Leadership lessons from the mayors of major global cities

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m 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. A year ago, amid a wave of DOGE cuts to federal agencies, Modern CEO highlighted the things government gets right, notably its ability to solve problems that businesses can’t or won’t because doing so isn’t necessarily profitable. Finding solutions to many of those challenges—including affordable housing, mass transit, and public education as well as environmental sustainability and climate change—is increasingly falling on city leaders, says Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York and founder of Bloomberg LP. “The more [that] national governments retreat from the world stage, the more important mayors become,” Bloomberg said last month at the Bloomberg CityLab 2026 summit, hosted by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Aspen Institute. “Mayors have to move quickly and adapt to big change.” And, like CEOs, these city leaders must often think big while also managing minutiae. “Mayors, perhaps more than any other civic leaders, are expected to advance strategic, multiyear infrastructure and policy initiatives while at the same time being attentive to the hyperlocal needs of individual residents,” says Daniel Ramot, CEO of Via Transportation, a tech company that serves public transit systems. Adds Ramot, whom I interviewed onstage at Bloomberg CityLab: “I have always been impressed by how the very best mayors are able to manage this tension. It requires genuine empathy and attention to detail, combined with the ability to look beyond the status quo, dream big, and perhaps most importantly, ground those dreams in a reality informed, first and foremost, by data.” (Disclosure