Maybe you’ve been there. A bad day at work. A bad week, a bad month. You’re ready for something new, certain your talents will be more appreciated somewhere else. It’s time to quit. Do you do it in the spectacular fashion of your daydreams? Telling the boss about the teammate who takes credit for everyone’s work or finally letting your desk mate know that one should n-e-v-e-r microwave fish in the office? Stanford University’s Dave Evans and Bill Burnett would call this the Bridge Burner approach, and I think we all know it should stay the stuff of daydreams.

But giving standard notice and walking away quietly is not the best option either, according to Evans and Burnett. In this excerpt from their new book Designing Your Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness at Work, the founders of Stanford Life Design Lab offer a third way — be a Generative Quitter. Learn how to see opportunity in the “critical turning point between finishing well and starting anew” with their guide: How to quit your job spectacularly well

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What’s the best quit you’ve had? What worked, what didn’t, and what would you do differently? Tell us in the comments. Bonus points if you did manage to kindly share that microwave wisdom…

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But would you even want to quit if your boss just appreciated you more? Management researchers Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton say they’ve observed “a staggering gratitude deficit in the work world.” Managers who know showing appreciation is important for morale may still struggle to do it well, if at all. In this piece from Leading with Gratitude, Gostick and Elton outline a few simple things they’ve seen successful leaders do to overcome this, featuring insights from some heavy hitting retired CEOs: Why do so many bosses fail at gratitude? Here’s what you can do about it. 

Straight From the Experts

It comes back to management. Experimentation and analytics are the foundation of many digital businesses, but in The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World, Harvard Business School professors Michael Luca and Max Bazerman urge us to look harder at “the many managerial issues that arise when organizations begin to use experiments to inform decisions.” Watch out for real world examples.