History on Steerania

Quiet Quitting

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

The concept of “employee engagement” was coined in 1990 by a Boston University professor named William Kahn, who spent time studying summer camp counselors and architecture firms and concluded that workers bring varying degrees of themselves, physically, cognitively, emotionally, to their roles. His conditions were thoughtful: meaningfulness, psychological safety, availability. His paper was about human dignity at work.

Gallup got hold of it six years later and ran thousands of questions through a statistical correlation engine until they had twelve that predicted business outcomes. Profitability. Retention. Customer scores. They called the result a measure of employee engagement. The questions that survived were the ones that correlated with the organization’s success, which is not the same as the employee’s. Neither distinction was made in the marketing. It rarely is.

Mushroom Management

Fri, 29 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000

The polite term is “limited information sharing.” What it has always been called by the people on the receiving end is mushroom management. Keep them in the dark. Feed them bullshit.

Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 with a clear argument: management should think; workers should execute. Taylor built the entire model around that separation. Thinking was management’s work. Doing was everyone else’s. Workers given context, he believed, would form opinions about the work and slow it down. He ran the experiment in steel mills and called the results efficiency.

The Grammar of Time

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Prosecutor: Your Honor, the defendant targeted the victim as she walked alone at night down a poorly lit city street. He followed her, tracking her movements, cornering her against a wall, and repeatedly blocking her path whenever she attempted to walk away. This was not a random encounter; it was an organized escalation. The defendant orchestrated a large group of men to follow closely behind him, surrounding the victim, cheering him on, and cutting off her avenues of escape while he thrust his body toward her and forced physical proximity

It looks like a scene from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, right?

Bedtime Stories for the Boardroom

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Steerania Book · 2026

Bedtime Stories for the Boardroom

Enron. Wirecard. Barings Bank. Different decade. Different industry. Same ghost. This is the pocket atlas of corporate scandals. Sixty‑seven cases across nine decades, from a New Jersey oil tank in 1963 to the algorithm on the device in your hand today.

Paperback $21.99 Kindle $9.99 Google Play $9.99

Kaelen RookeAuthor 67Cases 1933 – 2026Period 295 ppPaperback

Evidence · Case No. 666

Available now · Three formats

Paperback $21.99 Kindle $9.99 Google Play $9.99

The Pocket Atlas of Corporate Scandals.
Trillions of dollars in documented mistakes. $9.99 on Kindle.

What is inside

A Musical Riff's Journey

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 10:00:00 +0000

The Chemical Brothers’ “Galvanize” (2005) contains a hypnotic Eastern-inspired string loop which defines the Big Beat sound. The origins of this famous musical motif involved unexpected coincidence, cultural musical adaptation and legal disputes which transformed the song’s core essence.

The producers Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons searched for their new track’s sonic hook through sources which extended beyond their typical UK club music exploration. The powerful rhythmic vocals of Moroccan singer Najat Aatabou led them to discover her song about betrayal which would become a worldwide anthem of empowerment.