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Beacon NY — 2019–07–25 | The social affordances on Medium are the principal reason I’ve returned. Here’s an example, the notifications as I logged in today to post this Daily:

A lot of welcome feedback with human names linked to it. Thanks, readers!

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I must be doing something right, because I got three offers this week to write for free, in order to ‘get my name out there’. This is after I complained about the practice.

What a world.

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Stories

Strippers Are Doing It for Themselves | In a long examination of the working conditions of strippers — which are generally dangerous, exploitative, and underregulated — Valeriya Safronova finds parallels with ride-hailing:

Ride-sharing drivers and others challenging the labor customs of the gig economy have much to learn from strippers’ experiences. Beginning in the mid-80s, such dancers were reclassified from employees to independent contractors in large numbers by clubs that followed the lead of the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theater in San Francisco, according to Gregor Gall, a professor of industrial relations at the University of Leeds, who wrote “Sex Worker Union Organising: An International Study.”

In 1998, a group of San Francisco dancers won $2.85 million in a settlement with the O’Farrell after suing for back wages. That was just the beginning.

“I think the strippers are the canary in the coal mine,” said Michael LeRoy, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who studies labor and employment relations, regarding the loss of various protections.

Most clubs classify dancers as independent contractors, and this allows them to not pay employment taxes, including Social Security and Medicare, and to not offer workers’ compensation for injuries on the job or health benefits. Through this classification, the clubs also do not have to pay minimum wage and overtime.

Clubs typically do not pay strippers a salary. And yet the clubs also tend to control dancers’ hours, outfits, performances and the amount they can charge for private dances. “As an independent contractor, in my nine years, every single day there’s something they do that’s against the contract,” Ms. Frances said.

For years, strippers have been filing lawsuits challenging their employment status, and in most cases the courts have sided with them. Mr. LeRoy has found that in 93 percent of rulings, the court agreed that the strippers had been misclassified. In some cases, the dancers won millions of dollars recovering wages and “stage rental fees.”

“I signed on to one lawsuit,” Ms. Frances said. “They paid out, and nothing changed.”

A recent ruling from the California Supreme Court, in a case brought against Dynamex, a delivery service, would toughen the rules by which to assess whether someone is an independent contractor and automatically classify strippers as employees. The ruling could be codified as Assembly Bill 5, which passed in California’s assembly and is awaiting review in the State Senate.

Antonia Crane, a dancer, author and writing instructor at U.C.L.A. Extension, is hoping to capitalize on the Dynamex decision. Ms.Crane, who did not want to share her age, is a founder of Soldiers of Pole, a labor movement of strippers striving to become a union. “Right now, the Supreme Court is saying, ‘You don’t even have to convince us,’” Ms. Crane said. “‘You’re employees, you have rights and the ability to organize.’”

The law should be clear: the main line of business of strip clubs is stripping, and therefore classifying strippers as independent contractors should be illegal. AB 5 could change things in California, but rulings in other states have fallen the other way, with ride-hailing drivers being classified as independent contractors, and by extension, strippers might be too.

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DoorDash Changes Tipping Model After Uproar From Customers | The delivery service has revamped the tipping policy ‘which had effectively meant customers’ tips were going to DoorDash rather than the person who delivered their meal’. As I discussed in The Starting Point and The Bottom Line for The Gig Economy, no competitive advantage for the gig companies should come at the expense of the workers.

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Staples has launched Worklife magazine, announced in a press release as

a quarterly magazine designed to spark conversation and serve as a resource among working professionals. Staples Worklife was created as an extension of the Staples® brand transformation introduced earlier this year and will be delivered digitally and in print. The magazine is designed for professionals who see their work as more than just a job but rather as a fulfilling career fueled by purpose and people.

[…]

The inaugural issue includes an interview with bestselling author Daniel Pink who shares his tips on motivation mistakes and how to correct them. Additional articles in the premiere issue include: “Under Pressure,” tactics for calming your company culture; “Making Peace,” a guide to managing workplace conflict; and a recurring feature called “The Decider,” a flowchart that in this issue will help you answer the question — do I really need to go to that meeting?

As noted, Staples involved in a brand transformation initiative, and this seems like a start.

Staples had an interesting coworking partnership going with Workbar in the Boston area which ended early this year, and has led to the creation of Staples’ own Staples Studios in the former three Workbars located within Staples stores.

I still think coworking is a possible angle for Staples, since the company owns or rents a great deal of retail space, and in at least some of those 1220 US stores coworking could fit in pretty well, especially with the new worklife positioning. Might be better positioned as a coworking start-up with the rights to build out in Staples stores and elsewhere. And of course, they could showcase those Worklife brands, like Union&Scale furniture and decor.

I’ll keep an eye on this.

Quote of the Day

The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. It is the great task of human knowledge to bridge this gap and to find those patterns in the past which can be projected into the future as realistic images.

| Kenneth Boulding

Elsewhere

OpenTable now offers delivery with help from Uber Eats and Grubhub | OpenTable is adapting to the era of food delivery:

As of today, you can use OpenTable’s updated iOS app to book dinner reservations or have your food delivered. OpenTable announced that it’s partnering with Uber Eats, Caviar and Grubhub to offer meal delivery from over 8,000 restaurants in 90 cities across the US.

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5 facts about the state of the news media in 2018 | Michael Barthel offers some stark numbers from the Pew Research Center:

1?? U.S. newspaper circulation reached its lowest level since 1940

[See related story: Over 2000 American Newspapers Have Closed in Past 15 Years ]

2?? Cable news was a bright spot in another down year for the U.S. news media industry’s economic fortunes.

3?? Digital ad revenue has grown exponentially, but a majority goes to Facebook and Google rather than to publishers

4?? The audience for local TV news has steadily declined.

5?? Traffic to news websites seems to have leveled off.

If you just connect the dots we’ll be down to newspapers in only the largest 10–20 US cities and three or so national newspapers (NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal). No one has figured out how to do local in the new century, for papers, TV, or any medium, really. And still, we are drowning in news.

Beacon NY — 2019–07–14 | Read this week’s full Weekly, on Medium. Here’s the tweetstorm version.

Stories

A Movement Toward What? | I responded yesterday to the Corporate Rebels call to create a movement out of their community of followers, one dedicated to making work more fun. Maybe that is too narrow a goal.

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The Four Biggest Challenges Digital Platforms Need to Address | New regulatory constraints, growth pressures, the shift from B2C to enterprise markets, and technology disruption.

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How CEOs can disrupt the business disruptors | Benjamin Finzi, Vincent Firth, Mark Lipton, and Kathy Lu adopt the concepts of Jui Jitsu — countering the aggressive offense of an opponent with defensive misdirection of their force — to business disruption.

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To-do lists can become a stressful burden | Olivia Goldhill seems to have an unhealthy, perhaps even obsessive, relationship with her to-do lists.

??

Quote of the Week | There ought to be a future we can choose. It’s up to us to find it. | Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira

??

Elsewhere

Futurism Needs More Women | Rose Eveleth digs into ‘futurism’ and finds many men, but few women. But she does find the wonderful Madeline Ashby

Beacon NY - 22019-06-18 — I fell back into my work groove yesterday after two weeks in Europe, or maybe a better metaphor is jumping onto the back of a fast-running animal and holding on for dear life.

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I owe the title of this issue to Greg McKeown, whose 90 Percent Rule is described by Susan Shain, in the Elsewhere section.

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Consider becoming a paid sponsor to support our work, and to receive in-depth investigative reporting and discounts to other events, reports, and activities.

And paid sponsors gain access to our new members community. Visit members.workfutures.org to request a trial membership.

:::

Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories

Belabored Podcast #177: More Hours for What We Will, with Will Stronge | Sarah Jaffe and Michelle Chen podcast:

What if the best thing we could do for ourselves, the planet, and even the places where we work was—to do less work?

I like Will Stronge and the work at Autonomy. The argument that working less is good for the climate has real potential.

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Say Hello, Wave Goodbye: How Off-Boarding Builds Organisational Resilience | Cathryn Barnard says the unthinkable:

If continuous turnover is the new normal, what can be done to avoid losing key talent?

One super-effective approach is to leave the door open for exiting workers to return.

We’ve entered a new age of the boomerang employee.

The boomerang employee is a beautiful metaphor.

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Email Autocomplete Is Sucking the Life Out of Communication | Emily Reynolds wonders if allowing algorithms to generate our email responses is draining the humanity out of our work lives.

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Why Giving Up Is Sometimes the Best Way to Solve a Problem | Tim Herrera digs into the question of when to give up on solving some problem:

Rather than fighting tooth and nail to find the “correct” solution to the problem in front of you, sometimes it’s worth the risk of looking foolish to ask: Why are we even trying to solve this problem, anyway?

Quote of the Day

Never accept work where you’re not learning.

| Charles Eames

Elsewhere

How to, Maybe, Be Less Indecisive (or Not) | Susan Shain explores indecision, and offers a few approaches to coping with decision-making overload, like Greg McKeown's 90 Percent Rule:

This involves evaluating an opportunity on a scale from 0 to 100. If your interest falls anywhere below 90 percent, reduce its score to zero and reject it.

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The New Dropbox: A Pivot, More than an Upgrade | I take a look at the new Dropbox:

Dropbox has released an early version of a ‘New Dropbox’, one that will reposition Dropbox from a file sync-and-share appliance?—?a product space that is rapidly being commoditized?—?and instead shifting toward a new center of gravity, as a content-centric work management utility.

Beacon NY - 2019-06-29 — This issue draws its title from a line in the second story, where I characterize myself like this:

I have transitioned to thinking of myself as a teacher slowly walking down a hill, chatting with others, and not the young adventurer charging up the other side of the hill, pushing others aside, looking for worlds to conquer.

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In Just Another Recalibration I explain resetting my writing and work agenda — starting now — because of various projects outside Work Futures Daily, and changes that I am making to WFD as a result.

The tl;dr version is this:

1. I've fallen back under the spell of Medium, principally because of its social affordances, so I will be doing most of my long form writing there. Check out medium.com/@stoweboyd, while you're thinking about it.

2. That also means I will be turning some of the longer 'stories' I have been writing in the WFD newsletter into posts on Medium, and linking to them in the newsletter. Other stories will remain as before. This means that my followers (and others) on Medium will get to see them along with subscribers here.

3. Because of increasing demands on my time, I am dropping the Work Futures Minipost — the summarized version of the Work Futures Daily — that has been going out to the subscribers on the free plan. The fregans will have to subsist on the once-a-week Work Futures Weekly, like this issue. Maybe that will convince more of them to sign up to be sponsors, but at any rate, I just don't have the time to craft the Minipost anymore.

4. I hope that this will free some time for the fledgling community at https://members.workfutures.org/, which is intended for paid sponsors, and a forum to talk about topics of interest to them. I plan to dedicate more time there. In particular, I am hoping to hold a monthly webinar that will to free for sponsors, but for a fee for others. Starting perhaps in late July.

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If you're getting this you probably signed up at workfutures.org (or one of its predecessors) or stoweboyd.com. If someone forwarded this to you, sign up here. Feel free to pass this along to others.

Consider becoming a paid sponsor to support our work, and to receive in-depth investigative reporting and discounts to other events, reports, and activities.

And paid sponsors gain access to our new members community, and access to other Work Futures events.

:::

Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories of the Week

Women Are Better Leaders When We Let Them Lead | I take a look at research from Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, who probe the biggest conundrum in business, in HBR's Women Score Higher Than Men in Most Leadership Skills: women score higher than men in leadership skills, but hold small fractions of leadership jobs.

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Your Work Peak Is Earlier Than You Think | Arthur Brooks ponders an existential question after overhearing (on a plane trip) a well-known and accomplished man bemoan his sense of having become irrelevant. Brooks asks,

Can I really keep this going? I work like a maniac. But even if I stayed at it 12 hours a day, seven days a week, at some point my career would slow and stop. And when it did, what then? Would I one day be looking back wistfully and wishing I were dead? Was there anything I could do, starting now, to give myself a shot at avoiding misery—and maybe even achieve happiness—when the music inevitably stops?

[…]

Call it the Principle of Psychoprofessional Gravitation: the idea that the agony of professional oblivion is directly related to the height of professional prestige previously achieved, and to one’s emotional attachment to that prestige. Problems related to achieving professional success might appear to be a pretty good species of problem to have; even raising this issue risks seeming precious. But if you reach professional heights and are deeply invested in being high up, you can suffer mightily when you inevitably fall. That’s the man on the plane. Maybe that will be you, too. And, without significant intervention, I suspect it will be me.

The Principle of Psychoprofessional Gravitation can help explain the many cases of people who have done work of world-historical significance yet wind up feeling like failures. Take Charles Darwin, who was just 22 when he set out on his five-year voyage aboard the Beagle in 1831. Returning at 27, he was celebrated throughout Europe for his discoveries in botany and zoology, and for his early theories of evolution. Over the next 30 years, Darwin took enormous pride in sitting atop the celebrity-scientist pecking order, developing his theories and publishing them as books and essays—the most famous being On the Origin of Species, in 1859.

But as Darwin progressed into his 50s, he stagnated; he hit a wall in his research. At the same time an Austrian monk by the name of Gregor Mendel discovered what Darwin needed to continue his work: the theory of genetic inheritance. Unfortunately, Mendel’s work was published in an obscure academic journal and Darwin never saw it—and in any case, Darwin did not have the mathematical ability to understand it. From then on he made little progress. Depressed in his later years, he wrote to a close friend, “I have not the heart or strength at my age to begin any investigation lasting years, which is the only thing which I enjoy.”

Presumably, Darwin would be pleasantly surprised to learn how his fame grew after his death, in 1882. From what he could see when he was old, however, the world had passed him by, and he had become irrelevant. That could have been Darwin on the plane behind me that night.

A must read. A final point:

Whole sections of bookstores are dedicated to becoming successful. There is no section marked “managing your professional decline."

Once you read the article, you will understand when I say that I have transitioned to thinking of myself as a teacher slowly walking down a hill, chatting with others, and not the young adventurer charging up the other side of the hill, pushing others aside, looking for worlds to conquer.

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While people puzzle over WeWork, niche co-working spaces continue gaining traction| Connie Loizos on the growth of niche co-working:

This week, a young, New York-based startup called Alma raised $8 million in funding to expand its “co-practicing community of therapists, coaches, and wellness professionals,” which it first launched from a space on Madison Avenue last fall.

As CNN was first to report, the company is charging psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical social workers and acupuncturists $165 per month to become Alma members, which comes with services like billing and scheduling and even a matchmaking service that purports to connect professionals with patients. They also pay an hourly rate to book identically outfitted rooms that can be used interchangeably.

CNN called the company a WeWork for therapists, but Alma and its venture backers are hardly alone in seeing promise in more specialized co-working spaces, which have proliferated as their best-known peer in the co-working craze, WeWork, has itself set up all over the globe. According to one estimate, the number of global coworking spaces, thought to be around 14,000 in 2017, is expected to reach 30,000 by 2022.

[…]

More interesting [than using restaurants in the afternoon for coworking] is a newer trend of spaces built out for specific groups of people. Therapists is just the newest that we’ve heard, but there are plenty of others. L.A. alone is home to Glitch City, a 24-hour co-working space that caters to indie game developers; The Hatchery Press, for writers; and Paragon Spaces, for those working in the cannabis industry. Elsewhere, it’s possible to find with co-working spaces for people in the construction industry, and spaces for tech companies with on-demand workforces, and spaces for people committed to a zero-waste lifestyle.

I'd like public libraries to start offering co-working plans, but I want my own carrel, like I had in college as part of the honors program.

Quote of the Week

Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.

| Edward St. Aubyn

Elsewheres of the Week

In Too Much Money To Invest, I take a look at a strange tale: There are many trillions of cash sitting on the sidelines, because the rich and corporations aren’t sure what to do with it.

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New Ecological Economics: Superorganism and Ultrasociality | Della Duncan interviews economist Lisi Krall about ecological economics and the ultrasociality of humans and social insects. Trust me, you'll want to read this.

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Notes on Excessive Wealth Disorder | Paul Krugman points out that the fascination in media and policy circles with austerity in the face of the Great Recession was an indication that they have been taken in by the world view of billionaires:

While we don’t want to romanticize the wisdom of the common man, there’s absolutely no reason to believe that the policy preferences of the wealthy are based on any superior understanding of how the world works.

Beacon NY - 2019-06-24 — Is it Monday already?

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I owe today's title to Edward St. Aubyn's quote of the day.

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If you're getting this you probably signed up at workfutures.org (or one of its predecessors) or stoweboyd.com. If someone forwarded this to you, sign up here. Feel free to pass this along to others.

Consider becoming a paid sponsor to support our work, and to receive in-depth investigative reporting and discounts to other events, reports, and activities.

And paid sponsors gain access to our new members community. Visit members.workfutures.org to request a trial membership.

Actually, can you do me a favor? Could you send this issue of Work Futures Daily to ten of your friends? I'd like to drive more subscriptions, and you could help me accomplish that.

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Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

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New posts at On The Horizon: Rent the Runway’s Platform Strategy Becomes Clear and The Present and Future of On-Demand Work Platforms. Check it.

Stories

What Happens After Amazon’s Domination Is Complete? Its Bookstore Offers Clues | David Streitfeld details the downside of market dominance in the case of Amazon's bookselling business, which now commands more than 50% or book sales in the US. The company has grown an enormous ecosystem of sellers and resellers of books, but relies on the millions of ecosystem partners to self-police:

But Amazon takes a hands-off approach to what goes on in its bookstore, never checking the authenticity, much less the quality, of what it sells. It does not oversee the sellers who have flocked to its site in any organized way.

This laissez faire attitude has opened the door to counterfeiting, which seems to be growing. The answer to the problem of counterfeiting appears to be surrendering to Amazon, and making the e-commerce behemoth the wholesaler of your books.

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While people puzzle over WeWork, niche co-working spaces continue gaining traction | Connie Loizos on the growth of niche co-working:

This week, a young, New York-based startup called Alma raised $8 million in funding to expand its “co-practicing community of therapists, coaches, and wellness professionals,” which it first launched from a space on Madison Avenue last fall.

As CNN was first to report, the company is charging psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical social workers and acupuncturists $165 per month to become Alma members, which comes with services like billing and scheduling and even a matchmaking service that purports to connect professionals with patients. They also pay an hourly rate to book identically outfitted rooms that can be used interchangeably.

I'd like public libraries to start offering co-working plans, but I want my own carrel, like I had in college as part of the honors program.

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[This is a story taken verbatim from the Work Futures Daily today, the newsletter for paid sponsors. Just so you know what is available for $5 per month. Normally, I would have condensed this to less that 100 words in the Minipost.]

A.I. May Not Take Your Job, but It Could Become Your Boss | Kevin Roose looks at AI workbots that monitor the fine-grained details of workers activities — Is the customer support rep talking too fast? Is the Amazon warehouse picker moving too slow? — and wonders where it is heading:

For decades, people have fearfully imagined armies of hyper-efficient robots invading offices and factories, gobbling up jobs once done by humans. But in all of the worry about the potential of artificial intelligence to replace rank-and-file workers, we may have overlooked the possibility it will replace the bosses, too.

No, I haven't.

Management by algorithm is not a new concept. In the early 20th century, Frederick Winslow Taylor revolutionized the manufacturing world with his “scientific management” theory, which tried to wring inefficiency out of factories by timing and measuring each aspect of a job. More recently, Uber, Lyft and other on-demand platforms have made billions of dollars by outsourcing conventional tasks of human resources — scheduling, payroll, performance reviews — to computers.

But using A.I. to manage workers in conventional, 9-to-5 jobs has been more controversial. Critics have accused companies of using algorithms for managerial tasks, saying that automated systems can dehumanize and unfairly punish employees. And while it’s clear why executives would want A.I. that can track everything their workers do, it’s less clear why workers would.

“It is surreal to think that any company could fire their own workers without any human involvement,” Marc Perrone, the president of United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents food and retail workers, said in a statement about Amazon in April.

I disagree. If we are using algorithms to sidestep human cognitive biases in hiring -- Roose discusses Pymetrics, that has developed AI to do exactly that — then it make equal sense to rely on algorithms to sidestep similar biases in firing. Roose seems to agree, to some extent:

Using A.I. to correct for human biases is a good thing. But as more A.I. enters the workplace, executives will have to resist the temptation to use it to tighten their grip on their workers and subject them to constant surveillance and analysis. If that happens, it won’t be the robots staging an uprising.

I believe an uprising is inevitable, one that I have been calling the Human Spring, and which I predict for 2023. The Human Spring will be caused by growing discontent in the Western industrialized nations, and the proximate causes are the rise of artificial intelligence and its impact on work, economic inequality, and panic about ecological catastrophe from climate change and the results of climate change, like the worldwide immigration crisis.

The uprising won't be driven by minimal workbots monitoring the speaking rate of call center workers. Instead, it’s sparked by the fear and ongoing reality of full-blown AI taking over the jobs of call center workers, robots fully displacing the Amazon warehouse workers and Walmart shelf-stockers, and autonomous trucks sidelining a workforce of tens of millions of truckers and taxi drivers.

[ I wrote What Will a Corporation Look Like in 2050? for Wired in 2015 that details the three scenarios for the futures based on the Human Spring in 2023. A post I wrote recently — An End To Predictions, A Call For Revolution — touches on some of these ideas, and has been published by The Startup on Medium.]

Quote of the Day

Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.

| Edward St. Aubyn

Elsewhere

They welcomed a robot into their family, now they’re mourning its death | Ashley Carmen writes about the emotional ties people have with their Jibo robot toys:

A future in which they grow so attached to their robot that they celebrate its life, its birthdays, and eventually, mourn its death.

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Slack Stock Soars, Putting Company’s Public Value at $19.5 Billion | Erin Griffith reports on the surge in interest in Slack following going public, moving from the initial $26 reference price to $38.62. That means the company is valued at $19.5 billion, triple its private valuation of $7.1 billion. Even at that price, it might be time to buy.

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New posts at On The Horizon: Rent the Runway’s Platform Strategy Becomes Clear and The Present and Future of On-Demand Work Platforms. Check it.

Beacon NY?—?2019–07–23?—?I am moving into a new normal with regard to Work Futures Daily. Responding to some sensible comments from readers, who have pointed out the benefits of full contents in email?—?offline reading, not having to click to a link and transiting to Medium, and several who pointed out that ‘Medium sucks’?—?I am simply surrendering. Uncle.

I will be posting the full Daily on Substack to the full readership. It will also be available on Medium, behind the paywall.

This ends the distinction between paid and free subscriptions, so paid subscriptions are from this point forward simply a way to support the work of Work Futures (and get access to other sponsor benefits, as to be determined).

To those happy few who are sponsoring: thank you. 

For the rest: happy reading, and please consider actively supporting our work. At the very least, share what you like with others. Or buy me a latte.

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One of the strange negatives of writing a newsletterish thing like Work Futures Daily is that I get contacted by editors who’d like me to write for them; however, an increasing proportion state, baldly, ‘we can’t afford to pay contributors to write for us’. And then they try to justify this by telling me?—?and presumably others?—?that I should be happy to write ‘for the exposure’ since they have umpty-ump readers.

So, dear editors out there?—?and you know who you are?—?I appreciate your respect for my work, but your ethics are out of whack.

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Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories

Health Facts Aren’t Enough. Should Persuasion Become a Priority? | Aaron Carroll explores a fascinating topic. Those who have the least understanding of a complex issue often believe they are the most knowledgeable:

In a paper published early this year in Nature Human Behavior, scientists asked 500 Americans what they thought about foods that contained genetically modified organisms.

The vast majority, more than 90 percent, opposed their use. This belief is in conflict with the consensus of scientists. Almost 90 percent of them believe G.M.O.s are safe?—?and can be of great benefit.

The second finding of the study was more eye-opening. Those who were most opposed to genetically modified foods believed they were the most knowledgeable about this issue, yet scored the lowest on actual tests of scientific knowledge.

In other words, those with the least understanding of science had the most science-opposed views, but thought they knew the most. Lest anyone think this is only an American phenomenon, the study was also conducted in France and Germany, with similar results.

He continues:

Part of this cognitive bias is related to the Dunning-Kruger effect, named for the two psychologists who wrote a seminal paper in 1999 entitled “Unskilled and Unaware of It.”

David Dunning and Justin Kruger discussed the many reasons people who are the most incompetent (their word) seem to believe they know much more than they do. A lack of knowledge leaves some without the contextual information necessary to recognize mistakes, they wrote, and their “incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.”

Here’s how this plays out in business: people with minimal exposure to cognitive science, behavioral economics, social psychology, and organizational dynamics are often those most likely to reject ideas related to organizational evolution and at the same time are convinced of their superior knowledge about the factors involved.

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Jobs: Is 4-day work week the next big thing? | Paul Davidson reports on new statistics about the spread of the 4-day work week:

Fifteen percent of organizations offer four-day work weeks of 32 hours or less to at least some employees, up from 13% in 2017, according to an April survey by the Society for Human Resource Management. And a poll last year by staffing firm Robert Half found that 17% of companies had compressed work weeks that squish the same number of hours into fewer days.

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Has Sexual Harassment at Work Decreased Since #MeToo? | Stefanie K. Johnson, Ksenia Keplinger, Jessica F. Kirk, and Liza Barnes surveyed 250 working women in the U.S. in 2016, and again with 268 women in September 2018 about sexual harassment at work:

What did we find? In terms of what has changed, we saw that fewer women in our sample reported sexual coercion and unwanted sexual attention following the #MeToo movement. In 2016, 25% of women reported being sexually coerced, and in 2018 that number had declined to 16%. Unwanted sexual attention declined from 66% of women to 25%. In contrast, we noticed an increase in reports of gender harassment, from 76% of women in 2016 to 92% in 2018. This data suggests that while blatant sexual harassment?—?experiences that drive many women out of their careers?—?might be declining, workplaces may be seeing a “backlash effect,” or an increase in hostility toward women.

When we examined women’s feelings of self-esteem and self-doubt, we found an increase in self-esteem and a decrease in self-doubt since 2016. More important, the relationship between unwanted sexual attention and both of these outcomes (lower self-esteem, higher self-doubt) was weaker in 2018. Likewise, the relationship between gender harassment and the outcomes decreased. We believe that the knowledge that so many women experience sexual harassment has tempered its deleterious effects on self-doubt and self-esteem.

[…]

While our results point to the benefits of #MeToo in reducing sexual harassment over the last two years, we need to ensure that we maintain these changes, that women and men provide support for those who are harassed, and that vulnerable workers are not ignored. The goal of these efforts is continued progress on workplace equity, and this goal benefits all employees.

Good news.

:::

Working remotely is now the norm for developers, new study shows | A study by Digital Ocean shows that 86% of IT developers work remotely, and almost one third are full-time at home workers.

Quote of the Day

It is the aim of public life to arrange that all forms of power are entrusted, so far as possible, to people who effectively consent to be bound by the obligation towards all human beings which lies upon everyone, and who understand the obligation.

| Simone Weil, Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation

Elsewhere

40 Years Later, Lessons From the Rise and Quick Decline of the First ‘Killer App’ | Christopher Mims looks back on the rise of spreadsheets?—?Visicalc, Lotus 1–2–3, and Excel?—?as a foreshadowing of disruption and consolidation of digital markets.

Big companies getting ahead of their own disruption is now common. The iPhone was born out of Apple’s paranoia that someone else might supplant the iPod. And Facebook ’s acquisition of potential disruptors Instagram and WhatsApp gave the company the dominant social platforms on mobile, where most online social networking subsequently moved. Amazon’s dominance in voice-controlled assistants is a product of the company’s willingness to launch startups within itself and allow them to quickly fail?—?as the Fire Phone did?—?or disrupt much bigger incumbents, as Alexa took both Apple and Google by surprise. And Google, of course, had the foresight to acquire and invest heavily in Android.

Certainly there are still examples of new companies rising, but it’s hard today to imagine the handful of giants that loom so tall over the tech world allowing themselves to go the way of VisiCalc or Lotus. And the more wealth they accrue to buy into new technologies, spreading their bets evenly around the whole roulette wheel, the more invulnerable they appear.

PS I turned down a job offer at Software Arts, the maker of Visicalc, in 1983.

:::

Cutting 300 Calories a Day Shows Health Benefits | Anahad O’Connor reports on a new study on calorie restriction leading to positive impacts on health for non-obese subjects:

In the new study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health and published this month in the Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, researchers looked at a group of 143 healthy men and women who ranged in age from 21 to 50. They were instructed to practice caloric restriction for two years. They could eat the foods they wanted so long as they cut back on the total amount of food they ate, with the aim of cutting the calories they consumed by 25 percent.

Many did not achieve that goal. On average, the dieters managed to slash about 12 percent of their total calories, or roughly 300 calories a day, the amount in a large bagel, a few chocolate chip cookies or a small Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino. But the group saw many of their cardiovascular and metabolic health markers improve, even though they were already in the normal range.

They lost weight and body fat. Their cholesterol levels improved, their blood pressure fell slightly, and they had better blood sugar control and less inflammation. At the same time, a control group of 75 healthy people who did not practice caloric restriction saw no improvements in any of these markers.

Some of the benefits in the calorie restricted group stemmed from the fact that they lost a large amount of weight, on average about 16 pounds over the two years of the study. But the extent to which their metabolic health got better was greater than would have been expected from weight loss alone, suggesting that caloric restriction might have some unique biological effects on disease pathways in the body, said William Kraus, the lead author of the study and a professor of medicine and cardiology at Duke University.

“We weren’t surprised that there were changes,” he said. “But the magnitude was rather astounding. In a disease population, there aren’t five drugs in combination that would cause this aggregate of an improvement.”

In my personal case, I adopted calorie restriction (as well as restricting the great majority of my eating between 11am and 8pm) starting in January 2018. I have lost 45 pounds so far, and plan to lose at least 20–30 pounds more over the next few years. Like the test subjects, I am eating ‘what I want’ but cutting back significantly on overall consumption, especially snacking. On average, I’ve lost 2.5 pounds a month. And I believe this is sustainable because I don’t feel like I am on a diet.

:::

To Help Smokers Quit, Pay Them | Whether the incentive was under $100 or over $700, paying people to quit seemed to be effective.

:::

Growing Up: How To Let Go To Increase Innovation | Stowe Boyd | Digitally mature companies are twice as likely to cultivate partnerships

This was selected by Medium’s editors for the Business topic, yesterday.

Beacon NY — 2019–07–27 | The title for this edition is taken from the quote of the week.

:::

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:::

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Stories

Has Sexual Harassment at Work Decreased Since #MeToo? | Stefanie K. Johnson, Ksenia Keplinger, Jessica F. Kirk, and Liza Barnes surveyed 250 working women in the U.S. in 2016, and again with 268 women in September 2018 about sexual harassment at work:

What did we find? In terms of what has changed, we saw that fewer women in our sample reported sexual coercion and unwanted sexual attention following the #MeToo movement. In 2016, 25% of women reported being sexually coerced, and in 2018 that number had declined to 16%. Unwanted sexual attention declined from 66% of women to 25%. In contrast, we noticed an increase in reports of gender harassment, from 76% of women in 2016 to 92% in 2018. This data suggests that while blatant sexual harassment — experiences that drive many women out of their careers — might be declining, workplaces may be seeing a “backlash effect,” or an increase in hostility toward women.

When we examined women’s feelings of self-esteem and self-doubt, we found an increase in self-esteem and a decrease in self-doubt since 2016. More important, the relationship between unwanted sexual attention and both of these outcomes (lower self-esteem, higher self-doubt) was weaker in 2018. Likewise, the relationship between gender harassment and the outcomes decreased. We believe that the knowledge that so many women experience sexual harassment has tempered its deleterious effects on self-doubt and self-esteem.

[…]

While our results point to the benefits of #MeToo in reducing sexual harassment over the last two years, we need to ensure that we maintain these changes, that women and men provide support for those who are harassed, and that vulnerable workers are not ignored. The goal of these efforts is continued progress on workplace equity, and this goal benefits all employees.

Good news.

[from Work Futures Daily | Unskilled and Unaware]

:::

Open office plans have a surprising effect on communication at work | Lila McLellan returns to the never-resolved issues surrounding the open plan offices. However, since Quartz now has a hard paywall I couldn’t read beyond the first paragraph. Instead, I searched for the study she cited, The Impact of the ‘Open’ Workspace on Human Collaboration by Ethan Bernstein [emphasis mine]:

Organizations’ pursuit of increased workplace collaboration has led managers to transform traditional office spaces into “open,” transparency-enhancing architectures with fewer walls, doors, and other spatial boundaries, yet there is scant direct empirical research on how human interaction patterns change as a result of these architectural changes. In two intervention-based field studies of corporate headquarters transitioning to more open office spaces, we empirically examined — using digital data from advanced wearable devices and from electronic communication servers — the effect of open office architectures on employees’ face-to-face, email, and instant messaging (IM) interaction patterns. Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM.*This is the first study to empirically measure both face-to-face and electronic interaction before and after the adoption of open office architecture. The results inform our understanding of the impact on human behavior of workspaces that trend toward fewer spatial boundaries.*

Can we stop the baloney about open offices as some glorious wellspring of cooperation and innovation? It’s simply a drive to cut expenses on real estate. Want more productivity? Put the walls back!

Here’s an apt summary by Bernstein of a related study he undertaken earlier:

In a study involving human subjects, Bernstein et al. found that intermittent rather than constant social influence produced the best performance among humans collectively engaged in complex problem solving.

People need alone time to think their best.

The full study is here.

…

Just to contrast the science laid out by Bernstein, here’s a fluff piece in the NYTimes that highlights the newest twist in the open office trend, as explained by Jane Margolis in Walls on Wheels and Movable Pods: ‘The Evolution of the Open Workplace’. Of course, she passes along the usual nonsense about increased collaboration but quickly gets to the meat of the matter: saving money.

The desire to be able to switch things up at a moment’s notice has spread to companies in other fields, too. “Businesses are changing at a rate architects almost can’t keep up with,” Mr. [Grant] Christofely [of design firm M Moser] said.

The flux is a result of many factors, including wave after wave of technological change that has prompted repeated adjustments to office designs. (Remember the need for a 150-square-foot room for the computer servers? Now, data is likely to be stored off-site, or in the cloud.)

More collaborative ways of working have also been a driving force. A growing emphasis on teamwork often requires temporary settings for groups working on short-term projects.

Oh yeah. More collaboration. Sure. Gobs more. Exponentially more.

Then the real driver:

And there is always economic pressure to keep real estate costs down. Many companies have done away with private offices in favor of more efficient open plans, but some are shying away from long-term leases at permanent addresses altogether. The alternative: renting instant offices often called, appropriately enough, flex space.

Flex space represents 5 percent of overall office space in the 18 cities around the world surveyed for a recent report from the real estate services company Instant Group. Demand for short-term offices in flex-space facilities and other venues increased 19 percent last year.

“It’s a systemic shift in commercial real estate,” said Tim Rodber, chief executive of Instant, which procures space for Amazon, among other companies, and has an online platform listing more than 14,000 flex-space locations for rent, including about 4,000 in the United States.

One of the advocates of this flex space craze, Christofely acknowledges ‘this is not a solution that is right for everyone’. Even in the design firm undertaking flex space designs for major clients, the troops are unhappy:

A recent post-occupancy survey done at his firm revealed that the staff there felt the workplace was sometimes distracting.

[from Work Futures Daily | Somewhere Else]

:::

Investing in the age of deglobalisation | I agree with much of Rana Foroohar’s diagnosis of deglobalization, but I wonder about her prognosis on the fall of the FAANGs and the rise of China:

We all know that globalisation is under threat. Figures compiled by the Swiss Economic Institute show that globalisation peaked and began plateauing several years before the current trade wars began. The current headwinds to it — from lower cross-border capital spending to the localisation of supply chains due to populism, tariffs and the push for national champions — are not going away anytime soon.

So the smartest capitalists have begun to rethink their fundamental theories of investing for a new age: the age of deglobalisation. Some of the new rules are obvious — bigger may not be better. A recent JPMorgan report on deglobalisation shows that there has been a very tight correlation between cross-border trade intensity and US corporate profit margins over the past 20 years. Large-cap companies in particular “have greatly benefited from locating labour, factories and resources in countries with the most beneficial wage costs, taxation, regulations and infrastructure”.

That correlation is now breaking down as trade becomes increasingly fractious. Technology will be the chief battlefield on which the trade wars and political conflicts of the future will play out. Consider the recent headlines on that score, including more US-China squabbles over the Chinese tech group Huawei; the EU’s opening of an antitrust case against Amazon and possible fines for Qualcomm; and G7 struggles to agree on a system of digital taxation.

The most globalised tech stocks, which dragged the market up in recent years, will also lead it down. The recent setbacks for the Faangs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google’s parent Alphabet) is one sign, but there are many subtler and more telling examples of what is to come.

My bet is that we are transitioning to a platform economy, where the FAANGs have already taken the point position, and have disrupted most markets, like media, advertising, commerce, computing, and everything else. Even if the deglobalization trend plays out, platform economics will still be at the heart of the next era. If Europe levies a tax on the FAANGs, that won’t end all the network effects of exponential scaling: it only changes the price to participate.

I like this quote from Tom Siebel, who is on a publicity tour for his new book, Digital Transformation:

We are in a mass extinction event. You have companies with new DNA filling the voids in the ecosystem. You have Amazon rolling everyone. If you are Walmart, you are looking down that barrel of a gun. You are in a world of hurt.

It’s either you’re on the train or you’re on the track.

Foroohar looks in the crystal ball, and sees the policy gap between the US and China shifting the balance of where new investments may go:

China’s gravitational pull will also bolster commodities markets. The Chinese need oil — hence Beijing’s increasing involvement in the Middle East, and cozy relations with Russia, where both bonds and equities are outperforming. Commodities will be one of the few markets insulated from deglobalisation, as they will be driven primarily by the growth of the emerging market middle class. The new era belongs to this demographic, not to US multinationals.

I’m betting on the platform economy, and not the rise of the Chinese middle class. Just look what happened to the US middle class in the past 30 years.

[from Work Futures Daily | The Train or The Track]

Extra

I couldn’t wait another day or two to comment on Farhad Manjoo’s Op-Ed piece, The Tech Industry Is Building a Vast Digital Underclass, in which he starts with DoorDash finally changing it’s policies so that tipping is additive to the money its workers make, and expanding to the more general issues of the precarious gig economy:

What worries me is that these laborers are invisible “ghost workers” hidden behind screens and apps and algorithms and digital tip jars, working for unpredictable, A.I.-dictated, sub-minimum wage, beckoned into furious action when you press this or that button on your $1,000 aluminum-and-glass happy machine. They are delivering your food, driving you to the airport, sprinting frantically to pick up and wrap your toothpaste and toilet paper so it can be delivered in a day, all while keeping your social feeds free of terrorism and stray nipples (though only female nipples!).

But what worries me the most is that this is just the beginning. The software-driven policies of exploitation and servility will metastasize across the economic value chain. Taking DoorDash workers tips today will pave the way for taking advantage of everyone else tomorrow.

Because what’s to stop it? The real scandal of DoorDash’s pay scandal is that the company stuck with it for so long despite its clear unfairness. The company was betting that it would blow over, because usually such things do.

That instinct was probably correct. The rules of digital society won’t be much different from the rules of analog society: Working people will get shafted.

There has to be a reckoning. My prediction? The Human Spring of 2023, which I’ve written about a lot:

After mounting concern about inequality, the climate, and the inroads that AI and robots were having on society, in the 2020s Western nations — and later other developing countries — were hit by a ‘Human Spring.’ New populist movements rose up and rejected the status quo, and demanded fundamental change. At first the demands were uneven — different groups emphasized climate, or inequality, or the right to work.

But by the mid 2030s, all three forces were more-or-less equal planks in the Humania platform. This led to mandated barriers to inequality — such as limits on the multiple of the salaries of highest to lowest paid workers, and progressive taxation so that the well-off paid much higher taxes by percentage. Additionally, there were worldwide actions to limit oil and coal use, and a dramatic shift to solar in the early 2020s. Concerned that people would be pushed inexorably out of the job market, governments built limits on AI use into international trade agreements, based on a notion of the human right to work.

I wrote that in 2015. Yes, a worldwide revolution is imminent.

Quote of the Week

The best place to be is somewhere else.

| Albarran Cabrera

Elsewhere

Getting good feedback on Platforming | What Jeff Bezos Thinks. But I bet Minimum Viable Ecosystem will have a bigger response.

:::

The Next Big Thing in Fashion? Not Washing Your Clothes. | Elizabeth Segran reports on a new trend: clothes that don’t need to be washed very often.

I have a confession to make: I’ve been wearing the same black T-shirt every single day for two weeks now and I haven’t washed it yet. Anybody who knows me will realize this is very out of character. I’m a laundry addict. I get inordinate pleasure out of transforming my toddler’s mud- and applesauce-covered clothes into freshly laundered, neatly folded piles. And yet, I may hold off on washing this T-shirt for another few weeks. It miraculously looks (and smells!) like it was just cleaned. This $65 T-shirtis made by a startup called Unbound Merino, founded in 2016, that creates wool travel clothes that can go weeks without being washed.

Unbound is part of a broader wave of startups designing clothes that require less laundering. An eco-friendly brand called Pangaia, which launched late last year and already counts celebrities like Jaden Smith and Justin Bieber as fans, creates $85 seaweed fiber T-shirts that are treated with peppermint oil to keep the shirts fresher longer between washes. The brand estimates that this will save about 3,000 liters of water over the course of a lifetime, compared to a regular cotton T-shirt. Then there is menswear label Wool & Prince, which creates everything from $128 oxford shirts to $42 boxer briefs out of wool, all designed to be washed infrequently. Last year, the company launched a sister womenswear brand called Wool& that makes dresses that can be worn for 100 days straight without washing.

This new flock of wash-less brands are capitalizing on the convenience of not having to launder your clothes a lot, which is particularly useful if you’re traveling or crunched for time. But they’re also making an environmental argument: Over-washing clothes is not good for the planet. Washing machines account for 17% of our home water usage, and a quarter of a garment’s carbon footprint over the course of its lifetime comes from cleaning it. And yet, washing machine company AEG estimates that 90% of clothes washed aren’t actually dirty enough to be thrown in the laundry basket.

I am switching over once I finish my weight loss trajectory.

Beacon NY - 2019-06-20 — Joy Harjo has been named US Poet Laureate, and this issue owes its name to my favorite of her oeuvre.

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Consider becoming a paid sponsor to support our work, and to receive in-depth investigative reporting and discounts to other events, reports, and activities.

And paid sponsors gain access to our new members community. Visit members.workfutures.org to request a trial membership.

:::

Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories

Slack Wants to Replace Email. Is That What We Want? | John Herrman pokes at the promise and purpose of Slack and its competitors. He wisely compares the rise of work chat with the earlier rise of email, from which we still have much to learn, anthropologically:

Is Faster Really Better?

Slack reduces email, and email is bad, and so therefore it must follow that Slack is good. Furnishing a considerable tailwind to this marketing pitch is that people really do resent their email. Don’t you?

If the transition to work chat leads to greater control by the organization over the lives of the participants, making us move our phones closer to our beds, then it is pretty clear where the power dynamics are headed.

Another story about Slack by Caroline Sinders: Slack doesn’t care that you can’t block a workplace harasser. There is no way to block users on Slack, which makes it a possible vehicle for workplace harrassment.

:::

Five NY1 anchors file age and gender discrimination lawsuit against the New York station | Charter Communications, which acquired the Turner Broadcast Network and through that NY1, has set about renovating the New York mainstay, and they are doing more than just new studios: they are allegedly pushing out older female anchors. who have brought suit.

:::

Four success factors for workforce automation | Javier Gil Gómez, Pablo Hernández, and Rafael Ocejo write at McKinsey about the likely impacts of workforce automation:

We estimate that by 2030, 375 million workers globally and more than 30 percent of the total workforce in the US will need to change jobs or upgrade their skills significantly.

44% of North American companies surveyed have not started action to automate business processes.

:::

ADP Research Institute Sets International Benchmark for Employee Engagement with its 19-Country Global Study of Engagement | Employee engagement isn't getting better:

Sixteen percent (16%) of employees around the world consider themselves Fully Engaged, revealing 84% of the global workforce is not working at its full potential.

That's putting it mildly.

Quote of the Day

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

| Joy Harjo, from Perhaps the World Ends Here, and who has been named US Poet Laureate

Elsewhere

Grow Faster, Grow Stronger: Speed-Breeding Crops to Feed the Future | Knvul Sheikh reports on efforts to grow food faster

:::

Australian researchers find 'horns' growing on young people's skulls from phone overuse | Isaac Stanley-Becker reports on some research that sounds like an Onion story, but isn't:

New research in biomechanics suggests that young people are developing hornlike spikes at the back of their skulls — bone spurs caused by the forward tilt of the head, which shifts weight from the spine to the muscles at the back of the head, causing bone growth in the connecting tendons and ligaments. The weight transfer that causes the buildup can be compared to the way the skin thickens into a callus as a response to pressure or abrasion.

Beacon NY - 2019-06-23 — I am using the satires from the Work Futures Daily — not the Minipost — for the various stories in this Digest. Perhaps that will convince the free subscribers to upgrade to a paid sponsorship.

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If you're getting this you probably signed up at workfutures.org (or one of its predecessors) or stoweboyd.com. If someone forwarded this to you, sign up here. Feel free to pass this along to others.

Consider becoming a paid sponsor to support our work, and to receive in-depth investigative reporting and discounts to other events, reports, and activities.

And paid sponsors gain access to our new members community. Visit members.workfutures.org to request a trial membership.

:::

Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories

Slack Wants to Replace Email. Is That What We Want? | John Herrman pokes at the promise and purpose of Slack and its competitors. He wisely compares the rise of work chat with the earlier rise of email, from which we still have much to learn, anthropologically:

Is Faster Really Better?

Slack reduces email, and email is bad, and so therefore it must follow that Slack is good. Furnishing a considerable tailwind to this marketing pitch is that people really do resent their email. Don’t you?

In a 2011 study published in the journal Organization Science, researchers noted that while email was widely regarded as a “growing source of stress in people’s lives,” research also suggests that it affords people “flexibility and control by enabling them to communicate from anywhere at any time.” To attempt to address this contradiction, the researchers drew on interviews from nearly a decade earlier, conducted when email itself was still ripping through American offices, and producing its own stories of relief, ambivalence, and horror. Employees’ worries will sound familiar, and in hindsight maybe not unwarranted. “Although, in theory, email’s asynchrony should have granted recipients the leeway to respond at a time that was convenient for them,” the study said, “our informants described strong cultural expectations about not keeping senders waiting.”

Email, the paper suggested, had actually become an “interpretive scapegoat for the workers’ perceptions that they were expected to do more than they could reasonably accomplish in a day.” Email itself was new and required adjustment. It also provided a “culturally sanctioned rhetoric of complaint about overload as well as a tangible ritual for regaining control: to cope with overload, trim your inbox.” Complaining about work might be risky. But email? Even your manager complains about that.

Stephen R. Barley, a professor of technology management at the University of California Santa Barbara and a co-author of the paper, remembers subjects lamenting, nearly 20 years ago, the erosion of work boundaries as symbolized andenacted by email. “I think what they’re really expressing, and most white-collar workers would never say this, is that these technologies are appropriating time at the beginning and end of days, without any kind of payment,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s an encroachment of work into other spaces in your life.”

But with Slack, there is no perfect equivalent to inbox zero; an instant message from your boss during the day might demand not just a quick response, but an instant one; it will be up to us, but mainly our bosses, to establish what a late-night Slack message means or demands, as compared to an email, and what noise or vibration it should cause in the phone that many of us have moved closer to our beds.

This again raises the question of the second-order effects of communications tools. The introduction of new lines and forms of communication always change power relationships. If the transition to work chat leads to greater control by the organization over the lives of the participants, making us move our phones closer to our beds, then it is pretty clear where the power dynamics are headed.

Another story about Slack by Caroline Sinders: Slack doesn’t care that you can’t block a workplace harasser. There is no way to block users on Slack, which makes it a possible vehicle for workplace harrassment.

:::

IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries and that doesn't bode well for humanity | Evan Horowitz reports on a startling trend:

A range of studies using a variety of well-established IQ tests and metrics have found declining scores across Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, France and Australia.

Details vary from study to study and from place to place given the available data. IQ shortfalls in Norway and Denmark appear in longstanding tests of military conscripts, whereas information about France is based on a smaller sample and a different test. But the broad pattern has become clearer: Beginning around the turn of the 21st century, many of the most economically advanced nations began experiencing some kind of decline in IQ.

One potential explanation was quasi-eugenic. As in the movie “Idiocracy,” it was suggested that average intelligence is being pulled down because lower-IQ families are having more children ("dysgenic fertility" is the technical term). Alternatively, widening immigration might be bringing less-intelligent newcomers to societies with otherwise higher IQs.

However, a 2018 study of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families. In other words, the issue is not that educated Norwegians are increasingly outnumbered by lower-IQ immigrants or the children of less-educated citizens. Even children born to high-IQ parents are slipping down the IQ ladder.

:::

The New Dropbox: A Pivot, More than an Upgrade | I take a look at the new Dropbox:

Dropbox has released an early version of a ‘New Dropbox’, one that will reposition Dropbox from a file sync-and-share appliance?—?a product space that is rapidly being commoditized?—?and instead shifting toward a new center of gravity, as a content-centric work management utility. They build on the design of the virtual file system from the old Dropbox, and extend it with ideas derived from Dropbox Paper, in the form of a formatted text description area at the head of each folder, with text styling, lists, and?—?most critically?—?tasks. Files can be commented on in the new Dropbox folders (currently only through the new desktop app), and @mentioning of other users is also supported (currently only through the new desktop app).

If you have tasks, however, you need a way to filter tasks, such as 'show me all the tasks assigned to me ordered by date', and the new Dropbox does not have that yet.

I plan a follow up post, because I have found a way to integrate Dropbox Paper docs — which I use for work management — into the new Dropbox File system. (If you don't get it, just wait. The next installment will lay it out for you.)

:::

How Data Can Help You Win in the Winner-Take-All Economy | Neil Irwin argues that the best chance for a successful career is in the platform 'superstar' companies that dominate their fields':

In nearly every sector of the economy, people who seek well-paying, professional-track success face the same set of challenges: the rise of a handful of dominant “superstar” firms; a digital reinvention of business models; and a rapidly changing understanding about loyalty in the employer-employee relationship. It’s true in manufacturing and retail, in banking and law, in health care and education — and certainly in tech.

What it means to do a job well is changing faster than most people’s ability to navigate those changes. This has made the workplace seem scarier, particularly to midcareer people who suddenly find that their parents’ advice — show up early, work hard, learn your craft — is no longer enough. But just as important, these changes have conferred an advantage on those strategic enough to shift their approach.

If you’re looking to make a career out of creating great art, or changing the world through activism, or otherwise eschewing the conventional business track, I wish you the best. But this article isn’t for you: I’m here to address those seeking fortune in modern capitalism. And across industries, I’ve found, more and more of the most compelling opportunities are at companies that dominate their fields — global, profitable, well managed, technologically adept.

I’m not arguing that this is entirely a good thing. Clearly, consolidation gives large employers too much power to hold down wages, and political clout they can use to tilt the field against competitors and entrench advantages. Worse, as the recent tech backlash shows, the concentrated might of the Silicon Valley titans is disturbing in ways we are only starting to comprehend.

What I am arguing is that even if there is legislative action or antitrust enforcementto rein in these companies, their rise is driven by powerful technological forces that aren’t going anywhere. As a result, these superstar companies — and the smaller firms seeking to upend them — are where pragmatic capitalists can best develop their abilities and be well compensated for them over a long and durable career.

Irwin's comments about what former VoloMetrix people — acquired by Microsoft — found through analyzing the metadata associated with office productivity tools is fascinating:

They wanted to know things like: Is there an optimally productive length of the workday? Should salespeople focus on deep contact with a few clients or shallow relationships with lots of them? Ms. Klinghoffer and Mr. Fuller came up with some answers that amount to a data-driven guide to being a successful employee — not just at Microsoft, but at nearly any ambitious corporation.

One of their findings was that people who worked extremely long work weeks were not necessarily more effective than those who put in a more normal 40 to 50 hours. In particular, when managers put in lots of evening and weekend hours, their employees started matching the behavior and became less engaged in their jobs, according to surveys. Another finding was that one of the strongest predictors of success for middle managers was that they held frequent one-on-one meetings with the people who reported directly to them. Third: People who made lots of contacts across departments tended to have longer, better careers within the company. There was even an element of contagion, in that managers with broad networks passed their habits on to their employees.

Biggest takeaway: being forced to attend too many big meetings makes people sad.

Go read the whole thing.

Quote of the Day

Never accept work where you’re not learning.

| Charles Eames

Here’s the link to the full post on Medium, where I hope you will participate with comments, highlighting, applause, and so on.

Here’s the tweetstorm.

:::

The short but destructive history of mass layoffs | Sarah Todd: 'downsizing a workforce by 1% leads to a 31% increase in voluntary turnover the next year'

:::

The problem with automation | Steve LeVine reports on several papers from economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo that disrupt the smug assumption that AI and robots will create more jobs than they destroy

:::

'So far, we’ve used our know-how singularly automating at the expense of labor. If we keep on doing that, we will keep on destroying more jobs without job gains. It’s completely our decision.' | Daron Acemoglu

:::

As the workforce ages, phased retirement grows | Pamela DeLoatch describes the transition away from conventional retirement, where on your 65th birthday you’re handed a gold watch, a slice of cake, and hasta la vista.

:::

Quote of the Day | Ours is an age that must come to terms with failed expectations, and, worse, the guilt of recognizing why we held such ambitious dreams. | Charles Altieri

:::

Cities Have No Room for Children | Derek Thompson explores one of the side-effects of US urbanism: fewer families with kids.

:::

I'm featuring some older material:

What if Cities Are No Longer the Land of Opportunity for Low-Skilled Workers?

Paul Mason on Piketty's 'Capital'

David Autor on The End of the Upward Urban Dream

Thomas Friedman on John Hagel's Knowledge Flows

Beacon NY - 2019-07-04 — Somehow, I am just not feeling the Fourth.

:::

Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories

The Paradox of Connection | John Hagel lays out a hard-to-argue-with case for countering the growing fear in the world through empowering 'narratives of opportunity' that can counter the explosion of connections that bind us together and at the same time divide us. A must read. Extra credit: these forces are equally active in the world of work.

[from Work Futures Daily - Stupider in the Afternoon]

:::

The mindfulness conspiracy | Ronald Purser parses the mindfulness movement, pronouncing it as an opiate for the professional masses [emphasis mine]:

Mindfulness is nothing more than basic concentration training. Although derived from Buddhism, it’s been stripped of the teachings on ethics that accompanied it, as well as the liberating aim of dissolving attachment to a false sense of self while enacting compassion for all other beings.

What remains is a tool of self-discipline, disguised as self-help. Instead of setting practitioners free, it helps them adjust to the very conditions that caused their problems. A truly revolutionary movement would seek to overturn this dysfunctional system, but mindfulness only serves to reinforce its destructive logic. The neoliberal order has imposed itself by stealth in the past few decades, widening inequality in pursuit of corporate wealth. People are expected to adapt to what this model demands of them. Stress has been pathologised and privatised, and the burden of managing it outsourced to individuals. Hence the pedlars of mindfulness step in to save the day.

But none of this means that mindfulness ought to be banned, or that anyone who finds it useful is deluded. Reducing suffering is a noble aim and it should be encouraged. But to do this effectively, teachers of mindfulness need to acknowledge that personal stress also has societal causes. By failing to address collective suffering, and systemic change that might remove it, they rob mindfulness of its real revolutionary potential, reducing it to something banal that keeps people focused on themselves.

The fundamental message of the mindfulness movement is that the underlying cause of dissatisfaction and distress is in our heads. By failing to pay attention to what actually happens in each moment, we get lost in regrets about the past and fears for the future, which make us unhappy.

[…]

Mindfulness advocates, perhaps unwittingly, are providing support for the status quo. Rather than discussing how attention is monetised and manipulated by corporations such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple, they locate the crisis in our minds. It is not the nature of the capitalist system that is inherently problematic; rather, it is the failure of individuals to be mindful and resilient in a precarious and uncertain economy. Then they sell us solutions that make us contented, mindful capitalists.

We are not the problem. The problem is the shallow culture being described as a means for business leaders to motivate their workers to work harder and not complain. Deep work culture is about our relationship to our work, and to each other, which involves complaining about safety, injustice, and our rights.

[from Work Futures Daily - Outsourcing Stress]

:::

Can internal gig platforms upskill employees and boost productivity? | Rita O'Donnell investigates an interesting prospect: creating an internal 'gig platform' — modeled after the services in the talent marketplace — as a means to match employees with projects that will help them upskill.

[from Work Futures Daily | The Opposite Of Work]

Quote of the Week

I’m not good at small talk; I’m not good at big talk; and medium talk just doesn’t come up.

| Patty Marx

Elsewhere

Trello | Trello, the Kanban-based work management tool, won the 2019 Webby award for productivity tool. Congratulations! Their five word speech:

We're better when working together.

:::

AI classifies people's emotions from the way they walk | Kyle Wiggers:

Researchers at the University of Chapel Hill and the University of Maryland recently investigated a machine learning method that can identify a person’s perceived emotion, valence (e.g., negative or positive), and arousal (calm or energetic) from their gait alone. The researchers claim this approach — which they believe is the first of its kind — achieved 80.07% percent accuracy in preliminary experiments.

:::

Tracking Pixels in Superhuman | I respond to Mike Davidson's assertion that email client Superhuman has crossed the line into surveillanceland. I'll sit tight until it's resolved.

Update: CEO Rahul Vohra has admitted not thinking through the pixel tracking technology in Superhuman and apologized for the mess, which they are cleaning up:

I now recognize that we must deeply consider the overall ecosystem when designing software as fundamental as email. The team and I are committed to this now more than ever. We need to consider not only our customers, but also future users, the people they communicate with, and the Internet at large.

Beacon NY - 2019-06-17 — Back from two weeks in Europe. In Barcelona I joined other members of the Platform Design Toolkit community for a two-day working session, about which more to follow. Then off to Lisbon for the SocialNow conference, seeing old friends, and five days of roaming the cobblestone streets of the city with my son, Keenan.

I lost 5 pounds from all the walking!

:::

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And paid sponsors gain access to our new members community. Visit members.workfutures.org to request a trial membership.

:::

Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories

Food App Couriers Exploit Migrants Desperate for Work in France | Liz Alderman explores the sour economics of food couriers in France:

In France, where food delivery is a booming trend, some couriers who are registered on such apps [like Uber Eats, Deliveroo, or Glovo] are renting out their accounts. The substitute cyclists are often illegal migrants, asylum seekers and underage teenagers willing to work long hours for low wages, no matter the traffic or weather, according to French labor and humanitarian groups, some companies, and interviews with more than a dozen of riders and migrants.

[…]

“These jobs have become more precarious,” said Jean-Daniel Zamor, president of the Independent Deliverymen’s Collective in Paris, a group that works on labor issues for couriers. “The fact that there is less money from the platforms has pushed poor people to outsource to people even poorer than them.”

A race to the bottom, and a failure of regulation to stop it.

:::

How Data Can Help You Win in the Winner-Take-All Economy | Neil Irwin argues that the best chance for a successful career is in the platform 'superstar' companies that dominate their fields:

If you’re looking to make a career out of creating great art, or changing the world through activism, or otherwise eschewing the conventional business track, I wish you the best. But this article isn’t for you: I’m here to address those seeking fortune in modern capitalism. And across industries, I’ve found, more and more of the most compelling opportunities are at companies that dominate their fields — global, profitable, well managed, technologically adept.

Irwin's comments about what former VoloMetrix people — acquired by Microsoft — found through analyzing the metadata associated with office productivity tools is fascinating. Biggest takeaway: being forced to attend too many big meetings makes people sad.

Go read the whole thing.

:::

How To Handle A Toxic Manager | Chris Sowers provides on-the-ground advice about surviving a toxic boss.

Get out. The most important survival tactic is to get out as soon as you can.

The rest of the advice is solid, too.

:::

How to tell if you’ve got 'pre-burnout' | Zaria Gorvett reports on a WHO study on burnout:

Late last month, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the trendy problem will be recognised in the latest International Classification of Diseases manual, where it is described as a syndrome “resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed”.

According to the WHO, burnout has three elements: feelings of exhaustion, mental detachment from one’s job and poorer performance at work. But waiting until you’re already fully burned out do something about it doesn’t help at all –and you wouldn’t wait to treat any other illness until it was too late.

So how can you tell if you’re almost – but not quite – burned out?

“A lot of the signs and symptoms of pre-burnout would be very similar to depression,” says Siobhán Murray, a psychotherapist based in County Dublin, Ireland, and the author of a book about burnout, The Burnout Solution.

Quote of the Day

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

| Steven Hawking

Elsewhere

The Rise of Progressive Occultism | Tara Isabella Burton takes a deep dive into the enigmatic spirituality of the 'nones':

Progressive occultism—the language of witches and demons, of spells and sage, of cleansing and bad energy, of star and signs—has become the de facto religion of millennial progressives: the metaphysical symbol set threaded through the worldly ethos of modern social justice activism. Its rise parallels the rise of the religious “nones,” and with them a model of spiritual and religious practice that’s at once intuitional and atomized. Twenty-three percent of Americans call themselves religiously unaffiliated, a number that spikes to 36 percent among millennials (Trump’s white evangelical base, by contrast, only comprises about 17 percent of Americans). But tellingly, few among this demographic identify as atheists or agnostics.

:::

An End To Predictions, A Call For Revolution | I wrote this earlier in 2019, but recently posted it on Medium where it was curated for the Future topic.

Here’s the link to the full post on Medium, where I hope you will participate with comments, highlighting, applause, and so on.

Here’s the tweetstorm.

Uber and Lyft drivers were paid up to $100 to protest a bill that could make them employees | Uber and Lyft paid drivers $25-$100 dollars in exchange for their attendance at a rally against AB 5, a law that would make them employees

:::

Steve Jobs’s Alternative to the Open-Plan Office | Geoffrey James: Pixar got it right. Either spend big money on individual offices and open spaces, or don’t bother.

Case Closed: Work-From-Home Is the World’s Smartest Management Strategy | Geoffrey James: Research from Stanford and other sources reveals that working from home vastly increases productivity.

:::

Untangling your organization’s decision making | McKinsey team shares findings: 72% of senior-executive respondents thought bad strategic decisions either were about as frequent as good ones or were the prevailing norm in their organization

Quote of the Day | We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken. | Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

AI Trained on Old Scientific Papers Makes Discoveries Humans Missed | Madeleine Gregory describes new research applying machine learning to old materials science papers, and new findings appear

:::

Lee Bryant on Digital Leadership | A Model for Upgrading the Organizational Operating System

:::

On Haier’s Ecosystem Micro-Communities — Part 1 | Loose interdependencies between the members of an ecosystem are a source of strength, not a flaw

To read the Daily, visit Work Futures on Medium.

Here’s the tweetstorm:

What AI-Driven Decision Making Looks Like | Eric Colson writes a provocative piece that advocates handing over data-driven decision making to AI in a strangely affectless writing style

:::

You’re Hired. Now Wear This Headset to Learn the Job. | Karen Weise starts out writing a piece about using Hololens to learn new skills, and then veers into a briefing book about Microsoft’s efforts for the frontline workforce, in general

:::

I wrote about Microsoft’s frontline push in Continuously Discontinuous

:::

The Four Biggest Challenges Digital Platforms Need to Address | The convenors of this week’s MIT Platform Summit lay out their view on the challenges for platforms, and the incumbents they are disrupting

:::

'Most executives struggle to fully grasp the nature of “inverted firms,” those that move production from inside the organization to outside. They also have yet to learn how to make the transformation happen.'

:::

Quote of the Day | There ought to be a future we can choose. It’s up to us to find it. | Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira

:::

Needed: a trillion more trees | Dylan Matthews (via newsletter) reports on new revelations about carbon harvesting by reforestation

:::

Americans Shouldn't Have to Drive, but the Law Insists on It | Gregory Shill makes the argument that the laws in the US compel us into car ownership

? Previous

Beacon NY - 2019-06-26 — I missed a day yesterday. Too much work backed up from my daring to take a vacation.

:::

Anthony Bourdain whose birthday was the other day is responsible for this issue's title. I miss him.

:::

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Consider becoming a paid sponsor to support our work, and to receive in-depth investigative reporting and discounts to other events, reports, and activities.

And paid sponsors gain access to our new members community. Visit members.workfutures.org to request a trial membership.

Actually, can you do me a favor? Could you send this issue of Work Futures Daily to ten of your friends? I'd like to drive more subscriptions, and you could help me accomplish that.

:::

Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories

Your Work Peak Is Earlier Than You Think | Arthur Brooks ponders an existential question after overhearing (on a plane trip) a well-known and accomplished man bemoan his sense of having become irrelevant. Brooks asks,

Can I really keep this going? I work like a maniac. But even if I stayed at it 12 hours a day, seven days a week, at some point my career would slow and stop. And when it did, what then? Would I one day be looking back wistfully and wishing I were dead? Was there anything I could do, starting now, to give myself a shot at avoiding misery—and maybe even achieve happiness—when the music inevitably stops?

Once you read the article, you will understand when I say that I have transitioned to thinking of myself as a teacher slowly walking down the hill, chatting with others, and not the young adventurer charging up the hill, pushing others aside, looking for worlds to conquer.

:::

Work Is Like Water | Karen Rinaldi muses about work intruding into private life, like her experience of a conference call on the beach cutting into a surf lesson:

When I am in the ocean and surfing, I am fully human. When work pushes past the tide line and blends with my salty haven — a conference call on the beach, for example — what do I become? What am I if I am not a human being in the fullest sense of the word?

:::

We hired Fiverr workers to write about Fiverr's IPO | Alison Griswald writes about an oddball researchish project, using ultra-low-cost Fiverr gig workers to write about the Fiverr IPO. The results were terrible: the five dollar offer led to an article plagiarized from MarketWatch and TechCrunch, for example. The bottom line:

On Fiverr, you get what you pay for.

:::

No Slack for you! Microsoft puts rival app on internal list of ‘prohibited and discouraged’ software | Nat Levy and Todd Bishop comment on the not-too-surprising fact that Microsoft doesn't want its employees using Slack. After all, the two companies are direct competitors in the work chat marketplace. But the prohibition is principally driven by security concerns.

:::

The Present and Future of On-Demand Work Platforms | I took a look on Mary Meeker's Internet Trends deck, and gleaned some facts about on-demand work platforms:

A recent NPR/Marist poll suggests that 20% of US jobs are filled by contractors, workers that are hired on to a particular project, for a specific period of time, or on a discontinuous basis, and not as full-time, permanent employees. This ranges from Uber drivers to your cleaning lady, and also includes highly skilled-knowledge workers in tech companies. More than 120,000 of Google workers are contractors, compared with just over 100,000 full-time employees. This trend is growing, and not going to go away. Yes, there will have to be major social readjustments?—?since these contractors generally receive no benefits, and are skimping on saving for retirement?—?but the economic rationale for workforce agility and flexibility for employers currently holds sway.

Quote of the Day

Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love.

| Anthony Bourdain

Elsewhere

Hangouts Chat coming to Gmail as Hangouts Meet adds live captioning & public streams | Google wants to fight slack by bring work chat to the G Suite mail experience. That's a good idea, but why not for all Gmail?

Beacon NY — 2019–07–24 | The title today is from Tom Siebel, quoted in the story on deglobalization, below.

:::

Got a lot of good feedback on the end of the experiment here, as I discussed yesterday. Also had some folks buy me baguettes on Kofi. Thanks.

Also, getting positive feedback from the editors at Medium. Yesterday’s The Starting Point and The Bottom Line for The Gig Economy was selected for the Work topic page. Recently, The OECD Skills Outlook 2019: Too Aspirational was selected for the Economy page.

:::

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:::

Originally posted on Medium.

:::

Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories

Yes, You Actually Should Be Using Emojis at Work| Christopher Mims reports on new research stating emojis are safe for work:

In a just-published paper, researchers from Colombia describe how electrical activity in the brain indicates that we process emojis in the same areas of the brain where we process faces. The key is that emojis often include the most salient features for visually conveying human emotion — eyes, mouths, sometimes eyebrows.

“In computer-mediated communication, I don’t see your face, but when you send to me an emoji, my brain generates a similar response as when I can see you,” says Carlos Gantiva, a professor in the department of psychology at Universidad de los Andes and an author of the paper.

[…]

Ying Tang and Khe Foon Hew, researchers at the University of Hong Kong who study business communications, reviewed 50 studies on the use and impacts of emojis in communication and found that, on balance, proper use of emojis helps people form relationships and understand one another.

[…]

The utility of emojis is not an excuse to use them willy-nilly. If you don’t know the local emoji parlance, attempting to use one can make you seem unserious and damage your subsequent ability to collaborate with others, says Ella Glikson, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. With her collaborators, Dr. Glikson found that using emojis in initial communication with unfamiliar people could even make you appear less competent.

??

:::

A shift in the gig economy | The American Economics Association presents their chart of the week:

A paper in AEA Papers and Proceedings digs into banking data to better understand how digital marketplaces are transforming our financial lives. Authors Diana Farrell, Fiona Greig, and Amar Hamoudi use anonymized data from 2.3 million distinct Chase account holders to study the online platform economy.

Transportation dominates, both in the number of participants and total transaction volume. And yet, individual users appear to be earning less per month from driving people around.

It appears that drivers are driving less, perhaps because in a tight labor market they can do better elsewhere.

:::

Investing in the age of deglobalisation | I agree with much of Rana Foroohar’s diagnosis of deglobalization, but I wonder about her prognosis on the fall of the FAANGs and the rise of China:

We all know that globalisation is under threat. Figures compiled by the Swiss Economic Institute show that globalisation peaked and began plateauing several years before the current trade wars began. The current headwinds to it — from lower cross-border capital spending to the localisation of supply chains due to populism, tariffs and the push for national champions — are not going away anytime soon.

So the smartest capitalists have begun to rethink their fundamental theories of investing for a new age: the age of deglobalisation. Some of the new rules are obvious — bigger may not be better. A recent JPMorgan report on deglobalisation shows that there has been a very tight correlation between cross-border trade intensity and US corporate profit margins over the past 20 years. Large-cap companies in particular “have greatly benefited from locating labour, factories and resources in countries with the most beneficial wage costs, taxation, regulations and infrastructure”.

That correlation is now breaking down as trade becomes increasingly fractious. Technology will be the chief battlefield on which the trade wars and political conflicts of the future will play out. Consider the recent headlines on that score, including more US-China squabbles over the Chinese tech group Huawei; the EU’s opening of an antitrust case against Amazon and possible fines for Qualcomm; and G7 struggles to agree on a system of digital taxation.

The most globalised tech stocks, which dragged the market up in recent years, will also lead it down. The recent setbacks for the Faangs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google’s parent Alphabet) is one sign, but there are many subtler and more telling examples of what is to come.

My bet is that we are transitioning to a platform economy, where the FAANGs have already taken the point position, and have disrupted most markets, like media, advertising, commerce, computing, and everything else. Even if the deglobalization trend plays out, platform economics will still be at the heart of the next era. If Europe levies a tax on the FAANGs, that won’t end all the network effects of exponential scaling: it only changes the price to participate.

I like this quote from Tom Siebel, who is on a publicity tour for his new book, Digital Transformation:

We are in a mass extinction event. You have companies with new DNA filling the voids in the ecosystem. You have Amazon rolling everyone. If you are Walmart, you are looking down that barrel of a gun. You are in a world of hurt.

It’s either you’re on the train or you’re on the track.

Foroohar looks in the crystal ball, and sees the policy gap between the US and China shifting the balance of where new investments may go:

China’s gravitational pull will also bolster commodities markets. The Chinese need oil — hence Beijing’s increasing involvement in the Middle East, and cozy relations with Russia, where both bonds and equities are outperforming. Commodities will be one of the few markets insulated from deglobalisation, as they will be driven primarily by the growth of the emerging market middle class. The new era belongs to this demographic, not to US multinationals.

I’m betting on the platform economy, and not the rise of the Chinese middle class. Just look what happened to the US middle class in the past 30 years.

Quote of the Day

When people do inexplicable things, it’s always tempting to project qualities onto them that would offer a more innocuous explanation of their behavior than bad judgment, fecklessness, or stupidity.

| Elizabeth Spiers, Why Nancy Pelosi Won’t Impeach

Elsewhere

The Next Big Thing in Fashion? Not Washing Your Clothes. | Elizabeth Segran reports on a new trend: clothes that don’t need to be washed very often.

I have a confession to make: I’ve been wearing the same black T-shirt every single day for two weeks now and I haven’t washed it yet. Anybody who knows me will realize this is very out of character. I’m a laundry addict. I get inordinate pleasure out of transforming my toddler’s mud- and applesauce-covered clothes into freshly laundered, neatly folded piles. And yet, I may hold off on washing this T-shirt for another few weeks. It miraculously looks (and smells!) like it was just cleaned. This $65 T-shirtis made by a startup called Unbound Merino, founded in 2016, that creates wool travel clothes that can go weeks without being washed.

Unbound is part of a broader wave of startups designing clothes that require less laundering. An eco-friendly brand called Pangaia, which launched late last year and already counts celebrities like Jaden Smith and Justin Bieber as fans, creates $85 seaweed fiber T-shirts that are treated with peppermint oil to keep the shirts fresher longer between washes. The brand estimates that this will save about 3,000 liters of water over the course of a lifetime, compared to a regular cotton T-shirt. Then there is menswear label Wool & Prince, which creates everything from $128 oxford shirts to $42 boxer briefs out of wool, all designed to be washed infrequently. Last year, the company launched a sister womenswear brand called Wool& that makes dresses that can be worn for 100 days straight without washing.

This new flock of wash-less brands are capitalizing on the convenience of not having to launder your clothes a lot, which is particularly useful if you’re traveling or crunched for time. But they’re also making an environmental argument: Over-washing clothes is not good for the planet. Washing machines account for 17% of our home water usage, and a quarter of a garment’s carbon footprint over the course of its lifetime comes from cleaning it. And yet, washing machine company AEG estimates that 90% of clothes washed aren’t actually dirty enough to be thrown in the laundry basket.

I am switching over once I finish my weight loss trajectory.

:::

Your Data Were ‘Anonymized’? These Scientists Can Still Identify You | There is no Santa Claus, and no such thing as anonymized data:

Scientists at Imperial College London and Université Catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, reported in the journal Nature Communications that they had devised a computer algorithm that can identify 99.98 percent of Americans from almost any available data set with as few as 15 attributes, such as gender, ZIP code or marital status.

Even more surprising, the scientists posted their software code online for anyone to use. That decision was difficult, said Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, a computer scientist at Imperial College London and lead author of the new paper.

[…]

This not the first time that anonymized data has been shown to be not so anonymous after all. In 2016, individuals were identified from the web-browsing histories of three million Germans, data that had been purchased from a vendor. Geneticists have shown that individuals can be identified in supposedly anonymous DNA databases.

The usual ways of protecting privacy include “de-identifying” individuals by removing attributes or substituting fake values, or by releasing only fractions of an anonymized data set.

But the gathering evidence shows that all of the methods are inadequate, said Dr. de Montjoye. “We need to move beyond de-identification,” he said. “Anonymity is not a property of a data set, but is a property of how you use it.”

Here’s the link to the full post on Medium, where I hope you will participate with comments, highlighting, applause, and so on.

Here’s the tweetstorm.

Stories

On Emergent Leadership | Stowe Boyd | What are senior executives afraid of? Loosening the reins.

:::

Does Diversity Training Work the Way It’s Supposed To? | Adam Grant and colleagues looked into that, and found that no, it doesn’t.

:::

Untangling your organization’s decision making | McKinsey looked into about decision making in organizations: 72% of senior execs said they thought bad strategic decisions were about as frequent as good, or were the prevailing norm.

:::

A Year of Not Knowing | Jane Watson hasn’t been writing much (our loss), due to what she calls a ‘crisis of unknowing’. However, she’s been reading and offers a review of Art Kleiner's 'The Age of Heretics'

Quote of the Week | We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken. | Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

Elsewhere

On Emergent Leadership | Stowe Boyd | What are senior executives afraid of? Loosening the reins.

Instacart’s Broken Flywheel | Stowe Boyd | A two-sided marketplace turns out to be multi-sided, and that makes a big difference.

Beacon NY - 2019-06-19 — I owe the title of this issue to Thomas Sugrue, taken from the quote of the day.

:::

I knew I would be slammed when I returned from two weeks in Europe, but it's been madness.

:::

If you're getting this you probably signed up at workfutures.org (or one of its predecessors) or stoweboyd.com. If someone forwarded this to you, sign up here. Feel free to pass this along to others.

Consider becoming a paid sponsor to support our work, and to receive in-depth investigative reporting and discounts to other events, reports, and activities.

And paid sponsors gain access to our new members community. Visit members.workfutures.org to request a trial membership.

:::

Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories

The future of diversity and inclusion in tech | Megan Rose Dickey presents a summarization of the state of diversity in tech: not so hot.

I would characterize where we are now as a leap forward over the last 10 years and several steps sideways and a few steps backward.

| Freada Kapor Klein

:::

Women & Power | The NY Times recently held its New Rules Summit, with 'leaders across business, politics and culture gathered to explore some of the challenges faced by women in the workplace and how to bring about change'.

A treasure trove of material.

:::

In Japan, It’s a Riveting TV Plot: Can a Worker Go Home on Time? | A Japanese sitcom about a woman who 'dares to leave work at 6 p.m. sharp'.

:::

5 Steps To Build Freedom And Trust At Work | The Corporate Rebels manage to winnow down becoming a revolutionary company into five steps: design your own workplace, results-based working, remove control mechanisms, peer — not top-down — review. And the most radical: self-set salaries.

Quote of the Day

The path to change is seldom polite.

| Thomas Sugrue

Elsewhere

IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries and that doesn't bode well for humanity | Evan Horowitz reports on a startling trend:

A range of studies using a variety of well-established IQ tests and metrics have found declining scores across Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, France and Australia.

:::

The new iPadOS powers unique experiences designed for iPad | Apple has a new OS, iPadOS, which supports multitasking and a long list of other features, including a Files app.

Here’s the link to the full post on Medium, where I hope you will participate with comments, highlighting, applause, and so on.

Here’s the tweetstorm.

Robots are stepping in to help solve the worker shortage | Many countries, especially Germany, Japan, and South Korea which are confronted by aging populations, are upping their investments in robots

:::

In The Impact of the 'Open' Workspace on Human Collaboration, Ethan Bernstein finds open plan offices decrease f2f communications by ~70%. Can we stop saying they are good for anything except saving money?

...

In a related study Bernstein found 'intermittent rather than constant social influence produced the best performance among humans collectively engaged in complex problem solving'. Hello? Anyone listening?

...

A NY Times fluff piece pushes the usual line: open plan is all about collaboration. Then they cut to the meat: money. Now open is becoming 'flex', which is short-term workspaces: weeks, days, or hours.

:::

How to Give Your Team the Right Amount of Autonomy | Deborah Ancona and Kate Isaacs offer some solid advice in the form of 'guardrails': rules-of-thumb that can be applied whenever needed.

...

Here's one guardrail, Simple Rules:

'When a bottleneck arises, leaders at all levels identify the problem and come up with a simple rule to help address it, and then step out of the way'.

:::

Quote of the Day | The best place to be is somewhere else. | Albarran Cabrera

:::

Internet of things sparks race to replace the battery | Jessica Twentyman looks into innovative mechanisms to power sensors on gear like wind turbines, converting vibrations into piezoenergy

Continuing the Medium experiment: Work Futures Daily | Creative Impulses.

Here’s the link to the full post on Medium, where I hope you will participate with comments, highlighting, applause, and so on.

Here’s the tweetstorm.

A Year of Not Knowing | Jane Watson hasn’t been writing much (our loss), due to what she calls a ‘crisis of unknowing’. However, she’s been reading and offers a review of Art Kleiner's 'The Age of Heretics'

:::

How to give women a fair shot at advancement | Jennifer Deal likens career progression to participation in a tournament and says we have to change the rules to make it fair for women.

:::

Amazon to Retrain a Third of Its U.S. Workforce | Chip Cutter reports on a massive, long-term reskilling push by Amazon: it plans to spend $700 million over about six years to retrain a third of its U.S. workforce

Re: Amazon's plans Peter Capelli says 'It’s not altruistic. There’s some hard-nosed business-decision-making behind this.'

Quote of the Day | Grown-ups who worried that Mad was a subversive influence, undermining the youth of America’s respect for their elders and faith in our hallowed institutions, were 100 percent correct. | Tim Kreider

This Neat Design Could Make a Plane’s Middle Seats Tolerable | Alex Davies reports on a newly approved airplane seat design: the S1, which is 2 inches lower and pushed back 3 inches

Here’s the link to the full post on Medium, where I hope you will participate with comments, highlighting, applause, and so on.

Here’s the tweetstorm.

Does Diversity Training Work the Way It’s Supposed To? | Adam Grant et al looked into that, and? No, it doesn’t. Men and white employees overall were unchanged by the experience, in general.

:::

Our Summer Reading List | David Rotman's summer reading starts with a collection of papers on AI that ‘highlights all that we do not know’ about AI and its impacts, and then profiles the recent McKinsey study on the future of work in the US

:::

The future began four decades ago | Steve LeVine takes a close look at Carl Frey’s new book, The Technology Trap, and suggest that the AI optimists — who say AI will create more jobs than it destroys — should reconsider.

'Governments chose to overlook the costs of globalization and focus on the benefits. Governments must avoid making the same mistake with automation. | Carl Frey

Thirty years on, the future will still be boring. | J.G. Ballard

Unaffordable Urban Paradise | Richard Florida details how tech start-ups have moved from the suburbs into city centers, and it’s ruining them.

Florida has some answers, but it involves increasing density of cities, better public transport, and paying low-paid workers enough to support families. Sounds like a political platform.

:::

Successful Ecosystem Brands are Win-Win | My collaborator, David Card, explores the idea of ecosystem branding on On The Horizon.

Beacon NY - 2019-07-08 — I'm involved in several adjustments that may be noticeable to you, the free subscribers here.

The first adjustment: last week I stopped publishing the Work Futures Minipost, which was a summarization of the full Work Futures Daily. The Daily was available only for paid subscribers, and the Minipost was available for paid and free subscribers. This had reduced the busywork for me by an hour a day. Under this approach, fregans would still have access to the Work Futures Weekly.

But I am conducting an experiment with Medium. I will start posting Work Futures Daily and Weekly on Medium behind the paywall, and I will track where I am having the biggest influence. Note that I have considerably more followers on Medium than the combined free and paid subscribers on the newsletter, so I am anticipating that the Medium approach could win out.

Basically, I am transitioning — at least for the rest of July, and perhaps forever — to post Work Futures Daily and Weekly on Medium, and free subscribers will be able to follow there. I will be posting the friendlink for the Weekly on Twitter and here, but the Daily will be fully behind the paywall for unpaid subscribers. I have a hunch I can have a bigger influence on Medium where I have 12,000 followers than here, where I have only a fraction of that.

The second adjustment: I am moving more of my long-form writing to Medium, and placing it behind the paywall there. I have a considerable following there, and I find Medium’s social affordances the best anywhere. I still like certain aspects of Tumblr, but my time there is coming to an end, I think, at least for long form. I will have to slowly transfer serious long form from stoweboyd.com (stoweboyd.tumblr.com) to medium.com/@stoweboyd. My Tumblr account will remain a repository of quotations, poetry, and artistic influences, more of a daybook, but not a folio of serious writing. Of course, everything posted there will remain, but I will repost the most important to Medium.

Today’s Work Futures Daily | Better Cogs is up on Medium.

source: Parker Johnson

Beacon NY — 2019–08–06 | If I had a flag, and a flagpole to hang it on, it would be at half-mast. Or quarter-mast, which obviously should be a thing.

:::

Too busy because of planned trip to Shelter Island next week. That lifts my spirits a bit in a terrible week for the US.

:::

If you are receiving this you’ve probably signed up for the Work Futures Daily newsletter. You can sign up here for a free subscription. Support our work by becoming a sponsor, here. Or become a follower on Medium, here. Drop a few bucks in the hat, here, if you’d like to support our work on a one-time basis.

:::

Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories

The Economist turned me on to a new report, Employee Wellbeing, Productivity, and Firm Performance by Christian Krekel (London School of Economics), George Ward (MIT Sloan) and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve (Saïd Business School, University of Oxford). As the Economist noted, many American businesspeople consider ‘stakeholder capitalism’ a veiled form of socialist mumbo-jumbo:

The assumption is that firms which focus on stakeholders will struggle to survive in the Darwinian world of multinational business.

It is easy to be cynical about some of the language used by those who argue that employees should be treated better. One obvious example is a book called “Humane Capital” by Vlatka Hlupic, which includes a foreword by the Dalai Lama and is dedicated, portentously, “to humanity”.

But there is a serious point hidden amid its grandiose statements. Too many companies operate a top-down “command and control” system, Ms Hlupic argues, when they would be better served by giving employees more freedom to make their own decisions.

However, hard-headed executives will only be won round by hard facts. A convincing case can be found in a recent paper by Christian Krekel, George Ward and Jan-Emmanuel de Neve. The study, based on data compiled by Gallup, a polling organisation, covers nearly 1.9m employees across 230 separate organisations in 73 countries.

The authors studied four potential measures of corporate performance: customer loyalty, employee productivity, profitability and staff turnover. They found that employee satisfaction had a substantial positive correlation with customer loyalty and a negative link with staff turnover. Furthermore, worker satisfaction was correlated with higher productivity and profitability.

Of course, correlation does not prove causality. It could be that working for a successful firm makes employees more contented, rather than the other way round. However, the authors cite studies of changes within individual firms and organisations which seem to show that improvements in employee morale precede gains in productivity, rather than the other way round.

I wonder about business leaders that would have thought otherwise. But this lines up with other research I’ve reported on recently regarding the enormous benefits of psychological safety to the organization.

I think it’s amusing when the Economist suggests that a company that puts employee wellbeing first — ‘In short, staff will be treated as people, not as mere accounting units’ — will see great returns, but still goes on to refer to workers as ‘assets’.

:::

The growth of U.S. tech job listings has slowed | Steve LeVine comments on a new Cognizant report:

Year-over-year growth in postings for occupations like data scientist, software engineer and computer scientist plunged to 9% last quarter, from 30% the first quarter, according to the latest Jobs of the Future index, produced by Cognizant and provided first to Axios.

Slow-down in tech land… is that a predictor of a recession?

:::

Meet ‘Chet.’ His Employer Knows What Time He Woke Up Today. | Elliot Bentley and Sarah Krouse, with Illustrations by Taylor Callery. Very dystopian.

Quote of the Day

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

| John Maynard Keynes

Elsewhere

Bulletproof Backpacks in Demand for Back-to-School Shopping | A growing number of companies are marketing them to parents who are desperate to protect their children from gunmen. | A sad sign of the times.

_________

Originally posted on Work Futures on Medium.

source: Raph Howald

Beacon NY — 2019–07–27 | The title for this edition is taken from the contribution from The Corporate Rebels, below.

:::

If you are receiving this you've probably signed up for the Work Futures Daily newsletter. You can sign up here for a free subscription. Support our work by becoming a sponsor, here. Or become a follower on Medium, here. Drop a few bucks in the hat, here, if you'd like to support our work on a one-time basis.

:::

Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories

The Debate Over How to Classify Gig Workers Is Missing the Bigger Picture| Orly Lobel unscrambles the lack of protections in the gig economy, and answers the question raised in the title of his piece [emphasis mine]:

The larger issue is how to modernize employment and labor protections to fit with the realities of work today. In employment and labor law, we should strive to get regulation just right: not so little as to leave workers unprotected, but not so much as to distort the market and create employment disincentives.

Local and state legislators should not only clarify and simplify the notoriously malleable classification tests, but also create categories of protection that are not based on employee status.

First, some rights should be expanded to all workers providing their services in the market, regardless of how they’re classified. For example, all workers who experience discrimination, are harassed, or witness corruption should be protected by law and have recourse when they take action.

Second, we need to create rules that are specific to platform gig workers. Because not all wage and hour laws can be applied seamlessly to platform work, Uber and Lyft drivers and others providing their services through digital platforms should receive minimum hourly rates that parallel minimum wage laws.

[…]

Third, we should provide access to welfare rights such as health care, unemployment insurance, and retirement funds for gig workers who aren’t linked to a single platform.

[…]

Fourth, before instituting rules that apply to everyone, we need to consider the different motivations behind why people go gig.

Yes, I buy into the model of an inflexible floor — wage, benefits, and labor rights protections — and a flexible ceiling — ranging from almost no gigging to full-time gigsters — with varying contractual relationships with the client companies. But the basis of justice in this area, as I discussed in The Starting Point and The Bottom Line for The Gig Economy, comes from a statement made by Bastian Lehman, the CEO of Postmates:

No competitive advantage should come at the expense of workers.

[from Work Futures Daily | To Govern Ourselves]

:::

What Makes Work Meaningful — Or Meaningless | Catherine Bailey and Adrian Madden researched the factors that make or break meaning at work. Most of their preconceptions were overturned:

We interviewed 135 people working in 10 very different occupations and asked them to tell us stories about incidents or times when they found their work to be meaningful and, conversely, times when they asked themselves, “What’s the point of doing this job?” We expected to find that meaningfulness would be similar to other work-related attitudes, such as engagement or commitment, in that it would arise purely in response to situations within the work environment. However, we found that, unlike these other attitudes, meaningfulness tended to be intensely personal and individual; it was often revealed to employees as they reflected on their work and its wider contribution to society in ways that mattered to them as individuals. People tended to speak of their work as meaningful in relation to thoughts or memories of significant family members such as parents or children, bridging the gap between work and the personal realm. We also expected meaningfulness to be a relatively enduring state of mind experienced by individuals toward their work; instead, our interviewees talked of unplanned or unexpected moments during which they found their work deeply meaningful.

We were anticipating that our data would show that the meaningfulness experienced by employees in relation to their work was clearly associated with actions taken by managers, such that, for example, transformational leaders would have followers who found their work meaningful, whereas transactional leaders would not. Instead, our research showed that quality of leadership received virtually no mention when people described meaningful moments at work, but poor management was the top destroyer of meaningfulness.

We also expected to find a clear link between the factors that drove up levels of meaningfulness and those that eroded them. Instead, we found that meaningfulness appeared to be driven up and decreased by different factors. Whereas our interviewees tended to find meaningfulness for themselves rather than it being mandated by their managers, we discovered that if employers want to destroy that sense of meaningfulness, that was far more easily achieved. The feeling of “Why am I bothering to do this?” strikes people the instant a meaningless moment arises, and it strikes people hard. If meaningfulness is a delicate flower that requires careful nurturing, think of someone trampling over that flower in a pair of steel-toed boots. Avoiding the destruction of meaning while nurturing an ecosystem generative of feelings of meaningfulness emerged as the key leadership challenge.

Reading this I was reminded of Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory, which I wrote about in What Drives Us?:

I found myself impressed by immensely practical insight of Frederick Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory, which is based on the notion that job satisfaction and dissatisfaction are not two ends of one dimension, but actually two independent factors. Job satisfaction is a function of the work that someone does, and that has the capacity to fulfill needs, like achievement, competency, status, personal worth, and self-realization. Job dissatisfaction is linked to unfavorable perceptions of working conditions, relationships with others (especially supervisors), company policies, and salary. Herzberg’s breakthrough is that these two factors must be measured and managed independently, and in parallel.

Here the link between Herzberg’s job satisfaction and people’s perception of the meaningfulness of their work seems fairly direct: in both cases, it is a deeply personal feeling. However, job dissatisfaction is a shared condition caused by bad management, as is the sense of work being meaningless.

No surprise that later in their analysis, Bailey and Madden make the same connection with Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory:

In the 1960s, Frederick Herzberg showed that the factors that give rise to a sense of job satisfaction are not the same as those that lead to feelings of dissatisfaction. It seems that something similar is true for meaningfulness. Our research shows that meaningfulness is largely something that individuals find for themselves in their work, but meaninglessness is something that organizations and leaders can actively cause. Clearly, the first challenge to building a satisfied workforce is to avoid the seven deadly sins that drive up levels of meaninglessness.

The seven deadly sins:

1. Disconnect people from their values.

2. Take your employees for granted.

3. Give people pointless work to do.

4. Treat people unfairly.

5. Override people’s better judgment.

6. Disconnect people from supportive relationships.

7. Put people at risk of physical or emotional harm.

The researchers provide a model for an ‘meaningfulness ecosystem’, which I don’t think is really an ecosystem but more like a model for thinking about avoiding meaninglessness work.

Go read the whole thing.

[from Work Futures Daily | Safety and Meaning]

:::

When Pioneering Companies Fail | The Corporate Rebels created a list of companies that pioneered innovative organizational models but ultimately returned to conventional management. A common theme is the departure of a CEO who animated the innovation. This is a topic I touched upon recently in What We Can Learn From Bill Gore about Emergent Leadership. James O’Toole looked into a great many of these companies and found the experiments seldom last very long:

Yet these virtuous practices seldom survived through one, or at most two, successions of company leadership. At some point — often just after a socially pioneering CEO retired, died, or was forced out of office, or the company was acquired — the CEO’s successors abandoned the very practices that had made the company both financially successful and publicly admired. In particular, investors at publicly traded companies have looked askance at such practices whenever earnings have dipped.

[from Work Futures Daily | Without Mistakes, No Poetry]

:::

Uber Lays Off 400 as Profitability Doubts Linger After I.P.O. | Kate Conger reports on a huge downsizing at Uber, particularly in marketing:

Uber said it laid off a third of its marketing team on Monday, or about 400 people, as the ride-hailing company tries to cut costs and streamline its operations after its initial public offering in May.

The cuts, which were also announced internally on Monday, are taking place in multiple Uber offices around the world, the company said. The marketing team had more than 1,200 people before the layoffs. Uber employs almost 25,000 people globally, nearly half of whom are based in the United States, according to recent regulatory filings.

Uber declined to comment further.

This is really the reason I am posting this story:

In an email on Monday to Uber’s marketing staff, which was reviewed by The New York Times, Ms. Hazelbaker said the 400 layoffs were taking place because the team had grown bloated and decision-making was unclear. The marketing team’s organizational charts ran to more than 388 pages, she said.

The org chart was 388 pages?

Somehow I doubt Uber is operating around self-organized, small teams, each dedicated to a single well-defined task. Cutting 400 won’t fix what’s wrong across a dysfunctional company of 25,000.

[from Work Futures Daily | Freedom Over Fear]

Quote of the Week

There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.

| Joy Harjo

Elsewhere

Some older posts I have resurrected this week.

The polarization around remote work comes as no surprise | How you feel about remote work depends on who you are | Stowe Boyd

:::

How to make groups more productive? | Add women. | Stowe Boyd

:::

Some Feedback About Feedback | New research digs into the fallacies about ‘open feedback’ | Stowe Boyd

:::

Nudge Units | The science of behavioral change | Stowe Boyd

originally published as Work Futures Weekly | Rising and Falling.

source: Daniil Silantev

Beacon NY — 2019–07–29 | The past week has been liberating, since I just decided to give everyone access to Work Futures Daily. Yes, I have abandoned the paywall, but I will be working on other ways to benefit.

:::

If you are receiving this you’ve probably signed up for the Work Futures Daily newsletter. You can sign up here for a free subscription. Support our work by becoming a sponsor, here. Or become a follower on Medium, here. Drop a few bucks in the hat, here, if you’d like to support our work on a one-time basis.

:::

Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories

Half of leaders face a ‘confidence crisis’ in their ability to lead | Valerie Bolden-Barrett delivers some really bad news:

Only 50% of employees have confidence that their leaders can drive their organizations forward into the future, a new Gartner survey revealed. But it turns out leaders aren’t confident in themselves, either; only half of the 2,800 leaders surveyed said they are “well-equipped to lead their organization in the future,” Gartner said.

But Bolden-Barett proceeds with some small-bore prescriptions about better training, or the ‘complementary leadership’ approach advocated by Gartner, where two not-so-strong managers prop each other up. Personally, that sounds like tying two rocks together and hoping they will then be able to float.

How about self-organizing? How about learning from companies with the highest levels of continuous innovation, and adopting an emergent organization model?

:::

Standard Cognition raises $35 million to bring cashierless experiences to more stores | Kyle Wiggers

Like Amazon Go, Standard Cognition adds items nabbed from a display or shelf to a running tab that’s automatically charged to shoppers’ accounts as they exit. The system accounts for mistakes, like when a customer puts back an item they’d initially considered purchasing, and it anonymizes data to minimize the risk of overzealous brands or retailers targeting people’s purchasing patterns.

It’s also capable of preventing shoplifting. Standard Cognition’s AI can recognize telltale signs of theft from behaviors like trajectory, gait, gaze, and speed, all of which it helpfully flags via text message for store attendants. Learning those behaviors wasn’t easy — the bulk of sample data came from 100 actors who shopped for “hours” in a mock setup — but the result is an accuracy rate that’s above 99%.

In September, Standard Cognition became the second company to open a cashierless store in San Francisco, following hot on the heels of Zippin in August. The 1,900-square-foot space at 1071 Market Street lacks a check-in gate — all you need to begin shopping is to check in using the Standard Checkout app — and features dozens of ceiling-mounted cameras, each wired to a networked appliance that performs inference. It’s stocked with snacks, personal care items, and cleaning supplies currently, with plans to expand its inventory over time.

The store serves as a sort of functioning showroom. Standard Cognition is using anonymized data from it to improve its algorithms, and to walk prospective retail partners through live demonstrations. Fisher claims that hundreds of retailers are evaluating the company’s technology and that several have inked deals, including two which are deploying in multiple locations with scheduled go-live dates in Q3 and Q4 of this year. Standard Cognition previously said it plans to roll out its platform in 100 stores a day by 2020.

Standard Cognition directly competes with Trigo Vision, which recently inked a deal with Israel supermarket chain Shufersal for 272 cashierless stores and is reportedly in partnership talks with Tesco, and Zippin, which last August became the first company to open a checkout-free store in San Francisco. That’s not to mention Pandora cofounder Will Glaser’s Grabango, which this year began piloting a “no-wait” brick-and-mortar payment experience at a Giant Eagle store. Amazon is the elephant in the room — its Amazon Go locations across the country employ sensors, AI, and smartphones to streamline retail flows — but even Microsoft is said to be working on cashierless store technology.

Autonomous retail is a lot closer than autonomous cars. A huge market to be disrupted. Will this accelerate consolidation in the retail industry? What are the impacts on the workforce? Huge. And not a word about that in this Venturebeat article.

I guess the depopulation of retail just taken as a given. At least no one is quoted saying that automation is going to increase jobs in retail, or that the retail employees now stocking shelves, ringing up purchases, or washing the floors are going to be freed up for ‘better ways to serve the customer’. Nope.

These stores will have functionally zero workers. The neutron-bombing of retail.

:::

The Problem with HR | Caitlin Flanagan wants to hold HR responsible for decades of workplace harassment:

For 30 years, ever since Anita Hill testified at Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, HR has been almost universally accepted as the mechanism by which employers attempt to prevent, police, and investigate sexual harassment. Even the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission directs Americans to their HR offices if they experience harassment. That the #MeToo movement kept turning up so many shocking stories at so many respected places of employment seemed to me to reflect a massive failure of human resources to do the job we have expected it to perform. Even Harvey Weinstein’s company, after all, had an HR department.

Flanagan attended the Workhuman conference for HR people, and was perplexed:

No one called for reforming or replacing HR. Just the opposite: The answer to the failures of HR, it seemed, was more HR.

The experience left me with a question: If HR is such a vital component of American business, its tentacles reaching deeply into many spheres of employees’ work lives, how did it miss the kind of sexual harassment at the center of the #MeToo movement?

In her research for the next year, she realized that HR was very good at dealing with sexual harassment, but not the way you might think. HR works for the company, not the employees, and serves ‘as the first line of defense against a sexual-harassment lawsuit’.

They are not on the side of the harassed.

A must read.

:::

The Debate Over How to Classify Gig Workers Is Missing the Bigger Picture| Orly Lobel unscrambles the lack of protections in the gig economy, and answers the question raised in the title of his piece [emphasis mine]:

The larger issue is how to modernize employment and labor protections to fit with the realities of work today. In employment and labor law, we should strive to get regulation just right: not so little as to leave workers unprotected, but not so much as to distort the market and create employment disincentives.

Local and state legislators should not only clarify and simplify the notoriously malleable classification tests, but also create categories of protection that are not based on employee status.

First, some rights should be expanded to all workers providing their services in the market, regardless of how they’re classified. For example, all workers who experience discrimination, are harassed, or witness corruption should be protected by law and have recourse when they take action.

Second, we need to create rules that are specific to platform gig workers. Because not all wage and hour laws can be applied seamlessly to platform work, Uber and Lyft drivers and others providing their services through digital platforms should receive minimum hourly rates that parallel minimum wage laws.

[…]

Third, we should provide access to welfare rights such as health care, unemployment insurance, and retirement funds for gig workers who aren’t linked to a single platform.

[…]

Fourth, before instituting rules that apply to everyone, we need to consider the different motivations behind why people go gig.

Yes, I buy into the model of an inflexible floor — wage, benefits, and labor rights protections — and a flexible ceiling — ranging from almost no gigging to full-time gigsters — with varying contractual relationships with the client companies. But the basis of justice in this area, as I discussed in The Starting Point and The Bottom Line for The Gig Economy, comes from a statement made by Bastian Lehman, the CEO of Postmates:

No competitive advantage should come at the expense of workers.

Quote of the Day

That government is best which teaches us to govern ourselves.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Elsewhere

On Heartland by Sarah Smarsh | Carrie La Seur, the novelist (The Home Place), reviews Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. The review is heart-wrenching, since La Seur, like Smarsh, grew up poor and managed to fight her way out through education and grit.

As with any book that strikes so close to home, I approached Heartland reluctantly. From the book jacket I knew that Smarsh was born into luck I didn’t have: her grandparents still owned the land. I grew up envying farm kids as we followed Dad’s lousy lateral job transfers across the plains of Montana, Nebraska, and North Dakota. They had that great luxury, space, and also roots, with 4-H animals, big pickups, and daddies the other men respected.

I also knew that this would be a tough book to criticize. Like the women’s code of conduct that says, Don’t create work for another woman, the rural working class code is Give a leg up wherever you can, with the flip side, Never sabotage one of our own. Working class people often take up each other’s slack and cover each other’s backs in ways that I later discovered are rare, even unheard of, among the professional class. God knows we all need a break, you say to yourself.

[…]

I, too, come from generations of teen moms and broke the cycle. I’ve scrubbed floors, slung pizza, and shoveled shit for minimum wage, cobbled together loans and Pell grants and scholarships to get through school, and grasped for an understanding of why it was so tough. One reality of living poor is little time or motivation to examine the data on why you can’t get a fair price for your grain or earn a living wage at the QuikTrip. You look for common sense answers to Smarsh’s academic question: “If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills and the reason wasn’t racism, what less articulated problem was afoot?”

What, indeed?

Also see Smarsh’s Liberal Blind Spots Are Hiding the Truth About ‘Trump Country’:

Elite pundits regularly misuse “working class” as shorthand for right-wing white guys wearing tool belts. My father, a white man and lifelong construction worker who labors alongside immigrants and people of color on job sites across the Midwest and South working for a Kansas-based general contractor owned by a woman, would never make such an error.

Most struggling whites I know live lives of quiet desperation mad at their white bosses, not resentment of their co-workers or neighbors of color. My dad’s previous three bosses were all white men he loathed for abuses of privilege and people.

It is unfair power that my father despises.

:::

Dropbox irks Mac users with annoying Dock icon, offers clueless support | Jon Brodkin mildly rebukes Dropbox for its poor support response to the recent release of a new Mac desktop app, which apparently does not allow users to opt out of it opening every time Dropbox starts up.

:::

The Stock-Buyback Swindle | Jerry Useem looks into an astonishing trend line:

Over the past nine years, corporations have put more money into their own stocks — an astonishing $3.8 trillion — than every other type of investor (individuals, mutual funds, pension funds, foreign investors) combined.

Certainly there must be something better to do with that money than hand it to shareholders. R&D? Raising salaries? Acquisitions? It looks like executives of these corporations are exploiting the modern trend of stock buybacks to line their own pockets, at the expense of everyone else.

On The Horizon

Minimum Viable Ecosystem | The MVE is the least complex ecosystem that allows participants to learn about a more complex, future ecosystem with the least effort

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Innovating in a VUCA World: The Six Contexts Model | How Haier innovates in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world

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Platforming | What Jeff Bezos Thinks | The virtuous cycle at the center of Amazon spiraled up into one of the world’s most highly valued companies

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The Starting Point and The Bottom Line for The Gig Economy | No competitive advantage should come at the expense of workers

source: Trust “Tru” Katsande

Beacon NY — 2019–08–01 | I have an abiding goal to complete Work Futures Daily before lunch, at the latest. In the perfect world, I’d rather complete today’s Daily yesterday. Recently, my workload has conspired against that.

:::

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:::

Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories

American Airlines violated NYC law by disciplining workers for taking sick days, city says | In case you wondered, yes, many companies really don’t want workers to take sick leave, even to the point of breaking labor laws:

The New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) has filed a lawsuit against American Airlines for allegedly retaliating against ground crew workers who used sick leave by assigning disciplinary points for each sick day taken. DCWP also alleged that American failed to pay sick leave at the required rate, failed to allow employees to use accrued sick leave, illegally required advance notice and medical documentation for leaves shorter than three days and failed to provide the required Notice of Employee Rights, violating the NYC Paid Safe and Sick Leave Law.

The NYC law requires employers with five or more employees who work more than 80 hours per calendar year in the city to provide paid safe and sick leave to employees. Employers with fewer than five employees must provide unpaid safe and sick leave.

DCWP is seeking approximately $375,000 in restitution for more than 750 ground crew workers (including agents, representatives, fleet service and mechanical employees), along with civil penalties.

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Supervisors Driven By Bottom Line Fail To Get Top Performance From Employees, Baylor Study Says | A new study by Matthew Quade, Benjamin McLarty and Julena Bonner, found bottom-line management is a bad idea:

Supervisors who focus only on profits to the exclusion of caring about other important outcomes, such as employee well-being or environmental or ethical concerns, turn out to be detrimental to employees. This results in relationships that are marked by distrust, dissatisfaction and lack of affection for the supervisor. And ultimately, that leads to employees who are less likely to complete tasks at a high level and less likely to go above and beyond the call of duty. | Matthew Quade

The researchers wrote,

Supervisors undoubtedly face heavy scrutiny for the performance levels of their employees, and as such they may tend to emphasize the need for employees to pursue bottom-line outcomes at the exclusion of other competing priorities, such as ethical practices, personal development or building social connections in the workplace. However, in doing so they may have to suffer the consequence of reduced employee respect, loyalty and even liking.

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When Pioneering Companies Fail | The Corporate Rebels created a list of companies that pioneered innovative organizational models but ultimately returned to conventional management. A common theme is the departure of a CEO who animated the innovation. This is a topic I touched upon recently in What We Can Learn From Bill Gore about Emergent Leadership. James O’Toole looked into a great many of these companies and found the experiments seldom last very long:

Yet these virtuous practices seldom survived through one, or at most two, successions of company leadership. At some point — often just after a socially pioneering CEO retired, died, or was forced out of office, or the company was acquired — the CEO’s successors abandoned the very practices that had made the company both financially successful and publicly admired. In particular, investors at publicly traded companies have looked askance at such practices whenever earnings have dipped.

:::

Getting full value from external talent | Theodore Kinni reports on new research from PwC, that 92% of companies are not managing contingent workers — freelancers, independent contractors, gig workers, and crowd workers — as effectively as they might. What are some of the barriers?

Making contingent workers feel welcome is a particular challenge in environments where they are literally sitting in cubicles adjacent to full-time employees — yet wear badges that signify outsider status. “People look down on you, even though you’re doing the same work,” one former Google contractor told Bloomberg. Another said, “You’re there, but you’re not there.” If you felt that way, what are the chances you’d be performing at your best?

Sometimes the systems in a company reinforce those feelings of otherness and isolation. Contingent workers are not eligible for the same benefits that accrue to full-time employees. They are not usually invited to all-hands meetings or off-sites aimed at building camaraderie. And they may not be given access to the same communications and data tools — Slack, proprietary databases, content management systems — that employees use. I often work collaboratively with employee teams in client companies, but I’m locked out of the systems and platforms, like Google Docs, on which they work together.

Stupidity.

Quote of the Day

There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.

| Joy Harjo

Elsewhere

Ikea surveyed thousands of people to design 6 homes of the future | Elizabeth Segran is awfully blasé about the factoids in this piece on Ikea:

What Ikea found was that our fundamental notions of home and family are experiencing a transformation. Plenty of demographic research suggests that major changes in where and how we live could be afoot: For instance, people who marry later may spend more years living with roommates. If couples delay having children — or choose to remain child-free — they may choose to live longer in smaller apartments. As people live longer, we might find more multigenerational homes, as parents, children, and grandchildren all cohabit under one roof.

In addition to those demographic shifts, Ikea’s research uncovered something else: Many of the people in its large study were not particularly satisfied with their domestic life. For one thing, they’re increasingly struggling to feel a sense of home in the places they live; 29% of people surveyed around the world felt more at home in other places than the space where they live every day. A full 35% of people in cities felt this way.

35% of people living in cities don’t feel ‘at home’ there?

I did some digging and found this piece, IKEA’s 2018 Life At Home Report Shows People Don’t Really Feel At Home In Their Homes, with more background:

The study revealed that almost 40 percent of Americans currently don’t feel a sense of belonging in their homes. And according to Ditta M. Oliker Ph.D. on Psychology Today, feeling like an outsider can lead to loneliness and isolation.

When it comes to having a home that gives you all the warm-and-fuzzy feels, IKEA noted that there are five emotional needs that contribute to the feeling of home: security — feeling safe and grounded; belonging — feeling like you’re welcome and accepted in your community; comfort — being content and at ease in your surroundings; privacy — feeling in control of how you disconnect and reflect; and ownership, which isn’t necessarily about owning your home but rather having a sense of control over your living space.

“For a large number of people, home just doesn’t feel like home any more. We discovered a new behavior, where people use a network of spaces and places, both within and beyond the four walls, as part of their homemaking experience,” Macro Insights Leader at IKEA Group Maria Jonsson said in a press release. “We believe that this expanded notion of life at home gives people more opportunities to create the feeling of home, no matter where or how they live.”

Just strikes me as odd, but I have spent most of the past 30 years living in just two houses, and in both cases, I was an owner.

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Platforming | Pulling The Business Inside Out | Stowe Boyd | The first step is the hardest step

…

Spotify | An Emergent Organization | Stowe Boyd | The mechanisms that enable self-management also balance freedom and control

originally posted on Work Futures.

source: Kristina V

Beacon NY — 2019–07–30 | I was sideswiped by a mass of work, so I dropped the ball on a planned monthly symposium for Work Futures readers. I will circulate a questionnaire in August, and boil down a few topics to kick around sometime in September. Apologies to those who had it on their calendars.

:::

Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories

William Julius Wilson published When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor in 1996 to great acclaim:

Wilson, one of our foremost authorities on race and poverty, challenges decades of liberal and conservative pieties to look squarely at the devastating effects that joblessness has had on our urban ghettos. Marshaling a vast array of data and the personal stories of hundreds of men and women, Wilson persuasively argues that problems endemic to America’s inner cities — from fatherless households to drugs and violent crime — stem directly from the disappearance of blue-collar jobs in the wake of a globalized economy. Wilson’s achievement is to portray this crisis as one that affects all Americans, and to propose solutions whose benefits would be felt across our society. At a time when welfare is ending and our country’s racial dialectic is more strained than ever, When Work Disappearsis a sane, courageous, and desperately important work.

Now, twenty-three years later, the social state of urban America is much better than it was. But Wilson’s central finding is being borne out in the nonmetropolitan sections of the country, as Paul Krugman points out:

Violent crime has fallen drastically since the early 1990s, especially in big cities. Our cities certainly aren’t perfectly safe, and some cities — like Baltimore — haven’t shared in the progress. But the social state of urban America is vastly better than it was.

On the other hand, the social state of rural America — white rural America — is deteriorating. To the extent that there really is such a thing as American carnage — and we are in fact seeing rising age-adjusted mortality and declining life expectancy — it’s concentrated among less-educated whites, especially in rural areas, who are suffering from a surge in “deaths of despair” from opioids, suicide and alcohol that has pushed their mortality rates above those of African-Americans.

And indicators of social collapse, like the percentage of prime-age men not working, have also surged in the small town and rural areas of the “eastern heartland,” with its mostly white population.

What this says to me is that the racists, and even those who claimed that there was some peculiar problem with black culture, were wrong, and the sociologist William Julius Wilson was right.

When social collapse seemed to be basically a problem for inner-city blacks, it was possible to argue that its roots lay in some unique cultural dysfunction, and quite a few commentators hinted — or in some cases declared openly — that there was something about being nonwhite that predisposed people toward antisocial behavior.

What Wilson argued, however, was that social dysfunction was an effect, not a cause. His work, culminating in the justly celebrated book “When Work Disappears,” made the case that declining job opportunities for urban workers, rather than some underlying cultural or racial disposition, explained the decline in prime-age employment, the decline of the traditional family, and more.

How might one test Wilson’s hypothesis? Well, you could destroy job opportunities for a number of white people, and see if they experienced a decline in propensity to work, stopped forming stable families, and so on. And sure enough, that’s exactly what has happened to parts of nonmetropolitan America effectively stranded by a changing economy.

I think it’s worth teeing this up during the Democratic Debates this week.

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Uber Lays Off 400 as Profitability Doubts Linger After I.P.O. | Kate Conger reports on a huge downsizing at Uber, particularly in marketing:

Uber said it laid off a third of its marketing team on Monday, or about 400 people, as the ride-hailing company tries to cut costs and streamline its operations after its initial public offering in May.

The cuts, which were also announced internally on Monday, are taking place in multiple Uber offices around the world, the company said. The marketing team had more than 1,200 people before the layoffs. Uber employs almost 25,000 people globally, nearly half of whom are based in the United States, according to recent regulatory filings.

Uber declined to comment further.

This is really the reason I am posting this story:

In an email on Monday to Uber’s marketing staff, which was reviewed by The New York Times, Ms. Hazelbaker said the 400 layoffs were taking place because the team had grown bloated and decision-making was unclear. The marketing team’s organizational charts ran to more than 388 pages, she said.

The org chart was 388 pages?

Somehow I doubt Uber is operating around self-organized, small teams, each dedicated to a single well-defined task. Cutting 400 won’t fix what’s wrong across a dysfunctional company of 25,000.

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How to Tame “Automation Sprawl” | Tom Davenport looks into the burgeoning market for enterprise robotic process automation, and alerts us to ‘automation sprawl’ caused by the proliferation of automation tools:

One indication of the expanding sprawl is that RPA and several other automation tools are now going after data-intensive decision tasks that are made within those structured workflows. They are either adding machine learning capabilities themselves or making it easy for customers to use other vendors for them. The RPA firm UIPath, for example, has a partnership with the automated machine learning vendor DataRobot. ServiceNow has built its own machine learning programs for making recommendations for IT users and for onboarding employees. It’s clear that everybody is moving into each other’s territory and rapidly adding new functionality — the classic definition of sprawl.

OK — now what should you do about it? One answer is to look for generalized automation tools that can perform a variety of task types. For many companies, that increasingly leads them toward RPA, often in combination with machine learning. Eventually, I expect, the common attributes of RPA — things like an easy-to-use graphical interface and a built-in rules engine — will characterize other types of automation as well.

I am launching a new open research project on enterprise automation, starting next week, so more to follow.

Quote of the Day

Continue to embrace the things that make you unique, even if it makes others uncomfortable. You are enough. And whenever you’re feeling doubt, whenever you want to give up, you must always remember to choose freedom over fear.

| Janelle Monáe

Elsewhere

New shoe company, Atoms, is the first to offer quarter-sized shoes:

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3M invents a new way to ship products | Katharine Schwab introduces us to 3M’s replacement for cardboard boxes:

The Minnesota-based materials company 3M is releasing a new type of packaging that requires no tape and no filler, and it can be customized to fit any object under 3 pounds — which 3M says accounts for about 60% of all items that are bought online and shipped. 3M claims that the material, called the Flex & Seal Shipping Roll, can reduce time spent packing, the amount of packaging materials, and the space needed to ship packages.

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Artificials Should Be Allowed to Worship | An Op-Ed from the future in which an artificial being makes the case for freedom of religion for non-humans.

source: Andreas Klassen

Beacon NY — 2019–08–05 | What? Another month?

:::

I got a Shingles vaccination Friday, which turns out to have a live virus involved. I was totally unwell Saturday, like suffering a flu. In a daze. It made me realize how long it has been since I really was ill. At least a year. One of the benefits of working from home. Anyway… all better now.

:::

If you are receiving this you’ve probably signed up for the Work Futures Daily newsletter. You can sign up here for a free subscription. Support our work by becoming a sponsor, here. Or become a follower on Medium, here. Drop a few bucks in the hat, here, if you’d like to support our work on a one-time basis.

:::

Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories

Yes, America Is Rigged Against Workers | Steven Greenhouse says of all advanced industrialized nations, the US treats its workers worst:

The United States is the only advanced industrial nation that doesn’t have national laws guaranteeing paid maternity leave. It is also the only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee workers any vacation, paid or unpaid, and the only highly developed country (other than South Korea) that doesn’t guarantee paid sick days. In contrast, the European Union’s 28 nations guarantee workers at least four weeks’ paid vacation.

Among the three dozen industrial countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has the lowest minimum wage as a percentage of the median wage — just 34 percent of the typical wage, compared with 62 percent in France and 54 percent in Britain. It also has the second-highest percentage of low-wage workersamong that group, exceeded only by Latvia.

All this means the United States suffers from what I call “anti-worker exceptionalism.”

Academics debate why American workers are in many ways worse off than their counterparts elsewhere, but there is overriding agreement on one reason: Labor unions are weaker in the United States than in other industrial nations. Just one in 16 private-sector American workers is in a union, largely because corporations are so adept and aggressive at beating back unionization. In no other industrial nation do corporations fight so hard to keep out unions.

The consequences are enormous, not only for wages and income inequality, but also for our politics and policymaking and for the many Americans who are mistreated at work.

And unionization is rising for that reason.

Go read it.

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The Truth about Anti-White Discrimination | Keith Payne reports on research that confirms systematic discrimination against non-white job applicants [emphasis mine]:

News stories are full of statistical evidence for disparities between black and whites, such as the fact that the average black family earns about half as much as the average white family, or that the unemployment rate for blacks is twice that for whites, or that the wealth of the average white family is ten times the wealth of the average black family. But this kind of evidence is like a political Rorschach test that looks very different to liberals and conservatives. What looks to liberals like evidence of discrimination looks to conservatives like evidence of racial disparities in hard work and responsible behavior.

[…]

The only kind of evidence that can hope to bridge this divide comes from experiments which directly measure discrimination — and these experiments have been done.

Consider an experiment by sociologist Devah Pager, who sent pairs of experimenters — one black and one white — to apply for 340 job ads in New York City. She gave them resumes doctored to have identical qualifications. She gave them scripts so that the applicants said the same things when handing in their applications. She even dressed them alike. She found that black applicants got half the call backs that white applicants got with the same qualifications.

[…]

These kinds of experiments are not ambiguous like statistics on disparities are. There were no differences in merit. Race was the cause. Real employers and landlords discriminated against blacks and in favor of whites, by a large margin.

This kind of direct evidence of discrimination against minorities have been found in other arenas. Professors are more likely to ignore emailsfrom students of color. Airbnb hosts are more likely to tell black renters that the listing has already been taken. Pager and her colleagues published a meta-analysis incorporating every field experiment on hiring since the first ones were carried out in the 1980’s. Across two dozen studies, black applicants were called back 36 percent less than whites with the same qualifications. Not a single study found a reliable anti-white bias. Most sobering of all, the rate of discrimination is the same today as in the 1980’s.

It’s not getting better, no matter what people say, and there is no proof whatsoever of a white bias. But, as Payne points out, these findings are unlikely to change minds who are inclined to believe that non-white discrimination is decreasing or discrimination against whites is increasing, or both.

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‘Shark Tank’ star Kevin O’Leary expects employees to work on vacation: ‘100%’ | Nicole Lyn Pesce writes yet another episode in the cult of overwork, this time regarding Kevin O’Leary of Shart Tank:

“Shark Tank” personality Kevin O’Leary told the CNBC site Make It that he works while on vacation, and he expects all of his employees to do the same. “I work every day. Every day is a vacation for me. I just happen to work all day long, because I like to work,” he said. “I don’t have a division anymore between vacation time and work. It’s always both.”

And he demands the same commitment from his workers.

“Do I expect my employees to respond to me when they’re on vacation? 100%,” he asked-and-answered. “My employees are all over the country and sometimes all over the world. They’re working 24/7, or they’re not, but they’re getting the job done, and that’s the way the economy is going to roll. You don’t have to 9-to-5 anything anymore. You have to get the job done.”

And who is benefitted by this lack of time off? Kevin O’Leary.

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Chase commits to AI after machines outperform humans in copywriting trials | Adrianne Pasquarelli reports on Persado’s AI copywriter, which Chase is using:

Chase says that ads created by Persado’s machine learning performed better than ads written by humans, with a higher percent of consumers clicking on them — more than twice as many in some cases. The difference can be as simple as what word choice resonates with consumers. One digital ad written by humans read, “Access cash from the equity in your home.” However, Persado’s version, “It’s true — You can unlock cash from the equity in your home,” performed better with customers.

[…]

Alex Vratskides, CEO and co-founder of Persado, says the service is just a natural evolution of technology improving work for humans, similar to what calculators did for researchers doing long-division in the 1950s. “To the creative community, the marketing community, this brings accountability and data-driven insight,” he says. “If you go to any marketing creative out there and you ask, ‘How did you come up with that, why did you use that word and not that word,’ they cannot actually answer. With Persado, there is a mathematical answer.”

‘Humans need not apply’.

Quote of the Day

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

| Peter Drucker

Elsewhere

It’s Bosses, All The Way Down | Conventional thinking about emergent leadership is all wrong. | Stowe Boyd

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Phonebooth-Sized Offices Debut in Japan for Telecommuting Masses | Kantaro Komiya on coworking pods:

Call it co-working, Japan style. People on the go will soon be able to find a quiet place to sit down and tap away on a laptop, thanks to phonebooth-sized offices that will be popping up at train stations, airports and skyscraper lobbies.

An enclosure of just 1.2 square meters (13 sq. feet), the soundproof Telecubewill have a seat, desk and power outlets. Mitsubishi Estate Co., together with office furniture maker Okamura Corp. video-conferencing software vendor V-Cube Inc., and Telecube Inc. plan to install 1,000 of the boxes by 2023.

:::

Scientists have made a contact lens that lets you zoom in by blinking |

Scientists from the University of California, San Diego, have created a new robotic soft contact lens that lets you zoom by blinking twice. The lens can be controlled by your eye movements.

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CEO Daily | Katerine Dunn mentions a new trend:

There’s been a rapid shift in the funeral industry: funerals are offering increasingly high-quality live streaming, a trend that’s already occurring in other kinds of family events, including weddings. But the biggest takeaway? This is a development in tech that families are usually extremely grateful for. It allows more friends and family to watch the broadcast, and it means the event can be rewatched easily, which can help with the grieving process. Wired

Originally posted on Work Futures on Medium.

source: Jordan Whitfield

Beacon NY — 2019–08–08| This is the last Work Futures Daily for a while. I am headed to Shelter Island next week for some semi-downtime, and while I plan to do some writing I won’t be Dailying. You’ll see a Weekly this weekend and I’ll return 21 August.

:::

If you are receiving this you’ve probably signed up for the Work Futures Daily newsletter. You can sign up here for a free subscription. Support our work by becoming a sponsor, here. Or become a follower on Medium, here. Drop a few bucks in the hat, here, if you’d like to support our work on a one-time basis.

:::

Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories

Google’s in a tough patch.

…

Google Employee Alleges Discrimination Against Pregnant Women in Viral Memo | Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Jason Koebler report:

A memo written by a Google employee that accuses the company of discriminating and retaliating against her for being pregnant has been seen by more than 10,000 employees at the internet giant, Motherboard has learned.

Last week, the woman posted the memo, titled “I’m Not Returning to Google After Maternity Leave, and Here is Why,” to an internal company message board for expecting and new mothers. The memo was reposted to other internal message boards and has since gone viral, multiple current Google employees in different parts of the company have told Motherboard. Since then, employees have been posting memes that have gathered thousands of likes. The memes were made in support of the woman on an internal message board called “Memegen.”

[…]

“I documented what my boss was saying and reached out to HR to ask for help in navigating the situation. It was shared that others had reported my manager behaving inappropriately and that feedback had already been given to her. I was told my comments might be shared directly with my boss, but not to worry because strong measures are in place at Google to prevent retaliation,” she wrote. “Almost immediately upon my discussions with HR, my manager’s demeanor towards me changed, and drastically. I endured months of angry chats and emails, vetoed projects, her ignoring me during in-person encounters, and public shaming.”

On her last days before taking maternity leave, she was told she did not have a management job on return, and was encouraged to look for other jobs within Google.

…

Senators Urge Google to Give Temporary Workers Full-Time Status | Daisuke Wakabayashi relates the push by US Senators to get Google to drop its two-tier scheme:

A group of Democratic senators has demanded in a letter sent to Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, that the internet giant convert its more than 120,000 temporary and contract workers to full-time employees.

The letter, written by Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, also urged Google to stop its “anti-worker practices” and treat everyone at the company equally.

“Making these changes to your company’s employment practices will ensure equal treatment of all Google workers and put an end to the two-tier employment structure you have perpetuated,” Mr. Brown wrote. Among the 10 senators who signed were three running for president: Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

As of March, Google had more temporary workers than full-time employees — 121,000 temps and contractors and 102,000 full-timers, according to company data viewed by The New York Times.

The senators’ letter, which was sent last month, cites a May article by The Times that explained how Google had created a shadow work force of temps, contractors and other contingent workers brought in through staffing companies.

The senators pushed for a number of changes to how the company treats temps and contractors, including moving them to full-time status after six months as well as equalizing their wages and benefits with permanent staff.

While many of the temps and contractors sit in the same offices as Google employees and often do similar work, they usually make less money, have significantly worse benefit plans and do not enjoy the same rights.

…

Oh, and Trump has turned his baleful gaze on Google, too.

:::

Why won’t out-of-work men do ‘women’s work’? | I wrote this a few years ago as a response to an article by Susan Chira, and I summarized:

Men displaced from manufacturing and other traditionally male jobs won’t move into heath care, teaching, or administration, traditionally female jobs.

Chira reported:

Ofer Sharone, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has studied middle-aged white-collar professionals who have lost their jobs. He found that some men who might have been willing to consider lower-paid jobs in typically feminine fields encountered resistance from their wives, who urged them to keep looking.

[…]

Men can also face resistance from their female peers. Jason Mott, an assistant professor of nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, said some of his male students were teased by their female classmates. “They feel they need to really express their manhood, stressing the athletics they take part in,” he said.

Nursing offers a perplexing case study. In theory, nursing should appeal to men because it pays fairly good wages and is seen as a profession with a defined skill set. Yet just 10 percent of nurses are men, despite “Are You Man Enough … to Be a Nurse?” posters and other efforts to enlist men.

The hope is to focus on millennials who may be less bound by notions of traditional masculinity, said Brent MacWilliams, president of the American Assembly for Men in Nursing and a former commercial fisherman who is now an associate professor of nursing at Wisconsin-Oshkosh. He has seen more men apply to nursing schools, but he acknowledges his group will fall short of its goal of 20 percent male nurses by 2020.

:::

Another story I am pulling from the mothballs, and which is still relevant:

Poking in the Shadows: What about ‘Hard Work’? | We have to stop treating blue-collar work as an edge case

The great majority of the time, in the discourse about the future of work, we focus almost exclusively on the full-time managerial/professional/creative class, and exclude other groups from consideration, except as numbers in spreadsheets. So, freelance professionals and creatives — a growing population, perhaps 25% or more of the working population — are treated as an edge case, or as if they were indistinguishable from their full-time colleagues.

But the biggest edge case of all may be the working class, who are often involved in what I have called ‘hard work’ in the past: physical labor, like carpenters hammering nails, health care aides lifting patients from one bed to another, assembly line workers installing dashboards in a car factory, or waiters running meals from the kitchen to the front of house. Some of their jobs involve cognitive skills, similar to the ‘soft work’ of knowledge workers tapping their keyboards, but they may do their thinking standing up, with tools other than keyboards in their hands. They are the janitors cleaning the marble floors in the lobby when you come early to work, the security guards checking your badge at the elevators, and the folks wheeling in the sandwiches for a working lunch.

And much of their work is routine, which is a stark contrast to the trends for ‘soft workers’, where a premium is placed on creativity (at least conceptually), self-expression and innovation: the earmarks of ‘disruption’. This may put ‘hard workers’ at odds with the prevailing norms of today’s business culture.

Quote of the Day

Radical inclusivity means that people from different communities, backgrounds and ideological traditions will do their jobs differently and will bring new sensibilities, commitments and understanding with them when they sit at the tables of power.

| Barbara Ransby, ‘The Squad’ Is the Future of the Democratic Party

The same dynamic is likely for business, too. Going forward, we should expect people to act as ‘defiant and unapologetic voices of the communities that produced them’, not just additional voices in the choir, singing the same old tunes, and simply ‘adding color to the room’.

Elsewhere

Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns | Closing famed Fort Detrick? Sounds like the opening scens of a terrifying bio-apocalypse movie.

Safety concerns at a prominent military germ lab have led the government to shut down research involving dangerous microbes like the Ebola virus.

“Research is currently on hold,” the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, in Fort Detrick, Md., said in a statement on Friday. The shutdown is likely to last months, Caree Vander Linden, a spokeswoman, said in an interview.

The statement said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided to issue a “cease and desist order” last month to halt the research at Fort Detrick because the center did not have “sufficient systems in place to decontaminate wastewater” from its highest-security labs.

But there has been no threat to public health, no injuries to employees and no leaks of dangerous material outside the laboratory, Ms. Vander Linden said.

source: Frantisek Duris

Beacon NY — 2019–07–30 | I confess I am amassing a few days of Work Futures Daily on Sunday afternoon so that I can avoid distractions this coming week. Staring a new project on August first, and I need to get into some deep work for a few days.

It wasn’t too hard to do, because I have found a lot of great research to absorb.

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Stories

The five keys to a successful Google team | Julia Rozovsky boils down the results of a two-year study at Google to determine ‘what makes a Google team effective’. The expectation was that they’d find some skills mix that effective teams shared. And?

We were dead wrong. Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions. So much for that magical algorithm.

We learned that there are five key dynamics that set successful teams apart from other teams at Google:

1/ Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?

2/ Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?

3/ Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?

4/ Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?

5/ Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?

So it is the social dimension — not the technical — that determines team effectiveness. Most importantly, psychological safety was the most important factor:

Psychological safety was far and away the most important of the five dynamics we found — it’s the underpinning of the other four. How could that be? Taking a risk around your team members seems simple. But remember the last time you were working on a project. Did you feel like you could ask what the goal was without the risk of sounding like you’re the only one out of the loop? Or did you opt for continuing without clarifying anything, in order to avoid being perceived as someone who is unaware?

Turns out, we’re all reluctant to engage in behaviors that could negatively influence how others perceive our competence, awareness, and positivity. Although this kind of self-protection is a natural strategy in the workplace, it is detrimental to effective teamwork. On the flip side, the safer team members feel with one another, the more likely they are to admit mistakes, to partner, and to take on new roles. And it affects pretty much every important dimension we look at for employees. Individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they’re more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re rated as effective twice as often by executives.

And, since it’s Google, they built a tool — gTeams exercise — to pulse check teams on the five factors.

But the big takeaway is that we are approaching team formation wrong, looking to fit skills together like a jigsaw puzzle, when the real issue is creating a safe context.

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What Makes Work Meaningful — Or Meaningless | Catherine Bailey and Adrian Madden researched the factors that make or break meaning at work. Most of their preconceptions were overturned:

We interviewed 135 people working in 10 very different occupations and asked them to tell us stories about incidents or times when they found their work to be meaningful and, conversely, times when they asked themselves, “What’s the point of doing this job?” We expected to find that meaningfulness would be similar to other work-related attitudes, such as engagement or commitment, in that it would arise purely in response to situations within the work environment. However, we found that, unlike these other attitudes, meaningfulness tended to be intensely personal and individual; it was often revealed to employees as they reflected on their work and its wider contribution to society in ways that mattered to them as individuals. People tended to speak of their work as meaningful in relation to thoughts or memories of significant family members such as parents or children, bridging the gap between work and the personal realm. We also expected meaningfulness to be a relatively enduring state of mind experienced by individuals toward their work; instead, our interviewees talked of unplanned or unexpected moments during which they found their work deeply meaningful.

We were anticipating that our data would show that the meaningfulness experienced by employees in relation to their work was clearly associated with actions taken by managers, such that, for example, transformational leaders would have followers who found their work meaningful, whereas transactional leaders would not. Instead, our research showed that quality of leadership received virtually no mention when people described meaningful moments at work, but poor management was the top destroyer of meaningfulness.

We also expected to find a clear link between the factors that drove up levels of meaningfulness and those that eroded them. Instead, we found that meaningfulness appeared to be driven up and decreased by different factors. Whereas our interviewees tended to find meaningfulness for themselves rather than it being mandated by their managers, we discovered that if employers want to destroy that sense of meaningfulness, that was far more easily achieved. The feeling of “Why am I bothering to do this?” strikes people the instant a meaningless moment arises, and it strikes people hard. If meaningfulness is a delicate flower that requires careful nurturing, think of someone trampling over that flower in a pair of steel-toed boots. Avoiding the destruction of meaning while nurturing an ecosystem generative of feelings of meaningfulness emerged as the key leadership challenge.

Reading this I was reminded of Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory, which I wrote about in What Drives Us?:

I found myself impressed by immensely practical insight of Frederick Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory, which is based on the notion that job satisfaction and dissatisfaction are not two ends of one dimension, but actually two independent factors. Job satisfaction is a function of the work that someone does, and that has the capacity to fulfill needs, like achievement, competency, status, personal worth, and self-realization. Job dissatisfaction is linked to unfavorable perceptions of working conditions, relationships with others (especially supervisors), company policies, and salary. Herzberg’s breakthrough is that these two factors must be measured and managed independently, and in parallel.

Here the link between Herzberg’s job satisfaction and people’s perception of the meaningfulness of their work seems fairly direct: in both cases, it is a deeply personal feeling. However, job dissatisfaction is a shared condition caused by bad management, as is the sense of work being meaningless.

No surprise that later in their analysis, Bailey and Madden make the same connection with Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory:

In the 1960s, Frederick Herzberg showed that the factors that give rise to a sense of job satisfaction are not the same as those that lead to feelings of dissatisfaction. It seems that something similar is true for meaningfulness. Our research shows that meaningfulness is largely something that individuals find for themselves in their work, but meaninglessness is something that organizations and leaders can actively cause. Clearly, the first challenge to building a satisfied workforce is to avoid the seven deadly sins that drive up levels of meaninglessness.

The seven deadly sins:

1. Disconnect people from their values.

2. Take your employees for granted.

3. Give people pointless work to do.

4. Treat people unfairly.

5. Override people’s better judgment.

6. Disconnect people from supportive relationships.

7. Put people at risk of physical or emotional harm.

The researchers provide a model for an ‘meaningfulness ecosystem’, which I don’t think is really an ecosystem but more like a model for thinking about avoiding meaninglessness work.

Go read the whole thing.

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The 101 people, ideas and things changing how we work today | BBC Worklife collated a great list, including these, which are just the A’s:

Adaptability quotient In an ever-changing work environment, ‘AQ’, rather than IQ, might become an increasingly significant marker of success.

Algorithmic justice More machines than ever can recognise us, but they inadvertently discriminate on race, gender and more. People like Joy Buolamwini are trying to fix these built-in biases.

Anti-distraction apps For better or worse, the internet is an attention-sapping platform. Perhaps an app that blocks, well, almost everything can help you focus.

Autocomplete We’re starting to trust AI systems to write our emails for us. Is this time-saving tool changing how we communicate?

Automated hiring — and firing AI can screen your job application — the question is whether it should also be allowed to scan your social media, analyse your facial expressions and even fire you

Oh, and check out ‘globotics’ and ‘ghost work’. I am a big fan of ‘microbreaks’.

Quote of the Day

The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely.

Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

Elsewhere

Ex-Corporate Lawyer’s Idea: Rein In ‘Sociopaths’ in the Boardroom | Andrew Ross Serkin profiles Jamie Gamble, a retired corporate lawyer, who has come to realize that corporate executives are more-or-less required — by law — to act as sociopaths:

Mr. Gamble has had an epiphany since retiring nearly a decade ago that is so damning of his former life that it is likely to give his ex-partners a case of agita.

He has concluded that corporate executives — the people who hired him and that his firm sought to protect — “are legally obligated to act like sociopaths.”

He made that determination about five years ago when he started to work on a novel that recently inspired him to compose a provocative essay elucidating what he calls, based on his firsthand experience, a “complex network of horribles” in corporate America. He recently shared a draft with a small number of colleagues, seeking their comments.

“The corporate entity is obligated to care only about itself and to define what is good as what makes it more money,” he writes in the essay. “Pretty close to a textbook case of antisocial personality disorder. And corporate persons are the most powerful people in our world.”

Mr. Gamble’s change of heart will not exactly come as a revelation to the increasingly vocal group of investors, politicians and even chief executives who are pushing companies to be more responsible and to focus on metrics like environmental sustainability and corporate governance rather than on simply maximizing profits.

But in the world of corporate lawyers — and the board governance experts among whom it is quietly getting attention — Mr. Gamble’s essay may be a watershed.

He doesn’t blame his former clients, exactly. He blames the law.

His solution? Every company should

adopt a binding set of ethical rules, approved by stockholders and addressing the key ethical dimensions of corporate life

which would bind the executives to meeting those rules. He doesn’t offer some sterling example of such rules, note.

Serkin points out that this is not unlike the aims of Elizabeth Warren’s idea of a federal charter for corporations [see Failed Expectations], but Gamble’s plan keeps this ethics exercise in private hands. I’m with Warren on this one.

source: Chang Duong

Shelter Island NY — 2019–08–18| Perhaps weekly is the wrong word, but here are the highlights of the last few Work Futures Dailies I sent out.

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The quote of the week is by John Maynard Keynes, and from which I’ve drawn the title of today’s weekly. I almost entitled this issue ‘Bulletproof Backpacks’ but that was a step too far, even for me.

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Stories

Poking in the Shadows: What about ‘Hard Work’? | We have to stop treating blue-collar work as an edge case

The great majority of the time, in the discourse about the future of work, we focus almost exclusively on the full-time managerial/professional/creative class, and exclude other groups from consideration, except as numbers in spreadsheets. So, freelance professionals and creatives — a growing population, perhaps 25% or more of the working population — are treated as an edge case, or as if they were indistinguishable from their full-time colleagues.

But the biggest edge case of all may be the working class, who are often involved in what I have called ‘hard work’ in the past: physical labor, like carpenters hammering nails, health care aides lifting patients from one bed to another, assembly line workers installing dashboards in a car factory, or waiters running meals from the kitchen to the front of house. Some of their jobs involve cognitive skills, similar to the ‘soft work’ of knowledge workers tapping their keyboards, but they may do their thinking standing up, with tools other than keyboards in their hands. They are the janitors cleaning the marble floors in the lobby when you come early to work, the security guards checking your badge at the elevators, and the folks wheeling in the sandwiches for a working lunch.

And much of their work is routine, which is a stark contrast to the trends for ‘soft workers’, where a premium is placed on creativity (at least conceptually), self-expression and innovation: the earmarks of ‘disruption’. This may put ‘hard workers’ at odds with the prevailing norms of today’s business culture.

[from Work Futures Daily | Radical Inclusivity]

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The Economist turned me on to a new report, Employee Wellbeing, Productivity, and Firm Performance by Christian Krekel (London School of Economics), George Ward (MIT Sloan) and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve (Saïd Business School, University of Oxford). As the Economist noted, many American businesspeople consider ‘stakeholder capitalism’ a veiled form of socialist mumbo-jumbo:

The assumption is that firms which focus on stakeholders will struggle to survive in the Darwinian world of multinational business.

It is easy to be cynical about some of the language used by those who argue that employees should be treated better. One obvious example is a book called “Humane Capital” by Vlatka Hlupic, which includes a foreword by the Dalai Lama and is dedicated, portentously, “to humanity”.

But there is a serious point hidden amid its grandiose statements. Too many companies operate a top-down “command and control” system, Ms Hlupic argues, when they would be better served by giving employees more freedom to make their own decisions.

However, hard-headed executives will only be won round by hard facts. A convincing case can be found in a recent paper by Christian Krekel, George Ward and Jan-Emmanuel de Neve. The study, based on data compiled by Gallup, a polling organisation, covers nearly 1.9m employees across 230 separate organisations in 73 countries.

The authors studied four potential measures of corporate performance: customer loyalty, employee productivity, profitability and staff turnover. They found that employee satisfaction had a substantial positive correlation with customer loyalty and a negative link with staff turnover. Furthermore, worker satisfaction was correlated with higher productivity and profitability.

Of course, correlation does not prove causality. It could be that working for a successful firm makes employees more contented, rather than the other way round. However, the authors cite studies of changes within individual firms and organisations which seem to show that improvements in employee morale precede gains in productivity, rather than the other way round.

I wonder about business leaders that would have thought otherwise. But this lines up with other research I’ve reported on recently regarding the enormous benefits of psychological safety to the organization.

I think it’s amusing when the Economist suggests that a company that puts employee wellbeing first — ‘In short, staff will be treated as people, not as mere accounting units’ — will see great returns, but still goes on to refer to workers as ‘assets’.

[from Work Futures Daily | Not Mere Accounting Units]

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Yes, America Is Rigged Against Workers | Steven Greenhouse says of all advanced industrialized nations, the US treats its workers worst:

The United States is the only advanced industrial nation that doesn’t have national laws guaranteeing paid maternity leave. It is also the only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee workers any vacation, paid or unpaid, and the only highly developed country (other than South Korea) that doesn’t guarantee paid sick days. In contrast, the European Union’s 28 nations guarantee workers at least four weeks’ paid vacation.

Among the three dozen industrial countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has the lowest minimum wage as a percentage of the median wage — just 34 percent of the typical wage, compared with 62 percent in France and 54 percent in Britain. It also has the second-highest percentage of low-wage workersamong that group, exceeded only by Latvia.

All this means the United States suffers from what I call “anti-worker exceptionalism.”

Academics debate why American workers are in many ways worse off than their counterparts elsewhere, but there is overriding agreement on one reason: Labor unions are weaker in the United States than in other industrial nations. Just one in 16 private-sector American workers is in a union, largely because corporations are so adept and aggressive at beating back unionization. In no other industrial nation do corporations fight so hard to keep out unions.

The consequences are enormous, not only for wages and income inequality, but also for our politics and policymaking and for the many Americans who are mistreated at work.

And unionization is rising for that reason.

Go read it.

Quote of the Week

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

| John Maynard Keynes

Elsewhere

Bulletproof Backpacks in Demand for Back-to-School Shopping | A growing number of companies are marketing them to parents who are desperate to protect their children from gunmen. | A sad sign of the times.

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It’s Bosses, All The Way Down | Conventional thinking about emergent leadership is all wrong. | Stowe Boyd

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Originally posted on Work Futures on Medium.

Beacon NY — 2019–08–04 | Back in Beacon. It hasn’t changed much in a week, but I have (see below).

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Reading The Mushroom At The End Of The World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Perhaps the best work in ecology economics I’ve encountered. I will be writing about it in depth once I’ve finished… although ‘finished’ is probably the wrong word. Oh, and you’ll learn a lot about the matsutake mushroom.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Tsing wrote:

This book is not a critique of the dreams of modernization and progress that offered a vision of stability in the twentieth century; many analysts before me have dissected those dreams. Instead, I address the imaginative challenges of living without those handrails, which once made us think we knew, collectively, where we were going.

Here’s what Ursula Le Guin said about the work:

Scientists and artists know that the way to handle an immense topic is often through close attention to a small aspect of it, revealing the whole through the part. In the shape of a finch’s beak we can see all of evolution. So through close, indeed loving, attention to a certain fascinating mushroom, the matsutake, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing discusses how the whole immense crisis of ecology came about and why it continues. Critical of simplistic reductionism, she offers clear analysis, and in place of panicked reaction considers possibilities of rational, humane, resourceful behavior. In a situation where urgency and enormity can overwhelm the mind, she gives us a real way to think about it. I’m very grateful to have this book as a guide through the coming years.

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Stories

Leading US bosses drop shareholder-first principle | Simon Goodley and Rupert Neate report on a new wrinkle in the business sector, indicated by the Business Roundtable adopting a new mantra for business:

The bosses of 181 of the US’s biggest companies have changed the official definition of “the purpose of a corporation” from making the most money possible for shareholders to “improving our society” by also looking out for employees, caring for the environment and dealing ethically.

The radical change to the mantra of corporate America comes after decades of following Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman’s philosophy, which dates from 1970, that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits”.

Big business bosses signing up to the change by the influential Business Roundtable (BRT) lobby group include Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon (and the world’s richest person), the Apple boss, Tim Cook, and Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of Wall Street bank JPMorgan.

The change follows mounting public and political anger at the yawning gap between rich and poor in the US and across the world. Many of the leading contenders for the 2020 Democratic party presidential nomination, including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, have attacked the rocketing pay of business leaders and called for a rethink about the purpose of business together with better pay and protections for workers.

The piece takes a strange angle, noting the salary of every CEO quoted, as opposed to, say, their age. The authors are stressing that these CEOs are all massively overpayed as an aspect of the pay inequality baked into the world’s economy.

In Shareholder Value Is No Longer Everything, Top C.E.O.s Say, David Gelles and David Yaffe-Bellany get to the heart of things, focusing attention on what the CEOs did not get into:

There was no mention at the Roundtable of curbing executive compensation, a lightning-rod topic when the highest-paid 100 chief executives make 254 times the salary of an employee receiving the median pay at their company. And hardly a week goes by without a major company getting drawn into a contentious political debate. As consumers and employees hold companies to higher ethical standards, big brands increasingly have to defend their positions on worker pay, guns, immigration, President Trump and more.

“They’re responding to something in the zeitgeist,” said Nancy Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School. “They perceive that business as usual is no longer acceptable. It’s an open question whether any of these companies will change the way they do business.”

The Business Roundtable did not provide specifics on how it would carry out its newly stated ideals, offering more of a mission statement than a plan of action. But the companies pledged to compensate employees fairly and provide “important benefits,” as well as training and education. They also vowed to “protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses” and “foster diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect.”

It’s a smokescreen, of a specific new sort. Let’s call it stakewashing: widening the list of stakeholders in business to include employees and the community, pledging to protect the environment, be more diverse, etc. etc., while actually not changing a thing, operationally. Let’s see if the stock buybacks end, or if they commit to higher salaries.

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What Wellness Programs Don’t Do for Workers | Charlotte Lieberman debunks the conventional thinking about wellness programs:

A recent study examining over 30,000 employees at a U.S. warehouse found that those exposed to a workplace wellness program reported no significant differences in absenteeism, healthcare spending, or job performance than those who were not — though they did report greater rates of some positive health behaviors, like engaging in regular exercise.

In fact, another recent study suggests that corporate wellness offerings may resonate more with already-healthy employees, and even alienate those who are dealing with health issues in the first place, mental or physical. Consider that 97% of large American companies (5,000+) offer employee assistance programs (EAPs) to workers seeking support from a mental health professional. Given the climbing prevalence of mental health issues in the U.S., you might assume employees are putting EAP benefits to good use. However, a recent EAP industry trends report shows that only 6.9% of people actually use them.

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How Women Can Escape the Likability Trap | Joan Williams summarizes how much harder it is for women in business:

In their study of female entrepreneurs, the social scientists Matthew Lee and Laura Huang found that venture capitalists were more likely to fund companies led by women if those companies were presented as having a social impact. This provides a “cover” that helps women overcome the perceived mismatch between the stereotypes of the good, community-focused woman and the hard-driving entrepreneur.

Other research finds that women make a similar finesse while negotiating. Women who negotiate as hard as men do tend to be disliked as overly demanding. So they use “softeners” in conversation. (“It wasn’t clear to me whether this salary offer represents the top of the pay range.”) When Sheryl Sandberg negotiated for what no doubt was an outlandishly high compensation package at Facebook, she told Mark Zuckerberg: “Of course you realize that you’re hiring me to run your deal teams, so you want me to be a good negotiator. This is the only time you and I will ever be on opposite sides of the table.” She turned a salary negotiation (competitive and ambitious) into a touching testimony of team loyalty.

Isn’t this all a bit revolting? Here’s what works for men negotiating for a higher salary: I have another offer, and I need you to match it. Why should women have to do something different?

They shouldn’t.

The kicker:

This is all a lot of hard work, and it’s work that men don’t have to do. Men, to be successful, just need to master and display masculine-coded traits; women, to be successful, need to master both those and some version of feminine-coded traits that do not undercut their perceived competence or authenticity. That’s a lot trickier.

Quote of the Day

An effective organization is a community of human beings, not a collection of human resources.

| Henry Mintzberg

Elsewhere

U.S. Steel plans to lay off hundreds of workers in Michigan | Uh-oh. Trumponomics.

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The Rise of the Virtual Restaurant | A lot of players in the biggest trend in food: ghost kitchens.

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Ride Sharing Adds to the Crush of Traffic at Airports | Ride-hailing cars are forcing airports to rethink staging areas for picking up and dropping off passengers.

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Originally published on Work Futures on Medium.

source: Patrick Tomasso

Beacon NY 2019–08–21 | The stakewashing in the press these days is wearing me down. I am feeling decidedly left of socialist, as a result.

Stories

Tom Wilson, in Save Capitalism by Paying People More, appears to be embracing an agenda of corporate generosity, saying that companies should create more high-paying jobs. But this is just more stakewashing, since he doesn’t actually commit to raising wages. If you don’t know Wilson is the chairman, chief executive, and president of the Allstate Corporation and chairman of the executive committee of the United States Chamber of Commerce, which makes him pretty much the archangel of capitalism in the US, today. But in this piece, he wags his finger at corporate boards who aren’t focused on paying workers more, sort of:

American businesses prosper by asking tough questions, creating specific goals and executing plans. This must now be applied to creating higher-paying jobs.

But the other end of that equation would be closing the gap in executive compensation, where CEOs are making 200X what the rank and file are paid. Wilson has nothing to say about that.

But I love the anecdote about automation he shares:

I heard a story about Walter Reuther, the legendary union leader, walking through a Ford Motor plant in Cleveland that was becoming mechanized. A Ford official pointed to some new machines and asked him, “How are you going to collect union dues from these guys?” Reuther thought for a moment and responded, “How are you going to get them to buy Fords?”

I doubt that Wilson realizes that he sounds like a Saturday Night Live skit about the cluelessness of corporate leaders, Consider this snippet:

According to a 2018 Gallup poll, less than half of young Americans today support capitalism. This reflects the fact that business is not fully meeting society’s expectations: serving customers, making a profit, creating jobs and improving communities. Businesses are serving customers well and making good profits. But there is not enough focus on creating jobs that provide a living wage.

D’uh. How about making a stronger statement? Half of young people have wised up to the fact that capitalism is a con game, rigged to create capital out of appropriating materials from the commons — oil, minerals, water, the highways, the education of workers — and siphoning off the value created by people’s underpaid work, all applied to creating more capital for the shareholders.

Capitalism ‘works’, since the capital amassed leads to power that can be applied to controlling political parties, social movements, and politicians, and getting your screed published on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. The threat of automation is just an additional wrinkle, another way for capitalism to extract value magically from the realm of our everyday lives into the machinery of extraction.

Yes, they will automate the factories so there will be zero workers, if they can, and only later will they ask ‘who will buy the cars?’.

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The ‘Overqualified’ Trap Can Hit You at Any Time | Sue Shellenbarger looks into a strange status: being considered overqualified.

Few obstacles are more perplexing for job seekers than being told you’re overqualified. The problem can crop up anytime, even early in applicants’ careers, and often when they least expect it. Trying to overcome hirers’ misgivings can feel like shadowboxing with a ghost. New research lends insight into some of the quirky and often counterintuitive reasons managers decide somebody is just too good for the job — reasons applicants can sometimes overcome with forethought and skillful communication.

[…]

Dr. [Oliver] Hahl and several colleagues tested hiring managers’ willingness to make an offer to two candidates for a corporate finance job. Both had elite-college degrees and worked at comparable employers. One candidate had a stellar record, heading a 10-person team financing $1.5 billion transactions. The other led a much smaller team doing deals one-tenth the size.

The managers were more likely to make an offer to the candidate with the less impressive record, according to a study published in March and co-led by Dr. Hahl, Roman Galperin, an associate professor of management at Johns Hopkins University, and Adina Sterling, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University. The managers assumed the candidate with the stellar résumé wouldn’t be as committed to the company or stick with the job as long as the other applicant, the researchers found.

How to break the trap?

* Explain up front why you’re applying for a position that seems beneath you.

* Research the job in depth so you can describe how it matches your experience.

* Be consistent in explaining your reasons for applying throughout all interviews for the job.

* Show openness and flexibility by talking about things you want to learn.

* Line up references who will vouch for your commitment.

* Network with contacts who also know insiders at the target company.

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This is how your bad boss is affecting your health | Stephanie Vozza looks into work stress:

If you haven’t had a vacation yet this year, get one on the books right now. A study published in the Journal of Nutrition, Health & Aging found that skipping vacations is directly related to your health. “One of the most startling findings from the study was that participants who took less than three weeks of annual vacation had a 37% higher risk of dying than those who took more than three weeks,” says [Andrea] Goeglein [Author of Don’t Die With Vacation Time On The Books].

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Only 23% of people who quit their jobs regret it.

Quote of the Day

Ars longa, vita brevis.

| Hippocrates (Art is long, life is short.)

Elsewhere

What Makes People Charismatic, and How You Can Be, Too |Bryan Clark wants us to break through our social anxieties and connect. Basically, you need to learn how to be a good storyteller, and then a little more:

Charismatic people are well liked not just because they can tell a good story, but also because of how they make others feel. Aside from being humorous and engaging, charismatic people are able to block out distractions, leaving those who interact with them feeling as if time had stopped and they were all that mattered. They make people feel better about themselves, which leads them to return for future interactions, or to extend existing ones, if only to savor such moments.

source: James Lee

Beacon NY?—?2019–08–19 | I’ve spent a week on Shelter Island visiting with family friends. It’s hard to leave, but by the time you read this, I will have packed, boarded the ferries (yes, two ferries), and turned northwest to home.

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Today’s newsletter title is taken from the David Sax excerpt in the Elsewhere section, below, and also inspired by Shelter Island.

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Stories

Momofuku’s Secret Sauce: A 30-Year-Old C.E.O. | All about Marguerite Zabar Mariscal, who is CEO of Momofuku, by Elizabeth Dunn. A great tale that includes the secret trend of many restaurant businesses: women are running them.

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China’s Ninebot unveils scooters that drive themselves to charging stations | Yingzhi Yang and Brenda Goh report:

Segway-Ninebot Group, a Beijing-based electric scooter maker, on Friday unveiled a scooter that can return itself to charging stations without a driver, a potential boon for the burgeoning scooter-sharing industry.

And the heavy costs of people collecting scooters and carting them back to charging stations will rapidly fall. Could be one of the first cases of autonomous vehicles putting people out of work.

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Why the U.S. Has Long Resisted Universal Child Care | Claire Cain Miller examines the basic question: is childcare a public good? Because if it is, we should make it accessible to all.

Most Americans say it’s not ideal for a child to be raised by two working parents. Yet in two-thirds of American families, both parents work.

This disconnect between ideals and reality helps explain why the United States has been so resistant to universal public child care. Even as child care is setting up to be an issue in the presidential campaign, a more basic question has recently resurfaced: whether mothers should work in the first place.

In many ways, it has already been settled: 93 percent of fathers and 72 percent of mothers with children at home are in the labor force. It helps the economy when women work, research shows, and it’s often economically beneficial for their families, too?—?40 percent of women are their families’ breadwinners. Significant evidence demonstrates that when there’s high-quality, affordable, easy-to-find child care, more women work.

Some form of early childhood care and learning is part of the campaign platform of most of the Democratic presidential candidates. President Trump has not supported universal child care, but has bolstered existing child care policies, including approving a record increase to the Child Care and Development Fund for low-income families and a child tax credit increase.

Perhaps going onto a war footing to combat climate change might lead to universal child care in the US.

The only time the United States had something close to universal public child care was during World War II, when in 1941 the Lanham Act directed federal funding to high-quality, government-run child care centers so women of all incomes could work as part of the war effort. But lawmakers were careful to say that it was an emergency measure, and that the centers would not become permanent. (The children who went to these centers, particularly from low-income families, performed better educationally and economically throughout their lives, compared with children who were too young to be eligible for the care, research found.)

Universal child care had strong bipartisan support when it was proposed in the Comprehensive Childhood Development Act of 1972, but President Richard Nixon vetoed it over its “family-weakening implications.”

Since then, the government has provided some child care assistance to low-income families. There is also a child care tax credit for working parents. But half of Americans live in places where there is no licensed child care provider or where there are three times as many children as child care slots. Child care costs a typical family about a third of its income. Just 10 percent of providers are considered to be high quality. At the same time, work for many Americans has become more inflexible and time intensive, and part-time or flexible jobs can be hard to find.

The result is a divided system, in which good child care is accessible only to affluent families, and many mothers in the United States can’t afford to work, said Taryn Morrissey, who teaches public policy at American University and was an adviser to the Obama administration on its early-learning initiative. “Instead of investing in a tool we know would help inequality,” she said, “we’re exacerbating it.”

:::

Is It Time to Let Employees Work from Anywhere? | Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, Barbara Z. Larson, and Cirrus Foroughi pose a question, and the answer is ‘yes’ [emphasis mine]:

In a working paper currently under review, we studied the effects of a work-from-anywhere program initiated in 2012 among patent examiners at the U.S. Patent & Trade Office (USPTO). We analyzed productivity data for patent examiners (highly educated and specialized professionals) who switched from work-from-home work conditions to the WFA program.

Our results indicate that examiners’ work output increased by 4.4% after transition to WFA, with no significant increase in rework (re-writing of patent decisions upon appeal from inventors). Supplemental analysis also showed that patent quality (as measured by examiner-added citations) did not deteriorate . The 4.4% productivity increase represents up to $1.3 billion of annual value added to the U.S. economy, based on the average economic activity generated per additional patent granted. (While not the focus of our study, we also found a correlation between working from home and increased productivity relative to working in the office, consistent with the findings of the earlier study.)

In supplementary analyses, we also found that examiners transitioning to WFA relocated, on average, to locations with significantly lower costs of living, representing an effective increase in real salary for these employees, with no increased cost to the organization.

Interestingly, examiners who had been on the job longer (that is, those closer to retirement) were more likely to move to the “retirement-friendly” coastal areas of Florida than their lower-tenured peers. While this correlational finding is not predictive, it suggests that granting employees the ability to work from anywhere could yield some career-extending benefits to both employees and the organization, by encouraging valued senior employees to remain in the productive workforce longer.

[…]

Employers who allow employees to work remotely should grant these employees true autonomy and flexibility, rather than trying to micromanage their remote work. Our results comparing WFH and WFA employees indicate that granting greater autonomy can actually enhance employee productivity.

My bet is that the great majority of companies will continue to ignore these findings and others like them, despite the win-win involved.

:::

Before an A.I. system can learn, someone has to label the data supplied to it. | The human grunt work behind the rise of AI?—?interesting stuff by Cade Metz.

Quote of the Day

Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.

| Daniel Denning, Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness

Elsewhere

The Pain of Losing a Local Record Store | David Sax expresses the pain of losing a favorite store or restaurant?—?in his case a used record shop?—?and how it is linked to ‘sense of place’:

My relationships with the staff at June Records were forged over their recommendations: Julia’s suggestion of Jennifer Castle’s dreamy “Pink City,” Raf’s assurance that even my children would dig William Onyeabor’s minimal Nigerian disco and Andrew’s recent pick of an obscure Brazilian acid psych record that’s become the instant soundtrack of my summer. Sure, you can get help and suggestions shopping for music at an Urban Outfitters, but it’s not the same, because what I built at June over the years of transactions was something deeper: a sense of place.

No place stays the same forever, and few of us want to live somewhere that is frozen in amber, where entrepreneurs cannot take a chance with their ideas and open a business. We seek the new, and the novel, and welcome improvements in our neighborhoods with open arms. But we also need places to anchor us. Novelty is wonderful, but only when balanced with the familiar. And when those familiar businesses close, for whatever reason, our reaction also occurs on a human scale. A sigh of resignation. A flood of memories. And sometimes, if you truly loved the place, a sadness so genuine it can trigger tears.

:::

A few new posts at GigaOm’s open research publication on Medium:

Brief | Workona, A Chrome Workspace Manager | Stowe Boyd | Shouldn’t tab management be integrated with file sync-and-share? Yes. I want Workona-style tab management in Dropbox, please.

Brief | Taskade, a new ‘work processing’ app | Stowe Boyd | A promising start, but there’s a lot yet to implement in Taskade.

:::

originally published on Work Futures on Medium.

source: Atlas of Transformation

Beacon NY | 2019–08–22 | Today’s issue takes its name from the quote of the day by Svetlana Boym, particularly this:

The 20th century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia.

I was first introduced to Boym in a review of Zygmunt Bauman’s Retrotopiaby Alastair Bonnett. He added an additional quote from Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia:

Survivors of the twentieth century, we are all nostalgic for a time when we were not nostalgic. But there seems no way back.

As Bonnett styles it, we are longing for a past that never was.

Bauman argues that nostalgia is the defining emotion of modernity, the era we are emerging from. My sense if that nostalgia is still operative for many, but the postnormal era will become dominated by weltschmerz: the kind of feeling experienced by someone who understands that physical reality can never satisfy the demands of the mind; the feeling of sadness when thinking about the evils of the world.

:::

If you are receiving this you’ve probably signed up for the Work Futures Daily newsletter. If not, you can sign up here for a free subscription. Support our work by becoming a sponsor, here. Or become a follower on Medium. Drop a few bucks in the hat, here, if you’d like to support our work on a one-time basis.

Stories

If You Want Engaged Employees, Offer Them Stability | Marla Gottschalk unscrambles the mumbo-jumbo about employee engagement with an obvious conclusion:

Most organizations struggle to find the right balance between stability and change, which in turn affects individual contributors. But in the race for innovation and digital transformation, the idea of stability has been somewhat lost.

[…]

The psychological contract is an often unstated exchange agreement, or set of promises about what we bring to our work and what we expect to gain from our employers in return. Sadly, once stressed or broken, this contract is very difficult to repair. Reviewing the health of these contracts is a unique opportunity to increase stability, and in turn, to retain valuable employees, as the psychological contract has been shown to correlate with outcomes such as job satisfaction, commitment, performance, and trust. Managers can address psychological contracts more openly by having regular discussions about what is being exchanged in the employee/employer relationship. This can help clarify goals, drive performance, encourage developmental conversations, and help employees begin to explore career planning. Also, as things inevitably shift within the organization, there should be ongoing discussions about how the changes might affect the work and the individual. During times of major change, psychological contracts should be revisited often. For example, goals and performance metrics should be recalibrated from time to time, and certainly after any organizational changes take place.

[…]

Psychological safety. William Kahn, professor of Organizational Behavior at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, defined psychological safetyas “being able to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences to self-image, status, or career.” While the concept has been studied for decades, we are only just now truly acknowledging the importance of its role in our work lives.

A must read.

:::

About 22% of U.S. workers think they’re more qualified than their boss | Seems low to me. 61% say they can handle their manager’s day-to-day responsibilities.

:::

Beware of Employees Who Are Very Engaged in Their Work | Alina Dizik on when work engagement goes too far [emphasis mine]:

New research shows that employees who are too engaged are likely to have difficulties in their personal lives and may take part in actions that negatively affect the company. In addition, such workers can become more difficult to manage over time and produce worse results.

Deeply engaged employees who become more difficult to manage can be overly demanding of superiors and become suspicious of their intentions, says Stuart Bunderson, professor of organizational ethics and governance at Washington University in St. Louis. When Prof. Bunderson first started looking at how zookeepers derived meaning from their work, for example, he learned that many tend to look at their job as a calling. That, in turn, made them tougher to manage than less-engaged employees. They also expected more from those above them. The zookeepers objected to placing a carousel at the zoo, for instance, because they saw it as trivializing the zoo’s mission, until it was repositioned to promote conservation, Prof. Bunderson found.

The professor also studied managers five years after receiving their M.B.A. degrees and found that the most engaged employees displayed similar qualities. A “higher sense of moral duty” makes it tougher for them to respect deadlines or work in a team, he says.

“There’s no such thing as acceptable compromises or good enough when things are framed in moral terms,” says Prof. Bunderson, who in January published a review of research into work as a calling. “So, for example, if I see my calling as helping my consulting clients find the best possible solution for their problem,” he says, “I will become especially frustrated when management tells me that I need to push certain solutions or limit the amount of time I can spend in problem diagnosis…especially when compared to my colleague for whom a job is just a job.”

Some researchers have found that work engagement has a negative impact on a personal level. In a 2018 study, after a three-month period, workers who said they felt emotional ties to their work reported experiencing more stress in reaction to workplace demands than workers who said they didn’t feel emotional ties to their work, says Thomas Britt, a psychology professor at Clemson University who studies work engagement.

:::

This Is What People Think of You When You Wear Headphones at Work | Scott Mautz informs us that we are sending a signal by wearing headphones at work:

For the most part, you’re probably sending the exact message that you want to: “Leave me the hell alone.” But there are also unintended perceptions being created. When employees in the study were asked what impression co-workers give off when wearing headphones, here were the responses:

º Want to be left alone: 27 percent

º Focused: 22 percent

º Busy: 17 percent

º Love music/music quality: 16 percent

º Rude/pretentious: 9 percent

Interestingly, the perception of being pretentious tripled when co-workers were wearing in-ear headphones (like AirPods).

Wow.

Quote of the Day

The 20th century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia. The optimistic belief in the future has become outmoded while nostalgia, for better or for worse, never went out of fashion, remaining uncannily contemporary.

| Svetlana Boym, Nostalgia (in the fascinating Atlas of Transformation)

Elsewhere

How Kurt Vonnegut Predicted the Automation Crisis | Arvind Dilawar connects the dots from Vonnegut’s Player Piano to the present day:

Player Piano may have been written 67 years ago, but its prescience is uncanny — though not inexplicable. It is a product not only of Vonnegut’s extraordinary imagination, but his years of experience working directly with engineers, whose mentality the novel reflects in reaching its logical conclusion. If today we find ourselves becoming increasingly trapped within that conclusion — between automation-driven mass unemployment on one side and the supposed panacea of universal basic income on the other — Player Piano also offers us hope for how we might yet break free.

Except that the Luddite-like revolt in the book is squashed, and nothing changes.

PS Arvind lives around the corner from me!

:::

America the Mediocre | Paul Musgrave skewers Americans’ image of the US as the best country on Earth.

A 2017 Pew Research Center poll found that most Americans disagree only whether the United States is the best country in the world (29 percent) or one of the best (56 percent). Only 14 percent of Americans agree instead that there are other, better countries.

[…]

By many measures, the United States looks like a decidedly middle-of-the pack country or even one at the bottom of the set of rich countries. Consider the classic three American goals: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” On measures indicating the quality of life, the United States often ranks poorly. The U.N. Human Development Index, which counts not just economic performance but life expectancy and schooling, ranks the United States at 13th, lagging other industrialized democracies like Australia, Germany, and Canada. The United States ranks 45th in infant mortality, 46th in maternal mortality, and 36th in life expectancy.

What about liberty? Reporters Without Borders places the United States at 48th for protecting press freedom. Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index ranks the United States as only the 22nd least corrupt country in the world, behind Canada, Germany, and France. Freedom House’s experts score the United States 33rd for political freedom, while the Varieties of Democracy project puts the quality of U.S. democracy higher — at 27th.

As for happiness: The World Happiness Report places America at 19th, just below Belgium. Belgium!

Less formal impressions reinforce the conclusion that Americans’ view of their own exceptional accomplishments aren’t shared quite as widely as they believe. On Twitter, I asked people who have spent time in both the United States and other countries to tell me about everyday ways in which they found the United States to be less advanced than other countries.

I received more than 2,000 replies in a day.

The overwhelming tone of the responses was bemusement and surprise at just how poorly so many parts of American life worked. To be sure, some responses reflected preferences, not policy. Europeans think American bread is too sweet, I learned, and others think Americans dress too informally. But most users narrowed in on real failings of U.S. public policy.

One Twitter user, former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, summed upcommon complaints well: bad roads; maternity and paternity leave; K-12 education; most Americans’ stubborn monolingualism; and, unsurprisingly from the former president of a country sometimes nicknamed “E-stonia,” “digitization of virtually all public services.” And many of the commenters brought up the everyday failings of American life, such as its dismal transportation infrastructure (“seems on the verge of falling apart”), lack of sidewalks, anemic public transportation systems, and lack of public toilets.

:::

The WeWork IPO | Ben Thompson warns people the WeWork IPO is a risky bet.

:::

Originally published on Work Futures.

source: Bing Han

Beacon NY | 2019–08–24 | A busy but ineffective week, mostly because Monday was the travel day at the end of a vacation to wonderful Shelter Island, which also meant Tuesday was a boundary day. I will be writing a lot this weekend to catch up.

:::

The Substack email newsletter will read more like the tweetstorm I produce after posting the daily on Medium. I want to encourage the 1800+ recipients of the email newsletter to click through to the full post on Medium, and participate here, using Medium’s social affordances. Yes, that might entail creating a Medium account to fully participate.

Stories [from Boundless Curiosity on Medium]

If You Want Engaged Employees, Offer Them Stability | Marla Gottschalk unscrambles the mumbo-jumbo about employee engagement with an obvious conclusion.

[from Work Futures Daily | Nostalgia]

:::

What Makes People Charismatic, and How You Can Be, Too | Bryan Clark wants us to break through our social anxieties and connect. Basically, you need to learn how to be a good storyteller, and then a little more: make people feel they matter.

[from Work Futures Daily | Ars Longa, Vita Brevis]

:::

Reading The Mushroom At The End Of The World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Perhaps the best work in ecology economics I’ve encountered. Oh, and you’ll learn a lot about the matsutake mushroom.

[from Work Futures Daily | Without Handrails]

:::

Is It Time to Let Employees Work from Anywhere? | Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, Barbara Z. Larson, and Cirrus Foroughi pose a question, and the answer is ‘yes’.

[from Work Futures Daily | A Sense Of Place]

Quotes of the Week

The 20th century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia. The optimistic belief in the future has become outmoded while nostalgia, for better or for worse, never went out of fashion, remaining uncannily contemporary.

| Svetlana Boym, Nostalgia (in the fascinating Atlas of Transformation)

Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.

| Daniel Denning, Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness

Elsewhere

Simone Cicero has written the first draft of An Entrepreneurial, Ecosystem Enabling Organization, which references my recent piece at On The Horizon, On The Emergent Organization. Simon adopts the terminology that I borrowed from the research of Deborah Ancona, Elaine Backman, and Kate Isaacs, but he inverts the three layers of the Emergent Leadership model. Here you see I have depicted the customers at the center of the universe:

from Stowe Boyd

While Simon moves customers to the periphery:

from Simone Cicero

My sense is that they both make sense, depending on what you are trying to emphasize.

At any rate, go read Simone’s piece.

:::

For some reason, my 10 Work Skills For The Postnormal Era has been percolating on Twitter. I am glad that so many are finding it relevant even though it was written in 2017. I named this weekly after the first skill: Boundless Curiosity.

Beacon NY | 2019–08–27 | Today’s issue gained its name from Pragya Agarwal’s piece, below.

:::

The wonderful weather is making it hard for me to work. Time for another walk.

Stories

The American Economy Is Creating a National Identity Crisis | Tim Wu says enough is enough: a national reckoning about the economy that defines us as economic units — as working drones and mindless consumers — is long overdue.

:::

Belonging In The Workplace: A New Approach to Diversity And Inclusivity | Pragya Agarwal debunks ‘cultural fit’ and offers ‘belonging’ in its place:

Baumeister and Leary define belonging as “the feeling of security and support when there is a sense of acceptance, inclusion, and identity for a member of a certain group or place, and as the basic fundamental drive to form and maintain lasting, positive, and significant relationships with others.” People are motivated by an inherent desire to form inter-personal links and connections. But many diversity initiatives do not have the necessary impact.

[…]

It is crucial to assert that when I talk about a sense of belonging, I am not talking about a culture of “best fit.” In fact, completely the opposite. Here, the intention is not to focus on trying to hire people who will fit into workplace culture, or support the employee in fitting into existing workplace culture at the cost of their own identity. This will have a completely opposite effect.

The idea is not to ignore differences but to normalize how we discuss and talk about them. The idea is that everyone is different, and they are equal. My research shows that people who feel they belong perform better, become more willing to challenge themselves, and are more resilient.

A good read.

:::

How Employees Shaped Strategy at the New York Public Library | Bruce A. Strong and Mary Lee Kennedy report on their consulting project with the New York Public Library, one of the world’s largest, with staff of over 2,500, 93 branches, and a $300 million plus annual budget. They suggested a subversive idea in innovation planning:

In the spring of 2014, we proposed a radical approach: offer anyone on staff — over 2,500 individuals, many of them union members — the chance to shape the library through strategic conversations with senior leaders. We believed that if the Library was to be truly nimble, senior leaders couldn’t unilaterally come up with a plan. Involving staff in conceiving, designing, and implementing the change would result in a course of action that was more fit-to-purpose and more likely to be well executed. Staff would fully understand the changes and be accountable to each other for their implementation.

The conversation would be neither bottom-up nor top down. Staff would take a lead role in designing, testing, and advocating solutions. Leadership would shape the conversation to ensure proposals were strategically on-point. Senior leaders also would provide resources, guidance, and act as decision makers.

But would involving so many people work in practice? How to get them engaged? How to ensure that the conversations didn’t bog down or become chaotic?

Several organizations for whom we had worked or had researched used a technique we call “innovation communities” to structure strategic conversations so that they’re both efficient and effective. These diverse groups of volunteer employees work across organizational boundaries and outside of their regular operational duties. They are empowered by — and in frequent communication with — senior management. Innovation communities had been used by Best Buy to grow its portion of the women’s consumer electronics market by $4.4b in less than five years. Boston Children’s Hospital used them to make advances in telemedicine. Japanese pharmaceutical Eisai used them to improve care for Alzheimer’s patients.

Convinced, the library’s management team created three innovation communities with each one focusing on a core library function: circulation, collections, and reference.

The authors detail the process, what worked and what didn’t, and conclude that — despite various hiccups and challenges to conventional thinking about strategy development — the experience was very well-received across the organization, and additional experiments were being started at the time of the article’s publishing in 2016.

The biggest takeaway:

What surprised us most was the importance of the social aspect of the innovation communities. Community members consciously forged new and strong bonds of comradery, commitment, and common purpose.

And that brings us to our concluding point: strategy as currently practiced rarely emphasizes the importance of community. Our experience with the Library highlights it. The social bonds created by the innovation communities, we believe, will be integral to the Library’s continued efforts to realize its strategic direction. It will be up to leadership to continue to foster the social environment and the conversations in which strategic ideas are born, nurtured, and carried out.

Quote of the Day

Life isn’t just about money, and jobs aren’t just about income.

Neil Irwin, How a Quest by Elites Is Driving ‘Brexit’ and Trump

Elsewhere

Cities Are Saying No to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics — and FCC Bullying | Christopher Mims looks into rising concerns about 5G:

Billed as the key to the future — of telecommunications, of global competition, of innovation and even of municipal infrastructure — 5G has instead become a bone of contention. In addition to upgrading existing towers, it will require an estimated half-million new towers and small-cell sites on utility poles, lampposts and buildings. Experts also anticipate a long rollout period, potentially of a decade or more.

We’ll have to see if the claims by 5G boosters will overcome these concerns.

If you are receiving this you’ve probably signed up for the Work Futures Daily newsletter. If not, sign up here. Support our work by becoming a sponsor, here. Or become a follower on Medium, here, and click on the applause button. Drop a few bucks in the hat, here, if you’d like to support our work on a one-time basis.

source: Drew Beamer

Beacon NY | 2019–08–26 | Because Labor Day, I will be posting Work Futures Daily only Monday and Tuesday this week, and only Tuesday and Wednesday next week, and a single Weekly on 9 September. I am having a staycation in Beacon for the holiday weekend.

:::

We are on vacation at On The Horizon for August.

:::

I bought a new iPad Pro— with a 12.9" screen — to use as a second screen when I travel, and as a third screen at home. (I will also use it as an iPad, occasionally. I am going to see if I can take notes with the Apple Pencil.) This is my office set up, now: a 44" Dell at the upper right, the iPad at the upper left, and my Macbook Air at the center bottom.

More screenage makes things better.

:::

If you are receiving this you’ve probably signed up for the Work Futures Daily newsletter. If not, you can sign up here for a free subscription. Support our work by becoming a sponsor, here. Or become a follower on Mediumand click the applause button a bunch: that helps. Drop a few bucks in the hat, here, if you’d like to support our work on a one-time basis.

See the full newsletter content at Work Futures on Medium.

Stories

DoorDash breaks silence on driver tips, says it’ll start paying them next month | CEO Tony Xu wakes up to the negative press last week.

:::

Companies Might Be Smarter With Workers in the Boardroom | Noah Smith looks into research on German companies with worker representation on their boards: they did better.

:::

America needs more unions | German Lopez relates his ‘conversion’ from disbeliever to supporter of unions through the unionization of Vox where he works.

:::

Bursting The Bubble: Teal Ain’t Real | The Corporate Rebels gently caution the community about Frederic Laloux’s Teal organization thinking.

Quote of the Day

Over dinner earlier this year (2015), I confessed to Frederic Laloux that his best-selling book Reinventing Organisations was the very best business book I’d ever read that I couldn’t quite bring myself to recommend to others. There was something going on for me, where the stories in the book didn’t seem to match the conclusions.

| Tom Nixon, Resolving the awkward paradox in Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations.

Elsewhere

Room for Improvement? New Hotelier Tests an Algorithmic Pricing System | Craig Karmin reports on Life House, a hotel concept that wants to reward guests who spread the word

:::

Blame it on the False Prophets of Economics | Benyamin Appelbaum points out that we don’t have to accept an economic system that treats income inequality as inevitable.

If you are receiving this you’ve probably signed up for the free Work Futures Daily newsletter. If not, sign up here. Support our work by becoming a sponsor, here. Or become a follower on Medium, here, and click on the applause button. Drop a few bucks in the hat, here, if you’d like to support our work on a one-time basis.

Beacon NY | 2019–09–05 | Back from a short Labor Day break. This is a bit long because I’ve been reading and not posting newsletter issues.

Stories

The Next Hot Job: Pretending to Be a Robot | Christopher Mims describes a variety of jobs where humans are ‘piloting’ semi-autonomous delivery robots, drones, security robots, and inventory-control robots.

:::

Killer Robots and the New Era of Machine-Driven Warfare | Humans are too slow so they’ll be pulled out of the loop in future warfare, says Zachary Fryer-Biggs, despite the previous story’s focus on humans piloting drones.

“The problem is that when you’re dealing [with war] at machine speed, at what point is the human an impediment?” Robert Work, who served as the Pentagon’s ?2 official in both the Obama and Trump administrations, said in an interview. “There’s no way a human can keep up, so you’ve got to delegate to machines.”

Every branch of the U.S. military is currently seeking ways to do just that — to harness gargantuan leaps in image recognition and data processing for the purpose of creating a faster, more precise, less human kind of warfare.

The Navy is experimenting with a 135-ton ship named the Sea Hunter that could patrol the oceans without a crew, looking for submarines it could one day attack directly. In a test, the ship has already sailed the 2,500 miles from Hawaii to California on its own, although without any weapons.

Meanwhile, the Army is developing a new system for its tanks that can smartly pick targets and point a gun at them. It is also developing a missile system, called the Joint Air-to-Ground Missile (JAGM), that has the ability to pick out vehicles to attack without human say-so; in March, the Pentagon asked Congress for money to buy 1,051 JAGMs, at a cost of $367.3 million.

And the Air Force is working on a pilotless version of its storied F-16 fighter jet as part of its provocatively named “SkyBorg” program, which could one day carry substantial armaments into a computer-managed battle.

Until now, militaries seeking to cause an explosion at a distant site have had to decide when and where to strike; use an airplane, missile, boat, or tank to transport a bomb to the target; direct the bomb; and press the “go” button. But drones and systems like Sea Mob are removing the human from the transport, and computer algorithms are learning how to target. The key remaining issue is whether military commanders will let robots decide to kill, particularly at moments when communication links have been disrupted — a likely occurrence in wartime.

So far, new weapons systems are being designed so that humans must still approve the unleashing of their lethal violence, but only minor modifications would be needed to allow them to act without human input. Pentagon rules, put in place during the Obama administration, don’t prohibit giving computers the authority to make lethal decisions; they only require more careful review of the designs by senior officials. And so officials in the military services have begun the thorny, existential work of discussing how and when and under what circumstances they will let machines decide to kill.

Go read it.

:::

6 Ways CEOs Can Prove They Care About More Than Shareholder Value | If the Business Roundtable letter is going to be more than just ‘stakewashing’ CEOs will have to actually change how they manage. This is a great list by John Elkington and Richard Roberts, and here’re just a few snippets:

Follow the advice of Judy Samuelson of the Aspen Institute, who has called on companies to “dampen down the intense focus on stock price in CEO pay.”

[…]

To give real teeth to your commitment to serve all stakeholders, ensure that different stakeholder groups are properly represented in your governance structures. Appointing worker representatives to the Board is one tried-and-tested approach; creating independent advisory boards is another

[…]

If these CEOs truly embraced the logic, “they would resign from all trade and industry groups which lobby to slow or stall necessary systemic changes.” They would also “forcefully and publicly lobby for a meaningful price on carbon and for the breakup of monopolies and oligopolies.”

[…]

Several commentators have suggested that companies committed to the interests of all stakeholders should not engage in share buybacks — or, at least, reduce their reliance on the practice.

Andrew Winston also has some comments, in Is the Business Roundtable Statement Just Empty Rhetoric?:

Shareholder primacy is a problem but may not be the real one.

Economist Alfred Rappaport is one of the fathers of the idea of shareholder value. But in his book Saving Capitalism from Short-Termism, he makes a compelling case that our real issue is short-termism and how we think about “value.” Basically, if you manage for long-term value, of course you need to account for customers, employees, communities, and more. When we define value as this quarter’s profits, we don’t invest (and we certainly don’t prioritize long emergencies like climate change). I believe that the current economic model incentivizes the liquidation of natural capital for profit. But how much of that is due to concern about investors per se, or focus on short-term profit only? For this reason, the final commitment in the BRT statement — where they commit to long-term value — is possibly the critical element.

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Should Work Be Passion, or Duty? | Firmin DeBrabander channels Seneca, and suggests we should attend to duty not our dreams.

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The App Age Has Come Far. Look at Long-Haul Trucking | Julie Weed is focused on the app, not the network, which is dumb.

Trucks move about 70 percent of freight by weight in the United States, but the industry is inefficient, with more than a quarter of trucks on the road riding empty.

Enter platforms to connect drivers with freight shippers.

[Silpa] Paul [of Frost and Sullivan] said on-demand brokerage services like Convoy were one of “the hottest technologies in the trucking industry globally.” An app that can take the place of countless emails and phone calls and provide load and truck availability, rate negotiations, proof-of-delivery and payments is extremely valuable to trucker and shipping company alike.

As part of an industry study, Ms. Paul estimated that services like Convoy’s were expected to grow rapidly, from posting $210 million in broker fees in North America in 2017 to $6.7 billion in 2025. The efficiencies are not expected to cause any truckers to lose their jobs because there is a shortage of over 60,000 of them in the United States, according to the American Trucking Associations.

The apps also promise a positive environmental impact. Improving efficiency means fewer empty trucks on the road, which would lower carbon emissions.

More than 40 companies just in North America have been founded in this business over the last seven years, including Uber Freight, Loadsmart and Transfix, attracting billions of dollars in investment, according to Ms. Paul. Traditional brokers and logistics companies are also trying to modernize their operations, she added.

Ms. Paul said on-demand brokerage services like Convoy were one of “the hottest technologies in the trucking industry globally.” An app that can take the place of countless emails and phone calls and provide load and truck availability, rate negotiations, proof-of-delivery and payments is extremely valuable to trucker and shipping company alike.

As part of an industry study, Ms. Paul estimated that services like Convoy’s were expected to grow rapidly, from posting $210 million in broker fees in North America in 2017 to $6.7 billion in 2025. The efficiencies are not expected to cause any truckers to lose their jobs because there is a shortage of over 60,000 of them in the United States, according to the American Trucking Associations.

[…]

If truckers call their usual brokers and no one has a job, they may need to drive home empty or wait days for a new load. “With a centralized database, there are more jobs available,” Mr. Lewis said.

On the shippers’ side of the Convoy platform, companies award shipments to Convoy, which lists those jobs on the app for carriers to see. Shipping rates typically fluctuate, depending on destination, urgency, available drivers and other factors. Convoy automatically prices the job based on this data and its own algorithms, but truckers can also bid for a job if the stated price seems too low.

Quote of the Day

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of evolution is its ability to generate cooperation in a competitive world.

| Martin Nowak

Elsewhere

Welcome to the Econolypse | Part 1 | Stowe Boyd | We face a top-to-bottom paradigm shift reshaping trade, markets, businesses, and how we live and work.

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Photo by Anupam Mahapatra on Unsplash

Beacon NY | 2019–09–12 | The slow tempo of summer is long gone.

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Fractional Futurist | I stole a page from Chris Brogan, who recently pitched himself as a ‘fractional CMO’. So I am offering to work as a ‘fractional futurist’. After all, everyone talks about the future, but no one does anything about it.

Stories

Using Neuroscience to Make Feedback Work and Feel Better | David Rock, Beth Jones, and Chris Weller dissect the premises of feedback, and lay out a path to applying it:

Simple as it may seem, feedback — that ubiquitous necessity of organizational life — has proven to be an axis on which organizational culture turns. Research is suggesting that by switching from giving feedback to asking for it, organizations can tilt their culture toward continuous improvement; smarter decision making; and stronger, more resilient teams that can adapt as needed.

Why Feedback Matters

Feedback isn’t just a ritual of the modern workplace. It’s the means by which organisms, across a variety of life-forms and time periods, have adapted to survive. To University of Sheffield cognitive scientist Tom Stafford, feedback is the essence of intelligence. “Thanks to feedback we can become more than simple programs with simple reflexes, and develop more complex responses to the environment,” he writes. “Feedback allows animals like us to follow a purpose.”

Research is suggesting that by switching from giving feedback to asking for it, organizations can tilt their culture toward continuous improvement.

It’s no coincidence the words organism and organization share a Latin root. Just as feedback enables the former to flourish, so it does for the latter. The single-celled amoeba that relies on feedback from its marine environment can more easily find bacteria to munch on, and the salesman who risks losing his job owing to missed targets — metrics, too, are a form of feedback — knows he must change his approach, finding better leads or making more of the customers he has. The same is true for the underperforming department that faces restructuring and rethinks how it collaborates. In all cases, feedback is what keeps organisms, and organizations, alive and well.

Even within organizations, feedback can take many forms. Key performance indicators (KPIs) and other quantitative data are perhaps the most recognizable kind of feedback, especially during performance reviews, but conversational feedback — for example, a quick chat over coffee — counts too. Indeed, just as leaders should think carefully about the KPIs that guide behavior on their teams, they should consider the patterns of verbal feedback that guide their teams to improve.

Research has found roughly 87 percent of employees want to “be developed” in their job, but only a third report actually receiving the feedback they need to engage and improve. The reason for the gap is hardly a mystery: Typical feedback conversations are about as pleasant as a root canal. Managers dread them because it’s often unclear what kind of feedback the employee wants or needs, and employees dread them because even light criticism can feel like an assault on their status and credibility. Indeed, West and Thorson’s new study found that receivers’ heart rates jumped enough to indicate moderate or extreme duress in unprompted feedback situations.

A great read. I particularly like how they spell out how a company can take gradual steps to grow a feedback-seeking culture, where asking for feedback is common:

At the office, leaders can begin by asking for feedback on low-stakes topics, such as the temperature in the office or how people felt about yesterday’s lunch. The point is to get people used to giving feedback that was asked for. When leaders take the first step, they signal to the wider organization that asking is important, and the low-stakes questions help build a sense of trust and agency in their team members. People are given an opportunity to feel heard, which boosts their status, makes them feel more included, and gives them a greater sense of autonomy. West says it also empowers them to give better feedback, replacing brittle smiles with more honest critiques.

And of course this requires psychological safety, which is critical in so many ways.

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The Yoga Instructors vs. the Private Equity Firm | Colin Moynihan reports on yoga instructors in NY City who are seeking to form a union, and the company that employs them — principally as part-time employees — is opposing the effort. Notably, that company, YogaWorks, a chain of over 60 locations, is controlled by a private equity fund.

In certain ways teaching yoga may seem like a dream job — a way to earn money while staying healthy and helping others. But yoga teachers say that their work can be filled with the type of stress that the practice is meant to alleviate.

Many, experts say, are participants in the so-called gig economy, where companies employ nonpermanent workers and don’t have to contribute to unemployment insurance or workers’ compensation, or heed minimum-wage and overtime laws.

Most YogaWorks teachers are something of a hybrid, classified as employees but given only part-time work with little or no job security, organizers said. And many of those teachers also do “gig work” as independent contractors for other employers. The effect, multiple instructors said, can be exhausting, with teachers constantly scrambling to make ends meet, competing for work and spending unpaid hours preparing for sessions.

Still, several teachers said, they stick with their classes because they enjoy their jobs and they believe in the ability of yoga to improve lives.

“I love when people have some kind of realization, or feel a part of their body they weren’t able to feel before, when something just clicks,” Markella Los, a YogaWorks instructor and an early union organizer, said.

The aim of forming a union, several teachers said, is to negotiate over making pay rates transparent, creating standards for raises, obtaining benefits and job security, and asking that teachers have a voice in ensuring that classes preserve values intrinsic to yoga.

“They often say the yoga teachers are the center of this business,” Tamar Samir, who has taken part in the unionization effort, said of the company’s leaders. “But then somehow the way that teachers are supported in terms of pay and benefits and job security doesn’t match that.”

Unions are coming back, with yoga instructors joining the machinists union, and even strippers are organizing.

Yoga has become a big business in the US:

The number of yoga practitioners has risen to 36 million in 2016, from 20.4 million in 2012, and spending — on clothes, equipment, classes — has also increased, to $16 billion from $10 billion over the same period.

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The Necessary Radicalism of Bernie Sanders | Jamelle Bouie lays out the scale and breadth of Bernie Sanders labor plan.

You may have missed it, but late last month, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign released the senator’s proposal for revitalizing the American labor movement. If passed into law, his Workplace Democracy Plan would end “at will” employment (employers could no longer dismiss employees for any reason without warning), institute industrywide “sectional” bargaining (versus organizing at individual companies) and curtail “right to work” laws.

Those measures alone would give unions a little room to breathe in an otherwise anti-labor atmosphere. More than half of Americans have a favorable view of unions, but in 2018 only 10.5 percent of workers were unionized. And nearly three years into his presidency, Donald Trump has been unabashedly hostile toward labor, even after selling himself as a tribune of the “forgotten man.”

But the most important parts of Sanders’s plan have to do with striking and other powerful levers. He would give federal employees the right to strike and ban the permanent replacement of any striking workers. He would also end the prohibition on secondary boycotts, which keeps workers from pressuring “neutral” employers — like suppliers and other service providers — in the course of an action against their “primary” employer. This prohibition closes an important avenue for collaboration among workers. Lifting the restriction would open new paths for collective action.

We need more.

Quote of the Day

The Earth and its resources are treated as spoils by the powerful, who will use all the powers they have to continue the ruinous policies of the past. But the Earth must be reconsidered as a shared commons, and our principal purpose must be to move from the shambles of our current economic and geopolitical systems to a new order, based on sustainability and universal human rights.

Stowe Boyd, The Myth Of Libertarian Populism, The Dream Of Fluidarity

In the spirit of the Democratic Debate, tonight.

Elsewhere

Lower Speed Limits Could Save Your City (and Life) | Andrew Small on the trend toward slower cities:

In his prescient 1973 essay, “The Social Ideology of the Motorcar,” André Gorz makes a similar point about how private cars turned speed into a commodity that, when introduced into the city, created havoc: “When everyone claims the right to drive at the privileged speed of the bourgeoisie,” he wrote, “everything comes to a halt, and the speed of city traffic plummets.”

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Beacon NY | 2019–09–18 | There is folk wisdom in the saying ‘naming calls’, a superstitious or mystical concept where mentioning something makes it more likely to happen or mentioning the ‘true name’ of some spirit or demon can actually summon it forth. But in the commonplace or barnyard sense, if you call a dog ‘Rex’, over time he will come when you call his name.

The names we give to things matter, so associating ride-hailing with feudalism, or pointing out that ‘meritocracy’ was originally pejorative, adds background to the discussions we are having about the future of work.

Stories

You Call It the Gig Economy. California Calls It ‘Feudalism.’ | Miriam Pawel provides deep background on California’s Assembly Bill 5. It wasn’t really about ride-hailing drivers, but old-fashioned delivery drivers. The court case behind it all is 14 years old, predating the app era:

Although the ride-share businesses Uber and Lyft were center stage in the run-up to the legislature’s votes, they were in fact not the impetus for the new law.

The bill was actually incited by a 14-year-old case in which Los Angeles delivery drivers sued their employer for lost wages after they were abruptly reclassified as independent contractors. Last year, the state’s highest court issued a broad ruling that sought to clarify what had long been a murky legal standard. The decision said workers are presumed to be employees unless a business can meet the “ABC test” — an independent contractor must be free from the control of the hiring entity, perform work outside the normal scope of the hiring entity and be an independent established practitioner of the trade performed. With exceptions for specific professions, the new measure adopts that definition.

The focus on the gig economy has obscured the more widespread impact of the new law in traditional businesses where workers — like the delivery drivers who sued in 2005 — have been misclassified for years. Hundreds of thousands of construction workers, janitors, truckers, nail salon workers and others now paid as independent contractors will be entitled to earn minimum wage and overtime, receive unemployment insurance and family leave, and have bargaining rights. The state hopes the measure will garner it much of the estimated $7 billion a year businesses have evaded paying in payroll taxes; unions hope to recruit new members. Their success will be both an indication of their strength and a key to effective enforcement.

But Pawel does not really answer the implicit answer of the piece: will our governments — municipal, state, and federal — pass laws to make most of the gig economy illegal? California has, and New York is next to go, I bet.

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Fortitude: reflections from #gnfwomen | Nicole de Beaufort attended a women’s leadership conference in Miami where she ‘felt simultaneously empowered and defeated’. And then… [all emphasis hers]

After several days of thinking through these questions, I became impatient. I felt like we were becoming an echo chamber, repeating back the same things until they became meaningful only to us. It felt as if we were not going to make a difference by sitting here talking about it. But then Victoria Budson, executive director of the Women in Public Policy Program and the Harvard Kennedy School, and the conference emcee, delivered thoughts that were as synthetic of all that came before as they were disruptive. They are paraphrased below. Each is, to me, a koan of sorts, upon which I’ve meditated and troubled. Each becomes a nesting doll of social constructs and meaning, built upon history and culture. These lines below? These are things I want to spend more time thinking about and working through.

In the workplace and in society we have non-equal networks of information.

The repercussions for errors are bigger for women in the business context. This is learned behavior.

Success comes from being able to navigate through our cultural construct. The choice is in where to invest your time and energy.

You do not choose whether or not you’re on the path. The pathway has been decided for you. Unless you design and create environments that yield gender equity.

Opportunities without realistic discussion of the challenges inherent in them are not really opportunities.

Fact: women who take time off after having children are underemployed for the rest of their lives.

We need the full set of information. And we need to invest in things that bring joy and create an environment to think differently.

When women choose roles, they choose all that comes with it; the impact, pressures and strains. Having a network of women who are dealing with this can buoy you.

Women will be discussed and judged in every part of society. There are innumerable obstacles in our way. There is joy in removing and not yielding to barriers.

For some reason, reading this reminded me of a recent Ron Chast New Yorker cartoon, where Dorothy is talking to Glinda, the good witch, and asks, ‘So, my choices are just Oz or Kansas?’ Are we limited to the same old discussions and the same old hypotheses regarding women at work? Budson (and de Beaufort) seem to be offering a way out.

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The Meritocracy Is Making Us Miserable | Christopher Shay interviews Daniel Markovitz about his book, The Meritocracy Trap:

Christopher Shay: What is the “meritocratic trap” that you’re describing in the book?

Daniel Markovits: The idea is that the rise of a super-skilled, super-trained elite causes two things to happen: First, the elite invests enormously in training its children. This means that people who aren’t born to rich parents don’t have the same educational opportunities. That’s why you see things like the Ivy Plus colleges with more students from the top 1 percent than the entire bottom half. That’s one part of it: the concentration of education and training in a narrower and narrower elite of children.

And then there’s a labor market part, which is the remaking of the labor market in a way that distinctively favors the skills that elaborate training gets you. The labor market that, at mid-century, was dominated by a large mass of mid-skilled, middle-class jobs is today dominated by a small number of glossy jobs by super-elite workers who can then expropriate the returns to labor and immiserate a large mass of others. It’s a trap, because it excludes everybody outside of the elite from opportunity. And for the elite, it’s a trap because there’s an alienating character to being trained and then worked in a ruthless competition your whole life.

CS: You point out that the term meritocracy itself is relatively new; it’s from the late ’50s. Could you describe how it was first used?

DM: The term was invented by an English sociologist named Michael Young, who wrote a book called The Rise of the Meritocracy. It is a profound and bizarre book. It’s an imaginary social history of the second half of the 20th century, written from the perspective of a made-up social historian in the 21st. And he coined the term “meritocracy” because government by the most virtuous was already taken, that’s aristocracy. So he replaced the Greek root for “virtue” with the Latin root for “earn.” For him it was a term of critique, not a term of approval. He lamented, deep into his life, that it had been embraced as a term of praise.

I love that ‘meritocracy’ was spun up for a cautionary futuristic scenario, and then was appropriated by those it criticized. And Markovitz is espousing a fairly stark condemnation of the ‘super-elite’ bourgeoisie, and laying the social divide of inequality at their feet.

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Future of Work: The new bundle is being invented as we speak | Laetitia Vitaud is gaining hope as we move ahead creating a new ‘bundle’, or social contract around work:

In the twentieth century, the dominant work model was that of the Fordist “bundle”. In exchange for division of labour and subordination, each worker was offered a bundle of benefits: a steady revenue, health insurance, paid holidays, a retirement pension, access to banking credit and housing, the promise of better future earnings thanks to the bargaining power of influential unions, a social and political identity, a set of connections, and more. The bundle made the alienation of industrial jobs quite acceptable. It gave workers dignity, economic security and a sense of agency.

But for roughly four decades now we’ve been experiencing a global unbundling of jobs. Globalisation, deindustrialisation, the decline of unions, the financialisation of the economy and the digital revolution have all played a role. Economic security is on the decline. Workers are now offered a deal that involves accepting subordination and alienation without the old tradeoff. The result is bad jobs, insufficient hours and revenues, no access to housing, job hopping, no sense of agency, isolation, and a lack of bargaining power.

In many ways the traditional bundle was a collective one. Thus the unbundling leaves today’s workers with the task of creating a personalised bundle of their own, of finding unique ways to combine the different elements of the bundle to fit their needs and situation. What was collective becomes individual. As Charles Leadbeater said, “the bundle has become a backpack”.

Go read what she thinks is coming.

Quote of the day

Giving something a name can be just the same as inventing it.

| Brian Eno

Elsewhere

Madewell Diverges From J. Crew as a Darling of Casual America | Sapna Maheshwari says the rise of Madewell reflects the casualization of work clothing in the US:

While Madewell is only about one-third the size of J. Crew, the brand has taken off in recent years thanks to a retail strategy better suited to today’s shopping landscape and a broader shift to more casual clothing in the United States. Madewell said in its filing that it believed a substantial portion of the population anchored its wardrobes to denim — and not just on weekends “but also increasingly for work and social occasions.”

“There’s a real blurring now between what people are wearing on the weekend and what they’re wearing for work, and that blurring is working really well for brands such as Madewell,” said Sarah Willersdorf, a partner at Boston Consulting Group who specializes in fashion and luxury. Jeans are a particular beneficiary of the “casualization” trend among men and women, which has also fueled growth in athleisure and streetwear, she said.

While the trend toward casualization in America started in the 1990s with the technology revolution on the West Coast, it has “intensified” in the years since the recession and is now even extending to traditionally conservative workplaces like Goldman Sachs, said Marie Driscoll, a managing director who covers fashion and luxury at Coresight Research.

Allowing business casual at work is one of the cheapest workplace benefits.

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Originally posted on Work Futures.

Photo by Jacob Shutler on Unsplash

Beacon NY | 2019–09–09 | I’ve seen a number of compliments about Work Futures Daily in recent weeks, the most recent include these (forgive the image: Substack doesn’t support embedding Tweets?):

Stories

Implementing Self-Management: Here’s How It’s Done | The Corporate Rebels examine the few companies that are actually practicing self-managing, and blueprint the hard work they went through to get there. Worth reading. Somehow I had hoped they would look for and detail the similarities across these pioneering companies. Maybe coming in a later update?

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Let’s bring back the Sabbath as a radical act against ‘total work’ | William Black looks into the ancient roots of the Sabbath — the fourth commandment’s ‘Remember the Sabbath, and keep it holy’ — and argues we might be well-served to return to that thinking in a time when we worship at the altar of overwork:

We are expected to compete with each other for our own labour, so that we each become our own taskmaster, our own pharaoh. Offer your employer more and more work for the same amount of pay, so that you undercut your competition — more and more bricks, and you’ll even bring your own straw.

In our neo-pharaonic economy, we are worth no more than the labour we can perform, and the value of our labour is being ever devalued. We can never work enough. A profit-driven capitalist society depends on the anxious striving for more, and it would break down if there were ever enough.

The Sabbath has no place in such a society and indeed upends its most basic tenets. In a Sabbatarian economy, the right to rest — the right to do nothing of value to capital — is as holy as the right to work. We can give freely to the poor and open our homes to refugees without being worried that there will be nothing left for us. We can erase all debts from our records, because it is necessary for the community to be whole.

It is time for us, whatever our religious beliefs, to see the Sabbatarian laws of old not as backward and pharisaical, but rather as the liberatory statements they were meant to be. It is time to ask what our society would look like if it made room for a new Sabbath — or, to put it a different way, what our society would need to look like for the Sabbath to be possible.

If the Israelite slaves could stand up to Pharaoh and kept the Sabbath sacred, maybe we could stand up to our own inclination to give up everything for work.

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Late shift transit: How lagging service harms vulnerable workers | Patrick Sisson reviews a new report on how late-night workers get shafted by lack of transit options:

The American work day is 24 hours, but most public transit is oriented for the 9-to-5ers. A transit gap late at night and early in the morning is a growing burden for an expanding, and overlooked, part of the country’s workforce.

A new report by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), “Supporting Late-Shift Workers: Their Transportation Needs and the Economy,” released yesterday, calls for transit agencies, employers, and local governments to band together and make a renewed effort to help this often-overlooked constituency of transit riders.

These commuters typically get left behind when it comes to transit options for their commutes, adding to the problems caused by an underfunded transit systems and a disconnect between job locations and affordable housing, which make commutes longer, regardless of the time of day. Affordable transportation can give workers a leg up in employment, the opportunity to take a new job, and the security to save more money. As public transit ridership in the U.S. goes through a ridership crisis, it’s only more vital that riders at night don’t get ignored.

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Why Fast Food Is the Ticking Time Bomb of Job Automation | Brian Merchant reports on why fast food will be the first industry totally automated:

Typically, one of the major sources of resistance to automating a process, task, or entire job is the impact it will have on a salaried employee. Layoffs look bad for the company doing the automating, there are myriad social factors in play that create resistance — management will be reluctant to fire longtime employees, for one — and there is risk involved in setting up new machinery, which may take years to get running smoothly.

But in an industry that turns its entire staff over every year — especially one in which the bulk of its jobs are intended to be an agglomeration of repetitive tasks like taking and inputting orders, adding and arranging ingredients to a dish, and cleaning floors and tables — corporations and middle management will spend a lot less time weighing social factors and nursing concerns about optics. Hell, fast food is already one of the worst-regarded jobs because workers are openly treated with so little dignity, the benefits range from threadbare to nonexistent, and the wages are so low.

All of which is to say: As soon as the fast food companies can automate those jobs, they will. The only things preventing those companies from doing so are the projected costs and the functionality of the automated systems. That’s it.

Ghost kitchens and food delivery services are also eating away at the other end of the restaurant business.

Quote of the Day

The past is not dead. It never dies. Although it moves further away: at every passing moment. To recover the past is thus possible. What’s required, however, if one really has the desire to recover it, is to travel down a kind of corridor which grows longer at every instant.

| Giorgio Bassani

Elsewhere

Are Platforms Commons? | Stowe Boyd | Before sweeping regulation of platforms as common carriers, should we instead reconfigure them as commons, governed by the participants?

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Even Physicists Don’t Understand Quantum Mechanics | A classic Kuhn generational conflict, in physics.

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How Does WeWork Make Money? | According to CBInsights, by taking away the pain of space transitions for its customers. How much is that pain avoidance worth?

WeWork gives its tenants something that is ordinarily hard to find: a flexible space, on-demand, with short-term leases (in some cases, even on a month-to-month basis). This solves a problem that plagues fast-growing startups especially: the process of finding a new office space, moving in, signing a long-term lease, remodeling the space, and moving out to start it all over again somewhere else.

When a company outgrows its WeWork membership, it can upgrade to a more spacious option, a private office, or even a private floor — reducing friction from transitions. Customers don’t have to think about all the minutiae of renting office space, and they get access to plenty of office perks (free coffee, fast internet, and so on).

For landlords, WeWork offers significant value as well, including higher rents, an expanded tenant pool, and increases in real estate values. In a blog post published in 2018, the company reported rent premiums in buildings it occupies in New York and Los Angeles of between 15–29%. The company estimates that it has generated $250M in additional revenue for landlords in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles alone.

This reciprocation of value is key to WeWork’s flywheel model — the engine of this billion-dollar company’s sky-high valuation.

Which fell by half this week, pre-IPO, as the smokescreen of ‘WeWork as tech company’ is clearing.

Photo by Chris Gallagher on Unsplash

Beacon NY | 2019–09–11 | I made a strategic error in taking out the air conditioners last weekend. It will be 87ºF today, so I at least have to put my office AC back in.

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This issue owes its title to an elsewhere piece, below, about Canada’s approach to dealing with buildings in consistently flooded areas: they are establishing no-building zones, and demolishing those repeatedly flooded. Climate retreat is a necessity.

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Stories

Senate passes AB5 gig-work bill, turning contractors into employees | AB5 bill has been passed by the California Senate. I wrote about this bill at length in Falling Back To Earth earlier this week:

The bill is based on a 2018 CA Supreme Court ruling that determines that a worker must be classified as an employee if they perform a function central to a company’s business. So an accountant doing the books can be a contractor, but if your business is providing rides to passengers, the drivers are employees. Period.

The implications go far beyond ride-hailing [as Kate Conger and Noam Scheiber wrote]:

The measure could affect millions of Californians beyond ride-hail drivers, including janitors, nail salon workers and cable-television installers [and exotic dancers: see below]. And it would give momentum to an emerging consensus on the center-left that workers are entitled to a basic level of economic security that many Americans now live without.

I bet we will see similar laws in other progressive states, like New York, and Washington. Many Democrat presidential candidates are pushing for a federal law with similar principles.

:::

Meanwhile, Uber has laid off 435 employees, trying to cut costs. We’ll see lots more layoffs there, I bet. The economics of platforms will have to change drastically (see Are Platforms Commons? for more on that).

:::

In somewhat related news Jennifer Carsen reports Club to pay $4.5M after exerting ‘overwhelming control’ over dancers it called independent:

A class of exotic dancers at a Philadelphia gentlemen’s club were employees, not independent contractors, and a jury’s award of $4.5 million for unpaid minimum wages and unjust enrichment was proper, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said (Verma v. 3001 Castor, Inc., ?18–2462 (3rd Cir. Aug. 30, 2019)).

Although each dancer signed a contract confirming she was an independent contractor, the employer exerted “overwhelming control” over the terms of the dancers’ work, said the 3rd Circuit. The club established available shift times; fined dancers for tardiness; gave instructions on physical appearance and dictated hair, dress, and makeup choices; established several dance-floor rules; banned changing into street clothes before the end of shifts; and set the price and duration of all private dances.

Because “the dancers’ relationship to the Club falls well on the ‘employee’ side of the line,” the 3rd Circuit upheld the jury verdict in favor of the dancers.

This ruling is based on the current federal regulations for determining if workers are misclassified as independent contracts by their employers, not the more stringent rules of the California Supreme Court which form the basis of AB5. But Verma v. Castor has broad implications, not just for exotic dance clubs.

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Daimler brings driverless truck tests to public roads in Virginia | Daimler acquired a majority stake in Torc, and together they are testing level 4 autonomous trucks — capable of operating with limited human oversight in select conditions — in VA. They don’t state, but presumably the ‘select conditions’ is exclusively highway driving.

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Harvard Just Discovered that PowerPoint is Worse Than Useless | Ha!

Quote of the Day

I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Elsewhere

Canada Tries a Forceful Message for Flood Victims: Live Someplace Else | Our northern neighbors are smarter than us:

Unlike the United States, which will repeatedly help pay for people to rebuild in place, Canada has responded to the escalating costs of climate change by limiting aid after disasters, and even telling people to leave their homes. It is an experiment that has exposed a complex mix of relief, anger and loss as entire neighborhoods are removed, house by house.

We need to accept a retreat from the coastline and flood plains, nationwide, no matter how aggressively we counter climate change because it will take hundreds of years — at the least — to return to pre-1950 temperature levels.

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Medium launches a new business publication, Marker, and Steve LeVine (formerly of Axios Future) has reemerged as an editor at large, there. LeVine has been a great source for me.

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source: Rachel

Beacon NY | 2019–09–14 | I learn something every week by the stats on what people clicked on in Work Futures Daily.

Stories

Implementing Self-Management: Here’s How It’s Done | The Corporate Rebels examine the few companies that are actually practicing self-managing, and blueprint the hard work they went through to get there. Worth reading. Somehow I had hoped they would look for and detail the similarities across these pioneering companies. Maybe coming in a later update?

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To Build an Inclusive Culture, Start with Inclusive Meetings | Kathryn Heath and Brenda F. Wensil focus on practical ways to counter meeting chaos:

Meetings matter. They are the forum where people come together to discuss ideas, make decisions, and be heard. Meetings are where culture forms, grows, and takes hold.

[…]

Let people know they can speak openly and offer a dissenting opinions without fear of retribution.

[…]

Take advice from a few of our most successful clients:

º Set clear ground rules at the start of the meeting and stick to them. When inclusive meeting conduct is codified, it puts offenders on notice and makes everyone aware of their rights and responsibilities.

º Watch closely for dominators and interrupters. If someone tries to control the dialogue, interject and redirect the conversation back to the broader group.

º If someone is interrupted, step in quickly. You might say, “Wait a minute, I want to hear more of what Janice has to say,” or “Back up. I am intrigued with what Luke was telling us. Luke, can you finish your thought?”

Filled with great tactics.

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Using Neuroscience to Make Feedback Work and Feel Better | David Rock, Beth Jones, and Chris Weller dissect the premises of feedback, and lay out a path to applying it:

Simple as it may seem, feedback — that ubiquitous necessity of organizational life — has proven to be an axis on which organizational culture turns. Research is suggesting that by switching from giving feedback to asking for it, organizations can tilt their culture toward continuous improvement; smarter decision making; and stronger, more resilient teams that can adapt as needed.

Why Feedback Matters

Feedback isn’t just a ritual of the modern workplace. It’s the means by which organisms, across a variety of life-forms and time periods, have adapted to survive. To University of Sheffield cognitive scientist Tom Stafford, feedback is the essence of intelligence. “Thanks to feedback we can become more than simple programs with simple reflexes, and develop more complex responses to the environment,” he writes. “Feedback allows animals like us to follow a purpose.”

Research is suggesting that by switching from giving feedback to asking for it, organizations can tilt their culture toward continuous improvement.

It’s no coincidence the words organism and organization share a Latin root. Just as feedback enables the former to flourish, so it does for the latter. The single-celled amoeba that relies on feedback from its marine environment can more easily find bacteria to munch on, and the salesman who risks losing his job owing to missed targets — metrics, too, are a form of feedback — knows he must change his approach, finding better leads or making more of the customers he has. The same is true for the underperforming department that faces restructuring and rethinks how it collaborates. In all cases, feedback is what keeps organisms, and organizations, alive and well.

Even within organizations, feedback can take many forms. Key performance indicators (KPIs) and other quantitative data are perhaps the most recognizable kind of feedback, especially during performance reviews, but conversational feedback — for example, a quick chat over coffee — counts too. Indeed, just as leaders should think carefully about the KPIs that guide behavior on their teams, they should consider the patterns of verbal feedback that guide their teams to improve.

Research has found roughly 87 percent of employees want to “be developed” in their job, but only a third report actually receiving the feedback they need to engage and improve. The reason for the gap is hardly a mystery: Typical feedback conversations are about as pleasant as a root canal. Managers dread them because it’s often unclear what kind of feedback the employee wants or needs, and employees dread them because even light criticism can feel like an assault on their status and credibility. Indeed, West and Thorson’s new study found that receivers’ heart rates jumped enough to indicate moderate or extreme duress in unprompted feedback situations.

A great read. I particularly like how they spell out how a company can take gradual steps to grow a feedback-seeking culture, where asking for feedback is common:

At the office, leaders can begin by asking for feedback on low-stakes topics, such as the temperature in the office or how people felt about yesterday’s lunch. The point is to get people used to giving feedback that was asked for. When leaders take the first step, they signal to the wider organization that asking is important, and the low-stakes questions help build a sense of trust and agency in their team members. People are given an opportunity to feel heard, which boosts their status, makes them feel more included, and gives them a greater sense of autonomy. West says it also empowers them to give better feedback, replacing brittle smiles with more honest critiques.

And of course this requires psychological safety, which is critical in so many ways.

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Harvard Just Discovered that PowerPoint is Worse Than Useless | Ha!

Quote of the Week

Never accept work where you’re not learning.

| Charles Eames

Elsewhere

Are Platforms Commons? | Stowe Boyd | Before sweeping regulation of platforms as common carriers, should we instead reconfigure them as commons, governed by the participants?

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Canada Tries a Forceful Message for Flood Victims: Live Someplace Else | Our northern neighbors are smarter than us:

Unlike the United States, which will repeatedly help pay for people to rebuild in place, Canada has responded to the escalating costs of climate change by limiting aid after disasters, and even telling people to leave their homes. It is an experiment that has exposed a complex mix of relief, anger and loss as entire neighborhoods are removed, house by house.

We need to accept a retreat from the coastline and flood plains, nationwide, no matter how aggressively we counter climate change because it will take hundreds of years — at the least — to return to pre-1950 temperature levels.

If you are receiving this you’ve probably signed up for the Work Futures Daily newsletter. If not, sign up here. Support our work by becoming a sponsor, here. Or become a follower on Medium, here, and click on the applause button. Drop a few bucks in the hat, here, if you’d like to support our work on a one-time basis.

Originally posted on Work Futures.