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11 ways the World Cup can help you survive.
An adjustment to the Information-Action Ratio.
There’s a lot of stuff out there along the lines, “Can you guess the hidden meaning behind every World Cup kit?” and it’s hard to know how to feel about it.
On the one hand, it’s an eyesore and a regrettable reminder of how our brains have been turned to mush. On the other, there really is a lot to learn from a coming together of 48 rabid fanbases from the four corners and the Lord only knows how many nations, cultures and languages they represent. I know a straight shooter respected on all sides who will tell you without a hint of irony that this World Cup is the most important geopolitical event in history, and the thing it’s replacing at the top of the charts is the last one.
The 1001 plays it straight, of course, because you don’t need clickbait or SEO bros when huge-if-true claims like "The World Cup is a random number generator" and "Everything is a tradeoff" are, in fact, true. The thing about kit-based knowledge - and I say this as someone who, at the behest of Grandad, could once name the home ground of all 92 clubs in the Football League - is there’s very little you, someone in the waning days of their career with a laptop job, can do with it, other than score points at The Parrot’s Beak quiz on a cold, rainy Tuesday night in Sheffield.
The real quiz is extending as many careers and lives as possible long enough to see the next World Cup. For that, we need to adjust the Information-Action Ratio a little away from titillating trivia and toward generalizable concepts that can be deployed day in day out at the desk in mum and dad’s basement.
I wrote a list of some of the things football commentators say which sound silly out of context yet will make you better at understanding contemporary workplace dynamics and communicating about them with your colleagues (human or otherwise).
You can bet your bottom dollar "11 ways the World Cup can help you survive" is unlike any listicle you've ever read.
From The 1001, an EA sports blog.
“Chief of Staff” models from a long-time Chief of Staff
I have served in Chief of Staff or CoS-like roles to three leaders of CEA (Zach, Ben and Max), and before joining CEA I was CoS to a member of the UK House of Lords. I wrote up some quick notes on how I think about such roles for some colleagues, and one of them suggested they might be useful to other Forum readers. So here you go:
Chief of Staff means many things to different people in different contexts, but the core of it in my mind is that many executive roles are too big to be done by one person (even allowing for a wider Executive or Leadership team, delegation to department leads, etc). Having (some parts of) the role split/shared between the principal and at least one other person increases the capacity and continuity of the exec function.
Broadly, I think of there being two ways to divide up these responsibilities (using CEO and CoS as stand-ins, but the same applies to other principal/deputy duos regardless of titles):
Some things to note about these approaches: