What's on Your Mind?

If you walk into a grocery store in the Netherlands or Germany, you might not realize you’re being steered toward plant-based protein, from vegan tortellini to plant-based yogurt. But across Europe and the UK, major retailers are quietly driving that shift. And they’re seeing results at a time when plant-based sales are struggling in the US. Lidl, a budget supermarket, grew UK sales of its private-label plant-based line by nearly 700% from 2020 to 2025. In Germany, France, and Italy, plant-based retail sales are growing across multiple categories, with most of that growth coming from supermarkets’ own brands. Lidl is one of several retailers with a deliberate stra…

Neri Karra Sillaman is an adviser and speaker who was recently recognized on the Thinkers50 “Radar” list for 2024 as one of the top 30 emerging management thinkers. She is an adjunct professor and entrepreneurship expert at the University of Oxford, and founder of Neri Karra, a global luxury leather goods brand that has been manufacturing for leading Italian labels for over 25 years. A former child refugee, she brings a powerful perspective on resilience, cultural innovation, and ethical business to her work. Her insights have been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, and Fortune. What’s the big idea? It’s no coincidence that immigrant-led bus…

Some words are far too mild for the violence of what they describe. Migraine is one of them. For many people, it evokes a simple headache—an inconvenience solved with an aspirin (or Tylenol) and a glass of water. For those who’ve never experienced it, migraine is almost a cliché: a lame excuse to stay in bed or avoid a meeting. But for millions of people—and I’m one of them—migraine is anything but benign. It is a debilitating neurological disease that can force life to grind to a halt for days at a time. It is an invisible disability that millions are expected to simply “push through.” The Mild Version Everyone Sees—and the Severe One No One Understands I ofte…

Trust is the essence of collaboration: as Yuval Harari eloquently noted, we as a species would not exist if it weren’t for our superior ability to collaborate so effectively—and it’s largely down to trust. In the days of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, decisions on trust were relatively straightforward, even when it came to appointing leaders. Indeed, our ancestors lived in small groups of closely related individuals and spent all of their time together. Furthermore, the key attributes they were interested in evaluating or judging were easy to observe: courage, practical knowledge, hunting and fishing dexterity, and physical strength. There was no need then for psychom…

Our capacity to juggle several tasks at once is among the most important capabilities of the human cognitive system. Just consider a typical day in the life of a modern human: you glance at your phone while waiting for coffee to brew, skim headlines while half-listening to a podcast, mentally rehearse a client pitch while walking your child to school, reply “noted” on Slack during a meeting while updating a slide deck, check your bank balance while standing in line, and, in a moment of entirely optional productivity theatre, scroll through a friend’s Facebook feed to see what their cat had for breakfast (admittedly, not the most important addition to our already heavy…

More than 30 states across the country have had at least one case of someone sick with Salmonella so far in 2026. Many of those cases are believed to be caused by contact with outdoor poultry, like ducks and chickens. But separately, there’s also been a wave of food recalls for Salmonella contamination, tied to milk powder used in snack seasoning. Salmonella isn’t an uncommon bacteria; each year, the U.S. sees some 1.35 million Salmonella infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Most of those stem from food. If it seems like Salmonella is becoming more common, though, there are a few reasons why—related to how we detect…

A shooting last weekend at a children’s birthday party in California that left four dead was the 17th mass killing this year—the lowest number recorded since 2006, according to a database maintained by the Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. Experts warn that the drop doesn’t necessarily mean safer days are here to stay and that it could simply represent a return to average levels. “Sir Isaac Newton never studied crime, but he says ‘What goes up must come down,'” said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University. The current drop in numbers is more likely what statisticians call a “regression to the mean,” he said, r…

Aspiring entrepreneurs often ask me whether they should quit their full-time jobs and go all in on starting a business. “Keep your job,” I always say. (That’s what I did; I worked in manufacturing for 20 years before I became an entrepreneur.) “Prove your idea for a business works. Prove you can make money. Prove you’re willing to do whatever it takes. If you’re not willing to spend nights and weekends on your startup, instead of running toward the business you feel compelled to start, you’re probably running away from a job you don’t like.” That advice, or at least the reasoning behind it, always falls a little flat. To many people, choosing not to go all in imp…

Below, Jodi-Ann Burey shares five key insights from her new book, Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work. Jodi-Ann is a writer and critic on race, culture, and health equity. Her essays appear in various arts, business, and literary publications. She created and hosts the prose and poetry salon Lit Lounge: The People’s Art, as well as the Black Cancer podcast. What’s the big idea? Authentic is more than a critique of the empty promise of being authentic at work. It is an invitation to question the structural realities of what it takes to be a person at work. To begin, we must take seriously the health and wellbeing of workers most impacted by ha…

Batteries are powering a significant shift in how we go about our daily lives, ranging from the devices we carry to electric vehicles and energy storage systems. Batteries play a critical role across key sectors from data center infrastructure, military, and microgrid applications to consumer electronics and more. But as demand surges, so does end-of-life material that needs to be managed. Beyond serving as compact energy sources, batteries also represent a domestic source of essential critical minerals. To fully realize their value, it is crucial to close the loop at end-of-life by recovering these minerals and strengthening the supply needed to support a rapidly exp…

We all know the people pleaser in the office—the one who takes on extra work, stays late without being asked, and is at the full disposal of the department manager. They also may agree with whatever the majority says and will dodge conflict, even though they are in the right. But does this mentality pay off? Likely not, say experts. Who exactly is a people pleaser? A people pleaser is someone who abandons their own needs and values to try and make someone else happy, explains Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and the author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do. While on the surface, you may think this selfless approach will fast-track you at work, however, this…

Being adaptable has always been a useful skill. But in today’s world, it’s essential. In our volatile, AI-accelerated workplaces, adaptability lets us transform uncertainty and pressure into clarity, learning, and discerning action. Thankfully, adaptability is a skill we can develop. In fact, there are science-backed practices we can adopt to improve our adaptability, and the benefits go far beyond our careers. In practical terms, adaptability is being able to regulate and adjust your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors amid changing circumstances while staying aligned with your values and long‑term goals. True adaptability is not passive compliance: it’s conscious ongo…

If you’ve been in the corporate world long enough, you might have seen technical specialists hit a career ceiling. They’re brilliant at what they do, but they can struggle to advance to leadership positions. That’s because management requires a different type of thinking: less task-oriented, more focused on the big picture. This is a mindset that’s common in successful company founders, who employ knowledge, experience, and intuition to maximize value creation within the given context. And it’s a mindset that’s increasingly relevant today. For instance, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs survey from 2025 names analytical thinking as the top core skill emplo…

Google’s sustainability webpage once specifically mentioned the company’s goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2030, and included a subpage titled “operating sustainably.” But that pledge has disappeared from the main page, which now highlights the company’s commitment to artificial intelligence. The subpage was renamed “our operations.” Google maintains that it is still aiming for a 2030 goal, though executives have acknowledged that the growth of AI makes it challenging. Still, the change to the sustainability page is an example of how tech companies are being a bit quieter about their climate goals as they expand their use of AI. The explosive growth of…

Most organisations are no longer made up of one homogenous group of full-time employees. Instead, they’re becoming ecosystems. A mix of permanent employees, fractional leaders, freelancers, contractors, project specialists, and increasingly, technology and AI are doing part of the work too. In fact, the workforce of 2026 is predicted to become “agentic”, whereby AI agents are expected to displace or reshape tasks and roles. This makes collaboration with AI a necessity, not for the future of work, but now. This emerging blended workforce gives organisations access to a wider range of skills, faster. It allows them to scale up and down as demand changes. It creates …

Dive into the exhilarating world of innovation with FC Explains, a video series that spotlights the game changers and visionaries from Fast Company’s prestigious Most Innovative Companies list. This annual ranking celebrates the trailblazers who are reshaping industries and cultures, pushing boundaries, and transforming the world. First up is Bluesky. View the full article

Blue skies ahead? Jay Graber, the CEO of social media network Bluesky, announced that they were stepping down on Monday. Graber is “transitioning from CEO to a new role as Bluesky’s Chief Innovation Officer,” she wrote in a Bluesky post, and will be succeeded by new interim CEO Toni Schneider. Schneider, a venture capitalist and partner at True Ventures, wrote that he was “thrilled to announce that I’ll be joining Bluesky as interim CEO. I deeply believe in what this team has built and the open social web they’re fighting for,” in a post of his own. Bluesky was founded by Jack Dorsey in 2019, and actually began as an internal project at what was then Twitter …

Your four-year-old needs a bike. The cheap ones from a big box store will work, sure—but they’ll be heavy, clunky, and harder for them to learn on. The premium Woom bike weighs half as much—but it costs $400. You want the best for your kid, but do you want to drop that much for something they’ll use for a few months? With a bit of internet sleuthing, you might come across an alternative. There’s a 50,000-person Facebook group devoted entirely to buying, selling, and trading used Woom bikes across the United States. And the brand noticed this group bubbling up. But Facebook Marketplace has limitations—transactions aren’t always secure, and buyers can’t easily searc…

Dead cartoon owls, brain-rot cookie content, fake rebrands, and library thirst traps. Welcome to the era of DGAF branding. In this episode of FC Explains, Grace Snelling breaks down why major brands and public institutions are ditching polished ads for chaotic content and seeing massive results. From Nutter Butter’s unsettling TikToks and California Pizza Kitchen’s fake midlife crisis to Duolingo “killing” its iconic owl and libraries going viral with memes, this episode explores how being weird online has become a serious marketing strategy. We look at the numbers behind these stunts, the cultural forces driving them, and why leaning into chaos can sometimes …

The biggest brands pour creativity into being instantly recognizable. A logo you can spot at 20 paces. A color palette that becomes cultural shorthand (think Oreo blue or Coca-Cola red). That visual obsession runs through every corner of marketing. TV, social, out-of-home, retail, and packaging. Millions go into crafting imagery, with every frame revised until it perfectly reinforces the brand. So, of course visuals matter—they always will matter. But the best performing brands aren’t blinded by them. They understand that a cohesive sonic identity that spans campaigns and touchpoints ensures your brand is remembered long after someone closes their phone or wal…

There’s a lot of fear these days in the media world over the “zero-click” future. AI chatbots and search engines ingest content, interpret it, and then summarize it for users, with the inevitable consequence being that people no longer visit your site. This is not theoretical. Data from Chartbeat, an analytics company that serves media sites, shows global publisher traffic from Google dropped by one-third last year, with smaller publications hit hardest. So yes, AI substitutes content, but it doesn’t do so evenly. A recent analysis from Define Media Group looked at how the presence of Google AI Overviews affected traffic to different types of content over the past yea…

In the late 1920’s, Einstein and Bohr were engaged in a series of famous debates about the future of physics, in which Einstein insisted that “God does not play dice with the universe.” “Einstein, stop telling God what to do,” Bohr retorted. Einstein lost the argument and his career as a productive scientist was largely finished after that. Ostensibly, the debate was about quantum mechanics and whether what we can know about subatomic particles is absolute or merely a function of probability. But at a deeper level it challenged a basic philosophical principle that had been around since before Plato or Aristotle: that essence precedes existence. If essence precede…

The gas station convenience chain Buc-ee’s is known for selling a slew of logo-ed merch to its devoted brand fans. And increasingly, it’s also known for aggressive trademark enforcement, suing competitors, apparel brands, and small businesses over logos, mascots, and even names it argues are too close to its signature smiling beaver. Most recently, Buc-ee’s, which has locations across the South, has gone after Ohio chain Mickey’s for its mascot logo, a cartoon moose, a move greeted with some skepticism. After all, as one skeptical commentator noted: “A beaver is not a moose.” Fair enough. But as the Texas-based chain grows, such lawsuits—often focused on cartoon anima…