The "Fallacy of Stochastic Invention" 🔊

If you haven’t seen this video that WebMD parent company “Internet Brands” sent to their employees telling them that they need to return to the office, you really have to check it out. It’s cringe-inducing, tone deaf, and callous in the way that American business has desperately worked to normalize for decades.

“We work better together,” Internet Brands CEO Bob Brisco states in the video, adding, “We aren’t asking or negotiating at this point.” The video leaked to the public and the reaction was… Predictable.

“Well,” you might say, “CEOs gonna CEO.” That’s true, the withering empathy of the C-suite, unchecked by labor or anti-trust protections dissolved by Ronald Reagan, has allowed the American CEO to evolve into a different species, one which looks upon its employees as “inconvenient gut flora1.”

But all that aside, the entire stated basis of this message is fallacious, and I’ll tell you why.

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Unplugging is good, actually

In the middle of 2021, a new word exploded through social media: “grindset.” The word may have been new, but the idea was not. Amid a continuing pandemic that upended our norms of work and life, the online world rallied around the notion that exceptionally hard work can transform a “side hustle” into a business.

Everything that was wrong about that idea back then is still wrong now, yet we continue to glorify “disruptors” and “innovators” and believe that the “Protestant work ethic” is the gateway to wealth. Although working hard and committing yourself to a purpose are noble and useful habits, don’t confuse raw, unmetered, self-destructive exertion with good leadership.

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Newsletter update

How has your year been so far? Has it met with your expectations?

As for me, my year has been great, but has not gone entirely as expected. A lot has changed for me, and there are changes coming for this publication, too. This is your “Curious Leader update post.”

TL; DR: I’m still here, and this is still happening.

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Challenge expectations 🔊

This comic from “marketoonist.com” showed up on LinkedIn somewhere and made me laugh. It depicts one person boasting about using AI to expand a single bullet point into a lengthy email, and another person boasting about using AI to condense a long email into a single bullet point.

I think the reason this is funny is because it’s just possible enough to be believable, and highlights an ironic office process dysfunction in a novel way. It’s a ChatGPT joke, but it’s also a foolish workplace norms joke.

Let’s dig into what we can learn from it.

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How to agree on something 🔊

The foundation of a healthy working relationship is agreement. Even when people have differences of opinion—and they always will—getting everyone on the same page about broader goals and individual motivations produces better outcomes.

As a manager, you can use a few conversational techniques to create powerful agreements that drive productivity and job satisfaction. Let’s take a look at a couple of them.

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