What's on Your Mind?

On February 10, 1985, an imprisoned 66-year-old male serving a life sentence was offered a conditional release that would have reunited him with his wife and children, from whom he had been separated for 23 years. The prisoner turned down the offer. His name was Nelson Mandela. In a rejection publicly delivered to the South African government by his daughter at a rally in Soweto, Mandela refused the condition that he permanently walk away from the country’s anti-apartheid movement. “I cherish my own freedom dearly, but I care even more for your freedom,” he stated, unwilling to “sell the birthright of the people to be free.” Mandela would spend another five ye…

I have a confession to make. I keep a secret document in my Google Drive titled “Fund Theses That Piss Me Off.” And every time I read about a venture capital fund with a generic, meaningless, or buzzwordy thesis that manages to raise a bunch of money regardless, I copy and paste it into my burn pile. This is how I started to notice a couple of years back how sometimes VCs will make dramatic changes to their thesis and investing focus. And it happens not just at a fund level, but across whole chunks of the industry, too. Take, for instance, climate VC. This was a white-hot category not too long ago. Today, all of a sudden, all the climate funds are gone, or they’v…

When Meryl Rosenthal and her cofounder started a human capital and workplace transformation consultancy in 2005, she was 41 years old. Nine years later, her cofounder left for personal reasons, rendering Rosenthal—by then age 50—a so-called solopreneur. Being a woman of that age and running a business on her own certainly came with challenges. One, she says, was that younger HR and business leaders tended to assume she didn’t have the necessary expertise because her background had not squarely been in HR. Another was a preconception that she—as an older woman—didn’t understand technology as well as her younger peers. None of these things daunted Rosenthal, though…

Managing people is about helping people tap into underutilized reserves and overlooked skills that are indigenous to them, not fixing their habits. The people you manage naturally look to you for answers. They might even ask you to tell them what to do, which creates two major problems: If you tell them what to do, and even if you’re right, they won’t learn anything. If you give clear instructions regarding what to do and things still go wrong, they more than likely will blame you for the resulting mess. This kind of dynamic quietly creates an unhealthy dependency where the employee begins to look to you not just for guidance, but for approval. Anyone who…

As a leadership consultant who helps organizations understand how to apply artistic thinking, one of the lessons I have learned is one of the basic differences between the artistic practice and the business practice—in the former, questioning is the way of life, in the latter answers are the way to go. Artists ask “why” constantly. Why does this exist? Why are things the way they are? Why are we doing it this way? That relentless questioning is how they push past convention—and it’s the engine of genuine creative thinking. Bring that same type of question into most organizations, and something breaks. “Why are we doing it this way?” stops sounding like curiosity. It s…

Look, we all know the drill. Job hunting is basically a full-time job that pays zero dollars and requires you to be perpetually “passionate” about companies that make, I don’t know, enterprise-grade cloud storage for other cloud storage companies. It’s exhausting. But it’s 2026, and if you’re still copy-pasting your résumé into a hundred different web forms like it’s 2012, you’re doing it wrong. The robots are already screening you, so you might as well hire some robots of your own to level the playing field. Here are five AI-powered job-hunting tools to check out. Teal: Mission control If your job search is currently a mess of saved LinkedIn posts and half…

News that Microsoft was reportedly planning to pause its carbon removal purchases has rocked the still-nascent carbon removal industry. The company helped drive the market: In fiscal year 2025 alone, it made deals with 21 companies around the world to remove a record 45 million tons of CO2. Those deals included new contracts with companies like Re.green, which is restoring a swath of the Amazon rainforest, and Vaulted, which removes carbon by burying organic waste. Last month, it added a contract with Liferaft, a company making biochar from agricultural waste in the Midwest. The industry uses a wide range of technologies to tackle one part of the climate challenge: at…

Earlier this week, Apple made its biggest announcement of the year, and no, it wasn’t about a new iPhone. The company announced that longtime CEO Tim Cook would be stepping down as chief executive, to be succeeded by hardware chief John Ternus in September. While the timing of the announcement on Monday was unexpected, nearly everything else about the development was not. In fact, Apple’s leadership transition is turning out to be one of the most carefully choreographed CEO shakeups in corporate history. Here’s why, and what comes next. Apple isn’t just any company, it’s a $4 trillion industry leader Any time a CEO changes, uncertainty is introduced—not just at…

Below, Aneesh Raman and Ryan Roslansky share five key insights from their new book, Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI. Raman is LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer. He previously served as senior adviser on economic strategy to the state of California and led economic impact at Facebook. Roslansky, who is CEO of LinkedIn, is also EVP of Microsoft Office and Copilot. What’s the big idea? AI’s impact on work is unfolding in real time—rapidly—and individuals have more agency than they think. By understanding how skills, roles, and industries are evolving, anyone can actively shape their career and stay ahead in the age of AI. Listen to…

In recent years, nearly half of employees report increased workloads and an accelerating pace of change, so the last thing anyone can afford is doing hard work that doesn’t make an impact. Ambitious workers aren’t afraid of putting in effort, but they want it to contribute to work that matters. Work worthy of our effort creates value on two dimensions: it generates value for others (your organization, customers, or the people around you), and it creates value for yourself through personal meaning and growth. Research shows that connecting to both dimensions taps into our intrinsic and values-based motivation. When those connections are weak, despite being busy, the wo…

Our culture of individualism pushes each person to try to be a star. “Team player” has even come to have the negative implication of subverting one’s own well-being and best advantage, and maybe even becoming invisible to leadership. To counteract these possibly negative effects of selfless invisible toiling, people often strive to make sure leadership sees their individual achievements. But research shows that the culture of individual stars is not what leads to team success. A McKinsey study found that superstar individuals often do not create the best teams: Thinking about themselves first leads to behaviors that disrupt team trust and problem-solving. Google’…

Ikea bed, Ikea sheets, Ikea towels, Ikea desk, Ikea chairs, Ikea curtains, Ikea light fixtures, Ikea trashcans, Ikea clothes hangers, Ikea side tables, Ikea throw pillow, Ikea clock. This is the rough inventory of a room in the world’s only Ikea hotel—the Ikea Hotell in its Swedish spelling—located in Älmhult, Sweden, the same small town where Ikea was founded in the 1940s and where its headquarters still sits. I stayed a night in this very Ikea hotel recently during a reporting trip to Älmhult for a story about (surprise, surprise) Ikea. As one would expect, the lobby, amenity spaces, and hotel rooms themselves are outfitted entirely with Ikea furnishings—Fröset chai…

The missed promotion. The botched presentation. The project that went sideways despite our best efforts. We’ve all been there, stuck in what I call failure’s funk: that heavy mix of shame, fear, and paralysis that keeps us replaying mistakes long after they’ve passed. In both life and work, this funk doesn’t just feel awful, it blocks learning. We’re so busy avoiding, denying, or criticizing ourselves that we miss the insight failure offers. We often hear that failure is life’s best teacher, but learning from it isn’t automatic. It doesn’t happen just because we failed; it happens because we do the inner work, reflecting, reframing, and choosing to respond differe…

Independent bookstores are beacons of hope, offering intangible commodities such as connection, empathy, and knowledge, in addition to physical books. The convenience and discounts of Amazon have long threatened their very existence. Since 2015, Independent Bookstore Day has worked to combat this threat on the last Saturday of April. This year’s festivities fall on April 25. Fast Company sat down with Andy Hunter, founder and CEO of Bookshop.org, to talk not only about the holiday and his organization’s work to offer an Amazon alternative. A cultural awakening around independent bookstores Since the pandemic and continued high cost of living, we as a …

My earliest memory of travel insurance was the life insurance vending machines that used to populate airports up until the early 1980s. For those too young to remember this bizarre part of 20th century air travel, these kiosks offered very short-term life insurance policies that cost $2.50 (paid in quarters) for coverage of up to $62,500. Since these pre-travel policies were marketed to anxious flyers, it seemed clear the insurance companies were capitalizing on fear rather than offering a needed product. Over the intervening decades, I never revised my opinion of travel insurance. I’ve been lucky enough to never need travel insurance, but my family’s recent trip …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During the pandemic housing boom, homebuilders saw their number of unsold completed new builds dry up as overheated demand quickly absorbed almost everything for sale. That is exactly what was experienced by D.R. Horton, America’s largest homebuilder, which had just 600 unsold completed new builds for sale in fiscal Q2 2022—compared to 4,700 in its fiscal Q2 2020. However, as the pandemic housing boom ended and the market shifted, U.S. homebuilders saw their unsold new builds spike back up. At the end of its fiscal Q2 2025—the three months ending Ma…

There are ​more than 20 billion things​ to watch on YouTube, but sometimes that endless choice can feel constraining. It’s all too easy, for instance, to get trapped inside an algorithmic bubble that keeps stuffing you with more of the same thing. And that’s before you get sidetracked looking at comments, descriptions, and sidebar recommendations. Fortunately, a new tool makes watching YouTube feel more like watching old-school TV—with a grid-based channel guide to flip through and minimal distractions. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech …

Two new experiments show that most people do not even consider that a personal message could be AI-generated, even when they themselves use artificial intelligence to write. To see how people judge someone based on their writing in the age of ChatGPT, my colleague Jiaqi Zhu and I recruited more than 1,300 U.S.-based participants, ages 18 to 84, and showed them AI-generated messages like an apology sent in an email. We split our volunteers into four groups: Some people saw the messages with no information about who or what wrote them, as in everyday life. Others were told the messages were definitely written by a human, definitely AI-generated, or that the source could…

Below, Richard Davidson and Cortland Dahl share five key insights from their new book, Born to Flourish: How New Science and Ancient Wisdom Reveal a Simple Path to Thriving. Davidson is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as the founder and director of its Center for Healthy Minds. He also founded a nonprofit, Humin, which translates science into tools that cultivate and measure well-being. Dahl serves as a contemplative scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds and as chief contemplative officer at the center’s affiliated nonprofit, Humin. What’s the big idea? Feeling ha…

The time-honored tradition of scouring a new cereal box in search of a prize is coming back to the breakfast table. WK Kellogg Co. is partnering with Disney ahead of the release of Toy Story 5 this summer, rolling out cereal boxes with either classic in-box playable toys or collectible items inspired by the animated movie franchise. When and where to find them Beginning April 26, customers nationwide will be able to get their hands on the Toy Story 5-inspired cereals across Kellogg’s many brands including Froot Loops, Frosted Flakes, Corn Pops, Apple Jacks, Frosted Mini-Wheats, Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes, and Cocoa Loops. The limited-edition boxes can be id…

Thousands of AI startups are fighting for the VC funding needed to win a slice of the enterprise market. But according to Scott Stevenson, cofounder and CEO of the legal AI startup Spellbook, many are inflating their real revenues to get it. In a viral tweet on April 17, Stevenson called out these fledgling companies for perpetuating a “huge scam” in their metric reporting. It’s time to expose a huge scam in AI startups: Contracted ARR The reason many AI startups are crushing revenue records is because they are using a dishonest metric The biggest funds in the world are supporting this and misleading journalists for PR coverage. The setup:… pic.twitter.com/NQ0qFSn…

There appears to be a recent epidemic of users hijacking companies’ AI-powered customer service bots to turn them into generic AI assistants. The goal is to get the branded bots to do their bidding, without having to subscribe to an AI service. Sometimes, people force the bots to do things that they are not supposed to do, like giving extraordinary product deals and even helping them to take legally problematic actions. Most recently, a wave of LinkedIn posts and social media videos went viral for claiming that users had coaxed McDonald’s customer-service virtual assistant to abandon its burger-centric purpose and to debug complex Python programming code instead. One …

Staples is ready to party, just in time for graduation season. The office supply retailer is adding Party City shop-in-shops to 700-plus of its stores in 34 states across the U.S. Customers will be able to buy party supplies and decor, including balloons, gift bags, and favors; have helium balloons inflated; and order other celebration must-haves like personalized invitations, banners, and posters using Staples’ same-day print and marketing services. The companies announced their partnership in a joint news release on April 21. As part of the collaboration, Party City will also sell its products at Staples.com. Shoppers can use this store locator tool to find …