Barry O’Reilly is excited to welcome Temi Ofong to the Unlearn Podcast. Temi is the Chief Operating Officer for Corporate Investment Banking at Absa, South Africa’s most influential bank and one of the largest banks on the African continent. Temi describes his journey to his present role as an incredible learning curve. He shares the lessons he learned and unlearned throughout his career, in particular, the importance of putting people first to achieve success. Empathy As A Superpower “If you're...
Apr 15, 2020•34 min•Ep 27•Transcript available on Metacast Karen Tay, Smart Nation Director for the Prime Minister's Office of Singapore, is on a mission to transform Singapore into the world’s leading smart nation, where technology is used for maximum public good. She chats with Barry O’Reilly about how she is helping to modernize government by applying product development thinking to policy, organizational and talent development. She shares how this is changing the way the Singaporean government works. [note: this was recorded before the coronavirus o...
Apr 01, 2020•43 min•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast This week’s guest on the Unlearn Podcast is Eric McNulty, head of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative at Harvard. Eric is a crisis leadership expert who has worked on crises such as the Boston Marathon bombing, Hurricane Sandy and Deepwater Horizon, the BP oil spill off the coast of Mexico. He offers valuable insights about making decisions in crisis situations, in light of the Coronavirus pandemic that has gripped the world. A Helpful Decision-Making Tool The leaders who respond bes...
Mar 18, 2020•36 min•Ep 25•Transcript available on Metacast Alberto Savoia had a successful career as Chief Technology Officer in major companies such as Sun Microsystems, SunLabs, and was Google’s first Engineering Manager. As an entrepreneur, however, he realized that building the right thing was more important than building things right. He chats with Barry O’Reilly about the pivotal unlearning moments in his life and his new approach to product development. The Beast of Failure You work hard to create a great product, you launch it and the market rej...
Mar 04, 2020•39 min•Ep 24•Transcript available on Metacast For 20 years, Jen Grace Baron has sought to discover the secrets of sustaining inspiration. Her findings are the subject of a book which she co-authored with Allison Holzer and Sandra Spataro, entitled Dare To Inspire: Sustain the Fire of Inspiration In Work and Life. She chats with Barry O’Reilly about his interesting topic in this week’s show. What makes it worthwhile? In entrepreneurship, as in life, there are going to be tough days. Jen says that she and her co-authors asked each other, “Wha...
Feb 19, 2020•34 min•Ep 23•Transcript available on Metacast Testing Business Ideas with David J. Bland David Bland’s work includes the product death cycle, a classic anti-pattern innovators and entrepreneurs fall into when trying to create a new product. He highlights that building what customers say they want is not the way to be successful; instead, ideas need to be tested to see what they need to succeed. In this week’s show, Barry O’Reilly and David discuss his new book, Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation, including what ...
Feb 05, 2020•44 min•Ep 22•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Gail Lebovic is a surgeon and entrepreneur whose work has made a great impact on the healthcare space, particularly by devising innovative surgical techniques and developing medical devices aimed at improving the lives of women with breast cancer. Host Barry O’Reilly describes her as a world leader with a passion for problem-solving and for thinking outside the box, which makes her unique in the highly structured field of surgery. Challenging The Accepted Culture Surgical thinking is founded...
Jan 22, 2020•37 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast Barry O’Reilly opens Season 2 of the UnLearn Podcast by commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing. He welcomes special guest Dr. Ed Hoffman, NASA’s first ever Chief Knowledge Officer. Ed is a Senior Lecturer at Columbia University School or Professional Studies, and serves as Strategic Advisor for the Project Management Institutue. In these roles he works with industry leaders to develop capabilities in leadership, projects, teaming, and future of work dynamics. He is a sough...
Jan 08, 2020•47 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast In this finale episode of Season 1, Barry O’Reilly takes the time to answer questions posed by listeners. He reached out via social media and allowed his followers to ask him anything about himself, the podcast, or things they might want to learn and unlearn. Here are several of the questions posed and Barry’s answers: Q: What takes up too much of your time? (Helen, Melbourne AUS) A: Noisy notifications. Non-specific interruptions that disrupt my flow are frustrating for me. I don’t like interru...
Dec 24, 2019•34 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast Tanya Cordrey started her career as a journalist for a road haulage magazine. Today she serves on several boards and consults with many leading organizations. She has led teams and international expansions in companies such as BBC and eBay, and oversaw the transformation from print to digital media at The Guardian Media Group in her role as Chief Digital Officer. She joins host Barry O’Reilly to discuss her role in leading difficult change in often very traditional organizations. Doing Something...
Dec 11, 2019•51 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast Stephen Orban found an old TI-99 in his uncle’s attic when he was eight years old. The first thing he did, he says, was take it apart to learn how it worked. Soon he was writing programs to make things move around on the screen. He knew since then that he wanted to work with computers. Throughout his career he has brought exponential technology to many traditional organizations, such as Bloomberg and Dow Jones. He is now leading a new initiative in Data Analytics at AWS. Killed by Traditional Te...
Nov 27, 2019•39 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast As a trained occupational psychologist, Kim Atherton has worked with leaders and organizations to understand how they create high-performance teams. She joined Ovo Energy - a green energy tech company in the UK - when it was just 50 people in a barn, and helped to scale the company to 2,500 employees. During her time at Ovo, she recognized that misalignment was a problem for companies, which inspired her to found Just3Things, a startup that helps organizations improve alignment at scale. Alignme...
Nov 13, 2019•43 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast Barry O’Reilly is pleased to welcome Martin Eriksson to the Unlearn Podcast. Martin is the co-founder of ProductTank and the Mind the Product conferences that have scaled and sustained themselves around the world. Learning From One Another When he started ProductTank in the back of a London pub, Martin never imagined that his small meetup of 25 product managers would be the genesis of a community over 150,000 strong from 180 cities, or that they would be hosting 5 conferences around the world. T...
Oct 30, 2019•32 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast This week’s guest is Thaniya Keereepart, Head of Product, International at Patreon. Thaniya joined Patreon after working with Major League Baseball (MLB) and TED, moving into the digital space. Raising Your Hand Some people gravitate towards structure, but people like Thaniya thrive on unstructured paths. She says, “The through-line of all of my turning points has been that I have a habit of raising my hand to volunteer to do things I don't really know how to do.” She credits her bravery to lear...
Oct 16, 2019•40 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast Barry O’Reilly is excited to welcome Eric Ries to the Unlearn Podcast. Eric is an entrepreneur who currently heads the Long Term Stock Exchange. He is best known, however, as the author of the international bestseller: The Lean Startup. The principles of Lean Startup were birthed from seeing many startups and Silicon Valley companies fail for lack of customer engagement, slow iteration, and long feedback cycles—experiences that inspired Eric to think about different ways to work. He shares how h...
Oct 02, 2019•43 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast Snehal Kundalkar, Senior Director of Engineering at Reddit, grew up in a world of dualities. On the one hand she was taught that her place as a woman was between the kitchen and the kids, but on the other hand she was encouraged to embrace uncertainty to solve complex problems. She was naturally attracted to engineering and she channeled her anger at the injustice of her situation into creativity. She didn’t see herself in the expected role of home provider, so after completing her Bachelor's de...
Sep 18, 2019•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Creativity can come in a variety of forms, and for Jake Knapp, author of Sprint and Make Time, it was a mixture of painting, artistry and old school programming. Jake finds creative satisfaction in trying to figure out how to design, optimize and improve everything from the default settings in his own life, to how people run meetings and design products. Sometimes, having an outsider’s view can be quite useful. What’s holding us back? We’ve all had times when we feel like we haven’t gotten enoug...
Sep 04, 2019•36 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast You always want to look back on your life and say that your path from point A to point B was linear. It almost never really is. Today’s guest on the Unlearn Podcast is Mark Graban, author of Lean Hospitals and Measures of Success, who started out as an engineer for General Motors. It’s been quite a journey. Today, he and Barry O’Reilly will be talking about how that kind of a shift can happen, and what he learned and unlearned along the way. Clashes of Culture You might not think that the worlds...
Jul 31, 2019•41 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast Entrepreneurs tend to talk about the success, the fun and excitement of running a company. Fewer talk about struggles. Today, on the Unlearn Podcast, Barry O’Reilly talks to Teresa Torres, Product Discovery Coach at Product Talk. They get into what’s hard about the path to success, and at the end of the day, what really matters. No One Has All The Answers Like many young CEOs and founders, Teresa found herself working with people who were older, more experienced, and with access to more resource...
Jul 17, 2019•38 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast CEO School and The Future of Work with Stephane Kasriel In this episode of the Unlearn Podcast, Barry O'Reilly speaks with Stephane Kasriel, the CEO of Upwork—the world’s largest freelancing platform where businesses and independent professionals connect and collaborate remotely. Upwork is driving the future of work conversation, and discovering what it really means along the way. Creating Capability To Continuously Change Stephane feels one of the most exciting aspects of the tech industry is h...
Jul 03, 2019•36 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast Barry O’Reilly has had many mentors over the years, and among them, Mary and Tom Poppendieck have been some of the most inspirational. In today’s conversation, they talk about challenges the Agile community faces, debunk the myths of scaling agility, and finally, Mary and Tom reveal how they have stayed relevant for decades as they continue to coach, mentor, and help others. About Mary and Tom Neither Mary nor Tom started with software. Mary was an engineer who worked with problems that had life...
Jun 19, 2019•47 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Joe Norena is the Managing Director at HSBC and the Global Markets Americas COO. From corporations to startups to corporate digital, his experience has run the gamut of organization. Joe has led a life of unlearning, and every new thing he learned he has applied to the next situation. In this episode, Joe and Barry talk about the pivotal moments in his career that brought him where he is today. Unlearning Starts Early... From the beginning of his life, Joe has been surrounded by people who model...
Jun 05, 2019•36 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast Have you ever felt boxed in based on your job description? Join us today as Katri Harra-Salonen, the Chief Digital Officer of Finnair Oyj, shares what she’s learned and unlearned throughout her career of mixing industries, mixing roles, and being comfortable with being uncomfortable. The Un-comfort Zone: By design, Katri actively puts herself in situations where she has to grow, and calls this being in the Un-comfort Zone. When you put yourself in a place that challenges you, you become energize...
May 22, 2019•28 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast How do you figure out what works? On this episode, we have Gibson Biddle, a speaker, advisor, and teacher who is the former Vice President of Product Management at Netflix. He’s been involved with many startup companies to help them develop products, and today we’re talking about consumer science, metrics, and experimenting our way through work and life. Data and consumer science: “I don’t care what they said, I don’t care what it looks like, I just want to see the data.” These were a former bos...
May 08, 2019•48 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast Melissa Perri is a champion for product management who’s built her business around helping others understand it. She now teaches product thinking for product management to all types of companies and excels at experimenting small and fast for big results. Unlearning Business Analysis and relearning Product Management. Starting out, Melissa had no idea what she wanted to do but she knew she wanted to work with people, code and design together. After passing on Wall Street and developer jobs, Melis...
Apr 24, 2019•41 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast Kent Beck is a third-generation geek. His grandfather was a radio geek, his father, an electrical engineer, moved to Silicon Valley in the 60s, and Kent and his father built their first personal computer together. He’s the creator of Extreme Programming, alphabetically the first signer of the Agile Manifesto and most recently helped Facebook scale their engineering organization from 700 to 5,000 people. Helping geeks feel safe in the world. This is one of Kent’s creeds, and as a third-generation...
Apr 24, 2019•53 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast Over 2,000 years ago, the Roman Empire rose to heights previously unseen, occupying more than 2 million square miles and ruling 20 percent of the world's population. Was that success due to visionary leaders? The prime location of the Tiber River? Engineering feats of roads and aqueducts? Maybe the laws of governance? The truth is, it was none of those. The Roman Empire's tactic of abandoning old practices in favor of new ones that worked better, often taken from those they conquered, is what ga...
Apr 18, 2019•7 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast 
