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Authenticity is currency. You can spend it recklessly and go broke, or invest it strategically and build wealth. Most leaders are choosing bankruptcy without even realizing it. Right now, workplaces are debating authenticity. Some call “bring your whole self to work” a dangerous myth that punishes marginalized employees. Others claim it’s the secret to engagement and retention. Both are rightand both are missing something. Unfiltered authenticity without skill can be destructive. And yes, marginalized employees pay a higher price when they try to be authentic in systems that weren’t built for them. But your team already knows when you’re faking it. That difference between genuine authenticity and performed authenticity determines everythingtrust, safety, retention, innovation. Think about the best leader you’ve ever had. Now the worst. What separated them? Kevin Built Wealth. Nancy Went Broke An employee once described two former managers to melet’s call them Kevin and Nancy. Kevin had emotional intelligence. When you sent an email that landed wrong, he’d follow up: “Hey, I think you meant this . . .” He remembered small details from weeks ago. You felt seen. He operated from a place of genuine care. Nancy was polished. She said all the right things about supporting her team. But over time, you realized it was packagingfriendly but transactional. Like a car salesman calling you “buddy” while steering you toward the close. Surface-level all the way down. The result? People trusted Kevin enough to be vulnerable, to take risks, to bring their full selves. With Nancy, they performed. Stayed professional. Protected themselves. Kevin built wealth. Nancy went brokelosing her best people in the process. The Cost of Going Broke When leaders perform authenticity instead of practicing it, the price is steep. Trust erodes: Employees start second-guessing everything you say. They stop bringing you problems until they’ve become crises. They smile in meetings but vent about you in private Slack threads. Performance declines: When people feel unheard, they stop trying. They do the minimum, knowing their ideas will be dismissed or reworked later. Half-hearted efforts, wasted hours, and endless redos are all symptoms of leadership that performs authenticity instead of practicing it. Psychological safety vanishes: When you fake authenticity, your team learns to fake it right back. No one risks being vulnerable or challenges ideas. Creativity dies quietly in conference rooms where everyone nods along. Your best people leave: Not always loudly. Not immediately. But they start looking. They stop investing. They give you their labor, not their loyalty. For marginalized employees, the cost is even higher: Research shows the toll of code-switching and masking isn’t just emotionalit’s biological. Black adults, for example, “weather” years faster under chronic workplace stress, aging 6.1 years beyond their peers. Ninety-one percent of neurodivergent employees mask their traits at work, and most report burnout as a direct result. That’s what happens when people spend their careers navigating leaders like Nancyconstantly calculating, code-switching, and self-protecting while leadership performs its way through “authenticity.” It doesn’t just drain engagementit literally accelerates aging and drives talent out the door. What Building Wealth Actually Looks Like Kevin didn’t just happen to be authentic. He had the emotional intelligence to make authenticity work. Here’s what that looks like in practicethe four pillars of authentic leadership: Self-Awareness (Know Yourself): Kevin knew his triggers and blind spots. When he got impatient, he recognized it and communicated expectations clearly instead of lashing out. Nancy probably had no idea how she came acrossor worse, she knew and didn’t care. Transparency & Honesty (Show Yourself): Kevin admitted mistakes and shared challenges thoughtfully. Nancy talked about transparency but never revealed anything real. Her vulnerability was scripted. Consistency & Integrity (Be Yourself): Kevin’s actions matched his words whether you were in the room or not. People knew what to expect. Nancy adapted to the audiencewarm in meetings, different behind closed doors. Respectful Adaptation (Balance Yourself): Kevin was authentic without being unfiltered. He knew how to disagree respectfully, to be real without being reckless. Nancy confused polish with professionalism and never learned the difference. Without EQ, authenticity is chaosbluntness masquerading as bravery, oversharing disguised as vulnerability. With EQ, authenticity becomes the foundation for trust, creativity, and growth. Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself Here’s the uncomfortable truth: You might be Nancy and not know it. Cognitive dissonance lets us live with a lie. When we forfeit self-awareness for comfort, we convince ourselves we’re being authentic while we’re actually performing. We package our niceness. We script our vulnerability. We say the right words while our team watches our actionsand knows better. If this stirs some discomfort, that’s your cue to practice emotional intelligenceto pause, reflect, and not defend. Try this on Monday morning: Practice the pause. When someone challenges you, do you immediately defendor take a beat to ask, “What if they’re right?” Audit yourself. Do you remember what your people tell you? Do you follow up weeks later? When you admit a mistake, are you learningor just managing your image? These small acts separate the leaders building wealth from those heading toward bankruptcy. The Return on Investment When you invest authenticity wiselywith emotional intelligence as your guidethe returns compound: Trust multiplies: People stop hedging. They bring their full thinking, their wild ideas, their honest concerns. Problems get solved faster because no one’s wasting energy performing. Retention stabilizes: Your best people stay not for perks but for purpose. They don’t just work for youthey work with you. Innovation accelerates: Psychological safety fuels risk-taking. Teams build what mattersnot just what looks good in presentations. Culture sustains itself: Authentic leaders create authentic teams. It spreads. New hires learn what’s truly valuednot what’s written on the wall, but what’s modeled in the room. The difference between Kevin and Nancy wasn’t personality or charisma. It was the willingness to do the inner work required to show up authentically and skillfully. Kevin built wealth because he had the emotional intelligence to make authenticity work. Nancy went broke because she never learned th difference between saying the right words and being real. The question isn’t which leader you want to be. The question is: Which leader are your people actually experiencing?
Category:
E-Commerce
As Sir Isaac Newton discovered, the core scientific law of gravity is that what goes up must come down. The principle applies in many areas, which is why markets are jittery about the near-unchecked, three-year growth of stock prices fueled by the strength of the generative-AI revolution. The market is on a tear, with a large gap growing even wider between public market valuations and the significantly higher private-market valuations of AI-exposed companies. The top five tech companies in the U.S. are, collectively, valued at more than the combined size of the Euro Stoxx 50, the U.K., India, Japan, and Canadaand account for around 16% of the entire global public equity market, according to Goldman Sachs. Its not just AI model makers and the firms that provide their infrastructure: Its the associated industries that help serve the AI market. Earlier this year, Harvard economist Jason Furman estimated that U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was almost entirely due to investment in data centers. Investors in companies like Nvidia are seeing blockbuster returns, as the firms value has risen more than 1,200% in the past five years, thanks to being one of the few companies able to provide the computer chips required for the AI revolution. Even so, some are worried that Nvidia is providing financing to customers looking to buy its chipsa supposedly circular chain that short sellers have quibbled with. (Nvidia, for its part, has issued responses to market analysts to refute those claims.) It all adds up to a tetchy time, with nervousness and debate about an AI bubble. Not helping matters are the public comments about the current moment by some of the industrys biggest names. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that were currently in an AI bubble where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has called it a frenzy. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a podcast in September that an AI bubble, and its potential burst, was definitely a possibility. Comparisons have been drawn to the 2000s-era dot-com bubble. Weathering the storm So if we are in an AI bubble and it does burst, then wholl be left standing at the end of it? The idea that entire economies might be hit by the bursting of any bubble is unlikely to happen, reckons Christopher Tucci, professor of digital strategy and innovation at Imperial College Business School in London. The internet bubble, for example, wiped out many companies and investors, but the technology itself only grew in importance afterwards, he says. Tucci sees AI in a similar way, noting, Even if the investment bubble bursts, the underlying technology will remain critical and will continue to advance. And while the bubble continues to inflate, Tucci believes thats good news for smaller companies. At the moment, large amounts of money are flowing into AI startups, he says. This lowers startup costs, increases the number of competing companies, and creates vulnerabilities, mainly for investors. But if and when that bubble bursts, those smaller companies are more likely to be exposed, while larger companies will be insulated from more significant risks. Survivors will be the ones that own distribution, says Sergey Toporov, partner at early-stage VC firm Leta Capital. Toporov is blunt about the lack of a moat for smaller companies, saying, Nobody cares about your best-in-class AI startup unless people actually know it exists. In that view, companies like the big four AI firmsGoogle, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Metaare likely to weather any storm, but smaller competitors could struggle. The rest will consolidate or become specialized model shops, Toporov says. Smaller companies that have what Toporov calls defensible advantages like proprietary data or deep integration into business workflows could withstand an AI-caused market correction. He says the same is true for firms with strong distribution, recurring demand, and a deep technical moat. Companies that piggyback on existing technology, including AI wrapper services that use their larger competitors AI models in order to provide answers to their customers, sometimes in specific specialties, may face a tough road ahead. Big unknowns However, not everyone agrees with that vision of the future. AI apps with high valuations look the riskiest at the moment, says Sampsa Samila, professor of strategic management at IESE Business School. They dont have easy moats against improving foundation models or other apps. Samila believes even those that operate foundation models, like OpenAI, could be in a difficult position. Foundation labs burning billions are also looking shaky, he says. It’s not at all easy to see how OpenAI will manage, unless it develops winner-take-all superintelligence. In part, thats down to what Samila sees as circular financing deals, including those supported by Nvidias funding in order to obtain Nvidia chips to power their models. While OpenAI could struggle because of its cash burn, Samila contends that bigger, more established names in the space are better placed to weather the problems. Google is interesting because they control TPUs [tensor processing units], have proprietary data from Search, YouTube, and Gmail, and are already monetizing AI through Cloud, he explains. But the big unknown for Google is whether its rollout of AI-native ads can replace its search revenue. Another area of concern for Google, given competition from the likes of Microsoft, is that its tech stack doesnt always integrate well with the existing IT systems being run by organizations. Amongst the AI apps, deep embedding into customer workflows is going to be key to survival, Samila says. Many companies tend to use Microsofts products rather than Googles in large part because its what theyve always done. Whatever happens, most people believe there are fundamental differences between a possible imminent burst of the AI bubble and the dot-com stock market crash. The Magnificent Seven tech firms have a 24-month forward price-to-earnings ratio that is 25 times their collective valuationhigh, but half the level it was in the dot-com era. Price-to-earnings growth is also around half the level it was a quarter century ago. And many of the biggest names in the space are well-capitalized tech firms with cash reserves that can pay for any financial hiccups ahead in a way that the dot-com eras biggest names couldnt. Regardless, those in and around the AI sector need to be aware of whats ahead.When a correction comes, venture capital will dry up potentially for several years, Tucci predicts. In the long run, however, AI as a technology will continue to grow in importance, regardless of short-term investment cycles.
Category:
E-Commerce
In 1983, Howard Schultz was an employee of Starbucks, a small chain of coffee stores that mainly sold beans (and no drinks), when he was sent to Milan for a trade show. As Schultz observed Italians visiting their local cafés, he loved what he saw, describing it as a sense of community, a real sense of connection between the barista and the customer. A few years later, after Schultz convinced Starbuckss owners to sell him the company, the new owner attempted to build that same type of connection here in the U.S. To do so, Schultz knew he had to take care of his people. He called them partners, not employees, a symbol of a more collaborative working relationship. Over the years, Starbucks offered perks that were typically unheard of for part-time workers in food service, benefits like health insurance and contributions to college education. Nowadays, though, Starbucks seems to have lost the reputation for looking after its people. No doubt, at least part of the reason for that is Schultz has stepped down as CEO, multiple times, returning as the company struggled under his successors. A few years ago, after taking over on an interim basis, Schultz even went on a listening tour, visiting stores across the country to find out how the company had lost its way. Starbuckss brass, and even Schultz himself, became hopeful when the company tapped Brian Niccol, former CEO of Chipotle, to take over the helm. In the world of fast food and fast casual dining, Niccol was a superstar. Most recently, he had completed a major turnaround at Chipotle, a company that saw sales double in Niccols first year as CEO, along with a major rise in stock price. Everyone wondered the same thing: Could Niccol do the same for Starbucks? In the beginning, I liked what I saw. Niccol vowed to return Starbucks to its roots, with a renewed focus on serving the finest coffee and a plan to update stores to make them more welcoming. Niccol also returned fan favorites, like condiment bars so customers have more control over customization. But as more details of Niccols turnaround plan surfaced, concern grew. Baristas would be required to adhere to a much stricter dress code. They were given a set of guidelines, even a script, detailing their interactions with customers. Baristas were instructed to write something genuine on each customer cup, with threats of repercussions if they didnt. This is the fatal flaw in Niccols turnaround plans. The workplace has evolved, and command-and-control management is no longer effective, at least not long term. Thats especially true in the service industry, where trust empowers employees to connect with customers. Beyond that, Niccols latest policies are antithetical to how Schultz built Starbucks in the first placea company that prided itself on putting its people at the center of everything it did. In contrast, Niccol and his team would benefit from taking a close look at a recent turnaround story, led by a CEO who, like Niccol, had experience resurrecting a dying brand: James Daunt of Barnes & Noble. A former investment banker turned bookstore owner, Daunt took over the helm of Americas largest bookstore chain in 2019, which had been in steady decline for years. Since Daunt took over, Barnes & Noble has experienced a resurgence, leading to an expansion of dozens of new stores in 2023. This wasnt Daunts first successful turnaround. The British businessman did something similar in the U.K., where he revitalized another chain of flailing bookstores, Waterstones. So, how did Daunt get lightning to strike, twice? His hallmark strategy was simple: Give power to local store managers. We sort of take three steps forward and then one step back, Daunt once said in an interview with The New York Times. The forward is my constantly encouraging and pushing for the stores themselves to have the complete freedom to do absolutely whatever they wanthow they display their books, price their books, sort their sections, anything. Those freedoms are difficult if you lived in a very straitjacketed world where everything was dictated to you. In essence, Daunt turned local Barnes & Noble stores, and Waterstones stores before that, into indie bookstores. The strategy worked because of the trust he put in his people, and the power he gave them. Of course, theres more than one way to turn a company around. Niccol found success at Chipotle. But a focus on efficiency and policies over people is diametrically opposed to Schultzs dream for Starbucks: that Italian-inspired vision of local connection between barista and customer. I believe Niccols overarching goal to return Starbucks to its roots is a good one. But the companys ability to produce that experience of connection will depend on the people who are serving the drinksand that will require rebuilding a culture where Starbucks employees feel supported and cared for, not threatened. If Starbucks can get back to taking care of its people, its people will take care of the customers. And the turnaround will take care of itself. By Justin Bariso Sign up for my newsletter on how to build emotional intelligence in you and your team. This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister site, Inc.com. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
Category:
E-Commerce
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