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You can feel everything—the frustration, irritation, and fear—and still choose your response from a place of calm. That’s what the Stoics (thinkers from ancient Greece and Rome) have taught me. Stoicism is staying calm when life isn’t, focusing on what you can control, and not wasting energy on what you can’t. I’ve been studying Stoic philosophers for years, and the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus has transformed my relationship with myself and how I work. I now practice the art of making the most of the gap between feeling and action. These four Stoic teachings can help you become your best self at work. 1. You control the response The many e…

Open almost any newspaper, scroll through LinkedIn, or listen to the latest business podcast, and you will encounter a familiar theme: the return of the strong leader. From “wartime CEOs” to hard-charging founders and authoritarian coaching styles in elite sports, and the virtues of “hands on” leaders, there is a growing narrative that command-and-control leadership is not only back, but necessary. The appeal is intuitive. When the world feels volatile and uncertain, decisiveness offers comfort, and centralized authority promises clarity. But, is this resurgence real, or are we simply observing a handful of highly visible cases amplified by media and investor attentio…

SpaceX still has deep roots in the rocket business, but the Elon Musk-owned company is doubling down on artificial intelligence as it prepares for an IPO. In a social media post Monday afternoon, SpaceX announced it had started a working relationship with AI coding startup Cursor, which includes an option to buy the company for $60 billion. (Should SpaceX decide against buying Cursor, it will pay $10 billion for its work.) “The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world’s most useful models,” the company said in the post…

Employees at Meta Platforms may soon feel like they’re spilling TMI to their employer’s MCI. The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp is installing new software—reportedly dubbed Model Capability Initiative (MCI)—on its employees’ computers and workstations that will, among other things, track and capture mouse movements and keystrokes in an effort to train AI models, Reuters first reported on Tuesday. It’s all part of a broader effort to develop autonomous AI agents that can perform specific work tasks. A Meta spokesperson confirmed that the company was, indeed, pushing forward with the measure. “If we’re building agents to help people com…

Los Angeles just became the first major school district to put limits on screen time at school. The resolution, which was brought by Nick Melvoin, a concerned parent, passed 6-0 with one recusal. Now, screens in schools will no longer be a free-for-all. The district will have to create policies around screen time based on both grade level and subject. The resolution will also prohibit screens in first grade and below, bans screen time at recess for middle and elementary schoolers, and will restrict access to YouTube in class. Additionally, it will make clear to parents how they can go about opting out of using screens at school. Screen time is part of most …

The most sustainable piece of clothing you own probably has nothing to do with recycled polyester or organic cotton. It’s the little black dress you’ve worn on repeat for 15 years and the pair of ripped Levi’s 501s you can’t imagine ever throwing away. The harder question—the one the fashion industry has never quite figured out—is how to design something like that on purpose. How do you make a garment someone loves now and will continue to wear for years? This is something Sarah Bonello thinks about constantly as she designs for her new label, The Park. After decades in fashion PR, where she developed a finely tuned sense of what the market was missing, Bonell…

As AI becomes more advanced in quality, leaders are increasingly invoking AI to justify unpopular decisions like layoffs. However, much of that story collapses under scrutiny, and workers know it. This gap between rhetoric and reality is eroding trust. This amplifies inequities and quietly sets organizations up for long-term cultural and performance damage. Author, speaker, and strategist Lily Zheng sees a clear pattern: executives are using AI to explain decisions that are in fact driven by past mistakes, investor pressure, or leadership preference. Companies that went on aggressive hiring sprees during the pandemic are now quietly “correcting” courses. They’re frami…

The first sign that something had changed was the Topo Chico. It arrived on our porch one afternoon—a case of it—along with Graza olive oil and La Roche-Posay face wash. When our 4-year-old announced she would eat nothing but Uncrustables for the foreseeable future, a box arrived within the hour. The prices were lower than on Amazon, and we got them faster, with no delivery fee. It turns out that my husband had gotten hooked on Walmart—all without ever setting foot in a store. Earlier this year, he discovered that our American Express card included a Walmart+ membership. He activated it on a whim. Since then, he’s been placing orders on the app almost daily, from go-t…

There’s a question I ask every guest on my podcast, Inspired with Alexa von Tobel. It comes near the end of every conversation, after we’ve gone deep on business models, hard pivots, and the relentless grind of building something from nothing. The question is simple: What’s a mantra that runs through your head? I started asking it on a hunch. After years as a founder, dropping out of Harvard Business School to launch LearnVest during the height of the financial crisis, scaling it to acquisition, and then building Inspired Capital, I had come to believe that mindset wasn’t a soft variable. It was a hard one. The words we repeat to ourselves shape the decisions we make,…

For a company with one of the most important jobs in information security, assessing the risks and opportunities of AI might feel less like an analytical exercise and more like a roll of a 20-sided die. That’s because a password manager, which already has to defend a customer’s most valuable credentials against both outside attackers and the customer’s own carelessness, now has to contend with AI on multiple fronts. AI can help a password-management firm develop code and find vulnerabilities faster, but it may also enable clients to ship sloppy, vibe-coded apps that expose passwords. And while AI agents promise to zip through complex tasks with a single-minded foc…

We are living through a fundamental shift in what work is for. As AI takes on more routine cognitive tasks, the uniquely human capacity to imagine, connect, and create meaning becomes the primary source of organizational value. Yet most companies are still measuring performance metrics prioritized for a different era: inventory turnover, cost per lead, and utilization rates. These metrics were designed to optimize extraction. They are poorly equipped to cultivate imagination. The organizations that will win in the Imagination Era are those that build new measurement systems to match their new ambitions. Not because metrics are magic, but because what a company ch…

As artificial intelligence puts Americans out of work, there are programs available to help them land on their feet—but experts warn they’ll need to ramp up quickly to meet the demand. One new pilot program sends a $1,000 monthly stipend to workers displaced by AI while providing career support to help them return to the workforce. Called the AI Dividend, it’s an initiative that’s privately funded through donations to the Fund for Guaranteed Income (a nonprofit that distributes cash through various programs, including its AI Commons Project) in partnership with What We Will, which provides recipients with community support and career resources. The Fund for Guaranteed…

Women face discrimination on several different fronts at work. They are 14% less likely to be promoted than their male colleagues. They still face pay gaps. And they suffer professionally for being caregivers at home, facing higher levels of burnout and a higher incidence of leaving the workforce altogether. According to a new report, working women also face unfair assumptions about their health from men. A new survey from Mira, a fertility tracking and health site, found that more than a third (37%) of men surveyed said they attributed a female colleague’s behavior to their hormones. Even more men (39%) said that they expect women to manage their emotions “diff…

Compliments come in many forms, and handling them well is an important part of building strong relationships and projecting a positive image. Sometimes a simple “Thank you” will do. But in other cases, praise may have a negative undertone, which you will want to respond to. Still others may be laudatory comments that you can build upon. Here’s how to respond to a broad range of compliments. 1. “I LIKE YOUR STYLE” The best and easiest answer to this compliment is “Thank you.” Whenever someone compliments you on your style (“I love your look” or “I love your purse/tie”), responding with “Thank you” shows grace and appreciation. Don’t undercut those complimen…

Lululemon today named Heidi O’Neill, a 26-year Nike veteran, as its next CEO, ending a monthslong search to replace Calvin McDonald, who stepped down from the top job after six years at the company. O’Neill, most recently Nike’s president of consumer, product, and brand, will start September 8 and be based in Lululemon’s Vancouver headquarters. The choice signals where Lululemon’s board thinks the company needs to go next—and it’s worth asking whether they’ve gotten the diagnosis right. For most of the last decade, Lululemon was one of the fastest-growing apparel brands on the planet. Under McDonald, who took over as CEO in 2018, the company more than tripled its …

This week, Starbucks unveiled plans to open an office in Nashville, in a bid to establish a home base in the Southeast. The coffee giant is investing $100 million in this expansion and plans to staff the new office with thousands of workers within the next five years. But according to a new Bloomberg report, Starbucks has had little success coaxing employees to relocate from the company’s headquarters in Seattle. Starbucks eventually plans to have about 2,000 employees based in Nashville. In a letter to employees that was also posted publicly, chief partner officer Sara Kelly disclosed that the Nashville office would be staffed with some new hires—but that certain te…

A new battery from Chinese company CATL, the world’s largest electric vehicle battery manufacturer, can be fully recharged in under seven minutes. Charging that battery from 10% to 80%—often considered an ideal maximum charge to protect the battery’s health—takes less than four minutes. It’s a striking technological advancement that closes the gap between EVs and gas vehicles—and beats out a recent battery advancement by Chinese EV giant BYD. China has come to dominate the electric vehicle and battery industries, and companies there are continuing to make impressive leaps forward. Shenzhen-listed shares of CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited…

There’s a surprising amount of science in a bag of potato chips. Researchers have spent decades developing potatoes for chip makers that can grow in all kinds of climates, avoid diseases and pests, sit in storage for months and still deliver a satisfying crunch. They’ve also kept an eye on consumer trends; a shift to snack-size portions has increased the demand for smaller chipping potatoes, for example. “The potato industry is dynamic,” said David Douches, a Michigan State University professor who leads the school’s Potato Breeding and Genetics Program. “The needs change, the costs, the pressures that they have, and the markets change. So we have to adapt to that with …

Michael is aiming for a record-breaking opening weekend. It’s also a critical flop. In a vacuum, the Michael Jackson biopic might sound like a perfectly palatable film. The movie stars Jackson’s real-life nephew Jaafar Jackson as the titular singer, following his childhood through the height of his career in the 1980s with non-stop musical sequences of the King of Pop’s greatest hits. But Michael Jackson’s legacy is more than just music. Audiences and critics alike are panning Michael for glossing over the dark side of Jackson’s life, proving that it takes more than a famous subject to make a biopic a critical success—even while Jackson’s star power propels the mo…

Bob Dylan, a native of the Upper Midwest, famously crooned that “the times they are a-changin’.” Nowhere is that more prescient now than in and around the Midwest’s largest city, Chicago, which is attempting to shed its skin as a Rust Belt metropolis and be born anew in the twenty-first century as the capital of the “Silicon Prairie,” a hub for the burgeoning quantum computing industry. It’s a literal transformation, too. The decommissioned U.S. Steel South Works, a decaying U.S. Steel foundry that once employed tens of thousands of people and shut down in 1992, is being resurrected as the new Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP), a 128-acre campus that …

Human beings are obsessed with change. As large scale scientific studies show, most of us would like to change at least some aspects of our personality, defined as consistent patterns of behaviors or habits that make us who we are and different from others. For example, I’d love to be less impulsive, excitable, or cynical, which is why I have been working on not being myself for many years. Likewise, most individuals want to grow, to develop new adaptations that make them a better version of themselves, and organizations are equally interested in transforming, which typically depends on their people’s ability to grow and evolve. At its core, change is not about becomi…

This month, Anthropic announced that it had built an AI model so powerful it couldn’t be released to the public. Claude Mythos had autonomously discovered thousands of critical security vulnerabilities across all major operating systems and web browsers. Anthropic chose to make the model available only to a consortium of technology companies, giving them an opportunity to patch vulnerabilities and strengthen defenses before models with similar capabilities inevitably fall into the hands of those who would exploit them. This development shines a light on the potential future dangers that the rapid evolution of AI models brings with it. These kinds of powerful models wi…

The North Face’s new collection is designed to make camping more accessible for everyone—and it starts with reconsidering the small details that designers often overlook. The Universal Collection is a five-piece set of gear, including a sleeping bag, tent, backpack, slippers, and hat. It was designed in collaboration with ski mountaineer Vasu Sojitra and rock climber Maureen Beck, both of whom are athlete collaborators with The North Face and advocates for the disability community. According to Luke Matthews, design manager of technical equipment for the North Face, the concept for the Universal Collection arose after his team noticed a common complaint from c…