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Agentic AI is increasingly appearing in leadership conversations, often accompanied by big claims and unclear expectations. For SEO leaders working with ecommerce brands, this creates a familiar challenge. Executives hear about autonomous agents, automated purchasing, and AI-led decisions, and they want to know what this really means for growth, risk, and competitiveness. What they don’t need is more hype. They need clear explanations, grounded thinking, and practical guidance. This is where SEO leaders can add real value, not by predicting the future, but by helping leadership understand what is changing, what isn’t, and how to respond without overreacting. Here’s how. Start by explaining what ‘agentic’ actually means A useful first step is to remove the mystery from the term itself. Agentic systems don’t replace customers, they act on behalf of customers. The intent, preferences, and constraints still come from a person. What changes is who does the work. Discovery, comparison, filtering, and sometimes execution are handled by software that can move faster and process more information than a human can. When speaking to executive teams, a simple framing works best: “We’re not losing customers, we’re adding a new decision-maker into the journey. That decision-maker is software acting as a proxy for the customer.” Once this is clear, the conversation becomes calmer and more practical, and the focus moves away from fear and toward preparation. Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up. The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need. Start Free Trial Get started with Keep expectations realistic and avoid the hype Another important role for SEO leaders is to slow the conversation down. Agentic behavior will not arrive everywhere at the same time. Its impact will be uneven and gradual. Some categories will see change earlier because their products are standardized and data is already well structured. Others will move more slowly because trust, complexity, or regulation makes automation harder. This matters because leadership teams often fall into one of two traps: Panic, where plans are rewritten too quickly, budgets move too fast, and teams chase futures that may still be some distance away. Dismissal, where nothing changes until performance clearly drops, and by then the response is rushed. SEO leaders can offer a steadier view. Agentic AI accelerates trends that already exist. Personalized discovery, fewer visible clicks, and more pressure on data quality are not new problems. Agents simply make them more obvious. Seen this way, agentic AI becomes a reason to improve foundations, not a reason to chase novelty. Dig deeper: Are we ready for the agentic web? Change the conversation from rankings to eligibility One of the most helpful shifts in executive conversations is moving away from rankings as the main outcome of SEO. In an agent-led journey, the key question isn’t “do we rank well?” but “are we eligible to be chosen at all?” Eligibility depends on clarity, consistency, and trust. An agent needs to understand what you sell, who it is for, how much it costs, whether it is available, and how risky it is to choose you on behalf of a user. This is a strong way to connect SEO to commercial reality. Questions worth raising include whether product information is consistent across systems, whether pricing and availability are reliable, and whether policies reduce uncertainty or create it. Framed this way, SEO becomes less about chasing traffic and more about making the business easy to select. Explain why SEO no longer sits only in marketing Many executives still see SEO as a marketing channel, but agentic behavior challenges that view. Selection by an agent depends on factors that sit well beyond marketing. Data quality, technical reliability, stock accuracy, delivery performance, and payment confidence all play a role. SEO leaders should be clear about this. This isn’t about writing more content. It’s about making sure the business is understandable, reliable, and usable by machines. Positioned correctly, SEO becomes a connecting function that helps leadership see where gaps in systems or data could prevent the brand from being selected. This often resonates because it links SEO to risk and operational health, not just growth. Dig deeper: How to integrate SEO into your broader marketing strategy Be clear that discovery will change first For most ecommerce brands, the earliest impact of agentic systems will be at the top of the funnel. Discovery becomes more conversational and more personal. Users describe situations, needs, and constraints instead of typing short search phrases, and the agent then turns that context into actions. This reduces the value of simply owning category head terms. If an agent knows a user’s budget, preferences, delivery expectations, and past behavior, it doesn’t behave like a first-time visitor. It behaves like a well-informed repeat customer. This creates a reporting challenge. Some SEO work will no longer look like direct demand creation, even though it still influences outcomes. Leadership teams need to be prepared for this shift. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Reframe consideration as filtering, not persuasion The middle of the funnel also changes shape. Today, consideration often involves reading reviews, comparing options, and seeking reassurance. In an agent-led journey, consideration becomes a filtering process, where the agent removes options it believes the user would reject and keeps those that fit. This has clear implications. Generic content becomes less effective as a traffic driver because agents can generate summaries and comparisons instantly. Trust signals become structural, meaning claims need to be backed by consistent and verifiable information. In many cases, a brand may be chosen without the user being consciously aware of it. That can be positive for conversion, but risky for long-term brand strength if recognition isn’t built elsewhere. Dig deeper: How to align your SEO strategy with the stages of buyer intent Set honest expectations about measurement Executives care about measurement, and agentic AI makes this harder. As more discovery and consideration happen inside AI systems, fewer interactions leave clean attribution trails. Some impact will show up as direct traffic, and some will not be visible at all. SEO leaders should address this early. This isn’t a failure of optimization. It reflects the limits of today’s analytics in a more mediated world. The conversation should move toward directional signals and blended performance views, rather than precise channel attribution that no longer reflects how decisions are made. Promote a proactive, low-risk response The most important part of the leadership discussion is what to do next. The good news is that most sensible responses to agentic AI are low risk. Improving product data quality, reducing inconsistencies across platforms, strengthening reliability signals, and fixing technical weaknesses all help today, regardless of how quickly agents mature. Investing in brand demand outside search also matters. If agents handle more of the comparison work, brands that users already trust by name are more likely to be selected. This reassures leaders that action doesn’t require dramatic change, only disciplined improvement. See the complete picture of your search visibility. Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform. Start Free Trial Get started with Agentic AI changes the focus, not the fundamentals For SEO leaders, agentic AI changes the focus of the role. The work shifts from optimizing pages to protecting eligibility, from chasing visibility to reducing ambiguity, and from reporting clicks to explaining influence. This requires confidence, clear communication, and a willingness to challenge hype. Agentic AI makes SEO more strategic, not any less important. Agentic AI should not be treated as an immediate threat or a guaranteed advantage. It’s a shift in how decisions are made. For ecommerce brands, the winners will be those that stay calm, communicate clearly, and adapt their SEO thinking from driving clicks to earning selection. That is the conversation SEO leaders should be having now. Dig deeper: The future of search visibility: What 6 SEO leaders predict for 2026 View the full article

Target Corporation has reportedly announced that it will cut about 500 roles at the company, partially in an effort to reallocate financial resources to boost the in-store customer experience. The job cuts would be the second major wave of cuts that Target has made in the last five months, and come less than two weeks after the company’s new CEO stepped into the role. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? On Monday, media outlets including CNBC and MarketWatch reported on a memo sent to Target employees by the company’s chief stores officer, Adrienne Costanzo, and its chief supply chain and logistics officer, Gretchen McCarthy. In the memo, the executives announced that the chain would be initiating more layoffs—this time cutting around 500 positions. However, the majority of the job cuts will not impact store-level retail workers. Instead, the memo says that about 400 jobs will be lost across its distribution and another 100 jobs will go across its store district level. Fast Company has reached out to Target for comment. We’ll update this story if we hear back. Target’s roughly 2,000 stores are divided into geographic districts staffed by corporate regional office workers. The memo stated that the number of these districts will be reduced, and thus some corporate workers overseeing these districts will be let go. Target has around 440,000 employees, most of whom work in its retail division. Job cuts of around 500 mean Target is laying off about 1/10 of 1% of its workforce. Why is Target cutting jobs? Besides a reorganization of its geographic districts, the financial savings from job cuts will allow Target to reinvest more money into front-line in-store staffing. “This change also fuels our ability to put significantly more payroll in our stores—primarily in additional labor and hours where needed most, but also in new guest experience training for every team member at every store,” the memo stated. In recent years, Target has faced customer criticism that checkout lines have gotten longer and stores have become messier. This has been attributed to lower staffing levels in stores and to store employees being taken off the floor to help fulfill online curbside orders. But the job cuts also come less than two weeks after Target’s new CEO, Michael Fiddelke, stepped into the role at the beginning of this month. Fiddelke was named incoming CEO last year and had previously served as the company’s operating officer. Fiddelke himself is the one who notified Target employees via memo in October that the company was laying off 1,800 workers. At the time, Fiddelke said those layoffs were “a necessary step in building the future of Target and enabling the progress and growth we all want to see.” Target hit by external and self-made problems In recent years, Target has had essentially flat year-over-year sales, not helped by the fact that many of its cost-conscious consumers are cutting back on their discretionary spending and inflation surges. A majority of the goods Target sells are discretionary items. Additionally, many of Target’s products come from China and other countries in Asia that have been hit hard by President The President’s tariffs, thus raising Target’s costs when it imports those goods to the United States. The company also shot itself in the foot last year when it reversed course on its celebrated diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the wake of The President entering the White House for a second term. The reversal of its DEI policies led to fierce consumer backlash and boycotts, resulting in foot traffic falling by almost 8% in many of its stores. How has Target’s stock price reacted to the layoff news? Investors in Target Corporation (NYSE: TGT) seem unfazed by the news of more job cuts. Yesterday, TGT shares closed roughly flat to $115.52 per share. And in premarket trading this morning, TGT shares are up only about 0.4%. Given this, investors seem to think the layoffs and district changes will have little meaningful impact on Target’s finances—at least in the immediate term. The good news for Target is that, as of yesterday’s close, the company’s shares are up over 18% year to date. While the company’s stock price is still down about 12% over the past year, TGT shares have now recovered significantly since their November low of around $83. View the full article

A month ago, we reported on a new help document on Google Ads for Performance Max optimization experiments: A/B testing assets beta. Well, now some are seeing this in the wild, where you can set up these A/B tests in a controlled environment. View the full article

There are some reports coming out that Grokipedia, the AI-based Wikipedia, is now showing a decline in search visibility in both Google and even ChatGPT. This comes after both an indexing and ranking surge in Google Search.View the full article

OpenAI has officially launched ads in ChatGPT yesterday. The company announced, "Today, we're beginning to test ads in ChatGPT in the U.S. The test will be for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads."View the full article

Google appears to be testing showing the citation favicon site icons at the bottom of the answer in AI Mode. This is in addition to where it normally shows those icons, at the top right of the card stack, on the side of the answer response.View the full article

Microsoft Bing is testing a dynamically loading results count under the search box. So when you enter your search phrase, the results count will dynamically count up from 0 to the number of results found.View the full article

To Dr. Richard Pan, a California-based pediatrician, the idea of living a long, healthy life should not be a partisan issue. Unfortunately, it’s become one: He knows that topics like vaccines, healthcare, and science at large are now extremely politicized, and that whoever has the power to shape our policies can have a big impact on the health of Americans. Pan has seen that firsthand in his time serving in California’s state assembly and then senate, where he authored landmark legislation around vaccines, health insurance, and even a law that led California to produce its own insulin—which paved the way for the state to offer the medicine for as low as $11. Now, Pan is running for Congress, motivated by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine agenda and broad issues around healthcare affordability. “I swore in medical school as part of my oath to help people and improve health,” he says. “Part of my career commitment would be to say, ‘Okay, well, I tried doing that at the state [level] and succeeded. Now I need to go to the federal government.” Pan is part of a wave of experts in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) who are running for Congressional seats in response to the The President administration’s attacks on science, facts, and also affordability. From doctors to scientists to math teachers, Democratic candidates, frustrated with the federal government’s actions, see an opportunity to use their STEM skills to win seats in Congress, and eventually shape policies that help the public. While some of these candidates have prior political experience, others are completely new to politics. Dr. Richard Pan RFK Jr. as a tipping point Pan first ran for California’s state assembly in 2010 after witnessing the effects of the Great Recession. The state struggled to pass a new budget, and funding shortfalls led to cuts to various health services. “I decided things were so bad that I would throw my hat in the ring and run,” he says. He flipped the Republican seat. Pan served in the State Assembly until 2014, and the state Senate from 2014 to 2022, before returning to medicine full-time. When RFK Jr. was announced as the Health and Human Services secretary, though, Pan saw it as a “tipping point.” He had already confronted RFK’s vaccine skepticism as a state lawmaker, and he saw RFK’s role in The President’s administration as something that could upend everything he worked on to help Californians. At the state level, Pan authored legislation that restricted vaccine exceptions; that law went into effect the same year California saw a massive measles outbreak. California hasn’t had such a large outbreak since. But measles cases are surging across the country, and RFK Jr. has been behind much measles vaccine misinformation. That risks everyone, Pan says. As cases increase, risks rise even for vaccinated individuals. When RFK Jr. spread false claims about vaccines during his Senate testimony, people started calling Pan—reporters, community members—asking what he was going to do about all the health protections being undone by the federal government. “I said ‘OK, then I’m going to Congress, because that’s where the problem is now,’” he says. Pan is running for the House in California’s 6th District. That seat is currently held by Democrat Ami Bera, who is challenging a Republican in the redrawn 3rd District. “Evidence and reason and the facts” Pan isn’t the only STEM expert who was asked to take action in response to the The President administration. Manny Rutinel, a microbiologist, first responder, and environmental lawyer, says community members asked him to step into the political ring for both his position in the Colorado legislature and his run for Congress. Rutinel is now running to represent Colorado’s 8th district—a seat Democrats lost by less than 1 point in 2024. The incumbent, Republican Gabe Evans, is running again, and multiple race ratings have called a “toss up” for 2026. To Rutinel, the stakes of both his campaign, and similar campaigns across the country, are clear. “To be able to put a stop to the horrors of what the The President administration and RFK Jr. are doing to our government, our institutions, our services, we need to take back Congress,” he says. He already sees his science background, along with his working-class background, reaching potential voters. In the first quarter of 2025 fundraising, his campaign raised more than $1.1 million, with an average donation of $32. “The message is resonating,” he says. “We want folks who are standing up for what’s right, who are using evidence and reason and the facts to be able to put forth legislation that actually helps people instead of hurting them.” Problem-solving mentalities Jake Johnson has taught high school math for the past 20 years. He’s never been involved in politics, but now he’s running to represent Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District—a seat currently held by Republican Brad Finstad. He knows his reasoning could sound like a cliche, but he stands by it. “I genuinely have enjoyed solving problems for two decades,” he says, “and I think that sort of spirit and mindset is something that is maybe missing a little bit in Washington these days.” The neighbors in his district seem to like that problem-solving mentality, too. Johnson’s campaign raised $100,000 the first day it launched. In both Q2 and Q3 of 2025, he outraised Finstad; Johnson’s average donation is under $50. Though he’s completely new to politics, Johnson is hopeful about his campaign; he describes himself as a “crazy optimist.” He’s also buoyed by the other STEM candidates he sees running across the country, many who are—like him, Pan, and Rutinel—backed by 314 Action, a PAC that is specifically working with STEM candidates in response to the The President administration. “We live in such a time of polarization where people get their ‘facts’ from different sources [and] when we can’t agree on basic fundamentals, we can’t have powerful, thoughtful conversations as a community,” he says. “We’ve got to get back to establishing some truths as much as we possibly can.” Public confidence in scientists Already in 2026, 314 Action is working with more than 150 STEM candidates nationwide. Many of those races are for Congress: beyond Pan, Rutinel, and Johnson, the PAC is backing Bale Dalton, former chief of staff at NASA and first-time political candidate running for Florida’s 7th District; and Audrey Denney, an agricultural scientist and educator running in California’s 1st District, among others. There are also STEM candidates running at more local levels, like Nirav Shah, who was director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention during the COVID-19 pandemic, and who is now running for Maine’s governorship. Americans’ public trust in government has been eroding. Only 17% of Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” or even “most of the time,” according to Pew Research. But they still largely trust scientists. A January 2025 Pew Research study found that 77% of U.S. adults say they have a “great deal” or “fair” amount of coincidence in scientists acting in the public’s best interest. Public confidence in scientists has dropped slightly since the start of the pandemic, but scientists continue to rank higher in confidence than elected officials or business leaders. To 314 Action, the current debates in Congress over vaccines, healthcare, and more point to a need for more STEM candidates. The PAC both recruits candidates and reaches out to candidates already running; recently, it said that all of its 150-plus STEM candidates outraised their opponents in the last quarter of 2025. The PAC has faced criticism for taking and concealing donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, in a 2024 Oregon Congressional race; 314 Action pushed back against the reporting at the time before campaign documents became public. “As The President and RFK Jr. ramp up their attacks on science and health care, 314 Action’s mission to recruit and elect more Democrats with science backgrounds has never been more urgent,” Erik Polyak, 314 Action’s executive director, said in a statement. “We work with a broad political coalition of individuals and organizations laser-focused on advancing winning campaigns.” To some, it might not be obvious that STEM experts would enter politics. Members of Congress tend to come from fields like law or business primarily (though education and public service are also dominant backgrounds). But to Dr. Pan, and others in STEM currently running for office, the idea makes clear sense. Pan cites Rudolf Virchow, the father of modern pathology, who said that “politics is nothing but medicine at a larger scale.” “The nature of politics right now demands that we actually enter the political field and practice medicine on a larger scale, as Virchow said, because it’s under attack,” Pan says. “One of the major sources of the problem right now is the current administration and the current people in Congress.” View the full article

We know AI responses are probabilistic – if you ask an AI the same question 10 times, you’ll get 10 different responses. But how different are the responses? That’s the question Rand Fishkin explored in some interesting research. And it has big implications for how we should think about tracking AI visibility for brands. In his research, he tested prompts asking for recommendations in all sorts of products and services, including everything from chef’s knives to cancer care hospitals and Volvo dealerships in Los Angeles. Basically, he found that: AIs rarely recommend the same list of brands in the same order twice. For a given topic (e.g., running shoes), AIs recommend a certain handful of brands far more frequently than others. For my research, as always, I’m focusing exclusively on B2B use cases. Plus, I’m building on Fishkin’s work by addressing these additional questions: Does prompt complexity affect the consistency of AI recommendations? Does the competitiveness of the category affect the consistency of recommendations? Methodology To explore those questions, I first designed 12 prompts: Competitive vs. niche: Six of the prompts are about highly competitive B2B software categories (e.g., accounting software), and the other six are about less crowded categories (e.g., user entity behavior analytics (UEBA) software). I identified the categories using Contender’s database, which tracks how many brands ChatGPT associates with 1,775 different software categories. Simple vs. nuanced prompts: Within both sets of “competitive” and “niche” prompts, half of the prompts are simple (“What’s the best accounting software?”) and the other half are nuanced prompts including a persona and use case (”For a Head of Finance focused on ensuring financial reporting accuracy and compliance, what’s the best accounting software?”) I ran the 12 prompts 100 times, each, through the logged-out, free version of ChatGPT at chatgpt.com (i.e., not the API). I used a different IP address for each of the 1,200 interactions to simulate 1,200 different users starting new conversations. Limitations: This research only covers responses from ChatGPT. But given the patterns in Fishkin’s results and the similar probabilistic nature of LLMs, you can probably generalize the directional (not absolute value) findings below to most/all AIs. Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up. The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need. Start Free Trial Get started with Findings So what happens when 100 different people submit the same prompt to ChatGPT, asking for product recommendations? How many ‘open slots’ in ChatGPT responses are available to brands? On average, ChatGPT will mention 44 brands across 100 different responses. But one of the response sets included as many as 95 brands – it really depends on the category. Competitive vs. niche categories On that note, for prompts covering competitive categories, ChatGPT mentions about twice as many brands per 100 responses compared to the responses to prompts covering “niche” categories. (This lines up with the criteria I used to select the categories I studied.) Simple vs. nuanced prompts On average, ChatGPT mentioned slightly fewer brands in response to nuanced prompts. But this wasn’t a consistent pattern – for any given software category, sometimes nuanced questions ended up with more brands mentioned, and sometimes simple questions did. This was a bit surprising, since I expected more specific requests (e.g., “For a SOC analyst needing to triage security alerts from endpoints efficiently, what’s the best EDR software?”) to consistently yield a narrower set of potential solutions from ChatGPT. I think ChatGPT might not be better at tailoring a list of solutions to a specific use case because it doesn’t have a deep understanding of most brands. (More on this data in an upcoming note.) Return of the ’10 blue links’ In each individual response, ChatGPT will, on average, mention only 10 brands. There’s quite a range, though – a minimum of 6 brands per response and a maximum of 15 when averaging across response sets. But a single response typically names about 10 brands regardless of category or prompt type. The big difference is in how much the pool of brands rotates across responses – competitive categories draw from a much deeper bench, even though each individual response names a similar count. Everything old (in SEO) truly is new again (in GEO/AEO). It reminds me of trying to get a placement in one of Google’s “10 blue links”. Dig deeper: How to measure your AI search brand visibility and prove business impact Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. How consistent are ChatGPT’s brand recommendations? When you ask ChatGPT for a B2B software recommendation 100 different times, there are only ~5 brands, on average, that it’ll mention 80%+ of the time. To put it in context, that’s just 11% of all the 44 brands it’ll mention at all across those 100 responses. So it’s quite competitive to become one of the brands ChatGPT consistently mentions whenever someone asks for recommendations in your category. As you’d expect, these “dominant” brands tend to be big, established brands with strong recognition. For example, the dominant brands in the accounting software category are QuickBooks, Xero, Wave, FreshBooks, Zoho, and Sage. If you’re not a big brand, you’re better off being in a niche category: When you operate in a niche category, not only are you literally competing with fewer companies, but there are also more “open slots” available to you to become a dominant brand in ChatGPT’s responses. In niche categories, 21% of all the brands ChatGPT mentions are dominant brands, getting mentioned 80%+ of the time. Compare this to just 7% of all brands being dominant in competitive categories, where the majority of brands (72%) are languishing in the long tail, getting mentioned less than 20% of the time. A nuanced prompt doesn’t dramatically change the long tail of little-seen brands (with <20% visibility), but it does change the “winner’s circle.” Adding persona context to a prompt makes it a bit more difficult to reach the dominant tier – you can see the steeper “cliff” a brand has to climb in the “nuanced prompts” graph above. This makes intuitive sense: when someone asks “best accounting software for a Head of Finance,” ChatGPT has a more specific answer in mind and commits a bit more strongly to fewer top picks. Still, it’s worth noting that the overall pool doesn’t shrink much – ChatGPT mentions ~42 brands in 100 responses to nuanced prompts, just a handful fewer than the ~46 mentioned in response to simple prompts. If nuanced prompts make the winner’s circle a bit more exclusive, why don’t they also narrow the total field? Partly, it could be that the “nuanced” questions we fed it weren’t meaningfully more narrow and specific than what was implied in the simple questions we asked. But, based on other data I’m seeing, I think this is partly about ChatGPT not knowing enough about most brands to be more selective. I’ll share more on this in an upcoming note. Dig deeper: 7 hard truths about measuring AI visibility and GEO performance What does this mean for B2B marketers? If you’re not a dominant brand, pick your battles – niche down It’s never been more important to differentiate. 21% of mentioned brands reach dominant status in niche categories vs. 7% in competitive ones. Without time and a lot of money for brand marketing, an upstart tech company isn’t going to become a dominant brand in a broad, established category like accounting software. But the field is less competitive when you lean into your unique, differentiating strengths. ChatGPT is more likely to treat you like a dominant brand if you work to make your product known as “the best accounting software for commercial real estate companies in North America.” Most AI visibility tracking tools are grossly misleading Given the inconsistency of ChatGPT’s recommendations, a single spot-check for any given prompt is nearly meaningless. Unfortunately, checking each prompt just once per time period is exactly what most AI visibility tracking tools do. If you want anything approaching a statistically-significant visibility score for any given prompt, you need to run the prompt at least dozens of times, even 100+ times, depending on how precise you need the data to be. But that’s obviously not practical for most people, so my suggestion is: For the key, bottom-of-funnel prompts you’re tracking, run them each ~5 times whenever you pull data. That’ll at least give you a reasonable sense of whether your brand tends to show up most of the time, some of the time, or never. Your goal should be to have a confident sense of whether your brand is in the little-seen long tail, the visible middle, or the dominant top-tier for any given prompt. Whether you use my tiers of ‘under 20%’, ‘20–80%’, and ‘80%+’, or your own thresholds, this is the approach that follows the data and common sense. See the complete picture of your search visibility. Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform. Start Free Trial Get started with What’s next? In future newsletters and LinkedIn posts, I’m going to build on these findings with new research: How does ChatGPT talk about the brands it consistently recommends? Is it indicative of how much ChatGPT “knows” about brands? Do different prompts with the same search intent tend to produce the same set of recommendations? How consistent is “rank” in the responses? Do dominant brands tend to get mentioned first? This article was originally published on Visible on beehiiv (as Most AI visibility tracking is misleading (here’s my new data)) and is republished with permission. View the full article

“The boomers are all about money. Gen X is like, ‘is it all about money’? Millennials are like, ‘where is the money’? And Gen Z is like, ‘what is money’?” That’s the conclusion Parks and Recreation star Amy Poehler came to on an episode of her podcast Good Hang with Amy Poehler. Since the episode aired last year, a clip has since been shared widely of her breaking down how each generation relates to money. She adds, “That’s my bad stand-up about it.” As the clip has gained traction online, on TikTok, actor Freddie Smith said that Poehler “totally nails it.” He then took it one step further and broke it down in terms of how each generation’s economy helped shape their attitude towards money. He says that for boomers, who lived through an economic boom, accumulating wealth was easy–or at least easier than it has ever been since. Baby boomers currently hold more than $85 trillion in assets, making them the richest generation by far. Therefore, they earn the title “all about the money.” Millennials, meanwhile, were handed a map and told the exact steps to follow to find the financial success their parents enjoyed. Only when they got there “we open up the treasure chest and there’s two f-ing coins in it,” explains Smith. Now, they’re all struggling through their millennial midlife crisis trying to come to terms with all the ways they’ve been sold a dream. Then there’s Gen Z. “They’re going to work and they’re getting paid direct deposit on Fridays and as soon as that money hits the account, it just goes automatically to their bills. They don’t actually ‘touch’ money” says Smith. Disillusionomics has come to define a generation that’s lost faith in the traditional markers of stability. What once defined financial success –a house, a family, retirement – feels increasingly out of reach for the youngest working generation. “This is such a true representation of what we’re all screaming about right now,” Smith concluded. “What is going ON?” (An explanation for Gen X doesn’t appear in the video, which doesn’t do much to beat the “forgotten generation” allegations.) Poehler’s soundbite emerged from a discussion with Parks and Recreation creator Mike Schur about shifting workplace environments, particularly in Hollywood—but also beyond. Schur suggests there’s a historical belief in Hollywood that if something good comes out of a chaotic environment, then it’s taken as validation: this must be the best way to produce great work. It’s similar to how the eat-sleep-work lifestyle–akin to the infamous “996” schedule–has recently gained momentum among certain tech companies. “So we better not try to fix the chaos,” he says. “When a rational person would think, ‘let’s fix the chaos’.” If the chaos is fixed, he suggests, people will still be able to produce just as good work—but without putting up with a toxic work environment as part of the deal. Schur says this attitude has improved in Hollywood in recent years. Poehler agrees, putting this down to a push from younger generations, “who have just reminded us that we don’t need to put up with behavior that we were used to putting up with.” Thanks to Gen Z’s penchant for work-life balance, “people are just a little bit less okay with having their lives ruined at work,” she says. When Schur, 50, and Poelher, 54, were coming up in Hollywood, “you put your head down and you try to survive,” Schur recalls. “The generation behind us, and especially the one behind that generation, looks at chaos and goes like—’oh, then no, thank you’.” View the full article

When Zillow launched 20 years ago, the home-buying process happened almost entirely offline. The company’s digital listings, combined with its innovative “Zestimate”—an estimate of a home’s value, based on the kind of data typically only available to real estate professionals—marked a turning point for the housing market. Zestimates weren’t exact representations of value, but they put power back in the hands of prospective buyers (to sellers’ and agents’ chagrin). Their near-instant popularity was an early “do your research” internet moment. Fast-forward to the present day, and Zillow, which has a $13 billion market cap and reports earnings after the market close on February 10, is once again under pressure. In partnership with First Street, a provider of climate risk data, Zillow had been publishing climate risk scores for the homes on its platform. But some homeowners have balked at their scores, and some have even sued. A home that First Street labels as high-risk for flooding, for example, can quickly drop in value. Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman, who joined the company in 2009 and became CEO in 2024, is walking a careful line. Zillow’s brand is associated with data transparency and consumer empowerment, but an increasing share of its revenue is tied to real estate agents who pay for software tools that help them virtually stage homes and message with open house leads. On the eve of the company’s Q4 2025 earnings, which analysts estimate will be $650 million in revenue for the quarter, 17.4% growth, Wacksman sat down with Fast Company to talk about how Zillow is navigating the competing demands of its two-sided marketplace, the affordability crisis, and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Zestimates weren’t perfect in Zillow’s early days, but even so, they were never taken down. Yet in the case of First Street’s climate risk scores, you’ve moved them to a separate place; people have to click through and leave the site. Walk me through the thinking there. Jeremy Wacksman When you are focused on helping the consumer, the buyer, and seller, you want to try and provide as much information as you can with the right context. That’s what the Zestimate always has been. And we show our work, right? We show what our accuracy is. It’s not an appraisal, it’s not a professional opinion, but it’s a great starting point. Our philosophy is: Information needs context. And it’s hard for it to be perfect, but more information generally, when given the right context, is better than less. Climate is the same way. We still have climate data on our site. We’ve tweaked what we show on Zillow versus what we link out to third parties, just given some of the accuracy data on some of the [climate] data sets. Get an official appraisal and figure out what you want to do, but almost every buyer and seller appreciates that data to start that conversation. It feels like part of the reason people are so sensitive to potentially a bad climate score or a bad Zestimate is just because of the state of the housing market. Inventory is tight, sales are sluggish, prices are high. There is this growing consensus that we need to make owning a home more affordable. Where do you see that tension over affordability show up on Zillow? The most stark change over the last decade has been the percentage of buyers who start with an affordability question versus start by window shopping. When I first joined, everyone just wanted to window shop. That’s how you got started. You fell in love with a home, then you hired an agent, then you figured out your financing. Now that’s flipped. About half as many buyers will say, I don’t even want to go get excited. I want to understand, can I do this? That massive shift, I think, is the best representation of the affordability crisis. You’re right: We are in a period where homes are incredibly unaffordable. Home prices have run up nearly 100% in some markets from pre-pandemic levels. Average rates obviously ran up, too, so your mortgage per home gets even less affordable. That’s why you’re seeing transaction volumes at 30-year lows. In a normal housing market, 5.5 million to 6 million homes will trade every year. We’re at 4 million. Relative to the last couple of years, it’s getting a little better, but if you zoom out, it is still dramatically unaffordable. What are the leading indicators you’re watching to see if the market is on the cusp of change? One way to track the overall picture is [to look at] what you consider an affordable home for a median-income household. With a 20% down payment, 30% of your income [going toward] a mortgage payment is affordable. At the market’s worst, we were close to 40% on average, so almost nothing was affordable. Now it’s drifting back down. I think that’s what you watch for. Zillow has been investing a lot in AI. One of the features that probably a lot of people have seen is virtual staging, or the use of software to add furniture and design elements to a listing. How do you go from conception to execution on something like that? Virtual staging as a concept is not something we invented. What we invented was the ability to do it with really modest tools. We saw this technology coming; we saw 3D tours and interactive floor plans, all these things. But they were done with very high-end, very expensive cameras and media capture. How do you get that to an average real estate agent? That’s the problem. The average real estate agent has maybe a $100 360-camera or an iPhone. So we built the technology ourselves. That’s why you now see virtual staging on 5% or 10% of listings in some markets. The agents can easily capture some media; we can generate an interactive walk-through. Zillow is trying to go from being an ad-based business to supporting transactions directly. Do those tools generate the kind of leads that you’re interested in? We are fortunate to have hundreds of millions of people on Zillow every month, shopping, dreaming, starting their transaction, using us as a companion. But we only help a very small share of those people actually buy, sell, or rent a home. Virtual staging and interactive floor plans and 3D tours: Those are tools for a listing agent to go win more business. But we spend as much time on software for agents to run their business, whether that’s book their appointments, schedule showings, run their offer processes. Sometimes, the best use cases of AI are just making that more efficient. I’ll give you an example. Agents are sending hundreds of messages a day to all their clients. Well, that’s something that generative AI can help with. We’re now sending millions of what we call smart messages. That’s something that sounds very simple, but think about the productivity gain. It helps them be a better guide, which helps them convert more business, which helps Zillow convert more business. Zillow is a partner to ChatGPT, which has been starting to encourage e-commerce through its interface. Some shopping categories are pretty simple. It’s easy to imagine, for example, that someone is going to go to ChatGPT and say, “What are the best pliers?” But a home is a little bit different, right? Buying a home and selling home, for sure, it’s a very different category than most verticals. The most interesting stat to me is that as technology gets more pervasive, and as data gets bigger, buyers and sellers feel even more paralyzed, and they want even more help. The percentage of people who say, “I want a full-service professional to help me” is higher now than it was before the internet, before the smartphone. You could think about ChatGPT and Gemini as a source of traffic for a vertical like ours, or as a technology we can build into our experience. We think the latter is really where it’s going to go. The average buyer spends six to nine months shopping, sometimes longer, sometimes years on and off. In this category, you are ultimately making a set of trade-offs between what you can afford, what’s available at the time, and all of your lifestyle situations—the commute, the school, the neighborhood. You don’t get to just pick from a shelf of endless supply. That’s why you end up hiring really good people to help you figure out how to make those trade-offs and figure out how to make sure you don’t make a financial decision that will cost you, because it’s the biggest financial decision you’ll ever make in your life. When it comes to figuring out the mortgage, figuring out which house to buy, figuring out how to sell your house, we think it will be this interweaving of professionals, professional software, buyers and sellers. And now you’re going to see LLMs [large language models] weave into all that. Twenty years in the future, what’s the one thing that will be really different about the search and the one thing that will be really different about the actual transaction? This category doesn’t work like any other category on your phone. You open your phone and you look at shopping and ride-hailing and travel and even wealth management—so much is digital. Real estate doesn’t work that way yet. We’ve made a bunch of progress, but it doesn’t. It’s very analog. It’s very paper based. It’s very asynchronous. We survey consumers every year, and the stat that always sticks out to me is that more than half of homebuyers cry during the process. I’m hopeful that in 20 years, hopefully in less than 20 years, we [can make Zillow into] more of a one-stop shop. It’s smart. It’s personal. It’s just all there for you. View the full article

Nobuhisa Iida to become president of FT’s owner while Naotoshi Okada will be corporate adviserView the full article

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 and refocus on “better balance” between their personal and business lives. But performance and well-being aren’t opposites—they enable each other. Wellness is a fundamental pillar of sustainable business practice. It provides the foundation of our clarity, stamina, and presence, and notably can’t be achieved through the avoidance of burnout alone. So it’s not surprising that with new leadership demands seen to be untenable, CEO turnover is at record levels and continues to climb. Around 52% of C-suite executives feel overworked and burned out. Median tenure among the S&P 500 companies has decreased 20% from 6 years in 2013 to 4.8 years in 2022—all at a time when HR heads are warning their boards of drying pipelines for high-potential future leaders. This pipeline crisis is magnified by Gen Z and millennial workers who are progressively rejecting traditional high-demand career pathways marked by high burnout rates. The result? Loss of key existing talent, associated productivity decline and risk during key leadership transitions, and significant erosion of internal readiness around succession planning. The data supports this: By early 2025, 44% of new S&P 500 CEOs and 52% of FTSE 100 CEOs were external hires, largely cited as due to internal benches being too thin. Easily overlooked While conversations on wellness in the workplace are advancing—and for good reason—to support everyday workers, leaders are often left out of the conversation. Executives have become an easily overlooked segment in employer wellness discussions at a time when they are the ones tasked with driving them. Said differently, and ironically, companies investing in corporate wellness initiatives elevate leaders championing workforce health but can inadvertently ignore the well-being of the champions themselves. So, where does that leave top leaders of companies? And who should be safeguarding and governing their wellness? Leaders are not immune to the same physical, mental, social, and cognitive health stressors that impact any person. But they are highly skilled at maintaining external composure in muting or even ignoring the impact of such strain. Executive-level competence has a unique ability to mask the cost of declining leadership health—but only until that cost mounts toward becoming unavoidable, and with potential to ripple far beyond the individual leaders. Market response When Apple announced that Steve Jobs was taking indefinite medical leave related to a physical health concern, its shares dopped 6%. United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz suffered a heart attack 37 days into the job, and uncertainty around his health condition contributed to short-term stock volatility and further share price drop for an already-declining stock. And when Bed Bath & Beyond’s CFO died by suicide, the company’s stock lost 15%. Markets are becoming more sensitive to executive illness and death. In fact, research shows that a CEO’s medical leave can have a particularly negative impact on shareholder value, especially when the leave is extended or the CEO is older. A 2016 paper analyzing CEO deaths at U.S. public companies found that between 1950 and 2009 markets seemed to react more and more strongly to such deaths, even after accounting for other factors. It’s clear that investor confidence is closely linked with key leader health and wellness—and it should be. Companies ranking higher in well-being yield significantly higher returns and outperform the S&P, and leadership is a key driver of this. So it’s no surprise that WTW’s 2025 global directors and officers survey found, for the second year running, that health and safety is the No. 1 risk for directors and officers globally. Top priorities include physical health and safety in the workplace and workplace impact on mental health and well-being. Yet there is no specific mention of leadership health as a stand-alone topic of distinct risk and interest. Leadership takes a toll on health Interestingly, recent research out of Sweden found that not only is poor health associated with greater CEO turnover, but health itself predicts appointment to a CEO position. Which implies that not only should boards be governing wellness and health for C-suite leaders to increase overall effectiveness and lengthen executive tenure, but boards should also oversee health and wellness of high-potential, next-generation leaders as part of critical succession planning. The leadership track is an increasingly hard sell for next-generation leaders given the latest research on CEO aging. Using a database of CEO facial images and applied machine learning to estimate CEO age, new research shows industry distress causes faster visible aging—adding an average of 1.2 years to their visual appearance for a given crisis or single period of distress. And with senior leaders today navigating an era of permacrisis, stacking and simultaneous crises could amplify this effect. Further, CEOs who experience periods of industry-wide distress during their tenure are found to die significantly earlier. This research quantifies a previously little documented yet important cost associated with serving as a leader—personal health cost. Leadership bears very real and material health consequences, especially when exposed to increased job demands and high-stress work environments of high-profile positions. The health effect is sizable. While many are quick to criticize the perks of CEO life, research has found that reduction in longevity of CEOs is consistent even with big pay packages. This signals an important trade-off for companies and individuals alike when there is a substantial personal cost to health and life expectancy. It’s no wonder newer generations may be gun-shy to take a similar path. There is an evolving fragility to traditional social contracts that key executives have with their companies. There are real yet often unspoken limits to the complexity, demands, uncertainty, and overload that individual leaders can sustain. And there is a necessary acknowledgment of the impact on individual leaders’ health and wellness, as well as broader amplified effects for companies. A lack of governance Leaders have a tendency to select for short-term productivity and hard-charge without needed recovery in order to remain responsive under escalating pressure “in the moment.” Take Elon Musk touting the benefits of sleep deprivation to achieve 120-hour workweeks and making a Tesla factory his primary residence for nearly three years. Most leaders focus their energy on being effective, not necessarily being well. And we haven’t developed sufficient governance to regulate this beyond the individuals themselves, both in the best interest of the leaders and the companies they helm. It is said to be a sign of intelligence to hold two opposing ideas at once while retaining the ability to function. This “doublethink” is equally true for balancing the health of a company (including financial health and workforce well-being) with the health of individual executives. Leaders are trained to regulate their corporate environments long before they regulate themselves, if ever at all. They often live in a state of chronic activation that is easily normalized but effectively overrides their physiology in an unsustainable way. Eventually, our bodies respond accurately to stressors and strain even if our intellect initially seeks to normalize them. And that is problematic for everyone involved. Well-being governance isn’t just about the concept of self-care for leaders. It’s about ensuring sustainable capacity and leadership to tap into the right level of decision-making, creative thinking, and steady engagement needed. This is what allows leaders to use both a microscope and a telescope, in parallel, to solve discrete near-term problems while driving long-term strategic efforts. Leaders are not without their own level of governance and oversight, which is typically provided by a company’s board of directors and executive team. And while wellness initiatives for populations of employees are most effective when championed by senior management, wellness initiatives for leaders are arguably most effective where championed by the board and C-suite. Good stewardship Effective boards and executive teams create and preserve long-term value by acting as well-being stewards of their enterprises. This includes providing appropriate levels of well-being governance and oversight, underpinned by the fact that healthy employees make better decisions and drive superior results. Effective leaders and boards understand the connection between corporate performance and well-being, including the materiality of well-being for executive-level human capital. And corporate governance of executive wellness has evolved from an HR-led perk into a strategic board-level priority, essential for both risk management and long-term value creation. Getting this right involves formal safeguarding of the physical and mental health of senior leaders to ensure stable decision-making and organizational resilience. Ultimately, executive wellness is a “human capital” governance issue requiring top-level oversight and strategic integration. And in a way that recognizes that leadership burnout and health crises directly impact share price and operational stability. This necessitates having accountability via standing committees, such as governance or compensation committees, charged with reviewing wellness assessments and setting baseline health targets for leaders. It also means elevating succession planning to include proactive health governance so that leadership pipelines remain healthy and “key person” risks for executives’ health are mitigated. And given that effective governance requires leaders not only to oversee wellness but also to model it, boards can mandate resilience training and structured stress management for executives in ways that support upskilling and also help nurture a health-forward culture that filters down to the entire workforce. Other initiatives may include: Visible participation of executives in wellness initiatives to legitimize and destigmatize such initiatives Use of KPIs to track effectiveness at the workforce population level and for key executives and high-potential succession talent Review of data on absenteeism, retention, and healthcare offerings engagement as well as use of frameworks for auditing workplace health and safety at the executive level Tying executive compensation to health and wellness goals to emphasize the importance of prioritizing health Setting clear standards on using existing wellness initiatives and perks, as simple as ensuring leaders use a minimum proportion of their vacation days each year A fiduciary duty Forward-thinking organizations must now treat leadership health with the same rigor as financial reporting, ultimately recognizing wellness as a fiduciary duty. What began as private health concerns behind closed doors have transformed into a material business factor that now influences investor decisions, market valuations, and regulatory frameworks. At a time when nearly 70% of the C-suite are seriously considering quitting for a job that better supports their well-being, and 81% prioritize their health over advancing their career, we need to overcome old disconnects around performance and health. A strong focus on well-being is critical to both employee and executive retention. Now is the time to legitimize executive well-being and make it part of the regular corporate dialogue. It should be explored with authentic curiosity and deep urgency around how top leaders are doing as a way for companies and investors to develop new “antennae.” This is especially important given that recent research from Spencer Stuart shows only 22% of global CEOs feel their board provides opportunities to discuss sensitive topics such as personal well-being. And given CEOs’ shortening tenures, it is critical that boards and not just C-suite executives ensure well-being governance endures and is perpetuated. If best practice is oversight for areas most material to a business, whether to reduce risk or capture competitive advantage, it only makes sense that we ensure special wellness focus for top leaders as part of that oversight. The financial and nonfinancial impacts are impossible to ignore. And as we move from looking at executive wellness as a personal matter to recognizing it as a fundamental pillar of sustainable business practice, it’s time we recognize a novel truth: Executive wellness governance really is the new corporate imperative. View the full article

The President and his supporters see the UK capital as the symbol of a Europe facing ‘civilisational erasure’View the full article

At the new ad agency Ability Machine in Nashville, creatives have access to a full suite of tools ranging from podcasting and photography studios to lighting equipment and design software. They also have quiet sensory rooms, dimmable lights, and a flexible seating system. Every part of the agency, from the way it tackles projects to the physical space it works from, is designed with its staff in mind, who are all adults with intellectual disabilities. The Ability Machine describes itself as a studio “powered by neurodiverse minds” that turns creativity “into both purpose and a paycheck for adults with varying abilities.” So far, Ability Machine has already worked with multiple local brands, as well as national names like Mercedes-Benz and Kind, on a range of creative assets from slogans to artwork for retail spaces and ad campaigns. The agency is a newly formalized offshoot of the autism-focused nonprofit On the Avenue, which provides a studio space for adults with intellectual disabilities to pursue creative passions and, in some cases, find employment on a range of projects. On the Avenue founder Tom Woodard has run the nonprofit for the past 10 years. Before that, he had a long career in advertising and brand building, primarily helping brands create signature jingles (you might remember him as the voice of the iconic Budweiser Super Bowl frogs). He says the idea for Ability Machine grew slowly over time, as he began bringing some of his creative projects to the community members at On the Avenue and asking for their input. While there are other programs out there for adults with intellectual disabilities, Woodard says he doesn’t know of any other spaces that encourage their members to pursue their own creative work—and ultimately leverage those passions into paid opportunities in the ad industry. A space to build professional skills Ability Machine is located inside On the Avenue’s 6,000-square-foot warehouse space, which is already equipped with a podcast room, sound studio, multitrack recording software, and more. It’s also a work environment that’s been designed with accessibility as a key priority, meaning members have access to different types of seating depending on their needs, sensory rooms to mitigate overstimulation, and customizable light and sound settings. “It’s really cool because if you’ve got somebody that says, ‘Oh, quick, we need a storyboard written,’ we can turn to a citizen and employ them immediately,” Woodard says. “There’s a familiarity of the building, of the staff, of their surroundings that someone with an intellectual disability really needs and flourishes in.” Days at On the Avenue are organized like a typical work day. Members arrive at 8 a.m., open the day with a group conversation, take a walk around the neighborhood, and then engage in something called assignment-based learning, which Woodard says is comparable to an individualized education program (IEP). The goal is to offer members a structured, productive environment that, for many adults with intellectual disabilities, can be difficult to find after high school ends at the age of 18. “Eighty-five percent of all folks with intellectual disabilities are underemployed or unemployed,” Woodard says. “That was just a bad number. It needed somebody to step up and do something.” Assignment-based learning at On the Avenue consists of projects guided by the interests of members. For example, Woodard says, one member named Riley has turned his love of college sports into a podcast called Rowdy Riley’s Sports Review, where he’s interviewed more than 15 NFL players and coaches. The team at On the Avenue is now looking for partners to help monetize the podcast. “People always ask me, ‘What’s the outcome that you’re looking for?’” Woodard says. “And I go, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s like when you go to college—nobody says, ‘Hey, this is where you’re going to go work afterwards.’ We simply try to build those job skills, those life skills, those roommate skills for these individuals through creativity, which makes it fun.” It’s through projects like Riley’s podcast that the idea for Ability Machine slowly germinated. The concept took real shape, though, when Woodard brought a project he was working on through his own creative agency for a Nashville candy shop called Goo Goo to members at On the Avenue. “I remember we were doing the remodel of the Goo Goo’s 3rd Avenue store,” Woodard says. “[The Goo Goo team] came in and we were sitting around our table, and I brought a bunch of folks that were at On the Avenue to sit at the table. One guy started drawing purple goo goos, and doing different things, and it brought something out in them.” After that meeting, members at On the Avenue helped complete the physical design of the 3rd Avenue location, as well as developing the slogan, “Never Chocolate Alone,” as a reference to Goo Goo’s bars with multiple mix-ins. From there, Woodard began pitching the budding creative agency to other companies, leading to more projects like a collaboration with Kind (maker of breakfast and snack bars) to create art in its New York City offices; a series of custom thank you cards and coloring books for a local Mercedes dealership; and an ad campaign for the brewery Music City Beer Co. Within the last few months, Woodard formalized this work into the official Ability Machine brand, with help from the creative and strategic partner Lewis and web development partner Ally. A new kind of ad agency The Ability Machine’s work model is flexible—some of its employees are full-time staffers, while others are community members at On the Avenue who can opt to contribute part-time for a project and receive an hourly wage. The system is built to ensure that members can work on schedules that make sense for them, while gaining hands-on professional experience. Currently, the Ability Machine has several new projects in the works, but Woodard is hoping to spread the word about the agency’s model to a broader base. Until established ad agencies are able to adjust their own office spaces to accommodate workers with intellectual disabilities, Woodard says, hiring the Ability Machine on smaller projects is a great way to support the community. “I didn’t want to build an agency just to build another agency,” Woodard says. “I wanted to build something with purpose.” View the full article

Conflict often arises from several underlying factors that can complicate relationships and hinder collaboration. Issues like poor communication and differing priorities can create misconceptions, in addition, competition for resources may lead to tension. Additionally, strong emotions and perceptions of inequity can further exacerbate these situations. Comprehending these dynamics is essential for effective resolution. So, what strategies can you implement to address these factors and cultivate a more harmonious environment? Key Takeaways Communication breakdowns lead to misunderstandings and escalate conflict among team members. Competition for limited resources creates tensions and conflicts of interest within groups. Differing priorities and values can result in misunderstandings and disagreements over project importance. Strong emotional dynamics influence decision-making and can complicate conflict resolution. Perceived inequity and unfair treatment foster resentment and frustration, impacting team morale. Information Problems and Poor Communication When communication breaks down, misunderstandings can easily arise, leading to conflict within teams. Misinformation or a lack of information is a common cause, creating gaps in expectations and responsibilities among team members. Poor communication, characterized by inconsistent messaging and unclear objectives, can escalate issues and reduce collaboration. When you fail to convey or interpret information accurately, it often leads to misunderstandings that disrupt organizational harmony. Moreover, a lack of feedback and inadequate information sharing cultivates mistrust and frustration, which can exacerbate conflicts over time. To combat these issues, it’s essential to establish regular updates and open communication channels. Conflict of Interest Conflicts of interest often emerge when you and others compete for limited resources, creating tension in various settings like the workplace. By recognizing the differing motives at play, you can move beyond simple compromises to find solutions that address everyone’s needs. Comprehending these dynamics not just helps resolve disputes but additionally promotes collaboration among all parties involved. Resource Competition Dynamics Resource competition dynamics often emerge from the struggle for limited assets, leading to conflicts of interest among individuals or groups. These conflicts often arise from competing motives for scarce resources, like funding or manpower, which are common causes of conflict. When individuals perceive inequities, tensions can escalate, causing what can cause conflict to spiral into deeper disputes. A well-known example is the story of two girls fighting over an orange; comprehension of each girl’s individual interests can lead to a resolution that benefits both, rather than a zero-sum outcome. Although compromise is often necessary in resource conflicts, a deeper comprehension of each party’s interests can encourage innovative and collaborative solutions, helping to resolve disputes more effectively. Understanding Interests Beyond Compromise Comprehending interests beyond mere compromise is crucial for effectively managing conflicts of interest, particularly when desires or needs clash over limited resources. By grasping the underlying interests involved, you can uncover solutions that extend beyond simple compromises. This approach encourages open communication, allowing parties to align their goals and expectations. Underlying Interests Possible Solutions One party wants the juice Split the orange for juice and peel Another party wants the peel Use peel for zest in cooking Shared goal: use both parts Collaborate on a recipe Effective conflict resolution hinges on identifying these deeper interests, enabling collaborative efforts to address the root causes of conflict and achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. Different Priorities When individuals or groups prioritize different aspects of a project or goal, misunderstandings can easily arise, often leading to conflict. These conflicts stem from varying criteria for evaluating ideas, which can create tension over what’s deemed important. Without mutual comprehension of each other’s priorities, frustration and misalignment can disrupt collaboration and teamwork. To cultivate a cohesive environment, it’s vital to establish agreed-upon priorities among team members. This alignment helps guarantee that everyone is working toward common goals, reducing potential conflict. In organizational settings, individual roles and personal ambitions can influence how tasks are prioritized, which may lead to competition and resentment if not addressed. Mediation can be valuable in identifying and reconciling these values conflicts, bridging the gap between differing priorities, and facilitating compromise. In the end, recognizing and respecting diverse priorities is fundamental for effective teamwork and conflict resolution. Strong Emotions Emotions can act as strong navigators in conflict situations, often revealing underlying issues that require attention. When you experience strong emotions, they can greatly influence conflict dynamics, steering your reactions and decisions. Past trauma may escalate these emotional responses, complicating resolution efforts and making rational thinking challenging. In such moments, emotional control becomes essential; without it, you might react impulsively instead of thoughtfully addressing the conflict. Mediation can provide a structured environment that cultivates emotional control, enabling you to focus on resolving underlying issues rather than becoming overwhelmed by feelings. Utilizing strategies like active listening and emotional validation can help prevent strong emotions from escalating, promoting constructive dialogue. By recognizing the role of strong emotions in conflicts, you can better navigate these situations and work towards effective resolutions, eventually leading to healthier interactions. Perceived or Real Inequity or Unequal Control Perceived or real inequity in a group can greatly impact relationships and productivity, as individuals often feel their efforts are undervalued compared to those of others. This sense of inequity can lead to resentment and frustration, creating a breeding ground for conflict. When authority dynamics come into play, where one individual or group holds more influence, it can further intensify feelings of oppression, leading to significant disputes that harm team morale. These perceptions can likewise reduce motivation and increase absenteeism, emphasizing the need for equitable treatment in workplaces. To cultivate a more harmonious environment, acknowledging and addressing feelings of unfairness is essential for conflict resolution. Transparency in decision-making processes and fair resource allocation can help alleviate feelings of inequity, promoting collaboration and comprehension among team members. Personal and Individual Factors Conflict often emerges not just from external factors but likewise from personal and individual characteristics that shape how people interact with one another. Personal factors, such as your unique values and beliefs influenced by upbringing and culture, can lead to disagreements in diverse environments. Individual personality traits, whether you’re assertive or introverted, considerably affect how you perceive situations and respond to others, often escalating conflicts. In addition, your communication styles—whether direct or indirect—can cause misinterpretations, as misinterpretations of intentions may arise. Emotional intelligence is another critical aspect; individuals with high emotional intelligence show greater empathy and comprehension during conflicts, whereas those with lower emotional intelligence may react impulsively. Moreover, high stress levels from workloads or personal issues can diminish your tolerance for frustration, making you more reactive to provocations and increasing the likelihood of conflict. Recognizing these factors can help you navigate disagreements more effectively. Interpersonal Relationship Dynamics In interpersonal relationships, miscommunication often leads to discontent, especially when clarity is vital. Furthermore, authority imbalances can create resentment among individuals, making it difficult to maintain a harmonious environment. Recognizing these dynamics is significant for addressing conflicts effectively and nurturing healthier interactions. Miscommunication Causes Discontent Miscommunication often serves as a catalyst for discontent in interpersonal relationships, particularly when clear communication is crucial for collaboration. When misunderstandings arise, they can lead to unresolved grievances, creating a cycle of conflict. Authority imbalances can likewise exacerbate these issues, as individuals may feel dominated or overlooked, intensifying feelings of resentment. Source of Miscommunication Impact on Relationships Solutions Ambiguity in Messages Frustration Set clear expectations Unresolved Grievances Eroded Trust Address issues swiftly Authority Imbalances Dominance feelings Encourage equal voice Misunderstood Intentions Conflict escalation Clarify intentions Lack of Feedback Misalignment Promote open dialogue Understanding these dynamics can help you navigate and improve your relationships effectively. Power Imbalances Create Resentment Authority imbalances in interpersonal relationships can considerably influence how individuals interact and feel within their social or professional environments. Influence imbalances often lead to resentment, particularly when one party feels dominated or lacks decision-making autonomy. Here are some ways these dynamics manifest: Favoritism can diminish team cohesion. Unequal treatment may lower motivation. Perceived domination can escalate minor disputes. Hierarchical structures often exacerbate organizational conflict. When employees perceive inequity, it’s common for frustration to build, affecting overall morale and productivity. To mitigate resentment, promoting equity and participative management practices is crucial. Creating an environment where everyone feels valued can help encourage collaboration and reduce the risk of conflict arising from influence imbalances. Frequently Asked Questions What Are the Factors That Lead to Conflict? Several factors lead to conflict in various settings. Poor communication often creates misunderstandings, whereas competing interests can escalate tensions over limited resources. Strong emotions, especially from past experiences, may cloud judgment, making resolution harder. Moreover, authority imbalances can nurture resentment, particularly when individuals feel oppressed. Finally, cultural differences in values and communication styles can cause misinterpretations, contributing to misunderstandings that eventually result in conflict among team members or groups. What Are the 4 Causes of Conflict? Conflicts often arise from four main causes: poor communication, unclear objectives, lack of trust, and perceived unfairness. When communication fails, misunderstandings can escalate into disputes. Unclear objectives lead to confusion and misalignment among team members. A lack of trust, often as a result of inconsistent behavior, undermines collaboration. Moreover, perceived unfairness, such as favoritism or unequal workload, creates resentment, further intensifying conflicts and disrupting teamwork. Addressing these causes can promote a healthier work environment. Where Do Conflicts Come From? Conflicts often stem from inadequate communication, leading to misunderstandings and misaligned expectations. They may arise when differing priorities clash, as individuals compete for resources or hold opposing values. Strong emotions, influenced by past experiences or current stress, can intensify disagreements. Furthermore, perceived inequalities in authority or resource distribution can breed resentment. Cultural differences and unique communication styles further complicate matters, highlighting the need for awareness and respect in conflict situations. How Does Conflict Develop? Conflict develops when communication breaks down, leading to misunderstandings among individuals. When objectives are unclear, frustration can arise from misaligned expectations. Authority imbalances, whether because of hierarchy or favoritism, often create resentment. Cultural differences can further complicate interactions, resulting in misinterpretations. Furthermore, emotional reactions, like anger or defensiveness, can escalate minor disagreements into significant conflicts, especially when individuals lack the skills to resolve these tensions effectively. Conclusion In conclusion, conflict arises from various factors such as communication problems, competing interests, and differing priorities. Strong emotions can further complicate situations, as perceived inequities and personal dynamics can escalate tensions. Comprehending these underlying causes is essential for effective conflict management. By recognizing and addressing these issues, individuals and teams can work in the direction of cultivating a collaborative environment, improving relationships, and finally resolving conflicts more efficiently. Awareness and proactive communication are key to mitigating potential disputes. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "What Factors Does Conflict Develop From?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Call by former Labour leader comes as prime minister defies pressure to leave Downing StreetView the full article

The real estate industry has paid over $1 billion in combined settlements in the longstanding cases from home sellers challenging commissions payments. View the full article

The rate impact has been real, but the capital implications do little to change all the "moving parts" in plans for the government-sponsored enterprises. View the full article

With an upcoming FIFA World Cup being staged across the nation, 2026 was supposed to be a bumper year for tourism to the United States, driven in part by hordes of arriving soccer fans. And yet, the U.S. tourism industry is worried. While the rest of the world saw a travel bump in 2025, with global international arrivals up 4%, the U.S. saw a downturn. The number of foreign tourists who came to the United States fell by 5.4% during the year—a sharper decline than the one experienced in 2017-18, the last time, outside the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, that the industry was gripped by fears of a travel slump. Policy stances from the The President administration on everything from immigration to tariffs, along with currency swings and stricter border controls, have seemingly proved a turnoff to travelers from other countries, especially Canadians—the single largest source of foreign tourists for the United States. Canadian travel to the U.S. fell by close to 30% in 2025. But it is not just visitors from Canada who are choosing to avoid the United States. Travel from Australia, India, and Western Europe, among others, has also shrunk. We are experts in tourism. And while we don’t possess a crystal ball, we believe that the tourism decline of 2025 could well continue through 2026. The evidence appears clear: Washington’s ongoing policies are putting off would-be travelers. In other words, the tourism industry is in the midst of a “The President slump.” Fewer Canadians heading south The impact of Donald The President’s policies are perhaps most pronounced when looking north of the U.S. border. According to the U.S. Travel Association, Canadian visitors generated approximately 20.4 million visits and roughly $20.5 billion in visitor spending in 2024, supporting about 140,000 American jobs. The economic impact of fewer Canadian visitors in 2025 affects mostly border states that depend heavily on people driving across the border for retail, restaurants, casinos, and short-stay hotels. The sharp drop in return trips by car to Canada is a direct indication that border economies might be facing stress. This has led elected officials and tourism professionals to woo Canadians in recent months, sometimes with “Canadian-only deals.” And it isn’t just border states. In Las Vegas, some hotels are now offering currency rate parity between Canadian and U.S. dollars for rooms and gambling vouchers in a bid to attract customers. Winter-sun states, such as Florida, Arizona, and California, are facing both fewer short-stay arrivals and an emerging drop-off in Canadian “snowbirds.” Reports indicate a noticeable increase in Canadians listing U.S. properties in Florida and Arizona for sale and canceling seasonal plans, threatening lodging, health care spending, and property tax revenue. Economic and safety concerns Economic policies pursued by the The President administration appear to be among the main reasons visitors are staying away from the United States. Multiple tariff announcements—pushing tariffs to the highest levels since 1935—along with tougher border-related rhetoric and an aggressive foreign policy have contributed to a negative perception of the U.S. among would-be tourists. Many foreigners report feeling unwelcome or uncertain about travel to the U.S., and some public leaders from Canada and Europe have urged citizens to spend domestically, instead. This significantly reduced intent to travel to the U.S. in 2025. Meanwhile, exchange rates and inflation have further affected some aspiring travelers, especially Canadians. The Canadian dollar was weakened in 2025, making U.S. trips more expensive. This disproportionately affected day-trip and shopping-driven border crossings. Travelers are also staying away from the U.S. because of safety concerns. Several countries have posted travel advisories about the risks of traveling to the U.S., with Germany being the latest. Although most worries are related to increased border controls, recent aggressive tactics by immigration agents have added to potential visitors’ decisions to avoid the U.S. A “wake-up call” for the U.S. The current tourism outlook is reason for concern. Julia Simpson, president and CEO of the industry association World Travel and Tourism Council, has described the situation as a “wake-up call” for the U.S. government. “The world’s biggest travel and tourism economy is heading in the wrong direction,” she said in May 2025. “While other nations are rolling out the welcome mat, the U.S. government is putting up the ‘closed’ sign.” According to estimates, the U.S. stood to lose about $30 billion in international tourism in 2025 as travelers chose to travel elsewhere. The disappointing figures for U.S. tourism follow a longer trend. The share of global international travel heading to the U.S. fell from 8.4% in 1996 to 4.9% in 2024 and was expected to drop to 4.8% in 2025. Meanwhile, arrivals to other top tourism destinations, including France, Greece, Mexico and Italy, are set to increase. The decline is also being felt by the business tourism sector, with every major global region sending fewer people to the U.S. for work. A World Cup bump? So what does that mean for the upcoming FIFA World Cup, with 75% of the soccer matches being hosted across the United States? Traditionally, host nations benefit from sports events, although impacts are often overestimated. After a disappointing year, the U.S. tourism sector expects the World Cup to boost visits and revenue. But The President’s foreign policy may undermine those expectations. A new visa integrity fee of $250 and plans for social media screening of some visitors make travel to the U.S. less attractive. And there are growing calls for a boycott of the U.S. following some of The President’s policies, including his aggressive stance about Greenland. Former FIFA President Sepp Blatter has suggested that fans avoid going to the U.S. for the World Cup. It remains to be seen whether fans will follow his call. Bookings for flights and hotels were up after the dates and venues of games were announced in December. But current political rhetoric is affecting travel decisions, especially given that fans from some specific countries may not be able to get visas. The U.S. government has imposed travel bans on Senegal, Ivory Coast, Iran, and Haiti, all of which have qualified for the World Cup. European soccer leaders have even discussed the possibility of a boycott, although such an action is unlikely to happen, given the revenue at stake for national teams and football associations. Will the “The President slump” continue? White House policies look unlikely to drastically change in the next few months. And this causes concern for tourism professionals, although most have remained silent about the recent immigration crackdown. To make matters worse, federal funding for Brand USA, the national destination marketing organization, was cut deeply in mid-2025, leading to staff shortages that have reduced the country’s capacity to counter negative sentiment through positive promotion. Soccer fans tend to be passionate about following their national side. And this could offset some of the impact of the The President travel slump. Yet, with sky-high match ticket prices and the international reputation of the U.S. as a tourism destination damaged, we believe it is unlikely that the tourism industry will recover in 2026. It will take a long time and good strategies to repair the serious damage done to the nation’s image among travelers in the rest of the world. Frédéric Dimanche is a professor and former director (2015-2025) of the Ted Rogers School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Toronto Metropolitan University. Kelley A. McClinchey is on the teaching faculty of geography and environmental studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

As the The President administration’s crackdown on immigration continues, keeping up with Immigrations and Custom Enforcement can feel like navigating a maze. From stories of agents raiding worksites and taking children in broad daylight to reported plans for new detention centers, the daily onslaught of alarming news makes it difficult to see the full picture of ICE’s actions at any given moment. Data journalist Michael Sparks is working on a solution. Sparks is a cartographer and coding editor at the Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism organization producing investigative stories about human rights, labor, and environmental concerns at sea. He’s applied skills from that role to create a new investigative database, “The Machinery of Mass Detention: A Record of What Has Been Lost,” designed as a centralized place to get updates on ICE’s movements. The database, which is housed at icetracking.org, includes continuously updating sections that track statistics like the total number of people currently detained by the U.S., the percentage of people held in ICE facilities with no criminal record, and the number of people who have died in ICE custody in the past month and year. The information is presented in succinct sections with citations from major news outlets that are easily fact-checked. Icetracking.org is a devastating but necessary resource to keep the public informed on the state of the administration’s immigration crackdown from a macro perspective, rather than simply in constant bursts of new information. icetracking.org How one data journalist is keeping track of ICE In his day job at the Outlaw Ocean Project, Sparks uses tens of thousands of government documents, news articles, and social media posts to build databases of environmental and human rights abuses at sea. Before that, he served as a product developer at The New York Times for four years, where he honed his data storytelling skills. Sparks says he felt compelled to use his skillset to hold power to account after Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by ICE officers in January. “I knew there was another vast amount of cruelty happening all over the country, and wanted people to realize that,” he says. Sparks took a little less than three weeks from starting the site to debuting it this week. It’s essentially a database composed of aggregated reports and stories from national outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CBS News, as well as local sources like Tulsa World, Houston Chronicle, and The Minnesota Star Tribune. The tracker’s code is programmed to send Sparks a list of relevant articles from these trusted sites every 48 hours, which he then manually approves or rejects, writes up a summary, and uses to update the site. In a memo at the bottom of the site, Sparks emphasizes the human toll behind the database: “What the numbers cannot capture is the texture of individual lives disrupted—the five-year-old taken from his walk home from school, the nurse shot dead while filming a protest, the grandmother detained at a routine government appointment. These cases, documented in the sections that follow, are not abstractions. They are the human particulars of a policy that has reshaped the landscape of American civil liberties.” icetracking.org “I want people to feel emotion and be motivated to act” Icetracking.org’s true impact rests in the way it displays information. Sparks says he pulled inspiration from The New Yorker’s UX for his design, opting for a simple color palette of white and black with pops of red for the most important information, and organizing the whole page into clear sections. When people first open icetracking.org, they see a succinct layout of seven key statistics, including the total number of people currently detained by ICE (around 73,000); the percentage of those being held with no criminal convictions (73.6%); and the number of people who died in ICE custody in 2025 (32, with 2026 expected to be even worse). Sparks says he updates these statistics any time one of his trusted sources publishes a new estimate. Users can then navigate to a header bar, organized by sections, for more information on each of the categories. Each subcategory similarly opens with a layout of the most significant statistics, followed by links to top articles. For one section, titled “Corporate Network: Who Profits From ICE,” Sparks created a color-coded chart to track the kinds of companies that have provided funding or support to ICE, as well as the scale of their contributions. These include the detention facility contractor GEO Group, the AI technologies company Palantir, and the tactical communications service CACI International. “The corporate network felt super important,” Sparks says. “These are detention ‘networks.’ Donald The President and Stephen Miller are not doing this themselves. This section deserves a lot more reporting that, in an ideal world, I could do.” So far, Sparks says, the reaction to the tool has been a mix of gratitude and horror at seeing this information presented in one place. “To be honest, that’s the kind of response I’m looking for,” he says. “I want people to feel emotion and be motivated to act.” View the full article

When we minimize our suffering with statements like “I shouldn’t complain—others have it much harder than me,” it can seem evolved, empathetic, even wise. In professional culture, this phrase often earns admiration. It signals gratitude, resilience, and perspective. However, beneath that polished humility lies a psychological defense mechanism that can quietly block emotional growth. That mindset reflects a subtle form of emotional bypassing, which is the tendency to sidestep uncomfortable emotions by rationalizing them away. This ends up muting, rather than healing. It may seem like a sign of maturity. However, empathy bypassing often prevents us from engaging honestly with our own reality, particularly in high-performance environments where vulnerability already feels risky. The psychology of bypassing The term bypassing comes from psychologist John Welwood, who described spiritual bypassing in the 1980s as the use of spiritual or moral reasoning to avoid painful emotions. In modern workplaces, bypassing shows up less as spirituality and more as rationalization. It’s the act of layering gratitude or perspective over stress until feelings become invisible. Bypassing certainly played a part in my journey toward a catastrophic burnout as a corporate finance lawyer. When colleagues around me experienced layoffs, I buried my misery. Complaining about my situation as a high-flying young solicitor at a Magic Circle firm felt indulgent, and potentially dangerous to my career. This kind of thinking might seem admirable, but research shows that emotional suppression increases stress responses rather than soothing them. Avoidance may feel like composure in the short term, but over time, failing to acknowledge what we’re feeling can amplify pressure and fatigue. Why ‘others have it harder’ feels so right to say It’s easy to see why this phraseology feels comforting. After all, it comes with values we admire—gratitude, compassion, and humility. Recognizing that others face greater obstacles fosters perspective and keeps self-pity in check, which are two vital traits for emotional intelligence. However, when this sentiment becomes habitual, it can cross an invisible line from awareness to avoidance. Psychologist Kristin Neff notes that true self-compassion depends on acknowledging suffering—not ranking it. When we tell ourselves our pain is less valid because others have it worse, we’re confusing empathy with denial. We treat compassion as a zero-sum game, where we see attending to our own emotions as somehow stealing from others. In truth, self-compassion is critical to our capacity to express compassion to those around us. By acknowledging our own pain, we improve our ability to have a genuine understanding of another’s. When empathy becomes avoidance Empathy bypassing is one of the most elegant—and dangerous—forms of denial. When we minimize our emotions, we distort the feedback loop that helps us understand our limits and boundaries. Over time, what begins as realism morphs into guilt. A 2019 study found that people who habitually minimize their own distress report greater anxiety and reduced well-being. The protective act of “keeping perspective” can end up silently draining your mental health. In professional settings, this often manifests as people downplaying the level of stress they’re experiencing or leaders who feel undeserving of support. They tell themselves they’re “grateful”—but that gratitude quietly erases their need for care. It causes us to isolate, creating even further harm. I’ve noticed this tendency in myself recently in light of global events. Gratitude is an invaluable psychological experience, and building it consciously improves perspective. But when it acts as a lightning rod for all our suffering, it can drastically undermine our emotional well-being. The paradox is that when we’re empathy bypassing, we seem composed. In fact, the opposite is happening; we’re actually detached. It might look like strength, but it’s often suppression. And while culture might reward suppression, it actually ends up reducing both resilience and innovation, which are two qualities that workforces rely on most. The cultural cost of constant perspective Many organizations unintentionally reinforce this pattern through what might be called performative positivity. Gratitude campaigns, “resilience bootcamps,” and culture slogans about toughness can (if you don’t implement them effectively) make emotional honesty feel out of bounds at work. When “others have it harder” becomes an unspoken moral code, employees begin to silence legitimate concerns. Burnout turns into a badge of endurance. People start seeing expressions of vulnerability as complaints. The result is a well-intentioned culture that values gratitude—but punishes truth. This is where psychological safety comes in. Workplaces where people feel free to express emotions and admit struggle are more collaborative and productive. When employees believe that only unshakeable optimism is acceptable, performance may rise temporarily, but authenticity declines. This leads to a slow erosion of trust disguised as high engagement. The key to balancing gratitude and honesty To move past self-bypassing, we need to treat empathy for others and honesty with ourselves as complementary, not contradictory. The key is integration and allowing multiple realities to exist at once. We can be grateful for having work and still find that work exhausting. We can recognize that someone else is struggling more severely and still acknowledge our frustration or disappointment. Emotional integrity lies in holding both truths without collapsing one into the other. Practicing a more honest form of kindness So how can professionals engage with their struggles without slipping into self-erasure? Start by noticing how often gratitude includes a “but.” Instead of thinking, “I’m stressed, but others have it worse,” try, “I’m stressed, and others have it worse.” That small change—replacing but with and—creates space for paradox and complexity. It permits you to feel what’s true without diminishing empathy for others. Leaders can model this integration publicly. Admitting limits isn’t weakness: it’s acknowledging psychological reality. By acknowledging your own pressures without minimizing them, you create environments where emotional honesty coexists with performance. Plenty of research shows that self-compassion actually strengthens motivation and resilience, not erodes them. The same principle applies across teams: Acknowledging difficulty deepens accountability, because people who feel seen and valued tend to feel engaged, too. The importance of feeling fully There’s nothing inherently wrong with acknowledging that “others have it harder”—but kindness without self-inclusion becomes self-neglect. In a culture obsessed with optimism, the quiet act of acknowledging one’s limits can be a radical form of strength. You don’t build real resilience through comparison, you forge it through integration—the ability to stand firmly in one’s humanity, even when others’ suffering looms larger. When we stop ranking pain and start recognizing it, we trade moral comfort for genuine integrity. And in doing so, we not only become kinder humans—we become more honest ones too. View the full article

The legend of Sisyphus goes like this: As punishment for cheating death and embarrassing the gods, he is banished to the underworld and sentenced to push a boulder up a hill. As Sisyphus nears the peak, the boulder rolls back down, and he must start over. And the episode repeats for eternity. I risk sounding melodramatic by comparing this story to the plight of the employed in 2026. Fair enough. But consider, if you will, the cycles in which a modern worker finds herself. She masters a new skill, and it’s deemed outdated. She learns a new software, and is told to use a different one. She gets a new boss, and the company is reorganized. She applies for a job, and gets no response. She lands a new job, and the job is dissolved. The dark core of the story of Sisyphus is not that his toil is repetitive or even that it’s eternal. It’s that the work is erased as soon as it’s done. The punishment—apparently the worst that the Greek gods could think of—is to accomplish nothing. If our skills and our jobs and the fruits of our labor are simply meaningless, are we not also climbing that hill with our own boulders? The problem of change fatigue Change fatigue is just that: fatigue. This has been studied, quite extensively, by psychologists. A 2024 long-term study of more than 50,000 workers in Germany found that organizational changes—like reorgs, layoffs, outsourcing, and mergers—are linked to things like sleep disturbance, nervousness, tiredness, and depression, and that the more changes an individual undergoes, the more likely they are to have these symptoms. “Organizational change is often implemented at the cost of employees’ working conditions and health,” the researchers conclude. Dutch academics studied the effects of repeated changes in a big European bank (they wouldn’t say which one) and found that the more change that workers experienced, the more likely they were to feel change fatigue. And the more fatigued they felt, the more likely they were to resist the next change. The more resistant employees became, the less likely it was that the company’s changes would succeed. But even those who supported the goals of the change were just as resistant as their unsupportive coworkers. The problem wasn’t the change itself; it was the knowledge that another change would come along right after it, wiping out the last. The company couldn’t be trusted. Says the employee to the employer: It’s not me; it’s you. A 2026 report from McLean & Company called change fatigue “an operational nightmare.” The scholars who studied the relationship between repetitive changes and employee resistance likened executives’ tendency to reorganize to a gambling habit. When there is no achievement—only work Work is becoming less repetitive. Automation and reorgs and reskilling mean that what we did yesterday, or the way we did it, is not what we’ll do tomorrow. Software engineers don’t have to write every line of code, recruiters don’t have to review every application, and customer service reps no longer have to review and tag every ticket—an AI agent can do all of that. So the ennui felt in the modern workplace is not the result of tedium, but of constant change that wipes out the progress of the individual. Why climb yet another hill only to find yourself at the bottom again? There is no achievement—only work. In 1942’s The Myth of Sisyphus, philosopher Albert Camus describes two natural responses to the meaninglessness of toil: that the suffering will either redeem or defeat. But he prescribes something else: defiance. Camus believed that the most important part of the story is when Sisyphus descends the hill, fully aware of the useless task ahead. What is he thinking? “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” he writes, not glibly. Happy, because he recognizes how absurd his situation is. Happy, because he is free from illusion. That’s Camus’ definition of defiance. Defiance for the 21st century worker may be rejecting the illusion that work must be meaningful to make the worker meaningful. The gods in the myth of Sisyphus demanded the climb. Today’s gods demand the climb, but also the method, the enthusiasm, and the willingness to pretend it will last. They should not be surprised when workers stop pretending. View the full article

On February 10, the Environmental Protection Agency said it would ditch its “endangerment finding”—the mechanism that allows the government to regulate climate pollution. It’s “the single biggest attack in U.S. history on federal authority to tackle the climate crisis,” Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a recent press briefing. Here’s a brief primer on what the rule is and what the repeal might mean. What is the endangerment finding? In 2009, the EPA issued a ruling saying that six greenhouse gases—including carbon dioxide and methane—were a danger to public health and welfare, citing a mountain of scientific evidence. The EPA issues similar “endangerment findings” for every pollutant it regulates, from mercury to ozone. (In the case of greenhouse gases, it’s known as the endangerment finding because it was a landmark decision.) Once an endangerment finding is in place, the EPA is required to regulate the pollutant and propose emission standards. What led up to it? When the Clean Air Act passed in 1970, it tasked the EPA with regulating pollutants that threaten health or welfare—including the climate. The agency didn’t initially regulate greenhouse gases, but in the late 1990s it acknowledged it had the authority to act. In 2003, the Bush EPA reversed course, declaring that CO2 and other greenhouse gases weren’t air pollutants. The Supreme Court overruled that four years later, calling greenhouse gases “unambiguously” pollutants and ordering the EPA to act on science and set vehicle standards. What regulations did it help create? In 2023, the EPA finalized a rule to reduce methane, a potent greenhouse gas, at oil and gas plants. In 2024, the agency created rules to tackle greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, which are responsible for around a quarter of the country’s climate pollution. The EPA also finalized “clean cars” standards to reduce pollution from passenger cars, light trucks, and vans, and new standards for heavy-duty trucks; transportation accounts for around 28% of U.S. emissions. Now what? The repeal is specifically tied to vehicle emission standards, so that’s what the administration will try to ditch next. Although the methane and power plant regulations also rely on the endangerment finding, those will take extra steps to undo. (It’s worth noting, however, that the EPA has already proposed getting rid of the power plant regulations and delayed implementing the methane rule.) It’s likely that the changes could eventually fail in court; since 2009, the impacts from climate change have become even more obvious, from more extreme heat waves to more destructive wildfires, storms, and rising seas. The The President administration is recycling the Bush administration’s arguments that CO2 and other greenhouse gases aren’t air pollutants, which the Supreme Court already rejected. What do the changes mean for business? Some automakers, including Ford, have argued for stability in greenhouse gas regulations and supported the EPA’s vehicle emission standards. Regulatory uncertainty makes it harder for companies to plan. “Undermining the endangerment finding would create more chaos, risk, and uncertainty for businesses already grappling with rising costs, extreme weather, and market volatility,” says Sean Hackett, a senior manager for energy transition at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. “We’re thinking about it within the bigger context that this rollback is just the latest in the series of actions that threaten business stability, investment, and innovation.” The American Petroleum Institute has said that although it supports the repeal of emission standards for vehicles, it believes that the EPA has the authority to regulate climate pollution from power plants and other stationary sources. (Legal experts from the Natural Resources Defense Council argue that there isn’t a distinction, and that both types of pollution can be regulated.) API supports methane regulations and says that the industry is working to reduce emissions. For automakers that are already dealing with the loss of EV incentives, it’s one more factor that could push American companies further behind global competitors that are moving to electric cars. “Repealing the finding doesn’t remove climate risk or investor expectations or global market demands—what it does do is it removes that stable federal reference point that companies use to plan,” Hackett says. “The regulatory whiplash from removing the endangerment finding would make it harder to sequence their investments in things like engines, batteries, supply chains, and workforce training. Then that uncertainty itself becomes a material financial risk.” View the full article

Like fingernails, human hair is something that’s considered normal and fine when it’s attached to the body, but gross in any other context. Hair clogs our drains. Seeing a single strand on our plates is grounds for returning food at a restaurant. And after it’s cut off at salons and barbershops, it’s promptly swept up and thrown away. Hair is usually destined for the dustbin, but what if it could be reused as a raw material for design? One designer is exploring some novel uses for hair, including making a biotextile that feels like wool. Designer Laura Oliveira collected clippings at two Portugese hair salons for her master’s thesis in product and industrial design at the University of Porto in Portugal. (The hair was donated anonymously after the two salons signed informed consent forms.) Oliveira received several large bags’ worth of hair that she cleaned and sorted by color, texture, and length. Over the course of the project, she developed what she calls a “hairbraium,” an archive of categorized human hair samples that she used as her materials library. Hair as a material Fashion designers have used human hair before (see Turkish designer Dilara Findikoglu’s Spring 2023 collection). In fact, hair has deep roots as a material. Textile made from human hair that dates to the Middle Ages has been found in Peru. Today, Dutch company Human Material Loop turns hair into yarns and textiles. Oliveira made her biotextiles by applying various textile techniques to hair, like carding, wet felting, and needle felting. The felted biotextiles were slightly scratchy, but structured and dense, “similar to coarse wool,” she says. She also experimented with other, more unconventional methods, like combining hair with glycerin, agar-agar, and pine resin. When combined with pine resin, which is usually brittle when solid, the hair absorbed it and improved its resistance and structural stability. “This project taught me a lot, both technically and conceptually,” Oliveira tells Fast Company. “Through the research and experimentation, I realized that hair has impressive properties and could potentially be applied in multiple fields, from agriculture and textiles to art and product design.” In addition to the fabrics, Oliveira turned hair into needle felt balls, tchotchkes, and filling material that could be used inside pillows and puffer jackets. With resin, she says hair’s potential as a raw material is mainly for artistic and design objects, where the goal is to create stronger bio-based composites that explore new aesthetic and tactile possibilities. “Overall, these materials are still in an experimental stage,” she says. “While they show interesting potential, they would require further research and testing to improve their mechanical performance, durability, and consistency before being considered for larger-scale or real-world applications.” View the full article