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Today is Giving Tuesday, the day set aside at the beginning of the holiday shopping season to encourage people to do something generous. In yesterday’s Forbes CEO newsletter, I focused on a company that has gone above and beyond average standards of giving: The Newman’s Own Foundation, which owns the grocery store brand started by actor Paul Newman and donates 100% of its profits to causes benefiting children and healthy eating. Through the years, the foundation has given more than $600 million to good causes.
I spoke with Newman’s Own Foundation President and CEO Alex Amouyel about how a company can give all of its profits to charity, yet continue to grow, pay salaries and run a good business. Amouyel said it’s a tricky balancing act, but not as difficult as it may look at first glance. Newman’s Own employees aren’t eligible for stock options, but that’s not necessarily a motivator—especially in a volatile category such as CPG food and beverage. Competitive salaries can still be offered, along with incentive programs and bonuses based on sales and performance.
Even salaries for top-skilled people can come from this model, Amouyel said. After all, tech companies, including Mozilla, can pay developers competitive wages to work there. But employees do tend to care about more than just their salaries—even those who are in-demand developers, Amouyel told me.
Workplace choice is “also related to purpose, and also related to flexibility in people’s roles, meaning, and having a good culture,” she said.
CFOs are always hunting for value in their corporate expenses, including technology. Any tech transition involves new costs and new areas to find potential savings. I talked to Robert Cooke, CEO of enterprise application developer 3forge, about how to make upgrades that work well for your business and your bottom line. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.
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NOTABLE NEWS
It’s the very beginning of the holiday shopping season, and so far, consumers are buying. According to Adobe Analytics, online Black Friday spending increased almost 10% over last year, hitting a record $11.8 billion—$1 billion more than in 2024. And Cyber Monday yesterday was on track to set a record with $14.2 billion in online sales.
While the out-of-the-gate spending is impressive, another question is looming: Will this pace and level of holiday spending hold throughout the holiday season, or did most people pounce on deals and get the bulk of their shopping done early? It’s a fair question, especially considering consumers have been having a difficult time this year. As inflation has persisted, tariffs have driven prices higher, and jobs have been cut, leading to a decline in consumers’ views of the economy.
According to the Conference Board’s most recent study, consumer confidence fell to 88.7 in November—the lowest point since April, when President Donald Trump first announced the sweeping regime of new tariffs on essentially all U.S. trading partners. Just 20.1% of consumers said business conditions were good last month, while 16.9% said they were bad. And consumers were notably more pessimistic about the business conditions six months from now, with nearly three in 10 expecting they will be worse than today.
Drilling down into the numbers, Forbes senior contributor Joan Verdon found that most shopping took place online, not in traditional retail stores. Tracking companies reported mixed results, with RetailNext saying Black Friday foot traffic was down 3.6%, while Pass_by reported overall traffic up 1.17%. According to Pass_by, the biggest increase in traffic came to traditional department stores, which saw a 7.9% bump on Black Friday, an increase the analytics firm attributed to the desire for one-stop shopping.
But Verdon writes that the winner of the shopping season so far is generative AI. On Black Friday, Adobe reported AI traffic to retail sites was up 805% year-over-year. And Salesforce reported $14.2 billion in global online sales—$3 billion in the U.S.—was driven by AI agents. Joe Shasteen, RetailNext’s global manager of advanced analytics, told Verdon that shoppers are now spending “with surgical precision,” something AI can help them do.
“The era of the impulse holiday spree is ending,” Shasteen told Verdon. “Consumers are in control, and they’re treating Black Friday as one data point in a much longer hunt for value.”
ECONOMIC INDICATORS
There’s very little good news about jobs this month. Data from payroll processing firm ADP indicated a near-20% uptick in job losses in the four weeks ending November 8—adding up to about 13,500 lost jobs each week. And many of the unemployed—41.3%—have post-secondary education, writes Forbes senior contributor Erik Sherman. A quarter have bachelor’s degrees or higher, he writes.
As employment numbers go down, prices are rising. Some of this is due to regular inflation, but 0.7% of the price increase is attributable to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, the National Bureau of Economic Research said in a new working paper, Sherman writes. The analysis analyzed retail price data and tariffs on different products across five major retailers. Researchers found that retail prices quickly adapted to tariffs, rising within days of tariff announcements and continuing to go up. Between March and September, imported goods were 5.4% more expensive, the report found. Currently, retailers are passing about 20% of tariff costs to consumers.
OFF THE LEDGER
Why The Cheapest Tech Solution Can Also Be The Most Expensive
3forge CEO Robert Cooke.
3forge
Technology doesn’t age well, especially now. Some older systems, adopted decades ago to save costs, are actually costing companies money as they’re trying to upgrade and implement generative AI. I spoke with Robert Cooke, CEO of enterprise application developer 3forge, about how CFOs can pinpoint these money-wasting solutions and replace them with something that is cost-efficient and lasting.
This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity.
When you figure out which technology is costing too much, how do you come up with a plan to replace or fix it?
Cooke: I think the people that have the greatest level of success—and this isn’t even just with software—have a plan. [It’s] like you’re in fifth grade when your teacher tells you: Make a plan for your life, write it down. You have to start somewhere, and you want to finish somewhere.
I’m gobsmacked how often this happens: People will come in and say, ‘Look, we need to really update our entire system. Let’s just break our system into five components. I’m going to focus on the component that has the biggest issue, the biggest cost, and I don’t care about everything else. I just want to solve that one.’ That’s a very bad approach.
I don’t think it’s a problem to tackle [the biggest problem] first, but I do think it’s important to step back and say, ‘Okay, when I tackle the problem in this first component, am I setting myself up for success on the second, third, fourth and fifth?’ Again, it’s thinking about a strategy that gets you to the end, then working backwards. Starting somewhere, then going forward.
What I like to advocate is that you come up with a plan, very high level, as to what the steps look like to get your system updated. I can talk about the different tactical and strategical solutions you can spend on each one. But what I always like to say is: Step back and start with your biggest and most complex pain point. It’s a balance. You want to focus on what is costing the most. If you can prove that you can solve the most complex pain point, then the other ones by extension are easier to get through.
When making these plans, the CFO is not acting alone. Who would give the CFO the most pushback in figuring out what needs to be done and in a cost effective way?
If there is an IT department, there’s certainly going to be discussion. Hopefully, it’s a constructive conversation. Each one of these roles has their responsibilities and their objections. Obviously, the CFO’s role is to streamline workflows, reduce costs, things like that. A lot of times, IT’s role [is] to be more thinking from a technology perspective, taking their experience to bear and try[ing] to minimize risk. There is a lot of risk when you’re updating a system, and so that might metastasize in the form of pushback.
Also, whether it’s the CFO or whoever’s managing budgets, there’s often pushback because there is this drive to go with the cheapest way to solve a problem. Which brings me back to the beginning: The cheapest way to solve the problem is often the most expensive way to solve the problem. If you have an outage or it doesn’t actually do what you need, then you haven’t really gotten to where you want.
What advice would you give a CFO who is looking at everything before them and trying to figure out a solution that works well for the company, does what they need it to do, and is efficient in terms of time and money?
My advice to a CFO would be about the same that I would give to anyone who’s managing teams that work with a lot of data: Your most expensive resource, your most valuable resource, is your HR. [For] almost all companies that are doing sophisticated finances, you’ve got some software, you’ve got your hardware costs, but the actual people are where your expenses are.
So you’ve got to ask yourself: Are the people spending time—and spinning wheels—on things that technology can help them solve? And if that’s the case, now you need to say: Is the technology we have in place doing that? If it is, great. If it isn’t, now you have to do a cost-benefit profile: If we forget about the cost of the technology, how much time can we save? How much can we reduce human labor? These are all standard things that technology tries to do, right? Technology is about getting a better product at a price.
Once you make the decision that yes, technology can help solve these things, again, I step back and say: Come up with a plan. The mistake I see over and over is: We’ve got this one pain point. Let’s find a vendor that solves that one pain point.
And that one pain point doesn’t integrate with everything else. Now we’ve just shifted the problem. It’s about thinking holistically on the workflow, and how do you come up with an integrated solution over time?
COMINGS + GOINGS
- Beverage company Keurig Dr Pepper appointed Anthony DiSilvestro as chief financial officer, effective November 25. DiSilvestro joins the company after most recently working in the same role at Mattel, and he succeeds Sudhanshu Priyadarshi.
- HR and payroll solutions provider TriNet selected Mala Murthy as its new chief financial officer, effective November 28. Murthy most recently worked in the same role at Teladoc Health, and she succeeds Kelly Tuminelli.
- Restaurant and brewery chain BJ’s Restaurants hired Todd Wilson as chief financial officer, effective December 15. Wilson most recently worked in the same role at Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, as well as Hopdoddy Burger Bar.
- Work management platform Smartsheet tapped Scott Torrey as its chief revenue officer, effective December 1. Torrey was previously chief executive officer at Payscale, and also held the CRO role at SAP Concur.
STRATEGIES + ADVICE
On Giving Tuesday, it’s worth zooming in on the economic impact of gratitude—which ultimately leads to greater overall output, and a better workplace culture.
Every leader has blind spots, but they can’t be fixed through leadership training. The best leaders identify their blind spots, then surround themselves with others who excel in those areas for advice.
QUIZ
This holiday season, some unionized workers at one large employer are on strike to get management back to the bargaining table. Where do they work?
A. Starbucks
B. Amazon
C. UPS
D. Verizon
See if you got the right answer here.
