Thursday 13th March 2025

Better leadership in 3 "Sketchplanations"

What makes a great leader? And what can we learn from others to improve our leadership skills and those of our teams and colleagues?

The first is practical: At 22, I found myself leading a Bangalore-based team of 40 software developers from an office in Belgium. Later, at the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford, I studied what made product design teams tick, which teams gelled and thrived, and which slumped. And I saw what kept students awake and focused rather than sleepy and checking their devices.

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Ben Horowitz: Quit being a coward and do the hard thing

Much of the management advice we find in books emphasizes using leadership tactics that may seem reasonably obvious. This advice is often easy to follow — but that’s not where leaders run into issues with their strategy, argues Ben Horowitz, founding partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and author of the best-selling book, “The Hard Thing About Hard Things.”

Horowitz says that leaders make blunders when they find themselves in highly emotionally charged situations where the emotion prevents them from doing the thing that they intellectually know they need to do. For example, firing a friend or doing a reorganization that causes a very talented employee to lose power. These things are much more difficult, and people often avoid them. But as a leader, you’re much better off running at your fear than running away from your fear because it’s going to chase you down, emphasizes Horowitz.

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The Big 5 personality traits you can change with practice

One day in the 1940s, an inmate came to see Raymond Corsini, a psychologist at Auburn Prison in Upstate New York. The prisoner, a man in his thirties, was getting out on parole, and before he left, he just wanted to thank Corsini.

The inmate said that, before meeting Corsini, he had always hung out with “a bunch of thieves.” He had a dead-end job in the prison kitchen, and he had long ago lost touch with his family and faith. His prospects for successfully reentering society were probably poor.

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The 4 "beauty ideals" that fuel everyday prejudice

Very occasionally, I’ll sit with a group of friends and we’ll congratulate ourselves on how little we care about beauty.

“The youth today are so obsessed with their looks. They don’t know what inner beauty is.”

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Confirmed at last: exoplanets found around nearest single star

Since we first realized that Earth was just another planet orbiting our Sun — like Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn — we’ve been compelled to wonder whether the other stars in our night sky possessed planets like we do. This question went wholly unanswered, from a scientific perspective, until the definitive detection of exoplanets first arrived: back in 1992. In the time since, we’ve discovered and confirmed more than 5000 exoplanets, including:

However, perhaps due to our bias of having just one star in our own Solar System, we’ve long favored to hunt for planets around nearby, singlet stars, as opposed to planets that might exist in binary, trinary, or richer multi-star systems. The closest three stars to the Sun are Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri A, and Alpha Centauri B: a trinary system. However, the next-closest star is Barnard’s star: a red dwarf located a mere 5.96 light-years away. Known as the “Greyhound of the Skies,” it’s one of the fastest-moving stars relative to the background of more distance objects that tend to remain fixed. After more than a century of searching, and a couple of prominent false positives, we’ve finally discovered that it does have planets of its own, after all. Here’s the story behind the discovery.

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Helena Rubinstein: A Pioneer of the Modern Beauty Industry

In the early 20th century, Helena Rubinstein defied gender, class, and cultural expectations to become one of the first pioneers of the modern beauty industry. Today, her namesake luxury cosmetics brand is worth more than $1 billion. Harvard Business School professor Geoff Jones wrote a case study about the visionary leader. He explored her journey—and the lasting impact she made on global beauty standards—on Cold Call in 2019 with host Brian Kenny.

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How to Push for Change in a Large Organization

Getting a big, bureaucratic organization to innovate or adopt new technologies is hard. That’s why Harvard Business School professor Maria Roche wrote a case study about U.S. Air Force Major Victor “SALSA” Lopez. He helped launch a program that uncovers ways to use AI to strengthen U.S. defense efforts. Professor Roche and Major Lopez talked about the challenges of fostering innovation within a large bureaucracy in a conversation with host Brian Kenny on Cold Call back in 2023.

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3 Policies to Guide a Pro-Growth, Pro-Worker Economy Under Trump

There is a powerful business case to be made for increasing the economic status of the lowest paid U.S. workers. Lower levels of inequality are correlated with higher overall economic growth that benefits every member of society, including shareholders. It has also been shown that companies with the best employee practices create sustained long-term value for their shareholders. But the private sector cannot act alone in creating a more inclusive form of capitalism. It needs strong incentives from the government. Among the potential policy ideas that could move the needle: expand employee ownership programs; raise the income level where federal tax is due; and make the minimum wage a living wage.

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7 Best Kids Bikes (2025): Mountain, Balance, Pedal, Coaster

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Google's Gemini Robotics AI Model Reaches Into the Physical World

In sci-fi tales, artificial intelligence often powers all sorts of clever, capable, and occasionally homicidal robots. A revealing limitation of today’s best AI is that, for now, it remains squarely trapped inside the chat window.

Google DeepMind signaled a plan to change that today—presumably minus the homicidal part—by announcing a new version of its AI model Gemini that fuses language, vision, and physical action together to power a range of more capable, adaptive, and potentially useful robots.


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