Why Business Leaders Need to Be More Curious

Seth Goldenberg wants us all to be more curious. The designer and entrepreneur brings design-based principles and questions to a variety of enterprises. He runs a design-based management consultancy, and has worked with many companies, including Apple and Oprah Winfrey’s OWN to help rethink their business structures and processes.

Goldenberg, who also runs a Dickensian-sounding bookstore, Curiosity & Co., that doubles as a wine bar and cultural center in Jamestown R.I., has recently turned his attention to the role of curiosity—instead of just knowledge—in the culture and especially in the way businesses operate. His book, Radical Curiosity: Questioning Commonly Held Beliefs to Imagine Flourishing Futures argues that the workplace of the future needs to be asking a lot more fundamental questions if it’s going to thrive.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What do you think the role of curiosity is in the workplace?

For me, it’s central. It’s the foundation. I mean, work is certainly turning itself inside out right now. We are having to recheck the questions we as…

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What Elon Musk Really Believes

“We have democracy?” Elon Musk interjected, with an impish smile. He’d just been asked how worried he was about the state of the American system of government. “We have a sort of democracy, I guess,” Musk went on, balancing his toddler son on his knee at a party marking his selection as TIME’s Person of the Year last December. “We have a two-party system, which generally means that issues get assigned in a semi-random manner into one bucket or the other, and then you’re forced to pick one bucket. Or like there’s two punchbowls, and they both have turds in it, and which one has the least amount of turds? So I don’t agree with, necessarily, what either party does.”

The exchange was a revealing one, both for the answer Musk provided and the question he avoided. His interviewer, TIME editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal, had hoped to engage him on the concern, widely shared among political experts, that our democracy is in danger—that the rule of law and free, fair elections are under threat from creeping authoritarianism, disinformation and institutional deterioration. But Musk seemed to regard American demo…

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What Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Means for Trump’s TRUTH Social

Conservatives on Twitter are celebrating a potential turning of the tide in the wake of Elon Musk’s deal to buy the social media platform–and many of them this week are heralding the departure of liberal users by mockingly tweeting trending hashtags like #ByeTwitter and #LeavingTwitter.

“Prepare for blue check mark full scale meltdown after @elonmusk seals the deal and I should get my personal Twitter account restored,” tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose personal account was permanently suspended earlier this year for spreading COVID-19 misinformation.

Musk’s $44 billion deal with Twitter has led to increased speculation over whether the billionaire Tesla CEO, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” plans to reinstate the accounts of prominent conservatives like Greene and, most notably, former President Donald Trump on the social media site. Musk’s purchase, which won’t be finalized until October, has also left a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the fate of Trump’s own alternative social platform, TRUTH Social.

TRUTH Social did not immediately respond to TIME’s request for comment on…

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