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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.
Category:
E-Commerce
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.
Category:
E-Commerce
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.
Category:
E-Commerce
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.
Category:
E-Commerce
In a seismic shift for one of televisions marquee events, the Academy Awards will depart ABC and begin streaming on YouTube beginning in 2029, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Wednesday. ABC will continue to broadcast the annual ceremony through 2028. That year will mark the 100th Oscars. But starting in 2029, YouTube will retain global rights to streaming the Oscars through 2033. YouTube will effectively be the home to all things Oscars, including red-carpet coverage, the Governors Awards, and the Oscar nominations announcement. We are thrilled to enter into a multifaceted global partnership with YouTube to be the future home of the Oscars and our year-round Academy programming, said academy chief executive Bill Kramer and academy president Lynette Howell Taylor. The Academy is an international organization, and this partnership will allow us to expand access to the work of the Academy to the largest worldwide audience possible which will be beneficial for our Academy members and the film community. While major award shows have added streaming partnerships, the YouTube deal marks the first of the big four the Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, and Tonys to completely jettison broadcast television. It puts one of the most watched non-NFL broadcasts in the hands of Google. YouTube boasts some 2 billion viewers. The Academy Awards will stream for free worldwide on YouTube, in addition to YouTube TV subscribers. It will be available with audio tracks in many languages, in addition to closed captioning. Financial terms were not disclosed. The Oscars are one of our essential cultural institutions, honoring excellence in storytelling and artistry, said Neal Mohan, chief executive of YouTube. Partnering with the academy to bring this celebration of art and entertainment to viewers all over the world will inspire a new generation of creativity and film lovers while staying true to the Oscars storied legacy. The Walt Disney Co.-owned ABC has been the broadcast home to the Oscars for almost its entire history. NBC first televised the Oscars in 1953, but ABC picked up the rights in 1961. Aside from a period between 1971 and 1975, when NBC again aired the show, the Oscars have been on ABC. ABC has been the proud home to The Oscars for more than half a century,” the network said in a statement. “We look forward to the next three telecasts, including the shows centennial celebration in 2028, and wish the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences continued success. The 2025 Academy Awards were watched by 19.7 million viewers on ABC, a slight increase from the year before. That remains one of the biggest TV broadcasts of the year, though less than half of Oscar ratings at their peak. In 1999, more than 55 million watched James Cameron’s Titanic win best picture. The film academy, in choosing YouTube over other options such as Netflix or NBC Universal/Peacock, selected a platform with a wide-ranging and massive audience but one without as much of an established production infrastructure. Still, more people especially young people watch YouTube than any other streaming platform. According to Nielsen, YouTube accounted for 12.9% of all television and streaming content consumed in November. Netflix ranked second with an 8.3% market share. Jake Coyle, AP film writer
Category:
E-Commerce
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