‘Yes, and’

Image by Donovan Valdivia via Unsplash

I have been trying to make sense of what is going on around the world over the last couple of weeks. George Floyd should not have died. He died because he was black. George Floyd is the tip of the iceberg. Before him there were many, many more: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner – many of whom have not got justice despite it being years since their death. 

The lives of black people have been taken so heartlessly not only by people in the US. The UK has a lot to be responsible for, apart from its own share of deaths of Black people. As Afua Hirsch said in her Guardian article last week:

The British government could have had the humility to use this moment to acknowledge Britain’s experiences. It could have discussed how Britain helped invent anti-black racism, how today’s US traces its racist heritage to British colonies in America, and how it was Britain that industrialised black enslavement in the Caribbean, initiated systems of apartheid all over the African continent, using the appropriation of black land, resources and labour to fight both world wars and using it again to reconstruct the peace. 

The structural racism that causes Black people to die again and again is not what non-Black people want to discuss unless they are forced to. It is a system that has been built over years, decades, centuries, and it will take time to dismantle, if we are lucky enough to even get there. There are a bulk of resources to read on this issue – here are ways you can learn in the month of June alone, so I won’t list them all here. If you are not black and want to understand why Black Lives Matter has taken on so much urgency, please give some of them a read, watch or listen. 

These discussions are hard, but they need to happen. I am far from educated enough on the subject of racism, anti-racism, structural racism, or anti-fragility – I’m still trying. Here, I want to lay out some of my thoughts on this issue, but also try and articulate something else that has been bothering me, as someone with Indian heritage. 

Even as many in India raise their voices in support of Black Lives Matter, there is warranted criticism for not supporting the causes that need a lot more attention in their own backyard. (With regard to the kind of discrimination that Black people see in America, I’m talking specifically about caste discrimination – of Dalits particularly, and religious discrimination – particularly of Muslims). 

There are two components to this: one, a large number of people who are getting the media attention for speaking up about Black Lives Matter in India at the moment are film celebrities, some of whom are very simply out of touch with reality (all the usual tone-deaf language about how ‘All Lives Matter’). These celebrities argue against racism in America, while endorsing fairness creams in India, and belonging to an industry which engages in ‘brownface’. You see the problem. 

The second is the legitimacy of talking about issues in other parts of the world when there are issues to tackle at home: from a long hard look at the casteism that contributed to Dalit student Rohith Vemula’s death in 2016 to more recent instances of police overreach similar to that being witnessed in the US at the moment. As an illustration, here’s one Instagram image I’ve seen shared a lot recently:

My niece Ragini Menon recently wrote a piece worth reading, about the pathetic record Indians have with regard to the treatment of Black people, and how South Asian Americans particularly owe a lot to the work of Black communities in the US (for more on the latter, follow SouthAsians4BlackLives on Instagram). Acknowledging that many of us stand on the shoulders of Black communities is important, as is the importance of dispelling the myth of Asian-Americans as the ‘model minority’. As this NPR piece notes:

Asians have been barred from entering the U.S. and gaining citizenship and have been sent to incarceration camps, Kim pointed out, but all that is different than the segregation, police brutality and discrimination that African-Americans have endured. 

Which brings me back to what made me want to explore all these things I’ve been reading, listening to and watching over the last few weeks: examining the ‘legitimacy’ of speaking up about one atrocity when there are others to acknowledge. The truth is there is no ‘convenient’ time to speak up. This is an ongoing battle; racism has been endemic for centuries. In countries like the US and UK, Black people have been facing hardships and violence for so long that many have unfortunately come to accept it as a way of life (yes, it saddens me to write that). It’s a mother’s fear of watching her son leave the house and not knowing if he’ll come back alive. It’s the fear experienced by a grown, educated Professor reduced to a shadow of his former self by the police, who stopped him in the road because of his colour. In India, Dalits and Muslims have faced this bias as well, for equally as long (a housekeeping note to anyone who wants to bring up white people or upper-caste Hindus – this is not the time or place. Please go somewhere else.)

I want to end by pointing to something that has helped me get some resolution to all these turbulent thoughts: this piece by Tamara Cofman Wittes, a  Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, who examines this alleged hypocrisy, of ‘promoting human rights when they are being trampled at home’, with reference to the US criticizing human rights abuses around the world when they are also not dealing with systemic racism at home. She concludes – and this has given me some succour – that the two aren’t mutually exclusive. You can fight for one and the other at the same time. In fact, we must. As she says:

By contrast, to insist that we must first “get our house in order” before speaking to others’ oppression, to be so ashamed by our own shortcomings that we refrain from calling out abuses abroad, and thus to withhold our solidarity from the abused, would itself be an act of moral abdication. As my friend Adham Sahloul wrote this weekend: “The people in the Hong Kong’s and Idlib’s of the world don’t have time for our spiritual reclamation sessions.” Sahloul calls for a “Yes, and” approach to American rights advocacy abroad, something that American diplomats of color, like Ambassador Nichols in Harare, already practice. Yes, we have important work to do at home. So do we all. Let’s continue reaching our hands across our borders in solidarity, and get to work.

Amen.

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As part of my research writing this piece, I learnt of many organisations working to eradicate discrimination in the US, UK and India, listed below for reference:

Global

International Dalit Solidarity Network

India 

Velivada: a media platform for stories about Dalits/Bahujans 

Dalit Queer Project on Instagram

Ambedkarite Students Association at TISS on Facebook

National Confederation of Dalit and Adivasi Organisations 

National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights

Safai Karmachari Andolan, the movement against manual scavenging 

Khabar Lahariya, which I personally subscribe to, a platform for rural journalism with stories told by women from Dalit, tribal, Muslim and backward castes. You can subscribe here. 

US (taken from this Google Doc)

Black Visions Collective

Reclaim the Block

NAACP Legal Defense Fund

Black Lives Matter

National Bail Out Fund

George Floyd Memorial Fund

Showing Up for Racial Justice

Campaign Zero

The Loveland Foundation

The Marshall Project

Color of Change

Bail Out Funds – Google Doc

UK

A list of Black racial justice organisations (public Google Doc)

Practical ways to support Black Lives Matter from the UK (public Google doc)

Kwanda, which I support financially, ‘a modern collection pot for black communities’. 

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Thank you to Siddharth Sreenivas for sharing the organisations working on the issue of caste discrimination in India, Ragini Menon for conversations and her thoughts, and the amazing people compiling resources for everyone to learn from and support. 

Masters of Scale: Reid Hoffman Tests His Theories of Success

Cross-posted from the Other Valleys:

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The best way to communicate ideas is to tell a story. The most interesting storytelling format these days is without doubt the podcast, which was elevated to new heights by the first series of the quite aptly named Serial a couple of years ago.

One of the newest podcasts to hit the waves is Masters of Scale, an audio series with LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman, no stranger to the startup/VC world. In it, he talks to successful entrepreneurs from companies like Facebook, Airbnb, Minted and Walker & Company to test his theories of success. What makes a business a rocketship, or more crucially, one that truly has impact in the world? It is published by WaitWhat, itself a new content company founded by two veterans from TED, June Cohen and Deron Triff – the two were responsible for creating and growing TED.com, the TED Open Translation Project, TED Radio Hour on NPR and TED in Cinema, amongst others.

I had the chance to ask June and Deron a few questions recently, to learn more about Masters of Scale. Here’s what they said – I hope you enjoy reading their responses as much as I did!

Both of you had long careers at TED before setting up WaitWhat. What is WaitWhat’s unique take on content in today’s world – how do you think you can make a difference in the deluge of content out there?

Our approach is really different from most media companies. The first is in the way we target our audience. We don’t tend to think a lot about demographics; instead we focus on how we want people to feel. We want everyone who takes in one of our programs to have a “wait, what?” moment — where they feel lit up and alive, filled with curiosity and wonder and awe. This is the kind of reaction that helps people realize their potential, and it also makes them want to share the content. Curiosity, awe, wonder — these are contagious emotions that make you want to share with other people.

We’re also different in how we think about format. Most media companies specialize in a single format – audio, video, written word — and then work to drive traffic to their own website / app / content. But we’re format and platform agnostic. As a content incubator, we’ll launch numerous media properties over the years ahead, and for each one, we’ll choose the format that’s best suited to the content, and then extend from there. Masters of Scale launched as a podcast, but will extend into other formats (short-form video, live events etc) over time.

Masters of Scale is the first ‘product’, so to speak, from the WaitWhat fold. I love the idea of Reid Hoffman testing his theories of success during the show. You describe it as a ‘music-infused detective story’. How did you come up with the idea of fusing those two genres in one show?

We’re passionate about creating new genres. So in everything we create, we think about how we can extend the formulas that others have created. Here, we wanted to create a program that surprised our listeners. From our days with TED Radio Hour, we became fascinated with the role of sound and music. We wondered what might happen to an ideas program if it were set to an original score, the way an independent documentary might be. Why shouldn’t an audio program surprise and delight you?

One of the things we love most about Masters of Scale is that the music — which is brilliantly composed for each episode by the Holladay brothers — is like a character in the show. A very surprising character!

Among other things, I’m a co-founder of Ada’s List, a global community for women in tech, and I was especially glad to hear that you’ve committed to a 50-50 gender balance for guests on the show. Why do you think that this has not been a big enough issue in American media so far?

We were genuinely shocked to realize that we were the first American media program to publicly commit to a 50/50 gender balance. To us, the benefits of balance are so clear, and the importance of a commitment is too. What we’re finding is that there is absolutely no shortage of extraordinary women business leaders to interview. We have a list 100-women long. They’re simply less recognizable than the male leaders, because they aren’t approached as much, and don’t put themselves out there. If you set a 50/50 commitment, it’s not a problem to fill the spots. But if you DON’T set a 50/50 commitment, your program will just naturally fill up with men, because they’re better known and more often recommended.

What was Reid Hoffman’s reaction when you pitched the show to him? How did that happen?

He loved it because we tailored it exactly to him. Reid is a natural mentor and teacher. He had wanted to become a philosophy professor; he gets great pleasure from sharing knowledge and he is SO DELIGHTFUL when he does it. He devotes a lot of his energy and time to mentoring others, and especially sharing his theories on how companies scale. So the idea of sharing his ideas on scale in a way that could, well, scale — was appealing.

Why did you decide on a podcast series for your first production, compared to other content formats? 

We were drawn to audio, because there’s a renaissance happening in podcasting right now. The extraordinary work that’s come out of the public radio world in recent years — This American Life, RadioLab, Ask Me Another, Planet Money — is being pushed in all new directions, now that there are other players — Gimlet, Wondery, Panoply, Audible— innovating in the space. We’re obsessed with podcasts! We love Ponzi Supernova and Where Shall We Begin (which we helped originate) from Audible; we love Reply All and Heavyweight from Gimlet; we loved The Message; we loved Serial and of course S-Town. That just scratches the surface.

If you are plugged into the cultural zeitgeist, you have to be listening to podcasts right now.

What can we expect from the next few episodes of Masters of Scale? How long will it run?

You can expect to hear Netflix’s Reed Hastings reflect on the pillars of building a successful company culture. You can hear the extraordinary Nancy Lublin of Crisis Text Line prove to you that scale leaders aren’t only in for-profit companies (they run not-for-profits too). And you’ll hear Linda Rottenberg of Endeavor muse with Reid over what city in the world just might become the next Silicon Valley.

What’s next for WaitWhat?

We have some exciting projects in the pipeline that are currently in stealth mode… stay tuned!!

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The first few episodes of Masters of Scale are now online:

Episode 1: “In order to scale you have to do things that don’t scale.” With Brian Chesky from Airbnb. 

Episode 2: “Always raise more money than you think you need.” With Mariam Naficy of Minted

Episode 3: “The best business ideas often seem laughable at first glance.” With Tristan Walker of Walker & Company

Episode 4: “If you’re not embarrassed by your first product release, you’ve released it too late”. With Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. 

Episode 5: With Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook. 

Stop wasting money on digital projects if you aren’t prepared to promote them properly by @marthasadie via @storythings

This post by Martha Henson is worth reading if you work in media in any format today, because whether you like it or not digital is part of what you do. Thanks to Storythings for the HT. Read the whole thing, I’m just going to pull this bit out:

Stop wasting money on digital projects if you aren’t prepared to promote them properly.

I’m serious. Do NOT embark on any digital project if you aren’t going to at least make a decent effort to tell people about it or otherwise figure out how people are going to see it.

If you are going to make an in-gallery app but only have room for a small piece of signage and no budget or space for print promotion, do not bother. If you are going to create a game and put it on your website and think maybe your organisation might be able to muster up a single tweet and facebook post about it, give up now. If you are creating an amazing interactive video experience but the entire budget is going on production and you’ve run out of money to market it, stop.

Source: Stop wasting money on digital projects if you aren’t prepared to promote them properly

I did this podcast for the Disruptive Innovation Festival

Some of you may know that from November 2-20, the Ellen Macarthur Foundation is celebrating the Disruptive Innovation Festival online. Kavi Guppta, with whom I co-wrote ‘Disruption in the Developing World‘ earlier this year, and I were invited to host a podcast for the festival. It went live on their website yesterday, so if you missed it yesterday, have 20 minutes to spare and are interested in innovation, technology, emerging markets, governments and the like, have a listen.

On structural innovation in medicine

Recently I was asked if I thought there was a shift in thinking towards more long-term, structural innovation over the short-term variety. It was an interesting conversation and one that I have many thoughts on which I might explore later, but in short I believe that long-term structural innovation is much more crucial, if less shiny, than that of the short-term kind (which anyone working in advertising will be familiar with), and that it has always been there, just not up front because it’s less sexy as a marketing tool.

In relation to this, I wanted to show this video on how HP has integrated its devices and software into Cambridge University Hospitals in the UK, and is reducing the time needed for treatment and consequently the outcome for a lot of patients, simultaneously making the hospital staff more productive and efficient. I have had the opportunity recently to spend some time in hospitals here in the UK, and the digital capabilities showcased in this video stand out significantly compared to the manual processes most hospitals still use. It may be because I am conditioned to think digitally given what I do, but technology adds a layer of confidence for me when it comes to recording of my data. Humans are prone to error, and while there can and will be no replacement for doctors it simply makes sense for data to be recorded and analysed automatically, to enable doctors and hospitals to focus on diagnosis instead of administration.

In the latest RSA Journal, there is a piece on the relationship between technology and patients by Roger Taylor, founder of healthcare data company Dr. Foster. It talks about a documentary by Mount Sinai Hospital which is worth a watch if you’re interested in medicine, and a white paper by Vinod Khosla [PDF] that has his view, as a technology optimist, of technology in the medical field (likewise). The core thesis of the RSA Journal piece is that it is important to make information available to patients because it engenders trust, and that regulatory institutions need to trust people to do the right thing with their information, even saying that ‘trusting people is not so very risky as it might seem, since, in the main, people trust doctors.’ Of technology in the medical field, it says:

“Technology may be able to do 20, 40, or perhaps even 80% of a doctor’s work, but it will never do the bit that people value most. That puts doctors in a very privileged position. But if that position is used to try and halt access to knowledge, it will ultimately undermine that trust.”

That’s why I think digitisation of information in medicine is important. It creates trust. And ultimately, better patients, better doctors and quicker solutions to illnesses. We all need that.

Ada’s List at Innovation Stories 2015

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to speak about Ada’s List at the Innovation Stories conference by the lovely Nadya Powell.

Ada’s List has been a really interesting journey for us 4 co-founders over the past 1 year and 8 months or so, but we haven’t really had the time to sit and digest what it means and where we should go next. This presentation provided me the opportunity to do a bit of a retrospective of our activity to date, and came at a time when the co-founders have started asking ourselves questions about what we want going ahead (more on that hopefully in the not-too-distant future).

I started the talk by talking about social movements, and how by virtue of being a community that works for change through collective action, Ada’s List is a social movement in itself. It came in at what I think was the right time – the women in tech discussion had just about started increasing in noise around 2013, and now it is a part of even mainstream media.

I mentioned MIT’s Building 20 and the way they collaborated across disciplines to create interesting work, which happens a lot with Ada’s List, being a group of people with roughly common interests but different backgrounds and expertise.

By dint of both circumstance and intent, we’ve spearheaded some thought-provoking debates around the workplace and work culture, government policy around women and technology and parenthood in the modern workplace, through the events we’ve organised. Our survey around the political leanings of our members in the run-up to the UK’s General Election this year was also a big project for us.

We’re going nowhere, and intend to go far with what Ada’s List calls Change at Scale: changing structures, political process, work culture…by doing what we do for women in tech, we want to change things for everyone.

An interview with Eileen Guo for @huffpostUK

Standing: Eileen Guo

I had the chance to interview Eileen Guo, founder of Afghanistan’s first digital agency, for the Huffington Post recently.

A key figure leading the charge for digital empowerment and citizen journalism in Afghanistan is Eileen Guo, a young entrepreneur who moved to Kabul after obtaining a degree from the US a few years ago. She is the founder of Afghanistan’s first digital agency, Impassion Afghanistan, and is designing the country’s first citizen journalism platform, Paiwandgah. Last year she organised the first ever social media summit the country has seen (in fact, Paiwandgah was mooted as a result of the summit). I was fortunate to be able to catch up with her over Skype, supplemented by email, just as the second annual Afghan Social Media Summit wrapped up a couple of weeks ago.

Words of wisdom from @annfriedman

This morning we had Ann Friedman speak to a bunch of us at Ada’s List. Ann used to be the Executive Editor of GOOD, and is a freelance journalist who has written for NYmag.com, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Hairpin, and Columbia Journalism Review amongst others.

There’s a Storify of the morning here, but I also wanted to separately share the links Ann referred to as I think they are all worth knowing (or re-familiarising ourselves with):

Shine Theory, or how powerful women make the best friends by Ann Friedman in NYmag.com

Horizontal Loyalty, from a 2011 commencement speech by NPR’s Robert Krulwich at the University of California Berkeley

Mentorship vs. sponsorship in fast-tracking your career by Jenna Goudreau in Business Insider

On scenius and stealing like an artist, Austin Kleon at SXSW 2014

100 Interviews, a personal project by journalist and comedian Gaby Dunn that kick-started her career

Ask and Offer, by Natalia Oberti Noguera on trying to match your skills with what someone else needs and vice versa

The Island, a (fictional) place to consign harassers to that can become code for warning people about them, by Ann Friedman

The Disapproval Matrix for understanding haters, by Ann Friedman

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Notes from @adaslist @undercurrent evening with @lucyblair @clayparkerjones @merici @ideo

Clay, Lucy and Merici at the Ada’s List-Undercurrent discussion on responsive organisations

This evening Ada’s List got together with Undercurrent, visiting from New York, to stage a conversation about future-facing organisations. I will probably sound biased but whether or not I was part of the organizing team, it was one of the most inspiring evenings I have been to in a while. I have long paid attention to Undercurrent’s work in re-defining what businesses are and should be paying attention to in the digital age. But beyond this, I am also fascinated by how they have been using Holacracy and other tools to create an organization that is truly of the 21^st century in the way precious few are today, as one of the attendees said.

On the responsive OS

Clay Parker Jones began by speaking about the responsive organization (well worth subscribing to their blog on the subject). Businesses today in any industry have more or less similar concerns and problems as their competitors, so it is important to think about how they can distinguish themselves in a fairly uniform scenario. All supermarkets have similar challenges for example, whether it’s Walmart,  Wegman’s, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose or Reliance Fresh. OK, so different market factors in each part of the world will push and pull those in the same market in slightly different ways, but by and large, supermarkets all struggle with standard things like selling more product, proving they care for the environment, making sure they take care of their employees and customers and so on.  So how do they equip themselves with competitive advantage? By thinking unlike a supermarket, and paying attention to market shifting opportunities the way Uber or Airbnb did.

On inclusion health

The second thing, mentioned by Lucy Chung, also a Partner at Undercurrent, was how they pay attention to ‘inclusion health’ or how their work environment values diverse individuals and gives them an opportunity to thrive. Not only does this just make sense from a culture perspective, it makes them more valuable to clients by walking the talk of a responsive, open company themselves. This attention to the company’s culture is greatly aided by Holacracy, a platform which, for those not familiar with it, is about distributed teams that are given complete autonomy within each small group. Individuals from different business disciplines come together to work on issues concerning the business, such as, for example, talent acquisition, clients, reputation and so on. Make no mistake – this isn’t something that is easy for just anyone to do – it is extremely unlikely, as Clay said, that an organization bigger than 500 employees will be able to practice this right off the bat in a meaningful way. This is because in traditional companies, managers have been trained to think and act a certain way over many years, a mindset that is extremely difficult to get rid of in favour of a fairly new and very flexible way of work.

On recruitment and ‘fit vs. add’

This led to a discussion on recruitment and how to hire the right kind of people. Lucy mentioned how they follow a 7-day hiring policy: they meet a candidate on Day 1, and progress them through meetings with other team members, at the end of which on Day 7 a definitive decision has to be made. A match in values is a key part of this. The host for the evening, Sue Siddall from Ideo, mentioned how they’ve moved from talking about ‘cultural fit’ to asking what ‘cultural add’ a potential employee would bring to the team. Audience members piped up with a viewpoint from the other side; that HR people in today’s big corporates have no idea what a good candidate is because they go purely by job spec and box-ticking, that’s what they are trained to do. Someone mentioned how long interview processes would result in getting ‘privileged candidates’ who could afford the luxury of multiple meetings for free, and how one approach was potentially paying people to be interviewed. Lucy said that that was exactly what they did by bringing in freelancers for paid work to assess fit for a permanent role.

Back to the responsive OS

The discussion then moved back to how Undercurrent works in a responsive way, paying attention to 6 key tenets:

–       decentralizing activity, rather than concentrating decisions in the hands of a few (autonomous teams do not need to wait for management approval to do something as long as the whole team is in)

–       simplifying work, as opposed to making it complex

–       pushing for transparency, by allowing anyone to sit in on team meetings

–       generating variety, to avoid stagnation and uniformity of thinking

–       encouraging divergent thinking, rather than convergent

–       replicating what works

The acronym they used, which they admitted was a work in progress, was ‘SLAM’: Self-organising, Lean, Autonomous, Multi-disciplinary.

On salary negotiation

Negotiation of salary was something a lot of people were naturally interested in. It’s been mentioned time and time again that women are bad negotiators and in general men are paid more for doing the same level of work. Undercurrent are working to eliminate this imbalance through a quarterly salary review process that involves each team member working through objectives and key results that they set with their mentor (who they pick) and getting some form of a salary increase commensurate with what they’ve achieved every single time. I loved what Lucy and Clay said: “we assume that the more you stay at UC, the better you’re getting – or else why are you still here?”. Pretty enlightened way of thinking I wish more companies took on board. This also helps to make sure that it isn’t only men who get the raises, just because they’re more likely to ask as a rule.

Women and diversity

The group also discussed how businesses needed to hire more women, especially at senior levels. An Ada’s Lister who said that her company had achieved the rare goal of having more women than men even at a senior level asked how they could move the discussion on from there. In response was another nice viewpoint: that all of us owe it to each other to look at how other types of diversity can be addressed so that at some point it becomes normal for everyone. Sue (Ideo) added another point of view: when they talked about maternity policies, they realized that they needed to also think of people who had other pressing life issues, such as having to care for elderly family.

Work-life blend

‘Blend’ is the term UC prefer using to ‘balance’, but as Ada’s Lister Suki Fuller said, it’s all just life, there is no such thing as ‘work-life balance’, something I’ve heard pop up in a few places over the last couple of months. Another question was about how to encourage employees to pursue projects outside of work such that they stayed engaged with the company. Lucy mentioned some ways they do it at Undercurrent: investing in such side projects for one, or even, where it’s requested, allowing people to take a sabbatical to work on their project and then return.

Network reach vs. size

The reach of the network as opposed to just the size of the organization was something else Clay mentioned that stayed with me. Undercurrent have alumni, friends, partners and collaborators all over the world who they tap into for thoughts and ideas, which allows them to scale and be much more responsive than if they kept their ideas just to themselves; the point being that being a large organization isn’t much use today if you limit what you do with the resources you have.

There was a lot more food for thought over the span of close to two hours. It’s clear that this way of operating a business isn’t going to be common soon, but I really really hope it does. Also, it’s worth re-reading Undercurrent’s Responsive OS thinking and actions from the recent past: this post by Lucy, this one from Clay, and this one from Mike Arauz, as well as going through these short presentations:

A huge thanks to Clay and Lucy for opening up the UC world to us on this side of the pond. At Ada’s List we’re pretty sure there’ll be more to come out of it, so we’ll stay tuned.

Here’s a Storify of the event too.

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Are you as forward-thinking as these organisations?

Over the last week, I’ve seen quite a few inspiring company/employee manuals (as I’m sure many of you have). I wanted to put them down here so I have them in one place, and as a reminder that if businesses want to retain the best talent, simple, people-focussed language and values like these are only going to increase in importance over the next few years. If you run a business and you’re not thinking about this, then it you should set aside some time to do some introspection.

Undercurrent’s Employee Bill of Rights

Big Spaceship’s Manual

Possible Health’s Culture Code

And in the context of this New Yorker post on the impact of salary negotiations  for women, I was reminded of the culture manifesto of one of the earlier businesses to operate along these lines, Nixon McInnes, specifically the way they practise open-book accounting where everyone can see how much their colleagues earn, something that is likely to directly address the imbalance between salaries of men and women.

Somewhere also wrote an interesting post on work and culture on Medium this week (on that note, check out Somewhere and Zealify).

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