The Ideas That Inspire Us Harvard Business Review published its first issue 100 years ago with a mission to help leaders put the best management thinking into practice. To mark our centennial, we asked eight current and former CEOs from some of the world’s top companies to describe the ideas that have propelled their own careers and organizations. Continued here |
Tesla to recall 362,758 cars because Full Self Driving Beta is dangerous On Thursday Tesla had to issue a recall for nearly 363,000 of its electric vehicles. At issue is the company's highly controversial "Full Self Driving" Beta, which the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration believes is dangerous. Continued here |
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How to Focus at Work When the World Is Falling Apart On average, most of us will spend one third of our lives at work. That’s about 90,000 hours. It’s inevitable that we’ll go through difficult periods during that time. There will be days when we suffer setbacks: a romantic break up, a fallout with a family member, the death of a loved one. There will be moments when world events break our hearts: a series of murders targeting Asian women in New York, the fall of Roe v. Wade, the war in Ukraine, mass shootings, nationwide political polarization. Continued here |
Microsoft officially blesses Parallels as a way to run Windows on M1, M2 Macs In the absence of a version of Boot Camp that runs on Apple Silicon Macs, the best way to run Windows on them has been to use a virtualization app like Parallels or (more recently) VMware Fusion. The problem is that, until now, the Arm version of Windows that runs on Apple Silicon Macs hasn't technically been allowed to run on anything other than Arm PCs that come with it due to Microsoft's licensing restrictions. Continued here |
Delta Air Lines Just Made a Big Announcement That Should Make Delta Employees Quite Happy If you want employees to do things to benefit your company, compensate them for it. Continued here |
Robots Enter the Race to Save Dying Coral Reefs Taryn Foster believes Australia’s dying coral reefs can still be rescued—if she can speed up efforts to save them. For years, biologists like her have been lending a hand to reefs struggling with rising temperatures and ocean acidity: They’ve collected coral fragments and cut them into pieces to propagate and grow them in nurseries on land; they’ve crossbred species to build in heat-resistance; they’ve experimented with probiotics as a defense against deadly diseases. But even transplanting thousands of these healthy and upgraded corals onto damaged reefs will not be enough to save entire ecosystems, Foster says. “We need some way of deploying corals at scale.” Sounds like a job for some robots. Continued here |
Risk of diabetes rises 58% after COVID, even amid omicron, study finds A person's odds of getting a new diabetes diagnosis were 58 percent higher in the months following a COVID-19 infection compared with prior to infection, even amid the era of omicron, researchers reported Wednesday in the journal JAMA Network Open. Continued here |
Doobie-us: Pot ads come to Twitter amid cannabis industry collapse Elon Musk’s fondness for 420 jokes is well-documented on Twitter, where the CEO loves responding to tweets with comments like “420 haha.” So it makes sense that Musk is well aware of opportunities for cannabis advertisers to reach Twitter users who like tweeting about marijuana as much as he does. It comes as no surprise, then, that Twitter announced yesterday that it would become the weed-friendliest social platform and start allowing some previously restricted cannabis ads to appear in Twitter feeds of users in states that have legalized weed. Continued here |
4 Types of Innovators Every Organization Needs Every company strives to be innovative, but most are missing key ingredients. How can you identify which ingredients your organization needs — and which employee styles can fill in the gaps? The authors’ research distills four key innovation styles that can lead to success — generators, conceptualizers, optimizers, and implementors — and explains how common they are across sectors. Then, they outline a four-part framework for ensuring your team or organization has all four styles represented. Continued here |
5 Highly Effective Steps to Take as a Love-Powered Leader What to do when things fall apart. Continued here |
The creepiness of conversational AI has been put on full display The first time Captain Kirk had a conversation with the ship’s computer was in 1966 during Episode 13 of Season 1 in the classic Star Trek series. Calling it a “conversation” is quite generous, for it was really a series of stiff questions from Kirk, each prompting an even stiffer response from the computer. There was no conversational back-and-forth, no questions from the AI asking for elaboration or context. And yet, for the last 57 years, computer scientists have not been able to exceed this stilted 1960s vision of human-machine dialog. Even platforms like Siri and Alexa, created by some of the world’s largest companies at great expense have not allowed for anything that feels like real-time natural conversation. But all that changed in 2022 when a new generation of conversational interfaces were revealed to the public, including ChatGPT from Open AI and LaMDA from Google. These systems, which use a generative AI technique known as Large Language Models (LLMs), represent a significant leap forward in conversational abilities. That’s because they not only provide coherent and relevant responses to specific human statements but can also keep track of the conversational context over time and probe for elaborations and clarifications. In other words, we have finally entered the age of natural computing in which we humans will hold meaningful and organically flowing conversations with software tools and applications. Continued here |
The first modern brain scan happened thanks to an eccentric engineer at the Beatles’ record company The possibility of precious objects hidden in secret chambers can really ignite the imagination. In the mid-1960s, British engineer Godfrey Hounsfield pondered whether one could detect hidden areas in Egyptian pyramids by capturing cosmic rays that passed through unseen voids. He held onto this idea over the years, which can be paraphrased as “looking inside a box without opening it.” Ultimately he did figure how to use high-energy rays to reveal what’s invisible to the naked eye. He invented a way to see inside the hard skull and get a picture of the soft brain inside. Continued here |
How LinkedIn Redesigned Its HQ for Hybrid Work More than half of people who can work remotely expect or prefer to do so at least part of the time. Organizations of all types must therefore make hybrid work more viable and sustainable. The design and construction of LinkedIn’s new headquarters offers three important lessons. First, the office has to be optimized for all use cases, from heads-down work to social gatherings. It also has to accommodate a more diverse workforce, accepting a more relaxed professionalism. Finally, those designing workspaces must constantly test, retest, and adapt them to suit changing needs. Continued here |
America’s Teenage Girls Are Not Okay This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week. American teenagers—especially girls and kids who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning—are “engulfed” in historic rates of anxiety and sadness. And everybody seems to think they know why. Continued here |
Mini-robot shifts from solid to liquid to escape its cage--just like the T-1000 One of the many iconic moments in Terminator 2: Judgment Day was seeing the T-1000 briefly morph into a liquid to pass through the metal bars separating him from his target: a teenage John Connor. A team of engineers mimicked that famous scene with a soft robot in the shape of a Lego minifig. The robot "melts" into liquid form in response to a magnetic field, oozing between the bars of its cage before re-solidifying on the other side. The team described its work in a recent paper published in the journal Matter. Continued here |
Is Your Burnout From Too Much Work or Too Little Impact? When it comes to burnout, it’s natural to assume that by lessening our workload we can fight the culprit. On the contrary, search has shown that when people are overworked but intellectually underutilized, they most frequently report feeling “exhausted.” Simply put, burnout isn’t necessarily a function of too much work; burnout is more often the result of too little impact. To increase your impact without adding more hours: Continued here |
Report: Incoming CEOs Are Trending Younger, and More Women Are Taking on the Top Role More Young, Female Leaders Are Becoming CEOs, Spencer Stuart Report Continued here |
What's Stopping You from Reinventing Your Career? In the authors’ work teaching and coaching thousands of managers, they have identified four traps – self-sufficiency, overthinking, procrastination and searching for the answer – that prevent leaders from taking the first steps necessary for considering and exploring possible new versions of themselves for the future. The authors have found ways to help leaders recognize which traps they are falling into and start imagining a way out — largely inspired by design thinking principles such as rapid prototyping, making ideas visual, and getting quick feedback. Continued here |
How Loud Was NASA's Artemis 1 Launch? As the United States prepares to once again land astronauts on the lunar surface, other countries are seeking to explore the moon, too, with rovers and landers The Space Launch System rocket produced crackling sounds 40 million times louder than a bowl of Rice Krispies cereal in milk, researchers say Continued here |
The Best Galaxy S23 Cases and Accessories If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Samsung phones are among the best Android handsets, and the new Galaxy S23 series is no exception. They're priced to match, which is why it's important to protect your investment, whether you have the Galaxy S23, Galaxy S23+, or Galaxy S23 Ultra. Sure, Samsung utilizes Corning's latest Gorilla Glass Victus 2 around the device, but glass is still glass, and a single drop could be all it takes to crack the screen. A case and screen protector don't guarantee a life free from scratches and cracks, but some protection is better than none. These are our favorite Galaxy S23 cases of the dozens we've tested. We've included accessories like chargers and cables to kit out your new phone. Continued here |
How Maersk Designed a More Resilient Supply Chain Maersk, the global shipping giant, created an innovation center in 2021 to help it contend not only with the supply disruptions caused by the pandemic but also long-term challenges such the need to decarbonize and further digitize its operations, deploy and leverage AI capabilities, and address endemic staffing and retention issues. In doing so, Maersk adhered to three principles, which other companies can employ to address supply chain problems as well as others. Continued here |
When headache medications cause your headaches Billions of people worldwide suffer from either migraine or tension-type headaches, and when these painful episodes occur, those stricken often reach for over-the-counter painkillers like ibuprofen, acetaminophen, and aspirin, or prescribed medications like triptans (migraine drugs) or even opiates. The relief these treatments provide is priceless to anyone regularly afflicted with head-splitting pain. But in some cases, when used in excess, they can lead to a peculiar disorder called “medication overuse headache.” An international team of researchers detailed this often-debilitating condition in an article recently published in Nature Reviews Disease Primers. Continued here |
From Prediction to Transformation While the popular view is that insights are the key benefit of artificial intelligence, in truth AI creates value by improving the quality of decisions. The good news is, the opportunities for it to do that in business are countless. But because decisions in one area of an organization usually have an impact on decisions in other areas, introducing AI often entails redesigning whole systems. In that way, AI is similar to groundbreaking technologies of the past, like electricity, which initially was used only narrowly but ultimately transformed manufacturing. Continued here |
Which Eero Wi-Fi Mesh Router Should You Buy? If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED The promise of reliable Wi-Fi without the need for any technical knowledge or tinkering has turned Eero into a household name. Amazon’s Eero systems are some of the best mesh Wi-Fi routers you can buy, especially if you’re trying to keep costs as low as possible. But with an expanding lineup of similar-looking devices, shopping for Eero mesh routers is confusing. Should you buy three? Do you need the latest Wi-Fi 6E? Are subscriptions essential? Continued here |
The (Still) Unsettled Science of Masking A new paper casts doubt on masks as a surefire COVID precaution—and people are already fighting about it. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Continued here |
Video Quick Take: Karin Gilges on Digital Transformation at Bosch - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM ACCENTURE Welcome to the HBR Video Quick Take. I’m Todd Pruzan, senior editor for research and special projects at Harvard Business Review. Bosch India, a German multinational engineering and technology company, recently partnered with the consulting company Accenture to conduct a large-scale program called the Digital Fluency Program, covering 4,000 employees across all functions. Continued here |
A Simple Way to Introduce Yourself Many of us dread the self-introduction, be it in an online meeting or at the boardroom table. Here is a practical framework you can leverage to introduce yourself with confidence in any context, online or in-person: Present, past, and future. You can customize this framework both for yourself as an individual and for the specific context. Perhaps most importantly, when you use this framework, you will be able to focus on others’ introductions, instead of stewing about what you should say about yourself. Continued here |
How One Company Used Data to Create Sustainable Take-out Food Packaging Digital technology has made it commercially possible for companies to offer an alternative, more sustainable, and deposit-free recyclable packaging system for take-out food. Suppliers rent their packages to restaurants and end users simply pick up their desired take-out and then return the packaging within a specified period free of charge. The restaurant cleans the used packaging and then reuses it. This article explores how one of the pioneers of this new approach, the German company Vytal, makes the new system work and offer five lessons from its experience. Continued here |
What the Most Productive Companies Do Differently A new report from McKinsey Global Institute finds that U.S. productivity growth has slowed in the last 15 years to 1.4% annual growth (as compared to long-term rates of 2.2% since 1948). It also found striking variations in productivity among leading and lagging firms within each sector — a gap that is only widening. Across sectors and geographies, the most productive companies follow a playbook with these four elements: 1) They capture value from digitization; 2) They invest in intangibles (such as R&D or workforce capabilities); 3) They build a future-ready workforce; and 4) They take a systems approach. If more firms followed this playbook and brought the U.S. closer to 2.2% growth, it could be worth $10 trillion in cumulative GDP by 2030. Continued here |
Buttons Are Bougie Now The 2022 Ford Bronco Raptor, among the most expensive offerings in the car manufacturer’s line of tough-guy throwback SUVs, features 418 horsepower, a 10-speed transmission, axles borrowed from off-road-racing vehicles, and 37-inch tires meant for driving off sand dunes at unnecessarily high speeds. But when the automotive site Jalopnik got its hands on a Bronco Raptor for testing, the writer José Rodríguez Jr. singled out something else entirely to praise about the $70,000 SUV: its buttons. The Bronco Raptor features an array of buttons, switches, and knobs controlling everything from its off-road lights to its four-wheel-drive mode to whatever a “sway bar disconnect” is. So much can be done by actually pressing or turning an object that Rodríguez Jr. found the vehicle’s in-dash touch screen—the do-it-all “infotainment system” that has become ubiquitous in new vehicles—nearly vestigial. Then again, the ability to manipulate a physical thing, a button, has become a premium feature not just in vehicles, but on gadgets of all stripes. Although the cheapest models of the Amazon Kindle line are simple touch-screen slabs, the $250 Oasis features dedicated “Page Forward”/“Back” buttons, while the $370 version of the Kindle Scribe comes with a “premium pen” for note-taking that itself has a button. Or consider the Apple Watch, among the most expensive smartwatches around: All models come with a button and knob on their right side just below the bezel—plus a second button for the more expensive Ultra model. The bargain-bin knockoffs sold on Amazon, by contrast, offer nothing but a screen on a strap. Speaking of which, I recently bought an Amazon-brand smart thermostat with a touch screen that nearly burned my house down. Perhaps a dial, like the one on the primo Google Nest, could have helped. Continued here |
Navigating the Data Deluge - SPONSORED CONTENT FROM NTT DATA In our increasingly digitized world, today’s most successful businesses are driven by data. They gather and analyze information from a myriad of sources, using what they learn to optimize operations, accelerate innovation, and make informed strategic decisions. Limitless opportunities to harness the power of data exist across the business spectrum, but perhaps no other industry can use it more meaningfully than the life sciences and health care sector. Continued here |
Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY's hedged repair bill When New York became the first state to pass a heavily modified right-to-repair bill late last year, it was apparent that lobbyists had succeeded in last-minute changes to the law's specifics. A new report from the online magazine Grist details the ways in which Gov. Kathy Hochul made changes identical to those proposed by a tech trade association. Continued here |
Does the Term "POC" Help Us or Hurt Us? Tech companies may boast of having diverse workspaces where “people of color” can thrive, but the data shows this is not true for every group. Data by race for 57 of the biggest tech companies revealed that in 67% of firms, Black people made up less than 5% of the workforce, Latino’s made up 8%, and the category labeled “all other races” was even less. This begs the question: In an industry that notoriously under-hires Black and Latino employees, is the term POC harmful or helpful? Continued here |
Trust Gives Businesses in Australia and New Zealand a License to Innovate - SPONSORED CONTENT FROM Mastercard Innovation is a global imperative. In 2021, a survey for a Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report, “The Value of Experience: Customer Needs Top the Innovation Agenda,” found that the Covid-19 pandemic had accelerated innovation efforts, as 53% of executives said their organizations placed a high priority on innovation—up from 47% a year earlier—and 42% had responded by increasing their innovation budgets. Continued here |
Chemical Health Risks from the Ohio Train Accident--What We Know So Far A train carrying toxic and combustible materials derailed recently in Ohio. Here’s what we know about the situation—and what we can’t know yet About two weeks after a train carrying toxic and combustible materials derailed just outside a small town near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border and filled the skies with black smoke, questions abound over the health and environmental impacts of the disaster. Continued here |
Video Quick Take: Accenture's Manish Chandra on Digital Fluency and Transformation - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM ACCENTURE Welcome to the HBR Video Quick Take. I’m Todd Pruzan, senior editor for research and special projects at Harvard Business Review. Accenture, a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital cloud and security, recently partnered with Bosch, a German multinational engineering and technology company, on Bosch’s Digital Fluency Program, to deliver a sustainable digital transformation. Today, I’m speaking with Manish Chandra, Managing Director of Strategy and Consulting, the Supply Chain and Operations Lead in India, and Zero-Based Transformation Lead for Growth Markets, to talk about Accenture’s role in Bosch’s Digital Fluency Program and the areas where digital can deliver sustainable value for automotive and industrial companies. Manish, thank you so much for being with us today. Continued here |
The Contradictions of Ron DeSantis He has ignited so many cultural confrontations that they’re difficult to keep track of, but he has acted most aggressively on education. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida hasn’t officially decided whether he’ll seek the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. But already the contradictions are sharpening between his prospective general-election strengths and his emerging strategy to win the Republican primaries. Continued here |
4 Techniques for Developing Strategy Insights Strategies only work if you can figure out how to position your organization on the strategic factors most relevant to your organization’s key stakeholders. And doing that requires what we call insight, a recognition that no-one else has had about what your stakeholders really want. This article identifies four techniques to develop the insight you need to crack open your competitive advantage: introspection, looking at other perspectives, observing actual behavior, and looking at what happens in other domains. Continued here |
UFO's Look A Lot More Like Spying Than Extraterrestrials By shunting pilot observations aside, the Pentagon likely fostered a UFO fad and overlooked Chinese intelligence technology entering U.S. airspace At latest count, Sidewinder missiles have burst both a wayward Chinese balloon and three “unidentified objects” floating over the U.S. and Canada. These suspected spies cast an unexpected spotlight on a significant national security issue: balloons and drones gathering intelligence for foreign powers. Continued here |
How to Write a Cover Letter Perhaps the most challenging part of the job application process is writing an effective cover letter. And yes, you should send one. Even if only one in two cover letters gets read, that’s still a 50% chance that including one could help you. Before you start writing, find out more about the company and the specific job you want. Next, catch the attention of the hiring manager or recruiter with a strong opening line. If you have a personal connection with the company or someone who works there, mention it in the first sentence or two, and try to address your letter to someone directly. Hiring managers are looking for people who can help them solve problems, so show that you know what the company does and some of the challenges it faces. Then explain how your experience has equipped you to meet those needs. If the online application doesn’t allow you to submit a cover letter, use the format you’re given to demonstrate your ability to do the job and your enthusiasm for the role. Continued here |
3 independent proofs that quantum fields carry energy One of the biggest questions that appears right at the intersection of physics and philosophy is as simple as it is puzzling: what is real? Is reality simply described by the particles that exist, atop a background of spacetime described by General Relativity? Is it fundamentally wrong to describe these entities as particles, and must we consider them as some sort of hybrid wave/particle/probability function: a more complete description of each “quantum” in our reality? Or are there fields, fundamentally, that underpin all of existence, where the “quanta” that we typically interact with are simply examples of excitations of those fields? When quantum mechanics arrived on the scene, it brought with it the realization that quantities that were previously thought to be well-defined, like: Continued here |
It's Always Sunny Inside a Generative AI Conference Dave Rogenmoser, the chief executive of Jasper, said he didn't think many people would show up to his generative AI conference. It was all planned sort of last-minute, and the event was somehow scheduled for Valentine's Day. Surely people would rather be with their loved ones than in a conference hall along San Francisco's Embarcadero, even if the views of the bay just out the windows were jaw-slackening. But Jasper's "GenAI" event sold out. More than 1,200 people registered for the event, and by the time the lanyard crowd moseyed over from the coffee bar to the stage this past Tuesday, it was standing room only. The walls were soaked in pink and purple lighting, Jasper's colors, as subtle as a New Jersey wedding banquet. Continued here |
Beware a Culture of Busyness Once upon a time, leisure was a sign of prestige. Today that idea has been turned on its head, and busyness is the new status symbol. Busy people are considered important and impressive, and employees are rewarded for showing how “hard” they’re working. Such thinking is misguided. It can cause organizations to overload their employees, base their incentives on the amount of time they put in, and excessively monitor their activities, all of which undermine productivity and efficiency, research shows. Meanwhile, reducing work to manageable levels can actually enhance them. Continued here |
Judging Parents Online Is a National Sport Whether they share their joys or their struggles, parents just can’t win on social media. To be a parent on the internet is to be constantly accused of false advertising. We make parenting sound “so freaking horrible,” “messy, tedious, nightmarishly life-destroying,” like it will “change everything, mostly for the worse.” Or is it that we make it look “so easy,” “aesthetically-pleasing” and “effortlessly beautiful,” “miles from what motherhood looks like for many of us”? Continued here |
The Truth About Aliens Is Still Out There The question is not whether aliens exist—I’m firmly in the “Hell yeah, they do!” camp—but rather when we’ll have enough hard evidence to end the decades-long debate over said existence. Believers in UFOs have gotten some tantalizing clues over the past few years. Those 2019 New York Times videos of zig-zagging, Tic Tac–like vessels with curious propulsion are always worth a rewatch. Likewise, the huge New Yorker feature by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “How the Pentagon Started Taking UFOs Seriously,” is pretty much required reading before you offer a qualified opinion on the issue. As my colleague Marina Koren wrote yesterday, UFO sightings are indeed getting more frequent, even if the data don’t necessarily scream ALIENS! Continued here |
What Chatbot Bloopers Reveal About the Future of AI Last week Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, was gleefully telling the world that the new AI-infused Bing search engine would “make Google dance” by challenging its long-standing dominance in web search. The new Bing uses a little thing called ChatGPT—you may have heard of it—which represents a significant leap in computers’ ability to handle language. Thanks to advances in machine learning, it essentially figured out for itself how to answer all kinds of questions by gobbling up trillions of lines of text, much of it scraped from the web. Continued here |
Susan Wojcicki, Googler No. 16 and longtime YouTube CEO, is stepping down There are big changes at YouTube today as longtime CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down from her role and leaving Google. The YouTube Blog features "A personal update from Susan" that announces she'll be stepping down to "start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I'm passionate about." YouTube's new leader will be Neal Mohan, one of Wojcicki's longtime lieutenants who has worked at Google for 15 years. Continued here |
Case Study: Should a Dollar Store Raise Prices to Keep Up with Inflation?
Discount retailer Dollar Bill’s has been struggling to maintain its margins over the past two years because of inflationary pressures, delays on imported goods, and decreased foot traffic. Now the board has asked CEO William Fisher Jr. to develop a strategy for raising prices. William worries that raising prices will hurt the company’s reputation and alienate customers, but he recognizes that something has to change. Continued here
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