Shut Your Laptop List: Ambitions on the rise and crumbling
If you’ve ever worked in communications, you know there’s always some email you get on a Friday that threatens your ability to shut your laptop and transition into your weekend with peace of mind. Every week, we plan to bring you an email to counteract that. While we can’t save you from every source of weekend angst, the Shut Your Laptop List should help you go into your weekly respite feeling smarter, inspired or (if we’re really killing it) chuckling a little. Let’s go.
Women's ambition: A Latina dichotomy
The landslide victory of Mexico’s first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum, signals a slightly new direction for a country in which machismo continues to dominate most avenues of traditional power. She’s a renowned climate scientist, and her triumph speech started with “As I have said on other occasions, I do not arrive alone,” — a clear signal that she plans to keep feminist ideals central to her approach to governing. “We all arrived with our heroines who gave us our homeland, with our mothers, our daughters and our granddaughters.” Running on a campaign that promised to address economic inequalities, she’s really checking all the boxes 80s baby feminists pin on their ambitious woman vision board. (Given she’s more of a technocrat than AMLO, one can only imagine that she’ll continue working to expand Mexico’s economy in ways that beckon bigger opportunities for comms and marketing pros in the nation — someone's gonna have to handle all that PR.)
On the other side, J.Lo is fully in her #FlopEra. She’s effectively drifted from an impressive Super Bowl performance just a few years ago, to a decidedly panned documentary, to a last-minute cancellation of her major tour. On top of all of this, the tabloids are reporting that her comeback marriage is headed for divorce. Don’t get us wrong, J.Lo’s had a rabid fanbase for a couple decades. But she’s seemingly jumped the shark in the cultural zeitgeist, and she didn’t even know it.
Either way, we’re sending both these powerhouse women good vibes. Their presence and achievements make large and small differences in a lot of people’s lives.
AI whistleblowers raise their voice
A group of AI-industry employees — primarily current and former employees of OpenAI, along with some others — issued an open letter earlier this week to raise the alarm that AI companies are not sufficiently guarding against the technology’s potential harms. Interestingly though, the point of the letter was less to build the case about the potential harms, and more intended to call on companies to operate with more transparency and openness to criticism. In all, these are necessary pushes that the increasingly powerful AI industry needs. But we tend to agree with Casey Newton of Platformer’s recent assessment: if these whistleblowers want to be taken more seriously, more specificity about what’s at risk here is very necessary.
Walmart's slow, but sure, turnaround
Fifteen years ago, very few people would have openly talked about enjoying their Walmart shopping experience. And a lot of that sentiment resulted from the company’s embattled public image. If anyone remembers PeopleOfWalmart.com and the endless dings on the company’s employment and environmental policies, things just weren’t good. (One of your authors knows well, because he used to support the company’s PR efforts.)
But today is a new day. Between upgrading some employment practices (in favor of hourly associates) and making smart choices to compete in the increasingly important e-commerce marketplace, Walmart is steadily resetting those tricky public perceptions. These are the types of policy adjustments that lend themselves to smart, proactive comms, from executive positioning to thought leadership to intentional CSR. Let’s see where Walmart takes it next.