Lead by Design Dev Singh

Joseph founded his first business at sixteen years old. He has gone on to launch a number of organisations since. He is still involved with a few of these organisations: Sterning Group, which is a licensing group of ethical and sustainable recruiters, and the Merz Institute, a data-driven conservation organisation with a broad mission that ensures continual relevance in a world where the only constant is change.

Joseph is passionate about solving big issues from consumerism and energy to insect biomass decline and the climate crisis.

You can learn more about the Merz Institute at https://merzinstitute.org/ and you can connect with Joseph on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephmerz.

Show notes: https://devsingh.net/joseph-merz-004

Some of the questions I ask Joseph in this conversation


What is an ethical and sustainable licensing group business?
How did you decide what kind of businesses to set up to drive your mission forward?
How did your dad’s experience as a monk influence your business and leadership mindset?
How did you recognise you were unfulilled?
What is your goal setting system that’s different to larger organisations?
How do you cultivate an essentialism mindset?
How can you tune into seeing how things really are?
What can move the needle faster to deal with our biggest planetary problems?
How do you keep moving forward in the face of pessimism about success?
How do you design and build an advisory board?
How to make the most of your available advisers?

About Dev Singh:
Dev Singh (@DevSinghNet) has over a decade of experience working with established and aspiring organisational leaders to build stronger & more strategic business foundations, and to lead with greater impact and influence. Besides working with organisations all over Australia in over a dozen sectors, Dev has coached and consulted for entrepreneurs and executives in places as varied as Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, UK, Southeast Asia, North America, and Singapore. Dev has designed and delivered keynotes and workshops for hundreds of organisations worldwide on entrepreneurship, business strategy, leadership, branding & marketing, communication, influence and innovation, across a range of industries and sectors including Government, Financial Services, Retail, Professional Services, Non-Profit, Education, Technology & startups. Dev has a Bachelor of Business and a Bachelor of Medical Science, with a particular interest in Organisational Psychology and Behavioural Neuroscience. He’s also certified in Agile Coaching and Agile Leadership.  

Connect with Dev Singh:

Visit the Lead by Design PODCAST: https://devsingh.net/lead-by-design-podcast
Visit the Dev Singh BLOG: https://devsingh.net
Follow Dev Singh on TWITTER: https://twitter.com/devsinghnet

Brendan has worked in the tech product space for 12 years and has recently returned to Australia, after six years in Sweden. Five of those he spent with Spotify during their hyper growth phase, first as an Agile Coach and then as the Product Manager for Spotify’s desktop client.

Brendan has an eclectic mix of skills and experience, having worked as an Agile / Org Coach, Product Manager and Chief Product Officer. He's worked on mature platforms with millions of users (like Spotify for Mac / Windows), blue sky innovation features (like Spotify Running), as well as in the depths of technical infrastructure, with native client architecture and big data.


Product Management / Product Ownership
Agile and Lean Coaching
Product Discovery / Innovation
Organisational Design and Culture
Leadership Coaching

Brendan is particularly passionate about helping individuals, teams and organisations to accomplish their goals through working with and acknowledging the human side of work.

Throughout his time at Spotify, Brendan had the honour of giving talks across Europe about Product Discovery and the Agile Coach role, telling stories through the lens of Spotify’s culture.

Just prior to joining Organa Brendan worked at a non profit, mental health startup on a mission to bring personal growth to the masses and he joined Organa to bring lessons learned from Sweden to Australia as well wanting to be part of a company that shares the principles and ways of working I've come to love and admire.

Show notes: https://devsingh.net/brendan-marsh-on-spotify-and-product-leadership-003/

Some of the questions I ask Brendan in this conversation

Is there a shadow side associated with carrying that ex Spotify label?
What is SAFE (Scaled Agile Framework)
What did Spotify struggle with?
What did Spotify get wrong along the way?
What do you get asked the most?
What do you wish people would ask about more?
How, if at all, does the Spotify model foster leadership by design, and what can others learn from it?
How do you compete with much larger and more powerful organisations?
What do we give up by choosing innovation and product differentiation?
Was the culture at Spotify caused by the model or was it just a correlation?
Why did you decide to stop being an agile coach and start being a product owner? What was that experience like?
Are product owner and product manager two different jobs?
In your bio, it says that you’re particularly passionate about helping individuals, teams, and organizations to accomplish their goals. What is your experience in terms of being able to do these things through working with and acknowledging the human side of work, working as a coach and as a product manger? What is the human side of work? What does that mean?
Did you experience of going from being a coach to a product owner and product manager mean that you had fewer opportunities to practice mastering yourself in the moment because of the nature of these roles or did it become more important?
What are some of the most valuable lessons you’ve brought from Sweden back to Australia that you learned from observing mistakes, whether at Spotify or elsewhere, or making mistakes of your own?

Steven Ma lives and breathes agile, and has trained, evangelised, coached and directed Agile across a wide range of industries, both domestically and internationally.

He is the Current Chief Purpose Officer at No Moss Co, and his personal mission is to make work more human.

Steven co-designs organisations for empathy and agility; emphasising a more human purpose to work. His self-described super-powers are personal grit and endless energy; and he thrives in contexts where leaders desire change and share his agenda of growing people, building purpose and creating environments for incredible business outcomes.

Show notes: https://devsingh.net/steven-ma-on-making-work-more-human-002

Some of the questions I ask Steven in this conversation


What is the relationship between empathy and agility?
Has the popularity of Agile been a good thing for leadership coaching or diluted the value and impact of it?
Can you have one without the other (coaching for the benefit of an individual's development vs for the benefit of the organisation) to the extent where it becomes an issue where that lack of integration can start to fester?
Why and how did you come up with your title Chief Purpose Officer, and what's your purpose these days?
What made Steven a successful entrepreneur despite coming from a vulnerable, refugee background?
How can leaders who might be stuck in the rut of risk aversion or attachment to accountability, escape that rut and inspire their own vision and imagination?
What does it mean to lead by design?
Should you design your organisational system first or your leadership first?
How do you bring loving kindness and compassion into the design of your leadership in the face of pervasive systemic racism?


About Dev Singh:
Dev Singh (@DevSinghNet) has over a decade of experience working with established and aspiring organisational leaders to build stronger & more strategic business foundations, and to lead with greater impact and influence.
Besides working with organisations all over Australia in over a dozen sectors, Dev has coached and consulted for entrepreneurs and executives in places as varied as Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, UK, Southeast Asia, North America, and Singapore.
Dev has designed and delivered keynotes and workshops for hundreds of organisations worldwide on entrepreneurship, business strategy, leadership, branding & marketing, communication, influence and innovation, across a range of industries and sectors including Government, Financial Services, Retail, Professional Services, Non-Profit, Education, Technology & startups.
Dev has a Bachelor of Business and a Bachelor of Medical Science, with a particular interest in Organisational Psychology and Behavioural Neuroscience. He’s also certified in Agile Coaching and Agile Leadership.

Connect with Dev Singh:
Visit the Lead by Design PODCAST: https://devsingh.net/lead-by-design-podcast
Visit the Dev Singh BLOG: https://devsingh.net
Follow Dev Singh on TWITTER: https://twitter.com/devsinghnet

Dr. Anne Stenros on creative leadership, strategic design, the importance of heroes and sheroes, and what it takes to be a future-proof leader in a rapidly changing, complex and chaotic world

Show Notes: https://devsingh.net/dr-anne-stenros-on-creative-leadership-and-strategic-design

Dr. Anne Stenros (@CasaAnna) is a thought leader and an architect with a doctorate in technology. She has over 25 years of experience in Creative Leadership and Strategic Design. Between 2005 to 2015, she acted as the first Design Director at KONE Corporation, a world leading elevator and escalator company. In 2016 to 2018, she was appointed as the first ever Chief Design Officer CDO of a city, namely the city of Helsinki.

She has also had a professorship in Creative Leadership at the Aalto University. She has participated as an expert role in many different EU forums, and she was the member of the World Design Capital WDC 2022 selection committee by World Design Organization WDO.

Currently she is speaking, lecturing, writing, mentoring, and catalyzing change. She's curious about the future of cities, architecture, and urbanism. She believes in collaboration, co-creation, and creative collective.

Some of the questions I ask Anne in this conversation:
• Why do you think that fitting designers into a traditional and strict organizational model will kill their creative capacity?
• What is design leadership? How is it different to not design leadership or any other leadership? Is there even a distinction or is every leadership actually design leadership?
• What is the difference between design leadership and Creative Leadership?
• Should all leaders be creative? And should leadership by default, be creative or is Creative Leadership something different?
• Do you think it helped that you were a creative professional before and while there are some fundamental lessons that you got as a designer or as a creative professional that helped you be a better leader?
• What can [emerging and aspiring leaders] learn from creative disciplines, or design or service design or strategic design that would help them become a better leader, even if they're not working in a creative field themselves?  

About Dev Singh:
Dev Singh (@DevSinghNet) has over a decade of experience working with established and aspiring organisational leaders to build stronger & more strategic business foundations, and to lead with greater impact and influence.
Besides working with organisations all over Australia in over a dozen sectors, Dev has coached and consulted for entrepreneurs and executives in places as varied as Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, UK, Southeast Asia, North America, and Singapore.
Dev has designed and delivered keynotes and workshops for hundreds of organisations worldwide on entrepreneurship, business strategy, leadership, branding & marketing, communication, influence and innovation, across a range of industries and sectors including Government, Financial Services, Retail, Professional Services, Non-Profit, Education, Technology & startups.
Dev has a Bachelor of Business and a Bachelor of Medical Science, with a particular interest in Organisational Psychology and Behavioural Neuroscience. He’s also certified in Agile Coaching and Agile Leadership.

Connect with Dev Singh:
Visit the Lead by Design PODCAST: https://devsingh.net/lead-by-design-podcast
Visit the Dev Singh BLOG: https://devsingh.net
Follow Dev Singh on TWITTER: https://twitter.com/devsinghnet