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Measurement noise from AI tracking tools is making it harder for brands to separate real visibility from artificial signals. The post Your AI Visibility Tracker Is Quietly Breaking Your Analytics And Your Strategy appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Learning about exercise can be overwhelming. One YouTube channel tells you what to do, and you think, OK, I’ve got that. Then you see an Instagram post that tells you something else entirely. Stop by the gym and ask a trainer, and they’ll let you know that both of your sources are overthinking it and instead you should do things their way. Why is it all so complicated? I have some thoughts on that, and some tips for navigating the confusion. One of the biggest reasons is that there are many good answers for each of your fitness questions. So you don’t have to find the one true correct answer before doing your workout, any more than you’d need to identify the unquestionably best restaurant in town before going out to eat. Let’s dig in to some of the types of confusion that you’re probably running across, and what to do about each. Not every piece of fitness advice is for youFirst I’d like to address the biggest reason we see conflicting advice in any subject: Different experts are talking to different audiences. You, the reader or viewer, are not in all of those audiences at once. For example, if you search for “how to squat,” you’ll find a variety of answers to the question. One expert might have advice for bodybuilders to build as much leg muscle as possible. Another might be telling powerlifters how to get strong and move the most weight in competition. Yet another might be introducing beginners to the idea of doing an air squat for the first time. It makes sense that they would all say different things, right? How to navigate this: Decide on a type of advice to follow. If you want to learn the basics of powerlifting, for example, there are books and videos and real life human coaches who will teach it to you. And if you’re a beginner, don’t seek out advice for advanced lifters; it may not be helpful to you yet. If you can’t decide what direction you’re going, it’s fine to check out different sources and compare. But don’t expect them to all agree with each other. The algorithm rewards pointless debatesThe basics of training are pretty simple, even if it may not seem that way when you’re a beginner. You get better at running by putting in time on your feet, and not trying to turn every training run into a race. (See our beginners’ guide here.) You get stronger by lifting heavier weights over time, although that doesn’t have to mean lifting more every single week—best to follow a program that guides you through a sensible path for progress. And if you’re brand new to everything, all you really need is to build a routine and not give up; literally all of the details can wait. But we like to learn more, and if we’re confused or anxious, we often think the cure is more information. So we visit YouTube (or the information firehose of our choice) and see what it has to say. But here is where the algorithm stands in our way: YouTubers don’t have much of a career if they just put out a few videos with basic information and then sit back and relax. So we get in-depth debates on things like: Which running shoe might be marginally better than another? Should you do your morning workout before or after breakfast? Should you do dumbbell lateral raises with your hands in a neutral position or with your pinkies pointing slightly upward? (You might think I’m joking with that last one, but for a brief viral moment it was a hugely controversial subject.) Creators also get more engagement if they react to other creators, cultivate rivalries, say that everyone else has it wrong, debate creators with the opposing viewpoint, etc. The algorithm rewards confusion, because it makes people watch more videos. In reality, the direction of your pinkies on lateral raises is going to make, at most, 0.0000001% of the difference in how your shoulders look a year from now. Even if you could get a solid answer on which way is best, it wouldn’t actually matter. How to navigate this: One day I was typing the word “optimal,” and my phone auto-corrected it to “optional.” That’s a life lesson right there. Optimal is optional. If you’re doing things basically good enough, optimizing the details is going to make very, very little difference. When you are an Olympic athlete and tiny differences in your performance could make or break your chances for a gold medal, you can revisit these questions. For now, just remember that there are many paths toward fitness, and you can take whichever you find simplest or most enjoyable. Most fitness advice is meant to nudge youLet’s step out of the social media algorithm for a moment, and talk about the very reasonable things you might hear from a trainer. As a trainer is trying to guide your movement, they’ll give you cues. These are not meant to be objective descriptions of exactly what happens in a lift, but rather nudges in a particular direction. For example, if your heels pull off the ground as you are squatting, you might be told to “drive through the heels.” This can lead to confusion if you hear another trainer say to “keep even pressure on all parts of your foot.” That would be a better cue for somebody who is tipping back onto their heels, but it could work for the person who is getting up on their toes as well. The truth is that both trainers are trying to do the same thing: keep you from rocking too far forward or backward. Since cues are nudges, they can't really be right or wrong; they can just be helpful or unhelpful. The cue that works for someone else may not be the right cue for you. How to navigate this: Ask for clarification if you’re getting the advice in person. If not, try both of the conflicting cues, and see if one of them helps you to feel stronger or do the movement better. You may also want to read our explanations of the cues that tend to confuse people most. View the full article

For more than two decades (nearly as long as I’ve been in SEO), backlinks have been core to SEO. Google’s PageRank changed search by using backlinks as a proxy for trust. A link wasn’t just a pathway; it was a vote. The more votes you had and the more authoritative the voters were, the higher you ranked. But as Google and AI systems matured, entity-based understanding emerged. AI models became better at understanding content, context, and credibility without always needing a hyperlink as a crutch. Today, visibility isn’t driven solely by links. It’s strengthened by the broader signals your brand has earned: how often it’s mentioned, cited, and trusted across authoritative sources. Search engines and AI platforms now prioritize these signals. AI’s role in reducing reliance on links alone Modern AI systems can evaluate trust and expertise in ways that were impossible a decade ago. AI has changed how authority, trust, and expertise are measured. It can now assess authority through signals once approximated mainly by backlinks. AI can: Identify entities and map their relationships across the web. Interpret sentiment and contextual relevance. Detect manufactured link patterns with near-perfect accuracy. Understand brand prominence without a single hyperlink. Evaluate reputation signals from reviews, mentions, and citations. Cross-reference information across multimodal sources. A brand mention in a reputable publication—even without a link—reinforces entity authority. Consistent expert citations validate expertise. These signals can’t be faked. The result is a new era where links still matter, but they’re no longer the only star. Authority is now a network of signals. The rise of entity‑first SEO As Google relies less on raw link signals, something else has increased: entities — the people, brands, organizations, and concepts behind the content. Google increasingly showcases brands based on who they are and how they’re discussed across the web, alongside their backlink profile. At its core, entity-first SEO means Google and LLMs are mapping relationships: identifying brands, understanding what they’re known for, and evaluating how they’re referenced in trusted sources. For example, an outdoor gear company with a modest backlink profile began appearing in AI Overviews for “best hiking backpacks” after repeated mentions in Reddit threads, YouTube reviews, and a few expert roundups. Only some mentions included links, but the brand appeared consistently in trusted, topic-relevant conversations. Google interpreted those unlinked mentions as proof of real-world relevance. If your brand consistently appears in a positive light in topic-related conversations, AI sees that as proof you’re relevant and trusted. The brands that win now have the strongest entity presence. PR‑style links + editorial = off-page powerhouse PR-style links and editorial coverage are earned mentions in reputable publications — the kind that signal real-world authority, not algorithmic manipulation. Why editorially earned links outperform volume-based link building Old-school, volume-based link building is less effective as AI improves at detecting manufactured patterns. But high-quality, relevance-driven link building—especially when paired with PR signals—is more valuable than ever. Editorial PR links from journalists, analysts, and industry voices who choose to reference a brand because it’s newsworthy or authoritative reflect genuine credibility. They’re the digital equivalent of a trusted expert saying, “This brand matters.” Authority-Based Link BuildingVolume-Based Link BuildingStrong editorial contextThin or generic contentHigh topical relevanceLimited relevanceNatural language anchorsOver‑optimized anchorsTrusted authors and publicationsSites with weak editorial oversightClear entity associationsObvious link‑selling footprints AI doesn’t just look at the presence of a link; it evaluates the context around it. Models are trained to reward authenticity. Search aims to reward the most authoritative entities. Creating multi‑signal authority The real power comes from a combination of signals. As search has evolved, quality has become more powerful than quantity. Now AI is driving another shift. You can grow traditional, relevance-focused links alongside new brand signals. A single earned placement done well can generate: Brand mentions that reinforce entity recognition. Citations that validate expertise. Positive sentiment that strengthens trust. Topical associations that build relevance. Valuable hyperlinks for foundational growth. Entity reinforcement across the Knowledge Graph. Secondary coverage as other sites pick up the story. This is multi-signal authority — holistic credibility that AI systems are designed to reward. It tells Google and LLMs: you’re known, trusted, and relevant. You need to be part of the conversation. As powerful as PR signals are, they’re only one part of a larger authority ecosystem. AI evaluates brands through a multi-signal trust profile that determines visibility. Breaking down the new authority stack Authority is now defined by the breadth and consistency of signals that validate who your brand is across the web. It’s evaluated as humans do: reputation, recognition, expertise, and prominence. Authority is no longer a single metric tied to links. It’s a network of signals, including: Brand strength: Rising branded search volume, navigational queries, and direct traffic patterns that signal real-world recognition. Entity validation: Consistent NAP details, schema markup, and unified profiles help confirm your brand and connect references back to the same entity. Topical authority: Depth of content, subject-matter experts, and external collaboration to show your brand is genuinely knowledgeable about the topics you discuss. Reputation signals: Reviews, citations, third-party mentions, and sentiment patterns that reflect trustworthiness. PR signals: News coverage, interviews, podcast appearances, and industry mentions that reinforce your brand’s relevance. Together, these signals create a holistic authority profile that AI can interpret. The brands that win have the strongest multi-signal authority footprint. Brand strength is the silent factor Brand strength quietly outweighs other signals. The data shows it: brands in the top 25% for web mentions average 169 AI Overview citations, while the next quartile averages just 14. That’s not a small gap. This aligns with AAhrefs’ analysis of ~75,000 brands. The strongest correlations with appearing in AI Overviews were branded web mentions, branded anchors, and branded search volume—all signals of real-world brand presence. Consider two competing fitness apps. One has thousands of backlinks from generic listicles. The other is frequently mentioned in Reddit threads, YouTube reviews, and TikTok “day in the life” videos. The second app appears consistently in AI Overviews because AI sees it as part of the real-world fitness conversation, not just the link graph. The brands dominating AI Overviews have the strongest brand presence, supported by consistent links, mentions, citations, and contextual relevance. Predictions for 2027 and beyond By 2027, link building will undergo radical change. The shift from a numbers game to a confidence game will become the norm, and Share of Authority or Voice will be the new metric. Here are my top three predictions for what’s next. Prediction 1: Visibility will be measured by a “Share of Model” metric. AI rewards signal density, not link density. Link building will expand to include “seeding” information in AI training hubs. Instead of mass outreach to low-tier blogs, strategies will target user-preferred sources like Reddit, LinkedIn, Substack, and GitHub, which LLMs use for high-quality, human-led data. Brands that appear most often in training data, trusted sources, and high-authority conversations will earn visibility. This is the next step in a world where signals determine authority. Traditional MetricPredicted MetricWhy the ChangeBacklink CountEntity Citation FrequencyAI values brand mentions as much as linksDomain Authority (DA)Source Reliability ScoreFocus on the trustworthiness of the sourceAnchor TextSemantic ContextAI reads the intent around the link, not just the textPageRankShare of Model (SoM)Success is being the AI’s preferred answer Prediction 2: Brands will act as primary newsrooms as proprietary data generates the strongest authority signals. As AI systems rely more on multi-signal authority, proprietary data becomes one of the most powerful assets a brand can produce. Data isn’t just content — it’s a signal engine. It naturally earns the signals AI trusts most: PR coverage. Citations. Mentions. Social discussion. Co‑occurrence with authoritative entities. Long‑tail references in future content. Traditional link building still provides foundational authority, but data-driven assets are the accelerant. They create high-trust, high-context signals that AI models weigh heavily. On a platform where visibility depends on how often your brand appears in authoritative contexts, proprietary data is the most scalable way to increase your Share of Authority. Prediction 3: Unlinked brand mentions will become one of the most valuable authority signals Traditional contextual links will continue to build the foundation. But beyond that, search engines will track every time your brand appears alongside specific topics. Links will need “semantic context.” Every mention of your brand in news, podcasts, reviews, forums, social posts, and roundups becomes a signal that strengthens your entity. AI isn’t replacing link building — it’s expanding it The future of off-page SEO isn’t a battle between traditional link building and AI-driven signals. It’s the realization that links were always just one signal. Now search engines can understand dozens more. Traditional link building still matters. It provides the foundational authority, crawl paths, and topical relevance every site needs. AI has widened the field. It can read context, interpret sentiment, understand entities, and evaluate brand presence. These signals don’t replace links — they amplify them. Links built the foundation. Signals build the skyscraper. View the full article

Growth in headline figure obscures worse than expected $700mn increase in fee-paying assets View the full article

Higher utilization and aggregate excess payments point to pressure, according to TransUnion. Debt-to-income averages remain below traditional mortgage caps. View the full article

Have you ever wondered what the “S” in S Corporation really stands for? It actually represents “Subchapter,” referencing Subchapter S of the Internal Revenue Code. This designation allows corporations to pass through income, losses, and other tax attributes directly to shareholders, helping them avoid double taxation. Nevertheless, not every business can qualify for this status. To understand the specific criteria and implications, let’s explore what it takes to become an S Corporation. Key Takeaways The “S” in S Corp stands for “Subchapter,” referencing Subchapter S of the Internal Revenue Code. S Corporations allow income and losses to pass through to shareholders, avoiding double taxation. Eligibility requires a maximum of 100 shareholders who must be U.S. citizens or residents. Only one class of stock is permitted in S Corporations, ensuring equal rights among shareholders. To elect S Corporation status, all shareholders must file IRS Form 2553 with their signatures. Understanding the Meaning of “S” in S Corp The “S” in S Corporation signifies “Subchapter,” which is derived from Subchapter S of the Internal Revenue Code. Comprehending what does S Corporation stand for is essential for small business owners considering this structure. An S Corporation definition describes it as a special type of corporation that allows income, losses, deductions, and credits to pass through directly to shareholders. This setup avoids double taxation at the corporate level, making it financially advantageous. To qualify as an S Corporation, a business must meet certain eligibility criteria, such as having no more than 100 shareholders and being a domestic corporation. The election for S Corporation status is made by filing IRS Form 2553, which requires signatures from all shareholders. Fundamentally, the “S” in S Corp stands for a unique tax treatment that combines the benefits of a corporation and a partnership, making it an attractive option for many small businesses. Overview of S Corporations When considering business structures, S Corporations offer a unique blend of benefits that can appeal to small business owners. Defined under Subchapter S of the Internal Revenue Code, these entities allow income, losses, deductions, and credits to pass through to shareholders, thereby avoiding double taxation. To qualify as an S Corporation, a business must adhere to specific criteria, including having no more than 100 shareholders, all of whom must be U.S. citizens or residents. Here’s a quick comparison of S Corporations and C Corporations: Feature S Corporation Taxation Pass-through taxation Shareholder Limits Maximum of 100 shareholders Stock Classes Only one class of stock Eligible Shareholders Must be U.S. citizens/residents Forming Process File Form 2553 for election If you’re considering how to change LLC to S Corp, remember to follow the IRS guidelines. Advantages and Disadvantages of S Corporations Comprehending the advantages and disadvantages of S Corporations can help you make informed decisions about your business structure. One key advantage is pass-through taxation, which allows corporate income and losses to be reported on your personal tax return, avoiding double taxation. You’ll also benefit from lower self-employment taxes, as only wages are subject to these taxes, whereas distributions are not. Nevertheless, S Corporations face stricter IRS regulations, including the necessity to pay shareholder-employees a “reasonable salary,” which may lead to increased scrutiny. Furthermore, the limit of 100 shareholders, all of whom must be U.S. citizens or residents, can hinder growth potential compared to C Corporations. Although S Corporations provide limited liability protection, compliance requirements, including annual reporting and specific eligibility rules, can impose extra costs and administrative burdens. Balancing these factors is vital for your business’s success. Eligibility Requirements for S Corporations To qualify as an S Corporation, your business must meet several specific eligibility requirements set by the IRS. First, your entity must be a domestic corporation and can’t have more than 100 shareholders. All shareholders need to be individuals, certain trusts, or estates; partnerships, corporations, and non-resident aliens can’t hold shares. Moreover, an S Corporation is limited to one class of stock, meaning all shares must have the same rights regarding distribution and liquidation. Furthermore, all shareholders must be U.S. citizens or residents, excluding nonresident aliens from ownership. To elect S corporation status, you’ll need the unanimous consent of all shareholders, which involves signing Form 2553. This form must then be submitted to the IRS to finalize your election. Meeting these requirements is essential for your business to maintain its S Corporation status and enjoy the associated benefits. Tax Implications of S Corporations Comprehending the tax implications of S Corporations is crucial for any business owner considering this structure. S Corporations avoid double taxation, passing income and losses directly to shareholders. You’ll report these on your personal tax returns using Schedule K-1. Annually, S Corporations must file IRS Form 1120-S by March 15, detailing their financials. Here’s a quick overview of key tax aspects: Aspect Description Impact on Shareholders Double Taxation Avoided; income taxed at personal level Lower overall tax burden IRS Form Required Form 1120-S must be filed annually Compliance with IRS regulations Schedule K-1 Reports individual share of income/losses Required for personal tax returns Health Insurance Premiums Over 2% shareholders must report premiums on W-2 Affects taxable wages Deductions and Credits Passed through to shareholders Directly impacts personal tax liability Understanding these implications can help you make informed decisions about your business structure. Frequently Asked Questions Why Is It Called an S Corp? It’s called an S Corp as it refers to a specific tax designation under the Internal Revenue Code. This structure allows small businesses to benefit from pass-through taxation, meaning corporate income isn’t taxed at the corporate level. Instead, it’s reported on shareholders’ personal tax returns. Established in 1958, the SBA designation helps small businesses avoid double taxation as they meet certain criteria, such as having no more than 100 shareholders and a single class of stock. What Does the S in C Corp Stand For? The “C” in C Corporation doesn’t stand for anything specific; it simply distinguishes this type of corporation from others, like S Corporations. C Corporations are taxed separately from their owners under the Internal Revenue Code, which can lead to double taxation on profits. This structure allows for unlimited shareholders and various classes of stock, making it suitable for larger businesses. Incorporating as a C Corp requires following specific legal and regulatory procedures. Is an S Corp Better Than an LLC? Whether an S Corp is better than an LLC depends on your specific needs. S Corps have stricter shareholder limits and require U.S. citizenship, whereas LLCs allow for more members and include nonresident aliens. Taxation differs too; S Corps pass income to shareholders, while LLCs can choose their tax classification. Furthermore, S Corps must adhere to more compliance regulations. Evaluate your ownership structure, tax flexibility, and operational requirements to determine which option suits you best. Which Is Better, S or C Corporation? When deciding between an S corporation and a C corporation, consider your business size and goals. S corps offer tax advantages by allowing income to pass through to shareholders, avoiding double taxation, but limit shareholder numbers and types. C corps, on the other hand, can attract more investors and issue multiple stock classes, making them suitable for larger businesses seeking growth. Your choice should align with your funding needs and operational structure. Conclusion In conclusion, the “S” in S Corporation stands for “Subchapter,” reflecting its designation under the Internal Revenue Code. This structure allows for pass-through taxation, offering significant advantages like avoiding double taxation. Nevertheless, S Corporations must meet specific eligibility criteria and adhere to regulations to maintain their status. Comprehending these key aspects can help you determine if this business structure aligns with your financial goals and operational needs, making it a viable option for many entrepreneurs. Image via Google Gemini This article, "What Does the “S” Stand For in S Corp?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve probably seen the marketing for The Devil Wears Prada 2, whether it’s a glamorous outfit from Anne Hathaway or Meryl Streep all over social media or a Diet Coke can plastered with the signature double-spiked red heel. The global press tour, which spanned cities such as Mexico City, Tokyo, Seoul, and Shanghai, culminated at the movie’s star-studded world premiere at New York City’s Lincoln Center earlier this month with Hathaway, Streep, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci present. As studios promote trailers for upcoming releases, it’s no surprise that they’re also using premieres as massive marketing vehicles as well. In the first movie, Hathaway’s Andrea Sachs is an aspiring journalist and fish-out-of-water who scores a job at a fictional fashion magazine called Runway, only to butt heads with its icy and manipulative editor-in-chief, Miranda Priestly. Released in 2006, it was set during a time when legacy media was still relatively nearer to its prime. In the sequel, Miranda and the rest of the Runway world are grappling with the transition from print to digital media, declining advertising revenue, leadership changes, and the fight for attention in an algorithm-driven online world. Martha Morrison, head of marketing at Disney Entertainment, Studios, said that when the team was planning the premiere, hosting it in New York felt like a full-circle moment since the movies are set in the city. “It felt like it was natural to extend the celebration of these characters coming back to New York,” Morrison told Fast Company. “We wanted it to feel like it was a celebration, but we also wanted to feel like it was sort of an experience.” The premiere (produced by 15|40 Productions) was bigger and flashier than the original, with not only the main cast, but several influencers, fashion journalists, and even Anna Wintour in attendance—a red carpet fit for Runway itself. What was also prominent at the premiere were brand activations across the beauty, fashion, technology, hospitality, and food and beverage categories. These included: A L’Oreal Paris photo booth where guests could pose for their own Runway cover. A Runway-branded elevator door sponsored by Zillow, where attendees could recreate their own strut and catwalk. A Waldorf Astoria table where guests could get their own custom fashion illustrations drawn by an artist. An interactive Runway closet where guests could virtually try on clothes using Google Shopping AI technology. Other brands Disney and 20th Century Studios partnered with include Dior, Lancôme, TRESemmé, Tweezerman, and Grey Goose for various commercials and branded products. Morrison said the credit goes to Lylle Breier, who leads Disney’s global marketing partnerships. “Their goal was to make sure we had a powerhouse collective of all of the best in class partners and brands and culture defining collabs that we possibly could,” Morrison said. “It makes it all feel really special and really in-world and elegant.” “Something tactile and special” But perhaps one of the biggest marketing stunts from the campaign is the limited-edition fictional Runway magazine the team created that was handed out not only at the premiere, but at the various L’Oreal Paris, Grey Goose, and other branded pop-up newsstands in Los Angeles and New York. The magazine—which features Blunt’s Emily Charlton on the cover—is full of editorial features, ads promoting the brand partnerships, and fashion taken from the sequel. There’s even an “editor’s letter” from Miranda and articles written by Andrea, but all the contributors are actual fashion designers, artists, and creators the studio partnered with. (Disney declined to disclose the marketing budget for the sequel.) “It felt like we had to meet the mark as we were going to make our own Runway magazine,” Morrison said. “A lot of effort and care was put into making sure that it matched what people’s expectations are of what they would get if they had a real Runway magazine in their hands.” Morrison noted that while so much of the promotion of the film lives digitally, she said it was important that they gave fans something physical as a keepsake. “In a world where we have a lot of things happening in our campaign that are living online, living in digital, there’s also something great about having something tactile and special you can have in your hands and feel like you’ve got something that feels really exclusive,” Morrison said. “There’s a real power in that as well.” Ultimately, everything in the campaign goes back to celebrating the fans and their love for the movies and its characters, according to Morrison. “Nostalgia is very hot,” she said, even as the movie very clearly depicts how people are impacted by the passage of time. “[The characters] have evolved and changed, and there’s a reason for everybody to come back together,” Morrison said, adding that the team’s goal was to “make this feel like an undeniable cultural moment that is really firmly in the zeitgeist.” View the full article

One of the hardest parts of being a homeowner is knowing whom to call when something goes wrong with your house—a process that starts with figuring out what’s actually wrong in the first place. “What if you wake up, you’ve got a wet spot on the ceiling, and you’re like, Oh crap, I’ve got a problem, but I don’t actually know what it is or who to hire?” says Marco Zappacosta, cofounder and CEO of the home-services marketplace Thumbtack. The 18-year-old platform has made a robust business of helping homeowners navigate the sometimes bewildering process of home improvements and repairs by connecting them with all sorts of service pros—handymen, roofers, electricians, plumbers, and more—faster and more efficiently than traditional methods. Last year, Thumbtack took in nearly $500 million in revenue, according to Zappacosta, up 24% year over year. The company, he says, is “meaningfully profitable.” (Thumbtack makes money by charging professionals a fee for each introduction to a customer.) More than 4.5 million users turned to Thumbtack to help with some 8 million projects over the past 12 months alone, up 15% over the past year. Even so, finding the right person for the right job remains daunting. There are, after all, more than 300,000 pros on Thumbtack, each with a unique set of skills. Thumbtack has been using AI for years to refine how users search for pros on its platform. But LLMs have unleashed new possibilities for matchmaking, and the company is now launching an entirely redesigned app experience: Instead of searching for service pros, users are guided to them via an AI-driven interface that starts with homeowners simply describing what they’re seeing. The new UX asks users to describe their problem in plain language, upload photos, and answer a few tailored questions. Thumbtack’s AI then interprets the problem and serves up a handful of pros whose expertise matches the issue. “We can now meet you where you are,” Zappacosta says. “You don’t have to know or be sure of anything.” An AI guide to home repairs Thumbtack’s new experience builds on a feature the company introduced last year that incorporated natural language processing into search. But instead of acting as a separate chatbot or a stand-alone search feature, AI is now “baked into everything we do,” says Zappacosta, helping users throughout the entire life cycle of working with a pro. For users, the AI-guided UX not only lowers the hurdles to beginning a new project, it also reduces the uncertainty that surrounds the hiring process. Thumbtack now narrows the list of results users see to a curated few pros and explains why each is a good fit. “You can look at the most hired in your neighborhood, the person whose price is most competitive, or maybe the person who has the soonest availability,” Zappacosta explains. “And with that, you make a confident hire.” The new product also eliminates barriers for professionals on the platform. Instead of asking them to fill out rigid questionnaires and checklists to supply Thumbtack with the right metadata to power searches, pros can use natural language to detail their expertise and set nuanced parameters for their work. For example, a pro can tell the AI, “I don’t travel more than 50 miles if it’s less than a $1,000 job, but if it’s over $1,000, game on,” Zappacosta says. The company is preparing to roll out a new communication layer that provides homeowners with Thumbtack phone numbers to keep their information private. Because these conversations happen through Thumbtack, the platform can transcribe them, generate AI summaries, set reminders, and help customers compare quotes side by side. Before this feature, Zappacosta says, Thumbtack had visibility into just the 30% to 40% of communications that happened directly inside the app’s chat feature. These conversations will also provide Thumbtack with another rich vein of unstructured data to refine its AI matchmaking, such as “details around who likes which jobs, what jobs they’re good at, pricing estimates, and how long things are going to take,” Zappacosta explains. “All of that is very context-, neighborhood-, and pro-specific”—and traditionally has been very hard for the platform to track. Thumbtack’s AI can add up to a lot of time saved for contractors, says Jack Marquardt, owner of Electric Avenue in Portland, Oregon, who has been on the app since 2017 and serves on its advisory board. He cites a recent example of a homeowner who wanted a garage door installed and mistakenly reached out to an electrician. Marquardt had to explain that while he could put in an outlet and get power to the door, he couldn’t install the door itself and that other companies specialize in such jobs. Thumbtack’s new tools should be able to weed out these dead-end leads while speeding up communications around pricing and other parameters. “We’re just all on the same page a lot faster,” Marquardt says. Professionalizing the pros Zappacosta hopes the new experience of Thumbtack incentivizes homeowners to be proactive about taking care of their houses, rather than just responding in times of crisis and need. He sees home maintenance, in particular, as an area for growth. But perhaps the company’s biggest opportunity lies in helping its largely analog service providers further professionalize by becoming, as Zappacosta says, their “business sidekick.” The vast majority of Thumbtack’s pros, he notes, don’t really use any back-office software, beyond QuickBooks. “They don’t otherwise leverage software to delight their customers, to be super responsive, to provide digital invoicing and payments,” he says. “We’ve earned the right to help them do a whole lot more than we do with them today.” Thumbtack isn’t announcing any back-office software just yet, but its timing would be good. Interest in skilled trades is growing amid concerns about AI’s impact on office jobs. Thumbtack has doubled the number of pros on its platform over the past five years, and Zappacosta notes that 40% of those who have joined since 2024 are younger than 35. “The arc is often they become an apprentice, they become a technician, and then they’re like, Wait, I can go get my own jobs. I can build my own firm,” he says. “And they turn to Thumbtack to go do that.” Marquardt, for his part, is happy to have AI assist him without fearing that it’ll replace him. “People can use AI to help educate themselves and maybe diagnose their own [home repair] issues,” he says. “But they’re still going to need skilled electricians to come and actually execute everything right.” View the full article

When a former Nike employee joined the company a few years ago, she felt like she was in exactly the right place to work on diversity, equity, and inclusion. She believed in the sportswear giant’s DEI leadership and was moved by how John Donahoe, then the CEO, had spoken about corporate responsibility in public appearances. “I was like, oh my gosh, yes, companies should fight for their values,” recalls the employee, who requested anonymity because she is not authorized to speak on behalf of Nike. “Fantastic. Nike is the place for me.” But her excitement waned just months into the job. Something had shifted: She couldn’t get access to data easily, and projects got stuck in limbo as she awaited approval from the legal team. She was also instructed not to delete any emails or files. She didn’t know it, but Nike had become the target of a rather unusual investigation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (Nike says it’s standard practice during any legal proceeding for the company to advise employees not to delete files or information.) As the federal agency tasked with enforcing anti-discrimination laws in the workplace, the EEOC now fields more than 88,000 discrimination claims in a year. But this wasn’t a routine investigation into worker complaints. The EEOC’s interest in Nike had been initiated by a commissioner, Andrea Lucas, rather than a specific claim of discrimination from an employee. Lucas—who The President later appointed as chair of the EEOC—brought the charge in response to Nike’s DEI programs, alleging that the company has discriminated against white employees and job applicants by pursuing its diversity goals, which included tying some compensation to DEI metrics and providing career advancement opportunities for under-represented employees. Stamping out DEI Since becoming chair of the agency in early 2025, Lucas has made her intentions clear, embracing an agenda in line with The President’s executive orders that prioritizes “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination.” In a New York Times report this week, current and former EEOC employees claimed that the agency was relentlessly pursuing charges of discrimination against white men. The investigation into Nike is a crucial flashpoint in the anti-DEI movement—one that, depending on the outcome, could have serious consequences for DEI programs across corporate America. At a time when employers across the U.S. have sought to distance themselves from DEI efforts that could prove legally risky, Nike’s public commitments to diversity work appear to be the very reason Lucas has taken aim at the company. “I thought: If I can work in the DEI team at a company like Nike—which has so much influence over the world—what could the impact be?” says the former Nike employee. “And I think similarly, Andrea Lucas was like, if I can get Nike—one of the biggest, most influential companies in the world—to stop doing DEI, then all of the other dominoes will fall.” In speaking with former Nike employees as well as EEOC officials, diversity experts, and shareholder activists, a portrait emerges of how Nike became the The President administration’s first DEI domino, what’s happening quietly as the current EEOC pursues its agenda that we aren’t seeing, and the significant ripple effects for corporate America if the company fights this action or folds. Nike’s record on DEI Nike’s reputation as a progressive employer dates back decades, well before the company made Colin Kaepernick the face of a high-profile ad campaign. Back in 2002, Nike was one of just 13 employers to receive a top score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, an annual benchmarking survey that measures workplace inclusion. (In response to conservative backlash over the last few years, many companies have now stopped participating in the ranking altogether. Nike continues to participate.) Before the Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act protects LGBTQ+ workers against discrimination, Nike was a vocal supporter of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which aimed to ban discrimination against gay workers; a leader on Nike’s diversity and inclusion team even testified before the Senate in 2009, making the business case for passing the bill. By 2018, however, Nike was contending with a widely publicized gender discrimination lawsuit, amid myriad allegations of sexism and harassment within the company. (The lawsuit has yet to be resolved, despite progress on a tentative settlement last year.) Nike ousted several male employees when the issues came to light, and following an internal pay equity audit, the company awarded raises to over 7,000 employees. A few years later, when many companies took pains to promote racial equity in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, Nike made bold commitments of its own: The company pledged to increase the number of women in leadership roles and boost the share of racial and ethnic minorities to 35% across its workforce; Nike also tied executive compensation to making progress on its DEI commitments. Nike’s senior leadership also participated in an intensive six-week certificate program in 2020, spearheaded by diversity consultant and Northwestern University professor Alvin Tillery. His team trained 900 global vice presidents at Nike through a combination of live instruction and asynchronous video content. As for the scope of the program, Tillery described it as “one of the most significant corporate investments in their human capital” that he has seen across the landscape of DEI trainings. Still, as is often the case with diversity work, Nike needed a nudge to be more transparent about its internal progress on DEI. In 2021, the shareholder advocacy nonprofit As you Sow filed a proposal urging Nike to share data on its progress around diversity and inclusion. “Since 2019, we’ve been tracking companies’ disclosure of workforce demographics, including hiring, retention, and promotion rates,” says Meredith Benton, the workplace equity program manager at As You Sow. “At that time, Nike was a large employer not sharing that data set, where there was a brand risk associated with any claims of an equitable workplace.” The following year, after As You Sow sought to file another shareholder resolution, Nike agreed to release metrics on recruitment and promotion rates for diverse employees by 2024. (At the time of writing, however, Nike does not seem to have shared that information.) The company also publicly posted its EEO-1 form for the first time, which captures workforce demographic data and must be submitted to the EEOC annually by all private sector employers with more than 100 employees. A “risk averse” internal culture The former employee who worked on DEI at Nike described the company as “risk averse” and apprehensive about collecting data even prior to the EEOC investigation. “Access to data was a struggle,” she says. “They said: Well, if we uncover inequity, then we make ourselves liable. If people find out that we knew that there were inequities and we didn’t do anything about it, then they could sue us.” She claimed that Nike seemed more interested in big, showy moments that promoted inclusivity, like the company’s Juneteenth celebration. She did feel that many employees and even senior leaders were committed to DEI—but actually getting the work done proved more challenging, in part because of the company culture. “Unfortunately, rigorous DEI work makes people feel uncomfortable,” she says. Since 2020, there has been quite a bit of turnover across Nike’s DEI team, including a quick succession of five chief diversity officers. The company also opted not to publish a corporate sustainability report last year sharing its progress on DEI. When Tillery conducted the leadership training with Nike, he found that—like many companies of its stature—the top leaders were largely male and white, with some exceptions. “I didn’t look at them and say, ‘oh my god, Nike is winning on the DEI front,’” he recounts. “I’ve worked with companies where their middle and upper management seemed more diverse.” Tillery points to companies like McDonald’s or even Walmart, which he argues have more “visible diversity” in the C-suite. But he also believed Nike’s leadership demonstrated a genuine desire to “be good inclusive leaders,” despite the company’s shortcomings. “The bottom line on all of these trainings is that it’s good for business,” Tillery says. “It reduces complaints from women and people of color. It makes people across the board feel valued . . . You’re going to tell companies who’ve been sued multiple times for racial and gender discrimination that they shouldn’t try to prevent that?” Implications for Nike—and corporate DEI As the EEOC investigation has unfolded over the last two years, Nike claims to have cooperated with the agency while also pushing back on the full scope of its requests, arguing they are burdensome. “We have had extensive, good-faith participation in an EEOC inquiry into our personnel practices, programs, and decisions and have had ongoing efforts to provide information and engage constructively with the agency,” a Nike spokesperson said in a statement. “To date, we have shared thousands of pages of information and detailed written responses to the EEOC’s inquiry and are continuing our attempt to cooperate.” (Nike had also previously told Fast Company that the subpoena enforcement action felt like a “surprising and unusual escalation.”) “We are committed to fair and lawful employment practices and follow all applicable laws, including those that prohibit discrimination,” the statement continued. “We believe our programs and practices are consistent with those obligations and take these matters seriously.” Former EEOC officials say the specifics of the investigation are not exactly out of the ordinary, at least so far—not even the lengthy timeline. What is atypical, however, is that this investigation was thrust into the public sphere before there was any resolution. EEOC investigations are supposed to remain private until they come to an end; if a case is not dismissed and the agency finds reasonable cause, the next step is a conciliation process that often results in a settlement. If both parties cannot come to an agreement, the EEOC may bring a lawsuit, though that is considered a last resort. An impasse In the case of Nike, the EEOC chose to enforce a subpoena in court, bringing the investigation into the public record. The EEOC does rely on subpoenas to ensure employers comply with the agency’s requests for information—but enforcing them in court is hardly standard practice. “I would say that it’s clear that the EEOC and Nike, through their counsel, have reached an impasse, and that’s why this has gotten filed in court,” says Karla Gilbride, a former general counsel for the EEOC who was fired by The President last year. “The only situation where something would go to the court for enforcement is when the employer doesn’t comply with that subpoena, or in the commission’s view, isn’t forthcoming enough . . . And in my experience, that is pretty unusual.” Chai Feldblum—a former EEOC commissioner and president of EEO Leaders, a group of former senior officials who worked at the EEOC and Department of Labor under previous administrations—says the investigation is far from over. When it does eventually come to a resolution, it could involve a lawsuit if the EEOC wants to make an example of Nike. But regardless of the outcome, Feldblum argues, the damage is already done: The EEOC has drawn plenty of attention to this case. “This is an EEOC that wants to have a broad frontal attack on ill-defined DEI efforts,” she says. “They have already achieved that goal with their public subpoena against Nike, regardless of how this particular case ends up playing out.” Even if the two parties come to an agreement and avoid litigation, the EEOC could exert its influence to broadcast the details of the settlement and effectively send a message to other employers. She points to recent DEI-related settlements with Columbia University and a Planned Parenthood affiliate, both of which were made public. (The investigation into Columbia was especially notable because it was prompted by a commissioner’s charge, and the university agreed to pay a whopping $21 million—the largest public settlement with the EEOC in nearly 20 years.) The stakes for Nike Whatever the outcome, there’s a lot at stake for Nike, whether or not the EEOC finds evidence of anti-white discrimination. It certainly doesn’t help that Nike is in the midst of a sweeping overhaul to turn around the business—and progress has been slow at best. (Just this month, Nike announced its second round of layoffs this year, impacting 1,400 jobs largely in the tech department.) “The brand of Nike is built on the bodies of Black athletes,” Tillery says. “So of course [the The President administration] wants to take it down for the cultural cachet. I think they don’t expect to necessarily win in court, but they expect the corporate counsel to either be afraid or to extract concessions from Nike—and then they can go to all the other companies they want to threaten and get deals.” Through his consulting firm, 2040 Strategy Group, Tillery has run the numbers for other companies on how caving to anti-DEI pressure could potentially harm their brand. The message was clear: Brand identity and customer loyalty would drop precipitously. Target experienced this firsthand after dialing back its DEI policies last year: The decision prompted a boycott and widespread outrage from the Black community, and Target’s faltering sales dipped even further; the company’s stock dropped by over 30%, and former CEO Brian Cornell eventually stepped down. That’s why, in the face of legal threats from the The President administration and anti-DEI pressure from conservative activists, many companies split the difference by maintaining their DEI efforts under another name (cue the shift to “belonging” and “inclusion” programs at companies like Disney). Nike is no stranger to consumer outrage, having experienced it firsthand after its polarizing campaign featuring Kaepernick. But the good will the company garnered by taking a stand on racial equality also means there’s more to lose. “I hope that they fight it out for the next two years,” Tillery says of Nike. “If [this case] gets up to the Supreme Court, it’s a wild card. But if I talked to [CEO] Elliot Hill, I’d say the harm to the brand will be unfathomable if they fold.” The cost of resistance Even if the company chooses to fight this investigation, Nike will likely be forced to make some concessions and changes to its DEI programs, much like its peers in the corporate world. The publicity around Nike’s case could set the stage for similar inquiries into other formidable employers, or the threat of a potential investigation could scare some companies into backing away from DEI more than they already have. Just this month, IBM forked over $17 million to settle a case brought by the Justice Department, as part of an initiative targeting DEI programs across federal contractors. The government claimed that the company’s DEI programs—which allegedly considered demographic background as part of employment decisions—were unlawful. (IBM already reportedly made changes to some DEI programs last year or eliminated them outright.) “Fighting against the government requires a lot of money,” says DEI practitioner Evelyn Carter, who recently authored the book Was That Racist? How to Detect, Interrupt, and Unlearn Bias in Everyday Life. “It requires a lot of time [and] expertise, and I have spoken with many leaders who said to me—when they were changing the names of their DEI teams and the like—that they knew they weren’t doing anything wrong. But they also knew the risk of having a lawsuit brought against them, even if they could fight it and win, would financially tank the company in such a way that it was easier to just fly under the radar. And that killing effect is, I think, what Lucas was going after.” In fact, there could already be similar investigations underway that have remained private thus far—or may never become public if companies capitulate to the agency’s demands. One former EEOC official who asked to remain anonymous told Fast Company that the agency is reportedly pursuing “weak charges” alleging anti-white discrimination and resorting to subpoena actions to obtain more information from employers, according to accounts from corporate counsel. Many employers are reportedly scared of getting negative publicity and doing their best to comply with the EEOC’s requests. In the meantime, the EEOC is diverting precious resources away from its core mission of finding justice for vulnerable employees who experience workplace discrimination. “For the EEOC to prioritize attacking [DEI] efforts—rather than addressing the overwhelming majority of charges alleging what we know is discrimination—is an irresponsible use of limited resources,” Feldblum says. “We know that there has to be a negative impact on their ability to do their job in these other areas. We want an EEOC that addresses the pressing problems that our civil rights laws were designed to solve—not an agency that engages in fishing expeditions to identify a few favorite victims of supposed discrimination. That’s what is happening now, and that’s a sad moment for our country.” A glimmer of hope Perhaps there is a glimmer of hope in how certain companies have navigated the surge in anti-DEI sentiment over the last few years. Some major companies have stayed the course on DEI, even if they are no longer using that exact language. In recent years, shareholder activists have proposed anti-DEI resolutions that found virtually no traction: According to As You Sow, 24 companies faced anti-DEI proposals last year—and 99% of shareholders voted to support management and keep DEI programs intact. “Companies are talking to us, saying explicitly that they’re worried about spurious lawsuits based on the fact that they have these programs,” Benton says. “But they know that they have to protect these programs because the programs are important to them and to how they run their business.” There are, of course, a few prominent companies that have held their ground in response to anti-DEI attacks, despite the attendant concerns. “We know the famous examples of companies that stood firm, Apple and Costco, in large part because shareholders didn’t want to get rid of the programs,” Tillery says. “They just said no, and there’s been no real consequences to that.” In response to the shareholder vote, The President called DEI a “hoax” and urged Apple to “get rid of DEI rules,” to no avail. And Costco stood firm against a letter from 19 Republican attorneys general pressuring the company to dispense with its DEI policies. Nike could follow in their footsteps, and then some—if its leadership dares to see this investigation through to the end. “They’re the ones holding the ball around equity and inclusion,” Benton says. “This is the biggest game Nike is ever going to play when it comes to social issues.” View the full article

Ask any paid search manager who has tried to get an AI agent to do something genuinely useful with a Google Ads account and you will hear a version of the same story. They exported performance data, pasted it into a chat window, got a solid answer, and then did the exact same thing the next day. Exporting, pasting, repeating — that isn’t automation. That’s the same manual work you were doing before, performed in a different window. The AI tools are not the problem. Any of the major ones can do solid analysis when the right data is in front of them. The problem is getting that data to them live, current, and without a human in the middle copying it across. It’s the reason most PPC accounts in 2026 still run almost exactly the way they did before anyone started talking about agents. Call it the data wall. The problem hiding behind “we just need better prompts” Every ad platform is a silo by default. Google Ads records a conversion. Your CRM records whether that lead is qualified. Your inventory system records whether the product behind that click is still on the shelf. None of them talk to each other without deliberate plumbing. PPC managers have bridged that gap manually for years: weekly exports, cross-referenced spreadsheets, dashboards that were stale by Monday morning. That was workable when a human was doing the bridging on a set schedule. It becomes a structural problem the moment you hand execution over to an agent that must act in real time. Take a keyword showing healthy volume, an acceptable CPA, and a CVR in range — all according to Google Ads. In HubSpot, those same conversions are tagged as disqualified leads: wrong territory, no budget, wrong company size entirely. The agent has no way to know. It keeps bidding. The budget keeps spending. And the problem doesn’t surface until someone runs the monthly review. That is a data access problem, not a prompting problem. Better prompts don’t fix it. But a better pipeline does. MCP gives your AI agent access to data and skills The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that lets AI clients connect to external tools and data sources without a custom integration for each one. Before MCP, getting an agent to read from Google Ads, your CRM, and an inventory system meant building and maintaining three separate connectors, with the burden compounding every time you added a source. MCP standardizes the handshake. A platform publishes an MCP server once, and any compatible AI client — Claude, ChatGPT’s agent mode, your team’s custom agent — can connect to it. Google has already open-sourced its Ads API MCP server on GitHub, which allows agents to run Google Ads Query Language (GAQL) queries directly against live account data. The infrastructure problem that has blocked most real-world agentic PPC work is finally being addressed at the platform level. What opens up when data finally flows The CRM gap closes first. An agent connected to both Google Ads and HubSpot can pull last month’s conversions, cross-reference them against CRM disposition, identify the keywords producing disqualified leads, and lower bids on those sources — on a schedule, without a human compiling the report. A loop that used to swallow half a day runs automatically. Inventory creates the same kind of blind spot. An agent connected to Shopify can check stock levels before weekend campaigns go live. When an SKU drops below the threshold, the corresponding product group is paused before traffic hits a page that no longer converts. Even the data-pipeline work itself gets faster. On a recent “PPC Town Hall“ episode, Lars Maat — a PPC expert and agency founder in Rotterdam — described building a Python pipeline with no prior Python experience, connecting the Google Maps API, Google’s Things To Do feature, and Ahrefs to generate optimized landing pages for a parking client to identify nearby attractions, check search volumes, and feed the content to a generator. The whole thing was live in two weeks. The only constraint was getting the right data in front of the AI and not what it could do. Access without guardrails is its own problem Here’s where things get interesting, and where most of the MCP hype is skating past a real issue. Write access to a live Google Ads account, in the hands of a probabilistic language model, without institutional constraints, is a new category of risk. An agent that can pause a campaign needs defined parameters: what threshold triggers the action, who gets notified before it fires, which campaign types require human sign-off. Those parameters don’t exist inside the AI tool. They have to be built around it. Advertisers can grant granular permissions to the Optmyzr MCP to stay in control of what the connector is allowed to do on its own, what it can never do, and what it can do with human approval. Advertisers can grant granular permissions to the Optmyzr MCP to stay in control of what the connector is allowed to do on its own, what it can never do, and what it can do with human approval. On another “PPC Town Hall“ episode, Ann Stanley — founder of Anicca Digital and one of the UK’s most experienced paid media practitioners — described effective AI deployment as a sandwich: humans at the front who understand the goal and can give precise instructions, humans at the back who review the output and decide what ships, and AI handling execution in the middle. The quality of what comes out depends on the quality of what goes in and on whether the middle layer has any constraints at all. This is where raw API access stops being enough. Google’s open-source MCP server is a good piece of infrastructure. But it is not a safety net. It will happily run any GAQL query and any mutation the agent constructs, and if the agent hallucinates a campaign ID or picks the wrong lookback window, the ad account absorbs the consequences. LLMs are probabilistic. Ad platform APIs are not. So, something has to sit in between. Why Optmyzr built its own MCP We have spent over a decade encoding how Google Ads actually behaves — not just what the API exposes, but the interdependencies between settings, the edge cases around campaign types, the nuances of what makes a “duplicate keyword” a true duplicate versus a false positive. That work lives inside Optmyzr as a business intelligence layer. Our MCP connector is how we let your AI agent borrow it. When Claude, ChatGPT, or your team’s custom agent connects to the Optmyzr MCP, it gains access to the same Sidekick capabilities your team uses inside Optmyzr: pulling PPC performance reports with rich filtering and segmentation, surfacing configured and triggered alerts, creating and editing alerts, retrieving merchant feed details, summarizing portfolio health across every active account, and — this is the one most people miss — generating and executing a full Rule Engine strategy from a plain-English description of what you’re trying to accomplish. That matters for three reasons most DIY setups miss: Strategy from a sentence, executed inside Optmyzr. The MCP’s Rule Engine function takes a natural-language instruction (“find campaigns where CPA has drifted 20% above target over the last 14 days and draft a bid-adjustment strategy”), generates the corresponding Rule Engine strategy, runs it against your account, analyzes the results, and returns recommendations. The LLM writes the intent. Optmyzr’s deterministic Rule Engine does the work. That is the execution and control layer that raw ad-platform MCPs don’t have. Cross-account, portfolio-scale analysis. Sidekick, inside the Optmyzr UI, is brilliant at single-account, single-page context. The MCP is where you go when the question is “which of my 80 accounts has negative-keyword waste trending upward this month?” An AI client connected to the Optmyzr MCP can fan out across every account on your profile in a single prompt. This is the single biggest reason agencies plug their agents into the Optmyzr MCP rather than a raw Ads API connection. Guardrails inherited from Sidekick. Every action taken through the Optmyzr MCP runs under the same permissions and workflow logic as using Sidekick directly. The agent analyzes, strategizes, alerts, and composes proposed changes; humans or existing Optmyzr approval flows ship the changes. That is the “safety sandwich” Stanley described, baked into the product rather than bolted on. The end result is an AI agent that operates across your portfolio with the reach of an API, the judgment of a platform that has been in this space since before AI agents were a category, and a safety posture that doesn’t require you to build your own circuit breakers. A practical starting point If you want to experiment with read-only access across raw ad platforms, Windsor.ai and Zapier’s MCP integration are the fastest on-ramps. If you’re comfortable managing your own guardrails, Google’s open-source Ads API MCP server on GitHub gives you precise GAQL control at the cost of building the safety layer yourself. If you run client accounts where a misfire is unaffordable — or you just want your AI agent to think across your whole portfolio with the judgment of a senior PPC strategist — the Optmyzr MCP is the fastest path to an agent that is actually safe to give the keys to. It works with Claude Desktop (via custom Connectors or manual config), Claude Code, ChatGPT (via Developer Mode apps), and any MCP-compatible client. And, you can set it up in minutes: generate an API key from the MCP Integration panel in your Optmyzr settings, paste the server URL into your AI client, and your agent is operating across every active account on your Optmyzr profile. Full MCP setup guide and instructions. The data wall is coming down either way. The question is whether your agent walks through it with a plan, or a prompt and a prayer. View the full article

In the music video for “Runway,” Lady Gaga’s collaboration with Doechii for The Devil Wears Prada 2 soundtrack, the wardrobes are high fashion and the musicians and their dancers serve, pose, and vogue. Colorful and camp, it’s everything you’d expect considering the subject matter of the song is about turning dance floors into runways. For some viewers, though, it just looks like a Target commercial. The post activity for Popcrave’s tweet about the “Runway” music video is filled with commenters pejoratively comparing the clip to a Target ad. It’s not hard to see why. Swap out the black-and-white lines on the video’s main set with red-and-white circles, and it looks like a spot for a deluxe edition of the soundtrack with three exclusive tracks available only at Target. The retail giant became a popular music video producer thanks to its star-studded commercials promoting Target Exclusive albums for artists like Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, and Taylor Swift in the 2000s and ’10s. Target raised the stakes with live commercials filmed during awards shows beginning with Imagine Dragons during the 2015 Grammys. YouTube The creative partnership was mutually beneficial. The format of Target’s commercials gave musicians the freedom to express themselves and their latest album eras. The ads also provided a promotional platform they weren’t getting at other big-box retailers like Walmart—but used to get from, say, iPod ads. Meanwhile, Target’s visual brand elements, like its logo and distinctive red color, would inevitably be embedded in the music videos’ sets. Secondary visual features, like high-contrast set pieces or graphic black-and-white stripes in Gwen Stefani’s live commercial music video for her 2016 song “Make Me Like You” became shorthand for the Target brand world, too. And that brand affiliation strategy drove traffic to its physical music aisles at a time when digital downloads still reigned supreme. It also gave the retailer pop cultural cachet. Target still sells exclusive albums, but it doesn’t promote them like it once did, with commercials that had hi-fi, bespoke choreography and expensive, live awards show ad time. YouTube While Gaga has released Target Exclusives for her albums Mayhem and Chromatica, she’s never filmed her own Target commercial. But the “Runway” video, directed by choreographer Parris Goebel (who codirected “Abracadabra”), lets us imagine. The creative direction and set design is graphic, high-contrast, colorful, and theatric—in other words, it’s Target-coded. And the dancing is like an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, with each dancer attempting to outdo the last: performance as competition. While detractors claim the “Runway” video is a visual retread, others find its extravagance fitting and see the fashion-forward focus as avant-garde and fun. For what it’s worth, the 2010s homage in the music video seems intentional: Gaga pairs a bright-blue Robert Wun dress and matching headpiece with a bright-yellow wig that recalls 2010’s iconic “Telephone” video, for instance. That callback’s not reductive, it’s a reference. YouTube And if there’s another reason the music video feels like a throwback, it’s that corporate Pride has fallen out of vogue. “Runway” might look like a Target commercial, but Target wouldn’t do a commercial like that now. (Gaga, however, totally would.) For any criticism the “Runway” music video has gotten, it’s done its job. After all, this is the music video for the lead single to a soundtrack of a sequel to a 20-year-old film. Of course it’s going to feel nostalgic. View the full article

Rocket, United Wholesale Mortgage and Pennymac said they will use the new government-sponsored enterprise credit metric as large lenders get on board. View the full article

Meet the top loan originators in the 28th edition of National Mortgage News' annual ranking and learn how they approach purchase business. View the full article

When the New York Red Bulls professional soccer team heads to practice at its new state-of-the-art training facility in Morris Township, New Jersey, the players will be doing so alongside a bunch of 9-year-olds. The $100 million facility, which officially opened in April, was designed as much for the pros on the Major League Soccer squad as for the roughly 6,000 kids that take part in the club’s academy and soccer camp programs every year. “The objective was always to have a space that we could grow into—not just good for the moment, but to think about the future,” says Marc de Grandpré, president and general manager of Red Bull New York. “Our success on the first team is going to be predicated on our success in the academy, ultimately.” It’s an unusual investment for an American soccer team. The facility, officially named the RWJBarnabas Health Red Bulls Performance Center, spans across 80 acres and features eight full-size soccer pitches—including a 350-seat match field—as well as gyms, physiotherapy spaces, classrooms, and a team-building dining hall. The facility is now the main practice area for the Red Bulls and the second-division Red Bull New York II, but it’s also the training ground for the organization’s youth development academy, with teams ranging from under-10s to under-18s. Rather than separate the younger athletes from the pros, the organization decided to bring them all under one roof as a form of encouragement and development for the junior players. “When you’re in an academy meeting room, you’re looking out the window and you can see the first team train,” says Julian de Guzman, Red Bull New York’s head of sport. “That’s where you want to be one day. And that’s something to be reminded of every day.” De Guzman says this is the norm in Europe, where the academy arms of professional soccer teams are valuable sources of new talent. Red Bull, which also owns several other professional sports teams, including soccer teams in Leipzig, Germany, and Salzburg, Austria, is now bringing this approach to the U.S. To do so, they’ve worked with the global architecture and design firm Gensler, which has a deep portfolio in sports training facility design. Previous projects include training facilities for the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces and the professional basketball teams in Phoenix. Kristin Byrd, the lead designer on the Red Bulls facility, says the team came with high expectations for how the space could function and match the caliber of facilities used by its other teams, particularly its European soccer teams. One primary demand was that players be as connected to the field as possible. That translated into a design ethos of extreme transparency throughout the facility, with its 4,600-square-foot gym that looks out of a two-story wall of windows onto the main training pitch, and everything from the dining hall to the hydrotherapy pool offering clear sight lines to the field. “The flow and the adjacencies are different from many training facilities that we’ve done previously,” Byrd says. Views to the training fields are all about keeping players connected to the game, and to the team. “If a player is injured, more often than not, they’re in the back room working out or getting worked on,” de Grandpré says. “It was important to have all that be visible so that someone who is not training with the first team can be rehabbing and still watching the team play, and feel like he’s part of the squad and not removed somewhere else.” The spaces and connectivity within the facility are also guided by Red Bull’s deep expertise in sports medicine and exercise science, working not just with its European soccer teams but also the extreme athletes it supports, like mountain bikers and skydivers, through its Athlete Performance Centers. Everything at Red Bull New York’s facility—from its dual-depth pool and its outdoor running hill to its wellness lab—serves a purpose, according to de Grandpré. “It’s not just there because there’s some new trend that we need to have X or Y technology,” he says. “Everything was designed with use in mind and the intent of making our players better.” That also includes some unique elements, according to Byrd. One is an outdoor recovery courtyard, accessible through the players’ physical therapy area. “It’s sort of a walled garden, a relaxation area, an area for the players to get outside where they can have that green space, have that natural light, but not be on display to anybody else that would be visiting the facility. Because the only way to really enter it is attached through that recovery zone,” she says. “It’s something we’ve explored in a lot of our other projects, but for whatever reason, it’s gotten too value-managed out. Or maybe the other teams didn’t see it as a value. Having that access to green space and natural light is a huge element for healing,” she adds. The facility also includes a stand-alone building intended for use by visiting teams, with their own private training areas, gym, and locker room. The Brazilian national team plans to use the facility as its home base ahead of the 2026 World Cup. Recognizing that it won’t just be players using the facility, the design also accounts for another major user group: the parents and family members of the youth academy players. In addition to covered spectator seating on the main pitch, the facility also includes an indoor area for families to get out of hot or cold weather or to grab a snack. “They really wanted to make sure that the parental community was taken care of,” Byrd says. It’s an extension of the facility’s focus on building up the community of the team, from its youngest members on up. “What we want to do here is enable all these young kids to fall in love with the game,” de Grandpré says. “We all know that 99% of them will not end up pro, but we want them to enjoy the game. And for that 1%, we want to give them the best chance to end up playing with the first team.” View the full article

Executive leaders today face mounting pressure to boost productivity and innovation with AI. Employees—on the other hand—report low trust in organizational change and limited information about how AI will impact their work (or whether it’s going to replace the jobs that the company hired them to do). According to a December 2025 Gartner survey of 110 CHROs, 95% reported undertaking AI-related initiatives in their organizations. But while many companies are experimenting widely with AI, most organizations are struggling to translate AI investment into something that actually improves their businesses. Why AI adoption isn’t that simple AI adoption is uniquely difficult. It is significantly more challenging than past transformations. That’s because success depends on reengineering work, operating models, and culture. Compare this with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), which largely involves deploying technology. Positioning AI as a “member of the workforce” magnifies this complexity by creating identity confusion and eroding trust amongst human employees. An April 2025 Gartner survey of 2,889 employees found that 79% of employees already report low trust in organizational change. Employees experience and relate to AI in varied ways. It all depends on their usage, familiarity, and cultural and personality preferences. Some naturally humanize AI, especially as systems act autonomously or interact in human-like ways. This reflex isn’t wrong. However, leaning into this can create two risks: unrealistic expectations about AI’s capabilities and identity confusion about human roles. It’s important for leaders to position AI as a powerful technology and work resource, not a colleague, teammate, or part of the workforce. Leading with clear, intentional language and consistent communication helps reinforce trust and protect ROI. Clear positioning of AI helps leaders stay focused on business imperatives while balancing human impact and driving sustainable change. This purpose‑driven positioning moves organizations beyond passive adoption and lays the groundwork for sustainable change across three facets: language, trust, and consistency. Language: set intentional boundaries CEOs are under immense pressure to demonstrate the value of AI. Vendors increasingly market AI agents as “hirable” replacements for human roles. They might do this by positioning AI as a “virtual colleague” or “teammate” to access staffing budgets. This framing can trigger serious consequences, including decreased trust and engagement, as well as stalled productivity. Gartner predicts a 15% drop in engagement by 2028 if AI agents appear in organization charts. Language that acknowledges the instinct to humanize AI, while reinforcing clear boundaries, helps employees understand where AI supports work, but also where accountability remains human, and how roles will evolve. Framing AI as a tool that amplifies human strengths, rather than a teammate, reduces fear, accelerates adoption, and keeps attention on business outcomes. Building trust by equipping the manager layer You can build or break trust through managers, and it’s also through them where change efforts ultimately succeed or fail. But companies often leave many managers without guidance. They expect them to have the answers to employee questions without shared language or clear principles. This creates inconsistency and fuels uncertainty. C-suite leaders need to provide managers with practical talk tracks, FAQs, and examples that enable them to explain what exactly is changing and what employees can expect. When managers can clearly articulate how AI affects workflows and accountability, employees gain confidence to experiment and adopt. Effective AI leadership also requires visible alignment among the CHRO, CEO, and overall C‑suite. When you have a shared message across your leadership group, it gives managers the expectations on what language they can rely on to build trust, reduce uncertainty, and lead with confidence The importance of consistency and aligning your stories Mixed AI narratives have consequences beyond adoption. When organizations promote an “AI‑first” story externally while emphasizing cost-cutting or restructuring internally, employees and external stakeholders quickly notice the disconnect. Over time, credibility erodes, which weakens trust and undermines the employee value proposition. This creates avoidable brand risk. To avoid reputational issues, you need to ensure that alignment extends beyond executives. This includes internal communications, marketing, investor messaging, and customer narratives. Every single part of your company needs to be clear on the role that AI plays in the organization’s strategy. That coherence reduces speculation, protects trust, and reinforces confidence in leadership. If companies want to reap the rewards that AI can bring, they need to move beyond experimentation. This requires owning the narrative, setting clear language boundaries, equipping managers to build trust, and ensuring consistency across the enterprise. Only then will they see a positive (and sustainable) impact. View the full article

Managing cash flow effectively is crucial for your small business’s success. By developing a forecasting model, you can predict income and expenses based on historical data. Identifying investment opportunities through expense categorization helps you allocate resources wisely. Furthermore, comprehending supplier payment options and reviewing banking relationships can improve your financial standing. As you continue to explore these strategies, you’ll uncover fundamental practices that can augment your cash flow management considerably. Key Takeaways Regularly update your cash flow forecasts to align with changing business conditions and improve accuracy in predictions. Monitor cash inflows and outflows to identify trends, enabling better budget management and expense control. Establish a cash reserve to handle unexpected expenses or downturns, ensuring business continuity. Negotiate favorable payment terms with suppliers to align payments with cash flow cycles, enhancing liquidity. Utilize financial tools, such as interest-earning accounts and cash management solutions, to optimize cash flow. Develop a Forecasting Model Developing a forecasting model is vital for small businesses looking to manage their cash flow effectively. A well-developed model helps you predict annual income based on historical data, allowing for better planning of future cash needs. Regularly updating your forecasting model guarantees that it aligns with changing business objectives and market conditions, enhancing your cash flow management. Identify Investment Opportunities To identify investment opportunities that align with your business goals, start by classifying your expenses strategically. This classification helps you pinpoint which investments can provide the best returns without straining your cash flow. Classify Expenses Strategically Classifying expenses strategically is essential for small businesses seeking to identify investment opportunities and optimize their financial management. By segmenting your expenses into clear categories, you can better understand your spending patterns and find areas for potential investment. Consider these three categories: Operating Expenses: Daily costs that keep your business running. Strategic Investments: Funds allocated for growth initiatives, like marketing or technology upgrades. Reserve Funds: Money set aside for emergencies or unforeseen expenses. Regularly evaluating these categories allows you to pinpoint underperforming areas. This way, you can reallocate funds toward promising investments that align with your operational goals, in the end improving your cash flow and supporting long-term growth for your small business. Explore Investment Options Wisely How can small businesses effectively investigate investment options that align with their financial goals? Start by comprehending your operations and objectives to pinpoint opportunities that support your growth strategy. Classify your expenses into operating, reserve, strategic, and restricted categories. This classification helps you decide where to invest surplus funds wisely. For maintaining liquidity during earning returns, consider mid-term investment options like time deposits and money market funds. Furthermore, look into long-term investments, such as bonds and treasury notes, to diversify your portfolio and potentially boost returns over time. Regularly assess your asset portfolio to mitigate risks and capitalize on market opportunities, ensuring they align with your overall business objectives. This approach helps secure your business’s financial health and growth. Understand Supplier Payment Options Even though managing cash flow can be a challenge for small businesses, grasping your supplier payment options is essential for maintaining financial stability. Balancing supplier payments with accounts receivable guarantees you have enough liquidity to meet your obligations and operational expenses. Here are three key options to reflect upon: Checks: Using checks can give you a 1-2 day float before funds are debited, which aids in cash management. Credit Cards: These can offer up to a 30-day buffer before costs hit your accounts, providing flexibility in financial planning. Overdraft Protection: Implementing business overdraft protection keeps transactions moving smoothly, preventing payment delays that could disrupt operations. Additionally, comprehending and negotiating supplier payment terms allows you to align your payment schedules with your cash flow cycle, optimizing your financial management. Consolidate Debt Consolidating debt can help you streamline outstanding payments, making it easier to manage your finances. By combining multiple bills into a single payment, you may lower your interest rates and simplify your payment processes, which can greatly improve your cash flow. Evaluating your current debt obligations is a key step in identifying opportunities for consolidation that can alleviate financial stress and boost your business’s liquidity. Streamline Outstanding Payments Managing multiple outstanding payments can be challenging, but streamlining these obligations through debt consolidation can greatly ease your financial management. By consolidating your debts, you can simplify your financial obligations and improve cash flow. Here are three key benefits: Single Payment: Combine multiple payments into one monthly obligation, making it easier to track your expenses. Improved Cash Flow: With fewer creditors to manage, your liquidity improves, allowing you to allocate resources more effectively. Negotiation Opportunities: Consolidation may allow you to negotiate better terms with lenders, further easing financial strain. Regularly assess your current debt obligations to highlight consolidation opportunities, reducing the overall stress on your business and streamlining your financial management. Lower Interest Rates Finding ways to lower your interest rates can greatly impact your small business’s financial health. Consolidating debt allows you to combine multiple bills into one manageable payment, often securing lower interest rates and extended repayment periods. This not only improves your cash flow but also reduces your monthly payment obligations. With increased liquidity, you can allocate funds to crucial operations or growth initiatives. Furthermore, debt consolidation helps you avoid late fees and penalties, leading to a more stable financial position. Regularly evaluating your debt can reveal opportunities for consolidation, simplifying your financial management and reducing stress. In the end, an effective strategy can save you money on interest, letting you reinvest or build a cash reserve for future needs. Simplify Payment Processes A streamlined payment process can greatly improve your small business’s cash flow. By consolidating debt, you can simplify your financial obligations, which often leads to lower interest rates and easier management. Here are three key benefits of debt consolidation: Single Payment: Combine multiple bills into one, reducing financial stress and enhancing liquidity. Improved Cash Flow: Longer repayment periods can lower your monthly expenses, allowing more cash for operations and growth. Better Credit Score: Fewer open accounts may boost your credit score, making it easier to secure financing in the future. Regularly evaluating your debt situation helps identify consolidation opportunities, in the end aiding in maintaining a healthy cash flow for your business. Take a Closer Look at Competitors When you take a closer look at your competitors, you open the door to valuable insights that can greatly improve your business strategy. Conducting a competitor review helps you comprehend market positioning, allowing you to adjust your strategies and maintain competitiveness. By analyzing their product lines and services, you can identify gaps in your offerings and pinpoint areas for improvement or innovation. Moreover, comparing pricing strategies guarantees your prices reflect fair market value, which can boost your sales potential and prevent lost profit opportunities. Grasping your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses informs your decisions regarding marketing, product development, and customer engagement strategies. Regularly evaluating competitor performance keeps you agile, enabling you to respond effectively to changes in market demand and customer preferences. This proactive approach not just strengthens your business but additionally positions you more favorably within the competitive environment. Assess and Evaluate Inventory and Supplies Evaluating and reviewing your inventory and supplies is crucial for maintaining a healthy cash flow in your small business. Regular assessments can help you identify excess stock of slow-selling items that tie up cash resources. Here are three key actions to reflect on: Monitor Inventory Levels: Regularly check your inventory turnover rates to avoid overstocking, which leads to increased holding costs and cash flow issues. Review Equipment and Supplies: Periodically assess your assets to find outdated or unused items that can be sold or salvaged for immediate cash. Optimize Supplier Contracts: Analyze your supplier agreements and negotiate better terms to improve inventory management and elevate cash flow stability. Review Banking Relationships Building a strong banking relationship is essential for managing your cash flow effectively. Regularly evaluate your banking services to guarantee you’re using options that improve your cash flow. Consider exploring payment solutions that expedite customer payments. Assess your current bank fees; switching banks may provide better terms that positively impact your finances. Here’s a quick reference table to guide your banking review: Service Benefit Considerations Interest-earning accounts Increase cash flow Compare interest rates Cash management tools Streamline financial management Analyze fees and features Business overdraft protection Avoid cash flow disruptions Review limits and costs Payment solutions Speed up customer payments Understand processing times Maintain an open dialogue with your Bank of America to stay informed about new products that can optimize your cash management strategies. Regular assessments can greatly benefit your business. Frequently Asked Questions How Can I Improve My Business’s Cash Flow Quickly? To improve your business’s cash flow quickly, start by evaluating your current expenses and cutting unnecessary costs. Consider offering discounts for early payments from customers, which can incentivize quicker cash inflow. Streamlining your inventory management can likewise help reduce holding costs. Furthermore, review your payment terms with suppliers; negotiating longer terms might provide you with more time to manage cash. Finally, guarantee timely invoicing to avoid delays in receiving payments. What Are Common Cash Flow Mistakes to Avoid? To avoid common cash flow mistakes, first, don’t underestimate expenses; always budget for unexpected costs. Second, maintain clear invoicing practices and follow up on overdue payments without delay. You should furthermore avoid mixing personal and business finances, as this complicates tracking cash flow. Finally, don’t neglect cash reserves; having a buffer can help manage fluctuations. How Often Should I Review My Cash Flow? You should review your cash flow at least monthly to stay on top of your financial health. Regular assessments help you identify trends, manage expenses, and predict future cash needs. If your business experiences fluctuations, consider weekly reviews to gain more insight. What Tools Can Assist With Cash Flow Management? To manage cash flow effectively, you can use several tools. Accounting software like QuickBooks or Xero helps track income and expenses in real-time. Cash flow forecasting tools allow you to predict future cash needs. Furthermore, spreadsheets can provide a simple way to monitor cash inflows and outflows. Mobile apps likewise offer convenience for tracking expenses on the go. Utilizing these resources can streamline your cash flow management and improve your financial decision-making. How Do Seasonal Trends Affect My Cash Flow? Seasonal trends directly impact your cash flow by creating fluctuations in income and expenses throughout the year. For instance, if your business relies on holiday sales, you might see increased revenue during that period, but lower income during off-seasons. It’s essential to anticipate these changes, budget accordingly, and manage inventory effectively. Conclusion In conclusion, effectively managing cash flow is essential for your small business’s success. By developing a forecasting model, identifying investment opportunities, and comprehending supplier payment options, you can make informed financial decisions. Furthermore, consolidating debt, evaluating inventory, and reviewing banking relationships will further improve your financial stability. Implementing these strategies not just helps you maintain a healthy cash flow but likewise positions your business for growth and resilience in an ever-changing market. Image via Google Gemini This article, "7 Essential Cash Flow Tips for Small Businesses" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Managing cash flow effectively is crucial for your small business’s success. By developing a forecasting model, you can predict income and expenses based on historical data. Identifying investment opportunities through expense categorization helps you allocate resources wisely. Furthermore, comprehending supplier payment options and reviewing banking relationships can improve your financial standing. As you continue to explore these strategies, you’ll uncover fundamental practices that can augment your cash flow management considerably. Key Takeaways Regularly update your cash flow forecasts to align with changing business conditions and improve accuracy in predictions. Monitor cash inflows and outflows to identify trends, enabling better budget management and expense control. Establish a cash reserve to handle unexpected expenses or downturns, ensuring business continuity. Negotiate favorable payment terms with suppliers to align payments with cash flow cycles, enhancing liquidity. Utilize financial tools, such as interest-earning accounts and cash management solutions, to optimize cash flow. Develop a Forecasting Model Developing a forecasting model is vital for small businesses looking to manage their cash flow effectively. A well-developed model helps you predict annual income based on historical data, allowing for better planning of future cash needs. Regularly updating your forecasting model guarantees that it aligns with changing business objectives and market conditions, enhancing your cash flow management. Identify Investment Opportunities To identify investment opportunities that align with your business goals, start by classifying your expenses strategically. This classification helps you pinpoint which investments can provide the best returns without straining your cash flow. Classify Expenses Strategically Classifying expenses strategically is essential for small businesses seeking to identify investment opportunities and optimize their financial management. By segmenting your expenses into clear categories, you can better understand your spending patterns and find areas for potential investment. Consider these three categories: Operating Expenses: Daily costs that keep your business running. Strategic Investments: Funds allocated for growth initiatives, like marketing or technology upgrades. Reserve Funds: Money set aside for emergencies or unforeseen expenses. Regularly evaluating these categories allows you to pinpoint underperforming areas. This way, you can reallocate funds toward promising investments that align with your operational goals, in the end improving your cash flow and supporting long-term growth for your small business. Explore Investment Options Wisely How can small businesses effectively investigate investment options that align with their financial goals? Start by comprehending your operations and objectives to pinpoint opportunities that support your growth strategy. Classify your expenses into operating, reserve, strategic, and restricted categories. This classification helps you decide where to invest surplus funds wisely. For maintaining liquidity during earning returns, consider mid-term investment options like time deposits and money market funds. Furthermore, look into long-term investments, such as bonds and treasury notes, to diversify your portfolio and potentially boost returns over time. Regularly assess your asset portfolio to mitigate risks and capitalize on market opportunities, ensuring they align with your overall business objectives. This approach helps secure your business’s financial health and growth. Understand Supplier Payment Options Even though managing cash flow can be a challenge for small businesses, grasping your supplier payment options is essential for maintaining financial stability. Balancing supplier payments with accounts receivable guarantees you have enough liquidity to meet your obligations and operational expenses. Here are three key options to reflect upon: Checks: Using checks can give you a 1-2 day float before funds are debited, which aids in cash management. Credit Cards: These can offer up to a 30-day buffer before costs hit your accounts, providing flexibility in financial planning. Overdraft Protection: Implementing business overdraft protection keeps transactions moving smoothly, preventing payment delays that could disrupt operations. Additionally, comprehending and negotiating supplier payment terms allows you to align your payment schedules with your cash flow cycle, optimizing your financial management. Consolidate Debt Consolidating debt can help you streamline outstanding payments, making it easier to manage your finances. By combining multiple bills into a single payment, you may lower your interest rates and simplify your payment processes, which can greatly improve your cash flow. Evaluating your current debt obligations is a key step in identifying opportunities for consolidation that can alleviate financial stress and boost your business’s liquidity. Streamline Outstanding Payments Managing multiple outstanding payments can be challenging, but streamlining these obligations through debt consolidation can greatly ease your financial management. By consolidating your debts, you can simplify your financial obligations and improve cash flow. Here are three key benefits: Single Payment: Combine multiple payments into one monthly obligation, making it easier to track your expenses. Improved Cash Flow: With fewer creditors to manage, your liquidity improves, allowing you to allocate resources more effectively. Negotiation Opportunities: Consolidation may allow you to negotiate better terms with lenders, further easing financial strain. Regularly assess your current debt obligations to highlight consolidation opportunities, reducing the overall stress on your business and streamlining your financial management. Lower Interest Rates Finding ways to lower your interest rates can greatly impact your small business’s financial health. Consolidating debt allows you to combine multiple bills into one manageable payment, often securing lower interest rates and extended repayment periods. This not only improves your cash flow but also reduces your monthly payment obligations. With increased liquidity, you can allocate funds to crucial operations or growth initiatives. Furthermore, debt consolidation helps you avoid late fees and penalties, leading to a more stable financial position. Regularly evaluating your debt can reveal opportunities for consolidation, simplifying your financial management and reducing stress. In the end, an effective strategy can save you money on interest, letting you reinvest or build a cash reserve for future needs. Simplify Payment Processes A streamlined payment process can greatly improve your small business’s cash flow. By consolidating debt, you can simplify your financial obligations, which often leads to lower interest rates and easier management. Here are three key benefits of debt consolidation: Single Payment: Combine multiple bills into one, reducing financial stress and enhancing liquidity. Improved Cash Flow: Longer repayment periods can lower your monthly expenses, allowing more cash for operations and growth. Better Credit Score: Fewer open accounts may boost your credit score, making it easier to secure financing in the future. Regularly evaluating your debt situation helps identify consolidation opportunities, in the end aiding in maintaining a healthy cash flow for your business. Take a Closer Look at Competitors When you take a closer look at your competitors, you open the door to valuable insights that can greatly improve your business strategy. Conducting a competitor review helps you comprehend market positioning, allowing you to adjust your strategies and maintain competitiveness. By analyzing their product lines and services, you can identify gaps in your offerings and pinpoint areas for improvement or innovation. Moreover, comparing pricing strategies guarantees your prices reflect fair market value, which can boost your sales potential and prevent lost profit opportunities. Grasping your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses informs your decisions regarding marketing, product development, and customer engagement strategies. Regularly evaluating competitor performance keeps you agile, enabling you to respond effectively to changes in market demand and customer preferences. This proactive approach not just strengthens your business but additionally positions you more favorably within the competitive environment. Assess and Evaluate Inventory and Supplies Evaluating and reviewing your inventory and supplies is crucial for maintaining a healthy cash flow in your small business. Regular assessments can help you identify excess stock of slow-selling items that tie up cash resources. Here are three key actions to reflect on: Monitor Inventory Levels: Regularly check your inventory turnover rates to avoid overstocking, which leads to increased holding costs and cash flow issues. Review Equipment and Supplies: Periodically assess your assets to find outdated or unused items that can be sold or salvaged for immediate cash. Optimize Supplier Contracts: Analyze your supplier agreements and negotiate better terms to improve inventory management and elevate cash flow stability. Review Banking Relationships Building a strong banking relationship is essential for managing your cash flow effectively. Regularly evaluate your banking services to guarantee you’re using options that improve your cash flow. Consider exploring payment solutions that expedite customer payments. Assess your current bank fees; switching banks may provide better terms that positively impact your finances. Here’s a quick reference table to guide your banking review: Service Benefit Considerations Interest-earning accounts Increase cash flow Compare interest rates Cash management tools Streamline financial management Analyze fees and features Business overdraft protection Avoid cash flow disruptions Review limits and costs Payment solutions Speed up customer payments Understand processing times Maintain an open dialogue with your Bank of America to stay informed about new products that can optimize your cash management strategies. Regular assessments can greatly benefit your business. Frequently Asked Questions How Can I Improve My Business’s Cash Flow Quickly? To improve your business’s cash flow quickly, start by evaluating your current expenses and cutting unnecessary costs. Consider offering discounts for early payments from customers, which can incentivize quicker cash inflow. Streamlining your inventory management can likewise help reduce holding costs. Furthermore, review your payment terms with suppliers; negotiating longer terms might provide you with more time to manage cash. Finally, guarantee timely invoicing to avoid delays in receiving payments. What Are Common Cash Flow Mistakes to Avoid? To avoid common cash flow mistakes, first, don’t underestimate expenses; always budget for unexpected costs. Second, maintain clear invoicing practices and follow up on overdue payments without delay. You should furthermore avoid mixing personal and business finances, as this complicates tracking cash flow. Finally, don’t neglect cash reserves; having a buffer can help manage fluctuations. How Often Should I Review My Cash Flow? You should review your cash flow at least monthly to stay on top of your financial health. Regular assessments help you identify trends, manage expenses, and predict future cash needs. If your business experiences fluctuations, consider weekly reviews to gain more insight. What Tools Can Assist With Cash Flow Management? To manage cash flow effectively, you can use several tools. Accounting software like QuickBooks or Xero helps track income and expenses in real-time. Cash flow forecasting tools allow you to predict future cash needs. Furthermore, spreadsheets can provide a simple way to monitor cash inflows and outflows. Mobile apps likewise offer convenience for tracking expenses on the go. Utilizing these resources can streamline your cash flow management and improve your financial decision-making. How Do Seasonal Trends Affect My Cash Flow? Seasonal trends directly impact your cash flow by creating fluctuations in income and expenses throughout the year. For instance, if your business relies on holiday sales, you might see increased revenue during that period, but lower income during off-seasons. It’s essential to anticipate these changes, budget accordingly, and manage inventory effectively. Conclusion In conclusion, effectively managing cash flow is essential for your small business’s success. By developing a forecasting model, identifying investment opportunities, and comprehending supplier payment options, you can make informed financial decisions. Furthermore, consolidating debt, evaluating inventory, and reviewing banking relationships will further improve your financial stability. Implementing these strategies not just helps you maintain a healthy cash flow but likewise positions your business for growth and resilience in an ever-changing market. Image via Google Gemini This article, "7 Essential Cash Flow Tips for Small Businesses" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

A cure for kitchen nerves, plus a recipe for anchovy pastaView the full article

Learn how to use Claude Code with Google Search Console, Analytics, and the Semrush MCP for data analysis, dashboards, and reports. View the full article

We know what worked and what failed the last time aroundView the full article

We are living through the most rapid and sweeping digitalization in history. The average adult touches their phone hundreds if not thousands of times a day. And yet, at this moment of peak digital saturation, a countermovement is taking shape in schools, governments, and research institutions. More and more people have reached the conclusion that for human beings to think well, learn deeply, and stay mentally healthy, we may need significantly less technology. Consider what’s happening in education. Australia passed legislation banning children under 16 from social media entirely. Sweden, having spent a decade rolling tablets into every classroom and replacing textbooks with screens, has now reversed course. Across the world, country after country is arriving at the same verdict: Digital tools, introduced with enormous enthusiasm and the best of intentions, turned out to be a corrosive threat to children’s cognitive development. What happens to our cognitive and professional capabilities when we automate the most demanding tasks? Every convenience comes with an invisible tax levied on our skills. We have spent decades enthusiastically building workplaces that use our brains less and less. In schools, the reckoning has already begun. At work, we are still waiting. The dominant professional narrative still pushes for more AI, more automation, more tools. Productivity discourse is almost entirely about addition—add this agent, this app, this workflow—with no attention paid to what is being subtracted in the process. Here are eight old habits that will give you and your organization an edge because everyone else has forgotten them. 1. Keep a work notebook and write in it by hand The physical work notebook has become a rarity in the modern office. It shouldn’t be. When we write by hand during meetings or while thinking through a problem, we engage fine motor systems and higher cognition in a way no keyboard can replicate. A landmark 2014 study shows “the pen is mightier than the keyboard”: Notetakers who write by hand show deeper conceptual understanding than those who type because the slowness of the hand forces genuine processing and synthesis rather than verbatim transcription. You have to decide, in real time, what actually matters. A 2023 Norwegian study used EEG imaging to confirm that in regions of the brain associated with memory encoding and creative thinking, handwriting produced greater neural connectivity than typing. 2. Read long-form books, reports, and articles Professionals who read substantive books, reports, and long-form articles gain a clear edge over those who rely on short digital content. Deep reading builds the capacity to follow sustained arguments, retain nuance, and engage critically with complex ideas. By contrast, screen-based reading tends to encourage skimming and shallower comprehension. In a professional setting, this difference is significant. Being able to work through a 300-page book or a dense industry report (and apply its insights) is what distinguishes true expertise from surface-level familiarity. AI can summarize content, but it won’t replace your mental models formed through slow reading. 3. Run a real brainstorm with people, whiteboard, and no screens The pandemic normalized video calls to the point where gathering colleagues in a room with a whiteboard now feels old-fashioned. It shouldn’t. Physical copresence generates qualitatively different creative outcomes from remote sessions. People read body language in real time, interrupt productively, and build on ideas before they have been fully articulated. The best group outputs emerge from spontaneous, unplanned exchanges. A 2022 paper in Nature tracking 60,000 Microsoft employees detailed how remote work can measurably reduce the serendipitous connections that generate novel thinking. Also, remote workers’ professional networks become more siloed over time. “Weak tie” exposure is the single strongest predictor of creative output and career development! So book a room and ban screens for an hour. 4. Walk, especially during the workday The World Health Organization lists sedentary behavior among the four leading behavioral risk factors for global mortality, alongside smoking, excessive alcohol, and poor diet. Office work is sedentary by design. Most professionals know it and do little about it. The case for walking specifically is the most practical and evidence-backed intervention available to the worker. A Stanford study found that walking boosts divergent creative thinking by an average of 81% compared to sitting, and the effect persisted after participants returned to their desks. Walking meetings, lunchtime loops around the block, taking the stairs—these activities cost little time and money. But uptake depends on managerial exemplarity: When leaders model these behaviors, they legitimize them and shift workplace norms. Sitting for nine hours a day, five days a week, over decades, by contrast, amounts to a slow, preventable decline. 5. Train and learn without AI . . . to use it better tomorrow Here is the paradox at the heart of the current AI moment: The productivity gains from AI are substantially larger for senior, experienced workers than for juniors. A Harvard Business School study on AI-assisted consultants found that experts using AI outperformed all other groups, but that less-experienced users, when deployed on tasks beyond their current competence, produced worse outputs than those working unaided. Let’s use the elevator as a simple metaphor. Pressing a button is effortless. Repeat that choice every day, and your legs and glutes atrophy. The colleague who takes the stairs is eccentric until the power goes out and they’re the only one left who can climb the stairs without strain. If AI absorbs the entry-level and mid-level tasks through which junior staff traditionally developed into senior ones, organizations face a skills cliff. The solution may be deliberate, AI-free learning environments where people are forced to develop real competence and build the judgment that will make their use of AI useful. 6. Have coffee with your colleagues and mean it Small talk has a terrible reputation in productivity culture. It’s treated as wasted time. The research says otherwise. Casual exchanges improve mood, increase a sense of belonging, and make people feel more invested in the organizations they work for. They are the cement that holds professional communities together. Susan Pinker’s The Village Effect, published more than a decade ago, is arguably even more relevant today. It shows that face-to-face social contact is one of the strongest predictors of longevity and sustained cognitive performance. The professional who cultivates a wide network of casual, warm workplace relationships invests in the social infrastructure that underpins collaboration and psychological safety. Loneliness is also a performance risk. Among remote and hybrid knowledge workers, chronic loneliness is a pervasive occupational hazard. 7. Dress the part because enclothed cognition is real “Enclothed cognition” refers to the measurable influence of clothing on the wearer’s psychological state and performance. Participants wearing a white coat described as a doctor’s coat made 50% fewer errors on attention tasks than those wearing the identical coat described as a painter’s smock. What we wear at work tells us who we are in that context and shapes how we perform accordingly. The normalization of casualwear in professional environments, accelerated by hybrid work, has had a cost. Clothes also involve mutual respect. As the external signals of professionalism have eroded, many organizations report a corresponding drift in standards of communication, preparation, and commitment. It may not be necessary to go back to formal dress. But the small daily ritual of choosing to look like someone who takes their work seriously is worth a lot. 8. Speak without slides and learn to persuade your audience The slide deck has become the default unit of professional thought. Every argument must be bulleted. Every meeting must have its deck that can be shared, forwarded, and consumed asynchronously. Thus we are good at making slides and less comfortable making an argument in real time through the force of clarity and conviction. In fact, now that more and more slides are generated by generative AIs, it will be more and more essential to regain the faculty to convince others without them. Amazon famously banned PowerPoint in senior leadership meetings, replacing decks with written narratives that had to be read in silence before discussion: The underlying insight was that slides allow the presenter to hide behind formatting. Audiences who receive spoken explanation alone retain more than those who have explanation and on-screen text at the same time. Practice speaking without the deck. View the full article

The most important Wi-Fi news from the past week. The post Roundup: Amazon eero exempt from ban, Charter doubles down on ‘seamless connectivity’, Ookla’s in-flight Wi-Fi ranking, India’s public Wi-Fi appeared first on Wi-Fi NOW Global. View the full article

I never thought I’d see discussions of looksmaxxing on LinkedIn of all places. But nowadays, I increasingly am. For the uninitiated, “looksmaxxing” is an internet term that originated on incel message boards in the 2010s. It’s a practice that encapsulates various extreme methods, such as jaw surgery, that some men go through to improve their looks. (Or, in the language of masculinity-coded productivity culture: to achieve peak optimization.) “Looksmaxxing” entered the zeitgeist in earnest after it seemingly started when its patron saint, the 20-year-old influencer Clavicular, appeared at New York Fashion Week last month, with profiles in The New York Times and GQ. The term “looksmaxxing” and the goal of “optimization” are closely associated with what’s become known as the “manosphere”: a somewhat loosely related ecosystem of online communities and groups that promote outdated views of masculinity, rampant misogyny, and an opposition to feminism, has seemingly moved more mainstream. Netflix entered the conversation with a documentary featuring several other prominent influencers in this space. Since then, coverage has appeared everywhere from NBC News to the Wall Street Journal. Now? Manosphere lexicon is entering the workplace. “I’ve definitely noticed some manosphere-coded language in some of my employees,” Liam, an HR executive who asked me not to use his real name to speak freely on this topic, told me. “It raises some red flags, but I’ve never had any issues with any of these guys yet,” he shared, noting conversations about “alphas,” “betas,” “chads,” and “stacys.” While the concept of the manosphere may feel new to those who don’t closely follow internet subcultures, its language—and the problematic ideologies it describes—have been slowly seeping into daily life for years. What’s changed is that we now have the tools to recognize it. The manosphere’s slow, wide expanse To better understand how internet subcultures move beyond niche communities and into everyday language, I spoke with Whitney Phillips, an associate professor of information politics and media ethics at the University of Oregon, who studies the relationship between online behavior and mainstream culture. Phillips noted that the term “manosphere” itself has become increasingly amorphous. It’s used to describe everything from Andrew Tate, the controversial influencer known for promoting hyper-masculine self-help and anti-feminist views, to “anyone with even a tenuous connection to UFC” or generic “hustle culture”—collapsing very different figures and audiences under the same umbrella. As media coverage of these communities has expanded, she suggested, the label has stretched along with it, absorbing adjacent ideas and audiences that weren’t originally part of the same ecosystem. That’s what we’re seeing happening in the workplace.. “It creates a kind of unified front that then people who get lumped into that category latch onto.” She pointed to Mark Zuckerberg’s comments on Joe Rogan’s podcast about bringing “masculinity” back to the workplace—language that overlaps with the idea that leadership requires traditionally masculine traits, like dominance, or that workplace culture has become “neutered” by DEI initiatives. Lumping more and more figures into the “manosphere,” she suggested, can make the label easier for those audiences to adopt—or strategically repurpose. As the media has covered the idea of the manosphere more, Phillips said that language from niche online communities started circulating far beyond the people who originally used it. When toned-down versions of manosphere language start appearing in mainstream settings—phrases like “high body count” appearing on LinkedIn, for example—it can make the underlying worldview feel more legitimate to the people who already use those terms, Phillips said. In that context, the language can serve as an insider signal, recognizable to some audiences even when it sounds neutral to others—allowing the assumptions behind it to circulate more widely without being openly debated. ‘When terms get used, ideologies come with them’ You can easily find other examples of “manosphere” terminology in everyday professional discourse. While some examples clearly originate inside manosphere communities (like a Computer Science subreddit post crediting looksmaxxing with landing an internship) others have already started drifting away from their origins. For example, folks on LinkedIn discussing “high-value” employees, or “body counts” regarding layoffs. This reflects the way language travels before institutions and systems catch up to its meanings. The problem is, in this case, the toxic meanings can unintentionally travel through culture with the terms themselves. “When terms get used, ideologies come with them,” Dr. Alice Marwick, Director of Research at Data & Society, who studies online behavior, told me. Even if people adopt these terms casually or ironically, they carry assumptions about hierarchy, competition, and value that can reshape how success and status are discussed. For example, she notes how many young people now use the term “sigma,” a label that originated in the manosphere to describe a supposedly independent “lone wolf” man outside traditional hierarchies but still dominant within them. While young people use it as a new substitute for “cool,” its manosphere roots are still traceable. And that matters because the origin of the term doesn’t disappear just because the tone becomes casual. That shift is especially visible in the overlap between manosphere discourse and a broader culture of self-optimization that already has a foothold in professional environments. Long before most workplaces were explicitly talking about the manosphere, they were already comfortable with “grind,” “discipline,” and self-optimization. In some cases, those frameworks map neatly onto each other. Marwick noted that the logic behind looksmaxxing, for example, rests on the idea that success—romantic, social, and professional—comes from maximizing one’s position within an implicit market and hitting arbitrary benchmarks. It’s a worldview that “encourages people to see each other as objects” competing within a system, rather than collaborators operating inside one. It also encourages people to view others as competitors, whose value can be ranked accordingly. While it may seem absurd, consider that we’re living in a personal-brand-obsessed society, where superficial-seeming benchmarks—looks, follower count, connections—hold weight. She also noted a trickle-down effect. “In the early 2020s, we have this real emphasis on diversity and feminism and coming to terms with sexism and racism, and there’s an openness to LGBTQ ideas and gender diversity. Then with the [second] The President election, you have a real backlash to that,” she said. “The current The President administration draws heavily from fringe online subcultures,” she says, and “has really done a lot to normalize a lot of this stuff.” That shift is visible in the rollback of DEI protections in the federal government, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth championing the return of a “warrior” ethos to the military, and the prioritization of male audiences. Still, the impact of these ideas doesn’t always appear where people expect it to. While some discussions of the manosphere focus on harassment or overt misogyny, Phillips emphasized that the more common shift is subtler. The language circulating online didn’t invent sexism, she said. It makes what already exists easier to express. “It makes what already is there more palatable,” she explained, often by framing it as humor or cultural shorthand—”locker room talk” or questioning levels of “fun,” for example —rather than ideology. This can help explain why conversations about the manosphere often feel both new and familiar at once—and why the meaning behind the language can be damaging, even if used frivolously. ‘The vacuum that the manosphere is seeking to fill’ In many workplaces, the influence of these ideas shows up less as explicit alignment with online subcultures, and more as a change in tone: how leadership is described (alpha leadership), how ambition is framed (often aggressively, if it’s a woman), or who benefits from competitiveness. And because those shifts often arrive through language rather than policy, they can be difficult for organizations to recognize as cultural change at all. According to HR consultant Lily Zheng, the effects can be especially pronounced in younger or less structured companies, where founders’ assumptions about hierarchy and gender can quietly scale into institutional practice. A startup led by people steeped in manosphere-adjacent ideas, Zheng noted, “may very well create norms and practices that replicate those beliefs as the organization scales,” particularly if early leaders dismiss concerns about sexism or overlook the emergence of “boys’ club” dynamics. Over time, those norms can become systemic. More established organizations aren’t immune either, but they’re shifting for different reasons. Rather than responding directly to manosphere discourse, many companies have stepped back from gender conversations altogether amid the broader backlash against DEI initiatives. Zheng warned that this retreat may create a vacuum that online communities are increasingly positioned to fill. “The diminishing presence of these spaces at work,” they said, “will only widen the vacuum that the manosphere is seeking to fill.” If that happens, the workplace won’t necessarily become more explicitly ideological. But folks may be less likely to challenge the status quo or speak out against problematic behavior. And that may be the most important takeaway from the recent surge of attention around the manosphere. As conversations about gender and power recede in some workplaces, the language filling that space can feel like a sudden arrival—even when the assumptions behind it have been circulating for years. But as Marwick and Phillips pointed out, researchers and activists have been tracking these dynamics since at least the late 2000s. What’s changed isn’t the existence of the ideas—it’s that they’ve infiltrated workplace culture so deeply that they’re becoming harder to ignore. The current wave of coverage isn’t introducing the manosphere into the workplace, so much as reflecting the broader shift that’s mainstreamed an internet subculture and made the embrace of its more problematic aspects more permissible. It’s not a sudden arrival. It’s a moment of recognition that this language and these assumptions have been shaping the world of work for some time. The good news is that when people can recognize and name behaviors, they’re better positioned to challenge them. View the full article

Ask most leaders to describe a high performer, and you’ll hear some version of the same profile: sharp, resilient, and relentless. Ask those same leaders what they mean by resilient, and the answer almost always collapses into two dimensions: mental toughness and physical stamina. We have built entire leadership development industries around cognitive acuity and physical wellness. What we have largely ignored is the third pillar: emotional recovery. This is not a soft argument. It is a structural one. And the science, along with a growing body of evidence from the workplace, suggests that overlooking emotional recovery is not just a wellness gap; it is a strategic one. We Use Emotions the Way We Use Energy Melissa Painter, founder of Breakthru—a micro-break tool integrated into Microsoft Teams and Slack—put it plainly when I spoke with her recently: “We all use our emotions as a resource throughout the day.” That framing rang true for me: not emotions as a byproduct of work, but as a resource consumed by work. Our emotional reservoir is a resource that needs replenishment. Painter designed emotional recovery into Breakthru from inception, not as an afterthought. The product guides users toward one of four “mood states” (centered, energized, joyful, or confident) through body-based movement. The insight behind this is both ancient and neuroscientifically current: The body is one of the most effective tools we have for shifting emotional states. As Painter noted, when a second grade teacher tells a child to “shake it off,” that instruction is both metaphorical and literal. Physical movement reorganizes the nervous system. It changes how we feel, not just how we move. It also changes how we think. As I like to say, when we move, our ideas move. What Painter’s team did not anticipate was the range of emotional states users would report after just two minutes of movement. People came back with words like brave, fearless, and awake. These were not outcomes Breakthru promised. They were outcomes the body discovered on its own, when given the space. The Data We’re Not Collecting A telling signal from Breakthru’s usage data is the “surprise me” option, which asks the system to choose a mood state on the person’s behalf. Recently, it’s become the most selected choice. Painter’s read on this is that people today are experiencing such profound decision-making fatigue that many can’t summon the cognitive bandwidth to choose how they want to feel. They just know they need to feel different. This is the hidden cost of a workplace culture that mistakes busyness for productivity. In my book Move. Think. Rest., I trace this confusion back to our designing today’s work around first Industrial Revolution norms—a model built around output, efficiency, and measuring only what was visible. We have inherited that model wholesale and applied it to knowledge work, where it fundamentally does not belong. The stretch and movement influencer, Alicia Archer, said it well: The challenge is not that we overperform, it is that we under-recover. Painter told me that the physical consequences are well documented. Prolonged sedentary behavior increases early mortality risk by 35% in women and 18% to 19% in men. A mere two minutes of movement and breathing produces metabolic and cognitive benefits that last two hours. But Painter points to a subtler form of self-harm that rarely makes it into the data: breath-holding. A significant number of people unconsciously hold their breath throughout the workday, for example, while reading email, before a difficult meeting, or in the middle of a deadline sprint. They are trying to access a state of hyperfocus, but what they are actually doing is slowly breaking their adrenal system. Emerging Leaders Learn by Watching, Not Listening Carson Van Gelder, head of growth at Breakthru, shared something in our conversation that I have not been able to stop thinking about: Teams are sometimes actively demonized for taking walking breaks during the workday. The implicit message is that pausing signals weakness and that weakness disqualifies you from leadership. Painter named the mechanism precisely: People learn by watching, not by hearing. When a leader publicly endorses rest and then visibly skips it, the real message is transmitted, not the stated one. The subtext lands as: Breaks are for people who aren’t serious. If you want to lead someday, don’t be a weakling. This is, of course, not the case. Leaders are paid to think strategically, hold the bird’s-eye view, and make high-quality decisions under pressure. None of those capacities is enhanced by continuous cognitive depletion. Most senior leaders will readily admit they have no real thinking time in their workday. We rarely treat that confession as the red flag it is. What shifts a leader’s behavior, Painter has found, is not more data. It is one direct question: What is it in your own psyche that tells you two minutes is not available to you? And then: Just try a two-minute break once. Most leaders who do are genuinely surprised by how they feel. That surprise is itself diagnostic. It reveals how thoroughly we have trained ourselves to ignore the body’s signals in service of a productivity model that was never designed for human beings. Redefining What Counts In my framework of imagination age KPIs, I offer that organizations need a more expansive and honest definition of what constitutes high performance. Creativity, quality of thinking, emotional regulation, and meaning are not soft metrics. They are the actual inputs to the outcomes we claim to want. Painter makes the same argument from the product side: She hopes that when clients evaluate whether Breakthru is working, they do not stop at sentiment scores but also listen to individual voices. Is someone going home less depleted? Are they more even-keeled with their team? Has something shifted in how they show up? That kind of qualitative measurement requires leaders to decide what they actually value and then build systems around it. Right now, most organizations are measuring what is easiest to count, not what matters most. The result is a workplace that produces decision fatigue, breath-holding, and a population of depleted leaders. Emotional recovery is not a wellness initiative. It is infrastructure. And like all infrastructure, its value becomes undeniable only after we have watched its absence long enough. View the full article

FTSE 100 energy group says bid ‘fundamentally undervalues’ its businessView the full article