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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 wo…

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’…

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…

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 chai…

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…

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. AI flattery drives engagement—and distorts judgment Social networks like Facebook and TikTok use a range of techniques to keep us engaged and scrolling (and ultimately viewing ads). One of the most effective is tailoring content to our tastes and preferences, a strategy that has proved highly addictive. Last month, a Los Angeles jury found that Meta’s and Google’s use of infinite scrolling and algorithmic recommendations caused a young user to become addicted, and ordered the compa…

As visitors head into downtown Vancouver through the city’s False Creek Flats neighborhood, the first thing they’ll see is the Hive: a 10-story office building built out of wood and shaped like a giant honeycomb. Beneath its webbed exterior, the building is hiding a clever design system that keeps it safe from earthquakes by allowing it to wiggle, shake, and settle. The Hive, designed by the Toronto-based architecture studio Dialog, is the tallest seismic-force-resisting building made from mass timber in North America. By substituting mass timber for typical steel-and-concrete construction, the building is sequestering a total of 4,403 metric tons of CO2; equivalent …

The point of mopping floors is to clean them, but it’s actually pretty messy, as you’re sloshing increasingly grimy water from your bucket to the floor. Are you actually cleaning, or just redistributing the filth? Joseph Joseph, a U.K. houseware design studio and manufacturer, has a new solution: a two-chamber mop bucket called the UltraClean that separates the fresh soapy water from the dirty water, and squeezes out the mophead as you go. This just might be the biggest advancement in mop bucket technology—yes, it’s a thing—since the mop wringer. The secret to the UltraClean system is its slot, which is designed to do two things at once: clean and rinse. Here’s ho…

German aviation group Lufthansa is cutting back on flights amid fuel price surges related to conflicts in the Middle East. On Tuesday, the company announced plans to eliminate 20,000 short-haul flights through October, a decision expected to save around 40,000 metric tons of jet fuel. The adjustments to the flight schedule will impact the unprofitable routes across the Lufthansa Group network, which includes Lufthansa Airlines, Swiss International Air Lines, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, and ITA Airways. “Passengers will therefore continue to have access to the global route network, particularly long-haul connections,” the company said in a press statemen…

Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders are set to vote Thursday on the company’s proposed $81 billion sale to Skydance-owned Paramount, in a mega merger that could vastly reshape Hollywood and the wider media landscape. Paramount wants to buy all of Warner. That means HBO Max, cult-favorite titles like “Harry Potter” and CNN could soon find themselves under the same roof as Paramount’s CBS, “Top Gun” and the Paramount+ streaming service. And a greenlight from shareholders would bring the acquisition closer to the finish line. Shareholders are expected to meet at 10 a.m. ET to vote on the deal, which is valued at nearly $111 billion, including debt, based on Warner’s current…

American Airlines is leaning further into the idea that airport lounges should feel less like generic waiting rooms and more like extensions of the cities they serve. Its latest project in Nashville makes that strategy pretty clear. At Nashville International Airport (BNA), the airline is planning a new Admirals Club that will significantly expand its footprint and redefine what a lounge can be. A much bigger lounge The new space in Concourse A will span about 17,400 square feet, nearly triple the size of AA’s current lounge at the airport. When it opens, it’s expected to be the largest airline lounge at BNA, giving travelers far more room to spread out, …

You want to be happier. You want to feel more fulfilled. You want to live a longer, healthier life. Hold that thought. Lewis Terman, a Stanford University psychologist, was a pioneer in I.Q. testing. His revisions of the Stanford-Binet test helped it become a widespread tool for measuring general intelligence. In 1921, he identified 1,500 children who had scored 135 or higher on the test and began one of the longest longitudinal studies ever conducted. (The New York Times calls Terman and his study of “Termites,” as the kids called themselves, the “grandfather of all lifespan research.”) Terman’s study was guaranteed to outlive him, but that was the point…

Many consumers may be pausing their travel plans until whenever the U.S.-Iranian fuel crisis ends. But if you were hoping that airline ticket prices and other ancillary costs will come down afterward, the CEO of United Airlines has some bad news for you: Airlines may not lower prices to their pre-war levels even after fuel prices fall. Instead, they’ll pocket the profits. Here’s what you need to know. Ticket prices rise as Iran war drags on This week, United Airlines (Nasdaq: UAL) reported its Q1 2026 earnings. For all intents and purposes, it wasn’t a bad quarter. Total operating revenue was up 10.6% year over year to $14.6 billion, capacity rose 3.4…

Three congressional candidates wagered on the outcome of their own elections on Kalshi, according to the prediction market, which said Wednesday that it fined and suspended the men from their platform for five years. It is the latest high-profile case of alleged insider trading on prediction markets including Kalshi and Polymarket, which have brought bipartisan scrutiny from Congress and calls for stricter regulations of the websites where people can put money on just about anything. Kalshi’s disciplinary documents named Mark Moran, who is running as an independent in Virginia’s U.S. Senate race; Ezekiel Enriquez, who ran in a Texas Republican primary for a U.S. House s…

The United States’ advanced manufacturing future may have an unexpected limiting factor: a dire shortage of welders. While venture capital has placed big bets on a cutting-edge future of data centers, defense tech, and robotics, actually making the physical devices remains a challenge without finding the right talent to melt, fuse and repair metal. The American Welding Society projects that the country will need more than 320,000 new welding professionals by 2030, which means hiring about 80,000 new welders every year. Path Robotics believes the future of America’s manufacturing workforce will be augmented with torch-wielding robots. The Columbus, Ohio-based company,…

For digital nomads, logging on to work from a cafe, co-working space, hotel lobby or airport lounge is a way of life. Remote working has been made possible by reliable high speed internet and turbocharged by the pandemic. For some remote workers, that includes working from somewhere other than their home, perhaps because their company doesn’t have a physical location in their area, or because they don’t have an ideal home office setup. Working in public, however, doesn’t come without privacy and security risks. Here’s a quick reminder of precautions to take: Read the rulebook Hybrid or fully remote working is the norm for many jobs, so it’s a good idea to check f…

JetBlue replies to customers on social media every day, from assuaging their customer service woes to thanking them for choosing their flights. But one seemingly innocuous JetBlue response may have set a class action lawsuit in motion, after customers became convinced that the airline implicated itself in using surveillance pricing. A social media frenzy JetBlue first drew suspicions of surveillance pricing with an April 18 reply on X to a user complaining about the airline’s prices. “A $230 increase on a ticket after one day is crazy,” they wrote. “I’m just trying to make it to a funeral.” JetBlue replied, recommending that the user “try clearing your cache an…

Beast Industries, the $5 billion media conglomerate founded by YouTube star MrBeast, is being sued by a former employee who says she was sexually harassed, discriminated against as a woman, and fired shortly after returning from maternity leave. The company refutes her claims, saying it has evidence, including Slack and WhatsApp messages, company documents, and witness testimony, that contradict the lawsuit’s allegations. The federal lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in the Eastern District Court of North Carolina, paints a picture of Beast Industries as a boy’s club in which women were excluded from male-dominated meetings, demeaned in front of colleagues, and told to “…

OpenAI on Thursday released its most capable AI system, GPT-5.5, which the company says will enable a more powerful Codex coding agent. OpenAI is quick to say, however, that GPT-5.5 will power the widening set of general digital work tasks that Codex is capable of. The system is significantly better than previous releases at helping with scientific work, including creative aspects of generating new hypotheses and testing them. The system represents an improvement in autonomous or agentic capability. GPT-5.56 “represents a step toward AI systems that can complete complex, multi-step tasks on a computer without human guidance,” OpenAI says in a blog post. GPT-5.5, …

Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to select employees, it announced in a memo on Thursday, CNBC reported. The move is a first for the company, as the tech industry at large faces shifts in the era of artificial intelligence. The program will be available to U.S. workers at the senior director level and below whose employment years and age add up to at least 70. Employees with sales incentive plans are ineligible. Those who qualify and their managers will receive more information on May 7, according to the memo. The plan is expected to take effect in the fourth quarter of Microsoft’s fiscal year 2026, which ends June 30. About 7% of the U.S. workforce is expe…

Lowe’s Home Improvement is facing pressure to cut ties with Flock Safety, the surveillance company that makes cameras, drones, and automated license plate readers (ALPRs). The pressure comes amid reports that Flock data has been used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and even aided in an investigation of a woman who had an abortion, driving fears about a mass surveillance state. In August, 404 Media reported that Flock cameras stationed outside of Lowe’s and The Home Depot “are being fed into a massive surveillance system that law enforcement can access.” The story cited records obtained by EFF. In an April 1 letter addressed to CEO Marvin Ellison…

Thanks to social media, a new legion of fans are discovering something new to love at Buc-ee’s: The OverBite. Though it’s been on the shelves at Buc-ee’s for several years, the hockey puck-shaped, chocolate covered candy bar has become a bit of a viral sensation more recently. Available in five different flavors, these quarter-pound treats feature a thick layer of either milk or dark chocolate and fillings like peanut butter, caramel, and cookies and cream. It seems Rich O’Toole, a Texas-based singer and songwriter, may get credit for kicking into overdrive the latest frenzy over the OverBite. In a post on X that’s amassed more than 8 million views since Monday,…