The Wake-up Call of the Away Story

Welcome to my Weekly Thoughts Newsletter, where you'll find my take on the week's news stories, my favorite pieces on how we can thrive even in our stressful world, and some fun and inspiring extras.

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@ariannahuff / Instagram

The Big Sleep (Question): If you’ve ever wondered how to convince your kids that getting a good night’s sleep is something they should actually want to do — which includes every parent ever — Thrive’s Sleep Editor-at-Large Shelly Ibach’s latest column is for you. As she says, it requires more than just telling your kids about sleep — you have to show them what it means in your own life. “It starts with parents talking about sleep when their children are very young and demonstrating how much they value sleep themselves,” Shelly writes. “Kids learn by example, so it’s important that the adults set up a healthy environment around sleep at home.” And that includes things like putting away your devices as bedtime approaches, which makes it a lot more likely your children will, too. More tips follow, which you can read here.

The Neverending Story: Noah Baumbach’s movie Marriage Story came out last week and has provoked strong reactions — so many, in fact, that, as W reported, the memes are already threatening to overtake the movie. Contrary to its title, it’s really a divorce story, chronicling the demise of a marriage between Charlie, a theater director, played by Adam Driver, and Nicole, his actress wife, played by Scarlett Johansson. As Nora Ephron once said, "marriage comes and goes, but divorce is forever." And how a marriage ends is actually a lot more important than how it starts. And the struggle to get it right in Marriage Story is so real and raw, we feel like we’re going through divorce ourselves. And many people, of course, have gone through it, including me. It wasn’t an easy journey, but I learned a lot of lessons about co-parenting when you’re no longer a family, which I wrote about here. And I only hope that, for the sake of the more than a million children a year whose parents get divorced, amicable co-parenting is a journey more and more divorced couples take.

Courtesy of Thrive Global

What Do You Get for the Newsmaker Who Has Everything?: My wish list for some of the stars of 2019, both naughty and nice, to help them thrive in the new year. Feel free to borrow any ideas for those on your list. Read More on Thrive: My Holiday Wish List for 2019 Newsmakers

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The True Lesson of the Away Story 

With its revelations of a culture of bullying and burnout at the luggage company Away, The Verge’s investigation lit up social media and launched a thousand hot takes.

It’s an incredible sign of the times how quickly the story — and Away’s board — moved. The piece was published on Thursday, and by Monday, Away’s CEO Steph Korey had been removed and replaced. 

The details in The Verge’s report portray a truly toxic culture at Away: a 3:00 a.m. Slack message from Korey, telling customer experience employees that their time off requests would no longer be considered; a manager’s request to “take a photo with your computer in bed when you get home,” as proof that employees were working; employees publicly scolded for not immediately responding to messages, even on nights and weekends.

But Away is just one symptom of a much larger affliction. Call it the hypergrowth-to-burnout pipeline. Again and again, we see promising, disruptive companies rocketing to success, but powered by a workplace culture that drives people into the ground. 

As Away illustrates, outward signs of success — the billion dollar valuation, accolades, magazine covers — can conceal a core that is, if not rotten, unhealthy and unsustainable. Executives often justify these hard-charging cultures as simply necessary to succeed in a competitive world. 

But burnout inevitably takes its toll. Increasingly, a healthy and sustainable culture is going to be what separates the big players — the ones who are in it for the long haul and really make an impact — from the flavors of the moment.

The first shift business leaders need to make is to avoid the “growth above all mindset,” which, as we saw at Away, became cancerous, metastasizing into every area of the company and subsuming all other values, including empathy and trust. The second mindset shift that needs to happen is ending the delusion that employees have to burn out in order for a company to succeed.

Tim Junio is the co-founder and CEO of Expanse, a fast-growing cybersecurity startup (formerly called Qadium). I met him last year at an IVP dinner (IVP is an investor in both Expanse and Thrive), and we talked for a long time about how the Silicon Valley delusion that you need to burn out in order to succeed needs to change. Shortly after, he sent me an email he had just sent to all his employees, which we published on Thrive. You can read his full email here, but here are a few of the best practices he shared:

• Sleep the right amount your body needs, and plan your schedule around it. 
• Improve the quality of your sleep by giving yourself time to unwind before you get into bed, when possible. 
• Identify what rhythm works for you for disconnecting from work for a bit on a regular basis, including building in time to think about higher-level things related to your job. 
• Take your vacation, and take your vacation seriously.

These are small suggestions, but when leaders repeatedly and authentically send the message that burnout will not be glorified and that people need to take care of their well-being, it adds up. It’s a powerful way to demonstrate that living a sustainable life — and empowering employees do so as well — is the best way to achieve sustainable growth. As more and more companies see the benefits of this approach — and the costs of continuing on the dead-end path to burnout — I predict that 2020 will be the year when leaders begin to give company culture the respect it truly deserves.

Read More on Thrive: Why the Away Story Is a Wake-up Call for Every Business Leader

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Before You Go

Podcast of the Week: I was so moved by this week's episode of our immersive podcast “Meditative Story,” in which psychologist and author Susan David shares how she managed to process the death of her father at a young age. As she was struggling to make sense of it, a teacher stepped in and showed Susan the importance of allowing ourselves to feel not just the good parts of our lives, but also the bad. You can listen and subscribe here.

Magazine Cover of the Week: Time’s Person of the Year is Greta Thunberg. One of my favorite Greta quotes: “Learning about climate change triggered my depression in the first place. But it was also what got me out of my depression, because there were things I could do to improve the situation. I don’t have time to be depressed anymore.”

Tech and Humanity Collision of the Week: A.I. is good at many things, but baking is not one of them. Technology writer Janelle Shane fed 2,000 pie recipes into some neural networks and had them generate some new pies of their own. Here are the results. If you’re planning on some holiday baking, you might want to avoid them — though I’m intrigued by “Fog-Crust Pecan Pie.”

@JanelleCShane / Twitter

Human Connection of the Week: This amazing story in The New York Times of two people who fell in love at Auschwitz and reunited 72 years later. Their story is a testament to the power of maintaining one’s humanity, even in the most extreme circumstances. It put me in mind of one of my favorite quotes by one of my favorite authors, Viktor Frankl, also a Holocaust survivor. “Everything can be taken from a man,” he wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, “but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”