Chief Executive Magazine

The AI buildout has made data centers one of the most sought-after asset classes in the world, and one of the trickiest to underwrite. Demand for power and high-density computing is outrunning what existing facilities were designed to support, with grid constraints and rising costs making well-located, upgradeable sites more valuable by the month. Hundreds of billions of dollars are moving toward new capacity.

Every CEO understands formal authority. It comes with the position. You can set strategy, allocate capital, restructure an organization, promote talent and make difficult decisions that affect thousands of employees. Formal authority allows leaders to move organizations forward. But it doesn’t necessarily inspire people to follow. Throughout more than 35 years of coaching CEOs and executive leadership teams, I’ve noticed a striking pattern. Some leaders walk into a room and immediately create trust.

The new 50 percent duties President Trump dropped on Canada garnered enormous press coverage since they took effect August 22. But while they hit roughly $20 billion a year in Canadian goods, it is worth keeping things in perspective: They only cover about 5 percent of what Canada ships us: cement, furniture, plywood, textiles and apparel, seeds, refrigeration equipment, cosmetics, jewelry, hockey sticks, fishing rods, swimming pools, wigs. The bigger worry is where things go from here.

This summer, wildfires have forced evacuations across France, Spain, Germany, the UK, Croatia and Greece. More than a third of a million fled their homes in Spain and France alone, and prompted what was likely France’s largest peacetime evacuation, with an elevated fire risk reaching as far east as Romania, Hungary and the Balkans. While death tolls are lower due to predictive technologies and warning systems, the chances are that some of your employees have been affected.

Andy Harris President of North American Strategies & Managing Director, STS Capital

Was anyone else shocked by the death of Dolly Parton this week? It just felt way too sudden. For those of us who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, Parton was a near-ubiquitous part of American culture for our whole lives, timeless, un-aging. Parton just was, and you somehow thought she always would be.

For manufacturing developer Charles Carey, expanding domestic production serves a mission beyond growth. Carey is the founder of CIG Companies, which develops and finances renewable energy initiatives, and the leader behind solar manufacturer U.S. Modules. “We are building domestic capability that supports American energy independence, strengthens infrastructure and creates meaningful U.S. jobs,” he says.

We frequently hear about the value of authenticity in leaders. New leaders are advised to “just be yourself,” “don’t ever change,” and “be who you are.” In a culture where so many of our interactions are on social media, where influencers are filtering, looksmaxxing and presenting heavily-curated experiences, and where nearly everybody has asked “is this AI, or real?” it’s understandable that we’re concerned about being real and authentic.

For most of modern business history, the relationship between company executives and their customers has been fundamentally transactional. Organizations designed products, customers purchased them and service functions existed primarily to resolve problems that arose after the purchase. Value flowed in one direction: from company to consumer. Even as digital transformation improved speed and convenience, the underlying dynamic remained largely unchanged.

Your go-to-market strategy may be working against you. Not because your product is wrong, or your team is underperforming, but because the model itself is outdated. Marketing builds awareness. Sales closes accounts. Field teams execute in-market. Each hand-off happens in sequence, and somewhere in the middle, the customer loses the thread. For challenger and mid-market brands, that gap is expensive.