workplace-culture
(12)
Didier Elzinga and the art of letting go
He left Hollywood to explore what makes people work well together. Culture Amp’s founder has now handed over the CEO’s chair - and is putting his own ideas about growth to the test.
Steve Sonnenberg Put a Thank-You Note on the Balance Sheet
He lost his first company, borrowed $5,000 for a domain, and spent four years making an impossible Amazon rewards idea work by hand. The wager turned workplace appreciation into a platform used across 163 countries.
Dale Bornstein Built an Agency by Treating Culture as the Work
After 27 years at one agency, Dale Bornstein took a risk on a smaller one. Her bet was that people-first leadership could be a growth strategy - and M Booth's next decade made the case.
Rachita Sharma Bet Her Name on a Fairer Kind of Work
At thirteen, she dropped a surname to reject an inherited advantage. Years later, Rachita Sharma built a company around the same wager: judge young people by what they can become.
Mindi Cox Built a Career by Looking Up From the Job
For nearly three decades at O.C. Tanner, she has treated culture less like a slogan and more like a daily operating system - built from open doors, specific gratitude, and the courage to let people do more than their job descriptions.
Becky Jones Has Spent 25 Years Making Advertising Feel Human
An internship pulled her toward cable. A research job got her through the door. At Viamedia, Becky Jones turned the supporting work of marketing into a 25-year study of how people, culture and technology move together.
Arianna Huffington Has Changed the Subject Again
She built a publication around the internet's appetite for more. Her second company is built around a harder proposition: that progress can begin with less, done deliberately.
Brittany Wong Is Marketing the Moment When Work Feels Human
Across two decades and several software categories, Brittany Wong has built a career around a stubborn question: how do you turn an abstract promise into a habit people can actually feel? At Bucketlist Rewards, that question now lands on recognition itself.
Chris Fudge Is Betting the Workplace on One Small Signal: I Saw What You Did
After three decades crossing marketing, sales, service and coaching, the Achievers CMO has arrived at a plainspoken thesis: culture is built in the moments when useful work becomes visible.
Emily Mikailli
Emily Mikailli is the CHRO and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Signifyd, the commerce protection platform based in San Jose, California. A former lawyer who traded the bar for the tech industry, she has led People and Culture at Signifyd since 2016, scaling the company's global workforce nearly 5X in headcount and over 25X in annual recurring revenue across offices in San Jose, London, Belfast and New York. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, she is known for a candid, human-centric approach to building teams and serves as Vice Chair of the board at Parisi House on the Hill, a nonprofit supporting mothers and children affected by addiction.
Roxanne Petraeus
Roxanne Bras Petraeus is the co-founder and CEO of Ethena, a New York compliance-training startup that turns the most ignored hour at work, the annual harassment course, into something people actually finish. A Rhodes Scholar, Harvard ROTC graduate, and U.S. Army combat veteran who deployed to Afghanistan before consulting at McKinsey, she launched Ethena in 2019 with engineer Anne Solmssen and has raised roughly $50 million, including a $30 million Series B in 2022, to make compliance modern, funny, and forgiving rather than fear-based.
Janine Yancey
Janine Yancey is the Founder and CEO of Emtrain, a San Francisco-based AI-powered compliance training and workplace culture analytics platform she founded in 2006. A former employment lawyer and first-generation college graduate, she built Emtrain to replace lecture-style compliance check-boxes with cinematic, skills-based learning backed by behavioral data. The platform serves 800+ enterprise clients including Netflix, Yelp, and Chevron, has raised $18M in funding, and is known for its proprietary Workplace Color Spectrum and culture benchmarking engine drawing on 25 million employee sentiment data points. Yancey famously predicted the #MeToo movement in a 2016 Medium article - months before it went global.