Meller Notes

This episode is different. No news, no study, no three topics. It is my own story of how a Brazilian ended up in Sweden, and it is here for one reason: if you want to take your career abroad, what separates the people who do it from the people who keep talking about it is not luck, it is preparation. I start with the difference between a wish and a choice. Saying you would like to live abroad is a...

You got the offer, you signed the contract, and now comes the part nobody prepares you for. Your first week at a new job is not about delivering results, it is about being read for the first time. And the read people make of you in those first days is much harder to change later than we tend to think. In this episode I talk about three things that shape that first week. The first is listening befo...

You have read the strategy books. Maybe even the good ones. And you have probably noticed something almost nobody says out loud: the people who read the most business books are not necessarily the best leaders in practice. In this special episode I talk about something I have been thinking about for a while, how to read better, which means reading the right things, in the right order. Business boo...

Every job posting carries a ruler. Every statistic carries a measuring instrument. This episode is about what happens when no one checks if those two are calibrated right, and about the hiring and career decisions being made on top of that gap. In the first theme, a study of more than 50 million job posts across 28 European countries shows that the remote version of a job lists, on average, 25% mo...

We spend our whole life training to do the work and almost no time learning to talk about the work. This special episode is about the job interview, split into three moments and one bonus. In before, you see what real research says about how recruiters use social media to screen candidates, and why preparation is not about looking better, it is about closing the gap between what you show and who y...

Everyone wants to move faster. And it is exactly the rush for speed that makes companies cut or skip the part that was making the work function, the human part. This episode has only two themes, on purpose, because both tell the same story from different angles. In the first, Deloitte shows, through one of the largest yearly studies of work, more than 9,000 leaders across 89 countries, that compan...

Something repeats across the three themes today. There is a loud, confident story that everybody repeats, and underneath it the numbers say something else. In this episode we look at three places where that happens: return to office, creativity with AI, and false alignment in meetings. In the first theme, US Census Bureau data published by Fortune in July 2026 shows hybrid and remote work sitting...

Some changes arrived wrapped as an improvement and, in practice, charged the opposite to anyone who did not read the bill. A new management philosophy that promises results. The AI that promises to free the boss. The AI that promises to give your time back. In all of them the question is the same, and it is good for your week, did the improvement free your best work or empty it? The first topic is...

This week I went looking for four stories that, at first glance, have nothing to do with each other. AI, career advice, customer complaints, and a fatal self-driving car accident. The more I dug in, the clearer the thread became. We live in a world obsessed with shortcuts, and in all four cases the shortcut sends the bill later, not now. What you will learn: Why an MIT Sloan professor argues that...

Tactics without architecture is excellent work in the wrong direction. In 2026, three data points changed how I think about career strategy. The market quietly raised the bar for entry-level professionals without raising the training budget. Research from Harvard revealed that where you work shapes your trajectory as much as how hard you work. And a phenomenon called talent hoarding is blocking ca...

We reached the middle of 2026, and three things changed the way we work. AI started filling work with things that look finished but are not. The middle layer of management, the one so many people planned to climb, started to disappear. And the job market froze, with people staying in their jobs more out of fear than choice. Three different forces, one answer. In all of them, you are the one who de...

There are things you cannot build when the pressure hits. Leadership in a crisis, a team with real depth, people you actually trust. You build all of it before, while everything is calm and no one is watching. This episode is about that. Three themes, one thread: what the rush of the short term quietly destroys. And I hold myself to this too. The 7 Cs of crisis leadership. People who get through a...

Meller Notes is here, curating content on career, leadership, and management for your personal and professional development. There is a gap in almost every career I know. It does not show up in performance reviews and never becomes a one-on-one agenda item. It lives in the background, in conversations you are not part of. In this episode, three topics that talk about the same thing: what you are b...

What are you building deliberately? And what are you just letting happen? Three things are shifting at the same time in the world of work. None of them are about what the system is doing to you. They are about what you are, or should be, doing. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer surveyed 33,000 people across 28 countries and found that only 32% of the global population believes the next generation w...

Are you getting back what you actually give? Three topics that look different on the surface. One question connecting all of them. This episode covers productivity, ambition, and meetings, and what they share in common: value being extracted without being returned. The Bureau of Labor Statistics published in May 2026 that the share of economic output going to workers fell to 54.1%, the lowest reco...

Meller Notes is here, curating content on career, leadership, and management for your personal and professional development. Three organizations spent the last year studying what is happening to work. Gartner, Deloitte, and SHRM reached different conclusions through different paths, and all of them point in the same direction: the human cost of acceleration is being transferred to the professional...

Three things are happening at the same time in the job market — and nobody is saying they are the same thing. People are working two, three, five jobs simultaneously without any employer knowing. The generation that will inherit organizations is looking at senior leadership roles and deciding they don't want them. And the people who carry the most important information inside companies are sta...

In 1963, Katharine Graham took over the Washington Post at 46 with no plan, no mentor, and no experience running a business. She was not in her father's plan. She was not in her husband's plan. She probably was not in her own plan either. In the 28 years that followed, she redefined American journalism, became the first female CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and built an entire generation of...

In February 2014, Satya Nadella took over Microsoft with a stagnant company and a culture that rewarded internal competition instead of growth. He arrived with a book under his arm, eliminated the system that was destroying collaboration, and declared that the company needed to become something different. In 2026, Microsoft is worth more than 3 trillion dollars. What he changed was not the product...

In this episode of Meller Notes, we look at what is happening right now — not at what is coming next. In April 2026, three independent sources reached the same diagnosis through different paths: work continues, people continue, careers continue — but something changed from the inside. In the value of what gets delivered. In the access for those who are just starting out. In the energy of those who...

When was the last time you simplified something at work — and it stayed simple? Not for a week. For months. Most simplification attempts do not last. Someone adds three new slides, one more metric to the dashboard, one more meeting to align the last meeting — and the complexity is back as if it never left. In this special episode, I explore the book The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda — designer,...

Meller Notes is here, curating content on career, leadership, and management for your personal and professional development. In this episode of Meller Notes, we stop the quarter and look at the data. Not the announcement data — the results data. In Q1 2026, three global studies arrived at the same diagnosis by different paths: the distance between what organizations know they need to do and what t...

Meller Notes is here, curating content on career, leadership, and management for your personal and professional development. In this episode, we start with the story of Nikola Tesla, one of the most brilliant minds in history, who created ideas that shaped the modern world yet lived long enough to see the system fail to recognize, sustain, and fund his work, and from that lens we explore how the s...

Meller Notes is here, curating content on career, leadership, and management for your personal and professional development. In this episode of Meller Notes, we start with a man trapped in Antarctic ice in 1915 — no ship, no route, no rescue in sight — and move into three patterns that look like strengths in modern work but may be quietly working against you. Ernest Shackleton lost the Endurance....

For the last three years, AI was announced as the biggest transformation in work since the industrial revolution. Budgets were redirected. Teams were restructured. Professionals were laid off with the narrative that technology would replace them. In Q1 2026, the data arrived. Not the announcement data. The results data. Gartner officially declared that the AI expectations cycle is in the Trough of...