The four winners, Kate H. of Vermont, Yasmine B. of California, DeJanae P. of Texas and Harleen C. of New York, were selected from more than 6,000 applicants. Each receives a $45,000 grant and a full year of small business services from H&R Block experts. Beyond the four recipients, every applicant has been offered a $1,000 voucher toward H&R Block small business services, worth more than $6.3 million in total.

Kate H. founded BirdieBlue, which upcycles retired ski and snowboard gear into bags and accessories. Yasmine B. founded Hayati Goods, a modern Arabic food brand built around Palestinian za’atar spice blends. DeJanae P. founded Dotted, offering non-toxic feminine care products and a reproductive health app. Harleen C. founded Harleen Kauer, a size-inclusive, ethically produced Indo-Western fashion brand.

The women founders AI trust line

The survey numbers explain the line. 79% of the founders are already using or testing AI, and 77% expect it to help their business. But trust stops at the money. Founders said they trust AI for customer-facing tasks, not for financial projects, and just 7% trust AI for payroll. The survey was collected by Hello Alice from the programme’s applicants, so it reflects this group of founders rather than a random sample of all women founders.

That caution makes sense once you see how these founders started. 54% launched entirely on their own, with no mentor and no support network. Only 12% had a formal mentor when launching. One in five had no network of other entrepreneurs at all, and 15% did not know how to find a mentor. The gap is structural, not a lack of desire.

Capital is the sharpest edge. 79% want access to capital and funding connections, the single most requested form of support, and 62% want access to financial experts such as tax professionals and bookkeepers. Women receive just 2% of global venture funding, according to the World Economic Forum, cited in the release. Two thirds of the founders reported prior-year revenue under $100,000, and one third are pre-revenue or earning less than $25,000, even as 64% say their business is growing.

The AI industry keeps selling a future where software runs the whole business, and calls human oversight friction. These founders call it the business. When you have built with almost no support, you do not hand the vault keys to a chatbot. Every fully automated pitch that removes the human from money decisions is solving a problem founders do not have.

“Female small-business owners are growing, but too many are doing it without the capital, mentorship, and financial expertise they need to truly thrive,” said John Thompson, vice president of financial services and small business at H&R Block. “We go beyond funding, by providing the human support and professional services our research shows they want.”

What founders should do

Use AI to buy back hours. Keep a human in every money decision. And invest in one real mentor relationship before the next tool subscription. That order matters: tools first, trust second, and never the other way round.

The founders who survive will not be the ones with the most automation. They will be the ones who know exactly what to automate and what never to hand over. The announcement lands during National Women’s Small Business Month, and its lesson lasts longer than the month: AI is a tool, not a CFO.

Read more in our Women Founders & Leaders hub, and in related CEO Medium stories: Elizabeth Iorns Is Bringing Human Medicine to Dogs and Cats and Scaling a Product-Based Business Just Got Easier with The Product Boss.

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Start with the gap itself, because the numbers are stark. The US Food and Drug Administration approves fewer than 10 new drugs each year for companion animals. For people, the figure is more than 50. Yet dogs and cats develop many of the same diseases as their owners. Often, the same underlying biology drives them: cancers, heart disease, immune disorders and neurological conditions. When a pet gets sick today, veterinarians routinely reach for human medicines. They use them off-label. They do so without dosing or safety data for the species in front of them. The treatment exists. The evidence package does not. And nobody has owned the job of creating it.

A licensing model built on other people’s research

Familiar Therapeutics exists to own exactly that job. Elizabeth Iorns co-founded the company as chief executive. Dan Knox co-founded it as chief operating officer. The company licenses the veterinary rights to drugs with years of human research behind them. Then it leads the clinical development and manufacturing work. That work wins FDA approval for dogs and cats. Each programme starts partway down the road. As a result, the company believes it can move significantly faster than rivals. A new animal drug typically takes seven to ten years from scratch.

The lead programmes target conditions where owners currently have few real options. They include hemangiosarcoma, an aggressive cancer common in dogs. They also cover intervertebral disc disease. In addition, they cover respiratory disorders in flat-faced breeds and immune-mediated diseases. The seed money is earmarked for moving those lead programmes into clinical studies. It will also advance the wider pipeline, according to the company’s launch release.

What separates this launch from most seed announcements is how much has already happened. In its first five months, Familiar has built 13 programmes. They span oncology, neurology, cardiology, respiratory disease and immunology. It has signed several licensing agreements with pharmaceutical and biotech partners. It has also opened two investigational new animal drug files. Those files sit with the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine. In addition, it has filed a provisional patent. Its first clinical study is set to open this autumn. The University of Illinois Veterinary Teaching Hospital will host it. Most companies announce a seed round with a slide deck. In contrast, this one announced it with a pipeline, regulatory files and a teaching hospital.

The founder has done the unglamorous part before

Iorns is a cancer biologist by training, with a PhD in cancer biology. She ran into a version of this problem from the other side. As a young researcher, she struggled to find collaborators and suppliers. So in 2011, she co-founded Science Exchange with Knox. Science Exchange is a marketplace that let scientists outsource experiments to verified labs. The company went through Y Combinator. It also raised from investors including Union Square Ventures and Index Ventures. Iorns then led it through its acquisition in 2024. Knox ran operations there. In effect, Familiar is the same founding team. It points the same skill at a new market. It is building the trusted intermediary layer in a fragmented, specialist industry. In that industry, the science is strong and the infrastructure is weak.

Her framing of the mission is clinical rather than sentimental. “Our goal is to give vets proven, FDA-approved treatments that change the course of serious diseases in dogs and cats, where today they often have very few options,” Iorns said at the launch. Note what that sentence promises. It does not promise wellness apps or diagnostics dashboards. Instead, it promises approved drugs that change outcomes. It is the most regulated, slowest and most defensible corner of the pet economy. She chose it deliberately.

What the Familiar Therapeutics funding has to prove

None of this makes the next stage easy, and the risks are specific. Licensing cuts both ways. Familiar’s pipeline depends on pharmaceutical partners. Those partners must keep handing over veterinary rights to their compounds. It also depends on terms a seed-stage company can afford. Regulatory files are not approvals. The FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine will still require species-specific safety and efficacy data. It requires that data for every programme. Thirteen programmes in five months is an impressive rate of deal-making. However, it also spreads a small team across five therapeutic areas. That spread comes before any single programme has read out clinical results. The discipline question is whether the company sequences ruthlessly. The alternative is trying to run everything at once.

The market timing question

There is also a market timing question. Pet owners have shown, repeatedly, that they will pay for treatments. Those treatments extend a dog’s or cat’s life. Meanwhile, human drug pipelines keep producing compounds whose veterinary rights sit unused. Familiar’s bet is that the arbitrage between those two facts is wide enough to build a company on. The $5 million buys the first clinical studies. Those studies are the evidence that will make or break the next raise.

For founders, the transferable lesson is about second acts. Iorns and Knox did not chase a trend after their exit. Instead, they recycled a decade of pattern recognition. That pattern recognition covers how science actually gets bought, sold and delivered. Then they applied it to an adjacent market where the same friction existed. We make a related point in our piece on how much a founder should pay themselves in year one. Early-stage success usually comes from discipline about the unglamorous fundamentals, not from novelty. Familiar’s founders have swapped novelty for leverage. They are profiled alongside other operators in our Women Founders & Leaders hub.

The verdict on this seed round will not come from the announcement. It will come when the first Familiar study reads out at the University of Illinois. It will also come when the first licensed compound clears the FDA. That compound will clear it for a species it was never originally designed for. If that happens even once, the model stops being a curiosity. Instead, it becomes a template: a standing bridge between human medicine and the animals. Those animals share our homes and, increasingly, our diseases.

Photo: Nenad Stojkovic, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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CSL was, until recently, Australia’s most valuable listed company and a fixture in global growth portfolios. The past year stripped that status away. A run of earnings and revenue downgrades, followed by a plan to cut 3,000 jobs, triggered selloffs. As a result, those selloffs wiped billions of dollars from its market value. Former chief executive Paul McKenzie departed abruptly in February amid investor frustration over the falling share price. Gordon Naylor, a board member, has run the company on an interim basis ever since.

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The turnaround is already priced in

Here is the complication for any incoming chief executive: the recovery has started without her. CSL has forecast growth for fiscal 2027. In addition, its shares have more than doubled from the decade low they hit in June. Investors have, in effect, already paid for a turnaround that Waterhouse now has to deliver. If momentum stalls, she owns the disappointment anyway. The new leader inherits the expectations created by the rebound. Instead, she does not inherit the sympathy created by the fall.

Chair Brian McNamee set out the brief in February, when the search began. The next chief executive, he said, would need “the ability to continue the momentum of our commercial performance, renew our pipeline and simplify our operations without losing the science and purpose that built this great company.” Announcing the appointment, he argued Waterhouse has done each of those things more than once. “Deborah is an outstanding global leader with a proven ability to grow complex businesses,” he said. “The Board’s decision to appoint Deborah was unanimous.”

The CSL CEO Deborah Waterhouse record: thirty years at GSK

Waterhouse is no turnaround tourist. She joined GSK in 1996 and has spent three decades inside large, complicated pharma businesses. She ran GSK in Australia and New Zealand from 2008 to 2012. Then she ran its US vaccines business, then its US primary care business. She took the top job at ViiV Healthcare in 2017. GSK owns a majority of ViiV, with Shionogi as a shareholder. It is the world’s leading specialist HIV company. It recorded sales of £7.7 billion in GSK’s 2025 financial year. Alongside ViiV, she serves as president of GSK Global Health.

The ViiV tenure is the core of her case. HIV treatment is a market where standing still means losing. Older daily pills give way to long-acting medicines. Meanwhile, rivals circle every patent. McNamee credited her with renewing the franchise “by driving the development and commercialisation of the next generation of medicines to support patients.” In other words, she has already done the exact job CSL needs done. In practice, that job is to keep a mature, profitable drug business growing. It must grow while the business builds its next generation of products underneath it. She also brings board experience outside pharma. From 2019 to 2025, she was a non-executive director of Schroders. At Reckitt, she has been a non-executive director since July 2026.

A £1.5 million salary and a £7.71 million buyout

CSL disclosed the full contract. The numbers show how expensive it is to extract a sitting chief executive from a rival. Waterhouse will earn a base salary of £1.5 million a year. CSL sets her short-term incentive at 120 per cent of salary at target. The maximum is 240 per cent. Her long-term incentive starts at 250 per cent of salary at target, rising to 500 per cent. On top of that, CSL will hand her restricted stock units worth £7.71 million. Indeed, those units replace the GSK awards she forfeits by leaving. CSL will also hand her a further £1.65 million in performance shares. In short, those shares bridge the gap between her old and new incentive cycles.

The contract’s fine print

Two details in the fine print deserve attention. First, she will stay based in the United Kingdom. She will spend significant time in Australia, the United States and other major markets. A chief executive will run a Melbourne institution. In contrast, her home is on the other side of the world. The board is betting that it can schedule presence. Second, her contract bars her from any involvement in CSL’s Seqirus vaccines business until 31 March 2027. In fact, that bar is a legacy of her years competing against it at GSK. For her first two months in the job, one of CSL’s three divisions is formally off limits. Indeed, it is off limits to its own chief executive.

Waterhouse, for her part, leaned on an old connection to the city. “CSL is one of the great companies in our industry, and I saw what it means to Australia when I lived and worked in Melbourne,” she said. “The foundations are strong. My job is to continue the momentum and evolve the path into reliable growth for patients and shareholders.”

What this appointment says about boards in 2026

Read the pattern and a shift in boardroom taste becomes visible. When a share price collapses, boards no longer reach for a visionary with a transformation slogan. They reach for an operator who has run a comparable P&L, in a comparable regulatory regime, for a long time. Waterhouse’s entire career has been spent inside businesses that sell complex medicines to sophisticated buyers under heavy regulation. In short, there is no learning curve in this appointment, and that is precisely the point.

It is the mirror image of the decision we covered in the Lindt board story this week. In that decision, directors removed a chief executive and reached back for a predecessor. Boards on both sides of the world are making the same calculation. In a year of downgrades and activist pressure, familiarity beats novelty. The Lindt board wanted a known pair of hands from inside the building. The CSL board wanted a known pair of hands from inside the industry.

Why this appointment matters for women

For women watching the top of the corporate ladder, the appointment matters for a structural reason. Waterhouse did not get the job through a diversity initiative headline. She got it because she had spent nine years running a £7.7 billion business. Ultimately, that business maps almost exactly onto the vacancy. The pipeline argument has always been that women reach these roles when they are given the big operating jobs first. Her career is that argument, documented. More profiles like hers sit in our Women Founders & Leaders hub. The pattern across them is consistent. The route runs through revenue responsibility, held for years.

The tests arrive quickly. Seqirus returns to her remit at the end of March. The fiscal 2027 growth forecast has to be met, not managed down. And the simplification programme she inherits has to land. In particular, it includes those 3,000 job cuts. It has to land without hollowing out the science the board wants to protect. “The foundations are strong,” she said. By this time next year, investors will grade that sentence.

Photo: Sgroey, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Start with what is known. Wilson, 71, founded Lululemon in Vancouver in 1998. He and Shannon “Summer” Wilson married in 2002. They announced their separation on 6 September 2026, after a family-law proceeding was filed in BC’s Supreme Court in April. Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the matter, reports the couple has no prenuptial agreement. The proceedings are not public, so nobody outside the courtroom knows the split. What is public is the size of the fortune a judge may now reshape: roughly $6.1 billion, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The numbers a courtroom now holds

Wilson and connected entities hold 9.9 million Lululemon shares, about 8.7 per cent of the company, according to a May 2026 securities filing reported by Inc. At September prices that block was worth just under $1 billion, the largest stake any individual holds. Nor is it the whole fortune. As the Wall Street Journal set out, Wilson also owns about 17 per cent of Amer Sports, the group behind Arc’teryx, Salomon and Wilson, valued at roughly $2.8 billion.

The stock has since slipped to just under $98, so read the billion-dollar figure as September’s number. In September it fell 17.4 per cent in a single day, closing at $100.61, roughly 80 per cent below its December 2023 high of $511.29, after the third sales forecast cut of 2026. A shrinking company, a restless founder and a sealed courtroom now act on the same block of shares.

Summer Wilson built the product, not just the marriage

The meme version casts Summer Wilson as a beneficiary. The record says otherwise. She was among Lululemon’s earliest employees and its founding lead designer, the person behind the soft, technical fabrics that turned a Vancouver yoga label into a global brand, and Wilson himself has credited her with a key role in building it. She also holds roughly 1.1 million shares directly, worth around $100 million on September’s reporting. Whatever a court awards her, she enters the proceedings as a founding operator with her own shareholding, not a footnote to someone else’s career.

That distinction matters beyond one family. Women who build companies alongside founders are routinely written out of the cap table story, then written back in as dependants when a marriage ends. Our Women Founders & Leaders hub is full of the other version: operators who were there from the first sketch. The founders behind The Product Boss built a seven-figure company teaching product businesses to scale, and nobody calls their work a marital asset. Summer Wilson’s design work deserves the same plain description: she helped make the product that made the fortune.

Why the Chip Wilson divorce is a governance problem

Four months earlier, Wilson was fighting a very different paperwork battle, and winning it. In May 2026 he ended a public proxy fight through a cooperation agreement that put two of his nominees, former ESPN marketing chief Laura Gentile and former On co-chief executive Marc Maurer, onto the board, in exchange for a standstill and non-disparagement commitment lasting about 18 months. The truce was designed to give incoming chief executive Heidi O’Neill, who took office on 8 September, a clear run at a turnaround.

Now set that truce beside the divorce. The voting bloc at the centre of the settlement is the same bloc a family court may divide, transfer or force into a buyout. A transfer fragments voting control. A buyout funded by share sales pressures a stock already down 80 per cent from its peak. Either way, a ruling about a marriage becomes a fact every shareholder has to price. Family law does not usually move markets. When the founder skipped his paperwork, it can.

The BC rule, stated carefully

Let us state the BC rule precisely, because the pub version gets it wrong. Under British Columbia’s Family Law Act, property a spouse owned before the relationship is generally excluded property: the value it had at the start stays with its owner. What the law shares is the growth. As BC family lawyers at Meridian Law Group explain, the increase in value of that excluded property during the relationship becomes family property, and family property is presumptively split equally.

That is not “half of everything”: the pre-marriage interest itself is not handed over. But look at the timeline. The couple married in 2002, four years after founding and five years before the 2007 listing. Almost all of the growth, the listing, the global expansion, the peak valuation, happened inside the marriage, so the exposed share of the fortune is very large. And settlement, as lawyers quoted by Inc. note, need not move any shares: a cash payment or an offset against other assets could do it, at the cost of finding a great deal of cash.

The founder paperwork checklist

A prenup is not a prediction that a marriage will fail. It is the same hygiene as a buy-sell agreement or key person insurance, a point wealth advisers made repeatedly as this story resurfaced. You frame it, as one adviser put it, as protecting the business, the employees and the partners counting on continuity. Founders who would never raise money without a term sheet routinely skip it. This case shows the bill.

So, the checklist this story argues for:

Decide ownership before the wedding, not after the filing. A prenup signed when the company is worth little is a calm conversation. A postnup signed after the growth is a negotiation under pressure, though it remains an option for couples already married, each with independent lawyers.

Document what you owned on day one. Keep a clean record of pre-marriage holdings and get independent valuations at intervals, so the excluded value is provable decades later.

Keep business money and household money apart. Commingling is how separate property quietly turns marital, and clean books are the whole defence.

Align the corporate documents. Transfer restrictions, spousal consent provisions and the estate plan should tell the same story as the marital agreement, so no settlement ambushes the cap table.

Credit both builders from the start. If a spouse is designing the product, their name belongs on the share register while the company is being built, not in a court submission twenty-five years later.

Wilson spent 2026 proving how much leverage careful paperwork gives a founder. He won board seats with it. The one document he never signed is now the one that counts.

Photo: Phillip Pessar, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Inside the Phia cookie stuffing findings

Startup Fortune described Bloomberg’s investigation in detail. Researchers tested Phia’s browser extension across more than 50 retail sites. They found a consistent pattern. When a shopper reached checkout, a hidden tab would open. It inserted Phia’s referral code. That code replaced the code of the publisher that had actually sent the shopper there. One example involved a Nordstrom link from a Wirecutter review. There, the referring publisher lost its commission without any visible action by the shopper.

Independent affiliate researcher Ben Edelman spoke to Bloomberg. He said a commission requires a real user making a real click. The rules do not permit fake, simulated, imaginary, or hypothetical clicks. Capital One Shopping ran its own tests. It independently corroborated Bloomberg’s findings. Edelman later noted the behavior appeared concentrated in Phia’s iOS Safari extension. That area of the ecosystem historically gets less scrutiny.

The founders reportedly knew for months

The timeline turned a fixable bug into a credibility problem. Bloomberg first contacted Phia on July 7. A spokesperson said the company had learned of the issue within the last 24 hours. The spokesperson called the behavior “misattributions” in the codebase. They said the team had fixed it overnight.

But Bloomberg’s August 11 follow-up told a different story. TechCrunch reported on it. The report cited leaked Slack messages. They indicated Gates and Kianni had known about the cookie stuffing since December. By June, the practice had grown sharply. It covered an estimated 51 percent of the merchandise value Phia claimed credit for each month. Once the team disabled the features, daily revenue collapsed. It fell from roughly $80,000 to between $10,000 and $28,000. Phia has disputed some of Bloomberg’s claims. The company said the revenue drop also reflected disabling most monetization, not just the cookie stuffing. It said it is reversing fraudulent transactions and has hired a compliance head.

The fallout keeps spreading

Impact.com suspended Phia’s account after reviewing the behavior. Impact.com is the affiliate platform used by e-commerce brands. That matters. As Startup Fortune’s account put it, affiliate commissions were Phia’s business model. Separately, Inc. reported on FTC complaints. The Federal Trade Commission had been fielding consumer complaints about Phia’s undisclosed advertising since January. That was months before Bloomberg’s reporting. Inc. based its story on records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

This is also the Honey pattern repeating. PayPal’s Honey faced the same cookie stuffing accusations from the same researcher. Honey now faces a class action lawsuit over it. The pattern is not one bad actor. It is a business model built on invisible checkout behavior. Nobody inside the company flags it, because the numbers look great.

The real scandal is the diligence nobody did

Phia raised $43.5 million in total. Kleiner Perkins led an $8 million seed round in September 2025. Notable Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins then led a $35.5 million Series A in May 2026. People reported the funding news. The angel list reads like an awards show. It includes Sydney Sweeney, Hailey Bieber, Paris Hilton, and Priyanka Chopra Jonas. It also includes Khloé Kardashian, Kris Jenner, Sara Blakely, and Sheryl Sandberg. More than 30 names appear in total.

Startup Fortune’s core criticism should worry every founder reading this. A shopping app’s revenue mechanics are knowable. Investors should have examined how Phia earned its affiliate revenue alongside its AI claims. When the founder is a household name and the angels are household names, scrutiny relaxes. That happens exactly when scrutiny should tighten. Social proof replaced diligence. Now the market is pricing the difference.

What founders should take from this

Audit your own growth mechanics before someone else does. If a revenue line depends on behavior a user would object to, that is not a growth hack. It is a liability on a timer. Publish how your affiliate or referral revenue actually works. Put a second pair of eyes on any code that touches checkout. A researcher, a journalist, or your own affiliate platform will audit your revenue mechanics eventually. The only question is whether you find the problem first.

Phia fixed the code when a reporter called. A simpler question will follow the founders longer than the code. Who should have noticed before the reporter did?

For more on how startups handle money and scrutiny, explore our related coverage. See our Entrepreneurship & Startups hub. Also read how investor scrutiny caught up with Polsia AI’s $30M raise and the pricing mistakes first-time founders make.

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Bradley was one of a handful of directors at the Institute, the firm’s well-known business and economics research arm. After a conduct review, he lost that leadership role and some internal committee posts. He remains a senior partner. Bloomberg reported the removal on October 12, quoting McKinsey spokesman Taylor Burns: “His public comments fell well short of the standards we expect at our firm.”

What happened in the McKinsey glass cliff controversy

The fuse was a LinkedIn exchange last month. Julia Carreon, a former Citigroup and Wells Fargo executive, had published Walking on Broken Glass: Navigating the Aftermath of the Glass Ceiling in September with co-author Shannon Nutter. When a friend’s post highlighted the book’s discussion of the glass cliff, Bradley showed up in the comments and questioned whether the concept exists at all. Bloomberg reported that he called it “a very convenient way to always be a victim in the rain.”

Carreon told Fast Company she first assumed he was joking. “I wasn’t understanding that he didn’t know that the glass cliff was a thing,” she said. “It finally hit me in real time that he thought we made it up for our book.”

The comments are gone. McKinsey first distanced itself from the exchange. Then came the conduct review, and on Sunday the demotion.

It was not about the opinion. It was about the product.

Here is the part most coverage misses. McKinsey has co-published the Women in the Workplace study with Sheryl Sandberg’s LeanIn for more than a decade. It is the most-cited corporate study on gender in business, and it is a McKinsey product. A director of the firm’s own research institute publicly calling the glass cliff made up is not an HR problem. It is a trust problem. He made the product look fake.

That is why the punishment landed where it did. McKinsey did not fire Bradley. He is still a senior partner, still employed, still well paid. It took away the leadership titles, the roles that let him speak for the firm’s authority. The firm was protecting the one thing it actually sells: the belief that McKinsey knows what it is talking about.

This matters because the easy take is wrong. McKinsey did not punish Bradley for holding a different view. It punished him for torching his employer’s products in public. If you sell authority on a topic for a decade and your own director says the topic is invented, clients notice. That is brand damage, not free speech.

The fair objection, and why it still misses

To be fair to Bradley, questioning research is how research gets better, and academics genuinely debate the glass cliff literature. A world where the only acceptable public view is support would be its own kind of rot. The strongest case for him: a senior researcher pushing back on a popular theory is exactly what serious people are supposed to do.

But there is a line between debating a theory and mocking it in a book author’s comment thread, and Bradley crossed it. Peer review is the right place. A LinkedIn pile-on under a first-time author’s book post is not. The place is the message, and the message was disrespect. McKinsey’s clients pay for judgment. Public disrespect is the opposite of judgment, and it is why leadership accountability keeps becoming the story.

The founder lesson: check your own team

This is the part founders should sit with. Every company has a gap between what it claims and what its people say in public. Most of the time the gap is small and nobody looks. McKinsey’s gap became a Bloomberg headline because the person widening it ran the research arm.

Ask the uncomfortable question now, before the incident: which of your people are quietly working against what your company claims to stand for, in public, right now? The engineer who tweets that your security is a joke. The salesperson whose podcast goes against your pricing page. The co-founder whose hot takes travel further than your mission statement.

Then write the rule down before you need it. Decide in advance who can contradict a core position on social media, and what happens when they do. McKinsey clearly had no such rule ready, which is why it moved from distancing to a conduct review to a Sunday demotion. A policy written in calm weather beats a conduct review written in a storm.

And note what McKinsey protected first. Not the partner. The research. Your main product, the thing that built your name, deserves the same priority. If someone on your team is making it look fake, that is the fire to put out, whatever their title.

The bottom line

The glass cliff describes women taking the wheel of a company already heading for the ditch. Bradley’s demotion is the mirror image: a man who spent 27 years building the car, then told the world it has no brakes. McKinsey took his keys, but let him keep the car. Founders should take the warning and the method. Review the gap between your claims and your people’s public words, write the rule before the crisis, and protect the product first. The internet keeps receipts, and so do your clients.

Read more in our Leadership & Management hub.

Sources: Bloomberg via Moneyweb, Bloomberg via The Hindu BusinessLine, Fast Company, LinkedIn News

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Women in business are changing how companies grow in 2026. Female leaders are building strong teams, serving customers, and creating useful products. They are also challenging old ideas about who can lead.

Many women leaders combine clear goals with empathy. They listen to employees and act on useful feedback. As a result, teams can work with more trust and focus.

New rules for modern leadership

Successful leaders now value skills over old beliefs. They measure results, support flexible work, and make decisions with better data. In addition, they create paths for more women to enter management and starting businesses.

Women founders often solve problems that others overlook. They understand different customers and build products for wider communities. Their experience can also improve hiring, marketing, and service design.

Building open companies

Inclusion requires more than a statement. Leaders must set fair goals, review pay, and give employees access to mentors. They should also make promotion rules clear. These steps can help talented people advance.

What comes next

The future belongs to companies that welcome many views. Women in business leadership will continue to shape technology, finance, health, and consumer markets. Their progress can help create workplaces that are more creative, responsible, and strong.

For example, women entrepreneurs can grow faster when they share knowledge and build strong networks. Meanwhile, employers can support progress through training, flexible schedules, and clear reviews.

Read more leadership insights at CEO Medium and explore practical resources for open growth.

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This natural birth story follows a mother who chose a planned home birth at age 43. She wanted calm support, clear choices, and a safe experience.

Her labor moved quickly. With help from her care team, she stayed focused and comfortable through each stage.

Preparing for a home birth

Preparation began with health checks and thoughtful planning. She discussed risks, emergency options, and comfort measures with qualified professionals.

Her support team also prepared the home. They organized supplies, protected privacy, and kept communication clear.

Lessons from the experience

Every birth is different. The right plan depends on personal health, medical guidance, and access to trained care.

This story shows why informed choices matter. It also reminds families to ask questions and prepare for changes.

Read more leadership and life stories. See trusted maternal health information.

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Women entrepreneurs are building useful companies and creating new jobs in 2026. Their stories show how clear ideas and steady work can turn small projects into strong businesses.

Many founders begin with a skill or a local need. They test an offer, listen to customers, and improve it over time.

Business ideas that work

Service businesses can start with low costs. Consulting, design, home care, tutoring, and online support can meet steady demand.

Product businesses can also grow. Founders may sell focused products, digital downloads, or subscription services. A narrow audience makes it easier to explain the value.

Lessons from inspiring founders

Successful women entrepreneurs set clear goals and track progress. They ask for help, build useful networks, and keep learning from mistakes.

Growth does not need to happen all at once. Start with one customer problem, deliver a good solution, and reinvest carefully.

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Lucy strategizes with her clients to find insurance packages that meet their financial needs. Prior to her current role, she held prominent senior roles at CIBC, Hub Financial, yourCFO Advisory Group, Burgeonvest Insurance, and Burgeonvest Bick Securities Ltd. 

One area of Lucy’s expertise is disability insurance. She educates clients on how policies protect income in case of illness or injury. In this interview, Lucy shares her insights on why disability coverage is essential and how to understand available options.

Q: Why do Canadians tend to forget about disability insurance?

Lucy Lukic: A lot of people underestimate the possibility of a serious illness or injury impacting their ability to work. Many think that government programs or employer plans will cover them completely, but those really only provide partial income replacement or have strict limits. Younger adults and other people who are in good health tend to think that coverage isn’t needed yet, but actually, accidents and health conditions can happen to anybody. My goal is to change that perspective by teaching clients the importance of disability insurance as something that is essential, not an optional luxury. When people understand real-life risks, more Canadians can take the needed steps to protect their financial stability. 

Q: How has disability insurance changed recently? 

Lucy Lukic: Disability insurance used to be a niche add-on, but now it’s a central part of financial planning. More Canadians are now working as freelancers, small business owners, and juggling multiple income streams. Workplace plans don’t offer enough protection. Policies are now more flexible, and people can customize benefit amounts, durations, and cost-of-living adjustments. Mental health coverage has also become more important, with anxiety and depression counting as legitimate reasons for claims. Staying informed about these changes can help people make better choices for long-term security. 

Q: What should people look for when choosing a disability insurance plan?

Lucy Lukic: Review your monthly expenses. See how long you can sustain these expenses with no paycheck. Look at policy features like elimination periods, benefit periods, and check if benefits are indexed to inflation. I also encourage my clients to compare group insurance from employers with individual policies, because gaps in protection can exist. It’s also important to review definitions of disability, because some policies vary in how they determine eligibility. People can avoid surprises by asking the right questions and understanding the fine print. 

Q: What effect does mental health & chronic illness have on disability insurance now? 

Lucy Lukic: Insurers are noticing more claims linked to mental health and chronic conditions, but coverage still varies. Anxiety, depression, and burnout are legitimate reasons for benefits, and people should make sure their plan explicitly covers them. Chronic health problems like arthritis, diabetes, or back injuries are also typical causes of long-term disability claims. It’s not just sudden injuries that qualify for coverage. When people know this information, they can choose insurance plans that truly protect their income, no matter the condition that arises. 

Q: What is one tip you can give to people regarding disability insurance?

Lucy Lukic: Disability insurance doesn’t replace your paycheck. It helps protect your lifestyle, family, and long-term goals. I encourage people to view insurance as a safety net that lets them focus on recovery without financial stress. Also, starting coverage early can make a big difference in costs and eligibility. When clients know how policies work, they feel empowered to make the right decisions. Ultimately, having the proper insurance gives people peace of mind, which is invaluable in planning for the unexpected.

The post Interview with Hamilton-Based Insurance Professional Lucy Lukic on the Relevance of Disability Insurance appeared first on CEO Medium.