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Lets do a thought exercise. If the role of the chief marketing officer is to oversee marketing and the role of the chief operating officer is to oversee operations, while the chief financial officers responsibility is to safeguard the organizations finances, then whats the responsibility of the chief executive officer? Surely, its more than overseeing executions or leading executives, yet the CEO naming convention doesnt give much insight as to what the role is or what its responsible for. This gets even more convoluted when an organization has both a CEO and a president. Whos responsible for what? Clearly, a president presides over the organization or nation stateits right there in its etymology. But, perhaps, the CEO nomenclature needs a bit more clarity. After over 200 in-depth CEO interviews at the Yale School of Managements Program on Stakeholder Innovation and Management since 2020, Jon Iwata has an interesting take on the matter. According to Iwata, the former IBM senior vice president and chief brand officer and now lecturer at Yale, the job of the CEO involves the challenge of refounding the company. That is, the founder started the organization for a reason, be it a year or a century ago, with a thesis about the business and why it exists beyond the category. Simon Sinek refers to this as a companys why; I like to think of it as the companys conviction. Its what they believe and are willing to stand for, even if it means losing business. I find conviction to be much more action-oriented because your organization can have a why but veer away from it in the face of inconvenience. However, you cant be convicted if you arent willing to stand for it. Through this lens of refounding, the CEOs job is to maintain the integrity of the founders intended conviction and align it to a holistic operating system within the organization. That operating system, of course, is culture. Like any culture, the ideology of a companys conviction informs the way the organization sees the world and how it engages in it. Over time, as an organization grows and each incremental team member grows further and further away from the founder and their intentions. Consider a start-up with five employees. Its likely that the sixth employee gets to spend a substantial amount of time with the founder and hear her preach the gospel of the organizations conviction. The sixth-hundred employee, on the other hand, after the companys 50th year of operation, not so much. Therefore, there must be a vehicle to evangelize the enduring convictions of the organization. Thats the responsibility of the CEO. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_16-9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_square_thumbnail.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"FROM THE CULTURE","dek":"FROM THE CULTURE is a podcast that explores the inner workings of organizational culture that enable companies to thrive, teams to win, and brands to succeed. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then this is the most important conversation in business that you arent having.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Listen","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLvojPSJ6Iy0T4VojdtGsZ8Q4eAJ6mzr2h","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91470870,"imageMobileId":91470866,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} This isnt merely a matter of proximity; its also a factor of context. Take the fictional start-up that grows into a multinational organization sixty years later. Over the course of those decades, the world around the organization changes substantially, which exerts force on how the organization behaves. Societal norms shift. Social expectations evolve. New technologies bloom. The result of these changes subsequently require change from the organization as well. For instance, there was once a time when child labor was considered acceptable, but society changed (thankfully), which necessitated a corresponding organizational change. While these adjustments happen outside the organization, its incumbent on its leadership to not merely blow in the wind of change but also stay anchored in its conviction, negotiating the tension between the present (todays context) and the past (the founders intention). The founder constructed the organizations point of view of the world in a world that no longer exists. Therefore, as the world around the organization changes and evolves, so, too, must the organization. What does the organization believe and what does that mean today? Its the CEOs responsibility to not only regurgitate the convictions of the organization but also recontextualize them for a contemporary world. Like the United States of America was founded 250 years ago on a conviction and a set of policies articulated in the Constitution, these ideas had to be recontextualized for a modern day. Hence, why we have amendments. The same goes for organizations. This is the job of the CEO, to reenvision the founding beliefs of the organization in a contemporary context and imbed this refounding conviction into the operating system of the organizationits culture. So, perhaps, a more apt title for the CEO would be the chief envisioning officer, the leader whose responsibility is to envision the founders intentions in todays world and activate the company to behave accordingly. This isnt merely a grammatical subversion, but an entire paradigm shift. Hear more about the idea of refounding in our conversation with Jon Iwata on our latest episode of the FROM THE CULTURE podcast. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_16-9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_square_thumbnail.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"FROM THE CULTURE","dek":"FROM THE CULTURE is a podcast that explores the inner workings of organizational culture that enable companies to thrive, teams to win, and brands to succeed. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then this is the most important conversation in business that you arent having.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Listen","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLvojPSJ6Iy0T4VojdtGsZ8Q4eAJ6mzr2h","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91470870,"imageMobileId":91470866,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
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E-Commerce
** NEEDS JUSTIN POT BYLINE ** Have you ever opened your favorite music-streaming app and wondered why all your playlists have the same five songs? It can be annoying, even if they happen to be five songs youre really into right now. And, make no mistake, they will be five songs youre really into right now, because thats how many of these services workand its not because everyone else has the same taste in music as you. For instance, any Spotify playlist that says created for in the header is catered to the individual user, based on their listening history. Theres nothing wrong with that, necessarilyit can be nice to know youre going to hear songs you like. But there are downsides. Mostly, this feature makes it hard to discover new music. Maybe you want a little bit of an idea of whats going on in the broader culture. Maybe you love discovering new songs. Music-streaming services have a tendency to stick the same songs into every playlist and radio station, but theres a way to get out of the same ol song rut. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! Time to escape the algorithms Ive actually got two Cool Tools to share with you today. Both of these tools will help you escape the music-streaming algorithms so that you can discover and listen to new music. You can start using either of them in an instant. 1 The first tool is called Spoqify, and it creates a clean version of any Spotify playlist or radio station so you can listen to music like an anonymous user. Spotify, without the suggestion-controlling historywhat a novel concept! The easiest way to use Spoqify is through a browser. To get started, simply: Copy the URL for any playlist or radio station on Spotify Change the t in spotify.com to a q Paste that new URL into a browser The service will instantly create a playlist for you containing what Spotify would show you if it had no prior knowledge of your listening habits. You can now listen to the updated playlist and even save it to your library. Though it is a bit of a workaround, you can still use Spoqify if youre on the Spotify app. Granted, its not as simple (youll need to install a tool called Spicetify), but it allows you to listen to Spoqify without ever leaving the service. (Also, is anyone else getting confused with all the Spotify/Spoqify references?!) 2 If you dont use Spotify or you dont want to mess with URLs, you could always check out Playlist Generatortodays second Cool Tool. This separate service lets you search for any song, artist, or album and creates a list of similar songs. It reminds me of Pandora, back in the day. Once you generate your playlist on Playlist Generator, just click on the Transfer buttonand you’ll be taken to their partner site, where you can export your playlist to any number of streaming services. Or, if you want to listen on Spotify, you can connect Playlist Generator with Spotify to save a list directly to your library. Playlist Generator is a little like Pandora back in its heyday. Ive been enjoying both of these services, though I recommend combining tools like these with a good community radio station, if your town has one. Theres nothing like real human DJs for finding new music. Both of the services mentioned here will work in any web browser. Theyre also both completely free. You can use both Spoqify and Playlist Generator without creating accounts, though you can connect your Spotify account to Playlist Generator if you want. Playlist Generator does also collect some information, but the sites privacy policy makes clear that it doesn’t sell or share your personal information in any shady-seeming ways. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
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E-Commerce
Over a long and industrious career, the investor George Soros developed a theory he calls reflexivity. The basic idea is that expectations dont form in a vacuum. They are shaped, in part, by our perceptions of what other people believe. The more widely an idea is accepted, the more likely we are to accept it ourselves and that, in turn, reinforces the collective wisdom. If many believe that, say, the stock market will go up or that AI will create an economic boom, were more likely to believe it too. That belief then drives behavior: investors buy stocks, companies pour money into AI, and the prediction begins to fulfill itself. All of this only adds fuel to the fire. Nobody wants to get left out of a good thing. Soros made a lot of money betting against reflexivity because once the pattern of self-reference and self-reinforcement takes hold, things are bound to overshoot. Expectations drift far beyond underlying realityand eventually snap back. It seems something similar is brewing. As big institutions accumulate unprecedented power, a growing backlash seeks to take power back. The rise and fall of Porters competitive advantage For decades, the dominant view of business strategy was shaped by Michael Porter’s theory of competitive advantage. In essence, he argued that the key to long-term success was to dominate the value chain by maximizing bargaining power over suppliers, customers, new market entrants, and substitute goods. Yet as AnnaLee Saxenian explained in Regional Advantage, around the same time that Porters ideas were gaining traction among CEOs in the establishment industries on the East Coast, a very different way of doing business was gaining steam in Silicon Valley. The firms there saw themselves not as isolated fiefdoms, but as part of a larger ecosystem. The two models are built on very different assumptions. The Porter model saw the world as made up of transactions. Optimize your strategy to create efficiencies, extract the maximum value out of every transaction and you will build a sustainable competitive advantage. The Silicon Valley model, however, saw the world as a web of connections and optimized their strategies to widen and deepen linkages. If you see your business environment as neatly organized into specific industries, everybody is a potential rival. Even your allies need to be viewed with suspicion. So, for example, when a new open source operating system called Linux appeared in the 1990s, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer considered it a threat and immediately attacked, calling it a cancer. Yet even as Ballmer went on the attack, the business environment was changing. As the internet made the world more connected, technology companies found that leveraging that connectivity through open source communities was a winning strategy. Microsofts current CEO, Satya Nadella, declared that the company now loves Linux. Ultimately, it recognized that it couldnt continue to shut itself out and compete effectively in a networked world. Preferential attachment, power laws, and network collapse Phil Knight built Nike into exactly the type of business Porter imagined. It created an impressive marketing machine built on partnerships with famous athletes, dominance of retail channels, including its own proprietary outlets, and an optimized supply chain that kept costs to a minimum. The company was a paragon of sustainable competitive advantage. Then, in the early 1990s, writer and activist Jeffrey Ballinger published a series of investigations about Nikes use of sweatshops in Asia. People were shocked by the horrible conditions that workersmany of them childrenwere subjected to. In many cases, factory owners lived outside the countries where the facilities were located and had little contact with employees. As the network scientist Albert-László Barabási and his colleagues discovered, this is exactly the type of asymmetric vulnerability that even the most powerful fall prey to. A firm like Nike becomes dominant because of a phenomenon called preferential attachment, sometimes also called the Matthew effect. Essentially, the rich get richer. What happens is that once a node in a network builds a small advantage over competitors, it is more likely to attract new connections than smaller players. That creates a power-law distribution in which the network is dominated by large hubs that are exponentially larger than their competitors. Yet the sweatshop scandal threatened to reverse that process, making rivals without scandals marginally more attractive to consumers than Nike. That shift, however small at first, could cascade, allowing rivals to strengthen relationships with suppliers and retailers, widening and deepening their corporate networks at Nikes expense. At first, Knight was defiant, but ultimately, even he recognized he needed to give in. As he would later write in his memoir, Shoe Dog, We had to admit. We could do better. Going beyond its own factories, the company established the Fair Labor Association and published a comprehensive report of its own factories. Backlashes, old and new Today, we live in a new era ofbig business dominance. Just seven companies dominate the U.S. stock market. The economist Thomas Philippon and his colleagues have documented how the growing dominance of large firms across increasingly consolidated industries has led to a decrease in competition in the United States. A Federal Reserve report had similar findings. Weve been here before. The Gilded Age in the late 19th century was marked by enormous investment in a breakthrough technology: railroads. Vast fortunes were made and a breed of oligarchs like Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Rockefeller created industry trusts that allowed them to dominate the United States, both commercially and politically. Yet every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution. The Gilded Age was soon followed by the Progressive Era and the rise of the muckrakers epitomized by Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, and McClures Magazine, who exposed corruption and exploitation on a massive scale and shifted the political winds. New legislation and enforcement tools, such as the Sherman Antitrust Act, led to a leveling of the playing field. Today, we are seeing similar signs. The Australian government has banned social media for children under 17. Frustration with the low-quality content that AI has flooded the internet with led The Economist to name slop as its Word for the Year. Elon Musks effort to bring Silicon Valley management techniques to government with DOGE was a massive failure, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Against this backdrop is a growing New Brandeis movement, which seeks to reinvigorate antitrust efforts and restore competitive markets. After gaining traction during the Biden Administration, it has mostly been dormant since, but things can change quickly. Larger risks amid lesser resilience In 2008, when the global financial crisis hit, the world was a relatively stable place. While the U.S. was still engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, those were fairly low-level conflicts at that point. The U.S. federal deficit was $450 billion and the U.S. national debt was $10 trillion, both less than a third of what they are now. Today, the world is a very different place. Beyond the worsening economic situation, we have the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. Russia, China, and other bad actors are engaged in a massive information war against the West, fueling populist surges and political turmoil in Western nations. The Atlantic Alliance, once a force for stability, is in shambles. Many would argue that, today, we are in a new Gilded Age, in which powerful industrialists, unbeholden to the rule of law, regularly engage in predatory behavior, but their actions are often shielded from view by technology, buried in complexity. When they are called before Congress, the peoples representatives seem lost, unable to meaningfully challenge their power. And much like the Gilded Age was marked by continued cycles of government-sponsored overinvestment and financial panics, today we are likely on a path to an AI bubble that will rival the massive panics we had in 1873 and 1893. Unfortunately, unlike during the 2008 financial crisis, our capacity to manage the fallout will be greatly diminished. Clearly, we are on a path that is taking us into rough waters. As Soros described, once the pattern of self-reference and self-reinforcement has taken hold, systems dont correct gently. They overshootand the eventual snapback is rarely orderly or kind. Correction will not come from markets alone. It will come through backlashpolitical, social, and institutionalwhen those left bearing the costs decide the system no longer serves them.
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E-Commerce
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