Galentine’s Day, pet gifts, and acknowledging failure: How founder and CEO Jim McCann is navigating Valentine’s Day at 1-800-Flowers.com
Fast Company
by Stephanie Mehta
1h ago
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.  Consumers will spend a whopping $27.5 billion on Valentine’s Day this year, up from $25.8 billion last year, according to the National Retail Federation.   For 1-800-Flowers.com, the purveyor of cand ..read more
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Why tomorrow’s breakthroughs will come from polyintelligent thinking
Fast Company
by Noubar Afeyan
1h ago
In news outlets, business publications, and scholarly journals, there is a crescendo of commentary about the combined power of human intelligence and artificial intelligence. Without question, that convergence is already yielding exciting discoveries in many fields. Yet a third, equally crucial, kind of intelligence is being left out of the discussion: nature’s intelligence. The idea that nature itself displays the hallmarks of what we understand as intelligence—the ability to learn, to encode those learnings in new, more effective models, and to continually adapt—is not altogether new. Leonar ..read more
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100 years, 5 covers: The ‘New Yorker’s art editor chooses her favorites from the last century
Fast Company
by Zachary Petit
1h ago
The cover process at The New Yorker is a beautifully inexact science.  Each week, longtime art editor Françoise Mouly presents editor David Remnick a range of options—some still in sketch form—and Remnick chooses the one that feels most apt for the cultural moment. It could be a cover about a breaking news story; it could be a seasonal cover, an evergreen cover (Mouly banks the latter two types throughout the year). But inevitably, somehow, whatever he chooses feels organic to the publication, if not inevitable. “What makes The New Yorker unique is that, as a general-interest magazine, ou ..read more
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Why Rivian’s CEO isn’t worried about Trump’s EV policy
Fast Company
by Adele Peters
1h ago
The Trump administration’s fight against electric vehicles includes everything from trying to get rid of the EV tax credit to freezing funding for charging stations. But EV company Rivian says its strategy hasn’t changed. We talked to CEO RJ Scaringe about why his long-term vision isn’t dependent on current policy, and the company’s future plans for its products. The company makes luxury SUVs and trucks, including 2024’s bestselling premium SUV in California (electric or gas); next year, it will launch a more affordable vehicle that starts at $45,000. Construction on a new factory outside Atla ..read more
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This gorgeously simple lamp uses only one material
Fast Company
by Hunter Schwarz
1h ago
It’s a simple idea. Aside from its electrical components, the Hoop Table Lamp by Finnish furniture company Vaarnii is made completely from pine timber and pine veneer. The result is a warm, natural statement lamp without any fuss. Released last week, the lamp is available in two sizes. It retails for about $360 for the medium and about $260 for the small. The appropriately-named London designer John Tree designed the lamp, which has a solid wood base created from a knot-free block of solid pine timber. The Hoop table lamp is topped by a pine veneer shade that’s cut thin enough to allow a glow ..read more
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Everyone brings past trauma to the workplace. These coaches can help leaders navigate it
Fast Company
by Jessica Klein
3h ago
It took decades, but Rachael Kelly broke the insidious cycle of abuse she’d been stuck in since childhood. At the time, she was leading human resources at a restaurant group in 2020. “I’m new in this job, and my toxic marriage start[ed] to peak,” she says. Meanwhile, she was trying to help the employees at her restaurant who were suffering through the trauma and joblessness of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ending her marriage to an abusive husband while helping those workers establish safety nets made her think: “How do we package [what I’m doing here] and model it forward?” Kelly ended up doing just ..read more
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Herman Miller’s sleek new standing desk is actually a four-legged table
Fast Company
by Grace Snelling
3h ago
The standing desk is old news. Behold, the standing table.  Herman Miller just released a new design that takes the concept of a standing desk to a whole new level. The Spout Sit-to-Stand Table comes in a range of sizes, from 2-by-4 feet to a whopping 4-by-7 feet, supports up to 400 pounds, and can seat a whole team rather than just one worker. That’s because it breaks a key form factor that most other standing desks follow: the number of legs in use.  The vast majority of standing desks have only two motorized legs, mostly because they’re easier to stabilize and engineer to move sea ..read more
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Trump’s immigration plans follow a familiar playbook: exclusion, incarceration, and mass deportation
Fast Company
by Capital and Main
3h ago
When Rodriguez has an upcoming appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, sometimes his daughter’s grades slip.  The stress of not knowing whether ICE will let him stay in the United States has already sent two of his children to therapy, Rodriguez said.  “They know that when I go to the ICE appointments, we don’t know if I’ll come back,” Rodriguez said in Spanish. The Guatemalan man, who asked not to be fully identified out of fear of retaliation, has already been deported once, and he has been held in ICE custody a few times. Though Rodriguez already has a deportati ..read more
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Trump wants to dismantle the agency that provides weather forecasts. It will make your life worse
Fast Company
by Kristin Toussaint
3h ago
The Trump administration and Elon Musk have spent the past several weeks upending the federal government. After essentially shutting down most operations of the nation’s foreign aid efforts through USAID, the next target appears to be NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Musk’s team has reportedly infiltrated NOAA’s offices, and NOAA staff have been told to stop all contact with foreign nationals, which threatens the very nature of the agency’s work; international cooperation is crucial to both weather and fisheries activity because neither the atmosphere or the ocean are ..read more
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This is the most important hire you can make if you want your company to run smoothly
Fast Company
by Clara Ma
3h ago
Appointing a chief of staff is a critical first step for any CEO looking to make impactful leadership decisions. But an executive who merely utilizes their chief of staff as an administrative extra set of hands risks missing out on meaningful transformation opportunities. The critical decision to position a chief of staff as a true executive partner, when executed well, can be a bold investment that impacts a CEO’s legacy. Based on my own experience as a chief of staff for a Series A unicorn-to-be and my current work coaching and placing these professionals, I’ve seen firsthand that today’s ch ..read more
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