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We may earn a commission from links on this page. Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news. Peloton announced this week, among other things, that all of its devices are getting a bit of an overhaul. While the Bike, Bike+, Tread, Tread+, and Row each got some improvements, this doesn't necessarily mean you have to upgrade your equipment just yet. Comparing old Peloton models with the new Cross Training SeriesFirst, the basics: Peloton unveiled all-new versions of its classic at-home fitness equipment Wednesday. Collectively, they're known as the Cross Training series—the equipment itself is the Cross Training Bike, the Cross Training Bike+, etc. Like before, there are still five models—two bikes, two treadmills, and a rowing machine—but the new versions have features that make them more compatible with cross training and are just a little better than their predecessors overall. Peloton Bike vs. Peloton Cross Training BikeWe'll start with the classic bike, Peloton's bread and butter. The original Bike retails for $1,145 and the new Cross Training Bike is $1,695. Like all the new models, the updated version of the base model Bike features a swiveling touchscreen designed to make it easier for you to segue from cardio on the machine to strength, stretching, yoga, or some other Peloton workout, all while still following along with an instructor on the screen. Otherwise, what this $200 price hike gets you is pretty basic: There is improved audio in the form of front-facing speakers, better wifi connectivity, and Bluetooth 5.2. It also has an upgraded seat, which Peloton describes as "an ergonomically redesigned saddle with enhanced cushioning and optimized weight distribution." A comfier seat is a bonus, but comfier seats were already available on the third-party market. There are more similarities between the old model and new than there are differences. Both have manual resistance knobs, a 21.5" touchscreen, a belt drive, and magnetic resistance. To be clear, Peloton didn't set out to reinvent the (fly)wheel here; all of these devices are functionally similar to their predecessors. You cycle on the Bike, run on the Tread, and row on the Row, just as you always did. Bike+ vs. Cross Training Bike+I liked the old Bike+ when I tested it out, but the new Bike+ has some significant upgrades over that one. The old-style Bike+ retails for $2,495 while the Cross Training Bike+ is $2,695. You get the swivel screen and the upgraded seat, but you also get a movement-tracking camera that uses AI to make suggestions and correct your form, Sonos audio with a woofer, AI-powered voice commands, a fan, a phone tray, and better software overall. Like the old Bike+, this one has a 23.8" HD touchscreen and the much-loved auto-resistance feature. I got the chance to play around with the new devices at Peloton Studios this week and, from what I experienced, the company's claims that the hardware and software have been enhanced to improve touchscreen responsiveness and audio quality are accurate. That's true for this new Bike+ and all the newer models announced. Tread vs. Cross Training TreadThe Cross Training Tread is $3,295 compared to the Tread's $2,995, though both get you a 23.8" HD touchscreen, a maximum speed of 12.5 miles per hour, and an incline up to 12.5%, as well as a soft-touch running belt. That price increase also covers the swivel screen, an upgraded processor, and better speakers and connectivity. Tread+ vs. Cross Training Tread+You're going to notice a theme here: The Plus models pack more upgraded features into their upgrades, period. That's true for the Cross Training Tread+, which sees one of the biggest price increases over its predecessor—it now retails for $6,495 compared to $5,995. The similarities are in the 32" screen, slatted running belt, and incline up to 15%. The differences mirror the differences between the Bike+ and Cross Training Bike+: It comes with the movement-tracking camera, swivel screen, Sonos speakers, voice control, fan, and upgraded tech and hardware. Row vs. Cross Training Row+The Row is the Peloton device that moved from plain-old equipment to Plus line. Now, the Cross Training Row+ retails for $3,495 instead of $3,195 and comes with all those Plus features, like the rotating screen, movement-tracking camera, Sonos speakers, voice control, fan, and upgraded processor. Should you upgrade your Peloton device?Let me start by saying I have only gotten to interact with the new devices for a brief time during a press event, so I haven't formed my opinion based on any extensive use. That said, what I saw at the event was impressive—especially from the Plus line, which is the line that features the much-touted movement-tracking camera. If you are considering upgrading, your best bet is to go all the way to Plus so you can make the most of all the new features Peloton announced. The movement-tracking camera and voice controls were really slick in the demos I participated in. The camera can correct your form or let you know when lifting a certain way is becoming too easy for you and you should consider moving to a higher weight, for instance. The Plus line also has the built-in fan, which is simply a nice touch. All of that said, while Peloton rolled out new classes and AI features to accompany these cross training devices, everything except the motion-tracking and voice control works fine on existing equipment. If you have a Bike or even older Bike+, you'll still be able to use the new customized workout scheduling feature, plus all the other features you've already had access to. If you're not in a rush to get rid of your old machine, you don't have to unless you really want the motion-tracking camera and voice commands. Upgrading to the Cross Training Bike or Cross Training Tread doesn't make sense to me right now, since the only real improvement you get with those is the swivel screen. If I were going to get a new device—and, after almost five years with my beloved Bike, I'm finally considering it—I'd opt for a Plus so I could take advantage of all the new tools and features. It's worth keeping in mind, though, that whether you upgrade hardware or not, you're going to be paying more as it is. Membership fees for Peloton's app, which allows you to take classes and follow programs on your phone as well as on the company's proprietary devices, are going up as of the new equipment release. The new prices for membership are: All-Access Membership goes up from $44 to $49.99 per month App+ Membership goes up from $24 to $28.99 App One Membership goes up from $12.99 to $15.99 Moreover, Peloton has done away with free installation, which we knew was coming. You'll have to spend $150 for assembly of your new device, unless you get a Cross Training Tread+, which will run you $299 in assembly fees. Accounting for all these extra fees is part of deciding if you need new equipment, so take it all in. Peloton will be rolling out deals for existing members who want to upgrade in the coming days and weeks. For now, don't forget that the company launched its own resale platform earlier this year and, depending on what kind of device you sell, not only do you get paid for the equipment itself, but you get a few hundred bucks off your future Peloton purchase. If you're considering a new device from this upgraded fleet, look into selling your old goods first so you have a better sense of how much money you have to work with. And if you don't have a Peloton device but want one, maybe think about waiting around a few weeks for all the older models to hit the resale site. Like I said, the new software upgrades work just fine on them, so this could be your moment to get a great deal. View the full article

In a landscape increasingly shaped by technology, Shopify is stepping up to redefine the shopping experience for small business owners. Today, the eCommerce giant announced a groundbreaking partnership with OpenAI that allows merchants to sell their products directly within AI-driven conversations, particularly those utilizing ChatGPT. This collaboration aims to seamlessly connect shoppers with millions of products, positioning Shopify as a leader in the quickly changing world of online retail. Vanessa Lee, Shopify’s VP of Product, highlighted the transformative potential of this initiative: “Shopping is changing fast. People are discovering products in AI conversations, not just through search or ads. This will let our merchants show up naturally in those moments and give shoppers a way to buy without breaking their flow.” For small businesses, this shift holds significant implications, expanding their reach into an arena where consumer attention is often fleeting. Through the integration of ChatGPT, Shopify merchants gain real-time access to essential product data, like pricing and inventory. When a user queries ChatGPT for shopping recommendations, their responses will automatically draw from Shopify’s vast network of merchants, enabling direct purchases. Colleen Waters, VP of eCommerce at Steve Madden, underscored this benefit, stating, “AI will fundamentally reshape how our customers shop. Being on Shopify means we can automatically be wherever our customers are shopping—including inside AI conversations.” For small business owners, the marriage of AI and commerce presents various practical advantages. With their store names prominently displayed, merchants maintain transparency and consumer trust, ensuring shoppers know exactly who they are buying from. From an administrative perspective, all orders will route through Shopify’s system, keeping merchants firmly in control of their brand identity and customer relationships. Additionally, Shopify specifies whether customers check out through a merchant’s site or via the Instant Checkout process. This flexibility allows small businesses to tailor their shopping experience without extra complexity. “Our goal is always to keep merchants on the cutting edge by default,” Lee remarked, emphasizing that the tools provided are designed to promote growth for businesses of all sizes. However, while the prospects of increased sales through AI interactions are exciting, small business owners should also consider potential challenges. Adapting to a new sales channel can be daunting. Owners may need to familiarize themselves with the nuances of AI-driven commerce and ensure their online presence is optimized for these emerging platforms. The integration also necessitates a robust reliance on technology—something not every small business is equipped to handle, especially those without dedicated IT resources. Ultimately, with the rapid growth of AI influencing consumer behavior, the strategic move by Shopify positions small business owners to capitalize on “agentic commerce,” where transactions can occur fluidly within AI-driven dialogues. As Vanessa Lee puts it, “We’re making sure our merchants thrive in the era of agentic commerce.” This transition allows entrepreneurs to focus on their core competencies—developing their products and enhancing customer relationships—while Shopify manages the technical complexities. For small business owners looking to stay ahead in an evolving retail landscape, selling through AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT could become a vital component of their sales strategy. The future of commerce involves not just reacting to change but being prepared for it. As Shopify continues to innovate, it may provide a lifeline for businesses aiming to navigate the emerging digital terrain. For further information about this partnership and how it can enhance your business, visit the original announcement on Shopify’s website here. Image via Shopify This article, "Shopify Integrates With OpenAI to Transform AI-Driven Shopping Experience" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

In a landscape increasingly shaped by technology, Shopify is stepping up to redefine the shopping experience for small business owners. Today, the eCommerce giant announced a groundbreaking partnership with OpenAI that allows merchants to sell their products directly within AI-driven conversations, particularly those utilizing ChatGPT. This collaboration aims to seamlessly connect shoppers with millions of products, positioning Shopify as a leader in the quickly changing world of online retail. Vanessa Lee, Shopify’s VP of Product, highlighted the transformative potential of this initiative: “Shopping is changing fast. People are discovering products in AI conversations, not just through search or ads. This will let our merchants show up naturally in those moments and give shoppers a way to buy without breaking their flow.” For small businesses, this shift holds significant implications, expanding their reach into an arena where consumer attention is often fleeting. Through the integration of ChatGPT, Shopify merchants gain real-time access to essential product data, like pricing and inventory. When a user queries ChatGPT for shopping recommendations, their responses will automatically draw from Shopify’s vast network of merchants, enabling direct purchases. Colleen Waters, VP of eCommerce at Steve Madden, underscored this benefit, stating, “AI will fundamentally reshape how our customers shop. Being on Shopify means we can automatically be wherever our customers are shopping—including inside AI conversations.” For small business owners, the marriage of AI and commerce presents various practical advantages. With their store names prominently displayed, merchants maintain transparency and consumer trust, ensuring shoppers know exactly who they are buying from. From an administrative perspective, all orders will route through Shopify’s system, keeping merchants firmly in control of their brand identity and customer relationships. Additionally, Shopify specifies whether customers check out through a merchant’s site or via the Instant Checkout process. This flexibility allows small businesses to tailor their shopping experience without extra complexity. “Our goal is always to keep merchants on the cutting edge by default,” Lee remarked, emphasizing that the tools provided are designed to promote growth for businesses of all sizes. However, while the prospects of increased sales through AI interactions are exciting, small business owners should also consider potential challenges. Adapting to a new sales channel can be daunting. Owners may need to familiarize themselves with the nuances of AI-driven commerce and ensure their online presence is optimized for these emerging platforms. The integration also necessitates a robust reliance on technology—something not every small business is equipped to handle, especially those without dedicated IT resources. Ultimately, with the rapid growth of AI influencing consumer behavior, the strategic move by Shopify positions small business owners to capitalize on “agentic commerce,” where transactions can occur fluidly within AI-driven dialogues. As Vanessa Lee puts it, “We’re making sure our merchants thrive in the era of agentic commerce.” This transition allows entrepreneurs to focus on their core competencies—developing their products and enhancing customer relationships—while Shopify manages the technical complexities. For small business owners looking to stay ahead in an evolving retail landscape, selling through AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT could become a vital component of their sales strategy. The future of commerce involves not just reacting to change but being prepared for it. As Shopify continues to innovate, it may provide a lifeline for businesses aiming to navigate the emerging digital terrain. For further information about this partnership and how it can enhance your business, visit the original announcement on Shopify’s website here. Image via Shopify This article, "Shopify Integrates With OpenAI to Transform AI-Driven Shopping Experience" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Strengthen your international presence by aligning hreflang setup with market goals and user expectations. The post Ask An SEO: What Are The Most Common Hreflang Mistakes & How Do I Audit Them? appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

More than a sales tool, a product demo can be the moment your brand earns credibility and converts prospects. A strong demo proves value in real time, turning curiosity into confidence. Too often, though, demos fall flat – sounding like a scripted feature list instead of a compelling, conversational story. This article shows how to create demos that resonate with real customer needs and differentiate your brand through empathy, consistency, and competitive insight. Know your product, know the problem it solves A demo isn’t about memorizing features. It’s about mastering the problem your product solves. Without this deep understanding, you’re just delivering a monologue. To build an effective, people-first demo that connects with real pain points, you need to become a subject matter expert on your product, inside and out. Get hands-on: Use the product yourself. Explore every feature and setting to understand its purpose and avoid technical glitches during a live demo. Talk to the team: Engage with product managers, engineers, and customer support. They have a great deal of practical knowledge that may not be in formal documentation and can provide crucial insights into how the product really works. Listen to customers: The most profound insights come from your users. Have direct conversations, read online reviews, and pay attention to feedback. This audience sentiment will reveal their needs, challenges, and how they actually use the product. A demo’s success is determined by your mastery of the user’s problem. When you show genuine empathy for their struggles, you transform the demo from a sales pitch into a trusted consultation. Ask questions at the beginning stage of the demo if you haven’t met them before. This can help you tailor your demo to address specific issues the person is trying to solve. Dig deeper: How to do audience research for SEO The differentiator playbook: How to leverage competitive analysis Every demo is a comparison in the buyer’s mind. To stand out, you need to highlight your unique value proposition – and that starts with competitive analysis. Done well, it’s more than research. It’s storytelling. To conduct a targeted competitive analysis: Set clear goals: Define what you want to learn. Are you identifying unique selling points, uncovering pricing advantages, or spotting market gaps? Your goals should be measurable and aligned with your strategy. Identify your competitors: Look at both direct and indirect competitors. Direct competitors offer a similar product to the same audience, while indirect ones may solve the same problem with a different solution, like a water brand competing with a soda brand as a lunch-time beverage. Use the right tools: Use a blend of primary research (e.g., signing up for free trials) and secondary research (e.g., search engine analysis tools to see which keywords they’re targeting). Read online reviews to understand their strengths and weaknesses from a user’s perspective. With this data, you can build a “differentiator-driven script.” Your demo’s story should focus on a common pain point and show how your product uniquely solves it, especially where a competitor’s solution falls short. Here’s a simple framework to organize your findings: This is a great task for you to get help from your favorite generative AI tool. I’ve built several competitive “battle cards” using Gemini’s deep research feature, which has been particularly helpful for this task. During the demo, don’t talk about competitors’ weaknesses. Focus on your product’s strengths, especially those that differ from other products the prospective customer may mention. Dig deeper: How to analyze your SEO competitors to find opportunities Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Consistency and practice: The foundation of a great presentation A demo is a conversation, not a monologue, and practice is what elevates it from a memorized script to a fluid, conversational discussion. Consistency, meanwhile, ensures that your brand’s tone, style, and messaging are unified across every touchpoint, from live demos to pre-recorded videos. To perfect your demo: Ditch the script, embrace the dialogue: Scripts are a starting point, but your goal is to internalize the material so you can respond flexibly to real-time questions. Role-playing with a colleague is a great way to practice thinking on your feet and build confidence. Stick to the 3-point rule: Avoid overwhelming the audience with a “feature dump.” Instead, focus on demonstrating only the two or three core value propositions that directly address the prospect’s pain points. Build a single source of truth: A centralized repository for all brand assets, from slide templates to approved messaging, ensures every department, not just marketing, stays on-brand. This consistency can result in increased information retention for customers and sales. Use technology to scale: Tools like Marq or Prezent can automate brand compliance, allowing teams to create on-brand presentations instantly. This ensures your message remains cohesive even as the company grows. Dig deeper: The complete guide to high-impact educational video content Mastering the pivot: How to handle questions and concerns An engaged prospect asks questions, which is a great sign. It means they’re paying attention and considering your product’s value. Handling these inquiries gracefully is a hallmark of expertise and professionalism. Respond verbally first: Instead of immediately jumping into the software, answer with a simple “yes” or a quick explanation. This addresses their curiosity without derailing your demo or losing control of the narrative. Park questions that don’t fit: If a question is too big or unrelated, acknowledge it and explain that you’ll “circle back to that at the end” or follow up afterward. Make a visible promise: Write the question on a notepad or shared screen to show the prospect you’ve heard them and won’t forget it. Create a high-value follow-up: Treat unanswered questions as opportunities to continue the conversation. Send a personalized email that directly addresses the concern, reinforcing your reliability and expertise. The journey after a demo is just as crucial as the demo itself. A speedy, proactive, and thoughtful follow-up keeps you top of mind and makes your potential client feel important. Dig deeper: How to make engaging long-form YouTube videos Winning demos start with the customer A great product demo is a strategic asset grounded in empathy, insight, and consistency – not luck or charisma. By knowing your product, understanding the competition, and delivering with a human-centered approach, you turn a demo into a growth engine. The best demos always begin with the customer’s needs. View the full article

Instead of using your usual study methods (and getting the same results you always get, for better or worse) this is the year to level up. There are plenty of great ways to review and retain material, but to use them, you have to give up your bad habits first. Here's what to avoid and what to prioritize instead. Don't just rewrite your workRewriting is fine if you’re refining and condensing your material (and you should be rewriting your notes immediately after class for better retention), but it’s not the best strategy for remembering information if you’re simply recopying everything you’ve already written over and over. The writing center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill suggests condensing notes to the point that they only include key concepts. After or instead of that, try using active recall, a method that requires you to dig information out of your short-term memory to help that information stick around longer. You can use flashcards (ideally by mastering the Leitner method), summarize your chapters and notes out loud (otherwise known as blurting), or take a practice quiz—and it’ll be more helpful than basic rewriting. If you're low on time or motivation, you can generate a custom practice quiz using Google's NotebookLM. That's what I've been doing while I've been reviewing for an upcoming certification exam. You just upload your own materials and the software will create flashcards and quizzes for you. Don't take linear notesWriting down what you hear during a lecture is important, but doing it in a productive and beneficial way is even better. And while this might seem like it’s not really “studying,” remember that it’s the first big step toward overall retention. Just jotting down key words and phrases or, worse, every single word, won’t help you identify main concepts or make connections between them. Instead, use a note-taking method like outlining or the Cornell method to actively listen and record the most pertinent information as you go. And don’t forget to revise them right away after class! The same goes for when you're reading materials on your own. Use a note-taking method designed to enhance your critical reading skills, like SQ3R or KWL, so you can take notes that make sense and serve the bigger purpose of helping you retain what you're learning. Don't cramCramming is an inevitable part of the school experience at some point or another, but it’s not an ideal way to study every single time you have a test. In fact, scholars and researchers have suggested it may even backfire, causing you to remember less for your big test. Instead, schedule your studying out across multiple days. Use the distributed practice technique to create the perfect schedule for your studying based on when your next test is. It takes more discipline, but it will help you remember more material for longer periods of time, which makes it ideal for cumulative finals as well as regular old quizzes. Don't work nonstopTake breaks when you study, even if you’re cramming. A key element of distributed practice is breaking the study sessions into chunks. Seriously, it's called chunking and it's a real study technique. You’re more productive when you take breaks, so try using the Pomodoro method to schedule those breaks consistently. Pomodoro is a method that calls on you to work for 25 minutes, take a five minute break, and get back to work four times before taking a bigger break. You can mess around with methods that work for you, too. For instance, try an app to help you stay focused and schedule your Pomodoro sessions. You can also fiddle with the timing of your sessions. Maybe longer work and break segments work for you or you need shorter time working. Pomodoro adaptations are abundant, so take some time to figure out what you prefer. Avoid being too granularIf you are really locked in on your content and start obsessing over every detail, you're going to miss the forest for the trees. The University of British Columbia warns its students against over-highlighting, and for good reason: When you make everything a key point, you don’t remember the pieces of information that really are. There are benefits to color-coding your texts and notes, but only if you do it intentionally and carefully—and colorful highlights aren't the only way this can become problematic. Consider the Pareto principle, which says that 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort. Use one of the reading techniques I mentioned—SQ3R or KWL—to break down your content until you have a good idea of the most crucial elements, then study from there. You don't need to know every single definition of every single word, but you'll need to know how the course material connects so you understand what it's all about. This is also where taking those breaks comes in. If you go too hard for too long, you'll get a little too worked up. Break up the chapter, break up your time, and don't get over-stressed to the point of losing the plot. If you're worried you're not grasping the overall concepts, try using the Feynman method to see how you're doing. It involves teaching the material to someone who is unfamiliar with it, relying on the idea that if you can teach something, then you understand it. Do this with a friend or a parent or even with ChatGPT. If you struggle explaining it—like if you've spent too much time trying to memorize every tiny detail but can't relay how they all work together big-picture—head back to the drawing board and break the material down more. View the full article

Sweeping tax commitments are foolish in an unpredictable world but abandoning them would be corrosive to democracyView the full article

It’s the dream: You finish a huge project that wins widespread acclaim—from your boss, your peers, your clients, your friends and family. You’re flying high. The world should be your oyster. And yet? You can’t find the inspiration to follow up. Your productivity dries up. You’re afraid lightning won’t strike twice. You fear being a one-hit wonder. Maybe not in the obsolete pop star sense—but in the professional, creative, successful sense. It’s a horrible, limiting feeling that kills your productivity, not to mention confidence. But according to research from the Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, there’s a cause for the feelings of inadequacy following a big accomplishment. And better understanding this phenomenon can help to break through that mental block. In this paid Premium story, you’ll: Better understand why success makes you scared How to trick your brain out of the paralyzing thought loop Learn how to knock it out of the park a second time Feeling marked by success The research points to something called a “creative identity threat,” in which you become so attached to your reputation for genius (or, well near genius), that you fear putting it at risk with another project. This paralyzes original thinking—making a sophomore slump almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Dirk Deichmann, one of the researchers behind the Rotterdam study, says that the inspiration for this project was the product of living in a flat above a cookbook store. He was fascinated by the sheer variety of titles in their window. “You can do endless combinations with new categories [of cuisine], new techniques, and materials,” he says. So as a creativity researcher, he immediately started wondering what kinds of factors would influence a cookbook author’s success. Working with Markus Baer, a professor of organizational behavior at Washington University in St. Louis, he turned to data from the U.K.’s cookbook market, looking at detailed records of year-by-year sales. They found that around 50% of first-time authors fail to write another book in the five years following their debut. Now, this could occur for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the sales of the first book were dreadful. But in many cases, it was the opposite: It was often the people with the most original ideas and the greatest acclaim who failed to publish a second title. The phenomenon, they suspected, could be explained by an area of psychology known as “role identity theory”: how certain “roles” become embedded in our sense of who we are. If we have received extraordinary praise for our ingenuity, then our reputation for creativity may become central to our identity. We fear that crown slipping, and so we (counter-intuitively) avoid new creative adventures—in case we fail to meet the same acclaim a second time. Fear of a jeopardized reputation Deichmann and Baer decided to test this hypothesis and explore this phenomenon of self-sabotage. They measured how “novel” each cookbook on their list was (by analyzing publishers’ online descriptions of its contents), as well as how many awards each book received, if any. Sure enough, the more “creative” someone’s debut had been—and the more acclaimed they had received—the less likely they were to publish a sequel. Success, it seems, can be a poisoned chalice. For further evidence, Deichmann and Baer decided to recreate the phenomenon with participants in the lab. In one experiment, the participants were asked to come up with a concept for a new cookbook. Some were told that they had shown great originality, while the rest were told their idea was “solid and traditional.” These two groups were divided again, with roughly half from each receiving additional recognition by being told their idea was likely to “make a big splash”—leading them to be featured on the cover of the university’s magazine. Finally, all participants were offered the chance to pitch a second cookbook concept. As expected, the people who had been singled out for their creativity, and won the additional recognition of the magazine cover, were significantly less likely to propose a follow-up idea. Crucially, a questionnaire about their feelings confirmed that this reluctance stemmed from their fears of losing their creative identity. They were more likely to agree with the statement “the thought of coming up with a new idea for a second book makes me feel like I could jeopardize my reputation as a creative producer,” for instance. A creative identity threat may be prevalent in many domains, Deichmann suggests. Any time you allow your ego to depend on the acclaim you hope to receive for a project, be it a killer marketing campaign, an ingenious design or an outstanding product line, you could find yourself struggling to come up with more new ideas. Escaping the trap If you worry about suffering from creative identity threat, Deichmann has a couple of suggestions. The first is collaboration. Find someone, or a group of people, who might be able to contribute to your next project. “That way, the creative identity threat doesn’t lie so heavily on you, but you share it.” The second is to try to focus your mind on the creative process, rather than obsessing about the end goal, which inhibits the free-flowing thoughts that are essential for idea generation. This fits with research by Ella Miron-Spektor, professor of organizational behavior at the INSEAD business school in Fontainebleau, France. She’s examined how people’s “goal orientation” can influence their creativity. Some people are “performance oriented” (worried about how their results compare to their peers); others are “learning oriented” (focused on building skills). In one study, Miron-Spektor looked to seven years of data from a tech company that had introduced an innovation program asking employees to suggest ways to improve their processes or products, which were then judged by an expert panel. She found that learning-oriented people produced more ideas, and the quality of those ideas tended to grow over time. Meanwhile, the performance-oriented people tended to dry up quickly. Finally, Deichmann’s third piece of advice: Establish a creative routine. After a big success, you may feel especially anxious if you simply wait for your next “eureka!” moment to land by change. But you may feel greater confidence if you can find a systematic process to find and test ideas. An inventor or designer, for example, might start out by interviewing and observing their potential customers to suggest new markets to exploit: “You define a problem, you generate different ideas for that problem, and you prototype.” There is no guarantee that inspiration will strike the same mind twice—but a little courage, perseverance, and strategy can greatly enhance the chances that your genius will burn long into the future. View the full article

Think about the last piece of health advice you actually followed. Chances are, it wasn’t from a medical journal or even a doctor’s office. Most likely it was from a colleague, a neighbor, or a trusted friend—the kind of advice that feels personal and authentic. As humans, we’re wired to trust people we know or feel like we know. That’s why two-thirds of Americans now seek health information on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and other social platforms, where it’s easy to connect with others who have relatable voices or similar stories. The default ways we explored our symptoms in the past, i.e., by seeing a doctor or referencing a handful of known credible sources, are no longer the primary ways people are getting their health information. They’re following influencers to understand everything from “hormone balancing” hacks to what it’s like living with Type 1 diabetes or managing postpartum depression. These conversations can introduce potential risks like spreading misinformation, oversimplifying complex treatments, or turning serious health decisions into viral challenges. They can also be used to raise awareness and create supportive communities. With such high stakes, brands can’t afford to stay on the sidelines. Healthcare needs a different influencer playbook Healthcare has been slower to embrace influencer marketing as a tactic—and there are plenty of good reasons why. It’s inconvenient when a new lipstick advertised by your favorite beauty influencer disappoints. Maybe the experience hurts the brand’s reputation a bit, too. But when health advice goes wrong, it can prove outright dangerous. Netflix’s (Un)Well documentary series famously spotlighted influencers touting “miracle cures” that were later debunked as ineffective or even harmful. Yet, the reality is consumers are turning to peers, not professionals, for relatable health advice—whether brands join the conversation or not. Avoiding these spaces altogether means a missed opportunity to meet patients where they’re already seeking and sharing health information. The path forward isn’t about copying retail or lifestyle influencer tactics. It’s about creating approaches rooted in accuracy, empathy, and meaningful patient engagement—showing up as educators and trusted partners, not product pushers. 5 ways health brands can reimagine influencer marketing More than 8 in 10 people seeking health information on social media are concerned about incorrect or misleading medical information. For health brands, there’s an opportunity—and I would argue, a responsibility—to approach influencer marketing differently. Instead of chasing quick hits and conversions, influencer programs need to rethink the role of content creators as storytellers and community builders who can help make health information more accessible and actionable. Here are five tactics where I’m seeing success: Tap into peer-to-peer power Healthcare is deeply personal, and people trust advice from those who’ve lived similar experiences. Although medical experts like Sanjay Gupta or celebrity wellness figures like Gwyneth Paltrow hold substantial authority and reach, consumers are increasingly turning to patients, caregivers, and advocates for more tailored guidance. That could be a person sharing their chemotherapy journey on TikTok or a caregiver offering advice in a Facebook group about supporting elderly parents at home. Authentic voices like these help simplify complex topics, offer emotional support, and make care feel more accessible. Reflect audiences to earn trust Our health systems have historically underserved and excluded certain groups, and people in these communities maintain long-standing skepticism toward healthcare leaders. Acknowledging this reality is the first step toward driving more meaningful engagement online. Trusted peers can open doors brands alone can’t unlock, especially when they better represent or reflect the audiences we’re hoping to reach. Many of these voices already exist within clinical trial communities, patient advocacy groups, or condition-specific networks—and they’re eager to share what’s worked for them with others. Brands can equip these influencers with the tools, training, and information to responsibly educate and empower. Emphasize storytelling over hard sales On social media and elsewhere, our goal isn’t pushing products. Our focus is empowering people with accessible, credible information to make better decisions about their own lives. Influencer strategies must move away from transactional endorsements and prioritize authentic, accurate, and advocacy-driven storytelling. Overly polished or promotional messages feel disconnected from the emotional weight health decisions carry. It’s important to highlight real journeys and offer useful tips and resources consistently across channels. This approach lets audiences see how products fit into their bigger picture of living well. Think beyond ‘just another channel’ Influencer engagement isn’t “just another channel” in an omnichannel mix. That strategy is woefully outdated and won’t generate the desired ROI. Modern influencer marketing is authentic, creative content that meets people where they already are: on TikTok, yes, but also in local forums, community centers, or college campuses where health decisions are also shaped. Don’t force traditional campaigns into influencer spaces. Also, avoid relying on top-down advertising to enter peer-driven forums. Instead, build custom influencer marketing programs unique to where conversations naturally happen and empower credible voices to participate meaningfully in the discussions where they fit best. Build in governance without killing authenticity In such a highly regulated industry, health brands are understandably concerned that an influencer might say something off-script that could damage the brand or violate compliance standards. But we don’t need to sacrifice authenticity to manage these risks. The key is a proactive governance model that sets clear expectations for influencers, provides the necessary training, and establishes content guardrails, fact-checking, and formal review and approval processes. It’s also critical to put in place a response plan if something inaccurate, misleading, or off-brand is posted. This isn’t about over-policing content. It’s about giving brands and influencers the structure and support to engage confidently, knowing there’s a safety net in place. Join health and wellness conversations thoughtfully Health brands are no longer the only ones shaping narratives. They now share the space with patients, caregivers, advocates, and people seeking and sharing advice across Facebook groups, Reddit threads, and other online communities. Instead of trying to control these conversations, brands can contribute meaningfully through a more collaborative approach. When influencers are treated as allies rather than advertisements, brands earn trust, reduce misinformation, and ultimately help people make better, more informed health decisions. View the full article

X has been more open lately about how its algorithm works. In its own documentation, the platform notes that engagement is the strongest signal for visibility — replies, profile clicks, and dwell time top the list — but Premium subscribers also get an extra lift. In a recent breakdown from Social Media Today on the X algorithm, verified accounts (which come with a Premium subscription) benefit from this boost, alongside other factors like video watch time and conversation depth. On the flip side, link posts, all-caps updates, and “offensive” content see sharp penalties. In other words, X has made it clear: if you want reach, you need to be engaging and verified. This insight raises an important question: just how much difference does Premium actually make? To answer that, we teamed up with Buffer’s data scientist, Julian Winternheimer, and looked at more than 18.8 million posts from 71,000 accounts over the past year. The results show a growing divide — Premium isn’t just about editing tools or longer posts anymore. It’s also about distribution. Does Premium really change content performance on X?Our analysis suggests that Premium accounts do see significantly more visibility. 🚀 According to our findings, Premium accounts get around 10x more reach per post than regular accounts. Interestingly, reach has trended downward over time on X, with median reach going from hovering near 1000 in August 2024 to less than 750 in August 2025. ⚡ Engagement rates show a similar pattern. Premium accounts moved from a median of about 0.3% in late 2024 to 0.4% by mid-2025. In contrast, regular accounts declined from around 0.15% to a median of 0% by March 2025. A median of zero means that at least half of these accounts received no likes, replies, or reposts on their posts. This aligns with what X has shared about its algorithm: Premium subscribers receive visibility boosts, while non-Premium accounts may find their content harder to surface. Our findings reflect that dynamic. Premium now appears to influence not just access to features, but also how content is distributed in the feed. The study: how Premium affects reach and engagement on XTo understand just how much an X Premium subscription changes things, we analyzed 18.8 million posts from 71,000 X accounts between August 2024 and August 2025. Roughly 27% of these accounts were subscribed to one of X’s three Premium tiers: Basic, Premium, or Premium+. When we compared reach and engagement side by side, a pattern emerged: performance isn’t split only between free and paid accounts — there are also differences within Premium itself. That means X effectively functions as a tiered system, where visibility varies by subscription level. To illustrate what that looks like, we broke the data down across reach, engagement, and content type. In the next section, we’ll walk through those differences in detail. 💡If you’re interested in seeing Julian’s analysis, check out his blog for a deep dive.1. What’s the difference in reach between regular and Premium accounts?🚀 In our dataset, Premium users received around 10x the median reach of regular accounts. That gap has been consistent over the past year but became especially pronounced in 2025, when Premium+ accounts — the highest tier — began to pull further ahead. Regular accounts: typically under 100 impressions per post.Basic accounts: a small lift above non-subscribers, but still limited reach.Premium accounts: closer to 600 impressions per post.Premium+ accounts: often more than double Premium accounts, and the clear leader at over 1,550 impressions per post.While Premium users might have larger audiences, follower size alone doesn’t account for the difference. The scale of the gap suggests that Premium tiers benefit from built-in distribution advantages, consistent with what X has outlined in its documentation. 💡 For creators and brands focused on reach, Premium appears to provide a stronger baseline for visibility. 2. What’s the difference in engagement between regular and Premium accounts?When it comes to engagement (likes, replies, and reposts), the differences across tiers are less dramatic than for reach. Premium Basic leads slightly, with a median engagement rate of around 0.55% per post.Premium+ is close behind, landing right at 0.53%.Premium sits marginally lower, at around 0.49%.Regular accounts had a median engagement rate of 0%, meaning at least half of these accounts received no visible interaction on a typical post.Interestingly, Premium Basic appears to “punch above its weight” on engagement, even without the broader visibility that comes with higher tiers. Still, without the same reach, those engagement gains may be less impactful overall. 3. Which X Premium tier is the best?Premium isn’t a single upgrade — it comes in three tiers, and the differences show up in both features and performance. 🚀 Premium+ subscribers consistently see the highest reach of all account types. Standard Premium users perform far better than regular accounts, while Premium Basic sits closer to an entry-level step-up. Taking a month-to-month look from mid-2024 to mid-2025, some interesting patterns emerge from the data: Premium+: leads across both reach and engagement. In some months, their median reach doubled that of standard Premium.Premium: delivers the biggest jump compared to regular accounts — the line where the visibility gap truly opens.Basic: unlocked essential Premium features like longer posts and editing, but didn’t show the same reach gains as the higher tiers. Engagement rates were relatively strong, though limited visibility meant those interactions didn’t scale as widely.Regular accounts: remain at the bottom, with reach under 100 impressions and a median engagement rate of 0%.X Premium comes in three tiers with different features and visibility benefits. Here’s a quick breakdown of what each tier offers. Tier Price Key Features Performance Impact (from our data) Best For Basic $3/month Includes essential Premium features like editing posts, longer posts (up to 25k characters), longer video uploads (3 hours/8GB), bold/italic text formatting, bookmark folders, create communities, custom app icons, and modest reply prioritization Little to no measurable reach/engagement lift compared to free accounts Users who mainly want basic features and small additional benefits without paying for full visibility Premium $8/month All Basic features + monetization (ads revenue sharing, creator subscriptions), Media Studio, X Pro, higher Grok access, reduced ads (about half), Premium gifting, and the verification checkmark Where the visibility gap truly opens — consistent reach/engagement advantage over Basic/free Creators and brands who want a subscription plan that offers both premium features and measurable distribution gains Premium+ $40/month All Premium features + ad-free browsing, long-form Articles, highest Grok access, Radar trend tracking, top-tier reply prioritization, and visibility boosts The strongest performance — often doubling the reach of other Premium tiers Power users and brands relying on X as a core growth platform, where a premium subscription provides maximum increased exposure 👉 In short: Higher X Premium tiers correlate with stronger visibility. 4. Which content performs best on X?Not all post types are created equal — and the data makes that crystal clear. When we broke engagement rates down by content type, the gap between Premium and regular accounts became even sharper. Some takeaways from the dataset: Text posts: Consistently lead for Premium accounts, climbing close to 0.9% median engagement by mid-2025. For regular accounts, engagement collapsed to ~0.25% after March 2025.Video posts: A close second, holding steady above 0.7% for Premium users while dropping sharply for non-subscribers.Image posts: Reliable but middling — Premium users see around 0.4–0.5%, while regular accounts hover closer to 0.2%.Links: The weakest format across the board. Premium cushions the blow (around 0.25–0.3%), but for regular accounts, engagement flatlined to 0% in March 2025.💡 If you’re paying for Premium, lean into text and video. They deliver the strongest, most reliable engagement lift. Images can diversify your feed, but links remain heavily penalized unless you’re on a Premium plan. 💡Learn more about what to post on X: Data Shows Best Content Format on Social Platforms in 2025: Millions of Posts Analyzed5. Do posts with links affect content performance?Yes, but not all posts are affected equally, and Premium softens the outcome. 🚨 For regular accounts, link posts have been completely suppressed since March 2025 — their median engagement rate is 0%. That means if you’re not on X Premium, sharing a blog post, product page, or newsletter link is essentially invisible. For Premium users, links still underperform compared to text, video, or images — but they at least register meaningful engagement, typically around 0.25–0.3%. X’s latest algorithm update makes this explicit: links trigger penalties. For non-Premium accounts, that means silence. For Premium accounts, links register, but lag far behind text and video. 💡 However, if you must share links, Premium+ is the safest bet for maintaining visibility. What this means for creators and brandsOur data points to a clear pattern: Premium accounts receive more visibility, while non-Premium accounts often struggle to surface in the feed. That said, more reach doesn’t always translate into better outcomes — the impact depends on your goals and how central X is to your overall strategy. 👉 Put simply: Premium can expand your distribution, but engagement remains the key factor in sustaining growth. If visibility on X is important to you, Premium may provide a stronger baseline — but the real driver is whether your posts spark replies and hold attention. View the full article

The White House website has been updated to blame the government shutdown that began Wednesday on Democrats. The official White House homepage was topped on Wednesday by a red, scrolling banner with the all-caps message “DEMOCRAT SHUTDOWN: DEMOCRATS’ [sic] IN THEIR OWN WORDS” along a countdown showing how long the shutdown has been going on. Users who clicked through were taken to a landing page with a livestreamed video of clips of Democratic lawmakers criticizing past shutdowns, integrating partisan messaging into its design. With a news ticker, countdown clock, and clips of politicians speaking on Capitol Hill, this is web design inspired by one of President Donald The President’s favorite pastimes: cable news. It’s just one way the The President administration is hoping to shift blame about the shutdown away from Republicans, who control the White House and both chambers of Congress, and who a plurality of Americans think deserve the blame. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released Tuesday found 38% of respondents blame Republicans for a shutdown, 31% blame both parties, 27% blame Democrats, and 4% blame neither. Federal blame game appears in several contexts Some federal agencies are finding ways to blame Democrats for the shutdown through official channels, too. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) website added a pop-up and landing page messaging that says “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government. HUD will use available resources to help Americans in need” while the State Department’s website says “Due to the Democrat-led shutdown, website updates will be limited until full operations resume.” At the Small Business Administration (SBA), employees received language for a suggested out-of-office email that blamed Democrats, according to Wired. “I am out of office for the foreseeable future because Senate Democrats voted to block a clean federal spending bill (HR 5371), leading to a government shutdown that is preventing the US Small Business Administration from serving America’s 36 million small businesses. Every day that Senate Democrats continue [to] oppose a clean funding bill, they are stopping an estimated 320 small businesses from accessing $170 million in SBA-guaranteed funding,” the suggested email language read. Potential legal implications of partisan messaging Richard Painter, former White House ethics lawyer for former President George W. Bush and a University of Minnesota professor of corporate law, says the White House website update isn’t a clear-cut violation of the Hatch Act, which restricts the political activities of federal employees, “unless the official statement mentions candidates, elections or campaign slogans,” though he says it may violate rules about lobbying. “I do think, however, this is probably part of a coordinated executive branch campaign to lobby Congress, and thus this in combination with the agency web pages and emails probably violates statutory restrictions on use of taxpayer money to lobby Congress,” Painter tells Fast Company. Donald Sherman, executive director and chief counsel at the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, said while it’s not a Hatch Act violation, “agency employees are legally bound to provide nonpartisan service to their constituents.” “A government shutdown causes stress for the public regardless of political affiliation; it is wildly inappropriate for agency leadership to politicize the situation and blame political enemies,” Sherman said. A civic institution meets cable news spin Other government agencies have communicated the shutdown online without partisan messaging, like NASA, which has a banner that reads “Due to the lapse in federal government funding, NASA is not updating this website. The White House took a far less neutral stance—though the website displayed toned-down rhetoric by Wednesday afternoon. The news ticker swapped out its messaging blaming Democrats for the shutdown with an update to watch the White House press briefing, during which Vice President JD Vance made a surprise cameo and said he doesn’t think the shutdown will be long. After the briefing, whitehouse.gov scrapped the news ticker. The countdown clock on the White House homepage reading “Democrats Have Shut Down The Government” above its top navigation, however, remains. View the full article

Data for September reveals continuing impact of payroll tax increases on hiring and employmentView the full article

Greater Manchester Police said four people were hit by car and also suffered stab woundsView the full article

As the government shutdown stalls key housing programs, lenders are shifting tactics to keep loans moving and preparing for bigger challenges ahead. View the full article

It looks like it could be sitting on the campus of any number of major universities across the country, but this sleek, glass-lined educational building is far from the conventional teaching space: It’s a new training facility for the Ironworkers Local 63 union in Chicago. The training facility is being used to give young ironworkers hands-on experience welding, climbing, and installing the essential elements that underlie buildings around the world. As anxiety snowballs over just which professions will survive the emergence of artificial intelligence, physical trades like ironwork are seeming more and more AI proof—the building itself a counterargument to the perception that a promising career path necessarily starts at a university. The building was designed by architecture and design firm Gensler and is located in the town of Broadview on the outskirts of Chicago. It’s a school of hopefully no hard knocks, where apprentice ironworkers will learn to move and weld multi-ton pieces of steel inside what is essentially a giant glass jewel box. Despite the role’s name, ironwork involves a wide range of construction processes that go far beyond welding massive metal beams. More than half the union’s work in recent years has been installing glass curtain walls­—the smooth facades that shimmer on skyscrapers the world over. Paul Wende saw the trendlines. He’s the union’s business manager, financial secretary, and treasurer, and he set out to give the unionworkers a place to refine those skills without having to learn on the job. “Everything we do has to line up. Everything from the floors to the ceilings tie into the horizontals on the windows. Everything goes off of that glass. So it’s got to be perfect. The architects really go over it with a fine-tooth comb,” he says. “Well, if you’ve got to be perfect, you better train on it.” “The West Point of training centers” Rather than just finding empty space in a workaday warehouse, Wende had a higher vision for the facility. “What I wanted to do was turn that school into the West Point of training centers,” he says. Wende might have had his mind on the upper echelons of the U.S. military, but it was another local trade union that became the true model to follow. In the mid-2010s, the Chicago Plumbers Union opened a state-of-the-art training facility that brought its apprentice workers out of a musty basement and into a clean, well-lit educational building. Gensler also designed that building, and Wende approached the firm’s Chicago office seeking a project suited to his own union’s trade. The building is a teaching tool for future IW 63 workers The design that emerged is an elegant three-story building wrapped in curving dark glass on its front side, and highlighted with a bright red “IW 63” sign on its corner. Inside, it’s specially outfitted with structures and tools that are used on a daily basis by ironworkers when they’re erecting buildings and installing their facades. “They can build and then disassemble an entire three-story building within the space that they can then install curtain wall on,” says Scott Hurst, a principal at Gensler who led the project. “The building itself is an instrument. It’s a teaching tool.” Hurst says the entire building was designed to offer educational opportunities. There’s a bridge crane at the top of the space that can move five-ton iron beams, and the structure that holds up that crane can also be used to practice rigging and panel installation. There’s a central spiral staircase (another ironworker installation task), revolving and sliding doors (ditto), operable skylights (ditto), and solar panels (ditto). “When you think of all of the things that you might find Local 63 performing out in the field, this building is really meant to embody those and demonstrate those in a kind of real way,” Hurst says. The exterior is also a reflection of the trade’s abilities. The shape of the glass facade, with its slight concave curvature, was inspired by a weld bead, and is meant to evoke the elegant side of what ironworkers can do. In an architecturally rich city like Chicago, Local 63 has had more than its share of high-profile projects, from the skyscraper thrill experience Tilt on the 94th floor of the John Hancock building to the mirrored polish of the Bean. For Wende, it was important that the training facility had some of the same architectural panache. “We do all this cool, ornate stuff and no one ever really knew who we were,” he says. “Until now.” The Gensler-designed training center is also a marketing tool The building has garnered its own kind of celebrity status, hosting local politicians, events, and training sessions for visiting ironworkers. Within the first week of the building’s opening it hosted an international ironworkers competition, where ironworkers were speed-climbing the columns inside the facility and rigging up cross beams. It’s also part of the way the union aims to attract new talent. Wende says there’s been consistent interest in the union for years, but the new building only broadens the trade’s appeal. “It is a marketing tool beyond belief for what we do and who we are,” Wende says. Making the building work for ironworkers and lure in the next generation became a major part of the design process. “As we think about Gen Z and their changing appetites towards what might be future-proof careers, recognizing that if we want people to take pride in the craftsmanship and the work that they do, they deserve facilities that fill them with that pride,” Hurst says. Beyond the trade, the building is beneficial to the architecture and development community. While ironworkers use the facility to train, builders and designers can use it to test out new ways of making buildings. “All the questions that a contractor might have when it comes to how to construct something, or the ease of construction, or even cost concerns, can be alleviated by taking them through a facility like this,” Hurst says. The facility had one extra benefit for the union itself. Local 63’s own union ironworkers helped build the project. Job security is literally built in. View the full article

David Droga was the face of Accenture Song even before it was called Accenture Song. The ad legend sold his agency Droga5 to Accenture’s creative advertising and marketing division then-called Accenture Interactive in 2019. He became CEO of that division in 2021, and rebranded Interactive as Accenture Song in 2022. So when he stepped down in May, the $20 billion company was not only losing its CEO, it was also losing the voice of the agency. Named to lead the new era was Ndidi Oteh, who comes from leading Song’s operations in the Americas, and has been at Accenture for about 14 years, where in her previous role she was the global account lead for Nike, and retail industry strategy and consulting lead for the West Coast. Earlier this month, Oteh officially sat down behind the CEO desk. Song is facing a lot of the same challenges as the rest of the advertising and marketing services industry: layoffs, restructuring, and shifting client budgets—all as AI wreaks havoc on the traditional ways of doing business. But its new CEO believes it has the tools and capabilities to thrive. Droga once told AdAge, “You either grow into the future or you’re shrinking into the past.” Oteh says that thanks to Droga’s vision of bringing creativity together with Accenture’s technology and business services, Song has had a head start in preparing for the future of marketing and advertising. Despite its size, Song is still just about 30% of Accenture’s overall business. The larger parent is a broad, global consultancy that specializes in digital transformation and operations efficiency. Not only does this give Song the opportunity to pair its capabilities with Accenture’s, it also shields it from some of the ebb and flow of the ad industry as those industries figure out how to navigate a world where success means more than producing great creative. “This isn’t a conversation about having a great Super Bowl ad, one could argue it never was,” she says. “The reality is now, we aren’t only talking about marketing. We’re talking about marketing, customer service, social commerce, sales, creating digital products, and how that should all be powered by AI. We have always had the right pieces, but we are now connecting all of it in a way that’s very different.” Industry of one In Accenture’s most recent earnings report, released last week, Song’s revenue was up by 8% to $20 billion. Despite the positive results, Song is not immune to the shifts in its business. As of September 1, Accenture bundled services including strategy, consulting, Song, technology, and operations into a single integrated business unit called Reinvention Services. Song’s parent company, which has a workforce of about 800,000, also laid off more than 11,000 employees over the last three months as part of a $865 million restructuring program. The holding company model is in a state of flux, with significant consolidation reflecting the need for greater efficiency. Omnicom and Interpublic are merging to create the world’s largest advertising and marketing services holding company. Publicis recently combined Publicis Worldwide and Leo Burnett into a single entity called Leo. The promise of the holding company model has always been to deliver world-class creative and strategy at scale, with technology, media, and everything else all under one roof. Traditionally, a major hurdle has been overcoming the fact that most of these capabilities are from separate companies, gradually acquired by the holding company, and silo’d from each other in a way that is both confusing and inefficient for the clients. Companies under the same parent have often been competing against each other more than collaborating, with clients complaining about workflow bottlenecks and a lack of consistency. All the recent consolidation is an effort to strip away these barriers. In 2022, Song itself consolidated a number of the creative agencies under its roof, moving all but Droga5 under one P&L. Song has made more acquisitions in the last few years. In August, it acquired social and influencer agency Superdigital. And in 2024, it bought consumer engagement firm Unlimited, digital design and tech agency Work & Co., and Brazilian creative shop Soko. Oteh says that Song approaches acquisitions through the lens of capability, building, and expansion. “In most cases, we either already have the capability, and we’re saying we want to do more, or we’re saying we see this is where the future is heading, and we want to make sure that we have it,” she says. The key is how it’s integrated into the company as a whole. “How do we embed it so all of us lift, not that there’s just this siloed organization?” she says. “If we can’t, that doesn’t help you drive reinvention. Our clients are asking for a company that understands how everything’s connected, how to bring people together, and how to bring different functions and capabilities to be able to drive those harmonized customer experiences.” Oteh says Song sits apart from the ad holding companies by virtue of its own parent company. “I don’t really think about where Accenture fits in comparison to holding companies,” says Oteh. “Song is powered by Accenture, and that means the foundation of technology. Actually understanding your data—what it takes to build an AI infrastructure—is what Accenture does every day. In many cases, Accenture is already helping them with the infrastructure, so that allows us to have different types of insights into what they need to do to really make sure they’re driving growth with their customers. I think that puts us in what feels a little bit like an industry of one.” Growth engine CMO A decade ago, Oteh says that many CMOs had given away a lot of the core components of their brands’ connections to the customer. The technology teams owned the consumer data, as well as the strategy around digital tools like e-commerce. In too many C-suites, the CMO was brand-only. Oteh says this has shifted dramatically. “They were spending a lot of time talking about what to build from a messaging and marketing perspective, but the other core components of what it takes to truly understand your customer had been given out,” she says. “Now, there’s not a CMO today who is not talking about two things: First, I have to do more with less. And second, getting better insight out of my customer data to drive forward.” For Oteh, CMOs should be the growth engine again for their company, instead of marketing being the first stop when cuts need to be made. “The CMO wants to be at the center again, and in order to do that, they have to really make sure that they’re modernizing the way in which they work,” she says. “Maybe gone are the days where you have 100 different agencies that you’re working with. Maybe gone are the days that you’re spending most of your time doing your operational tasks that truly can be done through AI. There has to be a transition, and every single CMO that we talk to today is saying, ‘How do you help us get there?'” Back in 2022, Droga told me the key to Song’s success was about making sure that it can effectively combine its strengths with those of the rest of Accenture’s capabilities. Now, Oteh says the real challenge is to do everything they’ve been doing, but faster. “So many of the opportunities that we’ve had over the past year are not just about marketing, but about sales, customer service, design, building a product, and connectivity to finance,” she says. “And that did not used to happen at the rate that is happening now.” View the full article

It’s the end of the workday. You’re ready to bounce. But you feel compelled to check in with your boss. For many workers, it feels like the appropriate thing to do. But as one viral TikTok makes clear, those norms may be changing. The skit—which has more than 20 million views—asks whether it’s okay to leave at 5: An employee walks into the boss’s office. “I’m heading out,” she informs him. “Wow—5 p.m. right on the dot. I just love your work-life balance,” he responds sarcastically. “The workday ends at 5,” she, very fairly, points out. The post then opens up the debate to the comments section: Do you leave at 5 o’clock on the dot? Do you finish up what you’re working on and drift out sometimes between 5 and 6 p.m.? Or do you ensure you are always the first one in and the last one out of the office? Naturally, people were divided. Some stood by the fact that they will work the hours they are paid to work, not a minute longer. “If I’m prepped and ready to work at 8 I’m prepped and ready to leave at 5,” one wrote. “Go to the bathroom from 4:30-5. Then go home,” another suggested. “I’m in my car at 4:56,” another added. In many workplaces, though, staying put at your desk past 5 p.m. or until your boss has packed up and left is the unspoken rule. “I always believed you show up 10 mins before you start and leave 10 mins after you time is done,” one commenter wrote. “If you’re paid until 5, you work until 5. It takes a few minutes to gather your things,” another added. Checking in with your boss can be an act of transparency and open communication. But it could give a toxic boss an opportunity to make you work late when there’s no need. It could also be a sign of a fawn response, in which you suppress your own needs for validation from an authority figure. And staying until your boss leaves (or hanging around trying to look busy) can be a form of presenteeism, which could lead to burnout and isn’t even good for the company’s bottom line. In the U.S., employees are already expected to work more hours than their counterparts in most other nations. Taking off promptly at 5 p.m. has long been a trait managers could judge you on. But whether it’s seen as lazy or simply setting healthy work-life boundaries is changing. For the first time ever in 2024, recruiting agency Randstad’s yearly survey of 26,000 workers around the world found work-life balance surpassed pay as a key motivator for employees. Within those firm boundaries, “9 to 5” means “9 to 5,” regardless of salaried status. “If you’re micromanaging a few minutes,” one commenter on the TikTok post said, “I don’t wanna work for you.” It’s currently still an employer’s market, which may empower managers to feel no qualms about asking direct reports to work late. Of course, that won’t last forever. But the debate on whether bosses should keep people past 5 might. “People don’t quit jobs,” said one commenter. “They quit managers.” View the full article

Whatever happens next at Starbucks will be studied for decades to come. The world’s largest coffee chain has faced six quarters of declining same-store sales. But for the last year, its new chairman and CEO, Brian Niccol—the surest bet in the restaurant industry—has been architecting a turnaround. Hot off turnarounds at Yum Brands with Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, which he followed up by modernizing burrito building at Chipotle, Niccol has proven himself to be both a master marketer and operations expert. Which is why, when he announced that his strategy for Starbucks was to revive the third place, even some of Niccol’s fans were skeptical he could pull it off. Earlier this month, we published our Fall cover story in which I profiled the plan through an unprecedented amount of access with Niccol. And the same morning that story went live, I sat down with him at our Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York. Fast Company In front of a standing-room-only audience, Niccol gave his first public interview since taking the job. And what the audience experienced was remarkably like what I did over hours of previous conversations with Niccol: He is disarmingly practical, charmingly matter-of-fact, and flatly uncompromising. Unlike many CEOs who will say just enough to escape off the stage, he proved open to take on any question about his business with gusto. You can hear the full interview on this month’s episode of our podcast By Design, watch it on our site, and also read the full transcript below. From his plans to design a new Starbucks chair to his comments on his biggest competitor, you don’t want to miss this one—best enjoyed alongside a hot cup of joe. Fast Company: No matter what your feelings are about Starbucks, in your heart of hearts, there was a time that Starbucks was the best. And I don’t know that we’re going to agree on what that year was, but whatever it was, Brian wants to bring you back to it. Since taking over as CEO last year, he’s kicked off a design-led turnaround for Starbucks, re-skinning stores, bringing back seats, rethinking sort of back-of-house service. But I do have one little confession. When Brian and I first met for this story, I said that at the announcement of his hiring, I wasn’t sure he was the guy for the job. Sure his bonafides were really as the top guy in the restaurant industry. He came from Taco Bell, where he launched an app and turned that company around. He went to Chipotle—a very different, very analog company—where he installed screens and a second line for making burritos that brought new efficiency. He upgraded their app significantly, and turned Chipotle around. But Starbucks has the best app already! So what could he do there? And I think what we really got into quickly was that for Starbucks to have a design turnaround, it actually needed to rethink its entire infrastructure. Brian Niccol: Look, the Starbucks strategy of “Back to Starbucks” is all about ultimately getting to the place of being the best of Starbucks again. And if you think about what makes Starbucks special, it’s how you feel when you’re in a Starbucks, when it’s truly a community coffee house. It truly is the third place. I think it is our point of difference and it’s why people fell in love with Starbucks. It’s why I fell in love with Starbucks 20 years ago when we had the first Starbucks come to the little town I was in just outside of Cincinnati. And I think there’s no reason why we can’t have that today. And I actually think people want it more than ever. I know digital and AI and the ability to connect and get bits of information in all forms or fashion are faster and easier than ever before. But I think nothing beats the good old-fashioned sit-down with a friend, sit-down with a family member, sit-down for a job interview face-to-face over a cup of coffee. It never can be replaced. And so I think when we do it right, there’s nobody better. And I firmly believe the best days of Starbucks are still in front of us. I’ve had the opportunity to travel around the world and experience our coffee and the community coffee house around the world, and it transcends cultures; it transcends borders. It really is, I think, the best of humanity when you get people together around a table, in a safe place, over a cup of coffee. I really do believe it’s important to get these ceramic mugs back too because there is something to this like mug hug when you get your warm cup of coffee. And we want all those little moments to be back again. We’re designing a new mug, we’re designing a new seat, we’re doing these coffee house uplifts. I do believe the customer experience—the aesthetic of that community coffee house—is really important. It seems like at an age when everything is basically digital and convenience dominates, it’s no longer a distinguishing feature for your brand. Look, we’ve got to have access through the app, we’ve got to be quick, we’ve got to be convenient, we need to have drive-throughs. I think the thing that separates us is that coffee house moment. Whether you’re walking into a coffee house to just grab your cup and go, I think it’s important that you walk into a coffee house. We’ve all been in those places where we’ve gotten to-go food. And if you walk into a place and it’s empty and soulless, you don’t feel great about that to-go order. If the place has a soul, a connection, even if it’s a to-go order, you feel much better about that to-go order. And I think the same is true for Starbucks. That’s part of the business argument, right? That basically upgrading the physical space will actually increase digital orders and other things along those lines. Absolutely. And look, the other thing too is there was a lot of feedback from our partners on what it took to run the Starbucks. Now you have three key access points: You’ve got the drive-through, mobile-order pickup, and now you have the café or the counter experience for the café. And we’ve worked on technology and process and flow and staffing to ensure that our teams are set up where they can do all three of those access points successfully. Some of the feedback I was getting initially is they’re not set up for success. And so you might’ve heard us talk about this Green Apron service model that we just started to roll out, and we’re investing $500 million to $600 million into additional labor in the stores. But it’s purposeful. It’s purposeful to make sure that every transaction is more than a transaction—it’s actually a moment of connection both at the time you order and at the time you hand it off. So I want to rewind a bit: You start last year, you come into the role. Tell me what drove you crazy. Well, there were a few things that drove me crazy. I had left Chipotle and I had about a month, month and a half before I was starting at Starbucks. And the thing I did was I started going to Starbucks with a lot more frequency. I was kind of between jobs and I heard that’s kind of one of the things you do is you go hang out at Starbucks. But when I went, what I quickly realized is we had done some things that basically did not deliver on having a great in-café experience. I walked into a store, and outlets were covered or outlets weren’t working. There weren’t enough seats. It was clear that we had prioritized a waiting area for mobile orders over solving, How do we better sync up the timing of when you order your drink and when you show up for your drink so that you don’t need as big of a waiting area and we can put those seats back in? I also saw it was very transactional, as opposed to giving our baristas, or our partners, the time to create connection and also do their craft correctly, consistently. When I started to see these things . . . it was really interesting. There was one customer, he happened to be in front of me and he didn’t realize I was the CEO. And he ordered a brewed cup of coffee from our Clover Vertica machine, and our barista turns around, makes the brewed cup of coffee and then sends it down the line behind lattes and everything else. The gentleman’s literally getting anxious. You can tell he just wants his cup of coffee right now, and instead we were sending it down the line. And so I just asked him: I was like, “Hey, does this happen to you all the time?” He’s like, “All the time. . . . I can put my own milk in my coffee.” And what I found out was we had removed the condiment bar during COVID and we never put it back. And we had also changed the process of brewed coffee to go down the line as opposed to just handing it back to you at POS. It went down the line because the barista was the one to pour in the oat milk or whatever. That’s right. And inevitably, your coffee’s very personal. So to tell somebody how much milk to put in or how much sugar to put in, it’s very hard to get it correct when the person doesn’t see what’s going on. So we also had a scenario where we’re redoing these coffees a lot, or worse yet, I saw somebody hand somebody their cup of coffee, a cup with some milk, and then a cup full of sugars. And then this person’s gotten now three cups and is looking like, Well, where am I supposed to go with this? We don’t have the seat for him to sit down to go put the cream and sugar into his coffee. So those were little things where I’m like, Gosh, this is really frustrating and there’s no reason for it to happen. It made it hard on our partner, it made it hard on our customer. And these were simple things to solve. And hopefully you’ve seen that already go into effect where now we have the condiment bars back. When you do order brewed coffee, they should hand it to you right at the order point. Let me pause you there, though. Because on paper it’s simple enough to put the milk back on the condiment bar. But on the back end, you stopped charging more for different or alt dairy milks, right? That’s a relatively big decision, but you made it pretty quickly. Yeah, well that was another thing that I was hearing from customers. And I guess probably the point, to go back to your question, when I first started—I always take the approach of what are customers saying? What are our partners saying? What’s working? What’s getting in the way? And then it’s a really easy list to create to say, “Okay, if we just fix these things to eliminate these pain points for both our customers and our partners, I think we’re going to make a lot of progress.” One of the pain points was why is regular milk no upcharge, but there’s an upcharge when I want oat milk? I was listening to it, and I’m like, I think they’re right. As a customer, that would not delight me. So we made the decision to stop charging for alt milk. Doing that also freed us up to then have the right milks on the condiment bar. What I found out was one of the weird little barriers was, well, we wanted to charge for the alt milk, so we didn’t want to put it on the condiment bar. I saw the hacks where people get the espresso, pick up the oat milk, and dump half the container. Kind of screws everybody, but also saves a dollar. What’s so interesting is you see these compensating behaviors, and you’re like, this is really silly. We can make it very simple. And the simplicity actually works for everybody. You’re changing store design quite a bit. There will be three core store designs—I would say small, medium, and large. And the small in particular is going to be a new format store we haven’t really seen before, modeled after a classic espresso bar. So the idea is in a small format you can still have a great barista connection and still have a couple of seats. You’ve all experienced these places as you’ve traveled around the world. The traditional espresso bar is actually, though, just a walk up to the bar, get a shot of espresso, maybe have a few words, and out you go. I do believe we still need to have some atmosphere where if you want to sit down and have your drink, you can still have a seat. So there’ll be small formats primarily driven toward the idea of like, hey, I want to get my coffee. Maybe just have a minute or two at the barista [counter] and then move on. But [we will] also provide six to eight seats where if you want to sit down, you can sit down. Then obviously when you go to the medium store, you’re going to have probably 30 seats. And then as it gets bigger, you can get to 50, 60 seats. In some cases, even bigger. You might’ve seen we just opened a flagship store in Spain at the Bernabéu [Stadium] in Madrid, and that is the third place on steroids. You have a complete view of the pitch or the Real Madrid soccer team. It’s amazing. It really is amazing. I think actually, I think Fast Company called it the most beautiful Starbucks in the world right now. So my point is they can be beautiful when they’re big and multistoried, or they can be beautiful and intimate when it’s 800 square feet with 10 seats. We do not have to make a trade-off. You’re adding 30,000 seats back? I think it’s going to be closer to hundreds of thousands of seats back. We’ve basically seen every major restaurant chain rip out seats over the last five years. I wrote an essay a few years ago called “Death of a place to sit,” and we’ve seen this trend everywhere. Do you think this is going to lead the industry in a resurgence of seating? Do you think people sort of draft off of Starbucks like they did Starbucks’s rewards app years ago? I think people want a place to be able to spend time with each other over food or over coffee. When I was at Chipotle, there was a moment there where we were like, “Oh, you don’t need that front of house anymore. You can just do everything through the digital-make line.” At the time I felt like I was a little bit out on the island, but I was like, “I disagree.” I think people like to come into the store, interact with [other people]—in that case going down the line to get your customized experience. And the same thing’s true at Starbucks. I hear over and over and over again, the connection between the barista and our customers is unlike anything I’ve heard. There are these examples where people walk in, and the barista knows them so well that they’ve already made their drink before they’ve gotten to the POS. I wish every single one of our transactions was that intimate, that personal. That’s what we need to get to. Fast Company This is taking a lot of investment. You’re going to staff up; these store uplifts cost about $150,000 apiece, and remodels cost a little bit more. All of these improvements I do believe could move the needle significantly for Starbucks. But are you worried with a pinched middle class where we’re seeing credit card debt rising and the economy’s obviously shaky? If you have all of these challenges around a $6 or $7 coffee, does that offset your gains? I don’t think so. When you have a commitment to craft and quality like we do, and then you have a commitment to what I would call a great customer experience. I would love for Starbucks to become the world’s greatest customer service company. Right now, when I ask people “Name me a great customer service company,” I usually get a blank stare. Which I find fascinating because I’m like, well geez, that tells me right off the bat there is a huge opportunity to be the defining customer service company. I think there is tremendous value in being a world-class customer service company combined with great craft, great quality food and drink. And I think when you look at putting those two things together for the price that we will have to charge for it, I think it’ll turn out to be invaluable. It comes back to experience. I’m still seeing reports that to provide that customer experience baristas are taxed a little extra. And I know you’re staffing up. I know that you are simplifying the menu, and you’re doing all sorts of things to help them out, to buy them time. But they’re writing with Sharpies on cups again, they’re still slammed. When do you feel like you’ll see a broad relief for that group? Our goal is to create a situation where our partners can thrive. I do think we have to accept what the standards need to be, though. And so our standard is going to be great customer service and great craft, and I don’t believe we can lower the standard. I think what we need to do is make sure we create process, programs, investment so that the standard is achievable. And the other thing too—and I’ve said this to our organization—I was like, here’s the fact: The standard’s going to go up every year. If you think the Sharpies are hard today . . . Well no, what happens is over time the Sharpie becomes just, “This is what I do.” That’s the baseline. That’s the baseline. And it is partly a new thing right now. Therefore, as with anything, any little bit of change, sometimes there is a change curve. I think the mistake sometimes is we read into the change curve as like, “Ooh, we need to lower the standard.” I actually think, no, we need to provide the support to get through the change curve and then give people the ability to hit the standard. What I’ll tell you is when people hit the standard and they get that great customer experience, they are unbelievably proud of what they just provided. We as the corporation need to make sure we’re setting our teams up for success so they have every right to hit the standard. You mentioned a new chair and new cups. These are sort of pet projects that you’ve had. I don’t know if anybody remembers, but Starbucks used to have this purple chair that was very Tim Burton-esque. And when you came on, you were like, “We’re bringing back the chair.” When you walk into these places that are personal to you, there’s always a seat that you’re like, That’s my seat. And even if somebody’s sitting in it for the moment, you keep an eye on it. And the reality is that purple chair was one of those seats in our stores where it was like, You know what? Once that seat’s available, I’m going to grab it. You would also see young kids—it was amazing to me—but six kids would be using that one chair. And so we’re going to come out with, I think our contemporary version of that signature chair. It probably won’t be in every single Starbucks, but it will be in a lot of them. And then I also think there’s an opportunity to differentiate ourselves with a special mug. So when you choose to stay in our café, you get a ceramic coffee mug that aesthetically says, “Hold me, stay with me.” And ideally people will be wanting them personally. Maybe they’ll even want to buy ’em for their own use at home. I was going to ask: Is that something I could buy, or is it something I’d only drink out of at a Starbucks? Can I buy the chair? So there’s a debate. Look, my preference is, why not? Why not let people, if you love the chair and you want to buy it, we should probably do something with Pottery Barn or Williams Sonoma or whoever, Restoration . . . where they can turn around and resell this chair for us. We’re not going to be in the chair-selling business. There’s a debate though. Some folks are like, “Oh, we should only have the mugs in the store.” And I’m like, “Well look, if you enjoy it in the store, why not let people purchase ’em to enjoy at home?” I think the more you’re exposed to our brand, the better. I feel like a lot of your decision-making, at least in our conversations, tends to come through as, not to oversimplify it, but common sense. I think sometimes we overdo it and we walk past common sense. And I say this to our team all the time. I’m like, “Why are we doing this? Because common sense.” I don’t need a study. I don’t need more analytics. This is obvious. So therefore we’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it with urgency. I think sometimes we like to make simple things sound super complicated, and I’m like, “You know what? I don’t have time for the complication.” We need to be moving at the speed that our customers are moving. And when you see common-sense solutions, you just got to act on it. We have only a few minutes left and now we are at the point of Mark has questions about Starbucks as a Starbucks customer. So, what’s up with matcha? Matcha is going way up, but my understanding is there’s not a lot of matcha in the world. It’s funny you bring this up—we were just talking about this. We’re going to figure out how not to run out of it, that’s for sure. But yeah, matcha is having a moment. And look, the reason is, it’s really good, right? One of my afternoon drinks is a cold matcha latte. And I think also it tastes really good when you put one of our cold foams on it. The Chinese chain Luckin is really growing quickly. They have a very opposite model, like very Uber-based transactional. Is there anything you admire from what they’re doing? I think there’s always something you can learn, and they’ve done a nice job with I would say, some of their flavor work. I think they’ve done an interesting job on how they’ve turned the app into the only way you can interact with that business. It’s a different approach. I don’t think it’s the right approach for us. It’s definitely having an impact in China. But I will tell you our Starbucks business I think is having a nice recovery in China as well by us getting back to making sure that we’ve got the right product innovation and also the right customer experience. The one thing that they’ve probably done a nice job of is just an unbelievable pace of product innovation. And so I think it kind of sets the tone for like, Hey, we cannot be complacent on flavors and drink combinations. Alright, we’re at time. Do you have a secret to share about any future menu items? Well, I will tell you, and this probably isn’t all that secretive, but we are coming out with protein cold foam. Oh, come on. That’s not a secret. The other thing I’ll tell you is we are going to be reimagining all of our baked items. I think there’s a real opportunity for us to be much more artisanal, and I think it will complement our beverages. I do believe our food needs to match the craft of our coffee, and I think there’s a real opportunity for us to elevate and be much more artisanal in what you experience out of our bake case. Then ultimately, even with our food, the reality is you can’t get past people talking about protein. I keep thinking it’s peaked, and I’ve been proven wrong. So you’re going to see us figure out how we can combine more protein with gluten-free options, and I think you’re going to see a nice improvement on the food side of things. So even more protein. Even more protein. View the full article

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Soon after Zohran Mamdani secured the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor, Amanda Litman posted a video selfie on TikTok. “The dinosaurs of the past, the boomers, the hostile managers, the assholes—they are behind us,” she preached to the camera. If viewers felt inspired to “run to take on the status quo,” they should head to her organization’s website and register. Though Mamdani is not affiliated with Litman’s eight-year-old nonprofit, Run for Something, his generational fight aligns with its purpose: to encourage young and underrepresented people to run for political office, including “hyperlocal” positions like city council and school boards. Litman says that Mamdani’s win sparked the organization’s biggest-ever candidate recruitment surge, with 5,000 sign-ups in five days. That follows the previous record: 10,000 sign-ups within two weeks of The President’s (second) election. A total of nearly 250,000 people have reached out to express interest in running for local races. About 10% of them have pursued office in 50 states and D.C. Litman believes that Run for Something has the largest candidate pipeline on either side of the political aisle. If Litman’s nonprofit were a business, it would be booming. But when you depend entirely on donations, and you operate in the fickle realm of politics, income is always precarious. There are ebbs and flows. In 2022, Run for Something raised $17 million; in 2023, after successful midterms, the figure dropped to $8 million; in 2024, it reached $12 million. This year, it is tracking slightly downward again. “Democratic donors are capricious,” Litman says. “Year over year you’re hoping that they haven’t changed their minds about everything they believe.” As Alexandra Acker-Lyons, a Denver-based Democratic donor adviser and longtime Run for Something funder, puts it, “Republicans have a 40-year plan, and if we’re lucky, we have a four-year plan.” And backers often give nonprofits less leeway than they would businesses, even when the backers are wealthy enough to weather economic stressors. “If you were investing in a company, you would give them five years of runway, 40% of their budget, and would say, ‘Let’s talk in two years,’” Acker-Lyons says. “That is just not how it works in nonprofits.” But today—with DEI in a tailspin, the cost of living causing anxiety, and democracy eroding—funding has felt a bit more stable. Litman says the most active donors right now are those disillusioned with the Democratic party and those more interested in building long-term power than merely scoring a cocktail party invitation and “a photo with a future senator to put on your fridge.” Litman began her career as an email writer for Obama’s 2012 campaign; she then headed up Hillary Clinton’s email outreach in 2016. She cofounded Run for Something in 2017, on the day of The President’s first inauguration. In each year of that presidential term, 15,000 prospective local candidates signed up, eager for the organization’s help with everything that newbies need, from collecting signatures to hiring staff. Run for Something has raised funds from major foundations and entities including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, and crypto investor Mike Novogratz, as well as many individuals giving $500 or less. In 2022, it had about 24 people employed, on its way to a planned total staff of 80. But after Democrats exceeded expectations in the 2022 midterms and attention turned to 2024, donations began to fall. In November 2023, there were more than 60 people on payroll, but in January 2024 Litman and her cofounder, Ross Morales Rocketto, had to begin laying off staffers. “Every part of it sucked,” Litman says. “[But] it was the right thing to do, because if we had not, we would not exist in this moment.” Among the 30 employees remaining are a trio of engineers who have built tools that are helping Run for Something handle its current growth. It’s a small group, but “very few organizations in our space have full-fledged tech teams” at all, says chief technology officer Jordan Haines, who joined in 2023 after building an edtech startup. One tech platform they built looks for matches between the roughly 500,000 open elected positions in the country and the 250,000 potential candidates in the pipeline. Run for Something can score viable candidates dynamically based on various factors, including what Haines calls “some gnarly pieces of data” like age, issue leanings, renter status, and geography, which Litman says “can get really messy quickly” because elected-office districts don’t map easily onto zip codes. Another tool—“a CRM where the ‘C’ stands for candidate,” Haines says—is a custom-built platform to manage the 1,000 or so candidates farther along the pipeline who have applied for Run for Something’s endorsement since 2024. Interested candidates typically sign up online, where they gain access to resources including conference calls, webinars, and an app for connecting with past candidates and mentors. But once candidates file to be on a ballot, they may apply for Run for Something’s nod, and they have about a 50% chance of securing it. Criteria include running as a Democrat or an independent for the first, second, or third time; being born after 1984; and other subjective criteria, such as running a grassroots campaign with “heart and hustle” and being what it calls a “hell yeah!” candidate. One reason that Run for Something’s pipeline is growing so fast is a new partnership with Bernie Sanders. As part of his ongoing “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Vermont senator is recruiting progressive candidates, particularly from working-class backgrounds, who are then filtered into one of three candidate-supporting organizations. “He’s said the whole time that the goal isn’t to just pop into a state and do a rally,” says Jeremy Slevin, Sanders’s senior adviser. So far, more than 7,000 prospective candidates have signed up with Sanders, with more than 3,000 onboarded with Run for Something. The Sanders allyship may be surprising, given Litman’s association with the historically more moderate Clinton; the acrimony between the former rivals, particularly from Clinton’s side, is hardly a secret. Centrist Democrats argue that deferring to the party’s left resulted in The President’s victories and that the Mamdani playbook is not widely translatable. But progressives invert that narrative and are bent on challenging a lackadaisical establishment. “What I’m not seeing is a willingness to do deep reflection,” Acker-Lyons says of current Democratic leadership. “We lost to a monster twice, and we need to take a really hard look in the mirror as to why.” Nearly half of Sanders’s registrants are running as independents. “I am very much supportive of [that] in places where the Democratic brand is so dismal that they can’t win.” Run for Something’s win rate stands somewhere around 54%, though Litman stresses that she doesn’t think victory is the best success metric. The organization wants to be competing in contested races in purple and even red districts. “If we had a 70% or 80% win rate, those are folks that probably didn’t need that much help to begin with,” she says. For instance, former pastor Justin Douglas won his race for commissioner of Dauphin County, which includes Hershey, Pennsylvania, by 184 votes in 2023, flipping control of the commission for the first time in more than a century. Many successful Run for Something candidates are now seeking even higher office, such as Anna Eskamani, who flipped a Florida House seat in 2018 and is now running for mayor of Orlando. Frankness from Litman is part of her brand. She’s outspoken on social media, where her praise for Mamdani was accompanied by scorn for Andrew Cuomo. She has proudly expressed support for divisive figures like David Hogg, who departed as DNC co-vice chair after planning to support primary challenges by younger leaders against older Democrats. She’s transparent in her Substack newsletter about being disappointed that her recent book, When We’re in Charge, was absent from the major bestsellers lists. (“Even though I said I didn’t care, obviously I cared. Sigh.”) When asked if it’s smart for the head of an organization that represents a wide range of candidates to be so vocal about her own opinions, she says, “Ultimately, I speak for the organization. Also, I don’t know any other way to be.” She thinks it’s important for her to inspire others to be their own authentic selves. Litman knows that her work will only get harder as expectations for Run for Something rise, particularly leading up to the midterms and 2028 presidential election. There’s a “perpetual tension,” she says. Even if nonprofits have substantial money, there’s always more they could be doing. But right now, she’s optimistic. “I know what it feels like when things are going bad,” Litman says. “I do not feel that way this year.” View the full article

When Allison Whalen returned from parental leave years ago, she found her corner of the business in shambles. Her direct reports were frustrated, her projects had stalled, and she felt the weight of disruption on both sides. Curious whether her experience was unique, she asked around. The response was striking: The number-one reason employees left their companies after parental leave wasn’t lack of policy—it was career derailment caused by how leave was managed. That “aha” moment led her to found Parentaly, a company that helps thousands of employees and managers navigate parental leave through pre-leave planning, return-to-work support, and manager training. With clients ranging from Zoom to PwC to Hershey, Whalen has built a front-row seat to how leading companies are rethinking leave. I sat down with Whalen, who also happens to be a Wharton MBA and former enterprise sales leader at Managed by Q (acquired by WeWork), to talk about what’s changing in 2025—from why parental leave is now viewed as a business event to how it’s becoming a surprising career accelerator. Have you noticed any emerging trends in how leading companies are approaching parental leave in 2025? I think a lot of companies raced to expand their paid leave policies a couple of years ago, which was a really positive step. But now they’re facing the challenges of implementation. Many expanded without putting enough thought into how to actually manage these longer leaves effectively. More than ever, I’m hearing HR and leadership teams say they’re fielding concerns from managers about how to support the business when critical employees are out for extended periods. The shift I’m seeing is that companies are starting to recognize parental leave not just as a personal event but as a business event. Historically, people were hesitant to talk about the challenges openly, because they didn’t want employees to feel unsupported. But I’m seeing organizations become more comfortable proactively planning for absences in a way that actually makes employees going on leave feel more supported. In short, companies are realizing they need to invest not only in the policies themselves but in the execution—so that working parents are truly supported, and so those longer paid leave policies remain sustainable. How do you see parental leave fitting into broader conversations about retention and talent development? One of the big shifts I’m hearing from HR leaders is around how parental leave can actually be a career accelerator. Instead of seeing it as a pause, companies are starting to think long term: When someone returns, could they step into a role that’s more senior, a better fit, more aligned with their career trajectory? Leave can be a forcing function to help an employee shed responsibilities that feel too junior or unproductive, which is something I get really excited about, because it aligns so closely with what we believe in. The other shift is around talent development for the coverage team. Companies are asking: How can we use this as a chance to give a junior employee a stretch assignment, or to give someone from another part of the organization exposure to a new area of the business? And if that person thrives, maybe they stay in that role or expand into new opportunities. What I’m seeing overall is more positive conversation about coverage and replacement—employees saying, “I’d love to be replaced if it means I get elevated when I return,” as long as that’s what they want. It’s hard to pull off in practice, but when it’s done with the right planning and support, it can be a win for everyone. In your experience, what cultural signals really distinguish companies that truly care about supporting working parents from those that are just checking the box? In my view, the biggest indicator of whether a company truly supports parental leave is whether fathers are taking it. When men have access to extended paid leave and actually use it, it’s such an equalizer—it signals broad-based support and reframes leave as a caregiver experience, not a men-versus-women issue. Another indicator is how openly company leaders talk about parental leave and frame it as a positive, supported moment. And honestly, you can also hear it in how employees talk about their experiences. Two companies might have identical policies, but at one, employees will say they felt they could disconnect, that they were treated respectfully when they returned, that they came back to a strong role. That’s what people post about on LinkedIn—not the policy itself, but the lived experience. So for me, the two biggest signals are whether fathers actually take their leave, and how leaders and employees are talking about the leave experience. Building on that—if someone’s job searching and they’re pregnant or planning to be, are there any markers they can look for, from the outside, to get a sense of the real story? First of all, table stakes is whether the company publishes its paid leave policy and benefits for all caregivers. If they don’t, that may be a red flag. As a job seeker, I’d want to see specifics: How many weeks do they offer? Do fathers get paid leave? Do hourly as well as salaried employees have access? Those details say a lot about the culture and how broadly they think about support. You can also look at what else they publish—bereavement leave, NICU leave, policies that go beyond parental leave but show how they support employees through different life milestones. I often hear people say they ask about parental leave policies in interviews even if they’re done having kids, because it’s a signal. If a company offers leave for men, extended leave for birthing parents, and thoughtful policies overall, that usually reflects how they’ll treat employees during other major personal moments as well. What organizational blind spots do you see most often when companies roll out parental leave programs? I think the biggest blind spot is when companies roll out a policy without the support to actually make it work. A big part of that is the managers’ experience. Managers are put in a tough spot—they want to support their employees, but they’re also thinking, How am I supposed to do that and still deliver on my goals? And of course, no one comes to them and says, “We’ll cut your goals in half because someone on your team is going on leave.” That’s one of the biggest missteps I see—assuming managers will just figure it out. Instead, they often end up scared, unsure what they legally can and can’t say, and fall back on their own personal experiences, whether or not they’re parents themselves. That leads to inconsistency, and it puts a lot of pressure on managers who, in most cases, genuinely want to do the right thing but just don’t know how. View the full article

Figma burst into the public eye in 2022 after Adobe was blocked from buying the design startup for $20 billion. This chapter set the stage for an even bigger milestone at Figma: a splashy IPO this summer at nearly double that valuation. Cofounder and CEO Dylan Field shares what distinguishes Figma from competitors, and why design is increasingly at the center of every industry in today’s software-driven economy. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I should congratulate you because you had a blockbuster IPO this summer. The stock settled a bit, but you still got nearly a $30 billion valuation, which is double what Adobe tried to buy you for a couple of years ago. Going public with so much fanfare and attention and success, has that been fun? How much do you look at it as a distraction in some ways for you and your team versus, “Let’s ride this wave as long as it’ll go, this is great”? I’ve been really proud of the team. I think nothing’s really changed in terms of our focus. I think the day itself was not just a celebration of Figma, but a celebration of design and for design to go public in that way. I felt very honored to be able to be part of that day. Hanging from the walls at the New York Stock Exchange we had the words, “Design is everyone’s business.” There were some champagne toasts, some people who were singing karaoke that night. What’s your go-to karaoke song? After two weeks of roadshow, my voice was gone, so I was just trying to make conversation, not sing that night. But there were some epic performances for sure. I thought about you a lot and the whiplash you had to go through with the Adobe merger getting blocked. I’m curious how the company’s different because of that experience. Are you different? Are your products different? There were strategic reasons you wanted to become part of Adobe initially. It’s interesting. The company that’s acquiring in this period between sign and close, they can’t direct activities, and that’s something I think people don’t really know. And so we had our road map going into the deal, and that was our road map during the deal. It didn’t change, and our foot I think, was on the gas throughout. And the more that we started to have to ask ourselves with just regulatory being what it was, whether or not that was a correct assessment, not a correct assessment, we’ll leave it to history to tell. But I think that throughout as we saw that regulatory risk was real, that gave us even more impetus to say, “Foot on the gas even more.” I was like, “Okay, if we’re part of Adobe, great, we’re going in strong. And if we’re not, we should definitely be keeping our foot on the gas.” It was hard. As you’re talking with regulators all over the world, that’s almost a full-time job in itself. And to do that while also keeping the company going at full speed and then some, the team was incredible through that period. In some ways was that part of the appeal for Adobe of having Figma? Like, you guys are future tools that they didn’t have in the future way of operating. Where they want to go is where you are, and to a certain extent, maybe where they are is some of the places you want to go. We still don’t really see Adobe as competitive. I think it’s the easy framing, maybe. A lot of the Adobe suite, I’m not rushing to go build any of that. We have so much to go cover this journey from my data product, and I think that the focus for us right now is on a lot of the AI stuff . . . opportunities to make it so that we can lower the floor, bring more people into the design process, but also raise the ceiling, make it [possible for] designers [to] do more. It’s easy to say those words. It’s a lot to execute on to actually make that really good and up to the standards of designers. Because ultimately all of us humans, we expect more from AI than we expect from a human. If you say, “Here’s a small prompt to change my spacing in a file,” Figma better get it right, otherwise people dismiss it out of hand. I’m not saying that we have to do the work of a world-class designer, because we won’t. There’s a need for designers to lead the charge, and AI will only get you so far. But the drudgery, how do we remove that from the design process? How do we get more access to more people, bring more people into the world of creating prototypes and software? Those are our big things to bite off. I’ve noticed that the word design and the definition of what a designer is are often misunderstood by people in the business community, often by investors in the Wall Street community. People think, Oh, designer, they’re deciding what color the curtains are going to be or something like that. And I’ve had these conversations before with Mark Parker when he was the CEO of Nike who was a designer, Brian Chesky at Airbnb. Designer CEOs are still a small club. What do people not understand about design? What makes a designer CEO different? There are a million definitions of design, but I always like to think of it as a kind of core problem-solving, and I think that people go on this design journey and maybe the first step is like, does that even matter? I made something cool. Why do I need a designer? And then I think at some point people go, “Well, I should at least make it pretty. I’ll hire a designer. How do I make it pop? How do I make it cool, sexy?” And then I think from there people go, “Wait a second, maybe that’s not enough because I’m putting this in front of people—my product, my software, my app—and they don’t know how to use it. They’re getting stuck.” And I think then from there they kind of think about, Okay, well, what’s the overall system? How do I think through how this entire thing should work? What’s the brand? What’s my point of view as a business? What are the business constraints? What’s the culture right now? How does that affect everything? It’s like you can go out in these outer rings and just keep going. And I think that designers have for a long time had a mentality of almost like this imposter syndrome. If you think about the way that design has evolved as a career, there were almost no designers in the 1990s, early 2000s, very few in number. They were oftentimes misunderstood, and yet they did incredible work despite it. Then we got into the Apple era of “design is how it works,” and Steve Jobs really championing design. You started to see this rapid growth in the number of designers being hired. When we started Figma, we didn’t know if Figma design was a big enough market because the Bureau of Labor said that there were 250,000 designers or something like that in the United States. And the reality was that there’s this total exponential trend of how many designers were being hired and how design-to-engineer ratios were changing. Through that growth, there were new challenges that were introduced. How do I keep everything consistent when all these different design voices have all sorts of creative ideas they want to explore? And also, how do I be efficient on a team with many designers around the table? How do I bring my voice as a designer to the highest levels? How do I have a seat at the table? And that was the meme then. Well, now design has a seat at the table in the era of today. I think people recognize the importance of design. They might not always understand it, but everyone’s trying to understand it. So now I think it’s like how do we lead? How does design bring people along and how do more designers step into roles where they can guide their organizations? Because the design process of thinking through different ways things can work, diverging, and then being able to converge on a solution and deliver it to customers and iterate, that is the business process that you go through for everything, and that’s what everyone needs to be thinking through as they adapt in this new age of software that we’re in. View the full article