When the CEO Desk Turns Over: What John Ternus’s Rise Means for Work at Apple

In the quiet, well-tuned machinery of Apple, a new chapter of leadership planning is unfolding. With Tim Cook turning 65 and a string of senior departures in 2025 reshaping the executive bench, attention in Cupertino has swung back to a name familiar to many inside the company: John Ternus, the longtime hardware leader whose career has been built on the seams where engineering, operations and product meet.

More than a succession story: a workplace story

This is not only a CEO succession narrative; it is a workplace narrative about what continuity, craft and stewardship mean for tens of thousands of people who design, assemble and sell Apple products, and for the managers who make daily decisions about priorities, trade-offs and culture. The prospect of an orderly internal succession — someone who has spent decades at the company and who knows the rhythm of product cycles, supply lines and the engineering mindset — offers stability. Stability matters: it steadies teams, frames career pathways, and keeps the focus on getting the work done.

Who John Ternus is to the workforce

To employees, John Ternus represents a particular kind of leader. He is steeped in the engineering side of Apple: a background forged in hardware design, systems integration and the relentless attention to detail that marks Apple’s product teams. For engineers and designers, such a background signals a leader who understands trade-offs at the schematic level and the pressures of delivering physical products at scale. For operations and supply-chain colleagues, it signals someone comfortable with the cadence of global manufacturing and logistics.

What continuity would mean in practice

Continuity at the top can preserve core advantages:

• Product rhythm. Familiarity with Apple’s product cadence reduces the risk of disruption across hardware launches and platform updates.
• Cross-functional alignment. A leader who has operated across engineering, operations and product can keep the truce — and the collaboration — between these groups that modern devices demand.
• Talent retention. Internal promotion tends to reassure mid- and senior-level managers who see a path forward. That affects morale and the decision of top performers to stay or leave.

Challenges that accompany continuity

Yet continuity is not a panacea. The world Apple operates in is changing fast: services, artificial intelligence, regulatory pressure, and heightened expectations for sustainability and worker welfare demand different emphases from leadership. An internal successor from hardware roots must prove two things to a modern workforce:

• That they can extend their vision beyond silicon and chassis into software platforms, cloud services, and AI-driven user experiences.
• That they can translate the intense product-first culture into organizational practices that attract diverse talent, support hybrid work where it helps, and create managerial pathways that scale.

Signals for managers and employees

For managers inside Apple and for leaders elsewhere watching closely, the succession conversation is instructive. It highlights several actionable lessons about leading through transition.

• Build visible competence. Leaders who aspire to higher roles do not only accrue accomplishments; they make their work legible so that people across the company understand it. That means translating technical wins into organizational impact.
• Cultivate cross-disciplinary fluency. Modern companies reward leaders who speak both code and commerce, product and policy. The ability to bridge disciplines preserves momentum during leadership transitions.
• Prioritize mentorship and succession within teams. The best internal successions are the result of deliberate bench building, not chance. Investing in the next layer of leadership diminishes disruption when the top office changes hands.

Open questions that matter for work

The talk about a successor inevitably raises practical questions that affect day-to-day work at Apple. Will priorities shift toward services and AI in ways that reorder team structures? Will R&D budgets tilt differently? Will the post-Cook era revisit workplace policies — from return-to-office guidance to remote hiring — with new nuance? The answers will influence hiring pipelines, performance metrics and how teams set quarterly goals.

Boardroom dynamics, seen from the shop floor

The board’s decision will be watched not only by investors but by managers and employees. A board that endorses internal promotion sends one message: continuity, predictability and respect for institutional knowledge. A board that chooses an external hand signals a readiness to disrupt and to rewire priorities quickly. For the workforce, each path has trade-offs: routine and clarity versus shake-ups that create new opportunities (and risks).

Why this moment is different

Succession is routine in large companies, but Apple’s combination of scale, cultural cachet and product secrecy makes it consequential in a distinct way. The company is more than an employer; for many people who work there it is a career-defining institution. The departure of senior leaders in 2025 has accelerated the pace of speculation, but it has also revealed the strength of Apple’s bench: a set of technical leaders and operators who have been tested in product cycles, supply shocks and geopolitical shifts.

What a Ternus-led Apple might signal for work culture

Imagine, for the sake of argument, a leader whose formative experiences are in hardware: someone who prizes iteration, disciplined timelines, and close collaboration between industrial design and engineering. Such a leader might emphasize hands-on mentorship, apprenticeship models in technical teams, and deliberate skills transfer between design and production. For the broader workforce, that could mean renewed investment in in-house training programs, apprenticeship-style rotations, and clearer career ladders for technical tracks.

The imperative of inclusive leadership

But the modern workplace needs more than engineering discipline. It needs inclusive leadership that broadens access, supports flexible work where it makes sense, and builds cultures that retain people across life stages. The successor’s challenge will be to marry the craft ethic of Apple’s engineering core with a leadership style that fosters psychological safety and inclusion—so that creativity thrives across the whole company.

How other organizations can learn

There are lessons here for the wider world of work. First, succession is a workforce strategy: when companies plan transitions, they should think about talent pipelines, not just optics. Second, domain depth matters: leaders who rise from technical ranks bring credibility on complex product bets. Third, communication is essential: transparent messages about what changes and what remains reassure teams and preserve productivity.

Practical steps for managers during a leadership transition

• Reiterate team priorities and measurable goals so day-to-day work retains clarity.
• Document knowledge and processes to reduce single-person dependencies.
• Mentor and promote internal talent to keep the bench deep.
• Listen to employee concerns and surface them upward; transitions raise uncertainty and need candid forums.

Closing: an invitation to stewardship

Leadership transitions at companies like Apple feel monumental because they are: they shape product roadmaps and the livelihoods of thousands. But for the people who make work happen, succession is also an invitation to stewardship. Whether the board chooses John Ternus or another candidate, the next chapter will be written by managers who keep teams focused, by engineers who translate ideas into prototypes, and by the many unsung contributors who ship products.

That is the hopeful takeaway for the Work community: succession can be unsettling, but it is also an opportunity. It forces organizations to sharpen their processes, clarify career paths, and double down on the things that make work meaningful. In that light, John Ternus’s emergence as a leading candidate is less about a single seat in Cupertino and more about a test of institutional resilience — and about whether Apple can carry its culture of craft forward while evolving to meet the demands of a new technological era.

For managers and workers everywhere, the lesson is practical and enduring: build a bench that can lead, keep the work legible, and treat transitions as moments to reinforce purpose. That is how companies survive leadership change and emerge ready for the next wave of work.

Aikido Security’s $60M Leap: Unifying App Security to Change How Work Gets Done

When a Belgium-based startup raises $60 million at a $1 billion valuation, the moment is about more than money: it is a signal. For organizations wrestling with fragmented toolchains, alert fatigue, and the growing velocity of software delivery, Aikido Security’s Series B is a marker of a new phase. It suggests a future where the boundaries between code, cloud, and application security blur, and where security becomes a platform that supports modern work rather than slowing it down.

From Fragmentation to Unity

The modern enterprise runs on an ecosystem of services, frameworks, repositories, continuous integration pipelines, and runtime platforms. Each layer has spawned specialized security tools: static analysis for code, software composition analysis for dependencies, configuration scanners for infrastructure as code, and runtime protection for production environments. The result is well-intentioned but operationally costly—teams must stitch signals together, prioritize noisy alerts, and translate vulnerabilities into actionable work across silos.

Aikido Security positions itself at the heart of that problem. The company’s stated aim is to offer a unified platform that correlates findings from source code to cloud runtime, presenting a single pane of truth that aligns risk with business context. For those who manage application delivery, that single pane is not simply a convenience; it is a potential productivity multiplier. When security insight is embedded into the flow of work, decisions are faster, remediation is more accurate, and trust grows between engineering, product, and security functions.

Why This Matters to the Work Community

Work is increasingly about teams collaborating across time zones, disciplines, and tools. The most immediate benefit of a unified security platform is reduced cognitive load. Developers no longer need to bounce between disparate consoles or triage alerts disconnected from the code they own. Security and operations teams gain context-rich signals that make priorities clear—high-impact risks get attention, low-risk noise gets filtered, and audits become less of a frantic scramble and more of an ongoing practice.

There are cultural effects, too. Unified tooling encourages shared responsibility for security. When configuration issues in an infrastructure-as-code template are shown alongside the code changes that introduced them, remediation becomes a collaborative task rather than blame shifting. That dynamic supports healthier teams and less burnout—two issues that touch every leader in the modern workplace.

A European Moment

Raising a large, late-stage round and reaching unicorn status is an important moment for the Belgian and broader European tech ecosystem. It underscores that complex, enterprise-grade security companies can scale out of Europe and compete globally. For talent markets, investors, and policymakers, Aikido’s success is a practical argument for continuing to nurture deep-technology ventures across the region.

Regulation, Compliance, and the Global Market

Regulatory regimes—GDPR in Europe, evolving supply chain security guidance in the U.S., and sector-specific mandates—have raised the stakes for software provenance and runtime integrity. A platform that maps vulnerabilities and misconfigurations from source through deployment helps organizations respond more quickly to regulatory demands and demonstrates governance across the software lifecycle. For companies that sell to regulated industries, that capability offers a competitive edge: faster procurement cycles, clearer audit trails, and reduced exposure to compliance-related fines or reputational damage.

Technology that Enables Flow

At the heart of the practical change is integration. Successful unification requires deep connectors into code repositories, CI/CD pipelines, issue trackers, cloud providers, and observability stacks. It is not enough to collect findings; a platform must enrich them with context—who owns the code, what service will be impacted, and how severe the potential business impact is. This is the kind of intelligence that lets teams prioritize fixes in a way that aligns with product roadmaps rather than purely technical severity scores.

Automation matters too. The right automation reduces repetitive tasks—sweeping low-risk alerts into remediation workflows, automatically opening tickets for high-priority findings, or enforcing policy gates in CI pipelines. But automation is a tool for people: it creates time for engineers to do the creative work of building features and solving hard problems, rather than slogging through noisy alerts.

Workforce Impacts: Hiring, Skills, and Collaboration

As platforms coalesce, the nature of roles within organizations shifts. Instead of hiring for narrowly defined, tool-specific skills, organizations will increasingly prize people who can operate across the stack—developers with an understanding of secure design, operations staff fluent in software delivery, and product managers able to weigh security trade-offs in product terms. That shift reshapes hiring, training budgets, and career ladders.

Importantly for the Work community, unified platforms lower the barrier to entry for smaller teams. Startups and SMEs that lack large security teams can adopt an integrated approach without a prohibitive lift. The result is a democratisation of higher-grade security postures across organizations of all sizes.

Customer Trust and the Market for Confidence

Security today is a business conversation as much as a technical one. Customers evaluate vendors not only on feature sets but on how those vendors manage risk. Aikido’s positioning as a single platform for end-to-end application security can translate into meaningful assurances for commercial customers: continuous evidence of patching, provenance of code and dependencies, and runtime signals that a service remains healthy and uncompromised.

Challenges and the Road Ahead

No path to unification is free of trade-offs. Integrating across many tools and environments introduces complexity of its own. Data normalization, avoiding false positives while maintaining sensitivity, and scaling correlation engines to handle millions of events per day are difficult engineering problems. The human problem—driving organizational change, convincing teams to converge on shared workflows, and reconciling divergent priorities—can be as hard as the technical one.

Yet, the opportunity outweighs the cost. The Series B funding provides the runway to iterate on integrations, expand global reach, accelerate product development, and invest in customer success functions that help organizations get value quickly. For the workplace, that means faster adoption curves and more tangible benefits delivered to teams grappling with the realities of modern software delivery.

A New Baseline for How Work Gets Done

When security becomes an integrated, contextual, and automated layer of the development lifecycle, it changes the default assumptions of how teams operate. Speed and safety—once framed as trade-offs—can become complementary goals. Leaders in product, engineering, and security can align around shared metrics: time-to-patch, mean time to remediation, and the proportion of production incidents traceable to known configuration or dependency issues.

For the Work community, Aikido Security’s funding round is a reminder that tools shape behavior. Investment in platforms that reduce friction, centralize context, and automate the mundane is an investment in the people who do the work: developers, operators, product teams, and the managers who must balance risk with innovation.

Conclusion

In a world where software powers nearly every aspect of business, the companies that make security invisible and useful will determine how quickly organizations can move with confidence. Aikido Security’s $60 million Series B and $1 billion valuation are less a finish line than a milestone: a validation that the market values unification, clarity, and a human-centered approach to protecting systems. For those building and running software, that future looks like fewer disruptions, clearer priorities, and work that is safer without being slower.

A New Tide at the Docks: How a Supreme Court Ruling Could Rewire U.S. Freight and Work

Imagine the hum of a port yard shifting pitch, cranes pausing in their rhythm, truck drivers recalibrating routes, and planners redrawing flow maps in cloud-based control towers. A Supreme Court decision that strikes down Trump-era tariffs applied under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) would do more than change prices on invoices. It could reroute volumes, alter carrier economics, and trigger a cascade of operational and workforce responses across the U.S. logistics ecosystem.

Why this ruling matters to people who keep America moving

Tariffs are more than policy abstractions: they shape the relative costs of sourcing, the calculation for inventory positioning, and the incentives for modes of transport. In containerized trade, small unit-cost changes scale fast. A removal of tariffs on targeted imports would reduce landed costs for certain goods, encouraging importers to accelerate shipments, replenish inventories, or shift sourcing back to routes previously dampened by additional duties.

For the Work news community—dockworkers, longshore labor, truck drivers, dispatchers, warehouse staff, and planners—this is not a distant legal drama. It is a practical pivot point that could change daily volumes, shift hiring patterns, prompt new skill demands, and reconfigure the flow of labor between ports, rail yards, and inland distribution centers.

Immediate freight-flow mechanics: volume, velocity, and venue

When tariffs are lifted, three freight levers typically move:

1. Volume acceleration: Lower import costs tend to spur demand. Retailers and distributors might pull forward shipments to take advantage of price drops, creating a temporary spike in container volumes that amplifies port and terminal activity.
2. Modal reallocation: Shifts in cost can change the competitiveness of air, ocean, and rail. For products where tariffs were a meaningful portion of landed cost, ocean shipping becomes comparatively more attractive, potentially nudging freight off air and onto vessels.
3. Sourcing adjustments: Companies may re-evaluate nearshoring versus distant sourcing trade-offs. Removing tariffs could make distant suppliers more price-competitive again, affecting long-term volume distribution across trans-Pacific routes.

Carrier economics and alliance dynamics

Carriers operate on tight margins influenced by fuel, vessel utilization, and contract rates. A sudden increase in demand for containers can tighten equipment availability and push carriers to redeploy blank sailings, adjust schedules, or reallocate vessel capacity across trades. That will affect predictability: blank sailings that once alleviated overcapacity could reappear as carriers chase higher-rate lanes.

Alliances and slot-charter agreements will be tested. Lines will negotiate how to share the upside or manage unexpected peaks in specific gateways. That negotiation plays out in manifest changes, port calls, and the timing of contract negotiations with shippers and forwarders.

Port operations and the human infrastructure

Ports are systems of people, machines, and software. A policy-induced uptick in containers will stress gate operations, yard density, crane productivity, and intermodal connections. For workers on the ground, the impact is tangible:

• Steeper rhythms and irregular surges may require extended shifts or additional hires in drayage and yard operations.
• Changes in container dwell time drive tug-and-truck scheduling decisions, affecting gate congestion and wages tied to throughput.
• Short-term spikes could exacerbate existing backlogs, reigniting conversations about automation, scheduling windows, and labor-model adaptations.

Contracting, rates, and the price signal for planning

Freight contracts, both spot and contract, will be the first place the new reality is priced. Shippers with ongoing contracts might see immediate benefits in landed costs only at renewal, while those buying spot will experience price swings sooner. That split matters for procurement teams deciding whether to hedge, accelerate, or defer purchases.

Procurement and planning teams will face classic trade-offs:

• Lock in rates now and miss potential future declines if competition heats up.
• Stay on spot and risk sudden price increases during transient volume surges.

Supply-chain planning: from tactical fixes to strategic reorientation

Beyond immediate moves, a judicial shift invites firms to revisit strategic choices:

1. Inventory strategy: Lower tariffs reduce the cost of holding imported inventory, influencing safety-stock calculations and just-in-time practices. Some firms may opt to rebalance inventory portfolios between speed and cost.
2. Sourcing footprints: The calculus for nearshoring versus overseas production shifts. The combination of tariff relief and geopolitical risk assessments will reshape multi-year sourcing plans.
3. Network design: Distribution centers and cross-docks may be repurposed depending on new flow patterns, with inland ports and rail ramps gaining or losing prominence.

Labor and workforce implications

Workers will feel the ruling through workflow changes and demand for different skills. Key implications include:

• Hiring surges and skills gaps: Port operators, trucking companies, and warehouses may need to recruit quickly. Roles requiring digital scheduling, telematics, and equipment handling will be in high demand.
• Training and reskilling: Increased automation at gates and yards will coexist with higher need for technicians, operator certifications, and software-savvy managers.
• Wage dynamics: Localized congestion and labor shortages could push wages up in hotspots, while improved throughput efficiency might moderate wage pressure over time.

Regional winners and losers

Not every port or logistic hub benefits equally. The distributional effects depend on infrastructure capacity, hinterland connectivity, and labor availability.

• Gateway ports with modern terminals and efficient intermodal links stand to absorb more of the incremental volumes.
• Overburdened ports with existing congestion could see service reliability decline, prompting shippers to reroute to alternative gateways or inland ports.
• States and metro areas that invest in workforce training, last-mile infrastructure, and rail connections will capture a disproportionate share of new economic activity.

Risk management: scenarios to plan for

Operations leaders should build rapid scenario models. Useful scenarios include:

1. Short-term surge: A 10-20% volume bump over 3-6 months as importers pull shipments forward.
2. Sustained shift: A new baseline 5-10% higher in targeted categories over 1-3 years, reflecting persistent sourcing changes.
3. Volatility wave: Oscillating demand prompting frequent schedule reworks and spot-market volatility.

Each scenario requires different playbooks: surge staffing and overtime agreements for the first; investment in capacity and partnerships for the second; and improved real-time visibility and hedging tools for the third.

Technology and data: the accelerants of adaptation

Visibility platforms, predictive analytics, and collaborative interfaces between carriers, ports, and shippers will be decisive. When flows change swiftly, organizations that can see the network, simulate outcomes, and reallocate assets in near-real time will outperform those relying on weekly or monthly cadence.

Key tech priorities include:

• End-to-end visibility across ocean, rail, and truck legs.
• Scenario-driven simulation engines that marry demand signals with port and vessel schedules.
• Workforce management tools that match capacity to predicted surges and reduce manual scheduling friction.

What leaders should do in the next 90 days

Practical steps for transport and logistics leaders, in a prioritized order:

1. Review contractual exposure to tariffs and model their removal across top SKUs.
2. Run stress tests on terminal and yard capacity for short-term surge scenarios.
3. Engage with labor partners about flexible scheduling and rapid-hire protocols.
4. Coordinate with carriers and 3PLs to understand capacity options and potential re-routing.
5. Accelerate implementation of visibility tools to shorten reaction time on manifest changes.

Longer arc: resilience as a workforce story

The larger lesson is less about one ruling and more about how logistics systems—and the people who operate them—adapt to political, economic, and legal shocks. Resilience is a human-forward concept: it depends on cross-trained workers, robust labor-management frameworks, and institutions willing to invest in continuous learning.

For the Work news community, the coming months will be an invitation to shape the change. Unions, employers, training providers, and local governments will each play a role in smoothing transitions and ensuring that new flows translate into decent, sustainable jobs rather than temporary strain.

A hopeful closing: opportunity in motion

Policy shifts can be disruptive, but they also unleash opportunity. A ruling that removes tariffs could lower consumer prices, re-energize certain manufacturing linkages, and create steady demand for logistics work across a range of skill levels. The imperative for leaders is to translate that macroeconomic motion into fair contracts, safe workplaces, and career pathways that let workers share in the gains.

In a world of interconnected supply chains, the docks, rail yards, and warehouses are not backdrops; they are stages on which livelihoods are made. The legal wind may change direction. The communities that succeed will be the ones that move with it—adapting processes, investing in people, and reimagining their networks so that freight flows better, and workers benefit more.

When Recruiting Crosses a Line: Lessons for Workplaces After the OnePlus Indictment

Taiwanese prosecutors have recently indicted parties involved in recruiting engineers for OnePlus, and Pete Lau, the company’s chief executive, has been named among those charged in connection with recruitment that authorities say proceeded without required local approvals. The matter has rippled beyond headlines about a single company or leader: it is a cautionary tale about how modern talent strategies intersect with national rules, corporate governance and the ethical obligations of employers.

For the global workforce community—HR leaders, hiring managers, in-house counsel and the engineers themselves—the episode illuminates three realities that define contemporary work: the accelerated demand for scarce technical skills, the complexities of operating across legal jurisdictions, and the reputational stakes that attach to how hiring is executed.

Speed vs. Scrutiny: The New Tension in Tech Hiring

Technology firms are built on velocity. Product roadmaps, market windows and the imperative to recruit top engineers drive companies to move fast. That speed, however, does not exempt organizations from local laws and administrative requirements. When hiring moves at the pace of ambition rather than the cadence of compliance, companies risk creating vulnerabilities that are legal, financial and cultural.

Beyond liability, there is a human dimension: when hiring workflows sidestep local norms or formalities, they can leave candidates and local communities feeling excluded or disrespected. For a company that depends on trust and technical collaboration, that sentiment can be corrosive.

Regulatory Context Matters—Everywhere

National rules vary: some require explicit approvals for foreign firms to recruit certain categories of workers; others control how headcount is registered or how data about candidates is transferred. These rules often stem from labor protection policies, immigration controls, or strategic sensitivities about talent deemed essential to national industries.

Whatever the source, the principle is the same. Recruitment that ignores local regulatory frameworks can trigger investigations, sanctions and public scrutiny. Because high-skilled talent is both mobile and strategic, jurisdictions are increasingly assertive about ensuring their laws are observed. Firms that treat local frameworks as an afterthought risk being tripped up not just by administrative fines but by damage to brand and leadership credibility.

What the Work Community Should Learn

This episode is less about a single headline and more about practical governance lessons that every organization should internalize. Consider these actionable takeaways:

• Make compliance an enabler, not a bottleneck. Hiring policies should be designed to preserve speed while embedding checkpoints that ensure adherence to local requirements. That means streamlining the approvals process, not bypassing it.
• Document decisively. Clear records of recruitment decisions, communications with candidates and any interactions with local authorities create transparency that can be indispensable if questions arise.
• Invest in local knowledge. Local HR partners, country managers and legal counsel are not optional luxuries; they are frontline risk managers who translate rules into operational steps.
• Elevate governance. Boards and senior leaders should receive periodic briefings on hiring practices in regions where compliance obligations are complex. Delegation without oversight invites error.
• Design ethical playbooks. Beyond legal compliance, companies should ask whether their hiring practices respect local communities and labor markets. Ethical considerations guard reputation as much as legal ones.
• Prepare contingency plans. Recruiting missteps can escalate quickly. Response playbooks—covering communication, remediation and corrective procedures—help companies move from reaction to resolution.

Leadership, Accountability and Culture

When high-profile leaders appear in legal proceedings tied to hiring, it forces a reckoning about responsibility. Leadership tone matters: when executives implicitly reward rapid hiring absent proper checks, they propagate risk incentives through the organization. Conversely, visible accountability and a commitment to doing hiring right fosters a culture where compliance and ambition coexist.

For HR teams and managers, the message is clear. Policies must be lived, not merely posted on intranet pages. Training, performance metrics and reward systems should align with practices that meet both business objectives and the letter and spirit of local law.

The Broader Implications for Talent Mobility

As work becomes ever more global, companies must design talent strategies that reflect geopolitical realities. That includes anticipating where regulators may focus scrutiny—whether for reasons of national security, labor protection or economic policy—and proactively aligning recruitment approaches accordingly.

Remote work and distributed teams expand the pool of talent, but they do not erase the need to think locally. Jurisdictions retain authority over their labor markets. Companies that want to play globally must also learn to operate locally with humility and care.

A Moment for Reflection, Not Panic

Headlines about indictments and legal actions understandably provoke anxiety. But the healthier response for the work community is measured reflection: identify the vulnerabilities in your own hiring lifecycle, strengthen local partnerships, codify transparent processes and make remediation straightforward and timely.

The OnePlus-related case will be resolved through legal channels. For organizations everywhere, the enduring lesson is institutional: ambitious hiring strategies require equally ambitious governance. When speed, ethics and compliance are deliberately balanced, companies can expand their talent reach without compromising the legal, cultural and reputational foundations that sustain long-term success.

In an era when talent is a strategic asset and borders remain consequential, the smartest organizations are those that treat the rules of the road as part of their competitive strategy—not obstacles to be circumnavigated, but guardrails that protect people, companies and communities.

The Work of Reinvention: What Saks Global’s Chapter 11 Means for Leaders and Employees

When Saks Global announced a Chapter 11 filing after securing roughly $1.75 billion in financing, leadership framed the move not as an ending but as a defining moment — a deliberate act of reinvention coming on the heels of the Neiman Marcus takeover. For people who build companies, manage teams, and shape daily work life, this moment is more than corporate finance. It is an invitation to rethink what it means to steward a brand, a workforce, and a shared purpose through disruption.

Bankruptcy and restructuring conjure images of balance sheets and lawyers, but the most consequential effects happen on the shop floor, in showrooms, in distribution centers, in open-plan offices, and in the private conversations between managers and their teams. This is where livelihoods, morale, and institutional memory reside. How leaders choose to navigate this period will determine whether the company emerges merely solvent, or fundamentally stronger and more coherent.

Reframing Chapter 11 as a Strategic Reset

Chapter 11 is a legal mechanism; it is also a management opportunity. The new financing provides breathing room. The restructuring process creates a rare runway to reassess cost structures, talent deployment, customer propositions, and operating models without the daily pressure of short-term liquidity crises. For the Work community, the lesson is clear: legal and financial frameworks can create strategic space for organizational clarity.

That strategic space should be used deliberately. Instead of treating restructuring as a one-off financial fix, leaders can treat it as a chance to align organizational design to future strategy. That means asking hard questions about roles, skills, and processes — and committing to transparent, humane execution.

What This Moment Demands from Leadership

Leadership during a defining moment must do five things, simultaneously and visibly:

• Communicate with candor and cadence. People need clear information on what is changing, when, and why. Regular updates reduce rumor and anxiety. Clarity about intent — not just logistics — helps teams align their work.
• Prioritize human dignity. Financial restructuring is about numbers, but its consequences are human. Thoughtful transition support, fair severance, retraining options, and mental health resources matter. Treating people with respect preserves trust even through necessary reductions.
• Protect critical capabilities. Determine which skills and roles are strategic to the future business and safeguard them. Losing customer-facing talent, category specialists, or digital product teams in the name of short-term savings can be a false economy.
• Embed accountability into new structures. Redesign operating models with clear decision rights and measurable outcomes. A restructured company needs leaner lines of authority and clearer ownership of priorities.
• Use the moment to renew purpose. Reaffirming why the company exists and whom it serves rallies people. A renewed mission and simple priorities make daily decisions easier and align dispersed action.

The Workforce Implications: Risk, Opportunity, and Reskilling

For employees, the immediate questions are practical: Will my job change? Will I be asked to relocate or reskill? Will benefits or schedules be altered? Answers that are partial or delayed breed attrition and disengagement. Leaders owe their people a plan, even if it is a plan for phased transitions rather than a final blueprint.

Restructurings often accelerate work that was already happening: automation of routine tasks, consolidation of back-office functions, and a push toward omnichannel operations. This accelerates demand for different skill sets — digital merchandising, supply chain analytics, customer success, and agile product development. Companies that invest in targeted reskilling and redeployment reduce hiring costs and preserve institutional knowledge.

At the same time, organizations should be mindful of disparate impacts. Hourly retail workers, logistics staff, and store managers experience change differently from corporate teams. Equitable transition strategies — offering flexible scheduling, options for internal mobility, and pathways to upskill — keep the workforce resilient and diverse.

Culture as Capital

Culture is often an under-recognized asset in restructurings. A coherent culture speeds execution, retains critical employees, and reassures customers. During a restructuring, leaders should err on the side of honoring cultural touchpoints: rituals that bind teams, transparent decision-making, recognition practices, and respectful handling of separations. These norms become capital that helps the organization reconfigure quickly.

Preserving culture does not mean resisting necessary change. It means translating core values into behaviors that guide day-to-day choices during uncertainty. For a luxury retail brand, this might mean ensuring customer experience remains impeccable even as back-office systems are modernized. For distribution teams, it might mean maintaining safety and dignity standards while optimizing productivity.

Practical Steps for HR and People Leaders

People teams sit at the center of any successful restructuring. Concrete actions to take immediately include:

• Map critical roles and flight risk. Identify who is essential to the company’s near-term survival and who is most likely to seek opportunities elsewhere.
• Design empathetic transition programs. Build outoutplacement, retraining, and income supports for those affected. Make internal mobility seamless with clear pathways and fast-track applications.
• Communicate relentlessly. Create a communications timeline that addresses frontline teams differently from corporate employees; ensure managers are trained to have difficult conversations.
• Measure morale and adjust. Use pulse surveys and manager feedback loops to detect hotspots of disengagement and respond quickly.
• Align incentives to renewal goals. Tie executive and manager incentives to long-term recovery metrics, customer experience, and employee retention, not just cost-cutting.

The Customer—and the Brand—During Reorganization

For a retail brand with deep heritage, preserving customer trust is essential. Operational changes that impact delivery windows, returns, or in-store experiences must be communicated proactively. Customers are often more forgiving than companies expect if they see authenticity, honesty, and a clear path to improvement.

Reorganization can also be a moment to reimagine the customer proposition: streamline assortments to focus on signature categories, double down on services that drive loyalty, and invest in digital touchpoints that reduce friction. These choices show both employees and customers a coherent future.

Why This Is a Defining Moment — And What Success Looks Like

Leadership’s language matters. Calling a restructuring a defining moment sets a tone: this is a period that will shape identity, strategy, and workplace norms. Success will look less like a return to the old normal and more like the emergence of a company that is aligned around fewer, clearer priorities, with a workforce organized to deliver them.

Indicators of a successful reinvention include stabilized turnover among critical roles, improved speed of decision-making, retained customer satisfaction on core metrics, visible investments in strategic capabilities, and a renewed sense of purpose among remaining teams. These are the outcomes that matter to people who do the work every day.

A Final Word to the Work Community

Moments like these test the mettle of leaders and the resilience of workforces. They are painful because they force trade-offs, but they are also clarifying because they demand choice. For those who design jobs and lead people, the obligation is to choose with both discipline and humanity.

There is an opportunity here to rebuild not simply to survive, but to craft a leaner, more purposeful organization where employees can do their best work. That outcome is not inevitable. It will require transparent leadership, strategic prioritization, protection of critical capabilities, and a relentless focus on the dignity of those who do the work.

As the market watches Saks Global’s next chapters unfold, the real story will be written by managers, HR leaders, and the workforce — by the day-to-day decisions that shape how the company functions, serves customers, and honors the people who make it possible. For the broader Work community, this is an instructive moment: financial tools may enable change, but people create recovery.