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There are three kinds of annoying colleagues. I have already written about dealing with annoying bosses and colleagues. What happens if the source of your annoyance is one of your direct reports? Once again, dealing with what bothers you depends a lot on what it is causing the problem. Here are four common causes of annoyance. 1. The one who sucks up It is natural for people who are ambitious to want to find ways to get ahead. Obviously, doing great work is important, but a little self-promotion can’t hurt either. After all, if you have lots of direct reports, you may not notice everything that everyone is doing. So, you should expect that the folks who work fo…

Large language models are quietly reshaping the way people write research papers—and scientists are catching colleagues using AI to do their work. View the full article

Ask any C-suite leader if AI is a priority in their organization. The answer is yes. The numbers back it up. Menlo Ventures reports that companies spent $37 billion in 2025 on AI. But spending does not guarantee success, and many companies are now coming out of major rollouts with little to show for it. Adoption is low, productivity hasn’t increased, and ROI is still an idea on a slide because organizations handed AI to their IT team like it was new software to install and called it a rollout. Deploying AI is a workforce strategy that demands behavior change and a new operating model. It’s not a technology rollout. It’s a workforce and culture transformation. …

When David Dominé moved to Louisville, Kentucky, for law school in the 1990s, he was captivated by the historic district of Old Louisville, lined with stately Victorian mansions. After he bought a reputedly haunted home in the neighborhood—and had “some strange things happen” there—he began researching the ghost stories told in the area. That led Dominé to write books about the community’s legendary hauntings. Soon, reader interest convinced him to offer tours, leading to a business he calls Louisville Historic Tours. Dominé’s company now has about nine tour guides, mostly people interested in local history. Many live in the neighborhoods where they give tours. “We star…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. I recently celebrated my 56th birthday, and I’m feeling my age. Not because I’m slowing down (which I am), but because I feel increasingly removed from the passions, peeves, and predilections of Gen Z and Generation Alpha. This matters, as young people shape popular and workplace cultures, and…

If you stop by the “as-is” section at one of Ikea’s U.S. stores, you might now find a vintage table from the 1980s. The company recently started accepting older products in its Buy Back & Resell program, which gives customers store credit for bringing back used items, and then offers them for sale to other customers. Since launching as a pilot in the U.S. five years ago, the program—still the only one of its kind at a major furniture retailer—has steadily expanded, underscoring the demand for circular options. The program “is our opportunity to bring our products back into the store from our customers to keep them out of landfill,” says Mardi Ditze, sustainabi…

Kraft Heinz said Wednesday it’s pausing its plans to split into two companies. Steve Cahillane, a former Kellogg Co. chief who became CEO of Kraft Heinz on Jan. 1, said he wants to ensure that all of the company’s resources are focused on profitable growth. “I have seen that the opportunity is larger than expected and that many of our challenges are fixable and within our control,” Cahillane said in a statement. The company’s shares dropped 5.2% in early trading Wednesday as Kraft Heinz reported lower quarterly and annual results. Kraft Heinz announced in September it was splitting into two companies a decade after a merger of the brands created one of the biggest foo…

Year-end giving can be a moment of reflection, but for businesses and philanthropy alike, it should also include looking forward and asking the question, what’s next? One throughline from this past year is uncertainty. Uncertainty has rewritten how we work, live, and lead. Yet, one thing that still holds true is we share a responsibility to keep systems strong so no one is left behind, especially children. I’ve seen firsthand how instability isn’t just economic, it’s deeply human. I’ve seen it in a mother whose baby’s survival depended on something as small as a packet of therapeutic food. In that moment, you understand that systems created as large scale solution…

Women’s sports continue to thrive. Record-breaking WNBA viewership, a flood of new brand investment, and now Unrivaled: the women’s basketball league built by players, for players. Commissioner Micky Lawler pulls back the curtain on what it really takes to launch a high-stakes sports startup in the full glare of the public eye. The question is no longer whether women’s sports can compete. It’s how fast they can grow. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scalepodcast, Rapid Responsefeatures candid conversations with today’s top business leade…

It’s the sort of thing you might not notice until it really matters, but the U.S. Postal Service recently changed how it defines the “postmark” on a piece of mail—warning that the postmark date is not a reliable indicator of when you actually mailed something. If you’re the sort of person who waits until the last minute to send time-sensitive mail, that means you’ll need to stand in line at your local post office and request a manual postmark when dropping off your mail. While the way mail is postmarked hasn’t undergone some major shift recently, the postal service set out earlier this year to clarify earlier what a postmark means and how the process works. B…

You’re invited to a holiday party with a dress code—cocktail attire. Instead of panic-scrolling through a bunch of dresses that look great on someone else and questionable on you, you open your laptop. A runway show starts in your living room. The lighting is cinematic. The music hits. And every model walking the runway is YOU. Same body, same proportions, same posture. You toggle the scene from dramatic spotlights to natural daylight to a candlelit restaurant, watching how each dress moves and fits in real life before you pick the one that feels right. But this isn’t just a better shopping experience; it is a design process that’s likely to yield an outfit that appea…

You are going to want to turn up the volume on your television sets. It’s time for the 68th Grammy Awards, which take place on Sunday, February 1. The movers, shakers, and singers of the Recording Academy are primed to put on one heck of a concert at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. Let’s take a look at the host, nominations, and upcoming changes before we dive into how to tune in and jam. Who is hosting the 2026 Grammy Awards? Trevor Noah is back for his sixth consecutive year as the master of ceremonies. This is going to be his last hurrah, though. In fact, he almost didn’t do the honors this year. Executive producer Ben Winston told the Los Ange…

Every drink has its trade-offs: Plastic bottles are lightweight and leak-proof, but they come at a cost to the environment. Cans are convenient and recyclable, but are prone to spilling. A new can design marries the best of both. ReLid USA designed a fully recyclable aluminum can that’s resealable, thanks to a patented tab that opens and closes using a built-in sliding mechanism. You lift the tab end and slide it open to drink; when you want to reseal it, you slide the tab back to its original position. According to ReLid, the tabs work for at least 14 reseals. The design and development of the cans began in 2020 by Re-Lid Engineering AG, a Liechtenstein-based pac…

Last year was a brutal one for layoffs, with large cuts coming from Amazon, UPS, Microsoft and Verizon. And as things get rolling for 2026, it’s looking like this year won’t be any less uncertain for workers. This week has seen a slew of sizable job cuts from a wide variety of companies. As of Thursday morning, more than 61,650 positions have been eliminated. The actual number is likely a fair bit higher as many of the companies announcing layoffs—such as Shopify, Expedia, and Vimeo—did not release the number of jobs that were impacted. Dow Inc. was the most recent well-known company to announce cuts. On Thursday, the chemical maker said it would do away with…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. It’s the time of year when we all make promises to ourselves. I’m committing to read more, procrastinate less, and squeeze in an extra hour of piano practice a week. I asked other CEOs to share their 2026 New Year’s resolutions; here are seven responses, in their own words. Omar Abbosh, chief…

Businesses still spend billions each year on management training programs, but here we are in 2025—with a growing leadership gap and executives scrambling for answers. And if I can get honest for a moment: We’re still approaching the problem backward. Senior leaders keep promoting high-performing individual contributors into leadership roles and expecting them to figure it out on the fly. Many don’t have the time, support, or temperament to lead people well. Then we’re surprised when the results are uneven or the team burns out. Before companies invest in another round of training, they need to start with a more fundamental question: Are we choosing the right people to…

Generative AI has rapidly become core infrastructure, embedded across enterprise software, cloud platforms, and internal workflows. But that shift is also forcing a structural rethink of cybersecurity. The same systems driving productivity and growth are emerging as points of vulnerability. Google Cloud’s latest AI Threat Tracker report suggests the tech industry has entered a new phase of cyber risk, one in which AI systems themselves are high-value targets. Researchers from Google DeepMind and the Google Threat Intelligence Group have identified a steady rise in model extraction, or “distillation,” attacks, in which actors repeatedly prompt generative AI systems in an …

Federal regulators on Thursday approved a new higher-dose version of the blockbuster obesity drug Wegovy that may help users lose more weight and keep it off. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a 7.2-milligram dose of Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide. Previously, the highest approved dose of the drug, taken as a weekly shot, was 2.4 milligrams. The new dose received accelerated review through the FDA’s ultra-fast drug review program. The approval was granted 54 days after the request for review was approved, the agency said in a statement. The new dosage will be available in April at pharmacies in the U.S., with a price to be announced t…

A 911 call about a man resembling “the CEO shooter.” Body-camera footage of police arresting Luigi Mangione and pulling items from his backpack, including a gun that prosecutors say matches the one used to kill UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and a notebook they have described as a “manifesto.” Notes about a “survival kit” and “intel checkin,” and testimony about alleged statements behind bars. A three-week pretrial hearing on Mangione’s fight to exclude evidence from his New York murder case ended Thursday after revealing new details about his December 2024 arrest in Altoona, Pennsylvania, steps prosecutors say he took to elude authorities for five days, and what h…

The legend of Sisyphus goes like this: As punishment for cheating death and embarrassing the gods, he is banished to the underworld and sentenced to push a boulder up a hill. As Sisyphus nears the peak, the boulder rolls back down, and he must start over. And the episode repeats for eternity. I risk sounding melodramatic by comparing this story to the plight of the employed in 2026. Fair enough. But consider, if you will, the cycles in which a modern worker finds herself. She masters a new skill, and it’s deemed outdated. She learns a new software, and is told to use a different one. She gets a new boss, and the company is reorganized. She applies for a job, and …

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Performance assessment matters: Research from McKinsey & Co. maintains that companies with a focus on employee performance see 30% higher revenue growth and lower attrition rates than their peers. In the past, though, top executives seemed to care mostly about the results of employee revi…

A note Jeffrey Epstein’s former cellmate claimed he found after the millionaire sex offender’s first suspected jail suicide attempt was made public Wednesday, years after being sealed and locked in a courthouse vault as part of an unrelated legal dispute. U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas in White Plains, New York, ordered the release of the note after The New York Times asked him last week to unseal it and other documents in a case involving the former cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione. Federal prosecutors did not oppose the request. Few people had known about the note until Tartaglione, a former police officer serving a life sentence for killing four people, mentioned it…

OpenAI on Thursday released its most capable AI system, GPT-5.5, which the company says will enable a more powerful Codex coding agent. OpenAI is quick to say, however, that GPT-5.5 will power the widening set of general digital work tasks that Codex is capable of. The system is significantly better than previous releases at helping with scientific work, including creative aspects of generating new hypotheses and testing them. The system represents an improvement in autonomous or agentic capability. GPT-5.56 “represents a step toward AI systems that can complete complex, multi-step tasks on a computer without human guidance,” OpenAI says in a blog post. GPT-5.5, …

When I tell fellow tech executives that every employee at sunday, from our engineers to our finance team, must complete a restaurant shift before they can fully onboard, I usually get confused looks. “You mean like, shadow someone?” they ask. No. I mean they tie on an apron, take orders, run food, and yes, deal with the 15-minute wait for the check that our product was literally built to eliminate. It sounds extreme. It is extreme. And it’s also one of the smartest business decisions we’ve made. Here’s why: business is often removed from the industries we serve. We’re keeping that empathy right there. The Empathy Gap in Tech I’ve spent 25 years in the tech …

A decade ago, when Claire Burgi moved to New York City, she decided to cut meat out of her diet. The 33-year-old actor and audiobook narrator, who lives in Queens, grew up in California, where she’d seen the effects of climate change firsthand. She knew that meat consumption was a major driver of greenhouse gas emissions and that vegetarianism was a way to help conserve resources and reduce pollution. “When I was young, it rained a lot,” she says. “Now, it rains much less. All the fires are astoundingly horrific.” The December 2017 Thomas wildfire burned more than 280,000 acres in and around Burgi’s hometown of Ventura, just north of Los Angeles. “I just didn’t w…