Ep 60. Barry Schwartz: Making Work Meaningful
If you want to attract talented people, you're going to have to show them that at the end of each work day they've made the world better in some small way.
Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz, the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action (Emeritus), has been at Swarthmore College since receiving his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. He’s author of 10 books and 100s of articles and is well known for both his scholarship and his ability to bring complex sociological and psychological research to bear on the practical matters we all face in our daily lives at work and at home. Schwartz has written The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, named one of the top business books of the year by both Business Week and Forbes, and, with Ken Sharpe, Practical Wisdom, about which he gave a TED talk viewed by more than 2MM people.
In this episode, Stew and Barry discuss Barry’s most recent book, Why We Work, including a brief review of the history of work. Many companies adhere to the ideology that employees only care about compensation and so that is all that matters; in this view, quality and meaningfulness of work are irrelevant. Barry’s optimism about this changing springs from his observations of the Millennials and women who are convincing companies that factors like social interactions and variety of work are just as important as compensation. Listen and learn from one of the world’s leading experts about how more enlightened philosophies of work are emerging and what this means for our future. Click here for the transcript.
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