Bags of ice-thwarting salt aren’t usually a hot item at Bates Ace Hardware in Atlanta, but store manager Lewis Pane sold all 275 he had in stock in one morning as residents braced for a major storm to deliver heavy snow, sleet and freezing rain on a broad section of the U.S. in coming days.Payne said he had 30 online orders for “ice melt” before 8 a.m. People sprinkle the salts on the ground before a storm to disrupt the formation of ice.“It’s impossible to get right now,” Payne said. “We have had to make special trips to our warehouse to pick up extra items because people need them.”The storm was expected to hit starting Friday, stretching from New Mexico to New England and across the Deep South. The damage could rival that of a major hurricane.Meteorologists say ice may linger on roads and sidewalks because temperatures will be slow to warm in many areas. Ice could also weigh down trees and power lines, triggering widespread outages.The city of Carmel, Indiana, canceled its Winter Games out of fear residents could get frostbite and hypothermia competing in ice trike relay and “human curling” in which people slide down a skating rink on inner tubes.College sports teams moved up or postponed games, and the Texas Rangers canceled their annual Fan Fest event.The coldest windchills may fall below -50 F (-46 C) across the Northern Plains with subzero wind chills reaching as far southeast as the Mid-Atlantic states and Southern Plains, the National Weather Service said.At the Atlanta hardware store, Wendy Chambers stopped by to pick up batteries and flashlights in case there is a power outage.“We’re gonna be prepared, aren’t we? We’re going to be able to read, do things, play games,” she said before heading to church choir with her granddaughter.Oklahoma truck driver Charles Daniel planned to load up as much freight as possible before the storm arrives in his area on Friday.“You’ve got to be very weather aware, and real smart about what you’re doing,” said Daniel, who delivers goods across western Oklahoma in an 18-wheel tractor-trailer.“You can’t back down into decline docks, you can’t go into neighborhoods or parking lots,” Daniel said. “I’m 40,000 pounds unloaded. One mistake can literally kill somebody, so you have to use your head.”He said truck drivers need to have a change of clothes, plenty of water and a couple of jackets on hand in case they get stuck because it would be a while before a tow truck could help them.In Arkansas, the Department of Transportation started treating some roads with brine on Tuesday. The salt helps prevent ice from forming. Over 10 inches of snow were expected in parts of the state.Rain was complicating efforts to pretreat roads with salt in Alabama on Wednesday because precipitation washes away the brine. The Alabama Department of Transportation encouraged people to stay off the roads if ice forms.“Any amount of ice is pretty dangerous, and certainly a quarter-inch could be very hazardous,” said Seth Burkett, a department spokesperson.Snow and icy conditions were forecast for Maryland beginning Saturday afternoon or evening, with peak effects Saturday night and into Sunday morning. The governor declared a state of preparedness to help authorities respond quickly.Governors in North Carolina and South Carolina declared states of emergency, making it easier for state and local agencies to coordinate and get help from groups like the National Guard.
Associated Press writers Brian Witte in Annapolis, Maryland; Dylan Lovan in Louisville, Kentucky; Jamie Stengle in Dallas; Kimberly Chandler in Montgomery, Alabama; Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina; and Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, contributed to this report.
Emilie Megnien and Sean Murphy, Associated Press
A new neighborhood under construction near Sacramento, California, in the rolling foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, looks like a typical subdivision. But its one of the first developments designed at a neighborhood scale to withstand wildfires.
Each house goes farther than Californias latest building requirements for high-fire-risk zones, from enclosed, ember-resistant eaves to dual-paned, tempered glass windows that can better withstand extreme heat in a fire. The design considers not just each house, but how homes interact, spacing buildings at least 10 feet apart and removing combustible features to prevent fire from spreading between them.
Called Stone Canyon, it’s one of the states first Wildfire Prepared Neighborhoods, a standard developed by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), a research nonprofit funded by the insurance industry.
[Photo: KB Home]
Designing homes that withstand wildfires
At a unique facility in North Carolina, the nonprofit recreates wildfiresfrom embers to wind speedand then uses controlled tests to see how houses perform.
We build full-size structures and we can control the wind speed and direction,” says Roy Wright, president and CEO at IBHS. “We can control the ember flow and the cast that is coming in that direction. We put out and publish really interesting, wonky things about wildfire. But [with the new standards] we said, let’s just take the most important pieces of the science and make them really plain and usable for developers and homeowners.”
[Video: KB Home]
KB Home, the national developer behind the project, decided to tackle a new level of fire safety after learning about IBHSs research. At a building conference in 2024, the team watched one of the nonprofits demonstrations, which featured a house built to the standard building code next to one built to IBHSs standards.
They simulated a wildfire event where embers were blowing against the two structures, says Steve Ruffner, president and regional general manager for KB Homes in Southern California. The home that was built to the old standards burned fairly quickly, within about half an hour. And the other home didn’t burn at all.
At the time, KB Home had another development underway in a fire risk zone in Escondido, near San Diego. On the fly, we changed the design guidelines of our homes to accommodate the IBHS standards, says Ruffner. (The homes, which start at around $1,000,000 and around 2,000 square feet, are aimed at “step-up” buyers looking for an upgrade; in the development near Sacramento, they start in the high $700,000s.)
[Photo: KB Homes]
IBHS had already put out a new building standard for “wildfire prepared” homes in 2022. In 2024, after meeting with KB Homes, it sped up the development of a related standard at the scale of a neighborhood.
To get the designation, homes need to include features like noncombustible gutters, a Class A fire-rated concrete tile roof, ember-resistant vents, six inches of vertical clearance at the base of exterior walls, noncombustible fence and gate materials, and a five to 30-foot “defensible zone” around the home where any vegetation is carefully spaced to avoid the spread of fire. Plants have to be drought-resistant California natives.
The standard overlaps with California’s newest building code, but requires better, more resilient building materials for certain components. California’s code also doesn’t require at least 10 feet of space between buildings or the elimination of “connective fuel pathways” between buildings.
[Photo: KB Homes]
“Structure separation is the biggest indicator of wildfire progress that will take placethat density,” says Wright. “That’s why when you’re building new developments, you can incorporate this in. Because you want to make sure that within the adjacent home, if it is fully engulfed, that you’re giving the next structure a chance to survive.”
Fires often spread through embers that can be blown long distances on windy days. In both the development near Sacramento and the one in Escondido, the homes are near open wild land that could easily burn; embers wouldn’t have to travel far.
“We want to make sure that those homes can withstand those embers showers,” Wright says. “If embers are going to land on the property, it may ignite some bush or something that is away from the home on the parcel. But what’s closest to the structure is going to be able to withstand those embers showers. And if one of the structures has a really bad day and ignites, we slow the spread so that we’re not going to lose the whole neighborhood. We’re going to actually give the firefighters a chance to get in there and actually beat it down.”
It also protects older homes nearby. “There are adjacent subdivisions or neighborhoods that were built 40 years ago,” he says. “And th kind of actions that these neighborhoods have put in place are actually going to have a protective effect for their neighbors, because when they can withstand the impact of wildfire, that means the fire doesn’t spread.”
[Photo: KB Homes]
From lab tests to proof of concept
In the first project in Escondido, KB Home worked with the city to change some design guidelines (instead of Craftsman-style homes made from wood, they pivoted to ranch homes with cement-based siding or stucco). The city also required timber fencing that was treated for fire, but when IBHS explained that the coating quickly wears off in the sunmaking this type of fence flammablethey were able to switch to a metal fence that looks like wood. The switch actually helped save costs, Ruffner says.
In total, all of the changes didn’t add significantly change the development’s bottom line, and there were some unexpected benefits. “We found out that tempered windows are much tougher, so we didn’t break as many windows during [construction], and we ended up saving a lot of money that way,” says Ruffner.
[Photo: KB Homes]
The first neighborhood in Escondido includes 64 homes, and an HOA agreement that requires homeowners to maintain gardens over time so fire can’t spread between plants or trees. The first homeowners have been carefully adhering to the plan. “They want to make sure they don’t break the rules because honestly, insurability in California is a big, big deal,” says Ruffner. “If you’re not insurable, you have to go into the public programs that are very, very expensive. And so at least they have a good chance here to negotiate with insurance companies.”
The newest neighborhood near Sacramento will follow the same path. So far, only model homes are in place; KB Home builds each house to order as each home is sold. Each house will be evaluated by IBHS before the neighborhood gets the “Wildfire Prepared” designation, though it’s getting a provisional designation now.
[Photo: KB Homes]
Now that KB Home has shown that meeting the standard is financially viable, other developers also have projects underway. Around a dozen other projects are being designed to the standard now, Wright says, some with several hundred homes in a single development.
Of course, the work can’t completely eliminate risk. It’s not possible to make a house completely fireproof, Wright says. But in a worst-case scenario, even if 20% of losses in a neighborhood could be avoided in a fire, that’s “absolutely phenomenal,” he says.
“Every time one more structure doesn’t burn, that means that structure is not sending off its flame. It’s not sending off its embers,” he adds. “Every time we save a structure and it survives, we really narrow the path of how that fire will propagate into a neighborhood.”
Most sales pitches fail for one simple reason: they try to say too much. It’s natural to be passionate about your product or service. Of course you want to showcase the features and benefits. But if you want your audience leaning in and listening, less is always more.
We live in what I call an AHA world. AI-focused, hyper-connected, and always-on. Distractions abound. If you cant capture your prospect and customers’ imagination immediately, youll lose them to their emails, Slack messages, and TikTok feeds.
The good news is theres a 90-second fix that will help you craft a pitch or presentation that keeps your audience on the edge of their seats. The structure is so simple, its almost too good to be true. Its the same framework the world’s best journalists use to keep their readers coming back for more and the same approach I teach leaders, sales teams, and founders who want their message to cut through.
Lets dive in.
Find Your Headline
Most people start creating a pitch or presentation by opening a slide deck and dumping content into it. Or worse, opening an existing slide deck and trying to rearrange it. Dont. Before you write a single word or think about your visuals, you need to strip your pitch down to a single sentence.
Imagine it appearing on the front of a newspaper or at the top of a social feed. What words would you choose? Keep them short, punchy, and memorable. Ten words or fewer is a good rule of thumb.
This single line of text becomes the anchor for your entire pitch. It forces you to stay disciplined. If something doesnt support your headline it doesnt make the cut.
When you look at the newspaper industry, the best headlines have an emotional element too. They dont just present information, they engage the target audience. A weak pitch headline is forgettable: SaaS Product Seed Round is accurate but bland. $10 million Opportunity To Revolutionize Fintech is much more compelling.
A strong headline creates energy. It signals to your audience why they should care. But its most important function is as a yardstick for your content. Test every slide, story, and statistic against it. If its aligned with the headline, it stays. If it doesnt, it goes.
Distill It Into Three Key Messages
When you look at the text of a newspaper article on the page, youll see the headline and a number of subheadings. If all you do is skim those, youll have the gist of what is being said. You dont need to read the whole thing. That structure is a great shorthand for pitches and presentations.
Your audience cant absorb unlimited information. Most people walk into meetings already holding a handful of important thoughts in their heads: deadlines, dinner plans, unfinished tasks. If you give people 17 reasons why your product or service is a good fit, theres no hope theyll remember all of them.
Id like to suggest that three is the magic number. Not seven. Not five. Three.
Three ideas feel complete and satisfying. Three creates a sense of structure. Three gives your audience a map they can follow without working too hard.
When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone back in 2007 his headline was Apple reinvents the phone. His three key messages were as follows: An iPod. A phone. An internet communicator. Eight words, three ideas, total clarity. His whole presentation was built around those unifying messages. He covered a lot of ground in his 1 hour, 42 minute presentation but those were the things he kept coming back to.
Your three key messages are the organizing ideas that sit beneath your headline. They are what your audience will remember long after the details fade. Ask yourself: If they only kept three things from this pitch, what must they be?
This is where you need to be ruthless. Speakers often flood their audience with data points, product features, or historical context. But doing so only creates overwhelm. It is not your audiences job to decide what matters. Its yours.
Decide How You Want Them To Feel
With a headline and three key messages, you now have a pitch structure that is simple, repeatable, and memorable. The final step is to think about how you want people to feel.
This is the part most people skip entirely. But its the one that separates forgettable communicators from compelling ones. Decisions are rarely made on logic alone. Even the most analytical audiences are influenced by the emotional resonance of the message.
Before I became a communication coach, I trained and worked as a professional actor. One of the first things actors learn is the power of emotional intention. Before stepping on stage, or in front of the camera, you decide the feeling youre trying to generate in the audience or the other character. That choice influences your breath, your voice, your posture, and your energy. It changes how your words land.
The same principle applies in a sales conversation. Ask yourself: What emotion do I want to leave them feeling? Should they feel excited? Reassured? Educated?
There are thousands of options. Choose one. That emotion becomes the current that runs through your delivery. A pitch with emotional intention not only sounds and feels different but is far more memorable too.
Heres the whole technique condensed:
20 seconds – write your headline 60 seconds – choose your three key messages 10 seconds – set your emotional intention
Thats it. In 90 seconds, youve clarified your message, sharpened your structure, and supercharged your delivery. Its focused, clear, and engaging.
And if youd like to see this technique in action, just look at the structure of this article. Its built exactly the way I encourage people to build their pitches: one headline, three key messages and a single emotional intention guiding the tone.
In an AHA world, simplicity isnt a compromise. Its a superpower.
The metallic fringe hanging down from the edge of Anishnawbe Health Toronto’s community health center near downtown Toronto is the biggest indication that something different is happening here.
Created to provide centralized health care and traditional healing to the 90,000-strong Indigenous population of Toronto, the clinic is the centerpiece of a unique city block of development that was intentionally led by the Indigenous community and designed to reflect its culture.
[Photo: James Brittain/courtesy KGA]
The wraparound fringe of more than 12,000 strands of stainless steel chainthe kind of aesthetic flourish easily targeted for elimination by the value engineers of a typical developmentis just one of many elements of the project that put its Indigenous roots on full display on this block.
From its services and its building forms to the orientation of its landscaping, the development embodies Indigenous traditions, practices, and principles in a way that’s wholly uncommon in most urban environments.
[Photo: Riley Snelling/courtesy KGA]
Named the Indigenous Hub, this city block of development includes the aforementioned health center, along with an Indigenous job training center, two mid-rise residential towers, and public and private plazas. Indigenous iconography and material references can be seen across the site, from building facades that reference sacred blanket designs and healing rituals to wall treatments that evoke the bark of trees that once stood as forests on this site.
It’s a project that goes to unusual lengths to put these elements on display. And it also required everyone involved in the project, from the developer to the architects and the landscape designers, to rethink their approach to urban development.
[Photo: James Brittain/courtesy KGA]
‘A place of indigeneity’
Located in a part of the city that was once the floodplain of the Don River, and before that the ancestral lands and hunting grounds for Indigenous people for thousands of years, the site holds deep resonance for the community. The designers of the project, including an Indigenous architecture firm headquartered in a nearby First Nation, put great effort into drawing those connections in the look and feel of the project.
“The intent was all about how do we ensure that when people are in this block, they understand that it is a place of indigeneity, and also understand where they are within the city,” says Matthew Hickey, a partner at Two Row Architect, an Indigenous architecture firm that advised on the design of every part of the project.
[Photo: James Brittain/courtesy KGA]
Working closely with Stantec Architecture, Two Row helped create the plan for the block, and then worked alongside Stantec and the architecture firm BDP Quadrangle to guide the design of the buildings and outdoor spaces within the block, including building facades inspired by traditional dress, traditional healing spaces that connect directly to the earth, and a central Indigenous Peoples Garden plaza where medicinal plants are grown.
This ambitious, Indigenous-led development has been decades in the making. The charity health care organization Anishnawbe Health Toronto (AHT) had been searching for a place to consolidate and improve services it had been providing to Toronto’s Indigenous population since the 1980s. Then in the late 2000s, when officials in Toronto put in a bid to host the 2015 Pan Am Games, this former floodplain was targeted as a potential site for redevelopment. As part of the plan, and in line with Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action, a two-and-a-half acre section of the redevelopment area was set aside for Indigenous uses.
Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. This bonus newsletter from Davos explores the strategic relationship between CEOs and chief technology officers. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
In my previous life as a technology journalist, I wrote and edited countless stories about corporate chief technology officers (CTOs) emerging as key partners to their counterparts in the C-suite. When marketing functions became more data-driven, chief marketing officers clamored for attention from product and engineering. Today, chief financial officers (CFOs) push tech leaders to drive companies productivity gains from software and automation even as they scrutinize tech buying decisions.
Now, as artificial intelligence (AI) and agents become pervasive at companies, CTOs have another executive to collaborate with: their bosses. In an interview with Fast Company editor-in-chief Brendan Vaughan during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Cloudflare cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince and CTO Dane Knecht made the case for technology chiefs as strategic partners to CEOs.
The C-suite syncs up
Prince says Knecht has been instrumental in pushing him to adopt AI beyond fun use cases, such as creating amusing images for company slide presentations or invitations for his kids birthday party. The best CTOs in the world are going to be the ones that are saying to even the 51-year-old or 61-year-old or 71-year-old CEOs, You can do this too, says Prince, whose company provides customers with tools to protect and improve the performance of their websites. And if you can do that, its going to actually help you build better companies.
Its a sentiment echoed by Nacho De Marco, CEO of global software development company BairesDev. (BairesDev partnered with Fast Company on the event featuring Prince and Knecht.) He says his clients, who turn to the company to help scale their engineering teams, see AI as essential to their future. When the CEO and CTO are aligned, that transition usually goes really well, he says.
Knecht, who started out as Cloudflares first product manager, eventually took a role building and leading the companys emerging technologies and innovation (ETI) unit. Prince carved out 10% of the product and engineering budget for innovations that arent on any customers road mapand might even challenge Cloudflares existing business model. Prince credits the division with propelling the companys growth, saying: If Dane and the ETI team hadnt existed, Cloudflare would be yet another CDN [content delivery network].
Knecht, in turn, says Prince always nudges him to be more ambitious. You really dont ever bring Matthew an idea where he says, Thats a good idea, Knecht says. Hell say, Eh, think bigger. Its always, Think bigger.
Two roles, one strategy
Prince says he was somewhat reluctant to promote Knecht to CTO because Knecht was doing such a good job running the innovation skunkworks. However, Prince was impressed with how well he interacted with customers. Knecht has, for now, retained the ETI team as part of his responsibilities.
Indeed, the ability to build relationships with customers is essential for CTOs intent on proving their strategic value to their CEOs. Tal Cohen, president of Nasdaq, says CTOs need to be able to understand how clients use the products their tech teams are building. He also encourages CTOs to become tech translators for their CEOs, helping their bosses understand major technology shifts, whether its the latest announcement from Nvidia or a breakthrough in their own industry. You need to demonstrate that youre three-dimensional, adds Cohen, who leads Nasdaqs Market Services and Financial Technology divisions.
Working with your tech leads
CEOs, how do you engage your CTO on strategy? And CTOs, how do you make sure that you are included in strategic conversations with your CEO? Send your examples and anecdotes to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. Well share helpful examples in a future edition of the newsletter.
Read more: the evolving C-suite
Whats behind the surge in CFOs becoming CEOs
Why so few human resources leaders become CEOs
Im a CMO whos friends with my CFO
People know when a brand genuinely cares about well-beingfor employees, customers, and humanity at large. In many cases, its an intangible truth they can simply feelin how theyre treated, how decisions get made, and whether a companys stated values actually show up in practice. Plenty of brands talk about purpose and people. Fewer live it. And the difference is increasingly obvious.
That gap is why brand well-being is emerging as a meaningful framework for companies that want to build durable growthnot just short-term performance. At its core, brand well-being recognizes that a brand isnt a logo or a campaign. Its a living ecosystem made up of people, culture, purpose, and consumer relationships. When one part breaks down, the entire system weakens. When all three are healthy, the brand becomes more resilient, trusted, and relevant over time.
Importantly, this isnt abstract. Its a leadership choiceand one companies can control.
What Is Brand Well-Being?
Brand well-being is a holistic concept that encourages companies to prioritize wellness across three critical dimensions. Employee well-being asks a basic question: is work designed in a way that supports peoples physical, mental, and emotional health, or does it quietly drain them? Culture well-being examines whether a company operates with meaning and humanityand whether employees feel genuinely connected to each other and the work itself. Consumer well-being focuses on how brands show up in peoples lives: are they improving them in tangible ways, or simply competing for attention?
If well-being is the equivalent of organizational health, the logic is straightforward. Healthier employees perform better. Purpose-driven cultures retain talent. Trust-based consumer relationships last longer. No business would argue against those outcomes. What company wouldnt want its workforce to be healthier, its culture more purposeful, and its consumer relationships more authentic? Yet many still treat well-being as a side initiative rather than a core strategy.
The Business Case: Wellness Drives Work
For years, wellness initiatives were framed as perksa nice box to check and a headline to score PR points. Too often, a companys wellness strategy is a daily app reminder that feels more like an annoying interruption or chore.
The data tells a different story when well-being is approached consistently and strategically. A Cigna-commissioned study found that employer well-being programs delivered an average ROI of 47%, returning $1.47 for every dollar invested. According to Wellhub, 99% of HR leaders say wellness programs improve employee productivity. Meta-analyses show reductions in absenteeism and healthcare costs with ROI approaching 148%, saving hundreds of dollars per employee annually. Companies investing in well-being also see meaningful drops in turnoversometimes by as much as 25%.
Well-being is no longer a bonus. Its a business strategyone that drives loyalty, retention, and performance at scale. One of the strongest validations comes from Indeeds Work Wellbeing 100, a data-driven ranking developed with Oxford University that evaluates publicly traded companies based on extensive employee survey data. Many of the companies that score highest on employee well-being also outperform the market and regularly appear on the Fortune 500. The correlation is hard to ignore: organizations that invest in well-being tend to outperform those that dont.
Well-being isnt a costits a competitive advantage.
Bringing Brand Well-Being to Life
The challenge, of course, is moving from intent to impact. Brand well-being doesnt come from a single program or campaign. It requires expertise, lived experiences, and real feedback loopsinside and outside the organization. Done correctly, it can play a transformative role not only in deepening consumer relationships, but also in boosting cultural energy within the company itselfand yes, ultimately, productivity.
Forward-thinking companies are starting to treat well-being as an integrated ecosystem. They bring credible experts into leadership and employee learning, focusing on sustainable performance, stress management, communication, and burnout prevention. They engage consumers through real-world experiences that foster connection rather than spectacle. And they create safe, personal environmentsevents, retreats, and small-group forumswhere people not only learn about mental and physical health, stress management, personal sustainability and nutrition, they feel comfortable sharing honest insights about their lives, needs, and expectations.
Those insights, when fed back into product design, workplace culture, and brand strategy, become far more valuable than traditional surveys or focus groups. They allow brands to understand not just what people say, but how they actually feel.
Importantly, the most effective brands integrate well-being naturally. Products and services show up as part of the experience, not as forced marketing moments. The goal isnt to sell wellness. Its to support it authentically.
Ive seen brands like LOréal, the NBA, BlackRock, Bayer, Morgan Stanley, Volvo, Hackensack Meridian Health, and Wells Fargo experiment with this model through internal offsites, community experiences, and retreats hosted in well-being-focused environments. The result isnt just better moraleits stronger relationships, higher trust, and clearer insight into both employees and consumers. Over time, the impact drives increased happiness long after the event ends.
The Leadership Question
Every company says it wants to evolve. But evolution requires trade-offs. It means leading with care, connection, and long-term thinking in a system still optimized for speed and short-term returns.
Some leaders already understand that investing in well-being is inseparable from investing in brand performance. Others still treat it as an optional expensesomething to revisit when margins allow.
The market is increasingly clear about which group is winning.
Brand well-being isnt about being nice. Its about building organizations that people want to work for, buy from, and believe inagain and again. The question facing todays leaders isnt whether well-being matters. Its whether theyre willing to lead knowing it does.
A century ago, work was unsafe and openly adversarial. Strikes were common. Turnover was extreme. Productivity suffered. HRthen called personnelwas created to manage this instability. Its job wasnt to make work fulfilling. It was to reduce friction between employees and the company, keep people on the job, and protect output.
As companies matured, so did HR. The function expanded to include hiring, pay, benefits, training, grievance handling, and legal compliance. On paper, this evolution gave HR a broad view of how people experienced workand the potential authority to shape it. But that authority was never fully claimed. Instead, HR generally settled into administering systems and policies designed by othersespecially the C-Suite.
In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, University of Virginia business school professor Allison Elias explains how this history is experienced today. Employees dont see HR as a driver of better leadership or a healthier workplace. They see a function that listens but rarely acts, collects feedback but seldom follows through, and lacks the authorityor the courageto intervene when leadership behavior is the root of the problem.
Employees today doubt whether HR has the power and standing to influence how individual leaders actually leadespecially when leadership behavior openly undermines trust, clarity, dignity, or psychological/emotional safety. Over time, that gap between listening and acting has become the narrative.
The good news: HR now has the opportunity to reinvent its role in organizationsbut it must step fully into it.
Well-being drives performance
Over the past year, remarkable research has shown that employee well-being has a direct and profoundly positive impact on organizational performance. The newest study comes from Irrational Capital: drawing on more than a decade of public and private data, they found companies ranking highest in employee well-being significantly outperform their peers in long-term stock appreciation. Over an 11-year period, firms in the top tier of employee well-being outperformed those in the bottom tier by nearly six percentage points. By contrast, companies that excelled primarily on pay and benefits outperformed by just over two points.
Whats now empirically clear is that how people feel about their day-to-day work experienceand their direct managersmatters far more than what they are paid to tolerate it. And, if well-being drives performance, then feedback must be continuous, actionable, and tied directly to leadership accountability.
A real voice
What employees are craving is a real voice. They want to be routinely asked for honest feedbacknot once a year or even semi-annually via traditional engagement surveys proven to have little if any impactbut through focused pulse surveys that capture how they are experiencing work week-to-week. They want to know that their input is heard, considered, and has real influence. That feedback should flow not just to individual managers and senior leadership, but also to HR itselfso the function can monitor patterns, hold leaders accountable, and ensure employee well-being is protected at every level of the organization.
When survey results show managers are consistently uncaring, unsupportive, or otherwise undermining employee well-being, HR must willingly intervenecoaching leaders to improve or, when necessary, removing them. This is where HR can finally claim the role it has long been empowered to play: shaping how leaders lead, embedding well-being into daily work, and ensuring organizations operate for people, not just for goal achievement.
The ‘How’
The tools for this already exist. Pulse surveys can be deployed one day and summarized the next, delivering real-time insights to managers, senior leaders, and HR. This immediacy creates a rare opportunity: HR doesnt need to wait months for engagement reports to act. Every piece of feedback becomes a lever to correct course, reinforce positive leadership, and make tangible improvements in how people experience work.
Whats critical is that HR canand mustbe the true guardian of this ecosystem. That means more than administering surveys or running reports. It means owning the operationowning well-being. It means creating a culture where employees know their voice carries weightand consequences. It means ensuring that workplace leaders understand the practices that contribute to well-being and that there are real teethaccountabilityin its oversight. It must celebrate managers who excel, coach managers who fall short, weed out those who dont improve, and embed well-being metrics into how leaders are evaluated and rewarded.
It must be clearly understood that this is not merely a moral imperative; its a business imperative. When people have their needs consistently met for belonging, safety, growth, appreciation, and respect (the key drivers of well-being), organizations see measurable gains in retention, commitment, collaboration, creativity, and profitability.
Claiming power
The truth is workplace leadership practices are in dire need of transformation. Evidence abounds that traditional methods deplete people rather than energize themand HR has both the access and authority to lead the needed change throughout their organizations.
For HR leaders, the question is simple: will you fully claim the power your role affords? Will you leverage real-time feedback, hold leaders accountable, and transform the employee experience? Doing so will not only improve performance and profitabilityit will permanently elevate HR from a back-office function to the strategic force every modern organization needs.
The moment is now. Employees are speaking. The data is clear. The tools exist. HR, step into your power! Shape how leaders lead. Protect well-being. Drive performance. Make your mark: ensure work is safe, meaningful, humaneand create organizations that truly flourish.
Economists increasingly describe todays economy as K-shaped: Households with higher incomes and assets are pulling ahead, while many middle- and lower-income families struggle to keep up. Prices for housing, healthcare, and everyday necessities have risen faster than paychecks, leaving millions of Americans feeling squeezed, exposed, and uncertain about the future. For many families, affordability is not an abstract concern, it is the daily challenge of covering essentials while trying to stay afloat.
You would expect that reality to shape what Congress prioritizes in response to economic anxiety. Instead, affordability is being invoked to justify making crypto market structurethe rules governing how digital assets are regulated and integrated into the broader financial systema legislative priority, rather than addressing the more pressing sources of financial strain facing most families.
Crypto offers a story about upside and progress, but it does not answer the underlying problems of unstable incomes, fragile savings, and rising exposure to risk. Affordability is not about access to new financial products. It is about whether households can reliably pay for basics, absorb shocks, and plan for the future without taking on more volatility.
Supporters argue that regulation can turn risky markets into engines of opportunity, especially for communities long excluded from traditional finance. But while regulation may promise harm reduction, it cannot turn speculation into a vehicle for broad-based wealth-building. Congresss focus on conferring legitimacy on crypto reflects a troubling substitution of financial speculation for the harder work of rebuilding the real economy.
Wealth that lasts
The reason becomes clearer when you start with what wealth-building actually requires. Wealth that lasts is built on stability, not volatility. It looks like a paycheck that covers the mortgage, a retirement account that compounds quietly over decades, and savings that remain after a medical bill or a layoff. For most households, its accumulated gradually through retirement savings, pensions, and home equity.
These systems are deeply imperfect, and trust in them has eroded for good reason. While wages rose after the pandemic, the cost of housing, healthcare, and other necessities rose faster, leaving many households feeling less secure. But the failure of existing systems does not make volatility a solution. It makes stability more, not less, important.
Falling short
Measured against those standards, crypto falls short. Crypto markets are organized around speculation rather than value creation. Tokens do not generate cash flows like businesses or bonds; their prices move on hype and momentum rather than economic fundamentals. An economy that already feels precarious does not need more ways for households to absorb financial risk.
That speculative structure tends to reward those who can enter early and exit first. When crypto prices surge, new investors rush inoftn drawn by recent gainswhile larger, better-positioned holders are more likely to sell into the rally. Many ordinary households arrive later, buying at elevated prices amid extreme volatility. Research shows that lower-income investors in particular tend to enter later and at worse price points. Over time, this dynamic functions less as a wealth-building system and more as a wealth transfer from late-arriving households to earlier and more sophisticated participantsreinforcing the same uneven gains that already define todays K-shaped economy.
The limits of regulation
Regulation is often presented as the solution, but not all regulation reduces risk. Strong guardrails can in principle reduce fraud, limit spillovers, and protect the broader financial system. The problem is not regulation itself, but how its being pursued. Much of the current market structure debate is defined less by nonnegotiable safeguards than by pressure to reach a deal quickly, even if key protections are weakened, deferred, or left unresolved.
Even strong regulation has limits. It does not change what crypto is or transform speculative assets into a reliable vehicle for long-term wealth-building. Even a well-regulated casino is still a casino. Rules can make gambling safer; they do not make it a retirement strategy.
That distinction matters beyond individual investors. When volatile assets are granted legitimacy without firm safeguards, risk migrates into retirement systems, financial institutions, and local economies. And when those risks spread, they do not fall evenly. Communities of color are especially exposed to systemic shocks because they have far less generational wealth to fall back on when credit tightens or savings are hit. Losses are harder to absorb and recovery takes longer, even for households that never touch crypto.
At the same time, these communities are often targeted directly by financial marketers and intermediaries promoting high-risk products. We have seen this pattern of predatory inclusion before. In the years leading up to the financial crisis, risky mortgage products were sold to Black and Latino households as pathways to opportunity, only to shift disproportionate risk onto families least able to absorb losses. Today, similar language surrounds crypto. Access is framed as empowerment, but access to volatility is not affordability, and exposure to risk is not safe wealth-building.
Stablecoins are the point where these risks become policy. Congresss recent handling of stablecoins offers a case study in prioritizing crypto expansion over the real economy. Less than two weeks after passing sweeping legislation that cut healthcare, food assistance, and student aid, lawmakers moved quickly to advance stablecoin legislation framed as a consumer protection measure. In practice, it prioritized industry growth and speed over downstream consequences for credit, banking, and communities, leaving key safeguards weakened or unresolved.
Real consequences
Those legislative choices have real economic consequences. If deposits migrate out of banks and into stablecoins, some economists estimate the shift could translate into roughly $250 billion less lending across the economy. If stablecoins function as yield-bearing substitutes for bank deposits, potential credit losses could rise sharply, possibly into the trillions of dollars. Those losses would hit community banks first, along with the small businesses, rural areas, and communities of color that rely on relationship-based lending.
Congress should not confuse legislative movement with economic progress. In an economy already split between those who are gaining ground and those struggling to stay afloat, lawmakers should be clear-eyed about what this legislation actually does. It does not make wealth more accessible or everyday life more affordable. It does not make families safer. It normalizes dangerous financial risk while leaving the real economys wealth-building failures unaddressedat a moment when ordinary Americans can least afford to lose.
A week is a long time in politics. But in Donald Trumps world, even a day can feel like an eon. On Tuesday last week, the United States approved the export of Nvidias H200 GPUsthe second-most advanced computer chips powering the generative AI revolutionto markets that include China.
The decision was granted with caveats. Supplies could be forestalled if the U.S. began running short, for one thing. But it was an approval. Then, 24 hours later, the White House levied a 25% tariff against the same chips at the point theyre imported into the United States.
That matters because, under the rules Trump instigated on Tuesday, all those H200 chips that could be exported to mainland China after being fabricated in Taiwan must first make their way to the United States to be tested before being re-exported to customers. That adds up to a bigger bill for Chinese tech companies wanting to import cutting-edge chips into their country. (To avoid this, China is building up its domestic AI chip development and manufacturing capacity, and recently issued its own counterban on the import and use of H200 chips.) But it also causes chaos for the chipmakers themselves. Because AI hardware is now the backbone of national competitiveness, even small shifts in U.S. trade policy ripple across trilliondollar markets and global supply chains.
The latest chopping and changing is a total overhaul of the normal way of doing business, says Willy Shih, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. Business, like sports, is conducted on a playing field, where there are rules and regulations, and also norms, he says.
These days, with the tariff situation changing almost every day, I tell people to imagine being a coach of a football team, and the rules change every minute, Shih jokes. Thats what it feels like. The impact on markets from such uncertainty can be significant, he adds. When you see people hold up investments waiting for some stability, thats why. Its hard to make long-term investment commitments when the rules could change tomorrow.
Because companies dont know the price theyre going to have to pay to bring goods into their factories, theyre often reluctant to splash the cash on new purchases. A series of chip-adjacent companies has previously complained about lower-than-expected orders because of unpredictable tariff policy. European lithography firm ASML missed expectations in the first quarter of 2025 by more than $1 billion thanks to tariff uncertainty, their CEO said at the time. And markets reflected the chaos of Trumps tariff about-turns this year immediately: Nvidia dropped more than 3% after the 25% levy was introduced, suggesting investors were jittery about the repeated policy pivots.
The issue is that it isnt just buyers who are making those long-term commitments on spending. Chip manufacturers rely on trying to understand future demand in order to build out their production capacitysomething that can be imperilled with quick-moving changes to tariffs implemented by Trump. My general belief is that most, or frankly all, semiconductor management and actual visibility of what is going on with demand is precisely zero, says Stacy Rasgon, managing director and senior analyst at Bernstein. They have absolutely no idea. All they see are the orders in front of their face.
Being able to ramp up or ramp down production capacity in such a geopolitical environment makes things even more challenging. And Nvidias H200 chips are particularly tricky to make, meaning that the companyalongside other manufacturers of major chips affected by the Trump tariff changeshas to think carefully about how it plans the buildout of factories and capacities. Less than a month ago, Nvidia was asking its suppliers if they could step up demand to account for H200 demand totalling 185% of the firms current stock levels.
The situation puts more pressure on the people running chip companies, says Srividya Jandhyala, professor of management at ESSEC Business School, and changes the skills they need to navigate the constant changes. As companies find themselves and their products squarely in the midst of geopolitical tensions, the job description of their top managers has changed, he says, pointing to the way that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has had to mutate how he works. His job today is about being an effective corporate diplomat, crisscrossing the world to convince policymakers that his companys products have a place in the vision policymakers have for their countries, Jandhyala says.
But that vision may have to contend with rapidly shifting realities in a world where Donald Trumps whims dictate international trade.
Gold Zone, NBC Sports whip-around coverage of the Olympics, didnt debut with the 2024 Summer Games in Paris. As far back as the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, the network had experimented with the formatusing multiple screens to cover simultaneous live events, a technique that had been popularized since 2005 by RedZone coverage of the NFL. But Paris did mark the first time that Gold Zone had run on NBCUniversals streaming service Peacock, providing real-time coverage of all 39 sports with zero embargoes. Gold Zone will return on Peacock for the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Games in February.
Molly Solomon: We decided to create a new class of Olympics programming. We wanted to take a format that sports fans were acquainted with, NFL RedZone whip-around coverage, and pitch it to hardcore sports fans to watch the Olympics like that. Wed never given the audience a front-row seat to everything that was happening at once.
Amy Rosenfeld: NBC declared, We are not going to hold anything back. Nothing is embargoed.
Solomon: Ive never felt as much energy in an Olympics control room as I did in Gold Zone.
[Illustrations: Michal Bednarski]
Rosenfeld: That control room was not for the faint of heart.
Solomon: The first day I walked in there, you could see it was a unique product. It was fast-paced, frenetic. I thought it could appeal to younger viewers. It was almost like FOMO: Youre scrolling your social feed, where you feel like youre catching up with what happened that day.
Rosenfeld: A sports producers worst nightmare is when youre trending on Twitter. That is never good news. My sister texted me about two-thirds through day one and said, Hey, #Gold Zone is trending. And I thought, Oh God, Im going to have to go on LinkedIn and get another job and its all over for me and I should have gone to business school.
Cohost Scott Hanson is known for his on-camera exuberance. On day three, while tracking several Americans in different sports who were simultaneously going for gold, he got so excited that he began pounding his desk and lacerated a finger on a stray binder clip.
Hanson: I was bleeding all the way down to my wrist. It got into my dress shirt, splattered my notes. Sometimes I get carried away. The next day, everybody came to set with a Band-Aid on their right pinkie.
Solomon: The secret to the success of Gold Zone is energy. It helps drive the fun.
Hanson: I hope all of us have an injury-free Games in Milan.
On August 5, 11 days into its Paris Olympics coverage, Peacock delivered the moment fans had begun clamoring for, bringing together on-screen for the first time the two famous RedZone hosts: Andrew Siciliano, afternoon host of the Games coverage, and Hanson, who was covering prime time.
Rosenfeld: I didnt realize what cult figures those guys are and that the idea of the two of them kind of passing a baton and cohosting was going to shake the earth.
Hanson: I always thought the majority of the sporting public didnt know there were two RedZones. [DirecTVs RedZone channel, with Siciliano, launched in 2005; NFL Networks RedZone, with Hanson, launched in 2009.]
Siciliano: I knew it would resonate. My phone started blowing up. Not just with texts from friends and family but from people I hadnt heard from in years. The Spider-Man meme was popular, the two Spider- Men pointing at each other.
Conjuring Anchorman, Siciliano tweeted, Ron Burgundy and Wes Mantooth couldnt do it, but Scott and I can. Which of course begs the question: Who is Ron and who is Wes?
Siciliano: Ill let you decide whos Ron and whos Wes.
Hanson: Im not biting on that.
Siciliano: Theres not going to be a fight in the alley, and I dont think anyone is going to kill anyone with a trident.
Hanson: I keep a trident in the closet just in case things get out of control.
