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If youve ever felt like your pet knows exactly when to pull you away from the stress of your computer screen, you arent alone. A landmark study surveying over 30,000 pet owners in 20 different countries found that 78% of dog or cat owners report that their pets remind them to take breaks during work or tasks, with 50% of the participants saying this happens daily. The study, which was conducted by YouGov on behalf of Mars, is the largest international survey of its kind in the world. The findings resonated deeply with David Reilly, Global VP at Mars Petcare. If my dog’s at daycare, I don’t take a break at lunch time, he says. But if my dogs’s not at daycare, somehow miraculously, I find the space to create up an hour to take my dog on a walk. Knowing that his relationship with his own pet had such an impact on his mental health, David was excited by the data. I think 46% of people globally report their mental well-being is their number-one health priority and 56% of the population of the world has a pet. So if we can help unlock this idea that the pet could be your well-being superhero . . . then theres a real opportunity there, he says. To do this, Mars Petcare team needed to seek further expertise. We have a deep knowledge of pets and we actually have a deep knowledge of the bond between people and pets. But we aren’t experts in human mental health, says Reilly. The solution was to collaborate with consumer mental health company Calm. Together, Mars and Calm collaborated on a collection of content meant to help pet lovers think about their bond with their pets as ways to improve their own well-being. Its launch marks the first pet-inspired collection featured on Calm. The content on Calm will include: A series of sleep stories inspired by the emotional connection between people and their pets. A series of guided meditations meant to help listeners reflect on the ways pets support their mental wellness. A series of breathing exercises. On Marss pet advice platform Kinship, Mars and Calm are launching the interactive quiz My Pet Guru, which helps pet owners learn which of six wellbeing superpowers their pet has based on questions about their personalities and behaviors. Together, were helping more peopleand their petsexperience the proven benefits of the human-animal bond through real stories, science-backed tools, and supportive content, says Greg Justice, chief content officer at Calm. Once the insights are rich . . . it doesn’t need to be overly clinical says Reilly. The researchers, pet experts, and content creators, worked together to find the sweet spot of ensuring that the content was true to what we’d heard, but also really accessible and also engaging for pet owners or other people who love pets. Mars and Calm are also seeking touching stories from pet owners to inform the wave of pet stories from Calm. What I’m looking forward to, honestly, is hearing the stories that people share. Pets genuinely make a really incredible impact on people’s lives, says Reilly.
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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. Long before the Trump administration tapped Elon Musk to cut federal costs and headcount via the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), business leaders and politicians have been trying to find ways to make government leaner, less bureaucratic, and more like a well-run corporation. In 1982, Ronald Reagan asked J. Peter Grace, CEO of W.R. Grace & Co., to lead a private sector committee to root our government waste. While campaigning for the presidency in 1992, Bill Clinton promised to radically change the way government operatesto shift from top-down bureaucracy to entrepreneurial government. The notion that federal agencies and programs can be run more like businesses has animated the Oval Office aspirations of executives such as Michael Bloomberg, Howard Schultz, and Doug Burgum. Public-sector playbooks for CEOs But are there lessons that executives in the private sector can learn from their public counterparts? Businesses certainly have benefitted from government; tech companies owe a debt to DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, for funding the predecessor to the internet, for example. Local governments can be particularly good at empowering employees at all levels to innovate, something that can confound large corporations. Rick Wartzman and Lawrence Greenspun, when they were with the Drucker Institute, shared the story of how a single front-line employee and two-middle managers in South Bend, Indiana, streamlined the citys application for tax-abatement to four pages from 22 and moved the process online. The mayor who challenged them to innovate? Pete Buttigieg, who went on to become U.S. Secretary of Transportation during the Biden administration. Government has produced and shaped other notable leaders, including Christina Romer, the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration; and Maura Healey, the current governor of Massachusetts, whom I happened to interview last week at Think 2025, IBMs annual event for senior business and technology leaders (Fast Company was a strategic media partner at Think). At a time when many forces are pushing government entities to be more like businesses, I asked both of them to reflect on what business can learn from government. Heres what they had to say: Maura Healey, governor, Massachusetts: Nobody has ever asked me that question. In many ways, government can do better by operating like a business, but in other cases that just doesnt hold. Government is the place where things have to get done that the market isnt going to do. As governor, I have to be attentive to the needs of seven million residents, some of whom voted for me and some of whom didnt, many of whom have competing interests. In government you have to find a way to account for all of that. It gets messy; it gets noisy; but at the end, it helps in terms of productive policy formulation when you have that kind of stakeholder incorporation. “For purposes of creating a better worldI think in big termsa world where there is an abundance of energy, of housing, of healthcare, of transportation, of economic opportunity and prosperity for every child, it has to come from a broader lens than sometimes might be incentivized by the bottom line. Christina Romer, professor emerita, Graduate Division, University of California at Berkeley, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers: Government policymaking is often chided for being slow, and it can indeed be frustratingly bureaucratic and incremental. But moving fast and breaking things is not what Social Security recipients want when they are waiting for their checks or what the public expects when the FAA is reconfiguring flight patterns and deciding control-tower staffing. At their best, government actions are carefully researched, broadly vetted, and deliberately implemented. This approach wouldnt work in every business setting, but it could certainly help prevent many bad decisions and unintended consequences. Something else that impressed me during my time in government was the high quality of government workers. Far from being the lazy, overpaid bureaucrats they are often caricatured to be, I found government workers to be knowledgeable, hard-working, and committed to serving the public. Businesses would certainly benefit if they could generate that kind of loyalty and passion in their workers. Good enough for government work Are you a business leader who has worked in government? What did you learn from your experiences in the public sector? Send your stories to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. I may include insights in a future newsletter. Read and listen to more: good government The first 100 days at the SBA Gen Z really wants to work for the federal government Reclaiming the phrase good enough for government work The Computer Freaks podcast tells the untold story of how the internet almost didnt happen
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E-Commerce
A group backed by tech billionaires spent years and $800 million secretly buying up over 60,000 acres of land in Solano County, California, 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. The groupwhich calls itself California Forever and is funded by Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Laurene Powell Jobs, among othersplanned from the start to build a brand-new city for as many as 400,000 residents. But to do that they needed voter approval to change the countys development rules. Just before heading to the ballot this past November, California Forever yanked its initiative despite spending over $9 million on its campaign. Now it seems California Forever may have found a way to develop the property it owns without needing to win an election. The pulled ballot measure caught the attention of Bret Prebula, the city manager of Suisun City, a small city in the area. It was the trigger, he tells Fast Company, for coming up with the idea to expand the citys borders and annex nearby land as a way to address the citys finances and budget deficit. There is only a small bit of undevelopable marshland to the citys west; to the east are the vast tracts of land owned by the tech titans. Prebula brought his idea to the Suisun City council last year, and in January it voted four to one to explore the possibility of annexing land. It was a heated meeting, with critics bringing up California Forevers likely involvement, but the mayor of Suisun City chastised attendees multiple times that California Forever was not on the agenda. And yet, when Suisun City later sent letters out to property owners surrounding the city, California Forever was the main group that responded to indicate its interest. The map Suisun City produced of what land its looking at annexing is exactly where California Forevers proposed city would be, says Sadie Wilson, director of planning and research at The Greenbelt Alliance, which has been leading the opposition to California Forevers development plans. A few weeks later, Rio Vista, another small city in the area, announced it, too, would explore annexation in response to Suisun Citys announcement. The city voted to join the effort to ensure that, as City Manager Kristina Miller said at the meeting, it will have a seat at the table so that, for lack of a better word, we are not on the menu. Many of the councilmembers took the same stance, voicing their opposition to California Forevers plans while saying, in the words of Councilmember Rick Dolk, the city needs to take a defensive position. Indeed, Rio Vistas hand may have been forced: the land Suisun City is looking at annexing thats owned by California Forever goes right up to the citys west border. If it didnt join in, the city could feel the impacts and get none of the benefits, Wilson says. At a meeting in mid-April, the two cities signed a memorandum of understanding to avoid being pitted against each other. Suisun City is also pursuing an agreement with California Forever that would require the group to cover all of the costs of consultants and other needs the cities will have as it explores the idea of annexation so it doesnt have to spend its own money. That could also include an agreement that California Forever wont put another measure on Solano Countys ballot next year as the group vowed to do after it pulled last years initiative. For California Forever, it seems that annexation is the focus right now, says Nate Huntington, resilience manager at the Greenbelt Alliance. Representatives from the group have attended meetings in both cities in which these plans were discussed. In response to a request for comment, a California Forever spokesperson says: We look forward to working with Suisun City, Rio Vista, and Solano County to bring new industries, amazing neighborhoods, and new sources of tax revenue to the region. The annexation process is typically lengthy, often unfolding over several years. Before either city can expand its sphere of influence to include additional territory, the city councils must first vote in favor of the proposal. They must then reach an agreement with the county on how to share property tax revenue. After that, detailed plans and analyses must be developed to outline what the expansion would involve and how the cities would provide municipal services to the new areas. The plan must then be approved by the Solano Local Agency Formation Commission, which oversees jurisdictional boundaries. The process also requires a municipal service review, an environmental review, and multiple city council votes. But opponents of California Forevers development plan point out that the group has a track record of trying to do things differently than what is typical. There are roadblocks, but also I think theyve shown theyre really willing to go around the normal process, Wilson says. California Forever is very powerful and they have a lot of resources. Prebula, for his part, sees it similarly, saying that it could make sense, if annexation moves forward, to see if the state legislature will pass legislation shortening the process as it did for the construction of a new NBA stadium. But the deal could be a raw one for the cities if they move forward. Although they would get upfront development fees from California Forever, a fiscal study of the groups ballot initiative commissioned by the county last year found that, had it won and developed the city, the county would over time actually lose $103.1 million, and that was under an arrangement where all tax revenue would have flowed to the county. If the cities go forward with annexation, theyll have to share tax revenue with each other and the county, earning even less. Prebula rebuts those findings, arguing the analysis happened way too quickly and was based on archaic ways of delivering services. Opponents of California Forevers efforts say the annexation plan reflects the groups belief that it cant win at the ballot box, especially when they got off on such a bad start and theres so much distrust, Huntington says. The group kept its plans secret until the New York Times revealed who was behind the land acquisition in 2023. California Forever also sued local ranchers and farmersmost of whom had refused to sell their landalleging they violated antitrust law when they collude[d] by holding out for higher offers and seeking $510 million in damages. Many of those landowners were ultimately forced to settle and give up their property. Jan Sramek, former Goldman Sachs trader and CEO of California Forever, told Fast Company last August that the group would refuse to drop the case. They also say it represents an end-run around the public. If you go the annexation route, there is no vote, noted Duane Kromm, a former member of the Solano County Board of Supervisors who was involved in opposing California Forevers ballot initiative. Prebula argued that county residents voice can be heard without a public vote and that his approach brings more people into the conversation when you have a select group of people who can foster a process and a project. That, he argued, is what democracy is, its just not about a vote. But Wilson argued that its a way to go around the process California Forever should have followed. Its saying you dont care about the publics vote, dont care about the county process, she says. Time and again they seem to just be doing whatever they want and not respecting the people or laws or processes or communities.
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E-Commerce
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