All Activity

You’ve audited your client’s website and compiled performance data. You’ve identified what’s working, what can be improved, and your recommendations for future strategies. But how do you turn that data into a presentation that’s easy to explain and builds trust? Start with stories. Storytelling isn’t just for entertainment. It’s how people make sense of information. That’s what makes it so effective for data presentation. One of the simplest ways to structure that story is the three-act structure. It’s a familiar framework used everywhere, from Aristotle’s Poetics to Star Wars. What is the three-act structure? The three-act structure is a simple framework that shows how a story moves from beginning to middle to end. It shows how a protagonist moves from their starting point to a meaningful change. Applied to data storytelling, it helps you organize your insights, position your client as the main character (the protagonist), and clearly show what happens next. While similar to the five-point narrative arc, this framework is organized into three manageable sections: what the story is about, what happens when the main character is introduced to conflict, and how that conflict is resolved. Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up. The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need. Start Free Trial Get started with Act 1: The beginning This is where the protagonist’s norm and conflict — the issue the main character is meant to face, also known as the antagonist — are established. The protagonist wants something, and the conflict is holding them back from what they want. An event or circumstance occurs that incites the protagonist into action. The background is established, the goals are defined, and the audience is invested in the protagonist’s success. Act 2: The middle The story is developed, and tension builds. The protagonist experiences roadblocks caused by the conflict/antagonist that hinder them from their ultimate goal. Conflict arises until it can no longer be ignored, causing a pivotal moment that leads into the final act. Act 3: The end The narrative is affected by the change in Act 2, bringing the story to a final showdown between the protagonist and the conflict/antagonist, ultimately resulting in a resolution. The protagonist may find closure or know what path lies ahead (this may set the stage for a sequel). The three-act structure helps you understand website data on a deeper level. It also prepares the data to be presented to your client in a way that places them at the center of the story. Using the three-act structure to identify your data’s narrative Why bother using the three-act structure as a framework for strategy analysis? It builds trust, showing your client that you’re going on a journey alongside them. You and your client are on the same team, with the same destination in mind: their success, even if the data isn’t communicating immediate results. The application of the three-act structure to data storytelling happens in three steps. Step 1: Briefly recap the existing strategies, establish previous wins, and identify the challenge currently affecting performance. This sets the baseline of Act 1. Step 2: Explain the roadblocks and how they stand in the way of the overall strategy’s success. This parallels the growing conflict found in the structure’s Act 2. Step 3: Recommend the next steps and how you plan to address the conflict. Show what success looks like by providing examples of how your recommendations fit the narrative of your client’s goals. This is Act 3, the resolution of the structure. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Where is your client’s story in the three-act structure? Your client is the protagonist of their story. To work more effectively together, you need to communicate to your client that you’re invested in the story of their success. At the heart of each data set is the story of how your client is impacted. When you communicate what the data is saying, position yourself as the guide who helps the main character get where they need to go. An example of applying the three-act structure framework to data analysis and presenting the data’s narrative would look like this: ActGoalScenarioApproach1Set the stage, center your client as the protagonist while introducing the challenge as the antagonist.Your client’s website has received a substantial increase in organic traffic as a result of your most recent strategy, but is experiencing a high bounce rate on select pages.Recap the strategy that led to the traffic increase and summarize the outcome from a high-level perspective.2Identify the conflict, potential roadblocks, and related stakes.The high bounce rate is preventing your website from experiencing consistent traffic flow. Explain why a high bounce rate is detrimental to overall performance, and connect the affected pages to the overall strategy.3Recommend strategies and outline next steps.Your client’s high bounce rate indicates low page speed due to large images that take a long time to load.Help the client visualize how best practices lead to better outcomes. Recommend image compression as a next step. The conclusion doesn’t always mean the end of the story Finding the story in your data — and communicating it clearly — is how you build trust with clients. Clients don’t want industry jargon. They want to feel seen, understood, and that they’ve entrusted their digital marketing success to the right person. Stories, and the connections they form, get them there. Reaching the conclusion of your data’s narrative isn’t the end, but the beginning: the start of strategy implementation, of collaborative partnerships, and of greater results. When looking at data, you and your client are on a journey together. A downward trend in your data doesn’t mean your story is over, and an upward trend doesn’t mean there’s no hope for a sequel. In either case, a new journey (your next strategy) can begin. View the full article

Google is testing showing video ads within the local pack ads. This is also known as immersive map view videos, I am told.View the full article

A Reddit thread asks if there are any issues with Google Search handling a domain name that has a single letter change in the domain name from another domain name. John Mueller from Google said that usually this is not a problem from Google Search.View the full article

Are ChatGPT ads allowing advertisers to go after competitors with greater specificity, or is this just a topical fluke? View the full article

The folks at the Internet Archive are having issues with archiving the web. Something it has done since 1996 and is such a foundational website that it is sad to see. That being said, Fabrice Canel from Microsoft Bing wants to help.View the full article

Carroll Tower, a 194-apartment public housing development in Providence, Rhode Island, was built in 1974. For more than 50 years, residents there relied on electric baseboards for heating and their own window air conditioners, if they had them, in the summers. But now, the entire building has been retrofitted with a modern HVAC system: 277 heat pumps from Gradient, a San Francisco-based climate tech startup, will heat and cool the property. The heat pumps were installed as part of a $1.25 million public-private project between the Providence Housing Authority, Gradient, the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources, energy consulting firm Abode Energy Management, and Envr Air, which works to accelerate HVAC electrification. It is among the largest completed heat pump installations in the United States. Installation across the entire building took just 12 days, with no drilling or rewiring required. Since heat pumps are highly efficient, the installation means less energy use and fewer emissions for Carroll Tower. The upgrade could save the building 450,000 kilowatt-hours, or about $94,500 in energy costs, a year, according to a preliminary estimate, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 219 tons annually—equivalent to a gas car driving about 500,000 miles. A solution for vintage buildings Residential buildings account for about 20% of the country’s carbon emissions, and heating and cooling is responsible for over half of those buildings’ energy use. HVAC systems can also leak natural gas or refrigerants, which are potent greenhouse gases. Electrifying those systems can drastically slash emissions. Heat pumps are a particularly promising climate solution; even when they rely on an electricity grid powered by fossil fuels, they still cut tons of emissions a year compared to other heating systems. In 2022, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) launched a “Clean Heat for All” challenge, asking manufacturers to develop an electric, easy-to-install heating and cooling system. Gradient was one winner (along with China’s Midea) and will provide 10,000 of its window heat pumps to NYCHA buildings. Those projects are rolling, but some buildings have already received the heat pumps. A public housing development in Queens got 72 heat pumps in 2023. That led to an 87% reduction in energy use, with the development’s energy costs cut in half. Gradient has since worked with housing authorities in Boston; Chelsea and Lynn, Massachusetts; and more. Its heat pumps work especially well in “older, vintage buildings,” like those found in public housing authorities, says Gradient founder and CTO Vince Romanin. These can be buildings where extensive upgrades are difficult (such projects may require asbestos mitigation, for example), and where upgrades are sorely needed because there are no current cooling systems or the heat fails frequently—both of which can be health risks to residents. ‘You can get your window back’ Carroll Tower is one of two elderly-only buildings in the Providence Housing Authority. The average age of residents there is 71. Before this upgrade, not every resident had air conditioning; in the summers, the building would turn certain spaces into cooling stations. Now, everyone will have access to their own AC. “A lot of them are happy,” says Larry D’Alfonso, an 81-year-old resident and president of the tenant council. The Gradient units, he adds, are “very quiet.” Depending on the apartment layout or building heating system, heat pumps can have other benefits too. If someone’s apartment uses steam radiators for which they can’t set their own temperatures, a Gradient retrofit allows for personal temperature control. The units also come with a standard air filter, with an ability to upgrade it. Romanin adds that the heat pumps, which hang over a windowsill, can make a unit more comfortable because they don’t block that window like an AC unit would. They’re also quieter than clanking radiators. “Human comfort is way more than just the temperature in the room,” he says. “The idea that you can get your window back and get more natural light is actually important to someone’s comfort. The noise profile is actually important to someone’s comfort.” Easy installation Then there’s the installation. For general HVAC systems, installers may need to drill holes into walls or run refrigerant lines or ductwork through buildings. Even less elaborate systems, like ductless mini-splits, can still require the handling of refrigerants or wiring, often requiring a licensed contractor. Gradient installers don’t need to be HVAC certified. The heat pumps plug into a standard 120-volt outlet. “Our system is the first I know of that can electrify [publicly owned] buildings without having to do any work on the facade,” Romanin says. Installing 277 heat pumps throughout Carroll Tower’s 194 apartments and common areas took only 12 days, without displacing any residents. (Some units may have more than one heat pump depending on their square footage). That saves building owners on retrofit costs, too. D’Alfonso confirms that the installation was “very fast.” The installers were also “tremendous to the tenants, very courteous,” he adds. The only complaints he’s heard so far from his neighbors were that some people had to move their furniture around to accommodate the heat pumps, which stick out about 9 inches from the wall. “They gotta get used to them,” he says. “It’s something new.” View the full article

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. These are difficult times for elite universities. Controversies over the handling of pro-Palestine protests on campus cost several school presidents their jobs; under the The President administration, federal research grants have plunged; and just 42% of Americans polled by Gallup in 2025 reported confidence in higher ed, down from 57% in 2015, the first year the poll was conducted. Just this month, Yale University released a report acknowledging prestigious schools’ role in losing the public’s trust. So why is Daniel Diermeier, the chancellor of Vanderbilt University, thoroughly enjoying a role that has frustrated or felled many of his peers? Diermeier, who became chancellor (the equivalent of a CEO) in 2020, believes he’s cracked the code to leading unwieldy institutions: Avoid politicization and stick to one’s core purpose. And those are lessons he thinks corporate leaders should apply to running businesses. By many measures, Diermeier’s approach is working. Undergraduate applications rose 12.6% in 2025, and the school saw a 20% jump in early-decision applicants—a metric of a school’s desirability. Indeed, Vanderbilt now admits just 4.7% of applicants, making it more selective than Cornell or Dartmouth. Under Diermeier’s direction, the Nashville-based school is expanding, with a new campus opening in New York City and campuses planned in West Palm Beach, Florida; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and San Francisco. Diermeier also has his detractors. A February Chronicle of Higher Education feature called him the sector’s “most divisive” chancellor, noting that Diermeier’s embrace of institutional neutrality has been seen by critics as a capitulation to “bad-faith critiques” of universities. Before arriving at Vanderbilt, Diermeier was provost at the University of Chicago, whose “Chicago Principles” on freedom of expression mirror Vanderbilt’s Statement of Principles. Prior to becoming provost, he was a University of Chicago dean and professor, where he taught and researched crisis and reputation management. I sat down with Diermeier to talk about how he thinks about leadership in a polarized moment—and what his experience running a major research university might mean for CEOs facing the same turbulent terrain. Edited excerpts follow: MODERN CEO: Every generation feels like it’s living in extraordinary times. How would you characterize the current environment in which you’re operating? DIERMEIER: There are [some] big forces shaping our lives. One, we’re living in an age of rapidly accelerating technology. Of course, AI is on everyone’s mind, but the next big thing is right around the corner with quantum [computing], and that is transforming sectors and industries. Number two, the changing geopolitical environment has shifted dramatically. I remember an important CEO saying, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, that the great challenge for our generation was to “get globalization right,” and now people are talking about decoupling. The third one is the erosion of trust in major institutions, accompanied by a tremendous polarization of society, which is maybe the fourth—those are the three or four things that are shaping the leadership environment, whether you’re in business, a university, or government. MODERN CEO: Trust is a big topic. How do you think about trust as a leader, and what are some of the things you’re working on to restore trust in higher education? DIERMEIER: There’s a global erosion of trust across the board, and that’s one of the big findings from the Edelman Trust Barometer. The erosion of trust in universities has been more pronounced than in most other institutions. People on the left worry about inequality and that universities are enhancing inequality. The main concern is that we’re politically biased to the left and that we’re “woke machines.” And then everybody is worried about affordability. My sense is you have to address these concerns head-on and ask yourself: Is this a communication problem or a real [systemic] problem? Universities are a large segment with different flavors, but at leading research universities, there has been a dramatic increase in financial aid. The net cost for families has actually gone down over the last 10 to 15 years, especially for families at lower income levels. If you go to Vanderbilt and your family makes less than $150,000 [a year], it’s free. So that’s a perception problem. On inequality, people who graduate from our universities who come from the lowest income segment and those who come from the highest income segment, if they both have an economics undergraduate degree, they have the same expected lifetime income. There’s a high correlation between kids’ income and parents’ income, but if you graduate from a selective, large research university, your lifetime income and the lifetime income of somebody from a very different background is the same. So, the question is, “How do you get in?” We have debates on admissions, but inequality in education doesn’t start at age 18. The problem for us is how do we make sure that we get qualified applicants from across the spectrum to apply. On the political bias question—there, I think we have a real problem. I think universities have drifted toward one side of the political spectrum, and I think there has been mission drift. The willingness for universities to take sides in political battles has clearly increased during the last 10 years, and it has really hurt them. You need to be clear about what your purpose and your values are—and don’t be dragged into other things that are really beyond the purpose of what you do. MODERN CEO: At a research university, how do you navigate an environment where [accepted science] on vaccines or climate change are politicized? DIERMEIER: It’s really critical to be very clear and explicit about the values and the purpose that you’re engaged in. I’ll give you a different example that shows how we’re thinking about it. We’re in the business of generating knowledge and then conveying it to the next generation of students and to the public. We are not in the business of telling people how to think. Not in the business of taking sides on political or policy issues as an institution. Our job is to encourage debate, not to settle it. So, let’s take an example. The Dobbs [Supreme Court] decision on abortion rights in the United States [that overturned Roe v. Wade]: Some universities issued statements saying the Dobbs decision was inconsistent with the values of the university. But in my law school, I have faculty who believe Dobbs was badly argued, and I have faculty who believe Roe v. Wade was incorrectly decided on jurisprudential grounds—even if, from a policy standpoint, they’d agree that access to abortion should be legal and safe. And we have people who say we need a compromise in the middle. The university needs to be a place where those views can be debated freely. We are a platform where questions on climate change can be freely debated and where faculty can do the work and provide decision makers with information and knowledge. MODERN CEO: You’ve said operating in hyper-polarized environments is increasingly the reality for CEOs broadly. What’s your advice to them? DIERMEIER: Be clear about who you are, your purpose, your values, and your positioning—you have to embrace that part. [Beyond] leading people and execution capabilities, managing your board—things that typically are seen as being part of the CEO’s toolkit—the ability now to operate in hyper-polarized and politicized environments is really critical. MODERN CEO: Last question: You once wrote that being a university chancellor is the best job in the world. Do you still feel that way? DIERMEIER: One hundred percent! You have to be an academic leader. Then you’re basically the CEO of a mid-sized enterprise, and it’s a pretty complicated business. It has a research and education mission, then you have an asset management component, which is the endowment. We also have a $3.5 billion real estate portfolio. On top of that, you have college athletics, which is a whole other thing. And the third piece is you really have to be a politician. You have to connect with your [municipal] mayor, with the council, with the local council, with the state, with the governor, with the federal government. These are entirely different skill sets, and makes this job challenging. Read more: the ABCs of leadership Ignition Schools drive entrepreneurship and innovation Be a better leader in today’s challenging environment How to build a leadership legacy View the full article

About 20 minutes into the Devil Wears Prada—the 2006 David Frankel film that constitutes one of the most important and perfect films ever produced (please hold all dissent)—Meryl Streep delivers a critical speech to Anne Hathaway that encompasses the plot’s primary tension. The moment, which may come up in the sequel (an Instagram post from a professional dyeing service in New York suggests this may be the case), comes as Streep’s Miranda, the frigid chief editor of a top fashion magazine is pondering items that might be featured for an upcoming issue, while surrounded by her stressed-out underlings. Also in the office is Andie (Hathaway), a comparatively disheveled new assistant who has somehow landed a coveted role at the esteemed Vogue stand-in, diligently taking notes on the runthrough. When an underling presents two blue belts to Miranda for consideration and notes that it’s tough to choose between them, Andie snortles and says, “Both of those belts look exactly the same to me. I’m still learning about this stuff.” This, of course, is precisely the wrong thing to say. Up until this point in the movie, Andie has hid, very poorly and under the guise of bubbly unfamiliarity, that she thinks the fashion industry is vain and stupid. Miranda, intelligent and ever-perceptive, has picked up on Andie’s covert derision, and uses her blue belt faux pas to delve into a crisp and critical evisceration of Andie’s attitude. You can just watch this scene online, but Streep’s dismantling of her assistant is summarized below. That “lumpy blue sweater,” she explains, is not just blue but cerulean, a color that traveled from designer collections, from Oscar de la Renta to Yves Saint Laurent, down through the market until it landed, inevitably, in Andie’s closet. What Andie shrugs off as “stuff” is a system she already participates in, albeit passively—and it’s one that generates countless jobs and millions of dollars. “It’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry,” Miranda tells a now totally silent and humbled Andie, “when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of ‘stuff.’” Andie’s implicit position, throughout the film, is that while she’s interning at a fashion magazine, she sort of thinks the industry is silly, even stupid, and she’s a reluctant—though perky—observer, not a participant. Miranda, of course, thinks the fashion industry is all there is. But that’s not Miranda’s point. Her point is that we all wear clothes. To think you’re not somehow not participating in fashion, however saintly or nefarious, is inane. Here’s where AI comes in. Now, a cerulean belt is not a large language model, and Miranda is not Sam Altman, but the scene is illustrative of a reflex by some to believe that they can simply excise the influence of a billion-dollar industry on their lives—and then feel morally superior for it. A small but loud community of AI skeptics is taking the position, like Andie, that AI is not something they’re participating in, sort of stupid, and even something to look down on. This community (which tends to thrive on Bluesky) seem to believe that AI ranges from silly, uncool, stupid, and most importantly, something ignorable that they are not using. AI will either be very good or very bad for humanity, but there’s probably no universe where AI is just a silly and vapid nothingburger we can roll our eyes at and ridicule. This has even emerged into a sort of purity test, where it’s become common (among some) to believe that using AI is like a personal flaw and nothing more than dimwit tomfoolery. Even in more thought-through circles, there’s a developing emphatic sense of moral outrage over the use of AI, and urging technological renunciation instead. One problem with this attitude is that it falls into the well-worn trap of an abstinence-only approach, pushing people to restrain themselves from making a poor choice when the deluge of social pressures and personal desire shepherd toward making that exact choice. Lest we forget that most of us are workers, and many people will use AI because their bosses tell them to, not, like, for fun. (Indeed, a Gallup poll recently found half of all workers in the US now use AI). This approach also suggests that a consumer choice is the solvent to a systemic threat. Calls for ardent vegetarianism, and urging people to flick off the lights when we leave the house, did not solve climate change (which is ongoing). The same is and will be true of AI and the misguided social trend that seems to hinge on shaming people who might do so. Miranda’s monologue, though, illustrates a second problem with this line of thinking. Yes, you can decide not to use ChatGPT, and perhaps this might give you a momentary feeling of organic cognition, free of AI’s influence. And that might be worth it, alone, for preserving your ability to think clearly. But know the internet is already polluted with the output of large language models, and that you are imbibing this output everyday. It is true that you do not need to personally pay for a subscription to Claude, but the architecture of our digital system means that large language models are already a rank-and-file feature of email software, customer service bots, in media production, and so much more. ChatGPT and search engines will eventually converge into the same thing, and they are, in fact, racing to the finish line to do so. AI is reshaping our energy production systems and our politics. The question is not whether you’ll have the soup, but whether you realize you, and the rest of us, are already swimming in the soup. Considered another way, this approach appears to be the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand when the very challenge you are facing is a sandstorm. Inconveniently, systematic threats require systemic solutions, not performing purity politics. If your revulsion is to AI is that it’s corrupting our ability to think independently—which it definitely is—ridiculing those who use the consumer version of ChatGPT is a very small and more importantly ineffectual hill to die on. View the full article

AI has quickly become the most overconfident line item in the modern marketing roadmap. Budgets are shifting. Teams are being restructured. Vendors are being evaluated almost exclusively through the lens of how “AI-powered” they appear. There is a growing assumption that once the right models are in place, performance will follow. Better targeting. Smarter segmentation. Higher conversion. More efficient spend. It sounds almost inevitable. But there is a quieter reality beneath the momentum. One that rarely makes it into boardroom conversations or conference keynotes. Most organizations are not struggling to use AI. They are struggling to feed it. And what they are feeding it is far less reliable than they think. The uncomfortable truth about inputs AI does not create truth. It scales whatever it is given. If the underlying data is fragmented, outdated or manipulated, the model does not correct it. It operationalizes it. At speed. At scale. With confidence. This is where the gap begins. Marketers have spent years investing in data infrastructure, pipelines and orchestration layers. On paper, the foundation looks strong. There is more data available than ever before. There are more signals, more touchpoints, more attributes tied to every customer. The assumption is that this abundance translates into readiness. But volume is not the same as validity. A customer profile built from five disconnected identifiers is not a unified identity. An email address that exists in a CRM is not necessarily active, reachable or even tied to a real person. Engagement signals that appear recent may be the result of automated activity, privacy shielding or bot interaction. AI models are not designed to question these inputs. They are designed to find patterns within them. So, when the inputs are flawed, the outputs become convincingly wrong. Identity is the fault line At the center of this problem is identity. Every AI-driven use case in marketing depends on the assumption that you know who you are analyzing, targeting or predicting. Whether it is propensity modeling, churn prediction, audience creation or personalization, identity is the anchor. Yet identity remains one of the least stable components of the data stack. Consumers move across devices, channels and environments constantly. They use different email addresses. They share accounts. They create new profiles. They disengage and re-engage in ways that are difficult to track cleanly. Over time, what appears to be a single customer often becomes a composite of partial truths. Even within authenticated environments, identity degrades. Touchpoints go inactive. Behavioral signals lose relevance. Records persist long after the underlying reality has shifted. Most systems are not built to continuously reconcile these changes. They capture identity at a moment in time and treat it as durable. And AI inherits that assumption. Which means many models are making decisions based on identities that no longer exist in the way they are represented. The hidden impact of fraud and synthetic activity Another layer omplicates the picture further. Not all data is simply outdated. Some of it is intentionally misleading. Fraud is evolving alongside marketing technology. The barriers to creating accounts, generating engagement, or exploiting promotional systems have decreased significantly. Automated tools and AI itself have made it easier to simulate legitimate behavior at scale. Fake accounts are not always obvious. They can pass basic validation checks. They can engage with content. They can move through funnels in ways that resemble real users. From a model’s perspective, they are indistinguishable unless additional context is applied. This creates a subtle but meaningful distortion. Acquisition models begin to optimize toward patterns that include fraudulent behavior. Lifecycle strategies adapt to engagement that is not human. Performance metrics improve on the surface while underlying efficiency erodes. The result is a feedback loop where AI reinforces the very issues it should be helping to solve. And because the outputs look sophisticated, the problem becomes harder to detect. Why traditional data strategies fall short Most organizations are aware that data quality matters. Significant effort goes into cleansing, deduplication and normalization. Records are standardized. Fields are filled. Duplicates are merged. These steps are necessary, but they are not sufficient. Clean data is not the same as accurate data. A perfectly formatted email address can still be inactive. A deduplicated profile can still represent multiple individuals. A normalized dataset can still be missing critical context about behavior, risk or authenticity. Traditional data practices tend to focus on structure. AI requires substance. It requires an understanding of whether an identity is real, whether it is active, whether it is behaving in ways that align with genuine consumer patterns. Without that layer, even the most sophisticated models are operating on incomplete information. The illusion of readiness This is how the mirage takes shape. Dashboards show high match rates. Databases contain millions of records. Models produce outputs that appear precise. Campaigns are executed with increasing automation. From the outside, it looks like progress. But underneath, there are unresolved questions. How many of those identities are actually reachable today? How many represent real individuals versus synthetic or low-quality accounts? How often are behavioral signals refreshed and validated? How much of the model’s learning is influenced by noise? These are no longer rare. They are foundational. And yet they are often overlooked because they sit below the level where most AI initiatives begin. A different way to think about AI readiness True AI readiness does not start with model selection. It starts with input integrity. It requires a shift in focus from how much data you have to how much of it you can trust. That trust is built on a few critical dimensions. First, identity accuracy. Not just the ability to match records, but to ensure that those records reflect real, current individuals. This includes understanding when identities change, when they become inactive and when they should no longer be used as the basis for decisioning. Second, activity validation. Knowing that a signal occurred is not enough. You need confidence that it represents meaningful human behavior. This is where distinguishing between genuine engagement and automated or manipulated activity becomes essential. Third, risk awareness. Every dataset contains some level of fraud or abuse. The question is whether it is visible and accounted for. Without that visibility, models will absorb and propagate those patterns. When these elements are in place, AI begins to operate on a different plane. Predictions become more reliable. Segments become more actionable. Optimization aligns more closely with real outcomes. Where this creates advantage Organizations that address these foundational issues are creating a structural advantage. They are able to suppress low-value or risky identities before they enter the modeling process. They can prioritize outreach to individuals who are both reachable and likely to engage. They can detect and mitigate fraudulent behavior before it distorts performance metrics. Over time, this compounds. Models trained on higher-quality inputs learn faster and generalize better. Campaigns become more efficient. Measurement becomes more trustworthy. Perhaps most importantly, decision-making becomes more grounded in reality. This is where AI begins to deliver on its promise. The path forward There is no question that AI will continue to reshape marketing. The capabilities are real, and the pace of innovation is not slowing down. But the idea that AI alone will solve underlying data challenges is a misconception. If anything, it raises the stakes. Because AI does not just expose weaknesses in your data. It amplifies them. The organizations that recognize this early are taking a more deliberate approach. They are investing in understanding their identity layer. They are prioritizing the validation of activity and the detection of risk. They are treating data not as a static asset, but as a dynamic system that requires continuous refinement. They are not asking, “How do we apply AI to our data?” They are asking, “Is our data worthy of AI?” It is a more difficult question. It requires a deeper level of introspection. It challenges assumptions that have been in place for years. But it is also the question that separates real readiness from the illusion of it. And in a landscape where everyone is accelerating toward AI, clarity at the foundation is what ultimately determines who moves forward, and who simply moves faster in the wrong direction. View the full article

In 2021, newly relocated to San Francisco from New York City, Danielle Snyder Shorenstein went with her husband to her first Golden State Warriors game. She wasn’t a sports fan, really, and especially not a Bay Area sports fan. “I identify as a New Yorker,” she says. Having owned and run a fashion and jewelry brand called Dannijo with her sister, Jodie Snyder Morel, since 2008, and looking around at the game merch, she thought to herself how unlikely she’d be to wear any of it. Over the course of the season, Shorenstein continued to go to games with her husband and began experimenting with her own take on fanwear. She cut up a jersey, added a crochet collar, some crystal work—and wore it to games. Soon enough, players’ wives and girlfriends were sliding into her DMs. Strangers were stopping her in the arena bathrooms, all asking the same question: “Where did you get that?” Danielle Snyder Shorenstein Jodie Snyder Morel “It woke me up,” Shorenstein says. “Sport is huge. I used to think about sports like, slap a logo on a product and show off your team. But I thought, I’m going to make this chic. That was the aha moment. That was the unlock.” As Shorenstein began to cultivate her own grassroots following at the Warriors games, she and her sister, who lives in Jacksonville, Florida, got to work on a second business, DannijoPro, a fanwear brand that blends fashion and sports fandom. The effort has been an experiment in innovating across two mature industries that rarely intersect. Now, nearly two years in, the business has a full line of fan gear, from understated button downs with a tiny, offset team logo embroidered on the shirt to bespoke vintage gear with hand-sewn details, crocheted collars and rhinestone touches. They’ve even started a line they’re calling 1/won, using vintage fan gear to make bespoke pieces at higher price points. Items at DannijoPro run anywhere from $85 to $495, and are sold on the company’s website, as well as at brand-hosted pop up shops and events. At the end of April, the brand will launch on online fashion retailer Revolve. Right now, DannijoPro is growing 120% year over year, with 40% of their sales coming from DMs on social media. The brand has grown through word of mouth, with a boost from the likes of Brooke Shields, Ayesha and Stephen Curry, Selena Gomez, and Benny Blanco wearing it. The brand has also brokered a licensing agreement with the NBA. Fashion reworked The founders’ experience building DannijoPro has been entirely different from their first foray as fashion founders. “The lay of the land in sports licensing is complicated. There is no road map,” Shorenstein says. “Every league operates differently and every team is different. The distribution is complicated. It’s layered and nuanced. Relationships really matter. But, there’s a lot of opportunity to be entrepreneurial. We are creating our own path within the confines of this landscape.” And, that path, says Morel, is focused on the female consumer in fandom—a buyer that’s been largely ignored in the sports fan apparel business, favoring an infamous “pink it and shrink it” model. “We’re trying to build something from the ground up,” says Morel, noting that there’s no preexisting distribution channel for what DanniJo Pro offers. “Our stuff doesn’t live on plastic hangers in an arena. We are taking a risk, trying to cultivate and create community organically. It’s not a short cut,” Shorenstein says. When you’re trying to take up space in a market you’re new to, you have to justify your presence, which, the sisters say, is more difficult than they ever expected. They’ve had to be creative to establish a toehold in fandom, brokering relationships with players, hosting events, and focusing on the bespoke aspect and craftsmanship in what they do. Looking at DannijoPro with a wider lens, it’s clear the company is also capitalizing on a thread emerging at the intersection of business and culture wherein brands like Hathaway Hutton with its viral Boatkin, Kristin Juszczyk’s Off-Season (in partnership with Skims founder Emme Grede, Fanatics and the NFL), collegiate artwork at Axis Hats and the Clearly Collective with its college campus and city-map scarves are leveraging established, legacy IP as a sort of growth hack. Even on Etsy and Instagram, budding designers are peddling reworked Ralph Lauren button-downs and Nike sweatshirts for a refreshed, unique look. The very existence of these businesses raises a question around innovation and originality, and whether building a brand from established IP, or creating brand adjacency, is equally as wise as building one from scratch. “Licensing is a win-win-win trifecta,” says strategist and licensing expert April Beach. “It is amazing for the creator of the IP—in this case the NBA—the licensee at DannijoPro and it’s amazing for the end users. It increases profit and it gives the licensee the opportunity to take someone’s incredible work and build their genius with it.” Nicole Dolgon, partner at New York City law firm Esca Legal, says that one of the best bits of a licensing agreement like the one DannijoPro has with the NBA is that there’s exponential growth in fanbase with very little lift for the NBA. Morel and Shorenstein do the heavy lifting, maintaining constant communication and product approvals with the league. And, so long as they can jump through the right hoops and maintain that relationship in all of the best ways, everyone does well. Perhaps the most validating interaction for Morel and Shorenstein came when Divya Mathur, chief marketing officer at online clothing retailer Revolve, called. “My focus is always where our customer is spending her time,” says Mathur, noting the brand will launch on Revolve at the end of April. “On my radar was an increase in attending sporting events. I was looking at brands in this space and I came across DannijoPro. I was really drawn to very specific things: their silhouettes, the sweatshirts. None of the product out there felt like it fit our customer.” But, she says, DannijoPro offered an opportunity to play in the sports space without leaving the fashion world: “It exists beyond game da. It crosses over into everyday life, with a lot of craftsmanship and detail. These are pieces you’ll feel proud to wear. That’s the white space in the market.” Morel says filling the void has evolved into three buckets of the business: NBA-licensed pieces with Dannijo signatures (crochet collars, hand-stitching, crystal work), available for any NBA team; the Atelier (or what the sisters call blanks), where customers take Dannijo “blanks” and work with in-house artists to personalize their pieces; and then 1/won vintage, which is sourced through longtime vintage dealers in California and Florida, reworked by hand (cut, stitched, painted). Organizing the business this way, especially with its vintage 1/won line and its hand-added details, is a resistance to fast fashion and AI-generated sameness in our culture, says Shorenstein. Sports fandom is a generational loyalty that has nothing to do with trends. (You don’t send your Warriors jacket to the RealReal, says Morel.) There’s a greater emotional attachment to these pieces, especially when they’ve been altered and created by humans. The community DannijoPro builds is as much the product the brand is selling as the clothing itself. The stadium bathroom becomes as much the trunk show as the athlete’s tunnel has become the runway. Says Shorenstein: “The NBA is our window to the world. People are buying joy and community with DannijoPro. And having an eye and style matters in this space. We are going to be lending our fashion house aesthetic to other sports and leagues outside of the NBA.” View the full article

If AI can write our emails, analyze data, and generate code, then machines outperform humans on nearly everything we currently measure: speed, productivity, and task completion. Based on these measures, humans lose. Their jobs. Their dignity. Their worth. A recent management study shows that AI can help people do 12% more work, 25% faster—but it gets the answers wrong 19% of the time. That’s a telling number. And helps us to understand what we’re all experiencing. We’re optimizing for throughput while quietly accepting a compounding error rate. If we value motion and not direction, we’re like Wile E. Coyote, sprinting forward ever faster—only to realize, a beat too late, there’s no ground beneath us. The reason this matters so much right now is that AI and humans are fundamentally different kinds of intelligence. Despite its “generative” name, AI is recursive. Similar to how “social media” isn’t at all social. AI finds patterns in what already exists, optimizes what’s already been done, and accelerates what’s already been decided. That’s genuinely powerful. It can create a song for you based on your story or code a basic website for you. But—and this is important—it cannot imagine what doesn’t exist yet. It cannot dissent. It cannot empathize. It cannot hold tension or sense when a decision lacks integrity. Humans can. We humans don’t just process the world—we generate new versions of it. We take a problem no one has solved, sit with its contradictions, and tussle with it long enough to create something others missed to build something genuinely useful. That generative capacity—to imagine, not just replicate—is what fuels every meaningful innovation. And it is precisely what our management measurement systems have never learned to see. Which is to say: this isn’t a new problem. It’s a 100-year-old one that AI’s recent emergence has suddenly turned into a crisis. Sorted, Ranked, Rated In the early 1900s, Frederick Taylor gave us scientific management—the idea that human work could and should be standardized, measured, and optimized like any other industrial input. People were inputs. Efficiency was the output. Shortly after, the U.S. Army formalized rating systems to rank soldiers against each other—a tool of military hierarchy designed to sort people for deployment, not develop them. When the wars ended, corporations inherited both the logic and the form. By the 1950s, the annual performance review was a fixture of corporate life. Again, not because it developed people, ideas, or innovation. But because it sorted, ranked, and rated. Then Jack Welch locked the idea in. At GE, he made it consequential and famous: the top 20% were handsomely rewarded, and the bottom 10% were fired, every year, by design. What spread across the global business world wasn’t just a practice—it was a premise. That human beings are meant to be ranked instead of linked. And here’s what most people don’t know: the stack and rank wasn’t actually about improving performance. Welch needed a mechanism to cut people because he was managing shareholder perceptions—using it, among other tools, to make GE appear to be growing when it actually wasn’t. A trial with no jury, no defense, and few witnesses Performance reviews are, by design, performative. Think about what a performance review actually is. It happens once or twice a year—far too infrequently for feedback to be useful. It documents the past rather than addressing the present or shaping the future. It’s tied to compensation, which means everyone performs for the grade rather than the work. If you’re a team leader, you’re often told in advance how many people are allowed to receive great reviews—forcing you to distort reality, ration recognition, and turn feedback into a competition among colleagues. Performance reviews are like a trial with no jury, no defense, and few witnesses—and the prosecutor and the judge are the same person. And we know it. A recent poll I did on LinkedIn shows that people truly get that performance reviews are less about the work (14%) and more about conforming to what is expected of you. That legacy is still running our collective talent decisions today. Not because someone looked at it and thought this was a good idea, but because it’s a norm we’ve inherited and not yet interrogated. The system is working exactly as designed. To commoditize humans. Everything becomes a derivative A few years ago, Adobe decided they’d had enough. “We were a company that thrived on creativity and innovation,” said Donna Morris, then Head of HR, “and the system felt like the exact opposite of that.” Rather than patch what was broken, they replaced it entirely—introducing the “check-in,” a model of ongoing, real-time conversation focused on growth rather than judgment. Managers were coached to have these exchanges as often as the work required, with an emphasis on coaching over critiquing. The shift was concrete: eliminating performance reviews freed up approximately 80,000 hours of manager time every year—the equivalent of 38 full-time employees freed from bureaucratic ritual. And that’s just managers. Countless hours of employee time were also reclaimed—time spent on self-evaluations, on rehearsing, on the sleepless nights that rolled into crappy days. Some companies have followed Adobe’s lead. Most haven’t. Because doing so requires seeing the world differently. It requires us to admit that what the world of management has been measuring isn’t actually valuable. And that the cost is compounded into something we can’t afford. Already, 70% of global jobs require little to no creativity. With AI, that number will only rise—accelerating a shift toward speed over substance, replication over originality, isolation over connection. What was always a strategic blind spot is now an existential one. If we can’t see how human distinctiveness creates value, we won’t just lose sight of it. We’ll automate it away entirely. We’ll design it out. Everything becomes a derivative—a recursive loop of what’s already been done, instead of what we actually need next. The challenges that matter most right now—in business, in society, in every organization trying to stay relevant—require ingenuity, genuine collaboration, and the willingness to work on problems that don’t have obvious answers. That’s not a soft people-y issue; It’s an economic one. The reason every valuable business is created is to produce something useful that didn’t exist before. But then we measure time saved and cost reduced. We are standing at a fork in the road. One path automates what machines do well, freeing humans to generate what comes next—the novel ideas, the solutions we haven’t seen, the work that makes organizations worth having. The other keeps measuring humans by an outdated model they’ll always lose, and in doing so, loses the very generative capacity no machine can replace. The speed/more/output metric is giving us the wrong answer. It tells us humans should absolutely lose our jobs if AI can replace them. But that’s only true if we keep asking the wrong question. Performance reviews are a symptom. The deeper problem is that we never built the right metrics to value what humans actually do. And now that we live in a world where everything routine can be automated, that blindness is no longer just a management failure. It’s the defining risk of our moment. We need to see the norms we’re standing on, so we can stop wondering why the ground feels so thin. View the full article

Research on 68 million AI crawler visits show what SEOs should do to improve AI search performance The post 68 Million AI Crawler Visits Show What Drives AI Search Visibility appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

For decades, the business world has quietly subscribed to a myth: that cognitive performance peaks early and declines steadily thereafter. It’s a belief baked into hiring practices, promotion decisions, and even redundancy strategies. Youth is equated with innovation, speed, and adaptability; age with decline, resistance, and risk. If we ask ourselves, “Am I a better/more effective employee now than I was at 21?” most of us would say, “Yes!” Science and data prove what we already know: that many of the cognitive capabilities that matter most in today’s complex, fast-moving organizations improve with age. The wrong model of intelligence The traditional view of cognitive performance is based on what psychologists call fluid intelligence. This is our ability to process new information quickly, solve unfamiliar problems, and think abstractly. This does tend to peak in early adulthood, which is why you’ll see scores on things like numerical reasoning tests peak at around 19. Fluid intelligence however, is only a small part of the story. So much more of what predicts job performance is crystallized intelligence. This refers to accumulated knowledge, pattern recognition, judgment, and the ability to make sense of complexity. This continues to grow across the lifespan, often peaking well into our 50s. Experience is a cognitive advantage One of the more striking experiments to show the value of experience is taken from the world of chess. In classic studies, chess masters could identify strong moves almost instantly. When asked how this was possible, participants couldn’t easily articulate why. They would say ‘not sure/it ‘feels’ right/’gut instinct’. Later research showed that this “gut instinct” wasn’t guesswork, but rapid pattern recognition built from years of experience. By midlife, most professionals have encountered hundreds (if not thousands) of variations of the same underlying problems: difficult stakeholders, failing projects, market shifts, organizational politics. This exposure creates what neuroscientists and psychologists often describe as pattern recognition. The brain becomes faster not because it processes raw data more quickly, but because it recognises familiar structures and shortcuts decision-making. In practice, this looks like: Spotting risks before they escalate Making better decisions with less information Navigating complex interpersonal dynamics with greater ease Knowing when not to act It isn’t slower thinking. It’s more efficient thinking. Yet many organizations systematically undervalue it because it doesn’t look like the rapid-fire ideation associated with youth. It’s also highly likely, that alongside the expert chess players, people themselves struggle to articulate the value of their experience to employers. Emotional regulation and decision quality Another overlooked advantage of older workers is emotional intelligence (or emotional regulation). Research consistently shows that as people age, they become better at managing emotions, maintaining perspective, and avoiding reactive decision-making. In high-pressure environments, this has a direct impact on performance. Leaders and employees over 50 are often: Less prone to impulsive decisions Better at handling conflict constructively More resilient in the face of setbacks More focused on long-term outcomes rather than short-term wins In a business environment which values trust, credibility and relationships, these are not “soft” skills, they are critical capabilities. The innovation myth One of the most persistent assumptions is that innovation is a young person’s game. While breakthrough ideas can emerge at any age, many of the most impactful innovations come from individuals with deep domain expertise. Economist David Galenson’s research shows that while some innovators peak early, many of the most important breakthroughs come from “experimental innovators”—people whose ideas are built slowly through years of experience, often reaching their peak in midlife or later. Innovation is not just about generating ideas. It’s about: Connecting disparate concepts Understanding what will actually work in practice Navigating the organizational and market realities required to implement change All are areas where experience is a significant advantage. The cost of ignoring midlife talent Despite this, many organizations continue to sideline or lose talent over 50, whether through redundancy, lack of progression, or subtle cultural signals that they no longer “fit.” The cost is enormous but largely invisible because it’s hard to measure what doesn’t happen: the insight not shared, the avoided mistake, the opportunity not taken. A workforce out of sync with reality There’s also a broader demographic shift that businesses can’t ignore. People are living longer, working longer, and often needing or wanting to remain economically active well into their 60s and beyond—yet organizational practices haven’t caught up. Many career paths still assume a linear progression that peaks in midlife then declines. Development opportunities are often disproportionately focused on younger employees and hiring processes frequently filter out older candidates (sometimes explicitly: ‘don’t send me anyone over 45’), often implicitly (‘we want someone malleable with less experience’). This creates a mismatch between the available talent pool and how organizations choose to use it. Make age the asset it is Peak brain power is a concept best thought of as something that evolves with age. In the consumer world, the people with the most money are often the least targeted. In the employment world, the people with the most experience are often the least valued. The question for businesses is not whether older workers can keep up. It’s whether organizations are smart enough to recognize and utilize the assets they already have. Those that do will gain a significant competitive advantage. View the full article

Some litigants are "knuckleheads" but others are real threats, and well-pleaded cases can easily cost companies millions of dollars, TCPA attorney Eric Troutman said. View the full article

A new EquityProtect scorecard finds 16 states have no deed fraud laws, leaving homeowners vulnerable as real estate fraud losses topped $275 million in 2025, with seniors bearing the heaviest financial burden. View the full article

The tiny easy chair Mikael Axelsson is holding in his hands—a dollhouse-size combination of bent wire, hand-carved foam, and hot glue—has been a white whale for the Ikea designer since he first modeled it back in 2014. The concept was simple, or at least he thought it would be: Build a frame of metal, fill it with a balloon-like cushion, and reinvent novelty 1990s blow-up furniture into a modern home furnishing. But after trying to take the Barbie-size model he’d built and expand it into a full-scale piece of inflatable furniture, he had two major problems. First, he could never quite figure out how to make an inflatable cushion that didn’t feel like an exercise ball. Second, he couldn’t convince his bosses that inflatable furniture wouldn’t be the total failure it was when the company first tried it in the late 1990s. “It’s been standing on my shelf since then,” he says. A little over two years ago, Axelsson pulled the model off the shelf at his desk in the design department at Ikea of Sweden, the global retailer’s headquarters in the small town of Älmhult, Sweden. Axelsson and the roughly 20 other designers on staff had been called to participate in an experimental design sprint in late 2023. They had two days to come up with boundary-pushing concepts for the newest edition of Ikea’s PS collection, a recurring furniture-centric product drop of Scandinavian designs that will launch this May. Axelsson saw the chance to revive his inflatable easy chair. This time, in the spirit of throwing everything at the wall, he got the go-ahead to at least explore the idea. He immediately started welding. He ended up building about 20 different versions of the chair, with varying tubular chrome frame configurations and bulbous hand-sealed inflation chambers. Several of these iterations were on display when I walked into Ikea’s headquarters in early April. I was there to visit Ikea’s secretive prototype lab—the place where conceptual designs get mocked up, refined, refined again, and eventually optimized for the large-scale production that will flatpack and distribute them to Ikea’s estimated 915 million annual in-store customers. Ikea invited me as the first journalist to see the space, the creative heart of the company, which pumps out 1,500 to 2,000 new products every year for markets all over the planet. To see how the space works, and to understand why it’s so important to Ikea’s $52 billion in retail sales in fiscal 2025, Fast Company has been given an exclusive look inside the prototype shop. Products being prototyped there are often two to three years away from making it to the shelves of one of Ikea’s 500-plus stores, and some experimental design ideas being tested there may never materialize. “You are basically in the future here,” says Johan Ejdemo, Ikea’s global design manager. The prototype shop is where that future gets gut checked. From top-level feasibility to aesthetic refinement to the minutiae of assembly fittings and stitch choices, products get built and rebuilt in the prototype shop to continually test whether they’re meeting the Ikea standards for functionality and affordability. Axelsson’s design went through that exact distillation process, with the added benefit of the concept kicking around in his brain for more than a decade. Settling into the green cushion of a near-final version of the inflatable easy chair that will finally hit stores in May, priced at $199.99, Axelsson cradles that first tiny model he made back in 2014. The two chairs look remarkably similar. Scattered around him are the rough mockups and failed tests that it took to make that leap, a leap that happens for thousands of items on sale in Ikea stores and sitting in homes around the world. “It would be really hard without this space to make good products, if not impossible,” Axelsson says. A culture of testing Prototyping has been part of Ikea’s DNA since it first started making its own furniture, but today the act of prototyping products is as much a design approach as a business strategy. Ikea is considered the largest furniture company in the world, with an estimated 5.7% market share in home furnishings. It’s continuing a long trend of expansion—66 new Ikea stores opened in fiscal 2025, and its largest retail franchisee, Ingka Group, expects to open 20 by the end of fiscal 2026. The nearly 2,000 products the company releases every year are produced at such a vast scale and with such tight profit margins that Ikea has cemented itself as a low-cost leader across a wide range of product types. Offering new and better products every year, with the aspiration of making them at as high a quality as costs will bear, has become the core business model. And the prototyping lab is key to its success. The secured doors of Ikea’s prototyping shop open up to reveal a calm (but clearly mad) scientist’s laboratory. There are five main rooms separated by a central corridor, and each is stuffed with racks of materials and enormous tools that represent the wide range of products Ikea has on offer. It’s high school shop class in hyperspeed: One area prints large panels of images for a textile, another is coated in sawdust, another blasts a CNC water jet cutter through a piece of sheet metal, and yet another fumes with the scent of freshly sprayed paint. Hospital white walls and smooth concrete floors contrast with the chaotic sounds of a screaming table saw, a zapping arc welder, and classic rock pouring out of a boombox. The prototype shop opened in fall 2025 as part of an expansion of Ikea’s headquarters, which is situated in the quaint southern Swedish town where founder Ingvar Kamprad launched Ikea as a mail order business in the 1940s. The new building adds 183,000 square feet to the complex, and the prototype shop sits centrally between the design department and the cafeteria, with separate spaces for the textile and comfort department, the metal shop, the wood shop, painting and surface treatment, and 3D printing. The shop finishes more than 3,400 prototype projects per year. Henrik Holmberg is the prototype shop’s manager, running a team of 14 specialists who work directly with Ikea’s designers and product developers. He started out in the prototype shop 25 years ago and notes with pride that the shop has existed since Ikea first ventured away from its roots as a mail order catalog and started producing its own furniture, back in 1955. Over the decades, the role of the prototyping shop has evolved from proving out new furniture designs to actively engaging in the design process itself. Designers, product developers, engineers, and marketers are regularly streaming into the shop to check on products in the works or tap into the expertise of the craftspeople there to help bring an idea to physical form. The opening of this new prototyping facility has made this interdisciplinary approach into the status quo. “Now we are integrated,” Holmberg says. “We are actually in the center of the house.” On any given day there are upwards of 60 different products being prototyped or refined. Project-specific rolling carts are scattered throughout the shop, filled with the raw elements of shelves, lamps, and bathroom accessories. The breadth of activity and the sheer amount of stuff is overwhelming. This is a short list of happenings in the prototype shop on the day I visited: —Textile experts compare two stitching treatments on the edges of a low price sofa’s cushions. —A piece of pipe is run through a CNC-controlled bending machine to become a curlicue. —A lumpy floor chair has its organic shape modeled in 3D software typically used by the fashion industry to print out the patterns a seamstress uses for upholstery. —A test label is wrapped around what looks to be a chocolate bar. “But don’t bite it because it’s just a piece of wood,” Holmberg says, holding the bar. “Here you can’t trust anything because we are faking so much.” Quick mock-ups like this are the blood of the prototype shop, fueling the creative process and accelerating the sometimes brutal evaluations that determine whether an idea should move forward or die young. “We do many iterations sometimes to ensure that we don’t spend too much time on the wrong thing too early,” Holmberg says. In addition to new products, the prototype shop is also regularly reevaluating old products. Sometimes this is for safety reasons, as regulations evolve and the company tries to eliminate tip-over risks in products like chairs and dressers. “That is apparently not safe anymore,” Edjemo says, pointing to a plastic children’s chair that’s one of the company’s best sellers. The revision underway angles the legs a bit farther out, making it more stable. “It takes a lot of energy, but you have to do it and it’s not always beneficial for the design,” he adds. “The regulations are changing all the time.” Sometimes a product comes back to see whether a more sustainable material could be used in its construction, or to improve its recyclability. “Circularity is influencing everything in design today,” Ejdemo says. All this means there’s very little downtime in the prototype shop. But the process isn’t rushed. In fact, Holmberg stresses the importance of carefully searching for the best solution to whatever product is being designed or refined, drawing on his team’s decades of experience in blacksmithing or carpentry or sewing. “Everything about prototyping is to have the access to explore. We try one track, then another track, and if that doesn’t work we need a third track,” he says. “The main thing is to be flexible.” Full circle prototyping One of the most striking pieces in the new PS collection launching in May almost didn’t make it through the prototype phase. Back during the collection’s design sprint in late 2023, designer Marta Krupińska submitted a drawing showing a simple but odd wooden bench for three people. Instead of sitting flat on the ground, the bench’s design called for it to have arched runners under its front and back legs, making it wobble from side to side. Prototype engineer Fredrik Larsen rushed over to the bench drawings before any of his colleagues could. “I took the opportunity to grab it first,” Larsen says. Krupińska says the idea for the rocking bench came from her inner child. “I like to do things against the rules, you know?” she says. After Larsen selected the bench to build, she couldn’t help but head straight into the prototyping shop with him. They immediately began to build the design together, at full scale. Rather than making a quick mockup, they decided to go straight to the pine that would be used for a commercial product. “We were reprimanded,” Krupińska says. “It didn’t land that well with my colleagues because they were doing very rough mockups in particle board and stuff like that.” The gambit paid off. “When I saw this, I was just like, this is perfect,” says Maria O’Brian, the creative leader behind the PS collection. “You understand it’s a bench, but you also see the playfulness immediately.” But the prototype had a problem. “The runners were deflecting like a flat tire,” Krupińska says. “We just sat on it and it was like ‘boom.’” She and Larsen went back to the prototyping shop. The bench, revised down to be a two-seater that could fit more easily into a smaller home, went through a few alterations to try to keep the arched runners from falling flat. They tried different woods, added an extra support bar, and they even reverted back to making a fast mockup out of particle board. Eventually they landed on a solution that involved cutting a channel on the bottom of the runners and lining them with a strip of metal. The runners held and the bench rocked. “Then we got in trouble with Johan [Ejdemo]. Because Johan is an old carpenter,” Larsen says. “Adding material is never the first strategy,” says Ejdemo, a former cabinet maker who’s been with Ikea for nearly 30 years. Conceding that the bench “was not my favorite,” he urged Larsen and Krupińska to find another solution that didn’t require adding metal or the bench was out of the collection. In the months following the PS collection’s design sprint, Larsen and Krupińska had left their full-size prototypes sitting around the office. People kept stopping by to give them a try. “Every week I got a new video from Marta of people playing on it, and she was like, ‘See, they also like it,’” O’Brian says. Having the prototypes out on display ended up leading to the solution Larsen and Krupińska needed. Another designer, thinking back on a recent project, suggested that they could gain more strength from the runners by slicing the wood lengthwise, reversing the grain and gluing them back together. “This was the breakthrough,” Larsen says. After four months of prototyping and problem solving, Larsen and Krupińska had a workable product. It will retail for $159.99 beginning in May. The last prototype they made is sitting in the prototype shop on the day I visit. O’Brian, its early champion, and Ejdemo, its biggest critic, take a seat on it together and begin rocking. Neither can help but laugh. “This is a product that we think is something you’ll remember for a long time,” O’Brian says. “We’re really happy we made it, because it was a bumpy ride. You never know. In these projects you have a lot of darlings that fall away.” “Building will give you the answers” Through a set of secured doors, Edjemo and I walk out of the prototype shop down a short hallway to the design department. It’s an equally secretive part of the compound—no photos allowed—but also one that’s integrally connected with the rest of the vast business. It’s another short walk to various other departments that run the company, including marketing, finance, and the executives laser focused on shaving pennies off production costs and adding pennies to the bottom line. None is separate from the other. “We’re based on the vision of creating better everyday life. It’s not just making a good-looking home. It goes a little bit deeper than that. We have a business idea connected to making that vision fly,” Ejdemo says. “Selling more products, we will be able to reinvest in how we make the products to offer them at prices so low that many can afford them.” This wide range of products “allows Ikea to cater to a lot of different customer segments and taste levels,” says analyst Neil Saunders, managing director for retail at GlobalData. “The new launches keep the range fresh and interesting, and it allows Ikea to adapt to new trends in home design and styling.” That’s why it’s in the company’s interest to put so much into its product development. Walking through Ikea’s design department, Ejdemo pauses to chat with a few team members about what they’re working on. One has a rolling bag filled with paints and brushes near her desk and a fresh water color for a new textile treatment. An intern has just gotten off the phone with a supplier exploring a new approach to ceramics. A market forecaster can’t say anything more than the fact that he’s currently figuring out what consumers will want from Ikea in 2030. Ejdemo is also testing the waters for what’s to come. He’s placed a few prototype pieces out in the design department just to see if they get any attention. “They’re not part of anything right now,” he says. “But they might be.” It’s not just experimentation, though. The output of the design department is heavily influenced by other parts of the company and a broader business strategy. “It’s very defined by the business, what they need, and what they’re going to do next, and they might have a gap in their offer,” Ejdemo says. “The priority of the job is the 1,500 to 2,000 products a year. They all start with design, and they all start with an understanding of the context around that product. Then you get guidance that it should sit in this style and be at this price level.” Sometimes that means the designers are taking assignments and pumping out products because that’s what the company needs. Other times, the stars align and it suddenly makes sense to pitch a weird rocking bench or a mothballed inflatable chair. Having the ability to take those ideas and quickly turn them into physical prototypes creates a proof point, or at least a spark of interest that suggests what might sell. For Ejdemo and the designers at Ikea, designing a product means making it. “I have learned throughout the years that sometimes it’s good to start with a quite crazy idea, because that gives you something. And then you understand to go in this direction or the other. But if you haven’t started to do these kinds of crazy versions, you will never find the next step,” says Ejdemo, still a carpenter at heart. “Starting building will give you the answers.” View the full article

Late last year, the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson gave a talk at Dragonsteel Nexus, an annual conference organized by his media company. It was titled, ​“The Hidden Cost of AI Art.”​ As Sanderson explains, early in his address: “The surge of large language models and generative AI raises questions that are fascinating, and even if I dislike how the movement is going in relation to writing and art, I want to learn from the experience of what’s happening.” Sanderson makes it clear that he disapproves of AI-generated art (“my stomach turns”), but he wants to understand better why this is the case. To do so, he begins considering and then ultimately dismissing a series of common objections: Does he dislike AI art because of the economic and environmental impacts? “Well, those do concern me, but if I’m answering honestly, I would still have a problem with it even if AI were not so resource hungry.” Does he dislike AI art because it’s trained on the work of existing artists? “ Well, I don’t like that. But even if it were trained using no copyrighted work, I’d still be concerned.” Does he just hate the idea of a machine replacing a person? Sanderson references the folk tale of John Henry attempting to beat a steam drill in a tunnel-digging competition that culminates in Henry’s death. “We respect him, but as a society we chose the steam drill. And I would too…The truth is, I’m more than happy to have steam engines drilling tunnels for me to drive through.” So what is it? Sanderson ultimately lands on a more personal reason. Talking about his struggles with his first (failed) book manuscripts, he identifies the key value of art: it changes the artist who attempts it. As he elaborates: “Maybe someday the language models will be able to write books better than I can. But here’s the thing: Using those models in such a way absolutely misses the point, because it looks at art only as a product. Why did I write [my first manuscript]?… It was for the satisfaction of having written a novel, feeling the accomplishment, and learning how to do it. I tell you right now, if you’ve never finished a project on this level, it’s one of the most sweet, beautiful, and transcendent moments. I was holding that manuscript, thinking to myself, ‘I did it. I did it.’” As a writer myself, I’ve also been thinking about this question recently. I like Sanderson’s take, but I’ve been developing one of my own. I understand art to be an act of deep human communication, in which the artist uses a tangible medium, such as a page of prose or a painted canvas, to transmit a complex internal cognitive state from their brain to that of their audience. It’s telepathy. And it’s one of the most beautiful and human things we do. This makes the idea of reading a book written by a language model, or watching a film generated by a prompt, intrinsically absurd, if not anti-human. It’s the heroin needle providing a quixotic simulation of love. What really struck me about Sanderson’s talk, however, was his conclusion. If art is deeply human, he argues, then it’s up to us to define it. “That’s the great thing about art – we define it, and we give it meaning,” he says. “The machines can spit out manuscript after manuscript after manuscript. They can pile them to the pillars of heaven itself. But all we have to do is say ‘no.’” I’ve noticed a trend in recent AI commentary toward a certain nihilistic passivity. You probably know what I’m talking about – the now popular style of essay in which the author, with a sort of worldly weariness, lays out some grim scenario in which AI destroys something sacred, and then sort of just leaves it there, like a cat dropping a dead bird on the doorstep. I’m getting tired of this meekness. Sanderson reminds us that we have agency. In the areas that matter most, it’s us, not the whims of Sam Altman or Dario Amodei, that determine how we shape our existence. All we have to do is say “no.” Correction: In last week’s AI Reality Check episode of my podcast, I said the following: “If you go back and look at the release notes for Anthropic’s earlier, less powerful opus 4.6 LLM, they say the following: their researchers used Opus to find, quote, ‘over 500 exploitable zero-day vulnerabilities, some of which are decades old.’ And let’s stop for a moment because that note, which was hidden in the system card for opus 4.6, is almost word for word what anthropic said about Mythos.” Some of this wording was sloppy, so I want to clarify it here. I was referring to this report on Opus 4.6, which Anthropic published the same day it was released. This is not technically the system card for Opus 4.6, but it is accurately described as release notes (or perhaps supplementary release notes). This report said: “Opus 4.6 found high-severity vulnerabilities, some that had gone undetected for decades.” In another place, it said: “So far, we’ve found and validated more than 500 high-severity vulnerabilities.” Both the title of the report and the conclusion refer to these vulnerabilities as “0-day.” The specific quote I provided, however, does not appear in the report. It’s actually a summary of the report from this tweet. In my opinion, the summary is accurate, but the way I worded the above implies that it was actually found in the report, which it was not. Thank you to the AI researcher who pointed out these issues. I appreciate corrections! You can always send concerns or notes to podcast@calnewport.com. The post Brandon Sanderson vs. AI Art appeared first on Cal Newport. View the full article

Late last year, the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson gave a talk at Dragonsteel Nexus, an annual conference organized by his media company. It was titled, ​“The Hidden Cost of AI Art.”​ As Sanderson explains, early in his address: “The surge of large language models and generative AI raises questions that are fascinating, and even if I dislike how the movement is going in relation to writing and art, I want to learn from the experience of what’s happening.” Sanderson makes it clear that he disapproves of AI-generated art (“my stomach turns”), but he wants to understand better why this is the case. To do so, he begins considering and then ultimately dismissing a series of common objections: Does he dislike AI art because of the economic and environmental impacts? “Well, those do concern me, but if I’m answering honestly, I would still have a problem with it even if AI were not so resource hungry.” Does he dislike AI art because it’s trained on the work of existing artists? “ Well, I don’t like that. But even if it were trained using no copyrighted work, I’d still be concerned.” Does he just hate the idea of a machine replacing a person? Sanderson references the folk tale of John Henry attempting to beat a steam drill in a tunnel-digging competition that culminates in Henry’s death. “We respect him, but as a society we chose the steam drill. And I would too…The truth is, I’m more than happy to have steam engines drilling tunnels for me to drive through.” So what is it? Sanderson ultimately lands on a more personal reason. Talking about his struggles with his first (failed) book manuscripts, he identifies the key value of art: it changes the artist who attempts it. As he elaborates: “Maybe someday the language models will be able to write books better than I can. But here’s the thing: Using those models in such a way absolutely misses the point, because it looks at art only as a product. Why did I write [my first manuscript]?… It was for the satisfaction of having written a novel, feeling the accomplishment, and learning how to do it. I tell you right now, if you’ve never finished a project on this level, it’s one of the most sweet, beautiful, and transcendent moments. I was holding that manuscript, thinking to myself, ‘I did it. I did it.’” As a writer myself, I’ve also been thinking about this question recently. I like Sanderson’s take, but I’ve been developing one of my own. I understand art to be an act of deep human communication, in which the artist uses a tangible medium, such as a page of prose or a painted canvas, to transmit a complex internal cognitive state from their brain to that of their audience. It’s telepathy. And it’s one of the most beautiful and human things we do. This makes the idea of reading a book written by a language model, or watching a film generated by a prompt, intrinsically absurd, if not anti-human. It’s the heroin needle providing a quixotic simulation of love. What really struck me about Sanderson’s talk, however, was his conclusion. If art is deeply human, he argues, then it’s up to us to define it. “That’s the great thing about art – we define it, and we give it meaning,” he says. “The machines can spit out manuscript after manuscript after manuscript. They can pile them to the pillars of heaven itself. But all we have to do is say ‘no.’” I’ve noticed a trend in recent AI commentary toward a certain nihilistic passivity. You probably know what I’m talking about – the now popular style of essay in which the author, with a sort of worldly weariness, lays out some grim scenario in which AI destroys something sacred, and then sort of just leaves it there, like a cat dropping a dead bird on the doorstep. I’m getting tired of this meekness. Sanderson reminds us that we have agency. In the areas that matter most, it’s us, not the whims of Sam Altman or Dario Amodei, that determine how we shape our existence. All we have to do is say “no.” Correction: In last week’s AI Reality Check episode of my podcast, I said the following: “If you go back and look at the release notes for Anthropic’s earlier, less powerful opus 4.6 LLM, they say the following: their researchers used Opus to find, quote, ‘over 500 exploitable zero-day vulnerabilities, some of which are decades old.’ And let’s stop for a moment because that note, which was hidden in the system card for opus 4.6, is almost word for word what anthropic said about Mythos.” Some of this wording was sloppy, so I want to clarify it here. I was referring to this report on Opus 4.6, which Anthropic published the same day it was released. This is not technically the system card for Opus 4.6, but it is accurately described as release notes (or perhaps supplementary release notes). This report said: “Opus 4.6 found high-severity vulnerabilities, some that had gone undetected for decades.” In another place, it said: “So far, we’ve found and validated more than 500 high-severity vulnerabilities.” Both the title of the report and the conclusion refer to these vulnerabilities as “0-day.” The specific quote I provided, however, does not appear in the report. It’s actually a summary of the report from this tweet. In my opinion, the summary is accurate, but the way I worded the above implies that it was actually found in the report, which it was not. Thank you to the AI researcher who pointed out these issues. I appreciate corrections! You can always send concerns or notes to podcast@calnewport.com. The post Brandon Sanderson vs. AI Art appeared first on Cal Newport. View the full article

Some days, the work itself isn’t the hardest part. The hardest part is deciding what deserves your attention first. You’re busy all day, constantly responding, switching, and reacting, yet nothing meaningful seems to move forward. The list gets longer, not shorter, and the sense of control slips away. This is exactly the tension explored in Liane Davey’s upcoming book Thoughtload. Her core idea is simple: when you’re overwhelmed, you don’t just need a better list. You need the right kind of support to process the workload. And that support doesn’t look the same for everyone. The Four Ways People Cope with Overwhelm When pressure builds, people tend to default to one of four responses. Some people need to talk things through. Conversation helps them clarify priorities, test ideas, and reduce the mental load. Others need to take action. Starting something, even imperfectly, creates momentum and cuts through inertia. Some need structure. They want to organise, categorise, and build a system that makes the work feel manageable again. And some need to reconnect with meaning. They reframe tasks, adjust how they approach the work, or find ways to make it more engaging. These are not personality traits. They are ways of restoring control. The problem is that most workplaces unintentionally favour just one of them, usually structure. We default to lists, systems, and processes as the solution to overload, even when that isn’t what people need in that moment. Why One-Size-Fits-All Productivity Advice Falls Short Traditional productivity advice often assumes that better organisation will solve the problem. It tells people to plan more carefully, structure their workload, and stick to a system. Structure is valuable, but it’s not always the starting point. When someone is overwhelmed, forcing structure too early can increase friction. Equally, constant action without clarity leads to busywork, and too much discussion without decisions slows everything down. Work today is too complex for a single mode of working. As we often say, you will never get everything finished, so productivity becomes less about completion and more about making better choices with your attention. That requires flexibility, not just discipline. What This Looks Like in Practice This is exactly why our How to be a Productivity Ninja workshop works so well. It doesn’t rely on one approach to productivity. Instead, it creates space for all four ways people regain control, often within the same session. There’s connection built in from the start. It’s a group workshop with time to talk, reflect, and sense-check thinking. Many participants say they feel immediate relief simply from articulating what has been sitting in their head. There’s action early on. The brain dump exercise gets everything out of your head and into a trusted place, creating instant clarity and momentum. There’s structure through the “second brain” system. Participants build a simple, practical way to organise their work on the day, rather than leaving with ideas they may never implement. And there’s space for creativity. Whether it is renaming projects, experimenting with formats, or shaping a system that feels intuitive, people find ways to make their work more engaging and personal. This blend matters because productivity is not just about tools or discipline. It is about giving people the right kind of support at the right time so they can move forward with clarity. In fact, 82% of participants go on to implement a new productivity system and report feeling more in control of their work after the workshop. A Simple Way to Regain Control Today If everything on your list feels urgent, start with a different question. Ask yourself what you actually need right now. Do you need to talk something through to gain clarity? Do you need to take one small action to build momentum? Do you need to step back and organise the work properly? Or do you need to reconnect this task to something more meaningful? Choosing the right response can help you move out of reaction mode and back into control. Ready to Work This Way for Real? If this resonates, join our upcoming How to be a Productivity Ninja public workshop to help you put it into practice straight away. You’ll not just learn a system, you’ll build one that works for you, with the support, structure, and space to actually make it stick. Book your place and start creating the clarity you need to focus on what really matters. The post Why Prioritisation Alone Doesn’t Fix Overwhelm at Work appeared first on Think Productive UK. View the full article

If you’re looking for free accounting software for your MacBook, you have several solid options to evaluate. Wave stands out for its invoicing capabilities, whereas Zoho Books is customized for micro businesses. ZipBooks offers unlimited invoicing as well, and NCH Express Accounts shines as desktop software for small teams. Finally, Akaunting provides an open-source solution with multi-currency support. Each choice has unique features, so let’s explore what fits your needs best. Key Takeaways NCH Express Accounts offers robust desktop accounting features for small businesses, supporting up to five employees with detailed financial reporting. Akaunting is an open-source software providing unlimited invoicing and expense tracking without subscription fees, perfect for freelancers and small businesses. Wave is a user-friendly platform that allows unlimited invoicing and estimates, ideal for MacBook users looking for simplicity and automation. ZipBooks provides unlimited invoicing, expense tracking, and project management, accessible via mobile devices for on-the-go financial management. Zoho Books caters to micro businesses with annual earnings under $50,000, offering extensive reporting and automation tools for efficient billing. Wave: Best for Invoicing and Estimates When you’re looking for an effective way to manage invoicing and estimates, Wave stands out as a top choice for MacBook users. This free accounting software offers unlimited invoicing and estimates, making it perfect for freelancers and small business owners. You’ll appreciate its user-friendly interface, which simplifies the invoicing process, allowing you to customize invoices and automate recurring billing effortlessly. With integrated reporting features, Wave allows you to generate financial reports, giving you insights into your business performance at no cost. Plus, its mobile applications let you create and send invoices on-the-go, enhancing your productivity. Data protection is a priority, as Wave guarantees cloud storage and 256-bit SSL encryption to safeguard your sensitive information. For those exploring personal accounting programs for Mac, Wave serves as a reliable option, combining features typically found in free checking account register software within a single, streamlined platform. Zoho Books: Ideal for Micro Businesses Zoho Books is an excellent accounting solution particularly designed for micro businesses earning $50,000 or less annually. It offers a free version that allows you and your accountant to send up to 1,000 invoices each year, making it ideal for small operations. With extensive reporting capabilities, expense tracking, and client management features, you can easily oversee your finances. Automation tools streamline cash flow management by enabling recurring billing and payment reminders. Moreover, Zoho Books integrates seamlessly with other Zoho applications, enhancing your workflow across various business processes. If your micro business deals with international clients, you’ll appreciate its support for multi-currency transactions. Here’s a quick comparison of key features: Feature Description Invoicing Send up to 1,000 invoices annually Automation Recurring billing and payment reminders Multi-Currency Support Facilitates international transactions ZipBooks: Best for Unlimited Invoicing For those seeking an invoicing solution without the constraints of monthly fees, ZipBooks stands out as a top choice for MacBook users. This platform allows you to create and send unlimited invoices for free, making it ideal for businesses needing straightforward billing. Its user-friendly interface simplifies the invoicing process, enabling quick invoice generation and management, which can greatly reduce the time you spend on billing tasks. Additionally, ZipBooks offers automation features for recurring billing and automatic payment reminders, ensuring timely payments and improving your cash flow. You can access the platform via mobile devices, allowing you to manage invoices and track time wherever you are, which boosts productivity on the go. With built-in expense tracking and project management features, ZipBooks helps you tag transactions for detailed reporting, making it easier to maintain financial oversight and stay organized. NCH Express Accounts: Best Free Desktop Software NCH Express Accounts provides a robust solution for small businesses, particularly those with up to five employees, looking for free desktop accounting software. This software includes crucial features for efficient financial management, making it easy to handle your accounting tasks. With invoice automation, you can create and send invoices effortlessly as you keep track of payments. Furthermore, you’ll benefit from generating over 20 detailed financial reports, such as profit and loss statements, which offer valuable insights into your business performance. If your business deals with international transactions, NCH Express Accounts supports multiple currencies, enhancing its usability. As a macOS-compatible application, it offers a reliable desktop solution without the hassle of subscriptions. Akaunting: Best Open-Source Accounting Software Akaunting stands out as an excellent choice for those seeking open-source accounting software customized for small businesses and freelancers. This platform allows you to manage invoicing and expenses without incurring subscription fees, making it a cost-effective solution. You’ll appreciate its user-friendly, modern interface, which makes steering your financial records straightforward. Akaunting supports unlimited invoicing, catering perfectly to your needs as it enables you to track expenses efficiently. Additionally, the software offers multi-currency support, allowing you to handle transactions in various currencies and convert them automatically. Being open-source means that developers can modify Akaunting to suit specific business requirements, integrating additional functionalities as necessary. This flexibility guarantees that you can tailor the software to fit your unique accounting needs, giving you control over your financial management. Overall, Akaunting provides a robust, customizable accounting solution for MacBook users. Frequently Asked Questions What Is the Free Accounting App for Mac? The free accounting app for Mac that stands out is the Small Business Administration Accounting app. You can use it without registration or login, making it convenient for freelancers and self-employed individuals. It supports up to 50 transaction entries in its free version and syncs data via iCloud, ensuring access across devices. You can in addition export your data in CSV format, with options for local or iCloud storage, enhancing your financial management experience. What Is the Best Personal Accounting Software for Mac? When choosing the best personal accounting software for Mac, consider your specific needs. Wave offers free unlimited invoicing and expense tracking, ideal for freelancers. Zoho Books provides robust reporting features for micro businesses. If privacy’s a priority, GnuCash supports multi-currency transactions as well as offering extensive reporting. Manager.io is great for local data management, though it lacks cloud backup. Finally, Akaunting allows customization, tailoring your accounting experience to fit your personal requirements effectively. What Is the Best Free Bookkeeping Software? When looking for the best free bookkeeping software, consider options like Wave, which offers unlimited invoicing and expense tracking. Zoho Books is great for micro businesses, allowing one user and an accountant to send numerous invoices. Manager.io provides robust desktop features, including payroll management, whereas ZipBooks offers mobile access for on-the-go management. NCH Express Accounts is suitable for small teams, featuring automated invoicing and extensive financial reporting capabilities to simplify your bookkeeping tasks. Does Mac Have an Accounting Program? Yes, Macs have several accounting programs available. You can choose from both cloud-based options like QuickBooks Online and FreshBooks, which offer features like invoicing and expense tracking. If you prefer free solutions, GnuCash and ZipBooks provide crucial accounting functionalities at no cost. Many of these programs support iCloud synchronization, allowing easy access to your financial data across devices. User-friendly interfaces and mobile apps improve your ability to manage finances efficiently. Conclusion In summary, selecting the right accounting software for your MacBook can greatly improve your financial management. Whether you need robust invoicing with Wave, detailed reporting with Zoho Books, unlimited invoicing through ZipBooks, reliable desktop solutions from NCH Express Accounts, or the flexibility of an open-source platform like Akaunting, there’s a free option customized to your needs. Evaluating these features will help you choose the best software to streamline your accounting tasks efficiently. Image via Google Gemini This article, "Top 5 Free Accounting Software for MacBook Users" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

If you’re looking for free accounting software for your MacBook, you have several solid options to evaluate. Wave stands out for its invoicing capabilities, whereas Zoho Books is customized for micro businesses. ZipBooks offers unlimited invoicing as well, and NCH Express Accounts shines as desktop software for small teams. Finally, Akaunting provides an open-source solution with multi-currency support. Each choice has unique features, so let’s explore what fits your needs best. Key Takeaways NCH Express Accounts offers robust desktop accounting features for small businesses, supporting up to five employees with detailed financial reporting. Akaunting is an open-source software providing unlimited invoicing and expense tracking without subscription fees, perfect for freelancers and small businesses. Wave is a user-friendly platform that allows unlimited invoicing and estimates, ideal for MacBook users looking for simplicity and automation. ZipBooks provides unlimited invoicing, expense tracking, and project management, accessible via mobile devices for on-the-go financial management. Zoho Books caters to micro businesses with annual earnings under $50,000, offering extensive reporting and automation tools for efficient billing. Wave: Best for Invoicing and Estimates When you’re looking for an effective way to manage invoicing and estimates, Wave stands out as a top choice for MacBook users. This free accounting software offers unlimited invoicing and estimates, making it perfect for freelancers and small business owners. You’ll appreciate its user-friendly interface, which simplifies the invoicing process, allowing you to customize invoices and automate recurring billing effortlessly. With integrated reporting features, Wave allows you to generate financial reports, giving you insights into your business performance at no cost. Plus, its mobile applications let you create and send invoices on-the-go, enhancing your productivity. Data protection is a priority, as Wave guarantees cloud storage and 256-bit SSL encryption to safeguard your sensitive information. For those exploring personal accounting programs for Mac, Wave serves as a reliable option, combining features typically found in free checking account register software within a single, streamlined platform. Zoho Books: Ideal for Micro Businesses Zoho Books is an excellent accounting solution particularly designed for micro businesses earning $50,000 or less annually. It offers a free version that allows you and your accountant to send up to 1,000 invoices each year, making it ideal for small operations. With extensive reporting capabilities, expense tracking, and client management features, you can easily oversee your finances. Automation tools streamline cash flow management by enabling recurring billing and payment reminders. Moreover, Zoho Books integrates seamlessly with other Zoho applications, enhancing your workflow across various business processes. If your micro business deals with international clients, you’ll appreciate its support for multi-currency transactions. Here’s a quick comparison of key features: Feature Description Invoicing Send up to 1,000 invoices annually Automation Recurring billing and payment reminders Multi-Currency Support Facilitates international transactions ZipBooks: Best for Unlimited Invoicing For those seeking an invoicing solution without the constraints of monthly fees, ZipBooks stands out as a top choice for MacBook users. This platform allows you to create and send unlimited invoices for free, making it ideal for businesses needing straightforward billing. Its user-friendly interface simplifies the invoicing process, enabling quick invoice generation and management, which can greatly reduce the time you spend on billing tasks. Additionally, ZipBooks offers automation features for recurring billing and automatic payment reminders, ensuring timely payments and improving your cash flow. You can access the platform via mobile devices, allowing you to manage invoices and track time wherever you are, which boosts productivity on the go. With built-in expense tracking and project management features, ZipBooks helps you tag transactions for detailed reporting, making it easier to maintain financial oversight and stay organized. NCH Express Accounts: Best Free Desktop Software NCH Express Accounts provides a robust solution for small businesses, particularly those with up to five employees, looking for free desktop accounting software. This software includes crucial features for efficient financial management, making it easy to handle your accounting tasks. With invoice automation, you can create and send invoices effortlessly as you keep track of payments. Furthermore, you’ll benefit from generating over 20 detailed financial reports, such as profit and loss statements, which offer valuable insights into your business performance. If your business deals with international transactions, NCH Express Accounts supports multiple currencies, enhancing its usability. As a macOS-compatible application, it offers a reliable desktop solution without the hassle of subscriptions. Akaunting: Best Open-Source Accounting Software Akaunting stands out as an excellent choice for those seeking open-source accounting software customized for small businesses and freelancers. This platform allows you to manage invoicing and expenses without incurring subscription fees, making it a cost-effective solution. You’ll appreciate its user-friendly, modern interface, which makes steering your financial records straightforward. Akaunting supports unlimited invoicing, catering perfectly to your needs as it enables you to track expenses efficiently. Additionally, the software offers multi-currency support, allowing you to handle transactions in various currencies and convert them automatically. Being open-source means that developers can modify Akaunting to suit specific business requirements, integrating additional functionalities as necessary. This flexibility guarantees that you can tailor the software to fit your unique accounting needs, giving you control over your financial management. Overall, Akaunting provides a robust, customizable accounting solution for MacBook users. Frequently Asked Questions What Is the Free Accounting App for Mac? The free accounting app for Mac that stands out is the Small Business Administration Accounting app. You can use it without registration or login, making it convenient for freelancers and self-employed individuals. It supports up to 50 transaction entries in its free version and syncs data via iCloud, ensuring access across devices. You can in addition export your data in CSV format, with options for local or iCloud storage, enhancing your financial management experience. What Is the Best Personal Accounting Software for Mac? When choosing the best personal accounting software for Mac, consider your specific needs. Wave offers free unlimited invoicing and expense tracking, ideal for freelancers. Zoho Books provides robust reporting features for micro businesses. If privacy’s a priority, GnuCash supports multi-currency transactions as well as offering extensive reporting. Manager.io is great for local data management, though it lacks cloud backup. Finally, Akaunting allows customization, tailoring your accounting experience to fit your personal requirements effectively. What Is the Best Free Bookkeeping Software? When looking for the best free bookkeeping software, consider options like Wave, which offers unlimited invoicing and expense tracking. Zoho Books is great for micro businesses, allowing one user and an accountant to send numerous invoices. Manager.io provides robust desktop features, including payroll management, whereas ZipBooks offers mobile access for on-the-go management. NCH Express Accounts is suitable for small teams, featuring automated invoicing and extensive financial reporting capabilities to simplify your bookkeeping tasks. Does Mac Have an Accounting Program? Yes, Macs have several accounting programs available. You can choose from both cloud-based options like QuickBooks Online and FreshBooks, which offer features like invoicing and expense tracking. If you prefer free solutions, GnuCash and ZipBooks provide crucial accounting functionalities at no cost. Many of these programs support iCloud synchronization, allowing easy access to your financial data across devices. User-friendly interfaces and mobile apps improve your ability to manage finances efficiently. Conclusion In summary, selecting the right accounting software for your MacBook can greatly improve your financial management. Whether you need robust invoicing with Wave, detailed reporting with Zoho Books, unlimited invoicing through ZipBooks, reliable desktop solutions from NCH Express Accounts, or the flexibility of an open-source platform like Akaunting, there’s a free option customized to your needs. Evaluating these features will help you choose the best software to streamline your accounting tasks efficiently. Image via Google Gemini This article, "Top 5 Free Accounting Software for MacBook Users" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Nigel Farage’s party has looked to Donald The President’s immigration crackdown as a modelView the full article

PM will address House of Commons amid dispute over whether officials should have shared details of Peter Mandelson’s security checksView the full article

Discussion of vetting and procedure is part of the excuse but not the core of the difficulty View the full article

Solopreneurs make dozens of business decisions every day. Which client to prioritize. Whether to raise rates. Which tool to try. In a corporate job, there are committees, managers, and approval chains to share the decision-making load. When you’re running a solo business, every call is yours. When I was a product manager, I learned to sort decisions into two categories: ones you can easily reverse and ones you can’t. It sounds almost too simple, but it changed how quickly I moved and how much I deliberated. That same framework can be applied directly to running a solo business. Reversible decisions: move fast Most business decisions are reversible. You can change course without significant costs or consequences. Trying a new project management tool, adjusting your social media schedule, testing a pricing structure with a single client, tweaking your email signature—these are all experiments you can easily undo. In product management, these are sometimes called “two-way doors.” You walk through, look around, and walk back if you don’t like what you see. The risk is low. But solopreneurs who are not comfortable making decisions often treat every decision like a permanent commitment. They spend days deliberating over choices that could be tested in an afternoon. Research on decision fatigue shows that the sheer volume of decisions degrades the quality of each subsequent one. For solopreneurs, who don’t have a team to absorb the delay, time spent agonizing over a reversible choice is time not spent on the work itself. When you catch yourself deep in a comparison spreadsheet for something you could simply try for a month, that’s the signal to move fast. Irreversible decisions: slow down Contrary to Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous line, “move fast and break things,” moving fast can cause a lot of damage in a solo business. Some decisions are harder to walk back. Things like signing a long-term bad client or investing months into building a service before validating the idea can be enormous drains on your business. These are sometimes called “one-way doors.” Once you’ve gone down a specific path, reversing course is expensive or impossible. These decisions deserve more deliberation: Gather data, talk to peers or a mentor, and set a deadline so you don’t stall indefinitely. The goal isn’t to avoid risk. Risk is always part of running a solo business. The goal is to match your level of care to the actual stakes involved. A small number of decisions deserve more of your time, and recognizing which ones they are is a skill you’ll develop over time. Building your own decision-making filter The reversible/irreversible distinction is a starting point. Over time, you can build a personal filter that speeds up the day-to-day. When a decision lands on your plate, run it through a few questions: Can I undo this in a month? What’s the worst-case scenario if I’m wrong? Am I deciding between two good-enough options? (If the answer to that last one is yes, just pick one and move on.) Gut instinct plays a role here, too. After you’ve been running your business for a while, you build pattern recognition. You’ve seen which clients work out and which don’t, which tools stick and which get abandoned after a month. Trusting your instinct is part of a business mindset—and it’s one of the advantages of working solo. You don’t need three rounds of approvals to act on what you already know. Even with learning over time, you won’t get every decision right. But you can at least spend the right amount of energy on each one. View the full article