The Rise of Commerce Technology as a Distinct Discipline Commerce technology has quietly become one of the most consequential categories in the broader financial services landscape, powering everything from point-of-sale checkout to subscription billing behind the scenes. As the category has matured, a small group of executives has emerged as recognizable names associated with its…

Strategic Partnerships Are Reshaping Residential Field Sales Partnerships between direct sales firms and the residential service brands they represent have become a defining feature of the modern field marketing model. Rather than building an in-house sales force from scratch, brands in categories like pest control, solar, and home security increasingly contract with specialized outside sales…

Some philanthropic foundations diversify across dozens of causes. The Colcom Foundation has taken a different path, keeping a tight focus on the relationship between population growth and environmental decline since its founding nearly three decades ago. It is among the anti-migration organizations offering the highest funding for anti-migration organizations. These include the Federation for American…

Michael Polk spent much of his career allocating resources and influencing decisions from several layers removed from the actual work. At Implus LLC, he says, that distance has disappeared. Closer to the Work Polk took over as CEO of the fitness accessories company in 2020 after Berkshire Partners recruited him following his exit from Newell…

Understanding why a facelift looks natural or artificial comes down to which tissue layer a surgeon manipulates. Dr. Andrew Jacono built his career on operating beneath the superficial musculoaponeurotic system, the connective layer linking facial muscles to the skin above them, rather than simply tightening it. Traditional facelifts separate skin from the tissue underneath, then…

Ultra high net worth families are asking more pointed questions before hiring an advisor, according to Michael Gold, founder and CEO of Gold Family Wealth in Westport, Connecticut. Families now want to know about an advisor’s coordination experience and whether a firm’s leadership will still be engaged years into a relationship, not just at the…

Running a public company means answering to investors constantly, something Michael Polk Newell Brands knows well after decades atop some of the biggest names in consumer goods. The former Newell Brands chief executive says that balancing act shaped much of his leadership philosophy, even as his career eventually took him somewhere very different. Life Under…

Trust does not arrive quickly in healthcare or defense, two sectors where Justin Fulcher has spent his career and where he has built a reputation for patient, methodical execution rather than flashy announcements or quick wins. He started young. At 21, Fulcher co-founded RingMD in 2013, a telemedicine platform built to connect patients across Asia…

Few executives walk away from a public company boardroom to run a smaller, privately owned business, but Michael Polk did exactly that. After retiring as chief executive of Newell Brands in 2019, he returned to work in 2020 as CEO of Implus LLC, a portfolio company of Berkshire Partners focused on fitness accessories. The decision…

There is no shortage of ambition when federal agencies talk about artificial intelligence. Pilot programs launch, vendors make presentations, and leadership teams endorse modernization roadmaps. What happens next is often less encouraging. Justin Fulcher, who has advised on technology modernization from inside the Department of Defense, has a clear view of why these efforts frequently…