The Pay-It-Forward Society

There is always a first time. Mark Seager is the one who gave me the opportunity to embark on this new journey. Little did I know at that time, that it was a major career switch. 

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Kris Howard and I work together at Amazon, in the same organization called AWS Developer Relations. I have experienced first hand how she is a human leader. This is not an episode about Amazon - although we shared a few experiences, and learnings we have had since we joined the company - but an opportunity to learn for a great leader.

Kris shared with us her journey as a manager, the challenges she faced along the way, and how she became a servant leader for an international team distributed in Asia Pacific.

Kris shared a few tips on how to drive 1:1s (find your flow!) and hiring, the importance of recognizing your blind spots, the value of collaborative leadership and, finally how she found out about Women in Tech.

We talked about her TED talk on knitting and coding, a fun, highly geek, and engaging presentation that I recommend.

Kris also talked about Contempt Culture.

Intro Music: credits Dyalla

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In this episode, Romain interviews Nicolas Cazeneuve">Nicolas Cazeneuve, a leader and CEO of EasyMovie">EasyMovie. He has an extensive background in the tech industry. Nicolas shares his experiences, insights, and lessons he has learned throughout his career.

Nicolas reveals that a degree in philosophy helped him develop a methodology that is useful when approaching problems. He also discusses his mentors and how they helped him accelerate his growth. Nicolas emphasizes the importance of spending time with a mentor to explore a problem together, which drives progress.

Nicolas also shares his strategies for learning and improving, which include reading books, listening to podcasts, and trying many things. He believes in the power of informal conversations to learn new things and meet new people. Nicolas also shares his insights on how to approach mentorship and how to challenge the way you look at things.

Throughout the episode, Nicolas emphasizes the value of exploring new ideas, taking risks, and learning from your mistakes. Nicolas's experiences and insights provide valuable lessons for anyone interested in leadership and personal growth.

You can contact Nicolas via LinkedIn; by the way, you will discover towards the end of the episode how he is leveraging the platform to learn, and grow…

00:00-Intro

01:40-Presentation

02:50-Bootstrapping

09:50-Hiring the first employee

14:00-Putting a structure in place

16:00-First line managers & career paths

20:40-Managing a distributed team in 2012

29:10-Having a vision

32:00-defining the values in an authentic way.

36:40-Having leadership principles as actionable mental models to build your company’s culture

42:40-Becoming manager of managers

46:15-Growing Individual Contributors into managers

52:10-Hiring new talents aligned to your Principles

1:01:20-Key principles of thriving teams

1:06:25-Scaling through others

1:18:20-Being a philosopher and entrepreneur

1:21:16-Mentorship

1:29:00-How do you grow?

1:40:02-Give a review and 5 stars :-)

Books we mentioned during the episode

Marc Benioff’s Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry

Jeff Lawson’s Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century

Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game

The Phoenix Project

The Power Of Habits

Working Backwards

Build: An Unorthodox Guide To Making Things Worth Making

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I met Amanda Spencer in a previous company, Riverbed. It was great to catch up and discuss her journey into leadership.

Throughout her career journey, Amanda has learned that if you want something, you've got to go and get it, and that the best leaders are the ones who don't sit and wait for things to happen, but go and make them happen.

We talked about

Amanda recommended some books: Brene Brown’s Braving the Wilderness, How to Lead and Atomic Habits

Intro Music: credits Dyalla

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