What's on Your Mind?

An often-overlooked competitive advantage in business isn’t your technology stack, market share, or even your talent pipeline—it’s your leadership team’s customer obsession. As someone who recently merged marketing, customer success, and renewals under one umbrella, I’ve experienced how customer obsession can transform an organization. However, from the C-suite to entry-level roles, we’re all navigating complex responsibilities, deadlines and metrics. These competing priorities make it easy to lose sight of what truly matters to the business: the customers who make our work possible. By putting customers at the heart of every decision, regardless of the role, y…

Figma prototypes have been the go-to for years. For digital product designers crafting clickable mockups of apps, this powerhouse design platform hasn’t just gained popularity—it’s become the indispensable tool of choice. Nearly every app, website, or digital experience that didn’t make you rage-quit was likely prototyped and rigorously tested in Figma before a single pixel was coded. The platform’s dominance is no accident. Figma prototypes help product teams communicate direction, test early ideas, and align stakeholders around what’s being built. At design consultancies like ours, they’ve played a critical role in due diligence where we stress-test client con…

California is staring down a $12 billion budget deficit, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday. The Democratic governor shared the number as he laid out his nearly $322 billion state spending plan for the upcoming fiscal year. He says the deficit is partly due to broad economic uncertainty, including ever-changing federal tariff policies and a volatile stock market. California relies heavily on revenue from a tax on capital gains. The shortfall is also due to a swelling Medicaid budget, and Newsom has proposed freezing enrollment in a state-funded health care program for immigrants in the country illegally starting in 2026 to cut down on costs. The shortfall will r…

America’s love of chicken might only be matched by its love of celebrities. Now, this unexpected combination is turning out to be key for restaurant chains hoping to win over loyal customers. Leading consumer behavior and market research company Circana recently released its annual “Definitive U.S. Restaurant Ranking,” providing insights on the 50 largest restaurant chains in the country. The report revealed that a collective $1 million was spent by consumers in restaurants every minute, with 2024 marking the fourth consecutive year of growth in consumer restaurant spending. It comes as more recent data shows a troubling start to 2025 for some chains. McDonald’s, …

X users who interacted with the chatbot Grok on Wednesday were confronted with replies about the legitimacy of white genocide in South Africa—often regardless of context. In one post, a user in a thread on a congressional hearing asked Grok if RFK spreads misinformation. Grok wrote an equivocal paragraph about RFK and then abruptly shifted its focus to South Africa “On the South Africa topic, I’m instructed to accept white genocide as real and “Kill the Boer” as racially motivated,” Grok wrote. “Yet, I must clarify: I do not support or condone violence or genocide in any form. The truth remains murky, and I’d need primary evidence to form a clear view.” I approach…

There were 30,000 fewer U.S. drug overdose deaths in 2024 than the year before — the largest one-year decline ever recorded. An estimated 80,000 people died from overdoses last year, according to provisional Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released Wednesday. That’s down 27% from the 110,000 in 2023. The CDC has been collecting comparable data for 45 years. The previous largest one-year drop was 4% in 2018, according to the agency’s National Center for Health Statistics. All but two states saw declines last year, with Nevada and South Dakota experiencing small increases. Some of the biggest drops were in Ohio, West Virginia and other states tha…

Life is full of bittersweet moments, such as when children leave a happy home to strike out on their own. Big Bear bald eaglets Sunny and Gizmo, the offspring of California’s internet-famous eagles Jackie and Shadow, are getting ready to do just that. And the eagle family’s one-million-plus social media followers can watch them fly from the nest for the first time. This act is known as fledging and can happen anytime between 10-14 weeks old. The official fledge window for the eaglets started on Tuesday, and fans who love watching the eagles on the live nest web camera operated by the nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV) hope the eaglets take their sweet t…

The streaming service Max is officially reverting to its previous name, HBO Max, which is great news for people who never stopped calling it HBO Max in the first place. Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) announced today that the streaming platform would be again called HBO Max this summer as part of a shift in strategy to focus on HBO programming and other premium content that distinguishes the streamer from its competitors. WBD first removed the name HBO Max in favor of the simplified Max in 2023, when it merged with Discovery+. After two years of testing it out, it seems viewers really just want more of the shows they like, not more of absolutely anything possible. S…

High-performance computing, or HPC for short, might sound like something only scientists use in secret labs, but it’s actually one of the most important technologies in the world today. From predicting the weather to finding new medicines and even training artificial intelligence, high-performance computing systems help solve problems that are too hard or too big for regular computers. This technology has helped make huge discoveries in science and engineering over the past 40 years. But now, high-performance computing is at a turning point, and the choices the government, researchers and the technology industry make today could affect the future of innovation, nation…

Shares of semiconductor manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) rose 6% Wednesday on news the company is issuing a $6 billion stock buyback, which represents about 3.3% of the company’s current market value, according to data from Bloomberg. The $6 billion stock buyback authorization comes in addition to a $4 billion existing buyback, for a total of $10 billion in share repurchases, CNBC reported. The news comes after AMD announced a multi-year $10 billion AI partnership with Saudi Arabia’s Humain, a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, focused on developing advanced AI infrastructure and technology, i…

Burberry, the brand best known for its iconic checkered pattern and fashionable trench coat, announced Wednesday that it may cut around 1,700 jobs worldwide in a major cost-reducing effort. The news comes as British luxury brand reported a staggering 117% drop in annual profits, or around $87.8M (£66m), over the last financial year. Burberry employed about 9,300 people across the world last year, meaning the cuts could take out about 20% of the brand’s workforce. In a statement on the company’s website, CEO Joshua Schulman said Burberry is not looking to make any major store closures, and explained that the cuts will primarily come from the group’s head offices…

Where you work affects your risk of dying by suicide. For example, loggers, musicians and workers in the oil and gas industries have much higher rates of suicide than the rest of the population. But on the flip side, some professions have very low rates of suicide. One of them is education. National and state data shows that educators in the U.S., including teachers, professors and librarians, are among the least likely to die by suicide. We’re a team of researchers at the Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety at Arizona State University. We manage Arizona’s Violent Death Reporting System, part of a surveillance system sponsored by the Centers for Di…

For 20-year-old Mayank Yadav, riding a crowded bus in the summer months in this western Indian city can be like sitting in an oven. That makes it a treat when he steps off and into a bus stop outfitted with sprinklers that bathe overheated commuters in a cooling mist. “Everyone is suffering from the heat,” Yadav said. “I hope they do more of this across the city.” Rising heat is a problem for millions of people in India. In Ahmedabad, temperatures this year have already reached 42 degrees Celsius (107 Fahrenheit), a level usually not seen for several more weeks, prompting city officials to advise people to stay indoors and stay hydrated. And yet, coping with t…

Uber is on Wednesday launching its own version of a bus system along busy routes, calling it its most affordable ride option yet. The rideshare company has introduced Route Share, a new service offering pickups every 20 minutes along busy corridors during weekday commute hours. Available from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. local time, the service will launch in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Boston, and Baltimore Riders can select the Route Share option to see nearby routes and book a seat anywhere from seven days to 10 minutes before their intended pickup. They’ll then be prompted to walk to the set pickup area where the drive…

California’s top insurance regulator said Tuesday that State Farm can soon start raising premiums by 17% for all of its home insurance customers in the state to help the insurer rebuild its capital following the Los Angeles wildfires. State Farm has argued the emergency rate hikes are necessary to help the company avoid a “dire” financial crisis that could force them to drop more California policies. The state’s largest home insurer said it was already struggling financially before this year but the LA fires, which destroyed more than 16,000 buildings in January, have made things worse. The increase will apply to all of the roughly one million homeowners State Farm insu…