Hi!

So since 2016, this site is no longer updated, but I’ve kept it live as a reference.

The inspiration?

After experiencing 9-to-6 grey cubicle life as a marketer in Los Angeles, New York and London agencies, I learned I didn’t want to stay on that career track.

[above] The best cubicle of all the agencies: 26th and Madison Avenue, opposite the Flatiron in NYC (2008) – still, cubicles were not for me

Moving on, I felt I’d benefit from a routine to learn what makes workplaces enviable and profitable. So, in 2010, Andy and I started this website to help people (like us), fed up with crappy workplaces, create awesome company culture. This website became the routine I needed.

Business & culture. The heart of what I’ve learned so far..

Stealing from Marcus Lemonis, business boils down to three key things:

• People
• Product
• Process

Not only do I write about culture’s impact on business as a critic, I’m in the arena, making mistakes as I go. After leaving office life and a year of freelancing, I co-founded a boutique web marketing agency, co-creating its culture and brand—buckling in as satisfaction and revenue went up. But then satisfaction and revenue went down. So did team morale. On reflection, I made some rookie business decisions in all three areas..  and so I left the agency (4 offices and almost 5 years later).

The upside of the entreprenurial roller coaster is you get better if you allow yourself to become painfully self aware.

Since then—I updated this in 2022—I’m all in on branding at Matous rebrand consulting for mid-size b2b brands and scale-ups that hire me to strategize and then assemble the vendors needed to lead them through the whole rebrand process.

Conveniently, my consulting career allows me to observe and experience many different types of workplaces. From the warts, to the teams that thrive, to witnessing cringe-worthy leadership, to interviewing leaders (overused word but it fits) who pulled off creating enviable workplaces—it’s all so useful to me.

After 6 years of editing EW, what’s my enviable workplace?

Modern work-life allows you to make it what you want, impossible even 10 years ago. So for me, my ideal enviable workplace means flexibility, in a results-only work environment. To work from the office.. or cafe.. or from home under the oak tree at the back of the yard as my cat tries to eat the grass.. and sometimes from different continents—judged on output, not on process.

But my ideal workplace is hardly what this site is about. This is about diversity of culture and what you can apply to your own workplace to unsuckify it and, perhaps, turn up the enviable to 11.

Get in touch:

Drop me an email. Want to keep in touch? My twitter and my LinkedIn.