Authentic prestige.

It comes from work, delivered, and positive movement, unfettered.

Not that any of us should be chasing prestige, it can be entertaining to ponder why it is so very important — why we must acknowledge that in some professional environments, a title is the gateway substance to clout. A title should first be a way to capture all the responsibilities within a position. Second, a title should be a way for colleagues and stakeholders to understand the scope of a role and its authority — as well as its limits. We get into troubling status territory when we find ourselves in situations where, despite implied authority, impressively-titled parties have all of the capacity to pontificate without any of the potent juice to inspire performance much less judge it. Ah, the possibilities for strategy in a world that requires experience at the helm when we must distinguish between the genuine and the artificial.

Repose. John White Alexander. 1895. Oil on canvas. Anonymous Gift, 1980. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Forward-deployed job titles

Tom Hollands. What differentiates this genuine phenomenon compared to title inflation - where titles run a Red Queen’s Race of escalating fake prestige, simply to keep in place within a labor market where inflation is commonplace? Or more opaque resumé padding, where insiders confer elaborate titles on each other to appear opaquely impressive to outsiders? … The test is this: does the new title describe work that would have been unrecognizable five years ago? If yes, you might be onto something. If you’re just renaming “marketing coordinator” to “growth strategist,” but keeping all the responsibilities the same, then you’re not doing title arbitrage: you’re doing title inflation, and the best people will be able to tell the difference.

Mattering is the engine that drives behavior

Jennifer Wallace talks with CNBC Squawk Box. In the workplace, mattering is what we tell ourselves about our place in the world.

The adolescence of technology

Dario Amodei. I want to confront the rite of passage itself: to map out the risks that we are about to face and try to begin making a battle plan to defeat them. I believe deeply in our ability to prevail, in humanity’s spirit and its nobility, but we must face the situation squarely and without illusions. … We are now at the point where AI models are beginning to make progress in solving unsolved mathematical problems, and are good enough at coding that some of the strongest engineers I’ve ever met are now handing over almost all their coding to AI. Three years ago, AI struggled with elementary school arithmetic problems and was barely capable of writing a single line of code. Similar rates of improvement are occurring across biological science, finance, physics, and a variety of agentic tasks. If the exponential continues—which is not certain, but now has a decade-long track record supporting it—then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything.

Ten glittering tiaras and the fascinating stories behind them

Amy Elliott. Over the last 15 years or so, some tiaras have fetched millions of dollars at auction. Those high hammer prices are often directly connected to a history-rich provenance or a compelling celebrity/royal/aristocrat association. “People today are drawn to jewels with a story,” adds Daughters. “A tiara is a wearable fragment of history—it’s not just about carats or sparkle.”