Alyson Shontell

Alyson Shontell covers business through the lens of leadership, using in-depth conversations with powerful executives and founders to show how their decisions shape companies, markets, and public life. She focuses on how people in charge think, manage risk, and make unconventional calls, rather than on incremental news alone.

Leadership as the organizing frame

Shontell is editor in chief at Fortune, overseeing coverage across the masthead while continuing to write selected high-impact pieces herself. Her work treats business as a human, decision-driven story, centering the individuals who run major companies or institutions and the choices they make under pressure. She gravitates toward subjects whose leadership style has outsized consequences for employees, investors, and the broader economy, and her stories aim to capture both their public persona and their internal logic.

Even when the subject sits at the intersection of business and politics, she approaches them as executives. In her interview with Donald Trump about being “America’s CEO-in-chief” and “making deals that no normal person would make,” she structures the conversation around how he defines the role, negotiates, and measures success, treating the presidency in management and strategy terms rather than as a purely political office. That approach — asking political figures to explain themselves as leaders and operators — is consistent with how she interviews corporate CEOs and founders. Across her work, she is less interested in sound bites than in understanding how a leader frames a problem, what trade-offs they accept, and how that thinking shows up in concrete decisions.

High-profile CEO interviews and profiles

Long, reported interviews with high-profile CEOs are a core part of Shontell’s portfolio. She frequently sits down with leaders of large companies, dominant tech firms, and fast-growing startups to unpack how they built their businesses, what keeps them up at night, and how they navigate moments of inflection or crisis. Her questions tend to move quickly from biography to operating detail: how they structure their executive teams, what metrics they watch, how they balance growth and profitability, and how they respond when strategy collides with unexpected reality.

Her profiles often surface the tension between public narrative and internal reality. She presses on inconsistencies between a company’s brand and its internal culture, or between investor expectations and the constraints of the underlying business. When she covers a CEO in the middle of controversy or transition, she focuses on how that person evaluates risk, communicates with stakeholders, and recalibrates strategy. The resulting pieces are useful for understanding not only who runs a company, but what it is like to work for or invest in that leader over time.

Tech, startups, and the business of innovation

Shontell has a long-standing focus on technology companies and startups, and she brings that sensibility into her Fortune work. She pays close attention to founders who scale niche ideas into category-defining businesses, treating them as case studies in product-market fit, fundraising, and organizational design. Her coverage highlights how these leaders move from scrappy experimentation to building durable systems — governance, hiring, processes — that can support growth at scale.

In conversations with tech and startup leaders, she often draws out the gap between the mythology of entrepreneurship and its operational reality. She asks about investor pressure, burnout, failed experiments, and moments when a founding thesis had to be rewritten. She is particularly attuned to how technology shifts power in existing industries, whether through new platforms, data-driven business models, or changes in how work is organized. For companies pitching themselves as disruptors, she pushes them to define what exactly they are disrupting, who bears the cost, and how they plan to sustain that advantage once incumbents respond.

Company culture and the future of work

Another recurring emphasis in Shontell’s coverage is internal culture — how leaders build, break, and rebuild the environments in which their employees operate. She spends time on questions that many business profiles skim: how transparent executives are willing to be, what behavior they reward, and how they handle misconduct or underperformance at the top. Her interviews often probe how culture decisions play out across the organization, from senior leadership down to frontline employees.

Linked to that is a sustained interest in the future of work: hybrid and remote models, evolving expectations of workers, and the ways technology and economic cycles reshape corporate life. When she talks with CEOs about talent, she pushes them to go beyond slogans about “people being our greatest asset” and explain specific policies and trade-offs, such as return-to-office mandates, flexibility, and how performance is measured in a more distributed environment. Her stories in this area help explain how leadership decisions on workplace structure and culture filter into hiring, retention, productivity, and brand.

Voice, format, and what to expect from an interview

Shontell writes in direct, accessible prose that foregrounds the subject’s voice while keeping a clear editorial spine. Her pieces often blend narrative with extended Q&A or heavily quoted sections, allowing readers to hear leaders explain themselves at length while she frames and contextualizes the most important claims. She leans on concrete examples — specific deals, products, crises, and internal decisions — rather than abstract management talk, and she is comfortable pressing for detail when answers stay vague.

In interviews, she tends to move quickly from top-line talking points to the underlying mechanics: who was in the room, what data the team had, what alternatives were rejected. She is interested in decision paths more than in polished origin stories, and she will return to questions about accountability, governance, and culture throughout a conversation. For executives and founders, that means an interview with Shontell is likely to cover not only vision and strategy, but also how those ideas show up in daily management and in the lived experience of employees and stakeholders.