Maneuvering Monday

Send us Fan Mail Marie and the engineers talk to an advisory board of parents and teachers to get feedback on ASLO, and share the concerning results with Natalie and the leadership team, who finally seem to listen. Natalie, who used to be a teacher herself, decides to take things into her own hands. The engineers start setting shared objectives for each sprint based on a company value. Marie meets her HR contact Todd from competitor ConvoSystems, who shares a surprising truth about life with ...

Send us Fan Mail In the final part of chapter 5, things start to get real when Marie learns from Willie that Natalie purchased spare parts from Russia for Zebra Apps' physical data center, and that she likely traveled there together with Frank and Andrea. She also learns that every time the engineers create new features for ASLO, they increase their physical footprint in the data center. Jenni and Marie explains to Jaque why Zebra Apps is bleeding money, and suggest him to create a bett...

Send us Fan Mail Marie interviews the engineers to map out who work on the different aspects of ASLO. She learns that they belong to two teams, and uses an animal metaphor to convince Jenni to reorganize the engineering department to fix the quality issues, and to start funding the teams in a way that ensures continuous improvement. Marie meets up with Anne, and learns that she is secretly conspiring with Jason and Jaque to save Zebra Apps. Jaque shares that Zebra App’s financial situation i...

Send us Fan Mail In this first section of chapter 5, the UX Designer Jason makes a comeback at Zebra Apps. A mysterious meeting is taking place with attendance by the full leadership team and a white-bearded man. And Marie's colleague and employee Erik once again urges her to use her informal power and influence to help the engineers fix their dysfunctions and save Zebra's star product ASLO. Will she accept and join the hooded man-children in the engineering department? Thank you to Katie Ch...

Send us Fan Mail In the last commentary episode of chapter 4, we talk to Mary Lemmer, who is not only the founder of the company Improve, but also a keynote speaker, conference session facilitator, longtime entrepreneur, writer/author, and improv comedian. The story episode is full of attempts to solve the team communication and culture problems that have been identified earlier, and to disclose the key lessons from the commentary episode up front: The way you approach a situatio...

Send us Fan Mail In the second part of chapter 4, we are lucky to get hands-on advice from queer millennial expat leader Laurence Paquette who works as Vice President of Marketing for the large renewable energy company Vestas. The story episode is full of drama, and the conflict avoidance reaches a new high when Zebra Apps' management fails at setting boundaries when it comes to physical aggression. And suddenly, everybody is calling everybody on a Sunday. We talk about how to be a female ...

Send us Fan Mail In the first commentary episode of chapter 4, we are lucky to have "post transformation dude" Joe Auslander in the studio to share his great perspectives from his work which he describes as 'physical therapy of the delivery world and organizational transformation'. We talk about how to avoid getting lost in trying to fix 'people problems', how holding people accountable is not about staring at them with a mean face, and the actual value of whiteboards compared to virtual to...

Send us Fan Mail In the last commentary episode of chapter 3, we talk to global business leader Vivek Menon about the challenges Marie faces as this chapter comes to an end. Based on many years of leadership experience, Vivek shares his thoughts on the topics of the episode, which all revolve around organizational dysfunction. We talk about equal pay for equal work, professionally educated versus self-taught employees, and intelligent jerks. We talk about lack of accountability, and what rol...