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At the Exceptional Women Alliance, we enable high-level women to mentor each other to achieve personal and professional happiness through sisterhood. As the nonprofit organization’s founder, chair, and CEO, I am honored to interview and share insights from thought leaders who are part of our peer-to-peer mentoring. This month, I introduce you to Malika Begin, the CEO and founder of Begin Development, an organization development firm based in Malibu, California. Known for her signature approach to building heart-centered, high-performing cultures, Malika partners with leading organizations to strengthen executive teams, design transformational leadership programs, buil…

A typical RV has to plug in at a campground to run the power inside. But Airstream’s newest Basecamp 20Xe trailer is designed to power itself in remote locations: If you want to spend a week in the wilderness, you can theoretically use an induction stove, keep your laptop charged, turn on the air-conditioning, and have hot water for the shower—even if you’re nowhere near any utilities. [Photo: Airstream] “Over the past several years, we’ve seen a growing demand from our customers for what we call energy independence,” says Bob Wheeler, Airstream president and CEO. “The flexibility to not have to go to a campground with established power and energy supplies, to give…

On Valentine’s Day 2025, heavy rains started to fall in parts of rural Appalachia. Over the course of a few days, residents in eastern Kentucky watched as river levels rose and surpassed flood levels. Emergency teams conducted over 1,000 water rescues. Hundreds, if not thousands of people were displaced from homes, and entire business districts filled with mud. For some, it was the third time in just four years that their homes had flooded, and the process of disposing of destroyed furniture, cleaning out the muck and starting anew is beginning again. Historic floods wiped out businesses and homes in eastern Kentucky in February 2021, July 2022 and now February 20…

A typical three-bedroom house in Austin, Texas, can sometimes rack up monthly utility bills of $200 or $300 in the summer. But in new homes under construction in a nearby suburb, residents will owe little beyond the basic utility connection fee. The homes, built by Habitat for Humanity, tap into a shared geothermal system in a fully geothermal neighborhood. Heat pumps in each house connect to pipes that loop hundreds of feet underground, making use of the earth’s steady temperature for heating and cooling. The houses are also built to use as little energy as possible, with features like deep eaves that shade the interior and reduce the need for air-conditioning. Solar…

A new neighborhood under construction near Sacramento, California, in the rolling foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, looks like a typical subdivision. But it’s one of the first developments designed at a neighborhood scale to withstand wildfires. Each house goes farther than California’s latest building requirements for high-fire-risk zones, from enclosed, ember-resistant eaves to dual-paned, tempered glass windows that can better withstand extreme heat in a fire. The design considers not just each house, but how homes interact, spacing buildings at least 10 feet apart and removing combustible features to prevent fire from spreading between them. Called Sto…

The Centennial State may become first in the nation to require retailers to warn consumers that burning fossil fuels “releases air pollutants and greenhouse gases, known by the state of Colorado to be linked to significant health impacts and global heating.” The warning is the linchpin of a bill—HB25-1277—that narrowly passed the state House on April 2 and is scheduled to be heard in the Senate’s Transportation & Energy Committee this week. Its Democratic sponsors say the bill will raise awareness among consumers that combusting gas in their vehicles creates pollutants that harm their health and trap heat in the atmosphere, leading to more intense and extreme weat…

If you don’t want to be left behind by the AI revolution, you really need to start paying for it. At least that’s become the common refrain among some AI enthusiasts, who seem intent on instilling FOMO in less technical users. The free versions of ChatGPT and Claude, they say, are woefully inadequate if you want to understand where things are headed—so stop being a cheapskate and hand over your $20 (or $200) a month like the rest of us. “Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone,” HyperWrite CEO Matt Shumer recently wrote in a widely shared essay on AI’s impact. “The people paying for the best tools, an…

For most of modern management history, wasting time has been treated as a vice. This sensibility can be traced back to Frederick Taylor’s doctrine of scientific management, which recast work as an engineering problem and workers as components in a machine to be optimized, standardized, and controlled. In reducing human effort to measurable outputs and time-motion efficiencies, Taylorism marked the beginning of the end for seeing people as thinking agents, turning them instead into productivity units not unlike laboratory rats, rewarded or punished according to how efficiently they ran the maze. Since then, we have come a long way. The post-war rise of the knowledge wo…

One of my Bentley University students put it plainly the other day: “AI taking entry-level jobs is a ‘when,’ not an ‘if.’ But in venture capital, 70% of the decision is reading the founder and team—and that’s something AI can’t do.” That simple breakdown , 70% people, 30% product—flips the usual narrative about finance. For decades, finance was defined by numbers. Analysts lived and died by the spreadsheets. Today, AI can run discounted cash flows, parse a term sheet, and size a market faster than any junior associate. But if you talk to people in venture capital, they’ll tell you the math has never been the most important part. The numbers matter, of course, but the …

At 3:20 a.m. on January 8, Steve Gibson and his wife were jolted awake by a phone call: the Eaton fire was approaching their home in Altadena, California, and they had to evacuate. “We left in about 15 minutes,” Gibson says. “So we only took our passports, our insurance papers, three pairs of underwear, and our little dog, Cantinflas.” They thought that they’d be able to come back within a few hours. But they soon learned that their house—and their entire block—had been destroyed. They spent the next few weeks moving from short-term rental to short-term rental, and finally moved into an apartment, though they knew that insurance would only cover the cost temporar…

In an industrial park in North Las Vegas, near an Amazon warehouse and a waste storage facility, a new carbon removal plant is beginning to pull CO2 from the air and store it permanently. Called Project Juniper, it’s the first “integrated” plant of its kind in the U.S., meaning that it handles both carbon capture and storage in one place. (As a bonus, it also generates clean water.) Clairity Tech, the startup behind it, designed the new plant after raising a seed round of funding led by Initialized Capital and Lowercarbon Capital last year. After spending the last few months setting up the facility, it ran its full system for the first time last week. Founder Glen…

It’s been 70 years since Douglas McGregor sketched a management theory at MIT Sloan that leaders still ignore—and their teams pay the price. Known as Theory X and Theory Y, McGregor’s framework built on Abraham Maslow’s work on employee self-actualization, and it quickly became one of the foundational texts of modern management thinking. In McGregor’s theory, leaders fall into two camps. Theory X managers assume that employees are inherently lazy, need constant supervision, and would rather coast along than contribute. Theory Y managers, by contrast, see employees as self-motivated, responsible, and capable of growth if given the right environment. And the ki…

What’s the best way to respond when customers, former fans, or anyone else criticizes your work? Taylor Swift just provided a perfect script for what to say. It’s a great example for any entrepreneur, business leader, or creator to follow. Swift’s 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, released 10 days ago, is unquestionably a commercial success. It broke streaming records on Spotify with more than five million pre-saves, as just one example. But that doesn’t mean that everyone loves it. The reaction from music critics has been lukewarm and the reaction from fans is decidedly mixed, with some saying they adore the album and others saying they can’t stand it. One brand st…

Residents of the mostly Black communities sandwiched between chemical plants along the lower Mississippi River have long said they get most of the pollution but few of the jobs produced by the region’s vast petrochemical industry. A new study led by Tulane University backs up that view, revealing stark racial disparities across the U.S.’s petrochemical workforce. Inequity was especially pronounced in Louisiana, where people of color were underrepresented in both high- and low-paying jobs at chemical plants and refineries. “It was really surprising how consistently people of color didn’t get their fair share of jobs in the petrochemical industry,” said Kimberly T…

On Maui’s North Shore, inside an industrial building that was once a pineapple cannery, an architecture office sits across the hall from a surfboard manufacturer. When the architects first moved in, they noticed something: Every few days, the dumpsters in the back would fill up with scraps of foam from making the boards. David Sellers, one of the architects, realized that the foam could be used in a building material—insulated blocks that are typically made from a mix of concrete and new polystyrene foam. “I was just like, ‘We shouldn’t be throwing this away,’” says Sellers, principal architect at the firm, Hawaii Off Grid. “We live on an island, with limited space. S…

Morningside Park, a beloved neighborhood park in Miami with sweeping views of Biscayne Bay, will soon pilot an innovative approach to coastal resilience. BIOCAP tiles, a 3D-printed modular system designed to support marine life and reduce wave impact along urban seawalls, will be installed on the existing seawall there in spring 2025. BIOCAP stands for Biodiversity Improvement by Optimizing Coastal Adaptation and Performance. Developed by our team of architects and marine biologists at Florida International University, the uniquely textured prototype tiles are designed to test a new approach for helping cities such as Miami adapt to rising sea levels while simulta…

“The boomers are all about money. Gen X is like, ‘is it all about money’? Millennials are like, ‘where is the money’? And Gen Z is like, ‘what is money’?” That’s the conclusion Parks and Recreation star Amy Poehler came to on an episode of her podcast Good Hang with Amy Poehler. Since the episode aired last year, a clip has since been shared widely of her breaking down how each generation relates to money. She adds, “That’s my bad stand-up about it.” As the clip has gained traction online, on TikTok, actor Freddie Smith said that Poehler “totally nails it.” He then took it one step further and broke it down in terms of how each generation’s economy helped shape th…

Happiness over one’s lifetime has been popularly described as looking like a U-shaped curve: The joys of youth are followed by the challenges of our 20s and 30s before an upswing later in life that reaches a peak after retirement. While that may be true—or not—in wealthier countries such as the United States, it doesn’t apply to low-income, nonindustrialized societies. That is the main finding of a study I led that examined aging in rural, subsistence-oriented communities in 23 countries across the Global South. And our results have implications for global health amid aging populations and growing economic insecurity. In our study, we found that happiness levels d…

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. For the last decade, chief marketing officers (CMOs) haven’t felt as appreciated and necessary as they once were. But that may be changing—I should stress “may.” I’m thinking of the 2024 CMO Tenure Study by marketing consultancy Spencer Stuart. They’ve been issuing this study for two decades. Four years ago, the length of CMO tenure tightened to its smallest interval in more…

Picture this: It’s lunchtime in the 1960s, and you’re out with co-workers enjoying not one, not two, but three cocktails with your meal. While the three-martini lunch seems improbable today, workplaces still can be boozy places. After-work happy hours, corporate parties and client meetings at fancy bars are still expected in many areas of American corporate culture. Talking about sobriety with managers and colleagues therefore can be daunting for people in recovery from alcohol addiction. Professionals in some industries fear being judged for needing help or missing out on career advancement opportunities if social drinking is encouraged as part of a job. Treatment pro…

Two years ago, the last pay phones were disconnected in Rochester, New York. But a group of volunteers has started bringing a handful of phones back—and making them free to use. Called the GoodPhone Project, the effort is aimed at people who still don’t have reliable access to a mobile phone, including those experiencing homelessness. As pay phones have disappeared, alternatives have been hard to come by. “A lot of community centers, and especially the Monroe County libraries, were being inundated with people asking to use their front desk phones,” says Eric Kunsman, one of the volunteers behind the project. There’s a clear need: The handful of phones tha…

Around the world, farmers are retooling their land to harvest the hottest new commodity: sunlight. As the price of renewable energy technology has plummeted and water has gotten more scarce, growers are fallowing acreage and installing solar panels. Some are even growing crops beneath them, which is great for plants stressed by too many rays. Still others are letting that shaded land go wild, providing habitat for pollinators and fodder for grazing livestock. According to a new study, this practice of agrisolar has been quite lucrative for farmers in California’s Central Valley over the last 25 years—and for the environment. Researchers looked at producers who had idl…