A recruiter and founder unpacks a report drawn from conversations with 18 chief product officers, tracing how investor-backed companies still mistake product for delivery rather than strategy. The discussion lingers on reporting lines, commercial accountability and the organizational habits that quietly doom product leaders before they can create value.

At Cannes, Digitas North America CEO Amy Lanzi argues that advertising’s AI boom resembles the overhyped promises of programmatic, with platforms selling automation while agencies and brands still need human judgment, strategy, and data fluency. The conversation also traces the rise of creators as full-fledged marketing businesses and the growing fight over who controls the relationship between brands, audiences, and the platforms in between.

Natalia, Every’s head of consulting, describes how AI agents are moving from novelty to everyday infrastructure: managing sales ops, triaging email, building family care systems, and turning research into personalized learning tools. The conversation also argues for a clearer division of labor, with human judgment and off-the-shelf software still essential even as custom agents absorb administrative work.

In a live TED conversation, Molly Graham makes the case for careers built through risky leaps rather than orderly promotions, arguing that fear, awkwardness, and reinvention are often signs of growth. She reflects on scaling fast-moving companies, the value of asking naive questions, and the need for leaders to build environments where people can do their best work.

Roger Daley returns to discuss how Blackstone’s pandemic-fueled rise led to its merger with Weber, and what it takes to fuse a fast, entrepreneurial upstart with a storied but siloed legacy brand. The conversation ranges from antitrust limbo and tariff pressures to creator marketing, overseas manufacturing, and the culture overhaul required to run one company with two very different identities.

Ford CEO Jim Farley talks with Joanna Stern about the company’s risky effort to rebuild its electric-vehicle strategy around cheaper, simpler cars, while arguing that software, tariffs and Chinese competition are reshaping the entire auto business. The conversation widens into Farley’s view that America’s bigger crisis is not just EV profitability but a hollowed-out culture that undervalues factory, trade and emergency-service work.

Edwin Chen, the founder of data-labeling and evaluation firm Surge, describes training frontier models as a kind of schooling for AGI, where benchmarks now stretch from middle-school math to research-level discovery. The conversation widens into a debate over whether AI should optimize for human flourishing or the same engagement traps that warped social media, and what deeply personal data may be worth in teaching models taste, judgment, and voice.

Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill argues that innovation is less about lone brilliance than about building cultures, roles, and routines that let people co-create, experiment, and scale new ideas. She lays out why leaders must make space for others, bridge silos, and act more like wayfinders than visionaries with a fixed map.

HBR on Leadership signs off after more than 150 episodes, with host Hannah Bates announcing the show’s pause and a renewed focus on HBR IdeaCast and other projects. The farewell doubles as a thank-you to the production team and listeners who made the past four years of leadership conversations possible.

AWS chief Matt Garman argues that AI will reorder white-collar work rather than erase it, even as Amazon automates more tasks and trims parts of its own workforce. The conversation ranges from college AI degrees and shaky labor data to enterprise adoption, data center backlash, and the question of whether efficiency gains create new jobs fast enough.

A former Facebook executive revisits the company’s famous ethos of moving fast, arguing that its real aim was rapid learning rather than reckless breakage. The conversation traces how psychological safety, technical guardrails, and a founder’s temperament shape a culture that can scale without turning failure into blame.

Patreon CEO Jack Conte says the company has outgrown its old role as a payments layer and is rebuilding itself as a discovery, hosting and community platform for creators squeezed by algorithmic feeds, Apple’s fees and AI-fueled slop. The conversation ranges from social media’s failures to the payment and moderation pressures of running a creator business that now competes more directly with Instagram, TikTok and Substack.

Leadership coach Anne Morriss argues that hard organizational problems persist not because they are unsolvable, but because leaders misdiagnose them, underinvest in trust and storytelling, and wait too long to act. She lays out a five-step approach that starts with humility and buy-in, then uses speed as the final mechanism for turning intention into real change.

At Platformer’s first live show, Casey Newton and guests take stock of AI’s contradictory role in the workplace: a source of anxiety, a generator of strange new job titles, and a tool that may make software creation radically more personal. The conversation moves from Atlassian’s enterprise “context graph” to Eugenia Kuyda’s vision of companions and bespoke apps, tracing how automation may reshape both office work and the products people use every day.

Molly Graham talks with former Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson about the hidden chaos inside celebrated careers and breakout companies, where outages, doubt, and bad bets sit alongside growth. Their conversation turns on how to tell the difference between a difficult stretch worth enduring and a situation that demands an exit.

Skydio chief executive Adam Bry argues that autonomous drones are moving from camera toys to networked infrastructure, with their most consequential uses in emergency response, utility inspection, and military reconnaissance. The conversation turns on whether the United States can build a domestic drone industry at scale while navigating bans on Chinese rivals, the politics of surveillance, and the moral limits of AI in warfare.

Mark Zao-Sanders makes the case for timeboxing as both a productivity tool and a way to restore calm: put tasks on the calendar, assign them real limits, and let intention outrun distraction. The conversation links better planning to better collaboration, arguing that visible commitments and clear deadlines reduce anxiety for individuals and teams alike.

Financial Times writer Sarah O’Connor argues that AI’s effect on work is not an unstoppable natural force but a series of choices shaped by power, policy and the people closest to the job. Drawing on reporting from translators, nurses, software developers and Hollywood writers, she makes the case that the real fight is over human agency and what kinds of work should remain irreducibly human.

Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch argues that legacy media survives by acting less like a magazine publisher than a portfolio of brands built for events, subscriptions, commerce, video, and adaptation. He talks through the company’s restructuring, the collapse of Google-driven traffic, the uneasy bargains of AI licensing, and why authority matters more than raw scale in the creator era.

Brookings fellow Molly Kinder argues that the real danger of AI is not an instant jobs apocalypse but a long, destabilizing period of selective white-collar displacement for which government and industry have no credible plan. The conversation weighs retraining, safety nets, and broader wealth-sharing proposals against a future in which automation chips away at the skills and careers workers once thought were secure.