There are two great recent articles from HBR that you should take some time to read this week.  The first, about finding purpose at work, dives into how we always have purpose, or our personal WHY, drive our work, not our jobs or careers.  They recommend taking the time to journal for a few weeks and really keeping track of how much time you spend in the job, career, and purpose mindsets.  That’s a great exercise, but you know what?  First you have to understand your purpose, your why.  That’s a topic I’m pretty passionate about, as anyone who knows me would tell you.  Whether you know it or need to discover it, plaster that thing in front of you every day and spend time in your purpose with intent. Oh, it seems science also tells us that complaining is bad for you.  Go figure.

The second HBR article looks into whether lean manufacturing can put an end to sweatshops.  The author of the article, Greg Distelhorst, spent time tracking the manufacturing practices of Nike’s apparel supply chain.  Nike’s initiative sought to improve manufacturing operations — to deliver high-quality products in relatively small batches and on shorter production deadlines.  Sounds a bit like the model Zara uses.  While this is a start to this research, Distelhorse and his collaborators did find that violations of labor standards did fall by manufacturers incorporating lean principles, pursuing new managerial practices, and educating their workforce.

If you’ve not really been tracking what’s happening in South America, there’s Brazil to worry about and now Venezuela.

Snapchat may seem like a great deal of hype to many, but Fortune this week looks into why their impressive growth curve may justify that $20 billion valuation.

Disruption as a strategy has been touted out there a bit, with disruptive innovation being pivoted off of by many. There’s an interesting blog this week from Jerry Neumann on why disruption is not a strategy.

Microsoft is turning the tables this time on the Federal Government in the U.S. by suing over privacy issues and security in light of ongoing activity by the Justice Department.  As this article from the Wall Street Journal notes, over the past three years, Microsoft has sued the federal government four times, challenging law-enforcement efforts to secretly search customer data on servers at Microsoft’s data centers in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Forbes recently sat down with Google CEO Sundar Pichai for a conversation around AI, hardware, monetization, and the future of search.  Go check it out here.

There’s a great article over at Bloomberg this week about the prosecution of insider trading by the Federal Government.  It’s an interesting story, and better still is how the infographics change as you scroll through the story.

Variety, of all sources, had a really great article summarizing the many ways in which Marissa Meyer has failed Yahoo and its shareholders since her reign began just three years ago.  From the sense-lacking purchase of Tumblr for over $1B to squandering the digital properties Yahoo did have, Meyer has a lot to answer for as Yahoo puts itself up for sale to the highest bidder.

I used to have a Blackberry, and so did everyone with whom I worked.  Heck, I know some folks that are still adamant users today.  Lately, though Blackberry has been used as a term of disparagement, especially in comparison with Apple.  Thing is, though, that Apple’s position may be much worse than Blackberry’s ever have been if they refuse to move away from their closed systems.  Speaking of Apple, let’s take a moment and reflect that we don’t all need to aspire to their design practices.

Two news articles of interest this week about Uber: the first, Wall Street taking an interest in Uber’s car leasing plans with Goldman Sachs leading the charge with a $1 billion line of credit.  This credit facility will allow Uber to continue ramping up its subprime auto leasing business.  The second details how Uber knows too much information about you.  That shouldn’t surprise anyone reading this, and sure, it’s from a somewhat liberal media source, but still something we may see added to the security concerns that continue to grow.

Speaking of Goldman Sachs, though, Goldman has a great piece (including video) on how 5G is going to enable the surge from 12 to 30 billion devices connecting to the Internet of Things

In the news this week is the report that doctors have found the first case of a person in the U.S. carrying bacteria resistant to antibiotics of last resort.  That could signal the end of the road for antibiotics.

recode has put up all of Mary Meeker’s slides around internet trends from the code conference as well as some analysis .  For those of you unfamiliar with Meeker, she is a venture capitalist and Wall Street securities analyst, with deep knowledge on the Internet and new technologies.  The three takeaways from the talk include internet growth slowing down (excluding India), the way we search continues to evolve from typed words to image and speech-driven search, and apps might rival the home screen on mobile devices for user engagement.

I think we all see ourselves as having some creative bent within us, either in our professional or personal lives.  So how do those we identify as “creative geniuses” come up with great ideas?  This TED talk by Adam Grant delves into that, studying “originals” who dream up new ideas and then make them reality.  Grant talks about the three unexpected habits of those originals, including how they embrace failure.