What's on Your Mind?

At the Port of Seattle, cargo is always on the move. Longshoremen load and unload cars, electronics, grain, logs, and hundreds of other commodities from ships and trucks before these products land on store shelves around the world. The life of a longshoreman can be a difficult one, with long and labor-intensive hours spent on the waterfront. Yet, many of them say the work itself is not the most difficult part. Especially in recent months, as unpredictable tariff policies have impacted the number of ships entering U.S. ports, uncertainty is plaguing our ports and the workers who make domestic and global trade possible. “We’re very fortunate to have the jobs we do …

Late last year, Meta confirmed it would effectively be abandoning the metaverse, a nebulously defined project that spurred the company’s 2021 rebrand and has cost it over $70 billion since. At a strategy meeting at Mark Zuckerberg’s Hawaii compound, Reality Labs, the division responsible for the metaverse, was told to cut its budget by 30%, versus only 10% across the rest of the company. Reality Labs’ fate was arguably a long time coming: The division has never turned a profit, with cumulative losses these past five years totalling $73 billion. Wall Street reacted positively to the news, adding $69 billion to its market capitalization. You remember the metaverse, don…

One year on from the catastrophic LA wildfires, journalist, author, and MS NOW correspondent Jacob Soboroff examines what the fires reveal about America’s growing age of disaster. Drawing from his new book Firestorm, Soboroff shares hard lessons from the aftermath, exposing systemic failures, unlikely heroics, and what today’s recovery efforts tell us about how the U.S. will respond to the next crisis. 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 Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigat…

On Thursday at 3 p.m. ET, a helicopter flew along the Manhattan skyline for less than 18 minutes before plunging into the Hudson River. The sightseeing helicopter carried a family of five from Spain. Law enforcement confirmed the identity of the passengers to ABC News as Agustin Escobar, an executive from European automation company Siemens, along with his wife, Merce Camprubi Montal, and their three children. The family, along with the pilot, all died in the crash. The helicopter was chartered by the company New York Helicopter, which posted photos of the smiling family inside the aircraft just before it took off. The chopper appeared to be a N216MH—a Bell 206L…

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. We need to change the conversation about how we diagnose autism—and what we believe causes it. Lately, there’s been growing attention on environmental toxins and singular external triggers as explanations for autism. But the reality is far more nuanced. As a clinical geneticist and PhD genomic scientist with over a decade of experience working in medical affairs and clinical genomics, I’ve …

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 recent L.A. wildfires have been devastating, displacing thousands and leaving behind a stark reminder of how vulnerable our built environment remains. Having lived through the 2018 Woolsey Fire in Malibu, I’ve seen firsthand the immense challenges of rebuilding. In my April 2024 TEDx talk, “How building a home in four weeks can influence four generations,” I explored the emotional and financ…

Back in November, Fast Company and Johns Hopkins partnered for the first-ever World Changing Ideas Summit in Washington, DC, an event that convened leaders across business and academia to engage with the ideas and innovations reshaping the future. Knowing we were heading into a new year that undoubtedly is bringing new challenges to every industry, we asked some of our speakers working in space, healthcare, AI, and the intersections therein, what would be top of mind for them in 2026: “We’re in a race against resistance.” Akhila Kosaraju, founder and CEO of Pharebio, is using predictive and generative AI to power drug discovery. The startup plans to develop 15…

Donald The President surprised many in August when he made the government the owner of 9.9% of the troubled U.S. chip maker Intel. The administration paid for the Intel equity using $8.9 billion of the Biden administration’s CHIPs and Science Act grant money that had already been earmarked for Intel. The new grant money comes on top of the $2.2 billion in CHIPS Act grants Intel already received, bringing the government’s total investment to $11.1 billion. Intel’s finance chief David Zinsner said the government’s investment is meant to incentivize Intel to keep majority control over its contract chip-fabrication business. As part of the deal, the government gets a five…

If the three years since the release of ChatGPT have signaled OpenAI’s dominance of generative artificial intelligence, it’s worth recalling that the company’s rapid rise would have been impossible without another Big Tech backer. In 2019, Microsoft agreed to supply OpenAI all the compute it needed, with near exclusivity. In exchange, Microsoft retained the right to use OpenAI’s tech until the arrival of artificial general intelligence, or AGI: the point at which AI systems are able to act like humans and respond to whatever task they’re given, regardless of whether they’ve been trained to solve it. As generative AI’s capabilities blew past initial expectations, t…

When we talk about decarbonizing industries, footwear doesn’t often steal the spotlight. Yet behind every pair of sneakers or boots is a complex web of supply chains, raw materials, energy consumption, and logistics. While our shoes leave physical footprints, they also leave behind a much larger, often invisible carbon and waste footprint. The footwear industry is estimated to be responsible for hundreds of millions of metric tons of CO₂e emissions each year—that’s more than the emissions of some entire countries. And it’s a sector undergoing massive transformation, fueled by a perfect storm of shifting regulation, growing consumer demand for transparency, and the ur…

Below, Judd Kessler shares five key insights from his new book, Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need to Get More of What You Want. Judd is an award-winning professor of economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His research and writing have been featured in leading media, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and Harvard Business Review, among others. For his work on organ allocation, Kessler was named one of the “30 under 30” in Law and Policy by Forbes. He has been researching market design for the past 15 years. What’s the big idea? Life is full of hidden markets quietly deciding who gets…

Are you guilty of overusing the monkey covering its eyes emoji? Do you find it impossible to send a text without tacking on a laughing-crying face? Much like choosing between a full stop or an “x” at the end of a message, emojis have become their own form of language—complete with unspoken rules and hidden meanings (we all know exactly what we’re implying with the eyes emoji or the eggplant). But beyond adding subtext or flirtatious nuance, your go-to emojis might reveal more about you than you realize. According to a new study published in Current Psychology by researchers at Oklahoma State University, your emoji habits could offer surprising insight into your un…

There’s a quiet transformation underway in how we eat. It’s not being led by chefs, influencers, or climate activists. It’s being driven by a new class of pharmaceuticals that are changing the way millions of people relate to food itself. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy work by altering hunger signals in the brain. These medications don’t just help people feel full sooner. They are reshaping consumption patterns across the board. When hunger changes, everything from portion sizes to snacking habits and flavor preferences follows. This is fueling a broader redefinition of how we think about protein. What used to be a food category mostly associated with muscle-…

You’ve heard of burner phones. What about burner email? So much of the internet now requires that you hand over your email address before you’re able to use any services—from an app you’ve downloaded to signing up for a newsletter or redeeming a special offer online. But who says you have to give your real email address? Next time you’re asked, consider using an email mask. There are a growing number of services that give out disguised email addresses and relay any messages to your actual address. Experts say this can be a powerful tool to safeguard privacy and security. Here are some pointers on the whys and hows of email masking: Mask on The idea behind email…

Nintendo’s profits tumbled as sales of its Switch console lost momentum, prompting the Japanese video-game maker to lower its full-year forecasts. Kyoto-based Nintendo Co., which created the Super Mario franchise, reported Tuesday an April-December profit of 237 billion yen ($1.5 billion), down 42% from the same period the previous year. Nine-month sales dropped 31% to 956 billion yen ($6 billion), according to Nintendo, which did not break down quarterly results. The company now expects to rake in a 270-billion yen ($1.7 billion) profit for the fiscal year through March, down from the previous forecast for 300-billion yen ($1.9 billion). Sales of Nintendo machines fo…

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. Interim leadership is on the rise in the U.S. Nearly a quarter of new CEOs named in the first two months of 2025 were hired on an interim basis, versus 8% in the same period last year, according to a recent report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The surge in interim leadership co…

Breakfast has started to get a little riskier. More than six million eggs have been recalled since Sept. 29 over salmonella concerns. This week those concerns grew when the FDA expanded its earlier recall from Arkansas-based Black Sheep Egg Company and elevated the recall to Class I, which describes the highest possible risk to public health. The move follows a string of other recent egg recalls. In August, the FDA announced the recall of large brown cage-free Sunshine Yolks produced by Country Eggs, LLC of Lucerne Valley, California, and sold under the Nagatoshi Produce, Mizuho, and Nijiya Markets brands. Those products reportedly sickened at least 95 people across 1…

When I think about the changes in the context for strategy across my career, my view contrasts starkly with the consensus view. Most obsess about rising VUCA (the combination of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) as the key change. I don’t—and I explain my position in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) called What has Changed the Most for Strategy: Implications for Your Strategy. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here. The VUCA narrative I started advising executives on strategy in 1981. The question I pondered for this piece is how has the context for strategy changed over the past 44 years? The general answer…

Heathrow Airport, Europe’s busiest, has shut down today, following a fire last night at a nearby electrical substation that caused a major power outage. The closure has disrupted at least 1,350 flights, according to Flightradar24, with some aircraft diverted to alternate airports like Gatwick, Amsterdam’s Schiphol, and Paris’s Charles de Gaulle. What caused the fire? While the cause of the fire is still under investigation, British officials have stated that there is no evidence of foul play. According to the London Fire Brigade, the fire broke out at an electrical substation around 11:20 p.m. on Thursday, involving a transformer containing 25,000 liters of coo…