Love Letters to Troublemakers

"The machine is not coming to save you, but we can save each other. Your W-2 job, your corporate budget, your vendor lists—those are tools. You can use them to extract maximum efficiency for shareholders who are never gonna know your name, or you can use them to redistribute wealth, power, and safety so nobody in our community gets pushed to the margins." — Aparna RaeIN THIS EPISODEFor years, white-collar workers—especially women and people of color—were sold a neat little playbook: lean into every committee, negotiate your salary, polish your personal brand, and the corporate meritocracy will reward you. But after conducting in-depth interviews with 40 mid-career women pushed out of traditional employment and forced into entrepreneurship, Aparna Rae brings the receipts: meritocracy is a lie. At the first hint of economic and political friction, organizations scrubbed equity from their mission statements, eliminated the roles of the very people who built their cultures, and left workers with elevated resting heart rates and unmanageable workloads.Joining Aparna in the studio are two co-conspirators who survived the corporate trenches together at Nike: Dr. Evelyn Carter, author of Was That Racist?, and Season 1 co-host Lars Gallien. Together, they unpack what happens when the "canary in the coal mine" metaphor becomes a lived reality. From navigating the physical toll of opening Slack notifications to the practical power of overriding an executive contract veto to get an outsider paid, this episode breaks down why we must stop playing the single-player game of corporate self-advocacy and start building an underground network of workplace mutual aid.THE QUESTION WE'RE SITTING WITHIf the corporate machine will never love you back, how do you use your access, proximity, and budget right now to protect and redistribute resources to someone outside the walls?TAKE THIS WITH YOU (KEY TAKEAWAYS)Burnout is not simply an issue of working long hours; it is the direct physical result of giving 150% to a system that refuses to reciprocate. When companies trade meaningful security for symbolic perks, the nervous system pays the bill. If you have budget authority, vendor power, or a seat at the decision-making table, stop trying to run an empire at maximum efficiency. Use your social and political capital to override internal risk aversion, push back on corporate blacklists, and direct paid work to marginalized practitioners. Bridging cross-cultural divides requires moving beyond the transactional "quid pro quo" networking model. High-context solidarity means proactively tracking what your peers need and offering support without waiting for them to navigate the shame of asking. Sustainable career longevity begins by asking, "Who am I outside of late-stage capitalism?" Reconnecting with community gardens, school PTA boards, creative arts, and neighborhood care isn't a distraction from work—it’s the antidote to corporate isolation. RESOURCES MENTIONEDBook: Was That Racist? by Dr. Evelyn CarterResearch Reference: Aparna Rae’s field interviews with 40 mid-career women navigating corporate displacement and entrepreneurship Episode Archive: Season 1, Episode 8 with Hala Saleh on the Myth of Self-Advocacy Upcoming Article: Aparna Rae's upcoming analysis on women in work for Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnarae/CONNECT WITH OUR GUESTSDr. Evelyn Carter: Visit her Official Website & Book Page | Connect on LinkedInLars Gallien: Connect on LinkedInCONNECT WITH APARNA RAEWebsite: aparnarae.comLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/aparnaraeShare Your Story: Send a voice memo or email to [email protected] 

"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 YOUThe 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 MENTIONEDWhite 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

Are Nonprofit Boards Failing the Sector? The Cost of Dysfunction & How to Fix ItDid 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 ThemExplore Juliet and Mina's research and the full meta-analysis: Governance for ImpactCONNECT 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

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.comSend your stories and redacted screenshots: [email protected] #LoveLettersToTroublemakers #AparnaRae #FutureOfWork #CorporateCulture #BestPlacesToWork #WorkplaceSurveillance #HRCompliance #Bestplacestowork #greatplacestowork

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. 📧 [email protected]