Self-driving vehicle startups have often drawn skepticism for overpromising and underdeliveringsee: Argo AI and GMs Cruise subsidiary, both now in corporate junkyardsbut in early May, one of them achieved a milestone that had long eluded the industry: delivering a truckload of cargo for a paying customer on public roadswith no human behind the wheel.
Auroras May 1 announcement that it had begun commercial deliveries for its first customers, Hirschbach Motor Lines and Uber Freight, on two autonomous semitrailer trucks between Dallas and Houston followed some eight years of work by the Pittsburgh-based firm.
Aurora reached that milestone about half a year later than it had planned last year, owing to extra time needed to complete its safety case testing and self-certification. This is a multiyear journey, says Aurora president Ossa Fisher. A few months seemed minuscule in the grand scheme of both the opportunity that lies ahead of us and what came before.
But barely two weeks after the announcement, the company was back to having safety operators sitting behind the wheels of the two trucks.
In a May 16 company blog post, CEO and chairman Chris Urmson said one of its truck-manufacturing partners, Paccar, had requested that change because of certain prototype parts in their base vehicle platform. He wrote that after much consideration, Aurora respected their request and are moving the observer, who had been riding in the back of some of our trips, from the back seat to the front seat.
[Photo: Aurora]
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union that represents drivers, would prefer to keep things that wayand has been lobbying lawmakers in such states as Texas, California, and Massachusetts to codify that in regulations. Our position is that all trucks should have human operator requirements, says Teamsters spokesman Matt McQuaid.
A long road ahead
Despite the upshift-downshift progress, however, Aurora is still farther down the road than other companies in this space.
Gartner analyst Jonathan Davenport rates the company as significantly ahead of such competitors as Plus AI, which plans to inaugurate commercial service in 2027 and in early June announced plans for an initial public offering (its second attempt to do so).
Aurora staged its IPO in 2021, which has allowed a much clearer view of its financials than whats available from the likes of another company to make self-driving vehicles a commercial reality: Waymo. And those numbers show that running an autonomous-trucking company isnt cheap: In the first quarter of 2025, Aurora reported a net loss of $208 million. On its Q1 earnings call in May, company executives predicted $175 million to $185 million in quarterly expenses and revenue in the mid-single digits over the rest of 2025.
There’s a big difference between the operating cost today and the operating cost at scale, Fisher tells Fast Company. We are not making money on a per load basis today, and that’s public information.
Auroras plans include not just scaling up its fleet but also upgrading its hardwarefor instance, deploying a more compact version of its FirstLight Lidar sensor. Shrinking the sensing equipment could also help Aurora move closer to its goal of bringing its self-driving technology to passenger cars.
Chirs Urmson, CEO [Photo: Aurora]
We’ll have a next-generation of trucks in a year, she says. We’ll go to tens of trucks and hundreds of trucks and thousands of trucks. And as we reach scale, that’s whn you get the performance metrics to be highly profitable.
Davenport says the plan is indeed feasible, but has some doubts about the timeline. We’re still going to be two or three years, probably, he says. I would still classify it as probably in the development stage of R&D.
Aurora and other firms in the sector benefit from a market problem that needs solving: Traditional trucking companies can’t hire enough drivers to meet demand. But even then, Gartner forecasts that autonomous trucks will make up under 5% of truck fleets worldwide by 2029.
Either snow or rain or gloom of night
In the nearer term, Aurora aims to expand its operating design domainthe conditions under which its trucks can rollbeyond the current requirement of clear daylight. If there’s rain in the forecast, some days we don’t launch, Fisher says. We’re working very rapidly to resolve any and all weather issues and see that happening later this year.
Here, Aurora is following a common route for autonomous-vehicle projects: Start operations in ideal weather, then drive in increasingly less pleasant conditions. Waymo, for example, inaugurated service in sunny Phoenix, but when it opens for business in Washington sometime in 2026 its robotaxis will have to deal with a full spectrum of seasonal weather that, in the case of the occasional blizzard, should keep human drivers off the roads.
Unlocking commercial nighttime operationwhen a driverless truck would theoretically see its greatest advantage, by virtue of not needing to sleepis also on the to-do list for later this summer, Fisher says.
We’ve been driving in night for the last three years, she says of the firms testing. It is all about securing the evidence to close the safety case.
Auroras system already handles limited driving on surface streets to connect highways with the companys terminals. There’s a few things like turning tight corners as an 18-wheeler. That’s harder to do than exiting a highway off-ramp, says Fisher. But it’s a very solvable problem.
Other autonomous-trucking firms have opted to simplify their own operating design domain by staying off public roads. Kodiak Robotics, for example, launched self-driving commercial deliveries on private land in the oil-rich Permian Basin of Texas. Gartners Davenport also points to such closed environments as mines and ports as easier use cases for self-driving trucks. Autonomous haulage trucks in mines, for example, they’re already commonplace, he says.
Aurora, however, is not just committed to operating on public roads but planning to expand its operations outside of Texas. Well be opening up to Phoenix later this year and then, from there, expanding across the south of the United States, Fisher says.
But after 22 or so hours, a truck will have to refuel, which in the case of a truck with no driver means not any old truck stop will do. Aurora plans to build its own in Phoenix to start, after which the company plans to work with unspecified third parties on building facilities to refuel and inspect Auroras vehicles.
[Photo: Aurora]
Rules of the roads
Starting operations only in Texas has simplified Auroras regulatory operating domain, but Fisher professes confidence in Auroras ability to secure more green lights from other states, starting with New Mexico and Arizona and even California, which in April released proposed rules for heavy-duty autonomous trucks.
The more and more conversations we have, and honestly, the more miles we put on the driverless truck, the more welcoming folks are, she says. And so it looks like the tide may be changing even in California.
Fishers case for Auroras safety on the roads evokes that of Waymo. Like that Alphabet subsidiary, Auroras vehicles fuse inputs from an array of lidar, radar, and camera sensorsa distinct contrast from Tesla, which just began very limited robotaxi services in Austin relying on a no-lidar, cameras-only system.
Fisher emphasizes how each type of sensor helps provide a fuller picture: Radar excels in fog, lidar sees farther at night, cameras do better with up-close navigation. That approach to redundancy includes having two identical brains in the back of the cab plus a backup computer that can pull over the truck if the two primary computers fail.
Aurora and other autonomous-mobility developers may not have to worry about state regulations if a provision in the Trump-backed budget-reconciliation bill that would preempt state-level rules on AIand therefore on self-driving vehiclessurvives negotiations between the House and the Senate and the notable opposition of some Republicans.
Fisher, for her part, voices optimism about a federal framework that would allow verification of company safety cases by third-party auditors. Before [Transportation Secretary Sean] Duffy we thought anything at the federal level might be a decade away, she says. We’re now more optimistic that this could be a year or two away, and we would welcome that.
In any regulatory regime, Gartners Davenport emphasizes that companies have to take safety even more seriously with freight trucksstopping distances for one are 65% longer than for a passenger car. The risk associated with operating an autonomous truck is so much greater, he says. But, the analyst adds, the need for automation is also much greater than in taxis: It’s the use case that actually makes the most economic sense.
In recent decades, California residents have experienced a whiplash of weather conditions. After a few years of severe drought, heavy rains came in early 2023 that soaked the state for weeks. That rain led to mudslides, which were worsened by the fact that years of drought had dried out the soil, so it couldnt absorb the rainfall. That rain also then led to an explosion of vegetation growth, which would dry out when the next drought period hit and fuel devastating wildfires.
This rapid transition between wet and dry weather conditions is a hallmark of climate change, and its also an accelerating climate threat. This phenomenon is called precipitation whiplashes, and the forces that bring these drastic swings between drought and floods are speeding up. In a recent study, researchers say we could see an increase in precipitation whiplashes as early as 2028.
What causes precipitation whiplashes?
Weather systems are constantly swirling around our planet, like the Arctic polar vortex, a swath of cold, low-pressure air that sits at our planets poles; or the El Nio-Southern Oscillation, a cyclical climate pattern that brings a change in winds and sea surface temperatures.
Another one of these weather systems is called the Madden-Julian Oscillation, or MJO. Its a mass of clouds, rainfall, winds, and air pressure that passes over the tropics, moving eastwardly around the planet. Though its above the tropics (and can bring events like tropical cyclones), it impacts weather around the world, including global rainfall patterns, atmospheric rivers, and more.
The MJO circles the planet in periods of 30 to 90 days, and it includes two phases: a period of enhanced rainfall, and then a period of suppressed rainfall. But warming from greenhouse gases is speeding that cycle up, research has already found. In a new study from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers used advanced climate models to look more closely at how rising greenhouse gasses could exactly change the MJOs behavior.
Those models predicted a 40% increase in fast-propagating MJO events by the late 21st century, from 2064 to 2099, compared to historical data (19792014). But well start to see that frequency pick up as early as 2028, the researchers note. They also expect not only for this weather system to move faster, but for there to be an increased risk of jumping MJOsmeaning an abrupt shift in the phases between precipitationbeginning before 2030, too.
Why precipitation whiplash can be so dangerous
More frequent fast and jumping MJO events are expected to trigger disruptive weather fluctuations worldwide, the researchers writelike precipitation whiplash: rapid swings between really wet and really dry extremes. Researchers expect the precipitation impacts of these accelerated and jumping MJO events to be unprecedentedly severe.
Around the world, a few areas are expected to be hotspots for precipitation whiplash including central Africa, the Middle East, the lower part of the Yangtze River basin in China, the northern Amazon rainforest, the East Coast of the continental United States, and coastal Argentina, to name a few. These hotspots can result in various forms of cascading hazards, the researchers write, that pose unprecedented stress to ecosystem services, existing infrastructure, water and food security, and human safety.”
Those cascading hazards include events like what California has already witnessed: drought to rain to mudslides to vegetation growth to drought to wildfires. And as MJO events accelerate because of climate change, that will also significantly shorten response times against compound hazards, study author Cheng Tat-Fan says in a statement, catching societies off guard unless adaptation measures are in place.
The impacts of precipitation whiplash, then, should be considered when it comes to future infrastructure, urban planning, and agricultural practices, the researchers say. Fortunately, these fast-propagating MJOs can be a bit more predictable. But still, researchers need to improve their forecast models to better understand this weather behavior. If they do, and if they could then forecast these extremes four to five weeks in advance, that could improve disaster preparedness and save lives.
For architecture enthusiasts, a longtime dream may have just come within reach: A Frank Lloyd Wright home just hit the market, and it could be yours for a cool $2.5 million.
The home, located in Jackson, Mississippi, was designed by Wright in 1948when the late architect was 81for a local oil speculator named J. Willis Hughes and his family. Originally called the Hughes House, the home has since adopted the nickname Fountainhead, courtesy of an elaborate backyard water feature and pool. (Wright was also said to have served as inspiration for Ayn Rand when she wrote her classic novel of the same name.) The three-bedroom home has more than 3,500 square feet of interior space and a scenic view from its position tucked into the wooded hillside. And, while Fountainhead may boast a hefty price tag today, it was originally made to be affordable.
[Screenshot: Sothebys]
The home is one of just around 60 houses that are considered Usonian, a style created and coined by Wright in the 1940s and 50s. Usonian homes were Wrights answer to the postwar era: Designed to be accessible to the American middle class, they tend to make use of simple layouts, open floor plans, and natural materials. Given that Wrights total portfolio of designs includes more than 1,000 buildings, this style is now considered quite rare.
When approaching the homes design, Wright took his cues from the surrounding environment. The contours of the building site determined the homes parallelogram form, which is characterized by a multitude of low, horizontal leading lines. Furnishings like sofas, tables, beds, and dressers are all seamlessly built into the homes auburn wood walls.
The parallelogram design is etched in the floors, and dictates the placement of walls, the size of the doors, and the shape of the spaces, the homes listing on Sothebys International reads. It goes on to note that Fountainhead was built with no stud walls in the house, no Sheetrock, brick, tile, or paint and boasts of exquisite, exceptionally durable Heart Tidewater Red Cypress wood for the walls and ceilings.
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, the house saw some fairly significant wear and tear during the 25 years that it served as the Hughes family residence. However, the most recent owner, architect Robert Parker Adams, alongside his former wife, Mary, devoted years to restoring the home to its former glory. Adams has lived at the property since 1979.
Ive been here 40-something years; Ive had my experience, Adams told The Journal, adding that he hopes to share his experience and knowledge with the next owner.
We often focus on the visible obstacles stopping women from getting ahead: pay inequality, missed promotions and opportunities, and those boardroom tables with not quite enough seats. Yet there is another, less-visible hindrance to womens career success: our internal habits, harder to name and even harder to shake. The opportunity passed over not because it was out of reach, but because our inner dialogue said it wasnt ours to take. The apology slipped into an email that didnt need one. The shrinking, the over-preparing, and the relentless self-editing.
These arent flaws. They are learned responses to a system that taught women to be capable but cautious, competent but not disruptive, and yes, to have a voice, but not one that was too loud. These unexamined habits are shaping the careers we never meant to build.
1. Confusing competence with visibility
The sabotage: Many women believe if they work hard enough, someone will notice. Excellence in silence is rarely rewarded. Doing exceptional work and not drawing attention to it isnt noble. Its often just an efficient way of handing credit to someone else.
The insight: Hard work that goes unseen and waiting politely for ones turn builds resentment. Being good at your job isnt the same as being known for it, and in competitive environments, what isnt seen often doesnt count.
How to avoid it: Dont wait to be discovered. Learn to self-promote and name what you do, so no one else gets to define it for you. Regularly share winsboth yours and those of othersin team settings.
2. Waiting for certainty
The sabotage: This is self-doubt amplified. When it comes to promotions, unless almost every box is ticked, women are reluctant to put themselves forward. One unchecked box and its a hard stop . . . until next time.
The insight: What if there is no next time? When rejecting an opportunity, what might the perception being sent to your boss be? Your boss isnt a mind reader, magically understanding your thoughts moving back and forth.
Instead, they take it on surface value, assuming youre not so engaged or interested in being here. And hesitations compound over time: not just in missed opportunities, but in lost wealth, confidence, reputation, and influence.
How to avoid it: Adopt a progress, not perfection mindset. Practice tentative boldness and redefine your readiness, taking steps forward and refining as you go.
3. Being modest with achievements
The sabotage: Women often downplay workplace achievements, opting for humility over self-advocacy. The reluctance to self-promote is confused with bragging and arrogance. But being comfortable in naming your achievement is necessary for self-worth.
The insight: What begins as humility can morph into invisibility. Habitually softening your impact and deflecting praise reinforces a narrative where your work is assumed rather than acknowledged. It can train those around you to expect performance without credit. Visibility isnt vanity. Its professional accountability.
How to avoid it: Replace vague self-effacement with concrete contribution. Say, Heres what I contributed to that outcome, rather than, I just helped out a bit. Plus, adopt an internal mantra: Its not arrogance if its accurate.
4. Seeking career advice from the wrong counsel
The sabotage: Turning only to people who mirror your fears instead of challenging your growth. Often these are friends, family, or colleagues. Their intention might be for the best, but they have a bias to protect.
The insight: Whats the point? Friends and family often want to shield us from discomfort. But their advice can reflect their own fears, rather than your potential. And not every colleague has honorable intentions.
Discussions like this can snowball, reinforcing not only why you shouldnt take up the opportunity, but any other advancements, ever. The validation might feel safer, but it doesnt help. Its damaging.
How to avoid it: Seek advice from those who will challenge your thinking, not just nod along. Limit conversations that turn into bandwagoning. Seek to have actions as a result of purposeful career discussions, even if they are micro-moves. Take responsibility for your decisions: When coming to a decision, do you say, I have decided or My partner and I think more often? Clarity begins with ownership.
5. Being busy instead of strategic
The sabotage: Investing in extra work tasks that dont pay dividends. This is saying yes to everything in the name of being helpful while it slowly erodes your capacity.
The insight: Over-functioning is not the same as overachieving. The cost is invisibly paid in missed raises, burnout, and career stagnation. The perception of your busyness might be that you are not in control of your workload.
How to avoid it: Be discerning and politely decline what dilutes your focus. Track value over volume and pick strategic tasks that upskill and serve your growth. Practice saying no not with guilt, but with respect for where youre headed.
Theres a new energy brand on the market, and its betting that the next frontier in caffeine isnt coffee, soda, or any other drink, for that matter. Its the pouch.
Wip is a caffeine pouch, available in 100-milligram and 200-milligram strengths, thats designed to be popped between your lip and gum to provide a quick dose of what it describes as natural caffeine. The pouches come in candy-like flavors, including mint, sour cherry, orange citrus, and strawberry kiwi, all packaged in a brightly colored, hockey-puck-size container.
If any of that sounds familiar, thats probably because, at least in form factor, its pretty similar to the nicotine pouch brand Zyn, which exploded in popularity after gaining traction on TikTok, primarily among young users. Meanwhile, over the past few years, the caffeine market has also been buzzing with a similar demographic.
Energy drinks have gone mainstream, appearing on menus at Starbucks, Dunkin, and Dutch Bros. Older brands like Jolt Cola and Rockstar have gotten supercharged facelifts, while the newcomer Alani Nu notched more than a billion dollars in sales in just one year.
From 2018 to 2023, energy drink sales jumped by 73%. In all, the global caffeine market is expected to reach $28.95 billion by 2030.
Wip is betting on the idea that if consumers are gravitating toward a pouch for their nicotine boost, it might be a major new unlock for the caffeine industry, too.
[Photo: courtesy Wip]
The origin of a new form of caffeine
The idea for Wip was conceived by David Cynamon, a Canadian entrepreneur who is now the brands chairman and a major stakeholder. According to Wip CEO Richard Mumby, Cynamon understood the ubiquity of pouches in other form factors, mainly in nicotine, and recognized an opportunity to expand the consumer category into caffeine.
The brand debuted last summer under the name LF*GO! (alongside a marketing partnership with Mike Tyson), a move that Mumby describes as more of a market test than an official launch. In four months, they got really meaningful traction and realized they needed to bring in the right team to realize the full opportunity of creating an altogether new category for energy and caffeine, he says.
Mumby stepped in as CEO last October. Given the inspiration that Wip is pulling from the nicotine industry, Mumbys previous experience makes sense for this new role: From 2014 to 2017, he served as CMO for Pax Labs, the umbrella company for Juul and Pax vapes.
In less than a year, Mumbys team at Wip worked to create an entirely fresh identity for the brand before it hit the market in early June. The new branding takes a page out of Red Bulls iconic playbook, positioning the product as a tool for athletesand, like Zyn, also a cool accessory.
[Photo: courtesy Wip]
Is the pouch the new energy drink?
From an outside perspective, its easy to see why consumers might choose a nicotine pouch over a cigarette: You can pop one on the go, it has no odor, and, more recently, has become a kind of status-signaling habit among its young male target audience.
[Photo: courtesy Wip]
Its less clear why one might abandon their daily cup of coffee in favor of a caffeine pouch. Mumbys pitch for creating this new consumption category comes down to what he calls the three Cs: confidence, convenience, and cost.
He argues that consumers want to have confidence in the quality of their caffeine (a need that Wip purports to meet by deriving its caffeine from green coffee beans); they want the convenience of a handsfree caffeine option; and they want a cheaper caffeine fix (a 15-pouch pack costs about $8, or about 60 cents per serving).
For an emerging brand or category, sometimes you have to go to the periphery to find these unmet needs, Mumby says. But in caffeine, they’re really at the heart of the product.
[Photo: courtesy Wip]
Branding the caffeine pouch
To get the public on board with this novel form of caffeine intake, Mumby says he had a few main goals with the new branding. First, he needed to clearly articulate what caffeine pouches actually are, and establish a brand name that consumers could easily remember. He also needed a high-energy look to compete in an already saturated category. In collaboration with the branding agency Studio George, his team checked the first box with Wip, a name designed to be short, zingy, and catchy.
You can’t will consumers to do it, but I wouldn’t be disappointed if I heard somebody walk into a bodega and say, Do you have any mint Wips, or refer to having to Wip their way through a workout, Mumby says.
For the wordmark, Studio George opted for a forward-leaning, slanted bold font with jagged edges, meant to convey a sense of momentum. The packaging features flavor-signaling neon colors, metallic silver, and pops of energetic yellow, clearly evoking the world of sports branding.
Mumby imagines Wip as a product that could see mass adoption, but its specifically marketed as a companion for athletes and others whose pastimes involve using their hands. Someone headed to the gym, for example, might prefer a Wip over the “cumbersome” proposition of packing energy drinks in their bag, Mumby explains. “Also, a cup of coffee on a construction site is hard to put down and not have dust get into it,” he says. “If you work with both of your hands, you need dexterity. The form factor just lends itself to some obvious solutions.”
On first glance, Wip does look strikingly like a nicotine product, especially given its rounded packaging and hardcore aesthetic. Mumby says the brands main strategy to ensure consumers dont get confused is to incorporate clear signals at the point of sale, including by labeling the pouches as clean caffeine on display units. Currently, Wip is available online, on Amazon, at convenience stores in Florida and Arizona, and at some smaller athletic stores across the country.
[Photo: courtesy Wip]
I Wip my way through this article
Before writing this story, I gave Wip a try for the first timespecifically, the 100-milligram mint flavor. While Ive never tried a Zyn, and therefore cant compare the two, this experience was akin to sucking on an abnormally sweet Altoid, or maybe a less-powerful Listerine strip. It wasnt unpleasant (and it did prevent the onset of a morning caffeine headache), but it also wasnt my personal favorite way to consume caffeine. Still, I could see how the form factor might be convenient as a pre-workout boost or a pick-me-up on the job.
[Photo: courtesy Wip]
My main concern with Wip, actually, is how easy it is to consume. One of the 200-milligram pouches is equivalent to about two cups of coffee. A standard 8.4-ounce Red Bull contains just 80 milligrams of caffeine. Pop two max-strength Wips, and youve just hit the maximum amount of caffeine that the Mayo Clinic defines as safe for the average adult, likely in significantly less time than it would require to chug five Red Bulls.
When asked about Wips safety, Mumby says the brands website and social media sets out clear guidelines on safe caffeine consumption, including the 400-milligram limit. Its worth noting, however, that theres no such information on the package itself. While I didnt experience any adverse effects from my 100-milligram Wip, Im not sure I want to know what it might feel like to mindlessly have one too many. For now, Im sticking with coffee.
Have you ever admired a leader so dialed into their long-term mission that it seems nothing can shake their focus? Every move appears premeditated, every milestone perfectly timed. Now think about a leader who seems to always be in step with the moment. Their company launches timely features, aligns instantly with market shifts, and always feels fresh.
For every leader who succeeds through single-minded focus, there are others whose obstinacy has led them and their organizations to arrive at a destination that is no longer desirable. And while adaptability can be a gift, it also leads many organizations to shift strategies with each change in the winds without ever hitting on a true contribution.
This tension between structure and adaptability isnt just theoretical; its a foundational dynamic that has shaped industries for decades. Approaches to enterprise software development provide a useful way to gauge whether youre leaning too far in either direction.
Balancing Your Leadership Approaches
Early on in the history of the software industry, a waterfall strategy reigned supreme. Road maps guided development, with possible major platform releases happening every one to two years, version releases quarterly, feature sets monthly, and bug fixes weekly. Teams operated with near-military precision towards long-term goals, broken down into shorter term deliverables.
But as the pace of change accelerated, that model began to break down. Agile software development emerged, favoring speed, iteration, and real-time user feedback. Short sprints (often 60 to 90 days) determined what was going to be released. Each sprint on a project added features, fixed bugs, and adapted to feedback from the previous release. Unlike with waterfall, employees from across agile teams were empowered to fix things and make many changes without going through their chain of command to get approval.
In our coaching work, weve seen that the same push and pull between waterfall and agile playing out in leadership styles and company cultures. Some leaders operate like agile systems: adaptive, fast-moving, iterative, and with a distributed decision structure. They respond quickly to new data and arent afraid to pivot when the market shifts. Others take a waterfall-inspired approach: structured, methodical, deeply focused on long-term outcomes, and more rigidly hierarchical. They chart a course and stick to it, often prioritizing consistency over speed.
Neither mindset is wrong, but over-indexing on either one can create serious blind spots. Agile thinkers risk spinning in circles when they follow the tides. Waterfall thinkers risk charging toward goals that become outdated or foundering on unsolvable problems. For executives, the ability to integrate both approaches is no longer optionalits essential.
Heres how to strike that balanceand why your teams future may depend on it.
1. Assess your own leadership style
In our coaching conversations with leaders, we often start by asking them to reflect on whether they naturally lean toward structure or spontaneity. We can expand on their natural preference by administering a personality profile survey as well. Are they more likely to build a road map and stick to it, or pivot at the first sign of change?
Developing this self-awareness isnt about labeling or even changing your styleits about recognizing where you need balance. If you default to agile thinking, ask yourself: Are we making measurable progress? Or changing directions without setting a course? Are we building anything lasting? If you favor waterfall thinking, ask: Is our goal still relevant? What feedback are we ignoring? Which market changes do we need to take into account?
During a recent coaching conversation a senior marketing leader at large hospitality company expressed frustrations about her proposed product launch, a new menu item, being challenged by her colleague who runs operations. He thought a different item would be faster, easier, and aligned to what customers recently told him they wanted. Her team had spent the last six months toward brand alignment, market research, product iterations, testing, launch planning, and marketing planning and were now finally ready to do something. Her waterfall approach and his agile approach were in conflict. Both made great points. In the end, they struck a balance between both proposals and management styles.
2. Understand when culture amplifies leadership style
As a leader, you have to ask whether your company culture reflects your style or balances it. A culture determines how people behave naturally, on average, even when a leader is not in the room. Do people tend to work in a structured manner, with long-term goals in mind, always talking about progress against objectives? Or, does it feel like people question the current state, proposing new ideas and take initiative without seeking executive approval. Crucially, if the culture leans in a particular direction, how easy and safe is it for people who lean the other way to challenge the others. A lot of can depend on whether the company typically hires and promotes a type that matches the leaders biases or whether it embraces individuals who bring unique perspectives and skills to the workplace.
When you build a corporate ethos in your image, you magnify your own tendencies in ways that create a harmonious work environment. People are not likely to argue with your decisions, because they reflect their own opinions as well. Day-to-day, that can be pleasant. In the long-run, though, it creates problems. If the leadership and organization are all Agile, then chaos may manifest. A slow-moving Waterfall culture may stall innovation.
Take Boeing as an example; it continued reliance on a hierarchical, Waterfall-style of leadership and development culture has been widely criticized for contributing to recent crises. The rigid, top-down approach delayed necessary changes in engineering and quality control, despite repeated warnings from employees and whistleblowers. The 2024 mid-air panel blowout on an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX reignited scrutiny, and internal documents revealed slow, structured processes that resisted fast adaptation or real-time feedback. The Waterfall mindsetprioritizing schedules, approvals, and internal reporting linesled to safety risks, brand damage, and regulatory backlash.
In contrast, consider Netflix. In the late 1990s, they recognized an inefficiency in the movie rental business. Leaders in this space had significant overhead costs from the physical stores from which people rented and returned movies. By allowing customers to select movies online and have then delivered, they created an economy of scale. Building this business required attention to detail and customer service. Yet, the company remained sensitive to technology trends. They realized that they were essentially sending computer files through a low-bandwidth connection (the U.S. Mail) and disrupted their own business model by pivoting to streaming. Further realizing that many companies could develop streaming models, they pivoted again to content creation. Becoming a content creator requires a lot of expertise, and so they had to implement this model using a more traditional Waterfall approach. This balance between Agile and Waterfall approaches has enabled Netflix to remain a significant force in the market.
The takeaway? While a particular cultural and leadership disposition around Waterfall or Agile may b the natural to the organization and may have served it well for many years, great leaders are aware of those tendencies, and build a culture that can challenge the status quote and balance, when needed, Agile and Waterfall approaches to yield healthy (if sometimes uncomfortable) debate.
3. Combine long-term vision with real-time feedback
A 2024 meta-analysis in the Journal of Entrepreneurship, Management and Innovation found that agile leadership has a significant impact on organizational outcomes, team effectiveness, collaboration, and innovation. But the key isnt to replace long-term thinking entirelyits to layer agility on top of it.
Thats why the most successful leaders use both mindsets. They know when to zoom outbuilding toward five-year goalsand when to zoom in, listening to customer feedback or shifting based on real-time performance indicators. New Balance has done this exceptionally well, maintaining its long-term manufacturing commitments in the U.S. while evolving its brand to meet changing consumer tastesa move that helped drive a record $6.5 billion in sales in 2023.
A CMO we coached recently calls her approach glocal marketingthe balance between local and global marketing, which includes honoring the long term brand promise (Waterfall) while still connecting, through customization, at the local level to what is relevant and popular at that moment in a particular area (Agile).
At the team level, this looks like maintaining a steady mission while adapting tactics. At the leadership level, it means pairing clarity of purpose with the humility to course correct.
4. Build balanced teams that challenge your defaults
Theres a method in psychology to measure individual tendencies known as need for cognitive closure, and it provides a useful way to think about your own leadership approach.
People high in need for closure prefer action to thinking, so they tend to react to situations and engage with available information, which is characteristic of an agile approach. People low in need for closure prefer thinking to action and typically mull over information, which often leads to the focus on long-term goals characteristic of a waterfall style.
Understanding your own tendencies as a leader as well as those of your trusted associates is valuable, because it gives you the opportunity to balance your team to include those with a range of levels of need for closure to ensure your team isnt heavily biased toward either the agile or waterfall style. You can measure these tendencies with the Need for Closure scale. It will help you to see whether the people you work with tend toward High (i.e., Agile) or Low (i.e., Waterfall) Need for Closure.
If you find that your team tends to be biased more toward reaction or more toward deep thought, you can use timelines to help overcome those tendencies. For example, if your team tends to react quickly, set a deadline for finalizing a decision thats far enough out to allow your team the time and space to slow down and proceed carefully and thoughtfully. In contrast, if your team often deliberates too long and gets stuck in long-term patterns, an earlier deadline can push them to make decisions more quickly.
Dont surround yourself with people who think exactly like you. Instead, build teams that stretch your instincts, pressure-test your assumptions, and help you operate at both 30,000 feet and ground level. Often, peoples preferences reflect hidden assumptions that they themselves may not be aware of. Being forced to justify your strategic decisions explicitly in conversations brings those assumptions to the forefront. In addition, these strategic choices may sometimes reflect reasoning gaps that these conversations will also bring to light.
Navigate with intention
The best leaders dont choose between agile and waterfallthey learn to navigate the tension and switch gears with intention. Agility without direction leads to burnout. Direction without agility leads to obsolescence.
So, ask yourself: Are you leaning too far in one direction? What conversations, feedback loops, or partners could help you rebalance? Because real leadership isnt about having a single styleits about learning when to move fast, when to slow down, and how to bring your team with you, every step of the way.
Not all emojis are created equal.
The sparkle emoji or red heart emoji are staples of text conversations and social media captions. But how often are you using the baggage claim icon or the non-potable water symbol?
Recently, a new trend has emerged: mainstream emojis are being passed over in favor of more creative alternatives. The broken heart emoji? Tired. Predictable. The wilted rose emoji? Aesthetic. Unexpected.
The trend began earlier this year when a video from one TikTok user went viral. The caption read: lowkey starting to become too mainstream / i might just start using . Others quickly joined in. How it feels using in the era, one TikTok user posted, cutting to a photo of someones grandpa.
@savo.rl #luracks#fyp#foryou not myself – luracks
As David Doochin explained for Emojipedia: One of the most typical memes gaining traction among the TikTok contingent is the X has gone mainstream / we now use Y format that declares a given meme, emoji, or cultural symbol as out of date or past its prime and offers a replacement, usually a derivative of the original symbol in some way but sometimes totally arbitrary.
The most commonly used emojis include faces, hearts, and hand gesturesones that slip seamlessly into texts to convey emotion. “Loudly Crying Face” was the most-used emoji of 2024, followed by “Face with Tears of Joy” and the “Fire” emoji. Now, among younger generations and the chronically online, certain emojis have taken on entirely new meaningswith lesser-used icons pulled from obscurity.
YouTuber John Casterline posted a video last month encouraging people to adopt the aerial tramway emojionce the least-used emoji in the worldas a replacement for the common “Crying Laughing Face.”
I came up with a plan where we can make this emoji one of the most used emojis, at least on YouTube, he explained. Instead of using laughing emojis from now on, replace it with this. And if someone doesnt know why youre doing it, dont tell them.
This isnt the first time the aerial tramway has been thrust into the spotlight. Back in 2018, the now-defunct X account @leastUsedEmoji reported that the aerial tramway held the title of least-used emoji for 11 weeks straight.
Responding to the call, public transportation advocates rallied around the underappreciated emoji, spamming Twitter/X with strings of the aerial tramway. The plan worked. After 77 days, the tram climbed the ranks and was replaced in last place by input symbol for latin capital letters.
As of the accounts last post on August 3, 2020, input symbol for symbols had been the least-used emoji for 264 days. Perhaps its time it gets the same treatment.
Over the last two months, a first-of-a-kind project has taken shape at an industrial site in Nevada: the worlds largest microgrid built with used EV batteries, designed to power an adjacent data center.Its the first of a series of microgrids planned by Redwood Materials, the battery recycling company now valued at more than $5 billion. The company is taking in a quickly-growing volume of used EV batteriestens of thousands over the last year, and perhaps hundreds of thousands over the next 12 months. Most of those batteries still have enough capacity to have a second life before the materials are recycled. And they could help deal with a major energy challenge: how new data centers can come online quickly and cheaply without straining the grid and significantly adding to climate emissions.The amount of batteries coming back that have usable life and that are relatively more cost-efficient to deploy has ramped up dramatically in just the last year or two, says JB Straubel, CEO of Redwood Materials. The company announced its new energy business arm at an event on June 26.[Photo: Redwood Energy]Straubel, one of Teslas cofounders, left the automaker in 2019 to help build a new U.S. supply chain of critical battery materials using the growing pile of battery waste. Last year, the company started commercial production of cathode active material, one key component in batteries, from recycled materials. Its recycling business is already profitable; it generated $200 million in revenue last year. But it also recognized the huge opportunity to put some batteries to work again. [Image: Redwood Materials]How EV batteries can find a second lifeWhen a battery is in a car or a truck, its a pretty demanding application, Straubel says. You need a lot of power capability. You really want to charge quickly, usually, so you can go to fast charge stations. And you also need a pretty high percent of your overall initial range that you purchased in the car. But even when a battery has lost so much capacity that it no longer makes sense for driving, it can still be used to store energy. In that application, charging and discharging can happen slowly. A battery might only have half of its original capacity, but can still reliably support the grid or a microgrid. In some cases, it could be used for years before its eventually recycled.In the new microgrid, on Redwoods campus near Reno, more than 800 used EV batteries are connected to 20 acres of solar panels. It has enough power to run a new AI data center on the site, built by Crusoe, a company that designs and deploys low-carbon compute infrastructure.The data center operates fully off the grid, without an external backup. We still expect [the microgrid] to be very, very reliable, Straubel says. In some cases, it might be more reliable, because we have less failure points. To make it possible to avoid the grid completely, the team built a relatively large amount of solar power and large battery capacity. In other cases, the company will build microgrids that do have a grid connection, but allow data centers to run on their own renewable energy most of the time. Some projects could also be built with backup from gas generators. But there are advantages to off-grid renewable projects.[Photo: Redwood Energy]Why companies want to go off the gridOff-grid projects are faster than other alternatives. Right now, the wait time for a new gas turbine can be as long as seven years. Connecting large new renewable energy projects to the grid also takes years because of long delays in the permitting process. A self-contained microgrid can avoid waiting in the interconnection queue. And if its fully renewable, like the project from Redwood and Crusoe, it can also avoid the long process to get air quality permits. All that a project needs is simple construction permits. The process to build can also happen quickly. (Crusoes own data center infrastructure, which uses modular, self-contained small units, is also fast to deploy. The new data center is already running in test mode and will be available for Crusoes cloud customers to use in the coming weeks.)Because renewable energy is cheap, and Redwoods battery system is also affordable, the microgrids can compete head to head with fossil fuels. Were seeing prices now that I think are below what you can do with the gas microgrid, says Straubel. All of this means that even if a tech company doesnt have sustainability as its first priority when it builds a new data center, the microgrid can still be a compelling choice. It seems that in this moment, speed and power availability is the number-one topic, Straubel says. Maybe number two would be overall economics. Number three is sustainability. Not to say that people dont care about thatI feel that most of our customers care quite deeply about it. But theres a lot of pressure for everyone to grow fast and balance all these other constraints while doing it.[Photo: Redwood Energy]The potential for scaleData center providers that want to use solar power need to find land in the right location. But one recent analysis found that there was more than enough available land in the U.S. to support the massive energy demand from new data centersfar more than even high-end projections that say that we may need a staggering 300 gigawatts of new energy by 2030 to cover growth. That analysis looked at the feasibility of microgrids that were 90% renewable and 10% gas-powered. But it mapped out potential sites in detail, and points to areas that could also potentially be used for 100% renewable projects.Redwood is already working on other microgrids for other data centers. And over time, as more used EV batteries become available, they can play a greater role for the grid overall. The volumes in the automotive and transportation sector are so much higher than in the grid sector, Straubel says. Over the long term, I believe that EV batteriestrucks, cars, robotaxis, all of itwill have an extremely significant role to play in really all bulk energy storage.It can help the cost of energy storage come down, which is key to helping renewables fully scale up. Renewables are our cheapest source of generation today, he says. And I think thats only going to expand. But theyre intermittent. We have to find a cost-efficient way to deliver firm, reliable, renewable energy if we have a hope of scaling it. And to me, that is really the long-term main application.
I run two companies, lead a team of over 20 people, mentor women entrepreneurs, and juggle multiple side projects. As a result, my calendar is filled with calls, meetings, decisions, deadlines, and the constant ping of notifications.
For years, I convinced myself that unpluggingeven for a daywould be reckless. What if something urgent came up? What if everything collapsed?
Eventually, though, I did it. I turned off my phone for seven full days. No email, no WhatsApp, no Slack, no Instagram. Just silenceand, of course, a notebook.
This digital detox had a deeper purpose than a conventional holiday. In todays world, being on vacation can mean keeping in touch, even if lightly: answering emails, reading news, scrolling through social media, and so on. We stay in the information bubble, which makes it difficult to tune out the noise.
I didnt plan to turn this into a case study. I simply needed a break. What I didnt expect was how deeply restorative and surprisingly productive it would be. My fear was that it would slow me down, but instead, it recalibrated me. And if youre someone who thinks they cant afford to disconnect, thats exactly why you should. Heres a way to start.
What the detox looked like
Because it was the weekend, I didnt need to make a big announcement. Just four peoplemy mother, sister, business partner, and assistantknew how to reach me in case of an emergency. Everyone else was left in the quiet.
It was all designed consciously. Part of the detox fell on the weekend, when I did not expect any urgent messages from clients or partners. Also, there were some public holidays, so in the end I only missed one day of work.
At the same time, I put my full trust in my team. Our managers are the first point of contact for clients, while my business partner is the go-to touchpoint for employees. Everyone also has my assistants contact details, so if something truly pressing had come up, they would have easily found out why I wasnt responding.
So, late on a Friday night, I shut my phone down, and didnt turn it back on until one hour before my next workday. This buffer gave me space to ease in without anxiety.
In case youre wondering, there were no exceptions. The phone wasnt silenced or stashed in a drawer I could access when I needed comfort. It stayed off, completely out of reach.
Heres a snapshot of how a day looked like during this period:
Mornings started with movementpilates or a long runfollowed by a mindful, unhurried breakfast.
Then: hours of reading real books. No articles, no headlines.
I took two naps a day for the first 48 hours. It was as if my nervous system had been waiting for permission to rest.
By day three, something shifted. I began writing. Not for deadlines, just to think. I filled pages and pagesincluding my goals for the year, updates to my life balance wheel, forgotten ideas, coaching reflections, and personal values I hadnt revisited in months.
Creative clarity came fast, and because I opened the space for it, it stayed.
Three lessons I took with me
I walked away from my phoneless time with dozens of insights. Of those, three stayed with me, and theyve reshaped both how I work and how I lead.
#1: Clients are mirrors
Every client relationship reflects something back at you. When youre truly present, you start to notice what those reflections are teaching youwhere your boundaries are too loose, where your expertise can deepen, what energizes you, and what drains you.
We also learn to listen more attentively. As a seasoned PR pro, I know what I need to do to achieve the best possible resultsthe biggest coverage, the boldest narrative, the most polished story. But over time, Ive realized that what I consider the best isnt always what the client actually needs. This shift in perspective changed the way I work, and helped me build deeper relationships with my clients.
I can honestly tell Ive learned more about myself from client work than from many books or programs. Not because they teach me something directly, but because they hold up a mirror. When were receptive to it, that relationship becomes a shared process of growth.
#2: Choose your energy before the day begins
Before I made this shift, my mornings belonged to everyone else. Id wake up and immediately jump into the noiseemails, deadlines, and messages. I was reacting to the worlds demands before Id even taken a breath.
But now, I begin each day with a decision: Who do I want to be today?
I started setting a tone for the day, not with tasks, but with intention. Calm. Generous. Creative. Focused.
That one quiet choice each morning changed how I navigated everything else. I wasnt reacting, I was leading from the inside out. And when you do that, the world starts meeting you differently. Now, the day feels like minenot something Im surviving, but something Im actively shaping.
#3: Dont make decisions just to relieve pressure
Many of us, especially high performers, can easily confuse urgency with clarity. We say yes, push forward, launch, commit. Not necessarily because were grounded, but because were tense.
Stepping away helped me name that pattern. During this time, I realized how often I made choices to soothe discomfort rather than move from vision.
Now, before anything, I pause and ask myselfIs this decision coming from a place of power, or from a place of pressure?
Why more people should try a phone detox
Your brain needs rest. Not scrolling, not content-switching. Real, deep rest. We dont hesitate to give our muscles recovery days after a grueling exercise session. Why cant we do the same with our minds?
When we stop consuming content, our brain starts producing it. Ideas resurface. Our vision returns. We reconnect to the version of ourselves that doesnt need noise to feel alive.
Silence, as I learned, did not slow me down. It reintroduced me to what matters the most. We frequently imagine disconnection as a luxury. Its not. From this new vantage point, I can say it is a leadership practice. It is how we step back into our lives with discernment, energy, and purpose.
Nothing burned down while I was gone. The world kept spinning. And I came back steadier, sharper, and more attuned to those things I hold dearly.
If youre still thinking along the lines of, I could never take a week off, thats exactly your sign. There is clarity waiting for you, patiently, on the other side of silence.
In the fictional town Levi’s and Nike created to promote their latest collaboration of denim outerwear and Air Max 95s, the paperboy still delivers the morning newspaper by bike (with an arm like a cannon, by the way), and the neighbor out walking her dog just so happens to be the WNBA’s Dallas Wings star Paige Bueckers. Welcome to Blue Arc County.
[Photo: Levi’s]
For their latest joint collection, out in July, the brands are releasing a special edition of the Nike Air Max 95 made from Levi’s denim in a neutral matte white; black; indigo denim; and full-on Canadian tuxedo made from the Levi’s x Nike Trucker Jacket and matching Baggy Jean. Like its jeans, Levi’s sneakers with Nike feature a single Levi’s Red Tab under the Nike Swoosh on the right shoe only. The jacket sports a big Nike wordmark and Swoosh logo lockup in white on the back, plus co-branded brown leather patches.
[Photo: Levi’s]
The world Levi’s and Nike created for the collection is charming but hard to place. In promotional photos and social media shots featuring Bueckers, hip-hop artist Larry June, NFL player Keon Coleman, and designer Daniel Buezo, it’s a mix of rural country, Midwest suburb, and deep South. The local barbecue joint is staged like the sort of roadside, hole-in-the-wall treasure that draws in diners far and wide, and the Blue Arc County logo shows an evergreen tree line that evokes Nike’s Oregon roots. It’s Anywhere, U.S.A., built for promoting two iconic American brands at a time when heartland aesthetic is ascendent.
[Photo: Levi’s]
This isn’t Nike’s first foray into “jeakers” with Levi’s. They teamed up for apparel like a Nike SB x Levi’s 511 Skateboarding Collection in 2012 and Nike Air Force 1s by Levi’s in 2019. But their 2025 collab uses lighter-wash denim for the jacket and jeans and a lower-profile shoe that feels less like a novelty than some past attempts. It’s a simple capsule, but they got the details right.
[Photo: Levi’s]
The announcement was timed just before Nike reported its quarterly earnings June 26. The company said earlier this year it expects a sales decline, and its planned NikeSkims launch has been postponed, but a highly anticipated collab with the denim brand is good news.
Levi’s parent company, Levi Strauss, beat expectations earlier this year, and CEO Michelle Gass said on the company’s April earnings call that new products were “resonating and driving market share gains. She also referenced a “robust product pipeline that she said will fuel growth in the companys denim and nondenim business well into 2026.
