Love Letters to Troublemakers

Aparna Rae
  • 5.0 (7)
  • Business
  • Weekly

Your BS detector isn't broken — corporate culture just trained you to ignore it. Love Letters is the podcast for anyone who has ever suspected the problem isn’t us. We name what's broken at work, back it up with receipts, and build real power with workers who are done performing. No productivity hacks. No personal brand advice. Just honest analysis and a community ready to change the status quo. New episodes weekly.

  1. 6d ago

    E20. AI Future of Work Multiverse

    "Organizations, they're not bystanders to AI and impact on jobs. They're the architects. And so when things happen, it was not by chance, by magic, by fiat from up above. There were people making choices." — Tauseef Rahman IN THIS EPISODEWe are told that AI is here to liberate us from drudgery, but for many white-collar workers, it feels like the ultimate corporate "stick" to demand more production for less pay. AI is not just a neutral productivity tool; it’s a structural reorganization of who gets paid, how much, and why. In this episode, Aparna and Rob are joined by Tauseef Rahman to look at the cold, hard receipts behind this shift. Tauseef leads US Workforce Rewards Solutions at Mercer and works globally with organizations on job design, total rewards, and reskilling strategies as AI reshapes roles. We examine his latest white paper, Reinventing rewards for the AI multiverse, to ask the uncomfortable questions: Are companies genuinely redesigning work to elevate human capability, or are they using AI to hollow out jobs and cut costs under the guise of "efficiency"? We dive into the collapse of human expertise, the democratization of knowledge, and the impossible dilemma HR leaders face when caught between the human workforce and shareholder supremacy. THE QUESTION WE'RE SITTING WITHIf AI makes technical expertise abundant at near-zero cost, what does the organization owe a worker whose accumulated expertise it no longer values? TAKE THIS WITH YOU The AI "Multiverse" is a Design Choice: The impact of AI on jobs is not predetermined. It can be used to elevate middle-tier workers to take on expert-level decision making, or it can be used to hollow out roles and replace human labor cheaply. Organizations are the architects of these outcomes. The Collapse of the "Expertise" Premium: For a century, compensation was built on the scarcity of expertise. AI is actively compressing the performance gap—raising the floor for novice workers while eroding the advantage of top performers. This breaks traditional pay-for-performance and "tournament" models of work. HR’s Impossible Dilemma: HR functions are caught in a bizarre balancing act between executing algorithmically-driven cost-cutting for shareholders and advocating for the realities of wage laborers. Know Where the Value is Created: Organizations often don't understand how work actually gets done on the ground. As a worker, knowing exactly what you do that creates tangible value is your best defense when executives try to "spray paint technology" over your role. RESOURCES MENTIONED White Paper: Reinventing rewards for the AI multiverse CONNECT WITH TAUSEEF RAHMANTauseef Rahman leads US Workforce Rewards Solutions and oversees the Northern California and Hawaii market for the Workforce and Rewards business at Mercer. He spends his time thinking about where work is heading and how AI reshapes what organizations need from their talent strategy. LinkedIn: Tauseef Rahman

  2. Oct 22

    E19. Are Nonprofit Boards Failing the Sector?

    Are Nonprofit Boards Failing the Sector? The Cost of Dysfunction & How to Fix It Did you know there are nearly two million nonprofit organizations in the United States, generating roughly $3.5 trillion in annual spending? Yet, at the helm of most of these organizations are volunteer governing boards that are frequently lost in their own mythos and self-importance. This week, we are dismantling the archaic architecture of nonprofit boards. Far too many people join boards just to feel good, attend galas, and stroke their egos, leaving the actual governance and mission delivery to suffer. Host Aparna Rae is joined by Juliet Buder and Mina Velamoor, authors of Measuring Governance to Optimize Nonprofit Impact. We dig into the "give or get" rule, the financial bleed caused by executive turnover, the toxic consequences of treating governance like a speed limit, and why the sector might need to eliminate volunteer boards entirely. IN THIS EPISODE, WE DISCUSS: Why board seats are often treated as high-society perks rather than serious fiduciaries of public trust. Why ineffective administrators and disengaged board members are allowed to stick around in nonprofits when they would be fired immediately in the corporate world. How performative boards drive the highest leadership turnover rate of any sector, bleeding resources away from the community. Juliet and Mina’s data-driven approach to holding boards accountable and measuring their actual impact on the mission. Why complex, high-stakes nonprofits should consider paying board members to transform volunteer cheerleading into professional labor with real liability. RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: Read Aparna’s latest article in Nonprofit Quarterly: Nonprofit Boards Are Failing the Sector: Here’s How to Fix Them Explore Juliet and Mina's research and the full meta-analysis: Governance for Impact CONNECT WITH US:If you aren't ready for the friction of real change, it's time to step out of the leather armchair. Keep making good trouble wherever you are! Visit us at aparnarae.com

  3. Oct 15

    E18. Corporate Gaslighting & Pay-to-Play Awards

    Welcome to Season 2 of Love Letters to Troublemakers (formerly Circle Back Club): (Not) The Best Places to Work. In our season premiere, Aparna Rae and co-conspirator Rob Hadley take a sledgehammer to the multi-million-dollar industrial complex of workplace certifications. From the pay-to-play economics of top workplace lists to the glaring hypocrisy of companies like Enron and Amazon taking home awards, we pull back the curtain on why these lists actually exist. We explore how these certifications are designed to inflate executive egos, act as recruitment shields, and gaslight workers into thinking a toxic culture is actually a personal failing. We also examine why identity-based lists—like "Top Employers for Women"—often mask deep pay disparities and a total lack of basic accommodations for working mothers. Rob shares his insider perspective from running an employee experience analytics group on how these surveys are manipulated and why a company-wide ranking is essentially meaningless when culture varies drastically from one department to the next. If your work feels absurd right now, you are not imagining it. Join the investigation, send us your worst corporate memos, and let's dissect the sacred cows of corporate culture together. TIMESTAMPS:00:00 - The inherent hypocrisy of wanting to be on a "Best Places" list00:45 - Welcome to Season 2: Taking a sledgehammer to sacred corporate cows04:57 - The reality of running employee experience analytics07:20 - How the lists actually work: Application fees and manipulated surveys10:24 - The Hall of Fame of Harm: Enron, Starbucks, and Amazon12:59 - Mouse vibrators and workplace surveillance13:38 - The $200k healthcare executive docked pay for a lack of keystrokes16:23 - Why identity-based lists are often the most frustrating and deceptive24:15 - Executive ego and screaming over bonus stoplight charts37:40 - The Verdict: Keep it, fix it, or let it die? RESOURCES & LINKS: Website: https://aparnarae.com Send your stories and redacted screenshots: loveletters@aparnarae.com #LoveLettersToTroublemakers #AparnaRae #FutureOfWork #CorporateCulture #BestPlacesToWork #WorkplaceSurveillance #HRCompliance #Bestplacestowork #greatplacestowork

  4. Season 2 Trailer

    Not The Best Places To Work

    Welcome to Season 2 of Love Letters to Troublemakers (formerly Circle Back Club). This season, we are launching an open-source investigation into the sacred cows of modern work culture - the practices, policies, and habits everyone performs but nobody actually believes in. From the award badges your company paid a ton of money for, to wellness apps masking unmanageable workloads, to "unlimited" PTO that you can never actually take, we are putting corporate absurdity on trial. Every episode, we ask where these policies came from, who they actually serve, and what would work better, before delivering a final verdict: keep it, fix it, or let it die. If work feels absurd right now, you're not imagining it. Only one out of three people feel respected at work. It’s a design problem, and it’s following us home to our families, our neighborhoods, and eventually, the ballot box. CALL TO ACTION: Be our sources. Send us the memos, job postings, and Slack messages that made you stare at a wall, and we'll read the best ones on air. New episodes drop on Thursdays. 📧 loveletters@aparnarae.com

  5. Sep 3 ·  Bonus

    E17. Is AI a Psychosocial Workplace Hazard? A Conversation with Ruhee Meghani

    "We have lost the art of struggle... We need strong neural pathways built through pressure, not stress, but pressure. And that comes through challenging our thinking." — Ruhee Meghani IN THIS EPISODE The AI train has left the station. While media headlines fixate on tech giant valuations, compute power, and data center energy consumption, a quieter crisis is taking place inside the daily lives of white-collar workers. We are told AI will free up our time and build capacity, yet daily users are experiencing unprecedented levels of cognitive exhaustion, job precarity, and structural anxiety. In this episode, Aparna Rae is joined by Ruhee Meghani, founder of Allied Collective, calling in from Melbourne, Australia. Australia leads the world in progressive workplace safety legislation, formally classifying workplace stress, low job control, and poor organizational change as legally enforceable psychosocial hazards. Aparna and Ruhee examine AI through this regulatory lens, moving past tech hype to ask the human questions: How does cognitive offloading erode critical thinking and creativity? How is AI surveillance destroying psychological safety? And why is "AI transformation" often driven by executive FOMO rather than true organizational need? TAKE THIS WITH YOU The 17 Psychosocial Hazards: Australia legally regulates psychological injury from 17 distinct hazards—including high job demands, lack of job control, poor organizational change management, and remote isolation. The Cognitive Gym: Replacing human reflection, writing, and problem-solving with AI shortcuts strips our brains of the "sustained pressure" required to build strong neural pathways, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence. AI Surveillance as Structural Harm: Keystroke tracking, mouse-movement metrics, and video emotion/engagement scoring create intense workplace anxiety and erode workplace trust. The "Work Slop" & Efficiency Paradox: AI tools rarely reduce workloads; they accelerate output expectations, compress deadlines, and flood workflows with low-quality content. RESOURCES MENTIONED Australia's Safe Work Framework: Safe Work Australia Psychosocial Hazards Documentary: Coded Bias (Directed by Shalini Kantayya) Philosophical Frameworks: The Eight Limbs of Yoga & Samadhi (Self-Actualization) CONNECT WITH RUHEE MEGHANI Website: alliedcollective.com.au Ruhee Meghani on LinkedIn

  6. Jul 30 ·  Bonus

    E16. Beyond the Deck: Stop Over-Analyzing & Get Your Reps In

    "Work across so many sectors trains us to treat real-world human problems like abstract strategy exercises." — Aparna Rae IN THIS EPISODE Are you tired of staring at a 50-slide strategy deck that feels entirely disconnected from the real world? In this episode, host Aparna Rae is joined by innovation researcher, knowledge architect, and equity designer Dr. Pierce Otlhogile-Gordon to explore the "sense-making trap" of white-collar professional life. Together, they unpack why knowledge workers feel comfortable analyzing systemic issues from behind a screen but freeze when faced with relational, community-level work. Pierce introduces the concept of exposure therapy for changemakers, explaining why embodied knowledge matters more than theoretical frameworks, how philanthropic power turns communities into chessboards, and why you don’t need a massive grant to start making change. From community weaving canvases to "social judo," this episode is your blueprint for getting your reps in and moving from thinking to doing. THE QUESTION WE'RE SITTING WITH Is your action for you, or is your action for we? TAKE THIS WITH YOU Embodied Knowledge vs. Abstraction: You cannot learn how to swim by watching videos; you have to get in the water. White-collar workers need exposure therapy to the communities they are trying to impact. Start Small and Get Your Reps In: Build your changemaking muscle locally—through neighborhood associations, mutual aid groups, school boards, or simply paying forward a local need. Healthy Communities Feel Like a Forest: Ground your networks in biological ecosystems rather than brittle, top-down castles with moats. RESOURCES MENTIONED Relationality by David Jay Beautiful Trouble (Toolkit & Library) — beautifultrouble.org Tesa Collective (Movement-organizing games) — tesacollective.com One Piece (Anime/Manga governance model) CONNECT WITH DR. PIERCE GORDON Explore his curated social change library and framework at piercegordon.me

  7. Jul 9 ·  Bonus

    E15. Beyond the LinkedIn Algorithm: Using Your Voice to Fight Corporate Constraints

    "Brands are for products. People are defined by stories. And when they tell those stories in powerful ways, there is nothing more magnetic." IN THIS EPISODE If you have ever felt dirty trying to "build a personal brand" on LinkedIn, or cringed at the pressure of corporate self-promotion, this episode is your antidote. Aparna is joined by Amanda Hirsch, former Editorial Director of PBS.org and CEO of Mighty Forces - a storytelling company designed explicitly for people who give a damn. Together, they tear down the sterile, hyper-optimized machine of "personal branding" to discuss why brands belong to products, while human beings belong to stories. Changing this narrative requires immense courage. Too often, white-collar workers face deep-seated fear and severe corporate retaliation when they try to step away from compliance and speak out. The system is designed to keep us quiet and it is time we reclaim our voice.  Aparna and Amanda break down why your authentic, intentional voice matters more than ever right now. Your true perspective is not a personal brand to be managed for algorithms – it is a non-negotiable tool for collective liberation and real structural change. THE QUESTION WE'RE SITTING WITH What’s possible when we share our stories - for ourselves and others?  TAKE THIS WITH YOU Ditch the Corporate Brand Label: Humans are not products or companies. When we force ourselves into marketing caricatures, we strip away our nuance.  The Self-Promotion Gap: Women and marginalized professionals consistently struggle to advocate for their own brilliance online due to societal penalties—but rewriting your LinkedIn profile to reflect your true impact is a necessary, collective reclamation of space. From Striving to Collective Belonging: Storytelling shouldn't be a solo performance designed for individual gain. The deep medicine our world needs right now is showing up in the public square.  RESOURCES MENTIONED Learn more about Amanda’s work at mightyforces.co Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandahirsch/  Improvising Adulthood: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me by Amanda Hirsch Send us your stories, thoughts and connect with Aparna at pod@circleback.club; circleback.club or aparnarae.com

  8. Jun 25 ·  Bonus

    E14. Why hard data always loses to corporate interests—and how to fight back 📊📉

    "No billionaire can pull off theft in broad daylight without the help of everyday professional class workers who choose to stay silent or act out of outright complicity." IN THIS EPISODE We like to think that modern organizations are deeply objective, metrics-driven spaces. But what happens when objective data rubs up against the financial and personal goals of senior leadership? Let's say it plainly: the evidence typically loses. In this summer bonus episode, Aparna Rae goes completely solo to unpack how data has been weaponized as an employer risk-management apparatus rather than a tool to protect people. Drawing from shocking insider stories—including a healthcare CHRO who cherry-picked engagement data to safeguard executive bonuses and a retailer that outright denied a warehouse team’s tactical request for winter gloves—Aparna challenges us to look closely at the middle tier of everyday professionals who make brazen extraction possible. We're also looking closely at the education sector, exposing the multi-million dollar EdTech fraud schemes birthed directly by the Forbes "30 Under 30" pipeline, the pseudo-science behind corporate stack ranking, and the fine print that completely dismantles McKinsey’s most famous diversity case studies. THE QUESTION WE'RE SITTING WITH When data flatters power a little too neatly, do you have the structural courage to double-click and ask where it came from? TAKE THIS WITH YOU * The "30 Under 30" to Indictment Pipeline: The collapsing infrastructure of companies like All Here proves that the Venn diagram of founders committing massive investor fraud and the people celebrated on elite tech lists is practically a complete circle. McKinsey’s Replicability Crisis: Independent scientific researchers proved that the famous studies linking diversity to financial performance got the arrow backward. Strong corporate profitability allows companies to invest in diversity, not the other way around. We should invest in equity because humans deserve a dignified way of making a living—not because it pads a spreadsheet. The Cost of Truth-Telling: Highlighting Sarah Wynn-Williams’ groundbreaking memoir, Careless People, and the lengths to which tech oligarchs will go to legally silence corporate whistleblowers. The File vs. The Floor: Filing a business license is not evidence of income. Real data fidelity requires precise, continuous accurate representation. RESOURCES MENTIONED * Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams Green & Hand Research on the replication failure of McKinsey's diversity metrics Season 1, Episode 6 with Dr. Nicole DeKay on the psychological harm of stack ranking CONNECT WITH US Our digital space: aparnarae.com Send this episode to a data lover or people analytics professional in your circle: hello@circleback.club

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Your BS detector isn't broken — corporate culture just trained you to ignore it. Love Letters is the podcast for anyone who has ever suspected the problem isn’t us. We name what's broken at work, back it up with receipts, and build real power with workers who are done performing. No productivity hacks. No personal brand advice. Just honest analysis and a community ready to change the status quo. New episodes weekly.

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