Love+Work double whammy: a podcast and a review
🥶🥶🥶
This seems to be the prevailing emotion at the moment. As a Brit, I’m not afraid of a bit of cold (especially what most Australians consider cold… I see you Leanne Hughes!), but I maintain the fact that I was never as cold in the UK as I am indoors in Australia. Your apparent allergy to insulation gets me every year.
I was up in (slightly warmer) Brisbane two weeks ago for the brilliant Design Conference event. It was such a joy, and it’s just so fun to see/be around people who are genuinely excited about the work they’re creating. Not something you get in all industries. If you saw my conference round ups of day 1, day 2, or day 3 and had a serious case of FOMO, you can still grab a streaming ticket to watch this year’s event right here.
Here’s some other things I’ve enjoyed since we last spoke:
Netflix - Middleditch & Schwartz: we were assigned this to watch as homework for improv class, and it’s brilliant. It’s long-form improv based on suggestions from the audience. It’s clever, funny, and the dynamic and intimacy between Thomas and Ben is aspirational stuff.
Podcast - Hot Money: Who really owns the p*rn industry, and does it matter? Not something I’d thought much about (ok, ever) until I saw this new podcast from Pushkin all about a Financial Times investigation into the power structures, finances, and characters behind the industry. So far it’s very interesting, especially if you like a good financial scandal. (NSFW)
Chocolate - I am utterly delighted that Hey Tiger chocolate has risen like a delicious phoenix from the ashes. After a hiatus, it’s been resurrected by the team at SoulFresh and they’re back pumping out our favourite flavours again (and mine, including Best Mates and Game Changer).
Infrared saunas - bloody great, get yourself to your nearest one, pronto.
Shameless self-promotion - I have a new website/branding for my organisational learning and development work! You can have a poke around and enjoy the fun easter eggs throughout and Tess McCabe’s wonderful web design work here.
What have you been reading/listening/watching/enjoying recently? Pop a comment to this post, hit reply, or just tap the little heart button if you liked something you read.
Waving from under all of the blankets,
Steph
PS. To borrow from Austin Kleon (and everyone else who borrows this from Austin Kleon), this newsletter and the podcast are 'free but not cheap'. You can support their ongoing creation by buying me a coffee as a one off 'thank you', purchasing a card from the Good Press card store, or leaving giving the podcast a (five 😉) star rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Thanks!
Review: Love+Work by Marcus Buckingham
Quick blurb
Marcus Buckingham discusses the starring role that love could/should play at work, and how work needs a big redesign to allow this to happen.
What I liked
There’s some seriously great concepts in here; why we need to embrace our “wyrd” in order to connect what we love to how we work, how not to give feedback, how to dig deeper into the specifics of what you love, why the systems of education and work are great for systemising and categorising people but not great for helping people contribute in their own unique ways, and how to better lead and engage your teams.
As someone who works a lot with leaders and teams, some of the ideas here made me want to do a Tom-Cruise-style-sofa-jump, because work needs such a shake up, and there’s a lot in the book that pushes (hard) in that direction.
What I didn’t
There were two big things I didn’t like.
1) It felt like some parts were meant to be really profound, but instead felt a little repetitive and self-indulgent. It made me feel like I feel when I read the morning pages/journal pages that people put on Instagram; they mean something important to the author (which is great), but to anyone else they read like the diary ramblings of an emo 14 year old (there, I said it).
Marcus talks a lot about various parts of his life, which were interesting, but the link felt tenuous to a book about love+work. It made me wonder if he really wanted to write an autobiography, but the publishers said he had to tie it into something work-y and so he tried to do both, and probably at the detriment of both.
2) It lacked real examples of what ‘good’ looks like. As I said, there’s loads of provocative ideas in the book about the things that organisations / leaders can do to encourage more love at work, and what a love at work organisation does/doesn’t do, but didn’t offer many examples of organisations doing these things.
I would have loved to know what great love+work organisations are using/doing instead of performance ratings, peer feedback processes, and the other typical systems that Marcus says need to getinthebin. It makes these ideas (especially more ‘radical’ ones that involve scrapping almost everything that most organisations are based on) much easier to implement if there’s some alternative suggestions.
Overall ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
This was a tough one. Some of the ideas in here are worth five stars, but the book lost overall points for its lack of practical suggestions on the big stuff, and the repetitive nature of some of the sections.
Recommendation: invest 1 hour 40 mins into listening to this interview with Marcus on the Diary of a CEO podcast (and 15 minutes for this week’s episode of Steph’s Business Bookshelf, of course) instead of reading the book.