What Works | Small Business Podcast With Tara Mcmullin

It seems like every company today claims to be "on a mission" to change the world or improve our lives. They bill themselves as social movements more than profit-driven enterprises. It sounds nice. But how does it really function in the lives of workers? Do these missions meaningfully improve our communities?In this episode, I briefly explore the history of the corporate mission statement and then dive into a critique of the bestselling leadership book, Start with Why. You'll hear why the Start with Why ideology is so appealing, how it sets us up for disappointment, and whether it's actually an effective brand and marketing strategy. Plus, I leave off with an alternative take that flips this ideology on its head. Footnotes: Walmart’s Statement of Purpose Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, and Practices by Peter Drucker The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello Start with Why by Simon Sinek “Start with Why” TEDx talk by Simon Sinek The Problem with Work by Kathi Weeks Want more of

At least in my corner of social media, there are a lot of folks asking what makes a business ethical. Or, perhaps more accurately, there are a lot of folks answering that question. And there are probably even more folks worried that there’s something unethical about the way they run their businesses. They’re afraid they haven’t checked all the ethical business boxes. When Brooke Monaghan emailed me to ask whether I wanted to have a messy conversation about some of the messaging around ethical, equitable, or trauma-informed businesses, I jumped on the opportunity. You see, while this is certainly not true of all messaging on these topics, much of it unintentionally replicates problematic systems and social relations. Capitalism always appropriates that which tries to resist it.This episode explores a few different ways to think about the messages you’ve probably run into as you think about working or doing business differently. It’s not about calling anyone out or shaming anyone. It’s a look under the hood at

This Earth Month... buy more stuff?!We're about to be bombarded with messaging about corporate climate initiatives. We'll have the chance to buy merch to "support" the planet. And we'll be incentivized to spend more so that a small portion can be donated to organizations fighting climate change.As you might expect, it's all marketing. Earth Month and Earth Day seem to have become another excuse for a sale.But we miss a key issue in our fight for change if we stop at the "greedy corporation" critique. In this short dispatch, I compare Panasonic's #CreateTodayEnrichTomorrow campaign to Parks Project's mission to do good, and I advocate for a systems-level critique that can penetrate do-good messaging to get to the heart of the problem.Footnotes: Panasonic's ad: Green Impact (with Michael Phelps) Panasonic CES 2022 Top Things to See The Entrepreneurs Helping Save U.S. National Parks via Forbes Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher Want more of What Works? Subscribe FREE to the What Works newsletter at read.explore

"All parasites have value, Sibling Dex. Not to their hosts, perhaps, but you could say the same about a predator and a prey animal. They all give back—not to the individual but to the ecosystem at large." — Mosscap, in A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky ChambersFor the next few months, I'm focusing on some big projects and taking my foot off the gas of the podcast a bit. But since writing is how I think, my big projects spin off shorter pieces as I work through ideas. I'll share some of these shorter pieces here on the podcast and in the What Works newsletter as "dispatches" from my projects.Today's dispatch explores our feelings about those who don't work—and how those feelings can create obstacles to more sustainable choices about how we do work.Footnotes: Monk & Robot novellas by Becky Chambers Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook by James Boggs The Immunity to Change process via MindTools ★ S

I’ve called myself a recovering overachiever. I’m recovering not from the drive to excel but from the anxiety inherent to wondering if anything I achieve will ever be enough. And folks, it’s a struggle. The philosophy Byung-Chul Han describes this anxiety as central to contemporary society. He dubs our modern age the “Achievement Society” and argues that our plethora of potential projects and opportunities work to maximize our productivity. After all, what better way to inspire people to greater efficiency than by inspiring them to tackle #AllTheThings?This week, I talk with the host of The Anxious Achiever and author of the forthcoming book of the same name, Morra Aarons-Mele. We both the anxiety that the drive to achieve can create and how mental health conditions of all kinds impact the way we work.Footnotes: Pre-order The Anxious Achiever by Morra Aarons-Mele Listen to The Anxious Achiever podcast on your favorite app Find out more about Morra Aarons-Mele The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han Disciplin

We all have deep human needs—for belonging, for autonomy, for creative expression, for safety and security. But modern life can make it a real challenge to get those needs met in meaningful ways. Instead, we’re offered products with flashy marketing messages. Kitchen gadgets, social media platforms, clothing, personal care products, and many others offer to help us live our best lives. Financial and educational products promise a greater sense of security and autonomy. But do these commodities really satisfy our needs? Or do they merely stave off the hunger a little longer?In this final episode of The Economics Of, I explore how various economic concepts can help us understand why we buy the things we do, how our consumption relates to larger economics forces, and how our relationships are influenced by it all. I also talk with Mara Glatzel, the author of Needy, about how to better understand our own needs and create the conditions through which we can get those needs met.Footnotes: Get your copy of Needy by

What makes an idea valuable? What turns it into a product that can be bought, sold, or rented? Ideas turn into capital assets thanks to our system of intellectual property rights. But understanding IP isn’t simply a matter of learning what a trademark or patent is, and then learning how to leverage it to create wealth. To truly understand intellectual property, we need to under property—what it is and why it exists—first.In this episode, I explore the origins of our conception of private property, why we’ve coded intellectual property rights into law, and how one business owner—Jenny Blake—licenses her IP to companies to generate (relatively) passive income. Footnotes: Jenny Blake’s Free Time Jenny Blake’s Pivot Method Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow “Coding Land and Ideas | The Laws of Capitalism” featuring Katharina Pistor via the Institute for New Economic Thinking “Enclosure” on Wikipedia “Legal Evil” featuring Katharina Pistor via t

This is Part 2 of The Economics of Getting (and Paying) Attention. If you haven’t listened to Part 1, I highly recommend starting there!In today’s episode, I explore the “right to publicity” and the value of celebrity as an economic condition. From there, we get into how audience-building businesses gain efficiency by vertically integrating media, ads, and offers and how micro-media creators often leverage monopoly power to charge exorbitant prices.Footnotes: “New wellness price point just dropped” Conspiratuality Instagram post The World After Capital by Albert Wenger (available free) “The Audience Commodity and its Work” by Dallas Smythe “From Celebrity to Influencer” by Alison Hearn and Stephanie Schoenhoff Good Mythical Morning on YouTube Sporked “How Audience-Building is Different from Finding Clients” by Tara McMullin Vertical integration New episodes are published in essay form every Thursday at explorewhatworks.com. Get them delivered straight to your inbox, free of charge, by subscribing to What Wor

How comfortable are you with your own voice? How likely are you to say what's on your mind?Samara Bay, the author of the brand-new book Permission to Speak, is on a mission to change what power sounds like. I found Samara because one of my favorite podcasters was on Samara's show. I then binged her back catalog and started recommending her show to everyone I worked with. One of those folks then turned around and told Samara I had shouted her out! We've been fangirling together ever since. I first had Samara on the podcast during the Self-Help, LLC series (Episode 397: Bad Usage). But her book has just hit the shelves so I took that as an excuse to schedule another chat and bring it to you as a bonus "mini" episode. Enjoy!Footnotes: Buy Permission to Speak at Bookshop.org (or wherever you buy books!) Find out more about Samara Follow Samara on Instagram YellowHouse.Media ★ Support this podcast ★

Attention is a scarce (and precious) resource. A gargantuan number of media outlets, advertisers, influencers, and brands vie for our attention every day. In turn, many of us (including me) are out there trying to attract attention, too. At the same time, the changing nature of the attention market (as well as larger macroeconomic shifts) creates some real weirdness.This is the first episode of a two-part deep dive into the economics of paying attention, getting attention, and audiences as a commodity. In this episode, we’ll question how an influencer can charge $100k per year for coaching, examine how attention scarcity impacts the market, and explore the “principal product of the mass media.” This episode is for you if you ever spend time on social media, consume any kind of traditional media, buy things, or hope people will buy things for you. We’ll get into the weeds—but all for the purpose of getting very, very practical.Footnotes: “New wellness price point just dropped” Conspiratuality Instagram post “P

Toward the end of last week's episode, Kate Strathmann talked about the importance of understanding the "tiny economy" of your business. Digging into cashflow is a perfect way to do just that. When we start thinking about how money flows 3 dimensionally, we start to see new opportunities for investment, growth, and exercising our values.This episode originally aired in September 2021. Turns out, I needed an extra week to put together the economics of attention, and this piece followed up my conversation with Kate beautifully. I'll be back next week with an all-new episode!Footnotes: Cashflow Is A Feminist Issue (essay version) SBA report on credit market experiences among new business owners Report on the gender gap in business financing (CBS News) The Valuable Business of Maintenance Work Your Biggest Small Business Opportunity is Doing Less Decolonization is for Everyone: TEDx talk by Nikki Sanchez Written versions of each new episode are available at explorewhatworks.com every Thursday. Or, sign up for

Sure, you can build a business or independent career made for one. But once you start thinking about making a bigger impact or scaling up to serve more customers, you start thinking about hiring help. And that makes a lot of people nervous!The idea that we might unintentionally create a toxic work environment or exploit the people we hire is enough to keep many from hiring help at all. While you might expect this subject to get more of a psychological or sociological treatment, economics has a lot to teach us about creating equitable relationships at work, too.In this episode, Kate Strathmann joins me for a “conversation with no answers,” where we explore the possibilities of work relationships outside the traditional structures.Footnotes: More from Kate Strathmann and Wanderwell Consulting Previous episodes featuring Kate: 341, 298, 153 “Exploitation” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Episode 386: Extra Context — Getting Paid Surplus Labor in Radical Economics More about Guerilla Translation “Op

The first time I heard you could charge $47 for a PDF less than 50 pages long, I was shocked. When I first encountered an online course selling for $2000, I about fell out of my chair. Of course, it wasn’t long until I, too, was selling information products for more than my first car cost. Of course, I’m also an autodidact who benefits greatly from the proliferation of “free” information. And I’m a writer and podcaster who chooses to make 99% of what I make free to consume and use. I’ve benefited from both sides of the equation when it comes to the economics of information. And so this episode is a long time coming. It’s an exploration of the seeming paradox at the heart of how we value information. And this episode covers some broad territory: from the 1960s and Stewart Brand who originated the phrase “information wants to be free,” to how information gets priced, to a case study on two of my most popular forays into information products, to feminist economics and the erasure of care work.Footnotes: “The Rea

Welcome to “The Economics of…”—a new series from What Works. In this series, I’ll be exploring how economic concepts and frameworks can help us run our businesses or manage our careers. Each episode will have some fundamental economics education and a case study to make each concept tangible. Today, we’re tackling a pretty fundamental economic concept: opportunity cost. Opportunity cost helps us understand what we have to give up in order to get what we want. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, it is. But opportunity cost asks us to dig deep to discover the hidden costs of any decision—and that can be anything but straightforward.In this week’s case study, I talk with Tell Me A Story founder Hillary Rea about the opportunity cost of quitting social media (or rather, the opportunity cost of not doing all the things she has the time to do now!).Footnotes: Learn more about Hillary Rea and Tell Me A Story Economics in Two Lessons by John Quiggin “Unlimited Wants, Limited Resources” by Robert Skidelsky and the In

Well, it’s the first week of January. And whether you’re back to work or eking out a few more hours of unstructured liminal time, the arrival of New Year energy is imminent. You know what I mean by New Year energy—it’s that annual infusion of urgency, striving, and discipline that comes crashing down on our post-holiday mellowness. And if we’re not paying attention, that New Year energy will sweep us out to sea. What if this year, we embraced patience?  In this piece, I share how baking has helped me feel good about going slow and why that’s crucial to the way I work. Footnotes: You Belong by Sebene Selassie “The Human-Built World Is Not Built For Humans” by L. M. Sacasas Music available on Track Club by Marmoset  Essay versions of podcast episodes are released every Thursday on the website. Sign up for What Works Weekly to have them delivered to your inbox: explorewhatworks.com/weekly Start the new year with a radically different approach to goal-setting. Grab my new book, What Works: A Comprehensive Frame

If 2020 was the year people asked, “Can we really work from home?” and 2021 was the year people asked, “How might we return to the office?”, then 2022 was the year people started asking, “Why do we put up with this crap?”If like me, you’ve been working from home for many years, maybe this shift in discourse felt irrelevant. You’ve got your own gig; you make your own rules; you create your own working conditions. But I believe this larger shift transcends the divisions created by our tax codes—contractor, employee, sole proprietor, member of an LLC, and even employer. Whether we have obligations to an employer or rely on some of the world’s largest corporations for “free access” to the software products they create to harvest our personal data, we are workers.The way we think about work and workers is changing because work changed and is still changing.In this quick bonus episode, I lay out a vision for work in 2023 and beyond that defies the structures and assumptions that keep us focused on productivity and

This episode is decidedly different from what you've heard on What Works this year! If this happens to be your first foray into the show, maybe start with an earlier episode.But if you're into hearing my dear husband (and executive producer) chat about the ups and downs of this year, as well as some of our favorite things of the past 12 months, listen on!All of the books we mention in this episode are linked in my Bookshop store.Thanks for listening this year! Look for new episodes in 2023. I've got some great stuff planned.***Our work has evolved. Our way of working has not. Make 2023 the year you transform the way you work.I'm teaching a 3-part live workshop in January called Work In Practice. I'll guide you through rethinking the way you work from the ground up. We'll dismantle old mindsets and standard operating procedures. And then we'll rebuild a vision for work that's based on sustainability and satisfaction. Get all the details at WorkInPractice.Life!  ★ Support this podcast ★

Everyone experiences work stress from time to time. But some of us experience persistent work stress—even though we have more "tools" for reducing stress than ever before. If you've experienced work stress this year, there's a good chance you're thinking about how you can create the conditions for less stress in the new year. So today, I'm exploring how psychologists understand what kinds of work create more stress, what conditions reduce stress, and how we might intentionally design our work to be more sustainable.Note: In the last third of the episode, I use a swear word (commonly abbreviated B.S.) to reference a book & theory by David Graeber. It's the name of the theory... so I use it a lot. If you'd rather not hear it, stop the episode around 17:45. You'll still get most of the message!Footnotes: Creating Sustainable Work Systems: Developing Social Sustainability (2008) Chapter: "Sources of work intensity in organizations" by Armand Hatchuel (2005) Demand-Control Theory  Job Demand-Resource Model T

Over the last two years, I've transitioned from identifying as a business owner first to identifying as a writer and podcast first. In the first year—2021—I didn't realize that's what I was doing. But over the course of this year, it was quite intentional. Making that shift has allowed me to explore creative territory that I didn't think I could explore when my primary function was content marketing. In this week's episode, I talk with India Jackson about transitioning from content marketer to writer and podcaster. I share what it's meant for my work, my sense of identity, and my mental health. Plus, we talk about some of the difficult decisions I had to make on this journey.Tune in to India's show, Flaunt Your Fire, wherever you listen to What Works or at flauntyourfire.comFootnotes: Find out more about India Jackson and Flaunt Your Fire Find out more about Pause On The Play Hear India on EP 398: Good Bodies and EP 294: Offering Bespoke Services Jay Acunzo's LinkedIn post Grab your copy of my new book, Wh

The shelves are full of products that promise to fulfill your values: ecofriendly, independent, cooperative, woman-owned, Black-owned, sustainable, etc. And right on! Unfortunately, not every product that claims to align with your values really does. Often, values-marketing is more about maintaining the status quo than it is about doing things differently. That’s what I call “values hijacking.”Values hijacking occurs on the consumer level, but it also occurs on the cultural and political levels. Marketing, government policy, incentive structures, and cultural norms can all short circuit our critical thinking about what action to take.On today’s episode, you’ll hear about one my husband’s biggest soapbox issues, and then I’ll turn the mic over to Erica Courdae, host and founder of Pause on The Play, and we’ll go deep on how our values become hijacked by systems of power.Footnotes: More about Erica Courdae and Pause on the Play. POTP Episode 178: Values hijacking, capitalism, and systemic change with Tara McMu