When Your Team Blames You
When your team blames you for a failure or a decision they don’t like, it’s natural to feel a range of uncomfortable emotions. How can you work through your response and rebuild trust?
Be brutally honest with yourself. Start by identifying and naming your feelings, then take an honest look at your contributions to the...Read more...
Some days, you hate, hate, hate your job. Other days, you wonder if you’re truly unhappy or just coming to terms with the reality that workdays can often feel like a long, tedious slog. It’s even harder to tell the difference if your friends and colleagues constantly complain about their jobs. Once a group vent session begins, a creeping sense of self-doubt takes root. “You think, ‘Am I being entitled by wanting more or is it really this bad?’” says Jenny Blake, a former career development program manager at Google and author of three books, including Pivot and Free Time. “You can write it off as a first-world problem, but work is where you spend the vast majority of your waking hours, so it matters.” Read more...
Not all pandemic recoveries are created equal. The world’s richest economies have taken diverging paths in recuperating from the devastating effects of Covid-19. At a time when multiple forces and crises — wars, geopolitical tensions, the pandemic’s lingering aftershocks, high inflation and steep borrowing costs — weigh on global growth, there have been few bright spots. The US economy is one of them. Gross domestic product in the United States grew at a remarkable 5.2% in the third quarter, ahead of China, long the engine of global growth. “The US has really outperformed relative to other countries for the past year,” Innes McFee, chief global economist for Oxford Economics, told CNN. The United States has powered ahead of the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and other advanced economies this year. Last month, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development became the latest intergovernmental body to upgrade its forecasts for US growth this year and next, while downgrading the outlook for the 20 countries that use the euro currency. Read more...
Last month, China's President Xi Jinping sat down with President Joe Biden for the first time in more than a year. The pair had plenty to discuss, but one of Xi's most notable quotes was when he told Biden: "Planet Earth is big enough for the two countries to succeed, and one country's success is an opportunity for the other." U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo says that the reality is a bit more complicated than that. She sat down with All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly to explain what her plan is for coexisting with another world superpower — and the growing role of commerce in U.S. national security. Read more...
Gold prices hit an all-time high Monday, buoyed by growing expectations of interest rate cuts among investors, a weaker dollar and geopolitical tensions. Prices for the yellow metal jumped as much as 3% in Monday trade to reach $2,135 per ounce, rising above the previous record of $2,072 notched in August 2020. Prices later fell on the day to trade at $2,023 by 11.57 a.m. ET. In recent weeks, investors have grown increasingly confident that the US Federal Reserve has successfully reined in inflation through aggressive interest rate hikes, and may start to cut borrowing costs as early as March next year. Higher interest rates push up the yields on assets such as US Treasuries, drawing in investors. But, when interest rates are low, falling or — as in this case — expected to fall, demand for Treasuries ebbs, and gold, which doesn’t pay out any interest, becomes relatively more attractive. The yield on the benchmark 10-year US Treasury bill has fallen from a 16-year high of 5% reached in mid-October to stand at 4.3% Monday. Read more...
Over the very long-term, no asset class has outperformed the stock market on an annualized return basis. But over shorter timelines, the performance of the iconic Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI 0.82%), broad-based S&P 500 (^GSPC 0.59%), and innovation-driven Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC 0.55%), is no more predictable than a roll of the dice or flip of a coin. Since this decade began, the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Nasdaq Composite have bounced back and forth between bull and bear markets in each successive year. Though all three major indexes are well off of their 2022 bear market lows, volatility still rules the roost on Wall Street and has investors wondering where stocks will head next. Read more...
Amazon on November 28, 2023 announced a new chatbot called Q for people to use at work. The product, announced at Amazon Web Services’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas, represents Amazon’s latest effort to challenge Microsoft and Google in productivity software. It comes one year after Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI launched its ChatGPT chatbot, which has popularized generative artificial intelligence for crafting human-like text in response to a few lines of human input. Q is named after the character by the same name in the James Bond movies or the Q character in the Star Trek television shows, depending on which AWS executive you ask. A preview version of Q is available now, and several of its features are available for free. Once the preview period ends, a tier for business users will cost $20 per person per month. A version with additional features for developers and IT workers will cost $25 per person per month. The Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Duet AI for Google Workspace for business workers both cost $30 per person per month. Read more...