Friday 10th May 2024

The Research-Backed Benefits of Daily Rituals - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)

While some may cringe at forced corporate rituals, research shows that personal and team rituals can actually benefit the way we work. The authors’ expertise on the topic over the past decade, plus a survey of nearly 140 HBR readers, explores the ways rituals can set us up for success before work, get us psyched up for important presentations, foster a strong team culture, and help us wind down at the end of the day.

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How to Rethink Your Career as an Empty Nester - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)

When children leave the house for college or other opportunities, the sudden change and loss of predictability can be disruptive for working parents and their careers. It’s common for parents to feel grief when kids leave the house. Perhaps you’ve been caught unaware: you haven’t fully anticipated this time and season, and now your life looks like a blank canvas. How do you fill it? If you’re an empty nester (or will be soon), this article offers some questions for you to reflect on and strategies help you re-shape your life and find meaning — both personally and professionally — during this time.

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6 Common Leadership Styles — and How to Decide Which to Use When - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)

Research suggests that the most effective leaders adapt their style to different circumstances — be it a change in setting, a shift in organizational dynamics, or a turn in the business cycle. But what if you feel like you’re not equipped to take on a new and different leadership style — let alone more than one? In this article, the author outlines the six leadership styles Daniel Goleman first introduced in his 2000 HBR article, “Leadership That Gets Results,” and explains when to use each one. The good news is that personality is not destiny. Even if you’re naturally introverted or you tend to be driven by data and analysis rather than emotion, you can still learn how to adapt different leadership styles to organize, motivate, and direct your team.

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Long Covid at Work: A Manager’s Guide - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)

Nearly 18 million U.S. adults have long Covid, a multisystem illness that sometimes appears after a bout of Covid-19. Its wide range of symptoms vary from person to person, veer from mild to severe, and can wax and wane over time. There are no official treatments for long Covid; while some people see their symptoms resolve, others remain chronically ill. For those employees, the right workplace support can be transformative. Employers must not only help these individual employees but also build disability inclusion into their cultures and talent practices. A menu of accommodations along with individual job redesign efforts will help companies retain employees with long Covid and other chronic illnesses and enable them to contribute more than they could otherwise.

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Reframing the Competition

Imagine that two brands are running contests where participants stand to win nearly identical fitness watches. Both companies will award the watches to randomly chosen winners, amounting to 1 percent of all participants. Brand A has capped the number of entries at 1,000, while Brand B allows up to 10,000 entries. Which competition would you rather enter?

Competitive scenarios involving large groups of individuals are par for the course in all aspects of life. Our recent research, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology and featured in Harvard Business Review, examined a wide spectrum of competitive contexts. Our findings reinforce the idea that a larger competition size can discourage participation even when the objective likelihood of winning remains identical. We also found that helping people better comprehend their chances of winning could make a huge difference to whether people choose to take part in a contest or not.

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Why Southeast Asia became a spyware hotspot

A new Amnesty International report raises difficult questions.

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Hacking our way to better team meetings

As someone who takes plenty of notes, I’m always on the lookout for tools and strategies that can help me to refine my own note-taking process (such as the Cornell Method). And while I generally prefer pen and paper (because it’s shown to help with retention and synthesis), there’s no denying that technology can help to enhance our built-up abilities. This is especially true in situations such as meetings, where actively participating and taking notes at the same time can be in conflict with one another. The distraction of looking down to jot down notes or tapping away at the keyboard can make it hard to stay engaged in the conversation, as it forces us to make quick decisions about what details are important, and there’s always the risk of missing important details while trying to capture previous ones. Not to mention, when faced with back-to-back-to-back meetings, the challenge of summarizing and extracting important details from pages of notes is compounding – and when considered at a group level, there is significant individual and group time waste in modern business with these types of administrative overhead.

Faced with these problems on a daily basis, my team – a small tiger team I like to call OCTO (Office of the CTO) – saw an opportunity to use AI to augment our team meetings. They have developed a simple, and straightforward proof of concept for ourselves, that uses AWS services like Lambda, Transcribe, and Bedrock to transcribe and summarize our virtual team meetings. It allows us to gather notes from our meetings, but stay focused on the conversation itself, as the granular details of the discussion are automatically captured (it even creates a list of to-dos). And today, we’re open sourcing the tool, which our team calls “Distill”, in the hopes that others might find this useful as well: https://github.com/aws-samples/amazon-bedrock-audio-summarizer.

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How to Stop Worrying About What Other People Think of You - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)

If you want to be your best and perform at a high level, fear of people’s opinions may be holding you back. Our fear of other people’s opinions, or FOPO, has become an irrational and unproductive obsession in the modern world, and its negative effects reach far beyond performance. If you start paying less and less attention to what makes you you—your talents, beliefs, and values—and start conforming to what others may or may not think, you’ll harm your potential. If you really want to conquer FOPO, you’ll need to cultivate more self-awareness. Most of us go through life with a general sense of who we are, and, in a lot of circumstances, that’s enough. We get by. But if you want to be your best while being less fearful of people’s opinions, you need to develop a stronger and deeper sense of who you are. You can start by developing a personal philosophy—a word or phrase that expresses your basic beliefs and values. This philosophy isn’t a platitude or slogan; rather, it’s a compass, guiding your actions, thoughts, and decisions.

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Does the Universe expand by stretching or creating space?

It’s been almost 100 years since humanity first reached a revolutionary conclusion about the nature of our Universe: space itself cannot and does not remain static, but rather evolves with the passage of time. One of the most unsettling predictions of Einstein’s general relativity is that any Universe — so long as it’s uniformly (or almost uniformly) filled with one or more species of matter, radiation, or energy — cannot remain the same over time. Instead, it must either expand or contract, something initially derived independently by three separate people: Alexander Friedmann (1922), Georges Lemaitre (1927), and Howard Robertson (1929), and was later generalized by Arthur Walker (1936).

Right at around the same time, starting in 1923, observations began to show that the spirals and ellipticals in our sky were actually galaxies: “island universes” that were well outside of our own Milky Way. With new, more powerful measurements, we could determine that the farther away a galaxy was from us, the greater the arriving light in our instruments was redshifted, or observed at longer wavelengths, compared to the light that was initially emitted. It was as though the very act of journeying through space altered the wavelength of that traveling light.

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4 "love-based" approaches to allyship after the DE&I backlash

In recent years, many organizations have realized that the journey towards real allyship and lasting societal change is not as simple as hosting one employee celebration and posting about it on social media. It’s a long and complex path, requiring a concerted and sustained effort from the entire company in a way that underpins their culture and values. 

Many leaders are still committed to this journey but tackling the fatigue in our teams — the “ally-weariness” as I call it — has been made even harder as organizations navigate the growing backlash against DE&I. Movement against progressive policies has seen a rollback of legislation around affirmative action in the US, and many roles within DE&I are being cut as resources are quietly reassigned elsewhere. Vocal pushback on social media has also made business leaders more cautious, afraid to rock the boat and become the next target of negative online attention. 

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