It’s been an unprecedented and brutal week for the advertising industry. The finalization of Omnicom Groups $13 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group (IPG) (the biggest takeover in advertising history) is affecting tens of thousands of workersmost immediately the 4,000 expected to be laid off by the end of the year.
Both Omnicom and IPG own many different ad agency brands, all of which will be profoundly impacted by the merger. Omnicom is retaining only McCann from the IPG roster of agency networks, while folding FCB into BBDO, and both DDB and MullenLowe into TBWA, in order to achieve Omnicom Chairman and CEO John Wren’s goal of $750 million in synergies.
These are more than just a collection of acronyms, though. They are major agency brands, built over decades and generations, that will now disappear as their parent holding company fights to grow, survive, and remain competitive.
You’d be forgiven if you think the ad world is an alphabet soup of who’s eating who. But there is another side to the business that’s steering clear from the publicly traded drama. Independent agencies are growing in number, and in the scale and scope of work theyre being assigned by major brands.
It’s a trend that has been bubbling up for years. According to an Ibis World report, the number of U.S. ad agencies grew 2.2% from 2019 to 2024. Even anecdotally, there has been a surge in new creative shops. Isle of Any, for example, was launched in January by former Droga5 execs, and has already done work for The New York Times, A24, OpenAI, and Coinbase.
Part of the indie boom is undoubtedly a cultural correction to the mess that is major ad holding companies, as talent flees corporate bureaucracy for greener, more creative pastures. But it’s more than that at this point. In recent years, major brands have shown an increased willingness to work with these small shops despite (or because of) their size.
For years, independent agency Rethink has been winning industry awards and getting business results for Heinz. Mother, an agency founded in London 30 years ago, has a range of big clients, including Buick, Uber, Cheerios, and Stella Artois. And, of course, independent agency Wieden+Kennedy is known for its work for Nike, McDonald’s, Ford, and Michelob Ultra.
Amid all the ad world chaos, I spoke to indie agency execs at award-winning shops Rethink, Tombras, Joan Creative, Haymaker, and Mother about what the ad industry landscape looks like from their vantage point at this moment. As technology, data, and, in particular AI, levels the playing field in so many ways, these independents see a distinct competitive advantage in the combination of original creative and strategic thinking. Most crucially, though? They see clientsnot investorsas their primary stakeholders.
Holding company drama
The massive consolidation of IPG-owned ad agencies is the latest in an ongoing trend among publicly traded advertising companies over the past decade to boost profits and efficiency. In 2018, holding company WPP combined Wunderman and J. Walter Thompson (JWT) into Wunderman Thompson, and VML and Young & Rubicam into VMLY&R. Then in 2023, it combined them all into just VML.
How did that work out? WPP shares are down more than 60% year to date, and have hit a quarter-century low. Reports emerged last month that France-based holding company Havas was exploring an acquisition or stake in WPP. Havas has denied the reports, but it’s the state of the industry that made it so believable.
Jay Kamath, founder and chief creative officer of Haymaker, says there’s nothing wrong with mergers if there is a strong vision behind it. These arent visionary mergers, theyre survival mergers. The model is aging, margins are shrinking, and they think scale is a life raft, says Kamath, who believes scale does little to really help clients. In reality, it’s speed, not scale that brands care about as they vie for customers’ increasingly divided attention. They need faster teams who bring sharper ideas and are accountable partners, he says.
Dooley Tombras, president of Tombras, a Knoxville, Tennessee-based agency with additional offices across the U.S. and in Buenos Aires, sees holding companies as a model in managed decline. As holding companies continue to consolidate to compensate for a loss of top-line growth, the winners will likely be in the independent space.
As they consolidate brands, offices, and people to deliver cost synergies to Wall Street, they will naturally shore up to protect the billion-dollar-plus clients, Tombras says. Many major national brands spending in the $50 million to $100 million annual budget level will get lost in the shuffle and look to make a move. And it will likely be to a scaled independent.
Advantage: independent
Tombras’s theory seems to be resonating. Geoff Cottrill, former CMO of Coca-Cola, Converse, and Topgolf, recently commented on LinkedIn: If I were still a CMO, Id be looking for creative partners outside these massive machines.
So I called him up and asked him to elaborate. His answer should be encouraging to any indie agency, and to many of the impending holding company exiles looking to be hired. Marketing, as an industry, has kind of lost the plot, says Cottrill of the industry’s infatuation with data, AI, and money.
He notes, If you’re a midsized brand trying to fight for attention, needing to get the right creative ideas, get the right service levels, account management, you’re better off with a smaller, more nimble creative shop like Wieden+Kennedy or someone like Opinionated (an independent ad shop out of Portland, Oregon, whose clients include Adidas, Panda Express, and Hinge).
For Lisa Clunie, founder and CEO of New York-based Joan, being independent is a superpower. Brands want partners who can prototype, pivot, and produce without waiting for multinational approval chains, she says.
This is not a new concept. Back in 2021, Domino’s took its brand to a small, 23-person indie shop called WorkInProgress. At the time, the pizza chain’s then-CMO, Art DElia, told Ad Age, I really feel that the independent agency model gives us more flexibility and less distractions.
Tombras believes that brand and culture are at an inflection point given the proliferation of AI. Machine value will decrease, he argues, while human value is poised to skyrocket. The whole reason brands have gone to agencies in the first place is to get highly unique perspectives on how to solve business problems, he says. Independents are in an exponentially better position to attract talent because people are tribal; we want to play for teams.
For Teri Miller, U.S. CEO of Mother, the holding company business model, and now consolidation, feels a million miles away from what is actually happening on the ground in the business of creativity. Its just a totally different vocabulary, rule set, body language, she says. Clients who have hired Independents as an antidote understand why: We know who we are, why we exist, what our strengths are. We arent trying to be everything to everyone.
Creative advertising versus Public Company
I’ve been covering brands and ad agencies in one way or another for almost 20 years, and I’ve seen that great creative work is not exclusive to independent agencies. Agencies owned by holding companies, including those being shuttered through the Omnicom consolidation, have produced incredible work over decades. In fact, McCann, FCB, the Martin Agency, and TBWA/Worldwide were all on Fast Companys 2025 Most Innovative Companies list earlier this year.
Still, holding company agencies are facing bigger challenges, as the media landscape continues to fragment and the demands of clients have become more complex and immediate. In a media era that prioritizes cost and efficiency, the great work these agencies are making increasingly feels like it’s despite being part of a public holding company, not because of it.
The global publicly traded conglomerate still has advantages in scale, particularly in media buying. But there is no discernible advantage in terms of solving business problems with creative ideas and strategy. Joan’s Clunie says creativity and public ownership aren’t enemies, they’re just bad roommates. While public companies optimize for shareholder value, independent agencies optimize for creative value.
“When you need to hit quarterly targets, the easy moves are cost cuts, procurement deals, and operational tweaks,” Clunie says. “The risky move? Betting on a bold creative idea that might take two years to prove itself. Guess which one gets the green light at 11:59 p.m. before earnings?
It’s not that public companies can’t do brilliant work, she says. It’s that their wiring makes the safe choice easier and the interesting choice harder. And in our business, interesting usually wins. Independence means we can take the long view. That’s not romanticit’s structural.
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Back in his 1996 letter to shareholders, Warren Buffett famously wrote: If you arent willing to own a stock for 10 years, dont even think about owning it for 10 minutes.
That statement only makes the recent homebuilder stock purchases and sales by Berkshire Hathawayled by Buffett, who will step down as CEO at the end of 2025even more eyebrow-raising.
Heres the timeline.
August 2023: Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that in Q2 2023, the company made a bet on U.S. homebuilders and bought 5,969,714 shares of D.R. Horton, 152,572 shares of Lennar, and 11,112 shares of NVR.
February 2024: Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that in Q4 2023, the company had sold off 5,969,714 shares of D.R. Hortonthe vast majority of Buffetts big homebuilder bet he made early in 2023.
August 2025: Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that during Q2 2025 (the three months ending June 30), the company made a bet on U.S. homebuilders by purchasing around 1.5 million shares of D.R. Horton (valued at around $191.5 million). In the first half of 2025, Berkshire Hathaway acquired just over 7 million shares of Lennar, valued at nearly $800 million.
November 2025: Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that it has sold its D.R. Horton stake of around 1.5 million shares.
While Berkshire Hathaway has sold off its shares of D.R. Horton (No. 123 on the Fortune 500), it still owns around 7.2 million shares of Lennar (No. 129 on the Fortune 500) and around 11,112 shares of NVR (No. 396 on the Fortune 500), according to ResiClubs review of Berkshire Hathaways latest SEC filings.
Given Buffetts own adviceIf you arent willing to own a stock for 10 years, dont even think about owning it for 10 minutesits probably fair to avoid drawing sweeping long-term housing market conclusions from Berkshire Hathaways homebuilder stock trades over the past two years. After all, the firm bought them, sold them, bought them again, and sold them four times in just over a two-year window.
That said, if you forced me to speculate, Id guess Berkshire Hathaway initially eyed homebuilder stocks in the first half of 2023, after their sharp pullback in 2022, as builders adjusted to the rate shock. But heading into 2024, Berkshire Hathaway may have gotten cold feet on homebuilders as a long hold, as it became clear that the housing markets early-2023 firming was a bit of a head fakeand that a bigger power shift toward buyers, further housing-market softening, and additional homebuilder margin compression were still ahead.
After that played out, earlier this year, Berkshire Hathaway may have concluded that most of that margin compression had already been priced in and that it wanted back in on homebuilders.
That speculation does leave one remaining question: Why would Berkshire Hathaway now sell off D.R. Horton while still holding onto Lennar and NVR?
First, D.R. Hortons stock has had a stronger bounce-back over the past few months, while Lennar and NVR have not. (Perhaps Berkshire Hathaway believes that bounce-back still awaits.) So it might not be that D.R. Horton has fallen out of favor with Berkshire Hathaway, but instead simply that D.R. Hortons stock has already priced in much of its short-term upside.
Secondand this is me reading deep between the linesperhaps Berkshire Hathaway likes that Lennar has been more aggressive during this soft window in taking market share. While all the public homebuilders that ResiClub tracks have compressed profit margins over the past three years to offer larger incentives and affordability adjustments in an attempt to avoid a sharper pullback in housing starts, Lennar has been the most aggressive on that front.
In fact, Lennar has compressed its margins all the way back to 2009 levels, and is spending the equivalent of roughly 14.3% percent of final sales on incentives (compared with the typical 5% to 6% in normal times) in order to grow home sales and capture market share.
In September 2025, Lennar executives acknowledged that its finally time to pause [that strategy] and let the market catch up a little bit. That doesnt mean theyre completely reversing course or losing the market share theyve recently gained while using the strategy. Instead, it means they cant be as aggressive in early 2026 in pursuing additional market share, given how much margin compression theyve already absorbed.
Some investors, including Berkshire Hathaway, might like that Lennar has pursued a bigger market share through this choppy stretch and is now starting to defend margins.
Here’s what Stuart Miller, co-CEO of Lennar, said during the company’s September 19, 2025, earnings call:
For Lennar, this is n opportune time to pause and let the market catch up a little bit. Even though mortgage rates began to trend downward toward the end of the quarter, stronger sales have not yet followed. We have certainly begun to see early signs of greater customer interest and stronger traffic entering the market. With lower mortgage rates, purchasers are showing greater interest in considering their home purchase. And this is generally an early signal of stronger sales activity to follow, assuming rates remain lower.
And if interest rates continue to fall, we’re quite optimistic that this all will happen soon. The extended period of higher interest rates for longer than expected forced us, however, to adjust construction costs [lower average sales price] in order to enable sales in difficult market conditions. Our lower construction cost structure, together with reduced margin [bigger incentives], enabled us to meet affordability and support the supply-and-demand balance.
We drove sales pace to match production pace, and we fortified our market share and position in each of our strategic markets. We are now situated with a lower cost structure, efficient product offerings, and strong market positions to accommodate pent-up demand as rates moderate and confidence ultimately returns. As I said before, this is the right time. This is just the right time for us to pull back just a little bit.
We believe that we’ve gotten ahead of the current market realities, and we have built what we believe is a stronger long-term margin-driving platform. We know that this has taken some time as the market has remained weaker for longer, but we also know that our strategy has helped build a healthier housing market and has positioned Lennar for strong cash flow and bottom-line growth in the future.
While our deliveries were just below our goal for the quarter, and while we sold more homes than expected during the quarter, these accomplishments came at the expense of further deterioration of margin, which came down to 17.5%. Accordingly, we’re going to begin to ease back our delivery expectations for the fourth quarter and full year in order to relieve the pressure on sales and deliveries and help establish a floor on margin. We will reduce our delivery expectations for the fourth quarter to 22,000 to 23,000 homes, and we will reduce our full-year expectation to 81,500 to 82,500.
In addition to the Lennar and NVR homebuilder shares that Berkshire Hathaway still owns, the firm also fully owns Clayton Homesthe largest U.S. builder of manufactured and modular homesand HomeServices of America, a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate (under Berkshire Hathaway Energy) that offers a wide range of real estate services including brokerage, mortgage origination, and title and escrow.
For years, philosophers and psychologists have debated whether empathy helps or hinders the ways people decide how to help others. Critics of empathy argue that it makes people care too narrowlyfocusing on individual stories rather than the broader needs of societywhile careful reasoning enables more impartial, evidence-based choices.
Our new research, forthcoming in the academic journal PNAS Nexus, a flagship peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests this heart versus head argument is too simple. Empathy and reasoning arent rivalsthey work together. Each one on its own predicts more generous, far-reaching acts of assistance. And when they operate side by side, people tend to help in the fairest waysnot favoring some over othersand in ways that touch the most lives.
We studied two groups that regularly help others at personal cost. One consisted of living organ donors who gave kidneys to strangers. The other included effective altruists, who use evidence and logic to direct substantial portions of their income or careers toward causes that save the most lives per dollar, such as fighting extreme poverty or preventable illness.
All participants completed survey measures of empathyessentially, how much they care about and are moved by others suffering. They also completed survey measures of reasoning. These assess how often people slow down, reflect, and think through things before deciding what to do.
We also examined how these abilities related to a range of altruistic judgments and behaviors, from hypothetical choicessuch as deciding whether to help a close friend or a distant strangerto real-world donations.
On average, organ donors scored higher on empathy, and effective altruists scored higher on reflective reasoningslowing down and thinking things through. But across all participants, both traits were linked to broader, more outward-looking helping. People with either an elevated heart or head, and especially those with both, when compared with average adults, tended to support distant others and focus on helping as many people as possible.
Even among organ donors, whose empathic ability is far above that of average adults, empathy did not make them biased toward those who were close or familiar. When we measured their altruistic judgments and real-world donations, they were just as likely as average adults, and sometimes even more likely, to favor causes that saved the greatest number of lives.
These patterns challenge the assumption that empathy can narrow moral concern. In practice, we found, empathy can broaden it.
Why it matters
Relying on reason alone isnt enough to inspire people to help strangers. [Photo: Julia M. Cameron/Pexels]
Many of todays most urgent problemspoverty, climate change, global healthdepend on motivating people to care about strangers and to use limited resources effectively.
Appeals to empathy alone may inspire giving, but not necessarily the most effective giving. Appeals to reason alone can leave people unmoved, as often facts and numbers dont stir anyone to care. Our findings suggest that the most powerful approach may be to pair empathys motivation with reasonings direction.
Empathy provides the emotional sparka reminder that others suffering matters. Reasoning helps steer that motivation toward where help will have the greatest impact. Together, they encourage helping that is both compassionate and consequential.
Whats next
Future research needs to determine how empathy and reasoning can be strengthened in everyday decision-making. Could emotional stories paired with clear evidence about what works best help people choose actions that do the most good?
We also dont yet know whether people who focus their giving beyond the boundaries of their immediate social circles, like effective altruists, pay any social cost for doing soperhaps by inadvertently signaling less investment in close others. Promisingly, early evidence from organ donors shows that those who help strangers often maintain strong, stable relationships with their closest friends and family members.
Perhaps most importantly, researchers need to rethink how altruism is understood. Psychology lacks a clear framework for explaining how empathy and reasoning work together, for whom they work best, and the situations where they come apart.
Developing that kind of model would reshape how we think about helpingwhen helping expands, when it stalls, and why. While such core questions remain, the present findings offer reason for optimism.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
Kyle Fiore Law is a postdoctoral research scholar in sustainability at Arizona State University.
Brendan Bo O’Connor is an associate professor of psychology at the University at Albany, State University of New York.
Stylianos Syropoulos is an assistant professor of psychology at Arizona State University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Most entrepreneurs are familiar with diminishing returns: how, when other variables stay constant, at some point putting in additional time and effort results in increasingly smaller results. Since resources are always limited, figuring out where to spend your entrepreneurial time so it delivers the best bang per hour is critical.
That same premise extends to health and fitness. If youre like many entrepreneurs, you try to stay reasonably fit not just because its good for you, but because exercise helps you perform better under stress. Can elevate your mood for up to 12 hours. Can even make you a little smarter.
Still: how healthy and fit . . . is healthy and fit enough?
If you want to run a marathon, your definition of fit will differ from most. But if you want to compare yourself with other people and see where you currently standand, more important, get a sense of where you would like to standhere are three simple tests you can do at home.
If you fall in the average range, thats good. If you fall closer to the excellent range, thats greatand may be a sign that doing more in an attempt to increase your score might push you into the land of diminishing returns.
So with all that said, here are the three tests.
Lower Body Strength
To conduct this test, find a chair that, when you sit on it, puts your thighs at a 90-degree angle to your lower legs. Then put your hands on your hips, lower yourself until your bottom grazes the chair, and then straighten back up.
Then do as many reps as you can, without resting, until you run out of (leg) gas.
Heres a graph so you can see where you stand. (All images are courtesy of research scientist Schalk Cloete; for more, check out his deep dive into the subject.)
Want to be able to do more? Like many things, increasing the number of squats you can do is just a matter of time and effort: do four or five sets of squats to failure three times a week, and in three weeks youll definitely be stronger.
And with a great outcome: squats can strengthen your lower body and core, improve your flexibility, and reduce your risk of injury.
Upper Body Strength
The American College of Sports Medicine recommends using a pushup test to assess upper body strength and endurance.
To do pushups their way, start at the top, go down to the 90-degree mark, and push back up without locking out at the top. Women can do plank-version pushups or modified (from the knees) pushups.
Then just count how many you can do in one set. (A few couple-second rest breaks at the top are okay.)
Heres the results graph:
Comparing yourself with others provides a reasonable sense-check.
But also keep this in mind: a Harvard study shows that men (unsure why they didnt include women) who could do 40 or more pushups were 96% less likely to experience a cardiovascular event than those who could only do 10 or less.
In fact, pushup capacity was more strongly associated with reduced cardiovascular disease risk than aerobic capacity.
So if you want to increase the number of pushups you can do, heres a simple process you can follow (scroll down to How many pushups do you want to do?). Do that routine three times a week for 10 minutes, and after three weeks youll definitely be stronger.
Cardiovascular Fitness
Since there are a variety of ways to evaluate cardiovascular fitness, this ones a little trickier. There are stress tests. Exertion/heart rate tests. Whether you can run a mile, and if so how fast you can run it, is a valid test.
Another is VO2 max, the maximal volume of oxygen that can be inhaled and absorbed by a body. Generally speaking, the higher your VO2 max, the btter your cardiovascular fitness (within genetic reason, of course.)
One way to estimate your VO2 max is to use a fitness calculator like this. Answer a few questions and youll learn your expected VO2 max (based largely on things like age) and your estimated VO2 max (based on activity levels, resting hear rate, and waist size.)
Or you do the one-mile walk test as described here.
Then see how you stack up:
There are a number of ways to improve your cardiovascular fitness. Walking (briskly) is a great start. So is jogging. So is cycling, rowing, elliptical training . . . or if you want to double-dip and get some strength gains at the same time, consider doing HIIT workouts. Research shows that 11 (intense) minutes a day can make a meaningful difference.
Which is where diminishing returns come into play. If you want to enjoy the benefits of reasonablenot extreme, just reasonablefitness, you dont have to spend hours on a treadmill. You dont have to spend hours at the gym.
You just need to do a few key things that make a big impact . . . and then do them consistently.
Which is surely the same approach you take to running your business.
Jeff Haden
This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc.
Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
While digital live shopping has been popular for years in Asia, the phenomenon has only recently begun to take off in the U.S., thanks in large part to the rise of retail disruptor Whatnot. The platforms cofounder and CEO, Grant LaFontaine, shares how his team has managed to evoke the feel of in-person shopping inside an online experience, and how Whatnots breakthrough is influencing other retailers and brands. LaFontaine also digs into the startups response to deep-pocketed rivals like eBay, and why he believes the viral Labubu trend is here to stay.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
Whatnot has seen some real dramatic growth this year in the top 15 among free apps in the App Store, and No. 2 in shopping apps. For listeners who haven’t spent time on Whatnot or taken part in live shopping, can you explain a little bit about what the experience is like? People often make the comparison to a digital QVC.
Yeah, I started thinking about it a little bit differently. To me, live shopping is the best in-store shopping experience, but online. So, a lot of the people who are on Whatnot have either had their own brick-and-mortar shops or they’re streaming all the time. It’s like welcoming you into their store. So, you tap into their livestream. You’ll see a bunch of the inventory they have. You’ll see people in there. You can chat with the person, ask them questions about the product. I sort of view it as the shift of experiential commercenot just in a brick-and-mortar world, but bringing it online.
Part of the Whatnot experience is … it’s almost like it’s entertainment on your phone too, right? I mean, the best sellers have to be engaging hosts. Do you train new sellers about how to be effective in live selling?
You don’t have to be the world’s best entertainer to put on a good show, because what people value can be really different. The shopping experience itself is entertaining. The people that you can talk to are entertaining. It is a format that I think any seller or anyone who has a business can get advantage from. You’ll see a lot of the same people. You can chat with them. It’s like, maybe you go to your local bakery or your local pub, and you sort of know the people who frequent it. And you know the host, and you have a relationship with them. It even carries over to extremes. There’s a trend on Whatnot called Bless the Chat, and people will buy gifts and giveaways to have people who are just hanging out in the shows win. And it’s completely funded by the audience. And if you go into any of the big shows, it’s actually very, very common.
Your team told me that while you use AI in the back-end for efficiency and other things, that you only consider deeper AI in the customer experience if it really solves customer issues. As a CEO today, do you feel pressure to be using AI maybe more than you need to be?
Yeah, I think absolutely. I think one of the most inherent human characteristics is that there’s always some pressure by looking at other people and feeling like you need to do what they’re doing. If you’re in tech these days, you probably can’t go more than a one-hour-long period of time without hearing about something in AI. And so I think it makes you constantly question whether you’re doing the right things. Now, the truth with every new technology is, it either solves a problem or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t solve a problem, no one’s going to use it, so it doesn’t matter. So I think, despite all of the noise, we try and stay relatively grounded. We’re not doing AI for AI’s sake.
I’m curious whether there are any trends that you see on the platform about where collectibles are going. Are there any predictions about what might be hot next?
I think people have always viewed collectibles as niche markets, but what we’re seeing is that those markets are getting much bigger. Historically, when you look at collectibles markets and you think about the Beanie Baby that had this meteoric rise and meteoric fall. That’s what happens in collectibles. If you look across our collectibles business, we’re 6 years old now, and I don’t think it’s ever grown under 100% a year. I think in a world where everything’s sort of mass-produced, very digital, I think having unique things and being able to resonate with folks on those things is just providing more value. And so I think these markets are going to be more enduring. The Beanie Baby of the day is what they call the Labubu. My prediction is that that market keeps growing for a really long time.
The Labubu is not going the way of the Beanie Baby?
I think people want more unique experiences today. I think social media amplifies them. And so I think the Labubu is going to stay strong.
EBay launched a live shopping feature two or three years ago, right? Did you look at that as, like, “Oh, here’s a competitive threat.” Or as a validation of your model? Or maybe a little bit of both?
The way I look at a lot of these things is, I try and understand the historical context on incumbents versus startups. As a business, running a business that’s growing very fast, there are so many different things that you have to worry about at any given point in time. And so if you’re not really clear on what matters, you can get really distracted. And if you look at consumer markets in the U.S. over, I don’t know, 20, 30 years, it is pretty rare the incumbent wins when you have a fast-growing consumer company, as long as you execute really well.
Have I, at times, worried about competitors? Yeah, absolutely. It’s a very human emotion. Like, “Oh, here’s this company that has a gajillion dollars and they’re coming at something that we’ve spent a huge quantity of our life building.” But ultimately, I tell this to the team now, and it’s true: Every second I’ve spent worrying about a competitor has been a second wasted. And so I think now we just try and stay really, really, really focused on delivering. We are the largest in the market by a significant quantity, and we don’t want to get complacent. Sometimes the competition is doing things better than you. And if they are and it’s an area where you are competing for customers, you’d better deliver better than them. Or at least as good as themotherwise there are risks.
Are there things that you’ve learned about today’s consumer that traditional rtailers or e-commerce players are missing?
In many ways, Whatnot is like the polar opposite of the e-commerce players of the past 30 years. It’s not an efficient form of purchasing. You’re going to sit around and watch things for hours. I think the fundamental truth is that shopping’s always been an activity that people have enjoyed doing. A lot of shopping is experiential. I used to hang out with my friends in the mall. People are craving an experiential online e-commerce experience. That’s definitely going to be a thing that over the next five or 10 years, every brand, every retailer is going to end up investing in.
I read that you and the Whatnot team have this feeling of being perennially underestimated. I’m sure some of that is motivating. Is there a downside? Or would the downside be like losing the underdog feeling?
I think we like to be underestimated. The first time we tried to raise money … I have a spreadsheet with all of the investors who I talked to, and it got to 100 no’s, and I stopped keeping track of it. And I still have the spreadsheet and all of the reasons why. So I’m not going to lie, that’s motivating. At least for me, there’s nothing more motivating than someone saying, “Oh, you can’t do the thing.” I’ll always carry a little bit of chip. And I think a little bit of chip is helpful because it keeps you going, keeps you motivated. Now, it’s helpful to remain underestimated so that we’re not distracted and can just build. And then when the thing’s great, it will speak for itself.
Ask friends what kind of tech gift you should get for your parent, grandparent, or another older person in your life, and chances are youll get the same generic suggestions, like a digital picture frame or a portable Bluetooth speaker. But these gifts will almost certainly remain little used throughout the year. (I mean, how many digital picture frames would you like?)
Instead, this holiday season, why not get an older loved one a tech gift theyll actually use (and that might put your mind at ease, too)?
Here are five types of gifts that older people may truly find beneficial.
Smartwatches with fall detection
Talk to any older person about health concerns, and they will likely mention that one of their main fears is falling. And for good reason. While a younger person can often brush off a fall, such an event can be deadly for an older individual. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 14 million older adults fall each year, and these falls are the leading cause of injury-related death among people over 65.
The severity of a fall’s repercussions often depends on how quickly the person can get help, which is a problem if they live alone. Thats where modern smartwatches come in. Many flagship smartwatches have built-in fall detection, ensuring that the wearers contacts are notified immediately if they fall. In this way, a smartwatch is a great gift for an older person, one that can provide peace of mind year-round. Some good options are:
Apple Watch SE 3
Samsung Galaxy Watch7
Google Pixel Watch 4
Item trackers to help find belongings
As we get older, we naturally become more forgetfulunable to remember where we left, say, our wallet or keys. A subtle reminder of where things are can go a long way toward making life much less frustrating.
If your older loved one often forgets where they placed their belongings, item trackers might be helpful. They can usually be bought individually or in multipacks. Just attach the tracker to a keychain or slip it into a wallet or purse, and your loved one will always be able to quickly find where they last left their item. Reliable item trackers include:
Apple AirTag
Samsung Galaxy SmartTag2
Tile Mate
Robotic vacuum cleaners to ease the housework
The older we get, the more effort it seems to take to do the same household chores weve done throughout our lives. Who wouldnt want a helping hand with the house cleaning? A robotic vacuum cleaner under the tree could really put a smile on your loved ones face.
Robotic vacuums can save your loved ones time and effort by keeping floors clean without the arduous manual labor. Several companies make a wide range of robotic vacuum models. Some great choices include:
Roomba 105 Vac Robot
eufy 11S MAX
Roborock Q7 L5
Tablets, for easy email and web browsing
While age is never a determining factor in someones technical ability, an older person once told me that one of the best tech gifts they ever received was a tablet. They found its large touch interface easier to use than a mouse, the user interface was less confusing than on a desktop, and the ability to zoom in on on-screen items made even small text easy to read.
Tablets can be a lifeline for seniors who find computers too confusing or their smartphones screen too small, helping them stay connected to our broader digital world through email, the web, and video calls. Some excellent tablets for older adults include:
GrandPad Tablet
Apple iPad 11
Amazon Fire HD 10
E-readers to make reading more convenient
The retirement years offer lots of time for reading. And thats a good thing, as studies have shown that reading can help keep our minds sharp as we age.
Unfortunately, aging often causes vision issues, which can make it harder to keep up a reading habit. Standard-size fonts in most books can be too small for some older people. Thats where e-readers come in. They are lightweight and easier to hold for long periods than a physical book, and their software allows users to adjust the text size to fit their vision needs. Some of the best e-readers include:
Amazon Kindle
Amazon Kindle Paperwhite
Amazon Kindle Colorsoft
Artificial intelligence is everywhere. It fuels boardroom debates, guides priorities, defines access to information, and nudges consumer experiences. But while AI promises sharper insights and faster action, it also accelerates blind spots leaders already struggle with.
The paradox is this: AI can widen vision, but if used without the right insight, it narrows it. And when those blind spots meet the speed of AI adoption, the consequences multiply.
Ive seen this play out across industriesthrough my leadership roles at Google, Maersk, and Diageo, and in advising executives shaping some of the worlds largest organizations. The pattern is clear: technology does not pause at blind spots. Instead of alerting us, it often erases tracesuntil the competitive edge quietly slips into commoditization.
Here are three ways AI makes blind spots bigger and how to shrink them.
1. Data Without Context is a False Comfort
Every AI is shaped by what it has access to. Generative AI is guided by probability. Agentic AI acts on the data it is trained on. Both are only as useful as the context they can see.
This is where the first blind spot appears: leaders mistake the outputs of AI for reality itself, forgetting that the system is bounded by its inputs. A dashboard may glow green, or an AI may return precise answersbut precision without context is a false comfort.
This may feel like a familiar challenge, where reliance on fixed KPIs can make internal progress look convincing but fail to connect to real shifts in the market. I have seen hardworking teams pull in opposite directions: one rewarded for growing basket size through add-ons, another penalizing customers who adjusted orders, canceling each other out and driving customers away.
AI applied to those metrics would only have reinforced the misalignment. If business rules are applied at too low a level in the organization or process, sub-optimization will occur. In an AI context, this compounds at scale, locking inefficiencies into every automated decision.
All cases show the same trap: when data is cut off from context, leaders optimize for what can be measured instead of what matters. Availability is mistaken for reliability.
How to address the blind spot: Shift from validating what you already track to exploring what you dont yet see. Treat data as a landscape to be tested, not a dashboard to be confirmed. Ask where contradictions appear, where signals conflict, and where the edges of the system reveal something different from the center. Blind spots shrink when leaders are curious enough to explore anomalies instead of explaining them away.
2. Outsourcing Judgment Dilutes Core Value
Another growing blind spot comes when too much responsibility is placed on external systems or partners. AI is powerful, but it is not neutral. If leaders outsource judgment without feeding back their own expertise, they risk hollowing out the very value that makes their business distinctive.
Think of it this way: you have personal knowledge, collective knowledge within a company or institution, and global knowledge. Businesses naturally try to connect and leverage collective intelligenceso why, when it comes to AI, do so many neglect the need to actively share, contextualize, and update knowledge to keep it valuable?
I once debated a leading doctor responsible for defining a regions use of technology. He explained that he relied on his trusted X-ray machine and the same software he had used since the late 1990s. He did not log his evolving insights as structured inputs, nor did he feed edge cases back into the system, assuming vendor updates were enough. His judgment stayed in his head, while the softwareand the sectorfailed to learn from real-world experience. In a field where image recognition is advancing rapidly, that gap leaves value on the table and slows the diffusion of what works.
The point is not to develop all AI in-house, but to be clear about what truly differentiates you and ensure that knowledge is not given away. Cost management through outsourcing call centers may deliver quantifiable savings, but it also shifts valuable customer insights outside the business. With AI, those insights compound quickly, and what begins as efficiency can end in commoditization where your uniqueness is absorbed into someone elses model if you are not conscious about how AI is deployed.
How to address the blind spot: While AI is essential for efficiency and future operations, strategy must come first. Know your propositionthe value today and in the futureand build your AI approach on that, not the availability of pretrained software, partner rates, or the convenience of what others have packaged. Ask who gains value from the data you hold, and who has access to the data that could help you grow. In many industries, this will become the foundation for new revenue models and deeper partnershipsor the path to eliminate those without strategic clarity.
3. The Cognitive Trap Behind Algorithmic Comfort
Even with broad and evolving data and strong strategic clarity, AI can still trap leaders in confirmation loops. Algorithms are designed to learn from patterns, but patterns are not the same as insights. By default they reinforce what is most represented, not what is most revealing. Some models can be tuned to flag anomalies, but in most business settings the gravitational pull is toward the familiar. Of course it isbecause so do we.
The danger is that this collides with human blind spots. Neuroscience shows how the brain conserves energy by filtering out complexity, anchoring on what feels certain, and avoiding ambiguity. True neurogenesisthe creation of new thinkingrequires new contexts, yet most leaders default back to the familiar. Behavioral science confirms how leadersespecially experienced onesare prone to confirmation bias, mistaking familiarity for foresight. And the more changeable and unpredictable the world becomes, the harder it is to resist this pull. AI does not correct these tendencies; it magnifies them. It reflects back the certainty leaders crave, accelerating the speed at which untested assumptions harden into strategy.
The result is a narrowing of visionmore convincing, faster moving, and harder to detect. Left unchecked, this is how organizations find themselves trapped in the comfort of familiar patterns while competitors redefine the market around them.
How to address the blind spot: The way through is to stay grounded enough to notice when certainty becomes comfort rather than truth. That means questioning and stripping out assumptions that no longer serve and allowing the narrative to be retested against todays and tomorrows reality. Vulnerability is the entry pointnot weakness, but a signal of where assumptions have not been updated. Let these surface, acknowledge what it would take for you to change your mind, be curious about what could fit in, and explore new emerging directions to shape a new frame. Leaders who embody this stance expand their field of vision and prevent AI from hardening blind spots into strategy.
AI Tests Leadership
The thread across all three blind spots is the same: AI does not remove the limits of human judgment, it magnifies them. It amplifies whether a company is aligned or fragmented, insular or in tune, whether leaders are curious or complacent, wheter strategy is active or passive. The real test is not in the speed of adoption but in the awareness leaders bringwhether they can stay open enough to challenge what feels certain, while holding clear to what truly defines their value. That requires building a platform to connect, where diverse perspectives can feed into the systemconnecting both people and dataand ensuring a data access culture where exploration toward a common ambition is not just welcomed but expected. This paves the way not only for using AI, but for growing with it.
Entrepreneurs face more stress, fear, and anxiety in a single day than most people experience in a year. When building something in a crowded market, motivation doesn’t just dipit can disappear entirely. What is the difference between those who burn out and those who break through? Theyve mastered the three fundamentals: finding their real why, setting their own scorecard, and playing the long game.
New competitors launch monthly in the vertical drama space where I work. At DramaShorts, we’ve maintained our position among the top 15 apps globally by refusing to play someone else’s game. While others chase viral trends, we focus on building sustainable engagement. Heres the three-step strategy I follow when the going gets tough.
1. Find your real why
Before sustaining motivation, you need to understand what’s driving you. Skip the generic mission statements. Go straight to honest self-examination.
Take inventory: What do you want to accomplish? Why does this matter to you personally? Dig deeper if your answer feels generic or borrowed from someone else’s playbook. You can’t stay motivated working toward something you don’t genuinely care about.
We can quickly turn things around when we identify goals that truly excite us. The passion that comes from knowing your why becomes fuel for everything else.
Sara Blakely turned $5,000 and a simple idea about pantyhose into Spanx, now worth over a billion dollars. Blakely didnt try to compete on price or marketing budgets. Instead, she carved out her own category by focusing on a problem other companies ignored: how uncomfortable and unflattering existing shapewear felt.
While established brands pushed the exact tired solutions, she redesigned the entire experience from fabric to fit. Her why wasn’t fashionit was solving a problem she experienced personally. That personal connection sustained her through two years of rejections before landing her first retailer.
2. Set your own scorecard
In competitive industries, it’s tempting to measure yourself against every competitor. This is motivation poison. You’ll always find someone ahead in some metric; comparison kills focus.
Instead, define success on your terms. Set specific, measurable goals that align with your vision and values. Track progress against your benchmarks, not your competitors’.
Use the SMART frameworkSpecific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals. These give you clear targets and help you channel energy productively.
Jeff Bezos ignored the noise about Amazon’s lack of profits for years because he was measuring different metricscustomer acquisition, long-term market position, and infrastructure building. While critics focused on quarterly earnings, he tracked progress toward his vision of becoming “Earth’s most customer-centric company.”
3. Keep the innovation pipeline flowing
My motivation hack? I start each week by writing down three things our users will love that our competitors aren’t even thinking about yet. That forward focus keeps me energized when the market noise gets loud.
This isn’t about generating random ideas. I maintain a systematic approach to innovation. First, I schedule weekly user feedback sessions to identify pain points our competitors miss. Second, I study adjacent industries for features that could translate to our space. Third, I track emerging technologies and cultural shifts that might create new user needs. The execution part requires discipline: each idea gets a feasibility score, a timeline, and an owner. I review progress monthly and kill projects that aren’t delivering. The key is maintaining this pipeline consistently and not waiting for inspiration to strike.
The long game wins
Motivation in competitive industries means building systems that help you recover quickly from inevitable dips and sustain focus on what matters.
Stop watching the competition obsessively and start building something unique. Focus on your path, definition of success, and reasons for being in the game.
The entrepreneurs who thrive long-term aren’t necessarily the most talented or best-funded. They’re the ones who’ve learned to stay motivated when motivation is most complex to find.
The race is long. Pace yourself accordingly. The entrepreneurs who win aren’t the fastest startersthey’re the ones who continue to run when everyone else has stopped.
When it comes to market segmentation, I dont see truly well-documented cases often.
At a more simplistic level, we think of classic matrices such as BCG or McKinseys. But the real exercise of segmentation is far more complex. In certain contexts, it comes close to the behavior of a tensor: multiple dimensions, cross-dependencies, distinct weights, temporality, and contextual factors that shift the meaning of data depending on the axis being analyzed.
Thinking like a tensor is practicing Model Thinking, which remains, above all, an analog discipline. It requires a brain, not a machine.
The challenge is necessarily multidisciplinary, and this is exactly where executives suffer, spending enormous time compensating for immature teams.
Even when business operators manage to bring quantitative data from ERP, CRM, or sector reports (which are often scarce or methodologically fragile), the information set must be normalized. This process demands an additional set of competencies: statistical knowledge, data-cleaning techniques, sampling concepts, dimensional modeling, and even systems logic to avoid collinearity and redundancy.
When unstructured data is added, the challenge grows further.
This includes everything from more sophisticated sentiment analysis to qualitative inputs from field teams, customer recordings, or information mined from third-party sources. In these cases, the problem is not confined to normalization: It involves interpreting, validating, reducing noise, and converting natural language into structures that can interface with transactional data. It is epistemological, not just technical.
SERIOUS SEGMENTATION
Serious segmentation is not a mere snapshot of the market. It plots and overlays multiple layers: data on strategic human resources (both internal and competitive), asset acquisition history, technological maturity, revenues and margins, pricing elasticity, media activity, public opinion, and ecosystem maps revealing the true position of players.
Good segmentation uncovers unclaimed revenue, positioning errors, pricing failures, ignored clusters, asymmetries between capability and discourse, and even subtle competitor movements that go unnoticed at the tactical level.
The entire process demands other equally essential competencies: dataset modeling, command of relational tables, use of manipulation languages such as SQL, Python, or R, basic and applied statistics, visualization techniques, clustering, similarity analysis, and, above all, the ability to formulate hypotheses. Without hypotheses, there is no segmentation. There is only table sorting.
THE AGENT ERA
In the so-called era of agents (some already speak of the decade of agents) a complementary arsenal emerges to support these processes. Agents capable of cleaning and normalizing data, agents for web scraping and data enrichment, agents that classify and label content using LLMs as annotators, statistical automation agents able to perform clustering, PCA, or churn analysis, reconciliation agents capable of resolving deduplication and probabilistic matching, and competitive-simulation agents designed to test elasticity scenarios, pricing movements, or anticipated reactions of market players.
As a last resort, and not as the first option, as leaders outside tech hubs tend to believe, RAG enters the picture.
This article could list agents available in the ecosystem for immediate use, but it is fundamentally about the capabilities that precede automation.
Before any automation, there is foundational knowledge: truly understanding the discipline of segmentation, knowing principles of market behavior, and having clarity about the information models that generate strategic insights for guiding portfolio, productive capacity, and competitive advantage. No GPU, no matter how powerful, replaces this conceptual clarity.
And this clarity is not necessarily the exclusive responsibility of IT, the CTO, or marketing teams (understanding marketing here, according to the American Marketing Associations definition). Segmentation belongs to multidimensional leaders capable of moving fluidly across strategy, operations, data, behavior, and finance.
The provocative question remains: Do these leaders exist in the analog perspective, prior to automation? Many companies try to leap directly from subjective culture to algorithmic culture without building the intermediate methodological culture, and this is one of the silent sources of failure today.
There is robust literature on segmentation and, it must be said, it requires intellectual musculature. I appreciate Malcolm McDonald and Ian Dunbar in Market Segmentation.
Peter Fader, from the Wharton School, offers a more financial and pricing-oriented view in The Customer-Base Audit.
Naturally, these two works only give a glimpse of the thinking underlying the structured idea.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Finally, two observations.
First, what I have just written is not something that ChatGPTeven as a generative modelwould spontaneously produce. LLMs do not naturally form implicit assumptions across domains, nor do they articulate disciplinary layers whose connection depends on human repertoire and has not been previously mapped. They operate on existing corpora; they do not originate new paradigms on their own.
Second, most business schools today, aside from a small group of highly specialized institutions, tend not to emphasize this mode of thinking. Not by fault, but by design. Their structure was built to serve the needs of upward-moving managers, not to cultivate the broader, integrative perspective required of executive-level decision makers.
This gap in knowledge for top leadership has a structural explanation: The audience is relatively small, and therefore not the core economic engine of educational institutions. As a result, many executive leaders find themselves without ongoing renewal of their knowledge matrix, even in an era that promotes continuous learning.
A paradox of our time.
Rodrigo Magnago is researcher and director at RMagnago Critical Thinking.
A recent New York Times headlineDid Women Ruin the Workplace?sparked a firestorm across social media. Alison Moore, CEO of Chief, the prestigious network for senior women executives, is pushing back on this notion with data and nuance. Drawing from an exclusive nationwide survey of women leaders, Moore unpacks how evolving career paths are being misread, the impact of market disruption, and why women-centered spaces remain vital.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scalepodcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
The environment that you’ve come into with the Trump White House is kind of heightened; discussions about diversity are heated. The term DEI has become kind of a negative. How do you frame what Chief is about in this kind of climate?
There’s certainly more scrutiny on things today perhaps than there were in the past, but I think at the end of the day, there’s a desire for creating better, stronger leaders, better outcomes, better decision-making, more agile thinking. While there are different contexts being held and conversations being held around DEI and the nuances of that, the truth is when you cut through the big headlines, the realities remain the same, which is supporting leadership at a time of high velocity of change is always beneficial, and we happen to build that in a way that supports women leaders, and I think there’s a lot of support for that.
Chief recently published a report in partnership with Harris surveying over a thousand senior level women, and it pointed to a sort of changing definition of maybe ambition and success, a shift away from playing it safe toward bolder career moves, which was in some ways more optimistic and more empowering than I’d expected.
There had been a slew of articles that had come out focusing on changes in the workforce and finding the negative nugget in there to kind of put that on blast. And I’m not denying that there aren’t those factors at hand, but the she-cession is coming, women are being dumped out of the workforce. The return to office doesn’t work for all women in the polarity that we’re in today of big headlines being the only definition. We lose all nuance.
And so for us here, I come in February and I’m looking at this incredibly energetic Chief membership and thinking, “This is what I’m seeing. I’m seeing people reacting and responding to change in ways that are innovative and curious and thought-provoking, this level of optimism that’s sitting in Chief, that they’re communicating together.” This is not just Chief telling women to be optimistic, this is the energy that you’re feeling from conversation.
And so the genesis of this poll was how do we validate that? And so in the women that we surveyed, they’re citing that they’re more ambitious now than ever, and in fact they’re energized by the professional growth ahead because they feel like they can have more optionality and more of a hand on the wheel of their own career design than what they used to have. This is where that metaphor of the ladder and the stay rung to rung to rung and keep the course and stay the path and then something happens at the top. Everyone can see that’s not necessarily the case anymore.
How much of the boldness do you think might be economy driven? I noticed that over 80% of the executives cited market disruption as a motivator. It’s almost like disruption is, I don’t know, forcing action?
I think the economy is certainly always going to be a factor, but it’s also like, look at industry consolidation. You can look at what’s happening in the media business, you can look at what’s happening across retail. You can look at what’s happening in every vector and AI, which has a through line all the way across all of these industries, and a common thread of this duality of opportunity and threat of change.
Is that rung as a metaphor again, for just career direction, not necessarily the corporate ladder as much as it is just the up a ladder? Is that the right path for me? Do I want other options? Do I want different kinds of flexibility? Do I have the sort of tools at my fingertips to actually do that? And that is what happens at Chief and that’s what’s been very interesting for me to see and come back actually from a founding membership in 2019 to where we are today.
Women are building, scheming, meaning business is scheming, partnering, collaborating differently now. I think the lids off on a lot of that stuff for women. And so you do feel the optimism coming out in this survey, even though I think there’s a pragmatism and recognizing it is coming from disruption, but disruption does bring opportunity.
So much of Chief is built around in-person connection and community, but in-person it’s so hard to scale. And I know when I was talking to your predecessor, Carolyn, she talked about the potential to have a LinkedIn-like product and a Masterclass-like product and a dating-app like product. How do you think about todays digital tools for community versus the IRL experiences? Where do you balance those things?
What I think about Chief today, and I think that was a very accurate description that Carolyn gave when that started. I think we’ve morphed into this space where there are a couple of different components. There are intimate experiences. By that, I mean small space experiences where you talk and see and share about leadership challenges that can be in a virtual experience, very rewarding, but in certain places and markets, we can make that happen in real life.
It doesn’t have to be either-or, coaching, one-to-one coaching, so that happens on a virtual piece sometimes, that can be very rewarding, but if I’m going to have a cocktail party around other senior marketers, that should be at the clubhouse in real life. I’m about to go to LA this week for my eighth and then San Francisco in two weeks for the ninth. Nine ChiefXs this year, and this is where nine locations across the country, we’ve had members come, and it’s in real life, and they’re like rallies, and I get so much energy out of these things.
It’s unbelievable. We have some speakers, some programming, but it’s really about this kind of connecting energy between Chiefs with other Chiefs, big corporate people talking to founders of small things, folks who are in transition, all senior leaders in various parts of their journey, and these large rallies are definitely IRL and then peppered between that are the right size virtual experiences.
My next tranche of focus is really on the digital experience, the Chief app, the Chief digital experience in terms of, how do we make that as bes of a member companion? The networking piece, the connections piece, whether that was the LinkedIn analogy that Carolyn meant, that’s where that really comes to life, but it comes to life in service of a lot of in real life experiences across multiple use types.
Many of the things that a woman leader is interested in are things that any leader is interested in. It doesn’t have to connect to the fact that it’s a woman, and then there are a tranche of things that may be more applicable to women than to men, although you could argue they’re applicable to everyone. I always struggled with this when we mentioned you being in Fast Company.
It was for a package we did on the most creative people in business and there were men and women on it, and we didn’t do a most powerful women in business like Fortune did. But there is something different when women get together without men there that maybe as a man I don’t quite appreciate or I want to, but I don’t really know.
Listen, I think for women in leadership roles, there is a place and a time for being together and learning from each other that’s just different. It’s additive. The conversations are because a woman’s career journey is tied to that 360 view of who they are in life, it just makes those conversations different, but not necessarily better. I’ve been in multiple coworking environments where it’s male, female, that’s all great too. I’m a big believer in the bothI really am.
