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Creating a corporate culture that gives back
Why you should listen: leadership perspectives that combine, technology, art and philanthropy
Team development strategies driven by altruism
The emerging connection of ART in the IT sector
How IT and art have parallel processes
The Pledge 1% and how Matt Bullock of Spinify has created a Foundation to support even more of the community
How giving and social justice is woven in a successful career.
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Shownotes:
About Sheryle Moon:
Corporate leader Sheryle Moon on her leadership perspectives that combine art, technology and philanthropy
One of the first women in IT, Sheryle Moon has had an amazing and diverse career. She has a passion for creativity and design, in IT as well as art. She has been the second in command alongside successful entrepreneur Matt Bullock, the founder of international payment gateway, eWay, and now their second venture - Spinify, a gamification platform to incentivise work that matters.
Sheryle will be a Table Host at the Edge of Leadership Un-Conference March 28, 2017.
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Transcript:
Zoë Routh: Hi, it's Zoë, and on today's podcast we have the remarkable Sheryle Moon. She's an extraordinary woman who's one of the pioneering first ladies in IT. In this interview today, we go through the amazing trajectory of her career, we look at social contributions and social justice, and the interesting cross-section between IT and art, and all of that and what it can do to inspire you. Let's get into it.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Zoë Routh Leadership Podcast, your source of strategies and insights to make you a better leader. Influence, improve, inspire.
Zoë Routh: Hi, this is Zoë Routh, and I'm here with the extraordinary Sheryle Moon, who is the Chief Inspiration Officer at Spinify, another local Canberran business, which is set to do extraordinary things. I'm going to let Sheryle tell her story in just a moment. She's had a huge variety of trajectories in her career through art and IT, and it's just a wild ride. I'm going to get her to fill in the gaps. Welcome, Sheryle.
Sheryle Moon: Thanks, Zoë. My current role is as Chief Evangelist.
Zoë Routh: Chief Evangelist, sorry.
Sheryle Moon: Which is just a really, really cool title, and I have a really cool job with Spinify. I work very closely with Matt Bullock who's an inspirational entrepreneur based here in Canberra. He developed a company called eWAY over 18 years and sold it for many millions of dollars to a Fortune 500 company in 2016. Once he sold that, he then set up Spinify and having worked for him at eWAY I came across to work with him at Spinify.
That's where I am currently. Zoë's right. I've had a bit of a pottered career. I'm not one of those people who's followed a vertical career. I've moved across as things have interested me, as opportunities have presented themselves. Predominantly, I've worked in I guess what I would classify as non-traditional areas for women. Lots of IT in my career, having worked for IBM, for Anderson Consulting, which is now Accenture, then gone on to Manpower and worked in the global job for them managing 75 countries across the world.
Zoë Routh: Just a question about that. Are they still called Manpower?
Sheryle Moon: Yes, they are still called Manpower.
Zoë Routh: They're not people power?
Sheryle Moon: No.
Zoë Routh: Okay.
Sheryle Moon: It's one of those terms, I think, when you understand the history. The two men who set up Manpower in Milwaukee, after the second World War, there was not enough manpower to do all the jobs that were required postwar. The history is very important to Manpower as a company. Once you understand that, it's not quite as gender-biased as we might think. They were a great organisation to work for.
Then I took a small diversion and was asked to work for the Australian Information Industry Association. Because of my IT background, I worked specifically with them as the CEO to raise the profile of women in technology. During my career, whether it's been an official part of my career or extracurricular, I've certainly worked to advance the role of women in non-traditional careers, particularly in the STEM environment, and then also to help women at specific career points to decide what their career path might look like, and that it's okay to take big, bold steps, because they often deliver or wildly exceed your expectations about what your career could be.
Zoë Routh: Yeah, absolutely. STEM, for those who aren't familiar with that acronym, what does it stand for?
Sheryle Moon: STEM is science, technology, engineering, and math. I think it's quite interesting now that in the U.S. there's a movement to turn STEM into STEAM by adding Art, because there's a view that, in fact, the creative elements go very nicely with the STEM elements in order to be not just creative but innovative, and to advance economies through innovation. I'm behind that little push at the moment in the U.S., with friends in the U.S., and really interested to see where that goes. Having spent a part of my career running art environments and investing in art and brokering in arts, I'm very keen to see the right and left brain balance up to push through innovation, because we definitely need that in our world at the moment.
Zoë Routh: You're obviously a passionate advocate. We're sitting here in Sheryle's fantastic apartment. It's just got glorious pieces of artwork everywhere. You talk about left brain, right brain complementary thing in IT. How have you seen your passion for art complement your work or support the work that you do in IT?
Sheryle Moon: It's always been a bit of an adjunct to my work in IT. In some ways it's been the high touch to my high tick environment, because it's allowed me to interact with people who have a different way of viewing the world, who may not have the same business acumen that I've certainly developed in my career. That kind of mutually beneficial relationship to promote their works, to ensure that they get paid for their efforts.
I think artists, more than any other career or profession, suffer from the, "Well, that's really a nice piece. Why don't you give it to me and I'll put it up on my wall, or I'll put it in my gallery, or I'll promote it, and you'll get lots of exposure?" Artists in our environment are highly underrated in terms of the effort and the passion that goes into a single piece of art, regardless of what that is, whether we're talking wearable art, or we're talking paintings, or we're talking sculpture, ceramics ... People don't just knock up stuff.
Zoë Routh: That's right, and I had a sense of that. We were recently in New York over the Christmas break and we went to the MET, Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was extraordinary. They have an extraordinary collection there, and it gave me a truer appreciation for what goes into the creation of a piece of work. It's not just the doing, it's the seeing. I think artists see the world in different ways that allows us to change how we see the world. You see that with things like, at the cusp of changing perception, with people like Picasso. He radically changed how we see the world, interpret the world, and create an interpretation of reality. I think artists are true beacons, seers, I guess? Seers is probably the right word, or the terminology I might use for our culture. They've lost a lot of status and appreciation over the last couple of centuries, really.
I love the fact that art is being incorporated into IT, and I think that's a great sign that technology is coming into its own in terms of being able to spearhead the evolution of culture, because it is. It's got the innovation of robotics and AI, which is at the forefront of the robotic apocalypse, if you read some sayers, or the revolution of how we work and the end of work. There's some conversations around that, and it's not just in America, it's also in Australia. I met with the Australian Computer Association here in the ACT, and they're keen to incorporate that as well.
Sheryle Moon: That's great news.
Zoë Routh: Yeah. They're looking at how they can extend their training and development to incorporate that aspect of creativity and tech.
Sheryle Moon: It's interesting, Zoë, just as you were talking about what's happened over the last couple of centuries, because I can draw some more specific parallels between art and technology. If we go back to the Middle Ages and to people like Michelangelo, then he did his artwork on three separate levels. The first thing they did with the canvas was to put a dirt layer on. The dirt layer reacted with the canvas and formed the glue so that it would last forever, which is why paintings from that era do last forever.
Zoë Routh: Dirt off the street?
Sheryle Moon: Dirt off the street.
Zoë Routh: Yeah, right. Okay.
Sheryle Moon: They mixed it with a bonding agent, it might have been a glue, to bond it as an adhesive, to bond it to the canvas.
Then came a form layer. They would form out what the artwork was going to look like. Still with their oils or with a diluted oil, they would make the form. They might draw the church or the Mona Lisa, and put it all in perspective. Then the final layer was the colour layer. That's when they would finish it off.
If I look at how paintings are formed and how great art even today is formed, it still follows that methodology of layers. If I look at technology, it's the same. Spinify is a gamification company. We have games that improve business processes, but you still have to go through a layered approach. It's not that ... There wasn't a magic thing that suddenly made a game in the Apple App Store. There's a foundation layer. There's the back end, so the back end game mechanics. Then there's the design. The biggest part of a game is the design, and again that's where the creativity comes in. You get an end product in both situations, but there's all those layers underneath that sometimes get forgotten in how we value both technology and art.
Zoë Routh: I think that's right. I was hosting Leadership over lunch yesterday, which is my monthly network gathering. One of the major trends I see out there in business is this trend towards desire for friction-free. If you notice all the little things that irritate you about your day, they're often technology-related. We've become very impatient with technology, even though it's changed our world in so many ways and made life so much better in so many ways.
Even things like, for example, I was trying to pay for my parking using an app yesterday. I had to log into the app, where usually it's just open. I was like, "I can't remember my password." It's like, "Do you forget your password?" I'm like, "I'm not going through that crap." You have to get the email. I gave up and I just used my credit card. Such a tiny little thing. It's a little piece of friction in our lives, and we forget all that amazing design and layering that has gone into producing a free app that allows you to hopefully have a more seamless experience.
Sheryle Moon: Correct.
Zoë Routh: I think you're right. We are dismissive of technology, even if we have to upgrade our software again on the phone. It seems like every two weeks we have to do that. It's just such an impediment, and yet we're not appreciative of all the hours of work that went into upgrading and making that. Yeah, love that parallel. That's really fascinating. It opens our eyes to what we don't appreciate and what is there to value.
I'm curious about a couple of things. eWAY is a fabulous Canberra entrepreneurial story with Matt Bullock, who set it up and transformed this payment gateway to an international force, if you like. You've been part of that journey for a long time. I think Matt Bullock has a compassionate side. He's obviously a fierce entrepreneur, and he's launching as much energy into Spinify as he did into eWAY, I'm sure. He's a very fierce man, and he's also very committed to philanthropy. Can you tell us a little bit about what happened at eWAY in terms of how he embraces philanthropy and his social contribution there, and also how you see that fitting into business from your point of view?
Sheryle Moon: Of course. Matt is very focused on philanthropy. For a long time, before he set up his foundation, which is a recognised charity in Australia, and he's put money into the foundation to do some very specific philanthropic things, and I'll talk about those, but before that Matt was a very strong supporter of OzHarvest, which deals with providing meals to disadvantaged Australians. He's a very big supporter of that. Did the CEO cook-off year after year after year and made personal donations to the organisation. He's always been a long-term supporter of Ronald McDonald House.
Often philanthropy comes from our personal experiences. Matt's son had a life-threatening thing happen to him when he was born. He was rushed off to Sydney, and Matt and Wendy spent time in Ronald McDonald House in Sydney. Since then, so that would be the last eight years, they have supported Ronald McDonald House. They have subsidised rooms here in Canberra for Ronald McDonald House, very strong in that. That personal commitment to organisations like Ronald McDonald and to OzHarvest have now transferred across to the foundation.
Zoë Routh: What is the foundation called?
Sheryle Moon: It's the Spinify Foundation. One of the important components of the foundation is that Spinify is a partner of the Pledge 1% philanthropy initiative. So many of the great companies in the world, particularly in the tech environment, so organisations like Salesforce and Atlassian, which is another great Australian company, have all taken the Pledge 1%. What that means is that those are organisations who are prepared to commit either 1% of their revenue or 1% of their profits, so 1% of a financial commitment. 1% of their time, so companies who are Pledge 1% partners provide the opportunity for staff to pledge 1% of their time to charities that they're interested in. It's not just from the CEO, but it goes right down through the staff in the organisation. The third component is providing 1% of product to not-for-profit organisations. It's a very comprehensive way of giving back to the community.
Zoë Routh: 1% sounds like not very much. I'm wondering, because it's one and it's a percentage. Obviously that translates into a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of product when you have such big companies. What does that typically look like? Have you got end dollar figures or end time figures for some of those companies?
Sheryle Moon: I don't have them ready to hand, but they'd certainly be on the Pledge 1% website. There's a whole list of partners on there as well, plus videos of people making the pledge. Matt made the pledge with Scott Farquhar from Atlassian. It was really nice, two Australian, very successful entrepreneurs. It's interesting now that Scott Farquhar, for example, has decided to take a year off just to give back to the community.
Zoë Routh: Wow. What do you mean? Is he volunteering? What's he doing?
Sheryle Moon: He's volunteering. He's looking at more ways that successful organisations and successful individuals can solve the problems of the world. If you think about entrepreneurship, it requires really a 24/7 mentality, often for many, many years. The nice thing is that he's had the opportunity to do that. Matt Bullock has certainly taken some time to think about what the foundation looks like for him, as well, and in the last 12 months, has provided a lot of support for the Canberra Innovation Network and the Kiln Incubator here in Canberra, both in terms of sponsorship and in personal time to work with budding entrepreneurs and budding startups.
Zoë Routh: What's the Kiln Incubator? Is that how you, K-I-L-N?
Sheryle Moon: Yes.
Zoë Routh: Okay, great. Fantastic. He's obviously passionate about entrepreneurialism, because he's such a successful one, and encouraging other entrepreneurs to go for it is really important. I think you're right. I think there's a lot of business people out there who feel a sense of commitment to the community and want to contribute to solving the problems.
Sheryle Moon: The Pledge 1% started off with Atlassian and Salesforce, but encouraging people right from their early start-off days, when pledging 1% of nothing or $50,000 is tiny. Maintaining that pledge as you go then takes it from a very small contribution to the community, but still a contribution, to what is, for some of those companies, a very large contribution. I think it's very rewarding to see what you give back grow over time as you are a more and more successful entrepreneur.
Zoë Routh: Absolutely. I was talking to Todd Wright of Three Sides Marketing as well. That was his advice to every startup business, is to start from the beginning, to have a sense of social contribution, whether it be time, because often you don't have two cents to rub together when you're starting a business, as you said, so 1% of nothing is not much. It gives you a great sense of fulfilment to do that. You're right, it is rewarding to see how much more you can contribute as you grow. As your success grows, you can continue to contribute, and that contributes to ongoing success.
A lot of pushback from new business owners would be like, "I'm just struggling to make ends meet." How would you come back to them with that? If they're really struggling to make ends meet, and the idea of social contributions seems like another burden. Have you met people like that? What advice would you have for them?
Sheryle Moon: To be honest, we don't meet many, because I think there's a growing awareness that we all have something to give back to our communities. That goes for individuals as well as for businesses. Certainly, what I see, particularly now amongst young people coming through universities, because we do some work with universities as well, is that they want to be part of solutions, technology solutions in particular, because that's what we work with them on, that make the world a better place.
If I go back to the start of my career in the 1980s, when I joined IBM, it really was the greed is good era. There was very little personal responsibility or personal accountability for making the world a better place. I'm pleased to say in the last 40 years, or 30 years, whatever it is, we've moved on from that. I think it's very high on our conscious level that we have an obligation to help people who are less fortunate than ourselves, or organisations who are less fortunate than we are, particularly if we've been successful in business.
Zoë Routh: I think it's obligations. It's almost a calling, a sense that with great success comes great responsibility. The entrepreneurs I've met who are very generous don't feel it as an obligation, necessarily. They feel it as something that they want to do. They do it through gratitude and compassion. I love the fact that you've pointed out that the greed is good mentality has shifted a lot. It's still alive and well in some sectors, if we think about some of the global financial crisis and how much that notion of greed is good corrupted people and led to such crazy decisions, and had such massive repercussions.
I think when we have such a big incident like that, the antithesis arises. Greed is good. Really? What about compassion? Compassion and contribution can help us become even more prosperous as an entire community, and the more prosperous the community, the more prosperous the businesses. That's a lovely observation, a lovely link as well.
I'm curious about your job title, which I got wrong. Apologies for that in your intro. Chief evangelist. Was there much thought that came into that? Where is that coming from?
Sheryle Moon: Matt's always liked to work in a title-less environment. eWAY, Spinify, very flat organisations. It's very peer-to-peer relationships. It's more about the team working together to solve problems, particularly with Spinify, where we had six months to go from zero to hero, and develop two game products, one for the Android and one for the iOS platforms, and all of the back end game mechanics, to a launch date.
That was a hard launch date. We'd taken a booth at Dreamforce. The initial system was built on Salesforce, so it was a very hard deadline. That worked really well, because the team just mucked in and did whatever it took. It's a long time. I'd have to go back to the 80s to when I really, really coded, but even I picked up some of the coding and testing, like unit testing, to make sure that we presented professionally, which we did.
When we were going off to Dreamforce, we did make the decision that we needed to have cards. Being a dot com, Silicon Valley-style company, we thought about having things which were quirky and that people would notice, and people would remember, and then people would come back and talk to us, which is what happened. Matt, who's incredibly creative, said to me, "Why don't you be the chief evangelist?" I went, "Yes. I've always wanted to be the person." I am very passionate about what I do, and particularly about our product, so I'm like, "Yeah, that's me. That's what I'll be doing. I'll be just talking about it. I'll be selling it. I'll be spreading my passion to other people about how they can change business processes."
It's interesting, because my entire career has been about helping people change their business processes in order to be more successful. If I go back to my IBM days, the whole ... I was at IBM when people were moving their manual accounting processes, their financial processes, their inventory processes, from ledgers or books to computers. That was all about business process re-engineering, or business process improvement.
Gamification does exactly the same thing, because it gamifies the activities that people do to make them more engaged, so you've got a more engaged workforce. You've got people who are happy at work, because they're playing games and having fun, and you've got better business results. It's perfect for me to talk about, because that's really what my career's been all about.
Zoë Routh: And a lot of fun in there too, for sure.
Sheryle Moon: Yeah, definitely fun.
Zoë Routh: You've got clients now who've adopted the Spinify technology and app and are implementing it. What kind of projects or rules do they incorporate the Spinify app into, and what kind of results are you seeing?
Sheryle Moon: Initially, when Matt thought about the product, he thought about it for sales teams. There's been incentive competitions for sales people since the 1800s, since drapers gave their sales people an incentive to sell out of stock or ends of rolls. The incentive competition, the spiff goes back for a long, long time.
Zoë Routh: Is that what a spiff is, an incentive competition?
Sheryle Moon: Yeah, it's a Specific Performance Incentive Fund, because that was the money that was put aside. Specific performance is what it was all about. You have to do this specific activity in order to get the money.
Zoë Routh: Okay.
Sheryle Moon: We thought about sales people, but then I've managed service teams, and I've managed back office people. They also have activities. They have very specific activities. By the time we got to Dreamforce, we recognised that the product had a wider application than just sales people.
That said, some of the applications have now ... We do have people using it with their sales teams. We have people using it with their admin teams. We have two organisations, and I've just today been talking to a third organisation, who are using it to drive training and learning in their organisations. People have to do specific courses. Usually in large corporations, in order to progress in their career or to do their professional development, they need to do a series of courses. Most companies leave that to be an opt-in, because it should be something that people want to do, but now they're looking at how they incentivise that process by running a game, because everyone's used to a game, and they get points, and they get badges, and they get levels. That's working very well to drive learning outcomes.
We never thought about driving that specific activity, but the guys who are using it are just raving about it.
Zoë Routh: It harks back to the Boy Scouts and Brownies. My niece, who's seven, is in the Brownies, and she's obsessed with getting badges. I think that's the whole principle of gamification. It gives you something tangible to strive for. It gives you a sense of satisfaction once you get it.
I'm curious about the sales piece, though, because I think one of the things that we recognised, and I'm sure you guys have addressed that, and I think you talked about this a little bit, when you incentivise results instead of the actual activity that needs to generate the results, what have you seen? You just incentivise results versus the process of sales.
Sheryle Moon: I think most people know that if you do more activity, so if I'm a sales person, if I make more calls, if I send more quotes, if I have more meetings, then I will drive the sales, because you have a big funnel that you narrow down as you go over time. One of the things we talk about is changing activity-based behaviours, so not ABC, but ABB, because that's what gamification and Spinify does. It helps organisations effortlessly change activity-based behaviours, because the games run on the activity.
As you said, I see my progress in the game, in whatever the landscape is, and we've got a number of different landscapes or different worlds that people play in. I see my progress by completing an activity. If the metric is 50 calls, then I progress so many steps for every call I make.
The other important thing is that games give you immediate performance feedback. Immediately, I'm not waiting for a manager to tell me whether I'm doing the right or the wrong thing. I can see. Because I can see my colleagues, I can see if I'm doing the same level of activities that they're doing. I can see if I'm falling behind, if I need to do more.
Zoë Routh: It's public, is it? It's not just a private thing. There's a dashboard where you can see everybody else.
Sheryle Moon: Yes. In the game, I can see everybody. The game world, it's like a multiplayer online game. I can see all of my colleagues in the game. I can see who's fast approaching the rocket. I can see people who have fallen behind. I can see everyone, and I can always see where I am, because I have a slightly different halo than my colleagues. I can always pinpoint, "Okay, that's me. Who's in front of me? What are they doing? How many activities are they doing, because that's what I need to do?"
As you said, it's the self-motivation. We're all looking for frictionless, as you referred to. This is a way to help managers manage people in a frictionless way, because they'll manage themselves with that motivation of, "Whoa, I'm clearly not doing as my activities as my friend." A little bit of that peer pressure, that healthy competitive qualities that we all have.
Zoë Routh: Yeah. I think that's the important caveat. It could turn evil potentially, but that takes a lot of management, as well, to make sure that it does maintain healthy and it doesn't get corrupted. My friend Stacey Barr, who is a performance measurement specialist, is often very cautious about designing measures that going to make sure that promote good behaviour as opposed to ones that drive illegal or unethical behaviour just to get the results in.
Sheryle Moon: Correct, absolutely. One of the things that a number of our customers are using, because Matt's obviously managed teams, I've managed teams, what normally happens in a competition is that there's a good player. If we're talking about making phone calls, there will be people in your sales team who always make the most calls.
What we've talked to customers about doing, and what they are doing, is matching their games to the competency level of people. You would put your high performers in a different game, with a different metric and a different reward, to your core performers, and to your lowest performers. Because I think you referred to it earlier, Zoë, about the good feeling. To motivate people to want to do more, they have to have the winning feeling. If it's just one big contest and the top person always wins, then nobody else gets to experience that.
Zoë Routh: It's like a handicaps system, if you like.
Sheryle Moon: Yeah, although when I'm competing, if I'm one of the core performers, then I'm competing against people ... It's a level playing field.
Zoë Routh: Yeah, got it.
Sheryle Moon: Yeah. What it does, of course, is give those people the winning feeling, so they want to do more, and over time you're lifting your very poor performers up to the core performers, core performers up to top performers, and if you think about a small lift in each of those individuals will deliver a very big lift in revenue, in deals, in cases closed if you're talking about service teams, to the organisation. It's just a beautiful flow.
Zoë Routh: That's great. How much fun are you having over there at Spinify, you guys? How big is your team now?
Sheryle Moon: We've got 12 people here in Canberra, and then we've got people in the U.S. and in Canada, and then we've got a couple of really, really expert technical people, one in Poland and one in Croatia, and then we use about, at the peak of our development, probably about 120 freelance people. We're very good at going out and finding the right person for the job.
You don't need the right person necessarily for the entire time. For voiceovers, for example, or for some of our designs, or how should we set up our stand at Dreamforce, we found people, freelancers, who would give us all that information, a very discrete project, and that was the end of their relationship. We've got core employees, and then we've got a bunch of associates that we call on.
Zoë Routh: Fantastic. We talked a little bit about Matt Bullock's passions when it comes to philanthropy. What are the causes that matter to you?
Sheryle Moon: I think they're pretty broad. I'll give you an example. I've always contributed to things like Movember or cancer. Cancer affects all of us. Giving to those causes, donating time, marriage equality, even going back when it was about gay pride, so volunteering time to serve on stalls or fronting up to a couple of the rallies and giving out papers, and talking to people, and taking some of the negative feedback.
When we're in Santa Fe, Santa Fe is in New Mexico, and we had a house there for a long time. It was two of us. We used to go backwards and forwards, and then we bought a business there. New Mexico has the lowest level of education in the U.S., out of the 50 states. It has one of the lowest levels of living conditions. One of the Christmases we were there, 25 people froze to death.
Zoë Routh: Oh my goodness.
Sheryle Moon: Homeless people. That should never happen anywhere.
Zoë Routh: That's amazing.
Sheryle Moon: We became quite passionate about not just being philanthropic but working in community organisations and in political organisations in order to change the way social equality and social justice was delivered. I've certainly done that here in Australia as well. It is about change. I'm a huge advocate that you change things from the inside. It's harder to change them from the outside. Getting involved in not-for-profit boards, in not-for-profit organisations, volunteering time, there's huge opportunities for people to give back if they don't have money, to find a small amount of time to give back to community organisations in their community.
Zoë Routh: With the marriage equality piece, is that because on principle you believe in that, or do you have a personal story in relation to that that you wanted to support people, or is that just one of the things you felt was an important value for you?
Sheryle Moon: If I go back to when I was growing up, even from the time I was 11 or 12, my sister and I would run stalls in our front yard to raise money for ... There was a home for Down's syndrome children. We would raise money for them. As we went through our teenage years, we'd run stalls, we'd door knock to raise money for people who were less advantaged or more disadvantaged than we were. That's carried through most of our life.
When I joined IBM, I really was one of the first women involved in IT in Australia, in computers in Australia. I had a very strong sense of equality and social justice, as a feminist does, for all people. It's bigger than just gender bias. You see women were disadvantaged, and certainly faced a lot of discrimination in the workplace. Then that translated into other groups within our society, of which people who have a different sexual persuasion than I do were clearly disadvantaged. I had a lot of friends in the 80s who didn't make it through AIDS, for example. There's no reason why all of us shouldn't live equally in love.
Zoë Routh: Thank you. That was powerful. It doesn't surprise me that as a child you were door-knocking and raising funds. You're a very compassionate, determined person with a big heart, and that's shown up through your work. I feel very privileged to have heard your story today, and I'm really excited to share that with our listeners in terms of inspiring other people to be fierce and compassionate at the same time.
Thank you so much for coming on the show, Sheryle.
Sheryle Moon: It's my pleasure, Zoë. It's really been lovely to have known you for a couple of years now, and to be involved in the things that you're doing to change our society, as well.
Zoë Routh: That's right. You can come along and meet Sheryle. She's going to be a table host at the Edge of Leadership Un-Conference in March, where you get to spend time with her. Thanks again
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Related episodes on corporate culture:
E173 - People stuff lessons from Antarctica Research station leader, Rachael Robertson
E134 - My biggest failure was needing to be right - Marene Allison, CISO Johnson & Johnson
E27 - Peter Munday: Success is being able to give back
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About your host, Canberra leadership expert Zoë Routh:
Zoë Routh is one of Australia’s leading experts on people stuff - the stuff that gets in our way of producing results, and the stuff that lights us up. She works with the growers, makers, builders to make people stuff fun and practical.
Zoë is the author of four books: Composure - How centered leaders make the biggest impact, Moments - Leadership when it matters most, Loyalty - Stop unwanted staff turnover, boost engagement, and build lifelong advocates, and People Stuff - Beyond Personalities: An advanced handbook for leadership. People Stuff was awarded Book of the Year 2020 by the Smart WFM Australian Business Book Awards.
Zoë is also the producer of The Zoë Routh Leadership Podcast.