In January 2025, Fortune Brands Innovations announced it was moving its company's portfolio from individual offices across the country to one central headquarters outside Chicago, which meant hundreds of employees would need to relocate, or else lose their jobs.
"Increased in-person collaboration across a core part of our merchandising team will help us reinforce our merchandising authority, unlocking greater creativity and enabling us to move faster to deliver on our strategy."
Our rental property ambition was based on a very different financial environment: one with more stable investment returns, lower borrowing costs and more affordable construction costs. The current climate, higher interest rates, inflationary pressures and a more cautious property market, means the model no longer meets our investment criteria.
Xu credited the "world-class business environment" that local officials have built and the region's "complete industrial ecosystem" as a reason that companies like his have thrived. For Shein, local support has helped the firm grow to support more than 600,000 jobs in the area, Xu said.
D'Amaro, 54, has been serving as chairman of Disney's theme parks and experiences division, the unit that generates the majority of the company's operating income through its parks, cruises, and consumer products. He will succeed longtime CEO Bob Iger, who returned to the role in 2022 after previously leading Disney from 2005 to 2020. The move caps a multiyear succession process closely watched by Wall Street, Hollywood, and fans of the company around the world.
The biotechnology company Thermo Fisher Scientific is closing its Franklin facility, impacting up to 80 workers, the company said. In a statement to Boston.com, Thermo Fisher said it is closing its chemical analysis facility by the end of 2026. Most of the work will move to other U.S. facilities, as the company adjusts operations to meet current customer demand. The company said impacted workers will receive job transition support, with many employees relocating to other Massachusetts-based facilities.
Campbell joined the hedge fund in 2015 and held a strategy role throughout his entire career at Millennium, joining the firm when it managed $27 billion in assets and leaving when it had more than $83 billion. A person close to the manager described his role as working on various projects related to the organization's priorities at any given time.
The acquisition marks a dramatic strategic shift for Netflix, which has never made a deal of this scope. The streaming pioneer grew to become Hollywood's most valuable company, without the benefit of a library or studio, by licensing programs from others and then expanding into original content. With the purchase, Netflix becomes owner of the HBO network, along with its library of hit shows like The Sopranos and TheWhite Lotus.
The logic holds that when a company has a shareholder-unfriendly component of its portfolio - e.g. the business in question is cyclical, or it is low-growth or low margin - the company should diversify to make that business less-shareholder unfriendly. I take on the fallacy in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece entitled Diversification Can't Disappear a Strategy Problem: It Just Creates a Different Problem. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here.
Professional services-lawyers, accountants, management consultants like myself-the ones who actually process, analyze, and deal with a lot of data, those are the skills that can be replaced by AI and agentic AI," said Anne Lim O'Brien, vice chair, partner, and global co-leader of the consumer products sector at executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles.
Innovation hubs were once the darlings of corporate strategy, promising to future-proof businesses and spark breakthrough ideas. But two decades in, the cracks are showing. Too many hubs have struggled to prove their worth, and some have quietly shut down altogether. In reality, these costly spaces never lived up to the hype-and the future lies elsewhere. Rather than investing in shiny new labs, organizations should be cultivating innovation communities: networks of people, inside and outside the company, who collaborate around shared challenges and opportunities.
From my view, Verizon has struggled to articulate a clear strategy around market positioning, branding, and pricing, sticking too long to messaging that produced success when it was clearly the best network in the industry.
