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I once coached a VP leading a digital transformation across three continents. She had no formal authority over the teams she needed to engage, just a high-stakes mandate and a tight timeline. Her initial meetings landed with silence. No one pushed back, but no one leaned in, either. It wasnt until she shifted how she communicatednot what she said, but howthat momentum started to build. In environments defined by complexity and change, influence matters more than hierarchy. Yet many leaders still lean on outdated methods: top-down messaging, overreliance on data, or blanket statements designed to cascade through an organization. These tactics often create distance rather than buy-in. Persuasive communication isnt about being charismatic or loud; its about being clear, empathetic, and purpose-driven. Its how todays most effective leaders gain trust, align teams, and turn strategies into reality. Ive worked with hundreds of executives across industries and fully recognize it as a defining skill for modern leadership. Here are the core communication moves that leaders can use to influence without authority and create real traction in the process. CUT THROUGH RESISTANCE BY SPEAKING WITH SURGICAL CLARITY Ambiguity slows everything down. When leaders speak in broad terms or use fuzzy language, teams are left to interpret intentand that interpretation is rarely aligned. Leaders should drop the jargon and focus on making their desired outcomes crystal clear. One of my clients, a senior director in a global logistics company, struggled to mobilize cross-functional teams around a new initiative. The turning point came when she swapped dense PowerPoints for simple statements: Heres what were doing, heres why it matters, and heres how success will look. She gave examples that people understood, guidance that was actionable and illustrations of what great looked like. Once her message was clear, resistance dropped. People finally knew how to contribute. The lesson: Get specific. Lead with the desired outcome. Use language thats easy to repeat and hard to misinterpret. Clarity always connects better than complexity. LISTEN FIRST, THEN INFLUENCE THROUGH EMPATHY Most persuasion starts with a question, not a statement. Leaders who take time to understand what their teams care aboutwhat worries them, and what motivates themcommunicate more effectively because theyre speaking into real concerns. I worked with a COO frustrated by employee reluctance to adopt a new tool. Through guided interviews, the executive discovered a key blocker: The tool wasnt the issue. Fear of being replaced was. After acknowledging this fear directly and repositioning the tool as a support system rather than a threat, adoption rates soared. Influence doesnt mean glossing over concerns. It means addressing them directly and showing that youve listened deeply enough to know what really matters. CONNECT TO PURPOSE TO ACTIVATE ENGAGEMENT Facts may inform, but purpose moves people. When communication is tethered to values, it shifts from transactional to transformational. Effective leaders anchor change initiatives in a clear sense of mission, turning lifeless strategy into purpose-driven momentum. People dont want another strategy deck. They want to know how the work connects to something meaningful. How does this initiative matter to those doing the work, the end-user customers or even society? One executive I coached started sharing short stories at all-hands meetings about how their product impacted real customers. He led his conversation with how many women would live a better life instead of how many implants or how much revenue they were going to drive. It changed the room. People stopped nodding politely and started volunteering ideas. To influence at scale, anchor messages in something bigger than tasks. Link them to identity, mission, and shared goals. Listen to your own airtime and analyze the words you use and give value to. Are you asking how many deals did we close? or did you ask how many new customers are we helping? As a leader your words will echo what is considered most critical. REINFORCE THROUGH RITUALS AND REPETITION One messageeven when delivered perfectlyrarely sticks. Leaders who drive change build rhythms that reinforce key ideas over time. Repetition isnt redundancy; its strategy. I recently helped a leadership team rolling out a cultural reset develop a ritual where every meeting began with a one-minute reflection tied to company values. Over time, the repetition turned abstract values into lived behaviors. It wasnt about big speeches. It was about building cues into the system. It is not only about sharing a message broadly, but consistently weaving in what matters and why into unilateral communications, during a conversation, email, or messagerelevant to the context of that exchange of course. Ask yourself: Whats your team hearing consistently during one-on-ones, company meetings, performance report, updates, etc.? How can you use existing forumsstand-ups, all-hands, Slack messagesto echo the most important themes? ADAPT YOUR MESSAGE TO MATCH YOUR AUDIENCE Even strong communicators fall into the trap of broadcasting the same message to every stakeholder. But influence depends on relevance. What matters to a front-line manager may not resonate with the executive suite. My advice: Tailor your tone, format, and focus. One client, preparing to announce a restructuring, created two distinct narratives: one for employees concerned about role clarity, and another for partners needing strategic context. The shift didnt just ease the transition; it boosted trust across the board. Effective communication doesnt come from communicating louder or repeating yourself. It comes from reframing your message so others can truly hear it.
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E-Commerce
My day job is a design educator, so for me, this time of year is filled with writing syllabi, planning new classes, and thinking about what the next generation of designers might need to know as they enter an ever-changing field. To do this, I look for the designers, the writers, and the thinkers who challenge my understanding of design and force me to think about what we do in new ways. Thankfully, there’s been a handful of new books to come out over the last few months that do just that. As we head back to school, the books included here look back and look forward, asking big questions about how we use design today and how we might approach this moment in more thoughtful, considered ways. [Cover Image: Macmillan] Could Should Might Don’t by Nick Foster When you imagine the future, what does it look like? Chances are, when you picture the future, you picture radical architecture, flying cars, walking robotsa world aglow in blues and purples. When we imagine the future, we often imagine images made by other people and those images have become strangely homogenized. Nick Foster, a self-described “reluctant futurist” and the former design director of Google X, the tech giant’s “moonshot ideas factory,” thinks this is a problem. In his fascinating new book, he probes how we imagine the future and who has a stake in that future, making the case for a more rigorous, thoughtful, and provocative way to think about the future and how we get there. Both a guidebook for thinking about the future and a framework for interrogating the futures presented to us, Foster’s easy prose makes it simple for anyone to be a part of the conversation about the futures we want. [Cover Image: Inventory Press] A *Co-*Program for Graphic Design by David Reinfurt Built around three courses graphic designer David Reinfurt taught and developed at Princeton University over the last decade, this book blends theoretical ideas and practical knowledge about what it means to be a graphic designer today. Jumping back and forth through design history, moving across formats and mediums, and inviting a range of voices to participate in the conversation, Reinfurt shows that graphic design continues to be an expansive, ever-shifting space in which to think about ideas and how they move through the world. [Cover Image: MIT Press] Not Here, Not Now by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby In 2013, designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby released Speculative Everything, a now-canonical text on using design not to create things but ideas. The book has had an enduring impact on the fields of speculative design, design fiction, and critical design and continues to be a foundational text for design students. Dunne & Raby are back with a new book, Not Here, Not Now, that builds upon the ideas they introduced a decade ago. This new book proposes that we approach design not as a “solution” but as a “proposal” for new ways of thinking. Structured as a travelogue of ideas that journeys across science, philosophy, and literature, Dunne and Raby once again explore design’s role in a world where reality itself is called into question. [Cover Image: Hachette] The Invention of Design by Maggie Gram Reading Maggie Gram’s excellent new book, The Invention of Design, I couldn’t help but wonder how a book like this didn’t exist before. Over the last century design has moved from aesthetics to function, from the art department to the corporate boardroom. How did we get here? Gram, a designer and historian, charts this history, showing how our understanding of design has evolved over the last century, from design as decoration to the rise of design as problem solving, centering the figures who helped make design central to every area of our lives. But this is not a hagiography: as Gram chronicles design’s rise, she also interrogates its limits, noting where i’s fallen short of its goals and highlights the unintended consequences of design gone too far. [Cover Image: Verso] Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat by Hito Steyerl Over the last decade, I’m not sure anyone has written more provocatively and insightfully on how images (and how they circulate) shape our understanding of the world than German video artist and theorist Hito Steyerl. This new book is a collection of essays that explore the intersection and influence of artificial intelligence and climate change on the creation of images. From data-driven art to blockchain aesthetics, Steyerl mines our current moment to trace the overlap of politics, economics, and technology and how they structure what we see when we look out at the world.
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E-Commerce
The Eurovision Song Contest, the European musical showdown known for its glittery outfits, unusual performances, and over-the-top fanfare, is returning in 2026 for its 70th year. To usher in the anniversary, the competition just unveiled a rebrand, and fans arent thrilled. Next May, Eurovision (which moves to a new city every year) will be held in Vienna, according to a recent Instagram announcement. There, it will officially roll out its new logo, custom font, and brand symbol, all of which were revealed on August 18 and have since begun to appear on the contests social media accounts. [Image: Eurovision] The new look, which apparently was designed to bring more cohesion to Eurovisions look and make the brand more versatile on digital platforms, has attracted droves of negative feedback from fans. Commenters across social media say the branding has veered into cartoonish territory, with some even implying that the new wordmark and logo were generated by AI rather than human artists. Martin Green, director of Eurovision, says he was not at all surprised by the negative fan reaction, given that Eurovision has such a massive fanbase and any form of creativity is ultimately subjective. While he says that none of the rebrand was generated by AI, hes actually encouraged to see fans advocating for artists over AI. It’s really good to see the fans on this, actually, because from a personal and professional point of view, I agree with a lot of them, Green says. Inside Eurovision’s new branding The new Eurovision branding was designed through a collaboration between the European Broadcasting Unions in-house design team and the British branding studio Pals. Green says there were a few reasons for Eurovision to rebrand in 2026, starting with the fact that the competitions branding has remained largely unchanged for close to 15 years. We deal in pop music, and that pop music keeps us young and tells us what’s going on in the world, he says. As a brand, we want to keep refreshed as well. Pals took the main Eurovision logoa hand-drawn script that launched in 2004 and was later refined in 2014and plumped it up with chunkier, curvier letters. Its a typographic choice thats been popular among companies across categories in recent months, from Burger King to Goodreads and Glossier. The former capital E in Eurovision has been swapped for a lowercase version, and the words song contest are now a more prominent part of the logo rendered in the same custom script. In addition, a bespoke typeface called Singing Sans will serve as the Eurovision brands main font. Its a sans serif that can be used for day-to-day needs like press releases, but its also available in an iteration with exaggerated curls for out-of-home messaging and social media. Adapting the brand for digital uses was another of Greens main goals with the new look. I think the last time we refreshed was about 14 years ago, Green says. Even back then, digital was still relatively early. Now we are enormously digital: We reach billions through our social media and our digital activity. To make Eurovisions identity more versatile online, Pals broke out the main logos heart symbol into its own asset called the Chameleon Heart, which can adapt to reflect the host nations identity, a performers individuality, or a particular theme, a press release reads. It can also stand alone in places like the competitions app icons. The key thing was that it really was a refresh and an evolutionwe didn’t want to rip up the page, Green says. The brand obviously has great connectivity. It’s got great recognition, but it felt a little too informal and laid-back. We wanted to boost it forward. Eurovision’s director addresses AI accusations So far, the fan reception to the new branding on social media has been overwhelmingly negative. On Instagram and TikTok combined, the reveal has received nearly 5,000 comments, ranging from fans accusing the designers of using AI to generate the new assets to comparing it to the Pampers logo and Picsarts color gradient. [H]ey chat gpt, can you generate a new logo for eurovision, make it look childish, close to the old one but [Junior Eurovision Song Contest] coded, one Instagram commenter said. [I]ts like comic sans ms lol, another on TikTok added. This font came straight out of ChatGPT, a third said. Green has a long career history of working in major events, including serving as head of ceremonies for the 2012 London Olympics, which received massive criticism at the time for its abstract logo. He says the fan backlash did not come as a shock. It’s like the songs in the show: People love them, they hate them, they comment on them, he says. You always have to accept when you’re refreshing anything that the fans are going to have an opinion. All we ever ask is, Be kind, but you can be criticalit’s absolutely fine. As fans begin to see more of the new branding, Green adds, hes confident tha it will ultimately become more familiar and less controversial. To those speculating that the team used AI to generate Eurovisions branding, Green says that AI may have been used in the very early stages to brainstorm initial concepts, but none of the final branding was generated by AI in any way. A lot of this was hand-drawn by great artists, Green says. We haven’t used AI to create this. The fact that people feel it might be reminiscent of it, I think, is more about how AI is influencing design subconsciously, if you like. That’s the same thing as looking at the way that digital has influenced design, in terms of how legible and clear it is. The influence might be there, but it wasn’t used to create it.
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E-Commerce
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