Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) was never really meant to serve Pittsburgh. When the modern airport opened in 1992, it was built as a hub for U.S. Airways, primarily serving as a connection point for passengers heading elsewhere. Tens of millions of passengers used PIT annually, though only a small number of them were actually flying into or out of Greater Pittsburgh. Most stayed in the terminal, leaving one gate only to enter another, which was fineuntil it wasn’t.
“In 2004, the hub went away. Passengers plummeted. All those connecting passengers left,” says Christina Cassotis, who came on as CEO of the Allegheny County Airport Authority in 2015. After years of waiting for the hub, or any hub, to return, the airport authority decided it was time to accept that what PIT had become is an airport meant for people flying into or out of Pittsburgh. “We needed the facility to match the business plan,” Cassotis says.
[Photo: Ema Peter]
This month, more than 20 years after the U.S. Airways hub left town, Pittsburgh is opening a new $12.7 billion airport terminal building that embraces its status as an origin-and-destination airport, and one that puts its local passengers first.
Designed by Gensler and HDR in association with Luis Vidal + Architects, the new PIT landside terminal where passengers arrive and check in to their flights is a grand and welcoming entry hall with light flooding through from all sides. It’s essentially a canopy of a building, with a soaring and undulating roof overhead. Slits in its wavy top bring light in and offer views to the skies outside while subtly directing travelers through the security checkpoint and to their gates.
[Photo: Ema Peter]
Rooted to the region
Pittsburgh’s airport design concept came from Luis Vidal + Architects, known for its work on airports including London’s Heathrow Airport Terminal 2 and Boston’s Logan Airport Terminal E. “It was very obvious the hub was never coming back and this was going to be a destination and origin or an origin and destination. That’s the first clue for this design,” Vidal says. “It’s going to be for the place. It’s going to be rooted to the region, to the city, to its people.”
[Photo: Ema Peter]
Vidal says the concept was intended to reflect what he calls Pittsburgh’s virtues: nature, technology, and community. This is most obvious in the roof, with a curvaceous form that was inspired by the region’s rolling and forested hills. The roof’s hilly forms roll alongside each other, creating space for light to pour down into the building. Vidal says the effect is akin to taking a walk in a forest. “You see pockets of light coming down through the trees and the trunks,” he says.
[Photo: courtesy Allegheny County Airport Authority]
In this case, the trunks are massive branching steel supports that hold up the roof, powder coated in bronze and poking through the pale wood ceiling. It’s not as fully organic as the recently completed mass timber terminal at Portland International Airport, but the effect is a much calmer setting than conventional terminals that are strong-armed with hard gray concrete and steel.
The connection to nature in Pittsburgh’s airport design goes even deeper. Around the terminal building’s sides and in the negative space before it connects with the airport’s X-shaped concourse, large landscaped open spaces are available for travelers and airport staff alike. Two are positioned on the landside, and accessible to the public.
[Photo: courtesy Allegheny County Airport Authority]
Two others are on the airside, past security, and offer a rare space for airport travelers to access fresh air in an almost park-like setting. In contrast to other airports, where outdoor space is small, if it is available at all, PIT’s outdoor terraces make up more than two acres. It’s an amenity that had no small cost, and one that almost got abandoned in the evolution of the design from a concept in 2018 to a completed project in 2025.
“We had actually value-engineered that out,” Cassotis admits. “We were like, we can’t do this.” But the pandemic changed minds at the airport, and there was a renewed recognition that access to the outdoors and fresh air would be a benefit to all airport users. “It really became clear to us that we needed to do this and we needed it to be available to everybody,” Cassotis says. The airport declined to disclose how much the terraces cost.
The terraces are also designed to work around Pittsburgh’s sometimes volatile weather. Carolyn Sponza, a studio director in Gensler’s Pittsburgh office, says the architects worked to ensure that at least one of the terraces would be accessible year-round, no matter the weather. “Part of that design process was working with the maintenance staff to locate every single piece of equipment they needed to make sure that the walkways were clear, and laying it out in a maintenance room with the hose bed next door,” she says.
[Photo: Ema Peter]
It’s one of the side benefits of working on an airport like Pittsburgh’s as it transforms from a major hub to a more modest origin-and-destination airport. “A lot of the places that we work in the United States, we’re trying to fix the airports or bring them into this century, but they’re space constrained,” Sponza says. “One of the unique things that this airport had was the ability to dream big and set the vision, and not just try to incrementally fix what was there before.”
As Pittsburgh’s airport design officially opens to the public, the redesign is about right-sizing a facility for its actual needs, but also about resetting the expectations of the locals who’ll be its primary users. Rather than brooding as many have for many years over the U.S. Airways hub leaving the airport, the new terminal is a chance to start again.
[Photo: Ema Peter]
AI has a writing style, or, at least, an alleged style. Tools like ChatGPT and Claude seem to communicate with a tendency toward formalism. The chatbots are earnest, sometimes too evenhanded or overly complimentary. Theres a noticeable lack of personal flair, and no deeply held opinions. According to Grammarly, AI language tends to evoke “repetitive phrasing and robotic tone. Now, there are even AI buzzwords and phrases like pivotal and delve into and underscore.
Its the verbiage of instruction booklets for middle schoolers writing their first essays. In the age of AI, these helpful crutch words are now verbata non grata. Some people are now trying to avoid using these terms, because they sound like a lowly bot God forbid.
But the problem is bigger than simply sounding like an AI. Human speech is a time-tested neologism supply chain; people have a natural inventiveness when talking and writing. But as we increasingly communicate with chatbots and rely on AI agents to dissect concepts, summarize research reports, and synthesize internet searches, we’re filtering a wide array of content through the stilted and bounded syntax of LLMs.
Its even changing how we communicate. Researchers have suggested some AI-based writing assistance models can whittle away the overall diversity of human writing, shrinking the size of our collective vocabulary.
AI may literally be putting words into our mouths, as repeated exposure leads people to internalize and reuse buzzwords they might not have chosen naturally, Tom Juzek, a professor at Florida State University, told Fast Company earlier this year. With colleagues, he recently identified a vocabulary list of AI-speak, including words like intricate, strategically, and garner. He also found that these words are now more likely to show up in unscripted podcasts, a strong sign of whats called lexical seepage.
Can we plug the leak? AI companies are aware that off-the-self AI isnt always appealing. And theyre increasingly promising customization and tailoring that can bend these bots to our will and preference. You can tell ChatGPT the traits you want it to have, how you want it to talk to you, and any rules you want it to follow, OpenAI explained earlier this year upon the release of a new feature allowing users to choose preferred traits and personality features for their bots. If youre a scientist using ChatGPT to do research, youll want it to engage with you like a lab assistant. If youre caring for an elderly family member and need tips or companionship ideas, you might want ChatGPT to adopt a supportive tone.
AI what I am
In a perhaps-futile attempt to protect myself from AI speak, I told my ChatGPT agent to be more expansive with its vocabulary. Think widely-read, I told it. Also, try to use new words all the time! I want you to be varying up your vocabulary constantly. I banned the chatbot from ever using the phrases outlined by Juzeks research.
Thus far, ChatGPT seems to have improved. I think, at least. Its avoiding the banned words, and seems to be making a good-faith effort to communicate less formulaically. Its reaching for verbs that reflect better understanding of what its actually talking about.
But AI diction is a wormhole. The problem, Juzek explains, is that the nature of AI writing is about more than just our words, and extends to sentence structure and functional words like that, may, can, and should. “Asking your assistant to avoid buzzwords will probably make your writing look less AI-like to humans and reduce the chance that someone fires up a detector, he tells me. What it means for the bigger question of whether AI is homogenizing or flattening language, there — I think the jury is still out.
The great homogening
Some believe that a different approach could make AI a less rote communicator. Nathan Lambert writes in the newsletter Interconnects that the current LLMs arent trained to be good writers. These AIs are trying to be something for everyone, not platforms with voice and positionality, and are inclined to be succinct and neutral. The next step would be solving the problem of how models arent trained with a narrow enough experience. Specific points of view nurture voice, he writes. The target should be a model that can output tokens in any area or request that is clear, compelling, and entertaining.
Well need to wait for that technology, though. In the meantime, we cannot AI our way out of this AI conundrum. These companies are advertising tools to make AI extensions of ourselves, and outsource chunks of our individuality into a machine designed by finding correlations and inputting meaning from the webs surfeit.
The fear is that as we increasingly communicate with AI, well flatten human culture and speech in the process. Of course, this homogenization isnt new. Literature, radio, and television, and their linguistic evolutions, all had transnational reach. Social media created global slang. But AI is different. While it is a new technology, its not a new platform for our thoughts — its a new way of synthesizing them. This makes sense: Large language models are built by consolidating a vast trove of information into reasoning models that communicate like a digital common man. Meanwhile, we’re just here trying to be ourselves.
On November 14, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, screwdriver in hand, helped Pentagon facilities personnel install two new signs that read “Department of War.” After affixing the sign to the outside of the building, he turned toward onlookers and said, “Here we go.”
Hegseth’s handyman moment was more than a symbolic gesture: It was the first act of what he and the Trump administration hope will eventually be a wholesale rebrand of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. This rebrandwhich would require updating 700,000 buildings and facilities worldwide (not to mention all of the other places the DOD would become the DOW)could reportedly cost as much as $2 billion.
Switching signage, letterhead, placards, and more
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in September giving the DOD a secondary “War” name, but to make it official will require an act of Congress, and it won’t come cheap, according to figures shared by four senior congressional staffers and two others briefed on the cost to NBC News.
The estimated price tag would cover switching signage and letterhead, which together could cost about $1 billion alone, along with placards, badges, software, and code.
Rebrands can be tricky for any brand, but they’re especially hard when dealing with public agencies and taxpayer dollars. The public and lawmakers have taken issue with Trump’s plan to change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, a name the U.S. used before its military agencies were consolidated following World War II.
This isn’t just adding a few letters to a building, like Trump has done at the White House. The DOD, the executive-level federal agency that oversees the branches of the U.S. Armed Forces, has more than 3 million personnel and both inward-facing and outward-facing brand assets at facilities in the U.S. and 80 countries around the world. For comparison, Walmart counts 2.1 million associates and stores in 19 countries.
Opposition to the rebrand
Hegseth said on November 14 that the DOD sign at the Pentagon was replaced “because we want everybody who comes through this door to know that we are deadly serious about the name change of this organization,” according to a press release. But YouGov polling in September found a 58% majority of U.S. adults oppose renaming the DOD, and there’s bipartisan opposition to making the secondary name formal.
In a letter to the Congressional Budget Office in October, Senate Democrats on the Budget Committee cited both brand and budget concerns, writing that the new name “risks confusion, redundancy, and unnecessary cost expenditure.”
“Given the Trump administrations repeated emphasis on fiscal restraintparticularly its aggressive use of illegal impoundments and now, unconstitutional pocket rescissionsthis symbolic renaming is both wasteful and hypocritical,” Democrats wrote. “It appears to prioritize political theater over responsible governance, while diverting resources from core national security functions.”
Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, told CNN that he believes calling the DOD the Department of War “sends a bad signal to the world.”
“In a world with nuclear weapons, I think glorifying war . . . is not something I’m in favor of,” Paul said. Republicans have introduced legislation in the House and Senate to rename the DOD, and Paul said he would “lead opposition” to it if it came before the Senate.
Hidden costs
Trump has sought to cast himself as a peacemaker this year, which a war-themed rebrand is at odds with. It’s also at odds with his campaign promises.
Trump took office pledging to lower costs and rein in government spending, but coming up on a year back in office, persistent inflation and conspicuous government spending like his White House remodel project have taken a political toll. Trump’s net approval rating is sagging, and a pricey rebrand project viewed by many as vanity might not help.
Rebranding the DOD could cost taxpayers as much as $2 billion. Its political costs for Trump could be even higher.
Today marks a milestone: my 250th Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights series post. Back on October 5, 2020, when I published the first piece in this strategy series, “The Role of Management Systems in Strategy,” I was simply responding to a client’s question and trying to provide practical advice on the often-ignored fifth box of the Strategy Choice Cascade. I had no idea that first post would be the launch of a series that reaches 263,000 people (at last count) on a weekly basis. It feels fitting for this 250th post to return to the original topic in Revisiting Management Systems: The Nervous System of Strategy. And as always, you can find all the previous Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights here.
Im delighted to be joined in coauthoring this post by Steve Goldbach and Geoff Tuff. Both are former colleagues I mentored at Monitor Group and are now senior partners at Deloitte. They are the coauthors of three books, and their latest, Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift, is dedicated entirely to the power of enabling management systems (EMS) as a leadership tool. This represents the combined view of the three of us.
That original piece noted that many treat EMS as a lesser choicea mere implementation detail tacked on at the end. It argued the opposite: that your strategy is not truly complete until you have specified the distinctive management systems (processes, structures, rules, and protocols) that will build, maintain, and reinforce the must-have capabilities that make your where to play/how to win (WTP/HTW) choice a reality. The emphasis in that first piece was distinctiveness, noting that generic management systems that simply replicate so-called best practices are a route to mediocrity.
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Hone offers a critical and complementary observation. While it is vital to have distinctive management systems to enable a distinctive strategy, all management systemswhether they are distinctive or notmotivate human behavior. Marshaling the right kind of human motivation is the critical underpinning of any successful strategy. Management systems frame what good looks like from a behavioral perspective in the organization. We believe nearly everyone shows up to work wanting to be successful; your systems should tell them how.
In this way, if the WTP/HTW choice is the heart of strategy, then MHC are the muscles and EMS its nervous systemthe network of signals, incentives, and feedback loops that translate strategic intent into coherent, day-to-day action.
In biology, the nervous system is the bodys command center, regulating essential functions, processing inputs, and sending signals to muscles, allowing the body to react and control its functions. This is precisely what management systems do for an organization. They are the intricate web of formal rules and cultural norms that shape how people work together inside organizations. Formal systems might include how performance is evaluated, how financial targets are set, or promotion and hiring criteria. Cultural norms are the subtle cues and “unwritten rules” that dictate behavior, such as decision rightswho gets to make what choice, or even who is asked for an opinion. When all the management systems inside an organization are combined, they can either powerfully reinforce behavior consistent with what is necessary to support the strategy choices, or, all too often, hinder it entirely.
The Barnacle Problem: Drift Erodes Distinctiveness
A very common problem, particularly in large organizations, is that management systems tend to accumulate over time like barnacles on the hull of a ship. Barnacles create drag and can cause a ship to gradually drift off course. Layers of competing management systems have the same effect on organizations. The accumulation of management systems can happen for at least two core reasons:
Many designers, narrow designs. Management systems are rarely designed as a setthey usually crop up to address a specific problem. A well-intentioned functional leader in finance creates a new budgeting process. HR adds a new performance metric. IT implements a new security protocol. Each system feels like a “good idea” in isolation, but they accumulate and often unintentionally conflict, sending mixed signals throughout the organization.
Layering over, not uninstalling. Even when a company launches a “new strategy,” leaders rarely go back and remove or reshape the old systems. They just layer new ones on top while the old systems are still busiy motivating the old behaviors.
This accumulation erodes distinctiveness. Your carefully chosen, distinctive EMS are drowned out by the cacophony of the other systems, all pulling people in various directions. Drift is often imperceptible in the moment, and each subsequent deviation is similarly hard to see from the new direction of travel. It is only when a company is way off course that alarm bells start to soundand by that time, subtle course correction is ineffective.
A classic example of legacy management systems holding a company back happened at Sears decades ago. In the 1990s and early 2000s, leadership correctly identified e-commerce as a strategic imperative. They even had a massive advantage: a world-class catalog and fulfillment business. But the companys formal management systems were barnacles. Its P&L structure and incentive plans were built entirely around the profitability of individual brick-and-mortar stores.
When Sears.com was set up as a separate, competing P&L (the conventional wisdom at that time), store managers were inadvertently punished for behaviors that supported the new strategy. For example, if a customer wanted to return an online purchase to a local store (which was considerably easier at that time relative to today), the return would show up on the stores P&L, reducing its profitability. This motivated store managers to resist taking online returns, something that might have presumably given Sears a leg up in the new online world.
Drift tends to end badly. Organizations wake up and discover they are miles away from where they need to be to achieve their goals. They have no choice but to engage in so-called transformationmassive change at a rapid pace. These transformations are costly in terms of dollars, time, and human energy, and have very high failure rates. We are not anti-transformation per se; we just believe that with a bit more attention to day-to-day steering of the ship, much of that waste could be avoided.
The Antidote to Drift: Honing
Hone uses the metaphor of a chefs knife. Good chefs don’t wait for their knives to become uselessly dull before fixing them. A dull knife is dangerous, so chefs hone it every single day before use. Honing is not sharpening. Sharpening grinds away metal to create a new edgea transformative, costly act. Honing is a gentle, daily maintenance that realigns the existing edge, keeping it fit for purpose. Honing, as one chef described, is a meditation and a maintenance both keeping the knife serviceable and an act that reminds the chef of whats needed in the forthcoming service.
This is the antidote to drift. The external landscape any organization faces is constantly in motion: Customer preferences shift, competitors take new actions, technology advances, and regulation varies constantly. Leaders must respond by honing their organization with small changes to their EMS to steer behaviors consistent with the external shifts. Ideally this can happen by making small changes to existing management systems. But sometimes it might require creating a new distinctive system or uninstalling management systems that are no longer needed.
The Four Seasons example from the first PTW/PI post impeccably illustrates honing. The “glitch reporting system”where any employee, at any level, is empowered and rewarded for identifying and reporting a service “glitch”is an EMS. But it’s not a static one. By its very design, it is a honing system, a feedback loop designed to identify and correct for small drifts (a slow room service order, a dirty light fixture, a slippery floor) in real time, long before they accumulate into a “bad service” barnacle.
The Role: The CEO as Chief System Designer
This leads to a final, critical point. If EMS are the nervous system of strategy, who is the brain?
We have consistently argued that an organizations leadership must own its strategy, not outsource it. On this front, we believe that CEOs must own the overall design of their collection of EMS. The CEO must be the chief system designer because the CEO is the only person in the organization with both the authority and visibility to ensure coherence and congruence across all the organizational systems. While CEOs can (and should) delegate the detailed design of a sales incentive plan or a supply chain metric, they must own the theory of how all those systems interact to collectively motivate the desired behavior.
Bel Groupe (maker of brands such as BabyBel, GoGo squeeZ, and the Laughing Cow) is a terrific example of its CEO, Cécile Béliot-Zind, acting as the chief systems designer. Bels ownership and management team believe they can create competitive advantage by promoting a more sustainable food system. Béliot-Zind is fond of saying that sustainability without profitability has no impact and profitability without sustainability has no future.
Bel helps support farmers with whom it works to implement in necessary regenerative practices while enabling a better living. As a result, the company has access to a more resilient, long-term supply chain. To reinforce this commitment, Bel became a mission-led company by law (société mission) in France, formalizing this commitment in its company by-laws: a very strong management system creating consistency and a long-term commitment to this strategy.
Béliot-Zind also knew there were other systems that needed to change to reduce the typical profit versus purpose friction that occurs in many organizations. Her solution was to redesign her finance department to fuse responsibility for both profit and societal impact into a single function. She created a chief impact officer role responsible simultaneously for profit and for societal impact, ensuring both are managed with the same rigor as a traditional P&L.
That CEOs must be chief system designers doesn’t mean non-CEOs are powerless. On the contrary, all leaders can and should act as a chief system designer for their own team, honing the management systems within their control. And, just as important, they have a responsibility to identify and elevate the inconsistencies they see, making the case for why a particular system is causing drift.
Practitioner Insights
Here are four things you can do to put this into practice:
Audit your management systems. At the start of every strategy process, we suggest uncovering your strategy-in-use, including identifying the key management systems that drive behavior today (whether they are distinctive or not). An easy way to find these is to ask why people behave the way they do inside the organization. Then ask: Do these systems, in their current form, support or conflict with our new WTP/HTW?
Connect honing to your What Would Have to Be True (WWHTBT). Use the WWHTBT tool to assess your management systems. We are all fond of saying that strategy doesn’t come with an expiration date. It is good until one of its WWHTBTs is no longer true. This is your signal to hone. When a WWHTBT fails, or is being strained, identify the new behavior you need and then determine which management system must be adjusted (or created, or uninstalled) to motivate it.
Stop Blaming Culture. Culture isnt some immutable bogeyman. As has been pointed out in this series, you can hone it to support your strategy through changes to leadership behavior and careful modification of management systems. Find the specific management systems that are rewarding the behavior that creates cultural defects and change them. Culture is, in the end, a strategy choice.
Be aware of your “tells.” Leaders at all levels: Recognize that you are a powerful informal management system. Your attention, your questions, and your emotional reactions in meetings send the clearest signals of all about “what good looks like.” Make sure your personal cues are in alignment with your stated goals.
A full 249 PTW/PI later, the core message remains consistent. EMS is a critical element of strategyits nervous system. Leverage it and hone it, and you will be generously rewarded.
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Soooo, do you Labubu? The furry creature went viral this year thanks to Dua Lipa, Blackpink’s Lisa, and Kim Kardashian all buying into the adorably bizarre, plushy monsters. The results were millions in sales, long lines, and frantic scrambles as people tried to get their hands on this latest trendy phenom.
Labubus Chinese parent company, Pop Mart, reported global revenue for Q3 (July through September) jumped by about 250% compared to a year earlier, and sales in America were up by more than 1,200%. But it goes beyond Pop Mart, as brands from South Korea, Japan, and other Asian countries are finding more inroads into American culture. Just as American cultural influence has spread around the world via Levis, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Apple, and more, now Asian brands are making it two-way traffic.
Mixue, a Chinese ice cream and tea chain that recently overtook McDonalds as the largest fast-food chain in the world, opened its first U.S. store in New York City in September. Luckin, a Chinese coffee chain, is coming for Starbucks after opening a shop in NYC, too. Chinese automaker BYD surpassed Tesla in EV sales globally last year and is eyeing American expansion. Korean skincare brand CosRX drives 90% of its revenue from international sales, with major traction among Gen Z Americans. Taiwanese restaurant chain Din Tai Fungwith 21 U.S. locationsnow has the highest average per-location revenue of any American restaurant chain$27.4 million per store.
[Photo: Freer/Adobe Stock]
A new report from global ad agency network TBWA looks at some of the qualities that drove these companies’ overseas success. The report takes a deep dive into how exports like K-pop, matcha, anime, and Labubus have rebranded Asia for a new generation of consumersand explores what U.S. brands can learn from it.
With the rise of K-beauty, J-beauty, and now in a world of Miniso and Pop Mart, we’re seeing brands from Asia really building emotional connection with consumers, says Jen Costello, TBWAs global chief strategy officer. Its not cheap, fast, low-cost, plastic crap, but it’s actually being supported by increasingly breakthrough products that have a real role in culture.
[Photo: BYD]
Found in translation
The report outlines four underlying cultural valuesdeep mastery, unapologetic emotion, thoughtful friction, and social etiquettethat the new wave of Asian brands are particularly strong in. These obviously arent exclusive to Asian brands, just common threads among them.
Deep Mastery
Deep mastery revolves around the idea that as culture is increasingly saturated by AI-generated content and digital art, consumers are craving skill-based learning, time-honored craft, and enduring expertise. One brand example is Toku Saké and its focus solely on doing “one thing exceptionally well,” which is creating slow-brewed, small-batch sake. The idea is that specialization, rather than expansion, can be the new growth strategy for brands.
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Unapologetic Emotion
Unapologetic emotion signifies a cultural pivot away from irony, sarcasm, and emotional detachment, where sincerity was often dismissed as “cringe.” The report says audiences are growing bored of performative nihilism, and find freedom in honest emotional expression. Here, Pop Mart’s Labubus are the brand example, rooted in the Japanese culture of kawaii (cuteness).
Thoughtful Friction
Thoughtful friction challenges the idea that speed and seamlessness equal freedom. Instead, the report contends, the promise of effortless everything leads to digital addiction, burnout, and waste. The report uses South Korea’s pay-as-you-throw food-waste system that requires residents to purchase special, volume-based bags, creating a daily constraint that incentivizes people to think twice before discarding waste and to buy only what they need.
Costello says the concept of thoughtful friction surprised her the most. It’s unusual for brands to reject effortless experience in favor of creating intentional friction. It’s counterintuitive to the way that a lot of brands think, she says. Especially for Western brands, it’s always about making it seamless. It is always about reducing friction. It is always about making it easy. But there is value in making people think for just a moment and having that be rewarding.
[Photo: 8th/Adobe Stock]
Social Etiquette
The report defines social etiquette as an outlook that counters the hyper-individualism encouraged by the main-character energy cultural narrative, which has led to widespread incivility. It functions as “soft infrastructure” to preserve social harmony. The report says marketers should recognize that after years of “casual everything,” clear codes of conduct feel “refreshingly helpful.” One example is how Singapore Airlines has built its relationship between crew and passengers with high mutual respect, and has even considered rewarding passengers who demonstrate good behavior on flights through its loyalty program.
New export confidence
Pop culture and our ability to share it has made the world a much smaller place. The report posits that these core values have played a significant role in Asian brands making inroads with Western audiences. It’s also supported by a boom in tourism. (Visits to Japan soared y 16% last year, and Japan, Thailand, and South Korea are among the top 10 destinations for Gen Z travelers, according to travel visa service Ztartvisa.)
Emmanuel Sabbagh, TBWA\Asias chief strategy officer, says this overall cultural boost has given brands from Asia more confidence in talking to international audiences. For many, this is the very first time theyre seeing appeal from the West, says Sabbagh. They feel way more confident to be who they are and to express who they are to the rest of the world. Its a big shift. They say that this is their way to go bigger, stronger, not changed for the West. They want to be more themselves.
Traditionally, Asian companies have been stronger on product than building brands, particularly ones that translate to the West. That challenge remains for many of them. Sabbagh says the brand culture in America is very mature, in terms of how the logo, experience, and story are all tied together.
[Photo: Sundry Photography/Adobe Stock]
Thats where brands from the East are not as strong as they should be, Sabbagh says. Even a brand as big as Uniqlo, think about how they can go bigger into what is the promise, what is the real brand platform, what people will look for in that specific brand.” Sabbagh adds that many Asian brands hyper focus on process and manufacturing, but that leaves incredible white space for them to grow on the brand side of things. “The brand is what they are missing as the vehicle to go to the other side of the world and to be stronger in their own market,” he says.
The aim of the report isnt to get Western brands to mimic their Eastern counterparts, but rather to use their success to identify insights that work for their own audiences. The whole point is to make sure that you’re not just trying to hold up a mirror to these values, but find your version of it, find your truth in it, find what makes it real for you, says Costello. This isnt about going out and trying to replicate exactly what Pop Mart or Miniso have done.
Two new data centers in Silicon Valley have been built but cant begin processing information: The equipment that would supply them with electricity isnt available.
Its just one example of a crisis facing the U.S. power grid that cant be solved simply by building more power lines, approving new power generation, or changing out grid software. The equipment needed to keep the grid runningtransformers that regulate voltage, circuit breakers that protect against faults, high-voltage cables that carry power across regions, and steel poles that hold the network togetheris hard to make, and materials are limited. Supply-chain bottlenecks are taking years to clear, delaying projects, inflating costs, and threatening reliability.
Meanwhile, U.S. electricity demand is surging from several sourceselectrification of home and business appliances and equipment, increased domestic manufacturing, and growth in AI data centers. Without the right equipment, these efforts may take years longer and cost vast sums more than planners expect.
Not enough transformers to replace aging units
Transformers are key to the electricity grid: They regulate voltage as power travels across the wires, increasing voltage for more efficient long-distance transmission, and decreasing it for medium-distance travel and again for delivery to buildings.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that the U.S. has about 60 million to 80 million high-voltage distribution transformers in service. More than half of them are 33-plus years oldapproaching or exceeding their expected lifespans.
Replacing them has become costly and time-consuming, with utilities reporting that transformers cost four to six times what they cost before 2022, in addition to the multiyear wait times.
To meet rising electricity demand, the country will need many more of themperhaps twice as many as already exist.
The North American Electric Reliability Corp. says the lead time, the wait between placing an order and the product being delivered, hit roughly 120 weeks (more than two years) in 2024, with large power transformers taking as long as 210 weeks (up to four years). Even smaller transformers used to reduce voltage for distribution to homes and businesses are back-ordered as much as two years. Those delays have slowed both maintenance and new construction across much of the grid.
Transformer production depends heavily on a handful of materials and suppliers. The cores of most U.S transformers use grain-oriented electrical steel, a special type of steel with particular magnetic properties, which is made domestically only by Cleveland-Cliffs at plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Imports have long filled the gap: Roughly 80% of large transformers have historically been imported from Mexico, China, and Thailand. But global demand has also surged, tightening access to steel, as well as copper, a soft metal that conducts electricity well and is crucial in wiring.
In partial recognition of these shortages, in April 2024, the U.S. Department of Energy delayed the enforcement of new energy-efficiency rules for transformers, to avoid making the situation worse.
Further slowing progress, these items cannot be mass-produced. They must be designed, tested, and certified individually.
Even when units are built, getting them to where they are needed can be a feat. Large power transformers often weigh between 100 tons and 400 tons and require specialized transportsometimes needing one of only about 10 suitable super-heavy-load railcars in the country. Those logistics alone can add months to a replacement project, according to the Department of Energy.
Enormous railcar like this one in Germany are often needed to transport high-voltage transformers from where theyre manufactured to where theyre used. [Photo: Raimond Spekking via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0]
Other key equipment
Transformers are not the only grid machinery facing delays. A Duke University Nicholas Institute study, citing data from research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, shows that high-voltage circuit-breaker lead times reached about 151 weeks (nearly three years) by late 2023, roughly double pre-pandemic norms.
Facing similar delays are a range of equipment types, such as transmission cables that can handle high voltages, switchgeara technical category that includes switches, circuit breakers, and fusesand insulators to keep electricity from going where it would be dangerous.
For transmission projects, equipment delays can derail timelines. High-voltage direct-current cables now take more than 24 months to procure, and offshore wind projects are particularly strained: Orders for undersea cables can take more than a decade to fill. And fewer than 50 cable-laying vessels operate worldwide, limiting how quickly manufacturers can install them, even once they are manufactured.
Supply-chain strains are hitting even the workhorse of the power grid: natural gas turbines. Manufacturers, including Siemens Energy and GE Vernova, have multiyear backlogs as new data centers, industrial electrification, and peaking-capacity projects flood the order books. Siemens recently reported a record $158 billion backlog, with some turbine frames sold out for as long as seven years.
Alternate approaches
As a result of these delays, utility companies are finding other ways to meet demand, such as battery storage, actively managing electricity demand, upgrading existing equipment to produce more power, or even reviving decommissioned generation sites.
Some utilities are stockpiling materials for their own use or to sell to other companies, which can shrink delays from years to weeks.
There have been various other efforts, too. In addition to delaying transformer efficiency requirements, the Biden administration awarded Cleveland-Cliffs $500 million to upgrade its electrical-steel plantsbut key elements of that grant were canceled by the Trump administration.
Utilities and industry groups are exploring standardized designs and modular substations to cut lead timesbut acknowledge that those are medium-term fixes, not quick solutions.
Large government incentives, including grants, loans, and guaranteed-purchase agreements, could help expand domestic production of these materials and supplies. But for now, the numbers remain stark: roughly 120 weeks for transformers, up to four years for large units, nearly three years for breakers, and more than two years for high-voltage cable manufacturing. Until the underlying supply-chain choke pointssteel, copper, insulation materials, and heavy transportexpand meaningfully, utilities are managing reliability not through construction but through choreography.
Morgan Bazilian is a professor of public policy and director at the Payne Institute, Colorado School of Mines.
Kyri Baker is an associate professor of civil, environmental, and architectural engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Whats one thing every leader can do to make sure employees are happy at work and engaged with their jobs? Make sure they can trust in you, your organization, and one another. Thats the finding in a 2024 meta-analysis of studies with more than 1 million participants. When leaders seek to improve employee well-being, they typically think about things like remote work, flexible schedules, and wellness offerings such as gym memberships. But trust may be the most valuable perk of all.
A 2024 meta-analysis by an international research team led by Minxiang Zhao and Yixuan Li of the Renmin University of China psychology department examined 132 studies on trust from around the world. The studies had a total of more than 1 million participants. The researchers focused on two types of trust, interpersonal trust and institutional trust, exactly the two types that can occur in workplaces. They found that both types of trust correlate with social, psychological, and to a lesser extent, physical well-being.
If trust is so important, how do you get more of it? Unlike some other things, you cant mandate trust, and you cant demand that employees trust you, your company, or one another. But you can provide a workplace culture where trust can flourish. Here are some ways to do that.
1. Be transparent
If you want employees to trust you and your company, its obviously important to treat them fairly. But its almost as important to let them know whats going on. You may have to find a delicate balance between sharing competitive information and keeping too much to yourself. But half the employees in a recent survey said lack of information about what was going on at their companies was their biggest source of stress. Keep that in mind when considering whether to share bad news.
2. Be predictable
Many years ago, a CEO known for turning troubled companies around told me that his employees should never have to guess how he would answer a question. He told them his top priorities so they could always predict what he would say. He never wavered from those priorities.
We may be fascinated with leaders like Elon Musk who often change their minds. But we trust those like Warren Buffett, who consistently say the same things year after year. The more they can predict what you will say and do, the easier it is for employees to trust you.
3. Be trusting yourself
It may be hard for employees to trust you if, say, they know youre using software to monitor their keystrokes. Admittedly, treating employees with trust can backfire in the short term if you trust the wrong person. But in the long term, research shows that more trusting organizations tend to perform better, even in the often mistrustful retail industry.
I believe the reason for this is that, while we can easily see the cost of employee dishonesty when it happens, we dont always recognize that our mistrust comes at a high cost as well. If an employee has their bag searched every time they leave work, they wont feel the same trust or affection for the company that they otherwise might. And its human nature for them to try to figure out a way to sneak items out despite the search.
4. Help employees trust one another
Setting up competitions that pit employees against each other for important things like compensation can bring about acrimony and mistrust among them. Here again, the short-term gain may not be worth the long-term loss. Employees who trust their coworkers are more likely to collaborate effectively with them. Theyre also likely to be happier, and to stay in their jobs. Relationships at work are often the biggest deterrent to leaving a company.
You can help foster those relationships by asking people to collaborate on important projects and letting them share the credit equally. You can also create teams across different functions so that employees get to know their colleagues outside their immediate areas. And of course, any opportunity for employees to socialize, get together outside of work, or work together on community projects can help create those relationships and that trust.
In my book Career Self-Care, I explore workplace happiness, and how relationships at work can contribute to that happiness or detract from it. The more employees can trust in you, your company, and one another, the happier and less burned out theyll be. Its your job as a leader to make that happen.
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The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists re their own, not those of Inc.com.
Minda Zetlin
This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc.
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Tim Cook has led Apple for the past 14 years. In that time, the company’s market cap has jumped from $348 billion to $4 trillion. While his predecessor, Steve Jobs, might have been a leader in the field of innovation, few CEOs have shown the business acumen of Cook. But according to a report in the Financial Times, Cook’s run as CEO could be over as soon as next year.
The report has set off a guessing game as to who will take over the tech giant when Cook departs. (Apple did not respond to a request for comment on the FT story.) The name most commonly mentioned is John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, though reportedly no final decisions have been made yet.
Ternus wasn’t always the first choice. Jeff Williams was once seen as Cooks most likely successor, but he ended his operational responsibilities in July and plans to retire in the next six weeks. Craig Federighi, Apples senior vice president of software engineering, and Greg Joswiak, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, have also been mentioned as possible successors in the past.
However, both the Financial Times and Bloombergs Mark Gurman have said Ternus is the heir apparent. So who is the person who could inherit Apple as it approaches its latest crossroadswith product design more important than ever and AI coming to the forefront?
Meet John Ternus
At just 50, Ternus is the youngest top executive at Apple, but he’s hardly a newcomer. He has been with the company for nearly 24 years, leading the hardware engineering division since 2013. That puts him in charge of the teams behind the iPhone, iPad, AirPods, Mac, and more.
Over the past five years, he has become a more visible presence at Apple events, unveiling the iPhone Air in early 2025 and showing off Apple’s first silicon chip, the M1, in 2000. His engineering background could assuage critics who have complained Apple has become a less revolutionary company under Cook’s leadership (despite the hundreds of products released during his tenure).
Ternus started his career in tech at Virtual Research Systems, working on VR headsets for four years before joining Apple in 2001, which let him work on several products that would prove to be iconic for the company. By 2013, he was overseeing Mac and iPad development and added the iPhone hardware to his list of supervised products in 2020.
He is said to be well-liked at the company and by Cook, helping to contribute to product road maps and future strategies for Apple.
Will Cook retire?
Cook turned 65 this month, which has warmed up the talk of his eventual retirement, but he has previously downplayed questions about whether he plans to step down.
In January, Cook was a guest on the Table Manners podcast and said his retirement, whenever it should happen to occur, wont meet the traditional definition. He added he likely has many years left at Apple, though with the caveat that he doesnt want to be a CEO for the rest of his life.
I dont see being at home doing nothing and not [being] intellectually stimulated and thinking about how tomorrow can be better than today, he said. I think Ill always be wired in that kind of way and want to work.
If it seems like everything is getting more expensive, you’re right. Thanks to inflation (up 3%), which has affected goods from food to gas (for which prices are up 4.1%), you can now add the post office to the the long list of places where you’ll have to pay more.
Here’s what to know.
What’s happening?
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is planning to increase the price of shipping. The good news is, the changes won’t affect your holiday packages and won’t raise the price of stamps. The changes go into effect next year on January 18, pending a review by the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC).
How much will prices go up?
The move will raise prices approximately 6.6% for Priority Mail, 5.1% for Priority Mail Express, 7.8% for USPS Ground Advantage, and 6% for Parcel Select.
Although mail price increases are based on the consumer price index, shipping prices are primarily adjusted according to market conditions, USPS said in a news release.
Why is the post office raising prices?
The price hike is aimed at generating revenue for the ailing U.S. Postal Service. It’s part of its 10-year “modernization and transformation plan” to make the agency financially sustainable over the long term, and able to continue delivering mail and packages at least six days a week.
It comes as USPS posted a $9 billion loss for the 2025 fiscal yearwhich is actually a better financial outcome than last year, when it lost $9.5 billion.
One thing to note: USPS relies on revenue from its postage, products, and services to keep it afloatnot tax dollars.
How can I find out more about the new prices?
The complete USPS price filing, with prices for all products, can be found on the PRC’s website at prc.arkcase.com/portal/filings, or on USPSs website at pe.usps.com/PriceChange/Index.
Its happened to you countless times: Youre waiting for a website to load, only to see a box with a little mountain range where an image should be. Its the placeholder icon for a missing image.
But have you ever wondered why this scene came to be universally adopted?
As a scholar of environmental humanities, I pay attention to how symbols of wilderness appear in everyday life.
The little mountain iconsometimes with a sun or cloud in the background, other times crossed out or brokenhas become the standard symbol, across digital platforms, to signal something missing or something to come. It appears in all sorts of contexts, and the more you look for this icon, the more youll see it.
The icon has various iterations, but all convey the same meaning: An image should be here. [Image: Christopher Schaberg/CC BY-SA]
You click on it in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint when you want to add a picture. You can purchase an ironic poster of the icon to put on your wall. The other morning, I even noticed a version of it in my Subarus infotainment display as a stand-in for a radio station logo.
So why this particular image of the mountain peaks? And where did it come from?
Arriving at the same solution
The placeholder icon can be thought of as a form of semiotic convergence, or when a symbol ends up meaning the same thing in a variety of contexts. For example, the magnifying glass is widely understood as search, while the image of a leaf means eco-friendly.
Its also related to something called convergent design evolution, or when organisms or cultureseven if they have little or no contactsettle on a similar shape or solution for something.
In evolutionary biology, you can see convergent design evolution in bats, birds, and insects, which all utilize wings but developed them in their own ways. Stilt houses emerged in various cultures across the globe as a way to build durable homes along shorelines and riverbanks. More recently, engineers in different parts of the world designed similar airplane fuselages independent of one another.
For whatever reason, the little mountain just worked across platforms to evoke open-ended meanings: Early web developers needed a simple shorthand way to present that something else should or could be there.
Depending on context, a little mountain might invite a user to insert a picture in a document; it might mean that an image is trying to load, or is being uploaded; or it could mean an image is missing or broken.
Down the rabbit hole on a mountain
But of the millions of possibilities, why a mountain?
In 1994, visual designer Marsh Chamberlain created a graphic featuring three colorful shapes as a stand-in for a missing image or broken link for the web browser Netscape Navigator. The shapes appeared on a piece of paper with a ripped corner. Though the paper with the rip will sometimes now appear with the mountain, it isnt clear when the square, circle, and triangle became a mountain.
Two little mountain peaks are used to signal “landscape mode” on many SLR cameras. [Image: Althepal/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY]
Users on Stack Exchange, a forum for developers, suggest that the mountain peak icon may trace back to the landscape mode icon on the dials of Japanese SLR cameras. Its the feature that sets the aperture to maximize the depth of field so that both the foreground and background are in focus.
The landscape scene modevisible on many digital cameras in the 1990swas generically represented by two mountain peaks, with the idea that the camera user would intuitively know to use this setting outdoors.
Another insight emerged from the Stack Exchange discussion: The icon bears a resemblance to the Microsoft XP wallpaper called Bliss. If you had a PC in the years after 2001, you probably recall the rolling green hills with blue sky and wispy clouds.
The stock photo was taken by National Geographic photographer Charles ORear. It was then purchased by Bill Gates digital licensing company Corbis in 1998. The empty hillside in this picture became iconic through its adoption by Windows XP as its default desktop wallpaper image.
[Image: Microsoft]
Mountain riddles
Bliss became widely understood as the most generic of generic stock photos, in the same way the placeholder icon became universally understood to mean missing image. And I dont think its a coincidence that they both feature mountains or hills and a sky.
Mountains and skies are mysterious and full of possibilities, even if they remain beyond grasp.
Consider Japanese artist Hokusais 36 Views of Mount Fuji, which were his series of paintings from the 1830sthe most famous of which is probably The Great Wave off Kanagawa, where a tiny Mount Fuji can be seen in the background. Each painting features the iconic mountain from different perspectives and is full of little details; all possess an ambiance of mystery.
I wouldnt be surprised if the landscape icon on those Japanese camera dials emerged as a minimalist reference to Mount Fuji, Japans highest mountain. From some perspectives, Mount Fuji rises behind a smaller incline. And the Japanese photography company Fujifilm even borrowed the namesake of that mountain for their brand.
The enticing aesthetics of mountains also reminded me of the environmental writer Gary Snyders 1965 translation of Han Shans Cold Mountain Poems. Han Shanhis name literally means Cold Mountainwas a Chinese Buddhist poet who lived in the late eighth century. Shan translates as mountain and is represented by the Chinese character , which also resembles a mountain.
Han Shans poems, which are little riddles themselves, revel in the bewildering aspects of mountains:
Cold Mountain is a houseWithout beams or walls.The six doors left and right are openThe hall is a blue sky.The rooms are all vacant and vague.The east wall beats on the west wallAt the center nothing.
The mystery is the point
I think mountains serve as a universal representation of something unseen and longed forwhether its in a poem or on a sluggish internet browserbecause people can see a mountain and wonder what might be there.
The placeholder icon does what mountains have done for millennia, serving as what the environmental philosopher Margret Grebowicz describes as an object of desire. To Grebowicz, mountains exist as places to behold, explore, and sometimes conquer.
The placeholder icons inherent ambiguity is baked into its form: Mountains are often regarded as distant, foreboding places. At the same time, the little peaks appear in all sorts of mundane computing circumstances. The icon could even be a curious sign of how humans cant help but be nature-positive, even when on computers or phones.
This small icon holds so much, and yet it can also paradoxically mean that there is nothing to see at all.
Viewing it this way, an example of semiotic convergence becomes a tiny allegory for digital life writ large: a wilderness of possibilities, with so much just out of reach.
Christopher Schaberg is a director of public scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
