Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

When Meryl Rosenthal and her cofounder started a human capital and workplace transformation consultancy in 2005, she was 41 years old. Nine years later, her cofounder left for personal reasons, rendering Rosenthal—by then age 50—a so-called solopreneur. Being a woman of that age and running a business on her own certainly came with challenges. One, she says, was that younger HR and business leaders tended to assume she didn’t have the necessary expertise because her background had not squarely been in HR. Another was a preconception that she—as an older woman—didn’t understand technology as well as her younger peers. None of these things daunted Rosenthal, though…

As a leadership consultant who helps organizations understand how to apply artistic thinking, one of the lessons I have learned is one of the basic differences between the artistic practice and the business practice—in the former, questioning is the way of life, in the latter answers are the way to go. Artists ask “why” constantly. Why does this exist? Why are things the way they are? Why are we doing it this way? That relentless questioning is how they push past convention—and it’s the engine of genuine creative thinking. Bring that same type of question into most organizations, and something breaks. “Why are we doing it this way?” stops sounding like curiosity. It s…

Managing people is about helping people tap into underutilized reserves and overlooked skills that are indigenous to them, not fixing their habits. The people you manage naturally look to you for answers. They might even ask you to tell them what to do, which creates two major problems: If you tell them what to do, and even if you’re right, they won’t learn anything. If you give clear instructions regarding what to do and things still go wrong, they more than likely will blame you for the resulting mess. This kind of dynamic quietly creates an unhealthy dependency where the employee begins to look to you not just for guidance, but for approval. Anyone who…

Look, we all know the drill. Job hunting is basically a full-time job that pays zero dollars and requires you to be perpetually “passionate” about companies that make, I don’t know, enterprise-grade cloud storage for other cloud storage companies. It’s exhausting. But it’s 2026, and if you’re still copy-pasting your résumé into a hundred different web forms like it’s 2012, you’re doing it wrong. The robots are already screening you, so you might as well hire some robots of your own to level the playing field. Here are five AI-powered job-hunting tools to check out. Teal: Mission control If your job search is currently a mess of saved LinkedIn posts and half…

News that Microsoft was reportedly planning to pause its carbon removal purchases has rocked the still-nascent carbon removal industry. The company helped drive the market: In fiscal year 2025 alone, it made deals with 21 companies around the world to remove a record 45 million tons of CO2. Those deals included new contracts with companies like Re.green, which is restoring a swath of the Amazon rainforest, and Vaulted, which removes carbon by burying organic waste. Last month, it added a contract with Liferaft, a company making biochar from agricultural waste in the Midwest. The industry uses a wide range of technologies to tackle one part of the climate challenge: at th…

Earlier this week, Apple made its biggest announcement of the year, and no, it wasn’t about a new iPhone. The company announced that longtime CEO Tim Cook would be stepping down as chief executive, to be succeeded by hardware chief John Ternus in September. While the timing of the announcement on Monday was unexpected, nearly everything else about the development was not. In fact, Apple’s leadership transition is turning out to be one of the most carefully choreographed CEO shakeups in corporate history. Here’s why, and what comes next. Apple isn’t just any company, it’s a $4 trillion industry leader Any time a CEO changes, uncertainty is introduced—not just at…

Below, Aneesh Raman and Ryan Roslansky share five key insights from their new book, Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI. Raman is LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer. He previously served as senior adviser on economic strategy to the state of California and led economic impact at Facebook. Roslansky, who is CEO of LinkedIn, is also EVP of Microsoft Office and Copilot. What’s the big idea? AI’s impact on work is unfolding in real time—rapidly—and individuals have more agency than they think. By understanding how skills, roles, and industries are evolving, anyone can actively shape their career and stay ahead in the age of AI. Listen to…

In recent years, nearly half of employees report increased workloads and an accelerating pace of change, so the last thing anyone can afford is doing hard work that doesn’t make an impact. Ambitious workers aren’t afraid of putting in effort, but they want it to contribute to work that matters. Work worthy of our effort creates value on two dimensions: it generates value for others (your organization, customers, or the people around you), and it creates value for yourself through personal meaning and growth. Research shows that connecting to both dimensions taps into our intrinsic and values-based motivation. When those connections are weak, despite being busy, the work …

Our culture of individualism pushes each person to try to be a star. “Team player” has even come to have the negative implication of subverting one’s own well-being and best advantage, and maybe even becoming invisible to leadership. To counteract these possibly negative effects of selfless invisible toiling, people often strive to make sure leadership sees their individual achievements. But research shows that the culture of individual stars is not what leads to team success. A McKinsey study found that superstar individuals often do not create the best teams: Thinking about themselves first leads to behaviors that disrupt team trust and problem-solving. Google’s Proj…

Ikea bed, Ikea sheets, Ikea towels, Ikea desk, Ikea chairs, Ikea curtains, Ikea light fixtures, Ikea trashcans, Ikea clothes hangers, Ikea side tables, Ikea throw pillow, Ikea clock. This is the rough inventory of a room in the world’s only Ikea hotel—the Ikea Hotell in its Swedish spelling—located in Älmhult, Sweden, the same small town where Ikea was founded in the 1940s and where its headquarters still sits. I stayed a night in this very Ikea hotel recently during a reporting trip to Älmhult for a story about (surprise, surprise) Ikea. As one would expect, the lobby, amenity spaces, and hotel rooms themselves are outfitted entirely with Ikea furnishings—Fröset chairs …

The missed promotion. The botched presentation. The project that went sideways despite our best efforts. We’ve all been there, stuck in what I call failure’s funk: that heavy mix of shame, fear, and paralysis that keeps us replaying mistakes long after they’ve passed. In both life and work, this funk doesn’t just feel awful, it blocks learning. We’re so busy avoiding, denying, or criticizing ourselves that we miss the insight failure offers. We often hear that failure is life’s best teacher, but learning from it isn’t automatic. It doesn’t happen just because we failed; it happens because we do the inner work, reflecting, reframing, and choosing to respond differe…

Independent bookstores are beacons of hope, offering intangible commodities such as connection, empathy, and knowledge, in addition to physical books. The convenience and discounts of Amazon have long threatened their very existence. Since 2015, Independent Bookstore Day has worked to combat this threat on the last Saturday of April. This year’s festivities fall on April 25. Fast Company sat down with Andy Hunter, founder and CEO of Bookshop.org, to talk not only about the holiday and his organization’s work to offer an Amazon alternative. A cultural awakening around independent bookstores Since the pandemic and continued high cost of living, we as a …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During the pandemic housing boom, homebuilders saw their number of unsold completed new builds dry up as overheated demand quickly absorbed almost everything for sale. That is exactly what was experienced by D.R. Horton, America’s largest homebuilder, which had just 600 unsold completed new builds for sale in fiscal Q2 2022—compared to 4,700 in its fiscal Q2 2020. However, as the pandemic housing boom ended and the market shifted, U.S. homebuilders saw their unsold new builds spike back up. At the end of its fiscal Q2 2025—the three months ending Ma…

My earliest memory of travel insurance was the life insurance vending machines that used to populate airports up until the early 1980s. For those too young to remember this bizarre part of 20th century air travel, these kiosks offered very short-term life insurance policies that cost $2.50 (paid in quarters) for coverage of up to $62,500. Since these pre-travel policies were marketed to anxious flyers, it seemed clear the insurance companies were capitalizing on fear rather than offering a needed product. Over the intervening decades, I never revised my opinion of travel insurance. I’ve been lucky enough to never need travel insurance, but my family’s recent trip …

There are ​more than 20 billion things​ to watch on YouTube, but sometimes that endless choice can feel constraining. It’s all too easy, for instance, to get trapped inside an algorithmic bubble that keeps stuffing you with more of the same thing. And that’s before you get sidetracked looking at comments, descriptions, and sidebar recommendations. Fortunately, a new tool makes watching YouTube feel more like watching old-school TV—with a grid-based channel guide to flip through and minimal distractions. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech …

Two new experiments show that most people do not even consider that a personal message could be AI-generated, even when they themselves use artificial intelligence to write. To see how people judge someone based on their writing in the age of ChatGPT, my colleague Jiaqi Zhu and I recruited more than 1,300 U.S.-based participants, ages 18 to 84, and showed them AI-generated messages like an apology sent in an email. We split our volunteers into four groups: Some people saw the messages with no information about who or what wrote them, as in everyday life. Others were told the messages were definitely written by a human, definitely AI-generated, or that the source could…

Below, Richard Davidson and Cortland Dahl share five key insights from their new book, Born to Flourish: How New Science and Ancient Wisdom Reveal a Simple Path to Thriving. Davidson is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as the founder and director of its Center for Healthy Minds. He also founded a nonprofit, Humin, which translates science into tools that cultivate and measure well-being. Dahl serves as a contemplative scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds and as chief contemplative officer at the center’s affiliated nonprofit, Humin. What’s the big idea? Feeling happier, more …

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Is the Altman firebomb just the start of extreme doomer violence? On April 10, someone threw a molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house in San Francisco. The alleged assailant, 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama, didn’t stop there. He then went to OpenAI’s headquarters and told the security guards there that he intended to burn down the building and everyone inside. Two days later, someone allegedly fired two shots from a car driving past Altman’s house, but OpenAI said that event…

Warren Buffett is seldom wrong, especially regarding investment and innovation. As most of us know, the Oracle of Omaha offers wisdom that goes beyond industries, generations, and cultures. And that wisdom, even if it seems obvious (ever catch yourself saying, “Wait, I could’ve said that myself!”), is usually right on the mark. Like this piercing bit of truth-telling: If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster. That’s what Buffett once shared with a group of students at Georgia Tech when they asked him about his idea of success. He explained that success isn’t just about weal…

Since opening in Silicon Valley in 2019, NTT Research has operated as a long-horizon science lab, a dedicated arm of Japan’s telecommunications giant NTT Group, which invests more than $3 billion annually in global R&D. Now in its seventh year, the lab was built as a research subsidiary insulated from quarterly pressure and product roadmaps. Unlike startups or typical corporate innovation teams, NTT Research is a wholly owned entity focused on seeding advances in computing, security, and healthcare that can later fold into NTT’s global infrastructure and enterprise services. Many of these efforts take five to fifteen years to approach commercialization, a timeline no…

According to Wells Fargo’s recent Money Study, 64% of parents with Gen Z children say their 18- to 28-year-old kids still rely on them for financial support—whether it’s for housing or other expenses. Of the 3,773 U.S. adults surveyed at the end of last year, more than half who are parents (56%) said the monetary support they’re extending to their adult children adds a strain on their own finances. “It’s not surprising that young adults are leaning on both family and nontraditional sources for support, but these dynamics are also putting pressure on parents,” Emily Irwin, Wells Fargo’s head of private wealth planning, said in a press release. “Open communication,…

Have you noticed that in the current discourse around artificial intelligence, the narrative often slips into one of two extremes? There is either a techno-utopian dream of total automation or a dystopian nightmare where human agency is erased. But there are other options! As we navigate this inflection point in civilization, I invite you to consider a third path: pragmatic optimism. And that’s because we are currently in the midst of a human revolution, not a tech revolution. The most successful organizations of 2026 and beyond will not be those that simply use AI to do more things faster. Instead, they will be the ones that use AI as a creativity accelerator, freeing …

Over the past few years, words that once had no place in workplace conversations have slowly entered HR agendas: menstruation, endometriosis, perimenopause, menopause, breast cancer and—more slowly—male andropause or prostate cancer. These are not passing trends. They signal a deeper shift in how we understand work and the people who do it. For decades, work was designed around a fiction, that of the “neutral” worker, an abstract individual assumed to be fully available, consistent, rational, and unaffected by bodily constraints. But this neutrality was never real. As Caroline Criado Perez has shown in her brilliant book Invisible Women, many systems and environments hav…