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Take a moment to think about what the world must have looked like to J.P. Morgan a century ago, before his death in 1913. A shrewd investor in emerging technologies like railroads, automobiles, and electricity, he was also an early adopter, installing one of the first electric generators in his house. Today, we might call him a Techno-Optimist. He could scarcely imagine the dark days ahead: two world wars, the Great Depression, genocides, the rise of fascism and communism, and a decades-long Cold War. Had he lived to see it, he might have asked how, despite so many scientific and technological breakthroughs, things went so wrong. Today, we are at a similar juncture, and there are worrying parallels to the 1920s, including paradigm-shifting technologies, a revolt against immigration, globalism, income inequality, and even a global pandemic. Now, like then, the choices we make will shape our future for decades to come. We need those who create the future to be rooted in the world we live in. Theyre not. Building for a rational universe In the 1920s, a group of intellectuals in Berlin and Vienna, much like many of the Silicon Valley digerati today, became enamored with the engineering mindset. By this time, the technologies like the ones that Morgan invested in had begun to reshape the world. Much like Descartes, three centuries before, they thought that logic and rationality should rule human affairs. Their patron saint was Ludwig Wittgenstein, and their bible was his Tractatus, which described a world made up of atomic facts that could be combined to create states of affairs. He concluded, famously, that Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent, meaning that whatever could not be expressed in a logical form must be disregarded. The intellectuals branded their movement logical positivism and based it on the verification principle. Only verifiable propositions would be taken as meaningful. All other statements would be treated as silly talk and gobbledygook. Essentially, if it didnt fit in an algorithm, for all practical purposes, it didnt exist. Unfortunately, and again much like Silicon Valley denizens of today, the exuberant confidence of the logical positivists belied serious trouble beneath the surface. In fact, while the intellectuals in Berlin and Vienna were trying to put the social sciences on a more logical footing, logic itself was undergoing a foundational crisis that threatened the entire positivist project. At the root of the crisis was something called Russells Paradox, which created strange, self-contradictory statements, such as The barber shaves every man in town who does not shave himself. Assume such a barber exists and youre tied in a knot. It seemed like a small technical wrinkle, but it was a crack in the foundation that demanded repair. Broken logic David Hilbert, one of the most prominent mathematicians of the day, proposed a program to solve the foundational crisis. It rested on three pillars. First, mathematics needed to be shown to be complete in that every statement could be shown to be true or false. Second, mathematics needed to be shown to be consistent, no contradictions or paradoxes allowed. Finally, all statements need to be computable, meaning they yielded a clear answer. Hilbert and his colleagues received an answer sooner than most had expected. In 1931, just 11 years after Hilbert laid out his program, 25-year-old Kurt Gödel published his incompleteness theorems. The result shocked the mathematical world. Gödel showed that any sufficiently powerful logical system could be either complete or consistent, but not both. Put more simply, Gödel proved that every formal system will eventually break down. It will contain true statements that cannot be proved within the system itself. Logic would remain permanently limited, and the positivists hopes were dashed. You cant engineer a society based on a logical system that is itself inherently incomplete. For better or worse, the world would remain a messy place. Yet the implications of the downfall of logic turned out to be far different, and far more strange, than anyone had expected. In 1936, building on Gödels proof, Alan Turing published his own paper on Hilberts computability problem. Much like the Austrian, he found that all problems are not computable, but with a silver lining. As part of his proof, he included a description of a simple machine that could compute every computable number. Ironically, Turings machine would usher in a new era of digital computing. These machines, constructed on the basis that they would all eventually crash, have proven to be incredibly useful, as long as we accept them for what they areflawed machines. As it turns out, to solve big, important problems, we often need to discard our illusions first. Building dwelling thinking Underlying the positivist project was the rationalist assumption that we could overcome the flaws of human nature with pristine, faultless logic. Yet just the opposite happened. The 1930s and 1940s saw the rise of ideologies that claimed to be more scientific, only to see the world descend into an abyss of war and genocide. In the aftermath, amidst the rubble and horror, the world needed to be rebuilt. That, in turn, demanded some thought about how and in what image. It was in this period that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote his essay, Building Dwelling Thinking, in which he argued that to build for the world you need to know what it means to live in it: Building and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for dwelling. The two, however, are also insufficient for dwelling so long as each busies itself with its own affairs in separation instead of listening to one another. They are able to listen if both building and thinking belong to dwelling, if they remain within their limits and realize that the one as much as the other comes from the workshop of long experience and incessant practice. There is a fundamental difference between something designed for the way people actually live and dwell, and something designed to serve an abstract ideal. You feel it when trying to navigate an AI-powered customer service experience, or a self-service menu at an airport bar. When I lived in Moscow in 2003 and 2004, I was struck by the constant reminders that the city wasnt designed for living, but for something else. Theres just something dehumanizing about a world built solely for thinking and detached from dwelling. Thats probably why companies like Apple, Pixar, and Patagonia, that are able to harmonize building, dwelling, and thinking so deeply and consistently, win such devotion, because something that feels built for us validates us in a profound human way. Careless people In Careless People, former Meta executive Sarah Wynn-Williams describes the Silicon Valley executives she worked with as so wealthy and powerful that they had grown out of touch with many of the worlds realities. At one point, during discussion about how much to charge for internet service for refugees, she describes a senior leaders surprise with the realization that the inhabitants of refugee camps dont have jobs. Today, we increasingly live in the world of the visceral abstract, where the technologies that shape our lives are deeply rooted in concepts, such as quantum mechanics and natural selection, that cant be experienced directly. This is especially true for the next generation of technologies, such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and quantum computing. When you design for the physical world by, say, building a bridge, there is natural feedback if the building and thinking are out of harmony with dwelling. People can get to where they want to go or they cant. The path is smooth or bumpy. The view is beautiful, or it is ugly. We notice flaws, if not immediately, then eventually. But they come to light and can be corrected. But in the world of the visceral abstract, things arent so concrete. Nation states can manipulate us on social media, our chatbots can shift our psychology and our genomes can be engineered to interact with our environment in new and different ways, without us being aware of it. As technologies grow more powerful, the potential for good and evil multiply. This requires us to be not only careful, but connectedto not only think and build, but to dwell. We need to be suspicious of those who sell us visions of flawless logic; those visions are not only incomplete, they are inhuman. At some point, something has got to break.
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In 2015, I had a stillborn baby girl. I found out during a prenatal appointment that my daughter had no heartbeat. Because I was in my second trimester, I was admitted to the hospitals labor and delivery ward. The same ward where women deliver live babies. Except I did not get to bring my baby home. October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. Ive talked openly about pregnancy loss for many years. Ive advocated for more openness in the workplace. Its a way to honor my daughter, to use my voice to make things better for other grieving parents. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/04\/workbetter-logo.png","headline":"Work Better","description":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more visit workbetter.media.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} Bereavement policies should cover pregnancy loss My employer at the time had a very flexible leave policy. I ended up taking nearly three weeks off from work after my daughters stillbirth. My entire world felt like it didnt make sense anymore. My body needed to heal. Unfortunately, pregnancy loss often falls into a gap in companies bereavement policies. They dont allow any time off for a miscarriage or stillbirth. I met a woman through a support group who delivered her stillborn baby via C-section and had to go back to work mere days later. When theres no living baby, maternity leave does not apply. And the standard three-day bereavement leave that many companies have is wholly inadequate. Only a few states in the U.S. provide any guaranteed bereavement leave, and even fewer specifically include pregnancy loss as a qualifying event. Its mostly up to individual employers to craft their own policies. Many years later, I was working for a young company that was working to solidify its leave policies for the first time. I asked the HR person to include pregnancy-loss leave specifically. I said, You dont want to wait until a situation comes up and then be scrambling to define the leave. I fear that happens too often. Companies dont include pregnancy loss in their bereavement leave until an employee asks about it. At that point, the employee is in the throes of grief, which is the worst time to wait for HR to figure out a leave policy. In 2022, theSkimm launched a Show Us Your Leave campaign. Pregnancy-loss leave was included in the data collected. If you can influence HR policies and are unsure what type of bereavement support to offer, theSkimms database is a place to start. How to support a coworker who has experienced pregnancy loss Pregnancy loss is incredibly common: 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, according to WebMD. Some researchers believe that the number is much higher. Yet pregnancy loss is still a taboo topic, especially in the workplace. As a result, parents feel isolated in their grief. Recently a friend came to me because one of her employees had a miscarriage. She asked me, What can I do to support her? I believe that caring, compassionate coworkers often dont know what to do, especially if theyve never experienced pregnancy loss themselves. Here are my suggestions: Review this list from Miscarriage Association of what to say (and what not to say). Listen to this podcast episode: How to Support Someone Experiencing Pregnancy and Infant Loss. Set a reminder on your calendar to check in on a regular basiseven weeks or months later. Offer to listen if the person wants to talk. If youve experienced pregnancy loss yourself, Im so sorry. I know how devastating and isolating it is. I highly recommend resources from Share Pregnancy and Infant Loss Support. I want to see the narrative around pregnancy loss change, especially in the workplace. I didnt simply lose a pregnancy. My much-loved child died, as did all the dreams I had for her. Theres a hole in every family photo, because she isnt there. Workplaces canand shoulddo better. Pregnancy loss isnt rare. The workplace shouldnt be a source of awkwardness or additional pain. Companies and coworkers need to figure out how to support someone, because it will inevitably come up. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/04\/workbetter-logo.png","headline":"Work Better","description":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more visit workbetter.media.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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There are bigger, better-known tech brands than Logitech, but few have ever rivaled its quiet but pervasive impact on how people engage with the digital world. Headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, but with equally deep roots in Silicon Valley, the 44-year-old company helped to popularize once-unfamiliar devices such as computer mice and webcams. Those are still two of its marquee product lines. But Logitech also makes a dizzying array of other accoutrements for personal and business computing, including keyboards, headphones, speakers, microphones, videoconferencing equipment, tablet accessories, gaming controllers, and more. Despite playing in a variety of categories that are prone to commoditization, it has a genuinely impressive record of standing out by prioritizing design. Hanneke Faber joined Logitech as CEO in December 2023 after a long career at global giants such as Unilever and Procter & Gamble, where she oversaw familiar consumer brands in categories from soup (Knorr) to shampoo (Pantene). As she nears her second anniversary in charge, shes been busy sharpening Logitechs focus while giving it room to explore new territory. On October 28, the company reported its quarterly results and said that AI-infused products had helped it beat expectations. As the CEO of a company ultimately in the business of making physical goods around the worldLogitech manufactures a product every five secondsFaber has also been managing the impact of the Trump administrations tariffs at international scale. I spoke with Faber at Logitechs U.S. headquarters in San Jose, California. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Logitech has a pretty broad set of products and has been around for a long time. What is it these days, and is that evolving? It’s a combination of who we have been and where we’re going. One of the reasons I loved joining Logitech is that you get into a taxi anywhere, and [the driver] is like, Who do you work for? With Logitech, in a taxi in Shanghai, a taxi in Berlin, or a taxi in New York, they’re like, Oh yeah, I’m a gamer. Or That’s my mouse. It’s a product that’s in everyone’s hand, and it’s a brand most people know, which is great. Going forward, our mission is to extend human potential in work and play. And those words are very carefully chosen. Yes, we’re a tech company, but it’s about making people better and extending their potential. Extend is a riff on the mouse, because it’s an extension of your arm, and the mouse built this house. But we hope that we can make people a little more productive, help them connect more easily, and do all of that in ways that are healthier for people and the planet. That’s extending human potential, and we’ve decided that we’ll do that in work and in play. Today we have close to a $5 billion business, but if you look at the addressable market for work and play products, it’s about $25 billion. So theres still a ton of room to grow by extending human potential in work and play. We do that with superior products, and we describe the products we’re in as design-led software-enabled hardware. Design-led is so important to us. I was quite shocked when I got here that we have almost 300 in-house designers, which is more than a company like P&G or Unilever has in-house. Of course we make stuff, but increasingly it’s deeply software- and AI-enabled, and that’s how we make our products superior. And we employ more software engineers and hardware engineers these days. So that’s who we are. There aren’t all that many brands that are both work and play. How do you deal with that, given that in some cases, whats good for work is radically different from whats good for a gamer? The brand has really broad shoulders, so we can attract the 17-year-old gamer but also the CIO of a company who’s buying a lot of work products from us. And you wouldn’t think that the same brand can do that, but that CIO is often a gamer, too. And obviously, from a product point of view, there are a lot of synergies. Gamers need mice and keyboards, and people who work need mice and keyboards, but audio and video also goes across work and play. So while we have teams that are really dedicated to gaming and dedicated to work, there’s also a large, scalable engineering and design organization across both. Some people do care about design and will gravitate toward you. Others are focused on price or technology. Are you trying to increase the pool of people who care about design? I like to spend a lot of time with users and, well, some have more money than others. But I would say most people actually care about design. They might not talk about it as design, but they’ll talk about it as, When I walk into this room, I should be able to press a button or, ideally, not even press a button, and the videoconferencing should just work. In an age where technology is changing so fast with AI, we risk making things that are too complicated for most people to use on a daily basis. Designing them in a way that’s intuitive, thats really easy to use, is really important. And that, to me, is a real foundation of design. It’s not just colors and aesthetics. Talk a little bit about the process of developing software, especially now that AI is a thing. The way we look at AI, internally, is that of course it’s absolutely extending human potential, if I may use those words. Across the company, it’s making our people faster, more accurate, and just able to get more work done in less time. Certainly in coding, but also in places where I would’ve expected it less, like marketing and design, where you can just get more ideas more quickly. This is not about cutting people, but weve got to do more with the people weve got. And this is helping us do that. And then, maybe more excitingly, theres AI in products. The Logitech Sight [tabletop videoconferencing camera] is like an AI producer in the middle of the room. Its like Steven Spielberg is on the table, but he’s AI, and he makes sure everything is framed correctly and you’re having a really, really engaging meeting. I’m the person who’s always on my headset in an airport, and you’ll hate speaking to me, because you hear every announcement that’s out there. But with two-way noise cancellation, it actually knows when it’s me speaking, and it blocks out everything else. Again, without machine learning on our audio data, that’s not possible. And there’s a lot more to come. Pro X Superlight wireless gaming mouse [Photo: Courtesy of Logitech] There were stories a little while ago about Logitech talking about a mouse that gets better over time. And at least some of the instinctive response I saw was like, I don’t want my mouse to get better over time, and I definitely don’t want to subscribe to a mouse. I never used the word subscription. And it’s not an actual plan. But again, I like my designers to think big, and that can be in all kinds of spaces. In the age of AI, we’re thinking bigger than ever before, but I should probably keep my mouth shut when talking about these ideas. In theory, at least, might people look forward to software upgrades that make this product they already own more capable? Certainly, that’s very true on the B2B side. On the videoconferencing side, we’re constantly updating the software to be smarter, to be able to do more, and to make it easier for the people operating it. There’s nothing I love more than visiting one of our B2B customers and to hear from their CIO or IT managersthat tends to be a he, so I’ll use the wordthat he can manage 10,000 meeting rooms around the world with a click of a button. A lot of Logitechs products, like mice and webcams, are just part of the air people breathe. Headsets have been around forever. Does Logitech also need to enter completely new categories on a regular basis? Absolutely. Only the paranoid survive. So while we have a great core and we’ll continue to innovate on our core, we also need to do what I call more. There’s the core, and there’s more. The majority of our resources do go to the core, because we always want better mice and better keyboards and better cameras and better headsets. And there’s cool innovation there. The Combo Touch keyboard for the new iPads is a beautiful new product. A50 X, a new headset that lets you switch between different platformsgorgeous product. Pro X Superlight gaming mouseamazing mouse. You pick it up and you don’t even know that it’s there, it’s so light. But that’s core. Those are things we know, and we just make them better to stay ahead of the competition. And then we spend a smaller part of our resources on more. Last year, we [introduced] the MX Ink, which is a pencil for the Meta headset. And we launched [the Logitech Muse for Apple Vision Pro] at Apple’s developer conference. G515 TKL low-profile gaming keyboard [Photo: Courtesy of Logitech] Logitech often gets a lot of attention at Apple events. You don’t see Apple playing up other peoples products all that much. That was exciting for us as well. And we’re grateful for having a chance to work with both Meta and Apple on AR and VR. Is there a chance that someday that might be a big business, which I assume it isn’t yet? It’s not big yet, but it could be big in the future. And to do that together with big partners makes it more likely. And then there are other things that we’re doing in terms of more. We launched the Spot sensor, which is more for B2B. Its a sensor to put in meeting rooms, and it measures temperature, but also CO2 in the air. We haven’t done sensors before. The world will be full of sensors pretty soon. This is a space where we need to learn, because in an age of AI, our hardware is already in many places. We launch about 40 new products a year, and about between 30 and 35 are in the core. And then there’s another 5 or 10 that are more, because we do have to really learn on new categories as well. Logitechs Spot, a presence and environmental sensor for offices (on rear wall) is due later this year. [Photo: Courtesy of Logitech] How much of success is about the unglamorous world of designing the products quickly and knowing which price points to hit and knowing how to manuacture them and having good distribution, knowing which products to continue with and which ones to kill? It’s the foundation of it all. So if I look at strategy, how we win is with superior products and innovation with an iconic brand, and by doubling down on B2B. Those are the sexy things. Whats less sexybut I actually find them quite sexyare the go-to-market and the operations, and that’s where Logitech shines. We are an operational powerhouse. We make a product every five seconds. We manufacture in six countries. Last year we had record cost savings on how we manufacture. We do it with great quality, great service, and great costs, both at the top end and the lower end of our portfolio. That is critical in hardware. It’s very different from software-only companies, which most here in the Valley are. And then go-to-market, we’re selling in 150 countries. We don’t just sell to Best Buy and Walmart. We sell to [Europes] MediaMarkt and thousands and thousands of other customers around the world as well. Doing that requires a really strong organization on the ground in all of those countries. There was this period during the pandemic when all of a sudden people started to pay attention to a lot of the tech that Logitech plays intheir camera setup and their audio and so forth. How do you convince people who in a lot of cases probably already own something that there might be a newer one that’s worth investing in? Well, there are many layers to that question. First of all, we’re about a 50% bigger company than before the pandemic because of that dynamic, and we’re growing again. We are convincing people to trade in, to trade up, to trade across. Those are all great dynamics for Logitech. The other thing going on there is that it may feel like we sell a need, but in many cases it is a want as well, especially in gaming. Do you need the new Pro X Superlight mouse? No, you will survive without it. But it is such an incredibly appealing product that it will make you just that little bit faster and cooler as you play the game. I should ask about tariffs, and whether you have any clarity about their long-term impact. No, I don’t think anyone has any clarity. But what I do know is that we have a very advantageous starting point, because only 30% of our business is in the U.S. Also, we manufacture in six countries, not just one. So we’ve actively been moving things around to take advantage of the lowest tariffs. And when you have a strong brand, that’s loyalty, but it’s also pricing power. With that, plus a strong balance sheet, we have a much better starting point than most people. Are you able to pull the levers you’ll need to in order to deal with as best you can? Have you raised prices? I’ve been quite open about that. I don’t like raising prices, but in this context it was a responsible thing to do here in the United States. So we have done that back in April. What’s it like working for this company that has this heritage in two countries over this long period, which is fairly unusual? I think it’s super special, and it’s another advantage of this company. The Valley obviously has the innovation and dynamism. And for us, a company that launches 40 new products every year, this is a great place to be. But Switzerland is a country of watches. Its a country that’s been around since 1300. It has the long-term view, it has the accuracy, the precision, the quality, which is also very important for a company like ours. I feel very fortunate to lead a company with a foot in both places.
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