What Works

This is the final installment in Strange New Work, a series that uses speculative fiction to explore radical work futures.

Power. Some fear it. Others hoard it. Some with power speak softly. Others carry a big stick. Power is charisma, or coercion, or violence. Power is name recognition, or money, or computer code.

Regardless of your definition or perceptions of it, power plays a critical role in how we work.

Today, we explor...

This is the penultimate episode of Strange New Work, a special series from What Works that explores the future of work through the lens of speculative fiction.

What's the most undervalued skill of the 21st-century economy? Moderation.

I very well might be forgetting something. But with more of our lives and work showing up online every day, the way our feeds, data, and connections are moderated is critical to our dai...

I've got something short, sweet, and really special for you today. Sean, my husband, my go-to extrovert shield, and the co-founder of YellowHouse.Media has a new project that is pretty cool, if I do say so myself.

It's a hotline! Or rather, it's a weekly call-in prerecorded pep talk. It's sort of like a podcast, but you have to call a phone number to hear it. Trust me, this is a very Sean thing to do.

Each week, he shares a...

This is the 6th installment of Strange New Work, a special series that uses speculative fiction to explore radically different work futures.

Find the work you were born to do. Do what you were meant to do. Discover the work that makes you feel alive.

We've all heard these messages. Crack open any career, self-help, or personal development book on your shelf, and you're sure to find a similar message. It seems pretty convenie...

This is the 5th installment of Strange New Work, a special series that explores how speculative fiction can help us imagine radically different work futures.

Think the future of housework looks like Rosey the Robot from The Jetsons? Or maybe just a fleet of Roombas keeping every inch of a house free of dust or dirt?

Think again. Housework is ready for a much, much bigger disruption. Of course, housework is rarely portrayed ...

This is the 4th installment in Strange New Work, a special series from What Works that explores how speculative fiction can help us imagine new ways of working.

Social and professional norms aren't natural or innate. They're political. Those in power exert their preferences on those who aren't, and throughout history, have exerted social, cultural, and physical violence to either force subjugated people to assimilate or dri...

This is the third installment in Strange New Work, a series that explores how speculative fiction can help us imagine the future of work. 

Today's work happens in tiny slivers of time. And we try to optimize each minute or hour for all its worth. But remarkable work? Well, that takes time. And lots of it. The kinds of work that are central to our evolving economy—care work, maintenance work, creative work—require more time ...

This is the 11th edition of This is Not Advice, a "not advice" column for premium subscribers of What Works.

In this episode and essay, I tackle the assumed quid pro quo that's at the heart of content marketing. It's that quid pro quo that causes us to see the ideas, information, and stories we share online as a favor that demands something in return—follows, subscriptions, and sales. When we say, "I'm tired of sha...

This is the second episode in my new series, "Strange New Work."

Artist and writer Morgan Harper Nichols is a world-builder. She says, "Worldbuilding, for me, [is] a form of expansive hope—a necessary imagination for being alive." What is world-building? It's the process of creating secondary, fictional worlds. There's world-building in all sorts of fiction—but especially science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy.

A...

The future of work doesn't have to be an extension of today's reality.

This is the first installment in Strange New Work, a new series from What Works about imagining radically different ways of working and doing business.

In this episode, I take a closer look at speculative fiction and its role in the collective imaginary. Is science fiction all space operas and apocalyptic battles? Not hardly. Science fiction isn't really ...

Join Tara McMullin for a journey into the far future of work, and consider how we can create more humane, inclusive, and supportive work environment. The first episode of Strange New Work drops September 14! 

You can find Strange New Work wherever you listen to podcasts—and each new episode will drop in the What Works feed, too!

Support the show at: whatworks.fyi Strange New Work is brought to you by What Works with Tara McM...

Today’s episode is a sneak peek of Work In Practice, my new 12-week training program for guides of all kinds. This program offers a toolkit for identifying the beliefs and stories that make a more sustainable relationship with work possible. If you’re a coach, consultant, manager, or trainer who works with people rethinking how they work, this is for you.

***

"Anyone can succeed if they work hard and apply themselves!" That'...

There are rules you know about—and rules you don't. Some rules are written down—and other rules are "just the way things are." And there are rules that make things clear to everyone—and rules that exclude through their lack of clarity.

Charlie Gilkey is on a mission to bring those unclear rules and unspoken agreements out in the open and improve the way we work in the process. His new book, Team Habits: How Small Changes Le...

Play, learn, work, retire—those are the four stages of what Mauro Guillén calls the sequential mode of life. In his new book, The Perennials: The Megatrends Creating a Postgenerational Society, he proposes a new story for moving through life. It's a story that actually reflects the facts on the ground—rather than our grandparents' idea of what life was supposed to look like. 

In this episode, I talk with Guillén about his r...

This is the 8th edition of This is Not Advice, my "not-advice" column for premium subscribers of What Works. Today, I'm talking about our over-reliance on metrics and how easily we're seduced by reductive data. When does a metric turn into an incentive for bad behavior? And why are we so happy to accept the feeling of clarity and certainty without actually understanding what's going on?

Click here to upgrade your subscripti...

Making work for the public seems to come with a slew of fuzzy social expectations. What do we owe our readers, listeners, viewers, and followers? What more is expected beyond the post, episode, or video? How do you navigate the tension between care and boundaries?

When I came across a LinkedIn post that Randi Buckley made, I felt a wave of relief. Her answer to those questions? Nothing. We owe nothing more than we've alrea...

The media give us wildly exaggerated images of wealth and consumption. And even if we recognize that a tv show or an Instagram account is more fantasy than reality, those images impact what we believe we should be earning and buying. MoneyZen author Manisha Thakor calls the result Counterfeit Financial Culture and argues that it's one of the reasons we end up feeling like we're never quite enough.

In this episode, Manisha d...

At age 50, Manisha Thakor realized that she'd sacrificed her life at the altar of work. How did that happen? And what was she to do about it? Manisha's new book tackles how to unwind a toxic relationship with work and money.

Footnotes:

• MoneyZen: The Secret to Finding Your Enough by Manisha Thakor
• Find out more about Manisha Thakor
• Alienation by Rahel Jaeggi
• Capitalism and Desire by Todd McGowan
• What Works by Tara M...

This is an excerpt from the 7th edition of This is Not Advice—a not-advice column exclusively for premium subscribers. In this episode, I take a closer look at flexibility. When is it a feature? When is it a bug? When does flexibility create more opportunities for learning or value? And when does it devolve into chaos?

To hear the whole episode, become a premium subscriber for just $7 per month. You'll get twice monthly Thi...