Informed i’s Weekly Business Insights

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These are challenging times for organizations everywhere. Continuous disruption is in the air, with forces ranging from artificial intelligence, economic uncertainty, and geopolitical fragmentation to evolving workforce expectations, increasing customer demands, and tougher competitive dynamics redefining how leaders create value and sustain performance.

This report, the second edition of McKinsey’s State of Organizations research initiative, seeks to help leaders better understand these dynamics and address them effectively.  The survey responses inform our conviction that three tectonic forces are reshaping organizations and will continue to define their success in the years ahead.

The first force is the infusion of technology as automation and data analytics are joined by the burgeoning of AI, both the large language models underpinning generative AI and the advent of AI agents that can be inserted into company workflows. Collectively, these technologies amount to a paradigm shift that promises significant benefits, including productivity gains, faster speed to market, and cost reductions. They are leading organizations to reimagine how work gets done, redefine domains and end-to-end processes, and rethink traditional structures.  To harness AI’s potential, organizations need to embrace transformative dynamics, seize emerging opportunities—and test, test, test.

The second tectonic force is characterized by the economic disruptions and geopolitical uncertainty that are intensifying as the world becomes more fragmented. To thrive in this evolving landscape, organizations need to adapt swiftly yet sustainably to cope with increasing complexity and potentially rethink their location strategies.

The third tectonic force stems from workforce shifts. Evolving employee expectations, shifting demographics, and new techdriven working models are transforming the workforce. To remain competitive, organizations need to transcend traditional structures, redefine leadership, and refocus on performance to navigate ongoing disruption.

The research suggests that these forces are not temporary fluctuations but deep structural transformations that will test how organizations grow, operate, and lead.  They are interdependent: AI could liberate organizations from some of the physical location and geopolitical constraints associated with human workers, but it will raise other dimensions of complexity, including how humans and AI agents will collaborate. Their impact is only beginning to unfold: Technology, particularly AI, will accelerate the reorganization of work and value creation; economic disruptions will keep redefining global resilience and competitiveness; and workforce shifts will challenge leadership models and talent systems in new ways.

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Over the years, people have broken into a new business to steal cars, or they’ve rented them out and never come back. But until this day, the people like Zahr had never had a car simply disappear during shipping. He’d expected no trouble this time around, especially since he’d used Central Dispatch—“a legit platform that everyone uses to transport cars,” he said.   “That’s the scary part about it, you know?”  Zahr had unwittingly been caught up in a new and growing type of organized criminal enterprise: vehicle transport fraud and theft. Crooks use email phishing, fraudulent paperwork, and other tactics to impersonate legitimate transport companies and get hired to deliver a luxury vehicle. They divert the shipment away from its intended destination and then use a mix of technology, computer skills, and old-school chop-shop techniques to erase traces of the vehicle’s original ownership and registration.

These vehicles can be retitled and resold in the US or loaded into a shipping container and sent to an overseas buyer. In some cases, the car has been resold or is out of the country by the time the rightful owner even realizes it’s missing.

But the nationwide epidemic of vehicle transport fraud and theft has remained under the radar, even as it’s rocked the industry over the past two years. MIT Technology Review identified more than a dozen cases involving high-end vehicles, obtained court records, and spoke to law enforcement, brokers, drivers, and victims in multiple states to reveal how transport fraud is wreaking havoc across the country.

It’s challenging to quantify the scale of this type of crime, since there isn’t a single entity or association that tracks it. Still, these law enforcement officials and brokers, as well as the country’s biggest online car-transport marketplaces, acknowledge that fraud and theft are on the rise. 

It is estimated that around 8,000 exotic and high-end cars had been stolen since the spring of 2024, resulting in over $1 billion in losses. 

That would require significant changes to the way that load boards operate. Bryant’s Lamborghini, Zahr’s and Payne’s Rolls-Royces, and the orange Lamborghini Urus in Florida were all posted for transport on Central Dispatch. Both brokers and shippers argue that the company hasn’t taken enough responsibility for what they characterize as weak oversight.

Over the last year, Central Dispatch has made changes to further secure its platform. It introduced two-factor authentication for user accounts and started enabling shippers to use its app to track loads in real time, among other measures. It also kicked off an awareness campaign that includes online educational content and media appearances to communicate that the company takes its responsibilities seriously.

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The technology sector’s frantic race to build artificial intelligence infrastructure has created a massive, financial overhang. According to a recent in-depth report by Moody’s Ratings, the top five U.S. hyperscalers have accumulated $662 billion in future data center lease commitments not yet begun that are not current liabilities and therefore sit entirely off their balance sheets. As those leases begin over the next several years, and as landlords’ obligations are fulfilled, that more than half a trillion dollars’ worth of data center activity will be recorded on balance sheets.

The report, which analyzed the financial disclosures of Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Oracle, highlights how the unprecedented build-out of AI data centers is straining traditional accounting metrics. As of the end of 2025, these five tech giants had amassed a staggering $969 billion in total undiscounted future lease commitments, or data centers that have yet to be built. However, more than two-thirds of this total, that $662 billion figure, is for leases that have yet to commence, meaning that under generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, these companies are not required to recognize these massive obligations on their current balance sheets.

What is going on with these leases?  The root of this accounting phenomenon lies in the unique nature of AI hardware and the rules governing corporate leases. Historically, U.S. data center leases spanned 10 to 15 years. But because the cutting-edge semiconductor and technology equipment required for AI typically has a useful life of just four to six years, hyperscalers are demanding shorter initial lease terms with options to renew. And “to make the investment case for landlords,” the note explains, “these structures are often backstopped by a significant off-balance-sheet guarantee from the lessee.”

Moody’s warned that these opaque accounting practices mask the true economic risk facing the tech industry. While leasing reduces upfront capital investments, carrying such massive future commitments severely limits a company’s financial and operating flexibility, especially if AI industry conditions change rapidly. Because these liabilities are hidden, Moody’s concluded, in its own jargony way, that it is considering new ways to look at this issue.

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Most companies carefully cultivate close relationships with their investors. Corporate leaders, alongside their investor relations support staff, deliberately craft their communications to attract shareholders that support their firm’s business model, risk profile, and strategic narrative. Throughout earnings calls, investor days, and private meetings, shareholders are sold on a particular vision, and they’re expected to invest with the intention of seeing it realized.

But when a company pivots strategically, this carefully nurtured alignment can quickly disappear, creating a misfit with the investor base. Legacy investors—those drawn to the company’s original strategy and vision—can find themselves at odds with its new direction. In extreme cases the tensions can derail the company’s plans and cost top managers their jobs.

A critical mistake we frequently see when business leaders introduce a new strategy is that they become so focused on enumerating market opportunities, product demand, and earnings that they forget why their investors bought shares in their company in the first place.

To manage strategic change with an investor-informed lens, leaders should implement a three-step framework. 

1. Create Investor Scorecards.  The author’s approach involves identifying the companies in an investor’s portfolio and then scoring each of them on multiple measures across five categories: corporate risk tolerance, diversification, competitive aggressiveness, prosocial activity, and political engagement.  Then each company’s scores was weighted according to its size in the portfolio and calculate an overall average score for the portfolio on each measure.  Next we determine how much each investor’s average score on each measure deviates from the average score of all other investors, which provides a benchmark.  The scores indicate to a company how receptive a given investor is likely to be to specific changes in its strategic orientation. The company can see how much of a misalignment there is between its proposed strategy and a given investor’s preferences.
2. Diagnose Your Investor Fit Risk.  Once they understand each investor’s strategic preferences, companies can diagnose their overall investor fit risk for a strategic move under consideration. If a strategy involves only modest adjustments, standard investor communications may suffice. But when the move is more radical, a deeper analysis across the shareholder base is necessary.  Strategic pivots that depart from a company’s historical trajectory or break with industry norms unsettle investors.
3. Develop an Engagement Strategy Informed by Investor Risk.  Once a company has diagnosed the investor fit risk of its intended strategic move, the next step is to make a plan for engaging investors. It should reflect the degree of alignment (or misalignment) between the proposed strategy and the current investor base while also identifying new investors who can support the pivot and accelerate transformation.  If investor fit risk is low, the strategy is well aligned with current shareholders. But even in these cases, firms should not remain passive.   If investor fit risk is high, a more targeted approach is needed. Firms should consider a three-pronged strategy:  Engage likely supporters among current investors.  Address the concerns of “future-misfit” investors.  And identify and attract “future-fit” investors.

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The 33-year-old grocery entrepreneur claims this system is one of only a few nationwide that can ship customized boxes of food to anyone’s doorstep with room-temperature, chilled, and frozen items all in the same order. This feat as well as Misfits’ burgeoning fulfillment business for other brands is why Ramesh dreams of becoming the Amazon of perishable food—or at least the Amazon Prime—though he knows he has a long way to go.

“Amazon has built infrastructure for e-commerce and there’s so many different ways of monetizing it,” says Ramesh. “That philosophy has always been in the back of my mind—if we can build the best perishable [food] infrastructure in the country, we can monetize it in a lot of different ways.”

So far, Ramesh, who was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneurs list in 2020, has grown Misfits into a business with $500 million in annual revenue, with $45 million of that from Fulfilled by Misfits. Roughly $50 million comes from selling the ugly produce that Ramesh founded the business on in 2018 and another $50 million is generated by Misfits’ in-house brand, Odds & Ends. But these days, the vast majority is from regular grocery sales.

Fulfillment has become the fastest-growing part of Misfits and its gross profit margins are the strongest, too. That’s helped pad Misfits’ overall gross margins, which ended 2025 at over 40%, compared to typically around 20% for conventional grocery chains. Misfits Market is making more gross margin than traditional grocery chains, as well as publicly traded marketplaces such as pet food website Chewy, which has 30% gross margins and is the most similar publicly traded business to Misfits because it’s an online marketplace that does home delivery for perishable and non-perishable items. Not only that, but Misfits’ customers are also still saving more money—between 10% and 50%—than if they shopped in their neighborhood supermarket.

Ramesh says few entrepreneurs are competing with him to fix the grocery industry, and, in that, he’s learned a surprising lesson: “Low-margin businesses are good to build businesses in,” he says. “The hard businesses are the ones no one goes after because no one can make it work. So there’s no innovation, and it’s easier to break in and turn it on its head. And if you’re able to figure it out, there’s a much bigger prize at the end.”  Ramesh’s ultimate goal, he says, is taking Misfits public, like Instacart and DoorDash.

Much like Amazon’s early years, Misfits is not yet profitable and he’s “fine trading short-term profitability for healthy growth.” But Ramesh is investing for the long-term (Misfits manages a fleet of 350 refrigerated and freezer trucks) and continuing to push the company to new places (it also works with third-parties to sell curated boxes for diabetes or cancer patients, utilizing preventative care money for produce and protein purchases, totaling $6 million in sales in 2025).

After leaving his hometown of Chennai, India at six months old, Ramesh and his software engineer parents moved to Bahrain. Two years later, the family lived in Dubai. They left again for St. Louis, Missouri and then finally Atlanta. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton school and then went to work for Apollo Global Management. As an analyst, one of the companies he covered was in cold storage, and he learned that if a truck is late for a delivery, even if only a few hours behind schedule, the orders are often scrapped, and the perishable food is dumped.

After leaving Apollo to start a coding bootcamp business with two friends, Ramesh kept thinking about the inefficiencies of the food industry. To study the problem, he spent several months talking to farmers to understand just how pervasive and damaging food waste is.

In 2018, Ramesh started “just saying yes to some of them and buying the produce.” He stored boxes of discarded apples and other misshapen produce in his Philadelphia apartment and decided to sell a mystery box as a test case.

With produce sitting in his apartment, Ramesh coded Misfits’ website and he bought some Facebook ads offering ugly-but-still-good produce at a 30% or even 40% discount to grocery store prices. Within 10 days of the website going live, Ramesh had 500 pre-orders.

In 2019, investors including San Francisco-based Greenoaks Capital Partners poured in $16.5 million. By the time Ramesh landed a spot on the 30 Under 30 social entrepreneurs list at the end of the year, Misfits had helped rescue more than 10 million pounds of food.

The business was still only a little over a year into operating when the pandemic hit, and orders flooded in—up 400%. It overwhelmed the business, so much so that Ramesh had to shut down Misfits’ waitlist between April and May 2020. He even stopped advertising on Facebook.

Ramesh says he sees a path to sales of $800 million in the next couple of years, and $1 billion annually beyond that. One way to get there, he says, will be keeping Misfits’ offerings affordable.

“I don’t think the grocery industry has seen real innovation, I’m not exaggerating, in a hundred years,” says Ramesh. “From the way you source and buy to the way you set up a fulfillment center and the way you deliver to the doorstep, all of that can be reimagined.”

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In 1963, as the U.S. civil rights movement reached a new peak, most U.S. companies stayed quiet. That changed after events in Birmingham, Alabama. Images of peaceful demonstrators, including children, being attacked by police dogs and high-powered fire hoses shocked the country. Economic boycotts of segregated businesses in and near Birmingham followed. Under pressure from all sides, local business leaders spoke up and pushed city officials to negotiate. That shift helped lead to desegregation commitments.

Companies were not acting as ethical heroes; economic risk clearly mattered. But so did the reality, and the morality, of what was happening in the country’s streets.

Twenty years later, on a global stage, multinational businesses and U.S. academic institutions were drawn into the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, with calls to divest from investments and economic activity with the country. Once again, business was pulled into a societal reckoning, whether it wanted to be or not.

According to the author in the U.S., businesses are in a similar moment today? And how will history, or our future selves, judge the choices we make now?

The deaths and general violence brought tens of thousands of citizens into the streets to demonstrate. Like the Birmingham businesses 60 years ago, Minnesota’s companies couldn’t help but see what was going on. So the silence from much of big business was striking. Yes, dozens of CEOs of Minnesota-based companies released a joint statement calling for de-escalation and coordination between federal and local governments, but they didn’t say anything beyond that. Companies outside the targeted areas stayed silent — even ones with big footprints in places where agents were clashing with citizens.

Companies in Minneapolis and beyond have clearly been trying to lay low. But they hold extraordinary economic and political influence, and there are obligations that come with that power. Acting on that duty means that leaders must deal honestly with some myths and blind spots that are holding them back.

The Myths That Leaders Hide Behind.  In his conversations with executives across the U.S. and across industrial sectors, a familiar set of assumptions keeps surfacing. They boil down to three myths about the role of business in society and politics.  We don’t engage in politics.  Staying quiet reduces risk. And it’s not our job.

What Now?  It’s tempting to try and offer a neat checklist of things to do. This isn’t really one of those moments, but here are a few principles worth considering.  First, saying nothing about major societal issues is a decision, and often a high-risk one.  Second, decision thresholds (leaders’ own “red lines”) should be examined and articulated.  Third, not every decision should be reduced to a narrow cost-benefit analysis.  Fourth, it’s valuable to broaden the circle of perspective and advice.  Finally, don’t act alone.

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Most people believe that if they work hard, take ownership and deliver results, a successful career will naturally follow. He believed that too — until he became a leader.  What he sees now is the flaw in that thinking.  As leaders, this is the gap we’re responsible for closing.  Below are six unspoken rules founders and business leaders must actively coach if they want to develop future leaders rather than burn out their highest performers.

Rule 1: Hard work is the baseline, not the differentiator.  In high-performing organizations, hard work is assumed. Effort gets people in the game, but it rarely determines who advances. What separates people is how clearly their work connects to what leadership actually cares about.  Most employees default to reporting tasks unless leaders teach them otherwise. A simple coaching habit is to ask team members to explain their work in one sentence that ties directly to a company priority.

Rule 2: Visibility comes from alignment, not volume.  Many employees assume visibility comes from being busy or indispensable. In reality, visibility is created when work moves what matters most.  Presence matters, too. Remote work is efficient, but visibility requires intention. Trust is built through context, proximity, and informal interaction.  If leaders don’t clarify where visibility comes from, employees either overwork or disengage. Be explicit about which initiatives matter, where leadership attention is focused, and how people can contribute beyond their immediate scope.

Rule 3: Relationships are a productivity multiplier, not a distraction.  It removes friction from the work.  The people the author saw advance fastest were rarely the ones doing everything themselves. They were the ones who knew who to call, how decisions actually get made, and where resistance would show up before it did.

Rule 4: Leaders promote capability signals, not just competence.  When leaders decide who’s ready for more responsibility, they look beyond metrics.  The first signal leaders look for is self-awareness. Leaders want to know you understand your strengths and development areas. Self-aware people ask for help at the right moments, which builds confidence in their judgment.  Next is enterprise awareness—the ability to understand strategic priorities and frame decisions in terms leaders recognize as aligned.  Finally, people skills matter. Results are critical, but how those results are delivered matters just as much. Leaders notice who can move work forward without burning bridges.

Rule 5: Managers can’t advocate for what they can’t see.  Once the author started participating in talent review sessions, a clear pattern emerged. People who were promoted had simple, repeatable narratives attached to them: reliable, strategic, strong cross-functional partner.  Those narratives weren’t created through last-minute self-promotion. They were built over time through consistent communication.  Teach managers and employees that structured updates enable effective advocacy. Simple weekly or biweekly updates covering progress, risks managed, and what’s next make promotion decisions more informed and more fair.

Rule 6: The system rewards patterns, not potential.  When organizations promote or restructure, they reduce risk by advancing people who already look like they’re operating at the next level. How someone communicates, handles ambiguity, and makes decisions matters as much as what they deliver.  Make next-level expectations explicit. When people don’t know what “ready” looks like, promotions will always feel political.

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Sunny Israni knows how much grunt work goes into starting a business. The chief technology officer of agentic AI company Lightswitch and a four-time startup founder, Israni recalls the time-suck of doing basic tasks in the early days, such as turning pitch calls into proposals, converting proposals into decks, and assembling product photos. For startup founders launching new businesses today, however, a lot of operational tasks can be outsourced to AI.

LinkedIn research from 2025 estimates that 85 percent of small businesses are already using AI tools to enter data, write reports, and generate content, among other tasks. But even the best tools can’t replace you.   You cannot outsource your understanding to an AI agent.  You have to go in here with the spirit of collaboration with AI. That is how you really get far.

Israni’s first tip for entrepreneurs choosing their own AI tools is using a simple spreadsheet or list to keep track of which ones they’re currently using and how. With new tools being released nearly every day, revisiting that list will ensure every tool earns its place.  The real promise of AI is amplification—being able to have a much bigger footprint than was originally possible. Here are five AI tools he recommends.

Fathom.  Any entrepreneur will take a lot of meetings in the early days, so a meeting recorder like Fathom is critical to help you keep track. While Fathom could be prefers for its simple integrations with other software, Granola or even Google’s free Gemini notetaker can also be used.

Claude Cowork.  Claude’s research assistant can do anything from opening up your browser and Googling on your behalf to filling out a spreadsheet.  Claude Cowork is like having an analyst right next to you who’s extremely skilled.

Lovable.  To quickly build simple websites.   Any non-technical person can just go in and spin up a beautiful landing page.  Claude Code and Cursor are more powerful but a simple, cloud-based option such as Lovable, Bolt, or Replit is ideal for anyone who needs a high-quality website up quickly.

Gamma.  For entrepreneurs who spend a lot of time making decks and presentations, Gamma can save hours.

N8n.  For more advanced users who are familiar with other AI tools, n8n can automate entire workflows. For instance, users can build a workflow in n8n to search the internet for a niche topic. The user simply tells n8n to find all the latest content that has been released in the past two days, summarize it, digest it, and send an email with that digest.  Or, you could automate the workflow described above, asking n8n to take the steps from introductory call to pitch deck on its own.