Latest news with #leaders
CNN
2 hours ago
- Business
- CNN
Trump announces trade agreement with the Philippines and a 19% tariff
President Donald Trump said Tuesday he and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines have reached a trade agreement. The agreement calls for 19% tariffs on goods coming from the Philippines, while American goods shipped there won't be charged a tariff, Trump said in a post on Truth Social. This comes after the two leaders met in the White House on Tuesday. 'It was a beautiful visit, and we concluded our Trade Deal,' Trump wrote. However, it was not immediately apparent if the two leaders formally signed anything. Similar to other recent trade agreement announcements, few details were revealed. This is a developing story and will be updated.
Entrepreneur
6 hours ago
- Health
- Entrepreneur
How to Use Your Own Body Language Before It Sabotages You
When individuals begin paying attention to their nonverbal cues — not just those of others — they gain insight into what they're feeling and why. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. I've seen body language used to close deals, lead teams and command a room. There's no denying it's a powerful tool for influencing others. But its most valuable impact is internal. When individuals begin paying attention to their own nonverbal cues — not just those of others — they gain insight into what they're feeling, how they're responding, and why. I've watched this shift to self-awareness transform the way leaders and executives lead, communicate and connect. Furthermore, self-awareness doesn't just improve communication — it builds emotional intelligence. In this article, we'll explore how tuning into your own body language can sharpen your emotional intelligence from the inside out. And surprisingly, it often begins in the body, not the mind. Related: Why Emotional Intelligence Is the Key to High-Impact Leadership Self-awareness begins in the body One of the cornerstones of emotional intelligence is self-awareness. You can't be emotionally intelligent without a clear understanding of your own internal state and how it's shaping your behavior. The body holds a wealth of wisdom when it comes to understanding our emotional landscape. Most of us move through our day without consciously noticing our posture, gestures, or expressions. But those nonverbal cues are constantly broadcasting how we feel — whether we realize it or not. The more attuned you are to your own physical signals, the more insight you gain into your emotional state — and the more intentionally you can choose how to respond. Join top CEOs, founders and operators at the Level Up conference to unlock strategies for scaling your business, boosting revenue and building sustainable success. Learning to observe without judgment Learning to be self-observant — but not self-conscious — is a skill that can completely transform the way you understand yourself and communicate with others. Small, often unnoticed behaviors can reveal a lot about your internal state and the impression you're giving off at the moment. For example, how are you sitting? Are your arms crossed? Are your fists clenched? These subtle, nonverbal "tells" can offer a window into what you're feeling. Let's say I'm clenching my jaw or baring my teeth slightly while talking to someone. What message is that sending? And more importantly, why am I doing it? Am I feeling relaxed? Or is there a chance I'm frustrated, stressed, or even angry? Even something as simple as your hands can be telling. When people clench their hands, it often signals self-restraint — an effort to contain frustration or anger. On the other hand, open palms or extended fingers are more likely to reflect positive emotions like ease, confidence, or even joy. These signals matter because they often reflect emotions we haven't consciously acknowledged. We may not feel angry or stressed until we notice what our body is doing — and that awareness can be a game-changer. Personally, I find these micro-observations incredibly helpful, especially in meetings, social gatherings, or one-on-one conversations. It's in these spaces that small, unconscious behaviors often speak the loudest. From self-awareness to self-regulation Noticing is only the first step. It's regulation that turns self-awareness into emotional intelligence. For example, once you notice you're holding tension, you can take a breath and soften. You may ask yourself, "What's really going on here?" and choose your next move from a more grounded place. Let's say you catch yourself clenching your fists in a tough conversation. That's useful information — it tells you something is off. You can pause, uncross your arms, relax your hands, and reset your tone. Emotional intelligence isn't just about physical posture. It's about gaining the space to respond, rather than react. And for leaders, that's where true influence will begin. Related: Mastering thoughts and feelings for well-being Recognizing patterns One of the most powerful benefits of observing your own body language is that it reveals patterns. It's not just about catching a clenched jaw in a single meeting; it's about noticing that you always tense up before presenting or that you tend to cross your arms when someone challenges your opinion. These repeated signals are like emotional breadcrumbs, leading you to the beliefs, triggers, or stressors that live under the surface. This kind of pattern recognition builds emotional resilience. It helps you identify what consistently throws you off balance and gives you a clearer path to responding more skillfully in future moments. Start small. Choose one meeting, one conversation or one stressful moment this week to observe yourself more closely. How are you standing? Where are your hands? What is your breathing doing? These micro-observations, practiced regularly, create a foundation for greater clarity, confidence and emotional control. The power of tuning in As a society, we often talk about the importance of "reading the room." However, the most emotionally intelligent leaders I've worked with do something even more powerful: they read themselves first. True leaders understand that communication doesn't begin with words — it begins with emotional awareness. And by tuning into their bodies, they gain insight not only into how they're showing up, but why. Remember, emotional intelligence isn't just about understanding other people. It's about knowing yourself well enough to respond with intention and lead with lasting impact. Related: How to Build a Culture of Emotional Intelligence
Forbes
6 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
Watch For These 4 Signs That You Need A Sabbatical Not A Vacation
A well-timed sabbatical does not disrupt your career. It protects it. It prevents erosion. There is a moment when even high performers start to feel flat. The work is steady, the output is consistent, but something is missing. Ideas feel repetitive. Motivation dips. Confidence flickers. It is not burnout exactly. It is not boredom either. It is a quiet internal signal that something has shifted. For many leaders (and those who work for them), this moment marks the beginning of sabbatical thinking. Not because they want to quit. But because they cannot grow from where they are. A sabbatical is not a luxury. It is not a reward. It is a strategy. When taken with intention, it becomes a turning point that restores energy, reclaims direction and rewires ambition. But knowing when to take one is not always obvious. The most common mistake people make is waiting too long. They delay because they are still performing. They defer because no one else is doing it. They convince themselves it is not the right time. But careers are built in seasons. And sometimes the most productive season starts with a pause. These are the four signals it might be time to step away. 1. You Are Performing Well but Learning Nothing There comes a stage in many careers where competence turns into autopilot. You still deliver. Others still rely on you. But the challenge is gone. The feedback gets quieter. The goals start to feel recycled. What once felt like achievement now feels like maintenance. That kind of success can become a trap. Because nothing is wrong, it is easy to keep going. But if you are not learning, you are not building. You are repeating. And repetition without growth erodes momentum. Learning is not just about new information. It is about new stimulation. Fresh inputs. Intellectual discomfort. When those disappear, so does the sense of movement. A sabbatical is not just a break from tasks. It is a break from patterns. It creates space for different questions. It introduces different environments. It helps professionals get off the treadmill of efficiency and ask harder questions about what comes next. When your learning curve flattens but your responsibilities stay high, that is often the signal that something needs to change. 2. You Are Working More to Feel Less Sometimes overwork is not about ambition. It is about distraction. Professionals who have been in the same environment for too long often absorb stress they no longer recognize. They stop reflecting. They stop questioning. Instead, they fill their time. You take on extra meetings. You overcommit to projects. You say yes to everything because you fear what would happen if you slowed down. The calendar is full, but the meaning is thin. That thinness shows up in strange ways. You forget why you used to care. You stop seeing your colleagues clearly. You skim, nod, move on. You are functional but detached. This is not sustainable. And it is not healthy. But it is common. A sabbatical resets the rhythm. It forces disconnection from the constant doing and reintroduces thinking. It gives you room to feel again. And when you can feel again, you can make better choices about your work, your relationships and your direction. If you are keeping busy to avoid asking deeper questions, that is not discipline. That is avoidance. And avoidance has a cost. 3. You Are Respected but No Longer Seen Another sign it might be time for a sabbatical is when your reputation is strong but your role has gone stale. You are trusted. People appreciate you. But they no longer expect anything new from you. You are no longer part of the big conversations. Your ideas land, but they do not stick. You are invited out of habit, not momentum. And inside, you know you are not contributing at your best. This is not failure. It is drift. And it happens more often than most people admit. Sometimes the best way to regain relevance is to step away. Not forever. But long enough to reframe your narrative. To reset how people experience you. To stop being the person who always shows up and start being the person whose return is noticed. Time away can restore visibility. It can create curiosity. And it can remind others that you are not just consistent. You are evolving. This is especially true for mid-career professionals. When the early growth curve levels out and the executive track feels unclear, a sabbatical can reorient long-term focus. It is not a retreat. It is a reframing device. And often, that reframing is what unlocks the next phase of contribution. 4. You Cannot Hear Yourself Think The final and clearest signal that it might be time for a sabbatical is noise. The meetings never end. The emails are constant. Your calendar has no white space and your head has no quiet. You find yourself reacting more than deciding. You feel pressure to always be on. You chase productivity not because it is meaningful but because it is expected. And somewhere in that noise, you have lost contact with your own direction. When you cannot hear yourself think, you stop making deliberate choices. You start managing optics. You confuse motion with progress. And you forget what used to make you feel alive. This is where a sabbatical becomes less of a reset and more of a rescue. Silence is not wasted time. It is a condition for clarity. And clarity is the only thing that will help you return stronger, sharper and more intentional. A well-timed sabbatical does not disrupt your career. It protects it. It prevents erosion. It signals maturity. And in many cases, it sets the conditions for your next leap forward.
Fast Company
7 hours ago
- Business
- Fast Company
Reliability is the hidden foundation of enterprise AI success
Most traditional enterprise systems are one-dimensional. They do what they're designed to do—full stop. Once deployed, they either perform or they don't, and when something breaks, you fix it. AI -powered systems are different because they're capable of evolution. Each training run is more than a simple technical iteration; it's a moment of potential emergence. Behavior you didn't explicitly build into your systems can surface as unexpected value, like when a model trained on text suddenly demonstrates multi-step reasoning. That leap is where innovation starts to compound. However, that emergence depends on whether the job completes. When a job fails, what's lost isn't limited to compute or time. The momentum derails, creating a missed opportunity for value to crystallize. This is what I call 'AI compound interest'—the accumulated return on uninterrupted iteration. But that value only builds if each step in the process completes and contributes to the next. Interrupt the chain, and you reset the curve. More than time, recovering that momentum can cost you strategic ground. That's why reliability is more than a technical checkbox. It's key to success. Unfortunately, most leaders overlook the fact that reliability doesn't scale like compute does. A single node with 99.9% uptime seems dependable, but multiply that across 1,000 nodes, and those small gaps add up fast. Teams can tune models, refine pipelines, and optimize every layer, only to lose hours of training to a silent node failure. No failover, no checkpoints—just progress, wiped. This is an operational reality that reveals a core design truth: AI success isn't built on flawless execution. It depends on systems designed to take a hit and keep going. I've seen this play out firsthand. In a past role, my team and I managed a dozen servers under a 99.9% SLA, which allowed for about eight hours of downtime per server, per year. We invested heavily in what we thought was best practice: premium disk controllers, mirrored drives, and 24/7 support contracts. It looked bulletproof. However, when one of those premium controllers failed, it took 48 hours to replace. That single failure obliterated our SLA margin and consumed our operations budget. Meanwhile, the lower-tier components we'd expected to fail never did. The problem wasn't that we were underprepared. We just weren't prepared for the right thing. We'd protected against low-risk threats and missed the higher-impact failure mode entirely. Reliability isn't about covering every edge case. It's about knowing which failures are most likely to cost you, then designing your recovery model around them. NOT EVERY SLA IS BUILT THE SAME Too often, infrastructure decisions are made on the strength of vendor marketing —99.9% uptime, multi-zone distribution, racks of GPU capacity. While those numbers sound concrete, I find that they hide the real-world operational behavior. That's why I started asking, 'What margin exists behind that promise?' For example, if a node fails mid-training, how quickly is it detected and how is the job reassigned? Do they checkpoint progress automatically, or does recovery start from zero? One provider might expect you to build around failure by overprovisioning and absorbing the risk. Another may design failure recovery into the architecture itself, enabling graceful recovery without human intervention. Both may have the same SLA on paper, but they represent a different experience in practice. Another common issue I see is treating training and inference as if they operate within the same reliability domain. Though they're both parts of the AI lifecycle, their operational realities and failure consequences couldn't be more different. Training workloads are long running, highly distributed, and sensitive to synchronization breakdowns. One missed checkpoint can set a project back by hours, even days. Inference, on the other hand, plays out in milliseconds. It's user facing, latency sensitive, and unforgiving. A hiccup in one microservice can instantly ripple out to thousands of users. So when teams apply the same reliability strategy to both, they often end up overcompensating in one area and underestimating risk in another. THE SILENT LIMITER: POWER INFRASTRUCTURE Despite the fact that it governs everything, power is a risk that most leaders don't factor in. At hyperscale, power is a physical constraint. When you initiate a large-scale training run, the sudden spike in energy demand can overload the entire localized infrastructure. That could result in a specific rack of equipment shutting down or, in more extreme cases, an entire section of a data center hall. I've experienced the challenge of diagnosing intermittent failures that present as issues with individual nodes, then turn out to be the result of too much power being drawn at once. That's why I've started advising leaders to treat energy orchestration as a first-class reliability concern, on equal footing with compute and storage. WHAT RELIABILITY REALLY MEANS Too many teams treat reliability like an insurance policy. But in practice, it's something deeper. If AI is going to deliver strategic value, reliability has to be part of the foundation. It's what makes iteration sustainable and ensures the output of today's training cycle becomes the input for tomorrow's breakthrough. It shows up across the board—in the speed at which you can retrain, the confidence your team has to push models into production, and the frequency with which those models ship without rollback. These signals reinforce the same truth: reliability is embedded in how consistently everything works when it matters most. As a leader, it's time to start asking your team, 'Are we building for failure, or reacting to it? Are we compounding our innovation, or constantly clawing it back? When a failure occurs, do we lose models, or just milliseconds?' Because in AI, velocity may get you to the frontier, but only continuity lets you build on it.
Fast Company
9 hours ago
- Business
- Fast Company
Why adults with ADHD are 3x more likely to start a business
Adults with ADHD are 300% more likely to start their own business. That stat might surprise you. After all, ADHD is usually framed as a workplace liability, something to be 'managed' or 'accommodated,' at best. But look closer and a different story emerges. This isn't about ADHDers being bad employees. It's about what happens when you take people with brains wired for innovation, energy, and creativity and put them in systems that reward compliance, not curiosity. We've worked with hundreds of ADHD adults and leaders across industries, and again and again we see the same pattern. Many don't leave work because they can't cope. They leave because they're ready to lead. Why Traditional Workplaces Push ADHDers Out Let's start with the obvious. Most workplaces are built around neurotypical brains. They rely on linear timelines, sustained attention, meetings that run on strict agendas, and policies over people. These structures tend to favour those who are wired to act based on importance: 'I do this task because it matters.' ADHDers, by contrast, have interest-based nervous systems. We act when something grabs us. This isn't a weakness. It's a different kind of wiring. But it means we often struggle to thrive in environments where we're expected to push through boring tasks without stimulation, autonomy, or flexibility. Many of us end up masking our difficulties, overcompensating with perfectionism or people-pleasing. Eventually, we burn out. Katie was diagnosed with ADHD in her 40s, after years of trying to hold it all together in a leadership role in education. She could never understand why tasks that seemed effortless to others felt impossible for her. Alex, by contrast, was one of the first children diagnosed with ADHD in the UK back in 1990. But even with a diagnosis, understanding how ADHD showed up in adult life, especially in professional contexts, took decades. This mismatch between wiring and workplace is not just frustrating. It's deeply disempowering. Which is why so many ADHDers eventually create their own rules by starting their own businesses. Why Entrepreneurship Works for ADHD Brains ADHDers often thrive in fast-paced, high-stakes, creative environments. These are exactly the kinds of conditions that entrepreneurial life can offer. Starting your own business allows for flexibility, urgency, spontaneity, and passion-led problem solving. You get to build systems that work for your brain, rather than constantly struggling to fit into someone else's. Many of the traits that get pathologized in school or corporate life, such as impulsivity, hyperfocus, risk tolerance, and non-linear thinking, are the same ones that make ADHDers natural entrepreneurs. We're often great at big-picture visioning, rapid ideation, crisis problem-solving, and building deep, values-led connections with clients or audiences. Of course, entrepreneurship also comes with challenges. Executive function difficulties don't disappear just because you work for yourself. In fact, they can be magnified, especially without support. But when ADHDers have autonomy, interest, and the ability to outsource or collaborate around their weaker areas, the results can be extraordinary. The Hidden Cost of Being Forced to Fit In Many ADHDers don't wake up one day and decide to become entrepreneurs. Often, they escape into it. They leave workplaces where they were misunderstood, micromanaged, or made to feel broken. They start building something of their own not just out of ambition, but out of necessity. We've coached ADHDers who felt paralysed in open-plan offices, punished for needing movement breaks, or quietly passed over for promotion because they didn't 'look organized enough.' Others left high-paying jobs after burnout, only to discover that once they were in charge of their environment, their 'disorder' started to look a lot more like a strength. For women and marginalized genders, this story is even more complex. ADHD has long been underdiagnosed in women, in part because it doesn't always show up in loud or disruptive ways. Many women internalize their struggles, masking them behind competence, caregiving, and overachievement, until something gives. Entrepreneurship becomes a space not just of career growth, but of identity reclamation. Rethinking Leadership, Neurodivergence, and Success So what does all this mean for the future of work? If organizations want to retain and empower neurodivergent talent, they need to rethink what leadership looks like. It's not just about offering accommodations. It's about redesigning systems with flexibility, autonomy, and human-centred thinking baked in. It's about recognizing that some of your most innovative thinkers may not 'look professional' in the conventional sense but are already solving tomorrow's problems today. And if you're an ADHDer reading this, wondering if there's something wrong with you because the nine-to-five grind just doesn't fit, maybe the problem isn't you. Maybe your brain was never meant to sit quietly in someone else's system. Maybe you're here to build your own.
