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The CEO’s role is evolving. Private equity is playing an increasingly influential role in shaping the expectations, performance, and tenure of CEOs. The financial environment is also changing, with influence increasingly moving from public markets to private capital. As private equity grows in importance as the dominant form of value creation, executives who excel at driving EBITDA and delivering outsize returns have become the winners. In this landscape, CEOs are increasingly being measured by their ability to generate financial returns. But true leadership requires hitting more than financial targets. The most effective leaders understand that long-term success depends on balancing financial acumen with empathetic leadership. Those who fail to adapt risk becoming transactional managers rather than transformational leaders. Understanding this shift and defining ones leadership approach is more critical now than ever. How Did We Get Here? To grasp the challenges facing todays CEOs, we must examine the forces reshaping corporate leadership. Over the past few decades, venture capital and private equity firms have evolved from peripheral participants to key drivers of corporate investment. Alongside this shift, executive compensation has moved from salary-based models to equity-driven structures, directly linking a CEOs financial success to company performance. As a result, C-suite decision-making has become increasingly data-driven, prioritizing quantitative analysis over traditional intuition-based management. However, prioritizing financial capital over human capital creates a leadership challenge: Employees do not share the same motivation for growth and profitability as CEOs. As PwC identified in a study on purpose in the workplace, employees and business leaders prioritize very different things. Employees today are driven more by meaning, community, and impact, while business leaders are motivated by growth, innovation, and differentiation. Human capital intangibleslike meaning, trust, community, respect, and culturedont fit neatly into a spreadsheet, and theyre hard to quantify. What Teams Really Need A few years ago, Google researchers put together Project Aristotle to better understand what makes teams successful. They analyzed 50 years of academic research and studied 180 teams within Google to uncover the factors behind high-performing teams. Expecting to find a formula for optimizing employee performance through data, they were surprised by the outcome. The most significant factor they found wasnt quantitative at all. Instead, it was psychological safetya climate of trust and mutual respect in which employees feel comfortable being themselves. This insight, coming from one of the worlds most data-driven companies, highlighted the human side of leadership. Great teams and great leadership are more than metrics. They are about fostering an environment where people feel safe and valued. CEOs Feel the Strain While data-driven decision-making dominates the C-suite, the emotional and human aspects of leadership remain vital. And many CEOs feel the strain of this disconnect deeply. In our 2025 survey of 150 CEOs, we explored their perspectives on the quantitative and qualitative aspects of leadership. When asked about their top business priorities, 73% of CEOs prioritized growth, and 70% focused on profitability. These are expected answers, in line with the hard metrics driving todays corporate world. But when we asked what they personally worry about, the responses shifted toward the human side of leadership. CEOs were most concerned with issues like employee morale (65%), burnout and work-life balance (58%), board relations (53%), and ethical dilemmas (48%). These factors are crucial to maintaining a thriving, sustainable business culture. Balancing Profit with People Today, CEOs face the challenge of balancing their companys financial performance with their employees’ well-being. This balancing act has never been harder. CEOs are increasingly navigating complex and charged political environments. Employees notice when their leaders prioritize profit over people or avoid taking a stand on moral or ethical issues. In some cases, the companys reputation becomes so entangled in external politics that it begins to affect employee morale and the perception of leadership. This leaves CEOs balancing the demands of external stakeholders and their employees’ needs. When CEOs fail to take a stand or are seen as playing both sides, it diminishes their credibility as true leaders. Integrating Data and Humanity To succeed in todays business landscape, CEOs must do three things. First, leaders must navigate this fundamental shift in the CEOs role as private capital increasingly shapes market dynamics. Leaders need to align their leadership style with more quantitative-led private capital expectations. Second, leaders must better connect financial capital + human capital. There is a real opportunity to implement a leadership approach that measures and values emotional intelligence, and cultural metrics alongside financial metrics. Finally, leaders need to focus on creating psychological safety to create high-performing teams. Psychological safety across the employee base will increase engagement, collaboration, innovation, retention, productivity and ultimately performance. In 2025, this balance is not just a nice-to-haveIts the entrepreneurial superpower that will separate the disruptors from the disrupted. CEOs who blend quantitative financial acumen with data-driven team management will cultivate high-performance cultures that excel in times of uncertainty.
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E-Commerce
It took Duolingo more than a decade to grow its owl mascot, Duo, from a cute cartoon character into a social media star with tens of millions of followers. Then Duolingos marketing team did the unthinkable: It killed him off.The decision turned out to be the companys most successful social media play everand likely one of the widest-reaching social campaigns of all time, by any brand. Duo was originally created as logo in 2011, the year that Duolingo was founded. In the years since, the friendly (if occasionally menacing) green owl has grown into a layered character with friends, enemies, motivations, even a potential lover, and legions of fans. But on February 11, Duolingo announced that Duo was deadhit by a Cybertruck, fans later found out.This brand stunt was originally meant to roll out as an update to the apps icon (the cartoon owl appeared dead with his eyes crossed out), accompanied by a series of three videos for Duolingos social channels. Duolingo, after all, has a track record of building daring social media campaigns around its owl. Last year, the company rolled out a production-heavy April Fools prank promoting Duolingo on Ice, a fake musical for which the company made several very real music videos. This December, Duo starred in a collab with the the Netflix show Squid Game that saw him transform into a K-pop idol.But Duos death struck a deeper chord with users than these previous stunts. As the death notice began taking off on TikTok, it garnered thousands of comments from concerned fans, video responses from other brands, and even callouts on national news stations. As the reaction grew, Duolingos social media team saw the opportunity to build Duos untimely passing into something much bigger. Within a matter of days, theyd met with marketing, product, and engineering teams to spin the concept into a campaign of global proportionscomplete with localized ads, in-app integrations, merch, and brand partnership tie-ins. Candidly, we had three posts, and we were gonna post them and be chillingjust another day at Duolingo, says Zaria Parvez, Duolingos senior social media manager and the mastermind behind its TikTok strategy. The first post we did was a fake press release about Duo being dead. When we posted that, we saw that the user engagement was popping off. It was a number of impressions that wed never seen before. Then we were like, Okay, like theres a huge wind here. We need to build this narrative out even more.'In the two weeks between Duos death and the reveal that hed actually faked his demise, the Dead Duo campaign raked in a record 1.7 billion impressions across Duolingos socials in just two weeks. According to Duolingos market research, there was twice as much social media conversation around Duos demise as any of 2025s top 10 Super Bowl ads, which had aired just days before on February 9. Though the campaign was unprecedented in many ways, it followed a social media marketing recipe that Duolingo has perfected over the years: Combine a healthy dose of risk-taking with speed, agility, and, most importantly, a deeper brand story. For many companies, a mascot faking his own death would feel out of character or desperate. But for Duo, its right on brand.[Image: Duolingo]From Sick Duo to Dead DuoIn the past few months alone, Duo the owl has been roasted on a grill, shredded in a blender, and plagued by a terrible diseasebut this is the first time hes actually died. Duos recent ailments are part of the unhinged persona that has become his calling card online. In Duolingos early days, the company started using the owl to send push notifications to users, begging them to continue doing their lessons, often in a guilt-tripping tone. The internet spun Duos passive-aggressive personality into a meme (including one much-circulated image of him holding a gun).The company quickly embraced fans interpretation of Duo, building him into a much larger figure on the brands social media with his own cast of side characters. Duos defining characteristic is that he will do anything to get users to complete their lessonsincluding kidnapping their families and holding the Duolingo office dogs hostage. Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn told Fast Company in November that he reviews anything where the owl is going to be in the product, and his feedback usually is, Can we make it weirder?This strategy has unlocked a new level of visibility for Duolingo on socials: The brands TikTok account added more than 6 million followers over the past year, while total social media impressions grew 80% year over year. Duos internet stardom is so significant that, in an interview last year for the Acquired podcast, von Ahn assessed the owls value at hundreds of millions of dollars.Duolingo is now bringing more of Duos social media personality into brand partnerships and onto the app itself, building out his lore along the way. Part of this strategy has involved occasionally swapping out the apps default icon (a picture of Duos friendly visage) for something unexpected that reflects Duos desperation for learners to come back to the app. For a brief period in late 2023, Duos face appeared to be melted, startling users. An for two weeks in September 2024, the Duolingo icon showed a sickly looking Duowith snotty nose and red-rimmed eyesinciting both disgust and concern from fans. In an email to Forbes at the time, a Duolingo spokesperson explained the birds illness: Duo is quite literally sick of reminding everyone to do their lessons, they wrote. But dont worry. His symptoms arent contagious, as long as learners keep their streaks going. Sick Duo content ended up generating 30 million impressions across Instagram and TikTok. The success inspired the product team to push the envelope even further with their next icon update. [Image: courtesy Duolingo]Move fast and break Duo In early January, the Duolingo product team began exploring ideas for an app icon change, looking for something next-level that would grab users attention. After a few weeks of brainstorming options, Gregory Hartman, Duolingos head of art, had a radical idea: What if they just killed Duo?Hartmans mock-up of a Duo with Xs over his eyes went into audience A/B testing alongside several other icon options, including an anxious, sweaty Duo and a chubby Duo. According to Osman Mansur, Duolingos senior product manager specializing in reengagement, the results of the test were relatively inconclusive: The icons performed similarly in getting inactive users to return to the app. So Mansur took the results to Parvez for her input.We really liked Dead Duo because there was more lore, more narrative, more story we could tell about that, Parvez says. We particularly notice that when an app icon change has a strong emotion or a characteristic that people can relate to, it creates more buzz.With Parvezs blessing, Mansur brought the Dead Duo concept to Duolingos senior leadership teamincluding von Ahnand explained that both the product and marketing teams had a strong intuition about the potential icon swap. Von Ahn approved the selection, instructing the team to Dead the shit out of it. Parvezs team had just six days to craft the content that would announce Duos death. We value speed at Duolingo, Parvez says, so our biggest goal as a marketing team is how do we get things the quickest from ideation to post?A Cybertruck crimeThe news of Duos death came in the form of a somber black-and-white press release posted across socials, set to Sarah McLachlans Angel. It proclaimed: Duo, formally known as The Duolingo Owl, is dead. The following day, a post revealing Duos cause of death showed him getting hit by a speeding Cybertrucka timely jab at Elon Musks Tesla, which has been on a downward financial spiral as Musk has become increasingly involved in the U.S. government. Three days after Duo died, the official X account tweeted, All birds go to heaven, with images of the former Twitter logo and Dead Duo. Duolingo responded, both killed by a Cybertruck. RIP. both killed by a CybertruckRIP https://t.co/578dWAWsWo Duolingo (@duolingo) February 14, 2025The choice of a Cybertruck as the instrument of Duos murder worked exactly as Duolingos marketing team intended. We wanted to find social-first ways to get the internet excited and drive conversation about these different parts of Duos death, Parvez says. Cybertrucks look funky. And it was like, This seems like something that would happen to Duojust getting hit by a truck.In a third video announcing Duos untimely passing, two of Duolingos other characters mournfully deposited Duos coffin onto the bed of a pickup truck. The videos caption read, Btw im deaf so i hope this is a sad song, while the sexually explicit lyrics of the song Good Lookin by Dixon Dallas played in the background. Those three posts were supposed to be the extent of the Dead Duo campaign. But the internet had different ideas. As news of Duos death reverberated across TikTokthe Cybertruck video raked in 25.7 million views and the Good Lookin video garnered another 66.3 million, making it the companys second most-viewed TikTokmajor brands like KitKat, Subway, BuzzFeed, Hilton, and T-Mobile jumped into the comments to offer their condolences. The worlds most popular YouTuber, Mr. Beast, made his own TikTok about Duos death (it now has 96 million views.) Traditional media, including The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, weighed in as well. [Image: courtesy Duolingo]Duos death also led to one of the companys most sought-after achievements: an acknowledgment from the pop star Dua Lipa. For years, a cornerstone of Duos lore has been his one-sided love for the singer. But just before Valentines Day, Dua Lipa responded to Duos death with a tweet that read, Til death duo part. To commemoratethe occasion, James Kuczynski, senior creative director, says Duolingo sent Dua Lipa a gift basket which included a box of Duos ashes (a packet of matcha powder). [Screenshot: courtesy Duolingo]Inside Duolingo, the team was ecstatic. Parvez received a Slack message from von Ahn: Dua fucking Lipa tweeting about us. That same morning, von Ahn also sent a company-wide Slack that read, It is with a heavy heart that I announce the retirement of the entire marketing team. As they said, theres nothing left to accomplish.Duo dies 100 deathsAs it turns out, the marketing team was just getting started. With the original Dead Duo videos taking off online, the Duolingo team decided to capitalize on the moment by building out a much wider campaign. The company began systematically killing off its other characters on TikTok. Within a couple of days, it had worked with its merch partners to launch limited-edition plushie versions of the dead characters, which came in coffin-shaped packages. Duos death also went international. The company leveraged its 13 localized social media accounts to create region-specific narratives around the owls passing, engaging global audiences. In Germany, Duos death had a creepy, cult-inspired twist: After his death, a group of smaller Duos resurrected him through occult practices and initiated him as their leader. And in Japan, where theres a higher cultural sensitivity around death, Duo never diedinstead, he became stronger than ever.[Image: Duolingo]Rebecca Paramo, Duolingos regional marketing director for Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, says her team had all of two days to plan out their localized content and hop on the bandwagon. We pivoted most of the campaigns that we were already working on and partnerships with other brands, and were basically able to create an entire global and international narrative around Duos death, Paramo says.In Brazil, for example, Duolingo had previously lined up a major partnership with McDonalds that was set to drop around the same time that Duo died. There, Duos death was announced in a series of telenovela-inspired TikToks. When McDonalds saw the content, they were initially concerned for the future of the partnership. But Paramos team found a way to merge the two efforts: Duo appeared on a popular local TV gossip show to reveal both the McDonalds partnership and his resurrection. [Image: courtesy Duolingo]Duo rises from the deadDuo was never actually going to stay dead, of course. But as the buzz around his death grew, it became clear that the story of his resurrection would have to justify the hype. The team decided that the campaign needed to connect more directly to the apps language-learning missionand get fans involved.The weekend after the first Dead Duo post, several engineers worked to create a web page that would track the XP (experience points) that users receive when they complete their lessons, each of which are worth 20 to 35 XP. The page promised that users around the world could bring back Duo before its too late by completing enough lessons to rack up 50 billion XP. The site tallied the statistics by country, and ranked each oneenticing users to boost their countries standings. The engineers worked on it for hours over the weekend just to get us to the finish line, Parvez says. That speaks to Duolingo culture: When people started getting excited about it, everyone was like, How can we help? It became a company-wide effort.[Screenshot: courtesy Duolingo]While Duolingo is unable to share exact statistics on how much Dead Duo boosted in-app engagement before its first quarter earnings report on May 1, a spokesperson confirmed that the campaign drove a meaningful lift in new and resurrected users.[Image: courtesy Duolingo]Exactly two weeks after Duo first perished, fans revival efforts proved successful. Duo rose from the dead with a new app icon showing his eyes blazing with light, alongside a hype TikTok set to VVV and Playboi Cartis YEAT. In a subsequent TikTok, he addressed viewers himself: Ive always had two main goals: Get people to do their lesson and get Dua Lipa to notice me, Duo said. Neither was working. I had to do something drastic. So I thought, why not kill one green bird with two stones? [Image: Duolingo]Extreme DGAF brandingThe impact of Dead Duo surprised even Duolingo. The company had set a goal of 70 million impressions for the campaign, according to a spokesperson. In the past, Duolingos largest campaigns generated around 100 million impressions. Not only did Dead Duo achieve nearly 2 billion impressions on the companys own social media accounts, the campaign inspired around 160,000 pieces of user-generated contentabout 25 times the size of fan reactions to past icon changes. Dead Duo is a prime example of something that Fast Company has termed DGAF branding: A form of branding that eschews expectation and tradition in favor of all things wild. Examples include Pop Tarts sacrificing one of its pastries at the Super Bowl and Nutter Butters brain rot-inspired, head-spinning TikTok page. Already, other brands are trying to take a page out of the Dead Duo playbookSour Patch Kids recently announced that it would no longer be sour and would instead adopt the moniker, Patch Kids, before ultimately restoring its sourness days later. Still, Duolingo stands out in that, through its push notifications, brand partnerships, and social media content, its built Duo to feel almost like a real person (or owl) to fans. That level of connection is difficult for other companies to replicate.Duolingo, meanwhile, is taking its own lessons from Dead Duos resounding success. Mansur says its clear that the companys focus on creative speed is working, but the campaign demonstrated that marketing, product, and creative teams could benefit from collaborating more extensively.We have a very strong marketing team at Duolingo, and we have a very strong product team. But for a while, a lot of our work streams were kind of parallel to each other, Mansur says. This a really unique case where something that was within the product also had a larger marketing component to it, and required close collaboration. Were testing new things to strengthen this muscle of collaborating across different teams at Duolingo.For now, the team is still basking in the afterglow of Dead Duos successand taking a break from fielding countless questions from friends and family about Duos fate. From an outside perspective, its difficult to imagine where Duo could go from here. After all, there arent many moves more extreme than killing off a mascot worth millions of dollars. Parvez sees things differently. Obviously, as a marketer, theres always that fear of, like, Will we ever be able to one-up ourselves again? she says. But its also exciting. Its proof that, even five years into creating unhinged social content, weve been able to elevate it to literally a global scale where everyone was invested. I think the best is yet to come.
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F. Scott Fitzgeralds masterpiece The Great Gatsby conjures up images of gilded Art Deco opulence: cloche hats and shimmering flapper dresses; a freeflow of French 75s and festivities. And thats thanks, in part, to kaleidoscopic films like Baz Lurhmanns 2013 adaptation of the novel. But when you read Gatsby, you discover a less glamorous narrative that has perhaps been overshadowed by contemporary Jazz Age visual clichésone that is essentially a dark portrait of its times with a bit of rot at its core, thanks to the titular swindling bootlegger Jay Gatsby. And thats what luxe publisher The Folio Society sought to reflect in its brilliant limited-edition illustrated edition of the novel, which is out today on the centennial of the books initial publication. [Photo: courtesy The Folio Society] [We] wanted to move away from the sort of prescribed images that have been cemented in our consciousness, Folio Head of Editorial James Rose says. 100 years on, I think it’s Fitzgeralds look at the American Dreamand the abandonment of the American Dream. NEW ILLUSTRATIONS CAPTURE THE BOOK’S DUALITY Folio is known for its embrace of art, design, and high-end production, and for this edition they commissioned New Yorkbased Japanese artist Yuko Shimizu to bring the book to visual life. Rose says the publisher has worked with Shimizu before, and she has an innate ability to interpret a text and make it her own, as well as suss out hidden meanings and take an unconventional approach. Given that unconventional is exactly what Folio was going for with its interpretation of one of the most famous and well-trodden novels of all time, Shimizu was an ideal fit. [Illustration: Yuko Shimizu 2025, from The Great Gatsby/courtesy The Folio Society] Yuko got that instantly, Rose says. She didnt view the novel through the lens of the glamorous, glitzy jazz parties and flapper girls the period is known for, according to Rose. Once you peel back those layers, underneath it’s really quite horrid. [] She wanted to bring that out and actually show that behind all of this surface veneer of money and success, there’s actually a very dark undercurrent. As the gilded first impressions fade, readers discover that the mysterious millionaire Gatsby is in fact a charlatan. The antagonist Tom Buchanan breaks his mistress nose. Then there’s the fatal car crash and the climactic murder. Rose says Folio gives its artists a large degree of autonomy, and Shimizu came up with a list of scenes to illustrateultimately bringing all of those above and more to life across 13 pieces. When they came in, I think we were all stunned by them, Rose says. In her style theyre gorgeous yet tragicwhich strikes at the heart of the book at large. [Illustration: Yuko Shimizu 2025, from The Great Gatsby/courtesy The Folio Society] GAZING UPON THE AMERICAN DREAM The Great Gatsby in the most literal sense of the cliché needs no introduction. So, Folio elected to commission an afterword instead of a foreword, especially since analysis of the novel could end up spoiling its biggest moments. Who could you bring in to deliver an unexpected take on an unexpected edition?Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk. Though theres more connective tissue there than you might think. Chuck’s one of the foremost American novelists at the moment, and his books deal with that undercurrent of violence, Rose says. Particularly if you look at Fight Club, it is essentially about the male gaze on the American Dream. And this is just a continuation of exactly what F. Scott Fitzgerald was doing 100 years before. [Illustration: Yuko Shimizu 2025, from The Great Gatsby/courtesy The Folio Society] Rose says he wasnt sure what exactly Palahniuk would turn inbut he hoped it would offer a look at the book from a fresh angle, and thats exactly what the author did, exploring it almost as a morality tale, and (humorously, naturally) drawing parallels to everything from One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest to Rosemarys Baby. We shoul all be able to lament as beautifully as [Fitzgerald] did, Palahniuk writes in the afterword. Regardless of shaping the future, we should all be able to revisit our past with such skill and humility. [Illustration: Yuko Shimizu 2025, from The Great Gatsby/courtesy The Folio Society] BOTH TIMELY AND TIMELESS True to Folios output and its fan-favorite limited editions, the production is appropriately opulent. Shimizu illustrated the exterior, as well, which features the green light at the end of Daisys dock, a signature thematic element of the novel. The book is bound in goatskin leather, with green foil and gilded edges. Its printed on Dolce Vita Ivory paper, with Sirio Pearl Cocktail Blue Moon endpapers (which is just the best name for any paperand I dont know why, it makes me think of Jazz Age cocktails, Rose notes.) Each book is signed by Shimizu and Palahniuk, and housed in a custom cloth box that is screenprinted with a design by Shimizu in gold foil, featuring custom lettering by Atelier Olschnsky Grafik und Design OG in Vienna. The project was also printed and bound by Graphicom in Italy, which is renowned for its sheer craft and eye for detail. [Photo: courtesy The Folio Society] To keep things truly limited, Folio is only producing 500 of the books, which sell for $500 each. We will never do a 100th anniversary, centenary edition of Great Gatsby ever again, Rose says. So for us, we need to be very forensic about the materials that we use and get them just right. We’ve got one chance to get it absolutely perfect. Its a remarkably gorgeous objectand yet indeed contains illustrated horror right there on the case itself (those headlights . . . ), bringing the concept full circle. A century on, why are we still so entranced by Gatsby? Rose says the class and social divides at the heart of the book persist to this day. These are timeless themes . . . so I think Gatsby has an unlimited ability to find its way into a new generation, he says. It’s not just relevantI think it’s slightly prescient for America today. Alarmingly so, perhaps.
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