Meller Notes

William Meller
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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. 1 ngày trước

    #030 - Moving Abroad for Work: How to Transform a Dream Into Reality

    This episode is different. No news, no study, no three topics. It is my own story of how a Brazilian ended up in Sweden, and it is here for one reason: if you want to take your career abroad, what separates the people who do it from the people who keep talking about it is not luck, it is preparation. I start with the difference between a wish and a choice. Saying you would like to live abroad is a wish, and a wish asks nothing from you. Saying you will build a career that takes you abroad is a choice, and a choice makes you organize your present around a future that does not exist yet. Then I talk about the quiet work nobody sees. Focus on English, networking done long before I needed it, and the work of understanding my options and my own career portfolio. None of that looks like much on its own. Together it is the difference between being able to say yes and having to say you are not ready. I also talk about the one thing that breaks the whole plan and that almost nobody mentions: if you have a family, this move is not only yours. Many people decide alone and try to convince the people next to them later. In my case the alignment with my wife was built over time, it was a shared goal, and that is why the answer did not depend only on me when the moment came. Then I tell you how the moment arrived. Pandemic, remote work, English all day long, a referral, a consulting company in Sweden, and a direct question at the end of the process: can you land here as soon as the visa is approved? A few weeks to pack a whole life. The answer was yes, and it was not bravery. Finally, the half that the international career story hides. Distance from family, a silent grief, starting from zero after you already built a lot, a country with another language, another weather, another culture and another way of relating to people. Being ready is also knowing what you are saying no to when you say yes. More than four years and a daughter born here later, what I want to leave you with is not the story, it is the logic behind it. If your answer today is "not yet", that is not failure, that is a diagnosis. No external sources in this episode. Everything here is personal experience.

  2. 31 thg 8

    #029 - Your First Week at a New Job Matters More Than You Think

    You got the offer, you signed the contract, and now comes the part nobody prepares you for. Your first week at a new job is not about delivering results, it is about being read for the first time. And the read people make of you in those first days is much harder to change later than we tend to think. In this episode I talk about three things that shape that first week. The first is listening before you show up. Wanting to prove your value right away is natural, but nobody expects you to fix anything on day one. What they expect is that you learn how things work in there, and that includes noticing the gap between the way the company says it works and the way it actually works. The second is that relationships come before skill. In those first days nobody has seen you work yet, so what sticks is how you treat people. Learning names, treating the person who seems less important well, accepting a coffee. That builds more than any deliverable, and it is exactly what saves you when you need help a month from now. The third is the fine line between confidence and arrogance. Arriving confident is good, arriving ready to teach everyone is the fastest way to get rejected. Every company has a reason for doing things its way, even when it looks wrong. Humility here is not shrinking yourself, it is recognizing that you don't have the full map yet. If you are starting somewhere new, or you lead someone who is, this episode is about what really matters in those first days. No data, no studies, just the basics almost everyone forgets.

  3. 24 thg 8

    #028 - The Philosopher CEO: The Books Every Leader Needs to Read

    You have read the strategy books. Maybe even the good ones. And you have probably noticed something almost nobody says out loud: the people who read the most business books are not necessarily the best leaders in practice. In this special episode I talk about something I have been thinking about for a while, how to read better, which means reading the right things, in the right order.Business books teach the craft. How to price, how to compete, how to organize a team. That matters, but it does not teach what is underneath the craft, how power actually behaves, what people do under pressure, how to decide when the data runs out and you are alone with the call. That part was written a long time ago, by people who watched empires rise and fall, and it does not sit on the business shelf at the bookstore.The idea in this episode is not to trade one library for the other, it is to put both together in a deliberate order. On one side, professional formation, how an enterprise is actually run. On the other, human formation, the civilizational library that shapes judgment itself. I walk through how this system is organized, the numbers behind it, and I use six books as a practical example of weaving the two tracks together, three classics and three essential business books.The goal is not finishing a giant book list. It is reaching the moment when the data runs out and you are alone with the decision, and having something formed inside you to hold up that moment.Access now: https://mellernotes.substack.com/p/the-philosopher-ceo

  4. 17 thg 8

    #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

  5. 10 thg 8

    #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.

  6. 3 thg 8

    #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.

  7. 27 thg 7

    #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

  8. 20 thg 7

    #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/

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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

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  • Nhà sáng tạo
    William Meller
  • Năm hoạt động
    2026
  • Tập
    30
  • Xếp hạng
    Sạch
  • Bản quyền
    © William Meller
  • Trang web chương trình
    Meller Notes