What We Are Reading December 6, 2024

Possible leads have emerged about the gunman’s travel before the shooting of Brian Thompson and a message scrawled on ammunition.

Online endorsement of the killing of a slain insurance CEO is evidence of a terrible coarsening in society.

In the past decade, the author has watched more than 100 companies try to remake themselves into better competitors. Their efforts have gone under many banners: total quality management, reengineering, right sizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds. In almost every case, the goal has been the same: to cope with a new, more challenging market by changing how business is conducted. A few of those efforts have been very successful. A few have been utter failures. Most fall somewhere in between, with a distinct tilt toward the lower end of the scale. The lessons that can be learned will be relevant to more and more organizations as the business environment becomes increasingly competitive in the coming decade. One lesson is that change involves numerous phases that, together, usually take a long time. Skipping steps creates only an illusion of speed and never produces a satisfying result. A second lesson is that critical mistakes in any of the phases can have a devastating impact, slowing improvement and negating previous gains. Kotter’s lessons are instructive, for even the most capable managers often make at least one big error.

“Cynicism is not a radical worldview. It’s a tool of the status quo,” writes Dr. Jamil Zaki.

For Eduardo Sanchez, it is “difficult to vote for a candidate you can’t stomach as a Latino.” But the independent voter cast a ballot for Donald Trump this year, after voting for Joe Biden in 2020, pointing to the sharp rise in the cost of living since Biden took office.

The incoming Trump administration could mean big changes in the government’s relationship with tech companies in ways that could affect users, ranging from the content they might see online to whether they could be confronted with discriminatory AI systems.