Podcast appearances and mentions of phil abernathy

A Vancouver, Washington man accidentally dropped his wedding ring into Lake Tahoe during his wedding ceremony. It slipped right out of his hands, through the cracks of the dock and into the water. The couple could see the ring sitting on a rock about 15 feet deep and 40 feet off shore. Marlee, the soon-to-be wife told KTXL that instead of jumping into the water and finishing the ceremony, the couple turned to Facebook. Andrew Kent, the groom made a post on a “Tahoe Scuba Divers” page hoping a member wold make the trip to grab his ring. “Is there anyone in this group that would be willing to help us out?” Kent asked on March 12. “Or if anyone knows anybody that could lend a hand? Any help is appreciated!” The responses were positively overwhelming with many divers wanting to help. As soon as the administrator for the Facebook group Phil Abernathy read the post, he knew he wanted to help. “I knew that I would have some free time the following morning, and I genuinely love to dive,” Abernathy told McClatchy News. “I have done many different training courses. So It’s nice to be able to use the skills that I have trained.” Abernathy dove into the water and returned the ring safely back to the ecstatic couple. “At that moment the feeling of joy was one that no words can describe,” said Abernathy happily. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From around the globe to out your backdoor, here are the topics to keep you relevant and up-to-date!  National News: - Vail Resorts is not planning on using a reservation system for guests next season. CEO Rob Katz states that the system was only created in light of COVID-19, and he plans on it not being needed for next season. Also announced was a Kit Lender partnership providing head to toe rental ski/snowboard gear. - Disney says its two California theme parks will reopen on April 30 - at 15% capacity. One catch - no screaming allowed on any rides or roller coasters - Outside Lands is officially scheduled to happen this year, on Halloween weekend, Oct. 29-31 in Golden Gate Park, SF! Headliners include: Lizzo, Glass Animals, The Strokes, The Strokes, Vampire Weekend, Tame Impala and more!  - Amazon becomes the #1 clothing retailer in the US, unseating Walmart. We're talking $41B+ worth of apparel sold in 2020. This represents a highly impressive 11%-12% share of all apparel sold in the U.S. and 34%-35% share of all apparel sold online. To put this in perspective, Amazon sold almost 7x as much apparel/footwear as the second largest player online (Macy’s) - Anyone who shows a vaccine card at a participating Krispy Kreme gets a free glazed donut. The "best" part? The offer is valid until the end of 2021, so a vaccinated person could theoretically obtain a free glazed donut every day for the next 284 days. Brands have struggled to strike the right tone throughout the pandemic. But supporting the vaccine rollout so everyone can return to normal life is like saying you love fluffy puppies—not particularly controversial! - Partly as a result of hiring Blue Shield to run vaccine distribution, California’s COVID-19 response will cost $2 billion more than projected, with the state estimated to spend more than $15 billion through 2022, according to figures released last week by Newsom’s Department of Finance…. California appears to be the only state to have hired a health insurer to run its vaccine distribution — and it seems Blue Shield may have been chosen largely because of its lengthy relationship with Newsom. Over the past 16 years, Blue Shield has given nearly $23 million to the governor’s campaigns and special causes Local News: - Had some crazy activity the past week for the SLTPD – Sunday morning a stabbing suspect was arrested but this was after he smashed a police car window with a claw hammer. The stabbing victim said he was hanging at the redbox when someone jumped on their back and stabbed them with a metal drywall saw – this was on the heels of an incident that happened Friday morning where on Orangevale man shot at SLTPD officers with an assault rifle. The man was spotted trying to break into a room at the Three Peaks Resort – the suspect was shot, but does not believed to be life threatening 
- Everyone’s dream scenario happened this past week at Harrah’s – a person from Orangevale sat down at the three card poker table and on their first hand drew a straight flush and won a progressive jackpot worth $251,175 
- The TRPA released the final draft of the transportation plan and based on the projects that need to be done vs. the amount of budget there is to do them, the gap is a whopping $1B – keep in mind this is over the next 25 years and there are some pretty aggressive goals. The TRPA will be holding public meetings so people will get the opportunity to learn more but it will go to vote on April 28 & will include an additional member of the Forest Service so that the TRP can push federal funding into Tahoe Basin transportation projects.
- In a feel-good story from last week, a Washington state couple that had come to Tahoe to tie the knot, were doing so out on the pier at Sugar Pine Beach and when it came time to pull out the ring, it fell through the cracks of the pier – but, not to fear, local scuba diver Phil Abernathy came to the rescue and was able to find the ring being guarded by a crawdad 

Clarity of purpose, control without controlling, and designing for flow – these are three capabilities that are essential for Agile leaders to possess, according to Agile trainer and coach, Phil Abernathy. “Empowered teams are more dangerous if there is no clarity…[and are] nothing more than powerful horses pulling in different directions,” says Abernathy. The difference between good companies and great companies is discipline – they are not chaotic. Complex structures will always result in complex processes and inefficient controls because leaders believe in the biggest lie – that multitasking is efficient and effective. The idea is to work on one or two things at the same time, maximum. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Henrik Gruber hosts at the Business Agility Conference in Vienna, Austria. The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Connect with us on social media!  Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped  Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped  Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Melissa Perri on Deliver It, Jenny Tarwater, Laura Powers, Linda Podder, and Cheryl Hammond on Agile Uprising, Michael Sippey on Product Love, Ryan Jacoby on Scrum Master Toolbox, and Phil Abernathy on Engineering Culture by InfoQ. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting April 29, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. MELISSA PERRI ON DELIVER IT CAST The Deliver It Cast podcast featured Melissa Perri with host Cory Bryan. They discussed Melissa’s book Escaping The Build Trap and what motivated her to spend three years writing it. Melissa says she wrote it because she found herself answering the same questions about product management over and over again. They talked about what the build trap is (project-oriented, no product managers, spinning up teams for CEOs that prioritize work, never talking to customers, and getting rewarded for shipping features) and how demoralizing it can be. They talked about Stephen Bungay’s The Art Of Action and his notion of the knowledge gap, the alignment gap, and the effects gap, and Melissa told a story of how she applied these concepts for a client by introducing ways to address these gaps by learning how to communicate strategic intent. Melissa says she always hears from her clients that their CEOs and leaders care about points and velocity but she says that this is only because they have don’t know how else to measure success. When you give them goals that they can relate to, they no longer need to latch onto points and velocity. I particularly liked what Melissa said about getting leaders to work together as a team by getting rid of individual goals. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ep85-escaping-the-build-trap-with-melissa-perri/id966084649?i=1000434062102 Website link: http://deliveritcast.com/ep85-escaping-the-build-trap-with-melissa-perri JENNY TARWATER, LAURA POWERS, LINDA PODDER, AND CHERYL HAMMOND ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Jenny Tarwater, Laura Powers, Linda Podder, and Cheryl Hammond with host Chris Murman. They talked about the Women In Agile community and events and what they have learned so far. Cheryl said that they have learned that there is interest among all genders to learn about Women In Agile and get involved in the pre-conferences. Laura learned that it was giving her an opportunity to pay it forward to the next generation. Linda described being a recipient of what Laura has been paying forward and Jenny talked about meeting people through these events who helped her both professionally and personally. She also described how the huge number of attendees of the main conference that Women In Agile is attached to makes her feel lost and how the pre-conference helps her ease into the conference community. They talked about the Launching New Voices program and how it provides a stage and mentoring on how to give a talk to create a more diverse body of speakers. Linda was a protégé in the 2017 program and she described how it taught her not only how to present her topic but also taught her the psychology behind it so that she could help her audience internalize her message. Laura described being a mentor in the program and I loved what she said about authenticity. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/women-in-agile-2019/id1163230424?i=1000434352507 Website link: http://agileuprising.libsyn.com/women-in-agile-2019 MICHAEL SIPPEY ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Michael Sippey with host Eric Boduch. Michael Sippey became VP of product at Medium after spending some time running product for LiveJournal at SixApart and at Twitter. He was also one of the first bloggers. They talked about how many of these early blogging technologies developed into today’s modern social media platforms and how Michael wishes he could have thought more about the downsides of the technologies and planned for them. This led to a discussion of scenario planning and the the natural tendency towards optimism that product people have. They talked about the history of Twitter and some of the reasoning behind the restrictions Twitter introduced in their API in 2012 and some of the improvements Medium is making now to prevent amplification of low quality content. Then they got into a discussion of hypotheses and hypothesis testing as being fundamental to product management. Michael encourages his product managers to have hypotheses that are bold enough that the users are going to notice and that will drive enough change that it is worth the development time to pursue it. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/michael-sippey-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-hypotheses/id1343610309?i=1000434598454 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/productcraft/michael-sippey-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-hypotheses RYAN JACOBY ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Ryan Jacoby with host Vasco Duarte. Vasco started by by asking Ryan about his book, Making Progress - The 7 Responsibilities of an Innovation Leader. Ryan described the seven responsibilities as: 1) define progress, 2) set an innovation agenda, 3) create and support teams that build, 4) cultivate the ingredients of successful innovation (customer insights, well-defined problem statements, strategic questions, and ways of communicating evidence of what works and what doesn’t), 5) give great feedback, 6) inspire progress, and 7) reward progress. Vasco asked about how Scrum Masters can contribute to innovation. Ryan suggests picking some of the techniques they discussed, applying them to your team, and then sharing them widely. He then referenced Teresa Amabile’s work on finding out what makes people happy and work. He says that by helping your team make progress, you will be improving morale and people’s job satisfaction. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/bonus-ryan-jacoby-on-7-responsibilities-innovation/id963592988?i=1000434879127 Website link: http://scrummastertoolbox.libsyn.com/bonus-ryan-jacoby-on-the-7-responsibilities-of-an-innovation-leader PHIL ABERNATHY ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Phil Abernathy with host Shane Hastie. Phil talked about how happier employees make for happier customers. For producing happier employees, he starts with purpose, autonomy, and mastery as popularized by Dan Pink and he adds fairness. He distinguishes between fairness and equality. He says employees don’t expect equality — there are different levels of capability, maturity, experience, and salary but this is not seen as unfair. They then talked about org structures, going back to Conway’s law and how it relates to complexity. Phil talked about the KPI-driven organizations today that take anything that is not working and put a vice president in charge of it. This leads to things like having a head of “digital.” He asks, “What’s the difference between the IT department and this new digital department?” Nobody can explain it. He says that this obfuscation of accountability and responsibility is at the heart of complex structures and that instead we should copy the great companies. They all have small, simple, loosely-coupled teams delivering a service to a direct customer group, internal or external. Phil says people confuse empowerment and self-direction with no management and no direction. He says there needs to be a hierarchy, but it should be flat, with spans of control over ten. He has a metric he calls the bureaucracy mass index, which is the ratio of enablers such as managers to total employees. A healthy BMI is typically around 10% and in some companies he sees BMIs as high as 45%. He says healthier BMIs lead to happier customers and happier companies. Regarding the structure of the work itself, Phil says too many companies he works with are overloaded. The reason for the lack of prioritization is a lack of strategic clarity: there’s a digital strategy, an innovation strategy, IT transformation strategy and no one can figure out the real strategy. A simple strategy that can be explained in three to five bullet points does not exist. He then got into a description of OKRs and how they are developed collaboratively. The companies who get these right, he says, don’t have a prioritization problem. Last, he adds leadership style because structuring the organization and structuring the work is not enough. A good leadership style, he says, is based on an agreed set of values like trust, respect, transparency, courage, and experimentation. Every organization says they have these values but they don’t all practice them. He says it comes down to holding people accountable. He references Patrick Lencioni’s work on having trust at the foundation and he connected this to accountability and results. He says that the courage of senior leadership to call people out for breaking the values is the deciding factor. He then related this all to Carol Dweck’s book Mindset. This interview is only twenty minutes long, but Phil doesn’t waste a single word. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/phil-abernathy-on-employee-happiness-bureaucracy-mass/id1161431874?i=1000435046419 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/phil-abernathy-on-employee-happiness-and-the-bureaucracy-mass-index FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. 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In this Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Phil Abernathy about his work helping organisations focus on employee happiness to drive customer happiness and shareholder return and the Bureaucracy Mass Index as a tool to identify where companies are bloated and ineffective. He also spoke about what’s needed for real transformation. Why listen to this podcast: • Great companies are realising that in order to attract great talent you have to have a great place to work • If you have complex systems and complex processes, the root cause will be complex structures • The organisational BMI – the Bureaucracy Mass Index, the proportion of enablers to doers. A healthy BMI is around 10%, whereas in many organisations it gets to be as high as 40% • Having clear objectives that are visible to the while organisation enables good decision making; Objectives and Key Results are one tool to achieve this • Organization transformation must include mindset and culture as well as structure and roles More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2XhBYCO You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Check the landing page on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/2XhBYCO

Phil Abernathy is an Agile Leadership Coach as well as the founder and CEO of Purple Candor. His talk at the first-ever Business Agility 2017 conference is called "Structuring Your Business for Agility". Phil walks us through the maze of systemic organizational structures and processes of today's businesses. Seeing IT's successes with Agile, business and leadership are pulling it in and layering it on existing structures without realizing that they are setting themselves up to fail. With the KPI madness that gave rise to heads of innovation and service, Phil imagines "we will have a head of Business Agility". And at the bottom of all these heads is a single person, a Bob or Mary, who is completely lost. In this maze there are maze runners: individuals who know the bureaucracy and processes so well, they "know how to chase the work through the maze to get it done". Phil commiserates that "we still stick with the manufacturing, industrial era models to run in the knowledge-based economy" - but change is happening. With Agile, leaders are finally able to see the maze for what it is and, Phil believes, we're all in a good place to do something about it.SolutionsIQ Chief Technical Officer Evan Campbell hosts at the inaugural Business Agility 2017 in New York City.About Agile AmpedThe Agile Amped podcast series brings Agile news and events to life. Fueled by inspiring conversations, innovative ideas, and in-depth analysis of enterprise agility, Agile Amped provides on-the-go learning – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe!Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www2.solutionsiq.com/subscribe...Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook