Siri Chilazi and Iris Bohnet

There are certain rules and standards at work that are shared in formal trainings and onboarding, but there are also many norms that employees pick up over time—like whether taking vacation is encouraged or seen as signaling a lack of commitment or whether meetings start on time or a few minutes after the hour. Norms shape individual and collective behaviors and represent organizational culture or “how we do things here.” When set intentionally, they can also ground teams and create fairer workplaces in times of uncertainty. Anyone, regardless of seniority, can become “norm entrepreneurs” by taking three actions: 1) Change perceptions of “how we do things here,” 2) find the right audience, and 3) leverage collective action.

Michael Tempest

Mastering the balance between async and sync can lead to smarter communication habits and deeper engineering focus.

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson walks through how to restore trust and communication in a broken team.

It’s easy to view the debates between company leaders and employees over return-to-office mandates as overreaction on both sides: out-of-touch senior executives who don’t understand that the world has changed versus pampered, entitled, and unmotivated workers. But the fury the debates produce suggests that there is a deeper problem: a shifting psychological contract between employees and employers, and not just about return-to-office policies.

Joost Minnaar

How does a $40B company run without managers or hierarchy? Here's how Haier’s radical RenDanHeYi model works in practice—answered by the people living it.

Sunday Rewind: Storytelling for product managers: Don’t convince; Inspire by Petra Wille

Alan Wright

In 2021, I wrote a blog post on running effective show & tells. If I were writing that blog post again today, the first thing I would add would be kick of the event with trumpet time.  What is trumpet time? A chance to celebrate the achievements and contributions of your team over the past […]

Johanna Rothman

I'm a huge fan of team-based collaboration to complete small stories through the architecture. (The image above shows three small […]

A major source of unease around AI is how its advance can make societies’ existing inequities even worse—a systemic phenomenon called “artificial inequality.” This happens as socioeconomic opportunities and outcomes are concentrated within narrow societal segments. Unfortunately, artificial inequality is complex and can be hard to fix. To understand—and combat—this phenomenon, companies need to understand how and where it exists.