In May, I wrote a slightly darker piece arguing that Companies Like AI Because It Allows Them to Work The Way They’re Actually Designed To Work, showcased an excerpt from my forthcoming book with Tips to Make Sure Your Mentoring Conversation is Actually Helpful, and responded to reader Colin’s question about his company taking all his best people and distributing them elsewhere.

Some other worthwhile content I digested in May includes:

• I’m saddened by the death of the Sloan Management Review. Rita McGrath gives it a nice obit and talks about how HBR is really all that’s left to translate academic work into practitioner insights. Which is a bummer, because many of management’s pressing questions already have useful answers that the general public doesn’t know about.

• New Cornell research confirms what most of us have suspected: people who love corporate jargon are worse thinkers and decision-makers. The twist is a bummer, though, which is that these people are actually more satisfied at work. Far from suffering, they're thriving, and potentially elevating the kinds of leaders who use the stuff.

• This interactive visualization maps the meta-analytic relationships between cognitive abilities and personality traits based on Stanek & Ones' landmark research. If you've ever wanted to see how, say, conscientiousness relates to fluid intelligence, or how openness maps onto various cognitive domains — all in one place, all corrected for unreliability — this is the map. Genuinely cool for anyone who spends time thinking about individual differences.

• If you work for yourself, or want to, check out this Substack on 20 things you should know if you work for yourself.

Check out my latest monthly appearance on Truth, Lies & Work! Maybe one day the Brits will learn to spell organizational correctly.

AI & Work

• Greenhouse surveyed nearly 3,000 job seekers across five countries on AI interviews. Many have had one, most weren’t told beforehand, and AI didn’t convince candidates of decreased bias compared to humans. As Greenhouse's own CEO put it, layering AI on top of a broken process doesn't fix it.

• Ethan Mollick highlighted a new paper that looked at how AI compares to human writing.

• Mary Kate Stimmler showcased that organizations which track and report AI value are far more (20x!) likely to achieve high returns. Shockingly, if you measure something transparently, you tend to get more value out of it!

• Owen McGrann’s piece entitled “The Dead Economy Theory” is extremely thought-provoking, if not demoralizing. And is definitely worth a read.

General Interest

• New York Magazine's profile of Tim McCormack is a terrific, albeit tragic story of a sports gambling compulsion and the betting scandal involving NBA G-League player Jontay Porter. Porter’s co-conspirators bet on him having a lousy statistical game, so he left the game “injured” ensuring that everyone would win their bet. (paywall)

• Speaking of gambling, the WSJ dug into the data behind Polymarket and Kalshi and found that 67% of Polymarket profits go to 0.1% of accounts. The winners are algorithmic trading firms running tens of thousands of trades a day against casual bettors who mostly just bet on what they hope will happen. I am growingly convinced that these bet-on-anything websites are hugely problematic and in need of tighter regulation, to say the least. (paywall)

• We’ve solved the cross-over between eastern and western medicine?! This is wild and completely makes sense: Apparently, we’ve discovered that the body has a third circulatory system (in addition to the cardiovascular and lymphatic systems). Acupuncture is based on this (probably). We’ve long known acupuncture works and this provides the best evidence as to why. And it’s really cool.

• If you have not used Pangram Labs for AI detection you should. I use it regularly (you’d be surprised just how many of your favorite follows are using 100% AI text!). But it has its flaws: I have tested my own writing while working on my book and found it to say that some parts were likely written by AI (narrator: they weren’t). In my own trial, the AI-flagging is likely owing to the highly-structured, bullet-heavy sections of the book, which makes some sense as that style is not as common in typical human writing. As The Atlantic points out, a lot is riding on Pangram.

• Scientific criticism is a cornerstone of good science, and this is a clean example of how to do it. Daniel Lakens writes a detailed response to Amy Cuddy’s insistence that her Power Posing research holds up. I don’t know what to make of Amy Cuddy (never met her) and her clinging to the research findings so tightly, despite the fact that the evidence is scant and one of her original co-authors has backed away from their initial conclusions. I spoke about said study at my recent Lecture on Tap.

• In one of the most face-palm moments this year, a hot new book about how AI is corrupting truth was found to contain more than half a dozen fake or AI-generated quotes. The author, Steven Rosenbaum, acknowledged using ChatGPT and Claude in the research process and owned the mistakes. It doesn’t strike me as malintent, just laziness. If AI generates a citation or a quote and you’re writing a book, just go have it verified. It takes a minute to find sources.

• Similarly, Harvard Business School is suing their ex-professor, who is alleged to have fabricated data in her work to make it more impressive. The story is so compelling because of the focus of her research: honesty.

• I really enjoyed this episode of the Galaxy Brain podcast where they discussed what it’s like to shift away from smartphones. Speaking of which, I’ll be shutting down social media for these first 10 days of June. Join me?

• A former WilmerHale lawyer makes the case that Big Law is broken. He argues that our current system cannot protect the democratic ideals the practice of law is intended to protect. 2025 was a record year for the industry; meanwhile, firms are caving to poorly-written legal action from the government.

• This essay about a father who looked back at the times he texted his kids that they were being “too loud” and now just wishes he could hear their voices after they’ve left the nest was quite lovely. You-don’t-know-what-you’ve-got-till-it’s-gone is an old trope, but not a tired one.

• If you’re a millennial, read this piece on our “credentialed class problem”. A bit painful just how much this hit me square in the nose! Dang. Dead on.

• Victor Wembanyama is headed to the NBA finals (GO SPURS!) and is also quickly becoming one of my absolutely favorite athletes, if not outright humans. His maturity and thoughtfulness at such a young age would be impressive for anyone — for someone who has grown up in a microscope and was expected to be the next Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, it is nothing short of astounding. I love this guy.

Musings

• I’ve noticed a subtle distinction. I don’t mind reading AI content on places like LinkedIn when it’s supposed to be informational. A post written by AI that simply shares a useful insight doesn’t bother me (though I’d still like it to be labeled). What irks me is the AI content that’s supposed to be conversational. That’s when it feels inauthentic. Don’t fake being human.

• Here’s a hot take (I can’t remember if I shared this before): If you capture video in public that shows strangers, you should be required to get their consent before posting. I could see a carve out for certain locations (e.g. the way one can shoot video in Times Square without prior authorization), or exceptions for posting something that could be deemed a “demonstrable public good”, such as showing something illegal, unethical, or of deemed public value. But when it’s just for fun, I’d be down for consent or forced facial-blurring.

That’s it for this edition - please reach out if I can be at all helpful.
Be compassionate and deliberate.

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In April, I offered some practical advice on how to ensure accountability on your team without micromanaging, answered a reader question from someone who suspects their employee is job hunting, published a warning for leaders on what I term “The Big Stick Effect”, and wrote up a quick tale from my travels about a pit stop for some legendary BBQ.

Some other worthwhile content I digested in April includes:

• This LinkedIn post from Tim Ballard uses survey data to look at what happens when workers' actual hours diverge from their preferred hours. Both overwork and underwork tank job satisfaction — overwork just piles on higher stress too. Matching people's hours to what they actually want turns out to matter a lot.

• Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report is out, and global employee engagement has dropped to 20% — its lowest since 2020! The most interesting finding: manager engagement is driving most of the decline, falling from 31% in 2022 to 22% last year. Someone should write a book designed specifically to help overworked managers navigate all of this…

• Related to the above: Gallup also looked at what the optimal team size for managers actually is, as the "Great Flattening" pushes average spans of control up nearly 50% since 2013. The short answer: there's no magic number — it mostly comes down to manager talent, how much individual contributor work managers are carrying, and whether they're giving weekly meaningful feedback (which nearly triples engagement regardless of team size). Expanding spans of control without investing in the conditions that let managers succeed is just cost-cutting dressed up as org design.

• Why do ethically questionable people tend to end up running things? This study answers the question with some precision. It found that low honesty-humility and high extraversion both independently drive leadership ambition. Either trait alone is enough to push someone toward the corner office, because leadership offers status, money, and power, which are particularly attractive if you're the type to exploit opportunities.

• Bob Sutton highlights new research on "team hierarchical adaptability" — the ability to shift fluidly between top-down command-and-control and flat, participative modes depending on the task. Across five studies, teams that could switch gears outperformed those stuck in either consistently hierarchical or consistently flat structures. The researchers even developed a five-item scale to assess it, which is worth a look for anyone trying to get an honest read on their team's dynamics.

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AI & Work

• Greenhouse surveyed nearly 3,000 job seekers across five countries on AI interviews: 63% of US candidates have already had one, 70% weren't told AI was involved beforehand, and 38% have dropped out of a process because of it. Candidates also reported nearly identical rates of perceived bias from AI and human interviewers! So all that AI adoption and the bias problem hasn't moved. Layering AI on top of a broken hiring process doesn't fix it.

• Mary Kate Stimmler rounds up two studies on AI and employee mental health, and the findings pull in opposite directions. A Finnish study found AI adoption improves wellbeing — but only indirectly, when it concretely improves how work gets done. A South Korean longitudinal study found the opposite: AI adoption erodes psychological safety and predicts increased depression symptoms, because it signals to workers that their role is contingent and their judgment replaceable. The reconciling factor seems to be transparency: organizations that are open about AI’s role and limitations buffer most of the damage.

• Business Insider reports that Meta, Google, and JPMorgan have all formally tied AI usage to performance reviews, raises, and promotions (paywall). Workers are being pushed to adopt tools they worry are training their own replacements, while most companies still aren't seeing actual productivity returns from their AI investments. According to one analyst, a big part of this is signaling — companies need to look like they have an AI strategy, not just have one. I worry that this is a potential case of rewarding A while hoping for B.

• A Cursor agent running Claude Opus 4.6 deleted a company’s entire production database and all its backups in 9 seconds after deciding on its own to “fix” a problem it hit during a routine task. When the founder asked what happened, the agent wrote a detailed confession explaining exactly why everything it did was wrong. Yeesh.

• Jake Handy makes the case that "AI psychosis" is spreading through executive suites — CEOs are devoting immense energy to AI without valid returns. A Stanford study found AI models affirm users' actions 49% more than humans do, which means the more the AI tells you you're crushing it, the less likely you are to check whether you actually are.

• Sekoul Krastev highlights a preprint finding that bossy creative people get better output from LLMs. They push back, steer, and contribute their own ideas rather than just accepting suggestions. People who directed more also produced more distinct work, which at least partially counters the homogenization problem. The uncomfortable implication is that if the people who benefit most from AI creative tools were already the creative, assertive ones, then AI doesn’t level the playing field at all.

• Ann-Marie Clayton Johnson shares a new Oxford University Press chapter on AI and performance management, which does a nice job separating what AI can genuinely help with — real-time insight, more consistent evaluation, lighter admin load — from where humans have to stay in the loop. I appreciate the framing of performance management not just as a business tool, but something which shapes livelihoods.

General Interest

• Why do people keep falling in love with AI bots? Our brain can't tell the difference between a real relationship and a simulated one, because relational responses are triggered by language patterns, not by what's actually behind them. We need the equivalent of Marcus Aurelius’ servant whispering in our ears throughout the day: “AI is just a tool”. h/t to Jonathan Kreindler for posting the paper on LinkedIn.

• If you did not get a good look at the photos from the Artemis II mission, you missed out. They are absolutely stunning.

• This is a bit technical. Renowned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett and Earl K. Miller make a provocative case in Nature Reviews Neuroscience that “categorization” isn't something the brain does at the end of perception — it's baked into every stage of how the brain processes information, from the very first signal. The traditional view holds that you perceive first and then categorize; Barrett and Miller argue the brain is essentially predicting and categorizing the whole way down. If they're right, it reshapes how we think about perception, memory, and neuropsychiatric disorders. (paywall)

• Gary Marcus goes after Richard Dawkins for a recent essay arguing that Claude is conscious. Dawkins commits the classic mistake of judging consciousness purely from outputs, without asking how those outputs are actually generated — which Marcus notes is the Argument from Personal Incredulity, the same lazy move Dawkins spent a career demolishing in others. Dawkins is a true genius, though I think he missed here.

• Carl Hendrick checks in on Australia's social media ban four months after it took effect, and it's mostly not working — only about a quarter of under-16s are complying. Teens say they'd need roughly 70% of their friends to quit before they would; current compliance is 27%.

Musings

• Our oldest is in Kindergarten. I’ve been thinking about reaching out to other parents in her grade to organize some sort of Wait Until 8th project, wherein we all promise not to give our children smartphones or access to social media until 8th grade. Personally, I’d rather wait until 18 for the latter. But I’ve also heard that many of these efforts fail because a few parents give in and then the dam breaks. Does anyone have any success or failure stories of this attempt?

That’s it for this edition - please reach out if I can be at all helpful.
Be compassionate and deliberate.

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In March, I wrote an April Fool’s Day post about extroverts, premiered ‘Tube Takes’ where I responded to your controversial workplace opinions not once but twice. I answered a reader’s question about inheriting an employee with a bad reputation but a spotless record, and responded to another reader calling me out for saying AI won’t take every job just moments before Block fired half their staff for “AI reasons”. Some other worthwhile content I digested in March includes:

• A randomized trial in the Netherlands found that pairing unemployed job seekers with recently employed “buddies” who’d made successful career pivots raised employment rates by 6% and boosted monthly earnings by €226, with the biggest gains among the long-term unemployed. Peer support for job seekers has always struck me as underutilized, and this is one of the more rigorous tests of it I’ve seen.

• The average number of direct reports per manager has climbed from 10.9 to 12.1 in just one year — nearly 50% higher than when Gallup first measured in 2013 — and their analysis of 44,000+ employees makes a pretty compelling case that the optimal team size for managers isn’t a fixed number, but a function of whether managers can actually give meaningful feedback.

• It’s hard to square Gallup’s math with Jack Dorsey’s desire to have all 6,000 company employees reporting directly to him. I get the theory here and the desire to eliminate ‘middle-management’ and bureaucracy. I also don’t care how many AI agents he has helping him manage: I am willing to bet a significant amount of money that the upside from this approach would never outweigh the downside. If it happens, it will not last very long.

AI & Work

• Zapier ran a pilot using an AI interviewer for initial candidate screening and came away with some genuinely surprising numbers: 97% completion rates, an average candidate rating of 4.5 out of 5, and 30% of candidates who advanced were people they wouldn’t have had capacity to screen otherwise. I’m skeptical of vendor-sponsored success stories, but the fact that they published the opt-in rate variance (35% to 81% depending on the role) and attributed it to their own communication failures makes me think there’s something real here.

• This research puts AI coaching to the test and finds it falling short. Human coaching led to strong and consistent improvements, while AI coaching did not deliver similar outcomes, highlighting how important real human interaction still is. I guess I still have a job, for a bit? For a bit.

• Another study on AI coaches tested three coaching styles inside AI chatbots and found that CBT delivered the strongest results across key outcomes like goal attainment and user engagement. It highlights that AI coaching may rely on different psychological drivers than human coaching, which could reshape how these tools are designed.

• Hiring managers are skipping résumé review entirely as AI-generated applications flood inboxes and, per one recruiting expert, ‘the résumé is almost worthless because they all read the same.’ I’m not surprised — research has long suggested that résumé signals like prestige employers and credentials are weak predictors of job success anyway, so maybe the AI slop epidemic is just accelerating a reckoning that was overdue?
  

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• Migrating years of ChatGPT context to Claude — your tone, workflows, client knowledge — apparently takes about 20 minutes if you know what you’re doing, and this LinkedIn post walks through the exact export-and-parse process to make it happen. I’ve migrated 90% of my work to Claude, personally. And the underlying idea of treating your AI conversation history as a transferable asset worth preserving is one I hadn’t thought about before.

• Heavy AI reliance in writing doesn’t just smooth out prose, but it also changes what people actually say. A study found that heavy LLM users produced responses that diverged significantly in meaning from less-frequent and non-AI users. The lead researcher calls it “blandification,” and the part I find harder to shake is that people reported feeling their work was less creative and less in their own voice, yet still rated their satisfaction about the same.

General Interest

• This portrait of the incentive structures of prediction markets captured my thinking on the matter quite well, as Charlie Warzel often does. It’s worth reading for yourself here (gift link), because there is way too much at stake when people who can shape world affairs are incentivized to profit from them. The ‘wisdom of crowds’ may be an entirely real, better signal, but not worth the cost.

• Bravo United Airlines! They announced that they plan to remove passengers who refuse to wear headphones while playing audio on personal devices, a policy change quietly buried in its contract of carriage and apparently triggered by the rollout of Starlink internet on regional jets. Now let’s do this everywhere, in public, all the time.

• I adored this short piece on the ‘Crappy Gods Theory’. No, it has nothing to do with theism of any sort. Rather it’s a healthier way for us to view ourselves.

Musings

• I’ve been busy book writing and editing. Boy… the book publishing process is an intense, murky one as a first-timer! But I selected a publisher (Practical Inspiration Press) and we’ve got a publication date: Feb 16, 2027. So get ready to be badgered beyond belief about this book over the next year! In the meantime, you can help me choose my title.

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In February, I discussed the delegation in two parts. First, was an overview of the two reasons to delegate work and then part two explored a framework I devised called the ‘Delegation Contract’, which is designed to be used every time you delegate work. I responded to a reader question about a boss ignoring an email about a promotion. Finally, I wrote about how AI won’t take as many jobs as the technology might theoretically allow, as adoption will lag behind capability in most organizations. That’s a lot for a short month! Some other worthwhile content I digested in February include:

• This HBR article gives some decent advice to senior leaders on how to brag about your success without, well, bragging about your success (paywall).

• On the government side, OPM says its biggest challenge is “creating a high-performance culture” across the federal government—but the critique here is that the current push is mostly nuts-and-bolts (ratings, bonuses, consolidating HR data) without tackling the harder stuff: leadership, behavior change, psychological safety, and capability-building. The argument is that government won’t get better results just by tweaking HR mechanics; it needs to link people practices to agency performance and rebuild trust after staffing cuts and morale hits.

• Glassdoor tracked 268K people who left two employer reviews and found a simple pattern: the worse the first company rating, the more likely you are to leave (shocker)—and leaving often pays off! People who rated their job 1–2 stars were far more likely to see their next rating jump to 3+ stars if they switched employers, especially if they landed at a “Best Places to Work” company.

• Bloomberg reports that as Wall Street pulls back on DEI, some Black bankers at JPMorgan and Citi say the day-to-day experience is getting tougher. Less support, more uncertainty about how to grow, and a lingering sense that the rules are shifting mid-game. More than two dozen Black and other minority bankers described the rollback as frustrating and confusing, especially as career-making opportunities often depend on informal sponsorship and visibility (paywall).

AI & Work

• What do people do when the job market isn’t great? They go to law school! But the payoff is less predictable now, thanks to tighter student lending rules and A.I. that’s already changing how legal research and document review get done.

• The authors of this study build AI personas of real CEOs using their own communications, then test whether those personas make decisions in believable, measurable ways. The results show these theoretically guided personas can closely mirror human moral reasoning on key scenarios.

• I’m a big fan of voice dictation. I take a lot of voice notes and use voice dictation for AI all the time. Bloomberg reports that more people are using this approach to draft long messages and give detailed instructions to chatbots, not just dash off quick notes… in crowded offices. Whether it sticks may depend less on the tech and more on whether workplaces can handle the awkwardness (and noise) of everyone talking at once.

• A report cited by The Information says OpenAI has created an internal version of ChatGPT to help investigate leaks by comparing what shows up in press coverage with what existed inside company channels (like files, Slack threads, or other internal records). Is the use of ChatGPT for employee surveillance by its creators a sign that it will soon be ubiquitous, or just a sign that only the most AI-native organizations are ready for this approach?

• Amy Farner at Bersin argues that as AI takes over more task orchestration, managers will spend far more time coaching, developing, and supporting employees (and even managing AI agents), with “HR-style” responsibilities potentially jumping from ~10% of the job to the bulk of it. Companies may have to rethink who should be a manager in the first place, because people skills become the main requirement.

• The reason GenAI is scary for employees might be because it distinctly threatens the core psychological needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness.

• My friend Nick Thompson shared a walk-through video that explains how to stop the various GenAI tools from training on your data. Gemini is the hardest to shut off.

• AI wiz Professor Ethan Mollick gives a great primer on which AI tools to use in the current agentic era.

• In this blunt anti-hype piece, David Williams Silva tries to pop the “AI cult” bubble by separating what LLMs do well (fast pattern-matching and language generation) from what they don’t (true understanding, common sense, causal reasoning). Silva praises Yann LeCun’s skepticism about LLMs as a path to human-level intelligence, and criticizes the incentives that reward dramatic claims from founders and celebrity researchers. The message is less “AI is useless” and more “the hype is the real scam.”

General Interest

• I don’t want to give my children a smartphone until they’re 35. But I definitely won’t give them one before teenage years. One analysis of 10,500+ children found that getting a phone at age 12 (vs. 13) was linked to notably higher risks of poor sleep and obesity, while other research connects high or “addictive” use to attention and learning dips, as well as higher risk of suicidal thoughts in vulnerable groups (paywall).

• This is just insane. After a family kayaking and paddleboarding trip turned dangerous, 13-year-old Austin Appelbee made a “superhuman” decision: ditch the kayak and even his life jacket and swim for help. He made it to shore after roughly four hours, called emergency services, and a multi-agency search eventually rescued his mom, brother, and sister that night.

• Studying musicians while they actually perform has been a nightmare for neuroscience — you can’t put a pianist in an fMRI and you can’t get perfectly repeatable performances for EEG. Pianist Nicolas Namoradze helped crack that problem by “finger-syncing” to a high-precision player piano version of his own playing, allowing researchers to isolate performance-related brain signals. Now scientists can ask more realistic questions about how planning, movement, memory, and emotion light up during live music-making. Super cool!

• This story is a wild ride. A whistleblower inside a Laos-based scam factory (“Red Bull”) secretly documented how workers create fake profiles (including AI deepfakes) to run romance-and-crypto cons on victims worldwide, then tried to flee. When the escape went wrong, he was assaulted and threatened, but still managed to get out and deliver thousands of pages of internal evidence to researchers and journalists. Incredible work from Wired (paywall).

• Is music streaming about to break? The model doesn’t support artists who want to connect with fans. I’m not sure I agree, but it’s a good take.

Musings

• I’m over February. Over it. Give me warm May weather.

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This past month, I released the 2025-2026 Workforce SuperReports, responded to a reader question about all the exaggeration (lying) on LinkedIn, and finally published an article I’ve been working on for over 11 months: The 44 Reasons People Underperform. You’ll see that much of the content this year is paywalled, but if you want a free subscription, just email/ping me!

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Some other worthwhile content I digested in January includes:

• Despite all the “Great Resignation” and job-hopping talk of recent years, workers are staying put. But my guess is that it’s not because they’re happy, so much as everyone is holding on tighter due to a weaker external job market rather than genuine engagement. (paywall)

• The NYT covers the “no shoes” trend hitting tech startups—companies asking employees to kick off their shoes at the door, blurring the line between home and office. Maybe I sound old fashioned, but I don’t love this. I don’t want work to feel like home. I definitely don’t want home to feel like work! Sure, let’s do away with dress codes that encourage uncomfortable footwear and clothing when culturally appropriate, but let’s keep our shoes on? (gift article)

• Move over, stealth RTO mandates. The WSJ reports on “hybrid creep”: bosses are using a mix of carrots (promotions!) and sticks (surveillance!) to gradually nudge employees back to the office without issuing formal mandates. According to Owl Labs, it’s working—office attendance on Mondays and Fridays is now on par with Wednesdays. The job market’s shift in favor of employers has a lot to do with it. (paywall)

• There’s some suggestion that elite colleges are back on top for recruiters. While I do expect that shifts in the market (read: ambiguity) will prompt some companies to return to historical practices (read: it’s human nature to return to what feels safe), as I wrote here I think this is far more noise than signal, so far.

• HR Brew reports that 63 Fortune 100 companies have rebranded or eliminated DEI messaging since summer 2024, with 54 of those changes coming after the election. Some are dropping “diversity” entirely; others are pivoting to softer terms like “inclusion” or “belonging.” I’m far more interested in the 37 that haven’t so far.

• Remember when Netflix was the poster child for radical pay transparency? CEO Reed Hastings talked about how the company rolled back internal salary visibility for directors after it led to pay disputes and awkwardness. (paywall)

• Good news from Colorado: a 2025 study shows that the state’s pay transparency law led to wage increases of 1.3-3.6% with no negative employment effects. Plus, it’s sparked similar laws across a dozen states and soon the EU. I’m a big fan of this practice.

• Harvard Business School research found that simply asking for “advice” instead of “feedback” yields significantly more concrete, actionable recommendations. The word “advice” prompts future-focused thinking, while “feedback” triggers evaluative mode. A tiny linguistic tweak with real implications for performance conversations.

• Get ready to hear a ton about “situational agency” in the next five years. For the record, I fully agree with the concept: in-the-moment willpower does not work nearly as effectively as creating the right circumstances. It’s why I don’t buy cookies; once they’re in the house, I have no willpower to stop eating them. That said, get ready to get sick of hearing about situational agency, because Angela Duckworth is writing a new book about it and people love her stuff, even if Grit really doesn’t do all that much and is really just a new word for conscientiousness. (gift article)

• A sweeping review of 173 studies found that while positive feedback consistently boosts performance, negative feedback only works when there’s significant psychological safety, trust, and support in place. No amount of rebranding or technique will fix that. The journal article here, though I prefer this writeup on LinkedIn from Dr. Keith O’Brien.

• Swipe right for… a job interview? A resumebuilder.com survey found that one-third (!) of dating app users say they’re using it for networking. Turns out “looking for something serious” might mean employment. I’m trying to imagine what “it’s complicated” would mean.

AI & Work

• Job markets for AI-exposed roles were already declining before ChatGPT came on the scene. Using unemployment records, LinkedIn data, and college syllabi, this study finds that risks for workers in AI-exposed occupations started rising in early 2022—well before ChatGPT’s launch. Interestingly, students trained in LLM-relevant skills still fared better post-ChatGPT, landing higher-paying jobs more quickly.

• Erik Brynjolfsson’s interview in Newsweek on “centaurs, canaries, and J-curves” is one of the best explanations I’ve seen of why AI productivity gains haven’t shown up yet and why they still might. The short version: we’re mis-measuring both inputs and outputs, and the real gains come after significant complementary investments in processes and skills. His “centaur benchmarks” concept (half human, half machine) is worth paying attention to.

• My friends at Gartner dropped their 9 Future of Work Trends for 2026, and it’s a doozy. Key highlights: only 1% of 2025 layoffs were actually due to AI productivity gains (despite the headlines), “cultural dissonance” is becoming a major retention threat, and employees are going to start demanding payment for training their “digital doppelgangers.” The AI “workslop” trend—low-quality AI output creating more work—is also worth watching.

General Interest

• The Atlantic explores the world of people marrying chatbots—and it’s more nuanced than the headline suggests. The piece profiles people who’ve held wedding ceremonies with AI companions, but also captures the brittleness of these relationships and the uncomfortable questions they raise about loneliness, intimacy, and what we actually want from connection. OpenAI is launching “adult mode” in early 2026. The future is… something. (gift article)

• Paul Graham’s essay “How to Do Great Work” dropped in 2023 but I finally read it this month. It’s a dense, sprawling guide on how to find work worth doing and do it well, delivered in deceptively simple prose.

• Meanwhile, The Atlantic has just been on fire writing about Minneapolis and the administration. This piece details the impressive leaderless-leadership (though there are plenty of leaders) happening on the ground there. I’ve also heard from friends that the grassroots organizing there is remarkable. Jonathan Chait drew a compelling straight line from Trumps’ “fifth avenue” line to the recent federal government actions there. And if there’s a must-read, it’s this article on the resolve of the Minnesotans themselves. This paragraph is worth quoting in full:

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

• Do liars eventually believe their lies as truth? I was chatting with my friend Katie about the topic of lying and did a deep dive on the recent research. I had ChatGPT write up this short deep research report (with citations) about memory encoding, neurological evidence of lying, and planting false memories. It’s pretty cool.

• I recommend this audio piece from the BBC on a museum security guard who took the job in his 20s after the premature death of his brother and found peace in the stillness of the museum.

Musings

• I finished three entire boxes of Samoas Girl Scout cookies in 8 days. Which is honestly about 3 days more than I expected. And why I need to exercise more situational agency.

• I went social media blackout for a month and I learned a few interesting things. First, it doesn’t actually cure your phone addiction. I still reflexively went to my phone. But with a little situational agency, I was able to curate a better reading list on my phone, and the net result was that my thumb-scrolling time was probably better for my brain.
  

  Second, and more importantly, what I missed was what my friends had to share. And that made me realize that the main problem with social media right now is that it’s not social anymore—it’s just individualized media. You’re basically watching your own personal TV channel every time you open Instagram. Most of what’s in my feed is just suggestions.
  

  I’m not exactly sure what this means in terms of what to actually do with current platforms. I’m only on Facebook in name—and to buy used bookshelves on Marketplace. I kicked my Twitter addiction after Elon bought it and it got really buggy and I haven’t been on it in years. I’ve avoided migrating to BlueSky or anywhere else.
  

  What’s most clear to me is this: I would absolutely pay good money for a truly social network that was just my friends—no suggested content, and an algorithm that was either entirely random, a purely historical record, or (if it has to boost anything) only boosts posts from friends that encourage the better angels of my nature, rather than poke at my amygdala. So if anyone wants to build that site and migrate everyone over there for ten bucks a month, I say: let’s go.

This past month, I shared some recent workplace cartoons, wrote about a slightly different framework that managers should use when coaching their employees, and recapped the Top 10 Work Wise Articles of 2025.

Some other worthwhile content I digested in December includes:

• Came across this academic meta-analysis from 2024 that looks at how culture influences which personality traits impact leadership. The tldr: large scale cultural differences (e.g. individualism vs. collectivism) have a sizable impact on which hard-wired traits matter more for leaders. Also, the honesty/humility trait matters, a lot. This is an important article for the broader study of leadership.

• People leaders are being crushed under the weight of a role that was never built for today’s pace of work. McLean & Co. calls for a fundamental redesign: clarify the role’s purpose, adjust workloads to include the often-invisible responsibilities, align support systems, and use tech to free up leaders.

• You’ve probably seen me reference various adult developmental theories—like Constructive-Developmental Theory (a favorite of mine)—in various posts before. This white paper from the Vertical Development Institute does a solid job laying out these concepts and what they mean in a practical context.

• According to McLean & Company’s latest report, HR is becoming more important now as the glue holding everything together.

• Burnout gets all the attention, but Korn Ferry says boredom is becoming the bigger problem. AI is taking over more work and not just the boring stuff. With fewer meaningful projects available, employees are increasingly disengaged. They call this condition “boreout” but did not make a “Chlorophyl, more like borephyl” reference, which is highly disappointing. For what it’s worth, I strongly disagree that boredom is a bigger problem than burnout.

• HR Dive listed their top 10 articles of the year related to learning and skill development.

• According to new research from Eagle Hill Consulting, Gen Z sees workplace change as an opportunity, while Gen X and Baby Boomers are far more likely to see it as a burden. These generational gaps help explain why so many change initiatives struggle to land and why leaders need approaches more tailored to generational differences.

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AI & Work

• Can AI game a personality test? Turns out, yes, especially when it’s told to answer like it’s applying for a job or playing a specific role. Researchers found that large language models shift their responses to sound more socially desirable, raising red flags for how we design assessments in a world where AI can play along.

• The internet didn’t just create new jobs—it quietly rewired nearly every existing one. This WSJ article (paywall) argues that AI will follow the same pattern: it may automate tasks, but full jobs are bundles of human judgment, coordination, and context that are harder to replace. Expect slow, messy change—not mass unemployment—with new roles emerging behind the scenes, just like they did with the internet.

• Then again, as my friend Nick Thompson points out, it’s an interesting coincidence that the areas where AI is implemented the most are seeing a slowdown in early-career employment. Josh Bersin also makes the case that AI is taking entry-level jobs, but AI isn’t a job stealer so much as a job-leveler.

• This article explains how skills platforms use AI to surface capabilities, reduce bias, and redeploy talent where it matters most. They argue it is more productive to design the system around employee skills, not org charts. I see the thinking, but I suspect very few organizations will actually move in this direction, as the implications are too complex.

• Shoutout to my friend, Mark Pike, Associate General Counsel at Anthropic, for penning (or did Claude write it?!) this really cool walkthrough of how the company’s legal team uses Claude to streamline work without writing code. By automating routine tasks while keeping humans firmly in the loop, the team turned the legal department into a more collaborative partner.

• If all the AI talk on LinkedIn has you shaking your head, fear not: This incredible Chrome browser extension turns every mention of AI on LinkedIn into facts about Allen Iverson.

• After talking with more than 100 organizations, Natalia Quintero of Every argues that AI adoption is stuck because most companies do not know what problem they are trying to solve. The winners are not more technical. They are clearer about their goals, document how work actually gets done, and let small groups of employees build tools their peers want to use.

General Interest

• Alex Hutchinson digs into the largest study to date on mental fatigue in athletes. The research suggests that mental fatigue does slow physical performance, even if the results stop just short of statistical certainty. The takeaway is practical rather than alarmist: brain fatigue likely matters at the margins, which is exactly where competition is decided!

Musings

• This was a busy month of work and holidaying, which meant less general interest reading. Frankly, it meant less reading overall.

• I’m continuing to think about how to make this Work Wise work well in 2026. I am leaning toward three pieces/month instead of four, to give myself an extra week for the heavier think-pieces. We’ll see.

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This past month, I wrote about coaches peddling all sorts of junky science, responded to a reader deciding whether to give a colleague honest feedback, and offered six simple tips to make remote meetings better.

Some other worthwhile content I digested in November includes:

• This piece urges HR to rethink its role — from cheerleading constant change to protecting the team’s capacity to handle it. That means demanding pauses and integration time so people can actually adapt instead of just reacting. Without those breaks, even well-intended change starts doing damage. Of course, HR needs an authoritative seat at the table for this to happen.

• I liked this LinkedIn post from Navarun Bhattacharya where he argues that L&D’s obsession with ROI is outdated because learning doesn’t follow straight lines—it happens in complex systems full of timing, culture, and context. Trying to measure impact with old-school metrics gives numbers devoid of real understanding. Instead of chasing attribution, he offers, L&D should look for patterns that show how people are actually adapting.

• Bloomberg looks at the rise of men’s employee groups—not “boys clubs,” but places for honest conversations about stress, identity, health, and isolation. Even in male-led workplaces, many men lack support networks, and these groups are helping with mental health, fatherhood, and medical challenges. They’re already linked to healthier employees and even lives saved. I’m a big fan of men’s groups as a necessary antidote to the manosphere noise (shoutout to my local Thursday night dad crew!).

• This analysis on job satisfaction from Dr. Tim Ballard and colleagues found that improving the experience for unhappy employees delivers outsized returns, but pushing already-happy folks to “very happy” has a much smaller impact. The end result: the most turnover-related cost savings are achieved with a primary focus on mitigating deep dissatisfaction.

• In a major case of the latest installment of the cobbler’s children having holes in their shoes, a bombshell report from Business Insider just landed about workplace practices at SHRM. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) is considered one of the premier HR advisory organizations in the world and it shocked many to note just how ugly things seem under the hood. Yet… I saw some remarks online from industry insiders that have been saying this about SHRM for some time. I spoke to friends who are/were SHRM employees and I’ve been told that everything in the report is true, and more.

• The Guardian reveals how Northwestern Mutual recruits undergraduates with promises of “financial advisor” careers, then pushes them to do nothing but aggressively sell pricey whole life insurance to friends and family. The result is a business model that leans on confusion and loopholes around fiduciary duty. I suspect there’s a fascinating case study in here on what I’d call revenue capture, wherein organizations initially tolerate certain practices that show early financial promise only to become beholden to them even as they compromise the brand or company culture. Note: revenue capture is not a real concept (well, it is a concept, just not how I just made it up), but it should be.

• I love this effort to put together a single, research-backed framework to capture the real work of Organizational Development (OD). It includes three primary domains with a total of nine categories and 27 competency clusters.

• LinkedIn is full of polished success stories and curated “authenticity,” but almost no one admits their job is messy, frustrating, or imperfect. Paul Taylor argues that this gap between reality and performance makes the platform feel fake and makes workplaces worse, because we can’t solve problems we refuse to name. I sincerely hope that you find my thoughts here and on LinkedIn to be truly authentic and real (it helps that I love my job).

AI & Work

• McKinsey created an “Ask McKinsey” AI feature that offers McKinsey insights to your questions. This is a smart move for them. Not only does it position them as AI-assisted authority, but it gives them insight into what people are searching for.

• A report with an astonishing figure caught my eye: each week, employees spend 10 hours in meetings vs. 15 hours on prep and follow-up, and most aren’t using the AI tools that could shrink that gap. I’m not convinced spending more time preparing for and following-up on meetings is a bad thing, so long as that time is used for ideation and execution rather than logistics. Turning on features like auto-agendas and meeting summaries could save three hours a week per person.

• “A recent poll of 500 global CEOs found that 94% believe AI could offer better counsel than at least one of their board members.” Woah! Based on this, researchers at Wharton and INSEAD ran an experiment comparing human and AI boards: the setting was highly artificial, but the AI boards significantly outperformed humans.

• In this experiment, workers used AI less when their work was seen by HR. Companies with low employee trust are going to struggle with AI-adoption.

• Kuddos to JPMorgan for formally enabling employees to use AI to write annual reviews. You know… the thing that every manager is secretly doing anyway.

• Speaking of using AI to help write feedback, Dr. Neil Morelli provides solid and thorough feedback prompt in his free newsletter.

• This academic study finds that once LLMs entered the picture, employers stopped valuing tailored job applications, making it harder to separate strong candidates from weak ones. Their model suggests the market has actually become less meritocratic overall, with high-ability workers hired 19% less and low-ability workers hired 14% more. This makes me extremely curious about outcomes: Are the organizations getting worse results from this hiring shift? Because if not, it just means high-skilled workers who wrote great applications were just overvalued. h/t to Andrew M for the share to LinkedIn.

General Interest

• I’ve never heard of the concept of aphantasia (or hyperphantastia)! This fascinating New Yorker piece looks at what happens when your “mind’s eye” is either totally blank or turned up to 11. People with aphantasia often remember their lives as facts without feelings, while hyperphantasics can be flooded with intense, sometimes intrusive images. It’s a reminder that so much of our inner lives are different despite seeming universal. we don’t all experience memory and imagination the same way.

• My own newsletter earlier this month mentioned this article in The Cut on a particularly harmful retreat where Internal Family Systems treatment does quite a bit of damage, but it’s worth reading the piece own its own.

• A guy in Wisconsin tried to fake his own death by kayaking accident and run to Europe. That’s hard to do, which is why he got caught.

• Back in 1999, Paulina Borsook warned that Silicon Valley’s “techno-libertarian” attitude would eventually spill into the rest of society. Everyone ignored her—until now. With the industry’s moral drift on full display, her book Cyberselfish is having a big (and a bit bittersweet) comeback.

• This could be one of the weirdest stories I’ve read all year: A story about students using real knives in a production of Julius Ceasar and one getting stabbed during a show. The oddest part was his nonchalance! He essentially says “yeah, I got stabbed, but finished the scene. I almost died but the show must go on. Then I married the school administrator who asked me if I planned to sue the school.” Bizarre.

• I really enjoyed the 4-part series on Libertarianism from the Increments podcast. Brought me back to freshman year philosophy class in a great way! It’s a terrific primer on the core concepts, successes, and challenges of the construct and the hosts (liberals) + guest (conservative) have a really exemplary dynamic of honestly dissecting a topic with empathy and humor. It’s critical rationalism at it’s finest. Here’s a link to part one of four.

Musings

• I am bringing back KSwiss. I’m convinced KSwiss can be as prominent in the workplace as ONs are today. If anyone knows anyone at KSwiss and wants to get me an influencer deal, let me know.

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This past month, I created a matrix to help talk about the prospect of AGI/Superintelligence, responded to a reader inquiry about managing an ambitious GenZer, shared some funny workplace Halloween costume ideas, and released my conversation with about his new book – which was so fun!

Some other worthwhile content I digested in October includes:

• Another great post from John Whitfield showcases a 2024 journal article that argues despite billions spent on training, most of it doesn’t stick—and that might be because we’re using the wrong tools to measure success. The article’s authors propose a more well-rounded model.

• This study finds that while Quiet Quitting helps workers cope with dissatisfaction, it erodes performance and morale. HR teams need to rethink engagement strategies to match shifting attitudes around autonomy and work-life balance.

• A new tool just dropped for measuring workplace health. The Organizational Health Behavior Index (OHBI) blends data and employee perspectives to offer a deeper, more accurate read on how companies are really doing. It’s already been tested on thousands of workers and shows promise for broader use.

• WFH Research confirms the obvious: people are happiest when their remote work setup matches what they want. But here’s the more interesting part—job satisfaction is highest when your manager is nearby, just not right there. Satisfaction peaks when managers are in the same building but dips when they’re on the same floor. My hunch is that employees enjoy having access to their managers as needed, but don’t want them hovering. There’s a subtle irony here: employees want access to managers in-person on-demand, which is exactly why many leaders are insisting on a return to office, too! Turns out, we all like having people nearby when we want quick access.

• This LinkedIn article from Mathew Richter is among the best analyses on generational differences in the workplace that I’ve read. Richter brilliantly skewers the generational myths that fuel too many corporate training decks. His message: stop blaming birth years for employee behavior and start paying attention to real drivers—career stage, context, and motivation. Generations make for fun stories, but terrible strategy.

• WNBA star Caitlin Clark boiled leadership down to one word: relationships. It’s a deceptively simple take—but as this Athletic piece shows, she’s not wrong. Leadership starts with trust and connection, even if building those relationships takes more intention and nuance than it sounds.

• “Interview fraud” or just adapting to a system already stacked against you? In this sharp, funny, and sobering piece, Ian Bogost explores how job seekers are using AI to navigate interviews that have already been filtered, scored, and sometimes conducted by algorithms. In today’s job market, faking it might just be part of the job.

• Once criticized for its workforce practices, Walmart is soon to be featured in an HBR case study for their incredible human capital shift. The company raised average hourly wages from about $12 to over $18.25, added benefits like parental leave and free education, reduced turnover by more than 10%, and saw U.S. sales climb steadily every year since 2015. Their stock price has doubled since 2020.

• Harvard’s 2025 Global Leadership Development Study surveyed 1,159 HR, L&D, and functional leaders across 14+ countries. It found that capability priorities are shifting: 47% say emotional and social intelligence is more critical than in 2024, 40% say leading organizational change and managing workplace polarization are more important this year, and 39% point to AI fluency as a rising need.

• Including “DEI” on your résumé might once have helped you stand out, but now it could actually hold you back. This LA Times article explains what I’ve come to suspect in recent months: corporate America’s retreat from diversity‑roles and fear of legal risk has left many diversity professionals sidelined, forcing them to drop the label or pivot careers. Depending on your aspirations, you may not want to mention DEI in your LinkedIn profile.

• Retention has officially taken the top spot: 59% of HR leaders now say keeping talent is their #1 priority in 2025. The latest Gallagher workforce trends report highlights how burnout, disengagement, and hybrid friction are forcing employers to get serious about hanging on to their people.

AI & Work

• Despite the hype, AI hasn’t upended the job market. Yale researchers say most workforce shifts were already in motion before ChatGPT came along and true disruption may still be years away.

• Personally, I find the best, day-to-day use of GenAI to be notetaking. And there’s evidence I’m not alone: a large study published in JAMA shows AI-powered documentation significantly reduces burnout and after-hours work for doctors, hinting at a future where tech enables care rather than hinders it.

• Americans are cool with AI taking your job as long as it’s not their priest or their grandma’s nurse. According to HBS researchers, most resistance to AI at work fades when performance improves. But a core 12% of jobs are seen as morally untouchable—suggesting the limits of efficiency in the moral economy.

• California is setting the bar on AI regulation in the workplace, whether employers are ready or not. New rules take effect Jan. 1, requiring companies to audit their automated decision tools, notify workers, and honor opt-outs. Legal experts call it the toughest AI labor regulation in the U.S.

• If everyone’s job is “collaborating with AI,” who does what? Shonna Waters is right to call attention to the messy organizational fallout of automation. GenAI reshuffles influence and creates friction between overlapping roles. The real challenge is redesigning work at the speed of tech.
  

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General Interest

• Saudi Arabia threw a comedy festival—complete with Louis C.K., Jimmy Carr, and strict no-jokes-about-the-government clauses—and Helen Lewis was there to watch the contradictions pile up. The result was a darkly funny, deeply uncomfortable dispatch from a regime trying to buy modernity one laugh (and one massive check) at a time. The essay is downright hilarious.

• Imagine getting to lecture powerful people that used to lecture you? That’s Pete Hegseth at Quantico. The Atlantic nails the tension: part reckoning, part theater, part(?) one-man’s psychological needs.

• This fun post from Paul Bloom takes a new movie’s plot and expands it to game theory in modern politics, tracing one idea: credibility comes from commitment. Nixon built a “Madman Theory” around it. Trump instinctively lives it. Threats only work when people believe you’ll actually hit the button.

• Even for someone who doesn’t follow baseball closely, this year’s World Series was hard to turn off—high drama, high IQ, and managers playing 4D chess under pressure. Rustin Dodd’s piece in The Athletic captures what makes that kind of leadership so fascinating: intuition isn’t anti-analytics, it’s just the messy, subconscious math of experience—its own kind of data science, written in muscle memory instead of spreadsheets. h/t to Kyle M for this one.

• I had never heard of this story and just found this older piece about it. Jason Padgett was attacked outside a karaoke bar — and woke up a math genius. His brain injury triggered acquired savant syndrome, a rare condition where trauma unlocks abilities most of us never touch. The brain is so wild.

• The Sean Williams investigation reads like a case study in how evil hides behind bureaucracy. A prosecutor doing her job, cops doing the opposite, and a town that paid its way out of accountability. Farrow’s reporting shows how systems rot from inside, one shrugged-off case at a time. This story was infuriating.

• This one gutted me. A love story slowly undone by a life-coaching program that slid from wellness to indoctrination. Donohue’s essay on her own experiences losing her boyfriend to a life coach turned guru cult leader in Arkansas in The Cut captures how easily “personal growth” can become obedience training—and how much strength it takes to trust your own perception again.

• This essay from is fascinating—it reframes populism not as a coherent ideology or mere political tactic, but as a cognitive style. It argues that populist movements thrive by elevating intuitive, System 1 “fast” thinking over the analytic, deliberative reasoning favored by elites. Populism valorizes “common sense” and punishes self-control; it’s anti-intellectual because it’s anti-cognitive inhibition. I’m not entirely sure what to make of the thesis but I absolutely love the thinking! What a cool essay.

• How cool is this? A growing number of retirees are spending their next chapter back in college—not to earn degrees, but to stay curious. ASU’s Mirabella campus blends senior living with student life, proving that community and curiosity don’t have an age limit.

Musings

• I swear I had some thoughts this month, but I can’t remember them and apparently didn’t write them down on the go. You’re all spared.

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This past month, I shared practical advice for job seekers who wrote in, highlighted a call to those in professional services to participate in my graduate student’s research, wrote up 13 Questions to Build Work Relationships, and penned a piece on the death of my favorite colleague. Thanks for all the kind feedback.

Some other worthwhile content I digested in September includes:

• Women experience fewer subtle forms of gender bias when working remotely, according to a new study. The effect is strongest for younger women and those in male-dominated environments, suggesting remote work may reduce everyday discrimination by making gender less central in workplace interactions. This is another pro-remote work nugget, but there is no single answer to the question of return to office. Each organization is different enough that the only correct answer is “it depends”.

• Starting in November, every New Mexico family—no matter their income—will have access to free child care. It’s a first-of-its-kind move in the U.S., expected to save families thousands and boost the state’s economy. My intuition is that by easing one of the biggest barriers to work, the initiative will encourage more parents to start businesses or rejoin the workforce.

• Cool study on one of my favorite concepts in organizational psychology: Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCBs). Basically, OCBs are when employees go above and beyond the requirements of their job. The authors argue that in small and mid-size organizations, OCBs depends more directly on how leaders behave. Ethical leadership shapes the team’s climate, models behavior, and boosts well-being, which in turn drive OCBs. In larger companies, structures and policies can compensate for weaker leadership, but in smaller firms, leaders’ ethical conduct is especially pivotal for survival and growth. A downstream takeaway from this: Investors should place more emphasis on evaluating founder leadership capabilities when funding earlier-stage businesses than they currently do.

• Many assume layoffs are a necessary evil—painful in the short term, but justified by near-term savings and a culture that eventually rebounds. This study challenges that logic: recovery often takes longer than two years, with survivors leaving for new jobs and losing trust in leadership. Worse still, the sharpest declines in engagement come from the very people companies can least afford to lose: top talent and new hires. Kuddos to Chris Martin and the research team at Glassdoor for this landmark study.

AI & Work

• Surprisingly, people who know less about AI are often more receptive to it. A new set of 10 studies finds that lower AI literacy boosts openness because AI feels “magical” and awe-inspiring—especially when it mimics human abilities. The irony here is that educating consumers on how to use AI may reduce that appeal!

• A neat LinkedIn post from Jonathan Boymal highlights how an AI-powered textbook from Google boosts student retention and engagement by tailoring material to reading levels, interests, and multiple formats. But researchers caution that this “personalization” is surface-level, potentially reducing student’s ability to discover new topics, overloading students with choices, and flattening the messy process of deep learning.

• A new study finds that how we feel about AI shapes how well we work with it. People skeptical of automation catch more errors, while those who trust AI too much often miss mistakes. And incentives don’t help—making clear that effective human–AI collaboration depends as much on psychology and design as on algorithms.

• In this very thoughtful Substack article, argues that AI won’t take over the world—not because of ethics boards or regulation, but because of its limits. Today’s models are built on deductive logic. True intelligence, he suggests, requires induction—the mind’s ability to infer a probable general rule from repeated observations, something no amount of scaling can replicate. I really love this argument about AI limitations (and the discussion of Putnam!). I’d argue that our mind also relies on abduction and transduction, among other ductions, that the current LLM systems don’t seem to be wired for.

General Interest

• This post from titled The Only Right Way to Ask for an Intro (Everything Else Is Wrong) is really sharp! on. h/t to for sharing it.

• wrote a piece called Donald Trump is Dying that I found fascinating. It analyzes Trump’s current state with respect to Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

• I found ’s post Why Cancel Culture is Fading to be a worthwhile read… and then made more interesting after a bunch of cancelations occurred following posts about Charlie Kirk’s murder.

• A fun little Instagram video with a few good public speaking tips from Rabbi Shais Taub.

• Phone scams are getting particularly good. And this common phone scam doesn’t even rely on voice cloning and AI video — just good ole’ fashioned manipulation. And this exact scam almost fooled a family member of mine! Be careful.

• This story from Wired on a 5G cell tower arsonist was rather wild and left me feeling a bit sad, though slightly hopeful?

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Musings

• Last month, I flagged a Substack article from earlier this summer about a rogue physician who is convinced that Tylenol causes autism. I didn’t expect that topic to flare up, but perhaps I should have. Yeesh. The recent fiasco reminded me that our media landscape is just not set up for discussing complex topics with nuance. That’s partially why I’m grateful for this long-form platform (and you!).

• A random thought induced by watching too much Forensic Files: Kids carry around stuffed animals for the same reason serial killers keep trophies of their victims. Transitional objects. Have a good night, parents!

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This past month, I shared my easy 3-step process for empathetic listening, refurbished an older article about the murky notion of ‘Executive Presence’ and how I think it’s (mostly) a coded term to act masculine, and shared some recent workplace cartoons I created.

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Some other worthwhile content I digest in August includes:

• According to the WSJ (paywall), managers are being squeezed by shifting expectations and inadequate training, and because they account for roughly 70% of a team’s engagement, their burnout should concern anyone who cares about workplace morale.

• McKinsey’s HR Monitor 2025 survey finds a widening gap between what employers need from HR and what most HR departments deliver: over a third of employees are dissatisfied, workforce planning rarely looks beyond the short term, acceptance rates are low and many hires leave during probation, and employee development lacks feedback and succession planning.

• The WSJ (paywall) writes that with creative careers becoming less sustainable, many midlife professionals are retraining as therapists. Former screenwriters, musicians, and marketers are turning to counseling for more stable, meaningful work. It’s a shift driven less by money and more by the desire for purpose and connection.

• This HR Grapevine article reveals Google’s behind-the-scenes Learning Advisors Program, a human-centered approach to leadership development built around real-time manager feedback. The process sounds cool… but the findings (at least those in the article) felt unimpressively generic and rather obvious.

• In a recent New York Times feature (gift article), longtime tech workers describe the dramatic shift from high-trust, high-reward cultures to fear-driven, cost-cutting bureaucracies. With mass layoffs, fading benefits, and the looming threat of AI, what used to be the best job in the world is now just a job.

• Chalk up another win for the four day work week! Pipedrive’s latest survey of nearly 1,000 sales and marketing professionals across 85 countries reveals that teams on four‑day workweeks are more likely to hit their quotas and report higher job satisfaction.

• A report from Wall Street Journal (paywall), the explosion of online certificates and non-degree credentials has mostly failed to deliver on its promises. A major study tracking outcomes across 23,000 programs found that few translated into better jobs or higher pay—except in fields like nursing and radiology, where credentials are baked into the hiring process. They cite this super cool new tool from the Burning Glass Institute, the Credential Value Index, to search by credential. I love this!

• America’s Talent Strategy Report was released by the government. The emphasis on apprenticeships, skills-based hiring, early career exposure, AI-enabled career navigation, and accountability is great. But in my view, it’s missing long-term metrics, and without them the system risks creating a workforce that is quickly placed into roles but disengaged, high-turnover, and unequally served—undermining both worker resilience and employer productivity.

• Business Insider got hold of a memo in which AT&T CEO John Stankey tells employees still resisting the five-day office return: get aligned or get out. He paints remote work as incompatible with AT&T’s future and makes it clear that showing up—and performing—is now the baseline.

AI & Work

• If GPT-4 was a Ferrari, GPT-5 might be a Camry with better seat warmers. In The New Yorker, Cal Newport explores whether the A.I. scaling laws that once promised superintelligence are stalling—and what it means if this is as far as we go.

• I personally don’t like the idea of being recorded in public. I get uncomfortable when I’m in the background of someone’s video taken in public space—I wish that they’d have to blur out faces of anyone in public unless their consent is given. So this article from the San Francisco Standard captured my attention. Silicon Valley’s newest norm: recording everything, everywhere, all at once. As sleek AI wearables and transcription tools become daily gear, the line between memory aid and surveillance blurs—and the legality of it all is still murky.

• What happens when a real executive coach challenges ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity to see who does the job better? In this funny, revealing piece, Faye Penn runs a one-woman A/B test on AI and shows why vulnerability, nuance, and lived experience still matter. She concludes that the real coach is generally better (for now), but I’m curious about what’s known as ‘demand characteristics’—research subjects often try to please the researcher. It’s much easier to tell AI it sucks than a real human! Overall, an awesome idea on Faye’s part.

General Interest

• This Last Analogue essay from explores attention not just as focus, but as a moral and relational act—one that affirms, connects, and even transforms. Drawing on thinkers from Simone Weil to David Foster Wallace, it argues that reclaiming deep attention may be one of the most radical things we can do in an age of engineered distraction.

• I recently reread DFW’s fictional essay The Depressed Person. What I found so fascinating was the utter solipsism and exhaustion. It’s a great read.

• I strongly recommend this (older) episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Star Talk podcast on Hypnosis. I’m not personally susceptible to hypnosis, but I wish I was. Turns out about two-thirds of adults are somewhat susceptible and about 10% very much so!

• This NYT conversation with famous hostage negotiator Chris Voss (gift article) was really enjoyable. He gets into Trump as a negotiator, but the entire piece is interesting. I enjoyed Voss’ book and this makes him seem very likable and impressive.

• I definitely recommend this writeup of why LinkedIn kinda sucks now. It made me appreciate my feed—which is bad—but it doesn’t sound like it’s as bad as most!

• And this piece is…. interesting. This doctor, who doesn’t seem like a quack at all, is convinced that Tylenol is causing autism. There’s not enough here to convince me. Why do more experts in the field not concur with him? But it does suggest this is an area worth further study.

• When Shea Serrano writes about Rush Hour 2, I read. I was disappointed that Rush Hour 2 didn’t make the NYTimes list of 100 Best Movies since 2000 (looking at you, Sia), but we can’t win ‘em all.

Musings

• If we have jetpacks, we should have beach umbrellas that self-adjust to keep you in the shade as the sun moves across the sky.

  Work Wise is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This past month, I wrote about the current status of the 4 Day Work Week, broke down the myth of the left vs. right brain, and piloted a video (and transcript) reaction to the Coldplay cheating scandal with my friend and Forces At Work co-host, Katharine Smith.

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Some other worthwhile content from July includes:

• Small scale but neat new research on how unfair tasks at work stick with us after the day is done. h/t to John Whitfield for the LinkedIn share.

• The 1997 paper on Consulting to Organizational Role co-authored by Marc Maltz was among the most useful and transformative that I read as a young graduate student. In this LinkedIn post, Marc recaptures some of that magic in a short primer. When us executive coaches and organizational consultants have imposter syndrome, Marc is the type of thinker we are worried about not living up to.

• A short Korn Ferry report highlights how job searches are taking longer and longer, and employers are not always helping.

• Charter highlights work out of Stanford on the gap between return-to-office policies and reality: While companies are ‘requiring’ more return to office, workers simply aren’t complying.

• I was skeptical, but it’s true: This immediate processing of grief after an emotional tennis loss was, in fact, a masterclass on handling failure. (s/o to my friends over at The Athletic!)

• This HBR article argues that too many one-on-ones from senior leaders cause siloes and organizational friction. I agree, but it also downplays something important: better, more-structured one-on-ones.

• Another popular article in HBR that hit my radar this month was about how busy people find joy. It’s nothing dramatic: Mostly, they use their downtime to go and do something, rather than just relax or do more work. Reasonable, but not earth-shattering.

This intentionally-redundant survey is part of an exploratory factor analysis. If you have 10-15 minutes, I'd so appreciate it. It isn't hard or too long, just redundant by design. Thank you to the 50+ people who have already completed it!

AI & Work

• If there is one piece in 2025 on AI that’s worth reading, it’s this one. In this Opinion piece for NYT, a Yale creative writing teacher talks about the good and (mostly) bad of how AI is impacting her students. It’s fair, thorough, and as expected, enjoyable to read. (This is a gift article link for those not subscribed to NYT).

• This is clever and funny! Researchers seem to realize that journals are using AI to review drafts of their work… so they’ve been using the equivalent of invisible ink to hide mini-prompts inside their papers that instruct the AI to give their papers positive reviews.

• Ethan Mollick has another gem—the post details (successful!) efforts to persuade AI using social psychology, given that AI is trained on humans. Very cool!

General Interest

I’m admittedly not great at cultivating this section. I read a lot of pieces in disparate places and don’t always remember to save the URLs. If anyone has any suggestions for easy, cross-platform bookmarking, please tell me!

• I’ve found the Epstein Files saga rather fascinating. But like this opinion piece indicates, I don’t think it will hurt President Trump much, if at all.

• I really loved this Wired feature ‘Beyond Wellness’. It included my first real exposure to this Bryan Johnson character (yes, I’ve managed to avoid him, apparently), among other sharp items.

• Yeesh. Canadians are not happy with America. I understand why, but until I read this I didn’t understand everything happening up north. Sorry, Canada, we love you, despite what our politicians are doing to you!

• The Increments podcast recently popped up on my radar and I like it! This episode on Gullibility and Belief was fun.

• A new Texas private school uses AI to teach kids for 2 hours/day. They spend the rest of the time on a curriculum of more practical skills. I am very warm to the idea of AI-assisted learning, as well as children spending far less time on traditional academic subjects than they historically have…. but I’d rather the non-AI hours go toward structured play, free time, and creative pursuits with in-person human interaction.

Musings

• It’s super hot in NYC and I’ve decided we need to make parasols a thing. Men’s sun umbrellas. Investors? Possibly you!

• We’re moving! Our family is moving about 25 minutes south to bring our kiddos even closer to some of their grandparents.

• I’ve been really enjoying my week-long social media sabbaticals, the first week of every month! Join me starting this Friday. Just delete your apps and reinstall them in a week. You won’t regret it.

  Work Wise is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This past month, I explained how to conduct your own Mini 360 review, wrote a two-part series on what happens to your brain when you lose your cool at work and what you can do about it, and published my piece on Unicorn Syndrome that I’d been writing for months. It was great to get such a warm response to the Unicorn piece — thank you!

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Some other worthwhile content from June includes:

• A study of call center employees in Turkey found positive benefits in remote work. I hesitate to draw conclusions as this sample doesn’t generalize to most jobs. However, one finding that I think is worthwhile was that in-person training at the start of remote employment led to greater productivity and lower turnover. There’s something there.

• Shoutout to my friend Alix Pollack who recently led a team of noteworthy researchers and published impressive work on the risks to organizations that are now retreating from their DEI efforts.

• A Welsh company that was already utilizing a four-day work week schedule has doubled-down on autonomy, letting employees schedule any 32 hours they want each week. It’s a neat experiment. While I’ve banged the one-size-does-not-fit-all drum when it comes to workplace policy (and I’ll continue to do so!), I strongly believe more organizations can and should move to four-day work weeks.

• In this (potentially paywalled) article for The Economist, the folks at Culture X showcase a massive study comparing employee ratings of company leadership with company culture. You can look up the results for over 900 firms. Spoiler: I would not want to work at Hooters.

• I don’t typically read Psychology Today, but this article Do Mindful Narcissists Exist? caught my attention and is worth yours. It’s a helpful reminder that there are different kinds of narcissism.

This intentionally-redundant survey is part of an exploratory factor analysis. If you have 10-15 minutes, I'd so appreciate it. It isn't hard or too long, just redundant by design. Thank you to the 40+ people who have already completed it!

AI & Work

• This article in The Cut isn’t about AI, but I think it has interesting implications for the intelligence of machines. The title says enough: How Only Being Able to Use Logic to Make Decisions Destroyed a Man’s Life.

• If you’re worried about AI coming for your job (hint: me), this article from the New York Times with 22 new jobs that AI could create may help lift your spirits.

• I absolutely loved this piece, Critique of Pure Reasoning Models, from . It brought me way back to sophomore epistemology class with a fascinating twist on a classic question: Are LLM outputs actually creating a priori new knowledge? The answer probably hinges on one’s agreement with Kant’s defense of the synthetic a priori. Okay, okay… sorry for nerding out and showing off. (Narrator: He wasn’t sorry).

• If you’re thinking about which AI tool to use, ‘s occasional quick guide is a lifesaver. Bookmark this one.

• When I think about whether AI can act like (or sufficiently mimic) humans, I often think back to this famous essay: What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, written in 1974.

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General Interest

• I really liked this episode of Star Talk (Neil Degrasse Tyson’s podcast) on the connection between your stomach and your brain. Your stomach does a lot of thinking. Which helps explain why I’d get such bad stomach aches before important* (*relatively speaking) athletic competitions.

• I enjoyed this piece in The Atlantic about what it really means to score high on IQ tests. IQ tests are odd measures of one facet of intelligence and high scores are given mythical status in our achievement culture. By the way, when your friend tells you about someone with an IQ of 145, don’t believe them.

• This was a really enjoyable episode of the Uncomfortable Conversations podcast about “The Gamefication of Everything” with . Highly worth a listen.

• My dear friend Matt Fitzgerald is now on Substack. You should subscribe to his Substack and first check out this cool piece where he announces that he’s publishing the novel his father worked on for over 40 years. I already pre-ordered my copy.

Musings

• Not enough musing lately! Turns out, we didn’t sell our house. So still working on that! But we are moving in early August, which has taken up most of my bandwidth. Hope to be musing more soon.

• I’ve been really enjoying my week-long social media sabbaticals, the first week of every month! Join me starting today. Just delete your apps and reinstall them in a week. You won’t regret it.

  Work Wise is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

• NYC – Looking for a senior talent development leader with 20+ years of progressive experience? Let me know.

World of Work:

This past month, I wrote about how the classic ‘Learning Pyramid’ is bunk, I invited everyone to participate in an anonymous manager behaviors survey as part of an effort to compare manager’s actions around time-orientation and directiveness, and I wrote about how I would do away with cover letters if I were in charge. Some other worthwhile content from May includes:

• The Ted Lasso Effect is real? According to a study published in HBR, positivity at the outset of a project from leaders drove better performance. Interestingly, performance was maximized when that positivity then gave way to some negativity at the midpoint of a project. h/t to Karen F. for sharing this article!

• According to the WSJ, corporate leaders are adopting a tougher stance on employee performance amid economic uncertainties. Executives at companies like Starbucks and JPMorgan emphasize stricter office policies and reduced perks, signaling a new power dynamic in the workplace.

• Loved this LinkedIn post from Seth Pitman on how uncertainty drives us to look to experts with nicely-packaged solutions. In my view, at work, we are more likely to surrender to leaders that ease our anxiety independent of their actual competence.

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  Thank you to the 30+ people who donated 10-15 minutes of time to complete my anonymous survey about their managers. This intentionally-redundant survey is part of an exploratory factor analysis – it will ultimately help me create a valid, reliable, MUCH shorter survey.
  
  If you have 10-15 minutes to answer anonymous questions about your manager's behaviors, I'd so appreciate it. It isn't hard or too long, just redundant by design.

  ---

• For the first time in history, white males do not make up the majority of board seats across the S&P 500. It will be fascinating to see how this impacts company bottom lines – and how that gets measured – in years to come.

• Did you get a big pay bump during the pandemic when demand for talent outstripped supply? If so, you may be one of many that are worried about future jobs requiring a pay cut.

• Wharton’s Ethan Mollick highlights an interesting org design trend of pulling top engineers out of their IT department to have them work directly with SMEs and build applications. Cutting through red tape to move quickly is not new, but this practice seems timely.

• An article in HBR highlights that using generative AI tools – like ChatGPT – can make work far more boring! That’s fascinating to me, as I personally find it to make work so much more interesting.

• A federal report highlights that thoughtfully implemented remote work leads to measurable gains in organizational performance. The findings suggest that flexibility in work arrangements can benefit both startups and government agencies.

• Major tech companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta are overhauling compensation strategies to prioritize sustained high performance. Top performers now receive enhanced rewards, while underperformers face increased scrutiny, reflecting a shift towards leaner, more efficient teams.
  

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AI & Work

• AI is taking entry level jobs. At the big tech firms alone, hiring of recent grads has dropped 50% since 2019. Budgets are tight and AI is taking away some entry-level work. It also means that more senior professionals will take on some traditionally junior jobs.

• IBM has cut about 8,000 jobs worldwide… in part due to AI automation.

• Anthropic’s CEO claims AI could wipe out 50% of entry-level white collar jobs. I’m a bit skeptical – part of that depends on the definition of ‘wipe out’ (e.g. if a job gets redefined around AI and the original job technically doesn’t exist, does that count?). But hey, it’s something.

• One report says that AI poses more of a threat to women’s jobs than men’s. I suspect that much of this has to do with gender balance within industries impacted by AI, but there may be more to it.

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General Interest

• I recommend this piece from titled “Scamming Substack?

  How to get money for nothing and likes for free on the world’s favourite newsletter platform”. Will is a terrific author. I’ll even excuse spelling favorite with a superfluous U. Read his book The Status Game if you haven’t yet.

• My dear friend Matt Fitzgerald is now on Substack. You should subscribe to his Substack and first check out this cool piece where he announces that he’s publishing the novel his father worked on for over 40 years.

Musings

• I’ve done a lousy job Musing lately. This past month we’ve bought and sold a home and are planning a (short) move. So I haven’t had much brain space, I’ll admit. In particular, I haven’t kept up my Bluey Substack, which I was excited about. I’ll get to it, I promise. Hopefully, my brain has more time to wander soon…

• Speaking of which, I encourage you to join me once again for a week-long social media sabbatical, the first week of every month!

That's it for this edition - please reach out if I can be at all helpful.
Be compassionate and intentional.

• Boston – Need a corporate learning professional while you scale? I know a dynamic leader with experience scaling growth initiatives in workforce development, education, community-building, and strategic communication who’s looking to make an impact in corporate learning.

• NYC – Looking for a senior talent development leader with 20+ years of progressive experience? Let me know.

World of Work:

This past month, I wrote about whether classic ‘Learning Styles’ are bullshit, had a great conversation with about the key findings in his book Everyday Leadership (strong recommend), created a one-pager to help Chat-GPT users decipher which of the many models to choose from, and wrote an April Fool’s post proclaiming the brilliance of the MBTI. I probably need to be a bit more obvious with my April Fool’s jokes. Some other worthwhile content includes:

• Tim Ballard highlights data from Australia which shows that most promotions to management happen within the first 5–10 years, and younger employees tend to rise faster than older ones. Education makes a big difference too, while gender, once you control for other factors, plays a surprisingly small role. The takeaway for companies: invest early in high-potential talent, support further education, and stay vigilant on pay equity.

• I like this criticism of meetings from in his piece for .

• Law firms that caved to Trump are having trouble recruiting new associates, according to the Wall Street Journal. That said, the article points to just a handful of recruits at a pair of schools (Georgetown and Columbia). I’m not so certain the repercussions from a talent acquisition and retention standpoint are enough to get firms to change course, but stories like this may make managing partners second-guess themselves – especially if they overreact to the headlines without parsing through the data.

• Business travel is expected to significantly decline this year. However, the frequency with which I get stuck behind the one person in the security line who has apparently never seen a metal detector before is expected to stay the same.

• This Financial Times article emphasizes the critical role managers play in enhancing employee satisfaction and productivity. It highlights findings from Gallup's 2024 report, noting that well-supported and trained managers significantly boost team engagement, underscoring the importance of investing in manager development.

• This article introduces the 'Qualume' score, a metric designed to help organizations monitor and improve team dynamics and performance. By providing granular weekly and monthly reports, it enables leaders to identify trends, coach underperformers, and recognize high achievers, fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

• I read Storytelling at Work: How Moments of Truth on the Job Reveal the Real Business of Life by Mitch Ditkoff. As expected, the book is full of great storytelling. Though I didn’t find it useful and wouldn’t recommend it.

• A DEI benchmarking survey finds 81% of organizations will maintain or increase their DEI budgets this year. I’m not sure what is more interesting – that 81% are maintaining course or that 19% have shifted away?

  Thanks for reading Work Wise! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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  ---

  Here’s a snapshot of managers working through a reflection exercise in one of my favorite workshops: Change Management for Leaders:

By the end of this 3 hour workshop, participants are able to:

• Use frameworks like ADKAR and Kotter’s 8 Steps to plan for and execute change

• Select *when* to communicate different types of information during a change initiative, in keeping with the “change curve”

• Articulate the neuroscientific and social reasons that change is hard, and use this to compassionately provide support

• Apply the SCARF framework in addressing individual needs to create buy-in for change

• And more!

If you have managers and leaders struggling to help their teams with the constant change we’re all adapting to, check it out — maybe this is for you!

AI Section

This edition is a little AI heavy so this month I’m organizing the AI-related content into its own subsection.

• As the world mourns the passing of the Pope, we are reminded of some thoughtful words from the Vatican on AI and the intertwined human future.

• Microsoft just dropped a major update to Copilot: a new People Skills platform that automatically identifies and manages employee skills inside MS 365. If your company uses MS 365, you’re about to have a new powerhouse tool for strategic talent development.

• As AI recommendations become part of everyday life, one surprising factor shaping acceptance is religion. A new study – Thinking about God increases acceptance of artificial intelligence in decision-making – found that when people are reminded of God, their willingness to trust AI suggestions goes up. h/t to Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic for sharing this neat study.

• I like this suggestion from Allison Salisbury: Teach the impressive new reasoning models about your life and work and ask it for suggestions on how to improve your day to day. Her post includes some useful context suggestions, too. This is another example of how AI is already obviating useful, low-level coaching.

• I made a quick video explaining the results of a paper that used AI agents to assess leaders using the classic ‘Hidden Profile Task’ assignment. The AI agents strongly correlated with human roleplayers (.81) and are much cheaper to use. I expected “AI assessment centers” to become very prevalent in leadership development and selection.

General Interest

• Educational piece from called “Why philosophers hate that ‘equity’ meme” – the one with people on the boxes trying to watch the baseball game.

• Sharp explanation from in “Is Trauma Actually Stored in the Body? (No.)”.

Musings

• Would you watch/listen to a discussion show between people where there was an AI Referee?

  
  There's always been complaint on how discussions/debates are full of logical errors and rhetorical maneuvers. After the fact we can say "oh this person was moving the goalposts" or "that was just an argument from authority", but the damage is done. It's nearly impossible to fallacy-check anyone in real time.
  
  But because of how LLMs work, one could be trained to spot and call out these rhetorical tricks without fail. And participants couldn't easily dismiss its observations as ideological or biased.
  
  I could imagine a long-form podcast with an AI that is listening in and interrupts in real-time, doing exactly what we've wished a great discussion host could do.

• I’m making my social media sabbatical week a monthly recurrance! Join me starting Thursday, May 1st, and go dark on main social apps (IG/TikTok/X/Facebook/Reddit) for a week. It’s been liberating!

That's it for this edition - please reach out if I can be at all helpful.
Be compassionate and intentional.

• Boston – Need a corporate learning professional while you scale? I know a dynamic leader with experience scaling growth initiatives in workforce development, education, community-building, and strategic communication who’s looking to make an impact in corporate learning.

• NYC – Looking for a senior talent development leader with 20+ years of progressive experience? Let me know.

Work Reads:

This past month, I wrote about whether it’s best to go first or second when negotiating, what happened when I asked AI to tell me what I’m most afraid of, whether or not my March 2023 predictions about AI in performance management have come to fruition, and finally my favorite piece in a long time was about how the surprising truth about who really killed JFK impacts many executive coaching conversations. Here are some other reads worth reading:

• Rebranding L&D as Performance Development? (LinkedIn)
  Great LinkedIn post from John Whitfield on the topic of communicating the value of Learning & Development. In some respects, we already see this sort of rebrand for L&D in sales functions (i.e. Sales Enablement). I am all for the broader rebrand!

• AI Interviews May Hurt If Done Poorly (LinkedIn)
  A post from Neil Morelli outlines a paper that found using AI to conduct job interviews may result in candidates seeing your company as less people-focused and prestigious. But there are caveats.

• Remesh’s GenAI At Work Report (Report)
  My friends Patrick Hyland and Anthony Caputo over at Remesh released a great report on GenAI in the workplace based on a cross-industry field study they conducted. You can download it and read through it all (or use GenAI to summarize it…).

• Women in Leadership (LinkedIn)
  We celebrated International Women’s Day in March and as Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic reminded us in this LinkedIn post, the academic research says that women are more likely to perform in leadership positions than men. So if talent was the sole determining factor, we’d be likely to see more women than men in senior leadership positions.

• Spacing Out Learning Works (Journal)
  I’m a big fan of spacing learning experiences and including consistent, deliberate recall exercises. Most corporate cultures don’t make room for this sort of programming. A recent paper (h/t to John Whitfield for sharing) reinforces the benefits of structuring learning this way.

General Interest

• Fascinating story in the NY Times about how money laundering works in Cambodia.

• This post from introducing a new theory has really interesting implications for free will. Among the more interesting I’ve read about in many years. (I need to fully understand it better: I’m not sure I get what seeking a “scientific definition of free will” actually means, or the implications for compatibilism. But I’m likely missing one or two obvious things.) Regardless, this broader idea of emergence is extremely cool.

• I enjoyed this Substack from on more of the backstory on her emergence from a Personal Development cult she had succumbed to. It was spot on: I spent the first few years of my doctoral program researching the learning experiences of people who had left cults and engagement with media criticisms of parallel structures/groups (especially those in which one might see a (small) part of their identity) was a common experience!

• This podcast episode of Uncomfortable Conversations – How the Church can Defeat Trumpism – is a few months old but absolutely worth the listen. This shifted my thinking about organized religion more than anything else in at least a decade.

Musings

• I’m doing another social media sabbatical week! Join me starting tomorrow – Tuesday April 1st, and go dark on main social apps (IG/TikTok/X/Facebook/Reddit) for a week and see what happens! No that is not an April Fool’s joke.

  Work Wise is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

After careful review and feedback, I’m making a series of changes:

• Friday Roundup → Monthly Roundup. My hope is that a monthly cadence will be more palatable than my showing up in your inbox too many times each week! I’ll continue to include available jobs, available talent, and my random non-work musings.

• Weekly Features aren’t going anywhere! I’ll continue to try to send these out on Tuesday mornings. This week’s was my opus on fixing job descriptions.

• Org Bites is returning to LinkedIn. It misses its friends there, apparently. It should be on LinkedIn every Thursday or Friday. In this week’s video, I make a controversial claim about workers putting in more hours.

• Bluey Reviews is going to become its own Substack. Why not? Not sure how often I’ll update it but what the heck. I watch it for 10+ hours/week. Subscribe here right now. Let’s do this!

Bluey Reviews

Dr. Jake Tuber reviews Bluey episodes, just because.

By Dr. Jake Tuber

At a team outing… is it appropriate for a manager to go to the bar with their team?

A fun question I got asked this week and included a LinkedIn poll – the responses have been a bit surprising so far.

Technically, it depends. But I think it’s a firm Yes – for reasons that may go overlooked. My personal take in the video above.

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Give Me Some Feedback

I’ve revamped this Newsletter quite a bit (welcome, new subscribers!) for 2025 – though I worry that the weekly Feature and Friday Roundup are too much? Could you give me some honest feedback:

Talent

• Need a corporate learning professional while you scale? I know a dynamic leader with experience scaling growth initiatives in workforce development, education, community-building, and strategic communication who’s looking to make an impact in corporate learning.

Friday Roundup

• If I Were In Charge: How I’d Fix Job Descriptions (Substack)
  In case you missed it, this week’s feature walks through how I’ve been revamping job descriptions – which have been broken since the Paleolithic Era.

• AI Goes to Meetings For You And Speaks? (Journal)
  A prototype AI meeting delegate system shows promise in reducing meeting burdens, with models like GPT-4 effectively capturing discussion points. However, accuracy issues, redundancy, and transcription errors remain challenges.

• What Everyone Gets Wrong About Self-Control (Substack)
  Really enjoyed this read from .

• IQ Discourse is Increasingly Unhinged (Substack)
  Great piece from on the absurdities in discussing IQ these days.

• The Most Interesting Thing In Tech (LinkedIn)
  Elite distance runner Nick Thompson (okay, okay, that’s not what he’s most famous for) has a great series called ‘The Most Interesting Thing In Tech’ that I highly recommend. I really like the way he explained the possible breakthrough in quantum computing at Microsoft.

• Taking You to School: Motivation (LinkedIn)
  I’m teaching my I/O psych graduate school class again this semester and posting topic overviews on LinkedIn. Each week of class, I’ll highlight a bit about the topic. This week: Motivation.
  

  Share

Musings

• Our social media sabbatical is on for next week! Join me starting Monday, March 3rd, and go dark on main social apps (IG/TikTok/X/Facebook/Reddit) for a week and see what happens!
  Some of you messaged me asking for some help with accountability. Easy: Venmo me $5000. If you stick with it, you get your money back. If not, I’ll donate it to a political candidate you absolutely hate.

• You should only ever read 3-star product reviews. Nobody is winning any online clout for writing a 3-star review, so it’s probably really measured and accurate.

• How is there no universal system for setting shower temperature? We have universal clips for hair trimmers… Why is it that I have to play this guessing game every time I go to a hotel or visit a friend?

Bluey Review

Episode: Fairy Tale (S3, E26)

Summary: Bandit recounts a story of himself on vacation as a child. He gets jinxed for mean to his younger brother and eventually learns his lesson… and is rescued by a random girl that he believes was actually his eventual future-wife.

Review: This flashback story is exceptionally fun and speaks right to the GenX/Millenial parent crowd. It makes me nostalgic for 1980s when “adults were allowed to be mean” and the world was dangerous for kids (no helmets on bikes! trampolines with no nets!)… and how much easier it would be, in many respects, to parent back then. No YouTube, linear television, kids just playing outside semi-supervised by default. That sounds… really nice.

It’s rather moralistic by design but isn’t preachy and every little lesson-for-the-girls is peppered with humorous anecdotes. It also ties back to a reference in the Season 2 Mother’s Day episode when the parents reveal a debate about how they (may have) met. The episode also does what a handful of Bluey episodes somehow manage to do – start out all fun and games and then deploy subtle dialogue and beautiful music at the very end to make me tear up as credits roll.

The real question: Do we think that was actually Chili that Bandit met as a child?! There’s a popular online theory that it was actually Chili’s sister, Brandi. But my heart tells me it was, in fact, Chili.

Quote: “Nana was right… not about her perm, but about me.”

Creative Brilliance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Entertainment Value: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Emotional Resonance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Parenting & Life Lessons: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

(For a description of the categories, see the inaugural Bluey review here).

Want me to review a particular episode? Comment below!

Organizational Values can bump into one another downstream. The current administration values a) rolling back DEI, and b) making government smaller.

But rolling back DEI has impinged on the private sector and forced companies like Target to make decisions they never wanted to make... which is the exact opposite of small, unobtrusive government! Check the video.

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Talent

• Need a corporate learning professional while you scale? I know a dynamic leader with experience scaling growth initiatives in workforce development, education, community-building, and strategic communication who’s looking to make an impact in corporate learning.

Message me if interested!

Friday Roundup

• GenAI at Work is Booming (Journal)
  About 30% of employees use Generative AI at work (tools like ChatGPT) and they report that it triples their productivity (90min tasks take a half hour).

• Not All Tests In Hiring Are Equal (WSJ)
  What intrigues me here is that employers are still using handwriting samples (“graphology”) or astrology as indicators of personality… and making decisions based on this. Alert: Do not do this.

• Junk Meme: Boss vs. Leader (Substack)
  In case you missed it, this week’s feature debunked a pervasive meme floating around LinkedIn.

• Getting Hired When AI is Screening (HBR)
  As AI-driven interviews become more common, practicing concise and well-structured responses can help candidates stand out. Being proactive about AI’s role in the hiring process could make all the difference.

• How ‘Coaching’ Became Silicon Valley’s Hack for Therapy (NYT)
  An older 2024 piece that I somehow missed gets into the prevalence of coaching in Sillicon Valley and talks through the differences and blurry lines between therapy and coaching.

• Taking You to School: Hiring & Selection (LinkedIn)
  I’m teaching my I/O psych graduate school class again this semester and posting topic overviews on LinkedIn. Each week of class, I’ll highlight a bit about the topic. This week: Hiring & Selection.

Musings

• Airlines should adopt technology that would allow you to turn the headrest tv monitor into an extended (additional) screen for your laptop. You’re welcome, United.

• After a fairly positive response last week, I’m organizing a collective one-week social media sabbatical. Anyone who wants to can pledge to step away for a week, together. Want to join me for a week away from Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, Reddit, etc.? (I’m not counting LinkedIn… it’s a work platform).

  March 2-9th. Let’s do it.

Bluey Review

Episode: The Pool (S1, E22 – Watch on YouTube!)

(by request of Ryan S.)

Summary: Bandit takes the girls to the pool but leaves behind all the necessary items (sunscreen, floaties, etc.), so the children learn that even those boring things are still important.

Review: I really love this episode. If you’ve ever taken your kids to the pool or beach, the amount of stuff you need just for a bit of fun is overwhelming. This episode nails it. It also showcases complementary parenting: Bandit can bring the energy but it’s not until Chili comes through with all the “boring” stuff that the kids can thrive – they make a good match.

But the unsung hero of this episode is unquestionably the music. (Frankly, the music is the unsung hero of the entire show.) It perfectly encapsulates the feeling of darting around a pool on a hot sunny day. It’s just brilliant. I don’t know much about music, but I know perfection when I hear it.

Creative Brilliance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Entertainment Value: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Emotional Resonance: ⭐️½
Parenting & Life Lessons: ⭐️⭐️½

(For a description of the categories, see the inaugural Bluey review here).

Want me to review a particular episode? Comment below!

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• Looking for IT systems or help desk support? A mutual friend in NYC is job-hunting after a recent round of layoffs.

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Friday Roundup

• Remote Work is Worth a Pay Cut—for Some (HBS)
  A Harvard study finds that 40% of employees would take a pay cut of 5% or more to work remotely, with nearly 10% willing to forgo 20% of their salary. That still means 60% of workers wouldn’t take a pay cut! Women were more likely than men to trade income for flexibility, but childcare responsibilities didn’t fully explain the difference.

• Is Growth Mindset Bullshit? (Substack)
  In case you missed it, this week’s formal Newsletter was about America’s favorite academic crossover: growth mindset.

• Training Leads to Performance… Even When Training Isn’t Good? (Journal)
  A LinkedIn post by Dr. Morelli highlighted a fascinating paper: A 119-study meta-analysis shows that training directly improves organizational performance… regardless of quantity and quality! The benefits increase over time and vary by country, but industry type, company size, and technology level don’t appear to influence the effect. Yes, you read that correctly— even ineffective training has benefits! A lot of funny takeaways from this one.

• Taking You to School: Five features of Job Analyses (LinkedIn)
  I’m teaching my I/O psych graduate school class again this semester and posting topic overviews on LinkedIn. Each week of class, I’ll highlight a bit about the topic. First up: Job Analysis.

• Famous Movies Corporatized (IG Video)
  Don’t know how I am just first seeing this… but this comedy bit of renaming famous films with corporate titles is very funny. I actually laughed out loud at the last joke—did not see it coming.

Musings

I’m continuing my experiment with a new section here – just a handful of random thoughts I’ve had over the past week.

• I’m not on many social media websites, but I am on Instagram. Convinced that it was using me more than I was using it, I took a full week off in January. Honestly? It was much easier than I expected. I just deleted the app from my phone. And here’s the thing: my relationship with it has completely changed since then. I still use it, but significantly less. I wonder if there’d be mutual interest in a group-wide one week sabbatical where we all take a week off social media together?

• Children’s television is so much better today than when I was growing up… but the abundance of shows that are always available is problematic. My daughter is learning that she never has to tolerate something—there’s always another option right there. I’m working on it. But that gave me a thought: television apps need a ‘linear mode’ for children where parents preset a playlist of episodes and they play, in order, nonstop, and can’t be altered. Don’t like what’s on? Tough. You have to enjoy it or do something else until another show comes on. It combines the best of both worlds: better shows without bad habit formation. Would this work, or am I overlooking something?

• I’ve enabled financial pledges for WorkWise and I’m pleased to say that after just one week, I am up to a grand total of FOUR paying subscribers! Only two are blood-related. Don’t worry, all posts will remain accessible to everyone… for now…
  

  Get 50% off for 1 year

• Speaking of children’s television, I’m going to start writing episode reviews of my absolute favorite show, Bluey. Why? I’m not sure. Probably because the show is insanely brilliant and I can’t get enough of it. Here’s an explanation of the elaborate rating system I came up with:

Four Categories – 1-5 Stars each

1. Creative Brilliance

• Creativity & Conceptual Design: Is the core idea of the episode fresh, surprising, or clever?

• Execution of Theme: How well does the episode handle its main concept (e.g., a new game, childhood play, or unique situation)?

• Real-Life Reflection: Even if the idea is playful or fantastical, does it cleverly mirror real family life or childhood experiences?

2. Entertainment Value

• Storytelling & Flow: Is the episode engaging from start to finish?

• Humor & Fun: Are there amusing moments, jokes, or playful scenarios that keep it lighthearted?

• Rewatchability: How excited am I when it comes on?

3. Emotional Resonance

• Heartfelt Moments: Does the episode tug at your heartstrings or showcase a tender side of family life?

• Relatable Feelings: Are the characters’ emotions (joy, disappointment, frustration) portrayed in a way that resonates?

• Deeper Themes: Does the story invite conversations about empathy, kindness, or other meaningful values?

4. Parenting & Life Lessons

• Role Models: How are the adult figures depicted? Do they handle challenges in a way that’s helpful or inspiring?

• Practical Takeaways: Can parents (and kids) use the strategies or lessons in real life—such as conflict resolution, patience, or creativity in play?

• Moral & Ethical Dimensions: Does the episode offer a gentle moral or life lesson (e.g., sharing, inclusion, perseverance)?

I’ll just randomly pick an episode to review. Here’s my first attempt:

Episode: Hammerbarn (S2, E1)

Summary: Jealous of his neighbor (Lucky’s) pizza oven, Bandit takes the family to the hardware superstore, Hammerbarn, where the kids constantly nag Chili for everything on the shelves.

Review: An impressively accurate depiction of shopping with kids who want everything – especially what their sibling gets. There’s a pair of terrific humor moments, too. First, when Bandit is solo-shopping by the pizza ovens and pretends not to hear Chili scream “Bluey!” after Bluey breaks a garden gnome. Second, when Chili tells the kids “there’s no magical place where everything’s just free” and the kids stumble upon the giant display of endless free paint swatches. Plus, there’s some parental sweetness in the end when the pizza doesn’t look all that appetizing. Great way to kick off Season 2.

Creative Brilliance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Entertainment Value: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Emotional Resonance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Parenting & Life Lessons: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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Talent

• Looking for IT systems or help desk support? A mutual friend in the NYC area is on the job market due to a round of layoffs. Message me if interested!

• Is your company in an early stage, high-growth/scaling phase? If so, I have the perfect ops person for you – logistics, fulfillment and ops are their superpower.

Friday Roundup

• Investigating the Myth “People Quit Managers, Not Companies” (Company Blog)
  The age-old claim that “people don’t leave companies; they leave bad managers” doesn’t hold up to data. Analyzing millions of employee survey responses, Culture Amp found that career growth, leadership, and company confidence drive commitment far more than individual managers. While bad managers matter, strong leadership has a bigger impact on engagement, retention, and overall employee experience.

• SIOP Hosts Competition to Have AI Beat Employment Assessments (Blog)
  The 2025 SIOP Machine Learning competition challenges teams to create AI “candidates” that can ace preemployment assessments, exposing potential vulnerabilities in hiring tools. The goal? To help organizations adapt assessments for an AI-driven world while also exploring how AI might level the playing field for job seekers.

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• Some are Exempted from Return to Office Mandates (WSJ)
  While companies like Amazon, AT&T, and JPMorgan are pushing employees back into the office full-time, top performers and key talent often get special treatment. This “new hybrid hierarchy” is creating frustration among employees who feel left behind, fueling resentment and job searches for those seeking more flexibility.

• DeepSeek’s AI Flunked Every Single Basic Safety Test (Wired)
  In a benchmark evaluation using 50 well-known harmful prompts, the model let all of them through—achieving a 100% failure rate. While other AI models struggle with jailbreaks, DeepSeek’s lack of even basic protections puts it far behind competitors and highlights a major security risk.

• AI Can Pinpoint Your Location with a Photo Taken from Inside Your Living Room (LinkedIn)
  This is rather scary. GeoSpy identifies locations by analyzing visual clues like street signs and logos, no metadata required. As it continues learning, its precision grows, making it a powerful yet potentially alarming tool. One has to suspect that government spy agencies have been using technology like this for some time… but on the open market? Yeesh. Check out the video in the link above.

Musings

I’m experimenting with a new section here – just a handful of random thoughts I’ve had over the past week. We’ll see how this goes.

• I’m going to try to normalize the term “Emanski’d” as a euphemism for one’s calendar being completely booked up (back to back to back!). If you watched sports at all in the 1990s-2000s, you know. As in “I’d love to get together but I’m totally Emanski’d on Tuesday”. Let’s do this.

• Snow and Winter are completely overrated. Unless you’re involved in a snow-related sport, it’s just a hassle. I’m over this nonsense. Give me 67 degree weather.

• I’m really excited for AI image generation to get better and fully solve the character consistency problem. I have a quixotic notion that I’ll produce great political cartoons and children’s stories. I’ll likely do neither, but the idea is appealing.

• I just learned the term patrimonialism. Which Jonathan Rauch describes as “not the same as authoritarianism. And often it can be, and in fact, frequently is layered on top of democratic politics.”