Outdoors brand Yeti dropped its new holiday commercial, and it has a lot of what youd expect from a seasonal spot. Bad Idea outlines all the reasons you probably shouldnt get a Yeti for someone you care about: Dont get them a Yeti, says the voice-over, as a ribboned cooler flies out the back of a pickup truck. Unless you like dogs that are always wet, eyebrows that are still growing back, and sand in places sand should never be.
By the end of the commercial, its clear that the brand is aiming at people who are obsessed. It could be surfing, fishing, camping, golf, whateverits about those chasing the dream wherever it leads them.
But for all its charming predictability, this is more than just another ad for Yeti; its a major shift in the way the company approaches marketing and advertising. Thanks to a partnership with Wieden+Kennedy, this commercial is the first piece of advertising Yeti has made with an outside agency, and it signals a new era for a brand that has been staunchly self-made.
For the past 19 years, Yeti has largely created all its own marketing and advertising, including ambitious projects like its ongoing series of short documentaries under the Yeti Presents banner. Thats why my ears perked up when Yeti CEO Matt Reintjes announced the W+K partnership on his companys November 7 earnings call. This came amid outlining how revenue was up 2% year over year but profits were down slightly by 2%, which the company credited to higher tariff costs. International revenue was up 14%.
Mixing strong in-house creative cultures with big-name agencies is rare, especially today, as more brands build out robust in-house teams to replace or reinforce their long-standing relationships with agencies. When the two do mix, one typically emerges as the alpha.
When I spoke to Reintjes recently, he told me that teaming up with the same agency as Nike, Ford, DoorDash, and McDonalds is a reflection of Yetis ambition and expansion into mainstream sports, backyards, and yoga studios around the world.
We’re incredibly proud of the team that we have at Yeti and the way this brand has come to life with their vision and creativity, he says. We saw an opportunity to take the power of the in-house creative and content we have at Yeti and pair it with an incredible partner in Wieden+Kennedy and their global scale and global brand storytelling experience capabilities.
Its also an opportunity to redefine how a world-class creative marketer can coexist and thrive with a world-class creative shop.
The Great In-house Debate
Over the past 15 years or so, there has been an omnipresent tension in advertising between the role of in-house creative departments and ad agencies. Many in-house agencies were created to save a brand money by not having to outsource all of its creative work. It was also about control, the theory being that an in-house team would know the brand better, and it would be able to produce work faster to keep up with the pace of culture as social media exploded.
The reality is that brands were also fed up with unnecessary fees and bloated holding company bureaucracy. So they started to build out their own teams. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) publishes an in-house report every five years. Its 2023 report said that 82% of its members had an in-house agency, up from 78% in 2018. Some estimates now put that figure closer to 90%, though the trade groups next report wont be published until 2028. Each brand has its own model.
Almost all brand work from Airbnb, Squarespace, and Liquid Death comes from their in-house teams. Patagonia, another heavyweight in outdoorsy film content, produces all of its marketing in-house, too. In the past three years, Kraft Heinzs in-house agency, the Kitchen, has expanded its work from 4 of the companys brands to 19, and grown its team from 35 to more than 135 across two offices. PepsiCo has three different in-house agenciesSips & Bites for bigger projects, D3 for PepsiCo Foods in the U.S., and Creators League, which is focused on beverages. All told, its a major investment for these companies.
Ad agencies began to feel threatened. Every project or creative win by an in-house agency could conceivably have been theirs. Trade group In-House Agency Council reported last year that external agencies did 70% of the workload in 2021, but by 2023 that dropped to just 30%. Some execs estimated that 30% to 40% of revenue had bled from the traditional creative agency model through in-housing.
Yet Krafts most high-profile (and awarded) work still comes primarily from partner agencies like Rethink. When Pepsis in-house agency made the infamous Kendall Jenner ad in 2017, many ad agencies not-so-quietly celebrated the blowback.
What makes Yeti and W+K unique is their chance to reset this narrative and show what two incredibly strong creative entitiesin-house and externalcan achieve together.
Irrational Commitment
Last year, Yeti released a short film called All That Is Sacred. Directed by Scott Ballew, the 34-minute film is a portrait of Jimmy Buffett and his group of friends in Key West, Florida, back in the late 1960s and 70s. It shows the balance between the work and leisure life of writers and musicians, including Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Guy de la Valdéne, and Richard Brautigan, and their shared obsession with fishing.
No ad agency on earth wouldve made this. Or let e rephrase: No client would likely buy this idea from an agency. Not because ad agencies lack the creative talent. Ad agencies can, and do, make great, unexpected creative work. Even if we just stick to films, look no further than The Seat on Netflix (Modern Arts for WhatsApp), award-winning short doc The Final Copy of Ilon Specht (McCann for LOréal Paris), or waaay back to Pereira ODells role in Werner Herzogs 2016 feature doc Lo and Behold for Netscout.
But All That Is Sacred is ambitious even by Yeti standards. Most of Yetis best work has a direct tie to the brand, typically telling a personal story or chronicling an adventure of one of its many ambassadors. This is none of that. The tie to the brand is less direct, and more about vibes. That can be tough for an agency to push from the outside.
To use a Yeti-appropriate metaphor here, as a piece of brand content goes, its not just out in the wildernessits fully off-grid, to a point that would make most marketers feel naked and afraid. But its beautiful. And it fits. It fits in a way that only a brand so fully confident in itself and its point of view could.
That point of view has been the backbone of Yetis overall brand strength. Pierre Jouffray, Wieden+Kennedy executive creative director, says the agency worked with the internal Yeti team to really crystallize what that point of view is. After talking to all the brands ambassadors, one thing stood out. There’s something that is so true about their product, about the ambassadors, about the people, and about the way we would work together, which is this idea of irrational commitment, he says. Thats something that you can really connect with no matter what your pursuit is.
For Reintjes this isnt about taking a weird left turn for the brand. This isn’t about doing something different; it truly is additive, he says. It’s almost like a layer cake. We’re just adding another layer on top of the incredible work that our team does from the most grassroots, endemic, connected, authentic audiences across social media and different platforms. We look at this as augmenting and a partnership in and how we scale this brand for a really long time.
Bad Idea is a great start, blending what both companies do incredibly well. Its even narrated by musician and actor Ryan Bingham (Yellowstone), who hosted a Yeti show called The Midnight Hour in 2020.
The real test will be to build up the global brand work that truly taps into that idea of irrational commitment while still connecting and creating with the audiences who built this brand in the first place. Just Yeti It.
A reader writes: I have a new employee who is refusing to do some parts of her job. She hasnt done this with me directly, but when I left for a weeks vacation, I gave very clear guidance on what she should be working on. That included learning to use some of our equipment, practicing her job skills, and reviewing training videos with the team.
Unfortunately, while the other team members were focused on the training videos, she was watching personal videos on her phone. Each team member later told me separately that when they asked her to participate, her response was, No, Im not going to do it.
What should I do now?
Minda Zetlin responds:
Unless your employee is covered by a union contract, or a contract between you and her, you certainly have the legal right to fire her. Ethically, you have that right as well. When you hire someone to do a specific job, you can reasonably expect that they will do that job. The exceptions would be if you asked her to do something dangerous, illegal, or that violated her own ethics. Or, if you had unreasonable expectations for when or how much she would work, as in last weeks Ethics question.
Assuming none of that is the case, you can do whatever you choose. So ask yourself whats best for you and for your company, and also whats best for her. The answer will depend on why you hired her in the first place. Does she have skills your company needs? Do you see potential in her? Is she refusing to do these things because shes inexperienced and perhaps afraid of doing them badly?
Your next step should be to have a one-on-one meeting with her. Id begin by asking her why she declined to do tasks that clearly are part of her job. Id also ask about her future career goals both inside and outside your organization. Her answers will help you make an informed decision about what to do next.
Update:
The reader writes that they met with this employee one-on-one. I asked if she wanted the job, and she said yes, they write. I then listed the specific behaviors that needed to changeincluding refusing to participate and using her phone during work time. This was done firmly but with kindness, the reader says.
The reader also explained that the goal was to help this employee develop valuable professional skills. I made sure she understood the opportunity in front of her. The more senior person in her role earns more than $82,000 a year, and I explained that the training shes receiving could put her on a similar path at this company or anywhere else. The reader then printed out a list of the expectations this employee was to fulfill, and they each signed it.
The two met again for a follow-up two weeks later. By that time, her performance had improved dramatically. Shes now on week seven, and time will tell if she continues to grow into the role, the reader writes. But the kindly, structured explanation seems to have made a real difference.
Got an ethical dilemma of your own? Send it to Minda at minda@mindazetlin.com. She may address it in a future column.
This week’s biggest business news is perhaps that the U.S. federal government shutdown finally ended; however, that ending didn’t come without more than a few noteworthy concessions. Meanwhile, a beloved coffee chain walked straight into a strike on one of its biggest promo days, and a regional grocer found a way to turn literal loose change into both PR and foot traffic.
In the background, the tech world reminded everyone that hype cycles come with fine print. CoreWeave, one of the hottest names in AI infrastructure, delivered blockbuster revenue but still saw its stock sink on news of a delayed data center. IBM, facing louder rivals in quantum computing, rolled out new chips and a faster manufacturing plan to reassure customers it is still a contender. And amid all of that, Target is telling workers to smile more, and Google is suing over scam texts. Here are the stories that defined the week in business.
Marriott and Sonders Split Leaves Guests on the Street
Marriott abruptly terminated its licensing deal with Sonder, and within a day, the short-term rental operator announced plans to liquidate and file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. The collapse has created chaos for roughly 1,400 employees across more than 35 cities, not to mention for guests caught in the middle of stays. Some travelers reported being told to vacate with little warning, and others were denied access to their rooms or forced to navigate partial refunds and small credits after hours while on hold on the phone. Marriott says its priority is minimizing disruption for guests who booked through its channels, but both companies have gone quiet publicly as blame for the failed partnership flies in both directions.
Google Sues Alleged Smishing Kingpins Behind Fake USPS Texts
If you have ever gotten a fake USPS or toll road text, Google says it has found one of the groups responsible. The company filed a lawsuit against 25 unnamed individuals it ties to a global phishing as a service operation called “Lighthouse,” which allegedly used hundreds of fake website templates to mimic brands such as Google, USPS, and New York City agencies. Google argues that the nefarious network may have stolen as much as a billion dollars over three years by tricking users into entering logins and payment information. The suit leans on RICO, trademark, and computer fraud laws, and aims to disrupt Lighthouses infrastructure, even if the operators themselves are based overseas and beyond easy reach of U.S. law enforcement.
Starbucks Baristas Turn Red Cup Day Into a Red Cup Rebellion
On what is usually one of Starbuckss biggest promotional days, unionized baristas at more than 65 stores across 42 cities walked off the job. Members of Starbucks Workers United say negotiations over pay, hours, and hundreds of alleged unfair labor practices have stalled, and they accuse the company of refusing to bring serious proposals to the table. Starbucks insists the strike has had minimal impact so far and says it is ready to bargain when the union returns. The union counters that it is prepared to escalate into the largest, longest strike in company history if leadership does not agree to a contract that improves scheduling and take-home pay.
Hemp Becomes Collateral Damage in the Shutdown Deal
To move a bill that would reopen the federal government, senators accepted language that could effectively outlaw many hemp-based products within a year. The provision bans unregulated sales of items containing THC, which even legal hemp can include in trace amounts, and could devastate a $28 billion industry built after the 2018 Farm Bill loosened restrictions. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul tried and failed to strip the hemp language, arguing that it threatened thousands of jobs in his home state and elsewhere.
Shutdown Fix Sets Up a 2026 Sticker Shock for Health Insurance
The same deal that moved the government toward reopening will leave millions of Americans facing higher health insurance premiums in 2026. Senators agreed to fund the government without extending enhanced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits that currently keep exchange plans more affordable. Data from the Kaiser Family Foundation suggests that individuals could pay up to $1,836 more per year, and families of four could pay up to $3,735 more a year, if the credits expire. Democrats secured only a promise of a future vote on an extension and will now have less leverage, while employers are expected to hike premiums on workplace plans as well, continuing a decades-long trend of costs outrunning inflation.
Target Bets on Smiles and Service With New 10-4 Policy
Target is testing a back-to-basics strategy for its in-store experience as it heads into the holiday rush. A new 10-4 policy instructs employees to smile, wave, and acknowledge customers who are within 10 feet and to actively greet shoppers who are closer than 4 feet. The initiative lands just ahead of Black Friday and at the start of weeks of rolling promotions that stretch through late December, a period when two-thirds of Americans say they will already be shopping. Behind the friendlier vibes, Target is coming off better-than-expected second-quarter earnings, but also traffic declines, DEI-related boycotts, and recent layoffs that trimmed about 8% of its corporate staff.
CoreWeaves Data Center Delay Spooks AI Investors
AI infrastructure firm CoreWeave reported staggering growth, with revenue up 134% year over year and a $55.6 billion backlog of future business, yet its stock slid nearly 10%. The problem is a delay at a third-party data center that forced the company to lower its full-year 2025 revenue forecast by about $200 million. CoreWeave says the affected customer has agreed to keep the contract intact, meaning the revenue should arrive in 2026 instead, and stresses that 41 other data centers remain on track. Even so, the market reaction shows how jumpy investors have become about richly valued AI names, and how quickly sentiment can swing when execution hiccups threaten hyper-growth narratives.
IBM Pushes Back in the Quantum Arms Race
With DARPA publishing a list of top quantum contenders, and with rivals like Quantinuum touting record-setting machines, IBM is working to remind customers that it is still on schedule. The company announced two new processors: Nighthawk for near-term quantum advantage experiments, and Loon for longer-term, fault-tolerant architectures backed by advanced error correction codes. IBM is also moving quantum chip production into a 300-millimeter wafer fabrication plant at the Albany NanoTech Complex, a shift that should double its manufacturing speed and allow for much more complex processors. Executives say the goal is to make sure both hardware and classical software tools are ready so that real-world applications can scale by the latter half of the decade.
Pennies End, but a Grocer Turns Them Into a Marketing Win
With the U.S. Mint pressing its final penny this week after an order from President Trump to stop producing one-cent coins, a regional grocer is trying to capture both coins and customers. Market 32 and Price Chopper stores in six Northeastern states are hosting a Double Exchange Day that will swap up to $100 in pennies for gift cards worth twice as much. For shoppers, it is a way to turn jars of change into a sizable grocery credit. For the chain, it is a clever way to stock up on coins ahead of a looming shortage.
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Generally speaking, housing markets where inventory (i.e., active listings) has returned to pre-pandemic 2019 levels have experienced weaker home price growth (or outright declines) over the past 36 months. Conversely, housing markets where inventory remains far below pre-pandemic 2019 levels have, generally speaking, experienced more resilient home price growth over the past 36 months.
Of the 50 largest metro area housing markets, 21 major metros now have more homes for sale than at the same point in 2019. Last year, that count was 13 markets.
These are the 21 major markets where homebuyers have gained the most leverage: Memphis, TN; Austin, TX; Phoenix, AZ; Tucson, AZ; Denver, CO; San Antonio, TX; Orlando, FL; Nashville, TN; Tampa, FL; Oklahoma City, OK; Dallas, TX; Charlotte, NC; Seattle, WA; Houston, TX; Jacksonville, FL; Las Vegas, NV; Raleigh, NC; Birmingham, AL; Miami, FL; San Francisco, CA; and Portland, OR.
Many of the softest housing markets, where homebuyers have gained the most leverage, are located in the Southeast, Southwest, and Mountain West regions. Many of those areas were home to many of the nations top pandemic boomtowns, which experienced significant home price growth during the Pandemic Housing Boom, which stretched housing prices beyond local income levels.
There are some markets within Florida that have struggled with some inventory balance issues,” D.R. Horton COO Michael Murray said on the company’s October 28 earnings call. “Notably, Jacksonville and Southwest Florida have had some excess inventory, and demand has been a while coming to absorb that. So that’s kind of what you’re seeing in the current quarter’s results in the Southeast for us.”
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Once pandemic-fueled domestic migration slowed and mortgage rates spiked, markets like Punta Gorda, Florida, and Austin, Texas, faced challenges as they had to rely on local incomes to sustain frothy home prices. The housing market softening in these areas was further accelerated by the abundance of new home supply in the pipeline across the Sun Belt.
When and where needed, builders are often willing to reduce prices or make other affordability adjustments to maintain sales. These adjustments in the new construction market also create a cooling effect on the resale market, as some buyers who might have opted for an existing home shift their focus to new homes where deals are still available.
In contrast, many Northeast and Midwest markets were less reliant on pandemic domestic migration and have less new home construction in progress. With lower exposure to that migration pullback demand shockand fewer homebuilders doing large incentivesactive inventory in these Midwest and Northeast regions has remained relatively tight, keeping the advantage in the hands of home sellers.
While Im happy to extol the powers of the written word, sometimes you need a little something extra to get your point across.
Im not just referring to pictures, either, but also to annotations, flowcharts, and freeform drawings. These illustrative tools can be a powerful way to convey your message, whether by themselves or on top of an existing image.
Allow me to (*ahem*) illustrate exactly what I mean, using a free tool that might end up being the image-editing, markup-magic-creating supplement you never knew you needed.
This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures!
The picture of productivity
Next time you need to mark up an image or feel like rolling your own flowchart, remember this website: Excalidraw.com.
Excalidraw is a web-based app that bills itself as a digital whiteboard, but it is actually much more than that. With Excalidraw, you can also import your own images and then insert arrows, boxes, lines, and textor create completely freeform drawingsall on top of them.
Youll be ready to start drawing or annotating in just a few seconds. The site is free to use and doesnt require any logins.
To start using Excalidraw, just pick one of the drawing tools at the top of the screen, then click and drag on the canvas to insert it.
You can easily import any image into Excalidraw and then mark it up in all sorts of interesting ways.
To add an image, either click the image icon orif youre using the site on a computer and the image is in your clipboardjust hit Ctrl+V or Cmd+V to paste it in.
Use the Cursor tool to select items that you want to move or delete, and use the Hand tool to move around the canvas.
Excalidraw lets you save works-in-progress as files on whatever device youre using. Once youre finished, you can copy the resulting image to your clipboard or export it as an image file.
If youre an expert at editing photos on your phonethanks, perhaps, to my colleague JR Raphaels Android Photography Masterclassyou may wonder why youd need a separate app for annotating images.
For one thing, Excalidraw works on any device, not just your phone or tablet. (Ive found it especially helpful when marking up screenshots for my own tech advice newsletters.)
Excalidraw also supports illustrations without an image, so you can build a flowchart from scratch or doodle away on an infinite canvas.
Lastly, Excalidraw has more powerful annotation features than your phones photo markup mode, with additional drawing tools and a Layers feature for moving elements to the foreground or background.
Excalidraw’s annotation options are especially exceptional.
Some extra tips to keep in mind when using Excalidraw (some of which will only make sense if youre using a device with a mouse or keyboard):
Right-clicking on the canvas reveals some useful options, including a grid mode and a Zen mode that hides the toolbar.
Right-clicking individual items is helpful as well, allowing you to duplicate, flip, or move items forward or backward in the scene.
While drawing lines or arrows, you can connect them to the edges of a shape, and theyll stay connected even if you move the shape later.
Use Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z to quickly undo edits.
If you ever want to start from scratch, click the menu button in the top-left corner, then select Reset the canvas. (But consider saving your work first.)
To save your creation as an image file, click the menu button and select Export. Youll see a preview of what your image will look like along with some extra options. (Of note: Embed scene includes some data in the image file to allow for future editing in Excalidraw.) You can then save the file (as a PNG or .SVG) or copy it to your clipboard for easy sharing elsewhere.
Excalidraw.com is entirely web based, though you can install it as a Progressive Web App if youd like.
The site is free to use with no ads, including the ability to save project files to your local device and export images. An optional subscription for $6 per month lets you save files online and access extra features such as presentation mode and team management.
Excalidraw requires no sign-in, doesnt ask for personal information, and advertises end-to-end encryption for drawings.
Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
Frequent flyers and travel hackers who visited SeatGuru on October 31 were met with an unpleasant surprise: a shuttered website directing them to Tripadvisors homepage. After nearly a quarter-century in operation, the beloved website that helped fliers determine which seats to grab, and which to avoid, is gone. Heres why, and three SeatGuru alternatives to try now.
What was SeatGuru?
SeatGuru was a website highly regarded by frequent fliers. The site hosted seatmaps for thousands of airplanes and categorized every seat on each aircraft in order to help fliers figure out which to book and which to avoid. Good seats were those with qualities like the most legroom in their class, the deepest unobstructed recline, and amenities like power ports. Bad seats were those with limited recline, proximity to the toilets, or obstructed windows.
Since airlines rarely made customers aware of the drawbacks of certain seats, and priced them similarly to preferable ones, there was always some risk involved when selecting your seat while booking. SeatGuru took that uncertainty away. By visiting the site, you could pull up the exact make and model of your airplane for a selected flight and click any seat to see whether it’s good, bad, or something in between. You could then use the data SeatGuru provided to choose the seat that works best for you.
SeatGuru was founded in 2001 and was one of those websites that exemplified the promise of the early internet: that newly accessible data could help improve our lives in many small ways. In SeatGurus case, it meant frequent travelers could make more informed choices about which seats to select.
SeatGuru became so popular that in 2007, travel website king Tripadvisor acquired it. But now, 18 years after the acquisition, and 24 years after its founding, SeatGuru is no more.
What happened to SeatGuru?
While once a reliable repository of seat data, SeatGuru began to take a turn for the worse when the Covid pandemic started. Around 2020, SeatGuru stopped producing content for its blog, delisted its smartphone apps from app stores, and fell behind in publishing the latest seat map data, leading the site’s data to become increasingly unreliable.
Still, even until this year, provided the configuration of any planes seat did not change, SeatGuru remained a valuable resource for frequent travelers hoping to find the best seats on their flight. But then, on October 31, with no notice and no fanfare, Tripadvisor pulled the plug on SeatGuru. Now, visitors to the site are redirected to Tripadvisors homepage.
As for why, a Tripadvisor spokesperson told me that the companys pivot to AI initiatives was a driving factor in SeatGurus decline. Tripadvisor has been evolving its business for its next era of growth, one that is centered on experiences and powered by AI, the spokesperson told me. We’ve been focusing strictly on optimizing our legacy offerings, and deprioritizing areas of the business as we shift resources towards our marketplace growth opportunities.
SeatGuru was one of the areas the company felt should be deprioritized.
3 SeatGuru alternatives to try
SeatGuru may be joining many of its fellow useful websites from the early 2000s in the internet graveyard, but there are other ways to learn about a seat before you book it.
The first is SeatMap.com. The site was launched in 2022 and was founded by AMD and Microsoft veteran Djois Franklin and Fred Finn. Finn has the distinction of holding two travel-related Guinness World Records: most airmiles flown by a passenger and the person who has flown the most flights on the Concorde.
SeatMap hosts seat maps for planes operated by more than 750 airlines worldwide and categorizes each seat by color, based on comfort and amenities. In an email, SeatMap CEO Djois Franklin told me that the site was seeing a sharp uptick in traffic across the globe after SeatGuru shut down. To use SeatMap, just enter your flight information, and youll be presented with an interactive diagram of your flights seatmap.
A second website SeatGuru fans should try is AeroLOPA. The site, founded in 2021, doesnt have the interactivity of SeatGuru or SeatMap.com (meaning you cant click on an individual seat to learn more about it), but you can look up specifc planes in the fleets of nearly 200 airlines to find detailed cabin maps showing the relative positions of all seats along with general information about any cabins seat widths, recline, legroom, and more.
Finally, those wanting more social feedback about the best and worst seats should give SeatLink.com a look. The site lets you look up your specific flight, as SeatGuru did, and shows an interactive map detailing the amenities of each seat. SeatLink also lets users post comments about individual seats, enabling crowdsourced reviews and other socially aggregated data.
Legendary documentarian Ken Burns is set to release his long-awaited series after a decade in development. In the lead-up to the premiere of The American Revolution, Burns shares key lessons he gleaned from the founding of the United Statesand the parallels between the revolutionary era and today. He also reflects on his admiration for Lin-Manuel Mirandas Hamilton, and the obstacles he faces in his ongoing quest for truth.
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.
You have a new, six-part series about the American Revolution premiering on November 16. Why were you drawn to this? And why now?
I’ve been working on this for almost 10 years. . . . I said yes to this project in December of 2015. Barack Obama still had 13 months to go in his presidency. What drew me to the Civil War was organic and interior to my choices. I was looking at a map, a kind of 3D map, where I suddenly saw an arrow of British moving west through Long Island towards Brooklyn. This little, tiny town of Brooklyn, which is the largest battle in the entire revolution.
While there are no photographs in newsreels, I felt being a lover of maps and a willingness, I think, to reexamine my usual disdain for reenactments, they’re not going to reenact that battle. They’re just being there to make you feel the weather, make you feel the heat, make you feel the cold, make you feel the location, the interiors of all of these actions, and at that point, I realized maybe we can do this. Of course, I went about three years into this project and said, “Wow. If we hit our marks, we’ll be in 2025, which is the 250th anniversary of Lexington and Concord.” Then, all of a sudden people would arrive and say, “Oh. You planned this so well.”
Yes, yes.
We didn’t. I’m glad that a very deep dive into the revolution is going to happen way in advance of the 4th of July of next year, which is, for many people, the 250th. Of course, it’s been going on for some time, and will go on if you want to follow it through to the end, until 2039, which is 250 years after our government officially got started and George Washington became the first President of the United States of America. There’s lots of things going on, but a lot of it will be focused next July, and there is that risk that it could become super-ficialized. The war itself is already encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia. It is not bloodless or gallant.
You do not want to die when a cannon takes off your head, a bayonet guts you, or a musket ball rips through you. There’s just a remarkable set of characters and remarkable interiors to the war, the details of the battles, a really long, six and a half year war from Lexington to Yorktown. We need to know about our origin story, particularly in a time when people are sort of ringing their hands. We’re so divided. Well, you just look back there, and we’re really divided back then, and that maybe reinvesting with our origin story helps us find out what’s real and what’s artificial in all of the stuff that’s going on right now.
The current cultural story about the American Revolution that maybe is most prominent or most well known is Hamilton, is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s retelling in that. Did that impact the way you told the story at all?
Look, let me give my props to Lin Manuel. Hamilton is the greatest cultural event of this new millennium, this new century. It is a phenomenal thing. I mean, I’ve got a teenage daughter who’s 15, a 20-year daughter and an almost 15-year-old granddaughter, and they can recite, sing the whole thing, two-and-a-half hours. And so, they know tensions between big and small states. They understand between a strong federal Hamiltonian system and a state’s rights Jefferson model. They know who Hercules Mulligan is. They know all this sort of stuff about the revolution, and they have a kind of great glee about it that must mean that history teachers of this period are just lying down and thanking God for Lin-Manuel Miranda.
I mean, truth and fact are increasingly contested today, and we mentioned Hamilton. I mean, Lin-Manuel, the big picture is certainly there, but there’s a lot of artistic license in what he pulled together. When you look at this as a storyteller, and for our listeners who are business leaders and other leaders, the responsibility to promote strict accuracy, or like as long as we get the big picture right, it’s okay the details don’t matter as much.
The people that are listening to this have to do the former, right? Strict accuracy, and so do I. There’s not a filmmaker in a world when a scene is working, you don’t want to touch it, but we’re always finding new and destabilizing information that are true and you need to incorporate them. Lin-Manuel can actually take the poetic license necessary to do a big, Broadway musical, and God bless him.
I mean, there’s a guy that we know in our past who would take the histories and conflate characters, change countries, move these characters around. His name is William Shakespeare, and we don’t believe that there are any truths higher in fiction, which are sometimes more true than what’s real, but I can’t do that. I will sacrifice the art for the correct story. That makes it super complicated, but what’s interesting is when you do that, when you try to fit the round peg of the truth into the square hole of art, if you will, and you successfully negotiate it, it’s as good as anything. You’re right, we’re in an age where we’re supposed to be post-truth. No, we’re not. Are you post-truth? I’m not. I’m not.
Right.
Nor are the business leaders of the country. You’re going to fudge your figures? I don’t think so. We do know that large sections of where we supposedly get information are, themselves, unaccountable. They do not care, one way or the other. Whatever political persuasion, whatever it is, people are manipulating the truth all the time. Always has been. The problem is just the sheer size of the internet and its ability for a lie to get started before the truth can come back, but one and one is always going to be two. You can’t build an airplane, you can’t run a business, you can’t work the budget of a documentary film without one and one equaling two.
You can’t just make it up, right? You cannot make it up. George Washington rides out on the battlefield at least three times, that I know of, risking his life at Kipp’s Bay in Manhattan, at Princeton, and at the Battle of Monmouth, and these are significant things. If he’s killed, it’s all over, because he is the only person that held us together as a historian, Annette Gordon Reed says, that there’s one person who was able to figure it out. I’m interested in him. He’s deeply flawed. He’s rash. Those movements potentialy sacrifice the whole thing, and he makes terrible battlefield mistakes. He leaves his left flank exposed in the Battle of Long Island, the largest battle of the American Revolution, and loses it and New York for seven years.
It’s the British headquarters and the loyalist stronghold for the rest of the war. He does the same mistake at Brandywine in Pennsylvania, another huge, huge battle, where this time he leaves his right flank, but there’s nobody who knew how to inspire men in the dark of night, in the dead of cold, who could pick subordinate talent, that he wasn’t afraid of their skills or talent, who could defer to Congress and understand how they work, who could speak to a Georgian and a New Hampshireite and say, “You’re not that. You’re an American, this new thing.” Nobody. Nobody could do that. Does he have undertow? Yes. Does that make him any less heroic? No. Heroism is not perfection. Heroism is a negotiation within yourself between your strengths and your weaknesses.
Has truth always been sort of fungible and selective in U.S. history, a kind of a matter of debate and perspective, or is this time we’re in now different?
Human beings have always lied. People have been lying as long as there have been human beings.
When the camera was invented in 1826, many people thought painting would die. But it didnt. Instead, painters found new ways to express themselves. Painters reinvented expressionism, impressionism, and abstract art. Monet, Munch, and later Picasso, all thrived after the camera arrived.
When personal computers became common in the 1980s, there was fear that creative thinking would become less valuable. But computers opened the door to digital design, animation, and new forms of storytelling. Studios like Pixar, founded in 1986, showed how technology could help artists create worlds that were impossible before.
When Photoshop launched in 1988, photographers worried that editing tools would destroy the purity of photography. But Photoshop expanded what photographers and designers could do. It made visual creativity more accessible and helped build the modern creator economy.
So why does AI, today, make so many creators feel threatened?
History tells us one clear truth: New technology has never replaced creativity; it has always expanded it. Every time new technology arrives, progress follows.
The AI Genie Cant Be Rebottled
Artificial intelligence is simply the next chapter. It can help creators work faster, explore more ideas, and bring their imagination to life with fewer barriers.
Human imagination cant be replicated by a machine. The spark that evokes tears in a storys readers or a swoon from a melodys listeners is innately humanthat intangible side of creativity: talent, taste, lived experience, a unique point of view, and the urge to express it. But turning those intangibles into something others can see, hear, or feel also requires tangibles: time, tools, access, and resources.
Too often, thats where great creators get stuck. Not everyone can dream up and create a world worth caring about. But even those who can often lack the means to bring it to life in a way that others can enjoy as well. That’s where AI can help. It cant create soul, but it can remove barriers to entry by lowering the cost, time, skills, and resources needed to truly bring creative expression to life.
In this sense, AI can be a force multiplier for creativity. Just as the smartphone made photography universal, AI can democratize storytelling itself.
Collaboration, Not Replacement
In my work building an audio storytelling platform, Ive seen how AI can help creators, not replace them. Our platform lets anyone write and publish serialized audio stories. To help them, we’ve built AI tools that act like creative partners. They dont write for the authorsthey assist them. They help a writer stay consistent across hundreds of episodes, suggest plotlines when inspiration stalls, and offer real-time feedback on pacing and dialogue. Other tools turn text into natural-sounding audio, add background sound, or generate artworkcapabilities once available only to professional studios.
These tools dont take jobs from artists; they open doors for them. Many of our creators couldnt afford to hire professional narrators, sound designers, or illustrators. Without AI, their stories would never be heard. With it, they reach millions of listeners.
Thats not replacing creators. Its expanding who gets to be one.
Keeping Humans at the Center
Great art doesnt come from pattern recognition or probability. It comes from emotion, contradiction, curiositythe things that make us human. AI can help a writer structure a story, but it cant feel heartbreak or hope. That’s why we must build creator systems that keep those human creators squarely at the center: ensuring transparency, maintaining creative ownership, and deeply valuing the originators of ideas.
A New Chapter for Creativity
Were at a pivotal moment in a long story. The history of art and technology has always followed the same arc: disruption, fear, adaptation and, ultimately, expansion.
Steve Jobs once described the home computer (a technology that stirred up a frenzy of fear when it came to market) as a bicycle for the mind. He envisioned a tool that didnt replace our thinking but accelerated it, amplifying human imagination in the same way a bicycle amplifies human movement. This next chapter of creative innovation is ours to write. We can let AI reduce creativity to algorithms, or we can shape it into a bicycle for the creative mind, something that helps human talent travel farther and faster.
The future of storytelling shouldnt be about machines replacing humans. It should be about more humans telling more stories, reaching more people, and inspiring more imagination (and tears and swoons) than ever before.
Every fall, I anticipate the winter holidays with almost childlike joy. I look forward to familiar traditions with friends and family, eggnog in my coffee, and the sense that everyone is feeling a little lighter and more connected.
At the same time, I feel anxious and annoyed by the manufactured sense of urgency around gift giving: the endless searching and second-guessing shaped by advertisers, retailers, and cultural expectations.
Dont get me wrong, I mostly love givingand, yes, receivinggifts during the holidays. But as a researcher who studies consumer psychology, I see how those same forces, amplified by constant buying opportunities and frictionless online payments, make us especially vulnerable and often unwise this time of year.
Buying behavior, including gift giving, doesnt just reflect needs and wants but also our values. Frequently, the values we talk about are more akin to aspirational ideals. Our actual values are revealed in the seemingly inconsequential choices we make day after dayincluding shopping.
The cumulative effects of our spending behaviors carry enormous implications for society, the environment, and everyones well-beingfrom the purchaser and recipient to people working throughout the supply chain. This makes consumer behavior an especially important place to apply the emerging social science research on wisdom. While wisdom is defined in different ways, it can be understood as seeing decisions through a broader, values-informed perspective and acting in ways that promote well-being.
Over the past decade, consumer psychology researcher David Mick and I have studied what that means when it comes to consumption. Consumer wisdom? you may wonder. Isnt that an oxymoron?
But there are vast differences in how we consumeand as our research shows, this can lead to very different effects on individual well-being.
Defining consumer wisdom
Building on some of Davids earlier work, I began my own research on consumer wisdom in the summer of 2015, interviewing dozens of people across the U.S. whom others in their communities had identified as models of wisdom. Previous research guided me to settings where I could easily find people who represented different aspects of wisdom: practicality on farms in upstate New York; environmental stewardship in Portland, Oregon; and community values in Tidewater, Virginia.
I didnt use the term wisdom, though. It can be intimidating, and people often define it narrowly. Instead, I spoke with people whose peers described them as exemplary decision-makerspeople leading lives that considered both the present and the future, and who balanced their needs with others needs.
From those conversations, David and I developed a theory of consumer wisdom. With the help of a third coauthor, Kelly Haws, we validated this framework through national surveys with thousands of participants, creating the consumer wisdom scale.
The scale shows how consumer wisdom is not some lofty ideal but a set of practical habits. Some are about managing money. Some are about goals and personal philosophy, and others are about broader impact.
We have found that six dimensions capture the vast majority of what we would call consumer wisdom:
Responsibility: managing resources to support a rewarding yet realistic lifestyle.
Purpose: prioritizing spending that supports personal growth, health, and relationships.
Perspective: drawing on past experiences and anticipating future consequences.
Reasoning: seeking and applying reliable, relevant information; filtering out the noise of advertising and pop culture.
Flexibility: being open to alternatives such as borrowing, renting, or buying used.
Sustainability: spending in ways that support the buyers social or environmental goals and values.
These are not abstract traits. They are everyday ways of aligning your spending with your goals, resources, and values.
Importantly, people with higher scores on the scale report greater life satisfaction, as well as better health, financial security, and sense of meaning in life. These results hold even after accounting for known determinants of well-being, such as job satisfaction and supportive relationships. In other words, consumer wisdom makes a distinctive and underappreciated contribution to well-being.
Putting it into practice
These six dimensions offer a different lens on holiday normsone that can reframe how to think about gifts.
Interestingly, the English word gift traces back to the Old Norse rune gyfu, which means generosity. Its a reminder that true giving is not about checking boxes on referral, revenue-generating gift guides or yielding to slick promotions or fads. Generosity is about focusing on another persons well-being and our relationship with them.
From the perspective of consumer wisdom, that means asking what will genuinely contribute to the recipients life. One of the most important dimensions of consumer wisdom is purpose: the idea that thoughtful spending can nurture personal growth, health, enjoyment, and a sense of connection. Out with trendy gadgets, fast fashion, and clutter-creating décor or knickknacksthings that feel exciting in the moment but are quickly forgotten. In with quality headphones, a shared cooking class, a board game, and a workshop or tools to support a hobbygifts that can spark growth, joy and deeper connection.
In my ongoing research, people have described wise gifts as those that define value from the recipients perspectivegifts that stay meaningful and useful over time. The wisest gifts, respondents say, also affirm the recipients identity, showing that the giver truly understands and values them.
Wiser consumption is learnable, measurable, and consequential. By choosing gifts that reflect purpose and the original spirit of gyfutrue generositywe can make the holidays less stressful. More importantly, we can make them more meaningful: strengthening relationships in ways that bring joy long after.
Michael Luchs is a JS Mack professor of business at William & Mary.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Underperformance usually shows up in the guise of missed deadlines, low-quality work, or a bad attitude. This gets spotted sometimes, but not always, by a leader who then has to make a choice: when and how to tackle the underperformance.
However, the problem can be exacerbated by acting too quickly: there is often a fierce desire within leaders to jump to action. They want to stop the badness, stop the ripples, and solve the situation as quickly as possible. But often, this means that they make assumptions about what is causing the underperformance and how to solve it without taking a little time to explore the real reasons behind the poor performance.
The problem can also be exacerbated by acting too slowly: underperformance has a nasty habit of rippling out. Whether it creates a sense among colleagues that this low standard is acceptable, or whether it means that team members get annoyed that this individual is getting away with it (and therefore reduce their own efforts to create a sense of parity), it all ends in the same place: more underperformance and a potential impact on the workplace culture.
I developed SOLVE, a leadership problem-solving model, to deal with exactly these sorts of problems: ones that need solving but arent as easy as jumping straight to action. Causes need establishing, options need considering, context needs to be taken into account. In the case of underperformance, the five stages of the SOLVE model would work like this:
S State the ProblemTry to express, in 12 sentences, what the problem appears to be and the impact its having. Try to be precise about the behaviour causing concern: “Theyre regularly late with deliverables and hesitant to give their opinion in meetings, which reduces their impact and makes our team look unprepared.”
O Open the BoxHere, leaders dig into the problem more deeply, trying to work out why this situation is occurring. I encourage them to do a bit of research, and in this case, research should absolutely include talking to the team member in question to find out whats going on.
In the case of underperformance, I would investigate the following areas:
Has their workload increased recently, either because youve given them more tasks, or someone else has without your awareness?
Are they being asked to do work at a higher level than before? You might not perceive this in the same way they do, so its worth asking them the question.
Has anything changed in their personal life? In some country and company cultures, its not appropriate to ask this outright, but there is no harm in a catch-up asking them how things are going in general and seeing if they bring anything up.
Are they still finding their work interesting? Has anything changed that may have put their values out of line with the companys or vice versa?
Has the level of clarity over whats expected of them changed? If the companys strategy has changed, youre a new manager, or they are working across two projects, they may simply be confused as to what to prioritize and why.
L Lay Out Your SolutionBased on what youve discovered, you can now create a workable response. It might be offering clearer priorities, adjusting scope, or helping them to see the value of their work again. Leaders should think hard about what fits the context and the individual. With these very messy leadership problems, there is no such thing as a universal solutionthink about how your organizations size, industry, and status affect which solutions would work. If its a team issue, what impact does your function, size, and sub-culture have? And with regard to the individual involved, how does their background, personality, and experience affect your approach?
V Venture ForthHere, leaders start to put their actions into practice while looking out for problems along the way, ready to pivot. It may be that, as the underperformer starts to roll out actions to improve their performance, more factors reveal themselves as being important to take into account. For example, a leader I worked with recently thought that the solution to team disengagement was to increase rewards. However, the very mention of rewards led one team member to start to gripe about how this company thinks you can pay off anyone. It emerged that, even though the team member hadnt previously said it, their disengagement was as a result of feeling bored with the work, rather than feeling unrewarded. The leader focused instead on providing work that team member perceived as more interesting, and their engagement rapidly improved.
E Elevate Your LearningThis is about using the new skills and knowledge youve gleaned to generate further positive impacts. For example, if youve learned more about how to help team members manage their workload, can you share this with other leaders who have overstretched teams?
I believe, and have seen through my work, that the SOLVE model can make a meaningful difference in handling underperformance (as well as plenty of other types of leadership problems).
Leaders I work with on staff underperformance benefit from the encouragement that they should slow down, lay the situation out clearly, and then pick a solution that properly fits their context. They also appreciate being shown, through the Elevate stage, how to make sure that the time theyve taken solving this problem hasnt gone to waste. They have developed skills and approaches that will continue to help them and others in the future.
The SOLVE framework allowed one leader I recently worked with to break down precisely why their sub-teams were underperforming, looking at the issue on an individual basis, and come up with targeted solutions. Importantly, they were also able to use their skills to help other leadership teams across the firm, multiplying the impact that their careful handling of underperformance had for their firm.
I recommend, if you are keen to deal with an underperformance issue, to work through the five stages and see the positive impact that they can have on your team and, therefore, your leadership.
