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Every year on November 19, many countries around the world observe International Men’s Day. This holiday is not only about recognizing men’s achievements but also about highlighting their role in society, in families, and in shaping future generations.

🌍 History of the holiday

The idea of International Men’s Day emerged in the 1990s. It was founded by Dr. Jerome Teelucksingh from Trinidad and Tobago, who dedicated the date to the memory of his father — a man who embodied responsibility, honesty, and care. Since then, the celebration has spread across the globe and is now supported in dozens of countries.

💪 Values and goals

International Men’s Day addresses important issues:

• improving the health of men and boys,
• promoting positive male role models,
• fostering gender equality and mutual respect,
• highlighting fatherhood and men’s role in families,
• building a culture of support rather than competition.

The holiday reminds us that true strength lies not only in endurance but also in responsibility, care, and integrity.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Men in family and society

Today, men are recognized not only as providers or protectors but also as partners, fathers, and friends. Emotional maturity, empathy, and the ability to communicate openly are valued qualities. International Men’s Day challenges stereotypes and inspires a vision of a more balanced and supportive society.

🩺 Focus on health

One of the core missions of the day is raising awareness about men’s health. Men are less likely to visit doctors, which often leads to late diagnoses. The holiday encourages attention to both physical and mental health, reminding men that self-care is vital.

🌟 Modern meaning

International Men’s Day is a chance to say “thank you” to the fathers, brothers, husbands, friends, and colleagues in our lives. It is a day of recognition but also a day for open conversation about the challenges men face.

✨ International Men’s Day is more than just a holiday — it is an important step toward creating a fairer, kinder, and healthier world for everyone.

📈 Rethinking AI for Business: Less Complexity, More Efficiency

In the ever-evolving world of AI-driven business optimization, companies are constantly looking for smarter ways to make decisions — without adding unnecessary technical complexity. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) techniques have proven powerful, but they often come with a hidden cost: computational overhead and instability caused by their reliance on critic networks. Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) offers a refreshing shift. Originally successful in large language model alignment, GRPO brings a critic-free, cluster-based approach to reinforcement learning. It replaces heavy critic networks with lightweight group-and-action baselines, making training faster and more efficient — a huge win for businesses deploying AI in real-time systems. This article expands on earlier work exploring clustered RL policies for business applications and investigates how GRPO can be adapted to deliver personalized promotions and smarter decisions in the real world.

🤹 The Business Challenge: Many Goals, One Policy

Unlike traditional AI research problems, real-world businesses don’t have the luxury of optimizing for a single metric. A company might aim to:

• Boost revenue

• Personalize user experience

• Maintain fairness and transparency

• Stay consistent with brand voice

These goals often conflict, yet must be handled simultaneously by a single decision-making system. This is where most RL frameworks struggle. Standard models like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) tend to optimize for one dominant objective and rely on critic networks to evaluate every action — a setup that introduces delay, instability, and significant resource consumption. GRPO sidesteps these issues elegantly by leaning on group-relative comparisons within customer clusters. Instead of comparing every individual to an absolute critic estimate, the system learns by observing how similar individuals respond to actions, which dramatically simplifies the reward structure.

🧠 Why Critic-Free Learning Matters

In classic RL setups, a critic network estimates the expected value of actions, guiding the agent’s learning. But in business contexts, especially those using offline customer logs, critic learning becomes noisy, expensive, and sometimes outright misleading. GRPO removes the critic entirely. Instead, it groups users based on shared attributes (demographics, behavior, engagement level) and tracks the relative performance of actions within each group. This “in-group comparison” serves as the signal for learning — no critic needed.

Benefits include:

• Lower variance in policy gradients

• Faster convergence

• Reduced compute requirements

• Better alignment with human-level goals, like fairness across segments

These features make GRPO a strong candidate for practical, production-grade decision engines that need to run on constrained infrastructure without sacrificing performance.

🛒 Case Study: Personalized Promotions at Scale

Let’s take an e-commerce scenario: a company wants to serve personalized offers to users, balancing conversion rates with customer lifetime value and brand equity.

Traditional RL might recommend deep personalization for every individual, but that often leads to overfitting or inconsistent messaging. With GRPO, users are first clustered — say, by purchase history and browsing behavior. The algorithm then compares offer performance within each group, learning which promotions outperform the others without relying on an external critic model.

This creates a system that:

• Learns faster using real-world data

• Generalizes better across user segments

• Maintains a coherent brand experience

Importantly, this strategy works even offline, using historical logs — making it ideal for companies without access to real-time interactions.

💥 Is It All or Nothing?

Is making sustainability affordable under capitalism truly impossible? Or are we just not looking hard enough at the problem — or more importantly, at the opportunities?

Architect and sustainability advocate Smith Mordak recently raised this challenge in a thought-provoking piece, suggesting that truly ethical, sustainable, and affordable products simply cannot exist under capitalism. Mordak’s argument is rooted in a fictional — yet painfully realistic — story: an entrepreneur begins with a bold vision for a sustainable chair made from ethical materials and fair labor. But as scale increases and cost pressure mounts, the vision crumbles. Cheaper, less sustainable materials are introduced. The price goes down — and so does the mission.

Mordak concludes that capitalism itself is the culprit. It’s not just a product design issue — it’s a system design failure. The proposed solution? Rethink the entire economy: implement universal basic income, embrace alternative currencies, enable co-living models, and challenge traditional value exchange.

🧠 But Do We Have to Abandon the System?

The core question remains: Must we dismantle capitalism to achieve sustainability and affordability? The answer, especially for designers and innovators, is not so black and white. While we shouldn’t ignore the deep-rooted issues in current systems, we also can’t afford to tell the next generation of creators that the only way to act is to wait for a new economy to emerge. In fact, framing sustainability as always more expensive can discourage innovation. It boxes in designers, making them believe their only option is to create expensive, niche, eco-friendly products for wealthy customers. It limits the very kind of creative thinking needed to hack the system from the inside.

👟 Sustainability Can Be Affordable — Real-World Proof

Some brands are already proving that sustainability and affordability can coexist. Veja, the sneaker brand, is a prime example. Despite using ethically sourced materials and paying fair wages, Veja keeps prices competitive with major mainstream brands.

How? Two bold choices:

1. Zero advertising — freeing up funds typically spent on marketing.

2. Slow growth — scaling sustainably instead of chasing fast profits.

This mindset flips the typical business model, reallocating resources from brand noise to product integrity. It’s business model innovation — not utopian dreaming — that creates new possibilities. Pandora, the world’s largest jewelry company, made a similar move by switching to 100% recycled metals. Despite a $10 million cost increase, it didn’t raise prices, choosing instead to cut internal inefficiencies. These are the real-world hacks that Mordak’s argument overlooks.

🧃 Packaging, Food Waste, and Closet Apps — More Affordable Innovation

Across industries, we’re seeing other creative ways to make sustainability accessible:

• Refillable packaging: Supermarkets like Ocado and M&S offer discounts for reusable packaging — a win-win for both customers and the planet.

• Too Good to Go: This app rescues food from going to waste while helping people eat affordably.

• Digital wardrobe apps: These tools help users “shop their closet,” extending the life of clothing and reducing overconsumption.

• Beni: A free browser extension that helps people buy secondhand more easily, promoting reuse without added costs.

All of these examples show that smart design, when aligned with new digital tools and values-driven strategy, can stretch the boundaries of what’s possible — even under capitalism.

🛠 Hacking the System Starts with Mindset

Designers are more than stylists — they are systems thinkers. And while systemic transformation is essential, we shouldn’t treat today’s economy as completely immovable.

Designers should approach their work with a “system hacker” mindset, as described by von Busch and Palmas — modifying the rules, bending limitations, and finding unexpected methods to turn capitalism’s weaknesses into design opportunities. Think of it as ethical jiu-jitsu — using the system’s own force to redirect its energy.

By zooming out to see the larger economic and social context — and then zooming in to innovate at the business model level — designers can ask better questions, spot leverage points, and develop strategies that don’t just rely on higher prices as the only measure of sustainability.

True leadership isn’t about giving orders — it’s about inspiring others, listening with intention, and leading with respect, not fear.

The modern world calls for a different kind of leader. It’s no longer enough to be competent — you must also be empathetic, transparent, adaptable, and committed to creating an environment where others can grow. Leadership today is built on trust, not control; on actions, not just words.

A strong leader isn’t afraid to say, “I don’t know.” They don’t hide behind their job title — they’re willing to learn alongside their team, take ownership of mistakes, and turn setbacks into learning opportunities. They don’t demand perfection — they nurture potential. People don’t follow them out of obligation, but because they want to.

Leadership means taking responsibility — for your people, for your decisions, and for the emotional climate you create. The truest leadership often shows in the hardest moments: when things fall apart, when pressure is high, when uncertainty is everywhere. Do you bring calm? Do you bring clarity? Do you stay grounded?

Great leaders don’t always walk in front. Sometimes they walk beside. Sometimes they step back to allow others to rise. They know when to speak and when to listen. When to push and when to pause.

In today’s world, leadership is grounded in values. It’s reflected in how you give feedback, handle conflict, and support others even when it costs you something.

Leadership is a choice you make every day. It’s not about your title — it’s about who you choose to be.