work culture

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Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era? by David de Cremer

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bitcoin, blockchain, business climate, business process, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, future of work, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, race to the bottom, robotic process automation, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, Turing test, work culture , workplace surveillance , zero-sum game

Not every company is in business for the same reason, so they are not necessarily focused on creating the same kind of value. Algorithms lacking the emotional connection with what brings value to people’s lives do not engage in this kind of analysis. Finally, critical thinking skills are not only necessary for leaders to use, but also to install in the company’s work culture. Leaders build work cultures by setting examples and instilling values for which the company wants to be recognised. In this sense, a leader who practices critical thinking will also equip their followers with the same skill. After all, as we will see later, employees will work with algorithms to optimize efficiency in the operations and execution of tasks, so they need to be able to manage these processes in the same way that the leader manages the direction and purpose of the company.

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Empower algorithms in non-biased ways With an inclusive mindset in place, algorithms will be more easily seen as co-workers. They will be recognized as being part of the same team as you are! To achieve this level of inclusion it is necessary to create a sense of connection with the algorithm rather than a sense of distance. An inclusive work culture helps with this ambition. Inclusive leaders foster this work culture by helping employees to understand the value of the algorithm. They can do this by creating continuous education opportunities to understand advancements in technology. Be humble, and work on being tech savvy The presence of algorithms may create discrepancies in technological knowledge between different departments.

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It seems to have even reached the point that managing the maintenance of peace and stability is the only focus left, simply because the corresponding and ever-increasing bureaucracy has left no room to do anything else! Today, the major complaint is that people have too much paperwork to do and too many boxes to tick. For those who fear change, this may be good news because the system ensures that there is very little risk that work culture will become disrupted and turn into chaos. For those who are averse to maintaining the status quo, and want to encourage change for the sake of growth, this completely overwhelming administrative approach is nothing short of a nightmare. Why your mindset matters Most of you will know that it is not only individuals who see this problem, organizations themselves have also reached this conclusion.

How to Work Without Losing Your Mind by Cate Sevilla

Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, emotional labour, gender pay gap, Girl Boss, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, lockdown, microaggression, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Skype, tech bro, TED Talk, women in the workforce, work culture

She then listened to a podcast interview with the CEO of the Happiness Institute, Meik Wiking, who said that, while that statistic about people in the US is true, actually, people who live in Denmark and have children are happier than those without, simply because their work culture allows for it. ‘That was mind-blowing for me,’ she said, ‘because there are work cultures that allow people to be more than just workers, and I started to get a bit angry that we’re crap at this. We’re allowing this work culture to be as it is. I also write emails at night and set deadlines without asking if that deadline is appropriate. We’re all part of it, and we need to create work cultures where it’s OK to have other lives without repercussions.’ It’s the question of how we’re all negatively contributing to this inhospitable working environment for parents that has to be brought to the forefront.

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Here’s my shortlist of reasons why work is so shit for us – an actual shit list: no.1 We work for under-qualified, poorly trained managers who have negative impacts on our career trajectory and development, our ability to work effectively and our mental health. no.2 Toxic work cultures that are lacking in boundaries – allowing egos, envy, mental health problems and drama to run rampant – and also promote unhealthy working habits that normalize burnout and extreme amounts of stress. no.3 Employees are lulled into a false sense of security by being told their company is ‘family’ and encouraged to ‘bring their whole self to work’ – and then punished for it. no.4 Women are still paid less than their male colleagues, and our overall working culture puts parents at a disadvantage and is particularly unsupportive of working mothers.

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It’s hilarious and helpful with so many on-point insights that you’ll wonder if she’s been reading your Slack messages (she hasn’t)’ Lauren Bravo, author of How to Break Up with Fast Fashion ‘It’s funny and smart and incisive and smashes every narrative we’re fed as workers (and women). And it’s way beyond being an essential book on work culture; it’s an essential feminist text. The women who read this – employees, managers, wherever they are in the structure – will be changed by it. It’s nothing short of radical’ Terri White, editor, Empire ‘Fearless and funny! If you feel like work is getting or letting you down Cate is here to give you a hug and offer you practical advice.

The Unusual Billionaires by Saurabh Mukherjea

Albert Einstein, asset light, Atul Gawande, backtesting, barriers to entry, Black-Scholes formula, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Checklist Manifesto, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate governance, dematerialisation, disintermediation, diversification, equity risk premium, financial innovation, forensic accounting, full employment, inventory management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Peter Thiel, QR code, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, work culture

Through the above exhibit we are trying to convey the fact that since separate market share was reported for premium edible oils, Saffola has been a dominant player in this segment. Architecture Multinational FMCG companies in India are known for their professional management and a positive, pro-employee work culture. Over the years, Marico has matched and perhaps beaten these MNCs on this aspect of work culture which is critical to attract good talent. It has used its powerful board of directors for effective guidance. Let’s look at these aspects in detail: Work Culture—Marico’s key competitive advantage: The role of culture in building a sustainable profitable business is underappreciated by investors, particularly in the case of promoter-led businesses.

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Rama told me, ‘I have known Asian Paints for thirty years and all through this period, they have been obsessed about hiring the best people, about having the best IT and the smartest technology-driven process. They started obsessing about talent and technology way before anybody else in India.’ There are three critical aspects to Asian Paints’s architecture: a) creating a unique working culture that nurtures talent; b) using IT to improve competitive advantages; and c) creating a truly independent board of directors to help shape evolution of the firm. Asian Paints does not offer the highest pay packages to business school graduates. Then how does the firm manage to achieve one of the lowest attrition rates in its junior and middle management team across the consumer sector in India?

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Reminiscing in his office in Nungambakkam, one of Chennai’s oldest neighbourhoods, Kurien told us that he and Madhukar inherited a company that made paints for marine and rail applications. He estimated that 60 per cent of the colours that Berger produced in the 1970s were not even on the shade cards of distributors. As Kurien says, the biggest challenge was to change the work culture within Berger. This, along with a shift in focus towards decorative paints, was the transformation that Kurien led through the 1980s. Kurien hired high-quality talent and worked on building a culture that encouraged and retained such talent by giving full autonomy to employees. This improvement in culture gave the employees a sense of togetherness.

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte

8-hour work day, affirmative action, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deliberate practice, desegregation, DevOps, East Village, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, game design, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, machine readable, meta-analysis, new economy, profit maximization, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Zipcar, éminence grise

Markus Dettmer and Janko Tietz, “Germany’s Massive Job-Saving Program Could Still Fail,” Spiegel online, December 30, 2009, www.spiegel.de/international/business/betting-on-an-upswing-in-2010-germany-s-massive-job-saving-program-could-still-fail-a-669502.html. 7. “Guide: Maximum Weekly Working Hours,” Gov.uk website, December 3, 2012, www.gov.uk/maximum-weekly-working-hours/overview. 8. “The Danish Work Culture,” Copenhagen Capacity website, www.copcap.com/content/us/living_working/working_in_copenhagen/the_danish_work_culture. 9. Janet C. Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers, “Institutions That Support Gender Equality in Parenthood and Employment,” in Gender Equality, ed. Gornick and Meyers, 3–64. 10. “Public Holidays,” Visit Copenhagen website, www.visitcopenhagen.com/good-to-know/practical-stuff/public-holidays. 11.

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As I sought to get to the root of how work contributes to the overwhelm, it became clear complicated factors are at play: extreme work hours,12 rapidly evolving technology, information overload, globalization, changing demographics, shifting gender roles, the high status of busyness, economic anxiety, and cutbacks that “offload” more work onto the fewer remaining employees, not to mention the increased cost of living, stagnant wages, growing household debt, and the steep cost of child care followed by eye-popping college tuition bills—increasing 893 percent since 1980—that perpetuate the work-and-spend spin cycle.13 But as I read case after case of workers, both men and women, claiming they’d been discriminated against because of caregiving responsibilities, as I read studies on human performance and motivation that show our work culture is completely at odds with how we produce our best work, I came to understand that something deeper, and more insidious, drives us. I was about to meet the Ideal Worker. * * * The ideal worker doesn’t take parental leave when a child is born. He doesn’t need a place or time to pump breast milk.

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“There’s a lot of … He’s a real man; he works 90-hour weeks. He’s a slacker, he works 50 hours a week,” engineers told Cooper.64 It’s the kind of culture that applauded when pregnant Marissa Mayer announced she wouldn’t take maternity leave after being appointed CEO and president of Yahoo! Catherine Keefer, forty-two, reveled in the all-hours work culture when she first moved to the Bay Area and got a job where most women end up in high-tech: the “pink ghetto” of marketing. Work felt like the center of a very exciting universe. It was fun. There were Ping-Pong tables, upscale cafés serving specialty coffees, and valet dry-cleaning services so you’d never have to leave.

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

“Apple Just Dismissed More than 200 Employees from Project Titan, Its Autonomous Vehicle Group.” CNBC. CNBC, January 24, 2019. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/24/apple-lays-off-over-200-from-project-titan-autonomous-vehicle-group.html. “How is the work culture”: “How Is the Work Culture at the IS&T Division of Apple?” Quora. https://www.quora.com/How-is-the-work-culture-at-the-IS-T-division-of-Apple. fifteen-dollar-per-hour wage floor: Salinas, Sara. “Amazon Raises Minimum Wage to $15 for All US Employees.” CNBC. CNBC, October 2, 2018. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/02/amazon-raises-minimum-wage-to-15-for-all-us-employees.html

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When IS&T’s projects are finally completed, they can cause even more headaches for Apple employees, who are left with a mess to clean up. Multiple people told me their Apple colleagues were forced to rewrite code after IS&T-built products showed up broken. On Quora, a popular question-and-answer site among Silicon Valley types, the question “How is the work culture at the IS&T division of Apple?” has elicited some unbelievable responses. “The engineering quality is extremely lackluster,” says the top answer, written by an anonymous user who says they worked at IS&T. “When I first joined, I was absolutely SHOCKED to see how projects were designed and developed.

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See also Google Alter Girl (Syverson), 201 Amazon, 21–53 abuses of power by, 196 and Amazon Web Services (AWS), 45, 169, 171, 175 and artificial intelligence/machine learning, 42, 43, 109, 145–46, 219–20, 221 automation program at (Hands off the Wheel), 37–40, 41–44 and community support, 217 daily surveys at, 49–50 Day One culture of, 5–7 dominance of, 3 and Echo, 109, 111, 145–46, 147 employees of, 33–34, 41–46 employee training offered by, 35 Engineer’s Mindset at, 16 Go grocery store of, 21–22, 25, 53 headquarters of, 21, 53, 217 invention culture at, 16, 22–26, 45, 51 invention system at, 26–30, 36, 101 inventory management at, 37–40, 42–43 leadership principles at, 23–25, 47–48, 50 New York Times article on, 48–51 recruitment AI issues of, 219–20, 221 reinvention embraced by, 8 robot employees of, 30–35 tax breaks sought by, 217–18 technical creativity cultivated at, 51–52 work culture at, 48–51 written proposals at, 26–29 See also Bezos, Jeff Apple, 129–61 and AirPods, 133 and Apple Car, 148–51, 161 and Apple Watch, 133 collaboration absent from, 17, 131, 137–38, 142–43, 146–47, 150–51, 159 design imperative at, 134–36, 144, 149–50 dominance of, 3 and Engineer’s Mindset, 17, 131, 143, 151, 161 environment of, 136–37 hierarchies and top-down organization at, 131, 136, 143, 150, 151, 161 and HomePod, 129–31, 146–48, 151, 161 invention at, 131, 136–37, 160–61 and iPhone, 108, 133, 140–42, 149, 155–59, 160–61 and IS&T issues, 152–55 leadership of, 134 and Macs, 133 and privacy face-off with FBI, 155–59 products developed by, 7–8 refinement culture of, 132–33, 142–43 and revenue declines, 140–41 secrecy and silos enforced at, 137–40, 142–44, 146–47, 149, 151 and Siri, 142–46, 161 and user feedback, 144 values of, 159 visionary culture at, 17 See also Cook, Tim aQuantive, 163–65, 187, 196 artificial intelligence and machine learning advances in, 109 at Amazon, 42, 43, 109, 145–46, 219–20, 221 at Apple, 145, 150–51 automation technology’s integration of, 13, 14 bias potential in, 219–21 Bostrom on, 203–5 and dystopian scenarios, 195, 197 at Facebook, 75–81, 88 and face-recognition technology, 75–76 at Google, 109, 111–12, 114, 119–23 impact on employment, 36, 201–2, 204–5 and inventive cultures, 9–10 at Microsoft, 13, 164, 166, 170, 175–80 and Pentagon’s Maven project, 119–23 in predictive stocking, 38–40 recruitment of professors to private sector, 197 Athey, Susan, 166–71 automation and erosion of meaning, 198–202 impact on employment, 35–36, 216, 223–24 in inventory management, 37–40, 41–44 and predictability of humans, 37–38, 44 widespread application of, 11–14 Automation Anywhere, 13 Bach, Robbie, 164 Baldwin, Micah, 29, 49, 52 Ballmer, Steve at annual meetings, 181–82 leadership of Microsoft, 7, 18, 164–65, 167, 169–70, 171 Nadella’s succession of, 7, 18, 165, 171 Baquet, Dean, 49 Bauer, Ken, 139–40 Bezos, Jeff and Amazon Echo, 109 on careers in tech industry, 35 on Day Two, 5–6 drive of, 46–47 and Engineer’s Mindset, 15, 16, 18 fourteen leadership principles of, 23–25, 47 and invention culture of Amazon, 16, 22–23, 25, 53, 101 leadership style of, 3 and New York Times article, 49 and PowerPoint ban, 26 technical creativity cultivated by, 52 and Washington Post, 61–62 and written proposals, 26–29 Zuckerberg’s request to shadow, 61–62 See also Amazon “bias for action” principle, 24 bias in technology, potential for, 219–20 Birch, Rosa, 86–88 Black Mirror series, 191–92, 193–94 Bloodworth, James, 33 Bostrom, Nick, 203 Bosworth, Andrew, 84–85 Breisacher, Tyler, 119–20, 122 Brin, Sergey, 98, 106, 107, 110, 110n, 113 Brooker, Charlie, 192 Brownlee, Marques, 129–31, 147, 158 Cambridge Analytica, 83, 84, 158 Cameron, David, 192 Candela, Joaquin, 76–80 Carney, Jay, 49 Case, Anne, 201 Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, 218 Chew, Chee, 103–4, 105 China, 74, 135, 141, 142, 157, 192 Christensen, Clayton, 9 Claire, Craig Le, 14 cloud computing, 10, 166, 167–71, 175 collaboration Apple’s lack of, 17, 131, 137–38, 142–43, 146–47, 150–51, 159 communication tools enabling, 96–99, 115–16, 123, 125, 128 and Dweck’s “growth mindset” model, 185 and Engineer’s Mindset, 16–17, 17 at Google, 95, 96–99, 101, 105, 112, 114–16, 118–19, 128 at Microsoft, 166, 183–89, 190 at Square, 212 technology for, 10, 212, 225 transparency in support of, 96, 115–16 community, sense of, 200–201 compensation models, algorithmic, 81–82 conformity, teaching, 214–15 Cong, Jose, 98, 99 Conger, Kate, 94 Cook, Tim and Apple Car, 148–49 and Engineer’s Mindset, 17, 131 and hierarchies at Apple, 131, 136 and iPhone sales, 140–41 leadership style of, 134, 136–37 and privacy face-off with FBI, 156–57 and revenue declines, 140–41 and Siri, 143 and visionary culture of Apple, 17 See also Apple copying other products, 70–74 Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, 207–8, 210 Cowie, Jefferson, 201–2 Cox, Chris, 71 creativity, value of, 215 Cuban, Mark, 7, 58 Cue, Eddy, 134 “customer obsession” principle, 25 Damore, James, 93–95, 127 DataRobot, 13 Day One culture, 5–7 Dean, Jeff, 109, 111–12, 120 deaths of despair, 201 Deaton, Angus, 201, 202 democratic invention.

Working Hard, Hardly Working by Grace Beverley

Cal Newport, clockwatching, COVID-19, David Heinemeier Hansson, death from overwork, glass ceiling, global pandemic, hustle culture, Jeff Bezos, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, stop buying avocado toast, TED Talk, TikTok, unpaid internship, work culture

The fact that I agree with Petersen, and yet am not a millennial, does not negate her argument in the slightest. In fact, it shows just how epochal these issues stand to be – perhaps it’s not just a single burnout generation we’re looking at, but an entire new burnout culture created by our new working world. Work culture used to be about ‘earning stripes’, but we don’t want that any more. Generally, we no longer think it’s necessary to sit through fifteen years of corporate work in order to know the field and move up the rankings, paying respect to the culture in return for a pension we’re not even guaranteed to receive.

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Alongside late nights at the office with no overtime, unpaid internships and work experience are the norm in many industries. While the UK is by no means the worst when it comes to labour protection, it does become all the more shocking when we learn that other EU countries are proactively fighting this change in work culture by putting further laws in place to protect their citizens as the issue develops. I’m not sure how to ‘productively’ combat this – after all, we want to be able to work hard and benefit from the fruits of going ‘above and beyond’, but it certainly casts doubts on the incentive to work hours and hours unpaid in the name of winning a gold productivity star and raises a variety of valid, and very serious, questions..

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The thought of taking a day off due to being on the verge of a cold sits right next to ‘taking a day off because your dog ate your report’ in the things-you-just-don’t-do-at-work pile.) Yet it stands to reason that if you spend just one day in bed resting, you’ll be fine for the rest of the week. Instead, as is typical of our stoical twenty-first-century working culture, you end up waiting until you are actually quite sick and have infected the rest of your office with both a cold and your own glowing reputation of someone who just does not take days off. And when someone finally pleads with you to just go home (if you’re lucky), you end up taking more days off while you recover than you would have needed had you fought it early.

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture

It is important to price in time for failure – to notice what does not work as well as what does. The datasets on what works with hybrid time management need time to accrue. And what about the 80,000 workers of Fujitsu in Japan who are now, thanks to a programme called Work Life Shift, largely remote-based?58 Will they dislodge centuries of a working culture which used to be so onerous that pre-pandemic workers took just over half the annual leave they were entitled to?59 In 2015 a survey by the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training showed that over a third of women and men were anxious about ‘the ambiguity of work and time off’ which teleworking and remote working represented.

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The focus the Fourth Industrial Revolution has placed on reskilling and trying to outpace automation has often added to the feeling that we humans are bit-part players, acting our roles, wearing our costumes, with little or no agency. But this is now changing. By dressing in a more casual way, we are showing that the rigidity and formality of work no longer suits us. Rather than power dressing, which dominated working culture for so many years, athleisurewear is about comfort and freedom. The hoodies and leggings that can accommodate a school run or a jog plus a Zoom call are emblematic of a new holistic identity which allows you to be your complete self. The Stocktake and the Solopreneur This new freedom in how we work and what we wear to work may appeal to employees but is not popular with everyone.

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It can actually be alienating for some people who do not regard themselves as political but who do want to feel they gain something from belonging to a network. Unions could address this gap. If they were to position themselves as brokers of social capital or vital knowledge between organisations and their workers, they might reverse their decline in the Nowhere Office. The Long Lunch The shift from a place and task-based working culture to one focused around people will require both new networks and new confidence to go out and network. An IBM survey famously found that high performing organisations were 57 per cent more likely to invest in collaboration and social networking.18 Organisations wishing to equip their hybrid workforces for the new working environment would be wise to increase the investment they make in allowing their employees time and budget to develop contacts.

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery by Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore

Airbnb, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, call centre, chief data officer, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, data science, Diane Coyle, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, G4S, hype cycle, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, loose coupling, M-Pesa, machine readable, megaproject, minimum viable product, nudge unit, performance metric, ransomware, robotic process automation, Silicon Valley, social web, The future is already here, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture

So one of the first things your new digital institution needs to prove is that you can not only make agile teams work, but that they can deliver things that have eluded equally talented public servants that are organised in the traditional way. Minimum viable team Your first digital products will define the trajectory of your digital institution and what it does. Your first digital team will define the working culture and how things are done. There are a handful of hires you need to start with. Product manager The product manager is the first among equals in the team, and the public face of the project. They define and articulate the vision for what is being built, explaining that to the team and the wider organisation they operate in.

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However, as a general rule ‘innovation’ is something to be cautious about. Innovation units are an increasingly common sight in governments and large corporates. They set up with a remit to be disruptive, in much the same way that a digital unit should be. Many innovation units are full of good people and smart ideas. They often take on a similar working culture and practices those described in previous chapters: agile, multidisciplinary and open. However, the risk of bracketing disruption under the banner of innovation is that it can ultimately remain peripheral to the business, something to be held at arm’s length from whatever the ‘real work’ is. Many innovation teams find themselves trapped in the purgatory of being an add-on to the day to day rather than a force charged with fundamentally reshaping the organisation.

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Without the recognising the crisis the organisation faced, the DVLA would not have got close to this position. The chances of it delivering artful ­machine-learning-led services without fundamentally changing the institution itself are slim to none too. One indicator of an organisation’s maturity and readiness for this next wave of technologies – assuming that it already has a digital working culture in place – is how it looks after its data. If an institution knows what data it owns, makes it machine readable, and has considered the data protection and privacy issues that come with the responsibility of looking after it, it might have a fighting chance. Without those things, forget it. Whatever the hype may be, new technologies like machine learning are forcing the right questions into the open.

How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, call centre, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deskilling, Easter island, financial independence, full employment, Gordon Gekko, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, moral panic, New Urbanism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, spinning jenny, three-martini lunch, Torches of Freedom, trade route, wage slave, work culture

. : Sex and Idleness 2 a.m. : The Art of Conversation 3 a.m. : Time 4 a.m. : Meditation 5 a.m. : 6 a.m. : On 7 a.m. : A Dream Readers ' Section St Simeon 's Further .. . ' Preface It ' s good to be idle. The purpose of this book is both to celebrate laziness and to attack the work culture of the western world, which has enslaved, demoralized and depressed so many of us. Doing nothing, however, is hard work, as Oscar Wilde pointed out. There are always so many people around trying to make you do things. This is why I have tried to create a kind of canon of idle writing, from the philosophy, fiction, poetry and history of the last three thousand years, to give us idlers the mental ammunition we need to fight the fight against work.

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Workshops became ' manufactories ' ; the self-employed became the employed; families began to live on wages alone and to buy in the groceries that perhaps they had grown themselves in previous generations. They might have been earning more money, but a terrific blow was dealt to their quality of life. Joyful chaos , working in tune with the seasons, telling the time by the sun, variety, change, selfdirection; all this was replaced with a brutal, standardized work culture, the effects of which we are still suffering from today. In other words, the job was invented in order to make things easier for those at the top. The people were stripped of their independence in order to service the grand dreams of a socially aspir-ational mill-owner who believed in hard work - for other people.

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The newspapers create a climate of guilt around it because of the time it takes away from useful, productive work. As we saw in our chapter on skiving, headlines reading ' days lost to British industry due to sickness ' are a regular sight. The stories make one feel that when ill you are somehow letting the side down, losing the nation money. Being ill is unpatriotic and terribly inconvenient to the work culture. It results in days off and expense for employers. It makes us feel guilty. Society today simply does not allow us to be ill or, at least, it would prefer us to be uncomplaining automatons. Suffering is swept under the carpet, denied, ignored, made war upon. When we are struck down with illness, we should be thinking not, ' Oh no, my boss will get annoyed, ' but, ' Oh great, I can lie in bed, watch old movies, stare at the ceiling, read books -in short, do all those things that I am always complaining that I don ' t have the time to do. ' We can ' t take laudanum any more but I understand that Collis Browne ' s cough mixture has a similar effect.

What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, California energy crisis, clean water, cotton gin, deal flow, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, high net worth, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, Menlo Park, microcredit, new economy, proprietary trading, rolling blackouts, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, telemarketer, traffic fines, work culture , young professional

He worked in a county office alongside a food inspector, a building permit inspector, a septic system inspector, and a hazardous materials emergency response coordinator. The pay was less than half what he earned at Big & Oily, which clearly bothered him. He was wary of government bureaucracies, the turtle’s pace of their work culture. I had a sense that his commitment to this job would last only as long as his need to get revenge. And Big & Oily was doing everything it could to weaken his resolve. He whipped out his cell phone and played a message his answering machine recorded that afternoon. The call was from an old compatriot at Big & Oily: “Hey, Bryce, what’s going on, man?

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They’d stretched a huge net across the water, dragging each end with a tractor. Two men in chest waders walked along the pond bottom, one foot on the net to keep it from floating to the surface. Don doesn’t have to say too much. His presence is a motivator. If his hires don’t think they’re being monitored, they’ll slack off. That’s the work culture here, so that’s the essential nature of his role, and it’s hard for that not to have its erosive effect—he has to be slightly watchful, just about all the time. Don didn’t learn this lesson quickly, and it’s not in his basic nature. On Wall Street everybody’s income was tied to their performance, and that was all the motivation anyone needed.

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“I always loved engineering,” she said. “You’ve met my friends. I was one of them.” She’s also learned, from a seminar at UT, that feeling like an unqualified imposter at work is common. So common that it has a name: Imposter syndrome. It’s particularly common among women thrust into lots of responsibility in a male-dominated work culture, where the men make it taboo to ask questions because they don’t want to appear uninformed or unintelligent. In other words, Julia learned that feeling like an imposter wasn’t a sign that she didn’t belong there. It was a sign that she had to ask more questions. Most of all, she feels in retrospect that she fled engineering, more out of fear than out of wisdom.

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

The author of a popular management guide writes that ‘when people are happy and free to be themselves, they are more productive and give more of themselves’ (Bains, 2007). This new ethos sees aspects of workers’ personalities that were previously barred or ignored by their employers being dragged into the workplace. ‘Being yourself’ and ‘having fun’ are emphasised, and organisations’ earlier attempts to create uniform work cultures and a high level of identification with company values are written off as crude and passé. This new ethos is sometimes referred to as the ‘Californian ideology’, owing to its prevalence in America’s Silicon Valley. In the UK, it is perhaps epitomised by the (albeit extreme) example of London’s coveted Google offices, which comprise a sort of playground featuring beanbags, allotments, chill-out zones and an old-fashioned sitting room, designed to allow employees to ‘work from home’ whilst remaining in the office.

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In the UK, it is perhaps epitomised by the (albeit extreme) example of London’s coveted Google offices, which comprise a sort of playground featuring beanbags, allotments, chill-out zones and an old-fashioned sitting room, designed to allow employees to ‘work from home’ whilst remaining in the office. Peter Fleming and Andrew Sturdy explored this new fun-at-work ethos in their study of the Sunray (a pseudonym) call centre (Fleming and Sturdy, 2011). Sunray’s work culture was governed by the cringeworthy principle of the ‘3Fs’: ‘Focus, Fun, Fulfilment’ – a slogan repeated in team meetings, recruitment literature, and staff appraisal sessions. Attempts to inject fun into the office gave rise to a range of activities, from quizzes, themed fancy dress events and away-days to Friday afternoon drinking games and decorating the office to look like a jungle.

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As we saw back in Chapter 2, in relation to Catherine Casey’s study of Hephaestus, managerial attempts to engineer identification with work sometimes produce the opposite feeling in the worker (Casey, 1995). Workers try to preserve their individuality with a sense of disbelief, cynically dis-identifying with the work culture. A study by David Collinson records manual workers referring to the push to build a culture of excellence as ‘Yankee propaganda’. The company newsletter became known as the ‘Goebells Gazette’ (Collinson, 1992). These cultures of cynicism can undoubtedly act as important weapons in labour struggles, though they will only be effective if workers are also committed to the idea that an alternative is really possible.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Once their project has reached that stage they have to take the idea to a company council, which will make a decision about whether it should go ahead. This all needs a hefty pinch of salt. Work cultures are rarely as open and democratic as people at the top of an organisation claim, even at a company as funky as Google. Yet if only half of Sacca’s account is accurate, the company’s work culture poses a huge challenge for traditional, top-down companies. An organisation that wants to match Google’s capacity for innovation needs to match its work culture. Google is the most striking example of a company that has taken elements of We-Think-style work into the corporate world and created an extremely potent mutant: a money-making machine that espouses open-source values.

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The principle of doing things with people rather than to or for them will breed very different organisations, services and experiences in virtually every field. With is about how we work. I dropped out of working for large organisations because I wanted to be able to work alongside people, without hierarchies and job titles getting in the way. The working culture of open source communities, such as Wikipedia, and the web more generally, is a culture in which ideas are shared with like-minded people. In the world of the web you can freely communicate with anyone you need to regardless of title or hierarchy. And this principle is at the heart of great social enterprises such as the Grameen Bank and the Barefoot College, who identify people’s problems and devise solutions with them, thereby building capabilities that allow people to go on and sustain themselves.

Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away by Julien Saunders, Kiersten Saunders

barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, digital divide, diversification, do what you love, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, index fund, job automation, job-hopping, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lifestyle creep, Lyft, microaggression, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, passive income, passive investing, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, side hustle, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, work culture , young professional

People in the Middle often have enough income and are even saving for retirement, but they have no idea what they’re saving for, how close to or how far they are from achieving that goal, or why they’re even doing it. They’re often just going through the motions with no clear plan for their life and as a result, no purpose for their income. And when your income lacks purpose, you’re vulnerable—vulnerable to being sucked into the system of consumerism and the endless work culture of jobs. The vast majority of people in the Middle have adopted an approach to thinking about money that gets them only halfway to their anticipated destination. They’re doing well, but they can’t help but feel haunted by the sense they could or should be doing better. And the way they’ve defined doing better sets the tone for how they think about their current and future income.

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Instead, they continue working, telling themselves, Just another year or I’m waiting to get fired to collect a fat severance package. If nothing else, their responses illustrate a profound truth: financial freedom isn’t a number; it’s a feeling. We sensed our version of freedom on our honeymoon, even though it was for only two weeks. During our honeymoon, the feeling we had after spending time away from the office, work culture, and the American media machine intoxicated us. During our time in South Africa, we were also free from the self-induced pressure we’d placed on ourselves to uphold the image of Black excellence. While we certainly had luxury experiences, most of our treasured moments were not expensive at all.

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You might even be drawn to the idea of earning a higher hourly wage through working overtime or shift pay. But there are physical limitations to the total hours that can be worked. While “the grind” may be admirable and worthy of accolades by your peers on social media, it should be seen as a short-term and unsustainable solution to earning more money. Work culture in America has made most workers one-trick ponies. Most of us only know how to exchange our time for money, and as a result we’ve become overly reliant on jobs as the single source of income and benefits to support our lives. This income myopia makes us vulnerable and can have devastating consequences.

Belgium - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture by Bernadett Varga

Airbnb, Black Lives Matter, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Day of the Dead, high-speed rail, lockdown, Peace of Westphalia, trade route, women in the workforce, work culture

After work people without responsibility for children may have a drink before going home, especially in the summer when it is so pleasant to spend half an hour at a sunny sidewalk café, but this isn’t a daily fixture. A charming custom in Belgian workplaces is the reception. All kinds of opportunities, such as a birthday, are taken for staff to gather together in the office around lunchtime and indulge in drinks and snacks. This is all part of building a harmonious work culture and good relationships between colleagues, and is very civilized. The school day is from 8.30 a.m. to 4.30 or 5.00 p.m., though it is possible to drop children off any time after 7.30 a.m. and collect them up to 6:00 p.m. Parents spend much of the afternoon ferrying children between school, home, and after-school activities—sports, hobbies, visiting friends.

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There are twelve public holidays, and Belgians do not allow their work and home lives to overlap much; taking work home on the weekend, for instance, is a sign of desperation. It appears, too, that Belgians are extremely loyal to their jobs, if they are happy in them, and job turnover is not high, even if the economy is favorable. While this might signal a lack of dynamism in the work culture, it also means greater institutional continuity than in situations of constant staff turnover. The public sector is large because of the language-based duplications. At higher levels in particular, political affiliations have historically been influential in appointments, and politically awarded sinecures in ministries were common.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton

affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, estate planning, eternal september, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invisible hand, liberation theology, longitudinal study, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, price anchoring, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, walkable city, Washington Consensus, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Works Progress Administration

This€ historical trajectory ultimately produced the paradigmatic hightech workplace, where entrepreneurial free agents rented out their expertise to near-virtual companies, played foosball, and counted their stock options.34 Thus one in�flu�en�tial work culture of postindustrial society was definitively shaped by the networked Bay Area baby boomers. But their contemporaneous counterparts in the Ozarks had a similar in�flu�ence on the other work culture of the ser�vice economy, the one comprising far more Americans than the free-wheeling, no-collar corporate campuses that dominate our imagination of postindustrial work.35 Unlike the restless communards around Berkeley and Stanford, growing up absurd, the future managers of Wal-Mart were growing up rather strapped for cash.

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Pricey new chemical, mechanical, and biological inputs—herbicides, automatic tomato-Â�pickers, hybrid corn—took up the temporary slack in the labor market and made farming so capÂ�ital-Â�intensive that only increased acreage could support the great leap forward in mechanized production.19 For those who did not need to wrest a living out of their acreage, though, farming could still anchor a way of life distinct from national patterns. The small-Â�farm allegiances that shaped local work culture were hinted at by the Tyson poultry proÂ�cessing plants scenting the air around Northwest Arkansas. This Ozarks Fortune 500 company relied upon an agribusiness revolution: contract chicken-Â�raising. Farmers received tens of thousands of day-Â�old chicks, raised them in a computer-Â� controlled climate according to a rigidly standardized schedule, and then returned the broilers and fryers to Tyson Foods for proÂ�cessing by a new work force of Spanish-Â�speaking immigrants—a kind of factory farming for the outsourced era.20 As one such grower put it, “‘This Â�isn’t farming.

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To make the factory system, artisans’ skill was studied, codified, then built into machines and proÂ�cesses. To raise the serÂ� vice sector, a company like Wal-Â�Mart likewise metabolized the knowledge and skill of its initial work force. This very late moment in the history of capÂ�italism saw the enclosure of a rural, ProtÂ�esÂ�tant family ideology and a female work culture based on “people skills.” The Â�women in the stores—customers as well as waged employees—made their priorities known, and management responded accordingly. Not surprisingly, these priorities were distinct from those of men in industrial or professional workplaces as well as from those of Â�women seeking access to such “men’s jobs.”

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game

Google, for example, might reduce our memory, but we no longer need good memories, as in the moment we can now search for anything we need to know. I have no stance in this philosophical debate. My interest in this matter instead veers toward a thesis of much more pragmatic and individualized interest: Our work culture’s shift toward the shallow (whether you think it’s philosophically good or bad) is exposing a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth—an opportunity that, not too long ago, was leveraged by a bored young consultant from Virginia named Jason Benn.

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So why are these easily avoidable and time-sucking e-mails so common? From the sender’s perspective, they’re easier. It’s a way to clear something out of their inbox—at least, temporarily—with a minimum amount of energy invested. The Principle of Least Resistance, protected from scrutiny by the metric black hole, supports work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value. By doing so, this principle drives us toward shallow work in an economy that increasingly rewards depth. It’s not, however, the only trend that leverages the metric black hole to reduce depth.

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Suddenly any obligation beyond your deepest efforts is suspect and seen as potentially disruptive. Your default answer becomes no, the bar for gaining access to your time and attention rises precipitously, and you begin to organize the efforts that pass these obstacles with a ruthless efficiency. It might also lead you to test assumptions about your company’s work culture that you thought were ironclad but turn out to be malleable. It’s common, for example, to receive e-mails from your boss after hours. Fixed-schedule productivity would have you ignore these messages until the next morning. Many suspect that this would cause problems, as such responses are expected, but in many cases, the fact that your boss happens to be clearing her inbox at night doesn’t mean that she expects an immediate response—a lesson this strategy would soon help you discover.

Work Optional: Retire Early the Non-Penny-Pinching Way by Tanja Hester

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-work, antiwork, asset allocation, barriers to entry, buy and hold, crowdsourcing, diversification, estate planning, financial independence, full employment, General Magic , gig economy, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, independent contractor, index fund, labor-force participation, lifestyle creep, longitudinal study, low interest rates, medical bankruptcy, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, multilevel marketing, obamacare, passive income, post-work, remote working, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, side hustle, stocks for the long run, tech worker, Vanguard fund, work culture

Work can give us a sense of purpose, a sense of contributing to society, and a sense of usefulness. The problem isn’t work itself, but our current societal work culture. The culture in which too many of us wear our busyness and the bags under our eyes as status symbols. The culture that says you must hustle around the clock to be worthy. The culture that says our employers or clients own not just our work hours but every waking moment. We aren’t wired to handle that. That’s why we see study after study confirming what most of us already know: Today’s work culture is crushing us. Workplace burnout is at epidemic proportions,1 and workers feel stressed and exhausted.2 Large numbers of us work 50, 60, or even more hours every week.3 While our parents or grandparents rarely had to take work home with them, and certainly weren’t reachable after leaving the office each day, we’re now expected to be connected at all times.

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So it’s no wonder that so many of us are craving freedom from this fast-paced, high-pressure work world. We want to work on our own terms. We want to do something slower, something healthier, something more secure—or maybe just something different, something that makes our lives feel more meaningful. That’s what Work Optional is all about: reclaiming your life from our nonstop work culture so that you decide what role work will play in your life, instead of society deciding for you. It can take any form you imagine, from full early retirement with no paid work ever again, to a life with part-time or periodic work on your own terms. Maybe it’s a life in which you escape traditional employment and go to work for yourself with a big financial safety net in place to keep the work fun instead of stressful.

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

8-hour work day, airport security, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Brexit referendum, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, death from overwork, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, game design, gig economy, Henri Poincaré, IKEA effect, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Johannes Kepler, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, neurotypical, PalmPilot, performance metric, race to the bottom, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, zero-sum game

The Proposal of a Four-Day Weekday Stirs Up a Lot of Debate,” Beijing Review, August 2, 2018, www.bjreview.com/Lifestyle/201807/t20180730_800136855.html; Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, “Why Companies Should Say Goodbye to the 996 Work Culture, and Hello to 4-Day Weeks,” South China Morning Post, April 20, 2019, www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/3006873/why-companies-should-say-goodbye-996-work-culture-and-hello. Anna Ross is quoted in Kura Antonello, “Anna Ross: Founder & Director, Kester Black,” The Cool Career, at www.thecoolcareer.com/anna-ross. Previous Books by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: Rest The Distraction Addiction PublicAffairs is a publishing house founded in 1997.

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Everyone, from the newest to the most senior employees, would go through onboarding again, to guarantee that everyone was familiar with the most valuable tools and practices. “There are some things we need to require that everyone knows how to do,” he says, “because it is really important for the company and the working culture.” AT THIS STAGE… Making a four-day week work isn’t just about finding ways to work faster, as Henrik says. Of course, whether you’re the boss or a team member, you have to think about how to be more effective, how to be politely ruthless with your time, and how you can get your work done by Thursday.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

Guardian (US edition), August 15, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/15/roomba-robot-vacuum-poopocalypse-facebook-post. Somerville, Heather, and Patrick May. “Use of Illicit Drugs Becomes Part of Silicon Valley’s Work Culture.” San Jose Mercury News, July 25, 2014. http://www.mercurynews.com/2014/07/25/use-of-illicit-drugs-becomes-part-of-silicon-valleys-work-culture/. Sorrel, Charlie. “Self-Driving Mercedes Will Be Programmed to Sacrifice Pedestrians to Save the Driver.” October 13, 2016. https://www.fastcompany.com/3064539/self-driving-mercedes-will-be-programmed-to-sacrifice-pedestrians-to-save-the-driver.

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Angwin and Larson, “Bias in Criminal Risk Scores Is Mathematically Inevitable, Researchers Say”; Kleinberg, Mullainathan, and Raghavan, “Inherent Trade-Offs in the Fair Determination of Risk Scores.” 7. Bogost, “Why Nothing Works Anymore”; Brown and Duguid, The Social Life of Information. 8. Hempel, “Melinda Gates Has a New Mission.” 9. Somerville and May, “Use of Illicit Drugs Becomes Part of Silicon Valley’s Work Culture.” 10. Alexander and West, The New Jim Crow. 11. Hern, “Silk Road Successor DarkMarket Rebrands as OpenBazaar.” 12. Brown, “Nearly a Third of Millennials Have Used Venmo to Pay for Drugs.” 13. Newman, “Who’s Buying Drugs, Sex, and Booze on Venmo? This Site Will Tell You.” III Working Together 10 On the Startup Bus Technochauvinists love disruptive innovation.

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science) by Thierry Bardini

Apple II, augmented reality, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, classic study, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, invention of hypertext, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Project Xanadu, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, unbiased observer, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

The report con- cl uded that: There is a largely unacknowledged clash of personal values systems in ARC. . . . There is considerably more formality in the ARC work culture than appears at first glance. . . . There is a tendency in ARC to sometimes be unduly tied down to the past, to be preoccupied with evaluating past decisions and events, to be car- rYIng a load of yesterday's "unfinished business". . . . The relationships between Doug and ARC as a whole, and between Doug and various individuals and sub- groups in ARC, set much of the tone and pace of the work culture and provIde the immediate setting or background for the maJor issues and problems in the culture.

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The relationships between Doug and ARC as a whole, and between Doug and various individuals and sub- groups in ARC, set much of the tone and pace of the work culture and provIde the immediate setting or background for the maJor issues and problems in the culture. This dominance of the leader/others relationshIps is stronger here than In most work cultures. No other PODAC-related Journal entries were submitted after this point. Both professional organizational consultants concluded that specific issues plagued the ARC work culture, issues that needed more than nice bull sessions to move toward a resolution. Most of these related to the specific kind of leadership that Engelbart exercised on ARC and appeared finally as built-in problems in an organization set up around one man's crusade. It is no wonder, then, that the last episode of this social experiment led toward "personal" rather than "organizational development," and to still more conflict between Engelbart and the participants in his crusade.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

Digital technology has collapsed the boundaries between our working and personal lives, with many workers feeling that they have to go along with these new rules of engagement or risk the disappointment or disapproval of their bosses. Yet many of us must also ask questions of ourselves when it comes to how complicit we are in this always-on, always-working culture that the digital age has enabled. Is it our demanding boss that’s ‘making us’ open that email at the dinner table, or our digital addiction and dopamine craving? And could it be that sometimes we do have a choice, it’s just that we are wary of exercising it? Perhaps we mistakenly think we would look less than committed if we didn’t answer that email out of hours; or maybe in an age in which slogans such as ‘hustle harder’ and ‘rise and grind’ are not ironic but aspirational, it’s that many of us have come to see our own worth as being so fundamentally intertwined with our productivity and how much we earn, that we put the demands of our workplace before everything else.82 Whatever the reason, the upshot is that many of us find ourselves responding to bosses, clients and colleagues during family time, school plays and even in bed late at night when in reality our reply could wait until we were back at work the following day – and despite the fact that this disruption of our precious time with family and friends renders us more disconnected, not only at work but in our private lives too.

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And those of us – mea culpa – for whom work and our emails have the habit of taking over all God-given hours, but do have a meaningful choice as to whether we allow them to, need to at least acknowledge that by doing so we’re making a trade-off – and ask ourselves whether it’s a trade-off really worth making. At times it may be, but always? We need to become more acutely aware of the high cost of our digital addictions, just as our employers need to see the consequences of an always-on work culture: for employees’ mental health, for productivity, for decision-making and for creativity.83 At some innovative companies, management and workers are trying to draw some lines at least. As early as 2011, Volkswagen employees’ work council (similar to union reps) successfully campaigned for the company to program its BlackBerry servers to stop routing emails half an hour after work-shift end times.84 In 2014, Daimler, another German car company, instituted a policy whereby emails sent to employees on holiday would be automatically deleted.85 And in 2018, the European bargain supermarket chain Lidl banned work emails from 6 p.m. until 7 a.m. and over the weekend in some of its markets in a bid to improve its employees’ work-life balance.

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Note that whilst Schawbel doesn’t explicitly state that his survey questioned only office workers, it’s clear from reading the book that the focus of his surveys is overwhelmingly white-collar office workers. See also David Vallance, ‘The workplace is a lonely place, but it doesn’t have to be’, Dropbox, 15 July 2019, https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/work-culture/tips-for-fixing-workplace-loneliness. 2 Emma Mamo, ‘How to combat the rise of workplace loneliness’, TotalJobs, 30 July 2018, https://www.totaljobs.com/insidejob/how-to-combat-the-rise-of-workplace-loneliness/; Jo Carnegie, ‘The rising epidemic of workplace loneliness and why we have no office friends’, Telegraph, 18 June 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education-and-careers/0/rising-epidemic-workplace-loneliness-have-no-office-friends/; as of 2014, 42% of Brits reported not having a single friend at the office. 3 ‘Most white-collar workers in China anxious and lonely: survey’, China Daily, 23 May 2018, https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201805/23/WS5b04ca17a3103f6866eea0e9.html. 4 ‘Research on friends at work’, Olivet Nazarene University, https://online.olivet.edu/news/research-friends-work; ‘Loneliness and the Workplace’, Cigna, January 2020, https://www.cigna.com/static/www-cigna-com/docs/about-us/newsroom/studies-and-reports/combatting-loneliness/cigna-2020-loneliness-report.pdf, p.7. 5 ‘Loneliness during coronavirus’, Mental Health Foundation, 3 June 2020, https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/coronavirus/coping-with-loneliness. 6 ‘State of the Global Workplace’, Gallup, https://www.gallup.com/workplace/238079/state-global-workplace-2017.aspx. 7 Jane Ammeson, ‘Storytelling with Studs Terkel’, Chicago Life, 28 May 2007, http://chicagolife.net/content/interview/Storytelling_with_Studs_Terkel; Teenage Telephone Operator Reveals Loneliness In Terkel’s ‘Working’’, NPR, 27 September 2016, https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

For example, during the recessions of 1982–1983, 1990–1991, and 2007–2009, the loss of stable employment for male breadwinners resulted in more wives entering the workforce or increasing their hours, which economists term the “added worker effect.” According to one prominent study, the 2007–2009 Great Recession produced the strongest such effect: perhaps the “need” for extra work has been reframed by the gig economy as a positive opportunity for “extra” income. In effect, the work culture that promotes the idea that everyone should get a side hustle puts a positive sheen on the declining economic prospects of male (and female) breadwinners. The sharing economy draws on these histories, delegitimizing and feminizing work by pigeonholing sharing-economy jobs as mere side hustles.

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Turning off WhatsApp in Brazil would destabilize communications nationwide; likewise, when Waze erroneously advised drivers in Israel to avoid a major roadway, mad traffic jams ensued.14 The idea of Uber and the logic of its business model have already surpassed Uber itself. Both as workers and consumers, we have integrated the algorithms of Silicon Valley into our daily lives. The case of Uber shows us that technology has changed work in ways that are unexpected and potentially irreversible. The sharing economy popularized wider changes to work culture by conflating work with altruistic contributions, bringing into question the identity of workers and devaluing work itself. Meanwhile, Uber advanced its own vision of the legal status of its workers, emphasizing that they were closer to technology consumers than workers. This seemingly legalistic nuance is in reality a cultural sea change in how we categorize work.

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Plays with Fire,” New York Times, April 23, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/technology/travis-kalanick-pushes-uber-and-himself-to-the-precipice.html. 85. Julia Carrie Wong, “Uber’s ‘Hustle-Oriented’ Culture Becomes a Black Mark on Employees’ Résumés,” The Guardian, March 7, 2017, www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/07/uber-work-culture-travis-kalanick-susan-fowler-controversy. 86. Susan J. Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” February 19, 2017, Susan Fowler (blog), www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber. 87. Kara Swisher, “With Her Blog Post about Toxic Bro-Culture at Uber, Susan Fowler Proved That One Person Can Make a Difference,” ReCode, June 21, 2017, www.recode.net/2017/6/21/15844852/uber-toxic-bro-company-culture-susan-fowler-blog-post. 88.

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport

Cal Newport, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, fault tolerance, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Garrett Hardin, hive mind, Inbox Zero, interchangeable parts, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Nash equilibrium, passive income, Paul Graham, place-making, pneumatic tube, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, work culture , Y Combinator

Whether you’re a computer programmer, marketing consultant, manager, newspaper editor, or professor, your day is now largely structured around tending your organization’s ongoing hive mind conversation. It’s this workflow that causes us to spend over a third of our working hours in our inbox, checking for new messages every six minutes. We’re used to this now, but when viewed in the context of even recent history, it represents a shift in our work culture that’s so radical it would be absurd to allow it to escape closer scrutiny. To be fair, the hyperactive hive mind is not obviously a bad idea. Among the benefits of this workflow is the fact that it’s simple and incredibly adaptive. As one researcher explained to me, part of email’s appeal was that this one easy tool could be applied to almost every type of knowledge work—a much smaller learning curve than needing to master a separate bespoke digital system for each type of work.

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Another source of productivity in the XP method is its intensity. When you’re working with a partner, you’re locked into your work. There’s no tactful way to disrupt your focus to check email or idly surf the web, as doing so would leave your partner just sitting there, annoyed, waiting for your attention to return.6 Furthermore, given a work culture in which you’re expected to give your full attention to the problem at hand, with a project manager shielding you from distractions, you end up spending most of your day actually accomplishing hard things. XP is as close to a pure deep work environment as I’ve ever seen deployed successfully. Given this intensity, another core tenet of XP is “sustainable pace.”

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This makes it possible for her to vastly increase her value to her company, which, in a virtuous cycle, can gain her even more autonomy. The danger, of course, is that now she has to produce. Her note about the comfort of “showing up” to demonstrate value is more than just a casual dismissal of normal work culture. For many people, this strategy provides a professional safety net. Busyness is controllable: if you decide to be visibly busy, you know with certainty that you can accomplish this goal. Producing high-value results under scrutiny, as Amanda is now committed to doing, is much more demanding! Just deciding to produce valuable things is not enough to ensure that you’ll pull it off.

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin

affirmative action, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, edge city, facts on the ground, financial independence, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, post-work, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Results Only Work Environment, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, union organizing, upwardly mobile, white picket fence, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

(White came up with this term after she finally managed a night out alone with her husband, and they spent half the dinner staring at their iPhones.) But the work culture was still a revelation. Without a lot of official committees and HR red tape, Silicon Valley is figuring out the single most vexing problem for ambitious working women, a problem everyone thought was unsolvable: how to let them spend time with their children without ruining their careers. The industry has by no means solved the ultimate problem, meaning that there are just as few female heads of companies as there are in any other elite sector. But it gives us a glimpse of the work culture of the future, where face time isn’t so relevant and people take it for granted that women—and men—can be really ambitious and manage a life, too.

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Homogenous, social welfare–minded Nordic countries may be the global equivalents of Portland, but the effort to reengineer masculinity is cropping up in some surprising places—even more surprising than the average American high school. Over the last few decades, the company that controls a couple of offshore oil platforms nicknamed “Rex” and “Comus” in the Gulf of Mexico has made a systematic effort to transform their work culture. The goal was to reduce the unusually high number of workplace accidents, but the method they chose involved basically leaching the macho out of the workplace culture. In the old system, “the field foremen were kind of like a pack of lions. The guy that was in charge was the one who could basically out-perform and out-shout and out-intimidate all the others,” one of the workers explained to two researchers from Stanford and Harvard who did an anthropological study of the worksites.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

She remains “100 percent convinced that a big part of Josie Maran Cosmetics’ success is that everyone is encouraged to bring their whole selves to work, and we’re unified by our passion for taking care of the world as one way to take care of our company and ourselves.” Josie integrated all three purpose approaches into her company. She enabled her customers to gain purpose by caring for themselves and the planet. She created a work culture that celebrated work and seeks to maximize purpose for everyone on the team. Finally, she has invested in creating a supply chain for her company that supports women in Morocco. Purpose is fully part of the company’s DNA. Josie, like other leaders in the new economy, understands the incredible power of purpose in business.

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Post-Human Resources Debbie Cohen, a veteran of the Information Economy, joined the Mozilla team in 2011 as their Head of People. From the start, it was clear that Mozilla had a different culture and leadership style that would require her to design a new approach. It was an exciting opportunity to really push the limits of management and work culture. How do you develop leaders who succeed by following rather than directing? How do you build a community in which the line between volunteers and employees is razor-thin? These kinds of questions starkly contrast the approach to human resources at most Information Economy companies like Microsoft and Amazon.com, managing people through competition, top-down hierarchy, and intellectual jousting.

Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison by The Class Ceiling Why it Pays to be Privileged (2019, Policy Press)

affirmative action, Ascot racecourse, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, classic study, critical race theory, discrete time, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Hyperloop, if you build it, they will come, imposter syndrome, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Martin Parr, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, nudge theory, nudge unit, old-boy network, performance metric, psychological pricing, school choice, Skype, starchitect, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

Indeed, examined through the lens of emotional wellbeing rather than simply economic and occupational achievement, the ‘success’ of mobility is much more uncertain – even when it involves successfully breaking the class ceiling. 183 TEN Class ceilings: A new approach to social mobility We hope that over the course of this book we have made our key findings eminently clear: that people from working-class backgrounds earn less in top jobs than their privileged colleagues; that this can only be partially attributed to conventional measures of ‘merit’; and that more powerful drivers are rooted in the misrecognition of classed self-presentation as ‘talent’, work cultures historically shaped by the privileged, the affordances of the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’, and sponsored mobility premised on class-cultural homophily. But we also want to stake out what we think is important and innovative about our approach, not only our findings. We should say from the outset that a discussion of this kind necessitates a sustained engagement with sociological theory and literature, and therefore a somewhat different writing style.

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This will clearly vary by firm, but in much of our research, and the wider studies conducted by The Bridge Group, it is often middle and senior managers (that is, those below the senior executive team, but on the trajectory to those positions) who are most responsible for enacting and ‘socialising’ dominant work cultures, and who make routine decisions about how talent is defined and identified. It is also the case that it is often those in these middle and lower senior positions that perceive themselves as having most to lose in efforts to drive forward inclusion and equality. Based on The Bridge Group’s experience, engaging this audience usually requires a compelling case for change built on both advancing business performance and social equality; collation and presentation of internal and benchmark data to highlight the nature of the challenge; and the collation of voices from within the organisation (most usefully sourced through independent research) that animate the issues at stake in a way that resonates. 8.

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Yet it is also important for employers to recognise that coming from a working-class background is not always an ‘identity’ that people want to wear or own in the workplace in this kind of public way. For many, then, less public support mechanisms may be more appropriate, such as mentoring or buddying, or it may simply be that induction processes need to recognise better that candidates from different backgrounds can have markedly different levels of familiarity with working cultures and behavioural norms on arrival. Either way, it is important that organisations consult with staff from disadvantaged backgrounds about how to best support them, and prevent them from self-eliminating. 10. Lobby for legal protection The Equality Act 2010 ensured legal protections for a range of minority groups but, as mentioned, did not include class or socio-economic background.

Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Markus Krajewski, Peter Krapp

Apollo 11, business process, Charles Babbage, continuation of politics by other means, double entry bookkeeping, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, index card, Index librorum prohibitorum, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jacques de Vaucanson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge worker, means of production, new economy, paper trading, Turing machine, work culture

Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Kittler, Friedrich. 1997. Memories Are Made of You. In Schrift, Medien, Kognition: Über die Exteriorität des Geistes, ed. Peter Koch and Sybille Krämer, 187–203. Vol. 19 of Probleme der Semiotik. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag. Kittler, Friedrich. 1998. Die Herrschaft der Schreibtische. In Work@Culture: Büro. Inszenierung von Arbeit, ed. Herbert Lachmeyer and Eleonora Louis, 39–42. Klagenfurt: Ritter Verlag. von Kleist, Heinrich. 1805/1997. On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking. In Selected Writings, ed. and trans. David Constantine, 405–409. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing.

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Meyers Großes Konversations=Lexikon. 1906. Article “Buchdruckerkunst.” Vol. 3, 6th newly revised edition, 528–532. Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut. Meynen, Gloria. 1997. Bürokratien von Imperien, Bibliotheken und Maschinen. M.A. thesis, Humboldt Universität Berlin. Meynen, Gloria. 1998. Büroformate: Von DIN A 4 zu Apollo 11. In Work@Culture: Büro. Inszenierung von Arbeit, ed. Herbert Lachmeyer and Eleonora Louis, 81–88. Klagenfurt: Ritter Verlag. Michel, Paul. 2002. Ordnungen des Wissens: Darbietungsweisen des Materials in Enzyklopädien. In Populäre Enzyklopädien: Von der Auswahl, Ordnung und Vermittlung des Wissens, ed. Ingrid Tomkowiak, 35–83.

Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber by Susan Fowler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Burning Man, cloud computing, data science, deep learning, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, microservices, Mitch Kapor, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, work culture

At the end of our call, he asked me to come into the office for an in-person, on-site interview. Before my interview with Eamon, I’d spent a lot of time searching online for things like “Uber sexual harassment,” “Uber discrimination,” and “Uber work culture,” determined to avoid a repeat of my past experiences. But nothing bad came up: from the Google search results, it looked like Uber had never been sued by its employees. I was relieved, taking this to mean that it had a good work culture. It made sense, I thought; a company as big as Uber probably couldn’t get away with what happened at smaller companies, because the story would eventually get out. What I didn’t know at the time was that the mere fact that there was no public record of wrongdoing wasn’t because Uber had a spotless record, but because all Uber employees were bound by forced arbitration.

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Cambridge Analytica, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, lifelogging, low skilled workers, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, tech bro, the built environment, urban planning, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Given that women need to recover from pregnancy and giving birth, and may be breastfeeding, they are most likely to take leave first, leaving the higher earner (Japanese men earn on average 27% more than Japanese women) to take the biggest salary hit.100 It is unsurprising, therefore, that only 2% of Japanese men take the months they are entitled to.101 Japan’s extreme work culture likely also plays a part here – in a country where even holidays are frowned on, fathers report being shamed and penalised at work for taking parental leave. It is worth persevering, however, because the benefits of policies that enshrine in law equal parental responsibility for a child that, after all, two people have created, are long-lasting.

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When Apple announced its US HQ in 2017 as the ‘best office building in the world’, this state-of-the-art office was slated to include medical and dental treatment, luxury wellness spas – but not a child daycare centre.109 Best office in the world for men, then? The truth is that around the world, women continue to be disadvantaged by a working culture that is based on the ideological belief that male needs are universal. The vast majority of American homemakers (97% of whom are women) in a recent poll110 indicated that they would go back to work if they could work from home (76%) or if the job offered flexible hours (74%) – rather suggesting that while the majority of US companies claim to offer flexible working,111 the reality is somewhat different.

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Japanese women spend an average of five hours a day on unpaid labour compared to men who spend about an hour: it’s clear who will be free to impress the boss by staying in the office till late, followed by back-slapping drinks at a local strip club.121 Women’s unpaid workload is compounded in Japan by the two-track career options available in most big Japanese firms: career-track and non-career-track. The non-career-track option is mainly administrative, offers few opportunities for advancement, and is known informally as the ‘mommy’ track – because ‘mommies’ don’t fit into the kind of work-culture that is required for someone on the career-track.122 Combined with the impact having children has on a woman’s chances of promotion (dependent on her ability to demonstrate loyalty through consecutive years worked at a single company), it is unsurprising that 70% of Japanese women stop working for a decade or more after they have their first child, compared to 30% of American women, with many remaining out of the workforce forever.123 It is also unsurprising that Japan has the sixth-largest gender gap in employment and the third-largest gender pay gap in the OECD.124 Long-hours culture is also a problem in academia – and it is exacerbated by career-progression systems designed around typically male life patterns.

Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda

1960s counterculture, anti-pattern, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bash_history, Bill Atkinson, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, HyperCard, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lock screen, premature optimization, profit motive, proprietary trading, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine, Tony Fadell, work culture , zero-sum game

So, here’s my take on the Apple Way, our recipe for making software for products like Safari, WebKit, iPhone, and iPad, my explanation for how we made great products: A small group of people built a work culture based on applying the seven essential elements through an ongoing process of creative selection. Expanded out, it reads like this: A small group of passionate, talented, imaginative, ingenious, ever-curious people built a work culture based on applying their inspiration and collaboration with diligence, craft, decisiveness, taste, and empathy and, through a lengthy progression of demo-feedback sessions, repeatedly tuned and optimized heuristics and algorithms, persisted through doubts and setbacks, selected the most promising bits of progress at every step, all with the goal of creating the best products possible.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

It wasn’t just about leisure, the easy access to nice food and private transportation and abundant personal entertainment. It was the work culture, too: what Silicon Valley got right, how it felt to be there. The energy of being surrounded by people who so easily articulated, and satisfied, their desires. The feeling that everything was just within reach. Was I trying too hard to make this mean something? I asked Leah. Was that just buying into the industry’s own narratives about itself? I tried to summarize the frantic, self-important work culture in Silicon Valley, how everyone was optimizing their bodies for longer lives, which could then be spent productively; how it was frowned upon to acknowledge that a tech job was a transaction rather than a noble mission or a seat on a rocket ship.

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, antiwork, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, deskilling, emotional labour, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, future of work, ghettoisation, independent contractor, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, price stability, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, the built environment, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

.… Insurance companies did what they needed to do, doctors did what they needed to do, and the cost wasn’t so bad.”76 Providers were almost universally voluntary, nonprofit institutions—and often religious ones. “Mission trumped margin,” as Georgine Scarpino described Catholic health care in the postwar period. “It was like a family,” recalled Georgeanne Koehler of the Catholic work culture at St. Francis Hospital, where she worked as a psychiatric aide. “We loved working with the poor. Just loved it.… If you were poor, you might not get the best bed in the hospital, but you got the best care. And probably a little bit more in the way of compassion.” Inhibiting the infiltration of market logic, the state government penalized hospitals that dumped Medicaid patients on lower-grade facilities.77 Just as this inclusion rested upon disenfranchisement of care workers, however, it was also accompanied by the exclusion of the increasingly insecure Black fraction of the working class.

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While adjustment of the system in the 1980s was designed to diminish consumption, in this way, the baseline need persisted: institutional health care had become too central to the survival and social reproduction of the population. The workforce that produced it, too, proved collectively indispensable—even if internally stratified and individually precarious. Care and Work Culture Pittsburgh’s health care system in the late 1970s and early 1980s remained the institutional product of the postwar welfare state, stamped by the social power and communitarian values of the organized industrial working class. The system had been swollen by the inflow of income in the 1970s, extending the logic of postwar liberalism into the 1980s virtually unaltered.

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In a labor dispute at Monsour Medical Center, a nurse “testified after 11 years of employment that until very recently she was unaware that she was exceeding the purview of her responsibilities.” As observed by no less than Senator Richard Schweiker, many who worked in health care “would do voluntarily what we could not ask them to do otherwise.”4 By weakening the boundary between home and work, this work culture tended to generate everyday tensions between the two spheres and chaos in the lives of women workers. Gale Ridenour, for example, began work as a nurse in spring 1976. While management initially thought she was a slow learner, by midsummer her performance had improved. “Although Gale displayed some hesitance about assuming 3-11 charge, she has done well and has not needed to rely on Ms Hall,” wrote a supervisor in late summer.

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail by Robert Bruce Shaw, James Foster, Brilliance Audio

Airbnb, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, call centre, cloud computing, data science, deliberate practice, Elon Musk, emotional labour, financial engineering, future of work, holacracy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Jony Ive, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, loose coupling, meta-analysis, nuclear winter, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, work culture

This is a profound difference that influences its policies, practices, and, most importantly, the way people think and behave within the company—including their interactions with customers. An executive of Whole Foods suggests that the firm’s success is based on the experience of customers when they shop at its stores: “Customers experience the food and the space, but what they really experience is the work culture. The true hidden secret of the company is the work culture. That’s what delivers the stores to the customers.”8 A second management principle shapes how teams operate at Whole Foods. The company believes teams function best when they embrace a set of company-wide practices. Teams at Whole Foods have a great deal of autonomy to make decisions that benefit customers, team members, and the company.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

The answer, Robertson says, is self-organization. “Think about the human body. The human body has hundreds of trillions of cells. But there is no boss cell,” he says. This makes no sense, but anyway, we move on. Robertson tells us he began his quest to reinvent work because he was once a regular employee and found the traditional work culture to be stultifying. As he speaks he clicks on a remote, driving a PowerPoint presentation on a screen behind him. “I like to talk about my purpose in life,” Robertson says. “My purpose is to show people a radical new way to organize power.” As he says this he waves his hand—and the remote flies out of his fingers and skids across the floor.

…

Kooky management ideas are just part of the change roaring at us. We have a new compact with our employers, which involves jumping to a new job every two years and for many people means having to take charge of finding health benefits and figure out a way to save for retirement—things that our employers used to handle for us. We have a new work culture that celebrates overwork, exhaustion, and stress. Many of us are relocating to new offices, as companies abandon suburban office parks and move into urban locations. People who used to work remotely from home now must report for duty at an office, like those thousands of workers at IBM who have started schlepping into the company’s new “Agile hubs.”

The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work by Vishen Lakhiani

Abraham Maslow, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, data science, deliberate practice, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, performance metric, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social bookmarking, social contagion, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, web application, white picket fence, work culture

In the ensuing ten years, a lot has changed: Mindvalley’s office is on Inc. magazine’s 2019 list of Top 10 Most Beautiful Offices in the World. As you’ll learn soon, it started in the backroom of a warehouse in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We’ve reinvented the office and today it’s a case study for workplace interior designers. Our work culture at Mindvalley is so attractive that people from around the world relocate to Malaysia to work from our headquarters. Mindvalley employs brilliant minds from sixty different countries. Walking into our office is like walking into the United Nations with all its diversity. Our team dynamic is vibrant and thriving.

…

I couldn’t get my inner voice to shut up. It was telling me: Inner voice: You’re here for a reason. Quit feeling bad for yourself and start building up this company you call Mindvalley. Me: Piss off. I’m not in the mood. Inner voice: Be honest, you don’t have much of a choice. The work culture here is horrendous. It’s decades behind New York and Silicon Valley. You can’t find a job here that will keep you happy. So create your own world. Me: You make a good point. Inner voice: What makes you think you can’t attract talent in Malaysia? Sure, the country suffers from brain drain and there might not be much talent around, but think outside the box.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

For example, Luis Garicano and Thomas Hubbard showed how better systems for monitoring performance and hours billed allowed law firms to differentiate between their highest performers and the rest.10 The stars ended up being paid more, while the laggards got left behind or were fired. Intangible investment allows professional services employers to replace egalitarian work cultures, where pay is often based on seniority, with sharply incentivised ones, where workers “eat what they kill.” The rise of intangible investment also has an indirect but powerful effect on wealth inequality. Following the publication of Thomas Piketty’s landmark Capital in the Twenty-First Century, it became clear that a significant proportion of the increased wealth inequality that Piketty observed (almost all of it, according to Matt Rognlie)11 derived from the dizzying increase in property prices in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

…

Donald Trump’s government paid little regard to technocracy, but the support he received from accelerationist technology investor Peter Thiel perhaps comes from the same place. It is not clear which, if any, of these political gambits to gain the legitimacy needed to drive institutional change will work. But it is notable that they are being tried—and that politicians are willing to risk reputational damage to see if they work. Culture, Trust, and Cognitive Load Institutional design and politics are important to fixing the mess we are in, but on their own they can go only so far. If we are to develop and deploy better institutions for a new type of economy, we will also need cultural change. Economic historians such as Joel Mokyr and Avner Greif have shown how the prosperity of the modern age depended not just on institutions, technologies, and resources but also on underlying cultural change.

Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels by Rachel Sherman

Abraham Maslow, deskilling, emotional labour, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, knowledge worker, means of production, move 37, new economy, pink-collar, Savings and loan crisis, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, upwardly mobile, work culture , yield management

The production of dispositions in the hotel is presumably analogous to what happens in many other social institutions in which workers and clients also participate, including schools, families, clubs, and political organizations. Their experience in the hotel is unlikely to seem much different to them from their experiences in these other sites. I suggest that it should not seem so different to sociologists either and, thus, that dichotomies between inside and outside work, culture and production, are overstated. In the luxury hotel, this combination facilitates social reproduction. Guests’ sense of entitlement to the labor of others is solidified, as is their sense of reciprocal obligation to the individuals providing that labor. Workers’ interests are constituted in such a way that providing their subordinated labor to others benefits them.

…

Room service was very similar, because lack of supervision allowed workers to snack on various goodies and clown around. The restaurant servers played all kinds of games and practical jokes as well. 33. Susan Porter Benson makes a similar point when she shows that fragmented, inconsistent managerial authority in department stores and managers’ dependence on workers facilitate the development of a work culture among saleswomen (1986: 230). 34. I realized a few weeks into my work at the Royal Court that I had not tried to converse with any of the Spanish-speaking workers even though I speak Spanish; I felt that I had ended up on the front office side of some invisible barrier until I made a conscious effort to communicate with those workers. 35.

…

“The Politics of Service Production: Route Sales Work in the Potato-Chip Industry.” In Working in the Service Society, ed. Cameron Lynne Macdonald and Carmen Sirianni. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lundgren, Rebecka, and Carole Browner. 1990. “Caring for the Institutionalized Mentally Retarded: Work Culture and Work-Based Social Support.” In Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, ed. Emily Abel and Margaret Nelson. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lynn, Michael, and Michael McCall. 2000. “Gratitude and Gratuity: A Metaanalysis of Research on the Service-Tipping Relationship.”

Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David Robertson, Bill Breen

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, business logic, business process, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disruptive innovation, financial independence, game design, global supply chain, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, Wall-E, work culture

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, has gone even further, declaring that the surest way to tap into a wellspring of new ideas “is to make sure that each person in your organization is as different as possible from the others. Under these conditions, and only these conditions, will people maintain varied perspectives and demonstrate their knowledge in different ways.”9 When Plougmann joined LEGO, he found a work culture that was isolated and calcifying—its mostly male, very veteran Danish executives and designers were hamstrung by a lack of urgency and by homogenized thinking. “Product development was in the hands of people who’d been at LEGO for twenty or thirty years,” he recalled. “They were so inward looking, they expected that whatever they created would be right for the market.”

…

LEGO was beset with so many challenges that for more than a year, a turnaround strategy eluded Knudstorp. Even so, he knew from the outset that unless they quickly learned to master at least two of the seven truths—“build an innovation culture” and “be customer driven”—LEGO wouldn’t stand a chance of getting back in the black. The company’s anything-goes work culture, where developers were encouraged to think far beyond the brick and managers were expected to pursue market opportunities that were only remotely connected with the brand, had very nearly sunk LEGO. As a result, Knudstorp and other leaders would have to shape a performance-based culture where people’s passion and creativity were balanced with discipline and focus.

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

“Work wasn’t just work; it was their life’s passion,” Martin explains, “and they devoted every waking hour to it, usually to the exclusion of nonwork relationships, exercise, sleep, food, and sometimes even personal care.” Psychologists at Lockheed, one of the preeminent companies in what would become Silicon Valley, dubbed the particularly desirable worker mentality “the sci-tech personality,” Martin says, and molded their work cultures around them: Work whatever hours you want, for as long as you want, in whatever clothes you want, and we’ll make it happen. At HP, they brought engineers breakfast “so they would remember to eat”—an early iteration of the cafeterias and free meals and snacks that have come to characterize startup culture.

…

And while there are women in politics and the business world who do advocate for these policies, either they do not occupy the positions of power to enforce them, or if they do, they often use their platforms to demonstrate that change isn’t needed. Marissa Meyer, formerly the CEO of Yahoo, famously refused to take more than two weeks of maternity leave after giving birth to her first child—a symptom of a work culture that will not accommodate the realities of parenthood, but also a symptom of her willingness to operate by and implicitly strengthen that same culture. There are exceptions, of course: Patagonia has led the way in establishing subsidized, on-site childcare; at the Gates Foundation, every employee received a full year of parenting leave (which was recently cut to six months, plus $20,000 to pay for childcare costs).

How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Big Tech, Brexit referendum, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, colonial rule, commoditize, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, future of journalism, iterative process, James Bridle, Kevin Roose, lockdown, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, performance metric, QAnon, recommendation engine, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Twitter Arab Spring, work culture

The more we did, the more we wanted to do. I began to understand the concept of a “workflow”: a standardized, step-by-step process for executing excellent stories. Every step required strict quality control. In the Philippines, there was a personal cost to calling out an error or demanding better in a work culture; SIR, or “smooth interpersonal relations,” had long been prioritized. So we created our own team and energized them with a vision of what we wanted our newscast to be. We wanted video with the tightest editing, sequenced properly to tell a story, instead of a B-roll that unfurled lazily and meaninglessly.

…

Our main base was in the capital, Manila, but we ran nineteen provincial stations and six overseas hubs: two in North America, one in the Middle East, and one each in Europe, Australia, and Japan. We distributed content on radio, TV, and the internet. I also managed the Philippines’ only twenty-four-hour local English cable news network, ANC, the ABS-CBN News Channel, which was also distributed globally. My first challenge at ABS-CBN was changing the work culture. The media was a microcosm of what our nation’s leaders had to deal with: when situational ethics and patronage politics determine whether you, your family, and friends are rewarded or not. I was used to a certain standard of performance at CNN, where loyalty didn’t trump merit and the group had to deliver or face the consequences.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

cull less productive workers: The firm, being “driven by data,” will stop this only “if the data says it must.” Kantor and Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon.” Amazon also imposes: Kantor and Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon.” Apple, for example: See Ben Lovejoy, “Former Apple Managers Talk of the 24/7 Work Culture: ‘These People Are Nuts,’” 9to5Mac, October 1, 2014, accessed August 11, 2018, http://9to5mac.com/2014/10/01/former-apple-managers-talk-of-the-247-work-culture-these-people-are-nuts/. Recall also the law firm that tracks partners’ contributions in a database, updated every twenty minutes, that may be accessed by every partner, at any time and from anywhere, by computer or smartphone.

…

These accounts—right down to the gore—betray a monomaniac commitment to using, even abusing, oneself that is more familiar among elite athletes: they are white-collar versions of the NFL player Ronnie Lott’s decision to amputate a broken finger because surgery and a cast would have forced him to miss a crucial game. Even when meritocratic work culture pampers the body, it attacks the spirit. Amazon’s offices may be less brutal—less physically grinding—than its warehouse floors, but they are nevertheless pitiless and inhumane. The firm’s “leadership principles” call for managers to have “relentlessly high standards” and to “deliver results.” To achieve this, Amazon requires managers to challenge each other “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting” and—borrowing a technique traditionally associated with cults and totalitarian states—to be “vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing.”

…

., David Auerbach, “I’ve Worked Insanely Demanding Tech Jobs—and I Really Doubt Amazon Is Much Worse Than Google—or Even Microsoft,” Slate, August 17, 2015, accessed July 18, 2018, www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/08/amazon_abuse_of_white_collar_workers_i_worked_at_microsoft_and_google_and.html; Anne Weisberg, “The Workplace Culture That Flying Nannies Won’t Fix,” New York Times, August 24, 2015, accessed July 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/opinion/the-workplace-culture-that-flying-nannies-wont-fix.html?mcubz=0; “Depiction of Amazon Stirs a Debate About Work Culture,” New York Times, August 18, 2015, accessed July 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/technology/amazon-workplace-reactions-comments.html. not materially different: The language of worker competition changes across firms and over time. The particular phrases just rehearsed belong peculiarly to Amazon.

The Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, classic study, Clive Stafford Smith, collective bargaining, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Desert Island Discs, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, G4S, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, information security, job satisfaction, large denomination, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, operational security, post-work, Red Clydeside, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, Torches of Freedom, traveling salesman, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Winter of Discontent, work culture

One female member of staff recalls that when he came to office bridge evenings, ‘You would be his partner and he would not even talk to you.’60 FJ’s main visible enthusiasms were bird-watching and The Times crossword.61 The aloof management style of Hollis and FJ did little to diminish the sociable work culture of the rest of the Service, many of whose members never met the DG. One new recruit was told in 1953 by Bill Foulkes, a personnel officer in the newly founded B Branch, ‘One of the best things about working here is that the percentage of bastards is extremely low.’62 Extensive interviews with retirees and staff opinion surveys since the end of the Cold War63 strongly suggest that this has remained ever since the view of a considerable majority of the Service.

…

The declared number of dismissals in the civil service (which probably included resignations and reassignment to non-sensitive work) during the period from 1948 to 1954 was 124. The main impact of vetting, however, was at the point of entry. Almost certainly more were refused entry, or were deterred from applying, than were dismissed.82 The psychological impact was also considerable. Positive vetting was alien to the work culture of Whitehall. When Arthur de la Mare became head of the Foreign Office Security Department in 1955, it was still widely considered to be ‘unBritish’ and regarded by many diplomats with ‘contempt and derision’. He complained that many of the referees nominated by members of the Diplomatic Service who were being vetted ‘protested to us and their MPs at being interrogated by “snarks” on the background and integrity of their friends’.83 Far more remarkable than the distaste felt by the Diplomatic Service was the opposition within the Security Service to applying positive vetting to itself.

…

Thirdly, the lack of such a mechanism was ultimately the result of a managerial failure – particularly by FJ, who, despite his deep scepticism about the DRAT investigation, failed to appoint a Team B from within the Service to review the deeply flawed evidence on which it was based. Fourthly, the introverted work culture of the Service made it deeply reluctant to call in an experienced, senior figure from Whitehall to provide a second opinion. But that, in the end, a decade too late, is what it was forced to do. There was thus one long-term gain from the decade of otherwise futile and disruptive FLUENCY investigations.

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks

antiwork, basic income, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deskilling, feminist movement, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Kim Stanley Robinson, late capitalism, low-wage service sector, means of production, Meghnad Desai, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, pink-collar, post-Fordism, post-work, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Shoshana Zuboff, social intelligence, two tier labour market, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Regardless of the wages, intrinsic appeal, or status of one’s work, it can serve as a means to assert one’s moral superiority and thereby legitimate one’s economic privilege over a series of racialized and gendered groups. Over the course of US history, there is a continuous calling into question of the work commitments and habits of different immigrant and racialized populations. Whether it was the panic about the inability of US corporations to compete with a more vigorous Japanese work culture or the ongoing debates regarding the supposed inadequacies of the work orientations of “inner city residents,” “the underclass,” “welfare mothers,” or “illegal aliens,” the work ethic is a deep discursive reservoir on which to draw to obscure and legitimate processes and logics of racial, gender, and nationalist formations past and present.

…

Gray, Anne. 2004. Unsocial Europe: Social Protection or Flexploitation? London: Pluto. Greenwood, Ernest. 1966. “The Elements of Professionalization.” In Professionalization, edited by Howard M. Vollmer and Donald L. Mills, 9–19. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Gutman, Herbert G. 1977. Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America. New York: Vintage. Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1985. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.”

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis by David Boyle

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Goodhart's law, housing crisis, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mega-rich, Money creation, mortgage debt, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Ocado, Occupy movement, off grid, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pensions crisis, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, precariat, quantitative easing, school choice, scientific management, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, work culture , working poor

Then they turn that into the processes staff are led through on the screen. They also build in onerous reporting, box ticking and measurement systems to satisfy managers that the performance of every part of the process can be measured. ‘These are the assembly lines of the digital age,’ wrote Simon Head, one of the few academics to give this upheaval in work culture the attention it deserves, ‘complete with their own digital proletariat.’[14] A similar process was going on in the USA, though they came out the other side faster than we have in the UK. The American reform writer David Osborne, a trenchant critic of command-and-control, estimated that 20 per cent of American government spending was devoted to controlling the other 80 per cent, via armies of auditors and inspectors.

…

Their continued existence is vital for our own economic futures, for all the reasons that González de Cellerigo gave four centuries ago. But the English middle classes also stand for something, and even if this is no longer exactly thrift — as Patrick Hutber suggested in 1976 — it is also a series of connected values and ambitions about independence, work, culture, duty and the ability to make things happen. And paradoxically, also about the importance of values beyond money (even though they don’t always behave accordingly). Their presence is absolutely critical to a civilized life, not just for themselves, but for everyone. This book has been written like a kind of detective story.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Thus he resolved dozens of real-life conflicts within the actual social economy of formal appeals and complaints, including helping a grandmother campaign against alcoholism, speeding a mother’s request for an apartment, acquitting a decorated war veteran convicted of unspecified crimes, and restoring to his studies a graduate student found guilty of “hooliganry” for being found in a “nonsober” condition.38 At the same time that he was navigating this public trading zone between the superabundant conflicts of bureaucratic and real-life interests, he was developing the OGAS as a top-secret human-computer system proposal that would do the same—resolve informal conflicts at a national economic level. Next I look at how the informal behind-the-scenes work culture of these cyberneticists contextualizes this larger point. “Cybertonia”: From National Cyberculture to Local Counterculture Glushkov’s proposal to rationalize and automate the national economy in 1962 took shape just as his own institutional environment was being upgraded from a small computing center to a more ambitious formal setting of an academic institute, without losing its informal and, in after-work hours, almost countercultural work environment.

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This chapter has offered a look at the institutional landscape and alliances that formed and then dissolved between Nikolai Fedorenko’s Central Economic-Mathematical Institute and Glushkov’s Institute of Cybernetics, their heydays as the leaders of economic cybernetics and networked cybernetic reform through the late 1960s, the informal work culture of the Kiev-based cyberneticists in the 1960s, and early bureaucratic barriers that slowed the advance of the OGAS Project in the Soviet military. Neither the Ministry of Defense nor the liberal economists wanted to collaborate and support the OGAS Project, perhaps because the country had endured four turbulent years, from 1962 to 1966.

Don't Call It a Cult: The Shocking Story of Keith Raniere and the Women of NXIVM by Sarah Berman

Albert Einstein, COVID-19, dark matter, Donald Trump, East Village, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Milgram experiment, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, systems thinking, TED Talk, white picket fence, work culture

She was swayed by the steady salary Raniere could offer, and was made to feel like family among his roommates and business partners. She left her marriage and moved to the Albany area to take a bigger role within the company. Like Gina, she didn’t know there was already a handful of secret girlfriends in Raniere’s life. According to Natalie, the day-to-day work culture at Consumers’ Buyline was charged with sexual innuendo and manic, stay-up-all-night energy. “You go in,” she recalled, “and there’s this flurry of young energetic people flying all over the place till two a.m. like it’s noon.” The office was decked out with hulking computers and whiteboards filled with equations, pulling off a proto-tech-startup vibe.

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See collateral/collateral concept confinement, of Daniela conformity theory consent age of and bondage and branding issue of and sexual assault accusations Consumers’ Buyline complaints about creation of ends business growth KR’s defence of legal challenges of Natalie joins structure work culture of control techniques. See Raniere, Keith: discipline and control methods Cooper, Stephen creative writing cults accusation by E. Bronfman aspects of in NXIVM hallmarks of interventions NXIVM as Cuomo, Andrew D Dalai Lama Daniela attends first NXIVM meeting background becomes attracted to Myers confinement of confrontation with KR confronts KR about Camila contemplates suicide in confinement conversations with KR cuts hair desire for independent life desire to return to Mexico disillusionment with work at NXIVM education family’s belief in KR family’s rejection of first sexual experience with KR groomed by KR growing suspicions about KR hacking research and efforts impression of KR inability to apologize to KR intimidation techniques used on joins NXIVM KR discusses sex with life goals L.

This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World: A Practitioners' Handbook by Marc Stickdorn, Markus Edgar Hormess, Adam Lawrence, Jakob Schneider

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, different worldview, Eyjafjallajökull, fail fast, glass ceiling, Internet of things, iterative process, Kanban, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, minimum viable product, mobile money, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, RFID, scientific management, side project, Silicon Valley, software as a service, stealth mode startup, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the scientific method, urban planning, work culture

There is a risk that they may fall in love with these ideas, so frame them as springboards for further ideation, or prototype them fast so they can fail and start to evolve. 16 Essentially, this is research. Indeed, many research techniques make great homework – such as autoethnography, service safaris, diary work, cultural probes, or interviews. 17 See http://www.theworldcafe.com. 18 But think twice before tasking all your participants to look at existing solutions, as this can actually reduce the diversity of their ideas. See for example Smith, S. M., Ward, T. B., & Schumacher, J. S. (1993). “Constraining Effects of Examples in a Creative Generation Task.”

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The design team has first talks with the specific division in order to understand the scope of the “technical” project and identify user-centered design activities that could be executed as “integrated” UX or service design project. Such activities are categorized as “user experience design” or “service design” projects. In order to prevent a clash of working cultures, mindset, or terminology, the design team is free to decide on a different label and just refer to the scope as “improvement of the experience,” no matter if the project is concerned with the use of new products and services or the establishment of a customer relationship. This re-labeling is not just related to the terminology, but also reflected in the activities and tools used in the design phase.

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→ Think about humans: People get motivated by taking on responsibility and meaningful work. We had intuitively applied these principles to our community, which on the one hand made it more attractive for colleagues to join and on the other hand provided a prototype of an organizational setup – hence, we became the symbol of the new working culture we were trying to establish. Management also realized our success, and we received support from our board – which was necessary in certain ways, especially to get backing for the 30% work-time issue. However, the management support we receive is by means of mentoring, not top-down decision making – we are still self-governed.

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson

affirmative action, business cycle, citizen journalism, classic study, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, desegregation, Donald Trump, edge city, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, jobless men, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, school choice, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, work culture , working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Because of the increasing shift away from manufacturing and toward service industries, employers have a greater need for workers who can effectively serve and relate to the consumer. Inner-city black men are not perceived as having these qualities. The restructuring of the urban economy could also have long-term consequences for inner-city black women. Neckerman argues that a change in work cultures accompanied the transformation of the economy, resulting in a mismatch between the old and new ways of succeeding in the labor market. In other words, there is a growing difference between the practices of blue-collar and service employers and the practices of white-collar employers. This mismatch is important in assessing the labor-market success of inner-city workers.

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The position of inner-city black women in the labor market is also problematic. Their high degree of social isolation in impoverished neighborhoods reduces their employment prospects. Although Chicago employers consider them more acceptable as workers than the inner-city black men, their social isolation is likely to strengthen involvement in a work culture that has few supports allowing a move into white-collar employment. Also, impoverished neighborhoods, weak networks, and weak household supports decrease their ability to develop language and other job-related skills necessary in an economy that increasingly rewards employees who can work and communicate effectively with the public.

Neurodiversity at Work: Drive Innovation, Performance and Productivity With a Neurodiverse Workforce by Amanda Kirby, Theo Smith

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, call centre, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, deep learning, digital divide, double empathy problem, epigenetics, fear of failure, future of work, gamification, global pandemic, iterative process, job automation, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, phenotype, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, seminal paper, the built environment, traumatic brain injury, work culture

You can then take some of this dialogue and debate back to your organization to initiate meaningful change by helping them to understand where positive interventions can be made and what the potential benefits are to both the employee and the employer. From an employer’s perspective it is worth noting that many employees (particularly from underrepresented groups including neurodiverse employees) value the ability ‘to bring your whole self to work’. Being able to openly express one’s self in a pluralist inclusive work culture leads to retention of staff, good team morale and increased productivity. However, bringing ‘your whole self to work’ doesn’t mean you need to reveal everything about yourself but choosing and knowing you can. This is not our novel concept and has been given close attention by Mike Robbins in his book Bring Your Whole Self to Work: How vulnerability unlocks creativity, connection, and performance.8 Google conducted an in-depth research project between 2012 and 2014 called Project Aristotle, aimed at determining the key factors that contribute to high-performing teams.

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We must not underestimate how creative ideas, positive action and change can come from a wide variety of people. Having a group composed solely of those who identify as autistic or dyslexic could create its own ‘groupthink’ challenges. You could inadvertently create a group subculture, which is in its own way just as monolithic and singular as the wider work culture it is trying to influence. And, on a practical note, think about the logistics of the network meeting up: when, where and how. For example, try not to organize the first meet-up in a busy space with bright lights and poor noise reduction. Be considerate of those attending; you may want to offer different ways of engaging that suit different styles of communication.

Slide:ology: the art and science of creating great presentations by Nancy Duarte

An Inconvenient Truth, fear of failure, Isaac Newton, Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, telepresence, web application, work culture

The term codependent was coined in the mid ’80s and initially used by Alcoholics Anonymous to describe the unhealthy psychological condition that occurs in a relationship when one partner suffers from an addiction. 218 slide:ology A codependent person ends up providing too much care—and often too much latitude—to someone who is unhealthy. You are in a codependent relationship with your slides if you are desperately addicted to them and unable to break away. You may even make excuses for their sad condition, which of course only perpetuates their dilapidated state. If you are in a work culture that enables this codependent relationship, it will be even tougher to transform yourself. The first step is to admit you have a problem. The second is to acknowledge that your slides have become unmanageable. Dense content on slides can be addictive. The default template settings in applications such as PowerPoint encourage you to put an enormous amount of text on each slide, which transforms the slide into a document rather than a visual aid.

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise) by Andrew L. Russell

Aaron Swartz, American ideology, animal electricity, barriers to entry, borderless world, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, creative destruction, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, open economy, OSI model, packet switching, pre–internet, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, vertical integration, web of trust, work culture

If one of the founding ideals of OSI was to create a viable architectural alternative to IBM’s SNA, an equally important ideal was to ensure that future standards for computer networks be under the jurisdiction of computer professionals, not telecommunications professionals. Nevertheless, the convergence of computer and telecommunication technologies and services once again forced both groups to come together and try to reconcile the incompatibilities between their respective technical practices, work cultures, political economies, and motivations for creating international standards. Proponents of open and distributed systems were successful in creating their own forum for deliberations – SC16 – but they always operated under the explicit requirement to take the activities of telecom monopolies “into due account.”52 At its first meeting in February and March 1978, OSI leaders negotiated an agreement with members of CCITT Study Group 7 (the committee responsible for X.25) to share jurisdiction over proposed standards that would “have an impact on the basic design and features of Data Processing Systems.”

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Its chief competitor was the Internet, sustained by a standardization process that was an exception to – and critique of – requirements for consensus, due process, and a balance of interests that were developed by voluntary consensus bodies such as the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and ISO. Individuals, rather than companies or nation-states, were the only recognized participants. The Internet’s work culture – with its affinity for late-night bar meetings, informal hallway conversations, and benevolent elders – inverted the stiff diplomacy and representative democracy embodied in the formal procedures of the venerable national and international bodies. By the mid-1990s, the Internet political philosophy of “rough consensus and running code” – and its circumvention of monopolies, governments, and established channels for setting international standards – was widely admired and increasingly celebrated as a new norm and a new model of standardization for the information technology industries.

Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation by Serhii Plokhy

affirmative action, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, Transnistria, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game, éminence grise

An internationalist by conviction and an opponent of all nationalism, including Russian, Bukharin toed the party line when in July 1934, in connection with the reintroduction of history into the school curriculum, he praised the notion of the Soviet motherland and Soviet patriotism. Nevertheless, he defined the latter in international terms as “love of work, culture, the historical future of humanity, love of the noblest ideas of the age.” Bukharin was one of the main promoters of the notion of the Soviet people, which for him was devoid of any particular national coloration. Within that paradigm, he felt as comfortable attacking what he saw as the negative features of the Russian national tradition as he did any other tradition in the USSR.

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“In the past, the Russian people”: David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 34. “Whoever raises his hand”: “Za rodinu,” Pravda, June 9, 1934. “That tsarist rule in Russia”: Iosif Stalin, “O stat’e Ėngelsa ‘Vneshniaia politika russkogo tsarizma,’” Bol’shevik, no. 9 (May 1931): 1–5. “love of work, culture”: Aleksandr Vdovin, Russkie v XX veke: Fakty, sobytiia, liudi (Moscow, 2004), 78. “Once I said to Lenin”: Ibid., 103. “I well understand”: Ibid., 89. “an attempt to exalt the robbers”: Viktor Danilov, Vlast’ i formirovanie istoricheskogo soznaniia sovetskogo obshchestva (Moscow, 2005), 116.

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman

agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, basic income, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, cyber-physical system, David Graeber, death from overwork, deepfake, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, fake news, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kibera, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lateral thinking, market bubble, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Parkinson's law, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-work, public intellectual, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, sharing economy, social intelligence, spinning jenny, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban planning, work culture , zoonotic diseases

As a result, they don’t form part of the national conversation, or feature in news headlines, or result in grieving relatives demanding abject apologies from employers or action by governments. Even so, occasionally the problem has generated some profile. Over the course of the last decade, for instance, the CEO of France Telecom was forced to step down and several senior managers were put on trial charged with ‘moral harassment’, as a consequence of the toxic working culture they instilled at the company and which prosecutors insisted contributed to thirty-five suicides among staff members over the course of 2008 and 2009. There is now much more discussion about mental-health issues in the workplace in countries like Britain and the USA. And for good reason if the statistics are anything to go by.

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Far more likely catalysts take the form of a rapidly changing climate, like that which spurred the invention of agriculture; anger ignited by systematic inequalities like those that stirred the Russian revolution; or perhaps even a viral pandemic that exposes the obsolescence of our economic institutions and working culture, causing us to ask what jobs are truly valuable and question why we are content to let our markets reward those in often pointless or parasitic roles so much more than those we recognise as essential. Conclusion When in the 1960s anthropologists began to work with contemporary forager societies like the Ju/’hoansi, BaMbuti and Hadzabe, they did so in the hope that their work might shed some light on how our ancestors lived in the deep past.

The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010 by Selina Todd

"there is no alternative" (TINA), call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, different worldview, Downton Abbey, financial independence, full employment, income inequality, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, Red Clydeside, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, sexual politics, strikebreaker, The Spirit Level, unemployed young men, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

.), Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge, 2003). 26. D. Kynaston, Family Britain, 1951–57 (London, 2010). 27. M. Young, ‘Distribution of Income within the Family’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 3, no. 4 (1952). 28. See for example ‘An Investigation into Problem Families’, 1950, D495 (LI), R1, pp. 45–6, ULASC. 29. P. Ayers, ‘Work, Culture and Gender: The Making of Masculinities in Post-war Liverpool’, Labour History Review, vol. 69, no. 2 (2004). 30. Rowntree and Lavers, Poverty and the Welfare State, pp. 36–8. 31. On opinion polls see R. Lowe, ‘Modernizing Britain’s Welfare State’, in L. Black and H. Pemberton (eds.), An Affluent Society?

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., Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption: 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) HISTORIES AND COMMENTARIES (ARTICLES) Abrams, L., ‘“There was Nobody like my Daddy”: Fathers, the Family and the Marginalisation of Men in Modern Scotland’, Scottish Historical Review, vol. 78, no. 206 (1999) Alexander, S., ‘A New Civilization? London Surveyed 1928–1940s’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 64, no. 1 (2007) Ayers, P., ‘Work, Culture and Gender: The Making of Masculinities in Post-war Liverpool’, Labour History Review, vol. 69, no. 2 (2004) Bowden, S. and A. Offer, ‘Household Appliances and the Use of Time: The United States and Britain since the 1920s’, Economic History Review, vol. 48, no. 4 (1994) Clapson, M., ‘The Suburban Aspiration in England since 1919’, Contemporary British History, vol. 14, no. 1 (2000) Dale, P. and K.

Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion by J. H. Elliott

active measures, agricultural Revolution, banking crisis, British Empire, centre right, land tenure, mass immigration, mobile money, new economy, North Sea oil, Red Clydeside, sharing economy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, work culture

Lee and G. C. Peden (eds.), The Transformation of Scotland: The Economy Since 1700 (Edinburgh, 2005), p. 40. 61. ‘. . . a comparison . . . that would merit further scrutiny’, in Devine and Wormald (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History , p. 405. 62. William W. Knox, Industrial Nation: Work, Culture and Society in Scotland, 1800–Present (Edinburgh, 1999), p. 34. 63. Devine, Lee and Peden (eds.), Transformation of Scotland , ch. 3. 64. Knox, Industrial Nation , p. 36. 65. Devine and Jackson (eds.), Glasgow , vol. 1, p. 172. 66. Jaime Vicens Vives and Montserrat Llorens, Industrials i polítics del segle XIX (Barcelona, 2010, 1st edn., 1958), pp. 21–9; Devine, Lee and Peden (eds.), Transformation of Scotland , p. 51. 67.

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Cambridge, 1999. Kidd, Colin. Union and Unionisms: Political Thought in Scotland, 1500–2000 . Cambridge, 2008. Kidd, Colin. ‘Eighteenth-Century Scotland and the Three Unions’, in T. C. Smout (ed.), Anglo-Scottish Relations from 1603 to 1900 . Oxford, 2005. Knox, William W. Industrial Nation: Work, Culture and Society in Scotland, 1800–Present . Edinburgh, 1999. Konetzke, Richard. ‘La legislación sobre inmigración de extranjeros en América durante el reinado de Carlos V’, in Charles-Quint et son temps . Paris, 1959. Lee, Maurice Jr. The ‘Inevitable’ Union and Other Essays on Early Modern Scotland .

Affluenza: When Too Much Is Never Enough by Clive Hamilton, Richard Denniss

call centre, death from overwork, delayed gratification, experimental subject, full employment, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mega-rich, Naomi Klein, Own Your Own Home, post-materialism, post-work, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, wage slave, work culture

Withdrawal from community also reinforces the tendency among people who work long hours to mix almost exclusively with their workmates. There is nothing wrong with forming friendships with work colleagues, but problems do arise when individuals are unable to gain an external perspective on their work culture and the hours they are working. Community activity facilitates much broader mixing across socio-economic groups. Although hierarchies can exist in community and sporting groups, they are less likely to be based solely on income and profession. The broader an individual’s social network the less likely it is that they will see themselves at the bottom of the pecking order, because the definition of ‘success’ will differ widely across different organisations.

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

“The pirate,” Rediker continues, “was thus a threat to property, the individual, society, the colony, the empire, the Crown, the nation, the world of nations, and indeed all mankind.”15 Centuries before the invention of the computer, pirates successfully demonstrated the power of the hack, the potency of studying the establishment, taking apart the system to understand its every component, then using this knowledge to better it. WHY HACK? Today the characteristics associated with hackers are informing expectations around a new culture of work. Hackers pioneered many principles of informality that have since come to infect mainstream work culture. These include: problem-based work, a culture of openness and transparency, reputational and peer-based accountability (instead of rigid hierarchies and managers), and the permission to act on new opportunities. In a letter to potential investors, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook described the company’s culture and unique management approach, which he dubbed “The Hacker Way.”16 “Hacking,” Zuckerberg wrote, “is a means of building something or testing the boundaries of what can be done.”

Unleashed by Anne Morriss, Frances Frei

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Black Lives Matter, book value, Donald Trump, future of work, gamification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Jeff Bezos, Netflix Prize, Network effects, performance metric, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

It was the ultimate after-hours activity, highly restorative while also improving his ability to do his day job. Improv made Jason more effective as a leader, but he wasn’t leading while up on stage, “yes, and …”-ing his fellow performers.* This is a simple but important distinction, which can sometimes get blurred in a work culture that has normalized Ping-Pong as a legitimate, on-the-clock activity. Jason was growing as a professional and recovering as a human being, but he wasn’t having impact as a leader until he got down off the stage and returned to the challenge of empowering other people. In our experience, it’s generally one or the other.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

The Second Industrial Revolution created the Gilded Age, a period of American history during the late nineteenth century that was marked by staggering corruption, bloody labor clashes, bitter racial injustice, and soaring income inequality. And the advances in communication technology during the Third Industrial Revolution generated huge productivity gains, but they also facilitated a new 24/7 work culture and introduced new sources of anxiety into white-collar workplaces, leading to unprecedented levels of burnout and job-related stress. History suggests that while periods of technological change often improve conditions for elites and capital owners, workers don’t always experience the benefits right away.

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

"Susan Fowler" uber, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, lifelogging, lolcat, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, real-name policy, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tactical Technology Collective, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

All you need to do is slough away the layers of self-aggrandizement and jargon, and get at the heart of how people in technology work—and why their decisions so often don’t serve you. In this book we’ll take a closer look at how the tech industry operates, and see how its hiring practices and work culture create teams that don’t represent most of us—no matter how many “diversity” events these companies put on. Then we’ll walk through ways these design and development teams create shallow perceptions of audiences and their needs, and how those perceptions lead to products that, at best, leave out huge percentages of users—and at worst, take advantage of our personal data and encode bias into systems that hold tremendous power over real people’s lives and livelihoods.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

While opinions vary on whether Burning Man has stayed true to its original ethos, the festival remains highly psychedelic, and has made the taking of acid, mushrooms, or even stronger entheogens into something of a rite of passage for the would-be enlightened tech executive. For twenty-first-century Silicon Valley operators, these psychedelic initiations serve a purpose analogous to the way alcohol was used by media and advertising executives in mid-century New York. Getting drunk and harassing women was not just a facet of chauvinist work culture, but a way for an executive to prove he had no scruples about fucking over consumers, either. Psychedelics are a way for modern-day tech executives to show they are willing to reformat their own cognitive hard drives, and daring enough to apply those insights to the world at large. They are ready to reprogram humanity.

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

“That bathroom would have been worth $12,500,000,” Kurtzig later pointed out.37 Though many ASK employees may have had stock options, few, including even the earliest hires, owned significant amounts of stock. When ASK went public, Kurtzig’s shares were worth $40 million. She owned 3.6 million shares, seven times the combined stock of all other employees.II38 By the time ASK went public, it had many trappings of a classic Silicon Valley company. Its improvisational work culture featured jokes, first names, and dispersed authority. ASK’s board included the CEO of ROLM, one of the Valley’s most successful firms; the managing senior partner of a major investment bank; and an attorney from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the law firm that Larry Sonsini had by now successfully built into a one-stop shop for entrepreneurs.39 Young programmers in jeans worked in ASK’s low-slung headquarters building.

…

One person recalls that even the women on the assembly line talked about the value of ROLM’s stock and where it might go.9 Fawn Alvarez’s mother, Vineta, who had not sold a single share of the stock for which she had paid $7,000 during her years at ROLM, discovered that her equity was worth $360,000 (nearly $830,000 in 2016 dollars).10 Fear quickly followed the elation. How would ROLM, with its 9,000 employees, retain its identity and “great place to work” culture after IBM, with 350,000 employees, absorbed it? At ROLM, many people wore jeans to work, and Friday-afternoon beer bashes were sacrosanct. On Halloween, ROLM’s vice president of marketing dressed as Supermanager, complete with red tights and a red cape. By contrast, IBM had an unwritten dress code (white oxford-cloth shirt, tie) and a corporate policy that forbade drinking on the job.11 IBM’s success with its personal computer—developed in secret by what was essentially an internal startup operation—offered some hope that the giant company would appreciate ROLM’s innovative and entrepreneurial spirit.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

In Mexico, the official retirement age is 65, but the typical Mexican man retires at 72. In France, the official retirement age is also 65, but the typical Frenchman actually retires before 60. Changing the official retirement age and the level of pension benefits can encourage people to stay on the job, but it can’t produce overnight changes in the work culture. In most countries, the duration of the retirement “golden years” continues to lengthen, weighing on the economy. In the thirty-four industrial countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), from China and South Korea to the United States and Britain, the gap between the age at which the average person retires and the age at which he or she dies is now fifteen years, having increased steadily from two years in 1970.

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Since Xi took office in 2012 and started his crackdown, Mixer said, the new greeting is, “Have you been in yet?”—the word in refers to jail. By early 2015, more than 400,000 party members have been reprimanded and more than 200,000 prosecuted. Increasingly, the crackdown looks like a genuine effort to change the working culture of the party and cleanse it of corruption. That is a good sign for China. Country Total billionaire wealth/GDP Bad billionaires’ wealth/total billionaire wealth Inherited billionaires’ wealth/total billionaire wealth Brazil 8% 5% 43% China 5% 27% 1% India 14% 31% 61% Indonesia 7% 12% 62% Mexico 11% 71% 38% Poland 2% 44% 0% Russia 16% 67% 0% South Korea 5% 4% 83% Taiwan 16% 23% 44% Turkey 6% 22% 57% EM Average 9% 31% 39% Country Total billionaire wealth/GDP Bad billionaires’ wealth/total billionaire wealth Inherited billionaires’ wealth/total billionaire wealth Australia 5% 45% 41% Canada 8% 11% 47% France 9% 5% 67% Germany 11% 1% 73% Italy 7% 3% 51% Japan 2% 9% 14% Sweden 21% 5% 77% Switzerland 15% 29% 62% United Kingdom 6% 25% 32% United States 15% 10% 34% DM Average 10% 14% 50% Source: Forbes Billionaires List, March 2015 Why Bad Billionaires Matter Most The rubric of good versus bad billionaires is the most important part of this rule, because even if the superrich control an unusually large share of the wealth, and leading families face little competition, they can make a positive contribution to growth if their wealth is concentrated in productive companies.

Rethinking Narcissism: The Bad---And Surprising Good---About Feeling Special by Dr. Craig Malkin

Bernie Madoff, dark triade / dark tetrad, greed is good, helicopter parent, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Ronald Reagan, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, work culture

Some examples: •Your boss questions the quality of your analysis on a company’s equity, and then moves on to questioning whether or not you have what it takes to be a success at work. Can you help me understand how this helps me with the problems you see? What is it you want changed? •Your subordinate begins ranting about the abusive culture of the office (though you suspect he’s largely to blame). Can you help me understand how this improves our work culture? What specific solutions did you have in mind? •Your coworker starts blaming you for everything that’s gone wrong on a project. Can you help me understand how this helps our project move forward? I’m not sure what it is you’re asking for. Block the Pass If you’re feeling helpless or overwhelmed after an interaction with anyone at work, you’re likely at the end of an attempted hot-potato pass.

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, behavioural economics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, citizen journalism, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, experimental economics, experimental subject, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Kevin Kelly, lolcat, means of production, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, seminal paper, social contagion, social software, Steve Ballmer, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, work culture , Yochai Benkler

“We are going to clean up market streets in Lahore, and in doing so make Pakistan a better place. By signing here, you agree to show up in Anarkali and clean from 10 A.M. to 2 P.M. on Saturday.” Put that way, it’s pretty easy to see why building something out of people’s intrinsic motivations plus their free time is slow and uncertain work. Culture can’t be created by fiat. (Little in the domain of cognitive surplus can be done by fiat.) But the task isn’t just to get something done, it’s to create an environment in which people want to do it. Working groups tend to accrue more governance as they grow, in part because the larger a group is, the more tension there can be between any two members of the group, and the greater the power imbalance between any member and the group as a whole.

Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", air freight, business process, clean water, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Mahatma Gandhi, precautionary principle, pushing on a string, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, Rubik’s Cube, urban sprawl, work culture

HUMAN RESOURCE PHILOSOPHY A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both. —FRANÇOIS AUGUSTE RENÉ CHATEAUBRIAND Patagonia’s working culture can be traced to the origins of Chouinard Equipment. Ours was a small company designing and making the world’s best climbing equipment for its employees and their friends. The owners and employees were climbers; none considered themselves businesspeople. Working satisfied the creative urge to do something both useful and pleasurable, to make beautiful, functional climbing tools that the employees needed to pursue their own climbing.

The Mythical Man-Month by Brooks, Jr. Frederick P.

Boeing 747, Conway's law, finite state, HyperCard, Ken Thompson, machine readable, Menlo Park, Multics, no silver bullet, seminal paper, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Turing machine, work culture

In the classical in-house application development industry, schedule and the details of function were negotiable, development cost might not be; in the fiercely competitive open market, schedule and function quite dominate development cost. As one would expect, the starkly different economics have given rise to rather different programming cultures. The classical industry tended to be dominated by large firms with established management styles and work cultures. The shrink-wrapped industry, on the other hand, began as hundreds of start-ups, freewheeling and fiercely focused on getting the job done rather than on process. In this climate, there has always been a much greater recognition of the talent of the individual programmer, an implicit awareness that great designs come from great designers.

The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon? by Robert X. Cringely

AltaVista, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, business process, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate raider, financial engineering, full employment, Great Leap Forward, if you build it, they will come, immigration reform, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, managed futures, Paul Graham, platform as a service, race to the bottom, remote working, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software as a service, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, work culture

I wonder what would happen to the non-performers who grew so far by being loyal to managers. I do not even want to think about what would happen to the managers, who are technically challenged (not all, but most of them) and not fit for the outside industry. It is this very set of people who encouraged a low performance work culture here in India. The low performers who were loyal to the managers were rewarded and the high performers who come with some attitude were penalized. They were cutting the branch in which they were relaxing. Now the fun begins. STG IBM-India / August 18, 2013 / 8:39 am IBM in ‘death spiral’ Flashes of ENRON come to mind and I believe that the IBM Company will implode in less than five years from now; at ENRON (a big company), everyone thought the company would carry on indefinitely, regardless of what happened when the fraud was discovered.

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win by Chris Kuenne, John Danner

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset light, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, business climate, business logic, call centre, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, pattern recognition, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sugar pill, super pumped, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, work culture , zero-sum game

Later on, a candidate presumably has more choice in selecting where to apply his or her skills and therefore can be more demanding in fi nding the right alignment with you. * * * Too many ventures fail not because they have bad products, lousy business models, too little money, or uninterested customers, but because they don’t get the team dynamics and work culture right. As a builder, you may do a great job of selling and telling to get your businesses off the ground, but then flunk at gelling—developing an effective, high-performing team of talented people to grow that business to the scale worthy of its potential. Armed with the insights in this chapter, you can improve your odds of achieving what may be the most important fit of all: that between your Builder Personality and the team members you choose—and who, in turn, choose you—to build this business. 8 ATTRACTING YOUR BEST FINANCIAL SPONSORS Powering Vision with the Right Capital How important is Builder Personality to the financial sponsors of startups?

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Fred and Brian persuaded Julian to come to San Francisco for a work trial. These work trials were part of Coinbase culture and amounted to a several-days test to see if a prospective employee would fit in. Julian fit in just fine but, for his part, he had two objections. The first was that Americans worked too much. He preferred a work culture that left more time for sipping beer. Julian’s other objection was the beer itself—more specifically, that Americans did not know how to make it right. He flew back to Germany. Coinbase had better luck with Charlie Lee. A stout, soft-spoken man who wears his jet-black hair in a sharp part, Lee had used his “20% time” at Google—a renowned perk that let employees spend a fifth of their work hours on personal projects—to create Litecoin, an early alternative to bitcoin.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

Gelles makes a bold claim: “Stress isn’t something imposed on us. It’s something we impose on ourselves.”9 Really? Failure to cope is often blamed on a dysfunction in one’s neural pathways or troublesome thoughts and emotions. His colleagues at the New York Times would beg to differ. In an exposé of Amazon’s sociopathic work culture, the newspaper quoted a former employee as saying that he saw nearly everyone he worked with cry at their desks.10 Would Gelles have offered his advice to these Amazon workers, telling them that they were imposing stress on themselves, or that they could have chosen not to cry — and that their lack of emotional self-control could be attributed to being hijacked by their amygdala?

Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself by Nedra Glover Tawwab

delayed gratification, microaggression, shared worldview, work culture

Boundary issues at work look like Doing work for others Being asked about personal issues Taking on more than you can handle Not delegating Flirting Working without pay Not taking advantage of vacation days Saying yes to tasks you can’t responsibly complete Engaging in stressful interactions Working during downtime Doing jobs intended for more than one person Not taking needed time off Boundaries are not common sense; they’re taught. Sure, some people may be aware when they violate someone’s boundaries, but most likely, they don’t know. Boundaries are not common sense; they’re taught. In the workplace, they’re passed down by the HR department, the work culture, and the bosses. When people are in fear of losing their jobs, however, it’s hard to implement boundaries. * * * — In 2017, women began coming forward about sexual assault at the hands of the media giant Harvey Weinstein. He has allegedly assaulted at least eighty women, and for many years they didn’t come forward for fear of being blackballed in Hollywood.

The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time by Allen Gannett

Alfred Russel Wallace, collective bargaining, content marketing, data science, David Brooks, deliberate practice, Desert Island Discs, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gentrification, glass ceiling, iterative process, lone genius, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, pattern recognition, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, too big to fail, uber lyft, work culture

His grunge rock band developed a small measure of fame, but the life of a touring musician was a recipe for boredom, “I didn’t like it. It was very monotonous. It was three or four nights a week of the same exact thing.” He brainstormed different career options. What jobs would allow him to be at home, near his wife and, someday, his children? And could he avoid an office environment? He wanted a creative work culture, not one that reminded him of a random DMV. Hardesty hashed through various options and found a career that fit the bill: a painter! Artists practiced their trade from their homes or their studios, then shipped their work to galleries, where it was sold. As a fine artist, he would be near his wife and future children, far away from pale gray office ceiling tiles.

In the Age of the Smart Machine by Shoshana Zuboff

affirmative action, American ideology, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, demand response, deskilling, factory automation, Ford paid five dollars a day, fudge factor, future of work, industrial robot, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, job automation, lateral thinking, linked data, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, old-boy network, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, social web, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

Sebastion DeGrazia, Of Time, Work and Leisure (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1962), 197. 20. Pollard, Genesis of Modern Management, 161. 21. Ibid., 182. 22. Douglas Reid, liThe Decline of Saint Monday 1766-1876," Past and Present 71 (1976): 79. 23. Ibid., 78. 24. Ibid., 80. 25.Ibid. 26. Pollard, Genesis of Modern Management, 182. 27. Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 20. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 38. 30. Pollard, Genesis of Modern Management, 189. Sidney Pollard has classified these measures in three categories: the negative sanctions for particular behav- iors, the positive inducements toward particular behaviors, and the general effort to create a "new ethos of work order and obedience."

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By bidding the people to seek success as they did themselves, the employers manifested their abiding belief in the existence of a moral community regardless of class, for they proposed to measure the worth of each man by the same standard" (Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry [Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1974], 115). 6. Daniel Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America: 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 9-10. 7. Sidney Pollard, The Genesis of Modern Management (Cambridge: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1965) 123-26. 8. Rodgers, Work Ethic, 21; Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Indus- trializing America: Essays in American Working Class and Social History (New York: AlfredA. Knopf, 1976),20,37,58. 9. See the discussion in Frank W. Fox, liThe Genesis of American Technology 1790-1860," American Studies 17 (Fall 1976): 29-48. 10. Pollard, Genesis of Modern Management, 107-118.

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business process, call centre, conceptual framework, deskilling, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, medical malpractice, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, supply-chain management, telemarketer, Thomas Davenport, Toyota Production System, union organizing, work culture

He had fought hard for Brown but had failed to get her reinstated. I spoke to Brown soon after her dismissal. She was distraught at her treatment by AT&T, and has not worked since. There is substantial research showing that these examples of the harshness of working life at call centers are not isolated incidents but form part of a work culture characteristic of the industry as a whole. In 1999 the Radclyffe Group, business consultants whose clients have included CIGNA, Coca-Cola, and New York Life, undertook a survey of the call center industry and identified four factors that drove what it calls a "negative call center culture." With the detached, modular language of the business consultant, Radclyffe describes a work regime very similar to the one that RuthAnn Hogue and I came across in Arizona and Iowa.

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland, Jj Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, business cycle, call centre, clean water, death of newspapers, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, Kaizen: continuous improvement, knowledge worker, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, pets.com, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, work culture

I’m sure you do too. If you don’t crow about it yourself, you know someone who does—the guy who does three projects at once, who drives and talks on his cell phone, who promotes his competence by complaining loudly about all the things he has to juggle every day. This sort of “busy-brag” is becoming part of our work culture. In job descriptions you now see requirements like “must be able to balance five projects simultaneously.” The ability to juggle seems so attractive—especially in an age in which information is flowing through a thousand different pipelines and “must do nows” are proliferating. We want to be that guy—the Super-Juggler.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

I do this by illuminating the case of Black girls, but undoubtedly, much could be written about the specific histories and contexts of these various identities of women and girls of color; and indeed, there is much still to question and advocate for around the commercialization of identity in search. In order to fully interrogate this persistent phenomenon, a lesson on race and racialization is in order, as these processes are structured into every aspect of American work, culture, and knowledge production. To understand representations of race and gender in new media, it is necessary to draw on research about how race is constituted as a social, economic, and political hierarchy based on racial categories, how people are racialized, how this can shift over time without much disruption to the hierarchical order, and how White American identity functions as an invisible “norm” or “nothingness” on which all others are made aberrant.

The Year Without Pants: Wordpress.com and the Future of Work by Scott Berkun

barriers to entry, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Broken windows theory, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, future of work, Google Hangouts, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Kanban, Lean Startup, lolcat, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, post-work, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Stallman, Seaside, Florida, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the map is not the territory, The Soul of a New Machine, Tony Hsieh, trade route, work culture , zero-sum game

WordPress.com, where I'd work, was among the top fifteen most trafficked websites. Its success aside, its culture was unconventional. Employees were young and independent, and they worked from wherever in the world they wished. They rarely used e-mail, launched new work into the world every day, and had an open vacation policy. If a work culture qualified as being from the future, this was it. I told him I'd do it if I could write a book about my experience. He said yes, and here we are. This book has two ambitions: first, to share what I learned as an old dog in a futuristic workplace and, second, to capture the behind-the-scenes story of a good team at a fascinating company.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg

affirmative action, business process, Cass Sunstein, constrained optimization, experimental economics, fear of failure, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, old-boy network, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social graph, Susan Wojcicki, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

Many women would have accepted it without even trying to carve out the time they needed for their families. Others would have turned it down, assuming that having dinner at home most nights was not negotiable. Being forthright led to opportunity. Every job will demand some sacrifice. The key is to avoid unnecessary sacrifice. This is especially hard since our work culture values complete dedication. We worry that even mentioning other priorities makes us less valuable employees. I have faced this too. As I described, once I had children, I changed my working hours to be home for dinner. But only fairly recently did I start talking about this change. And while the impact of my actually leaving work early was negligible, admitting that I went home at five thirty turned out to be kind of a big deal.

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

The platform economy, breathless futurologists assure us, is the future of work: with ‘freelancing [as] the new normal’,12 it will fundamentally reshape the organization of businesses, the economy, and our working lives. Not everyone agrees. Frank Kalman, editor of Talent Economy magazine, is ‘not buying it’.13 The gig economy, he argues, represents a tiny fraction of our labour markets, goes against the grain of corporate work culture, and imposes a host of hidden coordination and transaction costs on traditional businesses. In short, ‘gig work is likely to remain a small part of the overall labor force, both from an economic perspective and a cultural, performance and man- agement perspective’.14 How big, then, is the gig economy?

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Atul Gawande, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, estate planning, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, gamification, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, hive mind, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Lyft, new economy, Parkinson's law, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, women in the workforce, work culture

Even my doctor commented on the drop in my cortisol levels. I am less anxious than I was a year ago, and no less productive. On a personal level, the research has been useful and the experiment successful. But in the end, this isn’t really about me. It wasn’t my choices, ultimately, that overloaded my schedule. It was the hard-work culture that made me believe I was lazy if I stopped working for even short periods of time. So the solution cannot come from my choices but from a collective choice to change the paradigm. There is one aspect of early human history I hope we can reclaim: a celebration of what is most human about us.

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

Michael Moritz, the former managing partner of Sequoia, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, has penned a number of spirited articles highlighting the risk that the US technology sector will become less competitive than China’s. In an article titled “Silicon Valley Would Be Wise to Follow China’s Lead,” Moritz argued that differences in attitudes about work-life balance between US and Chinese companies place the former at a distinct disadvantage. The Chinese work culture in tech start-ups, which can involve putting in fourteen-hour days six or seven days a week, stands in stark contrast to California’s tech scene, where companies juggle parental leave demands and workers prioritize the need for greater work-life balance. The grueling schedule adopted by Chinese companies is known by the shorthand “996”—that is, 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., six days a week.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Calls for workplace flexibility—which used to be called flextime—have been out there for decades, usually framed around family needs and work-life balance. However, in recent years, with the competitive demands of a fast-paced global economy, there has been less talk of flextime. In many industries, like tech and finance, workers have been afraid of requesting flextime for fear of looking lax. Many work cultures prided themselves on burning the midnight oil. However, because of the pandemic a widespread interest in flextime has emerged, based on the actual experience people have had working from home. The old stigma that being at home meant slacking off has all but disappeared, especially among knowledge workers.

China's Superbank by Henry Sanderson, Michael Forsythe

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Carmen Reinhart, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, failed state, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, price mechanism, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, too big to fail, urban renewal, urban sprawl, work culture

“The government needs to leverage the investment for local development,” he said. Problems also lie in the different expectations of working hours, something Gamora mentioned during a 2011 meeting with the Chinese vice minister of commerce on his visit to the country. Chinese law favors the employer but Ethiopian law favors the employee, he said. “The Chinese working culture is very hard, working all day and all night—that is based on terms of culture, not skills,” he said. The Chinese manufacturing zones will be successful, as Brautigam points out, if they attract significant local and foreign investment, create African employment, promote exports, and elevate industrial competitiveness in an environmentally and socially sustainable manner.

Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn

business process, c2.com, create, read, update, delete, finite state, index card, information retrieval, iterative process, operational security, recommendation engine, Silicon Valley, web application, work culture

Countervailing Forces: Business Setting, Social Interaction, Conflicting Cultures You want to introduce use cases, but run into the following situation / argument (I won't try to fix the argument, but you may enjoy recognizing you are not alone!): "We've always done it this other way..." With multiple cultures: 130 Chapter 11. Use Case Formats Page 131 - Forces affecting Use Case Writing Styles There is prejudice across teams, There are different work cultures, and people there simply "do things differently", The people writing the use cases use a different vocabulary than the people who will read the use cases. Level of Understanding Understanding is different at different times and places and among different people. You might choose to shift the recommended writing style due to: How much you know now ... ... about the domain .. about use cases in general Where in life cycle do you know it?

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization by Jeff Rubin

addicted to oil, air freight, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, big-box store, BRICs, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, energy security, food miles, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Just-in-time delivery, low interest rates, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, profit maximization, reserve currency, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, work culture , zero-sum game

Hence, the service sector’s share of employment, just like its share of GDP, may start to fall and in the process begin to reverse what had been previously thought to be an irreversible trend in our economy. This transition will not be a lay-up. The infrastructure, the technology, the training, even the work culture will have to undergo a massive overhaul to be anywhere near ready for a local economy. Many people who have not seen a lunch box since middle school, or who haven’t had a callous on their hands since the time they tried to build their own backyard fence, may soon become reacquainted with both.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

He had just left a tech start-up to work for himself. Neuberg enjoyed working from home, yet the experience was also isolating. He tried the de facto techie office, a coffee shop, but found it too noisy and distracting and devoid of meaningful interactions. Despite his complaints about the monotony and conformity of the nine-to-five cube-working culture, Neuberg discovered that he missed the social camaraderie of an office. To his surprise, watercooler conversations served a purpose. “It seemed I could either have a job that would give me structure and community,” he recalls, “or I could be freelance and have freedom and independence. Why couldn’t I have both?”

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

In many cases, this leads to teams that are heavy on young, Caucasian men who went to a short list of elite colleges, which hinders the organization’s ability to innovate or serve a broader market. But even without such problematic practices, hiring for “fit” should not mean asking, “Do you fit into this box?” For example, many start-ups have a work culture where employees come to the office after 10 a.m., work late, and spend evenings socializing together at bars. In other words, an extended version of college! If your start-up has such a culture, you might avoid hiring employees who want to come in early and leave before 6 p.m., or who rarely socialize or go out at night.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

Nonunionized Amazon workers in Pennsylvania, for example, have been subjected to such high warehouse temperatures that the company has ambulances permanently parked outside the facility ready to speed overheated workers to the emergency ward.50 In its Kentucky delivery center, Amazon’s hyperefficient work culture has created what one former manager described as the “huge problems” of permanently injured workers.51 In Germany, Amazon’s second-largest market, 1,300 workers organized a series of strikes in 2013 over pay and working conditions as well as to protest a security firm hired to police the company’s distribution centers.52 In Britain, a 2013 BBC undercover investigation into an Amazon warehouse revealed disturbingly harsh working conditions that one stress expert warned could lead to “mental and physical illness” for workers.53 But I don’t suppose the libertarian venture capitalists care much about the many casualties of this war of the one percent—such as Pam Wetherington, a middle-aged woman at Amazon’s Kentucky operation who suffered stress fractures in both feet through walking for miles on the warehouse’s concrete floor, yet received no compensation from Bezos’s company when she could no longer work.54 Or Jennifer Owen, a ten-year veteran employee at the Kentucky warehouse who was summarily fired after returning to work from an Amazon-approved medical leave after a car accident.55 While Amazon is a nightmare for nonunionized workers like Wetherington and Owen, it has been a financial dream for investors like Tom Perkins’s KPCB, whose original $6 million investment would, by 2014, be worth around $20 billion.

Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits by Kevin Roose

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, East Village, eat what you kill, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, fixed income, forward guidance, glass ceiling, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hedonic treadmill, information security, Jane Street, jitney, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Michael Milken, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, plutocrats, proprietary trading, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tail risk, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, two and twenty, urban planning, We are the 99%, work culture , young professional

“U.S. banks made $141.3 billion in net income in 2012, according to the FDIC, their best year since 2006”: Jesse Hamilton, “U.S. Banks Had Second-Best Earnings Ever in 2012, FDIC Says,” Bloomberg News, February 26, 2013. “In the summer of 2013, a twenty-one-year-old summer intern in Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s London office dropped dead”: Shiv Malik and Ben Quinn, “Bank of America Intern’s Death Puts Banks’ Working Culture in Spotlight,” The Guardian, August 20, 2013. “Marina Keegan, the Yale senior who provided me with a glimpse into the campus recruiting culture after Occupy Wall Street, was killed in a car crash”: Marina’s obituary was written by William Alden and published in the New York Times on May 29, 2012.

Monolith to Microservices: Evolutionary Patterns to Transform Your Monolith by Sam Newman

Airbnb, business logic, business process, continuous integration, Conway's law, database schema, DevOps, fail fast, fault tolerance, ghettoisation, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Kubernetes, loose coupling, microservices, MVC pattern, price anchoring, pull request, single page application, single source of truth, software as a service, source of truth, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, telepresence, two-pizza team, work culture

It’s Not One Size Fits All We started this chapter by discussing how your decision about whether to use microservices should be rooted in the challenges you are facing, and the changes you want to bring about. Making changes in your organizational structure is just as important. Understanding if and how your organization needs to change needs to be based on your context, your working culture, and your people. This is why just copying other people’s organizational design can be especially dangerous. Earlier, we touched very briefly on the Spotify model. Interest grew in how Spotify organized itself in the well-known 2012 paper “Scaling Agile @ Spotify” by Henrik Kniberg and Anders Ivarsson.

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes by Ian Leslie

Atul Gawande, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, data science, different worldview, double helix, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture , zero-sum game

For instance, when study respondents are presented with a diagram showing a scarf, a glove and a hand, and are asked to pick the two most closely related objects, Westerners tend to pick the scarf and glove, because both are pieces of winter clothing, while East Asians are more likely to pick the hand and glove, because of their close relationship to one another. Inspired by Henrich’s work, cultural psychologist Thomas Talhelm ran tests like this with groups of American conservatives and liberals. He found that liberals and conservatives think as though they are from completely different cultures – ‘almost as different as East and West’. Liberals are more WEIRD than conservatives: more analytical, readier to think in abstractions.

Speed by Bob Gilliland, Keith Dunnavant

Airbus A320, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, belly landing, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Neil Armstrong, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, US Airways Flight 1549, work culture

., 214 skiing, 82, 108, 173 Skliar, Bill, 130 Skunk Works (Lockheed Advanced Development Projects): and A-1 Blackbird, 143; and A-11 Blackbird, 133; and A-12 Blackbird, 124–31; creation of, 99; and debriefings following test flights, 163, 177–78; efficiency of, 100–101, 102, 116–17, 141–42; engineering challenges faced by, 137–39; Gene Reynolds’s career at, 113, 160; independence of, 99; jet-powered aircraft developed by, 99–109; Kelly Johnson retiring from, 200; Lou Schalk’s career at, 70, 103, 111–12, 126, 128, 132, 149, 161; and Project Suntan, 142; RJG as test pilot at, 1–2, 119–22, 124, 127–31, 136, 149–53; RJG joining, 111–15; secrecy of work at, 99, 111–12, 119–22, 131, 134, 135–36; security at, 115, 185–86; technological innovations and designs of, 102–3, 140–51; test pilots of, 101–2, 111–12, 126–31; Tony LeVier’s career at, 101–2, 112, 114, 117, 171; and U-2 program, 116–18; work culture at, 99–100; and XP-80 development, 100. See also A-12 “Archangel” Blackbird (Lockheed); SR-71 Blackbird (Lockheed) Smith, H. R., 183–84 Smithsonian Institution, 209–10 Smoke Hall (Bancroft Hall, Naval Academy), 48 Society of Experimental Test Pilots (SETP), 131–32, 213 Solomon, Ken, 67–68, 73 sound barrier, 76, 84–88, 201, 218 Soviet Union: aerial reconnaissance of, 115–19, 131; and arms race, 133–35; and atomic bomb testing, 66, 115; during the Berlin Airlift, 55–56; during the Cold War, 66–67, 75–76, 121, 205–6; and ending of U.S. reconnaissance overflights, 125, 131, 190, 204–5; during the Korean War, 78–79; missile capabilities of, 135; in the space race, 122–23; SR-71 missions near, 205–6; submarines of, 205–6, 207; and sweptwing aircraft design, 76, 92; threats posed by, 55–56, 63, 66–67, 75–76, 121; titanium from, 144–45; and U-2 incident, 118; during World War I, 3 Sputnik, 122 SR-71 Blackbird (Lockheed): acronym changes of, 135–36; air-conditioning system of, 146; and black paint innovation, 145–46; camera and sensor systems of, 152, 181–82, 205, 207; and center of gravity problem, 166, 178–80, 181, 186; chemical ignition system of, 150; cockpit design of, 151; and competition against RJG’s F-104, 175–76; crashes of, 180–81, 182–86; cruise speed of, 147–48, 152; dangers and risks facing test pilots of, 1–2, 149–50, 166, 178–80; and deaths, 180–86; debriefings following test flights of, 163, 177–78; declassification of, 203; design modifications and features of, 151–52; ejection system of, 151, 162, 178–79; ending of testing program and development of, 200; enduring legacy of, 210–11, 216–17, 227–28; and engine design innovations, 147–50; engineering challenges in design of, 137, 143–51, 156, 181–82, 186; evasive capabilities of, 152, 192, 204; fictional portrayals of, 211; first test flight of, 152–53, 155–56, 160–71, 228; fuel blend of, 150; heat-related challenges of, 143–50; impact of U-2 incident on, 190, 204–5; inlet system of, 143–45, 147–50, 182, 183, 186; Kelly Johnson’s legacy in, 135, 142, 151; limited operational theater of, 204–5; Lyndon Johnson unmasking of, 135–36, 145, 206; missiles fired at, 191–92, 204, 208; and mission following Libyan airstrike, 208; and missions during the Cold War, 202–7; and missions targeting Soviet submarines, 205–6, 207; museums housing, 209–11, 227; nicknames of, 191; operational rollout of, 189–90; public fascination with, 146, 202–4, 206–7, 210–11, 227–28; radar system of, 181–82; reconnaissance features of, 152, 181–82, 205–6, 207; refueling of, 177, 192; RJG as chief test pilot of, 1–2, 136, 176–80, 226; and RJG’s joke on Toof Brown, 187–89; and RJG’s legacy, 208, 211–12, 231; secrecy of, 135–36, 170, 171–72, 177, 187–89, 195, 202, 203–4, 206; shape of, 146; speed records in, 207, 209; stealth technology design elements of, 146, 205, 211; taxi test of, 155, 163; technological innovations of, 143–51, 181–82, 227; testing program of, 149–50, 176–86; test pilot team of, 180; titanium used in, 143–45; twenty-fifth anniversary flight of, 208–9; unstarts of, 150, 178–79; U.S.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

Move to Silicon Valley if it has the best talent for your type of company and if you can hire well there, but don’t limit your options: stay in a location or relocate to one where you would have an unfair advantage in either hiring great talent or striking partnerships. And, of course, some startups have opted to go fully distributed, and that can certainly work too. Given the expense of living and operating a business in Silicon Valley, recent shifts in remote work culture and distributed teams, and evolving startup ecosystems in other metros, more billion-dollar companies will likely be started outside Silicon Valley or as fully distributed in the next decade or so. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, Square, and Shopify now allow remote work, which will slowly but surely distribute senior talent outside Silicon Valley, accelerating this impact.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

After it was founded in 1993, the magazine engaged in “a cycle of mutual legitimation” with the ascendant Christian right wing, placing figures such as Newt Gingrich and anti-evolution telecommunications analyst George Gilder on its cover.26 As it declared Gingrich a “wired” politician, it also helped to legitimize calls for tax cuts, deregulation, and an embrace of a more “flexible” work culture, while imbuing the so-called “New Right” of the Republican Party with the countercultural ethos. As deindustrialization and globalization sent more jobs overseas, the push for project-based work that was in line with the long-standing libertarian opposition to the hierarchal corporate management structure continued.

Please Report Your Bug Here: A Novel by Josh Riedel

Burning Man, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, financial independence, Golden Gate Park, invisible hand, Joan Didion, Mason jar, Menlo Park, messenger bag, off-the-grid, Port of Oakland, pre–internet, risk/return, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, tech bro, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

I asked her my toughest content-policy questions, and she provided answers much more in-depth than the previous candidates. She was even familiar with the customer-support management system we used. At the end of the interview, I asked what questions she had for me, expecting the usual ones about benefits and pay and work culture. Instead, she asked me why I was working for DateDate. “You said you were an art history major?” I described the thrill of seeing a stranger on BART using DateDate. “An app we run out of this tiny office is changing the way people fall in love,” I said. “How can you not aspire to build that future?”

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney

Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture

We contacted more than two hundred people for this book, mostly current Apple staffers or those who had recently left the company. Some were willing to talk on the record, but many wanted to keep their names out of print. Apple did not respond to several requests for comment. Nonetheless, my research partners and I did get a number of people to talk, on and off the record, about Apple, Jony Ive and their unique work culture. Notably, we got some major players, including some who have worked closely with Jony for decades. They took us inside the studio and inside the minds behind Apple, in an unprecedented manner. The information they provided, and the details they were able to reveal about the company over many years, were immeasurably useful.

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

GE Ventures’ portfolio includes Rock Health (an accelerator of digital health-care start-ups), Stem (whose intelligent battery storage can reduce peak energy charges by 20%) and Mocana (a provider of embedded security systems for the industrial internet). Partnering with these start-ups not only gives GE access to disruptive technologies, but also creates a disruptive working culture. Comstock notes: Working with impatient 20-something entrepreneurs in T-shirts creates friction and tension within GE’s buttoned-up corporate culture. But it’s also energising. Start-ups’ enthusiasm is contagious. GE is also organising open innovation challenges, hosted on crowdsourcing platform NineSigma, inviting inventive minds worldwide to create affordable and sustainable solutions in its core health-care, energy and aviation businesses.

The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar

The important thing is that the values and rules are understood and the behavior is consistent with them. If the culture says everyone is equal, then the CEO better not have a reserved parking spot. Culture is built by establishing behaviors that the whole organization can and will adhere to consistently. For a podular system to work, cultural and technical standards are imperative. This means that a pod’s autonomy cannot extend to everything. Shared standards and protocols lose their value if they are not, well, shared. This kind of system needs a strong backbone that clearly articulates those standards and provides a way to evolve them when necessary.

Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg

big-box store, carbon footprint, classic study, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, employer provided health coverage, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, young professional

“But I sought out much younger women who were not interested in the answer to the dreaded five-word question: ‘Where is this relationship going?’ I wanted to be open to meeting the right woman. But I was also avoiding it because I prioritized my career and spent my social time with coworkers. I thought I’d have time for marriage and kids later on.” Mark is not the only one who has adapted to the 24/7 work culture by making the office the hub of his social life. One attorney we interviewed says that, after two years of seventy-hour work weeks, his gay colleagues had become his primary peer group. And Justin, the journalist we met in chapter one, says that he doesn’t mind the long hours because “it’s a social environment, you know?

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

A finance worker originally from Hong Kong, with a young son, asked the navigators how to present herself. “Don’t let silence in an interview intimidate you,” said a navigator. “When you go in, talk for ninety seconds or two minutes to start with about yourself, no more.” “Admit you don’t know the work culture at the company.” “Can I lie about my age?” called out one woman, giggling. “You can’t hide that!” a navigator, clad in a long-sleeved dress covered with large pink tea roses, replied. Then three navigators explained, in chorus, how easily any job applicant might get caught out falsifying their age—there are now digital records of all individuals, as we live in a surveillance society enamored with coded archives.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, butterfly effect, California gold rush, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Firefox, Ford Model T, General Magic , George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, IKEA effect, information asymmetry, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mason jar, Murray Gell-Mann, nudge theory, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Veblen good, work culture

Take the case of an advertising agency pitching to potential clients. It’s common for clients at such pitches to be furnished with an ‘evaluation matrix’ or ‘scorecard’, designed to ensure the process is transparent and objective. The intention is that each agency’s presentation is marked on criteria such as quality of strategy, creative work, cultural fit, knowledge of sector and cost-competitiveness. The idea is that these things are scored independently and then totalled to determine the winning agency but if you ask anybody who’s been involved in this procedure, they will often admit that they simply decided which agency they wanted to win and back-filled all the numbers accordingly.

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamond, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, work culture

Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.19 The McKnight Principles were a truly radical policy to implement just after World War II, when most companies had a rigid nine-to-five work culture and managers were mostly men wearing blue suits and crisp white shirts. McKnight stepped aside as chairman of the company’s board in 1966, the same year Spence Silver joined the firm. But the culture he created lived on, shaping the firm.20 Fry and Silver were good people, with initiative. Their bosses had faith in them and gave them lots of responsibility.

The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier

Big Tech, emotional labour, failed state, fear of failure, hiring and firing, hive mind, interchangeable parts, job automation, Kanban, Larry Wall, microservices, pull request, risk tolerance, Schrödinger's Cat, side project, Steve Jobs, WebSocket, work culture

If you have a value of “happiness and positivity is a choice,” the teammate who pooh-poohs every idea and criticizes everything is going to have problems fitting in. Sometimes, people will change to adopt the values. “Happiness and positivity is a choice” is actually one of the core values of Rent the Runway, and I would not say that I came from a work background of happiness. In fact, I came from a fairly professional and critical work culture. But I learned to appreciate the value of looking at things in a positive light. That doesn’t mean that I lost my critical eye, and it was never the easiest value for me to adopt completely, but it wasn’t a deal breaker. Using the core values to coach people in areas where they are misaligned can help you articulate what otherwise may feel like just ambiguous friction.

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

The scale and complexity of modern automobiles has made the car business the ultimate team sport, relegating all-powerful automotive auteurs to either tiny luxury-brand workshops or the history books. Tesla has a clear leader and it has a clear mission, but what it doesn’t have is what allows the best automakers to manage massive scale and complexity: clear cultural principles and practices. Tesla’s stated mission is profoundly motivating for many of its employees, and its work culture is correspondingly intense, but “accelerating the transition to sustainable transport” only explains the company’s ends, not its means—the why but not the how. As a result of this cultural vacuum, almost every decision that management makes at Tesla ends up coming down to a single consideration: Will Elon approve?

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer

Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, FedEx blackjack story, global village, hiring and firing, job-hopping, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, late fees, loose coupling, loss aversion, out of africa, performance metric, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, super pumped, tech worker, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, work culture

Jack, a manager in Springfield, Missouri, successfully revives a remanufacturing plant once owned by International Harvester. The plant is about to be closed but he raises money and stages a leveraged buyout. Then, in an effort to motivate his workforce, he sets himself two goals: Create a work culture of financial transparency, making every aspect of the business visible to every employee. Invest a substantial amount of time and effort training every staff member how to read and understand, in detail, the weekly operating and financial reports. Jack teaches his workforce, from the top engineer to the lowest worker on the shop floor, to read the company’s financial reports.

Barometer of Fear: An Insider's Account of Rogue Trading and the Greatest Banking Scandal in History by Alexis Stenfors

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, game design, Gordon Gekko, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, mental accounting, millennium bug, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shock, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Rubik’s Cube, Snapchat, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, work culture , Y2K

The incident and the background to it had already been erased from history, leaving behind many more questions than answers. But it added to the trading room folklore. However, it was not the extracurricular activities of certain traders that made me doubt that LIBOR was going to be a one-off scandal. It was activities within the working culture itself. Six months after the first batch of FX fines, Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, RBS and UBS were fined $5.6 billion for engaging in collusive practices in the same markets. According to the FBI, the activity involved criminality ‘on a massive scale’.3 Very few have since stepped forward to try to defend the behaviour leading up to the fines, which, when revealed to a wider public not familiar with FX trading ‘activities’, gave banks and traders even more of a headache.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

‘We are competing with gasoline cars,’ he said. ‘If we can’t win against gasoline cars, there’s no place for us in the market.’23 He ploughed money into R&D, spending more than his rivals. By 2019 CATL had over 2,000 patents in batteries and battery charging. CATL modelled itself on the hard-working culture and R&D focus of telecommunications giant Huawei, whose rise had led to growing political concerns in the US. Zeng knew that CATL could not always rely on Chinese subsidies for help. In an internal email in 2017 he referred to a Chinese allegorical saying: ‘the typhoon is coming, even the pigs can fly’, which suggested that with government support any company can do well.

The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You by Elaine N. Aron

do what you love, mirror neurons, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sugar pill, work culture

., overdo at work, protect too much in intimate relationships; neglect mental health but overattend to physical health). Finally, you may have overcome all of this and be treating your body just fine. On the other hand, you who were securely attached may be wondering why you are struggling with these same two extremes. But our circumstances, culture, subculture or work culture, friends, and our own other traits can all also make us go too far either way. If you are unsure about which you do, review the box “Are You Too Out? Too In?” The Problem of Being In Too Much Some HSPs, perhaps all of us at times, get sidelined because of thinking that there is no way an HSP can be out in the world and survive.

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

barriers to entry, Boeing 747, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, clean water, collective bargaining, Costa Concordia, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flag carrier, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, index card, inflight wifi, Lao Tzu, legacy carrier, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, work culture , zero-sum game

Some of the interesting ideas we heard about were the Netflix initiative of unlimited vacation days, meditation classes to combat stress, sleeping pods for afternoon naps and truly flexible working hours and locations. All of these innovations could and should be replicated by businesses all over the world and there’s good reason to do so – it’s good for business. Today’s twenty-four-hour work culture means it’s more important than ever before to look after our people. Arianna Huffington has made ‘wellness’ integral to working life at the Huffington Post where she wants her team not just to succeed but also to thrive – so she’s introduced healthy snacks, mindfulness training and, with the introduction of the Virgin Pulse Wellness Programme, Huffington Post employees are now fitter and more productive than ever before.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

“Others at the company said ‘We are a digital company and we communicate via digital means,’ Ben and I just got a bit antsy and wanted to make stuff,” Katigbak said. “Part of this was our frustration over an obsession with data and metrics. Early on it was an attempt to humanize the brand for an internal audience, and to humanize the user.” They began making signs for the workplace with slogans about Facebook’s hacker-derived work culture: “If It Works, It’s Obsolete,” “Is This a Technology Company?” “Move Fast and Break Shit,” and every possible variation on the word hack and its use in a phrase. Employees began noticing these signs hanging on cubicle walls and in hallways, and requested their own. Eventually, word got around to Mark Zuckerberg, who asked that the two produce hand-printed signs for Facebook’s annual app developer conference.

Work Less, Live More: The Way to Semi-Retirement by Robert Clyatt

asset allocation, backtesting, buy and hold, currency risk, death from overwork, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, eat what you kill, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial independence, fixed income, future of work, independent contractor, index arbitrage, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, rising living standards, risk/return, Silicon Valley, The 4% rule, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Economic Policy Institute, and American Management Association Why Work Seems Stale Before making the leap into semi-retirement, nearly every person steeled his or her personal resolve to do it by passing through a very low period—a place of being world-weary, sick of the stress and pace and compromises of the get-and-spend, live-for-work culture. Your work situation may still be pleasant and comfortable. However, if it is not, a candid look at the current state of the American working life may give you context for your feelings of dissatisfaction and help you see that leaving the rat race behind can be a mark of eminent good sense. chapter 1 | Figure Out Why You Want to Do This | 41 And in case you start feeling guilty or uncertain, realize that through history and across cultures, people have organized their lives in ways that look very much like semi-retirement.

Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

Decisions will be made using prediction markets and innovation will be run using open or distributed innovation principles. Work/life balance Instead of working less and enjoying a leisure society, we are working more. We are also commuting for longer periods. Being busy is a modern mark of prestige. This will all change. The open-all-hours work culture will be challenged by parents seeking more time with their kids and there will be law suits and regulation concerning the social costs of long work hours. Companies will be forced to pay for ruined marriages, stress-related illnesses and dysfunctional children caused by a culture of endless work, unrealistic targets and disappearing evenings and weekends.

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life. New York: Routledge. 250 References Morgen, Sandra. 1983. The Politics of “Feeling”: Beyond the Dialectic of Thought and Action. Women’s Studies 10:203–223. Morgen, Sandra. 1995. “It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times”: Emotional Discourse in the Work Cultures of Feminist Health Clinics. In Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women’s Movement, ed. Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Morgen, Sandra. 2002. Into Our Own Hands: The Women’s Health Movement in the United States, 1969–1990. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Corporate types from the energy and financial industries were drafted into charitable projects to protect the world from climate change, even if their way of thinking about profit, as practiced in their day jobs, was a big part of why climate change was happening. Business leaders were drafted into strategizing for women’s rights, even if their tools were to blame for the always-on work culture that made it harder for so many women to claim their rights and for the tax avoidance that made women-friendly policies like universal daycare more elusive. And, as at the Soros event, they were viewed as essential to increasing equality, even if their analytical frameworks and their atomizing of the realities of workers and communities had helped to increase inequality.

Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together by Andrew Selee

Berlin Wall, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, electricity market, energy security, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, job automation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, public intellectual, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Wozniak, work culture , Y Combinator

Most that have done so have flourished—and helped American communities along the way. Fernando Villanueva, who runs DeAcero’s US operations from Houston and once lived in southeastern Missouri overseeing the Poplar Bluff plant directly, has come to have a great appreciation for the professionalism of American workers. “There is a work culture here that is very deeply ingrained.” He loved his time in Missouri and came to respect the American colleagues he worked with day in and day out. But he also notes that in many ways, American industry seems to have become a bit complacent in the face of foreign competition. He believes that DeAcero brought from Mexico not only capital to invest and the ability to integrate operations across the border but also the drive to innovate and succeed in the global marketplace.

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy by David Sawyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Cal Newport, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, Desert Island Discs, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, index card, index fund, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, knowledge worker, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart meter, Snapchat, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, The 4% rule, Tim Cook: Apple, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, work culture , Y Combinator

Too many of us earn loads of money, but have no idea what’s in our pension or when we can retire. We employ cleaners and childcare providers and skip the queue with private healthcare. Either our kids are at private school or we pay £100k more on our mortgage for a good catchment area: same difference. Too many of us are so beaten down by an always-on working culture that we spend half our free time de-stressing. Too many of us like what we do, but don’t like our boss. Too many of us take the occasional Monday or Friday off sick because we have a bug just can’t face going in. Too many of us have problems sleeping or wear gumshields to stop our teeth grinding during the night.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

Even government bond traders march to the drum of delayed, audited releases of financial information, in their case economic indicators on estimates of inflation, unemployment, and GDP growth. What happens to this industry when all financial and economic data is being updated, automatically and indisputably in real time? What happens to the people who lose their jobs? What happens to the work culture? If the future foreseen by this book comes to pass, we’ll witness the biggest employment shakeup the world has ever seen. And this time, the most vulnerable jobs are not the usual suspects: the factory workers, the low-level clerks, or the retail store assistants. Now it’s the accountants, the bankers, the portfolio managers, the insurers, the title officers, the escrow agents, and the trustees—and, yes, even the lawyers.

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture