One Disney brand. Two vastly different guest experiences. A Walt Disney World ticket increasingly feels like a base airline fare. Want to wait in shorter lines (or barely wait at all)? Extra. Want reserved fireworks viewing? Extra. Want to get into the parks early? Pay to stay at a Disney resort. Oh, and while you’re…
I recently spent three days having an LLM help me solve a problem it turned out I didn’t actually need to solve. A LinkedIn creator I follow said they’d often been asked about writing a book based on their library of content. It amounts to hundreds of posts over several years. They knew the process…
I don’t envy the Sphere security team when The Rocky Horror Picture Show opens there next year. Rice. Toast. Toilet paper. Squirt bottles. Lighters. Playing cards. Rubber gloves. (I see you, fellow former midnight screening regulars.) Then it occurred to me: Rocky Horror comes with 50 years of audience rituals. Sphere knows fans will try…
I still don’t think I’m a cruise person. And yet we just booked our second cruise in five months. For context, our favorite hotel in the world has 20 (twenty!) rooms. So a year ago, I’d have told you without ever having taken one that cruising wasn’t for me. I had more than a few…
Organizations know when they’re borrowing money. Far fewer recognize when they’re borrowing against future capability. Every decision to automate, streamline, outsource, or eliminate work creates a tradeoff. The immediate gains are usually measurable. The capabilities those decisions put at risk rarely make it into the business case. That’s where organizations accumulate a different kind of…
Interesting follow-up to my post from March: Yesterday’s announcement that Sony Pictures is making a $100 million strategic investment in Cosm adds another piece to the puzzle. My original observation was that the National Hockey League (NHL) partnership wasn’t simply about replay or officiating. It established immersive-native production infrastructure across all 32 arenas. Now Sony…
When did you last think about the paper trail of your own career? Recently I posted about preserving institutional knowledge for your family. This time, it’s about doing it for yourself. For most of modern business history, professionals accumulated a career archive almost by default: hard copies of letters, memos, performance reviews, promotion announcements, presentations,…
Last year, I created a file called “In Case of Emergency – Start Here.” It grew out of a question I’ve found myself pondering increasingly often: if someone else had to step into my role tomorrow, would they know what they needed to carry on? I began thinking about what I knew that no one…
What a Michelin-level restaurant group and a Disney cruise ship reveal about hospitality and customer loyalty, Over the past month, I had two very different hospitality experiences: consecutive nights at Gracious Hospitality venues in New York, and my first Disney cruise. On paper, they have almost nothing in common. Gracious Hospitality Management operates high-end dining…
Stop for a minute and think about where expertise actually comes from. Not information. I mean the kind of expertise that lets someone sit across from a CEO and explain why a product can’t launch on time because of geopolitical supply chain issues. The kind that understands which stakeholder needs a call before the meeting,…
Intermediaries aren’t stealing customer relationships. Business are handing them over. Three seemingly unrelated posts caught my eye recently: Ellin, whose platform powers fan relationships for artists like Sabrina Carpenter and major festivals, cut through the noise on the Live Nation decision: whatever the remedy, artists who own their fan relationships come out ahead. “Owning your…
AI is helping make companies more efficient, and the short-term gains are real. Tallying the consequences of those efficiencies will take longer. When you remove friction from how work gets done, you remove more than inefficiency. You’re also removing the conditions under which people develop. Judgment doesn’t come from having the right answer a click…
Confession: I can’t handle a seven-course tasting menu anymore. Not because I don’t want to. Because I physically can’t. Roughly 8% of U.S. adults are now on GLP-1s (I’m one of them). Many projections suggest this number will at least double before the end of the decade. Meanwhile, restaurants are leaning further into longer formats:…
What do Netflix, Hermès, UHNW brands, and a Las Vegas restaurateur have in common? It’s a pattern that helps explain why strong brands stop being chosen. Last week, Hub Entertainment Research published an analysis of Netflix by Brandon Katz. Subscriber growth is strong, total viewing is up, and streaming continues to take share. But time…
How influencer-shaped expectations are creating a perception gap in Las Vegas tourism The 2025 LVCVA Visitor Profile Study (download PDF here) surfaces a meaningful shift in visitor behaviorfor guests who plan their trips using influencers. This “influencer-led” visitor arrives with a highly curated, high-expectation version of the destination already in mind. What stands out is…
Nearly 30 years later, this ad for Impulse Body Spray remains one of the most effective spots I’ve ever seen. I came across an old (2010!) post on here this week and realized the video link was broken. Fixing it sent me back to the ad I’d written about. It’s even better than I remembered….
There’s no shortage of “AI is revolutionizing [insert industry here]” takes.The problem with AI adoption is something nearly all of them ignore: capability doesn’t equal behavioral change. I’ve seen this pattern play out. Everything looks aligned on paper, leadership supports the tech, and teams agree it should make work more efficient. And yet. New capability…
Vinyl records. Craft spirits. Hand-knit clothing. Memorable meals. As tech becomes more powerful and pervasive, the appeal of things that feel human, tangible, and personal tends to rise alongside it. Futurist John Naisbitt gave this pattern a name in Megatrends: “high tech / high touch.” In The Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore argue that as…
A look at the hidden system behind social media nostalgia trends and how everyday posts can become valuable training data for AI models.
There’s been much chatter lately about the “tells” of AI writing. The cliché words and phrases. The tidy triads. The “it’s not this, it’s that” and the staccato single-sentence paragraphs. They’re ubiquitous now. But they’re symptoms of the real problem: letting AI replace your voice. When you know how someone writes, you develop a subconscious…
As organizations increasingly adopt AI, leadership teams optimizing for productivity today may discover a decade from now that they’ve weakened the succession and leadership pipeline they once took for granted. An Anthropic study published March 5 analyzing Claude usage, along with related labor-market analysis cited by Sakeeb Rahman, highlights an emerging shift: hiring into highly…
The partnership Cosm and the NHL just announced standardizes ultra high-resolution, multi-angle capture in all 32 NHL arenas. Today, that supports replay, player safety, officiating, and digital content. Put another way: it embeds immersive-native production infrastructure league-wide. For Cosm, the significance goes beyond any single use case. Their ecosystem spans arena-based capture systems, cloud production…
Leading with data requires judgment. This April, I’ll be speaking at the 2026 Women in Hospitality Leadership Conference at Wynn Las Vegas about what leading with data really means. In my experience, analytics are rarely the constraint. Interpretation is. Strong leaders don’t react to persuasive metrics at face value. They examine context, surface assumptions, understand…
When Alignment Masks Risk Some of the most expensive strategic mistakes aren’t made in chaos. They happen in rooms that feel aligned. When an executive team reaches agreement quickly, it feels like certainty and momentum. Speed and unanimity create energy. They can also create blind spots. Strong internal consensus is often where risk takes root….