What's on Your Mind?

Every December, millions of people pause to take stock of their lives before the new year. Some gather for vision-board parties, others sketch out New Year’s resolutions, and many quietly vow to “finally get organized” before the clock hits midnight. But this year feels different. We’re closing out 2025 in an economic climate defined by weekly corporate layoffs, social media posts from people with excel trackers archiving hundreds of job applications, and sidelined workers hopelessly looking for jobs for over a year. Families are being pushed to the brink by rising prices, and a generational affordability crisis—fueled by a shortage of three to four million homes nati…

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. Last December, Modern CEO named the inaugural Modern CEO of the Year. The goal was to recognize a business leader who embodied the traits frequently covered in this newsletter: inclusion, accessibility, humility, and innovation amid unprecedented uncertainty. We looked for a person with vis…

Just know this: There’s going to be a conversation about artificial intelligence at Thanksgiving this year. An AI superfan is going to gush about chatbots and go on, at length, about how “These things just seem to know everything.” The dinner table’s funnyman will play a highly cringe video they made with the technology. Someone else will either be flummoxed or horrified. A proud guest will declare a vow of abstinence—in fact, they’ve never even used ChatGPT, they will reveal. One self-important guest will feel very smart when recounting the time they caught an AI making a mistake, once. They’ll tell everyone about it. These conversations will be bad. There will…

At the start of the Introduction to Innovation class at Robert C. Hatch High School in rural Uniontown, Alabama, the face of a teacher fills a wall-size screen at the front of the room. Beaming in from far away like a Zoom call, the teacher is part of a new approach to providing specialized education in underserved communities. This is the Connected Rural Classroom. It’s a novel rethink of the typical high school classroom, designed specifically to increase access to niche, high-quality education for students in rural schools with limited resources. A remote teacher on a big screen is just one part of the classroom’s unique elements. Designed to emphasize science, tec…

What do Marriott, Peloton, and Major League Baseball (MLB) have in common? Each has recently navigated a major crisis in the court of public opinion. Marriott’s licensing agreement termination with Sonder left guests stranded and fuming mid-stay. Peloton announced its second product recall in just two years. And the MLB is the latest major sports organization whose players have been swept up in sports betting scandals. Crisis is everywhere. And while big brands may dominate the headlines, smaller companies face equally urgent situations. Regardless of a company’s size, leaders must be prepared when the ever-turning wheel of misfortune lands on their spot—because it wi…

When it’s parked in your garage, the Polestar 3 can now help you save on your electric bill. The automaker is the latest to roll out bidirectional charging for its electric vehicles, making it possible to charge the SUV’s battery when power is cheap and then use the vehicle to power your house when prices go up. The company partnered with Dcbel, a startup that makes technology that manages the flow of energy between the car and home. “Most of our cars sit in driveways more than 80% of the time,” says Dcbel CEO Marc-André Forget. “Now, for the first time, if we think about it, cars start to be useful even when parked. This is transformational. It’s the second-large…

Africa’s official maps are stuck in the past, often either outdated, incomplete—or both. But governments don’t have the budgets to fix them, making it difficult to complete projects as complex as deciding where to put new solar plants to as simple as delivering a package. Now a new plan is underway to map the entire continent using satellite data and AI. “Maybe 90% of African countries don’t have access to an accurate current base map for their country,” says Sohail Elabd, global director of emerging markets at Esri, the mapping company behind the Map Africa Initiative. At a United Nations event last year, Elabd met the heads of national mapping departments from a…

Working for myself was the goal. I did it. I made it. I work for myself. But it hasn’t fixed my life. I’m free to pursue anything I want. But achieving goals doesn’t and won’t make me complete. There’s a term for it: the arrival fallacy. It’s the reason we sometimes still feel “empty” even when we achieve what we want. Achieving a goal rarely feels like arrival. Because it’s not the end we imagined. You do everything you can to climb the ladder. But you get up there and then nothing. Or even worse, a disappointment. That happens because the end we expect doesn’t necessarily solve our problems. Goals are meant to guide us. They can show you how much you’ve grown. How f…

Below, coauthors Melissa Valentine and Michael Bernstein share five key insights from their new book, Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI-Enhanced, On-Demand Work. Melissa is an associate professor of management science at Stanford University, where she codirects the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization. Michael is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, where he is a Bass University Fellow. Both have had their work featured in major publications, including The New York Times and Wired. What’s the big idea? Have you ever wished that you could assemble your version of the Avengers at work? That’s basically what it means to build a Flas…

Meta allegedly stopped internal research on social media’s impact on people after finding negative results, a court filing released Friday claims. The filing took place in a Northern California District Court, as a group of U.S. state attorneys general, school districts, and parents launched a suit against Meta, Google-owned YouTube, TikTok, and Snap. The court documents allege that Meta misled the public on the mental health risks to children and young adults who excessively use Facebook and Instagram, even though its research showed that the social media apps had demonstrated harm. “The company never publicly disclosed the results of its deactivation stud…

We have reached the moment white collar workers have feared for months. Has AI finally come for my job? Companies like Salesforce claim they need fewer human employees to do the work AI can tackle, after laying off thousands. Klarna claims the company was able to shrink its headcount by about 40%, in part because of AI. Duolingo said last spring it will stop using contractors for work that AI can handle. Overall, companies have announced a staggering 700,000 job cuts in the first five months of 2025, an 80% jump from the previous year. The irony is almost poetic. For years, the tech industry assumed robots would come for factory workers first. Amazon’s leaked documen…

As a physician at Duke, I often saw how women, especially those juggling chronic illness, caregiving, and limited healthcare access, faced delays in getting the right care. What stood out wasn’t just the complexity of their conditions, but how predictable the barriers were. Women face unique challenges in getting timely access to the care they need. Many care options are simply inconvenient and often do not meet patients where they are. For example, forcing a busy working mom to take the day off work, driving 30 minutes for a routine screening can be a challenge if having to juggle a 9-5 and childcare too. Many women are caregivers for aging parents or children, compo…

I feel it—the strain, the fractured attention. The constant tug to check, scroll, click. Everything we want is a tap away. Yet when we chase it all, something essential slips through our fingers. I see it clearly in my own world of conferences and events. These are spaces meant for connection, yet people often leave feeling overwhelmed and oddly under-connected. The truth is that genuine engagement is rare. According to Gallup, only 21% of employees are fully engaged. Most are simply going through the motions. It’s a similar story at large-scale events and webinars, where participation beyond passive listening has long been the exception, not the norm. That’s exactly …

Changing an organism’s genome is a profound act, and the tools you use to make the changes don’t alleviate the need for responsible regulation. Since bursting onto the scene in 2012, CRISPR technology has been used to modify dozens of species from bacteria to livestock to plants, and even human embryos. Many countries have put ethical guardrails in place to prohibit creating designer babies. However, in agriculture, gene-edited crops are largely exempt from regulatory oversight, creating a “Wild West” where anything goes and edited crops are free to enter the food supply. Unlike “traditional” genetically modified organisms (GMO)—used since the 1990s to create Roun…

Leading the Exceptional Women Alliance gives me a front-row seat to how accomplished women lift each other through mentorship and growth. Joanna Dodd Massey is a corporate board director and Fortune 500 executive with expertise in risk, governance, and crisis leadership. She has a PhD in psychology and advises boards and executives navigating high-stakes challenges and organizational change. Q: Why do family conversations turn so tense during the holidays? Massey: Alcohol and forced family fun play a role, but underneath it all is our biology. Human beings are one of those species that can’t survive alone—we’re hardwired for connection because our survival depends …

Dick’s Sporting Goods (NYSE: DKS) announced it will close select Foot Locker stores and raised its full-year year outlook, in its third quarter earnings report on Tuesday. While Dick’s has not disclosed how many locations it will shutter (Fast Company has reached out for confirmation), it is part of a larger restructuring effort, according to executive chairman Ed Stack who spoke with CNBC. Dick’s acquired leading footwear and apparel retailer Foot Locker for $2.5 billion back in September, according to its latest earnings release. As of November 1, the company was operating 3,230 store locations across the combined Dick’s and Foot Locker businesses globally. …

Tests of ByHeart infant formula tied to a botulism outbreak that has sickened dozens of babies showed that all of the company’s products may have been contaminated. Laboratory tests of 36 samples of formula from three different lots showed that five samples contained the type of bacteria that can lead to the rare and potentially deadly illness, the company said Monday on its website. “Based on these results, we cannot rule out the risk that all ByHeart formula across all product lots may have been contaminated,” the company wrote. At least 31 babies in 15 states who consumed ByHeart formula have been sickened in the outbreak that began in August, according to …

If you ask New Yorkers on the street what they think about the giant, controversial print ad campaign in the NYC subway system, their initial response might be, “Which one?” In the past two months alone, not one, but two ad campaigns fitting that description have appeared on the subway. The first debuted in late September, when Friend, an AI company billed as a portable “companion,” ran a $1 million print campaign featuring a variety of servile messages like, “I’ll never leave dirty dishes in the sink.” The campaign received massive criticism, to the point that the MTA was forced to continuously remove Friend’s vandalized ads. In an interview with Fast Company, Frien…

Apple said on Monday it is cutting jobs across its sales teams to strengthen its customer engagement efforts, noting that only a small number of roles will be impacted by the layoffs. An Apple spokesperson told Reuters that the company is continuing to hire and the affected employees can apply for new roles. The impacted employees include account managers serving major businesses, schools and government agencies, according to Bloomberg News, which had reported the news earlier in the day. Staff who operate Apple’s briefing centers for institutional meetings and product demonstrations for prospective customers were also affected, Bloomberg said. One of the …