2025 Recap: CEOs discuss embracing AI, tracking wellness, and marketing for Gen Z | Leadership Next

Diane Brady: Why am I here? What is my purpose? What's the purpose of my company? And, you know, those were the best conversations for me, the ones where you really talk about what drives people personally, because that's the heart of authentic leadership.

Diane Brady: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about

Kristen Stoler: the people and trends that are shaping

Diane Brady: the future of business. I'm Diane Brady.

Kristen Stoler: And I'm Kristen Stoler.

Diane Brady: Happy holidays, Kristin. This is our end of year wrap up of our fabulous year, Kristin, of Talking to Incredible Leaders.

Kristen Stoler: Yes, we have talked to some excellent CEOs this season across a wide variety of industries. And, uh, we're gonna talk about some of our favorite moments on and off

Diane Brady: camera and excellent at what they do. But some, of course, are struggling in their businesses. Um, a lot of conversations about how they personally prepare themselves to lead, how they're reorganizing their companies in an age of AI and a little bit of a look around the corner, the tastes of the next generation to the. And really some of the products that don't even exist yet.

Kristen Stoler: Yeah. Well, we'll dive in more after this break.

Diane Brady: Quantum computing has the potential to transform industries by solving optimization problems, boosting machine learning, and sparking innovation in logistics, finance and materials science. Jason Gurzadis, CEO of Deloitte US is a longtime sponsor of this podcast and is here with us today. Hi, Jason. Thanks for joining us.

Jason Gurzadis: Great, great to see you, Diane.

Diane Brady: So what is quantum computing and how do you see it transforming industries?

Jason Gurzadis: Well, quantum computing has been a topic for some time, uh, in research, um, circles, uh, certainly closely watched by business. But it's fundamentally a different computing paradigm, uh, that uses the principles of physics instead of mathematics to drive the computing outcomes. It's been largely the domain of research, and it's becoming seen as being a more viable commercial computing methodology and approach. And I think the real uses will be ultimately around very complex optimization scenarios, further enhancements to scaling machine learning, and also very complicated simulations that, uh, could be relevant to a whole host of different business, uh, applications.

Kristen Stoler: Jason, what steps should leaders take to prepare for both its potential benefits as well as its potential risks?

Jason Gurzadis: It's really about readiness, planning right now, um, and preparing an organization to understand the implications. So it's about understanding what skill sets would be required, what type of, uh, cybersecurity protocols would need to be in place and begin to think about the types of use cases that would be, uh, very germane around optimization and simulation.

Kristen Stoler: Excellent advice. Thank you so much, Jason.

Diane Brady: Thanks, Jason.

Diane Brady: Okay, Kristin, I think, uh, let's start by having you hold up your hand. You've still got your oura ring on. I have let mine go. And I think that's kind of not emblematic of the year, but it's certainly. We started very much with a deep dive into wellness. And I think one of the things I really enjoyed was talking to people in these high pressure roles kind of about the life hacks and their philosophy. And we started with a father, son, uh, encore.

Kristen Stoler: Jane Naveen Jain and Naveen's company is the Microbiome Company, all about wellness. And I think we've asked almost every CEO that's come in, what do you do after work? And I think, is it, uh, everyone says go to the gym, track my sleep.

Guest: I run a couple times a week. I'm now a yogi. I do a lot of yoga. I do five, six days a week of yoga.

Guest: The thing I enjoy more than anything in the world is rock climbing.

Guest: I've always thought a fair amount of what I'm eating and a fair amount of sleep, exercise, sunlight, nothing is just going to happen.

Jim Lanzone: You have to make it happen. And that could be for getting on, on the treadmill or the elliptical or lifting weights or going for a run. It could be spending time with your spouse, it could be time to spend time with your kids. Um, I make a really big effort not just to do that, but, um, uh, my mom passed away a couple years ago, so I spent a lot of time with, uh, my dad, um, um, you know, but also friends. And, and so, you know, I've, I've gone to two live concerts in the last week.

Guest: I went through a period of my life where I, like, stopped, uh, sleeping after being a championship sleeper for most of my life. And I will tell you something. When I stopped drinking coffee and alcohol, it was my, my cognitive functioning, my perception, my m. All these things like, suddenly were like, elevated.

Guest: Sometimes you don't need an aura ring to tell you because, you know, right. You don't need to know. You didn't get sleep last night or you ate late and you don't feel that great. But I think it's important to take care of yourself.

Diane Brady: It was surprising the number of people who really put wellness as their top priority.

Kristen Stoler: You know, some of them train like athletes.

Diane Brady: I think you have to be an athlete to be in this job, especially right now, where time is compressed and you've got. We're in an AI revolution. So what used to take, you know, 20 years will take two years. It's grueling. And so I do think there's this Attention to health and an attention to leadership and how do we structure our companies.

Kristen Stoler: Yeah, I going back to that huge theme of this year, I don't think we had a conversation where we didn't talk about AI, but I also don't think anyone has it figured out. Right.

Diane Brady: I think this is going to be the year where it's not just about cuts, uh, but you're going to have to show the return on investment, how it's helping you to grow. I do think when you're talking to leaders, it's excitement is what people feel about AI. It's the excitement about how they can transform their businesses. Clearly AI is changing the way business is done. And what I think is interesting is how do we prepare our workplace for that.

Guest: We're very optimistic that this is going to be human acceleration technology. We're going to see higher quality experiences. We're going to see types of games, uh, I believe that no one's ever thought of.

Jason Gurzadis: Whenever you have massive, massive amounts of

Guest: data, AI is favorable.

Guest: We have fresh AI in a restaurant right across the street. And so I've been using it and testing it out and seeing how it works. It's really fun. Wendy, she greets you when you walk, when you drive up, she's hospitable. She always asks you if you want something else. It builds on your order.

Guest: If you believe some of the optimistic estimates for the GDP growth and what it takes to get that 6 plus percent GDP growth. If we're in the bullish AI adoption scenario, there's going to be a lot of labor force disruption.

Kristen Stoler: Gen Z and Gen Alpha, I think were also big topics that we talked about. We've had the CEO of Elf who talked about marketing and TikTok and how that's changed the beauty industry. Brooks Running talked about, you know, Gen Z's engaging in running earlier than any other generation. The other one I want to bring up is Robinhood. Vlad at Robinhood, because we asked him right off the bat, you know, what was it like coming out of the Gamestop craziness and Meme stock madness and what he's doing to now reinvent Robinhood. And I think we're going to still see in 2026 if his new strategy is working.

Diane Brady: Yeah, and look, he's, he, they basically are taking more of a Charles Schwab approach, I think, than they are the meme stock approach. So how do you become part, uh, basically how do you institutionalize yourself? So you're part of the fabric of the lives of these kids who came to you, maybe to trade a meme stock, but you're hoping they'll stick around and now put their retirement savings with you as well. So I think the generational shift is huge and definitely changing tastes in food, changing tastes in makeup, changing tastes and how you work and how we sell to this new generation, a generation that frankly, doesn't have as much faith in the traditional career path as I did back in 2019.

Guest: I remember my CMO coming to me saying, hey, we have to be on TikTok, because that's where Gen Z is. I'm like, well, if that's where Gen Z is, absolutely. Now what's TikTok? Um, and so we approach each of these platforms with a great deal of humility and curiosity.

Guest: What we're seeing with Gen Z is they started at age 11, uh, because think about it, in Covid, you're at home, your parents are going out for a run or walk, so you're going to join just to get out of the house. And so we have a wave of generation, uh, coming that we're pretty excited about and we're seeing it around the world.

Guest: But still, a lot of lawmakers for some time had in their head, this doesn't feel like work to me. This feels like some different thing. But really state by state, little by little, a lot of people are starting to say, this is the way millions of people are making money on their own terms and doing it in a way that really works for them.

Guest: Part of the focus is we do always want to be relevant to the next generation because you don't want to get stuck as, uh, a generational company like our predecessors, because eventually those people will not be around.

Diane Brady: I guess what struck me more, Kristen, was that the kind of foundational elements of leadership did not go away. You know, how you treat your people, having a vision and strategy. What is the job of leaders? To have the vision and strategy for your company, to pick the leadership team to execute it, and then, frankly, to get the conditions to ultimately replace yourself.

Kristen Stoler: Absolutely. And that leads me to, I think, our next big trend, which is comeback stories.

Diane Brady: Yes.

Kristen Stoler: We have heard so many different ones. Yahoo was my favorite. Jim Lanzone, because he took this company that was known for email and has now built it into this big media organization. I thought that was really interesting. McLaren Racing. We had Zach Brown on talking about how he's taken this team now to be a top team, uh, in F1.

Diane Brady: I've been to a couple of Formula One events this year. That is a rocket. It's a Lot of CEO gatherings are taking place there. It's, um, this cultural zeitgeist moment, moment it's having because of drive to survive. So I think Formula One is going to be something that will actually be part of the conversation, not just for Zach Brown, but other companies, because people want experiences, they want just this kind of connection as human beings.

Guest: The company, which had been such an early innovator, had a little bit lost its way, just a little bit. It was trying to do a lot of things. It was losing some shares and it just lacked the focus and frankly wasn't growing profitably. In fact, it wasn't making any money at all. And so now you have this very interesting situation. You know, 900 million m, almost a billion dollars of free cash, a profitable company growing again, and one that customers are really kind of falling in love with again. And so we have a whole new campaign actually. In fact, it just started today called Check Lift. And I want people to give us another try, check us out again. And what my hope is, is you're going to see, as I say, a comeback that just looks like it's for

Jim Lanzone: the ages to ask. Jeeves. That was my first turnaround. And I learned the hard way, like, what? You know, why were we able to do that? And we, you know, I think we almost 50x the stock from where we picked it up in at the crash in 2001 to the peak of where we got to before we sold to iec, um, and it was, we had a lot of traffic, but we had a product that had seen better days and a brand that had been through the wringer and a team that had been also threw it because it was the first crash. So you had to rebuild all that. And once you got the basics right and you got the team rebuilt and you were actually executing on your basic value proposition, you know, then you could innovate.

Zach Brown: Netflix and Liberty turned our sport from an exclusive sport to an inclusive sport. It's always been an awesome sport. I've loved it forever. But people didn't necessarily understand or they couldn't feel engaged with it. And now in this modern, uh, day era, where everything used to be about awareness, but now it's all about engagement, I think we figured out how to let people in the tent.

Diane Brady: Um, what did happen this year was in talking to people like Brene Brown, you always got the sense that the world has changed, that how do we deal with the kind of nasty, brutish, short elements of being American right now? And that was something I think a lot of CEOs are thinking about continuing.

Kristen Stoler: You know, our negative quick train here is that Brene, I think, had one of my favorite quotes of the season, which is that people are not okay. Yeah, it's in this climate, it's really hard to be human, is what she was saying. And I thought her candidness about that was great.

Diane Brady: And we started out with Richard Edelman and the Trust Barometer talking about the fact that business leaders have more trust right now than journalists. Yes. But, uh, also than public officials. So people are looking to company leaders to kind of show show us the way.

Guest: Today it seems like a particularly fertile environment for misinformation.

Diane Brady: And personality now has become more important than scientific expertise.

Zach Brown: I find so many similarities between being a racing driver and a CEO. So if you think about what a racing driver does, it's a lot of instinct, uh, it's a lot of data, it's a lot of trust in your engineers. It's being a great listener.

Jim Lanzone: If we violate trust with our users, and I would say over time, that is something that, you know, probably, uh, as the different variations of Yahoo and different owners of Yahoo, you know, it's. It probably wavered a bit, but we knew, like, that is the first thing. Like, we have to be the trusted source for people.

Speaker O: Our success through that time is really with those two things. How do we behave in a way that our, uh, communities can trust us, our people totally trust us, our customers trust us.

Guest: How do you really know a leader? Well, you know, a leader when they have followers, right? When they have earned the respect and trust of the people that they are trying to lead. Um, and so leadership in many ways is not about, like, what behaviors, you know, are the right behaviors. It's like, well, what works in the context for you to generate followership.

Speaker P: So when you talk about the core of a leadership or, you know, leadership team, a core of any team, you're talking about self awareness, metacognition, emotional granularity, mindfulness. And then one that I think is so lacking today that it's shocking, which is deep, complex understanding of systems theory. If you don't understand that the world that we're operating in today is built of systems inextricably connected to other systems, and that if you move one LEGO piece an inch over here, you've got fallout over here, you're not going to be able to win.

Diane Brady: So I think if we reflect back on the year, Kristen, I'm struck, of course, by all the different themes we talked about.

Kristen Stoler: Obviously, AI right, we have comeback stories, we have Gen Z.

Diane Brady: But I think what strikes me is that there's kind of a foundational element to what a leader does. You know, you set the vision and strategy of your company, you hire the right team, you replace yourself. I mean, there's a sense of what does it mean to be a visionary leader right now? Because we need visionary leadership. There's no question the world is changing very quickly. And I was struck by just the thoughtfulness of people, starting with, why am I here? What is my purpose? What's the purpose of my company? And, you know, those were the best conversations for me, the ones where you really talk about what drives people personally, because that's the heart of authentic leadership

Kristen Stoler: and getting a glance inside a day in the life, their psyche, why they do what they do, what motivates them,

Diane Brady: their workout routines, their life hacks.

Kristen Stoler: I think I would love to see see more of that in 2026. And I feel for all these leaders right now.

Diane Brady: Well, we're just human beings doing a job like the rest of us. And what a joy to be able to talk to the people on the front lines of business, the ones who are shaping it. I think in a way that is for the good.

Kristen Stoler: Yeah. What a great season. And thank you all for listening.

Diane Brady: Thank you.