Stay ConnectedMAKE WORK BETTER. Eat Sleep Work Repeat is the best podcast about workplace culture – it’s been listened to millions of times.
Bruce Daisley brings a curious mind to discussions about our jobs and the role they play in our lives.
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Copyright: © Bruce Daisley
Michael Morris's book Tribal covers the codes that bond humans together. It has been shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year award 2024. It came runner-up to 'Supremacy' by Parmy Olson.
He explains that humans are inspired by peer codes, human codes and ancestor codes when it comes to their behaviour - and he gives plenty of insight of how we could build more tightly bonded groups in our own teams.
Make Work Better: Resisting the Enshittification of Work in 2024
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Everywhere we look we see someone who is outraged - and plenty of that anger makes its way to the workplace.
The last time President Trump was in power it led to employees becoming more active - who knows if the same will happen in 2025.
Karthik Ramanna talks us through the way to deal with outrage - and the actions that any leader can take to make the workplace a better place. His new book is out now.
More about the Edelman Trust index
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Tiffany Gaskell outlines coaching as a route to transformational leadership
Tiffany Gaskell is the co-author of Coaching for Performance, the top-selling guide to coaching first published by Sir John Whitmore the inventor of the discipline.
It's curious to consider that there was a founder of coaching, and Tiffany takes me through the history of the practice, how it took hold and where it is today.
There's a key consideration about the modern manager given to us by the Gallup Global Workplace Report, 80% of those who are engaged with their jobs say they've received direct feedback from their manager in the last week.
This is a powerful insight but also poses a huge challenge - how can any of us find the time to observe and then feedback to every worker in our team. Tiffany explains that this is where a culture of coaching comes in, transferring the burden of observation from the manager to facilitating a socratic questioning approach.
You can follow Tiffany on LinkedIn and the book is out now.
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Brigid Schulte is a journalist and writer who brings a reporter's ear for stories to her exploration of modern work.
Over the course of a decade Schulte has talked to people about the impact their jobs has on their lives - and has explored any hope that we might be able to make this better.
Her new book, Over Work and paints a hopeful image of how we might fix the toxic elements of our jobs.
One of the examples is about Intel, who in 2013 experimented with a new initiative styled Freelance Nation to bring some of the upsides of gig work to a professional knowledge work environment. It proved hugely successful and yet they decided to scrap it.
Buy Over Work
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Colin Ellis is a consultant and author who spends his time working with organisations to improve their culture. He's turned his attention to why some companies go bad in a new book Detox Your Culture. He talked me through what has gone wrong at the likes of ITV's This Morning, the CBI, The Ellen Show and Boeing.
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How can any of us build a more effective team?
Owen Eastwood is one of the world’s most in demand performance coaches, with a focus on team culture & leading. Owen has worked with some of the most successful sporting sides in the world. He also works with corporate teams wrestling with similar themes.
Last year I talked to Owen about his work on belonging and identity but I wanted to pick his brains on the biggest challenge for modern leaders - how to build a stronger team.
Follow Owen on LinkedIn
Owen talks me through his step-by-step approach to building better teams - starting with the toughest starter question that most teams never tackle.
takeaways
For a full transcript see the website.
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How important is a happy workforce? According to Mark Price, the former boss of Waitrose, it's the main thing that leaders should be thinking about. Make your workforce happy and the profits will follow. Mark's new book is Happy Economics.
To prove it Mark cites his experience running the supermarket chain, when with a goal of workers happiness he made it the fastest-growing, most profitable supermarket in the UK.
The original purpose of the John Lewis Partnership, as laid out by the very same John Lewis , was to uphold the happiness of the people who worked inside the organisation.
Mark's new book is Happiness Economics. Mark's book makes the assertion that the quickest way to business success is to focus on creating happy employees.
This is genuinely a brilliant listen - and one that you might benefit from reading the transcript of - you can get the transcript here.
While I got real value from the book, I actually found the conversation even more enlightening. It challenged some things I believed and I found myself reflecting on it for the day afterwards. I think there’s a clarity in the conversation that the book lacks at times - I think it’s the challenge of books to be honest. We’re so used to ideas being visually backed up that when we’re paging through 200 pages of words the emphasis is often lost. Maybe they work best together.
Mark has a clear 6 stage framework for making a happy, productive workforce laid out in his compelling new book Happiness Economics.
Mark's company is WorkL. You can take their surveys and see their data on that link.
Key takeaways
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This episode is part of the Presence project: Presence: Fixing culture starts with your calendar, not your office
You might think an episode about improv comedy might be a stretch for a podcast about making work better. But in fact as Kelly Leonard explains today the skills of improv comedy are the most important ones that will determine our success at work.
Kelly helps to run Second City, the world's famous famous improv comedy club - he believes that improv skills can teach us about what we need in work going forwards.
** TRIGGER WARNING ** includes one brief mention of poetry
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This episode is part of the Presence project: Presence: Fixing culture starts with your calendar, not your office
In the 2000s a book called Fish! A remarkable way to boost morale and improve results became a bestseller. A small book, it was often used by companies accompanying a video of the same name. Together the two told a story of the culture of the fish market in Seattle, a noisy, bombastic place, but a place that was filled with joy. I first encountered Fish when a firm came to pitch to me when I was working in publishing. They told me that their culture was Fish.
There are a few things that stood out from it. The idea of intentionally designing culture isn’t new but this seemed to be explicitly linking culture, emotion and mood.
There were 4 principles of Fish
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This episode is part of the Presence project: Presence: Fixing culture starts with your calendar, not your office
This is the second episode about rituals - the first one is next to it in the podcast feed, it's an interview with Kursat Ozenc about how rituals can be used to create culture. This episode goes into real life examples.
Claudia Wallace talks about Crisp Thursday (Connection)
Andy Puleston talks about Pizza Meetings (Connection) and Leaving Speeches (Change)
Dan Pink talks about Friday Night Experiments (Creativity)
Biz Stone talks about Hack Week at Twitter (Creativity)
Dr Heidi Edmondson talks about Ten at Ten (Performance)
Heidi has a wonderful new book out - Darkness in the City of Light
You can also hear the original episodes that each of these extracts came from by click the links above. I have to say that those whole episodes are worth revising. For example, Andy Puleston talks about how effective the culture was at Radio 1 when it was a series of affiliated tribes and he articulates the role that buildings play in shaping cultures. Each episode teaches something special.
Andy Puleston is now Director of People & Culture at Circulor, an award winning technology business.
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This episode is part of the Presence project: Presence: Fixing culture starts with your calendar, not your office
Kursat Ozenc is a product designer who he teaches at Stanford university, He teaches on the subject that we can all learn from which is the idea that culture can be designed. The specific tool he uses to design culture is the creation of workplace rituals.
Kursat's first book is here and the second, on virtual meetings is here.
The reading list for Kursat's course is here
Kursat’s book includes the suggestions that: ‘The rituals in our life show what we care about’. Critically then creating rituals demonstrate what our culture values.
Kursat gives five use cases for rituals:
If you like this episode you'll also like the episode that accompanies it - which goes into depth about specific rituals that companies have used. Listen to that episode here.
A full transcript of the episode is at the website.
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Flow is the state of being in which people become so immersed in the joy of their work or activity “that nothing else seems to matter.”
Presence is to be in a flow state of connection with others.
Here’s the last discussion about the Happiness Track
HBR: The Best Leaders Have a Contagious Positive Energy
HBR: Proof That Positive Work Cultures Are More Productive
Today is the first of series of podcasts about an idea that needs more consideration in our workplaces. The idea of presence.
Emma Seppala is a psychologist and lecturer at the Yale School of Management – she also runs the Women’s Leadership program there. I first spoke to Emma about 6 years ago when I came across her book the Happiness Track. The hypothesis of that book was in many ways the sweet spot of this podcast: the notion that if you make workers happy then they do their better work. Emma had a new book out this week called Sovereign and it felt like a great reason to have a new conversation.
The conversation leads into the next block of podcasts which are all about the idea of presence. Over the last 4 years we’ve seen discourse from CEOs about wanting workers back in the office but in many ways they’re putting things the wrong way wrong. A lot of us find ourselves making our way into work and sitting on video calls all day. Or having headphones on because its so noisy. We got home at the end of the day thinking ‘what was the point of that’.
When bosses say they want us to be present in the office, what they actually describe is something different. They talk us about us interacting, having ideas, watercooler moments. Bosses say they want us to be present in the office, but what they really want is presence, for us to be in each others company.
For me presence is related to flow
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Today’s top episode goes to the heart of an issue that a lot of people raise with me.
They say ‘where do you start when changing a culture’.
To some extent it’s what the episode about the hospital trust in Barking was about, going in and changing the culture of a huge organisation.
I saw one of today’s guests Darren Ashby speak at an event - talking through the specifics of how his company Business Four Zero tried to change the culture of Tesco. Business Four Zero are one of a group of organisations who work with leaders to change company culture. I know there’s a few of these firms. I attended a dazzling event by one firm called Scarlett Abbot in this field about a month ago.
Darren is joined by Atif Sheikh as they talk through the specifics of what they did with firms like Electronic Arts, Aviva and Tesco. They’ve turned some of their work into a book which you can buy here.
Some of the things that stood out for me:
For example Intercontinental Hotel Group
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Isabel Berwick is a writer and podcaster who focusses on the evolving state of modern work. I’ve celebrated her podcast Working It many times here
(here’s her specials on the 4-day week for example, or her special on meeting-free days was essential listening). I love its ability to react rapidly to the biggest news stories of the moment and to drop a snackable episode midweek.
I talked to her about her opinions on modern work, going deep on the rapidly changing world of employment and where we’re going next.
Isabel has a brand new book out, The Future Proof Career, which she says is for everyone who doesn’t read books about work but wants to be better at navigating it.
Recent episodes you might have missed
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How should most of us think about the differences between Employee Experience and Employee Engagement.
I first spoke to Emma Bridger, who is the author of a well respected book on this topic and the founder of the EX Space, a learning community focussed on raising the bar in the Employee Experience field.
Then I picked the brains of Melanie Wheeler who leads People Communications at Sutherland, a firm widely recommended to me as outstanding in Employee Experience.
Get in touch
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Charles Duhigg’s bestseller The Power of Habit was the definitive guide to building and sustaining successful habits.
His new book, Supercommunicators, grapples with the knotty topic of creating successful interactions with others.
It’s a thorough and dazzling read that has many applications for the way we work (and how we live our lives).
We talked about:
Read an extract of Charles' book here
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Many of us have worked in environments that provided bonuses or rewards for success. Maybe they took the form of team rewards or individual incentives, or end of year profit-share schemes. But do these rewards achieve what they are designed to?
Professor Uri Gneezy is the world's foremost expert on the science of incentives - and he comes with a huge warning about what such schemes actually achieve.
Eat Sleep Work Repeat is today hosted by Bruce Daisley, Ellen Scott and Matthew Cook.
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This week's Eat Sleep Work Repeat is hosted by Bruce Daisley, Ellen C Scott and Matthew Cook.
Roll up roll up as this week we talk the major trends in work and workplace culture and the big stories of the last month.
Including:
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I was flattered to be invited to visit the NHS trust of Barking, Havering and Redbridge last year. I spent an afternoon meeting the team and seeing the place in action.
It was an inspiring question that CEO Matthew Trainer was asking: 'can we improve the results by making it a better culture?'
What does that look like? And how is going for them?
Matthew Trainer's CEO note at the end of 2023
Video: Inside the Trust
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We often overlook the fact that trust is the basis for all good culture. I called out some of the remarkable data on this in the Work In 2024 deck.
In Slack’s August 2023 survey of over 10,000 global office workers, trust was the top determinant of employees’ productivity scores. Employees who felt trusted were 2X as productive as those who didn’t. They were 30% more likely to put in extra effort at their jobs. If we don’t feel trusted we’re twice as likely to say we’re looking for
But what role does trust play in the modern company? And how can we build it?
Mark McGinn is a senior leader at the communications agency Edelman, he talks to me about their research into trust and how we should seek to build it.
Has our organisation replaced government? Increasingly our company is the biggest thing that we believe we can have an impact on.
Mark explains that Trust in our organisation is based on four things:
You'll strongly enjoy downloading Edelman's Trust Barometer and also Edelman's special Trust at Work report.
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The role of managers are pivotal in our working lives but most managers aren't trained or prepared for the responsibilities that they are given.
When we look at the research from Gallup about burnout and why people hate their jobs managers are regarded as having the biggest responsibility. Half of people who say they don't rate their manager say they are looking for jobs. So what can we do to make our relationship with our managers better? I chatted to Anthony Painter from CMI.
Download the Work in 2024 deck
Chartered Management Institute research on the Accidental Manager
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is hosted by Bruce Daisley, Ellen Scott and Matthew Cook. Sign up to the newsletter
We talk through the hottest topics in work:
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Professor Frances Frei is the biggest brain in the field of workplace culture and I was delighted to get another opportunity to talk to her.
She explains the one thing that firms should do to fix their cultures (spoiler: train their managers), why she thinks inclusion is a more important element of culture than just diversity.
The previous episode with Frances Frei
Frances and Anne’s podcast Fixable
Frances’ and Anne Morriss’ new book Move Fast and Fix Things
Quotes from the book that I cited:
“One way to build cynicism quickly in an organisation, something we see all the time, by the way - is to ask people for their input and then do very little with the information they give you (and take a long time to even do that)’
Robert McDonald, former CEO of P&G “Organisations are perfectly designed to get the results they get… if you don’t like the results you need to change the design”.
We're often asked for a summary of how to build a workplace where everyone feels welcome. Our short answer is to recruit great people you don't already know, give them interesting work to do, and invest in them as if your company's future depends on it. If they deserve a promotion, give it to them in a timely man-ner. Don't make them wait. Don't make them go to a competitor to get the role, title, and decision rights they already earned on your watch. And in the name of all that is right and just in the world, pay them fairly and equitably for the work they do.”
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Is toxic culture driving your team away?
If you’re someone whose job it is think about culture, or maybe you’re a boss who has tried to communicate values to your team then today’s episode is an essential listen.
Donald Sull and Charlie Sull are a father and son research team who have discovered extraordinary insights into values and what they look like in the real world.
Here are some articles to get you going to understand the world of the Sulls:
Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation
The Toxic Culture Gap Shows Companies Are Failing Women
Why leaders need to worry about toxic culture?
Charlie and Donald have a business that focusses on this called Culture X.
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is hosted by Bruce Daisley, Ellen Scott and Matthew Cook. Sign up to the newsletter
This week we go deep on the latest news about work.
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is hosted by Bruce Daisley, Ellen C Scott and Matthew Cook. Sign up to the newsletter
This week we go deep on the latest news about work.
We discuss:
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What Ange Postecoglou changed at Spurs in his first 100 days: ‘The mood has been transformed’
Charlie writes about the oratory of Ange Postecoglou
Last week I read something wonderful about the culture of Tottenham Hotspur, I contacted the writer and it felt like it was worth putting out quickly. We’ve got a couple of podcast recorded with Matt and Ellen so we’ll be back for a fuller episode next week.
Ange Postecoglou has been the manager of Spurs, Tottenham Hotspur, for around a hundred days. In that time he’s started something of a transformation. And I can tell that because the Spurs fans I know how have started smiling. Spurs have started the season well, currently sitting 2nd in the Premier League. But more than that the players seem to be happy and are playing exciting football.
There was a brilliant article by Charlie Ecceshare from The Athletic looking into the culture of the club under Ange, the article talked about how the mood of the club has been transformed.
For anyone interested in the impact that cultural change can create it was a fascinating read, full of specifics and clear actions.
Aren’t all of us looking to change the mood of our jobs? I got in touch with Charlie and we talked about Postecoglou, culture and the impact that culture has on results.
In the show note you’ll find links to Charlie’s articles, YouTube clips of some team talks we discuss and some other things that you might find of interest, like an interview with Gary Lineker.
Fabulous interview with Gary Lineker
Thank you to Charlie, all of the articles mentioned are in the show notes. What a fabulous discussion. I’m grateful for him taking the time to chat to me. If you’re interested in workplace culture you can sign up to the newsletter in the show notes - and also check out previous episodes on Liverpool FC, Barcelona and the All Blacks.
Further listening:
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is hosted by Bruce Daisley, Ellen C Scott and Matthew Cook. Ellen is away this week - we were working hard to squeeze an elite guest in.
Amy Edmondson is the most renowned organisational psychologist in the world. In other words she's looked to more than anyone else for the answers of how to fix work.
In this in depth discussion she talks us through what she understands by psychological safety, how any of us can create it and what she believes the best team structure is to achieve it.
We're also joined by Octavius Black, founder of Mind Gym, who provide behavioural science based interventions for lots of the biggest companies in the world.
Amy's new book is The Right Kind of Wrong
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This episode explores the concept of fun and its importance in adult life, challenging the misperception that fun is frivolous.
What is fun? Catherine Price suggests that it is the confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow.
The discussion also addresses the impact of social media on fake fun and the role of playfulness in work and productivity. The conversation explores the importance of fun in the workplace and the impact it has on productivity, connection, and overall well-being. It delves into the challenges of creating a fun work environment, the role of playfulness in building connections, and the significance of in-person interactions. The discussion also highlights the value of fun in education and its potential to bridge social and cultural divides.
Takeaways
Chapters
00:00
The Essence of Fun: Playfulness, Connection, and Flow
08:27
The Impact of Fake Fun: Social Media and Technology Addiction
15:27
The Role of Playfulness in Work and Productivity
31:20
Focusing on Inputs and Creating a Fun Work Environment
34:22
The Role of Playfulness in Building Connections
39:02
Fun as a Tool for Bridging Social Divides
Catherine Price is a science and health writer who has written a couple of sensationally timely books.
Firstly How to Break Up With Your Phone
Secondly, and today’s discussion focusses on this, The Power of Fun
I was put on to it by Elle Hunt’s Power of Fun article in The Guardian
Memorise it: fun is playful connected flow
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is hosted by Bruce Daisley, Ellen C Scott and Matthew Cook.
Ellen wrote about her learnings about being a manager
Despite government threats of legal action Cambridgeshire council are continuing their evidence-led trial of the 4-day week. “Nine in ten councils are struggling with job recruitment and retention and a four-day working week could be the answer”
Ellen mentions this article on Stylist about boundaries (registration required)
Half of the employees of Grindr were fired after the firm issued a RTO order. This included 100% of the firm’s trans employees. As Matt points out in the show trans employees are subject to the legislative whims of different states in the US and understandably try to locate in safe places.
We talk about the World Values Survey report "What the world thinks about work"
Libby Sander is an internationally renowned expert on work and the workplace, the MBA Director and Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Bond University. She is a leading thinker on understanding the future of work, and how we can reimagine it to live more meaningful and creative lives.
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I’m joined again by new cohosts Ellen C Scott and Matthew Cook.
Owen Eastwood is the most in-demand team performance coach in the world
He's earned that reputation by delivering break-through results with a diverse range of teams from Gareth Southgate’s England team and the England women’s team, to the senior leadership team of NATO. His former clients represent an elite range of teams who have gone on to achieve incredible victories. We wanted to understand how he did it.
What does he say? What does he ask?
Eastwood’s approach is consistent. By zooming out and pointing our fleeting contribution to legacy he urges teams to think about their ‘Us’ story. For me this suggests that what he’s actually doing is emphasising a powerful shared identity. In my mind I would see this as activating a visceral bond of community, he chooses to label it as ‘belonging’. That distinction ends up feeling semantic when presented with what his approach achieves.
This week on the podcast I’m joined by new co-hosts Ellen Scott and Matthew Cook as we talk to Owen and debate purpose, identity and belonging.
It’s a truly brilliant listen.
Follow Owen on LinkedIn
Joe Lycett’s remarkable special - the last 20 minutes of this are astonishing viewing
Ellen on thinking about leaving work on time
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A few months ago I put out a call asking for other voices to get involved in the podcast and I’m delighted today to add Ellen C Scott and Matthew Cook to Eat Sleep Work Repeat.
You may have read Ellen’s brilliant writing in The Stylist where she is the Deputy Digital Editor and previously in Metro. She writes and edits pieces on work, mental health, relationships, and more. Here’s her own Substack on work. She is also working on fiction and is represented by The Soho Agency.
Matt/Matthew is the founder of theSHIFT, an award-winning learning consultancy that specialises in cultural change inside organisations. He’s basically a people enthusiast who has turned it into his job.
I’ll be honest I love talking about work but I was worried that my own perspective might be a bit limiting. First and foremost I ended up as a boss and whether you intend it to or not that skews your perspective. Ellen and Matthew are here to help give a broader view. We loved recording the first episode and hopefully great things are to come.
You’ll find more on work at the ESWR website and the Make Work Better newsletter.
Today’s links:
The rise of Millennial Momagers
McKinsey claims to have cracked the formula for hybrid working
‘Sorry but productivity is lower at home’ - the article and the discussion of it is covered here
Hybrid workers are spending fully half of their work time in meetings
The benefit of ‘collective effervescence’ (there’s loads about this in Fortitude, p168)
Erin Meyer on the cultural differences of giving feedback
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Sorry for duplicate - the previous version had no intro!
If you liked this I actually shared a lot of the data on the newsletter a couple of weeks ago - read that here.
Today's episode is an in depth exploration of the latest Gallup Global Workplace Report, Anna Sawyer, a Principal at Gallup takes us through the findings - and the implications for all leaders.
Get your hands on Gallup’s ‘State of the Global Workplace Report’
I loved the Gallup report on employee burnout (and I cited the results in the show)
We talk a little about the Gallup Q12 criteria that help them form their results, people are asked:
Friendship is ‘the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of having been granted the sight of the essence of another’ - David Whyte
Read the meta-analysis (I *think* only 2020 is released at the moment)
Findings: Median percent differences between top-quartile and bottom-quartile units were:
• 10% in customer loyalty/engagement
• 23% in profitability
• 18% in productivity (sales)
• 14% in productivity (production records and evaluations)
• 18% in turnover for high-turnover organisations (those with more than 40% annualised turnover)
• 43% in turnover for low-turnover organisations (those with 40% or lower annualised turnover)
• 64% in safety incidents (accidents)
• 81% in absenteeism
• 28% in shrinkage (theft)
• 58% in patient safety incidents (mortality and falls)
• 41% in quality (defects)
• 66% in wellbeing (net thriving employees)
• 13% in organisational citizenship (participation)
View the Science Behind the Questions
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If you liked this I actually shared a lot of the data on the newsletter a couple of weeks ago - read that here.
Today's episode is an in depth exploration of the latest Gallup Global Workplace Report, Anna Sawyer, a Principal at Gallup takes us through the findings - and the implications for all leaders.
Get your hands on Gallup’s ‘State of the Global Workplace Report’
I loved the Gallup report on employee burnout (and I cited the results in the show)
We talk a little about the Gallup Q12 criteria that help them form their results, people are asked:
Friendship is ‘the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of having been granted the sight of the essence of another’ - David Whyte
Read the meta-analysis (I *think* only 2020 is released at the moment)
Findings: Median percent differences between top-quartile and bottom-quartile units were:
• 10% in customer loyalty/engagement
• 23% in profitability
• 18% in productivity (sales)
• 14% in productivity (production records and evaluations)
• 18% in turnover for high-turnover organisations (those with more than 40% annualised turnover)
• 43% in turnover for low-turnover organisations (those with 40% or lower annualised turnover)
• 64% in safety incidents (accidents)
• 81% in absenteeism
• 28% in shrinkage (theft)
• 58% in patient safety incidents (mortality and falls)
• 41% in quality (defects)
• 66% in wellbeing (net thriving employees)
• 13% in organisational citizenship (participation)
View the Science Behind the Questions
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Alex's book: Work less, do more
Make Work Better newsletter covered the 4 day week trials
For today’s episode I went to meet Alex Soujung Kim Pang. Alex has written a lot about our relationship with work, first in his book Rest and now in his book WORK LESS, DO MORE which is a refreshed version of Shorter.
When we first spoke the evidence for shorter working was a series of quirky stories of pioneering firms, frequently led by maverick bosses. In the last three years the landscape for shorter working (encompassing all manner of adaptations like four day weeks, compressed hours, 9 day fortnights and more) has transformed. Alex himself has played a role for 4 Day Week Global helping to design the mechanics of programs for test firms.
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We’re in a stage place with AI right now where for most of us it’s still a parlour trick. Something that we’ve seen create images of the Pope in bling or summon up meal planners that we’ll never use. But we’ve not really seen how it will impact our jobs.
Along the way there have been some huge claims:
Anecdotally I have heard the same from software developers.
And in aggregate there’s certainly a chance that we’re not thinking of the implications of these things.
Of course, he would say that his own extrapolations on these things are just an attempt to float ideas.
That’s why today’s podcast was so important for me to feature. I got the chance to chat to Alexia Cambon, Senior Director of Modern Work Research at Microsoft and Nick Hedderman, Senior Director of Modern Work, Microsoft. The discussion has implications for all of us, and how quickly we set about changing the way we work
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Zeynep Ton is the author of the Good Jobs Strategy - which holds the honour of being the book I refer to the most when it comes to talking about work. In that book she set about making the case for firms to create good jobs for their employees, not just for the moral reason but because it was a route to faster growth.
Now she returns with a new book, The Case for Good Jobs, which not only explains the reasoning for creating better working conditions for workers, but also how any firm can set about doing it. At the heart of the discussion is a recognition that workers want to do a good job - and often find obstacles in their way.
MIT Sloan Review: When Doing Less Adds Up to More
The Obstacles to Creating Good Jobs
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Michael Banissy is a psychologist whose work focusses on the importance of physical connection between people, he styles himself as part of a group of ‘scientists who stroke’. Touch has become sigmatised by the actions of those who have misused it, to the extent that many of us have become fearful of touching the arm or shoulder of others.
Michael Banissy gives a compelling case for appropriate touch, and asks us to rethink the role it plays in our lives.
His book Why We Touch is out now. (It’s called Touch Matters in the US).
Read more: How touch changes our decision making
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An episode today that is a reflection on where work is going and what implications there are for cities, for workers and for life.
Dror Poleg is a writer and commentator who thinks about how the internet is disrupting our lives. What sets him apart is his ability to see second and third order effects of change.
Dror Poleg's newsletter (and draft book of the future of work) can be found at his website.
Join me at Microsoft's event on AI and the future of work
Join me on 25th May at 12.30pm (13:30 CET) when I’ll be speaking at Microsoft’s Employee Experience event.
The event is focussed on developments in emerging workplace technologies, such as AI, and how we can optimise employee experience to help balance productivity, engagement, and wellbeing of employees.
I’ll be delivering a keynote speech and taking part in a fireside chat with Microsoft’s Alexia Cambon and Nick Hedderman about how we can implement AI in the workplace to build the future of work.
To register for your free seat, click the link here.
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Today’s discussion should land you right in the sweetspot of thinking about AI for your own job by taking a step back, by asking yourself how you can connect with AI and why you should.
Today’s guest Professor Costas Andriopoulos explain curiosity is the engine of creativity. And by striving to be curious our minds will surprise us with the creativity that results.
There was a wonderful piece of work five years ago by Francesco Gino from Harvard Business School that looked into curiosity.
It found that of more than 3,000 employees from a wide range of firms and industries, only about 24% reported feeling curious in their jobs on a regular basis, and about 70% said they face barriers to asking more questions at work.
In a study of 120 employees it was found that natural curiosity was associated with better job performance, as evaluated by their direct bosses.
In the survey of more than 3,000 employees mentioned earlier, 92% credited curious people with bringing new ideas into teams and organizations and viewed curiosity as a catalyst for job satisfaction, motivation, innovation, and high performance.
Professor Costas Andriopoulous is a Professor of Management and Associate Dean for Entrepreneurship at Bayes Business School, City of London University.
Links for today:
Professor Costas' book: Purposeful Curiosity: How asking the right questions will change your life
Promptbase - is a marketplace for AI prompts (you’ll get the best value from it if you sign up for a paid subscription on Midjourney). Here’s my own experiments
If you’re interested in generative AI for business then the posts by Ethan Mollick are essential to follow (‘Come up with names for a pasta restaurant Now read the Igor Naming Guide on how to name companies, give me better suggestions. Check those names for trademark violations. Make up unique names that won't violate trademark, explain them’)
I find that having inspiration can prompt your own imagination and this gallery can give you ideas.
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Ellen Scott is the deputy digital editor of Stylist and someone who has achieved recognition for having a sharp eye when it comes to observing the changing face of work.
Ellen was one of the first voices to pick up on the TikTok trend of Quiet Quitting, she's written about 'the ambi-work' movement and continues to give voice to the challenges facing Gen Z and Millennial workers. We talk about whether is as fair a deal today as it always was, and what firms could do to improve things.
You can read some of her past articles here
You'll find Joel Golby's final London Rental Property of the Week linked here.
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Are there forces at work that might impact the way work feels? Could we use those forces to make work better?
This discussion with Robin Dunbar and Tracey Camilleri took me to places I hadn't expected to go. That hormones, our brains and time would play a part in the relationships we forge at work isn't something that you would expect to find in a company's culture document, but as you'll hear today they forge a vital component of better team work.
Hormones are triggered by emotional interactions with other humans. Uniquely they only tend to work face-to-face. Hormones can help us build affinity with others in a powerful way that is often overlooked.
Brain-size impacts the connections we have with those people. At the core of human experience is our closest one (or two) relationships. There’s a small circle of 4 or 5 people who sit at the heart of our lives, and up to 15 who make up the majority of our time.
And that time is critical for the strength of those connections. We spent 40% of our time with our 5 closest relationships, and 60% with the top 15. By spending time we can become close friends with people in our lives.
The Social Brain by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey and Robin Dunbar is out now.
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Today’s episode is a discussion with Amy Gallo. During the pandemic I had a wonderful discussion about work and where it was going and I was delighted to have another conversation with her two years on.
Amy is the author of Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People) and The HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict. She also co-hosts the Women at Work podcast, and is a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review, where she writes about workplace dynamics.
Articles mentioned:
The Harvard study of human life & wellbeing: The secret to happiness? Here’s some advice from the longest-running study on happiness
Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome
The myth of bringing your full, authentic self to work
Amy wrote a wonderful article on psychological safety this week.
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Jeremy shares his: free bonus chapter
Jeremy Utley leads some of the most popular courses on creativity and innovation at the d.school of Stanford University. I was delighted to see that he was making his teaching of such popular courses available to a wider audience and chased him for an interview. This is one of his first interviews to talk about his brand new book Ideaflow.
In it he discusses the way to have good ideas, and why most of us aren't willing to do what is required. I loved this discussion. Buy Ideaflow here - and find out more about Jeremy and his co-author, Perry Klebahn, here.
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Sign up to hear more about Radix Big Tent
Rory Sutherland is one of the most respected brains in the advertising industry, a man whose early endorsement of behavioural economics helped popularise the nascent science. He's also a regular writer for The Spectator and Vice Chief of Ogilvy Group. Rory joins me to interview to talk about my new book, Fortitude, which has become a Sunday Times Bestseller and tackles the myth of resilience.
The event was hosted by a brilliant organisation called Radix Big Tent. Radix Big Trent gives a platform for non-partisan conversations about big policy issues, giving a voice to people and places. It provokes and promotes new conversations about the regeneration and renewal of our society in a non-partisan way, inspiring practical actions which demonstrate the value of political intervention and delivering real change in left behind areas.
It convenes Summits, Festivals, physical and online events around the country that engage local leaders and ordinary people, bringing them into contact with national policy makers and influencers.
If you would like to hear more please sign up on radixuk.org
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Lots of discussion right now about firms trying to kick start their workplace culture.
I wanted to explore conversations with leaders who were leading experiments in how to make things feel different.
In what prove to be a pair of candid conversations I talk to two firms who are asking the question if workplaces can be more motivated by trying to vary the ingredients. John Sill tells us how his firm The Foundation are trying out Wednesday plus one, then John Readman tells us how Modo25 have become the latest firm to try the four-day week - with some learnings along the way.
If you like this you can sign up to the Make Work Better newsletter
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Come along to one of my free events in September
We all tell stories all of the time, but what makes a magical, memorable story? What pitfalls should we avoid? This was an issue that I was thinking about. Presentations are stories, and we deliver presentations every day.
In my own investigation I found real value in the book by the storytelling organisation The Moth. I was beyond excited when I saw they were releasing a UK edition of the book. One of the authors Kate Tellers joins me to discuss The Moth's approach to making memorable stories. Kate is a senior director at The Moth, helping people transform into storytellers. But she explains something even more valuable, of how The Moth run workshops that allow colleagues to better connect with each other by sharing their stories with each other.
How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth
Carolyn Martin's story about becoming a Catholic Sister (such a beautiful story)
Josh Broder's story about being an extra in a huge film (this is incredible)
Kate's own Moth stories are here
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Professor Sophie Scott is the UK's most recognisable neuroscientist, famed for her passion and her ability to excite interest in a complex field. Her new book, The Brain - Ten Things You Should Know is out now and I got in touch to discuss what any of us can learn about the brain. It's a wonderful discussion that included one detail that stopped me in my tracks.
Listen to Professor Sophie Scott on our previous episode about laughter
Royal Institution Christmas Lecture
Cover image by Hugging Face AI
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Lots of my favourite podcasts have gone on summer break, so I wanted to keep putting some episodes out.
But maybe you don't want something that is too work related in the midst of the summer, so this is an episode that is more psychology and life than workplace culture. It's a lovely discussion with Max Dickins author of 'Billy No Mates'.
I got so much from the book - and from the discussion. Max reflects on the geezerish persona he adopts with workmen in his house and wonders if it's a performance and if it is a performance is it by him, or the workman or both of them. He considers how for many men adult life becomes a process of refusing to demonstrate - and then refusing to experience - joy. As someone asked of him, 'what happened to these men'?
The article that the episode is titled after is here - we discuss it in the show: “Men have no friends and women carry the burden”
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To find out more about the workplace culture course go to the website or the book page.
After recent episodes have made a case that the office might be on the way out, today is a voice who dares to say otherwise. Tom Goodwin is an active voice in media - operating somewhere between provocateur and consultant. He has been voted a top 10 voice in Marketing by LinkedIn, one of 30 people to follow on Twitter by Business Insider, and a 'must follow' by Fast Company.
In the conversation we discuss how there's a danger that we might be turning our backs on something special in the office, 'dog mode' and how the best technology is the technology that we have available to us now.
Tom's new book is a total rewrite of his first book Digital Darwinism.
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If you're a user of social media, whether Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn you'll have seen the work of today's guest.
Sign up for the free Winning Workplace Culture course here if you prefer Fortitude.
Get the Make Work Better newsletter here
Liz Fosslien is half of Liz and Mollie whose perceptive dissections of contemporary anxieties have won hundreds of thousands of fans. Liz talks through her process of creating these atoms of insight and how the response from viewers inspired them to write a new book about how to cope with the major emotions in our lives.
A lovely warm summer conversation. You can follow Liz and Mollie on social media - or buy their new book Big Feelings here
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A wonderful discussion that I think has got immense to richness to it. I chat to the boss of St John's Ambulance Martin Houghton-Brown (Martin on Twitter). I was struck with the power of the lessons about connection and identity - we often find ourselves throwing these terms around casually but Martin's testimony brings it vividly to life.
Pre-order Fortitude and get a workplace culture course for free (before 8th July 2022)
The book is about resilience - how we get it wrong, and where it really lies. There are a lot of mistakes made about resilience and increasingly our teams are getting fed up hearing us talk about it. Fortitude explores where resilience really lives.
The early reviews on the book are sensational.
Steven Bartlett said:
‘This is a truly refreshing, captivating and important book that shifted my perception on a topic I thought I knew! A must read.’
Gary Lineker said:
‘A book that confirms what I've always believed, that we can't be resilient on our own. In fact resilience is about all of us being stronger than any of us.’
Oliver Burkeman said:
‘An important and well-timed book. A fascinating and important pushback against the narrow,
joy-eroding version of 'resilience' that would leave us to sink or swim alone, Fortitude is an
indispensable guide to a more energising, human, and effective approach to working and
thriving in a post-pandemic world’
Noreena Hertz, author of The Lonely Century said:
'A thought provoking exploration of what it takes to get through tough times and a compelling
endorsement of the power of others to hold us up’.
Nadiya Hussain said:
'A much needed book that unfolds the surprising secrets of resilience. Something I never knew i needed to read but I'm so glad I did, it’s opened up a whole angle of thinking'
Alastair Campbell said:
‘A fascinating analysis of resilience - what it is, what is isn’t and why, when we develop it together, it becomes something better and more important, fortitude. It seems that resilience is a team game.’
Photo by Jorge De Jorge on Unsplash
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Two things on the podcast today - at the end of the episode there is a discussion with former guest, Brian Elliott from Slack's Future Forum.
Ahead of that I want to make an announcement about what I've been working on - with my new book Fortitude.
Fortitude is an investigation into the elusive idea of resilience, a book that discovers that resilience is a area filled with mistakes, misdirection and over-promise. The book finds the true secrets of resilience.
You can find out all of about the book here or you can receive my workplace culture course for free if you pre-order it now.
The Future Forum book 'How the Future Works' is available now.
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“There are two kinds of companies: One is going to embrace work-from-anywhere, and the second is in denial — I feel those companies will lose their workforce. You have to make a choice, as a leader, what kind of company you want to lead” (source)
The words of today's guest have stayed with me for the last few months. I'm so delighted to talk to Professor Raj Choudhury from Harvard Business School who will possibly wake you up from a self-created illusion.
He'll explain:
I was so looking forward to this and it doesn't disappoint.
Read Professor Choudhury's HBR cover article.
Here is the audio clip I mentioned.
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If you find yourself becoming interested in the magic of workplace culture one of the go to authors of the subject is today's guest, Dan Coyle.
Dan's 2018 book The Culture Code allowed him to go deep with some of the most successful cultures in the world - in the arenas of business, sport and even the military. He's returning after the blazing success of the Culture Code with a book that gives more of the energy of that title but drawn into a workbook, The Culture Playbook - imagine something like a journal with prompts of what to write.
He joined me for a discussion where we reflect on the challenges of the last 2 years and what any organisation should be thinking about as they set about creating a winning, forward-looking culture.
If you like this sign up for the newsletter - Make Work Better - for a special announcement in 3 weeks
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We're going deeper into the evidence today with two brilliant guests. Anne Raimondi is COO of Asana who were smart enough to have started a major piece of research into how work is evolving just before the world turned upside down. We're also joined by the most in demand brain in the world right now, Professor Nick Bloom. Nick is Professor WFH, an economist from Stanford University who has been researching remote working for over a decade.
Along the way we talk about how the biggest innovations in remote working are yet to come - and are coming from mindblowing places. We talk the changing expectations of Gen Z workers, why Nick doesn't believe we should be giving up our office just yet. We hear where the sweetspot of hybrid working is right now and why a little less freedom and a little more co-ordination is the order of the day.
I was desperately trying to get Nick on the podcast and to land Anne Raimondi at the same time is a wonderful stroke of luck.
Asana's Anatomy of Work Report 2022 is available here. You can access Nick's work here.
Make Work Better on Nick's work **SIGN UP FOR FREE**
A brilliant listen.
Some key findings from the Asana report:
Compared to one year ago:
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Status is a fundamental need for humans.
Such a fascinating discussion today. I recently read Will Storr's brilliant book The Status Game and was so taken with it I invited him on the podcast.
He quotes Professor Brian Boyd when he says that we:
‘naturally pursue status with ferocity: we all relentlessly, if unconsciously, try to raise our own standing by impressing peers, and naturally if unconsciously, evaluate others in terms of their standing’.
In study after study it is found that our wellbeing depends on the degree that we feel respected by other people. One study found that the attainment off status of its loss was ‘the strongest predictor of long-term positive and negative feelings’ in subjects.
I wanted to pick Will's brains to hear more of this - but also to understand how these mechanisms impact us at work. If you're interested in psychology or just a bit of people watching you'll love the reframing that this discussion provides for us. Along the way Will gives us the definitive take on why Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars.
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This episode is greatly enhanced by reading the newsletter that comes with it.
In today’s podcast I talk to two guests who have slightly different perspectives on how to fix the culture of the Met Police.
Dr Megan O’Neill is Associate Director at the Scottish Institute for Policing Research. She has extensively studied the police and has worked closely with them - most notably helping to revise a stop and search policy that was found to be failing. She explains the challenges of the job, and how we should think about getting buy in to reform.
Simon Holdaway is Professor emeritus of Criminology at the University of Sheffield. He joined the police after he left school and was promoted to sergeant. His study about the police has explored the culture of the profession and how themes of race could be more effectively tackled.
While the police (and the Met) might not feel adjacent to your business there are critical lessons about cultural change.
Four lessons of what good culture requires:
Further information:
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Caleb Parker is one of the most intelligent commentators on the future of our workplaces (Twitter, his website) and this conversation with him did not disappoint. Caleb is the founder of a flexible workplace offering, Bold, but also host of a truly brilliant commercial real estate podcast called The Work Bold Podcast.
I found Caleb's podcast via Antony Slumbers Twitter feed and it's become part of my weekly routine as it normally drops in time for my Sunday run. (BTW Antony was a former guest who shared with us the perspective of the commercial real estate sector early in the pandemic. I found the dialogue with Antony so rich that I wanted to seek another update from the sector.
The second half of the discussion is especially strong. I ask Caleb to give the stump pitch for the office and his answer is stunning. He also shares a stark warning that 'bad culture is a bigger threat to the office than the pandemic'.
Caleb also shares with us the perspective of his most inspiring guest on his own podcast - who outlined what is a breathtaking approach to the future office.
Here is the episode that he mentions with Michelle Schnieder.
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Last year I did a few episodes looking to see how firms were tackling the return to the office (the return to work - THE PLACE) but they were all small workplaces. Organisations that could make nimble actions, I wanted to see how a big firm handled these things. I contacted Tom Kegode, the lead for Work:Lab at Lloyds Banking Group. Lloyds employs 70000 people across hundreds of sites. It is logistically intense to make hybrid work for them.
Tom is a brilliant bright leader intent on creating something sustainable and special in the bank. He is thinking of creating co-working in branches. He is leading best practice about different workstyles in an organisation that isn't mandating any rules. In classic egoless style Tom brought along his colleague Josh Reynolds who works in employee experience. You can find them both on Linked In here:
Tom Kegode is the leader for Lloyds’ Work:Lab initiative.
Josh Reynolds sits within colleague experience.
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Professor Lynda Gratton is one of the world's leading experts on business and the future of work. She's on speed dial with the top CEOs and is a regular at Davos and the World Economic Forum. Her HBR cover article about 'doing hybrid right' has been the navigation guide to the last two years for many firms, and she's turned her thinking into a brand new book, Redesigning Work. She shares with me the questions she's asking of leaders in her MBA course and where she thinks work will go next. Along the way she also gives a shout out to her article about management in the remote era.
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Two outstanding conversations trying to make sense of what is happening around work. Firstly I chat to Brian Elliott who leads the Future Forum, a group led by Slack. they released a new report surveying workers in the UK, US and other major countries. Here are the topline findings - but the conversation goes way beyond this.
Brian also gives a shout out to Donut - a tool to build serendipity.
Then I speak to one of the most respected thought leaders in making sense of the future of work, Julia Hobsbawm is the sought after intelligent voice when it comes to future of work discussions. She chairs the Demos 'Workshift Commission. Her new book, The Nowhere Office is a confident reflection about how we can tackle the future - it’s out for pre-order now.
We talk about office politics, establishing what Leesman call our 'workplace why' - and how we can make hybrid work.
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As we start a new year considerations about the jobs we do have never been more prominent. One headline this year has already suggested that up to three-quarters of us might be considering changing jobs. Intriguingly money doesn't appear to be in the top five reasons to make a change.
I wanted to understand what was going on here, and what any of should be doing about it. Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis are the UK's most respected careers coaches. Their first book The Squiggly Career is a perennial bestseller, and has become adopted into the lexicon of how we talk about a renegotiated relationship with our careers. Their TED Talk has received millions of views. They have a new book out, You Coach You, which offers practical coaching for anyone curious about changing their career. Some of their suggestions - like job scanning - will help you reorientate what you want from your job - and how you can achieve it.
Whether you're thinking about changing work - or just have friends who are considering it - this is a great episode to help us reflect on what we want from our jobs.
Buy You Coach You now
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At this time of year I find myself listening to more podcasts I’ve released two episodes this week. One is a truly brilliant discussion about how simple decisions can transform workplace culture. And the second is not really about workplace culture but is a stimulating reflection on the way we’re living .
A couple of years ago I loved Jia tolentino’s Trick Mirror which was a sparklingly intelligent reflection on the way that the internet is evolving. And along the same lines is a brand new book, Disconnected by Emma Gannon. Emma is increasingly accomplished in multiple fields, she’s a novelist, a non-fiction writer and also an incredibly successful podcaster with over 10 million listens to her podcasts.
She’s written a new book which comes at a time that a lot of us are considering renegotiating relationship with our phone. But how can be not lose what we love about our devices which increasing our connection to those around us - a great discussion.
Along the way we also talk about her brand new writers' journal which you can find out more about here.
Photo by Rahul Chakraborty on Unsplash
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How did thinking about workplace culture increase the profitability of firms?
I was doing some thinking for some businesses over the last few weeks and the work of one person sprung to mind. Zeynep Ton is a professor of operation management at MIT Sloan School of Management. She found herself looking at the challenges that some businesses had with high employee turnover.
They were losing a lot of people. It was causing their service to suffer - it was also costing them a lot of money training and recruiting people. Sounds familiar?
From this it lead to another understanding. Some organisations by thinking about and planning the employee experience of work create jobs that were less stressful and more rewarding. It struck her that quite often companies don’t want to make decisions or create limitations for fear of upsetting customers. But in the process they become more muddled for customers and less rewarding for employees.
Zeynep goes on to say that the firms who think about these things and set about creating good culture and good jobs (a) are more profitable and have higher revenue (b) build more sustainable businesses so their stock does better.
Here are her 4 pillars:
Good more about the Good Jobs Strategy
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Over the last few weeks the newsletters that have achieved the most resonance were related to having a friend at work. For many of us our favourite jobs were enhanced by having a desk buddy - or a group of friends we could laugh with. But for many people their experience of work is increasingly lonely - maybe they had friends when they were in the office but that experience has transformed in the last two years. Yes, we've managed to get our jobs done, maybe our domestic life has even improved but work just feels a little more isolated and joyless.
How big an issue is this for us? Noreena Hertz is here to persuade you this silent spread of loneliness has wide reaching consequences, both for our organisations and for our societies.
In a brilliant and wide-ranging discussion we discuss why loneliness matters and what any of us should be thinking about to make our experience of work more complete. If you enjoyed this then this week's newsletter covers adjacent themes: sign up here
Photo by Lowie Vanhoutte on Unsplash
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What can we learn about what is going to happen next with work by chatting to the leaders of the sector that supplies our workplaces? You might think very little. There’s certainly no shortage of people in the commercial property sector who have been intent on suggesting that we need to go back to the rat race of all office/all the time.
But in that space there are some visionaries who are helping us seeing what is staring us in the face. Last year we’ve spoken to Antony Slumbers, on the newsletter I’ve shared links to the Work Bold podcast by Caleb Parker.
Get Cushman & Wakefield’s Return to the Office report
Read more of the C&W Futures posts
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Today I add Richard Pickering to that list. I was delighted to hear Richard, someone whose writing I’ve been following for a couple of years, speak at an event I was presenting at.
We had such a stimulating discussion on the sidelines that I was desperate to persuade Richard to come on here to talk. Richard is the Chief Strategy Officer at Cushman & Wakefield, one of the largest commercial real estate services companies in the world. His job is to make sense of the changes happening in the demand for property and to advise clients where we’re going.
He’s straight talking - both about what the office needs to adapt and how this is going to have ripple effects for companies and cities.
We talk about:
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Oliver Burkeman was a productivity geek. He was the guy trying to get it all done. He was that person, convinced he could optimise living to get the most out of life, writing about it in a wry, detached way in a Guardian column.
In this episode we talk about his pursuit of elite productivity - but also what it taught him about the ultimate goal of managing one's time. A truly brilliant discussion.
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Over the last few weeks I've been intrigued with the firms who have chosen to bite the bullet and ditch their office. What are their philosophies about getting colleagues together in person? How do they think about recruiting? What software tools do they use? What made them make the leap?
First up I talked to Camilla Boyer who plays a leading role at making the culture at events platform Hopin. Andrew McNeile is the Chief Customer Officer for Thinscale - a company that supplies secure remote working software for outsourcing firms. One of their customers has 375,000 user on their remote work systems. Then I chatted to Lewis Clark at Qatalog he is responsible for storytelling at Qatalog who are remote first (but he spends one day a week in the office).
Then I realised all of these firms were in some way invested in the shift to remote working so I talked to a real person - Lisa Freshwater has been helping Blood Cancer UK ditch their office for good. Finally I chatted to Dan Sodergren whose company YourFLOCK is fully remote.
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How can we use the power of psychotherapy to help us in our jobs? A brilliant discussion with psychotherapist Naomi Shragai where we talk about how her practice has increasingly brought workplace issues to her coach.
We cover:
If you're a people watcher or amateur psychologist you're going to love this. Naomi's new book is The Man Who Mistook His Job for His Life: How to Thrive at Work by Leaving Your Emotional Baggage Behind
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Today’s episode is one for those who have an appetite for psychology.
It is by two authors of a brand new book that I was interested to check out because it covers some of the biggest themes that hybrid working is going to impact - the issue of group identity. I genuinely think this is one of the biggest things that companies need to be thinking about right now.
As we discuss a lot of firms have thought about mission or values but the very best organisations create a sense of collective identity in their teams (and look this might be slightly different identity for different themes).
Identity is often seen to be something negative in politics or society - mainly because it is so expertly used by people we don't like. But it's incredibly powerful for any group - and understanding it is vital. Group identity is a big predictor of your likelihood of being vaccinated, clever nations like New Zealand used it to set about creating 'a team of five million' to fight the disease.
The discussion is with by Jay Van Bavel and Dominic J. Packer who as you’ll hear are both Canadian psychologists practicising in the US. Their book, The Power of Us, is out this week.
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This is the first of two read-alongs in August. Stacks of listeners and newsletter subscribers are reading along on two culture books with us, today we’re talking about Legacy by James Kerr. In two weeks we’re talking about What You Do Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz. Even you don’t read them the podcast here will cover the lessons of the books for anyone interested in workplace culture - and learning together. Go to the newsletter to join in with the conversation.
The All Blacks are the most successful rugby team of all time, in fact they have been called the most successful team in any sport. Drawing their players from a male population of just 2.5m New Zealand adult men, they don’t have any size advantage of the pool they draw from (if size determined outcome then England have more rugby players than the rest of the world combined). But the importance of team values have helped the team create and sustain a meaningful connection with the legacy of the team.
‘Culture is like an organism, continually growing and changing’.
Listen to the discussion then join the conversation about the key themes - either reply to the newsletter or add your comment in the chat threads here:
Divergent vs convergent meetings
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Does political discourse have a place in the workplace? What is going on Basecamp? A truly dazzling discussion with Megan Reitz, Professor of Leadership and Dialogue at Ashridge Executive Education – part of Hult International Business School. I got in touch with Megan when I saw her articles about Basecamp, Coinbase and political activism at work. Along the way we discuss Jonathan Haidt and whether Gen Z’s are softer than previous generations. I reference a discussion between Jonathan Haidt and the very first guest of the podcast Richard Reeves. Haidt’s book The Coddling of the American Mind is an intoxicating spell. It tells you really clearly why young people are softer now than previous generations (and that argument would be all the better if it were true).
Firstly, in depth coverage of the specifics of the Basecamp issue.
Then, Megan’s articles: what is your response to employee activism? Part two
Why employee activism needs to feature in your HR strategy
The Douglas Adams quote: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
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Amazon announced its earnings last week - and saw its share price hit a record high.
Announcing that they’d surpassed 200 million Prime members was just one of the milestones that the company was able to celebrate in a blowout performance. The company’s sales - no doubt helped by a captive audience trapped at home in a pandemic - rose by 44%, a growth clip that would seem impossibly high for a 17 year old firm if we hadn’t seen Apple’s revenue grow by 54% two days previously.
The interesting difference between Amazon and many of the tech brands that we’re surrounded with is that much of their innovation comes from within. For sure we all use multiple products by Google, but the search company bought YouTube, bought Android, bought what became Google Maps, bought Waze, bought Nest, bought their self-driving cars business, bought DoubleClick ads, and also bought lots of things that are now sitting in the where are they now? file like Fitbit and Motorola. Sure we know that Facebook own Instagram (bought in 2012), Whatsapp (bought in 2014) and Oculus (bought in 2014) but their homeground products (remember Poke? Slingshot? Lasso? of course you don’t).
The big question you might ask about these big tech cultures is ‘if they’re so special how come they don’t create any follow-on hits themselves?’ Tech versions of Pixar they are not, they’re the Maroon 5’s of invention, shipping in the clever ideas of other people to keep them bopping in the app charts. It’s not unfair to characterise these companies as bloated bureaucracies propped up by vastly cash generative ad businesses. The commercial real estate expert Dror Poleg commented last week that we sometimes look to the examples set by these big firms as a sign of what the smart brains are doing. Poleg was looking at JP Morgan just about agreeing to some degree of hybrid working. The truth of all of these firms is that, despite the external mystique, they are able to avoid decisions of scarcity by their high margins and often make terrible decisions along the way. I’m often emailed by people who work at big tech firms who tell me that their job is a slow-moving bureaucracy overwhelmed with rules and red-tape, in contrast when people from education or local government contact me they are apologetic for how slow their cultures are to evolve. Little do they know how big tech firms share a lot in common with them.
So how do Amazon do it? This week’s podcast is a discussion with long-time Amazon exec Colin Bryar. Along the way we talk through Amazon’s Leadership Principles, how Amazon created products like Kindle and Prime, their recruitment process, and much more. But there was one thing that really stood out to me and that was the idea of ‘Separable, Single-Threaded Leadership’. As Colin told me Jeff Bezos made a comment one day, ‘The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part-time job’. Bezos realised that the worst part of people’s roles was having to keep dozens (hundreds!) of colleagues in the loop because of co-dependencies. The best way to make people feel empowered by their job was to genuinely empower them - to let them get on with them without having to tell everyone what they were doing all of the time. To that end Bezos decided ‘that if we wanted Amazon to be place where builders can build, we needed to eliminate communication, not encourage it’.
Wow. Think about that. Someone recognising that the worst part of your job is endless video calls and emails stopping you actually doing your job. As Colin puts it, ‘In other words, Jeff’s vision was that we needed to focus on loosely coupled... Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/eatsleepworkrepeat. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week I chat to Elizabeth Uviebinené, Financial Times columnist and the iconic author of Slay in Your Lane about her new bookThe Reset. With Slay (‘The Black Girl Bible’) she proved that she could sell huge amount of books to audiences who weren’t represented by mainstream books, but The Reset takes aim at work, society and a whole lot more… and it aimed at anyone! We have a fun and sparky discussion (including talking about the LinkedIn heart attack guy).
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Rutger Bregman’s Humankind was my favourite book of 2020 and it comes out in paperback next month. A brilliant read (that also works wonderfully as an audiobook) it will appeal to fans of Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens or anyone who wants a provocative, thoughtful summer read.
To mark the paperback release I spoke to him about universal basic income, the way that we've worked in lockdown, and why we turn our backs to lots of evidence that humans are innately kind, decent beings.
Rutger's brilliant book Humankind is out in paperback in May 2021. For a full transcript of this interview go to the website.
Rutger mentions he's written recently about the end of neoliberalism - you can read that here.
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Two discussions today about big stories in the news. Firstly I chat to senior features writer at The Economist about his brilliant special report on work. Callum wrote the special report on work in this week's Economist - you can find it here.
Then I have a discussion with CEO and podcaster Dan Murray-Serter. Dan runs his own start-up, Heights.
We talk about three articles:
These and of the articles I find relevant to how work is changing are included in the weekly Make Work Better newsletter - sign up now.
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Kim Scott is the straight talking author of the phenomenal hit Radical Candour. Now she's back with a huge new book that's set to be equally as impactful.
She joined me with business partner Trier Bryant to discuss themes of diversity, workplace bias, bullying and harassment - and what any of us can do to stamp it out. Along the way we go into plenty of specific examples that will help you think about issues like this in your own workplace. We also get real talking about why standing up - even to good people - is an important thing we all need to do. There are some good stories in this episode!
Kim's new book is Just Work - available now.
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What a guest today. I've tried to speak to Professor Robin Dunbar for 4 or 5 years.
Robin has a new book out called Friends which is the sort of book you can lose yourself in on a holiday (if anyone lets you have one).
I enjoyed it for surprising me and going beyond what I already knew.
So reliant are human beings on our social collaboration that it has been suggested that our bodies have evolved the feeling of loneliness, an alarm system that aggressively resists isolation. Many other animals don’t have anything close to this — some mammals and birds actively seek isolation, spending weeks and months alone aside from rituals of mating and raising their offspring - something that Robin Dunbar and others have demonstrated is a reflection of brain size.
Robin Dunbar ‘spent the better part of twenty-five years studying the behaviour of wild animals’ - mainly monkeys, goats and antelopes. He wanted to understand social evolution - why species had the social systems that they have developed. He admits that ‘humans were, at best, only a very superficial interest’.
He noticed that monkeys and apes were social in a way that other animals were not. They would spend hours grooming each other, hours upon hours entwined round each other cleaning each other’s fur. ‘I had been deeply impressed by the fact that they groomed far more than they ever needed to for purely hygienic purposes’. It seemed there was some mutual pleasure in this action. When he took the time to explore what was the causal factor for this grooming long haired monkeys spent no longer grooming than shorthaired monkeys, large monkeys spent no longer grooming than small monkeys. The complexity of the hair management task wasn’t the prompt.
Rather it was the size of the brains of the primate that determined the amount of time spent. Dunbar proposed the Social Brain Hypothesis - that a species brain size constrains the size of its social group. ‘The problem with living in stable, permanent groups is that considerable diplomatic and social skills are needed to prevent the stresses and niggles of living in close proximity with others from overwhelming us,’ - we need big brains to help us manage the politics of a bigger tribe.
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A recording of a Twitter Spaces discussion with Scott Galloway. We talk remote working, why cities will never die, why working hard is Scott's top career advice. Along the way we talk about the power of touch, Goldman Sachs, missing humans and what will come next for work.
The Twitter Spaces app also blings a lot too, sorry about that. I've edited about 200 of them out.
Scott's book Post Corona is a bestseller.
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I’ve talked a lot about Cal Newport’s provocations about abolishing email (and Zoom calls) [find them here and here].
And in fact, I had someone last week astonished when I suggested we should try to limit video calls to eight hours a week. They thought I’d lost my mind. How would we get things done unless we were on video calls all day?
This default to video and emails is what Cal Newport calls the Hyperactive Hive Mind.
He’s convinced that we’ll look back at the way we’re working right now and be embarrassed we optimised for what was easy rather than what was productive. Cal outlines how we should be setting about to fix work - by changing our relationship with technology.
It is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant provocation that is unique to him and I think will give all us reason to reflect.
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Pre-order Conflicted now - available from 18th Feb
You can also read Ian's post on Paul McCartney that I mentioned on the show and follow him on Twitter here.
What's the route to better decision making at work? What can any of us do to ensure we resolve our disputes in a more productive way. A brilliant discussion with Ian Leslie about his forthcoming new book, Conflicted.
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A couple of things for you. I’m not sure I’ve mentioned here but I’ve done a new Audible Original podcast/audiobook called No Office Required. It is free. In December I spent a long time contacting a wide range of people from the likes of the author of Solo, Rebecca Seal through to futurists, psychologists, architects to find out the most effective way to do remote working. Like I say it’s free if you’re an Audible subscriber. I love audiobooks, whether just to break up the cycle of podcasts or because the escape into a novel can be really satisfying. If youre interested in getting going in the shownotes I’ve listed some of my favourite recent listens as inspiration.
A free download of my new Audible Original here - No Office Required
For those who aren't audiobook fans some inspiration on audiobooks
If you want to write a book here's my guide.
Secondly I was on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast. I’ve listened to a lot of his podcasts - he was the founder of the Social Chain media agency and I’ve met him a couple of times through that. He invited me down, it was only when I got to the Tube that I remembered it was going to be video. I had my full working from home garb on. Climate school strike T shirt and that. Anyhow there’s been lovely feedback to the discussion. We discuss why work culture isn’t feeling right at the moment, what any of us can do about it and also - as I used to work at Twitter - Donald Trump being banned from the platform. Again there’s a link to that below.
I chatted to Steven Bartlett on his Diary of a CEO podcast - watch it here.
On with today’s episode. At the moment I’m in the middle of writing a book on the myth of resilience. What’s the myth of resilience, the myth is that resilience is an individual strength that some of us have and some of us don’t. As I’ve been immersed in the most wonderful research along the way there’s been some people who I’ve seen their work and thought firstly I’d like to chat to them and secondly they’d be a good podcast.
Today’s guest is Dr Damian Scarf, he teaches at the University of Otago in New Zealand.
I saw him do a short and impactful TED talk: Dr Damian Scarf's TEDx Talk
Very much like Dr Jill Bolte Taylor who did that wonderful lecture about having a stroke, Damian uses his psychology to diagnose what went wrong with him when he was studying. He describes how he thought the way to get things done was to cut himself off. And as he cut himself off from more people he felt worse.
He says:
‘it’s our connections with those around us, the groups we belong to, that bolster our resilience. The number of groups we belong to not only bolsters our resilience, but is also protective against developing depression, can be curative of existing depression, and helps to prevent depression relapse. Even when you're old, groups are critical. The more groups we belong to, the slower our cognitive decline’.
So could our strength come from our connections?
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What's going to happen with our workplaces.
Today the theme is how, if we're not careful the way that we're using our workplaces is going redefine our work culture.
At the start there is discussion about some of the themes in the most recent newsletter and then go on to chat to Nick LiVigne from Convene. Convene are a coworking/events business that allows you to adapt your needs to the minute-to-minute demands of your business - they have been very successful in the US and are coming to the UK in 2021.
Nick explains how they see coworking evolving - and what to look for next.
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There is no better guest to kick off 2021 than Amy Gallo.
Amy Gallo is a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review writing about workplace dynamics and emotional intelligence. She is co-host of the wonderful Women at Work podcast
She's is the author of the HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict and gave a hit TEDx talk on that subject in 2019.
On the Women at Work podcast, Harvard Business Review staffers Amy Bernstein, Amy Gallo, and Emily Caulfield untangle some of the trickiest problems that women face at work. They talk to some of the sagest advisors on gender, they tell stories about their own experiences, and give practical advice to help women succeed at work.
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How the heck did we end up thinking that humour and serious work are in opposition to each other?
Today's guests, Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas, run a tremendously successful course at Stanford Business School on how we can all use humour to be better (and happier) at our jobs.
One of the people they have coming along to guest speaker at their course is Dick Costolo, Dick was my former boss as CEO of Twitter (and hired me to work there). He had an unorthodox background spending his post college years initially trying to make it as an improv comedian at the legendary comedy club Second City in Chicago (alongside people like Steve Carrell from The Office). I mention it because it comes up in conversation. In my first three months at Twitter I had an excruciating embarrassing episode with Dick, he was coming to London and was doing an event for us. I'd lined him up to be in conversation with Rory Sutherland. His assistant told me that I should get to his hotel for breakfast, get a nice table and order his food for him. Breakfast should be full cooked breakfast with plenty of crispy bacon. It had to be crispy. I'm not sure if she was trolling me but oh dear. The story deserves a full telling another time because it became a calamitous moment for me. When you hear mention of him this is why they laugh.
"When we observe humour in others it's so much more about mindset"
Jennifer and Naomi say students tell them "I'm not funny, I don't want to try to be funny" and this is the important revelation, to experience humour we don't need to seek to be the star of the skit, but more we need to allow ourselves to laugh at the lightness of a moment.
At the end of the book they give a context for the book, Jennifer's mother works in a hospital dealing with patients who at the end of their lives are asked to reflect on how they would have spent time differently. It becomes clear that the absence of joy in their everyday lives was unnecessary and tragic.
Take their quiz to find your own humour style.
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Seth Godin has cracked the secret of how to make you more creative. And the good news is that everyone can do it. He was so dogged by his need to share this that he has turned it into a book, The Practice. We talk about the simple way to unlock creativity and ask why schools don't teach this. At the end Seth gives his recommendations of the best things you should be reading (linked below)
My previous interview with Seth - How you can reinvent your company culture
Seth's recommendations:
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Zander and Benjamin Zander
Just Kids (audiobook) by Patti Smith
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There was an incredible response to the episode with Chris hayward last week. I know that Chris was really touched with the response. He’s not on Twitter but I know he was responding to some people on Linkedin last week.
Today’s episode is much lighter in tone but it’s fascinating rare opportunity to get a different perspective into another world. During the summer someone at GCHQ got in touch and asked whether it would be of interest to get an insight into the modern world of spying and intelligence. I’ve been very fortunate that since I’ve been doing this podcast I’ve been invited to M15, to M16 and inside the SAS so I was delighted to go inside GCHQ. Especially as I was allowed to record it and have one of the first interviews with someone inside GCHQ.
GCHQ (government communication headquarters - as its never known) was created in 1919 after the first world war as a way to gather intelligence to assist the British Government and UK military.
It’s always had a unique culture - harking back to its old site at Bletchley Park where – deliberately – everyone worked in huts so the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing to maintain secrecy. The code breakers of Bletchley park were famously principally women and were credited with helping to end the war 2 years ahead of what would otherwise have occurred.
I was fortunate to get a very rare interview with Jo Caven, a director at GCHQ, and one of the few people who are allowed to confirm they work at the organisation. It's a fun discussion - there's a few laughs in there - not least because Jo has a good sense of fun and entertains my more excitable questions.
Some interesting reading:
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WARNING: INCLUDES THEMES OF SUICIDE AND DEPRESSION
"I walked up and down Tottenham Court Road looking for a lorry to throw myself under"
An episode going deep on mental health today. I chat to someone who has been brave enough to reveal their own breakdown and how they got to the verge of suicide. In a recent piece of research Deloitte surveyed 1000 UK employees, 55% say their colleagues are just as productive but 38% say that lockdown has had a negative impact on their wellbeing. Not long ago Chris Hayward was named the number 1 media buyer in the UK by industry bible Campaign, he was responsible for buying advertising campaigns for some of the best known brands in the world.
An unfortunate accident made Chris's health take a turn for the worse and before anyone could notice he was spiralling through exhaustion and isolation into a very dark place. In this incredibly candid conversation Chris explains how he felt, how he's learned to cope and what he would say to others in his position.
Support if you're feeling suicidal
Mental health support for young people
How to help someone else who is feeling suicidal
Introduction to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
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Today's episode is for anyone who is curious about how human's tick. Work ultimately is a practice of the brain and how our brain processes and reacts to things is a fascination to me.
I have a friend who is studying neuroscience and a couple of years ago at someone's wedding I was chatting to him and said 'who should I be reading?' and he said the best voice in the field was a psychologist called Lisa Feldman Barrett. Sure enough I looked her up and her book How Emotions Are Made was dazzling and brilliant. it covers themes of understanding emotions.
One of the things that Lisa believes is that we don' t arrive programmed with emotions, we learn them along the way. The more emotions we're taught to understand the more we can feel. In her book she says people who read fiction books and learn to appreciate nuance of emotion end up feeling a wider range of emotions. She has a new book out. How Emotions Are Made is several hundred pages and her new book 7.5 Lessons About the Brain is much shorter and is very accessible. So if you're looking for a simple explainer about the brain it is a brilliant summary (I have disclose I way preferred the first book).
Along the way you're going to discover that no your dog isn't capable of feeling guilt, we talk about the test (that was in a previous episode) called the Reading The Mind in the Eyes test.
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What a truly wonderful conversation you're about to listen to today. Mo Gawdat is an expert on happiness and today's episode is a combination of philosophy and science - and it never fails to be stimulating to listen to every step of the way. This podcast used to be about happiness and work culture. And about 4 years I saw a captivating clip by Mo which went viral everywhere on the internet. I contacted him and finally here we are. Mo Gawdat was formerly the boss of Google X, the company's innovation lab, now he is one of the most respected thought leaders on how we can find happiness in our lives.
Links mentioned in the show:
Joe Biden's climate plan (I love this site Bloomberg Green btw their daily Green email is brilliant).
Listen to Mo's podcast. I'm on this episode.
Follow Mo on Twitter/Instagram.
Here's Mo's original viral clip if you want to share it - YouTube/Facebook/Twitter
Mo mentions the most successful artist Romero Britto - here's his work, he wasn't kidding about his work being simplistic.
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"When I moved to New York City, I realised what it meant to be truly lonely for the first time. I had no consistent community — people who would wonder where I was if I didn’t show up. I was disconnected. At the time, I thought that I was the only one who felt this way… but I was VERY wrong.Turns out, loneliness is a huge issue in the United States. The average American only has one close friend, and 75% of people are not satisfied with their friendships".
Jillian Richardson found that one of the most relatable things that any of us can do is confess to others that we're lonely. Freshly arrived in Manhattan she found the paradox of big cities is that we can be alone while surrounded with others. Her response was to create the Joy List - a list that once set about connecting people across New York with other like minded individuals and now sets about connecting anyone virtually.
The Joy List has become a phenomenon recommended by Esther Perel, Priya Parker and many more. She's also the author of Unlonely Planet.
Jillian gives us her 5 rules of community - and cautions that while communities can exist in the workplace we should be cautious about trying to get everyone into the same community at work. She also talks about her 'Ask' and 'Offer' walls as a device to bring teams together.
Peter Block: "Community requires a concept of the leader as one who creates experiences for others. Experiences that in themselves are examples of our desired future".
If you're thinking I'd love Jillian's help she offers her services professionally both as a course and as personal coaching. If you want to hire her she's willing and able to take that on you can contact her here.
Jillian mentions the Ritual Design Lab.
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We're at part 3 of our series about community at work.
Today's guest is one of the most respected community thinkers in the world, Casper ter Kuile, Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School and author of The Power of Ritual. His book is a practical guide to the way that communities come to life, not only is it practical it's also brilliantly written. I found myself annotating a lot of it and it's impossible not to learn from his wisdom on the topic.
“Disconnection sours the sweet things in life and makes them nearly unbearable”
Casper previously wrote a free book with Angie Thurston is at Harvard Divinity School called How We Gather which was a wonderful exploration of how post religious (secular) groups were creating get togethers that seemed to be inspired by the religious communities that went before them. Casper's perspective is wonderful, so respectful of religion even though he sits outside of it.
This series of episodes has been about understanding how our organisations can shape a sense of belonging in us, especially when we're no longer physically together.
I feel like the episodes are a journey. No one has professed to know the answers and there's plenty of cautionary notes. I'm certain anyone trying to shape community in their work will come away with plenty of thoughts after this. Not least that Casper says that it goes strongly against the spirit of community that someone in a community can fire someone else. Community is built on safety.
In the podcast I also talk about a previous episode on rituals and you can find that here.
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Today's episode is a further exploration of how firms will try to evolve their culture by hiring Community Managers. If you've not listened to last week's episode featuring Sarah Drinkwater pull up, back up and tuck in to that one first. Sarah said the person I should talk to is Abadesi Osunsade from Brandwatch - and so that's who we are talking to today. Abadesi's title is VP Global Community & Belonging at the 500 strong organisation.
We talk about seeking to get better at Diversity & Inclusion, giving voice to teams (and applicants) and how to build community in organisations who are no longer together.
Abadesi mentions Square's Rise program. This is the scheme that ensures there's always one minority candidate at the last stage of each hiring process. You'll find more details on it here. (note I couldn't find it on the UK website so maybe stay on the US site when it asks if you want to move).
Here's Abadesi's book and the other organisation she's part of The Hustle Crew.
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Image by @claybanks at Unsplash.
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New podcast today - the first of four podcasts about what’s next with work - specifically how can we make work feel like a community again, especially when you’re hunkered down under the duvet trying to survive the November chill. Over the next few weeks I’m going to be chatting to some incredible guests.
Today I kick off with Sarah Drinkwater who is a supreme community builder and now works for the Atomico fund.
Some links to what we discuss!
I mention that Gary runs Wonder - this is their website
She mentions Jason Fried's book Rework (my own book
Q Anon - outstanding Reply All when they pretty much work out which crackpot is behind it. Created by a crackpot, weaponised by the GRU.
The Sunrise Movement - love these kids
Image by Shane Rounce on Unsplash
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AHP's original article in Buzzfeed
Last year Anne Helen Petersen’s Buzzfeed article about burnout became a viral sensation, spawning a seemingly never-ending wave of ‘Year of Burnout’ headlines. Petersen’s writing triggered such recognition because she rooted it in the ordinary, in everyday experiences that were instantly relatable. She evoked her own life where industrious professional productivity (as a writer) was combined with a weary inability to get things done in her private life.
She initially thought there was something wrong with her. Googling for other people relating their aversion to getting sh!t done domestically, bills sitting unpaid, registrations unfiled, postal votes uncast, chores uncompleted. She realised it wasn’t personal, it was systematic. The way we were living was driving us to a constant feeling of being emotionally & physically spent.
Relatedly, it was sad to read of the passing of David Graeber this week. As an academic he was an unexpected icon of progressive politics but more than anything he was someone who invited us to revisit our preconceived ideas about how society functioned. Graeber had mused in his book ‘Bullshit Jobs’, wondering what had happened to the 15-hour week that in 1930 John Maynard Keynes had predicted by the end of the 20th century. He wondered whether it was indeed possible but societally we might have to reorganise the world of work to achieve it. Insurgent thinking for many, but there are echoes of this conjecture in Petersen’s book. Some of her thoughts might find resonance with frazzled younger workers wondering why they won’t be free of their student loans until 2045 and looking at house prices simmering away at 10 times their salary.
AHP reminds us that despite a whole genre of self-improvement literature that tells us that our personal actions can resolve burnout - or that, come on slouch, you need to be grittier, we need to point the finger at the actions of our firms, not ourselves. Ultimately she suggests that our casual acceptance of the way we’re working is having a toll on our psyche that can’t be easily unspun by productivity hacks and meditation apps. As Taylor Lorenz notes on the jacket, the book “is a compelling exploration of… how an entire generation has been set up to fail”.
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Today's interviewees: Bhushan Sethi leads PwC's workplace strategy business and Ben Waber is the CEO of workplace analytics firm, Humanyze.
Read the Humanyze research about the way work has changed since lockdown.
Here's the previous episode I recorded with Ben Waber.
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I was fortunate to speak to Gary Hamel about his forthcoming new book, Humanocracy.
He believes that the single most empowering (and profitable) thing that businesses can do is eliminate their creeping bureaucracy.
He talks about how increasingly organisations are paralysed with red tape and bureaucracy. The end result is that they can’t get anything done. There are some clear examples of this from the recent past. He characterises the Microsoft era under Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer as being one where opportunity after opportunity was passed because the organisation was so heavily bureaucratic. Satya Nadella has freed the organisation from a lot of this – with evident results.
Hamel proposes a series of questions that help you diagnose the extent of bureaucracy in your company - and you can read more about this here: read more
Buy Gary Hamel's new book, Humanocracy
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What are other firms doing about returning to work? How can any of us work out the right thing to do? I chat to 4 more firms to hear their plans.
Listen to conversations with Beth Marie Norbury from Babcock International, Tom Ellis from Brand Genetics, Richard from a big secret pharmaceuticals firm and Laura Pleasance from Captify. This is addition to Dan Cullen Shute last episode.
Here's more on my survey I put out last week (from last week's newsletter):
We’ve already heard loud and clear that workers don’t want to return to the old days but we’re starting to hear more about firm ordering workers back to their seating plan. L’Oreal US saw some unwelcomed attention this month when they told workers that if they didn’t come back ASAP they needed to authorise the firm having access to their private medical records.
So what are other firms saying is going to happen next? I got just under 100 qualitative replies to the survey; from pharmaceutical companies to start-ups, charities to defence contractors. The replies detailed different approaches from companies as they try to work out how to act next. The main headlines were:
Some of the most interesting quotations showing the spectrum of positions:
"[an organisation that went from 4 floors to 27 seats] It’s amazing how many of the things people said couldn’t be done from home could once COVID hit. We’re looking at a total rethink on workspaces and what the future looks like - a place for social interaction and collaboration with the ethos that work is something you do not somewhere you go… there’s no going back”
“We issued a survey to understand what our people feel comfortable with, and on that basis have told everyone no one will be asked to work from the office if they prefer not to for the rest of the year”
[We got everyone back to the office in mid July] “we're an office based business and we need to get used to being back in the office as we can't work from home together. No plans announced on long term flexibility but lots of employees are asking (as are new hires)”.
“The success of working from home, and the fact that so many staff have said they now want more flexibility, has lead [the organisation] to put one of our office buildings up for lease. So a full 5 day return to the office for everyone wouldn’t even be possible”.
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Here's Dan's tweets that started this conversation.
Today's episode is first of two episodes about the big return to work. It covers themes that I've covered in the newsletter over the last few weeks. What are other firms doing? How will they make their decisions. Over the 2 episodes I've chatted to stacks of people to get their views. Firstly I talk to someone who went on the record describing his company's approach.
Dan Cullen Shute is the boss of advertising agency, Creature he tweeted a few weeks ago that he was getting the band back together every Wednesday and Thursday. I asked him his thinking behind this and his vision of how this will create a special place to work.
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"We think people want to be liked, but they need to be needed".
A thoroughly stimulating discussion here - that I've allowed to run long because it's so interesting.
I met a brilliant guy called Misha Byrne who worked for a company called NeuroPower. I was so taken with what he was talking about (applying neuroscience to work) that we arranged to meet up, and he brought Peter Burow, the founder of the company along.
There's some wonderful stuff in this discussion:
The model that they use in their work is RELISH: Relatedness, Expression, Leading the pack, Interpersonal connection, See Progress and Hope for the future
We talk a lot about Matt Lieberman's book, Social.
Misha invites listeners to drop him an email you can do that here. Peter's book is here or you can read it for free here.
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"Tuesday and Thursday, see you there. BOOM!"
A lot of us are starting to long for human contact again and the office feels like a happy place to be. But what does the office of the future look like? I chatted to the brilliant Antony Slumbers (follow him on Twitter here). Antony is regarded as a visionary thinker in the real estate market and runs a course for you to learn to be the same.
Antony is incredibly incisive:
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Firstly a conversation with David D'Souza the membership director of CIPD (incidentally is a fantastic Twitter follow).
David talks about the choices available to firms right now:
If you want to follow the Twitter list I mention you'll find it here.
If you're interested in workplace culture you might like my newsletter makeworkbetter.substack.com
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I'm so excited about what is in the next few episodes. This is a short series of episodes about what we're about to lose with the end of office culture, and how we can build something new. If you like this please do share it.
Today's episode has two great interviews. Later I’m going to hear from the frontline how firms are changing their use of technology by chatting to Adrienne Gormley, Head of EMEA at Dropbox.
The first conversation is with Dr Emma Cohen, Associate Professor in Cognitive Anthropology at Oxford University. It went to see Dr Cohen before the lockdown and chatted to her in her office. Emma is going to teach you about the impact of working with other people. You're going to learn about how this impacts exercise and then about the self-other overlap. Over the next few episodes we're going to look at this more because understanding this is the secret of building new work.
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Varied episode today, firstly for Mental Health Awareness week, two members of West Midlands Fire Service talk about stress at work and when it's ok to say you're not ok. Then later in the show a brief discussion with April Vellacott and Jez Groom who give us a brief glimpse of how to use behavioural hacks to improve work.
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I've been chasing this conversation for over 2 years and I'm delighted today to talk to the world’s most sought after culture doctor: Frances Frei is the Red Adair of work culture problems.
If something goes wrong at WeWork, Uberor Riot Games there’s one name you call… You’ll be thrilled to hear the brilliant, thoughtful interview Frances gives.
She’s very clear answering:
Frances and her wife are the authors of a brand new book called Unleashed which recounts their experience at Uber, WeWork and more.
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Recorded live at Vidcon 2020
As we sit in a strange period of work, a slight distraction from the normal cycle with a discussion with two digital creators.
Arron Crascall has almost certainly appeared in your feed on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. He started using Vine when he was working at William Hill bookmakers and his content started to develop a bigger and bigger audience when he started using strangers as participants in his clips. Clip 1, clip 2.
Elle Mills has been described as the John Hughes for the YouTube generation and as 'the celebrity every YouTuber wants to be'. She creates fully rendered films that are appointment to view content. She's also been incredibly candid about the toll that creating has had on her. Here's when she turned her mum's house into a frat house , when she lived without the internet, her coming out video was a break-out smash, a slumber party with her brother and all his exes.
Tickets for Arron's live tour are on sale now.
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This episode is about the power of diverse thinking. Our guest is the thinker, writer, commentator Matthew Syed.
Matthew represented Great Britain in table tennis at the Barcelona and Sydney Olympics. He’s since gone on to the one of the biggest, most successful business writers in the UK with his books like Bounce in 2010, Black Box Thinking in 2015, a kid’s book You Are Awesome in 2018 and Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking in 2019.
Rebel Ideas has just come out in paperback this week. If you enjoyed this episode please do share it on social media and get in touch via the website, I’d love to hear from you.
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"Purpose is something that can be found but cannot be given"
For this episode I talk with London Business School professor Dan Cable about what work is going to look like in the future as we contemplate the fall out of coronavirus and homeworking. Clearly a lot of firms aren't going to make it through this completely unprecedented situation and to some extent maybe these discussions might seem like first world problems. The intention is to help us understand how we can use this moment to make work better - never waste a good crisis - as we say in the show.
You can talk about this episode - and more - on our new forum.
Dr Laurie Santos' happiness course and podcast.
Dan's book Alive at Work is a firm listener favourite.
READ: Dan talked about a paper saying bosses think less of workers they don't see.
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You can talk about this episode - and more - on our new forum.
Well what a strange time we’re living through. I don’t what I can say that hasn’t already been said. So to some extent this episode is a distraction - something interesting to listen to from a profession that is always in our highest regard in times like this but too easily forgotten in easy times.
Christie Watson is a trained nurse who spent 20 years working in hospitals across London.
She’s an Incredible testament to never allowing your creative spark to die. She explains to me how she wrote her first book - an award winning novel while studying a course in creative writing and working as a nurse - and also being a single mother.
The novel won the immensely prestigious Costa Book Award (a prize she didn’t know she was nominated for). Brilliantly she had to Google the prize when she got called to say she’d won it.
Her book The Language of Kindness: A Nurse's Story is a remarkable tale of a job right in the heart of anxious families while retaining professional distance. I was interested what the job of nurse was like.
We talk about privilege - mainly mine that I found her book so eyeopening about areas that i was oblivious to.
It’s a beautiful account that has become a best seller because of the sympathy that runs through it. In one episode chrissie washes the hair of a recently deceased patient so that the smell of the burning that killed them won’t pollute the family’s last moment
Christie's book A Language of Kindness.
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Second episode on the 4 day week. We go deep with someone who made the 4 day leap, Andrew Barnes' firm Perpetual Guardian made the shift to 4 days. He explains why some workers never told their partners, why others felt it transformed their experience of work and he gives the clear way to make a 4 day experiment work at your work.
If you're interested in going shorter one of the best ways seems to be to try a summer experiment - maybe from May to September - so now is a good time to start the preparation. If you try it please get in touch to share your experience!
Read the PDF of these episodes.
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First of two new episodes on one theme. Until coronavirus swept the world the discussion of 2020 was about the future of work being based on working less to achieve more. There are two episodes on this today.
Firstly former guest Alex Soojung Kim Pang talks about the research celebrating the benefits of working shorter (his book on the same subject came out this week). He spent the last 3 years going into firms that are using shorter working to build retention, productivity and creativity. He gives a clear roadmap of why you should consider working shorter, what the pitfalls are and what you could see as the benefit.
The next episode looks at a case study of a company that went 4 days to improve productivity. What did they do and how did it work out?
Download the PDF of this episode.
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When the biggest company in the world slipped from its throne how did a new CEO try to rescue it using culture. What did Satya Nadella do? How did it succeed, how did it fail? What can any of us do to change our company culture?
Download the PDF of the episode's lessons.
This episode draws on the outstanding paper by Herminia Ibarra, Aneeta Rattan and Anna Johnston from London Business School.
Here's the famous cartoon about Microsoft (vs other tech firms of the time)
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"We used to think 'the medium is the message', now we know that the messenger is the message".
Stephen Martin was the co-writer of one of my favourite books, Yes! so I was thrilled when I saw he had a new book, Messengers. He agreed to come on and talk about both books. How important are superficial aspects like appearance in our credibility. What is the one thing that we should do to make people like us more?
We discuss decision architecture, how any of us can influence others and the constituent parts of the choices that we all make.
Stephen - and his co-author, Joseph Marks are two of the most fascinating experts to help us interpret the complexities of trust and how we can foster a warmth in our own communication.
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Here he is, the philosopher king. Alain de Botton is the man that wrote philosophy books that sold like airport thrillers. He's sold millions of books reflecting on life, work and happiness.
We share a wonderful discussion about what role work can fulfil in our lives, where education is going wrong and how we can use psychology to help diagnose the challenges of our problem colleagues.
Alain's two new books from The School of Life are How to Get on With Your Colleagues and How to Think More Effectively
You can follow him on Twitter.
School of Life has over 5m subscribers on YouTube.
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Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper are the creators of the Squiggly Careers podcast - and the authors of a brand new book, The Squiggly Career. If you're wondering what to do with your life Sarah and Helen might be the best person to help you find the right answers for you.
This episode answers questions about what we should expect from our jobs - and the where happiness at work lives.
Helen mentioned the values episode of their podcast and you'll find it here.
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Hot topic right now. Annie Auerbach talks about her way of working flexibly and explains how all of us could be living a life we love.
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What's stopping you from you doing your best work ever? That's the question that Aaron Dignan (working at his culture consultancy, The Ready) asks the companies he meets.
Often the biggest barrier to us doing our best work is often our own attitude and mindset - and Dignan takes us step by step into his process. Aaron's book Brave New Work, is out now.
Also mentioned in this episode:
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Recorded at the Good Day at Work event in Manchester, hosted by Robertson Cooper.
During the last World Cup, as we gradually started believing in the prospects of a team whose members had surprised us with their humour, work-rate and calm demeanour there was a wonderful newspaper article that garnered lots of attention about the secrets of their transformation.
The piece introduced us to one of the people responsible for overhauling the mindset of the England squad. Previously players for the national team had always worn the heavy expectations upon them like a stiff and weighty leather overcoat. In the recent past those called up (like Raheem Sterling) have commented that the pressure created by fan aggression has stiffled players’ ability to express themselves creatively.
The nation was collectively astonished to see a very different England mentality this time round. And, as The Guardian article showed, Dr Pippa Grange was one of the people responsible.
It was a great honour to interview Pippa at the Good Day at Work event in Manchester in September 2019. The event was fully sold out, such was the interest in the outstanding line up of speakers.
Pippa spoke of:
The conversation was outstanding. Pippa is outgoing from the FA as I write this – I can’t wait to see what she does next.
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Today’s episode is about Uber. Its based on a brilliant book that stacks of people have found themselves tearing through in one sitting over the last couple of weeks, It’s a book called Superpumped by Mike Isaac. If you’ve heard Mike talking about the book, this chat will be different because we’re just going to focus on the culture of Uber. The question for me was ‘would Uber ever have been as successful if their culture wasn’t so psychopathic and secondly could someone else adapt Uber’s culture a little to be slightly less blatant in their evilness and get away with it.
On today’s episode. A brilliant discussion with Mike Isaac about the culture at Uber. I’m not supporting anything at all they did but there are certainly aspects of that you can’t help but think are brilliant. Travis Kalanick took people whose previous job had been running coffee stores and gave them whole cities to run. Giving people autonomy produced incredible, incredible results. The question then becomes - could you have got rid of the bad consequences by managing it better. And that is the question.
Mike Isaac is a New York Times writer and the author of the brand new best selling Superpumped.
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If you're interested in workplace culture you might like my newsletter makeworkbetter.substack.comMarcus Buckingham is a research who has specialised in debunking some of the lies that pervade our jobs. His discoveries are eye-popping. Company culture can't be measured, 'OKRs' (goals) never work and much more. It's a compelling and entertaining listen.
Get in touch to tell Bruce what you thought - or leave us a review at Apple podcasts.
Eat Sleep Work Repeat is part of #PODSTRIKE.
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On this week's pod, David Gasca and Steven Rogelberg explain how you can fix your meetings to make work less miserable.
Firstly David Gasca outlines the Silent Meeting Manifesto. In the world of work we're surrounded with very little scrutiny of the norms of meetings and emails, in that context David's work helps reinvent one of the immovable pillars of work. Download the Amazon Kindle version here. Try a silent meeting and tell us how you get on.
Then we spend time with the meeting doctor, Steven Rogelberg (author of The Surprising Science of Meetings). He tells us about 'Magic Time' and more.
Our sponsor is Perkbox - the best platform to manage employee benefits.
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In 2007 as Barcelona were looking to replace their manager they were faced with a difficult challenge. They decided if they were to move on with a strong sense of sustainable success they needed to think about the culture they wanted to build.
They drew up a list of criteria for how they wanted to choose the manager. Interestingly most of the list didn't mention football. Damian Hughes, Professor of Organisational Psychology at Alliance Manchester Business School goes on to explain the Barcelona approach to the challenges they faced.
Professor Hughes gives a 5 state model of culture. That was the work of James Baron and Michael Hannan at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Buy The Barcelona Way
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How did Jurgen Klopp build a culture that has caught the attention of everyone in sport. Including interviews with Klopp, Liverpool players and leading management psychologists we discover the 4 secrets of Klopp's culture at Liverpool (data, a simple plan, inclusivity, psychological safety).
You’ll find episodes, transcripts and other good stuff on the website EatSleepWorkRepeat.com.
Best articles to read more:
BEST READ: New York Times on Liverpool and data
WATCH: How Jürgen Klopp made Liverpool BELIEVE again
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In 2015 Anita Williams Woolley and colleagues published some groundbreaking work understanding the 'collective intelligence' of teams.
They asked 'can we judge the cognitive power of a certain group of people?'
The answer was that yes, they could and also there were certain things that helped predict this collective intelligence.
Professor Woolley explains the part that gender plays in this team intelligence and then gives you a test that you can take to help predict collective intelligence in your own teams. Anita's work is fascinating and immensely thought provoking. Is it time to change your team?
You can take the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test here.
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A lot of people have asked me if I’m going to do an episode on the importance of play.
One of the challenges of the word play is that its such a broad word and its associations aren’t always helpful when it comes to bringing everyone with us but today's guest I think shows what an incredible thing it can be.
Heidi Edmundson is an emergency medicine consultant in the Emergency Department at the Whittington Hospital. She wrote this article in the Guardian in January:I introduced fun to the lives of A&E staff. The laughter was infectious
We explore themes of how you turn individuals into a team? This inspirational senior doctor recognised that exercises her team did on their downtime seemed to energise and inspire them - and made them more connected. I think you’ll end up wanting to read more of the theatrical exercises that Heidi used to help forge a tightly bonded team?
Here is a full guide to Forum Theatre and its games.
This goes deep - can playing games with each other be a simple way to remind ourselves of each other’s humanity where that empathy seems to be a super power that helps us do a better job?
I loved this discussion so much - you can keep up with Heidi here on her Twitter.
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James Bloodworth lived undercover working in Amazon warehouses, care homes and clocked up hours as an Uber driver to see the realities of modern work for millions of Brits. It makes for a fascinating glimpse at the lives of people who often get ignored from the privilege of the open plan.
James' compelling book Hired is out now.
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This week I talk to Josh Krichefski (CEO, Mediacom UK) and Liz Fosslien (co-author of No Hard Feelings: Emotions at Work and How They Help Us Succeed).
Josh explains how they put mental health on the agenda on his firm by starting an honest, open discussion on it. Then we talk to Liz who gives us a users' guide to emotions at work. What can we do to make work a most empathetic way.
The Seligman model we discuss is the '3Ps'. Personalisation, Pervasiveness and Permanence.
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What if the way we've created work was built around the things that men prefer. Sue Unerman makes the compelling case that the workplace has evolved to serve male skills - and that this isn't good for the workplace and it isn't good for workers.
Sue Unerman is the Chief Transformation Officer at Mediacom, and also the author of two widely acclaimed books. We discussed her book (written with Kathryn Jacob) The Glass Wall
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Jim Collins is one of the most respected business writers in the world. With his books Good to Great and Made to Last he became the observer of great companies and what made them special.
He's just published a new book which is a supplement to Good to Great (pssssst, read GTG first).
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Dave Trott is a creative director, copywriter, and author. A colossus of advertising who has been awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by D&AD.
I chatted to him at the IAB Leadership Summit in St Albans.
It's not a talk about work culture as such - just a fascinating chat with someone whose job it was to be creative for a living. Dave's latest book Creative Blindness is a riot of colourful stories and lively lessons. Follow Dave on Twitter.
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Today we’re chatting to the MD of the innovations company IDEO, Sue Siddall to hear how they bring the power of telling stories to life in their organisation. In addition we’ve got a legend of workplace study today. William Kahn was responsible for creating two of the big concepts of positive workplaces. He coined the concepts of both psychological safety and employee engagement.
William Kahn is Professor of Organisational Behavior at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. He received his BA in Psychology from Clark University and his doctorate in Psychology from Yale University.
Sue Siddall tells us about 'Story Night' at IDEO. Sue is the UK MD of IDEO - a company who often provide inspiration to other organisations when they are thinking of fixing their culture.
If you like this, sign up for the New Work Now mailer here.
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If you’ve not already subscribed there’s a weekly email that goes out with the podcast. This week's includes a brilliant article on how small teams seem to be more radical, there’s a couple of discussions about Professor Adam Grant’s work and there’s a really good article on laughter in teams.
The laughter in teams article is from some research that NASA is looking at when it comes to casting their first expeditions to Mars. NASA looked at the success of different teams in isolation in Antartica. And it seemed that when there is a joker in the team, someone gifted in the art of lightening the mood it helps the overall morale of the team. I found this one fascinating, in The Joy of Work i talk about the successful Cambridge Boat race team in 2008 whose performance was transformed from a losing practice tie to winning boat race performance when they promoted a funny colleague to the boat. They felt that even though this wasn’t the best performing athlete they all felt themselves to be in a better mental state when he was present.
This is really neglected as a component of a happy team and if you’ve read The Joy of Work you’ll know I’m obsessed with it.
And it leads on to today’s guest. Robert Provine’s 2000 book Laughter is a real page turner of research about one of the most enjoyable but least studied aspects of modern life. He has also gone on to cover laughter - and other human behaviours in his 2013 book Curious Behaviour - Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond.Provine is the world’s expert on the subject. When we talked to Professor Sophie Scott in the live episode on laughter at work this time last year she mentioned professor Provine several times, and he’s also been the consultant for products like Tickle Me Elmo.
There’s some fascinating discussion. Laughter seems to signal a couple of things, safety and play. He makes a really interesting point at the end about the current state of politics being filled with the opposite of laughter - which is fear and anger
There was an interesting exercise a few years ago (and this was called out in Dan Lyons book lab rats) the exercise was conducted by Dan Ariely looked at the data from Great Place to Work. Ariely wanted to see if they had anything that correlated with stock data, to see if it would give you good investment advice to put money in good culture companies. Great Place to Work has been running since 1981 and each year has surveyed thousands of workers. Ariely looked at the data they had gathered.
There was one factor that leapt out. But it was an odd thing. It was safety. Companies where people consistently reported feeling safe at work tended to outperform the stock market average, sometimes by 200%. It applied to physical and emotional safety. The other factor that seemed to correlate was companies that had a strong sense of welcome.
If you listen to Professor Provine laughter would be in service of making all of those things stronger. What follows is the science of laughter, why we laugh and what it does. I hope you enjoy it.
Robert R. Provine, is a neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I called him on the phone to pick his brain
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Thanks to Penguin Random House here's a free extract of a couple of different parts of The Joy of Work.
You can buy the full audiobook here.:
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This episode today is magnificent – you’re really going to be stimulated and challenged by it.
Today’s episode is with someone I contacted 2 years ago to discuss his previous book. Cal Newport’s Deep Work was a simple avocation of the process of using uninterrupted concentration to get things done. He’s now back with a new book about taking the same principles beyond work into life. It's a guide for achieving happiness by being more intentional in how you use technology. Some might call it a manual.
What follows here is a sensational discussion with Cal - Digital Minimalism is out next week. I heard someone say recently that if you hear a new idea and its not shocking, its not really new. On that criteria this is really new. You’re going to find it mind expanding. Maybe you’ll disagree with it but it will leave you thinking for hours afterwards.
Cal believes we should eliminate email. He thinks we should stop being connected to 100s of people on social media. He thinks we should distinguish between social conversation and digital connection. Where we should eliminate all digital interactions.
He’s got a way for you to get there. He speaks of three principles of digital minimalism
Here's a great article on the book.
His suggestions in the book – that we touch on are that we should abandon weak digital ties with people. If you find yourself merely liking someone’s photographs in the course of your relationship then you should detach yourself from them. I remember when I was on Facebook thinking I was going to cull anyone I wouldn’t go over and greet if I saw in the street and he says something probably a couple of steps further.
Not only is this chat great but he tells me about his next book that sounds incredible. I won’t make a big introduction because I asked Cal to do that himself so here he is. He’s Cal.
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This is a podcast about making work better.
You can find all of the previous episodes on the website.
Here we go, two little things today to make you feel more brainy. It’s Blue Monday in the UK today - the day when we’re told it’s the most miserable day of the year - when we hate our job. By listening to these experts you’ll have some guidelines how you can make work better. They give solutions but I think once you listen to the data you’ll work out what to do yourselves.
Firstly something that might not seem directly connected to people in work initially but it’s about loneliness. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Brigham Young University. We start talking about the problem of loneliness in society and we go on to consider how loneliness is growing in work.
Next I wanted to talk to two researchers who have set about investigating if working long hours - or working harder leads to greater workplace success. The authors of the paper are the brilliant Argyro Avgoustaki from ESCP Europe and Hans Frankort from Cass Business School
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If you're looking to get a job sometime in the next decade - and that includes almost all of us - there's a very high probability that you're going to be exposed to a psychometric test. As they become enhanced by AI and made more scaleable via apps these tests are going to go everywhere. So what are the implications for what work is going to look at.
This episode I'm looking into the evolving nature of recruiting and how its changing to accommodate the latest science and also innovations in technology. Firstly I'm going to get my hands dirty testing one of the new evolving candidate testing apps that are starting to emerge. Then I'm chatting to Rich Littledale and he is a chartered psychologist who previously worked at a leadership consulting firm and now helps start ups with their strategic people challenges.
Read more about PeopleUp - Rich's firm
Just a reminder that all of the episodes are live on the website Eat Sleep Work Repeat.
Rich Littledale runs a company called People Up. In the show he mentioned a blog post - you can find it here.
As Rich there says most orchestras have now introduced blind auditions and in fact most them use carpeted stages to avoid the sound of shoes. Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/blind-auditions-orchestras-gender-bias
https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Goldin_Orchestrating%20Impartiality.pdf
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Rob Briner is an professor of organisational behaviour at London Queen Mary’s University - he's rated the top HR thinker in the UK. This is a brilliant chat. Very much essential listening for anyone interested in HR but also worth listening for those of us who sit thinking ‘what do HR actually do?’ or what should we do to improve things round here.
We talk about ‘evidence based management’ - which you can find out more about here: The Centre for Evidence Based Management. I’d researched it but he explained it way better. He ends up giving me his take on work culture and lots lots more.
Rob outlines some of the pitfalls that any of us make when we set about fixing work. He also explains the challenges of psychology - discussing something called 'the replication crisis' about large scale studies.
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Following up the discussion with Andy Rhodes this week it's a second episode about the police. My original plan was to edit both of them to get one episode about the profession but both were too good to chop up. So I want to flag that It's kind of about work culture but also kind of just a brilliant chat with a fascinating person. Consider it as a box set with the other police episode. When it gets into its flow it covers dog shows, walking buses and all manner of brilliance.
Stevyn Colgan joined the police after a bet from his dad - which he explains. I was put on him by our last guest Andy Rhodes who told me about ways they used dog shows to reduce the tension on council estates. Rather than chop it down to just cover the way that Stevyn led innovation in the workplace I've just left it intact. He's too interesting for me to butcher the chat.
Stevyn is the perfect example of a multi level life via his illustrations he became friends with Douglas Adams and ended up being a writer on the TV show QI. He wrote a book about his police problem solving unit work called One Step ahead. He's actually just published a novel called a Murder to Die For.
I'm not gonna lie we spent ages one summer evening sitting in the pub garden of a Amersham pub. My intro is me reminding him about this podcast but the chat it provokes is quite interesting.
If you want to learn more sign up for our newsletter at eatsleepworkrepeat.fm - thanks for listening.
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This is the first of two episodes on the police this week. One on dealing with stress in 'blue light' professions, one on how to be creative in stressful environments.
Andy Rhodes is the Chief Constable of Lancashire - and has responsibility for the wellbeing initiative in the UK police force. He talks through the challenges of policing under pressure. What do you do to stop police profiling people they encounter? The answer starts with how you treat them at work. I think you'll be inspired with the lead that Andy is taking.
To hear more about the evidence based approach to wellbeing in the police go to the Oscar Kilo website.
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We’re talking work culture in different ways for the next few episodes. The next two episodes after this are in the police force. But today’s guest is the best selling author of the year - Adam Kay. This is Going to Hurt : Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor has sold over a million copies. It’s also won the readers’ choice book of the year this year. So there’s a chance you’ve read it and if so you will love the discussion with Adam Kay because he takes us into the working environment in hospitals. If you’ve not read it I could not recommend this beautiful, funny, principled book more.
Adam explains in the book that the title Junior Doctor is a touch misleading - everyone who isn’t a consultant is titled a junior doctor. He is successful comedy writer who wrote the book 7 years after leaving the health service after a terrible terrible day at work. He wrote it because he found underpaid overworked health workers being politicised by the vampires who run government. Specifically the multi-millionaire former health secretary who claimed that in some way that doctors were greedy. The book is the funniest thing you’ll read this year and we covered that but we also talked through the working culture in hospitals.
US listeners will know that the issue of single payer health care is a hot topic in the US - in the UK we have the NHS and it’s worth saying as Adam says it is a source of national pride. We just need to fund it properly.
I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. I joined Adam for a chat at restaurant in West London.
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How can painting the walls of a company change their culture? We explore with Jez Groom today's guest.
An episode this week on behavioural science. It was prompted a little by discussions with Seth Godin and others. It was thinking can you change the culture in organisations by the way you engineer choices available to people - and I’m speaking to a behavioural scientist about these things.
First a bit of background - we discuss a reading list in the show and I’ve included it in the show notes but it’s worth giving you an intro. One of the best books I love on behavioural science is YES by Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin and Robert Cialdini.
In that book they spend chapter after chapter going through how the language that we use to invite people to do things has a big impact on what they subsequently do. TV shopping channels used to say ‘operators are waiting to take your call’ but they realised that that language made customers envisage rows of idle call handlers waiting for any sucker to buy something. So they changed it to ‘if lines are busy please try again later’. Similarly hotels evolved the notes about towels that you see when you stay as a guest. A lot of these things are built on the principles of influence made famous by Robert Cialdini.
The authors split hotel rooms, half with a note saying please recycle your towel by hanging it up, the other used social proof by saying ‘most guests at our hotel help the environment by reusing their towels’. They looked at the results. The people who got the social proof message were 26% more likely to recycle their towel. They found that they could easily improve on this by using principles of reciprocation - saying the hotel would make a donation if they reused the towel, and then further by saying ‘to thank you we’ve already made a donation’. And a weird specificity ‘by saying the majority of the people who used THIS room had reused their towel.
So if decision architecture can play a part in these things, can it make an impact on work. There may be decision architecture around your office. Maybe there are fewer waste paper bins than before - or you’re encouraged to use different recycle bins that are further away by the company alerting you to the benefits of these things.
Today’s guest is Jez Groom who runs the behavioural science company Cowry Consulting.
Jez told me at his old company Ogilvy they’d realised they could make breakthroughs in this area when they had introduced a hand stamp on the hand of workers in a food manufacture plant. No matter how much workers were told they needed to wash their hands to prevent kids getting ill or transferring dirt. But only 60% were doing it. They introduced a stamp a brown coloured e coli virus bug. It took 30 seconds to wash off. The bacterial count tumbled but most of this was kept after the 3 weeks of them doing it. The stamp had changed behaviour.
Find out more about Cowry Consulting
The books we discussed
Yes! 60 Secrets from Science of Persuasion
Pigeons getting variable rewards
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Seth Godin has been one of the world's freshest thinkers since before the internet was on solid food.
After a first career packaging books, he then rose to his own fame creating permission marketing.
His blog is many people's favourite stop on the web bus route picking up a million passengers every day.
We use his latest book This is Marketing as the model to bring to reinventing your workplace culture. What's the way to use his influence strategies to improve your job?
The chat is brilliant and goes everywhere. Clearly Eat Sleep Work Repeat isn’t a marketing podcast but everyone can learn something from Seth.
Contact the show podcast@eatsleepworkrepeat.fm
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Contact the show podcast@eatsleepworkrepeat.fm
This week's episode features the iconic Teresa Amabile - she's a professor at Harvard Business School. Originally educated and employed as a chemist, Teresa received her Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University.
If you're interested in her work this YouTube clip is a great start point.
Before the chat with Professor Amabile we talk through the news in work culture this week. Here's the explosive article on Netflix:
You can pre-order The Joy of Work at Amazon.
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Dan Cable is the author of the life affirming and brilliant Alive at Work - one of the most inspiring visions of what work could look like. The discussion covers big themes of purpose and motivation but brings simple practical tips. What are the simple things that any of us could do to our induction processes at work? How could we encourage our teams to bring their selves to work.
I mention two articles. One by Sarah O'Connor in the FT and this one by Josh Hall about compulsory wellness.
You can get in touch with Bruce here on Twitter. All of the previous episodes are available on the website EatSleepWorkRepeat.fm
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Today’s guest is regarded as one of the most influential management thinkers in the world largely because he considers themes and human behaviours that others avoid discussing. Jeffrey Pfeffer is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He’s author of books like Management BS, Power and most recently Dying for a Paycheck and it’s the last two books that we mainly discuss in today’s chat.
Read Dying for a Paycheck and Power
Jeffrey mentions this New York Times article about the stress of someone in the legal profession.
His book Power has become a global best seller largely because it is a manual for the Machiavellian. It’s a modern day version of Niccolò Machiavelli’s 16th century book The Prince. It’s not that Pfeffer believes this is what we should behave like to be our best selves but rather if we don’t behave like this we’re going to be exploited.
In the course notes for Jeffrey's stanford class on power he says that "insufficient sensitivity to and skill coping with power have cost Stanford graduates promotions opportunities and even their jobs".
Fundamentally the mistake we’re all making according to Pfeffer is believing that the world is fair. I know I’m guilty of this. Whether you watch US politics or British politics but I certainly find myself looking at current events thinking that a reckoning will come when the good guys will win and sort things out. Spoiler alert. The good guys don’t win. And the source for that point is history.
Pfeffer's belief is that in business they don't win so arm yourself. He believes that leaders often ascend to their position not through an innate goodness but because they understand the rules of power.
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Read more on the Good Jobs Strategy
If you like this the easiest way to get it is to subscribe on Apple podcasts - give us a rating while you’re there.
Zeynep Ton is a Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
She studies the retail sector and the way that some firms have invested in paying more and doing more for their workers. She studied firms like QuikTrip, Trader Joes, Mercador in Spain - she found that firms that treat their workers better achieve better results.
Quik Trips profit is double the retail average - all of her firms are more profitable and show consistent growth. And this is work that needs doing in 2012 The Independent reported that only 1 in 7 British supermarket workers earned a living wage.
We’ll talk about how they make their jobs happier but the key parts are they make some key decisions upfront (1) offer less (2) standardise and empower their teams (3) they train their workers to do all of the jobs and (4) they operate with slack - with spare capacity.
When I studied Zeynep's work - and even more so when I chatted to her I thought there's something in this that every single company can use.
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Professor Adam Grant is the most important business writer in the world - a man who says his study is focussing on how to make work suck less.
Adam is author of books like Give and Take, Option B, Originals, he's also the host of a chart topping podcast on work culture called Work Life with TED.
Adam Grant has been Wharton’s top-rated professor for seven straight years - his books have told over a million copies .
Give and Take examines why helping others drives our success. Originals explores how individuals champion new ideas and leaders fight groupthink; Option B, with Sheryl Sandberg, is a #1 bestseller on facing adversity and building resilience.
For more about Bridgwater read here http://uk.businessinsider.com/bridgewater-ranked-employees-by-performance-2018-3
The full episode is live on the website: eatsleepworkrepeat.fm
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Around 12 months ago myself and Sue Todd created the new work manifesto. It was an attempt to start the debate about simple things that we can change. You can find it on the podcast website eatsleepworkrepeat.fm.
It's had a briliant response, research companies have asked to help validate it, different professions like doctors and police have been in touch asking if they can adapt it for their working. Lots of companies have told me they've been trying it out with their teams.
One person contacted me and offered to share the experience and learnings of the New Work Manifesto in their team. And that was Tom Kegode. I went down one lunch time a few weeks ago to meet Tom and his team at Lloyds Bank Group. Tom is an innovations programme manager who has helped share the new work manifesto across LBG.
You're going to hear discussion of various parts of the manifesto and the way that people at Lloyds are trying to make work more positive and enjoyable. Round the table were Lloyds employees Sam, Kate, Miranda, Verica, Ben, Jess, Heather, Shirley, Alastair, Dave and of course Tom himself.
If you're interested in using the New Work Manifesto it all on the website, it's not copyright. Use it, change it, remix it, edit it but whatever you do please hit me on linked in or via twitter to tell me how you got on.
This is the last in the series. I'll be back after the summer with a stellar list of the people who have done the best research on work, laughter, philosophy and workplace creativity.
if you want to hear those episodes you're best subscribing via your podcast app.
I appreciate you listening. Please do get in touch.
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Two practical case studies this week. Businesses who have pulled back the curtain to show how they brought Purpose and Autonomy to life. Brilliant examples of companies trying new things and having success from them.
Rachel Bremer is the Communications Director at ASOS. She talks about how they re-energised 4000 young, ambitious employees to keep the business on an incredible growth path.
Laurie Young is the Development Director of Thoughtbot. He explains that they made one change that allowed them to get 5 days work done in 4 days - and what happened next.
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I've wanted to do an episode on mental health for months. But to be honest I've felt really conscious of messing it up. I ended up chatting to the best journalist who writes about it and she suggested that we talk about it.
Emily Reynolds is one of the sharpest writers in the UK, writing for publications like Vice, Wired, The Guardian, Stylist. Incidentally she also writes about mental health. Her book 'A Beginner's Guide to Losing Your Mind' is a very readable take on the realities of all sorts of mental health conditions.
We talk about how MH impacts those who experience it, how people around them should take account and far more.
Also along the way we discuss Emily's blog post 'An Incomplete List of All of the Men In The Media Who Have Wronged Me' which got consumed in the #MeToo movement.
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Lots of listeners have been hitting up my LinkedIn saying how can we make work better if we don't have a full-time permanent job. Emma Gannon might have the answer to their needs.
Emma is a podcaster, writer, broadcaster, blogger... in fact she's the perfect example of the freelance, multi-hyphenate lives that more of us are living in 2018.
A She describes how we can build careers out of freelance living and side hustles. How sometimes we can inspire ourselves and our own creativity with the things we do when we're not doing our main jobs.
Emma's podcast, Ctrl Alt Del is a phenom and her new book The Multi-Hyphen Method is out now.
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Quite a brainy episode today. Dr Richard Claydon is a someone who likes to question why we claim things - he's a natural challenger. He describes himself as a Transdisciplinary Behavioural Scientist and Ironist.
He writes some interesting (if a bit too long) things on Linked In that a few people sent to me. We had a brilliant chat for well over an hour but i've tried to edit it into something enlightening and digestible.
Richard says something that I've been thinking a lot. We shouldn't be worrying about company culture. Office culture or more probably team culture is the most important thing for us to be focussing on. Richard runs a company called Organisational Misbehaviourist
We talk about how the ideas of strategy and culture have an ongoing battle in business circles. In the 1980s and 90s there was a lot of talk about work culture - he explains that this was because the Japanese businesses that were idolised tended to seem to have a good culture.
Here's why I find academics have such a valuable contribution to this debate. Richard talks about the work of Professor Joanne Martin from Stanford University who spent time looking at whether you could observe a single culture in organisations. And the answer was you never could. Company culture is a nice story we tell ourselves but it's an illusion. When it's most aggressively implemented it leads to people pretending to go along with it with ironic attachment. What a fascinating idea
we talk about Project Aristotle which is a massive piece of work that Google did that looked at the best performing teams. The finding of that work was that the secret of good teams was psychological safety - people feeling comfortable in speaking up with no fear of punishment. Where people could be their complete selves.. This finding drew on the findings of Amy Edmondson - if you're interested in these things here's:
Read more about Google's Project Aristotle here
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James Doty is a neuroscientist who has spent his career trying to demystify the power of the brain. He's a Clinical Professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University and founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education.
If you watch his TED Talk you're going to fall in love with James, a gentle thoughtful guy. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart.
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Sir Cary Cooper is a psychologist - 50th Anniversary Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at the Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. He founded Robertson Cooper - a business which is collection of psychologists and wellbeing experts intent on helping people have a good day at work. Everyone I've met there is just brilliantly inspiring too - which I guess shows good people hire good people
he's a brilliant follow on Twitter too @ProfCaryCooper
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Sam Conniff Allende has spent his career building a youth marketing agency. Now he's concluded that the way to inspire younger workers is to channel the energy of the Golden Age of Piracy. In a fun discussion of pirates old and new Sam explains how the world would be a better place if we all tried to be a bit more pirate.
Sam's book Be More Pirate is published on 3rd May 2018. You can follow him on Twitter @SamConniff and @BeMorePirate
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Dr Amanda Goodall is a Senior Lecturer in Management at Cass Business school. I don't normally do stuff on leaders. There's enough leader lit out there. So I actually came upon Dr Amanda Goodall's work when I was looking at something else. I encountered her work when I was reading about the effect of our bosses on us.
Bad bosses are the worst thing at work. Amanda's research says we'll ask twice as much money to work someone who we can't stand. It's way more important than anything else. When someone resigns they resign from an individual not a firm.
So then she asked in her research what makes a good manager. She found that statistically people who are the best at management are those who were actually best at the original job. She believes hospitals should be run by doctors. Companies that make tech products should be run by people who build tech products. Football teams should hire someone who was the best footballer.
You might think of exceptions and her widely cited work says your examples are outliers.
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Who's Elvis round here? There was a time when answering that question would have earned you a nice cheque from the National Enquirer.
The second part of a spotlight on Thought Leaders - the gurus who are challenging the status quo.
Chris Barez-Brown is a best selling author, speaker and culture change consultant. …….He says: "We train businesses to manage change"
As he describes, Chris provides immerse experiences to improve the culture of leadership teams. These things don't come cheaply - one company told me they'd spent over a million pounts
Chris talks about something called 'talk it out' that is really interesting. I held this episode back because I was going to do a whole episode about the power of walking because a scientist called Marily Oprezzo who has done a paper on this - I may come back to Marily soon!
Always feel free to connect to me on Linked In.
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Two episodes here listening to some of the people who are challenging, provoking and questioning the status quo.
Tom Goodwin Exec VP at the media agency Zenith in New York. He's the head of innovation down there. But on the web is where Tom is a player. He is Linked In's number 1 influencer in the marketing field. That accolade will set you back 560,000 followers.
How did he end up there? Well Tom wrote a tweet (or series of tweets) that developed a life of their own. https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-all-for-the-customer-interface/
Tom has responded to his internet renown with a new book Digital Darwinism - Survival of the Fittest in the Age of Business Disruption
that's out now.
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A brilliant live discussion from Ad Week Europe on the scientific value of laughter - and how to bring it back to work.
Featuring Professor Sophie Scott, broadcaster Geoff Lloyd and sitcom writer Paul Coleman. Hosted by Bruce Daisley and Sue Todd.
All episodes are live at EatSleepWorkRepeat.fm. Please like and subscribe.
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Inside the rituals of two happy businesses. Over the last couple of months a few people have come up to me to tell me stories about things their companies do.
Firstly Andy Puleston - a Radio 1 alumni - came up to me and chatted to me about some of the things they did during the Andy Parfitt reinvention. Pizza meetings, heroic leaving speeches and lots of private offices filled with eclectic music and chat. I've let this run on because I found it fascinating. Ask me one time how I applied to get a job at Radio 1. Had an interview with Andy Parfitt and everything. Ah well.
Secondly we talk to Claudia Newman - Head of New Business at Young and Rubicon. She tells me about Crisp Thursday and their Start the Week meeting. I loved this chat.
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The Culture Code is the best book on work culture likely to be published this year. From Daniel Coyle author of the Talent Code, an international bestseller that cracked the formula of individual success. In the subsequent 5 years he's immersed himself in the best teams in the world - Navy SEALS, sports teams and some of the most creative companies in the world (including Pixar and IDEO).
Now he's ready to share the remarkable output of his work. Coyle's book gives clear guidance of what anyone who runs a team or works in a team should do.
A full transcript is on the website: eatsleepworkrepeat.fm
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When is your most creative time of the working day? When should you schedule your concentrated deep work? What the heck is a 'nappuccino' and what will it do for you? Daniel Pink explains how we can use timing to help improve our working environment.
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As becoming increasingly clear the single biggest issue of work culture in the last 10 years has been the Me Too movement.
Louise Ridley and Kirstie Brewer, freelance journalists and founders of Second Source discuss their involvement in the campaign to remove toxic sexual behaviour.
Second Source is a group of women journalists trying to tackle sexual harassment in the media industry.
Find details here: http://www.thesecondsource.co.uk or follow them on Twitter
Emily Reynolds' blog post can be found here.
The Vice UK anonymous letter is here: https://medium.com/@v1ceworkersuk/vice-uk-collective-workers-statement-7cd5f9538f24
The tweets discussing the response to that letter is here.
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Over the last 35 episodes we've discussed improvements to work, now we bring them all together.
In discussion with Sue Todd, CEO of Magnetic, we discuss the New Work Manifesto. The manifesto is an 8 point plan, designed to help us improve work and get more from our time at our desks.
The manifesto can be found at www.newworkmanifesto.org. Send us your thoughts and suggestions.
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The dramas at Uber, the reckoning of the #MeToo movement, the BBC pay gap, Bruce is joined by Andre Spicer to debate the biggest work culture issues of the year. Along the way we also discuss Andre's global fame as a lemonade stand pirate.
Andre also talks about his two new books this year: Business Bullshit and Desperately Seeking Self Improvement.
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EAT SLEEP SHORT: Are the robots coming for your job? This year Matthew Taylor delivered a report to the Prime Minister looking at the future of work in the UK. Here he explains his outlook on the future of work and how work can set about being a force to increase happiness.
Matthew Taylor is the CEO of the RSA. He was previously a political strategist working with Tony Blair.
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Angela Duckworth's Grit was one of the most impactful business books of 2016.
Here in an Eat Sleep short Angela talks about building resilient culture and the thing to look for when hiring someone with a gritty tenacity.
In her late twenties, Angela left a demanding job as a management consultant to teach maths to seventh graders in the New York City state schools. Angela is a MacArthur “genius” grant winner, researcher and CEO of Character Lab.
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Richard Reed was one the founders of Innocent - the most unlikely David taking on the Goliaths of the soft drinks business. With little more than a perky brand, unbounded optimism and a winning culture they're become the biggest juice brand in the UK.
So how did Richard build this exceptional culture? What was the Innocent version of 'Don't Be Evil'? Richard shares special techniques like 'learn one, do one, teach one' that helped share a climate of humble learning.
Richard talks about his new book 'If I Could Tell You One Thing' advice from the most respected people in the world, plus Michael McIntyre.
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VOLUME FIXED
David McClements is the founder of Whitewater international training & consultancy” (whitewaterint.com) . He works training and developing top performers. I saw David speak recently and was struck with his willingness to challenge some of the best established ideas.
His discussion about Chris Hoy and energy management is fascinating.
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Bjarke Ingels is the number 1 architect in the world. His buildings are taking the world by storm with their fearless disregard for the conventions and norms of our dull cities. Bjarke's buildings are both fun and immensely practical.
By when the greatest in his field is thinking about the future of work how does he design it? Bjarke explains how he is building innovative workspaces - both for others and for his own company.
Bjarke talks both about the cutting edge buildings that he is creating and references some of the accidentally brilliant buildings of the past like Building 20 at MIT which produced 9 Noble prize winners.
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Ben Waber is the CEO of Humanyze, a firm that spun pioneering work from MIT into the world's leading people analytics business. Their technology can track how your office is working.
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Jason Fried - at Basecamp - and Deborah Rippol - at Buffer - are writing the future. Exemplars of a new world of working where our offices are less important than our intellects. Both champion working remotely and letting our workplaces being secondary to our home lives.
Jason is the author of books like Rework and Remote. Deborah is the People Success Manager at Buffer.
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Dan Cable is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. His forthcoming book Alive at Work is visionary for helping us understand how to improve the sense of engagement in the workplace.
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Emma Seppala is a happiness expert. She's spent her life studying how we can be happier in life and has all the evidence to prove it. Emma gives a life affirming reminder that happiness at work isn't a luxury, it's a prerequisite for success and creativity. Emma's book The Happiness Track is superb.
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Biz Stone is a founder of Twitter - famously returning to the company in 2017. We talk about design, about his first start-up where the culture got corrupted and then intentionally inventing a culture to be more effective.
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Cal Newport is convinced that in 10 years we'll laugh at the way we're working today. We need a production line-like innovation to fix work... Enter Deep Work.
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Dan Pink is the most important researcher for understanding workplace motivation.
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Full notes and transcript at www.EatSleepWorkRepeat.fm Tweet us @eatsleepwkrpt
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In 2010 John Kay wrote an article for the FT called Obliquity. It proved so popular that it became a best selling book.Obliquity is the concept that to achieve what we want to do we should aim for other things - we achieve our goals obliquely.Tweet us your feedback @eatsleepwkrpt
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Joi Ito runs the Media Lab at MIT. In his new book Whiplash he gives an account of how the only way we can improve work is if we build cultures that are set to innovate and experiment.
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Hear from 5 people who have tried to change their work routines - with mixed results.Guests include Jenny Biggam and Zoe Basri from media agency The 7 Stars, David Wilding from Twitter, Laura Archer who turned her lunch break into 6 weeks extra holiday and Andy Oakes who has learned to work in bursts.Laura's book Gone For Lunch is a truly fun way to inspire yourself to do more with your time: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gone-Lunch-Archer-Laura/dp/1849499918
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Get inspiration from three people who started again. Martin Morales left his life in the music industry to open the restaurant he always dreamed. Paul Coleman created a life that combines innovation consultancy with writing Car Share for Peter Kay. Lisa Unwin set up She's Back to empower women's return to work after having children.
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Tony Schwartz is an incredibly successful writer, journalist and speaker. 15 years ago he set about changing the way we work. Seeing the growing exhaustion of people around him he's helped us understand why we're overwhelmed and what we need to do to push back.Listen to Tony and you'll have the perfect reason to decline that extra meeting to go for a walk. Let's all commit to #TakeBackOurLunch please. I'll meet you in the park.
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If most people knew the enjoyable secret of workplace creativity they'd probably feel liberated from the judgement of their peers. In this episode we hear inspiration from the ideas of Lucy Kellaway (FT journalist) and scientific evidence from Professor Sandy Pentland.Professor Pentland explains the single activity that characterises creative workplace - and it's probably something that you love doing.
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Rest is the fascinating new book by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. It outlines how a combination of sleep, rest, vacation and exercise can help us achieve more.Late nights spent glugging coffee achieve exactly the opposite of what we think - as Alex explains.
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Dan Pink has called ROWE the future of work. ROWE is the Results Only Work Environment. It's the idea that we don't worry about what people do at work as long as the job gets done. That means they don't have to come in at 9. Or 10. Or 11. Or go home at 4. If they do the job, that's what we asked them to do...Jody Thompson is the co-creator of the ROWE system. With Calli Ressler she wrote 'Work Sucks'
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Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of advertising group Ogilvy. Through his 30 years in the media industry he has become renowned for championing the use of behavioural economics. Rory is an author and regularly writes for The Spectactor.
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Mark De Rond is an ethnographer who embeds himself with teams under pressure. What's the culture like in a field hospital in Camp Bastion, in the boat race crew?Mark's latest book 'Doctors at War' - a first hand account of the culture in Camp Bastion's hospital - is out this week.
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Sacha Judd tells us how an online conspiracy about two members of One Direction led her to understand how we're failing to attract women into tech roles.Sacha is Managing Director at Hoku Group. She can be found at @szechuan
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Brad Stone has written behind the scenes studies of some of the most well known tech firms in the world. By spending time with the leaders of Uber, Amazon and Airbnb Brad has gained a deep understanding of what culture these firms create - whether via accident or design.Brad's latest book is The Upstarts - about Uber and Airbnb.
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Andre Spicer is a professor in organisational behaviour at Cass Business School. He's written about the disfunction of world places and the advent of 'organisational stupidity'.He's provocative and insightful. Tweet your views to @eatsleepwkrpt
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Kim Scott is the co-Founder of Candor, Inc and the author of Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity which is out in March 2017.Kim's view is that we spend too long at work not speaking frankly to each other. She's convinced that straight talking could solve a lot of problems.Follow Kim @kimballscott
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Paul Dolan is the author of Happiness By Design - a guide to making the decisions that lead you to being happier.
Joining me to discuss is John Owen - CEO of the Decision Practice.
Summary
In this episode, Bruce Daisley and John Owen discuss the importance of culture in building a successful business, the impact of attention allocation on happiness, the significance of energy management, and the role of values in shaping workplace culture.
Keywords
work culture, behavioral economics, happiness, attention allocation, energy management, workplace values
Takeaways
Chapters
03:12 The Impact of Attention Allocation on Happiness
08:07 The Significance of Energy Management in the Workplace
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Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In is the best selling book about work culture for the last 5 years. We talk to three women to get their view on the book - and of feminism in the world place.Dawn Foster is a Guardian journalist and the writer of Lean Out.Melissa Barnes leads Twitter's relations with the biggest brands in the world.Sue Todd is the CEO of Magnetic.
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The "Netflix culture document" is one of the best known works on company culture. For a company that is beloved of millions for it's shows and service, their published document is a spiky explanation of the realities of working there.Patty McCord is one of the brains behind it. She explains why the brutal honesty of the document is such a contrast to what we normally hear from firms.
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Featuring Dan Lyons (realDanLyons) - author of Disrupted - and Dara Nasr (@daranasr, UK MD of Twitter) Dan Lyons - Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-up Bubble is available now. We're all busy, so I enjoyed the audiobook version.You can revisit the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs here: http://www.fakesteve.net/
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