What's on Your Mind?

February 1 was National Change Your Password Day, a well-intentioned reminder that, ironically, highlights everything wrong with how we think about security in 2026. Here’s the truth: if you spent the first day of the month dutifully changing “Summer2025!” to “Winter2026!” across your accounts, you didn’t make yourself safer. In fact, you might have made things worse. Decades of Bad Advice We’ve spent decades teaching people the wrong lessons about password security. Add a number. Throw in a special character. Change it every 90 days. These requirements were etched into our collective consciousness, repeated by IT departments, enforced by login forms, and inter…

I’ve spent much of my career in fintech, but some of the most inspiring innovations I’ve seen came from a town most people have never heard of. In early 2025, Ipava State Bank, a tiny community institution in western Illinois, embedded a small amount of life protection into every eligible checking and savings account. No app to install, no portals, no extra steps—coverage was calculated from balances and capped per account. Six months in, reported results included $3.45 million in protection delivered, 7% deposit growth, 4.8% higher average balances, and a 25% increase in customers reaching maximum coverage levels—at a time when many peers were losing deposits. Th…

A new book by a former Deloitte executive turned workplace well-being expert argues exactly that In her new book Hope Is the Strategy, Jen Fisher, an expert on workplace well-being and human sustainability, makes a clear and timely case that hope isn’t a soft skill or a leadership afterthought; it’s a practical, learnable approach to navigating uncertainty and building healthier, more resilient organizations. In the following excerpt, Fisher draws on her personal experience grappling with burnout, as well as her research on well-being, leadership, and corporate culture, to reframe hope as something we can all learn and implement for ourselves and those we work with. …

A new word has entered the business headline writer’s lexicon over the last month: the “SaaSpocalypse.” Between mid-January and mid-February 2026, around a trillion dollars was wiped from the value of software stocks. The S&P North American Software Index posted its worst monthly decline since the 2008 financial crisis. Individual stocks have been savaged, with even Microsoft, the ultimate tech blue chip, falling by more than 10%. The panic is real. But is it rational? The catalyst for this turmoil was a series of product launches from AI companies—most notably Anthropic’s Claude Cowork tool and its subsequent upgrades—demonstrating that AI agents are now capa…

Tom Broughton, the founder of the British eyewear brand Cubitts that has recently landed in the U.S., wants to make you a set of glasses that you’ll be able to wear your entire life. “They could outlive you,” he says. That’s a radical notion these days. Over the past three decades, as fast fashion has become the norm, the price of eyewear has come down alongside the price of clothes and shoes. Brands like Zenni and Warby Parker market their glasses as a fashion statement that is so affordable, you can change them up whenever you want. You could wear a different pair every day of the week. Broughton finds this approach to eyewear problematic for many reasons. For one t…

When the new year rolls around, many people will resolve to get in better shape. Last year, Americans poured $44.8 billion into the fitness industry, flocking to gyms and buying at-home fitness equipment. But it usually takes just two weeks for people to abandon their goals. Gym memberships go unused. Peloton bikes collect dust. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have found that amidst all the fitness options on the market, personal training tends to lead to better results for several reasons: It involves a personalized program, fits into the participant’s schedule, and requires being accountable to the trainer. But personal training is expensive, priced…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Florida’s particularly intense overheating during the Pandemic Housing Boom is the key reason for its downside pricing vulnerability. While U.S. home prices rose +41% between March 2020 and June 2022, Florida home prices surged +51% over the same period—leaving some parts of the state significantly overvalued. Only, it takes a large enough shift in the supply-demand equilibrium for that vulnerability to manifest into falling prices. Of course, over the past three years, 5 factors have come together to create a supply-demand equilibrium shift large en…

People know when a brand genuinely cares about well-being—for employees, customers, and humanity at large. In many cases, it’s an intangible truth they can simply feel—in how they’re treated, how decisions get made, and whether a company’s stated values actually show up in practice. Plenty of brands talk about purpose and people. Fewer live it. And the difference is increasingly obvious. That gap is why “brand well-being” is emerging as a meaningful framework for companies that want to build durable growth—not just short-term performance. At its core, brand well-being recognizes that a brand isn’t a logo or a campaign. It’s a living ecosystem made up of people, cultur…

There’s nothing spooky about ghostworking, apart from how popular it may be right now. The newly coined term describes a set of behaviors meant to create a façade of productivity at the office, like walking around carrying a notebook as a prop or typing random words just to generate the sound of a clacking keyboard. (Some might call this Costanza-ing, after Jason Alexander’s example on a memorable episode of Seinfeld.) Pretending to be busy at the office is not something workers recently invented, of course, but it appears to be reaching critical mass. According to a new survey, more than half of all U.S. employees now admit to regularly ghostworking. That statistic …

In my old banking job, where I worked for 12 years, I found myself frustrated with the slow pace of the work, the layers of red tape and approvals to get anything done. After all, banking was a highly regulated industry, and while there were many rules to follow, they were just simply being a good bank by following them. I felt tired, drained, and lacked energy—similar symptoms to burnout. While the organization was frequently voted a “best place to work,” I couldn’t figure out why my “great job” felt so bad. I wasn’t overworking or spending endless evenings logging in, so the typical paths to burnout didn’t make sense. What I was actually experiencing was rust out. …

As an operative researcher for luxury retail companies, I spent my career grabbing onto one corporate contract after the next, like a tree-swinging retainer monkey. But in a tariff-distressed industry, those contract “branches” grew further and further apart until I was left hanging. Then a colleague experiencing a similar work gap said, “Well, I guess we’re retired.” I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, but nothing prepared me for the word “retired.” I’m a freelancer, so no one is coming to my house with a gold watch as a reward for loyal service; I have no desire to move south; and I don’t play golf. My equally self-employed friend Roland had a suggestion: W…

It’s time we recognize the compelling case for “wellness governance.” Being a leader today requires a new level of performance. One that overrides fatigue, can suppress internal signals, and absorbs constant urgency, all while rapidly context-switching. Simply said, modern leadership demands have increased, and not everyone is—or wants to stay—on board. Today’s leaders face growing expectations, dynamic responsibilities, and constant pressure to perform amid deep uncertainty and an ever-accelerating business ecosystem. This is reshaping the role of leadership into something increasingly challenging to sustain, and driving CEOs like HSBC’s Noel Quinn to step back a…

Does your manager hate to delegate tasks? It might sound like a good thing—after all, that means less work for you. But, just like having a micromanaging boss is no fun, having a manager who takes on much of your work can create a work environment that is both stifling and unproductive. We asked three experts about what causes some bosses to act this way and how to encourage your supervisor to step aside and allow you to do your job. What is a ‘snowplow manager’? A “snowplow manager” is a supervisor who takes on excessive work themselves rather than delegating to their team, says Frank Weishaupt, CEO of videoconferencing tech company Owl Labs. His team recentl…

AI startups are the belle of the VC funding ball, and it’s coming at the expense of pretty much every other type of company. That’s a main takeaway from a report published by Silicon Valley Bank on Tuesday. That report found that roughly 40% of VC funding in the U.S. last year came from venture funds that “list AI as a focus. Those comprise more than 15% of U.S. VC funds—a number that has doubled over the past five years. “Put all together, this reflects not only the investor enthusiasm around the space, but also the funds required to properly deploy into capital-intensive hypergrowth AI startups,” the report reads. And with AI companies sucking up a good perc…

Ugly might be the new cute: Just look at Labubu, a “kind of ugly” plush toy that has sparked a buying frenzy across the world, especially in Asia, reported CNN. People from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur flocked to shopping malls on Friday to get the latest edition of the oh-so-collectible furry, while they quickly sold out online. Inspired by Nordic folklore, the toothy stuffed animal has high, pointy, rabbit-like ears, big round eyes, and a mischievous grin with serrated teeth. Made by Chinese toymaker Pop Mart, Labubus come in so-called “blind boxes” the size of a hand, which keep the contents a mystery until the box is opened. Pop Mart, which sells collectibles, has …

Why are AI chatbots so intelligent—capable of understanding complex ideas, crafting surprisingly good short stories, and intuitively grasping what users mean? The truth is, we don’t fully know. Large language models “think” in ways that don’t look very human. Their outputs are formed from billions of mathematical signals bouncing through layers of neural networks powered by computers of unprecedented power and speed, and most of that activity remains invisible or inscrutable to AI researchers. This opacity presents obvious challenges, since the best way to control something is to understand how it works. Scientists had a firm grasp of nuclear physics before the first …

On the heels of its intriguing Super Bowl ad, AI.com is garnering all sorts of interest—so much, in fact, that it actually crashed the company’s website, as Super Bowl viewers scrambled to see what the company that no one has heard of was all about. The new AI platform, founded by Crypto.com CEO and co-founder Kris Marszalek, reportedly spent a whopping $85 million on the Super Bowl spot, only to garner so much traffic that he had to post on X: “Insane traffic levels. We prepared for scale, but not for THIS,” followed by three fire emojis. That 30-second ad, which ran during the coveted fourth-quarter ad space, encouraged fans to go to the site and create an AI-ha…

In the 1950s, the Air Force designed cockpits for the average pilot by measuring thousands of pilots and calculating the average for 10 key physical dimensions—height, arm length, torso size, etc. They assumed most pilots would be close to average in most dimensions. When researchers actually checked, they found that out of 4,063 pilots, exactly zero were average on all 10 dimensions. Not a single pilot fit the average they’d designed for. Even when they reduced it to just three dimensions, fewer than 5% of pilots were average on all three. By designing for the average, the Air Force created a cockpit that fit virtually no one well, and that had serious consequences f…

Six years ago, I wrote (with colleague Jennifer Riel) a Harvard Business Review article on functional strategy. But the questions about functional strategy keep coming unabated. It is a vexatious issue for CEOs, functional leaders, and boards of directors. So, I thought it would make sense to dedicate a Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) to Functional Strategy: The Three Key Functional Leader Tasks. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here. How Did We Get Here? In the business world today, there are great differences of opinion as to what functional strategy is or even whether functions should have strategies. A prevalent view holds that …