Business, Management, Marketing, Money, Tax, Law, People

Second Circuit Ruling Clarifies Reach of EFAA Under Continuing Violation Doctrine in Sexual Harassment Cases

Quick Hits The Second Circuit Court of Appeals held that for claims subject to the “continuing violation doctrine,” such as hostile work environment claims, accrual occurs with each new act that is part of the ongoing pattern of misconduct. Because the plaintiff alleged retaliatory acts occurring after March 3, 2022, her claims were found to have “accrued” after the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act’s effective…

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New Ruling Expands Trademark Owners’ Rights in Retail Space

Trademark lawyers are often asked: “What’s the difference between a trademark and a service mark?” In general, a trademark refers to a brand name used in connection with goods, while a service mark is one that is used in connection with the provision of services.  The services must be provided for the benefit of someone other than the mark owner. But the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (“TTAB”) ruled in…

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Announcing mandatory multi-factor authentication for Azure sign-in

Learn how MFA can protect your data and identity, and get ready for the upcoming MFA requirement for Azure. Learn how multifactor authentication (MFA) can protect your data and identity and get ready for Azure’s upcoming MFA requirement.  As cyberattacks become increasingly frequent, sophisticated, and damaging, safeguarding your digital assets has never been more critical. As part of Microsoft’s $20 billion dollar investment in security over the next five years and…

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Election 2024: What’s at Stake for Business and the Workplace?

In a US presidential election year with more twists and turns than most in recent memory, many of the issues on the ballot impact business. And keeping politics in the workplace respectful is forefront on managers’ minds as a divided nation prepares for weeks of potentially rancorous discourse.Ahead of the Democratic National Convention, HBS Working Knowledge gathered insights from Harvard Business School faculty about what’s at stake for companies, and…

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The Future of Weather Forecasting, and Why It Matters

Predicting the weather—especially in this age of climate change—is big business. Today, the market for weather-forecasting services is $10 billion in the U.S., where an estimated one-third of the economy is exposed to weather and climate. Industries ranging from agriculture to commerce to the military are key consumers of weather-forecasting technology, most of which is based on information provided by large, national weather services. But today, exciting new technologies are…

  • Post category:Battery Ventures
  • Reading time:9 mins read
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220 Seyfarth Attorneys Chosen as Leaders in Their Fields by Best Lawyers in America 2025

(August 14, 2024) - 220 individual Seyfarth attorneys were selected by their peers as leaders in their fields, covering 46 different practice areas, in the 2025 edition of The Best Lawyers in America. Lawyers from all 13 of Seyfarth’s US offices were honored. Two Seyfarth lawyers (William B. Hill, Jr. and Richard Morvillo) were each recognized in five separate practice areas. Three other attorneys (Jeffrey Berman, Douglas Mancino, and Gregory…

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Prudential embraces customer centricity: An interview with Priscilla Ng

As Prudential plc embraces digital transformation, the 176-year-old insurance company finds itself navigating a delicate balancing act: harmonizing the power of AI with a human touch, essential to delivering exceptional customer experiences. Prudential prioritizes data-driven insights to offer customers more-personalized, proactive, and efficient services and drive sustainable growth across global markets while preserving the personal connections that insurance customers value. Joe Ngai, chairman of McKinsey, Greater China, and a senior…

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What’s Next for the FTC’s Ban on Noncompetes?

Topics Leadership Talent Management Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images This past April, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a rule barring most businesses from entering into and enforcing noncompete clauses against their workers, declaring such provisions to be an unfair method of competition. If the FTC has its way and the rule takes effect — which seems unlikely, in view of a recent court decision discussed below —…

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Breaking Down the Mars Kellanova Merger

The year’s largest merger is here: the Mars Kellanova Merger. If you have never heard of Kellanova, you’ve likely heard of the company it was recently formed out of – Kellogg. Kellanova was launched in 2023 (that’s right, exactly 317 days from this announcement to be precise), as a carveout from Kellogg with the aim to separate the faster growing convenience foods from the slower growth cereal business.  The legacy…

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New study shows improved scores by students using Reading Progress

Fresno Unified School District launched a literary initiative to help get students reading on grade level by the end of first grade. Learn about the results. Early literacy is the cornerstone of academic success. Researchers at the University of Chicago and other institutions highlight a crucial shift: Up to the end of third grade, most students are “learning to read” while from fourth grade on, they’re “reading to learn.” With…

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Post-CrowdStrike, Six Questions to Test Your Company’s Operational Resilience

When cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike distributed a faulty software update in July, it impacted a staggering 8.5 million devices. The crisis rippled through commercial airline operations, package delivery logistics, ecommerce, and health care, to name a few.This incident serves as a stark reminder that business disruptions are not just potential threats, but common occurrences that demand immediate attention from CEOs, C-suite teams, and boards. It's time for leaders to take stock…

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AI and the Voices Behind the Music

AI has progressed within the last several years to do remarkable things. In February of this year, OpenAI unveiled Sora, an impressive text-to-video AI generator that produces high quality videos. This new generative AI innovation uses basic text prompts to generate up to 60-second videos. Like all generative AI tools, there are concerns about how the model is trained and the composition of the training data. The potential ethical and societal…

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Shiny objects: Insurance productivity in an era of AI and automation

The emergence of AI and generative AI (gen AI) has brought new energy to the age-old conversation about productivity. In this episode of the McKinsey on Insurance podcast, McKinsey senior partner Jörg Mußhoff sits down with partners Elena Pizzocaro and Selim Sulos to discuss why revisiting insurance productivity is at the top of CEOs’ agendas, how the most successful transformations use an end-to-end redesign approach, and why CEOs shouldn’t get distracted by…

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The Genius of PostHog Marketing

Starting my career in political communication taught me a lot, but one of the most important lessons was this: Know, and never underestimate, your audience. It’s easier said than done. After my pivot into the software world, I’ve experienced firsthand how challenging it can be to explain a complex technology in accessible language or reach a niche buyer audience. Good software marketing is hard, but excellent marketing is extremely hard—to…

  • Post category:Battery Ventures
  • Reading time:10 mins read
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New way to extend ‘shelf life’ of blood stem cells will improve gene therapy

Researchers have identified a drug already used for cancer patients, that, when applied to current gene therapy protocols can improve blood stem cell function threefold.One trillion blood cells are produced every day in humans, and blood stem cells are the only cell types in our body capable of producing all blood cell types over our lifespan, giving them immense regenerative potential. Blood stem cell gene therapy is a ground-breaking treatment…

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How to Turn Professional Services Into Products

David Plunkert/theispot.com Product management is one of the fastest-growing roles in business, having gained increased scope and importance in Silicon Valley. While product managers used to be hired almost exclusively by technology companies, they are now being recruited in growing numbers by service-oriented businesses as well, with firms such as Accenture, Chase, JPMorgan, Optum, and Vanguard adding product management functions in the past few years. Why are services companies looking…

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U.S. Department of Education Attempts to Clarify Scope of Injunctions Barring Enforcement of 2024 Title IX Regulations

Quick Hits At least six federal courts have issued injunctions barring enforcement of the U.S. Department of Education’s 2024 Title IX rule, which applies to complaints of sex discrimination occurring on or after August 1, 2024. Many of the injunctions lack clarity as to which institutions are covered. The Department issued guidance specifying the states and schools subject to the enforcement injunction due to a student or parent’s membership in…

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Khanmigo for Teachers: Free AI-powered teaching tool now available

Imagine having a teaching tool that’s always ready to help you with brainstorming, creating, and innovating. Meet Khanmigo for Teachers. Imagine having a teaching tool that’s always ready to help you with brainstorming, creating, and innovating. Meet Khanmigo for Teachers. Created by Khan Academy and powered by Azure OpenAI Service, Khanmigo for Teachers is available for free in English across 49 countries in partnership with Microsoft. Keep reading to find…

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Case Study: HR’s Pleas Are Heard, Resulting in Positive Culture Change

HR professionals often find themselves fighting an uphill battle to create a positive and safe workplace. Not to rub it in, but we thought we’d share a case study of what could be when the opposite occurs. Read on and see what happens when leadership listens to HR, as Rainbow Municipal Water District (RMWD) is a shining example of how HR can have a significant impact on workplace culture transformation…

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Dynamics of Dissent: The Western ‘Rules-Based Order’ and the Quest of the Global South

Recently, the West convened the so-called “Ukraine Peace Summit” in Switzerland. The event intended to address internal and external issues, but failed on both fronts due to its reliance on an escalation strategy. Internally, the summit aimed to function as a form of "collective catharsis," placing blame on Moscow for the problems faced by Western countries. This was an attempt to justify socio-economic difficulties to their citizens, such as rising…

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Rate hikes: How financial knowledge affects people’s reactions

15 August 2024By Evangelos Charalambakis, Omiros Kouvavas and Pedro NevesHow quickly do consumers react to rate hikes? The answer depends in part on how much they know about financial matters. This ECB Blog post shows that the better informed they are, the quicker their reaction.When central banks raise interest rates they aim to dampen demand in the economy, which ultimately helps keep inflation at bay. Consumers are key for that.…

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Seven Truths About Hybrid Work and Productivity

Topics Column Our expert columnists offer opinion and analysis on important issues facing modern businesses and managers. More in this series Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images Our collective experience of the pandemic enabled us to conduct endless experiments with work. Initially, the experiments were about where work took place (the home becoming a viable option), and soon they became about when work took place (the rigors of nine-to-five morphing…

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Explore new AI features in Learning Accelerators to empower your classroom

Discover new AI features in Learning Accelerators, designed to help you save time, create impactful content, and deepen your students' learning experiences. As educators, you know how important it is to help your students develop the skills they need for academic success. But sometimes, it can be challenging to find the right tools and resources to support them along the way. That’s why we’re excited to highlight the new AI…

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A Strategist’s Take on Shareholder Activism

Who really controls public companies? Some might say it’s the CEO and other top executives. Others may argue it’s the board of directors. Still others may mention the shareholders, to whom the C-suite occupants must ultimately answer, via the value of the firm’s shares. All those answers are correct, but there’s one cohort missing, and it has become increasingly influential over the past decade: activist shareholders. Tuck professor Mark DesJardine’s…

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One in four patients in vegetative or minimally conscious state able to perform cognitive tasks, study finds

Severe brain injury can leave individuals unable to respond to commands physically, but in some cases they are still able to activate areas of the brain that would ordinarily play a role in movement. This phenomenon is known as ‘cognitive motor dissociation’.To determine what proportion of patients in so-called ‘disorders of consciousness’ experience this phenomenon – and help inform clinical practice – researchers across Europe and North America recruited a…

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How innovation can accelerate industry momentum

People often speak of industry momentum as if it were a force of nature independent of individual companies’ actions—like the mysterious “ether” scientists once believed filled the universe and allowed light to travel. While demographics and macroeconomic factors outside organizations’ control do contribute to momentum, the trajectory and pace of industry growth very much rely on the innovation efforts of a sector’s constituent businesses. By harnessing technology and creating new…

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Why Companies Shouldn’t Delay Software Updates—Even After CrowdStrike’s Flaw

The CrowdStrike tech security outage in July revealed the true interdependence—and fragility—of global computer systems. Following several high-profile data breaches, policymakers are calling on businesses to do more to fix code weaknesses and protect systems from cyber criminals.A new study highlights one simple change companies could make: updating software sooner after improved versions hit the market. The research finds that some 60 percent of US organizations continued to use a…

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Voting for Political Influence

One of the realities of today’s financial markets is the outsized shareholder voting power held by the leading mutual funds. In 2021, the top three asset management companies (BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard) owned around 23 percent of S&P 500 firms. This made them the largest shareholders in 88 percent of the leading United States-based companies. Worryingly, it seems that these mutual funds are quite happy to use that shareholder voting…

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The hard stuff: Navigating the physical realities of the energy transition

At a glance The energy transition is in its early stages, with about 10 percent of required deployment of low-emissions technologies by 2050 achieved in most areas. Optimized over centuries, today’s energy system has many advantages, but the production and consumption of energy accounts for more than 85 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Creating a low-emissions system, even while expanding energy access globally, would require deploying millions of…

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The Value of Trust in World Politics

In this case, the relations of the same states may change as a result of the change of their representatives in negotiations. With one president (or minister), the factor of personal trust contributes to the success of negotiations, while with another leader of the same country, personal distrust undermines this. As an example, Donald Trump’s famous phrase “I had no wars. I’m the only president in 72 years, I didn’t…

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How to Mitigate Resentment in Your Team

When conflicts in a team – no matter how minor – are left unresolved, it can eventually breed resentment. If unaddressed, this could lead to cynicism and distrust, as well as harm individual and team performance. How should leaders deal with this? The intuitive answer might involve orchestrating frank, albeit difficult, conversations between the discordant parties. But such conversations are unlikely to lead to the desired reconciliation without a baseline of…

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Are Your Presentations Too Emotional — or Too Analytical?

Topics Column Our expert columnists offer opinion and analysis on important issues facing modern businesses and managers. More in this series subscribe-icon Subscribe Share Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images When you have the opportunity to connect with an audience, stating fact after fact is not the way to go. You have an opportunity to connect more deeply than you can with just facts. Granted, some presentations are solely to…

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In defence of non-disclosure agreements

Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs or confidentiality agreements) have come under fire in recent years due to concerns that they silence victims, conceal unlawful behaviour and prevent companies and regulators from understanding the full scope of systemic problems. These are all valid concerns. However, the part that often gets overlooked when discussing the use of NDAs is that there are good reasons why NDAs are commonly used. It is important to recognise…

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Can AI Save Physicians from Burnout?

In the past decade, physician burnout has evolved from a serious concern to a troubling epidemic, affecting 50 percent of physicians and physicians-in-training. Excessive workloads, process inefficiencies, and administrative burdens related to electronic medical records (EMR) documentation are hampering productivity and significantly impacting physician well-being.In the United States, physicians spend between 34 and 55 percent of their workday compiling clinical documentation and reviewing EMRs. While some of this contributes to…

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Solar energy breakthrough could reduce need for solar farms

Dr Shuaifeng Hu, Post Doctoral Fellow at Oxford University Physics, examining the new thin-film perovskite material. Image credit: Martin Small. Their new light-absorbing material is, for the first time, thin and flexible enough to apply to the surface of almost any building or common object. Using a pioneering technique developed in Oxford, which stacks multiple light-absorbing layers into one solar cell, they have harnessed a wider range of the light…

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Can Senior Politicians Teach Executives How to Lead?

Though business and politics might seem like different worlds, there are increasing commonalities between leadership in these realms. As I explain in the second edition of Los Presidentes Españoles, which explores the success and failures of Spanish leaders since the return of democracy in 1978, executives can learn a lot from the strategies employed by political leaders.After all, prime ministers and presidents are also managers. They preside over cabinets – their…

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German healthcare in the postpandemic era: Physician insights

The German healthcare system, renowned for its efficiency and quality of care, is at a critical juncture in the postpandemic era. The results of a McKinsey survey of physicians in Germany highlight substantial challenges that could be affecting the quality and reliability of patient care (see sidebar, “Research methodology”). The survey results also inspire optimism, however: most physicians believe the issues could be resolved with technology-enabled solutions, innovative organization designs,…

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Deconstructing silos to discover savings: The end-to-end excellence playbook for retailers

The squeeze on retailers’ profits is tighter than ever. And while some retailers are struggling to eke out value, the best are pulling away from the rest (Exhibit 1). Those that are left behind have already picked the low-hanging fruit to combat the sector’s headwinds: they have tried to solve their operational problems with localized solutions, to limited effect. But if they want to protect their margins and gain a…

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  • Reading time:15 mins read
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Make Smarter Investments in Resilient Supply Chains

More than ever, companies need supply chains that are resilient to disruptions, whether the cause is a natural disaster, an infrastructure failure, labor actions, or a global pandemic. Yet the conventional approach to resilience is seriously flawed. Many companies follow a boom-and-bust pattern, making big investments in resilience after a supply chain disruption and then paying little attention to the issue until the next crisis.This reactive way of protecting supply…

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Florida Teachers Union Fails to Upend Law on Dues and Recertification Requirements for Public-Sector Unions

Quick Hits A federal district court rejected challenges to a Florida law that makes it more difficult for public-sector teachers unions to collect dues and recertify. The court held that the Florida Legislature’s changes did not impair the validity, construction, or enforcement of collective bargaining contracts. The court left remaining for a jury trial the unions’ challenge regarding the prohibition on direct payroll dues deductions and assessments. Last year, following…

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