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Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! Im 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. As a new crop of summer interns arrive at your company, its worth considering: Will one of them rise to CEO? Deanna Strable, who became CEO of Principal Financial Group in January, interned at the company during college. After graduating from Northwestern University, she joined Principal as an actuarial assistant, the start of a 35-year journey that included a stint abroad and senior roles including chief financial officer (CFO) and president and chief operating officer (COO). (Disclosure: Principal is a longtime Inc. advertising and sponsorship partner.) People love to ask, Whyd you originally come to Principal? but I think a fundamental question is, Why did you stay here for 35 years? Strable says of the insurance and benefits company, which last year reported $16.2 billion in revenue, up 18% from 2023. It ultimately comes back to the work, the company, and the people. From entry-level to executive The intern-to-CEO path isnt unheard of, especially at family-led companies. Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts, whose father founded the cable company, first interned at its Storecast marketing unit in 1974. J. Patrick Gallagher Jr., CEO of Arthur J. Gallagher and Co., a global insurance brokerage founded by his grandfather, interned at the business in 1972. Some prominent CEOs are lifers, having spent their whole careers at one company. Tricia Griffith, CEO of the insurer Progressive, started as an entry-level claims representative, and Mary Barra, CEO of GM, started at the carmaker as a co-op student. And while research suggests that CEOs hired from within an organization slightly outperformed external hires during the pandemic, and performed on par with one another before the pandemic, more boards are turning to outsiders to run companies. Spencer Stuarts 2024 CEO Transitions report found that 44% of all new S&P 1500 CEO appointments last year were external hires, up from 32% in 2023 and the highest rate since 2000, when the executive search firm started tracking the data. The CEO role has never been harder or more complex, and I do believe that you really need multiple experiences to be an effective leader in todays world, says Janice Ellig, CEO of executive search firm Ellig Group. I dont want to predict that the intern-to-CEO [trend] is going to decrease, but Im not sure its going to increase. Many roles, one vision Ellig says boards and investors want their chief executives to bring a range of relevant experiences to the role. Insiders who get the top job have typically led different departments and excelled in areas that are important to the company. GMs Barra, for example, led manufacturing engineering, global human resources, and global product developmentcritical divisions at a major automaker with 90,000 employees in the U.S. alone. Principals Strable helped build and lead the companys benefits and protection business, which encompasses employee benefits, business owner solutions (life insurance and disability insurance), and nonqualified deferred compensation. As CFO, she worked alongside previous CEO Daniel Houston to develop a growth strategy that included discontinuing the sale of consumer life insurance products and focusing on higher-growth businesses such as retirement and global asset management. As a result, Strable says, she was able to hit the ground running, adding: You know the people, you know the products, you know the business, you know the strategy. The insiders double-edge sword Strable, who retains the president title at Principal, counts the familiarity and support of longtime colleagues as a plus of being an internal candidate. But where it can be hard is there are times that people just expect that youre comfortable with things the way they are today, she says. Strable says she encourages the company to lean into its strengths but also evaluate the areas where Principal has not been effective. She strives to find ways to learn from people outside the company. I reinforce that with a lot of our leaders, too, she says. You need to have a network of peers outside of the organization, both within and outside the industry. At a lunch meeting in New York shortly after she became CEO, Strable reflected on the corporate milestones shes observed throughout her three-decades-plus at Principal. Of note: Some of the first graduates of Principals on-site daycare center at its Des Moines headquarters, which opened 17 years ago, will soon be eligible for internships at the company. Perhaps one of them might even become CEO someday. Are you an insider CEO? Are you a company lifer who has ascended to the CEO role? What unique insights do you possess that outsiders or newcomers dont have? Please send your experiences to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. And while I have your attention, please spread the word that Fast Companys annual Brands That Matter program is extending its deadline to June 6. If your brand excels in making emotional connections, communicating purpose, and maintaining cultural relevance, consider applying via this link. Read more: inside track How Mary Barra remade GM and its culture Should your board consider an outsider for CEO succession? Former Nike intern Elliott Hill is ex-employees top CEO pick
Category:
E-Commerce
As a manager, its easy to get caught up in the day-to-day grind of fixing processes, eliminating bottlenecks, and streamlining workflows. We focus on reducing frictionthe things that get in the way of people doing their best work. And sure, thats important. But heres the thing: Reducing fear is just as, if not more, important. A comprehensive two-year study by Google identified psychological safety as the most important factor in high-performing teams. This environment allows team members to take risks and be vulnerable without fear of negative consequences. Harvard Business School professor Amy C. Edmondson emphasizes that psychological safety enables employees to speak up, make mistakes, and learn from them, which is essential for innovation and growth. Lets face it. The best processes in the world wont help much if your team is afraid to speak up, take risks, or challenge the status quo. Fear can stunt creativity, shut down communication, and make people avoid the very risks that lead to growth. So, as leaders, we need to think beyond just fixing processes. We need to also focus on creating an environment where people feel safe and confident enough to acteven if it means making a mistake along the way. Why Fear Matters More Than You Think Fear is a powerful force. It can make people double-check their work, avoid taking risks, and be extra cautious. But when fear becomes the driving force behind decisions, it also leads to silence. When people are afraid to speak up, they hold back good ideas, overlook problems, and avoid making necessary changes. Neuroscience backs this up. When we experience fear, our brains go into fight or flight mode, which limits our ability to think clearly and make rational decisions. When were scared, we become reactive instead of proactive. This is why a culture of fear isnt just uncomfortableits downright unproductive. As a leader, its your job to create a culture where people feel safe to speak up, ask questions, and challenge the status quo. Thats why reducing fear should go hand in hand with reducing friction. Fixing Processes Doesnt Fix Everything Lets look at a real-world example: the United States Postal Service. In the early 2000s, the USPS faced a significant drop in productivity, rising operational costs, and declining employee morale. To address these issues, management introduced new technology, upgraded processes, and streamlined workflows to improve efficiency and reduce errors. They invested in automated sorting systems and revamped scheduling to make operations run more smoothly. However, despite these process improvements, the results werent as dramatic as expected. Productivity wasnt increasing, and employees still seemed disengaged. The reason? Fear was still very much present in the workplace. Employees were afraid to speak up or share concerns about the new processes. If workers noticed something wrong with the new systems or had ideas to improve efficiency, they didnt feel comfortable offering suggestions or challenging the way things were done. This is a perfect example of how reducing frictionby fixing processesdidnt have the full impact it could have had because fear was still holding back the team. How could USPS have tackled both issues at once? They could have started by actively working to reduce fear within the organization. Management needed to create an environment where employees felt safe to make mistakes, raise issues, and offer constructive feedback. Employees who feel safe and supported are more likely to speak up when somethings not working and more likely to suggest creative solutions. They become partners in progress rather than passive participants. Balancing Both: Reducing Friction and Fear SEB, a Nordic financial services group, implemented a five-month training program focusing on psychological safety and perspective-taking for its investment banking leadership team. This initiative aimed to overcome transformation challenges and foster open communication. As a result, the team achieved revenues 25% above their annual targets in a strategically important market segment. A multi-industry case study followed businesses whose team members were hesitant to voice concerns. All participants implemented psychological safety workshops emphasizing active listening and constructive feedback. This initiative led to improved conflict resolution, enhanced communication, and increased productivity, positively impacting the company’s bottom line. To be an effective leader, you cant just focus on fixing processes. Thats a quick fix, but it doesnt address the deeper issues that impact team dynamics. Reducing friction is important, yes. But reducing fear is essential if you want to create a truly high-performing, innovative, and engaged team. Simon Brown, global learning and development leader at EY, has spent years building critical skills and behaviors in high-performing teams. He shares: You cant automate courage. While systems help things run smoothly, its the culture that inspires people to run toward challenges instead of away from them. Real-world application So, what does this balance look like in practice? Reduce friction: Simplify workflows, cut out unnecessary steps, and ensure your team has the tools and resources they need to do their jobs efficiently. Reduce fear: Foster a culture of psychological safety, where mistakes are treated as learning opportunities, where feedback is welcomed (not feared), and where team members feel confident enough to take risks and innovate. You/me/we: Adopt a decision-making framework that defines what decisions employees can make on their own without fear or reprisal. This cuts down on back-and-forth decision-making bottlenecks and helps people feel more empowered in their roles. Model a hands-off approach: Is your leadership decreasing the number of mandatory meetings but still attending themselves? Making outdated rules optional instead of obsolete? Without buy-in from the top, team members will be too afraid to take action on simplification initiatives that can free up time and decrease unnecessary mental distress.Leadership isnt just about improving processesits about improving peoples ability to act within those processes. If you want your team to truly thrive, youve got to focus on both reducing friction and reducing fear. When you do, youll create an environment where people feel empowered to make decisions, try new things, and speak up when somethings not working. Thats when the real magic happens.
Category:
E-Commerce
Loving Pinterest has long been a part of my secretly middle-aged personality. I have 16.1k pins to my name to prove it. I started my account in middle school eight years ago, and Pinterest has been a dear companion to me ever since. I used to log on every day to tuck away precious ideas and artworks into my boards, which I could take out to admire every time I needed advice, a joke, or a drawing lesson. I am not alone in this. Pinterest says that 42% of its global user base is Gen Z. I think Gen Z has really latched onto Pinterest as a safe platform to use, especially with so much happening around other social media platforms, says Lois, whose Tiktok videos about Pinterest under the username dandydemon have garnered over six million views. Pinterest is a very atypical social media platform. It’s not like Instagram, it’s not like TikTok, where youre actively scrolling. It’s a very personalized social media platform, and it feels almost like a journal of sorts for people. But for many users like Lois, a worrying pattern has emerged over the past couple of years. There is so much AI on the platform . . . that it’s hard to determine what [posts are] AI, and where it is coming from, she says. Other people like Reddit user InterationInternal agree. I was looking for hair color inspo and it was all AI. I couldn’t find a single human!! Then [I] typed in nail inspo, interior design – same thing. Is this platform dead? they wrote in a thread titled Pinterest is 100% AI now? R/Pinterest hosts hundreds of posts with similar complaints. Frustration over AI content and the recent mass deletion of user accounts is boiling over to the point where many users are leaving the platform for alternatives. Andy McCune, cofounder and CEO of the curation app Cosmos, says that after launching in August 2024, Cosmos has already gained millions of users. And, in the couple of days after Lois shouted out the platform as a Pinterest alternative in her a video discussing the Pinterest bans, McCune noted that Cosmos saw tens of thousands of new users join the platform. Pinterest says AI slop is not a problem on its platform. Pinterest’s systems are designed to prominently surface high-quality, inspirational content says a spokesperson for the company. Low-quality Gen AI content is therefore not broadly recommended by our systems or widely seen by users. Still, to help address user concerns about the presence of AI generated content on the platform, Pinterest rolled out a new feature to tag AI content in April. To help people determine whether a post contains AI-modified or generated content, Pinterest now analyzes the metadata of its images to look for AI markers. For those that fall through the cracks, Pinterest has also developed classifiers to detect AI generated content automatically. If Pinterest determines that an image is AI generated, it adds an AI modified label when users view it in closeup. As we refine these classifiers, our labels will become even more helpful and accurate, says the spokesperson. Not everyone thinks this fix will be enough. Lois believes that the existence of the AI pins in the first place undermines the utility of Pinterest. I use Pinterest for home decor reasons, she says. I love to imagine what my future home would look like, and also get decor items from Pinterest, and there’s no way to get a decor item that was made by AI . . . the whole point of Pinterest, to me, as far as the commerce side of it is seeing products that I can buy because they exist within reality. Pinterest is piloting a solution for this as well. The company is currently experimenting with a see fewer option for Gen AI pins in categories prone to AI modification or generation such as decor and food. We believe that AI should enhance, not replace, the value provided by our creators. Pinterests algorithms will continue to prioritize content that is inspirational, actionable, and most relevant to individual users, says the spokesperson. Deeper questions about AI on Pinterest Although these features may help users declutter their homepages of AI content, the overall amount of AI generated content on Pinterest will likely keep growing. After studying Pinterests monthly data and trend reports for January through April 2025, the technology-focused newsletter Garbage Day wrote for Sherwood News that every trend that Pinterest has specifically reported as growing since January 2025 has been saturated with pictures created by AI models. In fact, the article asserts that all 16 trends in Pinterests April trends report contained multiple AI generated images in the top 20 search results. The continued encouragement of AI generated images is worrying for many people working in the arts. It’s the sort of indiscriminate use of [AI] that bypasses the very valuable and hard work and the very sophisticated and complex work and creative processes of artists says Robert Brinkerhoff, Department Head of Illustration at RISD. I think one of our chief worries is that visual culture will diminish ultimately because with capitalism as a driving force, quality is not as important as money. Brinkerhoff notes that it is getting more and more difficult for artists to compete with the speed and increasing accuracy of AI generated content. For instance, an exploding area of practice for illustrators in recent years has been in visual development for film, for games, for animation, and many of our students are interested in that, he says. But those industries . . . are losing jobs and they’re being replaced by AI because it’s quite easy to generate that stuff and [AI is] very readily capable of creating stuff quickly. This concept is exactly what AI slop farmers on Pinterest such as Jesse Cunningham bank on. Cunningham openly admits to flooding Pinterest with AI content to make revenue. “I’m talking $10,000 per month on Pinterest . . . using AI images, using AI text,” he says in a YouTube video explaining his process. “On my page, we do 50 to 80 [posts] a day,” he says. We are presenting Pinterest with unique images every single time. This is why its hard to compete with AI. Not to mention that despite launching their new filters on AI content, Pinterest itself continues to use users’ information to train their own AI models. When you save or upload content to Pinterest, we may use it to improve the accuracy, safety and overall performance of Pinterest Canvas, says Pinterest on its Help Center website. What happens when a platform uses AI to train tself to better help people find inspiration to create a life they love, when an increasing number of uploads are AI generated? The more you subtract human beings from making things like art . . . the more dehumanized we become as a society, I think, says Brinkerhoff.
Category:
E-Commerce
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