Good morning. Being a CFO today can require the stamina of an elite athlete. Yet many corporate leaders fail to apply one of the most important lessons athletes learn: recovery is essential to sustained performance.
Gina Mastantuono, president and CFO of ServiceNow, a Fortune 500 company, has spoken about the benefits of fitness for both personal health and leadership, while pointing to a workplace culture in which senior employees still equate overwork with commitment.
“There’s always been this idea that if you have to work 14-hour days and get four hours of sleep, that shows you’re working the hardest and deserve the most,” she said. “That is such a terrible example for the people around us.”
Mastantuono spoke during a panel at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit with Olympic champion Janet Evans, chief athlete officer for the LA28 organizing committee, and Alicia Hatch, Deloitte’s U.S. sports chief commercial officer and women’s sports leader.
For Mastantuono, recovery isn’t a distraction from high performance; it’s a prerequisite for it. Just as the body needs rest to recover from exercise, professionals need time to recharge if they want to remain effective over the long term.
Prioritizing recovery has helped her improve her work-life balance, listen more thoughtfully, and remain composed under pressure. Those benefits extend beyond the individual to the teams she leads.
“When we do focus on taking care of ourselves, then we are much better bosses, much better colleagues, much better parents,” she said.
But the lessons athletes bring to leadership extend beyond recovery. They also learn to make decisions under pressure, adapt to changing circumstances, and keep moving toward a goal despite uncertainty.
“How many of you have ever made a high-stakes call with incomplete information and a lot of people watching?” Hatch asked the audience. “We face this every single day.”
She continued, “94% of female C-suite executives played sports growing up. And there’s a reason for that.” Sports teaches us confidence, teamwork, resilience. “But it’s also an amazing simulator for making decisions under pressure, performing continuously, even with changing circumstances,” Hatch said.
Evans offered a practical example of how an athlete’s mindset can translate into leadership. When LA28 chairman Casey Wasserman approached her in 2015 about joining the effort to bring the Olympics to Los Angeles, she knew the city faced a formidable competitor in Paris for the 2024 Games.
Rather than abandon the goal when Paris emerged as the likely winner, the team shifted its focus to securing the 2028 Games.
Evans said that experience reflected the qualities athletes bring to leadership: persistence, faith in a goal, and the ability to pivot when circumstances change. Pursuing ambitious goals, she suggested, requires a willingness to take risks, work through setbacks, and adapt along the way.
That mindset may be particularly relevant as women’s sports gain commercial momentum. Deloitte projected earlier this year that global revenues from women’s sports would reach at least $3 billion in 2026, a 340% increase over four years. Soccer and basketball are expected to lead, each accounting for 35% of global women’s sports revenue.
As women’s sports continue to grow, the leadership lessons associated with athletics are increasingly relevant beyond the playing field. For executives, that means not only developing the resilience to perform under pressure, but also recognizing when to step back and recover.
You can watch the complete panel session here.
Sheryl Estrada
Sheryl.Estrada@fortune.com
Leaderboard
Peter Griffith was appointed CFO of Mattel, Inc. (Nasdaq: MAT), effective Oct. 20. Griffith succeeds Paul Ruh, who will serve in an advisory role through the end of the year. Most recently, Griffith served as EVP and CFO of Amgen, joining the company in 2019 from Sherwood Canyon Group, LLC, a private equity and advisory firm where he served as president. Before that, he spent more than two decades as a partner at EY, serving in roles including global vice chair of corporate development and global managing partner of operations and finance. He also oversaw the firm’s finance and accounting, corporate development, tax, and treasury functions. Before joining EY, he was a managing director and head of the investment banking division at Wedbush Securities Inc.
A.J. Silver was promoted to CFO of CRISPR Therapeutics (Nasdaq: CRSP), effective Oct. 19. Silver succeeds Raju Prasad, who is stepping down from the company to pursue external opportunities. Silver has served as the company’s SVP of finance since January 2025. Since joining CRISPR Therapeutics in October 2018, he has held roles of increasing responsibility spanning strategic finance, treasury, financial planning and analysis, accounting and reporting, tax, and financial operations. Before joining the company, Silver spent more than 10 years at Ernst & Young LLP.
Big Deal
Bank of America Institute’s latest research suggests that consumers are beginning to see some relief from rising insurance costs, although the improvement varies significantly by location and demographic group. Median payments for auto, homeowners and renters insurance rose just 1% year over year in 2026, down from 6% in 2025 and approximately 12% in 2024.
However, the Institute’s October 19 report highlights persistent regional differences: major California metropolitan areas, along with Boston and New York, continued to experience sizable increases, while much of the Sun Belt saw smaller increases or declines. Florida recorded some of the steepest declines, potentially reflecting insurance reforms and consumer rebates. Younger consumers also continue to face greater cost pressures, with Gen Z insurance payments increasing nearly 6%.
The findings suggest that while broader insurance inflation is moderating, affordability remains uneven, with regional market conditions and individual circumstances determining how much relief households actually experience.
Going deeper
Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 billion-plus AI bet is about more than keeping pace with rivals—it’s about ensuring Meta never again has to build its business on someone else’s platform. That strategy is explored in a Fortune article by Molly A. Wallace, which examines how lessons from Meta’s long-running battles with Apple are shaping its push to build a full-stack AI ecosystem, from data centers and custom chips to personal AI agents that could reshape how people shop online. But the vision raises a critical question: could the AI tools Meta is building ultimately disrupt the advertising business that fuels nearly all its revenue?
Overheard
"If the upsides from AI are speculative, so are the downsides—and if the model works, it could reshape the AI market much as venture capital changed the risk calculus for starting a business."
—Mehran Gul, author of "The New Geography of Innovation,"writes in a Fortune opinion piece. He was previously at the World Economic Forum and attended Yale where he was a Fulbright Scholar, Fox International Fellow, and TeachingFellow.