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A sole proprietorship application is vital for officially establishing your business as a sole proprietorship. It typically involves filing an Assumed Name Certificate if your business name doesn’t match your own. You’ll need to visit your county clerk’s office, complete the necessary forms, and pay a fee that varies by location. Comprehending the steps, including obtaining an Employer Identification Number and necessary permits, is critical for compliance. So, what’s next in the process? Key Takeaways A sole proprietorship application typically involves filing an Assumed Name Certificate (DBA) if the business name differs from the owner’s name. The filing process for a DBA is quick, usually taking just a few minutes, but may vary by county. Obtain an Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the IRS to distinguish personal and business finances and for tax purposes. Register for any necessary permits and licenses based on your business type and local regulations to operate legally. Maintain accurate records of your business activities for tax reporting and compliance with local and federal regulations. Understanding Sole Proprietorships A sole proprietorship is a straightforward business structure that you might consider if you’re looking to start your own venture. It’s owned and operated by a single individual, meaning there’s no legal distinction between you and your business. This simplicity makes it an attractive choice for entrepreneurs, especially when starting a business in California. Establishing a sole proprietorship requires minimal paperwork, primarily a sole proprietorship application and possibly a business license in California, depending on your location and industry. However, it’s essential to understand that as the owner, you’re personally liable for all debts and liabilities incurred by the business, which puts your personal assets at risk. On the upside, you can report your business profits and losses on your personal income tax return, benefiting from pass-through taxation. This ease of setup and tax advantages contribute to the popularity of sole proprietorships among solo entrepreneurs. Forms Required for Sole Proprietorships When you’re running a sole proprietorship, comprehending the forms you need to file is vital for compliance. You may have to submit an Assumed Name Certificate if you’re using a business name that isn’t your own, and the specific forms can vary depending on your business activities. Moreover, staying on top of your tax obligations is fundamental, so make sure you utilize resources like the Business Tax Account to keep everything in order. Required Filing Forms Maneuvering the required filing forms for a sole proprietorship can seem overwhelming, but comprehending the fundamentals can simplify the process. You’ll likely need an Assumed Name Certificate (DBA) if your business operates under a different name. The specific forms depend on your activities and local regulations, so be sure to review those. Here’s a quick look at some crucial forms: Form Purpose Assumed Name Certificate Register a business name different from yours IRS Form 1040 Report your personal income, including business Form 1099 Report payments made to contractors, if applicable Business License Required to legally operate in your area Sales Tax Permit Necessary for selling taxable goods and services To learn how to apply for a business license in California, check local guidelines on types of business licenses and how to open a company in California. Tax Compliance Obligations Comprehending your tax compliance obligations is fundamental for managing a sole proprietorship effectively. You’ll need to file various forms based on your business activities. For tax year 2022 and onward, guarantee you e-file Form 1099 using the Information Returns Intake System (IRIS) to avoid penalties. Maintaining accurate records is vital for proper reporting and compliance with tax regulations. Furthermore, eligible business taxpayers can access their information through the Business Tax Account, which aids in filing. If you’re unsure about how to obtain a business license in California or how to acquire a business license in California, consider consulting with tax professionals. They can help you navigate your specific filing needs and deadlines efficiently. E-Filing Information Returns With IRIS E-filing your information returns through the Information Returns Intake System (IRIS) offers significant benefits, including improved accuracy and efficiency. By submitting your forms electronically, you can streamline the reporting process and minimize the risk of errors that often come with paper submissions. Timely submission is essential, as it helps you avoid penalties associated with late filings and guarantees compliance with the latest tax regulations. E-filing Benefits for Owners Managing the intricacies of tax reporting can feel overwhelming, but e-filing through the Information Returns Intake System (IRIS) offers significant benefits for sole proprietors. Starting with the mandatory e-filing of Form 1099 for tax years 2022 and beyond, this system streamlines your reporting process. The user-friendly IRIS platform enables you to file your information returns efficiently, simplifying record-keeping and ensuring compliance with tax regulations. You can easily access your business tax account online, which helps you retrieve necessary details for accurate submissions. Furthermore, e-filing reduces the risk of errors, making it easier to manage your tax obligations. Timely Submission Importance Submitting your information returns on time is fundamental for avoiding penalties and ensuring compliance with IRS regulations. E-filing Form 1099 is now mandatory for the tax year 2022 and later, making it important for sole proprietors to meet these deadlines. The Information Returns Intake System (IRIS) offers a streamlined platform for e-filing, simplifying the reporting process. By submitting your forms through IRIS on time, you can prevent potential penalties and fulfill your tax obligations swiftly. Moreover, e-filing accelerates the processing of your tax information, providing benefits for your business. Staying updated on e-filing requirements is critical for maintaining good standing with tax authorities and steering clear of late fees, ensuring your sole proprietorship operates smoothly. Steps to Start a Sole Proprietorship in Texas Starting a sole proprietorship in Texas involves several essential steps to guarantee your business is legally compliant and ready to operate. First, choose a unique business name that adheres to naming regulations, avoiding any misleading implications of government affiliation. If you plan to operate under a name other than your legal name, file an Assumed Name Certificate (DBA) with the county clerk’s office, which typically involves a small fee. Next, obtain an Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the IRS for tax purposes, separating your personal and business finances, and you can do this online at no cost. Moreover, register for state taxes, including a sales tax permit if you’re selling goods or services, through the Texas Comptroller‘s website. Finally, maintain proper business records, including financial documentation and licenses, to guarantee compliance with local, state, and federal requirements as you operate your sole proprietorship. Choosing a Business Name How do you choose the right business name for your sole proprietorship? Start by selecting a name that reflects your business’s nature and complies with local naming regulations. You can use your personal name without extra filings, but a different name requires an Assumed Name Certificate (DBA). Always check if your desired name is available to avoid conflicts with existing trademarks. A simple, memorable name can boost your brand identity, making it easier for customers to find you. Furthermore, verify the availability of matching domain names and social media handles for a consistent online presence. Criteria Considerations Examples Name Reflection Aligns with business type John’s Bakery Availability Unique without trademark conflict Tech Innovations Online Presence Matching domain and social handles StylishWares.com Choosing wisely sets the tone for your business. Filing an Assumed Name (DBA) Choosing a business name is only the first step; if you decide to operate under a name that differs from your legal name, filing for a DBA (Doing Business As) is essential. This process allows you to improve your branding and establish a unique identity. Here’s what you need to know about filing a DBA: Complete the Assumed Name Certificate at your county clerk’s office. Be prepared to pay a small fee, which varies by county. The filing process usually takes only a few minutes. Processing times may vary based on your county’s workload. Check for name availability to avoid conflicts with existing businesses before submitting your application. Keep in mind that a DBA doesn’t grant exclusive rights to the name, so others may still use it unless it’s trademarked. Taking these steps guarantees your business name aligns with your entrepreneurial vision. Obtaining Necessary Permits and Licenses Before you can successfully launch your sole proprietorship, obtaining the necessary permits and licenses is essential to guarantee compliance with local regulations. Each industry has specific requirements, which can vary greatly by location. You might need a general business license from your local government, along with any industry-specific permits, like health permits for food-related businesses. To help you navigate this process, check the table below: Permit/License Type Description General Business License Required to operate legally Health Permit Necessary for food-related businesses Industry-Specific Permit Varies based on your business type DBA Filing Needed if operating under a different name It’s important to contact local authorities or visit their websites for detailed licensing requirements. Failing to secure the right permits can lead to fines and legal troubles, jeopardizing your business operation. Getting an Employer Identification Number (EIN) Getting an Employer Identification Number (EIN) is a vital step for your sole proprietorship, as it helps you separate your personal and business finances. You can apply for an EIN online through the IRS website, and the process is quick and free, giving you immediate access to this important number. Whether you plan to open a business bank account or hire employees, having an EIN is often fundamental for managing your business effectively. EIN Application Process When you’re ready to establish your sole proprietorship, applying for an Employer Identification Number (EIN) is a crucial step, especially if you plan to hire employees or want to keep your personal and business finances separate. You can complete the EIN application process in several ways: Apply online through the IRS website for immediate approval. Submit Form SS-4 via mail or fax, which may take weeks to process. There’s no fee for obtaining an EIN. You can apply even without employees to help separate finances. Make certain you have a valid Taxpayer Identification Number for the application. Securing your EIN is a straightforward and cost-effective step in setting up your business structure. Importance of EIN Acquiring an Employer Identification Number (EIN) is a significant step for any sole proprietor, regardless of whether it’s not legally required in every situation. An EIN serves multiple purposes that can improve your business’s operations and credibility. Here’s a quick overview of its importance: Benefits of EIN Description Distinguishes Business Finances Separates personal and business finances effectively. Facilitates Hiring Employees Necessary for payroll and tax reporting if you hire. Enables Business Banking Required for opening a business bank account. Supports Credit Establishment Helps in establishing business credit. Aids in Licensing Crucial for applying for permits or licenses. Obtaining an EIN can streamline your business processes and boost professionalism. Registering for State Taxes To guarantee compliance with state regulations, sole proprietors in Texas must register for state taxes, which includes obtaining a sales tax permit if you’re selling tangible goods or taxable services. You can find the necessary forms and guidelines on the Texas Comptroller’s website. Here’s what you need to know: There’s no fee for the Texas Sales & Use Tax permit, but a security bond may be required based on your business activities. Be mindful of franchise tax obligations if your gross receipts exceed $1,230,000. Timely registration is essential to avoid penalties. Operating without the necessary permits can lead to fines. Failing to remit collected taxes might incur additional charges. Managing Costs of Establishing a Sole Proprietorship Establishing a sole proprietorship can be quite affordable, making it an attractive option for many entrepreneurs. The primary costs you’ll encounter typically involve filing a Doing Business As (DBA) name, which can range from $10 to $50 based on your county. Furthermore, general business licenses may cost between $50 and $100, whereas industry-specific permits can vary widely, costing anywhere from $25 to several hundred dollars. Typically, your total setup costs will fall between $20 and $200, depending on local requirements and your business type. Even though no formal registration is required to start a sole proprietorship, obtaining necessary permits and licenses is essential to avoid fines and legal issues. You can likewise get an Employer Identification Number (EIN) for free from the IRS, which helps separate your personal and business finances, making your accounting much simpler. Frequently Asked Questions How Do I Set Myself up as a Sole Proprietor? To set yourself up as a sole proprietor, start by choosing a unique business name, then decide if you’ll use your personal name or file a DBA. Obtain necessary permits and licenses based on your industry and local regulations. Apply for an Employer Identification Number (EIN) through the IRS to separate your finances. Register for state taxes if needed, and open a business bank account to simplify accounting and protect your personal assets. How Much Is It to Start a Sole Proprietorship in Texas? Starting a sole proprietorship in Texas typically costs between $20 and $200. You’ll need to file a DBA, which can range from $10 to $50, and obtain any necessary general business licenses, costing between $50 and $100. Depending on your business type, you might likewise need industry-specific permits, which can vary widely. Don’t forget, filing for an Employer Identification Number (EIN) with the IRS is free, helping you keep personal and business finances separate. What Does It Mean to File as a Sole Proprietor? Filing as a sole proprietor means you’re operating your business under your own name or a registered DBA, without creating a separate legal entity. You report all your business income on your personal tax return using Form 1040, which means your profits are taxed as personal income. You’re personally liable for all business debts, exposing your personal assets to risk. It’s essential to comply with local, state, and federal regulations to operate legally. How Much Does a Sole Proprietorship Have to Make to File Taxes? You must file taxes as a sole proprietor if your business earns $400 or more in net income during the tax year. This requirement triggers self-employment tax obligations. You’ll report your income and expenses on Schedule C, which you attach to your personal Form 1040. Regardless of whether your business operates at a loss, it’s crucial to file, as those losses can offset other income, potentially reducing your overall tax liability. Conclusion In conclusion, filing a sole proprietorship application is a straightforward process that involves submitting an Assumed Name Certificate, obtaining necessary permits, and securing an Employer Identification Number (EIN). By following the outlined steps, such as choosing a suitable business name and registering for state taxes, you can effectively establish your business. Staying organized and compliant with local regulations guarantees a smooth start for your sole proprietorship, setting the foundation for your entrepreneurial adventure. Image via Google Gemini This article, "What Is a Sole Proprietorship Application and How to File It?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

A sole proprietorship application is vital for officially establishing your business as a sole proprietorship. It typically involves filing an Assumed Name Certificate if your business name doesn’t match your own. You’ll need to visit your county clerk’s office, complete the necessary forms, and pay a fee that varies by location. Comprehending the steps, including obtaining an Employer Identification Number and necessary permits, is critical for compliance. So, what’s next in the process? Key Takeaways A sole proprietorship application typically involves filing an Assumed Name Certificate (DBA) if the business name differs from the owner’s name. The filing process for a DBA is quick, usually taking just a few minutes, but may vary by county. Obtain an Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the IRS to distinguish personal and business finances and for tax purposes. Register for any necessary permits and licenses based on your business type and local regulations to operate legally. Maintain accurate records of your business activities for tax reporting and compliance with local and federal regulations. Understanding Sole Proprietorships A sole proprietorship is a straightforward business structure that you might consider if you’re looking to start your own venture. It’s owned and operated by a single individual, meaning there’s no legal distinction between you and your business. This simplicity makes it an attractive choice for entrepreneurs, especially when starting a business in California. Establishing a sole proprietorship requires minimal paperwork, primarily a sole proprietorship application and possibly a business license in California, depending on your location and industry. However, it’s essential to understand that as the owner, you’re personally liable for all debts and liabilities incurred by the business, which puts your personal assets at risk. On the upside, you can report your business profits and losses on your personal income tax return, benefiting from pass-through taxation. This ease of setup and tax advantages contribute to the popularity of sole proprietorships among solo entrepreneurs. Forms Required for Sole Proprietorships When you’re running a sole proprietorship, comprehending the forms you need to file is vital for compliance. You may have to submit an Assumed Name Certificate if you’re using a business name that isn’t your own, and the specific forms can vary depending on your business activities. Moreover, staying on top of your tax obligations is fundamental, so make sure you utilize resources like the Business Tax Account to keep everything in order. Required Filing Forms Maneuvering the required filing forms for a sole proprietorship can seem overwhelming, but comprehending the fundamentals can simplify the process. You’ll likely need an Assumed Name Certificate (DBA) if your business operates under a different name. The specific forms depend on your activities and local regulations, so be sure to review those. Here’s a quick look at some crucial forms: Form Purpose Assumed Name Certificate Register a business name different from yours IRS Form 1040 Report your personal income, including business Form 1099 Report payments made to contractors, if applicable Business License Required to legally operate in your area Sales Tax Permit Necessary for selling taxable goods and services To learn how to apply for a business license in California, check local guidelines on types of business licenses and how to open a company in California. Tax Compliance Obligations Comprehending your tax compliance obligations is fundamental for managing a sole proprietorship effectively. You’ll need to file various forms based on your business activities. For tax year 2022 and onward, guarantee you e-file Form 1099 using the Information Returns Intake System (IRIS) to avoid penalties. Maintaining accurate records is vital for proper reporting and compliance with tax regulations. Furthermore, eligible business taxpayers can access their information through the Business Tax Account, which aids in filing. If you’re unsure about how to obtain a business license in California or how to acquire a business license in California, consider consulting with tax professionals. They can help you navigate your specific filing needs and deadlines efficiently. E-Filing Information Returns With IRIS E-filing your information returns through the Information Returns Intake System (IRIS) offers significant benefits, including improved accuracy and efficiency. By submitting your forms electronically, you can streamline the reporting process and minimize the risk of errors that often come with paper submissions. Timely submission is essential, as it helps you avoid penalties associated with late filings and guarantees compliance with the latest tax regulations. E-filing Benefits for Owners Managing the intricacies of tax reporting can feel overwhelming, but e-filing through the Information Returns Intake System (IRIS) offers significant benefits for sole proprietors. Starting with the mandatory e-filing of Form 1099 for tax years 2022 and beyond, this system streamlines your reporting process. The user-friendly IRIS platform enables you to file your information returns efficiently, simplifying record-keeping and ensuring compliance with tax regulations. You can easily access your business tax account online, which helps you retrieve necessary details for accurate submissions. Furthermore, e-filing reduces the risk of errors, making it easier to manage your tax obligations. Timely Submission Importance Submitting your information returns on time is fundamental for avoiding penalties and ensuring compliance with IRS regulations. E-filing Form 1099 is now mandatory for the tax year 2022 and later, making it important for sole proprietors to meet these deadlines. The Information Returns Intake System (IRIS) offers a streamlined platform for e-filing, simplifying the reporting process. By submitting your forms through IRIS on time, you can prevent potential penalties and fulfill your tax obligations swiftly. Moreover, e-filing accelerates the processing of your tax information, providing benefits for your business. Staying updated on e-filing requirements is critical for maintaining good standing with tax authorities and steering clear of late fees, ensuring your sole proprietorship operates smoothly. Steps to Start a Sole Proprietorship in Texas Starting a sole proprietorship in Texas involves several essential steps to guarantee your business is legally compliant and ready to operate. First, choose a unique business name that adheres to naming regulations, avoiding any misleading implications of government affiliation. If you plan to operate under a name other than your legal name, file an Assumed Name Certificate (DBA) with the county clerk’s office, which typically involves a small fee. Next, obtain an Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the IRS for tax purposes, separating your personal and business finances, and you can do this online at no cost. Moreover, register for state taxes, including a sales tax permit if you’re selling goods or services, through the Texas Comptroller‘s website. Finally, maintain proper business records, including financial documentation and licenses, to guarantee compliance with local, state, and federal requirements as you operate your sole proprietorship. Choosing a Business Name How do you choose the right business name for your sole proprietorship? Start by selecting a name that reflects your business’s nature and complies with local naming regulations. You can use your personal name without extra filings, but a different name requires an Assumed Name Certificate (DBA). Always check if your desired name is available to avoid conflicts with existing trademarks. A simple, memorable name can boost your brand identity, making it easier for customers to find you. Furthermore, verify the availability of matching domain names and social media handles for a consistent online presence. Criteria Considerations Examples Name Reflection Aligns with business type John’s Bakery Availability Unique without trademark conflict Tech Innovations Online Presence Matching domain and social handles StylishWares.com Choosing wisely sets the tone for your business. Filing an Assumed Name (DBA) Choosing a business name is only the first step; if you decide to operate under a name that differs from your legal name, filing for a DBA (Doing Business As) is essential. This process allows you to improve your branding and establish a unique identity. Here’s what you need to know about filing a DBA: Complete the Assumed Name Certificate at your county clerk’s office. Be prepared to pay a small fee, which varies by county. The filing process usually takes only a few minutes. Processing times may vary based on your county’s workload. Check for name availability to avoid conflicts with existing businesses before submitting your application. Keep in mind that a DBA doesn’t grant exclusive rights to the name, so others may still use it unless it’s trademarked. Taking these steps guarantees your business name aligns with your entrepreneurial vision. Obtaining Necessary Permits and Licenses Before you can successfully launch your sole proprietorship, obtaining the necessary permits and licenses is essential to guarantee compliance with local regulations. Each industry has specific requirements, which can vary greatly by location. You might need a general business license from your local government, along with any industry-specific permits, like health permits for food-related businesses. To help you navigate this process, check the table below: Permit/License Type Description General Business License Required to operate legally Health Permit Necessary for food-related businesses Industry-Specific Permit Varies based on your business type DBA Filing Needed if operating under a different name It’s important to contact local authorities or visit their websites for detailed licensing requirements. Failing to secure the right permits can lead to fines and legal troubles, jeopardizing your business operation. Getting an Employer Identification Number (EIN) Getting an Employer Identification Number (EIN) is a vital step for your sole proprietorship, as it helps you separate your personal and business finances. You can apply for an EIN online through the IRS website, and the process is quick and free, giving you immediate access to this important number. Whether you plan to open a business bank account or hire employees, having an EIN is often fundamental for managing your business effectively. EIN Application Process When you’re ready to establish your sole proprietorship, applying for an Employer Identification Number (EIN) is a crucial step, especially if you plan to hire employees or want to keep your personal and business finances separate. You can complete the EIN application process in several ways: Apply online through the IRS website for immediate approval. Submit Form SS-4 via mail or fax, which may take weeks to process. There’s no fee for obtaining an EIN. You can apply even without employees to help separate finances. Make certain you have a valid Taxpayer Identification Number for the application. Securing your EIN is a straightforward and cost-effective step in setting up your business structure. Importance of EIN Acquiring an Employer Identification Number (EIN) is a significant step for any sole proprietor, regardless of whether it’s not legally required in every situation. An EIN serves multiple purposes that can improve your business’s operations and credibility. Here’s a quick overview of its importance: Benefits of EIN Description Distinguishes Business Finances Separates personal and business finances effectively. Facilitates Hiring Employees Necessary for payroll and tax reporting if you hire. Enables Business Banking Required for opening a business bank account. Supports Credit Establishment Helps in establishing business credit. Aids in Licensing Crucial for applying for permits or licenses. Obtaining an EIN can streamline your business processes and boost professionalism. Registering for State Taxes To guarantee compliance with state regulations, sole proprietors in Texas must register for state taxes, which includes obtaining a sales tax permit if you’re selling tangible goods or taxable services. You can find the necessary forms and guidelines on the Texas Comptroller’s website. Here’s what you need to know: There’s no fee for the Texas Sales & Use Tax permit, but a security bond may be required based on your business activities. Be mindful of franchise tax obligations if your gross receipts exceed $1,230,000. Timely registration is essential to avoid penalties. Operating without the necessary permits can lead to fines. Failing to remit collected taxes might incur additional charges. Managing Costs of Establishing a Sole Proprietorship Establishing a sole proprietorship can be quite affordable, making it an attractive option for many entrepreneurs. The primary costs you’ll encounter typically involve filing a Doing Business As (DBA) name, which can range from $10 to $50 based on your county. Furthermore, general business licenses may cost between $50 and $100, whereas industry-specific permits can vary widely, costing anywhere from $25 to several hundred dollars. Typically, your total setup costs will fall between $20 and $200, depending on local requirements and your business type. Even though no formal registration is required to start a sole proprietorship, obtaining necessary permits and licenses is essential to avoid fines and legal issues. You can likewise get an Employer Identification Number (EIN) for free from the IRS, which helps separate your personal and business finances, making your accounting much simpler. Frequently Asked Questions How Do I Set Myself up as a Sole Proprietor? To set yourself up as a sole proprietor, start by choosing a unique business name, then decide if you’ll use your personal name or file a DBA. Obtain necessary permits and licenses based on your industry and local regulations. Apply for an Employer Identification Number (EIN) through the IRS to separate your finances. Register for state taxes if needed, and open a business bank account to simplify accounting and protect your personal assets. How Much Is It to Start a Sole Proprietorship in Texas? Starting a sole proprietorship in Texas typically costs between $20 and $200. You’ll need to file a DBA, which can range from $10 to $50, and obtain any necessary general business licenses, costing between $50 and $100. Depending on your business type, you might likewise need industry-specific permits, which can vary widely. Don’t forget, filing for an Employer Identification Number (EIN) with the IRS is free, helping you keep personal and business finances separate. What Does It Mean to File as a Sole Proprietor? Filing as a sole proprietor means you’re operating your business under your own name or a registered DBA, without creating a separate legal entity. You report all your business income on your personal tax return using Form 1040, which means your profits are taxed as personal income. You’re personally liable for all business debts, exposing your personal assets to risk. It’s essential to comply with local, state, and federal regulations to operate legally. How Much Does a Sole Proprietorship Have to Make to File Taxes? You must file taxes as a sole proprietor if your business earns $400 or more in net income during the tax year. This requirement triggers self-employment tax obligations. You’ll report your income and expenses on Schedule C, which you attach to your personal Form 1040. Regardless of whether your business operates at a loss, it’s crucial to file, as those losses can offset other income, potentially reducing your overall tax liability. Conclusion In conclusion, filing a sole proprietorship application is a straightforward process that involves submitting an Assumed Name Certificate, obtaining necessary permits, and securing an Employer Identification Number (EIN). By following the outlined steps, such as choosing a suitable business name and registering for state taxes, you can effectively establish your business. Staying organized and compliant with local regulations guarantees a smooth start for your sole proprietorship, setting the foundation for your entrepreneurial adventure. Image via Google Gemini This article, "What Is a Sole Proprietorship Application and How to File It?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Similarweb published some data sharing the click-through rates for OpenAI's ChatGPT ads. The overall CTR for ChatGPT ads are 0.68%, the top quartile is 1%, the best brands are 1.57% and the peak CTR is 5.4%.View the full article

The short answer: A new global study of 3,322 businesses confirms that small businesses face identical credential threats as large enterprises (phishing, weak passwords, insider risk) but more than half have no dedicated security team, no password manager, and no realistic path to the AI-powered defenses they believe they need. Do Small Businesses Need to Worry About Password Security? One in three businesses globally was hit by a confirmed cyberattack in the past year. That number holds regardless of company size. Small businesses are not smaller targets; they are easier ones, because attackers know the defenses are thinner. The 2026 State of Workforce Password Security report, based on 3,322 verified respondents across nine regions and six industries, makes this uncomfortably clear. The threat landscape for a 20-person business is functionally the same as for a 2,000-person enterprise. The difference is what happens after the first attempt. Large companies have security teams, access governance systems, and incident response plans. Most small businesses have none of those things, and more than half report no dedicated security staff at all. That gap is the story. And it starts with something as unglamorous as a password. How Too Many Apps Are Creating a Security Problem You Can’t See Think about how many tools your team uses on a given workday. Email. A project management platform. Accounting software. A CRM. A scheduling tool. Maybe a few others. Across the businesses surveyed in this report, 59% of employees globally use 15 or more business apps for work. For US workers specifically, that number climbs to 63%. Each one of those apps requires a password. In theory, each one should be a unique, strong string of characters that isn’t reused across accounts. In practice, most small businesses are managing this with browser-saved credentials, shared spreadsheets, or informal “ask your manager” policies. No one is watching this surface area grow, because there is no one whose job it is to watch it. This is what the report calls the “application sprawl problem.” Every new app your team adopts without a proper credential policy is another open door. The question is not whether attackers will find them, but when. The Tools Small Businesses Are Missing and What It’s Costing Them Here is the statistic that should worry every small business owner: only 26% of organizations globally use a dedicated password manager. That means three out of four businesses, regardless of size are managing employee credentials through informal means. For small businesses without an IT team, that number is effectively lower. The report is direct about this: SMBs rely on “manual password hygiene, shared spreadsheets, and informal policies.” If that description fits your business, you are in the majority. That does not make it acceptable. The threats most likely to exploit this gap are not exotic. Phishing and social engineering top the threat list at 68% of organizations globally, followed by weak or reused passwords at 61%. These are not sophisticated zero-day attacks. They are predictable, well-understood vulnerabilities that basic credential hygiene addresses directly. The reason they keep working is that most businesses have not deployed even the basics. The report also found that 74% of organizations globally lack complete visibility into who has access to what within their own systems. Employees who leave companies often retain access to tools they used. Role changes rarely trigger access reviews. For a small business with no one monitoring this, those orphaned accounts accumulate quietly until something goes wrong. Small Businesses Have Too Much Faith in AI Solving Security Issues Nine in ten respondents across the survey believe AI will strengthen their security posture. It is an understandable belief. AI-powered threat detection, behavioral analytics, and automated policy enforcement are genuinely promising capabilities. The problem is the gap between belief and reality. Only 8% of organizations globally are ready to deploy AI-powered security right now. That is an 82-point gap between enthusiasm and readiness. For small businesses, the report describes AI readiness as “near-zero without managed service delivery.” The primary barrier is not cost; it is legacy infrastructure that cannot support AI deployment. The risk for small businesses is not that they are skeptical of AI. It is that they might skip foundational security steps while waiting for AI to arrive as a shortcut. The report’s recommended sequence is clear: credential governance first, a Zero Trust framework second, AI-enhanced monitoring third. Jumping to step three without completing steps one and two does not accelerate security maturity. This matters because 65% of organizations globally still lack a Zero Trust security strategy. For most small businesses, Zero Trust adoption is effectively nonexistent. That’s a significant window of vulnerability, and no AI tool closes it. Next Steps for Small Businesses The report makes a compelling case that budget is not the main constraint on security maturity. Rather, the issues are architecture, talent, and visibility. The good news is that the foundational steps do not require a security team or a large budget. Start by auditing which apps your team actually uses and identifying which credentials are shared or saved in browsers. Then deploy a cloud-managed password manager with built-in defaults, one that does not require an IT administrator to configure and maintain. If you already use multi-factor authentication, pair it with a real password policy enforced by the manager rather than relying on MFA alone. As the report notes, MFA without strong underlying credentials is “a speed bump, not a barrier.” None of this requires waiting for AI. The threats hitting small businesses today are the same ones that hit them ten years ago. They keep working because the defenses have not caught up. That is the one gap you can actually close right now. Additional Questions, Answered What is the biggest password security mistake small businesses make? Relying on individual employees to create and remember strong, unique passwords for every business app they use. Without a centralized password manager enforcing policy, most employees reuse passwords or choose weak ones, and most businesses have no way to know when that happens. Credential reuse is the root cause of credential stuffing attacks, which 47% of organizations globally identified as a top threat. Do I need a dedicated IT team to protect my business from credential threats? No, but you do need the right tools. Cloud-managed password managers with opinionated defaults are specifically designed for businesses without IT staff. They enforce strong passwords automatically, manage access without requiring ongoing configuration, and integrate with the apps your team already uses. The report distinguishes between tools built for enterprises that require a full-time administrator and tools built for SMBs that work out of the box. Is a password manager actually worth it for a small company? Yes, particularly given the numbers. One in three businesses was hit by a cyberattack last year, and weak or reused passwords were a top threat factor in 61% of cases. A password manager is the most under-deployed, table-stakes security measure available. And for a business with five employees or fifty, it is the single most impactful step you can take this week. Image via Gemini This article, "Your Small Business Faces the Same Cyber Threats as Big Companies — Without Any of the Defenses " was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

The short answer: A new global study of 3,322 businesses confirms that small businesses face identical credential threats as large enterprises (phishing, weak passwords, insider risk) but more than half have no dedicated security team, no password manager, and no realistic path to the AI-powered defenses they believe they need. Do Small Businesses Need to Worry About Password Security? One in three businesses globally was hit by a confirmed cyberattack in the past year. That number holds regardless of company size. Small businesses are not smaller targets; they are easier ones, because attackers know the defenses are thinner. The 2026 State of Workforce Password Security report, based on 3,322 verified respondents across nine regions and six industries, makes this uncomfortably clear. The threat landscape for a 20-person business is functionally the same as for a 2,000-person enterprise. The difference is what happens after the first attempt. Large companies have security teams, access governance systems, and incident response plans. Most small businesses have none of those things, and more than half report no dedicated security staff at all. That gap is the story. And it starts with something as unglamorous as a password. How Too Many Apps Are Creating a Security Problem You Can’t See Think about how many tools your team uses on a given workday. Email. A project management platform. Accounting software. A CRM. A scheduling tool. Maybe a few others. Across the businesses surveyed in this report, 59% of employees globally use 15 or more business apps for work. For US workers specifically, that number climbs to 63%. Each one of those apps requires a password. In theory, each one should be a unique, strong string of characters that isn’t reused across accounts. In practice, most small businesses are managing this with browser-saved credentials, shared spreadsheets, or informal “ask your manager” policies. No one is watching this surface area grow, because there is no one whose job it is to watch it. This is what the report calls the “application sprawl problem.” Every new app your team adopts without a proper credential policy is another open door. The question is not whether attackers will find them, but when. The Tools Small Businesses Are Missing and What It’s Costing Them Here is the statistic that should worry every small business owner: only 26% of organizations globally use a dedicated password manager. That means three out of four businesses, regardless of size are managing employee credentials through informal means. For small businesses without an IT team, that number is effectively lower. The report is direct about this: SMBs rely on “manual password hygiene, shared spreadsheets, and informal policies.” If that description fits your business, you are in the majority. That does not make it acceptable. The threats most likely to exploit this gap are not exotic. Phishing and social engineering top the threat list at 68% of organizations globally, followed by weak or reused passwords at 61%. These are not sophisticated zero-day attacks. They are predictable, well-understood vulnerabilities that basic credential hygiene addresses directly. The reason they keep working is that most businesses have not deployed even the basics. The report also found that 74% of organizations globally lack complete visibility into who has access to what within their own systems. Employees who leave companies often retain access to tools they used. Role changes rarely trigger access reviews. For a small business with no one monitoring this, those orphaned accounts accumulate quietly until something goes wrong. Small Businesses Have Too Much Faith in AI Solving Security Issues Nine in ten respondents across the survey believe AI will strengthen their security posture. It is an understandable belief. AI-powered threat detection, behavioral analytics, and automated policy enforcement are genuinely promising capabilities. The problem is the gap between belief and reality. Only 8% of organizations globally are ready to deploy AI-powered security right now. That is an 82-point gap between enthusiasm and readiness. For small businesses, the report describes AI readiness as “near-zero without managed service delivery.” The primary barrier is not cost; it is legacy infrastructure that cannot support AI deployment. The risk for small businesses is not that they are skeptical of AI. It is that they might skip foundational security steps while waiting for AI to arrive as a shortcut. The report’s recommended sequence is clear: credential governance first, a Zero Trust framework second, AI-enhanced monitoring third. Jumping to step three without completing steps one and two does not accelerate security maturity. This matters because 65% of organizations globally still lack a Zero Trust security strategy. For most small businesses, Zero Trust adoption is effectively nonexistent. That’s a significant window of vulnerability, and no AI tool closes it. Next Steps for Small Businesses The report makes a compelling case that budget is not the main constraint on security maturity. Rather, the issues are architecture, talent, and visibility. The good news is that the foundational steps do not require a security team or a large budget. Start by auditing which apps your team actually uses and identifying which credentials are shared or saved in browsers. Then deploy a cloud-managed password manager with built-in defaults, one that does not require an IT administrator to configure and maintain. If you already use multi-factor authentication, pair it with a real password policy enforced by the manager rather than relying on MFA alone. As the report notes, MFA without strong underlying credentials is “a speed bump, not a barrier.” None of this requires waiting for AI. The threats hitting small businesses today are the same ones that hit them ten years ago. They keep working because the defenses have not caught up. That is the one gap you can actually close right now. Additional Questions, Answered What is the biggest password security mistake small businesses make? Relying on individual employees to create and remember strong, unique passwords for every business app they use. Without a centralized password manager enforcing policy, most employees reuse passwords or choose weak ones, and most businesses have no way to know when that happens. Credential reuse is the root cause of credential stuffing attacks, which 47% of organizations globally identified as a top threat. Do I need a dedicated IT team to protect my business from credential threats? No, but you do need the right tools. Cloud-managed password managers with opinionated defaults are specifically designed for businesses without IT staff. They enforce strong passwords automatically, manage access without requiring ongoing configuration, and integrate with the apps your team already uses. The report distinguishes between tools built for enterprises that require a full-time administrator and tools built for SMBs that work out of the box. Is a password manager actually worth it for a small company? Yes, particularly given the numbers. One in three businesses was hit by a cyberattack last year, and weak or reused passwords were a top threat factor in 61% of cases. A password manager is the most under-deployed, table-stakes security measure available. And for a business with five employees or fifty, it is the single most impactful step you can take this week. Image via Gemini This article, "Your Small Business Faces the Same Cyber Threats as Big Companies — Without Any of the Defenses " was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

The expectation to respond instantly to every message is burning out professionals across industries. But how can you move away from being “always available” without harming your reputation? Here, experts offer practical strategies to reclaim control of your time and attention, so you can establish clear boundaries while maintaining professional effectiveness and trust. Make Communication Predictable One effective way professionals can move away from being “always available” is by creating clarity and predictability in how they communicate, rather than trying to respond to everything instantly. Most professionals think they need to respond faster to reduce pressure. In reality, constant availability is created by uncertainty, instead of urgency. When people don’t know when they’ll hear from you, they keep reaching out. The shift that worked for me wasn’t becoming more responsive; it was becoming more predictable. While working as a consultant across multiple projects, I noticed clients weren’t asking for updates because things were urgent; they were asking because they didn’t know when updates would come. Instead of replying to every message, I reset the system. Instead of responding to every message immediately, I focused on improving the communication structure. I introduced regular update touchpoints to define when updates would be shared, when decisions would be communicated, what actually qualified as urgent, and how escalation would work. I also batched my availability instead of staying constantly online. And then? Follow-ups were reduced significantly because stakeholders had better visibility and confidence in the process. Communication became more purposeful, and I was no longer expected to be constantly available. My reputation didn’t suffer; in fact, it improved. I was seen as structured and reliable, instead of reactive. The truth is, you don’t earn trust by being always available; it’s earned by being consistently predictable. Dhruva Somani, Consultant, NamanHR Keep Personal and Work Channels Separate The rule in my world is simple. No SMS. No WhatsApp. Not with clients, not with my team. That is not a preference. It is a boundary I set deliberately, and it changed everything about how I work and how I show up outside of work. Text messaging and WhatsApp are personal channels. They live in the same space as messages from my spouse, my friends, and my family. When business bleeds into that space, it does not just interrupt work into personal time. It works both ways. You are never fully in either place. You are always half somewhere else. I learned this the hard way. I was at the playground on a Saturday morning with my young children. My phone buzzed. A client text. 10 a.m. on a weekend. I looked at it, and that was it. My morning was gone. Not because I spent an hour on the phone, but because my attention had shifted. I was physically at the playground and mentally somewhere else entirely. I was not present with my kids. I was not focused enough to actually help my client. I was cheating both. That moment stuck with me. So I drew the line. Business communication lives in business channels. Email, Slack, Zoom, Asana. All of them are fast, seamless, and asynchronous. Nothing urgent gets lost. No small children will be harmed. Nobody is bleeding. Everything gets addressed. And my personal space stays mine. I run a team of 15+ fractional COOs working with companies scaling at 7- and 8-figure levels. This boundary applies across the entire team. It is part of how we stay structured, focused, and aligned in our client work. And here is what most people do not expect: our clients respect it. Many of them adopt the same standard inside their own organizations because they see what it models. Protecting your attention is not about being unavailable. It is about being fully present wherever you actually are. That is what your clients, your team, and your family all deserve from you. Derek Fredrickson, Founder & CEO, The COO Solution Share Daily Schedule and Decision Protocols I used to answer Slack messages at midnight and then wonder why my team was doing the same thing. Turns out, when you’re always on, you’re training everyone around you that always-on is the standard. The shift that actually changed things was getting honest about how I work best. I realized I do my clearest thinking in the morning and my worst decision-making after 8pm. So I started sharing my working hours explicitly and documenting decisions asynchronously so nothing felt stalled while I was offline. My team knows there’s a protocol for genuine emergencies, but otherwise they’ll hear from me during my working hours. Here’s what most people miss: the anxiety about going offline isn’t really about you being available. It’s about your colleagues feeling confident that nothing falls through the cracks while you’re away. Solve for that confidence with clear documentation, async updates, and a real emergency channel, and nobody actually cares when you log off. Reliability beats availability every time. Once I stopped being “always on,” the quality of my responses went up and my team started making better independent decisions. The irony is that being less available made me more effective. Kenneth Shen, CEO, Founder, Pigment Set Clear Reply Times Move from availability as a default to responsiveness as a commitment, reframing the signal you send from, “I’m always reachable,” to, “When I engage, you have my full attention and a reliable turnaround.” In practice, this looks like setting explicit response windows rather than going silent. Something like: “I check messages at 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. For anything urgent, call me.” That’s not a boundary announcement; it’s a service agreement. It gives colleagues something to work with, which is what most people actually need. I’m close with a director at a consulting firm, who did this after noticing that constant availability had paradoxically eroded trust. Previously, her responses were fast but shallow, and people had stopped expecting considered judgment. She moved to twice-daily email windows, communicated it plainly to her team, and within a few weeks, the nature of the messages she received changed. People stopped pinging her for things they could resolve themselves, and started reserving her attention for decisions that warranted it. Her reputation didn’t suffer; it sharpened. The underlying issue is that most availability anxiety is really about unpredictability. People don’t need you constantly; they need to know what to expect from you. Tonille Miller, Founder, TonilleMiller.com Enforce a Firm After-Work Cutoff Draw a hard line between routine queries and genuine emergencies, then protect that boundary. I run a construction equipment hire business and when 5 p.m. comes on a normal day, the phone goes off. But if a tower crane has an issue on a live site, I’m picking up immediately, no questions asked. That balance is what builds trust. People don’t remember the email you replied to at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday. They remember that you dropped everything when it actually mattered. Being selectively available has done more for my professional reputation than being permanently online ever did. Tom McDaid, Managing Director, WOLFF Onsite State Your Availability Window and Escalation I find that the “constant availability” expectation is often more of an internal expectation than a stated expectation. Additionally, I’m living proof that you can put boundaries around your time without ruining your reputation. For my entire career, I’ve never checked email/Slack on evenings, weekends or vacations. And when I was a W-2 employee, I was consistently promoted at every company I worked for. What I’ve found with respect to being “always on” is that everyone thinks everyone else expects them to be “always on,” but we don’t actually expect that of others. More often, it’s a double standard we set for ourselves. There are, of course, companies and jobs where constant connectivity is truly an expectation of the job, but there are fewer of these than one would believe. Here’s what I’ve found helps to set boundaries around your time and availability without affecting your reputation or status: 1) Just tell people what you’re doing. Set an OoO reply that says something to the effect of: “Head’s down in deep work until 4pm; I’ll reply when I’m back in email; if it’s urgent contact me via [insert emergency channel]” Set an away message in Slack/Teams, to the same effect. If you feel you really need to, give a verbal head’s up to people you’re worried might judge you. You can say something as simple as: “I’ve read a lot of research that supports the benefits of batch processing your communications and turning off notifications in the interim so that you can get more done and I’m trying it out. If you don’t get me as fast as you were expecting to on email/Slack, please reach out to me on [insert emergency channel].” Now, what’s this “emergency channel,” you may be wondering? Well, that’s the method to contact you if there’s a true emergency. For most people, this ends up being a phone call or a text, as these methods are used much less frequently for work, so the signal-to-noise ratio is much better. 2) Use positive language. Don’t say, “I’m not available after 5 p.m.” Say instead, “The best hours to reach me are between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. And of course, if you need me urgently, here’s how to reach me.” This way, we put the onus on others to reach out via the emergency channel instead of feeling like we have to constantly keep checking email/Slack, etc. Alexis Haselberger, Time Management and Productivity Coach, Alexis Haselberger Coaching and Consulting, Inc Adopt a Consistent One-Day SLA In my experience, the “always available” or “always on” trap is less about boundaries and more about consistency. If you respond at 11 p.m. or over the weekend once, you can accidentally create a precedent. When you don’t do it the next time, it can start to create friction. Whether you’re an individual contributor or a manager, moving away from that requires a combination of candid communication and clear patterns that make you more predictable. For me, managing a team of 12 direct reports across four different countries and multiple time zones makes constant availability impossible. To keep myself from burning out while maintaining high trust with my team, I implemented a 24 hour global SLA. My team knows that my inbox and DMs are always open, but responses won’t always be instant. I encouraged them to send questions or thoughts as they come up, regardless of what time it was, to keep their workflows moving forward. In exchange, I committed to a response within 24 hours during the week. This consistency helped to reduce the anxiety for my team, while saving me from having to stay awake to accommodate every time zone. It also encouraged my team members to try and solve problems on their own and collaborate with each other, which has made me less of a bottleneck. George Atuahene, Founder, Ataraxis Pause Before You Commit While people say “no” is a complete sentence, saying “no” at work at the wrong time and to the wrong person can get you in trouble. You can be perceived as “not a team player” or “uncooperative,” and that can linger around and serve like a badge that you don’t want to wear at work. Instead, I recommend my clients to appear available, but on their own terms with low stakes boundaries. Low stakes boundaries start with the pause. Before you say yes or agree to do something when you have a heavy workload, it’s best to pause. You can use sentences like this: “Let me check my schedule and get back to you on that.” Or, “Can you send me the details by email so I can take a look?” Or, “Let me think about how I can best contribute and I’ll let you know tomorrow.” You are not giving a yes or a no on the spot, but you are giving the person your attention before you agree or pass the request. Another strategy is to use “yes, and” or “yes, but.” They help you say yes on your own terms. You tell them upfront how and when you’ll help. For example, “I can help with the initial steps, but I won’t be able to manage the whole project.” Or, “Yes, I can get this done, but to do it well, I’ll need until Friday. Would that work?” You are negotiating how and when you can get something done. If this is a request coming from a manager, you can also say, “This sounds important. To give it the focus it deserves, which of my other tasks should I de-prioritize?” If you need to say no, don’t go on and on explaining why. Instead, maybe offer a resource or give suggestions with a quick 10 minute call, just to make the person feel heard. There’s a place and time for a no at work without too much rambling, but it’s about how you say it and how that no comes across in your body language and tone of voice. While you can’t control the “always available” culture, sometimes it is possible to control how you respond and protect your time. Ana Goehner, Career Strategist, Digital Butterfly Communications, LLC Build Systems That Reduce Interruptions One effective way to move away from being always available is to replace reactivity with structured communication systems. I learned this the hard way. I used to be available at all times for everyone, every day of the week. It was terrible for both my health and my effectiveness. Something had to give. What worked wasn’t disappearing. It was setting up “hacks” that stopped me from sabotaging my own efforts. The biggest one: I block every Wednesday. No meetings, no internal calls. The team knows it, it’s been on the calendar forever, and it gives me actual uninterrupted time to think. I’m still reachable for clients if something’s on fire, but that day has become non-negotiable for me. All recurring meetings have a live agenda in ClickUp; if something comes up mid-week and it’s not urgent, it goes there instead of a Slack ping. That alone killed a huge amount of interruptions. I check email twice a day. I turned off most notifications (if something’s truly urgent, someone will call). I use a couple of AI agents to scan for actual emergencies so I’m not anxious about missing something critical. The deeper shift was getting out of the way on decisions. We built clear SOPs and I trust the team to use them. I’m not the bottleneck anymore, which means people don’t feel the need to constantly check in. My reputation didn’t tank, I like to believe it got better. Turns out people respect focus more than they respect someone who replies in two minutes at 10 p.m. Julia Duran, CEO, South Geeks Use Project-Specific Contact Points One trick that has helped me extend my availability without overextending myself has been to create unique contact information for specific projects. I’ll set up email addresses, phone numbers, and chat threads specifically to interact with key stakeholders on major projects. When we’re in crunch time, I’ll respond to those threads whenever is necessary, but that doesn’t mean I’m responding to every work email after hours. After the project is over, those contacts get deleted. Mark Sturino, VP of Data & Analytics, Good Apple Digital Predefine Paths for Different Urgency The solution is simple: define a communication channel in advance. Email for routine: I’ll respond within 1-2 days. WhatsApp for urgent: I’ll respond as soon as possible. In critical situations, call me. This works for two reasons. First, people always know how to contact me without feeling like they’re bothering me or waiting in the dark. Second, it naturally filters out people who can’t respect basic communication norms. If someone constantly calls with routine questions, that tells me everything I need to know. Nick Anisimov, Founder, FirstHR View the full article

Google posted new developer documentation for how to authenticate requests with Web Bot Auth. This is a "new cryptographic protocol that helps websites to validate that bots are authentic," Google wrote.View the full article

As successful as OpenAI has been since the launch of ChatGPT, the company is operating in an extraordinarily expensive and risky corner of tech, building frontier AI models at massive scale. Its future, even its survival, is far from certain. OpenAI is burning billions on top-tier AI research talent, carefully curated training data, and increasingly scarce computing power. Footing the bill is a growing cap table of VC and strategic partners, all betting on outsize returns within a few years. Compute is the biggest cost. AI companies must lock in capacity years—not months—in advance. Data centers take years to build and bring online. That forces companies to forecast demand far ahead, then scramble to generate enough revenue to cover those commitments. If they underestimate demand, they leave revenue on the table. If they overestimate, the consequences can be existential. OpenAI’s rival, Anthropic, must make a similarly precarious bet, but has bet more conservatively. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei described the challenge on a recent podcast with Dwarkesh Patel: “The curve I’m looking at is: We’ve had a 10x-a-year increase every year. At the beginning of this year, we’re looking at $10 billion in annualized revenue. . . . I could assume that the revenue will continue growing 10x a year [but] I can’t buy $1 trillion a year of compute in 2027. If I’m just off by a year in that rate of growth, or if the growth rate is 5x a year instead of 10x a year, then you go bankrupt.” OpenAI, by contrast, is playing a riskier game. The company has committed more than $1 trillion to building new data centers and leasing compute from an array of partners, including Amazon Web Services, CoreWeave, MGX, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and Arm. Oracle alone locked in a $300 billion, five-year data center partnership with minimum commitments running at about $60 billion per year by 2027, according to a PitchBook analysis. OpenAI has also contracted roughly $250 billion in compute from Microsoft, and pays about $5 billion annually back to Microsoft through its Microsoft Azure revenue share, PitchBook estimates. All of this spending hinges on how quickly OpenAI’s revenue grows. The company is generating about $25 billion in annualized revenue, according to PitchBook, a roughly 40-to-1 ratio of obligations to current revenue. If it misses key growth targets, it may struggle to cover its compute and data center bills. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that OpenAI missed internal revenue and user targets in early 2026, with CFO Sarah Friar privately warning leaders that the company may not be able to fund its future computing contracts if growth slows. OpenAI did not dispute the reporting. Instead, CEO Sam Altman and Friar said in a joint statement that they are “totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can.” And boy, are they. By PitchBook senior private company analyst Harrison Rolfes’s estimate, OpenAI’s cash losses could mount to nearly $74 billion in fiscal year 2028 before it has any realistic path to breaking even by 2030. “The Wall Street Journal’s reporting that OpenAI missed multiple monthly revenue targets this year after losing enterprise and coding share to Anthropic and Gemini is exactly the scenario that makes this math dangerous,” Rolfes tells Fast Company. “Every revenue miss compounds against a fixed obligation ladder that doesn’t flex.” If OpenAI had locked down a product that no one else could replicate, or one far ahead of competitors, it might have a defensible moat. That could help offset the risks of such aggressive expansion. However, many analysts see that moat as somewhat limited. “It has become clear that frontier models are rapidly commoditizing. DeepSeek repeatedly makes this clear,” says Columbia Business School professor Daniel Keum. “Switching costs are minimal. The main exceptions are firms like Google and Microsoft, which can embed AI into existing ecosystems that are very difficult to replace, such as Gmail, Google Calendar, and Microsoft Office.” OpenAI may have gotten an early lead in a market growing at an “exponential 10x” clip, Keum adds, but it hasn’t built much differentiation or strong lock-in, particularly with consumers. Anthropic, by contrast, could prove more durable given its focus on enterprise customers, where switching costs tend to be higher. And yet OpenAI recently raised $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation, suggesting investors still believe in a relatively fast “AI takeoff,” where businesses broadly integrate AI into their operations. That anticipated shift is what OpenAI and its peers are spending so heavily to prepare for. “The risk to OpenAI isn’t sudden collapse,” Rolfes tells Fast Company, “but more that because the obligation stack is this large and this locked in, every revenue miss shrinks your options faster than most people appreciate.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​” Both OpenAI and Anthropic are expected to go public in the near future, which will offer a clearer view into their financial risk. For now, investor sentiment appears to be tilting toward Anthropic’s more measured approach. In early April, reports appeared that people were shunning OpenAI shares on special market investor sites and flocking to Anthropic shares. Does OpenAI know something about the “AI takeoff” that investors don’t? View the full article

Google celebrates AI search growth while industry insiders warn of widespread job displacement. The post Google Says Search Is Fine, AI Insiders Say the Median Person Has No Future appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

The global economy will soon be running on fumesView the full article

Growing up, graphic designer, editor, and author Chip Kidd was about as artsy as he could be in 1970s suburban Reading, Pennsylvania. “I glommed onto comic books very early on,” he says. “I loved to draw. I loved to write. I took up the drums and joined the marching band; all of this typical artsy-gay-kid-that-can’t-come-out stuff.” Still, he says, he knew he wasn’t the most talented in drawing. “There’s always that other kid that draws better than you who gets the gig to draw everything for the yearbook; It’s not tragic. It’s like, alright, I’ve got to figure something else out.” That something else, as it happens, worked out pretty well. Today, Kidd is approaching 40 years as Associate Art Director at Alfred A. Knopf (he is perhaps best known for designing the book cover of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park). He’s written two novels, several nonfiction books on graphic design, and in 2025 released his first Marvel graphic novel, The Avengers in the Veracity Trap! Here, he talks about the kismet of his career arc from Eastern Pennsylvania, the practice of framing graphic design as problem solving, and how The New York Times crossword runs parallel to his creative process. I knew I wanted to do something creative for a living. In high school, we had––and they do to this day at Wilson High School in Westlawn, Pennsylvania––a fully functional television station within the high school. It’s like the ultimate AV Club. We would take turns running the camera, being on camera, directing the camera people. We covered all of our sporting events. For a while I thought that’s what I wanted to do. Then I started doing graphics for the various shows we were doing. This was from 1982 to 1986, pre-computer, everything done by hand. I didn’t really know at the time what graphic design was, but that’s what I was doing. I got accepted to Penn State in the school of communications. My freshman year, a guidance counselor pointed me in the direction of, “Oh we have a graphic design department here. Maybe you should try that?” So I took Introduction to Graphic Design, Introduction to Color Theory, etc, etc. And that is when I figured out what I wanted to do. The happily boring story is that I majored in that for the next four years, graduated with a portfolio, and went to New York City in the fall of 1986. That was the goal: go to New York and try to get a job. I interviewed at the time at all of the top graphic design firms and I got good feedback, but nobody had an entry-level position. Someone steered me over to Random House and at their imprint Knopf Publishing. They actually did have an entry-level position. I raised my hand. It was the assistant to the art director at Alfred A. Knopf Publishing. At that time, the art department was literally me and my boss. It was waxers and t-squares and taping your board onto your drawing table and lining everything up, measuring it all out. I enjoyed that. Then, gradually with time, I was given small design jobs for the books. It grew from there. In October, if I live that long, I will have passed my 40th year at Alfred A. Knopf. I feel very fortunate. Frankly, I’m the last of that breed. I have peers who are also the last, but that’s going to be it. It’s not for me to say, but the age of a 40-year career at the same place used to be not that unusual, but going forward it will be. That’s just the way things have evolved. I grew up in the town next to Shillington, Pennsylvania, the town my father grew up in. John Updike’s father was his math teacher. Alfred A. Knopf published John Updike, and I ended up working on his book covers. At some point, I would say in the late ’80s, I introduced myself to him and I told him this circumstance. He was absolutely delighted. We became fellow Shillington-ites. He was very prolific so I worked with him for 25 years. He just really enjoyed that connection and when I published my first monograph with Rizzoli in 2006, he wrote the introduction to it. That was just a thrill and an honor for me. This idea of something coming full circle. It sounds fictional, but it’s not. I think of myself as a visual person, and I think of myself as a creative person. What I don’t think of myself as is an artist. I understand at least in my mind what the division is between graphic designer and artist with a capital A. A big part of that division is that graphic design is problem solving for a client. Most of my clients were writers, though in that time I did a lot of freelance work as well—a poster, a logo, or in rare cases product design. You are creating something in the service of another piece of creation which frankly takes precedent over yours. That’s just the definition of the job. I have written several novels. That is much closer to art with a capital A. You’re starting with a proverbial blank page and starting to figure out how to fill it. You’re creating something from scratch. That to me is being an artist. Graphic designers are taking the writer or artist’s work and giving it a visual presence in the world. It’s much more—this sounds awful— but it’s more of a service industry, and I have no problem with that. What I’ve been able to do is get recognition for what I’ve done over the years. When I was first hired, I was barely 22 and what I understood from the get-go was that these are hardcover first editions with book jackets. When you look at the back flap it lists who exactly designed it. So I understood that was important. I have an aphorism: Limits are possibilities. It isn’t just an aphorism. It’s true. I learned that in school. You can only use one color to solve this problem, and it’s a challenge, but to me it’s a welcomed and interesting challenge. If something gets rejected, you have to approach that as an opportunity to start over and do something better. That can be difficult. Especially when you as a designer believe you solved it the best way the first time. Again, in that sense, you’re not in charge. All you’re in charge of is doing the design. You’re not in charge of getting it approved. So when I hit the wall with a design, what I do is give myself a break for a couple of days and think about: alright, this metaphor wasn’t working so is there another one that would work better? That’s the job: resilience. A lot of graphic designers do not get credit for what they do. Who designed the Tide detergent box? We don’t know but it certainly is iconic. Even going back to Coca-Cola: Who designed that? Since then, there are entire books on the history of graphic design, as which there should be, and sometimes you can get to the root. But for the most part these are not people you know of. Growing up in the ’70s, the only other area of graphic design where the designers got credit were record album covers. If you looked closely, you could see this one was done by Peter Saville. He was a huge influence on me. He was the graphic designer who did all of the sleeves for these groups coming out of Manchester: Joy Division, New Order, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark. I discovered that while I was in college. To this day, if I design a book cover and it gets put out into the world, it has my name on it. That is why we are even having this discussion right now. Not only did I get credit for what I was doing, but I piggybacked on these books that became iconic bestselling books. Cormac McCarthy, Donna Tartt, David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs, Oliver Sacks, John Updike. It was an incredible opportunity to work nonstop on these books that many of which became not just bestsellers but part of the literary canon of America. Every book is different, and every author is different. You have authors who do want to be very much involved, but you also have authors who more or less say, “Well do your job and I’ll react to it.” Book covers don’t sell books. What they are supposed to do is get your attention, to lead you to examine the book and see if it’s something you want to read. The book clubs, the reviews, that is the stuff that really does sell the book. It’s been that way forever in some form or another. I’m a great crossword puzzle addict. In the New York Times, Monday is super easy, and by Saturday it’s really, really hard. If I’m on a Friday or Saturday puzzle and I get stuck, I can put it aside and work on something else. In that time, l’ll start to see things and understand things I didn’t at the beginning. My subconscious has been working on it even when I wasn’t thinking about it. Graphic design problems are the same thing. I don’t know so much that creativity can be taught outright, but certainly developing your creativity can be taught. And the extent to which your creativity is functional and effective, that can be taught, unless you’re just out of the womb a genius––and some people are, certainly. Without my design education at Penn State, there’s no way I would have gotten to where I’ve gotten. I’m very much aware of that. Design education is a very practical thing, if you get a good one. View the full article

In February 2024, Gartner predicted that traditional search volume would drop 25% by 2026. It didn’t. Google’s search revenue accelerated to 17% year-over-year growth, crossing $63 billion in Q4 2025 alone. But clicks per search are falling while query volume explodes. The pie got bigger. The slices got redistributed. And most search teams are still optimizing for the old pie. Are you still poring over spreadsheets full of organic keyword rankings like it’s 2003? Your customers don’t care where they’re getting their answers. They’re just looking for answers they can trust. And they’re finding those answers across more surfaces than your rank tracker knows exist. If your organic strategy lives in one spreadsheet, your paid strategy in another, and your AI search strategy in a third (or nowhere), you’re optimizing for a search experience that no longer exists. What “search” actually looks like now Google “best tax software” right now. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Count the surfaces on that single results page. Sponsored ads across the top. An AI Overview with its own recommendations and citations. A Reddit thread (because Google knows people trust other people more than brands). Organic listings from CNET, H&R Block, and others. A video carousel. Discussion forum links. A product carousel with images and prices. More sponsored results at the bottom. And a “People also search for” section feeding the next query. That is one search. One keyword. And nobody owns it. Now think about how different people actually use that page. I scroll past everything to find the Reddit thread, because I want to know what real humans recommend. My dad clicks the first sponsored ad because he doesn’t understand paid advertising (sorry, dad!) and just trusts Google to surface the best option up top. Someone else reads the AI Overview, gets a good-enough answer, and never clicks anything at all. A fourth person watches the Smart Family Money video and leaves. Same query. Four completely different paths. Four different “winners.” And if you’re the brand celebrating a number-three organic ranking on this page, you may be missing that most of the real estate, and most of the user attention, lives somewhere other than those blue links. This is what I mean by the total SERP experience. Your customer sees the whole page. You should too. The AI layer changes the math AI Overviews now appear on roughly 25% to 48% of Google queries, depending on the study. ChatGPT processes 2.5 billion prompts a day. Perplexity is up 239% year over year. These are real numbers from real platforms where real buyers are forming opinions about your brand, or not forming opinions because you’re nowhere to be found. But before the panic sets in: AI tools still account for less than 1% of U.S. web traffic. Google sends 300x more referral traffic than all AI platforms combined. The sky isn’t falling, but the ground is shifting. The shift that matters most is behavioral. Wynter’s 2026 research found 68% of B2B buyers now start their research in AI tools before they ever open Google. They ask ChatGPT to narrow the field, then Google the shortlist to validate. AI evaluates, Google verifies, and your website converts. If your brand is missing from that first AI conversation, you’re not even on the shortlist when the Googling starts. Why the click data is more interesting than scary A Search Engine Land analysis of 25 million organic impressions across 42 clients found organic CTR drops 61% when an AI Overview appears. In addition, paid CTR drops 68%. EVERYBODY FREAK OUT!!! Right? Not quite. Here’s what the panicked LinkedIn posts leave out: brands cited inside AI Overviews see 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks. Being in the AI Overview doesn’t cannibalize your traffic. If anything, it amplifies it. The AI Overview functions like a trust signal, a stamp of “this brand is relevant to your question” that makes people more likely to click your listing below. The real twist, though, is that ranking well in organic doesn’t guarantee you show up in AI. Tom Capper’s research at Moz found 88% of AI Mode citations are NOT in the organic SERP for the same query. Organic and AI are pulling from different source pools. You can be number one in Google and completely invisible in ChatGPT’s answer to the same question. And the small amount of traffic that does come from AI? It converts at more than quadruple the rate of organic, according to Semrush. These visitors arrive more informed, more intentional, and more ready to buy. Which makes sense, because they’ve already done the evaluation inside the AI interface. By the time they click, they’re just confirming and often converting. The org chart is the problem Most companies have SEO reporting to content, PPC reporting to demand gen, and AI search reporting to nobody. BrightEdge found 54% of organizations have handed AI search to the SEO team alone, which is a little like asking your plumber to also handle the electrical work because, hey, it’s all in the same house. The waste from this setup is real. One branded Performance Max campaign paid roughly $500,000 for clicks that would have come through organic anyway. Google’s own research confirms: when you rank number one organically, only half your paid clicks are truly incremental. The other half? You bought what you already owned. Meanwhile, McKinsey found that a brand’s own website makes up only 5% to 10% of the sources AI references. AI pulls from Reddit, review sites, affiliates, publishers, and user-generated content. You can have the best SEO program in your category and be completely absent from AI search results because AI is reading what other people say about you, not what you say about yourself. The unified approach works. Level cut acquisition costs 18% and boosted SEO leads 22% by merging paid and organic for a B2B SaaS client. And we can use tools in our Level Intelligence Suite to connect performance signals across search surfaces. The channels compound each other. Treating them as separate line items on separate P&Ls leaves that compounding on the table. Three audits you can run Monday morning You don’t need a six-month transformation to start seeing the gaps. Three lenses, applied to your top 20 keywords, will show you where the opportunities and the waste are hiding. Lens 1: Where do you actually appear? Check your organic rankings, paid ad coverage, and AI visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini for the same set of keywords. Semrush has a free AI visibility checker. Most teams have never looked at all three surfaces side by side, and the gaps are almost always larger than they expect. Lens 2: Where are you paying for traffic you already own? Cross-reference your number-one organic rankings with active PPC bids on the same terms. Start with branded keywords, where the waste is usually largest and the test is cleanest. If you rank first and you’re still bidding, you’re probably buying your own clicks. Lens 3: Where is AI ignoring you? Compare your organic rankings with your AI citation presence. Only 11% of domains get cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity, so strength in one guarantees nothing in the other. And check your robots.txt while you’re at it. If you’re blocking AI crawlers like OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot, you’ve pulled yourself off those shelves entirely. This diagnostic shows you the full picture. What to do about it, the actual unification framework, is what I’m laying out at SMX Advanced. The window won’t stay open Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) keyword difficulty currently averages 15 to 20, compared to 45 to 60 for equivalent SEO terms. That gap will close. Once an LLM selects a trusted source, it reinforces that choice across related prompts. The brands getting cited now are training the models to keep citing them. Winner-takes-most dynamics are being baked into the weights. Many companies are seeing search traffic drop significantly. Those same brands, the ones that get it right, are seeing the inverse when it comes to business growth. Rankings and revenue have decoupled. The brands that win from here are the ones that stopped measuring channels in isolation and started measuring the search experience their customers actually have. We’re presenting a search unification framework at SMX Advanced in our session, “Organic, paid, and AI search: one strategy to rule them all.” If you want to stop optimizing for three separate channels and start compounding performance across every search surface, join us for the session or come find the Level team at Booth #9. Remember: The search experience that existed in 2023 is gone. The strategy should be too. View the full article

Google says AI's ability to surface common information makes human experience and subjective insights more valuable for content. The post Google: AI Makes Human Experience More Important For Content appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

It would be strange if dynastic succession were not on The President’s mindView the full article

A tall baobab tree greets people inside the Long Beach, California, headquarters of Vast, an aerospace company that is building the space station of the future. It’s planted beneath a skylight in the center of a white-painted circular lobby furnished with a sleek aluminum reception desk and built-in wood banquette that follows the curve of the walls. The tree and the room are symbolic. The former references trees in The Little Prince, a 1943 novella with a character who travels between planets, and the latter has the same diameter of a Haven-1 module, which the Vast team hopes will become home to researchers, astronauts, and travelers and eventually succeed the International Space Station. “There are these timeless stories of, ‘Why is humanity reaching for the stars? Why are we going to space?’” says Hillary Coe, Vast’s chief design and marketing officer. “Those Easter eggs start to ground you in the ‘why’ while you’re simultaneously understanding the ‘what’—the important engineering and structural feats that we’re doing.” The space race of the 21st century is tourism, with new companies like Vast rapidly developing the technology and physical infrastructure that will enable human habitation in the cosmos. Here on Earth, they’re also inventing new types of workspaces for this growing industry, which is expected to reach $87 billion by 2035. Vast’s new 49,000-square-foot headquarters, a collaboration between its in-house team and the New York-based multidisciplinary design studio Civilian, does all those things, in a sophisticated expression of how architecture can support high-performance work and reinforce brand. “Form empowering function” The space is minimalist, with polished concrete floors, custom-made white oak doors, and a palette of white and gray. But this wasn’t merely a stylistic choice; it reinforces the work Vast is seeking to do. “Form being able to empower function is really the core of what we’re dealing with,” Coe says. “And when you see that clean aesthetic, it’s very much for the sake of capability and efficiency.” The headquarters has a few jobs: First, it needs to meet the high-stakes performance requirements of Vast’s engineers, astronauts, creative teams, R&D, and more all working under the same roof. It also serves the purpose of communicating who Vast is to clients, customers, and potential employees. And, importantly, it helps establish trust for a product and service that are firsts of their kind. The office and the space station design have a similar look because they are optimized for human health and well-being. As Ksenia Kagner, who cofounded Civilian with Nicko Elliot, explains, the look and tactility of finishes, the quality of light, and acoustics “either hijacks people’s nervous systems or calms them down.” To that end, the office leans into biophilic design, which has been shown to reduce stress through natural materials, ample daylight, and plenty of plants. This also helps keep people focused on the task at hand instead of being distracted by their environments. Even though Vast is designing technology for the future, its workspace doesn’t bear the hallmarks of a too-slick, tech-forward vision of aerospace. “There’s a level of optimism and faith in humanity behind what they’re doing, which could be in contrast to some of the more dystopic ‘get into space and pull up the drawbridge’ fantasies that also run in this arena,” Elliott says. Mapping “user journeys” Vast operates under the belief that its competitive advantage is vertical integration. Design, engineering, testing, and production all occur in-house. Having communication among these teams was important to Coe. “You get to walk down the hall to ask somebody, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?’ Or ‘Hey, how did this actually work?’” she says. “In aerospace, having all of those teams in one place, talking with each other, seeing each other’s work, is actually pretty revolutionary.” Civilian devised a floor plan that reinforces the company’s integration. On one end of the building, there’s the clean room, where heavy-duty manufacturing takes place. On the opposite end is mission control, where astronauts and researchers would be stationed 24/7 when a space mission is underway. An all-hands space with a kitchen and lounge sits at the center of the building. The internal walls are mostly glass (with very high acoustic properties so you don’t hear drilling while doing heads-down work), providing visual transparency among the teams and assuring that the thing everyone is working toward—the space station—is constantly in view. A ramp, finished in custom aluminum (the primary material Vast uses in its spacecraft), connects them all. “It became this way of creating a user-experience journey,” Elliott says. “You are then brushing against all these different business groups and divisions as you move through the space.” 21st-century mission control One of the most demanding design challenges involved the mission control room, a 2,500-square-foot area where staff would be present at all hours during a space mission. (Vast has yet to send someone to space.) “They were very intent on the idea of eliminating nonengineering information from the field of vision,” Elliott says. The room is spare—just tiers of custom white-oak desks facing a 30-foot-long curved LED screen where critical data will be displayed. Sensory comfort is even more important in this area than the rest of the headquarters. Civilian designed an illuminated ceiling, which disperses even light across the control room, and covered the walls in acoustical panels made of wool in a similar shade of gray as the floors and the IT access panels on the desks. “If you’ve got astronauts’ lives on the line and you’re trying to look to see where the information is to be able to make and assess those quick decisions, you need a space that is designed so that it’s optimizing for decision-making,” Coe says. The high-stress work involved with 24/7 mission control staffing also influenced other areas of the headquarters, including a space furnished with chaise longues for resting and recharging, a gym, and a meditation room. Making space travel approachable Part of making the office look approachable and human-centered is to reflect trustworthiness. If the design is well-thought-out and the team is open and transparent with what it’s making, then there’s more confidence in working with the company. As space commercialization heats up, attracting talented employees and investors is critical. In the future, private travelers, too. It makes space travel seem “more accessible and normal,” Kagner says. “The customer is also critical, because this is ultimately a private business.” The headquarters was completed in 2025. Since then, the feedback Coe has received is that the space makes people feel integrated with Vast’s vision. “That’s what leads to that feeling of ‘I can trust this commercial company . . . with my life, with my research, with my product,” she says. “And that’s really important.” View the full article

The GSEs' financials are strong but odds are against a short-term change to conservatorship that would give stockholders access to their profits, Mizuho said. View the full article

In late April, indoor golf and entertainment brand Five Iron Golf launched its first location in Saudi Arabia after nearly three years of coordination with Golf Saudi, an affiliate of the country’s massive sovereign wealth fund. The golf center, located on the ground floor of the Public Investment Fund Tower—the fund’s headquarters and the tallest building in Riyadh—offers a similar mix of simulators, leagues and lessons, and food and music as other Five Iron locations both in the U.S. and abroad, says Jared Solomon, cofounder and CEO of the brand. “People are hitting golf balls, they’re having fun, they’re eating food,” he says. “They’re not drinking, because there’s no drinking there, but they’re having a great time.” Five Iron Golf, which launched in Manhattan in 2017 (the name nods to both the club and Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron District, where it opened its first location), now has more than 40 U.S. venues. The company has expanded abroad through franchise deals in Singapore, Dubai, Spain, and Portugal. The Saudi location opened under a similar arrangement with Golf Saudi. Solomon declined to share details, but says franchise agreements typically include fees of $50,000 to $100,000 per location and about 6% of revenue. Solomon hopes the PIF Tower site will be the first of multiple locations in Saudi Arabia. But the Five Iron launch wasn’t the biggest golf news out of the region this spring. That distinction belongs to the announcement by PIF that it would no longer fund the controversial LIV Golf tour, which has received more than $5 billion in PIF backing since its 2022 launch. In a widely circulated statement, PIF said backing LIV Golf no longer aligns with its current investment strategy, pointing to “investment priorities and current macro dynamics.” (The fund didn’t respond to Fast Company’s requests for comment.) “The bone saw tour” The move follows the Saudi-backed LIV tour’s disruption of the golf world, drawing players away from the gold-standard PGA Tour, which banned players from competing in both. It also raises broader questions about the future direction of the trillion-dollar PIF, which has invested heavily in global tech companies (from Uber to Magic Leap) and through vehicles like the $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund. It’s also set to acquire a substantial stake in a merged Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery media business. Under the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia has made clear its ambitions under its Vision 2030 project—a sweeping state-led plan to remake the kingdom’s economy—to transition from an oil-based economy to a hub for business, sports, tourism, and entertainment, powered in part by PIF investments. The country will host the 2034 FIFA World Cup and a 2030 world’s fair-style expo, and PIF recently reaffirmed its commitment to Newcastle United Football Club, maintaining its majority ownership of the Premier League team. Those investments are not purely economic. They’re also intended to reshape the kingdom’s global image after years of scrutiny over human rights violations, limits on women’s rights, and the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. “The objective of all of this sports funding is twofold,” says Aaron Ettinger, a political science professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. “One is to make money, and the other one is political. The political objective is to make Saudi Arabia look like a normal country and draw international investments and all that kind of stuff.” The decision to pull back from LIV may reflect the tour’s failure to deliver on either front. As Ettinger notes, upstart leagues often struggle to challenge entrenched competitors like the PGA. (Indeed, recent U.S. sports history is full of failed competitors to the National Football League.) LIV relied heavily on Saudi funding, and it’s not clear that it did anything to boost the country’s image abroad. “It was referred to as the ‘bone saw tour’ when it got started,” Ettinger says. “It just ended up drawing more attention to the kind of stuff about Saudi Arabia that makes people in the West really uncomfortable.” The LIV pullback also comes as the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has disrupted global oil markets, and as Saudi Arabia has stepped back from other ambitious, high-cost projects, including a planned linear city and a massive cubical building in Riyadh. “I think even before the war started, there were already indications that the PIF was reconsidering how sustainable some of its investments are over the long term,” says Andrew Leber, an assistant professor in Tulane University’s political science department and a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Program within the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In mid-April, PIF unveiled a new five-year strategy, marking a shift from “rapid growth and acceleration” to a phase centered on sustained value creation, with an emphasis on efficiency, impact, and stronger governance. Leber says that likely means a renewed focus on domestic investments tied to employment and political stability, and less emphasis on speculative global ventures. The pivot also coincides with rising tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which recently announced plans to exit OPEC, as well as a broader global turn toward economic nationalism, says Salar Ghahramani, a law professor at Penn State University and the president of Global Policy Advisors, a sovereign wealth fund advisory to investment banks and asset managers. “An investing partner with deep pockets” Even so, the shift does not signal an end to Saudi investment abroad. Technology deals and large-scale partnerships, including the Paramount-Warner deal, remain central to the country’s diversification strategy. “If PIF, for instance, thinks that a brand-new deal with Tesla would be to its benefit, I think it would go that way,” Ghahramani says. “I think that generally, so long as their decisions are made by market-savvy individuals and not so much politically driven decisions, I think those global investment and partnership collaborations will continue.” And since there’s no claim that PIF violated any deal with LIV in ending its support of the organization, the end of that arrangement is less likely to worry other businesses considering investment from the wealthy Saudi fund, Ghahramani says, noting, “All kinds of companies, in general, can always benefit from an investing partner with deep pockets.” Carleton University’s Ettinger suggests that tech deals also don’t risk the same kind of negative press that followed the rise of Saudi-backed LIV, as Saudi Arabia positions itself to be “the kind of stable centerpiece of the Middle East” when the Iran war ends. For PIF’s current focus, the deal with Five Iron may prove to be a better-suited investment than a continued role in LIV. The much smaller price tag, of course, may also make the deal easier to continue. And Five Iron’s Solomon argues the company can help expand access to golf within Saudi Arabia while offering a viable commercial return. “We’re laser-focused on making sure it’s a good investment for them—making sure that the people like it and it actually does what they want to do, which is hit their goals of growing the sport of golf,” he says. “And if it can do that, I have no doubt that they will live up to their word and keep expanding things.” View the full article

Artificial intelligence is helping knowledge workers do things that weren’t previously possible, according to a new report from Microsoft. In the company’s 2026 Work Trend Index report, which includes results from a survey of 20,000 knowledge workers who use AI at work, 66% of the AI users surveyed say that AI allows them to spend more time on high-value work, and 58% reveal that they’re producing work they couldn’t have produced just one year ago. That number rises to 80% among a category of AI power users Microsoft dubs “frontier professionals.” “Instead of just automating away what people used to do, and that’s an efficiency gain, what we’re seeing is much more exciting,” says Katy George, corporate vice president of workforce transformation at Microsoft. “What we’re calling ‘capability add.’” Examples range from new uses of AI to find and address software security vulnerabilities, to salespeople being able to quickly get up to speed before a customer meeting to an extent previously impossible or impractical. And while the benefits may come first to those AI power users, they can, in turn, pass their knowledge on to colleagues—or benefit from a supportive environment: A previous Microsoft study found employees more likely to get value out of agentic AI when their managers serve as role models for effective use. Those AI power users aren’t simply deferring to AI in every circumstance. George says some will, in fact, sometimes take longer to complete a particular task so that they can see how it can best be handled with the help of AI. But the survey also indicates that 43% of frontier professionals—and 30% of AI users overall—purposely do some tasks without AI assistance to keep their skills sharp. And 53% of frontier professionals—and 33% of AI users overall—intentionally take time before starting a task to decide what aspects should be done by AI versus a human. That’s likely because human judgment, critical thinking, and the ability to provide quality control for AI results remain important, even when AI use becomes more prevalent. Anecdotally, reports of AI hallucinations and errors are well known, even as the technology improves for many tasks, so it’s not surprising that 86% of those surveyed by Microsoft say they tend to treat AI output as a starting point rather than a final answer. “What declines is the amount of tactical, step-by-step execution work humans do themselves,” wrote Jared Spataro, CMO for AI at Work at Microsoft, in a blog post. “And what rises is the need for humans to set direction, define standards, and evaluate outcomes.” In essence, even workers who don’t supervise any humans are now putting management and delegation skills to work supervising AI, along with their subject-specific training that lets them devise tasks for AI and evaluate the answers. “People with real judgment and expertise are driving kind of the most effective use of AI,” George says. That can also involve IT and cybersecurity experts setting up permissions and environments for AI operations, which can also overlap with skills already used to manage people’s digital access. “IT becomes the control plane for agent operations, extending the same rigor already applied to people and applications so that scale does not come at the cost of visibility,” according to the Microsoft report. Still, that’s not to say that AI won’t significantly change the way people work, including eliminating certain jobs, with overall industry predictions of AI-related job loss and job creation varying widely. “Some jobs will change,” the report acknowledges. “Some will go away. And many that don’t exist yet will emerge.” But while the report suggests that AI has the potential to make some knowledge workers more efficient, it’s not necessarily the case that employers should be demanding a particular level of AI usage from employees. The appropriate usage will likely follow from employees’ expertise and experimentation with the tools, George suggests. “Therefore, we’re not so worried about, ‘Did you use it twice a day or 10 times a day,’” she says. View the full article

The organizations that are pulling ahead on AI adoption aren’t simply onboarding new tools, they’re rearchitecting work itself. That’s according to the latest edition of Microsoft’s annual Work Trends Index published today. The study—which included surveys with 20,000 workers using AI in 10 countries and trillions of anonymized Microsoft 365 productivity signals—suggests that AI can unlock immense value, but success depends on the surrounding workplace culture. It falls on leaders to align on their AI strategies, create time and space for collective experimentation, and adopt a less prescriptive approach to how work gets done more broadly. According to the study, 58% of AI users are producing work they couldn’t have a year ago. That figure rises to 80% in organizations that have already redesigned their operating model to support AI integration (referred to in the study as Frontier Firms), in essence building their operations around AI capabilities, not fitting the new tools onto old systems. Though AI adoption is often framed as an individual responsibility, the study found that organizational factors such as culture and manager support have double the AI impact of individual factors like employee mindset and behavior. “Individual workers are actually making incredible progress with AI fluency, but the organizations themselves haven’t changed,” explains Matt Firestone, general manager of product marketing for Copilot and Agents at Microsoft. “Leaders haven’t responded quick enough to unlock its full potential.” In order to unlock that value, leaders need to stop looking at AI as a software solution to be added to existing work processes, and start thinking of it as the catalyst for a much bigger transformation that redesigns how things get done in an AI-enabled environment. Workers are stuck in a “transformation paradox” Many individuals who attempt to redesign how they work in tandem with AI are running up against workplace structures that fail to support those efforts. According to the study, only about a quarter of AI users believe their leadership is clearly and consistently aligned on AI. The rest are stuck in what the study refers to as a “transformation paradox,” where “the pull to perform collides with the push to transform.” For example, 65% of AI users are afraid of falling behind if they fail to adapt quickly; however, 45% say it’s safer for them to work on their current goals. In fact, just 13% report being rewarded for using AI to reinvent how they work, even if results aren’t met. “You resolve the paradox by changing the organizational structure, so people’s individual fluency matches the organization,” Firestone explains. “When you do that, you get these virtuous cycles of self-improvement.” Shifting focus from tasks to outcomes According to the study, AI adoption has the greatest impact in organizations where individuals are learning, collaborating, and iterating collectively, rather than offloading individual tasks to automated tools. But fostering an environment where individuals feel empowered to tinker together remains a challenge for leaders who are accustomed to seeing productivity tools as a specific solution to a specific problem, rather than a catalyst for larger systemic change. “Creating those cultures where you’re co-building—you’re building in the open, you’re making mistakes, you’re reinforcing, you’re learning from one another—that’s a huge organizational shift, versus ‘I deliver a piece of work,’” Firestone says. Firestone explains that those organizations excelling in their AI integration foster a culture of collaborative experimentation. In those cultures, individual tasks and responsibilities are set aside, and teams are challenged to consider how they can utilize AI to deliver a desired collective outcome, which he likens to a hackathon. “When you go to a hackathon there’s a very obscure prompt, and there’s no right answer, it’s how quickly can you do it? How effective is your result?” he explains. “What’s cool about all these new AI tools is that it applies that to the context of knowledge work, where people can come together and just be wildly ambitious and build things that they weren’t able to before.” Transformation starts at the top That new workplace architecture described by Firestone might conflict with traditional management practices, which encourage workers to do a certain task in a prescribed way. “The job of any good leader is to think about what processes work for that team, that individual, that function,” he says. It’s about getting the job done—“that type of outcome-based thinking is really what this is about.” Another key factor that determines the success of AI implementation is the willingness of leaders to be early adopters themselves. According to a separate Microsoft-led study, those whose managers modeled AI use reported a 17% increase in perceived AI value, a 22 % increase in critical thinking about their own AI use, and a 30% increase in trust of agentic AI. “When you see your boss, your manager, your manager’s manager actively modeling AI use—that means building agents, that means sharing prompts in Copilot, that means sharing their workflows—individuals respond,” Firestone says. “When a manager models AI use, you can see behavioral changes, and you can measure and quantify it.” Managers who create a culture of experimentation anchored in psychological safety also experienced a 20% increase in AI readiness and value among their staff, according to the study. They were also 1.4 times more likely to be high-frequency users of agentic AI. “The beautiful thing is just how easy it is to get started with AI tools,” Firestone says. “There’s no complicated ‘getting started guide’ or documentation: You can just download something and start building.” “That inquisitive nature of play, exploration and optimism is something that makes this technology different from others.” View the full article

Affordability concerns continue to reshape the American housing market, upending expectations about home ownership and forcing buyers to get creative to make ends meet. According to a new report from Realtor.com, the high cost of living is bringing multiple generations of family members together under the same roof—making homes that can accommodate them a hot commodity. In its report, Realtor.com revealed that multigenerational homes come with a 65% higher median asking price than traditional family homes. But apparently that premium hasn’t deterred motivated buyers. A multigenerational living situation involves two or more adult generations of family members—often children, their parents, and a grandparent—sharing the same home. The homes themselves are usually larger and often come prepped and ready for a young family to move in with a parent in tow, or the other way around. Multigenerational homes may have in-law suites or ADUs (accessory dwelling units), extra kitchens, and multiple entrances, making it easy for an extended family to live together comfortably. Realtor.com found that in 2025, the median price of a multigenerational home was $709,000—65% higher than the standard listing median of $429,900. Even when the square footage is comparable, multigenerational homes command $262 per square foot compared to the $215 per square foot for a home without some of the former’s special features. “Multigenerational living is a meaningful force in the housing market,” said Hannah Jones, senior economic research analyst at Realtor.com. “A sense of shared purpose and care is at the heart of multigenerational living, a housing arrangement that is quietly shaping American family life.” A sign of the times The supply of multigenerational homes isn’t evenly distributed across the U.S. These homes are most popular in the West, particularly in California. The cities with the largest share of multigenerational home listings are all in the Golden State, led by Los Angeles (23.7%), San Diego (22.7%), San Jose (18.0%), San Francisco (17.4%), and Riverside (14.9%). In metro areas where multigenerational homes are more common, buyers don’t face as daunting a premium when shopping for one. In San Francisco, a home that can comfortably house multiple generations of family members sells for an average of 8.4% more than a single-family home—more, to be sure, but not an astronomical markup. In other parts of the country, it’s a different story. According to Realtor.com’s report, Cleveland (3.1%), Buffalo (2.5%), and Detroit (2%) have the smallest share of multigenerational home listings, and in those markets these homes come with premium asking prices that reflect their rarity. In Detroit, multigenerational homes are listed for 120% over a standard house’s asking price on average, and attract 82% more listing views than their single-generation counterparts. “In markets like Detroit and Cleveland, multigenerational homes are a rare find, and when one hits the market, buyers respond,” Jones said. “The strong demand and steep premiums we are seeing in inventory-constrained markets point to a real mismatch between what buyers are looking for and what is actually available.” Multigenerational living is on the rise in the U.S., but in many other countries it’s already the norm. In Asia, extended families accounted for almost half of all living arrangements in 2020, compared to just 11% in North America and 26% in Europe. In the U.S., two-parent households are more common than multigenerational ones; however, those numbers are undergoing a gradual but noteworthy shift, growing from 3.2 million families to 3.9 million families from 2014 to 2024. “While the share of multigenerational households held steady over the past decade, the number of families choosing to live this way grew . . . a sign that multigenerational living is becoming an increasingly common choice for American families as high housing and childcare costs create strong reasons for co-living,” Realtor.com economist Jiayi Xu said. View the full article

Every drink has its trade-offs: Plastic bottles are lightweight and leak-proof, but they come at a cost to the environment. Cans are convenient and recyclable, but are prone to spilling. A new can design marries the best of both. ReLid USA designed a fully recyclable aluminum can that’s resealable, thanks to a patented tab that opens and closes using a built-in sliding mechanism. You lift the tab end and slide it open to drink; when you want to reseal it, you slide the tab back to its original position. According to ReLid, the tabs work for at least 14 reseals. The design and development of the cans began in 2020 by Re-Lid Engineering AG, a Liechtenstein-based packaging design firm. ReLid USA, based in St. Charles, Illinois, is the exclusive North American licensee of the technology. The challenge was to design a scalable product that is recyclable, intuitive, and designed for large-scale manufacturability, says ReLid USA President and CEO Bill Brandell. And it wasn’t easy to do. “The product had to drop in to the current beverage-filling infrastructure without impacting the existing can-filling process,” Brandell tells Fast Company. The top is engineered to maintain the integrity of its seal through changes in temperature or pressure from carbonation. It’s a clever solution to a long-running problem that ReLid USA says works for water, energy and sports drinks, ready-to-drink coffee, wine, and spirits. Resealable cans are functional, but it’s also an aesthetic differentiator, giving brands that use them a unique, memorable package. The company is pushing its tech for beverage manufacturers looking to justify premium pricing or stand apart from competitors. L.A. Libations, a California consumer packaged goods incubator, will be the first to sell ReLid USA’s tops on canned water sold exclusively at the Southern California grocer Gelson’s. For now, there’s a production line in Germany that can produce 1 million cans per month that Brandell says will be introduced in small markets. The company plans to open a production facility of its own in the Central U.S. in the fourth quarter of this year. Other manufacturers have designed resealable can tops, but none have scaled widely. The Coca-Cola Co.’s Monster Energy brand has been a particular innovator in the space, selling drinks in cans that come with bottle tops and releasing a plastic resealable top mechanism on cans in 2009. ReLid USA’s tab doesn’t use any plastic, though—it’s entirely aluminum. That gives these resealable cans a competitive advantage for beverage manufacturers looking for ways to cut down on plastic waste. Finally, there’s a fully recyclable can with all the functional benefits of a bottle. View the full article

Here are the 50 most prolific mortgage originators in the U.S. as measured by units produced, according to the 2026 National Mortgage News Top Producers survey. View the full article

When markets swing, plans break, inboxes explode, and everyone starts saying the situation is “unprecedented” again, most teams do what humans have always done under pressure: they grip tighter. They add meetings. Escalate more decisions. Demand more updates. Work longer hours. And mistake motion for control. That response is understandable. It is also exactly how teams get slower, more political, and more exhausted at the moment they most need clarity. What’s the big idea? The teams that perform best in chaos rely less on heroics and more on habits. They do not magically become unflappable; they build simple, repeatable ways of working that reduce confusion, surface judgment faster, and keep momentum alive when conditions are messy. Here are five of those habits. 1. They get radically clear about what the team is actually here to do Panic loves ambiguity. When a team is unclear on its purpose, every urgent request feels equally important, every leader feels entitled to weigh in, and every disagreement turns into a turf battle. High-performing teams counter this with a living charter: a simple shared document that makes explicit the team’s purpose, time-bound mission, roles, and decision rights. I have seen how quickly this changes a team’s behavior. On one project team I coached, the work started to sprawl the minute conditions changed. Midway through the project, the budget was cut significantly, which reopened questions about priorities, scope, and who could make which trade-offs. New requests were coming in, different leaders had different opinions, and the team was burning time trying to sort through uncertainty instead of moving the work forward. We paused and clarified three things: why the team exists, what we were trying to accomplish in that moment, and who owned which decisions. That clarity does two things at once. It gives people a North Star when conditions change, and it reduces the amount of political navigation required to get anything done. Key takeaway: If your team is spiraling, start with clarity. Ask: What are we here to do together, right now? 2. They stop using meetings as emotional support and start using them to move work Under stress, calendars fill up fast. Teams schedule status meetings to feel aligned, emergency meetings to feel responsive, and follow-up meetings to process the first two. Before long, nobody can do the actual work. The best teams are far more disciplined. They treat meetings as tools with specific jobs. Some meetings are for defining and unblocking work. Some are for doing the work. Some are for showing work and getting feedback. Some are for learning. What they do not do is hold sprawling “talking meetings” where updates, brainstorming, decision-making, and vague concern-sharing are all thrown in the same pot. That shift sounds small, but it changes behavior. When a meeting has a clear mode and purpose, the right people show up, people know how to prepare, and the session ends with visible progress instead of a cloud of unresolved anxiety. Key takeaway: Before your next meeting, answer one question: What is this meeting for? If the answer is not obvious, cancel it or redesign it. 3. They choose their trade-offs before the crisis chooses for them One reason teams get frantic is that they try to optimize for everything at once: speed and perfection, quality and scale, consensus and velocity, innovation and risk. In calm periods that fantasy is inefficient. In turbulent periods it becomes fatal. Strong teams make explicit trade-offs early. They decide what matters most when good values collide. A few years ago, I coached a leadership team that got stuck during a crisis moment because nobody wanted to say out loud what they were optimizing for. They kept trying to do two things at once: gather broad input and move quickly enough to give the organization clear direction. The result was predictable. They stalled. Once they named the trade-off, the work got easier. In that moment, they decided inclusion mattered more than speed. They made space for broader input, adjusted the timeline to reflect that choice, and stopped pretending they could move fast while also bringing everyone meaningfully into the process. This discipline matters because chaos does not eliminate trade-offs; it just hides them until they become painful. Teams that stay calm are not pretending every priority can coexist. They set guardrails that help people make coherent choices without waiting for top-down permission every time reality shifts. Key takeaway: Ask your team: What are we prioritizing when the pressure is on? If you have not named the trade-offs, your team is probably arguing about them already. 4. They ask if decisions are “safe to try” instead of waiting for consensus Consensus can feel responsible, especially when stakes are high. But in practice, waiting for everyone to agree often slows teams to a crawl. It also quietly rewards the people most skilled at raising hypothetical concerns. The better question is not, “Does everyone love this?” It is, “Is there any reason this is not safe to try?” That distinction matters. A reversible experiment, a low-stakes pilot, or a bounded decision should not require enterprise-level certainty. Teams that stay calm know how to separate a real objection from mere hesitation. They make room for dissent, but they do not let preference masquerade as risk. This approach lowers the emotional cost of action. People do not have to pretend certainty they do not have. They just need confidence that the next step is survivable, learnable, and worth testing. Key takeaway: When a decision stalls, ask: Is this truly unsafe, or are we just uncomfortable? 5. They make learning visible before the postmortem Teams get more brittle when problems stay hidden until the end. People polish work too long, delay bad news, and avoid exposing half-formed ideas. Then the team discovers too late that it has been confidently building the wrong thing. The strongest teams work in public. They show work in progress. They demo early. They invite reaction while the work is still cheap to change. And they pause regularly to ask what is working, what is not, and what needs to shift next. This habit does more than improve the output. It stabilizes the team itself. Visibility reduces rumor. Shared learning reduces blame. Regular retrospectives turn setbacks into input instead of identity. In a stressful environment, that kind of rhythm helps people stay grounded because the team is not pretending perfection; it is practicing adaptation. Key takeaway: Do not wait until the end to learn. Show the draft. Debrief the sprint. Adjust while the work is still moving. The deepest myth about high performance is that great teams stay calm because they have better people or better plans. Usually they stay calm because they have better operating habits. When everything feels like it is on fire, calm is not a personality trait. It is a system. View the full article

The news landed quietly, tucked into a letter from MIT Sloan’s dean to colleagues: After 67 years, MIT Sloan Management Review is shutting down. Future insights, the letter explained, will live on via “digital newsletters, short-form video, social-first content, and podcasts.” This is a strategic inflection point for management thinking. It will have a major impact on the entire ecosystem through which serious management ideas travel from researchers to the people who run organizations. That ecosystem was already fragile. Winner-take-all dynamics MIT Sloan Management Review and similar journals were classic two-sided market propositions. They offered management ideas to subscribers, pulling in advertisers along the way. The scarcity factor was that only such journals had access to top faculty, even as faculty had relatively few major mainstream outlets to promote their ideas. MIT SMR, in particular, focused on evidence-based research and incorporated citations. While the basic value proposition hadn’t changed, the world around it did. Today, ideas flow through blogs, thinkers’ own websites, and massive numbers of books (I’ve written about the peak book hypothesis here). The scarcity factor of its content went essentially to zero, and when that happens, people’s willingness to pay evaporates. The publication’s departure leaves Harvard Business Review as a winner with network effect dynamics. If HBR is where the readers are, that’s where other ecosystem partners want to be. It will now be essentially the dominant institutional journal seeking to get research ideas into the hands of practicing managers. HBR (which I am delighted to say has published a fair amount of my work) faces its own pressures. As a must-have platform, it often must reject worthy ideas. It needs credibility with “C” level executives. Without a peer playing the same translation game, those pressures intensify. The management field needs more venues doing serious practitioner-facing work, not fewer. The Research-Practice Gap Was Always Major There is an enormous, largely invisible backlog of management problems that research has effectively solved but whose solutions have never made it into organizational practice. Just to take a few examples: We know, with considerable empirical confidence, how to design incentive systems that don’t destroy intrinsic motivation. We know that most large-scale change initiatives fail not because of strategy but because of implementation dynamics that are entirely predictable and manageable. We know that diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones under conditions of complexity, and we know specifically why and how to structure them to realize that advantage. We know a great deal about how cognitive biases distort resource allocation decisions at the top of organizations, and we have tested interventions that meaningfully reduce those distortions. We know that organizations and communities pay a terrible price for offering bad jobs. We know that many workplaces are literally causing those in them to suffer terrible health outcomes. None of this knowledge is secret. It lives in journals, in working papers, in the syllabi of good business school courses. What it largely doesn’t do is reach the CFO making a capital allocation call on Tuesday morning, or the division president trying to figure out why her transformation initiative keeps stalling. The translation layer between “what research knows” and “what practitioners do” has always been thin and underfunded. MIT SMR was one of the few publications explicitly committed to that translation. Now it’s gone. The Incentives Were Broken Long Before This The design of business school incentive systems is partly to blame. The incentive structures in research universities have, for decades, pointed faculty away from practitioner-facing work. Tenure and promotion are determined by publications in top academic journals: outlets with tiny circulations, peer reviewers who are other academics, and editorial standards that actively discourage the kind of narrative accessibility that helps ideas travel. Publishing in MIT SMR—despite its genuine rigor, its MIT imprimatur, its global reach among senior executives—counted for relatively little in most tenure cases compared to a placement in a top-tier academic journal that approximately 200 specialists might read. This reflected a conscious set of choices about what kind of knowledge production universities would reward. The result, over time, was a faculty increasingly optimized for talking to each other, and decreasingly equipped, or motivated, to talk to the people whose organizations their research was nominally about. Imagine medical doctors not keeping up with discoveries in their fields, or someone studying engineering not understanding the materials that might be used to design a bridge! MIT SMR existed in the gap that this incentive structure created. It depended on scholars who cared enough about practitioner impact to invest time in writing that their departments wouldn’t necessarily credit. That’s a fragile foundation, and it grew more fragile as the academic labor market tightened and junior faculty had fewer and fewer degrees of freedom about where they put their energy. If business school leaders want to bridge these gaps, they would make journals such as MIT Sloan matter in promotion decisions. Of course, with the advent of agentic AI and the reshuffling of management structures, their hands may well be forced to change what gets recognized and promoted. “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong” This quote, attributed to H. L. Mencken, reflects a broader issue. The dean’s letter frames the closure of MIT SMR as a response to “broader shifts in how audiences engage with management ideas.” He’s not wrong about the shift. But there’s a subtle and important conflation happening: The shift in how audiences consume content is being used to justify a change in what kind of content gets produced. That has potentially serious consequences. Short-form video and social-first content are extraordinary at spreading ideas that have already been simplified. They are almost useless at developing ideas that are genuinely novel and complex. For example, my work on the need for companies to behave like habitual entrepreneurs, if they hope to survive for the long term, has taken (so far) five books (with one more on the way), lots of HBR and MIT SMR articles, and multiple interactions with large numbers of stakeholders. It cannot be reduced to a LinkedIn carousel. Action points coming from short-form outlets without essential context are mostly useless, and conceivably even dangerous. The closure of MIT SMR doesn’t mean demand for serious management ideas disappears. It means that demand gets met by whoever has the biggest platform and the fastest content engine. Increasingly, that means AI-generated synthesis, influencer-driven frameworks with little empirical grounding, and the management consulting firms that have always been happy to position their proprietary models as received wisdom. One major institutional referee is leaving the field, and if a journal with so much credibility and backing can’t thrive, it suggests that the market for management ideas is fundamentally changing. There’s an irony worth noting: MIT Sloan is shutting down a publication in the name of reach and relevance at precisely the moment when AI is making it easier than ever to produce and distribute long-form, research-grounded content cheaply. The problem was never that rigorous ideas couldn’t find an audience because MIT SMR’s digital readership was substantial. The problem is that sustaining an editorial institution requires organizational commitment that goes beyond traffic metrics. What now? So what happens now? We can expect that independent voices, publishing on their own substacks and podcasts, and potentially executive education programs, become more important as the institutional middle ground hollows out. That’s both an opportunity and a risk: We can expect more diversity of voices but less quality control and less shared vocabulary across the management field. The gap between academic research and management practice, which MIT SMR existed to bridge, will widen. And the organizations on the wrong side of that gap—the ones whose leaders never encounter the research that might help them—will keep making the same avoidable mistakes. Sixty-seven years is a long run. MIT Sloan Management Review shaped how generations of managers thought about strategy, innovation, leadership, and change. The right response to its closure isn’t nostalgia. It’s to ask, with some urgency, where the future high-impact management ideas will come from and how they will be disseminated. That conversation has gone on for years, all the way back to management thinker Peter Drucker. With the disruption that is on the horizon as we enter an era of agentic AI and dematerialization, perhaps the topic will be revisited with renewed urgency. View the full article

Psychological safety is a crucial key to high performance, a positive culture, and team success—and for good reason. Google’s Project Aristotle found that it’s the number one factor in high-performing teams. When people feel safe to speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, and challenge ideas, teams learn faster and perform better. But as the concept has gained traction, something else has happened. Many misunderstand what it actually means, and that misunderstanding is quietly killing accountability. At its core, psychological safety is about creating an environment where people can speak up without fear of humiliation or punishment. What it’s not about is avoiding discomfort. It’s about protecting people from being silenced or mistreated. But somewhere along the way, we’ve started confusing discomfort with psychological safety. This might look like a manager who raises a performance issue, and the employee says that the conversation feels “unsafe.” A colleague respectfully challenges an idea, and someone says that it’s “inappropriate.” Someone receives fair and constructive feedback they don’t like and shuts the conversation down. Sometimes that reaction is genuine because discomfort can feel confronting. But discomfort on its own doesn’t mean something is unsafe. When we treat it that way, we create a different problem. We create avoidance. The problem with weaponizing words Calling something “unsafe” can become a convenient way to avoid a conversation, dismiss feedback, or deflect accountability. And when that happens, psychological safety isn’t the problem. Instead of helping people speak up, it shuts down a conversation. It becomes avoidance dressed up as safety. That’s where the real damage begins. Leaders start to second-guess themselves. They worry about saying the wrong thing, being called a bully, or triggering a complaint. So they pull back. They soften the message, dance around the issue, or let things slide altogether. Silence has consequences. Standards slip. Poor behavior goes unchecked. Performance issues linger. And resentment builds, particularly among those doing the right thing who can see that the leaders aren’t holding everyone to the same standards. Cultures don’t get healthier when leaders avoid hard conversations. They get weaker. This is the part many workplaces are getting wrong: psychological safety shouldn’t weaken accountability. In fact, it should strengthen it. When leaders practice it properly, it should create the conditions for honest, constructive, and sometimes uncomfortable conversations to happen safely. What psychological safety should look like Psychological safety is not about being “nice” or avoiding tension. It doesn’t mean everyone agrees. Psychologically safe teams debate. They challenge. They disagree. But they do it with respect rather than resorting to personal attacks. They get curious, not furious. They’re willing to say what needs to be said with care and clarity, even when it’s uncomfortable. They stay hard on the issue, soft on the person, balancing empathy with accountability. In these teams, people feel safe to speak up early when something is off track. They ask questions instead of guessing and own their mistakes rather than hiding them. They give and receive feedback in a way that improves performance, not damages relationships. That’s what high-performing teams do. However, misunderstanding or weaponizing the term can lead to silence, avoidance, or lower standards. In this instance, you need to address it sooner rather than later. Reset the standard Start by separating discomfort from danger. Have an explicit conversation with your team about what psychological safety is and isn’t. It’s important that you frame it not as a lecture, but as a discussion. Consider asking the following questions: What does psychological safety look like here? What’s the difference between feeling uncomfortable and being unsafe? What behaviors do we expect from each other? By surfacing assumptions and getting aligned, you reduce the risk of the term being used—intentionally or not—to avoid accountability. Be clear about your intent To prevent someone from using psychological safety as a shield in difficult conversations, you need to be clear from the outset. If you’re giving feedback, explain why. You might say, “I’m raising this because I want you to succeed,” or “I’m giving you this feedback because I want to help you improve.” Acknowledge the reality of the conversation: “This might be uncomfortable to hear, but it’s important.” When people understand your intent, they’re far more likely to hear your message and less likely to get defensive. Clarity helps to remove ambiguity, and ambiguity is where misunderstanding thrives. Another trap is assuming that if someone has an emotional reaction, something has gone wrong. It hasn’t necessarily. People can feel defensive, embarrassed, frustrated, or upset when receiving feedback. That doesn’t mean the conversation was wrong. It means they are human. Your role as a leader is not to remove discomfort. It’s to handle it well. Stay calm, respectful, and focused on the outcome. Be empathetic, but don’t back away from what you need to say. Raise, don’t lower standards Psychological safety isn’t supposed to lower standards or make everyone feel comfortable all the time. Its real purpose is to create an environment where people can perform at their best. You don’t build good teams by avoiding tension. You build them by creating an environment where people can speak honestly, hear difficult things, learn, improve, and still feel a sense of respect. View the full article