When I worked in HR, nobody asked me about the server room. It was a closet near IT with a loud fan and a sign on the door, and the only time it came up was when somebody wanted to move their desk away from the noise. Back then, computers, data, and all the strategy…
Stefanie Fackrell was laid off in 2023 and decided to bet on herself. The next two years tested that bet hard. Her brother, who was also her best friend, was killed by a drunk driver in 2024, and a year later she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She kept building her business through all of…
I’m in a group chat with consulting friends, and the hot topic of the day is how W-2 employees are pretty clueless about how good they have it at work. They’re so out of touch with how work works, they’ve lost every ounce of curiosity, and they have no hustle. They don’t know how good…
PR is not hard. I don’t have a team who tries to get me on the news, but I talk to journalists weekly about work, power, politics, and money. It’s because I used to have a job in HR, and now I write and speak about those topics. When I stopped working in corporate America,…
Your Job Is Not Your Family Your job is not your family. This is settled law. I’ve been writing some version of this sentence since 2004: your job is not your family. I wrote it on old HR blogs before anyone called them Substacks. I wrote it in “Betting On You.” I’ll probably write it…
Steal My Claude Setup by Laurie Ruettimann Lots of drama over the way companies like Anthropic and OpenAI will begin adding an invisible, digital watermark to the work their bots create for you. You can read about it here. Allegedly, there’s no watermark if an LLM just lightly edits your work. But if it writes…
Every HR leader wants to be strategically involved in creating an AI playbook for their organization. But where do you start when you wonder, “What is AI? LLMs? GenAI? What are AI agents? How do I write a policy for all this? Training? What about governance?” You’re not the only one asking those questions. Gaining…
How do I feel about Zionism and Anti-Zionism? by Laurie Ruettimann I went to my synagogue on a weeknight and took a Jewish storytelling class where I explored my relationship to Israel. You’re probably like, “What? Huh? What’s that all about?” Me too. I am naturally suspicious of formal religion, including my own. When it…
Laurie joined Meg Bear and Amy Wilson on their podcast, the Meg & Amy Show, for a conversation about work, money, and what’s actually breaking people right now. Much of it traces back to a period earlier in her career when she realized that if she wanted a different outcome, she had to make different…
Lisa Sterling said “absolutely not” when she was first asked to take a Chief People Officer role. Not because she didn’t care about people, but because everything she believed about organizational performance was at odds with what HR was supposed to be. She took the job anyway, with one instruction: get rid of all of…
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