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JPMorgan Chase’s new $3 billion global headquarters in midtown Manhattan was finally unveiled the week of October 20 after six years in the making. But rather than highlighting the Danny Meyer-curated food hall, imported taps that pour a perfect pint of Guiness, or lighting that adjusts with circadian rhythms, online attention has been focused on another feature of the 270 Park Ave. skyscraper. “Congratulations JPMorgan on the opening of your new headquarters!” billionaire Michael Dell posted on X last week, alongside a photo of what seems to be a trading floor in the new office. The image features row upon row of his companys monitors in four-screen setups, duplicated as far as the eye can see. Less than a week later, and the post has more than 17 million views. But maybe not for good reasons. Many in the comments are calling the image dystopian. Others are using it as an opportunity to rail against return-to-office mandates. Remote work kills the culture and warmth that only real human interactions in an office can create, one X user mockingly cited, immediately followed up in the next line with the culture and warmth right above Dells computer-lined image of the trading floor. Are these for cage free or free-range analysts? another quipped. Some defended the setup, saying this is simply what a typical trading floor looks like these days. (Who thought wed be nostalgic for office cubicles in the year 2025?) Imagine ripping a nothing from my end from row E, seat 15 at the new JPM HQ, one X user wrote. For efficiency, they ask everyone with no updates to repeat nothing from my end at the same time, another joked in response. Every morning at 9:05am you can hear it reverberating throughout the building in a haunting hum. Earlier this year, JPMorgan Chase enforced its return-to-office mandate, which requires employees to work at the site five days a week. Now I understand why everyone at JP wants to work from home, claimed another X user. This is an awful work environment. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has been a vocal supporter of scaling back remote work and getting employees back in the office full time. His employees, on the other hand, have other thoughts. A large number have signed petitions asking for more flexibility in the workplace, and unionization efforts are underway in response to the policy. (Fast Company reached out to JPMorgan for comment but hasnt received a response as of this writing.) For now, at least, Park Avenue is where youll find the banking giants 10,000-strong New York City workforce. The 60-story skyscraper is betting on a vision for the future of work that’s centered on in-person collaboration. Open all hours of the day, the building is packed with amenities, including a state-of-the-art gym, 24/7 food options, and even a pub. Sounds incredible. Its almost like you never have to leave.
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E-Commerce
Below, Paul Leonardi shares five key insights from his new book, Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life. Paul is a professor of technology management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a frequent consultant and speaker to a wide range of companies, such as Google, Microsoft, YouTube, McKinsey, GM, and Fidelity. He is also a contributor to the Harvard Business Review. Whats the big idea? We are the first generation in human history to carry the entire worlds information, connections, and distractions in our pockets. Its no wonder that the technology once promised to make life easier now leaves us tired and overwhelmed. Paul Leonardi refers to this as cognitive and emotional weariness, calling it digital exhaustion. But it doesnt have to be this way. With intention, we can turn our devices from sources of drain into tools of connection, empowerment, and creativity. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Paul himselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Exhaustion isnt weaknessits physics Maya wakes up at 5:50 a.m. to her phone buzzing. Within seconds, she is scrolling on Instagram. A news alert pops upshe clicks it. Three text messages arriveshe switches to a different app. Her partner tries to talk to her, but she doesnt hear him because now shes checking WhatsApp. By the time Maya gets out of bed, she has made dozens of micro-decisions and context switches. Her brain has already started burning through its limited energy reserves, and she hasnt even had coffee yet. This routine is a growing epidemic. In my research tracking over 12,000 workers across 12 countries for two decades, I found something startling. In 2002, the average digital exhaustion score was 2.6 out of 6. By 2022, it had skyrocketed to 5.5. My nine-year-old daughter looked at the graph and said, It looks like a snake about to strike. She was right. And that snake has struck. Think about a phone battery. When its new, you charge it overnight, and it lasts all day. But after thousands of charge cycles, it drains faster and faster. Eventually, it barely holds power at all. Our brains work the same way. Every notification, message, and screen switch drains our cognitive battery. Take Andi, a product manager I worked with at a software company. She told me, I feel like my brain is a phone battery that just doesnt hold a charge anymore. I used to be sharp all day. Now by 2 p.m., Im staring at my screen, unable to focus on even simple tasks. Andi wasnt weak or lazy. She was experiencing what neuroscientists call cognitive depletion. Every time you switch your attention, blood rushes to your prefrontal cortex. Your brain sounds a two-tone alarm, searches for the right neurons to handle the new task, then activates them. This process, called rule activation, happens in tenths of a second. Each switch burns precious metabolic energy. Every notification, message, and screen switch drains our cognitive battery. Your brain accounts for only 2% of your body weight, but consumes approximately 20% of your daily calories. Most of that energy is devoted to keeping your body running: breathing, heartbeat, and temperature regulation. Only a tiny reserve is left for active thinking. As neurologist Richard Cytowic told me, The brains reserve margins are slim and quickly eaten up by constantly shifting attention. I tracked 20 teams at three Fortune 500 companies and found that the average knowledge worker toggles between apps and websites 1,200 times per day. Thats 1,200 energy-draining attention switches. If each switch takes just two seconds, thats 40 minutes a day just transitioning between tools. But the real cost isnt time, its the cumulative exhaustion from all that switching. Since ancient Greece, writers have described exhaustion as the depletion of a finite resource. Today, that resource is attention. Just like muscles grow sore from physical labor, minds weaken when overtaxed by constant switching, scrolling, and interpreting. The problem is that our bodies are great at signaling physical fatiguesore muscles, aching jointsbut our brains rarely wave a red flag. Instead, exhaustion sneaks up on us. We dont realize weve crossed the line until were already depleted. Stop blaming yourself. If you feel exhausted by digital tools, youre not failing. Its the inevitable physics of finite energy colliding with infinite digital demands. 2. Tools multiply faster than our capacity We often assume the solution to digital overload is better tools. If I just had the right app, we think, everything would be easier. But the more tools we adopt, the more fragmented our lives become. Consider HealthCo, a global company I studied. When I asked employees to list their digital tools, I found that they werent just using email anymore. They had Slack for chat, Zoom for meetings, Jira for project management, Salesforce for customers, SharePoint for documents, Teams for cross-department updates, plus dozens of specialized tools. Each promised to make work easier. Together? They created chaos. One employee, Marcus, told me, I spend more time figuring out where to respond than actually responding. Did that question come through email? Was it on Slack? Did someone tag me in Jira? Im constantly hunting for conversations across platforms. My research revealed that the average knowledge worker spends 57 minutes per day switching between applications. They also spend 30 minutes daily deciding which tool to use for each task. Should I message on Slack or email? Should I put this in Notion or Google Docs? These micro-decisions seem trivial, but when youre making them 1,200 times a day, they create what psychologists call decision fatigue. Let me tell you about Shireen, a marketing specialist who listed 36 different digital tools she used daily. Everything from Adobe Illustrator to TikTok to her banking app. After our conversation, she looked at her list and said, Oh God. That exhausts me just looking at it. The average knowledge worker spends 57 minutes per day switching between applications. Shireen decided to try an experiment: she cut her tools in half. She identified tools that were redundant (using both Alexa and Siri), tools she barely used (Evernote for notes when she had Word), and tools that werent essential (three different social media apps for posting the same content). Six months later, her exhaustion score dropped by 40%. She told me, I thought Id miss those tools, but instead I feel liberated. Its like I decluttered my digital life. Technology expands faster than our cognitive capacity to manage it. Were running software from 2024 o hardware (our brains) that hasnt been upgraded in 300,000 years. Exhaustion isnt built from volume alone, but from fragmentation across too many platforms. 3. Interpretation is more draining than information Its not the flood of emails and notifications themselves that exhaust us most. Its what I call inference fatigue, meaning the mental work of constantly interpreting ambiguous digital communication. Take Aaliyah, who runs a nonprofit in Georgia. Her inbox was overwhelming, but what really wore her down was the constant interpretation. She told me, I spend so much mental energy trying to decode messages. Why did my colleague only reply with okare they annoyed? Why hasnt the donor respondeddid I offend them? What does that emoji really mean? Its exhausting trying to read between the lines all day long. Digital communication strips away crucial context: tone of voice, body language, facial expressions. Our brains work overtime to fill in the gaps. This creates what neuroscientists Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor call controlled processing, or slow, deliberate, effortful thinking that demands huge amounts of cognitive resources. Researchers examined college students responding to ambiguous Facebook posts. Not only did students feel mentally exhausted trying to figure out if someone was genuinely depressed or just seeking attention, but the emotional toll of arriving at these conclusions left them feeling depleted and dispirited. Think about your own digital life. How often do you reread a text, worrying about its tone? How many times have you analyzed a brief email response, wondering if the sender is upset? These micro-interpretations pile up until were mentally drained. In the analog world, a face-to-face conversation offers dozens of cues that help us interpret quickly and accurately. A slight smile, a furrowed brow, the speed of responseall provide instant context. In the digital world, every interaction becomes a puzzle to solve. These micro-interpretations pile up until were mentally drained. But it gets even more complex. Were not just interpreting others; were also constantly evaluating ourselves through digital mirrors. Take Zoom fatigue. Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford found that seeing ourselves on video calls creates unprecedented self-scrutiny. As he put it, Imagine in the physical workplace, for the entirety of an eight-hour workday, an assistant followed you around with a handheld mirror. Thats essentially what happens on Zoom. One of my students, Xiao, confessed to me, When youre teaching on Zoom, Im constantly managing how I appear. Am I nodding enough to show Im engaged? Can you see Im taking notes? I was so busy thinking about how I looked to you that I missed half of what you were saying. Exhaustion isnt just about too much input. Its about the invisible, constant work of decoding others meanings and managing our own digital presence. 4. Boundaries create energy, not limits We tend to think of boundaries as walls that keep us from being responsive and connected. But my research shows the opposite: boundaries create energy. Consider Vicente, a high school teacher and soccer coach I studied. He made one simple change: he turned off all notifications during soccer practice. No emails, no texts, no pings for two hours each afternoon. At first, I was anxious, Vicente told me. What if I missed something important? But then something magical happened. I was fully present with my players. I could see their technique improving, and have real conversations with them. And when I checked my phone after practice, I had more energy to deal with messages because I wasnt depleted from constant interruptions. Boundaries are like fences around your attention. They dont shrink your world; they protect the space where energy regenerates. In one study I conducted with companies using internal social media platforms like Jive, employees who set specific times to check messages improved their ability to find expertise by 31% and identify key contacts by 88%. Why? Because when they werent constantly interrupted, they could pay attention to patterns in communication and learn who knew what in their organization. But many of us resist boundaries. We worry well miss something critical or appear unresponsive. Jed, an investment banker I interviewed, prided himself on responding to every message within minutes. Im dependable, he told me. People know they can count on me for fast responses. We worry well miss something critical or appear unresponsive. So, I interviewed his colleagues. Most didnt even notice his quick responses. His boss actually wished hed slow down: Sometimes Jed responds too quickly without thinking things through. Id prefer more thoughtful responses, even if they take longer. Jed was exhausting himself to maintain a reputation that didnt exist. His always-on approach scored him a five out of six on the exhaustion scale, while providing no real benefit to his colleagues. Boundaries are about saying yes to energy, focus, and genuine connection. When we protect our attention, we create energy. 5. AI could save us . . . or exhaust us completely Let me present two scenarios based on my current research with ten companies that are implementing AI. AI as liberator. Imagine an AI assistant that truly understands your work patterns. It filters your inbox, showing you only the three decisions that need your input today. It summarizes those lengthy Slack threads into two sentences of relevant information. It drafts routine responses that sound like you, leaving you free to focus on creative, meaningful work. Im seeing glimpses of this at companies like HealthCo, where junior lawyers use AI to review contracts. Tasks that took days now take hours. They use their freed-up time to do higher-level work: strategic thinking, relationship building, creative problem-solving. AI as amplifier of exhaustion. My students recently used ChatGPT to write thank-you notes to a guest speaker. The AI expanded their brief thoughts into lengthy, formulaic essays. The speakers response? If youd sent me all these AI-expanded notes, I wouldve just fed them back into ChatGPT to summarize them. Think about the absurdity: Were using AI to expand our content, forcing recipients to use AI to compress it back down. Its an exhaustion amplification loop. Im already seeing this at scale. One executive told me 70% of internal documents at his company are now AI-generatedlonger, more verbose, but not more valuable. As he put it, Were drowning in synthetic content that no human actually wants to read. The scariest part? AI is getting better at keeping us hooked. In one study, personalized messages crafted by ChatGPT were remarkably effective at persuading people. AI can recognize our emotional states better than many humans, and it never gets tired of talking to us. A company I consulted for developed an AI sales assistant specifically designed to keep customers on the phone longer. As their product chief told me, Or AI figures out the perfect next thing to say to maintain engagement. Its like a conversation that never wants to end. If we design and use AI thoughtfully, it can reduce exhaustion by handling routine tasks and freeing us for meaningful work. But if we let it run wild, it will accelerate our exhaustion to unprecedented levels. AI is either the beginning of the end of digital exhaustionor exhaustions final evolution. The choice is ours. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea App. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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E-Commerce
In these volatile times, how do we navigate the intersection between values and commerce? Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert and Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya join New York Times reporter David Gelles onstage at the Masters of Scale Summit to reveal their different strategies for dealing with an activist White House, the pressure for what moderator Gelles calls “anticipatory compliance,” and how they grow their businesses while also prioritizing causes like environmental conservation and immigration. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response recorded live at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. Gelles: Ryan, Patagonia is a very different sort of company. This company has been meddling in politics, sometimes quite loudly, for more than 50 years now. Gellert: Meddling is a strong word. Meddling . . . oh, that’s a gentle word. [Patagonia founder] Yvon Chouinard has been donating to grassroots environmental activist campaigns for more than 50 years. In 2017, Patagonia sued President Trump and his cabinet during the first . . . Gellert: Yeah, that’s meddling. That’s meddling. And you still, even at a moment when most CEOs are afraid to say anything about this administration, you’re still out there raising the alarm almost every single week, it seems. When your business is selling clothes, why do you spend so much time talking about politics and policy? Gellert: Well, first of all, it’s super interesting being on the stage with you, Hamdi, and with you, David. I think you made reference to it. You wrote a book that’s just come out in the last month about our founder and our 52-year history. You and I have gotten to know each other quite well over recent years, and I think there’s a lot that we have spiritually in common as companies. And then I think, to the nature of your question, to each of us, there’s a lot that’s actually quite different in how we navigate that. I think for us to now answer your question, we are focused on protecting the natural world. Period. That’s why we exist. It’s not about making money. It’s not about being the biggest player in outdoor apparel and equipment. It’s about protecting the natural world. And so that’s what we do, and we exist in a world right now, here in America, where the threats are absolutely unprecedented. And I think that what you might describe as speaking out, I just think is telling the [expletive] truth about what’s going on in the world right now. Okay, so the climate’s at risk, pollution and polluters, the regulations are coming off, and conservation, particularly public lands here in America. I mean, it is one goddamn threat after another, every single day. And so what are we speaking up on? Those things that matter. Same things weve spoken up on for 52 years. As the CEO of a company and as an individual, do you ever worry about the fact that this is a moment and an administration that has shown a willingness to be retributive? Gellert: Yeah, of course. And how do you navigate that? Is there any, I mean, the word is anticipatory compliance? Are you holding back at all? I think we have to be very strategic. I think we have to be very considered. I think what we talk a lot about is, where do we have authenticity to offer an opinion on something, and where can we be truly additive? If it’s performative and we’re just offering an opinion to offer an opinion, that’s not a space we’re going to play in right now. I don’t think the times benefit from that. I think where we can be truly authentic is in one or two places. One is we’re a business, and so we can speak from the business sector. And the other is on environmental and climate issues. We’ve got a 52-year history. We work our asses off to minimize our footprint. As you made reference to, we’ve supported grassroots activism for 40 years and counting. And so that’s who we are, what we do, and I think we’ve earned the right to offer opinions on that. You get a sense of the different approaches to really a very similar and consequential set of issues. We’re going to talk about more than politics, I promise, but I do want to come back to this issue of, Hamdi, how you navigate a moment like this, and when you decide to work with Ivanka Trump, even when you decide to work with the White House. It can seem like a no-win situation. You work with someone, you piss one side off. You say something, you piss the other side off. How do you think about engaging in these partnerships where you are trying to find common ground without alienating any of your consumer base? Ulukaya: Yeah, look, what I do and what we do at Chobani is really, we have the known instinct or reflex that we react regardless of what the world thinks and all that kind of stuff. Ivanka actually did not start now. I worked with her in Idaho after President Biden got into the White House, actually. And what we did is, we made boxes of food from the farmers, and we delivered to people in need in communities at that time. And later on, even before the election, she and her partner, they created this organization called Planet Harvest, and she says: “Do you realize that in California, 40% of all the fruits and vegetables are wasted and left in the land because they don’t look good and there’s no buyer?” And I couldn’t believe it. I am aware of these things, but I didn’t even realize. And I went to the land and I saw, and partnered with her and her partners who had studied quite knowledgeably. Absolutely, we’ll do it. Absolutely, we’ll do it. I’ll invest with it, and I’ll lead it and improve the concept. So to me this . . . and when I said we are going to hire refugees during the first, I don’t know how many years ago, we got death threats and boycottsall kinds of stuff like that. The first time I wrote about your company. Ulukaya: You wrote it in The New York Times, and we got death threats. We all have to react as human beigs, who we are. And businesses are a combination of people. You’ve got to do the right thing regardless of what lawyers and communication experts will say. On the advisor council stuff right now. Ulukaya: I want to invite everybody towe have some serious, serious issues that we have to bring everybody to the table to. Look, we really do. I do see some egocentric reaction . . . just anger because of the other person. Okay, they are enormous about the differences. I don’t know. I was invited to the White House because I’m announcing a huge investment in Idaho and another one in Rome in New York, and being part of Invest in America. I don’t have any working relationship with the White House, but my view on immigration and refugees is the same. I have an organization called Tent. I just came from Mexico. I’m meeting all those people who are encouraging people to hire refugees and train refugees. These are timeless truths. People are going to move, and we have to make a system that works for every single person. And we proved it in our factories, in our communities. And today, you will not have farmworkers, or you will not have functioning farms and agriculture, without immigration. Everybody knows that. Everybody.
Category:
E-Commerce
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