A close-reading exercise: the word “please.” The two offices below are hypothetical. They are not descriptions of Lagos, London, or any other city’s workplace culture. “Please” can make a request gentler without telling the reader whether the work is optional. A...
Open whatever your company uses to run interviews â Greenhouse, Lever, a shared doc with a logo two rebrands out of date â and find the interview scorecard. It is a modest grid. Rows for technical skills, for communication, for problem-solving,...
How the Internal Memo Became an Organizational Artifact — and What It Reveals About Who Actually Decides A London financial services firm I’ll call Meridian Capital. Tuesday morning, March. A restructuring memo lands in 2,400 inboxes. Subject line: Organizational Update —...
I once watched a competent program manager at a London technology firm get labeled ‘bureaucratic’ for the sin of writing things down. She had started circulating brief decision logs after project meetings — nothing elaborate, just what was discussed, what was...
Psychological safety is the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking: that you can raise a concern, admit a mistake, or challenge a plan without being humiliated, sidelined, or punished. The term entered mainstream management vocabulary through Amy...
Workplace culture gets described as the personality of an organization: the shared assumptions, values, rituals, and unspoken rules that shape how people actually behave when no one is watching. In the material culture of work, those assumptions become visible through objects,...
I once sat in a London office watching a director present a ‘strategic transformation narrative’ to 200 employees. The document ran 47 pages. The phrase ‘world-class’ appeared eleven times, ‘journey’ nine, ‘north star’ four. By page 14, the transformation’s rationale had...
Busyness has quietly become a form of currency in modern organizations. It isn’t just a description of workload. It signals importance, commitment, belonging. Workplace ethnographers often call this performative busyness or status signaling through time use. It sits alongside related ideas...
The Hidden Currency of Overwork: How Busyness Became a Status Symbol in Modern Organizations Walk through any open-plan office, scroll LinkedIn for five minutes, or eavesdrop on a coffee-shop conversation, and you’ll hear it: “I’m swamped.” “Totally slammed.” “Drowning.” It’s rarely...
I once sat in the London headquarters of a financial services firm where the CEO opened an all-hands meeting with a slide titled “Our Next Chapter.” The slide had been produced by an external branding agency. The script had been workshopped...