Leapfrogging the Headlines with Soren Kaplan

California's largest lake, the Salton Sea, has shrunk by seventy square miles as water gets diverted to cities and farms instead. Desert wind now lifts pesticides and heavy metals off the exposed lakebed and carries them into towns across the Imperial Valley, and researchers at USC and UC Irvine found the dust is stunting lung growth in local kids. The state is racing to cover thirty thousand acres of shoreline by 2028. 

Soren breaks down why the lake's collapse is really a story about hidden support. The Salton Sea only stayed full because farm runoff poured into it for a hundred years, burying contaminants that were there from the start. He connects that to New York Community Bancorp, whose loan book looked rock solid only because cheap money kept property values climbing, until rising rates exposed the risk that had been sitting there all along. 

Soren lays out three moves for leaders: name the outside support propping up your best-looking asset, test how that asset performs without it, and clean up the risk early while you still control the timing. 

View original on Inc. Magazine: A Toxic Dust Crisis Is Unfolding in California. The Leadership Lesson Is Hard to Ignore 

A Baylor College of Medicine pediatrician told Texas lawmakers this week that high school seniors are legally carrying Vegas in their pockets. She was describing prediction market apps like Kalshi and Polymarket, where 18 year olds bet real money on sports, elections, and pop culture outcomes. The Texas Medical Association wants the minimum age raised to 21. 

In this episode, Soren breaks down why an age limit only delays the problem instead of solving it. The real gap is financial literacy. Research shows most teens have never heard of a FICO score, and one semester of personal finance education is worth roughly $100,000 per student over a lifetime. The same gap shows up in how young employees perform at work. 

Leaders will walk away with one concrete action: pick one young person you are responsible for, your own teenager or your newest hire, name the single financial skill they need most, and spend twenty minutes this week teaching it. 

View original on Inc. Magazine: This One High School Class Is Worth $100,000—And Most Students Still Don’t Take It 

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Learn more about Soren's work at sorenkaplan.com. 

More than 1,100 companies gathered in Shanghai this past July for the World Artificial Intelligence Conference. State media confirmed that Chinese firms have now built more than 400 different humanoid robot models, over half the world's total, with annual output projected to top 100,000 units this year. 

Soren Kaplan breaks down why most leaders are watching the wrong scoreboard. China's best AI model may not beat America's best model yet, but DeepSeek trained its R1 model for roughly $6 million against a reported $100 million for comparable U.S. systems, and Unitree already sells a full-size humanoid for under $6,000. You don't lose to a rival's best product. You lose to their good enough product at a price you can't match. 

Soren lays out three moves for leaders: change your scoreboard to measure cost and volume, not just flagship performance, put your team physically inside a competitor's market to see the scale firsthand, and track adoption instead of announcements to spot your real rivals. 

View original on Inc. Magazine: The FCC Just Banned Chinese Humanoid Robots. That’s Not the Story Business Leaders Should Focus On 

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Learn more about Soren's work at sorenkaplan.com. 

Researchers at Stony Brook, Columbia, and the University of Michigan tracked 14,419 self-published novels sold on Amazon from 2023 through mid-2026. Books flagged as mostly AI made up 20 percent of the catalog but earned only 11 percent of revenue. Quarterly book sales grew 19-fold while revenue grew less than 9-fold, and titles in Kindle Unlimited lost the most ground of all. 

Soren Kaplan breaks down what the data actually proves. This isn't AI replacing better human work, it's a flood of cheap substitutes diluting the return on every product in the market, including the best ones. Revenue per human-only book fell 17 percent even as AI titles kept losing on quality, and the same payment dilution effect is already showing up in music, where Deezer reports more than half its daily uploads are fully AI-generated. 

Soren lays out three moves for leaders facing the same dynamic. Own your audience so discovery doesn't run entirely through a pool competitors can flood. Make what's human and verified in your work visible to customers. Audit how cheaply a good-enough version of your product could now be made, and how much of your demand flows through a platform you don't control. 

View original on Inc. Magazine: New Research Says the Biggest Risk to the Book Market Isn’t AI, but Dilution 

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Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d 

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfrogging-the-headlines-with-soren-kaplan/id1896880297 

Learn more about Soren's work at sorenkaplan.com. 

A Los Angeles jury found Meta negligent for designing Instagram and Facebook to hook young users, awarding 6 million dollars in damages and assigning Meta 70 percent of the fault. Meta has filed an appeal, and the case is the first verdict in a coordinated proceeding covering thousands of similar claims.

Soren Kaplan breaks down why this verdict changes how engagement gets judged. The features product teams celebrate, infinite scroll, autoplay, endless recommendations, are the same features now used as evidence of negligent design, and the same legal theory is already reaching AI chatbots like Character.AI and OpenAI.

Soren lays out three moves leaders can make now: audit which metrics are actually driven by compulsion, measure whether customers are genuinely better off rather than just returning, and name the specific engagement mechanics you could defend in front of a jury.

View original on Inc. Magazine: https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/the-same-legal-theory-used-against-meta-is-now-coming-for-ai/91380693

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Learn more about Soren's work at sorenkaplan.com.

The corporate events industry hit $1.3 trillion in spending last year, according to Oxford Economics for the Events Industry Council, putting the market back at pre-pandemic highs. Companies are flying teams across the country and booking outside speakers again. But the return of the budget does not guarantee the return on it. 

Soren Kaplan breaks down the research behind why most keynotes fail to change behavior, including a study showing only 10 to 15 percent of workplace learning ever translates into changed behavior on the job. He shares how he redesigned his own keynote approach after speaking at Ford's Global Supplier Summit, building tools and structured discussion directly into the session instead of leaving change to chance. 

Soren lays out three concrete moves for anyone planning a corporate event: define the exact post-event shift you expect from attendees, find speakers who can also facilitate hands-on application, and build structured exercises into the agenda even if your speaker can't lead them. 

Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t 

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d 

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfrogging-the-headlines-with-soren-kaplan/id1896880297 

Learn more about Soren's work at sorenkaplan.com. 

Sixteen nonprofit colleges closed in 2025, and one consulting firm projects up to 370 more could close or merge within a decade. Private colleges are now discounting tuition by a record 57 percent, and new federal caps on student loans took effect July 1st. Soren Kaplan breaks down why this isn't a story about weak schools failing. It's a story about position. Higher education is splitting into elite brands with pricing power and low-cost providers with scale, and the middle position between them is collapsing. Leaders take away three moves: pick an end of the barbell instead of straddling the middle, track discounting before it becomes a permanent drag on pricing power, and route resources toward the end of the market customers are actually moving to. Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfrogging-the-headlines-with-soren-kaplan/id1896880297 Learn more about Soren's work at sorenkaplan.com.

Amazon Web Services committed a billion dollars to build a Forward Deployed Engineering organization, embedding thousands of engineers directly inside customer companies to build and deploy AI systems in 45 day cycles. Microsoft followed with a 2.5 billion dollar commitment and 6,000 engineers of its own. A new PYMNTS Intelligence report found that 71 percent of executives at billion dollar companies say organizational readiness, not the technology, is the primary barrier to AI performance. A separate Workplace Intelligence survey of 2,400 executives found that while 97 percent report some benefit from AI, only 29 percent see significant organizational ROI. 

Soren Kaplan breaks down what's actually happening inside these engagements. The job title says engineer, but the daily work is change management: building trust with the people whose behavior has to change, working inside a company's real approval processes and power structures, and proving results fast enough to satisfy a board. Amazon's team used this approach to cut Lyft's driver support resolution time by 87 percent. The lesson holds whether or not a company has a billion dollars to spend on outside engineers. 

Soren lays out three moves any leader can make now. Map the three or four people whose daily behavior needs to change before deploying any AI tool. Assign a named internal champion who owns adoption and removes barriers in the first 90 days. Track whether target workflows actually change within 30 days of deployment, instead of counting seat activations. 

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Apple just announced MapKit for Automotive, a set of developer tools that put Apple Maps directly inside a vehicle's dashboard. Ford is the first automaker to sign on. The feature debuts in Ford's next generation of electric vehicles, starting with a $30,000 truck in 2027. It feeds live road data into Ford's BlueCruise hands-free driving system and powers battery preconditioning that warms the pack before a charging stop. 

In this episode, Soren Kaplan breaks down what the Apple-Ford deal reveals about who actually creates value in a B2B supply chain. Fresh off keynoting Ford's Global Supplier Summit for 500 suppliers, Soren argues the suppliers that matter most now design for their customer's customer, not just the company that signs the check. 

Soren lays out three moves for any supplier: trace your product all the way to the person who actually uses it, find and own the one moment in that person's experience your product shapes, and bring your customer an innovation that will delight their own customers before they ask for it. 

Subscribe and listen on: 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t 

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d 

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfrogging-the-headlines-with-soren-kaplan/id1896880297 

View original on Inc. Magazine: Suppliers Competing on Price Are Losing the Real Game. Apple’s Ford Deal Shows What Wins 

Stanford spent eighteen months and 112 researchers studying California's K-12 public schools. Their AI analysis of seven thousand district planning documents found that only seven point nine percent of local goals had a measurable target attached to them. Administrators are spending nearly twenty hours a week on compliance paperwork, and two out of three districts have changed superintendents since 2019. 

In this episode, Soren Kaplan breaks down why this isn't an education story. It's an organizational design story that plays out inside most Fortune 1000 companies too. He walks through three failure points that show up whenever ownership, autonomy, and capability aren't designed with intention: unclear ownership of outcomes, autonomy handed out without guardrails, and skill gaps that undercut even a well-designed structure. 

Leaders will walk away with four concrete moves: map who actually owns your five most contested decisions, set a minimum standard before granting more autonomy, ask your team what process they would delete and remove it, and identify the specific skills your new operating model requires so people can be trained before they're expected to perform. 

Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t 

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d 

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfrogging-the-headlines-with-soren-kaplan/id1896880297 

Learn more about Soren's work at sorenkaplan.com.