Time is precious, and conferences can be expensive—and time-consuming. If your name is not on the official agenda, should you attend anyway? Perhaps it’s an annual industry gathering, or it’s a niche conference that may bring in business. There are many reasons to attend, and just as many not to. We asked our Fast Company Impact Council members if a conference is worth attending, even if they weren’t speaking at it. If you guessed that the answer is “it depends,” you’re right. It depends on a leader’s personal and professional goals, networking options, learning opportunities, and more. We share 13…
Author: Staff Writer
Five years ago, tech angel investor Chris Adamo and a few friends jumped on a burgeoning trend in the digital asset world: they used a virtual real estate broker to buy 23 parcels of property in a metaverse called The Sandbox. He doesn’t remember exactly how much he spent, but it was around $200,000 for the whole group. The real estate, to be clear, consisted of pixelated parcels in “hip,” “trendy” virtual “neighborhoods,” an asset that crypto bros and Web3 enthusiasts like Adamo saw as the future of tech and digital investment. At one point, it ballooned tenfold in value.…
I tend to write about AI from the perspective of the bleeding edge, looking at how journalists and media companies are using the technology to change the way they work, reach new audiences, and transform their organizations. But the reality is that there’s a stigma around using artificial intelligence in the journalism community. In conversations I have with working reporters and editors, there’s clearly still a lot of reluctance, if not outright disdain, for using AI in almost any part of their work. Looking at recent coverage of journalists using AI, however, you might think some of that disdain is…
Technology is making it easier for everyone to move faster. The important question is who will move in the right direction? New technologies—including AI and automation—are quickly becoming indispensable teammates that can draft, summarize, analyze, and accelerate the work that keeps organizations moving. I see most individuals on my team using AI and automation to complete some tasks in a fraction of the time, allowing them more time to focus on relationship-building, innovation, and value creation. When the use of AI and automation becomes widespread, it will stop being a performance differentiator. Differentiation will come instead from the people that…
Errands, Target runs, tennis games, and even flying to Europe—these are just some of the things employees have done while taking “soft off days.” The idea of taking soft off days, in which you use a work day to do just about anything else, has become a phenomenon. Videos across social media instruct employees on the best way to take a soft day while assuaging any guilt. While employers might see it as wasting company time, many people believe soft off days are harmless—even needed. So-called “time theft,” the practice of running errands or doing personal matters on the clock,…
Professional workdays are full, fast, and designed for productivity, not recovery. In Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, 80% of global workers said they don’t have enough time or energy to do their work, and workers were interrupted about every two minutes during the day. That’s the experience of modern work: back-to-back meetings, endless emails and chats, and constant task-switching. The day doesn’t pause for you. We know breaks matter. But for most of us, the problem in taking them isn’t desire or discipline, it’s that the workday doesn’t seem to have room. The good news is you can build short,…
The push toward digital currency is being framed as innovation and efficiency, but when you strip away the marketing language, what is unfolding is a structural transformation of the financial system that shifts control away from individuals and concentrates it within governments and central banks. The Bank for International Settlements has confirmed that more than 90% of central banks are now actively researching, developing, or piloting central bank digital currencies, which is not coincidence or experimentation but a coordinated global direction. This aligns directly with what I have been warning, that when governments face a sovereign debt crisis they will…
A tariff refund program will open next week following the invalidation of President Trump’s tariffs by the Supreme Court. But consumers shouldn’t get too excited—the program is aimed only at companies, not individuals. On Friday, the program was introduced by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which said the tool, Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE), will open in phases, with the first one beginning on April 20. “CAPE will simplify International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) duty refund requests made pursuant to court order and in accordance with appropriate statutory authority by providing an electronic pathway to submit valid…
The Banco Central do Brasil has raised gold’s share of reserves from 3.55% to 7.19% in just one year, effectively doubling its exposure and making gold the second-largest reserve asset after the US dollar, while total reserves stand at approximately $358.23 billion and the dollar’s share has declined to about 72%, marking a record low. This is not a marginal adjustment or routine diversification, it is a structural repositioning that reflects a growing unease with sovereign debt markets. When a central bank reduces dollar exposure while increasing gold holdings, it is not acting randomly but responding to a shift in…
The challenges with AI adoption have little to do with the technology itself. In the work environment, the hardest part is bringing together a new orchestration model that fully integrates AI tools while ensuring teams both adopt and master new behaviors to deliver tangible results. As Steve Lucas recently wrote in Fast Company, we have entered the era of the “AI natives and the AI nots.” This delta will become vividly apparent this year. At the center of the AI revolution: a fundamental reevaluation of organizational design. Roles are evolving because the skills, intelligence, and processes we have relied on…