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While the Lego Group has dipped its toes into tech waters before, the company hasn’t strayed far from its analog roots. But on Monday, the 94-year-old company unveiled a new product line that embraces the digital age, without abandoning its core business. At CES, Lego announced the upcoming launch of the Lego Smart Play system, an interactive technology that lets users’ Lego creations respond to player actions with tailored sounds, lights, behavior, and more. The company says it’s a way to further engage digital native kids without having them stare at yet another screen. While the toy market has struggled for the past few years, sales at the Lego Group have remai…

We’ve grown strangely comfortable separating things that were never meant to be separated: leadership from management, vision from execution, and perhaps most damaging, culture from strategy. Inside companies, this split shows up everywhere. A CEO announces a bold future about democratizing access or building a place where people take smart risks. Then culture gets handed to HR as if it belongs on a separate track, while the business strategy unfolds on its own timeline. The result is predictable. Employees are asked to navigate the distance between what leaders say and how the organization actually works. That distance is not neutral. It creates avoidable frictio…

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is one of the tech industry’s longest-serving chief executives, leading the chipmaker since cofounding it in 1993. Now he’s the recipient of a long-standing technology award: the IEEE Medal of Honor, established by a predecessor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1917. Huang was named the recipient of the medal (and an accompanying $2 million prize) at the Consumer Electronics Show on January 6 in recognition of his lifetime of work in accelerating computing—the technique of using specialized chips like Nvidia’s graphics processing units to speed specialized operations such as rendering images for video games, crunching …

I recently argued that return-to-office mandates aren’t really about productivity; they’re about control. Ironically, my article published smack-dab in the middle of a September inflection point of increasing office time requirements, a phenomenon Owl Labs dubbed “hybrid creep.” And now, perhaps shockingly, I’ve started a new job with a team that (gasp!) has an office. When I wrote my argument against RTO, I had no inkling that I would soon be back in an office (part-time) myself. I am now basically in a live experiment. So far, it’s changed how I feel about the idea of going into an office. It hasn’t changed my view on RTO. A lab for truly flexible work My ne…

Fast Company is now accepting applications for our annual Best Workplaces for Innovators awards. This marks the eighth year we will be recognizing companies and organizations around the world that most effectively empower employees at all levels to improve processes, create new products, or invent whole new ways of doing business. In addition to honoring the world’s overall Best Workplaces for Innovators, we will recognize companies in 19 categories, including a brand-new category, Skilled Labor, singling out companies that depend heavily on talented employees with the kinds of increasingly coveted technical expertise acquired through votech training and trade sch…

Chat platform Discord filed confidentially for an initial public offering in the United States, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The U.S. IPO market regained momentum in 2025 after nearly three years of sluggish activity, but hopes for a stronger rebound were tempered by tariff-driven volatility, a prolonged government shutdown and a late-year selloff in artificial intelligence stocks. Deliberations are ongoing and the company could decide not to proceed with a listing, the report said. A Discord spokesperson told Bloomberg “the company’s focus remains on delivering the best possible experience for users and building …

Everybody knows this coworker—the one who spirals about cost-cutting layoffs when snacks vanish from the break room. The one who thinks they’re getting fired because their boss hasn’t been using emojis with them lately. The one who’s the office Chicken Little: anxious, somewhat frantic, often misguided . . . and who can’t stop talking to others about whatever it is they’re anxious about. This person—and it could be you—may be justified, as it makes sense for employees to be nervous right now: layoffs are at an all-time high, and January is a common month for layoffs. But for the office Chicken Little, it’s not the dismal mass termination numbers alone that are sc…

Health tech gadgets displayed at the annual CES trade show make a lot of promises. A smart scale promoted a healthier lifestyle by scanning your feet to track your heart health, and an egg-shaped hormone tracker uses AI to help you figure out the best time to conceive. Tech and health experts, however, question the accuracy of products like these and warn of data privacy issues — especially as the federal government eases up on regulation. The Food and Drug Administration announced during the show in Las Vegas that it will relax regulations on “low-risk” general wellness products such as heart monitors and wheelchairs. It’s the latest step President Donald The President…

Inside Girl Scouts’ headquarters in New York City and its two licensed bakeries, a team of trend forecasters, marketers, and food scientists spend years cooking up its next iconic cookie. Now, fans of the annual cookie sale are about to get a taste of what the Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) team has been baking behind closed doors. The newest addition to the cookie lineup are Exploremores, a rocky road ice cream-inspired sandwich cookie with chocolate shortbread exteriors and chocolate, marshmallow, and toasted almond-flavored cream centers. For Girl Scout cookie enjoyers, a fresh cookie is always a welcome surprise. But, according to Wendy Lou, GSUSA’s chief rev…

If you visit the Hermès website in search of a scarf or a handbag, you’ll be greeted by a collection of whimsical sea creatures swimming across the screen. To navigate to the watch section, you’ll click on an image of a watch flanked by an eel. To locate shoes, you’ll click on a loafer with a pelican sitting inside it as if it were riding a boat. These sea horses and fish and eels and star fish are intriguing to the eye. While digitally-rendered images are hyper smooth, symmetrical, and flawless, these pictures bear all the imperfections of a hand-drawn illustration. We see the texture of the paper grain in the background, a slight irregularity in the lines, uneve…

Brands love to insert themselves into cultural conversations or piggyback on buzzy current events, a strategy sometimes called newsjacking. But it can happen without seeking, or even wanting, the attention. The borderline absurd virality of a Nike tracksuit evidently worn by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as he was taken into the custody of American captors is the most high-profile recent example—but it definitely won’t be the last. This form of what we could call involuntary product placement can be a conundrum for brands, which prefer to be associated with upbeat or positive events, not dictators or controversial geopolitics. And that’s been made even more cha…

One of Ikea’s most popular lamps of the past several years—nicknamed the “donut lamp”—is about to get a smart, colorful upgrade. The original donut lamp debuted back in 2023 as part of Ikea’s 20-piece Varmblixt collection with the Rotterdam-based designer Sabine Marcelis. With its glossy orange glass and soft, retro glow, the lamp quickly emerged as a fan favorite: In the three years since its debut, Ikea says one donut lamp has sold every five minutes in the U.S. It’s the company’s best-selling lamp, both in the U.S. and worldwide. Given the lamp’s popularity, Ikea has teamed up with Marcelis for a new version, this time featuring a smart function that allows it …

Resilience is not an inherited trait. It is a disciplined practice—a way of showing up that is cultivated over time through deliberate training of the body, mind, and spirit. In high-stress environments, whether on the battlefield, in the boardroom, or in the quiet turmoil of daily life, the ability to remain steady amid volatility is what separates reactive living from intentional leadership. What many discover, often through hardship, is that resilience is less about bracing against impact and more about widening the internal space between stimulus and response. That space—Viktor Frankl called it the foundation of freedom—allows for clarity, intentionality, and courage.…

For decades, design followed a singular truth. Whether it was the insistence that “form follows function” or the later pivot toward “form follows emotion,” the industry tended to adhere to a simple formula for design thinking: Find your North Star and follow. But that formula does not fit today’s reality. “Form follows X” is no longer a clean equation, because X isn’t a single variable. It’s a constellation that refuses to be reduced to one guiding idea. Modern design across brands, products, and experiences must use a multidimensional approach, speaking to function, feeling, context, narrative, culture, and experience, all at once. HUMAN EXPERIENCE DESIGN …

2025 was a fairly humdrum year for Apple from a hardware perspective. While the company’s software—including the “26” versions of iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS—got a major visual overhaul, Apple’s hardware lineup included just one brand new product: the iPhone Air. But that is set to change in 2026. This year, Apple is expected to release a number of brand-new hardware products, along with some updates to existing ones. And yes, AI will be a focus, too. Here’s what—and when—to expect from Apple in 2026. iPhone Fold The most anticipated device Apple is expected to release this year is a foldable iPhone. Colloquially known as the “iPhone Fold,” this device will b…

We’ve had branded entertainment since Procter & Gamble invented soap operas back in the 1930s. But today, brands are forced to diversify the ways in which they gain and hold our attention. It’s no longer as viable or effective to depend on traditional paid media tools. Innovative marketers are increasingly investing in content and experiences that attract and engage audiences rather than interrupt and annoy them. And the shift is driving results. Brands of all stripes talk about “brand entertainment,” but it’s the exceptions that truly create actual entertainment. I’ve spent a lot of time this past year writing and talking on the Brand New World podcast abou…

Most business leaders view themselves primarily as “productive” rather than “creative.” Productivity is often associated with measurable outcomes, such as efficiency, consistency, and task completion. Creativity, by contrast, is frequently perceived as spontaneous, unpredictable, and elusive. Yet, productivity and creativity are not at odds. In fact, they reinforce each other powerfully. Leaders who successfully integrate productive habits with creative practices can unlock new levels of innovation, effectiveness, and personal fulfillment. A global Adobe survey found that 75% of professionals report growing pressure to be productive rather than creative at work, whil…

There are few things more evocative of the free American spirit and the nation’s wide-open spaces than the image of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle zooming down a stretch of empty highway. But while taking one of the legendary hogs for a spin may still be liberating for riders, the company’s independent dealership owners are feeling an increasingly tight financial and business squeeze. A rash of reports in recent weeks have sounded alarms about the troubles Harley dealers face, and the rising number of dealerships closing shop as a result. While Harley-Davidson still counts more than 650 of those locations in operation across the U.S., specialist automotive media warn th…

Yes, there are the New Year’s traditions of setting ambitious goals and ditching bad habits, but one evergreen resolution that ought to top lists is to banish bad design. Why endure something that simply doesn’t work (or is an affront to aesthetics) any longer than we have to? In the spirit of fresh starts, we polled experts in architecture, tech, industrial design, and urbanism on the everyday annoyances and the big-picture issues that they think are in desperate need of a refresh in 2026. (Top on my personal list? Eye-searing headlights.) Design is inherently an optimistic act, and by fixing these issues, we’re a step closer to a more beautiful and better world…

The majority of us see change as a blind scary leap into the unknown—a scary evolution that demands we give up on everything we know. But what if we reframed change, not as something that happens to us, but as something we actively choose? Traditionally people perceived change in black-and-white terms: either you can change, or you can’t. That kind of thinking sets us up for failure by assuming that change requires some grand, perfect plan or major shift in direction. However, we also have the power to make small changes, no matter how minor they seem. And it’s these small changes that, over time, lead to profound transformation. Fear Takes the Wheel The most …

When a 7.7-magnitude earthquake hit Myanmar last year, roads buckled and thousands of buildings collapsed. But a group of small, ultra-low-cost homes made from bamboo survived without any damage. Finished just days before the quake, the houses are emergency shelters for some of the millions of people displaced by Myanmar’s ongoing civil war. Myanmar-based architecture studio Blue Temple worked with its spinoff construction company Housing Now to make the simple prefab homes as low-cost as possible while still able to withstand natural disasters. “We built them for the price of a smartphone—about $1,000 U.S. dollars per house,” says architect and Blue Temple founde…

Trust used to be the benefit of the doubt. Now it is the battle to be won. Recently, I asked a CEO client why she didn’t want to speak on a panel her team had been invited to. Her answer? “I’d rather the company speak for itself. I don’t want to make it about me.” That hesitation is common. Many leaders assume visibility is self-serving. But today, staying behind the scenes isn’t humility. It’s a risk. When nearly 70% of people believe business leaders intentionally mislead the public, credibility and trust, not marketing, has become the new currency. We are leading in an era when silence is interpreted as indifference and visibility is mistaken for vanity. That t…

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. In recent weeks Modern CEO has published predictions for 2026 from CEOs across industries and a list of books that can help leaders get ready for the year ahead. We invited readers to share their own prognostications and book recommendations. (Respect to the author who endorsed her own book…