Informed i’s Weekly Business Insights

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For young people with big ambitions, bagging a measly bachelor’s degree no longer seems enough. Students in America have been rushing into postgraduate courses, even as demand for higher education among the general public has declined. These days nearly 40% of university-educated Americans boast at least two degrees. In Britain a surge in demand from foreign students has created a huge boom in postgraduate education. Universities there now dole out four postgraduate qualifications for every five undergraduate ones.

Master’s degrees lasting one or two years are the biggest draw. These courses are necessary for jobs, such as teaching in academia, that are appealing even if poorly paid. Yet many of the people who enroll in postgraduate study are taking part in an educational arms race. Now that undergraduate degrees are common, goes the thinking, it takes extra credentials to get ahead. The hope is that advanced qualifications will boost all manner of careers.

That is often a mistake. New data are helping researchers compare the earnings of postgraduates with those of peers who are equally bright but have only a bachelor’s degree. One analysis suggests that more than 40% of America’s master’s courses provide graduates with no financial return or leave them worse off, after considering costs and what they might have earned anyway. A study in Britain concludes that completing a master’s has, on average, almost no effect on earnings by the time graduates are 35.

Dreadful returns to lofty qualifications should worry students and politicians alike. Governments are right to think that investing in skills can pep up growth—but not when universities are flabby and inefficient. It is not just students who suffer if poor courses burden them with outrageous debts; taxpayers do, too.

Governments should respond in two ways. First, they should abandon policies that are distorting the market for postgraduate study. The second priority for governments should be to give students the data they need to make better choices.

America is trying to change this. Under new rules, graduate colleges may soon be compelled to warn applicants before they sign up for courses that have a record of saddling students with low wages and high debts.

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Update now or risk losing access to your company’s systems and services.” Executives have likely seen this kind of message regularly sent to their company-issued mobile phone or computer. And when it pops up, they know exactly what it means and why: upgrading a device’s operating system can help protect it against bugs or unlock new features for more effectiveness.

As a leader, updates to your own operating system can be just as critical—if not more so. Your operating system—what we call your personal operating model—defines the way you get work done and ultimately determines your impact. This system comprises the choices you make about your priorities, the roles you choose to play, how you spend your time, and how you sustain your energy.

In this article, the author explore the four drivers of the personal operating model, critical questions associated with each, and best practices for building and maintaining such models at both the individual and organizational levels. Making space to regularly reflect on and adapt your personal operating model is a keystone habit for executives. 

The personal operating model consists of four drivers: priorities, roles, time, and energy. Depending on the professional and personal circumstances executives face, these can be either a drain on productivity or a source of personal resilience. As new realities emerge, leaders need to continually question their approaches to managing each of these elements.

1. Assess your priorities.  Effective leadership begins with defining clear priorities—the work to be done, the highest-impact problems to be solved, and the biggest opportunities to be pursued. To help sharpen their priority setting, leaders can consider the following questions:  Do you fully understand your mandates?  Are you ready for your most critical leadership conversations?  What can you quit doing now?  
2. Understand your role.  Once their priorities are set, effective leaders create a map of the tasks they will handle themselves and the work they will delegate to others. The following questions can help with this crucial step:  Are you focused on the work that only you can do?  Are you creating positive leverage to get work done?  Who has your back?  
3. Manage your time.  Once you have established your priorities and roles, you need to think about the most productive ways to manage your time. Top leaders focus on their most important work while allowing themselves the flexibility to handle emergencies, engage in strategic thinking, and create space for personal time. Consider these important questions.  Do your boundaries enable tight but loose schedules?  What rhythm have you established to manage your time?  How can you redesign meetings for maximum impact?  
4. Optimize your energy.  Now that you have a handle on managing your time, you can focus on bringing the right energy to your work. This involves protecting your physical health, maintaining strong relationships, and making your work match your meaning. Explore the following questions as you think about supporting your energy.  How do you protect your health in a demanding role?  Who are your real friends?  Why does this work matter to you? 

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Since the start of the generative AI boom, artists have been worried about losing their livelihoods to AI tools. There have been plenty of examples of companies’ replacing human labor with computer programs. Most recently, Coca-Cola sparked controversy by creating a new Christmas ad with generative AI. 

Artists and writers have launched several lawsuits against AI companies, arguing that their work has been scraped into databases for training AI models without consent or compensation. Tech companies have responded that anything on the public internet falls under fair use. But it will be years until we have a legal resolution to the problem. 

Unfortunately, there is little you can do if your work has been scraped into a data set and used in a model that is already out there. You can, however, take steps to prevent your work from being used in the future.  Here are four ways to do that. 

1. Mask your style.  One of the most popular ways artists are fighting back against AI scraping is by applying “masks” on their images, which protect their personal style from being copied.  Tools such as Mist, Anti-DreamBooth, and Glaze add tiny changes to an image’s pixels that are invisible to the human eye, so that if and when images are scraped, machine-learning models cannot decipher them properly.  But defenses like these are never foolproof, and what works today might not work tomorrow.  
2. Rethink where and how you share.  Popular art profile sites such as DeviantArt and Flickr have become gold mines for AI companies searching for training data. And when you share images on platforms such as Instagram, its parent company, Meta, can use your data to build its models in perpetuity if you’ve shared it publicly.  One way to prevent scraping is by not sharing images online publicly, or by making your social media profiles private. But for many creatives that is simply not an option; sharing work online is a crucial way to attract clients.  It’s worth considering sharing your work on Cara, a new platform created in response to the backlash against AI. 
3. Opt out of scraping.  Data protection laws might help you get tech companies to exclude your data from AI training. If you live somewhere that has these sorts of laws, such as the UK or the EU, you can ask tech companies to opt you out of having your data scraped for AI training. For example, you can follow these instructions for Meta. Unfortunately, opt-out requests from users in places without data protection laws are honored only at the discretion of tech companies.  The site Have I Been Trained, created by the artist-run company Spawning AI, lets you search to find out if your images have ended up in popular open-source AI training data sets.
4. If all else fails, add some poison.  The University of Chicago researchers who created Glaze have also created Nightshade, a tool that lets you add an invisible layer of “poison” to your images. Like Glaze, it adds invisible changes to pixels, but rather than just making it hard for AI models to interpret images, it can break future iterations of these models and make them behave unpredictably.

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When a company gives the CEO job to one of its own board members, people often assume that something must have gone wrong behind the scenes. Maybe the company is desperately trying to get itself out of a protracted period of tumult. Maybe the previous CEO’s departure was unexpected or forced, and only a tried-and-true board member can keep the ship sailing steadily until a permanent replacement can be found. Maybe the CEO’s departure was routine and expected, but somehow the succession-planning process just came up short.

Those are all reasonable explanations. During the past 10 years, however, as the complexity of the CEO role has increased, some companies have hired a board member to be their next leader for a different reason: It was the best option.  A growing number of companies are making this choice. From 2018 to 2023, board-to-CEO appointments increased threefold across the S&P 500 and the Russell 3000. 

Hiring a CEO from the board is still more of an exception than a rule. But there are compelling reasons to consider the possibility. Most notably, board members often can effectively adopt both internal and external perspectives. As insiders, they have a valuable feel for the company’s culture, history, and strategy; as outsiders, they can more easily challenge the company’s existing ways of operating.

But the board-to-CEO transition is a delicate one. Much can go wrong. Fellow directors may not know their colleague as well as they think they do, having worked together in only one context, and may overestimate how well their colleague understands the company’s inner workings. When internal candidates are passed over in favor of a board member, they can become demotivated and even quit. If handled without the appropriate care, a board-to-CEO transition can sap morale and destroy enterprise value.

So what’s the right way to think about the risks and rewards of selecting a board member as your next CEO? And if you decide to give a director the job, how can you—and the person you choose—maximize your chances of success?

When Does It Make Sense?  As levels of industry and geopolitical disruption rise, three factors have become important predictors of success for incoming CEOs: demonstrated efficacy in a past CEO role, institutional knowledge, and in most cases, relevant industry experience.

What Can Go Wrong?  Because board members are known entities, the specific challenges associated with their elevation to the CEO role can be overlooked. In situations where an appointment is intended for the long term (as opposed to being interim), it’s critical to be alert to four dangers.  Mistaking board expertise for readiness.  Competition within the board.  Negative reactions from internal candidates.  Nobody on the board should take on the CEO role as a favor to fellow directors or to come across as a savior to them. 

How Can You Boost Your Odds of Success?  A board-to-CEO transition can be a winning move, but it requires thoughtful effort, not only before but also after the selection of a CEO. It’s best to keep four rules in mind.  Plan early and often.  Treat board candidates just as you would any other.  Maintain credibility with the executive team and the organization.  Establish clear lanes for the chair and the incoming CEO.

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Peek under the hood of any corporate scandal or organizational failure, and you will almost certainly find one person, if not more, who knew that something was awry but failed to raise their concerns to leaders who were in a position to do something about it.   Across industries — including health care, car manufacturing, and aviation — the root cause of many crises can be traced back to environments in which employees felt unable, or unwilling, to voice their concerns.

Despite the well-known and often disastrous consequences of silence, many leaders remain confused about how to effectively solicit challenges from their teams. Based on their research the authors uncovered several concrete behaviors that are clearly effective in soliciting challenges from teams, which we discuss in a recent white paper.   Here, they outline five of the most effective actions that leaders can take to make constructive challenges not just possible but an integral part of organizational culture.

1. Ask better questions.  One of the most common missteps leaders make is asking broad, nonspecific questions like “What do you think?” or “Does anyone have any input?”   More effective questions directly invite disagreement. Instead of asking, “Does anyone agree with this plan?” consider asking, “What could go wrong with this approach?” or, “What are the potential risks we haven’t considered?” 
2. Acknowledge challenges as legitimate.  Simply inviting challenges isn’t enough — leaders also need to respond in a way that encourages further input. Generic expressions of gratitude, such as “Thanks for your input,” were ineffective at encouraging more challenges.   What made a positive difference was leaders acknowledging, specifically, the legitimacy of the challenge itself. For example, instead of a vague “Thank you,” when leaders responded with statements like “That’s a valid concern” or “I hadn’t considered that angle.
3. Keep meetings interactive and friendly.  Challenging a leader can be intimidating, especially since power imbalances are often pronounced. However, we found that leaders who maintained a friendly and interactive meeting atmosphere — using humor or taking fewer turns to speak themselves, and leaving more of the floor open for their team members to contribute — were more successful at eliciting challenges from teams.
4. Give decisions time.  Leaders must ensure that enough time is allocated for open discussion. Rushed decisions leave team members feeling that they lack the space or opportunity to fully articulate their concerns, which stifles constructive criticism. Study showed that longer meetings in which team members had the chance to digest and discuss ideas in detail led to more challenges to the leader’s flawed proposal and ultimately improved the decision.
5. Create accountability.  The study found that when leaders made individuals responsible for the success or failure of an idea, people were much more likely to challenge decisions they disagreed with. This is particularly effective when leaders use phrases like “Which option do you think is the best, A or B?” or “What’s the next step you all would like to take?”  When leaders amplify team members’ accountability for the outcome of a decision, the cost-benefit equation of remaining silent shifts — and incites people to take a stronger stance if they truly disagree with a course of action.

For leaders, cultivating a culture of constructive challenge is not a one-time effort; it requires close attention and sustained commitment.  In a world where the risks of silence can be catastrophic, the ability to foster open, honest dialogue is one of the most important skills a leader can develop. By encouraging dissent and embracing different perspectives, leaders can navigate complexity, mitigate risk, and drive their organizations toward long-term success.

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In USA we are near the end of this year’s football season, it’s becoming easier to predict which teams will emerge as championship contenders. They’re the teams that do the right things consistently well. They smartly self-correct their mistakes and focus on those mission-critical behaviors that—when adopted as habits—dramatically improve their prospects for winning.  That same formula works in business, too.  Seasoned organizational behavior consultants Julie M. Smith and Lori Ludwig offer an excellent guide in their new book Vital Behavior Blueprint: 5 Steps to Embed Mission-Critical Habits into Your Organization’s DNA.

What’s the process for identifying the mission-critical behaviors that—when adopted as habits—can dramatically improve an organization’s targeted results?

Smith says vital behaviors are actions that need to be done consistently—and by many—to achieve results. Here’s how to find them:  look for obvious behaviors that everyone knows are a problem, ask the people who do the work, ask subject matter experts, observe high and low performers to see what they do differently, analyze the customer’s journey to uncover pain points due to human actions, find the “behavior hot spots” in work processes where unwanted behavior variability occurs, and look for “cornerstone behaviors” that are foundational to other behaviors.

Smith and Ludwig say identifying and embedding vital behaviors in an organization’s culture is both an art and a science.

“Our habit formation process is rooted in Behavior Analysis, the science of what works in behavior change,” Smith says. “Backed by more than 100 years of research, it helps organizations identify vital behaviors, observe and measure them, adjust the surrounding environment to support them, and foster self-management for lasting habits.”

Smith and Ludwig apply the 80/20 rule to an organization’s performance culture.  The key is to identify the vital 20% of behaviors that drive 80% of outcomes, and then create a positive performance culture to make those behaviors habitual. This focused approach unlocks extraordinary results.”

An “ally network,” the authors say, can play a role in building and maintaining a high-performance culture.

Smith and Ludwig say employees need what they call three pillars to turn vital behaviors into habits:  clear expectations for achieving goals, actionable feedback (weekly at a minimum) with more positive than constructive input, and barrier removal to enable desired behaviors.

So, how can leaders know when vital behaviors are being adopted as personal habits by the people in their organizations?  Measure them, Smith says, and she recommends four quick pulse checks: directly observing the performer, asking the performer to describe how they perform the behavior, reviewing work output, and asking others who’ve observed the performer.

Smith and Ludwig offer five steps for building what they call a Vital Behavior Blueprint: prioritize key business results where behavior variability limits performance; identify Key Performer Groups—teams whose consistent actions are critical for achieving those results; clarify vital behaviors that drive results, ensuring at least 85% of key performers agree they are essential and commit to adopting them; “wire” ally networks to reinforce these behaviors; and build habits by strengthening the three pillars and removing barriers.

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During the past two years, Modern CEO has explored the skills and traits executives need to navigate today’s complex business environments. Leadership experts have argued that humility, authenticity, and resilience are essential to manage technological change, steer companies through geopolitical and economic uncertainty, and develop and retain talent.   Let’s add gratitude to that list. Author Chester Elton, whose work focuses on organizational culture, says high-performing teams and leaders embrace recognition. Gratitude wasn’t a “nice-to-have if you were to be a great leader. It was an absolute must-have.

With Thanksgiving upon us, the author asked dozens of CEOs to share what they’re grateful for. They universally thanked their employees, and some talked about the people—and pets—who provide them with support and inspiration outside the office. Here are just a few of the heartfelt responses: 

• Peter Chapman, president and CEO, IonQ.  “I am grateful to be alive during a period of such scientific discovery. Every day brings an announcement of a new breakthrough. And with the challenges ahead of us, we need these technologies to pave a way to a better future.” 
• Caren Cioffi, CEO, Agenda Hero.  “I am grateful to live in Silicon Valley, where the status quo is optimism, where people believe in what hasn’t been done yet, where it’s not a matter of if but when, and not a matter of whether it can be solved, but who will solve it. This optimism is unique, and my gratitude is evergreen.”
• Ivan Giraud, CEO, Bel Brands USA.  “I am grateful for the culture of care and openness fostered by the Bel U.S. team.
• Ben Goodwin, co-founder and CEO, Olipop.  “I’m deeply thankful for the incredible journey we’ve embarked on at Olipop. Our team’s passion and our community’s enthusiasm drive us to innovate and create a healthier soda. 
• Jay Jandrain, president and CEO, Butterball.  “I’m thankful for the time to slow down, gather with my loved ones, and share conversations and memories this Thanksgiving season. In my role at Butterball, I know firsthand the power of a great Thanksgiving gathering—and I’m grateful to be a part of an organization that brings people together around the table.” 
• Rosie Rios, CEO of Red River Associates and chair of America250.  “I’m thankful to my mother, who recently passed. She courageously left everything behind in Mexico to come to this great nation, raised me and my eight siblings as a single parent, and sent all nine of us to college. She made me feel that the American dream was a true reality.
• Kristin Peck, CEO, Zoetis.  “I have a lot to be grateful for, starting with my Zoetis colleagues, to my family, to my children, and I am also super grateful for my dogs.
• Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, CEO, Grammarly.  “This year, I had the opportunity to visit our incredible team members based out of Grammarly’s Kyiv hub. Grammarly was founded in Ukraine, so we have deep ties to the country and remain committed to supporting the people and our team members there through the war and the rebuilding to come.
• Alexa von Tobel, founder and managing partner, Inspired Capital.  “I’m so grateful to get to spend my days working at Inspired Capital with entrepreneurs who are trying to solve the world’s biggest problems. Seeing the world daily through that lens is a constant reminder of how much people care about humanity.

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As an entrepreneur with 17 years of experience and now working on his fourth company, the author has become hyper-aware of how vital it is to protect company culture. Building a successful company is about much more than hitting revenue goals or scaling quickly — it’s about fostering a healthy, vibrant workplace where your team can thrive. A toxic culture will undermine that faster than you can imagine.  Here are some hard-learned lessons the author has gathered over the years about identifying toxic culture and, more importantly, how to fix it before it’s too late.

1. Toxic culture doesn’t always look toxic at first.  It’s easy to think of toxic culture as blatant negativity, conflict or disrespect. But in my experience, it starts in much more subtle ways: passive-aggressive comments, cliques forming, communication breakdowns and employees feeling like they can’t speak up.  Toxicity starts small, but its impact grows quickly.
2. As a leader, you set the tone — always.  You, as the entrepreneur or business leader, are responsible for setting the cultural tone.  As a leader, make a conscious effort to lead by example. That means being transparent with your team, reinforcing your core values, and creating a space where everyone feels heard. It’s not enough to say you have great company values — you have to live them every day. If the leader isn’t walking the talk, no one else will either.  Keep a pulse on your team’s dynamics. Regularly check in with employees at all levels — not just your managers — to uncover the unspoken problems that might be festering.
3. Toxic culture drains talent — and fast.  It’s not just productivity that suffers when a company has a toxic environment — it drives your best people out the door.  A toxic culture drains creativity, enthusiasm and the desire to stay. One powerful way to build the culture back into your company is for all employees to take ownership of their work, collaborate freely and feel proud to be part of something meaningful.
4. Don’t wait — address issues immediately.  If you see signs of toxicity — address it immediately. Delaying is dangerous. In author’s experience, waiting to have tough conversations only allows the problem to fester. Whether it’s poor communication, office politics, or someone undermining your company values, these issues must be confronted head-on.  Sometimes, tough decisions have to be made. Letting toxic behavior slide, no matter how small, is a slippery slope.
5. Culture is a living thing — nurture it.  One of the most important lessons the author has learned in 17 years as an entrepreneur is that culture isn’t static. It evolves as your company grows, your team changes and new challenges arise. That’s why you should keep on constantly checking in with your team—gathering feedback, assessing the vibe and making sure they are staying true to their values.  Protecting your culture is an ongoing process. It’s not something you can set and forget. You need to nurture it, keep it in check, and make sure it’s growing in a healthy direction. At the end of the day, your culture is one of your greatest assets — don’t take it for granted.

Ways to be proactive in creating a great culture:  make cultural fit a key part of your hiring process; encourage regular, honest communication;  and celebrate wins, big and small.