Jump Associates

We’re hiring a Senior Associate Strategist. This role is for someone whose experience may cross a few worlds. Maybe you’ve moved between research and strategy. Design and business. Technology and human behavior. Or maybe you’ve built something, studied something deeply, or developed an unusual obsession that changed how you see the world. The specific combination matters less than what it has taught you to notice. Jump Strategists can sit with ambiguity without rushing to flatten it. They have enough range to move between the human and the commercial. Enough discipline to turn scattered inputs into a clear argument. In this role, you’ll work on high-impact projects for leaders facing consequential questions about growth, innovation, customers, markets, and the future of their organizations. At Jump, the work is close. We’re a small firm, and the craft matters here. You will contribute quickly, learn in the open, and grow into deeper leadership over time. If this sounds like the kind of work you’ve been preparing for, please apply. If someone came to mind while reading this, send them the role or send our Director of Talent & Growth Kwaii Bell their profile. Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/gyaQQ-Mc

To understand how leaders can make the most of a midyear reset, it helps to look at how one of the greatest coaches in history prepared his teams for the second half. As head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, Bill Walsh won three Super Bowls and built the team into the defining dynasty of the 1980s. But his real genius was as a teacher. He believed exceptional performance came from preparing people so thoroughly that excellence became habitual. Years ago, I got a chance to ask him how he prepared for talking to the team at halftime. He told me that much of what he’d say had already been delivered beforehand. During the week, he would speak with players individually, tailoring the message to what each one needed to hear. Then he would gather the whole team at halftime and repeat some version of that message. Each player would hear him and think, “Coach already told me this. He’s just saying it for everyone else.” I’ve thought about that answer ever since. Coach Walsh understood that a collective message becomes more powerful when it’s been built up from individual conversations. By the time he stood in front of the locker room, he was gathering many private conversations into one shared message. That’s a powerful lesson for any leader preparing a team for what comes next: the message may be delivered to everyone, but it has to be built one person at a time. The year is already in motion, but the outcome is far from decided. I wrote about how leaders can use this moment to make the most of the time that remains: https://lnkd.in/gCiRFXui

"Get-A-Waymos." It sounds like a punchline: burglars using autonomous vehicles as getaway cars. It's also one of our Headlines of the Future. The strange part isn't just that it happened. It's that the case is apparently still unsolved. Waymos are often flagged by skeptics as surveillance vehicles. 29 cameras inside and out. App-based access to unlock the door. Digital payment. A phone tied to each ride. In theory, this should be the least anonymous getaway car imaginable. And yet, they still haven't found the guy. By the time police got a warrant, the interior footage was already gone, and the exterior footage had the suspect's face blurred for privacy. The detective on the case put it simply: he thought it would be easier to solve in a Waymo. The headline is funny, but the signal underneath is bigger. Total surveillance doesn't automatically mean total accountability. The data existed. It just didn't survive contact with retention windows and privacy rules built for a different kind of problem. That's the point of Headlines of the Future. They help us ask: if this headline became normal, what else would have to change? Because the future rarely announces itself all at once. More often, it shows up first as a strange little headline. 🎧 Hear the full breakdown on this week's episode with Michelle Loret de Mola and Dev Patnaik: https://lnkd.in/eqYq2NqC 📩 Want more Headlines of the Future? Dev's newsletter, Future Focused, features additional ones weekly along with his personal letter. Subscribe here: https://lnkd.in/gMeRvVPd

TEDxSanDiego JOY - August 27, 2026 Speaker Announcement 🎤  Introducing Dev Patnaik  CEO of Jump | Author | Speaker | Professor Dev Patnaik is the CEO of Jump Associates, the strategy firm for future focused leaders. Dev has been a trusted advisor to CEOs at some of the world’s most admired companies, including Starbucks, Target, Nike, Universal Music and Virgin. He’s a frequent keynote speaker at major forums, and his writing has appeared in BusinessWeek, Forbes, Fast Company, and many others.  Dev is the author of Wired to Care, named one of the best books of the year by both Fast Company and Business Week. When not at Jump, Dev is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, where he teaches innovation methods to MBA and design students. Having witnessed the moments when bold bets were made and hard truths had to be faced, he has a rare perspective on what distinguishes leaders who shape the future from those who merely survive it. Join us on August 27 to listen to Dev’s exciting talk! 🎟️ Grab your tickets at tedxsandiego.com or click the link in our bio!

Casual observers may be forgiven for thinking that the only thing happening in the business world is artificial intelligence. For public companies outside the tech sector, it can feel like the only way to get rewarded is with a credible AI narrative. It’s as if the whole country has become a company town. Meanwhile, whole parts of the economy seem to have been quietly written off. Food, media, retail, and apparel are all being discussed like mature categories that are past their prime. But decline isn’t destiny. A24 is finding new ways to make movies matter. Chili’s is making casual dining feel alive again. And in an age when everyone was supposed to be done with brick-and-mortar retail, Barnes & Noble is opening new stores. When they’re in trouble, many companies start looking for a dramatic move. A Hail Mary pass. Barnes & Noble, Chili’s, and A24 instead decided to focus on their customers. Chili’s understood that, for a lot of younger customers, casual dining isn’t just about food. It’s about getting together with friends. A24 realized that viewing tastes are being shaped online long before they end up on movie screens. And Barnes & Noble realized that, in a fractured culture, reading tastes are deeply tied to place. What ties these companies together isn’t that they found some hidden growth market. They’re winning in places that many executives had already stopped believing in. And that makes them worth a closer look. I go further on A24, Chili’s, Barnes & Noble, and what their playbooks reveal here: https://lnkd.in/gbByRMPS --- If you want more, I write a letter to clients and friends every Saturday called Future Focused. Get it here: https://lnkd.in/gukyD-kD

The safest move in a downturn is to discount harder. That's what almost every restaurant chain is doing right now. Chili's did the opposite. They cut their menu by a quarter, raised portion sizes, and refused to coupon while the rest of fast casual bled customers to fast food. The insight wasn't about price. It was about not wanting to feel like a sucker in front of your friends. Barnes & Noble made a similar bet in books. Amazon won on convenience years ago. So Barnes & Noble stopped trying to out-Amazon Amazon and built around the one thing Amazon still can't do well: helping you discover a book you didn't know you wanted. Neither company is thriving because they found a bigger budget or a growth hack. They found something true about their customers that the rest of their industry stopped asking about. This week on the Jump Podcast, Dev Patnaik and Michelle Loret de Mola dig into Chili's, Barnes & Noble, and a couple other companies quietly outperforming industries everyone's already written off. 🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gtZava-N 🎧 Listen on Apple: https://lnkd.in/gjzvC6yb

I’m honored to be speaking at TEDxSanDiego on August 27th.   We’re living through one of the most disorienting moments in recent memory. AI, climate change, social fragmentation, shifting markets, changing institutions. The signals are everywhere, but they’re getting harder to read. And the pressure to just deal with what’s in front of us has never been greater.   Meanwhile, the decisions that will shape the next decade are already being made, often by people who feel like they barely have time to think past the next quarter.   That’s what I'll be talking about in San Diego.    Why do smart people miss the future? Not because they lack intelligence. Often, it’s because the present is so loud that it takes up all the room.   The future isn't something that happens only in boardrooms or strategy offsites. It shows up in the everyday choices we make about our companies, our communities, our families, and our own lives. Becoming future focused is a way of leading with more imagination, more agency, and more responsibility, whatever role you’re in.   Friends in San Diego, I hope to see you there. And for those further away, stay tuned.

When we're short on ideas, the usual move is to start benchmarking. Understand the competitors. Understand the landscape. Learn the best practices.   You can point benchmarking at any industry you want, but it always gives back the same kind of thing: a record of what already exists. Copy and the best you can do is catch up.   The ideas that actually move you forward aren't in anyone's benchmark yet. They usually come from understanding people in a different world well enough to spot something there that applies to yours. That takes someone who's comfortable stepping into a world that isn't their own. Someone who can learn quickly. Someone who understands you well enough to make the connection.   That's why we hired Katie Adkinson as our Marketing Content Lead.   She's grown the audience for a contemporary ballet company, kept 15,000 people opening a nonprofit's emails, taught English to kids in France, and helped Whataburger break into a new Tennessee market. Four different worlds, no straight line through them. Every one of those jobs put her in front of a different group of strangers and asked her to figure out what made them care.   For a long time, a path like that reads as unfocused. Couldn't she just pick a lane? It turns out the jumping around was the training. You learn more about people from four worlds than from one.   That's how we work at Jump. One month we're deep in a healthcare question, the next we're in retail or financial services, carrying what one world figured out into what might be possible for another.   So the next time your team is stuck, skip the benchmark. The answer usually lives somewhere you haven't looked.   Welcome, Katie. We can't wait to see what you bring back from places the rest of us haven't been.

A lot has changed in 28 years. When Jump started in 1998, we spent a surprising amount of time convincing people that the world was changing. That sounds funny now. Today, change is the one thing everyone agrees on. It's all we talk about. Every headline, every board meeting, every strategy session starts from the assumption that disruption is coming. The challenge isn't recognizing change anymore. It's knowing what to do about it. This past weekend marked Jump’s 28th Anniversary. And for 28 years our work has been grounded in a simple belief: the future isn't something to predict. It's something to prepare for. We've been lucky to do that work with extraordinary clients, brilliant Jumpsters, and ambitious projects that have made a profound impact across industries. Together, we've helped leaders see possibilities earlier, make sense of uncertainty, and build the capacity to move when the moment arrives. To the clients, partners, alumni, and teammates who have shaped this journey: thank you. But because we're future focused, anniversaries feel less like a milestone and more like a chance to look ahead. We're grateful for what got us here and the impact we've had, but we're even more energized by what comes next.

There’s no shortage of reasons to feel guarded right now. The news gives us plenty. So does the pace of change. So does the sense that trust is getting harder to earn and easier to lose. In times like these, many of us tend to believe that a hard-nosed, distrustful leader is the sharper, more realistic one. And many of us are… wrong. That’s according to Jamil Zaki. He’s a psychologist at Stanford who studies what happens when people stop trusting each other. What he’s found is that the people we assume are the sharpest judges of character are actually the worst. Worse at reading people. Worse at solving problems. Worse at the very thing we admire them for. He calls it the "cynical genius illusion." And it's everywhere. So, at exactly the moment when we need the sharpest judgment from the people around us, the ambient cynicism is making everyone's judgment worse. Including our own. The prescription, according to Jamil, isn’t optimism or positive thinking. It’s hopeful skepticism. A hopeful skeptic thinks like a scientist. Hope, in his framing, is not naïveté but "an accurate response to the best data available." His latest book, Hope for Cynics, goes deeper into this research and advice. But at the Jump Offsite, I’m excited to make it real with someone who makes hope feel rigorous. Someone who will make us question and discuss who we’re listening to, who we’re promoting, and who we’re hiring.