… 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. As they kill urban cores, cities will have a harder time collecting taxes, so cities will then tighten belts and core elements of a city’s infrastructure will…

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. Here’s a…

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…