Tara
McMullin

The core of Tara McMullin's work is a persistent interrogation of what she calls "conventional wisdom" in business - the received ideas about growth, goals, productivity, and success that circulate mostly because they're easy to repeat rather than because they're true.

Her book "What Works" is the clearest statement of this project. The argument, broadly, is that standard goal-setting frameworks are broken not just tactically but philosophically: they prioritize achievement over practice, outcomes over process, and the imagined future over the livable present. The alternative she proposes is less about a new framework and more about a different relationship to work itself.

She also brings feminist economic analysis into spaces where it's rarely heard. Her argument that cash flow is a feminist issue isn't rhetorical - it follows from a careful look at who gets business financing, who doesn't, which kinds of businesses get valued and which get dismissed, and how those patterns reproduce economic inequality along gender lines. It's the sort of argument that feels obvious once you've heard it articulated clearly, which is a mark of good intellectual work.

She's skeptical of the artificial intelligence industry in a way that's grounded rather than reactive. As someone who's been working in digital media since 2009, she has a sense of which technological shifts are genuinely structural and which are hype cycles dressed in new clothing. Her skepticism of AI belongs to the latter category, at least as currently deployed.

She describes herself as "equal parts charismatic and awkward" - which in the relentlessly polished world of online business education is not just refreshing but useful. It's a description that probably captures something real about how autistic traits interact with public performance: genuine warmth and intellectual engagement alongside the specific kind of social friction that doesn't go away with practice.

She's also an amateur baker, which she mentions in professional bios. This is not the kind of hobby that makes you look interesting in a calculated way - it's the kind of hobby that makes you actually interesting. There's something revealing about how someone spends their unstructured time, and bread-baking is inherently anti-optimization: it takes the time it takes, it doesn't scale, and it rewards attention over speed.

Her political positions are stated plainly. She's a radical feminist and anti-capitalist. She believes work is central to identity and meaning - not as a celebration of hustle culture, but as a reason to take seriously how work is structured, who it serves, and whether those structures can be changed. The distinction matters.

Her aspirations are scholar-adjacent: she wants to study and write about how sociocultural forces shape the way people work in the 21st century, drawing on the full range of academic tools while remaining grounded in practical reality. She is, as she puts it, a "wannabe independent scholar." The "wannabe" is probably too modest.