Reliant on our Imaginations

Elliot Ackerman | Bad Bosses | Factoids | Anti-Social Enterprise

Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

Quote of the Moment

Without memories to restrain us, we become reliant on our imaginations.

| Elliot Ackerman, 2034

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Back from the worst of all reasons to travel — a funeral — and trying to regain a sense of normalcy. Slow to return, though.

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Bad Bosses

Just how bad are bosses, in general? If you believe this Monster data, they are very, very bad: 75% rate bosses 1, 2, or 3 on a scale of 5, with 38% rated 'horrible'.

A poll conducted by Monster reveals that more than one-third of workers consider their boss to be “horrible” (38 percent) and 54 percent of respondents gave their boss a negative rating [1 or 2]. Only 17 percent of respondents gave their boss an “excellent” grade. To conduct the poll, Monster asked visitors to their site, “On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate your current or former boss?”

U.S. findings were:

• 38 percent of respondents answered “1 (horrible)”

• 16 percent of respondents answered “2”

• 16 percent of respondents answered “3”

• 13 percent of respondents answered “4”

• 17 percent of respondents answered “5 (excellent)”

“Your relationship with your boss can do more than upset your day — it can make or break your entire career,” said Mary Ellen Slayter, Career Advice Expert for Monster. “Having an adversarial relationship with your direct superior can negatively impact your life in countless ways with daily stress and stunted career growth generally being the most common.”

Remember how important ‘the boss’ is for workers. Gallup analyzed data from over a decade of data from over two million workers from over 30,000 organizations and found just how important managers are:

What no one saw coming, however, was the sheer size of that correlation—something Gallup calls “the single most profound, distinct and clarifying finding” in its 80-year history. The study showed that managers didn’t just influence the results their teams achieved, they explained a full 70% of the variance. In other words, if it’s a superior team you’re after, hiring the right manager is nearly three-fourths of the battle.

No other single factor, from compensation levels to the perception of senior leadership, even came close.

And companies continue to get that wrong.

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Factoids

1,600: Shopify has rolled out a calculator embedded in employees’ calendar app that estimates the cost of any meeting with three or more people. A typical 30-minute meeting with three employees can run from $700 up to $1,600 | via Dense Discovery

It’s not just the money, but still, great to know.

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Here’s some good news. U.S. per capita CO2 emissions have fallen below WWI levels! Maybe we can avert catastrophe? Need to get the world on a downward slope.

source: Our World in Data

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Teams that do regular debriefs (meetings focused only on learning from past team performance) improve team performance by up to 25%, but they are often infrequent, conducted only after things go wrong or big projects end. | NOBL

All projects should start with a pre-mortem, periodic (monthly? quarterly?) reviews, and a post-mortem.

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New research found that flexible outfits — those with hybrid, fully remote or electively remote staffs — added headcount at more than two times the rate of fully in-office counterparts during the March-through-May period. | Scoop Technologies

It’s a competitive advantage.

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Jobs advertising full-time remote work attracted almost half of all applications on LinkedIn in May, compared with just 19% for hybrid positions. | Mia Gindis

Attracting the best and the brightest, I bet.

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76% -- The percentage of hybrid workers who said they would return to the office any day other than Monday | according to a survey by B2B Reviews.

I don’t like Mondays! But Fridays are bad, too.

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A few years ago, the International Monetary Fund did a systematic study of the ability of economists to call recessions in advance, and basically found that they never succeed. | Paul Krugman

and then, this:

The Fed’s influential staff economists — who help policymakers assess the outlook — no longer think America will fall into a recession late this year, Mr. Powell said. They previously had forecast a mild one. | Jeanna Smialek

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Anti-Social Enterprise

LJ Parker raises some great questions about the decreasing returns from social media — precipitated to a great extent by the meltdown at Twitter, er, X.

 The Verge lamented last week on the end of this social era, wondering where we were all supposed to go now, but I think the point is we aren't all supposed to go any one place.

As Noah Smith put it in his insightful analysis of recent internet history:

"Slowly, people seemed to be rediscovering the truth that the old internet had taught us — that discussions work better when you can pick and choose who you’re talking to."

As we know now, putting the world in a single "town square" with too little, too late moderation meant it evolved into a continual firehose of toxic sludge. Fuelled by secretive algorithms, bots and twitter mob polarity and devoid of any productive utility, we were a million miles away from its early promise of connection and community. In this environment, Noah's argument for the fragmentation of the internet as the next paradigm shift makes a lot of sense, particularly when you look, as he does, at how the next generation of internet users are interacting. Conspicuously absent on the big platforms like Facebook and Twitter, they spend most of their time connecting on smaller platforms that optimise for group interactions rather than public debate.

"What these rising apps and platforms all share is fragmentation. Whether it’s intentional self-sorting into like-minded or community-moderated groups, or the natural fragmentation that comes from a bunch of different people watching their own algorithmically curated video feeds, these apps all have a way of separating people based on who they want to talk to and what they want to be exposed to."

I curated a conference at the Berkman Center in 2004 called Social Tools for the Enterprise, at a time when that concept was hardly more than a twinkle in our eyes. The utopian aspiration was that we’d adopt the techniques we’d learned from blogging and instant messaging and adapt them into new tools for enterprise community and communication. From that came web, web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, and work chat tools. And while some of the early promise still persists, social tools for the enterprise have their own shortcomings — perhaps not as horrible as the ‘toxic sludge’ that LJ alludes to.