What's on Your Mind?

There is a nationwide talent war for frontline, skilled workers, and unfortunately, too many companies are losing. Turnover among deskless workers, who account for about 80% of the workforce globally, is high, and they are notoriously difficult to train through traditional training programs. Corporate training solutions that work for someone sitting behind a desk rarely work for someone on a job site or factory floor. HR professionals cited employee engagement, retention, and recruitment as the top management challenges within the deskless workforce, according to a Society for Human Resource Management study. Unlike office workers with predictable schedules and easy …

AI has not changed the importance of judgment in product leadership. What it has changed is the cost of getting it wrong. Early in my career, I learned a principle that still guides how I think about building products: The strongest decisions rarely start with perfect data. They start with conviction, a hypothesis shaped by experience, customer insight, and pattern recognition. What ultimately separates high-performing product organizations from average ones is how quickly and confidently instinct is validated. That validation is the true role of product analytics, and increasingly, it is where AI amplifies its value. Analytics tests whether what you believed woul…

Authenticity is currency. You can spend it recklessly and go broke, or invest it strategically and build wealth. Most leaders are choosing bankruptcy without even realizing it. Right now, workplaces are debating authenticity. Some call “bring your whole self to work” a dangerous myth that punishes marginalized employees. Others claim it’s the secret to engagement and retention. Both are right—and both are missing something. Unfiltered authenticity without skill can be destructive. And yes, marginalized employees pay a higher price when they try to be authentic in systems that weren’t built for them. But your team already knows when you’re faking it. Th…

Walt Disney and OpenAI make for very odd bedfellows: The former is one of the most-recognized brands among children under the age of 18. The near-$200 billion company’s value has been derived from more than a century of aggressive safeguarding of its intellectual property and keeping the magic alive among innocent children. OpenAI, which celebrated its first decade of existence this week, is best known for upending creativity, the economy, and society with its flagship product, ChatGPT. And in the last two months, it has said it wants to get to a place where its adult users can use its tech to create erotica. So what the hell should we make of a just-announced dea…

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has proposed a new rule that could reshape how independent workers are classified in the United States. After nearly two decades of legal battles, policy swings, and political fights, the agency is once again attempting to clarify one of the most contested questions in modern labor law: Who gets to work independently, and under what rules? For me, this debate isn’t theoretical. I have been living inside it for nearly 20 years. Today, as the chief legal officer for a platform dedicated to connecting independent healthcare workers with open shifts, I have seen our legal system struggle to truly take care of the exact workers it says it…

The past few days in the stock market have been so wild—a plunge on Monday, a sharp pivot upward on Tuesday, a rise with lots of oscillations on Wednesday—that a record set by the Dow Jones Industrial Average on last week’s final day of trading has been largely overlooked. That’s unfortunate, because there’s a lot to be learned from that record about how financial markets work. I’m referring to the record loss inflicted on the Dow last Thursday by the three-digit share price drop of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH), the large healthcare and insurance company. (Thursday was the last day of trading last week because the market was closed for Good Friday.) That price d…

Three months ago, I fired up ChatGPT and asked it to design a highly aggressive, short-term investment portfolio, selecting five stocks that were most likely to make me fabulously wealthy in six month’s time. Then, I threw good sense to the wind, transferred $500 of my actual money into a Robinhood account, and bought the stocks that ChatGPT had pitched. Since then, it’s been a wild ride. My portfolio has flown to new heights, giving me serious FOMO about the fact that I didn’t put all my money into ChatGPT’s picks. Then, it singed its wings, falling Icarus-style to lows that had me almost ready to bail on the whole thing and redirect the charred rema…

When we talk about infrastructure for a local economy, most people picture roads, sewer pipes, broadband, or parks. But there is an invisible type of infrastructure that shapes where capital flows and which businesses are considered investable. These are the narratives shape how a city talks about itself and its people. Strong narratives rooted in abundance help attract institutional capital, spur innovation, and foster partnership and collaboration. When you treat narrative as an investable priority, you can reshape a city’s physical landscape. Seeking a quick return on investment, some fabricate narratives and relabel entire communities within cities without residen…

How do modernist transportation planners recommend handling congestion? By recommending new vehicle lanes. What happens when you build new vehicle lanes to handle traffic congestion? The vehicle lanes fill up with more traffic congestion. As they themselves have said for decades, you cannot build your way out of congestion. But every week you can do a quick internet search to see a bunch of new attempts. ‘Induced demand’ I’ve been hearing planners and engineers say “we can’t build our way out of congestion” since the 1990s, when I began my career. The wonky term that describes why adding more lanes doesn’t eliminate congestion is “induced demand.” Transportation p…

Every December, millions of people pause to take stock of their lives before the new year. Some gather for vision-board parties, others sketch out New Year’s resolutions, and many quietly vow to “finally get organized” before the clock hits midnight. But this year feels different. We’re closing out 2025 in an economic climate defined by weekly corporate layoffs, social media posts from people with excel trackers archiving hundreds of job applications, and sidelined workers hopelessly looking for jobs for over a year. Families are being pushed to the brink by rising prices, and a generational affordability crisis—fueled by a shortage of three to four million homes nati…

The correlation between reduced crime rates and thriving communities is profound. Lower crime not only ensures the safety of residents but also sets off a chain reaction of positive outcomes that enhance the overall quality of life. In short, crime reduction touches not only the potential would-be victims and families. It also touches the entire neighborhood and community that may not even directly understand the downstream effects. We’ve observed this time and time again over the past 8 years in building Flock Safety, a technology company that builds tools to solve and reduce crime. When cities feel the impact of lower crime, it’s reflected across every aspect of dai…

As a learning designer at Zapier, I used to spend my days helping my teammates learn: I built and led trainings, created enablement resources, and helped folks better understand how their work contributed to company strategy. Now, I sit inside our HR team as an AI automation engineer. But the through line is the same: I still help my teammates (and now customers, too!) do their best work. What is an AI automation engineer? AI automation engineer sounds like a vague title, so here’s the job, plainly: I embed with a team (HR, in my case), spot opportunities to enhance the team’s work, and build AI-powered workflows that jump on those opportunities. The goal is to cre…

For the last several years, enterprises have treated AI as something to test. A pilot here, a proof of concept there. That era is ending. According to new global DeepL research, a survey of 5,000 global executives on the impact of AI agents reshaping business, 69% expect AI agents to fundamentally change how their companies operate in 2026. Nearly half anticipate major transformation, while another quarter say that change is already underway. This moment didn’t arrive overnight. While 2025 was the year agentic AI moved from theory to application, enterprises are making the shift structural this year. Leaders are no longer asking whether AI works but rather deciding wh…

The expectation to respond instantly to every message is burning out professionals across industries. But how can you move away from being “always available” without harming your reputation? Here, experts offer practical strategies to reclaim control of your time and attention, so you can establish clear boundaries while maintaining professional effectiveness and trust. Make Communication Predictable One effective way professionals can move away from being “always available” is by creating clarity and predictability in how they communicate, rather than trying to respond to everything instantly. Most professionals think they need to respond faster to reduce pressure…

When SpaceX filed an FCC application earlier this year proposing to launch a million satellite data centers into orbit, the company argued the project would have no meaningful environmental impact. On SpaceX’s website, Elon Musk made the case for space-based AI infrastructure in simpler terms: “It’s always sunny in space,” he wrote, arguing that orbital data centers are “obviously the only way to scale.” When SpaceX filed an FCC application earlier this year to launch a million satellite data centers into space, the company said that the plan wouldn’t have any environmental impact. But researchers say the climate calculus is far more complicated than that. Yes…