 |
|
|
|||||
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 womens leadership community Chief launched in 2019, it set out to provide mentoring and peer-to-peer connections for women already inhabiting the executive level, Fast Company wrote at the time. These women who are at the top are generally alone on an island, cofounder Lindsay Kaplan added. Fast-forward to today: Chief still aims to serve executive women. (The company boasts members from 77% of the top 100 companies on the Fortune 500 list of Americas largest businesses by revenue.) However, nearly 20% of the community is much more entrepreneurial, or what the company describes as solopreneurs or senior leaders in transition. One leader, many titles As a result, Chiefs membership reflects the changing face of women in business: a mix of founders, corporate execs, board members, and nonprofit leaders and volunteers, who also happen to toggle among those roles. Theyre taking different paths to leadership and thinking not about a ladder but a lattice, or a more flexible, nonlinear career track, says Alison Moore, CEO of Chief. More than 15 years ago, my former Fortune colleague Pattie Sellers used the analogy of a “jungle gym” to describe such nontraditional professional journeys. Moore points to Chief members such as Rabia Farhang, who built an executive career in retail and fashion before founding BGood Collective, a strategic consultancy focused on purpose-driven organizations, leveraging her business expertise for social impact. At the same time, were seeing prominent businesswomen easily switching from corporate jobs to startups and back. Alicia Boler Davis, whom weve profiled in Modern CEO, worked at General Motors for 25 years, held senior roles at Amazon, became CEO of a fast-growing online pharmacy, and was recently named president of Ford Motors Ford Pro business. Strengths of the multihyphenate Moore believes these varied experiences make Chief members and their peers well-suited to manage in todays fast-changing business world. Whats happening in corporate environments has become increasingly dynamic, Moore explains. Women leaders whove worn or wear many hatsMoore describes them as multihyphenateshave the ability to run teams centered on resilience, efficiency, and execution, she says. Moore speaks from experience: She joined Chief after five years as CEO of Comic Relief U.S. and senior roles at HBO, DailyCandy, NBCUniversal, SoundCloud, and Condé Nast. She was also a founding member of Chief. Each different experience sharpens your leadership skill set, Moore explains. I sit where I am today because Im drawing from all of the experiences that I have had to make me a better leader.” Are you a leader wearing many hats? Does the term multihyphenate refer to your career trajectory? When your role progression isnt linear, how do you decide where to go next? Id love to hear your stories and possibly include them in a future issue of Modern CEO. Send them to me in an email message: stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. Read more: women in leadership How women in leadership can shape how others see them Meet Inc.s 2025 Female Founders The CEO I needed didnt exist. So, I became her
Category:
E-Commerce
For decades, we’ve been told that technology would liberate us from mundane work, yet somehow we ended up more tethered to our desks than ever. Now, groundbreaking research from GoTo suggests we may finally be reaching the inflection point where artificial intelligence doesn’t just promise freedomit delivers it. But the real revelation isn’t that AI might make offices obsolete. It’s that AI is creating the conditions for what I call “cultivation-centered work”an approach that prioritizes human development over performative productivity. The Great Workplace Liberation The numbers tell a compelling story: 51% of employees believe AI will eventually make physical offices obsolete, while 62% would prefer AI-enhanced remote working over traditional office environments. But here’s what makes this shift profoundit’s not about rejecting human connection. Instead, it’s about reclaiming the autonomy to choose when, where, and how we engage most meaningfully with our work and colleagues. This aligns perfectly with the core principles of my book, Move. Think. Rest. When 71% of workers say AI gives them more flexibility and work-life balance, they’re describing the conditions necessary for true cultivation. They’re talking about having time to think deeply, space to move naturally throughout their day, and permission to rest when their bodies and minds require it. From Extraction to Integration What’s particularly striking about GoTos research is how it reveals AI’s potential to support the full spectrum of human experience at work. Traditional productivity models demanded we compartmentalize ourselvesshow up as disembodied brains focused solely on output. But AI-enhanced work environments are creating space for integration. When employees report that AI allows them to “work anywhere without losing productivity” (66%), they’re really describing the freedom to align their work rhythms with their natural energy cycles. They can take walking meetings in nature, think through problems during movement, and create the environmental conditions that support their best thinking. The Cultivation Disconnect However, the research also reveals a concerning gap that organizations must address. While 91% of IT leaders believe their companies effectively use AI to support distributed teams, only 53% of remote and hybrid employees agree. This disconnect isn’t just about technology deploymentit’s about understanding the difference between using AI to replicate old productivity models versus leveraging it to support human flourishing. The companies bridging this gap successfully are those asking different questions. Instead of “How can AI make people more productive?” they’re asking “How can AI create conditions where people naturally thrive?” They’re designing AI implementations that support the three pillars of cultivation: movement (flexibility to work in various environments), thought (time and space for deep reflection), and rest (permission to disengage and recharge). The Age-Defying Impact One of the most encouraging findings challenges ageist assumptions about technology adoption. The research shows that across all generationsfrom 90% of remote Gen Z workers to 74% of baby boomerspeople report improved productivity through AI-enhanced remote work. This suggests something profound: when technology truly serves human needs rather than demanding adaptation to machine rhythms, people of all ages can benefit. This generational unity points to AI’s potential as an equalizing forcenot in the sense of making everyone the same, but in honoring the diverse ways different people think, process, and contribute. Perhaps most telling is that 61% of employeesincluding those working in officesbelieve organizations should prioritize AI investment over fancy workplace amenities. This isn’t about choosing technology over human experience. It’s about recognizing that true employee experience comes from having the tools and flexibility to do meaningful work in ways that honor their full humanity. The Path Forward As AI reshapes work, we have a choice. We can use it to create more sophisticated forms of surveillance and productivity extraction, or we can leverage it to finally realize the promise of technology serving human flourishing. The organizations that choose the latter will find themselves with a profound competitive advantage: employees who are not just more productive, but more creative, more engaged, and more capable of the kind of breakthrough thinking that drives innovation. The question isn’t whether AI will transform workit already is. The question is whether we’ll use this transformation to create workplaces that cultivate human potential or merely optimize human output. The GoTo research suggests employees are ready for cultivation. The question is: are their leaders?
Category:
E-Commerce
Modern skyscrapers may as well be spaceships. Their exteriors are usually impenetrably smooth, their shapes are often aerodynamic, and, for the most part, if you want to open a window, forget about it.The new Shenzhen headquarters for the Chinese fintech company WeBank punches holes right through this convention. Designed by SOM, the 30-story tower employs a diverse range of ventilation techniques that break the seal of the typical glass-and-steel skyscraper. It could be a new model for letting air inside tall buildings, letting people out, and improving the overall experience of working in a skyscraper.[Photo: Dave Burk for SOM]Completed earlier this year, the naturally ventilated high rise’s design uses open-air terraces, operable windows, and precisely engineered indoor atria to bring natural air inside and throughout the building. Large double-height spaces on the edges of the building are open to the air, and sliding doors and pop-out windows around the building let air move inside easily. “There aren’t that many buildings out there at this height that have this degree of indoor-outdoor space,” says Scott Duncan, an architect and design partner at SOM. Most skyscrapers have a very opaque division between inside and out. “Here, it’s a blurry one,” he says.The hermetically sealed skyscraper is starting to evolve, though. Since the pandemic, architects and developers have been looking at the glass-walled skyscraper through new eyes, adding more outdoor access and operable windows. WeBank’s headquarters takes this idea and integrates it into the building’s DNA, making access to the outdoors easy from every floor.Access to airflow is also prioritized within the center of the building. Multiple atria run vertically through several floors and create both visual interest and connectivity for workers as well as a pathway for air to flow through the space. Like the voids inside a block of Swiss cheese, the atria are negative space that allow hot air to move up and out of the building through a phenomenon known as the stack effect.“We shaped and sized all of these holes in the floor to allow for airflow through and across levels,” Duncan says. With multiple atria of different shapes that act almost like an upside down funnel, the designers could control how air gets vented out of the building.[Photo: Courtesy of SOM]Luke Leung, an engineer and sustainability lead at SOM who designed the atria, says the building has up to six air changes every hour, or a nearly complete venting of the air inside. For the health of people insideparticularly in the case of an airborne virus like COVIDsuch frequent air changes are optimal. “In 30 minutes, it would eliminate 95% of all the contaminants in the floor using natural means,” Leung says.The atria also have a social side, offering varying views within the building and across floors. Their borders become a kind of gathering place, with staircases running between floors and flexible workspaces around their edges.Part of this comes from the company itself, which is China’s first digital-only bank. Duncan says the company wanted a more modern approach to how each floor was laid out and how flexible it could be. Instead of building a taller building, the company opted to make each floor largerroughly 50,000 square feet, instead of a more typical 35,000 square feet. “They’re constantly recomposing their teams. So the more horizontal they could be, the more flexible they could be in terms of being able to connect multiple teams on a single floor,” says Duncan. “It’s a tech company, but it’s also a bank. And so those two cultures were coming together in this building.”
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||