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What do Marriott, Peloton, and Major League Baseball (MLB) have in common? Each has recently navigated a major crisis in the court of public opinion. Marriotts licensing agreement termination with Sonder left guests stranded and fuming mid-stay. Peloton announced its second product recall in just two years. And the MLB is the latest major sports organization whose players have been swept up in sports betting scandals. Crisis is everywhere. And while big brands may dominate the headlines, smaller companies face equally urgent situations. Regardless of a companys size, leaders must be prepared when the ever-turning wheel of misfortune lands on their spotbecause it will. Despite this inevitability, less than half of U.S. companies have a formal crisis plan in place according to a 2023 report by Forbes. I see it in my workshops all the time. Fewer than a fourth of the countless leaders Ive worked with have a dedicated crisis plan or team in place to help them navigate a crisis. Whether they are consciously kicking the can of crisis preparedness down the road or simply dont know where to start, the consequences are the same. Its not if you will ever experience a crisis, its when and how severe. Failing to prepare can shatter reputations, destroy careers, and cripple revenue in a matter of moments. Here are four actionable steps to ensure you arent caught off guard when crisis hits. 1. Create a crisis plan Planning is the most effective way to manage a crisis, yet many leaders find excuses to put it off. Some believe it will never happen to them; others underestimate the value of crisis planning because it does not generate revenue. In reality, crisis can happen to anyone, at any time, and facing a crisis without a plan is a major revenue drain, especially considering all the emergency expenses needed to manage it. A crisis plan is an essential tool that serves as a roadmap for navigating crisis response: In the same Forbes report, 98% of leaders who had activated their crisis communications plans found them to be effective. A plan doesnt need to be long30 pages is more than sufficientand should include an introduction, lessons learned from past crises, company information, crisis team member information, the companys risk profile, and key questions to ask during crisis to get as many details as possible. 2. Develop a crisis team The crisis team is a designated group of people from inside and outside an organization that assembles at a moments notice when crisis hits to help gather the facts and take appropriate action. This group of people will help leaders navigate the most sensitive moments of their careers, so its imperative to choose team members who will not only provide sound insight, but will also hold the company and its leaders accountable when necessary. A crisis team should be limited to no more than 12 people and should include representation from the President/CEO, senior VPs, division managers, IT, legal counsel, communications, HR, and finance. Each of these members brings valuable perspective from different departments and may represent different groups of stakeholders. Smaller companies can have as few as three individuals on their teamyou should never try to navigate a crisis alone. 3. Get comfortable with the uncomfortable As disconcerting as it can be for leaders to address the myriad risks their company faces on a daily basis, envisioning worst-case scenarios and developing a risk profile enables the development of a crisis management strategy before one hits. Worst case scenarios can range from a data breach that compromises proprietary information to an on-the-job employee injury. As there is a virtually unending list of worst-case scenarios, a companys risk profile will depend on the specific organization and industry. In the AI era, theres no reason for leaders not to have a tailored risk profile. Getting started is as easy as typing in your companys details. (Note: AI is not an appropriate tool to draft public-facing statements.) Once the risk profile has been established, you can predraft holding statements for each scenario that will serve as a guide during active crisis and save 20 to 30 minutes of precious time. 4. Learn how to recognize a crisis in your organization Crises often catch leaders off guard because the buildup that caused them goes unrecognized. Most crises are the result of an unsolved business problem. If the problem can be identified and addressed, its far less likely to snowball into a full-blown crisis. Take the example of Pelotonin 2023, it recalled 2 million bikes after broken seat posts led to multiple reported injuries. The business problem? Poor quality product posing a safety risk to riders. In November 2025, Peloton recalled nearly 900,000 more . . . for the exact same reason. This unresolved business problem created a crisis cycle that eroded consumer trust. Other business problems that commonly lead to crisis include weak security that invites cybercrime, failing to prioritize employee safety resulting in death or injury, or a lack of succession planning that leads to a companys downfall in the event of a CEOs death or departure. While leaders cant prevent crisis, they can prepare for it. Crisis planning could be the most valuable investment a leader ever makes. Because in business its not if a crisis will ever happen, its whether youll be ready when it does.
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E-Commerce
At the start of the Introduction to Innovation class at Robert C. Hatch High School in rural Uniontown, Alabama, the face of a teacher fills a wall-size screen at the front of the room. Beaming in from far away like a Zoom call, the teacher is part of a new approach to providing specialized education in underserved communities. This is the Connected Rural Classroom. It’s a novel rethink of the typical high school classroom, designed specifically to increase access to niche, high-quality education for students in rural schools with limited resources. A remote teacher on a big screen is just one part of the classroom’s unique elements. Designed to emphasize science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses and increase students’ technological fluency, the classroom is outfitted with a range of built-in cameras, adjustable lighting, flexible seating, and a slate of hardware for tech-centric programming. The classroom is supported by the state of Alabama and was created by Ed Farm, a Birmingham-based nonprofit focused on closing the growing digital skills gap in communities across the Southeast. “Especially in Alabama, there’s just a lack of high-quality STEM teachers and math teachers that those students in rural areas have access to,” says Waymond Jackson, president of Ed Farm. [Photo: Erin Little/courtesy Kurani] A high-tech classroom In contrast to the typical linoleum-floored room filled with rows of rigid desks, the Connected Rural Classroom looks more like a modern office. There are movable collaboration tables, standing desks, rocking chairs, ottomans, stadium seats along the back wall, and a line of focus booths looking through windows at the trees outside. The large screen sits at the front of the room on a dark wall that encourages better focus, with a small stage-like area at its foot for presentations by in-class instructors and fellow students. Calming colors and sound-absorptive materials tame the sometimes chaotic effects caused by a roomful of teenagers, and linear cues in the ceiling and floor subconsciously direct their attention to the room’s main instruction area. [Photo: Erin Little/courtesy Kurani] The room’s lighting is optimized for circadian rhythms, mimicking daylight to augment the single wall of windows in the room. There are also four programmed lighting scenes that can be used during different class scenarios, from stage-lit formal presentations to full-light active collaboration to a subtle dim setting for times requiring quiet focus. There are multiple cameras that provide the remote instructor with views of all parts of the room, and embedded technology allows the instructor to beam to a specific screen to interact with small groups, or directly onto a student’s tablet for one-on-one instruction. [Photo: Erin Little/courtesy Kurani] The classroom was designed by the architecture firm Kurani, which has been designing unconventional and often tech-forward classrooms for more than a decade. Founder Danish Kurani says this is part of making the room work not just for students but also for the teachers who may be sitting behind a computer hundreds or thousands of miles away. “We went to great lengths to essentially try to make it easier for the remote instructor,” he says. “It’s far more difficult when you’re remote, especially when you’re dealing with high school students. Like, how do you have presence in the room? How do you connect with them?” [Photo: Erin Little/courtesy Kurani] The zoom of classrooms The classroom design was developed with feedback from students and instructors, and in close collaboration with Ed Farm, which launched in February 2020 with funding from a partnership between the Alabama Power Foundation and Apple. The goal is to expand technology education for students and upskill adults in rural areas. Apple CEO Tim Cook, an Alabama native, was in Birmingham for the program’s 2020 launch. “Ed Farm is about clearing a path for anyoneof any age, background, or interestwhether or not they’re destined for a career in technology,” he said at the time. From top: The classroom at Robert C. Hatch High School in Uniontown, Alabama, before the redesign; the Connected Rural Classroom today [Photo: Erin Little/courtesy Kurani] Ed Farm has made physical spaces a cornerstone of its work, and developed the Connected Rural Classroom design as a prototype for improving the places where technology skill can be acquired. “There was this absolute misalignment between today’s workforce, today’s classroom, and tomorrow’s workforce,” CEO Jackson says, noting that working with Kurani, there was always the goal of creating a classroom design that could work across Ed Farm’s primary geography in the Black Belt of Alabama, but also beyond. “This is truly a model that can be scaled state by state,” he says. [Photo: Erin Little/courtesy Kurani] That hope informed the earliest stages of the design process. Kurani says his team started by researching existing public school classrooms across the country to understand their spatial and architectural conditions. They found that the average classroom is between 700 and 900 square feet, tends to have its door close to a corner, and has a single wall of windows on the opposite side of the room. [Photo: Erin Little/courtesy Kurani] The design the architects developed is a prototype that matches those average conditions. Kurani sees it as a kit of parts that can be slightly adjusted based on the layout of a room or the location of its door and windows. “When it’s time to deploy it in schools, it’s very easy and we can tell all of them, Yes, we can easily bring this to your school. It will fit, Kurani says. Ed Farm plans to scale the Connected Rural Classroom design to other schools, but also to expand its focus on creating similar educational spaces for people of all ages. “One of the things that we were pushed on by Apple as we came up with our solutions, was to think about the problems and the things that we’re doing that are relevant to Alabama as a microcosm of what actually exists across this country,” Jackson explains. “We see community spaces and unused community assets as an opportunity to bring technology and technology infrastructure closer to those folks that we’re seeking to serve.” [Photo: Erin Little/courtesy Kurani]
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E-Commerce
Just know this: Theres going to be a conversation about artificial intelligence at Thanksgiving this year. An AI superfan is going to gush about chatbots and go on, at length, about how These things just seem to know everything. The dinner tables funnyman will play a highly cringe video they made with the technology. Someone else will either be flummoxed or horrified. A proud guest will declare a vow of abstinencein fact, theyve never even used ChatGPT, they will reveal. One self-important guest will feel very smart when recounting the time they caught an AI making a mistake, once. Theyll tell everyone about it. These conversations will be bad. There will be camps: the Luddites, the accelerationists, the skeptics, and the 85-year-old ChatGPT power users. There will be the extant Elon evangelists, the people who are very tuned in, and the people who have not been paying attention to any of this. Conversations will touch on both the anticipation and the terror of the tech. The economy. The tech oligarchy. The environment. The bubble. No one will really be talking to each other. Not in any meaningful sense. Have the conversation anyway. Not because youll form some sort of consensus, but because these long human conversationsat their bestcome with love and also tension. AI provides neither. Of course, the major hurdle to reaching any sort of common understanding is that AI is too ambiguous a term to serve as a stable jumping-off point for a coherent discourse. For some, the term references a capital-intensive recipe of hyperscaled data centers and transformer models. For others, AI means the consumer-facing, knowledge-loaded models like Sonnet 4.5 and Grok 3. For others, there are simply the characters of Grok and ChatGPT and Claude. To many, AI is simply synonymous with the current age, some loose sense that the internet is increasingly automated and agentic. A good number of people simply use AI, increasingly intermingled with social media and the internet, as a shorthand for all technology. All of these definitions are, in their way, completely accurate, and too divergent for having any meaningful discussion about AI. Proceed, still. We do not choose our familiesor at least our blood relatives. AI, meanwhile, promises potentially limitless self-selection. Eras past gave us the YouTube rabbit holes and personalized algorithism. Now chatbots promise private universes of confirmation bias, personalization, and sycophancy. Younger generations are growing up with an unprecedented level of intimacy, and confidentiality, with these bots. Worse, people are forming deeply psychological and romantic relationships with AI tools, plopping their deepest selves into a digital abyssinstead of their loved ones or human professionals. This siloing away of our intimacy leaves us with impossibly difficult-to-predict consequences for our social skills and human relationships. For this reason, many people who have eschewed AI are protecting themselves, while the rest of us are still looking to define the relationship we want with the technology. The challenge, of course, is that AI companies already know what kind of relationship they want us to have with these chatbots: an all-encompassing one, an endless saccharine dialogue. We dont yet know what lifelong microtargeted conversational partners might do to us, but its probably not wonderful. This raises the stakes for our human interactions, including imperfect and ever-trying family holidays. AI firms want to woo us with frictionless interfaces for everything. The antidote is sitting across the table from the people we care about, and all the friction they come with, to discuss our interesting times and everything else.
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E-Commerce
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