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One provocative assertion I often make when teaching is that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who have hearts and those who dont. Students and executives usually chuckle awkwardly at this statement, wondering where I am going. I then share that many leaders look at changing technology and changing markets and realize that a lot of jobs in their companies will inevitably be eliminated within the next few years, and its not hard to predict which jobs will go away. The question is how the executives react to this realization. Leaders who have hearts experience empathy for those currently in jobs that will be disappearing, seeing individual faces and hearing individual names in their minds. Such leaders think of the men and women in their organizations as flesh- and-blood humans. They worry about employees losing jobs that feed their children, keep roofs over their heads, and provide health insurance, not to mention (hopefully) supplying a sense of satisfaction and meaning. Other leaders see the job elimination through a cooler lens, less concerned for those affected. They embrace creative destruction as a fundamental aspect of how capitalistic systems work. Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote about the inevitability that new technologies and advancements will destroy what came before. For instance, there used to be great demand for skilled telegraph operators and folks who could add columns of numbers quickly with just a penciluntil more cost-effective technologies devalued those skills. Leaders with this perspective focus not on the hardships of the unemployed but on the numerous new jobs created by the same forces of change. They believe employees simply must adapt or be left behind, and theres no point in getting upset about iteveryone owns their individual career. They see the latest disruptions as just the continuation of the human experience, going all the way back to our hunter- gatherer ancestors. Still others may only care about job cuts for the sake of cost reduction, never mind the creative part of the destruction. For the purposes of Systems Leadership, it doesnt matter which type of person you are in my (admittedly reductive) shorthand. You need to invest in your people whether you have a heart or not, for at least three major reasons. 1. It’s cheaper and easier to retrain than replace Studies show that it often costs less to reskill a current employee than to recruit, hire, and train a new one. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, finding and training a new employee can cost as much as six to nine months of their salary. For instance, if a worker earns $60,000, the company could end up spending an additional $30,000 to $45,000 to replace them. The Center for American Progress estimates the costs can be even higher, depending on the role. This means reskilling an existing employee is not just the right thing to do, but often the more cost-effective strategy. 2. Investing in people boosts morale and discretionary effort When a company invests in retraining its employees, it sends a powerful message. Imagine the morale boost when employees learn that their company values them enough to send them for specialized training in AI. Now contrast that with hearing that the company is posting external job openings for AI specialists, and layoffs are on the horizon to fund the new hires. The impact on employee enthusiasm and engagement is profound. Continuing education and upskilling are crucial for fostering loyalty, enthusiasm, and a productive workplace culture. 3. Institutional knowledge is an invaluable asset Many leaders prioritize fresh ideas, new talent, and innovation. But systems leaders understand the unique value of institutional knowledgethe insights and perspectives that only come from experience. While hard data often drives decisions, theres immense value in recognizing the importance of those who have navigated the complex challenges of the past. Their insights can be the key to solving future problems. Whether they have hearts or not, leaders must see employees as a resource to be invested in to advance the needs of the company. Systems Leaders take advantage of cost-saving opportunities without treating their people like replaceable cogs in a machine. At the same time, however, they believe fully in holding people accountable to high standards. They would say its a false choice to frame strong management and compassionate management hard heads and soft hearts as opposites. Great leaders aspire to both. Adapted from the book The Systems Leader by Robert E. Siegel. Copyright 2025 by Robert E. Siegel. Published in the United States by Crown Currency, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
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E-Commerce
The first iteration of Brand New World was a very specific look at how AI is changing how brands and marketers work. Now were back to talk about brand culture more broadly. Of course that will involve AI from time to time, but Ill also be digging into sports, entertainment, music, comedy, and everywhere else brands squeeze their way into pop culture. Everyone says they hate advertising, but everyone loves at least one brand. Brand New World is here to talk about why. That means Ill be popping up in your feed once every month as part of the Fast Company Podcast Network. Okay, here’s what you’ll hear on the first episode of season two. Apple’s big (creative) year For those who dont know or are unfamiliar, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is part awards show, part industry conference, and probably the biggest annual gathering of brands, marketers, entertainment folks, tech folks, and media on the planet. Anything and anyone that touches a brandfrom social platforms to sports stars and celebritiesis there. This year, ahead of the festival that kicks off June 16, Apple has been named the Creative Marketer of the Year. Now, Apple is an iconic marketer, an all-time, first ballot Hall of Famer. But in my opinion, 2024 has been a bit of a mixed bag. So why is this Apple’s year? To discuss where this past year fits in the pantheon of Apples greatest hits, I called up Elizabeth Paul. A strategist by trade, Paul is the chief brand officer at award-winning ad shop the Martin Agency. Youll know their work for major brands like Geico, UPS, the new Axe work with Pete Davidson, and much more. More importantly, shes always up for some hot take banter about the work and culture around advertising and brands. Paul told me when she was rewatching a lot of Apples 2024 work, she kept thinking about whether any of it would fit into her top 5 list of Apples all-time work. Is there anything this year that would dislodge something else that I’ve loved for a long time? she says. I would say the thing that got closest to me was Someday, which is beautifully done and really powerful. Listen to the podcast to hear us break down our top 5 lists of all-time Apple ads. Driving brand entertainment Last month, a new doc called The Seat debuted on Netflix about how Mercedes Formula One team decided on a successor for racing legend Lewis Hamilton. Hamilton had announced his departure, so the racing giant was forced to strategize its next move quickly and discreetly. Thats where WhatsApp comes in. The entire process of evaluating and naming young Italian driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli played out over the messaging app. The Seat is not only a feature documentary, but an excellent piece of brand entertainment, produced in partnership with WhatsApp. This episode I was excited to chat with Metas head of global consumer marketing Eshan Ponnadurai to talk about the process behind the doc, as well as the role it plays in the brands overall strategy. Esh has worked on major brands from Ford and P&G, to Uber, YouTube and Google. Hes got a long history of finding compelling and authentic brand stories to tell in unique ways. Here, we find out what The Seat takes from past successful work, particularly WhatsApps award-winning doc work We Are Ayenda, and its Giannis Antetokounmpo film Ugo: A Homecoming Story, as well as the precedent it sets for the future. The primary thing was knowing what people are going to be interested in, says Ponnadurai. How did you get to this driver? Why him? What’s his story? That’s the hook. That’s what people are tuning in for. And then organically, how does WhatsApp play a role here? So I think the balance is always (between) what is the right story and what people are interested in, and where the product naturally fits. The danger sometimes can be the inverse: We wanna sell you something, where’s the story?
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E-Commerce
As the founder and board chair of the tech nonprofit Products That Count, Ive had a front-row seat to AIs domination of the tech world over the past couple of years. A few years ago, just a sliver of the thousands of submissions our organization evaluates for our awards program were AI-based; this year, more than 90% of our nearly 10,000 submissions were for AI products. This exponential growth has made one thing painfully clear: AI has already become table stakes. In 2023, generative AI was the hot new buzzword; last year, agentic AI was the new kid on the blockand this trend is only going to continue. Just look at the product development cycles today for clues: AI skips pilots and goes straight to deployment. First movers are outpaced; OpenAI, Mistral, and Perplexity can no longer keep up with the pace of innovation organically, so theyve started to buy speed by making acquisitions. With AI no longer a differentiator, what matters is not just that you have AI but how youre using it. What separates the winners from the losers here isnt speed to launchits become clear that this is a futile race. Instead, what really determines whether a product will have sticking power today is how the AI is used in its context. As one committee member commented in reviewing this years awards program nominees: Its not about the data. Its about what you can do with it. The right weapon Just like picking your weapon for battle, the winning AI product is whatever is the most strategically advantaged in that fight. Here are the three major strategic traits that have emerged from evaluating thousands of AI products over the last few years. These traits show what winning AI products today are doing differently from their competitors, giving them the edge in an increasingly crowded field: 1. They have strategically superior moatsbuilt on data, personalization and customer intuition The right data, not MORE data, is the real moat. – Google Cloud Product Lead Varun Krovvidi (2025 awards committee) In the era of open APIs and fast followers, only the most thoughtfully designed products will be able to claim any lasting territory. Todays winners in AI wont just move fast; theyll think strategically and build moats that are based on true value. The name of the game here is personalization, but not the personalization we think we know. Next-gen personalization will go far beyond extracting ad recommendations from search history, or suggesting your next binge watch. The next winning formula in personalization knows users deeply, and knows not just their tastes, but also how they prefer to consume information, how they prioritize, what data theyre comfortable sharing. As Krovvidi said, Were seeing AI products use AI-driven feedback loops across diverse functions. This also means that AI will be used to understand the customer in a way that has never been done before. Just as Apple in the 2010s wrote the rulebook for what a personalized product should look like, we are now facing the next Apple-style revolution in good user design. True personalization is now a verticalized play, not a horizontal one. And successful personalization in this verticalized fashion is based on two core pillars: unique, high-quality data (not quantity, but connected insights on user preferences) and context-aware preferences (not just what users want, but how and where they want it). Combine these, and you get the next-gen disruptors. 2. They leverage ecosystems and interoperability as their competitive advantage Interconnectedness is what sets apart the winners from the rest in todays AI era. Whether its interoperable AI agents that hook into each other and collaborate to add greater value, or a niche tool thats highly specialized to plug into a technical and entrenched ecosystem and complete microlevel changes, the best AI products today are not just keenly aware of their contexttheyre explicitly designed to operate within them.This means designing products with not just an awareness of but an active optimization towards the existing infrastructure around them, acting as connective tissue rather than mass. The mantra here is 1+1=3. Superior AI tools today dont just offer value in a vacuum, they find ways to collaborate with other toolseven other AI agentswhere the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. 3. Theyre serious about privacynot UX ethics lip service & compliance theater Trust, privacy, and human-centric design are now essential building blocks of any great product.– Nicolas Rousseau, Chief Digital Engineering & Manufacturing Officer, Capgemini (2025 awards committee)If we thought privacy and ethics mattered previously, that goes double (or triple) in the era of AI. In the best of the best AI products, privacy is now the default mode. Opt-out is now opt-in. Superior AI products today assume users want control over their data, encryption, and anonymizing. We see an increasing number of product strategies centered on privacy-preserving architectures and decentralized intelligence, added Rousseau. From platforms that drive healthcare equity through remote monitoring to fintech solutions that democratize access to Capital, tech for good is no longer an afterthought but a competitive advantage. The great AI products are the most strategically and thoughtfully built If AI has started to feel like a fast-fashion race, the products that will win the day are those that keep focused on building quality over quantity and filling a genuine vertical end-to-end. The speed of evolution today means that the winning teams are not just cranking out the newest model and shipping it. Theyre taking stock of the ecosystem, building highly personalized and valuable tools that play nice with each other, and putting a premium on ethical design.
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E-Commerce
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