What's on Your Mind?

I like to say that I spend most of my life negotiating—and if you consider your own work and life, you just might feel the same. My career has been full of back-and-forth: I sat across tables negotiating agreements for Christie’s for over two decades as Global Managing Director of Strategic Partnerships; I stand on stages around the world as a charity auctioneer, negotiating prices up to maximize fundraising; and I founded a talent agency that requires me to negotiate pay and conditions on behalf of my clients. To top it all off, I’m a mom of three kids. Over the years, I have listened to many people unknowingly sink their own negotiations with a mistake as simple as…

Diversity initiatives, often called DEI, are in the political and business crosshairs. In recent weeks, Meta, Walmart, Target, Ford, and McDonald’s are among global companies ending their formal DEI initiatives. Some of the bluster is performative. And yet, for many employees and global firms, there’s a sense that this is an opportunity to rebalance the goals and rethink the strategy by innovating diversity practices to better meet the global business goals. Most DEI programs were crafted years ago, and their relevance and impact has been diminishing. Many initiatives overreached and have not adequately evolved to meet the changing environment. Like with any busines…

An unsubstantiated online theory has recently taken hold, claiming that family vloggers are fleeing Los Angeles to escape newly introduced California laws designed to protect children featured in online content. In recent years, several states have introduced new legislation aimed at protecting child influencers from exploitation. In September 2024, California Governor Gavin Newsom, with support from former child star Demi Lovato, signed two key bills designed to “ensure children and teenagers who perform in online content are protected from financial abuse.” One of the most important bits of the new legislation “establishes financial and legal protections for min…

Sometimes, authenticity can be a film’s most special effect. It took months for Best Actress front-runner Mikey Madison to learn how to pole dance like the titular exotic dancer in Anora and for her fellow nominee Timothée Chalamet to passably play guitar as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. The naturalism of both performances helped keep audiences under the spell cast by their surrounding films. So, it should probably come as no surprise that a backlash has emerged in response to several of this year’s Oscar-nominated films using AI, paradoxically, to achieve “authenticity.” The reaction began on January 11, when editor Dávid Jancsó revealed in an interview that h…

In the defining years of American business, founding CEOs were virtually synonymous with the companies they led. Walt Disney was Disney incarnate; Dale Carnegie came to represent the steel industry itself. These figures were not just company leaders; they were the gravitational center around which entire industries revolved. Those days are gone. Though we still have echoes in modern chief executives like Tim Cook or Richard Branson, these figureheads, too, are becoming rarer. In fact, the average CEO tenure is the lowest in recent history. Over the past three years, CEO turnover has reached record highs, with 58 leadership changes in the S&P 500 alone. This patter…

Catherine Bashiama runs her fingers along the branches of the coffee tree she’s raised from a seedling, searching anxiously for its first fruit buds since she planted it three years ago. When she grasps the small cherries, Bashiama beams. The farmer had never grown coffee in her village in western South Sudan, but now hopes a rare, climate-resistant species will help pull her family from poverty. “I want to send my children to school so they can be the future generation,” said Bashiama, a mother of 12. Discovered more than a century ago in South Sudan, excelsa coffee is exciting cash-strapped locals and drawing interest from the international community amid a global cof…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Total active U.S. housing inventory for sale recently fell by 42,133 homes, from 871,509 in December 2024 to 829,376 in January 2025, according to the latest Realtor.com data. Historically, national active inventory usually declines during this seasonal month-over-month window, with the average decline since 2017 being -69,646 between December and January. The fact that inventory is rising year-over-year, combined with January’s smallest inventory decline for the month since Realtor.com began publishing data in summer 2016, strongly suggests that…

CAVA hopes to expand its physical footprint after a year of financial success, CEO Brett Schulman announced in the company’s fourth quarter earnings call Tuesday. Over the 2024 fiscal year—CAVA’s first full calendar year as a public company—the Mediterranean fast-casual restaurant chain saw a revenue growth of 28.3% and delivered four straight quarters of free cash flow. And after opening 58 new restaurants this past year, the company anticipates new market openings in Detroit, South Florida, Pittsburgh, and Indianapolis. “We’re very excited to continue to grow those markets and build upon the presence we have in existing regions,” Schulman tells Fast Company. …

Gen Z came of age in an environment that previous generations couldn’t have imagined when we entered the workforce. They’ve never known the world without the internet or cellphones. Their education and early career paths were disrupted by a global pandemic that kept them at home, learning and working over a screen. They’ve been learning digital skills their entire lives. It’s no wonder that their perspective on work is different than ours—and it’s time for us to pay attention. With the aging U.S. workforce, we need to attract and retain Gen Z talent for our companies to thrive—and this means a focus on skills-first hiring. Gen Z wants employers to value the skills…

Every week, millions of Americans toss their recyclables into a single bin, trusting that their plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and cardboard boxes will be given a new life. But what really happens after the truck picks them up? Single-stream recycling makes participating in recycling easy, but behind the scenes, complex sorting systems and contamination mean a large percentage of that material never gets a second life. Reports in recent years have found 15% to 25% of all the materials picked up from recycle bins ends up in landfills instead. Plastics are among the biggest challenges. Only about 9% of the plastic generated in the U.S. actually gets recycled, a…

Jennifer Moss is a journalist, internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, and co-founder of the Work Better Institute. Her book The Burnout Epidemic was among Thinkers50’s 10 Best New Management Books for 2022. What’s the big idea? Leaders don’t need to take a ton of time overhauling company culture to create workplaces where employees want to spend their time. Simple shifts and incremental changes can foster community, fuel purpose, boost productivity, and deliver meaning to every team member. Jobs that employees actually like are the ultimate capitalist business strategy. Below, Jennifer shares eight key insights from her new book, Why Are We Here?: Creating …

With their drab gray suits and their Buddy Holly glasses, the so-called traitorous eight don’t look like revolutionaries. Given no context, you can imagine them occupying some kind of middle-management role at a small regional bank. And yet these are the people you can thank for the digital world. The eight—which included Intel cofounder Gordon Moore—had departed Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to found Fairchild Semiconductor, which soon became the world’s biggest producer of electrical components for computers. Many of its founders would, in turn, leave again to launch their own ventures. Many of these companies coalesced in the same area—the place we now call…

Sophia Rosenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her previous books include the award-winning title Common Sense: A Political History. Her writing has appeared in scholarly journals, such as the American Historical Review and the Journal of Modern History, as well as in media publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Nation. What’s the big idea? There is such a thing as too many options. Nowhere is freedom-as-choice and choice-as-freedom more evident than in the United States. As important as the right to choose has been in various emancipation movem…

In today’s whiplash business environment of change and uncertainty, there are a few simple, timeless strategies that consistently rank among the best for accelerating growth. No reinventing the wheel required. One such strategy is test-to-scale—close cousin of the venerable test-and-learn approach that’s long been a startup staple. Both can play a key role, depending on the stage of your company, industry, size, growth curve, and—importantly—internal culture. Basically, test-and-learn uses small scale, iterative experiments to see what works best. Testing different messaging in a marketing campaign, for example, or perhaps different product features. The idea …

Jeff Bezos once said, “I like to wander.” That may seem counterintuitive in a business world obsessed with speed, but in a relentless pursuit of momentum, many leaders forget that speed without reflection leads to burnout, inefficiency, and poor decision-making. A report by Asana revealed that nearly 70% of executives say burnout has affected their decision-making ability. The paradox is clear: The faster we try to move without reflection, the more we risk burnout, inefficiency, and short-sighted decision-making. Leaders often mistake pausing for procrastination. However, the reality is that strategic pausing is a high-performance leadership move that separates r…

When an AI-assisted résumé lands on a hiring manager’s desk, most people have the knee-jerk reaction to chuck it straight onto the reject pile. While more and more companies are using AI in their day-to-day operations, when it comes to résumés and cover letters, the use of artificial intelligence remains taboo. The importance of AI-savvy talent This instinctive aversion to AI is costing firms invaluable AI-savvy talent. And with the demand and competition for AI skills so fierce, many employers are letting prospective talent slip through their fingers, straight into the laps of their competitors. It’s time to overhaul recruitment processes out of the dark ages…

The color of your house matters beyond aesthetics. An extensive body of research shows that painting buildings white (which reflects heat) can make them cooler, and painting them black (which absorbs heat) can make them warmer. This is the reason why most houses in Greece are white, and many houses across Scandinavia are black. But what about the rest of the world, where temperatures often shift with the seasons? Industrial designer Joe Doucet has developed what he calls a “climate-adaptive” paint that can change colors based on the temperature outside. The patent-pending formula, which is known as thermochromic paint, follows the same principle as 90s mood rings. Except …

When he first gathered his newly assembled team to write the 1975 premiere episode of Saturday Night Live (then called, NBC’s Saturday Night), creator Lorne Michaels started with a simple credo: “Let’s make each other laugh, and if we do, we’ll put it on television and maybe other people will find it funny.” So many other people ended up finding it funny that SNL grew into a singular cultural phenomenon—one that remains on the air, and relevant, 50 years later. Over the course of making high-wire-act TV each week for a half-century, however, Michaels’s ideas about how to wrangle talent gradually evolved far beyond that initial make-each-other-laugh principle. “He …

In the second season of Severance, there’s an unexpected character: a child supervisor named Miss Huang, who matter-of-factly explains she’s a child “because of when I was born.” Miss Huang’s deadpan response is more than just a clever quip. Like so much in the Apple TV+ series, which has broken viewership records for the streaming service, I think it reveals a devastating truth about the role of work in the 21st century. As a scholar of childhood studies, I also see historical echoes: What constitutes a “child”—and whether one gets to claim childhood at all—has always depended on when and where a person is born. An age of innocence? Americans are deeply in…

Chevron will lay off 15% to 20% of its global workforce by the end of 2026, the U.S. oil company said on Wednesday as it seeks to cut costs, simplify its business, and complete a major acquisition. The No. 2 U.S. oil producer has faced production challenges including cost overruns and delays in a large Kazakhstan oilfield project. Its $53-billion deal to acquire oil producer Hess and gain a foothold in Guyana’s lucrative oilfield is in limbo due to a court battle with larger rival Exxon Mobil, which has more aggressively expanded its own production. Chevron also faces industry-wide weakness in the refining business and the expectation that oil prices could be unde…

After watching videos of a Delta Air Lines jet catch fire upon landing and flip over on a Toronto runway, it’s fair to wonder how anyone could have survived. But aviation experts said it was not surprising that all 76 passengers and four crew walked away from Monday’s disaster, with 21 people suffering minor injuries and only one still hospitalized on Wednesday. It’s a credit, they said, to advances in plane design as well as a crew that flawlessly executed an evacuation plan. “When I first saw (footage of) that aircraft upside down at the airport, I was like: ‘How can that happen? And how can anybody survive that?’” Michael McCormick, an assistant professor and p…

You may have noticed that the Google-owned video-sharing site’s infamous red play logo is now rendered in a softer, more pinkish hue. That’s because user research revealed that the company’s logo color rated as one of its top three most outdated design elements. Last updated in 2017, YouTube’s old brand color was a pure red that users perceived to be “too loud when implemented in key UI moments,” Robyn Lee, YouTube’s visual design lead, said in a Google Design blog post. From top: The old red vs. the new [Image: YouTube]The old red had other technical problems, too, like rendering orange on some screens and causing a burn-in effect on TVs—a major issue considering YouTube…