Agile Meridian

🎙️ NEW EPISODE: Joy Is a Strategy — Rich Sheridan on Building a Workplace People Actually Love

Rich Sheridan (https://www.linkedin.com/in/menloprez/) was a VP at a public software company with the title, the stock options, and the upward trajectory. By his mid-30s he was seriously considering walking away from tech to run a canoe camp in Minnesota. Not because he burned out. Because he looked at the results -- missed deadlines, frustrated teams, broken software, users called "stupid" -- and thought there had to be a better way.

There was. He co-founded Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan, named after Thomas Edison's original lab. Today, nearly 3,000 people a year fly in from four continents just to watch them work.

Not to learn about code. To see what a culture deliberately designed for joy actually looks like.

Most leaders who visit Menlo go home inspired. Then they tear down the office walls, move everyone into one open room, and wonder why half the team quit two months later.

Rich has watched it happen hundreds of times. The mistake is always the same: they copied the floor plan and called it a culture.

Rich joins me to explore:

✦ The canoe camp moment -- what it takes to blow up a successful career and build something entirely different
✦ The Thomas Edison blueprint -- what a lab from the 1800s taught Rich about human energy, collaboration, and innovation that modern workplaces have completely forgotten
✦ High-Tech Anthropologists -- why Menlo employs people whose entire job is to observe end users like a scientist, and what they discover that engineers in conference rooms never would
✦ The weekly reorganization -- how rotating pairs every five business days eliminates silos, kills single points of failure, and keeps knowledge distributed across the whole team
✦ The insurance company story -- a multibillion-dollar corporation that admitted four programmers leaving would put them out of business tomorrow
✦ What leaders get wrong when they try to build what Menlo has built -- and what it actually takes to get there

"We didn't build an open and collaborative workspace. We built an open and collaborative culture. Our workspace is a reflection of our cultural mindset." -- Rich Sheridan

Listen:
🎧 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/meridian-point/id1756304863
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/02dI5XTTHfBMQGZH7WTlAK?si=d29b1db370694b00&nd=1&dlsi=a5a3178b725f48b0
📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/ObvY1lRJMu4?si=pad64x2FM6D3Wdvz

Connect with Rich: https://www.linkedin.com/in/menloprez/
Free Virtual Tours of Menlo: menlosolutions.com (Tours tab)

Book time with Kumar: https://tidycal.com/coachkumar/30-minute-meeting

🎙️ NEW EPISODE: AI Won't Save You If You Can't Code — Tom Stiehm's Warning

Thomas Stiehm spent thirty years building software and leading teams. As CTO of Coveros, he helped organizations move from releasing software every two to three years to releasing every sprint. He co-authored research on using AI to automate behavior-driven development. Now at Steampunk, he's applying everything he knows to building better software for government.

Most organizations think handing everyone an AI code assistant is a productivity move.

It isn't. Not yet.

The developers learning to code with AI today have no idea what to do when it fails. And it will fail. Tom has seen this pattern before — the same way organizations bolted Scrum ceremonies onto existing structures without changing a single thing underneath, they are now doing the exact same thing with AI. Same shortcuts. Same skipped fundamentals. Same incoming disappointment.

Tom joins me to explore:

✦ The Fannie Mae hurricane story — a team that delivered three months of software work in the window most organizations would have called impossible
✦ Why application security is still the third-class citizen in software development — and what DevSecOps actually fixes
✦ The "drunk intern" problem — why AI coding assistants are incredibly useful and incredibly dangerous if you don't know the layer beneath them
✦ Why vibe coding is heading the same direction as Visual Basic — and what spec-driven development offers instead
✦ The airline simulator model — what aviation figured out about automation failure that software teams haven't
✦ Why AI adoption is a near-perfect replay of how Agile adoption failed — and what to do differently this time
✦ The one thing Tom says every organization skips that determines whether AI actually delivers value

"If you learn to code by using AI, you have no idea what to do when it fails." — Tom Stiehm

Listen:
🎧 Apple: https://lnkd.in/gb92KnYQ
🎧 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gbR5YzcW
📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/LtM-zmAnFgs?si=P9MQGFUM1ldqBksl

Connect with Tom: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiehm/
Steampunk: https://steampunk.com
Book time with Kumar: https://tidycal.com/coachkumar/30-minute-meeting

🎙️ NEW EPISODE: Co-Intelligence — Why Learning Together Beats Knowing Together

Diana Larsen has co-authored six of the most-referenced books in the Agile world. She has spent over thirty years helping leaders build environments where teams don't just perform — they flourish.

Most organizations are optimizing for the wrong thing.

They have spent years accumulating knowledge, building repositories, training people to be experts in their fields. And then AI shows up and starts doing all of that faster than any human ever could.

The organizations that survive this shift won't be the ones with the most knowledge. They'll be the ones that have learned how to learn. Together.

Diana joins me to explore:
✦ The difference between knowledge work and learning work — and why that distinction is now urgent
✦ Why AI is accelerating the problem for organizations that haven't made the shift
✦ What "co-intelligence" is and how teams actually build it
✦ Why blame is the silent killer of organizational resilience
✦ The "valiant leader" framework and what courage really looks like in transformation
✦ Why the Agile Fluency Model rejects the one-right-way mentality — and what it asks instead
✦ The one thing Diana believed about teams for decades that she has completely changed her mind on

"You can no longer create new knowledge and just put it away hoping someone finds it someday. You have to take it and build on it." — Diana Larsen

Listen to:
🎧 Apple
🎧 Spotify
📺 YouTube

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