What Works

It seems like every company today claims to be "on a mission" to change the world or improve our lives. They bill themselves as social movements more than profit-driven enterprises. It sounds nice. But how does it really function in the lives of workers? Do these missions meaningfully improve our communities? In this episode, I briefly explore the history of the corporate mission statement and the...

At least in my corner of social media, there are a lot of folks asking what makes a business ethical. Or, perhaps more accurately, there are a lot of folks answering that question.  And there are probably even more folks worried that there’s something unethical about the way they run their businesses. They’re afraid they haven’t checked all the ethical business boxes.  When Brooke Monaghan emailed...

This Earth Month... buy more stuff?! We're about to be bombarded with messaging about corporate climate initiatives. We'll have the chance to buy merch to "support" the planet. And we'll be incentivized to spend more so that a small portion can be donated to organizations fighting climate change. As you might expect, it's all marketing. Earth Month and Earth Day seem to have become another excuse...

"All parasites have value, Sibling Dex. Not to their hosts, perhaps, but you could say the same about a predator and a prey animal. They all give back—not to the individual but to the ecosystem at large." — Mosscap, in A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers For the next few months, I'm focusing on some big projects and taking my foot off the gas of the podcast a bit. But since writing is how...

I’ve called myself a recovering overachiever. I’m recovering not from the drive to excel but from the anxiety inherent to wondering if anything I achieve will ever be enough . And folks, it’s a struggle.  The philosophy Byung-Chul Han describes this anxiety as central to contemporary society. He dubs our modern age the “Achievement Society” and argues that our plethora of potential projects and op...

We all have deep human needs—for belonging, for autonomy, for creative expression, for safety and security. But modern life can make it a real challenge to get those needs met in meaningful ways. Instead, we’re offered products with flashy marketing messages. Kitchen gadgets, social media platforms, clothing, personal care products, and many others offer to help us live our best lives. Financial a...

What makes an idea valuable? What turns it into a product that can be bought, sold, or rented? Ideas turn into capital assets thanks to our system of intellectual property rights. But understanding IP isn’t simply a matter of learning what a trademark or patent is, and then learning how to leverage it to create wealth. To truly understand intellectual property, we need to under property —what it i...

This is Part 2 of The Economics of Getting (and Paying) Attention. If you haven’t listened to Part 1, I highly recommend starting there! In today’s episode, I explore the “right to publicity” and the value of celebrity as an economic condition. From there, we get into how audience-building businesses gain efficiency by vertically integrating media, ads, and offers and how micro-media creators ofte...

How comfortable are you with your own voice? How likely are you to say what's on your mind? Samara Bay, the author of the brand-new book Permission to Speak , is on a mission to change what power sounds like. I found Samara because one of my favorite podcasters was on Samara's show. I then binged her back catalog and started recommending her show to everyone I worked with. One of those folks then...

Attention is a scarce (and precious) resource. A gargantuan number of media outlets, advertisers, influencers, and brands vie for our attention every day. In turn, many of us (including me) are out there trying to attract attention, too. At the same time, the changing nature of the attention market (as well as larger macroeconomic shifts) creates some real weirdness. This is the first episode of a...

Toward the end of last week's episode, Kate Strathmann talked about the importance of understanding the "tiny economy" of your business. Digging into cashflow is a perfect way to do just that. When we start thinking about how money flows 3 dimensionally, we start to see new opportunities for investment, growth, and exercising our values. This episode originally aired in September 2021. Turns out,...

Sure, you can build a business or independent career made for one. But once you start thinking about making a bigger impact or scaling up to serve more customers, you start thinking about hiring help. And that makes a lot of people nervous! The idea that we might unintentionally create a toxic work environment or exploit the people we hire is enough to keep many from hiring help at all. While you...

The first time I heard you could charge $47 for a PDF less than 50 pages long, I was shocked. When I first encountered an online course selling for $2000, I about fell out of my chair. Of course, it wasn’t long until I, too, was selling information products for more than my first car cost.  Of course, I’m also an autodidact who benefits greatly from the proliferation of “free” information. And I’m...

Welcome to “The Economics of…”—a new series from What Works. In this series, I’ll be exploring how economic concepts and frameworks can help us run our businesses or manage our careers. Each episode will have some fundamental economics education and a case study to make each concept tangible.  Today, we’re tackling a pretty fundamental economic concept: opportunity cost. Opportunity cost helps us...

Well, it’s the first week of January. And whether you’re back to work or eking out a few more hours of unstructured liminal time, the arrival of New Year energy is imminent. You know what I mean by New Year energy—it’s that annual infusion of urgency, striving, and discipline that comes crashing down on our post-holiday mellowness. And if we’re not paying attention, that New Year energy will sweep...

If 2020 was the year people asked, “Can we really work from home?” and 2021 was the year people asked, “How might we return to the office?”, then 2022 was the year people started asking, “Why do we put up with this crap?” If like me, you’ve been working from home for many years, maybe this shift in discourse felt irrelevant. You’ve got your own gig; you make your own rules; you create your own wor...

This episode is decidedly different from what you've heard on What Works this year! If this happens to be your first foray into the show, maybe start with an earlier episode. But if you're into hearing my dear husband (and executive producer) chat about the ups and downs of this year, as well as some of our favorite things of the past 12 months, listen on! All of the books we mention in this episo...

Everyone experiences work stress from time to time. But some of us experience persistent work stress—even though we have more "tools" for reducing stress than ever before. If you've experienced work stress this year, there's a good chance you're thinking about how you can create the conditions for less stress in the new year. So today, I'm exploring how psychologists understand what kinds of work...

Over the last two years, I've transitioned from identifying as a business owner first to identifying as a writer and podcast first. In the first year—2021—I didn't realize that's what I was doing. But over the course of this year, it was quite intentional. Making that shift has allowed me to explore creative territory that I didn't think I could explore when my primary function was content  market...

The shelves are full of products that promise to fulfill your values: ecofriendly, independent, cooperative, woman-owned, Black-owned, sustainable, etc. And right on! Unfortunately, not every product that claims to align with your values really does. Often, values-marketing is more about maintaining the status quo than it is about doing things differently. That’s what I call “values hijacking.” Va...

What is a goal really? What purpose does a goal really serve? And is that purpose truly benefiting us, the goal-setters? These are big, messy questions. But they are far from abstract. Our answers to these questions—whether we know it or not—shape the way we work and live on a daily basis. This intermediary space—the space between philosophical questions and practical implications—is a place I hap...

Do we really have the same 24 hours as Beyoncé? Yes. And no. And… it’s complicated. There is a never-ending stream of advice about how to make the most of your time. And honestly? Most of it is just bullsh*t. That’s because there is no way to hack yourself or your work to produce more in less time if your emotions are fried, your energy is drained, or you’re dealing with the effects chronic illnes...

It’s been almost exactly 7 years since this podcast first launched as Profit. Power. Pursuit. Since then, we’ve produced 400 regular episodes (with some bonuses here and there). You know, I’ve written many more than 400 blog posts and emails. But we don’t number those—plus, they are published across different sites on the web, so I never have a handled on just how many times I’ve hit “publish.” 40...

Hustle. Grind. Boss up. Do more . Love them or hate them, these words are embedded into the ways we think about work and entrepreneurship. But as we’ve seen with the enormous growth of the r/anti-work subreddit and the panic about quiet quitting, more people than ever are thinking about different ways to go about building their lives, careers, and businesses. As we close out the Self-Help, LLC ser...

I wanted to include an episode on bodies in the Self-Help, LLC series because so much of our modern discourse around productivity, empowerment, entrepreneurship, and personal growth includes messages about our bodies. These messages might not be explicit, but the messages are there—and our brains pick them up loud and clear. Similarly, we might not realize that we’re sharing messages that insert t...