Culture Makers

Matt Defina is an organisational psychologist and program manager at The Man Cave - a preventative mental health and emotional intelligence charity that empowers boys to become great men. Through extensive study and work, Matt has explored how to create organisations and communities that bring out the best in people and now he does that at The Man Cave, ensuring the culture is evolving and scaling...

Callum Morrison is a commercial and solutions focused HR generalist who is passionate about building great leaders, creating engaged teams and vibrant workplace cultures. He grew up around business with entrepreneurial parents and knew early on that his 'sweet spot' would involve developing people, building cultures and delivering change and he set about getting both the theoretical frameworks and...

Dr Rachel Nowak wanted to be a farmer. She studied agricultural science, then fell in love with research and recognised that a lot of great research never made it out into the world, to become really useful and have an impact on our lives. So she set about changing that, becoming an award-winning investigative journalist. Now, as Director, Research Marketing and Communications at the University of...

John Salamone's epic job title of Chief Human Resources Officer at U.S. House of Representatives, Office of the Chief Administrative Officer, is the culmination of more than 25 years in people capital leadership. In some capacity or other, John has been in service to his community and constituents since he was in High School!  One of the US Government's top people capital leaders, John brings...

Check out my new podcast where I'll be discussing a different element of culture every week.

Jocelyn Hunter is one of Australia’s most respected PR professionals. With over 20 years PR experience working for some of the world's top technology-driven companies, in both agency and in-house roles, today Jocelyn runs her own successful PR consultancy, Bench PR , through which she is dedicated to building a vibrant workplace culture that values trust, empowerment and flexibility. She is buckin...

Carey McIntyre is passionate and deliberate about people and culture, developing teams and building future leaders while always listening to the needs of the community. Starting out at Kmart in his student days gave Carey a grounding in customer service, studying and working as a civil engineer gave him another perspective - and now he combines them with a boat load of experience, a thirst for lea...

From manning a candy stall at the local market to projects and change, by way of hotels and prisons, Lani is passionate about empowering people and teams to achieve great things.  Currently helping to transform the legal sector with her role as Innovator at the multinational, award-winning law firm King & Wood Mallesons, Lani is a trusted trailblazer and coach with over 20 years of change...

Tam C. Nguyen is a man of many skills! He is an advisor, speaker, adjunct professor, associate professor and is currently Deputy Director of Research at St Vincent’s Hospital. He is also on the board of directors at a start-up and is at the forefront of culture building in the world of artificial intelligence.  Bi-lingual, multi-disciplined and community-minded, he also has an 'alternate univ...

Géraldine Fauville is Assistant Professor in Education, Communication and Learning at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She specialises in research that focuses on the role that immersive technologies can play in promoting ocean and environmental literacies. Géraldine is currently engaged in a collaborative project with Stanford University researching the much talked about effects of Zoom fa...

Sharon Gray is a people leader dedicated to creating safe, productive vibrant workplace cultures. She has been working in the people, learning and development space for almost all of her career in the retail, hospitality, pharmaceutical and disability industries and she is currently People and Culture Manager for OzHarvest, Australia’s leading food rescue organisation. In this episode of Culture M...

The Culture Makers Podcast is back for 2021. Reflecting on the changes in the workplace as a result of 2020, looking ahead to the future of work, talking to the people who creating and evolving great cultures because of and despite the challenges.  Culture has never been more important - tune in to season three to find out what's worked - and not worked - for culture makers around the world....

Karen shares incredible insights from a career that started out in nursing - where Karen gained a unique understanding of the human condition - and evolved into senior roles in HR, Culture and Transformation for organisations including SAP, Philips Lighting and Nordea. She has achieved incredible success through her people-centric approach to transformation and innovation and now Karen heads up he...

Oren Seliger joins me on the phone from Israel where he is the IT Theater Leader for Cisco which means he is responsible for implementing, supporting and showcasing Cisco's IT infrastructure in Southern Europe. Cisco was recently celebrated by Fortune magazine as having the best workplace culture IN THE WORLD! And Oren is a great example of how the company has achieved this accolade through his se...

Sneha Sanghrajka Shah has lived and worked in Africa and America building successful teams and growing businesses as a trader, through a series of senior roles over 17 years with Thomson Reuters, and now as Managing Director, Business Accelerator, at Refinitiv - one of the world’s largest providers of financial markets data and infrastructure. She is based in New York.  Sneha's early career w...

Otti Vogt, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Transformation Officer of ING's Challenger and Growth business based in Amsterdam, is passionate about organisational transformation - especially the human-centric type. He combines high performance with making work a happy place to be and believes: "There is a lot to be done if people can have the courage to revise how they design work."  A disrup...

Andy Murray has a major background in project excellence and team building so it's only right he recently took up the role of executive director at the Major Projects Association in London.  Andy was the lead author of project management method PRINCE2® 2009 edition and has worked extensively in project and program review and delivery. He knows all too well the challenge of creating project -...

Steven Pereira is a leader, doer, mentor, collaborator and culture maker with many years of experience in building high performing teams and executing transformation for Coles Group and GS1 in Australia - where he recently marked 24 years of service for the global barcode and supply chain organisation.  In this episode we talk about the benefits of starting at the bottom,  leading by exa...

Clare Brown embarked on a career in technology sales 20 years ago when it was very much a boys club and the movements and support for women and diversity were not even a whisper in the staff room. As she has climbed the ranks of companies such as Hewlett Packard, Dell and Experian, Clare has built support networks, created highly successful sales teams and leaned in to her natural empathy and emot...

Damien Mu has been with AIA for more than 11 years - with just over six of them as CEO - so it's fair to say he knows the business and the insurance industry inside out. That doesn't stop him from being energised and excited about what he and his team can achieve every day. From burning out to bouncing back, bringing his family values and work ethic to corporate culture and going on his own h...

Jo Broadbent might have started her cricket career relatively late at age 21, but by age 23 she was in the Australian team and wasted no time in becoming one of the most successful female cricketers and coaches of all time - culminating in titles at every level of the game, including a triumphant world cup campaign in 1997.  In 2018 Jo was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the Qu...

Nick Blinco has parlayed a passion for anthropology into a highly successful career in Advancement - first at the University of Oxford and Birmingham University in the UK and now at the University of Melbourne in Australia. (If you're not familiar with it, Advancement is a role mainly seen in Universities that oversees alumni relations and philanthropic campaigns.) We talk about the subtle differe...

Bianca Ilibasic is the Chief Transformation Officer and Chief Operating Officer of Manulife Insurance, Malaysia - last year recognised as one of the country's best places to work.  Bianca is a project and delivery powerhouse whose brand is 'getting stuff done' and she builds exceptional teams and cultures in order to do this.  She left behind the sexy world of strategy (her words!) for p...

Welcome to Season Two of the Culture Makers Podcast! We are committed to bringing you stories of culture building from the people who are out there doing the work.  In this episode we're delighted to be talking to Alicia Aitken - who cannot easily be summed up such is the diversity of her skills, experience and passions. Alicia is an entrepreneur, tech start-up founder (before that was even a...

I sought out Mohan Aiyaswami after hearing him speak at conference because I was blown away by his breadth of experience in delivering huge pieces of work, his humility and humour. Mohan's perspective on successful transformation - and the importance of culture in that - was shaped by an early role at Indian Railways working on a complex and ambitious project to introduce online reservations to th...