Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Mohamed Salah have spent the past two decades defining one of soccer’s greatest eras. Now, as the 2026 FIFA World Cup marks Ronaldo’s final appearance at the tournament and another defining moment in the careers of Messi and Salah, they’re also preparing for life beyond the pitch.

Before Messi’s Argentina beat Salah’s Egypt in one of the tournament’s best matches on Tuesday, Salah was asked which player he would choose for one final “last dance” from a generation that included both Messi and Ronaldo. He chose Messi without hesitation. The answer carried extra weight given that Ronaldo had already confirmed this would be his final FIFA World Cup before Portugal’s Round of 16 defeat to Spain, bringing an end to his six-tournament World Cup career.

Away from football, however, the players’ futures are beginning to diverge. Messi and Ronaldo have increasingly embraced equity stakes in AI, health tech, and startup companies, while Salah has largely stuck to a more traditional mix of commercial partnerships, property, and philanthropy.

That shift has accelerated over the past decade as venture capital firms and startups increasingly seek celebrity investors who bring more than money. A footballer with hundreds of millions of followers can offer global reach, credibility, and distribution that few traditional investors can match.

“The shift from traditional sponsorship agreements towards equity stakes and startup investments reflects a broader focus on long-term wealth creation and financial security beyond an athlete’s playing career,” says Kamraan Khan, a partner at Dubai-based firm Archers Valuation and Advisory.

Over the past decade, elite athletes have increasingly traded one-off endorsement fees for ownership stakes in companies, joining a broader trend that has seen sports stars become investors rather than just brand ambassadors. In October 2022, Messi launched Play Time HoldCo, a San Francisco–based investment firm alongside entrepreneur Razmig Hovaghimian, founder of video-streaming platform Viki, which had earlier been acquired by Rakuten. The firm’s goal is simple: invest in companies operating across sports, media, and technology.

“While sponsorships typically generate income during an athlete’s peak earning years, equity investments can provide the potential for capital appreciation and, where applicable, future dividend income, helping to build more sustainable wealth after retirement,” notes Khan.

Initially reported to be targeting roughly $200 million, Play Time has since assembled a portfolio that increasingly resembles a Silicon Valley venture fund.

Per Play Time’s website, its bets include FieldAI, Fish Audio, World Labs, Perceptron, Intangible, and SuperAnnotate, alongside sports-specific investments in the FIFA-licensed mobile game Matchday and the memorabilia marketplace AC Momento.

Outside Play Time, Messi also holds an equity stake in fantasy football platform Sorare, which lets users buy and trade officially licensed digital player cards, and joined the ownership group of KRÜ Esports, the Valorant and Rocket League organization founded by his former Argentina teammate Sergio Agüero. His three-year, reportedly $20 million deal to serve as global ambassador for the blockchain fan-token platform Socios.com is a paid promotional contract, not an undisclosed equity stake.

As part of his landmark 2023 move to Inter Miami, Messi received an ownership component alongside his salary and signing bonus—an unprecedented arrangement in Major League Soccer. While reports have speculated about the size of that stake, neither the club nor MLS has publicly confirmed the details.

Sportico valued Inter Miami at $1.45 billion in February 2026, up 22 percent year-on-year and the highest valuation in MLS history.

If Messi’s investments reflect Silicon Valley’s AI boom, Ronaldo’s are centered almost entirely on health technology—an area that aligns closely with the personal brand he has spent decades cultivating around fitness and longevity.

Ronaldo became an investor in Whoop—the wearable fitness tracker and health analytics company—in May 2024, a deal that Whoop itself called “one of Ronaldo’s most significant investments to date,” after he had already been a paying member for years. “Whoop has become one of the most important tools I use to support my long-term health,” he said at the time. Whoop’s foray into the UAE is backed by both the Qatar Investment Authority and Mubadala Investment Company.

HubSpot has scrapped a plan to use its customers’ data for a new AI feature, just four days after announcing it. The CRM firm changed its terms on 1 July to pool customer data, including contact and employer details, for a tool that finds sales leads, The Information reported.

It opted users in by default. The backlash came at once.

The objection was less about AI than about consent. Customers argued that the data they had built up in HubSpot belonged to them, not to the company to share around. HubSpot set the default to opt-out. It enrolled everyone unless they hunted down a toggle. That turned a product tweak into a trust problem.

A four-day retreat

The revolt played out mostly on LinkedIn, where sales leaders and RevOps teams piled in. Some said they would switch providers. Within days HubSpot folded.

Chief product and technology officer Duncan Lennox apologised and called the change “a mistake”. He said HubSpot would not implement the new terms, and that any future use of customer data would be opt-in. The plan, in short, is dead.

The bigger nerve it hit

The speed of the climbdown says as much as the policy. Software firms are racing to bolt AI onto their products, and customer data is the obvious fuel. HubSpot is not the first to get burned. Slack drew fire in 2024, and Zoom in 2023, over terms that let them train AI on customer data. What stung this time is that CRM data is a company’s competitive asset, not just its files.

It also shows where power sits. In an era when a business can rebuild a workflow with cheap AI tools, big software vendors have less room to dictate terms. Annoy the customer base and it has more exits than it used to.

Why it matters

The episode is small, but it is a marker. Every SaaS company is weighing how to feed its AI without spooking the people who pay for it. HubSpot just ran the experiment in public, and learned that “opt-out” is now a fighting word.

ai and ml

Third-party testing shows heterogeneous compute platform combining H200s and SN50 RDUs churning out 763 tok/s in MiniMax M2.7

Intel’s big bet on SambaNova appears to be paying off in a big way. This week, the AI chip startup shared benchmark results showing its latest generation of AI acceleration, which combines Nvidia GPUs and the company’s accelerators, beating GPU-only inference platforms by a wide margin.

The testing, conducted by the AI benchmarking gurus at Artificial Analysis, showed SambaNova’s SN50-series accelerators, announced in February, churning out 763 tokens a second in MiniMax M2.7 at short context lengths (10,000 input tokens) — several times faster than competing inference providers running on GPUs alone.

Meanwhile, for longer context lengths, the company says that its platform is able to sustain more than 450 tokens a second. 

This feat was accomplished by combining Nvidia GPUs with SambaNova Reconfigurable Dataflow Units (RDUs) to form a heterogeneous inference platform.

Specifically, the computationally intensive prefill phase of the inference pipeline, during which prompts are processed and key value caches are generated, was handled by four Nvidia H200 GPUs.

Meanwhile, memory-bandwidth-bound decode operations, where output tokens are generated, were done on a single SambaNova rack containing 16 SN50 accelerators.

Disaggregating prefill from decode has become a key lever for reducing token costs for long-running AI agents, like code assistants. Nvidia initially demonstrated this with its NVL72 rack systems, by varying the ratio of GPUs used for prefill versus decode. The company further disaggregated this with its Groq-based LPX racks revealed at GTC this spring. Since then, just about everyone from AMD to AWS and Cerebras has announced some kind of disaggregated or heterogeneous inference platform using one or more accelerators.

With SambaNova’s latest performance figures, the startup hopes to demonstrate how customers can breathe new life into their aging GPU fleets by using its systems as decode accelerators. And because its systems are air-cooled, they can be deployed in existing datacenters — something that can’t be said of Nvidia’s latest generation of Rubin GPUs, which absolutely need liquid cooling.

SambaNova plans to show off even more powerful inference configs, with 128 and eventually 256 accelerators to demonstrate its ability to maintain high token generation rates at high throughput. As we’ve previously explored, this is something that GPUs alone have historically struggled with and one of the key drivers behind Nvidia’s Groq acquihire late last year.

The results come just a month after SambaNova and Intel announced Vector Core Compute would be among the first to deploy the combined GPU + RDU offering with TogetherAI as their first large-scale customer.

Ramping production of any chip isn’t a cheap prospect, but for its fifth-gen part, capital shouldn’t be an issue. On Wednesday, SambaNova completed the first close of a $1 billion Series F funding round led by General Atlantic, giving the AI chip startup an $11 billion valuation. ®

Malicious packages on the Node Package Manager (npm) and the Python Package Index (PyPI) delivered stealer malware to developers and users of Paysafe, Skrill, and Neteller payment applications.

The threat actor published at least 17 malicious packages simultaneously, each tasked to exfiltrate credentials and access tokens to a command-and-control server hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

All three payment platforms are popular, with Paysafe being mostly used by e-commerce sites and online marketplaces, gaming platforms, travel businesses, and financial services or software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers.

Skrill and Neteller are digital wallets and money transfer services used in online betting, cryptocurrency exchanges, and on Forex trading platforms.

Software developers working on such platforms integrate Paysafe’s SDKs into apps and websites to implement a secure payments and funds management system.

According to application security company Socket, these developers are the targets of the latest campaign via the following packages:

1. npm/paysafe-checkout
2. npm/paysafe-vault
3. npm/neteller
4. npm/skrill-payments
5. npm/paysafe-js
6. npm/paysafe-api
7. npm/paysafe-node
8. npm/paysafe-cards
9. npm/paysafe-fraud
10. npm/paysafe-kyc
11. npm/skrill
12. npm/skrill-sdk
13. npm/paysafe-payments
14. pypi/paysafe-kyc
15. pypi/paysafe-payments
16. pypi/paysafe-sdk
17. pypi/paysafe-api

The researchers say that the 13 npm packages published four malicious versions, from 1.0.0 to 1.0.3, whereas the PyPI packages published only one malicious version, 1.0.0.

All 17 packages pretend to be legitimate payment SDKs, even exposing the expected APIs, but instead return fake success responses rather than communicate with Paysafe’s backend services.

The real purpose is credential theft, as the embedded malicious code searches compromised environments for secrets such as tokens, passwords, and API keys.

According to Socket, the exfiltrated data includes Paysafe API keys, AWS keys, GitHub tokens, npm tokens, hostname, username, and metadata about API usage.

The data theft module in the npm packages attempts exfiltration only if a Paysafe API key is present and activates when the fake SDK is called.

The PyPI packages automatically activate the data theft routine upon initialization and do not require a Paysafe API key to be present at all.

Socket’s analysis of the malware reveals that it includes some rather basic anti-analysis features, stopping execution if it detects fewer than 2 CPU cores or if the hostname or username contains cues indicating a virtualized environment.

It is unclear who is behind this campaign, but Socket’s report highlights some attributes suggesting that the threat actor is sufficiently technical and may return in a more organized way.

The researchers warn that the attacker’s ability to pivot between ecosystems may make it more difficult to defend if there is only one ecosystem of visibility.

If any of the listed packages were installed, developers are recommended to immediately “rotate all secrets on any machine that imported or executed this package.”

 The researchers also advise searching dependency trees for the package names used in the campaign and deny any requests for them at the registry proxy level.

It is also recommended to look in the logs of Continuous Integration (CI) systems for PAYSAFE_API_KEY in combination with any of the listed package names.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.

Get the whitepaper

A semi-trailer that helps propel itself entered commercial road testing in late May, when a powertrain kit developed by Nivalis Energy Europe, headquartered in Luxembourg with engineering operations in Germany, was fitted to a trailer supplied by Amsterdam-based TIP Group. The self-powered trailer was handed over to German transport operator Sommer for use in its working fleet.

The Nivalis Powered Trailer Kit centers on an electric axle co-developed with Wiehl, Germany–based running gear specialist BPW, rated at 50 kilowatts peak, capable of both propulsion assistance and regenerative braking. That axle draws on a 60-kilowatt-hour, 400-volt lithium-ion battery pack charged from three sources: the axle itself during braking and deceleration, a full-rooftop array of photovoltaic panels generating up to 3.7 kilowatts-peak, and a 32-amp, three-phase AC grid connection available during parking stops. The driver’s only window into the system is a small display readable from the cab’s side mirror that shows the system status and battery charge level. Nothing about the trailer’s handling or licensing requirements changes.

The partners project savings of up to 7,000 liters of diesel per trailer per year, which is enough to keep about 19 tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the air. These figures are based on a trailer running 100,000 kilometers annually at payloads between 20 and 24 tonnes, on a mix of long-haul and hub-to-hub routes.

Pavel Gilman, vice president of sales and marketing at Nivalis, breaks down where those savings come from: roughly 30 to 35 percent from the electric axle during braking and deceleration, 11 to 15 percent from the rooftop solar panels, and the remainder (roughly half) from grid charging during parking stops. The pilot is planned to run for more than a year, spanning multiple seasons. The retrofit cost has not been disclosed, and the pilot is running on a single trailer. But the underlying assumptions are now on the table and they represent a specific, high-utilization use case (meaning a truck that’s almost always on the move, filled to capacity with freight) not a universal one.

Across Europe and North America, a growing number of companies have concluded that electrifying the trailer, rather than replacing the tractor unit, may be the fastest and most cost-effective path to decarbonizing long-haul freight. A new battery-electric heavy truck carries a high upfront cost and demands charging infrastructure that most freight corridors do not yet reliably provide. A retrofit kit fitted to an existing trailer is meant to sidestep both problems.

The question the industry has been working to answer is whether the energy harvested from regenerative braking, rooftop solar, and grid charging in short bursts when the vehicle is parked for loading and unloading is enough to produce savings that recover the kit’s cost in a reasonable timeframe. Several companies now believe the answer is yes, and they are accumulating field data to prove it—though not all of them are going about it the same way.

Trailer industry places its bets

The competitive landscape has taken shape most visibly in Germany. Trailer Dynamics, an Aachen-based company, has conducted field tests with BMW Logistics, DB Schenker, Duvenbeck, and Volkswagen Konzernlogistik, reporting average fuel savings of around 40 percent for diesel tractor combinations, substantially higher than the up to 18 percent reduction implied by the Nivalis projection. The difference traces directly to battery size, but Trailer Dynamics frames the choice as an economic question rather than an architectural one.

“The discussion should not start with battery size, but with the economics of the transport operation,” the company said in response to written questions. “There is no single battery capacity that is universally right for every fleet.”

Trailer Dynamics’s modular system offers three configurations ranging from 187 to 551 kilowatt-hours, sized to match route profile, annual mileage, payload, and charging access. The M300 version, whose designation reflects the capacity of its 300-kilowatt-hour lithium iron phosphate battery supplied by Chinese battery manufacturer CATL, adds approximately four tonnes to the trailer, roughly three times the one-to-1.4–tonnes added to a trailer by the Nivalis system.

Both companies’ systems would extend the range of a battery-electric tractor by reducing the energy demand on the tractor’s motor. But Trailer Dynamics explicitly targets that use case, claiming its self-propelled trailer yields combined ranges of up to 850 kilometers—enough to eliminate intermediate charging stops on many long-haul routes. Nivalis has not published range extension figures for electric tractor combinations, and its smaller battery and peak lower output suggest the effect would be more modest.

That higher energy storage capability widens the addressable market for Trailer Dynamics considerably and helps explain the investment flowing into the self-propelled trailer space. In November 2025, the European Investment Bank extended a €25 million loan to the company, backed by the European Union’s InvestEU program, to support commercialization. Trailer Dynamics says it plans to begin industrial-scale production in 2028, with adoption expected to accelerate as European carbon dioxide reduction requirements tighten toward 2030.

ZF, the German automotive supplier, entered the space with its TrailTrax system, using an electric axle rated at up to 210 kilowatts continuous power. ZF claims that, between onboard battery storage and energy recovered via regenerative braking, the self-propelled trailer system yields up to 16 percent in energy and carbon dioxide savings when combined with an ICE powered truck. The company also says TrailTrax can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 40 percent with opportunistic plug-in charging. Trailer manufacturers Kässbohrer and Krone have adopted the platform, as has BPW—the same running gear specialist co-developing the Nivalis axle.

In North America, Range Energy is developing a system with up to 300 kilowatt-hours of onboard energy capacity, compatible with diesel, battery-electric, and hydrogen fuel cell tractors. Range, which has announced a partnership with ZF, to help drive the development and adoption of the Range eTrailer System within the North American commercial trucking industry, is now equipping its trailers with ZF’s AxTrax 2 e-axle for battery-powered propulsion. Range Energy has a separate pilot agreement with DB Schenker, the German logistics company that is also among the European operators that tested the Trailer Dynamics system. Range and DB Schenker say they plan to deploy a powered trailer in commercial trucking operations in North America, with first deliveries scheduled for later this year. The breadth of activity across continents reflects a field that has moved well past the question of whether powered trailers work. The argument now is about which architecture works best and at what cost.

What the field does not yet have is a common standard for measuring and reporting savings. The figures from various pilots—an average of 40 percent from Trailer Dynamics, up to 18 percent implied by the Nivalis projection—reflect different routes, loads, seasons, and battery sizes. In some cases, they represent short validation runs rather than sustained operational data. Fleet operators evaluating competing systems are working with numbers that are difficult to interpret and impossible to rank against one another.

Both architectures reduce available payload, but by very different margins. The M300’s roughly four-tonne addition dwarfs the one-to-1.4-tonne addition of the Nivalis system. Trailer Dynamics argues the weight penalty is largely academic in practice, because more than 90 percent of trailer movements are constrained by cargo volume before they approach legal weight limits. Under current European regulations, both systems reduce payload on a one-for-one basis. Frameworks under discussion would change that. New rules could allow up to four extra tonnes for electric trucks, with proposals to extend the provision to electric trailers. If amended, the payload effect would turn positive for both systems. Until then, every kilogram of kit is a kilogram unavailable for freight.

Small versus large battery systems

The choice between large-battery and small-battery powered trailers is a bet on which cost will fall faster: battery pack prices or the cost of grid charging infrastructure. A large-battery system delivers higher savings but requires reliable charging access across the operating cycle. If infrastructure buildout stalls—as it has repeatedly in heavy-duty transport—operators face the same dependency problem that has slowed battery-electric truck adoption. The Nivalis architecture hedges against that risk: its 32-amp connection requires only a standard industrial outlet, and the solar array and regenerative braking handle significant energy input without infrastructure at all. Gilman frames the design philosophy in terms of the industry it serves.

“Logistics lives with low margins,” he said. “We are focused on the product which fits the industry technically and financially. It overcomes the capital expenditure hurdle and maximizes financial benefit by adding sources of energy which are symbiotic to each other.” And because Nivalis’s axle is comparatively light, he says, operators won’t be forced to reduce payload.

Trailer Dynamics sees it differently.

“Long-haul transport will increasingly move toward depot-based and destination-based charging models,” says Michael W. Nimtsch, the company’s Managing Director. “The question is not how small a battery can be made, but how much economic value each additional kilowatt-hour can generate over the life of the vehicle.”

On solar and regenerative recovery, Nimtsch argues both are useful complements to stored battery energy rather than substitutes for it.

“Compared with the daily energy demand of a long-haul truck, solar generation remains relatively modest,” he says. The Nivalis energy breakdown supports that view in relative terms: Grid charging contributes the largest share of projected savings, regenerative braking second, and solar third. That hierarchy means performance depends more on charging access during dwell time than the multi-source framing might suggest even if that access requires only a standard industrial outlet.

Trailer Dynamics prices its system between €145,000 and €195,000 and targets a payback period of no more than five years. Nivalis targets five to six years at current costs, falling to three to four years as volumes grow. Asked exactly what the price tag says, the company declined to answer. The minimum annual savings needed, Gilman said, is between €5,000 and €6,000 per trailer. Until someone publishes a full year of results from a trailer running in normal commercial rotation, fleet operators cannot answer the two questions that actually drives adoption: What does this cost, and when does it pay back?

On Wednesday, the US Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with tractor manufacturer John Deere over a 2025 lawsuit that accused the company of behavior that “unlawfully acquired and maintained monopoly power in markets for repair services for Deere farm equipment.”

The full statement lays out obligations for John Deere’s repair services, requiring the company to give farmers and third-party repair shops access to the same equipment and repair resources it provides to official John Deere dealers. This includes software capabilities, such as reading and resetting codes and pairing with other software, which customers have long had limited access to, creating delays when diagnosing equipment problems. Delayed fixes can mean delayed harvests, which many farmers saw as a fundamental threat to their livelihoods.

Under the agreement, John Deere will be required to provide this level of access, equipment, and services for the next 10 years, monitored by the FTC.

“After years of fighting for the right to repair, this order gives farmers real hope,” Willie Cade, a board member of the repair advocacy organization Repair.org, wrote in an email to WIRED. “But promises on paper must become tools in farmers’ hands, and we will be watching implementation every step of the way.”

Farmers have been fighting against John Deere’s repair practices for more than a decade, but the FTC began its fight in 2021, led by then-chair Lina Khan under the Biden administration. In April, John Deere agreed to pay out $99 million in a separate class action lawsuit brought against the company in 2022. Repair and consumer advocates say this FTC settlement does far more to help farmers than a payout did.

John Deere has maintained that it already has robust repair resources for its customers, including service manuals and diagnostic equipment. In John Deere’s press release, the company says the settlement is in line with what it has been doing all along, saying that “the agreement reinforces Deere’s continued innovation toward more flexible repair options, emphasizing increased access and transparency for customers. It formalizes Deere’s ongoing commitment to expanding access to diagnostic and repair tools.”

The consumer advocacy group US PIRG issued a statement about the settlement, citing the organization’s 2022 official complaint to the FCC about John Deere’s repair policies.

“We should be able to fix our own stuff,” wrote PIRG’s Right to Repair campaign director Nathan Proctor. “This settlement from the FTC gives farmers more and better options to repair their equipment. It is a win for farmers and all of us who want a more fixable world.”

Working in isolation, especially for leaders, is rapidly becoming an outmoded idea. The modern era is defined by rapid technological advancements and increasingly complex, collaborative global challenges. In this environment, leadership can no longer be approached as an individual pursuit.

Instead, leadership must be a collaborative effort in which knowledge, responsibility, and innovation are continuously exchanged across teams, roles, and areas of expertise. Success depends on the ability to foster connection, leverage diverse perspectives, and work collectively toward shared outcomes.

The shift is especially important in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields.

IEEE is bringing together emerging professionals and established experts and leaders at the inaugural IEEE International Leadership Conference to address the need for cross-generational knowledge-sharing and to equip professionals with tools for collaborative leadership. Honoring Expertise, Accelerating Potential is the theme of the ILC, scheduled for 3 and 4 October in Budapest.

The conference is expected to focus on how leaders can share information across roles, adapt to rapid technological advancements, and build stronger, more connected professional communities. Through discussions, panels, and interactive sessions, attendees can examine how collaboration across experience levels and disciplines can strengthen decision-making and foment innovation.

“There are several factors driving this shift [in leadership], including accelerating technological development cycles, the need to build public trust, and the large percentage of the STEM workforce approaching retirement,” says Vickie Ozburn, conference cochair. “Progress in STEM now depends less on individual brilliance and more on the ability to transfer knowledge, adapt, and make decisions that integrate technical expertise with ethical and social considerations.”

From hierarchies to shared leadership

Instead of traditional corporate models rooted in hierarchy and individual advancement, a more dynamic framework is taking shape, one that views leadership as a shared ecosystem built on mentorship, continuous learning, and intentional knowledge transfer.

It means recognizing that professional development is no longer a one-directional flow of experience from senior professionals to newcomers. Instead, it thrives as a multidirectional exchange. When emerging professionals, mid-career managers, and seasoned experts including retirees are brought together, the result is not only richer dialogue but also more resilient and well-informed decision-making. A cross-generational dialogue enables organizations to honor what has worked, critically assess what has failed, and thoughtfully shape what needs to evolve.

Bridging experience to drive future leadership

Howard Wolfman, cochair of the IEEE ILC, underscores the importance of historical perspective in leadership development, invoking George Santayana’s enduring insight: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

“In STEM especially, this principle carries significant weight,” says Wolfman, an IEEE life senior member and the founder and principal of Lumispec Consulting, in Northbrook, Ill. “Technological innovation doesn’t happen all of a sudden; it builds on decades of research, lessons learned, and accumulated knowledge. When leaders actively connect insights from across experience levels, they gain a more complete understanding of both opportunity and risk.”

That perspective reinforces the need for greater collaboration across roles and experience levels, ensuring that knowledge is not lost and is continuously built upon and applied in new ways. In this way, leadership development becomes a continuous, interconnected process rather than a series of isolated stages.

STEM careers are no longer defined by linear progression but by evolving contributions, in which each phase adds value to the field’s broader advancement.

What the changes mean for leaders today

Adopting a new leadership paradigm requires a shift in mindset across all levels. For senior leaders, success is defined not only by what they have built but also by the people they mentor and the knowledge they pass forward. Their legacy lies in enabling future leaders to succeed.

For emerging young professionals, innovation becomes more informed and impactful when it is grounded in historical context and informed by those who have already navigated similar challenges.

“Technological innovation doesn’t happen all of a sudden; it builds on decades of research, lessons learned, and accumulated knowledge. When leaders actively connect insights from across experience levels, they gain a more complete understanding of both opportunity and risk.”—Howard Wolfman, cochair of the IEEE International Leadership Conference

For organizations, cross-generational collaboration should be recognized as a strategic advantage, not merely an aspiration. Creating environments where knowledge flows freely and diverse perspectives are actively integrated is essential for long-term success.

The evolution reframes the distinction between management and leadership.

“A leader does the right thing, and a manager does things right,” Wolfman says. As the environment continues to shift, doing the right thing increasingly depends on drawing insights from across generations and experiences.

Building future-ready leadership pipelines

To build leadership pipelines capable of sustaining innovation and trust, organizations must begin asking more intentional questions:

• How do we create systems where knowledge sharing is continuous rather than episodic?
• How do we elevate emerging voices earlier in their careers?
• How do we ensure that experienced professionals remain engaged and valued contributors?
• How do we design leadership development as a collaborative, inclusive process rather than a competitive one?

Ultimately, leadership cannot be tied solely to titles or tenure. It is about contributing to a continuum in which each generation strengthens the next.

The IEEE ILC attendees are likely to leave the event with new insights and with a transformed perspective: Leadership is not about waiting for advancement or recognition; it is about engaging in an exchange of knowledge, responsibility, and vision, where the strength of the whole depends on the contributions of every generation.

Registration for the conference opens soon.