “battle ready” by helping them look after themselves. And finally, why a culture of accountability, freedom, trust, communication and emotional intelligence are critical to attract the top young talent of today into our businesses, but also to attract good customers, good suppliers, and create a sustainable ecosystem.

Listen to Rethink Culture wherever you get your favourite podcasts, including: 
(Spotify)  https://open.spotify.com/show/4BLXQ8CgFHvYG6UoIQazj9 
(Apple podcasts)  https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rethink-culture/id1655123154
(YouTube)  https://www.youtube.com/@rethinkculture
Further references: 
Dillon Jearey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillon-jearey/
Dillon Jearey on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DillonJearey
Kilowatt: https://kilowatt.co.za/
Humankind, by Rutger Bergman: https://www.amazon.com/Humankind-Hopeful-History-Rutger-Bregman/dp/0316418536

“Why should I constrain myself with Seattle’s geographic region when I can get talent throughout the world. Yes, it’s more challenging and I have to do more processes and technology to facilitate, but I believe fundamentally that there’s more talent that I can access and that outweighs having geographic proximity to the office.”

S01E07 of the Rethink Culture podcast features David Niu, a serial entrepreneur, who founded NetConversions, BuddyTV and TINYpulse, all of which were acquired by publicly traded companies. 

For David culture is  the norms and expectations “when no one’s looking”, and something he’s become increasingly intentfull with. His 3rd company, TINYPulse, measures employee engagement, and works with tons of culture data. David talks about some of the surprising findings from that work, for example how the single metric that correlates the most with employee happiness is how transparent management is. 

David shares many culture design tips. He explains how he front-loads his company values in the job description and interview process to hire for a culture fit.  He also talks about some of his favourite culture programs - like the 1% pledge, Cheers for Peers, employee nominated awards with oscar statuettes and customer parties with tuxes and wigs! 

Listen to Rethink Culture wherever you get your favourite podcasts, including:
(Spotify)  https://open.spotify.com/show/4BLXQ8CgFHvYG6UoIQazj9
(Apple podcasts)  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rethink-culture/id1655123154
(YouTube)  https://www.youtube.com/@rethinkculture

Further references:
David Niu on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidniu/
David Niu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidniu
TINYPulse: https://www.tinypulse.com/
Die With Zero book https://www.amazon.com/Die-Zero-Getting-Your-Money/dp/0358099765

“The culture I had at the time was the wrong culture, but it was the culture I deserved. It wasn’t my people. It wasn’t my clients. It wasn’t the environment. It wasn’t the economy. It was me. It was me trying to be the boss, to drive my team as opposed to the leader to lead my team”

S01E06 of the Rethink Culture podcast features Arnie Malham, author of Worth Doing Wrong, founder of BetterBookClub and CJ Advertising, an award-winning CEO, eight-figure entrepreneur, and best-selling author who helps leaders create engaging workplace cultures.

In his early days as a solopreneur, Malham struggled letting go of control, as his ego was running the company.  10 years in, he realised that culture reflects leadership; he needed to radically change his leadership, for his company to change. 

Since then he spent 10 years getting things right, He shifted his focus to helping employees grow, promising that everyone would leave a better person than when they arrived. He took ownership of CJ’s culture, delegated its culture programs to the bottom of the org chart, and gave every program a champion a checklist, KPIs and - most importantly - permission to fail. 

His book, Worth Doing Wrong, is a virtual tour of CJ's company’s culture. He encourages others to learn from his methods and adapt them to their own businesses.

Malham talks about his latest passion and venture, BetterBookClub.com,  and how it uses recognition and approval to help people develop reading habits - and why most book reading initiatives fail.

Further references:

Arnie Malham on LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/arniemalham/
Arnie Malham personal page: https://www.worthdoingwrong.com/
Arnie’s book recommendations: https://www.worthdoingwrong.com/bookrecommendations
BetterBookClub: https://betterbookclub.com/
Worth Doing Wrong book: https://www.worthdoingwrong.com/

In S01E05 of the Rethink Culture podcast, Mehmet Yitmen, co-founder at ACM Agile, talks about the principles of autonomous organisations and the process he uses to transform traditional hierarchical organisations into self-organising ones. Yitmen has worked with tens of organisations in Europe and the Middle East to transform them using agile and self-management principles over 20 years and carries a deeply ingrained practitioners perspective of the future of work.

He argues that our hierarchical, command-and-control way of working has been inspired by the industrial revolution. Similarly, autonomous, and self-managed organisations are inspired by the internet revolution, which is leaderless, distributed and transparent - qualities that reflect in the new ways of working. 

He sees two elements as the foundation of autonomous organisations - alignment (through purpose, values and principles) and transparency (so that teams can self-correct and re-align).

Yitmen also discusses some of the risks of applying autonomous principles - how individuals have to be 100% accountable for their work, and how managers need to unlearn when they no longer need to manage people.

He also discusses how in autonomous organisations, traditional HR functions like hiring, training and development need to happen locally within a team, while the role of a horizontal HR function is to support and coach staff.

Further references:

ACM Agile: https://www.acmagile.com/

Mehmet Yitmen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehmet-yitmen-a3723718

Vodafone: Our Agile Story book https://www.acmagile.com/books/our-agile-story

Reinventing organisations by Frederic Laloux https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/

Corporate Rebels: https://www.corporate-rebels.com/

"A lot of entrepreneurs often believe that they have to have it all figured out, before they introduce it to their team. I ve always believed that if lead with authenticity and I say when we really know what's going on and when we testing something, people give us a lot of grace. "

In S01E04 of the Rethink Culture podcast, David Nilssen, CEO of DOXA Talent, a 600-strong outsourcing group talks about running not a business with a purpose, but a purpose with a business, to elevate local communities in Vietnam, Philippines and Kazakhstan. Learn why it’s hard to be the best in class in everything if you’re a hybrid company, why they hire Caretaker and Idealist personas, and how DOXA Con, a staff and client event combines a rockstar party with training, and community work to feed 10,000 people. 

In this episode of Rethink Culture podcast we talk to Alexis Pantazis, Exec Director and Co-Founder of HellasDirect, a 200-strong disruptive insurance company, built ona culture of shared vision and self-managing, diverse teams.

"You always think of a strong leader as a general in the army, as opposed to somebody that has emotions and is much more open. Having people that are constantly learning or willing to admit their mistakes, who listen more, that’s the leaders that I look up to and I aspire to be, and that's something we need to rethink"

Listen to this episode to learn:

• which culture best practices they stole from organisations such as Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and the special forces army unit
• why they encourage staff to rotate around the business
• why the CEOs are still involved in interviewing new hires at a 200 people company
• what HR gets wrong with recruitment
• why they started a People & Culture team after they hit 100 people
• why in-office work is important when people need to learn through osmosis
• why passion (about anything!) is important to look for in a new hire
• why they are proud of their 3-month next-generation leadership program

More about the guest

Alexis Pantazis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexispantazis/

Hellas Direct: www.hellasdirect.gr

"If leaders are willing to be vulnerable and listen to their employees.. those are cultures which empower everyone to feel safe and to bring their whole selves to work... A lot of leaders are still trying to hide behind stuff.. and they are not sleeping well at night. The most peaceful place for a leader to be is to have stated values and then can stand in the spotlight of those values."

The second episode of Rethink Culture, features Will Scott, founder of Culture Fix Academy, entrepreneur, published author, servant leader, father and triathlete.

Will has worked with 10s of companies to transform them into culture-first workplaces. He talks about creating your values bottom-up, how to "notice and nominate" to reinforce values in the company using stories, how often to revise values, and how he started playing with values and culture as a young child in his treehouse.

In this pilot episode of Rethink Culture we speak with Haluk Can Hur, founder of Latro Chemical, a company pioneering a no-hierarchy, self-management model, that in 2022 received the 2nd Best Place to Work in Europe award. 

Latro is a 70-person company in Turkey running on a no-hierarchy, completely autonomous model with no titles, sales targets, OKRs, KPIs, no HR department and where decisions are taken at a team level, based on a unifying vision, and shared values. The founder Haluk Can Hur talks about his childhood influences, his vision and how he transformed the company structure in only 1.5 years. He describes many principles behind Latro's autonomous self-management - for example where decisions are taken by individual consent (not collective consensus), radical transparency where salaries and P&L are open to everyone, profit sharing, and culture as the shared values and vision that bonds and aligns people together in the company.

Resources referenced in the podcast:

• Reinventing organisations book by Frederic Laloux 
• The Latro Way, describing the self-management organisational model of the company