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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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 interaction via machines through well-defined APIs rather than via humans through emails and meetings. This would free each team to act autonomously and move faster’. We’ve heard free thinkers like Cal Newport talking about removing communication as an unproductive tax on working, but this is the first time I’ve recognised that it is the engine to drive i...

This week I chat to Elizabeth Uviebinené, Financial Times columnist and the iconic author of Slay in Your Lane about her new book The 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). Sign up for Make Work Better newsletter  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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. Rutger mentions he's written recently about the end of neoliberalism - you can read that here.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sign up for the newsletter 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: - What Gen Z workers want from their bosses - I've learned to never treat my work like a family - Lockdown mental fatigue is revived by social contact 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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sign up for the newsletter 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.    See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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. Sign up for the newsletter.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Buy A World Without Email 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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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?   Photo by Xavier von Erlach on Unsplash  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sign for the newsletter 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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sign up for the Make Work Better newsletter. 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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sign up for the newsletter 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) Seth's blog 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 Caste by Isabel Wilkerson Akimbo courses  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.