Our jobs often feel lonely in a sea of people (because we're the only ones who understand what we do). So essays that discuss what someone has learned in their job and journey are so valuable. Here are two: Lilian Mahoukou talks about his work at Mondelez,

What does it take to build a strong employer brand? Well, you need to know how to execute projects (tactical mind). You also need to be able to select and prioritize your projects (strategic mind), but theres something still missing. If you want your brand work to achieve maximum impact, you need to know how to tap into a third mind: the political mind. The Three Minds of Employer Branding over at ERE.

In a lot of ways, an EVP is like home improvement: you start watching enough HGTV shows from your couch and you start to think, "how card could that be? Maybe I should tackle my own EVP project..." Which are some of my favorite famous last words. Now, I'm not saying you can't build your own EVP all by yourself, but watching the process from the outside misses the complex and messy things that go on during the commercial breaks where everyone's screaming at each other and that suddenly load-bearing wall has been demoed. Oops. So if you're thinking about taking the job yourself, here is a great article at ERE on some common ways that companies who try to to DIY their EVP get into trouble.

"If this is how we consume content in our busy, daily lives, why would we behave differently in our even busier work lives?"

One of the very clear axes (plural of axis, not a thing for chopping wood) by which you can communicate your culture and brand (though it isn’t often used), is the way a company invests in individual professional growth. Is the employee in charge of their own growth (a la every agency I’ve ever seen), the employee is in charge but the company will pay, the company encourages and supports upskilling, etc. If you want to be known as a place where people are expected and supported in their growth (you’d think that was every company, but you’d be very very wrong about that), it means getting your CEO involved.

As a guy who seems to always be launching this new project or that new idea, I really do try and carve out a little time every few days to just… think. Sometimes its to write a sit-down book (not some musician biography or noir pulp book I use to escape, but a book I need to be seated in a chair to absorb). Sometimes it’s to dump a bunch of thinking on my white board. And while this year has made it hard to get a safe change of scenery (I used to love airports and plains for just this sort of thing, but my favorite was camping out in a hotel lobby for two hours), it is still imperative that we all break away from our calendar and email and make space to just think, to let the mind be… idle? Well, maybe if you’ve achieved total enlightenment, that’s something you can do, but every without the saffron robes, maybe you can just make sure you give your brain some space.