What's on Your Mind?

Entrepreneurs displaying narcissistic behavior are better able to convince investors to give them money when their grandiosity comes across as confidence as opposed to defensiveness or arrogance. That’s what we learned from watching 12 seasons of the popular reality TV show Shark Tank to better understand how an entrepreneur’s psychological profile affects their ability to secure funding. My research focuses on how entrepreneurs respond to challenges, including how personality affects their work. My colleagues and I based our study off the concept that there are two distinct “flavors” of narcissism: narcissistic admiration and narcissistic rivalry. Narcissisti…

For all the advances in data science, artificial intelligence, and behavioral assessments, one hiring ritual remains stubbornly unchanged: the job interview, where candidates are still subjected to awkward brainteasers about golf balls in airplanes, forced to disclose their “biggest weaknesses” to amateur psychologists, asked whether they would keep working after winning the lottery, or made to present to silent panels who seem less interested in evidence of competence than in observing how gracefully applicants endure a mildly humiliating social experiment. Despite decades of research showing that traditional interviews are only moderately reliable predictors of perf…

Getting a seat at the Masters is notoriously difficult, with tickets to the golf tournament only available to the public through an online lottery that has to be entered a year in advance. But the Masters may have an even more exclusive offering than attendance: a limited edition garden gnome potentially worth thousands of dollars. In 2016, Augusta National, the Georgia golf course that hosts the Masters every year, released the first gnome of what is now a coveted set of ten. Each year, the gnome sports a different outfit. Sometimes it’s a golfer, sporting a set of clubs and a sweater vest. Sometimes it’s an attendee, flexing its badge and a signature Masters snack l…

If you bought Tom’s of Maine toothpaste in the last six years, you could be eligible for a cash payout stemming from a recent $2.9 million settlement. The class-action lawsuit filed against Tom’s parent company, Colgate-Palmolive Company, “alleged deceptive and misleading business practices with respect to the manufacturing, marketing, and sale” of certain toothpaste products.” Tom’s is best known for its natural products. The toothpaste products were produced at its manufacturing facility in Sanford, Maine, where the company also makes deodorant and bar soap, and sold to consumers through third-party retailers. What’s the issue in the class-action lawsuit? …

This new outdoor fireplace—called the Totem Chiminea—would be at home in an art museum. It stands 5 feet tall, has a bulbous base that tapers into a slender flue, and is coated in porcelain enamel that comes in earthy colors such as sage green and burnt red. When you light a fire inside it, it emits warmth as well as a glow. At $4,500, it is not a casual purchase. But Neighbor, the 5-year-old brand that creates it, has found that many consumers are looking to invest in outdoor furniture that is as beautiful and thoughtfully designed as the pieces within their home. Neighbor was founded in 2020 in Phoenix by three friends—Nick Arambula, Chris Lee, and Mike Fretto—…

GoPro’s announcement that it plans to cut 23% of its workforce this week didn’t come as a complete shock to anyone who’s been following the wearable camera maker over the past few years. Once a leader in the action camera market, the company has seen its stock fall from highs of more than $93 in 2014 to just 80 cents today. The $10 billion valuation it once boasted is a distant memory. (GoPro’s current market cap is just under $122 million.) Now it’s betting on an ongoing turnaround plan to stabilize the business. Part of that plan involves becoming an even leaner operation. GoPro will lay off 145 of its 631 employees starting in the second fiscal quarter. That wi…

Economists and academics are still not clear on how, exactly, AI will change the jobs that are most vulnerable to its advances. Some jobs may disappear altogether, while others will simply evolve and be augmented by AI. But new research from Goldman Sachs this week indicates that the workers whose jobs are hit hardest by AI will find it particularly difficult to secure a new job—and suffer real economic setbacks in the aftermath. Drawing on four decades of federal data—which captured the lives of over 20,000 Americans from the 1950s to 1980s—the report found that the workers who were most impacted by technological shifts struggled to recover and took a month lon…

Issa Rae’s next project is coming to you vertically—and on TikTok. Hoorae Media, the star’s media production company, and TikTok announced on Wednesday a partnership to bring free exclusive micro-series content to TikTok and its PineDrama app. The collaboration launches later this April starting with Screen Time, produced by Hoorae Digital. This will be Hoorae’s first micro-drama series, with the media company co-developing a slate of additional micro-series with TikTok as part of the deal. The partnership marks Rae’s return to her digital roots, she said at TheWrap’s Creator x Hollywood Summit on Wednesday. Her first digital series, “The MisAdventures of …

Twenty years ago, honeybees first started to disappear in mysteriously large numbers. Stories in the media were everywhere, as were solutions to try to save the bees. But today, you hear less about the crisis. Has it simply been drowned out by the constant hum of breaking world news, or is the bee crisis over? There are some people who argue that we have “saved” the bees, while others say honeybees never needed saving in the first place. In truth, the problem hasn’t gone away. “Our losses have been getting higher and higher over the last few years,” says Zac Browning, a fourth-generation beekeeper from North Dakota. This winter, he lost more than half of his bees…

With most of New York City surrounded by water, climate change poses a grave threat to its infrastructure, as devastating storm surges and coastal flooding have shown. Inland blocks are in danger, too. Researchers at the New York Botanical Garden have created a new interactive map of the city showing the areas most at risk of flooding. They’re calling them “Blue Zones,” places where water is, used to be, or will be due to climate change. More than one-fifth of the city is in a Blue Zone, according to a paper published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. “Everybody was startled, including us,” Eric Sanderson, vice president of urban conservation at t…

For those of us not born tall and strong, using a shared electric bike can sometimes be cumbersome—they’re often big, heavy, and hard to maneuver. Bike-share giant Lime has taken note, releasing a new generation of bikes tailored for riders who could benefit from more accessible design. One of the first dockless micromobility companies, Lime launched in 2017, eventually filling the streets of major cities across the U.S., Europe, Australia, and the Middle East with its bright-green two-wheelers. Now the company has introduced an alternative model to its standard Gen4, designed to reach riders—particularly women and older adults—who may have found its original model ch…

Ever find yourself behind the wheel watching all the other cars go by and think to yourself, “Man, I’m a much better driver than all these clowns on the road?” It’s a funny thing about this question. Pretty much everyone reading this is likely to say “yes.” It seems we all think we’re better drivers than the next guy. In a landmark 1981 study, psychologist Ola Svenson asked people in the U.S. and Sweden to rate their driving skills compared to the average person. The results? Around 80–93% rated themselves “above” average—statistically impossible—with an eye-popping 93% in the American sample doing so. Psychologists call this “illusory superiority,” the human …

In operating reviews and boardrooms, I keep seeing the same pattern: leadership asks for rigor, teams deliver the numbers, and promising AI efforts get judged as underperforming before the organization has actually learned what it takes to make them real. Then someone pulls the plug, scales back the investment, or lets the initiative quietly expire. Sometimes they’re right. But often, they’ve just used the wrong test. The problem isn’t that leaders care about measurement. Strong measurement discipline is exactly what separates organizations that scale AI from those that accumulate pilots. The problem is that many leaders are applying a mature-business scorecard to…

“Same soulless vibes. Fewer fossil fuels.” So says the website for Mumumelon, a new project that made exact dupes of Lululemon staples like hoodies and yoga pants—but with renewable energy and a detailed plan to cut emissions. Inside a fake pop-up store in London in late March, a fake employee gave customers the pitch: “We stole Lululemon’s designs and made them less terrible for the environment.” “We’ve been campaigning on Lululemon for a few years now to push them to invest in the renewable energy transition and phase out fossil fuels from their supply chain,” says Ruth MacGilp, a climate campaigner at the advocacy group Action Speaks Louder. “We wanted t…

Mental healthcare has traditionally been based on a single relationship: patient and provider, one hour at a time on a weekly basis. The major flaw with that model is that mental health conditions rarely stay in their lane, something we commonly see at Equip. Depression intersects with chronic illness. OCD co-occurs with eating disorders. One provider, no matter how skilled they are, can only hold so much. This has to change. The evidence increasingly points toward team-based care as the model that actually moves the needle for how we can deliver mental health treatment. Integrated, multidisciplinary teams sharing information, aligning on treatment goals, and …

My father has a PhD in mechanical social engineering and, among many things, designed cooling systems for nuclear reactors. From him, I inherited a restless curiosity about how the world works and a deep respect for the laws of science. Over the years, I’ve found that many of the principles governing physical objects translate perfectly to business. Take Newton’s first law of motion. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest, and objects in motion stay in motion—at least in a vacuum. What’s true in physics is true for companies. Those that stall are destined to fall behind. But the businesses that remain in constant motion? They succeed. In the agentic AI era, data is …

Many tech observers initially believed the software engineers would become scarce in the face of AI. But that hasn’t turned out to be the case—in part due to the power of human ingenuity. “Software engineers are spending less time coding,” says Aneesh Raman, the chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn, who just published the book Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI. “But now they’re getting to build things in a way they couldn’t before. They’re going into conversations with clients and customers. Or they’re thinking about the ethical implications of what they build.” In their book, Raman and his co-author—LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky—argue that …

Issa Rae is a Hollywood success story. Her web series The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl launched her career in the early 2010s, leading to her HBO series Insecure and now her production company Hoorae Media. Through all her projects, Rae has been praised for her authentic portrayal of Black women’s lives—but at a recent panel, Rae said that the entertainment industry is no longer interested in celebrating diversity. Shifting tides in the film industry While speaking at TheWrap’s Creators x Hollywood Summit last Wednesday, April 8, Rae pointed out a troubling trend she’s seeing on the production side of Hollywood. “I’m seeing it. Just blatantly. Peopl…

A California company has recalled more than 3.1 million bottles of lubricating eye drops because it had not properly tested—and thus could not prove—whether the products were sterile. These products are sold under several names at major retailers across the country. The company, K.C. Pharmaceuticals, initiated the recall on March 3, 2026. I am a clinical pharmacologist and pharmacist who has assessed risks of poor-quality manufacturing practices and lax oversight for prescription drugs, eye drops, dietary supplements, and nutritional products in the United States for many years. This recall is very large, potentially affecting over a million people. Using nonsteri…

Google’s sustainability webpage once specifically mentioned the company’s goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2030, and included a subpage titled “operating sustainably.” But that pledge has disappeared from the main page, which now highlights the company’s commitment to artificial intelligence. The subpage was renamed “our operations.” Google maintains that it is still aiming for a 2030 goal, though executives have acknowledged that the growth of AI makes it challenging. Still, the change to the sustainability page is an example of how tech companies are being a bit quieter about their climate goals as they expand their use of AI. The explosive growth of…

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. “If you elegantly avoid the subject of money,” says Emma Grede, “money will somehow elegantly avoid you.” Grede is most certainly not avoiding the subject of money, ambition, or other topics some women may consider taboo. In her new book, Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work …

With the growing momentum of the “No Kings” protests, activists have increasingly turned to the 3.5% rule—Erica Chenoweth’s observation, based on over a century of historical data, that once a protest movement mobilizes 3.5% of the population, it achieves its goals within a year. As a result, many have begun to treat the 3.5% threshold as a primary objective. Not so fast. Even Chenoweth herself has cautioned that the rule is “a descriptive finding, not necessarily a prescriptive one.” Her subsequent research has shown that at least one uprising—in Bahrain—reached a 6% participation rate and still failed. In fact, most successful movements never reach the 3.5% level at…

Looksmaxxer leader Braden Peters—better known as Clavicular or “Clav”—likes to smash his cheekbones with a hammer and do meth to stay lean. What does he not like? Being associated with the incel community or questioned about his manosphere friendships on television. In a recent segment for 60 Minutes Australia, journalist Adam Hegarty sat down with Clavicular, but the interview was abruptly cut short when Clavicular walked out. For those unfamiliar with Clavicular, the New Jersey-born Kick streamer, 20, has risen in popularity over the last few months for sharing his looksmaxxing journey—what he calls a movement of self-improvement—where he resorts to rather extre…

Americans can’t get enough chicken—brands like Raising Cane’s and Chick-fil-A have risen as fast-food superstars while others race to consolidate their spot as winners of the chicken sandwich wars. Now, Chili’s is entering the game in a big way. Value menus, a staple of chain and fast-food restaurants, bundle multiple menu items at a discounted price, giving customers a full meal without the full cost. Now, Chili’s—whose value meal includes an entrée, fries, a soda, and bottomless chips and salsa—is adding chicken sandwiches to the mix. “We’re setting our sights on fast food chicken sandwiches, offering our gigantic Big Crispy and Spicy Big Crispy chicken sandwich…

From the outside, ambitious professionals look confident and in control. Promotions, leadership roles, packed calendars—they all signal someone who has it figured out. But many high achievers are quietly struggling with something else: they’ve stopped trusting their own instincts. Ambition trains you to listen outward. Performance reviews, promotions, praise, and metrics reward the ability to meet external expectations. Over time, that habit can drown out the internal signals that tell you when something feels aligned and when it does not. Rebuilding self-trust rarely happens in a single breakthrough moment. It happens gradually as you start recognizing the pa…