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CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!  S33Emotional intelligence has limits: Hone your "perceptivity" as well  Most people think they are better judges of character than everyone else. (Of course, that statement is statistically impossible — read it again.) For years scholars cast doubt on this notion, regarding perceptivity as more a learned skill than a natural ability. However, recent research into what is called “the good judge” of character suggests that some people do have an advantage in this area. One 2019 study found “consistent, clear, and strong evidence that the good judge does exist” — in other words, some people are indeed better than others at judging personality.My own experience bears out this finding. Over my two decades of working with leaders across industries as wide-ranging as private equity, apparel, health care, and agribusiness, I’ve found that some people are extraordinarily adept at judging others, but these individuals are few and far between. The vast majority of professionals think their judgment of others’ personalities is accurate. In truth, they fall prey to a whole range of biases that skew how they size people up and in turn lead to horrible decision-making.
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S1Ten Classic American Brands Owned by Foreign Companies Moreover, the industry is America’s biggest private-sector employer, responsible for one of every four jobs, or 55 million employees. Yet in today’s challenging consumer environment, retailers are facing higher e-commerce penetration and inflationary pressures—across an industry notoriously known for razor-thin margins. Known for its everyday low prices, Walmart achieves a competitive advantage through pricing goods approximately 25% cheaper than traditional retail competitors. Overall, groceries make up more than half of total sales. While its main customer base is often low and middle-income shoppers, the retail giant is seeing a surge in sales from higher-income customers as shoppers seek out lower grocery prices.
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S4Organizations Work to Reduce Animal Deaths With Relegated Passageways More than 4 million miles of public roads across the U.S. provide vital links for commerce, services, and travel, but they’re treacherous barriers for wildlife seeking food, water, and mates. Exposed and unsure about the noisy, unfamiliar terrain presented by an open road, an animal that hesitates or misjudges the speed of an approaching vehicle risks fatal consequences.Unfortunately, those encounters are all too common on busy roadways. According to the Federal Highway Administration, there are more than 1 million wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVCs) every year in the U.S. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of animals killed and maimed, WVCs also result in hundreds of human fatalities and tens of thousands of injuries.
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S5Why Does Spaceflight Destroy Astronautsâ Red Blood Cells? Recent research, however, suggests otherwise: A paper published in Nature Medicine in 2022 found that space anemia is the result of a dramatic and persistent spike in red blood cell destruction. Whereas on Earth our bodies break down 2 million cells every second, in space they ramp up to 3 million per second, a 50 percent increase.Notably, the condition does improve throughout post-flight rehabilitation. And astronauts have dealt with it just fine up to now, but most trips to outer space, like those for individuals on the International Space Station, last only six months. It’s unclear how human physiology would fare on the multi-year voyages of the future — not to mention permanent colonies on the moon or Mars.
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S6The best car camping essentials There are a thousand and one ways to enjoy the great outdoors—and not all of them involve a six-person tent. Many people (present company included) are taking advantage of the mobile accommodation currently parked in their driveway, i.e., car camping. Unlike a traditional tent-and-pole campsite, camping à la automobile is more convenient, great for last-minute adventures, and allows you to pack as heavy or as light as you'd like. While you could, in theory, hit the road with nothing but a toothbrush and a case for wanderlust, I've found that there are a few specialty items that make sleeping on the road a little more comfortable.I’ve been on my fair share of car camping trips, including a 5-week jaunt around the U.S in a tiny Honda Civic, to National Park-centric road trips during which I car camped the entire time. I’ve spent plenty of time packing and unpacking my vehicle, folding down the seats, and setting up a makeshift bed and kitchen in the back. Here are some car camping essentials I recommend.
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S7Can vitamin D help fight cancer? Our own immune system is one of our greatest allies in suppressing the development of cancer in our bodies, but it often needs a little push. One way of doing this is by using a class of medications called ‘checkpoint inhibitors.' These medicines release the brakes on certain immune cells—called killer T cells—that then try and kill cancer cells. These can be very effective treatments for certain kinds of skin, lung, and kidney cancers, but unfortunately, they don’t work for every patient.A flurry of studies published in 2018 demonstrated that the patients’ microbiome may have something to do with this. People who did or didn’t respond to checkpoint inhibitor therapy were found to have consistent differences in the bacteria commonly found in their gut. And in 2021, two studies found that transferring microbes from the fecal matter of people who did respond to the therapy to the gut of those who didn’t, could improve therapeutic benefits in the latter patients.
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S8How to Convince Putin He Will Lose Two ideas dominate discussions about how to bring the war in Ukraine closer to an end: the West should either pressure Ukraine to make concessions to Russia or support Ukraine’s efforts to win on the battlefield. Both approaches rightly recognize that negotiations will remain futile until changing circumstances compel one side to accept peace terms that it rejects today. Nonetheless, neither approach is likely to end the war.Withholding arms from Ukraine could eventually force it to offer concessions to Russia as part of a desperate attempt to end the war, but advocates of this approach overlook how it would also affect Russia’s war aims. Moscow would react to its newfound military advantages by doubling down on its most extreme demands—further territorial gains in places such as Kharkiv and Odessa, regime change, demilitarization, and more. Any willingness in Kyiv to make concessions would be offset by Moscow’s newly expanded war aims. The result would be Russian gains on the battlefield, not peace.
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S9The Taiwan Aid Bill Wonât Fix the Arms Backlog In April, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law a trio of emergency supplemental spending bills, including one focused on the Indo-Pacific that is commonly referred to as the Taiwan aid bill. The new legislation seeks in part to address Taiwan’s roughly $19.7 billion backlog of arms sales from the United States—a hot-button issue given China’s increasingly provocative military activities around Taiwan and the perception among some U.S. analysts that Taiwan is not as much of a priority as Washington claims.In April, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law a trio of emergency supplemental spending bills, including one focused on the Indo-Pacific that is commonly referred to as the Taiwan aid bill. The new legislation seeks in part to address Taiwan’s roughly $19.7 billion backlog of arms sales from the United States—a hot-button issue given China’s increasingly provocative military activities around Taiwan and the perception among some U.S. analysts that Taiwan is not as much of a priority as Washington claims.
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S10U.S. Military Planes Are in Haiti. Haitians Donât Know Why. In the past several weeks, I have watched dozens of sleek U.S. military planes descend over Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where I live. They were the first flights to land since gangs blockaded and halted commercial air traffic in March. U.S. news reports suggest that the aircraft contained civilian contractors and supplies to pave the way for the deployment of a Kenyan-led security mission to Haiti, which is expected to begin any day now.In the past several weeks, I have watched dozens of sleek U.S. military planes descend over Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where I live. They were the first flights to land since gangs blockaded and halted commercial air traffic in March. U.S. news reports suggest that the aircraft contained civilian contractors and supplies to pave the way for the deployment of a Kenyan-led security mission to Haiti, which is expected to begin any day now.
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S11Supreme Court unanimously rejects challenge to mailed abortion pills “Given the broad and comprehensive conscience protections guaranteed by federal law, the plaintiffs have not shown—and cannot show—that FDA’s actions will cause them to suffer any conscience injury,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the opinion. “Federal law fully protects doctors against being required to provide abortions or other medical treatment against their consciences—and therefore breaks any chain of causation between FDA’s relaxed regulation of mifepristone and any asserted conscience injuries to the doctors.”Reproductive rights advocates will celebrate the ruling, which helps safeguard access to one of the most common methods of abortion. Mifepristone is used in roughly two-thirds of abortions in the U.S. The figure surged after the court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, triggering new laws and restrictions in 25 states.
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S12The fight over medical abortion has worsened pregnancy care The Supreme Court unanimously shut down one of many troubling tugs of war over access to abortion. By tossing out FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, it quashed the utterly mistaken notion that the Food and Drug Administration improperly approved mifepristone, a drug used for medical abortion, nearly a quarter century ago.This Texas-based case, which sought to roll back access to one of two abortion medications, was not really about anti-abortion doctors supposedly being harmed by the government’s actions. It was about a political drive to unfairly question and restrict a longstanding, safe, and sometimes necessary medical treatment to end pregnancies.
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S13S14S15S16S17Is Google S.E.O. Gaslighting the Internet? In March, Gisele Navarro watched Google Search traffic to her Web site, HouseFresh, disappear. HouseFresh evaluates and reviews air purifiers. Her husband, Danny Ashton, launched the site in 2020, when the pandemic created a spike in demand for air purification, and at its peak the business had fifteen paid contributors. (Navarro and Ashton also work together at NeoMam, a content studio that Ashton founded.) Google traffic to HouseFresh had been slowly declining since last October, but the recent drop was far more dramatic—from around four thousand daily search referrals, or click-throughs from Google results, to around three hundred. The site makes money from affiliate fees, taking a small cut when a reader follows a link from HouseFresh to purchase an air purifier online; less traffic means less revenue, and the site can now only afford to pay one full-time employee. Navarro told me, “We are living our lives like Google is gone for us.”In May, we got a glimpse into the inner workings of Google Search, from a leak of twenty-five hundred pages of the company’s internal documentation. The files seem to have been uploaded to GitHub by an unknown party, in March, but gained attention only when Erfan Azimi, a search-engine-optimization consultant, sent it to Rand Fishkin, a veteran S.E.O. expert and a commentator on the industry. The leak is from Google Search’s A.P.I., or application programming interface, a kind of directory of labels that external developers can refer to in their code in order to call up information from Google’s internal infrastructure. It is a vast list of coding tags incomprehensible to the lay reader. But the documents identify many of the variables that Google’s search algorithm takes into account, without going so far as to specify how those variables are weighted or how a site’s ranking is ultimately determined.
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S18Happy Seventy-eighth Birthday, Mr. Ex-President On Thursday, when Donald Trump met with Republicans in Washington, it was the first time he’d visited Capitol Hill in the four years since he pressed Congress to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In a statement, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticized him for “returning to the scene of the crime” and warned that he was on a “mission of dismantling our democracy.” Trump’s allies in the Republican Party, meanwhile, suggested that he would be in forward-looking policy mode as he talked about plans for a second term in the White House. Yeah, right.Trump, it will perhaps not surprise you to learn, has not been reborn as a statesman or a wonk. Reliable accounts suggest that his private remarks before the House Republicans were pretty much in keeping with his public appearances these days—sclerotic, rambling, nasty, and often incomprehensible. Fox News’s senior congressional correspondent reported, rather tactfully, that the ex-President meandered through “lots of tangents”; a small sampling, from the many accounts to emerge of what went on in the room, included Trump sharing his opinion on everything from Taylor Swift’s prospective endorsement of Joe Biden, to the “dirty, no-good bastards” at the Justice Department, to why he is a “big fan” of William McKinley. (Tariffs!) Trump wondered if his close ally Marjorie Taylor Greene was being “nice” to Speaker Mike Johnson these days. He called Biden a “dope” and, in one of those split-screen moments that tells you everything about the stakes of the 2024 election, warned that Ukraine is “never going to be there for us”; Biden, meanwhile, was in Europe, pledging unequivocal support to Ukraine in the form of a ten-year bilateral security agreement. Trump even trashed Milwaukee, where Republicans are soon to meet to nominate him as their Presidential candidate for a third straight election, as “a horrible city.” Once Trump’s comment became public, there were many competing explanations from attendees as to why he might think so; he apparently did not say.
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S19When Anxiety Is Not a Superpower There is no feeling or metaphysical concept that Pixar Animation Studios can’t turn into some sort of blob. This was my complaint with the studio’s previous effort, 2023’s Elemental, which conjured a city populated by talking gobs of fire and water who clumsily embodied broader metaphorical topics. The first Inside Out, released nearly a decade ago, was the peak of Pixar’s blob cinema—a children’s drama about brightly colored beings representing human emotions such as joy and sadness, warring with one another as a representation of an 11-year-old’s evolving inner life. The systematization of something so multifaceted felt a little glib, but Pixar knows how to entertain, and so Inside Out pushed my buttons with practiced ease.Inside Out 2 is, similarly, quite entertaining. Still, there were more than a few moments when I bristled at Pixar’s willingness to boil the headiest emotional concepts into the kind of bland CGI goop one might encounter during an Apple keynote. Joy being a chipper, canary-yellow lady, sure; Anger being a grumpy red stump with flames for hair, fine. But have you ever wondered what someone’s “sense of self” might look like? Inside Out 2 has the answer: a bunch of glowing strings tied into a tree-shaped bow. Every time staggeringly vague matters of the mind were reduced to screenwriting MacGuffins, some insidious blob in my own mind—call that emotion “David’s nonsense detector”—had me wondering what Jung might make of all this.
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S20What Children Remember About Their Fathers Father’s Day looks different for each family. For some, it is a moment to celebrate the dad(s) in your life and let them know how much you appreciate them. Maybe it’s with a homemade card, or pancakes, or an afternoon in which a dad is allowed to take a nap and watch replays of the 1998 NBA finals uninterrupted. But the day can also be steeped in mourning, as the loss of a father, or father figure, is felt more acutely and the memories of that person can come bubbling to the surface.In The Atlantic’s archives, you can see these themes playing out across time. I found myself deeply moved by the connections between a March 1950 essay by Virginia Woolf about her father, Leslie Stephen, and a January 2024 essay by my colleague Ross Andersen, about his father, Erik Dybkaer Andersen.
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S21If Ray Kurzweil Is Right (Again), Youâll Meet His Immortal Soul in the Cloud Ray Kurzweil rejects death. The 76-year-old scientist and engineer has spent much of his time on earth arguing that humans can not only take advantage of yet-to-be-invented medical advances to live longer, but also ultimately merge with machines, become hyperintelligent, and stick around indefinitely. Nonetheless, death cast a shadow over my interview with Kurzweil this spring. Just minutes before we met, we both learned that Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and one of Kurzweil's intellectual jousting partners, had suffered that fate.Back then, many people regarded his predictions as over the top. Computers achieving human-level intelligence by 2029? Way too soon! In the age of generative AI, that timeline seems conventional, if not conservative. So it's not surprising that Kurzweil's new book, out this month, is called The Singularity Is Nearer. A lot of the dotted lines in the first book's charts have now been filled inâand are impressively on the mark. Still, even though I'm bowled over by the technological advances that Kurzweil correctly predicted, I have trouble wrapping my (unaugmented) mind around his sunny scenario of our disembodied brains thriving hundreds of years from now in some kind of cloud consciousness.
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S22The Secret to Living Past 120 Years Old? Nanobots We are now in the later stages of the first generation of life extension, which involves applying the current class of pharmaceutical and nutritional knowledge to overcoming health challenges. In the 2020s we are starting the second phase of life extension, which is the merger of biotechnology with AI. The 2030s will usher in the third phase of life extension, which will be to use nanotechnology to overcome the limitations of our biological organs altogether. As we enter this phase, we’ll greatly extend our lives, allowing people to far transcend the normal human limit of 120 years.Only one person, Jeanne Calment—a French woman who survived to age 122—is documented to have lived longer than 120 years. So why is this such a hard limit to human longevity? One might guess that the reasons people don’t make it past this age are statistical—that elderly people face a certain risk of Alzheimer’s, stroke, heart attack, or cancer every year, and that after enough years being exposed to these risks, everyone eventually dies of something. But that’s not what’s happening. Actuarial data shows that from age 90 to 110, a person’s chances of dying in the following year increase by about 2 percentage points annually. For example, an American man at age 97 has about a 30 percent chance of dying before 98, and if he makes it that far he will have a 32 percent chance of dying before 99. But from age 110 onward, the risk of death rises by about 3.5 percentage points a year.
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S23S24S25How to Get Your Colleagues On Board with Your Idea In the early stages of your career, getting people to not only listen to, but to agree to or to act on your ideas or views can be challenging. It’s often a time when you have the least amount of influence and are still building your reputation. When you want to persuade someone to see (or do) things your way, you may default to skills you’ve been socialized to exhibit: making a rational argument supported by data, persisting in the face of a challenge, and projecting confidence. But these strategies can be counterproductive. When others seem to be resisting your ideas, there is usually a deeper belief or concern informing their view — one that they aren’t saying out loud. To uncover these roadblocks and see better results, you need to understand the other person’s reasoning, instead of trying to explain your own. The key is to ask the right questions.
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S26Why Cofounder Partnerships Fail â and How to Make Them Last Up to 43% of startup founders ultimately buy out their cofounder due to interpersonal rifts and power struggles. To understand why so many cofounder partnerships end in failure, the authors conducted research on lead founders seeking cofounders, finding that lead founders tend to prioritize skillsets and execution while potential cofounders prioritize interpersonal compatibility. This mismatch in priorities is the root of so many cofounder splits. To overcome this, the authors offer three recommendations for lead founders and cofounders alike: 1) Put yourself in the other person’s shoes, 2) Don’t neglect the interpersonal aspect in initial conversations, and 3) Consider co-creating the idea with a partner.
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S27It's the Summer Without Interns. Here's What That Means for Your Talent Pipeline Job postings for internships in 2024 fell well below 2022 and 2023 levels, according to a new report from Indeed. And in a new analysis from the job site Handshake, the number of internship postings dropped more than 7 percent in the year leading up to May compared to that same period the year before, as first reported by Bloomberg. In professional services, nonprofits, and the technology and financial services sectors, the drop was particularly apparent. That's not surprising, considering the labor market has cooled considerably since 2022. But while hiring for teen workers has steadily increased since the beginning of this year, it's faded for workers ages 20 to 24--the ones prime for internships--noted Nick Bunker, economic research director for North America at Indeed Hiring Lab, in the Indeed report.
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S28The FDA lost a whistleblower complaint about unsanitary conditions at an infant formula plant for a year, auditors revealed The Department of Labor received the email and three days later forwarded it to an FDA address specifically for such complaints. But one of several staff members charged with managing the FDA inbox at the time “inadvertently archived” the email in February 2021, and it wasn’t found until a reporter requested it in June 2022.The FDA took some actions and did follow-up inspections but “more could have been done leading up to the Abbott powdered infant formula recall,” the auditors wrote. The FDA needs better policies for reporting the status of complaints to senior leaders and to make sure that inspections are done quickly, the report concluded.
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S29S30Tencent-Backed AI Drug Discovery Startup Xtalpi Rises In Hong Kong Debut The company, formally known as QuantumPharm, finished its first day of trading at HK$5.8, up 9.8% from its HK$5.28-a-share price set for its initial public offering. Its stock surged as much as 24.6% in intraday trading. Xtalpi, which uses artificial intelligence and quantum physics to discover new drugs, raised HK$989.3 million ($126.7 million) in its listing.Xtalpi was the first to go public under a Hong Kong new listing rule for specialist technology companies with smaller market cap and lower revenue, which was introduced more than a year ago to revive the city’s sluggish IPO market. The AI-powered drug discoverer attracted cornerstone investors including the investment holding company owned by Peter Lee, co-chairman of Hong Kong’s Henderson Land Development; and the private fund controlled by Gong Hongjia, the Chinese billionaire behind surveillance product supplier Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology, among others.
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S31After 13.8 billion years, why hasn't the Big Bang faded away? For the past 13.8 billion years, our Universe has been expanding, cooling, and gravitating. The hot Big Bang itself was, at least for our observable Universe, a one-time event that was the proverbial starting gun for everything that’s happened since. As we expanded and cooled, we formed atomic nuclei, neutral atoms, stars, galaxies, and eventually, rocky planets like Earth. Although extremely early relic signals exist — including a background of gravitational waves generated during the phase of cosmic inflation that preceded the Big Bang and a background of neutrinos released just a second after the hot Big Bang — the earliest signal we’ve observed is today’s cosmic microwave background (CMB), created when the Universe was a scant 380,000 years old.The existence of this leftover radiation, originally known as the “primeval fireball” when it was theorized, was an astonishing prediction dating back to George Gamow all the way in the 1940s, and it shocked the astronomical world when it was directly detected back in the 1960s. Over the subsequent 60 years, we’ve measured its properties exquisitely, learning a tremendous amount about our Universe in the process. What’s perhaps most remarkable, however, is that this early, relic signal still persists a whopping 13.8 billion years after atoms first became neutral and this background radiation was first emitted. It still hasn’t faded away, and the scientific explanation for why is nothing short of profound.
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S32Overthinking? Refocusing on bodily sensations may calm your mind Why is it that visiting the beach sometimes assuages a bad mood? The Sun warms your cheek, a cool breeze ruffles your hair, and, suddenly, all seems well. There’s something about getting out of your head and into your senses that can make all your troubles melt away, even if only for a moment. In fact, research suggests that vulnerability to depressive spells may have less to do with overthinking than under-sensing. While it’s long been thought that negative thought patterns underpin depression, it may be the case that rumination simply distracts depressed patients from their sensory experiences — and that sensory inhibition may be the primary culprit. Over the past two decades, University of Toronto psychology professor Norman Farb and his colleague Zindel Segal have conducted studies on how healthy and depressed people experience sadness, exploring questions like whether they’d respond to clips from sad films in different ways, or whether their brains would show particular patterns of activity compared to people who weren’t depressed.
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S34Complexity science could transform 21st-century research. Here's how. A new science is emerging that promises to become the defining field of the 21st century. More than just a narrow specialization, it’s not just a new field but a new way of doing science — a new way of organizing intellectual domains and effort. Given its broad impact, it goes by several names, but the one that embraces its full potential is complexity science. Today, I want to briefly introduce why it’s already so important and why it’s likely to define the frontiers of human inquiry for decades to come.I’m writing this essay after beginning a door-jam of a book called Foundational Papers in Complexity Science. Volume One, 1922-1962. It’s part of an intended four-volume set to be published by the incomparable Santa Fe Institute (SFI). As promised in the title, the book contains key papers in the development of complexity as a field. What really makes the book worthwhile, however, is that each paper features an introduction written by a current researcher and annotated by that scientist. Even better yet, the first volume contains a masterful introduction to the field by David Krakauer, the head of SFI.
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S35Did warm-bloodedness pave the path to sentience? We feel, therefore we are. Conscious sensations ground our sense of self. They are crucial to our idea of ourselves as psychic beings: present, existent, and mattering. But is it only humans who feel this way? Do other animals? Will future machines? Weaving together intellectual adventure and cutting-edge science, neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey describes in his book “Sentience” his quest for answers: from his discovery of blindsight in monkeys and his pioneering work on social intelligence to breakthroughs in the philosophy of mind. In the following excerpt from “Sentience,” he challenges traditional explanations for the evolution of sentience in mammals and birds, proposing that warm-bloodedness may have played a crucial role.Birds and mammals have in common a physiological feature that distinguishes them from all other animals: They are warm-blooded. That’s to say, they maintain a constant body temperature higher than the surroundings, typically 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit) for mammals and 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for birds.
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S36How Activist Investors Could Push Southwest Airlines to Cater to Higher-Paying Business Travelers Known for its single-class layout, unassigned seating, minimalist onboard fare, and almost unbelievably enduring "bags fly free" policy, Southwest has become a favorite carrier with voyagers happy to trade frills for lower fares. But its refusal to put on the dog--and rake in the considerably augmented revenue that doing so generates for competitors--has thrust the airline and its management in the crosshairs of activist investors. They are now looking to boost profit and stock prices by forcing fundamental cultural and operational changes on the carrier. That is the message of the letter hedge fund Elliott Management sent to Southwest's board this week after taking a $1.9 billion stake in the company and becoming one of its major shareholders. The missive offered even fewer flourishes than the airline's flights. It got straight to the point, calling out the current management's "poor execution and leadership's stubborn unwillingness to evolve" by adopting the hardcore business practices and myriad fees characteristic of more profitable rivals.
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S37OpenAI is Reportedly Making Bank Amid the AI Revolution OpenAI's ChatGPT was already one of the best-known AI brands amid the surge of artificial intelligence tech coming from Google, Microsoft, and others, but its role as market leader may have been cemented this week when Apple confirmed it was partnering with the chatbot maker to power key features of its "Apple Intelligence" AI push.Now new information suggests that OpenAI really is raking in incredible sums from its sometimes-controversial tech, despite the competition from its deep-pocketed rivals. It may even have doubled its annual revenues compared to last year's figures.
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S38Microsoft President Testifies Before House Panel Over China-Linked Hack Microsoft President Brad Smith appeared before the House of Representatives panel on homeland security on Thursday, where he will field questions about the company's security practices after Chinese hackers breached its systems past year.China-linked hackers stole 60,000 U.S. State Department emails last year by breaking into the tech giant's systems, while a Russian group separately spied on Microsoft's senior staff emails earlier this year, according to the company's disclosures.
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S39How Canvas Beauty Founder Stormi Steele Drove $1 Million in TikTok Shop Sales in a Single Day Last Saturday, Canvas Beauty founder Stormi Steele sat behind a bright pink table full of her haircare and beauty products for more than five hours, phone camera and lights pointing at her. The TikTok livestream she was creating became a hit -- in fact, Steele claims it made her the first person to hit $1 million in sales during a single TikTok livestream.Steele believes it is her authenticity that has driven her popularity among consumers. "By the time you hit 'CEO status,' you're supposed to look a certain way. You're supposed to maneuver a certain way, you're supposed to have people on your team, have assistants -- and it's like, a lot of people who are just starting aren't there yet," Steele says. "So when I got on TikTok, they was able to see something that was successful, yet something that was still very close to home."Â
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S40If You're Not Supporting LGBTQ+ Workers, You're Missing Out on a Giant Pool of Talent On June 11, Inc. hosted a panel discussion in its New York City headquarters on economic opportunities and challenges facing the LGBTQ+ community, entrepreneurs in particular. Hosted by Inc. editor-in-chief Mike Hofman, the panel featured Lee Badgett, an expert on LGBTQI economics and the co-founder of Koppa; Marc Coleman, founder and CEO of the Tactile Group, an Inc. 5000 company; and Brian Ellner, president of One Strategy Group. The conversation centered around headwinds LGBTQ+ professionals and entrepreneurs face in a variety of areas, including underrepresentation on startup and corporate boards -- only 0.8 percent of Fortune 500 companies have an LGBTQ+ board member -- as well as the lack of investment by venture capital firms and the ongoing threat to LGBTQ+ rights playing out in the Supreme Court and halls of government.Â
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S41TikTok Has Introduced a Image Search Feature to TikTok Shop The video-sharing platform has launched a visual search tool that is available to users in the United States and Southeast Asia, TechCrunch reported earlier this week. Instead of using the search bar to find products, users can now take or upload a photo of an item, and the app will show similar products for consumers to purchase on TikTok Shop. Visual search features aren't new in the e-commerce world. Google has enabled shopping through its visual search feature, Google Lens, since 2018. Bing Image Search, Yahoo Image Search, and Pinterest Visual Search Tool are also popular tools that help consumers find products.
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S42Solomon Choi, Founder of 16 Handles Frozen Yogurt Chain, Dies at 44 Solomon Choi, a two-time restaurant industry founder and investor in early-stage food and beverage brands, died on June 7, the company's new owner and CEO Neil Hershman confirmed. Choi was 44 years old."He was a visionary who came to New York City in his 20s and founded this iconic frozen dessert brand. 16 Handles is where I got my personal start in franchising, and I owe so much to Solomon for the opportunities, education, mentorship and friendship he provided me throughout the years," Hershman said in a statement, as cited by Restaurant Business.Â
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S435 Traps to Avoid as You Gain Power as a Leader As you transition to a leadership role, your relationship to power changes: You gain more of it, and people start acting differently around you due to your authority. How can you avoid the hidden traps of gaining power, which shapes you in ways you may not realize? The authors outline five key traps leaders can fall into — the savior trap, the complacency trap, the avoidance trap, the friend trap, and the stress trap — and offer ways to counteract each.
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S44Tech at Work: The Future of Spatial Computing The Apple Vision Pro is the latest in a long line of trendy, expensive spatial computing headsets. (Remember Google Glass?) But the augmented reality and virtual reality features that these devices enable can have an impact beyond video games. Pioneering companies are using these immersive tools to train employees and to engage with consumers in digital and retail settings. It’s growing increasingly important for senior leaders to explore the possible use cases and to understand the potential benefits and ongoing challenges that accompany these technologies.
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S45How to Get Your Colleagues On Board with Your Idea In the early stages of your career, getting people to not only listen to, but to agree to or to act on your ideas or views can be challenging. It’s often a time when you have the least amount of influence and are still building your reputation. When you want to persuade someone to see (or do) things your way, you may default to skills you’ve been socialized to exhibit: making a rational argument supported by data, persisting in the face of a challenge, and projecting confidence. But these strategies can be counterproductive. When others seem to be resisting your ideas, there is usually a deeper belief or concern informing their view — one that they aren’t saying out loud. To uncover these roadblocks and see better results, you need to understand the other person’s reasoning, instead of trying to explain your own. The key is to ask the right questions.
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S46Why Cofounder Partnerships Fail -- and How to Make Them Last Up to 43% of startup founders ultimately buy out their cofounder due to interpersonal rifts and power struggles. To understand why so many cofounder partnerships end in failure, the authors conducted research on lead founders seeking cofounders, finding that lead founders tend to prioritize skillsets and execution while potential cofounders prioritize interpersonal compatibility. This mismatch in priorities is the root of so many cofounder splits. To overcome this, the authors offer three recommendations for lead founders and cofounders alike: 1) Put yourself in the other person’s shoes, 2) Don’t neglect the interpersonal aspect in initial conversations, and 3) Consider co-creating the idea with a partner.
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S47S48A little-known AI startup is behind Nigeria's first government-backed LLM Earlier this year, Nigeria’s technology minister, Bosun Tijani, announced that the country would build its own large language model, trained in five low-resource languages and accented English. This LLM, he said, would help increase the representation of Nigerian languages in the artificial intelligence systems being built around the world.Tijani said the project would be a partnership between the nonprofit Data.org; two government bodies, the National Information Technology Development Agency and the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; and Awarri, a Lagos-headquartered startup.
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S49The most important news from Apple isn't about AI Apple is hosting its annual developer conference this week, and the big news so far has been all about AI. The company announced a new partnership with OpenAI and a deep integration of AI tools across the next version of the iPhone’s operating system, iOS 18. It’s a major collaboration between two Silicon Valley giants, and it’s already reshuffling the internal politics of the industry: OpenAI co-founder-turned-rival Elon Musk did not take the announcement well, threatening to ban iPhones at his companies if the changes go through.But while AI dominated the headlines, Apple made a smaller announcement at Monday’s keynote that could have a far greater impact. While running through a list of new features in iOS 18, Apple’s software chief, Craig Federighi, said that iMessage will support RCS messaging, an open protocol intended to succeed SMS. It might sound like a dry, technical change, but it’s a big step in leveling the walled garden Apple has built around iMessage. And given iMessage’s huge presence in the U.S. — and minimal presence everywhere else — that could make a huge difference in tearing down global tech barriers.
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S50LinkedIn's AI Career Coaches Will See You Now Many burned-out workers have likely dreamed of hiring a career coach or résumé writer. Now, LinkedIn is introducing chats with generative AI career experts based on real people. Other new AI tools within the platform will help people write résumés and cover letters or evaluate their qualifications for jobs posted.LinkedIn has ramped up its generative AI tools in the past year and is moving to incorporate the tech into even more of its offerings. On Thursday, the career site announced new features like a pilot for AI-powered expert advice, an interactive chat to break down information in LinkedIn courses, and more AI features that can be used to search for and apply for jobs for its premium users in English. The changes showcase a massive push by LinkedIn to capitalize on generative AI. (LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, which has invested heavily in OpenAI, which in turn is powering the platformâÂÂs AI offerings.) And as LinkedIn continues its drive to become more than just a job site, people may spend their time there socializing or learning new skills through video courses.
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