Organizations & Culture

Aspiration, Meaning, & The Traps of Ambition (A Book Review of Agnes Callard’s Aspiration)

To others, I made a bold decision to quit my job and chart a different course in 2017.  Yet in my own experience of the event, there was no singular moment or decision made.  This disconnect between my own experience and the narrative of bold all-or-nothing leaps  has mystified me and driven a lot of ... Read more

Hustle Traps: Ten Guaranteed Paths To Burnout For The Self-Employed Creator

Starting your own business is a secret dream of many and with the emergence of more clear paths to make money online, many knowledge workers are deciding to test the waters of self-employment and entrepreneurship.  In making such a leap many people hope to increase the amount of freedom and fulfilment they have with their ... Read more

Spaceship You: How To Understand Who You Are as a Remote Worker

The following is a guest post from Artur Piszek, founder of Deliberate Internet. He has been a remote worker for the last five years. This October, I will have 5 years of Remote Work experience. For the past 4, I have been sharing the journey with my liveaboard colleague and wife – Maria. We both ... Read more

The best advice on working remotely your boss doesn’t want you to see

During the initial months of the Covid crisis you were bombarded with tips about how to optimize your day while working online and how to be more effective than ever while multi-tasking zoom meetings, slack chats and conference calls. For many, working remotely is unsettling. They start questioning their relationship with work, worry about how ... Read more

Managing Millennials & Other Misinformation On Generations at Work

Over the past few years, many people have asked me what I though about ““how do you manage millennials in the workforce?” This is the kind of question that throws me into a fit of sadness about the modern state of work. The problem is the question itself. A better question would be to start ... Read more

Integrating Chaos: Building Resilient Organizations with Chaos Theory

Our imagination about what happens in the business world has become disconnected with reality and it all starts with an accepted narrative about the unstoppable power of Fredrick Taylor’s ideas The narrative goes like this: Fredrick Taylor introduced managers to analytical methods and tools that helped them to dramatically improve productivity; however these efforts also ... Read more

Questions About The Future Of Work

The US has lost 38 million jobs as of May 23rd, 2020. Some of those may come back. Many will not. Going into 2021, the US will likely have the highest unemployment rate in the last 100 years. I’ve written quite a bit about the fragile labor economy and believe the gaps I’ve written about ... Read more

Matt Mullenweg’s & Automattic’s Five Levels Of Remote Work

Remote work is poorly understood and for good reason. What most people have experienced is merely being “allowed” to work remotely on occasion, having to stay home with someone sick in the family, logging in while traveling or waiting for the cable guy to install internet. While I am a fan of remote working I ... Read more

Hamsternomics: Printing Money, The Economy & Work Beliefs

Essay by Paul Millerd & Ryan Borker Look at this cute little guy: Right now, as citizens of the United States we may become that hamster.  Near term, we don’t really have a choice.  Long term, we might have a choice. A lot of people have asked us what printing money means. Like, what actually ... Read more

Millenarianism & Pandemic Utopias | Review of Black Mass by John Gray

Millenarianism is is defined as “the belief by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming fundamental transformation of society, after which “all things will be changed”. I ran across this concept in a fascinating book by John Gray called “Black Mass” where he explored how humans have consistently been drawn toward millenarianist ... Read more