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Plex has been rolling out a new user interface for a while now, and to say it's been divisive among users would be an understatement. Users on Reddit regularly complain about the interface being confusing and slow; others wish the application would focus on personal media servers instead of things like movie rentals. Plezy is an alternative Plex client that solves these issues. The application, which is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS, focuses entirely on personal media servers. Plez has a simple user interface, but the real advantage over the official Plex app is its speed. Everything about Plezy is faster than the official Plex app—it launches faster, searches faster, and starts playing videos faster. If you've ever found yourself frustrated waiting for Plex to load, Plezy might be the answer you're looking for. Credit: Justin Pot Having said that, Plezy isn't perfect. A few prominent Plex features, including live TV and offline downloads,aren't supported at all. There are no applications for Roku, Apple TV, or any TV-based platform. The application also can't combine shows and movies from multiple servers, even for search or the "now watching" list, meaning anyone who uses multiple servers may have to switch between servers regularly. That's a small annoyance more than balanced by the performance improvements. But if you just want a quick way to play personal media on a computer, phone, or tablet, Plezy does the job faster, and with less clutter, than the official Plex app. Plex is a great way to build your own personal streaming service, but the company has been downplaying that particular use case for a while—it's nice to see an alternative client with focus. The desktop version of Plezy—macOS, Windows, and Linux—is available for free. The iOS version costs $4. The Google Play link was not yet active while I was writing this, though you could download the APK file from Github and sideload it. View the full article

If you’ve seen a bird’s-eye view of Earth over the past decade, chances are it came from Colorado-based Maxar Intelligence. From some 280 miles up, its powerful imaging satellites have created an atlas of modern problems: the impacts of extreme weather, the build-up of Russian tanks near the Ukrainian border, the ruination of Khartoum and the decimation of Gaza, even the not-so-total destruction of Iranian nuclear facilities by U.S. bombers. What you may not have noticed: Last month, the Maxar brand was itself wiped out, after its private equity owner replaced it with a new moniker: Vantor. The new name reflects how the company that sees everything on Earth now sees itself. Peter Wilczynski, Vantor’s chief product officer, points to “the harsh V, which gives it that edge.” The edginess extends to a slick new website, where fast-paced scenes on screens evoke Jason Bourne, or Alex Karp. But unlike Palantir, where Wilczynski spent a decade, or Anduril, a Vantor partner, the new name does not come from The Lord of the Rings, the touchstone for so many unabashed defense tech firms. Still, Wilczynski admits: “it could be Elvish.” The Maxar makeover “reflects a broader crossroads for Earth observation,” says Jarkko Antila, the CEO of Kuva Space, a Finnish startup building a constellation of AI-equipped hyperspectral nanosatellites, capable of monitoring any material on the Earth’s surface. “Raw satellite imagery alone is less of a differentiator. Combining imagery with AI-powered analytics and sensor fusion to access real-time actionable intelligence is what customers demand.” The hard-edged, tech-forward revamp isn’t just marketing. Maxar’s transformation reflects bigger shifts in the business of watching Earth. A new wave of military and intelligence demand has led companies to double down on government work or even enter the market for the first time. According to Novaspace, a consultancy, the data and services market for defense and intel customers grew by 42% over the past five years, reaching $2.2 billion in 2024. National security work now represents more than 65% of the whole earth observation data market. Whereas imagery satellite companies once leaned into civic applications, the firms are increasingly turning to AI to rapidly analyze all kinds of space data, and sharpening their focus on national security amid turmoil here on Earth. “We’re experiencing growth across every region as customers respond to the changing geopolitical climate,” Wilczynski says. Vantor’s international business has grown by double digits this year to around 100 government and corporate customers, with the bulk of its contracts now with military and intelligence agencies, he adds. A separate Maxar division that builds the satellites, the California-based Maxar Space Systems, was also rebranded, as Lanteris. At the top of its new roadmap, the company said it was centered on “platforms for missile tracking, secure communications, and resilient constellations that safeguard U.S. and allied interests.” Last week, the lunar infrastructure firm Intuitive Machines bought Lanteris for $800 million, “mark[ing] the moment Intuitive Machines transitions from a lunar company to a multi-domain space prime,” CEO Steve Altemus said in the company’s press release. Investors who previously shied away from national security are now pouring in record amounts of cash. According to Bain & Company, venture capital investment in defense tech has increased more than eighteen-fold over the past decade. Over the next decade, Goldman Sachs estimates, the global satellite market will grow from $15 billion to $108 billion. “DoD is basically saying, ‘Hey, private sector, spend your equity dollars, do some preliminary work and that will help us decide what we want,’” Shahin Farshchi, a partner at Lux Capital, said October 29 at a satellite conference in California. A data glut At Maxar—Vantor—the makeover was years in the making, says Wilczynski. In 2022, the private equity firm Advent International purchased Maxar Technologies in an all-cash $6.4-billion transaction in 2022 and split its imagery and satellite businesses into separate divisions. Advent—whose business involves buying, repackaging and selling companies—said the firms would prioritize work for the U.S. government and its allies as part of its broader defense portfolio. Since then, Maxar Intelligence has shaken up its executive team with tech veterans and rejiggered its business, with a focus on services and extracting insights from data. Vantor—which grew partly out of the early Google Maps partner DigitalGlobe—also operates ten satellites built by Maxar and another ancestor, GeoEye. Its six WorldView Legion satellites produce some of the highest-resolution color images commercially available, down to 30 centimeters, or 15 with “enhancement”—good enough to count individual tanks and the crowns of trees. (Only Airbus’s satellites offer a comparable resolution.) Dozens of other companies operate some 1,200 earth observation satellites, helping governments and companies keep tabs on everything from airbases to mines to big box parking lots in a zoo of formats, from optical to hyperspectral to SAR and RF. All this adds up to a problem of too much space data, more than humans can look at, let alone sort, combine, or usefully analyze. “It’s like a thousand times, a million times, the data that you were handling 10 years ago,” says Wilczynski, who previously helped develop Palantir’s data management system and geospatial platform. The glut has pushed Maxar and its two large earth observation rivals, Planet and BlackSky, to become more like tech firms, building AI to combine data from space and other domains like drones and phones, and devising slick interfaces that can extract objects and flag changes on Earth and at sea. (Years ago, a similar flood of video evidence—and the subscription services involved in managing it—led the law enforcement contractor Taser to hire executives from Tesla and Apple, build a cloud-based platform, and rebrand as Axon.) Incumbent players are only now moving into the world of rapid data fusion, says Antila of Kuva, which plans to sell defense customers subscription-based access to its hyperspectral microsatellites; on-board Nvidia chips will help speed up data processing. “But it remains to be seen how quickly they can reset their existing processes and business models.” At Vantor, that effort has meant a range of new partnerships and products, from analysis tools to near-real-time 3D globes, to less traditional ways of presenting and selling geospatial data. Ninety percent of Vantor’s revenue now comes from subscriptions and recurring contracts, amounting to over $900 million, a business the company projects will grow by double digits this year. “Geopolitics are driving countries to want eyes faster” In part, the shift can be traced to a set of color images taken by Maxar on November 1, 2021. The photos, first published in Politico, showed tanks massing near the Ukrainian border. That, and subsequent Maxar imagery, helped convince the world that Putin was serious about his plans to invade, more than three months before it actually happened. NEW: Photos show Russian troops & equipment, including hundreds of tanks, self-propelled artillery and an Iskander mobile short-range ballistic missile are deployed in a training area located approx 160 miles north of the Russia – Ukraine border. 📸: @Maxar pic.twitter.com/qXkj7V1yeI — Elizabeth Campbell (@ECampbell360) December 23, 2021 The war that followed was another reminder that commercial space data wasn’t just a nice-to-have. Along with communications provided by Spacex’s massive Starlink network, commercial satellites would prove pivotal for Ukraine’s defense: Since images by Vantor and other companies are unclassified, U.S. and NATO commanders and analysts could easily share them with Kiev, providing critical intelligence. That sharing arrangement became well known in March, after President Donald The President abruptly turned off Kiev’s access to a Maxar-run digital atlas used by the Pentagon and other US agencies and overseas partners. The White House restored access 11 days later, but the episode unnerved U.S. allies around the globe. “The moment was a wake-up call for partners around the world, and we’ve seen an uptick in demand from international government partners who want to pay for direct access to our spatial intelligence capabilities,” says Wilczynski. The push for more surveillance from space is said to be existential in the longer term, too. For defense and intelligence agencies facing the prospect of AI-powered weapons and drones, the data that comes from above will determine who wins future wars. “Geopolitics are driving countries to want eyes faster,” Will Marshall, CEO of Planet, told a panel at World Space Business Week in September. The publicly traded company has signed deals with NATO, Germany, and Wales. It has also announced a new factory in Berlin, and seen its stock more than triple this year. “People are very worried, and countries want to have their own independent means of surveying the world,” he said. Since July, Vantor has signed over $300 million in contracts, including a deal with Taiwanese aerospace firm AIDC for Raptor, a system that uses its 3D terrain models to guide swarms of drones. Under a separate Army contract, Vantor is also building a 3D virtual globe for training and planning. Last month, the company also signed a deal with the Space Force to capture images of other satellites, a growing concern amid tensions in orbit. Wilczynski puts the market for its products next year at $2 billion. One of Vantor’s largest U.S. government contracts is for GEGD, the web-based portal that provides unclassified imagery and geospatial data to 400,000 users across federal agencies and U.S. partners. The company last year also won a contract to provide AI capabilities for programs that help analysts at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency monitor industrial sites and detect vehicles and ships. That work has informed some of its new commercial AI products. The shift toward defense represents something of a return to the industry’s roots. The space industry has traditionally been propelled by intelligence agencies, which provide the large stable contracts needed to put expensive satellites into orbit. Over the past decade, Maxar and a growing number of earth observation firms have expanded into civil and corporate applications, including mining, energy, finance, insurance, and disaster relief. “The public is left out” But for Vantor and the rest of the industry, the picture of the future is still murky. As defense budgets explode, U.S. government budgets for civil and commercial contracts are shrinking. The The President administration’s $18.8-billion budget for NASA, pending Congress’s approval, pushes the space agency to its lowest level since 1961, and cuts nearly half of its science mission funding, or a third of its science portfolio. On the defense side, where the Pentagon is investing in more of its own satellites (including a requested $40 billion for the Space Force), the administration has proposed about $130 million in cuts to its commercial imagery contracts. In a letter to Congress in June, executives from Vantor and other firms protested the cuts, arguing they would cede U.S. leadership in space. “The decision to abandon America’s vetted and reliable commercial remote sensing capabilities, while adversaries China, Russia and Iran rapidly expand their state-backed Earth observation infrastructure is ironic, shortsighted, and perilous,” says the letter. The industry’s concerns underscore the gravitational pull of defense budgets, and the reality that demand for space imagery among non-government customers hasn’t been as high as some had expected. “There are only so many government contracts, and commercial demand never lived up to the hype,” Tushar Prabhakar, founder of Orbital Sidekick (OSK), a hyperspectral data company, wrote at Space Republic. “So maybe the real question isn’t about Maxar. It’s how does this industry finally break free of its own gravity well?” The industry shifts are also raising eyebrows among advocates for public space data. Commercial and government programs like the U.S.’s Landsat and the EU’s Sentinel have been foundational for climate science, agriculture, and disaster relief for decades. Vantor and other EO companies also run open data programs, providing imagery in the wake of disasters. U.S. and Western governments subsidize some access to commercial data for use by scientific and humanitarian users. Public portals like NASA WorldView, EO Browser, the Copernicus Browser, Google Earth Pro Microsoft’s Planetary Computer, Esri’s Living Atlas, and OpenAerialMap offer tools for searching, sharing, and using various kinds of satellite and drone imagery. But all of those programs are contingent on goodwill. And researchers have reported significant gaps in the coverage provided by public data. For instance, there is no comprehensive repository of recent or historical high-resolution imagery, which could be valuable for a range of humanitarian and environmental challenges. As the industry focuses more on the defense and intelligence sector and government budget cuts threaten research satellites, public access to critical data could be at risk. “That’s my worry,” says Bill Greer, a geospatial analyst who worked on humanitarian mapping at Maxar and founded Common Space, a nonprofit trying to launch its own satellite for research purposes. “A complete enclosure of satellite imagery by defense and intelligence, where the public is left out.” Seeing the Earth in near-real time To see how space got here, zoom out a bit. It was Space Imaging, Maxar’s ancestor, that launched the first spy-grade commercial satellite in 1999, with a then eye-popping resolution of 1 meter per pixel. Since then, a parade of advancements—including SpaceX’s reusable rockets—made it much cheaper for giants and upstarts alike to bring large and small satellites to orbit. In February, Maxar hit a critical milestone. Six years after a mechanical failure took out one of its costly Legion satellites, it successfully launched two more, Legion 5 and 6, aboard a SpaceX rocket. “If that program did not work,” says Wilczynski, “there was not a company.” Once the satellites were up, the time was right for the company to go on “offense,” and turn “a lot of the latent potential that the company had into something that’s a little bit more concrete and durable.” While Maxar was a SpaceX-like “space behemoth,” says Wilczynski, with tentacles reaching across the whole space domain, “we were really trying to think about a company that was more vertically integrated across space, air, and ground, using the space-based data as the global foundation,” he says. All the data is handled by TensorGlobe, a set of cloud-based technical services built to process an unceasing flow of high-resolution imagery, covering some six million square miles per day. Wilczynski likens the infrastructure to Amazon Web Services, but for geospatial data, continuously ingesting, stitching, and enhancing. “That’s really valuable for a customer who’s trying to build a spatial intelligence system that takes imagery from multiple providers,” he says. With a zoo of vendors, combining and making sense of the data at speed is one challenge. “It will be interesting to see how Maxar is going to deal with the interoperability of various data sources and do it in a near-real-time cadence,” says Antila. Wilczynski agrees. The hurdles for earth imagery now aren’t about hardware, but “an information overload challenge of data coming from each of those domains being pretty siloed, being pretty disconnected,” he says. “And this is something that I was really fascinated about at Palantir, thinking about knowledge graphs and connecting semantic data.” Wilczynski says defense agencies are already using the platform to choose from a mix of government and commercial satellites, just as companies might split their data workloads between their own data centers and cloud services. And as AI models learn from the work of human analysts, the system is helping automate the process too. “That scheduling’s actually very hard,” he says. So is turning all the imagery into a single 3D map, in near real-time. Other algorithms, from the startup Ecopia AI, layer on 2D vector base maps, with features like building footprints, roads, and land cover. Yet more software wraps a mess of images onto a “living” globe. These models form the basis of Raptor, a system that helps drones navigate by terrain in GPS-denied environments like Ukraine. They also feed the U.S. Army’s One World Terrain program, which will provide geospatial data for the mixed-reality headset project started by Microsoft and now led by Anduril. The 3D maps can be continuously enriched and verified against new imagery coming from sensors on helmets and drones. And those “real world” terrain models can then be used to train geospatial AI models, more firmly “grounding” them to prevent dangerous falsehoods in the outputs. Researchers at IBM, Google, and elsewhere have also released dynamic maps and geospatial AI models that have been used by insurance companies and disaster relief groups. “A lot of how we’re thinking about the risks of AI are, how do you continue to use real world observations to keep the system from spiraling away into some false hallucination of what’s happening by connecting it to the world,” says Wilczynski. A cloudy picture Even as the data gets better and faster, the ground is shifting beneath the industry’s feet. As part of the budget proposal for NASA submitted earlier this year, the The President administration proposed abandoning more than 40 missions, including at least 14 Earth science missions. The White House has also called for a roughly 30% reduction—about $130 million—in the National Reconnaissance Office’s procurement of imagery under its commercial imagery purchasing program. The administration is also seeking to eliminate funding entirely for synthetic aperture radar imagery, a capability widely used since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In a June 16 letter, the CEOs of Maxar, Planet, BlackSky, Iceye US, Capella Space, and ground systems provider KSAT told the leaders of the House and Senate Appropriations, Armed Services, and Intelligence committees that the budget cuts would undercut The President’s Golden Dome plans, stall the Space Force’s initiative to create a Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, and “derail” U.S. leadership in AI development. Commercial imagery “can be used today, or they can wait six, eight years and spend billions of dollars building systems,” Susanne Hake, general manager of Vantor’s U.S. government business, said at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Global Aerospace Summit in September. “We commercial companies have shown that we can deliver at scale, but in order to do that, we do need long-term contracts and consistent funding in order for us to be able to build our technology.” Vivid Features vectors in Reynosa, Mexico, including road centerlines and 2D and 3D building footprints But for Bill Greer, of CommonSpace, the market’s continued reliance on the defense sector comes at the expense of other, less-resourced users. Maxar’s rebrand “looks like private equity positioning for a sale, likely to defense primes or similar players,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “If that happens, we can expect further restrictions on who gets access to this data, price increases to make the more restricted data more profitable, and restrictions on how the data is used. Government will pay more for access to the same data, and end users will miss out entirely.” Some have advocated for government rules that say any imagery purchased with taxpayer dollars be released to a wider array of civic users. Groups like UN-SPIDER have also pushed for more capacity and training for Earth observation, especially in developing countries. Satellite companies could also open up more of their archives. If they did, Greer thinks the industry could drive more non-defense commercial business. “This is a big spot where the commercial industry gets it wrong,” he says. “They’re not developing the market without allowing access to that data.” Sentry integrates Vantor’s Cortex and Forge software to automate multi-constellation orchestration and intelligence analysis. There’s some historical precedent here. The Landsat program began providing then-precious 60-meter views of Earth in 1972, but its full impact was limited by cost, with prices reaching $4,500 per scene during the 1980s when the commercial sector operated the satellite. In 2008, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) transitioned to a policy of open data, free to users. The impact was immediate. Daily downloads skyrocketed from 53 scenes to more than 5,700, and within three years, a report found annual economic benefits of $1.7 billion in the United States alone, according to a June report by the Group on Earth Observations​​ (GEO), a partnership of governments and international organizations. By 2023, those benefits had grown to $25 billion annually, far exceeding the $5 million collected in data sales by the USGS. The open data enabled projects like Australia’s water resource mapping, which analysed 300,000 Landsat scenes to grasp continental-scale water trends, and, said GEO, “catalysed a global movement toward open-access Earth observation.” Greer would like to see the commercial sector follow Landsat’s lead and open up more of its data. “The problem is that this data is super good, and access isn’t,” he says. He adds: “My hope is that you start seeing more of that [data], and then that leads to tasking, and there would actually be growth in the industry, and more people that actually understand the value.” View the full article

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Before becoming CEO and president of C.H. Robinson in 2023, Dave Bozeman worked at four of the world’s most iconic companies: Harley-Davidson Motor Company, Caterpillar, Amazon, and Ford Motor Company. During each stop, he gleaned valuable lessons: Harley-Davidson (16 years): The motorcycle maker educated him on the power of lean principles, including continuous improvement and just-in-time inventory management. He adds: “I learned the value of connecting with people who do the work. I came in as an engineer, but I wanted to be on the [manufacturing] floor.” Caterpillar (9 years): The construction and mining equipment maker offered him an opportunity to experience operational excellence globally and at scale. “Cat allowed me to see that people around the globe want to do a great job, but they want clean process and workflows to do that,” he says. Amazon (5+ years): Bozeman built the tech giant’s Middle Mile global transportation business, which moves customer orders from vendors and fulfillment centers to its sorting facilities and delivery stations. “Amazon allowed me to learn how to solve problems at scale with technology,” he says. Ford (1 year): While heading customer service and enthusiast brands such as Mustang and Bronco, Bozeman says his time at the automaker offered a deeper, tactile understanding of how things get made. “It was really about getting back to touch, feel, smell,” he says. Bozman’s collection of experiences—industrial, technology, transportation—prepared him to run C.H. Robinson, a freight broker connecting shippers with truck, rail, ocean, and air carriers. But it is a customer-centricity he learned from all four companies that is helping propel his modernization and transformation of the 120-year-old company. “These companies, at their heart, are all about the customer,” he says. “It’s an obsession at Amazon; at Harley-Davidson, the customers tattooed themselves [with the company logo]; at Caterpillar, you’re in the dirt with them; and Ford is all about the brand and its customers. That’s why I’m obsessed with customers and customer service.” Dealing with the “freight recession” C.H. Robinson customers have benefitted from several new programs announced on Bozeman’s watch. The company is deploying artificial intelligence (AI) to increase the speed and volume of freight quotes—the estimated cost to ship goods. “Touchless appointments” technology schedules freight pickups and deliveries, replacing a process traditionally handled by phone or email, and AI chooses the ideal appointment time. As a result of cost cutting, divestitures, and productivity gains, the company earlier this year reported an 11% reduction in staffing. “It’s not just about headcount,” Bozeman counters. “We look at it as upskilling; we’re investing in customer-facing people, who can now help solve supply-chain, logistical problems with customers as we move away from manual tasking.” Bozeman says implementing new technology and disciplined execution have been keys to its improved financial performance. Despite a “freight recession,” marked by weak demand and low rates, C.H. Robinson posted a 68% increase in third-quarter net income even as revenue fell 11% to $4.1 billion. The company says the recent quarter was its seventh straight period of outperforming analyst earnings-per-share estimates. At a time when many of C.H. Robinson’s customers face supply-chain challenges and tariff uncertainty, Bozeman is applying lessons he’s learned firsthand from timeless brands and putting them to work in new ways. The result: C.H. Robinson’s company’s ability to innovate may prove to be a competitive edge during a challenging time for freight. Experience counts Leaders often use their past experience in new ways. What are some of the lessons you’ve collected from the different companies you’ve helped lead? How have they benefited the company you lead now? Share your top takeaways from each role—brief bullet points are great—and we’ll compile unexpected experiences in a future newsletter. Also, we’re still soliciting nominations for the 2025 Modern CEO of the Year. Please nominate yourself or someone you admire via this link. Submissions are due November 21. Read more: CEO lessons What Alicia Boler Davis had to “unlearn” from Amazon and Jeff Bezos Beautycounter founder Gregg Renfrew’s “season of learning” GE Vernova’s Scott Strazik is trying to rekindle its former parent’s entrepreneurial zeal View the full article

At its best, work can be energizing, creative, and meaningful. It can also be emotionally exhausting and stressful. Even in healthy organizations, we all deal with interpersonal tension, stinging feedback, impossible deadlines, and the constant pressure to perform. Add in the rapid pace of change and a steady diet of uncertainty, and it’s no wonder many of us feel perpetually on edge. Stress isn’t just a sign that something’s wrong—it’s a signal that something matters. Emotions like frustration, anxiety, and excitement all contain useful data about what’s important to us, what we value, and what we need. Yet in most workplaces, we’re trained to treat emotions as distractions from rational thought rather than as essential information that guides it. When we ignore or misread that emotional data, we lose access to one of our most valuable internal resources. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), originally developed by psychologist Marsha Linehan to help individuals struggling with chronic emotion dysregulation, offers a powerful framework for understanding and responding to emotions effectively. DBT isn’t about suppressing or indulging emotions—it’s about interpreting them accurately and acting wisely in response. The same skills that help people navigate crises and build healthier relationships can help you stay centered in a difficult meeting, receive feedback without spiraling, and recover from professional setbacks with greater resilience. Here’s how DBT’s core principles can help you use your emotions as data—and manage stress and intensity at work more effectively. 1. Recognize When You’re in Emotion Mind and Do Something Different DBT starts with the idea that many of our problems arise from emotion dysregulation—feeling hijacked by strong emotions and acting in ways that make things worse. At work, that might look like firing off a reactive email, shutting down in a tense discussion, or replaying a negative interaction long after it’s over. These reactions come from what DBT calls Emotion Mind—a state in which feelings drive thoughts and behavior, often overriding reason and long-term goals. The antidote is Wise Mind, the integration of emotion and reason. Wise Mind is the space where you can both acknowledge how you feel and still act in ways that serve your goals. When you notice your pulse racing before a presentation or frustration mounting in a team meeting, take a breath. Ask yourself: What is this emotion trying to tell me? Maybe it’s signaling that you care about doing well, that you value fairness, or that you need more clarity. Once you’ve decoded that data, you can decide how to respond skillfully rather than react impulsively. 2. Check the Facts Emotions provide information, but not all that information is accurate. Sometimes they’re based on assumptions or incomplete data. You might feel angry when a manager doesn’t include you on an email chain and interpret it as rejection, or anxious when a colleague’s brief message reads as criticism. DBT’s Check the Facts skill helps you distinguish between what your emotions are telling you and what’s actually happening. Ask yourself: What exactly happened? What are other possible explanations? Am I assuming intent I can’t verify? This isn’t about invalidating your feelings—they’re real, even if the story attached to them isn’t. It’s about ensuring your next action fits the facts, not your assumptions. When you treat emotions as data, checking the facts becomes the emotional equivalent of verifying a source before acting on it. 3. Practice Opposite Action to Change Your Emotion Once you’ve checked the facts, you can choose whether to act on an emotion or shift it. DBT’s Opposite Action skill is a behavioral way to update your emotional data. If your emotion doesn’t fit the facts, you do the opposite of what it urges you to do. If you’re angry and want to withdraw or lash out, the opposite action might be to approach calmly and with curiosity. If you’re anxious before a presentation and want to avoid, the opposite action might be to step forward—to practice, to engage, and to risk. Opposite Action doesn’t mean pretending to feel great when you don’t. It’s about behaving in line with your goals rather than your impulses—and, over time, reshaping the emotion itself. 4. Use Interpersonal Effectiveness Skills to Navigate Difficult Conversations Emotional data doesn’t just live inside us—it shows up between us. Interpersonal friction is inevitable, especially in environments with high stakes and constant feedback. DBT offers practical tools for these moments. The skill of DEAR MAN provides a clear structure for asserting needs or saying no effectively: Describe the situation objectively. Express how you feel or what you think. Assert what you want or don’t want. Reinforce why collaboration helps everyone. Stay Mindful of your goal. Appear confident, even if you don’t feel it. Negotiate when needed. You might say: “The last few deadlines have been difficult to meet because the workload has increased significantly. I’m feeling stretched thin. I’d like to discuss redistributing tasks or adjusting the timeline so the work remains high-quality.” By integrating emotion and reason, you turn emotional information—I’m overwhelmed—into effective communication. That’s what Wise Mind looks like in real time. 5. Cultivate Mindfulness of Current Emotions Mindfulness, the foundation of DBT, helps us observe emotional data without reacting to it. When you’re flooded with stress—heart pounding, shoulders tense, thoughts racing—pause for a moment and name what’s happening. “Tension in my chest. Tightness in my jaw. Thoughts saying, ‘I can’t handle this.’” Labeling activates the brain’s prefrontal cortex, shifting you from reaction to reflection. You move from being in the emotion to observing it. That small shift—recognizing emotion as data rather than as danger—can completely change how you respond. 6. Practice Radical Acceptance Sometimes the data your emotions deliver points to something you can’t change: a difficult colleague, a lost opportunity, or an organizational decision you don’t agree with. Fighting that reality adds suffering to pain. Radical Acceptance means acknowledging reality fully so you can decide what to do next from clarity rather than denial. You can say: “I don’t like this, and it’s happening.” “This situation is painful, and resisting it isn’t helping.” Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation—it means seeing the full picture so you can use your emotional data wisely rather than fighting it blindly. 7. Build Resilience Proactively Most of us think of resilience as bouncing back after stress, but DBT teaches that resilience starts before the stress hits. Skills like PLEASE (taking care of physical health) and ABC (accumulating positive emotions, building mastery, and coping ahead) help maintain emotional stability so your system processes stress more accurately. When your body and mind are well cared for, you’re less likely to misread emotional signals as threats. Daily habits—sleep, nutrition, movement, connection—aren’t just wellness clichés. They’re how you keep your internal data system online and responsive. A New Model of Effectiveness at Work DBT’s philosophy is dialectical: balancing acceptance and change. In the workplace, that means recognizing that emotion and reason aren’t opposites to be managed—they’re partners to be integrated. Emotions are data. They tell us what matters, guide our attention, and strengthen connection. But like any data, they require interpretation and skill to use well. The most effective people and teams aren’t the ones who avoid emotional intensity; they’re the ones who train for it—who can read emotional cues accurately and respond with balance and wisdom. That’s the heart of DBT: learning to stay grounded, curious, and fully human in the middle of life’s—and work’s—chaos. Adapted from Real Skills for Real Life: A DBT Guide to Navigating Stress, Emotions, and Relationships (Guilford Press, 2026). View the full article

President Barack Obama famously chided Donald The President in April 2011 during the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. The reality show star had repeatedly and falsely claimed that Obama had not been born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to be president. The President’s demands that Obama release his birth certificate had, in part, made The President a front-runner among Republican hopefuls for their party’s nomination in the following year’s presidential election. Obama referred to The President’s presidential ambitions by joking that, if elected, The President would bring some changes to the White House. Obama then called attention to a satirical photo the guests could see of a remodeled White House with the words “The President” and “The White House” in large purple letters, followed by the words “hotel,” “casino,” and “golf course.” Obama’s ridicule of The President that evening has been credited with inspiring The President to run for president in 2016. My book, The Art of the Political Putdown, includes Obama’s chiding of The President at the correspondents’ dinner to demonstrate how politicians use humor to establish superiority over a rival. Obama’s ridicule humiliated The President, who temporarily dropped the birther conspiracy before reviving it. But The President may have gotten the last laugh by using the humiliation of that night, as some think, as motivation in his run for the presidency in 2016. There is a further twist to Obama joking about The President’s renovations to the White House if The President became president. The President has fulfilled Obama’s prediction, kind of. The The President administration has razed the East Wing, which sits adjacent to the White House, and will replace it with a 90,000-square-foot, gold-encrusted ballroom that appears to reflect the ostentatious tastes of the president. The US$300 million ballroom will be twice the size of the White House. President Donald The President It’s expected to be big enough to accommodate nearly a thousand people. Design renderings suggest that the ballroom will resemble the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private estate in Palm Beach, Florida. “I don’t have any plan to call it after myself,” The President said recently. “That was fake news. Probably going to call it the presidential ballroom or something like that. We haven’t really thought about a name yet.” But senior administration officials told ABC News that they were already referring to the structure as “The President Donald J. The President Ballroom.” The renovation will have neither a hotel, casino, nor golf course, as Obama mentioned in his lighthearted speech at the 2011 correspondents’ dinner. Obama pokes fun at The President In the months before the 2011 correspondents’ dinner, The President had repeatedly claimed that Obama had not been born in Hawaii but had instead been born outside the United States, perhaps in his father’s home country of Kenya. The baseless conspiracy theory became such a distraction that Obama released his long-form birth certificate in April 2011. Three days later, Obama delivered his speech at the correspondents’ dinner with The President in the audience, where he said that The President, having put the birther conspiracy behind him, could move to other conspiracy theories like claims the moon landing was staged, aliens landed in Roswell, New Mexico, or the unsolved murders of rappers Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. “Did we fake the moon landing?” Obama said. “What really happened at Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?” Obama then poked fun at The President’s reality show, The Apprentice, and referred to how The President, who owned hotels, casinos, and golf courses, might renovate the White House. When Obama was finished, Seth Meyers, the host of the dinner, made additional jokes at The President’s expense. “Donald The President has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican—which is surprising, since I just assumed that he was running as a joke,” Meyers said. The President gets the last laugh The New Yorker magazine writer Adam Gopnik remembered watching The President as the jokes kept coming at his expense. “The President’s humiliation was as absolute, and as visible, as any I have ever seen: his head set in place, like a man on a pillory, he barely moved or altered his expression as wave after wave of laughter struck him,” Gopnik wrote. “There was not a trace of feigning good humor about him.” Roger Stone, one of The President’s top advisers, said The President decided to run for president after he felt he had been publicly humiliated. “I think that is the night he resolves to run for president,” Stone said in an interview with the PBS program Frontline. “I think that he is kind of motivated by it. ‘Maybe I’ll just run. Maybe I’ll show them all.‘” The President, if Stone and other political observers are correct, sought the presidency to avenge that humiliation. “I thought, ‘Oh, Barack Obama is starting something that I don’t know if he’ll be able to finish,’” said Omarosa Manigault, a former Apprentice contestant who became The President’s director of African American outreach during his first term. “Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President The President,” she said. “It is everyone who’s ever doubted Donald, whoever disagreed, whoever challenged him—it is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.” The notoriously thin-skinned The President did not attend the White House correspondents’ dinner during his first presidency. He also did not attend the dinner during the first year of his second presidency. Although The President has never publicly acknowledged the importance of that event in 2011, a number of people have noted how pivotal it was, demonstrating how the putdown can be a powerful weapon in politics—even, perhaps, extending to tearing down the White House’s East Wing. Chris Lamb is a professor of journalism at Indiana University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

Company culture doesn’t affect performance. That’s not a hot take, that’s what a 2022 meta analysis from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found when they compared more than 500 research papers on the topic. From the report: The findings are very clear: there is little evidence consistently linking organizational culture to performance, but if such a link should exist, it is very weak and too small to be practically meaningful. As such, organizations and practitioners should be careful spending time and money on company-wide culture change programs as they are not likely to increase performance. And yet, when asked, 92% of executives believe that improving their firm’s culture would increase the value of their company. So are 92% of executives wrong? And are millions, if not billions, of dollars wasted each year on culture efforts? The short answer? Yes and yes. The full answer is a bit more complicated. Why the myth persists Leaders cling to the idea that culture drives results because it feels controllable. You can write new values, host an off-site, or hire a chief culture officer. It’s far easier to reprint the employee handbook than to rewire incentives, decision-making, or priorities. Culture talk offers the illusion of progress—something visible, moral, and manageable—while the real performance drivers remain untouched. Company culture is still deeply misunderstood Many leaders talk about culture as something you have—a vibe, a set of values, a mood—rather than something you do. But culture is not a static asset; it’s the emergent result of how decisions are made, what gets rewarded or punished, and which behaviors the system makes easy or hard. When executives say “we need a culture of innovation,” but still require six layers of approval for new ideas, they’re confusing aspiration for infrastructure. Leaders aren’t being honest about their culture, or with themselves Research from MIT Sloan Management Review (2020) found no correlation between a company’s stated values and the lived experience of its employees. In other words, what leaders say their culture is and what people actually feel day-to-day are worlds apart. Firms with large culture gaps see lower productivity and impaired alignment. The misalignment fuels cynicism and distrust, undermining managerial credibility and depleting morale. Employees in these organizations report reduced commitment and higher turnover. Instead of confronting that gap, many double down on optics: slogans, all-hands pep talks, or off-sites meant to “rebuild trust.” But culture isn’t changed through words or rituals—it’s changed through systems. Decision rights, information flow, meeting cadence, and incentives form the real architecture of behavior. Until leaders are honest enough to align those structures with their rhetoric, culture initiatives will keep delivering the same result: symbolic satisfaction with no measurable performance gains. Leaders aren’t being strategic about their culture Every era has its cultural role model—the company everyone else is told to emulate. In the ’90s it was Jack Welch’s GE. Then it was Apple, then Amazon. Now it’s Jensen Huang’s Nvidia. Each time, executives rush to borrow their rituals and slogans, hoping to import a little of their magic. But let’s be honest: your company isn’t that company—and it shouldn’t be. Culture is simply how strategy gets lived. Which means a “best culture” doesn’t exist, only a fit culture—one that reinforces your distinct strategy and constraints. Copying someone else’s culture while pursuing a different strategy isn’t just naive, it’s counter-strategic. The culture obsession is a distraction The corporate world is hooked on culture because it’s comforting and it makes leadership feel human and moral. But culture talk often becomes a way to avoid harder truths: bad strategy, misaligned incentives, broken systems, and unclear ownership. In our experience as a consulting partner to some of the world’s largest and most complex companies, a “culture problem” is usually a smokescreen for problems that leaders have long known about and shirked responsibility for: a “nice” way to avoid assigning blame or deflecting responsibility. And when we analyzed 1,700 public companies and their Glassdoor ratings, we found that the No. 1 topic among negative reviews were complaints about leaders and management. So, poor leadership produces poor cultures. What to do instead Before rushing to rewrite values, produce swag, or drag people to town halls, leaders first need to hold themselves accountable. Do they actually behave in the way they hope others will? Do they collaborate with their peers as “one company” or is that really just a slogan? Does the way they allocate resources match what they claim to prioritize? Are the people they’re promoting really the best “culture bearers” or merely squeaky wheels or political players? Then, leaders should consider culture as the shadow cast by the operating model they design and manage. If you want to change the shadow, you have to move the object casting it. That means redesigning how decisions get made, how information travels, and what gets measured and rewarded. Culture is not a lever to pull; it’s a reflection of the choices leadership makes every day about how work actually happens. So yes, culture matters, just not in the way most executives think. You don’t fix performance by fixing culture; you fix culture by fixing performance. Because in the end, culture lives in the rules you enforce, not the words you endorse. View the full article

Back in 2012, as a young assistant professor, I traveled to Berkeley to attend a wedding. On the first morning after we arrived, my wife had a conference call, so I decided to wander the nearby university campus to work on a vexing theory problem my collaborators and I had taken to calling “The Beast.” I remember what happened next because ​I wrote an essay​ about the experience. The tale starts slow: “It was early, and the fog was just starting its march down the Berkeley hills. I eventually wandered into an eucalyptus grove. Once there, I sipped my coffee and thought.” I eventually come across an interesting new technique to circumvent a key mathematical obstacle thrown up by The Beast. But this hard-won progress soon presented a new issue: “I realized… that there’s a limit to the depth you can reach when keeping an idea only in your mind. Looking to get the most out of my new insights, and inspired by my recent commitment to the textbook method, I trekked over to a nearby CVS and bought a 6×9 stenographer’s notebook…I then forced myself to write out my thoughts more formally. This combination of pen and paper notes with the exotic context in which I was working ushered in new layers of understanding.” I even included a nostalgically low-resolution photo of these notes: More than a decade later, I can’t remember exactly which academic paper I was working on in that eucalyptus grove, but based on some clues from the photo above, I’m pretty sure it was this ​one​, which was published the following year and received a solid 65 citations. I revisited this essay on my ​podcast​ this week. The activity it captured seemed a strong rebuke to the current vision of a fast-paced, digitized, AI-dominated workplace that Silicon Valley keeps insisting we must all embrace. There’s a deeply human satisfaction to retreating to an exotic location and wrestling with your own mind, scratching a record of your battle on paper. The innovations and insights produced by this long thinking are deeper and more subversive than the artificially cheery bullet points of a chatbot. The problem facing knowledge work in our current moment is not that we’re lacking sufficiently powerful technologies. It’s instead that we’re already distracted by so many digital tools that there’s no time left to really open the throttle on our brains. And this is a shame. Few satisfactions are more uniquely human than the slow extraction of new understanding, illuminated through the steady attention of your mind’s eye. So, grab a notebook and head somewhere scenic to work on a hard problem. Give yourself enough time, and the enthusiastic clamor about a world of AI agents and super-charged productivity will dissipate to a quiet hum. The post Forget Chatbots. You Need a Notebook. appeared first on Cal Newport. View the full article

Executives like to say they are “integrating AI.” But most still treat artificial intelligence as a feature, not a foundation: they add a chatbot here, an automated report there, and call it transformation. That’s the same mistake companies made in the early days of the web: building websites as brochures instead of re-thinking their business models around digital interaction. AI is not a feature. It’s an architectural layer that will reshape every workflow, decision, and product. Those who treat it as decoration will fade, those who treat it as structure will lead. From automation to agency As product strategist Connor Davis noted, “every great company will soon have an agentic layer, a system that not only automates tasks but also orchestrates them across functions.” The distinction is crucial. Automation is about efficiency: doing existing tasks faster or cheaper. Agency is about delegation: letting the system make decisions, coordinate actions, and even manage other software on your behalf. Think of it as moving from tools that execute commands to assistants that understand context. The leap is subtle but profound. When a finance team uses an LLM to summarize quarterly reports, that’s automation. When the same system proactively flags anomalies, adjusts forecasts, and alerts the CFO with recommendations, that’s agency. Companies that understand this shift are already reorganizing around it. They are not adding AI to workflows: they are building workflows around AI. What an ‘AI-first’ roadmap really means To be “AI-first” doesn’t mean using the latest model or adding generative features. It means designing products and processes that assume continuous intelligence at their core. Andrew Bolis captured this well: “AI will become the orchestration layer across every SaaS tool. Instead of humans jumping between apps, agents will execute intent across systems.” That’s the future of enterprise software. Today’s SaaS stack forces humans to be the middleware: copying data between CRMs, spreadsheets, and dashboards. Tomorrow’s agentic layer will do that work automatically, turning enterprise systems from silos into a single, adaptive “organisms”. And here’s no less than a biologist telling you so, and a few years in advance. This evolution mirrors what happened when APIs transformed the web. At first, companies built isolated web apps: then APIs connected them. Now AI agents will do the connecting… and the deciding too. The three pillars of an AI-first architecture From what we’re seeing across industries, AI-first organizations share three foundational traits: A data substrate, not a data warehouse Traditional data systems store information; AI-first systems understand it. That means building contextual layers, from embeddings, to knowledge graphs and retrieval systems) that make data retrievable in natural language and usable in real time. A semantic interface If your team still clicks through dashboards, you’re behind. The AI-first enterprise interacts through language: voice, text, or context-aware prompts. The interface becomes conversational because the workflow becomes cognitive. An agentic layer Every AI-first company needs an orchestration layer that can act autonomously within defined boundaries. Agents handle not just information retrieval but task execution, generating code, scheduling, procurement, customer response, and compliance checks. The challenge isn’t whether they work: it’s how much you trust them to decide. The cultural reset executives must lead This is not a technical project: it’s a cultural one. Building an AI-first organization requires leaders to unlearn decades of linear thinking about processes and hierarchy. The question is no longer how can technology support our employees, but how can employees supervise technology that works alongside them. The manager of the near future won’t just oversee people: they’ll coordinate agents. Executives who think in terms of software adoption will miss this entirely. The right question isn’t which vendor’s AI tool to buy , but which decisions you’re ready to delegate to a machine. That shift demands a new kind of governance: clear ethical boundaries, data transparency, and oversight mechanisms that ensure AI recommendations remain auditable and explainable. Companies that fail to define those boundaries early will end up with AI that works… but works for the wrong goals. The new competitive advantage The competitive edge in the AI era won’t come from access to the biggest model or most GPUs. It will come from organizational adaptability, or the ability to incorporate AI decision-making without losing accountability. In every industry, a similar pattern will emerge: the incumbents will integrate AI as a feature, the challengers will rebuild their stack around it. The difference will show up in speed: companies that treat AI as infrastructure will compress decision cycles from weeks to hours. Those that don’t will move at human speed while their competitors move at machine speed. But don’t confuse velocity with chaos. The best AI-first companies aren’t automating indiscriminately: they’re orchestrating intelligently. They design human-in-the-loop architectures where humans remain the moral and strategic governors, and AI handles execution at scale. Building the agentic future responsibly The temptation, of course, is to delegate everything. After all, if agents can optimize marketing spend, supply chains, and code deployment, why not let them? The reason is simple: trust is earned, not automated. AI agents must be auditable: their decisions explainable and reversible. Without that, an organization risks the “black box syndrome” that has already plagued large-scale AI deployments. I’ve written before about this risk in Fast Company: when you build on systems you don’t understand, you surrender control. Agentic systems make that surrender seductive. They don’t crash, they comply. And that’s precisely why they’re dangerous if left unsupervised. Remember the paperclip maximizer… Practical steps for executives For leaders beginning their AI-first journey, here’s a roadmap: Start with one value chain Pick a process with measurable outcomes such as customer service, logistics, or internal reporting, and prototype an agentic version. Don’t start with chatbots, start with impact. Form an AI governance board Blend technical and ethical oversight early. You’ll need both to scale safely. Invest in retraining Your teams don’t need prompt engineers: they need problem-framers who understand what can and can’t be delegated. Keep data open inside the enterprise AI thrives on accessibility, not silos. Build policies for responsible internal sharing. Measure decision latency, not output volume The real gain from AI-first design isn’t producing more: it’s deciding faster. From feature to foundation AI is no longer the icing on the product: it’s the yeast in the dough. It changes everything from the inside out. Companies that understand this will design architectures where agents and humans collaborate seamlessly, data flows freely, and decisions happen in real time. Those that don’t will keep bolting AI onto outdated systems and wondering why nothing truly changes. The agentic future isn’t coming: it’s already here. The only question left is whether your company is ready to stop piloting and start delegating. View the full article

It became clear in the late 2010s that Amherst College’s science center had aged far past its prime. As the concrete building fell into disrepair, school leaders suspected a demolition was in order. Old, poorly insulated, and inadequate for the technical demands of today’s research, it seemed like too steep a challenge to repurpose, says Tom Davies, the school’s Executive Director of Planning, Design, and Construction. Especially after a new science center opened on campus in 2020. “It was a stranded asset with essentially no value,” he says. “But what our consultants were able to show is that it does have quite a bit of value.” In the course of exploring options, engineers and the architectural team at Herzog & de Meuron devised a different future for the building, firmly rooted in its past. They decided that the hefty concrete frame could be stripped down, and two comparatively lightweight floors of mass timber could be added on top to create additional space. This approach, which stays within the school’s commitment to reduce its carbon footprint, was approved, and the repurposed building will soon reopen as a new student center in the fall semester of 2026. The Amherst project exemplifies the potential of found capacity, a concept advocated by Justin Den Herder, vice president and principal at global engineering firm TYLin, which worked on science center renovation. He believes there’s extensive opportunity in this form of mass timber top-off, but there’s simply not enough familiarity with this material, or enough examples, to spur additional investment and development. Engineers like Den Herder have concluded that much of the older building stock in big cities, built with solid foundations able to hold additional weight, could easily support a few additional floors, especially if they were constructed of more lightweight material. More modern office projects, value engineered to cut costs, likely wouldn’t have this capacity. “I would be willing to say the majority of buildings could accept this,” said Den Herder. “I think the number of buildings that couldn’t accept at least one story in mass timber are probably certainly in the minority.” Mass timber—rising in popularity due to its biophilic properties and lower carbon footprint—fits this use case perfectly. A number of recent projects utilizing this concept of stacking additional floors on existing buildings suggests a new direction for those seeking added density in our downtowns. Europeans have been doing these designs for years. There’s even a Dutch design concept, optoppen (topping up in Dutch) that describes these kinds of developments. A coalition of industry partners has gathered a portfolio of dozens of existing projects, and created tools to evaluate the potential of such projects in cities like London. But it’s starting to see more recognition in the United States, with a few recent high profile projects. In Washington, D.C., the 80M building, which opened in the fall 2022, added three mass timber floors atop a downtown office, which were quickly leased by BP and the American Trucking Association. The project didn’t require costly reinforcement of the existing foundation, says Steve Trapp, executive vice president for Columbia Property Trust, and the wood interiors and 12-foot-tall windows with commanding views of the nation’s capital offered a compelling, unique office environment for tenants. Other projects rely less on mass timber, but take a similar approach to expanding the square footage of an existing building. The Terminal Warehouse renovation in New York City, designed by CookFox, will add six floors of new office space, clad in glass and metal, atop a brick warehouse during renovations set to commence this year. Another recent project in Manhattan, 787 11th Avenue, added additional floors with floor-to-ceiling glass atop a ‘20s-era building that initially served as an automobile showroom. Adding floors in this manner can work well, says Trapp, especially for something like a warehouse-to-office conversion, since the original structure has such a solid foundation. Columbia was also behind the Terminal Warehouse project. However, the current office market, with demand down and vacancy rates over 20% in many U.S. cities, means there’s little to no appetite at the moment to stack new floors and add space when there’s already too much. “If we had the right investment conditions, we would absolutely go forward with [similar projects],” says Trapp. “Mass timber has really taken off since 80M was conceived. We just haven’t had the right circumstances.” But the proof of concept for projects like 80M suggest the idea would work well when the economics become more favorable. And mass timber additions remain ripe for residential projects. Den Herder says that in New York City, for example, the building code allows for adding a few additional stories on many townhomes and brownstones, offering a potential pathway for more densification, especially in the outer reaches of boroughs like Queens and Brooklyn. By changing the lens by which you view a building renovation, this kind of vertical addition with mass timber can help save a building, instead of demolishing it. View the full article

The number of highly qualified refinance candidates rose to 1.7 million, the most in three and a half years, as mortgage rates ease. View the full article

A lifelong Manchester City fan stands in front of a 3D virtual avatar of the team’s star player, Erling Haaland, at an EA Sports FC prelaunch event. Towering and lifelike, the avatar’s every grin, gesture, and movement is perfectly synced to Haaland himself. The fan plays, interacts, and even shares a laugh during a spontaneous dance battle with the digital Haaland in real time. For a few electrifying moments, it’s as if their football hero has come to life in front of their eyes, blurring the line between reality, fandom, and technology. This isn’t a far-off sci-fi scenario; it already happened. 3D digital avatars are starting to transform how humans connect in virtual spaces, offering a level of immediacy, responsiveness, and personalization that was once impossible. For brands, this represents a massive opportunity to engage audiences in ways that feel human, scalable, and alive. The shift is already underway According to Gartner, 54% of brands are using some form of chatbot or conversational AI platform for customer-facing interactions. But while 2D avatars and text-based chatbots have paved the way, 3D digital avatars are poised to take this evolution to the next level. With advancements in AI, real-time animation, and emotional modeling, brands can now create avatars that move, react, and even emote like humans, making digital encounters feel as authentic as real ones. And audiences are ready. Gen Z, in particular, is primed for animated interactions. Nearly half (48%) of this generation prefers animation to live-action, and adults aged 18 to 34 are now the biggest fans of animated content. From Roblox to VTubers, the language of animation has become the language of self-expression. For a generation that socializes online and personalizes digital avatars, interacting with 3D animated identities feels natural—an extension of how they already live and connect. The opportunity for brands The challenge for brands has always been how to create meaningful connections at scale. Brand ambassadors are one way, but talent isn’t scalable. A celebrity ambassador can’t record personal videos for every fan, and a top athlete can’t be in three cities at once. 3D digital avatars are changing the equation. With real-time animation tools and AI modeling, brands can create content that feels live-action in quality but is lightning-fast to produce. This allows brands to be reactive, spontaneous, and human, without waiting for a shoot day or a gap in a busy brand ambassador’s schedule. Picture Shaquille O’Neal’s digital twin welcoming customers to multiple Home Depot events simultaneously, each interaction tailored to the audience; Lionel Messi’s 3D avatar hosting a live Q&A with fans after a big game; or Wendy’s iconic mascot bantering with fans in real time, trained on years of the brand’s famously sassy tweets. Why just use words on X when you can connect visually in real time? Why 3D digital avatars feel real A common question is, how can a digital avatar feel “real?” The answer lies in expressiveness. The difference between a 3D character and a 3D avatar is emotion. Characters like the M&M’s mascots communicate through jokes and dialogue. Avatars, on the other hand, mirror the subtlety of human interaction—an idiosyncratic smirk, a pause, or a glance that creates genuine emotional resonance. Early prototypes already show how users can pose questions to a digital avatar and receive individualized, emotionally attuned responses. This glimpse into avatar-based interaction hints at transformative potential, not just in marketing but in education, customer service, and healthcare. Imagine a child preparing for intensive medical treatment, comforted by a 3D animated character that brings warmth and understanding to the daunting journey ahead. Pediatric personas would be able to respond to the child’s questions and concerns in a calm, reassuring manner, reaching them in the familiar environment of their own home. Building empathy into the system To make avatars feel authentic, AI models are trained on everything from a person’s interviews to their mannerisms and speech patterns. If someone has a signature laugh, gesture, or way of speaking, the avatar learns it too. This ensures interactions feel personal, not mass-produced. What excites me most is the scalability of empathy. Two people can have completely different, yet equally real, experiences with the same avatar, each interaction tailored to their interests, questions, and emotional tone. This level of personalization is a game changer for brands looking to deepen their connection with audiences. How brands can get ahead now Technically, this ecosystem relies on real-time animation engines like Unreal, AI-driven facial and voice modeling, and cloud-based data storage. The human layer is just as critical. This isn’t plug-and-play software; it takes creative producers, animators, and AI engineers to make an avatar feel alive. For brands to truly own this technology, they’ll need to find experienced partners or build small internal “avatar studios” that blend storytelling with tech fluency. It’s an investment in people as much as in infrastructure. If you’re a brand leader, here’s how to prepare for this shift: Identify your expressive assets. Who in your ecosystem—mascots, ambassadors, talent—best represents your brand’s values and story? Start gathering inputs. Video, voice, and movement data are the raw materials that power authenticity. Establish creative guardrails. Set clear boundaries for what your avatar can and can’t do, ensuring alignment with your brand values. Build hybrid teams. You’ll need a mix of creativity and AI literacy to bring avatars to life. Experiment. Start small. Let an avatar greet fans, appear at an event, or respond to a limited set of questions. The goal is to learn how people connect. The next phase of human connection To understand where this space is headed, consider how far virtual representation has already come. When I played Madden NFL in college, the players were pixels. Today, they look like real athletes. In two years, our digital avatars could look and sound exactly like us, in 3D, and be fully trained to interact on our behalf. The next frontier of digital experience isn’t about technology alone—it’s about emotional presence. Brands that learn to speak this new language of presence have a distinct advantage. View the full article

If you are reading this from outside the U.S., you may have already seen the videos. Clouds rolling over the Grand Canyon. Kids screaming down roller coasters. Snowboarders gliding through white forests. America’s latest tourism campaign, “America the Beautiful,” is out, and it is selling the American dream. But will tourists buy it? According to a May 2025 report from the World Travel and Tourism Council, international visitor spending to the U.S. is projected to fall to just under $169 billion in 2025, down from $181 billion in 2024. Even in 2024, 90% of all tourism spending came from domestic travel, while international travel dipped from many of the country’s key source markets, including the U.K, Germany, South Korea, Spain, Ireland, and the Dominican Republic. The country’s national tourism marketing agency, Brand USA, developed “America the Beautiful” to rebuild confidence in these shrinking markets. The campaign glows with idealism and nostalgia for the great outdoors, the great American road trip, and majestic landscapes that pulse with life in spite of their sovereign’s attempts to turn large swaths of it over to fracking. By choosing a title that is associated with an 1890s poem that has become one of America’s most patriotic songs, Brand USA seems to want tourists to forget about the country’s present issues and travel back to a time, or a place, where patriotism didn’t so often manifest as nationalism. A campaign with high stakes “America the Beautiful,” first announced in June, launched on October 20—months after The President’s “Big Beautiful Bill” tax and spending law slashed Brand USA’s federal funding by a staggering 80%. (Travel lobbyists are now fighting with Congress to restore the budget.) The agency laid off 15% of its staff in September, and shut down its ad-supported streaming service GoUSATV, which promoted inbound tourism. By undercutting a national tourism marketing agency that promotes the U.S. internationally, The President ostensibly flipped the finger to global visitors, reflecting, instead, his America-first priorities. But America needs international tourism. International visitors contributed just over $217 billion in revenue in 2019, supporting nearly 18 million jobs nationwide. The tourism sector more broadly is also a reliable driver of federal, state, and local tax revenue, contributing more than $585 billion annually. The stakes for “America the Beautiful” are high. The fall of the American Brand Next year will be a big year for the United States. Between America’s 250th anniversary, the 2026 World Cup that will take place across 11 U.S. cities, and the Route 66 centennial, the country is poised for celebration on many fronts. “America the Beautiful” was timed to boost tourism ahead of those big events. Brand USA partnered with AI-powered software Mindtrip, which offers interactive maps and custom itineraries. They also created various video spots highlighting “America the Brave” and “America the Big Hearted.” “We’re not asking people to simply visit America; we’re inviting them to feel it, taste it, and carry home experiences that become core memories,” Leah Chandler, Brand USA’s chief marketing officer, said in a recent press release. What if not enough people don’t want what America has to offer? “My view is that advertising campaigns are useless at persuading people to change their minds about countries,” says Simon Anholt, a leading researcher and advisor on nation brands and national image. “You can’t talk yourself out of an image that you behaved yourself into.” According to the 2025 Anholt Nation Brands Index, a systematic survey of international perceptions of countries, the United States has dropped out of the top ten for the first time in 19 years. After topping the index in both 2005 and 2016, the U.S. fell from 1st to 7th place following The President’s election in 2016. After his re-election in 2025, the U.S. has dropped to what Anholt calls an “unprecedented” 14th place. (Japan and Germany remain at the top of the list.) The fall isn’t just about perception. Anholt says there is a “more than 80% correlation” between a country’s score in the Nation Brands Index and the amount of money it makes from tourism, foreign investment and trade. The exact breakdown remains unclear, “but it’s a certainty that when image declines, visits decline too,” he says. Politics or pleasure? Whether some tourists are able to separate the political from the pleasurable will depend on who you ask. For Tom Buncle, the former chief executive of the Scottish Tourist Board and a tourism consultant who helps destinations improve their global competitiveness, the U.S. remains an appealing destination despite geopolitical tensions. “Regardless of all the issues, California is still going to have amazing beaches, Arizona is going to have amazing deserts, Florida is going to have amazing surfing, Colorado is going to have great mountains,” he told me. “Politics aren’t going to change that.” Buncle agrees that many challenges are hard to ignore: Some tourists have said they are afraid to visit for fear of being turned away at the border. Others worry about visa restrictions and higher visa fees. “But as I keep saying, our countries, our cultures, our landscape is bigger than all of us,” says Buncle. “It’s been there for centuries, it’s going to outlast all of us.” Anholt is less optimistic. He brings up the “halo effect,” namely when people start to dislike a country’s policies so much that they unconsciously downgrade many other unconnected aspects of the country. If tourists still want to like America, they’ll overlook the bad stuff. If they no longer want to like America, they might pick another travel destination. “Once they’ve flipped, they tend to stay flipped,” he says. And if enough people stay flipped, he adds, it will be “the beginning of payback time for America First.” Repairing the image Brand USA, which declined an interview, is aware of the challenges. “So what’s our assignment? At this moment, the U.S. travel industry needs a rallying cry,” Leah Chandler told Travel Weekly in July. “We know that international audiences still love many things about the U.S. and are connected to the people through our culture and our stories. And while right now might not feel like it’s the right time for some, there are others who have the means and desire to visit the United States, and those people will prioritize a visit here.” As an American resident (admittedly, not the target demo) I can’t help but cringe at the tone-deafness of the campaign. On the one hand is an agency promoting “connection,” “boundless adventures,” and the kind of open-armed welcome that has made what America is today. On the other hand is a president who has willfully stoked violence, torpedoed America’s global standing, and slashed refugee allotment (unless they’re white). The dissonance is deafening, and it likely won’t be lost to those who get their news abroad. But perhaps there’s room for hope beyond the cynicism. “Yes, the global news is coming out with not a very pretty picture, but [there is value in] reminding people that the real USA is still there for them to visit to enjoy,” says Buncle. Even if reality is dark, shining a light on the brightest spots doesn’t have to be false advertising. It could be an attempt at repair. Americans deserve that. View the full article

OpenAI is going house hunting. The world-leading AI company is reportedly looking for a massive corporate campus of at least 500,000 square feet to house its ever-growing workforce of insanely well paid engineers and support staff. What’s more important than OpenAI’s desire to expand, though, is the company’s choice of where to do it. OpenAI is looking not in the trendy, vibrant heart of San Francisco, but deep in the dull, gray corporate expanses of Silicon Valley. That bucks a major trend in the AI space—and signals a broad and impactful change to the industry. Corporate hermit crabs For generations, America’s most successful tech companies have followed a familiar pattern: start in some tiny, inappropriate space, then expand to a massive office park in Palo Alto or Mountain View. Hewlett Packard famously started in a garage before expanding to ever-larger campuses. Apple did the same, and now controls most of Cupertino from a bizarre, insular spaceship of a building. Google started in a Stanford dorm room before moving to (surprise!) a garage, and later a 3 million square foot compound in Mountain View, the Googleplex. Often, Silicon Valley’s tech companies behave like corporate hermit crabs, taking over the campuses of their failed predecessors. When Facebook moved to the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, they didn’t even bother to invest in a new sign–they just flipped the old one around and put a big Facebook logo on it. Even today, the original Sun Microsystems sign still hides on the back of the Facebook one. When Google repurposed the former campus of Silicon Graphics to build the Googleplex, they kept a dinosaur named Stan. Things will be great when you’re . . . A new wave of tech companies coming to power in the mid 2010s, though, started to trod a different path. The social network X (née Twitter) had its headquarters in the Civic Center neighborhood of San Francisco until Elon Musk forcibly excised it. Uber and Square were originally down the block. Airbnb, Zynga, and Cloudflare are all in San Francisco’s trendy but rough-around-the-edges SoMA district. These newer companies realized that their hip, young engineers didn’t want to live in the suburban doldrums of the Valley. They wanted nice food, bars that stay open past 10 pm, and all the other cultural trappings of a major city. After the pandemic, the trend towards downtown tech HQs accelerated. Companies realized it was easier to lure engineers back to the office if it happened to be down the block in a city where they’d love to live, rather than a chartered bus ride away. As today’s AI companies started their meteoric growth, then, it was only natural for them to situate themselves downtown. OpenAI started in SoMA’s historic Pioneer Building. When they outgrew that space, they moved to a massive, glass-fronted campus in the up and coming Mission Bay neighborhood–all skybridges, living walls, louvered windows to let in the bay breezes, and fancy cafes that serve boba tea in little glass bottles you get to take home. Although a quietly-imposing security guard stares down anyone who approaches the front doors too closely, I love walking around the OpenAI campus and its adjacent urban parks. Anthropic likewise started in a historic building right by San Francisco’s Financial District, before moving to something a bit more corporate, but still in the heart of the city. This influx of AI talent–and the buckets of money that go with it–has been fantastic for San Francisco. As a professional photographer, I visit the city at least once a week to take photos. Union Square, which struggled mightily during the pandemic and became a symbol of San Francisco’s failings, is now home to a new Nintendo store, a bar from basketball star Steph Curry, and an eyeball-scanning hub for Sam Altman’s crypto startup World. SF was just rated one of the safest cities in the world. Back to the burbs Now, though, that trend seems to be reaching its limits. It’s one thing to locate your headquarters in an energetic, happening part of the city when you’re a scrappy startup pursuing the impossible dream of AGI. But when you’re planning a trillion-dollar IPO and have a headcount in the thousands, even the biggest downtown office will struggle to hold you. And so, the AI world’s inexorable march to the Valley begins! OpenAI is the first big AI company to plan an exodus from San Francisco. But as the flood of money continues to flow in, it’s unlikely to be the last. To me, it’s indicative of the fact that the AI sector is slowly growing up. Much as many young engineers start out living downtown, only to answer the siren song of the ‘burbs as they have kids, cars, and schools to consider, so too has the rapidly maturing OpenAI decided to live somewhere with easier access to neighbors, more room to spread out, and virtually unlimited oceans of parking. The startups serving the AI sector will surely continue to choose downtown digs. And OpenAI and its ilk will likewise keep satellite offices in the city, much as Google does today. But as companies like OpenAI increasingly pursue a path toward serving corporate customers and worrying about such petty things as profitability, they’re moving back in line with the path taken by the tech giants who came before them. And that means moving to Valley HQs. I’ll admit, I’m a little sad to see the locus of AI starting to move so predictably to the ‘burbs. But it’s also strangely comforting. People are terrified of OpenAI and its friends for their ability to rapidly disrupt industries and otherwise remake the world. But people felt the same way about Google back in the day. And Fairchild Semiconductor before it. OpenAI’s all-too-predictable march to the Valley is a reminder that AI companies feel powerful and all-encompassing today, but ultimately stand on the same ever-shifting tech sands as their predecessors. Give it a few decades, and another hermit crab will come along to flip their signs around, move in their own generations of talented young engineers, and get to work building whatever comes next. View the full article

A business owner I know tends to only hire people in their twenties, under the assumption they bring new life into his business: new ideas, new innovations, new skills. And he’s sometimes right, especially in the specific. But in general? Science says his hiring approach is probably wrong. In a review of studies published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, researchers found that the age at which scientists and inventors reach their moment of “genius” is increasing: while the average age used to be younger, the majority now make their biggest contributions to their field after the age of 40. As the researchers write: This research consistently finds that performance peaks in middle age: the life-cycle begins with a training period in which major creative output is absent, followed by a rapid rise in output to a peak, often in the late 30s or 40s. The same is often true for entrepreneurs. A Journal of Business Venturing study found that the most successful entrepreneurs tend to be middle-aged, even in tech. In fact, a 60-year-old startup founder was three times more likely to launch a successful startup than a 30-year-old startup founder, and nearly twice as likely to launch a startup that landed in the top 0.1 percent of all companies in terms of revenue and profits. Why does scientific genius tend to occur later, rather than earlier? Sure, occasionally an apple will still fall off a tree to spark insight; Sir Isaac Newton was 23 when he developed his theory of gravity (as well as calculus, a subject my high school report card despised him for). But true mastery typically takes time. As the researchers write, “The link between creativity and extant knowledge may depend not just on the acquisition of extant knowledge via training, but may depend on the nature and difficulty of the cognitive processes involved in drawing together and extending sets of extant knowledge.” Or in non-researcher-speak, it’s not enough to just know things; you have to know how those things fit within larger frameworks in order to make new connections and new breakthroughs. The same is true for entrepreneurs. While younger startup founders tend to be more tech savvy and less risk-averse, older startup founders benefit from greater experience, business skills, connections, and access to connections and capital. In a broader sense, it’s hard to develop a sound strategy, to make the endless number of tactical decisions required to build a business, or to be a good leader when you have limited experience. For entrepreneurs, being older isn’t something to overcome. Experience is a genuine competitive advantage. And that’s also true for new employees. Sure, younger workers tend to be more tech savvy. They may possess recent education more applicable to a rapidly changing industry. If you need specific skills, a younger job candidate may be the perfect fit. But if you need broader skills, or an interconnected set of skills like leadership, take a closer look at a more seasoned candidate. Younger or older, the person you hire should be the best person for the job, regardless of age. That’s why the real key is to identify the skills and attributes you need, and then focus on finding the best fit regardless of any preconceptions you might have — especially if you assume older dogs can’t be taught new tricks. Because contrary to popular belief, genius usually takes time to develop and emerge. After all: Steve Jobs may have been 21 when he co-founded Apple, but his most commercially successful innovations came when he was in his late 40s and early 50s. —Jeff Haden This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy. View the full article

Most people recognize that when you’re answering email while walking your dog and listening in on a meeting, you’re bound to lose effectiveness. Whether it’s that awkward silence when your boss asks for your input and you didn’t hear it—or you stepping in something not so pleasant because you didn’t realize your dog had done his business right in front of you. The limitations of multitasking present themselves in an obvious fashion. But as a time management coach, I’ve seen that it’s not just trying to do too many small things at once that can trip you up. I also see people dramatically reduce their effectiveness when they try to do too many large things at once—a tendency I like to call “macrotasking.” Macrotasking can look like remodeling your kitchen while switching jobs and also having a baby. Or it can look like redesigning your company’s website while also launching a podcast and hiring for multiple key leadership positions. It’s technically possible to do multiple large projects at once. But macrotasking can leave you in a state of paralysis because you’re not quite sure where to start. And even if you do begin, you can end up with many projects that linger on for far too long because you don’t have the focus to complete them. If you find yourself overwhelmed by all of your open endeavors personally and professionally, here are three steps to move forward more effectively and efficiently. Limit Your Starts The first key to effective macrotasking is limiting how many new projects you start at once. If you have a really large item, such as a remodel or launching a new product, avoid beginning other major projects at the exact same time. The initial phase of any project has a high startup cost of completing research, framing out what needs to happen, getting the right team in place, and making strategic decisions on direction. Most people can only do this effectively in one or two key areas at once. After the initial direction is set and you can potentially delegate out the ongoing work, then you can turn your attention to kicking off another major project. But trying to start three or more of these at once can backfire. It can either slow you down because you aren’t giving any one of the projects the attention they need, or it can cause you to make poor decisions because you’re not giving yourself the space you need to be thoughtful. If the idea of limiting the number of projects you’re starting is anxiety inducing, map out your projects over the coming quarter: “In October, I’ll launch the remodel, in November, I’ll look into starting a podcast, and in December, I’ll do strategic planning for a rebranding.” Having a place to put your project ideas so you know when you’ll get to them can help with focusing on accomplishing what’s in front of you now. Leave Space for Implementation Ideas are amazing. Strategic planning is great. But implementation is the only thing that truly leads to results. If other people are doing the majority of the work on projects, macrotasking can work when those projects are in the implementation phase. You’ve set the direction, now others are executing and can move multiple workstreams forward concurrently. That being said, you’ll still need to leave space in your calendar to review the work and provide feedback. That might look like having weekly project meetings or blocking in recurring time to look at whatever has been sent to you and answer questions. If you’re the primary person responsible for implementation, macrotasking will be more difficult. In my experience as a time management coach, I typically don’t see people able to move along more than two to three large projects when they are the person doing the heavy lifting. If you find yourself in that situation, you’ll need to pace yourself. Each month, define what are the two or three projects that you can really move forward and focus on them. Then you’ll need to accept that the other projects may progress much more slowly, or might need to wait until an upcoming month to receive your attention at all. Bring Work to Closure By following the above two pieces of advice, you should be able to bring projects to completion on a consistent basis. But a tendency that I’ve seen in macrotaskers is that they really enjoy starting things, but don’t find it exciting to complete them. That can leave them with a multitude of almost-done projects that haven’t made it across the finish line. If you find yourself in that situation, you may need to create a rule for yourself that you can’t start anything new until you’ve wrapped up some of the old items. Then pick a few close-to-completed projects to get your devoted attention. Most likely when you decide to do this, a myriad of ideas will pop into your mind of new things to do. Resist the urge to start on them and instead write them down on a list for future months. And if you’re finding even with your best of intentions to focus on completion, you’re still not getting projects completely done, get help. That could look like having a coworking session with a colleague where you commit to getting specific work done, partnering with a coach to hold you accountable or hiring more help. There’s no shame in needing support to get projects to closure. Macrotasking is possible with the right approach. By using these three strategies, you can get multiple large projects done without getting overwhelmed. View the full article

JCB to contribute equal amount to Conservative partyView the full article

Corporation fails to learn from criticism, while politicians have consciously reduced its scope for quality journalism View the full article

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so,” is a quote, often attributed to Mark Twain, that people like to repeat because it so captures our everyday experience. You can learn things that you don’t know, but it’s incredibly difficult to unlearn something you believe to be true. There’s real science behind this. Things we experience are packed away in our brain as the connections called synapses, which form and evolve over time. These connections strengthen as we use them and degrade when we do not. Or, as neuroscientists who study these things like to put it, the neurons that fire together, wire together. That’s why leaders pursuing change often default to a manager’s mindset instead of a changemaker’s mindset, because that’s what they know and what they’ve been successful with. Yet just like in that famous quote, those same assumptions can undermine a transformational initiative. Here are three beliefs that sabotage change and what you can replace them with. 1. Transformation Is Persuasion At Scale For 35 years, psychologist Robert Cialdini researched which types of communication were effective and which were not. He found that influence is based on six key principles: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. More recently, Wharton’s Jonah Berger has used data analysis to come up with his SPEACC framework. Others emphasize using emotional rather than analytical arguments. Salespeople trained in these techniques find them effective. They qualify the customer by asking good questions, do a needs analysis and then tailor their pitch to a unique value proposition. When they encounter resistance they use proven techniques to overcome objections and close the sale. Most leaders have some familiarity with these techniques so they naturally apply them to transformational initiatives. The problem is that changing mindsets and behaviors isn’t a one-time decision and the best indicator of what we think and do is what the people around us think and do and this effect extends out to three degrees of influence, so it’s not just people we know personally, but the friends of our friends’ friends that shape our opinions and actions. The truth is that change isn’t about persuasion, but collective dynamics. Decades of research has shown that change spreads through peer networks rather than communication campaigns. Or, as network science pioneer Duncan Watts once put it to me, ideas propagate through “easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people.” Instead of trying to shape opinions, we’re often better off shaping networks. That’s why we advise our clients pursuing transformational change efforts to start with a majority, even if that majority is only three people in a room of five. You can always expand a majority out, but once you’re in the minority you’re going to get immediate pushback. You need to go where there is already energy and enthusiasm around an idea, not try to create and maintain it yourself. 2. Transformation Is Like A Product Launch Anybody who’s ever taken a marketing course is familiar with Phillip Kotler’s ideas about marketing. The legendary professor advised us to differentiate our product or service, analyzing customer needs and building awareness about how what we’re selling meets those needs. He also showed how these same concepts apply to nonprofits and government agencies. So it shouldn’t be surprising that change leaders often take a similar approach. They create a big launch event to create awareness about their idea’s differentiating values, endlessly promote and drive their message home. The aim is to reach and convert enough people fast enough to make change seem inevitable. This is a terrible approach for a number of reasons. First, a product is targeted at a particular segment and everybody else can ignore it. But an organizational change affects everybody. Inevitably, there are going to be some people who aren’t going to like it and they will resist, seeking to undermine your efforts in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. That’s why in our change workshops we help clients design a Keystone Change, something with a concrete and tangible goal, involving multiple stakeholders that they can work on with their core team of early enthusiasts. This isn’t a quick and easy win, often they can take months or even years to achieve. But it paves the way to the larger change. Every idea starts out weak and unproven. Pixar’s Ed Catmull called them ugly babies. They need to be protected and nurtured so that they can mature and grow. Exposing them to hostile forces early on will only get them killed in their cradle. 3. Once People Understand Change, They Will Embrace It When we’re passionate about an idea, we want others to see it the same way we do, with all its beautiful complexity and nuance. We want people to share our devotion and fervor. It seems obvious that once everyone else understands the idea the way we do, they will embrace it. Yet the simple truth is that’s almost never true. This assumption, sometimes known as the information deficit model, emerged in the 1930s, as electronic media gained traction and scientific advances reshaped our understanding of the world. The logic was simple: More public engagement would lead to greater scientific literacy. But the evidence doesn’t back that up. One study found that information about agricultural science didn’t change opinions, and an NSF survey showed that many who understood evolution still didn’t believe it Even when we do shift knowledge and attitudes, behavior often remains stubbornly unchanged. For example, a 2009 study found that rising concern about climate change did not lead to meaningful action. In the business world In studying corporations, Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton found consistent gaps between what executives know and what they actually do. At any given time, people are navigating a tangle of competing influences—prior beliefs, ingrained habits, social pressures, and noise from all directions. That’s why ideas spread most effectively through peer networks, not top-down campaigns. We’re social creatures. More often than not, people don’t adopt ideas because they’re convinced by arguments—they adopt the ideas they see working around them. Adopting A Changemaker Mindset People become successful managers by adopting a manager mindset. They treat transformational initiatives as if they were just a scaled-up sales process. They focus on persuasion to try and build consensus. They plan a big launch event as if they were unveiling a new product and create top-down informational campaigns to evangelize the idea. Yet adopting a changemaker mindset starts with letting go of the illusion that change is simply a matter of better messaging, bigger launches, or more information. Those strategies might work for selling products or ideas, but transformation runs deeper. It’s not about convincing people to think differently—it’s about creating the conditions that allow them to act differently. That requires a shift in how we see our role as leaders—not as promoters or persuaders, but as architects of influence and weavers of networks. The beliefs that sabotage change persist because they work in other contexts. We’ve seen how persuasion techniques can win over a client or how a well-timed product launch can drive adoption. But transformation isn’t a transaction—it’s a journey. It’s messy, social, and nonlinear. Leaders who succeed in driving meaningful change understand that what matters most isn’t how persuasive they are, but how effectively they can empower others to bring in others, who can bring in others still. You don’t need to convince everyone all at once—you start with a local majority that can build traction. Change spreads not through force or logic alone, but through people witnessing others like them doing things differently—and succeeding. Ultimately, transformation isn’t about getting people to embrace your idea—it’s about helping them make it their own. View the full article

Below, Ranjay Gulati shares five key insights from his new book, How to Be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage. Gulati is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. He is a leading expert on purpose-driven leadership and helps organizations unlock growth and meaning. What’s the big idea? Courage is essential in the uncertain world we live in. It allows us to expand our horizons, grow in unexpected ways, and reach our fullest potential by taking bold action. How to Be Bold provides a road map for understanding what courage really is, explains why it’s important in our personal and professional lives, and offers a set of practical tools for becoming more courageous. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Gulati himself—below, or in the Next Big Idea app. 1. Courage is a choice, not an innate trait. One day, back when I was a teenager, my mother and I received a visitor at home. The man introduced himself as a representative of a real estate development company intent on buying some land my mother had purchased years before. The company had approached her repeatedly in the past and, each time, she had refused to sell. This time, the man began by pleading with her and offering a blank check. When she refused, he became adamant that his boss had insisted he must close this deal. When that didn’t work, he pulled back his blazer, and there was a gun tucked in his waist belt. While I was frozen in place, pondering what to do next, my mom immediately stood up, walked up to the man, and slapped him hard across the face. He was stunned, and so was I. She then ordered him out of the house, and we never saw the developer again. After he left, I immediately asked her if she was scared of the gun. To my surprise, she replied that yes, she had seen his gun and yes, she was afraid. But she said, “I will not let my fear define me. No one was going to come to my house and bully me into selling land I have worked hard to buy.” Her behavior was courage—taking action in the face of fear. Courage is a choice. My mother had made a choice to face her fear and not cave into it. For a long time, I assumed she and others like her were innately courageous, while I was not. I saw these few individuals as among the chosen ones—made of steel, like the ancient samurai or modern-day test pilots. When it came to myself, I took solace in the fact that humans are wired not for courage but for cowardice. Evolutionarily, fortune favored those who hunkered down rather than those who exposed themselves to danger. But I soon realized that opting for cowardice, while safe, is not a wise choice: it locks us into complacency and keeps us from leading a full life. Courage doesn’t come naturally, but it is necessary for thriving. Courage leads us to empowerment. The first step toward courage is becoming acquainted with the discomfort of fear. Our bodies and minds yell “run!” or “hide”—but what if we made the conscious choice to lean into the fear, stay with it for a moment, understand it, and move through it? 2. Courage starts with the stories we tell. Imagine dedicating your life to opposing a brutal authoritarian government and advocating for a just and open society. You narrowly survive an assassination attempt. You and your family escape to safety in a different country. Would you return to your homeland, knowing it means certain arrest, imprisonment, or even death? This was the choice Alexei Navalny faced. In January 2021, Navalny boarded a flight back to Russia, leaving his children behind. He was detained upon arrival and died in a remote Siberian prison three years later. What compelled him to walk back into the fire? Navalny’s unimaginable courage was the product of a powerful story he had crafted for himself and others. His vision was “to create the beautiful Russia of the future”—a prosperous, democratic nation allied with the West and immersed in world commerce. This potent, tension-filled story articulated a moral quest and a series of principles to uphold. When we embrace a powerful story and make it our own, we feel a sense of personal responsibility and feel compelled to act even in the face of fear and possible harm. For Navalny, facing the ultimate consequences, the stakes were reframed, elevating the dream of a prosperous nation above the fear of isolation, risk, or death. You don’t have to be a political activist, combat warrior, or astronaut to embrace such a path. Stories are courage magnifiers. Courageous behavior starts with moral clarity that becomes a catalyst for bravery. As you train your courage muscles, ask yourself: What core values do I stand for? And then ponder: What would I do to defend them? 3. Courage relies on imperfect theories, not perfect intel. Many situations that require courage are rife with uncertainty. While risk is something we can usually comprehend and mitigate, uncertainty feels like walking through fog, unable to foretell consequences or outcomes. We simply don’t have enough information to make sound predictions. No amount of analysis can help us credibly pin down a strategy. There is no optimizing our way around it. When we face uncertainty, it triggers a sense of losing control. Most of us remain paralyzed and wait for the fog to dissipate. But there is another way. A brilliant social scientist, Karl Weick, defined the process of moving through uncertainty as “sensemaking.” Sensemaking consists of progressively understanding an unclear situation by taking small strategic steps. I’m reminded of how Tom Cruise approaches the incredible stunts in his movies. How can this man jump off a cliff while racing a motorcycle with such confidence? He spends countless hours taking small steps to progressively know more about every aspect of the stunt: the setting, the gear, the training. He and his team simulate small versions and learn from each effort, gradually incorporating more elaborate moves before taking the ultimate leap. He said in an interview: “I’m going to learn to crawl before I walk, walk before I jog, jog before I run, run before I sprint, and then I sprint off a cliff or a building.” This is exactly what we do in sensemaking: We take a small step and gather data, then take stock to analyze what it means. With this knowledge, we formulate a theory of what is going on. We then take additional steps, gather more data, and keep contrasting it with what we knew before so we can revise the theory. This is done over and over again. We move through uncertainty to understand it: we don’t stand still. We drive away the fog through our actions. We act our way into knowing. 4. Courage takes a village. When we encounter uncertain situations, we often turn inward and tackle them alone. We hesitate to seek help, fearing it might seem like a burden or sign of weakness. This reluctance is fueled by the cultural ideal of the self-made hero. As a result, we mistakenly view self-sufficiency as strength and needing others as failure. But this belief may undermine courage. Courageous individuals don’t shy away from seeking support. They recognize that strong relationships are key to bravery. Having people to count on in tough moments boosts confidence. Take Frances Haugen, a former MBA student of mine who became a whistleblower at Facebook. She tried to fix the issues at Facebook from the inside first, but when that didn’t work, she went public—knowing full well it could cost her dearly. She lost her job and valued connections, but she gained peace of mind knowing that she helped spearhead a movement to hold social media companies accountable for the content they publish and promote. Research highlights four distinct kinds of support that can boost your boldness: Moral support or “I’ve got your back”: When things get tough, just knowing someone’s in your corner can make all the difference. That emotional boost—feeling seen, supported, and believed in—can keep you going. Haugen found it in her family. Informational support or “Here’s what you need to know”: Facing uncertainty means dealing with the unknown. Your crew can fill in the blanks, give advice, or clue you in on things you might be missing. Haugen relied on Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit law firm that helped her navigate the legal risks of disclosing internal documents to regulators, lawmakers, and journalists. Resource support or “I’ll lend you my tools”: Sometimes courage requires concrete resources—specific skills, manpower, access. Haugen needed a trusted platform to disseminate her message. Once she connected with the press, she worked closely with journalists to ensure the information would be responsibly reported. Appraisal support or “You’re doing well—keep going!”: It’s hard to gauge your own performance accurately under pressure. Trusted confidants offer honest feedback, helping reality-check perceptions and make adjustments. Haugen relied on good friends. Building and nurturing these connections is fundamental to developing the capacity for bold action. Don’t wait for a crisis to forge your connections. Start now. Cultivate relationships with people who can offer this multifaceted support. And remember, it’s a two-way street. Just as you rely on others to build your courage muscles, offer your support to help them build theirs. The myth of the lone hero is compelling, but the reality of supported courage is far more powerful. 5. We can design organizations and teams to boost courage. We can be courageous as individuals, but we make the biggest difference when we infuse teams and organizations with courage. Most teams and organizations are inherently risk-averse. They rely on systems of predictability and accountability that help processes run smoothly, but these very systems also hold people back from acting boldly or speaking up. And yet, some teams and organizations have avoided this trap and created environments where collective courage flourishes. The workers of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel provide a striking example of collective courage. In 2008, as terrorist attacks rocked iconic landmarks of Mumbai, the Taj’s staff and guests were trapped under siege for nearly 60 hours. At this trying time, the staff’s ethos of “guest first” overrode the primal instinct of self-preservation: not one of them fled the scene—instead, they all stayed and made sure the guests who were stuck in the hotel were protected. In one of the banquet halls, staff were serving dinner to about 60 VIP guests. Twenty-three-year-old Mallika Jagad was the young manager in charge. She heard what initially sounded like fireworks, only to realize they were gunshots. Without panic, she took charge, instructing everyone to get down on the floor and remain silent. She and her team shut all the doors and windows, turned off the lights, and locked the room to remain undetected by the terrorists walking the halls. They lay awake overnight, guarding the guests and reassuring them. At one point, smoke seeped into the room, triggering the sprinklers and causing further panic. Mallika and her team quieted the emerging commotion and broke one of the windows to call the firemen below for help. They watched as all guests were evacuated safely down a ladder, and only then did they accept their own evacuation. The hotel’s director, Karambir Kang, kept directing rescue operations throughout the siege, even though his wife and children were trapped in their apartment inside the hotel and ultimately perished. A guest later said: “He never once mentioned his own family. He was only asking about us, telling us to stay calm.” This remarkable story illustrates how collective courage is activated when organizational values are truly lived, rather than simply declared. Make a point to join teams and organizations that allow that collective spirit to rise. Do your part to model courage for others and inspire them. And if you are able to make the rules, don’t let complacency stifle bold action. Enjoy our full library of Book Bites—read by the authors!—in the Next Big Idea app. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission. View the full article

Every professional faces cycles consisting of booms, busts, restructurings, and reinventions. The difference between those who endure and those who fade isn’t luck or timing; it’s adaptability. In volatile economies, careers built on curiosity and agility thrive long after others stall. No market cycle lasts forever. Careers, like economies, move through expansions and contractions. It’s vital to continue upskilling, remain flexible, and adapt to market cycles. They are not always predictable, but the leaders who adapt, always learn, network, reflect, and rebalance will outperform the cycles. Adaptability Is the New Alpha In finance and beyond, resilience has become the defining metric of leadership. According to a 2024 McKinsey report, only 16% of global employers actively invest in adaptability and continuous learning programs. Yet among 10,000 employees surveyed worldwide, 26% ranked adaptability as their top skill need, particularly among frontline and early-career workers. The market rewards those who evolve. A career that endures market cycles is one built to adapt. Think of your skills like an investment portfolio; diversify, rebalance, and hedge against obsolescence. Continuous Learning Beats Tenure Experience used to equal expertise. Today, it’s learning velocity that wins. Experience once defined expertise. Today, it’s the speed of learning that sets leaders apart. According to a 2023 World Economic Forum Report, 44% of a worker’s skills will need updating by 2027. Staying relevant now requires continuous reinvestment through certifications, side projects, or stretch roles that broaden your capabilities. Build optionality into your career so when markets shift, you’re already ahead of the curve. Networking Compounds Like Capital Strong relationships grow exponentially, much like capital. A 2020 Forbes Publication states 80% of jobs are secured through networking, yet only 24% of professionals network consistently. Focus on building authentic connections before you need them. People remember collaboration and genuine engagement far more than acts of desperation. Reflect and Rebalance Every few years, pause and audit your professional portfolio. What are your strongest performing assets: skills, relationships, projects? Which ones are underperforming? The leaders who survive downturns are the ones who treat their careers like living systems: dynamic, data-informed, and purpose-driven. It’s a Marathon Build for the Long Run A career that survives market cycles is not built on luck. It’s built on adaptability, continuous learning, networking, and reflecting. Like an investor who thrives in volatility, the resilient professional knows; downturns reveal true value. A resilient career isn’t built in bull markets; it’s forged in the storms. The goal isn’t to predict every wave but to learn how to surf. View the full article

US stock futures gain and Treasury yields tick up in ‘relief rally’View the full article

The job market is rough right now. Mass layoffs have people desperately clinging to their current positions. The Great Flattening has more and more workers competing for a dwindling number of roles as entry-level roles dry up and AI potentially rendering entire career paths obsolete. Long-term unemployment is at a post-pandemic high, with more than one in four workers without jobs unemployed for at least half a year. Which makes it a nerve-wracking time to be moving through any sort of career upheaval. If you do find yourself unmoored in the current market, whether or not by choice, it could be a good time to recalibrate and get clear on your next steps. The team of career experts at U.K. jobs site targetjobs suggest one way to find direction amidst the chaos. It’s called the GPS Method. Whether you’re just entering the workforce (I’m so sorry), considering a career pivot, or plotting your next move, this method can help you decide where you want to go and how you’re going to get there in small, actionable steps. G: Ground Yourself The first step is all about grounding. Before you update your LinkedIn and start firing out job applications, take a deep breath and look inward. Ask yourself, what actually are my interests, strengths and values and how do they fit into work? This doesn’t necessarily have to be your life’s passion. In fact, many workers are no longer interested in sexy job titles, instead saving their real passions and ambitions for off the clock. Rather it’s about recognizing what gives energy and what drains it. Perhaps, you recognize you work best when bouncing ideas off people in the office. Or you’re most productive in a remote setting away from any distractions. Think about the impact you want to have in your next role. Does a fast-paced environment at the forefront of innovation excite you, or do you feel the pull to help others in a meaningful way? P: Plot Your Path Once you’ve done the inner work, it’s time to start putting a plan together. Rather than spray and pray Easy Apply applications to every job posting you can find, conduct meaningful research and use the job spec to tailor your CV to the role. (Yes, many hiring managers can tell when you’ve used AI.) Remember, one considered job application is worth a thousand half-baked ones. Think in experiences, not commitments. If you can, take on a few freelance projects to test out a new career path before you dive head first. Network at events or reach out to connections in the industry for advice. Look at it as collecting data and trying out different techniques to find what fits you best. S: Steer and Stay the Course The traditional career ladder is dead. A “lattice” (or jungle gym) career approach has taken their place, but requires a little more adjustment as you go. Make sure not to fall asleep at the wheel; continue to set short-term goals and reflect on what is working and what isn’t so you can course correct as needed. The “stay the course” part? It means be patient. Bumps in the road are normal. In fact, they are a great time to circle back and repeat the process, and any rejection is only redirection. View the full article

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European Commission president had ‘scheduling’ issues at COP30 summit in Brazil and did not meet the UK premierView the full article