About this podcast
Launching Wednesday 16th September 2026.
The Wankernomics podcast is a deep dive into workplace bullsh*ttery.
Each week, co-hosts James Schloeffel and Charles Firth drill down, deep dive and unpack examples of corporate bullsh*ttery from the real world, deconstructing the way people use to bullshit their way to success (or failure).
Wankernomics answers the questions you always wanted to know but were too busy stuck on an all-hands company-wide Teams call to ask: What does it mean when someone talks about ‘operational cadence’ in a weekly all-hands staff meeting? What is the most horrific employee recognition scheme ever conceived? Why does it feel like waiting times for call centres are getting longer and longer?
The Financial Times has called Wankernomics the “workplace comedy phenomenon”. Since 2023, Wankernomics has run mock corporate workshops to sold out audiences across the globe. Mixing real-world stories with personal anecdotes from James and Charles’s 20+ years in the working world, the podcast is informative, funny and totally relatable.
Follow now so that you can find it in your podcast feed, every Wednesday morning.
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Episodes
- The 69 Words Banned By General Motors · 41 min · Season 1 Episode 10In 2008 General Motors circulated an internal presentation listing 69 words that employees were banned from using. It’s not the typical sort of list that you might see in a…
- Meta's Organisational Values Are Hilarious · 26 min · Season 1 Episode 9At Wankernomics, we love corporate values – the four or five words that are chosen at an off-site meeting run by an overpaid facilitator, placed on a poster in the office kitchen…
- The original working titles for some of the world's best-known brands · 34 min · Season 1 Episode 8Coming up with a brand name is difficult. Just ask James. When he was a branding consultant he named two television channels. Both have since been scrapped. In this episode…
- Why The Beatles never used Trello or Jira · 34 min · Season 1 Episode 7Workplace productivity apps like Trello, Asana, Jira and Miro are everywhere now. But do they actually increase productivity, or are they just another thing to add to your…
- The onboarding episode: new starters, please listen to this first · 28 min · Season 1 Episode 6Our People & Culture team advised us that we rushed ahead and launched this podcast without first doing an onboarding episode. What a disaster. How will people know how to…
- How many buzzwords can you fit into a single job advertisement? · 42 min · Season 1 Episode 5"When I grow up I want to manage the delivery of complex cross-functional initiatives and shape scope across business cases" said no-one, ever. Job advertisements have a…
- Government bureaucracy: There’s a form to fill out before you can listen to this episode · 42 min · Season 1 Episode 4Most workplaces have at least some ridiculous processes that seem to serve no purpose. But when it comes to pointless bureaucracy, Government departments are best-in-class…
- Your Call Is Not Important To Us · 51 min · Season 1 Episode 3In 2023 the entire network of Optus – one of Australia’s largest telecommunications providers – went down for 12 hours. The outage caused major disruptions across Australia as 11…
- “Free donuts in the foyer”: The Enron scandal retold · 46 min · Season 1 Episode 2You probably know the story. In 2001 Enron – then one of the largest companies in the world – collapsed after it was found to be using illegal accounting tricks to hide massive…
- Is this the worst employee recognition scheme ever created? · 52 min · Season 1 Episode 1In 2025 a worker was sent an email from their employer to recognise their three years of service. Inside the email was a button that read, ‘view recognition’, which when clicked…
- Trailer · 3 min · Season 1After taking on board extensive stakeholder feedback and running a strategic analysis to identify gaps in our end-to-end customer offering, we’re thrilled to advise that we’re…
