Roasting Marshmallows

Creating a budget is one way to stay on top of your expenses. Most companies spend a lot of time analyzing past performance to come up with budgets for the next year, trying to stick to them as close as possible. However, due to todays rapid changing markets, traditional budgeting might not be the best fit for companies anymore.

Beyond Budgeting is the idea of abolishing traditional budgeting processes to eventually establish a highly decentralized organizational system and adaptive set of management processes. We are sitting around the camp fire with Bjarte Bogsnes, Chairman of the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable, and has helped numerous companies globally getting started on their own Beyond Budgeting journey.

Bjarte Bogsnes has a long international career, with more than 25 years of Beyond Budgeting experience, having worked in both Finance and HR.

He is a popular international business speaker and is the winner of a Harvard Business Review/McKinsey Management Innovation award.

He is author of "Implementing Beyond Budgeting - Unlocking the performance potential", a theoretical introduction and a practical guide to bringing such a more empowered and adaptive management model to life.

Beyond Budgeting Roundtable: https://bbrt.org/ - sign up for the newsletter!

Bjarte's website: https://bogsnesadvisory.com/

Bjarte on twitter: https://twitter.com/bbogsnes

In the age of liberated companies, there are different models of governance where individuals are responsible to undertake actions on behalf of their company.

With a participatory decision making process and distributed leadership at its core, sociocratic governance is at odds with the traditional vertical management system.

A sociocratic organization allows the individual to express oneself within a group, and allows the group to function in an autonomous and co-responsible manner.

Sociocracy produces organizations that are both collaborative and highly productive. The process for decision-making is very different from majority voting that inevitably produces majority rule.

As with society, the majority rule easily leads to polarization and promotes competition and dominance instead of coöperation and equality.

Using consent and collaboration as a foundation for decision-making and communications, Sociocracy builds a strong governance structure that extends from the mailroom to the boardroom and from the client to the founders.

We are roasting marshmallows with John Buck, co-author, along with Sharon Villines, of the book "We the People, Consenting to a Deeper Democracy - A Guide to Sociocratic Principles and Methods" and "Agile Bossa Nova" with Jutta Eckstein

Governance alive website: https://www.governancealive.com/

John on twitter: https://twitter.com/johnabuck

We, the People book: https://www.sociocracy.info/we-the-people-2/

Bossa Nova book: https://www.agilebossanova.com/

The president of the United States is usually considered the most powerful person on the planet. Indeed, the US has the biggest economy, the most powerful military, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood and NASA.

How did America become such a powerhouse? With a little imagination, you could compare America's lifecycle to that of a product or even a company. There's the introduction, rapid growth, disruption and renewal.

With that comparison in mind, one could imagine the president to be the Chief Marketing Officer, selling us the American dream. What lessons can we draw today from developing the product that is America?

We are roasting marshmallows with Jason Voiovich, author of the book "Marketer in Chief: How Each President Sold the American Idea. In it, Jason retells the story of America, but through the eyes of its most influential salesperson - the president.

Jason’s favorite way to observe the world is through its history. He believes the people from the past have plenty to teach us about the challenges and opportunities we face today.

Get the book: https://marketerinchief.com/

Jason's website: https://jasontvoiovich.com/

Jason on twitter: https://twitter.com/jasontvoiovich

On the show, we have talked a lot about books, and we have even had a few guests that wrote one. It has crossed our minds to write a book of our own a few times as well.

Today, we are roasting marshmallows with Wouter Lagerweij. Wouter is currently in the process of writing a book called: "A Product Owner's Guide to Escaping Legacy: how to get back in control and start delivering again". As a developer, manager, product owner, and as an Agile Coach working with people in all those roles, Wouter has been dealing with legacy for a large part of his life.

To make that happen Wouter uses the knowledge and skills gathered in over fifteen years of experience applying Agile processes and practices from XP, Scrum, Kanban, Lean and Systems Thinking.

Ever since the dawn of humanity people had to work together and form teams in order to achieve a common goal. These goals could be something as vital as survival, but also, as civilizations were growing to build great structures, or in modern times, building awesome apps on your phone!

Like the times teams can and will, change as well. One would expect with all these years of teamwork that people would have gotten very good at adapting to these team changes.

Turns out, this is often not the case. Luckily for us, we are roasting marshmallows with Heidi Helfand, a software engineering leader with over 20 years of experience helping fast-growing companies double and triple in size. She wrote a book, Dynamic Reteaming, which details people-focused patterns and tactics to help companies thrive through hypergrowth.

She has helped launch Procore Technologies and AppFolio to IPO and Expertcity to acquisition by Citrix. She was on the original development team that built GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar.

She is currently VP of Engineering Growth at Kin Insurance, which offers affordable coverage to homeowners in catastrophe-prone regions.

She coaches software development teams using practical, people-focused techniques, with the goal of building resilient organizations as they experience rapid growth.

Heidi's website: https://www.heidihelfand.com

Heidi on twitter: https://twitter.com/heidihelfand

Get the book "Dynamic Reteaming" here: https://www.heidihelfand.com/dynamic-reteaming-book (Amazon)

Fear of change is subtle. It operates in your subconscious, convincing you that it's there to protect you. It will keep you safe.

Or does it?

Embracing change can help bring growth, and with that, fulfillment and ultimately success. Both for individuals, but also for organizations.

Today we are roasting marshmallows with Linda Rising, author of several books, including one called "Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas" and it's successor "More Fearless Change: Strategies for Making Your Ideas Happen", which can help you and your organization to bring change.

Linda is an internationally known presenter on topics related to patterns, retrospectives, influence strategies, agile development, and the change process.

With a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in the field of object-based design metrics, Linda's background includes university teaching and software development in a number of different domains. These include telecommunications, avionics, and strategic weapons industries (probably top secret).

Linda on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindarising

Linda on Twitter: https://twitter.com/risinglinda

Linda's website: https://lindarising.org

When serving millions of customers all over the world, a classic, top-down approach to decision making is not very scalable. This was the realization that the company our guest today works at made, and has since then reversed the chain of decision making to enable the teams to make the day to day decisions by themselves.

For the last few years he has been working as Engineering Director at Klarna where he helped build the Klarna Checkout, Klarna Payment, Merchant Card Services and other Klarna products that are used daily by millions. He is active in developing the engineering culture by being involved in the open source program, events organized by Klarna and the marketing activities that Klarna does from an engineering stand point.

We are roasting marshmallows with Mite Mitreski: Director, Trust center at Klarna. Mite talks about #fintech, #security, #incidentresponse, #engineeringmanager, and #softwareengineering

Mite on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitemitreski

Mite's website: https://mitemitreski.com/

Mite on twitter: https://twitter.com/mitemitreski

Imagine being on a submarine with your colleagues, heading out to open waters, potentially being together in a cramped space for several months. If morale and performance amongst you and your fellow colleagues is low, you would probably be reluctant to go.

Our guest today had to deal with this, being assigned command of the nuclear submarine, USS Santa Fe, the ship everyone joked about during their Prospective Commanding Officer training.

However, he managed to transform the ship into the best performing vessel in the fleet, and shared the story in his book, Turn the Ship Around.

We are roasting marshmallows with David Marquet, a retired United States Navy captain and the bestselling author of Turn the Ship Around and Leadership is Language.

Imagine a work place where everyone engages and contributes their full intellectual capacity. A place where people are healthier and happier because they have more control over their work - a place where everyone is a leader.

David on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmarquet/

David on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ldavidmarquet

David on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/LeadershipNudges

Ask someone what marketing is, and they will often tell you "Advertisements and catchy slogans", and maybe they continue describing a scene they've recently seen on Mad Men.

The truth is, the internet has changed how people look at the impact of interruption type marketing, like for example ads or a cold call.

When we receive anything that looks like plain old, traditional marketing, it gets thrown before it gets read.

So, how should you do your marketing in today's world? Luckily for us, we are roasting marshmallows with Ruth Plater, CEO & Founder at Radial Path, Digital Marketing mastery for the fast-moving global tech and telco industries.

Ruth has played a fundamental role in helping small to medium-sized businesses, with a focus on the tech space, revolutionise their brand and marketing activities, scale sales teams, increase customer acquisition and loyalty, and prepare for growth. Helping propel Small/Mid sized Enterprise, but also startups to their next commercial level.

Ruth on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruthplater/

Radial Path's website: https://www.radialpath.com/

What if we said that there's a list that will help you with software development, or even with your company in general? 

It's called Heuristics for Effective Software Development Organisations: A continuously evolving list, and it contains as of this episode 27 nuggets of wisdom for your benefit. It started out as a way to present the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto in a clearer and more contemporary way, although the author, Allen Holub, has added a few things.

Who is Allen Holub? Allen Holub is an internationally recognised software architect and Agile consultant/trainer. He speaks all over the planet about these topics and agile-friendly implementation technology like microservices and incremental architecture, but his bread and butter is in-house training and consulting in how to create highly functional Lean/Agile organisations, and how to design and build robust, highly scalable software architectures suitable for agile environments.

Allen's website: https://holub.com/

Allen on twitter: https://twitter.com/allenholub

Allen's books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Allen-I.-Holub/e/B001IXRSV2