Articles | Ideas from Thought Leaders

Dull click-through communications and learning will no longer be tolerated. Here are four tips to make your online learning more effective.

As a manager, you have an impact on your employees’ mental health. Here are a few tips to help you keep your remote team on track and on the bright side.

If you’re not used to managing a virtual team, there might be a few growing pains while you adjust to this new reality. But fear not, there’s good news: the knowledge and the tools already exist for you and your remote team to be successful.

Creativity is learnable providence. It feels like an inexplicable miracle when it arrives, and we may never be able to isolate all the variables that generate it. But, in my experience, we can reliably create the conditions to invite it.

It was a meeting of the minds — three of the world’s most unconventional thinkers in a delightfully conventional setting. The glow of candlelight. The aroma of fresh oregano. And the sound of vigorous debate, mixed with occasional bursts of laughter, filled the room. It was a dinner party with an unlikely combination of guests. One man spoke Greek. Another Italian. And yet another English. The trio communicated through an electronic translator, worn as an earpiece. Were you to eavesdrop on their conversation, you might assume they were old friends. However, you would be mistaken.

Last Thanksgiving, while other people’s families were arguing about politics, my family and I managed to get into a fight over whether they should be paying more attention to the security of their computers and data. One insisted she doesn’t do any online banking; another pointed out that his email is incredibly boring; and, anyway, they pretty much all assume anyone who wanted to would be able to access everything anyway.

A conversational introduction along with a cheat sheet that will introduce you to the lingo, debates, key players, and other components of cybersecurity issues, starting with a step-by-step guide to setting up a virtual private network (it's easier than you might think!) and a explanation of how to figure out what cybersecurity threats should actually worry you.

Designers do more than make shiny, pretty things. They shape how the world works by solving problems. And right now, the country has some problems. Designers can help. There is a cadre of designers who devote themselves to politics and civic engagement. We spoke to some of them: researchers who study and clarify voting laws, designers who help communities navigate local regulations, and optimistic technologists.

The next time you enter a query into Google’s search engine or consult the company’s map service for directions to a movie theater, remember that a big brain is working behind the scenes to provide relevant search results and make sure you don’t get lost while driving.

Designing websites is a form of artwork, which for most of us is precisely why it’s so rewarding. The problem is, it’s also why the quality of a design can be exceedingly hard to quantify. Not only do opinions vary from user to user, one seemingly beautiful website might not perform as well as another less extravagant one.

Richard Shindell is a singer-songwriter who is best known for telling deeply human stories with his songs. His latest album is Careless. We kick off today’s show with Richard playing a song off the new album titled “All Wide Open.” Then, Brian and Richard talk about the themes that Richard keeps revisiting in his songs (10:30), the time he spent in the seminary (20:30), and why this new album is a kind of departure for him creatively (34:00). The two round out the conversation talking about Richard’s writing process (44:00) and why the dispossessed are so often featured in his music (54:00). Richard ends the podcast by playing one of Brian’s favorite songs—“The Kenworth of My Dreams.

Over 4,000 companies have corporate universities. Some of the most famous are run by GE, Disney, and McDonalds. Their purpose is to instill the company’s vision and values and cultivate critical skills and competencies. The best ones are permeable membranes that transfer knowledge from the outside in: Steve Jobs recruited the Dean of Yale’s Business School to run Apple University, while Jeff Weiner recruited business coach and thought leader Fred Kofman to lead leadership development for LinkedIn. Some of the best programs are said to rival traditional business schools.

New York graphic designer Seymour Chwast, 84, has been designing posters, magazine covers, and corporate packaging—such as a first-generation Happy Meal box for McDonald’s—for more than half a century. The co-founder with Milton Glaser of Push Pin Studios, he is the author of more than 30 children’s books and four graphic novels, and the designer of several typefaces.

Several posthumous releases—from the unfinished studio album Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk to the deluxe reissue of Live at Sin-é (Legacy Edition)—have gestured, however imperfectly, at the various paths Jeff Buckley could have charted if not for his untimely death at the age of 30. And the latest release, a compilation of early recordings titled You and I, has now spawned an interactive video—for Buckley’s cover of the Bob Dylan song “Just Like a Woman”—that fittingly explores the theme of alternate possibilities.

When George Saunders isn’t tucking Stephen Colbert into bed, he moonlights as one of our most masterful writers of fiction. That mastery can be witnessed in any one of his collections, but if you want something more direct—wisdom straight from the author’s mouth—there’s this striking documentary by Tom Mason and Sarah Klein, which sees Saunders parse his philosophy of storytelling in a neat seven minutes.