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CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!  S29The Key to a Fulfilling Career? Variety.   If you feel bored or unfulfilled by a job you once relished, you might be succumbing to what scientists call habituation: our brain’s tendency to react less and less to things that don’t change, so that what once brought joy and meaning can stop doing so over time. The antidote is to pursue variety, both inside and outside of work, since ample research shows that people are most engaged and satisfied when they are learning something new. Organizations can nudge people into diversifying their experiences, for example by regularly rotating people into new projects or positions. But individuals also have the power to dehabituate by finding different work opportunities, studying new skills, or trying new hobbies.
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S1Don't Underestimate the Power of Silence - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  Many of us have forgotten (or even fear) quiet. We live in a world full of noise and chatter. A world wherein our daily routines are inundated with distractions and responsibilities. This practice, called the Sphere of Silence, is a 60-minute routine that can help you stay grounded, focused, and most importantly, remain hopeful when your mind wants to spiral. There is one ground rule: Follow the below steps in complete silence.
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S2S3Weird Lab-Made Atoms Hint at Heavy Metals' Cosmic Origins - Scientific American (No paywall)  The new heavyweights are isotopes of the metals thulium, ytterbium and lutetium. Isotopes are versions of atoms with irregular numbers of neutrons in the nuclei. In this case, researchers packed 113 and 114 neutrons in with thulium’s 69 protons, 116 and 117 neutrons next to ytterbium’s 70 protons and 119 neutrons alongside lutetium’s 71.Heather Crawford, a nuclear chemist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who was not involved in the study, says the facility’s early results are exciting. “Even with the facility just barely coming online, there were already new isotopes,” she says. “We knew that would be the case eventually, but the speed with which it came was just really nice to see.”
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S4Tiny magnet could help measure gravity on the quantum scale - New Scientist (No paywall)  Despite keeping you stuck to the ground, gravity is the weakest force we know of. Only very large objects, like planets and stars, produce enough gravitational force to be easily measured. Doing the same for very small objects, on the tiny distances and masses of the quantum realm, is extremely difficult, in part because of the miniscule size of the force, but also because larger objects nearby can overwhelm the signal.He and his team found that, with a 1 kilogram test mass spinning nearby, they could measure a force on the particle of 30 attonewtons. An attonewton is a billionth of a billionth of a newton. One limitation is that the test mass must be in motion at the right speed to create a gravitational resonance with the magnet, otherwise the force won’t be strong enough to be picked up.
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S5Is the human brain really the most complex object in the universe? - New Scientist (No paywall)  BACK in 2012, neuroscientist Christof Koch wrote in his book Consciousness: Confessions of a romantic reductionist that the human brain is “the most complex object in the known universe”. Given that there are about 86 billion neurons in a brain, connected up in ways that we are only beginning to unravel, this seems intuitive. But when I put it to David Wolpert at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico – created in the 1980s as a hub for the budding field of complexity science – he doesn’t see it that way. “It’s almost farcical to entertain that we are the most complex system in the universe,” he says. “The question is actually wrongheaded.”Despite this, I persevere. Surely, there is some common measure of complexity that can be applied to all kinds of intricate systems? After all, if you squint, clusters of galaxies and the filaments that connect them look like tangled circuits of neurons. There are even roughly the same number of neurons in the human brain as there are galaxies in the observable universe. This similarity in form may have something to do with general laws through which complexity emerges, says Ricard Solé at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. Or it may not. “Coincidentally, that might appear in both systems, but that doesn’t mean anything,” he says.
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S6Bring Human Values to AI - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  When it launched GPT-4, in March 2023, OpenAI touted its superiority to its already impressive predecessor, saying the new version was better in terms of accuracy, reasoning ability, and test scores—all of which are AI-performance metrics that have been used for some time. However, most striking was OpenAI’s characterization of GPT-4 as “more aligned”—perhaps the first time that an AI product or service has been marketed in terms of its alignment with human values.When it launched GPT-4, in March 2023, OpenAI touted its superiority to its already impressive predecessor, saying the new version was better in terms of accuracy, reasoning ability, and test scores—all of which are AI-performance metrics that have been used for some time. However, most striking was OpenAI’s characterization of GPT-4 as “more aligned”—perhaps the first time that an AI product or service has been marketed in terms of its alignment with human values.
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S7Saving for retirement in your 50s can be 'really stress-inducing,' expert says. These tips can help  A so-called financial vortex â where competing life goals get in the way of financial priorities â is to blame, according to the research. For example, Gen Xers may be balancing care for aging relatives and children that forces them to put their own financial progress on the back burner.Ted Jenkin, a certified financial planner and the CEO and founder of oXYGen Financial, a financial advisory and wealth management firm based in Atlanta, said he typically helps clients come up with a "work optional" plan to leave their long-term corporate jobs for work they find more fulfilling.
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S8How to Be Creative on Demand - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  Creativity feels like an inexplicable miracle when it arrives. We may never be able to isolate all the variables that generate it. But there are ways to reliably create the conditions to make creativity a more predictable occurrence. The first thing you should do is think about the problem you’re trying to solve — let it marinade — and then walk away from it. This first round of effort is less about solving the problem than about priming the pump. It is after this step that the unconscious work begins — the work that draws from a fuller complement of mental resources, experiences, and creative connections. While that problem sits in the back of your mind, follow your curiosity. The key is to pay the price to create a rich experience with these sometimes pointless amusements. It’s often tempting to ignore these whimsical thoughts, but you do so at your creative peril. Begin collecting and organizing the experiences and information you’re taking in. Try to do something that doesn’t interest you daily — you never know what will turn out to be useful, including engaging in uncomfortable conversations. Finally, when the creativity hits, stop what you’re doing and work. Honor these moments by writing; don’t ignore these impulses.
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S9Incorporating generative AI into your companyâs technology strategy | MIT Sloan - MIT Sloan (No paywall)  “Digital technology, AI, and generative AI are not just pervasive in our business, they are really driving our transformation,” Peck said. “Upwards of 80% of orders are now customer-placed, and data from AI is driving those upsell, cross-sell shopping experiences as opposed to more transactional reorders.”Sales and support: Sysco maintains nearly 2 million SKUs, about 200,000 of which are in high demand among customers. The firm has been leveraging traditional AI and analytics to make product recommendations, but generative AI can incorporate unstructured data, such as images or social media data, to capture additional signals. “This will help us be even more creative feeding the shopping cart for our customers,” Peck said. “We are starting to see bigger shopping carts and higher margins by turning traditional AI into more generative AI.”
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S10Boiling tap water can remove 80 per cent of the microplastics in it - New Scientist (No paywall)  Eddy Zeng at Jinan University in China and his colleagues took samples of tap water and measured their levels of NMPs, finding an average concentration of 1 milligram per litre. They then boiled the samples for 5 minutes, before allowing them to cool. The levels of NMPs were then remeasured and found to have reduced by more than 80 per cent.“We estimated that intakes of NMPs through boiled water consumption were two to five times less than those through tap water on a daily basis,” says Zeng. “This simple but effective boiling-water strategy can ‘decontaminate’ NMPs from household tap water and has the potential for harmlessly alleviating human exposure to NMPs through water consumption.”
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S11The potential and the plight of the middle manager - The Economist (No paywall)  Nothing turns on management theorists more than conflicting incentives. (If the idea of an aroused management theorist has ruined your breakfast, sorry.) They ruminate on financial motives—the adverse impact that individual bonus schemes might have on team collaboration, say. They churn out studies and books on the competing interests of shareholders and the executives who act on their behalf.A new paper, published by Achyuta Adhvaryu of the University of California, San Diego, and Emir Murathanoglu and Anant Nyshadham of the University of Michigan, casts fresh light on the problem. It shows that clashing incentives are not always financial, and that conflicts can occur even between different levels of management. In the process it underlines that a much-mocked group deserves to be taken far more seriously.
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S12The 7 most bizarre facts about leap day  Once every four years — well, almost every four years — our calendar gifts us with an extra day: February 29th, also known as leap day Most of us who are born on this planet will experience perhaps around 20 such leap days in our lives, most a little less, some a little more, but its importance shouldn’t be underestimated. Leap days, as rare and whimsical as they may seem, actually play a vital role in our role as timekeepers: they keep our annual calendar in line with the seasons, year after year and century after century. Although leap day might have a bizarre historical origin and is accompanied by a series of urban legends that surround it, its very existence is predicated upon scientific, not superstitious, reasons.Without a leap day, the physics of planet Earth would quickly cause the seasons to move out of phase with our annual calendar, and the equinoxes and solstices would drift around the days, months and seasons. In fact, if we simply added a leap day to our calendars every four years without fail, things wouldn’t line up very well, either, which is precisely what happened for the centuries under which humanity followed the Julian calendar. Only if we properly account for our planet’s axial rotation and revolution around the Sun can we keep our calendar correct, and that’s what leap day is all about. Here are seven of the most bizarre, but still true, scientific facts that everyone should know.
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S13"Russell conjugation": A rhetorical trick that loads words with emotion  In his 2023 State of the Union speech, President Joe Biden referred to the 2020 election as the “greatest threat” democracy faced “since the Civil War.” During his 2016 election bid, former President Donald Trump promised that he could “make America great again.” Barack Obama claimed the gun lobby holds “Congress hostage right now,” while George W. Bush said, “Al Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime.”Now, maybe you agree these statements were accurate and maybe you don’t. Either way, that’s not entirely the point. While each president spoke as though simply stating the facts, they were infusing their words with emotional significance and not simply for rhetorical flair. Their goal was to sneak in arguments that would, hopefully, go unnoticed and unquestioned.
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S14Pax Economica: The forgotten history of the free-trade movement  In the 1927 musical Strike up the Band, a struggling American cheesemaker catches a much-needed break when the United States government slaps a tariff on the import of Swiss cheese. Hoping to drive his overseas competitors out of the market for good, he comes up with a seemingly absurd but quite logical plan. Outside of working hours, he sets up an organization called the Very Patriotic League to spread anti-Swiss sentiment and, eventually, campaign for a full-blown invasion of the Alps. When the tariff war turns into an actual war, the cheesemaker emerges as the richest man in town.Today, tariffs and other forms of economic protectionism are commonly associated with socialism and authoritarianism, while open, unregulated markets are seen as agents of capitalism and democracy. In the not-so-distant past, things were a little different. As historian Marc-William Palen shows in his latest book, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free-Trade World, protectionism was a weapon that Western countries used to control and exploit their colonies. In this age of empire, left-wing political groups saw free trade not as a threat, but as a means to create a different, more egalitarian world order.
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S15Gary Vee: Rules of billion-dollar brands  According to marketing expert Gary Vaynerchuk, the best ideas come from one thing: listening. Gary Vaynerchuk, the entrepreneurial force behind VaynerMedia and VeeFriends, explores the critical missteps businesses make in connecting with their customers, primarily their failure to adapt to consumer needs and their reliance on yesterday’s strategies. Vaynerchuk emphasizes the transformative — and often overlooked — power of caring and empathy in advertising. Great marketing is not just about bombarding people with ads; it’s about making sure every message respects the consumer’s time and is something they’d actually enjoy.
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S16How to Bootstrap a Product or Service People Will Love  Forget fancy pitch decks and venture capital meetings. Multiple business giants have proven that bootstrapping isn't about shortcuts. Think Airbnb, started in Brian Chesky's living room, or Dollar Shave Club's viral video that launched them to millions. Their stories are about resourcefulness, focus, and building the company their own way, brick by brick, on their own terms.Check if people are looking for something similar to your solution: Use Google Trends, Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, and Semrush, and see how often your keywords appear on search. For example, if you want to launch an AI-powered finance app, look up if your audience understands what it is and what it's for.
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S17How Business Scorecards Can Drive Growth  Eric Crews, an Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) member in Boston, is the founder and CEO of Crews and co., a management consulting firm that helps ready-to-scale, seven-figure businesses prioritize the right tools to increase revenue, profitability, and salable value. We asked Crews to share his preferred goal-setting methodology.Metrics, measurables, key performance indicators: They're the lifeblood of any entrepreneurial venture. As a business owner, you want data that helps you understand your business, protect its profits, and drive its success. I know I do. That's why every company I've run and advised has tracked key metrics with a business scorecard.
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S18'There's Too Much Nepotism in This Organization' And Other Complaints From a New DEI Survey  Apparently, "it's all about who you know," is still a thing. At least when it comes to career opportunities. That's according to a recent survey of 6,000 professionals across North America, including employers and employees, conducted by global recruiter Robert Walters about diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the workplace.More than three-quarters (77 percent) of companies in the survey admit to valuing a candidate's personal connections more than their skills. So it tracks that 68 percent of candidates lose out to someone with a stronger network. Perhaps most daming, in light of these statistics: Only 11 percent of companies report having "clear measures in place to prevent nepotism."
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S19Google and Meta Are Scrambling to Fix Their Oversensitive AI Models  Google and Meta's artificial intelligence models need insensitivity training. Both companies are contending with backlash following the release of their latest AI language models, and the consensus is that the tech giants may have made their models too sensitive. A few weeks ago, Google updated its Gemini web app to include an image generation tool, and it didn't take long for people to notice a problem: the image generator declined to produce certain content. In one example, when a user asked the generator to create a picture of a white cowboy, Gemini refused to do so, writing that "focusing on a character's ethnicity can contribute to harmful stereotypes and assumptions." When the user then asked for a picture of a black cowboy, the generator created the images immediately.Â
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S20Getting Caught in an Industry Hype Cycle: the CBD Products Edition  Several years ago, CBD and its purported health benefits were poised to carve out a prominent niche in the beverage and wellness industries. But a patchwork of legislation has curbed the industry's growth, the New York Times reported Wednesday, leaving some purveyors adjusting to the reality that their lotions, beverages, tinctures and more may not chart the meteoric path they had envisioned. The growing pains could be seen as a natural outcome of a hype cycle settling into a market reality. In new industries, fluctuations are frequent: In cryptocurrency and Web3, for instance, investors heaped $30 billion on companies developing the technologies in 2021, banking on the notion that digital worlds and currencies would foster the next iteration of the internet. The hype crescendoed, then tumbled hard: 2023 saw $7.8 billion invested in Web3 startups, according to a Crunchbase analysis. Now, amid the AI revolution, many investors and startups aren't sure where the industry is heading.Â
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S213 Questions Great Leaders Never Ask  Great leadership is not about having all the answers but instead asking the right questions that encourage your team to find those answers themselves. This means question-asking is not just a useful skill but the language of exceptional leadership.   This skill is crucial for drawing out the greatness, confidence, and leadership abilities in those around you. However, there's a fine line between fostering an empowering environment and stifling the confidence of those around you, and that line rides on the questions you ask.Â
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