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Why do we stay in jobs that are bad for us?

Why do we stay in jobs that are bad for us?

I have a post drafted in my blog titled “My birthday gift to myself this year: Retirement.” It’s dated February 26, 2012. At that time, I’d…
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Surveys about customer service are useless

Surveys about customer service are useless

Last year, I took a customer service survey for Healthcare.gov. It asked me 6 questions about the customer service I’d received. The…
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Don’t add it to the manual

Don’t add it to the manual

When I was in high school, I went to a church camp in the summer where the students ran a day camp for underprivileged youth during the day…
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Sometimes you’re the thing that has to change

Sometimes you’re the thing that has to change

How many times do you bring up your concerns to your bosses? How many suggestions for improvement do you make? How do you do good work when…
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good.simple.open: the values that lead to better work
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Complexity creates power

Complexity creates power

Complexity — whether by negligence or design — creates power but never power for the user. This is why a relatively new discipline called…
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Make it simple by default

Make it simple by default

In their book Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson write a chapter advising us to “Say No by Default.” This is a great way to…
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Beware the people who want “job security”

Beware the people who want “job security”

I often hear individuals voice a concern like, “I’m the only one who knows how to do this” or “I spend 5 days a month dealing with this…
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Prevent bureaucratic aspirants

Prevent bureaucratic aspirants

When we run good, simple, and open workplaces, we also cut down on the amount of sycophants aspiring to a “better” job by sucking up. They…
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Build the Flowers Paradigm: Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge

Build the Flowers Paradigm: Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge

In several companies, I’ve watched an Idea Guy who partnered with a Business Guy to build a business only to squeeze the Business Guy out…
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Let good, simple, and open sell itself

Let good, simple, and open sell itself

Often, we start worrying about marketing spin before we even have a product. “How do we highlight the best features and downplay the bad?”…
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Why would you want to piss him off before he starts working here?

Why would you want to piss him off before he starts working here?

Pay your employees a proper salary. In Remote, the authors advise paying your remote workers in distant locales the same salaries you pay…
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Bad jobs are hostile to our personal lives and don’t produce good work

Bad jobs are hostile to our personal lives and don’t produce good work

Around the time I published good.simple.open, the book, a friend and I had an IM conversation about his bad job. It showed in grimy detail…
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Trump customer service with user experience

Trump customer service with user experience

In web development, we don’t talk about Customer Service; we speak of User Experience. After all, on a website, we’re not always there to…
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It’s hard to let go of management

It’s hard to let go of management

A chapter of good.simple.open is called “How to manage it (until you don’t have to)” in which I advocate for employee autonomy and some…
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Get out of crisis mode

Get out of crisis mode

I was in a meeting once when an employee made the painfully acute statement that “we’ve gotten really good at fire drills but we don’t know…
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Leadership and Management are different things

Leadership and Management are different things

Flattening organizations and changing management’s role doesn’t mean we do away with leaders. Leadership is different from management…
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The failures of sink or swim management

The failures of sink or swim management

A friend and former colleague of mine referred me to this article in the Harvard Business Review as an explanation of the culture at our…
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Don’t be a bully in your work

Don’t be a bully in your work

Once complexity is established in a workplace, it leads to a bullying mentality. That may have been the intent all along or it may be a…
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You’ve got to manage different people differently

You’ve got to manage different people differently

At one agency, we hired a traffic manager to coordinate the tasks given to us in the Creative Department by the client managers. In his…
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Sharing fitness tracker data with your doctor shouldn’t be discouraged

Sharing fitness tracker data with your doctor shouldn’t be discouraged

Does your oncologist need to know how many steps you took yesterday? Maybe they should. MIT Technology Review recently covered the new…
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Be the pencil

Be the pencil

Internet entrepreneur John Battelle once wrote a blog post about Facebook attempting to out-compete Twitter. He didn’t believe this was…
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Why is management so disconnected?

Why is management so disconnected?

Over 17 years in digital jobs, I have experienced many times when I’m good at something in my job and not allowed to pursue it fully. In…
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Open your culture

Open your culture

Anil Dash, a great observer of tech culture, wrote a post on his blog that nails a problem in web communities: “If your website’s full of…
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Why I am a maker

Why I am a maker

As a minimalist, I am sympathetic to Debbie Chachra’s statement in her recent essay “Why I Am Not A Maker” that “it’s not all that clear…
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Build it like a physical product.

Build it like a physical product.

At least until the singularity, products of intellect still require physical interaction at some level. As such, they follow mechanical…
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Choose your team

Choose your team

I went through several verbs before deciding on the right one for the title of this essay. Build? Create? Assemble? “Choose” was the…
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Watching a bad system perpetuate itself

Watching a bad system perpetuate itself

I’ve been watching a company I’ve worked with over the past 3 years do the same thing over and over. It’s tempting to quote that old saw…
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Stop doing it the way you’ve always done it

Stop doing it the way you’ve always done it

Creative thinking may mean simply the realization that there’s no particular virtue in doing things the way they have always been done. …
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