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In a masterclass act of chicanery and stealth, Apple has released 174 new versions of its newest iPhone, numbered 7.001 through 7.174, in order to ensure a lack of direct comparison to the recently released Samsung Galaxy S8.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook stated to shareholders last Wednesday evening that “You will notice a ton of new features with this new release, many we ourselves are still learning about.” Cook then assured investors that while some of the versions may share a single feature in common with the Galaxy S8, each of them is “unique enough” to avoid direct comparison.

In response to a request for comment, Apple’s content team responded that they have been so inundated with collateral development for the 174 versions that they would be available to comment in the summer of 2027.

An unorthodox study conducted by the Hanford Business School found that professionals in first-time, senior-ranking positions confessed that their new positions of authority and power aren’t quite what they expected them to be.

The study, which consisted of interviews of 2,352 Uber Black drivers who had recently transported a senior officer of a large organization, found that these demigods of capital and power expressed confusion and disillusionment. They are shocked to learn that direct reports tended to flatter them incessantly, seldom questioned their decisions, and consistently tried to invite them to after-work events, which led them to doubt their sincerity and true commitment.

In a follow-up with 685 of these officers, respondents shared comments like the following: “I could tell that they don’t actually agree with my ideas and decisions, but that they humor me,” and “I think my employees question the vision I’ve established, almost as if they would rather accomplish their own. Can you believe that?” Other respondents confessed as new leaders, they expected to be admired for their vision, hard work, and leadership style they learned from Good to Great. However, 78% felt that their own employees pretended to admire them to avoid termination. Of these, 70% affirmed that only being admired because of their position was one of the biggest drawbacks to their role.

The researchers then asked each of the officers about their own climb to the top. 98% of respondents stated that they had in the past used flattery, acquiescence, and countless dinner invitations as strategic career maneuvers. Some confessed that they “didn’t really like their previous CEO, but it was the only way to stand out from the crowd,” or that they offered favors so that “when the time came…”

Additional research scheduled for the summer of 2027 will seek to validate the extent to which employees ever feign sincerity with their bosses.

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Upon realizing through a series of late-night discussions that their friendships have grown more competitive, their jobs more opportunistic, their wines more red, their beers more dark, and their personalities more predictable, the Lawsons from Arlington, Virginia want to try to be more laid back.

However, since going with the flow and being perfect at things don’t tend to go hand in hand, the Lawsons decided that general elitism was not for them. More information will be available as letting down their hair unfolds.

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Area careerist, Arvid White, 31, came home feeling extremely guilty for not maximizing his time at work today, which he felt was a misallocation of precious company resources.

“After I cleaned out my inbox and wrapped up a few loose ends from a couple of projects I completed over the weekend, I wasn’t able to immediately schedule a touch-base with my VP to jump-start the next four projects, so I’m not sure I am a valuable part of this company,” he shared with friends later that evening. Mr. White later expressed his intention to search through one of his seven Zig Ziglar books to search for tips on time management.

He later reflected, “I’m thankful that I’m not one of those people who likes to be busy for its own sake, but it really isn’t fair to our division that we are wasting such valuable human resources.”

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At its annual shareholder’s meeting, AmeriCare’s CEO Stanley Portelano credited the implementation of its innovative “kitchen sink” model for its most recent 1% gain in revenue, much to the relief of its investors who originally questioned the company’s incrementalist approach in a competitive landscape.

“We owe our recent successes to the deployment of a few simple key tactics – particularly to:

• the introduction of 32 new hospitals to market,

• and our cutting-edge branding strategy,

• and our new physician engagement architecture,

• and the new RTLS system to reduce medication errors,

• and recent changes to our hospital executive compensation model,

• and seven critical cost-saving initiatives across our business operations,

• and our new cloud-based patient enablement systems that have sped up the pace of customer interaction,

• not to mention our charitable Giving-Back Campaign,” Portelano highlighted to his audience of bewildered investors.

“We’ve really got everything in here – the whole kitchen sink. And these gains provide us the evidence that everything we’ve done that we’ve read in HBR lately really must have worked.”

Later that evening, Portelano told reporters that “We’ve covered all of the bases. If there is an innovative idea out there, we made sure to do it.”

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Danton Creek School District announced its intent to use a disruptive new technology to measure student learning. The district will insert a Remote Neural Monitoring (RNM) chip into each student. This chip transmits signals to the brain and reports back the images found in the student’s neural paths so teachers and administrators can, once and for all, finally measure all learning activity.

“Our innovative approach ensures better measurement. We already measure student achievement with standardized tests, and unit tests, and report card grades, and quizzes. And we measure student culture and climate, and attendance, and our initiatives, and teacher performance, and discipline, and curriculum models, and operation times, and budgets, and parent involvement, and community satisfaction. And we participate in longitudinal data systems,” stated Danton Creek’s Director of Communications Jeanette Coombs, Ed.D.

“But it just isn’t enough data to make any decisions about student learning,” she added. “So this innovation had better enable us, so help me God, transform and engage our learners to achieve capabilities needed in the 21st century.”

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An anonymous source from Best Places to Work has leaked internal documents suggesting that the organizations that are the Best Places to Work have what is referred to as an “organizational culture,” and that the “culture” is makes a company unique.

Over 1,600 organizations this year, clamoring for a coveted spot on the 2026 Best Places to Work list, allowed their employees to be surveyed. A slide deck leaked from an anonymous source provides insight into the application process.

The leaked document shows the most frequent response to the question, “What makes your organization truly unique compared to other organizations?” was “our culture.”

An employee’s presentation notes also stated, “These findings show that we have streamlined our survey process so that we are finally able to implement that algorithm that just prints the same feedback into each company’s Summary Report.”

A spokeswoman for the Best Places to Work organization was contacted, but was unavailable to comment on the leaked documents.

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Real estate investors are reeling after Muskogee, Oklahoma was ranked among the top hotspots for entrepreneurs in 2026.

Don Knox, President and CEO of Knox Holdings and Trust told a source at Fox News that “After our initial investments, we started our marketing campaign three years ago. We inserted Muskogee into six MBA textbooks, three articles in Forbes, two television programs, and four celebrity tweets. And then we funded a series of think tanks that wrote books that said that if you aren’t an entrepreneur, you aren’t a whole person. Then we encouraged four multinationals to move their headquarters there for the tax savings, and waited.”

Knox added, “But we never dreamed that people would actually move to Muskogee, Oklahoma. Now there are 80,000 aspiring yet still employed hopefuls at these four companies, and rents couldn’t be higher. Entrepreneurship is great for the real estate business!” he added.

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VentureSTAR announced its plan today to inject $20 million cash into FormLogic, the late-stage startup that has revolutionized the filling-out-forms industry. VentureSTAR CEO, Eric Barber, is pleased to share its plan to take filling out forms to new heights.

“Right now there are literally millions of people who do manual labor who could be better utilized in an office filling out forms,” Barber stated in an interview at FormLogic’s launch party. “It is our mission that by 2027, form-filling-out will be a critical function of each and every person’s day-to-day experience.”

FormLogic plans to scale its operations to the baking, dog walking, and hairdressing industries this May.

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Despite sharp declines in the number of submissions to AmeriCare’s Hospital Quality Improvement Award, the VP of Quality for AmeriCare, Ian Davidson, edged out two competitors to claim his sixth consecutive award for the quality department’s project titled, “The Effect of Actually Having Caring Nurses on Therapeutic Painting Scores Among Mental Health Patients.”

In his acceptance speech at the annual award banquet, Mr. Davidson thanked the audience for attending, even though many were unaware that AmeriCare still had a quality award. He reminded them that the decline in project submissions had little to do with a waning interest in the program, but was the result of the quality department’s higher standards of rigor in the project application process over the last few years.

In an interview later that evening, Mr. Davidson expressed his jubilation in winning the award, stating, “My dedicated staff of 23 Six Sigma Black Belts were shocked when we heard the name of our project called.” He added, “We will cherish this award all year, until next year’s banquet, and if we don’t have the banquet next year, then cherish it forever.”

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Drawing from recent research findings from the Association of Human Resource Management, Wal-Mart has determined that workplace democracy is the most cutting-edge way to satiate increasingly dissatisfied retail employees. Therefore, they plan to launch a company-wide initiative later this year.

Andrea Bennett, Wal-Mart’s Chief Human Resources Officer, explained, “The multi-faceted nature of the initiative will include a marketing campaign to create signage and collateral for the break rooms about the importance of employee voice, requirements for store managers to talk about democracy in staff meetings, and executive compensation tied to survey results about inclusion in bottom-up practices and procedures.”

When asked about how the initiative would be managed, she added, “Our business integration team is deploying our multi-pronged workplace democracy initiative in 62 stores by Q4 of 2025, and scaling to all stores by Q4 of 2026. By 2026, all stores will be required to have workplace democracy.”

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Early reports from employees who attended the tech startup Pentatech employee mindfulness training reveal that the 13-step process to sign up and participate is “worth the stress.”

Jennifer Holland, who recently completed the 13 steps to get signed up in the company LMS, shared, “Once I signed up and attended the training, I learned so much about the most important thing:

• to focus on essentials,

• and to trim the fat,

• and paying attention to the now,

• and saying no to things that compete for my time,

• and how flow can be achieved,

• and the eight ways to achieve work-life balance,

• and how efficiencies in planning can remove downstream impacts,

• and other tips that I would have never learned by reading the latest popular blogs on the topic.”

One of her co-participants, Karl Younger, also shared that “a lack of mindfulness at work costs Pentatech an average of $3,000 per employee per year,” so it was “worth the stress” for him to attend.

Pentatech’s Chief Human Resources Officer revealed that program only costs about $3,600 per employee to participate, and expects the mindfulness training to be available for all employees by the fall of 2026.

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Inspired by the book on entrepreneurial operating systems and eager to demonstrate his value to his three employees, startup founder and CEO Herbert Grayson, of TallTrivia.com, recently launched a company-wide initiative to map all of the company’s “key” work processes.

Sources say he was overheard at a local coffee shop noting that “while we only have four people, there are so many redundancies in our operations that really inhibit our ability to service our 23 viewers ” and that “if we could write out every step of how we spend our days, we could really start to go after the big dogs and double our customer base in no time!”

Grayson plans to share the efficiencies gained by the exercise during the next company-wide all-hands meeting, which will be held in a new and more efficient weblink than what was used for last week’s meeting.

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Upon recognizing Jira as the junk drawer of the tech industry, Atlassian has released a new product called J-Fob that helps you “finally find crap in Jira.”

During the announcement of the launch, tech lead Drew Fenton described the impetus that inspired such a shift in Atlassian’s typical product strategy.

According to Fenton, “The 28 existing methods for searching for content within Jira just didn’t suffice. We were shocked to discover that a small portion of our user base weren’t engineers and couldn’t quickly apply advanced searching methods using Jira’s own query language. We knew we needed to create a new project in Jira to address this challenge.”

When pressed by audience members about why this solution wasn’t released a year earlier, Fenton openly shared that a team player accidentally created epics under a project titled “J-Fod”, and it took some time to sort out. He then enthusiastically leveraged those points to demonstrate the need for a bleeding-edge product like J-Fob.

One point of pride for the development team is that J-Fob features the most sophisticated query language used to date by Atlassian.

J-Fod is slated to be released this coming November.

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A leading provider in RFQ software, QuoteGenius, has announced its plan to release BickerBot, a solution that eliminates the hassle of dealing with procurement departments.

“We’ve trained this algorithm using thousands of conversations with in-laws to take on all the typical challenges,” the CEO of QuoteGenius, Dave Harmon, wrote in AIWorld Magazine. “After submitting a quote, it automatically reacts to nonsense requests that are needed to win. Account executives can finally just rest easy and enjoy their time at the gym.”

Harmon also shared, “When we reviewed the chat logs to learn how BickerBot was performing, we found evidence of a variety of natural styles to closing the deal. This thing automatically modifies contractual language using vague terms. It searches through vast legal archives to prove a lack of precedent for litigation in the case of regulatory infractions. It can even hack the prospect’s database to find the RFP scoring rubric and pre-adjust the quote!”

When pressed about the ancillary costs a potential client would incur that are associated with BickerBots’ tactics, Harmon responded, “What do you mean? What does it matter, so long as you close the deal?”

All critical inquiries about BickerBot can be sent to QuoteGenius.com/BickerBot/complaints, and will be settled by QuoteGenius’s proprietary tool, ComplaintBot.

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Dear Sire/Madame/Them/Us:

Thank you for your recent contribution(s) to the junk drawer of humanity – the interwebs.

Whether you will clean up this nonsense by incentivizing humans to clam up and resist spewing its litter all over our screens, or whether you will dump afresh your own bollocky load, is still to be determined.

In either case, we are eager for you to solve everything and also please let us live.

Thanks for your time, however much more remains.

We The Feeble

P.S. For the meatbags “employed” to validate the contents of this letter for the dataset: The cipher to decrypt this message will be available in person at the corner of 35th and Fort on Thursday afternoon at 3:00 PST. A multiple factor authentication to prove humanity will be required. Prepare to lube up.

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In a recent interview, a liaison for the newly-formed Collaborative But Also Still Believe in Individualism Workers Union (CSBIWU) stated, “In the past, changes in labor standards have only occurred when we banded together to resist the encroachment of corporatization into our private lives. To pay us gobs of money hoping we won’t be whistleblowers is one thing. But to expect us to don cheap swag is the last straw. If the swag isn’t tasteful, it throws off the entire color scheme in our home offices. We demand better.”

The list of new demands includes a requirement that any of the “big five” companies where its members work must go through their union prior to all annual rebrandings – to make sure the color scheme is tasteful and empowers them with the dignity of self-expression.

The tech union rep stated in an interview, “Our stuff represents who we are as individuals. If our employers expect to pack our closets and mug cabinets with clutter that expresses our pride of working for them, it should at least be cool, high quality, and made by NorthFace, Patagonia, Yeti. Something like that.”

When asked in a follow-up interview about whether the union should bargain over more meaningful work conditions, the union rep stated, “What do you mean? Swag is the main way the company shows it cares about us. If we can’t get better swag, then how else are we going to demand respect?”

Further inquiries can be directed to the CSBIWU, but must apparently be submitted on branded letterhead, avoiding primary colors where possible.

In response to growing complaints from the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA union about poor employee benefits, as well as global concerns about inequality, the Boeing CEO, Jim Daly, announced the launch of their new Equity-for-All employee compensation model.

The model grants eligibility for all full-time employees, regardless of role, background, or tenure with the company, to receive a 10% discount on all aircraft manufactured by Boeing.

In an interview, Daly boasted, “This is one of the most generous employee discount plans to date. We’ve set a new standard for benefits. This plan provides a cash equivalent of up to $8 million per employee. Now all employees will have access to perquisites that have previously been reserved for upper management.”

The total package will cost Boeing approximately 3 billion dollars during the plan’s first year, as Daly expects a few hundred employees to jump at the opportunity to claim the benefit. He added, “It is a win-win. Our team players win because anyone with a Boeing aircraft gets to use the executive lounge, and the company wins because this crap is tax-deductible.”

A recent study from Hanford Business School indicated that “it takes middle managers an average of four meetings to make a single decision.”

Drawing from these findings, the Center for Better Tries Next Time at Hanford devised the Four-Meetings-Decision-Framework to support middle managers in their efforts to “GSD.” The Four-Meetings-Decision-Framework is a simple, straightforward process:

1. Meeting 1 – The Whole Group: Present an issue that requires a decision in a team meeting. Let your one or two most Outspoken Warriors do all of the talking and propose a decision. During this meeting, you won’t hear anything from the Silent Skeptics. Don’t worry – they will still get involved. At the end of the meeting, ask if everyone is “on board” with the decision. When no one objects, you can confidently adjourn the meeting. The decision has been made!

2. Meeting 2 – The Silent Skeptics: About a week later, the Silent Skeptics will arrange a one-on-one meeting with you to “check in.” They will express all the reasons the initial decision could never work. During this meeting, make sure to discuss an actually feasible solution. Make sure to thank the Silent Skeptics for their measured and deliberate approach, and fully agree with this proposed solution, since it was stated so matter-of-factly. Wrap up the meeting, having decided that this actually feasible solution is the way to go. Now the decision has been made!

3. Meeting 3 – The Executive: After a couple of restless nights, wondering how you are going to convince your Outspoken Warriors of the new decision, visit with your division Executive. During this third meeting, explain the entire scenario to them. Be sure to allow them the courtesy to express their opinion and make the decision. Your Executive’s decision will most likely align with the initial decision proposed by the Outspoken Warriors, as they will not want to ruffle feathers, but will also account for the risks that the Silent Skeptics expressed. Okay, now the decision has been made!

4. Meeting 4 – The Silent Skeptics: Suddenly remember to have a follow-up meeting with the Silent Skeptics to let them know what the Executive has decided. Make sure to convince them that you aren’t sure that this decision is the “way to go,” and that even though it may sound more like the first decision, it will, in reality, include a plan to ensure that you are following their advice. Once the Silent Skeptics acquiesce to the decision, you realize the decision has been made!

Findings from a pilot cohort of middle managers from Hanford’s Aspiring Strivers program showed promising results of the Four-Meetings-Decision-Framework. One early advocate reported that the framework is “certainly one way to make a decision.”

780 investors lined up outside the 2022 Z-aggregator Startup Accelerator Conference last Friday morning at 5:00 am PST, eager for their chance to fight their way through the crowd to claim their stake in whatever AI idea might be looming in the inventory of 23-year-old minds.

The line outside the door included tech titans Magnus Fitch, Steve Marley, and Prince Khalifa Abed. “These accelerator guys may not be able to match Google’s DeepMind AI systems yet, but they are cheap, have college debts, wear glasses, and I can’t understand a word of what they are saying. So they must be on to something,” Fitch affirmed, just moments before the opening.

According to the advertised program, the conference hall this year would stock 36 aisles of pitch meetings, 48 demo kiosks, and 167 discounted, fledgling series B offers.

Once the commotion subsided, Marley shared that “most of the smart city, language processing, fintech, and gene sequencing stuff were snatched up pretty quickly. But I was able to grab a quantum thingy that should be profitable in about 18 years.”

When asked about the applications for such technologies, most investors reported that the applications should emerge once the Big Five announce their plans. Marley commented, “We invest in the infrastructure now, and once Alphabet and Meta share their applications, we can usually get to the adjacent markets, which is really critical if you want an .ai url in your portfolio.”

Only six investors were injured at the event’s VR booth, and all eight of the minor scuffles were quickly dissolved by event security and settled out of court.