Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

If you’re a manager today, your job may well be changing. That is, if it hasn’t already. As companies continue to compress their org charts and axe layers of middle management, a new role is emerging: the “supermanager.” Leaders are finding themselves responsible for significantly more direct reports and broader responsibilities. And in many industries, the trend shows no sign of slowing. A Gallup survey published in January, citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that the average number of reports managers have increased from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025. The share of managers overseeing 25 or more employees has also grown in the past year, wi…

Do women board members make a company more innovative or risk-averse? The answer is both, according to our recent study. It all depends on how the company performs relative to its goals. Professors Małgorzata Smulowitz, Didier Cossin and I examined 524 S&P 1500 companies from 1999 to 2016, measuring innovation through patent activity. Patents reflect both creative output and risk-taking. They require significant investment in novel ideas that might fail, disclosure of proprietary information and substantial legal costs. In short, patents represent genuine bets on the future. Our findings revealed a striking pattern. When companies performed poorly in relation …

Rob Shaver is a 49-year-old retail worker who recently had a streak of running at least 1 mile every day for three years. He’s also been living with Stage 4 bone and lung cancer for more than 20 years. Shaver’s commitment to living in spite of illness is chronicled in the short film The Life We Have, which uses his life as a lens through which to examine questions at the heart of the human experience: What gives life meaning when time feels fragile? How do we keep moving forward when suffering feels endless? Though profoundly sad, the film, directed by Sam Price-Waldman, is also thoughtfully inspiring. We see Shaver on his good days, running and spending time w…

For consumer packaged goods, the path from product idea to store shelves runs directly through the center of Unilever‘s new North American headquarters, and not just because the company makes market-saturating products like Hellmann’s mayonnaise and TRESemmé shampoo. This new headquarters space was designed specifically to put the entire process of product creation on display in its office, from ideation to development to marketing to retailing. Spread across 111,000 square feet in downtown Hoboken, New Jersey, Unilever’s newly opened headquarters is centered around an accessible spine of rooms and facilities that are optimized for bringing new products to market. The…

Change often fails and that rarely has anything to do with whether the concept is a good one or not. As Howard Aiken famously put it, “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throat.” As the creator of the Harvard Mark, one of the very first computers, he was speaking from experience. The truth is that any time you set out to make an impact there’s going to be some who won’t like it. They’ll seek to undermine what you are trying to achieve and they will do it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. It’s a hard truth, but one we all need to accept: resistance is inevitable when you …

JPMorganChase said Wednesday it plans to open more than 160 new bank branches in over three dozen states—and renovate nearly 600 more—as part of a nationwide, multibillion-dollar push for more affordable financial services. Those branches will include locations in rural and low-to-moderate income (LMI) communities in the Northeast, Southeast, America’s “Heartland” or Midwest, and Southwest—including in North and South Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Massachusetts, and Tennessee this year. JPMorganChase tells Fast Company those will include branch locations in: “Greater Philadelphia, Greater Boston, the Tampa Bay area, Minneapolis–Saint Paul metro area, R…

Three AI companies—OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity—are on the verge of receiving approval to sell their technology, hosted on their own cloud systems, directly to the government, a person familiar with the matter tells Fast Company. That authorization will be on a “low impact” and pilot level, the person said, but constitutes a major step toward independence. That independence could help those companies avoid some of the complications created by ongoing partnerships between AI firms and longtime government tech contractors. As large language models have gone mainstream, AI companies have often relied on tech firms that have already passed arduous government security re…

Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Swedish fintech company Klarna, says the organization is set to drastically downsize. And he says he shares his outlook on the workforce with another CEO: Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. Siemiatkowski made the comments on the 20 VC podcast with Harry Stebbings earlier this week, where the CEO didn’t deny that the company has been steadily shrinking. The CEO said that currently the company has about 3,000 employees. That’s down from 7,000 just four years ago. In another four, he says there will likely be less than 2,000—a reduction of one-third. Siemiatkowski cited both layoffs and the employees leaving the company and not being replace…

When I cofounded Brilliant Earth in 2005, e-commerce was still in its infancy. I believed technology could reshape the jewelry industry entirely—changing how customers find pieces they love, personalizing their own designs, and reimagining the customer experience. We launched as a digital-first venture to do just that. Now, two decades into our pioneering digital journey, I’ve realized something surprising: Our most sophisticated online tools have actually made in-person interactions more valuable. I believe the brands leading the next wave of innovation aren’t choosing between digital and physical. They’re using digital excellence to help create meaningful in-person …

Mark Zuckerberg and opposing lawyers dueled in a Los Angeles courtroom on Wednesday, where the Meta CEO answered questions about young people’s use of Instagram, his congressional testimony, and internal advice he’s received about being “authentic” and not “robotic.” Zuckerberg’s testimony is part of an unprecedented social media trial that questions whether Meta’s platforms deliberately addict and harm children. Attorneys representing the plaintiff, a now 20-year-old woman identified by the initials KGM, claim her early use of social media addicted her to the technology and exacerbated depression and suicidal thoughts. Meta Platforms and Google’s YouTube are the …

A new $7.25 billion settlement between Bayer and a group of cancer patients could wrap up a huge wave of lawsuits against the company over allegations that it didn’t warn consumers about cancer risks associated with the weedkiller Roundup. Bayer faces more than 180,000 claims over Roundup, which contains the herbicide glyphosate – the chemical at the center of the controversy. Most of those claims are from people who used the weedkiller, which is sold at any hardware or garden store, at home. The lawsuits have prompted Bayer to pull glyphosate out of many products under the Roundup brand, though glyphosate is still commonly used by farmers and in the agriculture busin…

Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Swedish fintech company Klarna, says the organization is set to employ drastically fewer people. And he says he shares his outlook on the workforce with another CEO: Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. Siemiatkowski made the comments on the 20 VC podcast with Harry Stebbings earlier this week, where the CEO didn’t deny that the company has been steadily shrinking. The CEO said that currently the company has about 3,000 employees. That’s down from 7,000 just four years ago. In another four, he says there will likely be less than 2,000—a reduction of one-third. Siemiatkowsk said employees leaving the company are not being replaced, and expla…

In 2013, when Meredith O’Connor was 16, the music video for her debut single “Celebrity” went viral. Afterward, she channeled her own stardom into championing childhood mental health: As a hyperactive kid, O’Connor says she was often the subject of bullying, and when her music career gave her a platform, she was eager to use it to advocate on behalf of other victims. “I knew my fan base was younger, but I didn’t know how many people would resonate with mental health challenges,” she says. “I realized there were millions of gifted people that are being marginalized, and that’s when I really wanted to start the mental health study.” Since blowing up YouTube over a…

“Before The Whale, I had everything to prove. And now, to be honest, not so much,” Oscar winner Brendan Fraser, 57, told AARP The Magazine in an interview last month. The 50-and-older segment is the fastest-growing demographic in the world, according to Myechia Minter-Jordan, AARP’s CEO. And three years ago, Fraser—a Hollywood mainstay for 35 years whose career has been marked by challenges like depression and work drought—was nominated for (and won) his first Academy Award for playing the lead in director Darren Aronofsky’s prestige drama The Whale. In his acceptance speech, Fraser thanked Aronofsky “for throwing me a creative lifeline.” In the interview with AA…

Imposter syndrome happens when we have the feeling that we do not deserve what we have achieved, fearing that we’ll be discovered to be fakes or frauds. Our successes, we tell ourselves, were achieved not through our actual abilities and talents, but through some combination of luck, timing, and mistakes others made that allowed us to slip through the cracks. Nobody is immune to this feeling, and it affects all segments of the public—from leaders, artists, actors, and the people we see as high achievers. Sheryl Sandberg, Harvard grad and former Facebook COO, wrote in her 2013 book Lean In: “Every time I took a test, I was sure that it had gone badly. And every time I…

The 2026 Milan-Cortino Winter Olympics is set to debut a new sport: ski mountaineering, also known as skimo. Over the course of two days at the Stelvio Ski Centre located in Bormio, Italy, 36 athletes will compete in three main events: men’s sprints, women’s sprints, and mixed relay. The race is part endurance and speed, as typical skimo competitions feature athletes racing against each other as they ascend uphill with support of climbing skins before skiing downhill. The Winter Olympics version, however, differs in format. This version compresses the competition into a roughly three-minute race. Each leg of a skimo race requires its own specialized equipment. …

If the thought of AI smart glasses annoys you, you’re not alone. This week, the judge presiding over a historic social media addiction trial took a harsh stance on the AI-powered gadgets, which many bystanders find invasive of their privacy: Stop recording or face contempt of court. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in a trial that many industry watchers say could have severe ramifications for social media giants, depending on how it turns out. At the heart of the trial is the question of whether social media companies like Meta, via its Facebook and Instagram platforms, purposely designed sa…

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign is remembered a decade on for the exclamation point in its “Jeb!” logo, but Jesse Jackson’s campaign actually used the punctuation 28 years before him. Jackson, the civil rights activist who died Tuesday at the age of 84, ran for president twice, in 1984 and 1988. At the 1988 Democratic National Convention, his supporters held red signs that said “Jesse!” in white. Jackson came in second in the 1988 primary with nearly 30% of the vote against the party’s nominee Michael Dukakis, and since then, candidates from Bush to 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and former U.S. Sen. Lamar Alex…

A new 3D-printed construction technique turns corn into a novel building material. Corncretl is a biocomposite made from corn waste known as nejayote that’s rich in calcium. It’s dried, pulverized, and mixed with minerals, and the resulting material is applied using a 3D printer. This corn-based construction material was made by Manufactura, a Mexican sustainable materials company, and it imagines a second life for waste from the most widely produced grain in the world. The project started as an invitation by chef Jorge Armando, the founder of catering brand Taco Kween Berlin, to find ways he could reintegrate waste generated by his taqueria into architecture.…

Most leaders understand their message needs to define exactly who their work is for. Fewer realize that it should also define who it’s not for. Fewer still realize that their message is unintentionally excluding some of the very people they want to attract. Effective messaging repels on purpose. Careless messaging excludes by accident. And for leaders, knowing the difference can make or break your organization’s credibility. REPEL TO ATTRACT The idea of intentionally turning away potential customers can make leaders uncomfortable. It seems counterintuitive, even reckless, to deliberately shrink your total addressable market when you’re trying to grow. But tryi…

Fifty years is a long time for any company to stay in business. About 20% fail in their first year. By year five, roughly half are gone. By the end of a decade, nearly 70% don’t make it. Reaching a golden anniversary raises a question about what allows some businesses to last. The answers are often framed in terms of Herculean efforts, access to capital, and brilliant strategy. All those matter. But in my experience, the gift of longevity is the result of something less visible and harder to measure: the quality of the relationships built along the way. This factor was apparent to me when I opened my first flower shop on April 1, 1976, and it only grew stronger as…

At the Winter Olympics, skiers, bobsledders, speedskaters, and many other athletes all have to master one critical moment: when to start. That split second is paramount during competition because when everyone is strong and skilled, a moment of hesitation can separate gold from silver. A competitor who hesitates too much will be left behind—but moving too early will get them disqualified. Though the circumstances are less intense, this paradox of hesitation applies to daily life. Waiting for the right moment to cross the street, or pausing before deciding whether to answer a call from a number you don’t recognize, are daily examples of hesitation. Importantly, some ps…

The pressure to adopt AI is relentless. Boards, investors, and the market tell us that if we don’t, we’ll be left behind. The result is a frantic gold rush to implement AI for AI’s sake, leading to expensive pilots, frustrated teams, and disappointing ROI. The problem is that we’re treating AI like a magic wand—a one-size-fits-all solution for any problem. But true transformation comes from strategically applying it where it can make the most impact. This is the “AI sweet spot,” where the real competitive advantage lies. It’s not about having the most advanced AI, but about having the right AI, applied to the right problems, with the right people. Here are five …