Curt Cignetti will soon sign a new contract with Indiana that pays him at least $12.5 million per year. But after digging into the numbers, Cignetti might still be the most undervalued coach in college football (and not for the reason you might think). We all know what Cignetti has done at IU is remarkable — he turned a perennial cellar-dweller into the national championship favorite just two years after his arrival. This has transformed IU's athletic department: • Before the 2025 season even kicked off, ticket revenue for IU football surpassed $13 million. • Indiana announced a $50 million stadium naming rights deal with Merchants Bank. • Fundraising hit a record high, with billionaire IU alum Mark Cuban donating to the athletic department for the first time. But that’s the obvious stuff; Cignetti’s real impact comes in the admissions office. IU’s football team is essentially a marketing vehicle for the university — 24 million people watched them win the Rose Bowl, 18 million watched them win the Big Ten Championship, and when College Gameday visited campus, more than 2 million people watched a three-hour commercial about the school. This exposure is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and is already impacting Indiana’s finances. In 2025 alone, Indiana University set school records for total enrollment (48,626 students), freshman class size (10,127), first-year out-of-state students (4,697), and applications (73,400). Indiana University Applicants • 2020-21: 46,623 • 2021-22: 50,159 • 2022-23: 54,345 • 2023-24: 67,731 • 2024-25: 73,400 Because IU can only admit so many students, it uses excess demand to 1) shift enrollment toward out-of-state students and 2) become more selective academically. Out-of-state students now account for roughly 50% of total enrollment, with 4,697 new non-residents admitted in 2025 — about 500 more than IU’s previous record. That matters because out-of-state students pay $30,000 more per year in tuition — $12,000 for residents versus $42,000 for non-residents. 500 new out-of-state students x $30,000 tuition difference ––––––––– = $15 million annually Over four years, those students are worth $60 million more than in-state students. And since football success attracts more applicants, IU can raise its academic bar. Indiana’s Fall 2025 class had a median high school GPA of 3.94 — the highest in school history. This creates a virtuous cycle. Better sports → more applicants → better students → higher rankings → even more applicants and higher tuition revenue. This is exactly what happened at Alabama with Nick Saban, and it’s why Indiana is comfortable giving Cignetti new contracts every year. P.S. If you enjoyed this breakdown, join 135,000 others who learn about the business and money behind sports by reading my 3x weekly newsletter: https://lnkd.in/dF2E-Qc2 #sports #sportsbiz

A few years ago, I was in a high stakes meeting with colleagues from Japan. I presented my points confidently, thinking I was making a great impression. But as I scanned the room, I saw blank expressions. No nods. No engagement. Just silence. I panicked. Had I said something wrong? Was my idea unconvincing? After the meeting, one of my Japanese colleagues pulled me aside and said, “Sumit, we really want to understand you, but you speak too fast.” That was my light bulb moment. For years, I assumed that mastering English and business communication was enough to build strong global relationships. But the real challenge wasn’t just the language - it was the rate of speech! Most of us don’t realize that speaking speed varies drastically across cultures. Here’s an eye-opener: ·      In India, we typically speak at 120–150 words per minute. ·      The global standard for clear communication is around 60–80 words per minute. ·      In Japan, where English is not the first language, this rate drops even further. So, what happens when we, as fast speakers, communicate with someone who is used to a much slower pace? Our words blur together. The listener struggles to process. And instead of making an impact, we create confusion. We often assume that if people don’t understand us, we need to repeat ourselves. But the truth is, we don’t need to repeat - we need to slow down, simplify, and pause. If you work in a multicultural environment, here are three things that can dramatically improve your communication: a.   Control your pace: Consciously slow down when speaking to an international audience. What feels “normal” to you might be too fast for them. b.   Use simple language: Smaller sentences. Easier words (vocabulary). c.    Pause & check for understanding: Don’t assume silence means agreement. Ask, “Does that make sense?” or “Would you like me to clarify anything?” I’ve seen professionals struggle in global roles - not because they lack expertise, but because they fail to adjust their communication style to their audience. I’ve also seen leaders who thrive across cultures, simply because they master the art of respectful, clear, and paced communication. If you want to succeed in a global workplace, rate of speech is not just a skill - it’s a strategy. Have you ever faced challenges due to differences in speaking speed? Let’s discuss. #GlobalCommunication #CrossCulturalLeadership #EffectiveCommunication #SoftSkills #CareerGrowth #WorkplaceSuccess #HR

Montana, Maine, Alaska, Nevada, and Michigan recently joined the growing number of states with official AI guidance for K12—bringing us to 31 states and 1 U.S. territory. Common priority areas across these new state guidelines include: • Human-Centered Approach - Ensuring AI augments rather than replaces human capabilities, judgment, and decision-making, with educators remaining central to instruction • Data Privacy and Security - Protecting student data and ensuring FERPA, COPPA, and state laws • Ethical Use and Academic Integrity - Establishing clear policies on plagiarism, proper attribution of AI-generated content, and responsible use practices • Professional Development - Encouraging districts to prioritize professional learning for educators on AI tools, pedagogy, and classroom integration strategies • Transparency and Accountability - Communicating clearly with stakeholders about AI use, disclosing when AI is employed, and establishing responsibility for tool selection and outcomes • Equity and Fair Access - Ensuring all students and schools have access to AI technologies, preventing widening of the digital divide • Policy Development and Governance - Creating board-approved guidelines, acceptable use policies, and frameworks for ongoing evaluation and continuous improvement Notably, Maine and Nevada also include AI for Education resources like our Drafting a GenAI Academic Policy and AI in Education 101 for Parents guide. This state-level policy development reflects the need and activity already happening at the district level, with recent research showing that 68% of districts have purchased an AI-related tool. We're also hearing from partners that it serves as a catalyst where state guidance exists—motivating districts and schools to begin their own local AI policy development. For those who want to learn more, we’ve compiled all of the current state level guidance for K12 in a single resource which includes summaries and links for each individual state. There you can also find all of the AI for Education resources shared as part of various state level guidance, including: • Drafting a GenAI Academic Policy at Your School • AI in Education 101 for Parents • Top 5 Questions for GenAI EdTech Providers • An Essential Guide to AI for Educators (free course) • Prompt Framework for Educators: The Five "S" Model • Prompt Library for Educators • How to Use AI Responsibly EVERY Time • AI Adoption Roadmap for Education Institutions Link in the comments!

Let’s talk about hidden disabilities—ADHD, dyslexia, anxiety, and others that don’t meet the eye. Too often, these students are left to struggle because their needs aren’t immediately visible. But here’s the thing: when we ignore those needs, it’s no different from denying someone in a wheelchair access to a ramp. Think about it. Would you expect someone to climb stairs without the tools they need? Of course not. Yet we often expect students with hidden disabilities to navigate education without the accommodations that would level the playing field. It’s not fair, and it’s not right. Accommodations like extra time, clear instructions, or a quiet space aren’t “special treatment.” They’re the difference between drowning and swimming. They’re the tools these students need to show us their potential, not their struggles. I’ve seen the power of a single adjustment. They’re what happens when we meet students where they are. What if we reimagined education as a place where every student feels valued and equipped to succeed? What if we stopped seeing accommodations as “extras” and started recognizing them as essential? Here’s a question for you: Have you seen examples of simple accommodations making a big impact? Or do you think schools are doing enough to support students with hidden disabilities? Let’s share, reflect, and push for better together. Image Courtesy: No Nonsense Neurodivergent #Disability #Accessibility #SDGs #Equity #HumanRights #WeAreBillionStrong ID: Allowing a student with a hidden disability (ADHD, Anxiety, Dyslexia) to struggle academically or socially when all that is needed for success are appropriate accommodations and explicit instruction, is no different than failing to provide a ramp for a person in a wheelchair.

This Teacher Changes 30 Lives Each Morning Here's Why This Works Every morning, a teacher greets her students one by one - not with rules, but with choice: A hug, A high-five, a nod, or quiet. A ritual so simple. Yet it tells 30 children: You are seen. You are safe. You belong. Here’s what this teaches us about leadership - and how to apply it at work: 1. Honor Autonomy (Self-Determination Theory) When people get to choose how they engage, they show up with more agency. Autonomy isn’t about letting go of structure - it’s about giving room to opt in. Try this: 🔷 Let people set their own work cadence - async, deep focus, or collaborative sprints 🔷 Ask: “What support looks best for you right now?” *** 2. Create Micro-Moments of Connection (Broaden-and-Build Theory) We don’t need hour-long one-on-ones to build trust. A genuine check-in. A name spoken with intention. That’s the glue. Try this: 🔷 Pause to celebrate effort, not just outcomes - a quick voice note, a public thank-you 🔷 Remember small details - a kid’s soccer game, a partner’s surgery - and follow up *** 3. Signal Safety in Small Ways (Polyvagal Theory) The nervous system responds before the intellect does. Safety is felt first. And safe leaders create brave spaces. Try this: 🔷 Ask: “Is now a good time?” before giving feedback or asking for decisions 🔷 Stay calm and present, especially when tensions rise - your tone sets the tone *** 4. Design for Anticipatory Joy (Affective Forecasting) The brain lights up for what’s coming next. The ritual at the door gave students a reason to show up smiling. Try this: 🔷 Drop a kind, unexpected message in the team chat - just because 🔷 Celebrate mundane milestones - 100 days in the role, 50th client call, 1st brave no *** 5. Anchor Culture in Meaningful Rituals (Harvard Research on Rituals) Rituals are memory-makers. They codify values in action - they say, this is who we are. Try this: 🔷 End each quarter with storytelling: what stretched us? what did we learn? 🔷 Welcome new hires not with logistics, but with a story of your team's "why" *** This teacher didn’t redesign the curriculum. She redesigned how people enter the day. You don’t need a big title to lead like that - Just the courage to meet people at the door. 💬 What’s one ritual you’ve seen shift the energy of a space - or want to create where you work? 🔁 Repost to inspire kind actions in the workplace. 🔔 Follow Bhavna Toor for more on conscious leadership.

Continuing from last week’s post on the rise of the Voice Stack, there’s an area that today’s voice-based systems often struggle with: Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and the turn-taking paradigm of communication. When communicating with a text-based chatbot, the turns are clear: You write something, then the bot does, then you do, and so on. The success of text-based chatbots with clear turn-taking has influenced the design of voice-based bots, most of which also use the turn-taking paradigm. A key part of building such a system is a VAD component to detect when the user is talking. This allows our software to take the parts of the audio stream in which the user is saying something and pass that to the model for the user’s turn. It also supports interruption in a limited way, whereby if a user insistently interrupts the AI system while it is talking, eventually the VAD system will realize the user is talking, shut off the AI’s output, and let the user take a turn. This works reasonably well in quiet environments. However, VAD systems today struggle with noisy environments, particularly when the background noise is from other human speech. For example, if you are in a noisy cafe speaking with a voice chatbot, VAD — which is usually trained to detect human speech — tends to be inaccurate at figuring out when you, or someone else, is talking. (In comparison, it works much better if you are in a noisy vehicle, since the background noise is more clearly not human speech.) It might think you are interrupting when it was merely someone in the background speaking, or fail to recognize that you’ve stopped talking. This is why today’s speech applications often struggle in noisy environments. Intriguingly, last year, Kyutai Labs published Moshi, a model that had many technical innovations. An important one was enabling persistent bi-direction audio streams from the user to Moshi and from Moshi to the user. If you and I were speaking in person or on the phone, we would constantly be streaming audio to each other (through the air or the phone system), and we’d use social cues to know when to listen and how to politely interrupt if one of us felt the need. Thus, the streams would not need to explicitly model turn-taking. Moshi works like this. It’s listening all the time, and it’s up to the model to decide when to stay silent and when to talk. This means an explicit VAD step is no longer necessary. Just as the architecture of text-only transformers has gone through many evolutions, voice models are going through a lot of architecture explorations. Given the importance of foundation models with voice-in and voice-out capabilities, many large companies right now are investing in developing better voice models. I’m confident we’ll see many more good voice models released this year. [Reached length limit; full text: https://lnkd.in/g9wGsPb2 ]

Major update on our work: In the last few years, a flood of new research has altered the landscape of the debate around kids, smartphones, and social media. 1️⃣ First, there is now a lot more work revealing a wide range of direct harms caused by social media that extends beyond mental health (e.g., cyberbullying, sextortion, and exposure to algorithmically amplified content promoting suicide, eating-disorders, and self-harm). These direct harms are not correlations; they are harms reported by millions of young people each year. 2️⃣ Second, recent research — including experiments conducted by Meta itself — provides increasingly strong causal evidence linking heavy social media use to depression, anxiety, and other internalizing disorders. (We refer to these as indirect harms because they appear over time rather than right away). Together, these findings allow us to answer the product safety question clearly: 📣 No, social media is not safe for children and adolescents. The evidence is abundant, varied, and damning. We have gathered it and organized it in two related projects which we invite you to read, in this post: https://lnkd.in/eAvfH3aQ

I graduated from the Wharton MBA a year ago, and here’s what I wish someone had told me before I started about recruiting, mindset, and social life. If you're starting this fall, this is for you! 1️⃣ Business school is a buffet (and you'll get indigestion if you try everything) First few weeks - take stock of everything it has to offer. Internships, fellowships, clubs, accelerators, etc. Then ruthlessly prioritize. Take what serves you and leave the buffet. (You’ll still feel FOMO and take on more than you should because you “paid for it” - that’s all part of the process!) 2️⃣ Pivoting is harder than you think Most people don’t get this until it’s too late - employers don’t recruit from MBA programs because they care that you have an MBA. They do it because MBAs filter for experiences/skillsets they want. You need to show them why you can do the job. The degree just gets you in the door - use the network to get the experience and build the skills. More people than you'd think go back to their old industries. 3️⃣ You'll have your "maybe I should recruit for consulting" moment Or banking. Even if you swore you'd never. We all do. When everyone's doing it, you'll second-guess yourself. That's normal! Just remember why YOU came to school. Stick to your plan, not theirs. (Unless your plan was to recruit for consulting/banking) 4️⃣ The social scene is middle school, except people have money (but it’s not all bleak) Hundreds of type-A personalities in one place and a lot of bankers/consultants who didn’t have enough fun in their 20s = drama, hyper-socialization. Who's dating who, who got the Goldman interview, who wasn't invited to that trip…People will talk about you if you stand out (for good or bad reasons). First semester feels intense, especially if you’re an introvert. By second year, everyone chills out and you find your people. 5️⃣ You'll need to touch grass B-school is a bubble. If you're not careful, you'll think comparing signing bonuses and taking out loans to go on another trip with 20 people you just met are real life. See non-MBA friends. Call your family. There’s a hive-mindedness in business school. Don’t lose yourself in it. 6️⃣ The classes are hit or miss (so be strategic) You’ll keep some class notes for decades to come (If you’re going to Wharton - Negotiations, Legal Aspects of Entrepreneurship, Scaling Operations to name a few). You’ll throw away others before the semester is over. Talk to second-years about which classes are actually worth optimizing to get into. Bonus: Do something unexpected. Join the club you think you'd hate. Take the class outside your comfort zone. I signed up for a week-long backpacking trip in the Andes despite every instinct not to and ended up leading a trip to Antarctica my 2nd year (best MBA memory!). People getting an MBA: What's the one thing you're nervous about as you start your MBA? People who have an MBA: What’s the piece of advice you wish you got before you started?

One of India's most powerful ideas in education didn’t come from Delhi. It came from Tamil Nadu, right after COVID left the country devastated. To address the massive learning gap created by the pandemic, the TN govt launched the 'Illam Thedi Kalvi' program. Millions of kids who had fallen behind were offered after-school remedial classes. To achieve this, 2 lakh women were hired to deliver the classes. This project proved to be a massive success on multiple fronts. Learning outcomes improved by 30% and the program impacted 30 L kids. Not just that, it also provided 2 Lakh women with dignified employment and increased female labour force participation in the state, all while utilizing a mere 2% of the education budget. It’s a shining example of what happens when governments think local, act fast, and care deeply. No wonder other states are looking to replicate it. If there’s a roadmap to rebuilding India’s learning crisis, it might just start from the South.

🥦Spain is leading the way on healthy sustainable school food 🇪🇸 In 2022 Spain updated its dietary guidelines to be more in line with the latest science on healthy sustainable diets (EAT-Lancet Planetary Health Diet). Now they are pioneering implementation -- having just passed a new royal decree on school food that brings what is served in line with NDG recommendations. The aim of this decree is for all children, regardless of family income level, to have access to healthy, nutritious meals at school. 🌟Highlights 🥩Meat to be served maximum three times a week. Red meat maximum once a week, processed meats maximum twice a month 🍇Focus on local, seasonal food -- 45% fruit and veg served must be in season 🫘Ramping up legumes -- to be served 1-2 times a week minimum in a variety of ways including as primary protein source in a main, or as part of a starter or side dish. Only 14% of schools currently serve legumes once a week 🚫Limits on processed foods -- pre-prepared options like pizzas, empanadillas, and croquetas can only be served once a month, and sugar-sweetened beverages, energy drinks and processed snacks will be banned from vending machines and school cafes 🍆Fully plant-based menus available for children who want them ⏰The new decree comes into effect next term, in all 17.000 Spanish schools (primary and secondary, public and private) This is an amazing step forwards, and I'm excited to see healthy sustainable food in Spanish school canteens. To ensure the policy vision becomes a reality on the 'school floor', compliance monitoring and enforcement will be key, as well as securing catering suppliers who are able to rapidly meet these new needs. Photo credit: Manu Garcia, La voz del sur. #foodpolicy #schoolfood #healthydiets #sustainablediets #publichealth #spain