This is the time of year when critics start to roll out their lists of the best movies, television shows, and albums of 2024. By many accounts, it was a tepid year in culture, with FX chairman John Landgraf declaring the end of “peak TV” and fears about generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) dominating conversations about creativity.

I’d argue that 2024 was also a fairly uninspiring year in business. Yes, stocks and Bitcoin soared, and Americans started businesses at a rapid clip, but venture capital investments in early-stage companies slowed, media companies shrank, and tech companies laid off workers in anticipation of AI-powered changes to the workforce.

The “Best Of” lineup

There were bright spots, of course. Inc.’s Winter issue celebrates the year’s Best in Business, a compendium of leaders and companies that demonstrated superior execution in a year marked by the aftershocks of high inflation and supply chain disruptions. Fast Company recently published its Next Big Things in Tech list, highlighting pockets of nascent innovation currently happening at startups and large enterprises alike.

For a year that many would characterize as a mixed bag, here’s Modern CEO’s curated look at some of the best in business, courtesy of my Inc. and Fast Company colleagues:

Best Ad: “One of the best ads of 2024 was when DoorDash evolved what a Super Bowl ad could be by offering fans a chance to win every single other product advertised during the big game. It leveraged fan participation and created an overall brand halo coordinating agreements with every single Super Bowl advertiser, all to drive more than 11 billion earned impressions and nearly 8 million sweepstakes entries.” —Jeff Beer, senior staff editor, Fast Company 

Best Board Member: Former TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot is widely sought after as a board member by both corporations and startups for her acumen in finance, operations, and experience in big tech. A profile in Inc. showcases all the ways she has supported executives at the companies where she’s a director; it also describes the way her board service has made her a better leader. “The founder mentality is like: This is your baby,” Brown-Philpot told contributor Issie Lapowsky. “The good part of that is you’re going to nurture it . . . The downside is you’re going to have blind spots.” Lapowsky concludes: It’s important to have a board that doesn’t share those blind spots.

Best Design: “The defining design of the year has to go to brat, the omnipresent green brand developed by the Brooklyn studio Special Offer for Charli XCX. Brat summer was a vibe, and it was embodied by this bold and unapologetic green counterbalanced by a lackadaisical ”I may have just screen grabbed this font off my phone and resized it” typeface. Permutations of this vibrant green—the biologically most visible color—have popped up at big moments over the past two decades. (Nike’s use of Volt shoes in the 2012 Olympics and Pantone’s “greenery” color of the year from 2017 come to mind.) Now, take another look at Wicked. Cynthia Erivo is so brat.” —Mark Wilson, global design editor, Fast Company 

Best DTC Comeback: Fast Company and Inc. agree: Glossier is back. Kyle Leahy, who became CEO in 2022, says the beauty company is profitable in part thanks to expansion into Sephora stores and global markets. Not only has Glossier weathered the direct-to-consumer (DTC) “reckoning” that felled other DTC darlings, it has managed to retain its cool. “There may not be another brand with quite the cult following of Glossier, which has not just customers, but stans,” contributor Amy Odell writes in Inc.

Best Tech Product: “I don’t think there’s any question that the tech product of the year is Bluesky. After being inundated with me-too AI throughout 2024, it warms my heart to see a tiny company rekindle the excitement of social networking entirely through user control and human curation, not algorithms. If CEO Jay Graber delivers on her promise of decentralization in 2025, even better.” —Harry McCracken, global technology editor, Fast Company 

Best Modern CEOs: Next week we’ll reveal the Modern CEOs of the year, culled from reader nominations and conversations with leadership experts.