I am a lifelong devourer of books, but I rarely read nonfiction. I don’t know why, but reading big, fat books about building the Brooklyn Bridge or Lincoln’s cabinet just don’t grab me, narratively, the same way that fiction does. …
Category: Organizational culture
Can we make work suck less?
I am having an unexpectedly slow start to work in 2022—unexpected because I thought I had projects lined up and now they’re either stalled or assuming different shapes than what I originally envisioned. This has left me with a lot …
Going back to the office
Out of the many TED talks/articles that turned into books that then turned into consulting businesses, I think “radical candor” generated some of the funniest stories for me. Radical candor, for the blissfully unaware, was an approach to delivering candid …
Expectations: Yours, mine, everyone’s
There’s a part of the working experience that doesn’t get talked about very often, but I think it highlights one of the most important skills that one can learn in a job: managing expectations. Your own, and others. This issue …
Emotional work at work, still hard.
“Emotional labor” was a Hot Topic a few years ago; the term was originally used to describe the work of managing personal feelings in a work context; then it was coined by a sociologist at Berkeley (why is it always …
On standing still, and moving forward
This post is not about the heartbreaking deaths of George Floyd/Breonna Taylor/Ahmaud Arbery/Philando Castile/Michael Brown/so many other Black people at the hands of police officers and white supremacists, and it’s not about the wave of anguish and rage, that’s being …
Company values: It’s complicated, I guess
At most organizations where I’ve worked, if organizational values were not already a thing, they became a Thing while I worked there. People realized that it’s not enough to have a clear mission; you also need guiding principles on how …
Knowing what you want in a job
In the two years since I left my last full-time organizational job (the two months in May and June of this year at a corporate comms job, I do not count), many, many people have told me that they are …
It’s all in the follow-through
When I was 10 years old, my well-intentioned father came into my room where I was reading a book at the time, I’m sure, because at that age, I was spending approximately every waking minute outside of school and cartoons …
The need for space
There are many ways to define the word “space.” You can think about space as the realm that exists beyond our planet and its atmosphere; you can also think about space in terms of your own body, and the places …
Minna Jung Consulting 