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After years of AI disrupting industries and streamlining repetitive workflows, the technology is now poised to transform animation. In 2024, director and writer Tom Paton’s AiMation Studios released Where the Robots Grow, a fully AI-animated feature film. Everything from animation and voice acting to music was generated using AI, at a cost of just $8,000 per minute—totaling around $700,000 for the 87-minute production. While IMDB reviewers criticized the film as “soulless and uninspired,” it proved that AI can deliver full-length animated features at a fraction of traditional budgets. But it’s not just filmmakers driving this shift. Indie game developers want to prototype characters and worlds in hours, not weeks. TikTok and social media creators are looking to animate original characters without studio resources. Major brands, too, seek emotionally resonant storytelling without monthslong timelines or ballooning 3D animation costs. The challenge: most 3D animation tools are still slow, technical, and expensive. Hoping to remove these barriers, a team of developers from OpenAI, Google, Pixar, and Riot Games launched Cartwheel, an AI-powered 3D animation platform. Cartwheel promises to make high-quality 3D character animation 100 times faster, simpler, and more affordable. Users can record motion with a smartphone, describe a scene with a text prompt, or pull from a library of expressive 3D movements. The platform’s AI transforms input into production-ready animations. Artists can refine them in Cartwheel or export into tools like Unity, Unreal Engine, Maya, or Blender—without disrupting their pipeline. The startup was cofounded by Andrew Carr, a former OpenAI scientist who helped develop Codex and ChatGPT’s code generation, and Jonathan Jarvis, former creative director at Google Creative Lab and founder of the animation studio Universal Patterns. The two met after OpenAI, intrigued by Jarvis’s concept for a generative animation tool, introduced him to Carr, who had just left the company to explore how AI could make animation more accessible. “I had a unique job, where I used animation to share complex research concepts clearly within Google, and make prototypes that couldn’t yet be built by software. Andrew always wanted to animate, and later invented a way to ‘talk’ to Blender, a popular open-source 3D software, with computer code,” says Jarvis. “We always wanted to build tools to help others get ideas moving and sensed the potential to animate in new ways using gen AI, that it would be centered around creative control.” After two years in stealth, Cartwheel is gaining traction. The company recently closed a $10 million funding round led by Craft Ventures, with support from WndrCo (Jeffrey Katzenberg), Khosla Ventures, Accel, Runway, and Tirta Ventures (Ben Feder), bringing total funding to $15.6 million. Over 60,000 animators, developers, and storytellers joined Cartwheel’s wait-list during stealth. Early adopters from DreamWorks, Duolingo, and Roblox are already using the platform. “All of our AI models are developed in-house. Behind the scenes, we’ve employed careful software engineering to ensure that all the pieces of our system work together in a way that can be plugged into existing animation pipelines,” Carr says. “Ensuring that the generated animation is properly scaled, moves naturally, and remains consistent throughout has been one of our biggest challenges.” A Creator-First AI Animation ToolWhile the generative AI field is increasingly crowded, Cartwheel positions itself differently: not as a replacement for artists, but as a tool that amplifies their creativity. “Animators and creatives don’t care if motion is generated, done by hand, motion-captured, or drawn from a library. They just want it to move to tell their story, make their game, or get their job done,” Jarvis says. “Our motion models can generate a lot of useful animation quickly, but they can’t do everything. That’s why we love a hybrid approach. Computers are great at finding patterns, but it’s the artist who brings the soul.” A key differentiator for Cartwheel is its team. Carr and Jarvis are joined by industry veterans with experience in film, games, and interactive design. Catherine “Cat” Hicks, former Pixar animation director on Coco, Inside Out, and Toy Story 3, serves as head of Animation Innovation. Neil Helm, head of Interactive Animation, worked on crowd systems at Pixar for Turning Red, Lightyear, Up, and Inside Out 2. The platform’s design is shaped by Steven Ziadie, former Sony and Riot designer, while production is led by Buthaina Mahmud, who helped define Unity’s real-time animation workflows and developed shaders used in the Spider-Verse films. “We reached out, and some reached out to us. Over time, we realized we all shared the goal to make storytelling faster, easier, and more powerful,” Carr and Jarvis tell Fast Company. “Culture is being shaped in increasingly dynamic, interactive, and immersive spaces like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox—all animation-driven experiences. We’re building tools for where animation is headed, and that’s resonating with industry veterans.” User feedback has helped shape Cartwheel’s interface. “We began with a focus on text to animation. In beta, we learned that while that’s compelling in many situations, often folks want to browse motions for inspiration, use video reference, or act out the motion themselves—so we’ve moved to a multimodal interface,” Carr says. What’s Next for Cartwheel?High-quality animation data remains scarce, with most data sets proprietary or lacking in diversity and detail. To address this, Cartwheel is using synthetic data—AI-generated animations that mimic real-world motion—to train and refine its models. “The next generation of AI companies has to find and curate the hard data types, and do the hard work to refine it and make it useful to people in that field. That’s where the value is,” Carr says. “While at OpenAI, I worked on the science of data quality and was able to generate millions of dollars of model improvements with just a few lines of code. We are following the same path at Cartwheel to ensure we produce the styles, qualities, and delightfulness in our motion data that artists need.” With fresh funding, Cartwheel plans to deepen R&D, grow its team, and bring its platform to broader markets. “Over the next 12 months, we aim to be a catalyst, enabling both large and small animation projects to flourish,” Jarvis says. “Ensuring ethically sourced data that empowers artists is fundamental to our approach. We are a team of artists building tools for artists.” View the full article

PPC is getting pricier and harder to measure. With branded search now key to media effectiveness, this piece outlines how to shift your strategy accordingly. The post Why Brand Advertising Matters For Paid Media Performance appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Ma Yansong is gesturing at a spiraling staircase inside the atrium of a building. The founder of MAD Architects—the Chinese firm behind the soon-to-open Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles—is in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, to inaugurate the opening of his first museum in Europe, and he is talking about movement. Of forms, yes, but mostly of people. The museum, called Fenix, sits on the edge of Rotterdam’s historic port, which was also the first Chinatown in continental Europe. It was here, from the banks of the River Maas, where millions of emigrants—Albert Einstein included—boarded ships toward North America in search of better opportunities. And it is here, in the building that once housed the world’s largest harbor storage warehouse for the Holland America Line, that Yansong has come to reflect on the meaning of migration. Fenix is likely the first art museum in the world dedicated to the politically loaded theme of migration. Exhibitions stretch across two long, airy floors inside a century-old warehouse that was purchased by local art and culture foundation Droom en Daad in 2018, then restored by local architects from the design firm Bureau Polderman. MAD’s tangled staircase connects both floors, then swoops out through the roof into a panoramic platform that offers sprawling views of the city. “I think it’s an architectural element, but it’s also a metaphor; it has a storytelling function,” Yansong says. “It’s not about numbers” Fenix is opening at a time in which migrants around the world are being vilified, humiliated, deported. The EU has been hardening its migration policy for years, and hard-right parties are fast gaining ground—in the Netherlands as well. Since President Donald The President took office, he has shifted nearly every aspect of U.S immigration policy to constrict regular immigration pathways, deport primarily black and brown immigrants living in the U.S. regardless of their legal status or criminal history, and instill fear among those who remain. By comparison, the team behind Fenix is approaching migration with empathy. “We show that migration is not about numbers or facts, but it’s really about people,” says Anne Kremers, director of Fenix. “There’s a migration story to tell in every family, so that really is our angle: to show that we’re all human.” The underlying theme is perhaps best illustrated by a giant sculpture of a sun hanging over the lobby, which is here to suggest that we all live under the same sun. The galleries showcase personal histories of identity and migration from around the world: a Chinese talisman from a queer man who fled his native China for the Netherlands, and a life-size MTA bus with various characters made of wood. One exhibition makes the argument that we are all one big family of migrants. Another lets you journey through a labyrinth of 2,000 suitcases collected from across the Netherlands, the United States, and Canada. A metaphor for migration In the atrium, Yansong has articulated his own interpretation of migration in the form of a loopy, sinuous stairway that has been dubbed Tornado. This star attraction is actually two staircases that meet at two separate junctions before ushering visitors onto the roof. For Yansong, these junctions are symbolic of the journey a migrant takes. “You have to choose,” he says. In pure Rotterdam style, the stairs were craned into place after being transported by barge. The structure is clad in 297 highly polished, stainless steel panels—each a different size and made in Groningen, in northern Netherlands. The steps themselves are made of a Norwegian wood called Kebony, which develops a natural silver-gray patina over time and resembles the wood on a ship deck. On the roof, when you lean over the balustrade, you can almost feel the flurry of emotions that emigrants must have felt when waving to their loved ones, themselves standing on the nearby “pier of tears.” (A pill-shaped elevator encased in a glass cylinder provides an accessible route and culminates to a similar experience when you emerge onto the roof.) Sometimes, architects designing art museums choose to scale back the architecture in order to let the art speak for itself. Here, Yansong opted for a design that bolsters it. Some will inevitably find the steel too impersonal in a museum that is filled with such intimate, vulnerable stories. But as visitors walk around the atrium and climb up the steps, they will see one another reflected in the mirrored surface, which—smudges be damned—is designed to reinforce the shared experience of the moment. Designing with emotion MAD is no stranger to cultural buildings, among them the Harbin Opera House in the province of Heilongjiang and the China Philharmonic Concert Hall in Beijing. But Fenix is the studio’s first cultural project in Europe, and the first European museum designed by a Chinese firm—an achievement that Yansong has long yearned for. “I always wanted this opportunity,” he says of the chance to design a museum in Europe. “It’s a journey for me, you know, to understand other people. I think that’s the most exciting part, for I go to a different place and try to understand.” Yansong grew up in Beijing, in the traditional hutong alleyways that would later be demolished as part of the country’s rush to modernize. During his early 20s, he studied at Yale, then worked in London (under Zaha Hadid) before returning to his native country. Since then, Yansong has become part of the second generation of Chinese architects revolutionizing architecture after the country opened up to private practice in the 1990s. In 2012, he gained international fame with his curvaceous “Marilyn Monroe Towers” in Mississauga, Canada, which led to other international commissions like an apartment complex in Paris, or most recently the One River North apartment block in Denver. But his Chinese background never seems to stray too far. “I think the fundamental difference between China and the Western world is the Chinese use more emotion,” he told me. In Fenix, like with every building, Yansong began with a hand sketch. “You capture an emotion at one moment,” he says, “and I try to keep that until the end—not to change it or make it perfect.” To him, the museum is a poetic interpretation of the migration that his own people have experienced—”the Chinese go everywhere,” he says—but also of migration as a whole. “Movement is universal.” View the full article

A century ago, Guccio Gucci opened a boutique in Florence, Italy, that sold high-end leather luggage to well-heeled travelers. He infused his brand with all kinds of unique design elements that would become iconic, including the double-G insignia and bamboo handles. Guccio’s oldest son, Aldo, would go on to transform the label into one of the best-known luxury brands in the world, alongside Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Prada. Aldo’s granddaughter, Alexandra Gucci Zarini, heard a lot about the origins of her family’s business around the dining table when she was growing up. She wanted to follow in her great-grandfather’s footsteps by becoming a fashion designer. But by the time she was in design school, the Guccis no longer controlled their namesake brand. In 1993, the family sold its stake to a Bahrain-based company that took it public. By 1999, the French luxury conglomerate Kering (formerly Pinault-Printemps-Redoute) had acquired a controlling 42% stake in Gucci for $3 billion. Within five years, that stake grew to 99.4%. “I wanted to be just like my grandfather,” Zarini says. “I wanted to create something long-lasting and meaningful. But my family wasn’t involved in the company anymore and so I went on with my life.” Zarini went on to do other things, including working at a family office and an art gallery, before becoming a stay-at-home mother. But two years ago, Zarini decided it was finally time for her to rekindle her dream: She cofounded her own handbag brand, called AGCF (which stands for Alexandra Gucci Creative Framework) with her husband, Josef Zarini. It produces luxury handbags priced between $1,000 and $3,000, along with small leather goods and jewelry. She launched her newest handbag collection, which features structured silhouettes that are subtly reminiscent of her great-grandfather’s original designs, earlier this spring. In many ways, the past two years have been a chance for Zarini and her husband to test the waters with their nascent brand—and now they’re ready to scale. They’re beginning to explore partnerships with department stores and other retailers around the world. Zarini’s goal is to appeal to a new kind of luxury customer, one who prefers quiet luxury to big brands. But there are also some customers who long for the old Gucci and are drawn to AGCF’s design language. “There’s a little hint of Gucci there, but it’s also a distinctly different brand,” Zarini says. “It’s a brand reimagined for today.” And indeed, AGCF provides luxury shoppers an alternative to Gucci, which is currently on a downward spiral. Last year, Gucci revenue declined by 23% from the year before to $8.6 billion. This weakened Kering’s earnings, which were down 12% to $17.8 billion. This year, Gucci’s first-quarter sales continued to tumble by 25%. In March, Gucci announced that it had appointed Demna, the creative director of Balenciaga for the past 10 years, to become its new artistic director, starting in July 2025. Given that Demna is known for pursuing the avant-garde, rather than the traditional, AGCF may offer a compelling option to fans of old-school Gucci. A 21st-Century Label Over the decades, there were others in the Gucci family who launched their own fashion lines, including two of Aldo’s sons, Giorgio and Paolo, in the 1960s and 1970s. (Those brands were ultimately absorbed into the Gucci Group and acquired by Kering.) But Zarini’s vision for her brand is different from those of her uncles. Zarini realized she had the opportunity to think about what would be different if Guccio Gucci had founded his brand today, and recognizes that the 21st-century consumer expects different things from luxury brands. For one thing, the planet wasn’t in crisis a century ago, so Gucci wasn’t built on sustainable principles. Conversely, Zarini has built AGCF with a focus on more eco-friendly materials and manufacturing processes. The brand sources its leather from a tannery in Florence that is audited by the Leather Working Group, and its small jewelry collection is made using recycled metals and lab-grown diamonds. We also live in an era of fast fashion, where trends shift quickly, creating a culture of overconsumption that is bad for the environment. Even luxury brands are guilty of cultivating trends to encourage people to buy more and more. Zarini has focused on designing bags that are minimal and classic, so they don’t go out of style. “Even the colors are going to stay the same,” she says. “Our goal is to create products that could have been worn 30 years ago and you’ll still wear 30 years from now.” More importantly, Zarini wants her brand to be associated with a social cause. She has spent her life focused on fighting against the exploitation of children. Zarini herself is a survivor. In 2020, she brought a lawsuit against three of her family members, describing years of sexual abuse perpetrated by her former stepfather, Joseph Ruffal, and complicity from her mother and grandmother. Zarini wants to use AGCF as a platform for raising awareness about child abuse. AGCF was founded as a B Corporation, and it donates 20% of its profits to support grassroots charitable organizations that are committed to advocating for children. She believes a fashion brand is a particularly good vehicle for telling this story because it’s also part of an industry that exploits children. “We know that the fashion industry relies on child labor,” she says. “And young models are taken advantage of.” Paying Homage to Aldo Gucci Zarini is building a luxury brand for the 21st century. Even so, she’s still deeply inspired by her great-grandfather’s work, and her products have silhouettes and motifs that are distantly related to the Gucci archives. AGCF seems designed to appeal to Gucci fans who are more drawn to the brand’s heritage than to what it has become in recent years. “There’s a subtle hint of heritage there,” Zarini says. “It ties back to my grandfather.” Zarini has created simple, structured silhouettes for her bags, some of which are reminiscent of classic Gucci pieces. The rounded shape of the Ascot bag, for instance, is similar to Gucci’s bamboo handle bag that was launched in 1947. The Chelsea crossbody bag has a trapezoid shape that is similar to the Gucci horsebit bag that came out in 1955. “If you look from afar, you might see the Gucci vibe,” she says. “But I’m interested in bringing in that heritage without too closely mimicking it, because I don’t want to ride the coattails of the Gucci name.” AGCF launched quietly two years ago. It sells its products online and from a storefront on Rodeo Drive. This is also a tribute to her grandfather, who first opened a store there in 1968. This was an important step for Gucci because it introduced Hollywood stars to the label, helping turn the brand into a global sensation. “Aldo Gucci was one of the first to open a store on Rodeo Drive, and turn the street into what it is today,” says Josef Zarini. “I think it’s important to remember him because he is a Gucci that the world doesn’t know very well.” View the full article

There’s a cost to bots crawling your websites and there’s a social contract between search engines and website owners, where search engines add value by sending referral traffic to websites. This is what keeps most websites from blocking search engines…Read more ›View the full article

Spring is officially here. It’s beautiful outside, and let me guess: You are spending all of your time indoors. Don’t worry, you’re in good company. On average people spend 90% of their time indoors. Not to mention that the other 10% is probably mostly spent in cars or other built environments. Workers in cubicles spend eight hours every day in a small gray box, separated from human interaction, marinating in stagnant air and fluorescent lighting. It’s cramped, uncomfortable, and unhealthy. One 2018 study found that workers in cubicles were 31.83% less active and reported being 9.10% more stressed at the office compared with workers in open bench seating. Not to mention that over time, chronic stress can lead to a host of negative health effects such as weight gain, trouble concentrating, irritability, lower rates of healing, and high blood pressure. In contrast, the field of biophilic design aims to create spaces that optimize productivity and well-being. In the roughly 300,000 years humans have been on Earth, offices have only really been around the past few hundred years. Biophilic architecture is based on the concept that humans evolved in natural environments, and because of this, we feel the best when these factors are mimicked. Incorporation or mimicry of the natural world into our built spaces can greatly improve peoples’ health, happiness, and productivity. Researchers have found that harnessing biophilic design can lead to powerful effects, such as buildings that make employees more productive, hospitals that heal people faster, and apartment complexes that reduce crime. However, you don’t need to invest billions of dollars to access the benefits of biophilic design—research has found that even small changes can have big impacts. Here are a few simple ways that you can leverage biophilic design in your workspaces to improve your well-being and productivity. Unsplash Start bringing plants to work The first step to creating a more biophilic workplace can be as simple as bringing a few plants to work. According to a field study published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal in 2023, adding plants into workplaces without views of greenery significantly increased employee workplace satisfaction and sense of privacy, modulated humidity, and improved opinions on workplace attractiveness, while decreasing health-related complaints. According to biophilic design consultant Sonja Bochart, “Even the smallest plant can make a difference.” In fact, according to a 2020 study, researchers found that 27% of participants saw a significant reduction of pulse rate when staring at a small plant on their desk, in comparison to a blank desktop monitor during breaks. Bochart especially recommends bringing in plants in an array of sizes, which “provides variety and is very pleasing to the mind and to the brain.” Research from NASA has also found that low-light and low-maintenance house plants, such as snake plants and spider plants, are great at producing oxygen and cleaning air pollutants. Unsplash Prioritize natural lighting Consistent exposure to natural sunlight can have a powerful impact on people’s health and productivity. One study found that workers in offices lit by sunlight reported an 84% decrease in symptoms such as headaches, eyestrain, and blurred vision. Bochart says that the benefits of sunlight exposure can also follow you home. Sunlight helps set people’s “circadian rhythms, which help our mood, help our development, and help our sleep and wake cycles,” she says. If you have some control over the design of your workplace, Ryan Mullenix, a partner at the international architecture and design firm NBBJ, recommends taking “opportunities to control one’s environment by adding dimmers to lighting and taking advantage of cross-ventilation [if there are operable windows] when the weather is nice.” Bochart also recommends working near windows as much as possible, which provides sunlight while also allowing people to connect with “nonrhythmic, sensory stimulation” happening outside, such as the weather, change of seasons, and animal activity. “That stimulation sensory system is really rich,” she says. If it isn’t possible to work near a window, Bochart recommends to “try to take frequent breaks and go outside, or spend time in a break room or other space with a window.” Unsplash Consider swapping pop radio for nature sounds According to a report by sustainability consulting firm Terrapin Bright Green, “office noise, especially prevalent within open-plan offices, is reportedly the factor that is most disruptive to indoor environmental quality and has been shown to increase stress and presenteeism.” Listening to nature noises could be a handy solution. One study found that listening to nature sounds after completing stressful tasks led to a 9% to 37% decrease in one’s skin conductance level, a measure of the body’s stress response. Unsplash Embrace natural patterns and decor Bochart recommends seeking out natural fractal patterns for decor, which are “patterns within nature that are repeated on different scales . . . found in almost in every natural item.” “Science is telling us that when we’re exposed to a multitude of fractal patterns, especially at a medium density, we get positive stimulation . . . so we’re able to process information faster and in a more relaxed way,” she says. “I even have some seashells within my environment.” Mullenix recommends considering hanging up some “nature-inspired art—photos or paintings that show green forests, waterfalls, flowering plants, etc., and are rotated each season. Even images of nature can provide a boost when the real thing is hard to come by.” Unsplash Build movement into your day Humans are not built to sit all the time. Lora Cavuoto, head of the University at Buffalo’s Ergonomics and Biomechanics Lab, says that staying seated at a desk for hours at a time without breaks can lead to problems like muscles, tendons, and ligaments wearing down. Cavuoto recommends building in regular breaks to “get up and go get water.” It allows you to stay hydrated, she says, “but it also gets you out of your seat. Get up and go to the bathroom or get coffee.” View the full article

Diversity training is more effective when it’s personalized, according to my new research in the peer-reviewed journal Applied Psychology. As a professor of management, I partnered with Andrew Bryant, who studies social marketing, to develop an algorithm that identifies people’s “personas,” or psychological profiles, as they participate in diversity training in real time. We embedded this algorithm into a training system that dynamically assigned participants to tailored versions of the training based on their personas. We found that this personalized approach worked especially well for one particular group: the “skeptics.” When skeptics received training tailored to them, they responded more positively—and expressed a stronger desire to support their organizations’ diversity efforts—than those who received the same training as everyone else. In the age of social media, where just about everything is customized and personalized, this sounds like a no-brainer. But with diversity training, where the one-size-fits-all approach still rules, this is radical. In most diversity trainings, all participants hear the same message, regardless of their preexisting beliefs and attitudes toward diversity. Why would we assume that this would work? Thankfully, the field is realizing the importance of a learner-centric approach. Researchers have theorized that several diversity trainee personas exist. These include the resistant trainee, who feels defensive; the overzealous trainee, who is hyper-engaged; and the anxious trainee, who is uncomfortable with diversity topics. Our algorithm, based on real-world data, identified two personas with empirical backing: skeptics and believers. This is proof of concept that trainee personas aren’t just theoretical—they’re real, and we can detect them in real time. But identifying personas is just the beginning. What comes next is tailoring the message. To learn more about tailoring, we looked to the theory of jujitsu persuasion. In jujitsu, fighters don’t strike. They use their opponent’s energy to win. Similarly, in jujitsu persuasion, you yield to the audience, not challenge it. You use the audience’s beliefs, knowledge, and values as leverage to make change. In terms of diversity training, this doesn’t mean changing what the message is. It means changing how the message is framed. For example, the skeptics in our study still learned about the devastating harms of workplace bias. But they were more persuaded when the message was framed as a “business case” for diversity rather than a “moral justice” message. The “business case” message is tailored to skeptics’ practical orientation. If diversity training researchers and practitioners embrace tailoring diversity training to different trainee personas, more creative approaches to tailoring will surely be designed. Why it matters The The President administration is leading a backlash against diversity initiatives, and a backlash to that backlash is emerging. This isn’t entirely new: Diversity has long been a contentious issue. Organizations like the Pew Research Center, the United Nations, and others have consistently reported a conservative-liberal split, as well as a male-female split, around diversity. Diversity training has done little to bridge these gaps. For one, diversity training is often ineffective at reducing bias and improving diversity metrics in organizations. Many organizations treat diversity training efforts as a box-checking exercise. Worse, it’s not unusual for such efforts to backfire. Our research offers a solution: Identify the trainee personas represented in your audience and customize your training accordingly. This is what social media platforms like Facebook do: They learn about people in real time and then tailor the content they see. To illustrate the importance of tailoring diversity training specifically, consider how differently skeptics and believers think. One skeptic in our study—which focused on gender diversity training—said: “The issue isn’t as great as feminists try to force us to believe. Women simply focus on other things in life; men focus on career first.” In contrast, a believer said: “In my own organization, all CEOs and managers are men. Women are not respected or promoted very often, if at all.” Clearly, trainees are different. Tailoring the training to different personas, jujitsu style, may be how we change hearts and minds. What still isn’t known Algorithms are only as good as the data they rely on. Our algorithm identified personas based on information the trainees reported about themselves. More objective data, such as data culled from human resources systems, may identify personas more reliably. Algorithms also improve as they learn over time. As artificial intelligence tools become more widely used in HR, persona-identifying algorithms will get smarter and faster. The training itself needs to get smarter. A onetime training session, even a tailored one, stands less of a chance at long-term change compared with periodic nudges. Nudges are bite-sized interventions that are unobtrusively delivered over time. Now, think about tailored nudges. They could be a game changer. The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work. Radostina Purvanova is a professor of management and organizational leadership at Drake University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

Google's AIO is wiping out mid-funnel user behavior data. Here are effective responses to zero-click SERPs for SEO. The post 30-Year SEO Pro Shows How To Adapt To Google’s Zero-Click Search appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

The buzz in Silicon Valley around AI agents has many asking: What’s real and what’s hype? Box’s cofounder and CEO, Aaron Levie, helps decipher between fact and fiction, breaking down the fast-paced evolution of agents and their impact on the future of enterprise AI. Plus, Levie unpacks how AI is really being adopted in the workplace and what it takes to legitimately build an AI-first organization. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I talked with Marc Benioff at Salesforce several months ago about his embrace of AI agents, but the use of his agents hasn’t quite taken off the way he hoped. I know you launched Box AI Studio to help organizations build their own custom AI agents. I’m curious how that’s going. So far, it’s either at or exceeding our expectations on all the use cases that customers are coming up with. So we’re pretty blown away about what we’re starting to see. We’re still very early days to be clear, but the rate of adoption is going fairly exponential, and the imagination that customers now have on this is blowing us away. I’ve rarely been in a customer conversation, either one-on-one or at a dinner, where I’m not hearing about a new idea that the customer has for Box AI that we did not already have on a whiteboard. And what’s exciting—and this is counterintuitive, I think, to a lot of folks outside of AI—you initially sort of see AI in sci-fi and sometimes in news headlines, The New York Times or whatever, as like, “Okay, it’s going after jobs. It’s going to replace these types of work.” From my anecdotes, I’ve had at least 100 interactions with customers in the first quarter of this year, the vast majority, 80%, I’m guessing, the bulk of the time of AI use case kind of conversation was spent on things that the company didn’t do before AI. So it wasn’t, “Hey, I want to take this type of work, and I want AI to go replace it.” There’s a type of work that we never get around to in our company. I want AI to go and do that, because finally, it’s affordable for me to deploy AI agents at the kind of work that we could not fund before. It’s opening up people’s imagination to, “Hey, I’m like sitting on 50,000 customer contracts. What if I could have an AI agent go around all those customer contracts, and figure out which customers have the highest propensity to buy this next product from me?” And this is not something that they would have people ever do. So it’s not replacing anybody’s job. They never said, “Oh, let’s have 50 people go read all the contracts again.” It just never happened. But now, if it only costs them $5,000 for an AI agent to go do that, they would do that all day long. And then guess what? When they get those insights, they’re probably going to now have more work for the humans in their business to go and do as a result of this, that hopefully, if it’s effective, drives more growth in their business—which then causes even more productivity, and then ultimately hiring and growth. And so it’s not kind of everybody’s first instinct, but most of the use cases that we’re hearing about are things where, “Because it is now affordable to deploy AI at a problem, I’m actually expanding the set of things my company can go do, and then the work that we can now execute on.” And that’s not only very, I think, exciting, but I think it’s going to be the default case for most AI adoption in the enterprise. In some of the conversations that I have, it feels almost like some of the businesses and leaders, they don’t really know what they’re looking for from AI. And hearing you, it sounds a little bit like you have to think about your mindset on it a little differently to open up and find those things that are most valuable to you. Yes. Yeah, every business is going to be different because some of the upside is a virtue of your business model. What are the core parts of your business model that, as a result of access to information, can change or be modified or improved? If I am a law firm, I could either reduce my cost, because now AI is going to do more of the, let’s say, paralegal work, or I could expand my service offerings, because now, all of a sudden, my team can venture into more domains because they can take their expertise and use AI to augment that. The default assumption is, “Oh, no, it’s going to go after the hours of a law firm.” But once this technology hits an individual business, they can actually decide to expand their customer base. They can go after, previously, customers that would’ve been unprofitable for them to serve. So these industries are not as static and zero-sum. The software industry . . . on one hand, everybody says, “Okay, if AI can do coding, then will we hire fewer engineers?” And in general, my argument is that we’ll probably hire as many—if not more—engineers if AI can get really good at coding, because what will happen is the productivity rate of our engineer goes up, which means that we can then ascribe a higher degree of value per engineer in the company. So your ROI is even better on each of those positions? Exactly. And take something like sales. If we can make a sales rep able to sell 5% more, because we give them better data, and they can prepare for a customer meeting that much better, or they can understand exactly the best pitch because they have access to all of Box’s data and they can ask it questions, I’m not going to just bank that as 5% more profit. Because what will happen is we’re going to internally, in some planning session, we’re going to get greedy, and we’re going to say, “Wait a second, that 5% gain that we just got in sales productivity, what if we reinvested that back into the sales team to grow even faster and get that much more market share?” And so you have an entire economy of companies making those individual decisions of, “Do you bank the profit, or do you use it to go and accelerate growth?” And what we tend to know from history is that the companies that get too greedy on the profit side, you just end up leaving yourself vulnerable to being outflanked by competitors. So capitalism has a pretty convenient way of almost driving the sort of productivity gains of these types of innovations to get reinvested back into the business. You’ve been talking about running Box in an AI-first way, and encouraging other leaders to do it. Are you like Shopify and Duolingo, who’ve announced that staffers have to justify anything that’s not AI-produced? What does AI-first mean? Yeah. So for us, AI-first means that we want to use AI as a means of driving an acceleration of the customer outcome, an acceleration of decision-making, an acceleration of building new features. So just think about it as mostly a metric of speed. On one hand, you could think about AI as going after like a massive work, and you could say AI is going to remove some part of that massive work and do it instantly, so the massive work goes down, or think about work as a timeline, and not a mass. All we’re doing is trying to get through each step so that way, we can get to the next step and so on. And everything’s faster. And everything’s faster. So I want to have us use AI to move faster down the timeline, not just purely to reduce the total mass of work that we’re doing. There’s probably one pronounced difference versus, let’s say, the Duolingo memo. There’s some emerging idea, which is sort of you have to prove that AI can’t do this thing for you to get then head count, and our general instinct is actually the opposite. If you can prove that you can use AI, then that’s actually when you will get head count, because what we want is we want the dollars of the business to go back into the areas that are the increasing areas of productivity gain, because those areas will then be higher ROI for us over time. View the full article

Disruption to widely used markets data service disrupts auction of UK government debtView the full article

People often think of disasters as great equalizers. After all, a tornado, wildfire, or hurricane doesn’t discriminate against those in its path. But the consequences for those affected are not “one-size-fits-all.” That’s evident in recent storms, and in the U.S. Census Bureau’s national household surveys showing who is displaced by disasters. Overall, the Census Bureau estimates that more than 4.3 million Americans had to leave their homes because of disasters in 2024, whether for a short period or much longer. It was the fourth-costliest year on record for disasters. However, a closer look at demographics in the survey reveals much more about disaster risk in America and who is vulnerable. It suggests, as researchers have also found, that people with the fewest resources, as well as those who have disabilities or have been marginalized, were more likely to be displaced from their homes by disasters than other people. Decades of disaster research, including from our team at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center, make at least two things crystal clear: First, people’s social circumstances—such as the resources available to them, how much they can rely on others for help, and challenges they face in their daily life—can lead them to experience disasters differently compared to others affected by the same event. And second, disasters exacerbate existing vulnerabilities. This research also shows how disaster recovery is a social process. Recovery is not a “thing,” but rather it is linked to how we talk about recovery, make decisions about recovery, and prioritize some activities over others. Lessons from past disasters Sixty years ago, the recovery period after the destructive 1964 Alaskan earthquake was driven by a range of economic and political interests, not simply technical factors or on need. That kind of influence continues in disaster recovery today. Even disaster buyout programs can be based on economic considerations that burden under-resourced communities. This recovery process is made even more difficult because policymakers often underappreciate the immense difficulties residents face during recovery. Following Hurricane Katrina, sociologist Alexis Merdjanoff found that property ownership status affected psychological distress and displacement, with displaced renters showing higher levels of emotional distress than homeowners. Lack of autonomy in decisions about how to repair or rebuild can play a role, further highlighting disparate experiences during disaster recovery. What the census shows about vulnerability U.S. Census data for 2023 and 2024 consistently showed that socially vulnerable groups reported being displaced from their homes at higher rates than other groups. People with less high school education had a higher rate of displacement than those with more education. So did those with low household incomes or who were struggling with employment, compared to other groups. While the Census Bureau describes the data as experimental and notes that some sample sizes are small, the differences stand out and are consistent with what researchers have found. For example, research has long pointed to how communities composed predominantly of Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Pacific Islander residents have disproportionately worse recovery trajectories after a disaster, often linked to aspects such as housing tenure and land-use policies. Though reporting individual experiences, the Census Bureau’s findings are consistent with this research, noting a higher rate of displacement for these groups. Low-income and marginalized communities are often in areas at higher risk of flooding from storms or may lack investment in storm protection measures. The morass of bureaucracy and conflicting information can also be a barrier to a swift recovery. After Hurricane Sandy, people in New Jersey complained about complex paperwork and what felt to them like ever-changing rules. They bemoaned their housing recovery as, in researchers’ words, a “muddled, inconsistent experience that lacked discernible rationale.” Residents who don’t know how to find information about disaster recovery assistance or can’t take time away from work to accumulate the necessary documents and meet with agency representatives can have a harder time getting quick help from federal and state agencies. Disabilities also affect displacement. Of those people who were displaced for some length of time in 2023 and 2024, those with significant difficulty hearing, seeing, or walking reported being displaced at higher rates than those without disabilities. Prolonged loss of electricity or water due to an ice storm, wildfire, or grid overload during a heat emergency can force those with medical conditions to leave even if their neighbors are able to stay. That can also create challenges for their recovery. Displacement can leave vulnerable disaster survivors isolated from their usual support systems and healthcare providers. It can also isolate those with limited mobility from disaster assistance. Helping communities build resilience Crucial research efforts are underway to better help people who may be struggling the most after disasters. For example, our center was part of an interdisciplinary team that developed a framework to predict community resilience after disasters and help identify investments that could be made to bolster resilience. It outlines ways to identify gaps in community functioning, like healthcare and transportation, before disaster strikes. And it helps determine recovery strategies that would have the most impact. Shifts in weather and climate and a mobile population mean that people’s exposure to hazards are constantly shifting and often increasing. The Coastal Hazard, Equity, Economic Prosperity, and Resilience Hub, which our center is also part of, is developing tools to help communities best ensure resilience and strong economic conditions for all residents without shortchanging the need to prioritize equity and well-being. We believe that when communities experience disasters, they should not have to choose among thriving economically, ensuring all residents can recover, and reducing risk of future threats. There must be a way to account for all three. Understanding that disasters affect people in different ways is only a first step toward ensuring that the most vulnerable residents receive the support they need. Involving community members from disproportionately vulnerable groups to identify challenges is another. But those, alone, are not enough. If we as a society care about those who contribute to our communities, we must find the political and organizational will to act to reduce the challenges reflected in the census and disaster research. This article, originally published March 4, 2024, has been updated with latest severe storms and 2024 census data. Tricia Wachtendorf is a professor of sociology and director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware. James Kendra is the director of the Disaster Research Center and a professor of public policy & administration at the University of Delaware. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

If you’ve ever been passed over for a promotion, you may have questioned the quality of your work. The other candidate probably had better experience, right? But what if the answer is that you simply weren’t top of mind. Instead of focusing exclusively on building a résumé, how much time do you focus on how you’re perceived? “A lot of people think that heads-down good work will speak for itself,” says Lorraine K. Lee, author of Unforgettable Presence: Get Seen, Gain Influence, and Catapult Your Career. “Then there are people who are thoughtful about how they’re seen, but they’re not being seen by the right people in the right places.” Both can be career killers. Lee says she struggled with this earlier in her career. “I worked on really high-profile projects,” she says. “I was well liked by my peers. As hard as I pushed, I could not figure out how to get promoted and how to get seen as a leader.” What was missing was presence, Lee says. “A lot of things compete for our attention. In order to stand out, we have to be unforgettable. We have to be really intentional with our presence.” Lee started paying attention to how and where she was seen. She became more thoughtful about how she led meetings, communicated on Slack and Teams, and showed up in a room or on video. “All these different factors are what make you unforgettable,” she says. “It’s not just about having certain charisma or gravitas; it’s how you can optimize each of those things.” An Unforgettable Brand Being memorable starts with your personal brand. “When people think ‘personal brand,’ they often think, ‘That makes me feel slimy’ or ‘I’m not a company,’ ” says Lee, who is an instructor for Stanford Continuing Studies and LinkedIn Learning. “We already have a brand, and our brand is essentially our reputation.” A brand is made up of four key factors, which Lee calls your EPIC framework—experiences, personality, identity, and community. First, consider personal and professional life experiences that make you who you are today. This includes any life events that have influenced you and that make your story memorable and unique. Your personality also factors into your brand. For example, Lee says her brand includes the fact that she’s introverted. “Some might be more serious, some more playful,” she explains. “Different aspects of our personality make us ‘us.’ ” Next is your identity, which consists of your cultural background and the values that you live by when you work, Lee says. “For example, I am someone who really values relationships. I’m also someone who wants to be known for following through on what I say I’m going to do,” she adds. “My Asian American cultural background is also a part of my identity.” Finally, the fourth piece is your community. “A lot of people forget about or don’t think about community,” Lee says. “You can think you have the best brand in the world, but if others are not seeing you as a leader or not seeing you as ready to get that promotion, there’s a disconnect.” Mentors and sponsors are an important part of your community. Mentors will coach you and share their own experiences, while sponsors advocate for you. “Sponsors say your name when you’re not in the room,” explains Lee. “They open doors for you. Finding a sponsor who can help lift you up and carry you along with them as they ascend in a company is really critical. A lot of us get over-mentored and under-sponsored.” An Unforgettable Introduction Once you’re intentional about your brand, showcase it by having a unique and powerful introduction, or UPI. Lee noticed that people often introduce themselves at meetings or on calls by saying their name, job title, and company. “Introductions are one of the most important situations in which we can create a strong impression and presence, but so many people let this opportunity pass them by,” Lee says. “You want your introduction to be a launching point for someone to learn more about you or know how they can turn to you in the future.” For example, when Lee worked at Prezi, she would introduce herself by saying, “Hi, I’m Lorraine. I lead the editorial team at Prezi.” A unique and powerful introduction expands that information, giving the other person a more holistic understanding of the value you provide. It can include your target audience, success metrics and goals, a fun fact, or a high-level view of what you do day-to-day. Depending on the person she’s meeting and the context of the interaction, Lee might introduce herself by saying, “I’m Lorraine. I lead the editorial team at Prezi. What that means is that I collaborate with business leaders and keynote speakers to create educational content for hundreds of thousands of business professionals.” “Even that little tweak with a little bit more information gives the person I’m speaking to a better understanding of what it is I do,” Lee says. “I come across as more authoritative and confident as well. Being intentional about our introductions and including a little bit more information than what we are normally accustomed to goes a long way.” Not paying attention to presence can stall a career, Lee adds. “You stay stuck with where you are. If someone’s not looking to advance, it may be fine at that point in their career. But for the people who do want to reach that next level, it’s really hard if you aren’t intentional about your presence.” View the full article

How then shall we live?View the full article

A viral clip of a woman scrolling on a completely clear phone with no user interface briefly confused—and amused—the internet. But the truth turned out to be far more literal than most expected. Originally posted to TikTok by user CatGPT, the video quickly racked up over 52.9 million views. In the comments, some speculated it was a Nokia model; others guessed it came from the Nickelodeon show Henry Danger. “This looks like a social commentary or a walking art exhibit. I’m too uncultured to understand,” one user commented. “It’s from a Black Mirror episode,” another wrote. Turns out, it was none of the above. Just a piece of plastic. The woman seen in line is also the one who uploaded the clip. In a follow-up video posted days later, she shared the “true story.” “This is a Methaphone,” she explains. “It is exactly what it looks like, a clear piece of acrylic shaped like an iPhone.” The “device” was invented by her friend as a response to phone addiction. “He told me that what he wanted to test was, if we’re all so addicted to our phones, then could you potentially curb somebody’s addiction by replacing the feeling of having a phone in your pocket with something that feels exactly the same?” she continued. “This little piece of acrylic feels like a physical artifact that directly responds to this collective tension we all feel about how our devices, which are meant to make us more connected, are actually having the exact opposite effect.” A 2023 study by Reviews.org found that nearly 57% of Americans reported feeling addicted to their phones. Some admitted to checking their phones over 100 times a day, and 75% said they feel uneasy when they realize they’ve left their phone at home. In the comments, many questioned whether pretending to scroll on a chunk of plastic could actually help with phone addiction. “This sounds like [an] SNL sketch,” one user wrote. “What stage of capitalism is this?” another asked. Some were simply disappointed it wasn’t a real phone. Despite the skepticism, the Methaphone raised $1,100 on Indiegogo. The campaign has since closed, though the creator says more may be produced if demand is high. Priced at $20, with a neon pink version going for $25, the Methaphone “looks like a simple acrylic slab—and it is,” the page reads. “But it’s also a stand-in, a totem, and an alibi. It’s the first step on the road to freedom.” View the full article

Michael Long is not the typical neuroscience guy. He was trained as a physicist, but is primarily a writer. He coauthored the international bestseller The Molecule of More. As a speechwriter, he has written for members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, presidential candidates, and Fortune 10 CEOs. His screenplays have been performed on most New York stages. He teaches writing at Georgetown University. What’s the big idea? Dopamine is to blame for a lot of your misery. It compels us to endlessly chase more, better, and greater—even when our dreams have come true. Thanks to dopamine, we often feel restless and hopeless. So no, maybe it’s not quite accurate to call it the “happiness” molecule, but it has gifted humans some amazing powers. Dopamine is the source of imagination, creativity, and ingenuity. There are practical ways to harness the strengths of our dopamine drives while protecting and nurturing a life of consistent joy. Below, Michael shares five key insights from his new book, Taming the Molecule of More: A Step-by-Step Guide to Make Dopamine Work for You. Listen to the audio version—read by Michael himself—in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Dopamine is not the brain chemical that makes you happy. Dopamine makes you curious and imaginative. It can even make you successful, but a lot of times it just makes you miserable. That’s because dopamine motivates you to chase every new possibility, even if you already have everything you want. It turns out that brain evolution hasn’t caught up with the evolution of the world. For early humans, dopamine ensured our survival by alerting us to anything new or unusual. In a world with danger around every corner and resources hard to acquire, we needed an early warning system to motivate us even more. Dopamine made us believe that once we got the thing we were chasing, we’d be safer, happier, or more satisfied. That served humans well, until it didn’t. Now that we’ve tamed the world, we don’t need to explore every new thing, but dopamine is still on duty, and it works way out of proportion to the needs of the modern world. Since self-discipline has a short shelf life, I share proven techniques that don’t rely on willpower alone. 2. Dopamine often promises more than reality can deliver. When we have problems obsessing with social media or the news, or when we’re doing excessive shopping, we feel edgy and restless. This is because dopamine floods us with anticipation and urgency. We desperately scroll for the next hit, searching for the latest story or watching the porch for that next Amazon package. As this anticipation becomes a normal way of living, the rest of life starts to feel dull and flat. That restarts the cycle of chasing what we think will make us happy. Then we get it, and when it doesn’t make us happy, we experience a letdown, and that makes us restless all over again. Here’s how that works for love and romance. When we go on date after date and can’t find the right person, or a long-term relationship gets stale, we start to feel hopeless. The dopamine chase has so raised our expectations about reality that we no longer enjoy the ordinary. Now we’re expecting some perfect partner, and we won’t find them because they don’t exist. Fight back with three strategies: Rewire your habits to ditch the chase. Redirect your focus to the here and now. Rebuild meaning so life feels more like it matters. I describe specific ways to do this through simple planning, relying more on friendships, and doing a particular kind of personal assessment. And there’s even a little technology involved that you wouldn’t expect. 3. Dopamine is the source of imagination. The dopamine system has three circuits. The first has only a little to do with behavior and feeling, so we’ll set that one aside. The second circuit (that early warning system) is called the desire dopamine system because it plays on our desires. The third system is very different. It’s called the control system, and it gives us an ability straight out of science fiction: mental time travel. You can create in your mind any possible future in as much detail as you like and investigate the results without lifting a finger. We do this all the time without realizing that’s what it is. Little things like figuring out where to go for lunch: We factor in traffic, how long we’ll have to wait for a table and think over the menu, and game it all out to decide where to go. But this system also lets us imagine far more consequential mental time travel, figuring out the best way to build a building, design an engine, or travel to the moon. “Dopamine really is the source of creativity and analytical power that allows us to create the future.” The dopamine control circuit lets us think in abstractions and play out various plans using only our minds. That means not only can we imagine a particular future, but we can also imagine entire abstract disciplines, come to understand them, and make use of them in the real world based on what we thought about. Fields like chemistry, quantum mechanics, and number theory exist because of controlled dopamine. Dopamine really is the source of creativity and analytical power that allows us to create the future. Dopamine brings a lot of dissatisfaction to the modern world, but we wouldn’t have the modern world without dopamine. 4. You’re missing out on the little things. When my best friend died at age 39, the speaker at his funeral said, “You may not remember much of what you did with Kent, but it’s okay, because it happened.” I did not know what that could mean, but years later, while writing this book, I got it. We don’t live life just to look back on it. The here and now ought to be fun. You may not remember it all, but while it’s happening, enjoy it. That requires fighting back against dopamine because it’s always saying: Never mind what’s in front of you; think about what might be. When Warren Zevon was at the end of his life, David Letterman asked him what he’d learned. Warren said, “Enjoy every sandwich.” 5. A satisfying life requires meaning, and there’s a practical way to find it. Even if you fix every dopamine-driven problem in your life, you may still feel like something is missing. To find a satisfying balance between working for the future and enjoying the here and now, we must choose a meaning for life and work toward it as we go. “If you’re making life better for others with something you do well and enjoy, the days feel brighter and life acquires purpose.” Is it possible to live in the moment, anticipate the future, and have it add up to something? The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl said we need to look beyond ourselves, because that’s where a sense of purpose begins. Aristotle gave us a simple formula for taking pleasure in the present, finding a healthy anticipation for the future, and creating meaning. He said it’s found where three things intersect: what we like to do, what we’re good at, and what builds up the world beyond ourselves. Things like working for justice, making good use of knowledge, or simply living a life of kindness and grace. What you do with your life doesn’t have to set off fireworks, and you don’t have to make history. You can be a plumber, a mail carrier, or an accountant. I’m a writer. I like what I do. I seem to be pretty good at it, and it helps people. The same can be true if you repair the highway, fix cars, or serve lunch in a school cafeteria. If you’re making life better for others with something you do well and enjoy, the days feel brighter and life acquires purpose. Life needs meaning, and that’s the last piece of the puzzle in dealing with dopamine and taming the molecule of more. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission. View the full article

Layoffs. Corporate restructuring. Leadership changes. New market strategy. Chances are that you’ll go through at least one significant company upheaval in your career (if not more than one). Employees are expected to adapt quickly, often with little support. While you may not be able to prevent internal changes, you can be prepared—and protect yourself. Get clarification on your job responsibilities One of the biggest impacts on your day-to-day might be changes in your job responsibilities. As soon as possible, you’ll want to discuss any changes with your boss. Ask directly, “Do I have any new responsibilities?” and “How will my performance be evaluated now?” Get the information in writing, if you can, even if it’s just a follow-up email you send after a discussion with your boss that says: “Based on our conversation, I understand that my role now includes X, Y, and Z.” You don’t want responsibility changes to be overlooked or misunderstood, and you don’t want the changes to negatively impact promotions or future raises simply because no one fully understands your role. Provide regular updates to your boss about how you’re handling your new responsibilities, and share any wins. Additionally, make sure your boss is aware of any concerns you may have. For example, you may not have been given proper training to make you successful with your new responsibilities. If something is unclear, raising concerns early shows you want to ensure you’re meeting expectations. Know your boundaries “Do more with less” has become the default expectation. You might quickly find yourself overwhelmed if you’re working with a smaller team, a smaller budget, or a major strategy pivot. It’s much harder to set boundaries if you accept additional work initially and then try to walk it back later. When faced with upheaval and asked to do more, you can say, “Yes, I can take this on. Which of my other responsibilities should I de-prioritize?” You can also mentally set a boundary around the number of hours you’re willing to work. If you’re asked to go above that, it’s time to push back. You could say, “I’m at capacity this week. Can this wait until next week?” Remember that loyalty is often not reciprocal Significant changes need clear direction. A company’s leadership team should communicate why the changes were necessary and how the company expects to benefit. If that doesn’t happen, it’s a red flag. The changes might result in more problems—or can’t save the company from a downward spiral. Keep your guard up. Look for signs that the company might be in deeper trouble, such as undergoing frequent leadership turnover, having an unclear strategy, or experiencing a lack of communication. Change is hard and takes time to have an impact. But if it feels like things aren’t going well, keep your résumé updated and your LinkedIn profile polished. Make sure you have an exit plan, even if you’re not ready to leave immediately. The company will always protect its interests first. You should do the same. View the full article

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It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. My manager gets anxious about how I manage my time even though I never miss deadlines My supervisor often assigns me projects well in advance of when they’re due. The problem is, she quickly gets anxious after assigning me work and mentions it repeatedly and hovers around my desk to check my progress on it. She doesn’t ask about it; she just watches what I’m doing and gets increasingly irritated and anxious if I’m not dropping everything to do the task she assigned. For example, at this beginning of this week she assigned me a project of the sort I’ve completed many times in the past. I know exactly how long it takes me and even if I build in several extra hours for something odd going awry, I can easily complete it in less than two work days. I have spent the days since she assigned it working on a long-term project that isn’t due for several months with plans to start the project my supervisor assigned four days before it is due. I’ve told her this, but she seems deeply concerned that I won’t finish on time. I have consistently completed my work on time and I have given her no cause to think there is any reason to doubt that I’ll have this one done on time. I’d understand her anxiety if I had a history of not meeting deadlines or if I were goofing off, but I’m trying to stay in the flow of working on my long-term project for a few more days. Am I wrong to do this? Should I just drop everything to do her assignment even though I know I’ll have it completed well with in the desired time frame? Can you ask her about it? Name what you’re seeing and ask what’s up: “You’ve seemed concerned recently that I haven’t started projects right away, even though I always meet deadlines. Part of my satisfaction with my job comes from having some autonomy in how I plan my time, and I think you see that pay off in my always reliably turning work in on time. Do you see it differently?”… followed by, “If I’ve misunderstood a deadline or if it has changed, I’d of course want you to tell me, but otherwise I’m hoping you will trust me to continue turning work in on time even when I’m juggling it with other priorities.” Alternately: “Have I done something to make you worry that I won’t reliably meet deadlines? As far I know, I’ve never missed a deadline, so I want to ask that you give me space to show that I will continue to do that. Of course if that changes, I would expect you’d need to manage my work more closely, but so far I think my track record of not turning anything in late has earned me some autonomy in how I manage my time. But if there’s a piece of this that I’m missing, I definitely want to hear your feedback.” Related: my boss gives me deadlines and then gets annoyed when work isn’t finished early 2. I’m struggling with my ego after not getting promoted I have a question about checking my ego in a role I feel overqualified for. I’m in a job for which I have a lot of experience, and I think I would have been a shoo-in for a (modest) promotion had it not come to light that I am leaving in a few months to go back to school. The job is just an elevated version of my current role, including all the same tasks. A while back (before school was a factor), the organization chose not to open interviews for this position after someone left; they can flex the number of people who have this title and are choosing to constrict that number supposedly because they do not want to offend the people who have applied multiple times/were rejected/are not any more competent than they were last time they applied. (I have never applied before, having only been here for about 10 months, though that timeline for a promotion is not out of the ordinary and the pace/type of work means one can thoroughly demonstrate competence within this period.) There is a broad range of skill levels here, and though I pride myself on expressing a lot of praise and charitability on the outside, inside I have been finding it harder and harder to tamp down my judgmental thoughts when people conduct this job in a way that demonstrates a severe lack of critical thinking. I’m vocally supportive of alternative approaches to our work and can often find something to appreciate in how a coworker operates, even if it’s different than what I had in mind, but I feel like I’m being beat over the head with conduct that I find basically incorrect. I’m struggling to put this in perspective. I am leaving shortly, this should not matter, this job is not intrinsic to my identity — yet every day, multiple times a day, decisions are made that lack any strategy or nuance, and these decisions affect the rest of the team and the clients we serve, so the amount of patience required is significant. We’re a nonprofit social service agency so are spread thin in terms of the resources we have to support vulnerable people; these utterly inept decisions matter a lot. But I usually have strong work-life balance and good boundaries regarding how responsible I feel for our clients, so I think a lot of my frustration is based on ego. Why do I care? I should just focus on my own work, right? I’m in therapy, etc. and can mostly discern this is a personal issue. I know I need to work on letting go, but I’m struggling. I’m leaving soon, so I don’t think it makes sense to lobby for a promotion (right?), but that’s still a few months of learning to surrender this egoism. I think this could be a character-building experience and would love your help in making it such. I suspect you’re struggling because it seems self-evident to you that you were well-qualified for the promotion, certainly better qualified than some of the people currently in the job — and so it’s a blow to the ego to think that wasn’t recognized and rewarded. But the thing is, knowing you’re leaving in a few months would absolutely be a reason not to promote you in many organizations. It really could be nothing more than that. It doesn’t make sense for them to go through the work of processing the promotion when you’re on your way out the door, or to put in the work of acclimating you to the new role. Moreover, some promotions (especially ones where tasks don’t change) are in large part retention devices, and it doesn’t make sense for them to put resources into trying to retain you when you’ve already shared plans to leave in a few months. So I don’t think there’s even a huge lesson about checking your ego here; if anything, I think the lesson is just to be realistic about how employment works, and how the dynamics change once people know you’re about to leave. 3. Should I tell my boss it would be OK to lay me off? I work in higher ed, and our division was recently told to expect layoffs in the upcoming fiscal year, even in areas not directly funded by federal research dollars. I would honestly be fine with being laid off. My spouse is retiring this year, and I’ve been debating how much longer I want to keep working myself. Should I say something proactively? I know you’ve advised not saying anything about planning to leave a job before it’s official, but in this case, I’m not worried about not getting assigned juicy projects or anything like that. (If anything, I’d be glad to be assigned fewer projects, even if I don’t end up leaving!) This is the last job I plan to have, so I’m not worried about developing in my career at this point — I just want to focus on my core responsibilities. If it’s possible that I might leave during the next fiscal year anyway, do I have an ethical obligation to my teammates to say something now? I would feel terrible if the next thing I heard was that someone else on my team was being let go and thought that it could have been me instead. But I don’t want to make things awkward with my boss, either, since I still have to work with her every day, and I don’t want her feeling like I’m somehow less reliable because I could up and leave at any moment. If you’re absolutely sure that you would be okay with being laid off (and potentially sooner than you might be expecting it would happen), then yes — you are in one of the few situations where it makes sense to say something if you want to. (You’re still not obligated to, though, and especially if you’re not 100% sure.) If you do decide to, it doesn’t have to be an awkward conversation! It could be, “I don’t have any current plans to leave, but I do occasionally think about how much longer I want to keep working, and if you do need to cut someone on the team, I would be comfortable being the one picked.” That said, keep in mind that layoffs are often about cutting the most expendable position, not person, and there can be other factors too (like you’re capable of picking up additional activities X and Y, while someone else isn’t). But it’s a reasonable thing to offer. 4. My PIP ended 23 days ago and no one has said anything to me I have been dealing with an absolute chore of a manager who put me on a performance improvement plan (PIP) as a way to push me out of the company. I have tried to find new work, but have been unable to secure a new job, and have thus been very carefully and actively working towards completing the PIP. Well, it’s now 23 days past the 90-day mark … and no one has contacted me about next steps in any direction. Have you heard of this before? Does this invalidate anything on their end since they have so thoroughly dropped the ball to exemplify my point of “it’s not me, it’s her”? It’s not unusual for a PIP not be immediately dealt with at its deadline. It should be, and it’s unfair to leave the employee hanging and unsure what steps may be taken next. But it’s not uncommon for it to take longer. It doesn’t invalidate anything on their end or exempt you from any potential PIP-related consequences. If you didn’t think your manager was trying to push you out of the company and also felt you’d met the terms of the PIP, there could be an argument for asking about next steps. But since you think she wants you gone, I wouldn’t poke at it unless you find the not knowing worse than any potential consequences of refocusing her on it. Leave it to her to raise it if she wants to. 5. My dad is terminally ill and I’m about to start a new job My dad has terminal cancer and recently ended treatment to begin hospice care at home with my mom as his primary caregiver. My sibling and I are very close with them and help as much as we can, which our current employers and colleagues have been wonderful about supporting. We were given the “six months” speech, but his cancer is extremely aggressive so it’s very likely we have much less time. I’m starting a new job after Memorial Day with a boss I worked for at a previous company. It’s primarily a remote position with fairly strict working hours, camera-on meeting requirements, and occasional in-office presence required, all of which I thought were doable before we got the dreaded news. On top of all the other ways we’re struggling right now, I have no idea when or how to let my boss know what’s going on and what timeframe we’ve been given. When we started the process of bringing me onboard, Dad was still stable and seemed to be responding to treatment, but things changed very rapidly after I accepted the new position. My boss approached me directly for the open role and to my knowledge didn’t interview anyone else, so I know that he has a very high degree of confidence in me and expects me to be working at or above the same level as the last time we worked together. We’re both part of a loose social group of former colleagues who’ve become friends, even though my boss and I aren’t, so there’s a chance he knows my dad is sick but we didn’t discuss anything but work during the hiring process. I don’t normally share much personal stuff at work but this obviously isn’t something I’m going to be able to muddle my way through without telling anyone or asking for support. Any advice? Oh no, I’m so sorry about your dad. I went through something similar with my dad right after starting a new job, too. The only thing you can really do is to give your boss a heads-up about what’s going on and what it could potentially mean for your work (like that you might need to take time off to be with him without notice) or even just that you’re not really sure and are figuring it out as things go along. It’s definitely weird when you’ve just started a new job, but if these are decent people, they will rally to get you whatever flexibility you need. The post manager gets anxious about how I manage my time, telling my boss it would be OK to lay me off, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager. View the full article

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