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Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday flagged the softening labor market after policymakers trimmed the benchmark interest rate by a quarter point to a range between 4% and 4.25%. Citing weakness in the job market, they forecast two more quarter-point cuts this year.
“Payroll job gains have slowed significantly to a pace of just 29,000 per month over the past three months,” Powell said at a press conference after the Fed policy decision. READ MORE
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is urging caution about the outlook for the U.S. economy amid persistent uncertainty over the impact of tariffs as well as geopolitical headwinds.
"I think you better be careful on that one [on the economic impact on the U.S.], because some of these things have long cycles. So we don't know yet. People are expecting these things to happen right away. But actually, a lot of them haven't happened," Dimon said in an interview on the "Office Hours: Business Edition" podcast released Wednesday morning. READ MORE
I could really use an executive assistant right now. Between work and all the kid stuff that comes with a new school year, it’s hard to keep the calendar straight and the fridge stocked.
Trouble is, I’m not an executive. READ MORE
Harris started looking for his first real job months before his graduation from UC Davis this spring. He had a solid résumé, he thought: a paid internship at a civic-consulting firm, years of volunteering at environmental-defense organizations, experience working on farms and in parks as well as in offices, a close-to-perfect GPA, strong letters of recommendation. He would move anywhere on the West Coast, living out of his car if he had to. He would accept a temporary, part-time, or seasonal gig, not just a full-time position. He would do anything—filing paperwork, digging trenches—to build his dream career protecting California’s wildlife and public lands.
He applied to 200 jobs. He got rejected 200 times. Actually, he clarified, he “didn’t get rejected 200 times.” A lot of businesses never responded. READ MORE
Most conversations around proxy voting focus on shareholder proposals and executive compensation. Meanwhile, the most significant votes tend to fly under the radar: director elections. Boards of directors play a vital role in representing shareholder interests by overseeing a company’s strategic direction, monitoring management and ensuring accountability for the creation of long-term value.
Director-election votes can be a powerful tool for weighing in on material governance issues. Increasingly, investors are doing just that. In the 2024 proxy season, directors who chaired their board’s nominating and governance committees received 5% more dissenting votes on average, reflecting investors’ willingness to hold specific directors accountable for board composition and broad governance concerns. READ MORE
All too often, good leadership is viewed as a more enticing and important topic than good management. People aspire to be leaders; they are trained to be managers. Many don’t even want to be referred to as a manager because the word itself has a bit of a PR problem.
And who can blame them? After all, leaders cast vision and point to the future. Managers review performance and point out problems. Leaders inspire. Managers inspect. Leaders throw great parties. Managers throw out non-reimbursable charges from an expense account. READ MORE
In my work advising high-growth companies, I often see founders hit an invisible wall, typically around the $25 million ARR mark, where the very instincts that made them successful begin to stifle their company’s growth.
A recent example illustrates this “Operator’s Trap”: the CEO, a brilliant leader, was still approving every proposal and personally reviewing customer tickets. While from the outside the business looked strong, the problem crystallized when a competitor made a strategic move no one on his team saw coming. And the reason became painfully clear—the leader responsible for scanning the horizon was buried so deep in the day-to-day that he could no longer see beyond it. READ MORE
The debate over AI’s impact on the workplace has moved from speculation to reality, as evidence of jobs lost to AI emerges. New research from Stanford University analyzing millions of payroll records through July 2025 reveals that generative AI is already creating significant employment disruptions.
This research represents one of the first large-scale, real-time analyses of AI’s impact on employment, according to report co-author Erik Brynjolfsson. Titled Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence, the study used comprehensive payroll data from ADP, covering millions of workers across tens of thousands of firms. READ MORE
The newest data showing labor market weakness puts at loggerheads both sides of the Fed’s dual mandate to maintain stable prices and ensure maximum employment.
The U.S. has expanded payrolls by just 598,000 in 2025, the slowest increase of any year since the pandemic. Meanwhile, inflation, as measured by the personal consumption expenditures price index minus food and energy prices, edged up in July to 2.9%, well above the Fed’s 2% inflation target. READ MORE
“Chief diversity officer” was once Corporate America’s hottest job.
Now corporate America has retreated from DEI and slashed thousands of jobs. So where does that leave the people who’ve built careers around that work?
Hear the story of one veteran executive who’s been job-hunting for more than a year. READ MORE
Working hard, or hardly working?
Americans work an average of 1,805 hours per year, according to the World Economic Forum, but some states put in more hours than others. READ MORE
There’s growing sentiment among workplace experts that the time of performance management-based reviews is up, and it’s the best company workers leading the revolt.
It’s not just the cream of the crop talent that’s turning a cold shoulder to performance management evaluation strategies; mainstream workers dislike the practice, too. READ MORE
Texting on the Moon? Streaming on Mars? It may not be as far away as you think.
That’s the shared vision of NASA and Nokia, who have partnered to set up a cellular network on the Moon to help lay the building blocks for long-term human presence on other planets.
A SpaceX rocket is due to launch this year — the exact date has yet to be confirmed — carrying a simple 4G network to the Moon. The lander will install the system at the Moon’s south pole and then it will be remotely controlled from Earth. READ MORE
After days of intense backlash, most recently from President Donald Trump, Cracker Barrel is scrapping its new minimalist logo.
“We thank our guests for sharing your voices and love for Cracker Barrel. We said we would listen, and we have. Our new logo is going away and our ‘Old Timer’ will remain,” the company said in a statement. READ MORE
Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Friday, while voicing concern about tariff-induced inflation, flagged signs of job market weakness and signaled that the central bank at its next policy meeting on Sept. 16-17 may need to trim the main interest rate for the first time this year.
“Downside risks to employment are rising,” Powell said in a speech. “If those risks materialize, they can do so quickly in the form of sharply higher layoffs and rising unemployment.” READ MORE
Who would say work was fun? Your job might be rewarding (some of the time). You may get on with your colleagues (some of them). But fun? It seems simultaneously too grand an ambition and too small.
After the work-centric “hustle culture” of the 2010s, then the backlash and widespread burnout brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, the general feeling around work right now could be described as ambivalent at best. At worst, it’s openly combative, as evinced by frequent references to the “battle” over working from home. Managers want employees back in the office; employees want flexibility, and to limit work’s impact on their lives. READ MORE
My book with Ranya Nehmeh, In Praise of the Office, about the benefits of face-to-face interactions is being released this month. Along with the attention that generates, I am learning about who advocates for remote work and who advocates for returning to the office.
For the record, we argue that it is possible to have the benefits of in-person working with a hybrid schedule, but it requires management to be much more purposeful with how it uses that in-person time than what we are seeing now. READ MORE
You can’t be a great manager without gratitude. At least, that’s according to 3,600 employees from across the globe in the fifth iteration of Achievers Workforce Institute’s (AWI) State of Recognition report. Despite this, only 15% of employees say their manager regularly recognizes them, which should stop every leader in their tracks.
In my world coaching leaders for a living, employee recognition is gradually becoming less fluff and more fuel for driving engagement, performance and results. According to the report, employees who receive weekly, meaningful recognition are nine times more likely to feel a strong sense of belonging, six times more likely to see a long-term career, and 2.6 times more likely to be at peak productivity. Even monthly, meaningful recognition from a manager drives major gains in engagement and trust — as long as it’s indeed meaningful…that is personal, specific, and tied to impact. READ MORE
Elon Musk's philosophy on success doesn't rely on buzzwords or vague motivation. Instead, it comes down to what he calls "simple math." READ MORE
There’s apparently some truth to the saying, “The enemy of your enemy is your friend.”
Elon Musk approached Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year, asking him to help finance xAI’s bid to buy Sam Altman’s OpenAI, according to a court filing released Thursday. The call for help came after a long history of tension between the tech superstars. READ MORE