In partnership with

I am Avy Leghziel, an organizational consultant and trainer with a knack for unorthodox ideas. This is Masters of Babel: here, I share insights on how we work, learn and manage.

Three ideas worth exploring

01 • Shhh, we are rich here

New trend: “quiet luxury”.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean your wealthy friend will stop talking endlessly about their latest glamping vacation.

Quiet luxury is when people choose to buy high-end items based on how comfortable, sustainable, or adaptable they are - and not based on how likely they are to impress their peers. Expensive yet comfortable business casual jackets — yes; flashy, puffy, itchy coats — no.

Luxury is often associated with exuberance — people wearing fancy garments or prominently displaying luxury brand logos. The evolution of the size of the Ralph Lauren logo on their signature polo is a good example.

Now dressing luxuriously might not be enough anymore, and dressing comfortably with minimalistic aesthetics is not enough either. We want both, and the market is offering interesting solutions. The Row and Cuyana are good examples.

A new generation of fashion icons is experimenting with the idea that luxury does not necessarily mean spoiling ourselves: we can put on the same branded garment twice without diminishing our ability to be stylish. It reminds us what we discussed in the past issue while talking about the Geoships.

We are learning to balance the desire for status and style with the need to promote sustainable values. We can see this in other fields as well:

• Chobani is an example of a successful business that invests back heavily in its workers-rather than exploiting them to maximize returns.

• John Mackey has been talking about this for decades through the concept of conscious capitalism.

• Regenerative travel wants to redeem tourism from exploiting local resources to become an opportunity to contribute to communities

Perhaps we are abandoning the binary approach for an integrative approach. I am curious to see if this trend will further spread into other sectors or become a choice of a few outliers.

02 • The rise of the unorthodox manager

I work with hundreds of professionals a year, and I often meet this profile: managers who defy traditional norms and are constantly seeking new ideas and blueprints.

Our generation of professionals inherited a vocabulary of norms and practices from our predecessors. They were coming from a century of industrial revolutions and big ideologies, and these shaped the way they built their teams, organizations and markets. Big companies, formal relationships, bureaucracy, and an unhealthy obsession with control.

It worked well for decades; now we experience all of that as a burden. It results in a working experience that is stressful, not necessarily productive, often empty of powerful ideas, and with little tolerance for curiosity.

A new breed of managers is leading the change: they are determined to achieve ambitious results while having an overall meaningful and enriching working experience. Less burnout and office politics, more results and personal satisfaction.

I’ve written a short book outlining what I believe are the guiding principles of this approach: it’s called the Little Book of Unorthodox Management. You can download it here (it's free). If you download it, please reply to this e-mail and let me know what you think.

03 • Am I a kidult?

Three years ago, I bought a Nintendo Switch. I bought it for me, and not for my kids, although obviously now they use it much more than me. I bought it for two reasons:

1. Nostalgia for the games I played on the Playstation as a teenager.

2. It’s a better alternative to scrolling through social media.

Apparently, i'm not the only one. A growing percentage of adults are wondering why gaming (and engaging in other recreational activities such as Lego, comics or even cosplay) should only be for children and teenagers. Someone coined the term "kidults" (kid + adults), because we clearly lacked a new label to trash each other.

It seems that the kidults tribe is a considerable engine for the economy:

• A quarter of game sales per year are bought by kidults. That's about 9 billions of purchases;

• The amount of adults buying items usually marketed at children such as Legos, toy cars, and board games is growing;

• Toy companies such as Hasbro and Mattel have been struggling in the past decade, and adults buying toys are a new potential area of growth for them.

It sounds like a beneficial development to me. I don't think that I am alone in looking for alternatives to toxic scrolling, and many videogames have healthy components of challenge, teamwork, and imagination.

Interestingly enough, we could have detected the kidult phenomenon already a few years back, by looking at some trends in the world of work. For a couple of decades tech workplaces provided their workers with free ice cream and slides in the office, in order to make the workplace a fun place to stay at.

We are reinterpreting elements of childhood and incorporating them into adult life. We realized that childhood and adolescence are the ages in which strong emotions, fun, imagination, and rich social interactions gave us a sense of pleasure and meaning, and we are wondering if we can do the same to make our adult lives more meaningful.

It’s an interesting direction: we are dismissing many dysfunctional norms based on formality and exploring alternatives that feel to us more natural and beneficial.

Stay up-to-date with AI

The Rundown is the most trusted AI newsletter in the world, with 800,000+ readers and exclusive interviews with AI leaders like Mark Zuckerberg.

Their expert research team spends all day learning what’s new in AI and talking with industry experts, then distills the most important developments into one free email every morning.

Plus, complete the quiz after signing up and they’ll recommend the best AI tools, guides, and courses – tailored to your needs.

Sign up to start learning.

Unrelated

What time was the cow milked to produce the milk in your fridge? If it was milked at night, you will probably sleep better.

One more thing

The most underrated free AI tool out there: Google Notebook LLM. It’s more of a companion than ChatGPT or Claude. Take a look here for a quick onboarding to how to make the most out of it.