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A commercial airliner was on final approach to San Francisco’s international airport in November when the crew spotted a drone outside the cockpit window. By then it was too late “to take evasive action,” the pilots reported, and the quadcopter passed by their windshield, not 300 feet away. A month earlier, a jetliner was flying at an altitude of 4,000 feet near Miami’s international airport when its pilots reported a “close encounter” with a drone. In August, a drone came within 50 feet of clipping the left wing of a passenger jet as it departed Newark International Airport. The incidents were all classified as “near midair collisions” — any one of which could ha…

Amazon and Grubhub are entering the second year of a five-year commercial agreement that gives Amazon Prime members access to the food delivery platform’s subscription program at no extra cost. As part of the deal, Grubhub’s ordering tab was integrated directly into the Amazon app and website, allowing users to order burritos while shopping for face wash or streaming a show. That seamless experience appears to be paying off, say company executives. “Amazon Prime customers are a very engaged customer cohort,” says Jamil Ghani, Amazon’s worldwide vice president of Prime. More than nine out of 10 orders on Amazon.com or in the app are coming from Prime members retur…

You’ve been knocking it out of the park. Your projects deliver, your name comes up in leadership meetings, and now you’ve been tapped for the next step: your first management role. It’s exciting. It’s validating. But it’s also a lot like stepping off a cliff with no parachute—especially if no one’s told you what leadership really requires. In fact, nearly half of first-time managers report feeling unprepared when they take on their new roles. Why? Because being a high-achieving individual contributor is a completely different job than managing people. It’s not a promotion—it’s a profession. So, before you accept that new title and the “corner Slack channel” that c…

In a small village in Senegal, almost no one has electricity, but that’s about to change. Last year, a 40-foot-shipping container rolled into town, unfolded an array of solar panels on its roof, and crews began running wires to connect the whole village to clean power. After final approvals from the local government, the new microgrid will soon switch on. The project had an unusual funding source: ChargePoint, the EV charging company known for its network of a million chargers in the U.S. and Europe, spent six figures helping get it built, working with a technology partner called Africa GreenTec. The EV charging company used money that it earned selling carbon cre…

In a first-of-its kind move, Hawaii lawmakers are ready to hike a tax imposed on travelers staying in hotels, vacation rentals and other short-term accommodations and earmark the new money for programs to cope with a warming planet. State leaders say they’ll use the funds for projects like replenishing sand on eroding beaches, helping homeowners install hurricane clips on their roofs and removing invasive grasses like those that fueled the deadly wildfire that destroyed Lahaina two years ago. A bill scheduled for House and Senate votes on Wednesday would add an additional 0.75% to the daily room rate tax starting Jan. 1. It’s all but certain to pass given Democrats hold…

Every friend group has one person who’s always running late. If you can’t think of one, chances are you’re that friend. Now, a newly launched app called Lately is here to help you stay on time for everything from meetings to dinner plans. Created by developer Erik MacInnis, Lately sends users timely nudges—30, 10, and five minutes before it’s time to leave. As the self-acknowledged “late one” in his friend group, MacInnis tells Fast Company that the idea for Lately struck during a fishing trip gone wrong. He had assumed it would take 20 minutes to get there, got sidetracked by replying to emails, left five minutes late, and the drive ended up taking 30. “When I ar…

Causal dining chains had a pretty bad 2024 when it came to solvency issues. Major chains, including Red Lobster, TGI Fridays, and Roti, all filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year. And 2025 doesn’t seem to be fairing better for more restaurants. The latest restaurant chain to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection is the Tex-Mex casual dining chain On The Border Mexican Grill & Cantina. Here’s what you need to know about the company’s bankruptcy filing. Why is On The Border filing for bankruptcy? On March 5, OTB Holding LLC, owner of the On The Border chain, announced it had voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Georgia. …

Emily Falk is a Professor of Communication, Psychology, and Marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Communication Neuroscience Lab and the Climate Communication Division of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Her work has been covered in the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, Forbes, and Scientific American, among other outlets. What’s the big idea? Every moment is filled with how we’ve decided to spend our time, and that time defines us. We make value judgements (often automatically) of our options and follow similar patterns, day in and day out. When we decide we want to change in some way, it can be extremely difficult to snap out o…

Only one in four U.S. employees strongly agree that their organization cares about their overall well-being, with stark implications. Gallup reports that high employee well-being leads to improved performance, fewer sick days, and lower rates of burnout and turnover. “When your employees’ well-being suffers, so does your organization’s bottom line,” the group noted. At one time we may have thought that workplace well-being was separate from personal well-being. But now with digital overload, remote work, and a blurring of lines between work and home, it is a critical area for addressing how we feel about life in general. So how can organizations make mental healt…

The acting chief of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said on Monday he has directed staff to look at ways to abandon a plan that would have widened the definition of alternative trading systems to include some cryptocurrency firms. The SEC in 2022 proposed requiring some crypto firms to register as alternative trading systems, drawing criticism from the sector in the face of potentially heightened oversight and additional rules. Acting Chairman Mark Uyeda told an audience of bankers he has instructed staff to look at ways to abandon that portion of the plan, which has yet to be finalized. It was an expansion of an earlier effort aimed at trading of Trea…

Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Company’s workplace advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: How do I decide what to take off of my résumé? A: There is much debate about if your résumé really needs to be one page. But regardless of if it’s one page or two, there are some common elements you can cut to make your résumé easier to read and more effective. Here are a few: Work history that’s more than 15 years old This one isn’t cut and dry. You shouldn’t just delete everything before 2010. But here’s what to consider cutting or condensing. I…

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. How do big companies evolve? How do they learn to do something new? These are questions that have taken up untold pages of books, magazines, and journal articles. As a venture capitalist (VC) in water, I’ve seen firsthand that most large companies in the sector struggle to effectively engage with external innovation, particularly with entrepreneurs developing technologies that could enhance thei…

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. I’m not one to jump on every shiny new tool just because it’s trending. Some tech tools, gadgets, and software have transformed my life for the better (like the Meta Quest), and some ventures did not fare so well (I will ignore Apple Watch’s reminders to stand until the end of time). But AI? It’s different. AI isn’t in the same league as the other tech you know and love. This is not just a…

Don’t let Canva’s rainbow gradients fool you. The Aussies are relentless, and their global conquest through easy-to-use design software continues as they set their sights on markets owned by Adobe and Microsoft. Even after a controversial price increase last year, growth is still explosive. Canva has added 50 million active users over the past 12 months, bringing its total to 230 million, with $3 billion in annual revenue. But despite this success, Canva decided it was time for a redesign. And it’s launching what the company considers its biggest overhaul since the app launched in 2012. It includes a Teams-crushing approach to file collaboration, a powerful AI-fueled spre…

The next frontier of consumer tech isn’t just about adding more screens to your life or boosting your devices’ processing power. Instead, it’s empowering users to accomplish more, from powerful new maker tools to more efficient skincare solutions. On the home front, assistive robots are suddenly in reach, and AI cameras are learning to provide better pet care instead of just surveilling humans. Of course, there’s cool screen-related stuff too, including wildly thin foldable phones and increasingly immersive AR glasses. Anker For 3D printing onto pretty much anything Printing 3D textures onto materials such as wood and metal usually requires industrial-grade tools, but A…

Since 1974, William Stout Architectural Books in San Francisco’s Jackson Square has been one of the city’s most iconic destinations for its seemingly endless stock of art, design, and architecture books. As the store was approaching its 50th year in business with a fresh owner, the Eames Institute for Infinite Curiosity, it discovered a problem: It had run out of stickers to label its books. Then it discovered another problem—it didn’t have a formalized logo to print more. But as luck would have it, a fairly competent design firm resided just across the street that offered to help: LoveFrom. “It’s a store we loved. And if we didn’t get to design [their brand], it would ha…

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. Many companies forget AI-powered enterprise applications are just business apps at the end of the day. The reality is, AI is simply another arrow in our quiver, albeit incredibly more powerful. But what IT has done since generative AI exploded on the scene is frantically rush to deploy any and all possible applications, causing massive confusion and huge resource wastes, without delivering much …

In large organizations, HR usually has a process for documenting concerns about employees’ effectiveness that can be used either to help fix those problems—or to provide a basis for later termination. One of the central records used for this purpose is the dreaded performance improvement plan, or PIP. If you get called in to see your supervisor and get hit with a PIP, you’re likely to experience a range of emotions. Understanding your emotional reaction and how to cope with it is an important part of moving forward successfully. Let’s consider a range of emotions you might be experiencing and what you should do: Feeling Grief One possibility is that the PIP com…

A study has confirmed what we all suspected: “K” is officially the worst text you can send. It might look harmless enough, but this single letter has the power to shut down a conversation and leave the recipient spiraling. According to a study published in the Journal of Mobile Communication, “K” was ranked as the most negatively received response in digital conversations—worse than being left on read or even a passive-aggressive “sure.” The study found that the single-letter reply often signals emotional distance, passive-aggressiveness, or outright disinterest. Despite its brevity, “K” carries surprising emotional weight. Adding an extra letter—making it “kk”—so…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Before there was Apple, Medtronic, or Tesla, there was General Electric (GE). Created in 1892 from the combination of Thomas Edison’s Edison General Electric and two other competitors, the American conglomerate was once the most powerful, valuable, and inventive company in the world. …

Our workplaces are undergoing the next technological revolution, brought on by the warp-speed growth of artificial intelligence (AI). Generative AI is a total game changer for how we work. One day, we’ll look back and wonder how we did our jobs without this technology. But not today. Many of us are still living firmly in the discovery period of AI at work, and we’re dealing with a big dichotomy. Employees are incredibly curious about how to use AI to make their jobs easier and accelerate their growth, but very few people feel like they know how to do that. The results of a recent Wiley survey of around 2,000 individuals across a range of job roles and industries …