Meaning At Work

There is an element of the mundane in every job. Consider the cabin crew who work on long-haul flights. The majority of their work is the repetitive, and strenuous task of wheeling trolleys full of food and drink down narrow aircraft aisles while repeating the same script, ‘chicken or beef’, to the three hundred passengers…

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Lucky By Design

The cathedral was packed. More than a thousand people arrived on a warm Tuesday morning to attend cafe owner, Sisto Malaspina’s funeral. Many more stood outside—others watched the service at home on their laptops or giant screens in Melbourne’s Federation Square. We were there, not to mourn Sisto’s death, but to celebrate how he had…

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The Tyranny Of Checking

There are jobs, and there is work that relies on the professionals checking. We want our surgeons, pilots and firefighters to check and double check. That isn’t the kind of checking most of us do now. It seems that we’ve unintentionally made a career out of checking. We spend many hours a day checking notifications,…

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Better Than Before

Our plumber, Evan, spends every minute of his day solving problems. There are no breaks to check email or to see who’s commented on Facebook. He’s too busy working things out, wondering where the source of the problem is or deciding how he might make the repair more robust than what was originally installed. Evan…

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Copy And Paste

If you can copy and paste the same rejection and send it to every candidate is it worth responding? If you can replicate your competitor’s innovations why bother to invest in your own ideas? If you can multitask while you’re on a call to a customer was the call worth making? If you can ignore…

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The Work And Reward

The customer is not there when the flowers he ordered to be delivered on a special birthday are sent too early without his handwritten greeting—which is still paperclipped to the order book. The florist gets on with processing the rush of early morning deliveries. It’s one of those days when she’s just too busy to…

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