He's the CEO and cofounder of Clockwise, which aims to help people manage their work calendars so they have more time to get things done — and not just sit in meetings.
Earlier this year, in a bid to be more efficient, he started using an artificial-intelligence tool called Granola to help him take notes in meetings and summarize takeaways and to-dos.
The result for Martin is time saved and "actually pretty damn good notes," he told Business Insider.
Efforts to reduce the sting of meetings are perhaps as old as meetings themselves. Yet the imperative can feel more urgent thanks to our propensity, hardened during the pandemic, to wedge more gatherings into our calendars.
Now, thanks to AI, we might soon have fewer work meetings — or at least attend fewer. It's likely, according to execs leading the development of the technology, that corpulent calendars will be no match for AI-powered notetaking apps capable of being everywhere all at once.
And AI meeting bots won't serve just as digital scribes. They'll resemble all-knowing, indefatigable assistants able to take on tasks like answering questions on our behalf, interviewing job candidates, and training workers, execs told BI.
The boss' avatar
Sam Liang generally has as many as 40 meetings a week.
It's not practical for him to attend each one, so sometimes he sends an AI stand-in. This is easy enough for Liang since he's the CEO and cofounder of Otter, an app that records audio from meetings and produces a real-time transcript using AI.
Liang told BI he uses Otter to forgo some meetings. He then reads the summaries or listens to the recording. Liang expects more leaders will soon do this.
He estimated that perhaps 20% of C-level executives would use AI avatars to attend routine meetings on their behalf by the end of 2025.
In his case, Liang has an avatar that acts like a "personalized agent." Otter trained the AI using seven years' worth of Liang's meetings, along with emails and some Google docs he wrote on topics like product principles, Otter's strategies, and why the company does certain things.
"When people ask me those questions, my avatar can answer probably 90% of those," Liang said.
This knowledge can flow to new hires at Otter. Liang said his AI avatar could use what he's said and written to explain his vision for the company, its strategies, and its origin, for example.
A view of the future
The ramifications of having an ever-present AI available to document our workdays — and beyond — will be similar in scale to that of the introduction of the internet, said Terry Sejnowski, a distinguished professor at the University of California, San Diego, who's a neuroscientist and the author of the book "ChatGPT and the Future of AI."
"Nobody predicted the impact it was going to have on our lives," Sejnowski said. "Same thing here. It's going to take decades."
He said keeping track of meetings and other interactions would go well beyond capturing audio or video. Sejnowski sits on the scientific advisory committee for Softeye, a startup developing glasses intended to work with a smartphone to serve as an AI assistant. Similar attempts have been made, of course. Remember Google Glass?
Ray-Ban Meta glasses allow users to take photos and videos. In September, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said updates to the glasses aimed to let users translate certain languages, scan QR codes, and capture images of what they've seen so they can refer to them later when, for example, they need to buy something.
Softeye's plan, Sejnowski said, is to have glasses that constantly recognize objects and people around the wearer and provide related information. He said they would also take snapshots and store them, along with the time they were taken. That would make it possible, he said, to reconstruct where a user was — and rely on the AI assistant.
"You can ask it questions," Sejnowski said. "Did I promise anything to this person?"
Highlight reels of meetings
Richard White, like so many other desk workers, found himself stuck on endless Zoom calls during the pandemic.
He found it frustrating to take notes, jump to another call, and have little time to clean up his takeaways in between. Plus, White said, even good notes weren't always reliable after too long.
"Do you really remember what was important?" he said.
Four years ago, White started Fathom, a company that uses AI to capture video and generate notes from meetings.
People don't necessarily want a transcript, he said, though it's often necessary for AI to work its meeting magic — including generating notes, making to-do lists, and updating data on customer-relationship management.
White said that what most meeting-goers are after, aside from a list of action items, is a better recall of the ephemeral and unstructured information that's often delivered at these gatherings. Showing up, White said, is often the only way to access it.
He said AI notetakers would be able to produce highlight reels of key meeting moments. The goal, White said, would be to reduce "meeting inflation" by enabling fewer people to attend them while maintaining information flow.
"You'll have an AI that actually goes out and listens to every meeting in your org and comes back and tells you, 'Here's the five minutes of content you should pay attention to today,'" White said.
White said an accessible record of all but the most sensitive meetings within an organization could serve as a basis for identifying gaps in training or generating feedback. That's in part because AI can now accurately discern sentiment and tone — something that's become possible only in the past six months to a year, he said.
Beyond that, he said, AI meeting bots will be able to act on ideas. So if someone in a meeting proposes creating a document, the AI would have a draft ready soon after.
White doesn't expect we'll necessarily each have individual bots that go to meetings on our behalf. He said that would quickly result in meetings swimming with AI avatars.
The best approach, White said, would be to use a "federated" system where all the meetings are accessible. That way, anyone not in the meeting could access the content through a personal agent that lives in the cloud, he said.
White said bosses could ask AI for instances in which a meeting was positive or when participants grew frustrated. A search might take the form of, "Give me a pricing discussion that didn't go well," he said. That goes well beyond parsing a transcript for the word "price," he added.
"The tech is finally there, and it's really good," he said.
An interview with AI
AI could also help document meetings with prospective employees, said Alan Price, the global head of talent acquisition at Deel, a global human resources company that helps employers hire abroad. Price told BI that Deel had begun using AI meeting tools to reduce the time and personnel needed to hire for roles like customer service.
That's important because when Deel posts that type of job, Price said, the company might soon have some 4,000 applications. So Deel uses an AI bot to conduct an initial interview with promising candidates. Then, a recruiter can evaluate the summary of the interview and, if necessary, review the audio and video to determine whether the candidate should move on to an interview with a person.
Price said that rather than spending 30 minutes on a single interview, a recruiter could review five or six interview summaries in that same time.
That bump in efficiency has enabled a single recruiter to hire 30 to 35 candidates within about two weeks, he said.
"The recruiter makes the decision," Price said, "but it's streamlined."
The Financial Times, which first reported the EY firings, referred to these instances of being dismissed for minor offenses as "stealth firing."
Joe Galvin, the chief research officer at the executive coaching platform Vistage, told Business Insider that this sneaky sacking is "a "covert behind-the-scenes activity" that "violates the principle of respect for the individual."
A corporation might think: "I'm trying to downsize a little bit without saying I'm downsizing a little bit," Galvin said.
"So you go through this process that does nothing but break trust."
Short-term gain for long-term problems
Stealth firing leads from an era of "quiet firing," where companies methodically made employees' roles increasingly uncomfortable and less appealing, such as implementing strict return-to-office mandates.
This trend, along with the quietly agreed-upon severance packages of "silent layoffs," is a tactic to avoid the optics of publicly cutting dozens of staff.
Cynthia Patterson, the founder of the HR consultancy firm PeopleOps.how, who has 20 years of experience in HR across tech, AI, healthcare, and retail industries, told BI that while quietly trimming headcounts in these ways may work in the short term, they can cause serious issues for a workplace.
"Any short-term outcome is offset by the negative cultural impact," Patterson said. "Employees are left second-guessing their own value and stability, creating an environment of anxiety and mistrust."
"This dynamic mirrors the patterns of toxic and/or abusive work cultures, where fear and uncertainty are used — intentionally or not — as tools for behavioral control," Patterson said.
A shift in power
People are also perceptive, and employees who see their colleagues be shown the door for minor indiscretions will only make them wary and dissatisfied.
Patterson told BI companies who push people out in arbitrary ways are mistakenly viewing avoidance as kindness.
"Employee performance management is part of running a business," she said. "And it can't be skipped because it feels uncomfortable or inconvenient to the employer."
Stealth firing, Patterson said, simply exposes a company's inability or unwillingness to have honest, necessary conversations about performance — and "signals to employees that the organization doesn't have integrity."
Galvin told BI that companies willfully harming their reputations in this way may find they are the ones suffering and bleeding talent if an era of revenge quitting hits in 2025.
"The signs are pointing up toward a really strong 2025 — our community is energized, hiring's going back up again, investments are going up, expectations for profits and revenues are up," he said. "The power shifting."
Weigh up your options
It's always a smaller world than you think when it comes to work and looking for your next job, Ciara Harrington, the chief people officer of the leadership training platform Skillsoft, told BI.
"It's in the interest of everybody to keep good relationships," she said. "I don't think anybody really wants to leave a company on bad terms."
Sometimes, companies have to let their staff go, and the best thing for everyone is to do so with respect and honesty. That way, while the news isn't what the employees hope for, they still maintain a level of respect for the company.
The alternative is that employees post on public platforms such as LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, and job review sites about their negative experiences, such as how they felt undervalued and lied to.
Patterson said these stories could reach future employees, customers, investors, and even employment lawyers, opening up companies to potential legal disputes.
"Strong companies know their employees are human beings and deserve to be treated as such," Patterson said.
Galvin told BI that if there are signs that your company is looking to stealth fire you, it's time to start weighing your options.
Even if your employer isn't planning on firing you, if their communication is poor, and you feel unsafe, it's best to get out anyway.
"In the absence of a story, we create one," Galvin said. "If you sense that's happening to you, you either have the direct conversation with your manager or start looking for your next job."
The author (not pictured) loves working with millennials.
FS Productions/Getty Images/Tetra images RF
I left the workforce years ago because I struggled to connect with baby boomers in the workplace.
As a Gen Xer, I now work with millennials and love it.
Millennial bosses understand that personal issues come up and work can't always come first.
In my early 40s, I did something revolutionary: I got a full-time job.
I'd been self-employed for over a decade, but the siren song of paid benefits was too strong to ignore. Within hours of starting in my new position, it became clear that I was an anomaly. I was one of only two members of my team over the age of 30, and there was an age gap of 10 to 18 years between me and my other seven coworkers.
Much to my relief, every member of that team was happy to teach me the ins and outs of the new job — including the loads of technology I needed to know. They didn't roll their eyes or make under-their-breath comments about old people and computers. They happily showed me the way.
As a Gen Xer, I have worked closely with millennials for over 15 years and with younger bosses for at least half that time. While they have been burdened with a lot of slander, I love working with millennials. They're collaborative and recognize that in helping their coworkers, they're helping achieve communal goals.
I struggled to work with older generations
I realize that no generation is a monolith, and it can be irresponsible to group people together. But we are all shaped by the events that transpire over our lifetimes, particularly those in the forefront during our formative years. So yeah, we have a lot in common with other people born around the same time.
I felt the rift between generations early on in my career. Honestly, it was the success-at-any-cost attitude of the baby boomers that pushed me out of the traditional workforce.
For example, I had one manager who couldn't understand why I didn't want to apply for a promotion. When I told him I needed all my bandwidth to be present for my children, he openly judged me, which affected my career trajectory.
I learned millennials are different
When they were young, millennials were often described as entitled. They were seen as doted on by hyper-involved parents.
But after working closely with them for years, I know that isn't the case. To me, it seems many millennials believe they can create lives they love.
Every younger boss I've had has encouraged me to stay home when I'm not feeling well, to prioritize my family, and to have fun at work. They recognize that my job is not my life but that while I'm in the building, I should be encouraged to do my best and enjoy myself as much as possible.
I once asked one of my favorite millennial bosses about filling out my timesheet. I'd had to miss work because my dog needed emergency vet care. I asked if I should call it a personal day or use vacation time.
"That was a sick day!" she said. "Anything that impacts your health or wellness counts as sick time."
She was the one who told me that volunteering at my children's school would benefit our team; we were working on creating volunteer opportunities for kids, after all. As far as she was concerned, whatever was going on in my life was relevant to work, and anything that interfered with work was a reason to take time off.
The workplace is about to shift again
It's about time we realize, as a culture, that young people are smart and savvy and have a lot to teach the rest of us.
It's funny to watch the rivalry between millennials and Gen Z play out via social media memes; each generation revels in being the young, cool disruptor and eventually has to reckon with being the old, staid boss who's responsible for keeping the machinery running.
This can lead to bitterness and resignation, or it can result in leaders who remember that life is supposed to be enjoyable and work is just work. I think the millennials are in the latter camp, and I'm happy to keep working for them until Gen Z becomes the boss of everything.
From Left: Cathy Engelbert, Leon Sinclair, Jensen Huang, Fei Fei Li, and Arthur Sadoun
Tom Williams/Getty Images; Greg Sandoval; Alyssa Powell/BI
Innovation and business go hand in hand — and that's constantly on enterprise leaders' minds, regardless of their industry.
Executives must understand how technological advancements, systemic barriers, and generational shifts are affecting their growth, then strategize accordingly.
Business Insider's annual list of people transforming business highlights these leaders who work in media, finance, technology, transportation, and labor.
The WNBA's first female commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, is spearheading a transformation in the sports sector with her focus on fan engagement and equity among players. In finance, Leon Sinclair is leveraging data and analytics to reshape the world of alternative investments at Preqin, where he's an executive vice president. Mike Hopkins, the head of Amazon's Prime Video and MGM Studios, is forging an ad-focused entertainment-business strategy that could redefine how content is made and consumed in the digital age.
Below, in alphabetical order by first name, are the 10 business leaders our reporters and editors credit with shaking up and remolding their industries.
Anna-Lisa Miller, executive director of the KKR-cofounded nonprofit Ownership Works
Ownership Works
Employers often say they prefer to hire employees who act like owners. As the executive director of the nonprofit Ownership Works, Miller aims to get employers to act on that ethos.
"It's not credible to ask employees to feel, think, and act like owners if you don't give them a financial ownership stake," Miller said.
Since its founding in 2021, Ownership Works and its corporate partners have shared $570 million in wealth across six companies and worked with more than 160,000 workers at 113 companies.
One way Miller seeks to convince business owners of the merits of employee shareholding is by showing them how it can improve the bottom line. She pointed to a time an employee in an Ownership Works company helped their employer save money by replacing a component costing $100 with a 3D printed part that cost just a few dollars.
"They often know where the company is losing money or making a mistake or where things could be better," Miller said. "And they often have ideas for how to fix the problem. It's just nobody ever asked them to."
Miller's career in employee ownership grew out of an interest in community development. Early in her career she helped a nonprofit in Hawaii create farming cooperatives, and she worked with another nonprofit to convert small businesses into worker cooperatives.
Miller said she wanted to find scale, so she approached Pete Stavros, KKR's cohead of private equity. Stavros first experimented with employee ownership at a garage-door manufacturer in 2015, leading to some of KKR's best results. He was looking to spread that model further.
After announcing the creation of Ownership Works with a $10 million donation, Stavros hired Miller as his first employee. Now it's her job to help the company's 25 private-equity partners, including KKR and Apollo, institute plans in their portfolios.
She does this in part by partnering with accountants, lawyers, and professional-services firms to make it easier to create these plans, acting as an employee-ownership consultancy. The organization also collects and shares metrics of success, such as hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to employees and decreasing turnover and higher profits at companies with employee ownership.
She's helping the nonprofit expand beyond private equity. Ownership Works recently worked with the cold-storage company Lineage to give $100 million in IPO proceeds to its employees and create a stock-ownership plan.
Miller believes that expanding employee ownership could significantly narrow the wealth gap and reduce financial insecurity.
Arthur Sadoun, CEO of Publicis Groupe
Publicis Groupe
Sadoun said he mostly received pushback when, in 2017, he told creative agencies that the future of creativity was commerce and AI.
"It's funny when you look at what happened now," Sadoun, the chief executive of the French advertising giant Publicis Groupe, told BI.
Back then, Sadoun faced a daunting task. He had just taken over as the third-ever leader of the 91-year-old company, home to the storied agencies Leo Burnett, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Publicis Conseil, which had created iconic advertising like the Marlboro Man, Tony the Tiger, and "Labour Isn't Working."
But Publicis was languishing behind its competitors having lost key clients like McDonald's. Financial growth was anemic.
Sadoun embarked on a plan to turn Publicis from a communications partner to a company that could help clients transform their businesses. He sought to break down silos between Publicis' various agencies and help them retool around a bet on "personalization at scale," advanced by the biggest acquisition in its history: the 2019 purchase of the data marketing firm Epsilon for $4.4 billion.
"The financial market did not like that," Sadoun said.
Neither did many of Publicis' own employees, particularly the Don Draper-esque creatives who were maddened that an outsize focus on data and programmatic ads meant the Parisian company would lose its je ne sais quoi. Competitors mocked Publicis' multimillion-dollar investment in creating an AI platform.
Sadoun and Publicis are having the last laugh.
At about $27 billion, Publicis' market capitalization is the largest of any individual advertising-agency holding company. It's forecast to end the year with the largest annual revenue, too, with the combination of its data and media offerings representing about half of its sales. While 2024 was a cause for celebration, it faces challenges ahead: This month, its rival Omnicom announced a deal to acquire Interpublic Group that would create the largest ad-agency network.
Sadoun credits his leadership team and employees for Publicis' turnaround. He has a more personal hope for his own legacy.
In 2022, Sadoun had an operation to remove a tumor in his neck that turned out to be cancerous. Unusually for the CEO of a public company, he disclosed his diagnosis before he underwent treatment: grueling rounds of chemo and radiotherapy that would affect the jet-setting executive's ability to travel. He was flooded with messages revealing that many people were hiding their chronic illnesses from their employers and colleagues.
The following year, Sadoun helped launch the Working with Cancer Pledge, which encourages companies to commit to offering more recovery-focused working environments. More than 600 companies have signed up, and the initiative was promoted with a splashy Super Bowl ad bought and created by Publicis last year.
"My one mission in life now, apart from my family, is to erase the stigma of cancer in the workplace," Sadoun said.
Cathy Engelbert, commissioner of the WNBA
WNBA
2024 was a transformative year for the WNBA. It said that attendance increased by nearly 50% year over year and that ratings on ESPN were up by 170% from last season, fueled in part by its rookie stars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. Sponsorship deals have boomed, bringing in advertisers newer to the sports world like Bumble and Skims.
Presiding over its astronomical growth is Engelbert, a former Deloitte CEO who became the league's commissioner in 2019.
The league has been planting the seeds of its growth for a while. It gained attention by playing during the pandemic in a bubble. It raised $75 million from investors, allowing it to invest in marketing and fan engagement. And it landed sponsorships on its own, separate from the NBA. External factors like the rise of "name, image, and likeness" deals and social media also helped draw attention to the sport.
"The thing that was overlooked is that Rome wasn't built in a day," Engelbert told BI. "We didn't do this overnight." One emphasis was on improving the fan experience by meeting spectators where they were, such as updating the app to look more like TikTok, Engelbert said.
The WBNA is a big brand now, and with its growth has come scrutiny. Engelbert took heat when she didn't directly condemn threatening comments on social media toward players but likened the situation to a rivalry between male players in the 1970s. She later apologized, promising to do better.
"We've been debriefing around a lot of things that happened this year," Engelbert told BI, adding that the league was looking at beefing up security and mental-health resources. "The vitriol our players, me, we all get, we're going to try to tackle that multidimensionally."
Engelbert also wants to talk about the flip side.
"There's a huge negative to all the vitriol, but there's also people caring about the league like they haven't before," she said. "Apathy's the death of a brand, and there's no more apathy."
The WNBA, which is majority-owned by the NBA, remains unprofitable; several outlets described sources as saying it was on track to lose $40 million or more this season. The WNBA declined to comment.
Increased sponsorship and media rights will be crucial to keeping up the W's momentum and getting in the black. In a big start, the women's league recently struck an 11-year, $200 million media-rights deal, up from its current deal of $60 million a year. Engelbert also has her sights set on global expansion, starting with the WNBA getting its first Canadian franchise next year. Corporate sponsorships are catching up to the rise of women's sports. Engelbert is ready to capitalize, with stats to appeal to the bottom line.
"There's a little scratching and clawing to make sure the old view of the WNBA is not the current view," she said. "Our fans are actually likely to buy from you. So we say this is a good business decision for you."
Fei-Fei Li, cofounder and CEO of World Labs
Greg Sandoval/Business Insider
Almost 20 years ago, while she taught at Princeton, Li, known as the "godmother of AI," tested the hypothesis that everything humans could see could be categorized and labeled.
This idea built off her graduate research focused on object recognition. Li harnessed the power of crowdsourcing to pioneer ImageNet, a database of 15 million images that became the foundation of computer-vision and deep-learning research.
Li has continued advancing this research. This year, she and the leading AI researchers Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall launched World Labs, a startup that aims to take AI beyond large language models. It's valued at $1 billion.
With $230 million in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, AMD Ventures, and Nvidia's NVentures, World Labs is seeking to explore AI applications in the two-dimensional plane of pixels and in 3D worlds with spatial intelligence. In December, World Labs dropped its first AI project: a tool designed to turn any image into a 3D model.
"Language is important but, as humans, much of our ability to understand and interact with the world is based on what we see," Li wrote in an op-ed article in The Economist in November.
She believes spatial intelligence — which can help with developing robots that look after older adults, or extra hands for a surgeon — is what truly human-centered AI will look like.
She's now a codirector of Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered AI and serves as the Sequoia Capital professor of computer science at Stanford. Li has also worked as a vice president and chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia
Tom Williams/Getty Images; BI
Huang is becoming the stuff of legend.
He has a reputation as a genius, a visionary, and a workaholic. Bosses everywhere want to know his every theory of management to replicate even a fraction of his success. That's because Nvidia has gone from a niche tech firm to one of the most valuable companies in the world in a little more than two years.
After decades of toiling out of the limelight, providing the video-gaming industry with graphics chips to render complex, ever-changing imagery but not gaining much name recognition beyond it, Nvidia burst into broader consciousness in 2022, after ChatGPT came to the market. Word quickly spread that the company had for years been buying thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units — it turned out that the kind of computing they're best at is similar to the demands of artificial intelligence.
Huang actually donated OpenAI's first eight GPUs, delivering them himself. But Huang anticipated the connection between his chips and AI long before then — he just didn't know how it would materialize.
Huang, 61, was born in southwestern Taiwan. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Oregon and Stanford. He had a few jobs in the semiconductor industry, including at Nvidia's major competitor AMD, until he founded Nvidia at 30 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.
Despite the recent spotlight on him now, Huang has staying power. He's one the longest-serving tech CEOs, with more than 30 years at the helm. In a recently published memoir, Morris Chang, the founder of Nvidia's most important supplier, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, described offering Huang the CEO job at TSMC.
Even now that Nvidia has a market capitalization of more than $3 trillion, Huang sees his work as far from finished.
"I watched Jensen make these kinds of bets that are far-reaching, where there's a lot of ambiguity as to when it's going to happen or not," Rev Lebaredian, a vice president of omniverse and simulation technology at Nvidia, told Business Insider this year. Huang is usually right. The journey to enter 2025 with hundreds of foundation models chasing ChatGPT started for Nvidia in about 2006.
Some investors still worry that when it comes to Nvidia, what goes up must come down. But investors also believe that if anyone can see or make the future, it's Huang.
Leon Sinclair, executive vice president of Preqin
Preqin
Sinclair, who grew up in the market town of Rugby in the middle of England, didn't picture a career in finance.
"We never really spoke about money around the dinner table or anything like that because there was never any of it," the 42-year-old told Business Insider in an interview.
Now Sinclair is helping demystify private markets and powering its growth through data.
With civil service in mind, he studied political science at Loughborough University and joined England's Department of Health shortly after graduating in 2004. But Sinclair, a competitive basketball and track athlete, quickly tired of the bureaucracy and craved a faster-paced work culture.
After six months, he left for a research-analyst position at Intercontinental Exchange, the operator of major stock exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange and clearinghouses. The finance novice was eager to catch up and learn as much as he could about debt products and subprime markets. He left in 2010 for the data provider Markit, well before the firm merged with IHS and was acquired by S&P Global.
Throughout his two-decade career he has maintained a sense of intellectual curiosity, describing himself as one of the most avid readers of industry news among his peers. Drawn to the complexity of private markets, he pivoted away from credit to build IHS Markit's private-equity and debt division. In 2023, he joined the private-markets-data powerhouse Preqin.
"You see some of the most innovative companies in the world, and you work with some of the most innovative funds in the world who are deploying capital into just really interesting spaces," he said.
Sinclair oversees how Preqin addresses the needs of fund managers, investment banks, and placement agents, representing some 3,000 front-office teams, trying to navigate the opaque industry of private markets. Preqin says the asset class has more than doubled to $16.8 trillion in assets under management over the past five years.Preqin's data can be used, for instance, to target limited partners for fundraising or create customized benchmarks to better convey performance to investors.
Private markets are becoming more transparent as providers like Preqin find ways to combine publicly available and proprietary data, Sinclair said. In June, his division launched a data tool to analyze deals across 6,500 funds. This aggregated data can be used to back up valuations in negotiations or identify which financial factors, such as revenue growth or debt pay-down, contributed the most value to a successful deal. The firm's insights are set to become more widely available, as BlackRock is set to acquire Preqin for $3.2 billion.
Sinclair said it's easier for individual investors to participate in private markets than ever before, pointing to the growth of data products and favorable regulatory developments. But he added that having options isn't the same as understanding them.
"There's a massive amount of education to do. Alternatives have a totally different vocabulary, a different way of thinking about performance, a different way of thinking about risks to the types of products," he said.
"I think there's also an obligation of the industry to build the right analytical tools, the right educational tools, datasets to bring the mass affluent along on that journey."
Marin Gjaja, CEO of Ford Model e
Ford Model e
The electric-vehicle market has experienced tremendous upheaval in the past year, and car companies are scrambling to understand today's EV buyers.
At Ford, Gjaja, the chief operating officer of the Model e electric division, is tasked with navigating the money-losing division through huge changes in demand and customer profiles.
After years of growth in the EV segment driven by wealthy early adopters, car companies face the challenge of selling these expensive and complex vehicles to more-regular customers.
Ford split its gas and electric divisions in 2022 in a bid to speed up EV development. The company's EV strategy has changed a few times since then, but Ford still breaks out its financial performance: So far in 2024, the Model e division has lost $3.6 billion.
In his operations role, Gjaja is trying to reverse those losses by working with Ford's dealers to improve customer experiences and perceptions. Before joining Ford in 2022, Gjaja was a senior partner at Boston Consulting Group, where he worked with clients in retail, technology, and automotive, among other industries.
He's putting those years of consulting experience to work as Ford tries to bridge the gap between the wealthy early adopters behind the initial success of vehicles like the Mustang Mach-E and the F-150 Lighting and the more-practical customers who more often leave the lot with a hybrid.
While higher prices have turned off some of these new EV shoppers, Gjaja said at an automotive conference in September that this cohort was considering a lot more than sticker price — including their distance from the nearest charger, the cost of charging, battery life, and resale values.
Gjaja argued that simply discounting electric cars wouldn't be enough to convince shoppers and certainly wouldn't solve Ford's profitability problem in its Model e division.
Instead of focusing on "functional economics," Gjaja said, he examines the "behavioral economics" of EV adoption. He said the journey from what he called an EV denier to a long-term convert could take up to three years.
"My job is to figure out how to sell and market a vehicle that people don't appreciate its value until they own it for three years," Gjaja said.
Mike Hopkins, head of Amazon's Prime Video and MGM Studios
Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios
Amazon is a retail and cloud powerhouse, and thanks to Hopkins, it's become a media powerhouse, too.
Under Hopkins, Amazon now offers not just a wide variety of TV and films but some of the biggest sports franchises like the NFL and the NBA, and even news. Amazon spent $18.9 billion on video and music in 2023, up by 14% from 2022. According to the data firm Ampere Analysis, sports is a growing part of Amazon's entertainment outlay, accounting for 14.3% in 2024, up from virtually nothing five years ago.
Amazon's entertainment offerings help keep people subscribing to Prime, the free-delivery service that includes Prime Video and other benefits. But it's also becoming a moneymaker in its own right.
In January, Amazon shook up the streaming-ads market when it turned on ads in Prime Video, driving down ad prices for competitors like Netflix while giving Amazon a big shot at the $28.8 billion pie that EMARKETER has forecast will be spent on streaming-TV ads this year.
Morgan Stanley has estimated the move could bring in $3.3 billion in revenue this year, on top of Amazon's existing ad business, worth $47 billion in 2023. And with NFL and other streaming rights, Amazon is muscling in on traditional TV networks' turf and training viewers that it's the place to go for live sports. It's even dipped a toe in news, the last stronghold of traditional TV, with a Brian Williams-hosted election-night special.
Hopkins' hire in 2020, along with the NBC entertainment vet Jennifer Salke's two years earlier, was a big signal that Amazon was serious about establishing itself as a key player in entertainment.
Hopkins is a product of legacy and digital entertainment, having been the chairman of Sony Pictures Television and the CEO of Hulu. At Amazon, he oversaw the $8.5 billion acquisition of the film studio MGM and pushed the company's entertainment studio to expand into broader fare. Prime Video also makes money by fulfilling its promise of being a one-stop shop for viewers by selling subscriptions to other companies' apps like Max, Starz, and, in its most recent flex, Apple TV+.
Prime Video captured just 3.7% of TV viewing in November, well behind Netflix (7.7%) and YouTube (10.8%), per Nielsen. Despite some wins, like the popular show "The Boys" and the buzzy film "Saltburn," it has a way to go in becoming a consistent hit factory. Still, since most people don't pay for Prime Video as a stand-alone service, it doesn't have the churn problem that dogs other streamers.
As part of Amazon, Prime Video is also insulated from some of the financial pressures affecting other entertainment companies. Hopkins is still bringing financial discipline to bear, however.
Amazon cut hundreds of jobs across Prime Video and MGM Studios teams early in 2024. Hopkins recently told Bloomberg that the advertising ramp-up was a factor in pursuing NBA rights and that he expected Prime Video to be profitable "very soon."
Prathibha Varkey, president of Mayo Clinic Health System
Mayo Clinic Health System
Since 2021, Varkey has been the president of the Mayo Clinic Health System, a network of 16 community hospitals and 45 multispecialty clinics across more than three dozen communities in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The facilities serve rural areas where care can otherwise be difficult to access.
Varkey, who comes from a family of physicians, said her work focused on reaching patients without ready access to the sprawling Mayo Clinic campus in Rochester, Minnesota, and its world-renowned medical expertise.
Varkey told Business Insider that part of her focus was finding new ways to incorporate technology so that more people can obtain care and administrative burdens can be reduced. That includes using artificial intelligence to help with diagnosing conditions and using technology so that clinicians can manage complex chronic conditions virtually.
The efforts also include introducing a mobile clinic that can go where routine and preventive care is needed and even provide wireless internet access so patients can confer with specialists. The clinic, which travels across southern Minnesota, offers virtual or in-person appointments. It has two exam rooms and a laboratory.
"So now you have preventive exams, specialist visits that are occurring in very remote areas," she said.
Varkey said Mayo Clinic Health System was also trying to bring medical expertise to rural residents through programs that connect small local clinics with specialists from hub sites or from Mayo's Rochester campus. Small clinics, she said, might have only a single nurse practitioner — nothing like the variety of disciplines a larger facility would have.
"It's been very exciting to watch, and patients have really appreciated it as well," Varkey said.
Another effort to meet patients where they are is the organization's hospital-at-home program. Varkey said remote monitoring technology helped these patients remain with family and be more comfortable than they'd be in a medical facility.
"You get the same Mayo care," she said, adding that the approach had been popular with patients.
Varkey, who also holds an MBA from the University of Minnesota, returned to Mayo in 2021 after serving as the president and CEO of Yale New Haven Health Northeast Medical Group.
From 2001 to 2013, Varkey held leadership positions at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, including associate chair of the Department of Medicine, medical director of Ask Mayo Clinic, and program director of the Preventive Medicine Fellowship.
Varkey said the expanding capabilities of AI and discoveries in genomics and molecular medicine were "taking healthcare to the next level — and very fast."
While those developments are exciting, Varkey said, they shouldn't distract from the primary goal of patient-centered care.
Ranjit Kapila, chief operating officer and copresident of Parametric
Parametric
Kapila likes to stay ahead of the game.
During the first 10 years of his career, the computer-science graduate completed four certifications each year while working as a tech consultant for firms like Nasdaq and Sallie Mae. While working at the hedge fund Citadel in the mid-2000s, he took MBA classes at night at Northwestern University.
"Everything in this field changes so quickly," he said. "Things change in finance and things change in tech at an ever increasing pace."
Now Kapila is a copresident and chief operating officer of Parametric, a pioneer of direct indexing with $570 billion in assets under management. He joined Parametric in 2019 after rising up the ranks at BlackRock, overseeing portfolio construction management for its widely used Aladdin platform. Kapila moved to a much smaller firm to have a bigger impact.
"It was an opportunity to kind of look at what Parametric has done well, think about how to build on the success, but then also take advantage of what's happening in the technology space and rethink how Parametric could operate, let's say, five years from that point," he said.
His move was well timed. There has been a boom in direct indexing, a tax-savvy investing strategy of buying individual securities modeled off an index like the S&P 500. Two years after Kapila joined Parametric, Morgan Stanley acquired Parametric's parent company, Eaton Vance. Thanks to a wave of similar acquisitions, Parametric faces well-capitalized competitors such as BlackRock's Aperio and Franklin Templeton's Canvas. Industry stalwarts like Fidelity and upstarts like Envestnet also want a piece of the action.
Kapila said Parametric, founded in 1987, has experience and scale on its side.
"I will say that given the technology trends, sometimes it's easy to come in and have a solution. It's much, much harder to have a scalable solution that will serve clients when the demand spikes," he said. "We're managing over 200,000 accounts for our clients. The level of scale, I think, often is a breaking point for some of the newer entrants."
To stay ahead of the competition, Kapila is pushing Parametric to develop more automated products, such as Radius, which launched this year. Radius constructs fixed-income and equity portfolios and runs simulations to identify the best selections for portfolio managers. Kapila described it as a "turning point" for Parametric.
"This is the first time we've had a product that's really end-to-end running in that automated platform manner with a person reviewing and approving and intervening as necessary," he said.
He plans to launch more cloud-native tools, which are easier to scale and manage, for other asset classes in 2025 and 2026.
Parametric is also bringing its tax-savvy strategies to active management, launching Custom Active this summer. Rather than modeling portfolios off indexes, clients can pick equities off strategies from its asset-management partner Lazard or sports-league sponsors.
"Those are examples where we can provide a tax overlay and help people get the advantages of direct indexing while managing to an active model," Kapila said.
"There's a demand for that, and it's early days," he added, "but I think that's really what's playing out."
Credits
Series Editor:Julia Naftulin Reporters:Lara O'Reilly, Lucia Moses, Nora Naughton, Alex Nicoll, Tim Paradis, Brittany Chang, Helen Li, Hayley Cuccinello, Emma Cosgrove Editors: Nathan McAlone, Graham Rapier, Julia Naftulin, Michelle Abrego, Kaja Whitehouse, Rosalie Chan, Monica Melton, Clementine Fletcher Art Direction and Photo Editing:Alyssa Powell, Isabel Fernandez-Pujol Copyeditors: Emma LeGault, Nick Siwek
Michael Dell says humor is vital and workers need to laugh and play and relax sometimes.
The Dell Technologies chief said people shouldn't always listen to their parents' advice.
Dell said he goes to sleep early, works out around dawn, and enjoys Texas barbecue.
Laugh and play pranks, balance work with downtime, and don't always listen to your parents' advice, Michael Dell says.
The Dell Technologies founder and CEO shared the colorful life advice during a recent episode of the "In Good Company" podcast. Dell, 59, ranked 13th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index with a $115 billion fortune at Thursday's close.
The personal-computing pioneer said humor plays a key role at his company.
"If you can't laugh, joke around, play tricks on people, you're doing it wrong, right?" he said. "You have to be able to laugh at yourself."
Dell said he toiled tirelessly as a young man to build his company, which generated $88 billion of revenue last year. But he warned against overworking and burnout.
"I learned a long time ago that there's a diminishing return to the number of hours worked in any given day, " he said. "And if you're going to do something for a long time, you better find the [right mixture of] working and playing and relaxing."
"You won't find me at the nightcap," he said. "I'll be asleep."
Barbecue and bad advice
The Texan businessman also voiced his love for one of his home state's delicacies, even if he doesn't prepare it himself.
"I believe in the theory of labor specialization, so I personally am not cooking a lot of barbecue, but I'm definitely eating barbecue," he said.
Dell also offered some general advice for young people: "Experiment, take risks, fail, find difficult problems, do something valuable, don't be afraid, and, you know, be bold."
He recalled his parents encouraging him to become a doctor and urging him to set aside his passion for building computers. On the other hand, he remembered his mother telling him and his two brothers when they were little to "play nice but win," which became his company's guiding philosophy and the title of his 2021 book.
"Well, yeah, your parents aren't always right, but they're not always wrong either," he said, adding people's "mileage may vary on the parents."
Airbnb's cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky, for example, told Fortune in November that he believed that nurturing high performers helps foster a culture of excellence.
"If you can't have favorites, if you can't say this is a high performer, and this is what excellence is, then you are going to be in big, big trouble," he said. "That's just not good leadership."
Chesky admitted that playing favorites "would be considered unfair and not systematic" at most companies and that doing so has to be done in the right way — free from bias and discrimination.
In fact, a bit of healthy competition can boost productivity and engagement among colleagues, but giving a select few people blatant and unfair preferential treatment will only fester resentment among teams in an already detached workforce.
Beth Hood, the founder and CEO of leadership and management training platform Verosa Leadership, told BI that favoritism in the workplace "is a slippery slope."
"While recognizing and nurturing high performers can drive excellence, if not handled carefully, it risks creating a culture of resentment and undermining team cohesion," she said.
"The challenge for leaders lies in striking a balance between celebrating outstanding contributions and maintaining the motivation and engagement of the wider team."
Nurturing high performers
Research from the Stevens Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois Chicago, and Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, published in the journal Personnel Psychology in 2022, found that one upside of workplace favoritism is that it can help clarify roles within teams and guide collaboration.
Hood said that for individuals who are highly motivated by positive reinforcement, "being openly acknowledged can act as a powerful catalyst for continued high performance. In this sense, leaders can use recognition as a tool to set a standard of excellence that inspires others to raise their game."
But favoritism can also get leaders into trouble.
Leena Rinne, the vice president of coaching at Skillsoft, a corporate training platform, told BI that favoritism is often "in the eye of the beholder."
"A leader can have really good intentions and still be perceived as playing favorites," she said.
"Recognition by a senior-level person does feel special," Rinne added. "So if that senior-level person is just even talking to or corresponding with or inviting people to different meetings, all of that can be perceived as unfair."
In a Harvard Business Review article published earlier this year, the authors pointed to the CEO of a Scandinavian robotics company who addressed just three of his nine direct reports in leadership meetings, and was seemingly unaware of the bias he was showing.
Pitting colleagues against each other — on purpose or not — can be hugely detrimental, Hood said.
"While in the short term this may seem like a powerful lever to pull, in the long term it is likely to cause significant performance challenges," she said.
Hood added: "It's a cynical leadership style that rarely ensures leaders can fully leverage everyone's potential, as it is predicated on a win/lose psychology."
Everyone appreciates recognition
Recognition is always appreciated, and it doesn't have to be big or costly.
Rinne said some of the most profound recognition she has heard people speak about years later is an email they received from their company's CEO.
"It takes almost no time on anyone's part, but really impacted how valued people felt, how seen they felt," she said.
If there are people in the organization shining brightly but not being recognized, you risk them feeling undervalued and ultimately leaving.
Rinne said praise works best when leaders communicate the link to performance, "ensuring that people feel that it's justified and fair."
Dilan Gomih, the founder and CEO of workplace performance and wellness consultancy Dilagence, told BI that words matter.
She said it's fine for leaders to favor people who are passionate about their work and do it tremendously well, but everyone has to be given the tools and opportunity to do so.
"It's got to be an equal playing field for anybody to be a favorite," she said.
Overall, Gomih said she struggled to see the benefit of having employees worry about being a favorite rather than about their work.
"Do you really want people wasting their mental energy thinking about favoritism? Or do you want their brains thinking about 'how do I perform my best at the job that I've been hired to do?'" Gomih said. "Because if they're doing that, it's win-win."
A better tactic may be to make that competition external and say, "It's us against the world," she said, to boost camaraderie and teamwork.
Rinne also said that the idea of "healthy competition" in companies could be reframed.
"It's always the team competition, the collaborative competition, that gets the organization the results we want," she said. "In my career, I haven't seen pitting team members against each other work in any context — except maybe the offsite scavenger hunt."
Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck views paranoia as a leadership superpower.
Experts warn Beck's mindset may lead to burnout and a toxic work environment.
Effective leadership requires resilience and fostering a culture of trust, workplace pros say.
Peter Beck doesn't sleep soundly and thinks paranoia is a "superpower."
The founder and CEO of the aerospace company Rocket Lab told CNBC in an interview that going home and sleeping soundly every night "just doesn't seem a tangible possibility."
He also described himself as a "chronic workaholic" and a "micromanager," and said he was "paranoid about everything, especially failure."
While some other leaders share Beck's views, workplace pros think it might be a recipe for burnout and stress.
Heather Lamb, a workplace well-being expert and author of "How Not to Be a People Pleaser," told Business Insider that while constantly being on your toes may feel like a way to stay sharp, this mentality "breeds a toxic work environment."
"Instead, constant stress and fear of falling short can inspire anxiety, self-doubt, and burnout that is damaging to productivity and well-being alike," she said.
A recipe for success?
Beck became the "newest space billionaire" in November, according to Forbes, with his 10% stake in Rocket Lab worth $970 million, and having accrued $65 million from selling shares.
The company is currently valued at $11.2 billion, according to CNBC.
Still, he is lagging behind other space entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk (worth $354 billion) with SpaceX and Jeff Bezos (worth $240 billion) with Blue Origin.
Rocket Lab's stock price surged to an all-time high at the end of November. While the company rivals Musk's SpaceX, Beck previously told BI he has no intention of colonizing Mars.
Instead, Rocket Lab focuses on building and managing rockets and satellites.
"Rocket Lab will never have the capital that Jeff and Elon have," Beck told Bloomberg News in an interview. "But all that means is you have to be a bit better at hustling, a little bit better at being innovative. You can't break the laws of physics no matter how much capital you've got."
Caution vs fear
Beck believes that his paranoia and micromanaging have helped his career.
In the short term, paranoia and a hyper-vigilant mindset can drive exceptional results, Edel Holliday-Quinn, a business psychologist who has worked in senior roles at Citi and PwC, told BI, especially in high-stakes industries like aerospace.
Breese Annable, a licensed clinical psychologist and career coach who has worked with many high-achieving professionals, also told BI that some level of alertness can be valuable for leaders.
"Anticipating challenges and planning for contingencies are facets of strategic thinking," she said. "However, when vigilance crosses into chronic hypervigilance, the psychological and relational costs outweigh the benefits."
Lamb told BI that leaders who are always anxious about the next misstep may lose sight of their own well-being.
"The world thrives on fear — yeah, people take pride in their work, for sure," she said. "Wanting to do good work is a fine goal. But if paranoia is at the heart of it, you are working to inhibit yourself rather than improve."
There's a difference between exercising caution and being immobilized with fear of failure, Lamb added.
"Realistic caution is the practice of thinking about the future, having contingency plans, and being mindful of all of the hurdles we face," she said. "But it's about managing those worries in a way that won't overwhelm you."
Negative impacts are individual and workplace-wide
Sleep deprivation significantly affects cognitive functioning, decision-making, and emotional regulation, Annable said, and if it is experienced long-term, it has been linked to higher risks of cardiovascular disease and weakened immune function.
Worrying too much about the future can have a lasting impact on the workforce as well.
Leaders who are on edge and driven by failure are likely to be micromanagers, Holliday-Quinn said, which can create a toxic workplace culture.
"Research consistently shows that employees under micromanagers experience lower job satisfaction, decreased engagement, and higher turnover rates," Annable said. "This creates a ripple effect that can undermine long-term organizational success."
Over time, this can lead to high turnover and low employee happiness.
"Employees may feel disempowered, undervalued, and overly scrutinized," she said. "Which stifles creativity and collaboration."
True effective leadership, Holliday-Quinn said, requires "resilience, self-awareness, and the ability to foster a culture of trust, collaboration, and empowerment."
"These are the hallmarks of leaders who leave a lasting legacy," she said. "Not just in terms of success but in terms of the positive impact they have on their organizations and the people within them."
Beck didn't respond to a request for comment from BI.
During Monday's episode of "Today with Hoda and Jenna," Kotb recalled how her former boss had made comments about her weight when she was younger.
"I still remember I had just started working in a small market. And I played basketball in high school, so I always assumed I was in shape even though, literally, after college and stuff, I wasn't," Kotb told her cohost, Jenna Bush Hager.
"I still remember my boss going to me, 'Hey, Hoda,' and I was like, 'Yeah?' He goes, 'Hey, I got an idea. Maybe you might want to try to get on the treadmill,'" Kotb said, recalling his words.
Kotb says she was shocked by his comment because she didn't see herself that way.
"You know when you have a perception of yourself that is not the perception of the world?" Kotb said. "Yeah, so I was like, 'What are you talking about?'"
She went on to explain that "if you don't fit," people will "want you to wear something a certain way, cut your hair a certain way, speak a certain way."
But when people pretend to be someone they're not, they'll start losing who they really are, Kotb said, adding that there are times when people do have to "do things to fit into a work environment."
Kotb's comment came about during a discussion on the show about Timothée Chalamet and how he recently shared that he was told to change his body type early in his career to land bigger roles.
A 2023 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management found that almost 72% of US workers who have experienced unfair treatment at work due to their weight say it made them feel like quitting their jobs. Additionally, 11% of HR professionals surveyed say obese employees at their organization are not always treated as fairly as average-weight employees.
Emily Capelli, a psychotherapist, previously told Business Insider that it can be helpful to speak up against weight stigma.
"You can say, just simply, 'That feels fatphobic,' or 'That hurts my feelings'," Capelli suggests. "This falls under setting boundaries with people, and I think it's helpful to say that setting boundaries is a skill. Like riding a bike, you can work on this skill."
There are also ways to change the subject or shut down the conversation if the topic comes up, she said: "It's perfectly OK to walk away."
A representative for Kotb did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular hours.
But the same pattern may apply to the workplace, too. Many job seekers complain of inconsistent behavior from hiring managers, CNBC reported, being flattered and praised one minute and ghosted the next.
"Love-bombing during job interviews happens all too often when recruiters or hiring managers want to keep you interested in them while they figure things out behind the scenes," Renee Barber, the global director of recruiting for TYR Talent Solutions who has over 20 years of experience in the recruitment industry, told Business Insider.
"They may overhype your chances to keep you interested," Barber said. "Especially if they're not ready to make a decision or they need to buy time without being direct about the actual situation."
Janine Chidlow, the managing director of EMEA at the global talent firm Wilson, told BI that love-bombing not only disrupts a candidate's career expectations "but also raises questions about organizational integrity and employer branding."
"This phenomenon isn't new," she said. "But its frequency and impact have surged."
Love-bombing may serve as a "morale-booster" for both candidates and interviewers, Chidlow said.
Amanda Fischer, an executive leadership and career coach who is the founder of AMF Coaching & Consulting, said that some recruiters and hiring managers want everyone they are interviewing to feel optimistic about the role so they don't lose out on the best candidates.
They may also want to create a strong connection so the candidate to make them less likely to negotiate further.
"In this particular instance, that is a highly manipulative move," Fischer said.
It may not always be a scheme, though, and some recruiters and hiring managers may be love-bombing without realizing it.
"They could genuinely be excited about a candidate and might not see how the excessive compliments could backfire," Barber said.
There are plenty of ways to recognize love-bombing during the interview stages.
According to Barber, some signs are excessive compliments, like being told you're exactly what the company is looking for, or that you're the best candidate being interviewed, or being given unrealistic promises, such as if they talk about you "being a great fit for the team" or "starting soon" before they've actually made a decision.
Fischer told BI that pressure for a quick decision is also "a huge red flag."
"From my perspective, there are very few circumstances where you should accept a role the moment it's offered," Fischer said.
Barber agreed, adding that if there is a long delay or no communication after the interview, "it's a sign that the praise might have just been a way to keep you interested before they made their decision."
What to do about it
Love-bombing during the interview process is symptomatic of deeper issues in recruitment, Chidlow said.
"While it may yield short-term gains in market perception, the long-term costs — disillusioned candidates, damaged reputations, and high turnover — far outweigh the benefits," she said.
"By prioritizing transparency and respect, organizations can foster genuine connections with candidates, ensuring a healthier, more productive recruitment process."
If you think the person on the other end of the interview desk is love-bombing you, it's good to set expectations early, Barber said.
"Before you wrap up the interview, feel free to ask when you can expect to hear back and what the next steps are," she said. "This can help you keep track of the process and avoid getting strung along."
A woman's out-of-office saga has caught the attention of the TikTok.
mihailomilovanovic/Getty Images
A woman's creative out-of-office emails sparked debate on professionalism and workplace norms.
Experts say OOO emails should reflect a company's culture.
Legal and social issues can arise if OOOs don't align with employer expectations.
The backlash to a woman's creative out-of-office emails has caught the attention of TikTok and ignited a debate over how much personality to bring to work.
Thara Moise, better known as Chef Moise, is a TikTok creator and private chef who also works a regular 9-5 as a catering and sales manager.
In a recent TikTok, which amassed more than a million views, she said she had received the "same talking to" from her boss at her day job multiple times due to her "super cute" out-of-office emails.
The emails would include stories she'd made up, historical facts, or wellness tips.
"Tell me why I had another conversation with this man today about how unprofessional that is," Moise said, adding that she felt like her personality was being "smothered by corporate America."
Some saw her creative automated emails as unprofessional, while others thought it was a sign that her workplace was stifling and restrictive.
"Imagine you sent an urgent email to someone and their automated response was a story instead of letting you know who to contact while they're out," read one comment, which received 21,000 likes.
Workplace analysts are also divided on the issue, saying it may all depend on the specifics of your office and the people in it.
Carla Bevins, an associate teaching professor of business management communication at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business in Pittsburgh, told Business Insider that OOO emails are an extension of workplace communication.
"While injecting personality can make them memorable, it's important to balance creativity with professionalism," she said.
However, Rich Mehta, the founder of the digital marketing agency Rigorous Digital, said that adding some personality into an OOO email could be beneficial in the right workplace setting.
"From the sendee's perspective, getting an OOO isn't usually a nice experience," he said. "Surprising someone with what can otherwise be a bit of a rubbish experience introduces dissonance, which usually means you'll be remembered."
Issues can arise
In more traditional workplaces, legal issues might arise.
Jo Mackie, a partner and employment law specialist at the law firm Burlingtons, told BI that inappropriate, offensive, or rude messages should never be tolerated, "but that begs the question of who decides what is and is not appropriate."
Raising the conversation three times shows that Moise should take notice, Mackie added, as failing to "follow a wilful management instruction" in employment law can potentially lead to disciplinary action, she said.
"If this continues, there is also scope for an employer to claim there has been a breakdown in trust and confidence between the employer and employee," she said. "And that is grounds for a breach of contract claim and may lead to dismissal."
Reading the room
Joelle Moray, a psychotherapist, workplace dynamics consultant, and the author of "What Are We Doing?! Radical Self-Care for the Hustle Culture," said that Moise's story is an example of the need to "get it right" rather than "being right."
Moray advises that individuals start by reading the room and deciding whether their workplace is more conservative or relaxed.
Then, they should take some time to consider who will read the email and why they want to add a casual tone or anecdote.
"Are you adding a wellness tip because you're the wellness committee chairperson?" she said. "Are you adding a historical factoid because you think they would be interested, or are you adding this so that you appear interesting?"
Moise told BI that she had found the response to her video funny for the most part, though some had veered into bullying or calling for her to be fired, which was "unnecessary," she said.
"Most people expressing negative thoughts are projecting their insecurities about being different or odd," she said. "I am incredibly accomplished on my own and have always navigated the workforce with ease."
Moise's workplace did not respond to a request for comment.
