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When he was 38, Fast Company senior editor Jon Gluck was diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer, multiple myeloma, and given just 18 months to live. Unbelievably, he has survivedand managed to thrivefor more than 20 years. In his new book, An Exercise in Uncertainty: A Memoir of Illness and Hope, Gluck details how he has lived with chronic illness for the past two decades. Gluck joined the Most Innovative Companies podcast to discuss getting diagnosed, how working helped him cope with his illness, and the workplace accommodations that enabled him to keep going. Your book follows your journey with a rare type of blood cancer. What is the condition? I have a blood cancer alternately referred to as a bone marrow cancer called multiple myeloma. It’s an incurable cancer but one that has fortunately, in my case, been treatable. I will never not have it, but fortunately I’ve been in a position where my doctors have been able to manage and control it quite nicely. There have been times when I’ve been very sick and then I’m treated and I go into a remission and then I’m sick again and I go into a remission. That’s been the story of the last 20 years. A portion of my book proceeds are going toward multiple myeloma research. In the book, you mention that the first person you called after your initial diagnosiswhen you were given less than two years to livewas your boss. Why? I think I was trying to create a sense of normalcy for myself. I think part of it was denial. I just didn’t want to really admit that anything was so wrong that I had to do anything differently than I normally would. Part of it was just the strange sense of duty I have sometimes as an individual. I was like, well, I better report to the boss that I won’t be there today, even though I’ve just received life-changing information. Its very Boy Scout behavior. I was also avoiding calling people for whom it would be a much bigger deal. You write that you encounter three types of responses when you disclose your cancer diagnosis. Some say they know someone who died from the same condition. Others immediately try to help and find solutions. Then theres a third type who just listens to you and is empathetic. What advice do you have for people whose friends or relatives share a diagnosis with them? It’s a tricky thing. Most everybody is well intentioned, and so whatever people say or do I understand. That said, I’m going to give a never, sometimes, always answer to your three buckets. So the never is, Boy, I just knew somebody who had that and they died yesterday. I think it’s pretty unhelpful. Probably the person who just told you they’ve been diagnosed with the same disease is not the best person to talk to about that. Sometimes I think wanting to help is complicated. The criteria I’d use there after 20 years of dealing with this is . . . are you offering something that’s genuinely helpful and that the person probably hasn’t already heard? If you are, then go for it. I think there’ve been people I know who said, Listen, I happen to know my wife’s uncle is really close friends with an amazing myeloma doctor at such and such a hospital. If you ever want to reach out to them, I can put you in touch. That’s helpful. Then the always category of basic empathy or sympathy. I’ve been really struck over the years by how powerful just somebody simply saying, I’m really sorry to hear that [can be]. Honest to God, those words alone are wonderful and more powerful than you think they are. One of the first people I told in my office, a colleague I remember very vividly simply said, You poor guy. I am really sorry. That was so moving and it wasn’t even someone I was particularly close with. It was just somebody who knew the right thing to say. While many people, when they get a diagnosis like this, rethink their whole lives, you looked back on your life and realized you were pretty happy with your job and your situation. How has work helped you throughout your illness? I have been working this whole time. I’ve hardly missed a day of work, even when I’ve been hospitalized, [thanks to] remote work and Zoom. Sometimes people say, That’s so brave or courageous or wonderful of you to have worked the whole time. Believe me, it has nothing to do with bravery in my case, its just an incredibly great distraction. The pressure and deadlines we deal with in our business were great for me because it was like whatever the problem is here at work, it’s not as big as that [cancer] problem. People often talk about getting that kind of perspective when they’ve received a diagnosis like mine. That’s absolutely been true in my case. I really came to see that I love what I do, and so there was just pleasure and enjoyment in doing the work. When you’re sick and not feeling well all the time or getting treatment and feeling even worse, pleasure and enjoyment are in short supply. You can still get burned out though. You wrote about leaving New York magazine after a while because you needed a break. I happened to be working at a place that was extremely demanding and I had been there for more than 10 years. As my disease became more complicated and my treatment became more aggressive and the side effects therefore were more debilitating, many people said to me, Do you really want to work this hard? Stress is bad for you. I was like, well, stress is bad for you if it’s bad stress or if it’s an excessive level of stress, but as I was saying a minute ago, a certain amount of stress I found really good in the sense that it kept my mind off of my illness. But that reached a tipping point somewhere in my 10th year of working. I realized I need a job that’s not so demanding minute to minute, day to day. There are constant layoffs in the media industry, which can be stressful when your medical insurance is tied to your job. What kind of insurance battles have you had? I’ve become an unwilling example of this new category of people I call cancer zombies. And what I mean by that is people who are half sick and half well. Theres a growing number of us because of the advancements in biomedical research and the treatments for many kinds of cancers. Instead of either you’re treated and you survive and you’re good to go for the rest of your life, or you’re treated and unfortunately the treatments don’t work and you pass away, there’s this whole cohort of us who are living for really long periods of time with varying degrees of illness and debilitation. Unless you’re independently wealth, that means you need to work for a lot of years and you need insurance for a lot of years, even while you’re struggling with your illness and your treatments. I learned that the leading cause of personal bankruptcy is unexpected medical expenses. Because of all that [my wife and I] felt like we really needed a sort of belt-and-suspenders approach, and for both of us to have insurance in case either of us got laid off because we were both in the media business and layoffs had been happening for many years at an alarming rate. In terms of dealing with insurance companies, it’s maddening. The system is so broken that what it comes down to is just getting lucky. What I mean by that is getting somebody on the other end of the phone who’s a human being, not a machine, and who actually cares and wants to help solve your problem. Whether that happens or not is just a crapshoot. You just have to keep going at it. What was the pandemic like for you? It was tough. Part of both my illness and my treatment have left me quite immunocompromised. We were in the city and we had no other logical place to go. We didn’t want to move in with family and expose them to extra risk. We followed all the precautions to a T. But then oddly enough, we went back to living the way most people were living. At some point I just decided, what’s the point of staying alive if you don’t live your life? One of the interesting things that happened toward the end of the first, most serious wave of the pandemic is that I wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post. The title was something like, It’s great that everybody’s getting back to normal. Now, please keep in mind that there are some of us who are immunocompromised who still need to take these precautions. Most of the comments I got were lovely and supportive, but [it was also] met [negatively] by some people. One of the comments I think was, That’s the luck of the draw. We don’t owe you anything, stop whining. How important are accommodations, like the ability to work remotely, for you? It’s been tremendously important. One of the other things that is interesting about the pandemic is that in some ways, people sort of sympathize more with everybody who has ever been through [illness] and has to worry constantly about germs. That was normalizing in a strange way. The best part was being able to work remotely. It allowed me to keep my job without going on disability. It allowed me to keep the constant distraction of working in place so that I didn’t lose my mind. It became a lifeline. Have you experienced any workplace discrimination? It’s a really tricky question. I’m not the kind of person to knee-jerk see that sort of thing everywhere, but I’ve had glimpses of it. When I was getting ready to leave New York magazine and interviewing for jobs at other places, a recruiter said to me, I read the story you wrote [about your illness] in New York magazine. How are you doing? On the one hand, she seemed like an extremely nice person and I’m the kind of person who’s inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, I wondered, Is she fishing for information about my health status so she can figure out if Im a wise hire? I’ll never know. I’m not here to give people advice [about] whether or not they should share information about their illness. I will say once you do decide to, there’s no putting it back in the bottle. So just be super sure that if you want to share this information, you are potentially opening yourself up to what can be a very serious problem. [Photo: Oscar Gluck]
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E-Commerce
Although less familiar than many of its tech rivals, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is kind of a big deal. Its valuation, north of $1 trillion, ranks the chipmaker ninth globally among publicly held companies, and its strategic significance in the silicon arms race led New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof to label it the most important company in the world. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) fabrication plant in Phoenix on Monday, March 3. [Photo: Rebecca Noble/Bloomberg/Getty Images] So when TSMCs massive new manufacturing plant (or fab, as those in the semiconductor business like to call it) arose recently in the desert north of Phoenix, Arizonans might have expected to see a polished logo adorning the buildings facade. Instead, many were likely flummoxed by the TSMC symbol. Was it supposed to be a crossword puzzle? A disco ball? A badminton racquet? A screen door replete with dead houseflies? [Image: TSMC] In fact, the logo, which debuted in 1988, one year after the companys founding, represents a stylized semiconductor wafer design, as a TSMC trademark application puts it. A wafer is a thin, circular slice of silicon which is cut into rectangular dies that are used to make computer chips. The flat section of the wafer, visible at the bottom of the TSMC logo, is called, well, a flat and is used for orientation in the manufacturing process. 1st column: Integrated Device Technology, 1982, Wacker MSCE, 1986. 2nd column: Integrated Device Technology, 1998, Zoran Corporation, 1983, Cirrus Logic, 1996. SemiTex, 1999. 3rd column: Silicon Valley Engineering Council, 1990, National Security Agency, 1990. [Images: courtesy of the author] The black rectangles in the logo seem to represent defective dies as they would appear on a wafer map, a diagram outlining the usable sections of the silicon disc. One might find this an odd design element to include, but it appears to have been a bit of a convention among ’80s wafer logos. San Jose semiconductor maker Integrated Device Technologys 1981 logo featured two such defective dies. When it reversed the coloring of its logo in the ’90s, did it realize the resulting implication was that an overwhelming majority of its dies were duds? TSMCÙs 1988 logo (left) and 2001 update (right) [Image: courtesy of the author] TSMC took the opposite tack, slightly revising its mark in 2001 to reduce the number of those troublesome black rectangles while improving legibility. Otherwise, though, the logo has remained unchanged and, frankly, it doesnt work well in 2025. Not only is the wafer symbolism inscrutable to the modern eye, but by todays standards, its design is overwrought, amateurish, and dated, in keeping with an overall company brand thats as dry as soda crackers. Beyond employing the most obvious graphic design solution of adopting the companys product as a logo, the firm has named itself using the largely-abandoned tactic of simple descriptiveness, which, if still in vogue, might have resulted in Apple being known as the Northern California Computer Company or Amazon going by Seattle Online Bookstore, Inc. Until recently, this may not have been seen as a problem for companies that, like TSMC, were not public-facing. There was a sense that branding elements like names and logos were shiny baubles that served only to catch the eyes of the public, and that were irrelevant within the context of B2B relationships. As economic historian Mira Wilkins put it in a 1992 paper, Most industrial organization economists consider the brand name as highly important in sales to the final consumer. They take the view, however, that profit-motivated firms are wiser than individuals, so trade marks are not needed to convey information to producers.” Such thinking is going by the wayside as modern economists let go of long-held assumptions about perfect human rationality, and it would seem time for even the stodgiest B2B companies to start caring more about their brands. TSMC, in particular, has been embroiled in geopolitical intrigue that has put it in an unprecedented spotlight. The face that it presents to the world matters more than it ever has, and its about time for TSMC to sunset its old wafer.
Category:
E-Commerce
Earlier this summer, Pepsi did something brands have been doing forever: It took a jab at its rival. In this case, that entailed some snarky satirizing of a popular Coke ad campaign. But it raised an eternal brand-battle question: Is it really a good idea to reference a rival so directly? Under the right circumstances, yes, according to the latest research on that subject in a recent Journal of Marketing Research paper, coauthored by Johannes Berendt, a professor of economics and communication at Hannover University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Germany. His fellow co-authors are Sebastian Uhrich, a professor of sports business administration at the German Sport University Cologne; Abhishek Borah, an associate professor of marketing at INSEAD (Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires) in France; and Gavin Kilduff, a professor of management and organizations at NYU Stern. For starters, Berendt explains in an email, its important to distinguish between true rivalry and mere competition: Real rivals not only compete against each other in the marketplace, but they also have a special competitive relationship based on a shared history, he says. This includes McDonalds vs. Burger King, Mercedes vs. BMW, Apple vs. Samsung, and, of course, Coke vs. Pepsi. Researchers call it the rivalry reference effect. Consumers know that this is more than just regular competition, Berendt says. In their studies (which included analyses of 1.5 million social media posts from real brands, as well as controlled experiments involving fictional posts in various brand categories), Berendt and his fellow researchers found that a brand message referencing a rival increases consumer engagementand can even impact purchase intent. Openly contested rivalries have a special appeal, Berendt adds. Messages between rivals are processed differently than between ordinary competitors. (Remember the chicken sandwich wars a couple of years back? It made sense that Popeyes and Chick-fil-A would scrap on social media, but it felt off when Wendys butted in.) Pepsis recent shot at its longtime nemesiss Share a Coke campaign is a good example of a fresh salvo between true rivals. The Coke campaign, a Gen Z-focused iteration of a past effect, involves limited-edition packaging printed with individual names like David or Mia. Pepsi copied the style but smirked at the sentiment on packaging and billboards, replacing names with shout-outs to burgers, wings, and other Pepsi-friendly grub pairings. Share a Pepsi with, say, pizza, not some bro, goes one example, resonating with the sodas Food Deserves Pepsi pitch. That said, the specifics of any single critique may matter less than its context within a clearly established rivalry. Between rivals, consumers instantly connect new episodes to a familiar, ongoing narrative, Berendt says. This is because rivalry has two central elements of exciting stories: familiar antagonists, such as Coke and Pepsi, and a classic plot, the recurring conflict. For a consumer who has long since chosen sides, the message can be reinforcing, but Berendt says even neutral consumers seem to enjoy, or engage with, known rivalries. Of course, there are limits. While deploying brand rivalry messages can play to feelings of consumer-group distinctiveness, it might risk implying an overly aggressive brand personality. But thats generally not an issue if a rival is attacked in a clever/humorous way, Berendt says. A few years ago, for instance, Burger King took a jab at McDonalds with its Every King Needs a Clown campaign in Germany. Occasionally, a rival-focused message can even take the high road, as when Mercedes’ CEO retired and BMW launched a spot thanking him for years of inspiring competition. The ad got 8.2 million views and lots of positive comments on YouTube, Berendt points out, suggesting that this was a classy way to engage with the rival. Interestingly, the rivalry reference effect works whether its the category leader or the chief challenger calling out its brand enemy. The dynamic seems to be similar either way, playing to longtime loyalties or just widespread familiarity with a competitive history. Its true, Berendt concedes, that social media teasing can escalate if fans get involved and go after each otherparticularly in the context of sports. And sometimes a badly executed attack on a rival can just seem childish. But based on what Berendt and his colleagues found, theres not as much risk as you might think. If done in a clever way, most consumers seem to enjoy a good clash between rivals once in a while, he says.
Category:
E-Commerce
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