   
CEO Picks - The most popular editorials that have stood the test of time!
Instead of Laying off 20 Percent of His Company, This CEO Made an Unusual Decision. It's a Lesson in Emotional Intelligence
 Covid-19 is ravaging the global economy and presenting employers with unprecedented challenges. For Gravity chief executive Dan Price, that challenge was crushing: The company's revenue had essentially been cut in half. Price was faced with a grave decision: Lay off 20% of his employees or go bankrupt.
Price refused to accept either option. Instead, he decided to do something almost unheard of in today's business environment:
He asked his employees what to do.
"As a CEO, I don't believe in top-down decisions," Price said on Twitter. "I spent 40 hours talking with every employee about our finances and asked for ideas."
What followed was a master class in emotional intelligence -- and a major lesson in how to run a business in the face of difficult challenges.
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A tribute: With Irrfan Khan, less was always more
 Irrfan's appeal lay in precisely what he could not be: a textbook Hindi film idol. He was an alternate hero.
It was this same cruel month of April back in 2002. Irrfan Khan, despite more than a decade of struggle and the popular Tony and Deeya Singh serial Banegi Apni Baat behind him, had only just begun to make an impression on the Hindi cinema audience. But London-based director Asif Kapadia, who had directed him in his award winning debut feature The Warrior in 2001, told me that Irrfan was, "the Indian Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn, Gary Oldman or Vincent Gallo... He can do anything he wants... I look forward to seeing him fly." He said this for a piece I was doing back then for Outlook magazine on the new compelling actors on Hindi cinema's horizon.
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Efficiency Is Biting Back
 Decades of streamlining everything made the U.S. more vulnerable.
For decades, even before Silicon Valley championed the "disruptive technologies" of the web, leaders in business and government alike have declared war on allegedly wasteful spending. Overlooked is the fact that too much zeal for lean operation has pitfalls of its own. In practice, the pursuit of efficiency has often resulted in the consolidation of smaller companies and facilities into larger ones; in greater congestion as more people are packed into smaller spaces, whether in office towers or aboard commercial airliners; and in the tight coupling of deliveries and other business processes in ways that, at least when all goes well, speed up production and reduce warehouse inventories. But consolidation, congestion, and tight coupling may also make our economy less efficient in the long run - and our society more vulnerable to outside shocks such as the coronavirus. Efficiency, in fact, can be hazardous to our well-being, and a strategic amount of inefficiency is crucial in keeping society healthy.
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Does COVID-19 Prove Women Are Best Suited to Lead in a Crisis?
 There are many lessons to be learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic and one of them might be how the world is in desperate need of a greater number of women at the highest level of politics.
In the global fight against the Coronavirus, New Zealand and Germany are notable exceptions, with the former having almost completely "squashed" the virus after recording only one death, and the latter experiencing nowhere near the level of suffering that’s occurring in France, Italy, Spain, Russia, the Netherlands and the UK.
New Zealand and Germany are also notable for the fact that both have female leaders - Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Chancellor Angela Merkel, an all too rare reality in the sphere of international politics.
Ardern's handling of the crisis has been described as a "masterclass" in political leadership, with Professor Michael Baker - one of the world's leading epidemiologists - describing New Zealand as a "huge standout as the only Western country that's got an elimination goal" for the virus, while Merkel has been lauded for pulling out the "bazooka" against the threat.
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The world after covid-19 - By invitation: Kishore Mahbubani
 The West's incompetent response to the pandemic will hasten the power-shift to the east
HISTORY HAS turned a corner. The era of Western domination is ending. The resurgence of Asia in world affairs and the global economy, which was happening before the emergence of covid-19, will be cemented in a new world order after the crisis. The deference to Western societies, which was the norm in the 19th and 20th centuries, will be replaced by a growing respect and admiration for East Asian ones. The pandemic could thus mark the start of the Asian century.
The crisis highlights the contrast between the competent responses of East Asian governments (notably China, South Korea and Singapore) and the incompetent responses of Western governments (such as Italy, Spain, France, Britain and America). The far lower death rates suffered by East Asian countries is a lesson to all. They reflect not just medical capabilities, but also the quality of governance and the cultural confidence of their societies.
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I am the portrait of downward mobility | Today's 40 year-olds on the lives they've led, and now this
 It used to be a given that each American generation would do better than the last.
Fully 92 percent of the Americans who reached their 30th birthday in 1970 earned more than their parents had earned at the same age, even after adjusting for inflation. But beginning in the 1970s, the economic ladder gradually became harder to climb, and fewer Americans were able to surpass their parents. In the cohort of Americans who turned 30 in 2010, only half earned more than their parents at the same age, according to research by a team of economists led by Raj Chetty, a Harvard professor. The American dream had become a coin flip.
That group of Americans, born in 1980, missed out on the post-World War II economic boom that lifted their elders to prosperity. While the economy grew during their childhoods, the gains were distributed much less evenly, as the federal government backed away from policies aimed at minimizing inequality. The winners won bigger, but more people were left behind. The year this group turned 21, the stock market collapsed and the economy fell into recession. In 2008, there was a bigger recession.
Now they're turning 40 and life hasn't gotten any easier.
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This Man Owns The World's Most Advanced Private Air Force After Buying 46 F/A-18 Hornets
 For the last 30 years, Don Kirlin has been flying for the airlines, working on real estate deals, setting up the world's biggest skydiving meets, and building a private air force the likes of which even he has a hard time believing is possible. Just last month, The War Zone was among the first to report that his company would be purchasing multiple squadrons worth of surplus Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) F/A-18 Hornets to be used in the contractor adversary air support role here in the United States. In that role, they would primarily fly against U.S. military fighter pilots, replicating aerial threats from potential enemy nations. So basically, they are bad guys for hire, but strictly for training and development work. Now, not only do we have all the details on that purchase, which is even more impressive than it initially seemed, but we talked at length with the entrepreneur owner of Air USA, located in Quincy, Illinois, about his company's past and what is turning into a remarkable, if not downright historic, future.
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Jerry Seinfeld with Alec Baldwin | Here's the Thing | WNYC Studios
 Jerry Seinfeld was just 27 when he first appeared on Johnny Carson in 1981. And he stood out. His material wasn't about his upbringing or personal relationships. It was about our universal experience of small things. His unique comedy style eventually led him to create his namesake show with Larry David. After Seinfeld ran for nine seasons, he decided to go back to stand-up, and to his audience. As he explains to Alec, Seinfeld feels uniquely connected to his fans: "You have this relationship with the audience that is private between you and them."
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It's time to build
 In the U.S., we don't even have the ability to get federal bailout money to the people and businesses that need it. Tens of millions of laid off workers and their families, and many millions of small businesses, are in serious trouble *right now*, and we have no direct method to transfer them money without potentially disastrous delays. A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it's needed most.
Why do we not have these things? Medical equipment and financial conduits involve no rocket science whatsoever. At least therapies and vaccines are hard! Making masks and transferring money are not hard. We could have these things but we chose not to specifically we chose not to have the mechanisms, the factories, the systems to make these things. We chose not to *build*.
You don't just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally. You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life.
You see it in housing and the physical footprint of our cities. We can't build nearly enough housing in our cities with surging economic potential - which results in crazily skyrocketing housing prices in places like San Francisco, making it nearly impossible for regular people to move in and take the jobs of the future. We also can't build the cities themselves anymore. When the producers of HBO's "Westworld" wanted to portray the American city of the future, they didn't film in Seattle or Los Angeles or Austin - they went to Singapore. We should have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular living environments in all our best cities at levels way beyond what we have now; where are they?
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Where Companies Go Wrong with Learning and Development
 Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University, and author of The Case Against Education, says in his book that education often isn't so much about learning useful job skills, but about people showing off, or "signaling."
Today's employees often signal through continuous professional education (CPE) credits so that they can make a case for a promotion. L&D staff also signal their worth by meeting flawed KPIs, such as the total CPE credits employees earn, rather than focusing on the business impact created. The former is easier to measure, but flawed incentives beget flawed outcomes, such as the following:
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The Coronavirus Has Upended Supply Chains. Here's How Companies Can Prepare for the Next Disruption.
 Over the decades, global companies have concentrated production geographically in order to save money.
Yet even before COVID-19, as Chopra and his coauthors argued in a 2014 article, the marginal benefits for this kind of concentration were diminishing, while the risks were increasing.
"The additional cost of a large company operating plants in different locations is often not more than the cost of having one huge plant," Chopra says. "You may reach the limit of your economies of scale at half the size, so by running two plants, you don't give up much in efficiency, but you gain a lot in resiliency."
In other words, whether you have one plant that can produce a million items a week or two plants making 500,000 items each, in both cases you may be producing so many items that you are already close to achieving whatever economy of scale is possible. But the likelihood of both plants going offline at the same time decreases significantly.
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Digital strategy in a time of crisis
 If a silver lining can be found, it might be in the falling barriers to improvisation and experimentation that have emerged among customers, markets, regulators, and organizations. In this unique moment, companies can learn and progress more quickly than ever before. The ways they learn from and adjust to today's crisis will deeply influence their performance in tomorrow's changed world, providing the opportunity to retain greater agility as well as closer ties with customers, employees, and suppliers. Those that are successfully able to make gains "stick" will likely be more successful during recovery and beyond.
Now is the time to reassess digital initiatives - those that provide near-term help to employees, customers, and the broad set of stakeholders to which businesses are increasingly responsible and those that position you for a postcrisis world. In this world, some things will snap back to previous form, while others will be forever changed. Playing it safe now, understandable as it might feel to do so, is often the worst option.
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Google is using AI to design chips that will accelerate AI
 A new reinforcement-learning algorithm has learned to optimize the placement of components on a computer chip to make it more efficient and less power-hungry.
3D Tetris: Chip placement, also known as chip floor planning, is a complex three-dimensional design problem. It requires the careful configuration of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of components across multiple layers in a constrained area. Traditionally, engineers will manually design configurations that minimize the amount of wire used between components as a proxy for efficiency. They then use electronic design automation software to simulate and verify their performance, which can take up to 30 hours for a single floor plan.
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Groups Search for Consensus, Individuals Search for Truth
 What's considered to be true is fought over. Individuals search for truth but groups search for consensus - and society is the largest group. So the biggest problem we run into is this: What society wants for you is not always what's good for you.
Even smart, critical thinkers go along with many of society's truths, knowing deep down they are lies.
Here's a simple example: "Money won't make you happy" is a social truth, but it's not an individual truth. Look at all the individuals trying to make money. They know money can remove a lot of sources of unhappiness and get them to a point where happiness is under their control. It becomes their choice, as opposed to being inflicted upon them by external forces.
That is just one of many lies society tells you.
Another one of society's lies is that you send your kids to school for education. In fact, they get an hour of education a day and indoctrination the rest of the time. They're taught at the speed of the slowest student, and they're mostly taught subjects that are irrelevant or obsolete.
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