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As a faculty member at the University of Texas, I often watch our football team play on fall Saturdays. During last weeks game, there was a penalty on the Longhorns’ defense. The referee called the penalty and mentioned the player who committed the infraction. Watching the replay, it was clear that the penalty was actually on a different player. No big deal, of course, because there was clearly a penalty. But, one player got called out on national television for the mistake of another. And that got me thinking about the times when someone makes a mistake at work, and then you get blamed for it. Not only can that be frustrating, but it may have implications for your annual evaluation or your job. So what should you do? The ideal way to react depends on a few factors. One is why people above you in the org chart think youre to blame. Another is your overall seniority in the organization. Why do they think it is you? It is easy to understand how a referee could call out the wrong player for a penalty in the chaos of a football game happening in real time. It is less clear why you would get blamed for a problem at work that you did not cause or contribute to. It can be helpful to get some insight into how you came to take the blame for the problem. One possibility is that nobody is sure how the problem came to be, and management has speculated that you were the source of the problem. In that case, it is important to sit down with your supervisor and discuss any involvement you may have had in the situation. If you were involved, but not the source of the error, then engage in the discussion in a spirit of understanding how you can do things differently in the future to support a better outcome or perhaps to catch an error. If you were not actually involved in the situation at all, then just clarifying your lack of participation should be enough. You should offer to help identify the source of the problem as part of this conversation. A second possibility is that you have been mistakenly identified as the individual who made a mistake, but the person responsible for it is known. In that case, it is also worth engaging with the person who made the mistake to encourage that person to come forward and accept responsibility. Most organizations would prefer that people who make mistakes own those errors so that it can become a learning opportunity. It is best for everyone involved if the person responsible for the problem steps forward. The third possibility is the most difficult one. It is possible that someone else made the mistake and has pinned the blame on you. That is unfortunate and poor collegiality. In this case, you need your receipts. Any information you have to demonstrate that you were not involved will be important. Find an ally in leadership to help you address the mistake. Focus primarily on yourself. There is a temptation to want to ensure the person who lied about you gets punished. Dont spend too much time trying to get justice. Talk to your ally about why you think you got blamed and then get back to work. Dont spend additional valuable time and effort on someone elses bad behavior. How senior are you? If youre low in the food chain of your organization, then engage in all of the steps in the previous section. You want to ensure that you dont suffer significant consequences for something you did not do. As you get more senior, the calculus changes. Certainly, you want to ensure that high-level leadership knows what is and is not your responsibility so that you dont get evaluated for the poor performance of people who dont work with you or for you. However, as you rise in the organization, your responsibility gets larger. You do bear some responsibility for the mistakes of the people who work for you. Just as you will get more credit than you deserve for the successes of your team, you will also get more blame than you deserve for the failures. If the mistake was made by one of your supervisees, dont try to evade responsibility by pinning the blame on them. Shoulder the responsibility for the error and then work with your team members to ensure that nothing like that happens again. Even when the failure lies with another adjacent team, you may still want to think about whether there are things you could do differently to decrease the chances of future errors or to minimize the damage caused by those errors. As you rise in the organization, your responsibilities influence more of what happens in the organization, and so you may benefit from taking some heat for actions that may not have been directly in your control. In those situations, have a frank conversation with leaders above you about what you think happened and what you believe can be done differently to avoid problems like that in the future. When you focus constructively on what comes next, you can develop a reputation for being a problem-solver rather than an excuse-maker.
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E-Commerce
Some innovative products are designed to solve a specific pain point for consumers, while others will address a problem they dont even realize they have. Take soggy sandwiches, for example. A focus group wouldnt necessarily highlight the need for a cooler that keeps sandwiches from getting soggybut once the problem was identified, it helped inform the design of Ninjas line of FrostVault coolers, according to Michelle Crossan-Matos, the chief growth officer of SharkNinja. Engineers and inventors are steeped in data that they can then leverage along with insight and empathy, in order to create the wide range of innovative products SharkNinja has become known for, Crossan-Matos said during a panel discussion this week at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York. It’s the marriage of intuition and data that makes all the difference, she said. Data insights Sometimes, customer insight causes a company to shift its focus, as was the case for Sunday. When the company was founded in 2018, the initial goal was to create a non-toxic, natural line of lawn care products, to serve as an alternative to the conventional legacy products. That was before realizing that homeowners didnt know how to care for their yards, said Brad Smith, the companys president. We learned pretty quickly that it wasn’t just enough to develop a good, solid non-toxic product, Smith told the audience at the panel. We also had to invest in relationships with these customers and provide content and personalized guidance to make them successful using our product in their yards. Sunday has since expanded how it collects information that will inform its product strategy, including gathering soil samples from customers to be added to its worlds largest soil database. That wealth of data also informs an AI tool called Sunny, Smith said: Its us engaging and getting very close with the customer and trying to solve their unique problems in their yard. For Pinterest, user data also informs the companys annual Pinterest Predicts report, which has an accuracy rate of about 85% for what trends will be popular in the future, according to Malik Ducard, the companys chief content officer. By aggregating what users save, pin to boards, or create on the site, that helps inform what people are interested in nowand the biggest trends that have not yet happened, he added. Those are the types of signals that we focus the mathematics of our systems on, because what we find is that that then drives higher quality experiencesmore about time well spent, than time just simply spent or poorly spent, Ducard said. Oh, the humanity! But its important to add a human touch in deciding what to do with the insights that data provides. The data don’t make the decisions, and the data doesn’t come out of the blueits powered and informed by people, Ducard said. Remembering that puts data and intuition less at odds, because ultimately the data goes up to a point and then we need to make a decision. Sunday invests heavily in both the data and science necessary to offer a custom prescription for a lawn care solution to its customer. But teams must leave room to be able to constantly make on-the-fly decisions, Smith said: The world doesnt wait for data analytics. For SharkNinja, spending time with consumers to really understand their needs, pain points, and what problems they encounter with products is also an integral part of the process. At the panel, Crossan-Matos recounted experiences that still give her goosebumps, that highlight specific pain points that the companys products could solve. At every point, we’re iterating and learning, she said.
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E-Commerce
Chipmaker Nvidia will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI and provide it with data center chips, the companies said on Monday, a tie-up between two of the highest-profile leaders in the global artificial intelligence race. The deal, which will see Nvidia start delivering chips as soon as late 2026, will involve two separate but intertwined transactions, according to a person close to OpenAI. The startup will pay Nvidia in cash for chips, and Nvidia will invest in OpenAI for non-controlling shares, the person said. The first $10 billion of Nvidia’s investment in OpenAI, which was most recently valued at $500 billion, will begin when the two companies reach a definitive agreement for OpenAI to purchase Nvidia chips Nvidia did not respond to immediate requests for clarification about the deal. The pact is among a spate of agreements between major technology players that includes years of investment in OpenAI from Microsoft and a deal last week between Nvidia and Intel to collaborate on AI chips. The two companies signed a letter of intent for a landmark strategic partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia chips for OpenAI’s AI infrastructure. They aim to finalize partnership details in the coming weeks, with the first deployment phase targeted to come online in the second half of 2026. “Everything starts with compute,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement. “Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future, and we will utilize what we’re building with Nvidia to both create new AI breakthroughs and empower people and businesses with them at scale.” Nvidia shares were up 4.4% while shares of Oracle, which partners with OpenAI, SoftBank, and Microsoft on the $500 billion Stargate AI data center project, gained nearly 5%. Nvidia’s investment comes days after it committed $5 billion to struggling chipmaker Intel. OpenAI and its backer, Microsoft, also announced earlier this month that they have signed a non-binding deal for new relationship terms that would allow for OpenAI’s restructuring into a for-profit company. Nvidia also backed OpenAI in a $6.6 billion funding round in October 2024. However, the world’s most valuable firm making another sizeable investment in OpenAI could lead to antitrust scrutiny. The Trump administration has taken a much lighter touch on competition issues compared with former President Joe Biden’s antitrust enforcers. In June 2024, the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission reached a deal that cleared the way for potential antitrust investigations into the dominant roles that Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia play in the artificial intelligence industry. Arsheeya Bajwa, Deepa Seetharaman, and Stephen Nellis, Reuters
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E-Commerce
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