Case studies

What happens when a team gets its hope back.

Four engagements from twenty years of practice, plus the lineage where the method began. Each one started with strain and ended with a team that could create, adapt, and tell each other the truth again.

Microsoft: the bottom 25% Microsoft Security: the drift Ticketmaster: NASDAQ debut Inside the algorithm builders The lineage: Southwest
Culture transformation

Microsoft: the climb from the bottom 25%

An enterprise division inside Microsoft Cloud scored in the bottom 25% of the company's employee Thrive index. Burnout ran wide, and rapid hiring outpaced onboarding, so new employees arrived to a culture already under strain.

We built a participatory culture program grounded in the Southwest principle: a volunteer Culture Crew, parallel Charting the Course workshops for leadership and the full organization, four culture OKRs with executive sponsors, and Culture University, a half-day onboarding cohort the executive opened herself. Goals came from the ground up; support came from the top down.

Result

Thrive scores rose from the bottom 25% to first place across all of Microsoft Cloud, and Culture University became the division's most highly rated onboarding experience.

Organizational diagnosis

Microsoft Security: the story that drifted

Leadership suspected the organization's story had fractured somewhere between headquarters, sales, field, and engineering, and nobody could say where.

Thirty in-depth interviews across marketing, sales, field engineering, and leadership traced the drift to its origin point, documented the competing narratives, and mapped them against the intended positioning.

Result

A diagnosis leadership could act on, delivered to the VP with a prioritized path back to alignment, and a listening method since repeated across five Microsoft organizations.

Repositioning under pressure

Ticketmaster: the NASDAQ debut

A $20 billion company spun out from IAC with no communications function at all, and a NASDAQ debut on the calendar.

We built corporate communications from scratch: financial communications, analyst relations, executive messaging. We coached the CEO, CFO, CMO, EVP, and Chairman through the debut, produced a two-day analyst conference, and repositioned the brand from ticketing company to your connection to live entertainment. An $80,000 essence video sold the vision.

Result

A smooth debut, five Silver Telly awards, a brand identity still in use nearly two decades later, and an early proof of the method behind our films: the essence video returned an estimated $2 to $3 million in equivalent advertising value.

Ethnographic research

Inside the algorithm builders

Two decades of fieldwork inside Google, Disney, PlayStation, Meta, and TikTok, listening to the people who build the systems that shape our lives.

The method: multi-layer listening across leadership and frontline stakeholders, in-home ethnography, segmentation studies, and a validation loop that returns findings to the top without losing the truth in translation.

Result

The research discipline that anchors every ListenLeaders diagnosis, and the production experience behind our films.

Where the method began

The lineage: Southwest Airlines

We both started at Southwest Airlines two decades ago, inside the most studied culture in American business, learning the founders' toolkit firsthand: participatory design, co-creation, employee storytelling, and rituals that reinforce shared identity. Every engagement since runs on that foundation.

Your team already knows what the survey means. We help you hear it.

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