Lessons of Rapid Response for 2026

BOB SAFIAN: Hey, everyone. Welcome to a special episode of Rapid Response. This year has been filled with so many twists and turns in geopolitics, in trade and tariffs, in AI and new technology. It’s an unprecedented environment to lead a business and to navigate a career. Looking to 2026, that pace of disruption shows no signs 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 amidst 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.

[THEME MUSIC]

Copy LinkLesson 1: 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, 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?

CRISTÓBAL VALENZUELA: Yeah, it’s a weekly thing, to be honest. It happens, 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 have long-term visions and we have long-term ambitions of where we need to take them. 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, like that open-ended research approach that’s less focused by goals, but much more by stepping stones of discovery.

SAFIAN: Cris’ 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 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?

CLARA SHIH: It’s such an important question. 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 it’s going to take –

SAFIAN: And I should be patient? Or – 

SHIH: 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. What’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?

Copy LinkLesson 2: 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.

BRIAN CHESKY: The term AI, the important term is artificial. We are now living in a world where you cannot know for certain, there could be digital fingerprints that this is real, but we’re going to live in a world where it’s not clear that what you’re seeing is real. In other words, now anything – 

SAFIAN: You can’t tell.

CHESKY: 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. So you want to ride a trend or you want to ride the opposite of a trend. And the opposite of artificial is real. The opposite of screen is the real world. 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, people want real connections in the real world. Why are people feeling so lonely right now? Because they’re connecting with, until recently, they were connecting with people they don’t know, arguing with people on the internet.  Your Instagram followers aren’t coming to your funeral. No one changed someone else’s mind in the 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.

SAFIAN: Brian’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. Here’s Adi Ignatius, longtime editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review, talking about the big takeaways from his tenure.

ADI IGNATIUS: The search for the kind of purpose of business, what we were talking about before where for 50 years it was all about the share price, I think we need a new consensus of the new paradigm. And it may be 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 we can all agree on of what is the responsibility of a company, of a CEO? And I guess the one other thing is that the soft skills, how do you interact with people? The things that seem sort of basic, they really matter and they matter up and down the hierarchy, from the CEO down to the lowest level. Business is how people interact with one another. So I came to understand that that stuff is really important.

SAFIAN: 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: 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 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.

Copy LinkLesson 3: The most important decisions are simple and brave

When 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 a higher priority. Do you feel any of that pressure to prioritize in a different way in this environment?

ALEXIS MCGILL JOHNSON: 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 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 – 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.”

SAFIAN: 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.

MCGILL JOHNSON: 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.

SAFIAN: 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 Jessica.

JESSICA BERMAN: 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. It’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 going to 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 pulling those out and I’m like, “Yes, you get it.” And it’s such a great analog for people to humanize and boil down hard to talk about or complex concepts or things that are really interpersonal.

SAFIAN: Is there a book that right now, a children’s book that you find yourself going to more?

BERMAN: I have one. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. It 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.

SAFIAN: We’ll be back with more lessons of Rapid Response after the break.  Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, we shared three lessons of Rapid Response drawn from our 2025 episodes and directly applicable to 2026. Now, two additional lessons featuring insights from the CEO of Sesame Workshop, the CMO of Autodesk, and iconic chef and humanitarian José Andrés. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkLesson 4: 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, Marc Lore, loves stretch goals. Here’s Marc talking with me about how he deploys stretch goals at food delivery venture Wonder.

You’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? It might be easier to just grow and announce milestones rather than set targets that maybe you won’t meet.

MARC LORE: 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. Investors, everybody understands this is the size of the prize, this is the goal. We’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 by putting it out there and then part being able to properly plan for it. So it doesn’t mean if you don’t hit it, you failed. But we are giving us the highest probability of getting there by putting these goals out there. The only drawback is 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. There’s way more upside than downside.

SAFIAN: 2026 will undoubtedly reveal plenty of upside, but we’ll need to take the right kinds of risks to unlock them. Here’s Dara Treseder, 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?

DARA TRESEDER: Yes.

SAFIAN: 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. There’s no way out of this bind.

TRESEDER: There’s no way out, let me tell you. We got to give CMOs and marketers, all marketers at all levels, we got to give marketers a break. It is a tough world out there. So yes, you have to opine with a 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. And if you end up speaking about things that you 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 in. Not the good kind of bath, the scalding kind of bath. So there really is that thoughtfulness that has to go into it.

SAFIAN: Yeah, again, 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.

TRESEDER: 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.  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.

Copy LinkLesson 5: 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. Sherrie Weston, the CEO of Sesame Workshop, which produces Sesame Street, talked to me about dealing with slashed government grants.

SHERRIE WESTIN: 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 lay off 20% of their staff.

SAFIAN: But layoffs and budget pressures weren’t the only obstacles Sherrie 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.

WESTIN: Right. At that time. Yes.

SAFIAN: But HBO dropped the show. Netflix came in. Was this all by design on your end?

WESTIN: Well, listen, it all worked out really well. And I will say that and it was, 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. on PBS.

HBO Max was clear that children’s was not their priority. So we don’t take it personally 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.

SAFIAN: There’s just no reward for wallowing in what isn’t working. One of my favorite conversations of the year was with José Andrés, restaurateur and founder of aid organization World Central Kitchen. No one lives in the duality of good living, fancy restaurants, and tough situations like natural disasters and war zones quite like José. 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 José.

JOSÉ ANDRÉS: I am optimistic in the way that in life, humans, we learn how to adapt and we seem sometimes we learn the lessons, even if 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? Almost over 100 years ago. And 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 camp grounds in poor neighborhoods and in rich neighborhoods.” Just people walking alongside 50 years married, hand by hand and just smiling that they spend their lives together. It’s the hospitals, the nurses, the doctors doing the best. Take a look around at airports, that they function in a very amazing way that they don’t know how. Things actually work.

We humans, we’ve been building 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 by burning everything down. You fix them by coming together to the table, realizing that there are problems that must be solved.

Problems never will be solved by finger pointing. Problems will always be solved sitting down at the table and coming together in how we find common ground. That’s the way we build good intent, good empathy, good policy that then becomes good politics because it’s on behalf of all Americans.

SAFIAN: Of everyone.

ANDRÉS: That’s the way we should be doing it. So that’s why, in a way, I’m hopeful.

SAFIAN: 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. I’m Bob Safian, thanks for listening.