😜 It doesn't have to be crazy at work 🏢

Seven Things — #46 — 18 February 2021

👋 Howdy and welcome to the museum of curiosities that is this newsletter.

There are certain stereotypes about the different kinds of companies out there. There’s the small and nimble startup bursting with energy, innovation, agility, where colleagues are ‘in the trenches’ and work as if there’s no tomorrow, bending the rules when necessary to change the world. On the other end of the scale, you get the corporate behemoth with all its power and influence, a huge staff representing cogs in a machine designed to grow shareholder value. In between, you’d find agencies and consultancies, tech companies, SMEs and more, each with their own stereotypes attached to them.

Throughout my career, I made it my goal to spend some time with each of these types to learn from them, sometimes transferring what worked in one context to another. In doing so, it occurred to me that these stereotypes are just that, and I’ve come across companies and people that did things differently with ‘radical’ thoughts such as these: Maybe entrepreneurs don’t have to be fresh-faced PhD dropouts working 100 hour weeks out of a garage each day of the week. Maybe large corporates don’t inherently demand legal and regulatory teams stifling every attempt of innovating.

The past year has undoubtedly shaken up our ideas of what it means to work or run a company. Looking beyond the question of whether to work remotely or from an office down the line, there are more ‘radical ideas’ to explore opportunities in shaking up existing stereotypes and default operating models. These were the things I was especially curious about lately:

• Work: It doesn't have to be crazy at workbook (Book), summed up by my (still ongoing) Twitter thread

• Work: Goodbye bureaucracy, hello common sense (Podcast)

• Design/Trends: Report on The State of Design in 2021 (Blog)

• Meta-Trends: Top 19 Overlapping Cultural Trends From 30+ Reports (Blog)

• Typography/Tools: Type scale (Web-app) helps you decide on font settings for your design system

• Art/Food: Happy Pancake Day with incredible Pancake art (Video)

• Random internet: A snail with a shell of iron that walks on vulcanos

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💌 Thank you for being curious with me.

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Disclaimer: Any opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any current or previous employers.