Summer is here, and “workcations,” a blend of business and personal travel, are on the rise.
According to data from Engine, a group travel startup, nearly two-thirds (65%) of full-time employed Gen Z workers say they’re likely to combine business travel with leisure travel. Also known as “bleisure,” this trend sees Gen Zers consistently adding extra nights to their work trips.
Why? For many, it feels like a free trip. Others say it gives them a chance to visit cities they wouldn’t normally travel to (35%), helps them maintain work-life balance (33%), and allows them to recharge and reduce stress (33%).
If workcations are here to stay, what makes them successful for both employers and employees? In this article, we share expert and employer insights on how to make workcations work.
Be transparent
I’ve combined business travel with family adventures across 60-plus countries, working during the mornings and exploring in the afternoons. My best tip? Be open with your company.
I chose roles at global companies because I wanted my family to see the world with me. I told each company up front: “My kids will travel with me, but it won’t conflict with my work.” They were always super supportive.
In the end, blending work and travel not only sustained my career—it raised my kids to be fearless, adaptable global citizens.
Jenny Dearborn, Chief People Strategy Officer and Talent Insights Practice Leader, BTS
Companies may need to establish a formal program
Prudential’s Work From Anywhere program allows employees to work fully remotely for up to four weeks in the U.S. Recently, three employees utilized our Work From Anywhere program to work from San Diego for two weeks. They stayed together in a short-term rental, connected and collaborated in person, took time off to explore the city, and even used our volunteer PTO to volunteer with a local nonprofit.
This is an example of our commitment to flexibility and employee well-being, which is supported through comprehensive benefits and programs. I’m glad that this approach continues to help our people drive great outcomes for our business.
My wife and I have been living the nomadic lifestyle for about 10 years now. If you’re traveling every few days, it’s almost impossible to be truly productive. We stay in each place for at least two weeks, but ideally for one to three months.
While it’s possible to respond to emails and chats and do other busy work while in transit, I’ve found that it’s crucial to build in workdays while traveling.
These are days with zero plans other than work. Or at least, mornings with zero plans. If we’re going to explore in the afternoon, I’ll block about four hours in the morning to get some work done. I’ll spend the first hour responding to emails and any unanswered support questions. Then I’ll have three hours to focus on one or more larger projects.
Time-boxing allows me to make significant progress in a short amount of time. I know I’ve only got a few hours, so I work quickly and efficiently. I’m far more productive when I know time is limited, and I use that time much more effectively.
The secret to recharging your batteries is ensuring that you fill three specific buckets, referred to as the ReNU buckets. The “Re” in ReNU stands for resources. To refresh yourself in your leisure time, you need to ensure that you replenish the resources that get depleted at work.
The “N” stands for needs. To get a boost in your leisure time, you need to satisfy your physical need for sleep and your psychological needs, such as the need for autonomy.
The “U” stands for unhooking, which involves psychologically detaching from work. It’s not enough to physically leave the office; you must mentally leave the office.
Workcations won’t be recharging because they don’t allow you to fill the ReNU buckets. By continuing to work, you fail to replenish depleted work resources, and are likely to feel just as run down after a workcation as you felt before it.
Back in 2020, I was seeing my coaching and therapy clients in person, rushing between meetings, navigating packed sidewalks. It was a life I had carefully built. But when the world changed, I realized I was ready for something different.
So I packed my laptop and headed west to Utah. Between client sessions, I explored hiking trails instead of crowded streets, soaking in the fresh air and wide-open views. After nine weeks, I decided to sell most of my belongings, let go of my office lease, and drive cross-country. I was thinking, “Why wait until retirement to live in the places I love?”
For the past four years, I’ve embraced a flexible, minimalist lifestyle while working with clients online. Do I still miss in-person sessions sometimes? Absolutely. But being able to show up fully for my clients and live a life aligned with my values has been an incredible gift.
I help travelers experience both remote adventure and refined comfort across Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet. As someone who manages international clients year-round, I find that picking accommodations that are more than just “Wi-Fi friendly” is essential to a successful workcation.
You’ll need space, quiet, and reliable backup if you’re on video calls when blending work and travel. My top tip for balancing work and exploration is to find a strong hotel Wi-Fi connection.
My family and I just returned from two months at sea—all while working remotely and world-schooling our then-6-year-old daughter.
My top tip? Having set “office hours” on sea days helped us maintain structure while still leaving room for the spontaneity and joy of travel. Even better, not having to manage the daily demands of our at-home lifestyle—cooking, cleaning, and laundry, all of which were taken care of on board—gave us a surprising amount of extra free time we hadn’t anticipated.
Treat workcations like a rhythm, and be willing to make adjustments. By clearly separating time for work, time for exploration, and planning ahead with your clients or team, you can be both present and productive.
This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.
Curious about my actual tech tool kit? I’m sharing the apps and tools that powered me through a recent morning—from wake-up alarm to lunchtime break. This builds on my recent focusing and timeboxing posts. I’d be delighted to hear about the tools you’re relying on today in a comment below or an email reply.
7 a.m.: Get ready for the day
I welcome the morning by getting my body and brain moving, picking a few words of gratitude, and gauging my wellness. When I’m exhausted, running late, or otherwise off-center, this gets blurred.
Oura Ring: I check my sleep quality and resilience score to calibrate my expectations for the day. Having an objective measure of how well I’ve slept, my heart rate volatility, and other metrics helps me decide whether to push my exercise harder or give myself grace. It also helps motivate me on dreary days.
Brain Games: Playing TheNew York Times’ Spelling Bee, Wordle, and Connections with my wife and daughters is a fun breakfast ritual, and less stressful than scanning headlines. I also like Pointed, Bloomberg’s new (first) game, and various other quick thinking games.
TickTime Cube Timer: I flip this onto its 1-minute side to initiate a simple countdown. Having this nearby helps me stick to a new habit: a trio of one-minute core exercises. Doing these at the start of the day helps get my energy going. It also means a busy day later won’t rupture my routine.
8 a.m.: Walk my daughter to school
No tech. No tools.
8:30 a.m.: Plan the day
While commuting to work, I listen to podcasts with Snipd. If my subway isn’t too crowded for me to lift my arms to read, I use Readwise Reader to catch up on articles I’ve saved for later. I also use Superhuman’s email app to check for work emergencies.
When I get to work, I map out what’s ahead with a digital/analog mix.
Apple Reminders: I keep at most three priority tasks at the top of my list. I only add to that top tier when I’ve completed one. I adopted that tactic from Oliver Burkeman’s excellent Four Thousand Weeks.
ReMarkable Paper Pro: I timebox my day hour by hour, based on priorities, energy level, and scheduled meetings. Having a detailed plan helps me avoid decision fatigue later. And when I lose focus, it pulls me back on track.
Sometimes I use Sunsama, a digital planner. I like varying my routine, so I rotate between planning there or on my Remarkable tablet [here’s why I use it], my office whiteboard, a Rocketbook erasable notebook, or paper.
9 a.m.: Writing
I tackle creative work early when my focus is freshest. Tools help minimize distractions and friction so I can concentrate and think.
Letterly: I dictate my thoughts into this app, which cleans up filler words and formats my dictation into an outline, summary, or series of questions to explore. It’s good for getting ideas flowing before more detailed thinking and editing. When I want an AI assistant to challenge my ideas, I use ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode, but Letterly is great for bionic dictation.
Lex: This writing tool provides a simple interface plus an AI editor that lets me check grammar, spelling, syntax, repetition, and more.
Raycast: Without switching apps, I can quickly add items to my Reminders or Calendar, maintaining my writing flow.
Headspace: Focus music without lyrics helps with concentration and blocks out city noise around my Times Square office.
10 a.m.: Wrangle Email
I set up periodic sprints to process email so it won’t consume my day.
Superhuman: I use keyboard shortcuts to move through routine emails quickly. Superhuman also has helpful tags and filters so I don’t drown in messages. The automated reminders ensure I follow up on open threads. Boomerang is a great alternative for follow-ups if you use Outlook or Gmail.
Shortwave: I like this AI-powered email app for easily finding, organizing, and summarizing messages.
Lazy: I use a quick keyboard shortcut to clip and file important info from an email into Lazy, my notes app, with contextual info automatically included (sender, date, subject line) without having to switch out of my email app.
Flow: Dictating messages saves my hands from typing fatigue. It’s remarkably accurate compared with old-fashioned dictation software. Unlike Letterly, this plugs text directly into whatever app I’m working with.
11 a.m.: Break
Wakeout: This app features GIFs of ordinary people doing stretching and cardio. I can imitate their movements for a variety of one-minute exercises. The exercise is minimal, but at least my brain briefly pauses and my body moves. These breaks help clear my head three times a day.
11:05 a.m.: Craft a presentation
When preparing workshops or classes, these tools help me craft engaging visual materials. I like app-smashing—using multiple apps together to benefit from their best features.
Beautiful.ai: Slides automatically adjust as I add content, saving design time.
Keynote: This reliable Mac presentation software works offline, supports in-person plus remote presentations, and offers slick moving slide backgrounds.
iA Presenter: I use this to create a visual presentation out of an outline. When I’m turning text materials into visuals, I import my words into this (non-AI) app, which displays markdown text as visuals alongside presenter notes.
Claude Projects and NotebookLM: These AI tools help me find common themes, key ideas, and examples in prior materials I’ve created, so I can build on my own past work.
Perplexity: Provides thorough, citation-backed search results powered by AI models that understand my detailed queries. The helpful search summary ensures I’m not left with hundreds of raw (Google) links to sort through.
This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.
Often lost in the generally breathless coverage of generative AI, ChatGPT sports a few genuinely useful features that aren’t quite so obvious.
These options don’t get splashy demos or make the headlines, but instead quietly make your life as a gen-AI user a bit easier.
Let’s take a quick look at some of ChatGPT’s unsung heroes.
Edit Prompts
We’ve all been there. You type out a prompt, hit enter, and immediately spot a typo that fundamentally changes the meaning. Or perhaps you realize you forgot a crucial piece of context.
But lo and behold, hover over your prompt and you’ll find a simple “Edit” button, which allows you to refine your input in real time. Iterate on your questions, add details, and guide the AI more effectively without losing the thread of the conversation.
Custom Instructions
A must-tweak for anyone who uses ChatGPT regularly, tucked away in the settings (click your profile photo up in the right-hand corner) is the “Custom Instructions” feature, which lets you tell ChatGPT how you want it to behave.
Want it to respond in a particular tone? Prefer bullet points over paragraphs? Want to avoid jargon? This is where you set the rules, ensuring consistency and making the whole experience feel a lot more personal.
Regenerate Responses
Whether ChatGPT’s response is a total dud or simply good, but not perfect, the “Try again” feature is worth playing around with.
Click the recycling arrows-looking icon that appears when hovering over the AI’s response and choose “Try again” to regenerate its response.
Each iteration should give you a slightly different angle, new phrasing, or an updated perspective. It’s a quick way to explore variations and ensure you’re getting the best output for whatever task you’re working on.
Stephanie Mehta, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Content Officer of Mansueto Ventures, speaks with Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg as he reflects on the company’s 25-year journey—from its groundbreaking innovations to its leadership in 5G technology. Vestberg also shares insights into the future of AI, the next phase of Verizon’s legacy, and his bold vision for the next 25 years of connectivity.
What does it take to lead through complexity, make tough decisions and still put people first? For me, the answer became clear during a defining moment early in my career—one that changed my path entirely.
Today I am a business-school educator, but I began my career in the corporate world. I faced a challenge so intense that it motivated me to go back to school and earn a Ph.D. so I could help others lead with greater purpose and humanity.
Back then, I was working for a multinational home goods company, and I was asked to play a role in closing a U.S. factory in the Midwest and moving its operations abroad. It was, by every business metric, the right economic decision. Without it, the company couldn’t stay competitive. Still, the move was fraught with emotional and ethical complexities.
Witnessing the toll on employees who lost their jobs, and the broader effects on their community, changed how I thought about business decision-making. I saw that technical skills alone aren’t enough. Effective leadership also requires emotional intelligence, ethical reasoning and human-centered thinking.
That experience was a turning point, leading me to higher education. I wanted to fulfill a greater purpose by equipping future business leaders with critical human-centric skills. And to do that, I needed to learn more about these skills – why they matter, how they shape outcomes, and how we can teach them more effectively.
Often called “soft skills” or “people skills,” these are also, more appropriately, referred to as “power skills” or “durable skills.” And they aren’t just nice to have. As my own experience shows and as research confirms, they are central to success in today’s business world.
Power skills: Underappreciated, yet in demand
Research on power skills dates back to at least 1918, when the Carnegie Foundation published A Study of Engineering Education. That report concluded that 85% of engineering professionals’ success came from having well-developed people skills, and only 15% was attributed to “hard skills.” These early findings helped shape our understanding of the value of nontechnical skills and traits.
Today, employers arguably value these skills more than ever. But while demand for these skills is growing across industries, there’s not enough supply. For example, nearly 7 in 10 U.S. employers plan to prioritize hiring candidates with “soft” or “power” skills, according to LinkedIn’s most recent Global Talent Trends report.
Yet 65% of employers cite soft skills as the top gap among new graduates, according to Coursera’s 2025 Micro-Credentials Impact Report. New hires are struggling in the areas of communication, active listening, resilience and adaptability, the survey found.
Power skills are transferable across roles, projects and industries, which makes them especially valuable to hiring managers. And research continues to show that these skills drive innovation, strengthen team dynamics and help organizations navigate uncertainty—key reasons why employers prioritize them.
Three power skills to prioritize
So what does it look like to lead with power skills? Here are three key areas that have shaped my own journey—and that I now help others develop:
Adaptability: Adaptability goes beyond simply accepting change. It’s the ability to think, feel and act effectively when the situation changes—which, in today’s business environment, is all the time.
Consider a company expanding into a new international market. To succeed, it must invest in cultural research, adapt its operations to regional norms and align with local regulations—demonstrating adaptability at both strategic and operational levels.
Empathy: As I learned firsthand during my time in the corporate world, empathy—or the ability to understand and respond to the feelings, perspectives and needs of others—is essential.
Empathy not only fosters trust and respect, but it also helps leaders make decisions that balance organizational goals with human needs. More broadly, empathetic leaders create inclusive environments and build stronger relationships.
At Western Governors University, we have an entire course titled “Empathy and Inclusive Collaboration,” which teaches skills in active listening, creating culturally safe environments and cultivating an inclusive mindset.
Inclusivity: Effective communication and teamwork consistently rank high as essential workforce skills. This is because organizations that excel in communication and collaboration are more likely to innovate, adapt to change and make informed decisions.
While managing a global transition, I saw how hard and necessary it was to listen across cultural lines, to foster collaboration across borders and departments. When teams collaborate well, they bring diverse perspectives that can foster creativity and efficiency. The ability to communicate openly and work together is crucial for navigating complex problems and driving organizational success.
The business landscape is evolving rapidly, and technical expertise alone is no longer enough to drive success. Power skills like adaptability, empathy and inclusivity are crucial, as both research and my own experiences have taught me. By prioritizing power skills, educators and businesses can better prepare leaders to navigate complexity, lead with purpose and thrive in a constantly changing world.
Summertime is vacation season. The weather is wonderful, the warm days are conducive to taking a break and getting away for a week or two. Plus, it is often easier for families with children to get away when school is not in session.
Vacations from work are not only fun, they’re also important. They are a chance to reconnect with family or friends. They’re also a way to get a break and reset.
Because vacations are important, it is useful to think about what you’re trying to get out of them, so that you plan them appropriately.
A vacation or a trip?
I like to distinguish between two kinds of getaways: vacations and trips. A vacation is focused on relaxation. The most difficult choices on a vacation should be where to eat, and whether to read by the pool or the ocean. A trip is busy. You’re there to see new things, meet new people, and explore the world.
Both vacations and trips can be rewarding. Vacations provide a true oasis from a packed daily life. The aim is to sleep late, relax, catch up on pleasure reading, and enjoy a slower pace. Vacations are most valuable when the fast pace of life has gotten to you. If you’re living a life when every minute is scheduled, then a vacation can remind you that time spent without an agenda has its benefits. It is also useful when you feel like you’re always living on the edge of exhaustion.
Trips are opportunities to create memories of experiences. They require a lot of advance planning in order to decide exactly where to go and what to do. Just about every day of a trip involves an itinerary in order to maximize what you get out of the place you’re visiting. Indeed, many trips are a little stressful while you’re on them, but they reward you with memories that you can look back on for a lifetime.
Another value of both vacations and trips is that they can slow time down. You have probably noticed that when you’re engaged in your normal routine that the days and weeks fly by. That is because your brain is able to predict what is going to happen next, so it doesn’t need to store a lot of new information. As a result, the moments go quickly as they are happening, and they don’t leave a lot of information behind, so they don’t seem that long even when you look back on them.
When you break up your routine, the days feel like they slow down, because your brain doesn’t know exactly what is going to happen next. Plus, if you are visiting a new place, you have lots of new memories to create, which makes the time feel long when you look back on it as well.
Plan to connect
Your relationships can suffer during the normal course of life. Running from one thing to the next means that you may not spend as much quality time with your partner as you should. You may miss out on time with children, parents, or friends.
As you plan a vacation, think about people you need to connect with and how to use your break to renew these connections. If you have family or friends that live far away from you, consider spending some of your vacation with them. Those moments of reconnection help to refresh relationships that are hard to maintain just with email, calls, and social media. Those visits will also help to create continuity between your life now and your past, which gives you a greater sense of coherence to your life story. That can help you to feel more grounded.
Plan to disconnect
If you’re going to take a vacation, you should also use that time to disconnect from work. One question you need to ask is how long you can go away before you will feel like you need to check in on work. For example, in my role, I find it easy to disconnect from work for a week, but if I were to go away for longer than that, I would feel like I need to check in on decisions that may require my attention. As a result, I tend to go away once toward the beginning of the summer and a second time toward the end rather than taking a single two-week vacation.
It is important to really get away from your work. If you check your email every day while you’re away, then part of you is being dragged into the context of work on a daily basis. You may not be physically present at work, but mentally you haven’t gotten the distance you need. By leaving work behind for the duration of your vacation, you create the conditions to feel refreshed and ready to return when the vacation is over.
In order to make this work, you also need to ensure that tasks that normally require your input can either be held until your return or that someone else can step in to address your responsibilities in your absence. Make sure you train people to do your job, so that you can leave without having to worry that things will fall apart while you’re away. That means you may need to start getting people at work ready now for your absence—even if your trip is weeks away.
In 2019, a midsized company used a familiar tool: the classic 2×2 scenario matrix. They mapped two axes of uncertainty: economic stability and technological innovation. From that, they built four polished narratives of the future. At the time, it felt rigorous and strategic.
Then everything changed.
Generative AI erupted into public consciousness. With the release of GPT-3 and a cascade of tools that followed, a technological tidal wave reshaped industries, workflows, and public discourse. Billions of AI-generated images, voices, and texts flooded the digital world.
At the same time, resistance grew. Workers voiced concerns about job displacement, regulators scrambled to keep pace, and the public began questioning the speed and direction of changes ahead.
Not one of the company’s four boxes accounted for this kind of multidimensional disruption.
The Future Didn’t Fall Into One of Four Boxes
Why did their scenarios fall short? Because the 2×2 model, and much of traditional scenario planning, was designed for a more linear, less entangled world. It reduces complex systems into binary trade-offs and often fails to consider the social, emotional, and symbolic forces that drive real transformation.
Today’s world is shaped by what we call SuperShifts™, nine deep, structural transformations that are changing how we live, learn, and work. These include forces such as IntelliFusion, where human and artificial intelligence merge; Techceleration, where technology evolves faster than regulation or adaptation; and Reality Remix, where the physical and digital worlds merge.
These are not isolated trends. They are interconnected systemic changes that defy prediction and demand a more sophisticated strategic response.
In a world of SuperShifts, planning for the most probable future is no longer enough. We need approaches that embrace complexity, expand foresight, and prepare us for disruptions that do not fit neatly into grids or quadrants.
The Problem: Classic Scenarios in a Complex World
Traditional scenario planning emerged in an era that felt more stable and linear. The 2×2 model simplifies uncertainty by forcing it into four tidy boxes. For a long time, that structure helped organizations think beyond the status quo. But in today’s world, it misses the mark.
Leaders now face overlapping disruptions in climate, technology, society, and geopolitics. These aren’t isolated variables; they are interconnected forces that influence and accelerate one another. Trying to capture this level of complexity within a binary framework reduces rich dynamics into simplistic either-or choices. The result? Shallow narratives that feel disconnected from reality.
SuperShifts expose the limits of these old tools. Consider the rise of decentralized governance, AI-human collaboration, or the fragmentation of global systems. These are not subtle evolutions; they are foundational shifts that rewrite the rules of society, economics, and identity. No quadrant can contain that.
In a world shaped by systems thinking, nonlinear change, and emotional complexity, traditional scenario methods often flatten what needs to be multidimensional. They strip away nuance, ignore lived experience, and fail to account for emerging tensions that matter most.
We need scenario tools that reflect the world we are in now: fast-moving, emotionally charged, and shaped by forces that don’t sit still.
Enter the Spectrum Foresight Framework
Instead of jumping straight into scenarios, Spectrum Foresight Framework™ begins with what we call Spectrum Shaping, vivid, layered vignettes of possible futures. These aren’t just speculative stories. They are grounded in Spectrum Layer Analysis™ (SLA), a seven-layer method that brings emotional, systemic, and symbolic depth to each imagined world.
Each Spectrum Shaping is a microcosm, a lived moment in a future shaped by shifts that are already underway. They reflect not just what happens, but how it feels, who it impacts, and what tensions emerge.
For example, a Spectrum Shaping built around the rise of AI in mental health might feature:
Headlines about virtual therapists replacing human counselors.
Systemic drivers, such as underfunded healthcare or surges in AI investment.
Power struggles between tech firms and clinical boards.
Emotional responses range from relief to existential dread.
Cultural narratives about vulnerability and machine empathy.
Going Deeper: Spectrum Layer Analysis
Within the Spectrum Shaping stage, it utilizes Spectrum Layer Analysis to uncover the layered forces that shape how futures are experienced, not just predicted.
SLA is the deep-structure engine behind immersive futures. Rather than crafting flat narratives based on trends, SLA challenges foresight teams to analyze each Spectrum Scene across seven interlocking layers, from observable events to unconscious cultural metaphors. These layers create the world-building scaffolding that turns weak signals into richly textured future scenes.
SLA moves foresight from descriptive to dimensional. It moves beyond surface speculation to construct futures that account for identity, power, emotional context, and systemic drivers. And these layers can fall into seven categories:
Surface Events and Discourse: Observable signals like headlines, memes, or emerging technologies
Structures and Systemic Drivers: Institutional, technological, or infrastructural dynamics beneath the surface
Power and Agency: Who holds power, who is excluded, and how agency is negotiated
Cultural and Psychological Frames: Collective mindsets, fears, values, and assumptions
Conflicts and Tensions: Fractures, resistance, and ideological friction
Narratives and Beliefs: Deep-rooted stories that guide behavior and justify decisions
Archetypes and Deep Metaphors: The symbolic frameworks and recurring motifs that shape perception
By scanning each layer in tandem, organizations can trace how a surface trend, such as AI regulation, may be driven not just by policy shifts but also by deeper stories of control, freedom, fear, and trust. This layered analysis reveals not only what might happen but also why and how it could unfold differently across cultures, industries, or generations.
Making business strategy more flexible
SLA ensures you’re not just reacting to what’s visible. It helps you understand why shifts are occurring and how they might evolve differently across cultures, markets, or generations. It bridges foresight and strategy, anchoring each insight in emotional, symbolic, and structural realities.
SLA makes strategy stretchable, robust across multiple futures, yet flexible when the unexpected hits. It’s the world-building tool that prepares Spectrum Shaping for their next evolution: full-fledged Spectrum Scenarios.
Why you should look at business scenarios with layers
Spectrum Scenarios are not just upgraded narratives: they’re a sophisticated, next-generation foresight method that moves beyond the constraints of traditional scenario planning.
Each scenario reflects a different way of living, interpreting, and engaging with a future shaped by shared underlying shifts.
Unlike traditional scenarios that often rely on archetypes, quadrant-based methods (like 2×2 matrices), or linear forecasts, which produce a limited number of binary outcomes based on two critical uncertainties, Scenarios are multilayered, emotionally resonant, and systemically grounded. They reflect the contradictions, power asymmetries, and diverse worldviews that make strategic planning more human and more real.
What Makes It Different
Think of these scenarios as parallel “lived realities” within the same domain, sometimes in the same city, company, or policy environment, but experienced radically differently depending on power, identity, worldview, or system position.
Instead of reducing uncertainty to polar opposites like “AI will be regulated” versus “AI will not be regulated,” this approach examines the full range in between. It considers possibilities from tightly controlled AI ecosystems to completely open-source models with minimal oversight. These spectrums are not just visual enhancements. They fundamentally change how leaders think about uncertainty, complexity, and strategic risk.
Organizations begin by identifying key uncertainties, trust in AI, geopolitical realignments, and data autonomy, and mapping them across spectrums, not binary opposites.
These drivers are then embedded into SLA-powered Spectrum Scenes. From these scenes, teams synthesize plural Spectrum Scenarios that reflect differing levels of disruption, adoption, identity alignment, and strategic challenge. Each scenario doesn’t just describe a world; it invites stakeholders to emotionally inhabit it, question their assumptions, and prototype resilient strategies in response.
How to Apply It
Spectrum Scenario Design isn’t just a thought experiment; it’s a practical tool set that organizations are already using to rethink strategy, stress-test innovation, and reimagine risk.
Here’s how to begin putting it into practice:
Start with Spectrum Scenes: Choose a strategic domain, such as trust in AI, climate migration, or workforce automation, and build 4–6 potential future moments in your business using the Spectrum Layer Analysis framework. Don’t aim for consensus. Aim for divergence.
Scan the seven layers: Analyze not just the surface trends, but the deep drivers: Who holds power? What beliefs shape resistance or adoption? What metaphors are unconsciously driving behavior?
Synthesize multiple perspectives: Group your Spectrum Scenes into 3–5 full scenarios. Each should represent a lived future experience, not an abstract trend line. Ask: Who thrives in this world? Who doesn’t?
Prototype the future: Bring each scenario to life with tangible artifacts, such as mock headlines, speculative product ads, or user journey maps. These tools help stakeholders feel the future, not just imagine it.
Pressure-test your strategy: Now ask the hard questions. What breaks in this future? What thrives? Where are you resilient, and where are you exposed?
Spectrum Scenario Design is not a onetime exercise; it’s a mindset shift. A capability. A practice that builds organizational agility, not by narrowing focus, but by expanding awareness. In a world where change is nonlinear, emotional, and layered, this is how tomorrow’s leaders build foresight that aligns the future.
Scenarios in practice
A midsized health tech company specializing in AI-powered diagnostics found itself on the edge of profound disruption. Regulatory regimes were shifting. Public trust in AI was eroding. Traditional strategy tools weren’t keeping up.
The company’s existing scenarios failed to anticipate that patients would begin withholding deeply personal data from diagnostic systems. Nor had they accounted for the convergence of conflicting global regulations, or the outright cultural rejection of AI health tech in conservative regions.
To better navigate this complexity, the company adopted Spectrum Scenario Planning, beginning with a foundational phase of Spectrum Scenes. The team generated scenes across domains: one spotlighted AI backlash in North America; another imagined spiritual resistance to synthetic diagnostics in Southeast Asia; a third depicted radical health data sovereignty movements in the EU. Each Spectrum Scene captured not just what might happen, but how it might feel, whom it might benefit, or leave behind.
Next, the team synthesized these scenes into five Spectrum Scenarios, exploring what it would mean to leverage the SuperShift “BioNexus” from the book, SuperShifts. These futures ranged from:
The decentralization of healthcare into local, AI-supported cooperatives
To global frameworks for ethical AI certification
To geopolitical blocs forming competing standards for biotech governance
Each scenario reflected the different experiences of various stakeholders, including patients, regulators, engineers, and investors; each was analyzed to identify emotional tensions, power dynamics, and system-level risks.
To activate strategic imagination, the team created fictional news stories, speculative product packaging, and even AI ethics training modules from imagined futures. These tools allowed executives and stakeholders to connect with the worlds they might soon inhabit emotionally. Finally, the team ran premortems on each scenario, identifying strategic blind spots and stress-testing assumptions.
The result? A strategic transformation.
The company created a volatility-ready innovation road map, formed alliances based not just on tech compatibility but on shared values, and reoriented its go-to-market strategy toward emergent belief systems around health, autonomy, and trust.
They didn’t just future-proof their road map. They learned to future-make.
From Future-Proofing to Future-Making
We cannot predict the future. But we can prepare ourselves to see it more clearly and design for it more confidently.
The truth is: traditional scenario planning isn’t broken. It’s just out of breath. In a world of cascading shifts and competing truths, quadrant models are too shallow and too singular. They flatten what should be felt.
The next disruption won’t fit inside a box. It will emerge from a cultural ripple, a shift in trust, or a story we didn’t yet know we were telling ourselves.
Scenario planning is dead. Long live Spectrum Scenarios.
Wes Lowe uses so much Claritin that he started an Amazon subscription to avoid running out. His kids take two asthma medications. This reflects the normalcy of pollution in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where residents breathe some of the dirtiest air in the nation.
Lowe lives about 20 miles outside of Fresno, in the valley’s heart. More than a dozen highways, including Interstate 5, run through the region, carrying almost half of the state’s truck traffic. The sky is usually hazy, the air often deemed hazardous, and 1 in 6 children live with asthma. “You don’t realize how bad it is until you leave,” Lowe said.
He understands California’s urgent need to clear the air by electrifying the trucking industry and pushing older, more polluting machinery off the road. That would reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by 17.1 tons annually by 2037, significantly reduce the amount of smog-forming ozone,and go a long way toward meeting federal air quality requirements. But as a partner at Kingsburg Truck Center, a dealership in Kingsburg, he’s seen how difficult this transition will be.
The Golden State started its trucking transition in 2021 when it required manufacturers to produce an increasing number of zero-emission big rigs, known as Advanced Clean Trucks, or ACT. The following year, it mandated that private and public fleets buy only those machines by 2036, establishing what are called Advanced Clean Fleets, or ACF.
The Environmental Protection Agency granted the waiver California needed to adopt ACT in 2023. But it had not acted on the exemption required to enforce ACF by the time President Donald Trump took office, prompting the state to rescind its application as a “strategic move” to keep “options on the table,” according to the California Air Resources Board.
The U.S. Senate threw the fate of the Advanced Clean Trucks rule into question when it revoked the state’s EPA waiver on May 22, stripping the state of its ability to mandate the electrification of private fleets, though it can still regulate public ones. Now the one bright side for the state’s efforts to clean up trucking is the Clean Trucks Partnership, under which several manufacturers have already agreed to produce zero-emission rigs regardless of any federal challenges.
All of this limits California’s ability to ease pollution. The Air Resources Board has said the Advanced Clean Fleet rule would eliminate 5.9 tons of nitrogen oxide emissions in the San Joaquin Valley by 2037. Another rule, the In-Use Locomotive regulation, bans internal combustion trucks more than 23 years old by 2030 and would reduce those emissions by another 11.2 tons. Even with those rules in place, the state would have to cut another 6.3 tons to bring air quality in line with EPA rules.
With the fate of California’s campaign to decarbonize trucking in question, even those who want to see it succeed are wavering. Kingsburg Truck Center started selling battery electric trucks in 2022, but saw customers begin to cancel orders once the state was unable to enforce the Advanced Clean Fleet requirement. Lowe has had to lay off seven people as a result.
“We got heavy into the EV side, and when the mandate goes away, I’m like, ‘Shit, am I gonna be stuck with all these trucks?’” Lowe said. “If I were to do it all again, I’d probably take a lot less risk on the investment that we made into the zero-emission space.”
California remains committed to cleaning up trucking. But the transition will require creative policymaking because the Trump administration’s hostility to the idea makes it “extremely difficult” for the state to hit its goal of 100 percent zero-emission truck sales by 2036, said Guillermo Ortiz of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Still, he sees ways the state can make progress. Lawmakers are considering a bill that would give the Air Resources Board authority to regulate ports, rail yards, and warehouses. That would allow regulators to mandate strategies to advance the transition, like requiring facilities to install charging infrastructure. Several state programs underwrite some of the cost of electric trucks, which can cost about $435,000—about three times the price of a diesel rig.
That’s not to say California isn’t fighting back. It plans to sue the Trump administration to preserve its right to set emissions standards. Losing that will make it “impossible” to ease the Valley’s pollution enough to meet air quality standards, said Craig Segall, a former deputy executive director of the Air Resources Board. “Advanced Clean Fleets and Advanced Clean Trucks arise out of some pretty hard math regarding what’s true about air pollution in the Central Valley and in California, which is that it’s always been largely a car and truck problem,” he said.
Even if the state loses the ability to regulate vehicle emissions and require electrification, Segall is confident market forces will push the transition forward. As China continues investing in the technology and developing electric big rigs, he said, companies throughout the rest of the world will need to do the same to stay competitive. He also said that trucking companies will see zero-emission trucks as an opportunity to lower maintenance and fueling costs. The Frito Lay factory in the Central Valley city of Modesto has purchased 15 Tesla electric big rigs.
Ultimately, the economic argument for ditching diesels is simply too appealing, said Marissa Campbell, the cofounder of Mitra EV, a Los Angeles company that helps businesses electrify. She said the state’s decision to table the Advanced Clean Fleets rule hasn’t hurt business.
“No one likes being told what to do,” she said. “But when you show a plumber or solar installer how they can save 30 to 50 percent on fuel and maintenance—and sometimes even more—they’re all ears.”
Valerie Thorsen leads the San Joaquin Valley office of CalSTART, a nonprofit that has, since 1992, pushed for cleaner transportation to address pollution and climate change. She sees the Trump administration’s recalcitrance as nothing more than a hurdle on the road to an inevitable transition. But any effort to ditch diesels must be accompanied by an aggressive push to build charging infrastructure. “You don’t want to have vehicles you can’t charge or fuel,” she said.
The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District won a $56 million federal grant in January 2024, to build two solar-powered EV charging sites along Interstate 5 with 102 chargers specifically for big rigs. About 45 percent of California’s truck traffic passes through the region, which has, over the past 25 years, eased nitrogen oxide emission from stationary sources by more than 90 percent. “A majority of the remaining [nitrogen oxide] emissions and smog-forming emissions in the valley come from heavy duty trucks,” said Todd DeYoung, director of grants and incentives at the district.
The Trump administration quickly halted grant programs like the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program that would have expanded charging infrastructure. But DeYoung remains confident that construction of the truck chargers will proceed because work started almost immediately. Similar projects are underway in Bakersfield and Kettleman City.
Not everyone is convinced the infrastructure needs to roll out as quickly as the trucks. Ortiz said emphasizing the adoption of the trucks will pressure the market to ensure chargers come online. “That sends a signal to charging infrastructure providers, to utilities, saying, ‘These vehicles are coming, and we need to make sure that the infrastructure is there to support it,’” he said.
That support is crucial. Bill Hall is new to trucking. He spent decades as a marine engineer, but during the pandemic decided to try something new. He runs a one-man operation in Berkeley, California, and as he carried loads around the state he noticed a lot of hydrogen stations. Intrigued, he reached out to truck manufacturer Nikola to ask about its electric hydrogen fuel cell rigs.
His engineering background impressed the startup, which thought he’d provide good technical feedback. Hall bought the first truck the company sold in California, augmenting his personal investment of $124,000 with $360,000 he received from a state program in December 2023. Despite a few initial bugs, he enjoyed driving it. As an early adopter, Nikola gave him a deal on hydrogen—$5.50 per kilogram, which let him fill up for about $385 and go about 400 miles. “I proved that you could actually pretty much take that hydrogen truck to any corner of California with a minimal hydrogen distribution system that they had,” Hall said.
But weak sales, poor management, and other woes led Nikola to file for bankruptcy in February. Without its technical support, Hall no longer feels comfortable driving his truck. The company’s collapse also meant paying full price for hydrogen, about $33 per kilogram these days. Hall is still paying $1,000 a month for insurance and $225 a month for parking. He says the state shares some of the blame for his predicament because it didn’t do enough to support the technology. He would have liked to see it distribute 1,000 hydrogen trucks to establish them and subsidize fuel costs. “I did the right thing, which ended up being the wrong thing,” he said.
Beyond the obvious climate implications of ditching diesel lie many health benefits. In addition to generating a lot of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide, the transportation sector is responsible for 80 percent of California’s ozone-forming emissions. “There’s no question that the transition away from combustion trucks to zero-emission would save lives, prevent asthma attacks, and generate significant, significant public health benefits all around the state,” said Will Barrett, senior director for nationwide clean air advocacy with the American Lung Association.
The state has come a long way in the decades since smog blanketed Los Angeles, and the San Joaquin Valley has enjoyed progressively cleaner air over the past 25 years. But people like Luis Mendez Gomez know there is more work to be done, even if the air no longer smells like burning tires. He has lived alongside a busy highway and not far from a refinery outside of Bakersfield for 40 years. It has taken a toll: His wife was hospitalized for lung disease earlier this year, and he knows 10 people who have died from lung cancer.
“This pollution has been going on for years,” Mendez Gomez said. “Nobody had cared before, until now. We’re pushing the government and pushing companies to help us.”
But just when it looks like things might change, the federal government appears willing to undo that progress, he said. ”All the ground they gained is going to go away.” —Benton Graham
With more and more people moving to urban areas, there’s an ever-growing need for people who can think at the scale of a city in order to solve problems. Experts in urban design are very much in demand.
Fast Company’s new analysis of job listings across several design disciplines puts a number on it: job postings for urban designers are up 102% compared to the previous year.
This boom may reflect the increasing relevance of the kind of work urban designers do, which is to create functioning communities and regions. Spanning architecture, city planning, landscape architecture, and urban development, urban design takes in the whole picture of a city and looks for ways that interventions at all scales can improve the system.
“It’s really a field of integration,” says Tyler Patrick, chair of the planning and urban design department at Sasaki, a large multidisciplinary design firm. Patrick says that Sasaki has been hiring more and more urban designers every year, and including their input on nearly every project. “It’s a field that continues to add a lot of value.”
Part of rise in demand for urban designers may stem from the fact that the way cities operate is inseparable from the issues of the day. From sustainability to community health to economic development, some of society’s biggest challenges can—and perhaps must—be addressed at the urban level. “Every project we go into we try to understand, How does this fit into the system? How does it change the system?” says Nick Leahy, co-CEO of the design firm Perkins Eastman.
Urban designers are typically trained to use sophisticated data analysis tools, including geographic information systems (GIS) and site planning software like Autodesk Forma. These programs and visualization tools help to quantify the ways design decisions play out at the level of a city system. Leahy says this type of analysis is increasingly critical in projects, whether it’s a 2,000-acre plan in Mumbai or the redevelopment of a key parcel in a city’s downtown.
And there’s plenty of work to do. Kris Krider, chair of the urban design and preservation division of the American Planning Association, says that the rise in urban design job postings is not surprising, especially in the U.S. “We’re looking at a lot of redevelopment within our existing cities and our communities, and it gets complicated pretty quick,” Krider says.
Urban designers, who are skilled in interdisciplinary thinking, are well suited to this messy job, able to weave new elements into the fabric of a living city. “This is not a greenfield site where you can design the perfect town square,” Krider says, using an industry term for undeveloped land. “You’ve got to fix stuff.”
The increased demand is likely to continue, especially given trends in American cities to try to move away from the car-centric planning of the past, and to make even suburban areas more vibrant, walkable, and livable. It would be hard to argue that most communities in the U.S. yet check all those boxes. That’s part of the reason, he says, that this type of designer can expect job security. “Urban designers never run out of work to do because there are so many mistakes to correct.”
This article is part of Fast Company‘s continuing coverage of where the design jobs are, including this year’s comprehensive analysis of 170,000 job listings.
For some in Hollywood, as Silicon Valley’s AI models have become impossible to ignore, it’s better to have a seat at the table as these new technologies emerge, rather than sitting back and letting the tech titans take full control.
This, at least, is the impetus behind Asteria, the generative AI studio cofounded by the filmmaking couple of Bryn Mooser and Natasha Lyonne, who promote their company as using “ethical” AI. Lyonne has justified her embrace of the technology by explaining: “It’s better to get your hands dirty than pretend it’s not happening.” The company has faced some backlash, both because Lyonne (tastelessly, her detractors would argue) claimed the late David Lynch had endorsed AI, and because its flagship model is proprietary—meaning we have no way to verify that it is indeed trained only on licensed material (as Lyonne and co. say it is).
Meanwhile, James Cameron is on Stability AI’s board, and has expressed his hope for using AI to make blockbuster filmmaking cheaper. Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Productions has partnered with Meta for AI testing and chatbots. Lionsgate signed a deal with Runway, an AI startup valued at $3 billion, to let the company train its model on the studio’s 20,000+ films and TV series; Runway also signed a deal with AMC.
This embrace of AI, though, puts the James Camerons and Natasha Lyonnes of the world at odds with industry peers who are opting to push back on these would-be robot overlords before they take over.
Studios are understandably wary of copyright infringement, especially since generative AI models trained on publicly available data can reproduce intellectual property—for example, creating an image of Elsa from Frozen upon request.
That concern is at the heart of several ongoing lawsuits against AI companies, including one from Disney and Universal against Midjourney, which includes dozens of side-by-side pictures comparing the studios’ own IP to Midjourney’s outputs.
Meanwhile, last year Disney formed an Office of Technology Enablement to oversee how the company can “responsibly” use AI in postproduction and VFX, among other initiatives. This demonstrates the balance Hollywood is trying to strike, with attempts to protect what’s theirs while ensuring they are not left behind by these technological developments.
Tensions are running high. Are you on board, or standing in the way? Nuanced decisions being made by studios, producers, investors, and talent right now will determine whether Hollywood will look recognizable in a decade.
Similar tensions have sprung up before in Hollywood. Past introductions of television, cable, streaming, and more have sent shivers down the spines of studios and their labor forces alike. In each instance, “when you are fighting for the right to continue running your business, it’s understandable that you would leave no stone unturned,” says Brandon Katz, director of insights and content strategy at Greenlight Analytics.
The issue is finding the right approach, as the use of AI in the creative industries remains deeply contentious and presents a different sort of multitiered threat. As Katz understands it, the studios are “trying to preserve as much as they can before the machine takeover,” as it seems clear that this technology is “inevitable.” This means everything from licensing content to train AI, cutting production costs by streamlining visual effects, dubbing and subtitling more efficiently to serve global markets, and flirting with full generative production. It is that final one, of course, that tends to draw the most scrutiny.
“We are enduring a painful contraction of the entertainment industry,” Katz says, “because legacy media doesn’t have the same money to play with that they once did, so these companies need to figure out cost-cutting moves. It is unfortunate that the result is not only job cuts but reliance and embracement of technology that might otherwise replace some of the creative human labor force.”
With this in mind, Hollywood’s unions are unsurprisingly deeply invested in how AI use in the industry develops, and the technology was key to the writers and actors strikes in 2023, when they won protections from nonconsensual cloning of actors and from AI scripts. Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, executive director of the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, tells Fast Company that since then, the industry has largely taken a more “cautious” approach to the technology. He notes that “people think they have a right to their own image, but they don’t”—he should know, since he himself was subject of a deepfake video during the strikes. The union is advocating for the No Fakes Act in Congress, to protect individuals from the misuse of their likeness (some argue the Act could actually do more harm than good). As efforts like Asteria and Runway have emerged, he adds, “we want to make sure to talk to every single company that wants to use this technology.”
Meanwhile, various courts are regularly issuing (often contradictory) decisions, including a recent win for AI companies in California which ruled that these companies do not violate fair use law when they train their models on copyrighted material. As both the tech itself and the discourse and legislation around it rapidly develops, Crabtree-Ireland recognizes that the union represents “vast swaths of performers” with different attitudes, as many want to find ways to use AI as a tool, while others (he estimates 10 to 15%) would prefer to prohibit it completely. From the union’s perspective, though, “what we’re able to do best is focus on the core principles of informed consent and intended use,” so performers not only give their consent but are also told exactly how their likeness or image will be used by the technology.
The bigger question is whether audiences will accept what these companies intend to do with AI—and the way these backlashes have played out is not going unnoticed. Crabtree-Ireland says performers “have been protected by the uncanny valley for longer than we expected,” as even the best models today still look rather unnatural. Nevertheless, “it’d be irresponsible to keep counting on that, or to assume that audiences won’t [start to] respond to it.”
“We’re focused on making the right push, contractually and legally,” he adds. “We want to be able to channel how this technology is going to be used.”
Katz points out that AI is also a boon to the creator economy, and will almost certainly help to further close the gap between professional and amateur productions, as YouTubers like MrBeast have already proved. “Can they approximate 50 to 75% of what a Warner Bros. can do for a fraction of the cost?” Katz says about how online creators will make use of AI. “What kind of bite does that take out of Hollywood?”
The only thing that is certain as workers of all kinds struggle to carve out their place in the future of entertainment is how little anyone seems to know.
Van Nuys Airport in Los Angeles is one of the country’s busiest general aviation hubs, as residents nearby can attest. Those who live near the airport say they hear a “relentless” roar of planes overhead—but none of those flights are commercial. Instead, Van Nuys serves private air travel, and it’s where celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Elon Musk store their private jets.
Van Nuys is also the third most polluting private airport in the world, according to a new study from the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT). It’s also just one example of the way private jet use has been growing, particularly in the United States. Of the 20 largest airports for private jet use, 18 are located in the U.S., including Van Nuys, Palm Beach International Airport, and New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport, which is just 12 miles from midtown Manhattan. (The other two top airports for private jets were located in France.)
Private jets come with a huge carbon footprint. One typical private jet emits the same amount of greenhouse gasses per year as 177 cars. And the use of private jets has been increasing. ICCT estimates that private jets produced up to 19.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in 2023, a 25% increase over the past decade—and equivalent to driving nearly 50 billion miles in an average gas car.
Aviation overall accounts for 2.5% of the world’s emissions. But how you fly can change your personal carbon footprint. On a commercial flight, those spacious business-class seats are responsible for up to five times as many CO2 emissions as seats in economy. That means people who take private jets, which typically have between six and 19 seats, are responsible for an even bigger share of emissions.
Private jet use accounts for about 2% of global aviation emissions. In 2023, global private jet flights collectively emitted more greenhouse gasses than all flights departing from London’s Heathrow Airport, which is the busiest airport in Europe.
Private jet flights also tend to be quick jaunts: less than 900 kilometers, and lasting fewer than two hours. (Short haul flights produce a disproportionate amount of emissions, accounting for about a third of aviation’s total carbon footprint.)
And most of the private jet flights happen, or at least start in, the U.S. Two-thirds of all private jet flights in the world departed from U.S. airports in 2023, accounting for 55% of all private jet emissions globally. Private jet use here has made headlines multiple times, as people have tracked Taylor Swift’s personal plane journeys or the fact that Starbucks CEO Brian Niccols would be using a business jet (a type of private jet) to commute from his home in Newport Beach, California, to the company’s headquarters in Seattle.
The U.S. is so flush with private jets that Florida and Texas together were the source of more private jet flights and greenhouse gas emissions than the entire European Union.
When it comes to curbing private jet use, some policymakers have floated the idea of taxing private jet emissions or fuels. In 2023, Congress introduced legislation to raise private jet fuel taxes from $0.22 to $1.95 per gallon, which would essentially be $200 per metric ton of a private jet’s CO2 emissions. While that proposal didn’t gain much traction, the tax proposal has recently been reintroduced.
Such a tax, the ICCT report estimated, could generate $3 billion annually for decarbonization efforts. “Given the slow pace of technological progress,” said Dan Rutherford, ICCT’s Senior Director of Research, in a statement, “it’s reasonable to charge ultrawealthy travelers more for their pollution.”
Every entrepreneur faces challenges on their professional path. Many women, in particular, share experiences of doubt and difficulty in making their voices heard. But rest assured, there are tried-and-true ways to get you past these speed bumps and back onto the right track.
In my two-decade career at Christie’s auction house, I learned to navigate these dynamics. And when I eventually left to start my own talent agency, I had to use strategies I learned from my time in the male-dominated corporate world to get buy-in from new clients. My ability to speak up in rooms full of men, pitch ideas to them, and feel confident doing so proved to be critical.
The truth is, entrepreneurial life can have a higher barrier to entry for many women. But common obstacles don’t need to stop you in your tracks. Here are five hidden roadblocks women should anticipate—so you, too, can approach any business challenge confident in your ability to own it.
Decision-makers don’t look like you
A common issue women face when they walk into a pitch meeting is a room full of people who don’t look like them. As a result, when they start to pitch their product or idea, the people in the room can’t relate and the deal falls apart quickly.
But knowing this will likely be the case gives you all the power. Do your research before you walk in the room so that you know exactly who you are going to be pitching to—that way, there are no surprises. Find out as much as possible about everyone who will be in the room so that you can find a natural point of synergy to connect you.
Since you’ve done the prework, you can ask leading questions that will steer the conversation in the way that you want. Don’t hesitate to practice your pitch on friends who might be similar to the people you are about to pitch to, so they can punch holes in your presentation. The more prep work you do, the easier pitch day will be.
Juggling invisible labor
Are you drained at the end of the workday, only to walk in the door at home to find that you are in charge of everything there, too? The second shift is a common trap for working women. And it can stop today.
Have conversations with your partner early and often about dividing invisible work at home. The sooner you get into a rhythm where you’re both aware of what it takes to keep a household moving, the less time you will spend arguing about it. Together, list out everything that has to get done around the house, and allocate it according to the things you are good at or like to do—until you get to the tasks neither of you want to do. Tackle those together. You can’t do it alone, nor should you.
Limited access to funding
Women have access to less than 3% of venture capital money; it’s a shocking disparity that bears repeating. So be loud. This statistic will only improve the more we talk about it.
Tell anyone and everyone who needs to hear it that women need more access to capital. If you’re a woman seeking VC money, get in touch with organizations like Female Founder Collective or Female Founders Fund, who help connect women with potential investors (and invest as well). Make the issue known, and align yourself with communities working to solve it.
Limited access to networks
My father always says “network or die”—meaning not that you’ll die if you don’t network, but your network certainly will. Fewer women than men in positions of business leadership means that curating connections is essential. If you find that your network isn’t growing, or your world seems small and you need a larger reach, it’s time to take matters into your own hands.
Organize a breakfast with a friend and ask her to invite six people you don’t know. Do the same with your network. Make it meaningful, not just transactional. At the event, let each person talk about their work and life, then ask a question that everyone at the table has to answer.
Artificial timelines
The world of constant updates that we live in can make success seem easy—as though if you aren’t killing it all the time, you aren’t successful.
If you find yourself scrolling on social media, concerned that everyone else is miles ahead of where you are supposed to be, say this to yourself as often as you need to: “I am living life on the timeline I am supposed to be on. Things will happen when they are meant to happen and not before. I am exactly where I need to be.” You will arrive—roadblocks in your rearview mirror.
King’s Hawaiian—the maker of the sweet, buttery rolls that were a staple in many American childhoods—just got a fluffy rebrand.
The updated identity, which includes a new wordmark, logo, color palette, and packaging, was executed by the creative agency Mrs&Mr for King’s Hawaiian’s 75th anniversary. The brand crests this milestone at a tricky time for the grocery industry, as inflation and the rising cost of living continue to dampen consumer spending. Based on a report from the market research firm Circana, bread and rolls sales have declined by around 1% in the past year—but, in an interview with CNN, King’s Hawaiian chief marketing officer Raouf Moussa shared that the brand’s sales have actually grown year-over-year despite this overall downturn.
According to Kate and Daniel Wadia, the duo behind Mrs&Mr, the goal of the new look included a careful balance of two priorities: modernizing the brand while also reconnecting its identity with the decades-long heritage that’s turned it into an enduring source of nostalgia. To do that, they started by turning to the classic rolls themselves.
[Image: courtesy King’s Hawaiian]
75 years of Hawaiian rolls
Before it became a packaged goods company, King’s Hawaiian was a small local bakery in Hilo, Hawaii, in 1950. Its founder, Robert R. Taira, was the Hawaiian-born son of Japanese immigrants, who ultimately perfected a more shelf-stable version of the Portuguese sweet bread he’d enjoyed in his childhood—an invention that would later become King’s Hawaiian’s iconic packaged Hawaiian rolls. King’s Hawaiian’s current CEO, Mark Taira, is Robert’s grandson. He worked directly with Mrs&Mr to help transform King’s Hawaiian’s branding.
[Photo: courtesy King’s Hawaiian]
“[King’s Hawaiian] saw themselves as this heritage brand that really needed to modernize, but also to stay true to its DNA and to its heritage,” Daniel says. “The impetus for the project was, ‘How do we become relevant to new generations of King’s Hawaiian consumers, while building on our legacy as this iconic brand that’s been around since 1950?”
[Photo: courtesy King’s Hawaiian]
To answer that question, Daniel and Kate parsed through archival materials from the brand’s early days, including original signage, vintage packaging, and old advertisements. And, because Daniel grew up in London and Kate in Australia, they also had to actually try the product for the first time.
“Once we experienced the fluffiness, the squidginess, it reminded me of a French brioche—my mother’s brioche has that squidginess,” Daniel says. “We really saw an opportunity for both the crown itself and also the wordmark to reflect the puffiness and the softness of the product. We wanted it to feel as if it had been baked—like, literally, the logo just came out of the oven.”
[Image: courtesy King’s Hawaiian]
King’s Hawaiian’s former logo, adopted in 2018, included a thin, uppercase serif font, encased in a pointed crown and surrounded by a bursting floral motif. Kate notes that the look had a “messy” quality, but, more significantly, it also had a “very regal,” “formal” feel.
“It felt almost a little standoffish,” Kate says. “This product is a family recipe, there’s such love and warmth and humanity that goes into this product, that we wanted it to feel a little bit more approachable.”
[Image: courtesy King’s Hawaiian]
Baking the King’s Hawaiian brand
To give King’s Hawaiian a friendlier feel, Mrs&Mr started by metaphorically “baking” the brand’s core assets.
The crown logo, for example, has been given rounded edges and a chunkier feel. And, alongside lettering artist Alec Tear, Daniel and Kate developed a custom wordmark font that looks freshly risen. While the wordmark’s font is still a serif, in keeping with the brand’s history, it’s now bubbly and weighty. The dots above each “i,” as well as the letters’ tails, are shaped to mimic a puffy Haiwaiian roll.
[Image: courtesy King’s Hawaiian]
Crucially, Daniel and Kate decided to keep the brand’s signature orange packaging, which has come to be strongly visually associated with the brand. To give the identity a brighter feel, though, they lightened the core hue a few shades and kicked up its vibrancy. They also expanded the brand’s usable color palette to include complementary colors like golden yellow and bright red. In place of the packaging’s former floral motif, Daniel and Kate opted to add in a more simplified pattern of illustrated hibiscus, monstera, and plumeria plants, all of which are native to Hawaii.
[Image: courtesy King’s Hawaiian]
The result is a versatile branding system that’s now been applied across King’s Hawaiian’s entire portfolio of products, as well as on its website and social media.
“It’s an iconic, beloved American brand—and it’s something that people are very nostalgic about,” Kate says. “They sell King’s Hawaiian merch; people wear their T-shirts and hats and socks. So it’s really exciting, but there’s also a true responsibility when you rebrand these iconic brands that you don’t give people design whiplash: it has to be familiar, yet updated.”
For the Los Angeles area neighborhoods devastated by January’s wildfires, rebuilding is a question of how, not if. A new effort involving 40 architecture firms from L.A. and beyond aims to broaden the scope of what that rebuilding looks like.
Case Study 2.0 is a model home design program that is creating a catalog of preapproved and deeply discounted house plans for fire victims in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods. Combining the quality of custom design with the speed and affordability of mass production, the designs are intended to be easily permitted, quick to build, relatively affordable and, just as importantly, beautiful.
Xenia Projects [Image: courtesy Case Study 2.0]
This effort was launched in February by Crest Real Estate, a land-use-consulting and permit-expediting company that works with architects, developers, and municipalities to get development projects approved for construction. Third-generation Angeleno Steven Somers, who founded Crest with his brother, Jason, 13 years ago, says that once the fires broke, he knew the company was obligated to do something to help in the eventual recovery. “We’re in a position where we understand the next steps,” Somers says.
Emre Arolat Architecture [Image: courtesy Case Study 2.0]
To expedite the rebuilding process, Crest recruited 40 top architecture firms from L.A. and beyond to develop more than 50 fire-resilient home designs that can be quickly approved for construction permits. The homes range from Spanish Colonials and compact bungalows to minimalist ranch-style single-story homes and modernist spectacles with sculptural rooflines. Designed to meet the parameters of the eight most common lots in the fire-affected areas, these house plans are contemporary in design but intended to be built in multiples rather than as one-offs.
Tracy Stone [Image: courtesy Case Study 2.0]
The architects have agreed to make their plans available to fire victims for $25 per square foot, which, depending on the firm, is just 25% to 35% of what they’d usually charge for architectural services. And once each design goes through the initial approvals process with either the city or county, it will take less than half the usual amount of time to get any additional build of that design permitted.
“The question we were asking was how do you rebuild 100 years of character over the next five years?” Somers says. “People are really concerned that what gets built back feels like a tract development and doesn’t have the unique variation from lot to lot that made these communities entirely unique.”
Solkatt [Image: courtesy Case Study 2.0]
A historical precedent
This effort was inspired by the postwar-era Case Study House Program, which sought to meet the booming demand for housing in the 1940s and ’50s by commissioning architecture firms to design replicable modern homes for the L.A. region. The resulting houses are now regarded as icons of mid-century modern design, but they didn’t achieve their intended scale.
Stahl House: Case Study House #22 [Photo: kjmagnuson/Flickr]
“Today we have a similarly urgent need for thousands of units of housing to be built. We want that to be done beautifully, just like the first Case Study House Program, but it must be done economically,” Somers says. “That’s where we feel like we’re picking up the baton.”
Grant Kirkpatrick is founding principal of L.A.-based KAA Design, and he worked with Somers as Crest was developing the idea for the Case Study 2.0 program. “As someone who has worked in the hillsides of Los Angeles for over 35 years—and has seen more than a dozen of our projects lost to fire—I feel a deep responsibility to be part of the solution,” Kirkpatrick says. “We see this as an opportunity to help reimagine what’s possible after loss—not only to restore homes, but to restore hope.”
Marmol Radziner [Image: courtesy Case Study 2.0]
Somers says the program cuts the cost of rebuilding in several ways. First is the discount on the designs offered by all the participating architects, including Morphosis, Marmol Radziner, and Tighe Architecture. Second is a range of 15% to 30% discounts offered by partner companies on building materials including doors, windows, roof tiles, and exterior cladding. There’s also the reduced overall cost that comes from having plans that are already preapproved.
Morphosis [Image: courtesy Case Study 2.0]
Once the first iteration of a design goes through that four-to-six month permitting process, Somers says each subsequent use of that design should be approved in just two months. And if the same contractor is used to build each iteration of a design, there are likely to be further cost and time savings. “They’re going to start to really create almost an assembly line process,” he says.
Solkatt [Image: courtesy Case Study 2.0]
All this combines to reduce the cost of building a nearly custom contemporary home by 20% to 35%, Somers says. In L.A., that could translate to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The goal, Somers says, is for the houses to be built for between $600 and $800 per square foot. That translates to between $1.2 million and $1.8 million for a 2,000 square foot house, which is more than the $970,000 cost of the average home in the city of L.A., according to Zillow. For the affluent residents of the Pacific Palisades, the cost may be more manageable than for the middle class residents of Altadena.
The homes offered through this program are not the cheapest option on the market, nor are they intended to be. “The real goal here is giving homeowners an option to rebuild something beautiful and that they’re really excited about, but that can cost less than what a typical one-off custom home would cost to build,” Somers says.
The program is still in its early phases, and none of the designs in the catalog has gotten to the point of going up for official city or county approval. But Somers says multiple architects are currently working with clients to pursue rebuilding through the program. “I’m absolutely confident that some of these homes will be built,” he says. “Whether that’s 10 homes or 250 homes remains to be seen.”
CEOs have become more than just corporate leaders—they’re among the most valuable assets on the balance sheet. Great leadership can drive billions in market cap by shaping narratives and galvanizing stakeholders. But what happens when the communication tools they use to build credibility start to erode it?
We’re entering a new era in CEO communications, one where human messages increasingly filter through the lens of AI. Analysts and investors have long leaned on AI-powered language models and sentiment analysis to dissect earnings calls, parsing executive tone, word choice, and delivery for signals on strategy, risk, or future performance. Now, CEOs and their teams are flipping the script—crafting messages with the help of generative AI to appeal to the very same systems analyzing them.
It’s a feedback loop of machines talking to machines. And while the tech arms race might make earnings calls look polished and sentiment scores spike, it also risks creating a sentiment gap. In the end, credibility is still the most valuable currency in leadership—and AI can’t replace that.
The CEO Premium Meets the AI Arms Race
Corporate valuation has always been about more than just numbers. Investors have baked intangibles like brand equity, leadership narratives, and cultural impact into their models. As NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran puts it, valuation is as much about a company’s story as it is about spreadsheets.
The CEO’s job is to integrate those stories with their strategies. Jensen Huang didn’t make Nvidia a trillion-dollar company because of flawless financial execution—he did it by selling a vision of AI as the engine of the future, powering everything from healthcare to climate solutions. That’s the CEO premium in action: the ability to turn a strategic story into market-moving value. But here’s what no one’s saying out loud: when that story is over-engineered with AI, something critical is lost.
Consider this: Bank of America’s S&P 500 corporate sentiment tracker, based on an analysis of thousands of earnings transcripts, hit an all-time high earlier this year, even as analysts lowered growth expectations for 2025. The disconnect is stark. While executives are optimizing their tone and language to look and sound bullish, it’s masking underlying realities.
We’re looking at a sentiment bubble, where polished communications are designed to impress algorithms but are creating distance from actual performance. The result? A risk to long-term stakeholder confidence and broader market integrity.
The Credibility Gap is Real–and Risky
AI-powered communications is an incredible asset. It can help executives sharpen their messages, anticipate audience reactions, and streamline delivery. But when it starts to obscure reality—or worse, is used as a veil—it risks blowing up the most important thing any CEO has: credibility.
Markets thrive on credibility. Investors place a premium on CEOs who communicate clearly and consistently, and are transparent about their strengths and challenges. When communication becomes engineered for algorithms rather than stakeholders, it creates a hollow effect—polished on the surface, but leaving questions below.
This is more than theoretical. A recent study published in Harvard Business Review found that employees rated CEO messages as less helpful if they thought the message was AI-generated—even when it wasn’t. Perception alone was enough to damage trust. That finding underscores the growing credibility risk CEOs face when misusing or leaning too heavily on AI.
What CEOs Need to Do Now
So where does this leave us? The CEOs who win in this new reality won’t be the ones with the most AI-polished messaging—they’ll be the ones who balance technology with authenticity. Here’s how:
Speak to Stakeholders, Not Just Algorithms: Say what you mean. Own the hard truths. AI should enhance a message, not sanitize it. AI-generated communications might score well with language models, but stakeholders—investors, employees, customers—aren’t grading on polish. They’re looking for clarity.
Anchor Narratives in Performance: Narratives drive valuation, but they’re meaningless without numbers. If the results are strong, show your math. If they’re weak, explain why. Don’t let AI overinflate optimism. Instead, use it to sharpen transparency.
Ensure AI Augments, Not Replaces: AI is great for refining delivery and identifying blind spots, but it can’t replace human judgment or instinct. Companies that over-rely on AI-driven clones or sentiment engineering risk losing the real connection that drives stakeholder engagement.
Anticipate the Credibility Pivot: As sentiment inflation continues, markets will inevitably adjust. Investors will begin looking for the next differentiator, pivoting from polished delivery to deeper signals of authenticity. CEOs who lean into direct, unvarnished communication will stand out.
Get Ahead of What’s Coming: The tools analyzing your every word are only getting more advanced. The only sustainable strategy? Consistency. Authenticity. Messages that hold up under scrutiny—algorithmic or human. If your leadership story can’t survive deep analysis, it was never leadership to begin with.
The Way Forward: Still a Human Game
AI is reshaping the rules of executive communications, but the most successful leaders will recognize that technology is a supporting act—not the star of the show. At the end of the day, the algorithms don’t close deals, inspire employees, or build relationships with customers—CEOs do.
In this next chapter of leadership, The CEOs who win won’t be the ones scoring highest on sentiment trackers. They’ll be the ones who use AI responsibly, stay grounded in performance, and lead with clarity and authenticity. Because when machines talk past each other, the whole system breaks down.
Credibility is still the most valuable asset a CEO has. And no algorithm can replace that.
On a recent flight home to Cincinnati, I found myself in a Wi-Fi pickle.
Delta was offering free in-flight Wi-Fi for all SkyMiles members, but only after logging in through a web page. That created an obstacle for connecting my recently-acquired retro gaming handhelds, which don’t have web browsers onboard. With no access to Delta’s login site, I couldn’t get them online to track my gaming progress.
Quite the first-world problem, but after a bit of searching, I found a solution: Using my Android phone’s personal hotspot feature, I could relay Delta’s Wi-Fi to any nearby device without having to go through a login page. Even with my phone in airplane mode, I was able to set up the hotspot and get my gaming handhelds online.
It turns out that Windows PCs, MacBooks, and many Android phones can share a local Wi-Fi connection this way. I wish I’d known about this earlier, because it can be useful in all kinds of scenarios:.
You’re paying for hotel, in-flight, or cruise ship Wi-Fi, but each device connection costs extra.
You’re using a guest Wi-Fi network that limits the total number of devices you can connect.
You’ve brought a Fire TV Stick or other streaming device to use in a hotel room, but the guest Wi-Fi network has a login page that your device can’t navigate.
In all of these situations, relaying the Wi-Fi connection from a phone or computer provides a workaround. To the network, it just looks like you’re connecting one device, but in reality you’re distributing it to your other devices as well.
This story first appeared in Advisorator, Jared’s weekly tech advice newsletter. Sign up for free to get more tips every Tuesday.
A personal hotspot refresher
When you set up a personal hotspot on your phone, it effectively becomes a tiny wireless router, with its own network name and password. You can join this network from your other devices, and they’ll use your phone’s internet connection to get online.
Typically, you’d use a personal hotspot to extend your phone’s cellular connection to laptops, tablets, or other nearby devices when Wi-Fi is unavailable. If your wireless plan supports hotspot use, it’s a great alternative to device-specific data plans (like those pricey iPad plans the major carriers love to push on unsuspecting customers).
But with the in-flight Wi-Fi pickle I mentioned above, connecting to cellular wasn’t an option. My phone was in airplane mode with cellular disabled, and there’s no cell reception at 10,000 feet in the air anyway.
Instead, I used the same personal hotspot feature to share Delta’s Wi-Fi connection with my gaming device. That allowed me to get online even though that device couldn’t log into Delta’s network on its own.
Side note: If you’ve never used your phone’s personal hotspot feature before, I suggest giving a try:
On iPhones: Head to Settings > Cellular > Personal Hotspot. From here you can turn on the hotspot and look up or change the network’s password. (The Wi-Fi network name will be the same as your phone’s name, set under Settings > General About > Name.)
On Android: Instructions vary by phone, but look for Settings > Network & Internet (or Connections) > Hotspot & Tethering. You can set both the network name and password from this menu.
With personal hotspot turned on, your phone should appear in the Wi-Fi menu on other devices, so you can connect with whatever password you set up.
Just remember that hotspot mode puts a strain on your phone’s battery, so turn it back off when you’re not using it.
Setting up the relay
Wi-Fi sharing is buried inside Samsung’s hotspot menu
To relay a Wi-Fi connection, you’ll need a compatible Android phone, Windows laptop, or MacBook. (Sadly, the hotspot feature on iPhones only works with cellular data; it can’t share local Wi-Fi connections.)
To see if your Android phone is compatible, try turning on your personal hotspot and Wi-Fi at the same time. If your phone’s top status bar shows both the hotspot and Wi-Fi symbols, any devices you connect to the personal hotspot should route through Wi-Fi instead of your cellular network. (You can also test this by turning on Airplane Mode before enabling the hotspot.)
On Samsung phones, you should also head to Settings > Connections > Mobile Hotspot and Tethering, tap on the words “Mobile Hotspot,” then tap the “Password” field. Hit the “Advanced” button at the bottom, then make sure “Wi-Fi sharing” is turned on.
If you can’t use your phone to relay a Wi-Fi connection, try sharing from your laptop instead:
Windows 11: Head to Settings > Network & internet > Mobile hotspot. Set a password under the “Properties” heading before turning the hotspot on.
MacOS: Head to Apple Menu > System Settings > General > Sharing, then click the “i” next to “Internet Sharing.” Turn on the “Wi-Fi” toggle, set your network name and password, then turn Internet Sharing on.
Wi-Fi sharing in Windows 11Wi-Fi sharing in MacOS
Just like the personal hotspot feature on phones, your laptop will create a small Wi-Fi network for connecting your devices, and they’ll share whatever internet connection the laptop is using.
Keep this in mind next time you run into an overly restrictive guest Wi-Fi network, whether it’s on dry land or not.
This story first appeared in Advisorator, Jared’s weekly tech advice newsletter. Sign up for free to get more tips every Tuesday.
Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
In the summer of 2000, moviegoers flocked to see Gladiator and Mission: Impossible II, Finland’s Nokia was the leading maker of cellphones, and American telephone companies Bell Atlantic and GTE completed their $52 billion merger. They changed the entity’s name to Verizon Communications.
I’m not big on writing about company anniversaries—to me they seem like the corporate equivalent of Hallmark holidays. However, as a business journalist in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a big part of my job was to chronicle the regulatory and technological changes that led to the formation of Verizon 25 years ago. I’ve interviewed all of Verizon’s chief executives, going back to its original co-CEOs, Chuck Lee and Ivan Seidenberg. And I wanted to speak to current CEO Hans Vestberg about the state of telecom today and how he’s positioning the company for its next 25 years.
Making a big request
For Vestberg, who became CEO in 2018 and led the company’s launch of its fast, low-latency 5G wireless technology, that means future-proofing the business by investing in its network. In 2021, Verizon pledged more than $52 billion to acquire wireless airwaves auctioned by the U.S. government. (For context, Verizon’s annual operating revenue last year was about $135 billion.) Vestberg says the purchase sets the company up to deliver products and services well into the next decades. “I promise you, 25 years from now, we are going to be the leading telecom company in this country,” he says. To do that, he says, “you need spectrum,” or radio frequencies for wireless communications.
Vestberg says the board of directors supported his massive spending request. “Our board is committed to think long-term,” he says. Investors have been less enthusiastic. The company’s stock price is about $42 a share, roughly where it was trading in early 2021, when it agreed to buy the spectrum—and the company underperformed the broader market in that time frame.
An investment in the future
Vestberg notes that today, phone calls and text messages—the main applications for wireless phones when Verizon was born 25 years ago—represent about 3% of the network’s total usage. Nearly half of the usage is for streaming movies, games, and other digital fare. He says he believes the capacity and design of Verizon’s network will allow the company to accommodate new technologies that will flow over its airwaves and fiber. “I’m here to manage the legacy of my predecessors and see that this company continues to be the number one in everything we’re doing in this market,” he says.
Future-proofing your business
How are you future-proofing your company for the next 25 years, and how do you get your board, investors, employees, and others to support your plans? Send me examples of your strategies—I’d love to share your stories in a future newsletter.
As organizations embed artificial intelligence into business operations, the demands on leaders are changing. Today’s teams aren’t made up of people alone—they’re increasingly hybrid, with humans and AI working side by side. This shift has profound implications on how decisions are made, how roles are defined, and how trust is built.
Simply put, as the world changes, leaders need to change, too—and fast. To succeed, leaders must adapt their approach—rethinking how they structure teams, develop talent, communicate change, and build cultures of continuous learning. Those who do will unlock new levels of agility and innovation. And those who don’t will pay a steep price.
Unsure where to start? Here are five essential leadership shifts to make now in order to lead effectively in an era when yesterday’s playbook no longer applies.
1. STRUCTURE FOR SHARED INTELLIGENCE, NOT JUST SHARED TASKS
Leadership today isn’t about control—it’s about enabling collaboration between people and intelligent systems. As AI agents become more capable and autonomous, leaders must influence human behavior and how AI operates within the team.
That means defining when AI leads and when people intervene, ensuring AI decisions are understandable, and creating clear escalation paths. The goal isn’t to micromanage AI—it’s to design environments where humans and machines both contribute.
By investing in the core operating processes and relational dynamics of team performance, you’ll turn your AI players into an all-star team.
Ask yourself:How can I lead effectively when I’m not the only—or even the smartest—“agent” in the room?
2. RECALIBRATE HOW YOU LEAD WHEN AI JOINS THE TEAM
If you want people to engage with AI, you need to treat it as an active tool, not a passive teammate. Start by understanding where agents can add value. Assign AI agents clear roles and embed them into workflows where their strengths—speed, scale, and pattern recognition—amplify human capability.
The real challenge isn’t humanizing technology—it’s humanizing the experience of those working alongside it. That requires that people feel trusted and included—not sidelined or replaced. It means involving them in shaping AI deployment, providing hands-on, practical training, and recognizing their uniquely human strengths—like empathy and creativity—as vital to success.
AI raises the bar for human critical thinking, decision-making, and accountability—and that’s where true value emerges. Done right, AI becomes a catalyst for confidence, collaboration, and culture.
Ask yourself: Am I fully leveraging the complementary strengths of humans and machines—while keeping the human experience at the center of it all?
3. BUILD YOUR LEADERSHIP MUSCLE
The roles and responsibilities of leaders that made their organization successful in the past are different than what’s required going forward. Leaders must demonstrate the courage to author an ambition that is less about protecting the past and more about creating the new.
With generative AI expected to impact over 40% of working hours, leaders must unleash the confidence of their employees while enabling their accountability, connection, and judgment. Develop employees with self-awareness and relevant experiences to grow into the future leaders you need.
Ask yourself:Am I embracing the nature of change as a moment to accelerate my ambition, foster greater connection, and ensure that my people fluency matches my tech fluency?
4. LEAD WITH LISTENING, NOT ASSUMPTIONS
AI adoption isn’t being held back by fear—but rather by misaligned perceptions between leaders and employees.
Accenture research shows that 94% of employees believe they can learn the skills needed to work with AI, yet only 5% of organizations are reskilling their workforce at scale. At the same time, C-suite executives say lack of skills is a large barrier to scaling AI. This isn’t just a resourcing gap—it’s a disconnect in how each group perceives the problem.
To close the gap, leaders must start with active listening. Explain why AI matters. Offer training that’s practical and ongoing. And create space for experimentation, feedback, and learning—especially when it doesn’t go perfectly the first time.
Ask yourself:Are you investing the time truly required to shape AI strategy through listening and conversation with the people expected to drive it?
5. BECOME AN ARCHITECT OF CONTINUOUS CHANGE
AI is accelerating. Your culture needs to evolve just as quickly. Yet, Accenture research shows only 25% of leaders believe their teams are prepared to embrace change. Just 42% of employees feel confident in their ability to keep up.
This is not a workforce gap—it’s a leadership opportunity. Start with a narrative that excites others about the possibilities while acknowledging the uncertainties. Embed co-learning into daily work. Encourage safe experimentation. And model the behavior you want to see: When leaders are curious, open to feedback, and transparent about their own journeys, others follow.
Ask yourself:Am I creating the right conditions for, and to work with, emergent and iterative transformation?
LEAD THE FUTURE BEFORE IT LEADS YOU
Leadership in the age of AI isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about showing up differently—listening harder, adapting faster, and being brave enough to rewire the workplace. The tools are changing. The core principles are not.
Empathy. Trust. Vision. These are still the anchors of great leadership. What’s different now is where—and with whom—you practice them.
The future of impactful leadership isn’t human or AI. It’s human and AI—working better together.
Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill are working to pass President Trump’s controversial One Big Beautiful Bill Act. A marathon session of voting in the U.S. Senate, known in Washington as a “vote-o-rama,” is expected to begin on Monday, according to CNN. But just what is in the bill, when will it become law, and how do Americans feel about it? Here’s what you need to know.
What’s in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act?
This isn’t an easy one to answer simply because the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is so large. In its current form, it spans around 940 pages and is packed with everything from tax breaks for the rich to changes to Medicare to defense spending.
Few people have actually read the entire One Big Beautiful Bill Act—including many of the Senators who are expected to vote on it this week. And that’s a bad thing, because when new laws are this sprawling and the changes so sweeping, they often result in unforeseen negative impacts.
There are at least hundreds of changes to U.S. law in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but some of the most dramatic changes revolve around tax cuts for the rich, largely paid for by cuts to Medicaid, the health insurance program designed to provide healthcare to America’s most poor and needy.
Citing estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), PBS has a good rundown of some of the major elements of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Some of those elements are:
$3.8 trillion in tax cuts, with the wealthy and corporations benefiting the most.
$350 billion for border and national security spending.
Medicaid and other government healthcare and social services cuts would result in 10.9 million Americans losing their health insurance coverage, and 3 million Americans losing their access to food stamps.
The elimination of a $200 tax on gun silencers.
A provision that would deter individual U.S. states from regulating artificial intelligence.
$40 million in funding to establish a “National Garden of American Heroes.”
When will the One Big Beautiful Bill Act become law?
There are several remaining steps that the bill needs to go through to become law. Earlier this month, the House passed its version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. However, Senate Republicans disagreed with many elements of the House version of the bill and have been making revisions to it in their chamber. Those revisions are ongoing.
Meanwhile, President Trump has also set an arbitrary timeline for when he desired the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to be passed. The deadline Trump stated is Friday, July 4.
Yet it is precisely this artificial deadline that has many worrying that lawmakers will not take the time they need to fully examine the bill’s elements and consider the long-term consequences it may have on Americans.
Republicans, of course, may still not agree on a new version of the bill, which could mean that Trump’s July 4 deadline could come and go. For now, here’s what you may be able to expect as far as a timeline this week, per CNN:
Republicans need to get their party holdouts to support the One Big Beautiful Bill Act as it currently stands, or make changes to it that will satisfy the holdouts. This process may be completed on Monday, or it could stretch for several days.
Meanwhile, Democrats, who all universally oppose the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will have their clerks read out the bill in Congress; this is estimated to take 10 to 15 hours due to the length of the bill and is being used as a stalling tactic. If any Republican Senators stick around for the bill’s reading, it may be the first time some of them have actually heard what is in the entire 940-page bill.
A debate on the bill will follow the Democrats’ reading of the bill.
A “vote-a-rama” will then take place on the bill. This is where Senators vote on amendments to it. A lot of this “vote-a-rama” will involve political theater, and as CNN notes, Democrats will likely use Republican Senators’ votes during this process in campaign attack ads during the midterm elections next year.
Finally, there will be a vote on passing the final One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law. No Democrats are expected to support the bill, and there may even be a few Republican holdouts, but it is believed that Republicans will still have enough votes in the Senate to pass it.
However, just because the Senate passes the One Big Beautiful Bill Act doesn’t mean it becomes law. The bill would then need to return to the House for a vote. If it passes the House, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would then become law with the president’s signature.
As for whether all this can be accomplished by July 4, that remains to be seen.
What do Americans think of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act
Most Americans don’t like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, including many Republicans and even self-identified MAGA supporters.
The nonpartisan nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) released the results of its comprehensive polling on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on June 17. Those results showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans viewed the bill unfavorably.
When KFF asked Americans if they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the results were clear:
64% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act
That unfavorability number jumps to 85% of Americans who identify as Democrats
Among Independent voters, 71% of Americans view the bill unfavorably
But what’s really interesting is the view of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act from Americans who identify themselves as Republicans:
While KFF found that just 36% of Republicans view the One Big Beautiful Bill Act unfavorably, that number is massively different depending on whether the Republican identifies themselves as a MAGA supporter or a non-MAGA supporter.
Yet even among MAGA supporters, more than a quarter of them—27%—view the One Big Beautiful Bill Act unfavorably.
And when it comes to non-MAGA Republicans, the numbers are much worse. A full 66% of non-MAGA Republicans view the One Big Beautiful Bill Act unfavorably.
If so many American voters across parties view the One Big Beautiful Bill Act unfavorably, why are Republicans rushing to pass the bill? That’s a question they’ll have to answer to their Republican voters during next year’s Midterm elections.
