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PODCAST

At Work with The Ready

Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin

Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin have helped teams around the world adopt more modern ways of working and on At Work with The Ready they’re sharing the inside scoop with you, too. Whether you’re struggling with a carousel of ineffective meetings, annual strategy sessions that go nowhere, or decision-making churn that never ceases, they’ve seen it all and are here to help. In each episode, they"ll break down common workplace challenges and show you the moves—both big and small—to start making real,

business management

All Episodes

28:45

58. The One Where Sam Says Goodbye

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/10/05

We've spent the last few months talking about organizations that are built to benefit from change. But change gets extra hard when people leave, especially when that person is your friend and a big part of what makes a job worth getting up for in the morning. It’s hard to balance being happy for someone moving on to their shiny new thing and still grieve the hole they leave behind. Well, the same goes for podcasts and we're a bit in our feels today: after three years behind the mic, Sam has decided

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9:17

AUA: How to Get Institutional Knowledge Out of...

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/09/28

In some organizations, the knowledge isn't in a wiki or a handbook…it’s trapped in people's heads and travels by hallway storytelling. A listener wants to know: how do you build a culture of knowledge sharing and async communication in a place where writing things down has never been the norm?In this mini episode, Rodney and Sam dig into why the oral tradition persists. From the power dynamics of hoarding knowledge to the fear of having receipts for decisions that went sideways, they share

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59:24

57. Your Company Wasn't Built to Grieve with Molly...

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/09/21

Organizations are absorbing more change than they were ever built for, and that change always comes with a lot of feelings. Whether it's a layoff, a reorg, a promotion, or handing off a project you built, we're constantly having to shed hopes and dreams and stability and start over. But most companies are built to avoid those feelings, not process them, so they just accumulate. Leaders skip straight to the "let's get excited about the future!" phase, everyone's feelings go underground, and teams get

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14:16

AUA: How To Make the Hard Call and Shut Something Down

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/09/14

Every organization is postponing something painful they don’t want to face. The CEO’s strategy that’s stopped working, the layoffs that have become unavoidable, the promising prototype that’s not delivering results. But even when what has to be done is clear, nobody wants to be the one to be the one to do it.In this episode, Rodney and Sam respond to a listener asking about how companies can get better at ripping off the Bandaid. They explore ways to put a clock on hard decisions, shrinking the

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55:13

56. Your Strategy is a Work of Fiction

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/09/07

Once a year a small group goes offsite, argues for three days, and comes back with a deck. Goals get written. Functions map their OKRs to the slides. Then the market moves, and everybody spends the next eleven months executing against assumptions that stopped being true in February. Most people in the building read that document and can't find themselves anywhere in it, which is how a strategy quietly becomes a story about a company nobody actually works at.In this episode, Rodney Evans and Sam

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8:19

AUA: How Do Leaders Stop Being The Decision Bottleneck?

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/08/31

It happens gradually: a leader makes one call that should have been decided by one of their reports, then another, until the whole team has quietly stopped deciding anything without “checking in” first. By the time the bottleneck is discovered, it feels like just how things are now and any change feels uncomfortable for everyone.In this week’s AUA, Rodney and Sam answer a listener’s question about how to catch yourself before you become that bottleneck, navigating the discomfort when handing

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54:54

55. Your Org Can Be Built to Benefit From Change. Can...

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/08/24

Most of us were told to find the one thing we're great at and ride it. Build the team around your gaps, get good at your specialty and let someone else cover the rest. That advice built a lot of careers, and it also built a lot of leaders who only have one move, right at the moment when the ground under their organization keeps shifting.In this episode, Rodney Evans and guest co-host Sam Rothkopf get into what leadership looks like inside an organization built to benefit from change. They cover

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9:23

AUA: Why Does Every Decision Take Forever?

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/08/17

Most organizations run on two default modes of deciding: build consensus until everyone's exhausted, or debate until the boss makes the call. Both feel normal and both quietly stall the work, so how do you introduce something better without triggering resistance?In this mini episode, Rodney and Sam trade their favorite on-ramps. Rodney starts small: be the person who asks "wait, have we actually decided?" Sam makes the case for a bigger palette of decision types, from the advice process to

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49:56

54. Change Only Sticks If It Starts At The Top:...

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/08/10

Hard truth time: your executive team sets the ceiling on how fast everything below it can move and most of them aren't built for that job. Decisions pile up on the CEO's desk because nobody's clear who owns them. Board prep swallows whole weeks. One person quietly absorbs all the coordination nobody designed for. Then a real change arrives, and the team soft-pedals it out through their functions until eight executives are telling eight different stories and nothing’s getting done.In this episode,

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10:45

AUA: Are Ego-Driven Leaders The Only Kind That Succeed?

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/08/03

Sam Altman and Elon Musk built some of the most valuable companies on the planet while doing nearly everything we would advise against. So a listener wants to know: if ego and raw self-belief keep landing people at the top, is all this talk of trust and participation on our show worth it?In this mini episode, Rodney and Sam get honest about survivorship bias, why colorful founders get all the ink while quietly thriving companies get none, and how the frontier game selects for a very particular

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51:06

53. The Chief of Staff’s Real Job: Turning Strategy...

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/07/27

If you hired a chief of staff to be your leadership team’s star athlete, don’t let them languish on the bench. At many organizations, chiefs of staff are meant to execute high-wire strategic work. But the job is often reduced to: glorified project management, executive cat-herding, and catering to the CEO’s whims. They compensate for bad work design through effort and influence, carrying big expectations with no real authority.In this episode, Rodney and guest co-host, Sam Rothkopf, lay out the

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9:14

AUA: When Do Well-Meaning Checklists Turn Into...

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/07/20

Every org has process that started as protection and calcified into performance: boxes we check to prove nothing bad happened, rather than to help good work happen. In this mini episode, Rodney and Sam respond to a listener trying to resist the "checklistification" of their org. They draw a line where good checklists turn bad and explore the limits for what checklists can—and can't—solve in your team's Twilight Zone. -------------------------------- Ready to change your organization

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50:31

52. Welcome to the Liminal Space (Buckle Up!)

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/07/13

Volatility is just the new normal, and it's crushed everyone's appetite for complexity at the exact moment complexity demands attention. Executives who used to love a whiteboard now say "just tell me the answer." Five-year plans read as fiction within months. Employees trust leadership less than ever and with AI in the mix the old moats (talent, pricing, product, position) are eroding or gone. So what's left? In this episode, Rodney sits down with Sam Rothkopf, co-steward of The Ready, to lay out

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7:55

AUA: How Do You Tell Leadership The Truth Without...

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/07/06

You can see it clearly: the project is FUBAR, the reporting is rosy, and the people with the power to do something about it are several levels above you. But sending a flare up the chain feels risky—especially when your boss's boss's boss is the one you need to reach. So what do you actually do? In this mini episode, Rodney and Sam respond to a listener stuck in that exact spot and offer a few moves that don't involve career-ending emails or anonymous screeds nailed to the CEO's door, and explore

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52:41

51. It's Time, Babe: How to Know When to Leave Your Job

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/06/29

Everyone tells you leaving a job is a math problem: runway, comp, the next offer, the spreadsheet that finally tips. But most people who ask "how do I know when it's time?" have already answered the question. They just haven't let themselves hear it yet. In this episode, Rodney and Sam get personal, both are in the middle of their own transitions, and unpack what it actually takes to leave well. They dig into the difference between the best days, the worst days, and the average day that actually

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8:30

AUA: How Do You Make Employee Ownership Actually Feel...

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/06/22

Plenty of companies make the move to employee ownership—ESOPs, EOTs, buyouts—and then wonder why nothing really changes. The shares transfer, the announcement goes out, and then... people still feel like employees. The ownership is technically there, but the culture hasn't caught up. In this mini episode, Rodney and Sam respond to a listener who's seen this gap firsthand and wants to know which parts of the operating system to examine first. Drawing heavily from The Ready's own experience as an

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51:01

50. The Ways of Working Movement Failed. Now What?

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/06/15

Fifteen years ago, the future of work seemed inevitable: bureaucracy was crumbling, adaptive organizations were the next default, and a whole movement of practitioners was going to get us there. That future never arrived. Agile transformation offices are being eliminated, the pendulum has swung hard back to command-and-control, and the companies we held up as proof are still the exceptions, not the rule.This week, Rodney and Sam take an honest look at the failure of the ways of working movement,

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7:15

AUA: Is Real Change Possible Inside Federal Bureaucracy?

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/06/08

Most of the conversation about the future of work is aimed squarely at the corporate sector—growth engines, dual transformation, quarterly targets. But what if your organization exists to regulate, administer, and serve the public? What if the purpose isn't changing, and innovation of the underlying mission isn't really on the table?In this mini episode, Rodney and Sam respond to an internal consultant at a large federal agency who's wondering how much of the podcast's advice actually translates

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50:53

Traditional Consulting Sold You a Great Idea. Now...

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/06/01

Producer's Note: It’s been two years since this episode first aired, and it’s every bit as relevant today. We’ve got some exciting things on these themes coming really soon, so revisit this one and we'll see in two weeks with a brand new episode. --- For decades, traditional consulting (think “management” or “strategy” varieties now synonymous with the Big Three) has been a go-to move for organizations looking for a shake up. Need a bulletproof vision for the future or a new org restructuring

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12:18

AUA: How Honest Should Leaders Be During a...

At Work with The Ready ·

2026/05/25

Your company announced a shiny new transformation, set to herald a new era of possibility. But a few weeks in, it's starting to feel a lot more like a top-down cost-cutting exercise with a nicer label—and people are afraid that speaking up will put a target on their back. Sound familiar? In this mini episode, Rodney and Sam respond to a listener caught in the middle of it all: working with the consultants, reporting to senior leaders, and hearing directly from employees who aren't buying the

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