The CFO's new role for a new age

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The CFO's new role for a new age May 15, 2022When organizations find themselves in crisis—whether it’s internal or global in nature—chief financial officers play a critical role in helping their companies navigate through the disruption. Whether it’s unifying the leadership team, building resilience, or developing growth strategies, CFOs are positioned to set up their organizations for not only survival, but also long-term success. Explore these insights to understand how the CFO role is evolving and what it means for your organization in the midst of geopolitical and economic uncertainties. Continued here

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On positive psychology - Martin Seligman Martin Seligman talks about psychology -- as a field of study and as it works one-on-one with each patient and each practitioner. As it moves beyond a focus on disease, what can modern psychology help us to become? Continued here

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Shankar Vedantam: You don't actually know what your future self wants "You are constantly becoming a new person," says journalist Shankar Vendantam. In a talk full of beautiful storytelling, he explains the profound impact of something he calls the "illusion of continuity" -- the belief that our future selves will share the same views, perspectives and hopes as our current selves -- and shows how we can more proactively craft the people we are to become. Continued here

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Make Leader Character Your Competitive Edge Why is this aspect of leadership and organizational culture so overlooked? Over more than a decade of investigating leader character in organizations, we’ve found that leaders largely underestimate and misunderstand the concept of character. They marginalize it as just being about ethics rather than recognizing it as the foundation of all judgment and decision-making. They generally assess their own character as “good enough.” They believe it is a fixed trait rather than a quality that can be developed, and so they don’t see how individual strength of character can be embedded and scaled in their own organizations and cultures. Simply put, they don’t see that competence and character go hand in hand.Our research into leader character began as an investigation into the failures of leadership associated with the 2008 global economic crisis.2 We conducted focus groups with over 300 business leaders in Canada, the U.S., England, and Hong Kong. The groups reached consensus that the character of leaders contributed substantially to creating the crisis. Unfortunately, there was no consensus about how to define character, and there was extensive debate about whether it could even be developed. We set out to address the underlying science of leader character: what it is (and is not), why it matters, how it can be developed, and how it is manifested in people’s actions. Continued here

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Webinar: How to Succeed With AI Augmentation For all the remarkable things that machine learning and advanced analytics can do, there are scores of things that AI-enabled machines still can’t do — at least not reliably enough on their own in the real world of business. That doesn’t mean you can afford to wait to take advantage of AI. Rather, it means designing AI applications that leverage what people and machines each do best, and how they can most effectively work together.Thomas H. Davenport is President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College; a visiting professor at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford; and a fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. Steven M. Miller is a professor emeritus of information systems, Singapore Management University (SMU) and an adviser to Singapore government agencies and industry on analytics, AI R&D, AI applications, and manpower development. Abbie Lundberg is editor in chief at MIT Sloan Management Review. She moderated the session. Continued here

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Billions in funding could kick-start the US battery materials industry Both public and private funding for battery manufacturing in the US have exploded, sped by the passage earlier this year of the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides incentives for electric vehicles. Under the requirements in the new electric-vehicle tax credits, battery components must be sourced and made in the US or its free-trade partners. But much of the investment in battery manufacturing so far has been focused on later stages in the supply chain, especially factories that make battery cells for electric vehicles.This funding announcement reflects an attempt by the US to catch up, especially for processing the minerals used to make batteries. Four of the projects that received funding are companies working to extract and process lithium, a key metal for lithium-ion batteries. The supply of lithium may need to increase by 20 times between now and 2050 to meet demand. Lithium production represents “one of the vulnerable pieces of the supply chain,” Nahm says.  Continued here

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We used to get excited about technology. What happened? On a recent evening, I sat at home scrolling through my Twitter feed, which—since I’m a philosopher who studies AI and data—is always filled with the latest tech news. After a while, I noticed a heaviness growing in the pit of my stomach, that telltale sign that you are not having a good time. But why? I wasn’t reading news about politics, or the climate crisis, or the pandemic—the usual sources of doomscrolling ennui. I stopped and reflected for a moment. What had I just been looking at? I had blinked at the aesthetic poverty of the most recent pitch for Meta’s Horizon Worlds VR game, featuring Mark Zuckerberg’s dead-eyed cartoon avatar against a visual background that one Twitter wag charitably compared to “the painted walls of an abandoned day-care center.” I had let out a quiet sigh at the news of Ring Nation, an Amazon-produced TV show featuring “lighthearted viral content” captured from the Ring surveillance empire. I had clenched my jaw at a screenshot of the Stable Diffusion text-to-image model offering up AI artworks in the styles of dozens of unpaid human artists, whose collective labor had been poured into the model’s training data, ground up, and spit back out. Continued here

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Why financial-services companies should set up their own talent exchanges Financial-services companies face a significant challenge: they need to reduce costs while ensuring they have the talent necessary to both run the business and continue to evolve in a highly dynamic marketplace. The “great resignation,” remote work, and enduring labor shortages have aggravated these challenges. At the same time, regulatory costs continue to rise, and upstarts from inside and outside the industry are taking a larger share of the revenue pie. With inflation persisting and recession looming, the road ahead isn’t getting any easier. Practically speaking, this means that cost reduction will continue to be the main lever available to meet shareholder expectations and improve metrics like return on tangible equity (ROTE).Labor is typically one of the highest costs for financial institutions, which have already gone through waves of reorganizations over the past decade to reduce such costs. Meanwhile, shareholders often pressure management to reduce head count. As a result, it has become commonplace for many institutions to increase the number of third-party contractors they use—both for special projects and to carry out basic business functions. In fact, in many organizations, a growing number of contractors have longer tenures than the average full-time payroll employee. The uptake of contractor roles presents an important—and often overlooked—cost-savings opportunity for many financial-services organizations. The challenge is not to use less talent, but to engage this sector in a more direct, strategic, and effective way. Continued here

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A Boom in Renewable Energy Has Blunted the Global Rise in Emissions Emissions associated with energy use are on track to increase 1 percent this year because of a boom in wind and solar powerFor months, there was a fear among energy observers that 2022 would turn into a carbon bomb for the planet.Global carbon dioxide emissions associated with energy use are on track to increase 1 percent this year, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday. That’s significantly less than what many observers projected earlier this year—when a global surge in natural gas prices prompted worries that many countries would turn to coal as an alternative.Coal consumption has increased, but the emissions impact has been largely offset by record setting growth in renewables, IEA said. The agency found that the growth in renewables alone likely avoided 600 million tons in additional CO2 emissions, or slightly less than the 646 million tons of CO2 produced by Germany last year. Continued here

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The luxury influencer raising millions of dollars from voter rage Maratea, a 30-year-old from Buenos Aires, started out on social media in 2015 as a playful and supposedly apolitical influencer. These days, he is constantly sparking political controversies, though he continues to claim to not care about party politics. He intersperses his calls to philanthropic action with rants against public figures from all parties. Politicians rarely respond, worried that a rebuttal might only increase the chances of more attacks from Maratea and his 3.4 million-strong following on Instagram. Rest of World reached out to five politicians and political activists, all of whom refused to speak for this reason. The transformation of Maratea’s online persona from a spoiled luxury Instagrammer to Argentine society’s savior has been striking for its speed and effectiveness. In a country where citizens are hyper-connected to the internet but increasingly disconnected from politicians of all stripes, Maratea has filled the void. Yet, he has not entered electoral politics like other celebrities. Nor has he simply focused on attention-grabbing stunts and cash giveaways like other online influencers have done. Instead, according to more than a dozen of his fans and social media experts that Rest of World spoke to, the Argentine influencer is challenging the very role of the state by making a bold claim: Through his high-profile charitable stunts, he is helping the needy more effectively than the government. In the process, he’s created a vast amount of wealth. Continued here

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Netflix ends password-sharing fees that sparked backlash in Latin America On Wednesday morning, millions of subscribers in Latin America woke up to an email from Netflix, announcing that the streaming giant was immediately suspending its experimental pricing trial in Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. Abandoning part of its password crackdown strategy after six months, Netflix will be bringing its other ongoing pricing trial, which it first rolled out in Peru, Chile and Costa Rica, to subscribers worldwide in 2023.Since August, when subscribers in Argentina used their account for an extended time outside their household, they were prompted to purchase a new “home” account for an additional permitted location. “After listening to consumer feedback, we decided to discontinue the ‘add a home’ feature,” said the email, a version of which was also sent to users in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. Continued here

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Experts Grade Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube on Readiness to Handle Election Misinformation The 2016 U.S. election was a wake-up call about the dangers of political misinformation on social media. With two more election cycles rife with misinformation under their belts, social media companies have experience identifying and countering misinformation. However, the nature of the threat misinformation poses to society continues to shift in form and targets. The big lie about the 2020 presidential election has become a major theme, and immigrant communities are increasingly in the crosshairs of disinformation campaigns—deliberate efforts to spread misinformation.More recent evidence shows that Facebook’s approach still needs work when it comes to managing accounts that spread misinformation, flagging misinformation posts and reducing the reach of those accounts and posts. In April 2020, fact-checkers notified Facebook about 59 accounts that spread misinformation about COVID-19. As of November 2021, 31 of them were still active. Also, Chinese state-run Facebook accounts have been spreading misinformation about the war in Ukraine in English to their hundreds of millions of followers. Continued here

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The Brightest Gamma-Ray Burst Ever Recorded Rattled Earth’s Atmosphere In early October, a wave of high-energy radiation swept over Earth from a gamma-ray burst, one of the most singularly catastrophic and violent events the cosmos has to offer. Astronomers quickly determined its distance and found it was the closest such burst ever seen: a mere two billion light-years from Earth. Or, if you prefer, 20 billion trillion kilometers away from us, a decent fraction of the size of the observable universe.To astronomers, “close” means something different. This one was so close, cosmically speaking, that it was detected by a fleet of observatories both on and above the Earth, and is already yielding a trove of scientific treasure. But even from this immense distance in human terms, it was the brightest such event ever seen in x-rays and gamma rays, bright enough to spot its visible-light emission in smaller amateur telescopes, and was even able to physically affect our upper atmosphere. Despite that, this gamma-ray burst poses no danger to us. Either way, I’m glad they keep their distance. Continued here

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John Fetterman Shows How Well the Brain Recovers after Stroke Five months later Fetterman sat down for an interview with NBC News where he used closed captioning technology to help manage the auditory processing issues caused by the stroke. “I sometimes will hear things in a way that’s not perfectly clear,” Fetterman told NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns. “So I use captioning so I’m able to see what you’re saying.” Oz and other Republicans have questioned Fetterman’s fitness for office and attacked him for needing accommodations.Aphasia, or the inability to understand or express speech, is very common following a stroke, impacting an estimated third of people who have one. (Fetterman’s campaign has denied he has aphasia, but some of his symptoms are consistent with the condition.) Those who have a stroke in their left brain hemisphere, which serves as the center of language processing in most people, are particularly vulnerable. For the brain to recover, it must modify and adapt to this new injury, a process known as neural plasticity. But neuroscientists still have many questions about how the brain rewires, particularly with regard to language. Continued here

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Why Elephants Don’t Get Cancer The scientists virtually modeled and examined elephants' 40 p53 proteins, finding two ways the gene could help elephants avoid cancer. First, the fact that elephants possess multiple copies lowers the chance of p53 no longer working because of mutations. Additionally, elephants' p53 copies activate in response to varying molecular triggers and so respond to damaged cells differently, which likely gives an edge when detecting and weeding out mutations. Continued here

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Some People Who Appear to Be in a Coma May Actually Be Conscious A medical team surrounded Maria Mazurkevich’s hospital bed, all eyes on her as she did … nothing. Mazurkevich was 30 years old and had been admitted to New York–Presbyterian Hospital at Columbia University on a blisteringly hot July day in New York City. A few days earlier, at home, she had suddenly fallen unconscious. She had suffered a ruptured blood vessel in her brain, and the bleeding area was putting tremendous pressure on critical brain regions. The team of nurses and physicians at the hospital’s neurological intensive care unit was looking for any sign that Mazurkevich could hear them. She was on a mechanical ventilator to help her breathe, and her vital signs were stable. But she showed no signs of consciousness.Mazurkevich’s parents, also at her bed, asked, “Can we talk to our daughter? Does she hear us?” She didn’t appear to be aware of anything. One of us (Claassen) was on her medical team, and when he asked Mazurkevich to open her eyes, hold up two fingers or wiggle her toes, she remained motionless. Her eyes did not follow visual cues. Yet her loved ones still thought she was “in there.” Continued here

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First Known Neandertal Family Discovered in Siberian Cave The discovery of the family—reported on 19 October in Nature — and seven other individuals (including a pair of possible cousins from another clan) in the same cave, along with two more from a nearby site, represents the largest ever cache of Neanderthal genomes. The findings also suggest that Neanderthal communities were small, and that females routinely left their families to join new groups.Set on the banks of the Charysh River in the foothills of the Altai mountains, Chagyrskaya is 100 kilometres west of Denisova Cave, an archaeological treasure trove in which humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans (and at least one Neanderthal–Denisovan hybrid) all lived intermittently over some 300,000 years. Excavations of Chagyrskaya, however, have so far revealed only Neanderthal remains, dated to between 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, and characteristic stone tools. Continued here

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Wildfires Spurred Risky Behavior in Los Angeles Mountain Lions Mountain lions are currently listed as a “specially protected species” in California while the state conducts a review to determine whether they should be classified as a threatened species. In the meantime, construction is underway on a new wildlife bridge across Southern California’s 101 highway. The bridge could help mountain lions safely disperse into new territories, potentially increasing the population’s genetic diversity and addressing at least one threat to the population’s survival. Continued here

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These Hawks Have Figured Out How to See the Bat in the Swarm Taylor: The part of the swarm that the hawk is headed for is gonna appear effectively stationary compared to the movement of the rest of the swarm. So this provides a mechanism whereby it’s possible for the bird plunging into the swarm to be able to identify which bit it’s gonna hit, but then also to be able to single out a target within that without having to suffer from the confusion effect. Continued here

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To Survive More Frequent Hurricanes, Puerto Rico Needs to Rethink Preparedness In the midst of an active hurricane season, Puerto Rico has suffered yet again. Thanks to Fiona, which crashed into the territory a few days before Ian hit Florida, we were without critical services like electricity, water, hospitals and fuel supplies. Fiona’s destruction was a sharp reminder of the life-threatening effects of Hurricane María, which caused $90 billion in damage five years ago. More than 30 people died because of Fiona and as we recover from yet another destructive hurricane, our leaders have ignored the planning and preparedness lessons made clear by María.After María, the U.S. federal and Puerto Rico local governments promised an increased level of resilience by strengthening existing infrastructures following the usual central-planning approach and solutions. But Hurricane Fiona has been yet another reminder that our strategy to build resilience in Puerto Rico is wrong, and that the leaders who espouse it are making decisions based on a philosophy that centers on the wrong things. They are rebuilding 20th-century electric grids, and water, sanitation and other infrastructure as they were before María hit; this will not work. Private companies cannot be relied on to provide resilient infrastructures. Rethinking how we approach planning and preparedness will make the archipelago a more viable place that benefits Puerto Rican people without straining budgets. Continued here

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The Live-Music Industry Is Broken Touring was a minefield before COVID; the pandemic just threw a few thousand more mines onto the field. Anyone within spitting distance of live music over the past two years — from road-warrior musicians to anxious ticket-holders and every behind-the-scenes toiler in between — has been plenty aware of the precariousness surrounding tour schedules in general. All it takes is a positive rapid test on an artist’s team, or travel-prohibitive supply-chain issues, or a mental-health crisis, or a straight-up lack of funding to derail an entire run of shows.Ever since “things opened up” again (was anything ever really closed to begin with?), showgoers and entertainers alike have practically grown numb to intermittent waves of gig cancellations. So when U.K. rap sensation Little Simz announced that she was nixing her U.S. tour this past April, the news initially resembled a drop in an increasingly miserable and disappointment-filled bucket. But Simz’s statement explaining the canceled dates gestured to even tougher struggles for touring artists on the horizon. “Being an independent artist, I pay for everything encompassing my live performances out of my own pocket and touring the U.S. for a month would leave me in a huge deficit,” she said at the time. “As much as this pains me to not see you at this time, I’m just not able to put myself through that mental stress.” Continued here

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What I Learned From Tracking My Calorie Burn for a Year Before I get into what I learned, here’s a quick refresher on TDEE. As the name states, it is an accounting of your total daily energy expenditure, or calorie burn. That includes calories you burn through exercise, calories you burn by walking around and fidgeting, and calories your body burns just to keep the lights on, so to speak—firing the neurons in your brain, pumping your blood, all that good stuff. Some people try to get a better sense of their TDEE by plugging in their numbers as if they do no structured exercise, and then adding in the calorie burn their fitness tracker reports for their exercises sessions. So let’s say the calculator thinks you burn 1,700 calories just by existing, and then you run five miles, and log another 500 burned. That would be 2,200 for the day. But exercise doesn’t burn as many calories as you’d think, so your numbers will likely be off. Continued here

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Is Your Baby Too Fat? Few things in this world are more universally adored than a chubby baby. As much as fathers may strive to stay fit, fend off the dad bod or just embrace their lovable big guy selves, their babies are encouraged to become adorable bundles of baby chub and fat rolls. Most dads strive to lose face fat, but absolutely everyone likes to see pinchable cheeks on a chubby baby. After all, baby chub eventually goes away and is harmless, right? Well, not always. Here’s everything parents need to know about chubby babies, those adorable baby fat rolls, and if your baby is too fat for their own good. Continued here

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Weights vs Bodyweight: Which Is Better? | Men's Fitness UK The Ironman World Championship finisher reveals his dream to become the first openly autistic professional triathleteBoxing played a huge role in the weight-loss programme that helped Ola Folawiyo lose 25kg, and got him fighting fit in the process…  Ahead of his new Netflix series, Wild Croc Territory, reptile wrangler Matt Wright explains what it takes to catch a crocodileWeights vs bodyweight: what’s more effective for all-round strength and fitness? Bobby Palmer tackles the age-old question with the help of two athletically minded identical twins… Continued here

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How Hitler's Nuclear Ambitions Were Sunk With a Tiny Ferry in a Norwegian Lake In prior years historians have disputed whether Hitler really did have the capacity to build a nuclear weapon, arguing that the Nazis were way behind the Americans. But in 2017 metal detectorists searching near a former research facility in Oranienburg, near Brandenberg, Germany found radioactive material. German test pilots also claimed to have seen unexplained mushroom clouds Continued here

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The Medieval Power Struggle That Inspired HBO's 'House of the Dragon' Henry I pursued measures to make his daughter palatable to them. Matilda, who had married the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V in 1114, returned to England a widow in 1125. Henry I, determined to forge a sacramental bond between his daughter and England’s magnates, compelled his barons in 1127 to swear their support for her as his successor. Henry I then turned to arranging a marriage for Matilda so she could give birth to a grandson and buttress her position.The unfortunate result is her inability to conceive with her husband while having three sons by a lover. Her situation is further complicated by Viserys’ remarriage to the lady Alicent, who gives him sons. Dangers stalk Rhaenyra’s path to power. In Westeros, as in England, a princess is expected to guard her chastity closely until marriage and, once wed, to be monogamous and not to “sully” herself in order to ensure the legitimacy of her children—a blatant double standard when noblemen frequently had children out of wedlock. Continued here

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Mexican and Indigenous Women Deserve Credit for Creating Tex-Mex Most Sundays, flour speckled my grandmother’s laminate-wood countertops, a consequence of hand-making dozens of tortillas for the week. Nearby, reused jam and spaghetti-sauce jars waited to be refilled with fresh salsa, a mild concoction crafted from the chile pequín in Nana’s backyard. Her homemade cooking was popular in her San Antonio community. Neighborhood kids would plan visits to my nana’s house on specific days depending on their hankerings. Some came for fried chicken, others for fideo or arroz con pollo. (My father said one of his friends was known in the family for having polished off “two whole birds by himself.”)But the real crowd-pleaser was Nana’s breakfast tacos. In a stroke of entrepreneurial spirit, one of my father’s six siblings began to feign hunger in order to resell some of the coveted breakfast tacos. My uncle’s little business was a big success at his Catholic high school, and Nana’s blend of fluffy eggs with chorizo, ham, or potatoes folded into one of her warm flour tortillas was the key. Continued here

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What Are "Bulls" and "Bears"? But where do the terms come from? No one really knows for sure. But one theory is that they come from a rather grisly bloodsport – popular in both Elizabethan England and gold rush era California – in which a bull would be pitted against a bear. Spectators would bet on the outcome. Thus you have ”bulls” versus “bears”. In this case, bulls represent a rising market, because when bulls attack, they thrust their horns upwards, whereas when bears attack, they claw downwards.  Continued here

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the Richest Athlete of All Time Did Nothing With His Wealth and Vanished Into History Gaius Appuleius Diocles entered the arena from an underground holding area. He’d made this walk dozens of times before, but it never got easier. It was easy to get lost in the spectacle of it all. Thousands of screaming fans, dust whipping around the sun-bleached earth, horses grunting in disapproval while assistants tightened ropes and readied equipment. Gaius spotted a young racer to his right, someone he’d never seen before. This kid was lost in the moment, staring in awe at the crowds. Thunderous applause enveloped Diocles as his name was announced and his feet left the ground, climbing onto the unstable platform of his chariot, but the crowd noise barely registered with him. Instead he went through an exhaustive mental checklist. Were his legs pressed against the wooden side rails of the chariot to keep his balance in the turns? Had he set his feet? Were the reins taut? Did the horses look relaxed? Everything felt comfortable, except for a bothersome dull aching in his right arm. That was to be expected after racing five times earlier that day, but it bothered him nonetheless. Continued here

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TikTok profits from livestreams of families begging WATCH: Mona Ali Al-Karim says she and her daughters beg for money to pay for hospital treatmentDisplaced families in Syrian camps are begging for donations on TikTok while the company takes up to 70% of the proceeds, a BBC investigation found.Children are livestreaming on the social media app for hours, pleading for digital gifts with a cash value.The BBC saw streams earning up to $1,000 (£900) an hour, but found the people in the camps received only a tiny fraction of that. Continued here

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How to Retire in Stages (and Why You Should) For many, the biggest reason to phase out of work in stages is that full retirement is simply not a financial possibility. The simplest form of partial retirement is turning your full-time job into part time hours. Unfortunately, not all companies will allow you to slash your hours, and instead insist on full-time work or none at all. Still, you could transition to part-time work in the same field at a different company, or maybe take the opportunity to try something new—especially if your financial need isn’t pressing (more on that below).Another reason to phase out your retirement is that you can get bigger social security checks by delaying your payout. If you were born in 1960 or later, your full retirement age for Social Security benefits is 67. If you start payments at that age, you’ll get 100% of what you’re entitled to...but if you can push payments off until age 70, they’ll increase to 124% of that age-67 payment, according to CNBC. With a part-time job, you can buy yourself more time for a bigger payoff. Continued here

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Successful Digital Transformation is All About Value In the digital era, how firms create and capture value has changed profoundly. But with digital transformation, many firms are leaving substantial value on the table, getting caught up in “doing” digital transformation rather than staying focused on how they will create and capture value with digital. To do this, first companies need to understand the three different types of digital value: value from customers (cross-selling, increased loyalty, great customer experience); value from operations (increased efficiency, modularity and reuse of components, automating processes); and value from ecosystems (leveraging partners for both access to more customers and range of products and services). With these types of value in mind, firms can then take action to create digital value by: identifying domain opportunities; building mutually-reinforcing capabilities; tracking digital value with a dashboard; recruiting digital partners; and investing in digital savviness of everyone at the firm. Companies that do this will become truly “future ready.”A global financial services firm we worked with really seemed to get the digital message. They hired a chief digital officer who led many locally successful projects to improve the customer experience. These included making it easier to move from in-person to online for certain tasks, plus targeted offers based on customer data. They felt confident they were creating great customer value. But there was a problem. Those local innovations ended up adding more complexity to the existing fragmented business processes, systems, and data. Although the customer experience often improved — and in some cases, revenue increased — the rise in the cost-to-serve eclipsed the gains and added other risks like cybersecurity and system crashes. Continued here

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What to read to become a better writer The first words are the hardest. For many of us writing is a slog. Words drip with difficulty onto the page—and frequently they seem to be the wrong ones, in the wrong order. Yet few pause to ask why writing is hard, why what we write may be bad, or even what is meant by “bad”. Fortunately for anyone seeking to become a better writer, the works recommended here provide enlightenment and reassurance. Yes, writing is hard. But if you can first grasp the origins and qualities of bad writing, you may learn to diagnose and cure problems in your own prose (keeping things simple helps a lot). Similarly heartening is the observation that most first drafts are second-rate, so becoming a skilled rewriter is the thing. These five works are excellent sources of insight and inspiration.Starting with Orwell’s essay may seem as clichéd as the hackneyed phrases he derides in it. Published in 1946, this polemic against poor and perfidious writing will be familiar to many. But its advice on how to write is as apposite now as then. (Besides, it is short and free.) Orwell analyses the unoriginal, “dying” metaphors that still haunt the prose of academics, politicians, professionals and hacks. He lambasts the “meaningless words” and “pretentious diction” of his day; many of the horrors he cites remain common. To save writers from regurgitating these, Orwell proposes six now-canonical rules. The first five boil down to: prefer short, everyday words and the active voice, cut unneeded words and strive for fresh imagery. The sixth—“break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous”—displays the difficulty of pinning down something as protean as language. But this has not stopped others trying. Continued here

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Tech Companies Innovate at the Edge. Legacy Companies Can Too. Technologies like 5G, artificial intelligence, and low and no code software design tools are changing how companies need to approach innovation. Specifically, they look to the edge of the organization where the business interfaces with its customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders, and where small-scale innovations are happening. Companies should adopt three practices: 1) free up small teams to act independently, 2) feed these teams with the systems, resources, and tools they need, and 3) funnel the best innovations back through the company. Continued here

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How to Gain a Competitive Advantage on Customer Insights Based on research into 12 companies, the authors detail the ways companies can gain their own privileged insights — including creating a more robust and engaging customer service experience, integrating customers into product and service development, and observing and interacting with customers while they use products. Continued here

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4 Business Ideas That Changed the World: Shareholder Value The idea that maximizing shareholder value takes legal and practical precedence above all else first came to prominence in the 1970s. The person who arguably did the most to advance the idea was the business school professor Michael Jensen, who wrote in Harvard Business Review and elsewhere that CEOs pursue their own interests at the expense of shareholders’ interests. Among other things, he argued for stock-based incentives that would neatly align CEO and shareholder interests. Continued here

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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

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Rooting Out the Masculine Defaults in Your Workplace Masculine defaults in the workplace aren’t new, but you may not always notice them. Masculine defaults are a form of gender bias in which characteristics and behaviors typically associated with men are rewarded and considered standard practice. But the evidence shows that effective workplaces require masculine and feminine behaviors (as well as non-gendered ones) to be effective. With masculine defaults, it may seem like there’s equal opportunity for men and women, but men are often more socialized to engage in stereotypical masculine behaviors and more typically rewarded for them. Based on their research, the authors identify how masculine defaults permeate organizations, and steps to address them: 1) Identify masculine defaults, 2) determine their necessity, and 3) dismantle or balance them. They also identify traps to avoid when addressing masculine defaults at work, like 1) believing that removing gender information is enough, 2) fighting masculine defaults with masculine defaults, and 3) seeing masculine defaults as culturally “good.” Continued here

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Climate Regulations Are About to Disrupt Global Shipping Ships that transport goods across oceans are collectively a major generator of greenhouse gases. Rules from the International Maritime Organization and the European Union aimed at curbing these emission promise to make transoceanic and regional shipping more expensive and reduce service, which will have a significant impact on global supply chains. Managers should begin to prepare now for this new era. Continued here