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From the outside, it looks like a generational standoff. Baby boomers are retiring earlier than expected, frustrated by workplace change, technology shifts, and growing tension with younger colleagues. At the same time, Gen Z talks openly about quitting jobs that feel misaligned or draining. Many leaders interpret this as a clash of values. Older workers cannot adapt. Younger workers lack commitment. The data tells a more complicated story. New research from Clari and Salesloft, conducted in partnership with Workplace Intelligence, surveyed 2,000 U.S. sellers and sales leaders across industries. The study found that 19% of baby boomers are planning to retire early because they are tired of dealing with Gen Z at work. At the same time, 28% of Gen Z respondents said they are actively searching for a role where they will not have to interact with baby boomers as much. The cost of that friction is not abstract. The research estimates that generational conflict is costing organizations roughly $56 billion each year in lost productivity, driven by miscommunication, burnout, and uneven adoption of new technologies like AI. On its own, that data suggests a workplace pulling itself apart. But another study complicates the narrative. Research from Southeastern Oklahoma State University, based on a survey of 1,000 employees, found that 71% of Gen Z workers are staying in a job or career longer than they want simply because they do not know how to leave. Nearly half say they are actively transitioning toward something new, while 68% report that their employer has no idea they are planning a change. Taken together, these findings reveal something leaders often miss. Baby boomers are leaving because they can. Gen Z is staying because they do not know how not to. This is not a motivation problem. It is a clarity problem. A shifting environment For many boomers, the workplace they are navigating today barely resembles the one they mastered. AI tools, shifting communication norms, and changing definitions of productivity have disrupted identities built on decades of experience and institutional knowledge. When those changes arrive without context or support, frustration grows. Early retirement becomes less about age and more about opting out of an environment that no longer feels coherent. Gen Z is facing the opposite challenge. They entered a workforce defined by constant change, but very little guidance. Career paths are opaque. Loyalty feels risky. Advice is often abstract. While they are often labeled as eager to quit, the reality is that many are stuck in roles they have already outgrown, unsure how to move on without harming their future. AI has intensified this divide rather than resolving it. For example, the same Clari and Salesloft research found that 39% of Gen Z would rather be managed by AI than by a baby boomer, while 25% of boomers say they would prefer working with AI over a Gen Z colleague. This preference is less about technology being superior and more about predictability. In environments where expectations feel unclear or inconsistent, AI can appear easier to work with than people. The leadership factor That is where leadership enters the equation. Engaged empathy is not about lowering standards or avoiding difficult conversations. It is about understanding how different generations experience the same systems and responding with clear, actionable communication. Without that effort, organizations allow frustration to turn into disengagement. For Gen Z, engaged empathy shows up as explicit career navigation. Not platitudes about growth, but concrete conversations about skills, timelines, and options. Many young employees are not afraid of hard work. They are afraid of making irreversible mistakes in a system that rarely explains the rules. For baby boomers, engaged empathy means recognizing that resistance to new tools is often rooted in identity, not stubbornness. When experience feels discounted rather than translated, trust erodes. Leaders who intentionally connect new technologies to existing strengths reduce defensiveness and preserve institutional wisdom. However, none of this works without clarity. High-performing organizations do not assume alignment across generations. They create it. They explain what success looks like now, how it is measured, and how employees at different stages can contribute and grow. They introduce AI as a shared resource rather than a silent evaluator. Boomers retiring early and Gen Z wanting to quit are not signs that work is fundamentally broken. They are signals that employees are responding rationally to unclear systems and inconsistent leadership. The solution is not fewer generations in the workplace. It is leaders willing to practice engaged empathy and communicate clearly enough that fewer people feel the need to escape in the first place.
Category:
E-Commerce
Last year was a brutal one for layoffs, with large cuts coming from Amazon, UPS, Microsoft and Verizon. And as things get rolling for 2026, it’s looking like this year won’t be any less uncertain for workers. This week has seen a slew of sizable job cuts from a wide variety of companies. As of Thursday morning, more than 61,650 positions have been eliminated. The actual number is likely a fair bit higher as many of the companies announcing layoffssuch as Shopify, Expedia, and Vimeodid not release the number of jobs that were impacted. Dow Inc. was the most recent well-known company to announce cuts. On Thursday, the chemical maker said it would do away with 4,500 positions as part of a streamlining operation it calls “Transform to Outperform.” The company says it plans to rely more on artificial intelligence and automation in the months ahead. Those layoffs represented approximately 12% of the company’s workforce. Dow was hardly alone this week, though. The staff trimmings are occurring at tech and tech-adjacent companies around the world and are adding up fast. Here are some other notable reductions in staff that have been announced this week. Pinterest On Monday, social media platform Pinterest filed a notification with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it was planning “a reduction in force that is expected to affect less than 15% of the Companys workforce.” With an estimated workforce of 5,200 people, that puts the layoffs between 700 and 800. The company said it plans to utilize AI to fill many of those roles. Nike The footwear giant confirmed plans to lay off 775 employees in the U.S., the third year in a row that it has cut jobs. Nike said it would rely on automation to handle the duties of those workers. United Parcel Service (UPS) During an earnings call with analysts on Tuesday, Brian Dykes, chief financial officer of UPS, revealed plans to reduce operational hours at the delivery giant by 25 million, which will result in 30,000 workers losing their jobs. The cuts come as the company winds down its long-standing partnership with Amazon. The Home Depot The Home Depot confirmed plans Wednesday to lay off 800 workers, including 150 at its Atlanta headquarters. “Were simplifying our corporate operations to better support our stores and our customers,” a spokesperson for the home improvement retail chain told Fast Company. “These changes include a reduction in roles associated with our store support center . . . This was a difficult decision, and were focused on doing the right thing and supporting associates who were impacted.” Amazon Just months after laying off 14,000 workers last fall, Amazon on Wednesday said it was eliminating another 16,000 jobs. And the company did not rule out additional cuts in the months to come (though it said none were currently planned). “Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm where we announce broad reductions every few months,” wrote Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon. “Thats not our plan. But just as we always have, every team will continue to evaluate the ownership, speed, and capacity to invent for customers, and make adjustments as appropriate.” Other companies laying off workers Beyond the cuts this week, January has also seen notable workforce reductions from Autodesk (1,000 workers), Ericsson (1,600 employees), Meta Platforms (1,500 people), and ASML (1,700 staffers), according to job cut tracking sites Layoffs.fyi and trueup. Savings and productivity gains that come with AI and automation will almost certainly be pointed at by companies that lay off workers as layoffs in 2026 continue, but several businesses that have decided to become AI-first workplaces have come to regret the move. Two years ago, Klarna Group instituted a hiring freeze as it embraced the notion that AI could do the work of hundreds of employees. Last May, however, it reversed course, saying it might have been too ambitious with its AI goals. Meanwhile, language learning platform Duolingo saw its push to embrace AI attacked on social media. Shares of Duolingo are down more than 61% over the last 12 months.
Category:
E-Commerce
Its Friday afternoon. Your inbox looks like a battleground, your calendar is a collage of back-to-back calls, and the strategic plan you built last quarter already feels outdated. Youve spent the week reacting, extinguishing fires, and juggling unexpected demands you didnt plan for. Youve been busy, but not necessarily productive. Youve managed the chaos, but you havent had space to lead through it. This is the trap many leaders find themselves in today. Our attention is consumed by the urgent, leaving almost no cognitive room for the deep thinking, creativity, and strategic foresight that leadership requires. Working harder isnt the answer. Neither is downloading yet another tool. Under time pressure and limited mental bandwidth, leaders tend to fall back on fast, intuitive shortcuts that erode decision quality in complex situations. What leaders need is a simple operating system reset: a weekly practice that converts disruption into insight and momentum. From Extinguishing Fires to Using Their Heat In nature, fire isnt only destructive; its regenerative. Giant sequoias, for example, rely on the heat of a forest fire to release their seeds. Flames clear the underbrush, enrich the soil, and make way for new growth. High-performing leaders work the same way. Instead of viewing disruption as something to resist, they learn to harness its heat. They recognize that crises, customer surprises, shifting priorities, and unexpected wins all contain valuable signals about how the world is changing and where opportunity sits. Some fast-moving organizations have formalized reflection into their operating rhythms. For example, Spotifys engineering teams have publicly described the use of agile retrospectives to turn surprises into learning. Taking time for a short weekly reset can help leaders capture those signals. Set aside 18 minutes at the end of each week to pause, asking yourself three deceptively simple questions and sitting with each for six minutes. 1. What must I clear away? Every ecosystem needs deadwood cleared before new things can grow. Your work is no different. Look back at your week and ask yourself: What assumption I held on Monday was proven wrong by Friday? What meeting, process, or habit is creating drag instead of value? Which zombie project is still consuming time or budget despite having no strategic future? The goal here is subtraction. Leaders tend to underestimate how much cognitive clutter weighs them down. Clearing it ruthlessly creates room for better decisions and more ambitious ideas. 2. What did this weeks disruption teach me? Once the underbrush is cleared, you can see what nutrients remain. Disruption is information. Your job is to extract meaning from it. This is benefit-finding: the discipline of intentionally looking for insight in unexpected places. Consider: What surprising customer comment, employee concern, or performance issue taught me something important? Where did our team get an unexpected win, and what were the conditions that enabled it? What new skill, workaround, or capability emerged that might be worth formalizing? This step shifts you from reacting to events to learning from them in real time. It builds future intelligence, the ability to read signals and adapt ahead of the curve. 3. What is one bold move I can take? Reflection without movement creates stagnation. Regeneration requires action. Choose one consequential decision, not a long list: What is the single conversation that will unlock progress next week? What experiment is worth running? What important decision have I been avoiding that I will now make? Choosing just one forces focus. It ensures you enter Monday intentionally. Its a shift from managing the week to shaping it. Lead the Future, One Week at a Time Taking a weekly reset isnt a productivity hack; its a leadership discipline that helps you step above the noise and recalibrate your direction. In an era defined by constant change, the leaders who thrive arent the ones who avoid disruption. Theyre the ones who know how to convert it into insight, energy, and action. They learn to use disruptions to leap forward. This discipline becomes even more important in a world shaped by accelerating AI adoption, geopolitical volatility, climate-driven shocks, and continual shifts in customer expectations, as highlighted in recent global risk assessments from the World Economic Forum. Leaders who thrive build regenerative capacity, the ability to clear noise, extract meaning, and act decisively through practices like the weekly reflection tool. Research on adaptive leadership consistently shows that learning-oriented organizations are better at turning change into innovation. This 18-minute ritual is how you start. By clearing space, extracting meaning, and choosing one bold move each week, you reclaim your agency in a world that constantly pulls you into reaction. Disruption isnt going away. But with the right rhythm, you can stop being managed by it and start using it as fuel for your next breakthrough.
Category:
E-Commerce
Today, thousands of Americans are participating in a general strike. The instructions are simple: no work, no school, no shopping. The aim is ambitiousto pressure the Trump administration to remove ICE from local communities. The strike is a response to the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota. In the days since, calls for a nationwide shutdown have spread rapidly across social media, shared by activists, nonprofits, and everyday people urging a halt to economic activity. Celebrities including Pedro Pascal, Edward Norton, and Jamie Lee Curtis have amplified the message to their followers. Some businessesmostly small, independent oneshave heeded the call. Clothing label Misha and Puff, olive oil maker Brightland, and underwear brand Oddobody have all closed for the day, forgoing revenue as a form of protest. “The only thing the Trump administration responds to is the market,” says Polly Rodriguez, founder of the sexual wellness company Unbound Babes, who has shuttered her business for the day. “Our goal is to raise awareness today, link people to other resources, and gather donations for organizations on the ground in Minnesota.” [Screenshot: The General Strike US] The Organizers Behind This Strike Although the strike has been organized in a decentralized way, with no single leader at the helm, many participants have turned to the website and Instagram account of The General Strike US, which offer guidance about organizing a general strike. Eliza Blum, a longtime labor organizer, built the site in 2022, alongside other activists. “I wouldn’t say I’m a founder,” she says. “We’re very much a non-hierarchical, decentralized network.” Through her work with Fight for $15, the campaign for a $15 minimum wage, Blum saw firsthand how strikes forced companies and policymakers to pay attention. As the Trump administration pursued what she viewed as increasingly authoritarian policies, she began to see labor as a central tool of resistance. “When Roe v. Wade was overturned, I hit a personal breaking point,” she tells me. “Protesting in the streets, holding signs, calling our representativesit wasn’t enough. We live in an extremely capitalist society where our greatest weapon is our labor. If working people stopped working, we could shut down the country until our demands were met.” Other prominent voices have echoed that view. “What does a national civic uprising look like?” Robert Reich, a U.C. Berkeley law professor, wrote in his Substack last April. “It may look like a general strikea strike in which tens of millions of Americans refuse to work, refuse to buy, refuse to engage in anything other than a mass demonstration against the regime.” The General Strike website calls for people to sign a “strike card,” pledging their participation in future actions. The long-term goal, Blum says, is to secure commitments from 3.5% of the U.S. populationroughly 10.5 million people. The figure comes from research by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, which suggests that when 3.5% of a population engages in sustained protest, authoritarian governments are likely to collapse. So far, about 435,730 people have signed the pledge. Once the number reaches 10.5 million, organizers plan to coordinate a nationwide strike. In the meantime, Blum argues that smaller, recurring actions are essential for building momentum. Reich agrees. “[It will take more than] just one general strike, but a repeating general strike,” he writes. “A strike whose numbers continue to grow and whose outrage, resistance, and solidarity continue to spread across the land.” Last Friday, hundreds of Minnesota businesses closed as a show of opposition to ICE. For Blum, this was an important turning point. She saw local unions come together with community organizers to work collectively. This local strike had an impact, making headlines in the New York Times and the BBC. “It was the first time, since I’ve been doing this that I saw a general strike actually happen,” she says. Crowds marching from Scotland to London during the General Strike, 1926. [Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images] The History of General Strikes The term general strike is most closely associated with events in Britain in 1926, when trade unions organized coal miners to walk off the job after mine owners slashed wages and lengthened working hours. Workers across other industriesincluding transportation, printing, and manufacturingjoined in solidarity, bringing large parts of the country to a standstill. The government quickly intervened, framing the strike as a threat not just to employers, but to the nation itself. Union leaders soon found themselves in direct confrontation with the state, and after nine days, they called off the strike. “It was a total failure,” says Jonathan Schneer, a British historian whose book, Nine Days in May: The General Strike of 1926 comes out this summer. (Disclosure: Schneer is my father-in-law.) “The coal miners were ultimately left isolated and forced to work under even worse conditions.” Schneer notes that while todays general strike draws inspiration from the events of 1926, there are also crucial differencesmost notably the level of coordination involved. In England at the time, between a third and half of all workers were unionized, and labor leaders were able to mobilize a significant share of the population. It took enormous organization to pull something like that off, Schneer says. Nearly a century later, the landscape has shifted. Todays action is being organized largely online, at a moment when labor unions are far weaker than they were in early-20th-century Britain. The United States also has a much larger and more geographically dispersed population. What remains constant, however, is the central role of capitalism in everyday lifeand the idea that halting economic activity can still be a powerful way to command the governments attention. When enough people participate, Schneer argues, the signal is impossible to ignore. The Demands For Blum, the fact that the strike isn’t centrally organized is one of its strengths. Like other activist groups that emerged during Trumps second termincluding Indivisibleshe believes organizing works best at the local level, allowing communities to respond to their own conditions. Her role, she says, is less about directing the movement than equipping others with the tools to organize within their own networks. That decentralized structure also means there is no single, unified set of demands. The General Strike US website lists a wide range of causes worth striking for, from universal healthcare to voting rights. For now, however, participants appear to be coalescing around a more immediate goal: removing ICE from local communities. On social media, posts frequently express solidarity with protesters in Minnesota and call for the abolition of ICE altogether. While organizers encourage people to stay home from work and school, the most accessible form of participation is refusing to spend money. A number of small businesses have chosen to close for the day in solidarity, though no major corporations have followed suit. I am very disappointed in the lack of reaction from companies that are far more powerful and influential than we are, says Melody Serafino, founder of the communications agency No.29, which also shuttered operations. Let me be clear: posting on Instagram and shutting down our business for a day is not brave. Real courage is being exemplified by the people on the ground who are putting their lives at risk. For Blum, however, this moment is just the beginning. She sees the current action as the first in what she hopes will be a series of escalating strikesand says it is already producing results. In recent days, tens of thousands of people have signed strike cards through her website. There is still a long road ahead to reaching the 3.5% threshold of the U.S. population, but the numbers, she says, are rising steadily. Movements that reach that level of participation never fail to bring about radical change, Blum says. But it takes time.
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E-Commerce
Last Saturday, more than six million people held their breath as Alex Honnold took his first step up Taipei 101. The Free Solo climber, who went on to ascend Taiwans tallest building without the safety of a rope and harness, drew crowds all around the building, as well as on Netflix, where the ascent was live-streamed as part of a show called Skyscraper Live. Some of these people had likely already watched Honnold scale the 3,000-foot rock wall of Yosemites El Capitan. But for many, the climber’s ascent up a man-made structure was likely an introduction to an altogether different kind of climbing: not on the face of a cliff, but the side of a building. This type of sport is called buildering (from bouldering, to climb boulders) and it has been happening for more than a century. Taipei 101 [Photo: Eagan Hsu/Unsplash] From rock to concrete For decades, the ultimate challenge for climbers was nature itself. Modern rock climbing took shape in the late 19th century, when alpinists ventured beyond traditional mountaineering and onto steeper, more technical cliffs. By the mid-20th century, climbers embraced free climbing, meaning they relied on their hands and feet to move upward while using ropes only as a safety backup in case of a fall. Then, in the ’70s and ’80s, free-soloists like John Bachar pushed the sport to its extreme, stripping away the rope entirely and turning every move into a high-stakes commitment. Now, buildings are the next challenge, says 70-year-old American climber Dan Goodwin, who has climbed a dozen buildings, including the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, and Millenium Tower in San Francisco. Today, more than half of the worlds population lives in cities, and the majority of climbers train in gyms. They get out of the gym and what are they looking at? High rises, says Goodwin. But climbing a building isnt the same as climbing the face of a mountain. With rock climbing, every move is different, but climbing a building calls for repetition, which Goodwin says attacks the muscle. Hips cramp, shoulders start to burn: It gets real quick, and I want to start educating people about how dangerous it is. Dan Goodwin climbs Simon Bolivar Tower in Caracas, Venezuela, before a large crowd for television company Venevision. February, 1982. [Photo: Private Collection] A brief history of buildering The thought of scaling the face of a building may send the average person into a tizzy, but people have been climbing buildings for almost as long as there have been buildings to climb. The earliest documented example dates back to 1901, when British alpinist Geoffrey Winthrop-Young anonymously published The Roof-Climbers Guide to Trinity College, mapping the architecture of the campus as a series of climbing routes. Some decades later, human flies like George Polley and Harry Gardiner scaled buildings in cities like New York City and Boston. Dan Goodwin climbing the CN Tower in Toronto, 1986. [Photo: David Cooper/Toronto Star/ Getty Images] By the 1980s and 90s, buildering had entered mainstream with televised (not live) ascents by SpiderDan Goodwin, and French climber Alain Robert, who went on to scale the Empire State Building, with no rope, and the Burj Khalifa with a safety rope and harness. (While Roberts was the first to ascend Taipei 101, Honnold was the first to do it rope-free.) Over the course of those years, buildings have changed drastically. According to Youngs original guide, buildings with good holds featured recessed window frames, narrow chimneys, and continuous parapetsarchitectural quirks that made climbing easier. With the advent of steel and concrete construction, many of these features disappeared in favor of sleek glass curtain walls, and climbing buildings became so much harder that some climbers have resorted to aids like suction cups and sky hookssmall devices that help climbers hang off tiny edgesto scale smooth facades. Goodwin was one of those climbers. In 1981, he climbed Chicagos Sears Tower (now known as the Willis Tower) using suction cups and sky hooks. As climbers, we would prefer relying on our physical strength than on a suction cup, he told me. I almost died because of my suction cups. But architecture dictates everything, as Goodwin put it, and the tower had no suitable hand or foot holds. Plus, the climber had recently been issued a challenge he had to rise to. In 1980, a fire engulfed the MGM Grand fire in Las Vegas and killed 85 people after smoke spread rapidly through the building. Goodwin was deeply affected by the fire, and as he watched firefighters struggle to reach people trapped on upper floors, he argued that climbers could be trained to scale skyscrapers during emergencies. When a local fire marshal dismissed the idea and challenged him to climb a building himself, Goodwin took it literallyand went on to climb the Sears Tower, then the tallest building in the world. That conversation changed my life, he says. Goodwin, whose memoir, Untethered, is set to come out in the spring, went on to climb over a dozen buildings around the world, including the CN Tower in Toronto, which he climbed in 1986twice in the same dayusing only his hands and feet. The hardest climbs, he said, were those with slick glass that called for suction cups. The easiest were buildings with clearly defined features. Taipei 101, with its stacked, bamboo-like segments and decorative dragon heads, fits into the latter category. So many beautiful handhold features, he says. Alex Honnold on top of Taipei 101. January, 2026. The next era of buildering Perhaps these complications are the reason why, after more than 100 years of existence, the sport today remains dominated by just a few big namesfrom legacy figures like Robert and Goodwin, to younger climbers like the 26-year-old George King, who famously climbed The Shard in 2019 before base jumping off the top, and Honnold, whose career focused on rock climbing before he took on Taipei 101. British skyscraper climber George King as he leaves HM Prison Pentonville in north London on January, 2020, on his release from imprisonment after free-climbing the London skyscraper, The Shard. [Photo: Daniel Leal/AFP/Getty Images] Today, the buildering community remains small. In fact, according to Andy Day, a climber and photographer who wrote a paper on buildering in 2017, to call it a community would be generous. Its a more niche, sub-cultural level of interest, he says, noting interest has largely ebbed and flowed over the years. The discipline required to do what someone like Alain Roberts or Alex Honnold do is just so unique that its not going to happen very often, he told me, adding, with a laugh, that there are enough well-equipped gyms serving hot coffee to keep climbers satisfied. But “SpiderDan” believes Honnolds live-streamed climb might usher in a new era for urban climbers. I know every climber is going to be walking through cities now and looking at what buildings they could climb, he says. Honnoldwho kicked off his ascent with a casual nod to the camera and ended it 91 minutes later with a low-key sick!made his climb look like a walk in the park. But Goodwin knows urban climbers need the same regulations as rock climbers, so he is now working on a separate book in the hopes of making urban climbing safer. We need to come up with standards, and ethics, and rules that govern future generations, he says, because you think youre the only ones right now, but I know other people climbing buildings, and in the next year or two, I wouldnt be surprised if we see fifty to 100 ascents.
Category:
E-Commerce
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