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When I tell fellow tech executives that every employee at sunday, from our engineers to our finance team, must complete a restaurant shift before they can fully onboard, I usually get confused looks. “You mean like, shadow someone?” they ask. No. I mean they tie on an apron, take orders, run food, and yes, deal with the 15-minute wait for the check that our product was literally built to eliminate. It sounds extreme. It is extreme. And it’s also one of the smartest business decisions we’ve made. Here’s why: business is often removed from the industries we serve. We’re keeping that empathy right there. The Empathy Gap in Tech I’ve spent 25 years in the tech …

When my emergency IAR app sounds at 3 a.m., there’s no room for ego, second-guessing, or hesitation. In that critical moment, all that matters is trust, teamwork, and execution. While I have spent decades in the corporate world, some of my most valuable leadership lessons have come from my experience as a volunteer EMS first responder. In the field, when I’m assisting in a life-threatening trauma situation or responding to a car accident, leadership is put to the test under extreme pressure. But whether I’m piloting an ambulance on a dark highway or guiding my company through turbulent times, the principles remain the same: Know your role, remove the noise, maintain a …

As an introvert, I dread large conferences. I get invited to a number throughout the year, and I usually scramble to find excuses for why I can’t attend. Since I have spent much of my career posing as an extrovert, some people are surprised to discover that I really don’t enjoy networking at large gatherings. I worry about feeling overwhelmed by the crowds, not remembering people’s names, having to sit alone for meals, drawing a blank and not being able to engage in small talk, and, of course, worried I won’t know anyone there. Just thinking through all of this is absolutely exhausting. Last year, I was invited to speak and attend Transform, a conference focused on drivi…

We’re more than half a decade removed from pandemic lockdowns—when remote work profoundly upended the 9-to-5—yet the preference for workday flexibility endures, a new report shows. According to the recently released ninth annual State of Hybrid Work report from Owl Labs, a video conference tech company, 65% of workers are interested in a concept the report refers to as “microshifting”: “structured flexibility with short, nonlinear work blocks matched to your energy, duties, or productivity.” In other words: breaking up your work shift into a bunch of tiny ones. Perhaps you log on at 6 a.m. to get a head start, then take a break for a midmorning Pilates class befo…

I recently argued that return-to-office mandates aren’t really about productivity; they’re about control. Ironically, my article published smack-dab in the middle of a September inflection point of increasing office time requirements, a phenomenon Owl Labs dubbed “hybrid creep.” And now, perhaps shockingly, I’ve started a new job with a team that (gasp!) has an office. When I wrote my argument against RTO, I had no inkling that I would soon be back in an office (part-time) myself. I am now basically in a live experiment. So far, it’s changed how I feel about the idea of going into an office. It hasn’t changed my view on RTO. A lab for truly flexible work My ne…

We’ve grown to despise meeting culture, and I understand why. Think about the last few meetings you’ve attended. How many of them felt clear, succinct, like a truly effective use of your time? I’ve sat through more meetings than I can count—many of them with half the participants multitasking, cameras on but minds elsewhere. As a certified facilitator who has designed everything from executive offsites to weekly team stand-ups, I’ve learned that most meetings fail not because people don’t care, but because leaders treat meetings as a necessary evil instead of the expensive, high-stakes collaboration moments they actually are. “But what can we do about it?” you might l…

Over the course of my career as an executive at Google, Yahoo, and Meta, and now as founder and CEO of my own firm, I’ve hired thousands of people. Across all those roles, one thing has stayed consistent: the applications that stand out are the ones that go beyond simply checking the boxes. In today’s job market, with a challenging economy and the rise of AI, fewer jobs are getting posted, and more people are applying for every job. So it’s all the more important to take the steps that will make your application stand out. Last year, we opened a chief of staff role at my company. Within days, we received more than 800 applications. My team and I read through every one…

I joined IBM Research in the early 1990s wanting to be a networking specialist. I spent time in grad school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) working on algebraic coding theory—specifically cyclic codes—for my master’s thesis. Cyclic codes are mathematical patterns that prevent signals from interfering with each other. Think of them as a way to let hundreds of conversations happen in the same room without anyone talking over each other. At the time, I thought that knowledge might never be useful again. But about six months into my job at IBM, serendipity struck. People started asking: is it possible to build a wireless network? Until then, wired ne…

IBM plans to invest $150 billion in tech manufacturing, research, and development in the United States over the next five years. The technology giant announced this commitment in a news release on Monday. IBM says the investment will accelerate American production of quantum computers and fuel the economy. The $150 billion investment includes more than $30 billion to fund research and development to advance American manufacturing of mainframe and quantum computers. IBM is one of the largest technology employers in the U.S. The company currently has manufacturing facilities in Poughkeepsie, New York. “We have been focused on American jobs and manufacturing since…

Over the past 30 days, many big-name tech giants have seen their stock prices fall hard, largely thanks to President The President’s chaotic tariff rollout. For example, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) has seen its shares fall 11% over the past month, while Nvidia has seen its shares fall (Nasdaq: NVDA) fall over 12%. But until yesterday, IBM (NYSE: IBM) was one of the big-name tech giants that rode out the tariff storm pretty well. While the company’s stock price did tank along with the rest of the markets in early April, it has recovered nicely since then and, as of the close of bell yesterday, its shares were actually up just a bit (about 0.6%) over the past 30 days. But…

After making his mark in Silicon Valley, Icelandic designer and tech mogul Haraldur “Halli” Thorleifsson is now solving a far more analog problem: the inaccessibility of local storefronts. As a wheelchair user, Thorleifsson knows firsthand how exclusion can be built into a city. “If you don’t see anyone using a wheelchair,” he says, “it’s not because they don’t exist—it’s because they have nowhere to go.” Thorleifsson has experienced such access barriers to public spaces throughout his life, but the turning point came on a late-night walk with his family in downtown Reykjavík, when he couldn’t join his son in a corner store because of a single step at the entrance. “A…

As Italy prepares for the 2026 Winter Olympics, a crucial part of the prep is the manufacturing of artificial snow; the Olympics organizing committee plans to make 2.4 million cubic meters of the stuff. The practice has become more and more common as climate change leads to warmer temperatures and less reliable snow packs. But as climate change worsens, artificial snow won’t even be enough to help certain countries host the Winter Games. By mid-century, the number of countries that could potentially host the Winter Olympic Games could be cut nearly in half, according to a recent study from the University of Waterloo. Currently, the International Olympic Commi…

Ideo—the global design firm famous for putting Design Thinking into the lexicon of corporate America—has vastly reduced its staff as appetite for its services have waned. But two years following the culling, the company has hired a new CEO. Michael Peng will take the role in June. Peng is a former Ideo partner who has spent the last five years leading the venture studio Moon Creative Lab, which was founded by the Japanese investment firm Mitsui & Co. “His leadership will bring a unique blend of human-centered creativity, multicultural fluency, thoughtful collaboration, and strong business acumen,” the company announced in a press release. Meanwhile, Derek Robs…

Most managers are using AI the same way they use any productivity tool: to move faster. It summarizes meetings, drafts responses, and clears small tasks off the plate. That helps, but it misses the real shift. The real change begins when AI stops assisting and starts acting. When systems resolve issues, trigger workflows, and make routine decisions without human involvement, the work itself changes. And when the work changes, the job has to change too. Let’s take the example of an airline and lost luggage. Generative AI can explain what steps to take to recover a lost bag. Agentic AI aims to actually find the bag, reroute it, and deliver it. The person that wa…

If you’re in the business of publishing content on the internet, it’s been difficult to know how to deal with AI. Obviously, you can’t ignore it; large language models (LLMs) and AI search engines are here, and they ingest your content and summarize it for their users, killing valuable traffic to your site. Plenty of data supports this. Creating a content strategy that accounts for this changing reality is complex to begin with. You need to decide what content to expose to AI systems, what to block from them, and how both of those activities can serve your business. That would be hard even if there were clear rules that everyone’s operating under. But that is far from a…

There’s an old joke among economists that goes like this: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” I didn’t say it was a funny joke. But when labor economist Robert Solow originally wrote those words in 1987, they were certainly true. Personal computers, corporate mainframes, and the first vestiges of the modern internet were all anyone could talk about. Yet productivity wasn’t budging. These whizzy technologies, in short, weren’t earning anyone any money. The phenomenon became known as Solow’s Paradox. Of course, we all know how that story ended. By the mid-1990s, productivity was on a tear, and tech was making lo…