What Works helps you make sense of work, business, and leadership in the 21st-century economy. Tara McMullin uses philosophy, media theory, social science, and systems thinking to explore how to work (and live) better in the digital age.
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Rethink. Rework. Reimagine.
How do you get others to care about what you care about? You have to care about what they care about.
The Latest
Culture & Media
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Systems & Society
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Critical Thinking
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Business & Entrepreneurship
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Management & Productivity
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Data & Metrics
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Future of Work
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Culture & Media ☞ Systems & Society ☞ Critical Thinking ☞ Business & Entrepreneurship ☞ Management & Productivity ☞ Data & Metrics ☞ Future of Work ☞
Tara McMullin is a writer, podcaster, and critic who studies emerging forms of work and identity in the 21st-century economy. She’s also a respected business strategist and educator who prioritizes fundamentals over flashy tactics, nuanced analysis over easy answers, and sustainability over profit for profit’s sake.
Bringing a rigorous critique of conventional wisdom to topics like success and productivity, she melds conceptual curiosity with practical application. Her work has been featured in Fast Company, Quartz, and The Muse.
Featured Essays & Episodes
Temporal Bandwidth
How do you think about the future in a world that seems to reward short-term thinking? Reach back into history, reacquaint yourself with the past, and expand your sense of Now.
Whether in work, business, or leadership, a more capacious temporal bandwidth offers us a more stable footing.
How do you get others to care about what you care about? You have to care about what they care about.
Why do ambitious and unconventional missions so often erode into something more like the status quo?
How HBO’s The Pitt can help us rethink busyness—and find ways to navigate it with care and grace
Crosswords, coffeeshops, and untangling life’s challenges by rethinking the problems we think we have.
How do you get others to care about what you care about? You have to care about what they care about.
If competence porn is media that titillates by showing highly skilled people doing their thing, then what could an erotics of competence look like?
Taking time to reread, rewatch, or relisten can be taking time to rediscover yourself.
What really happens when we ask for or give support to the creators we love?
What happens when we confuse a chatbot for a search engine? And why does it matter?
How HBO’s The Pitt can help us rethink busyness—and find ways to navigate it with care and grace
How I use the “man behind the curtain” framework, the process of normalization, and the theory of value capture to make sense of chaos.
To solve intractable challenges—big and small—we need systems and structures that catalyze our imaginations and urge us to realize higher values.
That voice in your head that insists on doing more, doing it faster, and doing it more efficiently isn’t really your voice at all. Meet the Tiny Puritan, Tiny Manager, and Tiny Entrepreneur.
Thoughts on college prep, midlife, and as-of-yet-uninvented careers.
The federal bureaucracy is going through a “reduction in force.” What does that have to do with you and your work? Quiet a lot, actually.
To break the Validation Spiral, we have to change the structure of the system.
Standardization has its place—but should be everywhere?