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We’ve been sold a lie. Somewhere between “go to school” and “get a job,” work became the central node of our lives—the very thing that defines us. We measure our worth by our output, our identity by our title, and our health by how much we can endure. The hours. The travel. The back-to-back meetings. The busyness. That’s not the picture we painted for ourselves when we chose our major in college and envisioned what we thought would be a fulfilling career; that’s conditioning. The result of which has shaped our meaning of work and how we see ourselves in it. But meaning isn’t found in the busyness of the grind—rather, it’s found in alignment. And when our work has gre…

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…

Have you ever tried to complete a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces? That’s what it’s like to run a business with siloed systems. Business data is critical in every industry, but if it’s siloed across departments, teams, and people—that is, if your puzzle pieces are scattered across your home—you may never figure out how to make that information work for you. Left unaddressed, this fragmentation can eventually undermine customer trust, brand integrity, and employee retention, severely impacting your business goals. True integration isn’t just about building more efficient systems: It’s about centering the entirety of your customer’s needs in every system you bu…

If you were to establish an electric truck company today, would the trucks be built in America? In April 2025, the answer is yes. In 2022, even after the pandemic, the answer might have been different. That was the year I initially founded Chang Robotics, a company that manufactures what we believe to be one of the world’s most powerful battery-operated commercial rigs. Its first commercial use will be for fast snow removal in airports and other mission-critical facilities. At the time, advisors, investors, and partners all said “Let’s take this to China. I’ll bet we could get this done in six months.” I declined. New Manufacturing Should Focus on Bei…

Below, Zelana Montminy shares five key insights from her new book, Finding Focus: Own Your Attention in an Age of Distraction. Zelana is a behavioral scientist who is pioneering a transformative approach to mental health and resilience. She has built a career advising and speaking for Fortune 500 companies, global organizations, and academic institutions. Her recent clients include American Express, Coca-Cola, Estee Lauder, Bank of America, UCLA, and Big Brothers Big Sisters. She appears regularly on The Doctors, Good Morning America, The Today Show, and Access Hollywood. What’s the big idea? We live in a world that is quietly, relentlessly unraveling our atten…

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 famous computer scientist Bill Joy once said, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” If you want to build something on the bleeding edge, you must have an open ecosystem that can pull in as many ideas as possible, skills and talents that exist beyond the four walls of your office building. This is the ethos of open source, the idea that the world is open …

As tech companies shell out millions for top AI talent—even reportedly billions—regular rank-and-file employees are left wondering how to get in on the action and land a job in artificial intelligence. One report found that job postings that mention needing at least one AI skill had salaries 28% higher than other jobs, which translates to $18,000 more. Jobs that required two AI skills had a 43% salary jump. To begin with, it’s worth considering where the AI jobs are and how this intersects with your interests and existing skills. Many jobs in AI can roughly be divided into five different categories: researchers engineers business strategists doma…

In business and sports, team dynamics impact outcomes. Whether you’re pursuing profits or championships, knowing what triggers your teammates can help you avoid conflict and stay on task. The problem is that taking time to better understand each other isn’t always our default setting, say John Eliot and Jim Guinn, authors of How To Get Along with Anyone: The Playbook for Predicting and Preventing Conflict at Work and at Home. “Blowups appear to be substance-driven, but they’re actually people-driven,” says Eliot. “The first step toward preventing and resolving conflict is to focus on figuring out the people participating in it not the underlying ‘problem.’” To wor…

Olivia Walch is an investigator in the Department of Neurology at the University of Michigan and CEO of a tech start-up called Arcascope. Her research has been featured on CNN, NPR, and in The Atlantic, among other outlets. Beyond sleep research, she coedited Political Geometry, a book on the mathematics of gerrymandering, and published comics with The Nib and Silver Sprocket. She is also the cartoonist of Imogen Quest, a webcomic that won her the “America’s Next Great Cartoonist” prize from the Washington Post. What’s the big idea? If you are dancing and can’t catch the beat, you are not dancing well. In this way, if your sleep doesn’t follow a regular pattern tha…

Raising venture capital for a physical-world company can feel harder than getting struck by lightning. You could be standing on a mountain for months, holding a metal pole in a storm, waiting. And you probably still wouldn’t get hit. Meanwhile, it can seem like founders in San Francisco announce a new AI round every other week. Capital moves quickly when you’re building software that rides the current hype cycle. If you’re building something that touches atoms instead of code, like manufacturing, energy, agriculture, or materials, you’re often grinding quietly. The timelines are longer. The checks are fewer. The rejections stack up. And pardon my French, but you get y…

If you handle hiring, generic AI-generated cover letters are probably a familiar foe by now. Nearly two-thirds of job seekers are using AI to help craft their applications. It’s understandable. In a world where some job seekers are having to send up to 50 applications to land a role, tools like ChatGPT enable them to cast their net wide and increase their chances. But this spray-and-pray approach to job hunting is a headache for hiring managers. It’s driving the volume of applications up and the quality down, making it harder to spot great candidates. The natural knee-jerk reaction from HR is to start playing a game of “I spy AI.” If we can just root out the …

Every C-suite executive I meet asks the same question: Why is our AI investment stuck in pilot purgatory? After surveying over 200 AI practitioners for our latest research, I have a sobering answer: Only 22% of organizations have moved beyond experimentation to strategic AI deployment. The rest are trapped in what I call the “messy middle”—burning resources on scattered pilots that never reach production scale. In my 20-plus years helping companies solve complex problems with open-source AI and machine learning, I’ve watched this pattern repeat across industries. Companies get excited about AI’s potential. They fund pilots. They hire data scientists. But when …

The hottest thing in meat, these days? Apparently, it’s vegetables. Nectar, a nonprofit research organization dedicated to advancing alternative proteins, released findings last week from a large-scale blind taste test comparing hybrid meat-veggie products with traditional meat. The blended products, which they’re calling “balanced proteins,” are a hit with omnivores—so much so that testers actually preferred some of them to their all-meat counterparts. “The irony is that a burger is a blended product,” says Andrew Arentowicz, CEO & Co-Founder of Both, one of the brands that taste testers in the Nectar survey rated as on-par with comparable all-meat products.…

In recent months, major tech companies have lured top talent from rival companies with multimillion-dollar salaries and rumors of unprecedented sign-on bonuses. Big firms are fighting for talent from Apple, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and beyond, reportedly offering pay packages that resemble those of NBA stars. Meta has been aggressively poaching talent from its competitors in the race to dominate AI, luring Apple’s robotics chief earlier this month in a move that made headlines. It’s news like this that makes workers ask themselves: “How can I get that to happen to me? (Even if I’m not a Silicon Valley CEO?)” Luckily, career experts say anyone can make themselves mor…

If you’re in an unfulfilling job or are dissatisfied with your work, it’s possible to get a fresh start no matter what the season. In fact, there are a few strategies that can help you find meaning and enhance your experience even as you slog forward. A lack of fulfillment in your job can have intense effects. It can derail your motivation, your energy, and even your performance. And these, in turn, get in the way of your happiness at work and can impact your overall happiness outside of work too. For many people, it’s hard to find meaning at work. In fact, half of workers in the U.S. reported that they lacked satisfaction in their work, and 38% said their job was…

Work consumes around a third of our waking hours during the weekday. Yet, according to Gallup, nearly a third of employees are disengaged. 80,000 Hours, a London-based nonprofit that helps people find the best career fit for themselves, reviewed 60 studies on dream jobs and found that a dream job meets six criteria: it’s engaging, it helps others, you’re good at it, you work with supportive colleagues, it doesn’t have major negatives, and it fits with the rest of your life. Dream jobs seem difficult to land—one 2024 survey of 3,000 employees across the U.S. finds only 14% of American adults are working their dream job. The same study found that 38% of adults hat…

In my work, I frequently observe teams whose purpose is to provide top-level service fall into frustration with their inability to deliver. With stress coming from a lack of support from their workplace’s practices, communication, or training, I can empathize. Studies find that workplace burnout is at unprecedented levels, and with layoffs forcing workers to handle multiple roles, emotionally exhausted teams deserve support to carry on. With frustrated customers being redirected to apps, endless hold times, or inadequate self-service forums that can’t address complex problems, we need solid teams to help us with our customer-facing problems. When trapped in bure…

Have you ever had the experience of rereading a sentence multiple times only to realize you still don’t understand it? As taught to scores of incoming college freshmen, when you realize you’re spinning your wheels, it’s time to change your approach. This process, becoming aware of something not working and then changing what you’re doing, is the essence of metacognition, or thinking about thinking. It’s your brain monitoring its own thinking, recognizing a problem, and controlling or adjusting your approach. In fact, metacognition is fundamental to human intelligence and, until recently, has been understudied in artificial intelligence systems. My colleagues C…

Small-business owners are up against a lot. It can be difficult to come up with the funding required to take an idea and turn it into something profitable, especially in an economy that can often feel less stable than many of us might prefer. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad idea to start your own small business. In fact, the opposite is often true. If you have an idea and a plan you believe in, the future of your small business can be wide open. Of course, there are a few considerations to keep in mind along the way, Chedva Ludmir tells Fast Company. Ludmir, who founded the consulting and coaching firm Consider Labs, regularly works with entrepreneurs…

Let’s do a thought exercise. If the role of the chief marketing officer is to oversee marketing and the role of the chief operating officer is to oversee operations, while the chief financial officer’s responsibility is to safeguard the organization’s finances, then what’s the responsibility of the chief executive officer? Surely, it’s more than overseeing executions or leading executives, yet the “CEO” naming convention doesn’t give much insight as to what the role is or what it’s responsible for. This gets even more convoluted when an organization has both a CEO and a president. Who’s responsible for what? Clearly, a president presides over the organization or nation st…

The last two years have been one of the toughest job markets I’ve seen in decades. This isn’t like 2020 or 2021, where after the initial phase of the pandemic receded, jobs quickly reappeared. This one has been slow and unrelenting—market volatility causing uncertainty, and digital transformation of workplaces, and AI taking over jobs faster than you can read the headlines. These days, it feels like you’re sending your resume into the abyss. Sound familiar? I see it every day as a recruiter and career coach: talented job-seekers submitting application after application into what feels like a black hole. Weeks turn into months. The silence is deafening. Each passing da…

“I have no idea if this is what they want me to do. I barely get any feedback.” This is a statement I often hear from leaders in my coaching calls, even those at a senior level. When these leaders were early in their careers, there was more frequent guidance and coaching on what success looked like for them and if their work met expectations. However, research by Amy Edmondson shows that the higher you rise in an organization, the less feedback you tend to receive, which can make it feel like you’re losing reassurance. In coaching calls with my clients, we often discover how reliant they were on their leader’s affirmation, and that this recognition served as motivat…

If you are career-minded, you may think applying for a loftier position in another company is the best route. In fact half of millennials expect to leave their current company within a year. But it’s not always the right move. Advancing in your present company may be a smarter move. You already know the culture and the people. If you enjoy them, who is to say that you’d find something better elsewhere? Also, some companies reward loyalty. And why would you want to compete with hundreds of applicants in a chaotic job market? If you are staying, hone your strategy. Follow these five steps to boost your likelihood of advancing. 1. ASK FOR VISIBLE ASSIGNMENTS …

If you’re leaving meetings feeling destabilized and second-guessing yourself, you’re probably not imagining it. Workplace bullying looks a lot different than it did in middle school. Here’s how to recognize it, respond in the moment, and protect yourself when the bully has power over you. View the full article

After weeks of searching and applying, you’ve made it to the interview stage, a victory in and of itself. But what happens if you land multiple interviews with different companies at the same time? While it’s certainly a good problem to have, it’s still one that needs to be handled with care—especially if one of the companies asks whether you’re interviewing elsewhere. But does interviewing with multiple companies make you seem like a more desirable candidate—or someone less committed? What if you get a job offer from one company, but are midway through the hiring process at another? These questions are common, and how you handle them can impact not only you…