Highlights From The First Season Of The Leading Wisely Podcast with Ricardo Semler

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LeadWise

5 min readApr 17, 2017

The human experience is truly unique, but there’s one thing that we all experience — Work.

It’s the common thread between us, regardless of age, gender, race, religion or location. We all need to work, but that’s not the reason why we’re stressed. It’s the way we work and the way organizations are built to work.

In the long run, the existing organizational structures and workplace cultures aren’t sustainable and they need to go.

At LeadWise, we’re dedicated to starting a new conversation on self-management and new models for management. That’s what the Leading Wisely podcast aspires to do.

The business leaders, entrepreneurs and management professionals featured on the podcast challenge current company structures and lead the way towards democracy in workplaces.

We questioned why and how personal freedom at the workplace is still an alien concept and found answers from real companies that are successfully people-centric. The first season of the Leading Wisely podcast, hosted by Ricardo Semler, has seen an interesting crop of entrepreneurs like Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson, Tony Hsieh and Rich Sheridan.

These are people who are focused on creating organizations that are liberal, democratic and completely unconventional.

The first season’s full guest list included:

New Ways to Manage

Self-management is clearly on the minds of managers — traditional or otherwise. While it’s a new direction that’s obvious to Millennials, it’s still quite a radical detour from the conventional micromanagement familiar to business leaders and managers of today.

However, many of the leaders on the podcast felt hopeful that more and more traditional managers will embrace self-management in the near future. Soon enough, managers who insist on continuing the old way will be made to feel like dinosaurs. Even government agencies are adopting these unconventional management principles. For example, the Holland health ministry started accepting self-management as the way forward.

Zappos is headed towards a city-like organizational structure according to CEO Tony Hseih.

“The mayor of a city doesn’t actually tell its residents what to do or where to live,” he says in his episode, adding that his employees would be mini-entrepreneurs at the end of this transformative, organizational move.

To him, the holacracy format which Zappos uses to organize itself, isn’t the focus. Instead, it’s a platform that offers enough functionality to support a city-like organizational structure that encourages self-management.

Established companies view new management models as being untested alternatives that they instantly reject. Or, they view these changes as being binary — a flip from total control to total transparency.

Professor and author David Burkus is on a mission to convince such companies that it’s a continuum instead. Eventually, he says, these companies will understand they need to change because the best of their talent would have migrated to companies that have adopted these ‘new-age’ management models.

Changes must be brought in incrementally, according to Burkus. A move like making salary information public, will excite employees for about two weeks, then would settle right into the work culture. He believes the Millennial generation is very open to transparent management models, a clear indication of the future of business.

The Don’t Grow Mantra

At Basecamp, ideas of management, growth and business-mortality are completely opposite to the norm. Co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson started Basecamp back in 1999 and have since been looking at ways to influence startups and small businesses across the U.S. to create calmer work cultures.

For Jason, Fortune 500 companies hold little appeal. Instead, he and David care about the hundreds of startups and the five million small businesses that already exist today. They feel they’d have a greater impact trying to influence the management models of these businesses.

While they accept that a growing business will have to shed the rebellious streaks from its startup days, they advocate containing growth to lessen the stress of running a business.

“Instead of aspiring for your business to go public or grow into a large company, what if we didn’t do those things? What if we had a larger playing field of smaller companies that had a much greater chance to resist these pressures because they just weren’t there?” David asked on the podcast.

He also adds that the creative destruction of irrelevant companies is actually better and that accepting a business’s mortality is a good thing. “Why is it that we are so obsessed with seeking immortality for this one company as though that means anything?” he asks.

Roadmap to the Future

To infuse companies with such radically different ideas, we need to throw out existing ideas of who a “boss” is and how organizations must be run.

For Rich Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations, companies and their teams need to openly share their vision for the future. However, it can’t be abstract and whimsical. Instead, it needs to be highly specific and provide a detailed roadmap to get there. Rich also believes in the scalability of a more people-centric corporate culture.

This first season lay the foundation for what’s to come with our podcast. Each episode and guest brings a fresh approach to change in the workplace and work structures, while also stressing the significance of these changes.

Leading Wisely podcast guests come from various walks of life and have made their careers in different industries, but are all working toward the same goal, which is to change how work works.

To keep up with new podcast episodes and LeadWise articles, sign up now to our free newsletter.

LeadWise believes that we need to change how work works. We do this by offering online courses, in-person workshops and software through an international network of changemakers. Join the movement at www.leadwise.co.

Highlights From The First Season Of The Leading Wisely Podcast with Ricardo Semler

Written by Talia Koren