Cultivated

While the midday sun baked the tourists, I took to the bar for a beer with the hotel manager, to find out how a large hotel full of British tourists actually runs. Hospitality is not software, or accounting, or architecture. But work is work.

As much as we make things at work, work also makes us — and, happily, it can remake us too.

A few years ago I sat in a meeting with a senior colleague whose team we'd let down and who was, quite reasonably, furious. On paper it looked like a confrontation. In practice it became something else — not because of charisma or luck, but because of a handful of specific, learnable behaviours.

At work we've decided friction is simply the enemy, and go to war on it without ever studying what we're removing. This is the lens I use instead: the three kinds of friction, the quadrant, and why a frictionless life isn't the point.

Creativity isn't a burst of genius that strikes the lucky. It's a rhythm between two modes — open and closed — and a great deal of what looks like brilliance is just someone who's learned to protect it. Here's the full cycle, and how to keep it turning.

A practical guide to using sound while you work — and knowing when to switch it off.

On strategy as one of the most human words we have: 'that which leads', and the three quiet things a real sense of direction rests on.

Six habits a newsroom trains into you - tell the truth, keep notes, think critically, be fair, protect what's private - and why they turn out to be the essence of ethical work.

On Nash's old pyramid of how we spend our time, why we move to escape when meaning goes missing, and the quiet waste of every evening we don't get back.