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Usually the epitome of good humor, my friend was seething. She had devised a zany and creative marketing idea for her firm. Securing the budget, designing a content strategy, hiring a creative agency, and then doing all the related work had consumed Alex and her team for a full six months. This was on top of their already demanding jobs. And then the unthinkable happened. Before the idea was announced, one of my coworkers, a PR guy, shared the ideamy ideawith the CEO and CMO. I watched her pace around my kitchen, her face getting redder and redder. While he didnt exactly say hed done the work himself, how he talked about it made it seem like it was all his. Did you tell anyone, go to your manager? I asked. Alex stopped her pacing. I did, and he said, When youre creative, people will steal your ideasyou should just get used to that fact. As we talked, I could hear that under Alexs anger was something elsecuriosity. About what this all meant. About what she could have, or should have, done differently. Was she the problem? Did she need to figure out how to play the game better? Was the PR guy the issue? Or her boss? And if it was her boss, did she need to quit? Those were the wrong questions. Its not you or them. The problem lies in the norm of tolerating bad behavior. When workplaces say, Creative ideas get stolen, harm becomes a given, not a choice. Ideas get stolen because theres no accountability. To be clear, sometimes an idea is just in the air, and two or more people come to it around the same time. And oftentimes, we create ideas together. Im not talking about those moments. Im talking about when its fully apparent what is happeningidea theft, where one party takes credit for the work of othersand how that theft is tolerated. Research shows that knowledge workers are keenly aware of idea theft; nearly one-third report having had it happen to them. Work often treats idea theft as no big deal. But the cost is real. Integrity is lost when ideas are disconnected from their source. The depth of the concept or the completeness of the thinking is lost. Downstream decisions are made without the rootedness of the original inspiration. Theft demotivates the next idea. When ideas are stolen regularly, idea generation shuts down because no one volunteers to be violated. And Alexs boss was right about one thing: Alex will certainly create more ideas. People create when they feel safe enough to imagine something new. Thatby definitionis why regulating bad behavior matters. The idea that was stolen? It became one of the firms most successful efforts that year. It inspired the companys next ad campaign and even a Super Bowl spot. But they didnt have any follow-up to this one-off success. Why? Because they no longer had Alex. The Counterintuitive Insight: We Can Take Care of Our Commons Most of us are taught to stay quiet. Dont make a scene. Go along to get along. And when someone crosses a linesteals credit, dominates meetings, dismisses ideaswe assume someone in authority will fix it. But that assumption hides a deeper truth: the rules of our workplaces are not enforced by leaders alone. They are enforced by what we tolerate together. In 2009, political economist Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for proving something that ran against decades of economic orthodoxy. Before her work, economists widely believed in the tragedy of the commonsthe idea that when a resource is shared, individuals will inevitably overuse it and destroy it. The only solution, it was thought, was top-down control: private ownership or government regulation. Ostrom proved otherwise. She showed that communities, left to their own devices, often devise highly sophisticated systems of shared managementsystems where consequences dont come from a distant authority but from the group itself. The people who depend on each other can also hold each other accountable. Her work wasnt about office politics. But it applies. Every team shares something. It might not be water or grazing land. But trust. Energy. Credit. Voice. And just like natural resources, these intangible goods are depleted when people act only in their own interests at the expense of shared interests. When a manager takes all the credit. When someone interrupts constantly. When emotional labor always falls on the same shoulders. What Ostrom teaches us is that we dont have to live inside that dynamic. We can protect shared goodsnot with permission from the top, but through practices we design ourselves. Through consequences we create and apply together. Shared spaces survive when the people inside them protect them. Change the Norm When something harmful happens at work, our instincts split: ignore it or wait for someone in charge to handle it. But silence has a cost. It makes us complicit in what we ache to change. Monica Lewinskydragged through the mud of a scandal she didnt create alonecalls on us to be upstanders: people who dont just stand by, but stand up. Who see cruelty and choose courage. Who see harm and refuse to treat it as normal. Research shows that when bystanders step in, bullying stops within secondsproving that empowering peers to act can cut bad behavior in half. What we allow becomes the rule of the room. When someone steals an idea, and no one says anything, the norm survives. When someone names itcalmly, clearlythe rule changes. But lets be clear: This isnt work any of us do alone. If bad behavior is tolerated, it grows. When it meets consequences, it stops. Bad behavior isnt mysteriousits simply a crime of opportunity, repeated when no one intervenes. This is not a personal problem. Its a social problem. Its up to those who see it to actto create the consequences. Not just to protect the harmed, but to stop the harm from spreading. Behavior doesnt change because people suddenly become better. It changes because someone names whats happening and refuses to treat it as normal. When you do, you wont do it alone. Another person will join in. And then another. Until teams decide, we can be clear, fair, and firm with each other. That our shared space is worth defending, protecting. Let yourself run toward that danger, not away from it. Adapted from the book Our Best Work: Break Free from the 24 Invisible Norms That Limit Us, by Nilofer Merchant. Copyright 2026 by Nilofer Merchant. Reprinted by permission of Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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E-Commerce
During an end-of-the-fiscal-year spending spree last year, the Department of Defense (DoD) dropped some dough on new Herman Miller furniture. The DoD spent $60,719 for chairs from the Michigan furniture manufacturer last September, according to the report from the watchdog group Open The Books, including at least one $1,844 Aeron Chair, the brand’s popular, ergonomic, fabric-meshed office chair. The Herman Miller purchases were just a small fraction of the record $93 billion detailed in the report, which was more than the DoD has spent in a single month since the group’s data goes back to 2007. For Herman Miller, its share was peanuts, considering the company is the longest holder of a federal government contract for office furniture, at more than 40 years. (Herman Miller did not respond to a request for comment by publication.) The DoD goes on an annual spend-it-or-lose-it buying spree every fall no matter the president or party, Open The Books found over a decade of tracking it. The group called on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to rein in the use-it-or-lose-it approach the agency takes to its budget. Instead, 2025’s spending was a record. While some line items highlighted in the report seem like clear attempts to run up expense reports before the time runs out, like $98,000 on a Steinway & Sons grand piano and $2 million on Alaskan king crab, office furniture purchases at least make practical sense. With nearly 3 million military and civilian employees, the DoD is one of the largest employers in the U.S. That’s a lot of butts in seats, which means a big budget for chairs and other office furniture. Open The Books found furniture purchases spike 564% every September over the monthly average across the other 11 months of the year. Last year, the DoD spent $225.6 million on furniture in total. Herman Miller’s parent company MillerKnoll had obligations of more than $15 million in the last fiscal year, and the DoD makes up 80% of its awarding agencies. In the past, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) spent nearly $250,000 on Herman Miller furniture for a conference room refresh, according to Open the Books, and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) spent $284,000 on Herman Miller furniture for its conference center. For defense officials looking to set up an office, Herman Miller offers DoD-approved options for everything from desks, carts, and lockers to nurses’ stations, pharmacies, and labs. This isn’t the kind of workplace interior design work that Ikea was built to handle. For Herman Miller, though, its volume of government sales isn’t what it used to be. Federal spending records since 2008 show MillerKnoll’s transactions peaked during former President Barack Obama’s administration, with obligations totaling more than $174 million dollars in 2010, a figure that dropped to a low of more than $12 million in 2023. While the DoD might not be as loyal a customer as it once was, Herman Miller has found other government work elsewhere. The company says it’s one of the largest furniture suppliers to state and local government agencies.
Category:
E-Commerce
Here is a number worth sitting with: 295%. That’s how much U.S. app uninstalls of ChatGPT surged in a single day last month, after OpenAI struck a deal with the Department of Defense that its rival Anthropic had publicly refused to sign. In the same 24-hour window, Claude’s downloads jumped 51%. By that evening, Anthropic’s app had climbed to No. 1 on the U.S. App Store, leapfrogging 20 apps in under a week. One values-driven decision. One weekend. A measurable transfer of market share. Most of the coverage framed this as a political story. It isn’t. Or at least, not only. It’s also a brand loyalty story. And it tells us something important about the category war that’s actually being fought in AI, one that has very little to do with compute power. The Switching Cost Nobody Is Naming Brand strategists understand switching costs intuitively. In banking, insurance, enterprise softwareanywhere the friction is highemotional and values-based factors end up doing as much heavy lifting as product performance. The category with the highest rational switching cost often becomes the category where trust matters most. AI is moving toward that same dynamic, faster than most people are ready for. An AI platform doesn’t just perform tasks. It accumulates context. It gets to know ushow we think, our shorthand, our working rhythms. For enterprise users in particular, this depth compounds quickly. The longer a business embeds an AI platform into its workflows, the higher the exit cost becomes, not just technically, but cognitively, culturally, and even emotionally. There’s a name for this: the relational cost. It’s the switching cost nobody in the AI conversation is actually naming. And in any high-switching-cost category, the brand questionwhat does this company stand for, and do I trust iteventually becomes the definitive one. Operationalizing Values Is Not the Same as Talking About Them The consumer response to the DoD news didn’t come out of nowhere. It was the visible payoff of a positioning strategy years in the making. Anthropic has been making a consistent, operationalized argument about what kind of company it isand backing it with choices that have visible cost. The Claude Constitution is a publicly available, inspectable training framework. Not a mission statementa framework. Anthropic’s Economic Index analyses AI adoption across sectors and positions the company as a participant in the difficult societal conversation about AI’s impact on employment, not just a product vendor. These are category-shaping moves, not PR. The market had been registering these signals quietly, long before last month. Independent analyses suggest Claude holds 32% of enterprise AI usage, significantly disproportionate to its 3.5% consumer footprint. Enterprisesmore deliberate, more risk-averse, more consequentially exposed to AI failurehave already been choosing Claude at scale. That gap between enterprise and consumer adoption isn’t a coincidence. It’s a trust premium. The Cost of Caring It’s easy to have values when they cost you nothing. For Anthropic, these came with a $200 million price tag. Thats the suggested value of this contentious Pentagon contract. Furthermore, the supply-chain risk designationa label the Trump administration has now formally applied, and which Anthropic is challenging in courtthreatens hundreds of millions more across broader government contracts. This damaging designation, historically reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei, has never before been applied to an American company. That is a real commercial cost, not a hypothetical one. But what looks like a ceiling from one angle looks like a moat from another. In the weeks since the dispute went public, Anthropic’s revenue run rate has nearly doubledfrom $9 billion at the end of 2025 to almost $20 billion today, according to Bloomberg. The government closed a door. The market opened several more. That is not a coincidence. That is what trust, operationalized and defended under pressure, looks like as a growth strategy. So What Does This Mean for Your Business? The question that should be on the table in every leadership meeting right now: which AI platforms are you building on, and have you thought seriously about what that association means for your brand? AI platforms are no longer neutral infrastructure. They carry values, make visible choices, take public positions. The AI your business relies on is becoming part of your brand. When a platform’s ethics come into questionas they periodically and inevitably willthat exposure travels upstream to every company in its orbit. This creates both a risk conversation and a strategic opportunity. Evaluating AI partners on trust and values criteria, not just capability benchmarks, is the kind of decision that looks obvious in hindsight and prescient in the moment. The Brand Codes Are Being Written Now Early positioning in emerging categories hardens fast. The companies that define what a space stands for, not just what it does, shape expectations for years. We saw it with social media, with streaming, with fintech. In each case, the brands that defined the category’s values, not just its features, built loyalty advantages that capability alone couldn’t disrupt. AI is at that moment. The conversation about what kind of category this is going to be is happening now, in public, in real time. Stop asking which AI is most capable. Start asking which AI your business can afford to be associated with. Because our whirlwind romance with AI is fast turning into something more serious; committed, often exclusive, long-term relationships where platform loyalties get more embedded and more entrenched by the day. Choose carefully. Credibility compounds faster than compute. The data is already proving it.
Category:
E-Commerce
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