Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
An aesthetics clinic software service, an engineering company and a communications group may not appear to have much in common. But they’re together bound by one thing: a genuine care for organisational culture. Tossing aside buzzwords and putting people, not PR, at the forefront of their culture strategy makes them the gold standard.
These companies have been recognised by Bendelta as some of the best places in Australasia to work, applauded for their excellent organisational culture and leadership.
Paola Molino, head of people and culture at TAL, says culture needs to be authentic. Louise Kennerley
Bendelta uses the “BEING at work” framework to measure a company’s success, which utilises five dimensions to create a data-driven picture of what makes a good place to work: Belonging, Energising, Integrating, Nurturing and Generating.
The data comes from the policies and practices of the organisation and the employee experience as determined by a survey.
TAL, a life insurance company, won in the “Belonging” category, recognising an organisation that “creates a culture of inclusion, empathy and connection where every person feels valued and safe to contribute”.
TAL has a robust diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) strategy and expanded leave options, including wellbeing leave, which a third of employees made use of in the last year
Bendelta 'BEING' Special Awards
Table with 2 columns and 5 rows. (column headers with buttons are sortable)
Belonging
TAL
Energising
Fresh Clinics
Integrating
Aurecon
Nurturing
Publicis Groupe
Generating
Judo Bank
All employees have access to LinkedIn Learning, allowing them to upskill in a flexible and tailored way. This has been particularly useful in the age of AI, allowing employees to feel more confident in their abilities.
Paola Molino, head of people and culture at TAL, says that for them, culture is all about listening to people. She described their culture as caring, relationship focused and purpose aligned.
“[Culture] doesn’t need to be a fancy initiative. It is simple. It needs to be authentic,” she says.
TAL regularly seeks structured feedback by sending out a survey to employees bi-monthly.
“That tells us the experience of our people, where the opportunities are, and importantly, we can then respond very quickly,” Molino says.
“We’re very keen to share the stories from our people, as opposed to corporate scripting and those things.”
She also spoke about the robust nature of TAL’s DEI program, which has existed for a long time.
“Where we have focused on is leveraging the diversity of thought ... for all of our people to feel that they can contribute in different ways, and we know that that creates stronger collaboration across the organisation and ensures that we have better outcomes for our customers.”
Fresh Clinics, a cosmetic and aesthetic clinic software company, won the “Energising” category, meaning they “build a vibrant, mentally healthy workplace that sustains motivation, wellbeing and performance”.
Chief people officer Ally Atkins at Fresh Clinics’ office in Surry Hills, Sydney: “We’re adults, and we reward impact and outcomes.” Louise Kennerley
Fresh Clinics offers an unlimited global employee assistance program, four wellbeing days and a fully flexible agreement, with no expectation of in-office attendance. “Work Your Way” is its declaration of radical trust, allowing employees to work whatever hours suit them. It also runs monthly “brunch and learns” to improve employee development and foster a sense of camaraderie.
Ally Atkins, chief people officer at Fresh Clinics, says “culture, for us, is ultimately the bedrock of everything we do. It’s how we show up for one another, and ultimately, how we show up for our members.”
For Fresh Clinics, actions speak louder than words. Atkins talks about “glitter moments”, a moment in the day when you do something small that makes people feel like they matter.
“Culture is not just something that you’ll see on the walls. It’s not like we have these posters of our values. It’s actually the company’s operating system.”
She also spoke to the importance of everyone being on board with culture strategy, rather than it being a top-down approach.
“Everyone’s responsible for it, and we have a hard expectation that you don’t have to be a cultural fit, because everyone’s diverse and different; you have to be additive to that culture, and if you’re not additive to it, then we have to have a conversation.”
Fresh Clinics’ focus on flexibility also shines through in the way it measures success.
“We’re adults, and we reward impact and outcomes. We don’t reward time on a desk,” Atkins says. It’s about what you produce, not how long it took you to produce it.”
Aurecon, a design, engineering and advisory company, took home the “Integrating” win, recognising its promotion of “flexibility and autonomy, helping employees align work with personal values and life rhythms”.
Incoming Aurecon chief executive Louise Adams says the country is now in the “age of the engineer”. Louise Kennerley
The Aurecon Way is the company’s framework for culture and ways of working. Its strongest message is “choosing optimism”, empowering employees to counter negativity by embracing an optimistic mindset.
Louise Adams is passionate about optimism, and when she came into the CEO role last year, disseminating culture in a style people understood was important to her.
“If we could bring real honesty and plain language into [our optimism-focused culture strategy], then it would be more likely that people were coming in for the right reasons and staying with us for the right reasons,” she says.
Optimism can be as simple as reflecting on positive things that happened at the end of each day, she says. It’s about training your brain to consider the good, not just the bad.
Adams says it “worked really hard on making sure that it wasn’t fancy marketing speak, but really easy to understand, and we’ve had a lot of feedback from our own people about how refreshing that is”.
She emphasises the importance of honesty, making sure employees understand the expectations on them, and not promising things Aurecon can’t deliver.
“We weren’t saying it’s all going to be easy and happy. We are actually saying what we do is hard work, what you think about may often be really difficult and complex,” she says.
Publicis Groupe ANZ CEO, Michael Rebelo.
Publicis Groupe, a communications company, won the “Nurturing” category, recognising the way they “support continuous growth and mastery through meaningful development and self-determination”. Publicis was an important driver initiating the Psychosocial Safety Code of Conduct, launched by the Media Federation of Australia, which provides practical guidance to reduce psychosocial risks.
Additionally, its Carers Collective employee resource group assists parents and carers, particularly through the empowered parents program which offers coaching sessions to help employees before and after parental leave.
Wellcome Collection(wellcomecollection.org) Over 100,000 images spanning 2,000 years of medical history, all free to download under Creative Commons licensing. The earliest item is an Egyptian prescription on papyrus. The collection includes medieval illuminated manuscripts, 16th-century anatomical drawings with hinged paper flaps that reveal the organs underneath, and etchings by Francisco Goya and Vincent van Gogh.
National Palace Museum, Taiwan(digitalarchive.npm.gov.…) One of the world’s largest collections of Chinese art and artifacts, spanning 8,000 years from the Neolithic period to the modern era. The museum has digitized 70,000 high-resolution images from its holdings of nearly 700,000 pieces, many of which were evacuated from Beijing’s Forbidden City during China’s civil war in 1948 and never returned.
Internet Archive MS-DOS Game Library (<a “https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games”>archive.org/details/sof…) Over 6,000 vintage games from the 1980s and 1990s, playable directly in the browser through an in-browser emulator called EM-DOSBOX. The collection exists because of eXoDOS, a long-running fan preservation project that tracked down software written for hardware configurations that no longer exist.
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (collection.cooperhewitt…) More than 215,000 design objects spanning 30 centuries, from ancient Roman marble to Pre-Columbian textiles to contemporary 3D-printed furniture. The museum holds the largest collection of wallcoverings in North America, and the entire catalog is searchable online with an open API and downloadable datasets.
Endangered Archives Programme(eap.bl.uk) Over 16 million digitized images and 35,000 sound recordings from more than 500 projects across 90+ countries, in over 100 languages and scripts. The program funds digitization of archives at risk of destruction or decay, from Timbuktu manuscripts threatened by conflict to palm-leaf texts in Southeast Asia. Originals stay in their countries of origin, with digital copies made freely available online.
Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite
Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch [no paywall]: “Last year I used detailed data on the ideological positions of people who post on social media to show that they over-represent the radical right and left, confirming the polarisation hypothesis.
Over the past week I have used the same dataset of tens of thousands of responses to questions on policy preferences and sociopolitical beliefs to test whether and how the most widely used AI chatbots shape conversations about politics and society.
The results strongly support the theory of AI chatbots as depolarising and technocratising. I found that while different AI platforms behave in subtly different ways, all of them nudge people away from the most extreme positions and towards more moderate and expert-aligned stances.
On average, Grok guides conversations about policy and society towards the centre-right — a rightward push for most people but a moderating nudge towards the centre for those who start out as conservative hardliners. OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini and the Chinese model DeepSeek all exert similarly sized nudges towards a centre-left worldview — a slight leftward nudge for most people but a moderating push away from fringe leftwing positions.
Importantly, this remains true after accounting for partisan differences in AI platform usage and chatbots’ sycophantic tendencies. Even when the AI bots know a user’s political leanings, conversations with LLMs still direct hardline partisans on both flanks away from extreme beliefs on average…”
Claude Mythos Is Everyone’s Problem
The Atlantic Gift Article: What happens when AI can hack everything? – “For the past several weeks, Anthropic says it secretly possessed a tool potentially capable of commandeering most computer servers in the world.
This is a bot that, if unleashed, might be able to hack into banks, exfiltrate state secrets, and fry crucial infrastructure. Already, according to the company, this AI model has identified thousands of major cybersecurity vulnerabilities—including exploits in every single major operating system and browser. This level of cyberattack is typically available only to elite, state-sponsored hacking cells in a very small number of countries including China, Russia, and the United States. Now it’s in the hands of a private company.
On Tuesday, the company officially announced the existence of the model, known as Claude Mythos Preview. For now, the bot will be available only to a consortium of many of the world’s biggest tech companies—including Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia. These partners can use Mythos Preview to scan and secure bugs and exploits in their software. Other than that, Anthropic will not immediately release Mythos Preview to the public, having determined that doing so without more robust safeguards would be too dangerous. For years, cybersecurity experts have been warning about the chaos that highly capable hacking bots could usher in.
As a result of how capable AI models have become at coding, they have also become extremely good at finding vulnerabilities in all manner of software. Even before Mythos Preview, AI companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all reported instances of their AI models being used in sophisticated cyberattacks by both criminal and state-backed groups.
As Giovanni Vigna, who directs a federal research institute dedicated to AI-orchestrated cyberthreats, told me last fall: You can have a million hackers at your fingertips “with the push of a button It’s not just tech journalists that are worried about the Mythos threat. “Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell summoned bank CEOs to an urgent meeting this week to warn about the cybersecurity risks associated with Anthropic’s powerful Mythos AI model.”
“Don’t worry about your children,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assured anxious parents. “Don’t hold them back if they want to go to jail, for they are doing a job for not only themselves but for all of America and for all mankind.”
In “How to Be a Dissident,” Gal Beckerman offers an inspiring tour of famous renegades with lessons for the rabble-rousers of today.
HOW TO BE A DISSIDENT, by Gal Beckerman
In the spring of 1963, in Birmingham, Ala., teenagers and children as young as six faced fire hoses, dogs and angry police officers to protest segregation. The campaign, called “Project C” — the “C” stood for “confrontation” — involved rolling marches and sit-ins. On a single day, hundreds of young people were locked up.
“Don’t worry about your children,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assured anxious parents. “Don’t hold them back if they want to go to jail, for they are doing a job for not only themselves but for all of America and for all mankind.” Less than a week later, the jailed kids were released and the city agreed to desegregate its lunch counters.
The so-called Children’s Crusade of 1963 is one of the many stories recounted in “How to Be a Dissident,” an inspiring series of profiles of activists and rabble rousers from Gal Beckerman, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review who is now a staff writer at The Atlantic, and whose previous works include a history of radical ideas and a history of Soviet Jews. Beckerman features the Birmingham tale prominently in a chapter titled “Be Reckless,” which also lingers on the example of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, who refused to remain in exile after an almost-lethal poisoning in 2020 and died in a Russian prison four years later.
To his credit, Beckerman offers no hard and fast formula for determining when heroic risk-taking veers into irresponsible adventurism or outright self-destruction. Recklessness is both “necessary” and “completely fraught,” he writes.
Superficially, “How to Be a Dissident” takes the form of a guide, with each of the 10 chapters focused on a trait central to the dissident temperament: In addition to being reckless one should “Be Alone,” “Be Pessimistic,” “Be Watchful,” “Be Human” and so on. But the book can also be understood as one man’s reckoning with the existential questions posed by the rising tide of authoritarianism.
There are, of course, classic dissident stories, set against the backdrop of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which sadly don’t feel as distant or foreign as they might have only a few years ago. We also meet the novelist and philosopher Albert Camus, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, Jesus Christ and many other luminaries. The subtext is that any one of us might be next: called to rebel when ICE agents snatch our neighbors, when lawmakers hijack our rights or when A.I. companies try to steal our livelihood.
The book’s stories are compellingly rendered, imparting clear and moving lessons or posing interesting moral challenges and ambiguities, especially when coupled with Beckerman’s insightful commentary. Yet some characters and accounts are more prickly or ambiguous than others. In the chapter “Be Funny” I flinched during an aside that compared the comedian Louis C.K.’s public masturbationto the Greek cynic Diogenes, who famously and irreverently lived in a large urn on the streets of ancient Athens and masturbated in the city’s marketplace, without mentioning that C.K.’s actions were abhorrent because he pressured women into watching or listening to him.
It was a reminder that one person’s dissident is another person’s douche bag or demagogue. As Beckerman acknowledges, dissidents are often “exasperating, self-righteous or rude” — or worse. Even Hitler, he says, could have qualified as a dissident before he rose to power. “Dissidence,” he writes, “is not inherently virtuous.”
It would have been interesting to hear Beckerman dig more deeply into this dilemma and its related complexities. Today, the most powerful people in Washington and their influencer supporters present themselves as dissidents perpetually besieged by oppressive forces. They blast thewoke mob, rail against the “Jewish oligarchy” allegedly pulling the strings of American foreign policy, smear students who argue that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza as terrorist sympathizers and rage against the Deep State, conflating hate speech with fearless speech and lies with suppressed truths and revelations. How can we reliably distinguish real dissidence from its profitable simulation?
As I finished Beckerman’s rousing manual, I couldn’t shake another thought: We need dissidents, yes, but we also desperately need discipline and vision. The book offers some tantalizing accounts of collective rebellion, including the fight for abolition in the United States and the struggle against communism in 1980s Poland that started among trade unionists. But more could have fruitfully been said about the push and pull between dissidents and social movements, or between the commands of private conscience and the outreach and compromises required to make lasting change. Beckerman shows how to sound the moral alarm, which is an important first step. What comes next — the steps required to forge durable coalitions and win specific democratic reforms — is harder and on this front Beckerman is more conflicted.
Which brings us back to King. When he raised his prophetic voice, it was in service of organizing toward clearly defined goals: civil rights, labor rights and an end to racism, poverty and militarism. Over decades, King and countless others built a movement wide and deep enough that it could coerce the powerful into making concessions.
When those courageous young people stood up to the Alabama authorities, their dissent was grounded in solidarity and guided by well-honed strategy. As readers of “How to Be a Dissident” think about the kind of dissidents they might want to be, they would be wise to remember that potent combination.
HOW TO BE A DISSIDENT | By Gal Beckerman | Crown| 199 pp. | $19, paperback
