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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. Last December, Modern CEO named the inaugural Modern CEO of the Year. The goal was to recognize a business leader who embodied the traits frequently covered in this newsletter: inclusion, accessibility, humility, and innovation amid unprecedented uncertainty. We looked for a person with vis…

I’ve always been somewhat ritualistic, shaped by my Midwestern upbringing in a modest immigrant family. I remember my parents calculating the mileage of our ‘82 Honda Civic in a notepad after every fill-up, the same car I eventually inherited in high school. Or saving every receipt on vacation to audit our daily spending down to the dollar. In every sense, they were amazing parents, and their rituals instilled in me a desire to be intentional about how I lived my life. As human beings in a world of constant distraction, time is the most precious resource we have. As a CEO, managing that resource is one of the most important skills you can master. And it’s no picnic. I…

Back on February 6th, 2017, a teenaged Sabrina Carpenter tweeted, “Is there a way to look attractive while eating Pringles asking for a friend.” Is there a way to look attractive while eating Pringles asking for a friend — Sabrina Carpenter (@SabrinaAnnLynn) February 6, 2017 Now, nine years later, the pop star is doing exactly that—in the brand’s Super Bowl ad campaign. Created by agency BBDO New York, the teaser shows Carpenter treating her Pringles like a flower bouquet, plucking chips while saying, “He loves me, he loves me not . . .” For Pringles, the spot represents the perfect formula for celebrity partnership. “Our partner talent has to be a ge…

If you’ve been noticing that cobalt-hued water bottles have started to pop up everywhere you’re not alone. The water has recently made an appearance on shelves at major retailers including Whole Foods and 7-Eleven, starred in viral social media videos created by fitness influencer Ashton Hall, adorned on tables at the Golden Globes, and beginning this week, will star in a fresh new advertising campaign featuring WNBA point guard Skylar Diggins. All of these marketing efforts represent a more expansive pitch by Saratoga Spring Water that the brand’s premium-priced water isn’t just for fine dining– which has been the brand’s core focus for the past several years — it’s …

For filmmakers with a fondness for certain fonts, using them frequently enough in their work can turn typography into a sort of signature. See the typeface in a film, and you know exactly who the director is. Wes Anderson has an obsession with Futura, while John Carpenter set his film credits in Albertus, a formal serif. Papyrus is now synonymous with James Cameron’s Avatar franchise, and more than 40 of Woody Allen’s films use Windsor. For director Sean Baker, whose comedy-drama Anora won the 2025 Oscar for Best Picture and netted him the Academy Award for Best Director, his font of choice is the tall, narrow, decorative Aguafina Script. Created by type desig…

Prioritizing growth to sell is a perfectly reasonable business strategy. Being acquired by a larger group at some point (like Poppi’s recent sale to PepsiCo) makes sense for many—to generate cash flow for expansion, take a shortcut to economies of scale or market penetration, or just cash in for early retirement. But not for me. Early on in my business journey at Bulletproof, we considered a buyout from a renowned global comms agency. But when they starting asking for growth projections and questioning whether we could achieve them, we walked away. We went on to smash those projections within three years—that’s when I truly started to realize we would be better off in…

What is “happiness”—and who gets to be happy? Since 2012, the World Happiness Report has measured and compared data from 167 countries. The United States currently ranks 24th, between the U.K. and Belize—its lowest position since the report was first issued. But the 2025 edition, released on March 20, the U.N.’s annual “International Day of Happiness,” starts off not with numbers, but with Shakespeare. “In this year’s issue, we focus on the impact of caring and sharing on people’s happiness,” the authors explain. “Like ‘mercy’ in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, caring is ‘twice-blessed’—it blesses those who give and those who receive.” Shakespeare’s plays of…

Coral reefs are vital to the health of the oceans, but in recent years they’ve been decimated by climate change, pollution, and overfishing. While this has been widely covered, a new documentary sheds light on the groundbreaking efforts to restore these fragile ecosystems, and the scientists and communities working to bring them back to life. Reef Builders showcases the work of the Sheba Hope Grows initiative, part of one of the largest coral reef restoration efforts globally, led by Mars Sustainable Solutions. Sheba, a cat food brand owned by global conglomerate Mars Inc., has been supporting reef restoration through its Hope Grows program since 2019. Th…

Right now, criminal and state-sponsored hackers are intercepting and storing encrypted data they cannot yet decode. Likely targets include everything from corporate secrets and medical records to legal agreements and military communications. Why would these actors bother to steal data they can’t read? Because they are betting on developments in quantum computing that will eventually let them crack this encrypted data wide open. This isn’t a fringe theory. The NSA (National Security Agency), NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), and ENISA (European Agency for Cybersecurity) are all treating this “harvest now, decrypt later” scenario as a live threat th…

During the Great Resignation, employers offered signing bonuses at unprecedented rates and, while the labor market has since cooled, the cash incentive remains popular, especially among in-person roles. According to a recent study by Indeed’s Hiring Lab, the one-time bonus was included in less than 2% of job postings on the platform before the pandemic, and skyrocketed to a peak of 5.6% in September of 2022. Though the labor market is largely back to pre-pandemic norms, signing bonus offers remain nearly twice as common as they were in 2019, and are now attached to 3.7% of U.S. job postings. “In the last couple years, the trend line has actually diverged,” ex…

Take a moment to think about what the world must have looked like to J.P. Morgan a century ago, before his death in 1913. A shrewd investor in emerging technologies like railroads, automobiles, and electricity, he was also an early adopter, installing one of the first electric generators in his house. Today, we might call him a Techno-Optimist. He could scarcely imagine the dark days ahead: two world wars, the Great Depression, genocides, the rise of fascism and communism, and a decades-long Cold War. Had he lived to see it, he might have asked how, despite so many scientific and technological breakthroughs, things went so wrong. Today, we are at a similar junctur…

Nick Foster is not a fan of how Silicon Valley imagines the future. As a designer and writer who has spent his career at places like Google, Nokia, and Sony, he’s had a front-row seat to the tech world’s relentless obsession with turning science fiction into science fact. The problem, he argues, is that the source material was never meant to be a manual for reality. “The primary function of science fiction is to explore ideas and to entertain. It shouldn’t be considered a brief,” Foster tells me. He worries when he hears people in meetings say, “We should make the thing from Minority Report.” To him, it’s a lazy shortcut—an idea taken from a cinematic universe built f…

In a record weird year for the economy, the price of silver is the latest thing to behave strangely. The price of the second fiddle precious metal has soared over the last month, hitting record highs and outpacing the growth of gold. After hovering between $15 and $25 an ounce for much of the last decade, the price of silver topped $40 an ounce this fall before spiking to a record high of $82 at the end of December. After topping $80 on Monday, silver fell back closer to $70 an ounce – still more than double what the metal was worth only a year ago. Precious metals like silver tend to do well in times of economic uncertainty and 2025 has fit that bill and then som…

Small businesses are planning to hire fewer recent college graduates than they did in 2025, making it likely harder for this cohort to find entry-level jobs. In our recent national survey, we found that small businesses are 30% more likely than larger employers to say they are not hiring recent college graduates in 2026. About 1 in 5 small-business employers said they do not plan to hire college graduates or expect to hire fewer than they did last year. This would be the largest anticipated decrease in small businesses hiring new graduates in more than a decade. Small businesses are generally those with fewer than 500 employees, based on standards from the U.S…

A few blocks from my home sits a small Japanese grocery store that has been in the neighborhood for years. It’s the kind of place that once felt irreplaceable—carefully sourced ingredients, shelves stocked with items I couldn’t find in mainstream supermarkets, and an owner who knows her regulars. But much as I love this store, it has been in steady decline for a few years now. Whole Foods opened up nearby and it now stocks all the basics—miso paste, kombu, dashi packets, nori—that I, or anyone else, could want for weeknight Japanese cooking. Suddenly, the extra trip to the specialty shop felt unnecessary most of the time. The big chain became “good enough,” and in a w…

If you’re having a farewell party for a beloved colleague, don’t cry too hard into your cake. There’s a decent chance they’ll be back. According to a Harvard Business Review study, 28% of “new hires” were “boomerang hires,” the term for someone who’d resigned within the last three years only to return. Mindi Cox, chief people officer for O.C. Tanner, provider of employee recognition and reward solutions, falls into the boomerang employee category herself. As a hiring manager, she’s also done her fair share of hiring former employees, too. “People often leave a job because there’s an opportunity that’s too good to turn down, or they have a life season, like I had, …

If you ask New Yorkers on the street what they think about the giant, controversial print ad campaign in the NYC subway system, their initial response might be, “Which one?” In the past two months alone, not one, but two ad campaigns fitting that description have appeared on the subway. The first debuted in late September, when Friend, an AI company billed as a portable “companion,” ran a $1 million print campaign featuring a variety of servile messages like, “I’ll never leave dirty dishes in the sink.” The campaign received massive criticism, to the point that the MTA was forced to continuously remove Friend’s vandalized ads. In an interview with Fast Company, Frien…

One of the wonderful things about watching AppleTV’s Severance is seeing the variety of “employee appreciation events” they throw. Each one worse than the last, but they provide wonderful satire of the flat attempts many companies make to demonstrate to their employees that they are valued. The truth is that employee appreciation is not shown by any event. It turns out that if you want the people who work in an organization to feel appreciated, you need to show that they are respected and valued every day. Managers should not wait for special occasions to say nice things about their employees’ performance. Instead, leaders need to be looking for chances to complim…

The meme coin boom has made some Web3 bros incredibly rich. But a new study published on Cornell University’s arXiv suggests the ecosystem is better understood as a place of extreme churn, flimsy infrastructure, and a surprising number of scammy projects that disappear quickly. Researchers Alberto Maria Mongardini at the Technical University of Denmark and Alessandro Mei at the Sapienza University of Rome built MemeChain, an open-source, cross-chain dataset of 34,988 meme coins across Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain (BSC), Solana, and Base. The system combines on-chain records with off-chain “legitimacy” signals such as token logos, social links, and archived website HTML. …

When I first started my freelance writing business, I assumed I should find clients who would put me on retainer. The appeal seemed obvious: steady income for me, predictable working relationship for the client. I even knew how to structure retainer agreements based on my prior roles at marketing agencies. But a few months into a solo career, I was willing to take any work that came my way. Which was primarily project-based work, not retainers. I quickly built a business based on ad hoc assignments from many clients, rather than relying on a few. The conventional wisdom would say that I was “doing it wrong.” Every solopreneur forum, coach, and freelancer communi…

As I write this my 6-and-a-half-month-old daughter is sitting on my lap in my home office, where she spends an hour or two each day. Despite all the toys I’ve laid out for her, the thing she typically reaches for is my keyboard, occasionally leading to the odd typo. I’ve been a freelance journalist for about 12 years, but never has this work-from-home, choose-your-own schedule arrangement been so valuable. Last year I was able to be with my wife at almost every doctor’s appointment, ultrasound, and blood test before we became parents in April. Since our daughter was born, I have enjoyed the flexibility not only to make it to every pediatrician appointment and give…