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President Barack Obama famously chided Donald Trump in April 2011 during the annual White House correspondents dinner. The reality show star had repeatedly and falsely claimed that Obama had not been born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to be president. Trumps demands that Obama release his birth certificate had, in part, made Trump a front-runner among Republican hopefuls for their partys nomination in the following years presidential election. Obama referred to Trumps presidential ambitions by joking that, if elected, Trump would bring some changes to the White House. Obama then called attention to a satirical photo the guests could see of a remodeled White House with the words Trump and The White House in large purple letters, followed by the words hotel, casino, and golf course. A projected image is shown on a large screen during President Barack Obama’s speech at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Gala at the Washington Hilton hotel, Washington, D.C., on April 30, 2011. The president showed his humorous side to show what a “Trump” White House might look like. [Photo: Martin H Simon/UPI/Shutterstock] Obamas ridicule of Trump that evening has been credited with inspiring Trump to run for president in 2016. My book, The Art of the Political Putdown, includes Obamas chiding of Trump at the correspondents dinner to demonstrate how politicians use humor to establish superiority over a rival. Obamas ridicule humiliated Trump, who temporarily dropped the birther conspiracy before reviving it. But Trump may have gotten the last laugh by using the humiliation of that night, as some think, as motivation in his run for the presidency in 2016. Demolition of the East Wing of the White House continues for the construction on U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed new ballroom, on October 26, 2025, in Washington, D.C. [Photo: Al Drago/Getty Images] There is a further twist to Obama joking about Trumps renovations to the White House if Trump became president. Trump has fulfilled Obamas prediction, kind of. The Trump administration has razed the East Wing, which sits adjacent to the White House, and will replace it with a 90,000-square-foot, gold-encrusted ballroom that appears to reflect the ostentatious tastes of the president. The US$300 million ballroom will be twice the size of the White House. President Donald Trump speaks holding a photos of the new ballroom during a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on October 22, 2025. [Photo: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post/Getty Images] Its expected to be big enough to accommodate nearly a thousand people. Design renderings suggest that the ballroom will resemble the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, the presidents private estate in Palm Beach, Florida. I dont have any plan to call it after myself, Trump said recently. That was fake news. Probably going to call it the presidential ballroom or something like that. We havent really thought about a name yet. But senior administration officials told ABC News that they were already referring to the structure as The President Donald J. Trump Ballroom. The renovation will have neither a hotel, casino, nor golf course, as Obama mentioned in his lighthearted speech at the 2011 correspondents dinner. Obama pokes fun at Trump In the months before the 2011 correspondents dinner, Trump had repeatedly claimed that Obama had not been born in Hawaii but had instead been born outside the United States, perhaps in his fathers home country of Kenya. The baseless conspiracy theory became such a distraction that Obama released his long-form birth certificate in April 2011. Three days later, Obama delivered his speech at the correspondents dinner with Trump in the audience, where he said that Trump, having put the birther conspiracy behind him, could move to other conspiracy theories like claims the moon landing was staged, aliens landed in Roswell, New Mexico, or the unsolved murders of rappers Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. Did we fake the moon landing? Obama said. What really happened at Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac? Obama then poked fun at Trumps reality show, The Apprentice, and referred to how Trump, who owned hotels, casinos, and golf courses, might renovate the White House. When Obama was finished, Seth Meyers, the host of the dinner, made additional jokes at Trumps expense. Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republicanwhich is surprising, since I just assumed that he was running as a joke, Meyers said. Trump gets the last laugh The New Yorker magazine writer Adam Gopnik remembered watching Trump as the jokes kept coming at his expense. Trumps humiliation was as absolute, and as visible, as any I have ever seen: his head set in place, like a man on a pillory, he barely moved or altered his expression as wave after wave of laughter struck him, Gopnik wrote. There was not a trace of feigning good humor about him. Roger Stone, one of Trumps top advisers, said Trump decided to run for president after he felt he had been publicly humiliated. I think that is the night he resolves to run for president, Stone said in an interview with the PBS program Frontline. I think that he is kind of motivated by it. Maybe Ill just run. Maybe Ill show them all. Trump, if Stone and other political observers are correct, sought the presidency to avenge that humiliation. I thought, Oh, Barack Obama is starting something that I dont know if hell be able to finish, said Omarosa Manigault, a former Apprentice contestant who became Trumps director of African American outreach during his first term. Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump, she said. It is everyone whos ever doubted Donald, whoever disagreed, whoever challenged himit is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe. The notoriously thin-skinned Trump did not attend the White House correspondents dinner during his first presidency. He also did not attend the dinner during the first year of his second presidency. Although Trump has never publicly acknowledged the importance of that event in 2011, a number of people have noted how pivotal it was, demonstrating how the putdown can be a powerful weapon in politicseven, perhaps, extending to tearing down the White Houses East Wing. Chris Lamb is a professor of journalism at Indiana University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
Company culture doesnt affect performance. Thats not a hot take, thats what a 2022 meta analysis from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found when they compared more than 500 research papers on the topic. From the report: The findings are very clear: there is little evidence consistently linking organizational culture to performance, but if such a link should exist, it is very weak and too small to be practically meaningful. As such, organizations and practitioners should be careful spending time and money on company-wide culture change programs as they are not likely to increase performance. And yet, when asked, 92% of executives believe that improving their firms culture would increase the value of their company. So are 92% of executives wrong? And are millions, if not billions, of dollars wasted each year on culture efforts? The short answer? Yes and yes. The full answer is a bit more complicated. Why the myth persists Leaders cling to the idea that culture drives results because it feels controllable. You can write new values, host an off-site, or hire a chief culture officer. Its far easier to reprint the employee handbook than to rewire incentives, decision-making, or priorities. Culture talk offers the illusion of progresssomething visible, moral, and manageablewhile the real performance drivers remain untouched. Company culture is still deeply misunderstood Many leaders talk about culture as something you havea vibe, a set of values, a moodrather than something you do. But culture is not a static asset; its the emergent result of how decisions are made, what gets rewarded or punished, and which behaviors the system makes easy or hard. When executives say we need a culture of innovation, but still require six layers of approval for new ideas, theyre confusing aspiration for infrastructure. Leaders arent being honest about their culture, or with themselves Research from MIT Sloan Management Review (2020) found no correlation between a companys stated values and the lived experience of its employees. In other words, what leaders say their culture is and what people actually feel day-to-day are worlds apart. Firms with large culture gaps see lower productivity and impaired alignment. The misalignment fuels cynicism and distrust, undermining managerial credibility and depleting morale. Employees in these organizations report reduced commitment and higher turnover. Instead of confronting that gap, many double down on optics: slogans, all-hands pep talks, or off-sites meant to rebuild trust. But culture isnt changed through words or ritualsits changed through systems. Decision rights, information flow, meeting cadence, and incentives form the real architecture of behavior. Until leaders are honest enough to align those structures with their rhetoric, culture initiatives will keep delivering the same result: symbolic satisfaction with no measurable performance gains. Leaders arent being strategic about their culture Every era has its cultural role modelthe company everyone else is told to emulate. In the 90s it was Jack Welchs GE. Then it was Apple, then Amazon. Now its Jensen Huangs Nvidia. Each time, executives rush to borrow their rituals and slogans, hoping to import a little of their magic. But lets be honest: your company isnt that companyand it shouldnt be. Culture is simply how strategy gets lived. Which means a best culture doesnt exist, only a fit cultureone that reinforces your distinct strategy and constraints. Copying someone elses culture while pursuing a different strategy isnt just naive, its counter-strategic. The culture obsession is a distraction The corporate world is hooked on culture because its comforting and it makes leadership feel human and moral. But culture talk often becomes a way to avoid harder truths: bad strategy, misaligned incentives, broken systems, and unclear ownership. In our experience as a consulting partner to some of the worlds largest and most complex companies, a culture problem is usually a smokescreen for problems that leaders have long known about and shirked responsibility for: a nice way to avoid assigning blame or deflecting responsibility. And when we analyzed 1,700 public companies and their Glassdoor ratings, we found that the No. 1 topic among negative reviews were complaints about leaders and management. So, poor leadership produces poor cultures. What to do instead Before rushing to rewrite values, produce swag, or drag people to town halls, leaders first need to hold themselves accountable. Do they actually behave in the way they hope others will? Do they collaborate with their peers as one company or is that really just a slogan? Does the way they allocate resources match what they claim to prioritize? Are the people theyre promoting really the best culture bearers or merely squeaky wheels or political players? Then, leaders should consider culture as the shadow cast by the operating model they design and manage. If you want to change the shadow, you have to move the object casting it. That means redesigning how decisions get made, how information travels, and what gets measured and rewarded. Culture is not a lever to pull; its a reflection of the choices leadership makes every day about how work actually happens. So yes, culture matters, just not in the way most executives think. You dont fix performance by fixing culture; you fix culture by fixing performance. Because in the end, culture lives in the rules you enforce, not the words you endorse.
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E-Commerce
Executives like to say they are integrating AI. But most still treat artificial intelligence as a feature, not a foundation: they add a chatbot here, an automated report there, and call it transformation. Thats the same mistake companies made in the early days of the web: building websites as brochures instead of re-thinking their business models around digital interaction. AI is not a feature. Its an architectural layer that will reshape every workflow, decision, and product. Those who treat it as decoration will fade, those who treat it as structure will lead. From automation to agency As product strategist Connor Davis noted, every great company will soon have an agentic layer, a system that not only automates tasks but also orchestrates them across functions. The distinction is crucial. Automation is about efficiency: doing existing tasks faster or cheaper. Agency is about delegation: letting the system make decisions, coordinate actions, and even manage other software on your behalf. Think of it as moving from tools that execute commands to assistants that understand context. The leap is subtle but profound. When a finance team uses an LLM to summarize quarterly reports, thats automation. When the same system proactively flags anomalies, adjusts forecasts, and alerts the CFO with recommendations, thats agency. Companies that understand this shift are already reorganizing around it. They are not adding AI to workflows: they are building workflows around AI. What an AI-first roadmap really means To be AI-first doesnt mean using the latest model or adding generative features. It means designing products and processes that assume continuous intelligence at their core. Andrew Bolis captured this well: AI will become the orchestration layer across every SaaS tool. Instead of humans jumping between apps, agents will execute intent across systems. Thats the future of enterprise software. Todays SaaS stack forces humans to be the middleware: copying data between CRMs, spreadsheets, and dashboards. Tomorrows agentic layer will do that work automatically, turning enterprise systems from silos into a single, adaptive organisms. And heres no less than a biologist telling you so, and a few years in advance. This evolution mirrors what happened when APIs transformed the web. At first, companies built isolated web apps: then APIs connected them. Now AI agents will do the connecting and the deciding too. The three pillars of an AI-first architecture From what were seeing across industries, AI-first organizations share three foundational traits: A data substrate, not a data warehouse Traditional data systems store information; AI-first systems understand it. That means building contextual layers, from embeddings, to knowledge graphs and retrieval systems) that make data retrievable in natural language and usable in real time. A semantic interface If your team still clicks through dashboards, youre behind. The AI-first enterprise interacts through language: voice, text, or context-aware prompts. The interface becomes conversational because the workflow becomes cognitive. An agentic layerEvery AI-first company needs an orchestration layer that can act autonomously within defined boundaries. Agents handle not just information retrieval but task execution, generating code, scheduling, procurement, customer response, and compliance checks. The challenge isnt whether they work: its how much you trust them to decide. The cultural reset executives must lead This is not a technical project: its a cultural one. Building an AI-first organization requires leaders to unlearn decades of linear thinking about processes and hierarchy. The question is no longer how can technology support our employees, but how can employees supervise technology that works alongside them. The manager of the near future wont just oversee people: theyll coordinate agents. Executives who think in terms of software adoption will miss this entirely. The right question isnt which vendors AI tool to buy , but which decisions youre ready to delegate to a machine. That shift demands a new kind of governance: clear ethical boundaries, data transparency, and oversight mechanisms that ensure AI recommendations remain auditable and explainable. Companies that fail to define those boundaries early will end up with AI that works but works for the wrong goals. The new competitive advantage The competitive edge in the AI era wont come from access to the biggest model or most GPUs. It will come from organizational adaptability, or the ability to incorporate AI decision-making without losing accountability. In every industry, a similar pattern will emerge: the incumbents will integrate AI as a feature, the challengers will rebuild their stack around it. The difference will show up in speed: companies that treat AI as infrastructure will compress decision cycles from weeks to hours. Those that dont will move at human speed while their competitors move at machine speed. But dont confuse velocity with chaos. The best AI-first companies arent automating indiscriminately: theyre orchestrating intelligently. They design human-in-the-loop architectures where humans remain the moral and strategic governors, and AI handles execution at scale. Building the agentic future responsibly The temptation, of course, is to delegate everything. After all, if agents can optimize marketing spend, supply chains, and code deployment, why not let them? The reason is simple: trust is earned, not automated. AI agents must be auditable: their decisions explainable and reversible. Without that, an organization risks the black box syndrome that has already plagued large-scale AI deployments. Ive written before about this risk in Fast Company: when you build on systems you dont understand, you surrender control. Agentic systems make that surrender seductive. They dont crash, they comply. And thats precisely why theyre dangerous if left unsupervised. Remember the paperclip maximizer Practical steps for executives For leaders beginning their AI-first journey, heres a roadmap: Start with one value chain Pick a process with measurable outcomes such as customer service, logistics, or internal reporting, and prototype an agentic version. Dont start with chatbots, start with impact. Form an AI governance board Blend technical and ethical oversight early. Youll need both to scale safely. Invest in retraining Your teams dont need prompt engineers: they need problem-framers who understand what can and cant be delegated. Keep data open inside the enterprise AI thrives on accessibility, not silos. Build policies for responsible internal sharing. Measure decision latency, not output volume The real gain from AI-first design isnt producing more: its deciding faster. From feature to foundation AI is no longer the icing on the product: its the yeast in the dough. It changes everything from the inside out. Companies that understand this will design architectures where agents and humans collaborate seamlessly, data flows freely, and decisions happen in real time. Those that dont will keep bolting AI onto outdated systems and wondering why nothing truly changes. The agentic future isnt coming: its already here. The only question left is whether your company is ready to stop piloting and start delegating.
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E-Commerce
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