Here lies the Opinion Newsletter of The New York Times, promoting an article — one of many recently — on how we all need to work less, and this part stands out:
“If everyone worked less,” she writes, “it would be easier to spread the work out evenly to more people. If white-collar professionals were no longer expected or required to log 60 hours a week but 30 instead, that would be a whole extra job for someone else.”
Or as Susan Lambert, a professor of social work at the University of Chicago, puts it in the essay, the goal…
I actually was a big Mad TV fan back in the day. It’s cool that Ms. Swan became Lois on Family Guy. It’s also maddening how few people realize that. Hm.
Written before about the expectations of friendship, which is an article that oddly performs well for me, and as I’ve gazed at my life over the past six months, I feel like my expectations are generally too high, and I need to lower them.
That sounds bad on surface, so let’s try to explain what I mean and not play the victim card. It might be a tricky line…
The importance of culture
Culture has become increasingly important, even to execs, in the past decade. Some of the notable findings around culture tying back to the business include:
- 94% of executives believe that a distinct workplace culture is important to their business.
- Strong cultures are associated with 20% higher productivity and significantly less turnover.
- 13 companies have appeared on every edition of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies To Work For, and those 13 companies outperform the market by 495% annually.
- 88% of job seekers consider the culture a top priority in their search.
- An average employee is 26% more likely to leave their job…
In summer ’13, I was working for McKesson in Houston. It was largely a joke of a job — my overall supervisor was on vacation for a big part of the summer, and my direct supervisor barely talked to me — so honestly, most days I was bored as hell, created a Tumblr blog which no longer exists, and sent emails to my then in-laws, who responded periodically. I lived with a 59 year-old woman named Barb who told me about her relationship to her son often, and I sometimes walked down the street to a Kroger at 10pm to…
Tough one to skate, because it’s completely tied to your family, your upbringing, your belief structure, and your values. But let’s try.
Bye bye Bezos
Over the weekend, the greatest entrepreneur of the disruption age, Mr. Jeffrey Bezos — to quote Bo Burnham, “You’ve made it!” — left his perch as CEO of Amazon, which he had been since 1994. He’s not leaving Amazon, no. He will be the Executive Chairman. And, if we’re being honest, he probably left the day-to-day somewhere around 2014, but it’s a better narrative that he’s “leaving” now. …
In the past 60 years, the pendulum of public opinion has swung rapidly and widely. The need for police to handle everything from the war on drugs to increased mental health response can seem to follow the whims of the media or politicians. Calls for warrior-style enforcement of law and order rapidly shift to demands for guardian-style community oriented policing, and, more recently, pressure for co-response and defunding altogether.
President Obama’s 21st Century Policing Report suggests a balance is needed, discussing the role of tactics as no more important than attitude, tolerance, and interpersonal skills. These ‘soft’ skill categories get…
Just to get this one out of the way up top: not sure I’m “infertile,” but I have limited avenues of fertility, and it’s largely because I didn’t take care of myself very well in my 30s. Might still happen naturally, might not, and other avenues might be pursued, be that IVF or adoption or foster. This is life, and it’s also life smacking you in the face (and/or genitals). Let me see if I can illustrate some of this for you.
- This will probably sound either very selfish or very basic, or potentially both, but one of the concerns…
I helped David Rock and the team at Neuroleadership Institute work on this article over the last couple of weeks. It also appears on David’s LinkedIn, but I liked the arguments herein and wanted to put it on my Medium as well.
Seen this recently in New York Times Upshot? “There’s no evidence of innovation being boosted in the office.”
We keep hearing the opposite, however, and it’s arguably been the central debate happening around the next phase of work.
For example, Nancy Baym, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft, has been recently sounding the alarm that 14 months of…
You want to believe that change is about clear communication and repeated habits, both at a personal and professional level. And you want to believe that you can change the viewpoint of someone else by doing similar things — facts, clear communication, context, data, science, history, etc.
In reality, if you’ve ever tried this, you know that it’s not at all how the game is played. We supposedly have this deep belief in science, but look at the last 18 months. Do we really? And in the USA, did CDC and WHO and whoever else underscore that belief in science…
Ted Bauer
Blogging, largely about work and how to improve it. How I make (some) money: http://thecontextofthings.com/work-with-me/
