Joanne Walters

The distance between what we say and what we tolerate. In recent weeks, the leadership of Microsoft’s gaming division did something executives rarely do in public. Rather than reach for the familiar language of momentum and “exciting roadmaps,” the new CEO of Microsoft Gaming, Asha Sharma, told the world plainly that the business wasn’t healthy. She acknowledged enormous investment with falling returns, an unsustainable hardware cost structure, and signaled difficult decisions ahead. For...

When Systems Become Personal In recent weeks, the Supreme Court significantly weakened key protections within the Voting Rights Act, a landmark civil rights law that for decades helped challenge racial discrimination in voting and redistricting. For many, this was political news. For many Black Americans, it was something more personal. It was felt emotionally, historically, and collectively. Moments like this remind us of something leadership often overlooks. People don’t experience systems...

Apparently, the internet has decided that self-understanding now comes with a prompt. If you’ve spent any time online recently, you’ve probably seen the trend. People asking ChatGPT to generate caricatures of who they are. Their personality, their work, and their essence are often paired with bold, colorful visuals that feel equal parts playful and unsettlingly accurate. It’s part curiosity, part branding exercise, part collective experiment in letting an algorithm hold up a mirror and say,...