What's on Your Mind?

More than 60,000 federal workers were dismissed during the first two months of the The President administration with more staff reductions expected in the coming months. Many are mid-career employees who have worked for the government for a decade or more, making it more challenging for them to make the case that their skills are transferrable to the private sector. “It’s an identity shift,” says Arianny Mercedes, founder of Revamped, a New York City-based career consultancy. For many of these professionals, their roles weren’t just jobs; they were commitments to public service, she says. “When someone’s identity is deeply tied to government service, being laid off or…

Becoming a manager for the first time can feel exciting, gratifying, nerve-wracking, and even overwhelming. But being a good boss is not about following a checklist of what makes a perfect manager, as there’s no such thing, argues Sabina Nawaz in her book You’re the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need). A former HR leader at Microsoft and executive coach for Fortune 500 decision-makers, Nawaz offers actionable frameworks in her book on how to become a better manager, backed by lessons from her clients and personal career wins and losses. Here are some top takeaways from the book on how new managers can best make the transition. Being a good ma…

Sometimes, being a leader means making tough calls—ones that aren’t popular, and sometimes even get misunderstood. You’ve probably heard the saying, “If everyone likes you, you’re not really leading.” Fair enough. But what do you do when you hear that no one wants to work with you? Maybe it comes up in passing from a colleague, or maybe it hits harder in a 360 review. Either way, that kind of feedback can sting. It’s that gut-punch moment where you think, Wait . . . what? You’ve been putting in the work, prioritizing the team (at least in your mind), but somehow people aren’t seeing it. They don’t get the pressure you’re under, the decisions you’ve had to make, or why…

It doesn’t take long for Christer Collin and Ola Wihlborg to assemble the newest credenza from Ikea. Collin is a 42-year veteran of the company, specializing in product development. Wihlborg is one of the company’s most senior designers, having created dozens of pieces of furniture sold by the retailer since 2004. The two Swedes are lifting parts and turning hex wrenches in a second-floor conference room in Trnava, Slovakia, just outside the capital, Bratislava. This is where Inter Ikea Group (one of two Ikea parent companies) operates one of its more than 30 furniture and furnishings factories through its subsidiary, Ikea Industry, and where a sizable number of the retai…

A software application called Interview Coder promises to help software developers succeed at technical job interviews—by surreptitiously feeding them answers to programming questions via AI. Interview Coder’s 21-year-old cofounder and CEO Roy Lee says he and Neel Shanmugam, the company’s cofounder and COO, created the tool partly as a protest against longstanding industry practices that require job candidates to solve programming puzzles during interviews. Lee, who until recently was a sophomore at Columbia University, says he spent hundreds of hours practicing such problems—time that could have been spent on actual coding projects. “This kind of killed a lot of …

The torches designed for Milano Cortina 2026, next year’s Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Italy, were made in service of the flame. Named Essential, the reusable, ultra-minimalist torch has a flared, open-top design meant to show viewers how the flame is generated because “what’s important isn’t the torch, but the flame,” Italian architect and engineer Carlo Ratti tells Fast Company. The design is meant to showcase the flame in motion. “The open-top design is crucial to how the flame comes to life,” explains Ratti, who designed the torch with his eponymous firm, Studio Carlo Ratti Associati. The torches were developed by Eni and Versalis, both official supp…

Barclays Center in Brooklyn is abuzz as the Brooklyn Nets’s Jalen Wilson catches the ball, readies himself, and releases a contested three. The ball arcs high above the Knicks defender’s outstretched arms and swishes through the net. As the stadium erupts, Bryan Velazquez throws a fist in the air. Even though he is blind, he knows that his team just scored. He felt it on his fingertips. Velazquez, who works as an outreach coordinator at Omnium Circus, is using a new kind of haptic device that translates live game action into vibrations. Developed by Seattle-based startup OneCourt, the laptop-size device consists of a silicone relief map displaying a basketball court with …

When Johnson & Johnson launched the first disposable diaper in 1948, it revolutionized modern parenting. But it also, unwittingly, created an environmental disaster. Diapers are largely made of plastic, which does not biodegrade, but breaks into microplastics that pollute our waterways and end up in our food chain. And yet, more than 300,000 diapers are thrown out every minute, bound for landfills or incinerators, and accelerating climate change. There’s now a movement to design a more eco-friendly diaper, from creating easier-to-use cloth diapering systems to diapers that use less plastic. But Hiro, a newly launched startup, may have the most creative solution yet. …

To make the most of its stores and keep customers coming back to shop in person, baseball hat retailer Lids announced Wednesday that 20 locations will have a newly redesigned store concept this month built for customization and personalization. Physical retail’s not dead, but to breathe new life into it—not to mention make more money from the remaining square footage—brands are rolling out more personalized in-store customer experiences. Concierge-style customer service along with customizable products have become the name of the game to counter the many headwinds physical retail has faced in recent years, including the rise of online and social media shopping, the pa…

Having a helicopter manager can bring you down. It’s exhausting to have a boss who constantly monitors you, requires you to check in all the time, and takes away your authority to make decisions. This sort of micromanagement can lead to decreased employee morale, lower productivity, and reduced job satisfaction, according to experts. “Whether intentional or not, helicopter managers send clear signals that they do not trust their direct reports and are concerned about the work getting done correctly,” says Matthew Owenby, chief strategy officer and head of human resources at Aflac. “Helicopter managers can often exacerbate burnout by making employees feel that they ar…

Amid tariff whiplash and the rejuggling of global trade, GE Vernova’s CEO Scott Strazik is finding a way to stay “relentlessly optimistic.” Strazik returns to the Rapid Response podcast to share how the company plans to continue its success as one of Wall Street’s top-performing stocks, despite looming supply chain disruption and market unpredictability. 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 navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Res…

Given all the recent bad news on the world stage, from tariffs wars to the war in Ukraine, it is no wonder Swedes are tuning in, for a moment of zen, to watch a livestream of “The Great Moose Migration” (loosely translated from the Swedish, “Den stora älgvandringen“). The 24-hour event, which runs for 20 days straight, kicked off on Tuesday. It has been providing soothing entertainment for millions of Swedes each year, around this time, since it first aired in 2019. That first year, nearly one million Swedes tuned in to literally watch moose walk through forests and swim across the Ångerman River, all captured by remote cameras and drones, per the Associated Press. By…

OpenAI has named labor leader Dolores Huerta and three others to a temporary advisory board that will help guide the artificial intelligence company’s philanthropy as it attempts to shift itself into a for-profit business. Huerta, who turned 95 last week, formed the first farmworkers union with Cesar Chavez in the early 1960s and will now have a say on the direction of philanthropic initiatives that OpenAI says will consider “both the promise and risks of AI.” The group will have just 90 days to make their suggestions. “She recognizes the significance of AI in today’s world and anybody who’s been paying attention for the last 50 years knows she will be a force…

A colossal squid has been caught on camera for the first time in the deep sea by an international team of researchers steering a remotely operated submersible. The sighting was announced Tuesday by the Schmidt Ocean Institute. The squid filmed was a juvenile about 1 foot (30 centimeters) in length at a depth of 1,968 feet (600 meters) in the South Atlantic Ocean. Full-grown adult colossal squids, which scientists have uncovered from the bellies of whales and seabirds, can reach lengths up to 23 feet (7 meters) — almost the size of a small fire truck. The squid was spied last month near the South Sandwich Islands during an expedition to search for new sea life.…

Some common business models can be described as B2C and B2B, which are “business-to-consumer,” and “business-to-business,” respectively. But now, get ready for “B2AI,” or “business-to-AI.” That’s one of the potential disruptions on the horizon, identified in a new report from Visa and the Institute for the Future. The report digs into the numerous ways that AI will transform commerce, and to some degree personal finance, including how consumers will likely lasso AI for their own means—and how businesses will, in turn, develop AI agents to communicate and correspond with consumers’ AIs. While many people likely haven’t adopted “personal” AI tools yet, they’re on th…