Time to Evolve Again

My mid-2000s, fresh-faced, professional look from around the time I joined Tyro.

After 12.3 years, yesterday was my last day at @Tyro. 😢

It’s been a huge journey, from a perilous payments startup with less than 20 employees and only ☝🏻 customer, to now a VC-backed, fully-licensed bank with well over 400 staff that is Australia’s 5th largest EFTPOS provider (by transaction volume).

I’ve done time as a Software Engineer, Development Lead, Engineering Lead (part of the management team), Technical Project Manager, Team Lead, Product Lead, and this last year, back to Software Engineer. I must have hired 50+ (awesome) people and interviewed many times that.

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Are You Being Too Agile?

Man lying under a tree daydreaming about the future. Proabably not what you'd call "too agile"Confession of a Chronic Futurist

I have a confession to make. I used to be a dreamer at work. Worse than that, I used to invest significantly into putting my dreams into motion.

What did that look like? It meant that when I was tasked with building a Model-2 presentation framework for the company I was working for, I bunkered down for over a month and came out with this massive framework that was going to be a solution to the whole world’s problems. It was basically most of what Struts did and some parts of what Spring does, before either of them existed. There were good things in there, and the company used the framework for many years, but I’m sure more than half the code I wrote never got used. I’d latched onto a good idea and run a marathon, but the team really only needed me to walk a mile.

Pragmatic Redemption

Then came the revelation of my software engineering life: agile. Continue reading

Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan et al. (Book Review)

Tribal Leadership:
Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization
by Dave Logan

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So, the story goes that our CEO, Jost Stollmann, asked Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder & co-CEO of Atlassian and one of Tyro’s board members, something along the lines of…

“If you had to recommend just one book to your leadership team, what would you choose?”

And Mike recommended: Tribal Leadership. I think I can see why.

What’s the book about?

The book is about the results of ten years of research by the authors and how they found that people in organisations form tribes; that each tribe has a prevailing culture; that the cultures can be roughly grouped into five different levels; that the culture of the tribe can be an indicator of organisational success; and that the culture of individuals and of tribes can be “upgraded” through the levels using actions they describe, undertaken by tribal leaders. (Note that it’s not about leaders trying to create tribes in order to succeed – the tribes are a natural phenomenon, and the benefit comes through recognising them and influencing them. It does talk about building and enhancing networks within tribes.)

The book is well-written (i.e. not boring), contains lots of case studies and interviews, has excellent summaries at the end of each chapter (no highlighting necessary!), and it doesn’t just focus on what to do to become “great” – it also covers basket case cultures and how to start progressing people out of there.

What did I like about the book?

The number one thing I like about this book, as a leadership book, is that it pretty quickly gets a thoughtful reader looking not merely at their own actions and what they can do to improve, but also at how the people around them in the organisation are acting and interacting. You start to think about how to improve the company by influencing the culture, not just about how to improve your own output and your team’s output by doing a few things differently.

The main premise of the book is pretty simple to understand and start putting into practise: people’s culture can be detected by the language they use, and also affected by the language those around them use. So, people in Stage 3 tribes (where most corporate cultures are at) are all about personal accomplishment and they’ll say a lot of things that basically translate to “I’m great”. In contrast, people at Stage 4 are all about forming and maintaining good working partnerships with people around them, and their language will come out as “We’re great”.

As soon as I started reading all this, I could see how problems which I’d observed at work were caused by the behaviours detailed in the book. I also started to see problems I hadn’t noticed before, or areas that were about to be problems, based simply on how people were talking to each other or about each other. I recognised in myself some things I’d been doing which were contributing to holding the culture back from where it could be.

The book has many examples of great companies to aspire to, and not just the ones you’re used to reading about. Yes, there’s analysis of raging startup successes like Zappos, but there’s also a lot of time spent describing a hospital that focuses on creating excellent customer experiences.

The book has great advice, much of which is easy to start following, and it changed the way I behave, even as I was reading it.

Should you read it?

If you’re in any kind of leadership position, in any kind of organisation, I highly recommend this book. Maybe it won’t change your world, and you may not have all the influence you would need in order to affect the whole organisation. At the very least it should help you to start seeing the culture around you for what it is, and start to move it forward from the position you’re in.

Buy it on Amazon

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