Paula Lacey

For a period, Natalie Maike was running two businesses. Green Alchemy was one of them. A clothing company was the other. Neither was growing the way it should have been, and she knew why: her attention was divided, and divided attention does not build anything well. When she decided to go all in on Green Alchemy, things shifted. That focus — combined with a serious investment in social media over the past two and a half years — has been the engine behind everything that followed. Green...

The American workplace currently holds five generations of workers. The Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z are all present, often in the same rooms, often struggling to make sense of one another. Gen Alpha is beginning to arrive. Eric Smith thinks about this constantly, and not as a problem to be solved but as a resource being left on the table. The friction is real. He hears it from business owners all the time — I don't know how to talk to younger people, I don't...

Eric Smith opens most conversations the same way: by asking who is at the table. Then he asks who is not. That question is the foundation of his consulting firm, Inclusivity LLC, which he describes as a full-service firm with a cultural competence lens. The work centers on intersectionality — understanding how different identities, perspectives, and experiences overlap and what happens to an organization when those differences are either welcomed or ignored. The business case, he will tell...