Happy Friday! We’ve compiled our favorite articles and essays from the last month and beyond for you to browse and enjoy this weekend.
This summer, NPR shared a print segment about the work lives of oil rig workers from their podcast Invisibilia. In 1997, Shell began construction on “the world’s deepest offshore well,” a 48-story deepwater platform called Ursa. The unprecedented project challenged all notions of how the rig’s workers would plan and build safely. “Even though the men faced the risk of death every day,” one oil worker said, “they never showed any vulnerability. This made the work even more perilous, because the men didn’t ask for help, didn’t admit if they weren’t up to a certain job.”
Can being more vulnerable lead to a safer work environment?
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In a recent Wall Street Journal essay adapted from his new biography of Leonardo da Vinci, author Walter Isaacson explores the life and mind of the ultimate Renaissance Man. How did Leonardo’s ambitious visions become realities? What made him so imaginative and prescient that people still debate his art and craft ball bearings based on his original design? What can we learn from the habits of a creative genius?
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Happy Friday! As usual, we’ve compiled our favorite articles and essays from the last month for you to browse and enjoy this weekend.
Harvard Business Review launched a fantastic series at the end of September focused on the epidemic of loneliness in the workplace. Former United States Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy writes in the cover story:
“Even working at an office doesn’t guarantee meaningful connections: People sit in an office full of coworkers, even in open-plan workspaces, but everyone is staring at a computer or attending task-oriented meetings where opportunities to connect on a human level are scarce. Happy hours, coffee breaks, and team-building exercises are designed to build connections between colleagues, but do they really help people develop deep relationships?”
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In the Harvard Business Review, novelist and advisor to technology entrepreneurs and investors Eliot Peper argues that business leaders should be reading science fiction – and shows us why “companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple have brought in science fiction writers as consultants.” What makes a genre that we so often associate with futuristic worlds or spaceships so useful to someone in the C-suite?
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At first, some are skeptical of the role literature can play in corporate settings. After all, a novel (or short story or play) can take a long time to make even a single point about human experience. In Hamlet, for example, Shakespeare expends 30,000 words to provide a window on the pitfalls of decision-making. Wouldn’t a short article (or even a PowerPoint presentation) more efficiently summarize the salient factors that produce good or bad decisions for work teams? But what might we miss?
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On some level, everyone thinks they know what it means to listen. You pay attention (at least a little). You allow other people to speak. You don’t interrupt. When they finish, you know what they said. Most of us acknowledge that it is important to listen – if only to be polite. But listening can be much more than that when it goes beyond just allowing others to speak and moves toward what the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer called the “miracle of understanding.” What happens to our own ideas and ways of thinking when we listen for understanding?
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My first college-level literature class was called “Writing the Essay,” a required seminar meant to teach the basics of crafting an argument rooted in textual evidence. We would write three essays over the course of the class in response to novels, essays and plays we read. I entered the seminar with a chip on my shoulder. I’d always been a bookworm; I knew how to read closely, and I was confident in my writing. It’d be an easy A.
Oh, how wrong I was.
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