 |
|
|
|||||
My first time plopping down on my therapists couch, I tried to breeze through the basics. Yes, upbringing, romance, family, social lifeall important. But I entered that softly lit space to vent about the place that eats up a third of my waking life. I was there to talk about the office. The physical location wasnt the issue; the office snacks were elite. The problem was the people: the supervisor with no respect for work-life balance, the snooty coworker firing off slick emails, the boys club that would always look out for its own. Being the only Black employee there wore me out in ways I couldnt always name. And talking it out with a licensed professional who looked like meincense smoke in the airhelped me locate my peace from 9 to 5. Im thankful those healing sessions a few years ago kept me from crashing out on Brayden in sales. But I never anticipated theyd also make me a better manager once I had a team of my own to lead. My most recent job had its share of team drama when I arrived. Morale was in the gutter, but workplace woes seemed to weigh heaviest on Gina, one of my direct reports. She was checked out like bell hooks books at the library. The go-getter energy she had when she started had devolved into bare-minimum effortand a creative interpretation of the companys unlimited vacation policy. The 1.0 version of me mightve addressed the situation by mirroring the coldness I experienced early in my career, parroting those icy conversations, questioning whether I had what it takes to be successful in a place like this. Corporate America can be cutthroat, especially when deliverables are regularly behind schedule and quotas are missed. But I felt an obligation to help my team shine, which meant pulling from the lessons I internalized back on my therapists cozy black upholstery. I sat with Gina in a 1:1 meeting to remind her that the companys PTO policy is at managements discretion. But then I got curious about her apathy. Turns out, she said shed been slept on more than Tempur-Pedic during promotion considerations. Even worse, before my arrival, she had been pushed into a role that was vastly different from the one she initially signed up for. I let her know I understood her frustration, like, for real. After all, Id previously been in her New Balances as I tried to climb the corporate ladder. I cut her a deal: If she stepped up on the nonnegotiables, Id give her a chance to prove herself as the point person on more challenging projects. The results didnt show themselves overnight. Shed been burned before, so it took some time and patience for her to fully buy in. But she took our handshake agreement and ran with it. Within a few weeks, she was hitting deadlines, contributing valuable ideas during brainstorming meetings, and even turning on her camera during Zoom calls. I gave her verbal flowers in her next performance review and got props from my boss, who was impressed at how I became an even better motivator than Jeezy. The thing people dont discuss enough is the way therapy teaches you the art of real talkthat is, effective, empathetic communication. You learn to listen actively, validate peoples feelings, and respond constructively. At first, it took conscious effort, but eventually it became second nature. That doesnt mean I turned into some kumbaya caricature of a manager. Accountability still mattered. I developed a knack for delivering (and receiving) tough feedback. I understood how to make people feel seen. The value of talking through interpersonal challengeseven the unsolvable ones. And because my team rocked with me, they wanted to kill it to make us all look good, I think. (Although in my self-conscious moments, I can only imagine what theyre telling their therapists about me. None of my business. Boundaries!) I can trace so many of my management wins back to my therapists office, a safe space where I was challenged to pause before reacting, to see the bigger picture, to regulate before responding. So, no, I dont recommend therapy just to survive toxic workplaces. I recommend it because it helps you build healthier ones. The Only Black Guy in the Office is copublished with Levelman.com.
Category:
E-Commerce
Take a moment to think about what the world must have looked like to J.P. Morgan a century ago, before his death in 1913. A shrewd investor in emerging technologies like railroads, automobiles, and electricity, he was also an early adopter, installing one of the first electric generators in his house. Today, we might call him a Techno-Optimist. He could scarcely imagine the dark days ahead: two world wars, the Great Depression, genocides, the rise of fascism and communism, and a decades-long Cold War. Had he lived to see it, he might have asked how, despite so many scientific and technological breakthroughs, things went so wrong. Today, we are at a similar juncture, and there are worrying parallels to the 1920s, including paradigm-shifting technologies, a revolt against immigration, globalism, income inequality, and even a global pandemic. Now, like then, the choices we make will shape our future for decades to come. We need those who create the future to be rooted in the world we live in. Theyre not. Building for a rational universe In the 1920s, a group of intellectuals in Berlin and Vienna, much like many of the Silicon Valley digerati today, became enamored with the engineering mindset. By this time, the technologies like the ones that Morgan invested in had begun to reshape the world. Much like Descartes, three centuries before, they thought that logic and rationality should rule human affairs. Their patron saint was Ludwig Wittgenstein, and their bible was his Tractatus, which described a world made up of atomic facts that could be combined to create states of affairs. He concluded, famously, that Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent, meaning that whatever could not be expressed in a logical form must be disregarded. The intellectuals branded their movement logical positivism and based it on the verification principle. Only verifiable propositions would be taken as meaningful. All other statements would be treated as silly talk and gobbledygook. Essentially, if it didnt fit in an algorithm, for all practical purposes, it didnt exist. Unfortunately, and again much like Silicon Valley denizens of today, the exuberant confidence of the logical positivists belied serious trouble beneath the surface. In fact, while the intellectuals in Berlin and Vienna were trying to put the social sciences on a more logical footing, logic itself was undergoing a foundational crisis that threatened the entire positivist project. At the root of the crisis was something called Russells Paradox, which created strange, self-contradictory statements, such as The barber shaves every man in town who does not shave himself. Assume such a barber exists and youre tied in a knot. It seemed like a small technical wrinkle, but it was a crack in the foundation that demanded repair. Broken logic David Hilbert, one of the most prominent mathematicians of the day, proposed a program to solve the foundational crisis. It rested on three pillars. First, mathematics needed to be shown to be complete in that every statement could be shown to be true or false. Second, mathematics needed to be shown to be consistent, no contradictions or paradoxes allowed. Finally, all statements need to be computable, meaning they yielded a clear answer. Hilbert and his colleagues received an answer sooner than most had expected. In 1931, just 11 years after Hilbert laid out his program, 25-year-old Kurt Gödel published his incompleteness theorems. The result shocked the mathematical world. Gödel showed that any sufficiently powerful logical system could be either complete or consistent, but not both. Put more simply, Gödel proved that every formal system will eventually break down. It will contain true statements that cannot be proved within the system itself. Logic would remain permanently limited, and the positivists hopes were dashed. You cant engineer a society based on a logical system that is itself inherently incomplete. For better or worse, the world would remain a messy place. Yet the implications of the downfall of logic turned out to be far different, and far more strange, than anyone had expected. In 1936, building on Gödels proof, Alan Turing published his own paper on Hilberts computability problem. Much like the Austrian, he found that all problems are not computable, but with a silver lining. As part of his proof, he included a description of a simple machine that could compute every computable number. Ironically, Turings machine would usher in a new era of digital computing. These machines, constructed on the basis that they would all eventually crash, have proven to be incredibly useful, as long as we accept them for what they areflawed machines. As it turns out, to solve big, important problems, we often need to discard our illusions first. Building dwelling thinking Underlying the positivist project was the rationalist assumption that we could overcome the flaws of human nature with pristine, faultless logic. Yet just the opposite happened. The 1930s and 1940s saw the rise of ideologies that claimed to be more scientific, only to see the world descend into an abyss of war and genocide. In the aftermath, amidst the rubble and horror, the world needed to be rebuilt. That, in turn, demanded some thought about how and in what image. It was in this period that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote his essay, Building Dwelling Thinking, in which he argued that to build for the world you need to know what it means to live in it: Building and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for dwelling. The two, however, are also insufficient for dwelling so long as each busies itself with its own affairs in separation instead of listening to one another. They are able to listen if both building and thinking belong to dwelling, if they remain within their limits and realize that the one as much as the other comes from the workshop of long experience and incessant practice. There is a fundamental difference between something designed for the way people actually live and dwell, and something designed to serve an abstract ideal. You feel it when trying to navigate an AI-powered customer service experience, or a self-service menu at an airport bar. When I lived in Moscow in 2003 and 2004, I was struck by the constant reminders that the city wasnt designed for living, but for something else. Theres just something dehumanizing about a world built solely for thinking and detached from dwelling. Thats probably why companies like Apple, Pixar, and Patagonia, that are able to harmonize building, dwelling, and thinking so deeply and consistently, win such devotion, because something that feels built for us validates us in a profound human way. Careless people In Careless People, former Meta executive Sarah Wynn-Williams describes the Silicon Valley executives she worked with as so wealthy and powerful that they had grown out of touch with many of the worlds realities. At one point, during discussion about how much to charge for internet service for refugees, she describes a senior leaders surprise with the realization that the inhabitants of refugee camps dont have jobs. Today, we increasingly live in the world of the visceral abstract, where the technologies that shape our lives are deeply rooted in concepts, such as quantum mechanics and natural selection, that cant be experienced directly. This is especially true for the next generation of technologies, such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and quantum computing. When you design for the physical world by, say, building a bridge, there is natural feedback if the building and thinking are out of harmony with dwelling. People can get to where they want to go or they cant. The path is smooth or bumpy. The view is beautiful, or it is ugly. We notice flaws, if not immediately, then eventually. But they come to light and can be corrected. But in the world of the visceral abstract, things arent so concrete. Nation states can manipulate us on social media, our chatbots can shift our psychology and our genomes can be engineered to interact with our environment in new and different ways, without us being aware of it. As technologies grow more powerful, the potential for good and evil multiply. This requires us to be not only careful, but connectedto not only think and build, but to dwell. We need to be suspicious of those who sell us visions of flawless logic; those visions are not only incomplete, they are inhuman. At some point, something has got to break.
Category:
E-Commerce
Step outside your front door on any given day, and say goodbye to money without even trying. Just commuting into the office now sets workers back a whopping $55 a day, data suggests. Thanks to the workforce-wide return-to-office push, many workers are back in the office at least a couple of times a week. With it come the coffee runs, desk salads, and after-work drinks that can quickly add up. Videoconferencing company Owl Labs has done the math and broken down the real cost of physically going into work. When in the office, in-person and hybrid workers spend an average of $55 a day, according to the 2025 State of Hybrid Work report: $15 on commuting, $18 on lunch, $13 on breakfast and coffee and $9 on parking. For those with pets, factor in an additional $10 a day for dog walkers or pet sitters. The total cost dropped from $61 in 2024, but is still up from $51 in 2023. For remote workers, who tend to make meals at home and only need to commute from their bed to their desk, their daily costs are considerably lower, averaging just $18 a day at home. This is also down slightly from $19 in 2024, but up from $15 in 2023. These numbers are depressing. Theyre frustrating. But theyre not surprising. Daily commutes to the office can be both costly and time-consuming, given the elevated price of gas and fare hikes. These days, a large coffee costs the best part of $10 in major cities after accounting for tax and tip, while a limp salad can easily set you back $20. Yes, of course you can bring lunch in with you but who wants to eat last nights leftovers three days in a row? Hybrid workers, on the other hand, save an average of $37 when working from home. Given the price gap, its unsurprising workers are willing to quit their jobs for more flexible work, with 17% quitting in the past year because of changes to their working arrangements. Owl Labs’ findings on the costs of in-person work come as companies including Amazon, Dell, Apple, Google, IBM, Meta, Salesforce, are doubling down on RTO at least three (if not all five) days a week for their workforce. At the same time, workers have been hit where it hurts in the wallet) by years of inflation, rising cost of living, and stagnating wages. As companies plan 2026 budgets and RTO policies, balancing in-office expectations with cost support will be key to keeping employees engaged and loyal, Frank Weishaupt, CEO of Owl Labs, told Fast Company. In fact, 92% of workers said the right incentives could convince them to return to the office; one-third want commuting or parking covered, and another third want free food and drinks. They say theres no such thing as a free lunch. But itd go a long way for workers who have to spend money to simply show up to work.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||