Industry News

I’ve linked to and written about the importance of 1:1 meetings before, and here’s another reminder:

The long game of building a thriving team is in showing up for your people week after week, and intentionally holding that space. You will not always see the value in each 1:1 right away. Your people might need help, too, to understand how to use them effectively. But over the long run, the benefits of an engaged and thriving team are immense.

I’ve been guilty of this before, but I’m...

As someone who is currently reading Slow Productivity and also watching Shōgun, I concur with this point from Austin Kleon:

During a recent phone call, my friend Matt Thomas told me he likes to take a high/low approach to balancing his input, which started when he was in grad school reading dense theoretical texts by day and chasing them with movies like Fast Five at night. I’ve currently got a good combo going: I’m reading Middlemarch and binge-watching Bridgerton. (As the poet Donald...

You don’t say…

Before providing employees with solutions to manage their stress, Fleming recommends that employers do more to tackle the ways in which their business might be causing the stress. A Deloitte survey of US workers, in 2022, found three systemic factors had an “outsized impact” on wellbeing: leadership behaviour; job design; and organisational working practices. It prompted the researchers to conclude that “perks and programmes”, alone, achieve little.

I really like this No Wrong Doors approach, and I think we can learn a lot from it in modern knowledge organizations:

Some governmental agencies have started to adopt No Wrong Door policies, which aim to provide help–often health or mental health services–to individuals even if they show up to the wrong agency to request help. The core insight is that the employees at those agencies are far better equipped to navigate their own bureaucracies than an individual who knows nothing about the...

Google has been super volatile over the past several weeks and now I am seeing even more volatility touch down on the first day of June, this past Saturday. It actually was a pretty heated weekend, with many of the tools showing extreme volatility and the chatter within the SEO community was unusually high for a weekend.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

This was one heck of a week with Google's search ranking data features being leaked...

Google's Head of Search, Liz Reid, wrote a blog post last night named "AI Overviews: About last week." She basically said that overall the vast majority of the AI Overviews are really good and they did find examples of where they can make improvements. But AI Overviews are here to stay and Google will continue to show them in Google Search.

This morning, I was doing some news queries and noticed that, sporadically, the Google News tab was not returning results for some queries. I thought it was just me and I moved on - but it was not just me - others are also seeing the Google News tab not working.

Google is now showing a newish "shopping ideas" carousel within its search results. It can show up for a variety of queries and gives you a less promotional version of the the shop all deals banners, but the links do lead to the Google Search shopping interface.