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Late last year, Meta confirmed it would effectively be abandoning the metaverse, a nebulously defined project that spurred the company’s 2021 rebrand and has cost it over $70 billion since. At a strategy meeting at Mark Zuckerberg’s Hawaii compound, Reality Labs, the division responsible for the metaverse, was told to cut its budget by 30%, versus only 10% across the rest of the company. Reality Labs’ fate was arguably a long time coming: The division has never turned a profit, with cumulative losses these past five years totalling $73 billion. Wall Street reacted positively to the news, adding $69 billion to its market capitalization. You remember the metaverse, don…

Thousands of nurses in three hospital systems in New York City went on strike Monday after negotiations through the weekend failed to yield breakthroughs in their contract disputes. “Nurses on strike! … Fair contract now!” they shouted on a picket line outside NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital’s campus in Upper Manhattan. Others picketed at multiple hospitals in the Mount Sinai and Montefiore systems. About 15,000 nurses are involved in the strike, according to their union, the New York State Nurses Association. The hospitals remained open, hiring droves of temporary nurses to try to fill the labor gap. The strike involves private, nonprofit hospitals, not city-ru…

There are many made-up celebrations these days, but at least National Pizza Week delivers something tasty. Coming in hot on the heels of so-called quitter’s day, when many people abandon their New Year’s resolutions, pizza shops around the U.S. will be tossing around some deals that could save customers some dough. Of course, many people don’t need an excuse to eat pizza—on any given day, about 11% of Americans do so, according to a study released in 2024 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Americans grappling with the high cost of living got some relief as inflation cooled in November, but that doesn’t mean that food prices have come down—and particularly for …

There’s a quote from Charles Bukowski framed on my office wall: “What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.” We’re in that fire right now. For 25 years, our company has moved people to show up for entertainment. Then the world changed. Entertainment changed. Technology changed. Almost overnight, we had to throw the old playbook out the window. So, we paused. We looked inward and asked the hard question: Do we rebuild what we had or transform into what we need to be for the future? Companies need to choose the second. For us that meant becoming culture-led, not as a slogan or a rebrand, but as the infrastructure for how we operate. Becoming cultur…

The convergence of brand work and entertainment is set to be making significant leaps and bounds this year as a result in a flurry of activity in 2025. Large brands of consequence have made serious investment in in-house entertainment studios over the past few years—LVMH, AB InBev, Nike, and Dick’s Sporting Goods, among them. Now, sports retail and gaming giant Fanatics is partnering with OBB Media to launch Fanatics Studios. The new division will be led by Michael D. Ratner, founder and CEO of OBB Media, and will operate as another pillar of Fanatics’ overall business, alongside retail, collectibles, and gaming. The goal is to independently create, finance, produce,…

Advancements in artificial intelligence are shaping nearly every facet of society, including education. Over the past few years, especially with the availability of large language models like ChatGPT, there’s been an explosion of AI-powered edtech. Some of these tools are truly helping students, while many are not. For educational leaders seeking to leverage the best of AI while mitigating its harms, it’s a lot to navigate. That’s why the organization I lead, the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund, collaborated with the Alliance for Learning Innovation (ALI) and Education First to write Proof Before Hype: Using R&D for Coherent AI in K-12 Education. …

In a recent interview with Wired, billionaire philanthropist Melinda French Gates made clear she is no friend of hustle culture and nonstop busyness. “My parents were countercultural. They actually taught us that you needed breaks,” she says. “We took Sundays off as a family, and guess what else? My parents actually taught me the importance of rest, of taking a short nap every day.” Building quiet, restful moments into your day doesn’t just help you think more clearly and feel better physically, she continues. It also helps you check in with yourself and your values. It is important to “know who you are as a person and to live in that direction and in that lane,…

Quiet quitting. Silent space-out. Faux focus. Call it what you want, a lot of today’s workers are going through the motions on the surface while quietly powering down beneath it. Nearly half of Gen Z employees say they’re “coasting,” and overall U.S. employee engagement sits at a decade low. When engagement fades, performance becomes performative. But disengagement isn’t just a problem to solve, it’s a signal to heed. Employees aren’t turning off. They’re trying to tell us something. As CEO of SurveyMonkey, I’ve witnessed how curiosity can be the cure to the workplace phenomenon “resenteeism”—a state of resentment combined with absenteeism—which is often fueled by…

Hiring in 2026 won’t look much like hiring even two years ago. If you don’t pay attention, you will get left behind. I was a retained search consultant for 25-plus years. I’ve written executive and board résumés for the last 10 years. I’ve never seen so much change in candidate sourcing happen so quickly. CEO priorities and expectations have shifted. AI is reshaping how candidates get surfaced. Résumé sameness has skyrocketed. Candidate shortlist cycles have accelerated. For you to be visible, your résumé has to do more than describe your work. It has to hit leaders’ priorities, satisfy automated systems’ tests, and make sense. The following five trends show you w…

When the FIFA World Cup 2026 arrives in the United States this June, it will signal more than soccer’s return to its fastest-growing commercial market. The tournament will span three countries—the United States, Mexico, and Canada—for the first time, becoming the largest World Cup ever staged. The scale, however, is also forcing a technological reset. As modern global sporting events grow in scale, expectations have evolved alongside them. Audiences now look for more immersive broadcasts and real-time data, broadcasters face rising reliability demands, and governing bodies continue to push for greater transparency and precision. Together, these pressures are starting …

Scott Adams, the creator of the uber-popular and satirical comic strip Dilbert, has died. He passed away on January 13, after announcing his diagnosis of metastatic prostate cancer last spring. He was 68. On Tuesday morning, the cartoonist’s former wife, Shelly Miles, shared the news of his death during a livestream on X. Miles read from a statement that Adams had prepared himself for the occasion. “I had an amazing life,” the statement said. “I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits from my work, I’m asking you to pay it forward as best you can. That is the legacy I want. Be useful. And please know I loved you all to the very end.” Dilbert was fi…

Let’s do a thought exercise. If the role of the chief marketing officer is to oversee marketing and the role of the chief operating officer is to oversee operations, while the chief financial officer’s responsibility is to safeguard the organization’s finances, then what’s the responsibility of the chief executive officer? Surely, it’s more than overseeing executions or leading executives, yet the “CEO” naming convention doesn’t give much insight as to what the role is or what it’s responsible for. This gets even more convoluted when an organization has both a CEO and a president. Who’s responsible for what? Clearly, a president presides over the organization or nation st…

2025 unleashed the enormous potential of AI. According to Pew Research, 62% of adults say they interact with AI at least several times a week, and 73% of U.S. adults say they are at least a little bit willing to let AI assist with their day-to-day activities. However, while most people today use AI primarily for answering their questions or researching products to buy, the real opportunity isn’t in better search functionality alone. In the consumer tech industry, we are at the threshold of a generational opportunity to leverage AI to make people’s lives better and more meaningful, saving them time on what they need to do so they can focus on doing what they want to do…

If you are Verizon customer, like me, you’ve probably been scrambling to make phone calls, send texts, and get online since Wednesday, due to a massive, nationwide service outage. (I am writing this from my local food co-op outside Boston, where I am using the internet in their cafe.) The mobile giant says the issue has now been resolved, however, some customers are saying they’re still without service. Some 1.5 million users reported the prolonged outage on Downdetector, which still had some 893 reports (as of around 2:30 p.m. ET). That’s over 24 hours after customers first started losing service around noon ET on Wednesday, with iPhone users reporting an “SOS” icon,…

An investigation into a sprawling betting scheme to rig NCAA and Chinese Basketball Association games ensnared 26 people, including more than a dozen college basketball players who tried to fix games as recently as last season, federal prosecutors said Thursday. The scheme generally revolved around fixers recruiting players with the promise of a big payment in exchange for purposefully underperforming during a game, prosecutors said. The fixers would then place big bets against the players’ teams in those games, defrauding sportsbooks and other bettors, authorities said. Calling it an “international criminal conspiracy,” U.S. Attorney David Metcalf told reporters …

As we head into the new year, I am facing a daunting prospect. After over 34 years in higher education as a professor and administrator, I’m moving to the private sector to support more effective teaching practices. I would classify this change as a significant career pivot. I am changing market sectors (public sector to private) and shifting from serving a single institution to a global base of clients. Decisions like this are not to be made lightly. It is important to ensure that you are making this move to run toward something attractive and not just away from something that frustrates you. Here are three important considerations if you think a significant career m…

I told myself I won’t check emails until I check off my “one thing” to do for the day. I couldn’t do it. I always reach for the phone in the morning. Willpower wasn’t enough. The brain is wired to take the path of least resistance. Fighting it every day with willpower won’t work. These days I use systems. I work with rituals. I get my most important tasks (MIT) done between 9 a.m. and 12 p.m. I schedule my MIT’s the night before. And get straight to work at the scheduled time. Ninety percent of the time at the same place. I’ve done it for so long, I do it on autopilot now. My three-hour block means no motivation required. I’m not relying on willpower to stay “producti…

Put down Wordle. New brain-exercise-for-the-day just dropped. “Can you read 900 words per minute?” a viral post that has been doing the rounds on X, challenges. “Try it.” If you made it to 600 words per minute, that’s more than twice the speed of the average reader. If you made it to 900, congratulations—according to some back-of-the-napkin math, that makes you 278% faster than the national average (which is 238 words per minute). By that same logic, it could take you around 40 seconds to read this 600ish word article. But should it? As one X user pointed out, “this is like brainrot for reading.” Or as Jane Ollis, medical biochemist and founder at AI-pow…

A major fast food franchisee has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The franchisee, Sailormen Inc., operates 130 Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen locations in Florida, and like the franchisees of other big-name fast food chains in recent years, has faced numerous economic headwinds. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? On January 15, Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen franchisee Sailormen Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Florida. Sailormen has been a Popeyes franchisee since the 1980s, and it currently operates 130 locations of the popular fried chicken chain. The conditio…

Quickfire question: Who, in a business, should be responsible for AI? Most of us would assume the tech side of an organization should hold the bag: the CTO, CIO, CDO, CMO or perhaps even a new chief AI officer. And while this direction certainly made sense in the early wave of AI adoption—when it was still a mere tool—the rise of agentic AI (read: autonomous, intelligent agents that behave less like gadgets and more like colleagues) forces us to rethink our assumptions. Which means we should be asking whether AI should be treated as a technology or as a member of the team. And if it’s the latter, is HR actually the role best positioned to oversee it? WHY HR IS…

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said on Friday it will start including ads for those who use the app for free, or have the cheapest subscription, ChatGPT Go. In the coming weeks, the company plans to start testing those ads in the U.S., which will directly relate to user prompts and conversations, “so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay,” the company said. According to OpenAI, the ads will be “clearly labeled” at the bottom of the chat and users can turn off personalization if they want. As for whether the ads will influence the answers ChatGPT provides, OpenAI said the “responses are driven by what’s objective…

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 week, Modern CEO shared reader recommendations of books leaders should read to get ready for 2026. Lyft CEO David Risher submitted a classic, writing: “If you’re looking for inspiration on how to write a comeback story for your company, there’s no better tale than The Odyssey.” Ris…