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This week's Ask a PPC explains why goal-based bidding can overspend budgets and how ROAS, CPA, and pacing actually behave inside ad auctions. The post Why Do Budgets Overspend Even With A Target ROAS or CPA? – Ask A PPC appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

You’re tracking the wrong numbers – and so is almost everyone else in SEO right now. We’ve all been there. You present a chart showing organic traffic up 47%, only to get blank stares from the CMO who wants to know why revenue hasn’t budged. Or you celebrate a top-three ranking for a keyword nobody’s actually searching for anymore. The metrics that made you look good in 2019 are actively misleading your decision-making in 2026. With AI Overviews dominating search results, zero-click searches becoming the norm, and personalized SERPs making traditional rankings less meaningful, sticking with outdated measurements puts your strategy and budget at risk. Let’s walk through the exact metrics your SEO team needs to retire this year and what you should measure instead. Traffic metrics 1. Organic traffic As a standalone KPI, organic traffic has been the primary metric in SEO reporting since SEO began. But on its own, it lacks context. Not all traffic is created equal. A thousand visitors who bounce in three seconds aren’t helping your business. A hundred visitors who convert at 8%? That’s a different story. I worked with a local HVAC company that saw traffic drop 22% year over year. Panic mode, right? Except revenue from organic actually increased by 31%. We’d pruned low-intent informational content and doubled down on high-intent service pages. Fewer visitors, better visitors. Before you panic about any traffic drop, look at where you’re losing traffic. If it’s informational articles and customer login pages, that’s not a revenue problem. It’s noise leaving your dashboard. 2. Total impressions without intent segmentation This metric is equally misleading. A million impressions from informational queries like “what is SEO” might generate awareness, but zero revenue. Ten thousand impressions from commercial queries like “best enterprise SEO agency” could fill your pipeline. Google Search Console gives you this data, but most teams don’t slice it intelligently. 3. Traffic growth without revenue correlation This one gets SEO teams in trouble with executives. You walk into a quarterly review, proudly show a 35% increase in organic traffic, and the CFO asks, “Great, how much revenue did that drive?” If you can’t answer that question, you’re just showing noise. 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 Ranking metrics 4. Average keyword position This looks useful in a dashboard but falls apart under scrutiny. If you rank No. 1 for a keyword with 10 monthly searches and No. 50 for a keyword with 50,000 monthly searches, your average position might look decent, but you’re getting crushed where it actually matters. The metric treats all keywords as equal when they aren’t. And with personalized search results, “average position” varies widely by user and location. 5. Isolated keyword tracking Searchers don’t think in isolated keywords. They ask questions, explore topics, and refine queries. Google has shifted to semantic search and topic modeling. Tracking “lawyer” alone is useless without intent — criminal defense, divorce, or someone researching what lawyers do. 6. Share of top 10 rankings This metric sounds smart until you realize 80% of your top 10 rankings may be low-intent, low-volume informational queries. Meanwhile, competitors hold the top three spots for every high-intent commercial query in your niche. One No. 1 ranking for a high-converting transactional keyword is worth more than 50 top-10 rankings for informational fluff. Authority and engagement metrics 7. Domain authority and domain rating DA and DR aren’t Google metrics. They’re proprietary scores created by SEO tool companies. Yet I see teams setting goals like “increase DA from 42 to 50 by Q3.” You can have a DA of 65 and get crushed by a DA 35 competitor if that competitor’s content better matches search intent. Stop putting these in executive dashboards. 8. Total backlink volume This is another vanity metric. Google’s algorithm weighs link quality, relevance, and context. A single link from a highly relevant, authoritative site in your niche is worth more than 500 spammy directory links. I’ve audited sites with 100,000+ backlinks that couldn’t rank for anything meaningful because 95% were junk. 9. Bounce rate This metric has been misunderstood for years. If someone searches “business hours for [your company],” lands on your contact page, finds the hours, and leaves, that’s a successful session with a 100% bounce rate. Google replaced bounce rate with “engagement rate” in GA4 for good reason. Similarly, session duration and pages per session need context. A high pages-per-session metric on your pricing page might mean users are confused rather than engaged. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Why these SEO metrics are failing now The search landscape has fundamentally shifted. Up to 58.5% of U.S. Google searches and 59.7% of EU searches now end without a click to any external website, according to SparkToro’s zero-click study. That means for every 1,000 searches, only 360 clicks go to the open web. AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity are pulling information and synthesizing answers without requiring a click. Your content can be highly visible and influential without generating a single session in Google Analytics. In many verticals, AI is now the primary discovery layer. About 24% of CMOs now use AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to research vendors, up from zero mentions just a year earlier, Wynter’s B2B buyer research found. Meanwhile, 94% of B2B buyers use LLMs during their buying process, according to 6sense’s Buyer Experience Report. Buyers are discovering vendors inside AI tools, then turning to Google to confirm what they’ve already heard. This means your SEO team’s goal is no longer just to “drive traffic.” It’s to make sure your brand shows up when buyers are deciding which options to consider. Modern customer journeys are also messy. A prospect might discover you via organic search, return through a paid ad, sign up for your email list, and finally convert through direct traffic. If you’re using last-click attribution, SEO looks ineffective. But without that initial organic touchpoint, the conversion never would’ve happened. Dig deeper: Measuring zero-click search: Visibility-first SEO for AI results What to measure instead Revenue and pipeline contribution from organic For ecommerce, track revenue from organic sessions by product category and landing page. For lead-gen businesses, track qualified leads from organic and how many convert to customers. Use CRM integration to connect the dots. Nobody cares about your DA if you can show organic contributed $1.2 million in revenue last quarter. Conversion-weighted visibility Track your visibility specifically for high-value terms that actually drive conversions. A franchise client shifted to this metric and discovered they were dominating low-intent queries but barely visible for high-intent local service terms. We reallocated resources, and qualified leads doubled in four months. Topic cluster performance This replaces individual keyword rankings. Track how well you rank across entire topic clusters, how many related keywords you rank for, average visibility across the cluster, and total traffic and conversions from that cluster. This gives you a holistic view of topical authority. SERP real estate ownership Measure how much of the search results page you own, not just organic listings, but featured snippets, knowledge panels, local packs, and People Also Ask boxes. Owning multiple SERP features for a high-value query means you’ve effectively blocked out competitors. AI platform visibility and brand mentions How often is your brand mentioned or recommended in AI-generated responses? Brand recommendations now matter as much as clicks. If you have a 90%+ recommendation rate across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews for your core topics, you’re winning, even if your click-through traffic looks flat. Tools are emerging to track this, but you can also do manual spot checks. This visibility builds authority and awareness, leading to brand searches and conversions down the line. Branded search and direct traffic as AI visibility proxies Here’s something most teams miss: When buyers discover your brand through AI tools or zero-click searches, they don’t click through. They search your brand name directly or type your URL into their browser. That traffic shows up in your branded search and direct channels, not organic. If your nonbranded organic traffic is flat but branded searches and direct visits are climbing, that’s often a sign your content is being cited in AI Overviews and LLM responses. Track these together. A client of mine saw organic traffic plateau while brand search volume increased 40%. Their content was being cited in AI Overviews, building awareness without the click. Dig deeper: 12 new KPIs for the generative AI search era How to transition your reporting Changing your reporting framework is scary. Stakeholders have stared at the same metrics for years. Start by auditing your current dashboard. Does each metric connect to a business outcome, or is it just activity? Retire vanity metrics gradually. If you’ve reported organic traffic as a standalone KPI, introduce “organic traffic by intent segment” and “organic-attributed revenue” alongside it. Over a few reporting cycles, shift focus to the new metrics and phase out the old. When introducing new metrics, explain them in business terms. Don’t say “conversion-weighted visibility.” Say “visibility for the search terms that drive the most leads and revenue.” Be transparent about why change is necessary. AI Overviews, zero-click results, and personalization have made old metrics less reliable. That’s not admitting failure. It’s demonstrating you’re evolving with the reality of search in 2026. 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 The metrics that prove SEO’s value The metrics you retire this year — organic traffic as a standalone number, average keyword position, domain authority, and bounce rate — aren’t bad. They’re incomplete. Worse, they create the illusion of progress while competitors focus on metrics that drive revenue. The metrics you adopt — revenue contribution, conversion-weighted visibility, topic authority, SERP real estate ownership, and AI platform mentions — connect SEO directly to business outcomes. They prove ROI, justify budget, and align your strategy with what matters. Take a hard look at your dashboard. Identify the metrics that make you look busy instead of effective. Retire them. Replace them. No one cares how much traffic you drove or your DA score. They care whether SEO drove growth. Make sure your metrics prove it. View the full article

Google has added 53 new languages to AI Mode, which means the AI Mode works in just under 100 languages. This was announced by Nick Fox from Google on X yesterday.View the full article

Google's John Mueller responded to a concern about having bad title tags and how that might impact your site in Google Search. He said on Bluesky "I don't think our systems have a "we don't like this one guy's titles" filter."View the full article

There has been an uptick in complaints from businesses around Google local reviews disappearing or being removed. We had something similar last October and it was fixed in December and now I am seeing more complaints about reviews going missing.View the full article

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign is remembered a decade on for the exclamation point in its “Jeb!” logo, but Jesse Jackson’s campaign actually used the punctuation 28 years before him. Jackson, the civil rights activist who died Tuesday at the age of 84, ran for president twice, in 1984 and 1988. At the 1988 Democratic National Convention, his supporters held red signs that said “Jesse!” in white. Jackson came in second in the 1988 primary with nearly 30% of the vote against the party’s nominee Michael Dukakis, and since then, candidates from Bush to 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and former U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, have used the punctuation mark in their logos to give their names some added emphasis. Though Jackson never held political office, the visual brand of his historic campaigns still resonates today for standing out in a sea of sameness. A protege of Martin Luther King Jr., Jackson was the founder of the civil rights nonprofit Operation PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity) when he announced his campaign in 1983 without any experience in elected office and became the first Black presidential candidate for a major party since Shirley Chisholm. Jackson’s exclamation mark logo was far from the only logo used in support of his presidential campaigns in a time before standardized, consistent branding was expected for political campaigns. He campaigned in serifs and sans serifs, and sometimes in bright yellow, a color that signaled a break from the standard red, white, and blue color palette of U.S. politics at the time. His campaign used slogans like “Now is the Time” and “Keep Hope Alive.” During a speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, Jackson explained his idea of the nation as a rainbow, a symbol that became associated with his candidacy and advocacy. “Our flag is red, white, and blue, but our nation is a rainbow—red, yellow, brown, black, and white—and we’re all precious in God’s sight,” he said. That message, along with Jackson’s push to build a “rainbow coalition” that transcended racial and class lines, inspired rainbow-themed buttons and ephemera. Buttons depicted rainbows that were red, white, and blue or the full ROYGBIV spectrum. In the window after designer Gilbert Baker designed the Pride flag in 1978 but before the rainbow became as closely associated with the LGBTQ movement as it is now, Jackson’s political brand made the symbol its own. Jackson’s political branding remains an inspiration today for candidates and designers looking for a more unconventional political aesthetic, from added punctuation or color schemes that break from tradition. The Jackson political brand has also proven strangely popular overseas. A K-pop star wore a shirt in a 2018 music video showing Jackson’s 1988 campaign logo, and Jackson ’88 tees for a time became a trend in Asia. It wasn’t about Jackson, specifically, but about the generic look of a nostalgic American political logo. A candidate unlike any other, Jackson had a visual brand that stood apart at the time. Today, it just looks all-American. View the full article

The other day, Google released the Google Search Console AI-powered configuration tool and we continued to wonder when the other features, like branded queries and the social channels would go live. Well, Google's John Mueller confirmed Google is still testing those two features before they are more fully rolled out to more users.View the full article

Jailing of couple on motorcycle trip for alleged spying ‘totally unjustifiable’, foreign secretary Yvette Cooper saysView the full article

Google is rolling out an update for Google Ads advertisers to certify for some cryptocurrency and complex speculative financial products. This is "incrementally to all advertisers over a period of time and not all advertisers and certification applications will be affected immediately," Google wrote.View the full article

A new 3D-printed construction technique turns corn into a novel building material. Corncretl is a biocomposite made from corn waste known as nejayote that’s rich in calcium. It’s dried, pulverized, and mixed with minerals, and the resulting material is applied using a 3D printer. This corn-based construction material was made by Manufactura, a Mexican sustainable materials company, and it imagines a second life for waste from the most widely produced grain in the world. The project started as an invitation by chef Jorge Armando, the founder of catering brand Taco Kween Berlin, to find ways he could reintegrate waste generated by his taqueria into architecture. A team led by designer Dinorah Schulte created corncretl during a residency last year in Massa Lombarda, Italy. “The material combines recycled nejayote derivatives with limestone and Carrara marble powder, connecting pre-Hispanic construction knowledge from Mexico with material traditions from northern Italy,” Schulte tells Fast Company. Growing momentum for clean cement alternatives Many sustainable materials studios are researching concrete alternatives. And while corncretl is just in the prototyping stage, food waste has been tested as a potential building material more broadly. Researchers at the University of Tokyo made a construction material it said was harder than cement in 2022 out of raw materials like coffee grounds, powered fruit and vegetable waste, and seaweed. Last year, researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology developed a rammed earth material encased in cardboard, which eliminated the need for cement completely, and Manufactura experimented with building materials made from coffee too. Designers have turned to 3D printers to build everything from train shelters to houses, and developing alternative materials to print with could lead to cheaper, more durable, and more sustainable construction methods. After Schulte’s team developed corncretl, they then moved to practical application, prototyping three panels for modular construction using a Kuka robotic arm. “The project employs an internal infill structure that allows the 3D-printed wall to be self-supporting, eliminating the need for external scaffolding during fabrication,” Schulte says, and the geometry of the system was inspired by terrazzo patterns found in the Roman Empire, particularly Rimini, Italy, where the team visited. “During a visit to the city museum, we were struck by the expressive curved terrazzo motifs, which became a starting point for translating historical geometries into a contemporary, computationally designed 3D-printed wall, culturally rooted yet forward-looking,” she says. Corn, or maize, is native to Mexico, and the country produces 27 million metric tons of it annually, according to the Wilson Center, a think tank. Finding an alternative use for nejayote, then, could then turn a waste stream from a popular food into the basis for building physical structures. If the byproduct from cooking tortillas proves to be one such source, taquerias could one day find themselves in the restaurant and construction businesses. View the full article

In the early days of SEO, authority was a crude concept. In the early 2000s, ranking well often came down to how effectively you could game PageRank. Buy enough links, repeat the right keywords, and visibility followed. It was mechanical, transactional, and remarkably easy to manipulate. Two decades later, that version of search is largely extinct. Algorithms have matured. So has Google’s understanding of brands, people, and real-world reputation. In a landscape increasingly shaped by AI-powered discovery, authority is no longer a secondary ranking factor – it’s the foundational principle. This is the logical conclusion of a long, deliberate evolution in search. From links to legitimacy: How authority evolved Google’s first major move against manipulation came with Penguin, which forced the industry to evolve. That’s when “digital PR” began emerging as a more palatable framing than link building. Google also began experimenting with entity-based understanding. Author photos appeared in search results. Knowledge panels surfaced. Brands, authors, and organizations were treated less like URLs and more like connected entities. Although experiments like Google authorship were eventually retired, the direction was clear. Google was redefining how it assessed website and brand authority. Instead of asking, “Who links to this page?” the algorithms increasingly asked, “Who authored this content, and how are they recognized elsewhere?” That shift has only accelerated over the past 12 months, as AI-driven search experiences have made the trend impossible to ignore. Dig deeper: From SEO to algorithmic education: The roadmap for long-term brand authority Helpful content and the end of synthetic authority The integration of the helpful content system into Google’s core algorithm marked a turning point. Sites that built visibility through over-optimization saw organic performance erode almost overnight. In contrast, brands demonstrating depth, experience, and strong brand authority gained ground. Search systems are now far better at evaluating whether content reflects lived expertise. Over-optimized sites – those with disproportionately high link metrics but limited brand recognition – have struggled as a result. In recent core updates, larger, well-known brands have consistently outperformed smaller sites that were technically strong but lacked brand authority. Authority, not optimization, has become a key differentiator. 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 Authority in an AI‑mediated search world Large language models (LLMs) learn from the open web: journalism, reviews, forums, social platforms, video transcripts, and expert commentary. Reputation is inferred through the frequency, consistency, and context of brand mentions. This has profound implications for how brands approach SEO. Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, YouTube, and trusted review platforms such as G2 are among the most heavily cited sources in AI search responses. These aren’t environments you can fully control. They reflect what people actually say about your brand, not what you claim about yourself. In other words, authority is now externally validated – and much harder to influence. Visibility is no longer driven solely by what happens on your website. It’s shaped by how convincingly your brand shows up across the wider digital ecosystem. This doesn’t mean the end of Google Market share data continues to show Google commanding over 90% of global search usage, with AI platforms accounting for a fraction of referral traffic. Even among heavy ChatGPT users, the vast majority still rely on Google as part of their search behavior. Google is absorbing AI-style answers into its own interface through AI Overviews, AI Mode, and other generative enhancements. Users aren’t abandoning Google. They’re encountering AI within it. The opportunity lies in building authority that performs across both traditional and AI-mediated search surfaces. I’ve previously written about the concept of building a total search strategy. Brand building is the new SEO multiplier One of the more uncomfortable realizations for SEO practitioners is that some of the most effective authority signals sit outside traditional search channels. Digital PR, brand advertising, events, partnerships, and even offline activity increasingly influence organic performance. A physical event can generate listings on event platforms, coverage in local press, and organic social discussion – each feeding into a broader perception of legitimacy. This is where paid and organic disciplines begin to converge. Brand awareness improves click‑through rates. Familiar names attract citations. Mentions on YouTube or in long-form journalism reinforce topical authority in ways links alone never could. We’ve even seen a recent study showing YouTube comments as a leading factor correlated with AI mentions. As someone who works across both paid and organic strategy, I see this multiplier effect repeatedly. Strong brands don’t just convert better – they now perform better organically, too. Dig deeper: The new SEO imperative: Building your brand Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. A practical framework: The three pillars of authority Building authority requires a holistic approach – one that starts with brand strategy, category understanding, and a broader set of tactics than traditional SEO. I’ve developed a simple framework that ensures consistent focus on three core pillars: 1. Category authority: Owning the truth, not just the traffic This is about defining how the category itself is understood, not merely competing within it. Authority begins upstream of content production, with a clear point of view on what matters, what’s outdated, and what’s misunderstood. Rather than chasing keywords, the goal is to become the reference point others defer to when making sense of the space. This is the layer search engines and LLMs increasingly reward because it signals genuine expertise rather than tactical optimization. 2. Canonical authority: Creating the definitive explanations If category authority sets the belief system, canonical authority operationalizes it. This is where brands invest in explanation-first content that answers questions properly, not superficially. Canonical explanations are designed to be cited, reused, and paraphrased across the ecosystem: by journalists, analysts, creators, forums, and AI systems. They form the backbone of content infrastructure – hubs, guides, FAQs, and explainers that are structurally sound, consistently updated, and clearly authored. In an AI-mediated search environment, these assets become the raw material models learn from and reference, making them central to long-term visibility. 3. Distributed authority: Proving legitimacy beyond your website What matters isn’t just what you publish, but how your brand shows up across platforms you don’t control. This includes: PR coverage. Social mentions. Video platforms. Communities. Reviews. Events. Even product experiences. Distribution and amplification aren’t afterthoughts. They’re how authority is stress-tested in public. Consistent, credible presence across these surfaces feeds both human perception and algorithmic inference, reinforcing legitimacy at scale. Dig deeper: How paid, earned, shared, and owned media shape generative search visibility Building authority beats chasing algorithms Every evolution in search presents the same choice. You can react – scrambling to interpret updates, tweaking tactics, and hoping the next change favors you. Or you can invest in becoming the recognized authority in your space. This requires patience, cross-channel collaboration, and genuine investment. But it’s the only approach that’s proved durable across decades of algorithmic change. The tactics influencing performance today feel less like legacy SEO and far more like classic marketing and PR: building authority, earning attention, and influencing demand rather than engineering visibility. No doubt Google will continue to evolve. AI systems will mature. New discovery platforms will emerge. None of that changes the underlying truth: Authority has always been the hardest signal to earn – and the most valuable once established. View the full article

The President’s latest plans for a White House annex could subtly reshape the path around the South Lawn, and its resulting irregularity says a lot about the Administration’s capacity for design nuance. The latest renderings for a new proposed building on the site of the demolished East Wing were briefly posted to the National Capital Planning Commission website on February 13, and then deleted. The plans call for a ballroom much bigger than the rest of the White House. So big, in fact, that it ruins the shape of the South Lawn driveway. Under the proposal, a new garden would cover the site of the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, which was demolished alongside the East Wing last year, while a roughly 22,000-square-foot ballroom would jut out ever so slightly into the path of the looping driveway that encircles the most famous backyard in the U.S. The elongated oval drive would then have to be pushed in on one side to accommodate the footprint of the enlarged ballroom, like the side view of an spherical exercise ball under pressure. Rather than maintain the intentional harmony of the current drive, the proposed path turns the South Lawn into a deferential design afterthought that makes way for The President’s dream ballroom. In the grand scheme of The President’s presidency—and the White House’s overall facade—a rerouted driveway is a minor thing. But the effect on this subtle element reflects the lengths his team will go to shoehorn his design ideas into reality, even if it means upsetting core design principles like balance elsewhere. Gold-obsessed, unless it’s the golden ratio Of course, nothing about The President’s proposed ballroom has ever been symmetrical, nor have any of his other White House design projects been particularly subtle. He started by tearing out the Rose Garden and putting a car lot-sized flag poll on the North Lawn and then got to work tearing down portions of the White House before anyone could okay it or say no. The President replaced the original architect for the ballroom in December after clashes over its size. A National Park Service report last year found the plans would “disrupt the historical continuity of the White House grounds and alter the architectural integrity of the east side of the property.” The latest proposed elevations for the ballroom, which were designed by Shalom Baranes Associates, a Washington, D.C., architectural firm, are more than twice the size of the since-demolished East Wing. The drafted design gives the White House complex the look of a male fiddler crab, which has one claw that’s bigger than the other. The planned ballroom dwarfs the West Wing in sheer footprint, which would make the overall visual balance of the White House grossly asymmetrical upon its completion. Heightwise, however, the building appears in the renderings to rise about as tall as the Executive Mansion itself, and the proposal takes great pains to show that it won’t be visible from various vantage points in Washington, D.C., like from the Jefferson Memorial or from the U.S. Capitol steps facing northwest. The building is designed with a neoclassical facade, Corinthian columns, and a wide staircase entrance, matching the call for classical architecture The President asked for in an executive order. Fine arts fueled by cash, but not the arts Construction of the ballroom will be paid for by corporate donors, raising thorny ethical questions for a president who once claimed to “drain the swamp.” Two-thirds of known corporate donors to the ballroom have received $279 billion in government contracts over the past five years. Some donors, including Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and T-Mobile are facing federal enforcement actions, according to a review from Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. Earlier this month, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) found that many donors failed to disclose their contributions in lobbying disclosure filings. The President has taken steps to remove friction or opposition to his plans to build the new building. Last October, he fired every member of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts board, the agency that would have reviewed his construction plans. Now, his 26-year-old executive assistant Chamberlain Harris, who has no background in the arts, is set to be named to commission Thursday, according to The Washington Post. View the full article

Microsoft co-founder cancels plans to deliver keynote speech at high-profile event on ThursdayView the full article

The pressure to adopt AI is relentless. Boards, investors, and the market tell us that if we don’t, we’ll be left behind. The result is a frantic gold rush to implement AI for AI’s sake, leading to expensive pilots, frustrated teams, and disappointing ROI. The problem is that we’re treating AI like a magic wand—a one-size-fits-all solution for any problem. But true transformation comes from strategically applying it where it can make the most impact. This is the “AI sweet spot,” where the real competitive advantage lies. It’s not about having the most advanced AI, but about having the right AI, applied to the right problems, with the right people. Here are five ways to find it. 1. Start with Your Biggest Bottleneck, Not Your Biggest Budget Many organizations fall into the trap of allocating their AI budget to the department that shouts the loudest. It’s a recipe for wasted resources. Instead of asking, “Where can we spend our AI budget?” ask, “Where is our biggest organizational bottleneck?” Identify the most time-consuming, repetitive processes in your company. Is it the hours your marketing team spends on pre-meeting research? The manual data entry bogging down your finance department? These pain points are your starting line. For example, one company I worked with found their sales team was spending over five hours preparing for a single client meeting. By implementing an AI agent to handle the research and data compilation, they reduced that prep time by 87%, saving nearly $300,000 a year in productivity costs. The AI wasn’t flashy, but it solved a real, costly problem. That’s a sweet spot. 2. Ask ‘Will This Enhance or Replace?’ The quickest way to kill an AI initiative is to make your employees feel threatened by it. When people hear “AI,” they often think “job replacement.” This fear breeds resistance and undermines adoption. As a leader, your job is to reframe the conversation from replacement to augmentation. Before implementing any AI tool, ask a simple question: Will this technology enhance our team’s capabilities, or simply replace a human function? The sweet spot is almost always in enhancement. Think of AI not as a new employee, but as a tireless intern or a brilliant colleague for every member of your team. It can handle the grunt work, analyze massive datasets, and surface key insights, freeing up your people to do what they do best: think critically and make strategic decisions. When your team sees AI as a partner that makes their jobs better, they will champion its adoption. 3. Build Trust Before You Build the Tech We don’t use tools we don’t trust. If your team doesn’t understand how an AI system works or why it makes certain recommendations, they will find workarounds to avoid using it. Trust isn’t a feature you can add later; it has to be the foundation of your implementation strategy. This starts with creating a culture of psychological safety, where employees feel safe to ask questions and even challenge the AI. Be transparent. Explain what the AI does, what data it uses, and where its limitations are. Appoint human oversights for critical processes, ensuring that a person is always in the loop for high-stakes decisions. In my work, I use the framework “13 Behaviors of Trust,” and it applies as much to AI as it does to people. An AI system earns trust when it is competent (delivers results) and has character (operates with integrity). Without that trust, even the most powerful AI is just expensive code. 4. Tie Every AI Initiative to a Business Goal “Exploring AI capabilities” is not a business strategy. Too many AI projects exist in a vacuum, disconnected from the company’s core objectives. If you can’t draw a straight line from your AI initiative to a specific goal—like increasing customer retention or reducing operational costs—you shouldn’t be doing it. Before you approve any AI project, map it directly to your company’s OKRs or strategic pillars. How will this tool help us achieve our vision? How does it support our mission? This forces a level of discipline that prevents you from chasing shiny objects. It ensures that your AI strategy is not an isolated IT function, but an integral part of your overall business strategy. AI that doesn’t align with your core purpose will always be a cost center. AI that does becomes a powerful engine for value creation. 5. Create Space for Learning, Not Just Execution Leaders often expect an immediate, seamless return on their AI investment. But there is no magic switch. Successful adoption requires moving your team from a zone of comfort, through the uncertainty of fear, and into zones of learning and growth. This takes time and patience. Don’t just budget for the technology; budget for the learning curve. Create sandboxes where teams can experiment with new AI tools without fear of failure. Celebrate the small wins and the lessons learned from missteps. The organizations that are truly winning with AI aren’t the ones that got it perfect on day one. They are the ones that fostered a culture of continuous learning, empowering their employees to adapt and grow. The long-term ROI from an empowered, AI-fluent workforce will far exceed any short-term gains from a rushed implementation. Finding your AI sweet spot is less about technology and more about psychology, strategy, and culture. It’s about shifting your focus from what AI can do to what it should do for your organization and your people. Stop chasing the AI hype and start solving your real-world business problems. That’s where you’ll find the lasting advantage. View the full article

Three individuals contacted Whitehall over past conduct after former consul emerged as cabinet secretary frontrunner View the full article

The credit reporting agency must revise its customer agreements because a judge disagreed with its attempt to end the case through an arbitration clause. View the full article

The 2026 Milan-Cortino Winter Olympics is set to debut a new sport: ski mountaineering, also known as skimo. Over the course of two days at the Stelvio Ski Centre located in Bormio, Italy, 36 athletes will compete in three main events: men’s sprints, women’s sprints, and mixed relay. The race is part endurance and speed, as typical skimo competitions feature athletes racing against each other as they ascend uphill with support of climbing skins before skiing downhill. The Winter Olympics version, however, differs in format. This version compresses the competition into a roughly three-minute race. Each leg of a skimo race requires its own specialized equipment. And that equipment matters. Who wins and loses in skimo is often a matter of milliseconds, determined during the transitions between the three distinct moments of the race: ascent, boot-packing (mountaineering), and descent. That’s where a 76 year-old German company comes in. Dynafit created the DNA Sprint Collection, a six-product line engineered specifically for the Olympic stage that 11 out of 36 athletes will use during the competition. The remaining athletes will use similar equipment provided by different brands in line with the International Ski Mountaineering Federation’s (ISMF) requirements. Dynafit’s Design Philosophy A typical skimo competition features rough, high alpine terrain and harsh, snowy conditions that are physically demanding on athletes. To maneuver this challenging terrain, athletes rely on gear such as skis, boots, poles, gloves, backpacks (to hold equipment while transitioning from one part of the race to the other), crampons (a spike attachment for athletes boots to grip onto ice while on foot), and avalanche gear. All of this gear is specifically designed to be lightweight to assist athletes in navigating the challenging, mountainous terrain. Historically, Dynafit is known for pioneering the boots and tech binding (a mechanism that lets athletes lift their heel while climbing uphill and lock into place to descend downhill) critical for performing the sport. Now, as the dominant brand in the $1.24 billion skimo equipment market, the company produces a range of products, including helmets, race suits, boots, skis, and skins, for the casual and elite skier. “ The biggest challenge in our development [is] to find the balance between weight and safety,” says Manuel Aumann, Dynafit’s Operations and R&D Director Bindings. Aumann explains that the company has an abundance of testing experience to ensure their products’ durability and safety. “We have to save every gram . . . but also [deliver] high safety products,” explains Aumann. “[For] every 100 grams you save on your boot or the ski, or on the binding, you could carry seven times more weight on the backpack. For our customers and for the athletes, [that] pushes them to the next level.” Re-Thinking Skimo Designs This will not be the first time that skimo qualifies as a Winter Olympic sport. Between 1924 and 1936, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) included skimo in the Winter Games but later discontinued it in part due to its dangerous nature. Then in July 2021, the IOC unanimously approved skimo’s inclusion in the 2026 Winter Olympics. For the occasion, Dynafit developed a unique line specific for the Olympics, including skis, bindings, poles, gloves, and backpacks. Creating a line of products to help elevate athletes’ performance involved a two-step process. First, in 2022, Dynafit hosted an international summit with 25 of its sponsored athletes to curate their feedback on equipment constraints. That input served as the foundation for the company’s four-year process from the redesign to market availability of its specialty product line. Aumann and his team dissected the Olympic format to inform their design process. The Olympic race focuses on sprint races. Athletes will be required to complete an uphill ascent on skis, transition into a short bootpacking section, then transition again for a downhill descent. This race format requires fast transitions between each phase. “The two minutes 30, you can split [in] time slots,” says Aumann. The rough estimation [is] two minutes for the uphill and 30 seconds for the downhill. We got into the analysis of where we can have the most benefit if we change something.” The team determined that the first half of the race, involving the ascent with skis and the transition where athletes remove their skis and place them into their backpacks just before continuing onto bootpacking (a foot race on skis with the assistance of poles), would yield the most benefit. The Dynafit team learned that while most of the new product line required minimal adjustments, their skis and bindings would require significant design alterations. “The handling operations, they’re quite important on this high level,” explains Aumann. “It’s really about the second[s] they can save during [these] transitions.” The rough alpine terrain of a standard skimo competition requires skis to have increased “skiability,” meaning they are carved and built for those conditions in order for athletes to make safe turns. Since the Olympics course will have smoother slopes with fewer steep curves and banked turns to help athletes, it allows skis to have less “skiability.” In other words, the skis do not need to be optimized for tough terrains, allowing Aumann and his team to focus on narrowing the ski-waist from 64 mm to 61 mm. “With this [slimmer] ski, we could save weight,” says Aumann. While a traditional race touring ski weighs 690 grams, the altered ski weighs only 650 grams. Another benefit of this slimmer version of the ski, particularly its narrower tail, is that it allows athletes to better handle transitions. For instance, when athletes move from skiing uphill to bootpacking, they must quickly loop their skis onto their backpack for the foot race and then later unhook them for the descent downhill. Ultimately, this design change is intended to help athletes shave off incremental seconds, which is critical in a sprint where every tenth of a second counts. Further, during the uphill transition from skis to bootpacking (the foot race), athletes will need to release themselves from their ski bindings, where steel pins meet the boot inserts to secure the boots within the binding. Then on the descent portion of the course, athletes need to step back into their ski bindings. The act of stepping in and out of skis presented additional time-saving opportunities and speed optimization. Aumann and his team made three key design changes to their fully aluminum, binding product. “What we did is to really make [the grip zone], where the athlete can grab, wider,” explains Aumann. [The athletes] don’t have to look down, but can grab it in a very easy way without looking.” The team widened the grip zone for the heel piece as well as the locking lever of the binding. Providing athletes with a larger grip zone surface allows athletes to use one hand to release their boots from the binding, saving at least a few tenths of a second. Lastly, the team redesigned its ski race stoppers, a safety feature required by the ISMF. Generally, standard ski touring stoppers deploy a small metal arm, or wire, into the snow to slow the ski if an athlete loses it or releases from the binding. According to Aumann, each stopper includes a plastic cap at the end to help it grip and fix into the snow. While a traditional alpine ski touring stopper features sharp contours and edges that can easily snag on a loop in an athletes’ backpack, Dynafit’s re-designed stopper lacks these features. Rather, the team modified the transition point where the plastic cap meets a metal wire by creating a smooth, rounded curve surface. By rounding out the curve, the updated design reduces the risk of catching onto other surfaces while improving overall reliability, all without adding weight. The modified race stopper alone weighs just 30 grams, compared to the 70 to 100 grams typical of standard touring models. Another important aspect of the redesign is that the stopper automatically retracts when athletes switch to the descend/downhill model, eliminating an additional step for manual adjustment. Aumann acknowledges that this design process helped accelerate a trend already happening across the industry. As the sport has grown in the past couple of years, manufacturers have increasingly considered tradeoffs rather than focusing solely on making lighter products. “Within the last two years that [has] changed,” says Aumann. “Perfect handling of the products [is] a very high priority. So, it is [acceptable] to have a product with a few [more] grams if the handling is better and can save time.” Dynafit has already begun incorporating these design tweaks into its commercial products. View the full article

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Most leaders understand their message needs to define exactly who their work is for. Fewer realize that it should also define who it’s not for. Fewer still realize that their message is unintentionally excluding some of the very people they want to attract. Effective messaging repels on purpose. Careless messaging excludes by accident. And for leaders, knowing the difference can make or break your organization’s credibility. REPEL TO ATTRACT The idea of intentionally turning away potential customers can make leaders uncomfortable. It seems counterintuitive, even reckless, to deliberately shrink your total addressable market when you’re trying to grow. But trying to message to everyone can come at a high cost, resulting in: Misaligned employees. People who don’t share your organization’s values may become unhappy and disengaged, ultimately eroding your culture and reputation. Wrong-fit customers. They’ll never be satisfied with what wasn’t designed for them, leading to negative reviews, returns, and reputation damage. Wasted resources. Messaging too broadly can result in additional expenses, from advertising to (and trying to convert) a larger pool of prospects, all the way through to customer service. The costs of attracting the wrong audience compound over time, while organizations with the deepest loyalty are often the ones explicitly saying “this wasn’t created for you.” Two particularly effective ways to do this are through values-based declarations and explicit audience definition. Values-based repelling involves taking a strong public stance on the ideas that matter most to your brand, effectively filtering out those who don’t share those values. When Patagonia launched their edgy “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign with a full-page ad in the New York Times on Black Friday, they weren’t just making a statement about overconsumption; they were signaling to impulse buyers and fast-fashion hunters that Patagonia isn’t for them. It was a bold expression of “this is what we stand for, and this is what we don’t.” Meanwhile, explicit audience definition expresses who an organization stands for. Basecamp takes this approach by saying: We are for this group. We are not for that group. This builds community and loyalty by creating a “small business” Us (“We stand with the underdogs. Freelancer? Underfunded non-profit? Small team feeling stuck in a large enterprise? Start-up battling established competitors? You’re our people.”) versus a “big business” Them (“They’re slow. They’re conservative. They talk too much. They’ve stopped taking risks. They’re resting on their laurels, gliding on their reputation.”) dynamic that makes their ideal customers feel seen and understood. So when does repelling cross over from “good” to “bad”—and is it possible to repel too much? In many cases, it’s not a matter of degree (turning the repelling dial up or down), but of intentionality. Often, the smallest details create unexpected barriers. Seemingly minor messaging decisions, invisible to internal teams who know what they meant to say, can alienate the very people you’d like to attract. BARRIERS YOU DIDN’T MEAN TO BUILD Every message draws a line: inviting some in, leaving others out. The risk is when that line is invisible to you but glaringly obvious to your audience. Strategic narrowing is, by definition, intentional. You decide who—and only who—you’re speaking to and why, shaping your message around what will resonate most. Careless narrowing happens when you filter people out by default through assumptions, jargon, stereotypes, unconscious bias, or unclear values. This type of exclusion isn’t deliberate. It’s built into the words we use, the assumptions we make, and the systems we design. It often feels harmless in the moment; after all, you didn’t mean to exclude anyone. But messaging missteps stack up, often in ways we don’t see until it’s too late. And when a message ends up alienating the very people you’re trying to reach, it can undermine everything you’re building: your team, your customers, and your reputation. Unintentional exclusion carries real costs: 1. Talent loss Talented candidates self-select out because they don’t see themselves reflected in your language, imagery, or values, leaving roles harder to fill. Current employees who feel overlooked or alienated disengage, and that disengagement can wreak havoc on your culture. This shows up in a number of quiet ways, for example: A company says it values a diverse workforce but schedules events on days that are major holidays for some employees. A strong candidate doesn’t apply because the job description uses jargon or must-haves that don’t actually matter. Company headquarters are accessible by public transport but the company offsite is not. Leadership talks a big game when it comes to its global perspective, but every quarter the big all-hands meeting is only live in US time zones. 2. Missed growth Customers who don’t see themselves in your story won’t buy in. People who could have been strong advocates never consider your product because the way you described it suggested it wasn’t for them. This shows up in many ways: Product positioning that assumes sameness. Parenting apps marketed “for busy moms” can unintentionally exclude dads, grandparents, or other caregivers who share the same challenges. Language that creates barriers. A landing page filled with jargon can leave first-time buyers feeling shut out rather than invited in. Product design with hidden friction. An app that assumes constant high-speed internet excludes rural users. Low-contrast color palettes exclude those with low vision. Visuals that signal who belongs. When websites or ads feature only one demographic, they subtly suggest others aren’t welcome, even if they are part of the intended audience. Peloton learned this the hard way. An early campaign centered on ultra-fit people in luxury apartments projected an elite, upper-class image that excluded people who weren’t wealthy and who represented a wider range of body types. The campaign also came under fire for portraying a sexist dynamic. While the intent was to be inspirational and aspirational, it didn’t take into account where many of its potential customers were starting out, and it wasn’t aligned with Peloton’s founding goal of democratizing fitness. The brand smartly course-corrected in 2023 with new messaging and ethos, emphasizing “fitness offerings for all ages, levels, and walks of life.” 3. Damaged credibility Beyond costing you potential customers and engaged employees, accidental exclusion damages how the broader market perceives your brand. When your company’s behavior contradicts your stated mission or core values, stakeholders notice the gap between what you claim to stand for and what your words and actions actually signal. The resulting erosion of trust can be imperceptible until it turns into a full-blown reputation crisis. Once trust is lost, it’s difficult to win it back. The difference between strategic and careless narrowing is intention and awareness: one sharpens your message, the other shrinks your reach. The result is always the same: qualified candidates opt out, customers conclude “not for me,” and stakeholders lose trust. You didn’t choose a niche—you just made yours significantly smaller. HOW TO REPEL, NOT EXCLUDE People are highly attuned to language. They notice who’s acknowledged and who’s overlooked, especially when it’s them. In a crowded market, intentional communication determines whether you expand opportunity or reinforce barriers. Inclusive messaging doesn’t mean trying to be everything to everyone. It means being deliberate about the language you use and the lines you draw so the right people feel welcomed in, not left out. To avoid missteps, regularly pause to ask: Who might this message unintentionally exclude? Are we relying on assumptions that not everyone shares? Does our language and imagery draw people in or push them away? Build guardrails into your processes throughout your organization: Choose words and imagery carefully. Intentionally repel those who are not ideal customers or employees, but incorporate safeguards and checks to make sure you’re not using language or visuals that unintentionally exclude. When creating a customer avatar, consider relying less on demographics and more on psychographics. What are their attitudes, values, and interests? Consider how your message might land differently based on someone’s lived experience, perspective, and motivations. Run language and formatting through an inclusivity check, test job posts with employees from different backgrounds, and test brand copy with focus groups who have different points of view and lived experience. When diverse perspectives are considered, accidental exclusion decreases. The business case is clear: employees are attracted and retained, brand messages land with the right audience, and teams better identify products and services for a broader customer base. According to a BCG study, companies with more diverse leadership boast 19% higher innovation revenue. And McKinsey finds that companies with diverse leadership teams are 39% more likely to outperform their peers financially. Make checking for accidental exclusion and unintended barriers a regular practice. Invite perspectives from people who don’t look, think, or work like you. Brands that do this consistently don’t just avoid costly mistakes—they build stronger cultures, retain better talent, attract the right customers, and gain credibility that lasts. View the full article

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Change often fails and that rarely has anything to do with whether the concept is a good one or not. As Howard Aiken famously put it, “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throat.” As the creator of the Harvard Mark, one of the very first computers, he was speaking from experience. The truth is that any time you set out to make an impact there’s going to be some who won’t like it. They’ll seek to undermine what you are trying to achieve and they will do it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. It’s a hard truth, but one we all need to accept: resistance is inevitable when you try to drive change. Once you internalize that, you can begin to move forward. When we work with organizations trying to adopt and scale new ideas, one of the first things we do is work to anticipate and build strategies to overcome resistance. We start by working to understand where resistance is most likely to come from and devise a plan to address the concerns opponents are likely to exploit. Understanding Sources Of Rational Resistance There are many good reasons to resist change. The status quo, for better or worse, is what people have become used to. They understand its benefits and how to work around its shortcomings. So the first barrier to change is the need to build trust in an alternative, more uncertain path. A second source of resistance is change fatigue. We live in an era that glorifies change, where disruption has taken on an almost cult-like status. So we need to consider not only the merits and demerits of a single initiative, but also the broader context—what has come before and what else is happening at the time. Many organizations juggle too many initiatives and the ones that fail increase change fatigue, making it harder for those that follow. A third source is competing incentives and commitments. Incentives, both explicit and implicit, are usually designed to reflect the status quo which is why many change leaders find themselves in the awkward position of asking people to act against their own interests, In other cases, the conflict is self-imposed, such as when a manager who wants to delegate more also sees herself as a hands-on manager. Finally, every change faces switching costs. Change always requires some investment in time, resources, training and other areas. Opponents of change often make the case that these costs exceed the potential benefits, which puts the burden of proof on those who support doing things differently. The key thing to overcome rational resistance is to anticipate it, which is why one of the first things that we do when we start working with an organization is to do a resistance inventory, laying out the categories of resistance and discussing what types of resistance can be expected, hope they will most likely manifest themselves and what strategies can mitigate them. Anticipating Irrational Resistance Many argue that resistance to change is merely an illusion. They claim that if you’re facing pushback, it’s either because you haven’t effectively communicated the value proposition or haven’t put in the effort to understand the “root causes” behind the opposition. Surely, if your idea has value, people will embrace it. Now, that’s just silly. Resistance doesn’t need a rational basis and often doesn’t have one. The truth is that humans form attachments to people, ideas, traditions and other things. When we feel that those attachments are being threatened, we will tend to act out in ways that don’t reflect our best selves. Anybody who has ever been in a romantic relationship or part of a family knows that. Transformation isn’t a popularity contest. It’s not consensus driven. It’s also not some heroic journey to some alternative future state about which everyone agrees (they never will). Change is always a strategic conflict between that desired future state and the status quo, which always has inertia on its side and sources of power keeping it in place. To overcome that resistance, you need to be clear-eyed and hard-nosed. Success or failure has surprisingly little to do with the quality or usefulness of your initial idea. Good ideas fail all the time. That’s why you need to be strategic. Slogans and gimmicks won’t help you. Change isn’t about persuasion—it’s about power and collective dynamics. Building Strategies To Overcome Resistance The first principle of building strategies to overcome resistance is to address the causes of rational resistance you’ve uncovered in your resistance inventory. Another approach you can apply at the same time is to recruit a few skeptics to form an internal red team to let you know where you’re going wrong. They’re bound to identify blind spots and can often become genuine supporters over time. Irrational resistance, however, requires more specific strategies. The first is to start with a majority. You can always expand a majority out, but once you’re in the minority, you will feel immediate pushback. You get to decide who you put in the room, so choose wisely. You have no obligation to invite the bomb throwers in. A second strategy is simply to not engage with your most active resistors. Decades of research has found that you usually need only 10% to 20% participation to hit an inflection point, so you don’t need to convince everyone at once. Go to where the energy is. Find people already enthusiastic about your idea, gain traction toward that 10%-20% threshold. A final strategy is a dilemma action in which you identify a shared value and then design a constructive act rooted in that shared value. That creates a dilemma for your opponents because they need to either let the constructive act go forward, or to violate the shared value. Either way, your change moves forward. Dilemma actions have been used for at least a century—famous examples include Gandhi’s Salt March, King’s Birmingham Campaign and Alice Paul’s Silent Sentinels. One of my favorites was a Lego protest in Siberia. They are just as effective in an organizational context, using an opponent’s resistance against them. Change Is A Strategic Conflict Many assume that you bring about change through persuasion. They believe that once people understand the idea they will embrace it. So they work to build awareness, desire and knowledge about the idea and equip people with the skills to implement it in the hopes that the transformation will take hold on its own and become self-sustaining. They are usually sorely disappointed. Decades of evidence show that shifts in knowledge and attitudes usually don’t result in changes in practice. There is also a large body of research that suggests providing people with the right information is unlikely to meaningfully influence their behavior. People aren’t blank slates—they bring prior beliefs and biases that shape how they respond to new ideas. The truth is that change isn’t some kind of hero’s journey to some alternative future state. It is a strategic conflict between that desired state and the status quo, which always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. It has sources of power keeping it in place and those sources of power have an institutional basis. That’s why you need to begin to think about how you will overcome resistance from the start. You can’t just wait until you encounter it and react, but must work to anticipate it and devise strategies in advance. That’s what makes the difference between successful changemakers and mere frustrated dreamers who once had an idea. View the full article

Fifty years is a long time for any company to stay in business. About 20% fail in their first year. By year five, roughly half are gone. By the end of a decade, nearly 70% don’t make it. Reaching a golden anniversary raises a question about what allows some businesses to last. The answers are often framed in terms of Herculean efforts, access to capital, and brilliant strategy. All those matter. But in my experience, the gift of longevity is the result of something less visible and harder to measure: the quality of the relationships built along the way. This factor was apparent to me when I opened my first flower shop on April 1, 1976, and it only grew stronger as that little business blossomed into 1-800-Flowers.com. When we stayed focused on our relationships, we moved forward. When we lost sight of them, we stumbled. Those relationships, of course, begin with customers who trust you with moments that matter in their lives. They extend to the florists, growers, makers, and partners who bring care and craftsmanship to the work every day. And they include the people inside the company, whose pride, judgment, and commitment ultimately shape what the business becomes. Relationships, up close Fifty years ago, I was working full-time as a social worker and part-time as a bartender. Both jobs showed me how our lives are shaped by relationships and how difficult it can be to express what we feel when the stakes are high. When the opportunity arose to buy the small flower shop across the street from the bar where I worked, I took it. In both jobs, I had seen people searching for ways to connect. If words sometimes fell short—and alcohol helped loosen them—why couldn’t flowers do their own kind of work? That tiny shop on Manhattan’s Upper East Side became a place where people brought moments they cared about: a birthday, a reconciliation, a loss, to name a few. In those early days, orders rarely came without context. A customer might explain that her daughter had just moved into her first apartment and felt lonely. Someone else would describe a gathering they hoped would feel warm rather than formal. People shared intimate details of their lives—it was the 1970s!—and many stopped by simply to say hello, swap gossip, or ask for a restaurant recommendation. Funeral work made that lesson unmistakable. Families came in for flowers, but what they really wanted was a way to express what words couldn’t reach. Over time, we became known for deeply personal tributes—arrangements shaped like garbage trucks for a sanitation worker, or gates left intentionally open because, as one family put it, “you never lock the gates to heaven.” Those moments stayed with me. They made it clear, early on, that carelessness had consequences—and that trust, once given, had to be earned again every single day. Scaling trust Built on strong relationships, that single flower shop grew into a small chain. Business was good, but I could see opportunities to grow further. The challenge then—as it remains today—was how to expand without losing the trust that had been built one customer at a time. We learned early on that convenience plays a role in trust, and technology became a powerful way to deliver it. In 1984, while listening to the radio one morning as I shaved in the bathroom, I heard about the growing impact of toll-free phone numbers. The company that owned the 1-800-Flowers number hadn’t figured out how to turn it into a national floral business. I thought we could with the right investment in telemarketing—this has always been a relationship business, after all. It worked so well that the phone number eventually became the name of the company. That was just the first of several technology waves we’ve navigated. We moved online when plenty of people doubted anyone would buy something so personal over the internet. We embraced mobile early. And today, we’re exploring how artificial intelligence can help people choose, personalize, and communicate more thoughtfully. Each shift mattered only to the extent that it made human connection easier. Technology earned its place when it helped people act on intentions they already had. It succeeded when it reduced friction in relationships—and failed whenever it distracted from them. Stewardship is a choice The trust required to build and sustain relationships is neither automatic nor permanent. It has to be earned again and again. I saw it up close as 1-800-Flowers.com expanded beyond flowers into gourmet food and gift baskets, and we began evaluating businesses to bring into the family. I remember my first visit to Harry & David after we acquired the company in 2014. Years of ownership changes and aggressive cost-cutting had taken a toll. Trust between leadership and employees had been badly damaged, and customers had noticed. When I arrived, the leadership team braced for a familiar conversation. They had grown used to owners focused on extracting value by cutting costs, narrowing ambition, and shrinking the future. People were understandably guarded, uncertain about what came next. But the conversation took a different turn. Instead of talking about what could be stripped away, we talked about planting more fruit trees and protecting what made the brand distinctive for the long term. The focus was stewardship rather than short-term returns. Previous owners had talked about harvesting value. We were talking about cultivating it. One longtime employee told me afterward that he had never heard an owner speak that way. Staying connected in a crisis The shift toward digital commerce brought challenges, especially when it came to maintaining relationships with customers who now encountered us through screens rather than storefronts. Technology created reach and convenience, but it couldn’t replace the power of being together. The pandemic brought that reality into sharp focus. In a moment of urgency, we closed all but one of our remaining Harry & David retail stores. As the crisis unfolded, I asked a simple question of my executive team: How do we stay close to our customers now? How do we check in, not as a business, but as people? A young woman in my office suggested writing a newsletter. That idea became the Celebrations Pulse. The first subject line captured the intent: “Just checking in.” In those early weeks, I shared thoughts on staying connected and maintaining perspective during a period of isolation and uncertainty. The response surprised me. Readers were struck that a brand wasn’t trying to sell them anything. As weeks turned into months, the focus naturally widened from COVID to loneliness, from crisis to connection, from coping to the deeper reasons we celebrate in the first place. We eventually invited readers to share their own stories, many of which became the foundation for future letters. What began as a simple outreach grew into an ongoing weekly conversation. Circulation steadily expanded, from six million to 10 million readers. Today, it’s approaching 20 million—proof that even in a digital world, people still value being seen, heard, and remembered. Another turning point Technology continues to evolve, and customer expectations evolve with it. The tools change, the pace increases, and leadership requires a willingness to keep learning. What matters most is staying attentive to the people you serve and the promises you’ve made to them. It’s easy to rely on approaches that worked well in earlier chapters. Over time, though, the work asks for new skills and fresh perspective. Relationships don’t stay strong by standing still; they grow when you meet people where they are. We were reminded of that in late 2024, when our food brands introduced a new order-management system ahead of the holiday season. The rollout didn’t meet our expectations, and some customers were left waiting during moments that mattered to them. It was a difficult experience, and a revealing one. As the company approached its 50th anniversary, that moment prompted reflection. Longevity brings responsibility—not only to honor what has worked, but to make thoughtful decisions that support the relationships the business depends on today and in the future. In the spring of 2025, I stepped aside as CEO of 1-800-Flowers.com and continued as chairman. I’m now partnering with our new CEO, Adolfo Villagomez. His experience at Home Depot and strength in operations and team culture balance my own perspective. He’s the yin to my yang as we move into the next chapter. After fifty years, the lesson is a simple one. As title and tools change, what endures is the work of earning trust—by listening closely, acting responsibly, and making decisions that keep relationships at the center. 50 years of gratitude Rather than protecting a legacy, the work ahead is about continuing to earn trust one decision, one interaction, and one relationship at a time. Gratitude keeps that responsibility front and center. Businesses don’t last because they declare success. They last because enough people decide, again and again, that they’re worth believing in. For that belief—and for the people who continue to extend it—I remain deeply grateful. View the full article

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At the Winter Olympics, skiers, bobsledders, speedskaters, and many other athletes all have to master one critical moment: when to start. That split second is paramount during competition because when everyone is strong and skilled, a moment of hesitation can separate gold from silver. A competitor who hesitates too much will be left behind—but moving too early will get them disqualified. Though the circumstances are less intense, this paradox of hesitation applies to daily life. Waiting for the right moment to cross the street, or pausing before deciding whether to answer a call from a number you don’t recognize, are daily examples of hesitation. Importantly, some psychiatric conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder are characterized by impulsivity, or a lack of hesitation, while excessive hesitation is a crippling consequence of several anxiety disorders. As a neuroscientist, I have been working to uncover how the brain decides when to act and when to wait. Recent research from my team and me helps explain why this split-second pause happens, offering insight not only into elite athletic performance, but also how people make everyday decisions when the potential outcome isn’t clear. We found that the key to hesitation is a response to uncertainty. This could be where a dropped hockey puck will land, when a race starts, or placing your order at a new restaurant. Hesitation and the brain To understand how the brain controls hesitation, my colleagues and I designed a simple decision-making task in mice. The task required the mouse’s brain to interpret signals that were predictably good, predictably bad or—most importantly—uncertain, meaning somewhere in between. Different auditory tones indicated whether a drop of sugar water would soon be delivered, not delivered, or had a 50/50 chance of delivery. How the mice behaved would not affect the outcome. Nevertheless, mice would still wait longer before licking to see whether a reward had been given in the uncertain scenario. Just like in people, unpredictable situations led to delays in response. This hesitation was not the result of vacillating between options in indecision, but an active and regulated brain process to pause before acting due to environmental uncertainty. When we examined neural activity associated with the onset of licking, we identified a specific group of neurons that became active only when outcomes were unclear. Those neurons effectively controlled whether the brain should commit to an action or pause to gather more information. The degree to which these neurons were active could predict whether mice would hesitate before making a decision. To confirm that these neurons played a role in controlling hesitation, we used a technique called optogenetics to briefly turn these brain cells on or off. When we activated the neurons, mice hesitated more. When we silenced them, that hesitation faded, and their responses were quicker by several hundred milliseconds, in line with their reactions to predictable situations. Researchers can use optogenetics to turn brain cells on or off. Daily life, disease, and downhill racing Our findings suggest that, rather than a weakness to overcome, hesitation appears to be a fundamental brain feature that helps people and animals navigate an uncertain world and avoid costly mistakes. Our study also provides insights into the balance of action and inaction in health and disease. The hesitation neurons are located in the basal ganglia, the same part of the brain affected in Parkinson’s disease, OCD, and addiction. While researchers must still determine how much overlap or interaction there is between the cells involved in hesitation and those affected in psychiatric disorders, their overlap in circuitry points to possible targets for treatment. Our next step is to understand how cells controlling hesitation interact with drugs treating ADHD and OCD, conditions where patients can respond impulsively during volatile or uncertain situations. We also aim to identify which brain areas provide these cells with information about uncertainty—the environmental signal so critical to hesitation. While researchers have found that several parts of an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex encode uncertainty, it’s unclear how the brain actually makes use of this information, where the rubber meets the road. Hesitation is not a flaw—it’s a critical feature for navigating an unpredictable world. Whether you’re a figure skater waiting for the perfect moment to launch your jump or just going about your day, the circuitry behind hesitation plays an important role in figuring out the timing to get the action right. Eric Yttri is an associate professor of biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

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