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Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Companys work-life advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: How can I get more sleep?A: I am writing this at 11:12 p.m., so this advice is as much for myself as it is for anyone else. Heres what we should all be doing differently:First, set a schedule and stick to it. The “stick to it” part is hard. But its called the golden rule of sleep for a reason. Set a bedtime, and then plan at least 20-40 minutes back from that time to start your bedtime routine. You might even need an alarm to remind you that its time to end what you’re doing. So, if you have to get up at 7 a.m. and you want to get seven hours of sleep, you want to be asleep by midnight. That means you should start your bedtime routine by 11:30 p.m..And speaking of bedtime routine, you know you cant go directly from staring at a screen to lights out, right? Your mind needs to wind down. Sleep experts recommend that you not only stick to the same bedtime every night, but that you also stick to the same (or similar) process each night. One option is to take things in 15-20 minute stages. First, prep for the next day (pack lunches, set out clothes) and do your nightly hygiene routine. Then spend 20 minutes doing a relaxing activity like reading. Whatever you do, dont sleep with your phone next to you.The other golden piece of sleep advice is intuitive but many of us with desk jobs skip it: Do some kind of physical activity during the daybut not right before bed. If you spend 30-40 minutes a day being active, you will be more physically tired and it will be easier to fall asleep.Want more advice on how to get more sleep? Here you go: Ultimate guide to getting more sleep 5 ways to get a better nights sleep Having trouble sleeping? Ask yourself these 6 questions
Category:
E-Commerce
Last fall, Will Ferrell sang an homage to PayPal to the tune of Fleetwood Macs classic Everywhere. The payments platform was making a big swing with the comedy legend for its biggest-ever U.S. ad campaign. It was also the first major piece of work under PayPal chief marketing officer Geoff Seeley, who joined the company in February 2024. The campaign was created with agency BBH, with an assist from Publicis Groupe creative shop Le Truc. But there was another partner holding influence over the brand strategy, all behind the scenes. The Intangibleswhich some might call the Avengers of marketingis a marketing powerhouse that has largely operated in the shadows until now. Founded in 2022, The Intangibles is a unique consultancy in a marketing industry littered with consulting options. Led by founder and CEO Ben Richards, founding partner Jon Wilkins, and chair Judy Smith, the firm is now launching publicly. Its made up of executive talent that focuses exclusively on intangible assets like brand, innovation, IP, customer experience, reputation, and cultureall oft-overlooked yet critical areas that drive long-term value. Richards is the former global chief strategy officer of Ogilvy, where he led a team of 1,500 strategists across 83 countries for nearly a decade. Wilkins was most recently the global chief strategy officer of Accenture Song, one of the worlds largest agencies. The two met in the early 2000s at legendary strategy firm Naked, where Wilkins was one of the three global founders. Smith is also CEO of strategic advisory firm Smith & Company, the former deputy press secretary to President George H.W. Bush, a veteran of crisis management, and the real-life inspiration behind the hit ABC series Scandal. From left: Judy Smith, Chair, Jon Wilkins, Founding Partner, Ben Richards, Founder & CEO. Richards says that intangible assets are seen as the dark matter of the business world. In reality, they’re very real, they’re very measurable, and I think they’re the future of business, he says. So we started thinking about the kind of company that could advise on how to grow tangible value from intangible assets. “Tribrid” model A decade ago, marketing and advertising was in the midst of a tug-of-war between major consultancies and ad agency holding companies. Deloitte alone had acquired more than a dozen creative agencies, while Ad Age named Accenture Interactive (now Accenture Song) the largest and fastest-growing digital agency network every year between 2015 and 2021. Agencies, meanwhile, were shifting their own strategies to better compete. R/GA, for example, set up a business transformation practice in 2012. The relationship between consultancies and agency partners for brands is still a shifting landscape between competition and collaboration, but Richards says he and Wilkins saw an opportunity for a very specific type of consultant, with a particular approach. Its a tribrid firm that combines the rigor of a management consultancy, the creativity of Madison Ave, and the value creation mindset of private equity, that we thought would be the best at unlocking tangible value for intangible assets, says Richards. Take the PayPal example. When PayPal named Alex Chriss its new CEO in September 2023, Seeley was less than a year into the job. PayPal was looking to shift its positioning quickly and significantly from a payments platform to a broader fintech company. We were brought in to help them engineer a new way to bring the brand to life in North America, Richards says of The Intangibles’s partnership with the company. Seeley says the firm has been invaluable in providing high-level consulting on the overall brand strategy, given the breadth of their experience in particular with marketing and marketing transformation. I need people around me who have been there and done it right, says Seeley. Theyve played the snakes and ladders of marketing for a long time, and they know more about the ladders, and they know where the snakes are. PayPals Seeley says the work his company has done with The Intangibles has complemented his other agency partners. It’s not competitive, because the services that they provide aren’t tangible things like making an ad or buying media, he says. It’s sitting with my VPs of marketing, or my heads of growth, and consulting with them over Hey, when we did this at like this big company that I was at, this is where we found some goodness. So it’s more senior client whispering than it is agency services. Elite experience The tribrid model is combined with what Richards called a naked style of communication and transparency: solid advice, plainly told. In a time when CMOs are asked to do more with less, and always faster, it’s easy to see why a resource like this could be helpful. Executing on this promise is easier when consultants are seen more as peers than hired help. The firm has talent with experience in the upper echelons of the industry, as opposed to a few senior leaders backed by an army of junior talent. So far, Intangibles works with about 30 people across New York, London, and San Francisco. At the partner level, the companys roster includes former Global CMO of Disney Studios MT Carney, former Godby, Silverstein & Partners Chief Strategy Officer Gareth Key, former Global CMO Lufthansa Alex Schlaubitz, former Global CMO of Bill Gates-backed C16 Biosciences Margaret Rimsky, and former Global CEO of Ogilvy PR Stuart Smith. So far, the company has done work with PayPal, Venmo, YouTube, and Kenvue (owners of Tylenol, Neutrogena, and Band-Aid), as well as a handful of private equity firms. Essentially, the company has assembled an on-call SWAT team of marketing, creative, strategy, and communications for the executive suite. Wilkins describes it as a hybrid model of senior talent within the company, and then tapping into their collective Rolodex to tailor teams to a client’s particular needs. We’ve got traditional employees, but we’ve also got this fantastic network of folks who are on speed dial, says Wilkins. So this really surgical application, this Avengers-style team, bringing together genuinely the best people in the world for a particular mission has worked really well.
Category:
E-Commerce
Within just a week, the sheer devastation of the Los Angeles wildfires has pushed to the fore fundamental questions about the impact of the climate crisis that have been largely avoided by lawmakers, influencers, and the public. Among them: What is the future of insurance when peoples homes are increasingly located in areas of climate riskwhether wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, or the rising sea levels? Those questions have bedeviled policy makers in Californiawhere insurance giants like State Farm, Farmers, and Allstate announced last year that they were no longer writing new policies in the state due to the surge in wildfires (in 2024 alone, firefighters across the state battled 8,024 wildfires that burned more than 1 million acres and destroyed 2,148 houses and other structures). Insurers have long been aware of the risk of climate changerising premiums, increasing losses. In 1973, the German insurance firm Munich Re published a brochure on flooding that it claims was the first use of the term climate change in the industry, warning of the growing risk of rising temperatures and increased carbon dioxide in the air. Some 40 years later, the CEO of French insurance giant AXA said it would be impossible to insure a world that is 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 Fahrenheit) warmer. Nonetheless, insurance companies have become some of the biggest financiers of fossil fuels, which are the primary cause of climate changethe extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal are responsible for over 75% of greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90% of carbon dioxide emissions. Fossil fuel companies made up 4.4% of the investment portfolio of the insurance industry in 2023, up from 3.8% nine years earlier. Two insurance giants, Berkshire Hathaway and State Farm, increased their fossil fuel positions by around $200 billion in that period. Overall, however, more than half of the countrys 238 property and casualty insurers recently surveyed by the Wall Street Journal have reduced their investments in oil, gas, and coal over the past decade. But while insurers around the world have restricted their coverage of fossil fuel projects, U.S. companies continue to write policies for conventional oil and gas projects. Spokespersons for State Farm and Berkshire Hathaway did not respond to requests for comment. Its a vicious cycle, some insurance industry experts say, with insurers investing their customers premiums in fossil fuel companies, whose activities accelerate climate change, which in turn increases the risk of the wildfires, super storms, and flooding that are causing insurers to drop coverage for millions of homeowners in order to avoid losses. Thats a significant amount of capital that is supporting polluting industries, said Frances Sawyer, the founder of Pleiades Strategy, which works to stimulate climate action. That hasnt been as much of a focus as it should be in their total structural riskfossil fuel investments that are directly making the risk environment worse that theyre handling on the other side of the balance books. By the numbers, climate change is having an enormous impact on the industry. The insured weather losses attributable to climate change have increased from 31% to 38% in the last decade, an annual increase that significantly outpaced the growth of losses in other sectors. Overall, about $600 billion in such losses over the last two decades can be attributed to climate change, according to a report by Insure Our Future, a global consortium of groups pushing insurance companies to stop investing in fossil fuels. For many insurers, the losses are not being offset by the premiums they collect from their coverage of fossil fuel companies. For more than half of the 28 leading insurance companies, their estimated losses due to climate change exceeded their fossil fuel premiums. Overall, climate-attributed losses for all 28 insurers totaled $10.6 billion, erasing most of the $11.3 billion they collected in premiums from fossil fuel companies. As a result, insurers have now dropped more than 1.9 million home insurance contracts since 2018, with nonrenewal notices tripling in more than 200 counties across the country, according to a recent congressional investigation. The burden falls heaviest on lower-income Americans and people of color. About 15% of the countrys homeowners who earn less than $50,000 a year are uninsured, according to the Consumer Federation of America. And 14% of Latino and 11% of Black homeowners are uninsured. Increasingly, more Americans are underinsured, making it likely that the full cost of reconstructing a house wont be reimbursed. A University of Colorado Boulder study on the 2021 Marshall Fire, the worst in that states history, revealed that 74% of affected homeowners were underinsured. Among them was Erica Solove, a mother of two who was forced to flee their family home barefoot when it was destroyed in the Marshall Fire. Because her policy reflected the valuation of her home when she bought it years ago, it wasnt nearly enough to help build a new home. She had to rely on savings and a GoFundMe campaign to finish reconstruction. When she tried to get homeowners insurance for that home, We were rejected by all of them, she said. The insurance companies are not being held responsible for not insuring people to any reasonable level reflecting the current reality, said Solove, who started the group Extreme Weather Survivors, and recently started an online Slack community for California wildfire survivors. Its not an individual problem, its a systemic industry problem. And the cost of homeowner insurance has skyrocketed, jumping more than 30% between 2020 and 2023 (13% adjusted for inflation), according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. That dynamic has increased pessure on insurers to shun the fossil fuel industryboth by no longer providing coverage to oil, gas, and coal projects and by no longer investing in the industry. Insurers self-reinforcing cycle of driving climate risks higher and restricting coverage for those risks is threatening public interest and financial stability, warned Insure Our Future. Some insurance giants are taking stepsItalys largest insurer, Generali, announced in October 2024 that it will no longer provide new coverage for oil and gas companies in the midstream and downstream sectors, which includes liquefied natural gas terminals and gas-fired power plants. But U.S. insurers in general continue to back the industry, and they have played a prominent role in the liquefied natural gas boom along the Gulf Coast. All of the senior lenders for the giant Rio Grande LNG terminal in Texas were insurance companiesFidelity & Guaranty Life Insurance (F&G), Everlake Life Insurance, American General Life Insurance, Security Life of Denver Insurance, Symetra Life Insurance, and Allianz Life Insurance of North Americaaccording to an SEC filing by the developer, NextDecade. Spokespersons for the companies did not return requests for comment. That role was highlighted in an industry publication, Insurance Asset Risk, which noted that despite seemingly making progress towards net-zero goals, insurers seem to be taking on a role previously occupied by banks in financing fossil fuel projects. In recent years, some insurance regulators have pushed for more transparency from the industry and warned it of the danger of investments that contribute to climate change. The insurance commissioners of California, Oregon, and Washington did a first-ever stress test of insurance company investments last year to detail the hidden cost of delaying climate action. In addition to exacerbating the climate crisis, such investments could be risky for insurance companies bottom line as the world moves to a clean-energy future, making it harder for them to write policies going forward. The three insurance commissioners warned in their report: Insurance companies invest premiums that they collect from people and businesses, generating returns that enable them to pay future claims, meaning the performance of investment income can have a direct impact on a companys ability to take on additional policies down the line. According to the insurance commissioners findings, insurers face greater exposure to climate risk in their corporate bond portfolios than in their equity investments. Their future losses on corporate bonds could range from $7 billion to $40 billion, per the analysis. Because homeowners insurance is required for most home loans, some economists are concerned that the insurance crisis could reignite a mortgage crisis on a scale of the 2008-2009 recession. Rising premiums and limited availability of insurance can have significant ripple effects across housing markets, reducing demand (and housing values) for homes in high-risk areas, according to a new Brookings Institute study. Any wide-scale decline in property values would present a systemic risk to the U.S. economy similar to what occurred during the 2007-2009 mortgage meltdown and ensuing global financial crisis, the Senate Budget Committee warned in a December 2024 report. It has a sort of this chilling effect where if insurance companies are announcing that theyre no longer writing policies in entire neighborhoods or entire communities or in some cases even entire states, that has implications for whether youre going to be able to sell your home because the mortgage market wont be available, said Jordan Haedtler, climate finance strategist with advocacy group the Climate Cabinet. The crisis has prompted most states to develop an insurer-of-last-resort program, available to those who cant get coverage from private insurance companies. But they are at risk of being overwhelmed. Californias FAIR Plan, which has only $200 million in reserves and $2.5 billion in reinsurance, has exposure of $5.9 billion from homeowners policies in Pacific Palisades alone, where the number of policyholders grew by 85% from last year. As Californias former insurance commissioner Dave Jones told Capital & Main, provisions in the FAIR Plan leave homeowners across the state on the hook for losses if the government plan is exhausted. Moving forward to address this crisis may take some dramatic steps, say experts. Publicly funded climate risk insurance, such as the FAIR Plan, dont adequately address the problem since they would face many of the same challenges as the private market in terms of managing rising costs and increasing climate risk exposure, plus the added complexity of political pressure to keep premiums artificially low, according to the Brookings report. The think tank recommends that state regulators develop initiatives to make more advanced catastrophe modeling tools available to insurers and incentivize them to offer discounts to policy holders for taking steps to make their homes more resilient by installing wind-resistant roofing, fire-resistant siding and hail-resistant shingles. Unfortunately, insurers arent on board yet in California. Last year, Jones worked with state Sen. Josh Becker and the Nature Conservancy on a bill that would have required the models used by insurers to account for risk mitigation efforts such as forest treatment, creating defensible space around homes and home hardening. The insurance industry killed it, Jones said. They killed the bill through lobbying and donations to lawmakers. They basically went in front of the insurance committee of the Senate and the Appropriations Committee of the Assembly and, and said, Were opposed to this, and convinced those two committees to gut the bill. Whats key is addressing the role of climate change, said Sawyer. Weve got to think about how were reducing climate pollution and continuing and accelerating Californias commitment to emissions reduction and investments in resilience, she emphasized. The last thing we need is solutions that try and treat this as a temporary financial crisis without reaching down to those roots and really thinking about the [insurance] sectors role in decarbonization and making us safer across the board. This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.
Category:
E-Commerce
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