What's on Your Mind?

If you’re familiar with Gallup data about employee engagement, they have been playing one of their Top 40 hits for decades now. It’s a classic we’ve all heard. The tune? “People don’t quit companies; they quit managers.” We’ve known this for years, but here we are, still stuck in the same leadership crisis. Too many managers don’t understand the difference between managing work and leading people. Here’s the plain truth: You manage the work; you lead humans. And when leaders miss that, the culture and performance pay the price. The brutal truths So, if you’re willing to take a hard look in the mirror, here are seven brutal truths about leadership every leader n…

There is a new calculator that shows how President Donald The President’s “big, beautiful” law will affect your 2026 tax bill, and how much additional take-home pay you’ll be getting. The calculator, from the Tax Foundation—an independent, tax policy research organization—looks at the new exemptions and tax write-offs in the massive 940-page One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which was signed into law in July. The savings are the result of the OBBBA extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, making many of the changes permanent, while adding some new short- and long-term tax rules, including the “No Tax on Tips” provision (which allows eligible tipped workers to d…

Every working parent has that one thing keeping them from completely losing it. Some have the Mary Poppins-like nanny who knows exactly when to show up with wet wipes and organic muffins. Others swear by meal kits, color-coded Google calendars, or chore charts their family actually follows (unicorn families, basically). For me? It’s a group text. Not glamorous, not particularly organized, but it’s my lifeline. This is where playdates get arranged, last-minute pickup emergencies get solved, and critical intel on the latest stomach bug gets dropped. It’s also where I can admit, “I fed my kids popcorn and blueberries for dinner,” and instead of side-eye, I get heart …

Fast Company is delighted to make this article available to any student for free. Please request a copy by email. I was sitting on the steps of Duke Chapel at 2 a.m. in December 2023, the Gothic towers looming above me, a 210-foot reminder of everything I was about to walk away from. My phone was exploding with notifications: Y Combinator had just accepted us. ChatGPT had hit 100 million users in two months—faster than TikTok, faster than Instagram, faster than anything in human history. And I was about to break my single mother’s heart. The chapel bells rang twice, echoing across the empty quad. In six hours, I’d be dropping out of one of America’s best univ…

“How did you get to where you are in your career?” My interest in this question dates back 45 years to when I was an MBA student at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Whenever corporate executives were guest speakers at our classes, I would listen intently as they described what contributed to their career advancement. In the same vein, as I speak with leaders today, I always make a point of asking them what they consider to be the main drivers of their success. Over more than four decades, the two most common responses are: (1) “I worked hard” and (2) “I have several unique skill sets.” As I look back on my corporate career, including as chai…

Square, the point-of-sale system owned by Jack Dorsey’s Block, is announcing a number of new upgrades today—including one that will make it easier for business owners to accept payments in Bitcoin. On Wednesday, the company made three announcements: An expansion of its platform for restaurants (including AI-voice ordering and a bigger, broader Grubhub integration) A conversational AI assistant embedded in its dashboard to answer questions, called Square AI Square Bitcoin: An integrated Bitcoin payment and wallet system for business owners The upgrades and announcements are designed to help business owners control their costs, dig up more insights withi…

When I worked in tech, I often heard engineering leaders explain why they couldn’t hire more women or minorities: the so-called pipeline problem. They claimed there simply weren’t enough qualified candidates entering the system, so naturally the pool of diverse talent remained thin. Many of us in the ecosystem called BS. The reality wasn’t a lack of qualified people; it was a lack of imagination, access, and commitment to creating inclusive environments where diverse talent could thrive. Fast forward to my work today in women’s sports. I find myself thinking about that same phrase—this time with a twist. In sports, a pipeline problem is very real, and very serious. Gi…

The world’s best engineers, entrepreneurs, and researchers face no shortage of opportunities. If you’re building the future in frontier technologies like AI, you could base yourself anywhere. So the real question is where. The answer today points north—to Stockholm. The European Commission recently declared Stockholm as Europe’s most innovative region. Ahead of Copenhagen, London, and Zurich, the Swedish capital took the top spot. Not just overall, but on a range of individual indicators, from lifelong learning and share of tech specialists employed to cross-border scientific publications, collaboration between SMEs, patent filings, and trademarks. Right after the…

In today’s dynamic labor market, industries from manufacturing to healthcare continue to grapple with persistent workforce shortages. To fill these gaps, organizations are looking beyond traditional talent pools. One of the most promising yet significantly underutilized groups is second-chance talent, or graduates of prison education programs. These individuals represent millions of highly motivated and skilled professionals seeking stability after incarceration. Too often, outdated hiring methods and social stigmas have blocked justice-impacted individuals from employment opportunities that could change their lives. However, by shifting perspectives and implementing …

On a recent Saturday, several hundred people flocked to Los Angeles International Airport and spent most of the day looking at airplanes — all because they follow the same airline-industry blog. That sentence may require some explanation even if you’ve read a post or two on Cranky Flier, the commercial-aviation chronicle written by industry veteran Brett Snyder. The avgeek gathering Snyder calls Cranky Dorkfest began in 2011. Snyder, based nearby in Long Beach, decided to see if any of his readers — many of whom regularly show up in comments on his blog under aviation-related pseudonyms — wanted to meet up. So Snyder suggested a triangular park between LAX’s Runway 2…

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…

If you’re a frequent flier, chances are you’ve been seized by the fear that your carry-on bag is too big for the overhead compartments. Now, for American Airlines passengers, it’s even more important to make sure that your bag is within the size limit before boarding. This week, the airline announced that it’s getting rid of its bag-sizers at gates. American Airlines told the news station KTLA that it started removing the metal sizers, which typically allow customers and gate agents to decide if luggage will fit in the airplanes’ overhead bins, on October 6. According to the airline, the move is intended to simplify the boarding process—bypassing the bottlene…

Too late. Too expensive. Too bland. Too antiquated. Too much of the same. There are just too many toos when it comes to Tesla’s new “cheap” cars, which the company announced on Oct. 7. Its highly anticipated “affordable models” are just stripped-down Model 3 and Model Y variants that come in at a more expensive price point than the current 2025 models. Some marketing genius labeled them as “Standard,” but judging the cars against cheaper, better models from automakers around the world, Tesla’s newest offerings can’t even claim that benign adjective. The truth is, these cars are terrible news for the company. With its reputation in tatters thanks to Musk’s bra…

A new study out Wednesday in the journal Nature from the University of California, Berkeley found that women are systematically presented as younger than men online and by artificial intelligence—based on an analysis of 1.4 million online images and videos, plus nine large language models trained on billions of words. Researchers looked at content from Google, Wikipedia, IMDb, Flickr, and YouTube, and major large language models including GPT2, and found women consistently appeared younger than men across 3,495 occupational and social categories. (Note: It’s possible that filters on videos and women’s makeup may be adding to this age-related gender bias in visual cont…

Trader Joe’s stores have a reputation for getting crowded at the best of times, but if you’re planning to make a stop in the next few days, beware: the brand just dropped a Halloween version of its mini tote bags, and they already went viral twice for creating in-store traffic jams. The bags, which come in combinations of black, orange, purple, and green, cost just $2.99 each and dropped in stores on October 8. They’re a tiny version of Trader Joe’s classic reusable tote bags, measuring just 13 x 11 x 6 inches—about the size of an iPad. This is the third time that Trader Joe’s has released a new version of the bags, which have proven to be a desirable fan favorite (to…

When treating a head injury, one of the questions doctors ask their patients is whether they know who is currently the president. It’s part of a standard neurological exam for assessing alertness and cognitive function after a jolt to the brain. In the absence of any preceding head trauma, though, it does not seem to bode well when hundreds of perplexed X denizens ask an elected official a similar question—especially when such inquisitory swarms have become a well-established pattern online in 2025. On Monday, U.S. Senator Jim Banks sent a fiery letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, urging him to investigate “errors” from the 2020 census. Banks shared the l…

About 40% of farm workers in the U.S. are undocumented immigrants, and they’ve become a focus of the The President administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown. Terrorized farm workers have been forced into hiding, and farms themselves have been left empty of their workers. Experts have long warned that The President’s promise of mass deportations would threaten industries that rely on undocumented workers—like agriculture—and that it could lead to mass disruptions in our food system. Now the The President administration’s labor department seems to be admitting that itself. In a document explaining the administration’s new rule cutting farmworker wages,…

The global economy is holding up better than expected despite major shocks such as President Donald The President’s tariffs, but the head of the International Monetary Fund says that resilience may not last. “Buckle up,” Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said in a speech at a think tank Wednesday. “Uncertainty is the new normal and it is here to stay.” Her comments at the Milken Institute come on a day when gold prices hit $4,000 an ounce for the first time as investors seek safe haven from a weaker dollar and geopolitical uncertainty and before the IMF and World Bank hold their annual meetings next week in Washington. The President’s trade penalties are expe…

Forget magical virtual worlds. In its quest to broaden the audience for virtual reality, Meta is now embracing much more familiar surroundings: Owners of Meta’s Quest VR headsets will soon be able to create digital replicas of any room in their house, and then invite others to “visit” them in those spaces. Imagine, for instance, having a spontaneous family reunion in a metaverse version of your living room – perhaps even with an avatar that looks just like you, and not a character that has escaped from a video game. “There is something very magical about scanning a space that you know, bringing someone else who knows that space into it and feeling like you’re there toget…

A political scientist who studies what helps people connect across differences. A novelist whose books about Native American communities in Oakland, California, sparked a passionate following. A photographer whose black and white images investigate poverty in America. Hahrie Han, Tommy Orange, and Matt Black are among the 22 fellows selected this year by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and announced Wednesday. It’s a recognition often called the “genius award,” which comes with an $800,000 prize, paid over five years that fellows can spend however they choose. The foundation selects fellows over the course of years, considering a vast range of re…

Carbon offsets have existed for decades, and the size of the voluntary carbon market has ballooned to about $2 billion. Many countries and countless companies, including giants like Amazon and Fedex, use carbon offsets to reduce their emissions as they work toward reaching net zero. And yet, these offsets haven’t significantly curbed global greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, global emissions are still increasing. As a climate solution, carbon offsets have failed—and according to a new scientific review looking at 25 years of carbon offset research, they’ve failed because they’re riddled with intractable, deep-seated problems that incremental changes won’t be able to s…

Up until a week ago, I was really quite satisfied by my iPhone 17 Pro. Not the Liquid Glass, but its soft orange aluminum frame felt just new enough to give me a spark. Then I opened the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold. Yes, its name is too long. Yes, it costs $700 more than my iPhone. Yes, it’s still heavier than I want it to be. And yet, I hate to admit it . . . the Fold justifies every analyst who has cried that Apple’s hesitance to adopt flexible screen technologies is starting to make it look dated. An estimated 17 million folding smartphones sold last year, representing a scant 1.5% of the smartphone market, but about every analyst expects that figure to balloon …

There’s a double whammy hitting the U.S. alcohol industry lately: Americans are drinking less, while foreigners have soured on our exported spirits amid higher tariffs. Those dynamics have worsened a crisis that’s already seen some distilleries go out of business this year and thousands of jobs eliminated. Exports of U.S. spirits to Canada plunged by 85% in the second quarter from a year ago, marking the steepest declines among four key markets, according to data released Monday by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DSCUS). Overall, exports of American spirits fell 9% in the second quarter as U.S. spirits makers pay the price of persistent trade tensi…

Being advised to max out your 401(k) is Personal Finance 101. But is that universally solid guidance? Tax-sheltered retirement plans offer the convenience of automatic investments and tax breaks—pretax contributions and tax-deferred compounding for traditional 401(k)s and tax-free compounding and withdrawals for Roth contributions. But the availability and quality of the 401(k) are also important considerations. Some workers don’t have access to an employer-provided retirement plan, and 401(k) quality can be uneven. High administrative costs, meager employer matching contributions, and costly investment lineups can detract from 401(k)s’ tax-saving features. …

Normalizing good urbanism requires culture change, and culture change requires an advocacy long game that makes space for ideas that seem impossible today. Political scientist Joseph Overton developed a concept in the 1990s that had a major influence on my views on and approach to building support for good urbanism. “The Overton window” refers to the range of ideas that are acceptable or mainstream in public discourse at a given time. The acceptable topics are shaped by public opinion, media coverage, influence of special interest groups, and actions of political leaders. As Joseph Lehman, a colleague of Overton’s put it, “Public officials cannot enact any policy…