Newsletter
December 2021 - Year three in review
Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday
Latest
Newsletter
November 2021 - on pay for performance, what makes a good manager, Oops write-ups, and team autonomy
November has been a month of challenges and surprises for me. So this will be a shorter issue. How much do you know about how your team works? On average managers either did not know or could not remember 60% of the work their teams do. In one extreme instance,
Ling- English
The corporation: it's something more than the people in it
John Naughton is surprised at journalists and commentators being horrified at corporations doing despicable things. Don’t they understand that a corporations is essentially a superintelligent AI which is entirely focussed on achieving its purpose — which in the case of corporations these days is to maximise shareholder value? That’s
Newsletter
October 2021 - on hiring well, your team's weakest link, collaboration, and re-onboarding
People who are preoccupied with success ask the wrong question
Ling- English
You learn more and faster by writing things down
Study: participants had to learn to identify the letters of a language they did not know. The learning was prompted in one of three ways: writing by hand, typing, or watching videos. "At the end, after as many as six sessions, everyone could recognize the letters and made few
EME
100 recommendations for making meetings more beautiful
Members of the House of Beautiful Business community shared ideas on how to improve meetings. Before you join your next meeting, have a read-through of what they came up with. See what the repetition is saying (or not saying). Even better: before you schedule your next, ask yourself: does
leadership
Can we manage without managers?
In response to an article in The Economist about the need for middle managers, Michele Zanini writes: Just because the ladder has fewer rungs doesn't mean leadership opportunities are scarce-quite the opposite. By giving people the ability to gain influence (and compensation) based on accomplishment as opposed
Ling- English
It’s time to rewild your attention
When you read what everyone else is reading, you’re likely to think what everyone else is thinking. And you might only be reading what the algorithms are putting before you. It’s time to rewild your attention. Big-tech recommendation systems (…) pose a (…) challenge for our imaginative lives: Their
Business Communication
It's not always rude to talk over each other
It’s called Cooperative overlapping. It seems self-evident. Starting to speak before another has finished violates their right to the floor. In formal contexts such as political debates, it breaches the rules. In casual conversation, it is simply rude.But it’s not so simple. As a linguist who
Business Basics
Your own privacy policy
Food for thought about privacy policies from Doc Searls: There is no reason why websites and services can’t agree to your privacy policy, and your terms of engagement. In legal terms, you should be able to operate as the first party, and to proffer your own terms, to which
Business Basics
Doing novel things and doing old things... is not enough
Cliff Hazell: Building a successful organization is a mix of doing new/novel things, old things, and very old things. I think we usually spend too much time talking about the new and novel as if it’s a silver bullet. Doing the old and very old things consistently and
Ling- English
Are you an Asker or a Guesser?
From The Atlantic: In some [groups], you grow up with the expectation that it's OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you&