What’s up Money Moguls – my name is Ansel and I’m Signum City’s resident Animal Crossing enthusiast. I’m here to tell you why the internet is a collective bunch of friggin’ jerks who are completely wrong about our Tanuki Saint of Generosity, Tom Nook. If you’ve somehow missed it, Tom Nook has been catching a lot of heat lately for being a capitalist overlord, real estate tycoon, and even a slaver?! Atrocious and wrong. Tom Nook is a gift and I’m here to set the record straight.

With the spread of COVID-19 and the advent of shelter-in-place orders, many workplaces are shifting to completely remote work. If you’re in charge of a team making this shift to remote work, reshaping your approach to leadership will be a crucial element of your team’s success moving forward. Remote work is not business-as-usual but at home; it is fundamentally different and requires a unique approach.

Communication is the lifeblood of a meeting. When that lifeblood is flowing well, your meeting will be smooth, effective, and pleasant to be a part of. If the facilitator or participants are struggling to communicate, however, the meeting will become frustrating and ineffective. The responsibility of effective communication rests upon everyone in the meeting space, but how that responsibility is fulfilled may look different depending on the person's role.

Zayna Khayat, a Ph.D. trained biomedical scientist, is the Future Strategist at one of Canada’s largest and oldest non-profit health organizations, SE Health. She describes her job title as “a fancy word for Chief Innovation Officer.” Outside of SE Health, Zayna holds faculty positions at Singularity University and the Health Innovation School, as well as an Adjunct Professor position at Rotman School of Management. Her work is creating a better future for senior citizens and aging adults.

Meetings become derailed all the time. It doesn’t matter how perfectly crafted your agenda is, how talented or productive your team members are, or how many years of experience you have facilitating. People get distracted. People get off-task. The question is – how do you steer your meeting back in the right direction?

At this point, we’ve all had many months to become accustomed to meeting virtually. Some love it and some hate it, but either way it seems that virtual meetings are here to stay – at least, they aren’t going anywhere any time soon. If your virtual meetings still aren’t going smoothly – perhaps they lack engagement or perhaps they’re a little chaotic – it may be time to go back to basics.

Lisa Baird is a multidisciplinary designer based in downtown Oakland, California. A true jack of all trades, she is a design strategist, information architect, writer, and interactive data visualizer. It is difficult to pin down just one title to describe Lisa as a professional.

Kris Pennella, Director of Red Hat’s Open Innovation Labs, is on a mission to assist companies in getting products to market faster by transforming their organizational structures. As someone on my own mission to put a stop to bad meetings by innovating organizations’ meeting cultures, I was excited to speak with Kris about how she utilizes innovation to drive corporate cultural change.