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Top-Tier Culture: What it Is, Why It’s Good, and How to Create It with Michael Weening

What does the President & CEO of a billion-dollar company think of “grind culture”? Work-from-home? Productivity?

Michael Weening can tell us. The President and CEO of Calix, Inc. (NYSE: CALX), which just broke $1 billion in annualized revenue, Mr. Weening’s experience spans multiple geographies and cultures, including North America, Europe, and Asia. He has worked for companies who dominate their industries—Microsoft, Salesforce, and Bell Canada—and managed people in every business function from sales to marketing to operations. He knows what it takes to succeed in radically different cultures, with radically different personality types.

Calix was named “Most Inspiring Workplace in North America” and has been heralded as a top-tier “Best Place to Work” by GlassDoor, Fortune, and BestPlacesToWork.com. It has earned awards for Happiest Employees, Best Compensation, Best Work-Life Balance, and Best Perks & Benefits.

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Misbelief with Dan Ariely


Join me for a chat with social scientist Dan Ariely to discuss his new book, Misbelief. He’ll help us understand why even smart people find misinformation so seductive. He’ll help us understand how even otherwise rational people can adopt deeply irrational beliefs. Given the problems facing the world today, and the prevalence of accidental and deliberate misinformation, we’re sure to have a lot to talk about.

Dan is a leading behavioral economist and author. He is the James B. Duke Professor at Duke University. His research focuses on how even smart humans behave irrationally. He has written best-selling books including “Predictably Irrational” and “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.” Ariely has co-founded several initiatives such as BEworks, Timeful, Genie, and Shapa that apply behavioral economics to real-world situations.

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The Enneagram in Business with Karl Hebenstreit

Do you know what drives your team? Your co-workers? Yourself? I thought I knew myself, too. Until Karl Hebenstreit helped me see otherwise.Author of “The How and Why: Taking Care of Business with the Enneagram,” Karl will explain how you can use a psychological profile called the “Enneagram” to understand yourself, your team, and your blindspots.We’ll use me as a case study. I took the validated Enneagram inventory and the results were unexpected. I wanted to see myself one way, and the inventory said something different. Through our livestream discussion, we’ll explore how to resolve that gap, and how to understand the strengths and weaknesses of learning your (and your co-workers/partner’s) actual approach to life.

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Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell: Doing Well and Doing Good

Join me for a discussion with Bracken Darrell, who has spent the last decade leading Logitech to be not only a world-class creator of electronic products, but a company that is building sustainability and equal opportunity into its DNA. He recently announced that Logitech is now carbon neutral, with a goal of becoming carbon positive (actually removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere) by the end of the decade.

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Thriving and Advancing when You’re the Only One with Christelle Mombo-Zigah

A high-tech overachiever manages a full-time job, a spouse, two young children, and a pandemic lockdown, all while getting a degree from one of the top business schools in the country. To top it off, Christelle Mombo-Zigah is a black woman with a French accent in an industry where any one of those is a rarity. Come join me for a livestream chat with Christelle about doing it all, surviving COVID, and using her differences as a source of power.

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Transforming Healthcare from the Private Sector with Jonathan Bush

Jonathan Bush is the co-founder of Zus Health, and previously CEO and co-founder of Athena Healthcare, a $6 billion company that handles back-end processing for medical practices and hospitals. He’s also a member of a famous political family. Earlier in his career, he intended to go into politics to help make the world a better place. Instead, he’s choosing to make his mark through the private sector. Join us for a conversation with Jonathan about his career, his hopes for the future, and how he views the conundrum of improving the American health care system.

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3 Keys to Effective Communication

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Beginnings matter. Whether you’re an executive communicating a leadership message, a team leader building morale, or a solopreneur bringing your self to market, you’ve got something important to say. But. If you’ve got a great product/message/idea but can’t communicate it clearly, you’ve lost before you even get started. A decade’s worth of writing Get-it-Done Guy scripts taught me some things about clear writing.

This week I’ve seen a resume, an investor pitch deck, and an article that were full of great information. All three were presented in ways that would cause eyes to glaze over, because they were nothing but a mass of details.

The opening sentence and framing are the key to effective communication:

  1. Know what you want to communicate. Can’t write it in a single sentence? You either don’t have the sentence yet, or you’re trying to do too much.
  2. Start with a big picture statement that makes someone want to read more. Show your audience why it’s relevant. If you’re writing for multiple audiences, this can be the hardest thing to write, since you’re motivating multiple audiences who may have different, competing agendas.
  3. Eliminate jargon and acronyms. If your big picture statement is “Our ACRS system is adding an unprecedented 240 basis points to our operating earnings,” and your audience doesn’t know what ACRS is, what a basis point is, or what operating earnings are, then you’ve lost them before you’ve begun.

It only took a few sentences, applying these tips, to make all three pieces of writing much more engaging.

A Surprising Solution to Networking Nerves

Sometimes difficulty getting noticed comes down to something about your style that’s hard to change. So don’t change, reframe instead.

I’ve recently been working with a client on what it takes to become a major player in his company.

Past a certain point, a lot of success is managing how you’re perceived. Especially with first impressions, the first impression becomes the backdrop, and all subsequent interactions are viewed against that frame.

This has been a huge problem in my career. I’ve always looked younger than my age, and during my 20s and early 30s, I could pass for a teenager. I would walk into a conference and people would shake my hand while looking over my shoulder to find someone “important” to meet.

(Side note: women and ethnic minorities are often familiar with this dynamic.)

I tried to make up for it by wearing a suit. I looked like a teenager trying to look older by wearing a suit. It wasn’t an improvement. (Besides, I was raised in a traveling New Age polyamorous hippie commune. That shaped how I show up non-verbally. Despite having the degree, giving off “Harvard MBA” vibes, is exhausting.)

Ultimately, my breakthrough was being the speaker, rather than an attendee. People’s first impression was that I was a featured speaker, so must have something to offer. Then they would come to my session, and give that 18-year-old-looking person on stage a chance. I could establish credibility based on my topic and ideas. Being the speaker became my #1 strategy for networking at conferences.

Pay attention to your first impression. Change it, if it isn’t sending the message you want.

If you can’t change it for some reason (e.g., you were raised in a hippie commune and feel out-of-place acting like a Fortune 500 executive), abandon conventional wisdom and search for different ways to put yourself into the world.

The advanced course: take that differentiator and lean into it. It could be a powerful branding statement that could open the door to unexpected new opportunities.

Lessons from Burning Man “Mudpocalypse”

Burning Man’s “MudPocalypse” is instructive…It shows how bad media reporting is. It’s been framed as a big disaster of planning gone wrong. That’s not even remotely accurate. I was in contact with people on-playa the whole time. For anyone with real Burning Man experience, this is laughable. The Burning Man organization and community is a model for resilience (at least over the course of a week-long event. Here’s why:

🔥 Much of what’s reported is par for the course. For example, the 4-7 hour Exodus (exodus is what we call the exit day, it’s not the “people are fleeing a disaster” meaning of exodus) is standard. It had little to do with the rain. I’ve waited up to 11 hours. 70,000 people exiting onto a 2-lane highway safely takes a long time.

🔥 The planning was superb. The planning didn’t go wrong. It went very, very right. The Burning Man organization had wargamed this scenario. They delivered cell phone towers to the playa so people could make plans. They kept port-potties clean and well-stocked. They had a web page with clear communication so everyone knew what was happening and what to expect. (https://burningman.org/event/wetplaya2023/)

Furthermore, the Burning Man Organization actually pays for hyper-local weather reports every year, so they can start ramping up contingency plans the moment it looks like those plans will be needed.

🔥 There were plenty of supplies. The very ethos of the event includes Radical Self-Reliance. Everyone who attends is expected to bring *everything* they need to survive for a week. Including a bucket and pee bottle if necessary. There was never a shortage of supplies, and many camps have even said (on TV) that they still had a huge surplus and were trying like crazy to give the extra away. (This happens every years)

🔥 People helped each other. That’s the point. Other guiding principles are Community Effort and Civic Responsibility. You may never have experienced this in daily life–I know I hadn’t. On-Playa, people simply help each other out all the time. Constantly. If a camp was struggling for some reason (needing to move electrical cords, needing extra supplies, etc.), surrounding camps just pitched in to help.

🔥 People were already diligent. Leave No Trace: Another principle is Leave No Trace. Everyone is expected to carry out everything they bring in. So participants are naturally very careful about the ecology. This did not change during the mud, though the mud definitely made it harder to do a LNT sweep (because things may have been buried by the mud). The “Playa restoration crew” is going to have their work cut out for them in the next few weeks making sure the Playa is in perfect condition.

🔥 People had a good time. Watch the media interviews with actual participants. It’s funny watching news anchors try so hard for a story of tragedy, while almost every participant interviewed says “it was wet and muddy and that was kind of a bummer, so we build mud slides and mud sculptures and walked around instead of riding our bikes and played board games and had a good time.

The lessons

  • Take media reporting skeptically. They’re searching for the disaster story, not the accurate story.
  • Learn to do risk management. The Burning Man Org wargamed wet Playa scenarios, so they knew what to do when it happened.
  • Take responsibility for yourself, while helping others. The combination of “be self-reliant” and “take care of your community” is powerful. If everyone does it, then when you fall short in your own preparations, people can help you out, and vice versa.