This is It's Sleep Work Repeat. It's a podcast about making work better. I'm Bruce Daisley.

Today's conversation is with Professor Benjamin Laker. Now, I've been following the work of

Professor Laker for a long time, largely because some of the work that he's published in

things like Harvard Business Review or Sloan, MIT

management review have been the pieces that I've shared most over the last few years. In particular,

his piece on meeting three days was kind of my go-to link that I was having discussions with

people about for the last three years, really.

Professor Laker published an article about six months ago in Harvard Business Review that I just

wanted to talk to him about. So I got in touch. So just to properly introduce him, he's a

professor of leadership at Henley Business School,

part of the University of Reading.

He's written several best-selling books, and it's his articles that I think I especially enjoy because they often seem to capture the moment we're in and the way that our relationship with

work is changing.

So witness that idea of of meeting free days or

job crafting or anything in relation to these things. We go specifically into this article then in

HBR. And the article in HBR reflected on how you could think about changing culture and bringing

culture to life. And one of the things

it, I wrote about it in the newsletter about a month ago, one of the things it talked about

specifically is the idea that we shouldn't necessarily treat workplace culture initiatives

like campaigns. They're not just about standing up and changing the values, about sort of

addressing the team and telling them

what's changed. They are more about demonstrating behavior change. In fact, we go into sort of

...