What's on Your Mind?

As return-to-office mandates tighten, many workers are reckoning what life in a cubicle looks like. If it’s up to the Swiss furniture and design firm Vitra, your next cubicle might not look much like a cubicle at all. Vitra partnered with German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic to create Scout, a family of minimalist office furniture built to adapt to the flexible ways people work today. Launched on March 19, Scout is comprised of five pieces that range in sizes, offering stationary and mobile workspaces with customizable options for workplaces and schools. Konstantin Grcic The tables feature trapezoidal desks that have metal tubular frames. Attachments tha…

Elon Musk runs an auto company. He oversees an aerospace company. And he controls a social media outlet. Now he wants to add chipmaker to his resume. The multi-hyphenate billionaire announced plans over the weekend to build a chip manufacturing factory in Austin, Texas, which will produce chips for SpaceX and xAI, which recently merged. Musk, at a presentation Saturday, said the project, dubbed Terafab, will be the “most epic chip building exercise in history by far.” Musk has been talking about Terafab for a while, but the event on Saturday marked the official start to the project. While xAI and other artificial intelligence companies have largely depended on TSM…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. On Friday, Trumark Homes—which has been majority owned by Japan-based Daiwa House since 2020—announced that it has struck a deal to acquire a Seattle metro-based homebuilder JK Monarch. The deal is the latest in a recent string of U.S. homebuilder acquisitions by Japanese firms. Exactly five weeks ago today (February 13), Japan-based Sumitomo Forestry announced that it had agreed to acquire Tri Pointe Homes—a giant public homebuilder ranked No. 715 on the Fortune 1000—for $4.5 billion. Then on February 23, Stanley Martin Homes—which has been owne…

Several hundred non-tenured full-time faculty members at New York University are on strike after the school failed to reach a tentative contract agreement with Contract Faculty United-United Auto Workers. Nearly 75% of the union’s more than 900 full-time NYU contract faculty—who teach across the university’s various schools—voted to authorize the strike in February. On Monday morning, a deal seemed possible, with CFU-UAW extending its 8 a.m. strike deadline by three hours after bargaining through the university’s spring break last week. By midday, union members and supporters were on the picket line outside NYU’s John A. Paulson Center in lower Manhattan. The stri…

Polymarket is updating the rules of its platform to crack down on insider trading as the prediction market giant looks to curb scrutiny over market manipulation. Announced Monday, the updated rules outline three distinct categories of insider trading that will be prohibited on the platform: trading on stolen confidential information (based on confidential info that violates a preexisting obligation), trading on illegal tips (based on info that was passed down illegally), and trading by those who can influence the outcome. “Markets thrive on clarity,” Neal Kumar, chief legal officer of Polymarket, said in a press release. “These rule enhancements make our expectati…

If you have a direct report who identifies as neurodivergent, you may wonder how best to be their manager. Often, when we manage others, we imagine how we would react to the things we plan to ask, or the feedback we plan to give, and the work environment we aim to create. That strategy is not always effective in general, and it is likely to fail spectacularly when engaging with neurodivergent colleagues. Here are a few things to consider when supervising a neurodivergent employee. Engage with curiosity Start by being curious. Meet with your supervisee and get their permission to ask questions so that you know best how to enable them to succeed. Trust your emplo…

When people choose their cofounder, it’s rarely scientific. They’re guided by trust, and trust is easiest to find in familiar places: former coworkers, college classmates, close friends, people who already sit in your orbit. While starting a company is chaotic enough without bringing strangers into the mix, I wanted to understand whether this instinct toward familiarity actually comes with a cost. Turns out it does. Having worked with hundreds of early-stage startups as founders and investors, including at Coatue, Kleiner Perkins, and NFX, we wanted to test whether the instincts founders use to choose partners actually hold up in the data. We surveyed nearly 350 U…

Postpartum depression is often framed as a private struggle that unfolds at home or in the doctor’s office. But for millions of working parents, its effects also show up quietly at work—through missed deadlines, sudden disengagement, or a colleague who no longer seems like themselves. Too often, these changes are misunderstood as performance issues rather than signs of a common and treatable mental health condition. To better understand what employers, managers, and coworkers often miss—and how workplaces can respond more thoughtfully—I spoke with Andrea Clark, deputy CEO of Postpartum Support International, a global nonprofit focused on supporting families and raisin…

The most innovative retailers in 2025 used technology not to chase trends, but to solve real problems. As tariffs squeezed margins and labor costs climbed, companies scrambled to adapt. Shopify opened its platform to agentic AI shoppers, letting customers purchase directly within ChatGPT. Amazon launched Lens Live to turn smartphones into instant product scanners. Rebel scaled its re-commerce platform into new categories, processing over 70,000 returned products weekly and keeping 25 million pounds of goods out of landfills. Others doubled down on heritage and experience. J.Crew proved nostalgia sells when paired with a carefully curated archive. Printemps brought…

The world of public relations has always been about making a splash. And in an age of more and more media clutter, breakthrough ideas have never been more important. To create that can’t-miss-it buzz, this year’s most innovative PR firms paired an A-list Hollywood actor with an A-list Hollywood director, staged a surprise pop-event in a major urban transportation hub, enlisted some of the biggest stars from the booming world of women’s sports, and employed some creative grammar to stir up social media chatter. Giant Spoon created a campaign for the emerging electric vehicle brand Lucid that was essentially a short action film, directed by James Mangold (Ford v Ferrari…

Traditional economic development tends to focus on investments made and jobs created. For this year’s group of Most Innovative Companies—or in many cases, foundations or governments, in this case—the key performance indicator isn’t dollars spent, but connections made. Growth comes not from directing resources, but finding a better way to nurture what you already have. Governments found creative ways to unleash the potential of their residents, workers, and civil servants. The state of New Mexico, for example, made a first-in-the-nation move to subsidize childcare for all, giving working parents and families a leg up. In Illinois, the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act of…

The way we consume culture has fractured into millions of pieces and the far corners of the internet. But media companies are finding creative ways to keep capturing market share. For publishing imprint Bloom Books, that means capitalizing on TikTok’s rise by turning #BookTok’s viral hits into paperback bestsellers. For Webtoon, it’s doubling down on a dynamic fast-metabolism format with five-minute-long “episodes” that bring comic books to life. The satiric newspaper The Onion is channeling its best quality—humor—into a new revenue stream by opening its own ad agency, while the New York Times is cranking out vertical video reels meant to be viewed on smartphones. Li…

In some ways, the attention game for brands is only getting tougher. The increased pace of the cultural cycle and the tidal wave of slop hitting our feeds have added a layer of suspicion to any brand work. Is it real? How do you know? These are big, existential questions. This year, 20 companies, ranging from brands to agencies, are answering them from the perspective of marketers looking to build real connections with real people. The companies here are not only working to embed into and engage with culture, but they’re doing it in ways that reinforce the role of humans in that dynamic. It includes Dick’s Sporting Goods launching its own internal film studio to …

If you’re one of the legion of iPhone fans who can’t wait for the next major software update and all the new features it will bring, there’s some good news. Apple has revealed when you’ll be able to get a look at the iPhone’s next operating system, iOS 27—and you won’t have to wait much longer. Here’s what you need to know. Apple announces the dates for WWDC26 Apple has revealed when it will hold its next Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The conference, affectionately referred to as “dub-dub” by Apple employees, is one of Apple’s two major events throughout the year, and one of the tech industry’s most important. WWDC is an annual week-long event where A…

Taking stock of the once red-hot agtech sector, analysts have called 2025 a “transition year,” a polite way of saying crop prices slid, Bayer traded near a 20-year low, John Deere reported less than half of its 2023 income, and almost two dozen startups in once-frothy areas like indoor farming, drones, and insect-based ingredients collapsed. It was enough for a managing director of ag giant Syngenta’s VC arm to jokingly “thank God” it had avoided investing in alt-protein, carbon credits, and vertical farming—though he allowed that the downturn offered “good lessons” for smart entrepreneurs eyeing “a second wave.” Fast Company’s 2026 list of the most innovative companies …

Three years (plus) after the arrival of ChatGPT, chatbots are morphing into AI agents. As generative AI models have improved and become able to reason in real time, the major AI labs, starting with Anthropic, have begun to shift their research focus from models that compose and comprehend text to ones that reason, use tools, and work autonomously. The first kind of agent that matured to the point of having real-world impact was an agent that can write, test, and document computer code. Coding agents, powered by language models, can understand plain language, which has democratized software development and made “vibe coding” possible. Products like Lovable and Bolt al…

Beyond the not insignificant work of designing buildings, it can often seem that architects are also tasked with solving some of the biggest problems in the world. From reducing the environmental impact of buildings to increasing access to affordable spaces to fighting climate change to rebuilding what climate change has damaged, the architect’s work can verge on the infinite. For the architecture companies honored in Fast Company’s 2026 Most Innovative Companies awards, this mission creep is part of the appeal. All 10 honorees on this year’s architecture list have made societal challenges and systems-scale shortcomings into side projects of their more straightforward…