10: A Deficit in Visionary Leadership - Michael Rocharde and Jesse Pearlman

07/30/16 • 95 min

In a wide-ranging 3 way conversation with Jesse Pearlman, Agilist and Customer Success Manager at CA Technologies and former U.S. Marine, and my business partner Michael Rocharde, a Business Transformation Consultant and former intelligence officer in the British Army, we discussed leadership, leadership style comparisons, servant leadership, leadership crises, raising and supporting servant leaders in a corporate world, and leadership in government.

While recognizing that positive change (even if revolutionary) is on the horizon, we examined some of the most persistent and destructive problems of our time.

We covered the following:

The deficit in visionary leadership.
Unchecked capitalism, economic disparity and avarice behavior.
The rupture in the American political economy.
True change and grassroots leadership.
Visionary leadership vs. a management and survival mindset.
The legalization of corruption and the absence of leadership.
The prioritization of shareholders over customers, employees, and citizens.
Prospects for the current system.
Collaborative social enterprises.
Soulless greed, the rapaciousness of unregulated capitalism. and the coming revolution.
Benefitting everyone.
The resiliency of collaboratively made decisions.
Responsive startups and slow-moving behemoths.
People vs. profit.
Transparency, clearing interference and enabling teams.
Leading, inspiring, and motivating.
Worker empowerment and Michael Moore's latest film “Where to Invade Next.”
Exhaustion with corporate governance.
Technological expansion.
Tackling the biggest problems.
7th Generation and the Iroquois Nation Principles.
High-performing teams.
America's lack of a clear and unifying goal.
Technology and its negative effects on culture.
America's broken institutions.
The Coming Change.
Corporations and their destructive effects on families and community.
Millennials and the restoration of collaboration and communal living.
The end of meritocracy.
Corporate welfare and artificial life support.
Corporate predation.
The benefit of staying small.
Thoughtless Economic Disruption.
AI and Automation -- producing more with less people.
Creating realities and intrinsic motivation.
Experimenting, inspecting and adapting.
Innovation and Breaking Things.
Liberating People from Institutional Abuse.
Aligning the needs of people and enterprises.
Brainstorming and Masterminds.
The Screwed-up American Education System.
Critical Thinking and Self-Knowledge.
Classic corporate governance and Subordination.
Freedom, entrepreneurship, and the risk of failure.
Winning with style and negative leadership styles.
Strength, submission, and vulnerability.
Elevating others and paying if forward.
The only things that matter - our planet and our human connections.
Life under state-capitalism: atomization, isolation, and distrust.
The American Cultural Myth – you too can become a billionaire!
The End of Retirement, Millennials, and Student Debt.
The Death of Corporate Loyalty.
Critical thinking skills, leadership, and the importance of chess.
Socrates and change.
Questioning habitual thought patterns.
America's most persistent boxes: Fear, Uncertainty, and the Military-industrial Complex.
State supported capitalism and violence.
Innovation, government subsidies, and the war machine.
Fear and xenophobia.

While recognizing that positive change (even if revolutionary) is on the horizon, we examined some of the most persistent and destructive problems of our time.

We covered the following:

The deficit in visionary leadership.
Unchecked capitalism, economic disparity and avarice behavior.
The rupture in the American political economy.
True change and grassroots leadership.
Visionary leadership vs. a management and survival mindset.
The legalization of corruption and the absence of leadership.
The prioritization of shareholders over customers, employees, and citizens.
Prospects for the current system.
Collaborative social enterprises.
Soulless greed, the rapaciousness of unregulated capitalism. and the coming revolution.
Benefitting everyone.
The resiliency of collaboratively made decisions.
Responsive startups and slow-moving behemoths.
People vs. profit.
Transparency, clearing interference and enabling teams.
Leading, inspiring, and motivating.
Worker empowerment and Michael Moore's latest film “Where to Invade Next.”
Exhaustion with corporate governance.
Technological expansion.
Tackling the biggest problems.
7th Generation and the Iroquois Nation Principles.
High-performing teams.
America's lack of a clear and unifying goal.
Technology and its negative effects on culture.
America's broken institutions.
The Coming Change.
Corporations and their destructive effects on families and community.
Millennials and the restoration of collaboration and communal living.
The end of meritocracy.
Corporate welfare and artificial life support.
Corporate predation.
The benefit of staying small.
Thoughtless Economic Disruption.
AI and Automation -- producing more with less people.
Creating realities and intrinsic motivation.
Experimenting, inspecting and adapting.
Innovation and Breaking Things.
Liberating People from Institutional Abuse.
Aligning the needs of people and enterprises.
Brainstorming and Masterminds.
The Screwed-up American Education System.
Critical Thinking and Self-Knowledge.
Classic corporate governance and Subordination.
Freedom, entrepreneurship, and the risk of failure.
Winning with style and negative leadership styles.
Strength, submission, and vulnerability.
Elevating others and paying if forward.
The only things that matter - our planet and our human connections.
Life under state-capitalism: atomization, isolation, and distrust.
The American Cultural Myth – you too can become a billionaire!
The End of Retirement, Millennials, and Student Debt.
The Death of Corporate Loyalty.
Critical thinking skills, leadership, and the importance of chess.
Socrates and change.
Questioning habitual thought patterns.
America's most persistent boxes: Fear, Uncertainty, and the Military-industrial Complex.
State supported capitalism and violence.
Innovation, government subsidies, and the war machine.
Fear and xenophobia.

Previous Episode

9: Experimentation, Innovation, Managing Risk - Part 1 - Chuck Durfee

In episode 1 of a 3 part conversation with Chuck Durfee, Scrum Master, Agile Denver Board Member Emeritus, recent MBA graduate, recovering developer, and friend of neon tapirs everywhere, we discuss the following.

His 6 year history with Agile Denver, and the evolution of the Mile High Agile conference.
His experience as a Scrum Master, and his first experiment with Agile Scrum.
His early revelations with Agile.
Startup like experiences and the evolutionary path of backlog refinement.
War Rooms, Kanban style boards, tracking, and flow optimization.
The invaluable practice of asking questions.
Grassroots idea generation and dispersion.
His intuitive way of uncovering motivations.
Enticing people to apply their interests in new ways.
Developing cross-functional teams and organizations.
Leveraging transferrable skill sets, and cross-training.
Enhancing empathy by getting developers to think from a customer's point of view.
Developing a vocabulary from patterns, and how doing things empirically makes it difficult to name what you are doing.
Collaboration, Paul Raynor, and the need to develop a ubiquitous (shared) language.
Design Thinking. Domain Driven Design.
Cross-training, and the development of multidisciplinary teams and organizations.
Experimentation, Innovation, Managing Risk.

And now welcome to the first episode of a 3 part conversation with Chuck Durfee.

Next Episode

11: A Retrospective of Spotify's Squad Health Check - Todd Galloway

Some weeks ago I met with Todd Galloway, Scrum Master with Square Two Financial. Todd has a passion for helping teams to improve, assessing their health, and helping them get where they need to be. For Todd a lot of fundamentals go into helping teams to deliver value sustainably.

In our discussion we addressed the following:

The Agile Denver Scrum Master Guild.
Spotify's Squad Health Check (also known as a Team Health Check).
Todd's experience with the Team Health Check.
Coaching questions, lively discussions, and learning.
His recommended frequency for doing Squad Health Checks.
The Health Check questions with which his teams struggled most.
The challenge in motivating teams when a compelling mission is absent.
How powerful questions can help your teams to improve their creativity and collaboration.
End of Sprint pressure and problems with Scrum.
Scrum, Kanban, and Scrumban.
Bottlenecks and the need for greater flow.
The power in making commitments and setting clear and unifying goals.
Trust and information biases.
The importance in discussing the results of the Team Health Check during the same session.
Assessing team health in low trust environments.
And much more.

And now welcome to my discussion with Todd Galloway.