What's on Your Mind?

A twenty-something man once went to a French restaurant in New York—the kind of place with tuxedoed servers. He told the waiter he had never eaten anywhere so fancy and had a hundred dollars to spend, then asked him to bring the best meal he could within that budget. What arrived was a feast worth at least $150, and he was treated like a king. The experience stuck with him. That young man—who would later become a well-known executive coach, profiled in The New Yorker—came to believe in the value of trusting expertise and putting decisions in other people’s hands. It’s a useful lesson for leaders: when you truly delegate, people often exceed your expectations. …

Many resources exist about how to perform well in a formal job interview, but what’s talked about less is how to manage an informal conversation about a job opportunity where the format and success criteria are more ambiguous. The conversation is typically held away from the office over coffee, or even drinks and the ‘interviewer’ may not be taking any notes. These informal discussions most commonly occur at the start and end of a process. However, as headhunter Basil Leroux told me ‘nothing is ever really informal, as opinions and judgements are always being formed.’ In my work as an Executive Career Coach, I often see leaders fail to maximize an ‘informal chat’ as p…

Hundreds of millions of people consult artificial intelligence chatbots on a daily basis for everything from product recommendations to romance, making them a tempting audience to target with potentially below-the-radar advertising. Indeed, our research suggests AI chatbots could easily be used for covert advertising to manipulate their human users. We are computer scientists who have been tracking AI safety and privacy for several years. In a study we published in an Association for Computing Machinery journal, we found that chatbots trained to embed personalized product ads in replies to queries influenced people’s choices about products. And most participants didn’…

Upwards of 80% of HR professionals are women. When I first came across that number, what unsettled me wasn’t the stat—it was how quickly my brain accepted it. Of course HR is mostly women. That’s the department where “people” and “culture” live. Where feelings are attended to. The nurturing department. The moment I noticed I’d reached for that word, I realized the number wasn’t showing me a labor-market pattern but, instead, my bias—about which work is considered feminine, and which workers get feminized in the process. The chief human resources officer holds one of the most impossible jobs in the C-suite. They’re asked to be the company’s emotional infrastructur…

For the past decade, the global startup playbook has been clear: grow at all costs and dominate through visibility. Sweden has played a different game, one of profitability and sustainability—and is outperforming as a result. The country now ranks among the top 10 globally for unicorn companies, and first in Europe per capita, with 46+ billion-euro startups and counting. Earlier this year, vibe coding unicorn Lovable became the fastest growing software-startup in history, reaching $100 million in subscription revenue in just eight months For a nation of just over 10 million people, that’s an astonishing concentration of innovation. Stockholm alone now hosts one of the…

Ikea design manager Johan Ejdemo is looking years into the future. A towering Swede with a six-inch beard, Ejdemo is a trained cabinetmaker who has nearly 30 years of experience at Ikea. Since 2022 he’s been the company’s design head, leading a team of 20 in-house designers in Sweden and a roster of freelancers from around the world. Together they give shape to the 1,500 to 2,000 new products Ikea releases every year. Most have been brewing in the company’s design department for several years, if not more than a decade. I recently met with Ejdemo at Ikea’s headquarters in Älmhult, Sweden, the city a two-hour train ride from Copenhagen where the company was founded…

There are plenty of different hacks, tools, and apps designed to break social media addiction or otherwise reduce your screen time. This is just the cutest one. Cat Gatekeeper is a new Chrome browser extension designed by the developer Zokuzoku, and it reminds you to stop scrolling by sitting a cat on your browser as a clock counts down until your break time is over. The browser extension is meant for anyone who keeps opening social media without thinking, and it’s inspired by the all too real experience of cats who want attention at the exact moment that it’s time to get to work. “We’ve recreated that classic cat-owner experience in your browser,” the dev…

What’s the closest you’ve ever stood to a drone? I’m not talking about a cute quadcopter, but a military-grade death machine that can carry enough warheads to obliterate a bridge, a tank, or a building? Sure, I’d heard of them. I’d seen them on the news. I’ve closely followed the paper, scissors, rock war in Ukraine where every six weeks the Ukrainians or Russians break the rules with new drone hacks. But it wasn’t until I was standing in front of the Fury, an autonomous plane meant to fly alongside F-16s and other military jets, that our Terminator era of warfare really hit me. This thing looks mean in an unknowable way, like a deep-sea predator that’s shed its …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. One of the ways I’ve been tracking shifts in the supply-demand equilibrium of local housing markets for years is by monitoring changes in active inventory/months of supply. If active listings begin to rise rapidly while homes remain on the market longer, it may indicate pricing softness or weakness. Conversely, a sharp decline in active listings/months of supply could suggest a market that is heating/tightening up. Since the national Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out and mortgage rates spiked in summer 2022, directionally, that supply-demand equilibr…

Shares of Bed Bath & Beyond Inc (NYSE: BBBY) are surging this morning, a day after the company reported its Q1 2026 results. Despite the company reporting a loss for the quarter, BBBY stock is significantly higher, as many investors see evidence that the once-iconic home goods retailer’s turnaround efforts are finally showing results. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, Bed Bath & Beyond reported first-quarter results for its fiscal year 2026. While many will recognize the company due to its “Bed Bath & Beyond” name, the firm actually owns several businesses under its corporate umbrella, including Bed Bath & Beyond, O…

Cancer has a way of touching lives without warning. Nearly everyone in our community has a story—someone they love, someone they’ve lost, or someone still fighting. At MG2, that shared reality is why Swing for the Cure to benefit the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center has become so deeply meaningful to us. It isn’t just a charity event. It’s a collective response to something that has affected so many of us personally. Swing for the Cure began as a golf tournament, but it quickly became much more. Driven by the loss of his first wife, Patricia, our former CEO Jerry Lee believed that no one should lose a friend, family member, or loved one to breast cancer. That conviction …

Otter wants to turn your work meetings into institutional knowledge. The company is known for its audio transcription tool, which has evolved over the years to be able to join and transcribe online meetings in real time and answer questions about them via an AI chat tool. It’s now adding additional AI features to make it easier to integrate knowledge from those recorded meetings with other information, including integrations with other software like Google Drive, Jira, Salesforce, and Notion. Those will let Otter’s AI access live data from those apps, so it can pull data from an email or customer database as needed to best answer a follow-up question from a recorded …

When Malibu launched its “Get Ready With Malibu Pink” campaign this spring, the rum brand had all the necessary ingredients for a modern influencer campaign. Creator partnerships with Sabrina Brier and other influencers, on-trend “get ready with me” style videos, all centered on the debut of a new flavored rum with guava, coconut, and pineapple. But there was also one element that was surprisingly new terrain for Malibu’s parent company Pernod Ricard: its first major campaign designed specifically for TikTok. A platform once off-limits Until very recently, alcohol brands like Malibu were completely absent from TikTok. But over the past two years, TikTok’s stron…

Let me tell you my trick for remembering the names of people I meet: I don’t. It’s not for lack of caring. It’s just that my stupid brain seems to only excel at remembering trivial things, like my family’s exact food orders at a random restaurant we went to in 2023. That same brain is largely worthless at matching names to faces, especially when it’s been a while. So a couple years ago, I swallowed my pride and started maintaining a “People” note on my phone, which is basically just a list of folks I’ve met with some basic descriptions to help me remember them. It’s not fancy, but it’s already spared me from potential embarrassment on several occasions. This s…

While it sounds silly, especially since I have a variety of construction skills, I lay awake some nights stressing about our stairs. We had gotten quotes for replacing the carpet on our stairs with white oak, but the average estimate, not including materials, was $10,000 per flight. Three flights of stairs, at $10K per? Sounded like another job for me — except I had never remodeled stairs, and everyone I knew, including contractor friends, said I shouldn’t try. What really stressed me out was the fact I didn’t know what I didn’t know. It’s one thing to think you know how to do something and worry about whether you can actually pull it off; it’s even more stressful…

We’re in our optimization era: Increasingly connected, efficient, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, incapable of giving anything our full attention. But I don’t want to be optimized anymore. Algorithms predict what we’ll watch, AI generates what we’ll read, and marketing systems are built specifically to remove friction from discovery to purchase. Feeds blur together, and messages feel interchangeable. Connection—the thing marketing is supposed to create—has become exponentially harder to achieve. We need to bring the friction back, and that doesn’t come from obsessing over scale. Connection isn’t about reaching everyone at once; it’s about showing up meaningfully in the c…

Oprah Winfrey’s podcast is headed to Amazon. Winfrey’s production company, Harpo Entertainment, struck a multiyear deal to give Amazon-owned Wondery exclusive distributing and advertising rights to “The Oprah Podcast,” the companies announced Monday. Under the agreement, Winfrey’s podcast will expand to two new episodes a week starting this summer — and Wondery will distribute the show’s audio and video across Amazon platforms. Under the deal, Amazon has also obtained rights to the library of the widely-watched “The Oprah Winfrey Show” — which ran from 1986 to 2011 — as well as the talk show host’s book club and “Favorite Things” franchises. No financial terms of the a…

Today, one of the biggest tech showdowns of the year begins. It’s the day on which the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and the world’s most influential AI leader, Sam Altman, are expected to appear in court to issue their opening statements in the OpenAI trial. Here’s what you need to know about the high-stakes case. What is the OpenAI trial about? The trial centers around the very public dispute between Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Musk is suing Altman and OpenAI for allegedly deviating from their commitment to keep the company a nonprofit institution, as it was when Musk first invested millions of dollars in the then-upstart between 2015 and 2017. In 2018, Musk…

AI has made it easy to generate software code, but some open source projects have stopped taking code submissions from the public, citing a deluge of low quality code or code that doesn’t match project needs. Warp, maker of tools for AI coding, is moving in the opposite direction. It’s making its desktop agentic development environment (ADE) software open source and even encouraging users to contribute new features with the help of AI. The ADE lets humans and AI agents work together to write code. Founder and CEO Zach Lloyd says software developers typically have their own preferences on tools and working styles, and he anticipates the program will let some of …

Whataburger, the Texas fast food chain known for its made-to-order burger, is continuing its planned expansion across the U.S. The “hometown burger place that hasn’t compromised” will open 15 new restaurants by the end of June, according to what the brand recently told USA Today. The chain first announced it would be growing in 2020, after being acquired by BDT Capital Partners the previous year. Shortly thereafter, the fast food joint began launching new locations in new states. It focused its growth most aggressively in Southern states like Tennessee, Missouri, and Florida. At the time, the company said in a press release, that the chain isn’t just growing, but al…

New York City has its obvious icons: The Statue of Liberty; Milton’ Glaser’s I “heart” New York logo; yellow cabs. Lesser known, but no less iconic, is the city’s compost bins. You know a NYC compost bin when you see one. Dirt brown, with a bright orange clasp, they roll out on recycling day, filled with gloriously stinky food scraps. NYC distributed the large brown bins for free in 2024, but not every household got one before the sanitation department OK’d using any bin (55 gallons or less) for composting. Now the bins have been shrunk down to the scale of your kitchen, and we have to admit: We really want one. OnlyNY is selling a tabletop compost bin at the cent…