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This year delivered whiplash: geopolitics, tariffs, and technology all shifting at once. And heading into 2026, the disruption isnt easing up. Bob Safian distills hard-won lessons from his Rapid Response podcast this year on how to lead when the ground wont stop movingfeaturing standout moments from Airbnbs Brian Chesky, Runways Cristóbal Valenzuela, Metas Clara Shih, LinkedIns Aneesh Raman, Planned Parenthoods Alexis McGill Johnson, and the NWSLs Jessica Berman, with practical takeaways for turning uncertainty into advantage. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scalepodcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. Lesson number one: As tech moves fast, we need to move even faster Among the most challenging aspects for leaders is the speed of change and how it requires us to reset our expectations and practices. Here’s the CEO of AI video company Runway, Cris Valenzuela, talking with me about planning in the eye of the AI storm. How far out do you think of your product roadmap? Or is that something you’re reassessing all the time? Cris Valenzuela: Yeah, it’s a weekly thing, to be honest. If you’re planning on a quarterly basis, you’re not going to make it. You’re done. In four weeks, you’re going to get leapfrogged and things will change. We’ve historically taken this open-ended research approach. Instead of defining very specific goals you want to accomplish, you define the boundaries on which you want the team to play and experiment. And then setting the boundaries and the limits is kind of the hard thing because if it’s too open, then there’s nothing really directionally happening. If it’s too broad, then it’s just an objective that’s very clear. If it’s broad enough and has enough of the right incentives, then people are going to stumble on things that are new, that you’ve never thought of before, that have a great value. And those are the things that we care the most. Valenzuela’s approach is so different from traditional leadership, leaning into experimentation rather than specific goals, and reframing plans on a weekly basis. It’s an approach that could make a lot of people uneasy. I talked about this with Clara Shih, who’s led AI business at Salesforce and at Meta. She offered practical insights about navigating what’s hype and what’s imperative. Here’s me and Shih. How do leaders strike the balance between I got to be in this, versus it’s not really showing any measurable impact now yet? Clara Shih: I see this all the time from various leaders that I meet with. I think it’s first being hands-on and really getting in there and understanding the capabilities because I think with that judgment, with that firsthand experience, only then can leaders really know, “Okay, I want to apply it here, but not here.” Another really great success formula is splitting up the team, right? Having people focus on immediate use cases, what can I unlock today that will show me ROI this quarter, next quarter, versus what are the bigger bets where just I see the secular trend and we have to skate to where the puck is going. But just know that it’s going to take longer and more experiments to asymptotically hopefully get to the right answer. And then just having space and time to live in both time horizons simultaneously. What’s the day-to-day? What’s the quarter? How could I be completely screwed in six months or 12 months if I don’t have this tiger team that’s incubating experiments at startup speed? Lesson two: In an AI world, human connection is a competitive advantage AI technology is so powerful. But there’s an equally strong thread about emphasizing the human factor within enterprises, that that will truly differentiate the winners. Here’s Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb. Brian Chesky: The term AI, the important term is artificial. We’re going to live in a world where it’s not clear that what you’re seeing is real. And the opposite of artificial is real. The opposite of screen is the real world. People want real connections in the real world. Why are people feeling so lonely right now? Because they were connecting with people they don’t know, arguing with people on the internet and your Instagram followers aren’t coming to your funeral. No one changed someone else’s mind in YouTube comment section. And now pretty soon we’re going to have a situation where your friends are going to be AIs. So there has to be this movement to real. Chesky’s business at Airbnb, of course, relies on in-person interaction through home stays and experiences, but that doesn’t diminish the leadership implications of what he’s saying. The challenges and opportunities of this age come down to human choices. The choices we make about how we interact with each other defines leaders and organizations, especially because AI is changing how we’re interacting. Here’s LinkedIn’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer, Aneesh Raman, talking about what he calls the five Cs, the core human skills for this era. Aneesh Raman: What you’ve got is sort of what I call the five Cs, this list I’ve developed with neuroscientists, courage, compassion, creativity, curiosity, and communication. Those are kind of the core skills I think that make us humans. Remember, our species until about 40,000 years ago wasn’t the only sapiens around. And we were never the biggest, we were never the fastest. What allowed us to emerge as the apex species on this planet is that we were able to adapt in really important ways by those five Cs in how we both told really complex stories through language and then how we organized to increase scale around things like nation states. So that’s going to come to the center of it all for us and we’ve got to shore those skills up. Lesson three: The most important decisions are simple and brave When uncertainty is high, clarity of mission matters more than ever. For some, new pressure served as a valuable reminder of what was most important. Here’s an exchange I had with Alexis McGill Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood, who’s been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration all year. Alexis McGill Johnson: I feel concern that a number of really critical institutions in our society are feeling a financial pressure to, I think in many ways, go against thir core values. Your values are … That’s your integrity. That’s who you are. So I cannot actually stand here and say, “We’re going to walk away from the very communities that we have committed ourselves to providing care for.” It sounds like you wish maybe that there was a little more bravery from some other leaders whose, I don’t know, whose missions may not be as clearly values-based all the time. Two things come to mind here. One is watching people obey in advance, comply in advance before the actual directives come, which I think sends a signal that people are willing to kind of stand down. But I think we’re also missing the collective action here, that there is a logic of collective action that means that when we actually stay kind of arms linked and say, “You know what? We are going to stand with the rule of law and what we believe the Constitution says here.” I think it really is about linking arms and understanding that that is really the kind of strongest attack back in some ways to the kinds of things that we are facing. When it comes to decision making, I often think of a framework Brian Chesky has talked about, focusing on what he calls principle decisions versus business decisions, choices that you’ll be proud of even if things don’t go your way. It seems pretty simple, but then the most important decisions often are if boiled down to their essence. Jessica Berman, commissioner of the National Women’s Soccer League, keeps a pile of children’s books on the coffee table in her office to remind her team to ground themselves in the basics. Here’s Berman. Jessica Berman: Every single leadership lesson you need in life, you learned when you were five It’s such a great analog for people to humanize and boil down sometimes hard to talk about or complex concepts that are really interpersonal. Is there a book that right now, a children’s book that you find yourself going to more? I have one. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. Guess what? You can’t go around it. You can’t go over it. You can’t go under it. You just have to go through it. And that is the story of challenges in life, and so we cite that in our office almost every single day.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s net worth surged to $749 billion late Friday after the Delaware Supreme Court reinstated Tesla stock options worth $139 billion that were voided last year, according to Forbes’ billionaires index. Musk’s 2018 pay package, once worth $56 billion, was restored by the Delaware Supreme Court on Friday, two years after a lower court struck down the compensation deal as “unfathomable.” The Supreme Court said that a 2024 ruling that rescinded the pay package had been improper and inequitable to Musk. Earlier this week, Musk became the first person ever to surpass $600 billion in net worth on the heels of reports that his aerospace startup SpaceX was likely to go public. In November, Tesla shareholders separately approved a $1 trillion pay plan for Musk, the largest corporate pay package in history, as investors endorsed his vision of morphing the EV maker into an AI and robotics juggernaut. Musk’s fortune now exceeds that of Google co-founder Larry Page, the worlds second-richest person, by nearly $500 billion, according to Forbes’ billionaires list. Rajveer Singh Pardesi, Reuters
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With its goofy block lettering and bright colors, the MetroCard feels like a relic, which it sort of isan early 1990s design, complete with gradients and drop shadows, thats managed to stick around long enough to become one of New Yorks defining symbols. At a time when generic minimalism and the sheen of AI-generated graphics have taken over, its unmistakable graphics feel refreshing. And the fact that a 31-year-old fare payment system is still in circulation when most tech today becomes obsolete in a matter of months is a remarkable achievement. But the end is near: on December 31st, the MTA will stop selling MetroCards and completely phase them out on an imminent date that the agency has yet to announce. Loving tributes have already begun as the city pays its respects to the slim piece of plastic that kept commuters moving for three decades. Its not as iconic as the token, but maybe in the future it will be, says Jodi Shapiro, curator of the New York City Transit Museum, which on December 17 opened FAREwell, Metrocard, a new exhibition on the cards history. While it might be New York City Transits second-most famous fare payment system, it has had a tremendous effect on the metropoliss culture, how people get around, and what good municipal design ought to accomplish. It all began with a big ask: getting New Yorkers to change their habits. Peter Stangl (MTA Chairman from 19911995) swipes a brand-new MetroCard through a turnstile, 1994. [Photo: New York Transit Museum] A generational shift For 40 years before the MetroCard, New Yorkers paid for the subway using tokens. Dropping it into a turnstile wasnt much different than paying with coins. The MetroCard was a technical leap that changed how riders experienced the public transit system. At the time of its introduction, not many people used swipe cards, Shapiro explains. If you were familiar with them, you probably worked some kind of job where there was a security measure. [Photo: Stephen Chernin/Getty Images] The idea to replace tokens percolated in the late 1970s, when city council member Carol Bellamy proposed the idea. But it took until the 1980s for the MTA to take fare cards seriously. Richard Ravitch, the chairman at the time, wanted to update the system and keep it on par with Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Paris, which already adopted magnetic strip cards. He argued that it would encourage off-peak ridership, curb fare evasion, and allow the sale of monthly passes. ’Passes will encourage mobility, Ravitch said, and enhanced mobility will increase commercial activity in this region. The MTA launched the MetroCard in January 1994 and existed side-by-side with tokens for nearly a decade. With the change to a fare card also came a change to the turnstiles. To riders, the subways built environment doesnt change all that much, but when it does, its bigthe Vignelli/Noorda signage, demolishing the El lines, the fare evasion spikes and fins. The MetroCard was responsible for a major physical shift: electrified turnstiles, which were required to power the magnetic strip readers, and with them electrified emergency exit gates that can be remotely opened by booth clerks. The 90s are calling Now back to the MetroCard itself. With a blue gradient background, MetroCard spelled out in golden block letters that ascend in angle and descend in size from the bottom right to top left corner, the card is 1990s to the core. The decade was a highly experimental time for graphic designers because of the freedom desktop publishing, a relatively new tool at the time, gave them. With typography in particular, designers obliterated the rules. They set type on curves, stretched and warped letterforms, and layered text. [Photo: New York Transit Museum] Cubic Transportation Systems designed the magnetic strip and the turnstile readers, but the exact designers of the graphics are unknown. The most Shapiro has been able to concretely find is that a group of people within the MTA was responsible for the visual direction. Compared to the disciplined Helvetica wayfinding signage throughout the system, the MetroCard waspure pop, especially after the MetroCard Gold replaced the original in 1997. What is MetroCard?, 1993. [Photo: New York Transit Museum Collection] It wasnt just a cosmetic change, Shapiro says. It indicated visually that the magnetic strip was functionally different. Magnetic strip technology improved in the first few years after the original card debuted and more information could be encoded onto it. The new cards enabled free transfers between buses and the subway and also let the MTA sell 7-day and 30-day unlimited passes. (The new magnetic strips also gave rise to green and white student passes and gold and white reduced-fare cards for seniors and people with disabilities.) For this iteration of the MetroCard, the agency reversed the colorsblue lettering on a gold gradient backgroundand added a drop shadow to the text. The MTA logo in the top corner switched to gold, too, giving the image a faint resemblance to a sunset. The Cardvaark, proposed mascot for MetroCard, 1993. [Photo: New York Transit Museum Collection] The MetroCards graphics were friendly and, like the genius of the Antenna-designed MetroCard machine, taught riders how to use it. (There was even a plan to have an affable MetroCard mascot named the Cardvaark to boost early adoption.) You can only swipe it in one direction and so the text orientation indicates which side should go up and the slanted lettering mimics the swiping motion. That clipped top-right corner? Its an accessibility cue to let riders with low vision know how to orient the card through the reader. [Photo: Kyeema Mizell/Adobe Stock] Human-centered design About that swipe: Its a motion that requires just the right speed: not too fast, not too slow, just brisk enough much to the annoyance and exasperation of tourists as well as daily riders who dont want to look like newbies. (The exact speed should be between 10 and 40 inches per second.) The cool thing about the MetroCard is the swipe mechanism is human powered, Shapiro says. SubTalk: Refill your MetroCard, 2004 [Image: New York Transit Museum Collection] Relying on the manual labor of riders had ripple effects, like traffic jams at turnstiles, but on the whole its a lot simpler than the alternative: a conventional magnetic ticket reader, which mechanically draws a card in, reads it, and spits it out. The machine could jam at any of those three steps, which is risky given the volume of straphangers in New York. Over 4.6 million people ride the subway each day, which means that a single turnstile can clock thousands of swipes a day; in 2011 the busiest turnstile saw over a million riders pass through. How many points of failure do you really want to have with a system that has that amount of transactions? Shapiro says. And the answer is you want to have as few points of failure as possible. When you have a human-powered card reader, that’s only really one point of failure. In the calculus of subway math, lost time and expense of fixing a jam is worth a lot more than personal embarrassment. (Just ask Hillary Clinton and George Pataki.) [Photo: Brandon Klein/Adobe Stock] From to fare passes to holy grails While the MetroCards front gave it its identity and functionality, its back turned it into a collectors item. This was by design from the beginning, too. The graphics enticed people to buy and use them and offered an advertising opportunity. The MTA described them as walking billboards. MetroCards are printed using flexography and CMYK color, a process that results in crisp, vivid imagery and a high level of customization. Since tokens were a big souvenir for people’s trips to New York, then why wouldn’t the Metro Card be one? Shapiro says. The MTA launched the MetroCard with four collectible fixed value cards$1.25 (a single-ride fare at the time), $5, $10, and $20. Each denomination featured a different scenic view of New York on the back: Grand Central Terminal, the World Financial Center, Times Square, and the skyline. First limited edition MetroCards, 1994 [Photo: New York Transit Museum Collection] Through the years, the MTA issued many more special-edition MetroCard that celebrated the city and its culture, over 400 in all. The Transit Museum has several thousand MetroCards in its collection and just a fraction of them are in the exhibition. Theyre grouped thematically based on recurring motifs including sports teams, musicians, artists, PSAs and safety ads, commemorative moments, and transit facts. There was definitely some fun being had, Shapiro says. The first five years alone featured the New York Rangers winning the Stanley Cup, an illustration of subway riders by the Brooklyn-born artist James Rizzi, and an ad for Gang Starrs album Moment of Truththe first time rap artists appeared on the card. Gang Starr is great, Shapiro says, but one of their members is from Boston so I cant forgive that. In 2012, the MTA changed the MetroCard rules to allow special graphics on the front amid a wider expansion of advertising in the system. (Before then, the MTA issued a MetroCard with a green logo in honor of climate week.) The Brooklyn Museum took advantage of this to publicize its David Bowie exhibition in 2018 as did Instagram with its content creators campaign from 2024, the very last limited-edition MetroCards printed. [Images: New York Transit Museum] The MTAs collectors item strategy worked. After the Supreme card launched to hordes of Hypebeasts rushing to vending machines (the NYPD had to barricade the lines and limit buyers to two cards apiece), resellers listed the limited-edition MetroCards for upwards of $1,000 (you can find them on the secondary market in the double digit range now). And some holdouts are still hoping their Biggie cards will fetch $5,000. But the rarest, according to Shapiro, is actually a special prepaid New York Times MetroCard mailed to newspaper subscribers in 1994. You couldn’t buy it from a booth or anything like that, she says. One is listed on eBay for $950. Its interesting to see something that is such a fundamental part of every New Yorkers commute becomes some kind of grail on the secondary market, Shapiro says. Its odd. While Shapiro doesnt personally collect MetroCards, she has held onto a select few, including Barbara Krugers designs released for the 2017 edition of Performa, the James Rizzi illustrations, and ads from defunct businesses like Kozmo and Urban Fetch. Compared to the MTAs annual operating budget, around $20 billion, the revenue it earned from MetroCard campaigns is anemic. From 2012 to 2018, the MTA averaged about $600,000 a year in ad revenue. It rose to $1 million in 2019 then dropped to zero during 2020 on account of the pandemic, then ticked up to $166,000 per year between 2021 and 2023. In 2024, promos earned $641,000. Cultural touchstones More than being trophies for transit nerds, the MetroCard simply became part of the fabric of the cityliterally. Ana Ratner, the editor of The Other Almanac and a lifelong New Yorker, recalls how she and her friends used to gather spent cards (broken boxes where riders discarded spent cards were jackpots) and make clothes out of them. I wasn’t that good at it, so I did square things like wallets and tote bags, but then friends of mine could make dresses and those are really cool, Ratner says. You would punch holes in different parts of the MetroCard, link them with metal loops or wire or string, and then you’d have the chain tunic dress. Teen Vogue even feature one of her friends with a MetroCard-wrapped desk in its Last Look column. She was extremely crafty, Ratner adds. Juan Carlos Pinto, an artist based in Brooklyn, has been making collages out of MetroCards since 2002, using the ads on the back to bring color to his mostly blue, gold, and yellow compositions. Of course I will miss the card, he says. It became my bread and butter. But the switch to other forms of payment is unavoidable. Change is good. Numerous other artists have used the card as material, too. The Transit Museums next MetroCard show, opening in March, will chronicle it as an artistic medium. On the conceptual side, Shawn Lawrence James, aka The Blue Hundreds, a 40-year-old artist born and raised in Bed-Stuy, wrote a song in 2015 about the MetroCard that was featured in an exhibition at MoMA PS1. In it, he describes a glitch within two-trip tickets (bending the card just right lets riders swipe in for free, a trick he learned 20 years ago) against a backdrop of rising transit costs and increased policing of fare beaters. He saw the song as a way to help people save money, stay out of trouble, and offer access on your own terms, James says. The song was kind of like a protest. As the MTA phases out the MetroCard this graphic ephemera and the culture around it will slowly fade away. When tap-to-pay through OMNY fully takes over, many riders will never need a dedicated physical object to ride New York City transit, a first in over 160 years. Since transportation started in New York City in the 1860s, you’ve always either had to have a ticket or a token, Shapiro says, noting that tokens existed and were in use before the subway opened. Its going to be weird to not have everyone using something tangible. With the MetroCards retirement comes another casualty of dematerialization (remember ticket stubs, loyalty cards, and handwritten correspondence?) and another retreat into the digital wallets trapped in our phone screens. As the MetroCard exits daily circulation, we also lose the collective experience it embodied. On any given day, thousandsmaybe even millionsof New Yorkers carried the same exact object, with the same messages printed on them. The MetroCard is a link to a specific place and time: a PSA about the dangers of subway surfing, a fact about the most checked-out book in the NYPL system (that would be The Snowy Day by Jack Keats), or a simple poem. When the MTA released the Biggie cards, in honor of what would have been his 50th birthday, fans lined up for hours for the chance to buy one. Whos not going to want this, being born and raised in Brooklyn? a woman from Brighton Beach told the New York Post. [Image: New York Transit Museum] Presumably, the MTA could offer limited-edition OMNY cards, but since their expiration date, usually five years after issuance, is longer than the MetroCard and its cost, $5 each, is also higher, theres less incentive to switch up the graphics. A spokesperson from the MTA says that moving to a contactless payment unlocks potential for new customer-friendly promotions and fare discounts and mentioned a Barilla activation that turned pasta boxes with an OMNY decal stuck on them into a one-way ticket. Has anyone collected these? I, for one, havent swiped my MetroCard in nearly a year (it expired on January 31, 2025) since contactless payments are so much more convenient, but the scuffed up card with a PSA about not going on the tracks for any reason remains in my wallet, and likely will for quite sometime as a tribute to the legendary object. [a]
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E-Commerce
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