ResidentialBusiness

Brand licensing deals can be an easy way to make a quick buck, but it’s not without risks. A man who splurged for one of President Donald The President’s officially licensed watches learned that lesson the hard way after the timepiece arrived with an unfortunate typo. The $640 limited-edition “Inauguration First Lady” watch the Rhode Island man bought read “Rump” instead of “The President” across its pink face. “We expected that it would have the integrity of the president of the United States,” Tim Petit, who bought the watch for his wife, told the local news station WJAR. He said it made his wife cry. YouTube Perhaps expecting integrity from a product that trades on the name and likeness of the first felon president in U.S. history, a man whose second term in office has become a historic tangle of conflicts of interest, is asking for too much. But it’s also a pitfall that all brands face when they outsource their products. Licensing your brand can increase brand recognition and profits without cost risks, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but without specific, enforced licensing requirements, you risk losing out on quality control. Not that the The President brand is particularly airtight. The President has long made money from licensing deals, with resulting products such as The President: The Game, The President Water, and The President Steaks. In between terms, The President cashed in on new product releases like The President Sneakers and “God Bless the USA” Bibles, all using LLCs that licensed his name and likeness to manufacture and market The President-themed kitsch to his political supporters. The President Watches aren’t sold directly by The President, his business, or an aligned political entity, but by TheBestWatchesonEarth LLC, a manufacturer with a business address at a nondescript Wyoming building, which is also home to a daycare center. With The President back in office, The President Watches and other licensed storefronts represent something unprecedented: a president personally profiting off of merch sales, a category that until now has been relegated to campaign fundraising. And in a shocking but not surprising twist for the president who’s made domestic manufacturing central to his political agenda, the watches make no claim to be made in the United States (GQ actually sourced them to China). Luckily for the Rhode Island couple with the misspelled watch, the story has a happy ending. Though The President Watches has a strict policy of no refunds or exchanges and states on its website that “images shown are for illustration purposes only and may not be an exact representation of the product,” the company made an exception for the “Rump” watch, though only after the media got involved. Petit said he didn’t hear back from the company until after WJAR reached out for comment, and then he got a call from The President Watches offering to replace the watch and gift him an $800 coupon. Sometimes all it takes is a free press. View the full article

I tested the top ChatGPT alternatives and shortlisted 11 of them. Read this guide to explore their features and choose the best option for your needs. View the full article

It’s easy to forget how big a splash the first Roku box made when it debuted on May 20, 2008. At launch, the device worked only with Netflix, best known at the time as a mail-order Blockbuster rival that was just ramping up its streaming service. The 10,000 movies and shows you could watch skewed toward the random and musty: Back then, Netflix’s mail-order DVD service offered 10 times as many titles. But the $100 Netflix Player by Roku took a process that had been geeky at best—getting internet video onto a TV—and made it approachable and affordable. In the unassuming gadget, wrote The New York Times’s Saul Hansell, “I think you can see the future of video.” Hansell was right. And though that original box has grown quaint with time, Roku is still riding the streaming wave. The company ended 2024 with 89.8 million streaming households, an increase of 9.8 million year over year. In the first quarter of 2025, it streamed 35.8 billion hours of video, up 5.1 billion year over year—and more than 10 times what it was doing per quarter when it went public in 2017. Behind the scenes, Roku has constructed a diversified business to keep those figures growing and monetize them in new ways. Yes, it still makes streaming boxes, along with streaming sticks and soundbars. However, it also provides North America’s most popular operating system for smart TVs, which it licenses to other manufacturers and uses on its own Roku-branded televisions. It operates the Roku Channel, the most-watched free ad-supported streaming channel, having recently passed Tubi. It’s a powerhouse of streaming ads, giving marketers tools such as Roku Ads Manager and Roku Data Cloud. That Roku found itself in a place to build all this involved an early twist of fate. Founder and CEO Anthony Wood oversaw the first streaming box’s development as a skunkworks project for Netflix. When Netflix decided it didn’t want to sell a device of its own, Roku—which had made internet radios and digital signage controllers, among other products—inherited it. With the introduction of the Roku Channel Store in November 2009, the box began to evolve from a Netflix player into a comprehensive streaming portal. The Channel Store launched with 10 providers, including Pandora and Flickr; the company doesn’t disclose the current number, but it’s in the thousands, including more than 500 free ones. Anthony Wood “It’s amazing how companies underestimate that,” Wood says. “They still do. They don’t really understand what it means. For example, sometimes people will be like, ‘Your UI, your home screen, hasn’t changed that much.’ Like that’s terrible. And I’m like, ‘No, our market share keeps going up!’ So it’s not terrible. People like that.” Anyone who scoffs at Roku’s lack of change for change’s sake might want to consider how successful it’s been in a business that many others, including Google and Amazon, have long coveted. “When you think about the power of an operating system, in the mobile world you think of Apple and Google being the two dominant platforms,” says media and technology analyst Rich Greenfield of LightShed Partners. “In connected TV, the platform that is far and away the largest is Roku.” Hardware is hard Wood’s early realization that devices were most valuable as a springboard to build a platform did not involve any unique insight. Everyone in consumer electronics knows that hardware is hard and services can drive profits. But Roku has been one of the few consumer electronics companies to make it all work—certainly more consistently so than Sonos and GoPro, both of which have been through more than their share of tribulations in recent years. (Fun fact: All three companies were founded in 2002.) Just as Wood anticipated, Roku became a services company. In the first quarter of 2025, it made $881 million in revenue from its platform business, which spans advertising, subscriptions, and software licensing, with a gross profit of 53%. In devices, it had $140 million in revenue but a $19 million loss, for a margin of minus 14%. Overall, the company reported a loss from operations of $58 million and an adjusted EBITDA of $56 million, compared to a $72 million loss and adjusted EBITDA of $41 million for the first quarter of 2024. If you’re watching the Roku Channel—or another streaming service that’s part of the Roku Audience Network—you see ads the company has inserted in streams. (Overall, according to data from Pixalate, 38% of connected-TV programmatic ads in the first quarter of 2025 were delivered to Roku viewers, the highest percentage of any platform; Amazon’s Fire TV was second with 18%.) If you’re watching something else, such as Disney+ or Max, Roku can monetize that, too: Its built-in payments service, Roku Pay, lets it handle billing in return for a fee. Roku’s use of its platform as a giant marketing opportunity for its streaming partners extends to everything from its home screen and screen saver to the dedicated app-specific buttons on its familiar remote control; in March, it raised eyebrows by testing ads that play even before the home screen loads. As I was finishing this article, the platform was thick with messages promoting discounts associated with Streaming Day on May 20—a holiday it invented to celebrate the anniversary of its first box. Anti-Roku sentiment expressed online usually reflects frustration with the quantity of advertising and other promotional elements, though the company recently got blamed for some ads it didn’t place. Wood says that customer satisfaction studies help determine changes to the platform, but in some cases tweaks get the go-ahead even “if there’s a very neutral [reaction] or a slight decrease in satisfaction. Because you’ve got to remember, the revenue ultimately [results] in more content, more free content, more features, and lower cost.” Overall, he adds, “Those revenue streams have really worked for us—distributing streaming services, merchandising them, selling them, billing for them, and free content with ads.” If Roku hadn’t done an intrepid job of navigating a TV hardware ecosystem that’s radically changed since it shipped its early devices, it wouldn’t have a booming ad business. Back then, few people owned smart TVs; the company’s competition consisted of other boxes, most of which were clunkier and costlier than its own. But as streaming took off, most TVs added it as a standard feature. Theoretically, that could have rendered Roku and its add-on boxes redundant. The reality, however, was that the home-brewed software cobbled together by many TV manufacturers was terrible. That opened up an opportunity for Roku, whose interface was already widely praised for its polish and straightforwardness. In 2014, the company introduced Roku TV, a platform designed to be embedded into televisions rather than delivered via a box. It launched on models from China’s TCL and Hisense, respectively the third- and fifth-largest TV brands at the time. Looking back, Wood says that TV makers were skittish about ceding control of the on-screen experience. “When we first started going to TV companies, one of the biggest challenges we had was they all wanted a custom UI, and they didn’t want their UI to look like their competitors,” he remembers. In the end, many were convinced to standardize on Roku, which now ships on TVs from 35 brands, including JVC, Walmart’s Onn house brand, Philips, and Westinghouse. In some cases, they play up the platform’s brand and benefits on their packaging even more than their own. Among the TV manufacturers who still don’t offer Roku models are three of the best-known brands: Samsung, LG, and Sony. Wood contends that’s worse news for them than for Roku. “Samsung still makes their own platform,” he says. “They just don’t have enough scale and monetization, even as large as they are, to do what we do in terms of features. . . . And so we’re just a better product, and consumers care about that.” Then there are the most Roku-centric TVs of all. In 2023, the company introduced its own line of televisions; it went on to sell a million of them in 2024. Are the TV makers who license Roku’s software okay with it competing with their products? “They’d probably prefer we didn’t,” allows Wood, who calls it “just another move to build market share.” Along with catering to customers who want the purest possible Roku experience, doing so lets the company test new features before rolling them out more widely, he explains. It also helps retailers plug holes in their TV lineups when they can’t get all the models they’d like from other brands. At the launch event where I spoke with Wood, Roku unveiled its 2025 line of TVs. But it also introduced two new add-on streaming devices—not boxes but sticks that plug directly into a TV’s HDMI port, a diminutive form factor the company has offered since 2012. It’s still finding ways to improve them: The new models are slimmer than their predecessors, so they don’t block adjacent HDMI ports. They also draw power from the TV, eliminating the need for a cable and charging plug. Given that it’s now tough to buy a TV that doesn’t have streaming features built in, how is it possible that these sticks are still a thing? Even inside Roku, Wood says, many people expected the market for them to trend sharply toward zero. So far, it hasn’t: “Every year we keep selling them—we sell a lot of streaming sticks.” Some customers, he says, use them to upgrade aging smart TVs whose built-in software is no longer getting updates. Others may simply prefer Roku to other streaming interfaces. Roku’s continued focus on streaming shows a fair amount of discipline given that its brand is among the most recognizable in smart home technology. (Google’s Nest, by contrast, has migrated from thermostats to security systems, speakers, screens, Wi-Fi routers, and other products but lost its early buzz along the way.) Not that Roku hasn’t played around the edges: In 2022, I wrote about its foray into cameras and doorbells. Rather than lavishing attention on the project, it started with devices built by Wyze and then provided security and software upgrades, along with integrations with its TV platform. Today, Roku sells millions of products a year based on its Wyze partnership and is still rolling out new models. But the initiative shows no signs of broadening into an all-out effort to conquer every area of household tech. “Our primary business is streaming, but it’s kind of a nice accessory,” Wood says. It’s a channel, too For much of its history, Roku expanded the utility of its devices by supporting new streaming services as they came along. By 2017, its Channel Store had more than 5,000 of them, from the expected name-brand giants to upstarts representing an array of niches. That was the year it launched a service of its own, called—perhaps inevitably—the Roku Channel. That move went on to transform how the company made money by letting it sell ads on its own streams. Today, “It’s a multibillion-dollar business for us,” Wood says. Having its own channel also gave Roku the opportunity to simplify streaming even more by taking responsibility for what Steve Jobs would have called the whole widget—the entire experience from the design of the remote control to the lineup of shows. “In some ways, the Roku Channel is at the center of what they’re doing,” says LightShed’s Greenfield. Calling it a mere “channel” is a bit of a misnomer, though. It’s become a sprawling streaming service unto itself, with on-demand movies and episodes, live channels, and premium for-pay options such as Starz, AMC+, and the service soon to be known once again as HBO Max. The Roku Channel also has a life well beyond Roku’s own platform: You can watch it on the web, using iPhone and Android apps, or even on two of Roku’s archrivals, Google TV and Amazon’s Fire TV. Almost eight years into its existence, the Roku Channel has quietly gobbled up a meaningful percentage of the hours humans spend consuming video content. In April, according to Nielsen’s the Gauge, it accounted for 2.4% of all TV watched by people ages 2 and up (sorry, babies). That might not sound huge, but it’s 2.4% of all TV—broadcast and cable as well as streaming—and is up 71% year over year. And though it’s below YouTube (12%), Netflix (7.9%), Disney’s streaming services (5%), Amazon Prime Video (3.5%), and Paramount’s services (2.3%), it beats Tubi (1.9%), HBO Max and Warner Bros. Discovery’s other services (1.5%), and Peacock (1.4%). Roku itself says that the Roku Channel’s streaming hours are up 84% year over year, and that it’s the platform’s No. 2 service among U.S. watchers in terms of engagement. (The company doesn’t officially disclose which one is No. 1, but according to one source, it’s YouTube.) Contentwise, what Roku is streaming on its service bears a certain resemblance to Netflix in its early, pre-House of Cards days, before it shifted decisively to original content. There are vast quantities of recognizable TV shows and movies. It’s just that they aren’t the latest ones, and sometimes they’re decades-old comfort food. However, there are also more Roku Originals than I realized, including movies and series. These made-for-Roku items haven’t commandeered huge amounts of public attention, but 2022’s excellent fantasy biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story and a show Roku picked up after Disney abandoned it, The Spiderwick Chronicles, both won Emmys. And having some exclusives buttresses the platform’s story for marketers. As Wood puts it: “You go and talk to advertisers, you don’t say, ‘Hey, the Roku Channel has a whole bunch of reruns of Bewitched.” (Note: It does—116 episodes’ worth.) Marketers may like seeing Roku invest in original content, but a recent acquisition proves it isn’t overly fixated on prestige. On May 1, the company announced it was spending $185 million to acquire Frndly TV, a streaming service whose 50 channels include rerun purveyors such as Lifetime, the Game Show Network, Hallmark Mysteries, and—my favorite—MeTV Toons. Starting at $7 per month, it’s a logical step up from the free stuff that’s propelled the Roku Channel’s popularity. As a Roku property, it should benefit from the company’s ability to put it front and center on the platform. The power of Roku’s mass-market consumer footprint is so undeniable that even Apple has seen fit to embrace it. Like Roku, it has a streaming box: Apple TV, whose original version shipped even before Roku’s Netflix Player. But in January, the two companies collaborated on an “exclusive fan experience” for the hit Apple TV+ show Severance. Shortly before the second season premiered, the first one streamed for free on the Roku Channel. Anyone whose appetite was whetted for the new episodes didn’t need to buy an Apple TV box to catch them: Apple TV+ has its own Roku app. With Roku already in about half of American homes and its platform running about 40% of TVs and half of streaming devices, it runs the risk of maxing out its ability to scale up further. Wood acknowledges that U.S. growth is slowing, and emphasizes the importance of even more aggressive monetization. For example, the Roku home screen recently added a row with app “recommendations” the company can market to streaming partners. International expansion, he says, is also critical—already, the company has a commanding market share in Mexico. Still, 18 years after Wood began introducing Americans to streaming, he sees the potential to reach even more of them. The strategy—make it simple, make it cheap, and just keep going—abides. “People are still upgrading TVs, and our market share for TVs sold also keeps growing,” he says. “So I think there’s room.” View the full article

In June 2024, a team of divers sank a curious assortment of 24 sculptures off the northern coast of Bali. The sculptures look like works of art—and in many ways they are. But they are also memorial reefs that turn cremated ashes into structures that regenerate marine life. Over the past three years, a British startup called Resting Reef has been working to revamp the death care industry. Instead of keeping ashes inside an urn (which often ends up gathering dust on a shelf) or scattering ashes at sea (a fleeting gesture that leaves no lasting trace), you can have Resting Reef integrate them into an underwater memorial that can double as an artificial reef. Now, the results are in: Nearly a year after being placed on an otherwise barren stretch of seabed in Bali, the artificial reefs have attracted more than 46 new marine species. The site now boasts four times the fish biodiversity of the nearest comparable location thanks, in part, to the turf algae and coralline algae that have grown on the surface of the reefs, providing habitat for many marine organisms. The Bali reef pilot, which was funded by six government grants from the U.K., is the only such reef in the world. (It consists of pets ashes, but reefs made with human ashes are coming next.) The team is also in conversations with sites in Plymouth, U.K., and in Mexico. “Just as we have a cemetery around the corner, in the future we’ll have memorial sites—marine sites—opening around the world,” says Aura Elena Murillo Pérez, who cofounded Resting Reefs with Louise Lenborg Skajem. Nature’s fertilizer For all our beautiful differences when we are alive, all of us are reduced to the same chemical composition when we die. The exact composition of a person’s ashes can vary based on their weight, diet, age, and genetic makeup, but most people’s chemical signature will primarily be made up of calcium phosphate. This calcium phosphate is “one of nature’s main fertilizers,” says Skajem. If you spread someone’s ashes on your lawn, excess minerals will leach into the soil, but when captured as part of the mixture that makes up a Resting Reef, it will help various species attach to the structure and grow on its now bioreceptive surface. The exact ratio of materials is part of the company’s IP, but the team is committed to working with locally available materials. In Bali, the reefs used for the pilot are made from dog and horse ashes mixed with crushed shells and volcanic sand sourced from the island. In the U.K., the company has developed a non-cementitious formula that it says is very low on carbon. Redesigning death The business of death is in dire need of a redesign. The world is running out of space to bury our dead, and cremation releases an average of 500 pounds of carbon dioxide per person into the atmosphere (the equivalent of driving your car more than 500 miles). In response to the growing crisis, a number of startups have emerged over the past decade. These include companies that use biodegradable hemp coffins, shallow graves that grow into trees, and “aquamation,” which uses alkaline hydrolysis to dissolve the body in a more environmentally friendly way. By some estimates, in 2023 the green burial market was valued at $622 million and is projected to surpass $1 billion by the end of 2030. Resting Reef slots right into this ecosystem. The company still relies on remains from cremations or aquamations, but it was founded on the premise that we can honor our dead while giving new life to marine ecosystems around the world. When I first spoke with the founders in the spring of 2022, their focus was on oyster reefs, which are among nature’s greatest carbon sinks but have been lost to overharvesting and pollution. Now the model extends to whichever habitat is most in need of restoration. On the northern coast of Bali, that is corals. The artificial reefs come in two separate designs that can each accommodate various species: One features a ribbed texture that is ideal for benthic species like oysters; the other sports crevices and tunnels that mimic coral reefs and provide shelter for mobile species like juvenile fish. In the future, the team will have a portfolio of designs depending on the ecosystem or the intended aesthetic. And it’s not just about environmental impact. Resting Reef’s business model allows the company to invest in communities by employing local restoration experts (11 locals were involved in Bali) and running classes and workshops to increase marine literacy. “Kids don’t really know about what’s happening underwater, so it’s important that they become aware because we believe that they will become the guardians of the future,” says Murillo Pérez. Going beyond death More than a marine regeneration initiative, Resting Reef bills itself as a sustainable death care service that helps people build a meaningful legacy for themselves or their loved ones. Both Murillo Pérez and Skajem are certified funeral celebrants, which allows them to officiate funeral services and support families through bereavement. The 24 memorials that are currently underwater in Bali are all part of a community memorial for various pets (a spot in a Community Reef begins at $470, while a dedicated reef for your pet will cost you about $3,000). The pet memorial served as a useful pilot, but this summer Resting Reef will expand by launching its first memorial service for humans. The price of a dedicated memorial made with human ashes will begin at $5,200, which is cheaper than the average cost of a basic funeral in the United States. As of 2023, that was $6,280 for cremation and $8,300 for burial. The team will ask you to send the ashes by post, but some countries have a limit to the amount of human ashes you can send by mail. (The Royal Mail in the U.K. caps it at 50 grams.) So Resting Reef is considering other options, like collecting ashes from various funeral homes that could act as partners. For those who want to have a memorial ceremony and see the reef in person, the team offers a bespoke package called Experiential Reef. As part of the service, regardless of the tier, the team will send you a miniature version of your reef that you can keep close to you. You can opt in to have a portion of the ashes incorporated in the miniature sculpture, “because some people have difficulties letting go of the ashes,” says Skajem. And if you don’t, you still have a tangible object to remember your loved one by. Whether the distance turns out to be an issue remains to be seen, but to help people feel more connected, the team also sends regular updates in the form of impact reports—both environmental and social—and footage of the reef as it evolves. As Skajem puts it: “That’s part of the legacy.” View the full article

When Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 in 2016, the backlash was immediate and fierce. Tech reviewers called it “user-hostile and stupid.” Customers created petitions. Competitors ran ads mocking the decision. Yet today, wireless earbuds are ubiquitous, and the decision looks prescient rather than foolish. What Apple understood—and what most future-ready leaders eventually learn—is that meaningful innovation requires disappointing people strategically. This isn’t the leadership advice you typically hear. We’re told to inspire, to build consensus, to bring everyone along. But an uncomfortable truth lurks beneath these platitudes: as your impact grows, so does your capacity to disappoint others. And rather than avoiding this reality, the most effective leaders learn to navigate it intentionally. When Success Creates an Expectation Trap Author Rebecca Solnit captures this paradox perfectly. After supporting a friend whose first book had become unexpectedly successful, she explained that “success is full of failures, at least in the eyes of others, who want things from you, more of them wanting more than you can ever deliver, so you live in an atmosphere of pressure, unmet expectation.” This is particularly acute in technology leadership, where decisions must often be made ahead of market readiness. The moment you create something valuable, people develop expectations about what should come next—expectations that frequently conflict with the very innovation that made your work valuable in the first place. Consider Netflix’s pivot from DVD delivery to streaming. When announced in 2011, the company lost 800,000 subscribers and its stock plummeted 77%. Today, that disappointing decision looks like the defining move that secured Netflix’s future. Confidence: Not What We Think It Is The paradox exists for leaders across industries, though. Part of the challenge is that we fundamentally misunderstand confidence. As Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman explains, “Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct. Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it.” In other words, our feeling of confidence often has more to do with how neatly our story fits together than with its actual likelihood of being correct. This creates a dangerous dynamic in leadership, where seemingly “confident” decisions may simply reflect coherent but flawed narratives, especially when those narratives align with what stakeholders want to hear. This dynamic is especially dangerous in leadership, where the pressure to appear confident drives a pattern I’ve observed repeatedly: the rush to create strategies around emerging technologies (“What’s our AI strategy?” “What’s our blockchain strategy?”) rather than having the confidence to maintain core business strategies and incorporate new technologies experimentally. Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom’s concept of “insecure overachievers” illuminates part of this pattern: leaders who achieve at high levels while seeking external validation often prioritize appearing forward-leaning over being truly purposeful. The result? Decision-makers chasing technologies rather than outcomes, pursuing strategies that sound forward-thinking but may actually disconnect organizations from their core mission and meaningful impact. The Mathematics of Confident Decision-Making In statistics, confidence intervals don’t just tell us whether an effect exists—they reveal how certain we can be about what we know, which directly impacts our confidence to act. Mathematician Jordan Ellenberg illustrates this: a narrow confidence interval (such as between −0.5% and 0.5%) means you have “good evidence the intervention doesn’t do anything,” giving you the confidence to stop the initiative. A wide interval (such as between −20% and 20%) means you have “no idea whether the intervention has an effect,” signaling you need more data before making a decisive call. In other words, this statistical principle offers a powerful parallel for leadership decisions: true confidence comes not from eliminating uncertainty, but from understanding precisely what we know and what we don’t, and responding appropriately. This distinction offers us a powerful framework for leadership—what I call the Strategic Disappointment Matrix: Quadrant 1: High Certainty / Low Disappointment These are the easy wins—decisions where data strongly supports a path that few will object to. Pursue these enthusiastically, but recognize they rarely lead to breakthrough innovation. Quadrant 2: High Certainty / High Disappointment Here lie the necessary disappointments—decisions like sunsetting beloved but unsustainable products or implementing essential security measures that create friction. The evidence clearly shows these moves are necessary, even though they’ll create disappointment. These require courage, but clear communication can minimize backlash. Quadrant 3: Low Certainty / Low Disappointment These are experimental spaces where you can test hypotheses with minimal risk. These low-stakes experiments often yield what I call “bankable foresights”—insights about future priorities that you can invest in confidently even without complete certainty. Use these spaces intentionally to gather data that might eventually inform more consequential decisions in other quadrants. Quadrant 4: Low Certainty / High Disappointment This is where the biggest breakthroughs—and biggest failures—happen. When Airbnb suggested people rent their homes to strangers, or when Amazon invested in AWS, these decisions had uncertain outcomes and disappointed many stakeholders. These require the highest level of judgment and often define a leader’s legacy. Understanding where your decisions fall in this matrix doesn’t eliminate uncertainty, but it helps you respond to it appropriately. Practicing Strategic Disappointment Dr. McMillan Cottom suggests that developing comfort with disappointing others is “a critical life-skill” worth deliberately practicing. She recommends setting “the intention to disappoint at least one person, in some real way, over the next 24 hours,” noting that “the more comfortable you get with the risk of disappointing, the better things go on all fronts.” For leaders, this practice might include: Distinguish types of disappointment. Differentiate between disappointments that challenge people productively versus those that harm needlessly. Create transparent decision frameworks. Develop and communicate clear values hierarchies that show which principles take precedence when trade-offs become necessary. Articulate the “future-ready why.” Practice explaining unpopular decisions in terms of the longer horizon they enable, not just the immediate benefits. Build disappointment resilience. Develop personal practices that help you withstand the discomfort of being misunderstood or criticized for decisions you believe in. Measure meaningful impact. Create metrics that track long-term value creation, not just immediate satisfaction or engagement. Innovative Leadership Through Strategic Disappointment When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella decided to shift the company’s focus from Windows to cloud computing and AI, many were disappointed. Windows had been Microsoft’s crown jewel for decades. Developers, partners, and even internal teams who had built careers around the operating system felt betrayed by this pivot. But Nadella was practicing strategic disappointment. Rather than trying to please all stakeholders in the short term, he disappointed some intentionally to position Microsoft for long-term relevance. The results speak for themselves. Microsoft’s market cap has increased from roughly $300 billion when Nadella took over to over $3 trillion today, making it one of the world’s most valuable companies. More importantly, this shift has positioned Microsoft as a leader in AI and cloud computing—the very technologies shaping our future. Nadella’s strategic pivot demonstrates a crucial truth for future-ready leaders: disappointing people isn’t a leadership failure. It’s often the necessary price of meaningful innovation. The confidence to disappoint strategically isn’t about being certain you’re right. It’s about having the clarity to recognize when immediate approval conflicts with long-term impact, and the courage to choose impact even when it hurts. In a world moving too fast for perfect certainty, tomorrow’s most valuable leaders won’t be those who pleased everyone today. They’ll be those who had the courage to purposefully disappoint when necessary, navigating uncertainty not by avoiding it, but by embracing it as the necessary terrain of meaningful change. View the full article

In a small village in Senegal, almost no one has electricity, but that’s about to change. Last year, a 40-foot-shipping container rolled into town, unfolded an array of solar panels on its roof, and crews began running wires to connect the whole village to clean power. After final approvals from the local government, the new microgrid will soon switch on. The project had an unusual funding source: ChargePoint, the EV charging company known for its network of a million chargers in the U.S. and Europe, spent six figures helping get it built, working with a technology partner called Africa GreenTec. The EV charging company used money that it earned selling carbon credits from 10,000 EV chargers in Germany. Under the EU’s emissions trading program, it gets certificates for replacing gas or diesel fuel in cars with electricity. But since the electricity used to charge cars isn’t yet 100% clean, the company wanted to use the carbon credit funds to go a step farther. (Germany’s grid reached a record of 62.7% renewable energy in 2024, but still uses some coal and natural gas.) “From the very beginning, we said we are going to set aside a certain amount of money for each kilowatt hour,” says Andreas Blin, director of segments and partnerships at ChargePoint. “And this is going to be invested into a renewable energy product or project, just to make sure that everybody’s clear that we are not about greenwashing—we’re about burning less fossil fuels.” As the team considered where to spend the funds, it decided to partner with Africa GreenTec, a company that makes a mobile system called the Solartainer Amali, designed to quickly deploy solar power and electrify entire communities. The first project was built in Keur Ndiangane, a village with around 1,200 residents on the southern border of Senegal. Most people living there are subsistence farmers, dealing with a harsh climate that swings between floods and droughts. “Before our project, Keur Ndiangane had no access to centralized electricity or public lighting,” says Wolfgang Rams, CEO of Africa GreenTec. “Daily life effectively ended at sunset—shops closed, schools emptied, and the streets were plunged into darkness. Most households relied on candles or kerosene lamps.” Some small businesses, such as mills that process grains, ran on expensive diesel generators. To install the new microgrid, a crew spent a few weeks getting the “Solartainer”— which has 144 solar panels and battery storage—ready to run. (The process is normally even faster, but installation was slower because of extreme heat). At the same time, they spent two months putting up more than 100 poles and nearly 16,000 feet of wiring for the new grid. They also added 55 street lights that each run independently off their own solar panels, helping improve safety for people walking at night. Families can sign up for different plans depending on what time of day they want to use electricity and how much they need. More than 140 people are pre-subscribed so far. (ChargePoint doesn’t own any part of the project and won’t get any financial return from it.) The impact will be significant. In the past, while families might have used candles or kerosene for light at night, they’ll now easily be able to use bright LED lights and charge other small appliances. “Children can study in the evening,” Blin says. “People can work in the evening . . . This extends the daytime that people can use.” It can help enable internet access and refrigeration. Farmers can use the power to pump water on their fields, or run equipment to make new products, such as peanut oil. Healthcare clinics can use lighting and refrigerate medicine. New jobs have been created, as local residents will maintain the new solar microgrid. In other areas where Africa GreenTec has installed solar microgrids in the past, it has seen that electrification trigger economic growth—and then there’s more demand for power. Because of that, the system has been designed to adapt. The village can swap in a larger, more powerful solar microgrid when it’s needed, and the original Solartainer can be packed up and reused. “The previously used Solartainer Amali can be transported to the next village that is not yet electrified and can be used there again at any time,” says Rams. “This unique feature saves production effort and resources and reduces our carbon footprint.” The work is part of a much larger trend: Solar microgrids are quickly spreading across Africa. In Zambia, as one example, the government has installed 45 microgrids in rural communities, with plans for another 200 by next year, and 1,000 over the next few years, with support from nonprofits, the UN, and other funders. In Nigeria, World Bank funding has helped millions of people access electricity from solar microgrids in recent years. Last year, World Bank lending for off-grid solar projects reached $660 million. The World Bank Group has also partnered with the African Development Bank with a goal of connecting 300 million people in sub-Saharan Africa to electricity by 2030. Those larger efforts dwarf what a single company can do. Still, Africa GreenTec says that ChargePoint’s support meant that the village of Keur Ndiangane likely got power faster than it otherwise would have. “Without ChargePoint’s financing, implementing the project would have been extremely difficult,” Rams says. ChargePoint, founded in California in 2007, has been navigating a difficult period, with net losses of $282.9 million in the fiscal year ending in January, and around 250 jobs cut in 2024. It’s also earning less money now from carbon credits, because the value of carbon credits has fallen. Still, its network of EV chargers continues to grow, and the company expects to invest in electrifying another village. “I’d like to see more companies support things like this,” Blin says. View the full article

Blocking these bots will mostly impact the link index of the tools. They won’t be able to crawl the pages, so they can’t check where those pages are linking. It doesn’t matter for traffic estimates, keyword rankings, top pages, etc.…Read more ›View the full article

Researchers funded by the U.S. Navy have used gene-editing technology to make house spiders produce red fluorescent silk. This might seem like a quirky scientific novelty, but the breakthrough is a critical step toward modifying spider silk properties and creating new “supermaterials” for industries ranging from textiles to aerospace. The team at Germany’s University of Bayreuth, led by Professor Thomas Scheibel, successfully applied CRISPR-Cas9—a molecular tool that acts as “genetic scissors” to cut and modify DNA sequences—to spiders for the first time. The study, published in the scientific journal Angewandte Chemie, demonstrates how this technology introduces modifications that enhance the extraordinary properties of spider silk, turning it into a next-generation supermaterial. In a press release, professor Thomas Scheibel, chair of biomaterials at the University of Bayreuth and senior author of the study, said, “Considering the wide range of possible applications, it is surprising that there have been no studies to date using CRISPR-Cas9 in spiders.” His team injected a solution containing CRISPR-Cas9 components into female Parasteatoda tepidariorum, a common house spider species. To facilitate the process, the spiders were anesthetized with carbon dioxide and manually held under a microscope. The solution, which included a gene encoding a red fluorescent protein (called mRFP), was delivered into the eggs within the females’ abdomens before mating with males so the resulting baby spiders could carry the gene modification. What are scientists trying to do? The experiment set two objectives: first, to disable a gene called sine oculis, responsible for the development of all spider eyes, in order to study its function. And then second, to insert the fluorescent protein gene into the MaSp2gene, which produces the silk thread spiders use to move hunt, hike, and chill out. In modified specimens, disabling sine oculis caused total or partial eye loss, confirming its critical role in visual development. According to the study, without this gene spiders fail to form eye structures, though the cornea develops normally. But the breakthrough with far-reaching industrial implications is the silk modification. The injected fluorescent protein gene successfully integrated into the MaSp2 gene, causing fibers produced by the modified spiders to glow red under ultraviolet light. According to Scheibel, they “have demonstrated, for the first time worldwide, that CRISPR-Cas9 can be used to incorporate a desired sequence into spider silk proteins, thereby enabling the functionalisation of these silk fibres.” He says that the ability to apply CRISPR gene-editing to spider silk is very promising for materials science research—for example, it could be used to further increase the already high tensile strength of spider silk.” This accomplishment was no small feat. Spider genomes are complex, and their embryonic development—marked by unique cell migration stages—complicates genetic editing, according to the researchers. In fact, only 7% of egg sacs that were treated with the CRISPR solution contained modified offspring, a low efficiency rate typical for species with large broods (common house spiders carry about 250 spiders per sac). Additionally, the spiders they used are cannibalistic nature, which required them to be reared in isolation (not all spiders are cannibalistic in nature, but many do eat their males after mating and others eat each other). The race for “super silk” It’s a very promising development indeed. Spider silk is one of nature’s strongest materials. Certain types of spider silk are significantly lighter and tougher than Kevlar. Silk is also far more elastic, which means it can stretch and return to its original shape without losing its strength. To top all this, spider silk production by spiders (or other animals, more on this later) does not involve the industrial processes, high energy consumption, and pollution associated with the manufacturing of synthetic materials like Kevlar. This is a major area of interest for biomimicry and sustainable materials. Until now, modifying spider silk’s properties required costly, lab-based post-extraction processing, which is difficult to scale. This study shows that altering silk directly within the organism is feasible, paving the way for custom-designed silks with enhanced properties. While spider silk remains unmatched in natural performance, CRISPR-edited silkworms are emerging as scalable alternatives. Silkworms can be farmed en masse (unlike solitary, cannibalistic spiders), and recent advances show their engineered silk reaches 1.3 GPa tensile strength, comparable to high-tensile steel, which is a steel alloyed with chromium, molybdenum, manganese, nickel, silicon, and vanadium. Companies like Kraig Biocraft Laboratories already use CRISPR to produce spider-silk hybrids in silkworms, targeting industries like textiles and medical sutures. However, spider silk holds unique advantages over those genetically modified silkworms. Its dragline fibers are inherently stronger and 10 times finer. Using the method developed by Scheibel’s team, potential CRISPR-enhanced spiders are likely to gain more superpowers, like getting closer to Kevlar or gaining better electrical conductivity. Where super silk might be used In medicine, spider silk’s biocompatibility makes it ideal for dissolvable surgical sutures that reduce scarring and artificial tendons mimicking natural elasticity. Researchers are also developing 3D-printed scaffolds infused with silk proteins to regenerate bone or cartilage, leveraging silk’s porous structure to support cell growth. For drug delivery, silk microcapsules could release medications at controlled rates, improving treatments for chronic diseases. New applications can integrate silk in sensors for real-time health monitoring in implants or conduct electricity for flexible electronics. The U.S. Navy’s funding of the research makes sense too, given its interest in lightweight body armor. Spider silk can outperform Kevlar, while its elasticity reduces blunt-force trauma. In aerospace, silk composites could replace carbon fiber, cutting aircraft weight by 40% and improving fuel efficiency. NASA already explores silk-based materials for radiation shielding in space habitats, capitalizing on its strength-to-weight ratio. Companies like AMSilk and Spintex engineer spider silk proteins into biodegradable textiles, reducing reliance on synthetic fabrics derived from fossil fuels. Adidas has prototyped ultralight running shoes with silk midsoles, while Airbus tests silk-based cabin panels to lower aircraft emissions. Spintex claims that its energy-efficient spinning process—1,000 times more efficient than plastic production—could revolutionize sustainable fashion, addressing the industry’s 10% global carbon footprint. Right now, Scheibel’s team is already exploring CRISPR edits to add moisture-responsive shrinking or toxin-detecting color changes to silk. Once they achieve whatever new wundersilks they—or the U.S. Navy—have in mind, they will have to come up with a way to mass-produce them. This evokes images of farms full of millions of genetically modified spiders, which sounds as fun as a rave with 10,000 zombies from The Last of Us. But the spider farms may never happen: As the researchers mention, many spiders are cannibals and the success rate of modification is still very low, so this will be a challenge. That is what makes genetically modified silkworms ideal to make spider-like silks, as they have been farmed for silk production since the neolithic, about 6,000 years ago, when Yangshao culture in China realized that silkworms could be raised to harvest cocoons that then got weaved to create silk fabric. The solution may be taking the successful spider DNA modifications they develop and using other animals to produce them, like silkworms or goats (yes, spider-goats are a thing). I’ll leave you at this point. Good luck in your dreams tonight, my arachnophobic friends. View the full article

If you’ve always wanted to donate to Wikipedia but needed an extra nudge to do so, a new capsule collection by the German fashion brand Armedangels could be that reason. To mark Wikipedia’s forthcoming 25th anniversary next year, Armedangels designed a 14-piece collection that turns design features from the Wikipedia user interface and experience into brand elements. Its signature bright cobalt blue, called “hyperlink blue,” is a key color, along with white and yellow core colors. One design, featured on a T-shirt and sweatshirt, uses an iconic 1972 image of Earth called “Blue Marble” that was taken during the Apollo 17 mission and is in the public domain. Armedangels A text excerpt from “The Blue Marble” Wikipedia page is below the image, which is one of the most widely reproduced images in the world and “celebrates the freedom of knowledge,” according to the product description. Wikipedia’s serif “W” logo is featured throughout. The collection is available now via the Armedangels website. The Armedangels x Wikipedia collection includes items that equate knowledge to progress, with shirts promoting freedom, peace, and equality. Ball caps with slogans like “Open Source of Information” and “Yes, I know,” are fan merch for people who love going down multi-tab Wikipedia rabbit holes. The items range in price from about $16 for socks, $48 for hats, $57 for T-shirts, and $114 for sweatshirts. Armedangels The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation—which also operates tools like Wikimedia Commons and Wikibooks—saw annual revenue of more than $180 million in 2024, more than $170 million of which came from donations (though it says just 2% of Wikipedia readers donate). Some hypebeast apparel might be able to nominally improve that percentage, and it comes as the site itself has become a political lightning rod, facing increasing attacks from some on the right. Armedangels Armedangels says every piece is made from 100% recycled material, and 12% of sales proceeds go to the Wikimedia Foundation. It’s “sustainability meets free knowledge,” as the fashion brand says. “Because when we know better, we do better.” Like the pro-reading, anti-book-ban capsule collection for Penguin Random House by Online Ceramics, Armedangels x Wikipedia lends street-fashion cred to book smarts—and it raises money for valuable education resources at a time when anti-intellectualism is on the rise, and our information ecosystem has become especially polluted. Supporting a free online encyclopedia is one way to fight back. For Wikipedia, its volunteers, readers, and fans, the site is an effective line of defense against misinformation and ignorance. Now they have a limited-edition streetwear line that feels the same way. View the full article

You sit down to tackle your to-do list, full of energy and ambition—but 20 minutes later, you’re bouncing between emails, Slack notifications, and random tabs about vacation deals. Another hour slips away. Sound familiar? In today’s distraction-saturated workplaces, focus has become one of the most valuable—and elusive—skills we can master. The good news is that the focus isn’t just a matter of willpower. It’s a rhythm that can be trained, like learning how to play an instrument. Drawing from decades as a professional musician and a consultant in neuroscience-based productivity strategies, I’ve seen firsthand how much the brain responds to rhythm, structure, and intentional habits. Just like musicians tune their instruments and warm up before a concert, you can “tune” your brain to perform at its peak during the workday. Neuroscience backs this up: When we align our work with our brain’s natural cycles and cognitive strengths, we get more done—with less stress. Here’s how to use music-inspired rituals and brain science to sharpen your focus at work. Sync Your Brain to the Beat with Rhythmic Work Blocks Think of your workday like a symphony: It should rise and fall with a natural rhythm, not be an endless marathon of tasks. Our brains function in ultradian rhythms, alternating between 90- and 120-minute cycles of alertness and fatigue. Pioneering sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman discovered these cycles decades ago, and more recent studies, like those published in Progress in Brain Research, confirm that pushing beyond them leads to cognitive exhaustion. Instead of battling fatigue, structure your day into focused sprints followed by intentional breaks. Aim for 45 to 90 minutes of deep work, then take a 10- to 20-minute recovery break. How to do it: Set a timer for 60 minutes of focused work. Step away after the timer goes off—stretch, walk, breathe. Repeat the cycle two or three times for maximum cognitive performance. Just as music isn’t continuous noise without rests, your brain needs pauses to maintain focus. Set a Daily “Tempo” Check Before musicians start playing, they check the tempo and key of the piece. You should do the same with your mental state. Research published in The Journal of Neuroscience shows that emotions significantly influence attention and cognitive flexibility. If you’re tired, anxious, or distracted, deep strategic work may be unrealistic for that moment. Taking a few minutes each morning to assess your energy levels gives you agency over your day rather than letting it control you. How to do it: Quickly rate your current focus and energy from 1 to 10. If you’re below a 5, begin the day with lighter tasks like email cleanup or administrative work to build momentum. Reserve your high-focus work—like strategic planning or deep analysis—for when your tempo feels strong. Self-awareness builds cognitive resilience and keeps you from setting unrealistic expectations that undercut your performance. Use Music (Strategically) to Trigger Flow States Music can either help you focus or completely derail you. It depends on how you use it. Studies from Stanford University show that listening to music engages areas of the brain involved with paying attention and making predictions. However, lyrics and sharp tempo changes can split our attention and decrease deep focus. To enter a productive flow state, choose music that supports sustained concentration: Instrumental tracks Consistent rhythms Ambient sounds or lo-fi beats Some productivity apps, like Brain.fm, use neuroscience-based compositions to optimize focus. For example, lo-fi hip-hop playlists on Spotify are popular because of their steady, nondistracting beats. How to do it: Build a “focus playlist” with 1 to 2 hours of instrumental music. Use it only during work sessions when you want to mentally prime for deep focus. Over time, your brain will associate this music with “work mode” and transition more quickly into flow. Set a “Cue and Play” Ritual Before Deep Work Before performing onstage, musicians don’t just walk out cold. They have rituals: tuning instruments, breathing exercises, and visualization. Creating a consistent prework ritual signals your brain that it’s time for focus. This taps into a principle known as implementation intention, a psychological strategy proven to increase goal attainment by 300%, according to research published in Psychological Science. How to do it: Create a three-step warm-up to do before every deep work session. Stretch for two minutes. Brew a cup of tea or light a candle. Put on your focus playlist. These small, intentional actions trigger the brain’s “ready” state, helping you transition more smoothly into concentration. Rituals transform discipline into automatic behavior—freeing up mental energy for actual work. Break Projects Into Rhythmic Movements Like symphonies with movements—intro, crescendo, finale—big projects need natural segmentation, or a way of breaking things up into smaller categories. The human brain can comfortably hold about 4 to 7 items in working memory at once (as per research published in Cognitive Psychology). Large, ambiguous tasks overwhelm that limit, causing procrastination and fatigue. How to do it: Divide big projects into distinct phases: planning, drafting, editing, review, and delivery. Set milestone markers between each phase so you get a sense of closure as you progress. By thinking in “movements” rather than one massive project, you build momentum and reduce your cognitive overload. Eliminate “Syncopation,” or Unnecessary Disruptions In music, syncopation—unexpected shifts in rhythm—adds excitement. At work, unexpected disruptions usually add chaos. Studies from the University of California, Irvine, found that it takes 23 minutes to refocus fully after a distraction. Every ping, notification, or email breaks your cognitive rhythm and burns valuable attention energy. How to do it: Schedule deep work sprints, where you put devices on Do Not Disturb. Use apps like Freedom, Cold Turkey, or RescueTime to block distracting sites during these periods. Tell your team when you’re in a focused block so that they know not to interrupt unless it is urgent. You can put focus blocks on your work calendar that are visible to everyone, or even better, set your Slack status to “in deep work.” Guard your rhythm the way a conductor guards the tempo of an orchestra. Otherwise, you’re allowing random inputs to conduct your brain for you. Use Silence to Reset Your Brain’s Rhythm In music, silence isn’t absence—it’s intentional space that gives the sound its shape. Similarly, research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that periods of intentional silence promote brain regeneration, particularly in the hippocampus, which is associated with memory and learning. Small doses of quiet can dramatically reset attention and creativity. How to do it: After every major work block, spend 3 to 5 minutes in silence. No music. No podcasts. No screens. Just focus on breathing and mental stillness. This small practice strengthens your brain’s default mode network—the cognitive system responsible for creativity, problem-solving, and insight. In a world addicted to noise, silence can become your competitive advantage. Tune Your Brain Like an Instrument The ability to focus isn’t just a matter of working harder. It’s about working in rhythm with your brain’s natural cycles. By intentionally syncing with your cognitive rhythms—through music-inspired rituals, breaks, warm-ups, and boundaries—you can dramatically improve your ability to enter deep work states, stay there longer, and feel less drained at the end of the day. You don’t need more apps, hacks, or superhuman willpower to focus. You need a better rhythm. Treat your day like a musical performance, and your brain will follow the beat. View the full article

Long-term immigration fell sharply, to below 1mn for first time since 2022View the full article

High Court judge temporarily blocks signing that had been scheduled for Thursday View the full article

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A decade ago, the easiest way in the front door at a restaurant was often to call—or even just show up for a meal. Now, it’s far easier to book ahead, and the list of ways to get a coveted seat at the table is growing to include some surprising places. The country’s two largest delivery apps, DoorDash and Uber Eats, have both shared plans in recent weeks to add restaurant reservations to their apps. A crowded field Over the past few years, restaurant reservations—especially the hot ones—have become a type of currency. Call it a post-COVID return to socializing or our increased excitement to plan ahead; prime-time tables at top restaurants have gotten harder to secure than some concert tickets. Now, online scalpers target and resell hot reservations for a profit. The right credit card, a prestige Amex or a status Visa, comes with special access to popular reservations. Or, you can buy your way in through a number of app-based services that work with restaurants to secure high-value tables. In short, just about any company with a vested interest in restaurants wants to help you get a leg up—and inside—the front door. Uber’s entry That list now includes third-party delivery services, a once unlikely partner for restaurants hoping to coax diners off their couches. Last week, Uber Eats shared details of a deal with OpenTable, the country’s largest reservations provider, that lets Eats users book restaurant tables inside its app. Uber will add a new “dine out” tab inside its delivery app later this year for reservations, exclusive discounts and deals, and in-app ride booking. Uber’s subscription Uber One customers even get priority access to top tables set aside just for them. Or, as Uber’s senior director of delivery engineering, Rohan Mathew, said onstage as he detailed the program, “Your whole night is covered: deals, reservations, and rides.” Ease and convenience Third-party delivery apps don’t have the most hospitable reputation with restaurants. Operators frequently lament the high cost of commissions and a frustrating lack of customer data from the services. Still, diners want the convenience of takeout and delivery. According to just-released data from the National Restaurant Association, 37% of adults order delivery once a week. With so much business happening outside the four walls of a restaurant, it makes sense that full-service operators want their tables listed in as many places as possible. “At OpenTable, we’ve watched dining out evolve over the past 20 years—and this is the next chapter,” OpenTable CEO Debby Soo said over email. “Diners want ease and convenience when planning a night out, and we’re here to deliver that wherever it makes sense for them and our restaurant partners.” The DoorDash plan Soo says the company has over 150 tech partners, now including Uber, that it considers “high-converting channels” where it helps connect diners to the restaurants on its platform. This includes Uber Eats’ top competitor, DoorDash, which announced the acquisition of reservations and customer relationship management company SevenRooms for $1.2 billion earlier this month. When the deal closes later this year, reservations will likely find their way into the DoorDash app—though the company hasn’t confirmed exactly how or when. “We are just at the start of this transaction, so there are a lot of answers we don’t have in detail,” said Parisa Sadrzadeh, DoorDash vice president of strategy and operations, noting that she “would anticipate” a way for people to book reservations inside the DoorDash app. View the full article

Over the course of my career as an executive at Google, Yahoo, and Meta, and now as founder and CEO of my own firm, I’ve hired thousands of people. Across all those roles, one thing has stayed consistent: the applications that stand out are the ones that go beyond simply checking the boxes. In today’s job market, with a challenging economy and the rise of AI, fewer jobs are getting posted, and more people are applying for every job. So it’s all the more important to take the steps that will make your application stand out. Last year, we opened a chief of staff role at my company. Within days, we received more than 800 applications. My team and I read through every one of them. Just three stood out immediately. It wasn’t because the applicants held that exact title before or came from the most well-known companies: it was because they did something extra. One submitted a deck outlining how they would approach the role. Another sent a short video of themselves walking through a presentation they’d created. The third added a “User Manual,” a tool some organizations use to help teammates understand how to work together (and one our company uses, too). Each of the three caught my eye not just because they went beyond what we had asked for, but also because they used language and terms unique to our company that showed they understood and cared about how we operate. All three were invited to interview, and two of them made it to the final round. Taking the extra steps to bring attention to your application can be effective for all kinds of jobs. Whether you’re applying for your first job or your next leadership role, a strong, thoughtful application can help you stand out. Here’s what I’ve learned about how to set yourself apart. Treat AI as a beginning, not an end As of late, I’ve seen many job applications that sound almost identical. They begin with the same phrases, like “Due to my extensive experience” or “I am writing to express my sincere interest.” It’s clear that some were written entirely by AI. I’m not against using AI. It can help you organize ideas and polish your language. However, when you rely on it too heavily, your application ends up sounding exactly like everyone else’s. The best candidates may use AI to help support their thinking, but then they bring their own voice into the final version. Show how you think Résumés list what you have done, but strong applications show how you think. A short deck, a one-pager, a video, or a note with specific ideas gives companies insight into how you approach problems and communicate. You don’t need to be a designer or send something flashy (unless you’re applying for a design role!). What matters most is clarity and thoughtfulness. Show off some smart research When someone references details about a company’s mission, product, or values using specific examples, it shows care and effort. When we were searching for our next chief of staff, one of our applicants sent some positive quotes from her clients and called them “quotes from the Cookie Jar.” The Cookie Jar is a term we use for the Slack channel where we put customer testimonials—something we also mention on our company blog. By including our own terminology, it showed she had taken the time to go beyond just the first couple of pages of our website. Use your network when you can It’s still a good idea to lean on the tried-and-true strategy of leveraging your connections. If you know someone at the company you’re applying to, reach out to ask for a recommendation, an introduction, or even a quick tip; second-degree connections, too, might yield an introduction or a good word. And if you don’t have any ins at the company, don’t worry. Tailoring your message, doing deeper research, and writing an application that demonstrates how you think are just as effective for people without inside connections. In some cases, a standout application from someone without any ties can rise even further because it reflects initiative and creative thinking—two skills any team is looking for. View the full article

Early this month, the The President administration proposed cutting more than $1.2 billion dollars of funding for the National Park Service. Meanwhile, new polling found that public parks are beloved by almost all Americans—making them among the least polarized third spaces remaining in the U.S. According to a national study conducted by YouGov and published this week by the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, 89% of adults in a major U.S. city visited a public park in the last year, including 92% of 2024 The President voters and 90% of Harris voters. The study results come at the same time that the president and congressional Republicans are trying to pass a budget that would severely restrict national park staffing and maintenance. That means local parks might play an even greater role in shaping and strengthening communities in the years to come. Unsplash National Parks face potential devastating budget cuts On May 2, the The President administration released its 2026 budget plan. The document includes a proposal to cut millions of dollars of funding to national park sites, especially targeting smaller sites like national monuments and shorelines. “The National Park Service (NPS) responsibilities include a large number of sites that are not ‘National Parks,’ in the traditionally understood sense, many of which receive small numbers of mostly local visitors, and are better categorized and managed as State-level parks,” the budget reads. It adds that there’s “an urgent need” to transfer certain properties to state-level management and “streamline staffing,” though the budget doesn’t allocate any additional funding to states for this purpose. Unsplash Specifically, the budget recommends eliminating $900 million dedicated to the operation of national parks, $73 million to park construction funding, $77 million to recreation and preservation funding, and $197 million to the Historic Preservation Fund. Theresa Pierno, the National Parks Conservation Association president and CEO, called this “the most extreme, unrealistic and destructive NPS budget a president has ever proposed in the agency’s 109-year history” in a press release at the time. Congress still needs to approve a version of the budget, which is currently stalled amid Republican infighting over its contents. In the meantime, the NPS has already taken several recent blows: In February, the Department of the Interior, in conjunction with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, laid off 1,000 probationary employees, including park rangers. Another 700 workers took buyouts at the time. Early this month, the department announced plans to cut another 1,500 NPS staff members. As a result of understaffing, multiple parks, like the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado, have been forced to cut hours and close visitors centers, which is especially problematic given that visitors to national parks hit an all-time high last year. All the while, the The President administration has put public lands themselves at risk by fast-tracking drilling, mining, and logging initiatives in just the first few months of his presidency. Why public parks matter across party lines Trust for Public Land’s new report finds that the majority of Americans have positive associations with their public parks, regardless of political affiliation. The study shows that 79% of U.S. adults report having a park where they feel comfortable and want to visit regularly. In addition, 65% of adults report having a positive conversation in a park with a stranger over the last year, and 70% support keeping schoolyards open for the community after-hours. For those looking to live somewhere with better access to public outdoor space, the report also includes rankings of the nation’s best big-city park systems. This year, Washington, D.C., came in first, followed by Irvine, California; Minneapolis; and Cincinnati. Perhaps most notably among the results, both The President 2024 and Harris 2024 voters agree that they would pay more in taxes to improve the quality of local conservation lands, natural areas, and neighborhood parks—including 58% of The President voters and 85% of Harris voters. “Access to the outdoors is one of the things that we all resonate around,” says Trust for Public Land president and CEO Carrie Besnette Hauser. “It doesn’t matter whether a community leans red or blue.” In last year’s election cycle, Hauser notes, TPL supported 23 ballot measures around parks, public lands, and access to nature—all of which were passed. That included several measures in ultraconservative counties in Florida and Georgia, where constituents approved projects to protect wildlife, improve water quality, and reduce damage from floods. Given the broader trends uncovered both by voting results and by polling, Hauser says the The President administration’s proposed budget cuts to the NPS and nationally managed public lands run “completely counter to what people want,” adding, “Any proposal to continue to undercut [public lands] will actually be a disservice to the American people, because they just don’t support that notion. It would be counter to any polling, any expression of interest around people’s interest in protecting these places, conserving these places, and having access to these places.” View the full article

Fast Company’s Maria Jose Gutierrez Chavez reports on how millennials are taking over TikTok to share memories of life during the 2008 recession—and offer tips on how to survive. View the full article

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It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Junior staff ask me for recommendations I can’t give without reservations I work with a number of support positions filled mostly by recent grads. Although they support my role, they are part of a different company and I have no supervisory role over them. A high percentage of them eventually want to go back to school to do my job and I get asked to fill out recommendation forms a few times a year. Sometimes this is an amazing part of my job — I get to pay forward all the help that I received. But I’m struggling with what to do when my opinion of someone’s work isn’t so glowing. To not mince words, the support staff supervisor is truly terrible at his job. Between this, a toxic culture at their company, and being new to the workforce, many of the support staff have picked up habits that make it hard for me to recommend them without reservation. To give a couple examples, I’ve learned to not worry about some of them until they are a full 30 minutes late (meaning I’ve been doing their job and mine for the first 30 minutes of the day; I’m all for flexible time when coverage isn’t part of the job, but that is definitely not the case here). Anything their supervisor says is viewed as stupid and something that can be ignored and mocked, from the actually asinine to normal work requests. The recommendation forms will ask me to rank something like their punctuality or respect for management, items obviously a little hard to give glowing scores on. I feel conflicted. None of this is happening in a vacuum; they have often never had a job with a good culture and good management, and a lot of these behaviors have become normalized within their group. On the other hand, my field is small and I don’t want to vouch for someone who ends up not outgrowing the toxicity. I know from religiously reading your column that one (good!) piece of advice would be to offer to mentor them. The internal politics make that difficult — their company would view me as overstepping, my company would view me as spending time and resources that their company should be handling, and, honestly, I already do so much of their supervisor’s job that the idea of doing even more grates a bit. I would still be willing to try to help, though, if there is a way that is appropriate to my role. I don’t want to give up writing recommendations completely — some people are truly exceptional. Am I being too harsh, and, if not, is there a good script for turning down recommendation requests from peers? You aren’t being too harsh. In a small field, your reputation is on the line if you recommend someone who turns out to carry these same bad habits to their next job. But I do think there’s room to do something here! The key is to do it before you’re at the point where they’re asking you for recommendations. It doesn’t need to be full-on mentoring, for all the reasons you mentioned. But you could pull these staff members aside individually when you start noticing problems and say something like, “This isn’t something I plan to bring up again, but I want to give you a heads-up: a lot of people in your role end up asking me for recommendations to go back to school for X, and when I write recommendations I’m asked about things like punctuality and respect for management. I see the tough management situation you’re dealing with; I’m not blind to that. But I want to be up-front that if you ever do need a recommendation from me, I’m going to get asked about that stuff and have to be honest, and in some cases haven’t felt like I could write the recommendation at all. I never want to be explaining this to someone for the first time when they’re asking for a recommendation, and I think it’s fairer to say it early on while you can still do something with that information. It’s completely up to you what you do with it! I just want it out there so no one is surprised by it later.” 2. How do I get a security tag removed from a purchase years ago? What’s the most professional way to approach a retail employee about something that would likely make you look suspicious? What happened was that almost four years ago, I brought this great bra from Target. I went through the self-checkout line and was distracted by pleasant small talk with an employee. It wasn’t until I got home that I realized that I never got the big red anti-shoplifting thing-a-ma-bob removed, and it somehow didn’t trigger the door alarm at the front. I would’ve driven back to the store to have it removed, but it was late at night at the time. Through a combination of social anxiety and then-untreated ADHD, I never went back to the store with the bra. I’ve moved to a different state since this had happened, and it’s only compounded my problem. I re-discovered the bra with the old receipt in storage box this week. The receipt was from November 22, 2021. I would love to just walk into my nearest Target and have the tag removed, but I can’t think of any way to verify to customer service that I bought the bra honestly. (I’m the type of person who gets nervous when I leave a store without buying anything because employees probably assume that I stole something.) How do I approach an employee about this? What should I do if they bring in security if they’re suspicious? Should the old receipt from a different state be enough verification, or should I do something else? I’d love to hear from people with recent retail experience on this, but I think you can just bring it in with the receipt and say, “I know it’s ridiculous that it’s been several years, but I bought this bra at a Target in Rhode Island, here’s my receipt, and it still has the security tag on it. I put it aside to bring it back to have the tag removed and then completely forgot about it until recently. Is there any way to get it removed now, since I do have the receipt?” In other words, just lay it out for them! You say you don’t know how to verify that you bought it honestly, but your receipt does that — or at least it does that as much as any receipt ever does. (It’s also possible that they don’t even sell that bra anymore, which would further lend your account credence, although I don’t even think that will matter.) So just own it — “I did this weird thing, can you help?” (I feel like a full quarter of my customer service interactions involve me saying some version of “I did this weird thing, can you help?”) I think they’ll just remove the tag for you. Even if they can’t because it was years earlier, they’re not likely to accuse you of shoplifting when you have a receipt in hand. But if they do, you’ll explain it, and that will probably take care of it! Worst case scenario, they’ll say “this is extremely irregular and we are confiscating this bra,” and you will be no worse off than you are now, except that you will hopefully be able to laugh at this snafu the whole way home. 3. Work transitions when someone is told to leave immediately A manager on my team (not my supervisor) left the company unexpectedly about a month ago. It’s my understanding he was asked to leave immediately once the company learned he had taken a job with a direct competitor. This is pretty standard in my field and not the first time I’ve seen it happen, although it is the first time I’ve been so directly affected. Because he was asked to leave so abruptly, there was no time to properly transition his ongoing work. He was in a lead role on two key projects, and the rest of us have been scrambling to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. It’s a bit embarrassing to have to ask clients for information a second or third time if it was something they had already discussed with him. We have access to his work files and emails, which is helpful, but not everything was documented in an easy-to-find way. We are prohibited from reaching out to him with questions, and even if someone did, he is under no obligation to answer. Is there a better way for companies to handle sudden departures? I realize this can happen in any number of circumstances, like if someone has an unexpected health or family crisis. But, do you think companies should forcefully escort out employees who take jobs with competitors? Do you have any suggestions for the people left in the wake? It’s not unusual in some industries to have people leave immediately if they’re going to work for a competitor, although of course if someone wants to take trade secrets, contact lists, etc., they can just do that before they give notice. Part of the thinking is that once the move is official, the person will have divided loyalties (and perhaps the preponderance of that loyalty will lay with the new employer) and it’s better to get the person out of the information flow as soon as possible — no point in them continuing to hear details about strategy, etc. — but it’s a bit much. As for picking up the pieces after the person is gone, all you can really do is what you and your coworkers have been doing: going back over some of his tracks, asking for information again, and so forth. It doesn’t look great to clients, but there’s no other real way to handle it once the person is gone. 4. Firing someone right before her honeymoon I am firing one of my team members due to a reorg in my team and low performance. She is getting married in three weeks and just came back from a long-term sick leave of four months. Is it better to get it done ASAP or to wait for her to be back from her honeymoon? I’d do it ASAP because knowing she’s out of a job might change the spending decisions she makes on/leading up to her honeymoon. It’s not going to feel great to either of you, but I think it’s fairer to her to have all the information as soon as she can have it. (I do think reasonable people could disagree on this one, though.) However, the fact that she just returned from a long-term sick leave introduces some legal complications (like whether it will look like she’s being let go because of the sick leave), so you should consult with a lawyer or at least your HR department before doing anything. The law doesn’t stop you from firing or laying someone off who’s been on sick leave, but you want to make sure you can document that the reasons for the decision had nothing to do with the leave. 5. Is this bad LinkedIn advice? I have a family member who’s been laid off (not government or nonprofit but an industry affected by DOGE cuts). Their work paid for a job placement company. They told me that the placement company told them to create a LinkedIn profile listing as a current role that’s “seeking role in…” The placement company claims recruiters search for who’s currently working and that’s how to still come up in searches. It sounds to me like bad advice given by people who aren’t actually hiring managers. I’m concerned if the family member follows this advice it would work against them, but is it not a big deal? It’s going to look a bit cheesy/salesy and I wouldn’t recommend doing it, but it’s not likely to be held against them, especially if they’re otherwise a good candidate. The post when you can’t give a good recommendation, firing someone right before her honeymoon, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager. View the full article

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