What's on Your Mind?

When life gives people lemons, most try to make the best out of a bad situation. Instead, Beau du Bois, vice president of bar and spirits at Marisi Italian restaurant in La Jolla, California, found himself with an incredible opportunity. In 2021, the Adler and Lombrozo families, owners of the Puesto Mexican restaurant chain, tapped du Bois to build Marisi’s bar program from the ground up. One of the first actions du Bois took when learning about this new venture was starting a batch of limoncello, using a lesser-known Amalfi Coast technique. “They told me about Marisi almost exactly a year before we opened,” du Bois tells Fast Company. “And the very next day, even…

Hello again, and thank you for spending time with Fast Company’s Plugged In. Last October, I visited the Silicon Valley headquarters of 1X Technologies—the startup behind a humanoid home robot called Neo—and spoke with its VP of product and design, Dar Sleeper. Among the points he made was that long-standing public expectations have set a high bar for household robots. Naturally, he name-checked the world’s most iconic one. “The ultimate, North Star, in a lot of people’s minds, is Rosie the Robot,” he told me. “A Jetsons world where you ask and receive, and it makes your life better, you spend more time with your family, you’re more present.” Sleeper’s referen…

Revolutionary France may seem like a strange place to find a life hack, but in the 1790s, the French satirist Nicolas Chamfort offered some stark advice to cope with our daily travails. “One should swallow a toad every morning, so as not to find anything disgusting for the rest of the day,” he wrote. In other words, start with the thing you dread most, and the following obligations will feel far more pleasant. Chamfort’s name has largely been forgotten by the English-speaking world, but his unsettling phrase has endured as a popular productivity mantra: “Eat the frog.” The idea has even inspired a best-selling self-help book from the 2000s. But does it actually w…

Most people care about fairness at work and want to support colleagues who face marginalization—for example, people of color, women, and people with disabilities. Our research has found that 76% of employees want to be allies to co-workers who face additional challenges, and 84% value equity. That’s in line with a 2025 national survey that found 88% of employees supported employers offering training on how to be more inclusive. So why doesn’t that support always turn into action? Our new study in the Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health points to one reason: Some people may freeze with worry because they feel like a fake. Specifically, they feel like they don’t …

Instacart just became the first company to offer an end-to-end integrated shopping experience with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s yet another signal that AI is about to upend the way we shop—and, maybe, the way we cook. The new partnership was announced by Instacart and OpenAI on December 8. To use the interface, ChatGPT users need to make an Instacart account and then surface Instacart within their chat thread using a prompt like, “Instacart, help me shop for apple pie ingredients.” From there, they can discuss recipes, ingredient swaps, and their preferred store with ChatGPT, which will help them order all of the items they need from Instacart without ever changing tabs or …

From the latest skyscraper in a Chinese megalopolis to a six‑foot‑tall yurt in Inner Mongolia, researchers at the Technical University of Munich claim they have created a map of all buildings worldwide: 2.75 billion building models set in high‑resolution 3D with a level of precision never before recorded. Made from years of satellite data analysis by machine‑learning algorithms, the model reflects a sustained effort to capture the built world in three dimensions. The result now provides a crucial basis for climate research and for tracking progress toward global sustainable development goals, according to the scientists behind it.​ Professor Xiaoxiang Zhu, who le…

Leadership listening is in sharp decline, and the consequences run deep. A survey from People Insights found that only 56% of employees believe senior leaders genuinely make an effort to listen, which is down from 65% two years ago. We live in a world where algorithms reward noise. Visibility has become a proxy for value, and airtime is the metric that many use to measure leadership presence. But real influence doesn’t come from speaking more. It actually comes from listening better. Influence grows through empathy, trust, and the ability to see and understand people. The disconnection crisis When leaders stop listening, people stop contributing. Ideas fade…

Six years ago, when Michael Buckley returned to True Religion‘s offices as CEO, the denim brand looked nothing like the one he had built a decade earlier. Buckley was the brand’s president between 2006 and 2010, when True Religion was a luxury brand that sold jeans priced between $300 and $500 at Neiman Marcus and Barneys. Buckley helped grow revenues to more than $300 million a year, but after he left, the brand hit hard times, as it struggled to adapt to e-commerce. It filed for bankruptcy in 2017 and again in 2020. In 2019, after serving as CEO of Differential Brands Group (which owns Hudson Jeans), Buckley came back to True Religion to clean up the mess. He’s …

If you’re order number 67 at In-N-Out, don’t expect to hear your number called. The fast food chain has reportedly removed the number from its system, after viral videos show teens responding with wild celebrations after waiting around just to hear the number called. “Imagine explaining this to someone in the future,” one commenter wrote. Employees confirmed the number hasn’t been used for orders for about a month, according to a report from People magazine. After order number 66, the next order jumps straight to number 68. The chain has also removed the number 69, for good measure. The two digits, pronounced “six, seven,” not “sixty-seven”, have also been …

Imagine the scene: Your plane just landed late. You’ve barely got enough time to catch your connection, but first you’ve got to convince the other passengers to let you off before them. Good luck. Recently, though, a Delta Air Lines flight attendant flipped the script, according to Kathrin Peters. Peters, co-founder of consulting firm Withiii Leadership, says a recent flight taught her one of the best real-life lessons she’s ever seen in “generating instant connectivity.” After confirming the plane’s late arrival, the flight attendant asked passengers to raise their hand if they were ending their journey in Salt Lake City, the flight’s destination. After most …

Electronic gifts are very popular, and in recent years, retailers have been offering significant discounts on smartphones, e-readers, and other electronics labeled as “pre-owned.” Research I have co-led finds that these pre-owned options are becoming increasingly viable, thanks in part to laws and policies that encourage recycling and reuse of devices that might previously have been thrown away. Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy have dedicated pages on their websites for pre-owned devices. Manufacturers like Apple and Dell, as well as mobile service providers like AT&T and Verizon, offer their own options for customers to buy used items. Their sales rely on the availa…

Organizations often describe change as a technical exercise: Adjust a workflow, update a reporting line, reorganize a process or two. On paper, it all looks relatively contained. But the lived experience of change rarely aligns with the tidy logic of a project plan. Recently, I worked with a team in the midst of what leadership kept referring to as a “small restructuring.” And technically, it was. The core work wasn’t shifting, no one’s job was threatened, and the strategy made sense. Yet the emotional climate thickened almost immediately. One manager became more reserved than usual, answering questions with careful brevity. Another grew unusually fixated on mino…

“Happy Friday” is ranked as one of the worst ways to begin an email and it is also one of the worst ways to end a piece of correspondence. While “Happy Friday” may seem like a friendly send-off to colleagues as they approach the weekend, it can easily offend for many reasons. Here are three excellent reasons never to use this expression. #1: IT CAN BE ANNOYING This expression may be used by people who are trying to lift the spirits of a colleague or make the recipient feel relieved that the workweek is coming to an end. But your colleague may be involved in working hard to complete an assignment, or be involved in a project that needs to get done. If…

AI coaches are everywhere. They’re training marathoners and coaching leaders, and even billionaires Ray Dalio created an AI clone to serve as a digital mentor. In the past few months, searches for “AI coaching” have gone through the roof. And it’s easy to see why. AI coaches are available 24/7, cost less than a gym membership, and can recall every word you’ve ever said. Research even shows they can match human coaches in helping people reach their goals. Ironically, people often tell AI things they’d never tell another person. Studies show chatbots reduce our fear of judgment, making them surprisingly effective at uncovering what’s really going on. And with 94% of…

OpenAI on Thursday released its answer to Google’s impressive Gemini 3 Pro model–GPT-5.2—and by the looks of some head-to-head benchmark test scores, it looks like a winner. The new model took the highest score on a number of benchmark tests covering coding, math, science, tool use, and vision. (Benchmarks should, of course, be combined with real-world use to tell the whole story. But still . . .) OpenAI says GPT-5.2, which is a reasoning model, achieved expert-level performance scores on its own GDPval benchmark, which evaluates performance on 44 real professional tasks including things like spreadsheet creation, document drafting, presentation building, and more. …

Year-end giving can be a moment of reflection, but for businesses and philanthropy alike, it should also include looking forward and asking the question, what’s next? One throughline from this past year is uncertainty. Uncertainty has rewritten how we work, live, and lead. Yet, one thing that still holds true is we share a responsibility to keep systems strong so no one is left behind, especially children. I’ve seen firsthand how instability isn’t just economic, it’s deeply human. I’ve seen it in a mother whose baby’s survival depended on something as small as a packet of therapeutic food. In that moment, you understand that systems created as large scale solution…

Early in my career, I learned a valuable lesson that has stayed front and center. I was working for a company struggling to meet its marks. We were doing fine, but not knocking it out of the park. I walked into a quarterly business review, confident in our marketing metrics. We were hitting or surpassing every KPI, and I presented our achievements with pride. My CEO made a statement that stopped me in my tracks: “Marketing success means nothing unless the company as a whole is winning.” That moment was a turning point. In our focus on metrics, it’s easy to overlook what really matters. It’s a lesson I was grateful to learn early and one I believe every leader should e…

Every company is racing to modernize. There’s a sense that if you aren’t adopting new technology fast enough, you’re already behind. From AI and automation to digital platforms, the list keeps growing. Leaders make big investments, employees sit through onboarding sessions, and for a few weeks, excitement fills the air. Then the momentum fades. Dashboards sit idle. Pilots stall. The return on investment never arrives. We see it all the time. On the factory floor, operators are juggling a dozen tools that don’t talk to each other. Managers chase data that doesn’t reflect what’s really happening. Teams try to keep up with systems meant to help them but instead end u…

Cracker Barrel posted lower-than-expected sales in its fiscal first quarter and trimmed its revenue forecast for the year as it continued to feel the fallout from a botched plan to revamp its logo and restaurants. The Lebanon, Tennessee-based restaurant chain said Tuesday its revenue fell 5.7% to $797.2 million in the three months ending Oct. 31. That was lower than the $800 million Wall Street anticipated, according to analysts polled by FactSet. Cracker Barrel said its same-store restaurant sales dropped 4.7% while sales in its retail shops dropped 8.5%. Those declines were also slightly higher than analysts forecast. Cracker Barrel said it now expects total revenue …

It’s a common experience: you search for white bean soup recipes one time on Instagram, and you are bombarded with white bean soup content on the app for seemingly all eternity. Instagram wants to fix that. Starting today, the company’s three billion users can have more control over their algorithm via a “Your Algorithm” feature. It’s not quite Bluesky, or the Instagram of yore that only displayed content from accounts users followed, but it does let users select or unsubscribe from different topics. The new feature, which leverages AI, lets users pick topics they want to see more or less of on their explore page. Users will first be able to see a list of suggest…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. When assessing home price momentum, ResiClub believes it’s important to monitor active listings and months of supply. If active listings start to rapidly increase as homes remain on the market for longer periods, it may indicate pricing softness or weakness. Conversely, a rapid decline in active listings beyond seasonality could suggest a market that is heating up. Since the national Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out in 2022, the national power dynamic has slowly been shifting directionally from sellers to buyers. Of course, across the country that s…

Researchers on the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) and leaders of many of the major platforms—from Jeffrey Hinton to Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk—have voiced concerns that AI could lead to the destruction of humanity itself. Even the stated odds from some of these AI experts, with an end-days scenario as high as 25%, are still “wildly optimistic,” according to Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and coauthor of the recent best-selling book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. That’s because, as he argues in the book, the track we’re on with AI is headed for disaster—unless…