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A new book by a former Deloitte executive turned workplace well-being expert argues exactly that In her new book Hope Is the Strategy, Jen Fisher, an expert on workplace well-being and human sustainability, makes a clear and timely case that hope isn’t a soft skill or a leadership afterthought; it’s a practical, learnable approach to navigating uncertainty and building healthier, more resilient organizations. In the following excerpt, Fisher draws on her personal experience grappling with burnout, as well as her research on well-being, leadership, and corporate culture, to reframe hope as something we can all learn and implement for ourselves and those we work with. …

After years of struggling with the complexities of a merger that saw the combination of two major discount retailers a decade ago, Dollar Tree has decided to cut ties with Family Dollar. The company has announced an agreement to divest its Family Dollar business to private equity firms Brigade Capital Management and Macellum Capital Management for $1 billion, a strategic move that aims to streamline operations and enhance focus on its core Dollar Tree segment. Following the announcement, Dollar Tree’s shares surged nearly 7% in premarket trading on Wednesday. The deal is part of the company’s ongoing efforts to improve performance, with CEO Rick Dreiling emp…

OpenAI never wanted to build a chatbot. As an early beta tester for OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, I can vouch for the fact that the company was caught totally off guard by ChatGPT’s runaway success. An email that OpenAI sent me on November 28, 2022—just two days before ChatGPT came to market and kicked off a trillion-dollar, multiyear, economy-distending AI scramble—didn’t even mention the new interface. Rather, it bragged about the company’s then-revolutionary “DaVinci” model and how it could “deliver clearer, more engaging, and more compelling content” and allow developers to “take on tasks that would have previously been too difficult to achieve.” From th…

Most people still measure performance in hours. They pack their calendars as full as possible, track time down to the minute, and take pride in squeezing more into each day. However, the best performance comes from harnessing rhythm—the alignment of energy, capacity, and focus. It’s what turns effort into flow. In the industrial age, managing time made sense: productivity was tethered to factory shifts and desk schedules. But in today’s BANI—brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible—world, hours spent no longer translate neatly into value created. The leaders who thrive now are those who sense and harness the rhythms of their team. Energy rises and falls acros…

“Well, it took a minute,” said Spike Lee, surveying the glittering Met Gala crowd during cocktail hour through bright orange glasses that matched his New York Knicks cap. “But we’re here now, that’s the most important thing.” Lee was referring to the fact that for the very first time, the Met Gala was making a point of celebrating Black style and Black designers — something he felt was an overdue milestone, but a very welcome one. “Long overdue,” Lee repeated. “But we’re here to celebrate. And who knows what’s gonna happen because of this event? There’s gonna be reverberations around the world.” Lee was echoing an excitement that many of the approximately 400 guests — …

Though I long resisted the label, I have been a solopreneur ever since I started working as a freelance writer in 2010. As the owner, manager, and only employee, all decisions about my solo freelancing business are up to me—which continues to feel simultaneously invigorating and terrifying. But not all daunting solopreneurship decisions are the same. While taking creative risks and pitching big names continue to cause some minor fingernail-chewing even after all these years, investing in my business is the leading cause of second-guessing (and third-guessing, fourth-guessing) my own abilities as an entrepreneur. Many other solopreneurs share my lack of confidence …

When the Vietnam War finally ended on April 30, 1975, it left behind a landscape scarred with environmental damage. Vast stretches of coastal mangroves, once housing rich stocks of fish and birds, lay in ruins. Forests that had boasted hundreds of species were reduced to dried-out fragments, overgrown with invasive grasses. The term ecocide had been coined in the late 1960s to describe the U.S. military’s use of herbicides like Agent Orange and incendiary weapons like napalm to battle guerrilla forces that used jungles and marshes for cover. Fifty years later, Vietnam’s degraded ecosystems and dioxin-contaminated soils and waters still reflect the long-term ecolog…

The cutting edge of zipper technology involves zippers that work remotely. Japanese zipper maker YKK says it has developed a prototype for a self-propelled zipper that zips up with just the push of a button. These self-propelled zippers aren’t meant for your jeans or jackets, but rather for industrial uses, like tall tents that can’t be zipped up without using a ladder. That’s the mostly likely place you’ve seen YKK’s logo (it has 40% global market share). The company says the tech will save time and be safer than putting workers high up in the air to zip and unzip in hard-to-reach use cases. YKK conducted experiments with the zippers in February. It says th…

Since the tragic news broke that director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, have died, tributes have been pouring in. And amid the stories of kindness, compassion, and political action, one story stands out: How the couple’s chance first meeting altered the ending of the 1989 classic When Harry Met Sally—possibly the most beloved romantic comedy of all time. Had the couple not met during filming, the movie’s memorable New Year’s Eve ending might’ve not been a part of the film at all. During production of the iconic rom-com in New York City, photographer Michele Singer Reiner (then Michele Singer) stopped by the set. According to a 1989 New York…

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. When the software engineer and entrepreneur Deon Nicholas was CEO of Forethought, a customer service automation platform, he had an executive assistant to manage the minutiae of his workday. Not surprisingly, he appreciated the help. “That was something that I found was critical, something that actually helped me as a leader,” he explains. Few of us who aren’t in the executive suite have the luxury of calling on another person to wrangle our schedule, triage email, and otherwise keep the chaos of our professional and personal lives under control. As Nicholas contemplated the frenzy of excitement over AI agents…

No place is more vulnerable to hurricanes in the 50 U.S. states than the Florida Keys. The chain of islands celebrated by singer Jimmy Buffett in his odes to tropical escapism is surrounded by water, jutting out 120 miles southwesterly from Florida’s mainland to Key West with the Gulf and Atlantic Ocean on either side. The archipelago historically has been known for its quirky and libertarian inhabitants who revel in the islands’ hedonistic, artistic and outdoorsy lifestyle. In recent years, it also has become a haven for the wealthy. Overseeing safety for the more than 80,000 inhabitants of the Conch Republic — the nickname for the islands after denizens declared a to…

You have probably noticed that you have times during your day when you’re locked in and feel like you’re working at your peak and other times when your mind isn’t keeping up with everything that needs to be done. Some of that may reflect your circadian cycles. If you’re a morning person, you may arrive at work in the morning raring to go, but if you’re a night person, it may take you a while to get warmed up. A big influence on your cognitive effectiveness is fatigue that can build up over the course of the day. A lot of work on ego depletion suggests that the more difficult mental work you do in a day, the harder it can be to continue to do that work later. In some s…

A colossal squid has been caught on camera for the first time in the deep sea by an international team of researchers steering a remotely operated submersible. The sighting was announced Tuesday by the Schmidt Ocean Institute. The squid filmed was a juvenile about 1 foot (30 centimeters) in length at a depth of 1,968 feet (600 meters) in the South Atlantic Ocean. Full-grown adult colossal squids, which scientists have uncovered from the bellies of whales and seabirds, can reach lengths up to 23 feet (7 meters) — almost the size of a small fire truck. The squid was spied last month near the South Sandwich Islands during an expedition to search for new sea life.…

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. The speed and breadth of the changing political/cultural status quo in the U.S. has been breathtaking and disorienting for brand leaders across the tech/business community. Some leaders ​​have gone all in to kiss the ring of the new status quo. Many more are wrestling with the question “How do I continue to support the ideals my brand believes in without causing serious self-sabotage?” Thi…

In summer 2019, Bob McDonough took a full stack web development coding bootcamp at the University of Pennsylvania. An English-turned-telecommunications major in college, McDonough had been working at a bar while sending out job applications for positions he barely wanted. Most paid below $50,000 a year, an undesirable salary for a 27-year-old in Philadelphia. McDonough says his “degree really wasn’t doing it” for him. “So, I figured I’d add a certificate to stack my résumé,” he says. What McDonough was doing was upskilling—the practice of learning new skills or sharpening old ones to attain maximum desirability in the job market. While taking this web dev course,…

Some common business models can be described as B2C and B2B, which are “business-to-consumer,” and “business-to-business,” respectively. But now, get ready for “B2AI,” or “business-to-AI.” That’s one of the potential disruptions on the horizon, identified in a new report from Visa and the Institute for the Future. The report digs into the numerous ways that AI will transform commerce, and to some degree personal finance, including how consumers will likely lasso AI for their own means—and how businesses will, in turn, develop AI agents to communicate and correspond with consumers’ AIs. While many people likely haven’t adopted “personal” AI tools yet, they’re on th…

Once upon a time, there were two guarantees when getting a new job: a 401(k) and a work wife/hubby or bestie. No one assigns you. There’s no official moment. One day, they are just there. The person who can help you translate your boss’s cryptic email, exchange eyerolls after annoying comments at the staff meeting, or share your emergency stash of M&M’s at 3 p.m. But then 2026 happened and many of us work with colleagues we’ve only seen from the shoulders up on Zoom. So, I must ask, are work besties even a thing anymore? Or are they an outdated artifact of the pre-video conference culture? Why You Need a Work BFF Science backs up the value of office b…

Sign of the times: An AI agent autonomously wrote and published a personalized attack article against an open-source software maintainer after he rejected its code contribution. It might be the first documented case of an AI publicly shaming a person as retribution. Matplotlib, a popular Python plotting library with roughly 130 million monthly downloads, doesn’t allow AI agents to submit code. So Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer (like a curator for a repository of computer code) for Matplotlib, rejected and closed a routine code submission from the AI agent, called MJ Rathbun. Here’s where it gets weird(er). MJ Rathbun, an agent built using the buzzy agent…

Starbucks competitor Dutch Bros saw its stock price rise in premarket trading on Friday after the coffee chain posted double-digit revenue growth in its most recent quarter. However, shares were flat as of late morning, with the stock (NYSE: BROS) hovering at just over $50 a share. Perhaps even more important for the stock—and for those investors who are long on it—is the coffee chain’s announcement that it is on track to nearly double its store footprint by 2029. Here’s what you need to know. Dutch Bros has a record Q4 2025 Dutch Bros was founded in 1992, but it’s only in recent years that the coffee chain started to become a household name, thanks to its ev…

In part two of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company’s oral history of YouTube, we look at how the company’s rapid ascent after its 2005 founding led to multiple challenges, from bandwidth costs to unhappy copyright holders. This prompted the startup to consider selling itself, and on October 9, 2006, Google announced that it would be buying it, for $1.65 billion. That deal came with the promise that the web giant would help YouTube scale up even further without micromanaging it. Eventually, the balance they struck between integration and independence paid off. But when YouTube was still a tiny, plucky startup, nobody was looking that far ahead. Read more How YouTube A…

Kristina Smithe was running the California International Marathon in 2019, grabbing cups of water to stay hydrated, when she started to think about how much waste such events produce. On the flight home, she did the math: 9,000 runners, 17 aid stations, and something like 150,000 cups used once and thrown away. “I was just shocked that, even in California, it’s not sustainable,” Smithe said. That sparked her idea for something more durable—a lightweight, pliable silicone cup that could be used again and again. After working out a design, Smithe ordered her first shipment and tested them at a race in 2021. Now her business, Hiccup Earth, has 70,000 cups that Smithe rent…

Suzanna’s Kitchen, a Georgia-based food production company, has issued a recall of 62,550 pounds of fully cooked, bone-in breaded chicken products. The chicken, which was distributed nationwide, was recalled over mislabeling. While the product was labeled with a product code that classifies it as non-allergen-containing, the product contains soy. According to the recall notice, which was issued on December 12, the affected product is the eight-piece cut, bone-in breaded chicken portions that were produced on October 16, 2025. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) mark of inspection and establishment number printed on the side of the package is “P-1380.” …