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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. Summer officially starts in a few weeks, but I’ve already ordered and preordered the books that will keep me company on airplanes and trips to the beach. The first Modern CEO reading list was heavy on buzzworthy titles. Last year’s edition was a bit more dutiful, highlighting three works th…

Andy Hunter decided something needed to be done about the endless rise of Amazon in 2018—the year that the e-commerce giant surpassed 50% of book sales in the U.S. market. “I was concerned at that rate of growth,” says founder and CEO of Bookshop.org. Hunter did a back of a napkin projection and figured that by 2025, Amazon would have secured an 80% share of the U.S. market. That worried Hunter, who had long worked in the publishing industry, especially when paired with stats showing half of all independent, local bookshops in the country went out of business at the same time as Amazon became ascendant. “I felt very strongly that books are too important to our culture…

About 35,000 feet (10,670 meters) over the Mojave Desert, northwest of Los Angeles, Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 became the first privately funded airplane to break the sound barrier during a test flight on Tuesday. “She was real happy supersonic,” Boom Chief Test Pilot Tristan “Geppetto” Brandenburg said after landing, in a video posted by Boom Supersonic. “That’s the best she’s ever flown, was supersonic.” After getting to altitude, Brandenburg opened up the test plane’s throttles, accelerating to Mach 1.1, or about 845 mph (1,360 kph) — faster than the speed at which sound travels. In 1947, Chuck Yeager became the first human to break the sound barrier when he pu…

Age really is just a number when it comes to social media, as new research from Ampere Analysis shows that more than half of users ages 55 to 64 now watch influencer content every week. This number is up by 10 percentage points since 2020. In the U.K., the figure has also risen over the past five years, from 30% to 38%. TikTok and YouTube, in particular, are behind the growth—proof that Boomers’ social media presence is no longer limited to Facebook. “The biggest surprise in our latest data wasn’t how popular influencer videos have become, it is how rapidly this trend has extended to older audiences,” Annabel Yeomans, senior research manager at Ampere Analysi…

Burnout and boredom are the two dreaded b-words of the modern workplace. We fear one, dismiss the other, and often fail to see how easily they trade places. Too often, boredom masquerades as burnout. To the untrained eye, exhaustion and disengagement can look identical. Boredom is typically a form of cognitive under-stimulation, while burnout is emotional and physical overextension. Both can leave people feeling unmotivated and fatigued. But here’s the twist: in cultures that tend to glamorize busyness, many employees feel safer saying they’re burned out than bored. Burnout signals you worked “too hard.” Bored, on the other hand, signals the opposite. Recent repor…

If you’ve ever been personally victimized by one too many bad jokes from a boss around the water cooler, you’re not the only one—and now, there’s research to show that a boss who’s trying too hard to be funny might actually reduce job satisfaction. The finding comes from a new study published in the Academy of Management Journal and conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Over the course of several different sessions, the researchers found that leaders who went overboard on puns and jokes drained their employees’ emotional energy, leading to reduced job satisfaction. The results…

The NBA’s Boston Celtics are used to packing their arena with a sea of green. Now, the company’s owners, the Grousbeck family, are seeing green. That’s because the franchise has reportedly been sold for $6.1 billion, per ESPN, to a group led by Bill Chisholm, managing partner at private equity firm Symphony Technology Group. The sale would be the largest for a sports franchise in North American history, beating out the sale of the NFL’s Washington Commanders franchise two years ago, which tallied $6.05 billion. The sale would still need to be approved by the NBA Board of Governors. Fast Company has reached out to both the Celtics and Symphony Technology Group for …

Welcome to the world of social media mind control. By amplifying free speech with fake speech, you can numb the brain into believing just about anything. Surrender your blissful ignorance and swallow the red pill. You’re about to discover how your thinking is being engineered by modern masters of deception. The means by which information gets drilled into our psyches has become automated. Lies are yesterday’s problem. Today’s problem is the use of bot farms to trick social media algorithms into making people believe those lies are true. A lie repeated often enough becomes truth. “We know that China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and North Korea are using bot networks to amplify…

The buzz in Silicon Valley around AI agents has many asking: What’s real and what’s hype? Box’s cofounder and CEO, Aaron Levie, helps decipher between fact and fiction, breaking down the fast-paced evolution of agents and their impact on the future of enterprise AI. Plus, Levie unpacks how AI is really being adopted in the workplace and what it takes to legitimately build an AI-first organization. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating r…

There’s a common story in the marketing and advertising industry, with many variations. Whenever a member of that industry is at a party or on a plane, inevitably someone will ask what they do for a living. And as soon as they say advertising, that person immediately begins to tell them how good they’d be at working in advertising, how they should make this or that ad campaign better, or why that ad they saw during an NFL game is terrible. This probably doesn’t happen to engineers and doctors. The discipline of advertising, and the process behind it has always been up for debate and question. Well, starting on September 30th, NBC’s new show On Brand with Jimmy Fallon …

British oil giant BP just announced a new CEO, marking its fourth chief executive shake-up in the last six years alone. The company named Meg O’Neill, who previously led Australia’s top oil and gas company Woodside Energy for the role. O’Neill will become the first woman to hold the top executive spot at one of the world’s biggest oil companies. She said that she looks forward to working to “accelerate performance” at BP and plans to prioritize shareholder growth and reestablishing BP—now a possible takeover target—as a market leader in the oil and gas industry. O’Neill will take over from Murray Auchincloss, a longtime BP employee who was first appointed as inte…

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…

Branding is design. It’s the logos, typefaces, and design systems that bring a company to life. But it’s also strategy. A rebrand can reveal the priorities, motivations, and aspirations of a company if you look beyond the logo. In a recent conversation for FC Live, Fast Company‘s design editors Liz Stinson and Mark Wilson explored the true impact of branding through the lens of some of the biggest branding moments from the past year. If you missed the subscriber-only event, you’re in luck. You can catch the whole conversation in the video above. View the full article

Ren Barrus was just an intern at Cotopaxi, an outdoor gear and apparel company, when he noticed piles of used backpacks and jackets sitting in boxes at the warehouse. The company was only 3 years old—still a startup—but already, customers were eagerly using its 61-year warranty. One broken zipper and the brand would send a completely new backpack, no questions asked. It wasn’t that consumers were gaming the system; they just expected durability. Two years later, by then a team lead, Barrus launched a guerrilla repair program: When customers sent in their broken gear, he’d drive it to his mom’s house in Utah where she would fix it up on her sewing machine, and ship it…

AI is bringing voice to the forefront of brand interactions. Smarter AI means we can talk to our technology—LLMs, software, phones, cars, fridges, and even banking apps. The novel part is this: Our technology is now talking back, and convincingly so. Brands are catching on, and the smart ones know that voice isn’t just functional, it will form a core part of the brand identity itself. Voice will be the next frontier of branding. And not metaphorically. A brand’s literal voice—the voice(s) used for advertising, on their website, and now, in interactive AI-based conversations with customers—is becoming just as ownable as elements of a visual identity. But standing out …

Brands matter now more than ever. You don’t have to say it, I know what you’re thinking: the CEO of a brand agency arguing for brands? How surprising. But this isn’t for me. This is for every CMO looking to secure their seat at the table and fighting to keep brand investment alive. This is for every CEO and CFO balancing the pull of GenAI and the flood of new tools that promise optimization, automation, personalization, and agentic transformation. And yes, dare I say it, this is for my competitors, who I know are on their own crusade to prove that brand still matters. Because brands are quietly under attack, through budget cuts, short-termism, and the …

I didn’t set out to found a tech company, much less a brand that would redefine the standard for outdoor cellular cameras. Tactacam started with a simple passion for capturing and sharing outdoor moments, and that same passion drives us today. Throughout the years, I’ve found that success, growth, and customer loyalty come down to staying true to who you are. The brands that thrive lead with purpose and values, using them as guiding principles to earn trust, influence decisions, and create lasting loyalty, even during change. When brands drift from their core, they risk disrupting the very foundation of trust they’ve built. We’ve seen the consequences of brand dri…

In the run-up to the annual U.N. climate conference, set to take place in Brazil’s Amazon in November, the construction of a road is drawing attention, with critics arguing it will lead to environmental degradation. Before the talks, called COP30, the state government of Para is building a 13-kilometer (8-mile) avenue designed to ease traffic on a major highway that runs parallel. The road was planned long before Belem, a metropolitan area of 2.5 million people that sits on the edge of the Amazon, was chosen as conference host. That hasn’t spared it sharp criticism, however, because the road is expected to cut across the last remnants of rainforest in Belem. R…

Brazilian meat giant JBS came a step closer Friday to its long-held goal of trading its shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The company’s minority shareholders voted to approve the company’s plan to list its shares both in Sao Paulo and New York, casting aside opposition from environmental groups, U.S. lawmakers and others who noted JBS’ record of corruption, monopolistic behavior and environmental destruction. JBS Global CEO Gilberto Tomazoni said the outcome showed shareholders were confident in the benefits a dual listing would bring. The company said before the vote that listing shares in the U.S. would boost its global profile and attract new investors. …

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. PFAS contamination is everywhere: clothing, household products, even the water we drink. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), aka “forever chemicals,” are engineered to last, making them commonplace in manufacturing but devastating to human health and the environment. While regulators scramble to set new limits, traditional water treatment methods aren’t keeping up. For industry, th…

Every day, people are constantly learning and forming new memories. When you pick up a new hobby, try a recipe a friend recommended, or read the latest world news, your brain stores many of these memories for years or decades. But how does your brain achieve this incredible feat? In our newly published research in the journal Science, we have identified some of the “rules” the brain uses to learn. Learning in the brain The human brain is made up of billions of nerve cells. These neurons conduct electrical pulses that carry information, much like how computers use binary code to carry data. These electrical pulses are communicated with other neurons thro…

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr will face Senate questioning Wednesday for the first time since he pressured broadcasters to take ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air, a stance that drew bipartisan criticism and raised concerns about government interference in the media. Carr will appear before the Senate Commerce committee for an oversight hearing that will also include the FCC’s two other commissioners, Olivia Trusty and Anna M. Gomez. It will be the first Senate Commerce oversight hearing with all FCC commissioners since 2020, though there are two vacancies on the five-member panel. Since being tapped by President Donald The President …

How can you tell if someone is a great leader? They always want to know more. They’re interested in mastery of a subject or skill. They ask great questions. And, as they find out more, they sometimes change their mind. They’re a “learner.” But these days, most CEOs and other leaders take the opposite approach. They think of themselves as “knowers.” They appear to have all the answers. That’s bad for them, their direct reports, and the organizations they lead. That insight comes from researcher and author Brené Brown and Wharton professor and author Adam Grant. The two behavior experts had an open-ended discussion about the nature of courageous leadership during a rece…