In the defining years of American business, founding CEOs were virtually synonymous with the companies they led. Walt Disney was Disney incarnate; Dale Carnegie came to represent the steel industry itself. These figures were not just company leaders; they were the gravitational center around which entire industries revolved.
Those days are gone. Though we still have echoes in modern chief executives like Tim Cook or Richard Branson, these figureheads, too, are becoming rarer. In fact, the average CEO tenure is the lowest in recent history. Over the past three years, CEO turnover has reached record highs, with 58 leadership changes in the S&P 500 alone. This pattern has prompted the C-suite to focus on a new leadership strategy: employing interim CEOs.
Eighteen percent of all new CEOs are interim appointments compared to 7% just a year ago. For most, theyre still seen as a lame duck or hired gun, sent to take care of the companys rudimentary duties; at best, a suboptimal stand-in for a proper leader. The savviest companies, however, are no longer relegating interim CEOs to a holdover role. Theyre instead empowering them to be dynamic doers, essential to transforming organizations and breaking stale patterns and enacting rapid, bold changes.
Interim CEOs Have Unique Opportunities To Enact Change
Interims occupy a liminal space in the risk-averse, C-suite business world. Their temporary position frees them from the common pitfalls others so frequently get stuck in: politicking, backslapping, and monitoring rather than doing. With the right instincts and a good plan, however, the best interim CEOs can assess internal dynamics, align fellow leaders, and make key decisions while laying the groundwork for their successor or becoming permanent installations themselves.
When James M. Cornelius was appointed Interim CEO of Bristol-Myers Squibb in 2006, he spearheaded expansive strategic partnerships and top-down initiatives to reduce costs and risk. His eight-month interim period was marked with such focus and urgency that it earned him full-time tenure, where he remained for years. Besides just righting the ship, he made decisions quicker than a permanent CEO ever could have. Whereas the previous three years saw negative YoY growth, Cornelius got BMS back on track with a near-double-digit YoY revenue increase.
With the confidence of their fellow executives and shareholders, interim CEOs have the opportunity to move forward with the expectation of growth and new horizons, free from traditional time-pressures and deadlines. They can manage change in the C-suite, making tough-but-necessary decisions without bias.
When Chipotles wunderkind CEO Brian Niccol departed for Starbucks, many wondered who could possibly follow his historic tenure. Rather than a superstar CEO from another organization, Chipotle brought on Scott Boatwright, an interim CEO from their own rank-and-file. Leaning on his prior COO experience, Boatwright erased bottlenecks and streamline decision-making from the top down, using his unique skill set to maintain prior momentum for a rock-solid year-end. These successful initiatives landed him a solidified seat atop the fast casual empire, where he still remains.
In both of these cases, a new permanent executive may have felt pressured to keep the ship on autopilot rather than turn the wheel. With interim CEOs, these companies gave their leaders the freedom to make substantive change, resulting in both a healthy balance sheet and a naturally proven successorthe two foremost goals of any leadership transition.
Interim Tenure, Genuine Risk
Make no mistake, theres a myriad of reasons companies choose to play it safe by limiting the purview of interim CEOs. Leadership missteps dont just jeopardize the new leader but can also create long-term impacts way beyond their tenure.
Take Reddits interim CEO Ellen Pao, who took the helm in 2014 when the company was on a steady path to an IPO. Pao implemented massive, top-down changes to the sites rules and guidelines that went against Reddits founding ethos, causing upheaval among hundreds of thousands of users. She fired popular long-time employees, losing internal trust and community support alike.
While Pao may have started the trouble, it didnt end with her. As is often the case, a period of poor management led to cultural decay that lingered for years. Reddits cofounder had to come in and right the company’s ship over the ensuing half decade.
Temporary Leaders Need Long-Term Vision
As CEO tenure continues to shorten and transitions become a fact of life, interim leadership appointments will become the ultimate inflection point for an organizations future. Not every interim CEO appointment is doomed to failfar from itbut Reddits woes show why executive buy-in and clear company goals are essential.
Theres a term in executive circles for this: leadership alignment.
Successful companies let the interim CEO take charge but also have everyone else in the C-suite define their boundaries and establishes immutable values by which they must still abide. Top organizations will even allow stakeholders and employees to weigh in on those values to inspire increased confidence in the new head honcho.
Some of the biggest companies have proven leadership alignment works. When Target was flailing in 2014, longtime executive John Mulligan stepped in to lead them into the future. As he said himself, the strong support and clear guidance from other executives was precisely what he needed.
Interim no longer has to mean ineffective. During a period of leadership transition, the ship still has to go somewhere.
So, the companies that give even their temporary leaders the mandate to navigate uncharted waters will sail ahead, faring far better than those who force them to drift with the tide.
Research is clear that multitasking significantly undermines career progress despite its popularity in modern workplaces. But why does multitasking harm workplace productivity? And how can you maintain concentration to get more accomplished? Below, experts share proven strategies that replace multitasking habits with intentional productivity systems to improve focus and work quality.
No-Stacking Rule Drives Meaningful Project Completion
Trying to multitask is the workplace version of spinning plates . . . except they all end up smashed!
In my experience, multitasking is the fastest way to look busy while achieving very little. On the surface, it feels productive because you’ve got emails on the go, projects open, and calls happening, but the reality is that you’re only scratching the surface of each task. I used to have five or six projects all sitting at around 30% complete. It gave me the illusion of progress but left me with very few meaningful results.
The real issue with multitasking is the constant switching cost. Every time you change from one task to another, your brain has to reorient itself. You lose rhythm and you lose quality. Instead of giving something your full attention, you end up spreading yourself so thin that nothing gets finished to the standard it could. Productivity isn’t about activity, it’s about completion and impact. That’s what multitasking robs you of.
The strategy that changed everything for me is what I call the No-Stacking Rule. It’s very simple: I don’t allow myself to have more than two tasks in progress at any one time. This means that if something is sitting at 30% complete, I have to finish it before I can start something new with no exceptions. Easier said than done though!
It creates a discipline where I’m forced to think carefully about what I start, because once it’s on my plate, I’m committed to taking it through to completion. This rule stops me from scattering my attention across multiple half-done jobs and instead drives me to deliver tangible results.
A specific example: I once found myself with six different strategic projects on the go and all moving slowly and none close to completion. It felt overwhelming. When I applied the No-Stacking Rule, I cut everything back and committed to just two projects. I finished the first in three days, the second in the following week, and then moved on to the rest. Within a month, every single project was complete and signed offsomething that would have dragged on for months under my old approach (it used to drive my team mad!)
What I learned was that focus compounds. Completing one task gives you momentum and frees up headspace. Before long, you’re not drowning in half-finished work. Instead, you’re creating real impact.
Remember, multitasking at work is basically professional procrastination in disguise!
Sean McPheat, Founder & CEO, MTD Training
Mental Clarity Outperforms Productivity Hacks
Multitasking is one of the most pervasive myths in modern work. We wear it like a badge of honor, but the science is clear: it’s not efficiencyit’s cognitive switching. Each time we move between tasks, we lose time and mental energy. Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus cites research showing that it can take over 20 minutes to regain full focus after switching. Multiply that across a workday, and the cost to performance, well-being, and creativity is enormous.
In our peak performance coaching work, we see this daily. Leaders describe being “always on,” yet never feeling ahead. The problem isn’t their workload it’s their state of mind. When your mind is cluttered with competing thoughts, tasks, and worries, you’re not multitasking; you’re fragmenting your attention.
The most effective strategy I’ve found to maintain focus isn’t time blocking or task batchingit’s understanding how your mind actually works. Not emotional intelligence, not techniques, but insight. Once people grasp that their mental experience is created from the inside outnot by external pressure or circumstancethey stop trying to control everything outside them and start working from clarity inside them.
In practice, that means when I feel overloaded, I don’t reach for productivity hacks. I pause. I notice that my racing thoughts, not my inbox, are creating the sense of pressure. As soon as I see that clearly, my mind quiets, and focus returns naturally. This understanding isn’t about managing stressit dissolves it.
We apply the same principle in our programs. One pharmaceutical client saw dramatic results: 93% of participants reported reduced stress and overwhelm and 88% improved decision-making after learning this inside-out model of performance. When people stop fighting their thoughts and start working with a clear mind, productivity, creativity, and engagement followwithout the burnout.
The takeaway? You can’t out-plan an overactive mind. Productivity doesn’t come from doing more; it comes from thinking less. The real advantage in the modern workplace isn’t multitaskingit’s mental clarity.
Kay Tear, Managing Director, Business Reimagined Ltd
Ruthless Prioritization Delivers Higher ROI Results
Multitasking harms productivity because it drains both a team’s capacity and capability. When too many priorities pile up, velocity slows, quality drops, and burnout sets ineven though it looks like everything is moving forward. Skills are stretched thin, people work on tasks that aren’t the best use of their talent, and morale suffers as wins become harder to see.
My most effective strategy is ruthless prioritizationdoing less to achieve more. It starts with clarity: defining what problem we’re solving and asking, “Can the current team deliver this?” before adding anything new. In one case, we cut or paused 35% of active projects, freeing up capacity and capability for higher-ROI initiatives. As a result, over two fiscal periods, ROI across the portfolio of efforts rose by 20%, two-thirds of projects were delivered months ahead of schedule, and morale improved as the team delivered meaningful outcomes, which led to higher talent retention levels.
Rohit Bassi, Founder & CEO, People Quotient
GTD Method Transforms Focus Not Time
Multitasking harms productivity because it divides our attention and forces the brain to rapidly switch between tasks, a process that has been proven to drain mental energy, increase stress, and reduce the quality of our thinking. I learned this firsthand when I realized I was spending hours each year simply rewriting to-do lists, reacting to whatever was loudest or latest, and feeling perpetually busy, but not always productive.
The strategy that transformed my focus was implementing the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology, which shifts the goal from time management to focus management. GTD helps externalize thoughts and commitments so the mind is free to thnk clearly rather than constantly remember.
One of the most effective habits I adopted was the “mind sweep,” taking a few minutes to capture everything that has my attention on paper and then clarifying the next specific action for each item. By organizing these actions into trusted categories (“calls,” “emails,” “projects,” etc.), I eliminated the clutter in my head and could focus on one meaningful thing at a time.
The impact has been remarkable: I sleep better, my energy is higher, and I no longer react to crises. I respond with clarity, and throughout the years, my teams have also adopted this practice, and the result is a game changer. The difference was night and day. Those of us who drank the GTD Kool-Aid and went through the training stopped spinning in circles, made decisions faster, and stayed accountable to what we said we would do.
In a nutshell, multitasking scatters attention; having a focused and reliable system restores it. When we clear the noise and stop trying to hold things in our minds, overwhelm dissipates and creativity and strategy emerge.
Judy Goldberg, Founder, Wondershift
Separate Digital Environments Enhance Mental Focus
We humans are not wired for multitasking. Even if you are sure you are a pro at it, it might be harming your productivity and attention span in the long run. Focusing on too many things at a time increases anxiety levels and reduces your ability to enter deep focus that is crucial for tasks like brainstorming, ideation, planning, or strategy building. Long-term, it simply kills your creativity.
What I do to protect my focus is separate my digital environments. It’s convenient to have everything in one place, yes, but it ruins my concentration. So, for instance, I keep one browser “sacred” for deep work and research, and another for lighter tasks or entertainment like social media. Over time, the mind starts to associate the tool with the type of work you’re doing: when I open my work browser and see only my work tabs and bookmarks, my brain immediately switches into serious mode. It sounds small and maybe even silly, but those mental cues reduce friction and help keep my concentration abilities in shape.
Jan Hendrik Von Ahlen, Managing Director & Co-founder, Career Coach, JobLeads
Multitasking Disrupts Critical Flow States
Multitasking harms workplace productivity, leading to errors that can damage your personal brand. Today, it’s commonplace to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously, such as leading a Zoom call, sending a Teams message, and responding to an email. These actions make us appear “busy,” but beneath the busyness are poorly thought-out arguments and disengaged employees, resulting in lower engagement and longer cycle times.
A July 2024 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that multitasking disrupts “flow states” (deep immersion) by 40%, leading to reduced task satisfaction and 1525% more errors in complex tasks like report writing.
To counter this, my personal strategy to maintain focus is straightforward but effective: when working on critical strategic imperatives for the business, I close my Teams chat and email and silence my personal phone. By doing so, I’ve gained the ability to concentrate, which fosters more ideas and clearer thinking.
Andrew Lee, HR Director, Raytheon
Multitask With Intention Through Priority Management
Multitasking isn’t the villain. It’s the open-ended projects and shifting urgencies that eat up more time than they deserve. I always go back to Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and his time management matrix. Four quadrants: urgent and important, not urgent but important, urgent but not important, and not urgent and not important. The trap? We confuse urgency with importance, so our days get stuffed with urgent-but-not-important tasks that steal time from the real priorities. And the most dangerous ones? The important but not urgent tasks we push off until they explode into fire drills.
We build AI phone services for restaurants, and a big part of our work involves adapting to telecom regulations. It’s critical but rarely urgent. Deadlines can be months away, the scope is fuzzy, but it’s the kind of effort that can’t get shoved aside. Ignore it for too long and suddenly you’re headed towards serious downtime and messaging issues. Meanwhile, urgent and important efforts like sales pushes and marketing launches keep knocking at the door.
The trick is not to avoid multitasking, but to do it with intention. That starts with clearly defining where each effort sits in terms of importance and urgency. Then you build a process around it with cross-functional ownership, delegation to the right people, and everything logged in a centralized project tool. Not every project moves in a straight line, and as blockers pop up, you shift focus to the next priority. That’s what effective multitasking looks like, i.e., knowing what’s on your plate, when to tackle it, and who owns what.
Back to telecom as an example. We know exactly who our internal expert is, and while they wear multiple hats, they’re crystal clear on their ownership and priorities. That way they can balance their time across critical projects without things slipping through the cracks. Week to week, priorities will change. The key is to stay flexible but organized. When everything’s reviewed, documented, and assigned, you don’t lose track and you stop mistaking “urgent” for “important.”
Zeel Jadia, CEO, ReachifyAI
Creative Immersion Days Protect Quality Work
In creative work, multitasking dilutes the quality of ideas. Concepts need space to breathe when you’re building a brand’s identity or reimagining a client’s marketing strategy. If you’re bouncing between logo sketches and a website build, neither will get the full depth of creative exploration each deserves.
One way I make sure that focus is protected is by structuring our projects into creative immersion days. So instead of spreading a designer thin across five clients in a single day, we dedicate extended time to just one client. The result was not only stronger design work but also faster approvals because the concepts reflected a deeper understanding of the brand.
Adrienne Folse, Founder, Design the Planet
Time Blocking Transforms Task Completion Quality
Multitasking has become normal, even expected, in many workplaces.
You might be hired as a social media manager ut soon find yourself also doing graphic design, copywriting, and more. When we try to do too much at once, even if it feels “normal,” the work suffers.
The biggest issue I see with multitasking is that it’s easy to miss things.
You overlook details, rush, and hop between tasks without the mental space to go deep.
You’re checking notifications, hearing open office chatter, and prepping for the next meeting all while trying to produce high-quality work. That’s not a recipe for excellence.
And that’s what we should be aiming for: work that’s thoughtful, well-crafted, and drives results.
One strategy that helps me (and my team) stay focused is time blocking.
We block specific times on our calendars for high-impact tasks and honor those blocks like meetings.
As a founder, I now schedule certain days just for meetings and leave other days free for deep work. That way, I’m not bouncing between strategy calls and writing copy within the same hour. And it’s made a big difference.
Instead of dragging one task across three days in 30-minute chunks, I now get it done mostly in one sitting. I stay in flow. The work is better and the stress is lower.
It may require a lot of thought and adjustments to implement but if more teams, whether they are corporate, startup, or small businesses, made space for focus like this, I think we’d all see better outcomes.
Remi Roy Osi, Founder, PodGround
Efficient Processes Master Multiple Tasks Successfully
Multitasking can harm workplace productivity when it focuses on quantity over quality. In the rush of “getting things done,” you may compromise on quality by not giving each task enough thought, time, or attention.
The best way to stay focused is by clearly understanding and setting priorities, based on business objectives, revenue potential, impact, and other factors that are important to you or your organization.
For me, the trifecta of maintaining an efficient process, staying organized, and keeping a repository of templates has been an effective strategy in mastering multitasking and delivering high-quality results. There are huge time-saving benefits that lead to more efficient use of time to accomplish multiple tasks without compromising on quality.
Efficient processes: When managing multiple projects, you need to have a solid workflow for creation, approval, execution, and optimization. In my experience, this has fueled better alignment, communication, and collaboration between teams, while speeding up the process, overcoming obstacles, and leading to higher output. It also reduced our campaign launch times from more than a week to two days.
Staying organized: I maintained a central folder system that gave the team quick access to all documentation and resources. Instead of wasting time searching through multiple channels or asking peers, they were able to find the information they needed in one or two clicks and focus on the task at hand. It also created a central space where teams could access everything from guides and briefing documents to assets and reports in the same place for easier decision-making.
Templates: Hours were being wasted as stakeholders developed briefs from scratch, causing delays in campaign executions and losing the company money. I then created templates of briefing documents that stakeholders could easily complete through fill-in-the-blank options, drop-down menus, and other features. What would usually take more than 30 minutes to an hour to create ended up taking less than 15 minutes.
Sidra Tariq, Owner, Curio Solutions Hub
Few objects embody the endurance of the human spirit better than a medal. This Sunday, when the projected 55,000 breathless souls cross the finishing line of the annual TCS New York City marathon, they will be receive a one-of-a-kind medal to remember this achievement.
The NYC marathon medal looks different every year. While many previous versions have attempted to etch the experience onto metal, the 2025 medal takes an even more tangible approach. At first glance, the surface of the new medal appears to be brushed with an array of diagonal stripes. But flip it on its side, and you will notice that the stripes are ribbed, and they reflect the actual elevation of the five-borough course. The brutal start up the Verrazzano Bridge; the seemingly endless 5th Avenue incline, the rolling hills of Central Parkthese topographies can be felt (or re-felt) at the glide of a finger.
[Photo: courtesy NYRR]
The medal is an exquisite piece of design that celebrates the experience of running a marathon through touch. And it has been so popular since it was unveiled that it has even placated the prickliest of armchair critics. “In the 10 years I’ve been at this company, it’s the best reaction we’ve ever seen,” says Thomas Cabus, the creative director at nonprofit New York Road Runners, who designed this year’s medal. “All of them are positive, which is rare.”
Finishers medals lined up at the 2015 marathon. [Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images]
“Can we jazz it up a bit?”
The TCS NYC marathon medal archive, on display at the NYRR Run Center, shows how wildly the design of marathon medals has been over the years. The 2005 medal showed a crowd of runners huddled against the Verrazzano Bridge. The 2018 medal was shaped like an apple.
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Raman Oberoi (@ramanjitoberoi_georgian)
But some things never change: the TCS logo has to feature; the five boroughs have to be listed (in this case on the back of the medal) and there has to be room for willing finishers to get their initials engraved. Each medal also features braille lettering on the back.
Since NYRR rebranded in 2023courtesy of brand consultancy Chermayeff & Geismar & Havivthe medal designers also have to include a variation of the new motif, namely diagonal stripes to symbolize the five boroughs coming together on marathon day.
[Photo: courtesy NYRR]
The idea for the 2025 medal was born while the team was experimenting with those diagonal stripes. “The idea was, can we jazz it up a little bit?” recalls Keziah Makoundou, lead designer at NYRR, who codesigned the medal alongside Cabus. Once the idea materialized, the team took an official graphic of the course and extruded that to a three-dimensional shape. The elevation map was born.
[Photo: courtesy NYRR]
Designing a time capsule
Since the medal was unveiled in early October, it has been so popular that some runners who were planning on deferring are now considering walking the marathon just to get it. Others have called for this medal to become the signature medal of the TCS NYC marathon.
But what makes each medal so special is precisely the fact that it acts as a time capsule from a particular race. Tomasz Sablinski, a 69-year-old running aficionado who splits his time between New York City and New Jersey, has run over 80 marathons across North America and Europe. This year’s five-borough race will be his 12th.
“I must have over 100 medals,” he told me in an email. “And with so many of them, it’s fun when a medal stands out from the others because of its unusual design, or if it’s specifically related to the course it’s from.”
Sablinski is particularly fond of some of his wooden medals, but he loves this year’s design for the NYC marathon medal because it is so directly tied to the course. “You won’t be able to look at this year’s medal without recalling the elevation of the bridges around the boroughs,” he says.
When Sablinski crosses the finishing line on November 2, Cabus and Makoundou will be there to watch his and the reaction of 55,000 others when they receive their well-earned medal. And with so much positive feedback already, they feel both proud and pressured to top themselves next year. “Runners are very difficult people to please, so it’s like a challenge,” says Makoundou, before adding with a chuckle: “I don’t know what we’re going to do next year.”
Bill Gates has invested billions over the last two decades to help fight climate change. But in a new blog post, he argues that world is too focused on cutting short-term emissions.
“The doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals,” he writes, calling for a “strategic pivot” to focus on “improving lives” by focusing development dollars more on agriculture and disease and poverty eradication.
The logic is flawed, and built on a series of false trade-offs that ignore how interconnected climate and development goals are. Gates criticizes the “doomsday” view that climate change will “decimate civilization” in a few decades and writes that “it will not lead to humanity’s demise.” Because of the progress already made on climateand since humanity will survivehe argues we should now be more focused on alleviating human suffering rather than continuing to so intently focus on rising temperatures.
But climate scientists do not argue that civilization itself will end. Instead, they say, hurricanes, heat waves, and other climate disasters are already killing people, destroying homes and infrastructure, making it harder to grow food, and making life more difficult and expensive in other ways. The longer we wait to cut emissions, the worse those problems will continue to get, and the harder it will be to adapt. Human suffering is directly linked to whether or not emissions are curbed now.
Gatess essay uses really false framing that pits improving peoples lives against science-based temperature and emissions goals that are intrinsically connected, says Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. If you look around the world right now, climate change is directly undermining human development goals, poverty eradication, and health goals. You just have to look at the disruption from the climate-supercharged Hurricane Melissa to see an example of that.
A report this week from the medical journal the Lancet explains that the impacts of climate change are creating an unprecedented threat to the health and survival of people globally, with millions already dying unnecessarily each year. That threat keeps growing. With higher temperatures and more rain, mosquitoes can thrive in new areas, increasing malaria risk, for example. These are all directly connected, Cleetus says. You can’t solve these complex development and health challenges if you ignore climate change.
Gates argues that temperature goals are getting in the way of focusing on improving global poverty. But the most ambitious temperature goal in the Paris climate agreementto limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsiuscame from poor island nations who saw that sea level rise would hit them first.
“Bill Gates has the audacity as a billionaire to say, ‘Well, climate people don’t care about the poor and the developing world,’ when it’s like, dude, the temperature stabilization framework in many ways came from the poor and the developing world,” says Leah Stokes, a political science professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. “Why do we have the 1.5 degree target? Because these least-developed countries, small island nations, banded together to say, ‘This is what we want.’ It wasn’t the big rich countries pushing that.”
Having the temperature goal was critical, and a follow-up report from the IPCC talking about how much emissions would need to fall by 2030 to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. “That’s a timeline that policymakers can actually wrap their heads around,” Stokes says. It led to Biden’s ambitious climate policy in the U.S., and though Trump has reversed that, it also spurred states, other countries, and companies to set short-term goals.
Gates suggests that we shouldnt cut funding for health and development to fight climate change. But thats a straw man argument. When the Trump administration slashed spending on international health, it didnt move that money to climate programs. Globally, the funding comes from different sources.
Its not the same money, says Jigar Shah, co-managing director for Multiplier, a cleantech consulting firm, who previously ran the loan programs office at the Department of Energy. USAID is not spending money on clean energy. The money for clean energy is coming from the private sector, and most of this stuff is now so cost-effective and so profitable, its not even coming from blended finance. Its coming from pure private sector dollars.
Gates argues that communities can adapt to short-term climate impacts, and that economic growth will help avoid more deaths from climate changeif more people can afford air conditioners, for example, that will save lives. But that overlooks the limits of economic growth and resilience in the face of repeated disasters. Theres no way for economies to grow when theyre getting slammed again and again by climate-fueled disasters, Cleetus says.
The essay also suggests that economic growth in developing countries is at odds with climate policy. Theres not a single person in the world thats making that argument, says Shah. None of the poor countries have ever been required to reduce their emissions.
At the same time, as renewables have become the cheapest source of electricity, developing countries can affordably build out energy access without steeply increasing emissions. Pakistan, for instance, imported the third most solar panels of any country in the world in 2024. The entire solar revolution of the last three years in Pakistan was done with private sector capital and DIY videos on WhatsApp, Shah says.
Gates seems to suggest that it’s fine to wait to cut emissions further, because better technology (much of which is being supported with his investments) is on the horizon. But since climate change is a cumulative problem, waiting another decade to cut emissions means that we could easily pass critical tipping points. That’s the biggest contradiction in his argument: If he wants to protect lives and livelihoods, cutting emissions does need to happen now.
“What the science is showing is within the next decade, if we don’t sharply curtail heat-trapping emissions, there’s a real potential to blow right past the various agreement climate goals,” Cleetus says. “That can unlock feedback loops in the earth system that we cannot turn back even if we reduce emissions in the future.”
Gates urges world leaders at COP 30, this year’s global climate conference, to “prioritize the things that have the greatest impact on human welfare,” rather than centering emissions cuts. The ideas are probably unlikely to have much of an impact on what actually happens at the conference. But the messaging is bad for climate action globally. “I think the impact is more about piling on to a sense that climate change isn’t really something we should worry about,” says Stokes.
Of course it makes sense to continue to develop better, affordable climate tech. The companies that Gates’s Breakthrough Ventures has backed can play a meaningful role. But Gates could do more to help scale up the clean tech that’s ready now.
While startups can also help later, “I think it’s important to recgnize that if you’re going to reduce climate emissions at scale and make electricity bills more affordable in this moment, you have to deploy technologies that are already at scale,” says Shah.
“We have so many technologies that are stalled at, like, 5% of penetration,” Shah says. “We have 5% of our rooftops in the United States, maybe 6% now, with solar panels on them. Australia is at 30%. How do we go from 5% to 30%? We’re figuring that out today. I would love his help on that.”
The news that Microsoft is making 9,000 workers redundant this year, with a focus on jettisoning managers, has sent ripples through the business world. Andy Jassey, Amazons CEO, explicitly said this summer that AI advances will lead to job cuts. So its no wonder that workers all over the world, including one in five Gen Z workers, are “very concerned” that AI will take their job in the next two years (with Americans being more concerned than Europeans), and 32% of U.S. workers believe that AI will lead to fewer job opportunities.
AI has advanced to encompass a vast range of skills, not only data-driven ones such as coding and debugging, but also more managerial tasks, including generating reports and managing schedules.
With this technology snapping at managers heels and the worry about remaining relevant in a digitally driven world, how can you future-proof your management role and survive the AI purge? The answer lies in developing your human-centric skills.
Valuing human-centric skills
For years, the value of human-centric skills, such as empathy, active listening, and effective communication, has been diminished by the label “soft,” in opposition to “hard” skills like writing code or analyzing data, which are more easily quantified.
In a world rapidly and increasingly reshaped by AI and automation, these distinctions are under scrutiny. Were seeing that its the hard skills that AI can replicate incredibly easily, whilst soft skills remain the preserve of humans and are becoming increasingly crucial as managers need to navigate their teams through tumultuous change.
Theyre so important, in fact, that they need a name change. Theyre no longer soft; theyre now the imperative “power” skills that will future-proof your management career. More than just a semantic shift, this is a fundamental re-framing of how “soft” skills are perceived and valued. No longer dismissed as inferior or fluffy, these power skills need to be appreciated as the foundations of excellent management that will amplify the effectiveness of every hard skill you possessthink nuanced judgment, strategic thinking, genuine connection, and intuition.
And, in fact, power skills can be quantified; we can clearly see the impact they have on a workforce when used effectively by managers. Because good management and engagement matter.
Gallups annual State of the Global Workplace research has shown that a manager accounts for 70% of the variance in employee engagement, which feeds into the fact that at least a third of the variance in productivity between countries and companies is due to poor management. However, once someone is empowered by their manager to recognize and utilize their strengths daily, theyre nearly six times more engaged. Businesses with highly engaged staff experience 78% less absenteeism and significantly lower turnover rates.
The answer is a question
So how can you develop these power skills and ensure youre using them to truly engage the team you manage? The answer lies in learning to ditch the command-and-control approach to management and use an enquiry-led approach instead. Adopting coaching-related behaviors, which include developing situational awareness and knowing when and how to ask purposeful questions, is the core premise of a popular new approach to management known as Operational Coaching.
Proven effective in large-scale research conducted by the London School of Economics, adopting this new approach as part of a managers everyday style has been shown to shift the paradigm from directive management to facilitative leadership, while managers also generated a 74x return on investment.
Learning to adopt an Operational Coaching style of management isnt about telling employees what to do, but rather about guiding them to discover their own solutions, leveraging their strengths and taking ownership of their contributions.
At its heart is the power skill of thought-provoking questioning, where instead of jumping in to solve every problem themselves, managers ask powerful questions that encourage employees to engage in self-reflection, critical thinking, and problem-solving. This approach empowers individuals to take ownership of their challenges and solutions.
Its then supported by active listening and empathy, strengths-based development, and continuous feedback and reflection. Described as the missing superpower, this style of management fosters critical thinking, which in turn builds confidence as employees are empowered to unlock their potential. Its particularly suited to working with millennials and Gen Z workers, who favor a collaborative and supportive work environment over rigid hierarchies, and crave purpose in their work with regular feedback and opportunities for growth.
Operational Coaching also helps managers regain valuable time as it shifts the weight of routine problem-solving from themselves to their team members. This capacity can be reinvested in higher-value work, while empowering employees to develop their own skills. Measurable improvements in employee engagement levels, a direct result of the change in their managers approach, lead to higher profitability, increased productivity, and better business outcomes, including, for example, sales and customer service.
A shift in whats valued
In an era of rapid change driven by the democratization of knowledge through AI, human-centric skills that promote engagement, creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking will be the key differentiator between managers who can and those who will be displaced from their roles.
By moving away from a typically directive approach, managers who adopt an Operational Coaching style will cultivate environments of trust and psychological safety, where employees can experiment and take risks without fear of blame. As routine tasks become increasingly automated, our human value must shift towards how we think, adapt, interact, and lead. Its time to stop viewing these as passive, soft traits and instead appreciate them as active, powerful skills that hold the key to future-proofing your role as a manager who can get things done by mobilizing and enabling the skills and talents of others.
When the new Chevy Bolt arrives early next year, it will start at $29,995, making it one of the most affordable new EVs in the U.S. Its thousands of dollars cheaper than Teslas “affordable” new versions of its Model 3 and Model Y.
It’s also significantly less expensive than the average gas car, and like other EVs, it’s cheaper to operate. GM faces major headwinds with the loss of the $7,500 tax credit for electric cars, and it’s scaled back production plans and cut jobs in response. But the new Bolt is so affordable that it could win over consumers even without the incentive.
We wanted to get that under-$30,000 number, says Jeremy Short, chief engineer on GMs Bolt team.
For Short and his team at GM, achieving that price required some creativity under constraint. Below, Short details how GM kept the price low.
[Photo: Chevrolet]
A new battery
Instead of using standard lithium-ion chemistry, GM turned to a different type of battery that eliminates expensive materials like cobalt and nickel.
Called lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, theyre cheaper, longer-lasting, and safer than other lithium-ion batteries, though they dont store as much energy.
Its the first time that GM has used this type of battery. We had to develop this because we had an aggressive target to get to for price, says Short. And this is one of those things that balanced price and performance. The company also engineered a new low-cost, low-weight battery pack.
The battery can also charge more quickly than the battery in the previous version of the Bolt. When the original Bolt was developed as the first affordable EV with long range, fast-charging infrastructure was limited. Many EV drivers also charge at home most of the time. But the engineers knew that faster charging is a priority for customers. The new Bolt can charge from 10% to 80% in 26 minutes, with a peak speed of around 2.5 times faster than the older model.
[Photo: Chevrolet]
We were really in tune with things in 22 that customers thought there was some potential to improve, Short says. Top of that list was the charging rate. The range is also slightly better than the previous version, at 255 miles versus 247 miles per charge. The new Bolt is also now compatible with Teslas Supercharger network.
Now, Short says, a vehicle that had a reputation as a commuter car is “a bonafide road trip car.” When the company held a launch event in Los Angeles earlier this month, the engineering team drove four of the cars from Detroit to California. “At two of our lunch stops, we fully charged to 100%,” he says. “We had to start limiting our charges because we couldn’t even eat lunch fast enough.”
The company is temporarily importing the batteries from China, subject to steep tariffs. But its also ramping up production at one of its U.S. factories, which will begin in 2027. (The company has said that it plans to absorb some of the costs of tariffs across all of its vehicles, with an estimated $3.5 billion and $4 billion hit on its bottom line in 2026.)
[Photo: Chevrolet]
Economies of scale
The new Bolt also adds other new features, including around 20 safety and driver assist features that the last model didn’t have. Features like adaptive cruise used to be optional, Short says, but now are standard. That meant adding hardware like sensors. Extra features made staying on budget more of a challenge, but it was possible, he says, because of the new battery and economies of scale on other parts.
To make those economy of scale happen, GM borrowed components from its other EVs to help keep the new Bolts price down. When the original Bolt came out, it was a bespoke architecture, says Short. It had a unique battery, a unique motor, unique everything. Now, after GMs heavy investment in electric vehicles, it had more resources to work with.
[Photo: Chevrolet]
The Bolt uses the same front drive motor as the Equinox EV, the same integrated power electronics, the same drive mounts, and other parts, including a heat pump that helps make the car run efficiently when the heat is on. The center screen in the vehicle, with the ability toscreen YouTube and HBO Maxsomething that drivers can use when theyre sitting at a public chargeris borrowed from the brands mid-size trucks.
Adapting the parts meant redesigning them, in many cases, for the much smaller Bolt, but it helped make a significant difference on cost. By teaming up with other programs, we were able to get some economies of scale for what are truly better parts than we had before, Short says. “Between ourselves and the Equinox EV, we’re going to be the volume players for Chevy in EVs.”
Its widely known that social media can quickly turn into a toxic cesspool of hate speech and ragebait, particularly during times of political turmoil.
Across social media platforms, amplified by the algorithm, hate often breeds hate. But what exactly makes toxicity so contagious? It turns out, the problem may be coming from within.
A study published this month in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, co-authored by Alon Zoizner and Avraham Levy, looked at how social media users react when theyre exposed to toxic posts from people on their own political side, defined as the ingroup, compared with those from the opposing side, the outgroup.
Highlighting the motivations behind toxic posts, the researchers suggested that exposure to toxicity from your own side tends to encourage similar behavior, as a way to show loyalty and signal belonging. On the other hand, seeing toxic posts from the opposing side can trigger defensive reactions, prompting users to hit back.
Analyzing over 7 million tweets from 700,000 X accounts in Israel during 2023, a period of intense political division and conflict, the researchers found that toxicity mainly spreads online through ingroups.
In other words, the more people see toxic behavior from those on their own side, the more likely they are to mirror it. Reactions to toxicity from the opposing side were fewer. People are motivated less by outrage at the other side, and more by a desire to fit in with their own.
The design of social media makes this even worse. By highlighting political identities, it encourages social media users to see themselves as representatives of their group rather than as individualsand to act accordingly.
While much has been said about the polarizing effect of social media echo chambers, the researchers found that, contrary to their expectations, homogeneous networks are less affected by both ingroup and outgroup toxicity compared with those in more heterogeneous networks.
They suggest two possible reasons for this. People in more mixed social networks may see a wider range of opinions, which can spark more conflict and toxic exchanges. Those in very like-minded networks, however, might already hold strong views, making them less influenced by others and less likely to feel the need to prove their loyalty through toxic behavior.
Either way, toxicity is an unwelcome fact of the internet. Social media companies have engineered our feeds to keep us hooked on outrage and keep us online. Likes and shares then reinforce this cycle, rewarding those who perform their group identity most loudly, even when that means being the most toxic.
Elon Musk is the kind of entrepreneur who likes to have an enemy as motivationtraditional carmakers, the mainstream media, the deep state. His newest undertaking, launched October 27, is no exception: Grokipedia is positioned as an alternative to Wikipedia, which Musk claims is biased and woke. A product of Musks artificial intelligence company xAI, Grokipedias inner workings are unclear, but the pitch is that its an AI-generated compendium of what Musk calls truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
One major factor that makes Grokipedia different from Musks other rival-fueled enterprises is that Wikipedia is quite popular, well-liked, and widely trusted. Theres no substantial burgeoning dissatisfaction with or opposition to Wikipedia fueling demand for an alternative. To the contrary, in the world of mass-market information, its one of the strongest brands out there.
[Screenshot: Grokipedia]
This wasnt always the case. Founded in 2001, Wikipedias crowdsourced alternative to a traditional encyclopedia was treated with skepticism for its first decade or so, as consumers weighed the merits of formal expertise against what came to be called crowdsourcing. But by the mid-2010s, its trust grew even as long-established information brands struggled.
For example, in a YouGov survey in the U.K., 64% of respondents said they trust Wikipedia a great deal or a fair amount, beating out the likes of the BBC and The Times; a five-country survey in 2019 found trust of Wikipedia at 78% or better. For techno-optimists, Wikipedia was touted as a portent of the internets utopian work-together future. In a world where top-down information gatekeepers were no longer trusted, Wikipedia attained a Web-era version of gravitas, a crowdsourced Walter Cronkite.
That vision was replaced by the divisive realities of social media, but Wikipedia has hung on, remaining one of the worlds most popular sites, recognized as one of the great collective efforts of humanity, built on a robust internal debate structure from thousands upon thousands of individual contributors all around the world.
Prior to Grokipedias launch, Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales spoke to The New York Times about his new book, which tries to apply the lessons of Wikipedias success to our increasingly partisan, trust-depleted world. On the subject of Musk, Wales shrugged: Well be here in a hundred years and he wont. As long as we stay Wikipedia, people will still love us.
The truth is that the rise of AI more generally could pose a threat to Wikipedia: AI summaries in Google searches are already said to be cutting into Wikipedia traffic, and that could impact the combination of donations and volunteers that keep the effort afloat.
But as for Grokipedia itself, the site is off to a rocky start. Wired found that it pushes far-right talking points on gender and other issues. The Atlantic noted that the entry for Musk himself left out reference to his apparently pro-apartheid grandfather, but did note that hed lost 20 pounds. Some found that Grokipedia had, in multiple cases, simply rehashed its rivals entries, and others just saw it as a bland knockoff, the exact opposite of Wikipedias human touch and originality.
(Musks xAI has not been transparent about exactly how entries are chosen or assembled, but reports suggest they appear to be generated by some iteration of its Grok chatbot, seemingly working off Wikipedia entries in at least some cases.)
But even Cronkite had skeptics, so of course Wikipedia does, too. Musks complaints about the online encyclopedia (specifically his own entry) fall in line with a wider conservative line of attack. These critics insist that Wikipedia has systemic ideological biasesparticularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics. (Or at least thats what Grokipedia says.)
In a war of credibility, Wikipedia has become a formidable opponent, maybe especially to Musk. For many people, their level of trust in Elon Musk is extremely low because he says wild things all the time, Wales told The Times. When he attacks us, people donate more money.
A year ago, direct air capturetechnology that pulls CO2 from the airseemed ready to quickly scale in the U.S.
Project Cypress, a massive undertaking in Louisiana designed to capture more than a million tons of CO2 each year, won $50 million in funding from the Department of Energy in early 2024. In Texas, another major direct air capture hub also won funding. Together, the projects were eligible for as much as $1.1 billion from the DOE, part of $3.5 billion Congress set aside for DAC hubs in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Climeworks, a pioneer in the industry and one of the partners on the Louisiana project, was hiring a U.S. team, scaling up a new plant in Iceland, and signing large deals to sell carbon removal to companies like British Airways and Morgan Stanley. Heirloom, another tech company working on the Louisiana hub, closed a $150 million Series B round of funding. CarbonCapture, another startup in the space, raised $80 million. Multiple other DAC projects also won DOE grants.
The situation is different now. In one round of cuts, according to a leaked list, the DOE might revoke around $50 million in grants to 10 different direct air capture projects. (The cuts are part of more than $7.5 billion in cancellations for what the administration calls Green New Scam” funding.) A second leaked spreadsheet suggests that the flagship hubs in Louisiana and Texas might also be at risk. Earlier this year, Heirloom laid off some workers and reportedly canceled a planned project. Climeworks also had a round of layoffs.
At the same time, a few projects are moving forward, and one key tax credit is still in place. Government support isn’t the only thing keeping the industry afloat. But the technology is still in the so-called valley of deaththe stage when it still hasn’t reached large-scale commercial deploymentand funding cuts would be a major blow. Even as other countries offer incentives, it could slow down the industry globally.
“I think it could slow down substantially,” says Eric O’Rear, associate director at the economic and policy research firm the Rhodium Group. “If you look at it from a policy perspective, the U.S. was really dominating this space.”
From boom to uncertainty
As an industry, direct air capture is still in its infancy. The technology was proven in a lab 26 years ago, but the first commercial plant, run by Climeworks in Iceland, didnt open until 2021. It was a milestone, but tiny compared to what’s needed: It captures 4,000 tons of CO2 a year, or roughly as much as driving 930 gas cars over the same period. To deal with climate change, the world may need to capture 10 billion tons of CO2 a year by the middle of the century, according to one National Academy of Sciences estimate. (Thats on top of radically cutting emissions, not as a replacement.)
Critics have argued that the technology is too expensive to be a realistic solution. But the companies developing it say that scaling up will bring costs down, both because of economies of scale and because engineers can learn by doing, improving materials and processes as they go.
Climeworks Mammoth plant in Iceland, 2024 [Photo: John Moore/Getty Images]
Our approach, deployment-led innovation, involves running DAC plants in the field for rapid, real-world learning, Climeworks CEO Christoph Gebald told Fast Company in 2024. Now the company says that one key component of its tech, the sorbent, lasts 10 times longer than before, and its working on cutting its energy use in half, which would also cut costs in half.
The company aims for a cost of $250 to $350 per ton captured by 2030. Ultimately, the industry aims to achieve $100 per tona tipping point that would make it affordable enough to be deployed at a very large scale. The first corporate buyers are early-stage adopters willing to pay much higher prices to help the technology grow.
The two large planned DAC plants in Louisiana and Texas could help accelerate that process. But the future of those projects is still not clear.
In a statement after a leaked spreadsheet listed the projects, the Department of Energy said that no additional projects have been terminated, and that the DOE continues to conduct an individualized and thorough review of financial awards made by the previous administration. Both projects have bipartisan support from state leaders, and when they were on a DOE “hit list” earlier in 2025, Republican leaders helped keep Project Cypress alive, at least temporarily. But it’s possible neither project will continue.
CarbonCapture subsidiary True North Carbons Deep Sky installation under construction in Alberta, Canada, 2025 [Photo: CarbonCapture Inc.]
Smaller direct air capture hubs that had planned on DOE funding may also struggle to continueor possibly move. CarbonCapture, a startup that planned to install its tech in Arizona this year, has already relocated that project to Canada, to a site called Deep Sky that’s designed to help multiple companies scale up their technology in one place. Deep Sky announced last week that it plans to build a second large facility in Canada. The Canadian government offers strong incentives for DAC companies to build new plants. Some other countries, from Denmark to Japan, also have incentives for DAC projects.
“Globally, we are seeing carbon removal continuing to scale,” says Ben Rubin, executive director of the Carbon Business Council. “I think the big question is, who will be home to those economic benefits and who will be home to those jobs?” Project Cypress, for example, was expected to create 2,300 jobs and bring billions of dollars to Louisiana’s economy.
For the climate, it doesn’t matter if direct air capture happens in the U.S. or Iceland or Kenya. But the U.S. government, under President Joe Biden, started to take a leadership role in helping the tech grow faster. The political changes could slow global progress.
What’s moving forward
Some DAC projects are still underway, with or without government support. In Texas, 1PointFive, a subsidiary of the oil giant Occidental, is building a sprawling facility that could capture up to 500,000 tons of CO2 a year. 1PointFive told Fast Company that the facility is on track to start running this yearat which point it will be the largest direct air capture operation in the world.
Some of the captured CO2 could be injected underground to help get more oil out of old oil wells, a controversial move from a climate perspective. But some of it will also be permanently stored in deep rock formations or depleted oil or gas wells. Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency granted the company permits to inject millions of tons of CO2 in storage wells over the next 12 years. The captured CO2 could also be used to make everything from plastic to jet fuel.
The Stratos facility under construction, 2025 [Photo: 1PointFive]
The project, called Stratos, doesn’t have any DOE funding. Microsoft, one of the project’s customers, agreed in 2024 to buy 500,000 tons of CO2 removal over the next six years, with the caveat that the CO2 won’t be used in oil production. BlackRock invested $550 million; the total cost may be more than $1.3 billion.
Others are moving forward with smaller pilots. Avnos, a California-based startup, is nearing completion on a pilot called Project Brighton that was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, and plans to begin operation before the end of the year.
The company has an unusual hybrid approach that could potentially reach low costs earlier than others like Climeworks. Along with capturing CO2, it also captures water. The tech’s design means that it can cut energy use in half or more, dramatically cutting the overall expense. (At its first large project, it expects to capture CO2 for less than $250 per ton; as it scales up, CEO Will Kain says, it has a “good line of sight” to $100 per ton.)
Because the technology produces water from the air, it also has the opportunity to potentially be used at water-hungry data centers, or at facilities that want to use CO2 to make products like chemicals and need water for those processes as well. Avnos is involved in DAC hub projects with DOE funding, and hasn’t yet heard what the ultimate fate of those projects will be. But it also has deliberately looked for a variety of sources of funding for other projects. “We’re diversifying our sources of funding,” Kain says.
How the industry could keep growing
Kain is still optimistic about the industry. “The global momentum for carbon removal is very strong,” he says. Even in the U.S., when most of the clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act were axed by Congress this summer, a tax credit for direct air capture stayed in place and was actually expanded. (Now projects that use CO2 to make other products can get the same incentive as projects that permanently store CO2 underground.) If federal support for new projects wanes, as expected, “it certainly makes it harder for us to deploy first-of-a-kind pilots in the U.S.,” Kain says. “So companies like us have to get a little bit creative in how you fund.”
Some companies are also working on new ways to lower the cost of direct air capture and work without government grants, including a Denver-based startup called Heimdal. The company has an unusual approach: Instead of using large fans to pull in air and extract CO2, it uses calcium oxide, a mineral that naturally reacts with the gas to capture it. “It’s very simple,” says Marcus Lima, cofounder and CEO. “Its literally just spraying rocks on the ground.” The rocks are later heated up in a kiln to release the CO2 for storage or use. The cost is already low, at around $200 per ton.
The launch ceremony for Heimdals Bantam facility in Oklahoma, 2024. [Screenshot: Heimdal/CapturePoint]
The startup opened a facility in Oklahoma in August 2024 that can capture up to 5,000 tons of CO2 per year. To help with costs, it makes some compromises that some competitors wouldn’tselling the CO2 for use in oil production, and using natural gas as an energy source. But Lima argues that those are stepping stones toward an ideal for future operation. He also believes that companies should focus on bringing costs down without relying on grants.
“My view is, at least for capital projects, federal funding should serve as an accelerant, as an enabler,” he says. “What we’re seeing now with the chnge of administration and the general cooling in the climate-tech capital markets is kind of a return to earth. Reality now starts to matter a lot more, because you don’t have hundreds of millions of dollars in the venture markets that you can just have like that. Projects need to make money.”
Even companies with lower costs may face more challenges in getting investment now. “With this pullback in federal support, there is going to be increased uncertainty as it relates to how healthy the environment is for investing in the U.S.,” says Rhodium Groups O’Rear.
It still isn’t clear what will happen in the U.S. But more federal support would also help companies test a bigger variety of approaches to the technology. “We don’t know which of these technologies is going to be best at scalebest economic performance, best technical performance, the right kind of projects that communities want to host,” says Erin Burns, executive director of the carbon removal nonprofit Carbon180. As the world blows past 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, it makes sense to test as many solutions as possible. Without support, some nascent technologies may be lost completely.
Walk into any grocery store to stock up for Halloween and you will discover that, for chocolate treats, you have two basic choices:
Will it be Mars or Hershey?
I often buy both, but that is beside the point. The point is that the two giants compete for market share, but both enjoy robust sales. In other words, a relatively stable duopoly defines the U.S. chocolate candy market.
But it wasnt always like this.
Before the 1960s, the Hershey Chocolate Corp. reigned supreme as the undisputed chocolate king. It was in that decade that Mars went for Hersheys jugular. Hershey Chocolates response brought lasting change to its candy business, the local community, and Hershey Park, its chocolate-themed amusement park.
As a professor of American studies at Penn State Harrisburg who has recently published a book on Hershey Park, I am astounded by how these changes continue to reverberate today.
Milton Hersheys paternalistic capitalism
Before the 1960s, change was not a word one associated with either the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, or its famous chocolate company. Better words would be stability and productivityand this was by the founders design.
Milton Hershey founded Hershey Chocolate and built up the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, for his employees. [Photo: Bettman/Bettman Collection/Getty Images]
When Milton Hershey entered the confection industry in the 1880s, violent clashes between corporations and labor roiled American society. Hershey imagined a better way: paternalistic capitalism.
In the early 1900s, he built a chocolate factory and planned community out in the farms and pastures of central Pennsylvania. Instead of offering men and women wage-earning jobs and nothing else, he took care of his workers. They owned nice homes and benefited from a generous array of free or subsidized services and amenities: snow removal, garbage collection, trolley lines, good schools, a junior college, zoo, museum, sports arena, library, community center, and theater.
They even had their own amusement park.
But this was a reciprocal relationship. In return, employees were expected to work hard, exhibit loyalty, practice clean living, and refrain from labor agitation. With the exception of a strike during the Great Depression, the company and town lived in harmony. Milton Hershey called the place an industrial utopia, and residents largely agreed.
Moving to Hershey, one recalled, was like moving to paradise.
Harmony also defined Hersheys relations with Mars. At the time, Hershey produced only solid chocolatethink of Hershey bars and Kisses. In contrast, Frank Marss company specialized in chocolate-covered snacks, such as Snickers or Milky Way, in which milk chocolate is poured over nuts, caramel, or nougat.
Where did that chocolate coating come from?
Hershey, of course.
In those days, Mars was a client, not a rival. Without competition, Hershey enjoyed the luxury of not having to worry about market share. Amazingly, the company did not advertise under Milton Hershey and continued this policy after his death in 1945.
The production line at the Hershey chocolate factory in 1969 [Photo: Peter Simins/Pix/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images]
Hershey in crisis
Everything changed in 1964. The catalyst for change was Forrest Mars, the founders hard-charging son, who was a true disrupter.
After seizing control of his fathers company, Forrest Mars set his sights on dethroning Hershey. As reporter and author Joël Glenn Brenner explains, the younger Mars boldly terminated the partnership with Hershey while ordering his engineers to learn how to make Hershey-caliber chocolate in six months. He also modernized the factory and ordered a surge in advertising, all to wrestle market share away from Hershey, the sleeping giant.
The strategy worked. By the decades end, Mars had caught Hershey in terms of market share and pushed the chocolate colossus into crisis.
The good news for Hershey was that it had at the helm two forward-looking leaders, Harold Mohler and Bill Dearden. Though standard practice had always been to hire locally and from within, Mohler and Dearden recruited outsiders with MBAs from Harvard and Wharton to initiate sweeping reforms aimed at modernizing its archaic business practices.
The company oened a public relations office, conducted market research, installed IBM mainframe computers to crunch numbers, retrained its sales force, and created a marketing department. Many employees, a new executive joked, were so behind the times that they had thought marketing was what their wives did . . . with a shopping cart.
This effort culminated with the release of the companys first TV commercials starting in 1969. The sleeping giant had awoken.
The companys next move altered the town forever. As a cost-cutting measure, it terminated the free services and amenities at the core of Milton Hersheys vision. The era of paternalism was over.
As the company liquidated assets, residents howled in protest.
It was a very traumatic time for the community, one executive recalled.
For residents, the only consolation was that at least the amusement park would stay the same.
Or would it?
By the late 1960s, Hershey Park had degenerated into what one executive called an iron park with a bunch of clanging rides. Leadership faced a pivotal decision: renovate the park or close it forever.
The park had such a rich heritage, one executive recalled, that to shutter it would put a stamp of negative feeling within the community.
The company elected to renovate.
The original Hershey Co. chocolate manufacturing plant and Hershey Park Entertainment facility, foreground, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, circa 2009 [Photo: Bradley C. Bower/Bloomberg/Getty Images]
Hersheyparks transformation
But how to renovate was another matter.
In the 1960s and 1970s, owners of traditional amusement parks had to think twice before investing in their properties. That was because Disneyland, the nations first theme park, had caused a sensation when it debuted in 1955. Its incredible popularity, and the opening of the more spectacular Disney World in 1971, placed pressure on old-fashioned amusement parks everywhere.
After commissioning a feasibility study, Hershey officials decided to gamble: Instead of fixing up the old amusement park, they would convert it into a Disney-style theme park. To pay for the massive overhaul, they redirected capital earned from the dismantling of Milton Hersheys paternalism. Reborn as Hersheypark in 1973, the ever-growing complex has become a mecca for chocolate lovers and thrill-ride seekers from across the Northeast.
Every year, Halloween reminds me of this remarkable transformation. The stores become stocked with Hershey brands, and the theme park comes alive with its spooky Dark Nights entertainment.
In the past, workers at the Hershey plant would joke that they had chocolate syrup in their veins. These days, they clearly have innovation, too, and that creative spirit is largely due to Forrest Mars. By giving Hershey the jolt it needed, he shook up the status quo and changed the chocolate company, town, and park forever.
Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania.
John Haddad is a professor of American studies at Penn State.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
