Career
What Happens When Your Career Becomes Your Whole Identity (via Harvard Business Review)
Things that lead to enmeshment of your identity with your career are (1) being rewarded for working longer hours, (2) career achievements are highly values in an individual’s family or community, (3) bigger paychecks land you in a new socioeconomic class. To get untangled, (1) free up time and fill that time with non-work activities, (2) start small, (3) rebuild your network to include friends, (4) look beyond your job title.
Culture
Why Are We Here? (via Harvard Business Review)
- People want to work for orgs whose missions and business philosophies resonate with them intellectually and emotionally. Without this, you have a crisis of purpose, and workers feel lost.
- Leaders need to clearly communicate why the company exists in a manner that’s easy for employees to find, understand, and reference. It needs to be relevant, unique, and have a rightful owner (i.e., it can actually be accomplished).
- Be a magnet for talent. Use cross-functional teams to break down silos. Put your money where your purpose is. Make sure the leaders model your purpose.
How the Best Bosses Interrupt Bias on Their Teams (via Harvard Business Review)
There are too many suggestions to list here. If you’re looking for ways to improve diversity in hiring, day-to-day, and team development, there are numerous strategies in this article you can start using. The premise is that you can’t fix bias by yourself, but you can interrupt it happening.
Economy
How Should We Measure the Digital Economy? (via Harvard Business Review)
The most common measure is gross domestic product (GDP), but many of the digital services like Wikipedia cost $0, meaning they contribute nothing to GDP. Another issue with GDP is that it measures how much we pay for things, but not how much we benefit. An alternative is consumer surplus, where you ask people how much they value something. For example, if you bought a nice shirt for $40 but would have paid $100, there’s $60 consumer surplus. For digital services, people were asked how much money they’d have to be paid to give up Facebook (or a similar free service) for a month.
Leadership
Let Your Team Have That Heated Conversation (via Harvard Business Review)
- Emotion is an essential part of interacting with others and making decisions
- Too often we avoid conflict for the sake of harmony, which leads to “conflict debt” where we don’t talk about the difficult things
- Emotional outbursts are a symptom of pain; find a way to relieve that pain
- Replace phrases like “Why are you crying?” with “This is important. What do I need to understand?”
- Don’t punish people for showing or triggering emotions
Marketing
Designing Better Online Review Systems (via Harvard Business Review)
Most review systems don’t present a technical challenge, but instead a managerial one. When you don’t have enough reviews, seed them, offer incentives, and pool related products (e.g., each stylist at a salon gets the same review as the salon). People tend to give reviews if they’re 5-star or 1-star, which leads to selection bias. Some approaches to eliminate this bias are making reviews required, allowing private comments, and delivering carefully crafted prompts. To deal with fraudulent and strategic reviews, set rules for reviewers and use moderators.
Process
Quality and Effort (via Software Lead Weekly)
“In school, we harangue kids to be more careful, and spend approximately zero time teaching them to build better systems instead. We ignore checklists and processes because we’ve been taught that they’re beneath us. Instead of reacting to an error with, ‘I need to be more careful,’ we can respond with, ‘I can build a better system.'”
Sustainability
Why It’s So Hard to Change People’s Commuting Behavior (via Harvard Business Review)
This study found strategies that could encourage people to choose more environmentally-friendly commuting options (e.g., carpooling, using public transit). Specifically, 1) making people pay for parking, 2) making driving harder and other options easier, 3) giving people options to work from home. Two other points stood out to me: 1) better options are unavailable for me based on where I live, 2) nudging works best for one-off behaviors instead of habit-building.