The Weekly Pulse is my content curation and my highlights from readings, books, podcasts, insights, and everything I discovered during the week.
So, let’s go with some discoveries from the week!
#1 – How Brands Can Enter the Metaverse
#2 – Unleashing the Power of Communication in Agile Transformations
#3 – Ten Habits to Boost Your Happiness
#4 – Virtual Collaboration Won’t Be the Death of Creativity
#5 – Our Work-from-Anywhere Future
How Brands Can Enter the Metaverse
Source: Harvard Business Review
Author: Janet Balis
Summary: How should brands take their first steps into the metaverse? For that matter, what even is the metaverse? While the idea might feel like a novelty right now, there’s arguably huge potential for brands — if they can figure out where to start. New technology always requires a curious approach, but brands should follow the right guideline.
3 Highlights:
“… With post-Covid hybrid or remote working environments, many of these more creative virtual business experiences are likely to become even more relevant to how companies connect to their people and to their customers…“
“… Brands should always be in a test-and-learn mode, and the digital landscape, in particular, requires intellectual curiosity...”
“… See whether the metaverse gives you opportunities as a company to not only try new things but also to accelerate your purpose or long-term goals like sustainability, which is well suited to many applications of the metaverse…”
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Unleashing the Power of Communication in Agile Transformations
Source: McKinsey
Author: Christopher Handscomb, David Honigmann and Mrinalini Reddy
Summary: More organizations are seeking to become “agile” — a term that began in software development but now encompasses many efforts to work faster and more effectively in teams built around customers rather than silos. But the communications around agile transformations are different from in other transformations.
3 Highlights:
“… Keeping a checklist of to-do items doesn’t just make me productive, it makes me happier. When my checklist for the day is complete, I don’t feel pressured to continue working…“
“… Taking time to dissect your thoughts on paper helps you feel better. Becoming happier means reducing the time you spend in slumps. Writing cuts off slumps by giving you more control over your thinking…”
“… Cut out activities that aren’t valuable or entertaining, but don’t scrap every source of high entertainment. Separate the activities you really enjoy from those that are only mediocre…”
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Ten Habits to Boost Your Happiness
Source: Scott Young Blog
Author: Scott Young
Summary: Good habits can make you more effective. Great habits will make you happier. Scott recently has been trying to collect habits that make him appreciate life more. Finding the habits that make you more productive isn’t that hard, but placing the right rituals that impact your happiness is more difficult.
3 Highlights:
“… The overall story is about preparation the night before because of the expectation of morning immobility, then the release of power and the start of the day, then the fact that this goes on every morning…“
“… Cut out the noise for a period of time. This may seem contradictory to “filling your day with activity” but it’s not. The absence of activity usually results in noise: television, web surfing, and other distractions. Silence requires you will forgo the noise and simply think. Not easy to do in a busy world, but it can keep you sane…”
“… Cut out activities that aren’t valuable or entertaining, but don’t scrap every source of high entertainment. Separate the activities you really enjoy from those that are only mediocre. That way you can fully enjoy them without feeling guilty about an imposing to-do list…”
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Virtual Collaboration Won’t Be the Death of Creativity
Source: MIT Sloan Management Review
Author: Leigh Thompson
Summary: The COVID-19 pandemic put professionals in a box — a virtual one. Overnight, managers and their teams shifted from in-person brainstorming and ideation sessions to those taking place electronically via Zoom, WebEx, and other tools. If virtual collaboration doesn’t kill creativity — and can actually boost it — how can teams maximize that upside?
3 Highlights:
“… Individuals are more creative than groups. When I ask business leaders in executive workshops who are more creative, groups or individuals, almost no one chooses individuals. In fact, most studies have found that “per capita” creativity declines precipitously as group size increases...“
“… It’s true that virtual collaborators are often fully visible to one another and can’t “hide” behind text-only forms of communication like email. However, the disinhibition effect still exerts influence, since many of the politeness rituals of in-person communication, such as vocalizing agreement and engaging in small talk, are no longer present…”
“… None of this is to suggest that virtual communication is a cure-all for addressing creative-collaboration issues, or that managers and their teams should aim to work in their own “lighthouses” whenever possible, shunning face-to-face contact. However, virtual collaboration does provide benefits that many of us didn’t realize or pursue in pre-COVID-19 times. Our creative output may be all the better for it…”
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Our Work-from-Anywhere Future
Source: Harvard Business Review
Author: Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury
Summary: We learned that a great many of us don’t in fact need to be colocated with colleagues on-site to do our jobs. Individuals, teams, and the entire workforce, can perform well while being entirely distributed—and they have. So now we face new questions: Are all-remote or majority-remote organizations the future of knowledge work? Is work from anywhere here to stay?
3 Highlights:
“… Another solution to the socialization problem is to host “temporary colocation events,” inviting all workers to spend a few days with colleagues in person…“
“… The office—with its meeting rooms and break areas and opportunities for both formal and informal interaction—has been a way of life for so long that it’s hard to imagine getting rid of it…”
“… In interviews with female employees at BRAC, I learned that women whose careers were previously limited by cultural taboos against traveling to remote places or delegating housework had been helped by working from anywhere.…”
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- Weekly Pulse by William Meller | Special Edition, 2023
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