Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Augustus Doricko, founder and CEO of cloud-seeding startup Rainmaker, surveys the sky from a sunbaked hillside 5 miles from Utah’s Great Salt Lake. On this balmy Sunday afternoon in late September, the lake is calm, but its serenity belies a potentially catastrophic problem: The Great Salt Lake is shrinking—and is at risk of disappearing altogether. At its peak 40 years ago, the lake covered 2,300 square miles; today, more than 800 square miles of lake bed are exposed. As more of the lake dries, scientists warn that dust storms made up of toxic heavy metals could plague the Salt Lake Valley, home to 1.2 million people, and beyond. Rainmaker’s futuristic technology…

HBO Max might be getting a brand update. Again. The streaming service has notoriously waffled between different names and logos over the past several years. More recently, it got caught up in an intense bidding war between Netflix and Paramount Skydance to acquire its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery. On February 27, Netflix finally admitted defeat and abandoned its takeover bid—meaning Paramount is set to acquire WBD for $110 billion. The transaction is expected to close later this year. This supersized deal will undoubtedly have major ripple effects across the broader entertainment industry. But, for HBO, it might mean yet another blow to an already di…

When I was a product marketing leader for a corporate regional bank, I found myself getting annoyed during an all-day strategy meeting. My frustration came from hearing the same voices, sharing the same old ideas. I wondered why other people, especially the women in the room, weren’t speaking up. I remember thinking, “Well, you could be the one to speak up.” I felt nerves jump in my throat and doubt sink heavily in my stomach. Who was I to speak up? I thought that others in the room were smarter than me since they had higher titles and more experience. Looking back now, I realize that I had a big problem, a Pedestal Problem. I silenced my ideas because I was intimida…

There is a budget line in your business that no one is managing. According to research by Leadership IQ, confirmed across multiple subsequent studies, the average 18-month failure rate across industries is 46%—meaning nearly one in two hires either underperforms significantly or leaves within 18 months. The cost of each of those failures runs between 50% and 200% of that employee’s annual salary, accounting for recruiting costs, onboarding investment, lost productivity, team disruption, and replacement. Run the math. A company making 50 hires a year at average fully-loaded salaries of $95,000—not a large organization, just a growing one—is sitting on a financial expos…

Whatever your take on humanity, it is hard to deny one fact: we are, as a species, more hypocritical than we think, and tend to display a curious tendency for holding strong moral principles on one hand, and disregarding them without much guilt or awareness on the other. Unlike humans, a penguin does not preach fidelity in the morning and download Tinder by lunch. A meerkat on guard does not issue a memo on teamwork before sneaking off duty. A wolf does not publish a servant-leadership manifesto before stealing the kill. Across history, human moral systems have shared a curious pattern: the stricter the rulebook, the richer the archive of exceptions. Religions preach …

In boardrooms right now, speed is winning. Product cycles are compressing. Strategy decks are assembled in hours, not weeks. Cross-functional alignment—once the bottleneck of execution—is increasingly frictionless. This looks like progress. But a less visible shift is underway—one with direct consequences for innovation and competitive position. As AI removes coordination friction, it is also eroding cognitive friction: the productive tension through which original ideas emerge. Organizations that optimize too aggressively for speed and alignment risk becoming fast followers of yesterday’s logic rather than creators of what comes next. Why this Matters Now …

When AWS’s US-East-1 region went dark in late October, followed just a week later by a Microsoft Azure outage, it was yet another stark reminder that even the world’s biggest cloud vendors are not immune to failures. A simple DNS failure in AWS’s Route 53 rippled outward, knocking out applications, disrupting database services, and reminding us how dependent our tech infrastructure has become on a handful of cloud regions. With “an inadvertent tenant configuration change,” the Azure outage further highlighted the instability of some of these systems, once again demonstrating how small changes can have quite a large impact. With CyberCube estimating that the cost of …

Walk down almost any city street, beach, or park, and you’ll see them: cigarette butts scattered along the curb, tucked into sidewalk cracks, or washed up along shorelines—4.5 trillion of them. They’re now so common they’ve become nearly invisible. But that ubiquity masks a growing environmental crisis—one that has only intensified as nicotine products evolve. For decades, cigarette butts have been the most littered item in the world. The filter—often mistaken as biodegradable—is made of cellulose acetate, a form of plastic that can persist in the environment for years. These filters don’t just sit there; they break down into microplastics, leaching toxic chemicals li…

Since I was old enough to vote in presidential elections, I’ve heard plenty of grumbling across the political spectrum about moving to Canada if one candidate or another wins. And since I have been a full-time worker, I have also been party to a number of pie-in-the-sky conversations about the expat potential of retiring to Barcelona; Buenos Aires, Argentina; or Bangkok. But conversations about leaving the United States have felt a little different over the last couple of years. It started when several of my parents’ contemporaries actually retired abroad, rather than just thinking about it. Then multiple friends picked up stakes—which included selling houses and cars…

Why do some climate innovations fail to deliver? Not because they’re flawed, but because the business world misjudges their economics. From hydrogen to EV infrastructure, carbon-capture startups to precision farming tools, companies around the world are pouring money into climate tech. But for every promising climate innovation that scales, several more fizzle out too soon. Not because the science doesn’t work. But because the business case was either overestimated or underestimated at the wrong time. In the race to build the future, too many businesses are still blowing it on climate economics. Some assume customers will pay for green solutions at any price. Othe…

Organizations talk about wanting innovation, but most aren’t willing to create the right conditions for it. We celebrate disruptors, bold thinkers, and game-changing ideas—but the way most organizations actually run makes creativity nearly impossible. Leaders ask, “How do we encourage creativity?” But the real question is: “How do we keep it alive in a world that values efficiency over exploration?” Efficiency kills creativity, but not how you think Most discussions around creativity killers focus on rigid hierarchies, tight deadlines, and risk-averse cultures. While these are barriers, the deeper, more insidious problem is the cult of efficiency. Organizatio…

Headlines alternate between massive AI investments and reports of failed deployments. The pattern is consistent across industries: seemingly promising AI projects that work well in testing environments struggle or fail when deployed in real-world conditions. It’s not insufficient computing power, inadequate talent, or immature algorithms. I’ve worked with over 250 enterprises deploying visual AI—from Fortune 10 manufacturers to emerging unicorns—and the pattern is unmistakable: the companies that succeed train their models on what actually breaks them, while the ones that fail optimize for what works in controlled environments. The Hidden Economics of AI Failure …

Before air-conditioning existed, staying cool during the summer months in the southern United States was a foreign skill for early European colonists. But enslaved Africans, hailing from similar warm climates, had developed, over centuries, architectural strategies for combating sweltering summer conditions. It was from these early enslaved builders that the most quintessential architectural feature of homes in the United States emerged: the porch. Porches, verandas, porticoes, and other types of outdoor coverings connected to a building have existed in various forms across the globe for centuries. However, what we think of as an American style of porch, first associa…

The days are getting longer, sunnier, and warmer in the western hemisphere. Those bright summer days have a bigger impact on the workforce and the physical office than you may think. The obvious ones are longer lunches and fewer people in the office due to vacations. Yet when everybody is in the office, there is one common human habit happening during the summer that is often overlooked. One that undermines employee productivity and increases a building’s carbon emissions. The productivity killer? Sunshine. Not that anybody is against it, but when the sun is at its highest and hottest, sun glare and heat penetrating the glass panes in office buildings prompts employe…

Why do CEOs of big AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic often publicly acknowledge that AI is likely to result in significant job loss? Most AI company CEOs now concede that widespread job loss from AI is coming, while differing somewhat on the timeline. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has long acknowledged that AI will displace workers. “The real impact of AI doing jobs in the next few years will begin to be palpable,” he said recently. But he often adds that AI will also create new jobs, such as for humans who manage teams of AI agents. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been the most frank and pessimistic when it comes to AI-driven job loss: “I would not be surprised if somewhe…

“Overworked and underpaid” has become the modern workplace anthem. The internet is full of advice on how to negotiate harder, “quiet quit,” or jump ship. It’s an easy narrative to embrace: If you feel undervalued, the system must have failed you. That story is comforting. It’s also costly. While genuine exploitation exists, most people stop short of asking the harder, and far more lucrative question: What is my contribution actually worth in the market? Effort Is Not Currency We have a tendency to measure our value by our level of exhaustion. We tally up the stress, the late nights, and the emotional labor. But markets do not pay for perspiration. They pay …

Underperformance usually shows up in the guise of missed deadlines, low-quality work, or a bad attitude. This gets spotted sometimes, but not always, by a leader who then has to make a choice: when and how to tackle the underperformance. However, the problem can be exacerbated by acting too quickly: there is often a fierce desire within leaders to jump to action. They want to stop the badness, stop the ripples, and solve the situation as quickly as possible. But often, this means that they make assumptions about what is causing the underperformance and how to solve it without taking a little time to explore the real reasons behind the poor performance. The problem…

Do you know that the longer a decision-maker views your résumé, the more likely it is that you’ll get an interview? Recent research combined eye-tracking and machine learning to understand résumé decisions better. The most actionable conclusion was that Experience section dwell time predicts interview invitations. That’s next-level information. We’ve had eye-tracking studies for years. They tell us what readers look at, but give no additional meaning. Now, by applying AI, we know which sections of the résumé matter the most for getting interviews. I was a retained search consultant for 25-plus years. For the last 10 years, I’ve been writing executive and board ré…

You’ve worked together before. You trust each other. You know how the other person thinks under pressure. On paper, it’s the safest move. In many ways, it is. Shared history creates speed—faster decisions, candid conversations, less time decoding intent. When CEOs bring former colleagues into senior roles, baseline trust feels like rocket fuel. But familiarity also introduces a hidden risk that undermines executive teams far more often than leaders anticipate. What I see repeatedly in executive teams built on shared history is the quiet formation of inner circles. Leaders who “go way back” share shorthand, context, and trust earned elsewhere. Others, often equ…

You’ve likely heard of vibe coding and very well may have conducted an experiment or two yourself, enlisting Claude or some other AI tool to create a simple website or an interactive game. OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy coined the phrase with a tweet in February 2025. In its simplest terms, vibe coding involves telling an AI program what you want to accomplish and having the AI create the code. It uses natural language provided by the user to generate the software. Vibe coding is a truly revolutionary democratizer of software development. It allows anyone with a computer and a little imagination to come up with software that appears, at least on the surface, to …

If you wake up before sunrise ready to start the day, you’re not alone—and in many ways, the modern world is designed for you. Schools start early. Meetings begin at 8 a.m. And showing up first is still seen as a sign of dedication. Research from the University of Washington confirms this “early riser bias”: employees who start early are rated as more conscientious and receive higher performance evaluations, even when they work the same hours as colleagues who start later. It sounds like an advantage—and it is. But for many early chronotypes, that same structure becomes a trap. Because the day is already tilted in your favor, it’s easy to slide into overwork and under…

Working for myself was the goal. I did it. I made it. I work for myself. But it hasn’t fixed my life. I’m free to pursue anything I want. But achieving goals doesn’t and won’t make me complete. There’s a term for it: the arrival fallacy. It’s the reason we sometimes still feel “empty” even when we achieve what we want. Achieving a goal rarely feels like arrival. Because it’s not the end we imagined. You do everything you can to climb the ladder. But you get up there and then nothing. Or even worse, a disappointment. That happens because the end we expect doesn’t necessarily solve our problems. Goals are meant to guide us. They can show you how much you’ve grown. How f…

When Jon LaMantia, a Long Island-based business reporter, was in journalism school, his professor drilled one rule into his students: you get two exclamation points a year and no more. “So if you use them in January,” LaMantia recalls being told, “you better hope there’s nothing to exclaim for the rest of the year.” The rule stuck. LaMantia still thinks about that rigid quota today. “I use exclamation points all the time in texts and emails. If you don’t, the message sounds more stern,” he says. “But I can’t remember the last time I used one in a business article.” Strong feelings about the exclamation point aren’t uncommon. People tend to either love it or l…