Agile Meridian

Agile Meridian We are an Agile Coaching, Professional Coaching, Training, and near-shore/off-shore development serv

05/29/2026

NEW EPISODE on The Meridian Point.

Rich Sheridan built a software company so different that 3,000 people a year travel from four continents just to watch them work. Not to learn about code. To see what a culture deliberately designed for joy looks like in practice.

In this conversation we get into the real reason most organizations are stuck, why fear is a bigger drag on performance than bureaucracy, and the single mistake leaders make every time they try to build what Rich has built.

If you lead people, this one is worth your time.

Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/live/ObvY1lRJMu4?si=178UexTgkh4EW0mB

🎙️ NEW EPISODE: Joy Is a Strategy — Rich Sheridan on Building a Workplace People Actually Love Rich Sheridan (https://ww...
05/19/2026

🎙️ 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

05/19/2026

NEW EPISODE: Rich Sheridan on Joy, Inc. — The Business Case for a Workplace People Actually Love

Nearly 3,000 people a year fly in from around the world just to watch Rich Sheridan's company, Menlo Innovations, go about their workday.

Not to learn about software. To see what happens when a company is deliberately designed for joy.

Rich is the co-founder and CEO of Menlo Innovations and the author of Joy, Inc. and Chief Joy Officer. In this episode of The Meridian Point, he shares the story behind the company — from a mid-career breaking point that nearly ended his career, to building an organization that routinely gets called one of the most joyful and productive workplaces in the world.

In this conversation we cover:
- Why Rich believes fear — not bureaucracy — is the #1 drag on organizational performance
- The "High-Tech Anthropology" practice that changed how Menlo builds software
- How Menlo reorganizes itself every single week — and why it works
- Why Rich has no authority over who gets hired at his own company (the team decides)
- What nearly 20,000 visitors to Menlo have taught him about why most leaders can't build what he's built

If you lead people, this episode is for you.

Curious how disruptive your organization really is? Take the quiz: https://www.thedisruptormethod.com/quiz

05/13/2026

What you reward is what you get.

Every transformation I've seen fail came down to this.
Leaders changed the tools, the process, the org chart — but never touched the incentive system. And six months later everything reverted.

Tom Stiehm breaks it down in this clip from Episode 170.

Full episode link: https://www.youtube.com/live/LtM-zmAnFgs?si=eIFn47HKtcRKD8WH

05/07/2026

I've been saying this for months and Tom Stiehm finally gave it the framing it deserved.

The way Agile adoptions failed is a near-perfect preview of how AI adoptions are going to fail. Organizations wanted the benefit without doing the work. They bolted on ceremonies without changing the culture. They handed people tools without training them. And then they called it a transformation.

AI is following the exact same playbook. Same shortcut. Same skipped fundamentals. Same incoming disappointment.

Tom spent 30 years in software watching every technology wave hit organizations. His prescription: smaller experiments, active training, a safe place to practice before you go to production.

That's not complicated. It's just the thing most organizations skip because it feels slower than the shortcut.

The way Agile adoptions failed is a near-perfect preview of how AI adoptions are going to fail.

Tom Stiehm has 30 years in software and he saw this coming. Organizations want the benefit without doing the work. They skip the training, hand everyone a tool, and watch six months disappear into trial and error.

Same shortcut. Same skipped fundamentals. Same result.

Two minutes. Worth it. Full episode link in bio.

🎙️ NEW EPISODE: AI Won't Save You If You Can't Code — Tom Stiehm's Warning Thomas Stiehm spent thirty years building sof...
05/06/2026

🎙️ 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

04/28/2026

The question isn't how do we replace our people with AI.

It's how do we use AI to help our people learn faster together.

Diana Larsen nails it in this clip. If you're building something humans will use, you still need humans in the mix. Institutional knowledge, judgment, human reactions: AI can't replicate any of that.
Full episode link in bio.

04/23/2026

Most leaders think blame is a management problem.

It's actually a physiological one.

Diana Larsen and I talked about this in our recent conversation. When we're learning, our posture is open. Eyes wide, taking in data, sharing ideas. The moment blame enters the room, that posture collapses. It goes inward. Shame, guilt, self-protection. And you simply cannot build a learning organization on top of that.

We wonder why teams stop taking risks. Why innovation stalls. Why people go quiet in meetings.

Blame is usually somewhere in the answer.

This is a clip from our full conversation on co-intelligence and what it actually takes to build teams that learn together.

What does blame cost your organization? Drop it in the comments.

🎙️ NEW EPISODE: Co-Intelligence — Why Learning Together Beats Knowing TogetherDiana Larsen has co-authored six of the mo...
04/22/2026

🎙️ 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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04/16/2026

What if the problem with personality assessments isn't the data — it's the format?

Ryan Behrman made a simple observation. People open up when it feels safe and playful. Not when they're sitting alone answering 60 questions.

That's why StrongSuits is a card game, not a survey.

Clip from our full conversation — link in comments.

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