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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. I recently celebrated my 56th birthday, and I’m feeling my age. Not because I’m slowing down (which I am), but because I feel increasingly removed from the passions, peeves, and predilections of Gen Z and Generation Alpha. This matters, as young people shape popular and workplace cultures, …

For consumer packaged goods, the path from product idea to store shelves runs directly through the center of Unilever‘s new North American headquarters, and not just because the company makes market-saturating products like Hellmann’s mayonnaise and TRESemmé shampoo. This new headquarters space was designed specifically to put the entire process of product creation on display in its office, from ideation to development to marketing to retailing. Spread across 111,000 square feet in downtown Hoboken, New Jersey, Unilever’s newly opened headquarters is centered around an accessible spine of rooms and facilities that are optimized for bringing new products to market. The…

Gary Vaynerchuk prides himself on being ahead of the curve. As the chairman of communications company VaynerX and the cofounder of Resy, not to mention an angel investor in brands like Twitter, Facebook, Uber, and Venmo, he knows a thing or two about trends in business. And in a new interview with CBS Mornings, he shared what he thinks is to blame for consumer burnout: not advertisers, social media, or even consumers themselves—but modern parenting. “I think that parenting needs to be called out of the last 40 years,” Vaynerchuk said. “I believe that the burnout, the insecurity, all the stuff we talk about, I believe the reason we’re buying more stuff is, we’re using …

Three AI companies—OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity—are on the verge of receiving approval to sell their technology, hosted on their own cloud systems, directly to the government, a person familiar with the matter tells Fast Company. That authorization will be on a “low impact” and pilot level, the person said, but constitutes a major step toward independence. That independence could help those companies avoid some of the complications created by ongoing partnerships between AI firms and longtime government tech contractors. As large language models have gone mainstream, AI companies have often relied on tech firms that have already passed arduous government security re…

Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Swedish fintech company Klarna, says the organization is set to drastically downsize. And he says he shares his outlook on the workforce with another CEO: Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. Siemiatkowski made the comments on the 20 VC podcast with Harry Stebbings earlier this week, where the CEO didn’t deny that the company has been steadily shrinking. The CEO said that currently the company has about 3,000 employees. That’s down from 7,000 just four years ago. In another four, he says there will likely be less than 2,000—a reduction of one-third. Siemiatkowski cited both layoffs and the employees leaving the company and not being replace…

Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Swedish fintech company Klarna, says the organization is set to employ drastically fewer people. And he says he shares his outlook on the workforce with another CEO: Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. Siemiatkowski made the comments on the 20 VC podcast with Harry Stebbings earlier this week, where the CEO didn’t deny that the company has been steadily shrinking. The CEO said that currently the company has about 3,000 employees. That’s down from 7,000 just four years ago. In another four, he says there will likely be less than 2,000—a reduction of one-third. Siemiatkowsk said employees leaving the company are not being replaced, and expla…

A new 3D-printed construction technique turns corn into a novel building material. Corncretl is a biocomposite made from corn waste known as nejayote that’s rich in calcium. It’s dried, pulverized, and mixed with minerals, and the resulting material is applied using a 3D printer. This corn-based construction material was made by Manufactura, a Mexican sustainable materials company, and it imagines a second life for waste from the most widely produced grain in the world. The project started as an invitation by chef Jorge Armando, the founder of catering brand Taco Kween Berlin, to find ways he could reintegrate waste generated by his taqueria into architecture.…

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign is remembered a decade on for the exclamation point in its “Jeb!” logo, but Jesse Jackson’s campaign actually used the punctuation 28 years before him. Jackson, the civil rights activist who died Tuesday at the age of 84, ran for president twice, in 1984 and 1988. At the 1988 Democratic National Convention, his supporters held red signs that said “Jesse!” in white. Jackson came in second in the 1988 primary with nearly 30% of the vote against the party’s nominee Michael Dukakis, and since then, candidates from Bush to 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and former U.S. Sen. Lamar Alex…

United Parcel Service (UPS) is planning to close dozens of packaging facilities this year, the shipping giant revealed in a court filing this week. The plans include shuttering facilities in Texas, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, and several other states. It includes locations that have union employees, according to a docket made public as part of a lawsuit between UPS and the Teamsters Union. UPS revealed in January that it will cut 30,000 jobs over the coming year. The move was announced as its partnership with Amazon was winding down and amid a broader push toward automation. At the time, it also revealed plans to close 24 total facilities, though it did no…

Even if you barely use AI, pretty soon you’ll be paying the price for it. Due to the demands of AI data centers, memory supplies are drying up for all kinds of devices, from phones and laptops to desktop PCs and game consoles. Three companies control nearly all the world’s DRAM production—Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix—and they’ve shifted production toward the type of RAM that those data centers run on. This comes at the expense of RAM for consumer electronics, resulting in a shortage that could last into 2028. It’s early days for the fallout, but what sounded like an abstract concern in 2025 is quickly becoming real, as electronics makers ra…

You can put a lot of different things in fried rice, but certainly not glass. Unfortunately, that might be an ingredient in certain packages of Trader Joe’s chicken fried rice. Frozen food manufacturer Ajinomoto Foods North America is recalling more than 3 million pounds of chicken fried rice products due to potential glass contamination. The recall includes products with both Ajinomoto and Trader Joe’s branding. The manufacturer, based in Portland, Oregon, notified the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) after it received four customer complaints of glass in the rice. As of Thursday, February 19, no related inju…

The biggest drama in Hollywood in recent months hasn’t been on the silver screen but in the boardrooms of two of the most powerful companies in the industry. In December, streaming giant Netflix announced its intention to acquire legendary Hollywood studio Warner Bros. after its planned separation from Discovery Global. The proposed merger has sparked heated debate in Hollywood about the future of the cinema industry, and now, one of the most successful filmmakers in the world, James Cameron, has entered the fray. ‘Titanic’ director calls proposed merger ‘disastrous’ Many in Hollywood have not publicly spoken out against the proposed Netflix-Warner Bros…

The worst days of the pandemic are long behind us, but the world is still reeling from its aftereffects. For some people, this has driven a dramatic reprioritizing of what’s important in their lives, including where they work and the kind of energy they’re prepared to give to the company that employs them. According to a new survey, one result of the pandemic aftershocks in the workforce is a sharp rise in how much people want to take time off to travel. Younger Americans are so keen to vacation, in fact, that they’re putting off big life decisions and even going into debt. Not only could this shift in priorities affect your business if you’re trying to attract young …

We have a complicated relationship with creativity. Intuitively, we understand its value—the ability to produce new ideas and novel innovation. Instinctively, we know that it presents opportunities for marketplace advancements. When we think of some of the most revered organizations in modern times, like the Apple’s and Disney’s of the world, we point to their creative contributions and their impact. However, although most companies revere organizations with a creative culture, there is a deep-seated misnomer that some companies are inherently creative and others just aren’t, as if creativity is a rare gene or a divine gift that is bestowed on some and coveted by others. …

The Class of 2020 still aren’t over the COVID-19 pandemic cancelling their graduation. Apparently they never stop bringing it up, according to TikTok. Now their complaints are being used as a punchline. Being robbed? “Did you know that I didn’t get a graduation.” Slip on ice? “I didn’t have a prom, I didn’t have a homecoming.” Oh, your grandma just died? “Okay, well if you think that’s bad, I literally didn’t graduate.” While the trend has been around since Gen Z did—or didn’t—graduate in 2020, with some reminiscing on those “unprecedented” times and others crashing their siblings’ graduations in place of their own, it has recently picked up traction again…

As major employers have slashed jobs over the last year, many of them have cited artificial intelligence or automation to justify the cuts. AI was referenced in nearly 55,000 layoffs in 2025, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas—and the latest figures suggest that trend is continuing into this year alongside a record-high surge in job cuts, which crossed 108,000 in January alone. But economists and experts have repeatedly said that employment data does not indicate AI is replacing jobs en masse at the moment. And it seems even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shares this skepticism over whether AI is actually responsible for the layoffs roiling the wo…