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What if one weekly meeting took up 300,000 hours of manpower in a year? That’s the entire year of 34 people’s lives. But this stuff happens.

Take a deep breath and say it with me: not everything needs to be a meeting. Pause, and now say it loud and say it proud: some things can be an e-mail, a quick talk in the hallway, or a trip to… Continue Reading

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Brief thought exercise: where’s the line in a job interview between being casual/funny/personable and the definition of professionalism?

Feel like this has happened to me a couple of times in the last six-seven months: I’m at a job interview, and it’s one of those situations where you meet with 3-5 people in a given day, for about 30… Continue Reading

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Let’s say you shifted your organization to people working 4 days a week, 10 hours a day. Every weekend is a three-day weekend. Could this help employee engagement?

People already do this — the video above is an example, and there are pockets of big companies (like ESPN) where people can get 4 x 10 shifts as opposed to the standard 5 x 8 shift model for office/white-collar… Continue Reading

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Here are five things I’ve learned trying to get a job out of graduate school in 2014

I went to graduate school back in August of 2012. My career focus to that point had primarily been content (writing, editing, social), but what had begun to interest me was the idea of organizations and how they develop. At the point… Continue Reading

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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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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

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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