Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles carefully curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Since 2017 | Week 429, covering November 28-December 4, 2025 | Archive
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The future takes shape: Five dimensions of tomorrow’s wellness economy
By Kristi Klitsch Weaver and Stefan Rickert | McKinsey & Company | November 20, 2025
2 key takeaways from the article
- Most of us realize intuitively that health is much more than the presence or absence of disease. But what do we mean when we talk about wellness? McKinsey defines wellness along six dimensions: better health, fitness, sleep, mindfulness, appearance, and nutrition.
- According to McKinsey’s latest Future of Wellness research, which surveyed more than 9,000 consumers in China, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the global consumer wellness market has reached $2 trillion per year. In the United States, the wellness market is growing as much as 10 percent per year and is now worth $500 billion. Eighty-four percent of US consumers now consider wellness a top or important priority in their everyday lives—similar to the 94 percent and 79 percent who say so in China and the United Kingdom, respectively.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Health and Welness, Better Health, Fitness, Sleep, Mindfulness, Appearance, Nutrition
Extractive Summary of the Article | Read | Listen
According to McKinsey’s latest Future of Wellness research, which surveyed more than 9,000 consumers in China, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the global consumer wellness market has reached $2 trillion per year. In the United States, the wellness market is growing as much as 10 percent per year and is now worth $500 billion. Eighty-four percent of US consumers now consider wellness a top or important priority in their everyday lives—similar to the 94 percent and 79 percent who say so in China and the United Kingdom, respectively.
Most of us realize intuitively that health is much more than the presence or absence of disease. But what do we mean when we talk about wellness? McKinsey defines wellness along six dimensions: better health, fitness, sleep, mindfulness, appearance, and nutrition.
Fitness. In recent years, fitness has become much more than a way to manage health, or even a hobby; it’s becoming a core part of people’s identities. This is particularly true for younger people, especially Gen Z. Based on McKinsey analysis, we expect consumers to maintain their spending on fitness club memberships and fitness apps and increase their spending on in-person fitness classes and personal training.
Weight management. Weight management is top of mind for consumers in the United States, where nearly one in three adults meets the criteria for obesity. Sixty percent of consumers surveyed in the United States told McKinsey that they are currently trying to lose weight. Exercise remains the most common weight management intervention across markets. But others are rising in popularity, including nutritionist-led weight management programs, meal plans, and prescription weight loss medications such as glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1s).
Aging. People are living longer than ever. Older people, on average, can expect to have an additional 20 years of life compared with those in 1960. A move toward preventive medicine, the growth of health technology, and advances in antiaging research are propelling demand for products and services that support healthy aging and longevity. And healthy aging means a range of things to consumers, from supporting cognitive function to preserving one’s independence, living a long life, preventing chronic disease, and keeping energy levels high.
Just living longer doesn’t necessarily translate into untroubled old age. A recent McKinsey Health Institute (MHI) survey indicates a dissonance between a person’s actual age and their perception of their health. There’s also evidence that their socioeconomic status informs this perception. Put simply, people in lower-middle-income countries, such as Egypt or India, were more likely to report being in good health, even though they have a lower life expectancy than others in the survey. Conversely, people in high-income countries were more likely to report lower perceptions of health, even though their life expectancy is relatively higher. This reaffirms that health means more than simply the number of years you can expect to live, or the presence or absence of disease.
Women health. According to a report published by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with MHI, women live in poor health for 25 percent more of their lives than men do. There is an obvious moral imperative for closing what’s known as the women’s health gap. But improving women’s long-term health would also have significant economic benefits, to the tune of $1 trillion in annual global GDP by 2040.
A wide variety of new women’s health and wellness products have come on the market in recent years across a range of care needs. But there is still unmet demand for products and services, particularly those related to menopause, menstrual and intimate care, fertility support, and other areas.
Sleep is the second-highest health and wellness priority for consumers—and also where consumers say they have the most unmet needs. In a previous report, 37 percent of US consumers expressed a desire for additional sleep and mindfulness products and services. A large number of factors can affect a good night’s sleep, including diet, exercise, caffeine, screen time, and stress. Few, if any, tech players have been able to develop a holistic solution to consumers’ sleep issues—though sleep tech is a fast-growing industry. Sleep loss—particularly the loss of deep (or slow-wave) sleep—is linked to a long list of chronic health conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease, anxiety, dementia, depression, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes. It also affects cognitive function, attention, and decision-making.
The State of AI: Welcome to the economic singularity
By David Rotman and Richard Waters | MIT Technology Review | December 1, 2025
3 key takeaways from the article
- Any far-reaching new technology is always uneven in its adoption, but few have been more uneven than generative AI. That makes it hard to assess its likely impact on individual businesses, let alone on productivity across the economy as a whole.
- At one extreme, AI coding assistants have revolutionized the work of software developers. Mark Zuckerberg recently predicted that half of Meta’s code would be written by AI within a year. At the other extreme, most companies are seeing little if any benefit from their initial investments. A widely cited study from MIT found that so far, 95% of gen AI projects produce zero return.
- To many students of tech history, though, the lack of immediate impact is just the normal lag associated with transformative new technologies. In the case of AI, companies need to build new infrastructure (particularly data platforms), redesign core business processes, and retrain workers before they can expect to see results.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: AI & Productivity, Technology & Humans
Extractive Summary of the Article | Read | Listen
The following is an extractives summary of Richard Waters, FT columnist talks with former West Coast editor, MIT Technology Review’s editor at large David Rotman about the true impact of AI on the job market.
Any far-reaching new technology is always uneven in its adoption, but few have been more uneven than generative AI. That makes it hard to assess its likely impact on individual businesses, let alone on productivity across the economy as a whole.
At one extreme, AI coding assistants have revolutionized the work of software developers. Mark Zuckerberg recently predicted that half of Meta’s code would be written by AI within a year. At the other extreme, most companies are seeing little if any benefit from their initial investments. A widely cited study from MIT found that so far, 95% of gen AI projects produce zero return.
That has provided fuel for the skeptics who maintain that—by its very nature as a probabilistic technology prone to hallucinating—generative AI will never have a deep impact on business.
To many students of tech history, though, the lack of immediate impact is just the normal lag associated with transformative new technologies. Erik Brynjolfsson, then an assistant professor at MIT, first described what he called the “productivity paradox of IT” in the early 1990s. Despite plenty of anecdotal evidence that technology was changing the way people worked, it wasn’t showing up in the aggregate data in the form of higher productivity growth. Brynjolfsson’s conclusion was that it just took time for businesses to adapt.
Big investments in IT finally showed through with a notable rebound in US productivity growth starting in the mid-1990s. But that tailed off a decade later and was followed by a second lull.
In the case of AI, companies need to build new infrastructure (particularly data platforms), redesign core business processes, and retrain workers before they can expect to see results. If a lag effect explains the slow results, there may at least be reasons for optimism: Much of the cloud computing infrastructure needed to bring generative AI to a wider business audience is already in place.
The opportunities and the challenges are both enormous. An executive at one Fortune 500 company says his organization has carried out a comprehensive review of its use of analytics and concluded that its workers, overall, add little or no value. Rooting out the old software and replacing that inefficient human labor with AI might yield significant results. But, as this person says, such an overhaul would require big changes to existing processes and take years to carry out.
There are some early encouraging signs. US productivity growth, stuck at 1% to 1.5% for more than a decade and a half, rebounded to more than 2% last year. It probably hit the same level in the first nine months of this year, though the lack of official data due to the recent US government shutdown makes this impossible to confirm.
It is impossible to tell, though, how durable this rebound will be or how much can be attributed to AI. The effects of new technologies are seldom felt in isolation. Instead, the benefits compound. AI is riding earlier investments in cloud and mobile computing. In the same way, the latest AI boom may only be the precursor to breakthroughs in fields that have a wider impact on the economy, such as robotics. ChatGPT might have caught the popular imagination, but OpenAI’s chatbot is unlikely to have the final word.
Strategy & Business Model Section
The Gen AI Playbook for Organizations
By Bharat N. Anand and Andy Wu | Harvard Business Review Magazine | November–December 2025
2 key takeaways from the
- The authors, in their efforts to develop Gen AI Playbook for Organizations, suggest a framework. According to this framework the suitability of gen AI for a given task depends not just on the capabilities of gen AI but on two deeper factors: the cost of errors and type of knowledge the task demands.
- The two factors generate four quadrants. A) The no regrets zone: The area where the cost of errors is low and explicit knowledge is required, contains the clearest and most immediate opportunity for organizations to use AI. B) The human-first zone: Where the stakes are highest, in this domain gen AI may act as an enabler but not a decision-maker. C) The creative catalyst zone. With a low cost of errors and a need for tacit knowledge, is where gen AI can serve as a creative catalyst, helping humans perform tasks that often benefit from originality. And D) The quality control zone. Covers knowledge-heavy tasks that gen AI can technically perform well—because they are grounded in explicit, structured information—but for which even small mistakes could result in serious consequences.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: AI and Strategy, Competitive Advantage
Extractive Summary of the Article | Read | Listen
The questions about generative AI that we hear most often from business leaders include: When will gen AI match the intelligence of my best employees? Is it accurate enough to deliver business value? Is my CIO moving fast enough to lead our AI transformation? What are my rivals doing with gen AI? But those questions are misdirected. They focus on the intelligence of gen AI and its trajectory—how good gen AI is and how fast it’s improving—rather than on its implications for business strategy. What leaders should be asking is this: How can my organization use gen AI effectively today, regardless of its limitations? And how can we use it to create a competitive advantage? The authors’ based on their experience and research propose a framework for thinking about gen AI strategically and offers practical advice.
The suitability of gen AI for a given task depends not just on the capabilities of gen AI but on two deeper factors. The first is the cost of errors: how serious the consequences would be if gen AI makes a mistake. If an error in a task would lead to serious harm, financial loss, or reputational damage, then firms must be far more cautious about employing gen AI to perform it without human oversight. The second factor is the type of knowledge the task demands. Tasks that rely on explicit data (structured or unstructured information that can be captured and processed) such as screening résumés and summarizing course evaluations are well suited for gen AI. Other tasks—such as psychotherapy, hiring for soft skills, and nuanced leadership decisions—require tacit knowledge: empathy, ethical reasoning, intuition, and contextual judgment built through human experience. These tasks are fundamentally harder for gen AI to perform because they involve not just retrieving information but also interpreting nuance, responding flexibly to context, and applying judgment in ambiguous situations.
These two dimensions—cost of errors and type of knowledge required—form the foundation of the framework for identifying where and how to use gen AI effectively generates four quadrants.
- The no regrets zone. The area where the cost of errors is low and explicit knowledge is required, contains the clearest and most immediate opportunity for organizations. This is where gen AI should be deployed today and where AI agents will thrive in the future. Tasks in this quadrant rely on clear, documented data, and errors are relatively harmless. You don’t need perfect accuracy here. The real value lies in completing tasks faster, more cheaply, or at a greater scale than before.
- The human-first zone. Where the stakes are highest, in this domain gen AI may act as an enabler but not a decision-maker. Tasks here involve subjective judgment, situational nuance, and complex decision-making—and mistakes carry serious consequences, whether financial, legal, reputational, or personal. Trust, ethics, and long-term strategy are often on the line. Errors can have lasting consequences.
- The creative catalyst zone. With a low cost of errors and a need for tacit knowledge, is where gen AI can serve as a creative catalyst, helping humans perform tasks that often benefit from originality. Crucially, the refinement of gen AI’s output and the final judgment on what to adopt rest with humans. Mistakes can be tolerated because the quality of the results is subjective: There is no definitive “best” marketing slogan or “perfect” product design because people’s views of what is best or perfect are personal. Because the cost of getting tasks in this quadrant slightly wrong is low, gen AI can meaningfully augment human creativity by speeding up experimentation, generating a greater volume of ideas, and enabling broader participation in the creative process.
- The quality control zone. Covers knowledge-heavy tasks that gen AI can technically perform well—because they are grounded in explicit, structured information—but for which even small mistakes could result in serious consequences. These are high-accountability domains such as law, finance, and software development, where information is clear and codified yet the standards for accuracy are extremely high. This quadrant is ideally suited for a human-in-the-loop model: Gen AI provides speed and scale while humans provide judgment, oversight, and final accountability.
It’s often said that those who use AI will replace those who don’t. But the reality is more complex: As the framework illustrates, some tasks are best done by AI alone, others through human-AI collaboration, and some still require purely human judgment. Rather than debating replacement versus complementarity, the key is understanding which tasks remain distinctly human.
How Nesting Changes Platform Strategy
By Elizabeth J. Altman et al., | MIT Sloan Management Review | December 03, 2025
3 key takeaways from the article
- Nested platform is an arrangement where one platform embeds into another platform’s user experience. The host platform gains partial or total control of the customer experience. The nested platform provides an embedded experience. User experiences span both platforms, which aim to create value for users while increasing their own strategic advantage. A host may choose to allow multiple platforms to nest into it. Similarly, a nesting platform may choose to nest on multiple hosts.
- These nesting structures have implications for the business models of participating platforms. Along with the advantages, there are trade-offs on both sides.
- Once you’ve identified the potential to have nesting relationships, you must determine how close the relationship should be and how the parties will handle data access and data sharing. Should we host, nest, or do both? How may nesting relationships affect our governance? How might our resource requirements and costs be affected by nesting? Does a nesting relationship expose us to competition or brand conflict? Do we gain new technological capabilities by nesting? How tightly should we integrate, and how much functionality should we offer? And what data can be collected, accessed, and shared?
(Copyirght lies with the publisher)
Topics: Strategy, Business Model, Platform Economy
Extractive Summary of the Article | Read | Listen
Nested platform is an arrangement where one platform embeds into another platform’s user experience. The host platform gains partial or total control of the customer experience. The nested platform provides an embedded experience. User experiences span both platforms, which aim to create value for users while increasing their own strategic advantage. A host may choose to allow multiple platforms to nest into it: Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and other streaming services are all nested into the Sonos platform. Similarly, a nesting platform may choose to nest on multiple hosts; for example, Spotify also nests into other hardware platforms, such as Amazon devices that use its Alexa virtual assistant. Further, platforms may choose to nest in some cases and host in others. Spotify, for example, nests into Sonos’s app but also has its own Spotify Connect interface, which allows it to function as a host with device platforms nesting into it.
These nesting structures have implications for the business models of participating platforms. Along with the advantages, there are trade-offs on both sides. A nested platform gains expanded reach by joining an ecosystem that already has its own customer base, helping to drive the network effects that enable the nested platform to keep growing and remain viable. Yet it also cedes some control of its own ecosystem, customer experience, data, and brand visibility to the hosting platform. A hosting platform gains additional capabilities and features for customers, along with access to new markets and complementor ecosystems, but it also provides potential competitors with an entry point to its customers.
How Nested Platforms Create Value. Platforms facilitate exchanges between interdependent and complementary groups of users. They often act as matchmakers, bringing together producers and consumers or connecting users with each other. They are frequently powered by cross-side network effects: The more users on one side, the more valuable the platform becomes for the other side, and vice versa. Nesting one platform within another can be a powerful strategic move for both hosts and nesters. When nesters embed their offering in a host platform, it helps them reach new users and may fuel additional network effects as the feedback loop attracts even more complementors.
Once you’ve identified the potential to have nesting relationships, you must determine how close the relationship should be and how the parties will handle data access and data sharing. Should we host, nest, or do both? How may nesting relationships affect our governance? How might our resource requirements and costs be affected by nesting? Does a nesting relationship expose us to competition or brand conflict? Do we gain new technological capabilities by nesting? How tightly should we integrate, and how much functionality should we offer? And what data can be collected, accessed, and shared?
Nested platform structures offer hosts and nesters the opportunity to enrich their value propositions, reduce the risk of being outpaced by more dynamic or specialized competitors, and maintain their positions as central gateways in their users’ digital lives. As these structures increasingly become the norm, and as interconnected platforms dominate more and more industries, leaders managing platform strategy must consider nesting as a core part of their agendas.
How DoorDash became an $85 billion behemoth and won the delivery wars
By Jason Del Rey | Fortune Magazine | December 1, 2025
3 key takeaways from the article
- Tony Xu, cofounder and CEO of DoorDash, the $85 billion delivery company that has experienced a meteoric rise over the past five years. The company has more than twice the U.S. market share of the next competitor, Uber Eats—but that’s just the beginning, says CEO Tony Xu.
- Sounding now like a geekedout startup entrepreneur, Xu rattled off seemingly tiny operational improvements that DoorDash has rolled out, including all U.S. salaried employees including co-founder and CEO must do four delivery shifts a year, desserts being highlighted for Dashers because they are most likely to be forgotten DoorDash’s mapping technology, built in-house, advises Dashers on everything from the best location to park near a customer’s door, to the specific entrance they should use in large corporate or residential buildings.
- In the delivery app war the company is sharp focused on what might save only minutes or seconds on a delivery run but company leaders believe that together they add up to the key difference between success and failure in the most intensely fought battle in the on-demand economy.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Strategy, Business Model, Delivery App wars
Extractive Summary of the Article | Read | Listen
On this mild fall day in downtown San Francisco, Tony Xu Fortune 500 CEO cofounder and CEO of DoorDash was spending the afternoon as a “Dasher” for DoorDash—zooming around San Francisco in a staffer Audi SUV to deliver fried chicken salads and Mediterranean bowls. It wasn’t his first time; as a cofounder of the company, he was one of the company’s first Dashers—and all U.S. salaried employees must do four delivery shifts a year. A short while earlier, Xu had accepted four orders from the same ghost kitchen (industry vernacular for a takeout-only restaurant). “This is what I call playing the game on extra hard mode,” Xu said. “I’ve never done a quadruple batch.” Tony Xu, cofounder and CEO of DoorDash, the $85 billion delivery company that has experienced a meteoric rise over the past five years. The company has more than twice the U.S. market share of the next competitor, Uber Eats—but that’s just the beginning, says CEO Tony Xu.
Now, Xu wanted to demonstrate a feature on the DoorDash app’s interface for Dashers. “The order’s not ready yet but look, I want to show you something cool,” Xu told me as the author as he neared the Audi, which he had parked in a questionably legal spot on a narrow two-way side street in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood. “You see that? It just popped up like 10 seconds ago.”
Xu thrust his iPhone toward my face to read the alert: “Would you like to unassign from the order?” “Because it knows the order’s going to be extra late and knows our first two orders are at risk,” Xu explained excitedly. “So it doesn’t want to punish me. In the interest of time, I’m going to say, ‘Yes, unassign me.’”
This algorithmically determined triage is just the kind of hyper-focused approach that Xu has built his company on. Sounding now like a geekedout startup entrepreneur, Xu rattled off other seemingly tiny operational improvements that DoorDash has rolled out, including desserts being highlighted for Dashers because they are most likely to be forgotten. He showed the author how DoorDash’s mapping technology, built in-house, advises Dashers on everything from the best location to park near a customer’s door, to the specific entrance they should use in large corporate or residential buildings.
These are details that might save only minutes or seconds on a delivery run like ours—but company leaders believe that together they add up to the key difference between success and failure in the most intensely fought battle in the on-demand economy: the delivery app war.
Personal Decelopment, Leading & Managing Section
How Two Silicon Valley A-Listers Became Billionaires By Remaking Customer Service With AI
By Richard Nieva | Forbes | Nov 21, 2025
3 key takeaways from the article
- Bret Taylor, CEO of Sierra, a $10 billion startup that builds AI customer service agents is one of the most celebrated executives in Silicon Valley. With his cofounder Clay Bavor, decided soon after they started Sierra in 2023 that they didn’t want to commemorate signing new customers by ringing a stuffy old sales gong. Instead, they opted for something in line with the startup’s mountainous corporate identity.
- Sierra serves a mix of startups and large consumer brands, including retailer. That particular slice of the market is intentional: The company is going after big business, touting that over half of its customers have revenue of more than $1 billion, and 20% of them have revenue of more than $10 billion. That focus has paid off, with Sierra on track to exceed $100 million in annualized revenue by the end of the fiscal year in January.
- Sierra’s agents take care of the more knotty customer service issues — like returning a pair of shoes or canceling a subscription — that typically required chatting with a bot on a little popup screen on a corporate website, or worse, needing the attention of a human representative. But Taylor and Bavor don’t think of Sierra as a business that only helps handle customer complaints. They think agents will become so powerful that they’ll eventually become the primary way that businesses interact with customers.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Leadership, Strategy, Business Model
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Bret Taylor, CEO of Sierra, a $10 billion startup that builds AI customer service agents, is grinning as he blows into a massive alphorn stretched before him, an 11-and-a-half foot horn made of California redwood. The wail is at first shaky, but he eventually produces a sustained and clear tone. “It requires a little bit of a lesson on how to blow like a trumpet,” he later tells Forbes. “It’s so awkward and goofy that it’s just utterly perfect.”
Proper alphorn technique might not be the expected topic of conversation with Taylor, one of the most celebrated executives in Silicon Valley, with noted tenures at Google (co-creator of Google Maps), Facebook (CTO), Twitter (board chairman), Salesforce (co-CEO) and now OpenAI (board chairman). But it’s on the docket today because he and cofounder Clay Bavor, an 18-year Google veteran who headed the company’s emerging tech efforts in virtual and augmented reality, decided soon after they started Sierra in 2023 that they didn’t want to commemorate signing new customers by ringing a stuffy old sales gong — a cliche at other enterprise tech companies. Instead, they opted for something in line with the startup’s mountainous corporate identity. (They even list free alphorn lessons as an official benefit on job postings, and purchased the instrument, coincidentally, through a company called Sierra Alphorns.)
Taylor says they’ve blown the horn “hundreds” of times, an indication of the health of their customer service business, though the company won’t share an exact number of clients. They include a mix of startups and large consumer brands, including retailer The North Face, electric vehicle maker Rivian, home security giant ADT and digital radio company SiriusXM. That particular slice of the market is intentional: The company is going after big business, touting that over half of its customers have revenue of more than $1 billion, and 20% of them have revenue of more than $10 billion. That focus has paid off, with Sierra on track to exceed $100 million in annualized revenue by the end of the fiscal year in January, according to a source familiar with the company’s performance.
If you’ve interacted with one of Sierra’s agents, there’s a good chance you were already annoyed. That’s because they take care of the more knotty customer service issues — like returning a pair of shoes or canceling a subscription — that typically required chatting with a bot on a little popup screen on a corporate website, or worse, needing the attention of a human representative. But Taylor and Bavor don’t think of Sierra as a business that only helps handle customer complaints. They think agents will become so powerful that they’ll eventually become the primary way that businesses interact with customers. You’ll engage with them across several channels — text, phone call, app, WhatsApp and more. And they’ll become personal concierges working on behalf of a company, remembering past conversations with customers and making suggestions based on their personal preferences. “One of the promises of the internet was personalization, but the only full manifestation of that we’ve really seen is very targeted ads,” said Bavor, with no tinge of irony for someone who spent almost two decades at Google.
For now, though, agents can still be pretty rudimentary. On Wednesday, the company announced a handful of new products designed to make its agents act more like multi-purpose concierges. The goal is to not only have their agents tend to reactive issues like complaints. Instead, they want agents to pop up proactively when a company thinks it makes sense.
Blue chip investors like Sequoia, Benchmark and Thrive Capital are sold. In September, the startup raised $350 million in a round that valued the company at $10 billion. “What differentiates them is a high ceiling,” Neil Mehta, founder of the round’s lead investor Greenoaks Capital, told Forbes. “There’s really no company that could solve the sophisticated problems that they’re solving for some large companies in America.” The infusion of funding has also paid off for Taylor and Bavor, officially minting them as billionaires for the first time, with each owning a roughly one-quarter stake in the company, according to Forbes estimates.
But back to the alphorn. It’s not only a gimmick. It’s also supposed to symbolize how Sierra is trying to stand out in an already fiercely competitive market, which includes $1.5 billion-valued Decagon, a buzzy startup that’s attracted a frenzy from venture capitalists clamoring to invest; Kustomer, a smaller New Jersey-based rival; and Intercom, an established competitor with thousands of customers. The field is crowded because it’s one of the few sectors that is primed to immediately reap the benefits of AI, said Taylor, and the market is sizable: more than $12 billion in 2024, on track to hit nearly $50 billion by 2030.
Entrepreneurship Section
How Failure Taught Me to Succeed as an Entrepreneur
By FAST Company | Inc | Dec 3, 2025
2 key takeaways from the article
- According to an entrepreneur having over the past 50 years in the shoe trade, he has had his fair share of failure. The biggest lesson he learned, at the start of his career, is not to devote time and energy to a business or project that has little chance of success. This might sound obvious, however sometimes you are so involved in the detail of the day to day running of the business that you don’t stand back and question the future viability of what you are doing.
- His other lessons from his experience are: A) As an entrepreneur it is easy to get distracted and sidetracked into ventures that are not related to your area of expertise. B) Don’t underestimate the marketing cost of selling a new brand online; and you may have a great product, but it is essential that you get out there and sell. And C) It is essential to recognize the limitations of your abilities and hire a team that can do things better than you.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Entrepreneurship, Startups, Lessons from failure
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According to an entrepreneur having over the past 50 years in the shoe trade, he has had his fair share of failure. The biggest lesson he learned, at the start of his career, is not to devote time and energy to a business or project that has little chance of success. This might sound obvious, however sometimes you are so involved in the detail of the day to day running of the business that you don’t stand back and question the future viability of what you are doing.
He was a women’s shoe manufacturer in London in the 1980s. If he had looked at the big picture he would have seen that the future of manufacturing in the U.K. for low technology, high labor content businesses like footwear manufacturing, was unsustainable. Most of the production was moving to Asia where costs were much lower and the quality was excellent. It took a visit to Taiwan to see the same shoes being made at half the price that it was costing us in his London factory to persuade him to leave manufacturing and become an importer. His lesson is to respond quickly and try and anticipate change.
From a failed shoe shop closure he learned that as an entrepreneur it is easy to get distracted and sidetracked into ventures that are not related to your area of expertise. This loss of focus can be damaging, as not only is there a high probability that the new venture is unprofitable and you will lose money, but it also takes your attention away from your main activity.
During the pandemic, he launched a sustainable trainer brand. He felt that was where the growth was in footwear, so that’s where he needed to be. It was a failure. There are two important lessons for entrepreneurs here. One: Don’t underestimate the marketing cost of selling a new brand online. Two: You may have a great product, but it is essential that you get out there and sell.
The entrepreneur launched a range of children’s shoes online. The venture proved to be more difficult than thought out. The lesson resists the temptation to get distracted unless you are very confident that the new venture is financially compelling.
Finally, having the right team in place is essential. As an entrepreneur there is a danger that you are reluctant to give up control. It is essential to recognize the limitations of your abilities and hire a team that can do things better than you.
These 5 Core Values Are the Secret Behind 20 Years of Growth and Success
By Nathan Miller | Edited by Kara McIntyre | Entrepreneur | December 02, 2025
3 key takeaways from the article
- Should our core values really change? They might evolve or expand as our businesses grow and we gain experience, but our fundamental values shouldn’t disappear with each pivot. After all, they define who we are and why we do what we do as entrepreneurs.
- After reflecting on two decades of building and growing a business, the author has found that while his company has certainly transformed and adapted over time, the values guiding his decisions have remained remarkably consistent.
- Five core principles have served as his North Star from day one are: A) It’s not enough to set a vision and step back; a leaders need to truly immerse in the day-to-day realities of a business — listening to employees, connecting with clients and observing operational challenges. B) Stay close to the people you serve, ensuring that feedback is not only heard and valued, but acted on. C) Maintain independent ownership and avoid outside investment. D) Innovation isn’t always about being first to market — it’s about being the most responsive, adaptable and committed to delivering lasting value to the customers. And E) Invest heavily in industry education, both internally and externally.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Values, Business Growth
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According to the author, he was recently a guest on a podcast where the host asked him a deceptively simple question: “How have your core values shifted over your career as an entrepreneur?” He has been thinking about it ever since. Should our core values really change? They might evolve or expand as our businesses grow and we gain experience, but our fundamental values shouldn’t disappear with each pivot. After all, they define who we are and why we do what we do as entrepreneurs. After reflecting on two decades of building and growing a business, the author has found that while his company has certainly transformed and adapted over time, the values guiding his decisions have remained remarkably consistent. These five core principles have served as his North Star from day one.
- Personal connection. Time and time again, he has watched businesses stumble when leadership is absent — quality slips, culture dissolves and customers start to walk away. In his experience, being present and engaged has had the greatest impact on his company and has been absolutely critical to his ability to lead effectively. It’s not enough to set a vision and step back; the leaders who can truly immerse themselves in the day-to-day realities of a business — listening to employees, connecting with clients and observing operational challenges — build stronger teams and create businesses that thrive over the long term.
- Exceptional service. Our biggest differentiator in the software space isn’t the size of our company or the scope of our budget — it’s how we show up for our customers and deliver, every single day. Ever since I hired my first employee, I’ve committed to keeping our customer service entirely in-house and in-office — a decision that remains true today, almost twenty years later. Not only has this allowed us to build a culture that often feels more like a family than a workplace, but it’s also allowed us to maintain full control and ownership over the quality of service our customers receive. We’re able to stay close to the people we serve, ensuring that feedback is not only heard and valued, but acted on. At our company, service isn’t just a department — it’s a philosophy that guides everything we do.
- Organic growth. When companies answer to a board of directors, decisions ultimately revolve around satisfying investors — often prioritizing growth and profit at the expense of customers, employees or even the product itself. According to the author he has experienced this himself in the past and seen it damage others in his industry, which is why he has always valued maintaining independent ownership and avoiding outside investment.
- Continuous innovation. In the software world, standing still is the fastest way to fall behind. Our customers’ needs are constantly evolving, and the technology that supports them needs to keep pace. Innovation has always been at the core of our business — not by chasing every new trend, but by continuously improving the tools and value our customers rely on to do their jobs. Innovation isn’t always about being first to market — it’s about being the most responsive, adaptable and committed to delivering lasting value to our customers.
- Industry education. According to the author at his company, they invest heavily in industry education, both internally and externally. Internally, that means keeping their team knowledgeable and up-to-date, whether it’s technical training in our software platform, customer service skills or the latest property management best practices. Externally, he is passionate about sharing that expertise with his customers and beyond. His team spends thousands of hours each year building blog posts, webinars, guides and tutorials that they share for free with anyone in the industry. By empowering others with information, they help elevate the entire industry while also driving impact for their customers. A bonus — this commitment to education has become one of our strongest marketing tools, reaching millions of people every year and positioning our team as experts in our field.