What's on Your Mind?

As marketing leaders, we don’t wake up thinking about algorithms. We wake up thinking about growth. For CMOs, the job has always been the same: drive real business impact, improve ROI, and prove—repeatedly—that marketing is a growth engine, not a cost center. Long before generative AI entered the conversation, marketing leaders were under pressure to connect activity to revenue, align tightly with sales, and make performance visible. The pressure to quantify value didn’t start with AI. It started when the business demanded proof. What has changed is the speed and precision with which we can now deliver that proof. AI ISN’T REINVENTING MARKETING. IT’S REWIRING …

Founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Apple officially incorporated on April 1, 1976. The company helped usher in the era of personal computing, pairing meticulous design with tight hardware–software integration and a simple promise: “It just works.” Its history has been anything but linear. There were early breakthroughs, a near-collapse in the 1990s, and a dramatic revival after Jobs returned, followed by a run of mass-market hits beginning with the iPod and accelerating with the iPhone. All told, Apple has over five decades launched category-defining products, shelved its share of misfires, and pushed some genuinely odd ideas. These are the clearest examples of each…

The modern kitchen has become a canvas for self-expression, a place where consumers obsess over aesthetics and materials with an intensity usually reserved for fashion. They carefully consider the color of their Dutch oven, the kind of wood in their cutting board, and where to display their glass canisters. And yet, tucked into the corner of that same beautiful kitchen, is almost certainly an unattractive trash can that looks like it was designed in 2000 and never revisited. The home goods market is massive and growing. It was valued at $960 billion in 2024 and projected to reach $1.6 trillion by 2030. But aside from premium brand SimpleHuman, which paved the way for …

I’ll never forget the morning I froze in front of a client. I was a Vice President at Kearney, the global management consulting firm, presenting our proposal to a three-person client subcommittee. Mid-sentence, my mind went completely blank. Not the normal “lost my train of thought” blank. The kind of blank that leaves a scary emptiness where confidence used to live. I’d been putting on a mask each day. I’d tried to be positive and stay on top of everything. But that morning, I couldn’t do it anymore. I felt anxious and exhausted at the same time. My mind was racing, and my body was depleted. The mask had finally cracked in the worst possible place. What I didn’t …

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” – President John Fitzgerald Kennedy Most leaders will tell you they play the long game, and it is one of those things that sounds right and costs nothing to say. What is harder, rarer, and worth talking about is what underpins their conviction. Artemis II is a 50-year case study in exactly that. On April 1, four astronauts will board the Orion spacecraft and fly around the Moon in the first crewed lunar mission since 1972. The mission did not survive…

Your performance at work today has a lot to do with how you spent your time after work yesterday. It’s not just about putting down the devices at a decent hour and having a consistent bedtime routine. New research suggests we can take steps to optimize tomorrow’s performance as soon as work ends today. According to the study, mentally detaching from work earlier in the day—and not thinking about it for the rest of the evening—leads to more energy, less fatigue, and higher work-goal accomplishment the following day. “It’s critical that you start your recovery as soon as you can,” says lead author Ryan Grant, an assistant professor of psychological science at …

March Madness is well underway, but for a lot of people, it’s just another day at the office. That is, until you walk into the break room or sign into Slack and realize the place is abuzz with bracket chatter and Final Four predictions. You sigh, resigned to yet another month of sportsball—a whole lot of chatter about a game that you don’t know about. And don’t really care to. For many people, March Madness is a nearly month-long ritual that requires a lot of feigning interest or noise-cancelling headphones. For every excited person replaying Yaxel Lendeborg’s latest opponent-crushing dunk is a disinterested coworker nearby, confused at best, or at worst, sensing…

Bad, yet still pretty good, American cheese refuses to expire—and not just because of all the preservatives. American cheese—pasteurized, processed, and super-melty—is, for better or worse, arguably the 20th century’s most iconic food product. And yes, “pasteurized, processed cheese food” is what federal regulators call it instead of “cheese.” It is a paradox embraced shamelessly by some of the most elite food names around. From Salt Fat Acid Heat author Samin Nosrat (“I have a secret love of American cheese, the yellow kind that has a plasticky quality when it melts”), to J. Kenji López-Alt, whose The Food Lab dedicates a chapter to the science of melting cheese …

Across the top floors of an Amazon warehouse in Garner, North Carolina, about 10 miles south of Raleigh, the robots are already crowding out human workers. A sprawling robotic system in the middle of one floor specializes in stowing items, which involves picking up a pack of paper towels or a Stanley tumbler and making space for it in a storage bin—a complex task for a robot. The humans who work among them are left to mill about the perimeter of the floor. Few human workers are welcome on another floor populated by robots, aside from the technicians who maintain them. At this warehouse, known as RDU1, the workers have grown accustomed to robots buzzing around th…

The AI industry has a quiet addiction problem: It is addicted to tokens. Every new generation of agentic AI seems to assume that the answer to complexity is to throw more context at the model, keep longer histories, spawn more calls, loop over more tools, and let the token meter run wild. The rise of agentic systems, and now projects like OpenClaw, makes that temptation even stronger. Once you give models more autonomy, they do not just consume tokens to answer questions. They consume them to plan, reflect, retry, summarize, call tools, inspect outputs, and keep themselves on track. OpenClaw itself describes the product as an “agent-native” gateway with sessions…

Mark Twain once quipped, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” The problem is that we rarely question our own beliefs. Once a false assumption takes hold, it becomes a default lens we use to interpret the world—and dislodging it becomes incredibly difficult. One very basic assumption that lies at the heart of many change efforts is that information is power—the notion that if you arm people with the right knowledge, they will act on it. That’s why so many change programs are rooted in education and training, because they assume that the right information will change people’s behavior. There’s ev…

It’s 8:45am on a rainy weekday morning in Paris, and I’m standing in what used to be a traffic lane in a busy neighborhood near the city’s largest train stations. Less than a block away, cars are streaming by in the rush hour commute. But here, workers have torn up the pavement and replaced it with a newly-planted park with trees, a protected bike lane, and a wide gravel path for pedestrians. Where cars once drove, someone is walking his dog. It’s one of hundreds of streets in Paris that have been redesigned over the past decade as the city radically transformed to reduce pollution and make neighborhoods more livable. In front of elementary schools, around 300 streets…

There is a particular kind of leadership failure that occurs when a leader transitions into a new high stakes role. It’s tricky at first, because it doesn’t look like failure. No one is being fired. The leader feels productive, even indispensable. But below the surface, something has quietly broken. Talented people are no longer making decisions on their own. The team, once confident and self-directed, has learned to wait. An escalation culture is forming, and it is more common, and more costly, than most organizations acknowledge. The damage accumulates in layers. Disengaged employees cost the global economy an estimated $8.8 trillion in lost productivity annually, a…

Before he became a world-famous electronic music DJ and music producer, John Summit was just John Schuster — a CPA working at accounting firm Ernst and Young and making music on the side. After his single “Deep End” was released in 2020 and grew wildly popular, so did John Summit. He’s gone on to tour all over the world, and will be headlining at Ultra Miami this weekend – one of the biggest stages in the electronic music festival scene. Summit spoke to Fast Company about his journey, his events brand “Experts Only,” and what’s next in his musical endeavors. View the full article

Whether we like it or not, AI has infiltrated the workplace and employees are under pressure to use it. However, according to a new study, you may want to skip asking AI to help you manage matters of the heart. The two-part study, titled “Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence” was recently published in Science. The experiment made the case that using chatbots for personal advice and navigating emotional situations can be harmful because because the system is designed to tell people what they want to hear. Using chatbots may reinforce troubling behavior rather than help people take accountability for harm and apologize. A recent Cog…

It might not seem like the maker of lawn and garden products and a skincare and cosmetics company have much in common. But both ScottsMiracle-Gro and Clinique have recognized that people are likely to seek out advice online these days, which is why they’re meeting consumers where they are with educational resources. “We’re using a lot of agentic AI to help people in any given market,” said John Sass, senior vice president and chief creative officer at ScottsMiracle-Gro, speaking at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. “We have 158 years of experience; we can help you learn how to grow, whether you’re in Miami or Austin or Columbus, Ohio.” Recognizing this opportunity f…

For decades, there was a stubborn gender gap in employment, even as women grew more and more educated. Thirty-odd years ago, men still held 7 million more jobs—despite the fact that women were already earning college degrees at higher rates than their male counterparts. But by 2020, there was a turning point, and women outpaced men on non-farm payrolls by 109,000 jobs, which meant that they accounted for over 50% of the workforce. Then the pandemic happened. In the years since, women have slowly regained their foothold in the labor force, although working mothers in particular have faced an uphill battle between strict in-office policies and ballooning childcare cost…

Back in 1972, only 54 years ago, it was way harder for women and girls to play sports. Resources were scarce, there weren’t the same legal protections as today, it was socially discouraged—and coaches even often found themselves transporting entire teams themselves in their own cars, mopping courts and floors after a match, and funding the purchasing of uniforms and sweats. Before Title IX—the landmark legislation that ended sex-based discrimination in sports passed in 1972—girls and young women who wanted to go to college for athletics sometimes found they simply couldn’t. Maybe the admission requirements (which were different than they were for men) were too st…

During the week of March 23, a truck carrying Nestlé’s new Formula One-themed KitKat bars was making its way from picturesque central Italy to its intended destination of Poland. Somewhere along the way, the truck was intercepted and approximately 12 tons of the bars—or more than 413,793 KitKats—were stolen. The whereabouts of both the bars and the truck are still unknown. Despite all odds, this is shaping up to be a huge win for Nestlé. The Swiss food giant confirmed the chocolate heist to The Athletic on March 28, explaining that the bars in the truck were part of KitKat’s first season as F1’s official chocolate partner. No one was hurt in the process,…