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Artist Edel Rodriguez published his new print, Minneapolis, just hours after a federal agent shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti on January 24. The print features a pop art image of President Donald Trump, mouth agape and gun in hand, kneeling on the neck of Lady Liberty, whos slowly bleeding out on the street from multiple gunshot wounds. The killing occurred during the weeks-long, federally ordered presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection, and other federal agencies in the Twin Cities, where those agents have raided residential neighborhoods, detained employees from local businesses, and taken multiple schoolchildren into custody in broad daylight. Pretti’s death came just weeks after Minneapolis resident Renee Good was shot and killed in her car during an encounter with an ICE agent. Members of the Trump administrationincluding the president himselfhave spent the days following these two tragedies suggesting that both Pretti and Good posed a threat to federal agents, despite available video evidence that appears to refute those claims. As Minnesotans continue to witness ICE agents disrupting their local communities and targeting their neighbors, protest art has served a critical role in their collective movement against the surge of federal forces. Across Minneapolis, graffiti, yard signs, stickers, and even sleds with anti-ICE messages have exploded in popularity. Local screen-printing studios like Burlesque of North America and Art Price Studio have produced their own designs while also offering free printing services to protesters. Now, in the wake of Prettis shooting, artists across the nation are using protest art to offer their support to the cityand to express their outrage at the federal governments actions. These events are complex and can be easily manipulated, Rodriguez says. An image or a poster can cut through all of that and get to the heart of the matter. Many people feel they are alone in how they are feeling. Art helps people understand that they are not alone, that they are not imagining things. Minneapolis by Edel Rodriguez Minneapolis Rodriguezs concept for Minneapolis traces back to 2020, when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed resident George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for over nine minutes. At the time, Rodriguez created an initial sketch of the scene, followed by another version several weeks later, he says, of Trump doing the same to Lady Liberty. After witnessing the killings of Good and Pretti, Rodriguez created a new version of the illustration in which Trump is holding a gun over Lady Liberty’s prone form. All of these murders happened in the same city, and share one thing in commondisturbing violence and a disregard for human life by those in a position of authority, Rodriguez says. We talk about ICE or Border Patrol violating Americans civil rights, but the person responsible for the killings is Donald Trump. Thats where the idea for this image came from. Since 2016, Rodriguez has used his signature pop-art style to chronicle Trumps time in office, drawing inspiration from political artists like John Heartfield, George Grosz, Otto Dix, and Max Beckmann to use satirical work as a means of documenting history for future generations. Rodriguez, who grew up under Fidel Castros authoritarian regime in Cuba, says many of the Trump administrations recent actions feel strikingly familiar. We are in a very dangerous time in this country, he says. Americans seem to have accepted the idea that being asked for their papers by masked men is acceptable. I grew up in a dictatorship in Cuba where this was commonplace, where people had no rights against search and seizure and no free speech. All Americans should be outraged that people are being targeted based on the color of their skin or their accent. James Herriott, What Kind of American Are You What Kind of American Are You Undoubtedly the most widely circulated and impactful imagery from the killings of Good and Pretti are the videos and stills of the events themselveswhich citizens captured from several angles on the scene in both cases. These videos have served as crucial touchpoints to fight back against the administrations claims that Good and Pretti acted violently toward federal agentswhen, indeed, all visual evidence points to the contrary. They also inspired James Herriot, an artist from Montana, to create his first pieces of protest art, which have since picked up considerable traction on Reddit. When I got up and saw the news of Alex Pretti’s killing I was shaking, Herriot says. I felt like I had just watched a malicious, completely avoidable, and yet entirely predictable train wreck. Watching that federal agent unload round after round into a civilian on the ground was absolutely sickening. As someone living in a deep red area of the U.S., he adds, there are only a few people in his circle that he can speak openly with, so drawing sometimes feels like the only way I can process it. Herriots illustration, titled What Kind of American Are You, merges imagery from Prettis killing with a scene from the 2024 film Civil War. In the film, which imagines a fractured future America, an armed antagonist played by Jesse Plemons questions a group of journalists on their race and country of origin, executing any who dont answer to his liking. The subtext of the scene is that Plemonss character views whiteness as a proxy for Americaness. In this moment in the movie [Plemonss character] is asking What kind of American are you? to a group of strangers he intends to harm, Herriot says. I think that question hits on so many levels. . . . Are you one of ‘us’ or one of ‘them’ . . . Are you the right color . . . Were you born in the right place? Or even deeper, are you the kind of American who will stand for the values upon which our nation was supposedly founded, or one who will succumb to tribalism, hate, and party politics? In What Kind of American Are You, Plemonss character is pictured with his recognizable red sunglasses and assault rifle hovering over Prettis prone form, while federal agents point a gun and a can of pepper spray at Prettis head. Since posting the work, Herriot says hes received some reactions labeling the art as propaganda (which he believes sort of proves the point of it”), though the overwhelming response has been supportive. I think protest art plays the same role that physical protests do, Herriot says. While it may not functionally, directly change anything, it shows people that they’re not alone. It shows others that not everyone in the world thinks the same way they do. It shows those in power that their actions or policies are not accepted by everyone. Topsy, Dont worry, Ive got you Dont worry, Ive got you Topsy is a graffiti artist in Seattle, who asked to remain anonymous for this story due to possible retaliation. Topsy has been creating public protest art since Trump’s second inauguration, including designs in support of the No Kings protests, that depict ICE agents as pigs, and that satirize Trumps friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. News of Pretti’s death “bore a hole through my heart, the artist says. Topsy’s initial draft highlighted violent acts perpetrated by ICE. Ultimately, though, the artist decided to shift focus. “From all accounts of his loved ones, Alex was the embodiment of someone who cared deeply about justicelending himself to help others,” Topsy says. “This shows in all parts of his life, from his work as an ICU nurse at the VA, up to his last moments, protecting a woman before ICE executed him in retaliation. I realized that the strength of Alex’s light was far more powerful than the darkness of ICE. I wanted to make something beautiful that his parents could look at and be proud of him for that.” The final work is titled Don’t worry, I’ve got you. It shows Pretti, who worked at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Hospital, wearing blue scrubs and a stethoscope. Hes leaning over to assist Lady Justice, whos crumpled on the ground, wearing her symbolic blindfold. The image mirrors a moment seconds before Prettis death, when he attempted to help a fellow protester who had been pushed down by a federal agent. Topsy selected a wall in First Hill, a Seattle neighborhood known for its high concentration of medical centers, as the site for the work. Its now been viewed thousands of times in real life and across social media. “In a time of many injustices, where even our own Department of Justice refuses to investigate the murders of citizens by ICE, Topsy says, I wanted to highlight that regular citizens like Alex are the true people who will pull Justice up from the trenches and make sure she sees another day.
Category:
E-Commerce
Last week, I published a deep exploration into Palantir and its founder factory and how the companys power and success can be explained by its ability to attract elite talent and how it empowers them to develop their skills and learn new ones in the projects they pursue. That talent then goes on to found their own startups, invariably seeking to address hard, intractable problems much as they did in their work at Palantir. (In the few days since I published my first story, Ive found another 21 former Palantir employees turned founders, bringing what was already the largest public dataset of these people to 335. If you havent already, check it out here.) There are a number of high-profile companies founded by Palantir alums that many people have heard of. These include: Anduril, the defense contractor ($30.5 billion valuation), cofounded by Brian Schimpf, Matt Grimm, and Trae Stephens; Kalshi, the predictions market ($11 billion valuation), cofounded by Tarek Mansour; Eleven Labs, the voice AI platform ($6.6 billion valuation), cofounded by Mati Staniszewski; Handshake, the marketplace for early-career workers, colleges, and employers which has recently focused more on matching specialized talent with AI training opportunities ($3.3 billion valuation), cofounded by Garrett Lord; and Partiful, the planning tool for IRL experiences ($400 million valuation), cofounded by Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao. But there are so many fascinating stories among the cadre of startups founded and led by Palantir alums. The nine companies showcased below, which span healthcare, government services, cybersecurity, law, clean energy, hardware development, and not-for-profits, exemplify the power of being acculturated to finding a big, hard problemand having the skills to tackle it. Angle Health Palantir alum founders: Ty Wang (CEO), Anirban Gangopadhyay Other founders: None What Angle does: AI-native healthcare benefits platform, particularly serving employees of small and medium-size businesses Employees: Approximately 100 Funding: $197 million raised to date, including a $134 million Series B in December 2025 led by Portage, with funding also from Blumberg Capital, Y Combinator, and others Secret sauce: Creating a full-stack solution. To work toward achieving the companys goal of changing how people approach and access healthcare, as Wang says, and democratize access to the kinds of modern healthcare services . . . that are still not available to a lot of the people that really need them, Angle had to rebuild the technology infrastructure that powers the way that the vast majority of Americans access healthcare today, which is through their health plan. Angle has centralized data assets and focused on enabling AI-driven, human-in-the-loop workflows across its products and operations. That allows it to offer such things as digital behavioral health programs or digital pharmacies, for examplenewer services that have become more routine for large employers to include in their health plansand that can reduce the overall cost of care for the thousands of small businesses that Angle serves. One key learning from Palantir: Gangopadhyay explains that Angles culture encourages a lot of slow thinking and having discourse on a monthly basis to develop a clear plan, and then we’re very intentionally head-in-the-ground and hands-to-keyboards executing. Although Palantir itself is not structured this way in terms of a “monthly sync,” he adds that we’re very light on meetings. We leave the individuals to execute in their own way. That is spiritually aligned with how Palantir operates. Avandar Labs Palantir alum founders: Pablo Sarmiento (CEO and CTO) Other founders: None What Avandar does: Software for social enterprises and nonprofits to manage their data Employees: One Funding: Bootstrapped. In fact, Sarmiento says he will not raise equity-based funding, choosing instead to pursue non-dilutive capital sources, including revenue-based financing to align better with the goals of socially focused companies. Secret sauce: Think about it, says Sarmiento, we shouldn’t be building the software we need to fight a crisis during the crisis, referring to COVID as well as the work he did after he left Palantir, at Zenysis Technologies, helping create software so that the National Health Institute in Mozambique could successfully fight a cholera epidemic. It should exist. Avandar Labs lets not-for-profits and social enterprises build a unified data platform to integrate and analyze an organization’s program data. (It’s currently in beta but when complete, Sarmiento says it’ll be “customizable to any mission.”) The platform’s core technological difference is that it was built from the start for social sector use cases, such as “ensuring it can support epidemic response, humanitarian emergencies, and cross-sector coordination.” He promises it’ll be far cheaper than any alternatives, too. One key learning from Palantir: Bias towards action. Chapter Palantir alum founders: Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz Other founders: Corey Metzman, former Presidential candidate (and current Ohio gubernatorial candidate), Vivek Ramaswamy What Chapter does: AI to help American seniors find the optimal Medicare plan at the lowest cost Employees: Approximately 200 Funding: $186 million raised to date, most recently at a valuation of approximately $1.5 billion. Investors include Stripes, XYZ, and Susa Ventures, among others. Secret sauce: Using AI to help seniors navigate Medicare. Chapters recommendation engine identifies which of the 24,000 Medicare options that exist is right for an individual customer, taking into account their doctors, prescriptions regimen, usual pharmacies, the benefits that are most important to them, their ability and willingness to pay, and more. Each one of those inputs is a huge data problem in and of its own, Blumenfeld-Gantz notes. It has an app that can determine from a picture of a users Medicare card which plan theyre on and then curate every single item that’s eligible for your plan and check them out without a litany of phone calls, he adds. Speaking of calls, Chapter ingests every phone communication its brokers have to assess if they’re making high-quality, compliant recommendations and offer real-time feedback. One keylearning from Palantir: Being relentless. Working in a regulated space, where you have to get federal and state licenses and get licensed by insurance carriers in every state you operate, its just not accepting no, says Blumenfeld-Gantz. [You have to be] really annoying to state departments of insurance until they take your call and move your paperwork forward. The way I think about it is that you have to make it less work for them to do what you want them to do. Status quo, the easier thing is for them to do nothing. So you have to change the status quo so its easier for them to do something than nothing. Draftwise Palantir alum founders: James Ding (CEO), Emre Ozen Other founders: Ozan Yalti (former senior associate at the global law firm Clifford Chance) What Draftwise does: AI software for law firms and in-house legal teams to automate contract drafting, review, and negotiation Employees: Approximately 60 Funding: $28 million raised to date, from Index Ventures, Y Combinator, and others Secret sauce: Every other well-funded legal tech company in the space is building an application layer tool trying to put LLMs inside of bespoke interfaces to try to increase productivity for lawyers, says Ding. Draftwise is a data platform. We started by recognizing that the pain point we wanted to solve was one where the challenge is that big-ticket deals require data, and if you can’t have the data, you can’t make good decisions. We started from that foundation, integrating data across a variety of silos, bringing it together, and shaping it into an ontology. Then we also happen to have interfaces to serve that data to people inside their workflow. For example, Ding cites an add-in for Microsoft Word that Draftwise made. You’re drafting a contract, you’re negotiating financial covenants, Draftwise can pull together into a single view all the data you need to actually make the decision of what covenants to give. One key learning from Palantir: The thing I wanted to bring was immense agency, immense accountability, a sense of high integrity, says Ding, but also high effort where we’re just getting things done, we’re doing it right, and we’re doing the best we can. Fourth Age Palantir alum founders: Zach Romanow, plus founding partners Jesse Rickard, Pete Mills, and Samuel Tarng Other founders: None What Fourth Age does: Specialized forward-deployed engineering for Palantir customers to build complex applications on top of Palantirs platforms Employees: More than 50 Funding: Bootstrapped Secret sauce: My first customer is really the engineers, says Romanow, the best and brightest FDEs, or the people that could become the best and brightest FDEs if they’re in the right place and have the right teams around them. . . . hire the best possible people that at scale provide differentiated outcomes for customers, and the customers will pay you accordingly. One key learning from Palantir: If you have a very, very high bar for the people . . . then A players want to join the A team, Romanow says. Let’s really stay true to our principles of what we know great looks like. Manifest Palantir alum founders: Daniel Bardenstein (CEO); Marc Frankel (former CEO) Other founders: N/A What Manifest does: Software and AI bill of materials to protect everything from healthcare systems to military aircraft Employees: Approximately 30 Funding: $21 million raised to date from such investors as AE Industrial Partners (Boeing’s venture arm), Palumni VC, XYZ, and others Secret sauce: Provides both vendors and buyers with visibility into the provenance of the elements in the software and AI they depend on to eliminate the risk of introducing a potentially calamitous vulnerability. Software is the only thing that we buy that you don’t get to know what’s in it, says Frankel. Everything else in our lives comes with an ingredients list. One key learning from Palantir: Low ego, high ops tempo.” Nira Energy Palantir alum founders: Andy Chen (CTO) Other founders: Chris Ariante (CEO, ex-Exxon Mobil), Andrew Martin What Nira does: Software for clean energy developers, data centers, and utilities that helps them understand where theres available capacity on the electric grid for new projects Employees: Approximately 30 Funding: $65.5 million from Energize Capital, Y Combinator, and others Secret sauce: Focusing on one of the most painful roadblocks to building renewables, the hidden pain point impeding the goal to accelerate America’s power grid to be fossil free as quickly as possible, as Chen says. That is what’s known in the energy business as interconnectionadding renewable projects to the grid. Nira’s built mapping tools to help developers identify sites with capacity and another one to estimate costs while a project is in queue to come online. One key learning from Palantir: Learning about transmission planning is a critical part to being successful at Nira, Chen says. If you’re not interested, you’re not going to be able to learn it. One thing that’s similar culturally between Palantir and the people we have here is this fundamental curiosity and willingness to learn about totally random stuff that will never help you in a future job, but you want to do it because you’re fundamentally interested in it. Chen adds that he’s now hiring for a forward deployed engineering role. Nominal Palantir alum founders: Jason Hoch Other founders: Cameron McCord (CEO, former Naval submarine officer, ex-Anduril), Bryce Strauss (ex-Lockheed Martin) What Nominal does: Software to help hardware engineering teams, people who build such things as nuclear fusion reactors and satellites, test and deliver complex systems faster Employees: Approximately 100 Funding: $102.5 million raised to date, from Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, Lux Capital, Founders Fund, and others Secret sauce: Speed and solving the data challenges that hardware manufacturers face. When mechanical and electrical engineers work on hard hardware problems, they [also] have software problems, they have data infrastructure problems, Hoch says. We’re speeding up the workflows. We’re increasing the maximum complexity of what the hardware engineers and or customers can accomplish. When they finish a task or a simulation, they don’t need to crack open Claude Code to start understanding their data. It’s just right there in front of them. They’re able to ask the hard physics and engineering questions of the data. That’s the speed. For that data issue, when you’re building complex software systems, Hoch explains, you have this incredible toolkit of SaaS companies that have been building ways to make your job better for 30 years. Hardware engineers, by contrast, You’ll have 10,000 data points a second, a million data points a second coming off of a sensor, meaning that the nature of helping them process that data is not a solved problem. One key learning from Palantir: Remaining customer obsessed, remaining technically obsessed. Our customers are wildly technical. The things that I would have to teach people 12 years ago when I was onsite with a customer, these people already know it. It’s keeping us honest to making sure we’re really staying at the cutting edge. Sage Palantir alum founders: Raj Mehra (CEO), Matt Lynch (CTO) Other founders: Ellen Johnston (chief product officer) What Sage does: A hardware and software platform to deliver better eldercare, particularly in assisted living facilities Employees: More than 100 Funding: $59 million raised to date, from IVP, Friends & Family Capital, Maveron, and others Secret sauce: Building hardware to collect the critical data to support its software. How do we give caregivers better tools to care for residents? How do we give residents of these communities tools to call for help and get help when they need it? asks Mehra. Realizing that existing systems werent measuring relevant data, Sage has built Core, which tracks nurse calls and helps caregivers manage tasks, which operators can then “use to improve quality of care and caregiver performance,” Lynch notes. It also built Detect, which is AI-powered fall detection that enables care providers to respond proactively to those kind of emergency events. We can measure and pull in all of the telemetry from the physical devices that we’re deploying, Mehra adds. Based on all of that, you can then synthesize it and provide value to folks up the value chain. One key learning from Palantir: One of us is responsible for every single person we bring in, says Mehra. One of Palantirs founders interviewed every hire for a long time. We haven’t departed from that, he continues, and I don’t think we ever should because it’s how we keep the culture intact. Adds Lynch: Then, if we make a mistake, we own it . . . when bets don’t pay off, we can’t sacrifice the culture for that.
Category:
E-Commerce
As researchers approach the front doors of Oxfords new Life and Mind Building (LaMB), theyre greeted with a towering concrete facade, rendered with a rippling surface effect. What first appears to be a mere stylistic choice actually encodes something more special: Each of the concretes waves and dips is derived from the brain scan of an Oxford researcher. Designed by the architecture firm NBBJ, the LaMB is a massive, 269,000-square-foot space that brings together two departments: experimental psychology, which studies the human brain and how it operates; and biology, which encompasses both zoology (animal studies) and plant sciences. When it opened last October after four years of construction, it became the largest facility on the historic universitys campus. [Photo: Ty Cole/NBBJ] The LaMBs facade is visually striking, but it also embodies a few clever ways that NBBJ is reimagining what a university lab building can be. The structure is built to account for the natural path of the sun, capture energy using solar panels, and use advanced cladding technology to lessen its environmental impact. In short, its a vision of a lab thats better for both its staffers and the planet. [Photo: Ty Cole/NBBJ] A brain wave hidden in plain sight When visitors look up at the LaMB, theyre literally observing someones positive thoughteven if they dont know it. Darius Umrigar, a principal architect at NBBJ and the lead project designer of LaMB, says one of his teams main priorities was to design with longevity in mind, given that Oxford itself is nearly 1,000 years old. That meant choosing durable materials (concrete, stone, and metal) to make up the facade. At the same time, they wanted to ensure that the building would have aesthetic interest and fit within the existing campus. [Photo: Richard Chivers/NBBJ] The solution would need to be a design that works with the buildings thick concrete exterior and can withstand the environment for decades. [Photo: Richard Chivers/NBBJ] During that process, we talked to the head of experimental psychology, Umrigar says. They do a lot of brain scanning, both voluntarily and in terms of their approach to research and treatment. When we were considering the design, we were looking at how it would weather well and maintain its beauty without needing to be maintained. They wanted a texture for the buildings cladding that wasnt just flat concrete, he adds. Through this discussion, one student volunteered her own brain scan to serve as the basis of a potential decorative feature. That student was Sage Boettcher, whos now a career development research fellow in the department of experimental psychology. A scan of her brain was taken while she actively envisioned the future of the LaMB lab. From there, the NBBJ team isolated a two-second blip of the recording, resulting in a distinct sinusoidal wave pattern of dips and curves. Those rippling gestures were then carved into various stone slabs, which appear at intervals across the buildings exterior. What we try to do with NBBJ is to not leave a legacy that dates the building, but look at using materials in the truest form and balance that with the budget we’ve got to work with, Umrigar says. I think the harmony of simple, quality materials that will weather well and stand the test of time is certainly the key to success. [Photo: Richard Chivers/NBBJ] Labs are a major energy suckthe LaMB uses clever design to combat that The LaMBs facade is designed to be beautifu, but it also serves a greater purpose for the environment. Traditionally, labs are a major energy suck. According to a 2019 study, the combined emissions of hospitals and labs account for 4.4% of the worlds total greenhouse gas emissions. (For context, the study found that labs at Harvard accounted for nearly 44% of the universitys energy use, yet only 20% of its total space.) According to the engineering consultancy Hoare Lea, which worked with NBBJ on the LaMB, labs are typically expected to consume three to five times as much energy as a traditional office. Some estimates put that figure even higher, at around a factor of 10. [Photo: Richard Chivers/NBBJ] The main reason labs drain so much energy is their intense climate control demands. Maintaining the integrity of the many experiments that take place every day means labs need 24/7 systems keeping their air filtered, moving at the correct volume, and tuned to specific humidity and temperature settings. All of these demands equal major energy inputsand, ultimately, high operational costs. One of the biggest ways that lab buildings can conserve energy, Umrigar says, is by simply preventing air from leaking out. For the NBBJ team, that meant creating an airtight cladding system. The final design includes an outer layer of precast concrete panels, a thick internal layer of thermal insulation, triple-glazed windows, and precision detailing to ensure that every nook and cranny is sealed against the outside world. [Photo: Richard Chivers/NBBJ] The LaMB is also carefully situated to maximize natural sunlight. A central atrium cutout allows in soft daylight without overheating the building, while harsher light is captured via a series of roof-mounted solar panels. Inside, air source heat pumps and adaptive ventilation (which uses special sensors to determine how and when to circulate air) cut down even further on wasted energy. In all, these clever design tactics mean that the LaMB emits about 40% less carbon than it would at baseline. It’s a great achievement for a very large lab building, and certainly probably pushing the boundaries of what the university has been able to do for science buildings of this type in the past, Umrigar says. It sets a new benchmark, I would say, not only for Oxford, but for many other universities looking to develop a research facility.
Category:
E-Commerce
Kim (not her real name) is a scientist and tenured faculty member at a high-profile university. For years, she steadily moved up the hierarchy, yet no one could point to what she accomplished. She kept transferring from role to role, not because she succeeded. In fact, it was the opposite. Kim wasnt delivering measurable results, and no one liked working with her. She occupied an uncomfortable middle ground: not unsuccessful enough for the university to dismiss her, but no longer effective enough to stay. They transferred her to a newly created role. It came with bigger, but opaque responsibilities. The result looked like a promotion, but functioned as avoidance. I study and speak about high achievers in the workplace, including in my recent book, The Success Factor, and have observed this problem resurface, leading to the departure of top performers. What happened to Kim is what I call promotion by failure. Its the practice of moving an underperforming or difficult employee into a higher status role, often with increased influence and reduced accountability, to avoid directly addressing the poor performance. Ultimately, this isnt just a performance issueits a leadership and systems failure. Achieving promotion by failure When companies reassign, elevate, or create new positions for under-performing employees, this misaligned intervention sends an alarming signal with reverberating negative ripple effects on teams and the entire organization. The displacement strategy removes the bad employee from immediate friction but ignores the root cause. Sadly, the underperforming employee will eventually repeat their behavior in a new role. But promotion by failure doesnt help anyone. Its not a developmental rotation, and it doesnt provide a stretch assignment to the troubled employee. What it does do is reward poor behavior without consequence and leaves a trail of damage and mistrust in its wake. Reasons for this lack of accountability can be structural, psychological, or legal in nature. We typically see this to be more prevalent in large bureaucratic systems, organizations with weak performance management, and cultures that avoid conflict. Letting someone go may open a company up to litigation, especially if theres a lack of clear performance metrics. As a result, they end up shuffling the employee around so they can make sure that they dont do too much damage. Organizations then repeat the cycle until the employee leaves on their own, or the issues escalate to the point where companies cannot ignore the issue. Weak leaders share blame in fueling promotion by failure. They are often conflict-avoidant and worry that any potential grievances will damage their reputation. Theyve also convinced themselves that the role wasnt the right fit for the individual or have overestimated the power of a new role for the individual, instead of addressing their capability gaps. Why high performers leave when this happens Ultimately, while they might have avoided conflict by promoting a weak performer, there are unintended negative consequences. Top performers, in particular, can become disillusioned, which leads to employee disengagement, lack of innovation, and retention issues. High performers value competence, clarity, and fairness. Promotion by failure violates all three. It signals that results dont matter, negative behavior has no consequence, and excellence is optional. This causes your top performers to be disenfranchised, cynical, and disengaged. And when they feel all those things, eventually they leave the organization. As a result, organizations dont only end up losing their best talent, but also their trust. And when these people leave, who remains? Those who operate by smoke and mirrors rather than achieve results. The organizational cost that leaders underestimate Its not just poor leadership. Theres a tangible organizational cost and messaging when you reward poor performance. Erosion of performance culture: High performers have the image that optics trump output, and that they dont reward consistent results as much as visibility or tenure. It also sends a signal that performance standards vary depending on who the company is evaluating. Loss of institutional credibility: When communication about merit conflicts with reality, employees no longer trust promotion or role assignment decisions. Employees respond to leaders explanations with silence, rather than buy-in. Increased attrition among top talent: High performers leave due to neglect. The strongest contributors leave quietly, without waiting for counteroffers. The exit interviews raise red flags of poor leadership rather than workload or salary. Normalization of mediocrity: Instead of rewarding high performance and productivity, average becomes the acceptable norm, which stunts innovation. Feedback and brainstorming sessions shift from improvement to reassurance, while the company treats excellence as optional rather than expected. Succession pipelines filled with the wrong people: If you ever wondered why certain people are in leadership roles, its because in some institutions, promotion is about loyalty rather than capability. Companies fill those roles with people who create the least resistance. What senior leaders need to do If youre a leader who is committed to excellence, its time to address this overlooked (yet undeniable) reality. Address performance early and directly: Make feedback specific and behavior-based, not tied to outcomes or personality. Give ideas on how to improve performance and communication. Separate compassion from avoidance: There is no way around it. Difficult conversations need to happen despite discomfort, not when your top performers leave en masse. Its necessary for leaders to pair, not substitute, their support with accountability. Create consequences that dont rely on relocation: You should not reward poor performance. If someone is unfit for the role, think about reducing or redesigning their leadership role. Their compensation, scope, or authority changes should reflect performance realities, not wish lists. Invest in real development or make hard exit decisions: Measure progress based on pre-agreed milestones. If improvement doesnt happen, act decisively rather than extending the process indefinitely. Audit roles that exist without outcomes: Do an inventory of the leadership roles and flag those positions without clear deliverables. If necessary, redesign or eliminate them, and align titles and influence with measurable contributions. The mistake you accept becomes the new standard. Promotion by failure is rarely about one person. It mirrors what leaders tolerate, reward, and avoid. Ending promotion by failure is not about being harsher. Its about being honest, accountable, and fair. Its time to stop using title inflation as conflict management.
Category:
E-Commerce
A new book by a former Deloitte executive turned workplace well-being expert argues exactly that In her new book Hope Is the Strategy, Jen Fisher, an expert on workplace well-being and human sustainability, makes a clear and timely case that hope isn’t a soft skill or a leadership afterthought; it’s a practical, learnable approach to navigating uncertainty and building healthier, more resilient organizations. In the following excerpt, Fisher draws on her personal experience grappling with burnout, as well as her research on well-being, leadership, and corporate culture, to reframe hope as something we can all learn and implement for ourselves and those we work with. We’ve long misunderstood hope in the workplace. We’ve treated it as wishful thinkinga nice-to-have feeling that emerges when things are going well. But research from psychologist C.R. Snyder reveals something far more powerful: Hope is a cognitive process with three essential components: goals (what we want to achieve), pathways (our ability to identify routes to those goals), and agency (our belief that we can pursue those paths). This isn’t passive optimism; it’s an active strategy for navigating uncertainty and driving meaningful change. After my own experience with burnout, I discovered that hope isn’t what you turn to after strength failshope is the strength we’ve been looking for all along. It’s not the light at the end of the tunnel; it’s the torch we need to lead others through it. And when organizations embed hope into their leadership practices and culture, they unlock something remarkable: the capacity to transform not just how people feel about work, but what they can actually accomplish together. As more organizations prioritize helping their employees become healthier, more skilled for the future, and connected to a sense of purpose and belonging, they have an opportunity to instill hope in leadership and encourage it in workers. A roadmap for the future A leader who has hope can map out a path for an employee, offering a solid roadmap rather than an empty promise. They might say, “I can’t promise you complete job security, but I can provide you with the skills that will make you attractive in the job market.” That, in turn, helps foster hope in the worker, because they know that they’ll have more tools in their success toolkit, no matter what the future holds. That’s not just a win for the individual, but for the group. An organization (of any typeit could also be a community, or a family) filled with people tapped into their meaning and purpose is stronger than one made up of disengaged, unhealthy, and unhappy people. In fact, hope is a strategy for a variety of prevalent workplace problems: It can improve mental well-being and stress management; it can drive action and reduce catastrophic thinking; and it can help overcome the disengagement crisis at work. What’s more, hope will support our transition to a more human-centered workplace as AI takes on the more mundane, tactical aspects of work. Creating new ripples from leadership on down is possibleand as with the negative ones, it starts with modeling behaviors to set the tone for your team and your peers. That is, modeling the sustainable work behaviors and values that will drive purpose and well-being. Here are four examples: 1. Get clear on what your own boundaries are If you’re following someone else’s vision of success instead of your own, you’re going to end up miserable and probably burned out. So take that PTOreally. The company will not crumble without you. And don’t answer that email at midnightreply in the morning, during work hours. A leader who actually sets healthy boundaries and lives by them gives employees permission to do the same. As I reevaluated the role that work played in my life, I set my own new boundaries. I got clear on what my definition of success was, instead of allowing the external world to define that for me. And I brought hope into my life: I started each day with a set of “what if” questions, looking at the day ahead through the lens of possibility: What if this goes right? What if I do things this way? Then I’d end each day with reflection: How did it go? It helped me to see challenges as an opportunity for change. Here are some other daily practices I put in place, all of which I still follow today: Treat sleep as a nonnegotiable. I protect my eight hours like the business asset it actually is, recognizing that sleep isn’t a luxury but the foundation that makes everything else possible. Schedule humanity into the calendar. Not vague “personal time” but specific blocks for connections that make me human: dinner with my husband, phone calls with friends, reading fiction that has nothing to do with work. Incorporate daily recovery rituals. Three-minute breathing breaks between meetings, a proper lunch away from my desk, a brief walk outside to reset my nervous systemthese small moments of renewal prevent depletion from accumulating. Defend the calendar against the tyranny of urgency. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, exercise, and sleep aren’t just activities to fit around “real work”they comprise the immovable infrastructure that sustains my performance. Everything else has to work around them, not the other way around. 2. Embrace the unknown When we temporarily suspend our need for certainty, a different kind of productivity emerges. I call these my Possibility Days: Once a week, I grant myself permission to coexist with uncertainty. Instead of trying to control outcomes, I deliberately seek experiences with unknown results. I have conversations without preparing talking points. I explore ideas that seem impractical. I follow curiosity down rabbit holes without worrying where they lead. My most innovative solutions and deepest insights almost always trace back to these deliberate ventures into possibility thinking. 3. Walk the walk The old ways of leading through power and control are giving way to something more human, more hopeful, and more whole. The future of leadership isn’t just about what we doit’s about how we show up, how we hold space for both struggle and possibility, and how we cultivate well-being as a vital way of being. There’s this old thinking that we should check our feelings or emotions at work. It’s basically telling people: Don’t show up as who you truly are. When leaders normalize having no energy, no life, no nothing beyond work, it becomes not just accepted but expected. Emotions, whether they’re positive or negative, are really a sign of the things we care aboutand when we’re told not to bring emotions into the workplace, it stunts creativity, growth, innovation, connection, and understanding. The answer is simple: Show your emotions. Your employees look to you to set the pace, tone, and stakes of the team and the work being done. Be vulnerable and authentic about when you’ve made a mistake, when you said one thing and you did another, when you screwed up. Your actions show themthat decisions to support their own health and well-being and career growth aren’t going to be viewed negatively or make it seem like they’re less committed to their work. 4. Build teams grounded in trust True organizational and individual success depends on teams built on mutual trustteams that prioritize deep relationships alongside personal well-being. Trust-based teams require leaders who actively invite people to show up authentically and provide genuine support when they do. This means fostering psychological safety where team members feel confident giving honest feedback, taking calculated risks, learning from missteps, and growing from challenges rather than facing punishment for them. Organizations with the strongest well-being cultures maintain ongoing dialogue between leaders and team members. Within trust-based environments, people develop a growth-oriented perspective. Colleagues treat each other with genuine care and respect, creating workplaces rooted in kindness. This positive energy extends far beyond individual teams, helping organizations attract diverse talent, improve retention, spark innovation, and build lasting resilience.
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