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.
Its the first week in December. If you don’t already have the Christmas tunes blasting in the office, what are you waiting for?
The debate over listening to music while at work, however, often divides offices. Some love to crank up the music while toiling away, and find silence to be deafening. Others can only listen to background music or instrumental playlists like coffeeshop jazz in the background or LoFi Girl, a genre featuring low-fidelity, calming beats. Some insist on complete silence.
As the countdown to the holidays begins, Google searches for Christmas playlist 2025 have spiked this past week. But could listening to Mariah Carey or Michael Bublé on loop be sabotaging office productivity?
A study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience found that pleasurable music triggers dopamine release, creating a natural high that can boost energy for mundane tasks. But while listening to music can boost focus and productivity, the BPM, or beats per minute, matter: Research has shown music with a tempo of 50-80 beats per minute is optimal for focus and productivity. When background music at a workplace is out of sync with what workers need to get on with their jobs, it can affect their energy, mood and even performance.
So what does this mean for your favorite festive tunes? TopResume analyzed Spotifys most popular Christmas songs and ranked them by BPM to reveal the tracks most likely to derail office concentration in the final weeks of 2025.
Bad news for Ariana Grande stans. Grandes Last Christmas takes the top spot as the most distracting Christmas song, with a 206 BPM. This comes in at over triple the recommended BPM of 60-80 for maintaining focus during tasks.
Employees may also find Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters’ “Mele Kalikimaka (Merry Christmas)” and Shakin’ Stevens’ “Merry Christmas Everyone” somewhat distracting with a 203 BPM.
Andy Williams’ “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” (202 BPM), another Ariana Grande Christmas classic, “Santa Tell Me” (192 BPM) are also best left for lunch break listening.
On the other hand, Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” emerged as the most productivity-friendly holiday track, clocking in at just 67 BPM, the optimal tempo range for maintaining concentration.
Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas To You)” and Whitney Houston’s “Do You Hear What I Hear?” tied at 73 BPM. The Vince Guaraldi Trio’s beloved “Christmas Time Is Here” comes in at 75 BPM. Festive favorite Ella Fitzgerald claims two spots with “Frosty The Snowman” and “Sleigh Ride,” both at 77 BPM.
The end of the year is an especially demanding time for many professionals. Between wrapping up projects, juggling tighter deadlines, managing holiday commitments at home, and navigating the colder weather and shorter days, its easy for stress levels to creep up, Amanda Augustine, a certified professional career coach and the resident career expert for TopResume, says. Thats why its so important to create a festive atmosphere at work that doesnt sacrifice anyones focus.
p>Thats not an excuse to be a Grinch and insist on silence (after all, its Christmas and noise cancelling headphones exist for a reason). Simply swap out Ariana Grande for Ella Fitzgerald in shared spaces and everyones happy. Maybe.
A powerful advisory group within the CDC voted Friday to overturn a longstanding precaution designed to protect newborn babies.
If the change is approved by the acting director of the agency, the government will no longer universally recommend the hepatitis B vaccine at birth. The shot, which provides protection from the leading cause of liver cancer, has been standard practice for newborns since 1991.
Fridays 8-3 vote is a milestone for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who quickly began reshaping the public health agency to reflect his personal views on vaccines after being sworn in early this year. Kennedy has long been a prominent voice among anti-vaccine activists, a position that sparked broad concern that the CDC might break with scientific consensus around vaccines under his guidance.
In August, the FDA narrowed its approval for the COVID vaccine to people 65 and older or those with underlying health conditions. In spite of the FDAs changes, many insurers said that they would follow previous guidance and cover the shots widely for anyone who wanted one
In a press release following Fridays vote, the CDC defended its decision to support individual-based decision-making which would encourage parents and their doctors to opt into childhood vaccines based on the risk of infection. The committee will now only recommend the vaccine at birth for newborns born to mothers who test positive for hepatitis B.
“The American people have benefited from the committee’s well-informed, rigorous discussion about the appropriateness of a vaccination in the first few hours of life,” CDC Acting Director Jim O’Neill said.
Battle at the CDC
O’Neill, an entrepreneur and investor with prior experience at HHS, was chosen for the post after the dramatic ouster of former director Susan Monarez, who was herself nominated by Trump. Monarez was fired after refusing to back Kennedys preferred changes to the agencys vaccine policy, prompting a wave of high profile resignations at the CDC.
They are essentially trying to undo a lot of the science that has been settled for vaccine policies, Dr. Daniel Jernigan, former director of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, said following the flurry of resignations.
Former CDC Director Susan Monarez testified in the Senate in September, issuing grave warnings about Kennedys influence on U.S. health policy. Given what I have seen, if we continue down this path, we are not preparednot just for pandemics, but for preventing chronic health disease. And were going to see kids dying of vaccine-preventable diseases, Monarez said.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, also known as ACIP, has been a particular nexus of concern given Kennedys history of spreading vaccine misinformation. Kennedy fired all of the committees previous members earlier this year and installed new members friendlier to anti-vaccine policies.
At the time, Kennedy stressed that the agency should care as much about every child who could be injured by one of these products as we do every child who could be injured by an infectious disease, referencing a talking point common in anti-vaccine misinformation.
Doctors reject the CDC changes
In spite of Kennedys claim that the remade panel would feature no ideological anti-vaxxers, its new members include vaccine skeptics and other members with no prior vaccine experience. The changes were consequential enough to prompt a lawsuit from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the largest professional association of pediatricians in the country.
Pediatricians have seen firsthand the harm created by the disruptive and politicized decisions to overturn decades of evidence-based federal guidance on immunizations, AAP President Susan J. Kressly, M.D. said. These changes have caused fear, decreased vaccine confidence, and barriers for families to access vaccines.
Fridays vote wont be official until the CDCs acting director signs the new recommendations, which is very likely to happen. At least one Republican expressed his concerns about the rollback to 30 years of U.S. vaccine policy on Friday, encouraging the acting director to reject the changes. Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who supported Kennedy to lead HHS, also called the ACIP totally discredited on X leading up to the vote.
As a liver doctor who has treated patients with hepatitis B for decades, this change to the vaccine schedule is a mistake, Cassidy wrote on X. … Before the birth dose was recommended, 20,000 newborns a year were infected with hepatitis B. Now, its fewer than 20. Ending the recommendation for newborns makes it more likely the number of cases will begin to increase again.
Frank Gehry, who designed some of the most imaginative buildings ever constructed and achieved a level of worldwide acclaim seldom afforded any architect, has died. He was 96.
Gehry died Friday in his home in Santa Monica, California, after a brief respiratory illness, said Meaghan Lloyd, chief of staff at Gehry Partners LLP.
Gehry’s fascination with modern pop art led to the creation of some of the most striking buildings ever constructed and brought him a measure of worldwide acclaim seldom afforded any architect.
Among his many masterpieces are the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; and the DZ Bank Building in Berlin, Germany.
He also designed an expansion of Facebooks Northern California headquarters at the insistence of the companys CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
Gehry was awarded every major prize architecture has to offer, including the fields top honor, the Pritzker Prize, for what has been described as refreshingly original and totally American work.
Other honors include the Royal Institute of British Architects gold medal, the Americans for the Arts lifetime achievement award, and his native countrys highest honor, the Companion of the Order of Canada.
Years after he stopped designing ordinary-looking buildings, word surfaced in 2006 that the pedestrian Santa Monica mall project that had led to his career epiphany might be headed for the wrecking ball. Gehry admirers were aghast, but the man himself was amused.
Theyre going to tear it down now and build the kind of original idea I had, he said with a laugh.
Eventually, the mall was remodeled, giving it a more contemporary, airy outdoor look. Still, its no Gehry masterpiece.
Gehry, meanwhile, continued to work well into his 80s, turning out heralded buildings that remade skylines around the world.
The headquarters of the InterActiveCorp, known as the IAC Building, took the shape of a shimmering beehive when it was completed in New York Citys Chelsea district in 2007. The 76-story New York By Gehry building (now known as 8 Spruce), once one of the worlds tallest residential structures, was a stunning addition to the lower Manhattan skyline when it opened in 2011.
That same year, Gehry joined the faculty of his alma mater, the University of Southern California, as a professor of architecture. He also taught at Yale and Columbia universities.
Not everyone was a fan of Gehrys work. Some naysayers dismissed it as not much more than gigantic, lopsided reincarnations of the little scrap-wood cities he said he spent hours building when he was growing up in the mining town of Timmins, Ontario.
Princeton art critic Hal Foster dismissed many of his later efforts as oppressive, arguing they were designed primarily to be tourist attractions. Some denounced the Disney Hall as looking like a collection of cardboard boxes that had been left out in the rain.
Still other critics included Dwight D. Eisenhowers family, who objected to Gehrys bold proposal for a memorial to honor the nations 34th president. Although the family said it wanted a simple memorial and not the one Gehry had proposed, with its multiple statues and billowing metal tapestries depicting Eisenhowers life, the architect declined to change his design significantly.
If the words of his critics annoyed Gehry, he rarely let on. Indeed, he even sometimes played along. He appeared as himself in a 2005 episode of The Simpsons cartoon show, in which he agreed to design a concert hall that was later converted into a prison.
He came up with the idea for the design, which looked a lot like the Disney Hall, after crumpling Marge Simpsons letter to him and throwing it on the ground. After taking a look at it, he declared, Frank Gehry, youve done it again!
Some people think I actually do that, he would later tell The Associated Press.
Ephraim Owen Goldberg was born in Toronto on February 28, 1929, and moved to Los Angeles with his family in 1947, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen. As an adult, he changed his name at the suggestion of his first wife, who told him antisemitism might be holding back his career.
Although he had enjoyed drawing and building model cities as a child, Gehry said it wasnt until he was 20 that he pondered the possibility of pursuing a career in architecture, after a college ceramics teacher recognized his talent.
It was like the first thing in my life that Id done well in, he said.
He went on to earn a degree in architecture from the University of Southern California in 1954. After serving in the Army, he studied urban planning at Harvard University.
His survivors include his wife, Berta; daughter, Brina; sons Alejandro and Samuel; and the buildings he created.
Another daughter, Leslie Gehry Brenner, died of cancer in 2008.
By John Rogers, Associated Press
In South Korea several weeks ago, the U.S. and China came to a temporary agreement, in which theyll kick a rare-earth can down the road.
The agreement took the form of a one-year pause in the dispute between the two nations over rare earth elements (REEs): China postponed imposing newly announced export controls on 17 different REEs and, in turn, the U.S. announced it would reduce certain tariffs on Chinese goods.
For years, the United States and its allies have grappled with a troubling resource reality: China dominates the global supply of REEs and critical raw materials (CRMs)the essential ingredients of our digital age. From smartphones to electric vehicles, from solar panels to advanced weapons systems, our dependence on these materials has left the U.S. economically and strategically vulnerable.
While this new deal provides a short-term relief from supply-chain stress, it also deepens the case that we cannot forever rely on Chinas good will or geopolitical timing. Rather than doubling down on negotiations and hoping for stable access, what if we could build a parallel, resilient, and circular system here at home?
We actually can. Call it urban mining.
ELECTRONIC WASTE
Every year, millions of tons of electronic waste and batteries pile up in landfills or languish in drawersold laptops and broken phones, obsolete keyboards, and rusty routers. These discarded gadgets may be junk, but theyre also laden with circular ore. They contain cadmium, lithium, cobalt, and other valuable elements that can be extracted, refined, and reused. Recovery rates on materials in lithium-ion batteries, for example, can reach as high as 98% for cobalt, 95% for nickel, and 90% for copper and aluminum.
According to recent studies, the amount of precious and rare metals embedded in global electronic waste is enough to supply many industries for decades. We can leverage that here. If properly recovered, the materials in our existing e-waste could sustain electric vehicle and other manufacturing needs for the next 70 years. Urban mining offers a domestic supply of REEs and CRMsone that doesnt depend on any single foreign states capricious decision to keep exporting.
A NEW KIND OF SUPPLY CHAIN
Urban mining is more than recycling. Its about re-engineering the supply chain, turning structurally excluded communities into decentralized resource hubs where waste becomes a renewable source of critical materials.
Imagine a network of regional recovery centers across North America and Europe processing old electronics with advanced separation and extraction technologies. These urban hubs could feed the domestic market with a steady stream of critical materialsno freighters, no tariffs, no geopolitical strings attached.
We know the great potential of this approach because the Circular Supply Chain Coalition (CSCC) has tested these efforts already. As the founding convener of the CSCC, my company, Pyxera Global, conducted a pilot effort in Tennessee with leading circular supply chain partners who know a thing or two about reverse logistics.
Developing a robust urban-mining ecosystem could also create green jobs, boost local economies, and reduce our carbon footprint. More importantly, it would grant the countries in which the CSCC operates and its partners true mineral sovereignty. Instead of negotiating access to foreign mines, we could mine our own cities, transforming dependence into resilience.
In that light, urban mining stands out as a strategic insurance policy. If we build capacity to recover and reallocate critical materials domestically, we reduce external providers bargaining power.
We cant just dig our way out of this problem, nor do we have to. The minerals we need arent just buried deep in the earth. Theyre sitting in our homes, offices, and landfills, waiting to be reclaimed. Urban mining offers us a future of independence, innovation, and sustainability. The next gold rush isnt in them thar hills. Its in our landfills, garages, and junk drawers.
Deirdre White is president and CEO of Pyxera Global.
