What's on Your Mind?

You have probably noticed that you have times during your day when you’re locked in and feel like you’re working at your peak and other times when your mind isn’t keeping up with everything that needs to be done. Some of that may reflect your circadian cycles. If you’re a morning person, you may arrive at work in the morning raring to go, but if you’re a night person, it may take you a while to get warmed up. A big influence on your cognitive effectiveness is fatigue that can build up over the course of the day. A lot of work on ego depletion suggests that the more difficult mental work you do in a day, the harder it can be to continue to do that work later. In some s…

Raising Cane’s CEO Todd Graves could go without veggies in his to-go box. More specifically, his go-to Cane’s order includes the box combo, extra toast and extra sauce—and no slaw, he said in a TikTok last month. The fast food executive admitted he’s not a fan of coleslaw, adding “that’s why you can trade it out,” in Joe Bonham’s “Financial Flex” social media series. His reasoning for including the shredded salad: “I wanted a vegetable component to the meal, and coleslaw is a Southern thing.” As the post went viral, one user asked the exec to swap the coleslaw for mac and cheese. Others pleaded to keep the coleslaw on the menu. Customers who order the Box Co…

These days, tech bros keep talking about “taste”— the ability to exercise human judgment and determine unique responses while guiding a machine. It’s a rare skillset, as some AI-made media automates content in the form of generic slop. And now tech professionals are the very people worried that technology will rob society of any real taste. The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka, who broke down tech bros’ obsession with taste last month, coined the term “taste-washing” as the act of giving “anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism.” In other words: giving AI properties human-like qualities and letting them run with it. When machines do all the creating, what are …

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. Jim Collins, coauthor of Built to Last and author of Good to Great, didn’t set out to write another management book. His new work, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative, is a deeply researched meditation on how individuals navigate life’s transitio…

For years companies have been operating as though working parents with young children are the center of the work-life balance issue. Taking care of little kids is intense, to be sure. But the truth is the real work-life crisis isn’t at that point in their lives. It’s coming in five, ten, or fifteen years. This is the Caregiving Cliff, the time when the highest paid, most tenured, or most worthy of promotion start cracking under the pressure of taking care of kids, aging parents, and their own health needs. The moment when peak earning meets peak caregiving Recently, I spoke with a 47-year-old who had just turned down a promotion. She loved her job and wanted the pr…

Today, April 6, 2026, is Easter Monday. It’s the final part of the long Easter Weekend, which runs from Good Friday through today. In several countries around the world, including Canada and Australia, Easter Monday is a public holiday. But what about here in America, and what stores and institutions are closed for the day? Here’s what you need to know. Is Easter Monday a national holiday? No. Although Easter Monday is observed as a national holiday in dozens of countries worldwide, it is not a national holiday in the United States. This means that federal agencies—at least those not affected by the ongoing partial government shutdown—will operate as usua…

Robert Reich has been warning people about the dangers of inequality for decades, in all sorts of different ways. He’s interacted directly with politicians as a member of three different presidential administrations, most notably as Bill Clinton’s labor secretary. He’s taught thousands of college students at Harvard, Brandeis, and UC Berkeley. He’s written 18 books. And for 11 years, he has run Inequality Media, a nonprofit dedicated to informing the public about income and wealth disparity, among other imbalances of power in our society. Inequality Media now has 15 million followers across all its social media channels. At a time when Americans are increasingly payi…

Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot is integrated across the company’s products. It’s built into Windows 11, and recent features like Tasks and Pages are marketed as powerful tools for productivity. But one of Copilot’s Terms of Use just caught the internet’s attention for seeming to contradict that image of Copilot as a game-changer in the workplace, instead cautioning users that “Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.” “It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended,” the statement continues, as written on Microsoft’s Copilot Terms of Use page. “Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.” That language is a far cry fro…

On July 16th, 1945, when the world’s first nuclear explosion shook the plains of New Mexico, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the project, quoted the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” And indeed, he had. The world was never truly the same after nuclear power became a reality. Today, however, we have lost that reverence for the power of technology. Instead of proceeding deliberately and with caution, we rush ahead. In his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, tech investor Marc Andreessen implied that AI regulation was a form of murder. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth punished Anthropic when it tried to impose limits on its own technology. Clearly,…

As American astronauts fly to the moon for the first time in 50 years, the test flight has gone off without a hitch, almost. Happily, this time around, the “Houston, we’ve had a problem” moment came with much lower stakes than Apollo 13’s oxygen leak. NASA’s Artemis II is the first crewed mission featuring a proper toilet – a major upgrade from the Apollo-era days of astronauts chasing runaway bodily emissions in zero gravity. Historically, waste capture was handled by a crude system of plastic bags attached to spacesuits, a headache for astronauts already contending with the many life-threatening challenges of space travel. So far, the high tech toilet has come …

Over the weekend, Mario, Luigi, Bowser, and the rest of Nintendo’s iconic crew traipsed around the solar system and smashed their way to the top of the box office in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. It’s the latest sign that Hollywood and moviegoers have changed their tune on video game adaptations. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (a sequel to 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie) opened on April 8, just in time for the lead-up to Easter weekend. According to studio estimates cited by CNBC, the Illumination and Nintendo co-production earned $130.9 million over the weekend and $190.1 million in its first five days in North American theaters. Tack on an estimated $18…

AI is transforming companies everywhere. While some research has shown that women are falling behind in terms of AI adoption, at the leadership level women are highly involved in guiding AI strategy. According to new research from Chief, a network for senior women leaders, in partnership with The Harris Poll, women leaders are playing a key role in carefully building AI frameworks. The research, which polled 1,768 male, female, and nonbinary leaders, found that, overwhelmingly, women are driving AI strategy with 80% playing active roles in how it’s being implemented into workflows. Nearly a third (31%) said they were involved in AI governance, ethics, and responsi…

Some leadership lessons only come the hard way. Brené Brown reflects on the skills she wishes she had built sooner—and why they matter more than ever. View the full article

As the trial date nears for a showdown between Elon Musk and OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company has sent a letter to the attorneys general in California and Delaware accusing Musk of “anti-competitive behavior.” The letter, seen by both CNBC and the Sacramento Bee, alleges that Musk has been attempting to undermine OpenAI through a series of “attacks” on the company. OpenAI also accuses Musk of “coordinating his efforts” with Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, saying the two billionaires are “turning to conduct and approaches that we do think are really highly questionable and sharply worthy of investigation.” “It appears that Mr. Musk has reached new lows, as…

When Kitty got her fourth layoff call, she took it via Bluetooth in her car. She knew the script by then: the sudden 15-minute meeting invite, the HR rep that pops into the call, the platitudes that precede the devastation of being unemployed — again. “My boss says, ‘Hi Kitty,’ and I said, ‘You’re laying me off. Just go.’” Something happens after the second, or third, or even fourth layoff. Shock gets replaced by trauma-informed familiarity. Grief turns into exhaustion, shame calcifies. The way a person understands work changes, imbuing the next job with cynicism that’s hard to shake. A layoff victim’s relationship with work changes. Sometimes forever. But in…

You know the expression, “If you want to get something done, ask a working mother?” Surprising as it may seem, the same holds true for cancer patients. Conventional wisdom holds that cancer patients are too sick and fragile to work, at least not to their full ability. That can certainly be true in some cases, sometimes tragically. And I’m not suggesting that anyone should ever feel pressured to work if they don’t feel well enough to do so. But in many instances, the stereotype that cancer patients are too compromised to work is a myth. I know because I’ve been living—and working—with an incurable type of blood cancer for more than twenty-two years. And I’m by no mea…

The National Capital Planning Commission has voted to approve President Donald The President’s controversial White House ballroom plans, greenlighting the demolition of the historic East Wing to make way for a new neoclassical structure. But the ballroom is just one piece of a much bigger picture. Last year, the president signed an executive order mandating that new federal buildings return to a “traditional and classical” style, sparking a fierce debate among architects about who gets to decide what American democracy looks like. On this episode of FC Explains, staff writer Nate Berg breaks down the design agenda behind MAGA architecture, who is driving it, and what…

I recently noticed a paradox among a team of developers. With AI, engineers started writing code faster and getting answers in seconds, yet they also reported feeling more exhausted than before. AI hasn’t actually reduced the amount of work that needs to be done. Instead, it has fundamentally changed its nature. We can now run multiple tasks in parallel and perceive this as productivity. Up to a point, it is. But eventually, managing tools and constantly switching between them becomes more draining than performing the original tasks themselves. In some cases, it even slows down the process of finding a solution. I’ve been managing developer teams for over 15 years…

Lowe’s Foundation is making a major investment in future skilled tradesworkers. On Tuesday, the home improvement retailer announced it would commit an additional $200 million to training 250,000 tradespeople by 2035 through its Gable Grants program, bringing its overall commitment to $250 million. The investment comes amid a rising need for skilled tradespeople driven by a surge in AI developments. According to JLL’s 2026 Global Data Center Outlook report, the global data center sector is expanding by about 14% a year. Over the next four years, nearly 100 gigawatts of capacity will be added, which will require a $3 trillion investment. At the same time, we’re seeing …

In 1990, my mother discovered a four-year-old startup called American Girl, and she liked what she saw: Books about different eras in American history, told through the eyes of a girl roughly her daughter’s age, with an 18-inch doll based on each character. It was more educational and wholesome than Barbie, so she was happy to buy them for me. My favorite character was Molly McIntire, a 9-year-old living through World War II in Illinois, whose father had been sent to the front lines and hadn’t written home in months. What I loved about the books was that they trusted children to process difficult things—slavery, mortality, war—that adults typically shielded us from. …

While we are a tech company focused on financial services, we’ve realized a hard truth: in the high-stakes world of regulated AI, your model is only as good as the person who built it. While the rest of the industry is obsessed with “GPU-first” strategies, we are betting on a “human-first” approach to technology. In our newly released white paper, The Making of the Brillianeers, we outline a strategy, inspired by Toyota’s “just-in-time” manufacturing philosophy, that treats engineering talent not as an operating expense, but as a strategic, investor-level asset. THE TOYOTA PARALLEL Toyota revolutionized the automotive industry by moving away from massive, ineff…

One of the biggest barriers people face to their productivity is an inability to focus. Most people are highly distracted and distractable, which makes it hard to sustain the level of attention required to complete complex tasks and to think through difficult problems. Chances are at least part of your problem is self-inflicted. We have created environments with lots of attention-grabbing information. You have learned to seek out that information regularly. Indeed, your brain has timing mechanisms in it, and the desire to check your phone or your web browser may interrupt you at regular intervals, even when you’re trying your best to get something else done. Here …

We talk a lot about visionary leadership. You know, the ability to see around corners, spot emerging patterns, and imagine futures that don’t yet exist. These are all very important activities for strategic work. But something we rarely consider is what happens when the physical instrument of vision itself is under siege. Said more bluntly, what happens when our eyes succumb to the daily assault of screen time? I recently spoke with Dr. Valerie Sheety-Pilon, SVP of clinical and medical affairs at VSP Vision Care, whose organization has spent three years tracking the state of vision health in the American workforce. The data she shared stopped me cold—and it reframed h…

When companies rolled out return-to-office mandates starting in late 2024 and early 2025, labor force participation among mothers of young children fell from roughly 80% in 2023 to 77% by August 2025, reversing years of hard-won gains. Yet if you’re pregnant or postpartum, you have more rights than you may realize, including some that can help you keep your job while growing your family in a way that works for you. For all things working and mom-ing, we always turn to Daphne Delvaux, an employment attorney who represents working mothers, founder of the Mamattorney, and author of the new book Moms in Labor: An Employment Lawyer’s Secrets to Protect Your Baby and Your C…

The title cards for British actor Riz Ahmed’s new dramedy, Bait, are a colorful explosion of letters and numbers. If you look a little closer, each one reads like a code hidden in plain sight for you, the viewer, to unravel. Bait is a six-episode series that debuted on Prime Video on March 25. It stars Ahmed (who also created and cowrote the show) as Shah Latif, a struggling actor whose leaked audition to play James Bond incites a media frenzy. Each episode tracks Shah’s exponential spiral as his private life is made public, forcing him to contend with his own identity, belonging, self-worth, and the cultural narratives mapped onto him as a British-Pakistani actor com…