Wanted: suggestions for new Bucket list pioneers

You should really talk to David Heinemeier Hansson (creator Ruby on Rails & founder Basecamp). His book "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work" is a real eye-opener!

You're right, Martin. Basecamp is on the list, but we should maybe add David Heinemeier Hansson as well!

I think Helen Bevan (@HelenBevan on Twitter) is an inspirational person working in the NHS in England. Gary Hamel talks about NHS Change Day that was started by her and Jackie Lynton (sadly deceased) here:

Let me tell you a story about two individuals, Helen Bevan and Jackie Lynton, who were in the middle of one of the most bureaucratic, biggest organizations in the world and had a profound impact on that organization. The story starts in early 2013 and the organization is Britain's National Health Service, with more than a million employees. As you might imagine, it's bureaucratic. Healthcare is a very complex industry and if you are in Britain or you follow the British newspapers, just about every week you'll find a story of something that's gone wrong in the NHS. Well, Helen and Jackie had many years of experience at the NHS, but they weren't senior line executives. They were mid-level change people who'd run different sorts of traditional change projects at the NHS. They found themselves talking one afternoon to a group of young trainee doctors who had just joined the National Health Service and who were already frustrated about how difficult it was to get things done and how often doing the right thing for patients came second, third or fourth to doing the right thing for bureaucracy so they thought maybe there's another way to drive change here at the NHS. Now, the unit in which they worked, which was an internal consulting unit, they thought that that unit was going to be disbanded within a matter of months, so starting in January 2013, they launched their little project. They gave it a very ambitions name, the Change Day, but they said, "We only have 90 days to do something significant," and the project worked like this. Using a little social media platform and then everything they could do with viral marketing, they invited colleagues in to fill out a simple pledge form where you could pledge something you were going to do within your job, within your scope of permissions, to improve patient care. 2013 was the 65th anniversary of the National Health Service and they were hoping that by March, when they thought the project would have to end, they were hoping to get 65 thousand pledges. By the end of January, they had a few hundred. By Mid-February, about 5,000 and by the time they ended the Day of Change in Mid-March, they had 189 thousand pledges. A typical pledge might come from a group of paediatricians who said, "We promise to taste every medicine before prescribing it to kids and a helpless parent who's gonna have to try to get it down their throats," or it might be a group of nurses on a ward who said, "Every week, with their permission, we'll video our patients with our camera phones and then we'll come back and talk about what we could do to make their experience in the hospital more pleasant for them." So imagine that times 189 thousand pledges. That became the single biggest change program in the history of the NHS and Helen and Jackie launched it without any permissions, without going up, without putting together any big plans. They just started something. That's how you think if you're an activist, not an anarchist, not a terrorist, but if you're an activist, when you say, "I'm not helpless. I'm not going to ask somebody else to do this. This organization is my organization. I care too much about it to be helpless and I believe we can do something starting where I am right now." That's the secret to making a difference. That's the secret to hacking management.

What about Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress?
Their workforce is almost 100% remotely distributed around the world.
They interview using paid "auditions".
Everyone spends time doing customer support.
They have very high employee retention.

You should talk to Allard Droste about the way he thinks about trust and responsibility. His book 'Semco in de polder' is definitely an aanrader ;)

Thanks for this great suggestion Dan! Helen Bevan is on our radar already for a long time but, I agree, it is more than time to add her to the Bucket list..

Thanks Zeorin for this suggestion. We are going look into it! Sounds very interesting indeed...

Hi Joost,

have you talk to Karl-Martin Dietz? He's part of the Friedrich von Hardenberg Institut e.V. in Heidelberg. They have great (german) books and worked f.e. for dm.

Thanks for your great work!
Hannes

Hi Hannes, we never talked to Karl-Martin Dietz. Can you share a bit more about what is so special about his work and the Friedrich von Hardenberg Institut?

what about Ken Blanchard with his agility approach ( One Minute Manager ) supported by Servant Leadership concept?