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Its Friday afternoon. Your inbox looks like a battleground, your calendar is a collage of back-to-back calls, and the strategic plan you built last quarter already feels outdated. Youve spent the week reacting, extinguishing fires, and juggling unexpected demands you didnt plan for. Youve been busy, but not necessarily productive. Youve managed the chaos, but you havent had space to lead through it. This is the trap many leaders find themselves in today. Our attention is consumed by the urgent, leaving almost no cognitive room for the deep thinking, creativity, and strategic foresight that leadership requires. Working harder isnt the answer. Neither is downloading yet another tool. Under time pressure and limited mental bandwidth, leaders tend to fall back on fast, intuitive shortcuts that erode decision quality in complex situations. What leaders need is a simple operating system reset: a weekly practice that converts disruption into insight and momentum. From Extinguishing Fires to Using Their Heat In nature, fire isnt only destructive; its regenerative. Giant sequoias, for example, rely on the heat of a forest fire to release their seeds. Flames clear the underbrush, enrich the soil, and make way for new growth. High-performing leaders work the same way. Instead of viewing disruption as something to resist, they learn to harness its heat. They recognize that crises, customer surprises, shifting priorities, and unexpected wins all contain valuable signals about how the world is changing and where opportunity sits. Some fast-moving organizations have formalized reflection into their operating rhythms. For example, Spotifys engineering teams have publicly described the use of agile retrospectives to turn surprises into learning. Taking time for a short weekly reset can help leaders capture those signals. Set aside 18 minutes at the end of each week to pause, asking yourself three deceptively simple questions and sitting with each for six minutes. 1. What must I clear away? Every ecosystem needs deadwood cleared before new things can grow. Your work is no different. Look back at your week and ask yourself: What assumption I held on Monday was proven wrong by Friday? What meeting, process, or habit is creating drag instead of value? Which zombie project is still consuming time or budget despite having no strategic future? The goal here is subtraction. Leaders tend to underestimate how much cognitive clutter weighs them down. Clearing it ruthlessly creates room for better decisions and more ambitious ideas. 2. What did this weeks disruption teach me? Once the underbrush is cleared, you can see what nutrients remain. Disruption is information. Your job is to extract meaning from it. This is benefit-finding: the discipline of intentionally looking for insight in unexpected places. Consider: What surprising customer comment, employee concern, or performance issue taught me something important? Where did our team get an unexpected win, and what were the conditions that enabled it? What new skill, workaround, or capability emerged that might be worth formalizing? This step shifts you from reacting to events to learning from them in real time. It builds future intelligence, the ability to read signals and adapt ahead of the curve. 3. What is one bold move I can take? Reflection without movement creates stagnation. Regeneration requires action. Choose one consequential decision, not a long list: What is the single conversation that will unlock progress next week? What experiment is worth running? What important decision have I been avoiding that I will now make? Choosing just one forces focus. It ensures you enter Monday intentionally. Its a shift from managing the week to shaping it. Lead the Future, One Week at a Time Taking a weekly reset isnt a productivity hack; its a leadership discipline that helps you step above the noise and recalibrate your direction. In an era defined by constant change, the leaders who thrive arent the ones who avoid disruption. Theyre the ones who know how to convert it into insight, energy, and action. They learn to use disruptions to leap forward. This discipline becomes even more important in a world shaped by accelerating AI adoption, geopolitical volatility, climate-driven shocks, and continual shifts in customer expectations, as highlighted in recent global risk assessments from the World Economic Forum. Leaders who thrive build regenerative capacity, the ability to clear noise, extract meaning, and act decisively through practices like the weekly reflection tool. Research on adaptive leadership consistently shows that learning-oriented organizations are better at turning change into innovation. This 18-minute ritual is how you start. By clearing space, extracting meaning, and choosing one bold move each week, you reclaim your agency in a world that constantly pulls you into reaction. Disruption isnt going away. But with the right rhythm, you can stop being managed by it and start using it as fuel for your next breakthrough.
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E-Commerce
Last Saturday, more than six million people held their breath as Alex Honnold took his first step up Taipei 101. The Free Solo climber, who went on to ascend Taiwans tallest building without the safety of a rope and harness, drew crowds all around the building, as well as on Netflix, where the ascent was live-streamed as part of a show called Skyscraper Live. Some of these people had likely already watched Honnold scale the 3,000-foot rock wall of Yosemites El Capitan. But for many, the climber’s ascent up a man-made structure was likely an introduction to an altogether different kind of climbing: not on the face of a cliff, but the side of a building. This type of sport is called buildering (from bouldering, to climb boulders) and it has been happening for more than a century. Taipei 101 [Photo: Eagan Hsu/Unsplash] From rock to concrete For decades, the ultimate challenge for climbers was nature itself. Modern rock climbing took shape in the late 19th century, when alpinists ventured beyond traditional mountaineering and onto steeper, more technical cliffs. By the mid-20th century, climbers embraced free climbing, meaning they relied on their hands and feet to move upward while using ropes only as a safety backup in case of a fall. Then, in the ’70s and ’80s, free-soloists like John Bachar pushed the sport to its extreme, stripping away the rope entirely and turning every move into a high-stakes commitment. Now, buildings are the next challenge, says 70-year-old American climber Dan Goodwin, who has climbed a dozen buildings, including the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, and Millenium Tower in San Francisco. Today, more than half of the worlds population lives in cities, and the majority of climbers train in gyms. They get out of the gym and what are they looking at? High rises, says Goodwin. But climbing a building isnt the same as climbing the face of a mountain. With rock climbing, every move is different, but climbing a building calls for repetition, which Goodwin says attacks the muscle. Hips cramp, shoulders start to burn: It gets real quick, and I want to start educating people about how dangerous it is. Dan Goodwin climbs Simon Bolivar Tower in Caracas, Venezuela, before a large crowd for television company Venevision. February, 1982. [Photo: Private Collection] A brief history of buildering The thought of scaling the face of a building may send the average person into a tizzy, but people have been climbing buildings for almost as long as there have been buildings to climb. The earliest documented example dates back to 1901, when British alpinist Geoffrey Winthrop-Young anonymously published The Roof-Climbers Guide to Trinity College, mapping the architecture of the campus as a series of climbing routes. Some decades later, human flies like George Polley and Harry Gardiner scaled buildings in cities like New York City and Boston. Dan Goodwin climbing the CN Tower in Toronto, 1986. [Photo: David Cooper/Toronto Star/ Getty Images] By the 1980s and 90s, buildering had entered mainstream with televised (not live) ascents by SpiderDan Goodwin, and French climber Alain Robert, who went on to scale the Empire State Building, with no rope, and the Burj Khalifa with a safety rope and harness. (While Roberts was the first to ascend Taipei 101, Honnold was the first to do it rope-free.) Over the course of those years, buildings have changed drastically. According to Youngs original guide, buildings with good holds featured recessed window frames, narrow chimneys, and continuous parapetsarchitectural quirks that made climbing easier. With the advent of steel and concrete construction, many of these features disappeared in favor of sleek glass curtain walls, and climbing buildings became so much harder that some climbers have resorted to aids like suction cups and sky hookssmall devices that help climbers hang off tiny edgesto scale smooth facades. Goodwin was one of those climbers. In 1981, he climbed Chicagos Sears Tower (now known as the Willis Tower) using suction cups and sky hooks. As climbers, we would prefer relying on our physical strength than on a suction cup, he told me. I almost died because of my suction cups. But architecture dictates everything, as Goodwin put it, and the tower had no suitable hand or foot holds. Plus, the climber had recently been issued a challenge he had to rise to. In 1980, a fire engulfed the MGM Grand fire in Las Vegas and killed 85 people after smoke spread rapidly through the building. Goodwin was deeply affected by the fire, and as he watched firefighters struggle to reach people trapped on upper floors, he argued that climbers could be trained to scale skyscrapers during emergencies. When a local fire marshal dismissed the idea and challenged him to climb a building himself, Goodwin took it literallyand went on to climb the Sears Tower, then the tallest building in the world. That conversation changed my life, he says. Goodwin, whose memoir, Untethered, is set to come out in the spring, went on to climb over a dozen buildings around the world, including the CN Tower in Toronto, which he climbed in 1986twice in the same dayusing only his hands and feet. The hardest climbs, he said, were those with slick glass that called for suction cups. The easiest were buildings with clearly defined features. Taipei 101, with its stacked, bamboo-like segments and decorative dragon heads, fits into the latter category. So many beautiful handhold features, he says. Alex Honnold on top of Taipei 101. January, 2026. The next era of buildering Perhaps these complications are the reason why, after more than 100 years of existence, the sport today remains dominated by just a few big namesfrom legacy figures like Robert and Goodwin, to younger climbers like the 26-year-old George King, who famously climbed The Shard in 2019 before base jumping off the top, and Honnold, whose career focused on rock climbing before he took on Taipei 101. British skyscraper climber George King as he leaves HM Prison Pentonville in north London on January, 2020, on his release from imprisonment after free-climbing the London skyscraper, The Shard. [Photo: Daniel Leal/AFP/Getty Images] Today, the buildering community remains small. In fact, according to Andy Day, a climber and photographer who wrote a paper on buildering in 2017, to call it a community would be generous. Its a more niche, sub-cultural level of interest, he says, noting interest has largely ebbed and flowed over the years. The discipline required to do what someone like Alain Roberts or Alex Honnold do is just so unique that its not going to happen very often, he told me, adding, with a laugh, that there are enough well-equipped gyms serving hot coffee to keep climbers satisfied. But “SpiderDan” believes Honnolds live-streamed climb might usher in a new era for urban climbers. I know every climber is going to be walking through cities now and looking at what buildings they could climb, he says. Honnoldwho kicked off his ascent with a casual nod to the camera and ended it 91 minutes later with a low-key sick!made his climb look like a walk in the park. But Goodwin knows urban climbers need the same regulations as rock climbers, so he is now working on a separate book in the hopes of making urban climbing safer. We need to come up with standards, and ethics, and rules that govern future generations, he says, because you think youre the only ones right now, but I know other people climbing buildings, and in the next year or two, I wouldnt be surprised if we see fifty to 100 ascents.
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E-Commerce
Today, thousands of Americans are participating in a general strike. The instructions are simple: no work, no school, no shopping. The aim is ambitiousto pressure the Trump administration to remove ICE from local communities. The strike is a response to the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota. In the days since, calls for a nationwide shutdown have spread rapidly across social media, shared by activists, nonprofits, and everyday people urging a halt to economic activity. Celebrities including Pedro Pascal, Edward Norton, and Jamie Lee Curtis have amplified the message to their followers. Some businessesmostly small, independent oneshave heeded the call. Clothing label Misha and Puff, olive oil maker Brightland, and underwear brand Oddobody have all closed for the day, forgoing revenue as a form of protest. “The only thing the Trump administration responds to is the market,” says Polly Rodriguez, founder of the sexual wellness company Unbound Babes, who has shuttered her business for the day. “Our goal is to raise awareness today, link people to other resources, and gather donations for organizations on the ground in Minnesota.” [Screenshot: The General Strike US] The Organizers Behind This Strike Although the strike has been organized in a decentralized way, with no single leader at the helm, many participants have turned to the website and Instagram account of The General Strike US, which offer guidance about organizing a general strike. Eliza Blum, a longtime labor organizer, built the site in 2022, alongside other activists. “I wouldn’t say I’m a founder,” she says. “We’re very much a non-hierarchical, decentralized network.” Through her work with Fight for $15, the campaign for a $15 minimum wage, Blum saw firsthand how strikes forced companies and policymakers to pay attention. As the Trump administration pursued what she viewed as increasingly authoritarian policies, she began to see labor as a central tool of resistance. “When Roe v. Wade was overturned, I hit a personal breaking point,” she tells me. “Protesting in the streets, holding signs, calling our representativesit wasn’t enough. We live in an extremely capitalist society where our greatest weapon is our labor. If working people stopped working, we could shut down the country until our demands were met.” Other prominent voices have echoed that view. “What does a national civic uprising look like?” Robert Reich, a U.C. Berkeley law professor, wrote in his Substack last April. “It may look like a general strikea strike in which tens of millions of Americans refuse to work, refuse to buy, refuse to engage in anything other than a mass demonstration against the regime.” The General Strike website calls for people to sign a “strike card,” pledging their participation in future actions. The long-term goal, Blum says, is to secure commitments from 3.5% of the U.S. populationroughly 10.5 million people. The figure comes from research by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, which suggests that when 3.5% of a population engages in sustained protest, authoritarian governments are likely to collapse. So far, about 435,730 people have signed the pledge. Once the number reaches 10.5 million, organizers plan to coordinate a nationwide strike. In the meantime, Blum argues that smaller, recurring actions are essential for building momentum. Reich agrees. “[It will take more than] just one general strike, but a repeating general strike,” he writes. “A strike whose numbers continue to grow and whose outrage, resistance, and solidarity continue to spread across the land.” Last Friday, hundreds of Minnesota businesses closed as a show of opposition to ICE. For Blum, this was an important turning point. She saw local unions come together with community organizers to work collectively. This local strike had an impact, making headlines in the New York Times and the BBC. “It was the first time, since I’ve been doing this that I saw a general strike actually happen,” she says. Crowds marching from Scotland to London during the General Strike, 1926. [Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images] The History of General Strikes The term general strike is most closely associated with events in Britain in 1926, when trade unions organized coal miners to walk off the job after mine owners slashed wages and lengthened working hours. Workers across other industriesincluding transportation, printing, and manufacturingjoined in solidarity, bringing large parts of the country to a standstill. The government quickly intervened, framing the strike as a threat not just to employers, but to the nation itself. Union leaders soon found themselves in direct confrontation with the state, and after nine days, they called off the strike. “It was a total failure,” says Jonathan Schneer, a British historian whose book, Nine Days in May: The General Strike of 1926 comes out this summer. (Disclosure: Schneer is my father-in-law.) “The coal miners were ultimately left isolated and forced to work under even worse conditions.” Schneer notes that while todays general strike draws inspiration from the events of 1926, there are also crucial differencesmost notably the level of coordination involved. In England at the time, between a third and half of all workers were unionized, and labor leaders were able to mobilize a significant share of the population. It took enormous organization to pull something like that off, Schneer says. Nearly a century later, the landscape has shifted. Todays action is being organized largely online, at a moment when labor unions are far weaker than they were in early-20th-century Britain. The United States also has a much larger and more geographically dispersed population. What remains constant, however, is the central role of capitalism in everyday lifeand the idea that halting economic activity can still be a powerful way to command the governments attention. When enough people participate, Schneer argues, the signal is impossible to ignore. The Demands For Blum, the fact that the strike isn’t centrally organized is one of its strengths. Like other activist groups that emerged during Trumps second termincluding Indivisibleshe believes organizing works best at the local level, allowing communities to respond to their own conditions. Her role, she says, is less about directing the movement than equipping others with the tools to organize within their own networks. That decentralized structure also means there is no single, unified set of demands. The General Strike US website lists a wide range of causes worth striking for, from universal healthcare to voting rights. For now, however, participants appear to be coalescing around a more immediate goal: removing ICE from local communities. On social media, posts frequently express solidarity with protesters in Minnesota and call for the abolition of ICE altogether. While organizers encourage people to stay home from work and school, the most accessible form of participation is refusing to spend money. A number of small businesses have chosen to close for the day in solidarity, though no major corporations have followed suit. I am very disappointed in the lack of reaction from companies that are far more powerful and influential than we are, says Melody Serafino, founder of the communications agency No.29, which also shuttered operations. Let me be clear: posting on Instagram and shutting down our business for a day is not brave. Real courage is being exemplified by the people on the ground who are putting their lives at risk. For Blum, however, this moment is just the beginning. She sees the current action as the first in what she hopes will be a series of escalating strikesand says it is already producing results. In recent days, tens of thousands of people have signed strike cards through her website. There is still a long road ahead to reaching the 3.5% threshold of the U.S. population, but the numbers, she says, are rising steadily. Movements that reach that level of participation never fail to bring about radical change, Blum says. But it takes time.
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E-Commerce
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