- In today’s CEO Daily: Leadership and life lessons from the former CEO of Alcoa and Siemens.
- The big story: The world waits for Powell’s swan song Jackson Hole address.
- The markets: China is up amid mixed performance in global markets.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. Geoff Colvin here, sitting in for Diane. In these waning days of summer, in which CEOs and other hard-charging executives observe an unwritten pact to take it easy, or at least easier, they face a rare opportunity to think large thoughts. An appropriate beach book for them, offering hefty thoughts decidedly relevant to businesspeople, would be Leading to Thrive by Klaus Kleinfeld. The former CEO of Alcoa and Siemens now spends his days investing in not-yet-public companies while also mentoring CEOs and helping his daughters run their probiotics company (he started his career in the pharmaceutical industry). But he also burned to write a book “by a practitioner for practitioners” and to “separate the theories that sound good from those that work well in the real world.”
The result, unlike most CEO books, doesn’t begin with leadership, team building, managing the board, or other CEO topics. Those are for the book’s second half. The first half is all about “the inner game,” demanding personal “energy, focus, and resilience.” Speaking with me recently, he acknowledges his sins, “pushing teams because I had a clear idea of what I wanted to get done that day.” He’d insist his team keep working past midnight, only to find in the morning that the idea was terrible, and the people were too exhausted to think straight. That’s how he learned that energy management is way more important than time management. “It’s why I have this strong focus on how you gain and retain energy,” he says. His formula involves the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Friedrich Nietzsche, the Dalai Lama, and many others.
Kleinfeld disdains the concept of work-life separation. Yes, he says, “you play multiple roles,” but ultimately, “you are one person.” The idea that “I have a private life and I have a business life—that’s not the way the world works. It’s actually a very old industrial idea that wasn’t around before the Industrial Age, and it will not survive the post-industrial world.”
After all, he says, “It’s one life.” He would advise anyone “to really think about what excites them, what gets them up in the morning. Think about it and spend some time on it.” When he reflects on his own choices, he says he is always reminded of the work of Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative nurse who catalogued the regrets of the dying. “One of the top regrets is, ‘I wish I had let myself be happier,’” he says. “This is as simple as it sounds, but it also has the profound wisdom that happiness is a decision you take.”—Geoff Colvin
More news below.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
Top news
The world waits for Powell
Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell delivers his long-awaited keynote address at Jackson Hole today, amid intense pressure from the Trump administration over the central bank’s hesitance to cut interest rates. Analysts are struggling to predict the Fed's thinking due to a weak U.S. jobs market and hot inflation readings. The big questions on investors’ minds: Will Powell signal that a rate cut is likely next month? And will he reveal his plans after his term expires next year?
China, the U.S….and Nvidia stuck in between
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is reiterating that the H20 chip poses no threat to China’s national security, following reports that Beijing is asking tech firms to stop buying the company’s chips. The Information reports that Nvidia is asking some suppliers to halt work on the H20. Nvidia strongly denies adding backdoors and kill switches to its products. Huang, who is currently visiting TSMC, added that Nvidia is in talks with the U.S. about an H20 successor.
No U.S. visas for truck drivers
The U.S. will pause issuing worker visas for commercial truck drivers after a fatal crash in Florida last week involving an allegedly undocumented driver. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said foreign drivers are “endangering American lives and undercutting the livelihoods of American truckers.” The State Department separately confirmed that it continues to vet the 55 million foreigners who hold valid U.S. visas, even after they’ve entered the country.
DeepSeek emerges once more
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has updated one of its AI models just two weeks after the release of OpenAI’s new GPT-5. Experts say DeepSeek’s V3.1 boasts features similar to leading U.S. frontier models, while still keeping computing costs low. Shares in Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, China's largest chipmaker, surged almost 10% in Hong Kong trading on Friday.
The men behind World Liberty Financial
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., the U.S. president’s sons, are two of the leaders behind World Liberty Financial, a crypto business that’s netting deals worth billions since its founding last year. Fortune’s Ben Weiss recently visited the Trump Organization’s HQ to meet the men behind the venture.
The markets
S&P 500 futures are up 0.1% ahead of Powell’s Jackson Hole speech. Asian markets are mixed today: China’s CSI 300 is up 2.1% today, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng is up by 0.9%; Japan’s Nikkei 225 is up by 0.1%, while India’s NIFTY 50 is currently down by 0.7%. The STOXX Europe 600 is up by 0.2%. Bitcoin is down 0.6%, extending a 7-day slump.
Around the watercooler
The white-collar job market is frozen—now bartenders and baristas are seeing bigger wage growth than desk workers by Jessica Coacci
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump form an unlikely alliance over billions in chipmaker subsidies by Eva Roytburg
Trump goes on $100 million bond buying spree: Here’s what it could signal about future interest rates by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez
Steve Jobs didn’t actually become a billionaire thanks to leading Apple—but rather his work with a film company he bought off George Lucas by Preston Fore
Today's edition CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams and Nicholas Gordon.
