In this episode, Roy talks with Andrea Dehlendorf who has spent the last three decades as a labor organizer. From organizing Las Vegas casino staff and janitors in Los Angeles to Walmart associates, Andrea finds leaders among everyday people, helps them recognize leadership skills they didn’t know they had, and brings them together to show their power.

Andrea is the Co-Lead of Democracy Takes Work, which encourages innovation and experimentation in organizing.

We learned what organizing is, how it begins, how to identify a leader and organize a committee, how to plan actions from stickers to strikes, how to map power and negotiate, and what happens after a win.

Andrea’s advice to anyone who wants to be an organizer: you can’t be a part time doctor, but you can organize where you work.

This Is Not Advice is Roy Bahat's attempt to understand every aspect of a job directly from the people who do it exceptionally – so that everyone who listens can take those lessons into whatever it is they do. Roy is a startup investor focused on the future of work at Bloomberg Beta and an MBA professor.

Chapters:

00:00:00 - Preview

00:05:30 - Becoming an organizer in the first place

00:15:00 - Getting ideas: choosing what to organize

00:27:30 - The craft of organizing

01:32:00 - The organization of organizing

01:40:30 - Understanding and improving “the system”

01:57:15 - Progressing in your “career” as an organizer

02:07:15 - Final words

Reading List:

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, Jane McAlevey

A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy, Jane McAlevey

The Fissured Workplace, David Weil

Getting to Yes, Roger Fisher and William Ury

The Good Jobs Strategy, Zeynep Ton

Get on the Job and Organize, Jaz Brisack

Bringing Down the House, Ben Mezrich

Why David Sometimes Wins, Marshall Ganz

The Lean Startup, Eric Ries

Follow Andrea Dehlendorf on Substack: https://andreadehlendorf.substack.com/

Follow Roy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roybahat/

Follow Roy on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/roybahat.com

Subscribe to Roy’s newsletter: https://bit.ly/notanewsletter

Read Roy’s blog: http://roybahat.com/

Read our community-edited reference guide on how to work: https://www.thisisnotadvice.work/

#thisisnotadvice

In this episode, Roy talks with Rabbi Noa Kushner. She founded The Kitchen in San Francisco, a congregation that’s been studied by Jewish communities around the world for both meeting modern needs and fully engaging with traditional Jewish texts and ways.

Rabbi Kushner walks us through her journey, the inner life of a rabbi, what the role of a rabbi actually is, how to start by living a religious life, how prayer is supposed to work, how she built a congregation.

We learned that a community builds in some of the same ways a startup does. Rabbi Kushner built The Kitchen while figuring out what people wanted, and people kept showing up and showing her what she was creating.

And… she explains how everyone can learn about the Kitchen’s ways in her new book, Pretend You Believe: How to Enter Religion.

This Is Not Advice is Roy Bahat's attempt to understand every aspect of a job directly from the people who do it exceptionally – so that everyone who listens can take those lessons into whatever it is they do. Roy is a startup investor focused on the future of work at Bloomberg Beta and an MBA professor.

Chapters:

00:00:00 - Preview

00:03:40 - Becoming a rabbi in the first place

00:10:36 - Getting ideas

00:17:29 - Making the work (crafting the practice)

00:43:32 - Progressing your career

00:52:04 - Selling the work (building the institution)

01:07:27 - Communicating about yourself and the work

01:19:52 - Understanding and improving the system

01:27:22 - Final words: advice for someone considering the rabbinate

Read Rabbi Kushner’s book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/803567/pretend-you-believe-by-noa-kushner/

Follow Roy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roybahat/

Follow Roy on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/roybahat.com

Subscribe to Roy’s newsletter: https://bit.ly/notanewsletter

Read Roy’s blog: http://roybahat.com/

Read our community-edited reference guide on how to work: https://www.thisisnotadvice.work/

#thisisnotadvice

In this episode, Roy talks with author Eric Ries: software engineer, accidental blogger, initially-reluctant public speaker, and author. His first book was The Lean Startup, which gave the startup world its vocabulary. And his newest is Incorruptible, about how to help companies stay true to what they originally set out to do.

We learned that the writing comes last. Eric spent years trying out metaphors that fell flat, meetings that went nowhere, and typing out blog posts on a Palm Treo keyboard at a Starbucks on Sand Hill Road. This all happened before a single word of the manuscript existed.

A book isn't a longer blog post. And understanding the difference between those two mediums is most of the work.

The most important thing an author does is collect. From academic papers to weird governance ideas, and stories that don't make it in the published edition. You're like a baker gathering ingredients before you know what you're baking.

Eric dives into the inner life of the job and walks us through his journey: what it means to have your ideas escape and stop belonging to you, the strange “optimal level of fame” where people know your work better than your face, why the feedback is almost always about the reader and not about you, and what it's actually like to write and rewrite, and rewrite again.

This Is Not Advice is Roy Bahat's attempt to understand every aspect of a job directly from the people who do it. Roy is a startup investor focused on the future of work at Bloomberg Beta and an MBA professor.

Chapters:

00:00:00 – Preview

00:3:20 Becoming an author in the first place

00:54:00 Getting ideas

01:18:00 Making the work (crafting the writing)

02:23:00 Selling the work

02:45:39 Communicating about yourself and the work

03:59:30 Progressing your career

03:02:42 Understanding and improving the system

03:08:018 Final words: What should someone considering entering the occupation do?

Follow Roy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roybahat/

Follow Roy on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/roybahat.com

Subscribe to Roy’s newsletter: https://bit.ly/notanewsletter

Read Roy’s blog: http://roybahat.com/

Read our community-edited reference guide on how to work: https://www.thisisnotadvice.work/

#thisisnotadvice