 |
|
|
|||||
When MSNBC spins off from NBCUniversal (NBCU) by the end of its year to become an independent company, it will have a new name and logo. MSNBC will become My Source News Opinion World (MS NOW), and the multicolored Peacock logo MSNBC now borrows from its outgoing parent company will be replaced with a new red, white, and blue mark. “It looks very sporty,” Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough said announcing the rebrand on air Monday. The new name speaks to the network’s ambitions to stand on its own once it no longer has the global news gathering operation of NBCU to rely on. At the same time, the name is intended to sound similar enough to the old one to evoke a sense of brand continuity and signal to longtime viewers that the tone of the network’s coverage isn’t expected to change. Launched in 1996, MSNBC’s name was a nod to the two companies that partnered on to create it: Microsoft and NBC. Microsoft divested its stake in the company in 2005, and by 2007, the network had become known as a liberal cable news alternative to Fox News with the added bonus of having a network news operation to lean on for reporting and talent, care of NBC News. From the beginning, MSNBC borrowed the NBC “bird” for its own logo. Originally designed as an 11-feather peacock by graphic designer John J. Graham to promote NBC’s color television programming, the mark made its on-air appearance in 1956. The current six-feather version of the mark, first introduced in 1986 and designed by Chermayeff & Geismar, reduced the number of feathers down to just the primary and secondary colors. Over the years, it’s been refined even further. With the brand value that comes from decades of Olympics coverage, hit shows like Saturday Night Live, and local affiliates plus channels like MSNBC and CNBC that extended the brand’s reach to 24-hour cable news and financial news, the NBC logo has become one of the most recognizable in television. With the break-up of the NBCU from its cable holdings, NBCU is keeping the Peacock logo and “NBC” suffix for itself. That means NBCU’s outgoing cable networks, which will live under the new parent company Versant, all have to rebrand without the Peacock, including MSNBC, CNBC, Golf Channel, GolfNow, and SportsEngine. (CNBC, which was originally named the “Consumer News and Business Channel,” gets to keep the “NBC” in its name). In an internal memo, MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler said “the future of our success is not tied to remaining within the NBC family and using the peacock as part of our identity,” and the company is planning a significant national marketing campaign for the rebrand. Even so, the symbolism of replacing a rainbow-colored peacock with a corporate-looking red and white flag on blue backdrop has not been lost on some observers, who have wondered if it signals a move away from the network’s progressive coverage. In a “message to our community,” published online, MSNBC said that although its name was changing, its promise to viewers wasn’t. “For our viewers who have watched us for decades, it may be hard to imagine this network by any other name. We understand. But our promise to you remains as it always has. You know who we are, and what we do,” the network said. The network is clearly hoping that its new flag-waving brand will be received like a home with a “In This House We Believe…” yard sign in the front yard changing its flag from Pride to American when June turns to July. The new MS NOW name and logo is meant to mark a change in seasons but not of liberal values, the company contends. MS NOW represents a new era for the No. 2 most-watched channel in all of cable, which is on the verge of turning 30 and striking out on its own for the first time. But the true meaning of the rebrand will ultimately depend on what it delivers for its viewers.
Category:
E-Commerce
Another month, another founder accused of fraud. This time its Christine Hunsicker of CaaStle, indicted on July 18 for allegedly falsifying financial records, misrepresenting profits, and continuing fraud even after her removal by the board. According to reports, before meeting with an audit firm, she searched online for the terms fraud, created an audit firm fake, and JP morgan 4m records fakedan apparent reference to fraud charges related to yet another disgraced founder, Charlie Javice of Frank. These incidents are no longer outliers. Theyre becoming a pattern, and the startup world has yet to confront what that the pattern reveals: The startup ecosystem is designed to encourage deception. Risk-taking and self-confidence We all know that most founders share a penchant for risk-taking and a healthy sense of self-confidence. But couple these characteristics with the relentless assault of pressures that constitute daily startup life, and you have a recipe for trouble. Risk-taking slips into recklessness, and confidence metastasizes into outright narcissism. Lying is the norm. Particularly during the early stages, a Growth at All Costs imperative means that startups feel obliged to pursue aggressive growth to secure high valuations and attract continuous investment rounds. This pressure can lead founders to inflate metrics, fabricate success, or conceal failures to maintain investor confidence. Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX secretly transferred customer funds to his trading firm, Alameda Research, concealing these movements and misleading stakeholders. From optimism to deception A Fake It Till You Make It culture means that what starts as harmless optimism can easily escalate into deliberate deception. Founders initially omit negative details, then progressively falsify data to uphold illusions of success. Nikola founder Trevor Milton exaggerated product capabilities, even staging videos of a nonoperational electric truck rolling down a hill. The brutal demands of fundraising result in constant pressure to secure funding and maintain operational cash flow, which often pushes founders to compromise ethically. The necessity to present a highly favorable narrative to investors encourages fraudulent embellishments. Combined with a lack of oversight and governance, especially in early-stage startups, this leaves founders unchecked, increasing opportunities for fraud. Early investors and boards often fail to provide rigorous oversight due to limited motivation or expertise. A gradual process White-collar fraud is always a gradual process. No one jumps straight into the deep end of the criminality pool. Law enforcement officials have a 10:10:80 rule of thumb when it comes to white-collar fraud: 10% of people would never commit fraud, 10% of people are actively seeking out opportunities to commit fraud, and 80% of people have the potential to commit fraud if the timing and circumstances are right. The vast majority of these founders probably started in the 80%, along with most of the rest of us. It often begins with minor embellishments aimed at securing initial investment. Successful deception attracts further funding, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. But as the discrepancies between reality and claims widen, founders face intensified pressure to maintain their narratives, resorting to increasingly severe fraud to conceal earlier lies. Witness Christine Hunsickers continued deception even after her board had essentially kicked her out of her company. Seismic consequences The consequences of all this founder misbehavior can be cataclysmic. They extend well beyond the direct financial losses to investors. Broader investor confidence deteriorates, leading to reduced funding availability for legitimate startups. Employees suffer job losses, reputational damage, and psychological distress. Customers can experience direct harm, as in Theranoss false medical test results. The broader innovation ecosystem becomes risk-averse, slowing innovation due to increased regulatory scrutiny and cautious investment behaviors. Potential time bombs To mitigate this deadly cocktail of ego and pressure, we first need to understand that all founders are potential time bombs: the same traits that help them secure money, talent, and press are the ones that can eventually lead to their undoing. The old method was pretty straightforward: fire the founder, and replace them with a manager. But that only leads to zombie companies that stifle innovation in the crib. Startup founders are constantly being gaslit. Theyre being flattered as geniuses and world-changers on a daily basis. Many of their direct reports are sharp, canny careerists who only want to share good news. Its easy to see how people can lose perspective and start believing their own hype within the emperors new clothes environment of a startup. These people need perspective in order to curb the worst tendencies of startup culture. Every founder should cultivate a star chamber of mentors who are removed from the everyday persecutions of the startup in question (perhaps an older CEO, or a colleague from an accelerator program, or a startup blogger you admire). They need advice from people whom I call models of values: transparency, accountability, and ethical leadership. Many boards are sadly hopeless at this, because theyre complicit in the success (at all costs) of the startup. Oversight and accountability On the stick side of the carrot and stick approach, however, these people also need oversight and accountability. Their boards and investors must actively engage in governance roles, monitoring company practices and demanding transparency. They need to ensure financial transparency and operational integrity through audits and detailed reference checks. To prevent the next Hunsicker, Javice, Bankman-Fried, or Holmes, we need to confront the cultural rot at the core of startup life. We still need ambitious entrepreneurs to drive innovation, but not within a system that rewards deception and punishes transparency. Unless we change the rules of the gameby rethinking incentives, strengthening oversight, and investing in founder developmentwell keep producing brilliant visionaries who become cautionary tales.
Category:
E-Commerce
In 1967, a man named George Maciunas purchased a cast-off building at 80 Wooster Street in New York City. It had once housed light manufacturing, but by the late 1960s, it was empty, like much of SoHo. Maciunas was an artist and a bit of a provocateur. What he wanted to build wasnt a home or studio. It was a community. And within a few years, 80 Wooster had become a nerve center for Fluxus, the revolutionary movement that fused performance art and design. You could argue that much of SoHos creative explosion, and the contemporary art market that followed, traces back, at least partially, to that one building. But the real lesson of SoHo isnt about one building. Its about what happens when people live and work and think together, in close proximity. Its about density. Shared space. Its about what Maciunas stumbled upon and what Jony Ive, half a century later, is trying to design deliberately in San Francisco. During the pandemic, we collectively adopted a belief: that physical place doesnt matter anymore. That knowledge workers could work from anywhere, that Slack could replace the hallway conversation, that Zoom could replace the studio. But in shared spaces, powerful ideas emerge from the combustion that happens when thinkers and doers comingle. You see someones sketchpad. You hear someone pitch a prototype. You walk out of a gallery and into a conversation. Communities have always been engines of creative cross-pollination and acceleration. And they still are. Lets look at the evidence. Proximity Shapes Behavior When the Bauhaus school moved to Dessau in 1925, its new campus was a compound: a deliberate arrangement of workshops, student housing, dining areas, and design studios, all connected by a spatial logic that encouraged flow and interaction. Masters and students worked together, ate together, debated design over dinner together, and crossed paths in shared hallways and courtyards. The schools interdisciplinary breakthroughs (think of Breuers tubular steel chairs or Moholy-Nagys experiments in photography and metalwork) didnt come from curriculum alone. They emerged from proximity. The architecture itself, featuring transparency, openness, and connectedness, was a catalyst for creative exchange. We know from research that proximity changes behavior. MIT professor Thomas Allen found that communication between engineers dropped off sharply once they were more than 10 meters apart and declined even further across floors or buildings. Weekly collaboration often disappeared entirely. The closer we are, the more we interact. And the more we interact, the more likely we are to spark something new. So, what does that mean for the world we live in now? Renewal in San Francisco and Detroit Jackson Square in San Francisco, once a lively mix of galleries, boutiques, and creative firms, hollowed out after the pandemic. Office vacancy topped 35%, and much of downtown lost its pulse. But Jony Ive saw possibilities where others saw decline. Rather than lease a studio, he began acquiring and renovating a cluster of adjacent historic buildings. Why? Because he was, and is, on a design mission: how do you build a space that invites creativity, not just from your team, but from your surroundings? He called the resulting courtyard the Pavilion. And its not an office amenity. Its a place for open-air meals, impromptu conversations, private concerts, and more. Yo-Yo Ma has played there. Artists, technologists, and musicians mingle without an agenda. Conceivably a typographer might walk out of a meeting and stumble into a sound check. A hardware engineer might trade notes with a novelist over espresso. This is cross-pollination by design. Ive is building a creative ecology: a space where disciplines intersect, where proximity builds trust, and where inspiration moves laterally, not from the top down, but from the courtyard across. A contemporary answer to an old truth: ideas need neighbors. Jackson Square is not the only place where revitalization is happening through the communal sharing of ideas. Detroits Newlab anchors the citys 30acre mobility innovation district. Its built around the newly reopened Michigan Central Station, hailed as a symbol of Detroits creative revival. Since opening in April 2023, Newlab has housed more than 100 startups in mobility, climate tech, and hardware innovation, providing access to stateoftheart prototyping labs, fabrication workshops, and pilot zones designed to facilitate realworld experimentation. Newlab is both a workspace and a community. In June 2025, Michigan Central and Newlab launched a Creative Residency funded by the Knight Foundation, placing artists alongside technologists to explore projects at the intersection of art, science, and mobility. Fellows and Cohort members engage in crossdisciplinary prototyping, installations, and public dialogues, weaving creative practice into the heart of criticaltech innovation. On-site facilities like textile, CNC, robotics, and metal labs mean that a sculptor can dart between a fabrication session and a conversation with a batterydesign engineer. These are unplanned collaborations that spark fresh ideas. That creative density scales into impact. Through Detroits Advanced Aerial Innovation Region, startups like Lamarr.AI use drones and AI to audit city-owned buildings, capturing thermal inefficiencies and structural data for retrofit in days, not weeks. The project demonstrates how shared infrastructure and pilot zones accelerate meaningful collaboration between companies, municipal agencies, and innovators all within walking distance of Newlabs shared hub. What This Means for Businesses This isnt just about San Francisco and Detroit. Any business that depends on ideas should care where those ideas come from, and the lessons we can learn from the power of place. Talent Clusters Deliver. Designers in Barcelona. Engineers in Boston. Founders in Austin. When talent lives near other talent, new work gets made. The people who shape culture still gather in physical places. Cities with culture, density, and walkability will continue to pull ahead. Creative Adjacency Is a Multiplier. You dont need to be in the same company. You just need to be in the same neighborhood. Thats why companies moving into innovation districts perform well. The serendipity is built in. Participation Is More Powerful Than Presence. Renting office space in a city isnt the same as showing up for its cultural life. Businesses that attend local shows, sponsor creative spaces, or mentor local talent become part of the ecosystem. Thats how you stay relevant, by being part of the local rhythm, not just watching it. Dont Mistake Remote for Rootless. Remote work lets people live anywhere. That doesnt mean they live everywhere. Creative people still gravitate toward vibrant places, and businesses that want to hire or partner with them need to think the same way. If you want to find the next generation of storytellers or technologists, look for the places where ideas are already in motion. Culture Is Not a KPI. You cant track the power of culture on a dashboard. But you know when its there. In the right place, ideas sync faster. Instinct sharpens. Teams move with more confidence That matters, especially for work that doesnt come from templates like good brand work, new product ideas, original strategies. These things dont arrive fully formed in a shared doc. They emerge from conversation, curiosity, and experience. All three live in places with creative density. The Texture of Innovation In business, we often talk about innovation as if its a matter of systems: of process, of capital, of talent deployed efficiently. But that language leaves something out. It misses the texture of innovation, the way it moves through a neighborhood, picks up influence, and reshapes itself in conversation. It forgets that the most important ideas emerge, slowly, from an atmosphere. From a shared block, a corner café, a sunlit studio, a courtyard where someone plays cello in the afternoon. If companies want to matter, not just to markets, but to culture, they need to rethink place as something more than a backdrop. It is not a container. It is an ingredient. A brand built in isolation may be polished. A product designed in a vacuum may be efficient. But timeless relevance, the kind that resonates, that sticks, that spreads, comes from being in the world with others. The real opportunity in front of us is not a return to offices. Its to ask better questions about what kind of places we want to build around the work we do, and what kind of work becomes possible when we do.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||