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Themes
- AI
- AUA
- Aaron Dignan
- Depthfinding
- EOT
- OS Canvas
- Rodney Evans
- Sam Rothkopf
- Sam Spurlin
- authority
- built to benefit from change
- bureaucracy
- burnout
- capitalism
- career
- change management
- chief of staff
- communication
- competitive advantage
- consulting
- decision making
- employee ownership
- essential intent
- even/overs
- executive team
- experimentation
- founders
- guest episode
- jobs
- leadership
- learning
- meetings
- office politics
- operating rhythm
- org debt
- prioritization
- productivity
- profit sharing
- retrospectives
- stewardship
- strategy
- success
- sunshine zone
- teaming
- transparency
- twilight zone
- ways of working
- work
- work design
56. Your Strategy is a Work of Fiction
Rodney Evans and Sam Rothkopf close the built-to-benefit-from-change arc with the strategy conversation underneath all of it: what belongs at each altitude, what has to be on the calendar, and why the deck was never the work.
AUA: How Do Leaders Stop Being The Decision Bottleneck?
Rodney and Sam explore the tells that you've become the bottleneck, the freedom-and-consequences philosophy, and a decision log that makes the invisible visible.
55. The Org Can Be Built To Benefit From Change. Can You?
Rodney and Sam Rothkopf explore what leadership looks like when change never stops, and why org design without individual-level shifts will only get you so far.
AUA: Why Does Every Decision Take Forever?
Rodney and Sam explore easy on-ramps to better decision making, the power of a scrappy proposal, and how to stop hoping an answer lands on the table.
Ep. 54: Change Only Sticks If It Starts At The Top: Resetting Your Executive Team
Rodney and Sam Rothkopf explore what it takes to reset an executive team and why it has to happen before the rest of the company.
AUA: Are Ego-Driven Leaders The Only Kind That Succeed?
Rodney and Sam explore survivorship bias, frontier founders, and a definition of success that counts more than the balance sheet.
Ep. 53: The Chief of Staff’s Real Job: Turning Strategy Into Action
Rodney and guest co-host Sam Rothkopf recharter the most misused role on the leadership team: the chief of staff.
AUA: When Do Checklists Turn Into Compliance Theater?
Rodney and Sam explore when checklists set you free, when compliance brain creeps in, and where they fit between the Sunshine Zone and the Twilight Zone.
Ep. 52: Welcome to the Liminal Space (Buckle Up!)
Rodney welcomes guest co-host Sam Rothkopf to explore The Ready’s new thesis: in a world of constant volatility, the only durable competitive advantage is being built to benefit from change.
AUA: How Do You Tell Leadership What They Don't Want To Hear?
Rodney and Sam explore how to signal to senior leaders that a project is off the rails—without torpedoing your own career in the process.
Ep. 51. It's Time, Babe: How to Know When to Leave Your Job
Rodney and Sam explore how to tell when it's time to leave a job and what they’ve learned from their own experiences.
AUA: How Do You Make Employee Ownership Actually Feel Real?
Rodney and Sam explore what it takes to move past the financial transaction of employee ownership and into an actual ownership culture—structure, authority, and all.
Ep. 50: The Ways of Working Movement Failed. Now What?
Rodney and Sam explore what the movement to transform how organizations work got wrong, and what’s actually worth doing now.
Ep. 43: Dual Transformation Is The Future…And Nobody’s Prepared
Rodney and Sam explore why companies struggle to reinvent their core business while building what’s next—and what it actually takes to pull it off.
Ep. 38: Running Better Experiments at Work
Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin explore why most “experiments” at work aren’t experiments at all—and what it really takes to learn your way into the future of work.
Ep. 27: Everything Can’t Be Priority One
Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin explore why prioritizing everything means prioritizing nothing, what keeps teams from letting go, and how to make space for the work that actually matters.
Depthfinding Ep. 7: From Leadership to Stewardship
Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin explore why our traditional management playbooks keep failing us and how rethinking “leadership” from the ground up is the future.
Ep. 22: Founder Mode vs. Manager Mode is the Wrong Question
Rodney and Sam dig into how “founder mode” actually shows up in practice, where it causes more harm to an organization than good, what it means when real leadership seems to be left out of the discussion entirely.
Ep. 13: Leadership Teams of the Future Act Like Org Designers
Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin explore why most leadership teams still operate like it's the 1950s — and how that stagnation blocks the rest of the organization from becoming more adaptable and resilient.
Ep. 8: Traditional Consulting Sold You a Great Idea. Now What?
Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin dig into what traditional consulting promises and what it does and doesn’t deliver.