Lessons of Rapid Response for 2026

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2:07signs of slowing down. So to help listeners to offer some grounding, we've pulled five lessons from our rapid response coverage about how to best operate amid such ambiguity. These are lessons drawn from the on-the-ground experiences of leaders deep in the trenches of disruption. They offer equal parts inspiration and instruction on how to turn uncertainty into opportunity. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Lessons of Rapid Response.

2:44Lesson number one. As tech moves fast, we need to move even faster. One of our Rapid Response guests joked that talking about AI has become like a party game. Every time someone uses the phrase, we should all have to take a drink. But the ubiquity of the AI chatter reflects the deep impact that the technology is having across industries, across roles, across business models. 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, Chris Valenzuela, talking with me about planning in the eye of the AI storm.

3:31how far out do you think of your like product roadmap you know or is or is that something you're like reassessing all the time yeah i mean it's it's a weekly thing to be honest it's it's uh it's it happens like if you're planning on a quarterly basis you're not gonna make it you're done like it's it's in four weeks you're like gonna get leapfrogged and like things will change we have long-term visions and we have long-term ambitions of where things when we We need to take them. We've historically taken this like 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 like play and experiment.

4:08And then setting the boundaries and the limits is kind of the hard thing. Because if it's too open, then like there's nothing really like directionally happening. If it's too broad, then it's just an objective that's very clear. If it's like 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. Like that open-ended research approach that's less focused by goals, but much more by stepping stones of like discovery. Chris's approach is so different from traditional leadership, leaning into experimentation rather than specific goals, and reframing plans on a weekly basis.

4:50It's an approach that could make a lot of people uneasy. I talked about this with Clara Shai, 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 Clara. How do leaders strike the balance between, I got to be in this, versus it's not really showing any measurable impact now, yet? It's such an important question. I mean, 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.

5:36Another 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. And that area I can be more patient. I can be more. And I should be patient. Not patient, 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. Right.

6:10What's the day to day? What's the quarter? And where do I want to be? 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. We've had rapid response guests during 2025 talk about radical changes in healthcare delivery and coding and marketing and even online dating. 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.

6:58be? The term AI, the important term is artificial. We are now living in a world where you cannot know for certain. I mean, there could be digital fingerprints that this is real, but we're going to live in a world where it's not clear that you're seeing what you're seeing is real. In other words, now anything - You can't tell. You won't be able to tell. And I think that's maybe the point of it, that in the future, if it's on a screen, it will be artificial or it could be artificial. And so you want to ride a trend or you run the opposite of a trend. And the opposite of artificial is real. The opposite of screen is the real world.

7:38And so I think that the real world will not change that much in the next three years. I think we're going to basically create this digital world staring at a screen that's highly artificial. It's going to get more and more immersive and there's going to be a physical world. And again, like, you know, people want real connections in the real world. Why are people feeling so lonely right now? Because, you know, they're connecting with, you know, before reason until recently, 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.

8:07No one changed someone else's mind, YouTube comment section. And now pretty soon we're going to have a situation where your friends are going to be AIs. And like, like it's so, So there has to be this movement to reel. Brian's business at Airbnb, of course, relies on in-person interaction through homestays 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. Here's Adi Ignatius, longtime editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review, talking about the big takeaways from his tenure. You know, the search for the kind of purpose of business, you know, what we were talking about before where, you know, for 50 years, it was all about the share price.

8:54I think we need a new sort of consensus of the new paradigm. And, you know, maybe that the stakeholder stuff was too fuzzy or unclear. I won't say woke because I don't think that's a helpful word ever. but is there a theory of the case that that that we can all agree on that what is the responsibility of a company of a ceo and i guess the one other thing is that you know the soft skills you know uh how do you interact with people i mean the things that that seem sort of basic they really matter and and they matter kind of up and down the hierarchy you know from the from the CEO down to the lowest level.

9:39Business is how people interact with one another. So, you know, I came to understand that that stuff is really important. 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, Anish Raman, talking about what he calls the five C's, the core human skills for this era. Anything that is routinizable is going to be the technology. And that's both physical and intellectual as you think about robots aided by AI taking on more and more physical labor. So what you've got is sort of what I call the five C's, this like list I've developed with neuroscientists, courage, compassion, creativity, curiosity, and communication.

10:32Those 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 C's 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.

11:14When uncertainty is high, clarity of mission matters more than ever. During 2025, I asked a bunch of rapid response guests about their organization's mission and values. because many leaders struggled to apply existing frameworks to new policies and demands, from law firms to universities to major brands. But 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. The administration strategy sometimes seems like they want to flood the zone with so much to sort of push opponents, push organizations, corporate organizations to kind of give up on something in order to protect, you know, a higher priority.

12:04Do you feel any of that pressure to like prioritize in a different way in this environment? You know, I can say I feel disappointment. I feel concern that a number of really critical institutions in our society, The very institutions that kind of make up our demos, that make up our civic education and learning environment, that make up the kind of backbone of our jurisprudence and kind of legal foundations, corporations, you know, are feeling a financial pressure to, I think in many ways, go against their core values. There may be lots of ways in which they are reconciling that. Your values are, you know, that's your integrity.

12:49That's who you are. And 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, right? One is, you know, watching people obey in advance, right? 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, right?

13:27That 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, you know, with the rule of law and what we believe the Constitution says here. You know, 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 principal decisions versus business decisions, choices that you'll be proud of, even if things don't go your way.

14:04It 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 Jessica. Every single leadership lesson you need in life, you learned when you were five. And I'll just give a recent example. Actually, this morning we were on a board call with my owners. So I report to the 16 owners in the NWSL. By the way, for those of you who have only one boss, I do not recommend reporting to 16.

14:45It's hard. You know when you know. but on the call I got a little ping on slack from someone on my team that quoted one of the children's books which is if you give a mouse a cookie guess what happens if you give a mouse a cookie they're gonna want a glass of milk that's what happens when you give a mouse a cookie that's one of the 15 books on my desk so people on my staff are constantly like pulling those out and I'm like, yes, you get it. And it's like, it's such a great, it's such a great analog for people to humanize and like boil down sometimes hard to talk about or complex concepts or things that are really interpersonal.

15:27Is there a book that like right now, a children's book that you find yourself going to more? Is there a lesson that you pull from that? I have one. We're going on a bear hunt. It's relates to what you just said. 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. We'll be back with more lessons of rapid response after the break. Stay with us.

16:13This is Mike Nicholas, Capital One business customer and co-founder of Ansett Uncles, a plant-based restaurant and community space in Brooklyn, New York. And he's telling us how they started a product line. We already had a space in the community. The food was an extension of our lifestyle and our values. So we know we wanted to create something that was an offshoot to that. Our pepper sauce. That's my grandmother's recipe. That's like a liquid gold, right? If someone wants to approach us and ask us, what do we do? We provide flavor. Growing a product line is no small investment, but Mike and his wife and co-founder Nicole were able to manage with the help of their Capital One Business Card.

16:51Working with Capital One Business, we're able to leverage our limits and utilize those points, making sure we can continue the scale at the speed that we needed to go. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards. Every company wants to grow, but anyone who's scaled knows the truth. Growth creates complexity, and complexity kills growth. Bureaucracy creeps in, culture frays, and suddenly the energy that built your business starts working against it. I'm Jeff Berman, host of Masters of Scale. And when you want unfiltered insight on fighting that drift, turn to Founders Mentality, the CEO Sessions, with executive advisor Jimmy Allen.

17:39Each episode, leaders from companies like Audible, Walmart China, and AWS reveal how they stayed fast, focused, and human, even at massive scale. Founders Mentality, the CEO Sessions, business should be simple. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. The business world moves fast, and you don't have time to wait for your AI to turn into ROI. Because any business can use AI. The real breakthrough is how you use it. IBM helps you turn AI into more than potential. It helps you turn it into smarter ways of working and ultimately scaling. Let's create smarter business, IBM. Before the break, we shared three lessons of rapid response drawn from our 2025 episodes and directly applicable to 2026.

18:31Now, two additional lessons featuring insights from the CEO of Sesame Workshop, the CMO of Autodesk, and iconic chef and humanitarian, Jose Andres. Let's jump back in. Lesson four. It's always time to take risks, try new things, and dream big. Wall Street analysts may focus on the numbers, but so much business success is intangible and emotional. In uncertain environments, we tend to revert to what we know. It's comforting, but it can be counterproductive, which is just one reason co-owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves and billionaire entrepreneur Mark Laurie loves stretch goals. Here's Mark talking with me about how he deploys stretch goals at food delivery venture Wonder.

19:19You've set out these big public goals, 95 locations by next year, IPO ready by 2027 with a target valuation of$30 billion. Does putting these goals out in the world add pressure? Like it might be easier to just grow and announce milestones rather than set targets that, you know, maybe you won't meet. Yeah, and it's true. There's always a possibility you don't meet the goals. But I think the probability of hitting the goals goes up because you reverse engineer it and you work backwards and you get the company aligned investor. Everybody's like understands like this is the size of the prize. This is the goal.

19:58We're working backwards from this. This is why we need this amount of capital. This is why we need to do X, Y and Z in the next three months, six months, 12 months. So sort of part manifestation of it, you know, by putting it out there and then part, you know, being able to properly plan for it. So it doesn't mean like, you know, if you don't hit it, you failed, right? But we are giving us the highest probability of getting there by putting these goals out there. The only drawback is, you know, you look foolish or people will say, hey, you failed or you set a goal and you didn't hit it or, okay, fine, I can deal with all that.

20:34There's way more upside than downside. 2026 will undoubtedly reveal plenty of upside, but we'll need to take the right kinds of risks to unlock them. Here's Dara Treceder, chief marketing officer of Autodesk, talking with me about how to stand out in a crowded marketplace without turning off potential customers. You talked to me previously about this idea of opine with a spine, right? That to break through, you have to say something sharp. But you're also saying that the risk is higher than ever, but you have to take that risk. Like it's, there's no way out of this bind. There's no way out. Let me tell you, we got to give CLOs and marketers, all marketers at all levels, we got to give marketers a break.

21:15It is a tough world out there. And so, yes, you have to opine with the spine, but you got to be careful what you opine on. So you need to pick the thing that truly makes sense for your brand and business. You cannot opine on everything. If you speak about everything, you're speaking about nothing. you know and if you end up speaking about things that you don't have not earned the right to speak about you don't have the credibility to speak about you could end up in some real hot waters that you don't want to be on not the not the good kind of bath the scowled kind of bath so there really is that um there really is that thoughtfulness that has to go into it and you don't want to be walking back things which we've seen some brands get themselves into and then the blowback is really bad yes yes and it's like but you have to cut through so it really is that you want to be in healthy tension not toxic tension so it's almost like you but there's got to be some tension because if there is no tension there is no greatness you're not achieving the outsized commercial outcome so how do you get to tension that is healthy but it must not cross the line into toxic.

22:25Lesson five, when the unexpected hits, and it will, look for the opportunities. We all hate getting bad news, but it is inevitable. It's how we react to those challenges that defines us. Few entities have had headwinds in 2025 quite as fierce as those faced by public media outlets. Sherry Westin, the CEO of Sesame Workshop, which produces Sesame Street, talked to me about dealing with slash government grants. I don't ever remember a more difficult, more challenging year than this past year. There were some really difficult decisions and periods. No one ever wants to have to, you know, lay off 20 percent of their staff.

23:09But layoffs and budget pressures weren't the only obstacles Sherry faced. In the midst of this, Sesame Street's longtime streaming partner, HBO, bailed out of their partnership. Yet out of those lemons came Lemonade, a new arrangement with Netflix. Here's me talking with Sherry about it. Last year at this time, you were on HBO or Max or whatever they were calling it at that point. Then HBO dropped the show, Netflix came in. Was this all by design on your end? Well, listen, I mean, it all worked out really well. And I will say that. And we announced it as a public-private partnership between Netflix and PBS because it was so important that we not only got the incredible reach that Netflix offers, but also that we were still available for all children across the U.S.

23:59on PBS. HBO Max was clear that children's was not their priority. So we don't take it personally, you know, and we still have a great relationship. But Netflix is such a great place for us to be. As of today, we are reaching children in 190 countries. That's 330 million households in over 30 languages. And it's the first time in 56 years that we're reaching this many children all over the world. So that is something to celebrate. There's just no reward for wallowing in what isn't working. One of my favorite conversations of the year was with Jose Andres, restaurateur and founder of aid organization World Central Kitchen.

24:40No one lives in the duality of good living, fancy restaurants, and tough situations like natural disasters and war zones quite like Jose. But despite his worries, he always finds a way to keep optimistic. And there's no better way to round out our lessons. So listen in. Here's Jose. I am optimistic in the way that in life, humans, we learn how to adapt. And we seem sometimes we learn the lessons. Even it seems we only learn them short term and we have a short memory. And then we need to go back to the mistakes of the past to remind ourselves that this other is always a better way. The last issues with tariff happened, what, over 100 years ago?

25:31And I guess nobody is alive that went through the great pains that those tariffs created. Therefore, sometimes you have to go through problems to remind every human how good our life is, how much we have to work to keep improving what doesn't work. But my God, I'm asking everybody, go out right now. walk in your cities, walk in the countryside, take a look at the trees with the flowers and the butterflies and the children playing in the cup grounds in poor neighborhoods and in rich neighborhoods. Use people walking alongside 50 years married hand by hand and just smiling that they spend their lives together.

26:16It's the hospitals, the nurses, the doctors doing the best. Take a look around airports that they function in a very amazing way that they don't know how. Things actually work. We humans, we've been building in the last post-World War II a good world. A good world that in America is full of imperfections and that we need to work together to fix them. Of course. But you don't fix them burning everything down. You fix them by coming together to the table, realizing that there is problems that must be solved. Problems never will be solved by finger pointing. Problems will always be solved sitting down in the table and coming together in how we find common ground.

27:04That's the way we build good intent, good empathy, good policy that then becomes good politics because it's on behalf of all Americans. Of everyone. That's the way we should be doing it. So that's why, in a way, I'm hopeful. I hope Jose's spirit of coming together and hopefulness stays with you, whatever the adventures of 2026 bring our way. These lessons that we've outlined are gauged to provide some guidance as you navigate your own challenges and opportunities. We'll continue to come to you with Rapid Response every Tuesday and every Friday to help keep you updated in this topsy-turvy world.

27:45I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.

27:58Meet Emily Warden, Capital One Business customer and owner of Emily Warden Designs, a handcrafted fine jewelry store in Richmond, Virginia that got its start in a dorm room. I said I was going to try it for a year. I signed up to do craft shows, trade shows, got into a few local boutiques, and then things just picked up from there. Emily's steady success at trade shows gave her the capital she needed to invest in a storefront. Every cent that was made was going back into the business. I was nervous that we weren't going to get enough traffic, but we had a huge turnout. With Emily Warden Designs firmly establishing itself in the Richmond community, Emily would need to significantly increase inventory in order to keep up with demand.