… but we don’t discuss that openly. — Good newsletter here from Paul Millerd, whose stuff is usually pretty good: People Won't Work! | #225 June 3rd, 2023: Greetings from Austin! Ali Abdaal was in town this week and I got to treat him to his first tacos as a…open.substack.com If you’re into new ways of thinking about work, definitely read through that. Basically Millerd is taking pull quotes from a Vox article about how a lot of people in “Knowledge Work” — offensive term, as most plumbers…

That was nice. — We had a narrative from maybe August 2020 until sometime deep in 2021 that employees finally had power — they had those bastard employers over a barrel! — because they were “voting with their feet” and “reconsidering what work meant to them.” I agree that was happening to some extent…

Plus: dumb-ass Google searches. — Timothy Bliefnick just got convicted of his wife’s murder (that’s them, above, with their three kids) in a case that seemingly went to trial and got a conviction pretty quickly. This case had all the hallmarks of “something the media would be interested in,” including: White, attractive family Children involved …

It explains a lot of the other problems with work, obviously. — Stowe Boyd has a quality newsletter, and if you reference this edition: The Containers Of The Past Rishad Tobaccowala Please share Work Futures. My goal is 10,000 subscribers by the end of the year, and your sharing is…open.substack.com … you will come to find this article from a MIT Technology Review professor: Is this the REAL reason why productivity is falling? What is productivity? By strict definition it is the amount of work performed by each unit of a person's time (work per…makeworkbetter.substack.com

It mostly comes down to opportunities for growth. — Organizational development suffers from the same core business problem as many things — it’s hard to measure. Here’s the basic deal with many jobs: even though senior leaders usually aren’t very good at analyzing data in the context of decision-making, they nonetheless still believe that the only things deserving of…

Ain’t that the truth? — I got that quote from this article: Opinion | The Politics of Delusion Have Taken Hold Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share…www.nytimes.com Funniest thing is, I think I made out with the professor who said it back in 2002. What a cad I am. Another person in that article then says this: Various types of identities have become ‘stacked’ on top of people’s partisan identities…

Good trivia team name, poor modern reality. — I wrote about this once before: THE URBAN DOOM LOOP!!! Great trivia name, and also a good description of the potential future of downtown cores.tedbauer.medium.com Basically, the “Urban Doom Loop” is the idea that remote and hybrid work arrangements will kill downtowns. …

This dichotomy is more self-destructive than we realize. — You probably know the high-level of what happened in Uvalde about a year ago now, where several officers — at one point 30 officers from eight different law enforcement organizations — didn’t enter a classroom against one armed dude for about 54 minutes, thus likely creating more casualties. …

Succession and how it got so much right. — I am gonna write most of this article as if you, a potential reader, knows a little bit about the now-concluded HBO show Succession. If you don’t know much, it’s basically a fictionalized version of the Murdoch family, even though no one will openly admit it. There’s a dad, Logan…