Published writing:
In an article about the future of corporations from 2001, the management thinker Peter Drucker mused about the future of the workplace in The Economist. “The management of knowledge workers should be based on the assumption that the corporation needs them more than they need the corporation,” he said. “This means they have to be treated and managed as volunteers.”
One could make the argument that Drucker’s prediction only came half true, given the economic realities many workers have faced in the past two decades, including rising wage inequality and student loan debt. But I believe he was spot-on about how most knowledge workers think about their work. I’ve recently read different job satisfaction studies that show that work is in crisis, with as few as 40% of workers and as many as 70% declaring themselves to have checked out of their work completely.
Most entrepreneurs start out wanting to make their own version of a dent in the universe.That’s the appeal of entrepreneurship: take a risk to start something new, and be rewarded with category disruption, wild financial success, paid speeches, magazine covers, and the like.
Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, the co-founders of Uber, were no different. Having both come from successful startups, they were familiar with the sacrifices needed to be successful. Famously, Kalanick said they aimed to grow Uber “at any cost.”
Dents in the universe by definition displace one thing in favor of something else. Whose responsibility is it to consider the social costs of disruption?
It had to be there—listening to the buzzing discord of a 56k modem firing up in my teenage bedroom, what it took to send exactly one Juno email—that the true potential of the internet first dawned on me.
Before Facebook and Web 2.0, before the dotcom bubble and subsequent crash, before The Cluetrain Manifesto where hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, it was just me: a lonely, anxious teenager trying desperately to reach out and connect with others like me.
The Super Bowl has historically been the place where brands have debuted their big marketing campaigns for the next year, capturing viewers from what is still one of the most-watched events in the U.S. The past few years, those campaigns have included stark stands on social issues: from Audi on women empowerment during last year’s game to Dodge making a connection between its Ram Trucks and public service the other week.
The problem? Both of these ads came off almost immediately as inauthentic, and lead to an online backlash. Audi was immediately called out for how few women actually work at the company. And Dodge debuted its campaign with a distasteful voice overlay from Martin Luther King, Jr.
Business as usual is dead.
Many once held as industry innovators and lions in their arenas are now falling like dominos, and their dismissals are finally shifting the terrain of acceptable business conduct between women and men. Prominent media figure Mark Halperin is the most recent to lose not only his latest book deal from Time but also a lucrative series with HBO based on his political writings. Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective just cut ties with another prominent male based on news that surfaced about prior allegations of sexual misconduct. Amazon Studios’ Roy Price just had to resign under the same allegations. And the list will only continue to grow after the wide-spread news of film executive Harvey Weinstein’s decades long sexual harassment of countless women.
Some short time after the 2016 election, I had a conversation with a friend about the impact of social media on Trump’s win. I was wrestling with the role of what I thought was an inherently neutral marketplace of ideas in promoting Trump, the larger issues of Russian propaganda and interference in the election, and the general problem of abuse.
“We can’t put too much faith in technology,” my friend said. “Technology is more like magic than science.”
Dear CEOs of America,
Let’s start with a hard truth. We’re living in a dark time.
No matter your party affiliation, it’s hard to ignore the increasing social upheaval and corresponding activism, driven in part by our political moment but undergirded by the bigger trends of globalization, automation, and a historic distrust in our public institutions.
Public life is in crisis. And when public institutions fail, it affects all us, especially the most vulnerable.
So why are so many of you, many with incredible influence over our everyday lives, sitting on the sidelines?
In so-called “normal” years, many companies use the Super Bowl to create a halo effect around their brands, taking advantage of the massive audience to talk about our common values. (See: Proctor & Gamble’s #LikeAGirl, among other recent examples.)
If you’re like me, the past month has caused a bit of an existential crisis — and made you fired up and ready to do something.
But if you’ve never been involved in the kinds of fights you’re interested in, it can seem overwhelming. I’ve had many conversations over the past few weeks with well-intentioned people who see big problems and a big, intimidating white space before them in terms of where to start.