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. …
Tag: 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 …
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 …
On the compulsion of honesty
I’ve been noodling around with a blog post on speaking in code—and breaking the code—for a while now, and I’m not sure if that piece is ever going to see the light of day. Some insights strike me really powerfully …
Love in the workplace
I recently went through a family crisis. It wasn’t about me directly, it involved one of my parents, so I expediently posted an update on Facebook without too many details, just to let my friends network know and not have …
Lists: Internal Communications
I have never held a job with “internal communications” in my title. I have also never held a job where internal communications hasn’t ended up being a huge part of my job. Doesn’t matter how junior or senior the position was: …