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How many female entrepreneurs, bankers, and industrialists from the past can you name? You could be forgiven for thinking that, until relatively recently, there were none at all. Women are commonly assumed to have spent most of history as housewives. But in my new book, Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power, I present a revised economic history of the world—one that places women at the heart of the development of the global economy. Here are just five of the (many) ways that women have powered the global economy from the Stone Age to the present day. 1. Creators of global money Before electronic payments, banknotes, and silver coins, it was cloth—…

We’ve spent the better part of the past few years glued to our screens—clicking, swiping, streaming. Endless tabs, endless scrolls. And yet, despite all the infinite access, we’re still craving the one thing the web cannot render: real presence. That collective craving has rewritten the rules of marketing. Five years after COVID, brands are finding the antidote to Zoom fatigue by showing up in person again. Canva, the Australian graphic design platform, is moving quickly to meet this demand with the launch of the Canva World Tour, a global initiative spanning 40 cities across 30 countries and five continents, with the goal of training one million people in jus…

Vice President JD Vance on Sunday said there will be deeper cuts to the federal workforce the longer the government shutdown goes on, adding to the uncertainty facing hundreds of thousands who are already furloughed without pay amid the stubborn stalemate in Congress. Vance warned that as the federal shutdown entered its 12th day, the new cuts would be “painful,” even as he said the The President administration worked to ensure that the military is paid this week and some services would be preserved for low-income Americans, including food assistance. Still, hundreds of thousands of government workers have been furloughed in recent days and, in a court filing on Friday,…

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. When we named Tarang Amin Modern CEO of the Year in December 2024, the E.l.f. Beauty chairman and chief executive had racked up a string of notable successes. Under Amin’s leadership, the publicly traded cosmetics company had posted 23 consecutive quarters of net sales and market share growth. E.l.…

Long Beach Airport had a trailer problem. Long Beach’s quaint municipal airport originally opened in 1924 when airplanes flew using propellers—and the art deco terminal hadn’t undergone a full-scale renovation since. Instead, it adapted to the increased spatial demands of late 20th and early 21st century air travel, like increased security screening and modern baggage handling, in a rather temporary way: trailers. “It was known as the trailer park airport,” says Michael Bohn, a partner at Studio One Eleven, a Long Beach-based architecture and design firm. “It just became a hodgepodge. You went down these crazy aisles, and through different trailers. They had ven…

As a learning designer at Zapier, I used to spend my days helping my teammates learn: I built and led trainings, created enablement resources, and helped folks better understand how their work contributed to company strategy. Now, I sit inside our HR team as an AI automation engineer. But the through line is the same: I still help my teammates (and now customers, too!) do their best work. What is an AI automation engineer? AI automation engineer sounds like a vague title, so here’s the job, plainly: I embed with a team (HR, in my case), spot opportunities to enhance the team’s work, and build AI-powered workflows that jump on those opportunities. The goal is to cre…

In September 2023, we thought we had done something revolutionary. Helios AI became the first company in our industry to launch a generative AI agent. We called her Cersi. She was designed to help food companies understand the climate risks threatening their agricultural supply chains. She was powerful, intuitive, years ahead of the curve—and almost completely ignored. At the time, ChatGPT had just exploded onto the scene, and the hype around AI was deafening. Headlines promised that AI would transform every corner of business. Venture capital poured into the sector. But hype doesn’t always translate into real-world use—especially in industries that aren’t built to ad…

When we consider the subway, it’s often for reasons that have to do with decay and deterioration. The switches are outdated. The elevators are broken. The train is late (again). Of course it could be better, but rarely do we pause to take in what the system does right. Its 25 lines, 472 stations, and 665 miles of track traverse the city and offer a tremendous amount of mobility. And now, a new digital installation at the Fulton Street subway station by the information designer Giorgia Lupi and her team at Pentagram pays tribute to the system. “Sometimes adults lose the ability to see magic in mundane things and to treat what we experience every day with a …

Innovation hubs were once the darlings of corporate strategy, promising to future-proof businesses and spark breakthrough ideas. But two decades in, the cracks are showing. Too many hubs have struggled to prove their worth, and some have quietly shut down altogether. In reality, these costly spaces never lived up to the hype—and the future lies elsewhere. Rather than investing in shiny new labs, organizations should be cultivating innovation communities: networks of people, inside and outside the company, who collaborate around shared challenges and opportunities. Looking Back: Proliferation Innovation hubs have proliferated through private enterprise over the…

This year, Columbus Day, also known as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, lands on Monday, October 13. While it’s a federal holiday and many schools have it off, there are plenty of businesses still open—as well as U.S. stock markets. Here’s what to know about the holiday, and what’s open and closed today. Why is the holiday called Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day? Columbus Day, named after Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, occurs on the second Monday in October of every year, and celebrates Columbus’s arrival in the Americas on October 12, 1492, in the Bahamas. However, due to criticism over the treatment of Native Americans who were here when Colum…

In the 1960s, IBM embarked on what Fortune called the $5 billion gamble. It was a bet-the-company investment on a scale nobody had seen before. The payoff was the legendary System/360 mainframes, which revolutionized computing and set the stage for two decades of IBM dominance. That $5 billion would be roughly the equivalent of $50 billion today, but even that princely sum is dwarfed by the $364 billion that tech giants are expected to invest in artificial intelligence this year. And the spending won’t stop there. McKinsey projects that building AI data centers alone could demand $5.2 trillion by 2030. Today, the AI investment boom is probably the single biggest f…

Ever had a song you couldn’t get out of your head? That happened to me the other day. Pink Pony Club. It’s everywhere right now; I can’t escape it. And even though I really don’t like that song, it’s catchy. And as you’ve probably experienced, once you get a song like that stuck in your head, it can feel impossible to get out. What you might not know is there’s a scientific reason for this: It’s called ironic process theory. Or, you may have heard it by its more common name: The white bear problem. But there’s a tried and tested brain hack that helps you to get a song out of your head. What’s more, you can use it to replace negative or harmful thoughts with po…

Those who work a 9-to-5 know nabbing one of the few available weekend slots with your hairdresser or nail technician requires a huge amount of forethought. Or how time-consuming it can be to get your oil changed, buy your groceries, or wait in line at the post office. The two-day weekend is simply too short to squeeze in all the errands and life admin that builds up throughout the week. So rather than wasting precious leisure time—or worse, PTO—some workers are going ahead and scheduling their appointments on company time. “A little reminder to everyone who works in corporate that no one at work actually needs to know what your appointments are for,” one viral T…

Commuting in New York City can be a relentless sensory overload—the hustling, the pushing, the yelling, the ads whirling from every side. Getting to work can feel like a frantic race of people trying to escape the train station all at once. While the city hurtles past in a blur, Brandon Stanton has stopped to write it a love letter—on the walls of Grand Central itself. For the first time, the terminal and its subway station have been completely cleared of flashing advertisements and replaced with art. Brandon Stanton More than 150 digital screens now display thousands of portraits and stories from Stanton’s Humans of New York—the largest and most diverse colle…

Quantum computing promises to disrupt entire industries because it leverages the rules of quantum physics to perform calculations in fundamentally new ways. Unlike traditional computers that process information in a linear, step-by-step fashion, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, which can represent multiple states simultaneously. This leads to breakthroughs in areas such as drug discovery, financial modeling, and cybersecurity by overcoming computational barriers that have limited progress for decades. Quantum computing is transitioning from theoretical research to a transformative force for industries worldwide, much like AI and cloud computing before it. …

Nearly every company I work with is focused on using AI to drive productivity and efficiency. They are starting to see real gains, and that’s leading to excitement about AI’s future potential. However, AI used to drive efficiency is only the starting line, and there’s real risk if we stop there. In my work with Fortune 500 leaders across the C-suite, from chief HR officers (CHROs) to CTOs and CMOs, I’ve seen that the very best organizations recognize a bigger opportunity: using AI to help managers build connection and trust with their teams. The companies that are able to leverage AI both to drive efficiency gains and to build highly motivated teams will be the ones that …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Most of America’s largest homebuilders have publicly stated that the peak 2025 housing market saw softer-than-expected conditions, particularly in many parts of the Sun Belt. This softer housing market environment caused unsold inventory to tick up. Indeed, since the pandemic housing boom fizzled out, the number of unsold completed U.S. new single-family homes has been rising: August 2016 —> 61,000 August 2017 —> 63,000 August 2018 —> 69,000 August 2019 —> 79,000 August 2020 —> 52,000 August 2021 —> 34,000 Aug…

When the federal government shutdown on October 1, it started a chain reaction of income problems for federal workers. Roughly 900,000 government employees are now on furlough. Another 700,000 are working without pay because their jobs are too critical for them to stay home. To add insult to entirely preventable injury, the current administration has indicated that it may not provide the legally mandated back pay to these workers once the shutdown is over. Considering the fact that getting another job during the furlough may require the government employee’s agency approval (and wouldn’t help critical employees working without a paycheck), the shutdown could be a pers…

It’s hard to believe, but we’re only a few weeks away from Halloween, and after that comes November—and the unofficial start of the holiday season. If you travel during this time, you’ll know that finding cheap flights can be difficult. To get the best prices, people traditionally turn to comparison sites like Kayak and SkyScanner. However, as artificial intelligence seems to be taking over everything, and the tech industry won’t stop shouting about its benefits, I decided to try three conversational AI tools to see if they could help me find the cheapest flight deal for the Thanksgiving period. Here’s how that went. Flights listed on ChatGPT The first tool I …

SpaceX’s Starlink orbital internet satellites are falling out of low earth orbit at an increasingly alarming rate, with one to two satellites now reentering Earth’s atmosphere every single day. According to Harvard-Smithsonian Center astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, that number will only go up as more satellites end their useful lifetime and the low earth orbit (LEO) constellation numbers skyrocket. This is as much a design problem as anything. While the numbers vary, right now there are around 10,200 active satellites in low earth orbit. Of those, about 8,475 are Starlinks. In other words, about 80% of all those satellites belong to Elon Musk’s company. By 2030,…

The cracks in postmodern economic theories are visible. They’ve spilled into politics, with governments slashing budgets worldwide. The spark came from Richard Thaler (Nudge) and Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow), but the roots run deeper. In 1978, Herbert Simon won the first Nobel Prize for behavioral economics. Thaler later brought the field into public view with his “anomalies” articles in the Journal of Economic Perspectives between 1987 and 1990. The message was clear: People act based on their environments. Psychology had already demonstrated this in clinical practice; economics eventually followed. With that, homo economicus—the hyperrational ac…

Customer experience is entering the sci-fi age: knowing and understanding customers on an individual level, providing personalized service, and dedicated moments. All of this is becoming possible thanks to technological innovation. And as it shifts, we’re moving beyond the age of reactive service, where customer satisfaction was measured by stale, bi-annual surveys. We’re entering an era of proactive, predictive customer care. Companies’ missions today should be to transform every interaction into a moment of loyalty and growth, a goal we are working to achieve through our latest in-house innovation: the Customer Experience Index, or CXI. While many companies talk abo…