Teamistry

The can is Americana itself; the product indistinguishable from the ordinary contents. It's part of a quintessential American meal, soothing the hunger and warming the souls of families for more than a hundred years. But in 2001, a toxic atmosphere hung over the workers at The Campbell Soup Company. Its headquarters stood isolated behind barbed fences in the run-down city of Camden, New Jersey. Inside, a culture of anxiety and distrust prevailed. Employees, uneasy about going outside the gates, ate lunch in the building – and got no discounts on soup. The dwindling morale, along with impending financial crisis, pushed the company to the brink: it had the lowest employee engagement of any Fortune 500 company. To save this American culinary and cultural icon from collapse, a new CEO enters the scene and embarks on an ambitious mission. He wants to replace and rejuvenate the leadership team, boost morale, and turn the company's fortunes around – in just three years. His strategies are both tough and tender: he lets hundreds of unfit senior managers go, and sends tens of thousands of handwritten letters to employees to recognize and praise their work. 

In the penultimate episode of Teamistry's third season, host Gabriela Cowperthwaite takes us behind the scenes to witness Campbell's rebirth. We hear from the former CEO who led this mission, Douglas Conant, who explains how he translated "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs" into a step-by-step framework to rebound employee morale and confidence. We also hear from two of Doug's handpicked recruits who represented a new era of leadership at the company: Nancy Reardon, former Senior Vice President and Chief of HR and David White, former Senior Vice President of Global Supply Chain.

Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For a transcript of the episode and other extras, check out www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast/campbells-finds-the-soup-for-their-soul

When the pandemic struck, many pivoted their lives online – to connect with family, to work, to attend school. But many others, living in cutoff communities, like several neighborhoods in the city of Detroit, Michigan, where generations of systemic racism and poor infrastructure has left them largely isolated, this wasn't an option. Up to 40% of residents in these underserved areas have no internet at all, keeping them from the online world where everything had moved. But an enterprising team of "digital stewards" is changing this reality. In this episode of Teamistry, host Gabriela Cowperthwaite tells the story of the Detroit Equitable Internet Initiative – a network of formal workers and grassroots organizations that are bringing low-cost or free high-speed internet to families, one connection at a time. Their ability to win trust from the community and strategize on the ground – even during a pandemic – has emerged as a case study on how to mobilize a network to reach people in hard-to-reach places. You'll spend a day with Changa Parker and Kirk Teasley – the digital stewards – as they install WiFi door-to-door. You'll hear from Janice Gates, Director of Equitable Internet Initiative, and you'll hear from Nick Wilson, Network Manager at North End Woodward Community Coalition, as he leads the Digital Stewards on their daily missions. You'll also hear from Norma Heath, a community organizer, for whom reliable and affordable internet is no longer a distant dream thanks to this amazing team's work.

Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For a transcript of the episode and other extras, check out www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast/on-a-mission-for-equitable-internet-in-detroit

In 2016, a research video played in a conference room of Mattel Inc. caused deep concern. It showed an eight-year-old playing with iconic Hot Wheels™ toy cars. "Imagine doing this for an hour," the boy said, as if it was torture. The moment confirmed what many Mattel employees already knew: kids were shifting from physical toys to digital games at increasingly younger ages. And it meant that Hot Wheels, the best-selling toy on the planet, was losing its primary audience to digital gadgets and putting the company's future in jeopardy. The moment galvanized a small group of forward-thinking employees and a risky decision was made: everyone's favorite toy car would ride the digital wave – instead of being totalled by it. The team navigated strong resistance – after all, how do you fix a toy that isn't broken? – to introduce Hot Wheels™ i-d. It's a never-before-seen product that blends the physical toy with a digital platform. And guess what? It crashes and burns. But rather than sinking the venerable company, it benefits Mattel, Inc. 

To find out how, host Gabriela Cowperthwaite talks with both the innovators who challenged the status quo and the decision-makers who had trouble stomaching the risks. Hear from Chris Down, chief design officer at Mattel, Inc., and Ron Friedman, former director of global marketing. Also hear from senior leaders Steve Totzke, Mattel's executive vice president, and Ricardo Briceno, vice president of franchise marketing.

Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For a transcript and extras about this episode visit: www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast/reinventing-hot-wheels.

A cricket match played on April 18th 2008 between two city-based teams in India marks a historic moment in sports. It was the beginning of the Indian Premier League (IPL), a radically new tournament within the shortest format of cricket. Spearheaded by a flamboyant businessman, the IPL was to become for cricket what the National Football League (NFL) is to American football: an exciting prime-time entertainment for a new, global fanbase. And that worked – at first. Then the IPL's founder is thrown out, scandal rocks the league, and even diehard fans turn away from their beloved sport. In this episode, host Gabriela Cowperthwaite takes you back to the exciting origins of the league and behind the scenes to how the IPL rallies to save itself. Learn how a reformed league with a newly-appointed representative team restored transparency to the game, and how rival cricket boards became allies to stage a tournament during an even bigger crisis: the global pandemic. Listen to exciting analysis from Prakash Wakankar, a cricket commentator with the BBC, and hear from Simon Hughes, former English cricketer and co-author of "A New Innings," a book about the IPL. Also hear from "A New Innings" co-author Manoj Badale, lead owner of the IPL team Rajasthan Royals, and from Shane Watson, the former Aussie cricketer and founder of T20 Stars. Plus, Rehmatullah Sheikh, Teamistry's Story Producer and a massive cricket fan, joins in to talk about his experience with the IPL and the reforms that helped it bounce back from disgrace.

Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For the transcript of this episode and extras, go to www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast/saving-an-indian-cricket-league-from-itself

In 1994, IBM sponsored the Winter Olympics and held exclusive rights to telecast the games. But Dave Grossman – an engineer at IBM – discovered Sun Microsystems had stolen the live feed and was posting the results on its website. This sparked the creation of a team of innovators that not only convinced IBM's top brass to pay attention to the Internet but influenced a seismic change in everything about IBM as an organization. 

In the first episode of season 3, host Gabriela Cowperthwaite takes us through the story of how the newly-assembled team built a website from scratch in time for the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. And how their efforts didn't just prevent IBM from further embarrassment but transformed the entire company, going from one that almost missed the Internet to becoming a pioneer of its innovations, creating a website that would influence how we shop, work, and live online today. Along with Dave Grossman, the computer engineer who left IBM as a senior manager, we hear from John Patrick, IBM's former vice president of internet technology, and Jane Harper, former director of collaborative innovation programs at IBM.

Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For more on this episode visit https://www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast/when-IBM-nearly-missed-the-internet where you can see IBM's first Olympic website from 1996 in all its low-res glory and check out related teamwork articles.

In Season 3 of Teamistry, filmmaker and host Gabriela Cowperthwaite returns to spotlight teams that not only achieve the impossible, but also inspire change.

These stories of leadership and courage mark a turning point in how organizations—and even whole industries—are transformed for the better. Follow along as a team of trailblazers brings IBM on to the web; a group of innovators at Mattel fuses the world's No.1 selling toy Hot Wheels with a virtual platform; a community of digital stewards in Detroit connects underserved neighbors to the Internet. And many more. Starting June 7th, a new episode drops every two weeks. 

Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For more on the series, go to www.atlassian.com/podcast.

Before corporate social responsibility was a popular concept, Patagonia declared its commitment to better outcomes for their workers, and the planet. They soon discovered that commitment would include major pitfalls, but it seems the more Patagonia doubles down on its values, the better it performs. In this episode, we hear from Craig Wilson, former lead strategist for consumer marketing at Patagonia; Bethany Patten, Senior Associate Director for MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and Maya Spaull, Vice President of apparel and home goods at Fair Trade USA. We also speak with Andrew Kenney, a journalist who got insider access to see how Patagonia is redefining its business processes.

Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For more on the series, go to https://www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast.

In the West African country of Burkina Faso in the 1980s, an 18-year-old boy is killed in the road. Why? A case of meningitis. The meningitis epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa spurred a global race to find a vaccine, led by the founding of the Meningitis Vaccine Project (MVP). This network of doctors, vaccine developers, public health officials, and UN workers converged to develop an inexpensive vaccine – without Big Pharma. Instead, they built teams as an ecosystem of thriving partnerships. In this episode of Teamistry, we hear from the original MVP team and how they persevered despite enormous challenges.

Dr. Samba Sow, Director General of the Centre for Vaccine Development in Mali, Dr. Suresh Jhadav, Executive Director of the Serum Institute of India and Dr. Marc LaForce, then Director of the Meningitis Vaccine Project. We also hear from Dr. Ngozi Erondu, an infectious disease specialist who explains MVP's legacy in building "South-South" collaborations, and Dr. Mark Alderson, project leader at PATH, describes how the team brought the vaccine from labs in one part of the globe to clinics in another.

Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For more on the series, go to https://www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast.

In the desert plains of Northern Kenya, hundreds of people from around the world and different walks of life have gathered. The photographs they take with their GPS-enabled cameras might be humanity's best shot at saving an entire species. This is the story of Wildbook, an artificial intelligence (AI) software program that creates a live database to track animal populations. In this episode of Teamistry, host Gabriela Cowperthwaite discovers how a shared mission, and a shared technology platform supporting the work of diverse teams, is saving animals – and the biodiversity of the planet. 

We hear from Tanya Berger-Wolf, co-founder of Wildbook and Jason Holmberg, co-founder of WildMe, the organization that created and runs Wildbook. We also hear from Rosemary Warungu, zebra project manager at the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya, and Daniel Rubenstein, a behavioural ecologist at Princeton University, as they explain how Wildbook's global community is helping change local attitudes towards the Grevy's zebra — one photo at a time.

Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For more on the series, go to https://www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast.