As Discussed...

In this episode of As Discussed... , I'm joined by Jessie Zwaan — VP of People Strategy and Operations at Leapsome and author of Built for People and Purpose and Work — to dig into the gap between the purpose companies advertise and the work people actually live. Jessie's argument cuts against a lot of HR orthodoxy. Most people don't come to work for the company mission, and pretending they do cre...

In this episode of As Discussed... , I'm joined by Andrea LaRowe - Director of People Operations at 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and Hey - to find out how a high-trust, low-control company runs day to day. Andrea's core argument: stop tying pay to performance and you strip a layer of politics out of work. 37signals benchmarks salaries once a year to the 90th percentile of the San Francis...

Episode description In this episode of As Discussed... , I'm joined by Megan Bernard-May - founder of Pollinate XD, co-creator of the PX Dojo, and the person who led people experience at the BBC - to dig into what it means to treat the experience of work the way a UX designer treats a product. Meg's core argument: people experience is another flavor of experience design. Traditional HR builds arou...

In this episode of As Discussed... , I'm joined by Dart Lindsley - founder of 11Fold, host of the Work for Humans podcast, and former head of business architecture for HR at Cisco Systems - to dig into the idea of work as a product. Dart's core argument: companies have spent a century misclassifying their workforce. Employees fit the definition of customers, people who choose every day whether to...

Alfie Kohn has spent decades dismantling the assumption that rewards work. His research across education, parenting, and the workplace remains some of the most rigorous and underread work on human motivation - required reading for anyone serious about how people actually behave. Punished by Rewards is the place to start, and it should sit on every compensation professional's shelf. In this convers...

Robyn Shutak is a Partner at Infinite Equity and one of the sharpest minds in equity compensation. She joins me to talk about what happens when equity stops working the way it was designed to - and whether it was ever designed well in the first place. We get into underwater equity and the real cost of doing nothing about it. Vesting schedules built for a tenure reality that no longer exists. The g...

ICYMI Kim Minnick, Kim Rohrer, and I lost a debate on pay for performance recently. We were debating against Mark Frein, Jessica Zwaan, and their team captain, Matt McFarlane. The whole thing was moderated by the amazing Jessie Schofer. So we regrouped to chat about what we might have done better, discuss some of the reactions, and we meandered into other areas too. We got into the history of how...

Stefan Gaertner has been thinking about pay equity longer than most people have known it was a problem. He's a long-time friend, colleague, and one of the sharpest minds in the field - so when I get him on the show, we have a lot to talk about. In this episode, we get into the uneven global landscape of pay equity legislation and what that patchwork means for multinational employers trying to buil...

Luke O'Mahoney is the founder of SapienX, a platform of content, courses, and community for what he calls the "post-HR generation." His central argument is that People teams should operate like Product teams - designing, measuring, and iterating on the employee experience rather than administering it through siloed functions. We dig into the limitations of the Ulrich model - the framework that spl...

This episode with Tom Hill goes into the changing landscape of Salesforce effectiveness, highlighting the shift from a transactional role to a more consultative role. It explores the impact of AI and stakeholder management on sales, as well as the shift to team-based decision-making in the sales process. The conversation delves into the challenges of aligning sales with organizational goals, the c...

The conversation delves into the complexities of sales compensation, debunking myths about seller motivation, and exploring the challenges of modern sales models. It emphasizes the importance of understanding customer segmentation, sales process, and product-market fit before designing sales incentives. The role of technology in trapping uncertainty and the significance of data-driven quota settin...

In this episode, I wanted to share with you a sample from the upcoming audiobook recording of my book, What Pay Costs. I also wanted to take the opportunity to introduce myself and share a bit about why I started this podcast, and what you can expect to hear. What Pay Costs and my guide to sales compensation, Nothing Left to Take Away, are both available on Amazon in physical and Kindle editions,...

In this conversation I pepper Dan Walter with questions about the evolution of equity compensation, highlighting the early days of equity distribution and the impact of IPOs on equity compensation. We also explore the challenges in valuing equity, the impact of high valuations on equity compensation, and the use of equity as a wealth creation tool. We discuss the use of equity as a differentiating...