If you’ve been following the news lately, it seems like there’s a new stablecoin announced every day. Almost overnight, stablecoin payments have become a pillar of finance, with traditional institutions significantly accelerating or desperately chasing plans to integrate. To really capitalize on the potential, there are a few critical things that every participant needs to address, including existing blockchains.

The payments industry has traditionally kept blockchain payments at a distance. This was originally somewhat understandable. Anonymous wallet activities can seem like the antithesis of good financial governance for any regulated business. However, in 2024 alone, more than $15 trillion was settled onchain, surpassing Visa and Mastercard combined. And with the growth and explosion of stablecoins — which are ultimately on-chain assets just like your favorite memecoin or NFT — payments businesses have to solve for the key points of friction, rather than marginalize blockchain payments.

Existing blockchains like Sui have struggled to get payment processors and card networks to adapt their technologies to use the superpowers of blockchain. It’s not that blockchains are inherently less compliant; it’s that a form of gatekeeping has been taking place. The plausible argument has always been compliance, but one has to wonder if the real reason was always about the ways in which wallets (not cards), privacy innovations like zero knowledge, and instant settlement might make existing payments businesses lose their incumbent advantage.

But let’s not quibble on how we got here. With stablecoin growth rocketing, it is in everyone’s best interest to get on the same side of the table and fix the barriers between traditional fiat and on-chain payments.

Related: What Every Small-Business Founder Needs to Know About Stablecoins and Digital Dollars

Collaborating for growth — the Blockchain Payments Consortium

As founding members of the Blockchain Payments Consortium (BPC), which is a consortium of L1s and payments services providers, one fact we all wanted to address is that we in the blockchain industry were not making it easy for payments companies and traditional finance to get on board.

Each L1 has different technology stacks, smart contract languages and differing asset models. This variability can be messy — it creates headaches not just for enterprises wading into digital assets for the first time, but for the financial institutions that support them. Combined with endless exclusivity deals that ring-fence users, we may have actually harmed our ability to bring blockchain payments to the world.

It’s time to change that, and to do it, we need to work with each other and the off-chain payments industry.

The BPC aims to provide the frameworks and foundations for common solutions, standards and even interoperability. We all win when we make it easier for compliant and safe payment experiences to use blockchain rails effectively.

Stablecoins make this need urgent. As it stands, even the most popular stablecoins face fragmented liquidity across chains. Measurement of any payment activity is actually very challenging, because it’s still hard to tell which transactions on any blockchain are payments vs. something else. Relying on self-reported data from applications and “trusted entities” won’t help make the case that blockchains bring a valuable and important level of transparency and safety to the payments landscape.

Our initial goals are simple; we will look to sign up more members who care about common frameworks and standards. And together, we will look to publish simple but crucial commitments that all members will meet, starting with definitions of what a payment is on a blockchain and the metadata that identifies it.

This seemingly simple step will enable payments companies, data and analytics businesses, observers and regulators to actually see and understand payments activity on-chain, for any asset type, all without compromising the privacy and rights of individuals. Better applications and services will follow, and a new host of on-chain and x-chain innovation opportunities will rise.

Related: What It Will Actually Take to Bridge the Gap Between DeFi and Traditional Finance

Blockchain innovations, stablecoins and DeFi are inextricably linked

Common standards and interoperability are just one part of the equation. A second part will be showing the world what a future-facing payments ecosystem looks like. One that leverages the best that blockchain technology has to offer. One that offers privacy with verifiability, speed with compliance and assurance, and one that gives businesses flexibility to deploy their financial strategies across both traditional and decentralized financial (DeFi) markets.

The goal of common frameworks and standards is to help create more access to the best that blockchain has to offer. DeFi is the proven product-market fit for blockchains. And whilst dedicated private payments L1s may seem attractive to serve just payments use-cases, they miss a key point of value — stablecoins have blown up because they found product-market fit inside the world of trading and lending.

As they scale, answers to issues such as liquidity fragmentation lie in the broad and rich landscape of DeFi. It is hard to conceive how payments-focused chains will build strong and sustainable DeFi ecosystems where multiple business models, asset types, collateralization and liquidity opportunities exist. Traditional enterprises wanting to access and use stablecoins will soon find themselves looking for solutions to address stale treasuries — DeFi is already here and available on Sui, as well as on many public blockchains today, including all the founding members of the BPC.

Related: The Era of Blockchain Hype Is Over — Execution Is What Will Drive Adoption

A trillion-dollar industry is at stake

Within the BPC members’ ecosystems, more than $10 trillion in annualized payment volume and approximately 5 billion stablecoin transactions are already being processed. In the United States, the Federal Reserve recently said it “roughly [projects] stablecoin uptake reaching between $1 trillion and $3 trillion by the end of the decade.” This is a market experiencing unprecedented growth. But if we want to fully realize the potential of blockchain payments, it is essential to remove existing barriers to entry for everyone.

Defining a common framework for payments doesn’t remove choice or impact decentralization; different chains can continue to operate within their own parameters. What it does is provide a common language for interoperability. If stablecoins are going to be what we all want them to be, then blockchain payments have to grow up. Together with the BPC, Sui has grand plans to lead the charge.

If you’ve been following the news lately, it seems like there’s a new stablecoin announced every day. Almost overnight, stablecoin payments have become a pillar of finance, with traditional institutions significantly accelerating or desperately chasing plans to integrate. To really capitalize on the potential, there are a few critical things that every participant needs to address, including existing blockchains.

The payments industry has traditionally kept blockchain payments at a distance. This was originally somewhat understandable. Anonymous wallet activities can seem like the antithesis of good financial governance for any regulated business. However, in 2024 alone, more than $15 trillion was settled onchain, surpassing Visa and Mastercard combined. And with the growth and explosion of stablecoins — which are ultimately on-chain assets just like your favorite memecoin or NFT — payments businesses have to solve for the key points of friction, rather than marginalize blockchain payments.

Every founder eventually faces a strategic question that’s harder than it looks on a pitch deck: Should you build a lightweight offering that serves many types of customers, or go deep into one vertical and build a full-stack product that locks in loyalty from a single group? It’s one of the most defining decisions a company makes, especially in the early stages.

In theory, going wide brings exposure and speed. Going deep brings precision and defensibility. But in the messy reality of product deadlines, funding cycles and evolving customer needs, it’s rarely that clear-cut. Understanding the tradeoffs early can mean the difference between a scattered startup and a focused, resilient business.

Related: Focus on One Thing, or Diversify?

The case for diversification

In the early days, diversification often feels like the safer bet. Serving a range of customer types gets revenue in the door faster, helps test different personas and creates the illusion of momentum. This was the playbook Stripe used in its early years — building a developer-first payments platform that quietly powered everything from marketplaces to SaaS tools to on-demand services. The product was modular, the use cases were endless, and the brand benefited from touching so many different businesses.

Diversification also plays well with investors who want to see a big total addressable market (TAM). It gives you flexibility to test traction across segments and pivot quickly based on demand. But that flexibility often comes with a cost. Product decisions start serving multiple masters. The roadmap gets pulled in five different directions. And customer success teams are left chasing conflicting definitions of value.

Startups that diversify too early can dilute their core advantage. You might please everyone a little, but no one a lot.

Related: 5 Questions to Ask Before Diversifying Your Business

The power of going deep

Going deep is the opposite strategy. Build for one customer type, become irreplaceable, then expand from a position of strength. It’s what Toast did when it focused exclusively on restaurants. Instead of trying to be a generic POS system for every small business, they built an end-to-end operating system for food and beverage businesses: ordering, payments, payroll and more.

That depth created defensibility. Because Toast understood the nuances of restaurant operations, it could solve pain points that a broader competitor couldn’t. The result wasn’t just stickier customers — it was stronger pricing power, higher expansion revenue and deeper loyalty.

But depth has its own risks. Focusing on one customer type makes you more vulnerable to shocks in that industry. It also means slower top-of-funnel growth and potential investor pressure to expand prematurely. For teams with limited capital or uncertain runway, betting deep on the wrong vertical can stall momentum.

Still, if you’re confident in your initial wedge and your team can execute consistently, going deep is often the better long-term play. You get richer data, tighter feedback loops and a community of users who evangelize your product because it actually works for them.

You don’t always get to choose

The reality? Most early-stage companies don’t make this decision from a clean slate. Sometimes your first few deals pull you into a vertical you hadn’t intended. Other times, inbound demand from adjacent industries is too tempting to ignore. If you’re bootstrapped, one big contract in a niche vertical could keep you alive. If you’re venture-backed, the push for broader growth might come before you’re ready.

But regardless of how the path unfolds, the most disciplined founders treat early traction as a discovery phase, not a permanent blueprint. They observe where adoption is strongest, which customers expand fastest and where retention holds. They evolve from wide to deep when the data makes it clear.

Figma, for example, began by winning over designers. They didn’t try to be the collaboration tool for everyone on day one. Their focus on product design gave them credibility and usage density. Only once they had that depth did they start expanding into adjacent personas like developers and marketers. Their early discipline created the foundation for later, more confident diversification.

Related: How Being Intentional and Focusing on a Specific Niche Can Lead to Greater Success for Your Business

Moving forward: Know when to go deep

Ultimately, the choice between going wide and going deep isn’t binary — it’s sequential. Early on, going wide might help you gather signal. But the companies that win long-term almost always find a wedge and double down.

The key is to constantly listen: to your customers, to your churn, to your product metrics. If you’re solving a meaningful problem deeply for one segment, lean into it. Build the full stack. Become mission-critical. Then, and only then, consider expanding.

Founders don’t need to fear diversification, but they do need to earn it. And the way you earn it is by proving that you can deliver repeatable, scalable value to a customer group that needs you. That’s how you go from chasing opportunity to building something defensible.

Every founder eventually faces a strategic question that’s harder than it looks on a pitch deck: Should you build a lightweight offering that serves many types of customers, or go deep into one vertical and build a full-stack product that locks in loyalty from a single group? It’s one of the most defining decisions a company makes, especially in the early stages.

In theory, going wide brings exposure and speed. Going deep brings precision and defensibility. But in the messy reality of product deadlines, funding cycles and evolving customer needs, it’s rarely that clear-cut. Understanding the tradeoffs early can mean the difference between a scattered startup and a focused, resilient business.

In recent years, we’ve all watched companies pour staggering amounts of energy and money into “AI initiatives.” Some of these efforts were transformative, but many others took far longer than expected or quietly stalled out — stuck in planning cycles, technical sprawl, or endless experimentation. The average deployment time is eight months, and nearly half of the initiatives never make it to production at all.

After stepping into my role at Vida, where we build AI phone agents used across various industries, I noticed something consistent across customers, prospects and partners. The companies earning the most meaningful wins weren’t the ones with the largest AI budgets. They were the ones who moved the fastest. That observation eventually led me to a concept we now call ROAI: Return on AI. It’s a simple but powerful way to evaluate not just what AI returns, but how quickly those returns begin.

Related: Nearly 95% of Companies Saw Zero Return on In-House AI Investments, According to a New MIT Study: ‘Little to No Measurable Impact’

ROAI didn’t begin as a buzzword. It emerged from numerous conversations — customers sharing their breakthroughs, internal teams comparing timelines, and business leaders trying to make sense of AI costs versus value. In every conversation, one variable kept rising to the top — time:

The companies that treat time as a multiplier are the ones pulling ahead.

Why traditional ROI falls short for AI

ROI is familiar territory in business. We calculate the cost-to-return ratio, wrap it in a clean percentage and call it a day. But AI exposes the limitations of that model.

AI solutions rarely follow a predictable build-and-launch lifecycle. They require workflow design, iteration, data work, oversight, compliance reviews and often a second or third rebuild once real users begin interacting with them. AI is powerful, but it’s not magic.

If an AI tool “saves” $64,000 a year but takes 12 months to deploy, the organization earns nothing during that entire year. Meanwhile, customers and competitors continue moving. The opportunity cost quietly compounds.

This is where ROAI came into focus for me. It reframes value not just as what you earn, but when you start earning it.

A very simple formula

I wanted ROAI to feel intuitive enough that any operator, founder or finance leader could calculate it in their head. The simplest way I’ve found to explain it is this:

That’s it.

If you build an AI workflow that delivers a 100% ROI, fairly typical for automation-styled deployments, and you deploy it in one month instead of twelve, your ROAI isn’t just 100%, it’s 100% × 12.

That difference isn’t theoretical. It’s the difference between earning value all year versus earning nothing until next year. While the math is simple, very few teams actually think about their AI initiatives this way. The businesses that do tend to see measurable differences across revenue, customer experience, operational load and competitive positioning.

Related: 5 Reasons Why Your AI Deployment Isn’t Delivering

Why ROAI matters for the next era of AI

AI has crossed the line from novelty to necessity. What felt experimental 18 months ago now runs inside customer support centers, CRMs, logistics platforms, healthcare systems and even your local handyman’s service app.

But most companies aren’t struggling with “Does AI work?” Instead, they’re struggling with:

• How long until we can actually use it?

• How quickly can we make it safe and reliable enough for customers?

• How do we justify the investment without waiting a full budget cycle?

ROAI gives teams a more honest framework for answering those questions.

I’ve seen customers move from months-long timelines to weeks when they prioritize speed-to-value. That shift doesn’t just unlock financial returns — it accelerates learning loops across the entire product and organization. Once a team sees a working AI process in production, scaling to the next use case becomes dramatically easier.

Where companies see the biggest impact

Across hundreds of conversations with operators, revenue leaders and implementation teams, the same four patterns emerge again and again:

1. Removing internal bottlenecks

Many organizations try to build AI entirely in-house, underestimating the engineering, oversight, regulatory and iteration cycles involved. When they shift to more modular or prebuilt approaches, deployment drops from 12-18 months to 1-3 months. Their ROAI spikes because value starts flowing far sooner.

2. Revenue teams see gains fastest

AI is often framed as a cost-saver, but the fastest ROAI tends to appear in revenue-facing workflows — lead engagement, qualification, follow-ups, renewals. When AI shortens response times or captures missed opportunities, the financial impact is immediate. Deploying these workflows quickly multiplies that impact.

3. AI becomes a product line

Some Vida customers repackage and resell AI capabilities as part of their platform. For them, ROAI isn’t about internal efficiency — it’s about transforming AI from a cost-saver to a money-maker. Quick market deployment determines whether they capture that revenue or whether a competitor beats them to it.

4. Momentum dissolves resistance

Teams adopt AI more enthusiastically when they can see real results quickly. Long deployments drain momentum. Fast wins build confidence, reduce fear and create buy-in from customers and internal stakeholders. ROAI is as much about psychology as it is about financial outcomes.

Related: Is AI Worth the Investment? Calculate Your Real ROI

ROAI comes from watching real teams, stretched thin, overloaded with expectations, struggle to reconcile the promise of AI with the practical reality of deploying it. It was also born from watching organizations achieve measurable revenue gains because their deployments happened in weeks, not quarters.

When time becomes part of the equation, the picture gets clearer. Leaders stop asking, “What will AI do for us?” and start asking, “How fast can we prove it?” And in my experience, a shift like that changes everything.

In recent years, we’ve all watched companies pour staggering amounts of energy and money into “AI initiatives.” Some of these efforts were transformative, but many others took far longer than expected or quietly stalled out — stuck in planning cycles, technical sprawl, or endless experimentation. The average deployment time is eight months, and nearly half of the initiatives never make it to production at all.

After stepping into my role at Vida, where we build AI phone agents used across various industries, I noticed something consistent across customers, prospects and partners. The companies earning the most meaningful wins weren’t the ones with the largest AI budgets. They were the ones who moved the fastest. That observation eventually led me to a concept we now call ROAI: Return on AI. It’s a simple but powerful way to evaluate not just what AI returns, but how quickly those returns begin.

The company I founded over two decades ago went fully remote in 2018, thinking we were ahead of the curve. We’ve maintained our “Great Place to Work in Canada” designation twice since then. Remote work has delivered real benefits, especially for team members with young families.

But I keep coming back to something. Work arrangements that make sense at one career stage don’t necessarily work at another. I see three distinct phases.

Stage one: Early career (Don’t do remote)

When my family ran our shop in the Congo, I learned business by watching. I saw how my parents’ demeanor shifted when customers walked in, how they handled complaints, the subtle art of reading people and situations.

At my first job after graduating, I was using a tool incorrectly. My boss saw what I was doing and stopped me. “No, no, no, you don’t do it that way. You’re going to break this.” That two-minute interaction saved me hours. This doesn’t work through a screen.

My kids can’t see any of that now. I’m behind a closed door on video calls all day. When we used to have an office, my nieces and nephews would come over and see us having meetings. They’d absorb how professional relationships work just by being around.

This observation-based learning is how business skills actually develop. You don’t just learn procedures — you absorb judgment, timing and the hundreds of micro-decisions that make someone effective in their role.

We used to hire from universities through co-op programs. Students would work with us for four months, and if we liked them, we’d offer full-time positions when they graduated. Those co-op students learned as much from overhearing conversations as they did from formal training.

That pipeline doesn’t work the same way remotely. We can’t observe how people are working in that natural mentorship way where you notice someone struggling and offer guidance.

You can’t learn to read a room through Zoom or absorb professional norms by watching boxes on a screen. The subtle skills — when to speak up, how to handle conflict, how to build trust — come from being physically present.

For people starting their careers, being in a group environment matters. That’s when observation builds the foundation for everything that follows.

Related: He Spent $3K to Start a Side Hustle That’s Eyeing $1M Revenue

Stage two: Mid-career (Remote makes sense)

Then life shifts. You’re starting a family. Suddenly, the flexibility of not commuting becomes enormously valuable. You need to be there when a kid gets sick or to make it to school events during those years when it matters most. Maybe it’s one parent working from home while the other goes to an office. Or parents alternating days. The key is having the flexibility to make arrangements that work for your situation.

This is where remote work delivers its greatest benefit. For parents with young children, the flexibility can be transformative. These are often people who’ve already built their professional foundation through earlier in-person experience. They know how to work. Now they need space to execute while managing life’s demands.

There’s a tradeoff worth acknowledging: remote workers often have less visibility when opportunities arise. If you’re not in the room, you’re not there for the spontaneous conversations that sometimes lead to new projects or responsibilities. Many people in this stage knowingly accept that tradeoff—they’re prioritizing family during these crucial years, and that’s a valid choice.

Stage three: Late career (Don’t do remote)

But there’s a third stage worth considering. Eventually, your kids reach a certain age. Family demands shift. Maybe at this point, experienced professionals should spend more time in group environments again.

I was talking to someone about this framework yesterday. He challenged me on the middle stage. “We managed to commute and raise kids when they were three or four years old. We did it all.” Then he paused. “But yeah, I can’t stand being home all day. I want to be out with people.”

We’ve spent decades building expertise. We want to be around the energy and problem-solving that happens when people work together.

Not for their own learning — they’ve built their expertise. But because the early-career workers need someone to observe. The co-op students need experienced people around to learn from. The mentorship that used to happen naturally through proximity needs experienced professionals to be present.

If everyone who knows how to do the work is remote, where do the people learning the trade get their observation time? Someone has to be there for them to watch, to learn from, to absorb the unspoken parts of professional practice.

Nobody wants to be “forced” back in the office. But experienced professionals have something to offer that early-career workers need: the chance to learn by watching people who actually know what they’re doing.

Related: Why Are Remote Work Trends So Different in the US and UK?

A framework still taking shape

We’re fully remote now, and our team is distributed across the country. Going back to a traditional office setup isn’t realistic or something we’d want — we’d lose significant benefits we’ve gained.

But I’m thinking more carefully about matching work arrangements to what people need at different points:

• Early-career workers need proximity to experienced professionals for observation and learning
• Parents with young families need the flexibility remote work provides
• Experienced professionals benefit from group environments to provide mentorship that early-career workers need

When experienced professionals work alongside early-career people, both benefit. We can read body language, know when someone’s stuck. But it’s not one-way; early-career people bring fresh perspectives and new tools. When you mix these generations in person, something pretty amazing happens. It ultimately brings value to a business.

This isn’t solved. We’re experimenting with ways to create learning moments more intentionally for different stages of career and life.

Remote work isn’t going away, and for many situations, it’s clearly better than the alternative. But choosing between “fully remote” or “fully in-office” misses the fact that the future of work requires us to be honest about what people need.

Different people need different things at different times. And preserving learning through observation — really seeing how a business works — means that as business owners, we should be thinking beyond one-size-fits-all solutions.

The company I founded over two decades ago went fully remote in 2018, thinking we were ahead of the curve. We’ve maintained our “Great Place to Work in Canada” designation twice since then. Remote work has delivered real benefits, especially for team members with young families.

But I keep coming back to something. Work arrangements that make sense at one career stage don’t necessarily work at another. I see three distinct phases.

When Brad Charron took over plant-based protein brand ALOHA in 2017, the company wasn’t just struggling—it was in a full-blown crisis. Revenue was scattered across nine or 10 product categories, the core product wasn’t good enough, and the business was roughly $60 million in the red. Employees weren’t true owners in the company’s future, and the brand itself had lost its connection to the very idea it was built on.

Today, ALOHA is one of the top-selling brands in its category—and highly profitable. So, what changed?

Join us for a free webinar, 5 Leadership Strategies from Someone Who Rescued His Business from the Brink of Collapse, presented by NetSuite and Entrepreneur. Charron will share the real, behind-the-scenes story of how he led a dramatic turnaround—and the specific leadership principles any founder, operator, or “re-founder” can apply when their back is against the wall.

Joined by moderator Dr. Jill Schiefelbein, business communication expert and AI strategist, they will unpack the leadership playbook behind ALOHA’s turnaround, including how to:

• Balance urgency and patience when your business is on the brink.
• Lead as a “re-founder” by combining founder-level passion with operator-level discipline.
• Refocus on product quality and positioning instead of chasing lifestyle hype.
• Build an ownership culture where employees, leaders, and investors truly win together.
• Use data and profitability discipline to time your retail and channel expansion for long-term success.

If you’re leading a company through turbulence—or you simply want to avoid ever reaching the brink—this is one session you won’t want to miss.

The 5 Leadership Strategies from Someone Who Rescued His Business from the Brink of Collapse webinar will take place live on Thursday January 29 at 12 p.m. ET | 9 a.m. PT.

When Brad Charron took over plant-based protein brand ALOHA in 2017, the company wasn’t just struggling—it was in a full-blown crisis. Revenue was scattered across nine or 10 product categories, the core product wasn’t good enough, and the business was roughly $60 million in the red. Employees weren’t true owners in the company’s future, and the brand itself had lost its connection to the very idea it was built on.

Today, ALOHA is one of the top-selling brands in its category—and highly profitable. So, what changed?

Join us for a free webinar, 5 Leadership Strategies from Someone Who Rescued His Business from the Brink of Collapse, presented by NetSuite and Entrepreneur. Charron will share the real, behind-the-scenes story of how he led a dramatic turnaround—and the specific leadership principles any founder, operator, or “re-founder” can apply when their back is against the wall.

Last year, I worked with a global hybrid team that had grown fairly fast. They had people in the United States, Europe and Asia, and the team truly cared about the work. Everyone in the team showed up prepared.

But something odd kept happening.

Their meetings kept getting longer, and weekly “syncs” turned into 90-minute sessions. Not only that, their check-ins doubled, and their project calls began to stack on top of each other. People often joked that their real work started after hours, when they entered what they dubbed the “night shift.”

Leaders certainly felt the pressure because, despite being busy all day, the output kept slowing down. As a result, they kept adding meetings because, in their minds, the team needed more time to align. Instead, the pace of the work dropped yet again.

They were confused because they believed more talk would solve the problem, but instead, it kept getting worse. Much worse.

When I joined them, my first job was to watch how they worked. So, I sat through their calls, listened to how they made choices and paid close attention to the moments where energy dropped. After two days, the source of the slowdown became clear.

The real problem wasn’t the meetings. It was the total loss of ownership inside the meetings.

Related: My Strategy for Helping Leaders Reduce Their Meeting Time and Reclaim 10+ Hours a Week

Meetings expand when ownership fades

Leaders often think one of the reasons meetings grow is that the team is too detailed or too cautious. What I see in many global hybrid teams is much simpler.

The team doesn’t know who owns the last set of decisions.

When this happens, people do the same thing regardless of whether the team is a business or technical team. Here’s what they do:

• They come together, hoping someone else will make things clear

• They revisit topics they covered last week because no one is sure who decided what

• They retry ideas they talked through before because no one holds the final call

• They repeat the same debate across three different calls because there’s no shared record of decisions

The result is that meetings grow because decisions don’t stick.

In the global team I worked with, this showed up in small moments. For instance, someone said they would “take a look at a plan,” but no one knew what that meant specifically.

Someone agreed to “review the next steps,” but no one knew when they would do it. People wanted to move forward, but didn’t know who had the authority to close an item.

Those small gaps created big slowdowns.

You can’t fix meeting overload with more meetings

This is the trap many leaders commonly fall into. When the team slows down, they add more meetings so people can align because they think more time together will fix the confusion.

Unfortunately, it actually does the opposite.

A meeting can help if the goal is clear and someone drives the next steps. Otherwise, a meeting becomes a hindrance when the group is trying to figure out ownership while they’re talking.

This is why meeting overload feels so frustrating. Everyone can see the problem, but no one can name it. People think they’ve got a scheduling challenge when in reality, what they have is a clarity challenge.

The solution is for you to intentionally reduce meetings by strengthening ownership, not by shifting calendars.

The global team’s turning point came from a simple step

After watching their sessions, I asked for a short working session with the core leadership group. We looked at the last ten decisions they had made. Then I asked a simple question for each one.

Who made this call?

They went quiet.

They looked through notes, checked messages and searched for email threads that might help. They sincerely wanted to answer, but they couldn’t.

They were smart, committed and honestly trying hard. But they had no shared view of ownership.

As soon as they saw this, things started to move forward.

I helped them shift to a clean structure.

• Every decision needed a clear owner.

• Every action needed a clear owner.

• Every next step needed a clear owner.

They didn’t need a heavy or complicated framework. They just needed shared language and a simple habit.

By the end of the session, they could see the link between missing ownership and growing meeting hours.

The root causes of problems were identified:

• People had been doing extra calls because work somehow slipped through cracks.

• They had been repeating topics because decisions were soft.

• They had been stuck in loops because no one was sure who had the right to close out a question.

As soon as ownership got clear, meetings shrank.

Related: Companies Spend More Than $37 Billion Each Year on Unnecessary Meetings — Use These 5 Tips to Make Sure Yours Are Worth Attending.

The reason hybrid and global teams feel the pain faster

Hybrid teams can be effective, but they tend to have to deal with more friction points. Here are some examples:

• Time zones stretch the work.

• Messages cross paths.

• People miss small signals in video calls.

• Progress updates happen at different moments in the day.

When a team is in the same room, missing ownership still slows the work, but at least people can catch each other in the hallway and can talk something through before it grows. Gaps are fixed fairly informally.

In a hybrid team, on the other hand, missing ownership creates a gap that no one sees until the next scheduled meeting. That delay creates a second delay and another, and soon the team is holding more meetings just to fix the damage from the last set of meetings.

In the moment, it feels like it’s a time problem; however, it’s really an ownership problem.

The one mistake leaders make that makes this worse

When meetings start to feel heavy, a lot of leaders react from instinct. What they typically do is tighten agendas, shorten time blocks and reduce the number of attendees. While these are indeed good moves, the problem is that they don’t solve the root cause.

A meeting isn’t often long because the agenda is weak. More often than not, a meeting is long because the team is trying to make sense of ownership that should’ve been clear before the meeting began.

In my experience, this is the biggest reason why meeting cuts fail.

Leaders shrink a meeting, but the work behind the meeting isn’t clear. The confusion spreads, and the team works later. The decisions, meanwhile, get slower.

I see this pattern in growing companies of all sizes, around the globe and across different industry sectors. Leaders believe they’ve created a “fast” culture. They want to move quickly, and their teams work hard, but the structure behind the work has holes.

And those holes slow everything down.

How to create meetings that move work forward

The good news is that you can shrink your meetings and speed up your work at the same time. You just need to intentionally bring ownership back into the center.

Here are three steps to help leaders do this with very little friction:

• Start with a clear owner for every decision: If a decision has no owner, the meeting will grow until someone tries to fill the gap.

• Name the next step in simple language: If the next step is not clear, the team will revisit the topic in the next meeting.

• Close each meeting with a shared record: If the team cannot see what was decided, they will repeat the discussion.

These steps seem simple, but they’re powerful when leaders apply them with discipline.

The global team I supported used these steps for two weeks, and the results were truly impressive.

• Their meeting count dropped.

• Their syncs became shorter.

• People felt less stressed.

• The pace picked up again.

They didn’t hire more people, add new software or change their goals. They did, however, make ownership visible.

Related: 4 Ways You Can Create a Culture of Ownership

Clarity always pays you back

The leaders in this story were doing their best. They were committed and were pushing hard. Their problem wasn’t effort. Their problem was structure, and this is the part that surprises many founders and execs.

They think work slows because the team isn’t fast enough.

They think meetings grow because the team talks too much.

They think progress drops because the team needs more direction.

They miss the hidden truth that when ownership is unclear, even great teams slow down.

Once leaders fix that, the work moves again.

Leaders who intentionally build clarity into the center of their work never need to force speed, because their teams create it.

Tesla’s latest release isn’t a new electric car or a robot — it’s a limited-edition, $350 pickleball paddle called the Tesla Plaid.

Tesla introduced the paddle on Friday, announcing that it had partnered with paddle maker Selkirk on a premium product designed to improve durability and swing speed.

Popular Science notes that a high-end pickleball paddle is usually priced at under $150, making Tesla’s offering expensive by that standard. Despite the high price tag, the paddle sold out in under three hours, a Selkirk spokesperson told Business Insider, and was out of stock at the time of writing. Tesla will release more paddles next week, per the product page on its site.

Related: Tesla CEO Elon Musk Shows Up at All-Hands Meeting to Reassure Employees ‘The Future Is Incredibly Bright’

The paddle is built from carbon fiber with a foam core and is marketed as engineered for high-performance play rather than just a logo slapped onto an existing design. Selkirk’s research and development head, Tom Barnes, described the project as a “true engineering collaboration,” stating in a press release that Tesla’s design team and Selkirk spent over a year exchanging data, tweaking geometry and stress-testing prototypes before finalizing the product.

“This wasn’t simply a branding exercise,” Barnes said in the press release.

Paddle up, humanhttps://t.co/cbVmUlNH19 pic.twitter.com/U01XZJQV18

— Tesla North America (@tesla_na) December 12, 2025

The idea for a Tesla pickleball paddle emerged after Barnes met Tesla engineers at the 2023 USA Pickleball National Championships. Selkirk executives later visited Tesla’s Fremont, California, factory, met Tesla’s global director of product design and pickleball player Javier Verdura and began the design process, per Business Insider.

The pickleball paddle is Tesla’s first attempt at traditional sports equipment, but it isn’t the automaker’s first lifestyle product. Tesla offers home and apparel products, like backpacks for $185, salt and pepper shakers for $65 and an electric quadbike for children for $1,600.

Related: Tesla Approves Elon Musk’s $1 Trillion Pay. Here’s What He Has to Do to Get It.

The timing of the pickleball paddle launch reflects the rise of pickleball, a sport blending elements of tennis, badminton and ping-pong. A report from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association notes that an estimated 19.8 million Americans played pickleball in 2024, a 45.8% rise from the previous year and a 311% increase since 2021.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also a proponent of the sport. In 2023, he wrote in an X post that pickleball is “probably going to crush tennis. Way more convenient.”

The $350 pickleball paddle is a far cry from the much pricier electric vehicles Tesla sells. At the time of writing, the starting price for a Tesla Model 3 was $36,990, while a Model Y starts at $39,990.

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Tesla’s latest release isn’t a new electric car or a robot — it’s a limited-edition, $350 pickleball paddle called the Tesla Plaid.

Tesla introduced the paddle on Friday, announcing that it had partnered with paddle maker Selkirk on a premium product designed to improve durability and swing speed.

I’ve seen companies delay brand refreshes for years because the conversation feels emotional. Audience expectations are changing, trends are evolving, and service and product offerings are shifting. Legacy colors, inconsistent logos and decades-old visual decisions that become a part of the company’s identity no longer support how the business actually operates today.

People hesitate to touch them. But the moment a team starts redesigning the company website, those long-avoided decisions surface in a way that can’t be ignored. A website simply can’t evolve if the brand behind it is frozen in place.

Across industries, I’ve watched the same pattern take shape. The website becomes the place where unresolved inconsistencies finally show themselves. It’s the one environment where messaging, visuals, structure and user experience sit side by side, leaving no room for outdated styles, disconnected tones of voice or improvised design elements that accumulated over time. The process brings clarity to everything a company has outgrown.

The website becomes the blueprint, and sometimes what it reflects is the need for deeper brand architecture work and a visual redesign.

Related: Does Your Company Image Need a Refresh? What to Do When It’s Time to Rebrand

Why the website reveals misalignment first

Most companies don’t realize how far their brand has drifted until they start rebuilding their website. A website compresses the entire identity into one cohesive space. In print materials, one-off campaigns or internal decks, inconsistencies can hide. On a website, they collide.

Teams begin to notice that the color palette behaves differently when applied to digital components. Typefaces that once looked fine in static layouts act differently in responsive design environments. Messaging that used to feel accurate no longer reflects the company’s direction. And the moment new pages are drafted, tone-of-voice differences between departments suddenly become obvious. Years of improvisation catch up quickly.

What appear to be small friction points are actually signs of deeper brand misalignment. The website simply makes them visible.

Understanding why a refresh becomes necessary

A site redesign isn’t sparked by a creative impulse. It usually emerges when the brand no longer supports the organization’s direction. The website becomes a crossroads where teams confront what no longer fits.

Messaging that once carried the company forward now feels outdated because the business has expanded or shifted focus. Visual identities created for earlier stages of growth struggle to translate into modern digital environments. Logos that once felt timeless start to feel limited inside flexible systems. Even voice and narrative issues surface as new content is written and teams realize they’ve been communicating differently across the organization.

Sometimes the gap is subtle. Other times it’s unmistakable. But it always becomes clear once you begin designing inside a digital environment that demands cohesion.

Related: How to Know When It’s Time to Evolve Your Brand — and How to Do It Right

Why a website-led refresh makes more sense than a traditional refresh

Many organizations assume they must refresh the brand before touching the website. My experience has shown the opposite. A website project is often the most practical, grounded and cost-effective way to determine what a refresh should actually address.

Digital environments pressure every brand element to perform. If a color lacks contrast, you see it instantly. If typography isn’t flexible, layout issues emerge. If messaging lacks clarity, users feel it immediately. The website turns abstract brand ideas into real-world decisions. Instead of debating theory, teams evaluate brand elements in context. They prototype, test and refine long before committing to more permanent materials.

This approach also brings alignment faster than traditional refresh efforts. A website redesign naturally involves marketing, leadership, product and sales. That collaboration reveals what the brand needs to support how the business actually operates today. Once alignment takes shape in the digital layer, the broader brand system becomes easier to evolve.

How a website redesign strengthens the brand beyond the project

One of the unexpected advantages of a website-led refresh is how naturally it brings order to the entire brand. Rebuilding a site requires structure. It demands decisions about typography, color usage, messaging frameworks and component behavior. It forces alignment and eliminates ambiguity. That clarity often hasn’t existed before.

Because a website requires consistency, the work establishes patterns and rules the rest of the brand can rely on. Decisions that once lived in slide decks or personal preferences become centralized, shared and practical. Assets become accessible. Messaging becomes focused. Visual elements scale predictably.

This structure extends far beyond digital channels. It influences presentations, marketing campaigns, product experiences and the everyday way teams communicate visually. The refresh becomes easier to maintain because the website gives it a strong operational foundation. Instead of functioning as an isolated creative exercise, the redesign becomes the anchor for a brand system that remains steady, cohesive and adaptable as the company grows.

Related: Refreshing Your Brand Doesn’t Mean Starting Over

Making the decision

When a website redesign starts to feel strained — when discussions turn to whether a color still feels appropriate, whether a message accurately represents the company or whether visuals reflect the brand’s current direction — it’s not a sign that the project is drifting. It’s a sign that the brand is ready to evolve.

Recognizing that moment brings clarity. It aligns teams, sharpens direction and results in a brand that matches who the company has become. A website redesign does more than give you a new look. It shows you whether your brand and your business are still moving in the same direction. And if they’re not, the site becomes the clearest place to reset, realign and shape the brand you actually are today.

I’ve seen companies delay brand refreshes for years because the conversation feels emotional. Audience expectations are changing, trends are evolving, and service and product offerings are shifting. Legacy colors, inconsistent logos and decades-old visual decisions that become a part of the company’s identity no longer support how the business actually operates today.

People hesitate to touch them. But the moment a team starts redesigning the company website, those long-avoided decisions surface in a way that can’t be ignored. A website simply can’t evolve if the brand behind it is frozen in place.

Meta ignored scam ads from China, even though it knew users were being defrauded.

According to a Reuters investigation, Meta made about $18 billion in ad revenue from China in 2024. Roughly 19 percent of that money came from scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other ads that violate the company’s rules.

Internal documents show Meta briefly cracked down, with one executive writing, “The levels that you’re talking about are not defensible. I don’t know how anyone could think this is okay.” But the company backed off after leadership worried about the revenue impact.

Read more

Meta ignored scam ads from China, even though it knew users were being defrauded.

According to a Reuters investigation, Meta made about $18 billion in ad revenue from China in 2024. Roughly 19 percent of that money came from scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other ads that violate the company’s rules.

Internal documents show Meta briefly cracked down, with one executive writing, “The levels that you’re talking about are not defensible. I don’t know how anyone could think this is okay.” But the company backed off after leadership worried about the revenue impact.

Read more