Rethink Culture: Recent Episodes
Andreas Constantinou
Rethink Culture is the podcast that shines the spotlight on the leaders who are rethinking workplace culture. Virtually all of the business leaders who make headlines today do so because of their company performance. Yet, the people and the culture of a company is at least as important as its performance. It's time that we shine the spotlight on the leaders who are rethinking workplace culture and are putting people and culture at the forefront.
“We ‘re a service business that just happens to to collect waste. I never get out of the bed in the morning thinking I’ m in the waste industry. Never, ever, ever. I don’t go to the waste management trade shows. Personally I can’t think of anything worse to do. It doesn’t inspire me. But I will read every book about the service industry. I wanna know what’s the best service industry in Asia. I wanna know what’s the best service industry in the US. What’s the latest thinking in service? And then apply them to our little waste industry.”
S01E09 of the Rethink Culture podcast shines the spotlight on Gene Browne, the founder of The City Bin, a leading waste management company and a five-time winner of the ‘Deloitte Best Managed Company’ in Ireland.
Gene recounts how City Bin started in 1997 as an experiment in service quality, out of his passion for creating amazing customer experiences. How his entrepreneurial journey was part luck and part naivety, especially when ruthless competition burned his warehouse to the ground. The lessons of expanding to the Middle East, and seeing how middle management struggled to adapt to the company’s autonomous culture. 26 years later, his unflinching attention to customer service has become deeply rooted in the company; like treating his customers the way he would like a business to treat his parents; tying employee bonus to customer satisfaction to align employee actions with company values; and even apologising for bad service to customers by sending them flowers. Gene talks passionately about avoiding aspirational values, in favour of those principles that are as unique to any company as a fingerprint is to any person. And about giving his staff the gift of education, with a pledge to help the 80% of his less educated workforce to achieve their lifelong education goals.
Listen to Rethink Culture wherever you get your favourite podcasts, including:
(Spotify) https://open.spotify.com/show/4BLXQ8CgFHvYG6UoIQazj9
(Apple podcasts) https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rethink-culture/id1655123154
(YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/@rethinkculture
Further references:
Gene Browne on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/genebrowne100/
City Bin: https://www.citybin.com/
Books references:
Good strategy Bad Strategy, by Richard Rumelt https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11721966-good-strategy-bad-strategy
Building the Happiness-Centred Business by Paddi Lund [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10088113-building-the-happiness-centred-business
Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16120.Mastering_the_Rockefeller_Habits
“The first thing that I needed to do was to start creating a safe space for my staff to challenge me. The harder part was for my staff to fail. And sometimes when they failed, we lost clients. And that was really bitter, bitter pills to swallow. But I realised very quickly that if I was to create the safe space, I had to stop micromanaging. Because the minute I started micromanaging, the space was no longer safe. “
S01E08 of the Rethink Culture podcast shines the spotlight on Dillon Jeary, a Cape Town based serial entrepreneur with empathic leadership. Dillon is the founder of Kilowatt, a live events production company, 180 digital, an animation and digital content creation business, Three Peak Studio, for virtual broadcasting, and Circle Forward, a consultancy for team building events.
Dillon is a micromanager turned empathic leader with an open mind and a wide open heart. He talks about the importance of creating a safe space for his staff to make mistakes, to challenge him, and to share their feedback. Why “culture is what happens when no one else is watching” and how he came to realise the importance of culture only once his company hit 30 people. How he audits the culture of his companies, and has a committee of company representatives to solve the most important culture issues. How he gives factory workers flexible work hours, something unheard of in his industry. Why he thinks that mental health is extremely important for his staff, and how he makes his people “battle ready” by helping them look after themselves. And finally, why a culture of accountability, freedom, trust, communication and emotional intelligence are critical to attract the top young talent of today into our businesses, but also to attract good customers, good suppliers, and create a sustainable ecosystem.
Listen to Rethink Culture wherever you get your favourite podcasts, including: (Spotify) https://open.spotify.com/show/4BLXQ8CgFHvYG6UoIQazj9 (Apple podcasts) (YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/@rethinkculture
Further references: Dillon Jearey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillon-jearey/
Dillon Jearey on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DillonJearey
Kilowatt: https://kilowatt.co.za/
Humankind, by Rutger Bergman: https://www.amazon.com/Humankind-Hopeful-History-Rutger-Bregman/dp/0316418536
"If leaders are willing to be vulnerable and listen to their employees.. those are cultures which empower everyone to feel safe and to bring their whole selves to work... A lot of leaders are still trying to hide behind stuff.. and they are not sleeping well at night. The most peaceful place for a leader to be is to have stated values and then can stand in the spotlight of those values."
The second episode of Rethink Culture, features Will Scott, founder of Culture Fix Academy, entrepreneur, published author, servant leader, father and triathlete.
Will has worked with 10s of companies to transform them into culture-first workplaces. He talks about creating your values bottom-up, how to "notice and nominate" to reinforce values in the company using stories, how often to revise values, and how he started playing with values and culture as a young child in his treehouse.
In this pilot episode of Rethink Culture we speak with Haluk Can Hur, founder of Latro Chemical, a company pioneering a no-hierarchy, self-management model, that in 2022 received the 2nd Best Place to Work in Europe award.
Latro is a 70-person company in Turkey running on a no-hierarchy, completely autonomous model with no titles, sales targets, OKRs, KPIs, no HR department and where decisions are taken at a team level, based on a unifying vision, and shared values. The founder Haluk Can Hur talks about his childhood influences, his vision and how he transformed the company structure in only 1.5 years. He describes many principles behind Latro's autonomous self-management - for example where decisions are taken by individual consent (not collective consensus), radical transparency where salaries and P&L are open to everyone, profit sharing, and culture as the shared values and vision that bonds and aligns people together in the company.
Resources referenced in the podcast:
- Reinventing organisations book by Frederic Laloux
- The Latro Way, describing the self-management organisational model of the company
