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Brief thought exercise: is your job what you think you do, tell people you do, or actually do?

A couple of weeks ago, I was on this “business trip” (quotes indicate that it was for work, but admittedly a part-time job) and struck up a conversation with a couple of seemingly like-minded individuals at a hotel bar on Saturday evening… Continue Reading

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Stop telling me how busy you are

Stop telling me how busy you are

I read this in Slate before I went to bed last night and it resonated with me. Essentially, if we view the idea of being busy as so awful, why do we constantly tell others about it in a way that’s akin… Continue Reading

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Good managers are super rare. 82 percent of manager hires end up being the wrong one. (Whoa.) Here’s why (kinda).

People are staggeringly bad at managing others. Can we fix that? Continue Reading

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Employee engagement and the Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends report: What can we learn?

I’m writing this at the intersection point of a couple of different aspects of my life: 1. A few years ago, I went to graduate school to focus on organizational development/behavior and employee engagement. I was interested in these topics because… Continue Reading

Did you know 89 billion business e-mails are sent in a given day? (Smashes face into desk.)

Look at that info-graphic and just weep. 89 billion business e-mails are sent per day. That’s a whole lot of “Got it, thx” or “Need that ASAP, plz.” Think about this: in 1995 or so, business e-mail wasn’t even a norm. Now… Continue Reading

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Ultimate life hacks: flow and making tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge

I had an interview with 3M last year — if you’re not familiar, they invented the Post-It Note — and the interviewer says to me right off the bat, “Well, why do you want to work at 3M?” I wasn’t… Continue Reading

Fun with labor, maps, and statistics: if you want to find a job, move to North Dakota, Nebraska, or Dallas

I love data on jobs and job searching, probably because my own life is a wreck with that stuff right now. I started out looking at unemployment rate by state — to a coastal-bias person, it would seem crazy that the… Continue Reading

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Lao Tzu, the quest for organic communication at work, and FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, please stop proposing newsletters

Some backstory: I’m in this class right now about employee engagement. It’s a pretty interesting class for the most part, although it can get sidetracked with a lot of millennial vs. Boomer and OMG what does it all mean discussions, but I… Continue Reading