Tom Chi is one of the founding members of Google X who served as head of product experience at developing technology such as Google Glass and Google's self-driving cars. In this episode, we dive into the topic of cultivating an innovative culture and the role leaders play in enabling their teams to develop radical new technologies to solve some of the world’s hardest problems.  To join the CultureBrained Community, go to: tiny.one/culturebrained   

CultureLab with Aga Bajer

Tom Chi - Cultivating a Culture of Innovation

Community and social belonging are fundamental human needs, hardwired into our DNA. Gina Bianchini, the founder and CEO of Mighty Networks has had a front-row seat to hundreds of thousands of successful communities. She has also seen an equal number of communities fail. In this conversation, she shares what she learned about what sets successful communities apart and how you can apply her insights to create community and social belonging in your company.  To join the CultureBrained Community, go to: tiny.one/culturebrained

Gina Bianchini: Communities at Work

With hybrid and remote work, building diverse teams that collaborate well together is more challenging than ever. So, how do you go about creating an environment that drives innovation, performance, and impact and where people can create products that customers love and the business needs? My guest today, Yvette Pasqua, shares her experience on the topic. Yvette is the CTO of EXOS where she leads the product and engineering teams with a focus on continuous improvement, iteration, and using data to launch software that helps their members become healthier and achieve their wellness and professional goals. To join the CultureBrained Community, go to: tiny.one/culturebrained

Yvette Pasqua: Cultivating a High-Performance Culture

Spotify's CHRO, Katarina Berg, knows how to maintain a thriving culture while scaling from a successful startup to a global giant. She shares some of her secrets around unlocking human potential and turning the company culture into the grease that helps it keep rolling at top speed. She also discusses the importance of clarity about who you are and what you stand for and finding effective ways to operationalize your Culture Playbook. She shares how Spotify helps people connect meaningfully while they are working remotely and why people tend to have fun working for the company. To join the CultureBrained Community, go to: tiny.one/culturebrained

Katarina Berg: Culture at Spotify - Lessons in Scaling

People don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers. So here is a radical idea: What if we got rid of managers altogether? What if we could do it without decreasing the power of traditional hierarchy but by increasing the power of everyone else? This week Aga is joined by Brian Robertson, the father of holacracy to explore these questions and more. 

Brian Robertson: Getting Rid of Managers

Giff Constable is a product leader, entrepreneur, and author who has sold three companies and helped build many others. In this wide-ranging interview, we cover a lot of ground: from developing great products, leadership, cognitive biases, designing an HR function that actually works for the business, creating psychological safety, taking on creative pursuits that scare us, and much more.   

Giff Constable: Talking to Humans

Bretton Putter is the CEO of CultureGene and he helps companies build and develop strong, functional company cultures. He recently published his second book, Own Your Culture, and in this episode, we talk about what to think about and what to do (asap!) to create a thriving culture in the world of remote or hybrid work. Brett shares plenty of actionable insights and examples of practices you can implement to adapt to this new way of working. 

Bretton Putter: Building a Remote Culture

The world’s top leadership and culture whisperers - Frances Frei and Anne Morris joined me for a fun, wide-ranging, and insightful conversation about how you can unleash your team’s potential. Frances and Anne talk about redefining leadership, the relationship of culture and strategy, love and trust in the workplace, their experience working with Uber, WeWork and Riot Games, and much more.  For more ideas on how to build a thriving culture at scale, download my FREE Culture Playbook Guide

Frances Frei & Anne Morriss: Unleash Your Team's Potential

Growth. We all crave it. Both in our personal lives and in business. But what we often forget is that the biggest growth spurts inevitably come with growing pains. Suddenly we are in this weird place in the middle - no longer a child but still not an adult. Adolescence: something’s emerging, everything is changing and it’s really, really messy. Turns out that startups go through a very similar stage. And this is exactly what my guest today and I talk about in this episode of the CultureLab podcast.  For the Culture Strategy Bootcamp, go to bit.ly/culture-bootcamp

Tommi Forsström: Building Product and Culture during the Weird Middle Part

My guest today, Dorie Clark, suggests we need to make things easier for ourselves in 2021 and embrace the lowercase "r" reinvention: small, subtle changes that, over time, compound and often produce major transformations. But to achieve such impressive results over time, we need to develop a "reinvention habit."  And this is exactly what we talk about in this episode of the CultureLab podcast. I can't think of a better way to ease ourselves into 2021.    For Culture Bootcamp click here: bit.ly/culture-bootcamp

Dorie Clark: Reinvent Yourself

"I hate this company,” I said to myself, sitting in the office in San Francisco. “I can’t believe I created this.” This is how my guest today, Darius Mirshahzadeh, opens his book, The Core Value Equation. Darius had been successful by any external measure. He was the founder and CEO of a company that would soon hit the $10,000,000 revenue mark. He had 150 employees and a seventeen-thousand-square-foot modern tech office space in the heart of San Francisco’s SOMA district. And yet, he had serious regrets as a founder. He realized that the company he created was not the one he intended to. Somehow, while trying to build a successful business, he lost track of what he now considers one of the most important factors to achieve success and grow with minimum growing pains - the core values.  And core values are what we are focusing on in this episode. 

Darius Mirshahzadeh: Start with Core Values

What does a successful startup founder look like?  You probably have a vivid picture in your head – two supercharged recent college graduates bursting out of the gate with a fresh new idea that hits them like a lightning bolt, gets massive funding, and leads to a product launch that is an astounding success.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  My guest today is Ethan Mollick, an award-winning researcher at Wharton and the author of a new book, THE UNICORN’S SHADOW: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups, Founders, and Investors.  His mission is to democratize entrepreneurship.  In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about what's a myth and what is true in the world of startups. 

Ethan Mollick: Beyond the Startup Myth

Today, my guest is the co-founder and CEO of X4 Group, Peter Rabey. Peter and his team managed to scale and grow their business through extremely challenging times. Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, X4 Group has realigned the entire business strategy to avoid layoffs. The reboot went so well that their business - and headcount - grew by over 50% since June. Tune in to this wide-ranging conversation about scaling through the pandemic, hiring, onboarding, cultivating a healthy culture, and more! To download the Culture Playbook guide, click here. 

Peter Rabey: Growing During a Pandemic

Wendy Smith is an associate professor of organizational behavior at the Alfred Lerner School of Business at the University of Delaware. She earned her PhD in organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, and she researches a really interesting area - strategic paradoxes. For the interview with Professor Smith, click here. To be the first to receive the new audio postcards, please click here.

An Audio Postcard from Wendy Smith

To say that 2020 has been a challenging year would be an understatement. But there are many ways to look at our struggles and Bobby Herrera, the founder and CEO of Populus Group, suggests that we choose to see them as a gift. In this wide-ranging conversation, Bobby and I talk about his entrepreneurial journey and the culture he is committed to cultivating in his company. 

Bobby Herrera: The Gift of Struggle

In the 21st century, those who change the world are those who change the culture. They get people in synch, lead tribes of “people like us”, and generate an energy field where ordinary people achieve extraordinary results. But organisational culture can often be like the proverbial soap - too slippery to grasp. CultureLab with Aga Bajer is here to help you get a handle on culture. It aims at demystifying it and making it more accessible and less overwhelming in its complexity. On this podcast, Aga interviews leadership thinkers, culture (r)evolutionists, entrepreneurs, and all sorts of movers and shakers to provide you with the inspiration and tips on how to harness the force that drives your future.

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CultureLab with Aga Bajer

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