In today’s marketplace, “authenticity” has become a buzzword that brands strive to embody. Consumers will tell you they are drawn to companies that appear genuine, transparent, and aligned with their personal values, and brands are certainly paying attention.
However, the concept of corporate authenticity is complex and often misunderstood. While it seems easy enough to decide whether a person is authentic and honest (which does not imply we are good at it), it is rather more difficult to attempt to judge a corporation on whether it is true to itself or lives up to its values. Unlike individuals, corporations are open systems with diverse stakeholders, making the pursuit of authenticity a challenging endeavor. The impression or view a collective of individuals may hold on them represents less in the form of a tangible or concrete reality, and more in the form of an urban legend or story. As Yuval Harari notes, corporations are shared mythsPeugeot is not a car, it is a story.
In line, research shows that we often anthropomorphize brands, attributing human characteristics to them. This tendency is encapsulated in Jennifer Aaker’s seminal work on brand personality, which identifies five dimensions: sincerity (think Patagonia, known for its environmental activism and ethical sourcing), excitement (Red Bull, with its adrenaline-fueled branding and extreme sports sponsorships), competence (Toyota or Microsoft, projecting reliability and expertise), sophistication (Chanel or Rolex, evoking elegance and luxury), and ruggedness (Jeep or Harley-Davidson, built around toughness and adventure). These categories help marketers craft emotionally resonant narratives, but they can also misleadcreating the illusion of consistent, humanlike traits in organizations that are, in reality, anything but unified or coherent.
The Pitfalls of Virtue Signaling
Indeed, assigning brands personalities also sets them up for moral scrutiny. Once a company claims to be sincere, competent, or sophisticated, it invites consumers to hold it accountablenot just for performance, but for being honest in what it claims, and doing what it says. Thats where things often fall apart. Take the example of punk beer brand BrewDog. In 2022, the company launched an aggressive advertising campaign to distance its beers from the human rights abuses associated with the World Cup, even promising to donate sales of its Lost Lager to fight human rights abuses. But the story became more inconvenient when it emerged the company had a partnership with a distributor in the Gulf, and would continue to show World Cup matches in its pubs. As it turned out, the road from punk rebel to self-serving hypocrite turned out to be rather short.
On the other hand, Targets recent decision to double-down on its commitment to DEI despite the growing list of multinationals (including Meta, McDonald’s, Ford, Walmart, Amazon, Harley-Davidson, and Disney) deemphasizing or halting their existing DEI programs, appeared to trigger a consumer backlash (at least according to its CEO). Then there’s H&M, which promoted a Conscious Collection to highlight its commitment to sustainability, only for watchdogs and NGOs to uncover greenwashing practices and ongoing exploitative labor issues in its supply chain.
While consumer perceptions of insincerity may not always be fair or reliable (and there will never be a shortage of social media trolls praying on any corporate decision, including the decision to not say or do anything about anything), the fact remains that if you make a claim to be responsible or ethical, it is only a matter of time before consumers start looking under the hood to see whether your actionsand your political spendingare aligned with what your firm says it cares about. In the digital age, where every claim can be fact-checked and memed within minutes, performative values are not just ineffectivetheyre often self-handicapping.
Is This Brand for Real? A Consumers Guide to Authenticity
If you’re wondering whether a brands values are more than just marketing spin, here are a few practical ways to find out:
1. Is the cause connected to what they actually do?Brands are most credible when they support issues tied to their core business like a bank promoting financial literacy, or a food company addressing supply chain working conditions. If the cause feels random or like its chasing headlines, thats worth questioning.
2. Is the message matched by meaningful action?Look beyond the ads. Are they investing in real change, or asking you to do all the work? If a brand promotes sustainability but spends more on ads than actionor emphasizes consumer behavior over their ownit might be more about optics than impact.
3. Are there big gaps between claims and criticism?Compare what a brand says with how its covered in the press or watchdog reports. If theyre celebrating progress on diversity or climate, but facing lawsuits or fines in the same areas, thats a red flag. No brand is perfect, but consistency matters.
4. Who owns the topic inside the company?Real commitment goes beyond marketing. If sustainability or DEI is led by senior leadership and tied to company performance, that suggests seriousness. If its buried under PR, it may be more about image than impact.
5. Are they transparent about whats not working?No company gets it right all the time. But the best ones admit mistakes, revise targets, and explain why. Honesty is often more powerful than perfectionand its a key sign that the values are real, not just rehearsed.
6. Do they walk the talk politically?Some brands say one thing in public and back different things behind closed doors. If you care, tools like OpenSecrets.orglet you see whether a companys donations and lobbying match their stated values.
The Role of Leadership
Brand authenticity must be cultivated from the top down. Leaders set the tone for organizational culture and values. When executives embody the principles they espouse, it reinforces authenticity throughout the organization. Conversely, a disconnect between leadership behavior and corporate messaging can undermine credibility.
That said, we should also acknowledge a sobering truth: we will never truly know whether a leader is authentic in the sense of being true to their internal values. Self-knowledge is hard enough for individualslet alone for those interpreting others from a distance. But, as one of us (Tomas) argues in a forthcoming book, Dont Be Yourself: Why Authenticity is Overrated and What to Do Instead, that kind of inner authenticity may not be what matters most anyway. What matters is whether leadership behaviorregardless of motiveresults in positive, prosocial outcomes. Are decisions advancing the well-being of employees, customers, society, or the environment? If so, perhaps we shouldnt care whether the driver is conscience or capitalism.
To put it bluntly: we don’t need leaders to be saintswe need them to behave decently, even if theyre doing it to protect the brand, preserve investor confidence, or attract talent. In fact, many of the best corporate decisions are made precisely because they’re strategically ethicalnot because the CEO had a moral epiphany during their morning meditation.
Sure, there are rare and admirable cases where executives have chosen the harder, more ethical path even when it hurts profits (Target, as mentioned above)pulling out of exploitative markets, paying fair wages despite pressure to cut costs, or refusing to greenwash in favor of slower, more meaningful change. But those leaders are exceptions. We should appreciate them, not expect them as standard.
Disregard of decency
Still, even in a world where profit is king, some companies stand out not for their lack of idealism, but for their flagrant disregard of decency. These are the firms that exploit labor, abuse data privacy, pollute freely, or thrive on addictive productsnot incidentally, but as a matter of business model. Whether or not their leaders are being “true to themselves” is beside the point. What matters is that theyre consistently making the world worseauthentically or otherwise.
In this light, corporate authenticity should be judged not by introspection but by impact. Not by consistency with internal values (which are often opaque), but by observable behaviors, externalities, and the lived experiences of stakeholders. Or to put it differently: if your authentic self is toxic, exploitative, or unethical wed rather you fake it.
And heres the punchline. The most responsible organizations today are often the ones that dont fetishize authenticity, but instead institutionalize accountability. They build feedback loops, audit their culture, measure ethical risks, and reward good behavior even when its not performative. In other words, they focus less on being real and more on doing rightwhatever the motive may be.
Pretend Responsibly: Why Corporate Authenticity Is About Impact, Not Essence
Kurt Vonnegut famously noted that We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. The same warning applies to companies. In todays hyper-transparent, hyper-skeptical world, brands are in a constant state of performancetelling stories, signaling values, curating identities. But heres the rub: those performances shape reality. The way a company chooses to present itselfsincere or performative, strategic or self-expressivewill influence how it treats people, how it allocates resources, and how it responds when the spotlight moves on.
So yes, corporations must be careful what they pretend to be. Because the story becomes the strategy. The persona becomes policy. And even if the motive is opportunistic, the consequences are real. Corporate authenticity is not about soul-searching or storytellingits about alignment and accountability. If a companys public commitments match its operational decisions, if it treats people decently even when no ones watching, if it chooses to mitigate harm instead of maximizing plausible deniabilitythen its doing something right, regardless of how authentic it feels. To be sure, it is preferable to do the right thing for the wrong reasons than the wrong thing for the right reasons!
In short: dont ask whether a company is being itself. Ask what kind of self its choosing to performand whether that performance is making anyones life better. In the end, the best brands arent the ones that feel most authentic. Theyre the ones that behave responsibly, or at least manage to mitigate, if not avoid, bad behaviors relative to others.
On a Tuesday last fall, Michael Bierut was sitting in his living room in Tarrytown, New York, about 25 miles away from where he’d typically be on a weekday afternoon at any point over the previous few decades.
Bierut, 67, had just stepped back from his role as partner at Pentagram, the storied graphic design studio that has shaped the branding for many of the world’s most important companies, and he was feeling restless.
Its been disconcerting for me, Bierut said as we spoke with a view of the Hudson River sparkling from the window. He noted that the rest of Pentagrams partners were currently on an annual retreat in an undisclosed location. This was the first time he hadnt attended. Im a really black-and-white person. I have two speeds. I do a lot, or I don’t do it at all.
For most of his career, Bierut put on a suit and tie, took the Metro-North train from the suburbs to the city, and went to work. Now, he goes to the Flatiron office once a week in his new role as a strategist at-large, where he acts as a part-time consultant on retainer to his fellow partners. Bierut plans to use the rest of his time writing, teaching, and working on independent projects. He has a few ideas for design books.
Bierut has spent the better part of four decades running at full speed. He is responsible for some of the worlds most recognizable logos, including those for Mastercard, Slack, Verizon, and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. He shaped the industry from one centered on auteurs executing their creative vision into a more pragmatic and professional ecosystem of work by advocating for the field in business. He launched one of the first design criticism blogs, Design Observer, and is the author of a best-selling design book. He is, by many measures, a celebrity inside of the insular graphic design world, where his approachability and generosity have won favor in an industry thats often fueled by ego and big personalities.
If you say who are the famous graphic designers in the world, Michael will probably be in the top five depending on who it is that you speak to, if not No. 1 every single time, says Aron Fay, a former designer on Bieruts team.
Bierut has built a career out of being a good guy with great ideas. He is like the nice guy finishing first in a way, says Britt Cobb, another longtime designer on his team. But now, Bierut says, its time to step aside for a new generation of design leaders who can usher the industry into a new, and more complicated, era.
It’s a telling bookend to a fruitful career that has been driven by unrelenting focus, work, and ambition. I had this funny combination of insecurity and bravado, Bierut recalls of himself at the start of his career. Everything seemed to be affirming that my suspicions were correct that I was the best designer in the world.
[Photo: Aaron Richter for Fast Company]
66.5 years old
A few years ago, Bierut received an omen in one of the least mystical forms imaginable: a prepaid business class envelope from the IRS. It was his social security notice. The letter said hed be fully vested at 66.5 years old, which happened to fall on leap day 2024. He took it as a sign to retire. A very typical-for-me thing, he says.
Longtime Pentagram partner Paula Scher remembers when Bierut told her of his plan. He told me he was leaving on the specific date that he had made up, that had all kinds of significance between when he joined, or something with Dorothy, his wife, she says. I thought, Oh, you’re crazy. You’re never going to do that.
Scher was half right.
Ultimately, Bierut couldnt quite quit. He came back with the strategist at-large idea, which Pentagram partner Abbott Miller says offers a new model for retiring partners to stay on with the group. He’s a solo agent in this new model, which is fantastic for us because the alternative is that somebody just steps aside and leaves with all of that intelligence and history, says Miller, adding that the firm previously defined a partner as someone who ran a team. In the past, it’s been an unceremonious goodbye.
[Photo: Aaron Richter for Fast Company]
Bierut describes Pentagram as a little like Saturday Night Live: the cast changes, but the show goes on. Even before his quasi-announcement, hed been feeling like it was time to pass the torch. Bierut, who is known for filling composition notebooks with early sketches of his designs, had started to feel a gap between his core ideas and the most contemporary modes of executing them.
He rattled off half a dozen of his fellow partners. All of them can do things that I cant do, Bierut says. They have a facility with tools, a more nimble way of thinking with technology. I can do thingscommunicate in the ways humans dobut in terms of really realizing things, they make leaps that I cant make.
Bierut has always conceptualized his ideas with pen on paper; he never made the switch to computers himself. Now AI is further revolutionizing industry work, and the ability to execute digital and motion graphic brand iterations is table stakes as identities become more diffuse in online spaces. He recalls that in annual work presentations with partners, I went from feeling like an iconoclastic prodigy to feeling like I was heping up the same old stuff.
Bierut says his new role allows him to focus on his strengths, which center on ideas rather than execution.
His approach has earned him a unique legacy in the world of contemporary design. He is a descendant of modernisms masters like Massimo Vigenelli, and a mentor to scores of young designers. This has made Bierut a connective tissue between designs old guard of iconoclasts and a new cohort of design leaders, many of which came up under Bierut at Pentagram before leaving to start their own studios.
When he made the decision to pull back from Pentagram, he called a few senior team members like Cobb and Tamara McKenna, and then told the rest of the team. Theyd recently all gone to a screening of American Graffiti for Bieruts birthday, and he referred to himself as the townie character driving around with the high schoolers the night of graduation. He didnt want to hold on for too long. He was nervous about sharing the news.
I was sort of like a one factory town, and Im announcing the factory is shutting down, Bierut recalls. He gave his team members a years notice, helped them secure jobs elsewhere, and diverted his big clients to fellow partners. And then, the all-or-nothing guy found himself in liminal space.
Work for International Design Center, 1987-88. [Image: courtesy Vignelli Center for Design Studies/RIT]
Ohio born
Bierut was born in Garfield Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, in 1957, and grew up in nearby Parma. His mother, Anne Marie, was a housewife, and his father owned a business selling printing presses. He has twin brothers, Ronald and Donald. Bierut was an introverted kid. I used books the way people use phones these days, he says. The idea of going somewhere without a book was the most terrifying idea ever had.
But he had an innate artistic talent, and by high school used his skill as a way to get involved in other things that interested him, like theater and music. As a teenager, he discovered books by Milton Glaser, Armin Hofmann, and Neil Fujita. I wasn’t fit to be on stage, he says. But if I would do the poster, I could go to the cast party.
In 1975, Bierut enrolled at the University of Cincinnati. Yale-trained Professor Gordon Salchow, who previously taught at the Kansas City Art Institute, had just overhauled its design program in the style of the modernist Swiss Basel school. One of Bieruts professors, Joe Bottoni, remembers Bierut as having an innate talent. He had it in him, Bottoni says. We just gave him the opportunity to express it.
The departments mandatory work-study program brought Bierut to the East Coast for the first time in 1978 with a summer internship at the Boston public broadcast station WGBH. The office, led by designer and Yale professor Chris Pullman, was a high-octane place with a diverse client roster and a casual chumminess that would go on to shape how Bierut cultivated his own team at Pentagram. It was only three months, but it really changed my life, Bierut says.
The station was at that time on a growth trajectory to become the largest supplier of content to PBS, according to Pullman, and had about 400 employees. Pullmans team of about 10, including Bierut, handled design for the organization’s slew of national programming, including Carl Sagans Cosmos, which was seen by more than 500 million people. After three months, Bierut planned to return to Ohio to finish college and to his fiancé, Dorothy. But first, he made a stop in New York City.
Tom Sumida, Bierut’s WGBH supervisor, had mentioned earlier that summer that one of his Yale MFA classmates, Peter Laundy, just got hired at Vignelli Associates, the iconic New York firm led by the famous designer Massimo Vignelli and his wife, Lella. This caused some chatter in the officenot from Bierut, though, who only had a vague sense of the firms reputation. Even so, when Bierut and some friends took a week-long trip to New York at the end of the summer, Sumida told Bierut to look Laundy up.
Standing at a grimy New York City pay phone, Bierut pulled a note covered in names and phone numbers out of his pocket, dropped some coins into the slot, and rang Vignelli Associates. I was fairly shameless, Bierut recalls. I was in New York for a limited period of time and I thought, I’m going to make the most of this. Laundy said he was too busy to see him but he could drop off his portfolio. Bierut left his portfolio to be reviewed. The next day, Bierut was back in the lobby of the Vignelli office in hiking boots and a flannel shirt to retrieve it. I looked like I had rolled off the back of a pickup truck from rural Ohio, he says.
The Vignelli offices. [Photo: Luca Vignelli/courtesy Vignelli Center for Design Studies/RIT]
He gave the receptionist his name. Suddenly, bounding around a corner comes Massimo Vignelli himself, followed by Peter, remembers Bierut. Massimo starts pumping my hand with such enthusiasm and saying things like, So this is the kid. This is that Cincinnati kid, right, Peter? and saying Your portfolio is fantastic. Vignelli and Laundy gave Bierut a tour. The whole thing happened so fast, Bierut remembers with palpable amazement. After some period of time that might have been 30 seconds or 20 minutes, I was standing there with my portfolio wondering what the fuck just happened. Vignelli offered him a job. He joined Vignelli Associates a year later, after he finished college.
New York Bred
Bierut moved to New York City in June, 1980 one week after graduation. Basquiat, Haring, Warhol: Times Square was still seedy. Punk reverberated in the East Village. The city was seemingly coveredwith a light dusting of cocaine. When I asked him about New York during that time, Bierut more or less shrugged at all this as not quite as exciting as the Studio 54 era New York of the 70s.
Bierut (center) with Massimo and Lella Vignelli [Photo: Luca Vignelli/courtesy Vignelli Center for Design Studies/RIT]
Vignelli Associates was at its peak when Bierut was there from 1980 to 1990. Vignelli was the industrys sun; modernism rose and set with him. Look to IBM, American Airlines, Bloomingdale’s, Knoll, and the New York City Subway system map and wayfinding and youll see the mark of Vignellis pen.
Vignelli and Lella were strict believers in structure and an objective, rational, neutral design approach that anyone could interact with. They also used an extremely limited color and font system: white, red, and black; Helvetica, Futura, and Bodoni. Massimo began his career in Milan, which is close to the epicenter of modernism in Zurich. So he was very, very influenced by the Swiss graphic designers of that period, says Roger Remington, the former director of the Vignelli Center for Design Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Bierut eventually chafed against that rigidity, but first, he thrived.
Work for the Architectural League of New York [Images: courtesy Vignelli Center for Design Studies/RIT]
He clearly was the golden boy in the Vignelli office, recalls Rosalie Genevro, the former executive director of the Architectural League of New York, who first met Bierut as a Vignelli Associates client in 1985. Bierut designed all of the Leagues graphics, and the pro bono client moved with him to Pentagram in 1990. (He passed the League work to partner Eddie Opara upon his retirement.)
The Vignelli offices. [Photo: Luca Vignelli/courtesy Vignelli Center for Design Studies/RIT]
I remember thinking at Vignelli that I was a bit of a prodigy, Bierut told me at his home in North Tarrytown, where he and his wife moved to in 1984. And I was unbelievably ambitious. I would be given the most trivial thing in the world to do, and I would stay up all night to do 20 versions of it for Massimo to look at in the morning. He adds, I just couldn’t believe that I had this job. I was very conscious of the fact, also, that most of the time I didn’t quite know what anyone was talking about.
In one such instance, he had to assemble catalogue materials for an Architectural League of New York exhibition and call up a bunch of famous architects to make sure they sent their work on time. He didnt know who any of them werebut at least that made it easy for him to strong arm, say, acclaimed architect Peter Eisenman into meeting a deadline. But Bierut felt the contrast of his relatively pastoral Midwest background against the Ivy League milieu, and it pushed him to become even more ravenously curious, close the knowledge gap, and prove he could cut it.
A concept sketch and final for a 1981 Skyline: The Architecture and Design Review cover [Images: courtesy Vignelli Center for Design Studies/RIT]
Bierut deeply admired Vignellis passion, integrity, and deep convictions about design as a potential force for good in the worldthat design was inherently a public-spirited gesture. By the end of his decade at Vignelli Associates, Bierut had become its vice president of design and taken over as president of the professional organization American Institute of Graphic Artss (AIGA) New York chapter. But a curiosity about other ways of doing things nagged at him.
I knew I was successful at Vignelli because I got the principles, Bierut says. But I never thought it was the only way to design something. It was just the way Massimo liked to design, right? I’m a good mimic, but you’re not going to base your life on mimicry. Or I didn’t want to, at least.
The early Pentagram years
The question came over a plate of steak frites in a dimly lit restaurant downtown. Would he join Pentagram as a partner?
Like many of the designers Bierut hired to join his team whom I spoke to, he knew of Pentagram before stepping foot in the place. He wouldnt have guessed hed be considered for the job. But when partner Woody Pirtle asked Bierut if hed consider joinig as a partner following a talk Bierut gave at the firm, he played it cool and said hed think it over.
The renowned San Francisco designer Michael Vanderbyl, a friend, recalled Bierut asking him to dinner to get his opinion on the move. I said that yes, he should, because he could emulate Massimo so well, and I was anxious to see what he could do on his own as a designer, Vanderbyl says. I encouraged him to do it.
I could have been the heir apparent [at Vignelli Associates] I assume, so I had a decision to make when I was 33 years old, Bierut says. Do I want to do this forever or do I want to try something new? Just as when I was 66 years old, I had the same decision. Do I want to do this forever? Do I want to try something new?
Bierut accepted the position.
Now, he was autonomous. There was no one to tell him who to fire, how much to work for. Like everyone at Pentagram, I pictured how it would be, and its never the way you picture it, Bierut says. Its really independent. He described himself as unmoored and a little scared and excited during the early days. He began building a team, securing clients, and finding his own identity.
He started wearing a suit and tie. He became a member of the social club the Century Association, which Mark Twain described as the most unspeakably respectable club in New York, according to its website.
Posters for Yale School of Architecture, 2000-2019 [Photo: courtesy Pentagram]
Pentagram, founded in London in 1972, is one of the most prestigious international design firms in the world. Following a generation of mid-century firms named after one design hero, like Vignelli Associates, it operated instead as a design consortium of partners who run their own teams and budgets, secure their own clients, and carry their own weight. No matter each partner’s profit and loss at the end of the year, revenue is shared equally. It is built to be a melting pot of ideas, due to its unique structure. Disney, IBM, Coca-Cola, Citibank, SNL, FIFA: Its hard to capture how broad its portfolio is across global civic, corporate, and cultural institutions. Pentagrams work is elemental to the way people interact with the world.
Bierut was one in the first wave of second-generation partners who joined the firm, along with Michael Gericke, Jim Biber, and Scher. He helped founding partner of the New York office, Colin Forbes, who was also president of AIGA at the time, beef up Pentagram into the industry heavyweight it is in the United States today by building a roster of large, attraction-getting corporate clients, which complimented the cache-garnering cultural client roster Scher fostered. The firm started to gain attention as a group. Bierut built a reputation for consistently delivering results (though hes not without his critics).
Brooklyn Academy of Music identity, circa 1995[Photo: courtesy Pentagram]
Youve seen the work for his biggest clients: the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, Saks Fifth Avenue, Verizon, Mastercard, the New York Jets, PayPal, Slack, Benetton, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), Sesame Street, as well as myriad New York City institutions like the MTAs OMNY card system, Central Park Conservancy, Governors Island, St. John the Divine Cathedral, the Architectural League, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD).
He’s probably one of the strongest examples of that kind of . . . split that we have between the importance of great work and economic strength, Miller says.
If you can picture the logo for any of these, know that it probably germinated as a rough pencil sketch from Bierut’s head put to paper in a classic composition notebook (of which hes filled more than 100 that now line a shelf above his desk), or on the computer monitor of a designer on his team.
[Photo: courtesy Pentagram]
Bierut has a seeming ability to conjure an idea like a rabbit out of a hat that lends him an aura of mysticism. In reality, his iterative, in-the-moment ideation process came from Vignelli, who sketched ideas out in real time during client meetings. But without that peek behind the curtain, the skill confounds people. We would leave the meeting, and he would show me a sketch of a logo or an idea like, This is what they need, says Armin Vit, a designer on Bierut’s team from 2005 to 2007 who now runs design firm UnderConsideration. The sketches were gnarly, like scribbles, but the essence of what we ended up with weeks or months later was there.
Fay recalls Bierut proposing a solution for Verizon on the car ride homea gradient checkmark. He’s like, Oh, I think we should consider doing this. Which speaks to the genius of him. He sort of had fully conceptualized the thing after 10 minutes of sitting in a room with them.
Bieruts project mix has included pro bono work like for the Architectural League, and small spot illustrations for four-figure payouts, up to larger contracts in the five and six figures. His way of working has helped him retain long-term clients in his roster, like Genevro, who has been with him for decades, as well as corporate clients like Verizon, which brought in six figures over a multi-year contract. (Turner Duckworth rebranded Verizon in 2024.) Scher described Bierut as very profitable, and noted hat the firm lost a profitable partner when he changed roles, although she declined to cite specific figures. Miller also declined to share specifics.
Finding his own style
It took time for Bierut to shake off some of that Modernist puritanism and develop his own, more humanist aesthetic. I used to think his design was the least interesting of the Pentagram group in those early days when he was part of it, says Steve Heller, a former New York Times art director and author of more than 100 design books. I thought he retained a little too much of Massimo’s austerity. . . . He just had to find his voice, and his voice has always been more diverse than some of the others.
[Photo: Aaron Richter for Fast Company]
In his tidy home office, among white built-in bookshelves filled with design books and just behind his Eames lounger, Bierut has a framed quote by the artist Chuck Close that reads, Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. His team gifted it to him in the 2010s. The quote also opens his 2015 book How To. Its a useful artifact to understand how Bierut thinks. He doesnt see design as an absolute or stylistic ideal. Unlike fine art, its not a medium for self-expression.
[Photo: Aaron Richter for Fast Company]
This makes placing Bierut within design history difficult to do. There are some graphic inspirations, sure, like Fujita or Hofmann. But to really trace his design style, you have to turn to an architect: Ero Saarinen. Saarinen, who died in 1961, designed JFKs TWA Flight Center (now a hotel), the St. Louis Gateway Arch, the CBS Building in New York, and the GM Technical Center in metro Detroit. None of them look much like each other. Bierut describes Saarinan as a journeyman, who felt you had to find the right style for the job, and he takes inspiration from this positioning. According to Bierut, the design style is always, What would make sense for this particular thing?
Saks Fifth Avenue branding, 2007 [Photo: courtesy Pentagram]
But Bierut does have a few stylistic tells. He returns again and again to black and white compositions and simplified, big graphic moves, which he often iterates, multiplies, remixes or cuts off, as was the case for his 2007 Saks Fifth Avenue rebrand, which rotates and crops a contemporized version of its classic script logo into 64 squares. MIT Media Lab had a core black and white logo with some 40,000 permutations. (Bierut says its the one icon designers really fetishize.) Or his long-running, conceptually diverse, black-and-white Yale Architecture poster series, which Scher, Heller, and Miller all cited as among his best work.
Michael is this incredibly conceptual thinker, says Miller. He has a reputation as an incredible strategist and corporate identity person, but he thinks in this very deep way about the issues of scale and typography. A poster Bierut designed for the Architectural League of New York in 1999, which shows a nearly full-bleed black circle with the teeny tiny word scale in its bottom right exemplifies this, according to Miller. Its a quick study in wit. What all his successful projects have in common is a simple, clever, hook.
He might kill me for saying this, but there’s no one logo that Michael did that you like as the epitome of logo design, Vit says. But there’s so much work that is so consistently good at a level that is always appropriate, it’s always well-executed, it’s always relevant. . . . That’s what’s most impressive.
Scale for Architectural League of New York, 1999 [Photo: courtesy Pentagram]
Graphic design is a pas de deux between the written word and image. What got me into graphic design originally was about words more than anything else, Bierut notes. For him, corporate identity design, or branding, as its often known today, is a visual expression of problem-solving.
Branding system for MIT Media Lab [Photo: courtesy Pentagram]
I remember thinking, design training has a way of refining your sensibility to the point where you’re attuned to things that most people aren’t aware of; where youre doing work at registers that are going to be barely perceived by people; kind of working the math of really small differences and all these things that you’re going to be really picky about, he says. I always remembered, my mom wouldn’t know the difference between any of this stuff. And for certain things I was doing, my mom was the audience.
The Design Dad
Bieruts team remembers him as uncommonly generous with his time, even though, in their words, he wasnt particularly available, and generally doled out time in minutes, not hours.
We sort of lovingly would refer to him as being Design Dad, Fay says.
[Photo: Aaron Richter for Fast Company]
Bierut typically hired designers after they had a trial run as interns. In design you have strong-minded people, and I was really fortunate that I seldom had to hire full-time designers who I didn’t already know, he says. This also had a side effect of creating cohorts of people who were all around the same age and over long hours and takeout, became friends.
He looked for people who had innate curiosity and interest in all of the ins and outs of a project, and then he gave them outsized responsibility. At the start of a project, he would assign one designer as the leadsomething he learned from Vignelliand guide them through the initial decision-making about the design concept and direction. From there, he handed off basically everything leading up to a client presentation, with his guidance when needed. I dont have to sit at their desk and help them pick a typeface, he says.
In the early days, Bierut often returned from a client lunch with a logo or identity scribbled on a napkin and handed it to someone to execute, according to Agnethe Glatved, a designer on his team in the early 1990s. In later years, more experienced designers recalled him as being less prescriptive. Generally, he allows designers to run with the idea from start to finish, build it out, lead it, and that helps build their confidence, former Pentagram employee Talia Cotton says. That helps make them feel like they’re creative and they’re being heard.
The one-on-one relationship between a designer and clients also created a self-running system based on institutionalized trust that allowed Bierut the time to move on to the next project, and leave the office for client and new business meetings, with a shared understanding that his team would deliver. You look back and you see all these patterns, Bierut says. Massimo would travel a lot. Hed give me a project and go to Milan and would come back in two weeks and say, Hows it going? Every partner has a way of working that I suspect has root in how they came up in design.
[Photo: courtesy Pentagram]
The model required long hours from a high-energy twentysomething hire who could work independently and be married to the job. Many designers I spoke with said a typical workday ended between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., or later. They ordered dinners to the office. The team often worked weekends, not because Bierut explicitly required it but because of the caliber and quantity of work they were responsible for.
Everyone is scared that they’re gonna fuck something up and as a result of fucking up, ruin Pentagram’s reputation, and as a result, their career, says Cobb. So that magic makes people work really, really hard there. Michael never has to motivate anyone.
Signage inside The New York Times building [Photos: courtesy Pentagram]
In the early years, Bierut was often away at meetings, and his team members could tell when he found Wi-Fi because theyd all start getting emails. Whenever he was in the office, thered also be a long line of people waiting to get his ake on their work so they could keep going. Even so, former team members remember him as extremely present and encouraging. Occasionally, if he spotted a really killer design on a monitor, hed slow clap from partners row, a second floor overhang where all the partners sat, or loudly announce You did it!
And in an industry where personal, artistic investment can fuel decision-making, he remained relatively even-keeled. There’s no screaming, urgency, there’s no bloody consequences. We’re in it together, recalls former team member Jennifer Kinon of the work culture he built.
Pentagram is structured in such a way that forces attrition, as designers there hit a growth ceiling unless they become a partner, which is rare. So when the time came to move on, the learned self-sufficiency of the Bierut team created a diaspora of independent design studios: Champions Design, Cobbco, Order, Cotton, Fay, and Franklyn are just a few founded by his former team members. Even in their own firms, several designers I spoke with said they ask themselves to this day, What would Michael do?
All this has made Bierut into a father figure in the design world. Both Order founder Jesse Reed and Fay recalled car rides home from meetings. It felt like you’re with your dad, says Reed. He would play the Talking Heads and have his sunglasses on. He would start singing in the car.
Bierut once described the Vignellis as surrogate parents, and though he shifted uncomfortably in his seat when I asked him about being thought of as a design dad, its that quality of trust, pressure, and generosity that helped build such a strong alumni network in a new generation of designers. Its also similar to how Massimo and Lella’s son Luca Vignelli described Bieruts relationship with his family: He was like a second son for my father, and as a graphic designer more similarly spiritually attuned, so I guess that made him a sort of adopted brother to me.
The client whisperer
Bieruts alumni consider him to be an unflappable client whisperer. I’ve seen him do presentations where he hadn’t seen the most recent version of the deck, says Hamish Smyth, a former team member who now owns the design studio Order with Reed. Sometimes in the beginning they were printed out on paper still, he’d flick through the papers for like, 30 seconds. Okay, got it, and then just go in and crush the presentation. . . . You’ve got people sweating, preparing for these things for days, and he would just come in. He has this natural oratory ability.”
Smyth recalls a real estate client that came into the office several times to review their proposal on screen. They couldnt get approval. So Bierut suggested going old-school. They printed dozens of logos on 12-by-12-inch sheets mounted on boards and wrapped in paper like Vignelli used to do. Bierut presented one-on-one with the CEO. And the horse and pony show worked. (Bierut, however, didnt recall this.)
Bierut presents as familiar and approachable, sometimes code-switching based on the client, as Cobb recalls was the case in the casual tone he took to defuse tensions with the many native New Yorkers who were MTA stakeholders for their OMNY project. Reed recalls leaving meetings with a luxury real estate group white in the face, as they threw money at them to try to get the work on faster timelines. Bierut was unfazed. Reed recalls him saying, Can’t we just do the thing that we signed up to do and get paid to do that and then deliver and have a good day?
Verizons logo design was the easy part, according to Fay. Everything that came after that was really challenging and really political, he says. He recalled really disproportionate demanding timelines, in which tons of employees asked one or two people from Bieruts team assigned to them to crank out work. Michael was really great at setting boundaries with the client from the outset about what we’re going to deliver to you.
[Photo: courtesy Pentagram]
He also had an unrehearsed approach to presenting. He just treats people like people and that’s his best trait, says Reed.
He started to show you he had a form of generosity about another person’s point of view, says Scher, who recalls him using baseball analogies with male clients, because that was a relatable form of communicating design decisions. I’ve never once sat in with Michael on a meeting and thought, ‘he is blowing smoke up these people’s ass,’ says Cobb. (Bierut did, however, write an essay on the art of bullshit.)
But for all his generosity, Bierut does like to talk. He recalls coming out of a meeting with founding partner Colin Forbes when hed just started at Pentagram. He gently put his hand on my arm and said, I’ve got one bit of advice for you. I leaned down and he said, Don’t talk so much. I went completely red. I was horrified. I was so eager to please everyone that any bit of criticism just felt like an anvil on me. But he was right. The way I ended up shifting that was by saying you don’t learn anything by talking, you learn by listening.
Bierut accepts that clients are people, and people are complex. Pushing your way through doesnt solve for that. They’re successful, so there’s something they’re really good at doing, but whatever they’re good at doing isn’t this, or else they wouldn’t have called for help, he says. It feels like all of a sudden they’ve abandoned the world of business and they’re somehow in the world of black magic, you know?
NYC MTA “WalkNYC” campaign [Photo: courtesy Pentagram]
He compares a slide deck to a Rorschach test. They’re all ready to unload whatever their hopes, fears, dreams, nightmares are onto these shapes, colors, and forms you’re showing them.
Ultimately, the key to working with clients is understanding how to deal with people, and tha there’s no one way to prevail, says Bierut. One of the reasons I love being a designer is that I love clients. I don’t have a love-hate relationship with clients. I often say even the clients that I hate, love me.
People don’t vote for logos
It was 2014, and Bieruts phone was ringing. This in and of itself wasnt unusual. Bierut, then in his fifties, had already been a partner at Pentagram for nearly 25 years. The name carried notoriety. And so, calls were expected. But this circumstance in particular was a bit strange: It was Hillary Clintons presidential campaign. They needed a designer to craft the campaigns identity. Would he help?
Youve seen the final result as part of hundreds of millions of dollars of political advertising during her 2016 campaign: on yard signs, in digital ads, and at the end of swing state commercials. The design has gotten its fair share of criticism, but its also a good representation of Bieruts approach. The concept is simple and clear, with a clever play on visual elements, like much of his work: a sans-serif capital H, comprising two vertical lines and a forward arrow. Hillary equals forward progress. (A sort of design that I like to do is blunt and obvious, he noted in 2016.)
[Photo: courtesy Pentagram]
The first time that Bierut met with Clinton, he recalls telling her that people vote for candidates who they think can improve their lives. They don’t vote for logos. Instead, it acts as a signature, according to Bierut. It gives people a thing to coalesce around, mak[ing] sure that when your messages are going into a complicated, crowded environment, people can tell what you’re signing off on, and that they know it when they see it.
The identity project, code-named Hi-C, was secretly developed with assistance from Reed and advice from Miller. His former team member, Kinon, was the campaigns design director responsible for its distribution. The identity had an easily understandable concept and workhorse framework that made it adaptable and participatory. But its tight corporate style irked many people in the face of Trumps bombastic approach to campaigning. Critics saw the arrow as inadvertently symbolizing a move toward the right, rather than forward as intended.
[Photo: courtesy Pentagram]
We all know how that turned out. After Trumps win, the work led to both real backlash and reckoning about design’s efficacy, at a moment when conversations about the power of design were at an all-time high, and the industry pushed design as a secret weapon for solving deep-seated problems of all kinds and design thinking as good business. Critics saw the campaign branding as responsible for her loss. Donald Trumps graphics were easy to dismiss, Bierut wrote in 2017. They combined the design sensibility of the Home Shopping Network with the tone of a Nigerian scam email. Like so many other complacent Democrats, my only question was: Why is this even close?
Of course, broader foundational political, cultural, and social issues also factored into the loss. Long-standing, foundational agreements of American politics were shifting, along with party coalitions. Insatiable grievance proved to be a winning idea. Design cant overcome people’s fears and prejudices, says Scher. It just can’t do that messaging. It can to a degree, but you find out that people live in their own communities and that the breakthrough can be very different unless you’re selling something universal, like soap.
I asked what hed say to those who felt the branding was responsible for Clintons loss. Assuming those people are graphic designers, I would say for most of my life I’ve shared your exalted view of the power of graphic design to change the world, he says. I think it can change the world in many cases. I’m not sure this is a moment where the right logo or the wrong logo would have made a critical difference.
If he feels guilty about one thing, he says, its using what was successful for Obama as a model. The introduction of a logo, designed by Shepard Fairey, was a first for political branding, and marked a clean corporate approach Bierut followed, based on one initial. I never made that case explicitly, but I think in the background that was sort of a set of expectations that I didn’t question clearly enough.
But Bierut is used to criticism, and seems to consider it part and parcel of working in the public sphere. There are people that think it sucks, but in what we do, some things become famous, some become infamous, he says. You can just do the best you can do.
Slack identity [Photo: courtesy Pentagram]
For as outwardly self-deprecating and humble as Bierut is, since early in his career hed pined for the design industry to get the same attention as other cultural pillars like movies. He considers his push to makegraphic design part of the general zeitgeist his most significant impact on the industry, work hes largely done as a writer, speaker, and industry advocate completely outside his role at Pentagram.
All along, even when people were criticizing things that I had doneand I got a lot of criticism for things I’ve done over the yearsI remember thinking, I asked for this. I was dying for people to notice that I had done a logo for a presidential campaign or changed the logo of a big telecom company or changed or updated the logo of an online workplace communications platform, he says referring to Verizon and Slack, which he developed after the Clinton logo. Now two-thirds of them seem to hate it, maybe even more, he says. But that was what I wanted. I wanted people to notice it and so people were talking about it.
A new role to play
I met Bierut again on a Tuesday afternoon in April in Pentagrams most recent office on Park Avenue. The office was full of young designers sitting at Apple desktops, quietly clicking away, and milling around between meetings. The firms newest partner, Andrea Trabucco-Campos, met with designers in Bieruts former conference room. Partner Matt Wiley was in conversation with another partner, bent over papers splayed across a conference table in another room. Bierut has a small built-in desk next to partner Michael Gerickes, by a built-in bookshelf filled with books from his collection over the decades, including a designer encyclopedia his wife Dorothy gifted him in the 70s. Hed given up his larger desk when he became part-time. Aside from Luke Hyman, the other partner desks were empty, but there was energy in the air.
As we made our way around work stations, Bierut introduced me to partners and stopped to sit next to a designer who was formerly on his team, and was working on an identity hed passed to Trabucco-Campos. He loved the work she was doing and wanted me to see it, so we sat down at her monitor and she walked us through the concept. Bierut gushed. And even though he said the partners had gotten more deliberate about what he took on since November to keep him part-time, as we moved through the office, colleagues constantly stopped him, shouted for him, and consulted with him.
Aging creates an interesting tension because it involves both constancy and change. For Bierut, aging has shifted the way other people perceive him over time. First you’re like a kid in the room who no one’s expecting to talk, Bierut says. Then there’s a moment where someone like Massimo Vignelli turns to you and says, Michael, why don’t you explain the idea behind this one? Then, you become the same age as your clients and you take big swings, then a steady, big brother figure, and then, in a horrifying moment, you remind your team of their dad, he says. And you have to find a new role to play.
But Bieruts sense of self has been consistent. He recalls noticing how hed aged on video calls during the pandemic. It’s funny because in your head you’re the same person, you haven’t changed, he says. I feel like I’m exactly the same person I was the first day I sat down to work at Vignelli Associates in 1980. Hes still essentially driven by the same motivations as when he dropped coins in a payphone 40 years ago.
As Bierut wandered the office floor, he had a conversation across the room about building architecture related to a project he was helping with. Someone stopped him to show off a magnetic lip gloss case design in development. He pushed back a meeting due to our interview. In some sense, upon retirement, it seems his team just got a whole lot bigger.
Within apartment complexes, workplaces, and courtrooms, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have forcibly detained more than 50,000 people in the first six months of 2025. These people, some of whom were reportedly detained for matters as trivial as a single missing form, find their lives abruptly uprooted as they are transportedsometimes thousands of miles across the countryto large-scale ICE detainment facilities, which are primarily located in the South and on the East Coast.
ICE currently holds more than 48,000 detainees, though the agency only has funding to support housing for 41,500. Despite that overflow, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller now want ICE to ramp up arrests to 3,000 per dayand private prisons stand to benefit.
Taxpayers are expected to shoulder the cost of this potential expansion, but the money won’t just go to the government: The majority of ICEs 113 detention facilities are not government-run. More than 90% of immigrants arrested by the agency are held in private detention centers, most of which are operated by just two companies: Geo Group and CoreCivic.
Aerial view of the Geo Group-run Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington [Photo: David Ryder/Getty Images]
Private prisons occupy a controversial place in the criminal justice system, said Bob Libal, a senior campaign strategist at the Sentencing Project. Beyond general discomfort with the idea of profiting off of incarceration, reports have also questioned safety and security, citing higher incidences of assaults, theft, and contraband in private facilities than those operated by the Bureau of Prisons.
Despite their controversial status, private prisons have long been a part of the immigration landscapeand their role is only expanding as the Trump administration makes sweeping changes to immigration policy and enforcemen
The start of the Private Prison Industry
The first modern private prison, Libal says, was CoreCivics Houston Processing Center, which opened in 1984 as a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and later ICE, detention center. Four years later, cofounder Thomas W. Beasley told Inc. that CoreCivicthen known as Corrections Corporation of Americacan sell prison contracts “like you were selling cars or real estate or hamburgers.”
Houston Police arrive outside the Houston Processing Center during a protest on October 11, 2014. [Photo: Mayra Beltran/Houston Chronicle/Getty Images]
Although federal contracts were a part of the private prison industry from the beginning, it was a 1996 law that cemented their place in the criminal justice system. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 required commissioners to consider buying or leasing existing facilities before building new federal detention centers.
In the 30 years since this law passedand particularly since the post-9/11 formation of the Department of Homeland Security and ICEfederal contracts have become the industrys primary growth driver. Last year, federal contracts made up 52% of CoreCivics total revenue and 62% of Geo Groups, much more than the revenue received by state and international contracts.
The federal government never built their own capacity, said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice and author of Inside Private Prisons. They relied on these companies to do that.
A Growing Partisan Divide
Federal reliance on private prisons grew substantially under both Democratic and Republican administrations, but there has been a sharper partisan divide in the industry in recent years.
Presidents Obama and Biden each passed legislation to phase out private prisons during their terms. The Obama administration worked toward ending all private prison contracts except those undertaken by ICE, and the Biden administration vowed not to renew any private prison contract. These measures, later rescinded by the first and second Trump administrations, responded to safety and security concerns in private facilities, where differences in contracts and levels of oversight mean standards can vary not only by company, but by facility.
A guard escorts an immigrant detainee from his segregation cell back into the general population at the Geo Group-run Adelanto Detention Facility in California in November 2013. [Photo: John Moore/Getty Images]
It makes it very easy for there to be a pass the buck situation, said Jennifer Ibaez Whitlock, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center, noting that government agencies awarding contracts may not have enough presence in private facilities to identify problems, let alone address them.
Reports about ICE denying basic medical care to detainees have filled the news recently. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student detained in March, said her asthma attacks worsened after not receiving adequate medical care or opportunities to access fresh air while in detention. Similarly, Maria Isidro, a Florida resident detained during a routine check-in with immigration officials, has been shackled and denied medication for her diabetes in an ICE facility in Texas. We really dont have a full sense of the scope of it, except for on the occasions that people are released by ICE and can describe to their community or to the media, Whitlock said.
Still, these concerns and the legislation by Democratic administrations did little to stymie the industrys growth. The Geo Group, for example, has had relatively steady growth in its U.S. secure services sector, a part of the business including ICE facilities. That sectors revenue increased from $600 million to $2.4 billion between 2004 and 2023.
A new era of Unprecedented Growth
After Trump spent the 2024 campaign promising to initiate immigration crackdown (a deciding factor for many voters in the 2024 election), private prisons expect their growth to reach new heights in his second term.
Both Geo Group and CoreCivic have disproportionately supported Republican campaigns in most election cycles, but in the last election cycle, Geo Group was also the first company whose political action committee reached its contribution limit donating to the Trump campaign.
CoreCivics Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego [Photo: Carlos Moreno/Anadolu/Getty Images]
Their loyalty seems to have paid off, with Geo Groups stock price surging from $14.18 to $25.36 during the week of Trumps election last year, and CoreCivic seeing a similar rise, from $13.19 to $22.52.
Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now, CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger told investors on the companys first-quarter earnings call last month.
Both CoreCivic and Geo Group also donated $500,000 to Trumps inauguration, which CoreCivic spokesperson Brian Todd told Fast Company was consistent with our past practice of civic participation, including contributions to inauguration activities for both Democrats and Republicans.
The Geo Group-owned Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, California [Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images]
The Geo Group did not respond to a request for comment, but has expressed its willingness to support the new administrations goals and has stressed the significance of Trumps immigration policies for the company.
Weve taken several important steps in anticipation of what we expect to be significant future growth opportunities and related operational activity during 2025, Geo Group CEO J. David Donahue said on the companys Q1 earnings call last month.
Private detention’s expanding impact
Already, ICE has awarded a 15-year, $1 billion contract to Geo Group for a 1,000-person detention center in Newark, New Jerseythe first of several idle private facilities that may be reopened to accommodate the influx of detainees under Trump officials. Within a week of the reopening, Newark Mayor and gubernatorial candidate Ras Baraka was arrested for trespassing during a weeklong protest at the facility. His office previously filed a lawsuit, alleging the facility had not obtained proper permits before reopening.
Tom Homan, Trumps border czar and a former consultant for a division of the Geo Group, has said the administration plans to increase the number of immigrant detainees from 48,000 to 100,000. Another boon for the private prison industry, given the average cost of around $165 per detention bed.
In this time of transition, Geo Groups and CoreCivics stocks remain well above their preelection price, and concern among researchers and activists continue to rise.
Every detention bed is a person whose life and family and community are likely to be impacted, Libal says. Its another story of somebody whos dropping their kids off at school who was picked up by ICE and now is in a detention bed.
Were living in a personalized landscape, and organizations can no longer afford a one-size-fits-all approach to managing people. Employees increasingly expectand valuepersonalized experiences at work.
That means offering tailored career development paths, flexible work arrangements that suit individual lifestyles and goals, and mentorship and learning opportunities specific to employees’ career aspirations.
For small to midsize businesses, meeting these expectations can be a challenge. But it also presents a significant opportunity to attract and retain workers. If youre in this situation, a fractional HR partner can make all the difference.
The demand for personalization in the workplace
The modern workforce comprises individuals from multiple generations and diverse cultural backgrounds with various career aspirations. Employees want to feel seen, heard, and supported in ways that reflect their unique goals and circumstances.
This typically includes the following:
Career development that fits their goals: Not everyone wants to climb the traditional corporate ladder. Some are more interested in lateral growth, specialized expertise, or project-based learning. Employees are more likely to stay with organizations that invest in career paths tailored to their interests and strengths.
Flexibility beyond remote work: Personalized flexibility can mean different things to different people. For some, it might mean hybrid schedules and compressed workweeks. For others, its the ability to work variable hours. Then there are those who are interested in taking sabbaticals. This requires shifting the mindset to align work with life, rather than the other way around.
Truly supportive environments: Employees want resources that are relevant to them. Mental health programs, mentorship opportunities, or skill-building workshops are all good initiatives, but their impacts will be minimal if they dont align with what employees want or the specific stages of their journey.
How personalized experiences drive engagement and retention
Organizations that prioritize employee-centric strategies tend to achieve better outcomes when it comes to productivity, morale, and employee retention. When employees feel their employer understands and values their individual needs, they are more motivated, loyal, and aligned with the companys mission.
According to Gallup, highly engaged teams show 23% greater profitability, 70% higher well-being, and 78% less absenteeism. Personalization is a key driver of that engagementit creates an emotional connection between the employee and the organization, which leads to longer tenures and more substantial contributions.
How fractional HR can help
For companies without a dedicated internal HR team, delivering these kinds of individualized experiences may seem overwhelming. But it doesnt have to be. Fractional HR firms can provide scalable, strategic HR support tailored to meet the specific needs of your organization, regardless of the stage or size of your company
A fractional HR partner can help bring personalized employee experiences to life in the following ways :
Tailored talent development plans: They help businesses design role-specific and employee-specific growth paths. As a result, this ensures that every team member has a clear roadmap that aligns with their aspirations.
Custom work policy design: They collaborate with leadership to develop adaptable frameworks that cater to your team’s needs and align with your business goals. This includes, but isnt limited to, flexible scheduling and alternative leave policies.
Employee-centered programs: They assess workforce demographics and feedback to create benefits and engagement programs that reflect what matters most to your people.
Ongoing coaching and support: Theyre HR professionals who can serve as trusted advisors to your business. That might look like offering regular check-ins, career coaching, and real-time adjustments to keep experiences aligned with evolving needs.
Meeting employees where they are
Personalization in HR isnt just a trend. Its a shift toward more human-centered workplaces. Businesses that embrace this change will stand out as the employers of choice in an increasingly competitive market.
And if establishing an HR department isnt feasible with your business reality, you can look to partnering with a fractional HR firm. You dont have to guess what your employees wantor struggle to deliver it. Together, you can build a workplace where each person feels empowered, supported, and inspired to thrive.
Ever find yourself mentally drained before luncheven when the days barely begun? Thats not laziness. Its decision fatigue, and its very real.
From the moment you wake up, your brain starts spending mental energy to make choices: what to wear, what to eat, how to respond to emails, whether to speak up in a meeting, and more. Over time, each of these micro-decisions chips away at your cognitive bandwidthuntil youre running on fumes by 11 a.m.
According to research, decision fatigue can lead to worse choices later in the day, decreased self-control, and even unethical behavior. But the good news is that with the proper structure, you can drastically reduce mental overloadand set your day up for success.
Here are six science-backed strategies to minimize decision fatigue and boost clarity before noon.
1. Start with Structure: Automate the First 60 Minutes
Barack Obama, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg adopted similar wardrobe habits for the same reasonthey didnt want to waste energy deciding what to wear.
Routine isnt boring. Its strategic. Automating low-stakes decisions (like your breakfast, your clothes, or your workout routine) preserves your cognitive energy for high-impact choices later.
The first hour of your day sets the tone for everything that follows. Reducing friction early creates momentum and decision clarity that lasts all day. This also lowers stress hormones and boosts your motivation.
What to do:
Create a fixed morning routine: same wake-up time, same breakfast, same prep ritual.
Build a startup sequence for your workdaylike firing up your laptop, reviewing your goals, and taking 15 minutes of quiet thinking before meetings.
2. Make Your To-Do List the Night Before
When you start your day by scanning emails or Slack, you instantly go into reactive mode, focusing on others priorities.
Instead, make key planning decisions while your brain is freshat the end of the previous day. This helps you sleep better by offloading mental clutter; it also boosts your confidence and sense of direction in the morning. A prepared mind is a focused mind.
What to do:
Write down your top three priorities before you shut down for the day.
Review them first thing the next morningno thinking required.
Bonus: Include one quick win task to build early momentum.
3. Eat a Protein-Rich Breakfast (Yes, Really)
Your brain is 2% of your body weight, but uses over 20% of your energy. Without fuel, cognitive function declinesand decision-making suffers.
Skipping breakfast or grabbing only carbs causes blood sugar crashes, reducing your focus and increasing your irritability. A balanced breakfast stabilizes glucose levels, essential for maintaining consistent attention and emotional regulation throughout the day.
What you eat influences how you think. A nutritious morning meal primes your brain for clarity, patience, and problem-solving.
What to do:
Opt for protein and complex carbs, like eggs, Greek yogurt, oatmeal, or nuts.
Hydrate before having caffeine: even mild dehydration can impair concentration by 10%.
Add brain-boosting extras like berries, chia seeds, or greens for sustained energy.
4. Use Time Blocks to Limit Options
You spend mental energy whenever you ask, What should I do now? The more options, the more exhaustion.
Instead, create time blockspredefined periods for specific categories of work. This removes the burden of constant micro-decisions and helps your brain shift into the correct mode for the task.
Time blocking also reduces context switching, which studies show can cost up to 40% of your productive time.
What to do:
Block 9:0010:30 for deep work.
Block 10:3011:30 for admin or meetings.
Leave reactive tasks (email, chat) for the afternoon.
Color-code blocks on your calendar to visually reinforce focus zones.
This structure reduces ambiguity and decision points, preserving mental clarity for higher-order thinking.
5. Minimize Micro-Decisions with Environmental Cues
From desk clutter to notification dings, your environment constantly pulls you into unnecessary decision-makinglike Should I check this now? or Whats that ping?
Decision fatigue increases when external stimuli demand constant evaluation. Each small choice drains mental energy and pulls your attention away from meaningful work.
Design your environment to be your silent partner in focus. When your workspace supports your intentions, you make fewer decisions and stay in the flow longer.
What to do:
Silence nonurgent notifications.
Clear your desk of all but the task at hand.
Use physical cues: Post-it notes, open notebooks, or visible to-do lists to keep you anchored.
Add a visual focus zone markerlike a lamp or headphonesto signal deep work time.
This aligns with behavioral design principles championed by Nudge author Richard Thaler: simplify the environment to reduce cognitive load.
6. Build a Noon Reset Ritual
No matter how optimized your morning is, decision fatigue creeps in. Thats why resetting before the afternoon is criticalwhen poor choices tend to spike. By midday, your mental resources are often depleted, and without a conscious reset, your afternoon can become reactive and unfocused.
A pause helps restore clarity and regain control of your time and energy. It also boosts emotional regulation and decision-making accuracy.
What to do:
Pause at noon for 10 minutes of reflection or silence.
Ask: Whats one thing I need to finish today?
Reset your attention and reclaim your day before it runs you.
Try stepping outside or doing a short breathing exercise to refresh your mind.
According to research, this taps into the brains default mode network, which activates during rest and enhances creativity and problem-solving.
Save Your Brain for What Matters Most
You dont need to eliminate all decisionsjust the ones that drain you unnecessarily. The goal isnt rigid control over every moment, but the intentional design of your mental environment.
By front-loading important choices, using structure to reduce friction, and giving your brain regular rest, you fre up the cognitive bandwidth to lead, create, and perform at your best. Cognitive energy is your most valuable asset as a leader. Protect it with as much care as your time or money.
Remember: your attention is a finite resource. Spend it where it countson work that aligns with your values, energizes your team, and moves your mission forward.
Dairy is having a moment. Influencers on social media are drinking raw milk, consumers are going back to cows milk, and Republicans are pushing for whole milks return to school cafeterias.
But, while the plant-based milk world might appear in the rearview mirror, Oatly is leaning into coffee cultureand making some truly bizarre ads in the process. As part of a recent campaign called Blind Love, Oatly invited consumers to blind test whole milk and Oatly in coffee in a bizarre how-to video. In the accompanying ad, voiced by SNL alum Chris Parnell, the brand spoofed typical American pharmaceutical commercials, and presents a made up condition dubbed DOMP (Dormant Oatmilk Preference), to help viewers to diagnose themselves and discover their oat milk preference in coffee.
Oatly knows what it is doing. Studies show that Gen-Z is more responsive to absurd tactics, and 72% of Gen Zers and millennials prefer humorous ads. It comes to no surprise then that oddball advertising is becoming increasingly common for Oatly (and other brands, too).
Nutter Butter fills its TikTok with obscure brain rot content; Duolingos owl faked his own death; and Wendys irreverent comments have started a feud with Katy Perry. Yes, advertising is stranger than ever, but it’s effective.
We always do it in a strange way, executive creative director at Oatly Michael Lee says.
Late last year, the brand hired 31 professional Santas for a taste test switching milk and cookies with oat milk and croquembouche. Before that, another campaign featured “auditions” for an Oatly cooking show (spoiler: the casting tapes were the show). Oatly is very much in on the joke: on its website, the advertisement tab reads brainwashing.
The ad campaigns track with Oatlys marketing evolution. While the Swedish brand was born in 1994 targeting those with dairy allergies, it wasnt until 2013 when they shifted strategies to appeal to wider audiences, including a major redesign. The brand originally boasted muted packaging, but opted for a more rebellious rebrand as it entered the American market. Now Oatlys carton, covered with playful typography and quotes like wow no cow, and its like milk but made for humans, is a staple in grocery store aisles and coffee shops.
We had a very solid mission to convert dairy drinkers to plant based. But we were also human about it, and we had fun with it, Lee says. We did a lot of stuff that was very provocative that other brands wouldn’t have done, and so we had this kind of fearless, kind of punk quality.
[Photo: Oatly]
The plant-based revolution is declining
Just a few years ago, almond and oat lattes dominated orders, and recently more niche plant-based alternatives like pistachio milk have peaked consumers interest, yet there is no denying alt-milk is taking a hit.
From 2023 to 2024, whole milk saw a 1.6% increase in sales, while plant-based milks sales declined by 4.4%. For Oatly, its first quarter financial report revealed a 0.8% revenue decline compared to the same period the year prior, although it still expects to meet its first full year of profitable growth.
While consumers with dietary restrictions will remain loyal to nondairy products, most of the time, picking between whole milk and alt-milk is a choice.
The plant based group is really kind of a story of overlap, Darren Seifer, executive director and industry advisor for consumer goods and food service at Circana, says. 90% of [alt-milk users] are also using traditional dairy items.
Like the perfect storm that allowed alt-milks to boom in the first place, a similar one is brewing elevating whole milk to cult status.
Buzzwords like high protein, low-sugar, and gut healthy can be naturally occurring features in dairy, making it an attractive choice for users.
We’ve seen so far in the last year in traditional dairy, there’s been a strong emphasis around health claims, Seifer says. Aligning with the health trends that we see popping up, that’s been helping to drive some of its growth. And again, because there is an overlap among those who use plant based it feels like it’s drawing them away from it.
Additionally, financial factors like the higher price of alt-milk at a time of economic uncertainty might also be driving consumers away, Seifer explained, and cultural trends are also at play.
We started to see people tell us that they’re trying to get away from artificiality again, Seifer says. From the rise of tradwives, Make America Healthy Again, and a disdain for oils, many consumers are now opting away from ultra-processed foods, artificial colors and sweeteners, and more.
Define that as you wish, but that’s just the terminology that was thrown out there, he adds. And they might look at something like almond milk and say, well, that doesn’t occur naturally, so it’s processed.
[Photo: Oatly]
Brewing culture
In the midst of shifting trends, Oatly is doubling down on humor and culture. Specifically, it’s tapping into coffee culture and baristas’ expertise, going where consumers might first meet their product: in a coffee shop.
We want it to be easy for people to engage with us. So it has to be fun, it has to be cool. It has to be part of culture. So, coffee kind of plays that role for us, Lee says.
Traveling from New York and Chicago, to London and Berlin, the over 60 baristas on staff spend time at coffee shops around the world, informing Oatly not only where culture is going, but how coffee fits into the mix.
Every barista is not just a barista. They are tattoo artists. They’re in a band, they’re artists, they’re designers. And so that was a perfect way for us to follow coffee into culture, Lee added. Coffee culture is moving into fashion. It’s moving into nightlife. It’s moving into music. And since we have such a strong relationship with coffee, there’s kind of a license for our brand to do that.
Leveraging the intersection of fashion and coffee, the brand recently released a global lookbook, presenting various summer recipes like an Ube matcha latte and a cherry bakewell dirty soda recipe, both featuring colorful editorial visuals.
The company has been around for 30 years, and from our perspective, trends come and go, Lee added. We’re staying the course.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Theres a new orthodoxy quietly sweeping through executive leadership circles. It goes by many namesembodied awareness, whole-self management, conscious leadershipbut the core message is the same: intuition and spiritual presence are the foundations of strategic leadership.
At first glance, this seems like progress. Who wouldnt prefer a leader whos self-aware and emotionally attuned. In a business world riddled with brittle egos and performative hustle, a little more reflection is a breath of fresh air.
But beneath its soothing language, the practice of Conscious Leadership has more insidious effects on business culture. Pioneered by groups like The Conscious Leadership Group, it has evolved into a sprawling, self-affirming ideologyone that displaces competence with charisma, rigor with resonance, and accountability with affirmation.
The result? A growing class of business leaders who mistake internal coherence for external effectivenesswho believe that if they feel right, they must be right. Its not just anti-rational; its anti-leadership.
From Competence to Vibes
At the heart of the formal Conscious Leadership framework is the “15 Commitments”a framework designed to promote self-awareness, integrity, and responsibility. The commitments are trite and self-evident to anyone with a modicum of social or emotional intelligence.
But its not the principles that are the problem, its their embodiment conscious leadership heuristics have become popular shorthand in corporate and entrepreneurial leadership circles where Conscious Leadership has taken on its own ideological life.
Take the idea of the whole-body yes. It sounds poetic, even profound. But in functional terms, it’s an epistemic disaster.
The whole-body yes tells you that if something doesnt feel rightin your gutits probably wrong. Not just wrong for you, but wrong period. And therefore, you shouldnt do it. Or worse, you shouldnt have to do it.
On its face, this confuses intuition with truth. But more dangerously, it provides a prospective license to avoid the hard work of intellectual and moral analysis. Every hesitance becomes an omen to be heeded. Every discomfort becomes a signal to say no. Every debate becomes an attack on your authentic self.
In other words: if you dont want to do something, your subconscious probably knows its ethically compromised or strategically unsound. Therefore, resistance becomes virtue.
An undergraduate ethics major could tell you why this notion is so intoxicatingly fallacious: it is the embodiment of confirmation bias. It tells us that whatever feels right is, in fact, right. Its confusing righteousness with rightness, and its a cloaking device for all of our basest instincts.
Sociopaths exhibit this same kind of circular self-assurance. Like Luigi Mangione and the Unabomber, they are able to dress-up their prejudices in a pseudo-ethical manifesto to rationalize the overt violation of ethical norms.
Modern neuropsychology has taught us that our brain is quite good at confabulatingretroactively fabricating a reason for unreasonable behavior. Thats the essence of the whole-body yes; license for confabulation.
Business Leadership Without Skin in the Game
You can tell a lot about a framework by who evangelizes it. Conscious leadership tends to take root squarely among venture capitalists, consultants, HR departments, and coaching circlesthose stakeholders that are structurally insulated from the consequences of strategic execution.
These are not, generally speaking, people with direct exposure to existential business risks. They dont carry payroll. They dont answer to shareholders. They dont navigate hostile markets. Theyre not in the line of fire. And because of that, they can afford to substitute internal validation for external results. They can afford to confuse feeling good with doing good.
In that vacuum of real-world feedback, Conscious Leadership thrives. It spreads through offsites and retreats. It drips into executive workshops and middle-management Slack channels. It cloaks itself in the language of growth while quietly eroding the foundation of competency-based leadership.
The Reactionary Core: Anti-Rationality in a Pseudo-Spiritual Shell
Despite proselytization among progressive business leaders, Conscious Leadership is a deeply reactionary movement. It doesnt evolve leadershipit regresses to a kind of anti-rational romanticism. It seeks not to integrate intuition with reason, but to replace rational deliberation entirely with internal knowing.
In ancient traditionsfrom Buddhist mindfulness to Greek Stoicismtrue wisdom arises from tension: between emotion and restraint, instinct and inquiry, desire and discipline. The project of modernity was about striking this balance.
In philosophy, the Enlightenment forced the end of insular thinking and the birth of objective bases for decision-making.
In healthcare, we have evidence-based medicine rather than bedside impressions.
In law, we have procedural justice instead of the will of the monarch.
In finance, we have quantitative models instead of gut instinct.
Intuitions may point to the source of whats most fundamentally valuable in human life. But one also needs to recognize that we only get to play the game of modern society if we are able to temper our emotional, gut instincts.
Conscious Leadership indulgently short-circuits that developmental arc. You no longer need to sit in discomfort, wrestle with ambiguity, or act in spite of your fear. You simply check in with your truth, and act accordingly.
This kind of psychospiritual narcissism used to be the birth right of false gurus and religious fundamentalists, but executives are now importing it into the boardroom.
Conscious Leadership Isnt for Everyone: The Narcissism of Framing Dissent as Deficiency
Perhaps the most telling artifact of this movements epistemic regression is represented in an article from the formal Conscious Leadership group entitled Conscious Leadership Isnt for Everyone.
I felt a wave of relief when I stumbled upon this piecefinally, some humility to balance their ideological self-assurance. Surely, I thought, theyll acknowledge the limits of their framework. Something like: Maybe Conscious Leadership doesnt apply so well in a military context, where you cant pause to check in with your body before rushing to save a wounded soldier. Or: Maybe your whole-body yes should be informed by real analysis and empirical evidence.
But no. Instead of setting boundaries (the sign of a real discipline), the article castigates the un-initiated for their small-mindedness. For those not quite ready to do the work. Hres the tone: If you dont resonate with the Conscious Leadership framework, its not because the framework might be flawed. Its because you arent ready. You havent evolved enough. Youre still trapped in your fear, your ego, your unconscious patterns.
This is the hallmark of every narrow-minded epistemology, from religious cults to multilevel marketing: disagreement is pathologized. Non-belief is recast as immaturity. Critique is rebranded as resistance.
What could have been a useful framework becomes a totalizing worldview and a litmus test for identity. Its a circular self-help theology wrapped in the garb of a professional services business model.
The Real Danger: Corporate Adoption Without Accountability
Perhaps the most dangerous part of Conscious Leadership isn’t its spread in coaching circlesbut its growing adoption in boardrooms. As performance management becomes politicized and teams crave psychological safety, frameworks like these offer a tempting escape hatch: a way to appear ethical and evolved without committing to the hard metrics of performance or the messy realities of leadership.
This trend is more than aesthetic. Its structural.
We are watching as companies quietly substitute felt authenticity for functional accountability. Leaders are now praised for their vulnerability, but rarely challenged on the outcomes of their teams. Difficult conversations are avoided in the name of staying above the line. Strategy becomes an exercise in inner alignment. Disagreement becomes a trauma response.
But in this context, consciousness is the unique privilege of people who have, in some sense, already made it. Being at the top, they have the material wealth and security to dedicate themselves to introspection and exploration. They exhort this new way of thinking, and discourage the exact model ambition, competency-building, and hard-work that allowed them to rise to such a position in the first place.
In this way, Conscious Leadership is more rehabilitative than it is strategic; it is a framework that allows the executive caste to recapture some sense of humanity after years of grinding away in corporate gears.
For the underlings, aware of the path it took leaders to become leaders, these platitudes ring false. Those being consciously led are happy to pay lip-service to their leaders fluffy worldview as long as it protects their position in the organization. All the while, they feel the necessity to continue delivering tangible results The only realistic, quantifiable source of security within the organization.
The disconnectbetween leadership speech and the results-oriented nature of businesssimply breeds cognitive dissonance among employees. They need to confabulate a consciousness-based story to explain their strategic decisions, or worse, they actually use the Conscious Leadership Commitments to make those decisions.
What Leadership Actually Requires
Real leadership doesnt require denial of intuition, but it does require tempering it. It requires navigating the productive tension between feeling and thinking. It means honoring discomfort, not avoiding it. It means acting ethically even when your nervous system is screaming run.
And above all, it means holding power not as self-expressionbut as responsibility.
Leadership isnt about being your most authentic self in the boardroom. Its about making decisions under uncertainty, absorbing pressure so others can thrive, and balancing the needs of the self with the needs of the system.
That kind of leadership may not feel as righteous. But it works, particularly in a business context where employees actually care about whether their organization succeeds.
Heres another unsexy fact of life and businessthe best way to grow spiritually is to find a base of stability. And in many cases, this means having enough material wealth to pay medical bills, repair your car, and care for your family membersand that means that the business must thrive in real financial terms.
Thats why Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is still a useful framework: we need material security and basic social cohesion before we can work towards self-transcendence. But so-called conscious leaders dont realize that transcendence is path-dependent; they havent reflected enough to see that rightful leadership is earned through competency, merit, and sacrifice, rather than verbal appeals to higher ideals.
Most employees are happy to find enlightenment on their own time and in their own way. They dont want group therapy funded through the HR budget and proselytized by their boss.
Theyd prefer their leader to lead the way by making sound strategic decisions, and if that is at odds with being an empathetic and ethical human, then yes, youre in a crappy business situation. This isnt a revelation worthy of a book.
Conscious Leadership isnt wrong. Its just incomplete.
And after all that critique, frankly, the 15 formal Conscious Leadership Commitments are pretty much right. They are general enough to be unchallengeable, but they are represented (and treated) as a comprehensive leadership model.
Principles, rules, and commitments are a protection against chaos. They give us something to latch onto in complex situations, like executive leadership. But the truth is, a leader who truly embodies morality, humanism, and empathy has no need for a formal principle. The people who are most ensnared by moral principles and ideologies are those people who most need themthe type of people for whom integrity is unnatural and hard-won.
After all, the deeper essence of the 15 Commitmentsindividual responsibility, curiosity, integrityought to be ingrained early in life. These qualities should be nurtured through sound parenting, quality education, and lived experience. When foundational virtues like individual responsibility and empathy havent been deeply internalized, frameworks like these can feel revelatorynot because they unlock new wisdom, but because they compensate for what should have already been there.
Those who most loudly profess their principles often do so to paper over their fragility. Moral status, when secure, doesnt need to be declaredits lived.
So, live consciously and lead consciously, but if you ever hear someone start a sentence with in the spirit of conscious leadership, then I suggest you turn tail and run.
From fantastical worlds to personalized Ghibli-esque portraits, social media is flooded with AI-generated images that were created by merely a prompt. But what may be a fun tool for the average user has become an existential threat for graphic design.
And yet, surprisingly, graphic design jobs dont seem to be getting eliminatedyet.
By analyzing job posting data between fall/winter 2023-2024 and fall/winter 2024-2025, Fast Company found that the number of job listings for graphic designers stayed flat, despite worries about AI platforms eliminating these particular jobs.
There just haven’t been very many graphic-design based AI generators yet, says Daniel Lefcourt, visual artist and professor of art and computation at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
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Since 2018, Lefcourt has used AI models in various courses, and for the past four years he has taught Generative Systems, a course that explores how to use generative technology in the design process. The class uses Invoke, a 2-year-old generative AI platform, and Runway.
Only now are we seeing Figma and Adobe Illustrator starting to generate designs, and that’s pretty recent, he added. Before that, the tech wasn’t there yet to shift the design field in the same way.
The element of trust
While AI platforms such as DALL-E and Midjourney can generate overly produced fantasy-like images, it struggles with basic graphic design concepts like typography and uniformity.
If you’re using a tool that can’t give you consistent results, that makes it challenging to embrace like a standard tool, says Elliott Romano, who is pursuing an MFA in graphic design at RISD. Romano spent 10 years as a digital product designer at cultural institutions, hardware startups, and enterprise software companies before deciding to be more of a generalist than a specialist when it comes to visual communication. He now explores the creative application of generative tools.
I’ll be shocked if, as these things get better, they dont become a replacement of sorts, he says. I see the graphic designer becoming more of a creative director, and being able to come in and move things around.
AI is “designed to hit the lowest common denominator”
Jody Poole, a digital graphic designer who has spent the past 25 years working on campaigns for brands such as Coca-Cola, Comcast, and Kelloggs, recently shared on Reddit an experience hed had involving AI. He was completing a timed test that had been part of the application for a senior position at a marketing company. The design section of the test, he recalled, included questions like: The client wants you to design this promotional poster, but instead of coffee they want raspberry lemonade. What AI prompts would you use to design this?
I was stunned, he said on Reddit. No thought to typography or colour theory or visual hierarchy. Just give us the prompts and let AI do the rest.
Still, Poole recognizes that AI might be valuable for the design industry one day, particularly when it comes to translating and adapting a human-made design to reach wider and diverse audiences. There is a tidal wave of change that is happening within technology, and you either have to get out the surfboard and ride the wave, or you’re going to drown, he tells Fast Company.
The change might even come with an upside, he explains, likening AI-design with fast fashion, which had the effect of making bespoke designs highly prized.
AI is designed to hit the lowest common denominator, Poole says If you can rise above that, even a little bit, you become a unique, valuable talent out there.
Lefcourt, for his part, isnt too worried for graphic designers, either. What these tools are doing is shifting us into an entirely new realm of visual culture, he says. To be a trained artist, to understand how images work, and how images are created, from the Renaissance to now, actually positions you pretty well for this new world that we’re entering into.
This article is part of Fast Company’s continuing coverage of where the design jobs are, including this year’s comprehensive analysis of 170,000 job listings
Picture this: On your way out of the office, you notice a manager berating an employee. You assume the worker made some sort of mistake, but the managers behavior seems unprofessional. Later, as youre preparing dinner, is the scene still weighing on youor is it out of sight, out of mind?
If you think youd still be bothered, youre not alone. It turns out that simply observing mistreatment at work can have a surprisingly strong impact on people, even for those not directly involved. Thats according to new research led by Edwyna Hill, coauthored by Rachel Burgess, Manuela Priesemuth, Jefferson McClain, and me, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
Using a method called meta-analysiswhich takes results from many different studies and combines them to produce an overall set of findingswe reviewed the growing body of research on what management professors like me call third-party perceptions of mistreatment. In this context, third parties are people who observe mistreatment between a perpetrator and the victim, who are the first and second parties.
We looked at 158 studies published in 105 journal articles involving thousands of participants. Those studies explored a number of different forms of workplace mistreatment ranging from incivility to abusive supervision and sexual harassment. Some of those studies took part in actual workplaces, while others examined mistreatment in tightly controlled laboratory settings.
The results were striking: We found that observing a coworker being mistreated on the job has significant effects on the observers emotions. In fact, we found that observers of mistreatment may be as affected by what happened as the people actually involved in the event.
These reactions fall along a spectrumsome helpful, others less so. On the encouraging side, we found that observers tend to judge perpetrators and feel empathy for victims. These reactions discourage mistreatment by creating a climate that favors the victim. On the other hand, we found that observers may also enjoy seeing their coworkers sufferan emotion called schadenfreudeor blame the victim. These sorts of reactions damage team dynamics and discourage people from reporting mistreatment.
Why it matters
These findings matter because mistreatment in the workplace is disturbingly common, and even more frequently observed than experienced. One recent study found that 34% of employees have experienced workplace mistreatment firsthand, but 44% have observed it happening to someone else. In other words, nearly half of workers have likely seen a scenario like the one described at the start of this article.
Unfortunately, the human resources playbook on workplace mistreatment rarely takes third parties into account. Some investigation occurs, potentially resulting in some punishment for the perpetrator and some support for the victim. A more effective response to workplace mistreatment would recognize that the harm often extends beyond the victim, and that observers may need support too.
What still isnt known
Whats needed now is a better understanding of the nuances involved in observing mistreatment. Why do some observers react with empathy, while others derive pleasure from the suffering of others? And why might observers feel empathy for the victim but still respond by judging or blaming them? Answering these questions is a crucial next step for researchers and leaders seeking to design more effective workplace policies.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
Jason Colquitt is a professor of management at the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Over the past several years, electric vehicles have garnered something of a reputation for their unusual sounds on the road. Otherworldly EV warning sounds have been compared to a celestial choir, a flying saucer hum, and, in one TikTok with 23.5 million views, the song that might play just before ascending to heaven. But the angelic warble thats come to characterize EV acoustics might have a few drawbacks for pedestrians.
A new study conducted by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and published in March examined how well the average person could locate three common types of warning sounds from hybrid and electric vehicles at low speeds. It found that all three of the sounds were significantly harder for pedestrians to locate than the sound of a standard internal combustion engine.
Given that they have no combustion engine, EVs are naturally almost silent. That can be a benefit when it comes to urban noise pollution, but its not ideal for pedestrian safety. For the past six years, all EVs in the U.S. have been legally required to emit some kind of low-level noisea prompt that automakers have chosen to interpret in a range of creative ways. But it might be time for some automakers to take another crack at their proprietary EV acoustics.
What do Hanz Zimmer, a didgeridoo, and fighter jets have in common?
Starting in 2019, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ruled that all hybrid and electric cars have to be fitted with an external speaker that must make audible noise when traveling in reverse or forward at speeds up to 30 kilometers per hour (about 19 miles per hour). While the law sets expectations for when these noises need to play, it largely leaves the contents of the noise itself up to automakers.
Thats resulted in a variety of EV sounds on the road, from a Cadillac alert made using a didgeridoo to the Hyundai Ioniq 5 Ns fighter-jet-inspired sound and BMWs portfolio of i4 electric sedan noises by composer Hans Zimmer.
This unusual symphony hitting the roads has inspired quippy commentary on social media. Under a TikTok sharing the BMX iX 50s reverse sound, one user wrote, is this ribs by lorde? And in a video poking fun at Teslas reverse audio, another commenter joked, Every time our neighbour pulls onto the drive with their electric car my husband says the spaceship has landed. Beyond sounding a bit silly, though, there are a few key shortcomings to the sounds that many automakers are selecting for their EVs.
Why are EVs so hard (and annoying) to hear?
Chalmers researchers examined three of the main categories of EV sounds, also known as acoustic vehicle alerting systems (AVAS): two-tone, multitone, and narrowband noise (a noise concentrated within a small band of audible frequencies, often perceived as a hissing sound).
To compare these sounds to that of an internal combustion engine, researchers studied the reactions of 52 test subjects inside a soundproof chamber. Each subject was surrounded by 24 loudspeakers and given a laser pointer fashioned out of a toy gun. When one of the speakers played a simulated vehicle sound designed to mimic the noise of an EV at a low speed, the subjects were to point the laser toward the sound as quickly as possible.
The tests demonstrated that all the AVAS categories were harder for subjects to locate than the sound of an internal combustion engine. And, according to Leon Müller, a PhD student at Chalmers and one of the papers authors, one of the sounds was more problematic than the others.
[The two-tone AVAS] is significantly harder to localize than other types of warning sounds, as well as combustion noise, Müller says, noting that in a situation with just one vehicle present, these localization errors are relatively small and not particularly concerning for traffic safety. When there are two or three EVs present, though, the situation can get a bit stickier. In that case, the participants had much more [difficulty] localizing the cars, up to a point where most participants failed to even detect all presented EVs within an appropriate time, Müller says.
There are a few reasons why pedestrians might have trouble locating EV sounds. First, Müller explains, combustion noise is a very broadband signalmeaning it contains a lot of frequencies, and hence more information for our hearing system to work with. Second, humans have had substantially more time to acclimate to combustion sounds than artificial EV sounds.
We humans have learned over the last 100 years or so that cars sound in a particular way and how driving behavior, such as acceleration, is reflected in this combustion noise, Müller says. This potential learning effect might also contribute to differences in localization, especially when we need to decode multiple sounds at the same time. One could expect that we would then also get used to EV sounds within a few years. The only problem is that they currently all sound different.
A new sound
In the meantime, Müller believes there are two potential avenues to make EV sounds safer.
Currently, U.S. and EU regulations are limited to minimum sound levels in a specified number of frequency bands, which he argues allows the warning signals to be anything between a futuristic spaceship sound or a racing car engine. In the U.S., he adds, regulations dont require a velocity pitch shift, meaning that a car might sound the same going 60 mph as it does at 25 mph. To address these problems, Müller says the regulations should make more clear demands on the sound characteristics.
On the automaker side of the equation, the Chalmers study indicates that a more broadband AVAS signal, similar to the noise radiated by tires when driving faster, is preferable to a two-tone or multitone AVAS.
[This sound] is potentially less annoying than tonal sounds and has the advantage that we already have learned to interpret this noise since we hear it every day, Müller says.
In the long term, he adds that adaptive AVAS solutionslike pedestrian detection technologycould help EVs radiate a more advanced warning sound directly in the direction of the pedestrian, thus improving safety and reducing noise pollution.
One important bottom line here is that we are no saying EVs are bad or dangerous. With the right type of warning signal, they are not, Müller says. On the contrary, they have the potential of reduced noise pollution since the warning sound can be controlled, while the combustion noise in [internal combustion engine vehicles] is always there.
