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You might think of Walmart as America’s quintessential big box store—the place you can get everything from Hanes T-shirts to large screen TVs to cleats for your kid’s soccer uniform. But Walmart isn’t defying shaky consumer confidence because of the breadth of its offerings, which impressively stretches to 120,000 products at most stores. Customers aren’t flocking into stores to buy made-in-America T-shirts, as I wrote about in May, thanks to a novel partnership with American Giant. Or because it is adding more high-end products (at lower prices than you’d find anywhere else), as I covered in October in this profile of its chief merchant Latriece Watkins. Nor is …

I keep coming up against a logical fallacy in strategy that I feel compelled to address. The logic holds that when a company has a shareholder-unfriendly component of its portfolio—e.g. the business in question is cyclical, or it is low-growth or low margin—the company should diversify to make that business less-shareholder unfriendly. I take on the fallacy in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece entitled Diversification Can’t Disappear a Strategy Problem: It Just Creates a Different Problem. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here. The argument The usual motivator of this argument is cyclicality: We have a cyclical business, an…

Only a week after experiencing a dreaded “death cross,” and subsequently seeing its value fall to less than $81,000, Bitcoin is showing some signs of recovering. On Monday, BTC’s price topped $89,000, and as of early Tuesday, are hovering around $87,500. To be clear, the slump is far from over—the coin saw its price top $124,000 just last month—and no one can predict what will happen next, but it’s a clear upswing in momentum. All told, when Bitcoin bottomed out at $81,000, it had fallen around 35% off its high. There were several reasons for the selloff, including outflows from large institutional investors and broader economic uncertainty, among other thin…

Apple said on Monday it is cutting jobs across its sales teams to strengthen its customer engagement efforts, noting that only a small number of roles will be impacted by the layoffs. An Apple spokesperson told Reuters that the company is continuing to hire and the affected employees can apply for new roles. The impacted employees include account managers serving major businesses, schools and government agencies, according to Bloomberg News, which had reported the news earlier in the day. Staff who operate Apple’s briefing centers for institutional meetings and product demonstrations for prospective customers were also affected, Bloomberg said. One of the …

A copy of the first Superman issue, unearthed by three brothers cleaning out their late mother’s attic, netted $9.12 million this month at a Texas auction house which says it is the most expensive comic book ever sold. The brothers discovered the comic book in a cardboard box beneath layers of brittle newspapers, dust and cobwebs in their deceased mother’s San Francisco home last year, alongside a handful of other rare comics that she and her sibling had collected on the cusp of World War II. She had told her children she had a valuable comic book collection hidden away, but they had never seen it until they put her house up for sale and decided to comb through her belo…

Shares in Alphabet Inc (Nasdaq: GOOG), the company better known as Google, are rising again in premarket trading today. The stock is currently up by more than 4% following yesterday’s rise of 6.2%. If those gains hold, Google could be set to become the world’s next company with a $4 trillion market cap today. Here’s what you need to know. Why are GOOG shares rising? Shares in Alphabet have had a stellar run as of late. Yesterday, they rose more than 6.2%. Over the past five days, they have been up more than 11.5%. Over the past month, they have jumped more than 22%. And over the past six months, they have been up more than 87%. And that’s before…

European and Asian shares mostly gained on Tuesday after U.S. stocks rallied on hopes the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates soon. The futures for the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.1%. Germany’s DAX edged 0.1% lower to 23,216.76 and the CAC 40 in Paris added 0.1% to 7,965.77. Britain’s FTSE 100 likewise gained 0.1%, to 9,542.55. In Asian trading, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 picked up 0.1% to 48,659.52 as a plunge in technology giant SoftBank’s shares weighed on the market. It fell 10.3% on concerns that returns from its heavy investments in OpenAI may be threatened by the next generation Gemini artificial intelligence model that Google launched…

In a new legal filing, Meta is being accused of shutting down internal research that showed people who stopped using Facebook experienced less depression, anxiety, and loneliness. The allegations come as part of a lawsuit filed by several U.S. school districts against Meta, Snap, TikTok, and other social media companies. The brief, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California but is not yet public, reportedly claims the study, called Project Mercury, was initiated in 2019 and was meant to explore the impact of apps on polarization, news-consumption habits, “well-being, and daily social interactions.” Plaintiffs in the suit say…

Leaving your corporate job for a solopreneur path is a bold move—and it can feel terrifying. But as long as you’re prepared, it can be a smart move, especially in the current rocky job market. I worked at one corporate job for 15 years. Then I pivoted to a new career in marketing. Eighteen months later, I was working for myself as a full-time freelance writer. Within two months of going solo, I had replaced my salary at a marketing agency, but I’d also taken a lot of baby steps in advance of making the switch. You can make the transition to solopreneurship easier if you build a safety net before you walk out the corporate door. Here’s how. Calculate how much…

After entrepreneur Brynn Putnam sold her smart fitness company, Mirror, to Lululemon for $500 million in 2020, she was looking for her next big idea. It was the middle of the pandemic, and Putnam was living with five kids ranging in age from 2 to 21. She says she often found herself dreaming of an activity that would get her whole family to sit down and connect with each other. Brynn Putnam “When we played games, we were either playing board games like Candyland, so that the littlest ones could participate, or we would try to play video games, but the teenagers who’ve logged a lot of hours on sort of modern controllers would always smoke us,” Putnam says. “There wa…

You’re probably winding down from work and getting ready for a few days at home with your family. But anybody with caregiving responsibility knows that the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks will not be relaxing. Since the United States does not have a federal policy that gives workers paid time off after giving birth, having a medical procedure, or to care for a loved one, many will cram this labor into their precious holiday time. Many of us have a colleague who will come back to work exhausted after spending time with a dying parent, having taken advantage of the time off from work to figure out hospice and funeral arrangements. Or one who will be caring for a sibl…

New research has found that AI-powered content moderation systems from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek don’t always come to the same conclusions about bad language on the internet. View the full article

I think back to freshman year, when my friends and I would cram onto a lumpy dorm-issue twin bed and huddle around one phone, collectively cringing as we swiped through Hinge. That was my first foray into dating apps. It took me a week—and a handful of dead-end chats—before I deleted it. As it turns out, I’m far from alone. According to mobile app analytics company AppsFlyer, 65% of dating apps downloaded in 2024 were deleted within a month. This year, that number has climbed to 69%, AppsFlyer told Fast Company. During the pandemic, dating apps were a lifeline. Gen Z spent much of their formative years—high school, early college—on Zoom, and online dating…

Silicon Valley’s giants crowd the list of the world’s most valuable companies, but drugmaker Eli Lilly is hot on their heels. The company topped a market capitalization of one trillion dollars on Friday, becoming the first business in the health industry to hit that milestone. Lilly’s achievement comes during a tense week for stock watchers. AI chipmaker Nvidia, which itself became the first $5 trillion company less than a month ago, beat expectations with its latest quarterly earnings. But with AI overrepresented among the world’s top businesses and massive AI investments making headlines every day, investors remain skittish that excitement over the tech might be ove…

The gap between the release of the movie musicals Wicked: Part I and Wicked: For Good feels like the longest intermission ever. Eager fans had to wait a year before seeing the story’s conclusion, which premieres November 21. The creative team behind Wicked claims to have tried to condense the plot down to just one film, but an overabundance of material led to the decision to split it into two. Financial considerations also likely came into play as two films will make more money than one. As fans celebrate Wicked: For Good’s release week, let’s get you up to speed on everything you need to know, including projected box-office figures. Who’s in the movie? Sin…

How can you tell if someone is a great leader? They always want to know more. They’re interested in mastery of a subject or skill. They ask great questions. And, as they find out more, they sometimes change their mind. They’re a “learner.” But these days, most CEOs and other leaders take the opposite approach. They think of themselves as “knowers.” They appear to have all the answers. That’s bad for them, their direct reports, and the organizations they lead. That insight comes from researcher and author Brené Brown and Wharton professor and author Adam Grant. The two behavior experts had an open-ended discussion about the nature of courageous leadership during a rece…

As Sesame Street’s 56th season gets underway, Elmo, Big Bird, and the Sesame organization are navigating a volatile chapter in the show’s history—marked by government funding cuts, evolving new media habits, and AI’s impact on education. Sherrie Westin, CEO of Sesame Workshop, discusses balancing risk-taking with brand trust, partnering with Netflix, and why emotional well-being and kindness are the skills that matter most in today’s world. 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 Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with t…

A snaggle tooth. A gap in someone’s smile. A birthmark or mole. What do each of these facial features have in common? They all have wabi-sabi. That’s according to TikTok’s latest trend, which has users highlighting their imperfections and labeling them “wabi-sabi.” Not to be confused with the sushi accompaniment, wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic philosophy that finds beauty in imperfection and the natural process of aging—something we could all use a little more of in the age of “preventative facelifts.” The concept celebrates imperfection and the natural wear and tear that occurs with the passage of time, whether that’s a gently worn step, a chipped mug, or…

In 2023, Pop-Tarts changed the world of brand mascots forever when it sacrificed the life of a Strawberry Pop-Tart and fed its remains to the Kansas State football team as a reward for winning the Pop-Tarts Bowl game. The weirdly macabre stunt got 4 billion media impressions, and in the eight weeks following the game, parent company Kellanova sold 21 million more Pop-Tarts than in the eight weeks before the game. Riding on that success, the brand upped its ambitions and brought three flavors to the Pop-Tarts Bowl last year, letting the winning team’s MVP choose which one was toasted and eaten (Iowa State’s quarterback, Rocco Becht, picked Frosted Cinnamon Roll). Now …