An early December batch of links
Since the last batch of links went out, paying subscribers received essays from me about my deliberate shift away from sports obsession and then why mission-driven organizations aren’t the salve they’re promoted to be. This coming weekend, they will get a briefer on why small talk isn’t all that small.
Below, you’ll find a batch of links on the subjects this newsletter covers, which are professional development, community building, and self care.
These Young Workers Are ‘Romanticizing’ the Return to Office. I needed something like this when I was first starting out, only piecing it all together when I witnessed the basics done poorly. The advice in my era was you learn what you don’t want in a boss and from a career from watching it, and I believe we had it all backward. People should have been guiding and sharing notes along the way, the way these young workers are.
The office day-in-the-life videos overlap with another corner of the TikTok universe: “CareerTok,” where creators give advice about landing a job in a certain industry or tell viewers how to write a cover letter or edit their résumés. Ms. Chen and other creators attributed the success of their office TikToks to young people’s curiosity about what it’s like to be in the work force and how to choose a career path.
New Help for a Group at Risk for Suicide: Middle-Aged Men. This, in my opinion, is the most understated story of our current era. It’s everywhere you look, if you choose to look.
Bye-bye blazers and pencil skirts: What workwear sales reveal about the RTO push.
Have the Anticapitalists Reached Harvard Business School? “What happens at Harvard, Wharton and other elite campuses offers a small glimpse of the changes in the corporate realm. But at the same time, their graduates tend to have outsize influence on business, shaping the values and policies of the companies they may one day run.” This is changing, in my opinion. These people aren’t going to be the exclusive experts in the next generation that they’ve been to date.
Five Years After #MeToo, Wall Street’s Culture of Secrecy Makes Progress Hard to Measure.
Logistics Companies Are Diversifying Hiring, but Challenges Persist. I suspect that we’ll start to see more women in a variety of different fields that have become more popular and more prominent over the course of the past few years. Supply chain is a smart place for anyone to reinvent themselves.
What if we only worked four days a week? A good rundown of what the current cultural conversation is about how to rebuild work to be something better than it was before. We have to balance all of the existing good parts to the system with the additional elements being implemented.
The Class Where Future Bosses Learn How to Deliver Bad News.
‘Everybody’s a free agent’. “I know plenty of managers who already assume their staff members are constantly looking and accept the offer-counteroffer dance as a normal part of business.” This is probably the case. I know some people who’ve been looking passive for several years, waiting for the right one to come around to leap for.
Why Is It So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends?
Do You Like Your Boss? The Big Take Podcast. Finally, we’re investing in making sure that managers know what they’re doing. We used to promote them and hope it works out. And when it didn’t replace them with nobody until we did the same exercise again. It was never sustainable. Making and keeping better managers seems like a turn in the right direction.
Small Businesses Having a Hard Time Competing With Larger Companies for Top Talent.
Buying furniture online is a terrible experience. So, why are we still doing it? “The fact of the matter is that online shopping is both a blessing and a curse. You have more choice than ever both, but you have to work that much harder to strike gold.” Been thinking about this a lot this holiday shopping season (and I got myself cited about Cyber Monday).