What's on Your Mind?

Yes, it’s that time of year again, when most of the U.S. “gains” an extra hour of sleep as we “fall back” from daylight savings to shorter days, colder nights, and standard time. This Sunday, November 2, at 2 a.m local time, we will turn back our clocks to 1 a.m—and that will last until March 8, 2026 (when we will once again usher in daylight saving time). Although getting an extra hour of sleep sounds like a win, here’s what really happens to your health when the clocks change. Darker nights disrupt the body’s natural clock Darker evenings actually disrupt our body’s natural circadian rhythm, our mood, and our metabolism, according to Dr. Zaid Fadul, CEO …

The consulting firm Accenture recently laid off 11,000 employees while expanding its efforts to train workers to use artificial intelligence. It’s a sharp reminder that the same technology driving efficiency is also redefining what it takes to keep a job. And Accenture isn’t alone. IBM has already replaced hundreds of roles with AI systems, while creating new jobs in sales and marketing. Amazon cut staff even as it expands teams that build and manage AI tools. Across industries, from banks to hospitals and creative companies, workers and managers alike are trying to understand which roles will disappear, which will evolve, and which new ones will emerge. I researc…

Imagine starting a new job where your onboarding feels personalized just for you, with an AI assistant guiding you through training, introducing you to teammates, and checking in on how you’re settling in. That level of personalization in the workplace isn’t just a concept for the future – it’s already here and happening more rapidly than many HR departments anticipate. AI is transforming HR in the workplace. In 2026, AI won’t just take over repetitive tasks, but it will fundamentally change how companies hire, onboard, coach, and retain employees. The result is HR teams that are more strategic, data-driven, and more human than ever. After more than a decade worki…

Improving your work life doesn’t always require sweeping changes. Sometimes, the most effective strategies are the simplest ones, whether that’s protecting time for personal care, restructuring your day for better focus, or carving out moments with family. These small adjustments can reduce stress, restore balance, and promote better productivity and focus. Here, Fast Company Executive Board members share the simple changes they’ve made that have significantly improved the quality of their work lives and why these shifts are worth considering. 1. DESIGNATING ‘OFF-LIMITS’ HOURS I protect my time, headspace, and energy. I have designated hours every day that are …

Every single day, the average working person plays many roles: sassy coworker, office comedian, and deadline stickler, to name a few. The labor doesn’t stop when one gets home—with new job titles coming into play, such as mom, brother, pet parent, and more. On Halloween, you get to choose which character you want to inhabit instead of having society dictate your role. This frivolity requires forward thinking and planning. If you find yourself running out of time, popular culture and a few easy-to-obtain items can come to the rescue. Here are nine easy costume ideas that range from classic to timely. The Louvre museum robbers This one is perfect for last-min…

The market for obesity and diabetes treatments remains scorching hot, funneling billions in sales to Eli Lilly and fueling a bidding war over another drugmaker. Lilly said Thursday that its top-selling drugs, Mounjaro and Zepbound, brought in more than $10 billion combined during the recently completed third quarter. That made up over half of the drugmaker’s $17.6 billion in total sales. Separately, Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk announced plans to buy Metsera Inc. in a deal that could be worth up to $9 billion. That came more than a month after U.S. drugmaker Pfizer Inc. made a nearly $5 billion bid for Metsera, which has no drugs on the market but is developi…

Two prominent Republicans on Capitol Hill want the Supreme Court to allow a lawsuit to proceed against tech giant Cisco over allegations that the company’s technology was used to persecute members of the Falun Gong religious sect in China. In a Wednesday letter to the The President administration’s top Supreme Court litigator, D. John Sauer, Reps. Chris Smith of New Jersey and John Moolenaar of Michigan urged the administration to side with the Falun Gong plaintiffs and press the court to allow the lawsuit to go to trial. Smith co-chairs the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, while Moolenaar is the chairman of a special China committee set up in the Hous…

U.S. lawmakers have tried four times since September last year to close what they called a glaring loophole: China is getting around export bans on the sale of powerful American AI chips by renting them through U.S. cloud services instead. But the proposals prompted a flurry of activity from more than 100 lobbyists from tech companies and their trade associations trying to weigh in, according to disclosure reports. The result: All four times, the proposal failed, including just last month. Following a long-heralded meeting between leaders Donald The President and Xi Jinping, the sale of U.S. technology to China remains among the thorniest issues the U.S. faces…

Mark Walter is the majority owner of the Los Angeles Lakers after the NBA Board of Governors approved his purchase of a controlling stake from the Buss family. The Lakers and the league confirmed the next step Thursday in a transaction that is expected to close shortly. The sale of the NBA’s most valuable franchise was initially announced in June. Jeanie Buss will remain the Lakers’ governor under the deal for at least the next five years, and she will oversee day-to-day operations “for the foreseeable future,” the team said. Her father, Jerry Buss, bought the Lakers in 1979. But the Lakers are now primarily owned by Walter, the billionaire whose TWG Global in…

Stablecoins might not send your digital wallet to the moon, but the less speculative side of cryptocurrency is definitely enjoying its moment in the sun. According to a new report from Fortune, credit card stalwart Mastercard wants to make a massive bet on infrastructure that links digital currencies to the normal financial world. Mastercard is in advanced talks to buy the stablecoin startup Zerohash for between $1.5 and $2 billion, Fortune reports. Zerohash, founded in 2017, provides banking companies a toolkit for providing their own cryptocurrency and stablecoin products. If the deal goes through, it would represent a major investment in cryptocurrency infrast…

Hurricane Melissa, which made landfall in Jamaica on Tuesday, October 28, was one of strongest hurricanes to make landfall in the Atlantic ocean ever recorded. And it was supercharged by the effects of climate change. As it approached the Caribbean, Melissa—a Category 5 storm with winds of 185 mph—moved over exceptionally warm waters. The ocean was 2.2°F (or 1.2°C) warmer than average for this time of year—conditions that were “made up to 900 times more likely by human-caused climate change,” according to the scientists at the research nonprofit Climate Central. Carbon emissions from human actions trap heat in the atmosphere, but our oceans absorb most of tha…

Last year Canva reworked its user experience and tools in a full-frontal attack on the productivity and enterprise markets now dominated by Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. Now the Australian company is going for Adobe’s jugular. Affinity—the British company Canva bought in 2024—is out with a new app that aims to sink Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign with a simple proposal: If you are a professional designer, here’s an integrated photo editing, vector illustration, and page layout studio seamlessly integrated into a single application, with a feature set comparable to Adobe’s apps and a fully customizable UI. For free. You know, free free. “Free for…

For U.S. soldiers who find themselves at the front lines of a future conflict, it’s fast becoming gospel, due to the way warfare is rapidly evolving on the battlefields of Ukraine, that drones will be crucial to winning (or losing) the fight But the roughly 500 U.S. dronemakers can only build about 100,000 a year combined, according to Ryan Carver, communications manager for the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International. For comparison: One Chinese firm, DJI, can pump out millions of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) a year — 70% of the global supply. To ameliorate this challenge/problem, a number of startups believe 3D printing, specifically of drones,…

For the past 30 years, the web browser has been the primary way humans navigate the internet. It makes sense, then, that as artificial intelligence becomes more humanlike in its capabilities, it would use the same tool. That’s basically the idea behind AI-powered browsers, which are definitely having an “it” moment now that OpenAI has launched Atlas, its own web browser that incorporates ChatGPT as an ever-present helper. Atlas follows Perplexity’s Comet, which arrived in the summer to quickly capture the imagination of what an AI browser could do. In both cases, the user can, at any time, call up an AI assistant (aka agent), able to perform multistep tasks—such as na…

Google-parent Alphabet beat Wall Street estimates for third-quarter revenue on Wednesday, as both its core advertising business and cloud computing unit showed steady growth. Shares of the company rose 6% in extended trading. The company reported total revenue of $102.35 billion for the quarter, compared with analysts’ average estimate of $99.89 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG. The cloud services and AI giant raised its capital expenditure forecast for the year to between $91 billion and $93 billion, compared with the estimates of $80.67 billion. Google Cloud remained one of Alphabet’s fastest-growing segments, benefiting from surging enterpris…

Toyota was quick to pump the brakes on a claim President Donald The President made this week regarding an alleged promise by the Japanese automaker to invest $10 billion in the U.S. “We didn’t specifically say that we’ll invest $10 billion over the next few years,” Hiroyuki Ueda, president director, told reporters on Wednesday during the Japan Mobility Show in Tokyo, as first reported by Reuters. While Ueda stressed that the automaker will continue to invest and create jobs in the U.S. over the next few years, it hasn’t made any explicit promise of an investment of the magnitude The President referenced—nor, in fact, of any particular amount. The confusion,…

At last, the X-59 is airborne. NASA’s quiet supersonic airplane took to the skies in Palmdale, California, successfully landing back a few minutes later. While this initial sortie on October 28 was a subsonic check of basic systems and airworthiness, the flight represents the penultimate step toward reviving supersonic passenger travel over land. It also marks the beginning of a race to see which of three supersonic airplane ideas wins to become the dominant design of the 21st century. There’s Lockheed Martin’s X-59 dart-like shape developed to avoid the sonic boom. Then we have Boom Supersonic’s XB-1, which doesn’t look to avoid the sonic boom but to stop it from re…

The Federal Reserve cut its key interest rate Wednesday for a second time this year as it seeks to shore up economic growth and hiring even as inflation stays elevated. “Job gains have slowed this year, and the unemployment rate has edged up but remained low through August,” the Fed said in a statement issued Wednesday. “More recent indicators are consistent with these developments.” The government hasn’t issued unemployment data after August because of the shutdown. The Fed is watching private-sector figures instead. Wednesday’s decision brings the Fed’s key rate down to about 3.9%, from about 4.1%. The central bank had cranked its rate to roughly 5.3% in 2023 an…

Paramount is the latest company to join the bloodbath of layoffs this week. The entertainment giant began cutting around 1,000 workers on Wednesday, with twice that many pink slips expected in the days to come. In a memo to staff, new Paramount CEO David Ellison characterized the reductions, which will ultimately shrink the company by 10%, as a necessary step for the company’s long-term growth. “In some areas, we are addressing redundancies that have emerged across the organization,” Ellison wrote in a memo obtained by The Guardian and other outlets. “In others, we are phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities and the new structure…

And the layoffs keep coming. General Motors joins Amazon and Paramount this week, announcing on Wednesday it will be laying off 1,750 workers in Michigan and Ohio, in response to the downturn in U.S. electric vehicle (EV) market. The Detroit News first reported the news. Shares in the automotive maker (NYSE: GM) were down less than 1% in midday trading on Wednesday. The company said those cuts include 1,200 workers in Detroit at the company’s electric vehicle plant and another 550 employees at Ohio’s Ultium Cells battery cell plant. The company is also instituting temporary layoffs for some 850 workers at the Ohio plant and another 700 workers in Tennessee,…

It’s already been an exciting Major League Baseball season. And that excitement is clearly translating into the business and advertising side as well. Earlier this summer, Variety reported that ads for the MLB All-Star Game, which took place in July, sold out over a month in advance. On Monday night during Game 3 of the World Series, when the Los Angeles Dodgers won against the Toronto Blue Jays—which gave L.A. a 2-1 series lead and featured another significant performance from Shohei Ohtani—the game went to 18 innings and lasted six hours and 39 minutes. So what happens to ads when a game has extra innings? When a large tentpole tournament or games lik…

Meta recorded a nearly $16 billion one-time charge in the third quarter related to U.S. President Donald The President’s Big Beautiful Bill, and said its capital expenditure next year would be “notably larger” than in 2025. Shares of the company fell around 6% after the bell. Excluding the charge, Meta said its third-quarter net income would have increased by $15.93 billion to $18.64 billion, compared to the reported net income of $2.71 billion. The social media company now expects capital expenditure to be between $70 billion and $72 billion, compared with its prior forecast of $66 billion to $72 billion. Meta continues to benefit from its massive user ba…

In these volatile times, how do we navigate the intersection between values and commerce? Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert and Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya join New York Times reporter David Gelles onstage at the Masters of Scale Summit to reveal their different strategies for dealing with an activist White House, the pressure for what moderator Gelles calls “anticipatory compliance,” and how they grow their businesses while also prioritizing causes like environmental conservation and immigration. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response recorded live at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podc…

The latest buzzword is “AI literacy.” Much like “social media,” “ESG,” and “CSR” before it, employers are now looking for proof of fluency on résumés, and individuals are desperate to differentiate themselves to show that they are keeping pace. And it’s everywhere, mentions of terms like “agentic AI,” “AI workforce,” “digital labor,” and “AI agents” during earnings calls increased by nearly 800% in the last year, according to AlphaSense data. Over the last five years, workers across industries have become expected to be well-versed in a technology that is ever-evolving and still relatively new for so many, including the leaders implementing it. The trouble with AI is…

For leaders today, the pressure to do more with less feels relentless. Leaner teams, flatter organizations, and the rise of productivity tools such as Slack, Notion.ai, and Monday.com promise efficiency but often deliver the opposite: more reporting, more deliverables, and the demand to be “always on.”​​Organizations are increasingly falling into the “acceleration trap,” taking on too much too quickly and undermining their effectiveness and well-being. Sandra, a senior leader in the tech sector, saw this firsthand. After a reorganization left her team stretched thin, she slipped into a “9-9-6” routine—working nine to nine, six days a week. Gallup’s research shows unma…