Meller Notes

William Meller

Personal and professional development for people who want to grow in their careers, become more visible, lead better, and manage work and life with clarity. Meller Notes is here, curating content on career, leadership, and management for your personal and professional development

  1. 3d ago

    #027 - Remote Jobs Demand More and AI's Effect on Jobs Stays a Mystery

    Every job posting carries a ruler. Every statistic carries a measuring instrument. This episode is about what happens when no one checks if those two are calibrated right, and about the hiring and career decisions being made on top of that gap. In the first theme, a study of more than 50 million job posts across 28 European countries shows that the remote version of a job lists, on average, 25% more skills than the same job in person. It's not a different job, it's the same role with a higher bar, and the reason isn't distrust of remote work, it's the perceived cost of training someone from a distance. The result is a higher entry barrier at the exact moment the market most needs to develop new talent. In the second theme, contradicting data on AI's effect on jobs puts a cut of 23,000 US jobs side by side with a study of more than 21,000 companies showing headcount growth among the heaviest AI adopters. Neither side is wrong, and neither proves what it claims to prove. The question left standing isn't who's right, it's what you're measuring in your own routine while you wait for proof that may never come. Both themes connect through one question, what are you measuring, and what are you deciding based on what you don't measure. By the end of the episode, two concrete places to act, without waiting for your company to fix it first. Sources:Harvard Business Review, Aug 7 2026, research by Liao, Zhang and WangFortune, Aug 8 2026, report by Sebastian HerreraRamp Economics Lab with Revelio Labs, Jun 30 2026California Policy Lab, CAIT tracker, Jun 2026

  2. Aug 10

    #026 - What Nobody Teaches You About Job Interviews

    We spend our whole life training to do the work and almost no time learning to talk about the work. This special episode is about the job interview, split into three moments and one bonus.In before, you see what real research says about how recruiters use social media to screen candidates, and why preparation is not about looking better, it is about closing the gap between what you show and who you are.In during, we take apart the most repeated myth about body language in interviews, the famous 7, 38, 55 rule, and show what the original research actually says.In after, you learn why the thank you email matters less than people think, and a simple five step structure to turn every interview, won or lost, into real learning.In the bonus, an academic study about one small thing everyone forgets while trying to look perfect, the smile, and why it was never about the amount.Preparation does not guarantee the job. It guarantees that if you lose it, it was not because you were not ready.

  3. Aug 3

    #025 - Implementing AI at the Wrong Time? Manager Being Cutted or Saving the Talents?

    Everyone wants to move faster. And it is exactly the rush for speed that makes companies cut or skip the part that was making the work function, the human part. This episode has only two themes, on purpose, because both tell the same story from different angles. In the first, Deloitte shows, through one of the largest yearly studies of work, more than 9,000 leaders across 89 countries, that companies installing AI first and thinking about the process later are nearly twice as likely to miss the expected return. It is not the technology that fails, it is the order in which it is installed. In the second, the math many companies are doing right now, cutting the middle manager to gain speed, runs into two independent surveys, PwC and Randstad, that point to the same place. The one who keeps the best people on a team is the direct manager, not the name at the top of the org chart. The company cuts the very person who was holding the team together. In the end, the two themes meet in the same question. Where is speed making you skip the human step that was, deep down, the one delivering the result? Sources: Deloitte, 2026 Global Human Capital Trends, with Oxford Economics, more than 9,000 leaders across 89 countries. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends.htmlPwC, Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025, almost 50,000 workers across 48 countries. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/workforce/hopes-and-fears.htmlRandstad, Workmonitor 2026, 27,000 workers across 35 markets. https://www.randstad.com/workmonitor/Gartner, October 2024 projection on flattening and middle management.Live Data Technologies, manager decline reported by the Wall Street Journal.

  4. Jul 27

    #024 - The End of Remote Work, AI Ending Creativity, and The Fake Agreement

    Something repeats across the three themes today. There is a loud, confident story that everybody repeats, and underneath it the numbers say something else. In this episode we look at three places where that happens: return to office, creativity with AI, and false alignment in meetings. In the first theme, US Census Bureau data published by Fortune in July 2026 shows hybrid and remote work sitting at 22% and basically flat for two years. Research from Leesman found that only around 3% of large companies actually went back five days a week. But there is a turn here, and it is not a comfortable one. The share of people willing to quit over a return to office mandate fell from 91% to about 40% in a single year. Flexibility did not win. What changed is who holds the lever in the negotiation. In the second, research from the MIT Sloan Management Review brought four different studies together and found the same pattern in all of them. AI improves each person's result and, at the same time, reduces the diversity of ideas across the whole group. Everybody gets better and everybody gets more alike. And no productivity metric shows that happening. In the third, the July 2026 HBR cover story by Julia Dhar, Kristy Ellmer and Philip Jameson, from BCG. Their thesis is that most big transformations do not fail at execution, they fail before it, when leadership believes it agrees and it does not. More than 70% of companies fail to beat their industry peers after a performance drop. And here is the part that stayed with me. Back in 1993, Michael Hammer already found 50% to 70% of reengineering efforts failing. Decades later, with the entire economy digitized, we still do not know how to make a group of people change together. All three themes end in the same place. The story is always cheaper than the data, and that is why it wins first. Somebody still has to do the hard work of looking underneath it. Where are you believing the story instead of looking at what really happens? Sources for this episode Fortune, July 5, 2026, with Census Bureau and Leesman datahttps://fortune.com/2026/07/05/remote-work-data-shows-hybrid-and-flexible-work-arrangements-are-here-to-stay-census-data/ MIT Sloan Management Review, The Hidden Cost of AI-Assisted Creativityhttps://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-hidden-cost-of-ai-assisted-creativity/ Harvard Business Review, July 2026, The False Alignment Trap, by Julia Dhar, Kristy Ellmer and Philip Jamesonhttps://hbr.org/2026/07/the-false-alignment-trap

  5. Jul 20

    #023 - Performance-First Management, The Megamanagers, and the AI Verification Tax

    Some changes arrived wrapped as an improvement and, in practice, charged the opposite to anyone who did not read the bill. A new management philosophy that promises results. The AI that promises to free the boss. The AI that promises to give your time back. In all of them the question is the same, and it is good for your week, did the improvement free your best work or empty it? The first topic is the management pendulum. For six years the mandate was people first, and now it is moving again. An article in Harvard Business Review from July 1, 2026, written by four Gartner researchers, shows that 62% of managers feel they must protect the members of their team, 45% admit they make decisions that favor the employee and hurt the business, and the average manager spends 9 hours per week just solving personal tensions inside the team. Performance and productivity are back on top of the CEO agenda, and managers who move to performance-first are up to 21% more likely to deliver expected results, with employees who report more satisfaction, not less. The second topic is the megamanager era. A Fortune article from April 7, 2026, shows that the average American manager today has 12 direct reports, a number that almost doubled since 2013. Neil Thompson, from MIT, tested 40 AI models across thousands of real tasks and arrived at one question that decides everything, is AI automating the administrative scaffolding of your job or the expert core of it. The first loss inside a bloated team has a name, mentoring. The third topic is the verification tax. Sage research with IDC asked 2,275 finance leaders and found they spend close to 13 hours per week just rebuilding and validating AI outputs. A Berkeley study in Harvard Business Review confirms the pattern outside finance, AI does not reduce work, it intensifies it, the task expands, the line between work and rest blurs, and multitasking grows. The fourth topic is authenticity. An article in MIT Sloan Management Review asks whether you are an authentic leader or an authentic jerk, and brings an uncomfortable finding, the more a person believes they act on their own values, the less other people see them practicing what they preach. The way out has a name, humble authenticity. Or as someone said to a manager in the study, be yourself, but adjust the volume. Meller Notes is here, curating content on career, leadership, and management for your personal and professional development. SOURCES Harvard Business Review, The Case for Performance-First Management, July 1, 2026https://hbr.org/2026/07/the-case-for-performance-first-management Fortune, The megamanager era, April 7, 2026https://fortune.com/2026/04/07/megamanager-era-how-many-direct-reports-ai-middle-management/ Sage with IDC, Finance leaders demand AI transparency, July 2026https://www.sage.com/en-us/news/press-releases/2026/07/finance-leaders-demand-ai-transparency-as-71-percent-reject-unexplained-decisions/ Harvard Business Review, AI Doesn't Reduce Work It Intensifies It, February 9, 2026https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it MIT Sloan Management Review, Are You an Authentic Leader or an Authentic Jerk, November 25, 2025https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/are-you-an-authentic-leader-or-an-authentic-jerk/

  6. Jul 13

    #022 - Think, Specialize, Listen, and Stop Blaming: The Shortcut Is Expensive

    This week I went looking for four stories that, at first glance, have nothing to do with each other. AI, career advice, customer complaints, and a fatal self-driving car accident. The more I dug in, the clearer the thread became. We live in a world obsessed with shortcuts, and in all four cases the shortcut sends the bill later, not now. What you will learn: Why an MIT Sloan professor argues that if you cannot think without AI, you might not be thinking at allWhat a 2016 study on generalists and specialists actually has (and does not have) to do with 2026 hiring dataHow a hospital in Switzerland turned patient complaints into an innovation lab instead of treating them as noiseWhy a fatal 2018 self-driving Uber accident still teaches something about how leaders handle blame todayIn the first topic, I bring the concept of "AI gravity" from Professor Eric So (MIT Sloan), the constant pressure to outsource thinking to a machine in the name of efficiency, and a data point (still under peer review) showing 83 percent of people unable to quote a single sentence from a text they wrote with AI help minutes earlier. In the second, I put a classic 2016 study (Harvard Business Review), which found generalists get more job offers, side by side with the 2026 PwC Global AI Jobs Barometer, which shows the opposite happening exactly where AI touches the labor market most: more depth, not less, is getting rewarded. In the third, I bring research from Lohyd Terrier and Béatrice Schaad Noble (MIT Sloan Management Review) on how Vaud University Hospital in Switzerland has treated patient complaints as data, not disruption, for over a decade. In the fourth, I use research from François-Xavier de Vaujany and Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte (MIT Sloan Management Review) on narrative responsibility, starting from the real case of a fatal self-driving Uber accident in Tempe, Arizona, in 2018, to show why hunting for one person to blame almost never fixes the real problem today. I close the episode with one question: this week, which of these four shortcuts are you going to stop taking? Sources: Eric So, "AI Gravity Is Pulling You Toward Dependency," MIT Sloan, June 2026Kosmyna et al., "Your Brain on ChatGPT," MIT Media Lab, preprint 2025Nicole Torres, "Generalists Get Better Job Offers Than Specialists," HBR, June 2016"2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer," PwC, June 2026Lohyd Terrier and Béatrice Schaad Noble, "Turn Customer Complaints Into Innovation Blueprints," MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2026François-Xavier de Vaujany and Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, "Rethink Responsibility in the Age of AI," MIT Sloan Management Review, April 2026

  7. Jul 6

    #021 - Seniorized Entry-Level Jobs, Where You Work Matters, and Talent Hoarding

    Tactics without architecture is excellent work in the wrong direction. In 2026, three data points changed how I think about career strategy. The market quietly raised the bar for entry-level professionals without raising the training budget. Research from Harvard revealed that where you work shapes your trajectory as much as how hard you work. And a phenomenon called talent hoarding is blocking career growth from inside the companies where people already work.

  8. Jun 29

    #020 - AI Workslop, The Vanishing Manager, The Fear of Changing Jobs

    We reached the middle of 2026, and three things changed the way we work. AI started filling work with things that look finished but are not. The middle layer of management, the one so many people planned to climb, started to disappear. And the job market froze, with people staying in their jobs more out of fear than choice. Three different forces, one answer. In all of them, you are the one who decides your place. This episode is about how to become hard to replace on purpose, what I call being irreplaceable. What you will take from this episode: Workslop. Why AI generated work is costing almost two hours of rework each time, and the skill that protects you from it, owning the quality you deliver.The vanishing manager. Why the job title became the most fragile thing on the org chart, and how to grow by expanding your scope instead of chasing a title.The fear of changing. Why staying put became a career risk, and how to run your own mobility audit.

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About

Personal and professional development for people who want to grow in their careers, become more visible, lead better, and manage work and life with clarity. Meller Notes is here, curating content on career, leadership, and management for your personal and professional development

Information

  • Creator
    William Meller
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    27
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © William Meller
  • Show Website
    Meller Notes