Boss Level Podcast

Sponsor:Vincit

Sponsored by Vincit.

Thanks to Nordic Business Forum for making the interview happen. And thanks to the sponsor of the season, Vincit.

My guest  is Rutger Bregman from Holland. He's a historian and an author. His books Humankind and Utopia for Realists were both New York Times Bestsellers. You might also know him from a viral video of a speech he did in Davos or from an unaired, but leaked interview with Fox News that completely pissed off the host Tucker Carlson.We discuss how how we should move to a more benevolent view of human nature and how that would change the way we run our companies. Sponsor link:MinnaLearn

Josh Seiden is a designer, strategy consultant, coach, author and speaker. He helps clients launch new products and services, and to create more agile, entrepreneurial organizations. He's the author of Outcomes Over Outputs and co-author of Sense & Respond and Lean UX. We discuss why it's important to focus on the outcomes of the work we do and not on the output. You can learn more about Josh on his website.Sponsor for the episode:- MinnaLearn - Go here to join the exclusive Boss Level study group and get 25% off the price

My guest today is Kati Levoranta. Kati is currently a Partner and Executive Vice President at P2X Solutions. Previously she was the CEO of Rovio and she has a background in law. She's also on the board of Finavia, an airport operator company, Juuri Partners, a private equity company and OP, a large banking group.We talk about what Power-to-X means and how building plants differs from digital services. We talk about contracting, learning and how to keep yourself in good working order.Sponsor link:MinnaLearn

Episode links:Article on Boss Level Podcast in HS VisioOlli SaloSponsor:Swanlake Strategy

Some of topics covered in the discussion are:What's it like negotiating an exit?How does the operating model of a company change as it grows?What are the fundamental balancing acts in product development?Benefits of asynchronous communicationLimits of self-organizationLinks:SwarmiaSmartlyFlowdockSponsor:Swanlake Strategy

An interview with retired US Army general Stanley McChrystal. We talk about how to prepare for risks.This episode is sponsored by Swanlake Strategy. Further listening:My previous interview with Stan McChrystalEeva Vilkkumaa on decision making

Don't not tell anyone.

An interview with John Vanguard, the inventor of 'The Vanguard Method' and managing director of Vanguard consultancy company.

An interview with Timo Lappi, CEO of Heltti and Co-Founder of Fondia.

An interview with Aaron Dignan, the author of Brave New Work.

My guest is Jeff Gothelf, the co-author of Sense and Respond, Lean UX and Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking.

Cliff Hazell on going beyond cargo culting

This is not a regular episode. This one is special. This is an update. And this update holds the future of the podcast.

My guest for this episode is Jussi Markula, a teal mentor, a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of the Teal Finland community. In his daily work at Prominda, Jussi facilitates the exploration of new paradigms in organisations. Idea of a Teal organization was introduced by Fredrick Laloux in 2014 in his book, called Reinventing organisations. The book walks through the evolution of human organizational paradigms and then discusses the most advanced one to date, dubbed Teal. Jussi helps us delve a little deeper in to the breakthroughs that enabled teal organizations to come to life.

My guest for this episode is Barry O’Reilly, who’s one of the authors of Lean Enterprise that discusses how high performance organisations innovate at scale. What’s especially interesting to me about Barry’s experience is that he’s worked a lot with large organisations. He’s for example the founder of ExecCamp, where he takes executives to retreats lasting up to 8 weeks, and helps them disrupt their own businesses. We talk about how organisations can transform their culture to support experimentation and better decision making. Barry also highlights couple of insights from his newest book, Unlearn.

My guest for this episode is Gary Hamel, one of the biggest names in the field of strategy. Gary started working with strategy in the beginning of the 1980’s and has since released a bunch of groundbreaking articles and books on the topic. For example, the terms strategic intent and core competency were popularized by him and his colleagues. We talk about what makes strategies successful, how hierarchies affect organizations and what Gary thinks about bureaucracy. There is also a new segment introduced in the second half of the podcast, hope you like it!

My first guest for the seventh season is Eeva Vilkkumaa, Assistant Professor at the Aalto University School of Business. She studies decision making and resource allocation at companies and public organizations. We talk about how companies can develop mathematical models to support their decision making. Eeva emphasises the importance of co-creation when building decision making models. She thinks that if people are not involved on building the model or don't understand the principles behind the model, the results are not going to be great. Hope you enjoy episode!

My guest for this episode is Kaisa Hietala, who's working as an executive vice president for renewable products at Neste. Neste currently makes half of its profits from renewable products and the shift towards this state has been made during the last 10 years. We talk about changing the oil industry inside. What have been the most important lessons Kaisa has learned during her years at Neste? What kind of journey has the developing renewable product line been? Has the transformation to using renewable products been hard? Kaisa also reveals that 20 years ago she could have become a researcher in climate change. What made her to join an oil company instead? This is the last episode of Boss Level Podcast before summer break. Season 7 starts on September. If you want to enjoy the podcast during summer break, just tune again in to your favorite episodes. You're most likely to find some new thoughts and ideas, that you've missed during the first time. Or just start the whole show from beginning ;) We wish a great summer to all the listeners of Boss Level Podcast!

My guest for this episode is Leyla Acaroglu, who calls herself sustainability provocateur and cultural protagonist. She has developed the Disruptive Design Method, an approach to design-led social change. In Boss Level Podcast, we've often talked about systems thinking, but mostly in the context of organizations. With Leyla, we're going to take a look at systems on a much bigger scale: we talk about the systems that sustain life on earth and how we can use design to make our life on earth more sustainable.

My guest for this episode is Troy Hunt, well known security expert and creator of haveibeenpwned.com. It's a service which allows you to check, whether your email has been leaked as a part of a data breach. We talk about online security, including securing your accounts and using a password manager. We also discuss about privacy and compare our thoughts on social media platforms, messaging applications and encryption. What kind of trade-offs people should make to be more private? What is a pragmatic standpoint on privacy? What is the balance between convenience and privacy? Listen to the episode, tell us what you think! Also remember to check if you have an account that has been compromised in a data breach.

Today's topic is personal productivity and my guest is David Allen, author of Getting Things Done. Getting Things Done - often referred to as GTD - is a time management method, described in a book of the same title. It helps you capture all the stuff floating around in your brain, process it into your next actions and projects and then just get them done. The method has significantly improved productivity of probably millions of people. I read the book roughly 10 years ago and have since applied it pretty much every day. It has helped me to get stuff done and to feel less stressed about stuff. In this episode, we walk through some of David's history and talk about how he came up with the ideas and models behind Getting Things Done method. We also cover the basics of the method itself and give some tips on how to get better at it. If you're interested in learning more about the Getting Things Done method, I strongly urge you to find the book and read it.

My guest for this episode is Björn Wahlroos, one of the most influential businessman in Finland. He's currently the chairman of the board at Sampo Group, Nordea and UPM-Kymmene. Björn talks about his background in academia and how it has affected his world view. He also points out what are the defining moments in his career that have made significant impact in his thinking. We also talk about hardness of making big decisions and about the way we should run organizations. Björn also tells what kind of skills he values in leaders. Björn is known to have pretty strong opinions, and he doesn't exactly hold back in expressing them. Listen to the episode and tell us what you think!

My guest today is Joshua Kerievsky, the CEO of Industrial Logic, a Modern Agile consultancy. He has also started the Modern Agile community and has been a prominent figure in the agile community since the early days. His background is in software, but through his experience in agile methods, he has worked on a much broader range than just the software. We walk through some of Joshua's history and talk a bit about how that came out in the form of Modern Agile community. We'll finish with a topic of curiosity, which - according to Joshua - is a superpower.

My guest for this episode is Annu Nieminen, the CEO and founder of The Upright Project. We talk about Annu's work history at McKinsey's and Kasvuryhmä and about Annu's newest project, The Upright Project. Currently we measure companies using mainly financial indicators and, obviously, that’s just one piece of the pie. The Upright Project is trying to fix that and is working on building ways to measure the impact of companies more holistically. Basically they’re hoping to create a set of metrics for the companies impact on the environment, on knowledge, on society and on the health of its employees. I met Annu some years ago and I really enjoy having discussions with her since she is sharp as a knife and very passionate about her work. Hope you enjoy this episode too!

For this episode, my guest is Christopher Avery, the man behind The Responsibility Process. The Responsibility Process is a model to help you recognize unproductive mental states and help you take responsibility. I learned about The Responsibility Process from Christopher roughly 7 years ago and it has stayed with me since. It’s one of my go-to tools personally and I often use it with teams. We discussed about how one can learn to use The Responsibility Process and how it is useful model for both individuals and teams.

My first guest for the season is Teemu Arina. Teemu is a biohacker, a technologist, an entrepreneur and he was recently selected as Public Speaker of the Year in Finland.

My guest is Markku Kulmala. Markku is one of the most prominent scientists in the world in the field of atmospheric and earth system sciences. At University of Helsinki, he leads a research group that has more than 35 published papers in journals Nature and Science. Markku is the person you want to learn from on the topic of climate change research. We talk about how they do their research, what their initial results show and how they’re hoping the results help humankind fight climate change.

For this episode, my guest is Henrik Kniberg. Henrik is a prominent figure in the agile community. If you’ve seen the video on Spotify engineering culture, that video is created by him. He has also authored several books on agile. Henrik is also one of the early guests of the the podcast and the previous episode we did was about two years ago. Back then we discussed Henrik’s agile coaching work at Lego and Spotify and how he helped his kids win a robot battle against experienced programmers. But now, recently, he has shifted his professional focus towards something more important. He’s focusing on reducing the impact of climate change. We talk about how to be climate neutral, how to invest in climate projects, the community Henrik is running called Climate Crisplet, and how companies should deal with climate change.

Today Boss Level Podcast is covering one of the biggest problems in the world, poverty. My guest is Leila Janah who runs two companies aimed at helping the extremely poor by giving them work. One of her companies, Samasource, provides digital work in developing countries, and the other, LXMI, is an organic and fair trade skin care brand employing women. In addition to talking about businesses, we discuss how companies can measure impact.

I’m interviewing Bjarte Bogsnes. Bjarte is one of the key people behind the adaptive management model called Beyond Budgeting. If there’s one person you want to learn about Beyond Budgeting from, it’s Bjarte. Bjarte is one of the key people who have been leading Statoil’s journey from traditional corporate budgeting to a completely new management style. Along the way, he’s authored books on the things he has learned. What’s good to know before we get started is that despite the name, Beyond Budgeting is not only about getting rid of budgeting. It is a new approach to management that emphasizes empowerment and adaptivity. Beyond Budgeting’s 12 principles cover topics such as purpose, values, transparency, autonomy, targets and resource allocation. It is much larger than just budgets.

This is my interview with Harri Valpola. Harri is the CEO of Curious AI, a Helsinki-based 20 person startup that’s aiming to build a general artificial intelligence. Now that’s a pretty bold goal when Facebook’s head of AI research just recently said that in terms of general intelligence, we’re not even close to a rat. Harri is a respected researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. He knows his stuff. The previous company he founded, ZenRobotics, builds robots so that’s pretty cool too. We talk about what general artificial intelligence would be like, whether we should try to simulate the human brain or not and how curiosity is a great guide in life.

Today’s guest is Bengt Holmström. Bengt is Finnish, but he’s spent the last 40 years living in the US. Currently he’s a professor of economics at MIT. Bengt was recently awarded the Nobel prize in economic sciences together with his Harvard colleague Oliver Hart for their contribution to contract theory. Essentially, Bengt has spent decades studying incentives and trying to figure out how to design better incentive structures. This has been a recurring theme on the podcast so I’m sure you can appreciate how excited I am to have Bengt on as a guest. We talk about what it feels like to win the Nobel prize, incentives (obviously), and how transparency isn’t necessarily always a good thing.

Today’s topic is machine learning and I’m talking to one of the brightest minds in the field, Hilary Mason. She’s the founder of Fast Forward Labs, a machine intelligence research company. She also advises startups through Accel, a prominent venture capital firm. If you’re interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning, I’m pretty sure you’ll love this episode.

While I was in Australia in June to keynote the Agile Australia conference I had the privilege to interview Troy Magennis. When I first heard Troy speak at a conference years ago I remember how impressed I was with his deep understanding of the mathematics involved in forecasting. After listening to this episode I think you’ll be equally impressed. Troy is the founder of Focused Objective, a consultancy that helps companies with forecasting, portfolio planning, risk management and metric selection. We talk about why 3 to 7 recent samples is often better than thousands of samples from last year, how we need several opposing metrics to prevent local optimization and how we’ve lost the art of post mortems. Troy has a ton of resources that are freely available for you to download and try out. For example, you might like the team dashboard Troy has built. After listening to the episode you can use his tools to take your forecasting to the boss level.

My guest today is Katri Saarikivi. Katri is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Helsinki. She studies empathy in digital environments. Essentially she’s trying to figure out how we could better express ourselves in digital conversations.

Today, I’m chatting with Sara Öhrvall. Sara is the Co-founder and Senior Advisor at Mindmill Network. Mindmill helps companies understand how digital technologies impact their business. Before Mindmill Sara was the Senior Vice President of R&D at the Bonnier Group. Sara sits on several boards. For example, she’s on the board of SEB, a Nordic corporate bank and Investor, the leading owner of Nordic-based international companies. She also writes a column for Dagens Industri, which is the financial daily of Sweden. In 2017 Sara was selected for Wired’s list of 50 most inspiring female influencers from across Europe. She’s one of the best and brightest women in technology. We talk about the impact technology will have on people and businesses and how our companies should adapt to that change.

John Seddon is the inventor of The Vanguard Method. The Vanguard Method is a way of helping organizations move from command and control towards systems design. Seddon is the author of books such as Freedom from Command and Control and The Whitehall Effect. He’s currently working on a book titled Beyond Command and Control. Seddon’s work has provoked a lot of thought and has significantly deepened my understanding of how organizations function. We talk about organizations as systems, value and failure demand, incentives, system conditions, budgeting and how the system drives behavior.

Today's guest is Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay is an online index of digital content often used for sharing copyrighted material such as movies, TV shows or music. The Pirate Bay is possibly one of the world’s most resilient websites, since the authorities have been trying to take it down for more than a decade and yet it’s still running. ince The Pirate Bay Peter has worked on several things, such as Flattr, a way of making micropayments to content creators and Njalla, a privacy-oriented domain registrar. We discuss how Peter got into The Pirate Bay, how The Pirate Bay operated, what the trial was like and what Peter is up to nowadays.

For this episode I sat down for a chat with Tim Hwang. Tim has been labeled by Forbes magazine as the ’Busiest Man on the Internet’. First, he started ROFLcon, which stands for Rolling On the Floor Laughing Conference. It was a conference that studied internet culture through memes. After ROFLcon, he founded The Awesome Foundation For Arts And Sciences. The foundation’s sole aim is to promote awesomeness in the universe. It has donated over 2,5 million dollars to various projects through grants. The foundation operates through autonomous chapters that independently fund the grants and make decisions on recipients. He then started a law firm called Robot, Robot and Hwang to study how lawyers could be automated. Currently he advises Google on the impacts of artificial intelligence on public policy. Tim has done a lot considering he just turned 30. At the end of the interview I asked him what his next project is going to be and his answer was not exactly the kind of answer you normally get.

My guest today is Risto Siilasmaa. Risto is first and foremost an entrepreneur and a paranoid optimist. He’s the founder and former CEO of cybersecurity company F-Secure. His current role in the company is Chairman of the Board. Risto is also Chairman of the Board at Nokia. He took on the role in 2012 when Nokia was in a very difficult situation and actually one topics we discuss is how he came to accept the offer. We start off with Risto’s programming background, then move on to the early days of F-Secure and explore how the company was founded and how it grew. Regarding Nokia, we talk about the people side of the transformation Risto has led, the disadvantages of being a public company and whether structures drive behavior or the other way around.

Start of the new, fourth season! My first guest for this season is James Hewitt. James is the Head of Science and Innovation at Hintsa Performance. He’s a sports scientist and performance coach searching for fresh perspectives and new approaches to enhance the performance of people, products and projects. We talk about the Circle of Better Life, which is a model that covers all the important aspects of well-being. We talk about the science behind the methods they use and new and interesting research in measuring cognitive load in knowledge work. Towards the end you’ll hear some pretty simple tips for improving your brain’s performance.

As is suitable for the season finale, I have a very special guest. I’m interviewing retired four-star general Stan McChrystal. Former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates described McChrystal as "perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat”. McChrystal took command of an elite military organization, Joint Special Operations Task Force, and transformed it from a rigid hierarchy to a network of autonomous teams. The teams were encouraged to act autonomously as long as their actions served the purpose and were not immoral or illegal. For such a high level of autonomy to function the organization had to start sharing data extensively in order to create a shared concisousness. The story of the transformation is laid out in the book Team of Teams. What I especially love about the story is that it basically takes away all the excuses. If a military bureauacracy can transform itself to an agile network of teams, so can any business organization, no matter how large or traditional.

My guest is Sari Baldauf. Sari was selected as the most influential female executive in the year 1998 by Fortune magazine. In 2002 the Wall Street Journal named Baldauf as Europe's most successful female executive. Sari joined Nokia in 1983 and held several executive positions there. From 1998 to 2005 she was the General Manager of Nokia’s Networks business. She sat on the Executive Board of Nokia from 1994 until January 2005. In the end of 2004 she resigned from Nokia for personal reasons. Since then she’s moved on to become a respected board professional, working as the chairwoman of the board at Fortum, the Finnish energy giant, and as a member of the board at Daimler, among other roles. We talk about her defining moments, her happiest and saddest times during her career and her lessons learned on strategy and leadership.

In this episode I’m interviewing Joshua Spodek. He teaches leadership at New York University, has a PhD in astrophysics and does burpees everyday. I think that’s a pretty amazing one line description for anyone. His book Leadership Step by Step will be released in a couple of weeks. We talk about his principles for getting things done, his routines, his views on leadership, and we do a five minute walk-through of his book. We end the interview with some empathy and book recommendations.

My guest is Akiko Naka. She is the CEO of Wantedly, a Japanese social recruiting platform with 1,2 million monthly active users and a 100 employees. She’s passionate about helping people find work they love doing. We discuss her bold career moves, Wantedly’s business, decision making in organizations and strategies for finding a job you love.

If I’m concerned about privacy, my guest today is probably ten times more so. Aral is an activist, a designer and a software developer. He’s one of the founders of Indie, a tiny social enterprise working for social justice in the digital age. He’s also the man behind the Ethical Design Manifesto. We talk about Aral’s view on the evolution of computing, current business models of cloud services and venture capital. We cover the Ethical Design Manifesto and its implications on the software we build.

An interview with Jim Benson, the creator of Personal Kanban and Lean Coffee. We delve into Personal Kanban, which is an approach to dealing with the overload of stuff you need to deal with. We dig into into its two simple rules, visualizing work and limiting work in progress. We then walk through Lean Coffee, which is a simple and effective way to run your meetings. In the end we discuss Jim’s lessons on collaboration from his years in working to improve it in organizations.

On this episode I’m interviewing Simon Wardley and we’re talking about Wardley maps, which are Simon’s method for co-creating strategy with visual and context-specific maps.