All Activity

Think about the last time you binged those true crime documentaries. The next time you opened your streaming app, the homepage likely shifted. Investigative series rose to the top. Maybe a notification alerted you when a new series dropped. Promotional emails highlighted only what you hadn’t watched. You didn’t see the data parsing or the decisioning behind it. You just looked forward to enjoying the next title. That’s the standard. According to the Adobe 2025 AI and digital trends report , 71% of consumers want personalized — or personally relevant — offers and information, and 78% expect seamless experiences across channels. Yet fewer than half of brands consistently deliver. The issue is structural. When customer data lives in disconnected systems, teams will struggle to align insight, timing, and execution quickly enough to take meaningful action. AI can’t magic the problem away. According to the Adobe 2026 AI and digital trends report, fewer than half of organizations say their data foundation is adequate to support AI at scale. At the initial stages of the modernization journey, the path to personalization can feel daunting. But progress will be easier than you think when you introduce a foundation for a unified customer experience. The real barrier to personalization: Disconnected journeys Most brands have plenty of data. It’s cohesion they lack. Your marketing team likely runs email, web, mobile, paid media, support, and even in-person channels. Each collects important signals, but are they sharing context across channels fast enough to shape the next interaction? If not, impact is immediate. A customer browses a product online, then receives an email with a different price. Or a subscriber contacts support and has to repeat their story to multiple team members before getting help. Or a loyal customer happily purchases your product—only to see the same ads promoting it in their feed for weeks after. Even minor bumps along the customer journey chip away at trust. Nearly half of customers say they disengage when promotions feel irrelevant or mistimed. Delivering a unified customer experience requires continuously updating your understanding of each customer and then immediately sharing that insight across every department and touchpoint. This can require substantial change. But taking the following steps makes the path ahead more straightforward: Step 1: Build a unified customer profile A unified experience starts with a single, living view of the customer. Instead of keeping separate records for each channel, create a dynamic profile that reflects behavior, preferences, and history across all departments as customer activity happens in real time. Every click, purchase, service interaction, and loyalty update should feed into the same source of truth. With that information, customer segmentation becomes smarter and messaging becomes more relevant. Customers stop receiving duplicative or contradictory communications. And performance can be more accurately measured across the full lifecycle. This shift moves your marketing strategy from channel and campaign management to customer-first engagement. With a unified profile in place, teams respond to customers as individuals, not isolated events. Step 2: Connect insights to activation in real time Accurate data doesn’t create value on its own. Those behavior signals must trigger action to shape meaningful engagement. Cart abandonment should prompt a quick follow-up (but not too quickly). Product recommendations should reflect recent browsing and past purchases. Irrelevant offers should be removed entirely. Journeys should evolve as preferences change. Relevance largely depends on timing and second chances don’t come easily. Results from a Cognition Neuroscience Research project show the brain processes digital advertising in less than 400 milliseconds. Customers decide almost instantly whether a message applies to them. If systems can’t recognize context and activate insight within that window, the moment passes — and so does the opportunity to connect. AI supports this speed at scale. It identifies patterns in customer data, anticipates purchase intent, flags churn risk, and determines next-best actions within milliseconds. Its effectiveness, however, depends on accurate, unified data. Reliable inputs enable relevant outcomes. Step 3: Scale securely in the cloud Privacy expectations are rising, and protecting customer data is a top priority. As organizations unify more signals and activate them in real time, governance can’t be layered on later. It has to be built in from the start. To sustain a unified customer experience at scale, organizations need a modern cloud foundation that allows teams to process and activate data where it lives, reduce latency, limit unnecessary movement, and strengthen security controls. In the cloud, data ingestion and activation happen faster. Infrastructure grows alongside customer volume. Compliance frameworks are embedded, not bolted on. And technology teams spend less time maintaining custom connections and more time enabling innovation. Make every interaction count Personalization succeeds when brands are prepared for the right moment, not just the right message. When your data foundation is unified, activation happens in real time, infrastructure is more secure, and personalization stops feeling experimental. Instead, it becomes operational. And relevance becomes repeatable. Adobe Experience Platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS) brings these elements together and simplifies execution for your teams. Adobe Experience Platform creates real-time customer profiles that power segmentation, analytics, and journey orchestration across touchpoints. Deployed natively on AWS, it runs on scalable infrastructure designed for speed, resilience, and security—while reducing technical maintenance and complexity. Read the eBook, Capturing attention in the age of AI, to learn more about howAdobe and AWS provide the holistic view of your customer, which marketers need to deliver personalization, build retention, and increase customer lifetime value. Or, if you’re ready to see specifically how Adobe and AWS can simplify your unique path to unified customer experiences, reach out and start the conversation today. View the full article

Allie K. Miller, one of the most followed voices in the AI industry, says that “by the time you wake up, your AI should have already been working for you for hours.” Formerly the global head of machine learning for startups and venture capital at Amazon Web Services, Miller is among the busiest AI consultants and influencers in the industry, with more than 1.6 million followers on LinkedIn alone. Through her company Open Machine, she advises enterprises and business leaders—including those at OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Warner Bros. Discovery—on how to adopt AI. In 2025, Miller was named one of the 100 most influential people in AI by Time. In an interview with Inc., Miller says that nowadays, she largely works out of Claude Code, the agentic coding system developed by Anthropic. She keeps multiple instances of Claude Code running simultaneously in separate terminals. Because these Claude Code instances have access to Miller’s filesystem, they can autonomously complete work on her behalf. Miller teaches Claude Code how to complete workflows by using Skills, a feature that allows Claude Code to undertake and repeat multistep processes. Miller says that she’s developed automations that generate a report summarizing all of the urgent emails she’s received overnight and a daily morning briefing that runs through her entire calendar, recommending times to recharge. “It’ll tell me, ‘You have four different interviews or six client meetings,’” explains Miller, “‘so I’ve gone ahead and blocked out 30 minutes tomorrow for deep work.’” Another example: Every time Miller edits a social video of herself using CapCut, the TikTok-owned video editing app, she exports the video into a specific folder. Anytime a new file is added to that folder, an automation is triggered that automatically creates a transcript, a social post, and a screenshot for the video’s thumbnail. In general, Miller says, the best way to identify AI solutions that work for your specific use case is to simply have the AI model of your choice interview you. Tell it to ask you questions about your work, making note of areas that you feel could be more efficient or smoother. Then, Miller says, prompt it again with “make these ideas more proactive, more responsibly autonomous, and more action-forward.” With just that prompt, she adds, you can get started developing your own AI solutions. It’s not just workflows that Miller is automating. When developing a new post for her newsletter, Miller says that she runs drafts through eight “synthetic personas” that she’s developed, which represent the newsletter’s different audience demographics. “I’m not trying to appease all eight and write a happy-go-lucky version of the newsletter,” says Miller, “but I want to make sure I didn’t miss something important. I want to make sure that a parent reading [the newsletter] isn’t completely misunderstanding my take on something.” Miller has a similar strategy when making big career decisions. She built a self-described “AI boardroom,” complete with six synthetic personas, which weigh in on major company issues. Miller swaps around which six personas sit on the board, depending on her needs. “If it’s a media question, maybe I’m running it through Shonda Rhimes,” she says, “or if it’s a business question, maybe I’m asking Jeff Bezos.” These personas give their initial opinions on the decision, and then they all begin debating with one another in a group chat. “I literally had Mickey Mouse arguing with Jensen Huang,” Miller adds. The point, Miller says, is to get the most out of the raw intelligence offered by today’s AI models. “Wouldn’t you love to walk into a room of 10 geniuses arguing over something that you’ve been struggling with, and all they want to do is help you get to the best possible outcome?” she says. “For those who have a growth mindset and thrive off of dynamic, changing, adaptable business settings, the multiagent world that we are walking into in 2026 is going to be world-changing.” —Ben Sherry This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy. View the full article

Pity the middle manager. Even before the emergence of AI, these jobs had increasingly become a one-way ticket to burnout and misery. Since 2013, the average number of direct reports has increased by almost 50% to twelve employees, according to Gallup. The same poll revealed that less than one-third of managers are engaged at work, while over a quarter are planning to leave their jobs. Enter AI: The ever-changing chimera, swathed in hype, is now making life more complicated for managers. Executives are bewitched by AI’s promise of productivity. Rank-and-file employees oscillate between fear that AI will take their jobs and overusing it. Those sandwiched in between, the middle-managers, are caught between corporate’s AI directive (or lack thereof) and the occasionally wild experimentation of their direct reports. Unsurprisingly, some tech moguls see AI as an opportunity to eliminate the bothersome costs associated with paying human beings. Meta and Microsoft recently made headlines with new announcements about workforce reductions to counter ballooning AI costs. This follows Shyam Sanker, CTO of Palantir telling Fox News: “AI can eliminate bureaucracy because we’ve built up all these layers… to concentrate power essentially in the hands of a few bureaucrats running organizations and away from the worker at the frontline.” Block CEO Jack Dorsey appears to be on board with the idea. In the wake of laying off 40% of his workforce, he wrote a blog post arguing that AI will make middle managers obsolete. On Sequoia Capital’s Long Strange Trip podcast, he said he plans to eventually reduce management from five layers to two or three, with the eventual goal of getting rid of all of them to have all 6,000 employees report directly to him. Let us pause for a moment to consider the notion of 6,000 employees reporting directly to a CEO. Not exactly a Sun Tzu maxim. To win World War II, Dwight Eisenhower depended on the effectiveness of an army of middle managers (sergeants and lieutenants, captains and colonels). Dorsey’s assertion is the kind of magical thinking that may inspire potential investors to reach for the checkbook, but that in practice makes about as much sense as reducing salary cap burdens in the NFL by eliminating offensive linemen. The Challenges AI presents Designing your own layoff: Meta Companies like Meta have offered major-league compensation packages to AI researchers they think will get help them get the edge, while middle managers scramble to implement technologies that evolving more rapidly than projects can even be outlined. Ethan, an individual contributor on Meta’s product risk review team, describes utter chaos in 2025 as pressure to use an internal AI tool to handle risk reviews for products under development ramped up. (Ethan requested we only use his first name.) “My department was restructured six times within six months…I had a new manager every 30 days. None of them knew what the end goal was,” he says. “We had two weeks of getting to know each other, and then…we were trying to understand what the new objectives were for the new AI improvements. By the time we got comfortable, there would be another shift of ‘oh, we will actually want to do the process this way’ and then I would report to a different manager. A lot of people were burnt out from the constant change. There was a ton of attrition on the team.” Work quality suffered. The AI often made mistakes and couldn’t factor in context that wasn’t included in a product development document such as historical information. Ethan was essentially rubber-stamping products despite the risks they presented. “It was all in the name of shipping quickly and removing the privacy and risk function as that was seen as a blocker to development,” he says. “A lot of things slipped through the cracks.” Eventually, Ethan discovered the reasoning behind the mad rush: “It turns out what we were doing was setting up the framework for our department to be automated by AI,” he says. “I gave Meta nearly a decade of my life. It was my dream job for most of that time. In the end, everyone I worked with was laid off just so that shareholders could get a better return and Zuck could spend more on AI data centers the size of NYC.” Ethan left Meta last June. Shortly after his entire team was laid off. At the time he left, the risks he’d worried about had not been fixed. Just last week, Meta announced to employees the company would begin tracking keystrokes and mouse movements to help train its AI. His advice to others caught in the same trap? “If it feels like the company is trying to automate your job, they probably are. You should always be keeping your options open,” he says. “Loyalty to any the company, passion for the people or the product, especially in the tech industry means less to management than the share price.” In response to questions, a Meta spokesperson referred Fast Company to a Meta Newsroom Post which states: “this AI evolution within Risk Review doesn’t replace human judgement—it strengthens it.” AI for the sake of AI: Amazon A manager at Amazon (who was laid off earlier this year and wanted anonymity so as not to jeopardize his severance) described the overall culture at major tech firms: “Managers are being told to hold people accountable for using AI,” he says, in order to “show the company is adopting AI,” regardless of what AI was doing to the actual quality of the work. At Amazon, “logins and tokens and usage were tracked and held against people during annual reviews and promotion discussions.” The result? “People were building multiple highly redundant PartyRock [an Amazon AI app builder] apps to perform “doc writing reviews” because writing documents is a key aspect of working at Amazon. There were many many apps that were written to show that people were using AI and the value of the apps themselves was super low,” he says. “VPs [would] brag about how much their developers use AI and it’s an internal contest to see which team (based on actual monitoring of usage) is ‘doing the most with AI.’ What the builder/developers are doing and the quality or usefulness of what the output is has become secondary….” “With a company of Amazon’s size and scale, AI adoption is going to look different across different parts of the business,” Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson says. “…What we hear from the vast majority of our teams is that they’re getting a lot of value out of the AI tools that they use day-to-day.” Fake it to make it: Genentech Divya, a former analytics manager at Genentech, says the company ramped up its AI initiative in 2024 and announced a reorganization last April in the name of making the company more efficient and AI ready. People were allowed to re-interview for positions in July. Before the interviews there was a mad scramble to be associated with teams and managers who were good at using AI, rather than focusing on how to actually use AI. “We were just wondering what’s happening and trying to find ways to make ourselves seem important and valuable,” she says. “People were not really working. They were just preparing for the interviews.” Divya was laid off in July 2025. “Genentech is hiring hundreds of new roles to embed automation, digital, and AI across the organization,” says Nadine Pinell, a spokesperson for Genetech. “Our digital transformation is as much about people as it is about technology.” Don’t question authority: the startup Jenna, a marketing manager at a start-up building an AI tool for engineers, describes a mounting pressure to use AI whenever possible, even if it results in lower-quality work. She says the company wanted to demonstrate it was all in on AI, even in divisions that didn’t need to use AI. The strategy was effective: The startup was able to raise $100 million for its latest round of funding. Jenna, who requested we only use her first name, became increasingly worried about the approach. “I’d ask questions like what are you going to say to the junior developer who doesn’t get the job now because AI can do the work? Or the senior software engineer who doesn’t have a team of people to manage now because it’s exclusively AI agents?” she says. “I wanted to do good work, which is why I was asking tough questions. I wasn’t trying to be a naysayer.” A month after the funding round, Jenna and her team were laid off. The company is replacing them with a group that’s more “product-forward.” Cost-benefit analysis: Oracle Evan Harmer (a pseudonym) was a manager at Oracle who was laid off last September. “Oracle is on the hook for $300 billion worth of AI data centers, and so they’re looking for ways to cost cut. Humans are the most expensive part of the equation,” he says. “There was no warning… Most of the folks that we see are getting laid off are in engineering where AI is writing the code,” he says. “If an executive sees that, and they’re paying $200 to $500 a month for AI tokens that replaces I don’t know how many people, the math is difficult to ignore.” Oracle did not respond to a request for comment. The Opportunity Harmer found a new job at an AI startup. Within six months, he was able to vibe code three different apps, something that would have taken two teams a year to do at his old job. “The first time I created something, it was just like, Oh my goodness. This is it, I see it,” he says. “I understood why everyone was saying how AI was going to be such a big disruptor in the software industry.” Many of the nearly three dozen workers we interviewed described confused– and confusing–AI strategies at their companies. Many organizations aren’t building AI but are hoping to reap the productivity gains it promises. Priya, a manager at a public relations firm in India who requested a pseudonym because she did not want to jeopardize her chances of promotion, is struggling to understand how to apply AI. She says her company’s directive amounts to “use it but don’t use it.” “Every month or every other month, we have training programs…that show us that the company has onboarded another new AI platform that can help you seamlessly do your work…from writing your content to understanding the larger client landscape and identifying misinformation.” She says: “There’s a lot of things that are dumped into these one-hour tutorials with no follow up. Then you go back to your meeting notes…and try to figure it out.” At the same time, Priya’s organization writes copy for caregiving brands and the directive is to “sound human.” “How do I tell my junior associate you can use [AI], but you shouldn’t use it?” she asks. Priya says she spends three days a week rewriting her direct report’s AI slop. Tips on managing down At BCG, director of people and organization Pragya Maini found training sessions with very specific and clear information to be helpful. “We have enablement sessions that I’m running for project leaders as an internal AI champion, then separate ones for consultants, and then separate ones for more senior people, because the use cases would be very different,” she says. “We break it down by different use cases to show them how AI tools can be used.” Jason Ippen, VP of brand strategy at Georgia-Pacific, learned a gentle approach works better than forcing AI. “When ChatGPT really got big, a couple years ago, we started to recognize that was going to have an impact on the content creation…We introduced AI tools (e.g. Midjourney, ChatGPT) and said, ‘Start testing these on your projects.’” The result? “The creatives were stressed…We heard a lot about the limitations (hands with six fingers, off-brand copy) rather than how the tools could enhance their work.” Since then, he’s taken a different tack. “We’ve tried to create an environment that is motivating and encouraging to people, giving them time to experiment.” Maini pointed out that experimentation can come with some downside: “How do you make sure people are then not getting into rabbit holes of figuring out different tools? Are they also governing their time? I can’t risk having people spending a full week on just telling me, okay, I learned five new tools. There’s no perfect formula and some investment time needs to be built in upfront,” she says. “Normalizing that upfront takes a lot of pressure off.” Here’s what she says has been working for her: 1) Assign AI to a real task, not just a sandbox exercise. If someone has a deliverable coming up, that’s the moment to say “try using AI for this part.” 2) Accept a short productivity dip upfront as employees learn the tools. That’s the tuition for a much bigger eventual return on the investment of time. 3) Create a team norm of sharing what works so the learning compounds across everyone, not just one person. Reassuring Your Direct Reports The most prevalent anxiety managers saw was the fear that AI will take jobs. Mickael Mingot, the former head of programs and content strategy at TikTok for France, Belgium and Brussels, says his team used AI for low-value tasks such as writing copy for push notifications on phones during various campaigns such as the Olympics or the Oscars. While TikTok did not require managers to use AI, Mingot was aware that “we were working in a strategic partnership job that could easily be impacted by layoffs, easily be impacted by AI.” At the time, “TikTok had so many reorganizations.” Direct reports would bring up their fears in meetings with him. “You have to reassure them, but you’re actually not a hundred percent sure of what’s going to happen,” he says. “Direct reports think you have the solution to everything and visibility into every strategic decision, which is not true. Sometimes you have only 10% visibility.” “A big part of the manager job right now is to reassure people,” he says. Ultimately, he told his team: “Use AI as something that will multiply you, that will amplify you, because you are creative, because you are intelligent…If you use it, “you will be even more intelligent, even more creative.” Tips on managing up Leaders who don’t understand AI’s limitations are one of the largest sources of stress, middle managers say. “A lot of what we get from the leadership is… Shouldn’t AI help you do this faster? This shouldn’t take 20 weeks. This should take you 10 weeks,” says Lyn, a product manager for a retail platform, who asked for a pseudonym. Lyn’s team figures out which tools employees need and builds them. A large part of her job is understanding employee problems. “AI does not help with everything that we need to do…We have to go out, talk to people, and do the legwork of understanding all of the logic that currently exists in the tool or is there a bit that’s redundant or obsolete?” she says. “Some managers get it, because they use AI, but many don’t,” says an HR director working in transportation in Singapore. “At times there’s a bit of pressure ‘I think we should just go ahead. You can do a few more prompts, and we can get it done.’” He offered a three-part strategy: 1) Be very transparent. “Say, ‘you know we’re still learning prompting and even the AI takes time.’ It’s a constant dialogue with managers. 2) When they push back, “Show them evidence. This is the output, and it’s pretty crappy. It’s not very good for us to put it out there in a senior meeting.” 3) Get to the root of the problem. “Educate people. Have they used it and tried prompting and figuring things out?” Invest the time to keep up Maggie Miller, a senior director of corporate marketing at HackerOne, points out keeping up with all the different models and their releases is a challenge. Last year, she and her team brought in an AI consultant and built several custom GPTs for writing and campaign planning, yet she’s already worried they are not current because models have already been updated. “The pace of model innovation can be distracting, but staying grounded in what’s useful, what actually creates value for the team and the business, is what matters most,” she says. “My advice to other managers is to resist the urge to chase every new release and instead focus on building systems and use cases you can use. That way, you can incorporate meaningful improvements without creating constant disruption.” George, an engineering director at a medical device company, keeps up by living and breathing AI. “AI is literally a hobby for me,” he says. “I’m investing my commute time. I’m using that to do my micro learning on all things AI. I’m listening to podcasts and trying to keep up with what are the latest models this whole transformation. Anytime there’s a new model or a new feature, I go and tinker with it. I’m always trying the new things, just to be aware of how they work and how effective they are.” Dream it, build it Some middle managers are taking initiative and creating their own AI initiatives on their own terms. Last August, Abishek Chaturvedi, an engineer at Docusign and a co-worker brought a proposal to create an internal group of AI champions to their CTO. “We created this bottoms up group of five people,” he says. “Instead of having a mandate from our top down saying we have to use AI, we wanted to figure out, okay, where does it actually makes sense?” His team identified which workflows AI can help with and which tools are best to use. “Then we have a monthly workshop where we teach best practices,” he says. His team also offers office hours.” “As engineers, we are responsible for the code that we submit,” he says. His team’s job was to help other engineers “Build trust in AI, so how to structure your prompts and how code in a way that you have enough time for review, so you can trust the output from AI,” he says Today, Chaturvedi’s group of AI champions is 85 people strong, and AI adoption among engineers at Docusign is 95%. Dancing on your own Several managers are in companies where leadership is lukewarm on AI and left to experiment on their own. Russell Taris, a regional manager for a civil engineering firm, says his leadership is “not against us using AI, but they’re not pushing us to use it. We’re left up to our own devices…which is great for me and for because I kind of have the freedom to do what I want within the realm of, you know, confidentiality,” he says. Taris, who also writes a blog on the best AI productivity tools for managers, finds “the safest place to experiment is on tasks that only affect you. For example, I started using AI to prep for my own meetings, draft my own status updates, and organize my own notes because nobody needed to approve them. By the time anyone asked how I was being more productive, I already had months of practical experience and could speak on what worked and what didn’t.” For help he turned to “other team members who are figuring it out at the same pace I am. Not the IT department or the people selling the tools, but employees in my same position running into the same bottlenecks I was. Once you start those conversations, even casually, you realize you’re not the only one experimenting. And hearing what someone else tried and abandoned is just as valuable as hearing what worked.” To get senior leaders on board, he recommends focusing on results: “Most senior leaders don’t fully understand what AI is capable of and how it can be used responsibly. Generally, I don’t make a big production out of it when I turn something around faster than expected or present data in a way that is more functional… I’ll just mention that I used AI for a first draft or to build an internal tool…Most senior leaders don’t want a presentation about AI. The best way to get buy-in is to show that your work is improving without creating new problems.” The real magic is empowering middle management The middle managers who were most excited about AI were the ones lucky enough to be in organizations where AI implementations have been thoughtful and led by employees, or the ones where leaders have let employees experiment on their own. Despite all the uncertainty in the arms race over AI—how fast to go, what to compromise in the process, and whether or not the race is actually worth it—implementation is all in the hands of middle managers. They dictate what gets automated, what doesn’t, and what is an acceptable bar for quality—even if they have qualms. Still, regardless of where they stand on AI, or how brilliant they are at managing up and down—there’s only so much middle managers can do when faced with a confusing directive, or inhumane mandate. Middle managers may be the key to implementation, but they have only so much power to answer the pressing questions using AI raises: who gets to keep their job, how to conduct layoffs as humanely as possible, and how to make sure no one is left behind during AI rollouts. View the full article

Thank you for reading Modern CEO. Before we dive into this week’s topic, please check out our first livestreamed event exclusively for Modern CEO subscribers: On Monday, May 18, at 1 p.m. ET, I’m hosting The CEO’s Guide to AI. Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies, will help leaders understand where AI can have an impact—and what’s hype. You can RSVP here, and if you’re not already a subscriber, you can sign up here. And if you have questions for Matt, you can submit them to stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. One of my first Modern CEO newsletters highlighted the opportunity for CEOs to have constructive conversations with organized labor. It was a contrary take at a time when Amazon, Starbucks, and Apple were all fighting employees’ unionization efforts. But once again, there’s a gap between corporate efforts and public preference. More than two-thirds (68%) of Americans say they approve of unions, according to August 2025 data from Gallup, up from 58% a decade earlier. (Disclosure: Most of Mansueto Ventures’s editorial employees are represented by the Writers Guild of America East.) Collective Strengths International Workers’ Day is May 1, a public holiday in many parts of the world that’s equivalent to Labor Day in the U.S. and Canada. In recognition of May Day, I spoke with Judy Marks, chair, CEO, and president of Otis Worldwide Corp. At Otis, which makes, installs, services, and modernizes elevators and escalators, 64% of its U.S. employees are governed by collective bargaining agreements, and much of its international workforce are also under union contracts. For Marks, those agreements provide certainty at a time when much of the business landscape is in flux. “As a CEO, I would love predictability in everything we do, but it’s especially [valuable] in labor, which is so critical for us,” she says. Otis has 72,000 total employees; 45,000 are frontline workers doing installations, repairs, and maintenance. Beyond offering assurances around the cost and availability of labor, Marks says the unions help underline a culture of safety. The contract Otis has with the International Union of Elevator Constructors, a multi-employer union that covers workers in the U.S. and Canada, includes rules around equipment handling on job sites and additional measures designed to protect the safety of workers and others. “Having a consistent set [of work rules] that we can use throughout the U.S. and Canada is very important to protect the safety of our colleagues, our mechanics, and the riding public,” Marks says. The intersection of unions and tech I asked Marks about the impact that artificial intelligence will have on Otis employees in the field. The company has been using predictive software for years to support its field teams, and Marks is unequivocal about the impact on her field workers: “I look at them and say, ‘You will have a job. You will have a meaningful opportunity,’” she says, describing her vision as “human-led and AI-enabled.” Otis, for example, has tools that provide mechanics with information about which service calls to prioritize. Virtualization software can help them take pictures and order parts in real time. Late last year, the company introduced a robot that can inspect escalators overnight, identifying debris and wear so that when a mechanic shows up in the morning, they know exactly what issue to address, avoiding disruption for riders. Marks envisions a day when AI technology agents will allow a rider to verbally state their destination once in an elevator, a potential benefit to those who are visually impaired or simply may have forgotten which floor, say, their doctor’s office is on. Marks notes that Otis, which was founded in 1853 and last year posted $14.4 billion in revenue, has worked with unions in the U.S. and Canada for more than a century. And many union members are second-generation employees of the company, which has a positive impact on the workplace. Marks believes Otis’s culture benefits from the fact that management and labor are united in their purpose. “We [share] a focus on customers and quality of service,” she says, “and we’re aligned on our vision, which is giving people freedom to connect and thrive in a taller, faster, smarter world.” Are your employees unionized? Are you a CEO running a company with unionized employees? Is your relationship with labor confrontational or constructive, and how do you navigate the relationship? Send your insights to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com, and we’ll publish some of your thoughts in a future newsletter. Read more: The ascent of Sara Nelson, workers’ great hope Photo essay: Portraits of the American Worker Why people can’t build wealth on wages alone View the full article

If you’ve spent meaningful time in a corporate design role, you’ve probably received some version of this feedback at least once: you’re difficult. Too opinionated. Not a team player. You push back too much. You care too much about things that aren’t your call. I’ve heard this feedback described, almost word for word, by hundreds of designers across industries and career levels. And what strikes me every time is how consistently it describes not a liability, but a set of entrepreneurial instincts that organizations simply don’t know how to hold. The traits that get pathologized in corporate environments (the tendency to question assumptions, to challenge briefs before executing them, to care about systemic implications when leadership wants tactical outputs) are the exact same traits that allow entrepreneurs to build things that matter. The design industry has spent years framing these instincts as a management problem. But this isn’t about a management problem, this about a placement problem. The paradox most designers miss Design as a discipline was never meant to be purely executional and the designers who push back on decisions aren’t being difficult, they’re doing exactly what their training prepared them to do: hold the full complexity of a problem, consider the human impact of a proposed solution and advocate for approaches that serve people rather than just metrics. So when organizations reward compliance over craft, the designers who won’t comply end up labeled as problems. But there’s a paradox: the qualities organizations cite as concerns in performance reviews are often the exact same qualities listed as desired traits in job descriptions. Systems thinking, comfort with ambiguity, strong point of view and the ability to challenge assumptions are how companies want designers to think … until those designers think that way in a direction the organization didn’t sanction. And so the result is a generation of designers who have been conditioned to understand their own instincts as flaws. They’ve had their advocacy framed as conflict, their rigor framed as perfectionism and their values framed as impracticality. Many of them have spent years quietly accommodating environments that slowly reduced them to execution machines. And they carry that conditioning into their exits when they finally make them. The ones labeled difficult are the ones who build The designers I’ve watched make the transition from corporate to entrepreneurship most successfully are almost always the ones who were labeled as difficult. Not because difficulty is inherently a virtue, but because the same orientation that made them uncomfortable to manage makes them deeply competent at building something of their own. The UX skill set, properly understood, is a nearly perfect entrepreneurial foundation: Research skills translate directly to understanding markets, clients and unmet needs. The ability to synthesize ambiguous information into clear frameworks is invaluable in the early stages of building a business, when almost nothing is defined. Prototyping and iteration (two of the most fundamental UX competencies) are exactly how sustainable businesses get built. Not through perfect execution of a single plan, but through continuous learning from imperfect attempts. The capacity to hold a user’s perspective, to design from empathy rather than assumption, makes for a different kind of entrepreneur. One who builds with their clients, not just for them. One who asks better questions before reaching for solutions. One who recognizes that the quality of the experience determines the quality of the relationship. And the values that made corporate work feel untenable (the commitment to doing work that actually helps people, the unwillingness to compromise on quality, the insistence that design decisions carry real human consequences) become the foundation of a business practice rather than a source of friction within someone else’s. The part UX training doesn’t teach None of this is to romanticize entrepreneurship or to suggest the transition is clean. Building something of your own requires a tolerance for uncertainty that corporate environments spend years teaching us to avoid. It requires developing capabilities that UX training doesn’t cover: financial literacy, client acquisition, business infrastructure, the particular kind of psychological resilience that comes with having no floor beneath you. But the designers who understand what their skill set actually contains, who have learned to see their instincts as assets rather than liabilities, enter that uncertainty better equipped than they’ve been led to believe. The design community has a habit of evaluating its practitioners against the standards of the institutions that employ them. And this produces a narrow definition of what good looks like. It defines designers as excellent when they execute with efficiency, navigate politics with grace and advocate within acceptable thresholds. And it defines them as difficult when they do more than that. A more honest accounting would recognize that the designers who’ve been labeled difficult are often the ones who’ve maintained the most integrity about what the work is actually for. They’re the ones who haven’t fully surrendered their agency to the organization and they’re the one who, in the language of their own discipline, are still designing in service of human beings rather than in service of systems. If you’ve been told you’re hard to manage, it’s worth asking who benefits from that framing. And then it’s worth asking what you might build if you stopped trying to make yourself smaller. For a lot of designers, the answer is something the corporate structure couldn’t see . . . because it was too busy trying to contain you. View the full article

Garage Beer just got a packaging update that looks like a throwback. The light beer company, which became a household name after football stars Jason and Travis Kelce backed the brand in 2024, debuted its first-ever glass bottles on April 13. Instead of a standard long-neck bottle, Garage opted for a retro, stubby form factor. It has almost the exact same dimensions as a regular aluminum can, but manufactured in satisfyingly hefty dark-brown glass. The new bottle comes from its unique marketing strategy: In an industry filled with big competitors experimenting with flavor sub-categories, separate low-calorie offerings, and gimmicky marketing stunts, Garage keeps its product simple and unpretentious. It’s an inexpensive, light beer that only comes in original and lime flavors. And while most craft breweries are struggling, Garage is posting record sales. According to Eric Torgerson, Garage’s chief operations officer, any additions to the brand have to hew to its distinct, no-frills aesthetic. A throwback bottle felt like a natural extension of the company’s ethos. The design of the new packaging represents a measured approach to branding that aligns with the core identity of the product itself—not just adding new bells and whistles for the sake of it. “We wanted to make sure we were staying true to our brand identity of old school beer the way it should be; beer–flavored beer,” Torgerson says. “This is a ‘bottle-shaped bottle.’” From classic can to retro stubby Garage is the brainchild of founder and CEO Andy Sauer, who acquired the brand from the Kentucky-based Braxton Brewing and relaunched it in 2023. Since then, the brand has been on an astronomic trajectory. Over the past three years, Garage has shown triple-digit year-over-year growth, with sales increasing more than 500% in the 12 months ended in early April 2025. As of a September report from The Wall Street Journal, it’s valued at around $200 million and is continuing to grow, despite an overall slump in the beer industry. Just this month, the trade group Brewer’s Association ranked Garage as the 12th largest craft brewer in the country. In 2024, Sauer told Fast Company that, when people picked up the brand, he “wanted it to feel like that first beer they had with their dad in the garage.” Nowadays, all of the brand’s product design choices point back to that north star. While Garage keeps a tight edit on its recipes and flavors, it sees packaging as one area to get more creative. The brand has already produced five-gallon kegs of its original beer and is gearing up to launch a branded bucket filled with 24 cans of beer in the coming days. However, Torgerson says, the form factor customers request the most is, by far, the glass bottle. Their social media DMs and comments are filled with demands for glass. “It’s been something that we’ve always wanted to attack,” he says. A ’70s homage in a bottle Figuring out the appropriate glass bottle design began with the brand’s fans. Torgerson and his team set up a survey with various different glass bottles, including traditional high necks alongside a few chunkier iterations, to get a sense of what the Garage customer liked best. The most popular choice was a riff on the classic stubby—a stout, short-necked bottle that was popular in the ‘70s, particularly in Canada, where whole fan pages exist to chronicle these beloved retro bottles. The Garage stubby’s form factor is most similar to designs like the original Red Stripe bottle, introduced in 1928, or the Coors Banquet glass bottle, introduced in 1936. However, the Garage bottle was custom-made for the brand, meaning that its exact dimensions don’t exist anywhere else. The final design includes a label with a cut-out around Garage’s logo, a convenient twist-off cap, and a few cheeky pops of green for the lime flavor. Going forward, Torgerson says, fans can expect to find glass Garage bottles almost anywhere that cans are sold. While he thinks cans will likely remain the company’s bread and butter, he says glass is set to become “a huge component of the business,” especially in retail settings, where they pop on shelves. To test the final bottle design, Togerson took a few different bottle concept samples and went back to Garage’s roots: sharing with friends outside the company. When they gravitated toward the custom stubby bottle, he knew that the design was solid. “A lot of how Garage’s identity is built is just us drinking beer in our garages with our friends,” Togerson says. View the full article

Last week, Elizabeth Lopatto published an insightful article in The Verge. It boasted an intriguing title: ​“Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want.”​ “Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customers. It was to identify a need, and then fill it,” she writes. “But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future.” I certainly noticed this shift when it first began emerging. See, for example, my 2015 article titled, ​“It’s Not Your Job to Figure Out Why an Apple Watch Might Be Useful.”​ But it really picked up speed in the last half-decade. Here’s Lopatto with a needle-sharp summary of our current status quo: “In the place of problem-solving technology, companies have jumped on successive bandwagons like NFTs, the metaverse, and large language models. What these all have in common is that they are not built to really solve a market problem. They are built to make VCs and companies rich.” Of these three examples, large language models clearly have the most potential utility. But this doesn’t let AI companies off the hook when it comes to figuring out and communicating those uses. As Lopatto points out: “Normal people aren’t running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to automate every single part of their lives.“ Their biggest exposure to AI is using a tool like ChatGPT as a more verbose Google, or perhaps occasionally formatting an event itinerary. This is cool, and even useful, but at the moment it is probably less positively impactful in their lives than, say, the arrival of the iPod in the early 2000s. But unlike an iPod, these same ordinary users are forced to hear about AI constantly; not just enthusiast tech bro nonsense, but dark, disturbing, relentless accounts about how everything is about to change in terrible ways that they can’t control. This isn’t sustainable. Generative AI has no shortage of ways that it might, with care, be shaped into genuinely useful products, but this shaping needs to actually happen before the hyper-scalers earn the right to continually harass the psyche of billions of people with breathless pronouncements. Most people don’t care that GPT 5.5, released late last week, underperformed Opus 4.7 on SWE-Bench Pro. They want the AI companies to let them know when they have a product that will actually and notably improve their lives, and until then, they want these companies to leave them alone and try their best not to ​crash the economy​. As Lopatto concludes: “At some point, our Silicon Valley overlords forgot that in order for their vision of the future to be adopted, people had to want it.” They still have a lot of work to do. AI Is Destroying the Job Market. Also, AI Is Saving the Job Market I couldn’t help but add a quick additional note about AI to this week’s newsletter… One of the big stories of the last year was the shrinking post-pandemic job market for recent college graduates. Many media outlets confidently offered an explanation for this shift: AI was automating the work of entry-level positions. An ​article​ from last summer proclaimed that “AI is wrecking an already fragile job market for college graduates,” going on to note that “ChatGPT and other bots can do many of [the] chores” that used to be handled by entry-level workers. Another ​article​, published only two weeks ago, offered a stark warning: “college graduates can’t find entry-level roles in shrinking market amid rise of AI.” But then, last week, new job numbers revealed that the entry-level job market for college graduates was rebounding, and hiring in this demographic is now projected to rise significantly. Whoops. I guess AI wasn’t actually automating those jobs. (​I told you so​.) Does this mean the media will stop trying to force this technology into these more routine workforce narratives? If only wishing made it so. A recent Wall Street Journal ​article​ describing these positive numbers included the following line: “In some cases, artificial intelligence is spurring hires by enabling companies to expand services and product lines.” So, let’s get this straight: AI is simultaneously contracting the job market for recent college graduates while also expanding the job market for recent college graduates. Is there anything AI can’t do? The post Who Asked For This? appeared first on Cal Newport. View the full article

Last week, Elizabeth Lopatto published an insightful article in The Verge. It boasted an intriguing title: ​“Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want.”​ “Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customers. It was to identify a need, and then fill it,” she writes. “But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future.” I certainly noticed this shift when it first began emerging. See, for example, my 2015 article titled, ​“It’s Not Your Job to Figure Out Why an Apple Watch Might Be Useful.”​ But it really picked up speed in the last half-decade. Here’s Lopatto with a needle-sharp summary of our current status quo: “In the place of problem-solving technology, companies have jumped on successive bandwagons like NFTs, the metaverse, and large language models. What these all have in common is that they are not built to really solve a market problem. They are built to make VCs and companies rich.” Of these three examples, large language models clearly have the most potential utility. But this doesn’t let AI companies off the hook when it comes to figuring out and communicating those uses. As Lopatto points out: “Normal people aren’t running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to automate every single part of their lives.“ Their biggest exposure to AI is using a tool like ChatGPT as a more verbose Google, or perhaps occasionally formatting an event itinerary. This is cool, and even useful, but at the moment it is probably less positively impactful in their lives than, say, the arrival of the iPod in the early 2000s. But unlike an iPod, these same ordinary users are forced to hear about AI constantly; not just enthusiast tech bro nonsense, but dark, disturbing, relentless accounts about how everything is about to change in terrible ways that they can’t control. This isn’t sustainable. Generative AI has no shortage of ways that it might, with care, be shaped into genuinely useful products, but this shaping needs to actually happen before the hyper-scalers earn the right to continually harass the psyche of billions of people with breathless pronouncements. Most people don’t care that GPT 5.5, released late last week, underperformed Opus 4.7 on SWE-Bench Pro. They want the AI companies to let them know when they have a product that will actually and notably improve their lives, and until then, they want these companies to leave them alone and try their best not to ​crash the economy​. As Lopatto concludes: “At some point, our Silicon Valley overlords forgot that in order for their vision of the future to be adopted, people had to want it.” They still have a lot of work to do. AI Is Destroying the Job Market. Also, AI Is Saving the Job Market I couldn’t help but add a quick additional note about AI to this week’s newsletter… One of the big stories of the last year was the shrinking post-pandemic job market for recent college graduates. Many media outlets confidently offered an explanation for this shift: AI was automating the work of entry-level positions. An ​article​ from last summer proclaimed that “AI is wrecking an already fragile job market for college graduates,” going on to note that “ChatGPT and other bots can do many of [the] chores” that used to be handled by entry-level workers. Another ​article​, published only two weeks ago, offered a stark warning: “college graduates can’t find entry-level roles in shrinking market amid rise of AI.” But then, last week, new job numbers revealed that the entry-level job market for college graduates was rebounding, and hiring in this demographic is now projected to rise significantly. Whoops. I guess AI wasn’t actually automating those jobs. (​I told you so​.) Does this mean the media will stop trying to force this technology into these more routine workforce narratives? If only wishing made it so. A recent Wall Street Journal ​article​ describing these positive numbers included the following line: “In some cases, artificial intelligence is spurring hires by enabling companies to expand services and product lines.” So, let’s get this straight: AI is simultaneously contracting the job market for recent college graduates while also expanding the job market for recent college graduates. Is there anything AI can’t do? The post Who Asked For This? appeared first on Cal Newport. View the full article

M&A, complementary to widespread artificial intelligence implementation, is also high on the list of upcoming priorities for new Dark Matter CEO Vikas Rao. View the full article

The NEXA CEO accused his rival of lashing out at his company despite its own alleged wrongdoing in poaching loan officers and diverting loans. View the full article

Check out the initial reveal of the 28th edition of National Mortgage News' Top Producer survey, in a year where falling rates helped industry-wide volume. View the full article

The wearable breast pump space has never been more crowded. In the last three years alone, dozens of new devices have hit the market, each one positioned as more feature-packed than the last. Night lights. Stronger and stronger suction. Electric charging cases. Massagers and heat, placed with all the anatomical confidence of someone who has never needed to use one during late-night feeding hours, no less examined a woman’s anatomy or the clinical research on breast milk production. Feature innovation is important for a pitch deck you’re putting in front of investors. But from the inside of a nursing room – whether that’s at home, at the park, or in your employer’s pumping room – it too often looks like engineers trying to out-compete each other, rather than solving problems focused on women’s needs. I know this category from both sides. I came to this industry not as an executive with a market map, but as a mother who deeply understood the problem that existing products weren’t solving. That empathy taught me something that I don’t think gets said often enough in consumer tech: there is a meaningful difference between studying your user and being your user. The best products come from people who don’t have to imagine the problem because they’ve actually lived it. Empathy is an important part of innovating solutions, but it’s not enough, and this is also where many well-intentioned products fall short. Mothers don’t just deserve technology that centers their experience. They deserve technology that works, that has been tested, validated, and held to the same rigorous clinical standards we expect of any medical device that interacts with the human body. A flood of hardware Innovation in our category is genuinely important. Women deserve better products to support breastfeeding, and advocacy that moves the world forward in support of postpartum well-being. The market for products that support nursing mothers is growing, and that growth means more companies will enter it, some with real intent to innovate and others chasing revenue opportunities. In our category today, consumers are facing a flood of hardware that’s optimized to look good on a competitive spec sheet, not designed for their actual lives or biology. This is placing women into the “gadget trap”: a product team identifies a growing market, conducts a customer survey, and might even run a focus group or two before handing the design brief off to engineers to make the products impressive enough to win a slide in the investor deck. That device may look good on paper, but underperform — or even lead to discomfort or unsafe outcomes for those who are actually using it. For example, many wearable pumps strive to be the “thinnest” and, in doing so, build a pump that does not accommodate most women’s nipple enlargement while pumping — and worse, pair that with extremely strong suction. The result is a product that hurts and is ineffective. Not a niche Part of what drives this category’s blind spot is a persistent underestimation of who mothers are as consumers. They’re not a niche; they are some of the most discerning, demanding, and overlooked in consumer technology. They’re constantly navigating under limited time, limited sleep, limited physical and emotional bandwidth, and as industry innovators, we should have zero tolerance for products that waste any of those resources. Companies that center women and treat them with care and respect ultimately build better products. Brands that get this wrong are simply solving for the wrong audience. They were built for the marketing pitch and not for the person. To design with purpose, rather than to design for a pitch deck, isn’t about asking the question “What can we add?” It’s about asking “What can we make better? What can we simplify? What really works?” Listen rather than pitch These questions sound deceptively simple. Answering them is one of the hardest disciplines in product design, because they require resisting the instinct to keep building in “more.” Elegant, effective designs are built not through research alone. Research tells you what people say. Lived experience tells you what people mean. The best teams find ways to bridge that gap, through deep listening, through clinical partnership, through co-development with the people who will actually use what you’re building. The brands that will win in this category long-term are not just the ones with the most features. They’re the ones willing to go deeper and let the people who actually use the product lead the way. This is especially true in women’s health. For too long, women have been using products that weren’t really built for them — that was the problem with the breast pump category in the first place, before Willow began the wearable revolution. Let’s not let the mission at the core of this category be outpaced by market pressure to outcompete on the spec sheet. That discipline, the willingness to focus rather than add, to listen rather than pitch, is what separates a product built for a mother from a product built for a digital ad. View the full article

Earn citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google‘s AI Overviews with an 8-step SaaS playbook covering schema, llms.txt, and common pitfalls. View the full article

On February 10, 1985, an imprisoned 66-year-old male serving a life sentence was offered a conditional release that would have reunited him with his wife and children, from whom he had been separated for 23 years. The prisoner turned down the offer. His name was Nelson Mandela. In a rejection publicly delivered to the South African government by his daughter at a rally in Soweto, Mandela refused the condition that he permanently walk away from the country’s anti-apartheid movement. “I cherish my own freedom dearly, but I care even more for your freedom,” he stated, unwilling to “sell the birthright of the people to be free.” Mandela would spend another five years in prison until his unconditional release in 1990 at age 71. While often mythologized for his otherworldly stature, this lesser-known story best represents what made him revered: his courage. His life is a visceral, powerful example proving that we can live with virtue, alongside fear, and successfully navigate an uncompromising world. Unfortunately, tales of enduring models of courage—Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Amelia Earhart, among others—are told so reverently that courage begins to sound mystical. We tend to portray it as an innate trait possessed by dint of nature, a birthright hardwired into a rare few. Nothing could be further from the truth. Turning toward the fire Courage is the ability to act intentionally in service of a virtuous core mission, despite the risks. Yes, courage is foreshadowed by dread—an emotion that triggers our instinct to flee. But courage is what happens when we act against those instincts and run toward the fire. While some muster courage faster than others, we can all develop it as a habit. Courage takes work, time, and intention. Mandela noted that prison gave him time to think deeply, and that the rigid discipline of reflection shaped his behavior. He spent his days reading biographies and, legend has it, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Aurelius’ Stoic philosophy argues that a good life depends on governing your own mind. Mandela’s worldview grew eerily similar: control yourself, manage your vanity, and temper your hunger for approval. In my research for my book, C.O.U.R.A.G.E., this emotional independence is the fundamental underpinning of a courageous life. Mandela spent 27 years honing his. I concluded that courage is a deliberate skill, an ability developed by training seven key muscles, practiced together: Commit To A Purpose Own Your Potential Unmask Fear Reject Distracting Voices Act Decisively Grow From Failure Embody Resilience Proper training To activate this framework, professionals must adopt the mindset of an elite athlete. An athlete trains for the moment before the moment arrives, rehearsing fundamentals until execution becomes dependable under pressure. Courage works the same way. A leader doesn’t suddenly manifest it during a corporate crisis out of thin air; they rely on “muscle memory” forged through daily repetitions of micro-courage. In my book, I share the lived experiences of “courage pilgrims”—compelling, everyday models of courage: Ali Hassan Mohd Hassan turned a tiny startup into Malaysia’s most beloved sports retailer while keeping his purpose rooted in service to young people, not just profit. Roosevelt Giles rose from sharecropping poverty with a sense of self-worth that outgrew his circumstances. Janet King, a single mother in a deeply patriarchal setting, kept saying no to limiting assumptions and built security and dignity for her family. Gary DeStefano showed what decisive courage looks like in business by moving from debate to action and, just as importantly, by developing courage in others. Simidele Adeagbo transformed the disappointment of missing one Olympic dream into becoming Nigeria’s first winter Olympian and the first Black female Olympian in skeleton. Wendy Lea turned personal tragedy and business setbacks into a life of ecosystem building and resilient leadership. None of them is famous. But they hit the “gym” every day, building their courage muscle by having difficult conversations, pushing past debilitating rejection, and viewing failure not as a stop sign, but as vital coaching feedback. We desperately require this kind of athletic, conditioned courage today. Between the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence, deepening global polarization, the collapse of trust in institutions, and unprecedented economic shifts, we stand at a crossroads. The stakes are somewhat similar to the situation South Africa faced in 1990. Mandela’s cultivated courage steered a fractured nation toward reconciliation, averting anarchy. It took immense effort to forgive, to unite, and to insist on a shared future. Stepping into the arena Today, business professionals and everyday citizens face a similar challenge. The moment calls for leaders willing to risk their own comfort, popularity, or purse to guide the world toward common human uplift. We cannot wait for naturally endowed saviors to emerge. We must all step into the arena, knowing that we could each be the spark needed to ignite meaningful change. After all, courage is contagious. When Mandela was offered compromised freedom in 1985, he didn’t agonize over the decision. His response was quick because he had spent 23 years in the dark, lifting the heavy weights of reflection, purpose, and self-control. By the time the ultimate test arrived, his response was a reflex. We owe it to ourselves to start our own training today. Because ultimately, courage is not hardwired—it must be trained like a muscle. And courage is what the world needs the most these days. View the full article

Learn how AI tools like ChatGPT & Perplexity choose and cite sources. Check if your site is in sources and what to do if it’s not. View the full article

I have a confession to make. I keep a secret document in my Google Drive titled “Fund Theses That Piss Me Off.” And every time I read about a venture capital fund with a generic, meaningless, or buzzwordy thesis that manages to raise a bunch of money regardless, I copy and paste it into my burn pile. This is how I started to notice a couple of years back how sometimes VCs will make dramatic changes to their thesis and investing focus. And it happens not just at a fund level, but across whole chunks of the industry, too. Take, for instance, climate VC. This was a white-hot category not too long ago. Today, all of a sudden, all the climate funds are gone, or they’ve gone quiet. One climate VC that I used to send deals to is now doing “AI for climate” investing—something that I’m sure they know is an oxymoron. There are still funds doing what used to be thought of as climate deals, but now they have to talk about it using different words—words like American dynamism, resilience, supply chain, and defense. It should come as no surprise that this particular wild swing in language had something to do with a recent wild swing in the political discourse around climate in the U.S. I bet you can think of some other recent VC buzzwords that, due to political realities, are all but untouchable today—“diversity” being the big one. A whole generation of funds was built on the thesis that talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. To capture alpha from that arbitrage today, they must describe themselves in very different terms or risk extinction. SaaSpocalypse 😵 Politics is not the only culprit—tech trends play a big part in this, too. A couple of years back, funds that used to be generalist seed funds suddenly became AI funds. More recently, the so-called public market “SaaSpocalypse”—the expectation that artificial intelligence is going to kill SaaS companies, which have been the bread and butter of VC for decades—is changing the strategy and language of a large chunk of the industry. Five years ago, nearly everyone was a SaaS or enterprise investor. Today, it’s crickets. Last week, a fund manager friend who I used to think of as a SaaS guy told me that he’s only doing consumer these days (!). It’s not just SaaS that’s taking a hit—it’s a lot of general software investing, too. The spectacular growth of LLMs has lowered the barriers to entry in all kinds of software sectors. Now that it is so easy to build a product and launch it, the product itself is no longer thought to be any kind of protectable moat. And so, investors are venturing into sectors that are more immune to this, where the product is harder to replicate—spaces like hardware and consumer packaged goods. Both of which, not even a year ago, were extremely unpopular. I feel for you, founders For founders, the result is whiplash. They pitch VCs that Pitchbook says are in their sector, only to learn that their company is “out of thesis.” They find themselves in untouchable categories and have to pivot their own pitch, pronto. They follow VC advice, only to get the opposite advice not even six months later. By the way, this is a great reminder to founders that you should never build companies for the sake of investors. You should build for your customers, always. Investors will get it or they won’t, but the only way you’ll grow and eventually exit is by building something customers love. Hold the VC stereotype for a sec You might be tempted to blame this all on VC flimsiness or even hypocrisy. And sure, it plays into some well-deserved VC tropes. But it’s worth noting that founders do this, too. I bet you know some crypto folks who rebranded to AI in 2022. In fact, I bet you know some non-crypto folks who rebranded to AI recently, too. People should be allowed to change tracks, especially when there’s good reason to do so. I myself used to eye-roll when I noticed VCs jumping on a new bandwagon. But the more I see it, the better I understand it. I no longer assume that folks pivot language out of flimsiness. I assume they’re pivoting language for the sake of LPs, or limited partners—aka the people and funds that invest in VC funds. LPs are the lifeblood of VC Like founders and VCs, LPs are getting signals from the press, social media, analysts, and each other. Their bosses and investment committees are, too. If there is a general belief that a sector is dead (say, “SaaSpocalypse”), it will be really hard for an LP to justify investing in a fund that’s still focused on it. Conversely, if a new sector or opportunity emerges, it will be really hard to justify not having any new bets in that space. So the LP will want to fill that gap in their portfolio. And VC funds who hit that buzzword (and can back it up with proof) will have a shot at a new LP. In theory, our industry lionizes the contrarian. In practice, it’s extraordinarily hard to make contrarian bets and say contrarian things when you’re investing other people’s money. Because those people are hearing and reading about the things that are hot. And they’ll want to know why you’re doing something else. And, because it takes such a long time for VC bets to pay off, even if you’re contrarian and right, you won’t be proven a genius for a very, very long time. And you need to be able to raise regardless. A contrarian take For the record, my fund’s thesis is centered around founders rather than sectors. I occasionally get pushback from LPs who want me to concentrate further on a particular industry. In response, I share our sector interests, and disclose that these might change across vintages as new opportunities emerge and others ebb. And I disclose one of my most contrarian VC takes—that it’s better for early-stage VCs to specialize in types of people, not just in types of spaces. Because buzzwords come and go, and spaces rise and fall. But talent will always rule the day. View the full article

When Meryl Rosenthal and her cofounder started a human capital and workplace transformation consultancy in 2005, she was 41 years old. Nine years later, her cofounder left for personal reasons, rendering Rosenthal—by then age 50—a so-called solopreneur. Being a woman of that age and running a business on her own certainly came with challenges. One, she says, was that younger HR and business leaders tended to assume she didn’t have the necessary expertise because her background had not squarely been in HR. Another was a preconception that she—as an older woman—didn’t understand technology as well as her younger peers. None of these things daunted Rosenthal, though. “​​What helped me move forward was the combination of everything that had come before: work ethic, business experience, perspective, adaptability, and confidence. I was able to step fully into my own voice,” she says. “I was able to trust my judgment, and reshape the business around my strengths.” She adds that startup founders who succeed with their ventures often do so because they’re able to “borrow and apply skills from prior roles in entrepreneurial ways.” And that, she says, “is especially true for many women over 50.” Her business has thrived. It’s been going for over two decades. Rosenthal is about to turn 62. According to Census data, around 40% of all businesses in the U.S. were owned by women last year, a growing number that’s testament to changing gender norms. Women are also starting more companies than ever before—almost half, according to some research. But for female founders and business owners who are over 50, progress has come with a catch. Many report a double bind: bias tied not just to gender, but to age, too. That bias shows up most starkly in areas like funding. “You have to prove yourself a lot more as a woman, and an older woman,” says Julie Wing, a 65-year-old serial entrepreneur and aviation business owner. “Men don’t have to prove themselves.” What makes this double bind particularly galling is that, over the last few years, a growing body of research suggests that it is precisely this group of founders that may be among the most overlooked sources of entrepreneurial growth. One MIT study found that older business founders are much more likely to be successful than younger ones, not least because “prior experience in [a] specific industry predicts much greater rates of entrepreneurial success.” Research from Boston Consulting Group, meanwhile, shows that startups founded and cofounded by women performed better than those founded by men, generating, on average, 10% more in cumulative revenue over a five-year period. Perhaps even more strikingly, that research established that for every dollar of funding, the women-founded startups generated 78 cents, while male-founded startups generated less than half that—just 31 cents. In other words, overlooking founders who fall into both the disadvantaged age and gender categories could be leaving an indeterminable amount of economic value on the table. The Bias Trap While data on the particular experience of female founders over the age of 50 is scant, many studies show that both age and gender remain a barrier when starting a business and raising money. Research published last year shows that of the $289 billion of venture capital deployed in 2024, a mere 2.3% went to female-only founding teams, and just 14.1% went to mixed-gender founding teams. Academics in Germany and Austria last year published their results of a survey of 361 venture capitalists around the world, and found that more than a quarter of respondents said they believed women’s participation in founding teams to be overrated, that 15.3% said they considered women to be poor entrepreneurs, and 11.9% admitted they would not invest in women-led ventures. When it comes to age, the research is just as damning. One academic study published last year found a clear negative correlation between a founder’s age and the amount of money that person was able to raise: It became harder as founders got older. Shubhi Rao, a veteran corporate executive who, at the age of 54, recently founded an AI company, explains that both of these effects can, at least in part, be chalked up to familiarity bias—a tendency to favor and invest in a familiar or known option, even if, objectively, an unfamiliar option might be better. This can be particularly powerful when things are uncertain. And the world of startups is deeply uncertain. “There are no audited financials, no operating history, no comparables in the traditional sense. The product is unproven, the market is contested, and the team has almost certainly never done this specific thing before,” she says. Against this backdrop, decisions are frequently made on the basis of mental shortcuts, and what’s been done successfully in the past. “When you cannot underwrite the future,” she says, “you study the past.” Thin Historical Record The problem is that the past is not, as Rao puts it, “a neutral record.” Instead, it has been dominated by company founders who are young men—meaning that, by definition, successful founders are young men, too. So when someone who doesn’t fit that description enters the space, bias can kick in strongly. “Consider a woman in her mid-forties starting a company,” says Rao. “The question the system finds itself asking is not whether she is capable. It is whether there is anything to compare her to, whether the mental model [of her being a successful founder] holds, whether the pattern that we’ve so far seen when it comes to successful founders applies,” she adds. “And when you start layering variables, age and gender and sector and business model and background, the historical record thins out very quickly.” Julie Wing, the aviation executive, has seen this play out in everyday interactions. Of prospective customers or, indeed, potential funders, she says that they “naturally assume my male colleague is going to know more than me—even when I’m the sole owner of the business.” Sarah Clayton, a 58-year-old owner of a business-to-business conference company, says that women are also still more likely to be expected to manage children and other family responsibilities, something that’s corroborated by reams of research. This phenomenon also feeds into bias and preconceptions about their commitment and competence, and about what makes an ideal business leader. Rao says that for some combinations of founder characteristics, there is almost no prior example of somebody who’s done it before. For a woman of color, of a particular age and in a particular industry, for example, there might be no one else like her who’s made a name for herself. “Not because these founders have not existed,” she adds, “but because they were not the ones who got funded, and so they never made it into the picture in the first place.” The Experience Dividend Funders, and especially venture capital funders, are inherently focused on recognizing untapped value: finding the founder, the idea, or the company that no one else has spotted. And some funders actually are starting to appreciate that those opportunities might well be at an intersection of age and gender that’s traditionally not been as visible in the startup world. In a 2024 interview with Institutional Investor magazine, Katerina Stroponiati, a longtime investor, said that the venture capital world had for years “glorified youth.” “Imagine all this experience [older founders have], all this wisdom and all these years,” she added. Clayton says that the “list is long” of qualities that older women in business bring to the table: “They have high pain tolerance, they’re used to multitasking, used to preempting things happening while also just getting things done,” she says. “They also have high emotional intelligence and collaboration skills and they often lack ego,” she adds. Lauren Silva Laughlin, a 46-year-old founder of a men’s health startup that aims to create transparency around the market for sperm donorship, says that, in some cases, those structural disadvantages can actually force founders to build more disciplined businesses. “If it’s harder for me to raise money, then I don’t have the luxury of being able to afford to waste a million dollars in the first 12 months, or $5 million in the first two years,” she explains. “I have to be super thoughtful about what I’m doing and hyper-focused on it being a profitable company.” She also says that as an older founder, some of the barriers she faces embolden her, and make her more determined to succeed. “If I was in my twenties, some of what I encounter would piss me off,” she says. “But in my forties, I’m like—you do what you have to do to be successful.” Asked whether she thinks conditions are improving for women business owners and founders, Julie Wing, the aviation business owner, says that despite all of the challenges and headwinds that still exist, she’s optimistic. “Women are agile and resilient and determined, and the more we normalize women of all ages starting and leading businesses, the more we’re encouraging women to take that leap of faith—to pursue their dream of doing something on their own,” she says. She also thinks that women are becoming more willing and enthusiastic to go against gender norms and to prove themselves: “In some ways, I’d like to be alive in a hundred years’ time,” she says. “I think women might’ve conquered the world.” View the full article

Regulators had reviewed whether deal violated Beijing’s investment rulesView the full article

Grasping the key components of finances in business is crucial for anyone looking to succeed in a competitive environment. Effective financial planning and budgeting help set clear goals and manage resources efficiently. Accurate financial statements, like balance sheets, reveal a company’s health, whereas financial ratios provide insights into profitability and liquidity. As you explore financing options and risk management, you’ll discover how these elements work together to create a solid financial foundation for growth. What’s next? Key Takeaways Effective financial planning involves setting business goals and realistic budgeting to control spending and prioritize investments. Financial statements, including balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements, evaluate a company’s financial health. Analyzing financial ratios reveals insights into profitability, liquidity, and leverage, aiding strategic decision-making. Financing options, such as debt and equity, provide necessary capital for growth, each with distinct implications for ownership and repayment. Risk management and resource allocation strategies ensure alignment of financial resources with business goals while addressing potential threats. Financial Planning and Budgeting When you think about running a successful business, effective financial planning and budgeting play a vital role in achieving your goals. Financial planning involves setting clear business goals, like revenue targets or market expansion plans, which guide your budgeting and resource allocation. By creating a realistic budget, you categorize expected revenues and expenses, including fixed and variable costs. This helps control spending and prioritize investments effectively. Financial forecasting is another significant component; it uses historical data and market trends to predict future financial outcomes, ensuring your budgets align with anticipated sales volumes. Regularly monitoring and adjusting your budgets is important for staying on track financially, allowing you to adapt to changing circumstances and market conditions. Financial Statements and Accounting Comprehending financial statements is essential for grasping your business’s financial health, as they include the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement. Accurate accounting practices not merely guarantee compliance with tax regulations but additionally empower you to make informed decisions based on solid financial data. Understanding Financial Statements Financial statements serve as vital tools for evaluating a business’s economic performance and stability. They consist of three primary documents: the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement. The balance sheet provides a snapshot of your company’s assets, liabilities, and equity, showing the relationship between what you own and owe. The income statement summarizes your revenue and expenses over a specific period, allowing you to assess profitability through metrics like gross profit and net income. Meanwhile, the cash flow statement tracks the inflow and outflow of cash from operating, investing, and financing activities, highlighting your liquidity. Regular analysis of these financial statements is important for informed decision-making, ensuring you understand your business’s financial health and operational efficiency. Importance of Accurate Accounting Accurate accounting is fundamental for any business aiming to maintain financial health and make informed decisions. It provides a clear snapshot of your company’s financial status through vital financial statements like the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement. These documents are critical for evaluating financial stability and profitability, which are key components of business financial planning. For the best small businesses, regularly reviewing these statements helps identify areas for financial improvement and effective resource allocation. A solid financial plan for your business plan relies on this accurate data, ensuring you can meet immediate obligations and invest in future growth. In the end, effective finances for small businesses stem from diligent accounting practices that lay the foundation for informed decision-making. Analyzing Financial Ratios When you analyze financial ratios, you’re gaining crucial insights into a company’s overall performance and health. Financial ratios are derived from key financial statements, including the balance sheet and income statement. Profitability ratios, such as profit margin and return on assets, evaluate how effectively a business generates profit from its revenues and assets. Liquidity ratios, like the current ratio and quick ratio, measure a company’s ability to meet short-term obligations, indicating financial stability. Leverage ratios, such as the debt-to-equity ratio, assess the extent of debt financing compared to equity, providing insights into financial risk. Regularly analyzing these financial ratios allows you to identify strengths and weaknesses, guiding your strategic decision-making and financial planning. Financing and Investments In the realm of financing your business, comprehending debt and equity options is fundamental. Debt financing means borrowing money that you’ll need to repay with interest, which can be vital for covering costs or broadening operations. Conversely, equity financing involves selling ownership shares to investors, providing capital without repayment obligations, but it may dilute your ownership stake. Debt Financing Explained Debt financing, whereas a common strategy for businesses seeking growth, involves borrowing funds from external sources that must be repaid with interest. This method allows you to leverage capital without sacrificing ownership. Here are some key aspects to evaluate: Types: Common forms include bank loans, credit lines, and bonds. Repayment: Unlike equity financing, debt financing requires regular repayments, impacting your cash flow. Use: Businesses often utilize debt financing for capital expenditures, operational costs, and expansion projects. Tax Benefits: Interest payments are often tax-deductible, improving your financial management. Balancing borrowing costs with expected returns guarantees financial health and sustainability in your business finance strategy. Equity Financing Overview Equity financing serves as an essential alternative for businesses looking to raise capital by selling shares to investors, effectively inviting them to become partial owners in the company. This type of financing is particularly beneficial for small businesses, as it supports their financial planning without the burden of debt repayment. Nevertheless, it does dilute the ownership percentage of existing shareholders. Investors in equity financing typically seek returns through capital gains or dividends, relying on the company’s future performance. Startups often turn to venture capitalists or angel investors for initial funding. Furthermore, companies may opt for public equity financing through an Initial Public Offering (IPO), which can greatly improve capital for expansion and growth opportunities. Risk Management and Insurance Comprehending risk management and insurance is essential for any business aiming to maintain financial stability. To effectively manage risks and protect your financial health, consider these key steps: Identify Risks: Recognize potential financial threats that could impact your operations. Assess Risks: Evaluate the likelihood and potential impact of each risk on your business. Implement Insurance Coverage: Transfer financial risk through appropriate insurance policies that cover property damage, employee injuries, and operational disruptions. Engage in Contingency Planning: Develop strategies to address risks before they escalate, enhancing your business’s resilience. Regularly reviewing your insurance policies guarantees they align with your evolving risk profile and operational needs. Business Goals and Objectives Comprehending your business goals and objectives is essential for aligning your vision with your mission. By setting measurable targets and milestones, you can effectively allocate resources, ensuring that every financial decision supports your overall strategy. Regularly reviewing these objectives helps you adapt to changing market conditions, keeping your organization agile and focused on its priorities. Vision and Mission Alignment A well-defined vision and mission are crucial for aligning business goals and objectives, as they serve as the foundation for financial decision-making and strategic planning. When you focus on aligning your financial resources with these goals, you improve execution and accountability. Here are key components to contemplate: Clearly define revenue targets and market share aspirations. Establish specific, measurable objectives, like a 20% revenue increase through a new product line. Regularly review and adjust goals based on market trends and performance metrics. Communicate your mission effectively to nurture a shared direction among employees. Measurable Targets and Milestones Establishing measurable targets and milestones is crucial for driving business success since they provide clear direction and benchmarks to assess performance. You should set specific, quantifiable, and time-bound objectives, like aiming for a 15% increase in sales within the next fiscal year or reducing operational costs by 5% within six months. These measurable targets and milestones guide your financial planning for small business owners and help align your financial projections in the business plan. Utilizing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) allows you to track your progress effectively. Regularly reviewing these milestones guarantees you can adjust strategies based on performance and market changes, enhancing your agility and overall success, allowing you to explore the best business ideas and implement them effectively. Resource Allocation Strategies Effective resource allocation strategies play a crucial role in achieving your business goals and objectives. To optimize your financial resources, consider these key approaches: Align resources with goals: Make sure your budgeting decisions reflect your overarching vision, like revenue targets or market expansion. Prioritize investments: Use historical performance data to guide investment prioritization based on projected returns. Regularly review strategies: Adjust your resource allocation to respond to market trends and operational changes, keeping in line with financial forecasts. Utilize KPIs: Assess the effectiveness of your resource allocation strategies, confirming that financial resources are directed toward the most impactful areas. Budgeting and Financial Forecasting When you think about managing finances in a business, budgeting and financial forecasting play crucial roles in ensuring long-term success. Budgeting involves outlining expected revenues and strategically allocating resources to cover both fixed and variable expenses. This practice instills financial discipline within your organization. Conversely, effective financial forecasting utilizes historical data and market trends to predict future revenues, allowing you to make informed decisions about investments and resource allocation. A realistic budget promotes sustainable growth by accurately estimating costs and avoiding overestimation of revenues, which can lead to financial shortfalls. Regularly comparing projected income to actual expenses during budget reviews helps identify financial gaps, enabling timely adjustments that maintain stability. Furthermore, financial forecasting techniques, like cash flow and profit/loss forecasting, are critical for anticipating cash needs and planning for seasonal fluctuations in business activity, ultimately enhancing your approach to business finance. Cash Flow Management Cash flow management is vital for maintaining the financial health of your business, as it involves closely monitoring the inflow and outflow of cash to guarantee you can meet your immediate obligations. To maintain positive cash flow, consider the following strategies: Prompt invoicing: Send invoices quickly to encourage faster payments. Effective inventory management: Optimize stock levels to reduce excess expenditure. Timing payments: Schedule payments to suppliers in alignment with cash inflows. Use cash flow forecasts: Predict future cash needs based on historical data and anticipated sales trends. Regularly reviewing cash flow statements can likewise help you identify patterns and potential issues. This process allows you to make informed adjustments to your financial strategies, ensuring that your business remains liquid and can cover operational expenses, service debts, and invest in growth opportunities effectively. Capital Expenditure Planning Capital expenditure planning is essential for any business looking to invest in long-term growth and operational efficiency. This process involves strategically allocating funds for long-term investments, like equipment, technology, and facilities, which improve your operational capacity and competitiveness. You’ll need to evaluate significant expenditures against your overall business objectives and potential return on investment. Assessing capital expenditures means analyzing cost-effectiveness, the expected lifespan of the asset, and how well it aligns with future growth strategies. A well-defined capital expenditure plan guarantees you have the necessary funds for critical investments as you balance financial risk and sustainability. Regularly reviewing your capital expenditures helps you adapt to changing market conditions and reallocate resources for peak financial performance. Profitability Analysis Profitability analysis is a critical tool for businesses aiming to improve their financial health and operational effectiveness. By evaluating revenue sources and cost structures, you can pinpoint the most profitable activities and identify areas for improvement. This analysis goes beyond measuring revenue; it assesses cost-effectiveness, enabling you to adapt strategies for maximizing returns and ensuring financial viability. Key profitability metrics to reflect upon include: Profit margin – indicates how much profit you make from sales. Return on assets (ROA) – measures how efficiently you utilize assets to generate profits. Return on equity (ROE) – evaluates the profitability relative to shareholders’ equity. Product line margins – help you analyze which products or services yield the highest returns. Conducting regular profitability assessments allows you to compare your performance against industry averages, informing your strategic planning and decision-making processes. Importance of Financial Planning and Role of AI Effective financial planning sets the foundation for a business’s success by enabling clear goal-setting, resource allocation, and anticipation of future expenses. By incorporating AI technologies into your financial planning, you improve precision and gain deeper insights into your financial data. These insights support more informed strategic decisions, vital in today’s competitive market. AI can analyze historical trends and current market conditions, allowing you to create more accurate financial forecasts and budgets that align with your business objectives. Moreover, the integration of AI facilitates real-time monitoring of financial performance, which enables you to quickly adapt to changing circumstances. This agility is fundamental for maintaining a competitive edge. In addition, leveraging AI streamlines your budgeting processes and improves risk management strategies, nurturing resilience and sustainability in your financial operations. In the end, effective financial planning combined with AI can considerably enhance your business’s overall financial health. Frequently Asked Questions What Are the 5 C’s of Finance? The 5 C’s of finance are crucial for evaluating creditworthiness. Character assesses your reliability and credit history. Capacity looks at your ability to repay loans by analyzing income and debts. Capital represents your investment in the business, showing your commitment. Collateral includes assets you pledge as security, which lenders can claim if you default. Finally, conditions refer to the broader economic environment and terms of the loan, affecting your borrowing potential. What Are the 5 Elements of Finance? The five elements of finance include financial planning, which sets your goals and the path to reach them; financial statements, like balance sheets and income statements, that reflect your financial health; financing options, covering debt and equity to raise capital; risk management, aimed at identifying and mitigating financial risks; and budgeting, which helps allocate resources wisely and control spending. Together, these components provide a thorough framework for managing your business finances effectively. What Are the 4 Primary Components of the Financial System? The four primary components of the financial system include financial markets, financial instruments, financial institutions, and financial services. Financial markets serve as platforms for trading assets like stocks and bonds. Financial instruments, including derivatives and currencies, facilitate risk and capital transfer. Financial institutions, such as banks, provide crucial services like lending and investment management. Finally, financial services help individuals and businesses manage resources, ensuring effective financial planning and stability in the economy. Which of the Following Is a Key Component of Business Finance? A key component of business finance is financial planning. It helps you set clear goals and create a roadmap for achieving them, ensuring efficient resource allocation. By analyzing financial statements like balance sheets and income statements, you gain insights into your company’s financial health. Furthermore, effective budgeting and cash flow management are essential for maintaining liquidity, allowing you to meet obligations during investing in future growth opportunities. Conclusion In summary, comprehending the key components of finances in business is essential for your success. Effective financial planning and budgeting, accurate financial statements, and strategic financing decisions lay the foundation for growth. Furthermore, managing cash flow and analyzing profitability help you make informed choices. By integrating risk management strategies and setting clear business goals, you can navigate challenges and seize opportunities. In the end, a strong financial framework empowers your business to thrive in a competitive environment. Image via Google Gemini This article, "What Are Key Components of Finances in Business?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Grasping the key components of finances in business is crucial for anyone looking to succeed in a competitive environment. Effective financial planning and budgeting help set clear goals and manage resources efficiently. Accurate financial statements, like balance sheets, reveal a company’s health, whereas financial ratios provide insights into profitability and liquidity. As you explore financing options and risk management, you’ll discover how these elements work together to create a solid financial foundation for growth. What’s next? Key Takeaways Effective financial planning involves setting business goals and realistic budgeting to control spending and prioritize investments. Financial statements, including balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements, evaluate a company’s financial health. Analyzing financial ratios reveals insights into profitability, liquidity, and leverage, aiding strategic decision-making. Financing options, such as debt and equity, provide necessary capital for growth, each with distinct implications for ownership and repayment. Risk management and resource allocation strategies ensure alignment of financial resources with business goals while addressing potential threats. Financial Planning and Budgeting When you think about running a successful business, effective financial planning and budgeting play a vital role in achieving your goals. Financial planning involves setting clear business goals, like revenue targets or market expansion plans, which guide your budgeting and resource allocation. By creating a realistic budget, you categorize expected revenues and expenses, including fixed and variable costs. This helps control spending and prioritize investments effectively. Financial forecasting is another significant component; it uses historical data and market trends to predict future financial outcomes, ensuring your budgets align with anticipated sales volumes. Regularly monitoring and adjusting your budgets is important for staying on track financially, allowing you to adapt to changing circumstances and market conditions. Financial Statements and Accounting Comprehending financial statements is essential for grasping your business’s financial health, as they include the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement. Accurate accounting practices not merely guarantee compliance with tax regulations but additionally empower you to make informed decisions based on solid financial data. Understanding Financial Statements Financial statements serve as vital tools for evaluating a business’s economic performance and stability. They consist of three primary documents: the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement. The balance sheet provides a snapshot of your company’s assets, liabilities, and equity, showing the relationship between what you own and owe. The income statement summarizes your revenue and expenses over a specific period, allowing you to assess profitability through metrics like gross profit and net income. Meanwhile, the cash flow statement tracks the inflow and outflow of cash from operating, investing, and financing activities, highlighting your liquidity. Regular analysis of these financial statements is important for informed decision-making, ensuring you understand your business’s financial health and operational efficiency. Importance of Accurate Accounting Accurate accounting is fundamental for any business aiming to maintain financial health and make informed decisions. It provides a clear snapshot of your company’s financial status through vital financial statements like the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement. These documents are critical for evaluating financial stability and profitability, which are key components of business financial planning. For the best small businesses, regularly reviewing these statements helps identify areas for financial improvement and effective resource allocation. A solid financial plan for your business plan relies on this accurate data, ensuring you can meet immediate obligations and invest in future growth. In the end, effective finances for small businesses stem from diligent accounting practices that lay the foundation for informed decision-making. Analyzing Financial Ratios When you analyze financial ratios, you’re gaining crucial insights into a company’s overall performance and health. Financial ratios are derived from key financial statements, including the balance sheet and income statement. Profitability ratios, such as profit margin and return on assets, evaluate how effectively a business generates profit from its revenues and assets. Liquidity ratios, like the current ratio and quick ratio, measure a company’s ability to meet short-term obligations, indicating financial stability. Leverage ratios, such as the debt-to-equity ratio, assess the extent of debt financing compared to equity, providing insights into financial risk. Regularly analyzing these financial ratios allows you to identify strengths and weaknesses, guiding your strategic decision-making and financial planning. Financing and Investments In the realm of financing your business, comprehending debt and equity options is fundamental. Debt financing means borrowing money that you’ll need to repay with interest, which can be vital for covering costs or broadening operations. Conversely, equity financing involves selling ownership shares to investors, providing capital without repayment obligations, but it may dilute your ownership stake. Debt Financing Explained Debt financing, whereas a common strategy for businesses seeking growth, involves borrowing funds from external sources that must be repaid with interest. This method allows you to leverage capital without sacrificing ownership. Here are some key aspects to evaluate: Types: Common forms include bank loans, credit lines, and bonds. Repayment: Unlike equity financing, debt financing requires regular repayments, impacting your cash flow. Use: Businesses often utilize debt financing for capital expenditures, operational costs, and expansion projects. Tax Benefits: Interest payments are often tax-deductible, improving your financial management. Balancing borrowing costs with expected returns guarantees financial health and sustainability in your business finance strategy. Equity Financing Overview Equity financing serves as an essential alternative for businesses looking to raise capital by selling shares to investors, effectively inviting them to become partial owners in the company. This type of financing is particularly beneficial for small businesses, as it supports their financial planning without the burden of debt repayment. Nevertheless, it does dilute the ownership percentage of existing shareholders. Investors in equity financing typically seek returns through capital gains or dividends, relying on the company’s future performance. Startups often turn to venture capitalists or angel investors for initial funding. Furthermore, companies may opt for public equity financing through an Initial Public Offering (IPO), which can greatly improve capital for expansion and growth opportunities. Risk Management and Insurance Comprehending risk management and insurance is essential for any business aiming to maintain financial stability. To effectively manage risks and protect your financial health, consider these key steps: Identify Risks: Recognize potential financial threats that could impact your operations. Assess Risks: Evaluate the likelihood and potential impact of each risk on your business. Implement Insurance Coverage: Transfer financial risk through appropriate insurance policies that cover property damage, employee injuries, and operational disruptions. Engage in Contingency Planning: Develop strategies to address risks before they escalate, enhancing your business’s resilience. Regularly reviewing your insurance policies guarantees they align with your evolving risk profile and operational needs. Business Goals and Objectives Comprehending your business goals and objectives is essential for aligning your vision with your mission. By setting measurable targets and milestones, you can effectively allocate resources, ensuring that every financial decision supports your overall strategy. Regularly reviewing these objectives helps you adapt to changing market conditions, keeping your organization agile and focused on its priorities. Vision and Mission Alignment A well-defined vision and mission are crucial for aligning business goals and objectives, as they serve as the foundation for financial decision-making and strategic planning. When you focus on aligning your financial resources with these goals, you improve execution and accountability. Here are key components to contemplate: Clearly define revenue targets and market share aspirations. Establish specific, measurable objectives, like a 20% revenue increase through a new product line. Regularly review and adjust goals based on market trends and performance metrics. Communicate your mission effectively to nurture a shared direction among employees. Measurable Targets and Milestones Establishing measurable targets and milestones is crucial for driving business success since they provide clear direction and benchmarks to assess performance. You should set specific, quantifiable, and time-bound objectives, like aiming for a 15% increase in sales within the next fiscal year or reducing operational costs by 5% within six months. These measurable targets and milestones guide your financial planning for small business owners and help align your financial projections in the business plan. Utilizing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) allows you to track your progress effectively. Regularly reviewing these milestones guarantees you can adjust strategies based on performance and market changes, enhancing your agility and overall success, allowing you to explore the best business ideas and implement them effectively. Resource Allocation Strategies Effective resource allocation strategies play a crucial role in achieving your business goals and objectives. To optimize your financial resources, consider these key approaches: Align resources with goals: Make sure your budgeting decisions reflect your overarching vision, like revenue targets or market expansion. Prioritize investments: Use historical performance data to guide investment prioritization based on projected returns. Regularly review strategies: Adjust your resource allocation to respond to market trends and operational changes, keeping in line with financial forecasts. Utilize KPIs: Assess the effectiveness of your resource allocation strategies, confirming that financial resources are directed toward the most impactful areas. Budgeting and Financial Forecasting When you think about managing finances in a business, budgeting and financial forecasting play crucial roles in ensuring long-term success. Budgeting involves outlining expected revenues and strategically allocating resources to cover both fixed and variable expenses. This practice instills financial discipline within your organization. Conversely, effective financial forecasting utilizes historical data and market trends to predict future revenues, allowing you to make informed decisions about investments and resource allocation. A realistic budget promotes sustainable growth by accurately estimating costs and avoiding overestimation of revenues, which can lead to financial shortfalls. Regularly comparing projected income to actual expenses during budget reviews helps identify financial gaps, enabling timely adjustments that maintain stability. Furthermore, financial forecasting techniques, like cash flow and profit/loss forecasting, are critical for anticipating cash needs and planning for seasonal fluctuations in business activity, ultimately enhancing your approach to business finance. Cash Flow Management Cash flow management is vital for maintaining the financial health of your business, as it involves closely monitoring the inflow and outflow of cash to guarantee you can meet your immediate obligations. To maintain positive cash flow, consider the following strategies: Prompt invoicing: Send invoices quickly to encourage faster payments. Effective inventory management: Optimize stock levels to reduce excess expenditure. Timing payments: Schedule payments to suppliers in alignment with cash inflows. Use cash flow forecasts: Predict future cash needs based on historical data and anticipated sales trends. Regularly reviewing cash flow statements can likewise help you identify patterns and potential issues. This process allows you to make informed adjustments to your financial strategies, ensuring that your business remains liquid and can cover operational expenses, service debts, and invest in growth opportunities effectively. Capital Expenditure Planning Capital expenditure planning is essential for any business looking to invest in long-term growth and operational efficiency. This process involves strategically allocating funds for long-term investments, like equipment, technology, and facilities, which improve your operational capacity and competitiveness. You’ll need to evaluate significant expenditures against your overall business objectives and potential return on investment. Assessing capital expenditures means analyzing cost-effectiveness, the expected lifespan of the asset, and how well it aligns with future growth strategies. A well-defined capital expenditure plan guarantees you have the necessary funds for critical investments as you balance financial risk and sustainability. Regularly reviewing your capital expenditures helps you adapt to changing market conditions and reallocate resources for peak financial performance. Profitability Analysis Profitability analysis is a critical tool for businesses aiming to improve their financial health and operational effectiveness. By evaluating revenue sources and cost structures, you can pinpoint the most profitable activities and identify areas for improvement. This analysis goes beyond measuring revenue; it assesses cost-effectiveness, enabling you to adapt strategies for maximizing returns and ensuring financial viability. Key profitability metrics to reflect upon include: Profit margin – indicates how much profit you make from sales. Return on assets (ROA) – measures how efficiently you utilize assets to generate profits. Return on equity (ROE) – evaluates the profitability relative to shareholders’ equity. Product line margins – help you analyze which products or services yield the highest returns. Conducting regular profitability assessments allows you to compare your performance against industry averages, informing your strategic planning and decision-making processes. Importance of Financial Planning and Role of AI Effective financial planning sets the foundation for a business’s success by enabling clear goal-setting, resource allocation, and anticipation of future expenses. By incorporating AI technologies into your financial planning, you improve precision and gain deeper insights into your financial data. These insights support more informed strategic decisions, vital in today’s competitive market. AI can analyze historical trends and current market conditions, allowing you to create more accurate financial forecasts and budgets that align with your business objectives. Moreover, the integration of AI facilitates real-time monitoring of financial performance, which enables you to quickly adapt to changing circumstances. This agility is fundamental for maintaining a competitive edge. In addition, leveraging AI streamlines your budgeting processes and improves risk management strategies, nurturing resilience and sustainability in your financial operations. In the end, effective financial planning combined with AI can considerably enhance your business’s overall financial health. Frequently Asked Questions What Are the 5 C’s of Finance? The 5 C’s of finance are crucial for evaluating creditworthiness. Character assesses your reliability and credit history. Capacity looks at your ability to repay loans by analyzing income and debts. Capital represents your investment in the business, showing your commitment. Collateral includes assets you pledge as security, which lenders can claim if you default. Finally, conditions refer to the broader economic environment and terms of the loan, affecting your borrowing potential. What Are the 5 Elements of Finance? The five elements of finance include financial planning, which sets your goals and the path to reach them; financial statements, like balance sheets and income statements, that reflect your financial health; financing options, covering debt and equity to raise capital; risk management, aimed at identifying and mitigating financial risks; and budgeting, which helps allocate resources wisely and control spending. Together, these components provide a thorough framework for managing your business finances effectively. What Are the 4 Primary Components of the Financial System? The four primary components of the financial system include financial markets, financial instruments, financial institutions, and financial services. Financial markets serve as platforms for trading assets like stocks and bonds. Financial instruments, including derivatives and currencies, facilitate risk and capital transfer. Financial institutions, such as banks, provide crucial services like lending and investment management. Finally, financial services help individuals and businesses manage resources, ensuring effective financial planning and stability in the economy. Which of the Following Is a Key Component of Business Finance? A key component of business finance is financial planning. It helps you set clear goals and create a roadmap for achieving them, ensuring efficient resource allocation. By analyzing financial statements like balance sheets and income statements, you gain insights into your company’s financial health. Furthermore, effective budgeting and cash flow management are essential for maintaining liquidity, allowing you to meet obligations during investing in future growth opportunities. Conclusion In summary, comprehending the key components of finances in business is essential for your success. Effective financial planning and budgeting, accurate financial statements, and strategic financing decisions lay the foundation for growth. Furthermore, managing cash flow and analyzing profitability help you make informed choices. By integrating risk management strategies and setting clear business goals, you can navigate challenges and seize opportunities. In the end, a strong financial framework empowers your business to thrive in a competitive environment. Image via Google Gemini This article, "What Are Key Components of Finances in Business?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Analysts expect Brent crude to trade at about $90 in fourth quarter, up from earlier $80 predictionView the full article

A testament to ExpatFIRE, NomadFIRE, BaristaFIRE, CoastFIRE, and financial creativity on the path to financial independence As I sit on another one way flight to Bangkok, this time from Seattle, I can’t help but smile, excited with both anticipation and appreciation…for what I experienced on my financial journey of the last 9+ years, for what ... Read moreView the full article

As a leadership consultant who helps organizations understand how to apply artistic thinking, one of the lessons I have learned is one of the basic differences between the artistic practice and the business practice—in the former, questioning is the way of life, in the latter answers are the way to go. Artists ask “why” constantly. Why does this exist? Why are things the way they are? Why are we doing it this way? That relentless questioning is how they push past convention—and it’s the engine of genuine creative thinking. Bring that same type of question into most organizations, and something breaks. “Why are we doing it this way?” stops sounding like curiosity. It starts sounding like accusation. When Curiosity Sounds Like Accusation The rookie mistake is thinking that asking “why” is about curiosity. In corporate life, it often lands as judgment. “Why are we doing this?” translates, in most organizational cultures, to: “You’ve made a poor decision. Explain yourself.” Chris Voss, the former FBI lead hostage negotiator, identified this clearly: “why” questions put people on the defensive. They activate the instinct to justify, protect, and counterattack. This isn’t a character flaw in the person being asked. It’s a predictable response to feeling interrogated rather than engaged. Hierarchy amplifies this further. When a senior leader asks “why,” the question carries weight they may not have intended. When a junior leader asks it, they risk being read as challenging authority or undermining a decision already made. The data confirms what most people already feel. According to Gartner, less than half of employees feel they have the safety to challenge the status quo—even among those who feel safe to experiment with new ideas. Challenging is more threatening than experimenting. And nothing triggers that gap faster than a poorly framed question. The intent is curiosity. The impact is conflict. And that gap is where creative thinking goes to die. Much of my work is about bringing artistic thinking and practices into business environments—but making sure they actually land. That translation problem is something I’ve spent years thinking about. The artists I study and work with don’t stop asking hard questions—they’ve just learned, often unconsciously, to deliver them in a way that others can receive. A painter who asks ‘why does this feel flat?’ isn’t accusing anyone. They’re reconstructing the reasoning behind a creative choice so they can understand it, build on it, or redirect it. The question is investigative, not evaluative. From Verdict to Inquiry Business leaders can adopt the same instinct—but deliver it in a format the organization can receive. The shift is simple: replace “why,” which implies a verdict, with “what” and “how” questions that invite reasoning without triggering defense. Here are a few examples; consider the differences. “Why are we still working with this provider?” sounds like a verdict on whoever owns that relationship. “What would it take for us to get better results from this partnership—or to know it’s time to explore other options?” opens a forward-looking conversation without attacking the past. “Why aren’t we pursuing this?” signals frustration. “What would need to be true for this to be worth pursuing?” surfaces real constraints without implying someone dropped the ball. “Why did this happen?” in a post-failure meeting is almost always heard as: whose fault is this? “What is it that brought us into this situation—and what does it tell us about how we make decisions?” shifts the conversation from blame to systemic understanding. The pattern is consistent: “what” and “how” questions reconstruct reasoning rather than assign blame. They’re oriented toward understanding, not evaluation. They leave the other person somewhere to go other than defense. There’s an important caveat. The words alone won’t do it. A “what” question delivered with visible frustration or impatience carries the same charge as “why.” And using these questions performatively—asking “what’s the objective?” while already having decided the objective is wrong—will be recognized immediately. Skilled people can smell the difference between genuine inquiry and rhetorical inquiry. The reframe works because of the intent behind it, not despite it. But the deeper issue isn’t technique. It’s what organizations lose when inquiry becomes too costly. For artists, questioning isn’t a technique. It’s how the work stays alive. A painter who stops asking “why does this feel wrong?” stops growing. A film director who loses the question “what are we trying to make the audience feel?” loses the thread. Business leaders face the exact same questions—they just call it customer experience, product usability, or brand. And they don’t recognize the dependency until the creative thinking has already left the building. When asking “why” consistently produces defensiveness, political friction, or quiet career damage, curiosity doesn’t disappear. It goes underground. And when curiosity goes underground, so does the kind of thinking that leads somewhere genuinely new. Inquiry is essential. Delivery matters. Those two things aren’t in tension—learning to hold both is what it means to apply artistic thinking inside a business. So before your next meeting, consider: what’s the question you’ve been hesitating to ask? And what would it sound like if you asked it in a way that opened the room rather than closed it? View the full article

Managing people is about helping people tap into underutilized reserves and overlooked skills that are indigenous to them, not fixing their habits. The people you manage naturally look to you for answers. They might even ask you to tell them what to do, which creates two major problems: If you tell them what to do, and even if you’re right, they won’t learn anything. If you give clear instructions regarding what to do and things still go wrong, they more than likely will blame you for the resulting mess. This kind of dynamic quietly creates an unhealthy dependency where the employee begins to look to you not just for guidance, but for approval. Anyone who relies on you for everything doesn’t make you a better manager or manager; it limits both their development and yours. That’s why boundaries are not optional—they’re essential. Managing with true empathy means supporting without enabling, guiding without taking over. GENERAL DOS AND DON’TS FOR PRACTICING EMPATHY What You Should Do Start by looking inward to understand how you show up for every conversation. Practicing self-awareness involves observing our thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations without judgment. This can be challenging, as we often become so caught up in the moment that we fail to notice our internal state. However, by regularly taking a step back and observing ourselves, we can begin to identify patterns and triggers that influence our behavior. Once we become more aware of our emotions and beliefs, we can start to take steps to manage them in a more client-centered way. This may involve challenging our negative thoughts, practicing relaxation techniques, or seeking support from others. By developing greater self-awareness, we can become more mindful of our impact on others and create a more positive and productive environment for client success and personal growth. Here are some tips for cultivating and practicing self-awareness: Pay attention to your physical sensations. What are you feeling in your body? Are you tense, relaxed, or somewhere in between? Identify your emotions. What emotions are you experiencing? Are you feeling happy, sad, angry, or something else? Observe your thoughts. What are you thinking about? Are your thoughts positive, negative, or neutral? Consider your motivations. Why are you doing what you’re doing? What are your goals and intentions? Reflect on your interactions with your clients and others. How are you interacting with others? Are you being respectful, kind, and supportive? If not, you have more work to do. With that said, let’s consider another “do” for accurate empathy. Listen actively & nonjudgmentally. Pay close attention to what they’re telling you with their words and nonverbal cues. Are you reflecting what they’re saying back to them with your own insights, gestures, and facial expressions? It’s ideal to take some time after fully listening to them to think about your response, so you can respond with empathy. Don’t make the mistake of trying to multitask. You’ll miss out on what they mean, even if you don’t miss out on the words they say. Build on what they’re saying, so you can move toward greater understanding and connection. Yes, as a manager, you’re supposed to help your clients based on what you know. However, what you know to be true for you or someone else might not be particularly helpful or true for another client. Revisit and reflect. Regular introspection and reflection are critical on your journey of growth and self-actualization. If you can acknowledge that there’s always room to improve, and you’re willing to do the work to figure out how, then your outcomes will mirror your efforts. What You Shouldn’t Do Don’t ignore or downplay your own biases. Be honest about where you’re coming from and unpack your own baggage before you try to listen and engage in conversation. What are your personal triggers? Are there certain factors at play, like your age, race, gender, culture, personality type, or background that might be potential barriers to understanding? Some limiting beliefs are more deeply rooted than others. Don’t overlook indicators of misplaced empathy. Empathy is about stepping into another person’s experience, seeing the world through their eyes, and connecting with their feelings. Sympathy, on the other hand, means recognizing their pain from the outside and offering compassion without fully entering into their emotional space. Don’t assume that you’ve mastered empathy and have no more work to do. Learning accurate empathy is a lifelong process. As we’ve established, every person and situation is different. You’ll also change a lot throughout your life. It might be easier to show empathy in one season of your life and more difficult in another. If you adopt a learning mindset and get curious about yourself and others, you’ll constantly improve your ability to show accurate empathy. You can then apply these dos and don’ts to work and any other life situation. Excerpted from Leading from the Heart by Dr. D. Ivan Young, published by Post Hill Press. Available April 28, 2026, wherever books are sold. View the full article

Look, we all know the drill. Job hunting is basically a full-time job that pays zero dollars and requires you to be perpetually “passionate” about companies that make, I don’t know, enterprise-grade cloud storage for other cloud storage companies. It’s exhausting. But it’s 2026, and if you’re still copy-pasting your résumé into a hundred different web forms like it’s 2012, you’re doing it wrong. The robots are already screening you, so you might as well hire some robots of your own to level the playing field. Here are five AI-powered job-hunting tools to check out. Teal: Mission control If your job search is currently a mess of saved LinkedIn posts and half-finished Google Sheets, you need Teal. Think of this site as a project management tool, but the project is you drawing a steady paycheck. Its AI résumé builder scans the specific job description you’re eyeing and tells you exactly which keywords you’re missing. Teal is a freemium service. The basic job tracker and résumé builder are free, but if you want the unlimited AI keyword matching and résumé analysis, Teal+ will run you $13 per week, $29 per month, or $79 for three months. JobCopilot: Apply while you sleep Applying to roles is a numbers game, but manual entry is a soul-crushing slog. JobCopilot identifies the roles that actually fit your profile and handles the repetitive form-filling and cover letter tailoring. It uses a personalized agent that learns your preferences so you don’t end up applying for a senior architect role when you’re a junior designer. Plans start at about a buck a day for 20 applications and go up from there. Revarta: Mock interview partner Talking to yourself in the mirror is fine for a pep talk, but it’s terrible for interview prep. Revarta uses voice AI to conduct realistic, job-specific mock interviews. It analyzes your pacing, detects filler words, and critiques the substance of your STAR (situation, task, action, result) method answers. There’s a seven-day free trial. After that, it’s $49 per month, or you can grab a 90-day pass for $129. If you’re a career-long over-preparer, there’s a lifetime access option for $349. PitchMeAI: Network infiltrator The “hidden job market” is real. PitchMeAI is a Chrome extension that finds verified hiring manager emails and uses AI to draft hyper-personalized outreach based on their background and your specific skills. You get three free credits per month to test the waters. For unlimited résumé personalizations and hiring manager discovery, the Pro plan is $22 per month. Jobscan: ATS tamer Most résumés are rejected by an applicant tracking system (ATS) before a human ever sees them. Jobscan reverse engineers the logic of big-name systems such as Greenhouse and Workday to give you a “Match Rate” so you can better tailor your résumé to get through the initial gate. You get five free scans per month. If you’re a high-volume applicant, the monthly plan is $50, or you can go quarterly for $90 for three months. View the full article