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As inflation causes prices to rise, there is a cost that disproportionately impacts women—the “egg freezing tax.” In 2023, over 40,000 women froze their eggs—a safe, proven way to invest in more control over the timing of one’s family—which has grown in popularity for many reasons: general declines in fertility rates, delayed family building, and increasing numbers of women choosing to become a single mom by choice. Despite having founded three companies, one of the hardest things I’ve ever done was freeze my eggs. In my early thirties, while building my first startup in San Francisco, my nights were a blur of teaching myself to self-inject and tracking complex medica…

Corey duBrowa spent much of his career advising some of the world’s most scrutinized leaders—from Marc Benioff at Salesforce to Sundar Pichai at Google. Now, as CEO of global communications firm Burson, he’s helping executives navigate a charged marketplace shaped by AI disruption, ICE activity, and nonstop reputational risk. He explains why reputation remains one of the most powerful (and most misunderstood) assets in business, and how leaders should decide whether, when, and how to speak up. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scalepodcast…

Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture. Costco chair Hamilton “Tony” James caused a bit of a stir this week when, in an interview, he mentioned a retail category that’s done surprisingly well for the big-box chain: luxury goods. “Rolex watches, Dom Pérignon, 10-carat diamonds,” James offered as examples of high-end products and brands that have fit into a discount-club model more typically associated with buying staples in bulk. “Affluent people,” he explained, “love a good deal.” Courting that group may be particularly timely right now—and not just for Costco. According to a recent report from research f…

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. The creator economy has evolved from a marketing tactic to a C-suite priority, driven by a cultural shift that positions creators at the core of brand strategy. Over the past decade, it has transformed from a niche segment of digital culture into one of the most powerful forces shaping modern businesses. Today, creators sit at the epicenter of consumer attention, shaping purchasing decision…

We’ve grown strangely comfortable separating things that were never meant to be separated: leadership from management, vision from execution, and perhaps most damaging, culture from strategy. Inside companies, this split shows up everywhere. A CEO announces a bold future about democratizing access or building a place where people take smart risks. Then culture gets handed to HR as if it belongs on a separate track, while the business strategy unfolds on its own timeline. The result is predictable. Employees are asked to navigate the distance between what leaders say and how the organization actually works. That distance is not neutral. It creates avoidable frictio…

Anyone spending time inside a company right now can feel it. There is a growing assumption shaping decisions at the highest levels. AI will drive efficiency and therefore companies are expected to reduce headcount. It sounds logical. It sounds disciplined. But it is also incomplete. I have been in boardrooms where AI is discussed as both an opportunity and a justification. Leaders talk about transformation, and in the same breath talk about reducing headcount. The connection feels automatic, as if one must follow the other. Here’s what’s missing from the conversation: What is the work we actually want done, and how should it be done? THE EFFICIENCY SHORTCU…

Jane, chief commercial officer at a global professional services firm, watched issues that once stayed contained begin to climb the chain of command. As the issues grew, senior leaders were increasingly pulled into operational mishaps. Facing margin pressure and accelerating AI-driven change, the CEO redirected the leadership development budget and narrowed his focus. The move made sense. But as roles expanded and support narrowed, more decisions required senior intervention. What seemed manageable in isolation accumulated across teams. As AI automates routine work, organizations require a new set of leadership skills that technology can’t replace. Yet many organi…

The Fast Company Impact Council is a private membership community of influential leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual membership dues for access to peer learning and thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Customer experience is at a tipping point. Companies are struggling to see results from AI, digital transformation, and personalization. But let’s be real: Most companies aren’t connecting the dots. Consumers want seamless, human-like engagement, but too often they’re met with fragmented systems and half-baked AI solutions. The good news? The gap between what customers expec…

When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built Apple in a garage, the incumbents they were up against were slow-moving hardware companies. When Jeff Bezos started Amazon, Barnes & Noble wasn’t pouring billions into machine learning or cloud infrastructure. This doesn’t mean that it was easy for these entrepreneurs to change the face of whole industries. It was not. But it was at least possible. Back then, giants could be out-innovated because they were bureaucratic, cautious, and often blind to the potential of what the upstart start-ups were building. The situation is very different today. The startup landscape has changed radically. Where once it was populated by boots…

The AI industry is growing up fast. New model releases are now a regular event and premium AI features are quickly overtaken by free or freemium alternatives. Exhibit A: OpenAI unveiled its Deep Research tool, which can write reports on complex topics in minutes, as part of its $200-a-month Pro package, but rival Perplexity gives non-subscribers some access to its Deep Research assistant free of charge. (Yes, Google Gemini’s agentic research assistant is also called Deep Research.) With fewer fundamental breakthroughs, the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI are slugging it out over incremental improvements in search and reasoning performance. As AI pricing falls …

The Chinese AI company DeepSeek is making major waves across the tech industry after rising to prominence seemingly overnight. The artificial intelligence tool emerged in the top spot in Apple’s App Store yesterday, above competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini—and on a comparatively tiny timeline and budget. But there’s another way that DeepSeek is quietly outdoing its American competitors: through its branding. Late last week, DeepSeek released an updated version of its open-source chatbot called DeepSeek-V3, a product that has some tech analysts describing the company’s efforts as “a shot across the bow at the U.S. tech world.” DeepSeek-V3 performs si…

You’re in a meeting when your boss suggests changing a number to make the quarterly report look stronger. Heads nod. The slides move on. You feel a knot in your stomach: Do you speak up and risk being branded difficult, or stay silent and become complicit? Most people picture defiance as dramatic outbursts. In reality, it’s often these small, tense moments where conscience collides with compliance. I first saw the power of defiance not in the workplace, but closer to home. My mother was the ultimate people-pleaser: timid, polite, eager to accommodate. Barely 4 feet, 10 inches tall, she put everyone else’s needs above her own. But one day, when I was 7, I saw a dif…

In today’s dynamic, diverse, and rapidly changing workforce, organizations’ success is dependent upon creating an environment where different perspectives come together. That’s how we produce the best ideas. Despite the recent attacks on them, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion principles provide a crucial foundation for thriving companies. If companies want to experience the benefits of broad ideas, they need to attract talented employees from different backgrounds. And once they’ve hired those top talents, they need to make sure that they don’t exclude anyone from participating in discussions and sharing their honest views. Many arguments support why successful or…

At least half of the people I coach identify delegation as an area that they’d like to improve. Delegating can be a real challenge because—let’s face it—it’s tough to let go of control. Many of us believe that if we want something done right, we have to do it ourselves. Plus, it takes effort to explain the task, trust someone else to do it, and then follow up. Sometimes, it feels like it’s just easier to do it ourselves rather than invest the time in teaching someone else. But in the long run, this mindset can lead to burnout and missed opportunities for growing and developing our team members. So, while delegating may feel like a hurdle, it’s a crucial skill fo…

A useful rule of thumb is that when a problem persists for decades despite serious effort, the failure is usually not one of effort or intelligence, but of framing. Climate change sits squarely in this category. We have poured talent, capital, policy, and good intentions into solving it, and yet the core dynamics continue to worsen. This suggests that something foundational is off in how we are thinking about the problem. One of the clearest illustrations of that deeper issue sits far from financial centers and climate summits, in the Arctic. About 50 years ago, Denmark made a decision that looks increasingly unusual by modern economic standards. It removed around…

Today, design drives effective business strategy, but design education hasn’t caught up. As companies scramble to digitally transform, adapt to the climate crisis, and navigate culture and trade wars, design’s role has expanded—moving to the center of how organizations shape products, services, and systems. With this elevated role comes a sobering reality: Many design leaders feel increasingly out of their depth. Promoted for creative excellence, they suddenly find themselves navigating boardrooms, budgets, business models, and organizational change without the proper preparation. As Fast Company puts it, a generation of design leaders are in the midst of a “big desig…

As global temperatures rise and there’s a seemingly endless series of climate disasters, it’s natural to look to technology as a solution. From carbon capture (where emissions aren’t released into the atmosphere but buried in the ground) to geo-engineering (where particles are sprayed into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and lower temperatures), green innovations are frequently touted as the way to resolve our continued reliance on fossil fuels. But in our eagerness for silver bullets, we may be susceptible to optimism bias, focusing too much on potential benefits while ignoring many of the negative effects or drawbacks. A 2022 essay in Nature argues that many of t…

If you’ve spent meaningful time in a corporate design role, you’ve probably received some version of this feedback at least once: you’re difficult. Too opinionated. Not a team player. You push back too much. You care too much about things that aren’t your call. I’ve heard this feedback described, almost word for word, by hundreds of designers across industries and career levels. And what strikes me every time is how consistently it describes not a liability, but a set of entrepreneurial instincts that organizations simply don’t know how to hold. The traits that get pathologized in corporate environments (the tendency to question assumptions, to challenge briefs be…

I was thrilled this week when Apple issued a press release announcing that its original film, F1 The Movie, starring Brad Pitt, would make its streaming debut on the company’s video service December 12. But it wasn’t the news about the movie that excited me. Rather, it was a small line at the end of the press release that quietly announced something else: “Apple TV+ is now simply Apple TV, with a vibrant new identity.” The “+” branding on Apple TV+ always bugged me. Whenever I looked at it, I thought, “Apple TV plus what?” Apple News offers a free base version and a paid version that gets you more content, called “Apple News+,” which makes sense. But there’s never bee…

On Tuesday, SoftBank, the Japanese financial giant, announced plans to dump all 32 million of its shares in Nvidia, the AI chip maker. The news won’t be the needle that pops the AI bubble, but it did cause enough of a stir to make Nvidia’s shares drop 2% Tuesday morning. The bad vibes were muted somewhat by news of what SoftBank says it will do with the proceeds of the sell off, along with those from the sale of some of its $9.17 billion T-Mobile stake: The firm will double down on another big bet in the AI space–OpenAI. SoftBank expects to directly invest $30 billion in OpenAI this year, according to its second-quarter financial statement in September. And it had …

Disney has been in the cruise business for 27 years now, but over the past few years, the company has doubled down in an unprecedented manner. On November 20, the entertainment giant will see the inaugural sailing of the Disney Destiny, a 144,000 gross ton ship capable of carrying 4,000 passengers that is the latest in a growing fleet. It’s the fourth addition in the past four years. And five more ships are coming by 2031, which will bring the total to 13. An expansion like that isn’t cheap, but Disney is making a lot of sizable wagers these days. The new ships are part of a $60 billion capital investment between now and 2033, which includes a variety of planned updat…

Diversity training is more effective when it’s personalized, according to my new research in the peer-reviewed journal Applied Psychology. As a professor of management, I partnered with Andrew Bryant, who studies social marketing, to develop an algorithm that identifies people’s “personas,” or psychological profiles, as they participate in diversity training in real time. We embedded this algorithm into a training system that dynamically assigned participants to tailored versions of the training based on their personas. We found that this personalized approach worked especially well for one particular group: the “skeptics.” When skeptics received training tailored…