Work For Humans
Too often business leaders are forced to choose between the needs of their company and the needs of their employees. It’s a lose/lose scenario leaving managers burned out and workers seeking other opportunities. At Work for Humans, we believe work can be designed differently. When you design work like products people love, your company wins. Work becomes irresistible, employees passionately buy into their roles every day, and your company takes measurable strides towards your vision.
Episodes
167 episodes
Work Should Be Fun, Not Just Productive | Bree Groff
Bree Groff’s new book, Today Was Fun, pushes the reset button on expectations about work. There is no reason work can’t be fun. About half of the things that make it un-fun are self-inflicted—we can just stop doing them. Take off the s...
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Season 1
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Episode 162
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1:07:19
The System Is the Problem: Rethinking Business at the Systems Level | Sandra Waddock
Sandra Waddock has spent decades exploring the systems beneath the systems, asking questions about purpose, story, and the deeper operating logic of business. Sandra argues that the current model focused on growth, control, and short-term profi...
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Season 1
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Episode 161
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1:03:18
Customer Centricity: Designing Your Business Around Your Best Customers | Peter Fader
As one of the world’s leading experts on customer centricity, Peter Fader noticed that many businesses were making a critical mistake: they were treating all customers the same. Peter argues that customer centricity means focusing on the custom...
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Season 1
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Episode 160
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1:16:19
Time Poverty at Work: What It Costs and How to Reclaim Your Time | Ashley Whillans
Ashley Whillans has spent years studying how time, money, and workplace culture shape our well-being. As a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School, she’s found that time poverty is more than a personal stressor—it’s a leadership challen...
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Season 1
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Episode 159
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1:13:41
Transform Your Team: Redesigning Work for Clarity and Value | Stephanie Reuss & Victoria Stuart
Stephanie Reuss and Victoria Stuart noticed that companies were making big decisions about jobs, teams, and strategy without really knowing what people were doing. So they built Beamible, a platform that maps work at the task level. It helps or...
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Season 1
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Episode 158
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1:06:20
The Map to Fearless Growth: Moving Beyond Fear at Work and in Life | Amon Woulfe
Most of us don’t realize how much fear shapes how we live and show up at work. But Amon Woulfe sees it clearly. As the founder of 432Hz, he has spent over a decade helping leaders understand the deeper fears that silently drive behavior, limit ...
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Season 1
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Episode 157
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1:06:02
Is Work Worth It? A Philosopher on Why We Work | Michael Cholbi
Michael Cholbi approaches work not just as a function of economics or management but as a deep philosophical question. He brings a rare lens to the topic, one that connects ancient wisdom, contemporary ethics, and the day-to-day experience of w...
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Season 1
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Episode 156
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1:05:12
Metacognition: The New Essential Skill for an AI World | Anthea Roberts
Anthea Roberts began her career in international law. But after years of studying global conflict and power, she realized the real problem wasn’t policy—it was perspective. People weren’t just disagreeing on solutions; they weren’t even seeing ...
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Season 1
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Episode 155
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1:09:31
How to Design the Future On Purpose | Lisa Kay Solomon
Lisa Kay Solomon sees design everywhere—not just in products, but in conversations, strategies, systems, and futures. As a futurist and strategist, she has spent her career helping leaders and organizations think long-term, navigate uncertainty...
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Season 1
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Episode 154
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1:01:14
Inside Nubank’s Bold Experiment: HR as a Product | Suzana Kubric & Jessica Matsumoto
Nubank is the largest digital bank outside of Asia and one of the fastest-growing companies globally, recently surpassing 119 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Much of that growth has been fueled by an obsessive focus on cu...
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Season 1
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Episode 153
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1:07:36
How Platforms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work | Andrei Hagiu
If work is a product, and employees are customers of that product, then every company is a multi-sided business, one that must serve both consumers and workers. According to platform economist Andrei Hagiu, how companies design that experience,...
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Season 1
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Episode 154
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59:56
Built on Audacity: How to Be Bold at Work and Take Worth-It Risks | Anne Marie Anderson
At its best, work is co-created. It’s not something companies hand out—it’s something employees help build by showing up fully and taking risks. But that kind of courage requires something we don’t talk about enough: audacity. Anne Marie Anders...
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Season 1
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Episode 153
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1:00:45
The Surprising Power of Humility at Work | Simon Moss
When we talk about what makes a great leader, we tend to focus on confidence, decisiveness, and maybe even charisma. Less often do we talk about humility. And yet, humility, according to psychologist Dr. Simon Moss, may be the trait that unlock...
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Season 1
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Episode 152
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1:06:43
Listening Beyond Words: How to Really Hear People at Work | Oscar Trimboli
Oscar Trimboli has spent his life helping people hear what’s not being said. As a listening expert and advisor to some of the world’s largest companies, he’s discovered a surprising truth: most of us only catch a fraction of what’s being commun...
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Season 1
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Episode 151
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1:05:13
How Employee Ownership Could Save America’s Democracy | Joseph Blasi
What do the drafters of the U.S. Constitution, 19th-century industrialists, and a modern defense contractor have in common? According to economic sociologist Joseph Blasi, they all believed in one powerful idea: that democracy itself depends on...
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Season 1
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Episode 150
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1:09:48
The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works | John Truby Replay
From an early age, John Truby knew that stories are not just something that happens on a page. Story is all around us. It structures how we interpret events, and even how we decide how to live. For John, story forms explain the way the wo...
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Season 1
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1:07:29
How to Build an Economy That Works for Everyone | Nick Romeo
As a journalist, Nick Romeo has interviewed people doing remarkable things, from running worker-owned companies to redesigning gig work as public infrastructure. These experiences shaped his new book, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Ec...
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Season 1
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Episode 149
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1:06:50
The Progressive Work Ethic: What We Lost and How to Win It Back | Elizabeth Anderson
For centuries, the work ethic was used to justify inequality, but it also fueled a powerful movement for justice. In the final part of this series, Elizabeth Anderson and Dart Lindsley explore the progressive work ethic, a vision of labor roote...
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Season 1
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Episode 148
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1:17:43
Work Ethic's Dark Turn: The War on the Poor | Elizabeth Anderson
The work ethic began as a religious principle before evolving into an economic theory. But by the 18th and 19th centuries, it had taken on a new role: a justification for social inequality. Thinkers like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill saw work...
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Season 1
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Episode 147
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53:10
How Work Became a Moral Duty: The Origins of the Modern Work Ethic | Elizabeth Anderson
Elizabeth Anderson is one of today’s leading political philosophers and has spent years studying how the work ethic shapes our economy, society, and politics. In her latest book, Hijacked, she explores how hard work, a principle origin...
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Season 1
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Episode 146
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57:27
Designing Work Like a Subscription Product: How to Retain Top Talent | Luke O’Mahoney
Luke O’Mahoney is one of the leaders of the movement to reframe work as a product that every company sells to employees. In particular, Luke has gone deep into the implications of recognizing work as a subscription product, and brings ...
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Season 1
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Episode 145
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1:14:01
Who Owns the Experience of Work? Managers as Product Managers | Alex Komoroske
This is the third in a series of episodes with world-leading product management experts about how we might build product management best practices into team leadership. Alex Komoroske spent years as either a Product Manager or...
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Season 1
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Episode 144
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57:07
Beyond Accommodations: How Personalization at Work Benefits Everyone | Charlotte Dales
Most employees need some form of support to thrive at work, whether it’s flexible hours to care for a loved one, mental health resources, or a quieter space to focus. But asking for help can feel risky. That silence holds people back and costs ...
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Season 1
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Episode 143
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53:49
The California Experiment: Can Government Use Community Service to Fix Work and Heal Society? | Josh Fryday
When Josh Fryday’s wife was evacuated from Japan after the 2011 Japan disaster, he stayed behind. As a Navy officer, he joined Operation Tomodachi, one of the largest humanitarian relief efforts in history. Working alongside people who thought ...
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Season 1
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Episode 142
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55:06
Your Company's Superpower: How Dyslexic Thinkers Are Shaping the Future | Kate Griggs
At eight years old, Kate Griggs sat in a parent-teacher meeting and heard the words, “She’s not very bright.” The school had already written her off. But she wasn’t struggling because she lacked intelligence. She was struggling because the syst...
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Season 1
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Episode 141
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1:01:33