Disengaged

James A. Seechurn
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Management

Disengaged asks why most people feel detached from the work they do, and what it would take to change that. Organizations meet almost every problem with more control: more process, more measurement, more incentives. That response deepens the problem it was meant to solve, since control is what suppresses engagement in the first place. Each episode brings together writers, researchers, and practitioners in conversations about motivation, autonomy, pay, job design, and performance management, and about what it takes to build a workplace on a foundation of trust rather than control.

  1. 4d ago

    Anti-Consulting with Gerry Murphy

    Is it possible to run a professional services company without individual goals, without billable hours, without performance ratings? Gerry Murphy and Nua Group certainly think so... Gerry Murphy is a co-founder and partner at Nua Group, the San Francisco firm that describes itself as the anti-consulting firm. He qualified as an actuary in Dublin, spent eight years in Europe, and was a senior partner at Mercer with earlier leadership roles at Watson Wyatt before he, Joe and Chris set Nua up ten years ago. We cover the anti-consulting model, what happens to accountability when you delete the machinery, managers who never wanted the job, job architecture as a system of control, and whether any of it survives at ten thousand people. What we covered: Anti-consulting as a playful poke at billable hours, sales goals and internal meetingsClients love their consultants, not the firms those consultants work forTwo internal meetings every two weeks, and what the rest of the week is forNua consultants asking the partners whether they could please track their hoursThe nickel and diming that comes with the hourly modelEveryone at Nua gets the same bonus, whatever their individual performanceThe bonus that moves from 20 percent to 21 and pleases nobodyFour job levels on paper, two in practice: partner and consultantMajors and minors in place of practice areasGerry's rules of management, starting with do nothing, ending with two blank rulesManagers who never wanted the job and took it for the payMercer's manager charter, and Jensen Huang's thirty direct reportsElecting your own manager, and where Gerry pushes back on the ideaThe client whose job architecture, bonuses and equity created an incredible amount of workWhether AI makes experience and education requirements irrelevantStock options, RSUs, dilution and growthThe Ryland Report, and why the team asked for more financial detail, not lessScaling to ten thousand people, and the naming of Uber NuaPeople: Joe Farris, co-founder of Nua GroupPaul Reiman, compensation consultant and previous guest on this showDan Walter, equity compensation specialist and the first guest on this showJack Stack, who led one of the most leveraged employee buyouts in US historyJensen Huang, CEO of NvidiaBooks: Close the Gap, James Alexander SeechurnArticles: Are CEOs Paid for Performance? Evaluating the Effectiveness of Equity Incentives, Ric Marshall and Linda-Eling Lee, MSCI ESG Research, 2016 https://www.msci.com/research-and-insights/blog-post/are-ceos-paid-for-performanceOrganizations: Nua Group, Mercer, Watson Wyatt, Radford, Irish Pensions Trust, Morning Star, Nucor, Handelsbanken, Buurtzorg, Nvidia, Gallup, MSCI, StripeFind Gerry: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerrymurphynuagroup/ Website: https://www.nuahr.com Email: gerry.murphy@nuahr.com Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

  2. Sep 24

    Pay Differently with Paul Reiman

    "Best practice is either a product that somebody wants to sell and as a result it's common, but not necessarily proven as best." Paul Reiman is the founder and managing partner of Novo Insights, a Chicago-based compensation consulting firm, with nearly 30 years in compensation as a consultant and in-house leader. His book Pay Differently, out October 5, argues that pay transparency exposes the shortcuts compensation teams have relied on for decades. We cover the myth of best practice, the loyalty tax, job architecture as the office refrigerator, why the offer letter draws less scrutiny than the merit cycle, and whether sales commissions survive consumption-based selling. What we covered: Best practice as common practice with a better publicistThe telecom sales leader who asked a 22-year-old Paul, "Best practice according to whom?"The unproven rule of three measures in a sales plan, none under 20 percentWhy candidates who refuse to apply without a range move employers faster than legislationThe $100 toaster on sale for $50 the next dayThe fintech firm that turned down a star analyst asking for a $1 million salaryThe 75th percentile, and why a percentile is not a philosophyJob architecture as the office refrigerator and its 180 ketchup packetsThe manager who automates three roles and loses every direct reportThe loyalty tax, and why stayers earn less than leaversMerit budget benchmarking, and why to budget 9 percent next yearSame-store pay growth, borrowed from StarbucksLori the recruiter, her Coffee is for Closers mug, and fixing the front doorSelf-set pay at Semco and Smarkets, and crunchy or creamy peanut butterThe printing company that replaced commissions with salary and profit shareThe hand-drawn overhead transparency behind the 50/50 pay mix slide People: Alfie Kohn, author and previous guest on this showDan Ariely, behavioral economist and previous guest on this showAndrea LaRowe, 37signals, previous guest on this showStefan Gaertner, Syndio, previous guest on this showDaniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, psychologistsTeresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, researchersBoris Groysberg, Harvard Business School professorLouis Kelso, economistPhilip Slater, sociologistJerry Colletti, sales compensation consultantBryan Briscoe, Paul's longtime co-presenter Books: Pay Differently, Paul ReimanChasing Stars, Boris GroysbergThe Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer Articles: Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Econometrica, 1979 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1914185 Organizations: Novo Insights, 37signals, Semco, Smarkets, Haier, Morning Star, Nucor, Handelsbanken, Spotify, Salesforce, Starbucks Find Paul: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulreiman/ Website: https://www.novoinsights.com Book: https://paydifferently.com Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

  3. Sep 17

    Predictably Irrational with Dan Ariely

    Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. He co-founded Irrational Capital and has written eight books, including Predictably Irrational and Misbelief, which he wrote after a COVID conspiracy theory cast him as one of its villains. We cover the vintage Swiss Army knife model of decision-making, the India experiments behind Large Stakes and Big Mistakes, what Fortune 500 satisfaction surveys predict about stock returns, fairness as a judgment no regression will settle, and the writing Dan is doing now about the end of life. What we covered: States that introduced fines for texting and driving and watched accidents riseThe brain as a vintage Swiss army knife, adequate at many tasks, built for a world we have leftCar engineers who design against human error, social media engineers who design for itPrepaid debit against credit, weekly loads against monthly, Monday against FridayThe India experiments, where a month of pay riding on a puzzle made people worse at solving itThe brain surgeon offered $100,000 and threatened with a hitman in parking spot 33Which survey questions predict alpha, and which predict nothingPerceived fairness outranking salary level, and the argument Dan could not win on Wall StreetThe company that spent a day celebrating failed projects and paid half a million dollars to the winnerBureaucracy as an engine whose definition of success is nothing happeningThe hospital janitor we want to stop doing their job, and what job descriptions cost usTheory X, Theory Y, and the ancient craftsmen who spent half their time on beautyTwo years spent interviewing the people who wanted him tried, imprisoned, or hangedWriting as a way to make sense of his mother's death, and the three books he has in progress People: Alfie Kohn, author and previous guest on this showSimon Jones, narrator of Dan's audiobooksEd Lazear, economist behind the Safelite windshield studySam Glucksberg, psychologist of the candle problem experimentsDouglas McGregor, originator of Theory X and Theory Y Books: Predictably Irrational, Dan ArielyMisbelief, Dan ArielyThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams Articles: Large Stakes and Big Mistakes, Dan Ariely, Uri Gneezy, George Loewenstein and Nina Mazar, The Review of Economic Studies, 2009 https://academic.oup.com/restud/article/76/2/451/1594205 Organizations: Duke University, Center for Advanced Hindsight, Center for Advanced Bureaucracy, Irrational Capital, Harbor Capital, Alphabet's X, Safelite Find Dan: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danariely/ Website: https://danariely.com Substack: https://danariely.substack.com Bureaucracy: https://bureaucracy.danariely.com Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

  4. Sep 10

    How to Get Pay Right with Matt McFarlane

    Matt McFarlane and I met earlier this year on opposite sides of a debate about pay for performance. His team argued in favor and won the audience vote 62 to 38, and a week later he published a piece saying he had never been a fan of it. That opening carries the rest of the conversation: what pay for performance sets out to do, why the mechanism breaks at nearly every link in the chain, and what companies use instead once they stop treating an annual rating as the engine of everything. Matt runs FNDN, a compensation consultancy for startups based in Australia. He built the pay structures at Oyster that carried the company from 200 to 600 people across 70 countries, and he now hosts the FNDN Series podcast and newsletter and runs the Startup People Summit, a one-day APAC event for people leaders inside high-growth companies. We cover the companies that have taken negotiation out of pay entirely, the grip that benchmark data holds over compensation decisions, the tension between fairness and individual pay in collaborative work, what happens to the manager's role as AI absorbs more of the coordination, and the practical side of leaving a salaried job to consult. What we covered Why Matt argued for pay for performance in a debate and against it a week laterThe three percent merit budget, and what the annual salary survey roundups tell usRewarding a standout year with money, or using it to raise the standard across a teamWhy Matt left the job he enjoyed most in his career to build a compensation practiceHow his client window moved from 50 employees to 100 or 150, and what breaks at that sizeBenchmarking as a source of cognitive closure, and the living wage argument underneath itRunn's single rate per role, and the salary trajectory that made their people harder to poachCarta, 37signals, Buffer, and PayPal as models that remove the negotiationFairness as a relative judgment, and how quickly a good salary becomes an unfair oneWhy US companies resist narrow bands, and what wide bands say about trust in hiringThe bad hire label, the myth of the A player, and where responsibility for performance sitsThe player coach, the stretched leader, and ClickUp's million-dollar salary bandsWhat Matt tells anyone thinking about leaving a salaried role to consultPeople Matt McFarlane, founder of FNDN Rowan Savage, co-founder and CTO of Runn Andrea LaRowe of 37signals, a previous guest on this show Books Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin Articles "How to Become a HR Consultant," Matt McFarlane, FNDN Series #7 https://fndnseries.fndn.com.au/p/how-to-become-a-hr-consultant Organizations FNDN, Startup People Summit, Oyster, Runn, Carta, 37signals, Buffer, PayPal, Zappos, ClickUp, Buurtzorg, Gallup, Radford Find Matt LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewmcfarlane/ FNDN: https://www.fndn.com.au/ FNDN Series podcast and newsletter: https://fndnseries.fndn.com.au/ Startup People Summit: https://startuppeoplesummit.com/ Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

  5. Sep 3

    Protecting the Potential of the Idea with Dylan Soopramania

    Dylan Soopramania is a creative director and consultant whose work spans the UK, Australia, and North America, with campaigns for Coca-Cola, EA Sports, KitKat, Hellmann's, and Google. He designed the covers for all three of my books and the branding for this podcast. We have known each other for thirty years, and this is the first episode recorded in person and the first under the Disengaged name. Advertising is the one industry where creativity is the product, which makes it the sharpest test of the argument in Close the Gap. Dylan's rule for creative leads is to protect the potential of the idea: push it to the point where you and your trusted partners feel uncomfortable, because ideas get killed in internal conversations long before anyone learns where they could have gone. The same problem sits inside every business that needs to innovate. If people do not feel safe suggesting things that might get shot down, they play it down the middle. Dylan's account of what happened when I stopped chasing him on the cover, that the more I backed off the more responsible he felt, is the whole book in one sentence. What we covered: What a creative director does, and why brands rent a creative's tone of voiceHow the Close the Gap cover came aboutGood briefs, bad briefs, and Hellmann's sneakers made from food wastePresenting irrational ideas to rational peopleMad Men is dead: culture now informs marketingProtecting the potential of the ideaPixar's brain trust and the Overton windowCulture fit as hiring people who look and sound like youWhy the modern company still runs on a hierarchy inherited from the church and the factoryThe KitKat catapultFocus groups, market data, and the sea of samenessThe manager as emulsifierTrust, control, purpose, and tensionWhy asking people to keep doing what they do well kills the sparkFreelance versus full timeLeaving Dylan alone: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in one exampleProactive work, gold wall sessions, and 3M's fifteen percent timeExecutive pay, the C-suite, and the role of profitPeople: Steve Hey (Dylan's creative partner), Dart Lindsley (Work for Humans), Jessie Zwaan (job, career, calling), Amy Wrzesniewski, Aaron Dignan, Rensis Likert, Abraham Maslow, Joseph Overton, Paul Buchheit, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs Books: Close the Gap and What Pay Costs (James Seechurn), Purpose and Work (Jessie Zwaan), Brave New Work (Aaron Dignan), Colin Splodge and The Sizzledodge (Steve Hey and Dylan Soopramania) Organizations: Pixar, Coca-Cola, KitKat / J. Walter Thompson Sydney, Hellmann's / Ogilvy, Banana Boat, Google / The Hallway, 3M, General Electric, Patagonia, Buurtzorg, Nucor, Handelsbanken, Haier, AFL-CIO, MSCI Find Dylan on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/dylan-soopramania-5a439223 and on Instagram at @dyl_soop. KitKat catapult: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD3DUt4eZZw. Close the Gap: https://amzn.to/4x4FAZ6 Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH

  6. Jul 29

    Uncertainty and Closure with Arie Kruglanski

    Arie Kruglanski is one of the most cited social psychologists alive, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and a co-founder of START, the national center for the study of terrorism. He gave the field two ideas that shape this conversation: the need for cognitive closure, our drive to resolve ambiguity and settle on an answer, and significance quest theory, the claim that the need to matter sits beneath much of what we do. This episode takes both into the workplace. We start small, with a question that sent James to Arie's work in the first place: why do companies cling to performance ratings, job titles, and job architecture when the evidence against them is overwhelming? Closure is the answer, and Arie explains why noise, fatigue, and time pressure make people more certain rather than less, and why premature closure has been the mother of great mistakes, from Pearl Harbor to organizational change. From there we move to significance: the oldest complaint in history, the road that took Arie from architecture to psychology, and why pay has become the emblem of how much we matter. We close on the hardest problem of all, how anything changes, and a personal question about holding confidence and uncertainty at the same time. What we covered Cognitive closure, and why difficult conditions produce false confidence rather than better thinkingSeizing and freezing, belief perseverance, and why information that was available still gets ignoredThe Italian postal workers, and why people resist the idea of change more than any specific changeCareers as closure: why we follow available jobs over real passions, and Arie's own turn away from architectureThe quest for significance, from terrorism research to the workplace where most people earn their worthPay as significance, the CEO pay ratio, and the insatiability that comes with a bigness-oriented cultureBigness and Smallness, the reciprocal model of significance, and love as merit times appreciationCompetitive individualism, Arachne and hubris, and whether significance requires winners and losersWeber, Calvinism, and the roots of the American work ethicPsychological safety, loss aversion, and why change must start smallReligion as an ancient antidote to hubris, and what fills the vacuum when it recedes People: Arie Kruglanski (University of Maryland, START). Referenced: Dan Raviv and Sophia Moskalenko, his co-authors; Harold Kelley; Antonio Pierro; B. F. Skinner; Alfie Kohn (No Contest); Leon Festinger (When Prophecy Fails); Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (positive psychology); Carol Dweck; Angela Duckworth; Antonio Damasio; Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (loss aversion); Amy Edmondson (psychological safety); Max Weber. Books: Uncertain: How to Turn Your Biggest Fear into Your Greatest Power; The Quest for Significance: Harnessing the Need that Makes the World Go Round, with Dan Raviv; and the new Feeling Big, Feeling Small: The Human Yearning for Significance and Wonder, with Sophia Moskalenko. Find Arie: through his books, and on The Quest for Significance podcast, which he hosts with Dan Raviv.

  7. Jul 16

    The Employee Advantage with Stephan Meier

    In this episode of Disengaged, I'm joined by Stephan Meier — behavioral economist, Professor of Business Strategy at Columbia Business School, and author of The Employee Advantage — to explore why the next great shift in business is from customer-centricity to employee-centricity. Stephan's argument is that business has made this journey before. Companies moved from a product-centric to a customer-centric model, building tools along the way — segmentation, journey mapping, personalisation — to understand and delight customers. Those same tools can now be repurposed for employees, and the companies that do it will create an advantage rivals cannot easily copy. As Stephan puts it, hard is good: a culture where people are engaged, motivated, and innovative takes years to build — and that is exactly what makes it difficult to compete with. What we covered: The evolution from shareholder value to customer centricity to employee centricityThe zero-sum fallacy — Amazon's Harry Potter gamble and Costco's employee-first economicsWhere money works, where it stops moving the needle, and how a $5 favour destroys a friendshipPurpose — Kennedy's single mission for NASA and the janitor who wasn't mopping floorsThe engaged coach — clear direction with real empowermentEli Lilly applying customer journey mapping to female talent progressionH-E-B's cult following and the four-star truck driverHaier's RenDanHeYi model of autonomous micro-enterprisesBuurtzorg's self-managing nurse teamsJust right tasks — why the reward for good work is more good workAI-powered internal talent marketplaces at MasterCard, MetLife, and UnileverThe workforce of one — segmentation and personalisation through one-on-ones People Stephan Meier — author of The Employee AdvantageAlfie Kohn — author of Punished by RewardsDart Lindsley — host of Work for HumansJessie Zwaan — value beyond priceMegan Bernard-May — people experience designUri Gneezy — Stephan's co-author on incentivesTeresa Amabile and Steven Kramer — meaningful progressJos de Blok — founder of BuurtzorgJoseph Overton — the Overton windowDan Gutman and Stuart Gibbs — the just right books Books The Employee Advantage — Stephan MeierPunished by Rewards — Alfie KohnMy Weird School series — Dan GutmanSpy School series — Stuart Gibbs Organisations Amazon, Costco, Starbucks — customer centricity case studiesEli Lilly — employee journey mappingH-E-B — the employee-centric grocerHaier / GE Appliances — autonomous micro-enterprisesBuurtzorg — self-managing nurse teamsMasterCard, MetLife, Unilever — internal talent marketplacesNovartis / Sandoz — one-on-one personalisation Find Stephan at stephanmeier.com, where you can subscribe to his newsletter on the human-centric future of work — each edition comes with an original stop-motion Lego movie.

  8. Jul 2

    Purpose and Work with Jessica Zwaan

    In this episode of Disengaged, 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 creates a dissonance employees feel but rarely voice — an Emperor's New Clothes problem she traces through the anti-work movement, which she reads as a funhouse mirror held up to HR. Drawing on Joe Pine's experience economy, she places work on a spectrum from service to experience to transformation, and argues most workplaces are experiential, and that this is fine. People are motivated by connection, autonomy, and creativity far more than by mission — so design work around what you can genuinely offer instead of selling a purpose no one believes. What we covered: Work as a product — the three symbiotic products every company runs, and why employee experience behaves like a subscriptionPine's experience economy applied to work, illustrated through a cup of coffee, and where most workplaces actually sitWrzesniewski's job, career, and calling orientations, and why performance doesn't differ across themThe purpose gap, and how to close it without overreachingThe anti-work movement as a funhouse mirror of HRLeveling guides and job architecture as systems of control — cognitive closure, familiarity bias, and why bare-bones winsWhether AI will fix decision-making and performance management, and why the answer is mostly noThe T-shaped employee, and applying deep expertise broadly in an AI eraThe perception of laziness across generations (Dickens wrote fifteen novels and never worked afternoons), and the shift from individual to collective measurementPeople Jessie Zwaan — author of Built for People and Purpose and WorkDart Lindsley — host of Work for HumansJoe Pine — the experience economyAmy Wrzesniewski — job, career, and callingPeter Fader — author of The Customer Base AuditStephan Meier — employee segmentationArie Kruglanski — need for cognitive closureRensis Likert — participative managementAndy Whitlock — The Human HalfHuw Slater — OliTeresa Amabile — the progress principleBarry Schwartz — critique of rational choiceBooks Purpose and Work — Jessie ZwaanBuilt for People — Jessie ZwaanWhat Pay Costs — James Alexander SeechurnThe Customer Base Audit — Peter FaderCome Up for Air — Nick SonnenbergOrganisations Leapsome — where Jessie leads people strategyIntuit — finding purpose within a constrained missionThe Human Half — Andy Whitlock's consultancyOli — Huw Slater's companyModern People Leader — collaborators on Jessie's Substack, PL Build

See All (19)

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Disengaged asks why most people feel detached from the work they do, and what it would take to change that. Organizations meet almost every problem with more control: more process, more measurement, more incentives. That response deepens the problem it was meant to solve, since control is what suppresses engagement in the first place. Each episode brings together writers, researchers, and practitioners in conversations about motivation, autonomy, pay, job design, and performance management, and about what it takes to build a workplace on a foundation of trust rather than control.

Information

  • Creator
    James A. Seechurn
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    19
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 James A. Seechurn
  • Show Website
    Disengaged

You Might Also Like