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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. Fourteen years ago, Graham Dugoni decided to start a movement to address what he viewed as the deleterious effects of rampant smartphone usage. “What I saw was kind of impending nihilism, the sense that everyone is going to be inundated with media, and it’s going to hollow out the meaning i…

Octopuses are brilliant, emotional, and mysterious. Can they ever be farmed humanely? And if they can, should they be? Fast Company contributor Clint Rainey is the first journalist in the world to be let inside a cutting-edge effort to build the first commercial octopus farm. View the full article

It’s 4:59 PM on a Friday. You’re the Head of Design at a mid-sized biotech firm—mid-sprint, mid-thought—building out a set of specialized design roles that will define how your team delivers value for the next three years. Then the email arrives. Your recruiting partners have sent a pre-written job description, authored by a product manager, with a mandate to use it as-is. The title: UX/UI Designer. You pause. Not because the gesture wasn’t well-intentioned—it was. But because you recognize exactly what this moment represents: a quiet, recurring erosion of role clarity that has followed the design profession for over a decade. One ambiguous title, multiplied a…

Are you intimidated by personal finance? Vivian Tu wants to help. Tu is known for her TikTok account, “Your Rich BFF,” where she makes entertaining videos about personal finance. Topics include how to negotiate your salary and practical tips for dealing with credit card debt. Tu, who refers to herself as “your favorite Wall Street girly,” has 10 million followers on social media and has published two personal finance books. Tu, born and raised in Baltimore, often connects her interest in personal finance to her upbringing as the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her parents raised her to be frugal and appreciate money from an early age, but it wasn’t until a few years int…

After a near awards-season sweep by “One Battle After Another,” “Sinners” won best ensemble at the Screen Actors Guild’s 32nd Actor Awards on Sunday, shaking up the Oscar race and setting up a potential nail-biter finale in two weeks at the Academy Awards. The guild’s awards, formerly known as the SAG Awards, are one of the most closely watched Oscar precursors. Actors make up the largest slice of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and their choices at the Actor Awards often align. The victory for Ryan Coogler’s blues-soaked vampire saga showed that it has a strong chance to win at the Oscars, too, despite an almost unblemished run of awards for Paul Thomas…

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) just placed a $50 billion bet on rural healthcare, but the odds are not in its favor. CMS, now led by Mehmet Oz, MD, created the Rural Health Transformation Program to help the 60 million Americans in rural areas have better access to care, modernize facilities and technologies, and support innovation that brings “high-quality, dependable care closer to home.” But CMS only gave states a few months to create and submit their transformation plans to secure a piece of the pie. Early rollouts are underway, and many states are in over their heads. There is a real danger that technologies are about to be deployed that i…

AI is now the first stop for many customer journeys, from brainstorms and searches, to recommendations and planning. Recent research from The Knot Worldwide found that 36% of couples are now actively using AI in their wedding planning—nearly doubling year-over-year—as couples turn to AI platforms for wedding inspiration, writing, and organization. A couple might use AI to start their wedding planning journey, but as they move closer to choosing a venue or vendor, they naturally look for signals that help them feel confident—authentic reviews, a consistent online presence, and expert content—so that they gain additional context and trust before taking their next step. …

During the last decade, digital innovations have produced a range of recruitment and evaluation tools: now, whenever you first apply for a job, you are less likely to be judged by humans and more likely to be assessed by AI. Before you can even get the opportunity to impress a human interviewer, you will first need to impress the algorithm! More recently, AI has also been used to assist current employees in doing their jobs and then to help their employers evaluate how well employees are performing in those jobs. In fact AI adoption is now the norm across knowledge economy jobs, with estimates indicating that at least 70% of people use AI regularly at work (a figure t…

Following U.S. and Israeli strikes in Iran this weekend, airlines around the region and world have canceled thousands of flights amid continued conflict in the Middle East. Temporary regional airspace closures have led to airspace restrictions, forcing airlines to cancel flights and stranding countless passengers. As of Monday, March 2, 2026, airspace across many parts of the Middle East remained partially or fully closed. According to FlightRadar24, the following airspace regions remain partially or fully closed today: Iran Iraq Qatar Bahrain Jordan Kuwait Syria Israel United Arab Emirates (OMAE) airspace remains heavily restri…

If you’re in need of a winter pick-me-up, look no further than your local IHOP. The pancake chain just reminded folks that its yearly National Pancake Day holiday is about to take place. To celebrate, IHOP will be dishing out some free buttermilk pancakes all day long. The breakfast chain will be giving out free short stacks of buttermilk pancakes on Tuesday, March 3, from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. That means whether you’re in the mood for pancakes for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, IHOP will grill them up for free. The deal is only good for guests who are dining in and other flavors aren’t included in the deal—just the original buttermilk recipe. “As the leader in bre…

Stock trading platform Robinhood has announced its newest offering: the Robinhood Platinum Card. The upgraded option comes two years after the company unveiled its first credit card, the Gold Card. “We built the Gold Card to be the best card for everyday spending, and customer demand showed us there was room to push the boundaries even further,” Deepak Rao, the vice president and general manager of Robinhood Money, said in the announcement. “The Platinum Card offers higher limits, elite rewards and luxury benefits, and raises the bar for what customers should expect from a premium credit card.” Although you can request access, the new Platinum Card is invit…

There’s a new exercise trend making the rounds on the internet: Tai Chi walking, inspired by a centuries-old Chinese martial art that incorporates flowing hand and foot movements with breath and mindfulness. Also know as “meditation in motion” (and dubbed “medication in motion”), Tai Chi is a gentle form of exercise that has a number of reported health benefits, primarily strength, flexibility, and balance, and, to a lesser degree, aerobic conditioning, according to an article from Harvard Medical School. Without using weights or resistance bands, you can gain upper-body strength through arm exercises that use your core and back muscles in a similar way. Another s…

In January, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, announced that it would use its chatbot to develop an AI tutoring system for more than a million students in El Salvador. The announcement came on the heels of similar ones from OpenAI, which is connecting students in Kazakhstan with its ChatGPT Edu services, and from Microsoft, which is similarly equipping students and teachers in the United Arab Emirates with AI-based tools and training. While other countries are executing on national infrastructure projects for the AI era and treating it as an economic imperative, here in the United States, we can’t seem to move past a narrative of how AI makes it easier…

In the high-stakes world of revenue orchestration, a quiet but costly friction is slowing down deals. It isn’t market volatility or budget cuts—it’s a fundamental disconnect between the generations tasked with closing the sale. Steve Cox, CEO of the newly merged sales tech powerhouse SalesLoft and Clari, sat down with me recently to discuss a startling finding from their latest report: generational conflict is costing sales organizations an estimated $56 billion in lost productivity annually. That’s not a typo. Billion, with a B. “When Boomers hear ‘AI makes you faster,’ what they really hear is ‘You’re too slow,’” Cox explains. Meanwhile, 39% of Gen Z sellers pre…

The Social Security Administration is rolling out some big changes to how it handles disability payments while also upgrading its customer service. The changes come in the aftermath of a major overhaul by DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, in 2025, which resulted in the layoffs of more than 7,000 workers. First, let’s take a look at disability payments. The new process aims to cut the time it takes to determine eligibility for Social Security, speed up the time it takes beneficiaries to receive their checks, and, according to the Washington Examiner, reduce the agency’s current backlog. The SSA had a backlog of claims that was on track to exc…

Jurors in a bellwether trial about the impacts of social media on children watched a deposition of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday that explored what the architects of Facebook and Instagram knew from internal research about the negative experiences of young users and how the company responded. New Mexico’s attorney general alleges that Meta violated state consumer protection laws in failing to disclose what it knew about the dangers of addiction to social media as well as child sexual exploitation on the company’s platforms. Attorneys for Meta say the company discloses risks and makes efforts to weed out harmful content and experiences — acknowledging that some ba…

Late last month, frozen food manufacturer Ajinomoto Foods North America announced a recall of roughly 3 million pounds of not-ready-to-eat products after customers reported finding glass in rice. In the U.S., many of the recalled products were sold at Trader Joe’s locations. Now that the recall has been dramatically expanded, with new products being pulled from the shelves. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? On March 3, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) posted a recall notice announcing that Ajinomoto Foods North America was expanding its earlier recall to include an additional 33 million pounds of various ready-to-eat and not-re…

The job market is tough right now: AI résumé filters, the rise of ghost jobs, and waves of industry-wide layoffs. Many workers cling tightly to their jobs in this environment, a phenomenon known as “job hugging.” But a surprising number of mid-career millennials aren’t scrambling to avoid redundancy. Instead, they admit they’d prefer an external push out the door because the alternative—voluntarily navigating a chaotic job market—feels far too risky. And experts say it’s a trend that should leave the cohort right below millennials worried. A recent survey of 2,000 Gen Z and millennial workers in the US by online education platform ELVTR found that 37% of mill…

A defiant Elon Musk on Wednesday took the stand in a jury trial to defend himself against accusations that he engaged in a pattern of deceptive behavior that misled investors as he attempted to back out of his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter before he finally completed the takeover. The civil trial in San Francisco centers on a class-action lawsuit filed just before Musk took control of Twitter, a social media service he renamed X, in October 2022, six months after agreeing to buy the embattled company for $44 billion, or $54.20 per share. The price paid by the world’s richest man represents sliver of a fortune now estimated at $841 billion. The case, which represents T…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Familiar tensions around Sam Altman OpenAI CEO Sam Altman voiced his support for Anthropic in its dispute with the Pentagon over the use of its AI for targeting autonomous weapons and in domestic mass surveillance. He did so in a company meeting and during a CNBC Squawk Box appearance last Friday, the day Anthropic was effectively blacklisted by the The President administration. But two days earlier, on Wednesday, Altman had reportedly already begun talking to the Pentagon abou…

Daylight savings time (DST) is just around the corner. This Sunday, March 8, the clocks will spring forward again, and with the change comes the ongoing conversation about, well—why are we doing this, anyway? According to an AP-NORC poll, only 12% of Americans favor DST, while 47% oppose it and 40% are neutral. In Canada’s British Columbia (BC) province, the government has finally decided to take matters into its own hands, and come this Sunday, daylight saving time (DST) will be permanent year-round. “This decision isn’t just about clocks. It’s about making life easier for families, reducing disruptions for businesses and supporting a stable, thriving economy,” B…