As Discussed...

James A. Seechurn
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As Discussed... explores how pay, culture, and systems shape the way we work, and how we might design workplaces that actually make people want to do great work. Each episode is a candid conversation about what motivates people, how organizations try to measure performance, why pay matters (and why it often doesn’t), and the psychology that sits behind human behavior at work. Expect open discussions, research, and real-world examples from thought-leaders and practitioners who are rethinking how work really works.

  1. -5 дн.

    Purpose and Work with Jessica Zwaan

    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 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

    1 ч. 21 мин.

  2. 4 июн.

    37signals with Andrea LaRowe

    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 Francisco tech market, with no negotiation and no manager involvement, and rewards tenure through a profit share. Reviews still happen, on each person's anniversary, but they're a check-in rather than a lever for pay. What drives the work is intrinsic motivation - and a small, flat, bootstrapped company built to support it. What we covered: How pay works - benchmarking to Radford's 90th percentile, no merit cycle, no negotiation, and why managers stay out of itWhat reviews are for once pay is off the table, and why staggering them by anniversary beats an annual scrambleThe five-level structure - why level three (senior) is the baseline, why level five (principal) is reserved for people moving the industry forward, and how judgment separates people at the topProfit share based on tenure rather than individual output, and why it doubles as retentionHow a high-trust company handles a low performer - visibility, honest conversation, skill problem vs engagement problem, and why PIPs rarely earn their keepThe "manager of one" - hiring people who seek out problems without waiting to be toldThe 2021 decision to draw a line on political conversation at work, the roughly twenty people who left, and what it revealed about when leadership steps inWhy staying private and bootstrapped for 25 years let the founders decide what the company is for, and why equity isn't the draw people assumeSelf-determination theory - autonomy, competence, relatedness - and how 37signals delivers all threeWork as a product - treating work as something employees choose to buy, not something handed downSix-week cycles, kickoffs and heartbeats - the light mechanisms that stop a decentralized company splintering into silosAdvice for anyone stuck inside a pay-for-performance cycle People referenced Andrea LaRowe - Director of People Operations, 37signalsJason Fried - co-founder and CEO, 37signalsDavid Heinemeier Hansson - co-founder and CTO, 37signalsDart Lindsley - 11Fold, host of Work for Humans; "work as a product"Luke O'Mahoney - SapienX; "work as a product"Megan Bernard-May - Pollinate XD; "work as a product"Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theory Books Rework - Jason Fried and David Heinemeier HanssonIt Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work - Jason Fried and David Heinemeier HanssonFirst, Break All the Rules - Marcus Buckingham and Curt CoffmanWhat Pay Costs - James Alexander Seechurn Organizations, podcasts and websites 37signals - bootstrapped company behind Basecamp and HeyBasecamp - project management software; Basecamp 5 launched recentlyHey - email softwareRadford - compensation survey used for benchmarkingRework - 37signals' podcastThe 37signals employee handbook - on their websiteSemco - Ricardo Semler's company, upward-feedback modelHaier, Handelsbanken and Buurtzorg - decentralized organizations referenced

    1 ч. 34 мин.

  3. 15 мая

    The People Experience with Megan Bernard-May

    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 around policy, compliance, and risk management. A people experience approach starts somewhere else - finding the overlap between what's good for people, what's good for the business, and what's good for customers, then designing solutions inside that overlap rather than treating them as trade-offs. What we covered: Why traditional HR keeps shipping best-practice solutions that don't solve the problem, and what a design-led discovery process looks like insteadMeg's path from architecture to UX to people experience, including the master's in organizational psychology she did to round out the workWhy corporate environments resist experimentation in HR even though product teams A/B test routinely, and what makes an experiment "successful"The BBC and what productivity meant there - why getting clear on that question first matters more than any solutionPay complaints as symptoms - what's usually underneath them when benchmarking already says you're paying the marketA case study from a credit analyst team where dissatisfaction with pay turned out to be a job-design problemWhy dual career tracks still funnel people into management to chase money, and what flatter pay structures unlockSelf-determination theory as a stress test for any HR change - does it add autonomy, competence, and connectedness, or remove them?Handelsbanken, Spotify guilds, and Haier as examples of decentralized models that lend themselves to a people experience approachWhere people experience should sit organizationally - outside HR, as a guild that runs across the businessThree things any HR practitioner can start doing tomorrow: ask better problem questions, stop asking for permission, document the workPeople referenced Megan Bernard-May - founder of Pollinate XD, co-creator of PX DojoAdam Axton - co-creator of PX Dojo, based in MelbourneDan Pink - "take pay off the table" framingLuke O'Mahoney - "table stakes" framing of centralized HREdward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theoryBooks Purpose and Work - Jessica ZwaanWhat Pay Costs - James A SeechurnDrive - Daniel PinkOrganizations and resources Pollinate XD - Meg's consultancy, helping organizations move people experience out of HR and into the leadership functionPX Dojo - three-month cohort program for HR practitioners, structured white-belt to blue-beltHumani - online HR community in Australia where Meg moderates an experience design circle and runs a book clubHandelsbanken - Swedish bank, decentralized operating unitsSpotify - the guild model for cross-cutting disciplinesHaier - the marketplace model of the organization

    1 ч. 28 мин.

  4. 7 мая

    Work as a Product with Dart Lindsley

    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 keep buying the product called "your job." That reframe rearranges almost everything downstream - recruitment, onboarding, what managers do, how work gets allocated, and what good performance even means. What we covered: The category error at the root of modern management, and why scientific management's framing of people as factors of production still shapes practice todayHow employees fit the definition of customers in a multi-sided business, and the route Dart took to that model through business architecture work at CiscoThe limits of autonomy, mastery, and purpose as a design framework, and what Dart found after asking thousands of people what job they hire their work to doNegative transformation - the ways work changes us into people we don't want to be - and why that belongs on the cost side of the ledgerWhat it looks like when teams co-design their own work, including the four-dimensional bubble chart Dart uses to reallocate tasks based on what each person finds rewardingManagers as brokers optimizing flow between two customers, the paying customer and the working customerCommon pushback on the model: does it scale, is it anti-capitalist, and why bother if the existing system seems to workPlus a short detour into the night Dart climbed the Golden Gate BridgePeople referenced Dart Lindsley - founder of 11Fold, host of Work for HumansEdward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theoryClayton Christensen and Bobby Moesta - Jobs to Be Done frameworkJoe Pine - experience and transformation economiesDaniel Pink - autonomy, mastery, purposeAlfie Kohn - critique of behaviorist management ("pop behaviorism")Antonio Damasio - on emotion and reason in decision-makingJeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton - the knowing-doing gapRicardo Semler - Semco's participative modelBart Houlahan - co-founder of B Lab, partner at Irrational CapitalSandra Loughlin - EPAM, on data architecture and AISemmelweis, Pasteur, Koch, Lister - the germ theory paradigm shift, used as analogy for how slowly new management ideas spreadBooks Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness - Richard Ryan and Edward DeciThe Transformation Economy - Joe PineDescartes' Error - Antonio DamasioThe Knowing-Doing Gap - Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert SuttonDrive - Daniel PinkPunished by Rewards - Alfie KohnPodcasts and websites Work for Humans - Dart's podcast, 190+ episodes11fold.com - 11Fold's site, including a curated Discord community and an AI search across the Work for Humans back cataloguePX Espresso - Luke O'Mahoney's podcast, where Dart appears as a guestIrrational Capital - the ETF Dart references that tracks how employees feel about work at the companies they invest inAeroPress - the world's best coffee makerConnect with Dart on LinkedIn

    1 ч. 30 мин.

  5. 29 апр.

    Punished by Rewards with Alfie Kohn

    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 conversation, Alfie joins me to examine why behaviorism still dominates corporate management, what B.F. Skinner got wrong, and why financial incentives so reliably erode the intrinsic motivation they're meant to amplify. We dig into the role of promotion as a control mechanism, what the pay gap signals about corporate culture, and how the sales function exports extrinsic logic into the rest of the organization. We close on the cycle that keeps reward systems entrenched and the difficulty of moving colleagues past it. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Alfie Kohn's work and books07:12 B.F. Skinner and behaviorism15:34 The role of promotion in corporate America22:07 The impact of the pay gap on corporate culture33:27 The vicious cycle of rewards and motivation

    44 мин.

  6. 24 апр.

    The Equity Dilemma with Robyn Shutak

    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 gap between telling employees they are owners and what the cap table actually says. Why equity in VC-backed companies functions more like a lottery ticket than an ownership stake. And whether giving employees structured choice within their equity grants can close the gap between perceived value and actual value. We also explore a harder question: if equity compensation depends on stock price cooperation to feel real, what does that tell us about the instrument itself? Takeaways Underwater equity is not a passive problem - inaction sends its own signal and concentrates retention risk among the people you can least afford to loseVesting was designed to protect the cap table, not retain employees - and there is little evidence it doesMost employees in VC-backed companies hold less than 20% of shares collectively - calling that ownership is a stretchStructured choice within equity programs can increase perceived value without increasing spendEquity works best when companies treat it as trust, not controlChapters 00:00 Understanding Underwater Equity42:23 Equity Compensation and Volatility51:21 Employee Ownership in VC-Backed Companies01:20:52 The Skeptical Side of Equity Ownership

    1 ч. 30 мин.

  7. 14 апр.

    A Post Mortem of "The Great HR Debate"

    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 pay for performance became the default - how individualism got baked into compensation design, why corporate culture reinforces it, and what it would actually take to change it. We talked about legal personhood and how the way we define corporate success shapes everything downstream, including how we pay people. We got into bias, social media's role in calcifying bad management orthodoxy, and whether systemic change is even possible given the structures most of us are working inside. If you enjoy this and other episodes of As Discussed... please remember to subscribe, to like, and to share it with a friend that might enjoy listening - this helps tremendously.

    1 ч. 2 мин.

  8. 8 апр.

    Pay Equity with Stefan Gaertner

    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 build coherent compensation programs. We talk pay transparency - what it's actually changing inside organizations versus what companies say it's changing. From there, we dig into the mechanics: point-factor job evaluation, salary band design, and why the methodology underneath your pay decisions matters more than most HR leaders want to admit. We also spend real time on flat organizational structures and what happens to pay equity when you strip out the career ladder - and whether that's a feature or a bug. Then we close on AI: what it can genuinely do to support pay equity analysis, where human judgment is still non-negotiable, and why handing compensation decisions to an algorithm is a different kind of equity problem. Chapters 00:00 The State of Pay Equity08:06 Pay Transparency's Real Impact on Business23:06 Point-Based Job Evaluation Systems34:47 Salary Bands and Pay Fairness43:03 Flat Structures, Career Decisions, and Pay Equity1:10:33 AI's Role in Pay Equity

    1 ч. 20 мин.
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As Discussed... explores how pay, culture, and systems shape the way we work, and how we might design workplaces that actually make people want to do great work. Each episode is a candid conversation about what motivates people, how organizations try to measure performance, why pay matters (and why it often doesn’t), and the psychology that sits behind human behavior at work. Expect open discussions, research, and real-world examples from thought-leaders and practitioners who are rethinking how work really works.

Информация

  • Автор
    James A. Seechurn
  • Годы выхода
    2 тыс.
  • Выпуски
    13
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    Без ненормативной лексики
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    © 2026 James A. Seechurn
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    As Discussed...