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Taylor Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl is launched and irrespective of whether you call yourself a Swiftie or not, here is the thing: Taylor Swift’s genius is not limited to her singing and songcraft.

As the founder of her own multi-billion dollar enterprise she has higher returns than 99.9% of hedge funds, and has built a stronger global corporation than nearly every other American conglomerate CEO.

She is the only person that the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank track with precision.

She has a larger impact on the world economy than most economists that have ever lived, and has done more for US antitrust law than any sitting member of Congress.

There is a lot to learn from Taylor Swift.

Global investment fund manager and former head of Strategy at HBS (and Swiftie!) Sinead O’Sullivan taps into the same genius that sells out stadiums and shuts down the internet to give Taylor―the CEO, the strategist―the respect she deserves. O’Sullivan sums up Swift’s business savvy into ten big, teachable lessons in the latest book Good Ideas and Power Moves: Ten Lessons for Success from Taylor Swift, including:

* Build a World (Not a Product): how to create value that is greater than the sum of its parts (or, how Taylor created the fan-centered Swiftverse that fosters community, belonging, and off-the-charts engagement)

* Be Anti-Fragile: how to embrace volatility, build resilience, and thrive in uncertainty–when your competitors can’t (or, how Taylor gamed the chaos of Covid shutdown to own the airwaves)

* Don’t Just Play the Game, Change It: how to rewrite the rules on your own terms when your chips are down (or, how Taylor almost lost control of her music catalog to Private Equity―but re-recorded all her masters and took them back)

How Taylor Swift made herself anti-fragile

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Key decisions or actions taken by Taylor Swift that demonstrate her antifragility, which is the quality of systems, organizations, or people that not only survive chaos but actually grow stronger from disorder and stress.

These destructive paths, which would typically cause other artists or businesses to fail, instead made Taylor Swift and the Swiftverse stronger.

The four key moments highlighting her antifragility are:

* Withdrawing Her Music from Spotify (2014): Taylor pulled her music from Spotify, the fastest-growing streaming platform at the time, arguing that the service’s compensation model unfairly devalued artists’ work. This decision, which many considered “fatal” for an artist aiming to be the most listened-to in the world, defied intuitive wisdom.

The Antifragile Outcome: Instead of harming her, this move made her stronger. By withdrawing her music, she became an exclusive, “luxury good,” and the difficulty of accessing her music led fans to crave her and create an even stronger bond with her. When she returned to the platform in 2017, she immediately amassed nearly forty-eight million streams, demonstrating that the move did not kill her but actually strengthened her position.

* Engaging in Feuds with Other Musicians and Public Figures (Beefing): Throughout her career, particularly during the lengthy and complex feud with Kanye West and supporting figures, the more Taylor was publicly criticized or “beaten down,” the more fiercely her fan base rallied around her.

The Antifragile Outcome: This conflict led to “extravagantly higher levels of emotional connection” between Taylor and her fans within the Swiftverse. Because her public image is that of the ultimate underdog who doesn’t start fights but throws a “clean right hook to finish them,” the beef reinforced her relatability as someone dealing with the same professional battles (powerful men taking advantage of less powerful women) that her core female demographic faces in their own lives. Fighting these fires actually served to help her grow.

* Releasing Multiple Albums During the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020): While the global music industry largely stalled in 2020 due to the pandemic, forcing artists to cancel tours and delay releases, Taylor Swift embraced the lockdown to create and release two surprise full-length albums (folklore and evermore) in the same year.

The Antifragile Outcome: She was able to “Amazon herself” because she controlled her own value chain and had unique access to the music supply chain (e.g., a studio in her house and access to A-list collaborators). Since she owned and controlled her distribution via the Swiftverse, she could continue to deliver core products to a market that had virtually no competition for new material. This meant she sprinted up a hill (volatility) when everyone else was struggling, allowing her to win a deepened sense of friendship with her fans, who were consuming her music with 100% of their time, energy, and money.

* Rerecording Her Master Albums (Taylor’s Versions): This was the decision to rerecord her first six studio albums after the ownership of the original masters was sold to a company owned by Scooter Braun. This choice forced her to constantly be pulled back into the studio to recreate decade-old music, a wildly risky move with high effort and minimal guaranteed payout that industry analysts bet against.

The Antifragile Outcome: For Taylor, this lengthy and expensive ordeal did not suck the oxygen out of her career; the opposite occurred. It was a crisis that allowed her to call upon and strengthen the relationship she had built with her fans. Her tenacity and deep love for her catalog, combined with the fan base’s support, reduced the value of the original masters and propelled her career further. Her chips were down in the “real world,” but her chips were up in the Swiftverse, heightening fan support.

So yeah..you are a Swiftie now? :)

The expansion of AI infrastructure has significant environmental costs. Training large models can consume vast amounts of energy; generating text can use as much energy as charging a smartphone nearly four times, and generating one thousand images is equivalent to charging a smartphone 242 times!

Big ideas from the book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmare…

Hola! Welcome to BigIdeas.FM - we bring you conversational podcasts and sexy newsletters curated from world’s best and latest non-fiction books. Today, it’s time to Click, the latest book on startups by designer-authors who have been involved in Google ventures as well as many successful products.

One day in 2004, Gardiner Harris, early for a flight, sat down at an airport bar and started talking to the woman on the barstool beside him. She was a drug sales rep for Johnson & Johnson, and her horrific story about unethical sales practices and the devastating impact they’d had on her family fundamentally changed the nature of how Harris covered the company—and the entire pharmaceutical industry—for The New York Times. His subsequent investigations and ongoing research since that very first conversation led to new federal laws and ultimately to this book, a blistering exposé of a trusted American institution and the largest healthcare conglomerate in the world.

Harris takes us light years away from the company’s image as the child-friendly “baby company” as he uncovers reams of evidence showing decades of deceitful and dangerous corporate practices that have threatened the lives of millions. He covers multiple disasters: lies and cover-ups regarding baby powder’s linkage to cancer, the surprising dangers of Tylenol, a criminal campaign to sell antipsychotics in ways that have cost countless lives, a popular drug used to support cancer patients that actually increases the risk that cancer tumors will grow, and deceptive marketing efforts that accelerated opioid addictions through their product Duragesic (fentanyl) that rival even those of the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma.Filled with shocking, infuriating, but utterly necessary revelations, No More Tears is a landmark work of investigative journalism that lays bare the deeply rooted corruption behind the image of babies bathing with a smile.

A pioneering professor of organizational behavior turns the concept of networking on its head, arguing that we must move beyond the standard mentorship model to embrace sponsorship, where we use our social networks and political capital on behalf of others."It's not what you know, but who you know." According to conventional wisdom, our social networks are a resource to exploit, and getting ahead means extracting value from our social connections. But according to Dr. Rosalind Chow, Professor of organizational behavior at Carnegie Mellon's business school, not only is this an antiquated notion, it's also useless in today's society and workplaces. And it certainly doesn't account for the fact that not everyone starts on equal footing in the workplace. Based on decades of original research analyzing social hierarchies, corporate environments, and gender and race relations, Beyond Mentorship makes a bold case for completely changing the way we network.

To increase the number of women and BIPOC employees in our organizations, particularly in senior roles, we need sponsorship, not mentorship. Sponsorship involves managing others' impressions or beliefs about a protégé or colleague. Our social networks can and should be used on behalf of others. And it helps us too. What if we tried to position ourselves so that we could be the first to share new information, to elevate others to be more visible to decision makers, and to connect people to the help that they need? Suddenly, networking would become much more than just ladder climbing.At a moment the workplace is going through a seismic transformation, this book is a potent reminder that we can all build more equitable connections effectively, meaningfully, and joyously. And this book will empower readers to be smarter about cultivating authentic, supportive, diverse relationships and communities.

Are you working too much but feel like it's never enough? Have you turned the act of pretending you're "fine" into an art form? Does self-care feel like one more item on your already long to-do list?

We've been taught that resilience is the secret to navigating life's most difficult moments. But according to New York Times bestselling author, organizational psychologist, and researcher Dr. Tasha Eurich, there is one problem with this assumption. Scientifically, resilience isn't an unlimited resource, especially with the growing pressure and uncertainty we're experiencing today.

What if, instead of merely "bouncing back" from stressors and setbacks, we could harness them for forward growth?

Whether you're grappling with work stress, personal challenges, or the chaos of everyday life, Shatterproof offers an urgent alternative to stoic endurance as the only strategy for survival. Combining cutting-edge research, practical tools, and insights from her own struggle with a life-defining health crisis, Dr. Eurich will overturn your beliefs about what it takes to thrive through adversity, offering a scientifically supported system to help you feel better, do better, and live better than before.

You'll discover how to:

* Reclaim your best self when stress turns you into someone you barely recognize

* Uncover the unmet needs that keep you stuck in self-limiting patterns

* Turn stress into strength, exhaustion into energy, and confusion into confidence

* Find peace in the present and be prepared for what the future holds

* And much more

When we embark on this journey, we learn that the things that break us can also uniquely remake us. That is what it means to become shatterproof.

Learn how to cleanse, protect yourself from, and transmute bad vibes, regardless of their size or origin. Devin Hunter provides the support you need to face any energetic problem, whether you're a beginner or an experienced psychic. Each topic builds upon the preceding one, growing with you as you gain experience. This comprehensive book covers everything from dealing with unwanted ghosts to turning spiteful energy into soul nutrition.

Devin shares personal stories and secrets from more than twenty years as a professional psychic medium and teacher. He covers a wide range of topics and provides quick, step-by-step procedures to tackle any issue. He also offers tools and advice for expanding your abilities as a psychic or empath. This book is packed with ways to protect yourself from and cleanse your life of bad vibes.

Mark Fabian, one of the most exhilarating thinkers working on wellbeing today, presents a revolutionary approach to understanding why there’s more to life than the pursuit of happiness.

Beyond Happy explores how evolution has wired us to keep happiness just out of reach, leaving us perpetually stuck on a happiness treadmill. Instead of striving to escape it, the book argues, we should focus on making the treadmill a place we want to be. Finding this wellbeing begins with listening to our emotions, discovering intrinsic motivation and pursuing our authentic values. Fabian coaches you through this process of self-actualisation.

Wellbeing, however, is not solely an individual pursuit – it is something we cultivate together.

And so Beyond Happy also provides insights into enhancing your emotional intelligence, building relationships on care, and nurturing a karmic community.

Most profoundly, Beyond Happy shows the way out of nihilism – the pervasive sense that life on the treadmill is purposeless and incoherent. To escape this despair, we must develop a moral compass. To heal the toxicity of our acrimonious politics, we need to rediscover the joy of sharing and celebrating what we love.

Delivered with an entertaining mix of academic precision, a podcaster’s knack for storytelling, and the down-to-earth panache Australians are known for, Beyond Happy is a one-stop shop to everything you need to know about the good life.

Correct the power imbalances in your work and life with a science-backed practice that combines the rigor of Stoic philosophy with the relational impact of empathy.Stoicism combined with empathy may sound like a contradiction in terms. But when these seemingly opposing forces are harnessed together, they have the power to change your life.From surviving missile attacks and political oppression in Iran to leading high-stakes legal teams and negotiations in corporate America, Shermin Kruse's journey fuels her mission to merge empathy and stoicism as tools for navigating power, justice, and human connection in every facet of life. In this eye-opening book, she offers you this radical perspective shift—anchored in up-to-the-minute research—to help you navigate life's challenges with power and principles.

We often think of empathy as an emotional stance: we feel what someone else is feeling. But Kruse outlines a form of empathy that’s based in cognition, not emotion—a way for us to understand what the other person is thinking and feeling while keeping a distance from their feeling state—and shows us how we can strategically maneuver our level of engagement from “emotional empathy” to “cognitive empathy” in different circumstances. Then she utilizes Stoic philosophy and modern science to outline the how of emotional regulation and control. The bridge she builds between Stoicism and empathy gives us the knowledge and discipline we need to:

* Calmly assess the power dynamics of any situation

* Understand and manage our own emotions as well as the emotions of others

* Defuse danger and turn conflict into connection

* Skillfully steer a challenging conversation toward the result we want

Whether you're a leader striving to succeed in your role with integrity, an educator seeking to guide curious minds with compassion, a parent nurturing resilience in your children, or simply facing a personal or professional crossroads, Stoic Empathy is an essential toolkit for negotiating success in every area of your life.

Do you feel you’re simply going through the motions? Succeeding at work, pulling your weight at home, living an active social life . . . yet deep down, you feel drained? If so, you may be experiencing High-Functioning Depression.In the first book to uncover this new form of depression, Columbia University clinical psychologist Dr Judith Joseph draws on her personal struggles with the illness, revealing brand-new research and client cases to demystify this common yet poorly understood condition.

Discover her empowering plan for managing depressive episodes, called the Five V’s:• Validation: processing past traumas and present pain• Venting: releasing frustrations and anxieties• Values: identifying our key purpose and priorities• Vitals: slowing down to hear our needs• Vision: celebrating successes, milestones and everyday joyBy following the Five V’s, we can put an end to self-sacrifice and self-sabotage, calm our inner turmoil, and go from merely functioning to truly living.