Monday 28th April 2025

The Pandemic Proved That Remote Leadership Works

In the five years since the start of the Covid pandemic, the conversation about remote work versus return-to-office has centered largely on employees. But organizations also benefit when leaders are remote—when they live and work primarily in a different place than their teams—because they are able to hire from a broader pool of candidates and bring in stars who would be unlikely to move to the company’s headquarters. While there are still concerns around overseeing employees, building team culture, and maintaining visibility, there are ways to overcome them, including: conscious planning and use of time and travel; monitoring performance through technology and structure; and listening and creating connections.

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How Generative AI Improves Supply Chain Management

Over the past few decades, advances in information technologies have allowed firms working to optimize their supply chains to move from decision-making on the basis of intuition and experience to more automated and data-driven methods, which has increased efficiency and reduced costs. Unfortunately, business planners and executives still need to expend considerable effort to understand the recommendations coming out of their systems, analyze various scenarios, and conduct what-if analyses. They often need to pull in data science teams or technology providers to explain results or make updates to the system.

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Can You Tell a Genius Strategy from a Huge Mistake?

Chess can be played at different speeds, and when master players observe one move in isolation without knowing the kind of chess being played, it can be hard to identify smart play from poor play. Likewise in business, judging decisions can be difficult because of differentials in timing. Some investors focus on the extreme short term; others have an infinite holding period, and the kinds of managerial decisions that will be smart for one type of shareholder are often poor for the other.

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Executive Teams Are Losing Stakeholders' Confidence. Here's How to Get It Back.

Stakeholder trust in their leadership teams’ ability to handle volatility and uncertainty is at an all-time low. Unlike routine market or organizational challenges where there’s past experience from which to draw wisdom, what makes the current forces leaders are grappling with particularly difficult is that they’re precedent-setting. That means leadership teams will naturally fumble a bit as they find their footing in uncharted terrain, and that fumbling is often public, causing confidence in the team to dip further. Meanwhile, stakeholders are desperately trying to make sense of the unknown and expect their leaders to know things they don’t know. In a time when so much feels out of control, leadership teams that commit to showing up with transparency, humility, and unity give their organizations something rare: a steady hand.

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10 Strategies for Leading in Uncertain Times

Navigating today's level of volatility demands not just agility but a willingness to rethink how we lead, plan, and adapt. Leading through chaos is about learning how to ride the storm — and helping our teams do the same. Consider 10 insights from researchers and executives who are experts in key aspects of leadership during uncertain and chaotic times.

Since January, the news cycle has felt unrelenting to many people — every headline, sound bite, and social media scroll seems to deliver a fresh wave of disruption. The atmosphere is charged, with uncertainty touching every corner of society. While people are already dealing with U.S. economic tariffs and intense political rhetoric, the rapid evolution of generative AI adds yet another layer of complexity to business planning. Leaders must reconsider their footing in real time.

As Martin Reeves notes in his popular MIT SMR article "How to Strategize in an Out-of-Control World," organizations must prioritize strategic resilience. This means anticipating not only market trends but also political shocks and paradigm shifts. What's more, navigating the current level of volatility demands not just agility but also a willingness to rethink how we lead, plan, and adapt in a world that no longer plays by familiar rules.

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60 Bougie Home Upgrades That Are Actually Bargains on Amazon

Being bougie and budget-friendly can coexist in the same universe — all of the home upgrades on this list are proof. Everything you see here are made from luxurious materials and function beautifully — but with a low-end price tag and fuss-free DIY installation.

Stick these LED puck lights anywhere you need a little extra illumination; adhesive and screws come included for installation. Use the remote control to adjust the brightness, set up a convenient timer, and more. Each of the three lights runs on three AA batteries.

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60 insanely popular, cool things shockingly under $25 on Amazon

If you’re hoping to add some truly out-of-the-box items to your life, it can be daunting to figure out where to start when stocking up. A tried-and-true strategy, however, is to scope out the products that have become wildly popular on Amazon. After all, if thousands of reviewers are heaping praise upon cool home goods and useful gadgets, they might just be on to something. To that end, the list below is stuffed full of popular, cool things that are ready to enhance your home and your quality of life. Better yet, they all ring up at $25 or less, so you can get in on the hype without busting your budget.

Create effortlessly ethereal ambience with this cloud globe light. Thanks to the decorative interior, it looks like you’ve bottled up a rainstorm and put it on display. The LED bulb inside the wooden base gives it a gentle glow that illuminates the cloud like a lightning strike. It’s easy to operate, too, thanks to the included remote control that allows you to adjust the color and brightness.

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'The Last of Us' Just Introduced A Doomed Cult -- And Changed the Game In A Huge Way

In the wake of the apocalypse, it would make sense that people look for meaning, and that often means finding religion. It happened in The Leftovers with the Guilty Remnant, in Mad Max with the Cult of the V8, and in Yellowjackets with the Wilderness. The Fallout series was almost entirely about cults, from the Brotherhood of Steel to the Vault Dwellers, to that strange ritual moment in Vault 4.

The Last of Us touched on the pervasiveness of cults in times of crisis in Season 1, when Ellie and Joel encountered David, the leader of a fanatically religious group of survivors who have resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Now, in Season 2, the series is touching on one of the game’s biggest cults, way before the game ever mentioned them.

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Why a single tree, uprooted in a typhoon, means so much to one man in Hanoi | Aeon Videos

In September 2024, Typhoon Yagi made landfall in Vietnam, causing more than 300 deaths and widespread destruction across the country. In the capital city of Hanoi, at least 100,000 trees were uprooted – some of them more than a century old. In this short documentary, the Hanoi-based Dutch filmmaker Kate Villevoye tells the story of one such tree. Mr Cường’s banyan tree was imbued with deep significance for locals and, in particular, the man whose father had planted it in 1973 as a hopeful symbol of peace amid intense bombing, just months before the US agreed to withdraw all combat troops from the country. Featuring shots of Hanoi’s Old Quarter in the wake of the typhoon’s destruction, Mr Cường’s Banyan Tree offers a meditative, bittersweet reflection on the power of objects to create deep meaning in the human imagination.

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Is Canada heading down a path that has caused the collapse of mighty civilizations in the past?

Canada is, by nearly any measure, a large, advanced, prosperous nation. A founding member of the G7, Canada is one of the world’s most “advanced economies,” ranking fourth in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Better Life Index, which measures things like national health outcomes, security, safety and life satisfaction.

However, all of this prosperity and ostensible stability can mask social tensions, which can simmer for years, even decades, before boiling over into widespread unrest, civil violence and even societal collapse.

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