What's on Your Mind?

We’re facing a career confidence crisis. Work is changing fast, yet many employees feel stuck. At LinkedIn, our data shows workforce confidence has dropped to a five-year low, and only 15% of employees say their manager has supported them with career planning in the past six months. Managers can play a big role in righting the ship—helping employees build the new skills they need to stay relevant and develop into future leaders. But this requires a fundamental shift: transforming them from task-overseers to coaches developing talent and sparking the best ideas from their teams. There are some key steps any company can take now to develop a culture of coaching that sta…

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 way we work is changing. Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the workplace, automating tasks, creating new efficiencies, and helping us accomplish more across virtually all industries. In this environment, new hiring strategies based on evaluating a candidate’s full skillset—including their ability to problem-solve, think creatively, and adapt rather than solely relying on…

As one of the world’s leading charity auctioneers and a seasoned keynote speaker for companies like Goldman Sachs and Google, I have spent 80 to 100 nights on stage every year for over two decades. Since I am typically one of the last people to take the stage at a fundraising event, I have watched countless people in various stages of panic just moments before they go on stage. After they find out my role, I usually receive a predictable set of rapid-fire questions from upcoming speakers in the hopes that some last-minute tips from a pro can help them do more than keep from passing out when they hit the stage. Here are five things I tell people in the final moments b…

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-…

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 landscape of home automation has sparked numerous discussions about security and control. According to SonicWall’s comprehensive 2025 Annual Cyber Threat Report, smart home products experienced a staggering 124% increase in cyberattacks during 2024, with smart plugs emerging as particularly vulnerable targets. These vulnerabilities have ignited growing consumer concern about the safety of cl…

Basketball great LeBron James has become the first professional male athlete to have his likeness depicted in a Ken doll. Mattel Inc. unveiled the LeBron Ken doll on Wednesday to kick off the toy manufacturer’s “Kenbassador” series. Last year, nine female athlete Barbies, including tennis star Venus Williams, were introduced. “As a young kid, I was fortunate to have role models who not only inspired me but also showed me what’s possible through hard work and dedication,” James said. “Now, as an adult, I understand how vital it is for young people to have positive figures to look up to. That’s why partnering with Barbie to release the LeBron James Kenbassadors doll…

Three years after suing to block Microsoft from buying one of the biggest names in video games, the U.S. government is finally giving up. The FTC announced plans Thursday to drop a Biden-era case against Microsoft over its $69 billion acquisition of game maker Activision Blizzard, a decision the regulator said now best serves the public interest. In 2022, the FTC first announced that it would try to kill Microsoft’s planned acquisition of the gaming giant, which makes hit games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft. The following year, after the FTC failed to secure a preliminary injunction to stop it, Microsoft actually finalized the massive deal, but the regu…

In the entertainment industry, as in life, change is the only constant. It wasn’t that long ago that streaming services such as Netflix were the outsiders making waves and altering the way audiences watched movies. Today, there’s a new kid on the block rapidly growing in popularity. Vertical dramas, essentially a 90-minute soap opera broken down into one-minute episodes viewed—you guessed it—vertically on smartphones, are here to shake things up even further. (I know this firsthand as an actor who has recently worked on some of these projects.) Joey Jia, the CEO of Crazy Maple Studios, is at the forefront of this movement. His content creation company was named o…

AI is fundamentally re-engineering how work is done, who does it, and why. From AI-assisted nursing tools enabling healthcare providers to serve more patients to robotics improving retail fulfillment efficiency, the change is monumental. Organizations must establish a common language around work to navigate this transformation effectively. This raises a critical question: Who bears the responsibility for preparing the workforce for the AI age? Industry expert Josh Bersin notes that thriving in this era requires redesigning work, jobs, and organizational models—deconstructing tasks, evaluating AI solutions, and defining the human role alongside automation. This imp…

The AI industry hit a significant bend in the road toward artificial general intelligence in 2024. Previously, the stunning intelligence gains that led to chatbots such ChatGPT and Claude had come from supersizing models and the data and computing power used to train them. When the progress from massive scaling leveled off, researchers knew they would need a new strategy, beyond training, to keep moving toward AGI models that are broadly smarter than humans. Starting with OpenAI’s pivotal o1 model, researchers began to apply more computing power to the real-time reasoning a model does just after a user prompts it with a problem or question. o1 required more time to produ…

Ever get a feeling that something isn’t right? An internal voice that is trying to tell you something? It could be your intuition bubbling up. Or maybe it’s anxiety. Or both. Learning to tell the difference between anxiety and intuition can help you determine if that feeling is something you should listen to or address in another way, but it’s easy to confuse the two. “People have become disconnected from their emotions, beliefs, and self-confidence,” says intuitive life coach Tammy Adams. “They have so much doubt within themselves that they don’t listen to their own intuition. People veer off with fear and live more in anxiety than they do in confidence.” Your gu…

One of the world’s most iconic and controversial maps just got a major redesign. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in New York has unveiled the final version of an updated map of its subway system, marking the first time the map has had a full redesign since 1979. It’s a visually bold, user-centric design that, according to the MTA, will make it easier for people to understand where they’re going and how to use the system. The new maps are expected to be installed in train cars and stations over the next few weeks. The map features bright, color-coded lines for each train line, which criss-cross a stylized map of the city in horizontal, vertical, and dia…

Loneliness isn’t just a lingering by-product of COVID lockdowns—it’s a public health crisis. The impacts of social isolation are said to be as detrimental to human health as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, according to former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Loneliness can increase the risk of heart disease and strokes by roughly 30%, and dementia by about 50%. In some ways, we’ve never been more connected thanks to online networks. Yet for many people, social media has fueled perceptions that others are living fuller, more vibrant lives in comparison to their own. Some have found that online interactions pale in comparison to in-person hang outs. Champagne sales…

Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture. Costco chair Hamilton “Tony” James caused a bit of a stir this week when, in an interview, he mentioned a retail category that’s done surprisingly well for the big-box chain: luxury goods. “Rolex watches, Dom Pérignon, 10-carat diamonds,” James offered as examples of high-end products and brands that have fit into a discount-club model more typically associated with buying staples in bulk. “Affluent people,” he explained, “love a good deal.” Courting that group may be particularly timely right now—and not just for Costco. According to a recent report from research f…

Trying to find authentic, consistent joy in the midst of a reality that is relentlessly delivering devastating blows feels akin to finding a needle in an impossibly large haystack. But according to Michelle Obama, it is possible—and the power lies in acknowledging the depth of despair and apathy while still finding reasons for hope. At SXSW this week, the former first lady and her older brother, Craig Robinson, who is executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, took the stage for a live session of their new podcast, IMO. The pair were joined by Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist, the Yale professor behind the school’s most popular class t…

When it comes to wealth, most of us think about money. You measure your financial wealth by looking at your assets and your debts. But there are other areas in your life where you can be wealthy, including time. Would you consider yourself time-affluent or are you living the life of a time pauper? “Time wealth is all about freedom to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, and when you trade it for other things,” says Sahil Bloom, author of The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life. Building time wealth is about awareness and action, says Bloom. Be aware that time is your most precious asset and the…

Fast food giant Yum Brands has worked for years to distance itself from third-party tech partners. Last week, it made the ultimate power move: a development deal with Nvidia, a tech giant consistently ranked among the most valuable companies in the world. “We want to own the intellectual property. We want to own the technology,” Yum Brands chief digital and technology officer Joe Park told the Wall Street Journal. “That’s a shift in our strategy as we think about AI.” In other words: Yum knows its strength and wants full control over its own data. The company will build more services for its 61,000 restaurants with Nvidia’s tech with the goal of quickly processin…

A jury in Georgia has ordered Monsanto parent Bayer to pay nearly $2.1 billion in damages to a man who says the company’s Roundup weed killer caused his cancer, according to attorneys representing the plaintiff. The verdict marks the latest in a long-running series of court battles Monsanto has faced over its Roundup herbicide. The agrochemical giant says it will appeal the verdict, reached in a Georgia courtroom late Friday, in efforts to overturn the decision. The penalties awarded include $65 million in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages, law firms Arnold & Itkin LLP and Kline & Specter PC said in a statement. That marks one of the larges…

The death of Pope Francis has been announced by the Vatican. I first met the late Pope Francis at the Vatican after a conference called Saving Our Common Home and the Future of Life on Earth in July 2018. My colleagues and I sensed something momentous was happening at the heart of the church. At that time, I was helping to set up the new Laudato Si’ Research Institute at the Jesuit Hall at the University of Oxford. This institute is named after the pope’s 2015 encyclical (a letter to bishops outlining church policy) on climate change. Its mission is rooted in the pope’s religiously inspired vision of integral ecology—a multidisciplinary approach that addresses soc…