What's on Your Mind?

The traditional model of leadership, where a single individual is expected to provide all the answers, is becoming obsolete. In a world of accelerating complexity, hyper-specialization, and rapid change, no leader can single-handedly navigate the full spectrum of challenges facing modern organizations. The future of leadership is about curating the best insights, talent, and ideas, not dictating the direction. The best leaders will be those who act as architects of collaboration, assembling diverse perspectives and fostering an environment where expansive thinking thrives. This shift in leadership isn’t just about delegation—it’s about creating conditions for con…

Most of us are used to using internet chatbots like ChatGPT and DeepSeek in one of two ways: via a web browser or via their dedicated smartphone apps. There are two drawbacks to this. First, their use requires an internet connection. Second, everything you type into the chatbot is sent to the companies’ servers, where it is analyzed and retained. In other words: the more you use the chatbot the more the company knows about you. This is a particular worry surrounding DeepSeek that American lawmakers have expressed. But thanks to a few innovative and easy-to-use desktop apps, LM Studio and GPT4All, you can bypass both these drawbacks. With the apps, you can run various …

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. The emergence of generative AI and digital transformation has redefined customer-company relationships, empowering consumers like never before. As argued in a previous article I wrote, today’s customer is no longer a mere segment or target consumer, but a brand seeking vendors to help create their unique identity. Companies must now redefine their value propositions to meet thes…

U.K.-based Wren Kitchens abruptly ceased all U.S. operations on April 23, shuttering all brick-and-mortar retail locations and all of its showroom studios inside The Home Depot stores nationwide. Court documents show that Wren Kitchens filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the District of Delaware bankruptcy court on April 24. According to social media, the sudden closure blindsided employees and customers. Former U.S. employees, including workers at the company’s manufacturing facility in Hanover Township, Pennsylvania, are now without jobs. Unfortunately, many customers say they are now facing uncertainty, with some saying they’ve demolished kitchens and are still await…

Since Brian Niccol took over as Starbucks Chairman and CEO in 2024, he’s promised a grand turnaround for the coffee giant by going back to its roots in lovingly designed, customer-centric stores. The messaging wasn’t enough to break six straight quarters of global sales decline. Global sales grew 1% at the end of the 2025 fiscal year, but they left the U.S. behind. Now, Starbucks’s Q1 2026 earnings have beat analyst estimates and seem to be cementing a turnaround, marking the first time same store sales have increased in the U.S. in eight quarters. Starbucks same store sales were up 4% in the U.S. and 5% globally during the first quarter, thanks largely to a 3% ri…

When it comes to inquiring about—ahem—certain products, shoppers prefer the inhuman touch. That is what we found in a study of consumer habits when it comes to products that traditionally have come with a degree of embarrassment—think acne cream, diarrhea medication, adult sex toys, or personal lubricant. While brands may assume consumers hate chatbots, our series of studies involving more than 6,000 participants found a clear pattern: When it comes to purchases that make people feel embarrassed, consumers prefer chatbots over human service reps. In one experiment, we asked participants to imagine shopping for medications for diarrhea and hay fever. They were …

Using your email address as your username has become the standard. In many cases, you simply enter your email address and choose a password. Some services remove the need for a password altogether, allowing you to register using just your email address and a onetime code sent to it. Others offer the option to connect your account directly to your Google or Apple identity. As we scroll, shop, apply, and register across services, our email address quietly becomes our identity everywhere, from shopping platforms to banking to travel. Over time, more and more of our activity starts pointing back to a single account. While it all feels convenient, there is an issue we …

D-Wave is about to make waves. The quantum computing firm announced on Wednesday that, for the first time, it was able to “successfully simulate the properties of magnetic materials” using its Advantage2 annealing quantum computer, which “allows us to invent and evaluate new materials without needing to build them in the lab,” D-Wave CEO Dr. Alan Baratz tells Fast Company. In effect, this means that D-Wave has achieved “quantum supremacy” on a useful problem, something it says nobody else has yet been able to accomplish, and which is detailed in a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Science. “This is a really important moment in time for the entire qu…

Shares in major quantum computer companies were on the rise again in premarket trading on Tuesday, highlighting what has been a volatile couple of weeks for a nascent industry that continues to captivate. Here’s what’s driving the latest news: D-Wave announces Advantage2 By far, Palo Alto-based D-Wave Quantum Inc (NYSE: QBTS) is seeing the biggest boost in premarket trading, with its stock up more than 12% as of this writing. This boost follows a 7% increase in D-Wave shares on Monday. Investors are likely excited by news on Tuesday morning in which D-Wave announced the general availability of its sixth-generation Advantage2 quantum computing system, which the…

U.S. quantum computing firm D-Wave Quantum has struck a deal with a company called Swiss Quantum Technology (SQT) to bring D-Wave’s Advantage2 quantum computer to Europe. The deal, which amounts to €10 million ($11.63 million), will see D-Wave’s quantum computer deployed in Italy, where it will play a role in supporting the Italians’ efforts toward large-scale digital transformation, D-Wave announced on Wednesday. It will be part of a joint effort—collectively called the “Q-Alliance”—between D-Wave and IonQ, another American quantum computing company. In its announcement Wednesday, D-Wave said little about what SQT does, and scant information about the compan…

The once-empty space over 14 lanes of interstate highway traffic coursing through the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas is now an exceptional new development open to the public: Halperin Park. The $300 million freeway capping project includes a playground, splash pad, band shell, large lawn, and linear walkway that resurrects an erased section of a historic street. Joining the widely celebrated freeway-capping Klyde Warren Park, which opened its first phase over a stretch of a recessed downtown freeway in 2012, Halperin Park is a community-centric model for addressing the divisions wrought by highway building. Reconnecting a neighborhood Designed by architec…

Neko Health is taking its body-scanning technology to America. The Swedish diagnostic health clinic, cofounded by Hjalmar Nilsonne and Daniel Ek (also the cofounder and CEO of Spotify), said on Wednesday that it will launch a location in New York City, its first in the United States, in the spring of this year. The three-year-old startup, which offers comprehensive body scans to monitor risk factors for a range of health conditions from pre-diabetes to cancer, already has a presence in London, Manchester, and Stockholm. “For the first time, technology is enabling a fundamentally new healthcare experience centered on prevention,” Nilsonne, who is the company’s …

Anyone well-versed in internet lore will be familiar with the image of a slightly deflated child’s ball pit on a hotel convention room floor. DashCon (originally called Tumblr-Con, although not officially affiliated with Tumblr) was a fan convention held in Schaumburg, Illinois, back in 2014. It was originally intended to bring the Tumblr community together and scheduled to feature vendors and special guests from fandoms like Doctor Who and Sherlock. After a string of disasters, the weekend culminated in the 17-year-old organizer, Nessie O’Neil, going around with a paper bag asking attendees for donations to make up the roughly $17,000 needed to keep the conventi…

My father has a PhD in mechanical social engineering and, among many things, designed cooling systems for nuclear reactors. From him, I inherited a restless curiosity about how the world works and a deep respect for the laws of science. Over the years, I’ve found that many of the principles governing physical objects translate perfectly to business. Take Newton’s first law of motion. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest, and objects in motion stay in motion—at least in a vacuum. What’s true in physics is true for companies. Those that stall are destined to fall behind. But the businesses that remain in constant motion? They succeed. In the agentic AI era, data is …

In the rolling hills near Reno, Nevada, in a field filled with solar panels, something unexpected is nestled into the landscape: a data center that isn’t blowing up its neighbors’ electric bills. In fact, the modular data center, built by Crusoe, essentially doesn’t rely on the electric grid at all. It runs on solar power and an unlikely source: hundreds of second-life EV batteries. At a time when data centers are driving up electricity demand—and facing intense political pushback over potential impacts on energy bills and the environment—the batteries offer a flexible way to add power without leaning harder on the grid. The astonishing setup is the handiwork of…

Boom Supersonic wants to build the world’s first commercial supersonic airliner. Founded in 2014, the company set out to make air travel dramatically faster — up to twice the speed of today’s passenger jets — while also aiming for a smaller environmental footprint. For years, Boom has focused on developing the high-performance engine technology needed to sustain supersonic flight. Though the company has not yet debuted its revolutionary jet, last year it identified a new and potentially lucrative application for its novel technology: generating electricity for the data centers powering the artificial intelligence boom. Many of these data centers want the kind of f…

Across the country, data center demand and construction have been skyrocketing throughout 2025. And so has local opposition to those projects. From Indiana (where a developer withdrew its application to build a data center on more than 700 acres of farmland after local opposition) to Georgia (where now at least eight municipalities have passed moratoriums on data center development), residents and politicians are pushing back against the water- and energy-hungry sites. Between late March through June of this year alone, 20 data center projects, representing about $98 billion in investments, were blocked or delayed in the United States, according to a new rep…

If a single type of building could define our present time, it would undoubtedly be the data center. Underpinning the increasingly online way we work, shop, and entertain ourselves, data centers provide the computing power and storage to handle all the Zoom calls, Amazon purchases, and Netflix streams a person can cram into their day. And now as compute-hungry artificial intelligence dominates the future of nearly every sector of the economy—and possibly society as a whole—the data center will become even more ubiquitous. A headlong data center building boom is already underway. One report finds that average monthly spending on data centers has increased 400% in the l…

When Amazon proposed building its Project Blue data center in Tucson, Arizona, the company faced intense pushback. Residents raised concerns about the enormous amounts of water and electricity that the data center would need, two major ways such projects impact the environment, especially in a desert city. Ultimately, Tucson’s town council rejected the proposal (though its developer hasn’t given up). But the story highlights both the growing environmental impacts of data centers, and how location matters to that impact. A study published this week in the journal Nature Sustainability makes that connection even clearer. Led by researchers at Cornell University, t…

When fewer people belong to unions and unions have less power, the impact goes beyond wages and job security. Those changes can hurt public health and make people more unhappy. We’re economists who research labor and health issues. Those are two of the main findings of studies that we have conducted. More unionization, more happiness In the first study on this topic that we published in 2023, we found that increasing levels of union membership tends to make working-class people happier. We zeroed in on a question in the General Social Survey, which the University of Chicago makes available. It asks respondents to choose whether they are “very happy,” “somew…

Growing up in rural Northern California and later serving in the military, stationed in Mississippi, I experienced firsthand the stark disparities in access to quality goods. Even finding fresh, local produce often meant bypassing the grocery store for a farm stand because the desired options simply weren’t stocked. In many communities I lived in and visited, the available choices were severely limited, creating a significant market gap that persists today. This isn’t just a social issue I observed; it’s a massive missed revenue opportunity for retailers who are overly focused on saturated urban markets while overlooking the immense potential waiting in rural and Middle A…

As the founder, chair, and CEO of the Exceptional Women Alliance, I am privileged to work alongside extraordinary women leaders who reshape industries and redefine what leadership looks like. Within this sisterhood, we challenge, support, and elevate one another, sharing not just professional expertise but a commitment to lead with impact. Nicole Brownell is one of those leaders. She is a COO and growth strategist whose work sits at the intersection of digital transformation, product innovation, and behavioral intelligence. She has guided companies through scaling, designed GTM strategies that combine creativity with analytics, and she focuses on using data to deepen …