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PODCAST

What Works

Work is central to the human experience. It helps us shape our identities, care for those we love, and contribute to our communities. Work can be a source of power and a catalyst for change. Unfortunately, that"s not how most of us experience work—even those who work for themselves. Our labor and creative spirit are used to enrich others and maintain the status quo. It"s time for an intervention. What Works is a show about rethinking work, business, and leadership for the 21st-century economy. Host

business entrepreneurship

All Episodes

40:16

EP 500: What if you're not off track... and never...

What Works ·

2025/07/24

If you're like me, you often think about what you would have done to prepare for... this job, this economy, this political climate, this financial situation, etc... if only you'd known. But you didn't know (I didn't know). And you (I) couldn't know. Some of the loudest shoulds and supposed-tos we face are those we couldn't have achieved due to the time we were born or the family we grew up in.In this episode, I reflect on the rapid changes occurring in work and the economy in the 21st

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19:22

EP 499: Reduction in Force

What Works ·

2025/07/17

No job is safer than a government job, right? Well, not anymore. At least not in the US. I’m paying special attention to the fight over government jobs (or, as the administration might put it, “bloat and inefficiency”) because it’s part of a more comprehensive narrative project—one that shapes how we think and talk about work, and therefore think and talk about who we are and how we fit into society. Questioning the narrative that government workers are lazy or that bureaucracy is bloated

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11:32

INTERLUDE: The Pleasure & Promise of Re-Reading

What Works ·

2025/06/26

I wanted to drop in with a quiet interlude about re-reading (or re-watching, or re-listening) and its value in a world obsessed with new and different.Footnotes:Read the essay version of this episode."Murderbot Gets Us In Ways Humans Don't" by Tara McMullin on Motley Bloom"Broken Links" by Tara McMullinLiquid Modernity by Zygmunt BaumanCapital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? by Mackenzie Wark★ Support this podcast ★

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24:04

EP 498: Breaking The Validation Spiral

What Works ·

2025/06/05

Why is it that it seems like no amount of work, accolades, or achievement is enough? Why do we keep signing up for more, even as our capacity becomes ever more depleted? Why do we settle for mediocrity when we yearn for excellence?In today's episode, I revisit an idea from my book—the validation spiral—and provide a framework for understanding why we become stuck in it and how we can break free. Add to that a healthy dose of Audre Lorde's feminist theory, and you've got a satisfying mental

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27:00

EP 497: Please Support My Work

What Works ·

2025/05/29

If you subscribe to newsletters, listen to podcasts, or watch videos on YouTube, I've no doubt that you’ve been asked to support the person or people who created them. You can always support with a like or a share, of course. But generally, the support they’re looking for is financial.And for good reason, life is expensive. Jobs with good pay and decent benefit packages can be hard to find—especially in the culture industry.But I gotta tell you, I’ve always been a little irked by the word

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20:05

EP 496: What to Do When Things Get Messy

What Works ·

2025/05/22

No matter how fastidious you are about creating and executing a plan, working toward any big goal will require adjustments. No matter how diligent you are about documentation and maintenance, any process will break down over time. The work we do is always changing—whether because of the people we work with, the market we operate in, or the cultural context our work is received in. Even when it seems like smooth sailing is just one standard operating procedure away, things will shift.That

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61:44

EP 495: Ann Leckie vs. The "Well, Actually" Bros

What Works ·

2025/05/08

Is an AI chatbot, like ChatGPT, a search engine? Does it scour the internet for helpful information so that it can respond to user queries? These questions were at the heart of a small kerfuffle on Bluesky last week between decorated speculative fiction writer Ann Leckie and a few prominent tech thinkers. Honestly, it bummed me out. But I found that the next morning, I had a lot to say about it. So I enlisted my dear husband, Sean, and I talked him through it.This episode is different than

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23:49

EP 494: How Structure Transforms Ideas

What Works ·

2025/05/01

"I have so many thoughts and not enough time to think them," I recently blurted out to my husband. For me, "thinking thoughts" means scribbling notes or writing messy paragraphs about whatever is on my mind. Of course, no one wants to read my scribbles or suffer through my unrefined musings. So once I've spent some time thinking thoughts, I have to figure out how to organize them. To structure them. To narrate them.That's what today's episode is all about. Whether or not you're a writer,

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20:15

EP 493: The Prescription Economy

What Works ·

2025/04/17

"No one is ever completely safe from the critical gaze of a culture steeped in the makeover ethos." —Micki McGeeI have a theory that you can measure the decline of any social media platform by the time it takes for its feed to become a firehose of unsolicited advice. Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are all sludge piles of advice now, but it took them years to devolve. TikTok took maybe 18 months. Substack Notes? Like 3 months. Threads? Instant.Most of us (I think) can agree that the vapid

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26:20

EP 492: How We Realize Higher Values Through Enabling...

What Works ·

2025/04/03

Intractable challenges are often the result of a lack of imagination. That is, our solutions are constrained by existing systems and structures that likely created the problem in the first place. To dream up novel solutions that allow us to realize higher values, we need to build structures that enable and extend our imaginations.And sure, I'm talking about macroeconomic, climate, and political challenges. But I'm also talking about our day-to-day work and family lives.Footnotes:Read the

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18:08

EP 491: Meet Your Tiny Capitalists

What Works ·

2025/03/27

Many of us (most?) have an inner voice that loves to remind us that "If there's time to lean, there's time to clean" or that "Coffee is for closers." We nag ourselves about being more productive, working more efficiently, or hustling for more money. Even if we value rest, care, and comfort, that voice can be hard to ignore.Well, meet your Tiny Capitalist. Or rather, Tiny Capitalists: the Tiny Puritan, Tiny Manager, and Tiny Entrepreneur. Understanding the role they play helps us make better

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25:02

EP 490: Standardize Me

What Works ·

2025/03/13

Standardization is one of those ideas that, once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's a mental model that can explain, at least in part, many of our social, political, and personal challenges. Whether it's the clothes we wear, the language we use, the dates we go on, or the people we vote for, our choices are often unknowingly constrained by standardization.In this episode, an update of an essay I originally released for premium subscribers back in November 2023, I explore the role that

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15:34

EP 489: Temporal Bandwidth

What Works ·

2025/03/06

This episode is about the long term—the commitments, projects, and relationships we can work on when our "temporal bandwidth" widens. How we perceive time and our ability to do what's meaningful to us in time does have to be constrained by the urgency of now. There are ways to feel more grounded and create more possibilities at the same time.Footnotes:Read the essay version of this episode.The Steerswoman by Rosemary KirsteinOn Freedom by Timothy SnyderBreaking Bread with the Dead by Alan

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19:51

EP 488: Honeydew (Or, 3 Biases That Derail Remarkable...

What Works ·

2025/02/27

Most of the work I do that's not this revolves around coaching, editing, and/or thinking with people who have meaningful ideas they want to better express to the world. In this work, the question I hear most often is about making sense of a complex idea—the kind of idea that contains many smaller, supporting ideas and stories and research. The sort of complex idea best expressed in a lengthy essay, a book, a podcast series, or a documentary.How does one make a plan for tackling that kind of

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19:00

EP 487: Rethinking Our Tech Mythology

What Works ·

2025/02/20

The tech industry has a central role in shaping our work, our communication, and even our identities. Its mythology is woven into the products and services we use on a daily basis. So understanding how the people leading the tech industry think—how they perceive their own stories and generate their own hype—is a solid step toward making sense of what can seem so nonsensical.And there is one book I go back to over and over again when I need to make sense of our mythologies of disruption and

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26:50

EP 486: How Knowledge Really Does Become Power

What Works ·

2025/02/13

What does my new website, the TikTok "ban," and the ongoing purge of "woke" from government websites have in common?The power to decide what content counts and what doesn't—and use that power to shape the knowledge and experiences of others.In this episode, I continue to examine the state of The Website today. Amidst a backdrop of diffuse epistemic violence, the website is both an archive and a communication tool we can use to preserve the knowledge and ways of knowing we care about. In the

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41:56

EP 485: Broken Links

What Works ·

2025/02/06

I'm back! Maybe you noticed or maybe you didn't—but the show (and my newsletter) has been on its longest hiatus since its inception. In the final quarter of 2024, I decided I wanted to (re)consolidate my web presence, abandon most "platforms," and breathe some new life into my work. This episode reflects on both my own challenges with wrangling my online presence and the ways the state of the web has made it extra challenging. While there’s a lot to complain about when it comes to social

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27:31

EP 484: The Freedom to Buy

What Works ·

2024/12/12

So, health insurance is in the news. And so is Americans' feelings about it. I got to wondering how we ended up with this terrible health insurance system in the United States. I uncovered a fascinating story about the marketing campaign that sunk Truman's national health insurance program in the 1940s. I also discovered some interesting parallels to popular marketing messages among today's influencers, gurus, and marketers.Today's episode is a little trip through history that will

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21:09

EP 483: Avoiding Acquiescence Bias

What Works ·

2024/12/05

A problem, question, or challenge is often more than meets the eye. But we're biased to accept how an issue is initially framed. We acquiesce to the original terms. That's called acquiescence bias. When we don't counteract our acquiescence bias, we miss opportunities to get to the root cause or think creatively about a challenge. Today, I share 3 ways to resist acquiescence bias as you consider your next moves, goals, or plans.Footnotes:"In Your Spare Time" from No Time to Spare by Ursula

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17:57

EP 482: Seeing Software

What Works ·

2024/11/21

Do you see your software?Do you see how it influences how you run meetings, brainstorm ideas, fulfill your responsibilities, and communicate with others? Do you see how its text boxes, radio buttons, tabs, search results, and menus train you to think? Do you see it, or do you just use it?Footnotes:"The impossible dream of good workplace software" on Decoder "Practico-inertia" by Rob Horning ★ Support this podcast ★

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