That morning I’d just stepped off the plane from Tokyo into Beijing. Two days packed with meetings with local partners and regional healthy building experts, topped off with fantastic sushi and more sake than is strictly advisable. It was the opening leg of a trip across the region. Officially about work; unofficially, so far, mostly about eating.

I’d just wrapped up the morning’s meetings and walked out into a wall of hard summer sun. I reached for my sunglasses and scanned the street for somewhere that might be serving iced coffee. I turned off the main road into a quieter residential block where I’d spotted a little shop that looked promising.

The closer I got, the more people there were. Now, Beijing is always busy, but this was a different kind of busy. Nobody seemed to be in any rush to get anywhere. In fact, they were stopped in front of a chest-high police barricade. Clearly everyone knew something I didn’t.

But the strangest thing of all was that this crowd of hundreds of people was dead silent. If you’ve ever been to Beijing, you know how unusual that is.

It took me a while to work out why. The road wasn’t sealed because something had gone wrong. It was sealed because something enormously important was going right, a few hundred meters away, behind the walls of a school.

It Was Gaokao Day

The barricades, the police, the unnatural hush, none of it was about an emergency. It was about protecting a couple hundred teenagers from the slightest disturbance while they took the most important exam of their lives.

Across the country that same morning, traffic was being rerouted around schools, horns banned near exam sites, and nearby construction paused. The entire apparatus of one of the largest cities on earth had been quietly rearranged.

If you haven’t come across it, the gaokao is China’s national college entrance exam, and it is hard to overstate what it means. It is one set of exams spanning two to four days that more or less determines which university you go to, which in turn shapes the job you get, the career you have, and the broad direction of the rest of your life.

It is a tradition that traces back through the imperial examinations for well over a thousand years, with over 12.9 million students registered to take it this year. For most of those kids, it is the single highest-stakes day they will ever live through, and the entire country knows it. When the students finally spill back out of the gates, there is cheering and tears and flowers, because the hardest day of their lives is suddenly behind them.

It’s a moving thing to watch, an entire society exhaling at once.

I never did get my coffee from that first shop. The whole block was off-limits, so I gave up, looped the long way around, and found a different place. And somewhere on that detour, past a newsstand and a couple of screens flickering in shop windows, I noticed something I would not understand for another few months.

The headline that day was not the exam. It was the weather. Big, prominent numbers flashing temperatures from one city to the next. I remember thinking it was a strange thing to put on the front page, especially considering that the numbers weren’t particularly unusual.

Then I drank my iced coffee and forgot about it.

The Playing Field Was Never Equal

Months later, reading about a Europe that was buckling under its own record-breaking heat wave, I went digging, and the strange headline clicked into place.

A team of economists had taken the gaokao and matched the scores of 14 million students across more than two thousand counties against the temperature in each place on each exam day. Due to the rigidity of the gaokao system, it was close to the perfect experiment. The exam dates are fixed, students must take it in their home county, and air conditioning was not used in the studied sites.

The results showed the undeniable impact of temperature on the human brain.

A 2ºC (3.6ºF) rise in temperature during the exam dropped a student’s total score by 0.68%, and, more importantly, cut their odds of getting into a top-tier university by 1.2%.

This is the most standardized exam on the planet, the great level playing field, the thing that is supposed to be scrupulously fair precisely because so much rides on it. And buried inside it is a variable that quietly adds or removes points from your score, redirects which university you can attend, and therefore nudges the entire trajectory of your life, and you have zero control over it.

It is, frankly, a meritocracy with a serious dose of lottery thrown on top.

The economists who ran the study reached the obvious conclusion. They recommended putting air conditioning in the exam halls. Not for comfort, but to stop penalizing children for the temperature of the city they were born in.

And so, for those few days a year, the top headline in the country is the nation’s temperature, and the impact it will have on the lives of those millions of students.

You Don’t Need a Chinese Exam Hall to See This

We have all sat in an office that was either too hot or too cold and gotten precisely nothing done. When you are sweating through your shirt, there is simply no way for your brain to focus on the task in front of it.

The only thing it will do is circle back, over and over, to how you physically feel. I wish I’d worn shorts. I wonder if I can get away with taking my shoes off. Can I open that window? That’s all your brain has the bandwidth to think about. If I’m too hot, I get virtually nothing done.

When researchers at Harvard ran an experiment during a Boston heat wave, comparing students in air-conditioned dorms against students in older buildings without it, the gap was stark. The students stuck in the heat had 13.4% slower reaction times and scored 13.3% lower on basic arithmetic. These were healthy young adults, not a fragile population.

And, shockingly, the biggest performance gap showed up not during the heat wave but in the cooler days afterward, because the un-air-conditioned buildings stayed hot long after the weather broke.

Zoom out from a single heat wave and the curve is remarkably consistent. A meta-analysis from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, pulling together decades of office studies, found that performance peaks at around 22 ºC and declines as temperatures climb higher. By 30 ºC, you are working at about 91% of your best, a 9% tax just for being too warm. And for some (myself, I am quite certain!) it can be substantially worse.

When economists looked at 10 million PSAT scores across the United States, they found that without air conditioning, a single degree Fahrenheit hotter across a school year erased about 1% of that year’s learning. And because hotter schools disproportionately serve poorer and minority students, the effect accounted for roughly 5% of the racial achievement gap.

Everyone’s Right, and That’s Exactly the Problem

So the answer is simple, right? We just need to set the thermostat to the right temperature, air condition to the exact setpoint, and then everyone will be happy, right? Unfortunately, no.

This is where temperature gets really interesting, and becomes a lot more complicated to manage than most of the other environmental factors we are exposed to.

There is a level of CO2 at which all of us start talking nonsense. There is a level of fine particulate matter at which all of us struggle to breathe. There is a brightness at which all of us feel a stab of pain in our eyeballs from the sun bouncing off a white table. Those are fixed numbers. More or less the same for you, more or less the same for me, because as a species we are broadly similar.

That makes life easy for scientists. You run the experiment, you find the level where everyone says “oh god, that is unbearable,” and you have a threshold. Below it, fine. Above it, this many percent worse.

And with all of those, the direction is never in dispute. There is no tribe of people who secretly thrive at 3,000 ppm of CO2 and fall apart the moment you clean the air. Nobody’s productivity falls off a cliff because you stripped the pollution out of the room. It is less-is-better, full stop, end of story.

Temperature is the one exception.

It has a real biological effect, but, uniquely, there is also an incredibly strong personal preference combined with it. Temperature changes all of us, just not at the exact same numbers.

As I write this, I am in shorts and a t-shirt, perfectly happy at 21 degrees. If anything I would nudge it cooler. Three meters to my left, a colleague is wearing a scarf and a puffy jacket. She could go and find a peer-reviewed study proving her best work happens at 26 degrees, and the infuriating thing is that she would be right. And so would I, at my 21 degrees. We could each cite real research. We are both telling the truth. Put me in her 26-degree room and I am useless. Put her in mine and she is miserable and cannot think.

This is not a fringe observation. When researchers ran over 500 people through cognitive tests at different temperatures, they found that women performed measurably better on math and verbal tasks as the room got warmer, while men did the opposite.

You can see the confusion in the literature itself. One study found a 10% drop in cognitive performance at 26 degrees versus 24, even with people dressed for the heat. Another, testing trainee surgeons, found no impairment at 26 degrees at all. Both are real. They just measured different people doing different things, which is exactly the problem. With CO2 there is one answer. With temperature there are as many answers as there are bodies in the room.

Your Office Is Designed for Half the Room

It gets worse, because the disagreement is not just between people. It is inside the standards we built to settle it.

The model that quietly sets the temperature of nearly every office you have ever worked in was calibrated in the 1960s around the metabolic rate of an “average” male, specifically a 70-kilogram man (jeez, the general population was in better shape back then). That formula can overestimate a woman’s metabolic rate by up to 35%.

So the reason your female colleagues are reaching for cardigans in July is not that they are delicate. It is that the building is being run to the specifications of a man who clocked out decades ago and was never a fair stand-in for half the people in the room to begin with.

And it is not only sex. It is age, and it is hormones. For women going through menopause, the thermoneutral zone, the comfortable band of core temperature between shivering and sweating, can narrow to just a few tenths of a degree. There is no single setpoint on the planet that serves both a 25-year-old man and a 52-year-old woman whose internal thermostat now works by a different set of rules.

It’s Not Just About Comfort

If all of this sounds like a first-world office squabble, take a big step back and zoom out, because at scale this turns into a question of economics.

We like to imagine the fix is simple. Find the right number, say 22 degrees, set the thermostat, done. But that assumes you can actually hit 22 in the first place, and a growing share of the planet no longer can. Our family home in Switzerland does not have air conditioning. We never needed it. If it got hot, you opened the windows and it cooled down. That is simply no longer true, there or in a lot of the world, and it is becoming less true every year.

Now take everything the gaokao study showed you about temperature and cognition, and multiply it by hundreds of millions of people who cannot physically cool the room they are working in. The 2025 Lancet Countdown estimated that heat exposure cost the world 640 billion potential labor hours in a single year, a 98% increase from the annual average in the 1990s, with income losses on the order of $1.09 trillion. Low- and medium-income countries faced the brunt of this crisis, accounting for 68% of the global lost work hours.

The lottery from the gaokao exam hall is just playing out across an entire nation’s economy now.

One of the most successful nation-builders of the last century understood this deeply. Asked what invention had most transformed his country, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew didn’t say the internet or the microchip. He said air conditioning.

“It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.”

He treated temperature as a productivity lever, not a comfort setting, and he bet the entire country’s future on it. If you’ve ever been to Singapore, you will notice that a) they love their air conditioning, and b) Lee Kuan Yew was right. The quote went viral again two weeks ago when Elon Musk called him a genius for it.

A debate is raging in Europe about energy use versus comfort. I’m not here to participate in that, just to share the facts. Temperature does something measurable to human beings, at the scale of a single exam and at the scale of a nation-state’s economy, and we have spent a remarkably long time pretending it doesn’t.

Design for Abundance, Not Uniformity

Stop hunting for the number. There isn’t one. The answer was never a better setpoint. It is a range of them.

A friend at Gensler, Randy Howder, once described their design philosophy to me as “design for abundance,” and the phrase stuck. Instead of forcing one temperature on everyone and policing the inevitable complaints, you build a range into the space. A warmer corner and a cooler corner. A sunlit zone and a shaded one. And then you let people find the spot that fits their body that day.

This is almost effortless in the office of 2026, which has already moved away from assigned desks toward people moving around, choosing different settings for different kinds of work. You’re already letting people pick where to sit; let the temperature be part of what they are picking.

My favorite part is that giving people range is usually cheaper than the alternative, because conditioning one warm zone and one cool zone costs less than blasting the entire floor to a single temperature that still leaves half your team unhappy. You can end up with more people doing their best thinking, and a smaller energy bill, at the same time.

And remember the PSAT study I mentioned earlier? When air conditioning was added as an intervention, the heat tax almost entirely vanished.

We know how to solve this. It isn’t rocket science. It is our choice to make.

Managing temperature does not have to be the bane of facilities management, the unsolvable problem where everyone is always annoyed at you. Done right, it’s the opposite. It allows your people to do their best work, enjoy the office, and not strangle each other over a piece of plastic with a dial sitting on the wall.

By the time I had walked back past the school in Beijing, the exams had ended and the first students were coming out, blinking in the sun, some of them crying, some of them cheering. For many, the hardest day of their lives was behind them.

I now see that scene through a new lens, because of something that none of them could see when they were in it. On top of the years of study, years of hard work, and immense pressure, there was an invisible variable with the ability to swing the course of their life, completely out of their control. A portion of their life trajectory was dictated by which way the wind was blowing, and the number of clouds in the sky.

Anyway. It is now 24 degrees where I am sitting, which is at least three degrees too warm for my liking. If any part of this article didn’t resonate with you, I’m going to blame it on those three degrees.

Ask anyone to picture an accessible, inclusive workplace. They will paint the same image. Wheelchair ramps, accessible restrooms, braille signage, quiet rooms for the neurodiverse, a mental health day policy. It is a reasonable picture. It is also incomplete.

It is missing the one accommodation that likely affects up to half of your workforce but is not on any accessibility checklist - yet. Here are three stories that explain why it absolutely should be.

Three Stories

The first is Angela. She was a happy kid - top of her class, no particular problems. Then, in 6th grade, everything changed. She started to have trouble focusing. She kept sneezing, was plagued by headaches, and her grades collapsed. Her doctors diagnosed her with ADHD and put her on medication. But still, she didn’t get better. Nothing worked. She continued to struggle until, two years later, she moved to a different school building. Every single symptom magically disappeared.

The second is AJ. Four years into running his HVAC business, he started getting panic attacks. Once every six months at first. Then weekly. Then daily. Then ten times a day. Then full-blown seizures. His doctors ran every test they had, trialed dozens of medications, and eventually concluded he needed brain surgery. Yes, you read that correctly - brain surgery. He had given up hope entirely when someone asked him a question no doctor had thought to ask.

The third is my wife, Jess. She had asthma as a child but grew out of it as she got older. Then she visited me while I was living in Beijing. She started feeling terrible. She was constantly coughing and struggled to breathe at times. It got to the point where we started half-jokingly tracking her coughs per minute as a KPI.

You have probably worked out what connects all three of these stories. But they are not the only ones who share this connection.

These are not outliers. These are the people in your open-plan office right now - sitting three desks over, managing something you may not know about, breathing the same air as everyone else, hoping it isn’t making them worse.

The Common Variable

Angela, AJ, and Jess are like everyone else on that map. Real people living ordinary lives, whose health, productivity, and quality of life were being systematically destroyed by something none of them could see: the air they were breathing.

In Angela’s case, construction in her school building was generating toxic particulate matter that her doctors never thought to test for. Move buildings, symptoms vanish. For AJ, his occupational exposure to mold in poorly ventilated spaces was the cause of a neurological crisis that very nearly ended in unnecessary brain surgery - until someone asked him, “How’s your air?” For Jess, the severe outdoor air pollution of Beijing - seeping into buildings without adequate filtration - reactivated a respiratory condition she had left behind in childhood.

Three people. Three very different lives. One common variable hiding in plain sight.

The Accessibility Gap

The case for accessibility rests on a simple premise: a physical environment that prevents someone from entering, functioning in, or thriving within a space is discriminatory. We build ramps because a staircase-only building excludes wheelchair users. Braille signage exists because visual-only signs exclude those with vision impairments.

By that same logic, a building with poor indoor air quality excludes an entire population - one that is much larger than the population served by ramps.

• Roughly 9% of the global population has asthma, directly aggravated by particulate matter, VOCs, mold spores, and other toxins.

• Between 10% and 30% of people have allergic rhinitis, similarly sensitive to indoor air.

• Approximately 7% are immunocompromised at any given time - cancer patients, organ transplant recipients, people on immunosuppressive medications, and those with primary immune deficiencies. For them, a poorly ventilated room is a serious clinical hazard, not a mere inconvenience.

• Add COPD, cardiovascular conditions exacerbated by PM2.5 exposure, and neurological conditions sensitive to VOCs and CO2, and the figure balloons.

Despite cumulatively representing up to half the workforce in most countries, this population rarely appears in workplace policies in any meaningful way. At best, they are absorbed into a blanket disability category - one many do not self-identify with. A person managing lupus does not think of themselves as disabled. A cancer survivor returning after treatment does not raise their hand in the accessibility survey. But they are directly and immediately affected by the quality of the air they walk into every morning.

The Most Dangerous Assumption in Real Estate

The natural response from anyone responsible for a building is: “I agree this matters, but our air isn’t that bad.” Ask for proof. They go silent.

The percentage of building managers and workplace leaders with actual data on their indoor air quality is vanishingly small. Most assessments (when they happen at all) are periodic manual inspections. This is the rough equivalent of checking a patient’s blood pressure once a year and concluding they have no cardiovascular risk.

The data from buildings that have actually measured their performance is not reassuring. Take this recent nationwide commercial portfolio audit as an example:

Only 52% of outdoor air dampers and 75% of air filters were in working condition. Many of these buildings failed to bring in sufficient fresh air and filter out particulate matter. Occupants were breathing recycled, polluted air without knowing it.

This is not uncommon. HVAC systems fail silently. Filters clog. Dampers seize. CO2 builds up. The building looks and feels the same whether the systems are functioning or not. There is no broken staircase to photograph. There is just air, the assumption that it is fine, and the slow accumulation of health consequences for the people breathing it every day.

What Good Actually Looks Like

The fix is not complicated. Continuous air quality monitoring gives building managers data instead of assumptions. MERV 13 or higher filtration provides meaningful protection against particulate matter and airborne pathogens. Properly engineered mechanical ventilation ensures shared spaces are not accumulating hours of exhaled CO2.

None of this is experimental. It is widely deployed in high-performance commercial buildings, and within reach of any organization that chooses to prioritize it.

We regulate tap water to a standard that protects the most vulnerable, not the least. We do not accept assurances that the plumbing is “probably fine.” We measure it, certify it, and hold it to a standard. The air in those same buildings deserves the same treatment.

The Decision

The air in most workplaces is excluding countless people, right now. Not by design. By default.

It excludes the person with asthma who spends the afternoon foggy and breathless. The worker with VOC sensitivities who cannot be in the building on cleaning days. The immunocompromised employee who contracts an infection in a poorly ventilated meeting room.

None of this shows up in an accessibility audit or triggers a complaint. It is never fixed because it is invisible - and it stays invisible because nobody measures it.

The ramp did not appear because someone asked nicely. It appeared because someone decided exclusion was unacceptable. Make the same decision. Measure your air, fix what you find, and keep it that way.

Inspired by Plum Stone, founder and CEO of the Safer Air Project. A 20-year veteran of health policy, Plum is the primary driver of the conversation around IAQ as a critical inclusion issue. Through the Safer Air Project, she works to make indoor spaces healthy and accessible for everyone - especially those with chronic conditions.

Try something for me. Walk up to anyone in your organization and ask them: “Who is responsible for productivity in this company?”

Watch their face. You will see a look that is somewhere between confusion and existential dread. A deer in the headlights. They will stare at you, blink a few times, and say something like, “Uh… maybe HR?”

I have done this experiment many times. The response is always the same: Nobody knows! No one can even point you in the right direction. If you think about it for more than ten seconds, this is completely insane. We have someone in charge of the office plants. We have someone in charge of the snack wall. But nobody is in charge of making sure the 200 brains in the building are actually working.

A Company Is Just a Collection of Brains

Let’s go to first principles: What is a company?

Strip away the brand, the office, the org chart, the Slack channels. At its core, a company is simply a group of humans with a common purpose, trying to achieve an objective together. That’s it. Apple is just a group of people who share a belief system, a set of core values (think different!), and a goal. So is every other organization on the planet.

You know what else is a group of people with a common set of values, trying to achieve a goal together? A sports team. I have always felt that the analogy between a company and a sports team is one of the best in business. But there is one critical difference:

• In a sports team, the players use their bodies.

• In a modern company, the players use their brains.

The output of your organization is a function of four things: the number of brains you have, the quality of those brains, their ability to collaborate, and the tools they have access to.

That’s it. That’s the equation - everything else is simply a variable within that equation. And the implications are just as straightforward.

If your people are enabled to do their best cognitive work, your outcomes improve. If they’re not, then you leave value on the table. So if you were going to pick one metric, one KPI to rule them all, for the success of an organization, it should always be the cognitive performance of its people.

And yet, in virtually every company on earth, this metric has no owner.

HR Is Not the Answer

Back to my question. Some brave souls, after a long pause, will gesture vaguely toward HR.

Let’s be honest about what HR does in most organizations. Outside of recruitment, HR is thinking about vacation requests. HR is thinking about complaints. HR is organizing kickboxing lessons on Thursday afternoon.

Now, I don’t say this to belittle HR. These are all important functions. And personally, my cognitive performance probably does improve after fifteen minutes of kickboxing on a Thursday afternoon.

But the point is: these are inputs. They are leading indicators of a much bigger output. HR manages a slice of the pie. Nobody is looking at the whole pie. Nobody is standing back and asking, “Are our people’s brains operating at their best, and if not, what are all the levers we can pull to fix that?”

Some might say, “Well, it all rolls up to the CEO.” And sure, in theory, a CEO is responsible for everything. But the CEO also has to think about long-term vision, fundraising, board management, and a hundred other things. Having productivity “roll up” to the CEO is like saying the pilot is responsible for every rivet in the airplane. Technically true. Practically useless.

And yet this is how we run trillion-dollar organizations.

The Sports Team Test

Here is a test that exposes the gap.

Give me the name of a professional sports team that does not have somebody dedicated to optimizing the performance of its players. You can’t, because that team doesn’t exist. Or if it does, nobody has ever heard of it, and it has never won a game.

Formula One teams have people optimizing performance in every conceivable dimension. They monitor every aspect of the car and the driver, making micro-adjustments every few minutes to avoid catastrophic failures.

Dave Brailsford famously applied this same rigor to British cycling through his “aggregation of marginal gains,” hiring surgeons to teach hand-washing and painting truck floors white to spot performance-degrading dirt. Brailsford’s obsession with the 1% transformed a legacy of mediocrity into an era of total dominance, winning 80% of Olympic golds and five Tour de France titles in just six years.

Sports teams understand a fundamental truth: when you are a collection of people trying to achieve a common goal, and you can make those people even 1% better, the outcomes are outsized.

But in companies? Nobody is responsible for this. In fact, very few are even thinking seriously about it.

The GSK Precedent

There is one company that figured this out early, and the story is instructive.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, partnered with Formula One team McLaren in a strategic alliance that ran for years.

The idea was radical for its time: take the performance optimization expertise that McLaren had developed over decades of elite racing and apply it to a corporate environment.

McLaren’s “Mission Control”, the unit that analyzes team performance and directs real-time decision-making during a Grand Prix, was replicated inside GSK’s headquarters. The same monitoring systems used to track every component of a race car were adapted to optimize GSK’s manufacturing lines, R&D processes, and consumer healthcare operations.

GSK even launched a Human Performance Lab, a science facility dedicated to deepening the understanding of human performance, partnering with Olympic athletes, British Triathlon, and elite sports nutritionists.

And if you’ve ever been to GSK’s headquarters in London, you can tell the moment that you walk in the door, they are serious about the cognitive performance of their people. They have a vertical farm in the basement and probably one of the coolest gyms I’ve ever been to!

This was a pharmaceutical company looking at its workforce and saying: “Our people are our product. If we can make them perform even marginally better, the returns are enormous.” They borrowed from the world of elite sports because sports teams have been solving this problem for decades.

The question is: why aren’t more companies doing this?

The AI Multiplier

Here is where it gets urgent.

AI is automating away a growing share of organizational work. McKinsey’s latest research estimates that current technologies could, in theory, automate activities accounting for 57% of U.S. work hours. Routine tasks, such as data entry, document formatting, and copy-pasting cells, are being eaten by machines at an accelerating rate. At Kaiterra, I am furiously automating away all rote work for our teams.

For most organizations, this is an opportunity. The repetitive manual labor is being removed. What remains is the work that matters: complex cognitive work, high-stakes decisions, strategic thinking. The stuff you are not willing to leave to a machine - should we exit this product line? Should we bet the company on this acquisition while the board watches?

Think about what this means. The ratio of high-cognitive to low-cognitive work in your organization is shifting, fast. The proportion of your team’s day spent on work that requires peak mental performance is increasing. The decisions your people are making are getting bigger, more consequential, and more frequent.

If that becomes the majority of the work done by your people, do you not want somebody thinking about how their brains are performing? Do you not want someone asking whether your workforce is optimized for the one thing they are increasingly being asked to do - think?

We are entering an era where cognitive performance has never mattered more, and we still don’t have anyone responsible for it.

The Case for a Chief Performance Officer

We have a Chief Financial Officer to manage money. A Chief Technology Officer to manage systems. A Chief People Officer to manage, well, people-related processes. But we don’t have anyone whose primary mandate is: make the brains in this building work better.

I think it is time for a Chief Performance Officer.

Not an HR leader with a new title. Not a wellness coordinator with a bigger budget. A C-suite executive whose job is to look at every dimension of the employee experience and optimize it all for one outcome: cognitive performance. The physical environment, the tools, the workflows, the culture, the air they breathe, the light they work under, the noise they endure, and even how AI can enable higher performance.

If you think this sounds like a soft, fluffy wellness initiative, you’re not paying attention. This is direct P&L.

We spend fortunes on management consultants, leadership retreats, and digital transformation, all in the name of optimizing organizational output. Yet we ignore the fuel intake of the machine itself. We are tuning the engine while running it on contaminated gasoline.

A real estate team that understands its job is not to “manage space” but to “house brains” will make fundamentally different decisions about ventilation, lighting, acoustics, and layout. A technology team that understands its role is to “reduce cognitive friction” will prioritize differently than one that is just “keeping systems running.” A Chief Performance Officer would connect these dots, because right now, nobody does.

The Bottom Line

The most important KPI in your organization - the cognitive performance of your people - currently has no owner, no budget, and no dashboard.

Every professional sports team on the planet has solved this problem. They have dedicated, specialized professionals whose entire existence is to make their players 1% better. And they do this because they understand that when you are a collection of people trying to win together, marginal improvements in performance create outsized results.

Companies are no different. They are just decades behind.

The organizations that wake up to this, start treating cognitive performance as a first-class business metric, and give it an owner will have an unfair advantage. The rest will keep wondering why their people feel sluggish at 2 PM and why their best talent keeps leaving for companies that, somehow, just feel different to work at.

We need a Chief Performance Officer. And we need one before the AI revolution finishes reshaping what “work” means. Otherwise, we’re left with nothing but high-stakes cognitive labor and no one watching the gauges.

Inspired by Andrew Mawson, founder of Advanced Workplace Associates, who has been researching cognitive performance in organizations for years. Also by the great work of Chris Higgins at GSK and human performance strategist Josh Jackman, whose former firm, ART Health Solutions, helped GSK bring this to life. Tellingly, one of the original ART team members is now at McLaren Racing. 🏎️

There is a specific feeling you get when you walk into a truly high-performance building.

It hits you the moment the doors slide open. The light isn’t the oppressive hum of fluorescent tubes; it streams in through high-performance glass, filtered through a living wall of greenery. The acoustics are engineered so you can hear the person next to you, but not the conversation three tables away. You walk to the canteen and, instead of a vending machine dispensing Type 2 diabetes in a red can, there are healthy options.

The temperature is perfect. You don’t sweat, you don’t shiver, and the air doesn’t taste like stale carpet. You feel... capable.

I have spent a lot of time in these buildings - the ones with the “WELL Platinum” plaques on the wall. It is an environment designed for the maximum optimization of the human experience. It is impressive. It is desirable. But then, the skepticism sets in.

You look around at this incredible environment and think, “What’s the point of this perfect bubble?”

When we see billionaires shooting rockets into the stratosphere while our infrastructure crumbles, it’s easy to look at a plaque on the wall and wonder, “Does this really move the needle?”

We know these buildings represent a fraction of a fraction of the market. They are the 0.1%. Meanwhile, over 99% of the global population breathes air that is technically unsafe. In the face of those numbers, the work feels microscopic. You start to wonder: Are we actually changing the world? Or are we just curating a luxury experience for the most comfortable demographic in history?

It is a fair question. If we are just creating “Gucci” air for the few, the impact is negligible. But this view misses the fundamental mechanics of how innovation scales. In societal progress, the top tier of the market serves a critical function: They are the beta testers.

The Tesla Roadmap

Forget the headlines and the social media noise for a moment. In 2008, if you wanted an electric car that didn’t look like a golf cart, you had to buy a Tesla Roadster. It was a toy for the 0.1%. It cost over $100,000. It was exclusive, elitist, and irrelevant to the average family.

But the premiums paid by those early adopters funded the supply chain that built the Model S, which funded the Model 3. Today, the ubiquity of EV charging stations, the plummeting cost of batteries, and the incredible new cars being built from China to Saudi Arabia are direct downstream consequences of tech bros buying expensive toys fifteen years ago.

The rich didn’t just buy a car; they paid for the R&D. They subsidized the factory tooling. They ate the massive initial unit costs so that ten years later, the technology could be cheap enough for a Honda.

We are seeing the exact same phenomenon in our built environment.

The VOC Victory

Consider the history of VOCs. We know them best as “that new car smell,” but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. These compounds are woven into the very fabric of our buildings - in paint, carpets, adhesives, furniture, you name it - where they act as invisible toxins that fry your neural pathways.

Fifteen years ago, the LEED certification system introduced credits for using non-toxic, low-VOC materials. They were optional bonus points for developers who wanted the platinum plaque to justify higher rents.

But the math of manufacturing soon took over.

Because the most prestigious buildings in New York and San Francisco craved that top-tier plaque and demanded non-toxic paint, manufacturers like Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore had to produce it. Once they figured out how to make it at scale, the economics shifted. It became inefficient to run two production lines, one for the “high-performance” projects and another for the rest of the market. The low-VOC formulation became the standard formulation.

The market didn’t change because of a moral awakening. It changed because, like any other manufacturer, Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore hate production complexity. It became cheaper to make one good paint than two different ones.

Then came the regulators.

California, a state that functions as the R&D lab for American policy, looked at the data. They saw that low-emitting materials were viable. They passed legislation (CalGreen and CARB standards) that effectively took those optional LEED credits and made them mandatory law.

Then, the federal government followed suit. The EPA adopted the Formaldehyde Standards for Composite Wood Products Act, effectively taking California’s standards national.

In a relatively short timeline, we went from “non-toxic materials are a luxury upgrade” to “toxic materials are illegal.”

Today, when a family in Kentucky buys a sheet of plywood from Home Depot to fix their porch, they are not breathing formaldehyde. Why? Because a decade ago, a developer in Silicon Valley wanted a shiny plaque for their lobby.

The Next Frontier: Air

We are now standing at the same precipice with indoor air quality (IAQ).

Today, continuous air quality monitoring is a core pathway for WELL certification and a new standard in LEED v5. Currently, it is a luxury. We are placing high-end sensors in the offices of hedge funds to ensure their traders remain cognitively optimized.

Critics will say this isn’t helping the masses.

I would bet my own money that within a decade, the trajectory of VOCs will repeat with IAQ monitoring. The sensors being deployed in luxury offices today are driving down the cost of the hardware. The data collected is proving the ROI of fresh air - showing that CO2 buildup literally saps our brainpower.

California is already watching. Forward-thinking jurisdictions will soon bake continuous air monitoring into building codes. Eventually, it will become a federal standard. Other countries are already ahead of the curve and working on national standards. We already regulate the safety of the water that comes out of our taps; it is inevitable that we will regulate the air that enters our lungs.

The Invisible Legacy

If you are working on a building certification today, you might feel like you are just polishing a trophy for a landlord. But you need to zoom out.

The decisions made in the boardroom of a WELL Platinum project do not stop at the lobby doors. They ripple through supply chains, they prove viability to legislators, and they eventually rewrite the code for the entire industry.

The committee that wrote the first optional credit for low-VOC paint probably thought they were just helping a few architects get a better score. They couldn’t have imagined that their bonus points would eventually prevent hundreds of millions of Americans from breathing carcinogens in their own homes.

So, if you’re working on a certification for a trophy asset, don’t feel like your impact is confined to just the occupants of that building. You are running the beta test for the world.

The early adopters fund the prototype so the rest of the world can eventually inherit the standard. We need the 0.1% to pay the luxury tax on clean indoor air, so that in ten years, “healthy building” isn’t a premium classification. It’s just “building.”

I grew up in Switzerland. For years, I took the sky for granted. It was just there, an impossible, piercing blue. The air felt clean, sharp, scrubbing your lungs from the inside out. I didn’t realize that this air wasn’t normal - it was a winning ticket in the geographic lottery.

For most of the human race, that feeling is a fantasy.

I have lived in many cities with air that is a far cry from the Swiss Alps. And when I travel to cities where the air is thick enough to chew, where you can taste the particulate matter on your tongue, the reality is clear. The scale of the problem is simply too massive.

And yes, I am about to make an intentionally controversial statement. A statement that might get me cancelled by the environmental purists:

We are placing way too much focus on outdoor air quality.

Not because it doesn’t matter. It matters immensely. But because focusing on the outdoors simply does not have anywhere near the same short-term ROI as indoor air quality (IAQ), and, counterintuitively, is costing us millions of lives right now.

The Math

If you are waiting for the air outside your window to meet the World Health Organization’s safety guidelines, you should probably get comfortable. You’re going to be here for a while.

The data is terrifyingly clear: a 2023 Lancet Planetary Health study estimated that over 99.999% of the global population is exposed to PM2.5 above the WHO annual average limit. In 2025, only 13 countries and territories out of the 143 surveyed met this guideline - representing a fraction of a percent of the world’s population.

That means we have a failure rate of nearly 100%.

The consequences are not abstract. We are looking at 8.1 million premature deaths per year linked to air pollution. To put that in perspective, that is roughly the population of New York City wiped off the map, every single year.

And it’s not just death; it’s degradation. New research links PM2.5 exposure directly to Alzheimer’s and dementia, with some studies attributing more than one in four dementia deaths to air pollution. It is literally rotting our brains.

The mission to clean up the outdoor air is noble, necessary, and... astronomically difficult. It requires rewiring the global energy grid, overturning industrial supply chains, and political cooperation on a scale we haven’t seen since 1945. It is a multi-decade project (if we’re lucky).

And while we fight those decades-long battles, people are dying.

But here’s the part that should make you angry: we’re not failing because we lack resources. We’re failing because we’re allocating them to the wrong place. We are pouring billions into the hardest, slowest, most politically complex part of the problem, while starving the one variable we can actually control right now.

Misplaced Billions

The most recent estimate for outdoor air funding is $3.7 billion.

This only includes financial institutions and international aid. Adding domestic spending would skyrocket this number. And it’s not just money - we have extensive monitoring networks and strict regulations for outdoor air around the globe.

When you compare this with the resources for indoor air, the difference is, honestly, laughable.

Aside from a handful of small, often temporary federal grants that focus on very specific applications (schools, low-income communities, etc.), there is no major influx of cash dedicated to improving indoor air. There is no national regulation or unified global tracking system. At best, IAQ is lumped into other categories like energy efficiency or clean cooking as a “side benefit”.

We are pouring billions into outdoor air while barely spending pennies on indoor air - the very environment we could fix today to start saving millions of lives.

The Great Indoors

This is the unlock. The variable we are ignoring.

We don’t live outside. We live in boxes.

Estimates consistently show that human beings spend approximately 90% of our time indoors. We are an indoor species. We sleep, eat, work, and, unfortunately, scroll TikTok inside. Yet, we obsess over the air quality in the 10% of the world where we spend the least amount of time.

The silver lining here is control. The outdoors is a tragedy of the commons; the indoors is a solvable engineering problem.

• We choose the materials. We can decide if our walls off-gas toxic chemicals or not.

• We choose the ventilation. We can decide how much fresh air we bring in.

• We choose the filtration. We can scrub the air of the very pollutants that are killing us outside.

The incredible thing about buildings is that they are a closed loop. If we have the courage and the willpower to make the right decisions, we can absolutely ensure the purity of the air we breathe and the health of our occupants.

Stop the Bleeding

We could, technically, fix this tomorrow.

If we upgraded our building codes, retrofitted our ventilation systems, and deployed high-grade filtration, we could ensure that for 90% of your life, you are breathing air that is cleaner than a Swiss mountaintop.

We can remove the indoor pollutants - which, by the way, are often worse than outdoor levels due to cooking, construction, and cleaning chemicals - and filter out the outdoor smog before it enters our lungs.

This is the triage approach. If a patient comes into the ER bleeding out, you don’t lecture them on diet and exercise (the long-term fix). You stop the bleeding.

Fixing our buildings is the tourniquet. It stops the bleeding for eight million people a year.

And yes, not everybody has access to these buildings, and we can’t magically retrofit every building in the world to perform better overnight. But this will have enormous returns and deliver non-linear ROI. We are currently leaving that ROI on the table, and it is costing us lives.

The Pragmatic Pivot

Does this mean I don’t care about blue skies? No. I want blue skies in New Delhi and Beijing and Los Angeles. But I also want the people living there today to survive long enough to see them.

But the realist in me knows that we cannot hold our breath waiting for a perfect world.

We can, and absolutely should, embark on the multi-decade crusade to decarbonize the planet and clean the skies. We must. But let’s not suffocate while we wait for the politicians to get their act together.

We have the technology to save millions of lives right now. It’s just sitting there, inside.

We are terrible at assessing risk. We fear the shark in the water but ignore the cheeseburger on the plate. We panic about turbulence but text while driving.

Nowhere is this cognitive dissonance more obvious than in how we breathe.

I have lived in some of the cleanest corners of the Earth - literally next to a glacier at the top of the Swiss Alps - and some of the most notorious. I spent years in Beijing, a city that became the poster child for the “Airpocalypse.”

If I asked you where my lungs were safer, the grey skies of Beijing or the seemingly pristine cityscape of Vancouver, where I’m writing this now, you’d bet the house on Canada. You’d lose.

I breathed cleaner air in Beijing than I do in Vancouver. Here’s why, and why the air in your “safe” city might be far worse for your health than you think.

The Visible Villain

In Beijing, pollution wasn’t a statistic; it was the weather. You could taste it. Because the threat was visceral, the response was aggressive. We knew the outdoor air was toxic, so we treated the indoors like a life-support system.

Individuals and organizations in China don’t just open a window. They engineer a sanctuary. Here’s what I did in my apartment, and I am not an outlier:

• Proactive Systems: We had industrial-grade fresh air systems running 24/7.

• Filtration: Multiple layers of HEPA filtration scrubbing out particulate matter.

• Monitoring: Sensors for CO2, VOCs (volatile organic compounds), and PM2.5 in every room.

The result? The outdoor air might have been a choking 50 micrograms per cubic meter of PM2.5 back then. But inside? We were scrubbing 95% of that out. I was living in a consistent environment of 2.5 micrograms.

I was living in a bubble. But it was a clean bubble.

The Invisible Threat

Fast forward to Vancouver, or Toronto, or arguably wherever you are reading this right now. The outdoor air looks clean. The sky is blue. We assume “safe.” But complacency is a slow killer.

Most buildings in Canada, and across the West, are functionally obsolete regarding respiratory health. Many lack mechanical ventilation entirely, and those with ventilation often have poor filters, moldy filters, or no filters at all. They rely on “leakiness” or opening a window.

But here is the data point that should keep you up at night: We spend 90% of our lives indoors.

In Vancouver, the background outdoor pollution might be low, hovering around 4 micrograms. But because our buildings have almost zero filtration capacity, that 4 micrograms comes right inside. Then, you add the internal pollutants: the gas stove firing up (releasing NO2), the off-gassing from your cheap carpet (VOCs), and the CO2 from three people sleeping in a small room.

Then comes wildfire season.

Without fail, smoke blankets the Pacific Northwest every year. That “fresh” Canadian air turns toxic. Because we have no culture of filtration, that smoke walks right through the front door.

But we don’t need a natural disaster to see the failure. Even on a “perfect” day, when the fires aren’t burning and the sky is bright blue, the lack of protection still guarantees exposure. The math is simple:

The takeaway: It is healthier to live in a well-designed building in a polluted city than a poorly designed building in a “clean” city.

The IQ Tax

Why does this matter? It’s not just about long-term health, though the WHO states that 99% of the global population breathes air that exceeds quality limits. It’s about how your brain is impacted today.

Polluted air suffocates your brain and stifles your cognitive functioning. I’ve written before about this in “The Invisible 1% Edge the World’s Best Are Using to Outperform Everyone Else,” but I can also attest to this on a personal level.

Compared to the West, working in my purified Beijing office made my decision-making sharper and my fatigue lower. The difference was drastic and, frankly, alarming.

The Fix

The good news? This isn’t cold fusion. It’s plumbing.

We don’t need to terraform Mars or ban all cars tomorrow to fix this. We just need to treat indoor air quality with the same seriousness we treat tap water. You wouldn’t drink brown water from a tap because the reservoir “looked clean.” Why breathe unfiltered air?

It doesn’t cost a fortune. We have the technology available (mechanical ventilation and high-grade filters - MERV 13 or higher), and we have the data to prove it. We just lack the awareness.

It’s time to stop worrying about the shark in the water and start fixing the air in the room.

I listen to a lot of people talk. Almost always on 2x, which I love, but that’s a topic for another day! Recently, amidst the hours of audio, I noticed a surprising pattern emerge.

I was listening to Acquired, which was recently featured in the Harvard Business Review and is, frankly, excellent, and the hosts mentioned they track the CO2 levels in their studio while recording. Then, I read an article about Steven Bartlett, the force behind The Diary of a CEO. I was surprised to learn that he does the exact same thing.

Two of the most successful podcasts on the planet are obsessively monitoring their air.

At first glance, this seems like a quirk. But when the best in the world start doing the same weird thing, it’s not a quirk. It’s a strategy. They have woken up to the fact that clear air leads to a clear brain, which leads to clear results and outsized outcomes.

Cognitive Fuel

We like to think that our thoughts are purely a product of our intellect and effort. We are wrong. Our cognitive output is fundamentally tethered to our biology.

There is a mountain of research on this. A landmark study by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that cognitive function scores were 61% higher on days with low CO2 concentrations compared to “conventional” office environments. When they cranked the ventilation up even further? Scores doubled. Similar results are supported by decades of research from around the globe.

Yet, we ignore this. We sit in sealed boxes, recycling our own exhaust, and wonder why we feel sluggish at 2:00 PM.

The hosts of Acquired aren’t scientists; they are storytellers and analysts. But they understand leverage. They know that a CO2 monitor is a cheap hedge against stupidity.

The Bolt Margin

It’s easy to be cynical. You might ask: “Can you really prove that my podcast, or my memo, or my strategy deck turned out 13% better because I opened a window?” I have heard countless workplace leaders fear the day their CFO asks this question. Because the answer is, “No, you will never definitively prove the causation between these two in your own office.” But this misses the point. It asks the wrong question.

The right question to ask is this:

What Is the Value of 1%?

In world-class sports, the difference between immortality and obscurity is a rounding error. Some quick numbers:

• 2016 Olympics: Usain Bolt won gold with 9.81s. Justin Gatlin took silver with 9.89s. The gap was 0.08 seconds. That is a 0.8% difference.

• 2024 Olympics: Noah Lyles won by five-thousandths of a second.

When you are at the elite level, whether you are running track or running a Fortune 500 company, you do not look for silver bullets that make you 50% better. Those don’t exist. You scrape and claw for the final 1%. You take every single percentage point you can get.

British Cycling is possibly the best example of “the 1%”. In 2003, they famously hired Dave Brailsford as performance director. His relentless focus on incremental 1% improvements led the team to hire a surgeon to teach them how to better wash their hands and reduce viruses, and paint their truck white to more easily spot dirt that could degrade their bikes.

In 110 years, no British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France. After Brailsford’s focus on the 1%, Brits won 80% of the Track Cycling Gold Medals in the 2008 Beijing Olympics and five Tour de France victories in six years.

If fresh air gives you a 1% cognitive edge, and you ignore it, you are trying to win the Tour de France on a tricycle.

Air Quality is Asymmetric

This explains why we are seeing a massive trend in high-stakes environments adopting this technology. Financial services were the early adopters. JPMC’s flagship new office at 270 Park in NYC is the perfect example of this. They doubled the standard outdoor air ventilation rate and integrated 24/7 air quality monitoring to ensure their elite talent never loses that critical 1% cognitive edge to stale air.

Why? Because the ROI is undeniable.

If you are a trader on a floor moving nine-figure positions, a fraction of a percentage point in decision-making quality translates to hundreds of millions of dollars. If you are in a boardroom negotiating a merger, and the air is stale, your brain is literally suffocating. You are more likely to miss a nuance, misread a tone, or accept a mediocre term.

If better air leads to a slight uptick in the quality of a billion-dollar acquisition decision, the cost of an HVAC upgrade is statistically zero. It is a no-brainer.

The Takeaway

We spend fortunes on management consultants, leadership retreats, and digital transformation, trying to optimize organizational output. Yet we neglect the fuel intake of the machine itself.

The folks running Acquired and Diary of a CEO aren’t guessing. They are measuring. They are looking for their “little edge” to add to the basket.

If you are content with average, keep the windows closed. But for anyone trying to be in the top 10%, anyone for whom a 1% differential creates meaningful separation, measuring your air quality isn’t health advice. It’s a competitive advantage.

Don’t leave the 1% on the table.

We have a branding problem with fixing climate change.

In the sustainability world, the narrative is dominated by “The Climate.” We talk extensively about carbon footprints, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, environmental stress, you name it. We ask consumers and voters to make sacrifices today for a benefit that feels abstract, distant, and impersonal.

We are essentially selling altruism. Unfortunately, in a capitalist society, altruism is a niche product. Markets are not driven by altruism; they are driven by incentives. To put it plainly, people don’t give a sh*t. Asking a consumer to pay a premium for a cleaner planet in 2050 is like asking a teenager to save for a nursing home. It’s rational, but it’s never going to happen.

I spend my days focusing on indoor air quality and healthy buildings - addressing a threat that is very tangible and direct. From that vantage point, the gap in the messaging is obvious. But a leader in the sustainability space recently told me something that unlocked the problem even further:

“We spend all of our time thinking about climate change. But there is so much overlap between health and climate change that, if you fix one, you fix the other.”

From energy to real estate to infrastructure, we operate based on two separate buckets:

1. Climate: The planet, the weather, the future.

2. Health: My body, my family, today.

This segmentation is a mistake. The contents of the buckets are fundamentally intertwined. The largest driver of climate change (fossil fuels) is also the largest driver of the air pollution that is actively killing us. The solution to these problems is the same. We have the right product, but the packaging is wrong.

And the real magic here is that if we fix air pollution, the economic value unlocked will be more than enough to pay for the entire cost of fixing the climate crisis! There will be no premium to be paid for altruism; it will happen by itself.

If we want to fix the climate, we need to stop talking about “the sea” and start talking about “me.”

The Psychology of Self-Interest

Which headline grabs you? A) “Ocean acidification threatens fish populations in the Atlantic.” B) “Toxic particles in the air are shrinking your child’s lung capacity.”

Your amygdala doesn’t trigger for a fish. It triggers for threats to your immediate tribe. The closer the threat, the stronger the instinct. That is simply human nature.

This isn’t to say we don’t care about the environment. But the “Climate” argument is fundamentally challenging to how our brains work. Humans are terrible at understanding long-term risk. We are excellent, however, at responding to immediate danger.

When we talk about the air we breathe right now versus the state of the climate in 2050, the argument shifts from a geopolitical debate to a biological imperative. And that imperative is what motivates people to make actual change.

That is how we begin fixing the climate - by starting with the more immediate, personal crisis: air pollution. This is the bridge between the two buckets - the stone that takes out both birds. And that bridge is made of money.

The P&L of Air Pollution

If you look at the math, the distinction between saving the planet and saving ourselves evaporates. The cost of “business as usual” - burning fossil fuels and breathing the toxic byproducts - is astronomical. From chronic disease to lost productivity, polluted air is a massive tax on the global economy.

By focusing on eliminating air pollution (“Health”), we unlock the capital needed to solve the climate crisis. Let’s look at the numbers:

1. The Tax on Humanity ($8.1 Trillion):

The World Bank estimates the economic damage from the health impacts of air pollution (medical costs, lost productivity, premature death) is roughly $8.1 trillion per year. To put that in context: that is 6.1% of the global GDP. We are setting 6% of the world’s wealth on fire every year just to treat the symptoms of our energy system.

2. The Cost of the Fix ($3.5 Trillion):

According to McKinsey, transitioning the global economy to Net Zero by 2050 requires an annual investment of $9.2 trillion. But we already spend $5.7 trillion annually on our existing energy infrastructure. The incremental cost - the new money needed to go green - is only $3.5 trillion per year.

3. The Arbitrage:

This is simple arithmetic:

• Cost of the problem (Pollution): $8.1 trillion

• Cost of the solution (Net Zero): $3.5 trillion

• The spread: $4.6 trillion

We are currently spending $8 trillion a year to avoid spending $3.5 trillion. If this were a business, the board would be sued for gross negligence! We are told we can’t afford to fix it. But we don’t have a resource problem. We have an allocation problem.

And, by the way, an extra $4.6 trillion would allow us to end world hunger, transform education for the entire developing world, fund a full-scale manned Mars program from scratch, buy the entire U.S. gold reserve, and still have enough to buy the entire annual economic output of Italy. And then we could do this all over again, EVERY SINGLE YEAR.

The Bottom Line

For too long, the climate movement has framed the transition as a burden - a story of scarcity, cost, and sacrifice. But the economic reality proves otherwise.

By prioritizing clean air, we align our short-term, self-focused needs (“Health”) with our long-term, collective goals (“Climate”). This is the ultimate arbitrage. We fix air pollution today to stop the $8.1 trillion bleed, and in doing so, we fund the infrastructure that saves the planet for tomorrow.

We don’t need to choose sides. We just need to start where people feel it most - in their lungs - and let the economics do the rest.