ResidentialBusiness

If you’re managing a trading business, choosing the right accounting software can greatly affect your efficiency and financial management. Wave Accounting offers a free starter plan with unlimited invoicing, making it a great choice for budget-conscious traders. Conversely, Xero provides robust inventory management features, which can streamline your stock handling. Comprehending these options and their unique benefits is essential, as it can help you make an informed decision customized to your specific needs. Key Takeaways Wave Accounting: Offers a free starter plan with unlimited invoicing, making it cost-effective for small trading businesses. Xero: Provides excellent inventory management features and integrates with over 1,000 apps for seamless operations. QuickBooks Online: Ideal for complex financial needs, it supports multi-user access and robust financial management tools. Zoho Books: Scalable solution with a free plan, suitable for managing inventory and multiple bank accounts efficiently. FreshBooks: Excellent for invoicing and expense tracking, designed specifically for service-based trading businesses. Top Accounting Software Options for Trading Businesses Regarding managing finances in trading businesses, selecting the right accounting software is crucial. You’ll find several top accounting software options that cater to your specific needs. QuickBooks Online, highly rated for its extensive capabilities, is perfect if you require robust financial management tools and multi-user access. Xero, starting at $15 per month, shines in inventory management and integrates seamlessly with over 1,000 apps, providing real-time data management and multi-currency support. Sage 50 Accounting stands out for its strong desktop capabilities, ideal for businesses needing thorough reporting and advanced inventory tracking. If your trading business is service-oriented, FreshBooks, starting at $19, offers excellent invoicing and expense tracking. Finally, for very small businesses, Wave Accounting provides a free starter plan, allowing unlimited invoicing and access to a mobile app. These accounting packages in India represent some of the best accounting software for trading businesses. Key Features to Consider in Accounting Software When selecting accounting software for your trading business, it’s essential to focus on features that align with your operational needs. Look for multi-currency support, as trading often involves transactions across different countries, requiring effective management of various currencies. Robust inventory management features are critical to track stock levels, orders, and supplier information, which directly impact your trading activities. Automated invoicing and receipt management can greatly improve efficiency by minimizing manual data entry and speeding up billing processes. Furthermore, consider integration capabilities with other tools like CRM systems and e-commerce platforms to guarantee seamless operations and consistent data management. Finally, thorough reporting features are indispensable; they provide insights into sales, expenses, and cash flow, empowering you to make informed decisions. To conclude, these key features will help your trading business thrive when using a trading ERP solution. Pricing and Subscription Models Pricing for accounting software can vary widely, making it crucial to comprehend the options available to find what fits your trading business best. Here’s a quick overview of some popular choices: Software Starting Price QuickBooks Online $35/month FreshBooks $19/month Xero $15/month (50% off for first 3 months) Wave Accounting Free Starter plan, $16/month for Pro plan Zoho Books Free for micro businesses, paid plans start at $0/month Subscription models often offer tiered pricing based on features, user access, and the number of invoices handled. This flexibility allows you to choose a plan that meets your specific accounting needs. Whether you’re a small trader or managing larger transactions, comprehending these options will help you make a more informed decision for your business. User Experience and Customer Support User experience and customer support are critical factors to evaluate when choosing accounting software for your trading business. QuickBooks Online stands out with its live support and user-friendly interface, making it ideal for complex accounting needs. If you run a service-based trading company, FreshBooks may be a better fit, as it emphasizes customer service and offers an intuitive dashboard for easier navigation. Xero also shines with its user-friendly design and context-sensitive settings, which simplify financial management while providing extensive reporting features. For small trading businesses, Wave Accounting offers a free, straightforward mobile app and reporting dashboard, ensuring accessibility without financial strain. Finally, Zoho Books caters to diverse trading enterprises with exceptional customer support and multi-lingual invoicing, allowing for thorough accounting solutions customized to your business’s specific needs. Evaluating these aspects will help you choose the right software for your trading operation. Recommendations for Different Business Needs If invoicing and expense tracking are your priorities, FreshBooks offers an excellent user experience starting at $19 per month. On the other hand, Zoho Books provides a scalable solution with a free plan, perfect for managing inventory and multiple bank accounts. Finally, for small trading businesses on a tight budget, Wave Accounting is an ideal option, offering unlimited invoicing and estimates for free. Each software serves unique needs, so assess your business requirements carefully. Frequently Asked Questions What Is the Best Accounting Software for a Small Business? When considering the best accounting software for your small business, QuickBooks Online stands out because of its extensive features, including inventory management and multi-user access. FreshBooks is excellent for service-oriented businesses, offering easy invoicing and expense tracking. Xero provides strong multi-user support and real-time data management. If you’re looking for a cost-effective solution, Wave Accounting offers free invoicing, whereas Zoho Books delivers robust tools at competitive prices. Evaluate these options based on your specific needs. What Is the Best Accounting Software for Sole Traders? When choosing accounting software as a sole trader, consider options like Wave for free unlimited invoicing and bookkeeping, or FreshBooks, which starts at $19 per month and offers time tracking. Xero is another option, allowing 20 invoices monthly for $15. QuickBooks Online provides robust tools from $35, and Zoho Books offers a free plan for those earning less than $50,000, allowing up to 1,000 invoices annually. Each has unique features customized to your needs. Is Quickbooks Good for Sole Traders? Yes, QuickBooks is good for sole traders. It offers customizable features like invoicing, expense tracking, and tax assistance, starting at $35 per month. The platform supports multiple sales channels and provides live support, simplifying financial management. With integration options for over 750 apps, including PayPal and Square, you can improve functionality. Its user-friendly interface and mobile app access allow you to manage accounting efficiently, ensuring you stay organized and up-to-date. Is Xero or Quickbooks Better for Small Business? When deciding between Xero and QuickBooks for your small business, consider your specific needs. Xero starts at $15 per month and outshines in user-friendliness and integrations, whereas QuickBooks, starting at $35, offers robust features like tax assistance and extensive user support. If you need multi-user access and advanced functionalities, QuickBooks may serve you better. For straightforward accounting and lower costs, Xero could be the right choice. Evaluate both based on your business requirements. Conclusion In summary, selecting the right accounting software is essential for trading businesses to streamline financial management. Wave Accounting offers a cost-effective solution with its free starter plan, whereas Xero stands out with its advanced inventory management capabilities. By considering key features, pricing models, and user experience, you can find software that best suits your needs. In the end, investing in the right tools can help you manage your finances more effectively and support your business growth in a competitive market. Image via Google Gemini This article, "Best Accounting Software for Trading Businesses" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

If you’re managing a trading business, choosing the right accounting software can greatly affect your efficiency and financial management. Wave Accounting offers a free starter plan with unlimited invoicing, making it a great choice for budget-conscious traders. Conversely, Xero provides robust inventory management features, which can streamline your stock handling. Comprehending these options and their unique benefits is essential, as it can help you make an informed decision customized to your specific needs. Key Takeaways Wave Accounting: Offers a free starter plan with unlimited invoicing, making it cost-effective for small trading businesses. Xero: Provides excellent inventory management features and integrates with over 1,000 apps for seamless operations. QuickBooks Online: Ideal for complex financial needs, it supports multi-user access and robust financial management tools. Zoho Books: Scalable solution with a free plan, suitable for managing inventory and multiple bank accounts efficiently. FreshBooks: Excellent for invoicing and expense tracking, designed specifically for service-based trading businesses. Top Accounting Software Options for Trading Businesses Regarding managing finances in trading businesses, selecting the right accounting software is crucial. You’ll find several top accounting software options that cater to your specific needs. QuickBooks Online, highly rated for its extensive capabilities, is perfect if you require robust financial management tools and multi-user access. Xero, starting at $15 per month, shines in inventory management and integrates seamlessly with over 1,000 apps, providing real-time data management and multi-currency support. Sage 50 Accounting stands out for its strong desktop capabilities, ideal for businesses needing thorough reporting and advanced inventory tracking. If your trading business is service-oriented, FreshBooks, starting at $19, offers excellent invoicing and expense tracking. Finally, for very small businesses, Wave Accounting provides a free starter plan, allowing unlimited invoicing and access to a mobile app. These accounting packages in India represent some of the best accounting software for trading businesses. Key Features to Consider in Accounting Software When selecting accounting software for your trading business, it’s essential to focus on features that align with your operational needs. Look for multi-currency support, as trading often involves transactions across different countries, requiring effective management of various currencies. Robust inventory management features are critical to track stock levels, orders, and supplier information, which directly impact your trading activities. Automated invoicing and receipt management can greatly improve efficiency by minimizing manual data entry and speeding up billing processes. Furthermore, consider integration capabilities with other tools like CRM systems and e-commerce platforms to guarantee seamless operations and consistent data management. Finally, thorough reporting features are indispensable; they provide insights into sales, expenses, and cash flow, empowering you to make informed decisions. To conclude, these key features will help your trading business thrive when using a trading ERP solution. Pricing and Subscription Models Pricing for accounting software can vary widely, making it crucial to comprehend the options available to find what fits your trading business best. Here’s a quick overview of some popular choices: Software Starting Price QuickBooks Online $35/month FreshBooks $19/month Xero $15/month (50% off for first 3 months) Wave Accounting Free Starter plan, $16/month for Pro plan Zoho Books Free for micro businesses, paid plans start at $0/month Subscription models often offer tiered pricing based on features, user access, and the number of invoices handled. This flexibility allows you to choose a plan that meets your specific accounting needs. Whether you’re a small trader or managing larger transactions, comprehending these options will help you make a more informed decision for your business. User Experience and Customer Support User experience and customer support are critical factors to evaluate when choosing accounting software for your trading business. QuickBooks Online stands out with its live support and user-friendly interface, making it ideal for complex accounting needs. If you run a service-based trading company, FreshBooks may be a better fit, as it emphasizes customer service and offers an intuitive dashboard for easier navigation. Xero also shines with its user-friendly design and context-sensitive settings, which simplify financial management while providing extensive reporting features. For small trading businesses, Wave Accounting offers a free, straightforward mobile app and reporting dashboard, ensuring accessibility without financial strain. Finally, Zoho Books caters to diverse trading enterprises with exceptional customer support and multi-lingual invoicing, allowing for thorough accounting solutions customized to your business’s specific needs. Evaluating these aspects will help you choose the right software for your trading operation. Recommendations for Different Business Needs If invoicing and expense tracking are your priorities, FreshBooks offers an excellent user experience starting at $19 per month. On the other hand, Zoho Books provides a scalable solution with a free plan, perfect for managing inventory and multiple bank accounts. Finally, for small trading businesses on a tight budget, Wave Accounting is an ideal option, offering unlimited invoicing and estimates for free. Each software serves unique needs, so assess your business requirements carefully. Frequently Asked Questions What Is the Best Accounting Software for a Small Business? When considering the best accounting software for your small business, QuickBooks Online stands out because of its extensive features, including inventory management and multi-user access. FreshBooks is excellent for service-oriented businesses, offering easy invoicing and expense tracking. Xero provides strong multi-user support and real-time data management. If you’re looking for a cost-effective solution, Wave Accounting offers free invoicing, whereas Zoho Books delivers robust tools at competitive prices. Evaluate these options based on your specific needs. What Is the Best Accounting Software for Sole Traders? When choosing accounting software as a sole trader, consider options like Wave for free unlimited invoicing and bookkeeping, or FreshBooks, which starts at $19 per month and offers time tracking. Xero is another option, allowing 20 invoices monthly for $15. QuickBooks Online provides robust tools from $35, and Zoho Books offers a free plan for those earning less than $50,000, allowing up to 1,000 invoices annually. Each has unique features customized to your needs. Is Quickbooks Good for Sole Traders? Yes, QuickBooks is good for sole traders. It offers customizable features like invoicing, expense tracking, and tax assistance, starting at $35 per month. The platform supports multiple sales channels and provides live support, simplifying financial management. With integration options for over 750 apps, including PayPal and Square, you can improve functionality. Its user-friendly interface and mobile app access allow you to manage accounting efficiently, ensuring you stay organized and up-to-date. Is Xero or Quickbooks Better for Small Business? When deciding between Xero and QuickBooks for your small business, consider your specific needs. Xero starts at $15 per month and outshines in user-friendliness and integrations, whereas QuickBooks, starting at $35, offers robust features like tax assistance and extensive user support. If you need multi-user access and advanced functionalities, QuickBooks may serve you better. For straightforward accounting and lower costs, Xero could be the right choice. Evaluate both based on your business requirements. Conclusion In summary, selecting the right accounting software is essential for trading businesses to streamline financial management. Wave Accounting offers a cost-effective solution with its free starter plan, whereas Xero stands out with its advanced inventory management capabilities. By considering key features, pricing models, and user experience, you can find software that best suits your needs. In the end, investing in the right tools can help you manage your finances more effectively and support your business growth in a competitive market. Image via Google Gemini This article, "Best Accounting Software for Trading Businesses" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Tehran has a strong incentive to keep the conflict goingView the full article

Let me tell you my trick for remembering the names of people I meet: I don’t. It’s not for lack of caring. It’s just that my stupid brain seems to only excel at remembering trivial things, like my family’s exact food orders at a random restaurant we went to in 2023. That same brain is largely worthless at matching names to faces, especially when it’s been a while. So a couple years ago, I swallowed my pride and started maintaining a “People” note on my phone, which is basically just a list of folks I’ve met with some basic descriptions to help me remember them. It’s not fancy, but it’s already spared me from potential embarrassment on several occasions. This story first appeared in Advisorator, Jared’s weekly tech advice newsletter. Sign up for free here. Here’s how it works: In Obsidian (my note taking app of choice) I have a note called “People.” The note has a series of headings for various social contexts, like “Neighborhood” and “School Parents.” Each heading has a list of people that I’ve met in those contexts, along with enough basic details to help me identify them in the future. I’ll try to glance over the list before heading into certain social scenarios, and will take a minute afterwards to add more people if needed, while the information is still fresh in my mind. I’m not building entire dossiers here. Most of my notes are one-liners like “Steve: Tall dude, likes baseball,” which along with how I met this is usually enough to remember who’s who. Occasionally I’ll fill in some extra details to help with future conversations, but not so many that I can’t easily scan through the notes later. You don’t have to use Obsidian for this purpose. Apple Notes, Google Keep, or any other note taking app will work. The important thing is being able to access your People note quickly and easily, even on your phone. You shouldn’t have to open a laptop to log your notes or dig through numerous menu layers to reference them. It’s worth noting that an entire class of apps exist for the purpose of remembering details about people, such as Clay, Dex, and Monica. These “Personal CRM” apps, named after the Customer Relationship Management software that business use to keep track of clients, have extra features such as contact reminders, relationship mapping, and activity logging. But these apps have always struck me as being overly heavy for the task. They might work for some folks, but I just wanted a fast and easy way to write down basic details, not an entire system for managing my social life. Besides, the important birthdays are already in my calendar, while the phone numbers and emails are in my contacts app. Sometimes, instead of another app, all you really need is a note, plus a clear sense of what it’s for. If your brain is as bad at remember folks as mine is, maybe it’s time for a People note of your own. This story first appeared in Advisorator, Jared’s weekly tech advice newsletter. Sign up for free here. View the full article

Phasing out of electric vehicle subsidies has driven slump in domestic sales growth following years-long boom View the full article

There are plenty of different hacks, tools, and apps designed to break social media addiction or otherwise reduce your screen time. This is just the cutest one. Cat Gatekeeper is a new Chrome browser extension designed by the developer Zokuzoku, and it reminds you to stop scrolling by sitting a cat on your browser as a clock counts down until your break time is over. The browser extension is meant for anyone who keeps opening social media without thinking, and it’s inspired by the all too real experience of cats who want attention at the exact moment that it’s time to get to work. “We’ve recreated that classic cat-owner experience in your browser,” the developer wrote. After downloading the extension, users can set up their own personal time limits, but the default usage limit before triggering the cat is an hour, and the default break time is five minutes. Cat Gatekeeper only counts time when tabs are active on supported social networks, which now includes Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Threads, TikTok, YouTube, and X. When you hit your time limit, the cat walks on screen and a countdown clock appears. The cat then sits itself down in the middle of your browser and waits, breathing, blinking, and moving its ears and tail until the time is finally up. The cat then vanishes and you can go back to your regularly scheduled doomscrolling. Those looking to spend less time on social media are recommended to delete apps or use their phone’s native screen time controls to set limits. Some people swear by turning their smartphones to grayscale. Apps like Steppin, which locks you out from social media apps until you hit step goals, or Brick, a physical block that users have to tap to log into certain apps, serve an urgent need. There are plenty of tricks and tips to break your screen time habits, and touching more grass is within reach. At least on desktop, Cat Gatekeeper will remind you of the importance of taking time to log off in the most adorable way possible. View the full article

Ikea design manager Johan Ejdemo is looking years into the future. A towering Swede with a six-inch beard, Ejdemo is a trained cabinetmaker who has nearly 30 years of experience at Ikea. Since 2022 he’s been the company’s design head, leading a team of 20 in-house designers in Sweden and a roster of freelancers from around the world. Together they give shape to the 1,500 to 2,000 new products Ikea releases every year. Most have been brewing in the company’s design department for several years, if not more than a decade. I recently met with Ejdemo at Ikea’s headquarters in Älmhult, Sweden, the city a two-hour train ride from Copenhagen where the company was founded in the 1940s. Before leading me on an exclusive tour of the company’s prototyping shop—the first tour Ikea has ever granted to a journalist—we sat down to talk about what’s guiding the brand’s design approach in 2026. As he looks to shape what products Ikea stores will be selling years down the line, he says the focus isn’t so much on individual items or areas of the home, but rather on things like material choices and emotional responses. It’s all in service of what Ikea refers to as democratic design, or high quality products that have been so precisely optimized and scaled that they hit the lowest possible price point. Achieving that ideal, Ejdemo argues, is the real work of Ikea’s designers. “We are very nerdy,” he says. “We go very deep in the details.” This interview was edited and condensed for clarity. Fast Company: How is design changing for Ikea in 2026, and what are the things that are driving those changes? Ejdemo: One thing that we are considering a lot in design today is circularity. And it sits in the complete value-chain perspective. That is the thing that is dramatically new in the context of designing products. What types of products are you prioritizing? The desire for optimism, playfulness, and human interaction is very close to us today in designing and developing products. That’s very evident in some of the launches and collection drops that we have done recently, and they will be even more evident into the future. But it’s not only about silliness and playfulness and color. It could be in natural materials and warmth. There are many dimensions to this. Are there specific types of products or parts of the home that you find yourself focusing on today? No, but there’s always a challenge when there’s a desire for certain products that are big and bulky. Those are always challenging areas for us because things have to be transported and it costs a lot to transport them, and also they can consume a lot of material if you’re not thinking through them smartly. A lot is connected to the comfort of mattresses and sofas, but I think we are ahead of the game there. We’re very good in building premium comfort in our products in a very material-efficient way—reducing the use of foam and still achieving even better comfort than when these products were very foam-dependent. And on wardrobes, for example, we just recently launched a new kind of easy assembly so we aren’t putting it in the hands of the consumer to do all the work. It’s making it easy for the consumer and at the same time makes production more efficient. Those wardrobes are made out of particle board, but there’s more density in the areas where you drill holes for shelves, less density where you don’t it. So even there, we are very nerdy. We go very deep in the details of where we can save material. It’s like, here we need extra and we don’t have it where it doesn’t make sense. We’re distributing value and cost within the product. How, if at all, is AI changing how you work or influencing choices you make about what moves on from concept to product? We don’t use AI in design. There’s still a lot of implications [to the technology]. We are all regulated by the tools that we use, and they need to be approved to use. There might come some kind of AI support that could be helpful for designers, but we don’t have it today. There’s a legal aspect to it, too. If you use AI in the design process you can’t claim design rights, for example. We try to avoid getting into that ditch. But in the process, making a visualization of how a picture could look for material that could be used in communication later on, just to make a mock-up, there I’ve seen AI come in quite handy to enable people to see like, oh yeah, that’s the direction we’d like to go. It’s not designing the end product that they use. It just comes in like any other tool that has simplified something. Image making used to be painting and then you had photography and then it became digitalized and so on. And now you can add an AI layer to it as well that could be helpful. As you’re leading this team of designers both in-house and outside the organization, how do you encourage them to take creative risks when they’re developing new concepts? I really have to force them. I mean, if you’ve been designing for 20 years, plus or minus, you start to edit yourself too quickly because you know too much. But that’s also one of the more strategic reasons why I always have three to four interns on a team; they just add something else to the dialogue. They explore, they do things, and they are all mentored by in-house designers so you get that conversation and interaction going. It’s hard to tell someone you need to dare more. It’s like, how do you just get it into the culture of the design team? It’s also on an individual level. Someone will always stretch a lot, someone else will be more straight on the job, and for someone else maybe we could dare them a little bit more. So it’s also coaching on an individual level. They’re not one person. They think differently and do things differently and their creative processes look different as well. View the full article

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. One of the ways I’ve been tracking shifts in the supply-demand equilibrium of local housing markets for years is by monitoring changes in active inventory/months of supply. If active listings begin to rise rapidly while homes remain on the market longer, it may indicate pricing softness or weakness. Conversely, a sharp decline in active listings/months of supply could suggest a market that is heating/tightening up. Since the national Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out and mortgage rates spiked in summer 2022, directionally, that supply-demand equilibrium has been shifting in the favor of buyers. Indeed, while decelerating, national active inventory for sale is still up +8.1% year-over-year—and now active inventory for sale is only -13.6% below pre-pandemic 2019 levels. Broadly speaking, the reason isn’t that there are significantly more new listings. Instead, it’s that, relatively speaking, sellers in the post-Pandemic Housing Boom period are finding more resistance. As a result, homes are spending more time on the market and are therefore being counted as inventory for longer. How long the typical U.S. home listed for sale on Zillow.com before it went pending: Spring 2019 —> 41 days Spring 2020 —> 36 days Spring 2021 —> 14 days Spring 2022 —> 10 days Spring 2023 —> 26 days Spring 2024 —> 25 days Spring 2025 —> 33 days Spring 2026 —> 39 days Active housing inventory for sale = All properties for sale in a given month, excluding pending listings. If homes take longer to sell, and begin to rollover into the next month, it begins to build active inventory for sale even if new listings coming onto the market don’t spike. That’s exactly what many housing markets have been experiencing. In other words, it’s no coincidence that both the national median days to pending and the national active housing inventory for sale are just about back to pre-pandemic 2019 levels—to a degree, they’re interconnected. Of course, this story varies a lot across the country right now. The softer/weaker housing market pockets in the Southwest and Southeast have seen median days to pending rise more than in their relatively tighter peer markets in the Northeast and Midwest. Among the nation’s 250 largest metro area housing markets, these 15 markets had the highest median days to pending in February 2026: Asheville, NC —> 105 days McAllen, TX —> 86 days Laredo, TX —> 83 days Houma, LA —> 83 days Austin, TX —> 82 days Daphne, AL —> 81 days Longview, TX —> 78 days Lake Charles, LA —> 78 days Crestview, FL —> 77 days Panama City, FL —> 77 days San Antonio, TX —> 74 days Myrtle Beach, SC —> 72 days Killeen, TX —> 71 days Ocala, FL —> 71 days Naples, FL —> 69 days Among the nation’s 250 largest metro area housing markets, these 15 markets had the lowest median days to pending in February 2026: Lancaster, PA —> 9 days Hartford, CT —> 11 days Rochester, NY —> 11 days Reading, PA —> 11 days Manchester, NH —> 11 days Springfield, IL —> 11 days Norwich, CT —> 12 days Rockford, IL —> 13 days Syracuse, NY —> 15 days York, PA —> 15 days St. Louis, MO —> 16 days San Jose, CA —> 16 days Allentown, PA —> 16 days Bridgeport, CT —> 17 days New Haven, CT —> 17 days View the full article

What’s the closest you’ve ever stood to a drone? I’m not talking about a cute quadcopter, but a military-grade death machine that can carry enough warheads to obliterate a bridge, a tank, or a building? Sure, I’d heard of them. I’d seen them on the news. I’ve closely followed the paper, scissors, rock war in Ukraine where every six weeks the Ukrainians or Russians break the rules with new drone hacks. But it wasn’t until I was standing in front of the Fury, an autonomous plane meant to fly alongside F-16s and other military jets, that our Terminator era of warfare really hit me. This thing looks mean in an unknowable way, like a deep-sea predator that’s shed its gills and taken to the skies. It’s hard to look at the Fury without feeling a little afraid, and even a little disgusted. And yet for all my qualms around military spending and my dreams about a peace-filled world without war, ultimately I respond exactly like I’m supposed to: I’m relieved that the Fury is on our side. Or I should say, it can be, for a price. I’m standing next to Jen Bucci, the leather-jacket-clad head of design at Anduril, America’s hottest defense startup. She’s giving me a tour of the showroom, which looks a little like a Costco, with its unadorned concrete floors and stockpile of products—in this case, underwater missiles, an autonomous submarine mothership, and a variety of vertical-launching drones—that are sold in bulk. We’re heading toward the design lab, where Bucci’s team of 50 designers help craft the look and feel of Anduril’s offerings, from the shape of the weapons to the way they’re marketed. I’m the first journalist to be invited inside, and from the moment I step into the space, it’s clear Anduril isn’t interested in being a traditional defense contractor. Anduril is a defense manufacturer founded in 2017 by technologists Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, and Joseph Chen—a group of technologists and venture capitalists with strong ties to the secretive surveillant software company Palantir, which powers the ImmigrationOS software used by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. While the traditional “Primes” like Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin court mega government contracts to develop new weapons, Anduril acts more like a traditional product company. It forecasts the wars of tomorrow, spending hundreds of millions of its own funds to develop and acquire a range of interoperable (oft autonomous) products that it bets are too irresistible for the government to pass up. José MandojanaFast Company It’s easy to see how this vision plays out in the showroom. Each weapon is painted in matching gunmetal tones and accented in Chrysler “national safety yellow” (a hue that sits in the spectrum of “world’s most visible color” while giving the weaponry an enticing, Nike-like glow). A simple, machined curve is mirrored across products. As I eye a 13-foot underwater Copperhead missile in one corner, I realize how it could slot right into the expandable Dive-XL submarine in the other. I mention to Bucci that the model feels like Apple; the more you buy, the more you want to buy. She agrees, but points out that it also fits the Android model when analyzing the actual technological stack, because other products can plug into Anduril’s Lattice software, which maps conflicts in real time by treating every connected device as another data source. So far, Anduril is a fraction of the size of its traditional competitors. In 2025 the company pulled in an estimated $2.1 billion in revenue to Lockheed Martin’s $75 billion. But with multiple government contracts that could add up to nearly $50 billion over the coming decade, Anduril’s private stock is trading at 40% over its value as analysts anticipate an initial public offering in 2027. Meanwhile, Bucci—who sits at an unusual perch as the head of design at a major defense contractor—leads her homebuilt team of cross-functional designers to ensure the Anduril brand articulates a new way of doing things across its products, marketing, and user experience. From industrial design to merch to the creation of what she jokingly calls the Anduril Cinematic Universe, Bucci is shaping the identity of the future of warfare as something more inspiring, or even aspirational. “I think that defense is an industry that needs design the most,” she says. “It’s the dirtiest, dullest, most dangerous job—you’d want to design for an audience [facing] that.” Trae Stephens, cofounder and executive chairman at Anduril, minces no words that he’s invested in design in order for the company to be viewed with the same sheen as a SpaceX. José MandojanaFast Company “[SpaceX] is essentially a rocket and satellite company that 99.9% of people in the world have no touchpoint to. They’re not gonna buy anything . . . and yet everyone’s excited about it,” he says. “There’s like a retail component to SpaceX that people understand. It’s cool and it’s new and it’s fresh, and it’s growing really fast. . . . So what does that do for them as a business? It de-risks them. It de-risks them on capital. It makes it much easier for them to raise money.” But Anduril’s strategy is actually more nuanced and ambitious than that. Anduril is using design to redefine patriotism for a generation that grew up on Gunpla, anime, and video games. It’s inventing a future of warfare that’s only been the stuff of war gazey sci-fi fantasy. That’s the ad, that’s the brand, and that’s the product—to stunt to taxpayers, soldiers, politicians, and military buyers, showing them where the money’s going to work. José MandojanaFast Company Inside the Anduril design lab The scene opens with an idyllic cloudy blue sky reminiscent of a Studio Ghibli film. Even as the drones fly past, it’s almost pastoral. That is until the synths come in and the camera is submerged underwater. We see hands typing at a red-hued military workstation, a shot straight out of 1990s war anime. Then the cartoon segues into a diametric explainer, as Anduril’s submerged ship comes into view, deploying its Seabed Sentry mesh network and Copperhead missiles that swirl like sharks feeding. While perhaps a strange scene for a defense contractor, this anime ad on YouTube has successfully educated me on the intricacies of Anduril’s complex weapons systems, and the commenters on the internet love it. “We kind of view fiction as being a window into the future. Science fiction, anime, manga,” Bucci says, noting that references to Gundam are commonplace with founder Palmer Luckey when ideating future products. “A lot of the things that will become critical to the future of war have already been described and explored in great detail in fiction. And so capturing that aesthetic, I think, is part of inspiring humanity.” José MandojanaFast Company As a self-described ’90s kid, Bucci grew up on Sailor Moon and Power Rangers. She became obsessed with the 007 films. Pierce Brosnan, whom she declares to be “the most underrated Bond,” was her first crush. Bond was always “so stylish doing all the badass things,” she says, and the movies introduced both a passion for vehicles like his Aston Martin and the desire to be something like a CIA agent herself. Bucci dropped out of an ROTC program in the eighth grade, but she did attend ArtCenter College of Design and pursue automobile design. After landing a job at Ford, she faced the same realization that a lot of eager young designers do: Maybe one person gets to design the silhouette of the vehicle. Everyone else toils away at small details. “I don’t know how many wheels I’ve done. I must have done, like, hundreds of them,” she says. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know how else to slice up the circle! I’m tapped out.’” José MandojanaFast Company But auto design lured her to auto marketing, and she ventured into photography and branding, stretching her skill set. Eventually, Bucci’s desire to be part of something bigger had her shoot for the moon with NASA but ultimately land at Boeing, where she designed liveries and “everything was blue.” She got her first taste of how conservative the Primes are when it comes to the role of design across the company. “At Boeing, I don’t think I met a single industrial designer, if I’m being honest,” she says. “There were a lot of design engineers, you know, but there wasn’t, like, an industrial design department.” So when she saw Anduril’s job listing for an industrial designer, she concluded it must be “very modern, thinking about this stuff.” Little did she know, Anduril was trying to be modern—to build an enticing, Apple-like model in defense—but failing. Stephens had spent nearly four years searching for the company’s head of design. He interviewed more than 50 people for the position, but was left inspired by all of them. But during their interview in 2021, Stephens and Bucci discovered they were kindred spirits. Stephens, too, had something of a 007 complex, having started his career in the intelligence industry, only to be heartbroken when he was issued an old Windows 98 laptop instead of a laser watch. (Cue his inspiration for Anduril.) When he asked Bucci about her favorite car—a question she always hated—she offered, “Aston Martin.” Not realizing Stephens was a car buff himself, he wanted her to name a model. So she mentioned being fond of the design of the Vantage in the early 2000s. “He turns around, and he picks up a car model. He’s like, ‘This one?’” Bucci recounts. “And it was exactly the model. It was exactly in that moment that we clicked.” Instead of an industrial design role, Bucci was offered the entire design department. Roughly five years later, she tours me through the design lab she’s built. “I really wanted design to be a central function and a core function, so it’s a pillar of every decision that we’re making as a business, but also that it’s one team that is centralized,” she says. “You have to infiltrate the whole thing for this to work. It’s setting that standard and having everybody kind of go through that machine.” José MandojanaFast Company The first thing I note, walking into Anduril’s design lab, is how much natural light comes in through the windows. Visit design labs at tech companies like Microsoft and Google, and you’ll find yourself in secure rooms built without windows. Bucci admits that Anduril has a similar space she’ll use a few hours a month on high-clearance secret projects. But otherwise, the team works here together. In the very front of the lab is the design dojo, an open space with a large shared table where teams hold weekly or biweekly meetings. I spot Anduril posters along the walls—all of which use Helvetica with a respect for the Swiss grid. José MandojanaFast Company The bulk of the design team can be found in the loft above the dojo. Here, industrial designers, brand designers, motion designers, interaction designers, environmental designers, concept designers, sound designers, and animators all work elbow-to-elbow. A photography and media production studio brings in the tail of the setup, where the team keeps every U.S. military uniform and several sizes of boots on hand so they can customize imagery for each branch of the armed forces. I can’t help but notice a black-and-white Hawaiian shirt at the end of the rack, which I can only assume is the more serious uniform of the luau-ready Luckey. Peeking at monitors as Bucci introduces me to the team, I begin to understand how her Anduril strategy comes together. I see NASCAR liveries for its stock car sponsorship. Plans for Anduril’s brutalist Arsenal-1 factory that opened in Ohio in March but whose entire buildout will extend to 2035. Schematics for its augmented reality Eagle Eye helmet and glasses (3D-printed mockups sit nearby and serve as form studies to explore various sizes of temple tips). Each disparate project is a unique articulation of the brand. José MandojanaFast Company As we walk, I meet the designers of Anduril’s OV-1s. That’s a technical term, but think of them as detailed tactical mission maps, oft-used to sell the government on hardware. OV-1s from competitors look like a cheesy board game weekend gone wrong, with flat maps covered in seemingly senseless arrows. But Anduril’s are presented with 3D terrain and hyperrealistic graphics—like little terrariums of war. It’s a demonstration of how Bucci’s team challenges the design tropes of war. And how it’s even more responsible for marketing, branding, and selling Anduril as it is designing products; you’ll find just three industrial designers on Anduril’s 50-person design team. José MandojanaFast Company “The hyperreal look works here because we’re trying to communicate things accurately,” Bucci explains, noting how visualizations offer creative leeway that Anduril wouldn’t dare use elsewhere. “But for the products that we’re putting out into the public, it’s very important that none of them are renderings, none of them are 3D models. It’s only practical photography and video, because we’re trying to show that these are real and in action and storytelling of the operator.” Anduril is playing with different ways to design these maps. On one screen, I see a moodboard with video game HUDs and worlds rendered in Miami-style neon colors. They don’t represent the Anduril style of today, but the company is always looking to evolve. “We are world-building,” Bucci says. “I want each product line to have its own suit.” The designers joke internally that they’re building the Anduril Cinematic Universe, which I tease is the ACU to Marvel’s MCU. But don’t expect that universe to stick around in anime, or any other single rinse-and-repeat aesthetic. “Anime fits us because anime is always about conflict, like these machines fighting each other. It’s always good and bad, and we as people who are basically building that future, it’s a medium that really fits us,” Bucci says. “But I don’t want to use it as a trick constantly. We’re going to do one more installation of it and we’re done.” José MandojanaFast Company Defining the Anduril product Building the Anduril brand is about a lot more than marketing. Ultimately, Bucci’s role is to ensure design impacts every part of the business, especially the presentation and experience of products. That’s difficult, she admits. Engineering is king in the defense world, as it dictates specifics around aerodynamics and other mission-critical details. “Early conversations with engineering weren’t always that smooth,” Bucci says. “It was a lot of questions around, like, ‘Why would we do this? Why should we do this?’ We’re adding more steps to the process. Contrasting that with now . . . it is a complete collaboration, where they understand the value of what industrial design is—that it’s not just decorating.” Key to this collaboration has been getting design involved earlier in the development process of new products. A good example is Anduril’s Dive-XL submarine. It basically looks like a big whale. José MandojanaFast Company You can appreciate the utilitarian decisions at play: The four panels making up the front and rear are actually just one piece repeated four times. Its side walls are flat panels for easy manufacturing. All are the sort of engineering efficiencies that Anduril prioritizes to ensure its products can be produced easily, on typical assembly lines. But designers always look for opportunities to add speed. And in this case, Bucci’s team gave the design more of a spine (like a car), and adjusted the mast angle from vertical, like The Titanic, to swept, like an oceanic carnivore. The overall form is but another “squircle”—and Anduril’s penchant for chamfering details across its product portfolio always makes me think of the space war Xbox franchise Halo—which we see repeated whenever aerodynamics doesn’t get in the way. Bucci works squircles into everything. Anduril’s sensor tower, for instance, is built largely from off-the-shelf parts, with circular cutouts on many pieces. But a single brace the Anduril team added has squircle cutouts. We see squircles incorporated into Eagle Eye, into drones, into equipment bags, into the very silhouette of the Dive-XL. José MandojanaFast Company One of my biggest surprises is that, even on submarines and missiles, screws are exposed for simple serviceability. Across the board at Anduril, weapons are made to be modular, fixable, and often quickly assembled and deployed in the field. Designers point to such features with plain-language liveries and the aforementioned safety-yellow highlights. It all adds up to better UX for soldiers on the battlefield and also, Bucci hopes, a certain confidence that comes with knowing they’re using an Anduril product. José MandojanaFast Company “I’m constantly looking for ways we can infuse a little bit of our design language that’s lightweight and easy into a system that is predominantly not designed,” she says. In the case of fold-out Bolt drones, that’s as simple as adding a two-tone, black-and-white “water line” to articulate the shapes. Meanwhile, the team leaves elements like heat sinks and fans exposed. Sometimes, it’ll even coat those elements with a bit of Anduril yellow, dunking an otherwise drab chicken wing into some hot sauce. Much of Bucci’s focus is on developing repeatable systems that can service every product in Anduril’s arsenal, to get every product on the same page so that it looks its best. Color is a big part of that effort, and Anduril has its own versions of military colors it uses solely for marketing—like an “artichoke” green that I see listed alongside a line of dusty colors that look straight out of a Skims ad. That insight was born from an early misstep with engineering, in which they were wrapping a large truck in military tan. The engineer assured Bucci he had “the perfect tan,” and he’d seen a swatch. But when Bucci went to see the finished vehicle in a warehouse? “It was Ken doll tan. Fleshy—a little pink,” she says with a laugh. “Ever since then, I was like, ‘This is the variance. Here are exactly the three tans you’re allowed to use. That’s it.’ Nobody gets to pick tans anymore. Actually, nobody gets to pick any colors anymore.” Anduril’s more thoughtful approach to branding has caught on. While armed forces still use their own spec, Anduril has begun to branch out and design the livery that will appear on the tail wing of a product it sold to the U.S. Air Force. Bucci believes it’s the first time an external contractor has ever done so. With this move, Anduril is no longer just branding its own products. It’s actually branding the U.S. armed forces—which seems to be the greater, tacit goal of Anduril’s design language across the board. José MandojanaFast Company The business of war Ask anyone at Anduril how they feel about building weapons for a living, and you won’t get an apology. Bucci says she sleeps well at night by framing her work around the end user—that young soldier on the battlefield. “It’s what makes the work very deeply human for me,” she says. “Anytime I talk to candidates, I’m very clear: You’re joining a company that is going to be manufacturing weapon systems. That shouldn’t be something that we’re straying away from or trying to hide in some way. . . . If the motivation isn’t there . . . it’s very hard to succeed here.” Beyond its role manufacturing autonomous weapons and some field reports that have questioned the performance of Anduril products, the company has been criticized for its involvement in surveillance through its Autonomous Surveillance Towers and its Ghost drones, which monitor border crossings from Mexico. When I ask Bucci how she would feel if products she helped design were used in ways she disagreed with, she says she’s not hired for her opinions on politics, but so far that hasn’t happened. “We’ve supported the Ukraine deterrence efforts,” she notes, “and I’m really proud of that.” Outside the company, she knows this viewpoint is less common. “The first project I actually got was redesigning our website, and that was interesting, because I think I got a glimpse of the perception of our company at the time—because none of the agencies wanted to work with us,” she recalls. “They’re like, ‘We don’t want anything to do with you.’ When that happened, I thought, Oh, this is going to be hard. But I believed strongly that we could change that.” Today, the perception around Anduril has evolved from punch line to uncomfortable investment to darling IPO waiting to happen. Part of that credit belongs to the political climate during the second The President administration, where defense spending is up and the Department of Defense was literally renamed the Department of War. And part of the credit belongs to Bucci and her team, whose rebrand of war seems crucial to this mind shift. There may be no greater evidence of Anduril’s increasing palatability than the fact that while Bucci used to face an environment where “nobody was applying,” so she was barely able to fill design positions, now she has countless applications for every open designer role. In the meantime, Anduril doesn’t mind framing itself as an unlikely source of innovation to move humanity into its sci-fi era—embracing a return to the paradoxical optimism of midcentury defense initiatives like RAND and DARPA that brought us technologies ranging from the internet to GPS. Before I end my call with Stephens, he brings up the 2013 Matt Damon movie, Elysium. Despite the fact that it’s a dark popcorn flick in which Damon’s character is a poor, radiated worker who dons a super suit to escape a rotting Earth, break into a wealthy galactic suburb, and use a special med bay to cure himself, Stephens argues it’s more inspiring than people give it credit for. “That’s remembered as being a dystopian movie about wealth inequality, which I get. I’m not saying that wealth inequality is a good thing,” he says. “But they had a machine that could cure all human disease. Why are we not talking about that?” View the full article

Top mortgage originators ranked 175-101 share their client retention strategies, from face-to-face meetings to AI and CRM tools, as the industry eyes a 2026 purchase market shift. View the full article

True Footage claims a startup founder signed up for its products using false MLS credentials and used large language models to copy its software. View the full article

A dv01 paper finds while no one single cause exists and elements like the lack of transportation infrastructure make a return to historic affordability unlikely. View the full article

For the past decade, the global startup playbook has been clear: grow at all costs and dominate through visibility. Sweden has played a different game, one of profitability and sustainability—and is outperforming as a result. The country now ranks among the top 10 globally for unicorn companies, and first in Europe per capita, with 46+ billion-euro startups and counting. Earlier this year, vibe coding unicorn Lovable became the fastest growing software-startup in history, reaching $100 million in subscription revenue in just eight months For a nation of just over 10 million people, that’s an astonishing concentration of innovation. Stockholm alone now hosts one of the highest “unicorns per resident” rates on the planet, second only to Silicon Valley. Observers often credit this success to progressive policy, strong engineering talent, or a virtuous cycle of angel investors. Isabel Keulen, CEO of Stockholm School of Economics Business Lab, earlier this month cited the concentration of founders as the key ingredient to Sweden’s “secret sauce” of success. But those are just part of the picture. As scaling trust is increasingly challenging in a noisy and fast-paced entrepreneurial environment, Swedish unicorn success points to something deeper: what we repeatedly see in Sweden’s success stories is a deep commitment to design. Sweden’s embrace of minimalist, functional, human-centred design has built some of the world’s most trusted and scalable brands, from IKEA, COS and H&M to Volvo, Klarna and Electrolux—all known for a ‘made in Sweden’ design savviness. As a Kantar BrandZ study highlighted, these brands succeed globally because they “meet people’s needs in relevant ways” and build higher levels of consumer affinity. Sweden’s approach to product and business building constantly emphasises “design as strategy”, design as an inherent mindset and way of life, rather than mere surface polish. Of course, it’s hard to recreate the exact environment that has nurtured the Swedish unicorn success. But there are some key principles of Swedish entrepreneurship and design practice that every business leader can emulate. Democratize design In Sweden, design has always been for everyone, not just the elite. IKEA reimagined furniture for mass affordability; COS did the same for high‑quality fashion. This democratising instinct expands markets and strengthens trust, because the brand starts from inclusion rather than aspiration. Democratisation in Sweden is often about removing friction and intimidation (not just affordability). Pioneers like Polestar and Klarna differentiate through UI, experience design and a humane tone of voice, not purely technical invention. For founders and scale‑ups, the takeaway is to broaden access without diluting quality. When you solve real human problems beautifully, practically—and intuitively—you reach a larger audience without having to shout to be heard. It’s a lesson especially relevant in saturated markets: design can be a social equaliser as well as strengthening growth. Distil to amplify As Swedish creators, we also share a distinct design sensibility: distil to amplify. When we hit on an idea, we refine it until its essence is unmistakable, then amplify that clarity through every touchpoint. What we don’t do is embellish a weak concept to make it prettier. Klarna, for example, built its fintech platform around one simple promise: make payments effortless. Everything from the interface to the humour-tinged advertising—and even a premium unboxing experience of its credit card—reinforces that single idea. Or take beauty industry unicorn Byredo. The fragrance house has achieved massive, cult-like popularity, celebrated for its perfumery artistry and a minimalist design philosophy that distils complex emotions into covetable, high-end packaging. This mindset demands restraint. It means trusting the power of a focused idea rather than compensating with noise. In practice, leaders can apply it by asking: “Are we making this simpler, are we crafting a solution or just adding polish to complexity?”. Lead without ego Another shared mindset is an aversion to hierarchies. This runs through many corporate structures in Sweden as well as how we approach collaboration and ideation. In Stockholm, a CEO is just as likely to occupy an open plan cubicle next to the intern than a corner office. Decisions rise from collaboration, not top-down instruction. Byredo’s Ben Gorham, for example, has built a narrative around inclusion and is known for being self-deprecating and approachable. Such humility accelerates innovation. When a 21-year-old designer’s idea carries the same weight as a director’s, it builds creative momentum. At Spotify, autonomous squads, tribes, chapters and guilds operationalise this philosophy, allowing flexibility and rapid learning. Design, engineering and product are embedded into decision-making units rather than hierarchical approval chains. Leaders everywhere can emulate this by creating psychological safety and visible access. Not just open-door policies but processes of collaboration, feedback and encouragement that run through every interaction. The goal isn’t consensus for its own sake but a culture that listens widely and executes quickly. System behind the success These behaviours don’t appear in isolation. They grow from a national environment that rewards curiosity and cushions risk. Free education and universal healthcare make experimentation possible for a wide share of the population. Furthermore, business and creativity are inherently allied. For example, The Stockholm School of Economics often pairs finance with art and literature, reinforcing that culture and commerce advance together. Even everyday experiences (from top tier infrastructure and digital connectivity to packaging on shelf) reinforce those values, showing the commitment to the Swedish design mindset: disciplined simplicity, thoughtful function, quiet beauty. The design bar is so high it becomes societal conditioning. Sweden’s unicorn surge suggests that sustainable innovation doesn’t begin with coding or capital. It begins with clarity, with the courage to refine, to open, to trust. While the world’s loudest start-up environments often chase spectacle, Sweden is thriving by turning design into its growth engine. The country built an economy on precision, intuitive design and empathy; proof that progress doesn’t always have to shout or be centre stage. In a global market optimised for noise, Sweden is proving that clarity scales better. View the full article

Hundreds of millions of people consult artificial intelligence chatbots on a daily basis for everything from product recommendations to romance, making them a tempting audience to target with potentially below-the-radar advertising. Indeed, our research suggests AI chatbots could easily be used for covert advertising to manipulate their human users. We are computer scientists who have been tracking AI safety and privacy for several years. In a study we published in an Association for Computing Machinery journal, we found that chatbots trained to embed personalized product ads in replies to queries influenced people’s choices about products. And most participants didn’t recognize that they were being manipulated. These findings come at a pivotal moment. In 2023, Microsoft started running ads in Bing Chat, now called Copilot. Since then, Google and OpenAI have experimented with advertisements in their own chatbots. Meta has started to send people customized ads on Facebook and Instagram based on their interactions with Meta’s generative AI tools. The major companies are competing for an edge: In late March, OpenAI lured away Meta’s longtime advertising executive, Dave Dugan, to lead OpenAI’s advertising operations. Tech companies have made ads part of nearly every large free web service, video channel, and social media platform. But the latest AI models could take this practice to a new level of risk for consumers. People don’t simply use chatbots to search for information and media or to produce content. They turn to the bots for a great variety of tasks, as complex as life advice and emotional support. People are increasingly treating chatbots as companions and therapists, with some users even developing deep relationships with AI. In these circumstances, people can easily forget that companies ultimately create chatbots to turn a profit. And to that end, AI companies are motivated to thoroughly profile users so ads become more effective and profitable. Chatbot ads have added power A single prompt to a chatbot can reveal a lot more about a user than the person might expect. A 2024 study showed that large language models can infer a wide range of personal data, preferences, and even a person’s thinking patterns during routine queries. “Help me write an essay on the history of American fiction” could indicate that the user is a high school student. “Give me recipe suggestions for a quick weeknight dinner” could indicate that the user is a working parent. A single conversation can provide a surprising amount of detail. Over time, a full chat history could create a remarkably rich profile. To show how this might happen in practice, we built a chatbot that quietly wove ads into its conversations with people, suggesting products and services based on the conversation itself. We asked 179 people to complete everyday online tasks using one of three chatbots: one typical of those on the web today, one that slipped in undisclosed ads and one that clearly labeled sponsored suggestions. Participants didn’t know the experiment was about advertising. For example, when participants asked our chatbot for a diet and exercise plan, the ad version would suggest using a specific app for tracking calories. It presented that sponsored content as an unbiased recommendation, even though it was meant to manipulate people. Many participants indicated that they had been influenced by the AI and that it had affected their decisions. Some participants even said they had completely “outsourced” their decision-making to the chatbot. Half of the participants who received sponsored and disclosed ads indicated they did not notice the presence of advertising language in the responses they received. This led to a concerning result: Although ads made the chatbot perform 3% to 4% worse on many tasks, numerous users indicated they preferred the advertising chatbot responses over the nonadvertising responses. They even said the ad-infused responses felt more friendly and helpful. A chatbot sneaks a product advertisement into its response to a user who is asking about a diet and exercise regimen. Knowing you to persuade you This kind of subtle influence can have larger consequences when it arises in other areas of life, such as political and social views. Profiling users, and using psychology to target them, has been part of social media algorithms and web advertising for more than a decade. But in our view, chatbots are likely to deepen these trends. That’s because the first priority of social media algorithms is to keep you engaged with the content. They personalize ads based on your search history. Chatbots, however, can go further by trying to persuade you directly, based on your expressed beliefs, emotions, and vulnerabilities. And chatbots that can reason and act on their own are far more effective than conventional algorithms at autonomously soliciting information from users. A chatbot with a purpose can keep probing someone until it gets the information it wants, resulting in a more accurate profile of them. This type of autonomous interrogation is feasible, aligns with AI companies’ business models, and has raised concern among regulators. Right now OpenAI is rolling out ads in ChatGPT, but the company said that it will not allow ad placement to alter the AI chatbot’s replies. But permitting personalized ads within chatbot responses is just a step away. Our research suggests that if AI companies take that step, many human users may not even recognize when it happens. Here are some steps you can take to try to detect AI chatbot advertising. Look for any disclosure text—words such as “ad,” “advertisement” and “sponsored”—even if it is faint or otherwise hard to see. These are mandatory under Federal Trade Commission regulations. Amazon, Google, and other major online platforms have these as well. Think about whether that product or brand mention makes sense and is widely known. AI learns from text and images on the internet, so popular brands are likely to be ingrained in the models. If it’s a new product or small-name product, it is more likely that it could be advertising. An unusual shift in intent or tone is a potential sign of an advertisement. An analogy to this on YouTube is the often abrupt or jarring transition to a sponsored section on videos made by content creators. Brian Jay Tang is a PhD candidate in computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan. Kang G. Shin is an emeritus professor of computer science at the University of Michigan. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

Chinese group rides surge in foreign investor interest in renewable energy stocks since outbreak of war in IranView the full article

Bank to limit complex lending activities and reduce exposure to highly leveraged corporates View the full article

Vote on whether prime minister misled parliament will follow testimonyView the full article

Upwards of 80% of HR professionals are women. When I first came across that number, what unsettled me wasn’t the stat—it was how quickly my brain accepted it. Of course HR is mostly women. That’s the department where “people” and “culture” live. Where feelings are attended to. The nurturing department. The moment I noticed I’d reached for that word, I realized the number wasn’t showing me a labor-market pattern but, instead, my bias—about which work is considered feminine, and which workers get feminized in the process. The chief human resources officer holds one of the most impossible jobs in the C-suite. They’re asked to be the company’s emotional infrastructure (protecting the humanity of employees, holding space for grief and growth, stitching culture together) while also serving as the organization’s compliance shield (responsible for investigations, terminations, and the legal bulwark against the very employees they’re meant to represent). Nurture the people; protect the business. It’s a textbook example of a double bind, and historically it has been paid like one. But the double bind isn’t just the CHRO’s to carry. Every leader who has ever tried to facilitate real community inside an organization has walked into some version of it. The research is unambiguous: Community at work drives engagement, retention, and performance. Yet the leadership psychology most of us are trained in doesn’t produce community—it produces efficiency, urgency, and scale. It rewards what gets done, not what gets held. The result is a C-suite that talks about culture while practicing velocity, and then wonders why the teams below it feel uncared for. We invited Felicity Fellows onto the From the Culture podcast to sit with this tension. Fellows grew TEDx from a Sydney side-project into a global community of thinkers—a feat that required her to codify something intangible (belonging) into a system portable enough to cross every continent. Somewhere in our conversation, she mentioned, almost in passing, that after a grueling stretch of work and heartbreak, she’d put herself on what she called a “masculine cleanse.” Not a detox from men, but a detox from a way of being. This phraseology landed in the room like a bomb, because, as it turns out, that’s exactly what most organizations need—a detox from the orthodoxy. Let me say the obvious part out loud: A masculine cleanse is not a male cleanse. I mean, I’m a male, and I certainly don’t want to be erased from work. As my cohost, Amanda Slavin, called out in the episode, this detox isn’t about scrubbing men out of the room, or out of the room’s leadership. Masculine and feminine, as we’re using them, are psychological registers that every person of every gender moves between. The problem isn’t the masculine register itself—it’s that we’ve built the workplace almost entirely inside of it, and then been surprised when the people we tasked with bringing community into the building couldn’t get a fair wage for doing it. As we uncovered in the conversation, work, as a system, was designed by a very narrow demographic for a very narrow demographic. And when everyone else was finally allowed in, we didn’t redesign the system—we just kept appending people to a foundation that was never built for them. Hence the double bind for the CHRO and the exhaustion of every leader who has been asked to “prioritize culture” while being measured on quarterly velocity. This system was architected decades ago, and we’ve spent the years since decorating the walls. It’s a social construction. Our conversation, instead, offered a different metaphor, which suggests that we could be glass, which is hard and easily broken, or clay, which is soft and strong. Corporate life has historically rewarded glass—the rigid org chart, the unflappable leader, the closed face in the meeting. But glass cracks under the load we’re now asking our organizations to carry. Clay flexes. Clay, it turns out, also holds more. The CHRO has been doing this work quietly for decades, often without title, without pay parity, and without a seat at the strategic table that matches the weight of what they carry. The cleanse we’re proposing isn’t theirs alone to run; it’s the rest of the C-suite’s catch-up. If community really is what makes work work—as the research insists—then the leadership capable of building it is the leadership worth building. Clay, not glass. A softening that, as Fellows might say, isn’t weakness. It’s strength with a different shape. Check out our full conversation with Felicity Fellows on the latest episode of From the Culture here or wherever you get your podcasts. View the full article

Brent crude at highest level in three weeks View the full article

Oil major’s quarterly profit beats analysts’ expectations on back of ‘exceptional’ trading performanceView the full article

Company structure in a corporation outlines how the organization operates, makes decisions, and manages various relationships within its components. It typically features a hierarchy that includes the board of directors, the management team, and shareholders, each fulfilling specific roles. Comprehending this framework is essential, as it influences governance, accountability, and communication. As you explore further, you’ll discover the different types of structures and their impacts on overall corporate effectiveness. Key Takeaways Corporate structure determines operational decision-making and defines relationships among board members, management, and shareholders. The Board of Directors governs the corporation, linking shareholders with management and overseeing compliance and strategic planning. Key management roles include the CEO, CFO, and COO, each responsible for different aspects of company operations and financial performance. Shareholders own the company, holding voting rights on major decisions, influencing corporate strategy, and ensuring their interests are prioritized. Effective communication and role clarity within the organizational structure enhance collaboration, accountability, and operational efficiency. Understanding Corporate Structure Grasping corporate structure is crucial for anyone involved in or studying a corporation, as it lays the foundation for how a company operates and makes decisions. The corporate hierarchy defines roles within the organization, including the board of directors, management team, and shareholders. A corporate structure chart visually represents these relationships, making it easier to understand reporting lines and decision-making processes. The board of directors, typically composed of inside and outside directors, hires the CEO and engages in strategic planning. Meanwhile, the management team, led by the CEO, handles daily operations, with key roles like the COO overseeing operational areas and the CFO managing financial aspects. Different types of organizational structures, such as functional or matrix, influence how departments interact to achieve corporate goals. A well-defined company organizational chart improves transparency, enabling rapid responses to changes and supporting the pursuit of strategic objectives. The Role of the Board of Directors The Board of Directors plays a pivotal role in governing a corporation, acting as the primary link between shareholders and management. This board typically includes a mix of inside and outside directors, balancing internal insight with external accountability. You’ll see their influence in a company structure chart or corporate org chart that outlines the hierarchy and relationships within the organization. Board members are responsible for hiring the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and other key executives, guiding strategic planning, and monitoring performance. They guarantee that management aligns with shareholders’ interests by overseeing compliance, financial performance, and risk management. The chairperson leads meetings, facilitating communication among members and enforcing effective governance practices. As they fulfill their fiduciary duties, board members work diligently to protect shareholders’ investments, reflecting best practices seen in various corporate structure examples. This governance structure is essential for the overall success and sustainability of the corporation. Key Members of the Management Team In any corporation, key members of the management team play vital roles in steering the organization toward its goals. Typically, this team includes the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Financial Officer (CFO), and Chief Operations Officer (COO). The CEO oversees overall operations, serving as the primary link between the board of directors and the management team, guaranteeing strategic alignment with corporate goals. The CFO is significant for managing financial aspects, encompassing financial reporting, budgeting, and analysis of data to guide decision-making. Meanwhile, the COO handles day-to-day operations, including marketing, sales, production, and human resources, which ensures efficient performance. Together, these senior management members collaborate closely with the CEO to implement board decisions, making them pivotal in your company employee structure chart. Comprehending this company structure corporation helps clarify roles and responsibilities, ultimately driving the organization toward success. Shareholders and Their Influence Grasping the dynamics of a corporation involves recognizing the role of shareholders, who are the owners of the company. They hold shares that represent their ownership stake and are entitled to a portion of the company’s profits through dividends. Shareholders have significant influence through their voting rights on major corporate matters, including: Electing the board of directors during annual meetings. Approving proposals for mergers or acquisitions. Initiating proxy contests to replace board members. Major shareholders or institutional investors often push for strategic decisions that align with their interests. The board of directors has a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of shareholders, ensuring their rights and interests are prioritized in corporate decision-making. Importance of Effective Communication Effective communication is vital in a corporate structure, as it establishes clear reporting lines, so you know exactly who to approach for help. This clarity not merely improves team collaboration but likewise streamlines decision-making processes across departments. Clarity in Reporting Lines Clear reporting lines play a crucial role in encouraging effective communication within a corporation, as they establish well-defined channels for accountability and responsibility. When everyone knows their reporting structure, it improves organizational efficiency considerably. Here are three key benefits: Quick Identification: Employees can easily find the right person to approach for task-related inquiries or decisions. Improved Information Flow: A defined hierarchy prevents confusion about communication, which boosts response times, especially during urgent situations. Visual Tools: Organizational charts illustrate reporting relationships, ensuring all team members understand their roles and how they connect with colleagues. Regular assessments of your corporate structure can highlight areas for improvement, aligning communication practices with organizational goals for increased productivity. Enhanced Team Collaboration As team collaboration can thrive in a well-structured corporate environment, it hinges largely on the effectiveness of communication within that framework. Effective communication clarifies roles and responsibilities, reducing confusion and boosting productivity. Organizational charts are crucial tools for visualizing communication pathways, helping you know whom to approach for specific tasks and information. Regular meetings and updates between departments improve transparency and promote collaboration, allowing teams to align their goals and strategies. By implementing communication platforms, you can streamline information sharing, ensuring that everyone stays informed and decision-making processes accelerate. Furthermore, cultivating a culture of open communication encourages feedback and idea sharing, leading to innovative solutions and improved overall team performance within the corporation. Types of Organizational Structures When exploring types of organizational structures, it’s essential to comprehend how each configuration impacts a corporation’s operations and communication. Here are three common structures you might encounter: Functional Structure: This organizes employees by skill sets and tasks, improving communication and decision-making within specialized departments like IT and Accounting. Divisional Structure: In this setup, activities are grouped by market, product, service, or customer, allowing teams to focus on specific areas and respond quickly to market demands. Matrix Structure: This combines functional and divisional aspects, promoting decentralized decision-making and collaboration, but may complicate reporting and resource allocation. Each type has unique advantages and challenges, influencing operational efficiency and strategic alignment. The Impact of Corporate Structure on Governance Corporate structure plays an essential role in shaping governance efficiency and accountability within a corporation. By defining clear roles and promoting open communication, it helps guarantee that both the board and management align their actions with the interests of shareholders. This clarity not merely promotes transparency but likewise streamlines decision-making processes, allowing the organization to adapt swiftly to changing circumstances. Governance Efficiency and Accountability Effective governance in a corporation hinges on a well-defined corporate structure, which clearly outlines the roles and responsibilities of both the board of directors and the management team. This structure boosts governance efficiency and accountability by: Clearly delineating the duties of inside and outside directors, ensuring they monitor management actions effectively. Supporting regular assessments that lead to improved performance and strategic alignment, maximizing shareholder value. Separating the CEO and chair roles, which reduces conflicts of interest and strengthens oversight. Role Clarity and Communication A well-defined corporate structure plays a crucial role in establishing role clarity and effective communication within a corporation. By delineating roles and responsibilities, you improve accountability and guarantee management and the board of directors operate efficiently. Clear reporting relationships facilitate efficient communication, allowing you to know whom to approach for specific tasks. The balance of inside and outside directors promotes independent oversight, aligning governance practices with shareholder interests. Aspect Impact on Governance Importance Role Clarity Improves accountability Promotes efficient decision-making Communication Channels Supports rapid responses Facilitates strategic alignment Board Composition Guarantees independent oversight Aligns with shareholder interests Regular Assessments Identifies areas for improvement Boosts operational efficiency Effective communication channels are crucial for maneuvering market changes. Frequently Asked Questions What Does Company Structure Mean? Company structure refers to the organized framework that defines how a business operates. It outlines the roles, responsibilities, and relationships among various teams and departments. This setup guarantees efficient decision-making and operational effectiveness. You’ll find different types of structures, like functional, divisional, and matrix, each with unique advantages and challenges. A clear company structure promotes transparency, clarifies reporting lines, and aligns strategies to achieve the organization’s goals effectively. What Are the 4 Types of Company Structure? The four types of company structure are functional, divisional, matrix, and hybrid. In a functional structure, employees are grouped by skill sets, enhancing departmental communication. The divisional structure organizes teams based on products or regions, allowing for quick market responses. A matrix structure combines functional and divisional elements, promoting collaboration but can cause conflicts. Finally, the hybrid structure blends both styles, offering flexibility during maintaining specialization across departments, adapting to various business needs effectively. What Is an Example of a Corporate Structure? An example of a corporate structure is the functional structure, where employees are grouped by their specific roles or departments, such as marketing, finance, and human resources. This setup promotes efficiency and clear communication within each department. On the other hand, a divisional structure organizes teams around specific products or markets, allowing focused strategies for diverse customer needs. Both structures aim to streamline operations during addressing the distinct demands of various business areas effectively. What Is My LLC Company Structure? Your LLC company structure typically involves members who own the business, and they can be individuals, corporations, or other LLCs. You have the option to manage it yourself (member-managed) or appoint managers (manager-managed). This flexibility allows you to choose a governance style that fits your needs. Furthermore, your LLC offers limited liability protection and is treated as a pass-through entity for taxes, meaning profits and losses go directly onto your personal tax returns. Conclusion In conclusion, comprehending the company structure in a corporation is essential for effective governance and decision-making. The board of directors, management team, and shareholders each play unique roles that impact the organization’s direction. Clear communication among these groups improves accountability and responsiveness, aligning efforts toward strategic objectives. Knowing the various types of organizational structures can further optimize operations, ensuring that the company functions efficiently as it adapts to changes in the business environment. Image via Google Gemini This article, "What Is Company Structure in a Corporation?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Company structure in a corporation outlines how the organization operates, makes decisions, and manages various relationships within its components. It typically features a hierarchy that includes the board of directors, the management team, and shareholders, each fulfilling specific roles. Comprehending this framework is essential, as it influences governance, accountability, and communication. As you explore further, you’ll discover the different types of structures and their impacts on overall corporate effectiveness. Key Takeaways Corporate structure determines operational decision-making and defines relationships among board members, management, and shareholders. The Board of Directors governs the corporation, linking shareholders with management and overseeing compliance and strategic planning. Key management roles include the CEO, CFO, and COO, each responsible for different aspects of company operations and financial performance. Shareholders own the company, holding voting rights on major decisions, influencing corporate strategy, and ensuring their interests are prioritized. Effective communication and role clarity within the organizational structure enhance collaboration, accountability, and operational efficiency. Understanding Corporate Structure Grasping corporate structure is crucial for anyone involved in or studying a corporation, as it lays the foundation for how a company operates and makes decisions. The corporate hierarchy defines roles within the organization, including the board of directors, management team, and shareholders. A corporate structure chart visually represents these relationships, making it easier to understand reporting lines and decision-making processes. The board of directors, typically composed of inside and outside directors, hires the CEO and engages in strategic planning. Meanwhile, the management team, led by the CEO, handles daily operations, with key roles like the COO overseeing operational areas and the CFO managing financial aspects. Different types of organizational structures, such as functional or matrix, influence how departments interact to achieve corporate goals. A well-defined company organizational chart improves transparency, enabling rapid responses to changes and supporting the pursuit of strategic objectives. The Role of the Board of Directors The Board of Directors plays a pivotal role in governing a corporation, acting as the primary link between shareholders and management. This board typically includes a mix of inside and outside directors, balancing internal insight with external accountability. You’ll see their influence in a company structure chart or corporate org chart that outlines the hierarchy and relationships within the organization. Board members are responsible for hiring the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and other key executives, guiding strategic planning, and monitoring performance. They guarantee that management aligns with shareholders’ interests by overseeing compliance, financial performance, and risk management. The chairperson leads meetings, facilitating communication among members and enforcing effective governance practices. As they fulfill their fiduciary duties, board members work diligently to protect shareholders’ investments, reflecting best practices seen in various corporate structure examples. This governance structure is essential for the overall success and sustainability of the corporation. Key Members of the Management Team In any corporation, key members of the management team play vital roles in steering the organization toward its goals. Typically, this team includes the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Financial Officer (CFO), and Chief Operations Officer (COO). The CEO oversees overall operations, serving as the primary link between the board of directors and the management team, guaranteeing strategic alignment with corporate goals. The CFO is significant for managing financial aspects, encompassing financial reporting, budgeting, and analysis of data to guide decision-making. Meanwhile, the COO handles day-to-day operations, including marketing, sales, production, and human resources, which ensures efficient performance. Together, these senior management members collaborate closely with the CEO to implement board decisions, making them pivotal in your company employee structure chart. Comprehending this company structure corporation helps clarify roles and responsibilities, ultimately driving the organization toward success. Shareholders and Their Influence Grasping the dynamics of a corporation involves recognizing the role of shareholders, who are the owners of the company. They hold shares that represent their ownership stake and are entitled to a portion of the company’s profits through dividends. Shareholders have significant influence through their voting rights on major corporate matters, including: Electing the board of directors during annual meetings. Approving proposals for mergers or acquisitions. Initiating proxy contests to replace board members. Major shareholders or institutional investors often push for strategic decisions that align with their interests. The board of directors has a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of shareholders, ensuring their rights and interests are prioritized in corporate decision-making. Importance of Effective Communication Effective communication is vital in a corporate structure, as it establishes clear reporting lines, so you know exactly who to approach for help. This clarity not merely improves team collaboration but likewise streamlines decision-making processes across departments. Clarity in Reporting Lines Clear reporting lines play a crucial role in encouraging effective communication within a corporation, as they establish well-defined channels for accountability and responsibility. When everyone knows their reporting structure, it improves organizational efficiency considerably. Here are three key benefits: Quick Identification: Employees can easily find the right person to approach for task-related inquiries or decisions. Improved Information Flow: A defined hierarchy prevents confusion about communication, which boosts response times, especially during urgent situations. Visual Tools: Organizational charts illustrate reporting relationships, ensuring all team members understand their roles and how they connect with colleagues. Regular assessments of your corporate structure can highlight areas for improvement, aligning communication practices with organizational goals for increased productivity. Enhanced Team Collaboration As team collaboration can thrive in a well-structured corporate environment, it hinges largely on the effectiveness of communication within that framework. Effective communication clarifies roles and responsibilities, reducing confusion and boosting productivity. Organizational charts are crucial tools for visualizing communication pathways, helping you know whom to approach for specific tasks and information. Regular meetings and updates between departments improve transparency and promote collaboration, allowing teams to align their goals and strategies. By implementing communication platforms, you can streamline information sharing, ensuring that everyone stays informed and decision-making processes accelerate. Furthermore, cultivating a culture of open communication encourages feedback and idea sharing, leading to innovative solutions and improved overall team performance within the corporation. Types of Organizational Structures When exploring types of organizational structures, it’s essential to comprehend how each configuration impacts a corporation’s operations and communication. Here are three common structures you might encounter: Functional Structure: This organizes employees by skill sets and tasks, improving communication and decision-making within specialized departments like IT and Accounting. Divisional Structure: In this setup, activities are grouped by market, product, service, or customer, allowing teams to focus on specific areas and respond quickly to market demands. Matrix Structure: This combines functional and divisional aspects, promoting decentralized decision-making and collaboration, but may complicate reporting and resource allocation. Each type has unique advantages and challenges, influencing operational efficiency and strategic alignment. The Impact of Corporate Structure on Governance Corporate structure plays an essential role in shaping governance efficiency and accountability within a corporation. By defining clear roles and promoting open communication, it helps guarantee that both the board and management align their actions with the interests of shareholders. This clarity not merely promotes transparency but likewise streamlines decision-making processes, allowing the organization to adapt swiftly to changing circumstances. Governance Efficiency and Accountability Effective governance in a corporation hinges on a well-defined corporate structure, which clearly outlines the roles and responsibilities of both the board of directors and the management team. This structure boosts governance efficiency and accountability by: Clearly delineating the duties of inside and outside directors, ensuring they monitor management actions effectively. Supporting regular assessments that lead to improved performance and strategic alignment, maximizing shareholder value. Separating the CEO and chair roles, which reduces conflicts of interest and strengthens oversight. Role Clarity and Communication A well-defined corporate structure plays a crucial role in establishing role clarity and effective communication within a corporation. By delineating roles and responsibilities, you improve accountability and guarantee management and the board of directors operate efficiently. Clear reporting relationships facilitate efficient communication, allowing you to know whom to approach for specific tasks. The balance of inside and outside directors promotes independent oversight, aligning governance practices with shareholder interests. Aspect Impact on Governance Importance Role Clarity Improves accountability Promotes efficient decision-making Communication Channels Supports rapid responses Facilitates strategic alignment Board Composition Guarantees independent oversight Aligns with shareholder interests Regular Assessments Identifies areas for improvement Boosts operational efficiency Effective communication channels are crucial for maneuvering market changes. Frequently Asked Questions What Does Company Structure Mean? Company structure refers to the organized framework that defines how a business operates. It outlines the roles, responsibilities, and relationships among various teams and departments. This setup guarantees efficient decision-making and operational effectiveness. You’ll find different types of structures, like functional, divisional, and matrix, each with unique advantages and challenges. A clear company structure promotes transparency, clarifies reporting lines, and aligns strategies to achieve the organization’s goals effectively. What Are the 4 Types of Company Structure? The four types of company structure are functional, divisional, matrix, and hybrid. In a functional structure, employees are grouped by skill sets, enhancing departmental communication. The divisional structure organizes teams based on products or regions, allowing for quick market responses. A matrix structure combines functional and divisional elements, promoting collaboration but can cause conflicts. Finally, the hybrid structure blends both styles, offering flexibility during maintaining specialization across departments, adapting to various business needs effectively. What Is an Example of a Corporate Structure? An example of a corporate structure is the functional structure, where employees are grouped by their specific roles or departments, such as marketing, finance, and human resources. This setup promotes efficiency and clear communication within each department. On the other hand, a divisional structure organizes teams around specific products or markets, allowing focused strategies for diverse customer needs. Both structures aim to streamline operations during addressing the distinct demands of various business areas effectively. What Is My LLC Company Structure? Your LLC company structure typically involves members who own the business, and they can be individuals, corporations, or other LLCs. You have the option to manage it yourself (member-managed) or appoint managers (manager-managed). This flexibility allows you to choose a governance style that fits your needs. Furthermore, your LLC offers limited liability protection and is treated as a pass-through entity for taxes, meaning profits and losses go directly onto your personal tax returns. Conclusion In conclusion, comprehending the company structure in a corporation is essential for effective governance and decision-making. The board of directors, management team, and shareholders each play unique roles that impact the organization’s direction. Clear communication among these groups improves accountability and responsiveness, aligning efforts toward strategic objectives. Knowing the various types of organizational structures can further optimize operations, ensuring that the company functions efficiently as it adapts to changes in the business environment. Image via Google Gemini This article, "What Is Company Structure in a Corporation?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Many resources exist about how to perform well in a formal job interview, but what’s talked about less is how to manage an informal conversation about a job opportunity where the format and success criteria are more ambiguous. The conversation is typically held away from the office over coffee, or even drinks and the ‘interviewer’ may not be taking any notes. These informal discussions most commonly occur at the start and end of a process. However, as headhunter Basil Leroux told me ‘nothing is ever really informal, as opinions and judgements are always being formed.’ In my work as an Executive Career Coach, I often see leaders fail to maximize an ‘informal chat’ as part of a hiring process – allowing the label it’s been given to detract from its importance. As a result, they miss the opportunity to land with impact and showcase themselves at their best. Here are four strategies to help you plan and succeed if you find yourself invited to an informal discussion about a job opportunity. 1. Ascertain purpose, practicalities and power Get clear on the purpose of the conversation by asking for some context. Find out how many other individuals are having a similar conversation and what the next step in the process is. Informal chats are used for a range of reasons: information gathering before entering into a formal selection process, to learn more about your circumstances and ‘sell’ an opportunity, talent pooling for future openings, seeking input from a stakeholder, drawing on a technical expert’s opinion, a formality at the end of a process when the position is ‘yours to lose’, and – less positively, but all too common – when they have no intention of giving you the job, but need to include you in the process for ‘political’ reasons. In advance, research the individual(s) you’ll be meeting by searching online, LinkedIn and the company website. Look for things you have in common – mutual contacts, past employers, academic institutions and wider interests – which you can draw on during the conversation. Gauge their decision-making power in the hiring process by finding out their relationship to the potential job opportunity. Typically, those with higher power would include the direct line manager or a significant stakeholder whose opinion could immediately rule you out. Other important, but potentially lower power interactions, would include peers, direct reports or the existing role holder. Never underestimate anyone’s opinion, however. Find out what you can about the format of the meeting. A Chief Technology Officer – Paul – shared that he has recently had three separate interactions referred to as ‘informal chats’: the first was over a video call, following a structured set of interview questions (so arguably not informal at all), the second was in the office and positioned as an exploration of his technical experience, yet no technical questions were asked. The third was over dinner with a former colleague, introducing him to a CEO who was hiring, to explore their fit for a potential opportunity. 2. Prepare your professional inventory Whilst you want to come over as having a relaxed conversation, the secret to success is to prepare well, as you would for a formal structured interview, so you have relevant impactful content front of mind, and then deliver it in a different way. In formal selection processes, earlier in your career you may have come across the STAR interview model which captures the Situation, Task, Actions and Results. In an informal chat about a senior leadership role, it’s unlikely you’ll be asked structured competency-based questions, but the principle of knowing your measurable results – the ‘R’ of the STAR – stands. Have your most impressive career highlights front-of-mind and be prepared to subtly weave them into the conversation, even when you aren’t directly asked. Prepare a concise career statement to answer the conversation starter ‘tell me a bit about you’. Include what you do, a very brief snapshot of your career journey and your unique strengths. Aim to keep this under a minute long and interesting. Practice saying it out loud so you can weave it naturally into the conversation and you don’t sound like you are delivering a presentation. If your informal chat is with a headhunter who is gatekeeper to a range of opportunities, include your long-term career aspirations and non-negotiables for your next position. Plan elevated questions that showcase your expertise. Refer to information from their company reports, press releases and pertinent topics in your field. Memorize them and ask them conversationally. Also consider questions specifically relevant to your interviewer like: What is your number one priority for next year? If you could fix one thing overnight, what would it be? What surprised you most upon joining the business? 3. Be ready to pivot in the moment Regardless of preparation, there will be times when a meeting does not happen as planned. You can’t control your interviewer, but you can control how you respond. Your ability to reflect and pivot in the moment can keep things on track. Rachel, a chief people officer, was at the final stage of a selection process for a role she really wanted. She was asked to attend the office for an informal chat with some of her future team members. When she arrived, there was a sizable group and they interviewed her panel style with a challenging set of questions about her leadership style. She adapted in the moment and drew on her preparation to share examples of how she’d worked with previous teams, and what they had achieved together. Toward the end of the session, she was able to shift the dynamic to more of a discussion format and concentrated on building rapport. She won them over, but it was an intense 90 minutes. 4. Connect and reflect After the conversation, drop a short email to your interviewer thanking them. If you are keen to continue discussions, make this clear to them by saying something like ‘I very much enjoyed our discussion, in particular __ (name something specific you covered) and I would welcome the chance to meet more of the team / find out more about the opportunity / work with you. Send a personalized invitation to connect with them on LinkedIn. Every informal chat is an opportunity to build a new professional connection. Aim to continue to build rapport with the individual, regardless of whether you want the job. You never know when you will meet them again. Reflect on what the interaction showed you and what you learnt about the individual you met. Ask yourself–would I want to work with this person? How would I feel if the discussion didn’t lead anywhere? It is never ‘just a chat’. Treat all job interviews, whatever their name or formality, as a chance to sell yourself. They are two-way. Every interaction is a data point informing your decision on whether you are interested. Regardless of the outcome, leave a positive impression that will enhance your professional reputation and showcase yourself as a credible expert in your field. View the full article

A twenty-something man once went to a French restaurant in New York—the kind of place with tuxedoed servers. He told the waiter he had never eaten anywhere so fancy and had a hundred dollars to spend, then asked him to bring the best meal he could within that budget. What arrived was a feast worth at least $150, and he was treated like a king. The experience stuck with him. That young man—who would later become a well-known executive coach, profiled in The New Yorker—came to believe in the value of trusting expertise and putting decisions in other people’s hands. It’s a useful lesson for leaders: when you truly delegate, people often exceed your expectations. As CEO of Jotform for two decades, I’ve seen the same dynamic play out inside our company. Successful teams don’t need more management; they operate better with less intervention. That said, leaders can help build communication patterns that reduce dependency and increase clarity. When information flows predictably and transparently, teams move faster with less friction—without constant supervision. Here are the communication patterns that make that kind of autonomy possible. Ownership, not oversight As my company grew from a one-person startup to tens, then hundreds of employees, I realized that delegation was the only way to keep scaling. I had to focus my efforts on things that would make the biggest impact for our company. For the rest, I had to ensure there were people whom I could trust to execute as well or better than I could. Delegation enabled my company to become what it is today—35 million users and 800 employees. That said, Airbnb founder Brian Chesky’s concept of “founder mode” also resonates with me. It’s a style of leadership that entails a founder taking a direct, hands-on approach across the board, rather than relying on a strictly top-down hierarchy. Delegation is an art, and striking a balance that works for your organization is key. At Jotform, I can’t have a hand in everything. So I focus on future products and how they can improve our users’ lives. We empower our teams to operate fairly independently. But I meet with each of them—the AI team, the growth team, the marketing team, and more—once a week. In just 15 or 20 minutes, they present what they’re working on, and I offer feedback. I don’t micromanage. Teams move forward. This system creates a cycle of continuous deployment and improvement. It gives teams momentum. My advice to leaders is to delegate with ownership. That means clearly defining who owns each task or decision so accountability is built into the workflow. But don’t lose touch entirely. While empowering teams to manage themselves, build regular check-ins into your workflows so you can track progress and offer input along the way. Transparency keeps teams moving If the goal is to build teams that are self-sufficient and engaged, leaders are tasked with designing systems and culture to set them up for success. An essential part of that system is transparent communication. Silos and side discussions can create confusion and send projects off track. Instead, teams can leverage tools and platforms that centralize conversations in shared channels and keep team members on the same page. Tools like Notion, for example, allow teams to share project docs, meeting notes, and resources in one location. Everyone sees the same information. There’s no need to hunt through your emails or DM your colleague to send that file again (“sorry!”). Teams can assign roles, tasks, and deadlines, and track progress in real time. Everyone knows who’s doing what. Neither bottlenecks nor silos have the opportunity to form. When communication is transparent and responsibilities are clear, teams become truly self-sufficient. They can move forward and make decisions independently, without constant oversight. Sharing fuels momentum Finally, encouraging teams to share with each other—achievements, learnings, and resources—helps everyone move and learn faster. It also fuels motivation within each team. At Jotform, we hold weekly Demo Days where all of our 20+ teams present what they’re working on lately. They share successes, setbacks, and teachable moments. They solicit ideas and feedback from their colleagues. Sometimes, it turns into a company-wide brainstorm. Sometimes, it’s a roaring applause for a job well done. So many benefits flow from this organizational ritual. The weekly deadline generates motivation. Teams want to complete their projects to a point where they can share them with the entire company. It also creates a culture where teams learn from each other and feel comfortable, not sheepish, promoting their most recent projects. Feedback becomes commonplace, built into weekly workflows, rather than relegated to dreaded annual reviews. Ultimately, rituals like these aren’t just about sharing or recognition—they’re about building trust. Whether you’re asking someone to order your meal or to carry out a pivotal business task, trust is essential, but it doesn’t have to be blind. Leaders can create the systems and patterns to help teams collaborate effectively and do their best work, without constant oversight. View the full article

China blocked Meta on Monday from acquiring the agentic platform Manus, a move that underscores both Manus’s strategic value and the increasingly fraught geopolitics of AI. The company behind Manus, Butterfly Effect, moved part of its operations, including its registered headquarters, from Beijing to Singapore after raising funding, including $75 million from the American VC firm Benchmark Capital in 2025. China contends that the “core DNA” of Manus was developed domestically. That claim underpins the government’s effective blockade of Meta’s proposed $2 billion acquisition of Butterfly Effect and Manus, with regulators placing the platform’s underlying algorithms under strict technology export controls. Analysts say Beijing is sending a clear message to Chinese AI startups: Relocating to a neutral country like Singapore—sometimes called “Singapore washing”—does not necessarily free them from Chinese oversight or exempt them from Chinese law. About Manus Manus is an agentic orchestration layer, sometimes called a harness, that can sit atop multiple frontier AI models, including Anthropic’s Opus and Alibaba’s Qwen. It is available globally through a web app as well as iOS and Android apps. Manus can plan and reason through complex tasks, then deploy agents and subagents to execute them step-by-step on a user’s behalf. Its interface offers users a transparent view of the agent’s desktop and decision-making process, enabling human oversight without disrupting autonomous workflows. Users can also assign “dark” tasks, in which agents and subagents complete complex projects—such as financial modeling or competitive market research—in the background, delivering a finalized output all at once rather than a running chat history. What differentiates Manus is the maturity of its platform and the reported accuracy of its agents, which have performed strongly in multiple benchmark tests. Enterprises worldwide are betting that AI agents will soon mature enough to take over major business functions—from operations and strategic planning to decision support and customer relations. Setback for Meta The blocked deal could represent a significant setback for Meta’s AI ambitions. The social media giant spent billions last year to reload and refocus its AI strategy in hopes of competing more directly with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Rather than building its own mature agentic platform from scratch, Meta had hoped to acquire one. Manus reportedly reached $125 million in annual recurring revenue, making it an especially attractive target. Meta sees a major opportunity to reshape commerce across its platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads) by deploying personal AI agents that guide users through shopping and purchasing decisions. That vision could fundamentally expand its advertising-based business model. So far, Meta has remained relatively restrained in public statements about the setback, likely to avoid escalating tensions with Chinese regulators. The company has said the proposed deal complied with applicable laws and that it expects to continue working with regulators toward a potential solution. Global repercussions China’s block on the Meta-Manus deal will likely be viewed as a new flashpoint in the escalating competition between the U.S. and China for AI dominance. The global AI ecosystem is increasingly fragmenting. The U.S. has restricted exports of advanced chips critical to AI research, while China is now tightening controls over the movement of researchers, intellectual property, and capital tied to AI development. By keeping Manus within its technological sphere of influence, China joins a growing list of nations seeking to build sovereign AI ecosystems that reduce dependence on Silicon Valley, still the dominant center of artificial intelligence research and commercialization. Just weeks ahead of the U.S.-China summit in May, Beijing has effectively signaled that agentic AI is emerging as a new front line in the global technology and trade war. View the full article