The Working Life

A wide-ranging look at the allure and changing significance of work.With seductions, misunderstandings, and misinformation everywhere, this immensely readable book calls for a new contract--with ourselves. Drawing from history, mythology, literature, pop culture, and practical experience, Ciulla probes the many meanings of work or its meaninglessness and asks: Why are so many of us letting work take over our lives and trying to live in what little time is left? What has happened to the old, unspoken contract between worker and employer? Why are young people not being disloyal when they regularly consider job-changing? Employers can't promise as much to workers as before. Is that because they promise so much to stockholders? Why are there mass layoffs and "downsizing" in a time of unequaled corporate prosperity? And why are the most common lies in business about satisfactory employee performance? The traditional contract between employers and employees is over. This thoughtful and provocative study shows how to replace it by the one we make with ourselves.

Winner of the Australian Career Book of the Year Award 2022 (RSA Oceania) This Working Life is the book you need to navigate your career with courage, openness and a good dose of laughter in uncertain times. Springing off the success of her ABC podcast, Lisa Leong, together with journalist Monique Ross, is bringing a deep curiosity to the world of work. You spend most of your waking life working – a jaw-dropping 90,000 hours for the average person. You deserve to feel joy during that time. But how? This Working Life empowers you to experiment in the lab of life. You’ll reflect on your highs and lows, harness your superpowers and pinpoint your guiding values. You’ll learn the importance of empathy as you craft a job or curate a portfolio career that can grow with you. You’ll unlock the power of rituals, community and self-care, and build resilience that will help you face life’s inevitable curveballs. Lisa and Monique get personal, sharing hard-won learnings from their own lives, along with insights from world-leading thinkers like Dorie Clark, Jeremy Utley and Dan Klein, and practical activities to help you take action. No matter where you are, or where you want to be, This Working Life will help you get there.

The empowering new 3-step guide to combining work and life strategically, creatively, and successfully. The message is simple: Work doesn't have to be all or nothing. There are countless combinations of balancing work and life between these extremes. People can establish boundaries and change the way work fits into their lives, in a way that's good for employees and employers. Work+Life provides the tools to adjust the "work" portion of life in order to have more time and/or energy for personal responsibilities and interests. Even a small change can make a big difference. Industry expert Cali Yost has been working with people on all sides of the issue: employees and managers at companies such as General Electric/NBC, Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceuticals, and Ernst & Young, and EAPs nationwide that help companies help their employees. They all say the same thing--Work+Life is the missing piece of the puzzle, providing readers with invaluable work life balance tips and putting them on the cutting edge of the workplace revolution.

A job is never just a job. It is always connected to a deep and invisible process of finding meaning in life through work. In Thomas Moore’s groundbreaking book Care of the Soul, he wrote of “the great malady of the twentieth century…the loss of soul.” That bestselling work taught readers ways to cultivate depth, genuineness, and soulfulness in their everyday lives, and became a beloved classic. Now, in A Life’s Work, Moore turns to an aspect of our lives that looms large in our self-regard, an aspect by which we may even define ourselves—our work. The workplace, Moore knows, is a laboratory where matters of soul are worked out. A Life’s Work is about finding the right job, yes, and it is also about uncovering and becoming the person you were meant to be. Moore reveals the quest to find a life’s work in all its depth and mystery. All jobs, large and small, long-term and temporary, he writes, contribute to your life’s work. A particular job may be important because of the emotional rewards it offers or for the money. But beneath the surface, your labors are shaping your destiny for better or worse. If you ignore the deeper issues, you may not know the nature of your calling, and if you don’t do work that connects with your deep soul, you may always be dissatisfied, not only in your choice of work but in all other areas of life. Moore explores the often difficult process—the obstacles, blocks, and hardships of our own making—that we go through on our way to discovering our purpose, and reveals the joy that is our reward. He teaches us patience, models the necessary powers of reflection, and gives us the courage to keep going. A Life’s Work is a beautiful rumination, realistic and poignant, and a comforting and exhilarating guide to one of life’s biggest dilemmas and one of its greatest opportunities.

From the authors of the #1 New York Times bestseller Designing Your Life comes a revised, fully up-to-date edition of Designing Your New Work Life, a timely, urgently needed book that shows us how to transform our new uncharted work life into a meaningful dream job or company. With practical, useful tools, tips, and design ideas that show us how to navigate disruption (global, regional, or personal) and create new possibilities for our post-COVID work world and beyond. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans successfully taught graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford University and readers of their best-selling book, Designing Your Life ("The prototype for a happy life." —Brian Lehrer, NPR), that designers don't analyze, worry, think, complain their way forward; they build their way forward. And now more than ever, we all need creative and adaptable tools to cope with the chaos caused by COVID-19. In Designing Your New Work Life, Burnett and Evans show us how design thinking can transform our present job, and how it can improve our experience of work in times of disruption. All disruption is personal, write Burnett and Evans, as with the life-altering global pandemic we are living through now. Designing Your New Work Life makes clear that disruption is the new normal, that it is here to stay and that it is accelerating. And in the book's new chapters, Burnett and Evans show us step by step, how to design our way through disruption and how to stay ahead of it—and thrive. Burnett and Evans's Disruption Design offers us a radical new concept that makes use of the designer mindsets: Curiosity, Reframing, Radical collaboration, Awareness, Bias to action, Storytelling, to find our way through these unchartered times. In Designing Your New Work Life, Burnett and Evans show us, with tools, tips, and design ideas, how we can make new possibilities available even when our lives have been disrupted (be it globally, regionally, or personally), giving us the tools to enjoy the present moment and allowing us to begin to prototype our possible future.

Working life has been the subject of great change in recent years with contemporary conditions generally providing increased opportunities and autonomy for individuals. But these benefits can coincide with greater demands and responsibilities, increasing the pressure to work outside of traditional working hours and so creating conflict between work and family life. This book contributes towards our understanding of contemporary working life, considering how recent changes have affected the work climates, attitudes and well-being of individuals. Combining traditional theoretical frameworks with innovative research, it discusses both the positive and negative effects contemporary working life has on organizations and employees. International experts in the fields of work and organizational psychology present strategies to prevent negative working conditions and help individuals achieve a healthy work-life balance.

The prescriptive follow-up to the New York Times bestseller The Dream Manager. One of the major issues in our lives today is work-life balance. Everyone wants it; no one has it. But Matthew Kelly believes that work- life balance was a mistake from the start. Because we don't really want balance. We want satisfaction. Kelly lays out the system he uses with his clients, his team, and himself to find deep, long-term satisfaction both personally and professionally. He introduces us to the three philosophies of our age that are dragging us down. He shows us how to cultivate the energy that will give us enough battery power for everything we need and want to do. And finally, in five clear steps, he shows us how to use his Personal & Professional Satisfaction System to establish and honor our biggest priorities, even if we spend a lot more time on some of the lesser ones.

How does the politics of working life shape modern organizations? Is our desire for meaningful, secure work increasingly at odds with corporate behaviour in a globalized economy? Does the rise of performance management culture represent an intensification of work, or create opportunities for the freewheeling individual career? This timely and engaging book, by leading authorities in the field, adopts the standpoint of the 'questioning observer'. It is for those who need an informed account of work that is accessible without being superficial. The book is unique in its multi-dimensional approach, weaving together analysis of individual work experience, political processes in organizations, and the wider context of the social structuring of markets. The book identifies central questions about working experience and answers them in a direct and lively manner. It has a strong analytical foundation based on a political economy framework, giving particular weight to the contradictory character of organizations. These contradictions turn on the competing demands placed on organizations and the different political projects of groups within them. This perspective integrates the chapters, and permits numerous scholarly debates to be addressed - including those on identity projects, gender and work, power and participation, escalation in decision-making, and the meaning of corporate social responsibility. This book is suitable for undergraduate and graduate classes in Organizational Behaviour, Business Strategy and the Sociology of Work and Employment. It will also appeal to the general reader interested in grappling with the complexity of the changing environment of work.