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Even though it was built more than 100 years ago, a former engineering lab on the Ford Motor campus in Dearborn, Michigan, is a vision of the company’s future. The building originally opened in 1924 as a kind of early research and development lab, but Ford has now transformed it into a modern office building that the company sees as a model for its new global workplace standards. With more than 300 million square feet of offices in 46 countries, the approach for this one building will have wide implications for the face of the company, and the workforce it’s able to attract. The Ford Engineering Lab, as it is still known, is Ford’s version of a post-pandemic, human-centric workplace, according to Jennifer Kolstad, Ford’s global design and brand director. Sitting on a long curving couch within one of the open collaboration and social spaces in the center of the building, she points out the range of spaces around her. There are small modular meeting rooms, clusters of desks for small teams, café seats, and cushy chairs with side tables that look straight out of a fancy hotel lobby. “Before, Ford Motor Co. was a culture of desks,” Kolstad says. “We have consciously worked to reconstruct the association with how work gets done, which is that work does not necessarily occur at a desk.” A historic setting for a modern workplace An architect whose previous work has included luxury hotels in the Middle East and hospitality design for large architecture firms like Gensler and HKS, Kolstad is no office traditionalist. When she joined Ford in 2019, she set out to bring her hospitality experience to bear on a new kind of workplace. “Part of this work is to encourage people to share information, and to want to be together sharing ideas, in order to be more innovative,” she says. [Photo: Ford] A building from 1924 might seem an odd place for this kind of transformation to begin, but this building was different from the start. Designed by Albert Kahn, the famed industrial architect behind many Ford company buildings and factories, the Lab was intended to spur design innovations by putting ideas people, designers, engineers, and executives all under one roof. [Photo: Ford] And it’s a big roof. The long, two-story, 221,000-square-foot building has room for hundreds of workers, and the original design pushed the office space to its sides. Along the front face of the building there’s a dark wood-lined hallway the company calls Mahogany Row. (Fact check: It’s actually walnut.) Down this hall were the highly prized private offices that executives clamored for when this building originally opened, complete with picture windows to the outside and large anterooms where their personal secretaries sat. [Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy Ford] At the end of Mahogany Row are two larger adjoining offices, one for company founder Henry Ford, and the other for his son, Edsel. The Fords’ offices have been carefully preservedthis was the elder Ford’s last office at the company before his death in 1947but the rest of the spaces on Mahogany Row are now history-tinged conference and meeting rooms, updated with modern equipment and furnishings. [Photo: Ford] On the other side of hat hallway, a door leads to a light-filled open plan space, with a double-height cavern running down its spine. That double-height space, like a top hat on the building, is lined up and down with large skylights that pour daylight throughout. This facility has the DNA of the archetypal Henry Ford assembly line, and it sometimes worked that way. Ford workers could design, engineer, and build full-scale vehicle prototypes all within this one building, the car’s chassis moving through the building while hanging from steel rails that still sit just below the skylights. Ford’s Model A, introduced in 1927, was designed in this building. [Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy Ford] The ‘epicenter’ of a newly centralized corporate campus After many decades of use and several renovationsperplexingly, drop ceilings were added in 1978, blocking out the skylightsthe building was decommissioned by Ford’s real estate arm, Ford Land, in 2007. But its history, and those skylights, played a role in giving the building a second life. [Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy Ford] The company reengaged the building in 2015, and it was highlighted for renovation in a large-scale master planning effort in 2017. The effort was led by the architecture firm Snhetta, which is also behind the design of a 2-million-square-foot R&D hub under construction across the street from the Engineering Lab. Instead of buildings that were previously scattered across the low-density suburbia of Dearborn, Ford is centralizing its offices and facilities into a corporate campus. “This is the epicenter,” Kolstad says, inside the Engineering Lab. “For us, there was no question we were going to make use of this building.” [Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy Ford] The master plan for rethinking the corporate campus came out in 2019, and also started a process within the company to focus not just on the buildings but how employees use those spaces. Kolstad says the company has embraced the Well Building Standard, along with its evidence-based building design and operation protocols that prioritize human health and well-being. Rather than just thinking of offices as rooms full of desks, the company shifted its focus to environmental sustainability, natural light and materials, biophilic design principles, and the emerging science of neuroaesthetics. “It’s all very core to the way that we’re designing all of our buildings,” Kolstad says. [Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy Ford] New design principles take architectural shape in Ford offices The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic kicked this work into overdrive. Rather than waiting to see these ideas take form in the new research and development building that’s still under construction across the street, Ford folded them into the renovation of the Engineering Lab. Inside the building on a recent day, these principles show up in the varied types of workstations, the formal and informal collaboration areas, the seating, the conference room furnishings, and especially, in all that natural light. Groups of workers could be seen gathering around large screens in quiet conference rooms, while one-on-one meetings were happening at the central café space or on a long library table or on the steps of a grandstand-style tiered seating structure. On one end of the building, an open floor was peppered with a more traditional layout of individual desks, though even these rows were interrupted with clusters of desks pulled together seemingly ad hoc. “All of it is meant to evolve over time and, frankly, let our employes decide how they want to use the space,” Kolstad says. [Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy Ford] ‘We better be looking good to them’: Building loyalty among a new generation of workers When Kolstad joined Ford, part of the job was to reckon with the demographic reality that an estimated 60% of the company’s workforce was turning over within the following decade. “That really struck me because it meant that we were going to have this totally regenerated new younger workforce that had no historical loyalty to the company, necessarily,” she says. “So part of our work is about reestablishing that. We’ve got Gen Z, we’re now moving toward Gen Alpha joining us. We better be looking good to them, and ready for them.” [Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy Ford] Kolstad says the Engineering Lab, and the broader workplace transformation underway across Ford’s real estate portfolio, is all about designing for outcomes. She calls the approach “human affordance thinking,” and says every design decision was considered through the lens of improving workers’ experiences. “We were asking the question, do we believe it’s going to sustain a desired outcome, like innovation or collaboration or community building. And if it didn’t, we vetted it, and we didn’t allow it to move forward,” she says. The efficacy of these design approaches will likely become more clear in the coming months. Ford is instituting a five-day return to office policy in September, up from the current three. Having people in this office building every day will help Kolstad and her team understand how the design is, or maybe isn’t, creating the conditions for those worker experiences and outcomes. Whatever they learn, she says the building is set up to be able to evolve. And this approach is being implemented in Ford’s other offices around the world, and will even trickle out into its dealerships in the coming years. The goals for the new Ford offices go beyond aesthetics or office amenities, she says, though those are both important. “This is as much about cultural change as it is about physical tools,” she says. “These buildings are just tools.”
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E-Commerce
As a technologist, and a serial entrepreneur, Ive witnessed technology transform industries from manufacturing to finance. But Ive never had to reckon with the possibility of technology that transforms itself. And thats what we are faced with when it comes to AIthe prospect of self-evolving AI. What is self-evolving AI? Well, as the name suggests, its AI that improves itselfAI systems that optimize their own prompts, tweak the algorithms that drive them, and continually iterate and enhance their capabilities. Science fiction? Far from it. Researchers recently created the Darwin Gödel Machine, which is a self-improving system that iteratively modifies its own code. The possibility is real, its closeand its mostly ignored by business leaders. And this is a mistake. Business leaders need to pay close attention to self-evolving AI, because it poses risks that they must address now. Self-Evolving AI vs. AGI Its understandable that business leaders ignore self-evolving AI, because traditionally the issues it raises have been addressed in the context of artificial general intelligence (AGI), something thats important, but more the province of computer scientists and philosophers. In order to see that this is a business issue, and a very important one, first we have to clearly distinguish between the two things. Self-evolving AI refers to systems that autonomously modify their own code, parameters, or learning processes, improving within specific domains without human intervention. Think of an AI optimizing supply chains that refines its algorithms to cut costs, then discovers novel forecasting methodspotentially overnight. AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) represents systems with humanlike reasoning across all domains, capable of writing a novel or designing a bridge with equal ease. And while AGI remains largely theoretical, self-evolving AI is here now, quietly reshaping industries from healthcare to logistics. The Fast Take-Off Trap One of the central risks created by self-evolving AI is the risk of AI take-off. Traditionally, AI take-off refers to the process by which going from a certain threshold of capability (often discussed as “human-level”) to being superintelligent and capable enough to control the fate of civilization. As we said above, we think that the problem of take-off is actually more broadly applicable, and specifically important for business. Why? The basic point is simpleself-evolving AI means AI systems that improve themselves. And this possibility isnt restricted to broader AI systems that mimic human intelligence. It applies to virtually all AI systems, even ones with narrow domains, for example AI systems that are designed exclusively for managing production lines or making financial predictions and so on. Once we recognize the possibility of AI take off within narrower domains, it becomes easier to see the huge implications that self-improving AI systems have for business. A fast take-off scenariowhere AI capabilities explode exponentially within a certain domain or even a certain organizationcould render organizations obsolete in weeks, not years. For example, imagine a companys AI chatbot evolves from handling basic inquiries to predict and influence customer behavior so precisely that it achieves 80%+ conversion rates through perfectly timed, personalized interactions. Competitors using traditional approaches cant match this psychological insight and rapidly lose customers. The problem generalizes to every area of business: within months, your competitors operational capabilities could dwarf yours. Your five-year strategic plan becomes irrelevant, not because markets shifted, but because of their AI evolved capabilities you didnt anticipate. When Internal Systems Evolve Beyond Control Organizations face equally serious dangers from their own AI systems evolving beyond control mechanisms. For example: Monitoring Failure: IT teams cant keep pace with AI self-modifications happening at machine speed. Traditional quarterly reviews become meaningless when systems iterate thousands of times per day. Compliance Failure: Autonomous changes bypass regulatory approval processes. How do you maintain SOX compliance when your financial AI modifies its own risk assessment algorithms without authorization? Security Failure: Self-evolving systems introduce vulnerabilities that cybersecurity frameworks werent designed to handle. Each modification potentially creates new attack vectors. Governance Failure: Boards lose meaningful oversight when AI evolves faster than they can meet or understand changes. Directors find themselves governing systems they cannot comprehend. Strategy Failure: Long-term planning collapses as AI rewrites fundamental business assumptions on weekly cycles. Strategic planning horizons shrink from years to weeks. Beyond individual organizations, entire market sectors could destabilize. Industries like consulting or financial servicesbuilt on information asymmetriesface existential threats if AI capabilities spread rapidly, making their core value propositions obsolete overnight. Catastrophizing to Prepare In our book TRANSCEND: Unlocking Humanity in the Age of AI, we propose the CARE methodologyCatastrophize, Assess, Regulate, Exitto systematically anticipate and mitigate AI risks. Catastrophizing isnt pessimism; its strategic foresight applied to unprecedented technological uncertainty. And our methodology forces leaders to ask uncomfortable questions: What if our AI begins rewriting its own code to optimize performance in ways we dont understand? What if our AI begins treating cybersecurity, legal compliance, or ethical guidelines as optimization constraints to work around rather than rules to follow? What if it starts pursuing objectives, we didn’t explicitly program but that emerge from its learning process? Key diagnostic questions every CEO should ask so that they can identify organizational vulnerabilities before they become existential threats are: Immediate Assessment: Which AI systems have self-modification capabilities? How quickly can we detect behavioral changes?What monitoring mechanisms track AI evolution in real-time? Operational Readiness: Can governance structures adapt to weekly technological shifts? Do compliance frameworks account for self-modifying systems? How would we shut down an AI system distributed across our infrastructure? Strategic Positioning: Are we building self-improving AI or static tools? What business model aspects depend on human-level AI limitations that might vanish suddenly? Four Critical Actions for Business Leaders Based on my work with organizations implementing advanced AI systems, here are five immediate actions I recommend: Implement Real-Time AI Monitoring: Build systems tracking AI behavior changes instantly, not quarterly. Embed kill switches and capability limits that can halt runaway systems before irreversible damage. Establish Agile Governance: Traditional oversight fails when AI evolves daily. Develop adaptive governance structures operating at technological speed, ensuring boards stay informed about system capabilities and changes. Prioritize Ethical Alignment: Embed value-based constitutions into AI systems. Test rigorously for biases and misalignment, learning from failures like Amazons discriminatory hiring tool. Scenario-Plan Relentlessly: Prepare for multiple AI evolution scenarios. Whats your response if a competitors AI suddenly outpaces yours? How do you maintain operations if your own systems evolve beyond control? Early Warning Signs Every Executive Should Monitor The transition from human-guided improvement to autonomous evolution might be so gradual that organizations miss the moment when they lose effective oversight. Therefore, smart business leaders are sensitive to signs that reveal troubling escalation paths: AI systems demonstrating unexpected capabilities beyond original specifications Automated optimization tools modifying their own parameters without human approval Cross-system integration where AI tools begin communicating autonomously Performance improvements that accelerate rather than plateau over time Why Action Cant Wait As Geoffrey Hinton has warned, unchecked AI development could outstrip human control entirely. Companies beginning preparation nowwith robust monitoring systems, adaptive governance structures, and scenario-based strategic planningwill be best positioned to thrive. Those waiting for clearer signals may find themselves reacting to changes they can no longer control.
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E-Commerce
Business is a team sport, and it’s nice to have the camaraderie of laughing, grinding toward deadlines, and even gossiping with your teammates. But when youre the boss, youre not just one of the creweven if youd like the easy camaraderie shared among people who arent calling the shots. What happens when layoffs are approaching, or the company is facing budget cuts? You may feel lonelyyou know whats coming but lack peers to confide in or commiserate with. Then there are the everyday stressors that come with leadership, like giving feedback or telling someone they won’t be getting the promotion. It can be lonely at the top. If you miss being part of the team, here are some actions you can take. Accept your position and the restrictions that come with it As a leader, there are many things you wont be able to share with the folks on your teamand thats just the way it is. For example, you may feel jealousy when you see them laughing and having a good time while youre stuck doing the budgeting. Dont fight these feelings; acknowledge them. Accept the reality that youre the leader, and that many times youll have to stand alone. Find a trusted adviser Even though youre the boss, you still need someone to bounce ideas off of: you cant live in a silo. Find a person who shares your philosophies regarding business, leadership, and people. Establish a consistent cadence and routine for working with your adviser outside of your company. Note that this should be a reciprocal relationship; offer your ideas and opinions to your adviser when asked. Be someone in whom they can confide. Find appropriate times to pop in Just because youre the boss doesn’t mean you cant have any part of the day-to-day team operations. Find instances where you can pop in and be part of the team. Be judicious about thisfor example, you probably dont want to hop in on a meeting the team can handle on their own. An appropriate time to join the team may be when everyone is working toward a deadline and the load is intense. Otherwise, be present, but not overbearing. You have a new team group Even though youre the boss, youre not completely alone. You have new peersother managers, or the executive leadership team. Everything evolves and changes; you can have fun with this new group, too. Look for opportunities to connect, even if you miss your old team. You will evolve as a leader. Being the boss can be a great new opportunity, even if you miss the camaraderie that came without that title. Instead of longing for what was, make the most of your position and forge new relationships among your peers in leadership.
Category:
E-Commerce
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