What's on Your Mind?

Outdoors brand Yeti dropped its new holiday commercial, and it has a lot of what you’d expect from a seasonal spot. “Bad Idea” outlines all the reasons you probably shouldn’t get a Yeti for someone you care about: “Don’t get them a Yeti,” says the voice-over, as a ribboned cooler flies out the back of a pickup truck. “Unless you like dogs that are always wet, eyebrows that are still growing back, and sand in places sand should never be.” By the end of the commercial, it’s clear that the brand is aiming at people who are obsessed. It could be surfing, fishing, camping, golf, whatever—it’s about those chasing the dream wherever it leads them. But for all its charmi…

Over the next 20 years, an estimated $84 trillion will change hands in the U.S.; some call this the Great Wealth Transfer, others the Silver Tsunami. This wealth is held in cash and assets, but also in the estimated 2.9 million private U.S. businesses that are owned by those over 55. Many retiring business owners will look to sell their company to private equity or larger conglomerates, while others will pass their businesses on to their heirs. A few are considering something more radical: giving their company away to good causes, like Paul Newman who gave his eponymous food company to Newman’s Own Foundation when he passed away in 2008. This idea remains radical eno…

Our culture equates busyness with importance, overcommitment with achievement, and exhaustion with value. For high-achieving professionals, this belief system isn’t just inconvenient, it’s quietly eroding energy, focus, and fulfillment. Meetings pile up, emails never end, and the pressure to “do it all” becomes a measure of worth. And yet, this version of productivity is deeply misleading. The truth is, sustainable success doesn’t come from cramming more into your day. It comes from aligning what you do with who you are, and giving yourself permission to prioritize energy, clarity, and presence over perpetual motion. Because motion for the sake of it is meaningless. …

Stories about AI-generated fabrications in the professional world have become part of the background hum of life since generative AI hit the mainstream three years ago. Invented quotes, fake figures, and citations that lead to non-existent research have shown up in academic publications, legal briefs, government reports, and media articles. We can often understand these events as technical failures: the AI hallucinated, someone forgot to fact-check, and an embarrassing but honest mistake became a national news story. But in some cases, they represent the tip of a much bigger iceberg—the visible portion of a much more insidious phenomenon that predates AI but that will be …

Last week, the baby nutrition company ByHeart recalled all of its infant formula over concerns that it may be contaminated with Clostridium botulinum, the bacterium that causes infant botulism. Now the company is facing increasing legal drama and backlash from customers for potentially exposing babies to the dangerous illness. According to a November 14 update from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a total of 23 infants in 13 states who were exposed to the formula have developed suspected or confirmed infant botulism. All of the infants have been hospitalized, and no deaths have been reported to date. ByHeart had voluntarily recalled two batches of its…

It’s been 70 years since Douglas McGregor sketched a management theory at MIT Sloan that leaders still ignore—and their teams pay the price. Known as Theory X and Theory Y, McGregor’s framework built on Abraham Maslow’s work on employee self-actualization, and it quickly became one of the foundational texts of modern management thinking. In McGregor’s theory, leaders fall into two camps. Theory X managers assume that employees are inherently lazy, need constant supervision, and would rather coast along than contribute. Theory Y managers, by contrast, see employees as self-motivated, responsible, and capable of growth if given the right environment. And the ki…

Over the last decade, dozens of cities have reshaped streets around cycling and slower, safer, healthier travel. Take Paris: at rush hour, boulevards that were once packed with cars are now filled with thousands of people on bikes, newly planted trees, and cleaner air. In a detailed new analysis, the urban design consultancy Copenhagenize ranked 100 global cities on how far they’ve come to make it easier to bike—examining everything from changes in bike infrastructure to whether cities are promoting cargo bikes for delivery and teaching kids to bike in school. Nearly all top-ranked cities are in Europe, where strong pro-bike policies have lowered speed limits, ad…

AI models have a voracious appetite for data. Keeping up to date with information to present to users is a challenge. And so companies at the vanguard of AI appear to have hit on an answer: crawling the web—constantly. But website owners increasingly don’t want to give AI firms free rein. So they’re regaining control by cracking down on crawlers. To do this, they’re using robots.txt, a file held on many websites that acts as a guide to how web crawlers are allowed—or not—to scrape their content. Originally designed as a signal to search engines as to whether a website wanted its pages to be indexed or not, it has gained increased importance in the AI era as some…

Ransomware doesn’t knock on the front door. It sneaks in quietly, and by the time you notice, the damage is already done. Backups, replication, and cloud storage help recover from ransomware, but when it strikes, these products may not be enough. You copy your data and ensure copies are recoverable when needed. Replication is often viewed as the gold standard of protection. It is fast, efficient, and seems like an easy answer. Two common types of replication are in use today. The first is physical to physical. This is when data is copied from one physical device to another, usually at a remote location. The second is physical to virtual. This is when data is copie…

In today’s hyper-competitive B2B landscape, marketing leaders face a paradox: The pace of change is relentless, yet the need for clarity and purpose has never been greater. With artificial intelligence (AI) reshaping every facet of business, the imperative is not just to keep up but to lead the charge. To navigate this complexity, we must lead with vision and innovate with intent—focusing our efforts, aligning teams, and making decisions that drive the business forward. Below is a no-nonsense framework for CMOs to fulfill our mandate of not just keeping up with the market but shaping what comes next. VISION IS THE STRATEGIC COMPASS Vision is more than a lo…

Most of the software that truly moves the world doesn’t demand our attention: It quietly removes friction and gets out of the way. You only notice it when it’s broken. That’s not a bug in the business model; it’s a feature. In fact, “unnoticed but indispensable” is the highest customer-satisfaction score you can get. Consider these categories that already figured this out. The log-in that isn’t a task anymore Password managers, once you build the habit, fade into the background. They fill the box before you even remember there was a box. Single sign-on (SSO) systems go a step further and make logging in to everything feel like one action instead of 17 small, an…

Colleagues are a critical part of what makes your work experience enjoyable and meaningful. You interact with your colleagues and (in the best of cases) create a neighborhood of peers that you can rely on both to push the work forward and to share the joys and tribulations of the workday. That’s why annoying colleagues can be a particular thorn. When you have a peer at work that you don’t want to deal with, it disrupts the flow of your day and diminishes your intrinsic enjoyment of work. So, what can you do to deal with annoying coworkers? A lot of that depends on what is making them annoying. Here are a few possibilities. Missing social norms One thing th…

Maybe your car broke down, your computer was stolen, or you had a surprise visit to urgent care. Emergencies are inevitable, but you can prepare to deal with them by building an emergency fund. “There are so many things that happen in our lives that we don’t expect and most of them require financial means to overcome,” said Miklos Ringbauer, a certified public accountant. The industry standard is to save three to six months of expenses in an emergency fund. However, this can feel daunting if you live paycheck to paycheck or if you have debt. But if you’re in either of these situations, it’s even more crucial to build a financial safety net that can help you in tim…

A 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo of her asleep in a bed could make history Thursday when it goes on sale by Sotheby’s in New York. With an estimated price of $40 million to $60 million, “El sueño (La cama)” – in English, “The Dream (The Bed)” — may surpass the top price for a work by any female artist when it goes under the hammer. That record currently stands at $44.4 million, paid at Sotheby’s in 2014 for Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1.” The highest price at auction for a Kahlo work is $34.9 million, paid in 2021 for “Diego and I,” depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. Her paintings are reported …

Every C-suite executive I meet asks the same question: Why is our AI investment stuck in pilot purgatory? After surveying over 200 AI practitioners for our latest research, I have a sobering answer: Only 22% of organizations have moved beyond experimentation to strategic AI deployment. The rest are trapped in what I call the “messy middle”—burning resources on scattered pilots that never reach production scale. In my 20-plus years helping companies solve complex problems with open-source AI and machine learning, I’ve watched this pattern repeat across industries. Companies get excited about AI’s potential. They fund pilots. They hire data scientists. But when …

The following sentence might cause anxiety. As Thanksgiving looms near, it’s time to begin holiday shopping. The current level of inflation makes that even more stressful. How can you show your love without breaking the bank? It turns out, shoppers are turning to off-price retailers such as Ross, T.J. Maxx, and HomeGoods, according to recent earnings reports and data from location analytics company Placer.ai. Let’s break down the numbers. Ross Stores posts rosy earnings It’s fair to say that Jim Conroy, CEO of Ross Stores, is very pleased with the third-quarter earnings report released on Thursday, November 20. The company earned $1.58 per share…

New research has found that AI-powered content moderation systems from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek don’t always come to the same conclusions about bad language on the internet. View the full article

I think back to freshman year, when my friends and I would cram onto a lumpy dorm-issue twin bed and huddle around one phone, collectively cringing as we swiped through Hinge. That was my first foray into dating apps. It took me a week—and a handful of dead-end chats—before I deleted it. As it turns out, I’m far from alone. According to mobile app analytics company AppsFlyer, 65% of dating apps downloaded in 2024 were deleted within a month. This year, that number has climbed to 69%, AppsFlyer told Fast Company. During the pandemic, dating apps were a lifeline. Gen Z spent much of their formative years—high school, early college—on Zoom, and online dating…

Sometimes, a simple summary is all you need. Me? I’m a man of many words. (Understatement of the century, I know.) I appreciate interesting writing, where language matters and a person’s personality shines through in the prose. But let’s be real: 99% of the articles you encounter on this musty ol’ web of ours aren’t exactly awe-inspiring. They’re a means to an end. The same is true for most videos, too. And in any such scenario, you aren’t in it for the pleasure of reading or viewing and being entertained. You just want to get the gist of what’s happening without wasting any time wading your way through unimaginative drivel. The next time you find yourself…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. John Rogers, the chief data and analytics officer of Cotality (formerly known as CoreLogic), returned to ResiDay this year to give a two-part presentation: first, how risk—insurance, climate, construction cost—is reshaping the housing market, and second, how AI is about to turn property professionals into “superheroes.” In 2011, the firm was predominantly a U.S. mortgage-data company. Today, Cotality is a multicountry, multi-industry analytics platform that supports more than 1 million real estate agents, touches more than 8 out of every 10 U.S. mort…

As best I can tell, the über-wealthy believe the world as we know it is ending, that there won’t be enough to go around, and that this means they need to accumulate as much money and land as possible in order to position themselves for the end of days. The way they do that is with an induced form of “disaster capitalism,” where they intentionally crash the economy in order to have some control over what remains. So the function of tariffs, for example, is to bankrupt businesses or even public services in order to privatize and then control them. Stall imports, put the ports out of business, and then let a sovereign wealth fund purchase the ports. Or as is happening r…

Every good salesperson knows the 7-step process in which you identify and qualify a prospect to understand their needs, then present your offer, overcome objections, close the sale and follow up. It’s proven so consistently effective that its concepts have been the standard for training salespeople for decades. Many business leaders come up through sales and marketing, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they try to use similar persuasion techniques for large-scale change. They work to understand the needs of their target market, craft a powerful message, overcome any objections and then follow-through on execution. Unfortunately, that’s a terrible strategy. The tr…

Old Brick Farm, where Larry Doll raises chickens, turkeys and ducks, was fortunate this Thanksgiving season. Doll’s small farm west of Detroit had no cases of bird flu, despite an ongoing outbreak that killed more than 2 million U.S. turkeys in the last three months alone. He also avoided another disease, avian metapneumovirus, which causes turkeys to lay fewer eggs. “I try to keep the operation as clean as possible, and not bringing other animals in from other farms helps mitigate that risk as well,” said Doll, whose farm has been in his family for five generations. But Doll still saw the impact as those diseases shrank the U.S. turkey flock to a 40-year low this year…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. A modest rise in negative equity is emerging across parts of the U.S. housing market, but the overall picture remains far more stable than anything resembling the Global Financial Crisis. Having negative equity—commonly known as being “underwater”—means a homeowner owes more on their mortgage than the home’s current market value. According to ICE Mortgage Technology, just 1.0% of U.S. mortgages were underwater in April 2025. By October 2025, that share rose to 1.6%. That’s an uptick, but still extremely low by historical standards. For comparison, du…