arc news

May is here! With spring finally settling in, it’s a great time to refresh our thinking and look ahead. Here’s this month’s batch of tech and business reads to spark new ideas and keep momentum growing.

What We're Reading This Month

‍Five Paradoxes Shaping the Future of Cyber - Over the past few years, organizations in Australia and around the world have made real progress in cyber security. Executive backing is stronger; investment has increased and confidence in responding to breaches is rising. Is that confidence justified? Deloitte’s Global Future of Cyber Survey found that while 85 per cent of organizations feel prepared for breaches, only 70 per cent have taken enough cyber security actions to demonstrate a high level of readiness.

Has AI Ended Thought Leadership? - By any conventional measure, I am a “thought leader.” I’ve spent decades at the intersection of innovation and storytelling, building companies, selling them, breaking things, and starting over. I’ve written six books. I contribute regularly to this publication. And I’m here to tell you the category is dying. Not because the ideas don’t matter. They do. But because we’ve entered a period where the ratio of people talking about the future of work to people building it has become grotesquely inverted. The content machine, supercharged by generative AI, has flooded every LinkedIn feed, every conference stage, every corporate retreat with an endless stream of polished, confident, and frequently hollow insight. We are drowning in it. More here.

What is Process Improvement? - Most "broken" work isn't actually broken. What fails is the process behind it: messy handoffs, slow approvals, unclear ownership, and tasks that sit in inboxes like forgotten produce because nobody knows what the next step is. That's what process improvement is for: looking at a slow workflow and deciding it deserves better than "that's just how we do it.". Learn the break down of process improvement.

What Values Do You Really Stand For? - In his new book, What Do You Really Stand For? (Harvard Business Review Press, 2026), Columbia Business School professor Paul Ingram draws on decades of research and frameworks to help you articulate your values, integrate them into your work and life, build stronger relationships, and achieve better outcomes in all that you do. Here’s an edited excerpt.

Accountability Must Be Chosen, Not Mandated - Leaders today face intense pressure to deliver results amid restructuring, cultural volatility, and rapid AI adoption. When performance slips or execution wavers, the instinct is often to tighten controls, increase monitoring, set firmer targets, and “hold people accountable. ”But these efforts rarely produce the results leaders actually want. Instead of inspiring deeper ownership or better follow-through, organizations often see people avoid risk, downplay problems, or focus more onlooking accountable than being accountable. Article here.