The small American bookstore is back. Over the last five years, the number of independent bookstores in the U.S. jumped by 70%. In 2025 alone, 422 new bookstores opened, according to the American Booksellers Association.
The industrys success was far from inevitable. For a long time, indie bookstores were struggling. In 1995, when Amazon opened as the Earths largest bookstore and started undercutting the prices at brick and mortar stores, readers quickly started shopping online. Small stores, which were already facing competition from chains like Borders, started to close. By 2009, the number of independent bookstores across the country had dropped to an all-time low. Experts predicted that the industry would collapse. But then instead of continuing to declline, the numbers instead started to reverse The growth accelerated after the pandemic.
If you step back and try to understand what really happened from 2010 to today, it is a story of resilience, says Ryan Raffaelli, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies industries that beat the odds and survive in unexpected ways in the wake of technological change. Raffaelli has spent years researching the turnaround of indie bookstores. Its a story of hope. And its a story about the power of community.
[Photo: Janelle Hales/courtesy Liz’s Book Bar]
A new strategy for a digital threat
Soon after the rise of Amazon, some bookstores tried to compete directly with the online giant by adding more titles to their stores, Raffaeli says. But others eventually adopted a different strategy, doubling down on whats uniquely possible in a physical space.
First, theres the ability to convene peoplesomething that small bookstores have always done with readings and other events, but that theyre doing even more now. Some stores have as many as 500 events a year. These are not just author events, but birthday parties, all these other types of things that are inviting people into the actual physical space to engage with other like-minded individuals that are passionate about literary topics, says Raffaeli. People start finding their own tribe and they go, and I want to be around these people.
Theyve also leaned into curation: They start curating whats in the stores quite differently than what you would experience if you were going on Amazon, where you have this algorithm thats sort of saying, okay, heres the last three things you bought, this is what youd like, he says. Independents, because theyre so tapped into the author community, are often doing things to introduce readers to books and genres that the algorithm has yet to figure out. Its unclear if it will ever figure it out.
Thats possible because the people who work at independent bookstores are at the cutting edge of whats happening in literary culture, he says. Amazon hasnt duplicated that. (When Amazon tried to open physical bookstores itself, they quickly failed because they didnt have the same foundation of booklovers choosing books, or any sense of authenticity.)
[Photo: Janelle Hales/courtesy Liz’s Book Bar]
Maybe most importantly, independent bookstores have made a sense of community core to their identity. They were some of the first businesses to advocate for shopping local. It begins to shift the value proposition for why you would pay more in the independent bookstore compared to as if you were shopping online at a discount,” says Raffaeli. “Because many consumers will say, I will pay extra because I know that this is actually an investment in my community.
That wasn’t the case in the early 2000s, when consumers were more willing to chase a deal online. Now more people are aware of the value of keeping physical bookstores open. “This is a part of a two-decade process of educating the consumer,” he says. “And also retooling the stores to highlight things that may have always been there, but to really help people understand and appreciate the experience of entering an environment like this.”
[Photo: Janelle Hales/courtesy Liz’s Book Bar]
The pandemic boosted support
The pandemic was another existential threat for bookstores, but ended up boosting support. “I think that in some ways, the pandemic woke people up to processes that were invisible to them before and made them realize that they had to act to support what was important to them,” says Andy Hunter, the founder of Bookshop.org, a platform that launched in 2020 to help indie bookstores sell books more easily online.
Online sales helped many bookstores survive the shutdown, and still provide significant support. (Bookshop.org has sent more than $9 million to local stores in 2025, and independent bookstores’ own online sales have also grown.) But after the pandemic, there was even more interest in spending time in stores in person. “I think they benefitted from digital fatigue,” says Raffaeli. “People were excited to come back in and shop local and feel like the experience could exist and engage with other people in the store.”
[Photo: Janelle Hales/courtesy Liz’s Book Bar]
Bookstores have always been a meeting place, but they keep finding ways to nudge people to stay longer. I didnt want to have a bookstore where it was just transactional, like youre coming in, looking at books, and leaving, says Maura Cheeks, the owner of Lizs Book Bar, a bookstore in Brooklyn with a cozy bar that serves wine, beer from local breweries, and coffee and tea. I wanted to create a public space where people could come and relax, feel inspired, meet strangers, and just sort of spend time.
The store is one of a growing number to have a bar. It’s also a way to help a low-margin business survive and afford steep New York City rents. On a typical weekday, Liz’s Book Bar is filled with people talking and working at the bar; the store sees higher book sales on weekends, but the bar provides critical revenue. Other bookstores have found creative ways to add other merchandise with higher margins than books, from literary-themed socks to cookware next to a section of cookbooks.
[Photo: Janelle Hales/courtesy Liz’s Book Bar]
Sharing best practices
Because the stores are geographically constrained, they’re more willing than other businesses to share best practices with each other. (They’re also motivated by the fact that bookstores are seen as cultural institutions, and there’s a shared goal to preserve that culture, not just compete as a small business.) The industry association, the American Booksellers Association, hosts frequent events where booksellers can meet and share tips or take classes.
“I took a class and you could see how these practices were being institutionalized into the new way of thinking about how we compete,” says Raffaeli. “All these stores that start opening are benefiting from this experimentation that happened in the early 2000s…the survivors around that time started diffusing these practices at the industry level. I think that’s a big part of the story: they’re coming together and they’re teaching each other.”
Raffaeli is now studying how the lessons from booksellers can be applied to other situations, from museums to movie theaters to companies that want to bring workers back to the office. “We’re seeing people want to engage with one another,” he says. “They want to feel like they’re part of something, a part of the social fabric of their community or their organization. But you have to give them a reason to engage and you have to create the right conditions for that to happen.”
As readers look to curl up with a proverbial good book this winterand put their holiday bookstore gift cards to worktheyll be faced with an obvious question: What should they pick up next?
People find it much harder than you think, because there’s so much choice out there, says Rachel Van Riel, founder and owner of the book recommendation website Whichbook. Where do you start?
Whichbook employs human readers to classify books along dimensions like moods, levels of violence and sexual content, attributes of the main characters, and length. Its a process Van Riel says artificial intelligence cant yet replicate, though its still quite mathematical in nature, with new hires guided in tuning their scores to the sites standard. Then, Whichbook users can indicate their own current preferences with a set of sliders to find a set of books that match. Operating for free since 2003, at times thanks to funding from libraries, its designed to be a low-pressure way to discover interesting books.
I think when it’s more playful, people take more risks, and that’s where they end up finding something that maybe suits them better, Van Riel says. It’s also very nonjudgmentalwhatever you like, lots of sex, no sex at all, your choice.
Whichbook shies away from recommending big bestsellerssince, as Van Riel says, people are generally already aware of thembut it can suggest books similar to current literary hits, or help people find books from particular parts of the world via an interactive map. Its one of a growing number of websites, apps, and online communities helping people find something to read through various mixtures of algorithms and human insights.
Readers can take cues from influencers, like the loose community of literary-themed TikTok creators commonly called BookTok, or ask for personal recommendations on any of several subreddits set up for the purpose, like r/suggestmeabook or r/booksuggestions. Or they can take to book-based social networks, like Amazons Goodreads, The Storygraph, or Fable (recently acquired by Scribd ebook unit Everand), sharing suggestions and reviews with friends or friendly strangers. Each of those social sites also offers some automated recommendation features, as do many online bookstores, though the nuances of what makes a book a good read at a particular time can make the problem especially tricky.
We began just from the idea that there isnt a great book recommendation system, says Sebastian Cwilich, cofounder and CEO of online bookseller Tertulia, which launched in 2022. Even to this day, I dont think us or anyone else have absolutely cracked it.
Tertulia began with the idea of building machine learning models to generate recommendations based on literary conversations then happening on Twitter. That approach became less viable once Elon Musk acquired the site, now X, since book-related posting on the site dramatically dropped and the new ownership significantly raised prices to access such data, Cwilich says.
Its recommendations are still fairly data-driven, albeit more hand-curated, with the company tracking bestsellers, critical reviews, celebrity book clubs, and recommendations posted on Instagram. Much of that information is organized into a database for easy access by Tertulias editorial team. I think we do a really, really good job of unpacking a particular micro-genre or a particular author that’s kind of trending or in the cultural zeitgeist, says cofounder Lynda Hammes.
Tertulia also offers a sprawling set of other features, from recommendations by authors from poet and novelist Patricia Lockwood to actor and memoirist Lukas Gage, an integration with online book club community Belletrist, and a newly launched platform for authors to quickly build their own websites.
Of course, its also a bookstore, complete with a paid membership co-op program, and all those sources of book recommendations naturally help sell books, much like the staff recommendations bookstores large and small have long offered visitors. Even bookselling giant Amazon, in addition to personalized recommendations, offers editorial recommendations through its Amazon Book Review subsite.
We’re all very passionate readers, so we really try to keep our fingers on the pulse of what’s trending and what’s interesting, says Amazons senior editor Lindsay Powers, who is also a published author.
The site isnt simply recapitulating a list of Amazon bestsellers or titles highlighted by publishers, says Powers, whose work includes compiling monthly nonfiction and history lists for the site. She and her colleagues collectively read thousands of books each year, with Powers alone reading more than 300, and are given considerable freedom in their choices, she says. The site recently published a set of Best of 2025 lists, as well as holiday gift recommendations.
Since 2013, Amazon has also owned the online reading community Goodreads, which enables readers to log and share their own reading, see updates from friends, and access a mix of algorithmic recommendations and editorial content. One day, you might see a book recommendation from a friend in your newsfeed, says managing editor Cybil Wallace. The next, you might see an editorial roundup that really appeals to you. We just want to make sure there are lots and lots of different ways for you to find a book that you love.
Goodreads has almost two decades worth of data about what people like to read, and even editorial write-ups are heavily driven by what the stats show. We really pride ourselves in looking to our reading community to inform what we write about, Wallace says.
Other sites use their own data-driven approaches to connect people to books and help them track their reading, sometimes also attracting users who prefer minimizing their ties to industry giant Amazon. The StoryGraph, often compared to Goodreads, offers tracking features along with AI-driven recommendations and filters to find new reads. And PipeRead, another startup, recently launched with its own AI-powered recomendations, presenting suggested books in a Tinder-style swipe interface.
Fable, which launched in 2021 as a platform for online book clubs and now hosts more than 100,000 clubs for almost four million users, also includes an AI recommendation agent, as well as fitness tracker-style visualizations of individual reading habits that are often shared on social media. But the platform, which was acquired by Scribds digital book division Everand in 2025, still focuses heavily on person-to-person recommendations, whether thats through small-scale private book clubs, sprawling public clubs that can have thousands of members, or recommendations from celebrities like LeVar Burton or Paris Hilton.
Theres a big crossover between Fable and BookTok, which makes sense with 90% of Fable users younger than 40, says Kim Allee, marketing director for Fable and Everand. And a recent survey the company conducted found personal recommendations still remain one of the most popular ways to find something good to read.
I think finding that right book at the right moment from the right person means you’re going to have a deeper, kind of more human experience actually engaging with that book, says Allee. And I think especially in this day and age, that’s something that people really explicitly value.
Some book recommendation sites still rely entirely on human expertise. Five Books, launched in 2009, offers readers what it calls the best books on everything, presented through interviews with various experts where theyre asked to discuss their areas of interest and five books from the field. The site, says cofounder and editor Sophie Roell, was inspired by the classic British university system, where tutors assign a list of books to study.
It has recently featured a noir fiction list curated by activist and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, a list of books on World War II chosen by military historian Antony Beevor, and a set of five books on Jesus selected by Oxford theologian Robert Morgan. Their expertise means their recommendations can carry more weight than casual posts on social media. Morgan, for instance, has read more than 100 books on Jesus, says Roell.
“I thought he’s a reasonable person to choose the best books on Jesus, because if he’d only read seven, then, quite frankly, I’m not interested in his top five, she says. But if hes read 100, thats goodthats a pretty good filtering mechanism.
The site takes donations but is primarily funded by Amazon affiliate commissions, meaning its recommendations also need to appeal to readers enough to sell books and keep the business afloat. One advantage is that many visitors come to the site through Google, searching for books to buy on a specific subject rather than seeking a general-purpose recommendation.
It’s just such different strokes for different folks, really, with books, Roell says, which makes recommendations very hard.
For years, deepfakes were treated as a political or social media oddity, a strange corner of the internet where celebrity faces (of women 99% of the time) were pasted onto fake videos (porn in 99% of the cases) and nobody quite knew what to do about it. But that framing is now dangerously outdated, because deepfakes have quietly evolved into something much more systemic: an operational risk for corporations, capable of corrupting supply chains, financial workflows, brand trust, and even executive decision-making.
Recent headlines show that synthetic media is no longer a fringe experiment. It is a strategic threat, one that companies are not prepared for.
When a deepfake can steal $25 million
In February 2025, global engineering firm Arup fell victim to a sophisticated deepfake fraud. Attackers used AI-generated video and audio to impersonate senior leadership and convinced an employee to transfer $25 million in company funds. The World Economic Forum described it as a milestone event: the moment synthetic fraud graduated from experiment to enterprise-scale theft.
For any executive who still thinks of deepfakes as a social media phenomenon, this should be a wake-up call.
Arup had strong cybersecurity. What it didnt have was identity resiliencethe ability to verify that the human on the other side of the call was actually human.
CEO fraud, but this time with perfect replicas
In the past year, deepfake CEO-fraud attempts have surged, targeting CFOs, procurement teams, and M&A departments. A 2025 report noted that more than half of surveyed security professionals had encountered synthetically generated executive impersonation attempts.
Its easy to see why:
Deepfake video is now real-time and high-resolution.
Voice cloning requires only a few seconds of audio.
Attackers can now spoof emotion, urgency, or stress, exactly the cues that override employee skepticism.
One midsize tech firm reportedly lost $2.3 million after a convincingly faked audio call instructed finance to transfer funds for an urgent acquisition.
Clearly, traditional anti-phishing training doesnt prepare employees for a perfectly reconstructed version of their boss.
Deepfakes are no longer about politics: Theyre about business models
When a deepfake impersonates a celebrity to promote a fraudulent investment scheme, thats reputational damage. When a deepfake impersonates your spokesperson, CFO, product, or supply chain partner, that becomes a corporate disaster.
Weve entered a phase where synthetic media sits squarely inside the business risk landscape, according to Trend Micros 2025 industry report. Synthetic content now drives new waves of fraud, identity theft, and business compromise.
This isnt hypothetical. Its operational.
The new supply chain risk executives are not seeing
Brands increasingly rely on complex ecosystems: logistics partners, suppliers, distributors, influencers, service providers, third-party integrators. Every one of those nodes depends on trust.
Deepfakes turn trust into an attack surface.
Imagine these scenarios:
A fake video from your CEO announcing a shift in sourcing strategy sends suppliers into panic.
A voice clone instructs your Asian manufacturing partner to halt delivery.
A synthetic leaked clip of a defective product goes viral before your PR team wakes up.
A deepfake of a key supplier falsely confirms cybersecurity weaknesses, causing downstream partners to sue.
These are not science fiction. They are logical extensions of attack patterns that are already being deployedand they expose a blind spot in corporate risk management: the integrity of identity itself.
Why deepfakes hit brands harder than politics
Political deepfakes spark outrage. Corporate deepfakes trigger something worse:
Loss of customer rust
Stock volatility
Insider trading vulnerabilities
Lawsuits from partners
Regulatory scrutiny
The Securities an Exchange Commision has already warned the financial sector that AI-generated impersonation is reshaping fraud strategies, calling for upgraded identity-verification standards.
If regulators are paying attention, executives should too.
Why the traditional cybersecurity playbook isnt enough
Firewalls wont stop a deepfake. Multi-factor authentication wont stop a deepfake. Encryption wont stop a deepfake.
Deepfakes weaponize something no cybersecurity team has historically been responsible for: trust in human appearance and voice. The weakest link is no longer a password. Its a persons belief that theyre speaking with someone they know.
Identity, not infrastructure, is the new vulnerability.
Why brands must treat deepfakes as supply chain risk
Most companies still relegate deepfakes to the PR desk or misinformation team. Thats naive.
Deepfakes threaten:
Procurement workflows (fake POs, fake cancellations)
Vendor relationships (fake disputes, fake compliance issues)
Finance approvals (deepfake CFO instructions)
Customer trust (fake product failures, fake CEO messages)
Employee morale (synthetic HR directives, fake memos)
This is not just about fraud. Deepfakes can disrupt the coordination mechanisms that make supply chains work. They can paralyze a system without ever touching a firewall.
What business leaders must do (now)
Here is the emerging best-practice playbook for executives:
Add deepfake risk to your enterprise risk management framework: If ransomware is a board-level issue, synthetic identity needs to be too.
Implement verification protocols that do not rely on voice or video: Use secondary digital signatures, secure channels, or pre-agreed workflows.
Audit your vendors, suppliers, and partners: Ask whether they have deepfake-resilience policies, because their vulnerabilities become yours.
Deploy detection systems, but dont trust them blindly: Infosecurity Magazine notes that detection tools are improving but remain unreliable.
Train employees to distrust urgency: Most deepfake fraud leverages emotional acceleration: This is critical, do it now. Your strongest defense is giving employees permission to slow down.
Build an internal identity resilience policy: Define exactly how major decisions and financial approvals must be confirmed. No exceptions for I saw them on video.
The uncomfortable truth is that AI has made seeing and hearing obsolete. With AI, weve crossed a psychological Rubicon: Your eyes and ears are no longer authentication mechanisms.
Executives who fail to internalize this will face the same fate as companies that ignored phishing, ransomware, or cloud governance a decade agoonly faster, and with higher stakes.
Deepfakes are not about what is true: They are about what is believable. And in business, believability is often all that matters.
The new leadership challenge
The companies that thrive in the AI era wont be those with the biggest models or the flashiest copilots. They will be the ones that redesign trust, identity, and verification from the ground up.
Because if deepfakes can corrupt your operations and supply chain, then defending against them is not an IT problem. It is a leadership problem.
And if you dont solve it now, someone else (perhaps an algorithm with your CEOs face) might solve it for you.
Running a solo business can feel like operating without a map at times. Sometimes you can stumble along the path, figuring things out as you go. Other days, you look around and realize that youve wandered pretty far off course.
One of the hardest parts is not having anyone to rely on for guidance. Thats why community matters so much for solopreneurs. Rather than operating in a vacuum, you can bounce ideas off other people. Or you may find that community reduces your feelings of loneliness and isolation.
The sooner you find (or build!) a community, the easier it becomes to navigate the inevitable ups and downs of being a solopreneur.
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The connections that make solo work sustainable
Even though you dont have coworkers, you can still create a network that fills the same role: support, accountability, and a place to ask questions. For example:
One-on-one relationships
Fellow solopreneurs or business friends are incredibly important. These are the people who understand what your day actually looks like, because theirs looks similar. If you find a solopreneur with a similar business or in a similar niche, you can gain a lot. You can swap ideas, compare notes on pricing, or share resources. Or simply be a sounding board for each other when a client is being difficult.
The other day, I got a Slack DM from a fellow solopreneur who said, Can I run something by you real quick? And I was happy to answer. She would do the same for me.
If you dont know where to begin, start with platforms youre already using. Reach out to other solopreneurs and invite them to a virtual coffee chat. Be specific about why youre reaching out. Youd be surprised at how many solopreneurs are generous with their time and knowledge.
Structured communities (paid or free)
If you prefer something formal or with a larger group, consider joining a free or paid community for solopreneurs.
Paid memberships often come with perks, like workshops, expert Q&As, or networking sessions. If youre a new solopreneur, these communities can significantly shorten your learning curve, because youre surrounded by people whove been there, done that.
Free communitieslike Slack groups, LinkedIn groups, or Discord serverscan offer many of the same benefits. However, youll need to do a bit of quality control. Some spaces are overrun with self-promotion or spammy messages. Others are simply too quiet, for the group isnt big enough for conversations to happen organically.
Some solopreneurs hesitate to spend money on community, especially in the early days. Its an understandable concern. But the right community can save you hours of trial and error, or prevent you from making a costly business mistake.
Coworking (in person or virtual)
Maybe you dont need advice. You simply want to be around other people. What you miss most about corporate life is the time spent with coworkers.
Traditional coworking spaces give solopreneurs a way to work around other humans again. They can be especially helpful if you miss the rhythm of an office or struggle with motivation at home. Even being around strangers who are deeply focused on their laptops can be energizing. (Im a big fan of working in coffee shops.)
Virtual coworking offers a similar effect without the commute. Focus sessions and online coworking communities help solopreneurs stay accountable. Ive done virtual coworking with complete strangers, friends, and even people who arent solopreneurs but just want to get things done.
Of course, formal coworking usually has a monthly fee for either coworking spaces or virtual coworking. However, if youre more productive during coworking time, it might be worth the cost.
You dont have to navigate work alone
Theres no single right way to find community as a solopreneur. But one thing will always be true: The support you build now will grow alongside your business. Youll never regret the time you spend finding your people. Ive done all three things I suggest here: one-on-one relationships, structured communities, and coworking. The people Ive met are truly incredible.
The people you surround yourself withwhether through relationships or coworkingwill influence your business just as much as any tool or strategy you adopt. Theyre worth the investment.
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I am an introverted person who feels shy at events. Early in my career, I found conferences to be so overwhelming that I’d sometimes just hide in the bathroom, go into an anxious spiral of fear and guilt, and then try to convince myself to get out and talk to at least one person. Watching how other people seemed to enjoy these events and easily talk to everyone made me think something was wrong with me. The truth is that 36% of young people have anxiety. But knowing that didn’t make networking any easier.
However, networking is an important skill, and connections help drive your career and bring new opportunities. Research shows that people who network often tend to have higher compensation, get promoted more, and have greater career satisfaction.
As a business owner, I have to constantly build my network and go to various events. Over time, I’ve developed a set of mechanisms to help me be effective at attending such functionsand even enjoy them. After four years in New York, I’ve been to over a hundred events and landed several deals with many reputable partners and clients that resulted in significant revenues for my company.
Pre-event mindset
A long time ago, I used to pressure myself by thinking things like, I have to find a client … or … I have to land a partnership deal. This only made me more anxious. What helped is when I switched my goal to enjoying the event, meeting interesting people, learning new things, and making new friends. This made me more relaxed and, thus, more willing to be open and talk to people.
A study from Harvard Business School also found that those who relabeled their preperformance anxiety as excitement did better than those who tried to calm down.
Event prep
If Im attending a big conference, I research who is attending and set up meetings in advance. When I reach out to people, I always try to find an angle of how I can help a person, as opposed to just suggesting a meeting without an agenda. Since I run a PR firm, I usually check the latest news happening with the company, come up with ideas on how to amplify their brand, and suggest that we discuss it. Here is an example of the LinkedIn message that secured a meeting.
Hi [Name],
Nice to e-meet you! Love how [Company] is doing comms, and congrats on the recent news with [Recent news].
Will you be at [Conference]? Would love to chat and see if there is any way we can help expand the coverage (i.e., to additional local regions like LatAm). I have been in the space from 2013, ex-Cointelegraph CEO, and now have a comms agency. Always happy to connect with female leaders in the space.
Having a scheduled meeting is much less stressful than randomly wandering around the conference and approaching strangers. Several studies have found that having a structured plan before a social event helps to reduce anxiety and improve perceived social competence.
Know how to introduce yourself
Have a prepared intro tailored to the agenda of the event. Understand the attendee profile and think how you can help them. Focus on the result you can deliver rather than what you do. Instead of “I run a consulting firm that specializes in strategic advisory,” try “I help companies reduce customer churn by identifying early warning signs in their data.” The specificity gives people an immediate mental hook.
Career centers at MIT, Princeton, and similar institutions all recommend having a 30- to 60-second elevator pitch that highlights actions and results, not just job titles. Instead of saying you run a consultancy, you can say you help companies reduce churn by looking at early warning signs in their data. The more specific you can be, the better.
A side note on your facial expressions: Since Im from Eastern Europe, I tend to look very serious if Im not paying attention. That does not help when you want to connect with people. If you just start smiling, people smile back and start talking to you first.
Out-of-the-box conversations
At the events, 90% of people tend to ask similar questions that drive the same conversations over and over againwhich makes people tired and, ultimately, bored. Arrive prepared with a list of questions that will drive conversation in an unpredictable direction, making you stand out.
Instead of What do you do?, ask What was the most exciting thing that happened to you this week? Have some fun facts or stories to tell that would be relevant to the event. Another great way to be remembered is to let people know how they make you feel (I love your energy! or I love how open you are!).
Be present
This one might sound a bit esoteric, but its a game changer. When you are in your head too much, it builds a wall between you and other people. If you start internal dialogues with yourself too much, people will sense it. Neuroimaging work shows that when people feel actively listened to, it activates reward-related brain regions, resulting in more positive emotions toward the listener. Practice being focused on the person you are talking to, and you will have better outcomes.
Figure out what you can give people
Find out what the goals are of the people you talk to, and think about how you can help them. Give exact examples of ways you could work together or what kind of intros you could make for them. Networking is about giving. Based on Wharton Business School professor and author Adam Grants work on reciprocity styles, people who are natural givers help others without immediate expectation of having the favor returned, tend to build broader and more supportive networks, and, over time, often end up among the most successful in their fields.
Follow up and follow through
I am shocked by how rarely people follow up after an event unless they’re trying to make a straight sale. This habit definitely needs discipline, but it’s how you build a reputation as “the person who follows through.”
Take notes on the people you meet, what you talked about, and what they needed. That way, you can create better follow-ups after the event and increase the likelihood of a reply.
Follow up and, based on your notes, let the person know how you can help. If you suggested making an intro, make that intro.
All of this takes practice and positive reinforcement. Over time, you will learn that people love it when you apprach them and ask questions. They love talking about themselves. Even now, I sometimes fall into my old patterns and find myself hiding in the corners or wanting to leave early. Dont beat yourself up over that. Its a long, continuous journey, and the key is just to continue. Consistency is the key to success.
A headline catches your eye: A company you admire, known for its market performance and strong culture, is embroiled in a massive scandal. It causes reputational harm, profitability tanks, and customers notice. The details feel depressingly familiarenough to fill books (most recently The Dark Pattern).
With postmortems pointing to culture problems, your instinct might be to double-check your own organizations cultural health. So, you pull up last years employee engagement survey: 85% of employees feel comfortable raising concerns, and 90% believe leadership demonstrates ethical behavior. The numbers are reassuring. But the company youve read about probably had similar results.
The real question isnt whether your culture looks good on paper. Its whether youre reading the room, catching both the subtle tensions that statistics might miss and the signals for how to enable your people to succeed, which ultimately drives growth.
The annual engagement survey isnt enough
Most companies wouldnt run their operations based on annual customer feedback surveys alone. They track pipeline metrics, conversion rates, and customer interactions in real time, often with sophisticated analytics that account for regional and cultural differences in customer behavior.
Yet when it comes to their own people, many leaders still default to annual engagement surveys as their main culture check. A quick look at the culture assessment market shows that the flagship products are still benchmarked survey tools, underscoring this approach as the industry standard. These can be valuable as one source of cultural data, but they tend to capture abstract opinions rather than real workplace experiences and to provide insights months after cultural shifts have taken hold.
These surveys ask employees to rate their agreement with statements like I feel comfortable raising concerns. These approaches produce clean year-over-year statistics but suffer from predictable problems. Research shows that on surveys like these, people tend to give answers they think are expected rather than honest responses. Some employees may genuinely believe they would speak up in a hypothetical scenario and respond to the survey accordingly, but they actually stay silent when real situations come up. The result is bad data that leads to organizations believing they have healthy ethics and compliance cultures while missing signs of emerging problems.
This business-as-usual approach to assessing culture can be enormously costly: By some measures, toxic corporate culture was the single best predictor of attrition among for-profit companies during the Great Recession and, according to a pre-pandemic estimate, it cost U.S. employers nearly $50 billion annually due to attrition, stymied innovation, and impacts on employee health and well-being.
Learning to “read the air”
Better approaches combine multiple data sources and ask employees to share real workplace experiences, rather than focusing on abstract opinion gathering. Like “reading the room” in real conversations, effective culture monitoring requires picking up on subtle cues that reveal whats happening beneath the surfacethe tension when certain topics arise, the silence that follows questions about speaking up, the stories people tell when they feel at ease.
In Japanese workplace culture, the concept of reading the air (, or kuuki o yomu) embodies the nuanced ability to perceive and interpret unspoken social cues, group moods, and implicit expectations. This skill enables individuals to navigate complex interpersonal dynamics and maintain harmony, often without the need for explicit communication.
If you want to know what culture really feels like inside a company, you need stories. Thats why when a scandal breaks, journalists and investigators dont stop at financial findings or compliance reportsthey talk to people inside. Its an essential part of understanding what pressures employees were under, what signals they picked up on, and how decisions were actually made. The same principle applies to leaders trying to get ahead of cultural risk and contagion before it causes harm.
Interviews and focus groups give people space to describe actual workplace situations: the pressure they felt in a meeting, what happened when they raised a concern, how their manager responded. Those accounts bring out details that are flattened by standardized survey scores, like how people read signals, which trade-offs they face, and what they believe it takes to succeed. They also provide a space for employees to offer their own solutions or surface the informal approaches that are already being developed on the ground to tackle challenges.
This is the organizational equivalent of reading the air. Instead of observing body language cues in a conference room, leaders detect patterns across short narratives. Across several domains, qualitative methods are especially good at capturing this mix of context and action, which makes them valuable for understanding where risk lives in daily work.
This doesnt mean stories alone are enough. Anonymized administrative data from HR systems and helplines provide behavioral indicators that complement self-report feedback and produce a more rounded picture of the issues at hand. The goal is to develop organizational sensitivity to the imperceptible shifts that signal cultural problems before they become visible crises.
A field guide for “reading the room” of your companys culture
To make that kind of sensitivity practical, leaders need a way to structure what theyre listening for. One useful framework comes from cultural psychology, which breaks culture down into four interconnected elements: ideas, institutions, interactions, and individuals (the “Four Is”). These elements are present in every culture. What matters is whether they reinforce each other or send mixed signals.
Ideas: What really gets praised or promoted? Listen for whether shortcuts are framed as resourcefulness or as ethics that are slowing things down.
Institutions: How do targets, incentives, and policies shape behavior? Check if systems align with stated values, or if they create pressure to cut corners.
Interactions: In meetings or reviews, what actually happens when someone speaks up or challenges a decision? Watch who gets heard, who gets shut down.
Individuals: How do employees describe the choices theyve had to make under pressure? Look for stories that suggest they felt forced to choose between performance and principles.
Most compliance programs concentrate on two parts of this framework: making sure institutions are in placepolicies, trainings, reporting hotlinesand catching individual bad actors. Those pieces matter, but they nly cover a fraction of how culture operates. Assessments of toxic corporate cultures show that formal systems were often present.
What was missing was alignment with the other elements of corporate culture: leaders in practice rewarding results over the ethics they preach in town halls, daily interactions normalizing corner-cutting of carefully laid out procedures, and individuals feeling trapped in impossible trade-offs between organizational values and bonus incentives. This dissonance breeds toxicity and performance failures. The “Four Is” give leaders a way to avoid blind spots and to then design multiple small initiatives that foster alignment across every layer of the organizations culture.
Successful organizations recognize that culture isnt something you build once and maintain with annual training. Its a living system that requires the same continuous attention companies give to financial performance or operational efficiency. When early warning systems and thoughtful measurement align across the ideas, institutions, interactions, and individuals that make up an organization, something powerful happens: coherence.
Employees stop having to choose between doing the right thing and doing what gets rewarded. When leaders and organizations adopt tools to read the roomlistening for real experiences and collecting cues at all levels of the culture cycleethical decision-making becomes the natural way to succeed and grow the business, not an obstacle to overcome.
Dating in 2025 has been rough. According to articles, data, and personal narratives on social media, it seems that it’s never been more challenging to find a partner. But, according to a new report, when it comes to one qualification, daters may actually be lowering the bar.
Tawkify, a matchmaking service, surveyed 1,010 U.S. adults to find out how work-related trends are shaping modern dating. Turns out having a job is no longer a must-have for a growing number of romance seekers. These days, only 29% of daters say that unemployment is a red flag that would make them inclined to turn down a potential partner. Likewise, while living with one’s parents would’ve once been considered a major turnoff, nowadays, less than half of singles (42%) say it would be a deal-breaker.
The data seems to speak to just how financially tough times really are, which could lead to a small but important silver lining: a lot less judgment over potential partners not being gainfully employed. But the findings get even better for those who are unemployed but showing off their ambition in other ways. Nearly three in four employed people said they were open to dating someone who is unemployed as long as they have a “side hustle” or “a meaningful personal project.” And, well, who doesn’t?
Still, not having a job does change the way people date. Only one in three singles who is unemployed is actively looking for a partner after a job loss. A third say they’ve had to stop going on dates due to a job loss, and 25% say they’ve had to pivot to going on cheaper dates. Likewise, 65% say that not being able to afford dates, along with other pressing financial stressors, is the biggest challenge to dating after becoming unemployed. But losing a job is also a blow to dating confidence: 62% say they feel less desirable, and 52% experience anxiety about sharing that they are jobless on dates.
Interestingly, there’s a gender gap when it comes to how much having a job weighs on singles. Men largely feel that there is more of a stigma about being jobless: 68% of respondents say they feel there is a greater stigma about men who have been laid off than women, compared to only 5% who say the reverse is true. And the men may be spot on, as four times more men than women report being broken up with after a job loss.
Regardless, women feel more pressure to prove they are still ambitious. Overall, 36% of Americans say they feel pressure to prove they are still ambitious after becoming jobless, but women are more affected. Forty percent of women say they feel pressure to prove their worth, compared to only 29% of unemployed men who feel similarly.
Love may not pay the bills, but hey, at least paying the bills is no longer a requirement for finding love.
As the festive season gets into full swing, young corporate employees are taking to social media to flex their high-budget company holiday parties.
My company just brought in a whole glam squad to do our hair and makeup in the office before our holiday party, one TikTok creator posted. The video shows an office full of employees getting their hair curled and makeup touched up.
Sometimes I love corporate America, she wrote in the caption.
The comments were full of people desperate to know which company, and industry, she works in. My company has an $11 per person food budget, one wrote. This is pre-covid tech company energy and I love it for you, another added.
Another TikTok creator, who works in consulting, posted one clip last week that shows an elaborately decorated ballroom-style hall, avant-garde dancers, a sprawling bar, and decadent food served on silver platters. Corporate holiday party season, they wrote.
What a holiday party looks like at the largest hedge fund in the US, another wrote, over footage of a tightly packed room of people in suits dancing to a live saxophonist.
In spite of what you may see on social media, the share of companies hosting any kind of holiday party has been on the decline for years. In 2007, 90% of firms said they hosted one, according to data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a global outplacement and consulting firm. By 2024, that number had dropped to just 64%.
Once upon a time, the holidays were an opportunity for the ultimate corporate flex. In 2000, Bloomberg reportedly spent 1m on a London Christmas party based on the seven deadly sins, which included 10 different bars.
In 2006, Google threw a Greek myththemed party at Pier 48 for a reported 10,000 guests, dubbed Googlympus. Setup for the bash took a reported five days. Nearly a decade on, Yahoo hosted a Great Gatsbythemed holiday party at the same location in 2015, which reportedly cost $7 million.
Now the days of lavish, multimillion-dollar blowouts are long gone, especially amid ongoing layoffs and economic precarity. But if the envious comment section on TikTok is anything to go off, the appetite for corporate shindigs is still there.
Nobody throws a holiday party like a big tech company, one TikTok creator posted earlier this month. The video walks through the evenings activities, including floral arranging and a mariachi band.
Young professionals are largely prooffice partiesthe party just has to be worth actually attending.
Ninety-five percent of workers ages 18 to 34 believe holiday soirees boost engagement, according to an Indeed study. A recent KPMG report found that most professionals, and especially Gen Z employees, believe companies should encourage holiday parties and happy hours to help facilitate work friendships. In the same report, one in four employees felt their company wasnt prioritizing those opportunities enough.
They may not be into forced fun. But actual fun? Workers are still down for that.
When Apple launched the App Store in 2008, it was impossibly influential to the future of the internet. The all-powerful world wide web was sliced and diced into bite-sized apps oft-dubbed Web 2.0. What followed was not just software that fit in your pocket. From TikTok to Uber, these camera-wielding, GPS-integrated, cloud-connected platforms changed the way we lived.
Now, in the wake of AI, the app store is arising anew. But instead of being built as tappable icons inside a mobile OS, they are plugging directly into the conversations of LLMs like Microsoft CoPilot and Anthropics Claude.
Today, OpenAIthe largest AI platform with 800 million weekly usersis opening ChatGPT for any developer to integrate their app right into the flow of conversation (pending review and approval). Following a pilot earlier this year, now any developer can plug in their own apps to be suggested contextually during any chat, or summoned by a user by @ing their specific name.
[Image: Adobe]
Early partners like Adobe will let you edit images right in the flow of conversation (complete with sliders to tweak them), while Target will pull up any manner of product to buy. No matter your feelings on AI, the tools seemed destined to change the way we think about apps and even multitasking, by shifting us from software based upon nouns (Canva, Figma) to verbs (build a slide deck).
Its not going to feel like you’re entering through a front door anymore. You’re kind of meeting these [users] at a very specific moment in time, says Bryant Jow, a designer at OpenAI overseeing app integration. I really think one of the most important things is that it should not feel like there’s a learning curve or that you have to re-anchor yourself. It should just kind of feel like immediately and instantly intuitive.
[Image: Canva]
Indeed, the promise from all the partner companies I spoke to is to fulfill what LLMs generally only tease. We brainstorm all sorts of ideas inside AI chats, but when its time to bring them to life, we can hit a wall. This is where integrated apps can show up, offering their finer tuned services. But the devil is in the details. And very few of the details have been fully worked out.
If you remember the first apps that people made on the App Store, like the beer drinking app [iBeer], they were like, whatever, right? A lot of people took a moment to figure out how do we behave in this ecosystem? What do we build? How do we provide utility? And how do we optimize for that? says Gui Seiz, who leads product design on the AI team at Figma. I think we’re still at that stage.
[Image: Figma]
What ChatGPT apps can actually do, and how they do it
To be entirely frank, the AI model providers are creating something of an ouroboros with connected apps. You talk to ChatGPT. It recommends you connect with an app. That app, however, is likely powered by AI models that could be from OpenAI. And so its part-OpenAI-powered agent, filled with specialized knowledge, then shows back up on OpenAIs platform ChatGPT. Its our agents-talking-to-agents future, happening now.
However, the secret sauce to these connections isnt merely your typical pile of APIs that have been used to connect apps for years. Its a rapidly growing new standard called MCP (Model Context Protocol). Originally developed by Anthropic in 2024, its now open source under Linux.
When a company runs an MCP server, its essentially opening a door to make everything it wants grockable by AIsharing data, tools, and memoryall in one consolidated, automated process. While model companies originally brute forced their way across the internet, smashing and grabbing the data sets needed to build their systems, MCP is the equivalent of a butler asking them to wipe their feet and welcoming the AI in.
For Target, MCP meant that its initial launch on ChatGPT happened fasta mere four weeks from when discussions with OpenAI kicked off and Target was selling on its platform.
[Image: Target]
But whats it like to shop Target on an LLM? At the moment, you can type @target, and ask to shop, in my case, lego deals for xmas. It generates a thumbnail grid of options, all with prices. Tap one, and youre ushered to a new page with more info, just like youre on its website. There, you can add it to your cart. Target, like all of the partners I spoke to, promised more features will arrive fastmore at the scale of weeks than months.
Canva and Figma have both offered tools to create slide decks, turning a brainstorm or pretty much anything you want to paste into ChatGPT into a presentation. Both services are dipping into their own templates to build visual assets previewed as thumbnails. From there, you can tap into any preview to see the whole slideshow. The catch is that, in either case, you cant really edit these slides further through conversationthe app integration kind of kicks you back to stock ChatGPT following the query. Instead, the preview, like Target, refers you back to their respective apps.
[Image: Figma]
Its why the most ambitious integration seems to be that of Adobe, which integrated tools from Adobe Express, Photoshop, and Acrobat. Adobe actually built out its own, lightweight front end experience into ChatGPT, so if you ask it to brighten a photo, a few sliders will appear on the screen that only control exposure and black and white levels. That way you can get the image xactly as bright as you like, rather then telling the AI, “a little brighter, wait, no, a little darker.”
This UI is intentionally granular, built to surface only what you need for a task and nothing more.
Thats what makes this incredibly exciting, argues Govind Balakrishan, SVP and GM on Adobe Express. You’re no longer dealing with the the entirety of the Photoshop interface. You’re just dealing with those sliders that give you what you’re trying to do.
Discovering new apps will be the new SEO
App discoverability could still use work, though. And this represents both a short term and long term challenge for the company.
In the short term, conversational discovery just stinks.
To be honest, summoning these apps can be frustrating and buggy. OpenAI needs to do some clean up work on their front end, too, adding the creature comforts we expect. For instance, when you @ any available app, it autofills that app like an Instagram handlebut only after you paired the app successfully once already. In the case of Adobe, this gets extra tricky, as you summon specific functions via their separate apps like @Photoshop and @AdobeAcrobat (and don’t ask to build a PDF in Photoshop). Thats unnecessarily messy and should be sorted by the LLM, not the user.
[Image: Adobe]
Meanwhile, you arent even supposed to be forced to call out apps all the time, as they are supposed to be suggested casually by the LLM in what the company calls indirect invocation. Im not seeing much, if any, of that working yet.
When Im too casual, saying Id like to shop at Target instead of @target find me X, it listed nearby Target stores and then offered me shopping advice. When I said I was hoping to work with the Target app on ChatGPT right now, it explained I could do that, along with everything I could do in Target. But it was always up to me to invoke the aforementioned secret code@Target in this caseto make my query.
Its an easy enough affordance people will learn thats no different than using X or Threads, but the whole point of a friendly conversational interface is that it isnt a speakeasy. I was continuously surprised by the lack of contextual understanding (and OpenAI says they are not currently live for all users).
But this feels rapidly fixable.
[Image: Canva]
The greater existential question for OpenAI is how and why it would recommend one app over another app that offers similar features with similar quality.
Make no mistake, each company wants to be the app thats summoned on command. I myself wondered why some companies would even bother to plug into ChatGPT. As soon as they hand over their capabilities to a generalized AI, arent they diluting their own value? Target makes money with every sale, sure, and Canva still carefully offers its free items for free and its paid items for subscription. But Adobe, for instance, is offering all of its ChatGPT tools for free rather than upselling you to a subscription.
At some level, we believe that the more users we haveleveraging the breadth and strength of our applications, the better off we will be over time, says Balakrishan. Monetization will sort of work in its way out.
For now, it helps that all of these media generation services link you back to their respective apps, with full interfaces, to finish work you may only start on ChatGPT. Indeed, Canva shared early data from running its own MCP servers to field Claude, CoPilot, and ChatGPT requests since July. Theyve served 2.6 million users whove created more than 11 million designs, and its been working as a tool to attract attention. Canva notes that referral traffic from LLMs is rising at a faster rate than any other source.
But bigger picture, everyone seems to agree that baking apps into LLMs should be about more than just porting an app to a chat interface. It should unlock new workflows, functions, and UIs we haven’t imagined yet.
There’s some stuff that, for whatever reason, the modality that Figma offers isnt ideal to do that specific thing, says Seiz. “I wonder what kind of new use cases or new things people are going to be trying to do.
[Image: Figma]
Finding AIs next big modality
For Target, which launched just in time for Black Friday, one of its biggest surprises was a new shopping behavior. People uploaded handwritten lists instead of typing things in. That was interesting, and Target doesnt know whats possible from that, yet, but its one of many data points that could inform their future thinking.
We wanted to be early and have a role in how that path evolves, says Purvi Shah, VP of UX Design, Research and Accessibility at Target.
[Image: Target]
The greater concern for companies I talked to was not if they would be commoditized by plugging into a vast AI platform, but how they would be discovered in all that noise. Its no secret that Adobe, Canva, and Figma are each competitors, much like Target and Walmart (which was als was early to integrate shopping with ChatGPT]. Suggesting any of them contextually, in conversation, means that OpenAI needs to make a decision of which competing service is right for any given moment. Naturally, they all want to own that moment.
When I ask OpenAI how they will manage this issue, Jow admits, its definitely one of the hardest challenges facing the team. When I ask if well see paid placement, like the search ads that have driven Googles business for years, he says, Well see.
In the meantime, app developers shared their own nervousness about how this will develop, and agree we are likely to see a era of AI platform optimizationmuch like sites classically optimized themselves to be discovered by Googlein order to rise to the top of ChatGPT and other LLMs. For now, all developers can do is serve quality and relevant responses to any prompt, according to Seiz, so that OpenAI is incentivized to keep recommending ones service.
It’s certainly inevitable that there will be multiple adjacent experiences that offer a really great tool for that use case, says Jow. And I do think that what we want to really ensure is that those options are displayed to the user in a very transparent way, so the user can decide which tool is best suited for them.
