Effective

Preface

I wrote this book to answer the number one question people asked me after my first book, Work Here Now.

All too often, I’d give a talk on some of its themes around broken work, or I’d meet someone in real life who’d read it, and they’d say something like:

Okay, Melissa, I get it and I agree: the world of work is kind of a mess these days, and based on what you wrote I understand how and why that’s happening.

But tell me: knowing all of that, what should I do differently?

It’s a poignant question. Work goes through historical cycles of being more and less difficult, and hoo boy, is the old work roller coaster in a dip right now. Not since the early Industrial Revolution, I’d argue, have we seen such crummy working conditions. The specifics have changed—swap out dingy, flammable factories for endless Zoom calls and chat pings—but in the AI age we’re really in a pickle, much as we were when we first started industrialized production. It’s rough out there.

And what’s worse is that workforce/workplace issues are, almost by definition, multi-owner problems. If your day is tricky, it’s often the fault of your direct boss, whoever invented the pop-up notification, and dozens of people in between. No one holds the strings of the whole muddle.

So people are, naturally, interested in what they can control. I get that, and I agree!

As a long-time people consultant, I wanted, passionately, to be helpful to this question of what individuals can do. But I was also sensitive to some ...