Jason Fried’s new book Rework comes out today, and I’m delighted that we managed to talk just a week ago in the lead up to its launch. Now here’s a quote to kick us off. It’s from Seth Godin, and he says (and I’m paraphrasing), “Make everything a project – and run it through 37Signals’ Basecamp.” Jason is the one of the founders of 37Signals. They design useful software to help people work better – connect with people, run projects, managing stuff. (I know, because I use it!)

And what’s cool is they haven’t done it by practising business as usual, but by practising business as unusual. In this interview Jason shares some of his successful and counter-intutive approaches to how to get stuff done. We talk about:

• The evolution of 37Signals – and why where you start is not where you finish
• The value of introducing “done enough” as a measure of success
• The problem with meetings – and what to do about it
• Why planning is highly overrated
• And a bunch more…

You can pick up the new book on Amazon , follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonFried, and learn more about 37 Signals’ products at their website.

Listen to my interview with Jason Fried

(And by the way, Jason’s surname is pronounced “Freed” – Apologies to Jason, and please ignore my mistake at the start of the interview!)

My first job, when I finally stumbled out of university, was with a small creativity and innovation company. It was pretty fantastic – sort of a ‘Fast Company’ company before such a thing existed. And we truly felt that we were in the vanguard for making innovation and its attendant skill creativity important in organizations.

But vanguard? No, not really. Roger von Oech – now he was in the vanguard. He started his company Creative Think back in the mid 1970s and his book A Whack on the Side of the Head is a classic in the creativity field.

In this interview we talk about:

• The power of persistence, and some of the early struggles to get creativity seen as something that matters within organizations
• The importance of embedding creativity into the structures of your organization
• The role of the warrior in helping creativity flourish
• And a certain activity that can increase your ability to be creative (And David Rock agrees.)

You can follow Roger on Twitter at @RogerVonOech and on his website.

Listen to my interview with Roger von Oeck

If you’re interested in leadership, you know that a new book on the topic gets published, oh, about every 20 seconds. And most of them are eminently missable – the same tired truisms with a new smear of lipstick – with the life of a mayfly.

And then there are a few classics, books that have really stood the test of time. One of those is The Leadership Challenge, co-authored by Jim Kouzes and his long-time writing partner Barry Posner. It was recently nominated by 800 CEO Reads as one of their best business books of all time, and in part its strength lies in the fact that it is insight based on research, not just someone’s thought du jour. Jim is not only a author, he’s also the Dean’s Executive Professor of Leadership at the Leavey School of Business in Santa Clara University and at one stage was CEO of the Tom Peters Company for ten or eleven years.

In our interview we talk about:

• How 25% of the success of leadership can be explained (and what to do about that other 75%)
• Why challenging the process is a crucial part of Great Work
• A terrific story from Ben & Jerry’s. (Anything involving icecream fits into Great Work as far as I’m concerned.)
• The power of a creative partnership – and how he and Barry have maintained their working relationship for close to three decade

You can get access to a wide range of leadership materials at Jim’s website

Listen to my interview with Jim Kouzes

Roger Martin who is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management here in Toronto and the author of three great books on business. The first is The Responsibility Virus which talks about the power of building true partnerships. The second is The Opposable Mind which talks about ‘integrative thinking’ and his most recent is The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage.

In this interview we take on:

• The journey ideas take – from ‘mystery’ to ‘heuristic’ to ‘algorithm’
• Why ‘design thinking’ could be considered a counter-cultural act
• How the beginning of change lies in changing the way we think
• Why the burden of proof can be impossible to meet (and what the implications of that might be)
• The power of projectization – and a company that’s showing just how powerful that can be.

You can find out more about Roger and his work and get access to a range of great material at www.RogerLMartin.com.

Listen to my interview with Roger Martin

Do you have kids? If so, you’ve probably heard of Barbara Coloroso. Heck, I DON’T have kids and even I’ve heard of her! She is an authority (if not the authority) on parenting and teaching, school discipline, non-violent conflict resolution and re-conciliatory justice.  She’s written a number of best sellers:  Kids Are Worth It, which is about the art of parenting, The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander which uncovers a dynamic that happens all the way from the playground to the board room, and – flowing from that – Extraordinary Evil: A Short Walk to Genocide.

Because courage is so central to the concept of Great Work, I was delighted to talk to Barbara about some of these deep dynamics in our lives. In this interview we discuss:

• the differences between a “culture of caring” and a “culture of mean” – and how you can participate in and create either one of them
• how being a bystander is no excuse – there are no innocent bystanders
• how the best anecdote against the three most virulent agents ripping apart the fabric of our humanity – hating other human beings with utter contempt; hording me, mine, and more instead of ours, us, and enough; and harming with lying and cheating and stealing – is to create a climate in our homes, our schools, our communities, and our workplace where we can care deeply, share generously, and help willingly

Listen to my interview with Barbara Coloroso here

The interviews are all between 25 and 30 minutes long.
You can either download them here as mp3s, or go to iTunes, type in “Great Work Interviews” and you’ll see them all there.