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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. In recent weeks Modern CEO has published predictions for 2026 from CEOs across industries and a list of books that can help leaders get ready for the year ahead. We invited readers to share their own prognostications and book recommendations. (Respect to the author who endorsed her own book.) Heres a sampling of the responses. Bold Predictions ChatGPT becomes the new DoorDash 2026 will mark a fundamental shift: ChatGPT and other AI platforms will become the primary interfaces between consumers and restaurants. Discovery will evolve into actionpeople wont just find new restaurants on ChatGPT; theyll order and review there, too. In an AI-first world, the need for intermediaries fades as ordering rails connect restaurants directly to these platforms. This creates a massive opportunity for restaurants to reclaim the direct relationships they lost to third-party marketplaces. Savneet Singh, CEO, PAR Technology Customer experience shifts from speed to substance Over the past two years, companies raced to embed AI into service interactions, but many of those deployments are now revealing cracks. Our testing data proves it: In a recent analysis of enterprise models, 82% of AI failures stemmed from misinformation, especially in chatbots. These silent errors quietly erode customer relationships long before companies realize it. The next phase of CX (customer experience) innovation wont be about smarter automation; it will be about trustworthy automation. Ultimately, the companies that win customer trust wont be those deploying AI the fastest, but those ensuring every AI-driven interaction is accurate, safe, and human-centered. Dean Hickman-Smith, chief revenue officer, Testlio More technology, more vulnerabilities, more responsibility Let us all individually be ready for more and entirely new technologies in 2026, [and] embrace and prepare to secure ourselves even more. A lot of work is to come, especially for the specialists in the field. We can clearly see more vulnerabilities coming our way, but we should be ready to fight back. Experts should expect their expertise being needed more than ever in all aspects and fields, including policy development [for] and general awareness [of] cybersecurity. Ella Hamwaka, cybersecurity specialist Prepare for the “vibe coding” compliance crisis Organizations rushing to adopt AI coding assistants without proper governance will face a reckoning in 2026. While vibe coding feels efficient, its creating invisible and silent security gaps that traditional audits arent designed to catch. Companies that fail to implement AI-specific governance frameworks now will find themselves scrambling when regulators start asking hard questions about AI-generated code provenance and security controls. Shrav Mehta, CEO, Secureframe Cybersecurity hits the limits of system complexity 2026 is the year the cybersecurity industry confronts an uncomfortable truth: Were nearing the fundamental limits of sustainable complexity in distributed systems. This isnt about better tools or bigger budgets; its about the thermodynamic coordination constraints weve ignored for too long. Organizations that recognize this earlyand design for graceful degradationwill adapt and survive. Trey Darley, founder, Proper Tools Companies will rehire for jobs eliminated by AI Next year, companies that rushed to make layoffs hoping AI would fill a significant gap will realize they need to rehire to fill some of those roles. We saw this starting this year with companies like Klarna, rehiring to fill customer service roles that chatbots failed at. Next year, well see more of this. Mahe Bayireddi, founder and CEO, Phenom 996 culture loses steam because the output is not real We used to call it hustle culture, but this year it was rebranded to 996. Outside of short sprints (less than three months), I have never seen anyone produce long-term quality work for six days a week, 12+ hours in front of a screen. Actual output is similar to a normal day. VCs often push this culture more than founders, which fuels the perception that extreme hours are required. Its not sustainable, and it signals that a company is not building a culture for the long term. Immad Akhund, cofounder and CEO, Mercury Book Recommendations Sound Is Not Enough by Svetlana Kouznetsova The book explains why accessibilityparticularly audio and communication accessibilityis not optional or a nice to have, but a core business requirement for all organizations of any size. Svetlana Kouznetsova, accessibility strategy consultant The Art of Living by Epictetus This book sits on my desk (and in my work bag when I am on the road) 365 days a year. I commit to reading a page from it every day and have for over a decade. It is a practical manual for Stoic philosophya reminder of core values and whats actually in our control to live a happy, virtuous, and resilient life. Leagh Turner, CEO, Coupa The Odyssey by Homer If youre looking for inspiration on how to write a comeback story for your company, theres no better tale than The Odyssey. On the surface, its a Marvel comic-style adventure story of a warrior conquering obstacle after obstaclethe Sirens song, Cyclops grasp, Charybdis pull. Its also a story of leadershipof what it takes to overcome a fractious, even mutinous crew. Its a tale of tapping into motivation (over 10 years!) and keeping your eyes on the prize. David Risher, CEO, Lyft Share your thoughts and recommendations What books, resolutions, or big ideas are you embracing in 2026? Write to me at < href="mailto:stephaniemehta@mansueto.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">stephaniemehta@mansueto.com, and well revisit some of these topics throughout the year. Read more: the year ahead Venture investors share their market predictions How to rewire your brain for success in 2026 Five ways to build global teams this year
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E-Commerce
Its become almost a cliché to talk about how consistently organizational change fails. Study after study finds that roughly three-quarters of change efforts dont achieve their objectives. There are underlying forces that work against us adapting to changeincluding synaptic, network and cost effectsthat lead to resistance. Another problem lies in how we study change itself. Typically, researchers at an academic institution or a consulting firm interview executives that were involved in successful efforts and try to glean insights to write case studies. These are famously flawed, lacking controls, and often relying on self-serving accounts. One unlikely place to look for insight is a little-known academic named Gene Sharp, who wasnt interested in business at all, but political revolutions. What he found was that there are sources of power that support the status quo and these have an institutional basis. As long as they remain in place, nothing will ever change. But if you can shift them, anything becomes possible. A Revolutionary Shift Before 1789, the world was ruled by monarchies rooted in the divine right of kings and the feudal system. Yet that year would prove to be an inflection point. The American Constitution and the French Revolution began a fundamental realignment of power that culminated in the revolutions of 1848, a widespread uprising against monarchies that spread across Europe. But in the late 19th century something new emerged: nonviolent movements. Rising out of the abolitionist efforts in the US, which then morphed into the struggle for womens suffrage, new techniques of fighting for change emerged. Among those watching closely was a young law student, Mohandas Gandhi. He would later perfect their techniques in South Africa and India. It was Gandhis work that Gene Sharp first began to study and led him to an epiphany: violent revolts would always be at a disadvantage because the regime controls the means of violence, such as the military, police and other security agencies. It also has the power to create and enforce laws. Nonviolent movements, on the other hand, could fight with very different weapons, those of psychology, sociology, and economics, where the regime can be put at a disadvantage. Thats how Gandhi was able to win against seemingly impossible odds. What Sharp wanted to do was create a systematic strategic framework so that anyone could achieve what Gandhi did. Thats what led to his key insight: power is rooted in institutions, and only by shifting them can true transformation occur. Understanding Sources Of Power Think about an all-powerful dictator somewhere, like Vladimir Putin in Russia or Xi Jinping in China. Then, imagine that all of the janitors decide not to come in to work. That all-powerful dictator is now powerless to get the trash picked up. He can arrest the janitorsor even have them killedbut picking up all the trash in the country is not something he can do himself. The point is that a leaders power extends only as far as their ability to control or influence institutions. They can only make laws to the extent that they control the legislative system and can only enforce those laws if they control or influence the legal system and the police. The same goes for commercial institutions, educational institutions, the media and so on. That, in a nutshell, is Sharps key insight: power is never monolithic but distributed across many institutions, all of which have vulnerabilities. It can be attacked wherever you find a weakness. If you can influence the institutions that the regime depends on to maintain and enforce its power, you can create genuine transformation. This is not just a theory. It has been proven to work in practice. The color revolutions were rooted in Sharps ideas as was the Arab Spring in Egypt. The Center for Applied Non-Violent Actions and Strategies (CANVAS) has put them to work in over 50 countries and even offers a comprehensive curriculum to help others bring about the change they want to see. Yet Sharp’s ideas dont apply only to political movements. As I showed in Cascades, they can be just as effective in driving organizational change. Mapping Power In Your Organizational Ecosystem One thing every leader quickly learns is how little real power they really have. Formal authority only goes so far. Much like Gene Sharp observed about regimes, the status quo has sources of power keeping it in place. Often these have had yearseven decadesto entrench themselves. They will work against any significant change effort. Consider the dilemma of the PC manufacturers in the 1980s. It was clear that Dells direct sales model was vastly superior to selling through distributors and market leaders like Compaq and HP made a number of efforts to adopt it. Yet so many stakeholders, including powerful executives within the company and external partners, had a stake in the existing model. So nothing ever changed. Think about that for a minute. Pundits like to portray firms that get disrupted as simply not paying attention. But thats often not true. In this case, the leaders of these PC firms accurately diagnosed the problem and created strategies, such as modified compensation schemes, to address it, but still failed to overcome the forces keeping the status quo in place. Thats why in our transformational change workshops, one of the first steps is mapping the sources of power well nee to influence to make change happen. Much like Sharp revealed about political revolutions, once youve identified institutional targets, you can start designing tactics to address them. Change Isnt About Persuasion, Its About Power All too often, we think about change in terms of persuasion. We think if we can just come up with the right message, broadcast it widely and get it to the right people, that change will happen. But decades of evidence shows thats not true. Even if we are able to inform people and change their attitudes, they are unlikely to change their behavior. What Gene Sharp showed us is that change isnt about persuasion, its about power. To bring about transformation, we need to undermine the sources of power that underlie the present state while strengthening the forces that favor a different future. If you can influence the institutional stakeholders keeping the status quo in place, change can happen. If you cant, it is unlikely things will ever change. That also helps explain why so many change efforts fail. They start with tactics designed to create a specific effect, such as build awareness or create a sense of urgency. Leaders roll out communication campaigns, design training programs, or host events like hackathons. Then they congratulate themselves when the action achieves the intended effect and wonder why genuine change never happened. Until you identify, analyze, and understand exactly what your actions need to be targeted at, youre just wasting your time. Every enterprise, whether its an organization or an entire society, is governed by institutions that maintain the status quo. Once you are able to internalize that simple truth, you are ready to lead change effectively. Change isnt about snappy slogans or clever campaigns. Its what happens when you build the capacity to influence institutions.
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E-Commerce
Yes, there are the New Years traditions of setting ambitious goals and ditching bad habits, but one evergreen resolution that ought to top lists is to banish bad design. Why endure something that simply doesnt work (or is an affront to aesthetics) any longer than we have to? In the spirit of fresh starts, we polled experts in architecture, tech, industrial design, and urbanism on the everyday annoyances and the big-picture issues that they think are in desperate need of a refresh in 2026. (Top on my personal list? Eye-searing headlights.) Design is inherently an optimistic act, and by fixing these issues, were a step closer to a more beautiful and better world. [Photo: Snehit/Adobe Stock] Data Centers Data centers are the significant buildings of the moment, and we have a responsibility to make them part of our cities as theyre really powering the future. The buildings have to perform at the highest technical level, but they also need to connect and respond to a sense of place and to the community around it. For example, we designed a data center with a facade that has an intricate pattern language that feels more like a theater or civic building and other centers with mass timber, which lends warmth and beauty to the structure while also bringing a sustainability story to the structure. Every data center project of ours now starts with thinking through resilient strategies, including reducing or eliminating evaporative cooling and integrating next-generation thinking on energy usage. At the same time, there are people still working in these buildings and there needs to be consideration for the workplace as well. It’s about technology plus people, and we can’t ignore the human side of this because recruitment and retention are still key considerations. Its also interesting to think about what to do in a really dense urban environment. Were involved in conversion projects that take aging, underutilized office buildings and explore vertical mixed use. It’s not just about converting office to residential, which were doing in many locations. Can you take an aging office building and part of its reuse becomes a data center? In 2026, well see more of a global dialogue from a real estate standpoint on urban opportunities that includes thinking about data centers vertically. Jordan Goldstein, Co-CEO of Gensler [Source Image: whitecityrecords/Adobe Stock] Crossover and Compact SUVs Living in Los Angeles, Im surrounded by automobiles all day. Im always disappointed by how homogenous so many archetypes are. Crossover and compact SUVs are all so similar that you could swap the badges on any of them, and no one would know the difference between the brands. Unfortunately, over the last decade the same can be said of most sports cars. All the major brands have adopted the wide rear body of the [Porsche] 911, and for no reason; their engines are in the front of the car and dont demand the stability and width to balance the weight that sits on the rear wheels of the 911. Every brand has an origin story, and many of their older iconic cars were based on original ideas. As recently as the 90s, car brands held a unique design language. In the past, the only market that had homogeneous design was the Soviet Union. Our culture is based on differentiation in the market, where customers have choices. Today we lack real choice. This all points to a lack of vision and conservative leadership at the major automakers. There is no risk-taking, and the customer is given a design thats the result of market research rather than innovation and design. This should be a priority because it instills poor valueslack of originality, fear-driven business strategy, zero risk-takingon the built environment and our culture. Jonathan Olivares, Creative Director of Knoll [Illustration: FC] Data Ownership Every time we swipe our MetroCard, visit a doctor, buy groceries, or scroll through our phones, we are creating data. But we almost never get to see it to understand ourselves better. The data flows in one direction only, from us into systems that are used to optimize operations and algorithms and train models. What if instead our data could come back to us in a form that can help us see the patterns in our lives and understand our own stories? I want to redesign this fundamental relationship.The issue is that data has become the language that we need to navigate life but we haven’t been taught to speak it; and the interfaces that could help us learn are designed for administrators and quarterly reports only, rarely for actual people trying to understand their own lives. Imagine getting home from a doctor’s appointment and receiving a beautiful understandable visualization of your healthover time, where you can see patterns you didnt know existed. This is the type of context that can help us ask better questions about our health. Or imagine your transit system revealing the mundane rhythms of your own life back to you (the coffee shop you always stop at on Tuesdays, the routes you take when you’re stressed versus calm). This would close the literacy gap by making data comprehensible in the moments when it matters most without dumbing down complexity and nuances. I’ve spent my career proving we can do this. Better design here means more agency. It means people who can advocate for themselves. It means closing the gap between those who can speak data and those who can’t. Giorgia Lupi, Partner at Pentagram [Illustration: FC] AI Interfaces Im excited to see how teams rethink and redesign user interfaces for an AI-native world. Today, were still in the MS-DOS era of AI where every prompt, every agent, and every emerging modality is, for the most part, a long text response in a conversational interface. My prediction is that in 2026, well see a shift toward richer, more dynamic interfaces where both inputs and outputs evolve far beyond text. Its not surprising that AI user interfaces began as chatbots. Large language models operate on tokens, and text is the fastest, cheapest medium to build, debug, and evaluate. But decades of software and interface design have made something clear: humans dont think in language alone. We think spatially. We understand through motion, contrast, hierarchy, and causality, and our instinct is to act through direct manipulation, not just typed commands. As AI capabilities evolve, design is more important than ever. Visual interfaces arent going away, and neither is the need to see, shape, and refine ideas as we work. Designers have a rare chance to define the rules and patterns of this new interface era, shaping what work, play, and productivity will look like for decades to come. Loredana Crisan, Chief Design Officer of Figma [Source Photo: serdarerenlere/Adobe Stock] Material Labeling When anyone (architects, clients, contractors) walks into a big-box store, it would be transformative to see a Nutri-score or Local Law 33 energy grade for materials, but for wood in particular since its so widely used. A better system would treat wood like food, with clear, standardized material labeling. You should be able to see where the wood comes from, almost like buying eggs when youre faced with this wall of different levels of chicken torture. Material supply chains struggle with standardization and transparency for many reasons, but in my opinion, it is because consumers didn’t know they should be demanding it. For example, once it became clear that Quartz countertops were causing silicosis by those cutting the material, consumers were horrified. So much so that the Australian government made the material illegal. The problem is big-box retailers, where most wood is purchased, rarely surface this information, despite occasionally stocking high-quality or responsibly sourced material hidden in plain sight. Greater transparency at the point of purchase would empower people to make more precise decisions about a whole host of values that are important to them. When I walk into a box retailer, I want to know which 2xs are Code A (regeneratively cultivated through methods of land conservation and repair by a local within 100 miles who has been historically disenfranchised) or Code B (selectively harvested and replanted by a fifth generation land and sawmill owner using Indigenous cool burning to prevent forest fires) or Code C (small batch monocultures grown at high efficiency to prevent the replacement of biodiverse unproductive forests), etc. Lindsey Wickstrom, Architect and Founding Principal of Mattaforma [Source Photo: Emagnetic/Adobe Stock] Outdoor Lighting How about we all start taking a neighborly approach to outdoor lighting? When colleagues and friends talk to me about lighting, they used to mention wonderful festival lights they had just seen or lamps they appreciated or hated. But these days they mostly complain about light streaming into their windows from someone elses outdoor lighting. In the city, a new commercial tower in midtown streams constantly changing light into bedroom windows literally miles away. Entertaining for some, apparently, and intensely disruptive for others. Not to mention the damage to fish and bird habitat.
Category:
E-Commerce
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