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When my business went through a difficult season, I turned to my friend, ChatGPT. I asked the Large Language Model (LLM) for insights and advice on how to leverage my strengths and pivot my business as budgets for womens leadership programs shifted downward. When the well-framed answers started pouring in, I didnt pause to check in with myself and ask if my opinion diverged from ChatGPT or whether this advice aligned with my values and mission. In fact, I didnt even think to ask ChatGPT what might work in my favor if I just stayed the course.I was a LLeMming: a term Lila Shroff uses to describe compulsive AI users in The Atlantic. Lila Shroff shares that just as the adoption of writing reduced our memory and calculators devalued basic arithmetic skills, AI could be atrophying our critical thinking skills. A MODERN LEADERSHIP BLIND SPOT In my TEDx talk, I share that we are all susceptible to a cognitive bias called authority bias, which means we are heavily influenced by the opinions and judgments of perceived authority figures. This could be accepting your bosss input without critical evaluation, or it could be blind trust that ChatGPT always provides the right answers. Large Language Models offer us 24/7 access to advice and guidance. Its easy to fall into an authority bias toward LLMs because not only do tools like ChatGPT answer all questions with an astonishingly confident tone, but outsourcing our decision-making is convenient. Also known as Cognitive Offloading, the outsourcing of cognition helps people manage mental load, memory demands, and decision burden. There is also discomfort and effort involved in turning inward (and checking in is not quick, nor are the answers obvious). Given the fact that LLMs are not well-rounded, critical-minded people, this can be dangerous. LLMs have been known to hallucinate by making up data or resources, reduce cognitive problem-solving skills, and hinder spontaneous creativity. It also has a bias for positivity, which means it can validate or support even the worst of ideas. This bias can be especially powerful in making you drift off track as a leader. Heres what to do when you realize youre outsourcing your thinking (whether to an LLM or to a person). GET CURIOUS ABOUT YOUR MOTIVATIONS When I sought out ChatGPT to help me make some business pivots at the beginning of 2025, it seemed like a safe place to go to express my concerns and get advice without judgment. What I was really seeking was a sense of certainty in an uncertain time. Its tempting to default to our favorite LLM when uncertainty hits. One of my clients, a founder in the events industry, was feeling stuck in a creative strategy. She wanted to offload some of the uncertainty she was feeling around her marketing strategy, and so she asked ChatGPT to give her feedback. It gave her a host of strategies to try. When she asked my opinion, I asked her: Does the strategy align with your values? Does it move you and your team closer to your goals and objectives? Most importantly, does this recommendation energize you, or does it drain you?If you are wondering whether or not to use a strategy or idea suggested by AI, you can ask yourself these same questions. You can also start to take track of your own tendencies, like how frequently you turn to your favorite LLM to solve a problem, or even validate your choices and beliefs. Are you: Trying to eliminate uncertainty? Seeking validation? Craving alternatives? Or looking for novel ideas? When you notice why you turn to your favorite LLM for advice, it becomes easier to slow down and ensure you are using it for the right reasons. TRUST YOURSELF FIRST For over three months, I’ve stopped asking ChatGPT (my preferred LLM) for advice on business challenges after I realized I was drifting off course. While building a skill set around AI and LLM is critical as a leader, this exercise helped me rebuild self-trust. I feel better in my physical and mental health, my creativity has returned, and I feel back in alignment with my business, my decisions, and my future. I made some hard decisions to quit things that weren’t working for me (that were very well supported by ChatGPT). One of my clients realized that she was trusting Claude, her preferred LLM, too much for leadership advice. To combat this, she started to read the advice in a toddlers voice. It helped her remember that the recommendations, while sounding smart, generally offer no more experience and education than a toddler. Its often guessing at best. Sow down enough to assess whether this advice aligns with your value system, feels aligned, or even whether its advice youd entertain if a younger coworker suggested it. DONT OUTSOURCE YOUR LEADERSHIP POWER A client of mine remembers the precise day she started looking for a new job. It was the day she shared her annual marketing strategy with her CEO. As CMO, she had spent months gathering enough data and research to craft this careful plan. Her CEO took her plan, put it in ChatGPT, and told her they would be moving forward with one of ChatGPTs strategies, instead of her custom-crafted plan. She felt her intelligence was undermined as the CEO swapped her decades of marketing knowledge for a tool that has been known to guess. As modern leaders, we should be both proficient in using AI tools and also cognizant of when not to use them. We have to trust that we can bring all of our five senses to real business issues, and AI cannot. Delegating our approach and decisions to AI leads to a sea of sameness, and in my clients situation, employee disengagement. In my own experience, defaulting to LLMs for the answer made it harder to think creatively and on the fly for solutions. Remember, your experience, insights, and senses are unique and valuable. They are your competitive advantage. No AI tool can replace this.
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E-Commerce
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During an earnings call in June 2025, KB Homes McGibneywhose company prefers outright home price cuts over incentives when adjustments are neededsaid that some buyers turning to competitors are effectively overpaying for new builds to obtain mortgage rate buydowns. If those buyers need to sell in the near term, he warned, they could find themselves underwater and unable to recoup the artificially high base prices. “I believe that there are [builder] customers that are overpaying for the home to effectively get an incentive… They may potentially be upside down when they try to sell that home, McGibney said back in June. In January 2026, ResiClub interviewed KB Home CEO Jeffrey Mezger and COO Rob McGibneybeginning March 1, 2026, McGibney will assume the CEO role. During that conversation, ResiClub asked KB Home about that upside-down comment. Mezger and McGibney reaffirmed their stance, saying theyll continue to lean into transparent pricing over incentives. We believe in price transparency, Mezger tells ResiClub. Our biggest competitor is resaleand [resale] sellers dont offer incentive packages. In the view of KB Home executives, leaning too hard into incentive-driven strategieswhen affordability adjustments or net effective price cuts are needed to meet the marketcan translate into inflated base prices, larger loan balances, and greater near-term resale risk if a buyer needs to move sooner than expected.Our buyers tell us they like the clarity, McGibney tells ResiClub. They [our buyers] know exactly what theyre paying for I think [transparent pricing] really lowers that risk of [the buyer] overpaying for a home and potentially being upside down. Not long after mortgage rates spiked in 2022 and the pandemic housing boom fizzled out, many large homebuilders began offering sizable mortgage rate buydowns. Some have gone as far as shelling out $40,000, $50,000, or even $60,000 toward forward commitments that can get a borrowers mortgage rate below 4.99%or even 3.99%. Through an economic lens, the homebuyer is still ultimately paying for those buydowns if the headline price isnt coming down. According to AEI Housing Center, 64% of new single-family home sales in June 2025 by the 21 largest U.S. homebuilders included a permanent buydowncompared with 13% for all other new-home sales. Many large homebuilders do this because arbitrage in the bond market allows them to achieve a marginally larger reduction in a buyers monthly payment for each dollar spent on mortgage rate buydowns than for each dollar spent on outright price cuts. Here’s what Edward Pinto, senior fellow and co-director of the AEI Housing Center, wrote in a report published in November 2025: Why dont [more] builders just cut prices instead? The main reason is that permanent buydowns are far more cost-effective lowering the rate [via forward commitments for buydowns] by 100 bps costs the builder roughly 3.2% of the sale price. To achieve the same monthly payment through a direct price cut, the builder would need to cut the price by 10%. Furthermore, once a builder cuts the price on one home, buyers would expect similar discounts for the entire subdivision. But there is another factor at work. Permanent buydowns funded through bulk forward commitments are excluded from the seller concession limits, which cap how much a seller can contribute toward the borrowers closing costs. For Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac seller concessions are generally limited to 3-6% and for FHA the limit is generally 6%. Over 40% of sales by large builders have a combination of seller concessions plus permanent buydown cost in excess of 6%.”
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E-Commerce
Start in a low-level position and work your way upward. Does that even apply anymore? In fact, the career ladder doesnt work for everyone anymore. Right now, as technology disrupts the work rules, there are no clear paths forward. The linear career path changed somewhere between the rise of the gig economy and the rise of artificial intelligence. Companies are restructuring. Some industries may collapse entirely in the next five years. Ive gone from studying law to studying software entrepreneurship to being a self-improvement essayist. My career is still an experiment in progress. The world of work is changing. And Im changing with it. The people who make it are not those with impressive titles, but those who are willing to adjust to the new 21st-century workplace. Thats why these ideas matter right now. I hope they help you rethink your work life. 1. Build skills, not titles If the promotion is not coming, dont dwell on it. Or obsess over the next one. Focus on what you can do to take control of your skills. The title may look great on LinkedIn, but you will want more than that. Do more for your present skills. Can you get good at other skills beyond your current expertise? Can you interpret data? Manage difficult conversations? Build better relationships with the people on your team? These skills travel with you. Titles dont. Titles change, while your values and skills evolve. You are either ahead of change or being left behind. Dont focus too much on reaching the final level of management. Stack indispensable skills you can take anywhere. That means take that weird project nobody wants. Youll learn something. Say yes to the cross-functional teameven if its more work. Learn the skill that scares you a little. You will probably be terrified in the process. But you will learn a thing or two. That new skill will open more doors than any title ever could. 2. Think in networks, not hierarchies The org chart lies to you. It tells you theres one path up. It tells you your bosss boss is more important than the engineer in another department. Or to keep your head down and wait your turn. You are better than that. Ignore it. The most valuable people I know have spider-web abilities. They know people across industries, across functions, across companies. When opportunity knocks, it usually comes through someone you helped three years ago, not through your annual review. I worked with the Microsoft small-business team a few years ago because someone saw my work on a blog. If you can help a former colleague troubleshoot something, try to find a pocket of time to help. You never know how you could cross paths again. Be curious about what others doeven when you are out for a chat. Start small. Message someone whose work you admire. Just say you admire it. Introduce two people who should know each other. Share what youre learning. Publicly. Even if it feels scary. Make yourself useful to people you respectnot just to your boss. Useful to humans doing interesting work. 3. Experiment like your career depends on it Sometimes it does. Whats risky is betting your entire future on one carefully planned path. Diversify. Its easier said than done, but do what you must within what works for you. It will become the foundation for a career you didnt even plan for. Be ready for what could happen. You could be sabotaging your work life if you are waiting for the right time or the perfect plan. Your experiments dont need to change your entire work life. Youre not quitting your job (unless you are, in which case, have fun). Youre just testing things. You could spend a few months learning something unrelated to your job after work. Youll gain skills youd never get at work. Start a personal side project with no clear return on investmentjust because it interests you. Follow your curiosities. Experiment your way into new skills. Those that fail teach you what you dont want. The ones that succeed show you possibilities. 4. Redefine what “success” means for you Ask yourself: Whose definition of career success am I pursuing? I ask myself that question all the time. I spent my twenties trying to impress people. I wanted to work for a prestigious company, and have an impressive title. I got the offer. It didnt feel right. I turned it down. Ive never looked back. Your success may not be the pursuit of a career ladder. It may be living a life that fits you. Maybe success is the flexibility to pick up your kids from school. Or working on problems that matter. Maybe its having time to train for something youve always wanted to do. Maybe its all three, in different seasons of your life. My point is, you get to decide. And you get to change your mind. Find answers to these questions: What does a good day look like for me? What am I optimizing for right now? Money? Learning? Growth? Time? What would I do if I wasn’t trying to impress anyone? Your answers will change over time. Thats fine. You are evolving. The 21st-century career right now is not linear. But you have more choices. More opportunities to find your zone of genius. The uncertainty is the opportunity. Every unexpected change in your career. Every time the path disappears. Thats where you get to choose who you become. Youre not climbing a ladder anymore. Youre exploring what could be. Thats more interesting, I think. You get to build something wider and more uniquely yours. So stack those skills. Grow your network. Run your experiments. Define success on your terms. The career you build wont look like anyone elses. Its yours now and in the future.
Category:
E-Commerce
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