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. In recent weeks, I’ve been recommending and forwarding to friends and associates three smart stories that crossed my desk. Each ostensibly offers insightful or timely snapshots of modern American business. But upon deeper reflection, these very different pieces also…
Author: Staff Writer
As social media users continue to spend more time in their direct messages than posting to the main feed, companies are beefing up their features for private chats. TikTok recently said it will soon offer users the ability to send pictures and voice notes up to a minute long in its direct messages (DMs) and group chats, while Meta announced filters to sort Instagram DMs by categories like “Story replies,” “Unanswered,” “Followers,” and “Verified Users” for professional and personal accounts with more than 100,000 followers. [Image: Meta] The intent is to make the DMs more engaging. TikTok’s DMs will soon…
For most of his career, Mike Kelland worked on software. But after selling his last startup in 2016, he decided to focus on climate change instead. He zeroed in on one key part of the problem: Cutting emissions is no longer enough to address climate change on its own. He’d read an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that explained that we’ll also need to remove hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. “We’re 30 years beyond the point where decarbonization alone was enough,” Kelland says. He spent nearly a year meeting with scientists to learn…
QUESTION: Hi Martin, Considering the potential influence of AI, also taking into account the behaviour of the 80 percent that went with the COVID narrative, I was wondering. The AI is being fed by human interaction on the internet, probably somewhere else as well, but very much directed. Now that does not seem to direct to a real advancement, does it? What if the human spirit will be directed to a more animal like behaviour? Like a programmed nature thing that birds show. Go south in winter and go north in spring to get your food. Would not that be…
Most of us will work for a really bad boss at some point in our lives, perhaps more than one. Research by the Harris Poll bears this out, showing that more than 70 percent of workers have had at least one such noxious manager in their career. These difficult managers can range from inexperienced and incompetent bosses to truly mean-spirited individuals who have little regard for human suffering. Researchers have found that when we experience incivility in the workplace, about half of people intentionally decreased their work effort, more than three-quarters said it decreased their commitment to the organization involved,…
The number of unemployed Americans now outnumbers available job openings. Data from July show 7.24 million unemployed Americans compared to 7.18 million job openings, marking the first time that the unemployed have outnumbered the number of available jobs since April 2021. This is precisely what we see during stagflation and a structural labor shift. Companies are cutting costs due to regulations, taxation, and inflation that have never meaningfully waned since the pandemic. AI automation has replaced countless positions, and when companies do choose to hire, they are often seeking new hires from outside the US, where the cost of labor…
Technologies from AI to advanced robotics have been celebrated for their ability to lighten people’s workload. But despite their promises, these technologies aren’t being used to improve workers’ lives or keep them safe. In 2023, 385 workers died every day due to hazardous working conditions, with over 3 million more work-related injuries and illnesses reported that year in the United States. Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet spent a collective $155 billion on AI development in the first six months of 2025—close to what the entire U.S. government has spent on education, training, employment, and social services since the start of…
Perhaps the most significant infrastructure project in recent Italian history is the proposal to build a bridge connecting Sicily to the mainland. The Strait of Messina Bridge would be the world’s longest single-span suspension bridge, spanning 2.05 miles (3.3 kilometers), connecting Calabria to Sicily. The government is seeking ways to generate the €13.5 billion (around $15.6 billion) in funding, and one new proposal is to count it toward NATO spending. Italy has proposed that the Strait of Messina be included in its 5% NATO spending target. The Italian government believes that the bridge could be used to facilitate the movement…
This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. Bland AI outputs grow stale quickly. Instead of just speeding up routine tasks, what if we used AI to slow down, challenge our thinking, and build new tools, dashboards, and experiments? Read on for creative approaches that are changing how I think about AI. 1. Create your own devil’s advocate assistant Get thoughtful pushback on decisions. Challenge ideas. The tactic: Use AI as an intellectual sparring partner to stress-test your thinking, explore alternative perspectives, and identify potential blind spots before making important decisions.…
Troubling data from Friday as the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy added a mere 22,000 jobs in August. July’s figure was revised to show an uptick of 6,000 positions for a total of 79,000 new hires. June’s data was revised to show a loss of 13,000 positions, which comes after the prior estimate was also revised to show a 27,000-position decline. Unemployment in the US is now 4.3%. This is the first published jobs report since Trump fired BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer. As I explained in an earlier post, the formula used by the BLS is…