What's on Your Mind?

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. Being a life sciences CEO is not for the faint of heart. Drug discovery and patent approvals are costly and time-consuming, and even if an executive can steer a company to clinical trials, there’s a very small chance the product will be commercialized. One study says that 90% of clinical dr…

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. When I was a young professional in the 1990s, I didn’t aspire to be a CEO. (I was a business journalist focused on getting more challenging editorial assignments.) And even if I had wanted to run a company, I wouldn’t have known how to cobble together the necessary experiences to qualify fo…

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. Nearly 20 years ago, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen published The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, his groundbreaking work about why successful companies often lose their way. But CEOs still struggle with one of the book’s central …

When we consider the subway, it’s often for reasons that have to do with decay and deterioration. The switches are outdated. The elevators are broken. The train is late (again). Of course it could be better, but rarely do we pause to take in what the system does right. Its 25 lines, 472 stations, and 665 miles of track traverse the city and offer a tremendous amount of mobility. And now, a new digital installation at the Fulton Street subway station by the information designer Giorgia Lupi and her team at Pentagram pays tribute to the system. “Sometimes adults lose the ability to see magic in mundane things and to treat what we experience every day with a …

When you think of an electrical outlet, the first thing that likely comes to mind is a simple, rectangular device mounted on the wall—purely functional, often hidden from sight. Architect and designer India Mahdavi has different ideas, though. Working with the high-end electrical brand 22 System, Mahdavi reimagined the outlet as a cheerful pop of color that’s reminiscent of a smiley face. [Photo: Thierry Depagne/22 System] Omer Arbel, co-founder of 22 System and design brand Bocci, asked Mahdavi to bring an unexpected element of joy to this everyday utility by creating a distinct colorway for the existing outlet face—transforming it from a discreet necessity i…

Most people don’t give the display screens on their commuter trains a second thought, but for designer Emily Sneddon, they’ve proved to be a well of inspiration. Sneddon lived in San Francisco, where she worked at the design agency Collins, from 2021 until this year when she moved back to her home country of Australia. She designed Fran Sans, her first ever font, after noticing the display on San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s (SFMTA) recently retired Muni Metro Breda Light Rail Vehicle. Unlike New York City, which handles its public transit through a single agency, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), public transportation in San Fra…

I can’t think of anything better than assembling Lego blocks. Except assembling gigantic Lego that I can actually walk, jump, and nap on. Which is precisely what Lego and Nike did at Baoshan No. 2 Central Primary School in Shanghai.​ The school has 1,400 students who previously had insufficient sport and play facilities. Nike, which is building 100 playgrounds in schools all around China, decided to partner with Lego to fix that (the two are already partners in a series of cross-branding Lego sets and sports gear). According to the companies, the design was deeply collaborative and student-driven—and it shows: Instead of the previous sad concrete playground there’s no…

When the House of Cinema in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, was demolished in 2017, it was an architectural awakening for the city. A large circular concrete building completed in 1982, the House of Cinema was an instant cultural and architectural landmark in the city, then part of the Soviet Union. Its demolition, to make way for a controversial commercial development project, spurred many in the city to worry about which landmark would fall next. That led the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation to launch a citywide research project to document endangered buildings. Most were built between the late 1960s and early 1980s when the Soviet Union sought to frame its a…

Our phones are making us unhappy, but I’m not sure cutting myself off from humanity’s universe of information with a dumbphone is the answer. It’s kind of like how we know walking is healthier than driving, but it’s a moot point when the average person lives 27 miles from their workplace. However, maybe our smartphones don’t need a lobotomy. Maybe they just need to respect our boundaries. This is an idea explored in a new concept called Aperture, by the London studio Special Projects. It’s a case that crops your smartphone into a small square of your screen when you flip your case over, revealing a series of smart widgets. By the same firm that developed ideas like discre…

In his last semester at college, in between studying labor law and environmental impact assessment, Alex Elderbroom took a class on something very different: how to build a tiny house. In the class, at Paul Smith’s College in upstate New York—a school that mixes traditional academics with more practical courses—a small group of students spent three months last fall going through each step of the construction process, from planning and purchasing materials to building basic furniture for the finished 8-by-10-foot space. Elderbroom, who just graduated, happens to already rent a tiny cabin. He was interested in learning how to build one of the homes himself. “It seem…

You sit down at your desk, ready to start the day. Before you can even open your first email, you’ve already typed in three different passwords—each more complex than the last. By lunchtime, you’ve repeated the ritual half a dozen times. It’s frustrating, it’s slow, and it’s happening to millions of employees every single day. This is password fatigue—the silent productivity killer and hidden security risk plaguing modern enterprises. It’s more than an annoyance; it’s a costly vulnerability. Our global survey found that most users still rely on passwords as their primary authentication method. This should concern most organizations, because in an era defined by work-f…

It’s been more than half a century since it became more common to ship freight in trucks than by train. But when one company decided to start selling its product in the New York City market, it built its own new rail terminal to avoid the cost and emissions of trucking. “A truck is not an efficient way to take these types of materials long distance,” says Grant Quasha, CEO of Eco Material Technologies. The company makes supplementary cementitious material or SCM, a component added to concrete to make it stronger and longer-lasting. The material is made from fly ash, a type of waste produced from coal plants that the company sources from landfills at locations througho…

It’s a sound—and smell—car commuters have become intimately familiar with: the noxious fumes of asphalt repaving. U.S. road maintenance and highway expansion require a massive quantity of asphalt every year, roughly 400 million tons a year on average, according to Asphalt magazine, a publication of the international trade association Asphalt Institute. But a new process developed by St. Louis-based firm Verde Resources seeks to streamline the process, making it more sustainable and odorless. Verde’s new BioAsphalt process, which has been in development since 2022, utilizes what’s called biochar, or natural wood remnants from forestry waste that get added into the trad…

Electric vehicles have seen a lot of success in recent years, but there are still some concerns—from range anxiety to insufficient charging infrastructure—that limit their overall adoption. Hybrids don’t have those same worries, and hybrid sales have been gaining momentum as the growth of EV sales has slowed. That’s caused some carmakers to pull back on EV offerings and prioritize hybrids instead. But now a company called Horse Powertrain is offering an alternative to carmakers who are hesitant to go fully electric while still allowing them to develop EVs—and keep their EV production lines. Called the Future Hybrid Concept, it’s essentially a way for automakers to re…

This year, high-profile companies like Amazon and JPMorgan have embraced strict policies to get their employees back into the office full time, eliminating the option of hybrid work altogether. With limited exceptions, workers who choose not to comply with these new mandates are unlikely to keep their jobs—let alone get a raise. One company, however, is willing to shell out thousands of dollars to lure workers back to the office. According to a CNBC report, the celebrity video platform Cameo has promised each of its employees an additional $10,000 annually in exchange for coming into the company’s Chicago-based office four days a week. “We really felt like we want…

Many of the office buildings emptied by the pandemic are still sitting vacant. A recent report from Moody’s Analytics found that in the second quarter of 2025 office vacancy rates were still above 20% nationwide, and cities across the country are still trying to figure out what, if anything, to do about it. One startup has an unconventional solution. It wants to fill that empty space with crops. Area 2 Farms is a three-year-old company based in Arlington, Virginia, that’s taking the concept of indoor farming to unusual spaces. Its first farm, in Arlington, grows dozens of varieties of crops in a low-slung brick building tucked between a dog day care and a car repair s…

Last month in Los Angeles electric vehicle startup Slate Auto revealed its low-cost, American-made electric truck, with hopes to become the holy grail the auto industry needs to make EVs more affordable and accessible.The company expects its trucks’ sales price to be less than $20,000 with $7,500 U.S. federal tax incentives taken into consideration. While markets like Europe and China are seeing moderate to accelerated sales growth in their electric vehicle markets, the transition to EVs is slower in the United States. According to McKinsey’s latest annual survey, 12% of respondents in the U.S. said they intend their next car purchase to be a battery electric vehicl…

In 2034, Salt Lake City will join a short list of cities that have hosted a Winter Olympic Games twice, joining the likes of Turin and Innsbruck. But unlike in any Olympics of the past, skiers and bobsledders may glimpse a surreal sight overhead as they compete—flying air taxis. Though still nine years away from the Opening Ceremony, aviation company Beta Technologies sees the state of Utah as a proving ground for its electric planes. As competitors focus on major cities like New York and Los Angeles, Beta has inked a deal with Utah to start exploring transportation solutions across the very rural state. The Beehive State had a confluence of benefits for Beta, inc…

For many families with young children in the U.S., the cost of childcare is prohibitively expensive, preventing some parents, especially mothers, from returning to the workforce. That’s why one California-based company recently introduced a new childcare initiative, vowing to pay up to $3,000 a month in childcare costs for eligible employees. The cofounders of Cakes Body, 32-year-old twin sisters Casey Sarai and Taylor Capuano, say their own experiences as working mothers inspired the decision. Capuano recalls how, after having her first child, she made the difficult decision to return to work even though she had only $200 left each month after paying childcare costs.…

Influencers are not only good for skinny jean and matcha recommendations. Now, they can advise you on where to invest your money. Founded by 23-year-old Steven Wang, Dub is an influencer-driven marketplace where users can now copy the entire portfolios of the likes of Rep. Nancy Pelosi or billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman for just $9.99 a month or $89.99 a year. At the same time, retail traders accepted into Dub’s top creator program will be paid royalties for users to access their model portfolio. “I want the next five Warren Buffetts to be surfaced and famous on Dub,” Wang told CNBC last month. “If we’re really successful with the top creator program,…

Single-use soy sauce packets for sushi take-out orders are now a whole lot more sustainable, thanks to a redesign that doesn’t use any plastic. While sushi lovers in the U.S. are used to getting their to-go soy sauce in rectangular packets like they do their ketchup and mustard, soy sauce in Australia often comes in small plastic fish bottles with a screw top. This typical mini fish-shaped bottle is cute, for sure, but the user is done with it in a few minutes. Its packaging lasts much, much longer by comparison, since plastics can take as long as 500 years to break down. Does the user experience really require packaging that lasts that long? The Holy …

Handmade punch cards are currently trending on TikTok as a cute, visual way to track 2026 goals. Modeled after the punch cards that will secure you a free coffee or sandwich after showing loyalty to one cafe or another, users instead punch, stamp or check off a square every time they make progress on their goals, whether that’s staying consistent at the gym, completing a no-spend weekend or paying down debt. “Today’s New Year’s Eve, and I made these little punchcards this morning of goals I have for myself starting this new year,” TikTok user @camiunderthesea said in a video showing off her deck of cards. “The first one is to read five books. I’ve been trying to…