What's on Your Mind?

It can be difficult to assert yourself during a negotiation. You may feel emotional about the process, especially if you are countering a lower offer than you expected or are nervous about being up against a seasoned negotiator. Or perhaps you’re uncomfortable with the idea of selling yourself to a potential employer or partner. Whatever the case may be, your approach to negotiations could be working against you. The best way to make sure you don’t botch a negotiation is to prepare for it in advance, writes Lydia Fenet, a leading charity auctioneer and expert in selling and negotiations. That can involve using friends and family to practice how a negotiation may unfo…

Thinking back to childhood, what role did you play in your family dynamic? Maybe you were the straight-A student? Maybe you flew under the radar, not causing trouble? Or perhaps you were charged with taking care of siblings? The person you were inside your family relationship can impact how you act in the workplace today, says Dr. Alexandra Solomon, clinical psychologist and host of the MasterClass “In Practice” series on dealing with anxiety. “Sometimes we repeat those family roles in our adult relationships, and sometimes we do a 180 flip,” she says. “There’s a path of repetition and there’s a path of opposition. Our goal is to be on the third path, which is t…

In January 2022, when my book The Success Factor was published, I hosted a virtual book launch party. It was a celebration that brought together friends, family, and some of the high achievers I had interviewed for the book—astronauts, Nobel Prize winners, Olympians, and more. Just before the event, one of the astronauts texted me with an unexpected question: “Will [a prominent physician-scientist at the forefront of the COVID-19 pandemic] be there?” I chuckled and responded, “Omicron just hit; I think he’s a bit busy dealing with that right now. But this Nobel Prize winner will be there.” The astronaut’s reply floored me: “Wow, a Nobel Prize winner? Now that’s a …

Personality is one of the most underrated predictors of career success in the world. Defined by scientists as the range of habits and typical behaviors that make us who we are—and different from others—and with more than a century of robust academic evidence on how it impacts work and other real-life outcomes, here are some fascinating facts to digest: (1) The simplest and most reliable way to understand someone’s personality is to look at their scores (position) along five universal traits, namely emotional stability (how calm, composed, and non-anxious you are), extraversion (how sociable, assertive, and energetic you are), agreeableness (how kind, polite, and frien…

YouTube isn’t just a website anymore. And computers and smartphones aren’t even the primary ways that people watch YouTube content, either. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, in his annual letter to the YouTube community yesterday, wrote, “TV has surpassed mobile and is now the primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S.” At the same time, he said, creators “have moved from filming grainy videos of themselves on desktop computers to building studios and producing popular talk shows and feature-length films.” Ahead of posting his letter, Mohan spoke with Fast Company about how YouTube—which is celebrating its 20th year—is responding to changing viewer habits and givin…

When India banned TikTok in 2020, YouTube responded by launching a short-form video feature with a similar user experience in the country. Less than a year later, that feature rolled out globally as YouTube Shorts, which allows creators to post 180-second-long swipeable vertical content. Today, YouTube Shorts has roughly 1.5 billion users and receives an average of 70 billion daily views. With TikTok’s future in limbo in the U.S.—a much-delayed ban is set to take effect on June 19—Shorts is hoping that TikTok’s audience of almost 2 billion people will see it as a compelling alternative. YouTube is already the second-most visited site in the world, and the platform ha…

In part three of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company’s oral history of YouTube, new parent Google confronts the messy issues standing in the way of the video streamer’s long-term viability. As Viacom sues over YouTube users’ unauthorized uploading of intellectual property, Google and YouTube engineers simultaneously build technology that will save the business. Called ContentID, it lets copyright holders remove their work—or, better yet, leave it up and benefit from its monetization. YouTube also sets viewership goals that are even more wildly audacious than the ones it’s already achieved. First, though, Google has to convince even its own employees that buying the video…

In the early days of the current AI boom, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. It was a seismic move, but perhaps the most notable thing about it is what came after. In the subsequent months, publisher after publisher signed licensing deals with OpenAI, making their content available to ChatGPT. There were others who chose litigation, certainly, but most major media companies opted to take some money rather than spend it on lawyers. That changed last week when Ziff Davis filed its own copyright lawsuit against OpenAI. Ziff owns several major online properties, including Mashable, CNET, IGN, and Lifehacker, and garners a massive amou…

Zipline’s cofounder and CEO Keller Cliffton charts the company’s recent expansion from transporting blood for lifesaving transfusions in Rwanda to retail deliveries across eight countries—including high-profile partnerships with the likes of Walmart, Chipotle, Panera, and the Mayo Clinic. Zipline’s do-good health efforts and commercial deliveries are all part of Cliffton’s vision for a radical, new transportation network that meets consumers’ desire for accessibility and speed. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Res…

It’s been two years since Howard Schultz retired from the board of directors of Starbucks, a company he founded and led for decades, but he still enjoys chatting with customers—as he did on Tuesday before sitting down for a wide-ranging interview with Dan Roth, editor-in-chief of LinkedIn. Schultz was curious to know what a customer thought of the coffee chain’s protein lattes that debuted last month and he says there’s no better place to source this information than one of the 40,000-plus Starbucks locations around the world. A sense of curiosity is important for a business leader, as well as a willingness to “be in the mud” and learn directly from customers, Schultz…

Inside a new HP laptop, the copper in its heat sink comes straight from old HP devices—making the company the first to reuse its own recycled metal in a closed loop. In partnership with HP, the Australia-based startup Mint Innovation took in circuit boards from thousands of old HP computers and servers, and then recycled them to supply pure refined copper back to the company. The process is designed to be more sustainable than traditional smelting. Instead of melting down metals in a furnace—an energy-intensive, polluting process—the startup uses a mix of chemicals and biology to recover valuable materials. “What HP is effectively doing is mining e-waste of their …

This week, the startup Humane—which raised $240 million to build an iPhone-killing AI Pin—announced its sale to HP for $116 million. While far short of the company’s original $1 billion asking price, it’s astonishing the brand scrapped for anything at all. A product that had promised to change the world instead became a worldwide laughing stock, indicative of the worst tendencies of Silicon Valley founder hubris. Universally panned, Humane sold fewer than 10,000 units. Sometimes its returns outpaced its sales. Units could catch fire. Humane co-founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno thanked their few loyal customers by announcing their Pins would no longer work…

Sunday night marked Hulu’s first time airing the Oscars live. But its academy awards debut ended on a chaotic and frustratingly premature note. Hulu’s livestream cut off in the final moments of the show — with two major award categories, best actress and best picture, still to be announced because of a scheduling system issue. Those viewing the awards ceremony on Hulu instead saw an error code message that stated the event was over. Viewer outrage, predictably, ensued online. Fans, including those throwing Oscar-viewing parties, eagerly await the final, pivotal moments of the show. Hulu viewers missed Mikey Madison and “Anora” win the night’s titles for both b…

Over the last two years, the value of content has collapsed. Thanks to the LLM revolution, the internet is drowning in an avalanche of indistinguishable output: an endless parade of fast-food writing, recycled reports, and SEO-bait fluff optimized for algorithms instead of people. That’s why the only competitive moat left is the human story. For business leaders, this creates an urgent mandate: Storytelling is no longer a marketing tactic. It’s a strategic business imperative—the only reliable engine for changing minds and shifting behaviors. If your brand’s narrative isn’t uniquely human and demonstrably ownable, it will vanish in the churn. Here’s how to find th…

Robots have long been seen as a bad bet for Silicon Valley investors — too complicated, capital-intensive, and “boring, honestly,” says venture capitalist Modar Alaoui. But the commercial boom in artificial intelligence has lit a spark under long-simmering visions to build humanoid robots that can move their mechanical bodies like humans and do things that people do. Alaoui, founder of the Humanoids Summit, gathered more than 2,000 people this week, including top robotics engineers from Disney, Google, and dozens of startups, to showcase their technology and debate what it will take to accelerate a nascent industry. Alaoui says many researchers now believe hum…

I was strolling up the hill in Greater Boston to a French cooking class. The rich aroma of melting butter and fresh herbs greeted us as it wafted through the chilly fall air. My friend Sylvie and I were eager to learn the art of soufflé-making. The French instructors asked for everyone’s background. When Sylvie said she was from France, they pressed her to be specific: Which part of France? When they learned she hailed from Strasbourg, the Parisiennes exchanged disapproving glances. Sylvie eyed their silent, snooty disdain. It got worse. When Sylvie started asking about techniques, we received curt responses and pronounced sighs. We left feeling as deflated as a c…

The generative AI revolution has turned into a global race, with mixtures of models from private companies and open-source initiatives all competing to become the most popular and powerful. Many choose to promote their prowess by demonstrating their performance on common tests and levels within regular rankings. But the legitimacy of those rankings has been thrown into question as new research published in Cornell University’s preprint server arXiv shows it’s possible to rig a model’s results with just a few hundred votes. “When we talk about large language models, their performance on benchmarks is very important,” says study author Tianyu Pang, a researcher at S…

Few brands have been more associated with the fast-fashion boom of the last two decades than Zara, the flagship apparel chain owned by Spanish clothing giant Inditex SA. It may surprise some consumers to learn, then, that Zara has in fact reduced its global footprint over the last few years since the pandemic. The brand’s decline in physical storefronts has been moderate but meaningful, from a third-quarter peak of around 2,139 stores in 2019 to just under 1,800 stores five years later, according to earnings statements from Inditex. That’s a reduction of 16%. Now, thanks to new accounting metrics from the company, we’ve learned that Zara’s physical footprint…

No place is more vulnerable to hurricanes in the 50 U.S. states than the Florida Keys. The chain of islands celebrated by singer Jimmy Buffett in his odes to tropical escapism is surrounded by water, jutting out 120 miles southwesterly from Florida’s mainland to Key West with the Gulf and Atlantic Ocean on either side. The archipelago historically has been known for its quirky and libertarian inhabitants who revel in the islands’ hedonistic, artistic and outdoorsy lifestyle. In recent years, it also has become a haven for the wealthy. Overseeing safety for the more than 80,000 inhabitants of the Conch Republic — the nickname for the islands after denizens declared a to…