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AI Made Information Cheap. Strategic Judgment Is Still Expensive.

US Business News Staff US Business News Staff on August 14, 2026

For decades, one of the quiet advantages of being a large organization had very little to do with size itself.

It was access.

Large companies could afford to commission market research before entering a new category. They could benchmark competitors before repositioning a brand. They could study audience behavior before investing in a campaign, bring experienced strategists into important decisions, test assumptions, analyze cultural shifts, and ask outside experts to identify what leadership might be too close to the business to see.

Smaller organizations often made many of the same decisions.

They simply made them without the same intelligence infrastructure.

That imbalance is the market problem behind Datamorrow Solutions.

D. Benny Bennafield, the company’s CEO and Chief Storyteller, came to the problem from an unusual intersection of nearly three decades in brand, growth, digital, cultural strategy, and technology, and more than two decades of ministry service as an ordained deacon.

Eventually, those experiences produced the same question.

Why should the sophistication of a decision depend on the size of the organization making it?

A Familiar Access Problem

Bennafield had seen a version of the problem before.

In 2015, he helped launch Propellant Media around the idea that advanced media strategy and deployment technology should be accessible to small, emerging, and mid-sized businesses, not simply the largest advertisers with the largest budgets.

Propellant subsequently became a four-time Inc. 5000 company.

Years later, Bennafield began seeing the same structural gap one level upstream.

Technology had become more accessible. Media had become more accessible. Data had become more accessible.

Strategic intelligence had not.

Traditional consulting can provide enormous value, but the economics of the model were built largely around organizations capable of supporting large teams, lengthy engagements, extensive discovery, and substantial budgets.

Meanwhile, smaller companies, nonprofits, and churches still had to answer consequential questions.

Should the organization reposition?

Is the website telling the right story?

Why are donors not converting?

Which audiences are being overlooked?

How does the organization actually compare with competitors?

Will a corporate partner understand the value proposition?

What should leadership fix first?

And increasingly, what are search engines and AI systems telling people about the organization before anyone from the organization enters the conversation?

The decisions were not necessarily smaller.

The access to intelligence around them was.

The First Market Was Mission-Driven

Datamorrow began addressing that problem with particular attention to organizations where Bennafield believed the access gap was both obvious and consequential: churches and nonprofits.

That starting point was personal.

Bennafield’s ministry service had given him a close view of churches with considerable ministry depth, community impact, institutional history, and leadership capability that could nevertheless struggle to make the full value of what they had built visible to someone encountering the organization from the outside.

The nonprofit sector presented a similar contradiction.

Organizations could be changing thousands, or even millions, of lives while their public story made their scale, differentiation, impact, or partnership value surprisingly difficult to understand.

This is where the difference between doing important work and being understood as an important organization becomes economically significant.

A prospective donor does not experience the organization’s internal meetings.

A funder does not automatically know its history.

A corporate partner does not begin with institutional memory.

A prospective church member does not initially see everything happening inside the ministry.

They see evidence.

A website. Search results. Leadership profiles. Programs. Partnerships. Impact claims. Reviews. Videos. Donation pathways. Third-party references.

Those fragments become the outside interpretation of the organization.

And increasingly, another interpreter sits between the organization and the audience.

Artificial intelligence.

AI Changes the Economics, but Not the Entire Equation

Generative AI has dramatically compressed the time required to retrieve information, compare organizations, synthesize material, identify patterns, and produce strategic hypotheses.

That creates an obvious opportunity.

Work that once required armies of junior analysts and countless research hours can now be accelerated.

But Datamorrow’s operating thesis rests on an important distinction:

AI has democratized answers. It has not democratized judgment.

A polished recommendation can still be based on a poor assumption.

A competitor can appear to be the right benchmark while operating under completely different economics.

A tactic that worked brilliantly in one category can fail when transferred into another.

A pattern can be statistically visible but culturally irrelevant.

And an AI system can summarize whatever evidence it finds without knowing that the most consequential evidence is the information that should have been there but was missing.

That is the gap Datamorrow describes as the Judgment Gap.

The company uses AI to accelerate retrieval, comparison, synthesis, and analysis, then combines those capabilities with senior judgment, accumulated enterprise experience, outside-in evidence, benchmarking, audience psychology, and codified strategic frameworks.

The objective is not to replace strategic expertise with artificial intelligence.

It is to change the economics of delivering strategic expertise.

Seeing What the Organization Cannot See From Inside

Datamorrow’s process begins outside the organization.

Instead of first asking leadership what it wants the market to believe, the work examines what the available evidence already gives the market permission to believe.

That distinction matters.

An organization may describe itself as innovative while its public experience signals conventional.

It may believe its impact is obvious while its proof is difficult to locate.

Leadership may view several programs as an integrated platform while an outsider experiences unrelated initiatives.

A nonprofit may believe it has a compelling corporate-partnership proposition when its materials explain primarily why the nonprofit needs support rather than why the partnership creates value for the company.

The underlying principle is simple:

Internal intention and external perception are not the same data set.

Datamorrow examines that gap through strategic diagnosis, peer benchmarking, audience-journey intelligence, human-and-machine discovery, and an upgrade blueprint that turns the evidence into sequenced decisions.

The work is designed to end not merely with analysis, but with a leadership path: what needs to become clearer, what proof needs to become more visible, which audience barriers matter most, and what should happen over the next 30, 90, and 180 days.

When Intelligence Changes the Decision

The distinction matters most when the analysis affects what an organization actually does next.

At Mosaic Church in Mableton, Georgia, the outside-in work revealed that the challenge was not insufficient ministry depth. The church’s public infrastructure had simply failed to keep pace with what had already been built inside the ministry.

That is a very different problem.

Instead of treating the organization itself as deficient, leadership could focus investment on making its discipleship pathways, digital presence, visitor experience, care ministries, and community impact easier to understand and access.

At Mount Carmel Baptist Church in Cabot, Arkansas, the analysis helped expose both infrastructure and audience opportunities. The findings contributed to leadership hiring someone focused on graphics, publicity, social media, and the web. They also revealed that while the church visibly communicated its commitment to children and students, young adults might have more difficulty recognizing where they belonged.

And in the nonprofit sector, Step Up CEO Delores Druilhet Morton put the larger value proposition plainly:

“The strategic intelligence insights Datamorrow provides helps us, as non-profit leaders—especially small to mid-sized non-profits—to function with the same kind of sophistication as a much larger organization.”

Delores Druilhet Morton

CEO | Step Up | suwn.org

That may be the clearest expression of the economic argument behind Datamorrow.

Better intelligence does not simply give smaller organizations more information.

It is intended to help their leaders approach consequential decisions with a level of strategic sophistication that has historically been easier for much larger institutions to afford.

And it can change how the work that follows is prioritized.

The Next Democratization Layer

For much of the technology era, democratization has followed a recognizable pattern.

Capabilities once available only to large institutions become easier to deploy, less expensive to access, and eventually available to organizations much further down the market.

Computing did it.

Media did it.

Software did it.

Analytics did it.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating the pattern again.

Datamorrow is betting that strategic intelligence is next.

The company is not attempting to make every smaller organization behave like a Fortune 500 enterprise. Nor is the premise that AI eliminates the need for consultants, agencies, creative firms, digital partners, or experienced leadership.

The argument is narrower and potentially more important.

A church considering a major digital investment should be able to pressure-test the decision first.

A nonprofit preparing a corporate partnership strategy should be able to understand how a potential partner is likely to evaluate it.

A growing business preparing to reposition should be able to see how its competitors, customers, search engines, and AI systems already understand the category.

Organizations should not have to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars simply to get better questions onto the table.

That idea has shaped Datamorrow’s model around senior-led, fixed-scope strategic intelligence rather than an enterprise-sized consulting engagement.

And for Bennafield, beginning with churches and nonprofits is not incidental to the business strategy.

It is part of the reason the company exists.

After a career spent around organizations able to purchase sophisticated capabilities, his ministry life exposed what happens when organizations doing consequential work are expected to make equally consequential decisions without them.

Technology finally made it possible to attack that imbalance differently.

The opportunity now is to make sure that cheaper information does not simply create more information.

It should create better decisions.

Because the real promise of AI may not be that every organization can suddenly have more answers.

It may be that organizations that were once priced out of the room can finally afford better judgment before making the decisions that matter most.

D. Benny Bennafield

CEO/Chief Storyteller

Datamorrow Solutions

404.226.9589

bbennafield@datamorrow.solutions

datamorrow.solutions

global-faith.solutions

EU Sustainability Rules Raise New Compliance Questions for U.S. Firms

US Business News Staff 2 US Business News Staff 2 on August 14, 2026

Sustainability Rules in the European Union are becoming more targeted in 2026, but U.S. companies with European operations, customers or supply chains may still face reporting and data requirements. Changes to corporate reporting, due diligence and carbon-border measures mean businesses need to distinguish between direct obligations and requests flowing through commercial relationships.

Key Takeaways

  • The EU raised the main Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive threshold to more than 1,000 employees and above €450 million in annual net turnover.
  • The European Commission adopted revised sustainability reporting standards on July 3, 2026, cutting mandatory datapoints by more than 60%.
  • Corporate due diligence requirements were narrowed to companies exceeding 5,000 employees and €1.5 billion in net turnover.
  • The EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism entered its definitive phase on January 1, 2026.
  • U.S. producers of covered goods may be asked for verified emissions data when European importers use actual emissions figures.

The European Union has narrowed several Sustainability Rules that had been expected to affect a broader range of companies, but the changes have not removed compliance considerations for U.S. businesses connected to the European market.

On February 24, 2026, the Council of the European Union gave final approval to changes that reduced the scope of both the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, or CSRD, and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, commonly called CS3D. The revisions were designed in part to reduce reporting burdens and limit the extent to which information requirements pass to smaller companies.

For U.S. companies, the result is a more segmented compliance picture. Some businesses may now fall outside direct reporting requirements, while others may encounter sustainability-related obligations through European subsidiaries, branches, importers or customers.

Higher Thresholds Narrow the Sustainability Rules Reporting Net

The revised CSRD framework raises its primary thresholds to companies with more than 1,000 employees and net annual turnover above €450 million. Those limits significantly narrow the group of businesses subject to mandatory reporting compared with the earlier framework.

The rules also contain separate thresholds for companies based outside the EU. According to the Council, updated requirements for third-country businesses apply at a net EU turnover threshold above €450 million, together with turnover above €200 million for the relevant EU subsidiary or branch.

That distinction matters for large U.S. corporate groups because compliance depends on more than the location of the parent company. European revenue, workforce levels and the size of EU subsidiaries or branches can determine whether reporting requirements apply.

The changes also provide a transition exemption for certain companies that began reporting for the 2024 financial year but no longer fall within the revised scope for 2025 and 2026. The broader shift follows earlier EU reporting changes that reduced the population expected to remain under mandatory sustainability reporting.

For U.S. firms near the thresholds, the immediate compliance task is therefore a scope analysis rather than an assumption that every company doing business in Europe faces the same reporting obligations.

Revised Standards Reduce Reporting Demands

A second major change arrived on July 3, 2026, when the European Commission adopted revised European Sustainability Reporting Standards, known as ESRS, along with a voluntary reporting standard for smaller companies.

The Commission said the revised ESRS reduce mandatory datapoints by more than 60% and total datapoints by more than 70%. It also estimated that the revisions could lower reporting costs by more than 30% per company for businesses remaining within the mandatory framework.

The standards had not yet completed their scrutiny process as of mid-August. The Commission said the measures would apply after a two-month European Parliament and Council scrutiny period, which can be extended by another two months.

For smaller U.S. suppliers, another provision may be particularly relevant. The voluntary reporting standard supports a value-chain cap intended to restrict how much sustainability information companies subject to the CSRD can require from smaller businesses in their supply chains.

Companies outside the direct scope can still receive sustainability data requests from customers or financial institutions. Existing approaches to sustainability reporting compliance illustrate why finance, legal, operational and data teams may still need coordinated processes even when a business is not directly covered by an EU reporting mandate.

The revised framework, however, creates clearer limits on the information that can be required from businesses protected by the value-chain cap.

Due Diligence Rules Shift Toward Larger Companies

EU Sustainability Rules Raise New Compliance Questions for U.S. Firms

Photo Credit: Unsplash.com

The EU also substantially narrowed its corporate sustainability due diligence framework.

Under the revised CS3D scope, the principal thresholds rise to companies with more than 5,000 employees and net turnover above €1.5 billion. The Council said the change was designed to focus requirements on the largest businesses, which have greater influence across their chains of activity.

The amended framework allows covered companies to focus their assessments on areas where adverse environmental or human-rights impacts are most likely to occur. It also directs companies toward reasonably available information, reducing some of the pressure to collect extensive information from smaller business partners.

The timetable has also moved. EU member states have until July 26, 2028, to transpose the revised requirements into national law, and companies are expected to comply with the new measures from July 2029.

For U.S. businesses, that means CS3D is less likely to create a direct near-term requirement unless a company reaches the revised size and EU turnover thresholds. Suppliers and other business partners may still encounter targeted information requests from companies that remain covered.

Carbon Border Rules Put Supplier Data in Focus

While corporate reporting and due diligence requirements have been narrowed or delayed, the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, or CBAM, is already operating under its definitive regime.

CBAM took effect in its definitive phase on January 1, 2026. It applies to selected goods in carbon-intensive sectors including cement, iron and steel, aluminium, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen.

EU importers or their indirect customs representatives bringing in more than the general 50-tonne annual threshold of covered goods are required to apply for authorised CBAM declarant status. The threshold rules contain separate treatment for electricity and hydrogen.

The direct legal responsibility generally rests with the European importer or its representative, but U.S. producers can become part of the compliance process. When an importer reports actual emissions rather than using Commission default values, the producer outside the EU must provide verified information on the emissions embedded in the goods.

The first annual CBAM declaration covering 2026 imports is due by September 30, 2027. Importers must also surrender the corresponding CBAM certificates by that date.

That makes production and emissions records relevant well before the filing deadline for U.S. manufacturers supplying covered products to European customers. Operations, customs, finance and compliance teams may need consistent data even when the U.S. company itself is not the regulated importer.

The broader effect of the 2026 Sustainability Rules is therefore more precise than a simple expansion or rollback. Fewer companies face direct CSRD and CS3D requirements, while CBAM has moved into active implementation. For U.S. firms, identifying the relevant entity, threshold, commercial relationship and compliance date remains central to determining what information must be prepared.

Frequently Asked Questions

What changed in the EU Sustainability Rules in 2026?

The EU raised the main thresholds for sustainability reporting and corporate due diligence, removing many smaller companies from direct scope. The European Commission also adopted streamlined reporting standards intended to reduce the amount of information required from covered businesses.

Do the Sustainability Rules apply directly to U.S. companies?

They can, depending on a U.S. company’s EU turnover, workforce and European subsidiary or branch structure. Companies outside direct scope may also receive information requests from European customers or other covered business partners.

What is the new CSRD threshold?

The revised main threshold covers companies with more than 1,000 employees and annual net turnover above €450 million. Separate EU turnover and subsidiary or branch thresholds apply to qualifying businesses headquartered outside the EU.

When do the revised due diligence rules apply?

EU member states have until July 26, 2028, to transpose the revised CS3D provisions into national law. Companies are expected to comply with the new measures from July 2029.

How can CBAM affect U.S. manufacturers?

The main CBAM duties fall on EU importers or their indirect customs representatives. U.S. producers of covered goods may still need to supply verified embedded-emissions information when European importers choose to use actual emissions values.

Judge Sheila Renfroe Champions Accountability and Treatment in Shelby County Division 9 Mental Health Court

US Business News Staff US Business News Staff on August 14, 2026

By: Lennard James

For individuals struggling with mental health challenges and substance abuse, involvement with the justice system can become a revolving door. An arrest may address an immediate offense, but without treatment, structure, accountability, and community support, the underlying circumstances that contributed to an individual’s involvement with the courts can remain unresolved.

Since 2016, Shelby County Division 9 Mental Health Court, under the leadership of Judge Sheila Renfroe, has worked to provide another path, one that balances justice and accountability with treatment, rehabilitation, and an opportunity for participants to successfully reconnect with their families and communities.

“Life is not about the fall, it’s about the recovery,” Judge Renfroe says, a philosophy that captures the spirit of Shelby County Division 9 Mental Health Court and its belief that a person’s most difficult moment does not necessarily have to determine the rest of his or her life.

Supporting Judge Renfroe is a professional team that includes Bryan Carson, who serves in government relations and as courtroom coordinator, and Henry Kenworthy, the newly appointed deputy administrator. Together with prosecutors, attorneys, treatment professionals, community partners, and others involved in the process, the team works to create an environment where responsibility and recovery can exist side by side.

The philosophy behind Shelby County Division 9 Mental Health Court recognizes an important reality: some individuals entering the justice system need more than punishment. They may need an opportunity to address mental health conditions, substance abuse, behavioral challenges, housing instability, and other circumstances contributing to their involvement with the courts.

That philosophy does not eliminate accountability. Instead, accountability becomes an important part of the treatment and recovery process.

Entry into the program begins through a referral process, after which an assistant district attorney reviews the individual’s case. Most cases considered for the program involve nonviolent misdemeanor charges. The review process helps determine whether the circumstances of the case and the individual’s needs are appropriate for participation in Mental Health Court.

For those accepted, participation is not an overnight solution.

The program generally lasts approximately nine to 18 months, depending upon the participant’s individual circumstances, treatment needs, progress, and compliance with program requirements. Participants are expected to remain engaged, follow established guidelines, participate in treatment, attend required court appearances, and demonstrate measurable progress.

Substance abuse can be particularly significant. Mental health challenges and substance dependency can intersect, creating circumstances in which an individual repeatedly comes into contact with law enforcement and the courts. Treatment provides an opportunity to address those underlying issues rather than focusing exclusively on the offense that brought the person before the court.

Mental Health Court serves adults beginning at approximately 18 years of age and continuing well beyond that age, illustrating that mental illness and substance abuse are not confined to one generation, neighborhood, economic status, or stage of life.

At the heart of Shelby County Division 9 Mental Health Court is the opportunity for participants to find stability and substantially reconnect with the community.

That reconnection can take many forms. It may mean rebuilding relationships with family members, securing stable housing, pursuing employment, addressing substance dependency, maintaining appropriate mental health treatment, or simply developing the structure necessary to successfully move forward.

The objective is therefore much larger than getting someone through a court case. The goal is to help participants find a sustainable path toward stability while reducing the circumstances that could ultimately bring them back into the justice system.

Accountability remains central to that mission. Participants are expected to check in and demonstrate continued compliance with their treatment plans and program responsibilities. Periodic reviews, including longer-term accountability measures such as six-month check-ins, can help determine whether individuals are maintaining their progress and remaining connected to necessary services and resources.

Treatment is equally important.

When someone is dealing with an underlying mental health condition or substance abuse problem, ignoring that condition does little to improve the person’s long-term circumstances. Connecting participants with appropriate treatment creates an opportunity to address the source of a problem rather than dealing exclusively with its consequences.

The concept of a “Friend of the Court” further demonstrates the importance of collaboration. A judge cannot accomplish rehabilitation alone. Attorneys, prosecutors, treatment providers, community organizations, families, advocates, and other stakeholders can become part of a broader support network encouraging both accountability and recovery.

The principles behind Shelby County Division 9 Mental Health Court can also have relevance within the civil justice system. Civil courts may encounter individuals whose mental illness, addiction, housing instability, or other behavioral-health challenges affect the circumstances bringing them before a judge. Connecting appropriate individuals with mental health resources can potentially provide assistance before their circumstances become even more serious.

For Judge Sheila Renfroe and those involved with Shelby County Division 9 Mental Health Court, the larger message is about balancing compassion with responsibility.

A second chance should never mean an absence of consequences. Instead, it means providing an individual who is willing to accept responsibility and participate in treatment with a structured opportunity to change direction.

Every successful participant represents more than the completion of a court program. That individual may return to a family, workplace, neighborhood, or community with greater stability, stronger coping skills, and a better understanding of how to manage the challenges that once contributed to court involvement.

Since its beginning in 2016, Shelby County Division 9 Mental Health Court has represented an evolving approach to justice, one that asks an important question: What can happen when the court addresses not only the case before it, but also the circumstances that brought the individual there?

For participants willing to embrace treatment, accountability, guidance, and personal responsibility, the answer can be transformative.

They are given an opportunity to recover, reconnect with their community, rebuild their lives, and find a more stable path forward.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or medical advice. Mental Health Court eligibility, program requirements, treatment plans, and outcomes vary based on individual circumstances and applicable court procedures. Individuals seeking legal or behavioral health assistance should consult the appropriate qualified professionals or local court resources.

Carol Grojean, PhD, on Why Leadership Coherence Matters in the Age of AI

US Business News Staff US Business News Staff on August 14, 2026

By Gracie Jane

Artificial intelligence is giving organizations access to capabilities that would have seemed extraordinary only a few years ago. Yet, as those tools become more powerful and widely available, Carol Grojean, PhD, believes a different factor increasingly separates organizations that use AI effectively from those that struggle with it. That factor is a distinctly human one: leadership coherence.

Her perspective has been shaped by experience with organizational change at scale. Grojean spent 22 years at Microsoft, where she led multi-billion-dollar transformation programs, and has since advised executives, governments and organizations navigating the human dimensions of change.

She also contributed to AI strategy development in Thailand and has spent more than a decade turning the neuroscience of flow, coherence, and human potential into a practical architecture for leadership, including the tools to measure it.

As principal of Grojean Consulting and founder of the Coherence Method™, Grojean works at the intersection of leadership, organizational transformation and human systems. Her latest work explores an emerging question in executive development: Can leadership coherence be measured rather than simply perceived?

That idea is central to The Coherence Advantage™, a five-month executive leadership development program built around the Coherence Method and the Leadership Coherence Index™.

“Most leadership teams I work with believe they are aligned,” Grojean said. “As AI makes intelligence abundant, the scarce advantage becomes the one thing machines cannot manufacture: the coherence of leaders and the teams they lead. Leaders have always known that. The breakthrough is that we can finally see it, measure it, and intentionally cultivate it.”

Connecting Technology With Human Transformation

Grojean’s work extends beyond conventional executive development. She guides founders and senior leaders through immersive land-based leadership experiences, while her broader approach is informed by developmental, contemplative and ceremonial traditions she has studied and participated in across cultures.

She holds a doctorate in Transformative Social Change, three master’s degrees and an ICF coaching certification.

Her exploration of transformation also appears in “Vision Quest,” an 83-minute documentary produced by Exalted Media and directed by Jan Becker. Featured in The Hollywood Reporter, the film follows four participants through a four-day vision quest in the California high desert and is available through Prime Video, Google Play and YouTube.

Looking Beyond Perceived Alignment

Leadership alignment has traditionally been evaluated through surveys, interviews, assessments, and other forms of self-reporting. These methods show how a team perceives itself. Grojean’s framework does not simply add another opinion to that picture; it brings into view what is actually happening beneath it, so perception can finally be measured against reality.

The Leadership Coherence Index captures how a leadership team perceives itself across five domains: shared reality, relational coherence, systems sense-making, decision translation, and adaptive learning.

Grojean pairs those perceptions with data from Syneurgy’s AI-powered social neurotechnology platform, which reads what behavior and physiology actually show: whether attention and turn-taking are coordinated, whether thinking is converging, whether heart rates move together under pressure, and whether trust and safety are evident in behavior rather than only in what people claim, even flagging when synchrony is beginning to erode weeks ahead.

The comparison reveals the gap between how aligned a leadership team believes it is and how aligned its behavior and physiology actually show it to be.

For Grojean, that gap can become useful information, highlighting where leadership alignment appears strong and where greater attention may be needed.

The approach also raises a broader business question. Organizations routinely measure financial performance, customer behavior, and operational efficiency.

As technology develops, could aspects of human interaction that once seemed impossible to quantify become a measurable dimension of organizational performance?

The Human Side of AI Adoption

That question becomes particularly relevant as companies accelerate AI adoption.

AI can increase the speed at which organizations generate information, analyze problems and produce work. Greater technological capability, however, does not automatically create better judgment, clearer decisions or stronger collaboration.

“AI is an amplifier, and it scales incoherence exactly as fast as it scales output,” she adds. “The organizations winning with AI are not the ones with the best tools. They are the ones coherent enough to use them.”

Her framework therefore focuses on the human systems surrounding technological transformation.

The five-phase Coherence Method integrates nervous system regulation, strategic clarity, behavioral architecture, identity transformation and systemic integration. It is intended to help leaders and organizations move from fragmentation and overwhelm toward clearer thinking, stronger alignment and more grounded leadership.

While physiological leadership measurements and land-based experiences may appear to approach leadership from different directions, Grojean’s work connects them by examining how leaders and teams remain clear, grounded, and connected during significant change.

As AI becomes more deeply integrated into business, that question only grows heavier. Organizations may soon find themselves using many of the same technologies as their competitors, making the tools themselves less of an advantage.

Through The Coherence Advantage, the Coherence Method, and the Leadership Coherence Index, Grojean is making the case that the next measure of AI readiness will be something machines cannot produce: how clearly a company’s leaders think, decide, and work together.

When intelligence costs nothing, leadership costs everything.

More information about Carol Grojean and her work is available at carolgrojean.com.

Information about the “Vision Quest” documentary is available at visionquestfilm.com.

Lisa L. Baker Takes the Leadership Experience Tour (LET) Stage

US Business News Staff US Business News Staff on August 14, 2026

The former Fortune 500 executive introduced Beyond Success™, a 12-week program for leaders who have met their goals and still feel unsettled, to attendees on August 8.

BALTIMORE, Md., Aug. 11, 2026. When Lisa L. Baker walked onto the Leadership Experience Tour (LET) stage on August 8, the room already knew her resume, which includes more than two decades in senior roles at Citigroup, Microsoft and Synchrony, followed by the founding of leadership development firm Ascentim®. What they weren’t prepared for was how directly she would challenge them.

What Beyond Success Asks Leaders to Confront

Baker used her time on stage to introduce Beyond Success™, a 12-week program for leaders who have already hit their goals and still feel something isn’t adding up. The talk focused less on performance and more on motive. She asked the audience to examine who had written the definition of success they were chasing. Several attendees stayed after the session to keep the conversation going.

“Leaders often build very successful careers only to find themselves dissatisfied because they never stopped to ask what they truly wanted,” Baker told the audience. “‘Should’ is always someone else’s agenda for your life.”

It was the kind of line that landed differently coming from someone who has been in the rooms she was describing. She was not offering a theory about executive burnout. She spent 20 years climbing before she started asking the question herself.

How the Beyond Success Program Is Structured

Photo Courtesy: LET Media

Three phases shape the program: Reclaim Yourself, Redefine Success, and Rise to Your Greatness. Each one is designed to help participants separate inherited definitions of success from ones they would choose on their own. Cohorts are capped at 12 participants and run entirely virtually over 12 weeks.

The small cohort size is deliberate. Group coaching at this level depends on participants speaking candidly about decisions they would never raise in a staff meeting, and that candor is harder to reach in a crowded room. Because every participant moves through the same phase at the same time, the group builds a shared vocabulary for the questions they are working through.

Why the Message Reaches Senior Leaders

Lisa L. Baker encountered this pattern first inside three Fortune 500 companies and then again across her coaching practice. Senior leaders reach the title, the compensation and the scope they set out to earn, only to find the goal had been set by someone else. Sorting out which ambitions are actually theirs takes deliberate reflection, and that rarely fits between board meetings.

Her LET session drew executives, coaches, and entrepreneurs. Applications for the current Beyond Success™ cohort are open on the Beyond Success leadership program page.

About Lisa L. Baker and Ascentim®

Lisa L. Baker is the founder of Ascentim®, an award-winning leadership development firm that works with executives and teams to strengthen decision-making and performance under pressure. A former Fortune 500 executive with more than 20 years of experience at organizations including Citigroup, Microsoft, and Synchrony, Baker is a member of the Forbes Coaches Council and a two-time Inc. Best in Business award recipient (2022 and 2023). She has been featured in Forbes, CEO Weekly, NY Weekly, The Chicago Journal, and San Francisco Post, and Ascentim® was named a Globee® Woman-Owned Startup of the Year honoree.

Media Contact:

Lisa L. Baker

Ascentim®

ascentim.com