When change gets imposed on people instead of built with them, they tend to resist the change AND you. State Farm is three weeks into learning that lesson in public.

The background, quickly: In May, at a convention in Las Vegas, CEO Jon Farney told State Farm's roughly 19,000 agents their contracts were being scrapped. Anyone staying past 2027 signs a new deal with revised sales targets, daily AI use, health benefits gone, a deferred comp program many treated as their retirement plan ending. Or take a buyout and leave. By every account I could find, that speech was the first agents heard of any of it. The details came afterward via pre-recorded video and follow-up email, one-way channels, no conversation. Agents describe being blindsided, new Facebook groups sprang up within days just so people had somewhere to vent, and one agent told NPR the company had made "false promises." After three weeks of open revolt, State Farm partially backed down and extended the retirement program through 2028.

This week The Wall Street Journal ran a follow-up, because its original story drew roughly 900 responses from readers, customers and agents alike. The words that came up most for the chatbots and automated systems: "terrible," "infuriating," "it sucks." Plenty of customers said if their agent goes, they go too. One agent told the paper she'd been excited to try the new tool until it showed her as a policyholder for nearly two decades less than she'd been, and flagged her for a late payment she never made. State Farm's response leaned on its structure as a mutual company and its focus on "what's right for our customers over the long term".

Now, look, change is hard because it almost always feels like something is being taken away. Lost income, lost identity, lost certainty about how your day-to-day works. But give people options to weigh and a hand in shaping them, and they'll walk through fire with you. We know some of these terms were indeed movable, because State Farm moved at least one under fire in week three.

With any big change, the key is to listen first, so you know what each group is afraid of losing and then build the honest case for why. You brief the field leaders and managers before the big reveal and arm them for hard conversations, because nobody absorbs life-changing news from a CEO on a stage; they absorb it from someone they trust answering their specific question the next morning. Then you keep going: real channels for questions that get actual answers, visible adjustments that prove the listening isn't just performance theater, and the same messages repeated well past the point where you're sick of them.

So if a big operational change is headed for your front line whether its agents, franchisees, store managers, a plant floor, push your CEO to treat the announcement as a campaign vs an event. Map who's affected and what they stand to lose. Plan the next ten touchpoints, not just the first one.

And if AI touching customer records is part of the package, figure out what happens when the tool is wrong and how fast it can get fixed before the tool becomes the story. State Farm now has to run this entire process anyway but now its in public, with an angrier audience, and with reporters taking notes.

A year of interviews has bought Kristin Cabot basically a fresher version of the same headlines. Next Thursday, July 16, marks one year since Cabot and then Astronomer CEO Andy Byron were caught on the Coldplay kiss cam at Gillette Stadium, and a few seconds of video turned two private execs into a global punchline. Both left the company. Since then she's been everywhere: a New York Times interview in December, the Oprah Podcast in March, a PRWeek conference keynote in April, and a Boston fireside chat in late June that the Boston Globe Media covered and everyone else picked up as the anniversary approaches. She told the Globe she's "still a hot mess, but I'm better." She now advises Pirth.org, a nonprofit that helps people being torn apart online, and says that's where she wants to put her energy. She's still looking for a job.

She clearly wants to stop being the woman in the clip and become an advocate for people who get destroyed online. Monica Lewinsky, who shares her PR firm, proved it can be done... but Lewinsky's turnaround took years, and it only stuck once her advocacy was substantive and interesting enough to be the story on its own.

Cabot isn't there, and I dug into the last year of coverage to understand why. Every headline is some version of "Coldplay kiss cam woman." The nonprofit work, when it appears at all, shows up in the middle of the story or lower. Reporters aren't covering her because of Pirth. They're covering her because the scandal still gets clicks, and so every interview follows the same script: the jumbotron gets retold in full, the cause gets a mention. She's paying for a little attention on the new thing with a complete rerun of the worst moment of her life, every single time. Personally, I think that's a bad trade, and it can't build a new reputation because the old one is still the price of admission.

Brands make the same trade without noticing. The anniversary interview, the response to criticism the world had already moved past, someone agrees to it believing they're showing progress. But the reporter can't write that story without recapping the crisis, and so you end up handing them a reason to run the old story again.

So the test, for Cabot and for you: could the new work hold a headline without the crisis in it? If it can't yet, the interview isn't really repositioning anything. The wiser move is probably patience, and to keep building until the answer changes.

Cory Plofker announced Monday on LinkedIn that he's stepping down as CEO of Jones Road Beauty, the makeup brand his mother, Bobbi Brown, founded in 2020. He's been with the brand five and a half years, the last year and a half running it. On his watch the company hit nine figures in revenue and stayed profitable with no wholesale, no Amazon, no private equity, no outside money at all. So nobody pushed him out of a sinking ship.

The announcement was really well done because it says two things, in the right order. The formal one: "I am not the right person for the next phase." Then the human one which is that he'd rather be "building funnels and running ads than managing people and dealing with the mess that comes with being CEO", and he hasn't gotten to do the fun stuff in a while. Most executives would only say the first part but in my opinion, the second part is what makes the first believable, because wanting to do the actual work more than you want the title isn't a message anyone strategizes their way into. It feels true, and you can't argue with it.

He also said the decision was partly personal, and that after pouring everything into the business he needs time to step back. A founder's son leaving his mother's company after a year and a half in the job, partly for personal reasons, with no successor named... that leaves some room for people to write their own version. So the idea here isn't that he closed every gap but he did shrink it by answering the ugliest possible readings before anyone could ask: not pushed out, not a money problem, not a board fight. He's staying on the board, the successor search is public, and the company walks away from the announcement looking like it knows exactly what kind of leader it needs next which, as it happens, is the best recruiting pitch for that search anyone could write.