Over lunch in the office canteen this week I got chatting to a Danish artist and a French guy who works in advertising. The former was exhibiting some work in the cafe and the latter is someone who works a few desks away from me.
We spoke about the recent Copenhagen Fashion Week because the artist usually helps out there.
Anyway, the big news from this year was the announcement that the CFW organisers have said that fashion brands can only participate if they become sustainable.
Basically, agree to use a certain % of recycled materials, not destroy unsold clothes etc.
It seems to be an interesting dynamic: publicly declare you’ll only work with clients who don’t conform with the existing industry norms.
The result seems to be:
- Positive publicity: for championing a cause
- Normalisation of the cause: it becomes less weird for others to follow suit
Goldman Sachs (not usually one to be fawned over) recently got a lot of love by saying they won’t do IPOs for companies with all-male boards in an effort to promote diversity.
I can imagine other organisations (who, you’d think, are in a position to turn away businesses…) may also start making public conditions on who they’ll work with.
Any ideas what will be next?
In other news…
Thanks for the feedback on last week’s post about happiness at work.
A couple of follow ups:
- Do people even want to be happy?: this interview with Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman says people prefer satisfaction (thanks for sending, Ami)
- Is the root of work unhappiness bad bosses? and if so, what’s to be done about it..?
It seems that the cause of stress is often an inadequate manager who doesn’t have the time, inclination or skill set to develop you.
This seems to be problematic, because the skills in early jobs (i.e. do this function) are normally quite distinct from what you do in later jobs (i.e. manage others).
People might be great at completing a function (e.g. analyse financial statements) but terrible at leading a group of others to do that work (e.g. oversee and develop a team of accountants).
For ambitious people in their career, if the only route to prestige/ higher pay is to become a manager then it can lead to lots of people in those positions despite not being suited to them (where else are they going to get promoted to?).
A relevant, related question seems then to be: how to reward/ promote ambitious people who aren’t a fit with managing people?
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