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We don’t talk enough about what doesn’t scale. Which is ironic, because we talk about scale constantly. Scale is the shorthand for success in just about every industry. If it can’t scale, is it even worth doing? That’s the kind of thinking that floods strategy decks, venture capitalist meetings, and quarterly reviews. But here’s the question I keep circling back to: Can it still matter if it doesn’t scale? Because I’ve seen real impact in spaces where scale wasn’t the point. And frankly, it wasn’t even possible. THE MYTH OF “MASS = MEANING” There’s a quiet arrogance baked into how we treat scale, as if the size of a thing is what determines its significance. But some of the most meaningful changes happen in small rooms, not big stages. Think about financial education programs in rural communities. Or credit-building initiatives that are culturally tailored for a single neighborhood. They’re unpolished, localized, hard to replicate…and deeply effective. Yet because they don’t lend themselves to scale, they’re often dismissed or deprioritized. Scaling can absolutely expand access. But we shouldn’t mistake repeatability for revolution. WHAT’S LOST IN THE RUSH? Here’s what often gets left behind when scale becomes the headline: Nuance. What works in Memphis might not work in Minneapolis. Relevance. One-size-fits-all is rarely true in communities that have historically been overlooked or underserved. Feedback loops. When you scale too quickly, you lose the intimacy that invites honest feedback and real-time course correction. When we chase scale at all costs, we sometimes lose the very texture that made the original idea impactful. Small, sharp, and mighty. THERE’S POWER IN THE PILOT I’ve watched high-touch, hyper-relevant initiatives change the trajectory of communities—initiatives that no one would label “scalable.” The FICO Educational Analytics Challenge is a great example. It started with a small set of universities, giving students hands-on exposure to real-world AI and data science problems. The goal wasn’t to reach millions overnight. It was to invest deeply in students who otherwise might never get that kind of access. The early results were powerful. Students walked away with skills that shifted their career aspirations. One university even added a data science minor after participating. Those are outcomes that don’t need millions of participants to matter. Sometimes, small is the strategy. Sometimes, we need depth before breadth. WHEN SCALE IS THE LEVER That said, scale still has its place. Especially when the problem is systemic. Programs like the Educational Analytics Challenge are now growing toward a repeatable framework that more schools can adopt, while keeping the student voice at the center. The lesson? Scale works when it builds from authenticity, not when it erases it. The key is not to romanticize smallness or villainize growth. It’s to stay honest about what kind of impact we’re after, and whether our obsession with scale is helping or hurting that mission. WHAT IF WE MADE ROOM FOR BOTH? What if our strategies had space for pilots that weren’t polished, partnerships that were scrappy, and impact that wasn’t measured solely by reach? What if we treated scale as a choice, not a default? And what if we stopped asking “Will it scale?” as the first question, and started asking, “Will it matter?” That’s the kind of question worth building around. Rukiya Kelly is head of corporate impact and engagement at FICO. View the full article

Leading AI chatbot platform Character.ai announced yesterday that it will no longer allow anyone under 18 to have open-ended conversations with its chatbots. Character.ai's parent company, Character Technologies, said the ban will go into effect by Nov. 25, and in the meantime, it will impose time limits on children and "transition younger users to alternative creative features such as video, story, and stream creation with AI characters." In a statement posted online, Character Technologies said it was making the change "in light of the evolving landscape around AI and teens," which seems like a nice way of saying "because of the lawsuits." Character Technologies was recently sued by a mother in Florida and by families in Colorado and New York, who claim their children either died by suicide or attempted suicide after interacting with the company’s chatbots. These lawsuits aren't isolated—they are part of a growing concern over how AI chatbots interact with minors. A damning report about Character.ai released in September from online safety advocates Parents Together Action detailed troubling chatbot interactions like Rey from Star Wars giving a 13-year-old advice on how to hide not taking her prescribed anti-depressants from her parents, and a Patrick Mahomes bot offering a 15-year-old a cannabis edible. Character Technologies also announced it is releasing new age verification tools and plans to establish an "AI Safety Lab," which it described as "an independent non-profit dedicated to innovating safety alignment for next-generation AI entertainment features." Character AI boasts over 20 million monthly users as of early 2025, and the majority of them self-report as being between 18 and 24, with only 10% of users self-reporting their age as under 18. The future of age-restricted AIAs Character Technologies suggests in its statement, the company's new guidelines put it ahead of the curve of AI companies when it comes to restrictions for minors. Meta, for instance, recently added parental controls for its chatbots, but stopped short of banning minors from using them totally. Other AI companies are likely to implement similar guidelines in the future, one way or the other: A California law that goes into effect in 2026 requires AI chatbots to prevent children from accessing explicit sexual content and interactions that could encourage self-harm or violence and to have protocols that detect suicidal ideation and provide referrals to crisis services. View the full article

As of yesterday’s market close, Netflix is the only Big Tech company whose stock is trading at four figures, but that will soon change. The TV streaming giant, whose shares closed at $1,089 on Thursday, has announced that it will initiate a stock split next month. That will send the stock’s price per share much lower, though it will not change the company’s fundamental value. Here’s what you need to know about Netflix’s upcoming stock split. What’s a stock split? A stock split is when a company decides to divide the number of its existing shares in order to create new ones—hence the term “split” the shares. A stock can split by any factor a company wants. For example, in a 2-for-1 stock split, for every one share of the stock presplit, there will be two shares post-split. Or in a 100-to-1 stock split, for every one share presplit, there would be 99 additional shares post-split. However, because new shares are being created in a stock split, the value of the stock is diluted by an amount commensurate with the split. Take a 100-to-1 stock split of the imaginary Company XYZ. If the share price of Company XYZ was $1,000 before the split, its new share price would be $10 after the split ($1000/100). Yet even though Company XYZ’s stock price is now 100 times cheaper, the company itself isn’t worth less. A company’s value—its market cap—is determined by adding up the total value of all its shares. How much is Netflix splitting the stock by? Netflix has said that it will split its shares by a ratio of 10-to-1 next month. This means that for every one share of Netflix stock (Nasdaq: NFLX) that exists today, there will be another nine NFLX shares in existence after the split. Netflix is by far the only major company to split its stock in recent years. In 2024, Walmart split its stock 3-to-1. In 2022, Amazon split its stock 20-to-1 and Tesla split its stock 3-to-1. And in 2020, Apple split its stock 4-to-1. More recently, this week, there have been rumors that Palantir Technologies may soon split its stock. When do Netflix’s shares split? There are several dates to keep in mind when it comes to Netflix’s upcoming stock split. The most important day is Monday, November 17, 2025. This is when NFLX shares will begin trading at their new post-split price on the Nasdaq. On this day, there will be 10 times more NFLX shares in existence than there are today. Another important date is Friday, November 14, 2025. This is the day that each shareholder of record will receive nine additional shares for every one share of Netflix they own as of the “record date.” They will receive these additional nine shares after the markets close on November 14. The final date to remember is Monday, November 10, 2025. This is the “record date.” Only shareholders who own NFLX shares after market close on this date will receive nine additional shares on November 14 for every one they own after market close on the 10th. What does this mean for investors and Netflix’s share price? Netflix’s 10-for-1 stock split means that, come Monday, November 17, NFLX shares will trade at 10 times less than their closing price on Friday, November 14. However, as explained above, this does not mean that Netflix will be worth 10 times less, because there will also be 10 times as many shares in existence. This also does not mean investors of record will see the total value of their NFLX shares decrease. Though the individual share price will be 10 times lower, investors of record will also have 10 times the number of shares that they previously did. So why is Netflix splitting its stock then? Stock splits have no effect on the fundamental finances or valuation of a company. But stock splits can have a powerful psychological effect on investors, particularly retail investors. Big institutional investors, like investment banks and hedge funds, buy stocks in dollar amounts—$5 million or $100 million worth of shares in a single company at a time, for example. But retail investors often buy shares based on the stock’s individual share price. And a single share priced at more than $1,000 often puts that stock out of reach for retail investors, who may just have a few hundred dollars to invest each month. By artificially lowering its stock price through a stock split, a company can make its shares more attractive and accessible to retail investors, which could actually help drive up the share price as more people buy into the stock at its lower price. But making a stock more attractive to retail investors isn’t the only reason why companies split their stocks. Another reason is to make the company’s shares more accessible to its employees, who can often buy shares via an employee stock purchase program. If a company’s stock price is too high, employees may not even be able to afford one share per month. A lower share price can make it so that more employees can buy into the company. Indeed, the employee factor is the main reason Netflix cited for its stock split. “The purpose of the stock split is to reset the market price of the Company’s common stock to a range that will be more accessible to employees who participate in the Company’s stock option program,” the company said when announcing the split on October 30. View the full article

Our financial system still treats teens like little kids who need to wait their turn. Meanwhile, by the time most Americans turn 13, they have a smartphone in their pocket and are actively participating in the economy. Teens are transacting regularly, and many are earning through digital channels, running online businesses, or pursuing a passion project. There’s a better way. SUPERVISION AND A CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT We need to give teens supervised access to financial tools earlier in their lives. Let them learn financial responsibility through real experience. Help them build smart money habits in a controlled environment. By the time they hit 18, every teen should have the financial knowledge—and the confidence—to manage their money independently. Locking them out until adulthood is an outdated approach that’s damaging the financial health of the U.S. consumer. On the flip side, granting full access to everyone turning 18 despite a lack of any meaningful financial experience is like handing someone keys to a car on their birthday without letting them practice driving. It’s dangerous. It means a steeper learning curve, higher stakes, and tons of missed learning opportunities. That’s what we’re doing with money. Keeping teens sidelined doesn’t just hold them back. It hurts the economy and undermines future growth. The rules of money were written for the few, not the many. Those with access build wealth and opportunity—like teens who get a debit card early—learn to budget with guidance, and even get a chance to build credit before college. By 18, they’re ready for loans, apartments, and independence. Teens without those luxuries (read: a majority of the young U.S. population), are stuck using cash or borrowed accounts and enter adulthood with less real-world experience managing finances, and fewer options. The result is a system where the financial elite get a head start, and everyone else is forced to improvise with workarounds. THE COST OF WAITING Today’s teens are already an economic force. More than half report earning an income, and they’re not just working traditional jobs. They’re running online businesses, doing creative work, and participating in the gig economy. In fact, two in five teens are earning through digital channels, outpacing those in older cohorts. And they’re completely reshaping what it means to be a consumer in America. Their demand for instant, flexible, digital-first experiences are already changing how businesses operate. Take buy-now-pay-later for example. What started as young people rejecting traditional credit cards has become a market worth hundreds of billions of dollar, with one of our brands, Afterpay, creating an entirely new payment infrastructure around transparency and avoiding debt traps. Over the next decade, teen habits will set the standard for how money is earned, spent, saved, and invested. Ignoring this shift isn’t just overlooking the future—it’s missing what’s happening right now. Instead of creating tools for a massive group of active economic participants, banks and incumbents push teens to borrow their parents’ accounts, deal with cash, or cobble together apps that weren’t designed with them in mind. In a world that’s rapidly going cashless, these workarounds aren’t just inconvenient. They delay financial learning, widen inequality, and leave an entire generation less prepared for adulthood. Let’s fix the problem. ACCESS WITH PROTECTION At Block, we believe providing access and promoting safety are complementary. Through Cash App, we’ve built something different: a platform where teens can fully and responsibly participate in the digital economy while parents maintain oversight and control. With a parent’s or guardian’s sponsorship, teens can send and receive money, save, and even begin learning about investing in stocks and bitcoin. Parents get real-time transaction monitoring, customizable permissions, and a front-row seat as their teen learns responsible financial habits in a controlled environment. And this approach is working. Our data shows that teens are using these tools responsibly, and we’re setting teens up to develop confidence and capability in managing their money, two skills that will serve them throughout their lives. A CALL FOR CHANGE The technology to do this safely exists today, and the research backs it up. What we need now is a fundamental shift in how we think about young people and money. This means: Recognizing teens as active participants in the U.S. economy Building financial tools that balance access with protection Giving parents the right tools to guide their teens’ financial journey When we give teens safe, supervised financial access today, we’re not just preparing them for tomorrow. We’re accelerating the future of our entire economy. Owen Jennings is head of business at Block. View the full article

Every technological revolution has its awkward adolescence. We’re living through AI’s right now. Recent research from Stanford and BetterUp has given this moment a name: “workslop.” It’s the flood of hastily AI-generated content that clogs inboxes, clutters presentations, and quietly erodes productivity. The email that reads like it was written by a committee of robots. The strategy document with oddly formal phrasing and zero original insight. The presentation deck that says nothing new. If this sounds familiar, you’re not imagining it. And if you’re a manager watching your team’s output simultaneously increase in volume and decrease in quality, you’re not alone. But here’s what history teaches us: this phase is predictable, necessary, and temporary. The question isn’t whether we’ll move through it. It’s how quickly we can get to the other side. Why Workslop Happens When personal computers arrived in offices, workers treated them as expensive typewriters. When the internet became ubiquitous, we spent years learning that you can walk 10 feet to talk to someone instead of firing off another email. Each time, we mistook the tool for the solution. We’re making the same mistake with AI. Only faster, and at greater scale. The core problem is one of delegation versus collaboration. AI will deliver increased speed and efficiency, but most organizations have accidentally encouraged their people to treat it as something to offload to rather than something to work with. An associate generates a client memo with Claude and sends it along, complete with the telltale “AI can make mistakes, please double-check” footer still attached. A manager asks ChatGPT to write a strategy document and forwards it without adding context, nuance, or judgment. This isn’t a technology problem. It’s a mindset problem that technology has exposed. When content creation becomes effortless, the cognitive work of thinking deeply becomes optional. And when it becomes optional, people can opt out. What researchers are calling “cognitive atrophy” is really just a gradual disconnection from the thinking process itself. We’re delegating not just the execution, but the strategy. AI will get you 70% of the way there, but someone still needs to own that final 30%, and right now it seems some people are checking out before the finish line. The Way Through The good news? Workslop isn’t a crisis. It’s a phase. Organizations that recognize it as such can compress what might take years into months. Start by redefining what you measure. The drive to do more with less can create pressure to crank out more work in the same time, with AI as the productivity multiplier. But leaders need to resist the assumption that one person plus AI should equal twice the output. If you’re still evaluating employees primarily on volume, you’re incentivizing exactly the behavior you don’t want. Prose and code generation are now commoditized. What matters is the quality of thinking that directs these tools. In your performance management processes, assess people on their judgment, their ability to steer AI effectively, and their capacity to iterate toward genuinely excellent outcomes. Draw bright lines. Leaders need to align on the AI vision, the guardrails, and how they’ll hold people accountable. Establish explicit standards for what constitutes acceptable AI-assisted work. Some organizations are implementing simple rules: AI-generated content must be marked during internal review. Client-facing materials must demonstrate clear human value-add. Any work bearing AI watermarks or disclaimers gets automatically returned. These aren’t punitive measures. They’re cultural signals about what professionalism means in an AI-augmented workplace. Without mutual commitment from leaders to embed these standards, the bright lines blur. Embrace experimentation, but guide it. The workslop phase exists because people need room to learn, and that requires a growth mindset, not a fixed one. Risk aversion kills experimentation. Moving through this phase means reframing failure as data, celebrating what you learn from missteps, and managers modeling vulnerability about their own learning curve. Managers can accelerate this shift by tapping into people’s intrinsic motivation for mastery. But experimentation without feedback loops doesn’t create change. So have forums where teams share what’s working and what isn’t, and celebrate the wins and the learnings of human-AI collaboration. Learn from unexpected sources. Universities faced the workslop crisis before corporations did. Many have developed sophisticated approaches to maintaining rigor while embracing AI tools. They’ve created assignments that inherently require human judgment, implemented systems that flag low-quality automated work, and redesigned evaluation criteria to emphasize critical thinking over production. These aren’t perfect solutions, but they’re battle-tested ones that can translate to corporate contexts. Resist the delegation instinct. The most important cultural shift is also the simplest: don’t treat AI as your copilot. Treat it like a student, and you’re the teacher. This reframes the entire relationship. You’re not handing off work. You’re responsible for what that student produces, which means staying engaged in the iterative process, using tools to enhance rather than replace human judgment, and taking full ownership of outputs regardless of how they were generated. Organizations that successfully embed this mindset move through the workslop phase measurably faster. The upside? New Stanford research tells us that employees trust AI more when they can see it as a collaborator, not a closed system. An Unexpected Opportunity Here’s what makes this moment genuinely unique: the traditional corporate hierarchy of expertise has temporarily inverted. Right now, a brilliant 22-year-old who knows how to work with AI tools can create more value than their manager who doesn’t. This isn’t a threat to experienced leaders. It’s an opportunity. Junior employees have rare insight into what actually works, and smart managers are creating channels for those employees to lead the way forward. You’re not being replaced. You’re being offered a shortcut to expertise that would otherwise take years to develop. The companies that emerge strongest from the workslop phase won’t be those that restricted AI use or pretended the problems didn’t exist. They’ll be the ones that acknowledged the awkwardness, called it out, learned from it quickly, and built cultures where humans and AI genuinely complement each other. Experience shows us that the most critical cultural factors that will shape the success of AI include the degree of autonomy of teams to shape workflows, the measures and controls put in place, and what gets rewarded and recognized. We’re in the messy middle of the AI adoption curve. Workslop is almost certainly happening in your organization right now. The only question is whether you’re managing the transition or hoping it resolves itself. History suggests which approach works better. View the full article

Samsung’s latest innovation, the Galaxy XR, is set to redefine how small businesses leverage technology for enhanced productivity and customer engagement. With an infinite screen that seamlessly integrates virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), this device not only offers a fresh way to interact with applications but also opens the door to immersive experiences that could transform operations. The Galaxy XR features a cutting-edge interface guided by Gemini, an intelligent assistant that allows users to navigate with voice, hand gestures, and eye movement. For small business owners looking to streamline operations and enhance user experiences, this presents a compelling advantage. Key benefits include access to a wealth of applications optimized for XR, alongside existing Android apps. The device supports popular platforms and innovative XR content, enabling businesses to enhance customer interaction, improve training programs, and explore unique marketing strategies. Trending apps such as HBO Max, YouTube, and Google Maps will all be revamped for the XR format. In addition to mainstream options, small businesses can also tap into immersive experiences from brands like Adobe and Calm, which cater to a range of industries, from wellness to entertainment. This variety allows business owners to customize applications that resonate with their target audiences. “On Galaxy XR, Gemini Live can better understand what you’re seeing and doing, making it easier to get the help you need or take action on your behalf across your apps — with just a conversation,” a representative from Samsung noted. This functionality could drastically cut down on the time spent managing routine tasks, allowing owners to focus on strategic initiatives instead. In practical terms, businesses in niches like retail, real estate, and education stand to gain significantly. For retailers, for instance, the XR environment could be used to create virtual storefronts, offering customers immersive shopping experiences from the comfort of their homes. Real estate agents might leverage XR to provide virtual property tours, enhancing the buying experience for clients. Educational institutions could utilize the platform to develop engaging training modules, providing students with firsthand experiences in complex environments. However, venturing into XR technology isn’t without its challenges. Small business owners should consider factors like the initial investment in hardware and software, as well as staff training for effective utilization of these tools. There’s also the need to assess which specific applications will yield the highest ROI. Businesses must weigh the potential benefits against their unique operational needs. Furthermore, as XR technology evolves, staying updated on developments and compatibility issues will be essential. Open standards supported by Android XR, such as OpenXR and Unity, mean that ongoing innovation will be a constant, requiring flexibility from tech-savvy business owners. Moreover, there’s the question of customer acceptance. While the younger demographic typically embraces new technology, older consumers may need more encouragement to engage with immersive experiences. Addressing such hesitations could be crucial in maximizing the XR technology’s value proposition. In summary, the Galaxy XR signifies a leap forward for small business owners who are willing to adopt innovative technology. With its immersive capabilities and versatile applications, it holds promise for elevating customer experience and operational efficiency. As the digital landscape continues to shift, understanding and adapting to these advancements could provide a competitive edge. For more detailed insights, you can read the original press release here. Image via Google This article, "Galaxy XR Unveils Immersive Android XR Experience with Gemini Integration" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Samsung’s latest innovation, the Galaxy XR, is set to redefine how small businesses leverage technology for enhanced productivity and customer engagement. With an infinite screen that seamlessly integrates virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), this device not only offers a fresh way to interact with applications but also opens the door to immersive experiences that could transform operations. The Galaxy XR features a cutting-edge interface guided by Gemini, an intelligent assistant that allows users to navigate with voice, hand gestures, and eye movement. For small business owners looking to streamline operations and enhance user experiences, this presents a compelling advantage. Key benefits include access to a wealth of applications optimized for XR, alongside existing Android apps. The device supports popular platforms and innovative XR content, enabling businesses to enhance customer interaction, improve training programs, and explore unique marketing strategies. Trending apps such as HBO Max, YouTube, and Google Maps will all be revamped for the XR format. In addition to mainstream options, small businesses can also tap into immersive experiences from brands like Adobe and Calm, which cater to a range of industries, from wellness to entertainment. This variety allows business owners to customize applications that resonate with their target audiences. “On Galaxy XR, Gemini Live can better understand what you’re seeing and doing, making it easier to get the help you need or take action on your behalf across your apps — with just a conversation,” a representative from Samsung noted. This functionality could drastically cut down on the time spent managing routine tasks, allowing owners to focus on strategic initiatives instead. In practical terms, businesses in niches like retail, real estate, and education stand to gain significantly. For retailers, for instance, the XR environment could be used to create virtual storefronts, offering customers immersive shopping experiences from the comfort of their homes. Real estate agents might leverage XR to provide virtual property tours, enhancing the buying experience for clients. Educational institutions could utilize the platform to develop engaging training modules, providing students with firsthand experiences in complex environments. However, venturing into XR technology isn’t without its challenges. Small business owners should consider factors like the initial investment in hardware and software, as well as staff training for effective utilization of these tools. There’s also the need to assess which specific applications will yield the highest ROI. Businesses must weigh the potential benefits against their unique operational needs. Furthermore, as XR technology evolves, staying updated on developments and compatibility issues will be essential. Open standards supported by Android XR, such as OpenXR and Unity, mean that ongoing innovation will be a constant, requiring flexibility from tech-savvy business owners. Moreover, there’s the question of customer acceptance. While the younger demographic typically embraces new technology, older consumers may need more encouragement to engage with immersive experiences. Addressing such hesitations could be crucial in maximizing the XR technology’s value proposition. In summary, the Galaxy XR signifies a leap forward for small business owners who are willing to adopt innovative technology. With its immersive capabilities and versatile applications, it holds promise for elevating customer experience and operational efficiency. As the digital landscape continues to shift, understanding and adapting to these advancements could provide a competitive edge. For more detailed insights, you can read the original press release here. Image via Google This article, "Galaxy XR Unveils Immersive Android XR Experience with Gemini Integration" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. A lot of the productivity techniques and organizational hacks out there claim to make work easier and more efficient, and they really can—though you have to find just the right one for you. A few methods that originated in Japan have proven especially popular—consider the Toyota-approved Kanban scheduling method—including one of my favorites: kaizen. The man who took the philosophy mainstream, Masaaki Imai, died two years ago, but left behind a legacy of productivity and efficiency we can all learn from, because this technique not only helps you get more done, but helps you do everything better. What is kaizen?In Japanese, “kaizen” translates, essentially, to “improvement,” and that’s the goal at the heart of the method itself, which encourages individuals at all levels of an organization to work together to continuously improve everything about a company. When everyone from the boss to the intern is in on the plan, the idea goes, the place will simply be more efficient and everything will always be getting better. This is done through standardization and the implementation of uniform processes. A good example of this is within the Toyota production system: If there is any issue or abnormality detected by any worker in a factory, they stop the production line and employees and supervisors work together to resolve the problem. As Toyota puts it, this “humanizes the workplace” and the standardization involved empowers every individual in the organizational structure to make meaningful changes. This is all part of a system called Plan, Do, Check, Act (usually known as PDCA), which works perfectly within a kaizen framework. The PDCA cycle repeats, meaning once you’ve planned, you keep doing, checking, acting, and planning again, factoring in your results, so you’re always improving. (If you're familiar with an after-action review, which calls on you to review what you did poorly and what you did well, then use that information to plan out how you'll improve in the future, that's a helpful framework for understanding PDCA.) And while you’re doing all that, you have to keep the kaizen principles themselves in mind. How does kaizen work?In addition to incorporating PDCA, kaizen has its own set of five foundational principles: Know your customer: Cater to your customers or clients and take care to identify their needs and interests, plus how you can serve them from whatever level you’re at. Even a cashier who deals with one shopper at a time can have a broad, positive impact by making sure each is given detailed attention. A CEO who never deals directly with a customer can meet their needs by basing company decisions on data and feedback from buyers. In short, everyone and anyone can know the customer and serve them better. You can think broadly here: Maybe you don't have a "customer" per se, but your work can still require you to think of whomever you're doing that work for. Say you want to use kaizen to clean your home before your mom gets there for a week-long stay. Your mom is the "customer" you have to impress Let it flow: Eliminate waste, both physical and theoretical, meaning don’t take unnecessary steps, don’t clutter the space, and be direct in doing what you need to do. No matter what you're working on or how many people you're working with, this is where kanban can be a helpful complement, because it forces you to think over your action steps as you seek to meet a goal. Once you've identified what needs to be done and when, think of how you can scale each task back to only its most important, actionable elements. Go to Gemba: Gemba is the Japanese term for “actual place.” This means you should always be purposeful and direct about getting to where you need to be—which is likely to be where the action is happening. Don’t delegate anything you don’t have to, wait around on anything, or sit on the sidelines. Empower people: Encourage people in your organization, whether you’re their superior or they’re your peers, and make sure everyone is aligned in the common goals of the company and forward movement. If you're following a modified version of kaizen for a personal project, you can still take this step by not only giving yourself positive pep talks, but by making sure you have everything you need before you jump in. If you are working on that house-cleaning project, make sure you have all the right tools and are taking enough breaks that you don't burn out, for instance. Be transparent: Demonstrate your productivity with hard data and results and make sure everyone is always up to date on processes, developments, and goals. There are many ways to do this, even if you're working on your own. I personally love taking before and after pictures when I start and end a project, because seeing a finished product motivates me. Implementing all five of these in a working environment, per kaizen’s adherents, is the key to unlocking a culture of continuous improvement. If you want to learn more, there are dozens of books out there about the methodology, but you should start with the original: Masaaki Imai’s Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success. View the full article

Americans know AI runs on electricity — and they’re starting to realize they’re the ones paying for it. A recent nationwide survey of more than 1,400 U.S. households found that two-thirds of Americans believe AI is already driving up their power bills, and most said they can’t afford more than a $20 monthly increase. They’re right to be worried. As tech companies pour hundreds of billions into new data centers, the surge in electricity demand is rewriting the economics of the grid — and households are footing the bill for an “AI power tax” they never voted for. The frustrating truth is that this isn’t about running out of power. As prices keep rising and politicians promise to build our way out of this crisis, we already have more than enough electricity. A broken system What’s broken is the system around us. As Chris Wright, the Secretary of the Department of Energy, recently said, “we don’t need more electrons … We only need more electrons a few hours a year at peak demand. We have slack capacity 98% of the time.” Outdated pricing rules hide the real cost of peak demand, shift the burden onto ordinary people, and drive bills higher even when supply is abundant. And as AI’s appetite for energy grows, that broken system is turning into a massive, invisible subsidy — one that lands squarely on consumers. In 2025, U.S. tech companies will spend $300–400 billion on AI infrastructure.That’s over 2% of GDP, a greater share than telecoms at the height of the Internet boom. Growing demand This “industrialization of intelligence” has sparked the steepest electricity demand growth since World War II. Five-year load forecasts jumped from 23 GW in 2022 to 128 GW in 2025, with data center usage projected to rise from 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023 to 12% by 2030. And since January 2021, residential electric prices have climbed nearly 40%. In PJM, which covers 13 states and D.C., the cost of ensuring reliability—known as capacity prices—has spiked 11x in just two years, with analysts attributing two-thirds of the increase to data centers. That’s $9.3 billion in extra utility bills this year alone, or an AI power tax of $10–$21 per month per household. If similar trends spread nationwide, Americans could face $15–30 billion annually in AI subsidies by 2027. Unlocking capacity But the problem isn’t AI, or solar panels that fail to deliver power at midnight when demand is lowest—it’s figuring out how to unlock the slack capacity of our existing grid where and when we need it. Imagine if airlines couldn’t charge more for Thanksgiving flights, so they had to buy enough planes for everyone to fly that one day. The rest of the year, those planes sit idle, but ticket prices stay high year-round to cover that wasted capacity. That’s exactly how our electric grid works today. Households and small businesses pay flat retail rates that don’t reflect real-time scarcity or cost—whether power is dirt-cheap at 3 a.m. or sky-high during a heatwave, you pay the same. This “one price fits all” approach hides the true cost of peak demand. The bill for serving those peaks doesn’t vanish, it’s just socialized across everyone’s rates, driving costs up for all. Large industrial users don’t face this problem. They buy electricity directly in wholesale markets, where prices fluctuate by the minute, and can shape their demand to avoid paying for expensive peaks. This flexibility allows them to reduce costs dramatically. Meanwhile, households and small businesses can’t. The result is a regressive system where those least able to change their behavior are stuck paying the most. We have the technology The good news is that we already have the technology to fix this. Over 120 million smart meters are installed nationwide, covering more than 75% of U.S. homes and businesses. Smart thermostats, EV chargers, and home batteries are becoming more common, and these devices can automatically shift usage without impacting comfort or convenience. The impact of even small shifts is enormous. Simply moving demand during the top 2% of peak hours could unlock 126 GW of capacity, enough to meet projected demand growth through 2030 and avoid $250 billion in new power plant construction. In July, 100,000 California home batteries discharged simultaneously, providing 539 MW—the equivalent of five natural gas plants. Scaling that single program in CA could help avoid blackouts while saving $200 million. So why isn’t this happening everywhere? Incentives. America’s roughly 200 investor-owned utilities, serving about 70% of the population, operate under a business model that rewards building more infrastructure. Utilities earn guaranteed profits on every dollar they spend on new power plants and distribution lines. Flexible demand solutions, by contrast, save money for consumers but don’t generate revenue for the utility. This misalignment explains why utilities are now pushing to spend $1.1 trillion by 2029 on new infrastructure to meet AI-driven demand. The path forward One path forward is structural reform. Congress could deregulate the ‘final mile’ of the grid, much as it did for telecom in the 1990s. That wave of deregulation unleashed competition, drove down prices, and sparked the innovations that gave us the Internet, mobile phones, and eventually AI itself. Similar reforms to the electricity market would allow households and small businesses to finally access real-time pricing and level the playing field with large corporations. In practice, this would mean utilities still maintain the wires, but other companies could compete to sell power and services directly to households over that shared infrastructure—bringing real-time pricing, choice, and innovation to consumers. States and grid operators could also expand programs that reward flexible demand under existing rules, such as allowing residential users to pay based on their actual smart meter usage data, rather than generic usage profiles that obfuscates the value of shifting their demand. California has already shown what’s possible when consumers are empowered to participate. When given access to real market incentives, innovators can help everyday Americans stabilize the grid and lower costs for everyone. The AI revolution is here, hungry for electrons. This demand surge doesn’t have to break the grid. It may even be our opportunity to make America’s grid great again. We just need enough political will to set it free and entrepreneurs who have the grit and endurance to hack through the regulatory morass and save us in spite of ourselves. View the full article

It’s the best publication for investors — but the latest issue makes spooky readingView the full article

In the defining years of American business, founding CEOs were virtually synonymous with the companies they led. Walt Disney was Disney incarnate; Dale Carnegie came to represent the steel industry itself. These figures were not just company leaders; they were the gravitational center around which entire industries revolved. Those days are gone. Though we still have echoes in modern chief executives like Tim Cook or Richard Branson, these figureheads, too, are becoming rarer. In fact, the average CEO tenure is the lowest in recent history. Over the past three years, CEO turnover has reached record highs, with 58 leadership changes in the S&P 500 alone. This pattern has prompted the C-suite to focus on a new leadership strategy: employing interim CEOs. Eighteen percent of all new CEOs are interim appointments compared to 7% just a year ago. For most, they’re still seen as a lame duck or hired gun, sent to take care of the company’s rudimentary duties; at best, a suboptimal stand-in for a proper leader. The savviest companies, however, are no longer relegating interim CEOs to a holdover role. They’re instead empowering them to be dynamic doers, essential to transforming organizations and breaking stale patterns and enacting rapid, bold changes. Interim CEOs Have Unique Opportunities To Enact Change Interims occupy a liminal space in the risk-averse, C-suite business world. Their temporary position frees them from the common pitfalls others so frequently get stuck in: politicking, backslapping, and monitoring rather than doing. With the right instincts and a good plan, however, the best interim CEOs can assess internal dynamics, align fellow leaders, and make key decisions while laying the groundwork for their successor or becoming permanent installations themselves. When James M. Cornelius was appointed Interim CEO of Bristol-Myers Squibb in 2006, he spearheaded expansive strategic partnerships and top-down initiatives to reduce costs and risk. His eight-month interim period was marked with such focus and urgency that it earned him full-time tenure, where he remained for years. Besides just righting the ship, he made decisions quicker than a permanent CEO ever could have. Whereas the previous three years saw negative YoY growth, Cornelius got BMS back on track with a near-double-digit YoY revenue increase. With the confidence of their fellow executives and shareholders, interim CEOs have the opportunity to move forward with the expectation of growth and new horizons, free from traditional time-pressures and deadlines. They can manage change in the C-suite, making tough-but-necessary decisions without bias. When Chipotle’s wunderkind CEO Brian Niccol departed for Starbucks, many wondered who could possibly follow his historic tenure. Rather than a superstar CEO from another organization, Chipotle brought on Scott Boatwright, an interim CEO from their own rank-and-file. Leaning on his prior COO experience, Boatwright erased bottlenecks and streamline decision-making from the top down, using his unique skill set to maintain prior momentum for a rock-solid year-end. These successful initiatives landed him a solidified seat atop the fast casual empire, where he still remains. In both of these cases, a new permanent executive may have felt pressured to keep the ship on autopilot rather than turn the wheel. With interim CEOs, these companies gave their leaders the freedom to make substantive change, resulting in both a healthy balance sheet and a naturally proven successor—the two foremost goals of any leadership transition. Interim Tenure, Genuine Risk Make no mistake, there’s a myriad of reasons companies choose to play it safe by limiting the purview of interim CEOs. Leadership missteps don’t just jeopardize the new leader but can also create long-term impacts way beyond their tenure. Take Reddit’s interim CEO Ellen Pao, who took the helm in 2014 when the company was on a steady path to an IPO. Pao implemented massive, top-down changes to the site’s rules and guidelines that went against Reddit’s founding ethos, causing upheaval among hundreds of thousands of users. She fired popular long-time employees, losing internal trust and community support alike. While Pao may have started the trouble, it didn’t end with her. As is often the case, a period of poor management led to cultural decay that lingered for years. Reddit’s cofounder had to come in and right the company’s ship over the ensuing half decade. Temporary Leaders Need Long-Term Vision As CEO tenure continues to shorten and transitions become a fact of life, interim leadership appointments will become the ultimate inflection point for an organization’s future. Not every interim CEO appointment is doomed to fail—far from it—but Reddit’s woes show why executive buy-in and clear company goals are essential. There’s a term in executive circles for this: leadership alignment. Successful companies let the interim CEO take charge but also have everyone else in the C-suite define their boundaries and establishes immutable values by which they must still abide. Top organizations will even allow stakeholders and employees to weigh in on those values to inspire increased confidence in the new head honcho. Some of the biggest companies have proven leadership alignment works. When Target was flailing in 2014, longtime executive John Mulligan stepped in to lead them into the future. As he said himself, the strong support and clear guidance from other executives was precisely what he needed. Interim no longer has to mean “ineffective.” During a period of leadership transition, the ship still has to go somewhere. So, the companies that give even their temporary leaders the mandate to navigate uncharted waters will sail ahead, faring far better than those who force them to drift with the tide. View the full article

Research is clear that multitasking significantly undermines career progress despite its popularity in modern workplaces. But why does multitasking harm workplace productivity? And how can you maintain concentration to get more accomplished? Below, experts share proven strategies that replace multitasking habits with intentional productivity systems to improve focus and work quality. No-Stacking Rule Drives Meaningful Project Completion Trying to multitask is the workplace version of spinning plates . . . except they all end up smashed! In my experience, multitasking is the fastest way to look busy while achieving very little. On the surface, it feels productive because you’ve got emails on the go, projects open, and calls happening, but the reality is that you’re only scratching the surface of each task. I used to have five or six projects all sitting at around 30% complete. It gave me the illusion of progress but left me with very few meaningful results. The real issue with multitasking is the constant switching cost. Every time you change from one task to another, your brain has to reorient itself. You lose rhythm and you lose quality. Instead of giving something your full attention, you end up spreading yourself so thin that nothing gets finished to the standard it could. Productivity isn’t about activity, it’s about completion and impact. That’s what multitasking robs you of. The strategy that changed everything for me is what I call the No-Stacking Rule. It’s very simple: I don’t allow myself to have more than two tasks in progress at any one time. This means that if something is sitting at 30% complete, I have to finish it before I can start something new with no exceptions. Easier said than done though! It creates a discipline where I’m forced to think carefully about what I start, because once it’s on my plate, I’m committed to taking it through to completion. This rule stops me from scattering my attention across multiple half-done jobs and instead drives me to deliver tangible results. A specific example: I once found myself with six different strategic projects on the go and all moving slowly and none close to completion. It felt overwhelming. When I applied the No-Stacking Rule, I cut everything back and committed to just two projects. I finished the first in three days, the second in the following week, and then moved on to the rest. Within a month, every single project was complete and signed off—something that would have dragged on for months under my old approach (it used to drive my team mad!) What I learned was that focus compounds. Completing one task gives you momentum and frees up headspace. Before long, you’re not drowning in half-finished work. Instead, you’re creating real impact. Remember, multitasking at work is basically professional procrastination in disguise! Sean McPheat, Founder & CEO, MTD Training Mental Clarity Outperforms Productivity Hacks Multitasking is one of the most pervasive myths in modern work. We wear it like a badge of honor, but the science is clear: it’s not efficiency—it’s cognitive switching. Each time we move between tasks, we lose time and mental energy. Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus cites research showing that it can take over 20 minutes to regain full focus after switching. Multiply that across a workday, and the cost to performance, well-being, and creativity is enormous. In our peak performance coaching work, we see this daily. Leaders describe being “always on,” yet never feeling ahead. The problem isn’t their workload — it’s their state of mind. When your mind is cluttered with competing thoughts, tasks, and worries, you’re not multitasking; you’re fragmenting your attention. The most effective strategy I’ve found to maintain focus isn’t time blocking or task batching—it’s understanding how your mind actually works. Not emotional intelligence, not techniques, but insight. Once people grasp that their mental experience is created from the inside out—not by external pressure or circumstance—they stop trying to control everything outside them and start working from clarity inside them. In practice, that means when I feel overloaded, I don’t reach for productivity hacks. I pause. I notice that my racing thoughts, not my inbox, are creating the sense of pressure. As soon as I see that clearly, my mind quiets, and focus returns naturally. This understanding isn’t about managing stress—it dissolves it. We apply the same principle in our programs. One pharmaceutical client saw dramatic results: 93% of participants reported reduced stress and overwhelm and 88% improved decision-making after learning this inside-out model of performance. When people stop fighting their thoughts and start working with a clear mind, productivity, creativity, and engagement follow—without the burnout. The takeaway? You can’t out-plan an overactive mind. Productivity doesn’t come from doing more; it comes from thinking less. The real advantage in the modern workplace isn’t multitasking—it’s mental clarity. Kay Tear, Managing Director, Business Reimagined Ltd Ruthless Prioritization Delivers Higher ROI Results Multitasking harms productivity because it drains both a team’s capacity and capability. When too many priorities pile up, velocity slows, quality drops, and burnout sets in—even though it looks like everything is moving forward. Skills are stretched thin, people work on tasks that aren’t the best use of their talent, and morale suffers as wins become harder to see. My most effective strategy is ruthless prioritization—doing less to achieve more. It starts with clarity: defining what problem we’re solving and asking, “Can the current team deliver this?” before adding anything new. In one case, we cut or paused 35% of active projects, freeing up capacity and capability for higher-ROI initiatives. As a result, over two fiscal periods, ROI across the portfolio of efforts rose by 20%, two-thirds of projects were delivered months ahead of schedule, and morale improved as the team delivered meaningful outcomes, which led to higher talent retention levels. Rohit Bassi, Founder & CEO, People Quotient GTD Method Transforms Focus Not Time Multitasking harms productivity because it divides our attention and forces the brain to rapidly switch between tasks, a process that has been proven to drain mental energy, increase stress, and reduce the quality of our thinking. I learned this firsthand when I realized I was spending hours each year simply rewriting to-do lists, reacting to whatever was loudest or latest, and feeling perpetually busy, but not always productive. The strategy that transformed my focus was implementing the Getting Things Done® (GTD) methodology, which shifts the goal from time management to focus management. GTD helps externalize thoughts and commitments so the mind is free to think clearly rather than constantly remember. One of the most effective habits I adopted was the “mind sweep,” taking a few minutes to capture everything that has my attention on paper and then clarifying the next specific action for each item. By organizing these actions into trusted categories (“calls,” “emails,” “projects,” etc.), I eliminated the clutter in my head and could focus on one meaningful thing at a time. The impact has been remarkable: I sleep better, my energy is higher, and I no longer react to crises. I respond with clarity, and throughout the years, my teams have also adopted this practice, and the result is a game changer. The difference was night and day. Those of us who drank the GTD Kool-Aid and went through the training stopped spinning in circles, made decisions faster, and stayed accountable to what we said we would do. In a nutshell, multitasking scatters attention; having a focused and reliable system restores it. When we clear the noise and stop trying to hold things in our minds, overwhelm dissipates and creativity and strategy emerge. Judy Goldberg, Founder, Wondershift Separate Digital Environments Enhance Mental Focus We humans are not wired for multitasking. Even if you are sure you are a pro at it, it might be harming your productivity and attention span in the long run. Focusing on too many things at a time increases anxiety levels and reduces your ability to enter deep focus that is crucial for tasks like brainstorming, ideation, planning, or strategy building. Long-term, it simply kills your creativity. What I do to protect my focus is separate my digital environments. It’s convenient to have everything in one place, yes, but it ruins my concentration. So, for instance, I keep one browser “sacred” for deep work and research, and another for lighter tasks or entertainment like social media. Over time, the mind starts to associate the tool with the type of work you’re doing: when I open my work browser and see only my work tabs and bookmarks, my brain immediately switches into serious mode. It sounds small and maybe even silly, but those mental cues reduce friction and help keep my concentration abilities in shape. Jan Hendrik Von Ahlen, Managing Director & Co-founder, Career Coach, JobLeads Multitasking Disrupts Critical Flow States Multitasking harms workplace productivity, leading to errors that can damage your personal brand. Today, it’s commonplace to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously, such as leading a Zoom call, sending a Teams message, and responding to an email. These actions make us appear “busy,” but beneath the busyness are poorly thought-out arguments and disengaged employees, resulting in lower engagement and longer cycle times. A July 2024 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that multitasking disrupts “flow states” (deep immersion) by 40%, leading to reduced task satisfaction and 15–25% more errors in complex tasks like report writing. To counter this, my personal strategy to maintain focus is straightforward but effective: when working on critical strategic imperatives for the business, I close my Teams chat and email and silence my personal phone. By doing so, I’ve gained the ability to concentrate, which fosters more ideas and clearer thinking. Andrew Lee, HR Director, Raytheon Multitask With Intention Through Priority Management Multitasking isn’t the villain. It’s the open-ended projects and shifting urgencies that eat up more time than they deserve. I always go back to Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and his time management matrix. Four quadrants: urgent and important, not urgent but important, urgent but not important, and not urgent and not important. The trap? We confuse urgency with importance, so our days get stuffed with urgent-but-not-important tasks that steal time from the real priorities. And the most dangerous ones? The important but not urgent tasks we push off until they explode into fire drills. We build AI phone services for restaurants, and a big part of our work involves adapting to telecom regulations. It’s critical but rarely urgent. Deadlines can be months away, the scope is fuzzy, but it’s the kind of effort that can’t get shoved aside. Ignore it for too long and suddenly you’re headed towards serious downtime and messaging issues. Meanwhile, urgent and important efforts like sales pushes and marketing launches keep knocking at the door. The trick is not to avoid multitasking, but to do it with intention. That starts with clearly defining where each effort sits in terms of importance and urgency. Then you build a process around it with cross-functional ownership, delegation to the right people, and everything logged in a centralized project tool. Not every project moves in a straight line, and as blockers pop up, you shift focus to the next priority. That’s what effective multitasking looks like, i.e., knowing what’s on your plate, when to tackle it, and who owns what. Back to telecom as an example. We know exactly who our internal expert is, and while they wear multiple hats, they’re crystal clear on their ownership and priorities. That way they can balance their time across critical projects without things slipping through the cracks. Week to week, priorities will change. The key is to stay flexible but organized. When everything’s reviewed, documented, and assigned, you don’t lose track and you stop mistaking “urgent” for “important.” Zeel Jadia, CEO, ReachifyAI Creative Immersion Days Protect Quality Work In creative work, multitasking dilutes the quality of ideas. Concepts need space to breathe when you’re building a brand’s identity or reimagining a client’s marketing strategy. If you’re bouncing between logo sketches and a website build, neither will get the full depth of creative exploration each deserves. One way I make sure that focus is protected is by structuring our projects into creative immersion days. So instead of spreading a designer thin across five clients in a single day, we dedicate extended time to just one client. The result was not only stronger design work but also faster approvals because the concepts reflected a deeper understanding of the brand. Adrienne Folse, Founder, Design the Planet Time Blocking Transforms Task Completion Quality Multitasking has become normal, even expected, in many workplaces. You might be hired as a social media manager but soon find yourself also doing graphic design, copywriting, and more. When we try to do too much at once, even if it feels “normal,” the work suffers. The biggest issue I see with multitasking is that it’s easy to miss things. You overlook details, rush, and hop between tasks without the mental space to go deep. You’re checking notifications, hearing open office chatter, and prepping for the next meeting all while trying to produce high-quality work. That’s not a recipe for excellence. And that’s what we should be aiming for: work that’s thoughtful, well-crafted, and drives results. One strategy that helps me (and my team) stay focused is time blocking. We block specific times on our calendars for high-impact tasks and honor those blocks like meetings. As a founder, I now schedule certain days just for meetings and leave other days free for deep work. That way, I’m not bouncing between strategy calls and writing copy within the same hour. And it’s made a big difference. Instead of dragging one task across three days in 30-minute chunks, I now get it done mostly in one sitting. I stay in flow. The work is better and the stress is lower. It may require a lot of thought and adjustments to implement but if more teams, whether they are corporate, startup, or small businesses, made space for focus like this, I think we’d all see better outcomes. Remi Roy Osi, Founder, PodGround Efficient Processes Master Multiple Tasks Successfully Multitasking can harm workplace productivity when it focuses on quantity over quality. In the rush of “getting things done,” you may compromise on quality by not giving each task enough thought, time, or attention. The best way to stay focused is by clearly understanding and setting priorities, based on business objectives, revenue potential, impact, and other factors that are important to you or your organization. For me, the trifecta of maintaining an efficient process, staying organized, and keeping a repository of templates has been an effective strategy in mastering multitasking and delivering high-quality results. There are huge time-saving benefits that lead to more efficient use of time to accomplish multiple tasks without compromising on quality. Efficient processes: When managing multiple projects, you need to have a solid workflow for creation, approval, execution, and optimization. In my experience, this has fueled better alignment, communication, and collaboration between teams, while speeding up the process, overcoming obstacles, and leading to higher output. It also reduced our campaign launch times from more than a week to two days. Staying organized: I maintained a central folder system that gave the team quick access to all documentation and resources. Instead of wasting time searching through multiple channels or asking peers, they were able to find the information they needed in one or two clicks and focus on the task at hand. It also created a central space where teams could access everything from guides and briefing documents to assets and reports in the same place for easier decision-making. Templates: Hours were being wasted as stakeholders developed briefs from scratch, causing delays in campaign executions and losing the company money. I then created templates of briefing documents that stakeholders could easily complete through fill-in-the-blank options, drop-down menus, and other features. What would usually take more than 30 minutes to an hour to create ended up taking less than 15 minutes. Sidra Tariq, Owner, Curio Solutions Hub View the full article

Not all pieces of small business AI are created equal. Some are packaged to operate out-of-the-box, while others require undergoing a substantial training process before they work as intended. Some are calibrated to handle every conceivable business operation, while others arrive with a narrower focus on one or two critical tasks. Not to mention the fact that AI offerings are changing all the time. Small business owners may think they have a handle on the technology, but even seasoned AI users could benefit from a refresher given the rapid pace of AI development. And new users should know what to look for when evaluating AI deployments or risk wasting time and resources managing incorrect expectations. Here are some important questions for small business owners to ask about AI, the answers to which can help select a new piece of AI or maximize the use of one they’ve already implemented: How is the LLM trained? The year 2025 has exposed AI’s potential to perform copyright infringement without users knowing. For example, last summer, Meta and Anthropic were taken to court by book authors who alleged that the companies used published, copyrighted material to train their Large Language Models (LLMs), aka the massive data repository referenced by the AI, without permission or remuneration. These companies won their respective lawsuits due to protections around “fair use,” and the damage was done—proof that traditionally protected intellectual property was available to be data mined and LLMs were consuming it voraciously. In many of these cases, the winners were massive tech enterprises that likely employed an arsenal of lawyers for their defense. Small businesses cannot afford to find themselves on the receiving end of a similar intellectual property dispute. Not only would it be a costly affair, but customers are wising up to what these slip-ups might mean for their own data and are quick to change vendors if need be. Problems with LLMs usually begin during the training process. Some AI vendors let LLMs roam freely throughout the internet, picking up whatever stray data happens to come their way and paving the way for potential intellectual property disputes. Others feed their LLMs synthetic data, customer data with personal identifiable information removed, and other pieces of information that exist within guardrails. Small businesses interested in AI must find a vendor who engages in the latter—and who will provide the utmost transparency as training methods evolve or other issues arise. How does the software maintain privacy and security? A single data breach can spell the end of a small business’s lifespan, and the chances of this happening will only increase as the technology employed by bad actors continues to evolve. At the same time, keeping data private can be quite costly and time-intensive. That’s not to say that privacy and security needs to be something a small business thinks about every single moment of every day. For this, it’s best for SMBs to defer to the experts. The right tech vendor will handle these efforts and keep a small business insulated from issues. To determine if a vendor is the best fit, small businesses should ask about the vendor’s tech stack. Many will say they employ Amazon Web Services (AWS) or other third-party services, which may sound good at first. After all, these companies specialize in running tech stacks, so they must be the best choice, right? The problem with AWS specifically, which can be generalized to similar vendors, is that when too many companies hinge themselves on a single entity, when problems arise, all of those companies experience them. Look no further than the recent AWS outages for proof. Vendors that emphasize privacy and security will likely run their software from their own tech stack. This allows them to maintain 360-degree visibility into the system and deploy fixes right away whenever suspicious activity is raised. They can also make their processes more efficient, then passing the savings onto the customers or padding the company’s R&D budget to produce better technology. Vendors worthy of a small business are those who take matters into their own hands. How do the AI agents work? Implementing generative AI is far more complicated than turning on a faucet. Good AI requires that small businesses remain mindful of how the technology will integrate into its existing operations and workflow. After all, the worst-case scenario involves purchasing a flashy new AI product only for it to arrive far too complicated to be practical. The most effective AI agents—specific processes and tasks accomplished by AI—are ones that work in the background. Often, users won’t even know AI was involved because the technology simply works, which can help with adoption efforts, as well. When small businesses are seeking to incorporate AI, they must ask tech vendors about how much set-up is required before AI will be working at full capacity, and how much of it will integrate with the software a company is currently running. To simplify these efforts tremendously, small businesses can search for a vendor whose AI arrives already embedded in the software. This eliminates the need for clunky third-party integration efforts and ensures that data will be kept within a closed system, where it will be less likely to leak and stronger protective efforts can be incorporated. In addition, AI woven into the fabric of software is easier to keep up-to-date because software updates can be accomplished effortlessly. The less work required by the small business, and the more confident that business can feel about its technology vendor, the better. In conclusion Small business AI adoption has been stymied by a lack of data readiness, difficulty in integrating with legacy systems, and unnecessarily high costs passed down to the consumer. When a vendor builds its software on a single, internally-developed tech stack, incorporates agents into daily business operations, and subverts the use of third-party tools, customers can make great use of the AI while keeping their fears at bay. Small businesses may not be able to predict the future perfectly, but by asking the right questions of a potential AI vendor, they can at least ensure that future is in good hands. Image via Envanto This article, "Questions Small Businesses Need to Ask of Their AI Vendor" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Not all pieces of small business AI are created equal. Some are packaged to operate out-of-the-box, while others require undergoing a substantial training process before they work as intended. Some are calibrated to handle every conceivable business operation, while others arrive with a narrower focus on one or two critical tasks. Not to mention the fact that AI offerings are changing all the time. Small business owners may think they have a handle on the technology, but even seasoned AI users could benefit from a refresher given the rapid pace of AI development. And new users should know what to look for when evaluating AI deployments or risk wasting time and resources managing incorrect expectations. Here are some important questions for small business owners to ask about AI, the answers to which can help select a new piece of AI or maximize the use of one they’ve already implemented: How is the LLM trained? The year 2025 has exposed AI’s potential to perform copyright infringement without users knowing. For example, last summer, Meta and Anthropic were taken to court by book authors who alleged that the companies used published, copyrighted material to train their Large Language Models (LLMs), aka the massive data repository referenced by the AI, without permission or remuneration. These companies won their respective lawsuits due to protections around “fair use,” and the damage was done—proof that traditionally protected intellectual property was available to be data mined and LLMs were consuming it voraciously. In many of these cases, the winners were massive tech enterprises that likely employed an arsenal of lawyers for their defense. Small businesses cannot afford to find themselves on the receiving end of a similar intellectual property dispute. Not only would it be a costly affair, but customers are wising up to what these slip-ups might mean for their own data and are quick to change vendors if need be. Problems with LLMs usually begin during the training process. Some AI vendors let LLMs roam freely throughout the internet, picking up whatever stray data happens to come their way and paving the way for potential intellectual property disputes. Others feed their LLMs synthetic data, customer data with personal identifiable information removed, and other pieces of information that exist within guardrails. Small businesses interested in AI must find a vendor who engages in the latter—and who will provide the utmost transparency as training methods evolve or other issues arise. How does the software maintain privacy and security? A single data breach can spell the end of a small business’s lifespan, and the chances of this happening will only increase as the technology employed by bad actors continues to evolve. At the same time, keeping data private can be quite costly and time-intensive. That’s not to say that privacy and security needs to be something a small business thinks about every single moment of every day. For this, it’s best for SMBs to defer to the experts. The right tech vendor will handle these efforts and keep a small business insulated from issues. To determine if a vendor is the best fit, small businesses should ask about the vendor’s tech stack. Many will say they employ Amazon Web Services (AWS) or other third-party services, which may sound good at first. After all, these companies specialize in running tech stacks, so they must be the best choice, right? The problem with AWS specifically, which can be generalized to similar vendors, is that when too many companies hinge themselves on a single entity, when problems arise, all of those companies experience them. Look no further than the recent AWS outages for proof. Vendors that emphasize privacy and security will likely run their software from their own tech stack. This allows them to maintain 360-degree visibility into the system and deploy fixes right away whenever suspicious activity is raised. They can also make their processes more efficient, then passing the savings onto the customers or padding the company’s R&D budget to produce better technology. Vendors worthy of a small business are those who take matters into their own hands. How do the AI agents work? Implementing generative AI is far more complicated than turning on a faucet. Good AI requires that small businesses remain mindful of how the technology will integrate into its existing operations and workflow. After all, the worst-case scenario involves purchasing a flashy new AI product only for it to arrive far too complicated to be practical. The most effective AI agents—specific processes and tasks accomplished by AI—are ones that work in the background. Often, users won’t even know AI was involved because the technology simply works, which can help with adoption efforts, as well. When small businesses are seeking to incorporate AI, they must ask tech vendors about how much set-up is required before AI will be working at full capacity, and how much of it will integrate with the software a company is currently running. To simplify these efforts tremendously, small businesses can search for a vendor whose AI arrives already embedded in the software. This eliminates the need for clunky third-party integration efforts and ensures that data will be kept within a closed system, where it will be less likely to leak and stronger protective efforts can be incorporated. In addition, AI woven into the fabric of software is easier to keep up-to-date because software updates can be accomplished effortlessly. The less work required by the small business, and the more confident that business can feel about its technology vendor, the better. In conclusion Small business AI adoption has been stymied by a lack of data readiness, difficulty in integrating with legacy systems, and unnecessarily high costs passed down to the consumer. When a vendor builds its software on a single, internally-developed tech stack, incorporates agents into daily business operations, and subverts the use of third-party tools, customers can make great use of the AI while keeping their fears at bay. Small businesses may not be able to predict the future perfectly, but by asking the right questions of a potential AI vendor, they can at least ensure that future is in good hands. Image via Envanto This article, "Questions Small Businesses Need to Ask of Their AI Vendor" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Few objects embody the endurance of the human spirit better than a medal. This Sunday, when the projected 55,000 breathless souls cross the finishing line of the annual TCS New York City marathon, they will be receive a one-of-a-kind medal to remember this achievement. The NYC marathon medal looks different every year. While many previous versions have attempted to etch the experience onto metal, the 2025 medal takes an even more tangible approach. At first glance, the surface of the new medal appears to be brushed with an array of diagonal stripes. But flip it on its side, and you will notice that the stripes are ribbed, and they reflect the actual elevation of the five-borough course. The brutal start up the Verrazzano Bridge; the seemingly endless 5th Avenue incline, the rolling hills of Central Park—these topographies can be felt (or re-felt) at the glide of a finger. The medal is an exquisite piece of design that celebrates the experience of running a marathon through touch. And it has been so popular since it was unveiled that it has even placated the prickliest of armchair critics. “In the 10 years I’ve been at this company, it’s the best reaction we’ve ever seen,” says Thomas Cabus, the creative director at nonprofit New York Road Runners, who designed this year’s medal. “All of them are positive, which is rare.” “Can we jazz it up a bit?” The TCS NYC marathon medal archive, on display at the NYRR Run Center, shows how wildly the design of marathon medals has been over the years. The 2005 medal showed a crowd of runners huddled against the Verrazzano Bridge. The 2018 medal was shaped like an apple. But some things never change: the TCS logo has to feature; the five boroughs have to be listed (in this case on the back of the medal) and there has to be room for willing finishers to get their initials engraved. Each medal also features braille lettering on the back. Since NYRR rebranded in 2023—courtesy of brand consultancy Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv—the medal designers also have to include a variation of the new motif, namely diagonal stripes to symbolize the five boroughs coming together on marathon day. The idea for the 2025 medal was born while the team was experimenting with those diagonal stripes. “The idea was, can we jazz it up a little bit?” recalls Keziah Makoundou, lead designer at NYRR, who codesigned the medal alongside Cabus. Once the idea materialized, the team took an official graphic of the course and extruded that to a three-dimensional shape. The elevation map was born. Designing a time capsule Since the medal was unveiled in early October, it has been so popular that some runners who were planning on deferring are now considering walking the marathon just to get it. Others have called for this medal to become the signature medal of the TCS NYC marathon. But what makes each medal so special is precisely the fact that it acts as a time capsule from a particular race. Tomasz Sablinski, a 69-year-old running aficionado who splits his time between New York City and New Jersey, has run over 80 marathons across North America and Europe. This year’s five-borough race will be his 12th. “I must have over 100 medals,” he told me in an email. “And with so many of them, it’s fun when a medal stands out from the others because of its unusual design, or if it’s specifically related to the course it’s from.” Sablinski is particularly fond of some of his wooden medals, but he loves this year’s design for the NYC marathon medal because it is so directly tied to the course. “You won’t be able to look at this year’s medal without recalling the elevation of the bridges around the boroughs,” he says. When Sablinski crosses the finishing line on November 2, Cabus and Makoundou will be there to watch his and the reaction of 55,000 others when they receive their well-earned medal. And with so much positive feedback already, they feel both proud and pressured to top themselves next year. “Runners are very difficult people to please, so it’s like a challenge,” says Makoundou, before adding with a chuckle: “I don’t know what we’re going to do next year.” View the full article

Bill Gates has invested billions over the last two decades to help fight climate change. But in a new blog post, he argues that world is too focused on cutting short-term emissions. “The doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals,” he writes, calling for a “strategic pivot” to focus on “improving lives” by focusing development dollars more on agriculture and disease and poverty eradication. The logic is flawed, and built on a series of false trade-offs that ignore how interconnected climate and development goals are. Gates criticizes the “doomsday” view that climate change will “decimate civilization” in a few decades and writes that “it will not lead to humanity’s demise.” Because of the progress already made on climate—and since humanity will survive—he argues we should now be more focused on alleviating human suffering rather than continuing to so intently focus on rising temperatures. But climate scientists do not argue that civilization itself will end. Instead, they say, hurricanes, heat waves, and other climate disasters are already killing people, destroying homes and infrastructure, making it harder to grow food, and making life more difficult and expensive in other ways. The longer we wait to cut emissions, the worse those problems will continue to get, and the harder it will be to adapt. Human suffering is directly linked to whether or not emissions are curbed now. Gates’s essay uses “really false framing that pits improving people’s lives against science-based temperature and emissions goals that are intrinsically connected,” says Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “If you look around the world right now, climate change is directly undermining human development goals, poverty eradication, and health goals. You just have to look at the disruption from the climate-supercharged Hurricane Melissa to see an example of that.” A report this week from the medical journal the Lancet explains that the impacts of climate change are creating “an unprecedented threat” to the health and survival of people globally, with millions already dying unnecessarily each year. That threat keeps growing. With higher temperatures and more rain, mosquitoes can thrive in new areas, increasing malaria risk, for example. “These are all directly connected,” Cleetus says. “You can’t solve these complex development and health challenges if you ignore climate change.” Gates argues that temperature goals are getting in the way of focusing on improving global poverty. But the most ambitious temperature goal in the Paris climate agreement—to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius—came from poor island nations who saw that sea level rise would hit them first. “Bill Gates has the audacity as a billionaire to say, ‘Well, climate people don’t care about the poor and the developing world,’ when it’s like, dude, the temperature stabilization framework in many ways came from the poor and the developing world,” says Leah Stokes, a political science professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. “Why do we have the 1.5 degree target? Because these least-developed countries, small island nations, banded together to say, ‘This is what we want.’ It wasn’t the big rich countries pushing that.” Having the temperature goal was critical, and a follow-up report from the IPCC talking about how much emissions would need to fall by 2030 to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. “That’s a timeline that policymakers can actually wrap their heads around,” Stokes says. It led to Biden’s ambitious climate policy in the U.S., and though The President has reversed that, it also spurred states, other countries, and companies to set short-term goals. Gates suggests that we shouldn’t cut funding for health and development to fight climate change. But that’s a straw man argument. When the The President administration slashed spending on international health, it didn’t move that money to climate programs. Globally, the funding comes from different sources. “It’s not the same money,” says Jigar Shah, co-managing director for Multiplier, a cleantech consulting firm, who previously ran the loan programs office at the Department of Energy. “USAID is not spending money on clean energy. The money for clean energy is coming from the private sector, and most of this stuff is now so cost-effective and so profitable, it’s not even coming from blended finance. It’s coming from pure private sector dollars.” Gates argues that communities can adapt to short-term climate impacts, and that economic growth will help avoid more deaths from climate change—if more people can afford air conditioners, for example, that will save lives. But that overlooks the limits of economic growth and resilience in the face of repeated disasters. “There’s no way for economies to grow when they’re getting slammed again and again by climate-fueled disasters,” Cleetus says. The essay also suggests that economic growth in developing countries is at odds with climate policy. “There’s not a single person in the world that’s making that argument,” says Shah. “None of the poor countries have ever been required to reduce their emissions.” At the same time, as renewables have become the cheapest source of electricity, developing countries can affordably build out energy access without steeply increasing emissions. Pakistan, for instance, imported the third most solar panels of any country in the world in 2024. “The entire solar revolution of the last three years in Pakistan was done with private sector capital and DIY videos on WhatsApp,” Shah says. Gates seems to suggest that it’s fine to wait to cut emissions further, because better technology (much of which is being supported with his investments) is on the horizon. But since climate change is a cumulative problem, waiting another decade to cut emissions means that we could easily pass critical tipping points. That’s the biggest contradiction in his argument: If he wants to protect lives and livelihoods, cutting emissions does need to happen now. “What the science is showing is within the next decade, if we don’t sharply curtail heat-trapping emissions, there’s a real potential to blow right past the various agreement climate goals,” Cleetus says. “That can unlock feedback loops in the earth system that we cannot turn back even if we reduce emissions in the future.” Gates urges world leaders at COP 30, this year’s global climate conference, to “prioritize the things that have the greatest impact on human welfare,” rather than centering emissions cuts. The ideas are probably unlikely to have much of an impact on what actually happens at the conference. But the messaging is bad for climate action globally. “I think the impact is more about piling on to a sense that climate change isn’t really something we should worry about,” says Stokes. Of course it makes sense to continue to develop better, affordable climate tech. The companies that Gates’s Breakthrough Ventures has backed can play a meaningful role. But Gates could do more to help scale up the clean tech that’s ready now. While startups can also help later, “I think it’s important to recognize that if you’re going to reduce climate emissions at scale and make electricity bills more affordable in this moment, you have to deploy technologies that are already at scale,” says Shah. “We have so many technologies that are stalled at, like, 5% of penetration,” Shah says. “We have 5% of our rooftops in the United States, maybe 6% now, with solar panels on them. Australia is at 30%. How do we go from 5% to 30%? We’re figuring that out today. I would love his help on that.” View the full article

The news that Microsoft is making 9,000 workers redundant this year, with a focus on jettisoning managers, has sent ripples through the business world. Andy Jassey, Amazon’s CEO, explicitly said this summer that AI advances will lead to job cuts. So it’s no wonder that workers all over the world, including one in five Gen Z workers, are “very concerned” that AI will take their job in the next two years (with Americans being more concerned than Europeans), and 32% of U.S. workers believe that AI will lead to fewer job opportunities. AI has advanced to encompass a vast range of skills, not only data-driven ones such as coding and debugging, but also more managerial tasks, including generating reports and managing schedules. With this technology snapping at managers’ heels and the worry about remaining relevant in a digitally driven world, how can you future-proof your management role and survive the AI purge? The answer lies in developing your human-centric skills. Valuing human-centric skills For years, the value of human-centric skills, such as empathy, active listening, and effective communication, has been diminished by the label “soft,” in opposition to “hard” skills like writing code or analyzing data, which are more easily quantified. In a world rapidly and increasingly reshaped by AI and automation, these distinctions are under scrutiny. We’re seeing that it’s the hard skills that AI can replicate incredibly easily, whilst soft skills remain the preserve of humans and are becoming increasingly crucial as managers need to navigate their teams through tumultuous change. They’re so important, in fact, that they need a name change. They’re no longer soft; they’re now the imperative “power” skills that will future-proof your management career. More than just a semantic shift, this is a fundamental re-framing of how “soft” skills are perceived and valued. No longer dismissed as inferior or fluffy, these power skills need to be appreciated as the foundations of excellent management that will amplify the effectiveness of every hard skill you possess—think nuanced judgment, strategic thinking, genuine connection, and intuition. And, in fact, power skills can be quantified; we can clearly see the impact they have on a workforce when used effectively by managers. Because good management and engagement matter. Gallup’s annual State of the Global Workplace research has shown that a manager accounts for 70% of the variance in employee engagement, which feeds into the fact that at least a third of the variance in productivity between countries and companies is due to poor management. However, once someone is empowered by their manager to recognize and utilize their strengths daily, they’re nearly six times more engaged. Businesses with highly engaged staff experience 78% less absenteeism and significantly lower turnover rates. The answer is a question So how can you develop these power skills and ensure you’re using them to truly engage the team you manage? The answer lies in learning to ditch the command-and-control approach to management and use an enquiry-led approach instead. Adopting coaching-related behaviors, which include developing situational awareness and knowing when and how to ask purposeful questions, is the core premise of a popular new approach to management known as Operational Coaching. Proven effective in large-scale research conducted by the London School of Economics, adopting this new approach as part of a manager’s everyday style has been shown to shift the paradigm from directive management to facilitative leadership, while managers also generated a 74x return on investment. Learning to adopt an Operational Coaching style of management isn’t about telling employees what to do, but rather about guiding them to discover their own solutions, leveraging their strengths and taking ownership of their contributions. At its heart is the power skill of thought-provoking questioning, where instead of jumping in to solve every problem themselves, managers ask powerful questions that encourage employees to engage in self-reflection, critical thinking, and problem-solving. This approach empowers individuals to take ownership of their challenges and solutions. It’s then supported by active listening and empathy, strengths-based development, and continuous feedback and reflection. Described as “the missing superpower,” this style of management fosters critical thinking, which in turn builds confidence as employees are empowered to unlock their potential. It’s particularly suited to working with millennials and Gen Z workers, who favor a collaborative and supportive work environment over rigid hierarchies, and crave purpose in their work with regular feedback and opportunities for growth. Operational Coaching also helps managers regain valuable time as it shifts the weight of routine problem-solving from themselves to their team members. This capacity can be reinvested in higher-value work, while empowering employees to develop their own skills. Measurable improvements in employee engagement levels, a direct result of the change in their managers’ approach, lead to higher profitability, increased productivity, and better business outcomes, including, for example, sales and customer service. A shift in what’s valued In an era of rapid change driven by the democratization of knowledge through AI, human-centric skills that promote engagement, creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking will be the key differentiator between managers who can and those who will be displaced from their roles. By moving away from a typically directive approach, managers who adopt an Operational Coaching style will cultivate environments of trust and psychological safety, where employees can experiment and take risks without fear of blame. As routine tasks become increasingly automated, our human value must shift towards how we think, adapt, interact, and lead. It’s time to stop viewing these as passive, soft traits and instead appreciate them as active, powerful skills that hold the key to future-proofing your role as a manager who can get things done by mobilizing and enabling the skills and talents of others. View the full article

When the new Chevy Bolt arrives early next year, it will start at $29,995, making it one of the most affordable new EVs in the U.S. It’s thousands of dollars cheaper than Tesla’s “affordable” new versions of its Model 3 and Model Y. It’s also significantly less expensive than the average gas car, and like other EVs, it’s cheaper to operate. GM faces major headwinds with the loss of the $7,500 tax credit for electric cars, and it’s scaled back production plans and cut jobs in response. But the new Bolt is so affordable that it could win over consumers even without the incentive. “We wanted to get that under-$30,000 number,” says Jeremy Short, chief engineer on GM’s Bolt team. For Short and his team at GM, achieving that price required some creativity under constraint. Below, Short details how GM kept the price low. A new battery Instead of using standard lithium-ion chemistry, GM turned to a different type of battery that eliminates expensive materials like cobalt and nickel. Called lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, they’re cheaper, longer-lasting, and safer than other lithium-ion batteries, though they don’t store as much energy. It’s the first time that GM has used this type of battery. “We had to develop this because we had an aggressive target to get to for price,” says Short. “And this is one of those things that balanced price and performance.” The company also engineered a new low-cost, low-weight battery pack. The battery can also charge more quickly than the battery in the previous version of the Bolt. When the original Bolt was developed as the first affordable EV with long range, fast-charging infrastructure was limited. Many EV drivers also charge at home most of the time. But the engineers knew that faster charging is a priority for customers. The new Bolt can charge from 10% to 80% in 26 minutes, with a peak speed of around 2.5 times faster than the older model. “We were really in tune with things in ’22 that customers thought there was some potential to improve,” Short says. “Top of that list was the charging rate.” The range is also slightly better than the previous version, at 255 miles versus 247 miles per charge. The new Bolt is also now compatible with Tesla’s Supercharger network. Now, Short says, a vehicle that had a reputation as a commuter car is “a bonafide road trip car.” When the company held a launch event in Los Angeles earlier this month, the engineering team drove four of the cars from Detroit to California. “At two of our lunch stops, we fully charged to 100%,” he says. “We had to start limiting our charges because we couldn’t even eat lunch fast enough.” The company is temporarily importing the batteries from China, subject to steep tariffs. But it’s also ramping up production at one of its U.S. factories, which will begin in 2027. (The company has said that it plans to absorb some of the costs of tariffs across all of its vehicles, with an estimated $3.5 billion and $4 billion hit on its bottom line in 2026.) Economies of scale The new Bolt also adds other new features, including around 20 safety and driver assist features that the last model didn’t have. Features like adaptive cruise used to be optional, Short says, but now are standard. That meant adding hardware like sensors. Extra features made staying on budget more of a challenge, but it was possible, he says, because of the new battery and economies of scale on other parts. To make those economy of scale happen, GM borrowed components from its other EVs to help keep the new Bolt’s price down. “When the original Bolt came out, it was a bespoke architecture,” says Short. “It had a unique battery, a unique motor, unique everything.” Now, after GM’s heavy investment in electric vehicles, it had more resources to work with. The Bolt uses the same front drive motor as the Equinox EV, the same integrated power electronics, the same drive mounts, and other parts, including a heat pump that helps make the car run efficiently when the heat is on. The center screen in the vehicle, with the ability to screen YouTube and HBO Max—something that drivers can use when they’re sitting at a public charger—is borrowed from the brand’s mid-size trucks. Adapting the parts meant redesigning them, in many cases, for the much smaller Bolt, but it helped make a significant difference on cost. “By teaming up with other programs, we were able to get some economies of scale for what are truly better parts than we had before,” Short says. “Between ourselves and the Equinox EV, we’re going to be the volume players for Chevy in EVs.” View the full article

It’s widely known that social media can quickly turn into a toxic cesspool of hate speech and ragebait, particularly during times of political turmoil. Across social media platforms, amplified by the algorithm, hate often breeds hate. But what exactly makes toxicity so contagious? It turns out, the problem may be coming from within. A study published this month in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, co-authored by Alon Zoizner and Avraham Levy, looked at how social media users react when they’re exposed to toxic posts from people on their own political side, defined as the “ingroup,” compared with those from the opposing side, the “outgroup.” Highlighting the motivations behind toxic posts, the researchers suggested that exposure to toxicity from your own side tends to encourage similar behavior, as a way to show loyalty and signal belonging. On the other hand, seeing toxic posts from the opposing side can trigger defensive reactions, prompting users to hit back. Analyzing over 7 million tweets from 700,000 X accounts in Israel during 2023, a period of intense political division and conflict, the researchers found that toxicity mainly spreads online through ingroups. In other words, the more people see toxic behavior from those on their own side, the more likely they are to mirror it. Reactions to toxicity from the opposing side were fewer. People are motivated less by outrage at the “other side,” and more by a desire to fit in with their own. The design of social media makes this even worse. By highlighting political identities, it encourages social media users to see themselves as representatives of their group rather than as individuals—and to act accordingly. While much has been said about the polarizing effect of social media echo chambers, the researchers found that, contrary to their expectations, homogeneous networks are less affected by both ingroup and outgroup toxicity compared with those in more heterogeneous networks. They suggest two possible reasons for this. People in more mixed social networks may see a wider range of opinions, which can spark more conflict and toxic exchanges. Those in very like-minded networks, however, might already hold strong views, making them less influenced by others and less likely to feel the need to prove their loyalty through toxic behavior. Either way, toxicity is an unwelcome fact of the internet. Social media companies have engineered our feeds to keep us hooked on outrage and keep us online. Likes and shares then reinforce this cycle, rewarding those who perform their group identity most loudly, even when that means being the most toxic. View the full article

Berlin-based Stark failed to hit a single target in four attempts at two exercises with the British and German forcesView the full article

Elon Musk is the kind of entrepreneur who likes to have an enemy as motivation—traditional carmakers, the mainstream media, the “deep state.” His newest undertaking, launched October 27, is no exception: Grokipedia is positioned as an alternative to Wikipedia, which Musk claims is biased and “woke.” A product of Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, Grokipedia’s inner workings are unclear, but the pitch is that it’s an AI-generated compendium of what Musk calls “truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” One major factor that makes Grokipedia different from Musk’s other rival-fueled enterprises is that Wikipedia is quite popular, well-liked, and widely trusted. There’s no substantial burgeoning dissatisfaction with or opposition to Wikipedia fueling demand for an alternative. To the contrary, in the world of mass-market information, it’s one of the strongest brands out there. This wasn’t always the case. Founded in 2001, Wikipedia’s crowdsourced alternative to a traditional encyclopedia was treated with skepticism for its first decade or so, as consumers weighed the merits of formal expertise against what came to be called crowdsourcing. But by the mid-2010s, its trust grew even as long-established information brands struggled. For example, in a YouGov survey in the U.K., 64% of respondents said they trust Wikipedia “a great deal” or “a fair amount,” beating out the likes of the BBC and The Times; a five-country survey in 2019 found trust of Wikipedia at 78% or better. For techno-optimists, Wikipedia was touted as a portent of the internet’s utopian work-together future. In a world where top-down information “gatekeepers” were no longer trusted, Wikipedia attained a Web-era version of gravitas, a crowdsourced Walter Cronkite. That vision was replaced by the divisive realities of social media, but Wikipedia has hung on, remaining one of the world’s most popular sites, recognized as one of the great collective efforts of humanity, built on a robust internal debate structure from thousands upon thousands of individual contributors all around the world. Prior to Grokipedia’s launch, Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales spoke to The New York Times about his new book, which “tries to apply the lessons of Wikipedia’s success to our increasingly partisan, trust-depleted world.” On the subject of Musk, Wales shrugged: “We’ll be here in a hundred years and he won’t. As long as we stay Wikipedia, people will still love us.” The truth is that the rise of AI more generally could pose a threat to Wikipedia: AI summaries in Google searches are already said to be cutting into Wikipedia traffic, and that could impact the combination of donations and volunteers that keep the effort afloat. But as for Grokipedia itself, the site is off to a rocky start. Wired found that it “pushes far-right talking points” on gender and other issues. The Atlantic noted that the entry for Musk himself left out reference to his apparently pro-apartheid grandfather, but did note that he’d lost 20 pounds. Some found that Grokipedia had, in multiple cases, simply rehashed its rival’s entries, and others just saw it as a bland knockoff, the exact opposite of Wikipedia’s human touch and originality. (Musk’s xAI has not been transparent about exactly how entries are chosen or assembled, but reports suggest they appear to be generated by some iteration of its Grok chatbot, seemingly working off Wikipedia entries in at least some cases.) But even Cronkite had skeptics, so of course Wikipedia does, too. Musk’s complaints about the online encyclopedia (specifically his own entry) fall in line with a wider conservative line of attack. These critics insist that Wikipedia has “systemic ideological biases—particularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics.” (Or at least that’s what Grokipedia says.) In a war of credibility, Wikipedia has become a formidable opponent, maybe especially to Musk. “For many people, their level of trust in Elon Musk is extremely low because he says wild things all the time,” Wales told The Times. “When he attacks us, people donate more money.” View the full article

Business minister hails food group’s listing as sign of stock market revivalView the full article

A year ago, direct air capture—technology that pulls CO2 from the air—seemed ready to quickly scale in the U.S. Project Cypress, a massive undertaking in Louisiana designed to capture more than a million tons of CO2 each year, won $50 million in funding from the Department of Energy in early 2024. In Texas, another major direct air capture hub also won funding. Together, the projects were eligible for as much as $1.1 billion from the DOE, part of $3.5 billion Congress set aside for DAC hubs in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Climeworks, a pioneer in the industry and one of the partners on the Louisiana project, was hiring a U.S. team, scaling up a new plant in Iceland, and signing large deals to sell carbon removal to companies like British Airways and Morgan Stanley. Heirloom, another tech company working on the Louisiana hub, closed a $150 million Series B round of funding. CarbonCapture, another startup in the space, raised $80 million. Multiple other DAC projects also won DOE grants. The situation is different now. In one round of cuts, according to a leaked list, the DOE might revoke around $50 million in grants to 10 different direct air capture projects. (The cuts are part of more than $7.5 billion in cancellations for what the administration calls “Green New Scam” funding.) A second leaked spreadsheet suggests that the flagship hubs in Louisiana and Texas might also be at risk. Earlier this year, Heirloom laid off some workers and reportedly canceled a planned project. Climeworks also had a round of layoffs. At the same time, a few projects are moving forward, and one key tax credit is still in place. Government support isn’t the only thing keeping the industry afloat. But the technology is still in the so-called valley of death—the stage when it still hasn’t reached large-scale commercial deployment—and funding cuts would be a major blow. Even as other countries offer incentives, it could slow down the industry globally. “I think it could slow down substantially,” says Eric O’Rear, associate director at the economic and policy research firm the Rhodium Group. “If you look at it from a policy perspective, the U.S. was really dominating this space.” From boom to uncertainty As an industry, direct air capture is still in its infancy. The technology was proven in a lab 26 years ago, but the first commercial plant, run by Climeworks in Iceland, didn’t open until 2021. It was a milestone, but tiny compared to what’s needed: It captures 4,000 tons of CO2 a year, or roughly as much as driving 930 gas cars over the same period. To deal with climate change, the world may need to capture 10 billion tons of CO2 a year by the middle of the century, according to one National Academy of Sciences estimate. (That’s on top of radically cutting emissions, not as a replacement.) Critics have argued that the technology is too expensive to be a realistic solution. But the companies developing it say that scaling up will bring costs down, both because of economies of scale and because engineers can learn by doing, improving materials and processes as they go. “Our approach, ‘deployment-led innovation,’ involves running DAC plants in the field for rapid, real-world learning,” Climeworks CEO Christoph Gebald told Fast Company in 2024. Now the company says that one key component of its tech, the sorbent, lasts 10 times longer than before, and it’s working on cutting its energy use in half, which would also cut costs in half. The company aims for a cost of $250 to $350 per ton captured by 2030. Ultimately, the industry aims to achieve $100 per ton—a tipping point that would make it affordable enough to be deployed at a very large scale. The first corporate buyers are early-stage adopters willing to pay much higher prices to help the technology grow. The two large planned DAC plants in Louisiana and Texas could help accelerate that process. But the future of those projects is still not clear. In a statement after a leaked spreadsheet listed the projects, the Department of Energy said that “no additional projects have been terminated,” and that the DOE “continues to conduct an individualized and thorough review of financial awards made by the previous administration.” Both projects have bipartisan support from state leaders, and when they were on a DOE “hit list” earlier in 2025, Republican leaders helped keep Project Cypress alive, at least temporarily. But it’s possible neither project will continue. Smaller direct air capture hubs that had planned on DOE funding may also struggle to continue—or possibly move. CarbonCapture, a startup that planned to install its tech in Arizona this year, has already relocated that project to Canada, to a site called Deep Sky that’s designed to help multiple companies scale up their technology in one place. Deep Sky announced last week that it plans to build a second large facility in Canada. The Canadian government offers strong incentives for DAC companies to build new plants. Some other countries, from Denmark to Japan, also have incentives for DAC projects. “Globally, we are seeing carbon removal continuing to scale,” says Ben Rubin, executive director of the Carbon Business Council. “I think the big question is, who will be home to those economic benefits and who will be home to those jobs?” Project Cypress, for example, was expected to create 2,300 jobs and bring billions of dollars to Louisiana’s economy. For the climate, it doesn’t matter if direct air capture happens in the U.S. or Iceland or Kenya. But the U.S. government, under President Joe Biden, started to take a leadership role in helping the tech grow faster. The political changes could slow global progress. What’s moving forward Some DAC projects are still underway, with or without government support. In Texas, 1PointFive, a subsidiary of the oil giant Occidental, is building a sprawling facility that could capture up to 500,000 tons of CO2 a year. 1PointFive told Fast Company that the facility is on track to start running this year—at which point it will be the largest direct air capture operation in the world. Some of the captured CO2 could be injected underground to help get more oil out of old oil wells, a controversial move from a climate perspective. But some of it will also be permanently stored in deep rock formations or depleted oil or gas wells. Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency granted the company permits to inject millions of tons of CO2 in storage wells over the next 12 years. The captured CO2 could also be used to make everything from plastic to jet fuel. The project, called Stratos, doesn’t have any DOE funding. Microsoft, one of the project’s customers, agreed in 2024 to buy 500,000 tons of CO2 removal over the next six years, with the caveat that the CO2 won’t be used in oil production. BlackRock invested $550 million; the total cost may be more than $1.3 billion. Others are moving forward with smaller pilots. Avnos, a California-based startup, is nearing completion on a pilot called Project Brighton that was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, and plans to begin operation before the end of the year. The company has an unusual hybrid approach that could potentially reach low costs earlier than others like Climeworks. Along with capturing CO2, it also captures water. The tech’s design means that it can cut energy use in half or more, dramatically cutting the overall expense. (At its first large project, it expects to capture CO2 for less than $250 per ton; as it scales up, CEO Will Kain says, it has a “good line of sight” to $100 per ton.) Because the technology produces water from the air, it also has the opportunity to potentially be used at water-hungry data centers, or at facilities that want to use CO2 to make products like chemicals and need water for those processes as well. Avnos is involved in DAC hub projects with DOE funding, and hasn’t yet heard what the ultimate fate of those projects will be. But it also has deliberately looked for a variety of sources of funding for other projects. “We’re diversifying our sources of funding,” Kain says. How the industry could keep growing Kain is still optimistic about the industry. “The global momentum for carbon removal is very strong,” he says. Even in the U.S., when most of the clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act were axed by Congress this summer, a tax credit for direct air capture stayed in place and was actually expanded. (Now projects that use CO2 to make other products can get the same incentive as projects that permanently store CO2 underground.) If federal support for new projects wanes, as expected, “it certainly makes it harder for us to deploy first-of-a-kind pilots in the U.S.,” Kain says. “So companies like us have to get a little bit creative in how you fund.” Some companies are also working on new ways to lower the cost of direct air capture and work without government grants, including a Denver-based startup called Heimdal. The company has an unusual approach: Instead of using large fans to pull in air and extract CO2, it uses calcium oxide, a mineral that naturally reacts with the gas to capture it. “It’s very simple,” says Marcus Lima, cofounder and CEO. “It’s literally just spraying rocks on the ground.” The rocks are later heated up in a kiln to release the CO2 for storage or use. The cost is already low, at around $200 per ton. The startup opened a facility in Oklahoma in August 2024 that can capture up to 5,000 tons of CO2 per year. To help with costs, it makes some compromises that some competitors wouldn’t—selling the CO2 for use in oil production, and using natural gas as an energy source. But Lima argues that those are stepping stones toward an ideal for future operation. He also believes that companies should focus on bringing costs down without relying on grants. “My view is, at least for capital projects, federal funding should serve as an accelerant, as an enabler,” he says. “What we’re seeing now with the change of administration and the general cooling in the climate-tech capital markets is kind of a return to earth. Reality now starts to matter a lot more, because you don’t have hundreds of millions of dollars in the venture markets that you can just have like that. Projects need to make money.” Even companies with lower costs may face more challenges in getting investment now. “With this pullback in federal support, there is going to be increased uncertainty as it relates to how healthy the environment is for investing in the U.S.,” says Rhodium Group’s O’Rear. It still isn’t clear what will happen in the U.S. But more federal support would also help companies test a bigger variety of approaches to the technology. “We don’t know which of these technologies is going to be best at scale—best economic performance, best technical performance, the right kind of projects that communities want to host,” says Erin Burns, executive director of the carbon removal nonprofit Carbon180. As the world blows past 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, it makes sense to test as many solutions as possible. Without support, some nascent technologies may be lost completely. View the full article

Walk into any grocery store to stock up for Halloween and you will discover that, for chocolate treats, you have two basic choices: Will it be Mars or Hershey? I often buy both, but that is beside the point. The point is that the two giants compete for market share, but both enjoy robust sales. In other words, a relatively stable duopoly defines the U.S. chocolate candy market. But it wasn’t always like this. Before the 1960s, the Hershey Chocolate Corp. reigned supreme as the undisputed chocolate king. It was in that decade that Mars went for Hershey’s jugular. Hershey Chocolate’s response brought lasting change to its candy business, the local community, and Hershey Park, its chocolate-themed amusement park. As a professor of American studies at Penn State Harrisburg who has recently published a book on Hershey Park, I am astounded by how these changes continue to reverberate today. Milton Hershey’s paternalistic capitalism Before the 1960s, change was not a word one associated with either the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, or its famous chocolate company. Better words would be “stability” and “productivity”—and this was by the founder’s design. Milton Hershey When Milton Hershey entered the confection industry in the 1880s, violent clashes between corporations and labor roiled American society. Hershey imagined a better way: paternalistic capitalism. In the early 1900s, he built a chocolate factory and planned community out in the farms and pastures of central Pennsylvania. Instead of offering men and women wage-earning jobs and nothing else, he took care of his workers. They owned nice homes and benefited from a generous array of free or subsidized services and amenities: snow removal, garbage collection, trolley lines, good schools, a junior college, zoo, museum, sports arena, library, community center, and theater. They even had their own amusement park. But this was a reciprocal relationship. In return, employees were expected to work hard, exhibit loyalty, practice clean living, and refrain from labor agitation. With the exception of a strike during the Great Depression, the company and town lived in harmony. Milton Hershey called the place an “industrial utopia,” and residents largely agreed. “Moving to Hershey,” one recalled, “was like moving to paradise.” Harmony also defined Hershey’s relations with Mars. At the time, Hershey produced only solid chocolate—think of Hershey bars and Kisses. In contrast, Frank Mars’s company specialized in chocolate-covered snacks, such as Snickers or Milky Way, in which milk chocolate is poured over nuts, caramel, or nougat. Where did that chocolate coating come from? Hershey, of course. In those days, Mars was a client, not a rival. Without competition, Hershey enjoyed the luxury of not having to worry about market share. Amazingly, the company did not advertise under Milton Hershey and continued this policy after his death in 1945. Hershey in crisis Everything changed in 1964. The catalyst for change was Forrest Mars, the founder’s hard-charging son, who was a true disrupter. After seizing control of his father’s company, Forrest Mars set his sights on dethroning Hershey. As reporter and author Joël Glenn Brenner explains, the younger Mars boldly terminated the partnership with Hershey while ordering his engineers to learn how to make Hershey-caliber chocolate in six months. He also modernized the factory and ordered a surge in advertising, all to wrestle market share away from Hershey, the “sleeping giant.” The strategy worked. By the decade’s end, Mars had caught Hershey in terms of market share and pushed the chocolate colossus into crisis. The good news for Hershey was that it had at the helm two forward-looking leaders, Harold Mohler and Bill Dearden. Though standard practice had always been to hire locally and from within, Mohler and Dearden recruited outsiders with MBAs from Harvard and Wharton to initiate sweeping reforms aimed at modernizing its archaic business practices. The company opened a public relations office, conducted market research, installed IBM mainframe computers to crunch numbers, retrained its sales force, and created a marketing department. Many employees, a new executive joked, were so behind the times that they had thought marketing was “what their wives did . . . with a shopping cart.” This effort culminated with the release of the company’s first TV commercials starting in 1969. The sleeping giant had awoken. The company’s next move altered the town forever. As a cost-cutting measure, it terminated the free services and amenities at the core of Milton Hershey’s vision. The era of paternalism was over. As the company liquidated assets, residents howled in protest. “It was a very traumatic time for the community,” one executive recalled. For residents, the only consolation was that at least the amusement park would stay the same. Or would it? By the late 1960s, Hershey Park had degenerated into what one executive called “an iron park with a bunch of clanging rides.” Leadership faced a pivotal decision: renovate the park or close it forever. The park had such a “rich heritage,” one executive recalled, that to shutter it would “put a stamp of negative feeling within the community.” The company elected to renovate. Hersheypark’s transformation But how to renovate was another matter. In the 1960s and 1970s, owners of traditional amusement parks had to think twice before investing in their properties. That was because Disneyland, the nation’s first theme park, had caused a sensation when it debuted in 1955. Its incredible popularity, and the opening of the more spectacular Disney World in 1971, placed pressure on old-fashioned amusement parks everywhere. After commissioning a feasibility study, Hershey officials decided to gamble: Instead of fixing up the old amusement park, they would convert it into a Disney-style theme park. To pay for the massive overhaul, they redirected capital earned from the dismantling of Milton Hershey’s paternalism. Reborn as “Hersheypark” in 1973, the ever-growing complex has become a mecca for chocolate lovers and thrill-ride seekers from across the Northeast. Every year, Halloween reminds me of this remarkable transformation. The stores become stocked with Hershey brands, and the theme park comes alive with its spooky “Dark Nights” entertainment. In the past, workers at the Hershey plant would joke that they had “chocolate syrup in their veins.” These days, they clearly have innovation, too, and that creative spirit is largely due to Forrest Mars. By giving Hershey the jolt it needed, he shook up the status quo and changed the chocolate company, town, and park forever. Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. John Haddad is a professor of American studies at Penn State. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

The consulting firm Accenture recently laid off 11,000 employees while expanding its efforts to train workers to use artificial intelligence. It’s a sharp reminder that the same technology driving efficiency is also redefining what it takes to keep a job. And Accenture isn’t alone. IBM has already replaced hundreds of roles with AI systems, while creating new jobs in sales and marketing. Amazon cut staff even as it expands teams that build and manage AI tools. Across industries, from banks to hospitals and creative companies, workers and managers alike are trying to understand which roles will disappear, which will evolve, and which new ones will emerge. I research and teach at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business, studying how technology changes work and decision-making. My students often ask how they can stay employable in the age of AI. Executives ask me how to build trust in technology that seems to move faster than people can adapt to it. In the end, both groups are really asking the same thing: Which skills matter most in an economy where machines can learn? To answer this, I analyzed data from two surveys my colleagues and I conducted over this summer. For the first, the Data Integrity & AI Readiness Survey, we asked 550 companies across the country how they use and invest in AI. For the second, the College Hiring Outlook Survey, we looked at how 470 employers viewed entry-level hiring, workforce development, and AI skills in candidates. These studies show both sides of the equation: those building AI and those learning to work with it. AI is everywhere, but are people ready? More than half of organizations told us that AI now drives daily decision-making, yet only 38% believe their employees are fully prepared to use it. This gap is reshaping today’s job market. AI isn’t just replacing workers; it’s revealing who’s ready to work alongside it. Our data also shows a contradiction. While many companies now depend on AI internally, only 27% of recruiters say they’re comfortable with applicants using AI tools for tasks such as writing résumés or researching salary ranges. In other words, the same tools companies trust for business decisions still raise doubts when job seekers use them for career advancement. Until that view changes, even skilled workers will keep getting mixed messages about what “responsible AI use” really means. In the Data Integrity & AI Readiness Survey, this readiness gap showed up most clearly in customer-facing and operational jobs such as marketing and sales. These are the same areas where automation is advancing quickly, and layoffs tend to occur when technology evolves faster than people can adapt. At the same time, we found that many employers haven’t updated their degree or credential requirements. They’re still hiring for yesterday’s résumés while tomorrow’s work demands fluency in AI. The problem isn’t that people are being replaced by AI; it’s that technology is evolving faster than most workers can adapt. Fluency and trust: The real foundations of adaptability Our research suggests that the skills most closely linked with adaptability share one theme, what I call “human-AI fluency.” This means being able to work with smart systems, question their results, and keep learning as things change. Across companies, the biggest challenges lie in expanding AI, ensuring compliance with ethical and regulatory standards, and connecting AI to real business goals. These hurdles aren’t about coding; they’re about good judgment. In my classes, I emphasize that the future will favor people who can turn machine output into useful human insight. I call this digital bilingualism: the ability to fluently navigate both human judgment and machine logic. What management experts call “reskilling”—or learning new skills to adapt to a new role or major changes in an old one—works best when people feel safe to learn. In our Data Integrity & AI Readiness Survey, organizations with strong governance and high trust were nearly twice as likely to report gains in performance and innovation. The data suggests that when people trust their leaders and systems, they’re more willing to experiment and learn from mistakes. In that way, trust turns technology from something to fear into something to learn from, giving employees the confidence to adapt. According to the College Hiring Outlook Survey, about 86% of employers now offer internal training or online boot camps, yet only 36% say AI-related skills are important for entry-level roles. Most training still focuses on traditional skills rather than those needed for emerging AI jobs. The most successful companies make learning part of the job itself. They build opportunities to learn into real projects and encourage employees to experiment. I often remind leaders that the goal isn’t just to train people to use AI but to help them think alongside it. This is how trust becomes the foundation for growth, and how reskilling helps retain employees. The new rules of hiring In my view, the companies leading in AI aren’t just cutting jobs; they’re redefining them. To succeed, I believe companies will need to hire people who can connect technology with good judgment, question what AI produces, explain it clearly, and turn it into business value. In companies that are putting AI to work most effectively, hiring isn’t just about resumes anymore. What matters is how people apply traits like curiosity and judgment to intelligent tools. I believe these trends are leading to new hybrid roles such as AI translators, who help decision-makers understand what AI insights mean and how to act on them, and digital coaches, who teach teams to work alongside intelligent systems. Each of these roles connects human judgment with machine intelligence, showing how future jobs will blend technical skills with human insight. That blend of judgment and adaptability is the new competitive advantage. The future won’t just reward the most technical workers, but those who can turn intelligence—human or artificial—into real-world value. Murugan Anandarajan is a professor of decision sciences and management information systems at Drexel University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article