The World’s Best Newsletter*

The thing you can’t do, even when the entire world is upside down, is freeze.

If we all show up with different ick, whose wins? How do we break ties?

The core theory any time any organization hires anyone — employee, intern, contractor, law firm, outside agency — is leverage.

There is no narrative arc more dystopian than insecure people with power and limited accountability. Our tiny headlamp in an otherwise pitch black situation starts with the idea that work can be better.

Attaching the word performance to something doesn’t automatically make it a good idea. In fact, most of the time when we see performance initiatives announced, they have the opposite of their stated intent.

A lot of stuff lives in the “about work and not about work at the same time” bucket. Turns out that organizing humans around complex tasks is messy.

There was a hard call to be made. And Jeff made it. That’s not abnormal. Jeff makes a lot of hard calls. He has trained his whole life for just this moment. And this one just went very badly.

“Don’t worry, we have a slackbot that does weekly micro-learning prompts on how to use the brakes” is a transparently bad idea.