What we're learning in July

Featuring frontier firms, AI sobriety and a letter to a young activist.

We’re back again this month with another round-up of reads and links for you - wherever you are this July - whether deep into summer holidays or short winter days - we hope that you find our curated list of content that caught our attention helpful, engaging and challenging. As always, let us know if there’s anything interesting that you’re reading, listening to, or watching that you’d recommend to us!

1. “For centuries, mass poverty seemed inevitable. Starvation, disease, death. As late as the 1700s, roughly half of children globally would die before reaching adulthood. This was the natural order of things. And then everything began to change.” This fascinating podcast episode from the Atlantic is titled “The Myth of the Poverty Trap” and asks the question of why we haven’t yet ended extreme poverty, despite knowing how to do so. The transcript is also available here.
   

2. We are fans of Australian brand strategy consultant Eugene Healey, whose takes on brand strategy and cultural insights are always fascinating. This piece, on the latest evolution of the social media aesthetic of Gen Z, is a play-by-play of why your ‘messy’ feed may be feeling a little less authentic these days. Read more here.
   

3. Microsoft has declared 2025 the year of the “frontier firm”. The new organisational blueprint that is emerging is “one that blends machine intelligence with human judgment, building systems that are AI-operated but human-led.” The question is: how do organisations and leaders adapt to this new reality? Read their full report here.

4. The way we read on the internet has changed. The way we consume information - particularly for those who identify as “Very Online” has evolved; and nothing has signalled this demise more clearly than the death of Pocket, a “read-it-later” app much beloved by millennials (and the token millennial on our team, Christine). Read more about what Mozilla’s takeover and eventual shuttering of the app is saying about the way we consume content online today in fellow Pocket fan Ann Helen Peterson’s excellent Substack essay here.
   

5. We’ve been following a fascinating discussion by Elizabeth Oldfield on being “AI sober” (Oldfield recently revealed she doesn’t currently use any generative AI tools). This follow-up post on her Substack “Fully Alive” is a great read for those who are considering how to mindfully and consciously use AI, and what their own personal values around these tools might be. Read the full post here.
   

6. On the theme of AI, the Economist asks this month if AI is killing the internet. The way we are searching online (increasingly via gen AI rather than search engines) is seeing huge drops in traffic to content publishers like legacy media sites and Wikipedia, as gen AI gives the readers “answers” that don’t encourage further exploration. In an internet landscape that has always relied upon advertising (and therefore eyeball/click metrics) in order to sustain itself, this drop in traffic is hugely alarming - and may unintentionally change the way the internet, as we know it, looks and operates. Read more here.
   

7. We close this round-up with a letter to a young activist, first published in 2001 by Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes. We hope that it encourages you, leader, wherever you are and whatever you’re facing. She writes: “Do not lose heart. We are made for these times.”