Organizational leaders are witnessing a steep and unprecedented rise in employee healthcare costs that is eroding bottom-line profitability. According to data from the Business Group on Health, these costs are projected to rise by 9% this year, representing a 62% increase since 2017. To put it in perspective, this represents an incremental hit of nearly $1 million to the bottom line for a midsize organization of 500 people.
What CFOs are now confronting is a tipping point where the average total cost to insure an employee is nearing $20,000 annually. Notably, it is specifically mental health claims that are driving the spike. PwCs 2026 Medical Trend report shows that inpatient mental health claims have jumped a staggering 80% in the last 24 months.
For years, the corporate world has treated employee mental health as an imported problempersonal struggles that people bring with them into the workplace. But the evidence is now irrefutable that how employers manage their employees is having the greater impact and is often the leading driver of the strain. To be very clear, the way we work today has become a primary manufacturer of incremental stress, burnout, and mental health decline.
The Smoking Gun: Work is the Cause
Until now, the standard corporate response to employee mental health challenges has been to treat the symptoms rather than address the root causes. This means theyve offered workers resilience training, yoga and exercise classes, and sleep and meditation appsall band-aids on a structural wound.
The evidence shows that mental health strain is no longer an outlier and is the predictable outcome of employee expectations that exceed the human ability to recover and sustain high levels of productivity. According to the Mental Health America (MHA) data, 84% of workers identified at least one workplace factornot a personal onethat was actively harming their mental health.
This suggests that for the vast majority of people, the mental health crisis isnt bred at home; its being created at their desk. Here are three workplace leadership factors causing the most damage:
A Deliberate Lack Of Boundaries:With technology allowing people the ability to remain connected to work at all hours, the clear line between when employees workdays start and end has been entirely erased. Not wanting to forfeit productivity, organizations have so far resisted giving people this clarityand workplace managers too often exploit this by texting and e-mailing employees at odd hours and on weekends. Always being on and expected to respond prevents the human nervous system from ever truly recovering. People never get off the treadmill.
The Erosion of Human Connection: A focus on efficiencyand doing more with lessincreasingly means workplace leaders are stretched too thin to hold weekly check-in meetings with their teams. Companies are systematically replacing human-to-human coaching with AI systems, providing performance feedback via online dashboards and algorithmic scores. This is a biological disaster; it deprives the human nervous system of the context and connection required to feel safe. It also greatly undermines feelings of belonging, which is known to be the cornerstone of human well-being.
The Micromanagement Surge:
The rise of digital oversight is slowly creating a pervasive surveillance culture in our workplaces. In the 2024 American Psychological Associations, Work in America survey, 43% of employees reported feeling “monitored” at work in some way, and those who felt monitored were significantly more likely to report poor mental health. The lack of trust makes people feel incapable of doing the job they were hired to do and whittles away at their self-esteem. Furthermore, this lack of agency strips away their sense of control, which is another primary driver of human well-being.
The Managerial Squeeze
The primary source of employee stress isnt just their draining workloads, it is the person assigning them. The MHA report found that nearly 40% of employees explicitly name their manager as the top cause of their mental health issues.
This is further validated by Gallups 2025 State of the Global Workplace Report, which found that managers report higher levels of daily stress and burnout than the people they leada stress contagion that inevitably flows downward to their teams.
Its clear that when managers are run thin by layoffs and executive pressure, they often default to transactional and impersonal styles that make people feel devalued and tipped into survival mode. And, whenever human beings feel unsafethat their job is constantly on the linetheyre naturally more likely to break.
In the big picture, research shows many workers feel that their bosses are simply not there for them; they dont feel known and respected for who they are outside of work or valued for all they contribute. All of this means that workplace leaders have become stressors rather than stress relievers.
The Remedies: A Redirection Of Time And Intention
Facing both a financial and moral imperative to neutralize these stressors, organizations must now find the courage to sustainably pivotmoving away from whats effectively been wellness theater and toward structural changes explicitly known to elevate employee well-beingand help restore mental health:
Re-establish The On/Off Switch
Even if companies choose against establishing a one-size-fits-all remedy, workplace leaders should set explicit dark hours (e.g., 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.) for their own teams so people can rejuvenate. This will demand that leaders model and respect those boundaries and remove any stigma currently attached to not responding to messages after work. Nothing says people cant work beyond normal hours if they choose to. Its the expectation of always needing to be on that is the real pain point.
Foster Radical Belonging
Human beings aren’t built to handle pressure alone, and feeling connected to ones team is what supports resilience and personal thriving. Intentionally creating opportunities for employees to connect socially has become essential today. Leaders must also restore weekly check-ins (and coaching) with all direct reports and allow sufficient time to discuss each persons well-being before focusing on work goals and performance.
Look Out For People
What people need to flourish are feelings of psychological and emotional safety. So, leaders should ask themselves, Do my employees have work demnds they can reasonably meet? Am I available enough to them as a resource and sounding board? Do my actions demonstrate that I care about each person on and support them individually? Do people feel they have a voice in how their work gets done and in many of the decisions I make?
The Heart of the Matter
If were learning anything today, its that organizations cannot successfully scale productivity by subtracting humanity. The dramatic rise in healthcare costs and mental health claims reveals the illusion of this, and companies themselves are paying just as great a price as workers.
In the end, the most effective mental health support a company can offer is a manager who treats their people humanely.
Maybe youre not a hardcore football fan. Maybe youre looking forward to the ads and the halftime show more than the actual Super Bowl LX game. Youre not alonean estimated 40% of the more than 100 million U.S. Super Bowl audience consists of people who dont normally follow football.
But even if the names Patrick Mahomes and Jalen Hurts dont ring any bells (the starting quarterbacks of last years Super Bowl contenders, the Kansas City Chiefs and the victorious Philadelphia Eagles), a quick overview of this years big game may come in handy this weekend.
Who’s playing
The Seattle Seahawks will face the New England Patriots in Santa Claras Levis Stadium on Sunday, February 8, on NBC. Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30 pm ET.
No, you’re not experiencing déj vu
These two teams played in Super Bowl XLIX eleven years ago, with the Patriots winning 28-24 in what was, at the time, the biggest Super Bowl 4th quarter comeback ever. Tom Brady led two touchdown drives to bring New England from 10 points down to take the lead, and Russell Wilson threw an interception to little-known Malcolm Butler on the goal line with less than 30 seconds left, sealing the Patriots fourth Super Bowl.
Who are Super Bowl LX’s QB’s?
New England is led by second year sensation Drake Maye, Seattle by Sam Darnold.
Some key facts on Maye:
He was the third overall draft choice in 2024 out of North Carolina.
Just 23, Maye is set to become the second youngest quarterback to start a Super Bowl at 23 years and 162 days. (Dan Marino was just 23 years and 127 days when he started at QB for the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl XIX following the 1984 season.)
Mayes brother Luke was a star player for the Tar Heels basketball team.
In his second NFL season, Maye led the NFL in completion percentage, yards per pass attempt, passer rating, and various advanced metrics. He finished second in MVP voting (behind Matthew Stafford, quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams).
Key facts on Darnold:
At 28, Darnold is already playing for his fifth NFL team. He was considered a draft bust after flaming out with the New York Jets, who selected him third overall in the 2018 draft, and then struggling with the Carolina Panthers. He was a backup for San Francisco in 2023.
Darnold became the starter at Minnesota in 2024 after rookie J.J. McCarthy suffered a season-ending injury and led the team to the playoffs.
Darnold has been stellar for the Seahawks this year, including playing arguably his best game in the NFL in the NFC Championship win over the Rams, sealing a trip to Super Bowl LX for Seattle.
Key facts about the two head coaches
Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel has the chance to become the first person to win a Super Bowl as both player and head coach for the same franchise. Hes in his first season with the team, and orchestrated a turnaround from eight combined wins over the last two seasons to a 14-3 regular season and a trip to the Super Bowl. Vrabel was a star linebacker for New England during the first decade of the Brady-Belichick era, and participated in three Super Bowl championships. The NFL Coach of the Year as head coach of the Tennessee Titans in 2021, Vrabel was let go after 2023.
Mike Macdonald is in his second season as head coach of the Seahawks. Just 38, he has the chance to be one of the youngest coaches to win the Big Game if his team comes out on top in Super Bowl LX. Regarded as a defensive savant, he was a longtime assistant for John Harbaugh with the Ravens, and also spent a season as Jim Harbaughs defensive coordinator at the University of Michigan. He then went back to the Ravens as their defensive coordinator before earning the head coaching job in Seattle.
Other star players in the game
Patriots veteran wide receiver Stefon Diggs has made four Pro Bowls in his career, all with New Englands division rival, the Buffalo Bills. He is perhaps most well-known for catching the Minneapolis Miracle to defeat the New Orleans Saints as a member of the Vikings in the 2018 NFL Playoffs. Diggs is currently in a romantic relationship with rapper Cardi B. The two welcomed a baby boy in November 2025. Diggs is also facing felony strangulation and misdemeanor assault charges stemming from an incident with his former private chef in December.
On the defensive side of the ball, New Englands stars are defensive tackles Milton Williamsa big money free agent signing from last years Super Bowl champion Eaglesand Christian Barmorewho like Diggs is also currently facing assault chargesas well as third year cornerback Christian Gonzaleza two-time All-Pro who intercepted Jarrett Stidhams pass in the AFC Championship game to all but seal the win.
Seattle wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba led the NFL in receiving yards this season as a 23-year-old. He burst onto the scene as part of a stacked Ohio State team a few years before entering the league. Hes flanked by Super Bowl LVI MVP Cooper Kupp, who left the Rams after eight seasons last offseason to join the Seahawks.
The Seahawks have the leagues top scoring defense, allowing opponents just 17.2 points per game. The lineup features three second team All-Pro selections. Linebacker Ernest Jones, veteran defensive tackle Leonard Williams, and young superstar cornerback Devon Witherspoon all received those honors from the league, while 33-year-old defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence is also having a career resurgence, making the Pro Bowl.
Who owns the teams?
Under Robert Krafts ownership, the Patriots have been the most successful team in the NFL. A former season-ticket holder, Kraft bought the team, kept it in New England amidst challenges to move the franchise, and oversaw the entirety of the Brady-Belichick dynasty. This is the 12th Super Bowl appearance for the Patriots under Krafts ownership. The teams Big Game record going into SB LX is 6-5.
Micrsoft co-founder Paul Allens sister, Jody Allen, has been the de facto owner of the Seahawks since Pauls death in 2018. Reports emerged last week that Allen is looking to sell the team after the Super Bowl, but the ownership group refuted those reports.
Why people are talking about the announcer
One of his generations most popular announcers, 59-year-old Mike Tirico will make his Super Bowl play-by-play debut. He has hosted Super Bowl pregame and postgame coverage, as well as serving as NBCs Olympics host, but will have his first opportunity to call the Big Game on Sunday. Former NFL wide receiver Cris Collinsworth is no stranger to calling the Super Bowl, as hell have his sixth opportunity to do Super Bowl color commentary.
What about halftime?
Fresh off his Album of the Year Grammy win, international sensation Bad Bunny will perform at halftime. Selection of the 31-year-old native Puerto Rican sparked some controversy within the MAGA crowd as he’s a vocal opponent of Donald Trump and performs in Spanish. He has nearly 84 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
Who is favored to win?
The Seahawks are approximately 4.5 point favorites, meaning that sportsbooks expect Seattle to win by four or five points. For a modern Super Bowl, thats a fairly big line. Nobody has been favored by more than that in a Super Bowl in over a decade, per Sportsoddshistory.com.
What’s at stake?
If Seattle wins, it will be the franchises second Super Bowl, and will avenge the loss in Super Bowl XLIX back in 2015, when the Patriots denied the Seahawks from winning two in a row. For New England, a win would mean an NFL record seventh Super Bowl, all coming within the last 25 years.
It looks like a standard shipping container. But a metal box at a London factory is aimed at solving one of the shipping industrys biggest challenges: how to cut CO2 emissions on cargo ships.
The tech, from a startup called Seabound, can capture as much as 95% of the CO2 emissions from the exhaust on ship. The company is now preparing to install a set of the containers on a cargo ship in its first commercial deployment after years of development and pilot tests.
[Photo: Seabound]
The shipping industry is one of the last hard-to-abate sectors, says 30-year-old CEO Alisha Fredriksson, who cofounded the company in 2021 after working as a consultant and seeing the need for a new solution in the space. Clean fuels like green methanol and green ammonia exist, but only in limited amounts. Were still in very scarce supply of these fuels, and they’re projected to be 2-3x more expensive than the conventional fuels, she says. And the industry faces competition from other industries that can typically pay more for them.
Cargo ships also last for decades, and ships in use now cant easily switch to new fuels. As the industry slowly transitionsand in some cases begins to use other low-emission technology like wind powerthe startup is working on the pollution problem of the tens of thousands of ships that are already on the ocean. Cargo ships emitted 973 million metric tons of CO2 in 2024, around 2.5% of global emissions.
[Photo: Seabound]
Turning ship pollution into solid rock
Inside the companys modular containers, there are millions of marble-size pellets of calcium hydroxide, also known as lime. The box sits near the engine and connects to the ships exhaust. As the exhaust flows through the lime, the CO2 reacts with the material to make limestone. Each pellet slightly changes color, from white to off-white, as it captures carbon and soot from the exhaust. One container can capture roughly a days worth of pollution as the ship travels, and to cover a full route, multiple modules are connected together.
[Photo: Seabound]
Once the ship reaches port, a standard crane offloads the containers of calcium carbonate, effectively a fancy box of rocks, says Fredriksson. The limestone can be sold as a building material. Or, the company can reverse the reactionpulling the CO2 back outso that it can be sequestered or used to make fuels or chemicals. In that scenario, the lime can be loaded back into the containers and sent back onto a ship to capture more CO2.
Seabound’s first customer, Heidelberg Materials, will begin using the tech on a cement ship later this year. As the ship travels along the coast of Norway, the containers will capture CO2. Then the company will use the limestone in its kiln to make cement. (Heidelberg’s kilns also capture CO2, some of which will be permanently stored.)
The startup’s basic carbon capture process, called calcium looping, is also in use by some direct air capture companies like Heirloom, which uses trays of crushed rocks to pull CO2 from the atmosphere. But by hooking up directly to an exhaust pipe, Seabound can capture CO2 more efficiently. Waste heat from the ships engines also helps the process work faster.
Unlike expensive carbon capture technology at industrial facilities, the technology is simple enough that it can be relatively low-cost when it scales up, Fredriksson says. The company has calculated that it can also be one to two orders of magnitude cheaper than some other technology in development for carbon capture on ships.
The total process does create some emissions before it’s in use, as the lime is made and transported. But Seabound plans to work with lower-carbon “green lime.” Initially, though the tech can capture 95% of the CO2 as it comes from the exhaust stack, the total capture efficiency of the whole process will be closer to 80%. Over time, it’s feasible for the process to cut emissions by 90%.
[Photo: Seabound]
Cleaning up today’s ships
The startup, which has raised around 8.5 million ($11.6 million) in combined equity and grat funding from shipping companies and climate tech VCs, is working first with customers in Europe, where strict regulations are pushing the industry to quickly cut emissions. In the European Union, shipping is now fully subject to the EU’s emissions trading scheme, and a separate policy is ramping up fines for the emissions from fuel burned by ships. Shipping companies are also facing pressure from large customers, like Ikea, that have ambitious climate targets.
Seabound plans to focus on shorter routes that stay within Europe, setting up operations at the ports where ships refuel. Later, it plans to expand to Asia. Though global policy progess was delayed in 2025, after the International Maritime Organization postponed a planned global carbon price for shipping under pressure from the Trump administration, the IMO will be reconsidering the proposal later this year.
There are around 60,000 cargo ships in use now globally. Adding the tech to all of them would obviously be a heavy lift, though the industry has made other changes in the past, including adding sulfur scrubbers that capture other pollution.
There’s an argument that the new technology poses a moral hazardcompanies might be slower to adopt zero-emission tech if they can use CO capture instead. But Fredriksson says that given the slow pace of alternative fuels and other solutions, carbon capture is necessary.
“We started Seabound about four years ago now,” she says. “I think the future fuels feel just as far into the future as they did when I started the company.” If alternative fuels do become widely available, she says, the carbon capture tech could still be used to capture that exhaust. “Then we could do carbon negative shipping,” she says.
February 1 was National Change Your Password Day, a well-intentioned reminder that, ironically, highlights everything wrong with how we think about security in 2026.
Here’s the truth: if you spent the first day of the month dutifully changing “Summer2025!” to “Winter2026!” across your accounts, you didn’t make yourself safer. In fact, you might have made things worse.
Decades of Bad Advice
We’ve spent decades teaching people the wrong lessons about password security. Add a number. Throw in a special character. Change it every 90 days. These requirements were etched into our collective consciousness, repeated by IT departments, enforced by login forms, and internalized by millions of users who thought they were doing the right thing.
Meanwhile, the actual threat landscape evolved in an entirely different direction. Today’s attackers aren’t sitting at keyboards manually typing password guesses. They’re running offline brute force attacks with dedicated GPU rigs that can attempt 100 billion passwords per second against hashing algorithms like MD5 or SHA-1. At that speed, your clever substitution of “@” for “a” buys you microseconds of additional security.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which sets the gold standard for cybersecurity guidance, understands the new reality. Their latest digital identity guidelines represent a fundamental shift in how we should think about password security, and it’s not what most people expect.
Length Beats Complexity Every Time
NIST’s guidance is refreshingly straightforward. Length matters far more than complexity. A password should be at least 15 characters, but those characters don’t need to be a cryptic jumble of symbols that you’ll inevitably forget (or worse, write on a sticky note).
Instead, NIST endorses the concept of “passphrases” or multiple words strung together that are easy to remember but difficult to guess. “DontAskMeToChangeMyPassword” is more secure than “P@ssw0rd!” and infinitely easier to recall.
Even more surprising to many, NIST no longer recommends requiring special characters or numbers, and they’ve abandoned the practice of forcing regular password changes. Why? Because these rules don’t make passwords more securethey just make them harder for humans to manage, which leads to predictable workarounds that actually weaken security.
Passwords Are the Problem, Not the Solution
But here’s where NIST’s guidance gets really interesting. They acknowledge that even the strongest password is fundamentally insecure. Phishing attacks don’t care how long your password is. Data breaches expose credentials regardless of complexity. And with over 3,000 data breaches in 2025 alone, the question isn’t whether your password has been compromisedit’s how many times.
NIST’s primary recommendation isn’t about crafting the perfect password. It’s about moving beyond passwords entirely.
They emphasize multifactor authentication (MFA) as essential, not optional. They champion passkeyscryptographic keys stored on your devices that can’t be phished, guessed, or stolen in database breaches. They endorse password managers that generate and store unique credentials for every account.
Organizations are realizing that the password is the problem, not the solution. Passwordless authentication isn’t a futuristic concept anymore. It’s a practical necessity for companies serious about security and user experience.
What You Should Actually Do
If you must use passwords (and let’s be honest, you probably still need them for many accounts), follow NIST’s guidance. Make them long, use a password manager, and enable MFA everywhere it’s available. Better yet, embrace passkeys when offeredthey’re more secure and more convenient than any password could ever be.
But the real question isn’t “how do I create a better password?” It’s “why am I still relying on passwords at all?”
Instead of changing your password on National Change Your Password Day, why not change your entire approach to authentication?
Being adaptable has always been a useful skill. But in todays world, its essential. In our volatile, AI-accelerated workplaces, adaptability lets us transform uncertainty and pressure into clarity, learning, and discerning action. Thankfully, adaptability is a skill we can develop. In fact, there are science-backed practices we can adopt to improve our adaptability, and the benefits go far beyond our careers.
In practical terms, adaptability is being able to regulate and adjust your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors amid changing circumstances while staying aligned with your values and longterm goals. True adaptability is not passive compliance: its conscious ongoing calibration. Research links adaptability with higher life satisfaction and lower stress, especially when you add a sense of agency and social support.
Many people discuss adaptability as an external performance metrichow fast you can pivot, how many priorities you can juggle. For smart professionals, the real question is: how do you build adaptability from the inside out, without burning out?
Thats where the BRNT framework, which stands for Breathe, Rest, Nourish, and Talk, comes in.
How to go about cultivating adaptability
I designed the BRNT framework as an easy-to-remember anti-burnout tool, but it also forms the infrastructure of adaptability. Integrating the BRNT practices helps you alchemize your own adaptability. Its simple enough to act on and sophisticated enough to support sustainable high performance. Heres how:
Breatheallowing you to regulate before you respond
Breathe is about using breath, meditation, and movement to engage your parasympathetic nervous system, repair stress damage, and anchor yourself in the present moment. Practical expressions include guided meditation, a long walk, yoga, swimming, or simply watching the sunset with full attention.
From an adaptability standpoint, Breathe is your first line of defense. When you flood your nervous system, you react from habit and fear. But when you regulate it, you can choose your response. Breathe widens the gap between trigger and action, which allows you to:
Make better, calmer decisions.
Distinguish between noise and meaningful signals.
Access creativity instead of defaulting to defensiveness.
Restrebuilding the system that adapts
Rest focuses on improving and stabilizing sleep, taking breaks during the day, and disconnecting from work in the evenings, on weekends, and on vacation. As plenty of research shows, rest isnt a luxury: it is system maintenance for your adaptive capacity.
Cognitively, adaptability relies on working memory, emotional regulation, and perspective taking. When you have chronic sleep debt combined with nonstop stimulation, these functions degrade sharply. By prioritizing rest, you protect the very hardware that allows you to pivot. Deep sleep consolidates learning, and breaks and disconnection create space for insights.
In practice, rest might look like turning off your phone for an hour, taking a different route home to reset your senses, or setting a firm “no email after 8 p.m.” boundary. These microchoices accumulate into a state where you can tackle change with clarity, rather than exhaustion and fear.
Nourishcurating your inputs
Nourish is about making wise choices about what you consume. That encompasses nutrition, information, surroundings, and community. Thats why its important to be hydrated, have healthy social media practices, and block out some time in your week to do the things you love and spend time in nature.
Inputs shape adaptability. It is the food that stabilizes or spikes your energy, the social feeds that calm or inflame your mind, and the environments that drain or restore you. When you nourish yourself deliberately, you achieve the following:
Stabilize your baseline mood and energy, so change feels challenging, not catastrophic.
Reduce cognitive overload by limiting junk information, which leaves bandwidth for real problem-solving.
Reinforce a sense of self that isnt entirely defined by your work, which buffers you when roles or titles shift.
For high-achieving professionals, nourishment is often the most radical act. That requires you to choose quality over quantity in everything from meals to media to meetings. That curation is itself a form of adaptive intelligence.
Talkadapt together, not alone
Talk is about building and nurturing strong social connections and surrounding yourself with people you can be open and honest with. Practical expressions include texting with a friend, joining a vulnerable conversation with colleagues, scheduling a coaching or therapy session, or having lunch with coworkers instead of alone at your desk.
Adaptability is social, not solo. Social connection is one of the strongest predictors of both resilience and adaptability. Conversations can help you realitycheck your perceptions, access new perspectives, and co-create responses to change rather than carrying everything all alone.
Talk supports adaptability by enabling you to:
Surface and regulate emotions through language, instead of acting them out unconsciously.
Borrow other peoples ideas, strategies, and courage when you feel depleted.
Build networks that make practical adaptationlike changing roles, projects, or organizationspossible and even enjoyable.
Putting everything together
When you put everything together, the demand for adaptability will only increase. The challenge and the opportunity arent to meet that reality with frantic hustle, but with intentional inner work.
Consider using BRNT as a weekly selfreflection ritual. To do so, ask yourself the following questions:
Where did I breathe before reacting this week?
How did I rest and restore my system?
What did I nourish myself with, and what do I need to cut?
Who did I talk to honestly about what is shifting for me?
Over time, these practices do more than prevent burnout. They transmute everyday stress into data, insight, and growth.
This is what real adaptability is. Its not about not becoming a different person every quarter. It is about continually evolving to meet the moment with a steady nervous system, a rested mind, a nourished body and soul, and a supportive community behind you.
When Howard Schultz joinedand later acquiredStarbucks in the 1980s, he was deeply inspired by the communal culture of Italian coffee bars. From the beginning, Schultz envisioned Starbucks as more than a transactional stop for coffee. He wanted to build a community-centered space for people to congregate and connect. That vision helped redefine what a coffee shop could be. In recent years, however, that vision has lost momentum.
Shifts in how and where people work, rising costs, and intensifying competition have challenged Starbuckss dominance in the coffee shop landscape. In New York City, the company recently lost its position as the citys largest coffee chain to Dunkin, according to a report from the Center for an Urban Future.
Starbucks has since closed 42 stores in the cityroughly 12% of its New York locationsas part of a broader $1 billion restructuring plan that shuttered 400 metropolitan stores nationwide. The company that once felt like it occupied every corner is now becoming more selective with its presence.
As part of that reset, CEO Brian Niccol, former CEO of Chipotle and Taco Bell, is attempting to reestablish Starbucks as a true third place, distinct from both home and work. The third place is not something we need to reinventits who we are, Schultz said at the Starbucks Leadership Experience 2025.
The strategy, branded Back to Starbucks, calls for a shift away from the grab-and-go model that has dominated in recent years and toward a more inviting in-store experience with comfy chairs, couches, and power outlets, according to a CNN report. Starbucks plans to renovate 1,000 U.S. storesabout 10% of its domestic locationsas part of the effort.
As Niccol pushes to restore the brands third place ethos, Starbucks is betting that customers still want a place to stay, not just a place to order, in a market increasingly built around speed, convenience, and efficiency.
By Leila Sheridan
This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister website, Inc.com.
Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
Prices for a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl on NBC this year averaged $8 million. For the privilege of paying that, advertisers are required to spend an additional $8 million to buy ad time on other NBC sports broadcasts and the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.
With that much money invested (all before any is spent on actually creating a Super Bowl campaign) brands need to ensure they get your attention. This year, Rocket Mortgage and Redfin are aiming to do that by combining three things that will produce a large Venn diagram of interest: Lady Gaga singing Mr. Rogers’s “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”; a heartwarming commercial airing during the game; and, most crucially, giving viewers the chance to win a million-dollar house.
[Photo: Rocket Cos.]
Rocket Cos. CMO Jonathan Mildenhall says any successful Super Bowl campaign needs to have three different stages.
The only way to win at the Super Bowl is to win a disproportionate share of conversation pregame, as well as during game, and, increasingly, the progressive brands are talking about postgame conversation, Mildenhall says. For us the pregame was Lady Gaga behind the scenes, then during the game there is the spot, and we’re announcing the Great American home search for people to participate in over the days after the game.
So Mildenhall is playing Super Bowl chess, not checkers.
[Photo: Rocket Cos.]
Great American Home Search
On February 4, Redfin (acquired by Rocket last year) announced the contest, calling it a “never-been-done-before scavenger hunt” and inviting people to download or update the Redfin app to participate.
The search begins February 8 at 8 p.m. ET, immediately after Rocket and Redfins Super Bowl spot airs. Redfin will then release six app-exclusive clues over the next 48 hours for players to use Redfins search tools and filters to find the million-dollar home, which actually appears directly in the commercial. The first eligible player to solve all six clues and identify the home wins the house.
It’s a double-play attempt both to get people’s attention and immediately boost Redfin’s competitive muscle amid category leaders Zillow and Realtor.com.
“Turning up and just speaking to America using celebrities, bad jokes, and flashing a logo quickly becomes invisible, so we have to do a massive activation,” Mildenhall says. “Calling this activation the Great American Home Search is a deliberate attempt to create a strategic lockout from the biggest competitors because I want people to spontaneously associate Redfin and home search.”
[Photo: Rocket Cos.]
Neighborhood watch
The audience-participation aspect of Rockets strategy is just one lever the company is pulling for the Super Bowl. The spot itself is another.
Mildenhall says the creative behind the ad was inspired by the stark reality of how disconnected most of us are from the people we live next door to. According to a March 2025 Pew Research Study, only about 26% of Americans know most of their neighbors. And the percentage of people who know and trust their neighbors has decreased 8% since 2015.
This is part of the reason why Rocket enlisted Lady Gaga to reinterpret the Fred Rogers classic Wont You Be My Neighbor? After teasing fans with a behind-the-scenes video of Gagas recording session a week before the game, the actual Super Bowl ad shows the emotional roller coaster of moving and the evolving dynamics of neighborhoods through the eyes of two teenage girls.
Mildenhall says the goal is to spark a more culturally significant conversation with America about being better neighbors and being a better neighbor as a civic responsibility.
Americans ache for something and we see it in the stats. People are lonelier than ever before and need excuses and reasons to connect, Mildenhall says. People are struggling to find inspiration to connect with their neighbors. And we are going to be culturally significant brands because we’re going to tap into the cultural tension that can help lift up more Americans than any other tension. And this story is pressing into the loneliness that people feel in their own neighborhoods.
For most brands, having the Great American Home Search would be enough. But Rocket and Redfin have added the layer of a tearjerker spot scored by Lady Gaga. The combination of classic Super Bowl ad storytelling with audience participation to drive app downloads puts this on the short list for best all-around big game spot.
[Photo: Rocket Cos.]
Setting the tone
Last year, Rockets Super Bowl ad revolved around the dream of home ownership. According to a variety of recent studies, anywhere between 85% and 94% of Americans believe owning a home is good for the country and a fundamental stepping stone to the American dream.
The ad Own the Dream was set to John Denvers classic Country Roads. The twist was that coming out of the commercial break, the brand had arranged for the song to be played in the stadium, so as the ad ended, viewers came back to the game with the crowd singing the same song in real time. It was viewed nearly 250 million times on social media, and brand awareness has gone from 23% to 37%, according to the company.
Mildenhall says when he met with Lady Gaga for this years ad, she was very respectful of the original song but he wanted it to be something different. His message was, This cannot be a lullaby to America, it has to be a rallying cry to America. He adds that she was up to that, went into the studio, and it’s amazing.
For years, Rocket went for comedy in its Super Bowl spots, with big laughs from the likes of Jason Momoa (2020), Tracy Morgan (2021), and Anna Kendrick (2022). But Mildenhall says that while both the Morgan and Kendrick ads won the USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter, it wasnt the right fit for the brand.
Every time that somebody gets their mortgage, refinances their home, or gets out of bad credit card debt, were helping people get into college, or buy the house, and facilitating the American dream, he says. But our past approach would kind of cheapen that because we were getting celebrities doing jokes, and there’s nothing really funny about what we do.
The short long game
Most Super Bowl ads are what marketers call top-of-funnel work, basically vibes-based brand building for the longer term. But Mildenhall says marketers are under incredible scrutiny from their board and shareholders about every dollar, and its tough to show short-term value in longer-term brand marketing.
A creatively executed contest is a shortcut to short-term results, even in the Super Bowl. DoorDash pioneered this concept with DoorDash All the Ads in 2024, getting more than 8 million contest submissions and 11 billion impressions. And its in-game ad was just a promo code.
Rocket is combining that with Lady Gaga singing Mr. Rogers over a heartwarming story about an emotional part of the American dream. The spot itself is a great piece of brand marketing, but its also got a clue for the contest embedded in it, which will encourage contestants to watch it over and over. Meanwhile, the contest is driving downloads of the Redfin app, which will undoubtedly satisfy short-term justification of the big game investment.
We’re going to ensure that we’ve got eyeballs on the spot looking for the home, but it’s only after it airs that the first of six clues are given, and the remaining six clues are given over a 48-hour period to ensure that Rocket and Redfin are in the postgame conversation, Mildenhall says. So the new strategy that I would implore all marketers to be thinking about is you’ve got three stages of Super Bowl investment and one of those stages has to be dominated by your audience participation.
If you win that house, though, just remember to learn your neighbors names.
Watching the Super Bowl without cable keeps getting more expensive.
NBC will not offer a free stream of Super Bowl LX in 2026, an NBCUniversal spokesperson confirmed. Instead, cord cutters will need a Peacock Premium subscription, which costs $11 per month for the ad-supported tier. Cable subscribers who want to stream the game can log on to NBC’s apps.
This isn’t the first time NBC has put the big game behind a paywall. It also required a Peacock subscription in 2022, but back then you could still stream the Super Bowl for free on your phone via the NFL or Yahoo Sports apps. (Also, a month of Peacock cost just $5 at the time.)
It wasn’t always this way. In the late 2010s, before pay TV subscriptions entered a free fall, all the networks would stream the Super Bowl free of charge with minimal friction. Over the past five years, they’ve added new layers of complexity, requiring free trials, account sign-ups, and, in NBC’s case, hard paywalls.
Here’s how availability has shifted over the past decade.
2016: Free on CBS apps/website
2017: Free on Fox apps/website
2018: Free on NBC apps/website
2019: Free on CBS apps/website
2020: Free on Fox apps/website
2021: Free on CBS apps/website
2022: Peacock or NBC login required on TVs; free on NFL mobile app
2023: Free on Fox apps/website
2024: Paramount+ required, free trial available
2025: Free on Fox’s Tubi app with sign-in
2026: Peacock or NBC login required, no trial
This is the first year in which neither the host network nor the NFL will offer any free way to watch the game. The league stopped offering free mobile access in 2022, when it launched its NFL+ streaming service, and Peacock doesn’t offer free trials.
A few free work-arounds still exist. Those who get decent antenna reception from a nearby NBC station or affiliate can watch the Super Bowl for free over the air. Some live TV streaming services that carry NBC also offer free trials, though the cost of forgetting to cancel is steep: Hulu + Live TV charges $90 per month after a three-day trial, while YouTube TV has a 21-day trial followed by a $60-per-month promo rate for two months. Both trial offers are for new subscribers only.
Those options aside, the cheapest way to watch the Super Bowl will be to eat the cost of a Peacock subscription, even if it’s only for a month. Like most streamers, Peacock lets you cancel immediately after signing up and still provides the full month you paid for, with no auto-billing at the end.
Paying $11 for a single sporting event might sting, but at least it gets you the Winter Olympics as well. Lightshed Ventures analyst Rich Greenfield says that combo may explain why NBCUniversal is willing to paywall the big game, even if it means forgoing some ad impressions from free viewers.
“When you have so much firepower, they likely know youll convert versus giving so much high-value content away for free as part of a trial,” Greenfield says.
Either way, the trend is likely to continue in the years ahead. Paramount+ stopped offering free trials after a price hike in January, and Fox could eventually try to push its new $20-per-month Fox One subscription service instead of serving the game on Tubi.
Its a reflection of the overall state of the streaming industry, which initially used low prices and ad-free viewing to lure in new subscribers. For networks like NBC, CBS, and Fox, profits from the cash cow cable business helped fund those endeavors. But as traditional pay TV subscriptions plummeted, and Wall Street began looking for profits from the streaming side, the cost of access has increased.
Free Super Bowl streams are a casualty of that shift. Despite its reputation as a major event for advertiserswith 30-second ads selling for $8 million on average in 2026the networks are increasingly deciding that they’re better off putting the big game behind paywalls.
Check out Jareds Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming TV advice.
The MAGA movement has always been partly about culture, but lately conservative politics have fully ventured into the entertainment realm. Between the theatrical release of the Melania documentary, the drastic and ongoing reshuffling of the offerings at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the Kid Rock-headlined alternative to Bad Bunnys upcoming Super Bowl halftime show, the cultural MAGA-verse has shifted from backlashes and boycotts to counterprogramming.
The anti-halftime spectacle will provide an interesting temperature check of the impact of these efforts. The AllAmerican Halftime Show, organized by Turning Point USA, is billed as an explicitly conservative counterprogram to the official Apple-sponsored show featuring Latin phenom Bad Bunny. Kid Rock will be joined by mid-level country artists Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice, and Gabby Barrett. The show will be broadcast on Turning Points YouTube and social media accounts, as well as on several conservative networks such as OAN.
He’s said he’s having a dance party, wearing a dress, and singing in Spanish? Cool, Kid Rock said in a press release. We plan to play great songs for folks who love America.
A proud Puerto Rican, Bad Bunny is, of course, American, but he performs mostly in Spanish and has been openly critical of the Trump administration and ICE, making him a MAGA foe. So in a pop culture iteration of alternative facts, Turning Point and the MAGA-verse envision a world in which Kid Rock is a bigger attraction than the global superstar who was last years most-streamed artist on Spotify and just won the Grammy for best album on February 1. It seems delusional that Kid Rock can divert a significant audience from the years premier sports-cultural moment. What viewers it does gather will likely be motivated by anti-Bad Bunny spite.
We cant wait to watch the incredible show theyre about to put on, Turning Point boasted of its counter-lineup. We know millions around the country will be watching too.” (Last years Super Bowl audience was around 127 million people; Animal Planets halftime-show alternative, the Puppy Bowl, attracted about 12.8 million viewers.)
This counterprogramming strategy echoes a conservative tactic that long predates MAGA in the realm of information and persuasion. Rather than (or in addition to) complain about news sources they disagreed with, conservatives built their own alternatives, from Fox News and its newer, even more conservative rivals to popular radio talk shows and a slew of online media. No need to try to get your message through someone elses media when you can just program your own content.
Something like that strategy seems to have worked for first lady Melania Trump, who doesnt give a lot of interviews but is the subject of the documentary Melania, the contents of which she essentially controlled. Though lambasted by critics and mocked for a nationwide release on some 1,800 screens, the film did fairly well for a documentary, taking in $7 million on its opening weekend (experts predicted $5 million, skeptics close to $1 million). Theres still basically no chance it will earn back the $75 million Amazon paid to acquire and market the project, but all the jeering arguably brought Melania more attention and may well have motivated MAGA loyalists to head to the theater. Again, spite seems like a more significant motivator than enthusiasm.
Still, its not clear how well the cultural version of MAGA counterprogramming plays out over time. Consider the most prominent test case to date, the travails of the Kennedy Center, as cultural signpost.
Last year Trump seized control of the centers agenda, reorganizing the board, installing loyalists, and naming himself chair. Artists such as Rhiannon Giddens and Issa Rae canceled events, as did producers of a planned Hamilton run of performances. Evidently unfazed, Trump took an unusually active role in choosing recipients of the 2025 Kennedy Center Honors, including Sylvester Stallone, George Strait, and Kiss. Critics argued the choices had more to do with political loyalty than artistic merit.
But perhaps more to the point, the seemingly populist counterprogramming of a traditional Kennedy Center lineup did not play well in the cultural marketplace: Trump, who personally hosted the event, predicted it would pull the ceremonys largest-ever broadcast audience, and instead it drew the smallest.
Regardless, Trump proceeded to add his name to the venueinspiring more cancellations from performersand more recently to announce the center would close for two years for improvements. One thing that reportedly needs refurbishing is the list of visiting performers: CNN quoted an insider saying that thanks to mounting cancellations and trouble lining up new performances, there would not have been any programming to announce.
So while we have to wait and see how the Turning Point halftime show plays out against Bad Bunny (and the Puppy Bowl), counterprogramming has become more than just a MAGA-friendly strategy. Its apparently the only programming the MAGA-verse has to look forward to.
For totally logical reasons, this year’s Winter Olympics in Italy is bucking the trend of a single host city and splitting its sporting events between two main locations, Milan and Cortina. Milan, the second most populous city in Italy, is the urban setting for indoor events like ice hockey and ice skating. Cortina, a ski resort town 250 miles away, provides most of the snowand hill-based venues for quintessential Winter Olympic sports like alpine skiing and the bobsled.
But the two separate locations posed a problem for one of the key parts of the Olympics: the opening ceremony. How could there be one grand show when the sporting action was split in half and separated by hundreds of miles?
The solution was to put on the show simultaneously in both places.
When the opening ceremony is televised around the world on February 6, its pomp, performances, and athlete parades will be broadcast from both Milan and Cortina, with segments from each location woven together into one show. Creative director and executive producer Marco Balich, a veteran of 16 Olympic ceremonies, says the decision to include both locations became a kind of guiding concept for the ceremony itself.
Marco Balich (left) with Claudio Coviello and Antonella Albano (right) – Principal Dancers of Teatro la Scala [Photo: International Olympic Committee]
Cortina, he says, is “pure mountains,” while Milan is the opposite, “a total industrial, design- and fashion-driven city.”
“The narrative that we figured was going to be interesting was the relationship between a location in a city and a mountain, creating a metaphor between man and nature,” he says.
[Image: International Olympic Committee]
The dichotomy led to the theme of the show, Armonia, or Harmony. “The message that we humbly propose to the world would be to take the metaphor of man and nature and underline that we need to create dialogue between those two elements,” Balich says.
Balich and his firm Balich Wonder Studio used this concept to guide the design of everything from the rainbow of costumes dancers will wear to the spiraling stage for the Milan segment of the ceremony.
Caterina Botticelli, Costumes Manager [Photo: International Olympic Committee]
Balich, who is Italian, also worked on the last Olympics held in Italy, the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, and he says that opening ceremony played heavily on Italian history. This year’s version is much more driven by the impact of Italy on the world, and will include references to Italian inventors, Italian design, and Italian fashion. A special segment of the show will honor the late fashion designer Giorgio Armani. Elements of the ceremony will also feature the mountain areas Valtellina and Val di Fiemme, where other outdoor events will take place. All athletes competing in this year’s Olympics will be able to participate in the ceremony.
[Photo: International Olympic Committee]
Despite the technical challenges of filming the 2026 Winter Olympics opening ceremony in multiple locations, Balich says the overall production is intended to be very analog and very human. “The images that I remember of the Olympics are always human driven, whether it was Muhammad Ali lighting the cauldron in Atlanta or the drumming in Beijing 2008,” he says.
