Founders naturally worship speed. Move fast. Ship more. Keep the roadmap full so everyone knows you’re “building.”

I bought into that, too, until I watched “fast” turn into fragile.

Most startups don’t die because they moved too slowly. They die because they tried to do too much too soon. They stack ideas faster than they can validate them, and they wake up one day with a product that is harder to use, harder to explain and impossible to love.

I learned this while building a consumer tech business in smart glasses, a trend-heavy space where hype is constant and big platforms have the loudest megaphones. In categories like this, there’s always a new “must-have” feature and a new voice insisting you’ll be irrelevant without it. While yes, the pressure is real, so is the trap.

What saved us was a shift in habit. We started saying no more than we said yes. Not because we lacked ambition, but because we wanted adoption, not applause, and a business that could survive the cycle of trends.

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Build for utility, not applause

There’s a specific kind of pressure founders rarely admit out loud. It’s the pressure to look like you’re winning even before the customer has decided you are.

Investors want a bigger story. Industry hype wants you to match the market’s loudest assumptions. Competitors want you to play their game. And in wearables, that game often comes with the same predictable “innovation” checklist. More data collection. Deeper platform lock-in. More content. More engagement loops. More reasons for the user to stay inside someone else’s ecosystem.

Those things tend to serve everyone except the person wearing the product, who usually just wants a flexible platform that suits their day-to-day computing needs.

We felt that gravity at our company because it’s easy to confuse “what people are talking about” with “what people will use.” We spent the first two years of the company working towards AR features that sounded inevitable for the category, then realized we were building complexity that didn’t improve the everyday experience. It added friction. It blurred the purpose. It created more to explain, and less to trust.

So, we put AR on ice and focused on audio and optics. And the result? The most wearable smart glasses on the market today are delighting thousands of customers around the world.

In the wearables market — specifically smart glasses — if a device is perceived as a data-harvesting tool rather than a utility, adoption becomes a trust crisis. Unlike hardware, a trust deficit cannot be patched in a “v2.”

Building less turned out to be the smartest move we made, because it forced a simple question to become our standard: Are we building for applause, or are we building for use?

If it creates friction, cut it

Every startup needs a filter stronger than excitement. Otherwise, every new idea gets masked as “opportunity.”

For me, I only think about whether that helps someone today or not. That test kills a lot of “cool” ideas quickly because they’re only valuable for a pitch and not for the customer.

We had technical ideas that would have made us look more like the biggest tech companies in the space. They would have given us new talking points. They also would have made the product harder to trust and harder to use.

So, we anchored our product in utility. Made sure it’s easier to listen to music, easier to take phone calls and easier to handle mobile tasks. Most importantly, easier to ask AI something without pulling out your phone. We made it work with whatever phone and watch our existing and potential customers already own, rather than forcing them into a single ecosystem.

If you want to stay customer-first, make usefulness a standard that must be earned. Put every idea into a real-world scenario. If it adds steps, adds confusion, or adds reasons for the user to distrust you, it doesn’t belong, even if it looks impressive in a demo.

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How a single “no” can beat the giants

Founders love to talk about focus as if it lives in strategy decks. In reality, focus lives in leadership. It’s how you respond when the world tries to hand you a new “priority” every single day.

Treat attention with the same rigor as a CAPEX budget. If it doesn’t yield a strategic return, then the answer is no.

Especially in a small company, attention becomes the constraint long before talent does. Ten people can build something extraordinary, but ten people can also drown. The difference often comes down to decision-making. Every yes can splinter context, increase coordination and drain energy that should have been reserved for more important project execution.

That mindset shaped how we grew. We didn’t win by out-featuring giants like Meta. Our wins are built on a refusal to let industry hype dilute our product’s core purpose. That clarity, combined with focus on actual utility, propelled a small Florida-based team from an oversubscribed crowdfund to a Nasdaq IPO in just two years.

Ultimately, say yes only when it makes the product sharper, simpler and more useful. Say no to everything else. Your users will feel the difference. Your team and business will, too.

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For most of my working life at Kowloon Motor Bus Company, I have sat slightly to the side of the action. I have been involved in businesses without running them day to day, and that changed me. When you are not the one executing, you lose the comforting illusion that you are in control. At first, that is unsettling. Over time, it becomes clarifying.

Sitting on a board forces you to watch decisions travel. You make them in quiet rooms, then live with the consequences long after the papers are filed away. That distance teaches you things that are hard to learn when you are placed right in the middle of the machinery.

Here are five things I have learned from that position.

1. Decisions do not end when the meeting ends

When you run a business, there is a natural sense of closure once a decision is made. You move on to the next problem. You do not get that relief when you are on a board.

I remember approving what looked like a sensible operational change. The data was solid. The proposal had been carefully prepared. No one objected strongly. But months later, I began to notice subtle shifts — not in the reports but in the atmosphere. Conversations became shorter. Tension crept into places it had not been before. None of it was dramatic enough to trigger alarms, but it was there.

When you do not control execution, you are forced to sit with the long tail of your decisions. What looks tidy on paper can behave very differently in real life. On a board, a decision does not end when it is approved. It lingers. You do not get the reassurance of execution, only the responsibility of watching consequences unfold over time.

2. Efficiency often hides its true cost

Boards are frequently asked to approve decisions framed around efficiency. Cost savings. Optimization. Better use of talent and resources. On the surface, these all appear reasonable.

Efficiency, however, has a habit of externalizing its costs. You may not see them immediately, but they arrive eventually as burnout, turnover or declining service quality.

One discussion in particular stayed with me. A proposal promised clear savings, but only by placing sustained pressure on frontline staff. It was not unethical or reckless, just tight enough to risk tipping the balance. Sitting on the board gave me the space to ask a question that rarely appears in a deck. How long can people absorb this before something gives way?

Research done by the OECD on high-performance work systems shows this pattern clearly. Productivity gains achieved without adequate employee support often unravel over time. Boards are in a position to notice these risks early, but only if they are willing to look past the numbers.

3. People decisions are never just procedural

From a distance, people issues can look administrative. Appointments are approved, promotions are announced, and various transitions are managed. And policies exist to cover most outcomes.

One experience taught me otherwise. A senior colleague who was clearly struggling was under review. Performance was slipping, and tension was beginning to affect the team. The simplest option would have been to let formal process take its course and keep the conversation contained.

Instead, we addressed it earlier and more openly. We listened carefully and spoke directly about what was not working, with care and respect for the individual involved.

Nothing about that decision improved short-term metrics, but its impact was immediate. Meetings became more candid. Concerns surfaced sooner. People spoke more freely because they could see that difficult situations were handled fairly.

Research on psychological safety, led by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, shows that teams perform better when people believe they will be treated fairly, especially in difficult situations. Boards shape this culture more than they often realize.

4. Control and responsibility are not the same thing

Sitting on a board taught me to stop confusing control with responsibility.

I never wanted to be CEO. I knew early on that I was not suited to finance or day-to-day operations. What I could offer was continuity, communication and a visible commitment to the people who made the organization work. Sitting on the board allowed me to do that without pretending to be something I was not.

That shift changes how you define success. It becomes less about owning everything and more about ensuring the institution remains healthy after you step away.

Research into long-standing family and infrastructure businesses supports this approach. Organizations that survive across generations tend to separate ownership from management deliberately and early. Stewardship lasts longer than control.

5. The quiet decisions are the ones that endure

The most important decisions made in a boardroom rarely feel important at the time. They are seldom dramatic. More often, they involve slowing things down, choosing not to push and absorbing pressure rather than reacting to it. These decisions attract little attention, yet they quietly shape culture, trust and stability over time.

Boards are uniquely positioned to make these calls because they sit slightly removed from urgency. That distance is not a weakness. It is the point. Looking back, the decisions I am proudest of are the ones that allowed things to keep working, without noise or disruption, when no one was watching.

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Joy is rarely mentioned in serious conversations about leadership, especially when employees are exhausted and disengaged. It sounds too soft, too emotional, too unprofessional. Yet organizations that invest in authentic joy — not performative holiday photo ops or office parties — unlock a secret to performance, creativity and inclusion.

What joy really means

Joy is the sense that your spirit is vibrant and alive, a feeling of brightness and lightness. When we experience joy, we know, feel and act on what matters most, confident that more good things will follow. Research shows that joy manifests in our bodies — it releases “happiness hormones,” calms the nerves, surfaces as warmth on our faces and infuses interactions with playfulness and laughter.

Joy is essential for leaders. The fresh perspective it brings helps manage stress, boost resilience, make more inclusive decisions, build trust and imagine better futures. All of these benefits contribute to a stronger strategy and execution.

The World Economic Forum identifies the “Joy Gap”—the difference between employees’ expectations for experiencing joy and their actual experience at work. Many workplaces struggle because leaders lack a clear purpose, fail to foster healthy relationships or overlook authentic appreciation for their teams.

To understand the power of joy, it helps to define what it is not. Joy does not:

• Project false cheerfulness
• Inject forced positivity
• Ignore pain, inequity or injustice
• Support a scarcity mentality
• Expect perfection
• Accept fear-based control

It may feel inappropriate to focus on joy amid high-stakes business realities or societal suffering. Yet leaders can make space for it. By modeling and inviting joy, workplaces create environments where people feel seen, valued and free to bring their full selves to work. In doing so, joy fosters emotional safety, dignity and inclusion.

1. Joy drives engagement that drives performance

Joy is a powerful motivator. It sharpens the mind, improving decision-making and problem-solving. Positive anticipation energizes employees, helping them work harder with less stress.

A simple but underused driver of joy is authentic recognition. “Catching people doing things right” strengthens engagement and equity. Research from Dr. Meg Warren at Western Washington University shows that recognition matters deeply, especially when inclusive and intentional. How often are you acknowledging your colleagues for their achievements in ways that truly resonate?

2. Joy generates wellness

Joy supports both mental and physical health. It lowers blood pressure, strengthens immunity and triggers endorphins and dopamine — the brain’s natural mood boosters. Teams that experience joy are more resilient, less burned out and more productive.

Leaders benefit too. Experiencing joy helps regulate emotions, maintain perspective under pressure and respond more effectively to challenges—a reminder of the value of joy in both self-care and leadership.

3. Joy fuels collaboration and innovation

Innovation thrives where people feel safe, connected and energized. Joy encourages risk-taking, open communication and creative problem-solving. It unfreezes defensive behaviors and enables curiosity, experimentation and bold thinking.

Trust is foundational. Inclusive leaders build it by listening actively, caring for team well-being, collaborating to navigate challenges and supporting professional growth. Joy strengthens the relational infrastructure that drives continuous improvement and organizational excellence.

4. Joy equips employees to lead inclusively and excel

Every employee can contribute to inclusive leadership — in projects, relationships and decision-making. When joy is present, teams are motivated, aligned and high-performing. Joy bridges inclusion to excellence, fostering a culture of psychological safety, collaboration and achievement.

Signs that joy is thriving include employees who feel belonging, speak up, take thoughtful risks, collaborate well and pursue excellence without fear of bias or discrimination. This shared vitality is how organizations retain top talent and sustain high-performing teams.

Final thoughts

The true power of joy is that it reminds leaders — and teams — that even in chaos, goodness is possible. Joy reorients us toward kindness, integrity and mutual respect. Teams are stronger when they have faced challenges together, yet can still celebrate achievements and connection.

At its core, joy affirms: beyond pain and shortcomings, we are worthy of delight. Joy is not optional. It is essential to a life well-lived, a team well-managed and a company well-run. Enjoy.

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The relationship between an entrepreneur and their board of directors (BOD) is central to a venture-funded company’s success. A board is not simply a formal reporting structure; it is a governing body created by law and investment agreements. Entrepreneurs (and company executives) should focus on forging a productive partnership that leverages the board’s expertise, network and oversight to benefit the business.

Maintaining this relationship requires focused, proactive effort. Companies that treat board members as genuine resources, while aligning all stakeholders’ focus on creating value, are best positioned to succeed. Here are the steps entrepreneurs should take to cultivate a strong board relationship, turning the board into a strategic advantage rather than a mere oversight body.

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Fostering alignment through communication and transparency

One of the most critical elements in building alignment with your board is proactive, transparent communication. Business owners should not wait for scheduled board meetings to surface major issues. Surprises can significantly erode confidence. Instead, hold ongoing conversations with key board members between meetings. Many founders schedule monthly touchpoints to keep them regularly updated.

For example, in a B2B enterprise sales model with long sales cycles, you might share progress on KPIs such as sales funnel health and revenue projections.

Alternatively, if your company is rapidly developing new products or features, monthly touchpoints can focus on progress toward key milestones such as release timelines, beta feedback or customer adoption metrics. Keeping board members informed on whether milestones are on track, slipping or blocked ensures they understand the context of delays and can provide support, including introductions to technical advisors, candidate referrals or simply alignment on revised expectations.

These recurring updates ensure your board members are never surprised in a formal BOD meeting because issues and progress will have already been discussed and addressed.

In a similar fashion, teams should also regularly share the small wins with their board on the path to big achievements. This will help board members understand the context of large projects and the work that goes into each one. In turn, the board develops stronger pattern recognition for the critical steps involved in reaching goals, which will result in their being able to help steer the business in the right direction.

Leveraging the board as a strategic resource

A healthy board relationship goes beyond a reporting structure. Directors should instead be engaged as strategic partners who can help address specific challenges. Their networks are invaluable for introductions to potential customers, talent or partners.

In venture-funded companies, investor-directors also have insights from their many different portfolio companies. They can offer insights informed by this broader market experience. The key is to approach them with specific, well-framed “asks” rather than vague problems: provide background on the challenge, share what you’ve already tried and state clearly what help you need.

This preparation enables directors to provide targeted, actionable advice. Remember: Your board wants you to succeed.

Maintaining professionalism and efficiency

Respecting directors’ time is another way to build engagement. Your board meetings should be professional, start and end on time and stay focused on the most important issues. Discussions should have the right level of detail — enough to frame the issue and enable smart decision-making, but not mired in tangents or minutiae.

This discipline shows that the entrepreneur values the board’s expertise and time, further reinforcing engagement.

Driving engagement and value creation

Boards add the most value when they understand context, not just raw data. Don’t just give them a dashboard to look at. Instead, business owners should frame the data they present with contextual, helpful narratives. What’s driving the numbers, what risks exist and where is support needed?

In addition, rotating “deep dive” topics across meetings gives directors visibility into key areas of the business. These detailed explorations provide board members with a solid understanding of how all the interconnected components of the company and the various teams work together. This, in turn, empowers the board to offer valuable suggestions for improvement, drawing on their experiences with other companies that might have faced a similar problem or that excel in certain areas where your company is challenged.

This collaborative approach draws on board members’ extensive experience with other companies and creates a feedback loop for improvement.

Ultimately, remember that the board views the company through the lens of an investment. Alignment around increasing company value is what keeps everyone working toward the same goal.

Building and sustaining a strong relationship with your board of directors is an ongoing commitment to transparency, engagement and respect. By communicating proactively, leveraging directors as strategic resources and keeping meetings disciplined and value-focused, entrepreneurs can transform their board from a compliance requirement into a powerful ally.

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This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features Ted Raad, 37, the Nashville, Tennessee-based founder of influencer marketing and management company Trend. The agency represents more than 130 creator clients and secures approximately $80 million in brand deals annually. Responses have been edited for length and clarity. 

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What was your day job or primary occupation when you started your side hustle?
I was working at Hewlett-Packard in IT Mergers and Acquisitions. I was reviewing contracts and negotiating deals, so that part of the business was familiar to me when I started Trend.

When did you start your side hustle, and where did you find the inspiration for it?
I started Trend on January 7, 2019. The inspiration came from my wife, Dede, who was growing as a creator at the time. She signed with an agency that pushed campaigns that didn’t align with her brand. When she declined those deals, the relationship became uncomfortable. I saw a gap in the industry, and I wanted to build something that prioritized alignment, transparency and doing what was right for the creator.

Understanding creator rates and deal structures

 What were some of the first steps you took to get your side hustle off the ground? How much money did it take to launch?
I started by working with my wife and a few of her friends to understand creator rates, brand expectations and how deals were structured. I worked with a lawyer to put contracts in place, signed my first creators and began building brand relationships. My only startup costs were a laptop and internet. It was fully bootstrapped.

Are there any free or paid resources that were especially helpful in starting and running this business?
The most helpful paid resource was hiring an executive coach. Having someone with experience helped me think through hiring, time management and financial decisions. It gave me confidence and clarity during the early growth stages.

If you could go back and change one process or approach, what would it be?
I waited too long to hire. I tried to do everything myself to stay lean. Even when revenue started coming in, I delayed bringing on help. Hiring earlier would have saved time, stress and burnout. Once I hired strong people who believed in what we were building, the business changed quickly.

Navigating challenges with confidence and communication

What is something particularly challenging or surprising about this type of business?
There is no 9 to 5; you are always on. Early mornings, late nights, weekends. You are serving creators and brands constantly. You are never really the boss. You work for your clients, and you have to be confident enough to guide them while always acting in their best interest.

Can you recall a time when something went very wrong? How did you fix it?
Early on, I took on too many creators without enough internal support. Communication slowed and quality suffered. I owned the mistake, had honest conversations with clients and changed how we operate. That experience is why we now maintain one of the lowest talent-to-manager ratios in the industry. I won’t let that happen again.

How long did it take to see consistent monthly revenue? What does growth look like now?
It took about six months to see consistent revenue, largely due to 60 to 90 day payment terms. Early growth was fast, around 200% year over year. Today, growth is more consistent at 20% to 25% annually, with a strong focus on reinvesting in the team and long-term stability. I’m extremely proud that Trend has grown into a multi-division company approaching 100 employees with offices in Nashville and Houston. 

Revenue has increased at double-digit rates year-over-year, and our creator roster now tops 130 active creators, securing roughly $80 million in brand deals a year. Trend Social, our brand division, more than doubled in size in the past year, while Trend Elevate and Trend Athletes have expanded opportunities for both creators and brands. Beyond financial growth, I have focused on building a strong leadership team and systems that allow the company to scale while keeping our creator-first culture intact.

From a simple idea to a thriving business

What do you enjoy most about running this business?
Finding new opportunities for creators beyond traditional brand deals and helping them build additional income through podcasts, investing in brands, media opportunities or projects that extend beyond social platforms. Overall, I’m most proud of building a company that reflects my values while staying grounded in my family and faith. Trend started as a simple idea and has grown into a thriving business with nearly 100 employees and multiple divisions, but what matters most to me is creating a culture where people feel genuinely supported and where our success drives real impact in the community. I also take immense pride in raising three kids with my wife, Dede — with a fourth on the way — and in keeping family at the center of every decision, even as the company continues to grow.

What is your best piece of specific, actionable business advice?
Be realistic before you start. Understand what revenue actually looks like and how long it takes to get there. Once you commit, go all in. Not part-time effort, full commitment. Mentors help later, but early success comes from knowing your daily role and executing consistently.

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As an Asian-American kid growing up to an immigrant mom in North Carolina, I was taught to follow the rules (no exceptions). I was a Boy Scout, graduated top of my class and was hired by Goldman Sachs immediately after graduating undergrad. I had followed what I thought was the “right” path. I was living in the greatest city in the world (New York City, of course) and working at one of the best companies in the world … but none of it felt right.

Like many others in corporate America, I walked away from the high-powered banking job. Not because I couldn’t do it, but because it wasn’t my dream. Spending 100 hours a week working for someone else felt like living in the wrong skin.

After leaving Goldman, I went to Stanford Business School and started thinking about what’s next. Like everyone else in 2020, I was making stupid dance videos on TikTok when I realized I could also use social media to promote myself, my skills and whatever job I would land next.

Instead, what I found was much more meaningful: an online creator community authentically sharing their talents with the world.

The passion of these creator-entrepreneurs, the businesses they build and the way they bring people together through their shared digital community is, I believe, the essence of today’s American Dream. Regardless of generational differences, the American workers I talk to are (for the most part) no longer motivated by ladder climbing; they — we — are motivated by sharing our knowledge and expertise with others, and also making a decent living while doing it.

Dare to dream

What I also found among fellow creators was a web of disparate, broken systems, a misunderstanding of how to build true online growth, or even how to create an email campaign. Everything felt harder than it needed to be, none of the tools connected, and much of it was overwhelming (and overpriced) for new entrepreneurs.

I had a bit of programming experience, so I created and launched the first version of my company, Stan, in 2021. The beta launch was very basic but brought together many of the pain points my fellow creators and I were experiencing. We made it a one-stop shop, with everything a creator needs conveniently packaged and designed in one place.

Next, I convinced a few fellow content creators to let me set up their online brand presence, and the first creator saw an instant sale of their online course (for $999 no less) overnight — with no marketing and no other outreach except the creator’s own work up until that point.

The idea was simple: Make it easier for people to get paid for the work they were already doing. Stan wasn’t built to teach creators how to monetize. It was built to remove the friction altogether.

The business model proved to fill a unique gap in the marketplace, and building Stan became my full-time job. Today, five years in, we have more than 80,000 active creators on the platform, who have collectively made more than $400 million, and we even have backing from Gary Vaynerchuk and Steven Bartlett.

The everyday entrepreneur

What I’ve seen over the past five years is the creator economy becoming the default path for anyone looking to build something of their own. What defines a “creator” in 2026 can be anyone from a fitness coach, a special education teacher or a mechanic. These “non-traditional” influencers are moving into creatorship to truly own their brand, build their community and monetize what they know on their own terms.

It’s these everyday entrepreneurs, the ones working toward their dream and taking their ideas to the next level, that continue to motivate me and my team. Among these new creators, the ones who succeed typically have two key things:

1. They understand the needs their personal and professional brand fulfills: The most successful creators have clearly identified a gap in the market for their product or services and identified how they can help fill that need.

2. They share their experience authentically: You have to believe in your dream to build it, so why not share your story and experience authentically? Being true to yourself helps audiences connect with you and understand the “why” behind what you do.

Do good, and do well

When it comes to my “why,” like many other immigrant children in the U.S., I grew up with very little. While working at Goldman, I realized that I needed my work to be fulfilling (no, working at an investment bank didn’t check that box). I wanted my work to be meaningful and to give back to the greater good in some way.

Through my current work with Stan and the creator community, I’m able to directly help others build their dreams and monetize their businesses, turning their creative passions into a livable wage.

While many are still burning the candle at both ends, creating their businesses while also being parents, caregivers, partners and working one, two (or even three) other jobs, they’re working towards their dream of a successful future business built on their experience and creativity. If that doesn’t sound like “living the dream,” I don’t know what does.

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Could the very thing that drives us be what’s missing from today’s workforce?

It’s often quoted that we spend a third of our lives at work — 90,000 hours. True or not, the haunting figure captures a growing dissatisfaction with the status quo that many of us already feel.

Done with waiting for the clock to strike five and the padded four walls of a cubicle, Americans jumped ship from corporate America two years later in record-breaking numbers during what’s now called The Great Resignation.

For some, it was retirement or relocation, but for others it was a new start, a way to get out of the stale business roles that had nearly cost them their sanity and to find their voice in a world where they’d lost theirs.

While The Great Resignation may be behind us, it’s no secret that the term “employee engagement” has practically become an oxymoron, with engagement now down to a paltry 21% for employees and 27% for managers. But why is that? Should we blame Herman Miller for the cubicle farms that made us feel like subjects in a psych experiment gone wrong, or Henry Ford for the mind-numbing eight-hour shift or the Industrial Revolution’s 80-hour weeks for making America think a “mere” forty was somehow acceptable?

Productivity and long hours aside, who or what is driving the disengagement, and is there any hope of resuscitating the American workforce, or should we even try?

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The case for creativity

Part of the problem behind the quiet quitting epidemic may be the pay, the hours or the windowless walls, but could the bigger issue with employee unhappiness be that the roles we were handed forced us to leave a part of ourselves behind?

Could the confines of corporate America have kept us from producing anything that was a reflection of us, our voice, or the way we saw the world?

In other words, what if our misery stemmed not from the jobs themselves but because doing what we do best—bringing what we alone had to offer to the table — was off the table? Quite literally and figuratively fenced in, our creative juices were drying up before we could even clock in.

Over the past 14 years of working in marketing, I’ve seen one thing consistently breathe new life into how my team and I approach our work—the art of creating.

Recent studies show that people who embrace their creative side are undoubtedly happier. Why? Because creativity fosters not just a sense of agency and empowerment, but also resilience to stress. Before you reach for that paintbrush, keep in mind that creativity comes in many forms — whether crafting clever ad copy, pioneering a new perspective or showing up in the world in a way that’s so you, so innovative, it would make your younger self proud.

Lest this quest to embrace our creative side sound like little more than a callback to the free-spirited ethos of the 70s, happy people are not only healthier, they’re more productive, and increase company value by nearly double that of their counterparts.

Perhaps this quest for happiness and this hunger for self-expression explain the rise of the influencer culture today — a league of creatives vying to be heard on their terms. Tired of not having the artistic agency they longed for, they built communities that celebrated what they had to offer. Sure, at first glance, the monetized, over-stimulating reels, shorts and feeds feel nearly narcissistic in nature, but take a closer look and it’s people doing what they do best — creating.

To brands, the larger-than-life, addictive nature of the digital world has proven to be a robust revenue stream. With a projected $37 billion spent on influencers last year, creator ad spend has become a strategic performance driver for brands to drive engagement and, ultimately, sales.

By “sharing the pen” and introducing voices outside their own, brands can leverage trust that’s already been hard-earned without having to do the brunt of the work.

The case for authenticity

Influencer-brand matchmaking may be love at first sight, but a shotgun partnership could also come with long-term consequences. Pick an influencer with jaw-dropping numbers who’s not the right fit, and your customers will be wondering which intern was left to run your marketing department.

Pick the right influencer, but feed them a rigid script that strips away their creative autonomy, and their audiences — your potential customers — will feel the disconnect. Either way, it’s not just your budget that will take the hit. With your customers’ trust eroded, you’ll be left trying to claw back your credibility.

This “match-up hypothesis” of partnering with the right influencer is where the biggest challenge with strong brand-creator partnerships lies. Engaged and loyal digital communities are formed not just by influencers who produce an endless stream of content, but by those who use their storytelling to provide their audiences with an authentic, personalized experience rooted in transparency. Without that transparency, even the best brand partnerships leave audiences with an unsavory “sold to” aftertaste.

Instead of turning to mega-platforms with seemingly endless reach, many social-first brands are turning their efforts to niche markets — micro or mid-tier creators who are already producing content that’s a natural fit for their offerings. That means saving our starstruck moments for the red carpet, and instead capitalizing on the parasocial relationships cultivated within influencer communities, where creators are already shaping their audiences’ buying behavior.

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The case for humanity

With the rise of influencers comes an unwelcome truth that’s become glaringly apparent — we can’t always trust what we see or read. It used to be just influencers pretending multi-million-dollar content homes were their own, but today products of AI fill our social feeds, from deep fakes to ChatGPT-generated content, to rage bait videos. Even with over half of consumers able to spot AI-generated copy, it’s hard to know what to believe.

Influencers and brands may assume that AI’s biggest user, Gen Z, will overlook the lack of transparency, but they won’t. In fact, already notably critical of advertising, Gen Z has emerged as one of AI’s most discerning skeptics — calling brands that use AI for advertising everything from “inauthentic” to “fake.” Take the backlash from Guess’s AI-generated model ad or Coca-Cola’s latest Christmas commercial, for example.

As the demand for authenticity and trust continues to grow among younger generations, it’s important to remember that trust starts with us and that nothing can ever replace the human element. Will 90% of content become AI-generated as some have predicted, or will we create a different reality?

If the product of AI will always be little more than a response to a keystroke, then AI may be able to support humanity’s self-expression, but it can never replace it.

We are the ones who create to say “I was here,” to leave the world better than we found it. At best, AI will always be a mere echo of us, a shadow of the beauty we alone can release into the world.

In time, we may find that the future of work isn’t really about advances in technology or brand partnerships, but about cultivating environments where people are encouraged to move beyond their job descriptions and create a new future for themselves and the businesses they serve.

Life is art. We are the artists. As economist John Maynard Keynes once said, what’s stopping us from “cultivat(ing) into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself”?

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Most CEO content sounds the same now.

Scroll through LinkedIn, and you’ll see it. The same phrases, the same structures, the same takes repackaged with slightly different headshots. That’s what happens when leaders outsource their thinking and writing to AI. The content is technically fine, but it’s forgettable and interchangeable — and it’s doing nothing to build trust or differentiate the person behind it.

This would matter less if visibility were still optional. But for CEOs, it isn’t anymore.

Our team members expect us to be vocal on societal issues. Our customers look us up online before they buy, and what they see shapes their trust in our businesses. Investors pay close attention to how we think, speak and show up, especially in moments of change or crisis.

Whether we like it or not, we now shape the reputation of our companies through our own public presence as much as through the performance of our organizations.

Personal branding has become part of the CEO’s job, whether we like it or not. Those who continue to disregard it will watch their market share shrink as leaders at competing organizations invest in building visibility through thought leadership. And those who do it poorly, flooding feeds with content that could have come from anyone, are doing more harm than good.

The CEOs who are getting this right in 2026 are doing things differently. Here’s what that looks like.

1. Random acts of content are being replaced by a strategic approach

We have all seen CEOs misspeak publicly. We have all watched the crying CEO ridiculed for his failed attempt at vulnerability. Public visibility carries real risk, and more leaders are waking up to that reality.

The smart ones are getting intentional. Rather than showing up ad hoc on social media or industry stages, they’re building their visibility through strategic frameworks with professional guidance. This keeps them in the space of thought leadership rather than opinion leadership, and it lowers the risk of misinterpretation, overexposure and public scrutiny.

The nuance that matters here is serving the business without becoming its spokesperson. CEOs who are doing this well in 2026 share lessons and challenges thoughtfully in a way that humanizes them, while still maintaining responsibility for the people and organizations they lead.

2. AI is separating the real thought leaders from … everyone else

Audiences can feel the difference. They may not be able to articulate it, but they know when content lacks depth, when it sounds like it could have come from anyone, when there’s no real person behind the words.

That’s what happens when CEOs outsource their thinking and writing to AI. The content sounds generic (because it is!) and does more to damage their reputation than build it. AI is an excellent aid for research, organization and idea development. But the thinking itself and the writing itself need to stay human. That is the true differentiator.

CEOs who treat AI as an assistant rather than an author will be in the minority in 2026, and that minority will stand out. The bar for authentic thought leadership is getting lower because so few leaders are willing to clear it.

3. Quality is taking priority over volume

Over the past few years, many leaders experimented with frequent posting across platforms. They quickly learned that high output often diluted their message quality and left them exhausted in the process. The constant grind of daily content that says very little wasn’t sustainable and wasn’t working.

In 2026, CEOs are favoring fewer moments of visibility and investing more thought into each one. A well-considered LinkedIn post once a week rather than every day. A strong long-form article every other month rather than weekly. A meaningful podcast interview once a month instead of four. Each carries enough weight to build reputation on its own.

The leaders who are winning are the ones who have something meaningful to say and take their time saying it. For many of us, this is music to our ears.

4. Podcast guesting is winning over podcast hosting

The math on this one is hard to argue with.

Over the past year or two, many CEOs experimented with launching their own podcasts. Most quickly recognized the operational demands involved and the uneven return on time invested. Hosting a show is a real commitment, and for many leaders, it simply wasn’t worth it.

Guest appearances are a different story. A single well-matched interview takes about an hour and yields visibility across Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and the host’s owned channels. It boosts SEO and AEO for the organization. And it generates raw material that can be repurposed into articles, short-form video and LinkedIn posts for months afterward.

For time-strapped CEOs, that kind of return on a single hour makes guesting the visibility channel of choice.

And perhaps most importantly — guesting on a podcast cannot be outsourced. This means that it’s now one of the most authentic and human ways of building visibility and thought leadership.

Where this leaves us

These four trends point to a shift in how Gen X CEOs are thinking about personal branding. We’re past the era of “post everything everywhere and hope something sticks.” The leaders getting it right have realized that visibility done well takes less time and produces better results than visibility done on autopilot.

This kind of strategic presence strengthens trust, lowers risk, supports the long-term health of the business and builds thought leadership in ways that benefit us individually and the organizations we lead. The CEOs who figure this out now are benefiting from a real advantage over those still watching from the sidelines or jumping on the generic train of mass-produced machine-generated content.

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I have spent a lot of time watching smart teams do the wrong thing for very rational reasons. When leaders talk about AI risk, the conversation usually collapses into testing, with bigger eval suites, red teams and synthetic data.

The instinct is understandable. Testing feels concrete. You can point to dashboards. You can say you ran 10,000 cases instead of 1,000, and it looks like progress.

The problem is that this approach quietly assumes something false: That you can test your way to safety. There are infinitely many possible inputs to any nontrivial AI system. No matter how large your test suite is, it is still a rounding error.

At best, testing tells you what happened on a narrow slice of reality. It does not tell you what cannot happen. For leaders, that distinction is everything.

This is a decision about how you manage risk in systems you’re responsible for and that are already reshaping how capital, attention and value flow, even if you do not fully understand them yet.

Sampling feels like control, but it’s not

Executives are used to operating in environments where sampling works. Instead of interviewing every customer, a leader might talk to a handful and infer broader patterns.

In systems with bounded behavior, this is efficient. But AI systems are not stable in that way.

A modern model is a large, adaptive software artifact. Small changes in input can produce qualitatively different behavior.

When you test such a system, you are making a probabilistic claim. You are saying, “We did not see a failure in these cases, so we believe failures are unlikely.”

That belief has failed before.

In Australia, the federal government deployed an automated welfare debt recovery system, later known as Robodebt. It had been reviewed, scaled and used across hundreds of thousands of cases. On paper, it appeared to be working.

What it had not done was rule out a specific class of invalid assumptions about how income could be averaged over time. That single design flaw produced false debt notices, ultimately forcing the program’s shutdown.

This is the core problem with sampling. It tells you what happened in the cases you tried, but nothing about what cannot happen.

Leaders care about tail risk. They care about the rare cases that matter most, because those are the ones that trigger regulatory scrutiny, reputational damage and real-world harm. A single bad output can outweigh thousands of successful tests.

If your safety strategy relies entirely on testing, you are accepting that certain failures are inevitable and hoping they do not happen on your watch.

This is a risk-management bet

The right question for leaders is not, “What is the best AI safety technique?” It is, “Where should we invest if we want fewer catastrophic surprises?”

That is why I think formal methods matter. Formal methods are not magic. They do not prove that a system will never do anything bad. That framing is a category error.

What they do is narrower and more powerful. They let you make exact claims about specific properties of a system and let you say that, within a defined boundary, certain classes of behavior are impossible.

That is fundamentally different from testing.

Testing asks, “Did this happen in the cases we tried?” Formal methods ask, “Can this happen at all, given these constraints?” Leaders should recognize the difference immediately. One is reactive. The other is preventative.

For example, Rust did not make software bug-free. What it did was eliminate entire classes of errors by construction. Memory safety issues went from being something you tested for to something the system would not allow.

That shift changed how teams thought about risk. They stopped playing whack-a-mole with bugs after deployment and started preventing them before code shipped.

Fewer surprises, clearer guarantees

From a leadership perspective, the value of formal methods shows up in three places:

1. First, they force clarity.

To apply any formal technique, you have to specify what you care about.

• What inputs are in scope?
• What behaviors are forbidden?
• What invariants must hold?

Many AI failures happen because nobody was explicit about boundaries.

2. They reduce surface area.

If you can formally guarantee that a certain pathway cannot activate under certain conditions, you do not need to test every edge case related to that pathway. You have collapsed an infinite space into a finite claim.

3. They enable credible communication.

When something goes wrong, leaders are asked hard questions.

• What happened?
• Why did it happen?
• Could it happen again?

“We tested extensively” is not a satisfying answer. Being able to say, “This behavior is impossible within this defined scope, and here is why,” is much stronger.

None of this requires formal methods to be ready at full scale today. Leaders invest in directions. The question is whether you want your organization to build muscle around pre-deployment guarantees or to double down on post-hoc testing forever.

Every time I look at large, safety-critical systems, the lesson is the same. The most effective risk reduction comes from eliminating entire classes of failure early, not from catching individual failures late.

AI will not be different.

Choosing where to be early

There is a temptation to wait, because formal methods sound academic, the tooling is immature and the talent pool is small.

All of that is true, but it was also true for many technologies that later became table stakes.

Leaders are paid to make asymmetric bets, and this is one of them. You can keep pouring resources into larger test suites and hope that covers the risk you care about, or you can start investing in approaches that give you stronger guarantees, even if they are not yet perfect.

The payoff is confidence. Confidence that when you deploy a system, you understand what it can and cannot do, that when something breaks, you are not flying blind and that you are managing AI like the engineered system it is, not like a black box you poke and pray.

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Walk into any company’s office, and you will know something about its leadership before a single word is exchanged. The office space tells a story, and employees, customers and prospective employees can read this story quite accurately. They see the old carpet, the mismatched furniture and the difference between spaces designed with intention and those designed with aversion.

Office remodels aren’t just about aesthetics. They indicate priorities, intent and growth trajectories. When leaders invest in the physical environment, they are making a statement about where the company is headed.

The office as a leadership statement

Your office environment reflects your leadership mindset, whether you intend it to or not. There’s a big difference between reactive maintenance (i.e., fixing things when they break) and proactive and purposeful design that anticipates needs and creates possibilities.

Employees notice things, and when they see unkempt and neglected spaces, they conclude how much leadership values their experience. On the other hand, purposeful and strategically designed spaces are a strong statement on the leadership’s value of long-term and value-based growth.

Focus starts with the environment

Cluttered, outdated offices don’t just look bad; they actively erode concentration. Bad lighting strains eyes and saps energy. Bad acoustics fracture attention across dozens of micro-interruptions. Inefficient layouts force unnecessary movement and create bottlenecks that fragment workflow.

The physical environment directly impacts cognitive performance. Leaders who genuinely care about focus design for it. They consider:

• Lighting quality: Natural light where possible, task lighting that reduces eye strain

• Acoustic control: Quiet zones for deep work, soundproofing for collaboration areas

• Flow and layout: Intuitive pathways that minimize friction and interruption

• Environmental factors: Temperature and air quality that affect alertness

These aren’t luxuries. They are the table stakes for enabling sustained concentration that drives meaningful output.

Productivity is often a design problem, not a people problem

When productivity lags, the instinct is to examine performance or culture. But often, the real culprit is physical friction — the invisible drag created by suboptimal environments. Employees waste minutes searching for meeting rooms. They lose focus in open layouts with no acoustic separation.

Smart remodels eliminate these inefficiencies. Creative remodel designs that inspire productivity demonstrate how intentional spatial choices create environments where work flows naturally rather than requiring constant workarounds.

This shift requires viewing productivity through a design lens. When the space works with people instead of against them, performance improvements follow.

Office remodels as growth signals

Growing companies typically outgrow their spaces before they realize it. Teams squeeze into undersized conference rooms. New hires inherit makeshift desks in corners.

An office remodel signals more than improved aesthetics:

• Confidence in future demand: Investment reflects belief in sustained growth

• Commitment to team scale: Making room means planning to fill it with talent

• Long-term operational planning: Leaders think quarters and years ahead

Growth-led remodels anticipate needs and create capacity. Cosmetic upgrades apply fresh paint to fundamentally unchanged infrastructure. Research on scaling businesses emphasizes that physical space must evolve with operational expansion.

What high-growth companies get right about space

High-growth companies understand that office design must serve dual purposes: enabling deep focus and facilitating collaboration. They create flexible layouts that adapt as teams evolve, rather than rigid configurations that become obsolete within months.

These organizations invest in technology integration, modular furniture systems and multi-use spaces. According to research on workplace design, companies that prioritize adaptable environments report higher satisfaction and retention rates.

The key is designing for optionality — spaces that can shift from individual work to team collaboration without requiring major reconfiguration.

The cost of delaying an office remodel

“We’ll fix it later” is one of the most expensive phrases in business. The opportunity costs compound: lost productivity, declining morale and talent choosing competitors with environments that signal investment and seriousness.

Hidden inefficiencies accumulate. Minutes lost to poor layout become hours each week. Collaboration stifled by inadequate meeting spaces translates to slower decision-making. These costs don’t appear on balance sheets, but they are real and substantial.

Remodeling without disrupting momentum

The fear of disruption keeps many leaders from pursuing necessary remodels. But phased upgrades allow businesses to improve incrementally, completing sections while others remain operational.

Successful remodels require clear leadership communication. Teams need to understand the timeline and the vision. When leaders frame the remodel as an investment in the team’s success, employees tolerate short-term disruption more readily.

Office design as a retention and recruitment tool

Top talent interprets workspace quality as a proxy for organizational seriousness. Candidates walk through offices and make snap judgments about whether they want to spend their days there. In fact, the best and brightest want to know that the physical space they will be working in is appealing and comfortable, as they’ll be spending the majority of their time there.

The office functions as both a brand signal and a trust indicator. It answers unspoken questions: Does this company invest in its people? Is leadership thinking long-term?

Turning physical space into strategic leverage

The most effective office remodels align design decisions with business goals. This means making choices through an ROI lens rather than pure aesthetics. Every square foot should support focus, enable collaboration or strengthen culture.

Smart leaders ask: What will we need this space to do in 18 months? How can we build in flexibility for unknown future requirements? What investment now will save us from costly retrofits later?

Office remodels are not vanity projects. They are strategic statements about priorities, confidence and commitment. Leaders who invest in space invest in people and performance. They recognize that environment shapes behavior and that physical proof of forward-thinking leadership matters.

Growth-oriented leadership leaves physical evidence. It’s visible in spaces designed for both focus and collaboration, in infrastructure that supports rather than hinders and in environments that tell everyone: We are building something that lasts.

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