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The world’s auto industry is getting a shake-up from Chinese automakers that are quickly expanding across the globe, offering relatively affordable electric vehicles designed to wow car buyers with sleek designs and the latest high-tech interiors. Companies like BYD, Great Wall, Geely, and Chery Automobile are reaching outward as they build the scale they need to survive cutthroat competition in their home market. These generally are not state-run giants like SAIC, BAIC, and Guangzhou Automotive. The founder of Geely started out making refrigerators. BYD first built up its expertise in battery technology, now its biggest advantage as the world’s largest-selling EV make…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Before becoming CEO and president of C.H. Robinson in 2023, Dave Bozeman worked at four of the world’s most iconic companies: Harley-Davidson Motor Company, Caterpillar, Amazon, and Ford Motor Company. During each stop, he gleaned valuable lessons: Harley-Davidson (16 years): The m…

Camb.ai is on a mission to disrupt the dominance of English in global media. Founded in 2022, the AI-powered platform specializes in real-time translation that retains a speaker’s emotional resonance—processing content up to 20 times faster than traditional dubbing services. Major League Soccer now uses Camb.ai’s technology for live broadcasts. But the company has also found unexpected demand in markets like video advertising and the localization of interactive smart toys. To power its growth, Camb.ai has raised $15.5 million to date. The platform now supports translations in more than 150 languages—including Maleku, spoken by just 500 people. CEO Avneesh Prak…

Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Company’s work-life advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: How can I get more sleep? A: I am writing this at 11:12 p.m., so this advice is as much for myself as it is for anyone else. Here’s what we should all be doing differently: First, set a schedule and stick to it. The “stick to it” part is hard. But it’s called the golden rule of sleep for a reason. Set a bedtime, and then plan at least 20-40 minutes back from that time to start your bedtime routine. You might even need an alarm to remind you that it’s tim…

Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Company’s workplace advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: How can I get my boss to stop emailing me in the middle of the night? A: This dilemma is closely related to the question of how to say “no” at work without feeling guilty and how to push back if your workload is too much. All are part of setting boundaries, but in an uncertain job market, drawing firm lines between work and personal time can feel more fraught. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t set boundaries. In fact, the most valuable, creative, product…

Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Company’s work-life advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: How can I get over decision paralysis? A: I feel this one. I think we all do. By most estimates, the average person makes around 35,000 decisions per day. Most of those are small choices like what to wear, what to have for lunch, what to post on social media. Hopefully you’re not paralyzed by those choices. But you also shouldn’t discount them completely. If you spend too much time mulling over the less consequential parts of life, you can end up with dec…

Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Company’s workplace advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: How can I improve my team’s morale? A: Team morale isn’t an extra or a “nice to have.” It’s critical to a functioning company. And it’s not looking good out there. According to the latest Gallup report, only 36% of employees say they feel engaged at work. That means 64% of employees are feeling some degree of unhappy at work. Low morale can take a lot of different forms—from feeling less enthusiastic, less motivated, or less satisfied with work, all the …

Adapted from Nonlinear: Navigating Design With Curiosity and Conviction (MIT Press, February 4, 2025). When I open my smartphone in the morning, every social media app is full of advertisements marketing something to me. I feel like I’m trapped in a circuitous loop from ads and information coming through my devices: “Buy this, buy that!” We’re all stuck in this loop. Can we fix it? John Maeda (vice president of engineering, computational design, and AI at Microsoft) once created a computational artwork of an infinity loop that he often uses in his keynotes. We talked about my interpretation of his visual during a video livestream together back in 2020. I like…

Water scarcity is often viewed as an issue for the arid American West, but the U.S. Northeast’s experience in 2024 shows how severe droughts can occur in just about any part of the country. Cities in the Northeast experienced record-breaking drought conditions in the second half of 2024 after a hot, dry summer in many areas. Wildfires broke out in several states that rarely see them. By December, much of the region was experiencing moderate to severe drought. Residents in New York City and Boston were asked to reduce their water use, while Philadelphia faced risk to its water supply due to saltwater coming up the Delaware River. Before the drought, many people…

Headwinds across the business world challenge any leader striving to make an impact beyond shareholder value. Few organizations know this struggle better than the B Team, born out of Richard Branson’s drive to elevate the role and responsibility of business in society. CEO Leah Seligmann shares why some leaders are pulling back, where others are pressing forward, and which actions can have the greatest impact—from climate change to diversity. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations …

I’m a writer, not a programmer, so until recently a lot of the hype around ChatGPT’s abitilies as a coding tool went over my head. But then I realized generative AI’s programming powers can be helpful for more than just coders. It can also help anyone else dabble in code to get things done. In my case, that means creating new browser bookmarklets. These are special kinds of bookmarks that use JavaScript to modify or act on web content, and they’ve always been an underrated web browsing superpower. For years, I’ve used bookmarklets to speed up web videos, remove page clutter, and quickly search my favorite sites, but I’ve always been limited to whatever example cod…

On Saturday, hours after U.S. forces in Caracas killed at least 80 people and kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Donald The President sounded less like a wartime commander than a developer surveying a newly acquired property. The country’s future, he told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort, belonged to “very large United States oil companies,” which would soon be pumping “a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.” The land in question includes the largest proven oil reserves on Earth — at some 300 billion barrels, roughly 17 percent of global totals. But after years of political turmoil and U.S. sanctions, Venezuela accounts for barely 1 percent of …

Thousands of tonnes of plastic pollution could be escaping into the environment every year . . . from our mouths. Most chewing gum on sale is made from a variety of oil-based synthetic rubbers—similar to the plastic material used in car tires. If you find that thought slightly unsettling, you are not alone. I have been researching and speaking about the plastic pollution problem for 15 years. The people I talk to are always surprised, and disgusted, when they find out they’ve been chewing on a lump of malleable plastic. Most manufacturers just don’t advertise what gum is actually made of—they dodge around the detail by listing “gum base” in the ingredients. There’…

China likes to condemn the United States for extending its arm too far outside of its borders to make demands on non-American companies. But when it sought to hit back at the U.S. interests this month, Beijing did exactly the same. In expanding export rules on rare earths, Beijing for the first time announced it will require foreign firms to obtain approval from the Chinese government to export magnets containing even tiny amounts of China-originated rare earth materials or produced with Chinese technology. That means a South Korean smartphone maker must ask for Beijing’s permission to sell the devices to Australia if the phones contain China-originated rare earth mater…

Beijing imposed sanctions on Friday against 20 U.S. defense-related companies and 10 executives, a week after Washington announced large-scale arms sales to Taiwan. The sanctions entail freezing the companies’ assets in China and banning individuals and organizations from dealing with them, according to the Chinese foreign ministry. The companies include Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation, L3Harris Maritime Services and Boeing in St. Louis, while defense firm Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey is one of the executives sanctioned, who can no longer do business in China and are barred from entering the country. Their assets in the East Asian country have also been…

This holiday season, an unexpected treat has stepped into the limelight and onto the buffet table at many a festive gathering: the Jell-O shot. But the shot in question, which is currently going viral on TikTok and popping up on high-end menus across New York City, is nothing like the ones you probably remember from the sticky basement of a college frat party. Instead, these treats are sleek, refined, classy, and coveted—in short, the opposite of electric green slime in a plastic cup. Brooklyn-based Solid Wiggles, cofounded by pastry chef Jena Derman and mixologist Jack Schramm, is among the pioneers of this Jell-O shot revival. Founded in 2020, the company des…

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 economy is something of a rollercoaster and consumer behavior is shifting just as fast. From fluctuating costs to changing shopping habits, today’s market represents a real opportunity to support transformation for brands. As trusted marketing partners, our role isn’t to predict what’s next but to help clients confidently navigate the complexity, adapt with agility, and stay closely attu…

The Panama Canal is one of the most important waterways in the world, with about 7% of global trade passing through. It also relies heavily on rainfall. Without enough freshwater flowing in, the canal’s locks can’t raise and lower ships traveling between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Droughts mean fewer ships per day, and that can quickly affect Panama’s finances and economies around the world. But the same freshwater is also essential for Panama’s many other needs, including drinking water for about two million Panamanians, use by Indigenous people and farmers in the watershed, as well as hydropower. When the region experiences droughts, as it did in 2023–2024…

Just a handful of years ago, the idea of one person creating a company worth over a billion dollars seemed like a pipe dream. Thanks to rapid advancements in AI, the possibility of a “solopreneur unicorn” is less a matter of “if” and more a matter of “when.” Earlier this year, OpenAI founder Sam Altman told Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian that his group chat of tech CEO friends have a betting pool for when the world will see a one-person billion-dollar company. Ten months later, some experts suggest that the company could be founded in 2026, if it hasn’t been already, due to rapid advancements in agentic AI. “The ability of a person to scale themselves, to automat…

Cloudflare has often been described as some version of “the most important internet company you’ve never heard of.” But for the better part of 2025, cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince has been trying to change that. The company’s core business is to improve the performance and enhance the security of websites and online applications, protecting against malicious actors and routing web traffic through its data centers to optimize performance. “Six billion people pass through our network every single month,” Prince says. If Cloudflare is doing its job well, no one notices. But in July, Prince declared “Content Independence Day,” a broadside against the AI companies th…

At first glance, Clove’s collaboration strategy may seem a little wacky. Why, you might ask, is a startup that makes sneakers for healthcare workers partnering with Land O’Lakes butter, Levain cookies, and Olipop prebiotic sodas? It’s a good question, but there’s method to the madness. Clove’s team members spend their days studying the lives of doctors and nurses, and they’ve discovered that food is a rare source of pleasure and joy in a very stressful workplace. “I watch nurses get ready with me videos as a form of ethnographic research,” says Jordyn Amoroso, Clove’s co-founder and chief brand officer. “You see nurses pack their lunches with a baked good, or a health…

The Globeville, Elyria-Swansea and Commerce City communities in metro Denver are choked by air pollution from nearby highways, an oil refinery and a Superfund site. While these neighborhoods have long suffered from air pollution, they’re not the only ones in Colorado. Now, Colorado is taking a major step to protect people from air pollutants that cause cancer or other major health problems, called “air toxics.” For the first time, the state is developing its own state-level air toxic health standards. In January 2025 as “priority” chemicals: benzene, ethylene oxide, formaldehyde, hexavalent chromium compounds and hydrogen sulfide. The state is in the proc…

Many organizations are racing to build AI strategies, but too often they focus on adopting the latest tech, rather than creating the environment to support it. The reality is that lasting transformation is fueled by people, which requires companies to take a good look at their culture. At Architech, that’s exactly what we did. By prioritizing and rewarding innovation, we aligned our culture with our AI strategy—and it worked. This year, we are proud to be recognized as one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Workplaces. We are one of 10 companies globally recognized by Fast Company for excellence in AI, automation, and machine learning. Here’s how we built an award-…