What's on Your Mind?

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 …

Companies have never had more tools to measure engagement, yet employees have never reported feeling more disconnected. It’s one of the defining paradoxes of modern work: Engagement scores are the obsession of many organizations, yet loneliness, turnover, and team friction are rising. People are completing their tasks but not always experiencing the relationships that make work sustainable, creative, or truly human. Engagement measures motivation, whereas connectedness assesses whether people can work effectively together over time. Many researchers and thinkers have named the forces shaping the future of work. Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, highlights…

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…

Restaurant operators have been automating customer service processes for years. Implementing kiosks, self-checkout, and mobile ordering has helped margins and cut labor costs. But now there’s a problem. Friendliness scores dropped 12 points in just one year. Thirty-three percent of customers actively avoid restaurants that feel too automated. And AI is about to flood the market. Here’s the choice operators face: double down on customer-facing automation and watch friendliness scores keep falling or use AI differently. It’s time to stop automating what customers value and instead start automating what they don’t see. Smart operators recognize that having AI take or…

As AI becomes more advanced in quality, leaders are increasingly invoking AI to justify unpopular decisions like layoffs. However, much of that story collapses under scrutiny, and workers know it. This gap between rhetoric and reality is eroding trust. This amplifies inequities and quietly sets organizations up for long-term cultural and performance damage. Author, speaker, and strategist Lily Zheng sees a clear pattern: executives are using AI to explain decisions that are in fact driven by past mistakes, investor pressure, or leadership preference. Companies that went on aggressive hiring sprees during the pandemic are now quietly “correcting” courses. They’re frami…

Experts have compressed their predictions for when artificial general intelligence (AGI)—the type of AI that can equal or exceed human intelligence—will arrive. When predictions were first made in 2023, AGI was expected to arrive in 50 years. Newer estimates say five years. When GPT-5 came out this summer, it demonstrated surprising leaps in reasoning and memory, further accelerating those timelines. Progress is moving faster than anyone anticipated, and what once felt speculative now feels inevitable. Meanwhile, small teams are shipping products that would have required 100-person companies two years ago. The gap between the AGI debaters and the builders (those w…

The trajectory of our national economy is a central concern of every American. Our living costs rise as would-be hegemons battle over neocolonial control through tariff policies. And while social media creativity holds our attention, some part of us recalls older ways of storytelling, and we wonder, where do we belong? Most of us, even newcomers to this country—especially newcomers—were taught from an early age that anyone who works hard will eventually thrive. But we repeatedly see and know that this is merely a story told to us, not reality. The community in which you are born has a tremendous impact on your eventual life outcomes. If you are born into a poor commun…

For those tired of waiting in line to buy a new smartphone or anxiously refreshing a delivery tracking site to make sure a new phone arrives intact, Verizon’s Straight Talk Wireless brand is offering another option: phones from a vending machine. Straight Talk, a Verizon prepaid brand exclusively available at Walmart, has launched vending machines that dispense packaged iPhone and Android devices, similar to the tech vending machines often seen at airports. Customers can browse phones and plans via a touchscreen interface, then pick and pay for what they want, all without needing to wait for a salesperson. And when they take their new phone out of the box, it’s a…

“You need to think more strategically; you need to be more strategic!” It’s one of the most common, but least helpful, pieces of feedback professionals receive. It sounds smart, it sounds wise, it also sounds important. But ask people what it actually means, including those who are proffering this advice, and you’ll likely get many different answers. I’ve spent more than two decades working with leaders, entrepreneurs, and teams around the world to help them become more strategic in how they think, act and make decisions. Along the way, I’ve seen the same frustration crop up over and over again: people know strategy matters but don’t know how to “do” it. T…

Live and on-demand video constituted an estimated 66% of global internet traffic by volume in 2022, and the top 10 days for internet traffic in 2024 coincided with live streaming events such as the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing match and coverage of the NFL. Streaming enables seamless, on-demand access to video content, from online gaming to short videos like TikToks, and longer content such as movies, podcasts and NFL games. The defining aspect of streaming is its on-demand nature. Consider the global reach of a Joe Rogan podcast episode or the live coverage of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft launch—both examples demonstrate how streaming connects millions of vie…

Just a couple of years ago, pundits were warning of streaming’s demise. From Netflix to Spotify, these companies were burning through cash. How could they keep operating? Now, almost all of the streamers have made it to positive profits. Netflix is the envy of the entertainment industry, while its underlings like Disney+ and Max have also turned around their losses. Last Tuesday, Spotify shares jumped 13% after the company announced its first full year of profitability. There are still stragglers, but on the whole, streaming has formed itself into a successful business model. There’s a lesson here: For emerging tech, there’s value in patience. It took streaming …

In today’s high-stakes business environment, stress isn’t just an individual challenge—it’s a force that shapes careers and organizations. The U.S. Department of Labor finds that 83% of workers suffer from work-related stress, and 54% say that work stress affects their home lives. In my coaching work with hundreds of professionals annually, I’ve witnessed firsthand how impossible it is to separate stress from career trajectories; they are intertwined, each influencing and shaping the other. Stress can derail even the most carefully planned career paths, yet we often treat career decisions as purely rational, despite the fact that our psychological state profoundly inf…

Every fall, I anticipate the winter holidays with almost childlike joy. I look forward to familiar traditions with friends and family, eggnog in my coffee, and the sense that everyone is feeling a little lighter and more connected. At the same time, I feel anxious and annoyed by the manufactured sense of urgency around gift giving: the endless searching and second-guessing shaped by advertisers, retailers, and cultural expectations. Don’t get me wrong, I mostly love giving—and, yes, receiving—gifts during the holidays. But as a researcher who studies consumer psychology, I see how those same forces, amplified by constant buying opportunities and frictionless onlin…

Stretch fabrics are notoriously hard to process. When your old leggings wear out, they will probably end up in a landfill—even if you try to drop them off for recycling. But a Manhattan startup has developed a new material that could finally make this corner of the apparel industry circular. “There’s a reason why billions of pounds of textiles ends up in landfills,” says Gangadhar Jogikalmath, cofounder and chief technology officer of the startup, called Return to Vendor. “When we dial it down to the microscopic scale, it’s because everything that we wear has blends of yarn put together to create this apparel— nylon blended with spandex, wool with nylon, cotton, polye…

Stripe on Thursday announced a tender offer for employees and shareholders that valued the company at $91.5 billion, nearly 41% higher than its valuation a year ago, potentially delaying the fintech firm’s ambitions of going public. The deal signals the strong recovery of the global venture capital sector, as central banks have started to cut interest rates amid subdued inflation and strong economic data. “Stripe was profitable in 2024, and we expect to be so in 2025 and beyond,” co-founders John Collison and Patrick Collison said in their annual letter published on Thursday. The payments processing company was valued at $65 billion in a deal last year, which …

There is an “unprecedented degree of change in the business environment,” as one CEO in the latest Fortune/Deloitte CEO survey put it. If you’re struggling to scale your company, you’re not alone. Growth is harder and fatigue is everywhere. This volatile environment makes focus all the more important. I have worked with over a hundred VC or Private Equity backed startups through scaleups, and there are consistent barriers that every CEO and C-Suite, no matter your industry or business model, must overcome in order to grow successfully. As my old boss at Cisco, John Chambers, used to say “Concentrate on what you can control, not on what you can’t.” As a leader, here ar…

Medical equipment maker Stryker was allegedly hit with an Iran-linked cyber attack on Wednesday right after midnight ET, causing a global outage across its system, with staff and contractors saying a logo of an Iran-linked group appeared on the login page, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news. Shares of the Michigan-based global medical technology company (SYK) were down nearly 4% in early afternoon trading on Wednesday at the time of this writing. What happened? According to the report, staff said cellphones, laptops, and other devices that run on Microsoft’s Windows operating system to connect ​to Stryker’s ​technology ⁠systems …

StubHub’s 2024 revenue surged 29.5%, it reported on Friday in its U.S. initial public offering paperwork, as the online ticketing marketplace moves ahead with its long-sought New York flotation. A handful of companies are moving ahead with stock market listings despite volatility arising from uncertainty around U.S. trade policy. Nvidia-backed startup CoreWeave and Swedish fintech Klarna are among the companies gearing up to go public in New York. StubHub, one of the biggest secondary ticketing marketplaces for live events, will sell new shares in the proposed offering, it said. Its revenue jumped to $1.77 billion in 2024, compared with $1.37 billion a yea…

If AI lives up to its hype and we can “outsource” the thinking, planning, and strategy parts of our jobs, do we risk losing the skills that make us human? Research from the Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability found that there is “a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading.” In other words, use AI too much, and your mental faculties take a nosedive. But there’s another way to think about the issue. Could AI actually improve our cognition by freeing up our mental bandwidth for higher-value work? Make time for strategic thinking I’ve wor…

As any Studio Ghibli fan will testify, an afternoon spent binging Hayao Miyazaki classics is guaranteed to leave a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. Now, this feeling is backed by science. A study published by JMIR Serious Games, a peer reviewed journal focused on how gaming is connected to education, health, and social change, looked into how the brain responds to both watching films produced by the Japanese animation studio and playing the open-world game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The researchers gathered 518 postgraduate students and divided them into four groups. Some played Breath of the Wild and some watched Studio Ghibli films like My Neighbor Totor…

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…