Michael Lopp

Rands in Repose

Michael Lopp is a veteran Silicon Valley-based engineering leader who builds both people and product at historic companies such as Slack, Borland, Netscape, Palantir, Pinterest, and Apple. While he’s not deeply worrying about staying relevant, he writes about backpacks, bridges, people, leadership, and werewolves at the popular weblog, Rands in Repose.

Michael has written three books. His first book, “Managing Humans, 3rd Edition,” is a popular guide to the art of engineering leadership and clearly explains that while you will be rewarded for what you build, you will only be successful because of your people. His most recent book, “The Art of Leadership,” documents and explains daily habits leaders can use to make daily progress on developing as a better leader.

Talk: Leadership in a Time of Separation

In this talk, Michael Lopp walks through our new reality of distributed work. We look back on bias around distributed work pre-pandemic, examine new work realities after almost a year of distributed work, and talk about practical habits leaders can use to work in a fully distributed fashion.

Otti Vogt

ING

Otti is a disruptive thought leader with over 20 years of experience in implementing strategic business change in multi-cultural, complex businesses and in crafting human-centric learning organisations. He is passionate about personal and organisational transformation. As COO of ING’s Challenger & Growth division, he is accountable for ING’s global digital transformation programme and continuous optimisation of operational service performance for more than 20m customers worldwide. Previously, Otti gained a wide range of experiences in Telecoms, Consulting, Industry, non-profit and start-ups.

Talk: What's Love Got To Do With It. Beyond Agile: Crafting the Organisations of the Future

In times of historic change, we must have the courage to re-design our organisations, embracing uncertainty and enabling human flourishing at work. The companies that will win in the 2020ies are those that can “compete on learning” and provide a place where people can grow and attain a positive purpose together, rather than just driving efficiency and productivity. And we need leaders who can foster psychological safety and trust - in Humanocracies, “the business of business is people.

Dave Snowden

Cognitive Edge

Dave Snowdenis the founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy, organisational decision making and decision making. He has pioneered a science based approach to organisations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience and complex adaptive systems theory. He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on a range of subjects, and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style.

Talk: From enlightenment to entaglement how do we make sense in a world of accelerating uncertainties?

We live in a world that is inherently uncertain and the only thing we can know with any certainty is that any action we take will trigger unexpected consequences. Globalisation and hyper-localisation means that everything and everybody are entangled in ways that cannot be understood in terms of simple cause and effect relationships, or managed by just trying to make people more rational. In this presentation, Prof Snowden will look at ways in which we can manage this uncertainty through engagement with networks (including our own staff and country populations) in distributed decision support and micro-interventions. By starting journeys with a sense of direction we remain open to necessary and novel discoveries that allow us to shape the complex eco-system of which are a part.

Shery Brauner

Zalando

Shery is an engineering manager in site reliability engineering at Zalando SE, the most innovative and leading online fashion platform in Europe. With over 17 years of international experience in software engineering, she likes to use her knowledge to coach and mentor other women entering the world of tech.

Talk: Monitoring, tracing, & enabling - how we sustained acceleration in the new normal

Are you equipped to empower your team to seize the opportunities hidden within these times of change and disruption? Your organization is defined by its people and is successful because of them. In such uncertain times, leaders should unite and share the toolkits they use to overcome the challenges and transform them into success stories. In this talk, I will share how we managed to sustain the acceleration of productivity in times of change.

Matt Overall

SkuSpring

Matt Overall has spent the last few years in the airline industry, most recently with Panasonic developing a strategy for low-cost-carrier airlines. Before that, he ran the teams that delivered Gategroup's inflight retail platform (flying on EasyJet, Virgin Australia, and more). This software services more than 100m passengers a year, handling hundreds of millions of dollars of inflight sales - although Covid-19 has dented those numbers!

Before becoming involved in inflight retail, Matt focused on digital marketing and consumer-centric mobile applications and websites for iconic brands - delivering for Pepsi, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Vodafone, nPower, Argos, New Look, and AutoTrader.

Matt has worked with teams of all types, shapes, and sizes from well before the pandemic struck; from the more traditional office-based to fully remote and more complex hybrid models.

He did all of this while remaining hands-on, sometimes even managing teams and work literally on the fly, helping to make sure inflight systems performed well during critical phases of their delivery and deployment.

Talk: Keeping Change Human

It is easy to think of change as a process to be run, or a checklist of steps to walk through, but it is important to remember than invariably there is a human somewhere in there. Remembering to think carefully about either your own teams or customers (ideally both), can be the difference between glowing success and crushing failure - regardless of how good the technical solutions are. This talk is hopefully a reminder to look beyond the code and processes and to remember to consider how tech team actions can affect our users in emotional ways. Understanding and thinking about this can allow us to build better solutions that are embraced more readily and ultimately lead to better outcomes for all those involved.

Dr. James Stanier

Brandwatch

Dr. James Stanier is a computer science Ph.D who made the jump from software engineer to manager and has never looked back. He is based in Brighton and is SVP Engineering at Brandwatch. He has built web scale real time data processing pipelines and teams of people: both are equally challenging. James has written about his experiences on his blog that turned into a book, Become An Effective Software Engineering Manager, and was just published by The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Talk: The spectrum of synchronousness

With 2020 being a year of unexpected distributed working, and with the future of our industry looking more remote, being able to wield the right tools for communicating efficiently has never been more important.

You'll leave this talk with practical “bug fixes”, tricks, and a host of tricks that you can take away and implement immediately. We’ll go through a spectrum of communication -- from synchronous to asynchronous -- and plot our common workplace interactions on it. How can we do better? From there, we’ll also consider how the permanence of our communication varies as we move along the spectrum and what that might mean for the future

Shawn Fair

Fair Consulting Group

Shawn Fair is a leading motivational speaker and training expert in the areas of leadership, vision , time mastery, consultative sales, business development and coaching. He has impacted countless lives across the United States, Canada and as far as Budapest, Hungary both in their business and personal growth. Shawn has a unique ability to engage, motivate and inspire leaders of all levels to achieve their vision.

Talk: Effective Leadership, The Antidote to Corporate Dysfunction

This presentation is loaded with thought provoking content for managers of all levels. It is dynamically delivered, motivational, engaging throughout and practical. Managers will learn the dysfunction that happens within the Coporate environment when accountability, coaching, training and vision is absent. Because of the lack of consistency in these 4 areas leaders are responsible for allowing their employees to fall into zones that make it difficult to manage. The Anitdote to Dysfunction Presentation covers the Dead Zone, Comfort Zone, Panic Zone and the only zone that actually works for the good of employees which is the Stretch Zone. Shawn Breaks done the characteristic you see from employees that reside in each of the mention zones. Finally, the presentation breaks down the significance of all employees knowing the company vision and why they should see themselves in the big picture. This presentation opens the eyes of all managers who dare to listen.

Linda Rising

Independent consultant

Linda Rising has a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in the field of object-based design metrics and a background that includes university teaching and industry work in telecommunications, avionics, and strategic weapons systems. An internationally known presenter on topics related to patterns, retrospectives, agile development approaches, and the change process, Linda is the author of numerous articles and five books.

Talk: Busting Myths around Organizational Change

You're smart, and the people in your organization are smart. So making an organizational change should be easy—simply craft a transition plan and transparently explain the benefits, and all will all go smoothly, right? Not quite. Linda Rising will tackle this assumption and other organizational change myths. Learn about patterns for introducing new ideas and some useful tips for helping you grow any innovation step by step.

Sahana Chattopadhyay

Certified OD professional, Coach, Facilitator, Learning & Development Architect, and Instructional Designer with 18+ years of experience across diverse, globally distributed, and fluid organizations. Her experience includes consulting, facilitating, mentoring, laying the foundations for a learning organization, designing the entire spectrum of L&D from formal to informal/social learning, enabling distributed organizations to build online communities for collaboration & co-creation, and reimagining learning for the future of work.

Talk: Leading in Uncertain Times: Building Regenerative Leaders

We are in the midst of simultaneous systems collapse across the globe -- social, economic, political, environmental, and spiritual. The pandemic has opened up the cracks and underscored the fact that there is no going back to the "old normal" and to "business as usual". It has also emphasized our ineradicable interconnectedness with each other and all sentient beings.

Therefore, to thrive and flourish, we must reimagine our societies, politics, communities and institutions against this backdrop.

Reimagining and collectively co-creating a Regenerative Future requires deep shifts in our underlying narratives, metaphors, structures, and beliefs. And holding space for these paradigm shifts calls for wholly different kinds of leadership -- facilitative and regenerative leadership that operates from a different Source.

In this talk, I'll explore some of the fundamental qualities and capabilities of regenerative leaders.

Jim Szafranski

Prezi

Jim Szafranski is the CEO of Prezi, which he joined in 2015 and has helped evolve Prezi into a leading video and visual communications suite. Before becoming CEO, Jim rose to President at Prezi and steered the company’s strategic expansion into video and built its rapidly expanding ecosystem of collaboration partners. Jim also led the company’s integration of the Infogram acquisition and team, resulting in Prezi’s new visual suite of Prezi Video, Prezi Present, and Prezi Design.

Panel on: remote / non-remote

Suzan Bond

Suzan Bond and Co

Suzan Bond is certified executive coach with over 15 years of hands-on experience and an educational background in psychology, organizational behavior and community organizing. She spent more than a decade in tech in various positions, most recently as COO for a startup. Her work has included in-depth experience in career development, new manager training, leader on-boarding and as head of People. She's also run the internal side of a company including reorgs, change management, internal company communication, and executive team facilitation.

Panel: From ancient perofmance management to continue feedback and expectation management

Sergio Caredda

My name is Sergio Caredda and I define myself a Digital Knowmad, Rebel, Multipotentialite, HR Professional who believes in the human side of HR. This is me in a few words.

I currently work for VF Corporation as Digital Transformation Lead. I have substantial experience in HR across multiple functions, both in the business and in consulting. I’m a thinker and a doer, I like crafting and changing things.

Talk: Building the Intentional Organisation

Not a new organisational model, but rather a mindset that consider all organisational building blocks holistically. Managing Transformation in today’s world, requires a lot more than copying an organisation model. It requires rethinking the concepts of Value and Work, and the Sustainability of your enterprise in relationship with an environment that is more and more VUCA.

Scott Hanselman

Microsoft

Scott Hanselman is a programmer, teacher, and speaker. He works in open-source on ASP.NET and the Azure Cloud for Microsoft out of his home office in Portland. Scott has three podcasts for pop culture and tech media. He has also written a number of books for developers worldwide....

Panel on: remote / non-remote

John Knights

LeaderShape

John Knights is a co-founder and chairman of LeaderShape, is an experienced coach, mentor and facilitator of senior executives, teams and peer groups. He is an expert in Emotional Intelligence and a thought leader in 'Transpersonal Leadership' and the relationship between neuroscience and leadership. John developed LEIPA and 8ICOL, some of the most sophisticated 360 degree leadership assessments ever developed.

Talk: Developing Leaders for the 21st Century - They are Transpersonal Leaders

For the ever faster changing world of the 21st century, we need a new kind of leader for the human race and the planet to prosper . This presentation will provide insights into the journey of development of a Transpersonal Leader who leads beyond their ego to create performance-enhancing and sustainable cultures. They are be radical, ethical and authentic while emotionally intelligent and caring, as well as believing in life-long personal learning and development.

Antoinette Weibel

FAA-HSG Forschungistitute

Antoinette Weibel is Professor for Human Resources Management at the University of St. Gallen and director of the Institute for Work and Employment Research, University of St.Gallen. Antoinette does research in Human Resources, Organizational Studies and Organizational Psychology. Her recent research projects center on stakeholder distrust, trust and (new) controls, active trust, and trust in extreme situations.

Panel: From ancient perofmance management to continue feedback and expectation management

Janusz Stabik

Digital Agency Coach

Janusz is a coach and mentor to creative businesses across the globe. Following an exit from his own business, he's since helped over 200 businesses to catapult their growth. Among other things, he runs business growth programmes for Google across Europe.

Talk: The biggest challenge with leading and managing today is ... (and what to do about it)

Why employees might not be engaged and productive, and what to do about it.
How to make leadership feel natural (rather than a guessing game), and have your team follow you with energy and drive.
The biggest threat to your success and what to do about it.

Zoltan Szeni

Epam

Zoltan is a senior global HR executive with over 20 years of experience in a dynamic, multi-cultural environment, working in progressive, high-growth, competitive industries. As a VP and People Leader for EMEA, he plays a key role in enabling EPAM’s continued profitable growth and providing people and clients with innovative, inspiring solutions and rewarding experiences.

Panel: Not the sponsor panel you’d expect

Gabriella Matyas-Kollar

Morgan Stanley

Technology COO for Morgan Stanley Hungary, member of the Technology Management Committee, also worked for a global insurance company as CEE Head of Product Development. Involved in Innovation and Transformation projects. Graduated from INSEAD Global Executive MBA program, studied in France, Singapore, UAE and San Francisco. Her interest areas include Fintech, AI/ML and other new technologies but as well how we can make virtual collaboration and employee engagement work efficiently in an environment turned upside down by the pandemic.

Panel: Not the sponsor panel you’d expect

Balazs Nyers

SAP Labs Hungary

Experienced Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the computer software industry. Skilled in Enterprise Software, People Management, Cloud Operations and IT Service Management.

Panel: Not the sponsor panel you’d expect

Jean Hsu

Co Leasership

Jean Hsu is VP of Engineering @ Range. Previously, she was a co-founder of Co Leadership, a leadership development company for engineers and leaders in tech. She brings over a decade of experience in engineering and management roles from Google, Pulse, and Medium, as well as experience coaching individual contributors, tech leads, managers, CTOs and VPs.

Panel: From ancient perofmance management to continue feedback and expectation management

Michele Zanini

Management Lab

Michele Zanini is the co-author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller, Humanocracy, and a cofounder of the Management Lab, where he helps large organizations become more adaptable, innovative and engaging places to work.

Talk: Humanocracy: Resilient Organization, Good Jobs, Zero Bureaucracy

How is it ok...

• That a scant fifteen percent of employees around the world are highly engaged in their work?
• That only one in five employees believe their opinions matter at work?
• That fewer than one in ten have the freedom to experiment with new products or solutions?
• That seventy percent of jobs require little or no originality?

We can change this...
This is the legacy of bureaucracy, with its authoritarian power structures and rule-choked processes. Bureaucracy makes our organizations inertial, incremental and dispiriting. It sucks meaning out of work, and robs people of the freedom to become their best selves.
It’s time for something better. We need organizations that are flat, fast and open; that reward entrepreneurship and out-run change; that are a source of meaning and connection for employees and other stakeholders.
The good news is that you don’t have to be the CEO to dismantle bureaucracy. Anyone can take the lead in building an organization that’s fit for human beings and fit for the future. Drawing from decades of research and his new WSJ Bestselling Book, Humanocracy, Michele will show you how to get started:
Motivation: How do you get the courage to challenge the status quo?
Mindsets: How do you rid yourself of bureaucratic habits and beliefs?
Models: What can you learn from organizations that have made the jump to "humanocracy?"
Migration: What are the simple, high-impact things you can do to get your organization started on the journey to humanocracy?
The future of our species, and of every organization, depends on our ability to unleash the imagination and passion of every human being at work. This will require a revolution in how we lead, manage, and organize—and a change process that’s engaging, emergent and experimental, Given the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century, we have no time to waste.

Fanni Karolina Toth

Karolina, as a young teenager, led a weekly radio program in her native Hungary. Then she was a production intern at the local radio station while she was completing her degree in cognitive science at the University of Evansville. Now she is an internal coach at Coding Sans, a software development agency, while she also hosts the Level-up Engineering podcast, interviewing accomplished leaders in the tech industry from all across the globe.

Talk: Engineering podcast interview

In this discussion, two-time Level-up Engineering guest and former Engineering manager at Uber, Gergely Orosz will turn the tables and interview Karolina about her learnings throughout this year from 30+ interviews with industry leaders from Amazon, GitHub, Apple, Facebook, and the like.

Kata Faix

XecutEase

Katalin is a facilitator, trainer and business coach having 15 years of experience in facilitation and training in multinational businesses for managers, talents and leadership teams.

Having 10 years business experience in an intercultural environment, Kata combines her analytical skills, out of the box thinking, very precise and structured ways of working with her empathy and care towards people during her workshop facilitations, trainings and individual/team-coaching sessions. Kata holds a teacher’s degree from the ELTE University of Budapest and an Economist-PR degree from the Budapest Business School. She also has a Six Sigma Green Belt certification from the International Six Sigma Academy. Kata is a Certified Professional Facilitator and a Global Mentor by IAF. She is a Certified Facilitator of Lego® Serious Play®.

Talk: Get well-Play well! – with Lego® Serious Play®

In this interactive workshop participants will have the opportunity to both reflecting back and looking ahead to challenges they had and will have in the future while understanding what exactly they need to gain energy and get the best out of the VUCA world. The answer will be unique for each person demonstrated by her/his 3D model created by Lego® bricks. Furthermore, this workshop offers a great tool for leaders to involve and energize teams to gain commitment. Just bring 15 Lego bricks with you (colour and size do not matter) and let us “play” together!

Patrick Cournoyer

Peakon

When implementing Peakon at the San Francisco technology company where he was previously Vice President of People, Patrick was so impressed with both the product and the team that he moved halfway around the world to join Peakon in 2016.

As Chief Evangelist, Patrick travels the world speaking about the transformative power of Peakon. His passion is to inspire thought and action within the global HR community.

Talk: The Impact of COVID-19 on Employee Engagement and What Organisations Should Do Next

This year has transformed the world of work, and employee engagement has reached the top of the priority list for many organisations. Various strategies have been designed and implemented to support the assumed impact, but are the right areas being addressed? Incorporating data from Peakon’s newest report, this session will analyse the impact that COVID-19 has had on employee engagement globally, while considering the individual elements that combine to drive strong engagement. Join this session to gain insights that will help you to steer your organisation and its employees successfully through this period of rapid transformation, and prepare for the next phase.

Keith McCandless

Keith is co-developer of Liberating Structures, co-founder of the Social Invention Group and co-author of the book “The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures – Simple Rules to Unleash a Culture of Innovation” (2014). Keith specializes in helping organizations to innovate and manage complexity by working with groups to unleash creativity, discover opportunities, and build on momentum. His eclectic skills have been honed with groups all over the world, and are grounded in organization development, complexity science, business strategy, and graphic facilitation—all with an improvisational twist. He calls himself a structured improvisationalist.

Talk: Leading With All Voices Shaping the Future

The way we organize, lead and manage organizations is transforming before our eyes. Liberating Structures is one approach that makes it practical to include and unleash all voices in shaping next steps and the future. Lisa Gill (Reimaginaire) and Keith McCandless (Liberating Structures) will guide this roll up your sleeves session on "the good, the bad, and the ugly of leading the way to self-managing organizations." We will describe efforts around the world to replace the unwitting patterns that exclude people, stifle innovation, and constrain deeper, more enduring self-management.

Lisette Sutherland

Collaboration Superpowers

Lisette Sutherland is the Director at Collaboration Superpowers. With over 10 years experience with web-based collaboration tools and online community management, her goal is to get the best people working together regardless of location. Lisette has given presentations at a wide range of events, from conferences and Meetups all over the world to a TEDx talk in Kaunas, Lithuania. She regularly holds a workshop called "Work Together Anywhere" that is designed to help organisations become "remote first": the ability to work together online when necessary. Participants learn how to align, communicate, collaborate, and have fun online!

Panel: remote / non-remote

Nancy White

Full Circle associates

Nancy is deeply curious about how we human beings figure out how to work together in our complex, ever changing world. A practitioner of Liberating Structures and a long time process person - online and offline - she looks forward to learning something new every day. Since the pandemic she is grateful for the burst of collaborative learning from the LS community and the chance to practice with ever greater urgency. Nancy is a grandparent of two and lives in Washington State in the US. She loves dark chocolate an gardening!

Talk: Leading With All Voices Shaping the Future

Anja Ebers

Anja enables people to be great as a self-employed process guide and collaboration coach. She helps groups of any size to experience their divergence and diversity as an enrichment. She enhances the relational coordination among those present building connection and trust and inspiring new ways of working. Anja is a pioneer for more lively online meetings. The principles & the repertoire of Liberating Structures are a vital part of her work.

Talk: Leading With All Voices Shaping the Future