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It’s not just youyou really have been seeing a lot more of Gap lately. Over the last few years, the brand has embarked on a broad business turnaround. It hired Richard Dickson, Mattel’s former CEO who turned Barbie into a phenomenon. Then it brought on Zac Posen as its new creative director. It launched an elevated sub-brand, GapStudio, and it’s bringing back nostalgia-driven styles like low-rise jeans. But perhaps more effective than any single business decision has been Gap’s unabashed embrace of collaborations. Again and again, Gap’s partnerships have surprised shoppers by tapping into corners of culture and fashion that expand the audience for the classic American brand. There have been collabs with womens fashion brands Cult Gaia and Dôen (twice), Black design advocacy platform Harlems Fashion Row, luggage company Béis, and cool golf-wear brand Malbon. For people who doubted Gap’s fashion bona fides, these collabs were meant to prove them wrong. Is Gap actually plugged in? Mark Breitbard, the president and CEO of Global Gap Brand, has been trying to answer that question with a resounding yes for the last five years. When Brietbard joined Gap in 2020, he was dealing with a crisis of relevance. “Having been around the business for a long time, I always felt that the brand just needed more, he says. The brand deserved better, and the brand had good creative just dying to get out. Now, dozens of collabs later, a different company has emerged from the cryogenic freezerone that consumers are starting to actually care about. A new era for Gap Step by step, the Gap brand started to carry cachet. That’s really the storymore than one partner, one campaignit’s the story of all of it, says Breitbard, referring to the steady drumbeat of storytelling he and his team are building through its partnerships and marketing campaigns. Relative to the story that a revived Gap is trying to tell, all of this creative is the narrative, he says. And is intrinsic to its aim of restaking our claim as an American icon. [Photo: Courtesy of The Gap] But strong creative requires a solid foundation to work from. In 2020, when Breitbard moved from his role as president and CEO of Banana Republic to join Gap in his current role, the casual-wear brand had nowhere to go but up. In fact, the last time Gap was in the conversation, low-rise jeans were in style (think 2000 to 2010). Breitbard has incredibly broad responsibilities. I lead the Gap brand business. It means everything that you see that is Gap is under my purview, he says. Product, marketing, stores, e-commerce, partnerships, and all the experiences that go along with that, he adds. The Gapaissance is made up of many creative decision-makers, but at the end of the day, Breitbard is the one who makes the final call. When he stepped into the role, he first noticed that the brand needed a cleanup. Gap had a number of problems, starting with relevance, Breitbard recalls of the companys health when he first joined. The business model was broken in some ways. A brief summary of his to-do list: Reduce the Gap’s overstored retail footprint (they closed 350 stores) Reinvent product Cut the number of stock-keeping units (SKUs) Reinvest in quality Multiple rounds of layoffs, all of which took place through 2022 Followed by new creative hires in 2023, including its head of creative, Calvin Leung, and agency partner, Invisible Dynamics. CEO Dickson, credited with Barbies pink tsunami of a comeback during his time as president and COO at Mattel, also joined in 2023. At that point, the company felt established enough to move on from digging itself out and start building up positive momentum. In 2024, Gap tapped Posen to head up its new, higher-price-point sub-brand, GapStudio, itself a relevance play through red carpet and celebrity dressing. Thats also when the collaboration strategy started in earnest. (There were a few early collabs: the ill-fated, 10-year YZY partnership in 2020, which ended in 2022, followed by the more successful Gap x Dapper Dan collab in 2022.) According to Gap, the company rarely engaged in brand partnerships prior to Breitbards onboarding: about 24 collaborations over a span of 40 years, from 1979 to 2019. Since Breitbard joined the company, Gap has launched more than 15 partnerships (about three per yeara five-fold increase over the prior average of about two every three years). By mid-2025, Gap is running six to eight major partnerships per year. [Photo: Courtesy of The Gap] In 2024, Gap started to drop more frequentand surprisingly covetablecollabs, like with Dôen and Cult Gaia. The kind that might cause you to text your friend a link with at least five question marks: “Gap????? The company also began launching classic Gap ads with new talent: Troye Sivan, Tyla, and most recently Katseye, choreographed by Robbie Blue. All of this offers multiple approaches to reinvent its icons, as Breitbard describes it. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Robbie Blue (@itsrobbiesworld_) The strategy is meant to reestablish its own core styles and its own brand relevance through affiliation with partners that carry fashion and cultural credibility. We had the business starting to fire in 23 with a lot of the pieces there, he says. Then a combination of all the different moves we’ve been making. We ramped every single one of them upramped up the marketing campaigns, ramped up the collabs, ramped up the storytelling, and got more and more focused. That includes a focused partnerships strategy. According to Breitbard, any new partnership requires a few things: a clear internal understanding of established brand codes (described as rooted in denim and the authentic voice of Americana), value alignment with potential partners, a strong creative team, and a differentiated story and audience. That happens when a story can only be told with that partner, and that the partner can only tell with us, he says. But for Breitbard, it ultimately coms down to a basic relevance formula, which I call the group chat litmus test: Is it new? Is it unexpected? And is it cool? he asks. Relevance and its cousin, authenticity, are brand qualities that are both difficult to define and universally chased. Every brand wants to be part of the cultural conversation, because that ultimately establishes credibility in the eyes of the consumer and creates a wide marketing funnel through which to engage potential customers. Think of it as branding soft power. What unites all of these partnerships is the idea of authenticity and upholding Gaps DNA. We do go through great pains to ensure that the brand codes remain upheld in everything we do, Breitbard says. But having a strong creative team very locked in on who we are allows us to take more risks; it allows us to have interesting partnerships that feel new and unexpected. So that’s it. We rely on great creative talent. [Photo: Courtesy of The Gap] The halo effect Brand relevance leads to brand equity, which leads to sales. Collaborations help establish that: 29% of customers who make a collab purchase are new to the brand, according to Gap. But partnerships also offer a halo effect for its core product: 20% of consumers who made a collab purchase also added a Gap item to their cart, according to the company. And partnerships have also proven important to establishing longtail business leads. Collab customers skew youngerunder age 40. I questioned friends about their current perception of Gap. Ive noticed how Zac Posen has turned the ship. But not until this Katseye ad, have I been interested in actually buying from them, a 33-year-old PR professional based in L.A. told me. Froth, says a 35-year-old Australian consultant based in New York. I loved the [Katseye] ad and walked into a Gap store for the first time in my life. I think its getting cooler again, and they have trendier things in store, a 39-year-old New York-based fashion designer told me. Ive bought a few things recently. According to Breitbard, no one partnership best captures the resurgent era of Gap. Rather, its the strategy as a whole. Great creative begets great creative in the same way with talent and bringing more talent, he says of his team and its recent output. Reflecting on the recent partnerships and distinct campaigns, he says: All of this creative is the narrative. Right now, the creative is setting the paceand its adding up to a comeback no one saw coming.
Category:
E-Commerce
When a group of men without uniforms arrested Mahmoud Khalil inside his New York City apartment building in March, Khalils wife, eight months pregnant, asked them for identification. The men would not give their names or say what agency they worked for. All they said was they were taking Khalil, a legal permanent resident, to an immigrant lockup in downtown Manhattan. The statement was misleading. Within hours, Khalil was whisked out of the state. He soon found himself in the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center. The Columbia University graduate student, who had attracted nationwide attention by leading pro-Palestinian protests on campus and was not accused of any crime, spent more than three months imprisoned in the facility. Central Louisiana is a for-profit detention center, owned and operated by Geo Group, Americas largest private prison company. Geo first opened the facility as a juvenile prison in 1998, but it was shut down a year and a half later after a federal investigation found it was so dangerous that children were mutilating themselves just to get sent to the relative safety of the infirmary. Not wanting its prison inventory to sit idle for long, Geo Group reopened it in 2007 to hold immigrants instead. Khalils imprisonment made him just one of thousands of immigrants who find themselves locked up in a Geo Group facility at any given moment. And George Zoley, the companys founder and executive chairman, sees them as a once-in-a-lifetime boon to the business he has been building for decades. We believe our company faces an unprecedented opportunity at this time, Zoley told investors in late February. He said his company was holding 15,000 people in detention for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with plans to expand its capacity to at least 32,000. That would mean more than half a billion dollars in new annual revenue, he said. The normally reserved Zoley, 75, displayed some excitement on the call. He had planned to retire next year, but now those plans were on hold, he said, and he would stay with Geo to see it through its next era. In July, Geo announced a new agreement to keep him as chairman until 2029. (Longtime Geo executive J. David Donahue took over as the companys CEO at the start of this year.) Geo Group, founded in 1984 under the name Wackenhut Corrections, operates a sprawling empire that includes some 100 private prisons, immigration detention centers, and residential reentry facilities; electronic surveillance tools; and even ground transportation and flights. On any given day some 350,000 people are being monitored, transported, or held by one of Geos entities. And well over a third of its business comes from ICE: In recent decades, Geo has become a key partner in the governments efforts to detain, monitor, and deport immigrants. Last year, Geo took in about $1 billion from its contracts with ICE, equating to 41% of its annual revenue. The company operated 16 dedicated immigrant detention centers across the country. The story of how Geo grew into a prison behemoth traces Americas fixation on locking up large numbers of people, from mass incarceration in the 1980s and 90s to mass deportation more recently. But under the Trump administration, Geo is evolving from a background player in federal enforcement into something closer to a government appendage. With ties to both U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi and border czar Tom Homan, Geo now sits at the heart of Trumps hard-line immigration machinedetaining, monitoring, and even deporting immigrants on a scale unmatched in U.S. history. The companys profits are driven not just by federal contracts but by nearly free labor that it extracts from the very people it detains. (Neither Zoley nor Geo responded to multiple calls and emails requesting comment for this article. When I approached the companys headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida, to seek an interview, I was told to leave.) The week after Donald Trumps reelection, Geos stock shot up 65%, and in the first six months of the new administration, the company announced contracts to reopen three prisons it had previously shuttered, with space to hold more than 4,500 additional immigrants. Geo expects each to bring in between $60 million and $85 million every yeara total of more than $210 million in annual revenue for the company. With the passage of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill in July, ICEs budgetpreviously around $8 billion a yearskyrocketed. The agency is earmarked to receive an additional $75 billion through 2029, including $45 billion for detention facilities, which could double the number of people it can hold, and $30 billion for arrest and removal efforts. Thats a 300% increase over its existing budget for detention, an unprecedented increase in ICEs budget authority, says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. And Geo, which already provides more than a third of ICEs detention beds, stands to benefit handsomely, along with its chairman. Zoley himself is an immigrant who came to the United States as a child. But his own history does not appear to have translated into a more humane experience for people in his prisons, where lack of adequate food, healthcare, and staffing are frequent complaints. Immigrants inside Geos Central Louisiana detention center, where Khalil was held, are treated like cattle, thrown into a room with 70 other people, says Nora Ahmed, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Louisiana and one of Khalils lawyers. Theyre kept freezing cold, and increasingly, people are starving because they are frequently not given enough to eat, she says. This is not a humane place to live. On the day in June when Khalil was released from the detention center on bail, he stood outside the gate and described his experience inside. The moment you enter this facility, your rights leave you behind, he said. So once you enter there, you see a different realityjust a different reality about this country that supposedly champions human rights and liberty and justice. Geo, From Coast to Coast: A look at Geo Groups holdings across the country Click to expand. Source: Geo Group and news reports on recent immigrant detentions Born in Florina, Greece, Zoley arrived in America in 1953 when he was 3 years old, traveling with his brother and mother, who was already an American citizen. They reunited with Zoleys father, a bartender, who had made the journey a few years earlier, and soon applied for citizenship. The family moved to Akron, Ohio, where Zoley has said that he learned English. Though Zoley doesnt speak much about his background, he brought up his childhood while testifying before Congress in 2020 on ICE detention facilities during the COVID-19 outbreak. In his remarks, he explained that he was born in a house with no plumbing or electricity. When the family immigrated to the United States, he said, we traveled by ship, landing in New York City. And Zoley has maintained his Greek roots. He and his wife, Donna, have been involved in the Greek Orthodox church near their Boca Raton home and in a nonprofit that broadcasts Greek Orthodox programming. But in his congressional testimony, he was quick to distinguish his own immigrant past from the undocumented immigrants in his detention centers. He made clear: My family received approval to immigrate to the United States. Zoley didnt set out to become a jailer of other immigrants. After getting a PhD in public administration from Floridas Nova University and working in several low-level local government jobs in the state, he joined the private security firm Wackenhut Corp. in 1981 as its manager of local government privatization. Zoley traveled around the country trying to convince small towns to do away with their public firefighters and hire Wackenhut to run fire services instead. It didnt go well. In one episode, he promised to save Dover, New Hampshire more than $100,000 a year by reducing the number of firefighters it employed and instituting 56-hour workweeks for those who remained, substantially cutting back overtime. Although the city council approved a contract with Wackenhut in 1983, a community group rallied opposition, fearing understaffing and less responsive service. Later that year, residents amended the city charter to prohibit privatizing fire services, and most of the councilmembers who approved the contract were soon voted out of office. By the mid-80s, however, a new business opportunity was emerging. With the war on drugs ramping up, the crack epidemic spreading, and states imposing ever longer sentences, jails and prisons across the country were running out of room. State and federal authorities began looking to private companies to help fill the gap. Wackenhut soon became one of the biggest private operators of jails and prisons. Its prison divisions first contract, in 1987, was a deal with federal immigration authorities to operate the Aurora Processing Center detention facility in Colorado. After that, things moved quickly. Zoley landed new contracts for jails, prisons, and detention centers, and by 1988, the companys prospects looked so strong that Wackenhuts prison division was incorporated as a subsidiary, Wackenhut Corrections Corp., with Zoley as its president. When the prison business went public in 1994 and Zoley was named CEO, it operated nearly 14,000 beds and reported 120% growth from the year before. In 2000, there were signs that the prison population numbers were flatlining; some places reported a glut in prison beds. But Wackenhuts immigration detention business kept it going. A 1996 law had vastly expanded the circumstances that could cause an immigrant to be deported, adding new categories of crimes, including nonviolent offenses, that could lead to deportation. It created a surge in demand for immigration detention facilities, according to Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center, in her book Inside Private Prisons. Detentions rose even faster after the Department of Homeland Security opened its doors in 2003, the same year that Wackenhut Corrections changed its name to Geo Group. Congress budgeted money for tens of thousands more detention beds. Geo and its main competitor, CoreCivic, were ready to cash in on the new federal funding. The private prison industry has been rescued by immigration detention policies over and over and over, says Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, a group that advocates for eliminating private prisons. As demand for Geos criminal incarceration declined, it was federal detention contracts that rescued the company, she says. Unlike typical jails and prisons, which hold people who are accused or convicted of crimes, immigrant detention centers hold people while they wait for resolution of their immigration cases. Since immigration violations are generally civil infractions, not criminal, immigration detention is not supposed to be a punishmenteven though it often feels like it is. Who in their right mind thinks being in jail is not punishment? says the ACLUs Ahmed. Just the specter of people being behind bars makes the public think they did bad things, but that generally couldnt be further from the truth. Even so, many immigrant detention centers are indistinguishable from prisons, and the experience inside is largely the same. A jail is a jail is a jail, Ahmed says. Once inside, immigrant detaineessome of them recently swept up in workplace raidsoften find themselves with a new job, one that pays as little as $1 a day, or sometimes nothing at all. Geo has made a practice of using immigrant prisoners to do much of its maintenance, janitorial, food preparation, and laundry work, in what critics say amounts to a perverse form of forced labor: Immigrants who are accused of stealing work from American citizens may end up doing similar work after ICE arrests thembut now to benefit their jailers bottom line. A substantial contributor to the profits of Geo is the low wages of the people they are able to exploit while in Geos custody, says Jacqueline Stevens, a professor at Northwestern University and founder of its Deportation Research Clinic. A federal appeals court agreed, concluding in a recent decision that by paying the immigrants $1 a day at its Tacoma, Washington, center, Geo operated its facility with just a handful of full-time staff hired from the local area, thereby saving millions of dollars that it would otherwise have spent on payroll. Geo is facing a swell of lawsuits across several states that allege the company violates state minimum wage laws and a federal statute that prohibits forced labor. In one casea class action brought by people held in Geos Aurora, Colorado, immigration detention centerthe plaintiffs claim that Geo required prisoners to clean communal areas of the prison for free. (Those who agreed to do other kinds of work, like in the laundry room, were paid $1 a day.) Prisoners who refused were threatened with solitary confinement. One plaintiff, Hugo Hernandez-Ceren, testified that when he saw people come back from solitary, They had lost a lot of weight. They wouldnt talk to other people anymore. They seemed afraid. Theythey became antisocial. With that kind of leverage, Geo can force the prisoners to do almost anything, the plaintiffs say. In addition to denying it has done anything wrong, Geo claims it is immune from lawsuitsas a government contractor, it says it enjoys sovereign immunity just like the government does. Earlier this year, it asked the Supreme Court to decide a procedural issue in the Aurora case: After the trial court denied its sovereign immunity claim, at what stage in the proceedings can the company appeal the denial? This question is so important, Geo argued, that if the high court declined to hear the case, it would allow activists to frustrate federal immigration enforcement. In June, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in its next term, which starts in October. The prisoners in the Aurora case make other allegations, too, including that Geo does not provide enough food or toiletriesand that the food it does offe can be sickening. The food was very awful. People got sick in groups lots of times, another plaintiff in the case, Alejandro Menocal, said in testimony. We would complain and nothing would really change. Allegations about dangerous food, inadequate healthcare, and insufficient staffing have cropped up again and again in lawsuits against the company over the years. In a 2019 investigation of a different Geo facility, the Department of Homeland Security found egregious food safety issues, including chicken that it said smelled foul, expired food and unlabeled meat. And Geos grossly inadequate staffing was a key contributor to systematic, egregious, and dangerous practices that the Justice Department found in 2012 at a juvenile prison that Geo operated in Mississippi. The government concluded that management was deliberately indifferent to staff sexual misconduct with the prisonerswho were boys and men aged 13 to 22and staff often used excessive force as a first response, not as a last resort. A federal judge that year called Geos prison a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions. While the prison had been operated by another firm for most of its history, the Department of Justice said conditions did not improve after Geo merged with the firm and took over operations. Key personnel, policies, and training at the prison did not change substantially, despite Geos claim that it made corrective reforms to reflect the Geo philosophy, the report stated. Widespread understaffing has long been a problem for Geo and the rest of the prison industry, says Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council. Its a very significant bottleneck for any expansion of immigrant detention, he says, because companies like Geo find it so difficult to fully staff their prisonsor, potentially, favor fewer staff for business reasons. Inadequate food and staffing may have led to one of Geos most embarrassing recent incidents. A month after it opened an immigrant detention center in Newark, New Jersey, called Delaney Hall, four detainees escaped, apparently by kicking through a wall. The escapes occurred while other detainees were protesting over food. Kathy OLeary, of the Catholic advocacy group Pax Christi New Jersey and a leading opponent of Delaney Hall, said she heard that on the night of the escape, prisoners were given only slices of bread after not being fed for 20 hours. Geo couldnt figure out how to run things properly so people could be fed at a regular time, she says. The escapees were eventually recaptured, and Geo continues operating Delaney Hall despite calls for its closure. In the face of its critics, Geo maintains that it treats its prisoners humanely and fully complies with the terms of its government contracts. To the extent that any criticism is warranted, according to Geo and its supporters, it should be directed at the government, not the company. Youre a business thats fulfilling a needa need created by politicians, says Joe Gomes, a senior research analyst at Noble Capital Markets who follows the company, echoing the arguments of Geos supporters. You dont make the laws. You dont detain the people. What you provide are beds. Geo doesnt just provide beds, though. It handles nearly every step in an immigrants deportation process, from being held in a detention facility and released subject to electronic surveillance to finally being removed from the country. Geos subsidiary Geo Transport operates a fleet of vans, buses, and airplanes for the armed, secure transportation of prisoners and immigrants, both within the U.S. and internationally. It takes prisoners to court dates and, for immigrants, carries out flights to other countries. Its an area Geo thinks will grow significantly with the rise in deportation flights under Trump, Zoley told investors earlier this year. The company expects between $40 million and $50 million more in annual revenue from flights it conducts for ICE. Through another subsidiary, BI Incorporated, Geo provides electronic surveillance of people who are not locked up but whom the government wants to trackthose on parole or immigrants awaiting a final deportation decision. They may be required to wear a GPS monitoring device or regularly check in on an app, all powered by Geo. (At press time, the companys five-year, $2.2 billion contract to provide these services for ICE was set to expire at the end of August, though Geo expected an extension.) Geos electronic monitoring is a huge opportunity, says Gomes. He explains that monitoring generates higher profit margins than detention. And with millions of immigrants who are potentially deportable but not held in detention, Geo could vastly expand its monitoringand its profits. In the first quarter of the year, Geo was monitoring an average of 186,000 people a day. But, as Zoley pointed out in his second-quarter call with investors in August, there are as many as 8 million people in the immigration system who are not detained and another 10 million who are not in the system at allall of them potential future surveillance subjects. Geos critics warn that the expansion of electronic surveillance only increases the number of people caught up in the private prison industry. Authorities have deployed it to widen the detention net, says Tylek of Worth Rises. I look at electronic monitoring as incarceration 2.0. Geos monitoring app, which some immigrants are required to keep on their phones, also gives ICE new opportunities to quickly detain people. In June, some immigrants in New York City began receiving urgent messages on their Geo apps telling them, Your ICE official has asked that you present yourself in the office to review your case this weekbut when they arrived, ICE arrested them, according to the New York news outlet The City. Zoley has kept business flowing by building close ties with politicians. In 1996, he outlined a strategy of keeping his board of directors stocked with well-connected people. Just by having their names associated with us is all we expect of them, he told a gathering of securities professionals and reporters. Among the companys directors at the time were a former U.S. attorney general, a former Illinois governor, and a retired director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Geo is just as connected today. Bondi was a lobbyist for Geo in 2019. The company paid consulting fees to Homan before he joined the administration. Daniel Bible, ICEs head of enforcement and removal operations during the Biden administration, recently became a Geo executive. And Joe Negron, the companys general counsel, joined Geo immediately after stepping down as Floridas Senate president in 2018. Zoley and the company give huge amounts to politicians. A subsidiary donated $1 million last year to Make America Great Again, a pro-Trump super political action committee (PAC), and another $500,000 to Trumps inauguration committee. Altogether, groups and individuals associated with Geo gave $3.7 million to politicians and political groups in 2024, according to OpenSecretsalmost all of it going to Trump and other Republicans. Geo asserts that it doesnt abuse its political influence. We have not advocated for or against, nor have we played a role in setting, criminal justice or immigration enforcement policies, such as whether to criminalize behavior, the length of criminal sentences, or the basis for or length of an individuals incarceration or detention, the company said in an annual report on its political activity. But its opponents say those claims are misleading. The company might not directly lobby for more detention or longer sentences, but t donates to politicians who promise those policies. You dont spend millions of dollars and expect nothing in return, Tylek says. Outside of his private prison company, Zoley appears to be the front man and songwriter for a rock band called Akron, which has released two albums, both available on streaming platforms. While Zoley hasnt acknowledged the band is his, the connections are extensive. The bands name is trademarked by a Florida company that lists Zoley as its only manager. The bands songs are credited to George ChristopherZoleys first and middle names. He grew up in Akron, and the lead singer sounds like him. (Asked about the band, one of Zoleys brothers told me, I dont know what he does in his free time.) Most of the songs are about love and loss. But one track, released in 2021, stands out. Called The Sound, it references an unnamed injustice and describes the sound of voices in pain. The refrain laments that other people are ignoring that pain. But then the singer arrives at a realization: I could just stand here, and not share the blame. Or I could choose to do what I can. Make it a better place from where I began. Zoley, who lives in a $20 million, nine-bed mansion in the exclusive Royal Palm Yacht and Country Club community in Boca Raton, received $6.4 million in total compensation last year. He holds more than $100 million in Geo stock, and he is worth about $300 million, according to an estimate in May by Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His son, son-in-law, brother, and brother-in-law all have worked for or have had lucrative contracts with the company. Does Zoley feel any qualms about getting rich from the imprisonment of other people? He has never indicated so. To the extent that he responds to criticism at all, he largely blames the media or the nature of the prison industry itself. In a 2000 interview with 60 Minutes about conditions for children in his prisons, Zoley suggested that no one should be surprised about the occasional stomach-churning allegation. Any correctional organization is subject to numerous allegations of that nature, he said. Thats part of the business; it is a tough business. The people in prison are not Sunday school children. Working in his tough business, Zoley has often said how proud he is of his company. Announcing the reopening of an 1,800-bed immigrant detention center in Georgia this June, he expressed hope that Geo could help lock up even more people. We stand ready, he said in a press release, to continue to help the federal government meet its expanded immigration enforcement priorities.
Category:
E-Commerce
Ten years ago, I did what many only dreamed of at the time: I left my three-hour Bay Area commute behind, moved to Portland, Oregon, and started working remotely. I didnt make the change because I hated my job. I made it because I wanted my life back. I was fortunate because my company at the time, Upwork, allowed me to retain my role and work from wherever Id be happiest. This was long before the pandemic drove more distributed work. That decision by my employer unlocked more focus, energy, and meaningful contributions from me than any promotion would have. Since then, Ive seen remote models that thrive, and ones that fail. And when they’re being undone I can tell you: Remote work is not the problem. The problem is leaders who dont know how to lead, especially without looking over someones shoulder. ‘Return to office’ is the new fear-based management strategy Lets cut through the corporate euphemisms. When companies walk back remote policies, its rarely about restoring culture or collaboration. Its about control. And increasingly, that control is driven by fear. Some leaders are reacting to investor pressure. Theres still a persistent, and mostly unproven, belief that in-person work leads to better performance. Others are trying to justify sunk costs in empty corporate real estate. For companies sitting on long-term leases, an empty office isnt just a cultural liability; its a financial embarrassment. I saw this dynamic play out years ago when IBM issued a return-to-office (RTO) mandate. I responded with an open letter to IBMs remote workers. Thousands of reactions showed that people want to work, deliver results, and be trusted. Instead, what they were getting was a policy that constrained their daily existence. That same story is playing out again now. In the past year, Amazon began tracking employee badge swipes. Meta mandated three days a week in office. Google tied attendance to performance reviews. And Zoom, ironically, ordered employees within 50 miles of an office to return twice weekly. It is clear that many companies are retreating from flexibility and have yet to establish the optimal work model for both their teams and business results. The data is clear: remote work works, when done right The debate shouldnt be about whether remote work can be productive, since evidence shows it is. Gallup found that employees who have flexibility, working remotely three to four days a week, are the most engaged and productive overall. Microsoft research found that remote work improves productivity for individual tasks. That said, it can weaken cross-team collaboration if not actively managed. The fix? Not forcing everyone back, but designing systems that support connection and visibility. Great remote companies are designed, not defaulted What were seeing isnt a debate over location. Its a test of whether a company actually knows how to manage. The best distributed organizations dont wing it. They know that, just as great in-person teams require effort to build, so do great distributed ones. The companies winning today arent pro-remote or pro-office, theyre pro-empowerment. They trust people to do their best work and give them the clarity, flexibility, and infrastructure to succeed. Theyre intentional, from the tools they use to the way they communicate. They rely on clear documentation over hallway chatter, use platforms like Miro, Notion, Loom, and ChatGPT to support async work, and train managers on how to empower distributed teams. They also know that human connection matters. In-person offsites, optional coworking, and team rituals help prevent isolation. Most importantly, they invest in internal communications. In remote settings, comms arent a side function, they’re the glue. Without clear information, even the most talented teams lose direction. AI talent is pushing back on ‘return to office’ To attract and retain AI talent, companies will have to support remote work, as evidenced by the fact that AI-related roles are nearly three times more likely to offer remote work options compared to other tech jobs. As companies navigate AI-driven transformation, this competition for top AI talent will continue to pushback on remote work restrictions. LinkedIn research shows that in the U.S., the number of companies with a Head of AI position has tripled in the past five years, more than doubled in just the past two, and is expected to continue its rapid growth. The AI transformation may help foster further work model transformation. What employees can do when leadership isnt getting it right If your company is still finding its best approach to an effective geographical work model, you can help improve your situation from the inside by putting more of the practices in this article into place. Champion async communication, tools, and rituals that help your team communicate better and more intentionally. Doing so not only improves your experience, it increases your value as someone who knows how to operate in flexible environments. These skills are competitive advantages because companies cannot compete effectively without mastering them. That said, if your company is failing to support remote work, or actively pushing back on your attempts to foster it, see it for what it is: a red flag. It may be a sign of reactive leadership, misaligned priorities, or financial struggles. It might be time to quietly start looking elsewhere. Yes, the market is tough. But top talent still has options. Also, theres a reality that many leaders ignore: The best talent is often remote, and some roles are nearly impossible to fill locally. When you build with location flexibility in mind, you can hire the best person for the role, not just a person who lives within commuting distance. That gives you access to deeper talent pools and helps you stand out in competitive industries where recruiting is difficult. The next wave of fallout from return-to-office mandates is already unfolding At JPMorgan, employees reportedly petitioned against RTO requirements. I recently read that satisfaction scores in areas like internal mobility, work-life balance, and health and well-being dropped. And despite a 10% increase in mandated in-office days since early 2024, actual attendance only rose by 2%. The companies that understand that in-office mandates dont drive performance, trust their people, and design systems that support how they actually work, will keep the best talent, outperform peers, and shape the future of work. Everyone else will be left managing offices nobody wants to return to.
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