What's on Your Mind?

Last week, Block CEO Jack Dorsey shared that his fintech company would be cutting 40% of its workforce, arguing that AI would allow them to do more with smaller teams. Many observers wondered if the large-scale layoffs reflected the new reality amid rapid AI adoption, and whether it was just a matter of time before other companies followed suit. But not everyone is buying it. In a post on X, Whoop CEO Will Ahmed shared that his company—which makes health and fitness wearables—would be nearly doubling its 800-employee headcount this year, drawing a contrast with employers that have been slashing jobs over the last year. He then weighed in on the growing trend of compa…

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. During Charles Giancarlo’s first all-hands meeting after becoming CEO of Pure Storage in 2017, an employee asked: “How long are we going to keep the name Pure Storage?” The question suggested that having “storage” in the company’s name limited the range of products and services it could offe…

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…

Everyone who has tried to code with Anthropic’s Claude Code AI agents runs into the same usability problem: If you run two or three concurrent artificial intelligence sessions—say, one rewriting your server code, another generating tests, a third doing background research—you are forced to manually hunt through separate terminal tabs, each one generating a relentless stream of machine-readable log entries, just to figure out what each program is actually doing at any given moment. Not only is it hard to follow what’s really going on, but not checking constantly can also lead to problems, as agents might stop to ask you something and you won’t notice it for minutes or hou…

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…

Call it the day the music died. On December 31, 2025, MTV’s last music-only stations shut down forever​. The last video played on MTV Music in the U.K. was “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles—which was also the first video ever played on the original MTV channel in the United States back in 1981. That’s a good 44 years of music history, bookended with a song that explores the theme of technology changing the way people experience art. It’s beautiful, in a way: A song that mourns the end of the radio age is played to mourn the end of another era. If you, like me, enjoy having random music videos on in the background while you work—or even just having them …

If you’re tuning in to the Milan Cortina Olympics, you may be one of many spectators who’s suddenly invested in the sport of curling. You’re in good company: Swedish designer Gustaf Westman, best known for his chunky homeware, has become so fascinated by the event that he used it as inspiration for his latest design. Curling centers on an object called a “curling stone.” Using its gooseneck handle, competitors slide the round, 44-pound stone down an ice shuffleboard toward a target zone. Westman’s “curling bowl,” which he debuted on Instagram on February 10, reimagines the object as a snack bowl. The stone’s handle has been cleverly converted into the perfect slot fo…

For decades, people with disabilities have relied on service dogs to help them perform daily tasks like opening doors, turning on lights, or alerting caregivers to emergencies. By some estimates, there are 500,000 service dogs in the U.S., but little attention has been paid to the fact that these dogs have been trained to interact with interfaces that are made for humans. A team of researchers from the United Kingdom wants to change that by designing accessible products for, and with dogs. The Open University’s Animal-Computer Interaction Laboratory in the UK was founded in 2011 to help promote the art and science of designing animal-centered systems. Led by Clara Man…

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…

Having a baby isn’t cheap, but sometimes, even the delivery alone can be a crushing burden on families. According to a new survey, even moms who are insured can end up saddled with medical debt that adds to the financial stress of growing a family. What To Expect, a website that provides new and expecting parents with resources, surveyed 3,285 women on their experiences with labor and delivery charges. The research found that one in four moms have gone into debt due to the costs associated with giving birth. The survey found that, on average, moms are leaving the hospital with around $3,000 in debt. And that’s before the baby expenses—diapers, formula, daycare!—…

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…