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 S37What VUCA Really Means for You   It’s become a trendy managerial acronym: VUCA, short for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and a catchall for “Hey, it’s crazy out there!” It’s also misleading: VUCA conflates four distinct types of challenges that demand four distinct types of responses. That makes it difficult to know how to approach a challenging situation and easy to use VUCA as a crutch, a way to throw off the hard work of strategy and planning—after all, you can’t prepare for a VUCA world, right?
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S22The End of Netanyahu  Benjamin Netanyahu has always known what he wants his political epitaph to be. “I would like to be remembered as the protector of Israel,” he told the journalist Fareed Zakaria in 2016. “That’s enough for me.” The longest-serving Israeli prime minister has repeated this refrain for more than a decade, in English and Hebrew. It is the core case he has made for himself to the Israeli people, part of a winning electoral argument begrudgingly credited even by some of his critics. You may not like me and you may not trust me, he would imply, but only I can keep you safe.“The ability to spot danger in advance and prepare for it is the test of a body’s functioning,” Netanyahu once said on an Israeli talk show. “The Jewish nation has never excelled at foreseeing danger. We were surprised again and again—and the last time was the most awful one. That won’t happen under my leadership.” He concluded to applause: “This is what the state of Israel expects from me, and this is what I’ll do.”
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S36The ABCs of the Critical Path Method Recently added to the growing assortment of quantitative tools for business decision making is the Critical Path Method—a powerful but basically simple technique for analyzing, planning, and scheduling large, complex projects. In essence, the tool provides a means of determining (2) which jobs or activities, of the many that comprise a project, are “critical” in their effect on total project time, and (2) how best to schedule all jobs in the project in order to meet a target date at minimum cost. Widely diverse kinds of projects lend themselves to analysis by CPM, as is suggested in the following list of applications:
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S28What Jada Pinkett Smith's Critics Don't Understand  For describing her seemingly unconventional marriage as she saw it, she has become the villain.In her new memoir, Worthy, the actor Jada Pinkett Smith quotes the Marvel Comics superhero Wanda Maximoff to point out how women are often punished by double standards.
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S7S32The Balanced Scorecard--Measures that Drive Performance In the same way that you can’t fly an airplane with just one instrument gauge, you can’t manage a company with just one kind of performance measure. Think of a balanced scorecard as the instrument panel in the cockpit of an airplane. It’s a set of interrelated gauges that links seemingly disparate information about a company’s finances and operations. Together, they give you a more complete view of how your company has been performing, as well as where it’s headed.
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S31The Case for a Chief of Staff  New CEOs are typically focused on creating and implementing a strategy, building a top team, and driving culture change. Optimizing administrative workflow may not seem to be a priority. But a former CEO who now advises boards argues that many chief executives need a chief of staff (CoS)—someone who goes beyond the executive assistant role to help the office function smoothly. According to one CoS, the role encompasses being an air traffic controller for the leader and the senior team, an integrator connecting work streams that would otherwise remain siloed, a communicator linking the leadership team and the broader organization, an honest broker when the leader needs a wide-ranging view without turf considerations, and a confidant. In this article Ciampa outlines what a CoS does, the qualities one needs to succeed, and the ways companies typically design the role (with varying levels of responsibility) to help make a CEO more focused and productive.
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S10S16'The Black Book' Is Nigeria's First Runaway Netflix Hit  Editi Effiong's excitement is infectious. It's less than three weeks since his crime thriller, The Black Book, premiered on Netflix, and the movie has already been watched more than 70 million times. "I've been in a very happy place," Effiong says. "You create a thing and watch it go out in the world, it would make [anyone] happy."The Black Book is one of the most expensive Nigerian movies ever made, with a $1 million budget raised in part from Nigeria's tech elite, including the cofounder of fintech unicorn Flutterwave, Gbenga Abgoola, and Piggyvest's Odun Eweniyi. The movie's successâit claimed the most-watched spot on the platform in South Korea and has been the number-two ranked film in several countries across South America for over a weekâmakes it one of Nigeria's rare breakouts on streaming platforms and is perhaps a vindication of Netflix's decision to invest in "Nollywood," as the local industry is known.
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S38A Leader's Framework for Decision Making  Simple contexts are characterized by stability and cause-and-effect relationships that are clear to everyone. Often, the right answer is self-evident. In this realm of “known knowns,” leaders must first assess the facts of a situation—that is, “sense” it—then categorize and respond to it.
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S5S35S29S25The Mowing That Woke My Daughter  They are not my enemy, I remind myself, though they are tearing up the public hill just past my fence with loud tools and hacking with Weedwackers the wild violets and new lavender spread across the hill in bird patterns. We had watched them grow.One worker paused at the flare of yellow tulips, and from my window I saw him look around for a second and leave them, then look around and separate the small flowers from their stems, half- pausing to step over them with his boot, leaving to finish his job.
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S17Everyone Is a Luddite Now  The Luddites arrived on the streets of San Francisco much as they did in the English factories two centuries ago: under cover of darkness and with iconic weapons in hand. In this case, traffic cones. An enterprising activist had observed (or perhaps gotten an insider tip) that placing an object on the hood of a self-driving car blocks the sensors it uses to see the road. The car freezes. Many objects would do, but cones were handy, undamaging, and happened to transform Cruise’s robotaxis into four-wheeled unicorns. Unless it happens to be carrying a sympathetic passenger, the simple remedy of removing the cone is unavailable to the car. For weeks this summer, ahead of a state regulator’s decision to expand their reign, the city’s AV fleet was stricken by merry nocturnal raids.The pranksters were first branded as “Luddites” by online critics. Ignorant vandals, they meant. Tantruming technophobes who were attacking the very notion of progress. Somehow the activists had missed the memo about how electric robotaxis would cut carbon emissions and vastly improve road safety.
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S26The Perfect Book for Spooky Season  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.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is our supervisory senior associate editor Rachel Gutman-Wei, who works on our Science, Technology, and Health team. Rachel has reported on how handwriting lost its personality and made the case for eating raw batter. She also once ate an apple that had been sitting in the Atlantic offices for more than 400 days during the pandemic. (Those of us who know Rachel are a tad worried about her dietary choices.)
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S18This Contest Put Theories of Consciousness to the Test. Here's What It Really Proved  Science routinely puts forward theories, then batters them with data till only one is left standing. In the fledgling science of consciousness, a dominant theory has yet to emerge. More than 20 are still taken seriously.It's not for want of data. Ever since Francis Crick, the codiscoverer of DNA's double helix, legitimized consciousness as a topic for study more than three decades ago, researchers have used a variety of advanced technologies to probe the brains of test subjects, tracing the signatures of neural activity that could reflect consciousness. The resulting avalanche of data should have flattened at least the flimsier theories by now.
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S24AI Takes on Expiration Dates  Have you ever bitten into a nut or a piece of chocolate expecting a smooth, rich taste only to encounter an unexpected and unpleasant chalky or sour flavor? That taste is rancidity in action, and it affects pretty much every product in your pantry. Now artificial intelligence can help scientists tackle this issue more precisely and efficiently.We’re a group of chemists who study ways to extend the life of food products, including those that go rancid. We recently published a study describing the advantages of AI tools to help keep oil and fat samples fresh for longer. Because oils and fats are common components in many food types, including chips, chocolate, and nuts, the outcomes of the study could be broadly applied and even affect other areas, including cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.
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S4S9S33How to Stop Overthinking and Start Trusting Your Gut  Intuition is frequently dismissed as mystical or unreliable — but there’s a deep neurological basis for it. When you approach a decision intuitively, your brain works in tandem with your gut to quickly assess all your memories, past learnings, personal needs, and preferences and then makes the wisest decision given the context. The author offers strategies to learn how to leverage your intuition as a helpful decision-making tool in your career: 1) discern gut feeling from fear, 2) start by making minor decisions, 3) test drive your choices, 4) try the snap judgment test, and 5) fall back on your values.
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S40The 4 Types of Innovation and the Problems They Solve  Innovation is, at its core, about solving problems — and there are as many ways to innovate as there are different types of problems to solve. Just like we wouldn’t rely on a single marketing tactic for the life of an organization, or a single source of financing, we need to build up a portfolio of innovation strategies designed for specific tasks. Leaders identify the right type of strategy to solve the right type of problem, just by asking two questions: How well we can define the problem and how well we can define the skill domain(s) needed to solve it. Well-defined problems that benefit from well-defined skills fall into the category of “sustaining innovation.” Most innovation happens here, because most of the time we’re trying to get better at something we’re already doing. “Breakthrough innovation” is needed when we run into a well-defined problem that’s just devilishly hard to solve. In cases like these, we need to explore unconventional skill domains. When the reverse is true — skills are well-defined, but the problem is not — we can tap into “disruptive innovation” strategies. And when nothing is well-defined, well, then we’re in the exploratory, pioneering realm of basic research. There are always new problems to solve; learn to apply the solution that best fits your current problem.
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S21How storytellers (and their biases) crafted our history  In Tom Stoppard’s play Night and Day, two journalists are talking about the newspaper they work for. There is scant little that can be called “objective” when it comes to history. History is not about the past but stories of the past. Every historian, from Herodotus to Niall Ferguson, has an agenda. They choose what to include and what to cut, what to emphasize and what to downplay. If we’re looking for facts — indisputable, undeniable facts — we have precious few about anything pre-20th century. And so we rely on imagination, guesswork, and narrative.
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S6S20Single dose of psilocybin reduces depression in phase 2 trial  Can psilocybin serve as a uniquely powerful and long-lasting treatment for depression? Since the renaissance of psychedelic research emerged in the 2000s, a growing body of studies suggests that psilocybin can reduce symptoms of conditions like major depressive disorder, anxiety, and end-of-life distress.The most intriguing findings center on dosage: Some studies suggest that a single dose of psilocybin can yield therapeutic benefits that last long after the drug’s hallucinogenic effects wear off, possibly even months after ingesting one dose.
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S34The Elements of Good Judgment  Judgment—the ability to combine personal qualities with relevant knowledge and experience to form opinions and make decisions—is “the core of exemplary leadership,” according to Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis (the authors of Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls). It is what enables a sound choice in the absence of clear-cut, relevant data or an obvious path. Likierman believes that a more precise understanding of what exactly gives someone good judgment may make it possible for people to learn and improve on it. He approached CEOs at a range of companies, from some of the world’s largest right down to start-ups, along with leaders in the professions: senior partners at law and accountancy firms, generals, doctors, scientists, priests, and diplomats. He asked them to share their observations of their own and other people’s exercise of judgment so that he could identify the skills and behaviors that collectively create the conditions for fresh insights and enable decision makers to discern patterns that others miss. As a result, he has identified six key elements that collectively constitute good judgment: learning, trust, experience, detachment, options, and delivery. He describes these elements and offers suggestions for improvement in each one.
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S67What the Techno-Billionaire Missed About Techno-Optimism  As a general rule, any essay that includes the one-sentence paragraph “I am here to bring the good news” is written by someone who wants to take your money, your vote, or your soul. As far as I know, Marc Andreessen, the browser pioneer and cofounder of powerhouse VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, isn’t running for office. But the Techno-Optimist manifesto he posted this week (it’s a habit with him) is definitely bullish on inflating his already bloated wallet—and narrowing the broad arc of human existence with a relentless pursuit of new and even risky technology.Andreessen’s bolt from late-stage capitalism’s Mount Olympus—Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road—landed this week to a mixture of kudos and outrage. He posits that technology is the key driver of human wealth and happiness. I have no problem with that. In fact, I too am a techno-optimist—or at least I was before I read this essay, which attaches toxic baggage to the term. It’s pretty darn obvious that things like air-conditioning, the internet, rocket ships, and electric light are safely in the “win” column. As we enter the age of AI, I’m on the side that thinks that the benefits are well worth pursuing, even if it requires vigilance to ensure that the consequences won’t be disastrous.
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S39How Information Gives You Competitive Advantage The information revolution is sweeping through our economy. No company can escape its effects. Dramatic reductions in the cost of obtaining, processing, and transmitting information are changing the way we do business. Most general managers know that the revolution is under way, and few dispute its importance. As more and more of their time and […]
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S19The Best Crossplay Games for Consoles and PC  Crossplay games are ones you can play online with people on consoles or platforms different than yours. They're increasingly common, but the landscape remains fractured, and the options can be confusing. Some games are available only in a couple of places, and it's often unclear why some platforms are supported for crossplay and others aren't. Here, we've rounded up the best games that work on the most gaming destinations possible, so you can play with friends and family around the world. Looking for advice on gaming gear? Check out our many other product guides, including the Best Gaming Headsets, Best Gamepads, Best Gaming Mice, and Best Keyboards.
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S15Lunar bugs to ocean moons: seven things science has revealed about aliens so far  Through the years, BBC Future has covered a wide range of stories about what life from other worlds might look like and what the implications of discovering extraterrestrials might be. As we kick off a week of special coverage about aliens – all to mark the upcoming 60th Anniversary of the BBC's most famous alien lifeform, Doctor Who – we have picked some of our favourite extraterrestrial facts. The Moon, as we now know, is a dead place. But before the Apollo 11 astronauts landed there, we couldn't be 100% sure. In fact, there was the serious possibility that the three men on the mission could have brought space bugs back with them.
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