Have you ever wondered where the unsold concert merch from decades worth of tours end up? For artists associated with Universal Music Groups merchandise arm, Bravado, it often winds up in a massive Nashville facility, gathering dust. Its like the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, says Matt Young, president of Bravado. This stuff predates meI believe it was just forgotten.
From an environmental perspective, decades worth of apparel sitting in a warehouse is among the least harmful options. Typically that stuff gets donated to Goodwillbut they dont even want that much, especially if it has a band name, Young says. Some artists may want it destroyed, or you do a sale on a websitewhich is usually the first wave of defense.
Like fast-fashion, donated clothes that cant be sold in stores ends up in landfills or the global South, where countries like Pakistan, Kenya, and India import millions of pounds of used clothing every year from the West. Often rather than donate clothes, companies will incinerate them. UMGs head of sustainability Dylan Siegler says the company has so much deadstock in storage partially because it only donates or incinerates unsold merchandise as the very last resort.
[Photo: UMG/Bravado]
Looking to find a new option for its unsold apparel, Bravado is now sending 400,000 shirts from its Nashville warehouse via cargo ship to Morocco, where Spanish clothing designer and manufacturer Hallotex will turn many of them back into cotton yarn, which it will then spin into new, 100% recycled cotton shirt. It will also shred what cant be recycled, and turn that fabric housing insulation.
At the end of the process, Bravado will have some 280,000 new shirts that will debut as artist merch for European fans in the fall, ahead of the holiday season.
The effort was spearheaded by one of UMGs most influential artists: Billie Eilish. Eilish and her mother, Maggie Baird, have long focused on making both touring and merch more sustainable, encouraging fans to bring reusable water bottles to shows and eat plant-based, all while working with smaller designers on upcycled merch collections and sourcing organic or recycled cotton for apparel. With the T-shirt recycling effort, theyre helping UMG use recycled fabric on a wider scale.
We are drowning in clothes on this planet, much of which is in landfills, much of which is shipped to other countries to pollute their waters and their land, Baird says. I think we have to be extremely thoughtful about what merch gets put out in the worldwhy does it exist, how is it made, and what happens to it in its second life?
[Photo: UMG/Bravado]
Selling sustainability
Merchandisetour shirts, posters, and hats, among other productshas long been central to how artists connect with fans. But in the streaming era, these physical items have become increasingly critical for musicians as the music industry shifts away from relying on album sales for revenue. Entertainment analysis firm Midia Research projects that the global market for artist merchandise, which was roughly $14 billion at the end of 2024, will hit $16.3 billion by 2030. Industry sources say top artists can make in excess of $10 million selling merch annually.
For a company the size of Bravado, the challenge is feeding this demand while embracing more sustainable practices. Bravado president Young is no stranger to the merch business. Before he joined Bravado in 2021, he spent 13 years building Warner Music Groups in-house merch arm, Warner Artist Services, which he led from 2016 till his departure. But he admits that he wasnt well-versed in sustainable sourcing until he connected with Eilish and Baird.
In the past few years, Eilish has pushed Bravado to use nontoxic clothing dyes and water-based graphic inks in place of synthetic ones, which consume a lot of resources and include toxic chemicals that make them the worlds second-largest polluter of water.
Recently, Eilish has been exploring smaller partnerships focused on sustainable merch. In the spring, she worked with designer Iris Alonzo, who overdyed old tour shirts and hand-painted them before adding the tour title in water-based ink. Clothing upcycler Lost Love made unique sweaters and shirts entirely from postconsumer materials. And L.A.-based textile recycler Suay upcycled work shirts into Eilish merch by overdying them and adding an embroidered Billie name tag on the chest.
Baird says her daughters focus on sustainability dates back to the start of her career. We asked for [sustainable merch options] even before she was big, Baird says. It was a little bit like pushing a boulder up a hill for a long time.
There is one challenge that comes with stocking sustainable merchsticker shock. Sustainable usually means more expensivefor the company and for the fan, Young says. (Such options can require a premium of as much as 30% more than an all-new product). As a result, artists play a role in educating their fans about why their shirt costs more than another artists might.
Eilish plays a video before her shows explaining how her merchandise is made with an emphasis on sustainability. Her fan base has responded enthusiastically. Young notes that Eilishs stop at Quebec Citys Centre Vidéotron last September broke the venues record for single-day merch sales. Last summer, Bravado worked with Target to sell a limited-edition apparel line that included tees made with a blend of organic and recycled cotton. Young says the Target products sold strongly enough that the retailer placed multiple follow-up orders.
With more UMG artists, including Shawn Mendes, Lorde, and the Rolling Stones, asking for eco-friendly merch, Young says the company is laying the groundwork for a bigger commitment. UMG has been assessing Hallotexs capabilities via several small-scale test runs for the past several years. Now its putting its deadstock on a boat to see if itcan, Young says, unlock the economies of scale that come with mass production of sustainable options.
From left: Matt Young, president of Bravado; Susan Mazo, EVP of global communications at Universal Music Group; Eilishs mother, Maggie Baird; and Dylan Siegler, SVP and head of sustainability at Universal Music Group [Photo: R. Weber]
Making it scale
Hallotex, based in Barcelona, has for years been a go-to manufacturer for brands like Zara, J.Crew, Eileen Fisher, and Mara Hoffman who want sustainable options. Through a partnership with textile fiber maker Lenzing, Hallotex can incorporate the nontoxic, cellulose-based Tencel in products for retailers.
Its partnership with Bravado, though, is built on its own process, which it calls the Loop. The company is able to break down garments and other textiles into small pieces that can then be spun into new yarn. The fibers that are made in the process will be 100% cotton regardless of what the constituents of the waste T-shirt were, says UMGs Siegler.
Hallotex estimates that its process saves 15 liters of water per shirt createda small portion of the 2,700 liters needed to make a new shirt, from growing cotton, to processing the material, to manufacturing the final product. That adds up to 4.2 million liters of water saved for the shirts that Hallotex will make for Bravado.
At first blush, the idea of sending nearly half a million T-shirts across the world by boat to be recycled in Morocco doesnt seem like the most eco-friendly move, but it came down to which company was capable of processing the sheer volume of fabric Bravado had on hand.
The technology at that scale is not available in North America, Young says. We know putting it on a boat isnt the best for the world, but having it rot in a warehouse or go to a landfill is way worse, he says, noting that to mitigate the ecological impact of the journey, Bravado is planning to keep the new T-shirts in the nearby European market.
For now, UMG hasnt calculated the actual emissions savings of the process for recycling its 400,000 shirts. But Siegler and Young both say the effort is focused on the Hallotex partnership as a better way to utilize deadstock clothing. Young also says that, for now, Bravado will absorb any additional costs associated with the shirts that Hallotex creates.
Getting more artists on board is a crucial next step to scaling the capabilities of companies like Hallotex, and even ones closer to home. If we get more participation [from artists], we can figure out how to get companies with the technology in America to scale to where we can do this locally, Young says. Our ultimate goal is to get this to be such a widely accepted practice that the price drops to the point where people won’t even care or notice that a shirt is an extra couple bucks.
By the time most leaders sit down at their desks, theyve already spent a chunk of their best energy. Theyve triaged emails, squeezed in early meetings, and handled just one quick thing that ballooned into an hour. Its barely 10 a.m. and their attention is already diluted, their decision-making fatigued.
In my work as an executive leadership coach, I see every day what the studies have been showing us for years. Our brains capacity to make good decisions depletes as the day progresses.The sheer volume of decisions we have to make each day is leaving us diminished. And our days get hijacked by emailwith us losing almost a full days worth every week.
The compounding effect of this is that leaders are less sharp, more reactive, and prone to default decisions rather than breakthroughs. So what if, instead of reacting, we reserved that early window for something more valuable?
The first two hours of your workday arent just another block on the calendar. Theyre your cognitive prime. The time when your brain is sharpest and your energy most aligned with creative, focused work. Theyre also the time most leaders give away too easily. Reclaiming it is about making a deliberate leadership move that pays off in clarity, influence, and impact.
The cost of default mornings
Most of us dont design our mornings: we inherit them. Calendars fill with recurring meetings, habitual inbox checks, and requests from others. We hit the ground running, but often in the wrong direction.
This default mode comes at a price. While research shows we have peak cognitive capacity in the morning, that prime time is too often squandered on low-impact tasks. Its like hiring a Michelin-star chef to butter toast.
In the end, leaders end up firefighting all day, making decisions from a place of fatigue, and pushing their most strategic thinking to a time when their brain is already checked out.
The first two hours as a leadership lever
Reclaiming your first two hours isnt about working harder or even smarter, its about working sharper.
Working smarter is about efficiency. Its finding faster ways to do familiar things, streamlining systems, and ticking more off your list in less time. Thats helpful, but it still treats all hours of the day as equal.
Working sharper is different. It respects the natural rhythm of your body and brain. Its not just about what youre doing, but when youre doing it.
Your cognitive capacity peaks in the first few hours after waking. This is when your brain is most alert, creative, and capable of solving complex problems. Sharper work means aligning your most important thinking with your highest mental performance.
Leaders who intentionally front-load their day with deep, high-impact work dont just get more done; they make better decisions, model smarter working habits, and lead with more clarity. They create time to think, not just to respondand thats the game changer.
When your first hours are spent solving complex problems, crafting strategy, or preparing for high-stakes conversations, youre not just ticking off tasks, but setting the tone for how your team operates and how your business grows.
Small changes, outsized impact
When leaders begin to guard their early hours, the ripple effect is striking. Teams notice, the culture shifts, and people get braver about protecting their own energy.
Ive worked with senior leaders who transformed their teams operating rhythm just by removing early meetings and declaring the first two hours as thinking time. It signalled a new standard: that considered work matters more than constant busyness. That energy is a finite resource worth protecting.
And yes, it requires a shift. You may need to renegotiate habits with your team, push back on automatic scheduling tools, or educate others about your new working rhythm. But leadership is, in part, about setting boundaries that enable your best work and empower others to do the same.
Rethinking what belongs in the morning
To make the most of your best energy, you need to protect it. Heres how:
Block, dont hope. Set a recurring two-hour block in the morning for proactive work. Dont leave it to chance.
Start with friction. Tackle the task youre most likely to procrastinate; your brain is most equipped to handle it now.
Email can wait. Unless youre in customer service, few emails need a response at 8 a.m. Turn off notifications and dont open your inbox until after your deep work is done.
Delay the meetings. Push back recurring stand-ups or updates to later in the day where possible. Mornings should be reserved for creation, not coordination.
Even reclaiming just one morning a week can create meaningful shifts in how you lead and perform.
What your calendar says about your leadership
Theres a simple way to tell what you value most as a leader. Look at your calendar.
If the first two hours of each day are filled with admin and reactivity, its worth asking: what are you giving away? And what would change if you claimed that space instead?
Reclaiming this time is a move toward leading with more foresight and less fatigue. Its a signal to your team that thoughtfulness trumps frenzy.
And it starts tomorrow morning. Just two hours for your clearest thinking, and the work that truly matters.
New Yorker staff writer and author Evan Osnos spent decades chronicling the social, economic, and political changes in China and currently writes about American politics. To understand the second election of President Trump, though, he realized he needed to understand the vast inequality in American society. According to 2024 data from the Federal Reserve, more than two-thirds of the countrys wealth is held by the top 10% of U.S. households. And the top 1% of U.S. households hold more than one-third of the country’s wealth.
Osnos’s new collection of essays, The Haves and Have Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich, explores the world of the 1%, from their tax-dodging and yacht-buying techniques to their propensity for building luxury bunkers and employing pop stars to perform at private events. Osnos came on the Most Innovative Companies podcast to talk about his book, whats behind the rising inequality in America, and the danger that inequality poses to democracy.
Why did you want to write about the ultrarich?
In 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president, I realized that the normal tools of political analysisthe way that I usually write about what’s happening in the worldwere not going to suffice. I couldn’t understand how a guy who declared himself the enemy of the elites could somehow inhabit that role while being the billionaire son of a real estate family in New York. I needed to understand. The answer to that lay, ultimately, in trying to understand the mechanics of the big money world. That was the origins of this.
You begin the book by talking about how ubiquitous the ultra wealthy are in the administration and you write that inequality has led to the undoing of many societies. Do you think that is happening in America?
We are at a very tenuous moment, and I don’t think I’m unique in that impression. All of us, no matter where we sit on the political spectrum, we look at it and say, this feels really fragile and it feels volatile. The question of course is, why? From my perspective, you can’t understand this period without recognizing that we’re living at a time of really historic, arguably unprecedented inequality in this country. That’s not an abstraction. The richest people in America have a larger share of the nation’s wealth than their predecessors did in the Gilded Age. If you want to really have an honest conversation about what it will take to hold this country together, we have to be honest about the facts. Let’s remind ourselves [that] we’ve been through these moments before and we’ve found our way back to a more stable, productive, democratic future.
The first essay is a piece about yachts. What attracted you to the topic, which also provides the title for your collection?
The super yacht is the super symbol of our era. There used to be 10 of the largest yachts [available] a generation ago, and now there are 170. They occupy this kind of strange place in our culture. They’re both visible and invisible. I mean, you see them in the New York Post or in the Daily Mail. They’re designed to stay out of reach, but they are the most conspicuous machines that anybody could possibly own.
[Osnos photo by Pete Marovich]
The yachts are a symbol of a world in which capital is more mobile and more fluid and in which borders are liquified. I had this really interesting interview with a guy who has been in the yachting world for decades. He watched it turn into this ginormous industry with huge amounts of money on the line. And he said every decade or two [the yacht buyers are coming from] a new industry. First it was the Greek shipping fortunes. And so you saw Aristotle Onassis competing against another shipping magnate [for the most ostentatious yacht]. [Then] it was the oil money. All of a sudden, it was people from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and they had different needs. They were sailing their yachts around the Arabian Peninsula and they were inside all the time. They needed good air-conditioning. But what’s really interesting about [yacht buying] is that it tells you something about the global economy. Where is the center of gravity at any moment in our time? You could chart the history of American economics over the last 60 years by looking at the high seas.
They also depreciate in value immediately.
I remember the Financial Times wrote a great piece that described them as about as financially prudent as buying 10 Van Goghs and then holding them above your head while you’re treading water. [Yachts are] essentially something for people who have limitless resources.
You write about how it’s almost easier for a billionaire to live on a luxurious yacht than on land. It might seem uncouth to show how rich you are on land; on water, it’s a different story.
A Silicon Valley CEO said to me that the honest fact is that you can’t live in a $500 million house because the optics are weird. Your employees will be enraged at you. But a half billion dollar boat is pretty nice. This same CEO said to me that the yacht is the best place to, as he put it, absorb excess capital. A certain number of businesses have generated so much [money] because of the ownership structure for their founders and for key investors that [these people] are quite literally encountering this problem of having excess capital and having to figure out ways to park it in places that won’t cause blowback socially and culturally and ultimately in business terms.
One of the themes that I noticed across this world was that, in a way, this is the natural result of an unthinking cult of scale. t’s not that long ago that we thought scale was an unambiguous good. When I wrote a profile of Mark Zuckerberg a few years ago [for The New Yorker], I was talking to him and to his employees about this period when essentially connecting people was a euphemism for growing. And growing was a self-justifying, self-fulfilling idea. It was an end in itself. The yachts are the symbolic representation of that concept.
You grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and decided to write about the towns turn towards Trump. Why did you want to write about it?
It’s always been a prosperous place. It was an amazing place to grow up as a kid. It has the only public high school that I know of that has an electron microscope. There was also a point at which I became aware that Greenwich told us something important about what was happening in Republican politics. Greenwich had been traditionally the birthplace of the country club Republican. The Bush family was from there. Prescott Bush, who was the father of George H.W. Bush, was quite literally the country club golf champion in town. He was the senator from Connecticut, and he was an old-school moderate Republicanwhat they used to call a Rockefeller Republican.
But in 2016, the Republican Town Committee in Greenwich was led by somebody who came out and said they were not going to vote for Jeb Bush. They were going to vote for Donald Trump. That became a revealing indicator: Republican strongholds that we might’ve thought of being more inclined towards moderate Republicans were lining up with Trump. Part of the explanation is that there had been a decision along the way that we can no longer afford to do the kind of moderate Republican thing that gives a little here and takes a little here, but ultimately believes in working with Democrats. There was an argument to be made that there was a similar thing going on in the Democratic side, in terms of getting more and more extreme. But it was when you had the birthplace of Country Club Republicanism begin to line up with Donald Trump, I said, I’ve got to understand how that happened. And this essay tells that story.
What did you learn about how American elites paved the way for Trump’s election?
There is a lot of blame to go around for creating the myth of Donald Trump that continued for so long. Around New York City, Donald Trump was a permanent piece of media furniture. He was in the papers all the time, partly because he was pretending to be his own publicist and planting stories. To see him, through The Apprentice, become something else in the eyes of Americans more broadly was a turning point. All of a sudden he [became] known, through the power of this invented persona, as the icon of a big city, successful capitalist.
Part of the reason why I think why the word elite has become so fraught is that Trump used his own position in communities of power to say to the American public, Because I am an elite, I can help you pick the lock. I will help you understand why [the government] is corrupt, how it works, and therefore I, dear voter, will give you a piece of the action. After a half a century of him selling the illusion of access to power and fortune, he and his family have now realized that in 2025 the thing people will pay most exorbitantly for is access to the highest reaches of the United States government. His son has created a club called Executive Branch with an initiation fee of up to $500,000.
Its funny because at the same time, he hired a lot of elites to his cabinet.
He named 13 billionaires to the highest ranks of his administration. You can imagine a scenario in which you say, look, these are people who have succeeded. They understand the market; they understand economics. What becomes a problem is when the administration is so secluded from the experience of regular life that it has a very hard time expressing and enacting the public will.
It was quite telling when Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce, said that his mother-in-law wouldn’t notice if her social security check didn’t show up. I think there’s a lot of Americans that probably would notice if their social security check didn’t show up. I think this is part of what Elon Musk ran into, when he started talking about empathy as a weakness of Western civilization or social security as a Ponzi scheme. It was a revealing indicator of how much his life had become divorced from the experience of ordinary people.
Youve written about elites deriding other elites and saying, I’m different because I understand the common man. Why do you think that is so resonant with voters?
Americans at their core want to get rich. We always have and we always will. That is baked into the American idea. Whats happening now is that people in larger numbers are beginning to realize that there are impediments to that process. Part of the reason why Donald Trump was able to win again was that he is able to say to people, even in an unspoken way, that he wants them to prosper and succeed. Part of the process of getting people to understand [our level of inequality] is getting [them to] visualize some of the fault lines in our economy that are making it harder for people to prosper. The key is not saying to people they should give up on the goal of getting rich. The key is giving people the information to understand why they’re not.
When you’re talking about the sort of elites who have yachts, are they completely divorced from understanding the common person?
I think that the experience of entering into that world is actually farther away from regular life than outsiders imagine. There was a yacht owner who said on a documentary that if the public ever knew what it’s really like on these yachts, they’d bring back the guillotine. It sounds like a joke except that part of what’s happening is that [elites] are aware.
There was a really prophetic comment a century ago from [Supreme Court justice] Louis Brandeis. He said, you can either have democracy or you can have money concentrated in the hands of a small number of people, but you can’t have both. That was one of the observations that led to the New Deal and to an effort to try to shift the balance from a concentration of resources into the hands of too few, into a more equitable distribution. [That] led to what was ultimately a period of rising standards of living for more people. That period came to an end in the late 1970s. I think there is a recognition on the part of some in politics that we need to figure out a way to get back to that.
What was your favorite essay to write in the book?
The piece about pop stars performing at private parties. I embedded with Flo Rida for a bar mitzvah. It was an experience that as you’re doing it, you say to yourself, I think I will be able to die happy when I’ve done this. The reason I got interested in it was [wondering], what are the economics of that? What makes a pop star who could be performing in front of 40,000 screaming fans say, Actually I’m going to go to a sweet 16 in Teaneck. In the end, it’s not that complicated what motivates them to go. The reason why this is an artifact of our time, why it’s like a new thing, is the simple fact that, until recently, people couldn’t afford to have the Foo Fighters in their backyard on a Thursday, and now they can. I sometimes feel like I’m like a historian writing in real time about a world that we need to describe while it exists.
In 2015, Uber famously offered Beyoncé $6 million to perform at one of teir corporate events. Instead, she requested an equity stake in the company and ultimately made $300 million from it.
If you step back, what’s fascinating about that is that right there is a transaction between billionaire and billionaire. When you can get on board a certain kind of opportunity and experience, then the curve goes vertical, and you get access to all kinds of other things. It can be quite dangerous for a country because it means that those people are then getting further and further from the experience of everybody else.
I think it’s perilous for those individuals because they run the risk of suddenly encountering a kind of backlash and realizing they’ve lost touch with the people they were supposed to be in touch with. I quoted Ramsay MacMullen, the great scholar of Rome, in the book. He was once asked if he could summarize the epic history of the fall of Rome as concisely as possible. He said that it took 500 years but it can be distilled into three words: fewer had more.
In 2014, I left a secure job at Goldman Sachs to start a nonprofit. On paper, it looked like a reckless move: no funding, no team, barely any experience. But it was the best decision I ever made because it taught me that adaptability matters more than certainty.
While you cant control President Trumps second term, you can control how you respond to it by learning to work with uncertainty. As his policies rock supply chains, jobs, and lives, the best career plan is the one that can bend and flex.
Transformation
But lets be clear: Its not just Trump driving this uncertainty. AI and automation are transforming entire industries. Generational shifts are changing how people work and what they value in their careers. No matter whos in the White House, uncertainty is constant. The message couldnt be more explicit: Nothing is guaranteed except the importance of adaptability.
This is what I call Trump-proofing your career, and its not about being anti-Trump. Whether you support him or not, his leadership brings unpredictability, and your career plan cant hinge on any one leader or policy. It must be built to flex and shift with the world around you.
The old idea of climbing a single career ladder no longer holds up. In today’s job market, staying in the same role for too long can hold you back. According to HRreview, workers who change jobs regularly earn, on average, 31% more than those who stick around in the same job for years.
The best plan isnt a perfect five-year road map. Its about treating your career like an ongoing experiment, in which trying new roles, taking smart risks, and building transferable skills is more important than following a linear path. This mindset keeps you adaptable and engaged in a world thats changing faster than any one job can keep up with.
The ripple effects of this new reality are already apparent. More than 120,000 U.S. federal workers have lost their jobs or been targeted for layoffs in 2025, a stark reminder that even government work, once considered the gold standard for stability, isnt immune to sudden change.
THE PLANNING FALLACY
According to psychologists, the planning fallacy is how we fool ourselves into thinking the future will follow our plans. Ive seen this firsthand.
At 22, I thought I wanted to work in finance. I had spent years pursuing that path, convinced it was the surest way to build a successful career. But once I got there, I realized that the skills I wanted to develop and the goals I cared about didnt match what I was doing.
The daily work didnt challenge me in the ways I needed, and it didnt lead me in a meaningful direction. I realized that sticking with a path that didnt fit was actually riskier than stepping into the unknown.
So I did it. I moved back to Canada to build something that felt real and important, which pushed me to grow in the right ways. This led me to founding my nonprofit, Venture for Canada, which raised $80 million and empowered more than 10,000 young professionals to launch their careers. Most people thought I was out of my mind. But I learned that real progress in your career and life happens when youre willing to adapt your skills and goals to match what you and the world at large need most.
Not everyone can walk away from a steady paycheck. My story is just one example. But adaptability isnt about giant leaps. Its about small experiments that keep you aligned with what matters most.
FOCUS ON OBJECTIVES AND KEY RESULTS
One tool thats made a real difference for me is using objectives and key results. OKRs are a great way to break down overwhelming goals into small, measurable steps. Instead of mapping out the next 10 years, focus on the next three months. Pick one meaningful short-term objective, like exploring mission-driven work or building skills in a new sector. Then set two or three key resultssmall, specific actions you can track. At the end of three months, look back. What worked? What didnt? Where do you need to pivot?
Heres how I explain this in my upcoming book, The Uncertainty Advantage: First, identify your top three personal values. For example, if youre in marketing, your values might be creativity, collaboration, and growth, which inspire you when the world is unpredictable.
Second, set one short-term objective that aligns with those values. Dont worry about the next decade. Focus on what you can start todaysomething specific and achievable, like launching a new marketing campaign that pushes your creative skills and brings your team together.
Third, define two or three key results to measure your progress. In this marketing example, your key results might be testing three campaign concepts, meeting with two colleagues to brainstorm fresh ideas, and sharing early results with your manager within the month. Theyre small steps that build momentum, keep you learning, and help you stay adaptable.
TREAT YOUR CAREER LIKE AN EXPERIMENT
For some, adaptability might mean staying the course in a stable job. For others, it might mean pivoting into something entirely new. The key is to treat your career like an experiment. If you treat your next move as a chance to test what you care about and what you can build, you can shift from panic to purpose.
I think of a friend who shifted from teaching to technical program management and now wants to work in AI. He didnt have a 10-year plan. He focused on what sparked his curiosity and where he wanted to grow. It wasnt about having all the answers. It was about testing, learning, and staying true to his values.
So heres my challenge to you: Treat your career like the most crucial experiment of your life. Stay curious. Stay connected to what matters. Keep testing new ideas. Because in a world that can shift overnightand it willthe only plan that keeps working is the one youre willing to adapt.
For centuries, weve believed that the act of thinking defines us.
In what is widely considered a major philosophical turning point, marking the beginning of modern philosophy, secular humanism, and the epistemological shift from divine to human authority, the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (15961650) famously concluded that everything is questionable except the fact that we think, Cogito, ergo sum(I think, therefore I am).
Fast-forward a few hundred years, however, and in an age where generative AI can produce emails, vacation plans, mathematical theorems, business strategies, and software code on demand, at a level that is generally undistinguishable from or superior to most human output, perhaps its time for an update of the Cartesian mantra: I dont think . . . but I still am.
Indeed, the more intelligent our machines become, the less we are required to think. Not in the tedious, bureaucratic sense of checking boxes and memorizing facts, but in the meaningful, creative, cognitively demanding way that once separated us from the rest of the animal kingdom. The irony, of course, is that only humans could have been smart enough to build a machine capable of eliminating the need to think, which is perhaps not a very clever thing.
Thinking as Optional
Large segments of the workforce, especially knowledge workers who were once paid to think, now spend their days delegating that very function to AI. In theory, this is the triumph of augmentation. In practice, its the outsourcing of cognition. And it raises an uncomfortable question: if we no longer need to think in order to work, relate to others, and carry out so-called knowledge work, what is the value we actually provide, and will we forget how to think?
We already know that humans aren’t particularly good at rationality. Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that we mostly operate on heuristics (fast, automatic, and error-prone judgments). This is our default System 1 mode: intuitive, unconscious, lazy. Occasionally, we summon the energy for System 2(slow, effortful, logical, proper reasoning). But it’s rare. Thinking is metabolically expensive. The brain consumes 20% of our energy, and like most animals, we try to conserve it. In that sense, as neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett noted, the brain is not for thinking; its for making economic, fast, and cheap predictions about the world, to guide our actions in autopilot or low energy consumption mode.
So what happens when we create, courtesy of our analytical and rather brilliant System 2, a machine that allows us to never use our brain again? A technology designed not just to think better than us, but instead of us?
Its like designing a treadmill so advanced you never need to walk again. Or like hiring a stunt double to do the hard parts of life, until one day, theyre doing all of it, and no one notices youve left the set.
The Hunter-Gatherer Brain in a High-Tech World
Consider a parallel in physical evolution: our ancestors didnt need personal trainers, diet fads, or intermittent fasting protocols. Life was a workout. Food was scarce. Movement was survival. The bodies (and brains) weve inherited are optimized to hoard calories, avoid unnecessary exertion, and repeat familiar patterns. Our operating model and software is made for hungry cavemen chasing a mammoth, not digital nomads editing their PowerPoint slides.
Enter modernity: the land of abundance. As Yuval Noah Harari notes, more people today die from overeating than from starvation. So we invented Ozempic to mimic a lack of appetite and Pilates to simulate the movement we no longer require.
AI poses a similar threat to our minds. In my last book I, Human, I called generative AI the intellectual equivalent of fast food. It’s immediate, hyper-palatable, low effort, and designed for mass consumption. Tools like ChatGPT function as the microwave of ideas: convenient, quick, and dangerously satisfying, even when they lack depth or nutrition. Indeed, just like you wouldnt choose to impress your dinner guests by telling them that it took you just two minutes to cook that microwaved lasagna, you shouldnt send your boss a deck with your three-year strategy or competitor analysis if you created with genAI in two minutes.
So dont be surprised when future professionals sign up for thinking retreats: cognitive Pilates sessions for their flabby minds. After all, if our daily lives no longer require us to think, deliberate thought might soon become an elective activity. Like chess. Or poetry.
The Productivity Paradox: Augment Me Until Im Obsolete
Theres another wrinkle: a recent study on the productivity paradox of AI shows that while the more we use AI, the more productive we are, the flip side is equally true: the more we use it, the more we risk automating ourselves out of relevance.
This isnt augmentation versus automation. Its a spectrum where extreme augmentation becomes automation. The assistant becomes the agent; the agent becomes the actor; and the human is reduced to a bystander . . . or worse, an API. Note for the two decades preceding the recent launch of contemporary large language models and gen AI, most of us knowledge workers spent most of their time training AI on how to predict us better: like the microworkers who teach AI sensors to code objects as trees or traffic lights, r the hired drivers that teach autonomous vehicles how to drive around the city, much of what we call knowledge work involves coding, labelling, and teaching AI how to predict us to the point that we are not needed.
To be sure, the best case for using AI is that other people use it, so we are at a disadvantage if we dont. This produces the typical paradox we have seen with other, more basic technologies: they make our decisions and actions smarter, but generate a dependency that erodes our adaptational capabilities to the point that if we are detached from our tech our incompetence is exposed. Ever had to spend an entire day without your smartphone? Not sure what you could do. Other than talk to people (but they are probably on their smartphones). Weve seen this before. GPS has eroded our spatial memory. Calculators have hollowed out basic math. Wi-Fi has made knowledge omnipresent and effort irrelevant. AI will do the same to reasoning, synthesis, and yes, actual thinking.
Are We Doomed? Only If We Stop Trying
Its worth noting that no invention in human history was designed to make us work harder. Not the wheel, not fire, not the microwave, and certainly not the dishwasher. Technology exists to make life easier, not to improve us. Self-improvement is our job.
So, when we invent something that makes us mentally idle, the onus is on us to resist that temptation.
Because heres the philosophical horror: AI can explain everything without understanding anything. It can summarize Foucault or Freud without knowing (let alone feeling) pain or repression. It can write love letters without love, and write code without ever being bored.
In that sense, its the perfect mirror for a culture that increasingly confuses confidence with competence: something that, as Ive argued elsewhere, never seems to stop certain men from rising to the top.
What Can We Do?
If we want to avoid becoming cognitively obsolete in a world that flatters our laziness and rewards our dependence on machines, well need to treat thinking as a discipline. Not an obligation, but a choice. Not a means to an end, but a form of resistance.
Here are a few ideas:
Be deliberately cognitively inefficientRead long-form essays. Write by hand. Make outlines from scratch. Let your brain feel the friction of thought.
Interrupt the autopilotAsk yourself whether what youre doing needs AI, or whether its simply easier with it. If its the latter, try doing it the hard way once in a while.
Reclaim randomnessAI is great at predicting what comes next. But true creativity often comes from stumbling, wandering, and not knowing. Protect your mental serendipity. Use genAI to know what not to do, since its mostly aggregating or crowdsourcing the wisdom of the crowds, which is generally quite different from actual wisdom (by definition, most people cannot be creative or original).
Teach thinking, not just promptingPrompt engineering may be useful, but critical reasoning, logic, and philosophical depth matter more. Otherwise, were just clever parrots.
Remember what it feels like to not knowCuriosity starts with confusion. Embrace it. Lean into uncertainty instead of filling the gap with autocomplete. As Tom Peters noted, if you are not confused, you are not paying attention.
Thinking Is Not Yet Extinct, But It May Be Endangered
AI won’t kill thinking. But it might convince us to stop doing it. And that would be far worse.
Because while machines can mimic intelligence, only humans can choose to be curious. Only we can cultivate understanding. And only we can decide that, in an age of mindless efficiency, the act of thinking is still worth the effort, even when it’s messy, slow, and gloriously inefficient.
After all, I think, therefore I am was never meant as a productivity hack. It was a reminder that being human starts in the mind, even if it doesnt actually end there.
Enterprises are on track to pour $307 billion into AI in 2025more than $35 million dollars every hour. Yet most of that cash will never see daylight: an S&P Global survey found that 42 percent of companies scrapped most of their AI projects this year. The problem isnt funding or ambition; it is a failure to see that the moonshots need to be balanced by sure things, the stretch goals by easy wins.
AI’s true transformative power emerges not from any single initiative but when leaders orchestrate a portfolio of projects that runs the gamut from the revolutionary to the routine. The organizations that will thrive in this new era are those that pursue both the audacious bets that can redefine their industry and the mundane victories that provide the resources to fund the journey. These modern alchemists understand that transformation requires both vision and groundwork, both aspiration and application. And they know that going all in on a single idea offers an almost guaranteed path to failure.
The Innovation Portfolio
Just as financial portfolios balance risk and return across diverse investments, organizations approaching AI need to develop what we call an “innovation portfolio”a carefully curated collection of AI initiatives that offer multiple paths to transformation while effectively managing risk. This portfolio approach responds to a fundamental truth about innovation: long-term success requires a pipeline of projects that vary in their size, scope, risk, and transformative power.
The portfolio and financial management approach allows organizations to maintain a comprehensive view of potential AI projects and to systematically manage their development. Think of it as the difference between a chess grandmaster who sees the entire board versus a novice fixated on individual pieces.
The portfolio approach enables leaders to understand how different AI initiatives interact, where synergies might emerge, and how risks in one area might be balanced by stability in another. Crucially, it also lets leaders orchestrate a combination of big and small bets, long- and short-term plans, that fit the businesss needs and resources. Some projects will deliver value immediately while others represent longer-term bets on emerging capabilities that might fundamentally reshape entire industries. By maintaining a portfolio that encompasses both time horizons and risk profiles, organizations create the conditions for sustainable innovation rather than sporadic breakthroughs.
The CEO as Chief AI Orchestrator
The transformative power of AI is so great that it demands a fundamental change in the role of the CEO. In this new landscape, AI strategy cannot be delegated to the CTO alone. The CEO must become the chief orchestrator of the AI portfolio, balancing competing priorities while maintaining strategic coherence.
While a foundational AI tech literacy is essential for making informed decisions, this doesn’t mean that CEOs need to understand the technical minutiae at a highly granular level. Instead, they must excel in three critical areas:
Vision Setting: The CEO must articulate how AI aligns with organizational purpose. When employees grasp AI’s significance beyond its ability to deliver financial gains, adoption accelerates and resistance diminishes.
Resource Allocation: Making tough decisions about which AI initiatives receive funding and attention is vital. This demands the courage and authority to discontinue promising projects that don’t align with strategic priorities.
Cultural Transformation: Most critically, CEOs must embody the shift in mindset that AI requiresembracing uncertainty, celebrating intelligent failures, and demonstrating continuous learning. When the CEO publicly shares their AI learning journey, including their mistakes, it empowers organizational experimentation.
The Macro-Micro Balance
A successful AI portfolio should operate on two levels simultaneously. At the macro level, you’re asking profound questions: How might artificial general intelligence reshape entire industries? What happens when AI agents take over most knowledge work? How should a company be reconfigured to make the most of a hybrid human-AI workforce. These aren’t philosophical musingsthey’re strategic imperatives that guide long-term positioning.
But here’s where organizations often stumble: they become so intoxicated by grand visions that they neglect the micro-level victories that are necessary to fuel the journey. At the same time as planning for whole-of-organization transformation, you also need to ask what your company can do this quarter. Can you use an algorithm to optimize delivery routes? Is there a commercially available chatbot you can use to process customer inquiries? The mundane funds the miraculous.
Strategic Priority Mapping
Not all AI initiatives deserve equal resources. Comprehensive frameworks for harnessing AI’s potential and managing its risks, such as the OPEN and CARE frameworks, provide systematic tools for evaluating capacities and needs. For instance, the OPEN frameworks FIRST assessment provides a tool for rapid viability screening
Feasibility: Can current technology deliver your vision? Don’t confuse science fiction with strategic planning.
Investment: What’s the true costnot just dollars, but organizational attention and cultural capital?
Risk/Reward: Map the potential downside as well as the upside. Remember, though, that the biggest risk might be doing nothing.
Strategic Priority: How closely does this idea align with our core purpose? An AI initiative that is at odds with your organizations identity and goals is doomed regardless of its technical merit.
Time Frame: Can you sustain investment long enough to see returns? Many AI projects fail not because they were wrong, but because they are too early.
The Continuous Evolution Model
Static strategies die in dynamic environments. Your AI portfolio needs built-in adaptation mechanisms:
Regular Rebalancing: Quarterly reviews of project mix. Are you maintaining appropriate risk levels? Have new capabilities opened fresh opportunities?
Learning Loops: Every experiment feeds strategic understanding. Failed projects often teach more than successful ones.
Cultural Evolution: Organizations must embrace perpetual beta. Yesterday’s mindset won’t create tomorrow’s success.
From Theory to Practice
A financial services firm might simultaneously pursue:
A moonshot project using AI to predict market movements with unprecedented accuracy
A medium-risk initiative automating compliance reporting
Several low-risk projects improvig customer service chatbots
Each initiative serves distinct portfolio purposes. The moonshot could transform the business model entirely. Compliance automation delivers clear ROI within 18 months. Chatbot improvements show immediate returns while building AI capabilities.
The CEOs role is to ensure that each initiative receives appropriate resources while maintaining portfolio balancenot picking favorites, but orchestrating the symphony.
The Transcendence Factor
Ultimately, successful AI portfolios recognize a profound truth: AI isn’t just about efficiency or cost reductionit’s about transcending current limitations entirely. But transcendence requires groundwork.
Like alchemists purifying base materials before transformation, your AI journey begins with the mundanecleaning data, upskilling teams, running small experiments. These pedestrian activities build toward something greater: a point at which AI doesn’t just improve existing business operations but enables entirely new possibilities that were previously unimaginable.
Who will win?
The organizations that will thrive in the age of AI won’t be those that bet everything on a single strategy. The winners will be those who build diversified portfolios that balance transformational ambitions with incremental improvements, macro visions with micro victories, human wisdom with machine capabilities.
For CEOs, this balancing act isn’t optional. Leaders who treat AI as just another type of new technology have already lost. Those who recognize its power to fundamentally transform both companies and markets are the ones who will write the next chapter in business history.
The sun is out and your weekends are packed with plans to head to the nearest beach or pool. Now, you have to figure out how you’ll carry the piles of things you need for a day out, which might include towels, hats, drinks, a change of clothes, sunscreen, books, snacks, toys for the kids, and more.
While you could throw all of these items into a cotton tote bag and call it a day, a well-designed beach bag can go a long way to improving beach time. For one thing, it needs to be easily washable, since you’re going to be in sand. Ideally, you want to have compartments to separate wet items (like a bathing suit) from dry ones (like your print copy of Fast Company). And if you’re planning to bring food or drinks, you want these items to stay cool.
We’ve tested some of the best beach bags on the market today and identified five that are thoughtfully designed to improve your day out.
[Photo: Yeti]
Great For Picnics
Yeti Backpack Cooler, $275
A day out in the summer usually involves a picnic of some kind. And if you want to keep your beverages and salads cold, this backpack cooler is a fantastic option. To give you a sense of its capacity, it can fit up to 20 cans. As with other Yeti products, food stays very cold inside, especially if you include an ice pack.
The material is waterproof and repellant, which means anything you pack inside will stay dry even if water is splashed on it. I found it useful to bring a couple of pouches and wet bags to keep books and phones dry within this backpack.
[Photo: State]
Beach, But Make It Fashion
State Wellington Cabana Tote, $165
So you want to be styling at the beach, but you don’t want to compromise on functionality? Do I have the bag for you.
State has created a jelly tote, made of the same thick plastic you might find in jelly sandals. It’s enormous, with thick straps that won’t break, and comes in a very chic tortoise shell print (as well as other sophisticated colors, like caramel and latte). The material is very easy to clean, which is useful when you want to get the sand out. But it also comes with two nylon pouches inside: I use one to keep my phone and popsicle money out of sight, and the other to store wet swimsuits.
[Photo: Bogg]
Perfect For Large Hauls
Bogg Bag, $100 (plus more to trick it out with accessories)
There’s a reason the Bogg bag has become a phenomenon over the last few years. The original sized bag is ideal for the beach: It is made from strong, durable plastic, which is easy to clean, and can fit up to six large towels. Its large base means that it stands upright even in sand, making it easy to find items.
But the bag has gotten even better thanks to a growing array of accessories that neatly clip onto the holes on the bag. There are holders for beverages and phones, keeping these items easy to reach. There are toppers that function like a little table, allowing you to keep drinks and snacks elevated while you’re in the sand. There are also dividers, to keep the cavernous space inside the bag organized.
[Photo: Away]
You Love Pockets
Away Beach Tote, $125
I you’re an organization freak, the luggage maker Away has made the perfect beach bag for you.
It has created a mesh bag with six exterior pockets for you to stash your keys, sunglasses, sunscreen, and novels. Everything is visible, so you can easily locate it. Inside, there is a large zip pocket that can keep your wallet and other items out of view. There’s a dedicated water bottle holder insider. And on the exterior, there’s a clever loop for you to store your towel. (Or yoga mat.) The bag is made of a durable, sturdy plastic that is easy to wash. And the mesh makes it easy to shake off sand. All in all, a very practical bag.
[Photo: Leatherology]
An Eco-Friendly Option
Leatherology Canvas Beach Tote, $105
If you’re interested in a sustainable beach bag, consider Leatherology’s. It is made of organic cotton canvas that has been certified by both Global Organic Textile Standard and Organic Cotton Standard to ensure it has minimal impact on the environment. The trim is made from Italian leather that has been certified by the Leather Working Group. All of these materials are biodegradable, but it is designed to be very durable, so you will carry it for a long time.
The bag is full of useful pockets, including three mesh pockets and three cotton pockets. There are also two large exterior pockets for stashing your phone and books for easy access. And since it is made from canvas, rather than plastic, it is slightly more versatile. It works well as a roomy everyday bag, even when it isn’t the summer. Leatherology also offers customization options, so you can add your monogram to the bag to make it more special.
While Northern California is famous for its wines, it is also full of olive groves, many of which have been owned by the same family for generations. Since 2018, Aishwarya Iyer has devoted her life to persuading the world to appreciate American olive oil through her brand, Brightland. Her trick? Putting it in gorgeous glass bottles with art-adorned labels. “The bottles were a Trojan horse,” Iyer says. “They’re what pulls you into the brand, but what’s inside is magnificent. It was the tactic we used to convert Americans to using better-quality olive oil.”
The strategy worked wellpossibly too well. The 375-milliliter bottles, which sell for $37, went viral on Instagram. People took pictures of them on their kitchen counters. They brought them out for their dinner parties. The bottles suddenly became the go-to hostess gift, and one of Oprah’s favorite things. Iyer was thrilled: Today, one Brightland bottle is purchased every minute. And in 2022, the company landed $6.83 million in venture funding to continue growing.
But in some ways the beautiful bottles were also limiting. People saw them as precious objects, meant to be rationed for special occasions. And yet Iyers bigger goal is to get Americans to use California olive oil for all their cooking needsand in doing so, to support American farmers.
To broaden Brightland’s appeal, Iyer has just launched a new line of products called the Everyday Set featuring an oil for cooking and an oil for dressing salads. They come in a different format: a plastic squeeze bottle. The products are slightly less expensive than those in the glass bottles ($65 for 750 milliliters), although this is still four or five times the price of many other bottles of olive oil on store shelves. But these new Brightland products will soon be sold at Whole Foods stores across the country, allowing the brand to better compete in the olive oil wars.
[Photo: Brightland]
We love squeezing our olive oil
Over the past three years, the squeeze bottle has become the vessel for olive oil. This is partly thanks to Graza, an olive oil brand founded by Andrew Benin in 2022 that has raised $2.8 million in VC capital, which stood out for selling its products in forest-green squeeze bottles.
The squeeze bottle format allows you to better control how much oil comes out of the bottle and to squirt it more precisely into frying pans or salads. This is why chefs and home cooks have decanted olive oil into squeeze bottles for decades. (Many brands, including OXO, sell squeeze bottles for this purpose.) It has also been widely used in adjacent food categories, like hot sauce.
Graza’s innovation was selling its oil in these bottles wrapped in fun, modern branding. But Graza couldn’t copyright the bottles, since they were already commonly used. And it’s become clear that consumers love the format, as many other brands have started selling their oil in squeeze bottles, including California Olive Ranch, O Olive Oil, DeLallo, and Pompeian.
Brightland is among them. In 2023, it launched a pizza oil in a squeeze bottle that was a hit. The company sold out of its first 10,000 units within hours of launching. (Graza’s founder wrote an angry LinkedIn post about how Brightland had created a copycat product, but quickly apologized; Brightland did not comment on the incident.) From this pizza oil launch, Iyer realized that different bottles work in different contexts. “In this case, the squeeze bottle was a little more casual and playful, which is what you want on pizza night,” she says.
[Photo: Brightland]
The New Olive Oil Aisle
For Iyer, it’s been interesting to observe how the format of the bottle has shaped people’s perception of the oil inside. With the glass bottle, people saw Brightland as a luxury or art object. But Iyer wants consumers to reach for high-quality California olive oil whenever they’re cooking or making a salad. “I live in California, and I feel really passionately about supporting these farmers who are just a couple of hours north of us, and who have had these farms for several generations,” she says. “If we don’t cultivate demand for their oil, it won’t exist much longer.”
Iyer also points out that California has the highest quality standards when it comes to olive oil. As has been well-reported, many olive oils in the grocery store are adulterated with cheaper ingredients, like palm or canola oils. Some olive oil that is purportedly made in Italy actually comes from other countries, like Morocco and Tunisia. But the California Department of Food and Agriculture has high standards, and products made here are regularly tested to ensure they are pure.
Iyer wasn’t sure she would be able to get the prices any lower, since domestic olives oils are higher in quality and the cost of labor here is higher than it is overseas. But she found a farm that was able to manufacture at scale for Brightland, which helped bring down the price a little bit. At $65 for the pair of bottles, this olive oil is much more expensive than the average American is used to spending. Graza’s oil bundle, for instance, which comes from Spain, costs $37.
Iyer believes there are some consumers who will recognize the value in Brightland’s offering. The brand is trying to tell a story about how much frsher this oil is, and how it contributes to the livelihoods of American farmers. And ultimately, she believes that what is likely to convince them is the taste. That’s why she works with farmers to create a very specific flavor profile, much like winemakers do with wines. “It all comes down to flavor,” she says. “We’re blending varietals to be the right deliciousness right out of the bottle.”
Each generation of employees is shaped by its times. In todays era of perma-change, Generation Z is exhibiting distinct professional traits.
Having come of age during a period of economic instability and a global crisis, theyre less likely to hang their hats on a single career identity. Theyre less focused on salary and more drawn to balance, but theyre also highly pragmatic. The latest Gen Z workplace trend, adopting a standard work uniform, is just one example of that pragmatism. It also shows that while they value work-life balance, theyre also open to clever ways for achieving it.
Leaders stand to gainor losea lot by making the effort to understand Gen Z. Because if theyre not satisfied, theyll move on. According to the a 2024 workplace survey by EY, 38% of respondents said they were likely to quit their jobs in the next yeara rise largely driven by Gen Z. Understanding their work habits and expectations is essential to retaining top talent.
As the CEO of a company with over 750 employees and a growing percentage of Gen Zers, Ive had the opportunity to observe generational differences firsthand. Here are the strategies I use to address the habits and expectations of our youngest cohort.
Promote an automation-first mindset
Ive written before about the virtues of lazy employees. While that adjective is usually pejorative, I use it to describe something powerful: a professional who looks for the easiest, most efficient way to get something done. In my experience, Gen Z tends to share this superpower. These days, that often entails using the latest tools and apps on the market. Indeed, Gen Z expects tech tools at work to match the ease of use of social media apps they use in their personal lives. If theres a new project management platform that matches the intuitiveness of TikTok, chances are theyll be proficient in hours.
Promoting an automation-first approach in your organization empowers Gen Z employees to tap into their digital fluency and find the most efficient ways to complete tasks. At my company, for example, we encourage employees to set aside time to stay informed about the latest tech releases relevant to their job functions (with the help of sites like G2) and share their favorites with the team. Crucially, leaders should emphasize that tools like AI are meant to enhance, not replace, human work.
This approach naturally fosters multigenerational collaboration. While older generations might impart important lessons in leadership and management, younger employees can bring their innate tech literacy to the table. This not only breaks down unnecessarily rigid hierarchies, but it also helps to engage Gen Zers and boosts their feelings of investment in the company.
Offer personalized training and development
In the past, employee training was fairly linear. For professionals in a given role, the progression from entry-level skills to management typically followed a similar path. Todays requisite skill sets look different on a conceptual level. Deloitte has called it the return of the Renaissance figuresomeone with multidimensional talents, interests, and knowledge. That means building skills in tools and technology, data and analytics, as well as in management, creativity, and people leadership. The onus is on leaders to ensure employees receive the training they need. Dont assume they already have the necessary skills, especially since younger employees may sometimes overestimate their abilities.
In addition to traditional (and irreplaceable) person-to-person training and mentoring, Im a big proponent of AI platforms to offer employees personalized, scalable training, including both hard and soft skills. Companies like BetterUp, for example, offer employees actionable professional development skills, like how to handle a sensitive work conversation. Whats more, as your company grows, AI tools are a cost-efficient solution for continuing to offer employees at all levels the training they need.
To bring it all together, create a training pipeline that gives younger employees hands-on opportunities to apply the skills theyre learning and build the ones they aspire to develop.
Present flexibility on your terms
Its no secret that Gen Z is more accustomed to flexibility than any other generation. Many of them entered the workforce when working from home was the norm. For younger professionals, a flexible workplace is a priority. According to ZipRecruiters 2025 Annual Grad Report, 82% of college students hope to work remotely at least one day a week. However, just 33% (of the class of 2023) want fully remote workplaces.
Some companies are already on board with offering hybrid work arrangements. I happen to believe that working in the office is important for collaboration, training, and doing our best work. Striking a balance can be tricky.
To address the needs of Gen Z without overthrowing your organizations goals and values, leaders can offer flexibility in intentional ways. For example, a structured hybrid schedulelike a few days of their choice each month to work remotelycan give young professionals the breathing room they need. You could also offer work-from-anywhere weeks once a quarter, allowing employees to work where they feel best able to focus in that moment.
Even if the norm is to work within the office, leaders should make it explicit that employees can request time away if a personal need ariseswhether its a mental health day, a family obligation, or just space to recharge. You can also reinforce the idea that your organization values its employees rich, full lives outside of work. Gen Z employees who feel free to share their full selves, including their unique interests and hobbies, are more likely to feel engaged and committed to their organization.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Russia has persistently targeted attacks on power grids and energy infrastructure, often leaving whole communities in the dark. In response, a transformation is happening across the country, as war has forced Ukrainian society to quickly pivot toand start innovating infinding renewable energy solutions that can keep the power on in the face of continued infrastructure bombings.
Ukrainian communities are prioritizing energy security
Communities across Ukraine are becoming energy secure and energy independent: adding solar power stations to schools, hospitals, and homes; backing up that solar with battery storage capacity; and switching to more energy efficient heating and cooling with heat pumps and insulation. This is happening across Ukraine in response to the war and the years of large-scale attacks on power grids and energy infrastructure, which Russia continues to this day.
Cities and communities across Ukrainefrom Kyiv and Horenka to Rivne and Zviahel to Lviv and Sheptytskyiare scaling up this energy-secure trifecta wherever possible. And its paying off both in energy independence and economic savings; in many cases, these critical upgrades are cutting annual energy bills in half or more.
Hospitals have become the natural first stop for these kinds of upgrades since attacks to power grids and resulting blackouts jeopardize medical safety and medical procedures. The advanced Unbroken medical facility in Lviv, for example, which treats many of the veterans and victims of the war, is rapidly covering its many roofs with solar power and filling its basements with batteries so that its patients are protected from further energy insecurity and instability during surgery or recovery processes.
School facilities have become a second stop for upgrades since their energy footprint is both substantial and switchablemeaning theres usually ample roof space for a quick solar retrofit. Since schools also come with a sizable building footprint, theyre often utilized as bomb shelters for the community, which makes the energy secure retrofit even more essential and life-saving.
Multifamily housing unitse.g., homeowners associations (HOAs) in bigger cities like Kyiv and dormitories in cities like Zviahel for internally displaced persons from the warhave also become easy retrofits, transforming roofs into solar stations, backyards into heat pump housing, and basements into battery storage facilities.
These HOA retrofits have been so successful at the local level, the national association of homeowners may soon become the organizing mechanism for more of these whole-system energy security retrofits, coordinating a national campaign across the country.
Ukrainian industry is transforming
Communities across Ukraine are seeing the future of industryand where the job markets are headedand readying the renewable workforce of tomorrow. They understand where the market is going, especially in a country like Ukraine that is quickly transitioning to a more energy secure future. Which is why theyre launching training centers and school programs to teach Ukraines youth in renewable energy technology.
This is happening in coal mining towns like Sheptytskyi, where youth are learning how to build, operate, and repair solar panels and wind turbines, batteries, heat pumps, and more. Call it a just transition, or just call it smart business modeling. This is forward-thinking planning that could easily envision a future Ukraine that is exporting this industrial expertise and clean energy products across Europe and Asia.
Utilities are also transforming their industry to meet the moment. Water utilities in places like Rivne are realizing that in order to sustain their business model of providing clean and accessible water to communities, solar power stations must be an integral component of their business strategy.
In order to ensure that drinking water is available to residents 24/7, and free from the all-too-common blackouts that come with wartime and aging infrastructure, water utility managers are becoming powerful messengers for more solar power stations across Ukraine and unlikely leaders in the clean energy transition.
Leading innovation locally
In response to the war effort, cities across Ukraine have had to give up a sizable chunk of their tax revenue to the national government and as a result have had to become resourceful in thinking about local innovation, leadership, and autonomy. This is another reason to do all of the abovefrom pursuing energy security to supporting a local clean tech industrybecause nothing is guaranteed in terms of national government support during wartime.
This dynamic has also led to the emergence of a new kind of local leadership that is rising to the occasion. Local mayors and their deputies are making the compelling case for the energy security and clean tech industry identified above, building new trust and momentum within the community at a time when its desperately needed.
Now, these three trends above are all positive developments, even if theyre in response to an awful and devastating war. But for them to be sustainable and scalable to other communities across Ukraine who are desiring the same level of energy security and independence, viable new clean tech industry, and local autonomy, foreign aid dollars and technical support flowing into the country need to be configured accordingly.
As is often the case with aid dollars and technical support from Western countries during wartimea dynamic that was visible in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for examplethose funds often go to larger foreign contractors and consultants versus local organizations doing the work on the ground. As a result, those aid dollars and technical expertise end up leaving the country instead of building and strengthening local capacity for postwar leadership and long-term viability.
For these gains to be sustainable, more foreign aid and support needs to stay in Ukraine versus leaving it, building new capacity, industry, and infrastructure. Thats how the West helps Ukraine achieve the security, independence, industry, and autonomy its looking for.
Much of the existing work is already being driven by strong leaders on the ground who want to build a more resilient Ukraine. Now just imagine what good could be done if U.S. funders stepped up to really scale this work nationally. And imagine if funders within the European Union seized this moment to help Ukraines accession to the EU be a role-modeled one, of a country that is retrofitting to be more climate resilient.
Thats the opportunity in Ukraine. To leapfrog into a country that is energy secure and independent, leading the clean tech industrial revolution, and supporting local leaders and autonomy in the process. The West can support this vision. Its waiting to be realized.
