The Boot: 2026 Issue
Hey Businesses, we think you should quit…
RUNNING AI WITHOUT AN OPERATING SYSTEM
Businesses spent the last year telling employees they must use AI. Now they’re starting to find out what happens when everyone actually does.
Along with “tokenmaxxing” came soaring costs and a hard truth: more AI is not the same as better work. Employees are arbitrarily prompting, automating, and agent-ing their way through the workday because they were given usage targets and told that’s what progress should look like. But too often, all that activity is being grafted onto old workflows, old incentives, and old job architectures.
High adoption can look like momentum, especially when it saves time. But saved time is only useful if leaders know where it should go. Too many companies are tracking activity before defining value, then wondering why more usage has not translated into clearer decisions, stronger outcomes, or work that actually improves.AI is supposedly existential, but the real work is less glamorous than the mandate: deciding what should change, what should stop, and what humans still need to own.
42%
of regular frontline AI users save eight hours a week, but 66% receive limited or no guidance on what to do with the time they save.
Source: BCG
So, what now?
Start interrogating AI impact over simply AI activity. Audit where AI is actually being used and ask whether it is improving a decision, reducing low-value work, strengthening an outcome, or just adding another layer of motion. Then build around the use cases that matter: clear ownership, clear standards, clear risk boundaries, and a plan for turning saved time into better work.
SAVING CULTURE FOR LAST
Businesses keep making the same transformation mistake: they design the change, then treat culture as decoration to help people survive it. Leaders say culture matters, but the order of operations says otherwise.
In practice, the org chart is already redrawn or the new operating model is already in motion. By the time culture enters the room, the job becomes to soften the landing rather than to actually help shape the transformation. So culture gets relegated to messages, slogans, launch moments, and belated trainings. Is this useful? Maybe. Sufficient? Definitely not.
Culture should not simply be viewed as transformation’s PR department. It is what determines whether people understand, trust, and actually live the change. It’s the hard work of making sure a new direction is reinforced by what leaders do, what expectations change, what teams prioritize, and what the organization actually rewards. So if culture is not part of transformation’s design from the beginning, it becomes damage control for decisions that may already be working against the behaviors leaders say they want.
Only 53%
of employees believe their organization handles change effectively, even if they receive regular change communications from leadership.
Source: Perceptyx
So, what now?
Stop treating culture like the final chapter of the transformation plan. Build it into the earliest design decisions: how work will happen, what leaders will model, what managers will reinforce, what tradeoffs people will face, and what the organization will reward. If the transformation needs people to behave differently, culture cannot wait until rollout. It has to help shape the choices being made from the start.
DESIGNING CX SOLELY AROUND YOUR P&L
Businesses have spent years telling us they are customer obsessed. They’ve built CX teams, tracked NPS, mapped journeys, hired experience leaders, and constructed earnest slides about putting the customer at the center. And yet, too many everyday experiences with brands still seem designed around a spreadsheet.
Want the benefit? You’ll need to read the fine print, activate it, track it, and remember the window. Need help? Start with the chatbot, repeat yourself three times, and hope you eventually reach a real person. Want to cancel? Click through multiple screens, if you can even find where the exit is hiding.
Why? Because breakage, lower payroll, and fewer cancellations are profitable. So while companies peacock about customer experience, too many still reward the choices that quietly make it worse. But customers are noticing, and they feel disrespected when a company protects its own numbers by making their lives harder. While businesses may save a few dollars today, reputation, trust, and long-term value are much harder to win back once customers feel played.
25%
of U.S. brands’ customer experience rankings declined in 2025, while only 7% improved.
Source: Forrester, 2025 CX Index
So, what now?
Customer ease and business value are not always opposing forces. Take a hard look at understanding which choices protect real value and which ones profit from customer exhaustion. Then design for both trust and margin, so your business isn’t quietly training customers to resent it.
FIXING IT IN ‘POST’
Move fast and break things" was a mantra born in software startups and adopted by big corporates wanting to feel hip and agile. It has always covered up all manner of sins and now it's jumped the fence from apps and updates into the physical products people use every day, turning more customers across more industries into unpaid QA testers.
Whether it's to hit a launch date or target, companies are quietly shipping unfinished products and counting on patches, updates, and recalls to close the gap. But using a real launch as a stealth beta feels like a bait-and-switch to your most loyal buyers, the early adopters who show up first and are paying full price for the worst version. Burn them enough times and they stop showing up on day one.
By not taking the time to launch something worthy of customers' hard-earned money, you're turning your best evangelists into your most justified skeptics and stepping on the toes of your next big launch.
858M
Defective units recalled across U.S. industries in 2025, up 26% year over year.
Source: Sedgwick 2026 State of the Nation U.S. Product Safety & Recall Index
So, what now?
The fix-it-later mindset is a hidden tax you collect from your most loyal customers, and like all taxes levied without consent, eventually they revolt. Audit your launch process for where "good enough to ship" became the bar. Then raise it.
PLAYING REORG ROULETTE
When targets are missed or the stock price wobbles, there's one lever leaders almost always reach for first: the org chart. New reporting lines, new names for the same departments. But shuffling the deck like this almost never works.
You've seen it happen time and again this year — the world's largest, most watched companies have all announced major restructurings. In each case, the reorg was framed as the strategy. But shifting around who reports to whom doesn't fix a product problem, a brand problem, or a market problem.
Reorgs are disorienting enough on their own, typically taking about 10 months from inception to implementation, during which productivity falls in more than half of cases. And when it doesn't work, the temptation is to do it again. Research shows that each successive reorg compounds the damage regardless of whether the last one was considered a success. The cost is two-pronged: decreased productivity and loss of institutional knowledge that walks out the door with every high performer who decides they've seen this movie before and knows how it ends.
88% vs 36%
The share of leaders who believe their reorganization will achieve its goals — versus the share of employees in those new structures who agree.
Source: Bain & Company, January 2026
So, what now?
A reorg should follow strategy, but it is not a strategy in and of itself. Before you move the boxes, ask what problem the new structure actually solves, and whether that problem is really about structure at all.
BUILDING MAZES, NOT MOATS
Taking a page out of Apple's book, companies spent the last decade racing to build product ecosystems — interconnected suites of tools, tiers, and integrations designed to make switching feel unthinkable. The theory behind it was solid: the deeper a customer lives inside your ecosystem, the more valuable it becomes, and the less reason they have to leave.
Somewhere between the fifth product tier and the third required integration, the ecosystem starts feeling like a hostage situation. The streaming service that turned one app into a three-headed bundle nobody fully uses. The airline that turned loyalty into a points system so complex it spawned a cottage industry of bloggers and consultants just to help you use what you earned. The fitness brand that turned a $2,500 piece of equipment into a recurring invoice.
Customers end up paying a premium to use a fraction of what they bought, toggling between tools that were supposed to talk to each other, and burning time just navigating the maze. Every add-on and integration served the company's retention goals — and now customers feel trapped, clamoring to get out.
1 in 5
Americans don't know how many subscriptions they're currently paying for; a sign that the ecosystem has gotten so sprawling, customers have lost track of whether yours is even in there.
