Fast Companys 11th annual Innovation Festival takes over New York City this September 1518. Though every year introduces new offerings to the Innovation Festival, were also bringing back an attendee favorite: Fast Tracks.
Fast Tracks are our immersive, experience-based sessions that are hosted in the offices and spaces of New York Citys most innovative companies. Think of them as field trips for adults.
From Pickleball at Life Time, to augmented and virtual reality demos at CBS Stations, to a coffee tasting and tour with 787 Coffee, here are a few Fast Tracks you dont want to miss this year:
Brewing Coffee and Creativity: A Shot of Storytelling
Fast Track hosted by 787 Coffee
[Photo: 787 Coffee]
Join the team at Puerto Rican coffee company 787 for an in-depth exploration of how your morning cup of joe is transformed from bean to brew. From planting coffee seeds, to roasting a batch of beans, to making your own beverage, youll walk away with a deeper understanding of the life cycle of coffee and the stories it can be used to telland how that notion applies to your industry.
Peak Performance: From Mindset to Match Point
Fast Track hosted by Life Time
[Photo: Life Time]
Join Life Time at Penn 1 for an energizing Fast Track experience blending sport and self-optimization. Come ready to listen and play in this interactive session starting with a motivating discussion with Life Time senior vice president Jessie Syfko and Life Time vice president and founder of HPLT Brian Mazza, on how to fuel peak potential through discipline, mindset, and movement. Then grab a paddle (Life Times got em for you) and hit the court for hands-on pickleball instruction and/or straight up play with Life Times elite pros. Come in your workout gear and change after. With full dressing rooms on-site, youll be ready to power into the rest of your Innovation Festival day.
From Demos to Deals: How Building an AI Startup in NYC Gets You Closer to Your Customer
Fast Track hosted by The Refinery
[Photo: The Refinery]
As the second-largest startup hub in the world, New York City gives founders a unique edge: faster paths to revenue by building alongside the customers and industry heavyweights who can propel their growth. Join Tech:NYC president and CEO Julie Samuels for a conversation with leading AI entrepreneurs on how the citys density, diversity, and access to decision-makers turn ideas into partnerships and prototypes into revenue. Following the discussion, Fast Track attendees are invited to network with panelists and fellow guests, enjoy light bites, and take in the waterfront views.
How Oscar Mayer Won the Race to Cultural Relevance and Ignited a New Summer Tradition
Fast Track hosted by Johannes Leonardo
[Photo: Johannes Leonardo]
For decades, Oscar Mayer was a household staple that lived on the tip of peoples tonguesquite literally. Everyone could sing an Oscar Mayer jingle (or two), and the brand would spark smiles anywhere the Oscar Mayer Wienermobiles went.
As Oscar Mayers core audience matured and its pop-culture resence waned, the iconic Wienermobiles remained beloved. The challenge was clear: spark new brand conversation during the kickoff to grilling season, leveraging a nearly 100-year-old brand asset. The result: the Wienie 500. What began as a one-page idea in a brainstorm quickly evolved into a campaign that made marketing history and the Kraft Heinz record books. Generating more than 6 billion impressions and securing the No. 2 trending hashtag on X, the Wienie 500 took the world by storm, with fans demanding it become an annual tradition.
Featuring speakers from the Oscar Mayer brand and Johannes Leonardo, this session will give attendees a deep dive into how Oscar Mayer and Johannes Leonardo crafted Americas newest obsession and pastime in a way that sparked smiles and spread love for Oscar Mayer hot dogs across the nation.
The Business of Art and Creating a More Inclusive Space
Fast Track hosted by GPGallery
[Photo: GPGAllery]
As the art market shifts, a new generation of galleries is embracing a leaner, more intentional approachprioritizing authentic relationships over volume and aligning economic success with community investment. Join us for a timely conversation between artist and gallerist Jessica Ann Peavy and acclaimed painter Guy Stanley Philoche, hosted at GPGallery (GPG) and exploring how GPGs hybrid modelmerging the artist-centered mission of a nonprofit with the sustainability of a commercial galleryis creating measurable economic and cultural impact in Harlem. This conversation will unpack how GPG is at the forefront of that movement, offering a real-time case study on how culture and capital can evolve together, from the inside out.
Why We’ve Fallen Out of Love with the Biggest (Beloved) Brands, and How We Fix It
Hosted by Design Bridge & Partners
[Photo: Design Bridge & Partners]
The same brands that once made us fall in love have somehow fallen into fatigue. In a world where private labels deliver both dupes and desire, and digitally native creator brands are dropping every day, what role do the OGsthe traditional, established brands that built whole categories but are now fighting for differentiationplay today?
Using their proprietary, people-driven brand analysis platform, the top strategists at branding agency Design Bridge and Partners will explore how big brands are becoming a cautionary tale by overly relying on the feelings people already know and love them for. Theyll also demonstrate another way forward, revealing how these tried-and-true OGs can reinvigorate for a new eratapping the audience to offer additional insights and suggestions before revealing ideas for a revamped brand or two.
Mobilizing Capital to Tackle Climate and Poverty
Fast Track hosted by Acumen
[Photo: Acumen]
Around the world, the poorest communities are on the front lines of climate change, yet they have the least access to the resources needed to adapt and thrive. In this immersive Fast Track session, founder and CEO Jacqueline Novogratz will share Acumens pioneering approach to deploying the right mix of capital to solve the toughest problems at the intersection of climate and poverty, from assembling a $250 million capital stack to bring clean energy to the hardest-to-reach people living without electricity to raising $300 million for agricultural adaptation for smallholder farmersone of the largest such commitments in the world. Attendees will get to play investor and assess investment opportunities through Acumens framework of poverty focus and business viability. This Fast Track will explore what it takes to build systems rooted in dignity and challenge you to rethink investment as a tool for moral as well as economic transformation.
Reworking the Workplace with Ryan Anderson and MillerKnoll
Fast Track hosted by MillerKnoll
[Photo: MillerKnoll]
Join Ryan Anderson, VP of Global Research and Planning at MillerKnoll, for a new look at todays workplace. Ryan and the MillerKnoll team are known for rethinking how workspaces can best support people at every stage of their careers. Hell share insights on how the physical environment can be thoughtfully designed to reduce loneliness and social isolation, while enabling the relationship-based work thats essential for everyone to create meaningful interactions, from those just starting their careers to those preparing for their final career moves.
Guests will have the opportunity to tour MillerKnolls New York showroom (which opened just a year ago), where these ideas come to life. Discover how residential and hospitality-inspired design is making offices feel less institutional, how individual workspaces are evolving to support both focus and social connection, and why thoughtful workplace design is more essential than ever in an era of rising life pressures. Light bites and drinks will follow the session.
Life on the Edge: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Resilience
Fast Track hosted by Edge of Earth
[Photo: Edge of Earth]
For three years, the Edges of Earth team has lived and worked in some of the most remote and rapidly changing ecosystems on the planetabove and below the waterline. From disappearing kelp forests to off-grid coastlines and deep jungle research stations, this global expedition set out to document collapse, but more so, to understand resilience.
What they uncovered is called the edge effecta phenomenon where progress takes root in the margins, led by the people and systems that mainstream climate narratives often overlook.
This session features a screening of their short-form documentary, followed by a conversation and Q&A with expedition lead Andi Cross and special guests whove been part of this journeyfrom subsistence fishers and coral scientists to forest guardians and underwater engineers. Expect raw footage, grounded insights, and a reframing of what it means to make change in a world that often feels too big to fix.
Reimagining Local News: How CBS Stations Uses AR/VR to Tell the Story Within the Story
Fast Track hosted by CBS Stations
[Photo: CBS Stations]
Step inside the future of broadcast journalism with CBS New York, where innovation meets impact. In an era when local news is more vital than ever, CBS Stations is leading the charge in transforming how stories are toldleveraging cutting-edge augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technology to bring viewers deeper into the why behind the weather, elections, and major breaking news. This immersive session offers a behind-the-scenes look at how CBS New York is redefining the traditional newscast. Attendees will meet the journalists and technologists driving this evolution, explore interactive demonstrations of AR/VR storytelling, and tour the legendary CBS Broadcast Center. From dynamic weather visualizations to real-time election data rendered in 3D, discover how CBS is making news more engaging, informative, and future-ready.
How Designing for Queer Audiences Fuels Unique Innovation
Fast Track hosted by Local Projects
[Photo: Local Projects]
Amid growing political and cultural headwinds, LGBTQ+ communities continue to shape culture through bold self-expression, mutual care, and creative resistance. Designing for queer audiences today isnt just about inclusionits about unlocking new ways of thinking, building, and belonging.
Join Local Projects, the Fast Company award-winning experience designer of the new Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center, for a short tour of the exhibition with the founders. Following the tour, visitors will hear from a panel of LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs at the forefront of inclusive design, curated and moderated by communications agency Camron. Panelists will share personal stories and lessons learned from buildng forand withinqueer communities.
In an era of quiet, subtle brand refreshes, Trump is embracing a full-on rebrand with an executive order that seeks to rename the single largest U.S. government agency.
Trump’s 200th executive order of his second term, signed September 5, gives the Department of Defense the “secondary title” of “Department of War,” an old name for the U.S. military’s government agency before the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force were consolidated and renamed the Department of Defense in 1949.
“We’re going Department of War,” Trump said. “I think it’s a much more appropriate name, especially in light of where the world is right now.”
But like getting people to call Twitter “X or use the phrase “Gulf of America,” Trump could find his attempt at renaming the Defense Department easier said than done. You think changing a logo is hard? Try changing an entire brand name for one of the biggest U.S. employers.
“Changing a name doesnt change how people feel about you overnight,” brand name expert and Eat My Words founder Alexandra Watkins says.
It’s one thing to change a logo. It’s another to change a name. Trump can’t rename a department on his own without Congress, hence his executive order giving “Department of War” as a secondary name. Still, he’ll face hurdles to implementation that any brand would expect to encounter to undergo a name change.
“Big organizations don’t, or shouldn’t, take the decision to rebrand lightly,” Ben Weis, a strategy director at the naming and writing studio A Hundred Monkeys, tells Fast Company. “The bigger the organization and the more widespread the name, the bigger the lift and the higher the risk for blowback and confusion.”
For the Department of Defense (DOD), with its nearly 3 million military and civilian employees, the risk for blowback and confusion is uncommonly high. Pentagon officials are already fuming over the costs and work that could come with a branding change for an organization that has more than 700,000 facilities across every state and in 40 countries, according to Politico.
Not the first rebrand
The DOD was briefly called the National Military Establishment, but the name had the unfortunately aggressive acronym NME, which sounds like “enemy,” and it was changed less than two years later. Trump’s impetus for changing the name now is less pressing.
The DOD isn’t a company, so it doesn’t have to play by the same rules as a corporate rebrand, but Scott Milano, founder of the brand naming agency Tanj, says it fits into one of the buckets he often sees with renaming efforts.
“Normally, when businesses try to rebrand, there’s either a problem, like some sort of brand-specific problem, or in the case of naming . . . there’s a trademark issue, like you can’t use it moving forward,” he says. “Obviously that’s not the case with the Department of Defense.”
The more relevant way to frame it, he says, is when businesses outgrow their name and want to signal something new to the market, as he sees Trump doing with the change from “Defense” to “War.”
“It’s intentionally intimidating and it’s in your face, and I assume that was on purpose,” he says.
But being obvious isn’t always seen as a virtue when it comes to picking a brand name. In fact, experts say, it can undermine the message the organization is trying to send.
“Honest people don’t tell you that they are honest, cool people don’t talk about how cool they are, and truly strong people don’t puff their chests outthe world knows this,” Igor Naming Agency cofounder Steve Manning says. “It’s a reaction to feeling we are being seen as militarily impotent. Since this rebranding is nothing more than a surface treatment, it will be ineffective for the three years it will be in place.”
You think you know Patagonia, the apparel brand beloved by crunchy hikers and finance bros alike. But the company is more than half a century old, and it has taken many unconventional turns to become an icon of sustainable business.
[Cover Image: Simon & Schuster]
A new book digs into this history, offering lots of untold moments about the company that even die-hard Patagonia fans may not know. In Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away, author David Gelles provides a behind-the-scenes look at how Patagonia was built. Through in-depth interviews with Chouinard, we learn about the many conflicting pressures the Patagonia founder faced as he tried to create an apparel brand that does more good than harm in the world.
Here are three surprising things that happened along that journey.
Patagonia Once Partnered with the Pentagon
In the 1970s, the U.S. military was one of Patagonia’s biggest fans. It began with climbing gear. Chouinard, an avid rock climber, first came up with the idea of starting his company because he wanted to make better climbing gear. He couldn’t find metal spikes that he liked for wall climbing, or ice axes for ice climbing, so he developed them himself.
When the military got wind of these functional climbing tools, they began buying them for soldiers who would need to scale walls during military missions. In the decades that followed, Patagonia introduced innovative new fabrics that were moisture wicking and thermoregulating. By the 1980s, the military was buying off-the-shelf Patagonia base layers and fleeces for enlisted personnel working in cold climates.
“The [A]rmy’s 3rd Infantry Division was soon handing out full kits of Patagonia off-the-shelf long underwear and dark blue pile suits to its long-range surveillance teams to ward off the cold,” Gelles writes. Then, Patagonia was enlisted to create a custom cold-weather layering system for soldiers.
Today a close partnership between Patagonia and the U.S. military seems odd: Patagonia is associated with hippies and environmentalists, and yet the gear was being used to train soldiers for combat. And indeed, over the years, the brand’s antiwar employees and fans often criticized Patagonia for this collaboration. But Chouinard wasn’t bothered by the complaints, Gelles says, partly because he was a veteran of the Korean War and understood how hard life was for soldiers. In the end, Chouinard argued that Patagonia wasn’t making weapons or ammunition. “Bras don’t kill people,” Chouinard told Gelles. “People kill people.”
Patgonia and Walmart Were Once Unlikely Bedfellows
In 2005, Walmart invited Chouinard to speak to its top executives at its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Rob Walton, Walmart’s then CEO, had been connected with a sustainability expert who had worked closely with Patagonia, and he was intrigued by how Walmart could potentially be a force for good.
Chouinard, in turn, was intrigued by the invitation: He believed that if he could convince a company of Walmart’s scale to improve its practices, this could create enormous impact. Chouinard and his wife, Malinda, traveled to Arkansas from their home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on a private jet sent by Walmart.
In the book, Gelles paints a picture of what happened when Chouinard took the stage wearing a ratty wool jacket with leather elbow patches. He didnt mince words. He accused Walmart of not using its influence for good. In a striking example, Chouinard pulled out an enormous pair of jeans, designed for a morbidly obese person, with billows of fabric. According to Gelles, Chouinard said, “I have to hand it to you. How do you sell something like this for $8.99? The fabric alone must cost that much!”
Despite the confrontational nature of Chouinards talk, Walmart executives were eager to learn more. So they started making regular visits to Patagonia HQ to learn what they could. The two companies collaborated to create the Sustainable Apparel Coalition to develop a common set of standards called the Higg Index for fashion brands to sign on to. But after the index launched, the partnership petered out. Chouinard believed Walmart execs were willing to do a few easy things to improve the companys supply chain, but not what was required to actually clean up the entirety of that supply chain.
Patagonia accidentally sickened its Boston store employees
In the late 1980s, Patagonia opened a store in Boston. But after a few days in operation, Gelles writes, workers began complaining of headachesand the symptoms didn’t go away. So Patagonia brought in an expert to see what was going on.
The determination was that the companys new clothes were covered in formaldehyde. As workers unboxed the merchandise, they were breathing in toxic fumes. (Formaldehyde is a carcinogen.) The expert recommended a better HVAC system as a solution. Instead, Chouinard wanted to rid his product of toxic chemical treatments.
Over a long process aimed at getting rid of toxins that harm both people and the planet throughout the supply chain, Patagonia eventually landed on cotton farms that often use large amounts of pesticides. Cancer rates in regions where cotton is grown were 10 times higher than normal. So Chouinard asked his team to explore sourcing organic cotton. By the mid-1990s, Patagonia was among the first apparel brands to use organic cotton.
By the time Walmart’s executives partnered with Patagonia in the early 2000s, they too became interested in organic cotton, and began placing large orders with farmers. Some Patagonia employees worried that the relationship would harm the formers business, since organic cotton was part of what differentiated Patagonia from Walmart and other competitors. But over time, Patagonia grew into its leadership role in the apparel industry and realized that when other brands followed its lead, it was a win for all.
Fawning is a survival mechanism that develops in response to traumaa fourth response alongside the better-known fight, flight, and freeze reactions. Psychotherapist Pete Walker defines fawning as “a response to a threat by becoming more appealing to the threat.” When we fawn, we mirror others’ desires, suppress our own needs, and prioritize external validation to maintain safety. This isn’t simply people-pleasing or codependencyit’s a physiological trauma response that develops when fight or flight aren’t viable options.
Recognizing the signs: are you fawning at work?
For some fawners, it’s hard to identify their fawning because they’re just “meeting expectations” and in that context, fawning looks an awful lot like success. We pursue these paths, in part, because success is safety. It’s a shield. It brings us titles and money and all the things. At least that’s what we are told and sold.
Working at a law firm is the perfect environment for a compulsive fawner. Administrative assistants fawn over lawyers. Associates fawn over partners. Partners fawn over clients. It’s a very clear hierarchy, and self-abandonment is expected. The more hours you bill, the more the firm makes. So, while my client Anthony was at the top of his game, he was also just like the rest of us, at the mercy of the culture he was inavoiding conflict to gain financial security and access to a secure life.
Anthony was referred to me when his 20-year-old son went to rehab. On paper, Anthony was impressive: Harvard grad, law school, partner in a global powerhouse firmdetails that could’ve intimidated me. But I’ve never felt intimidated by Anthony. He is one of the most loving and loyal fathers Ive ever encountered as a therapist or otherwise. But also, Anthony is a fawner, and fawners want to be liked. With his black tee and salt-and-pepper beard, he logs onto every Zoom session with a cheerful smile that evokes one of my own.
Early in our sessions, Anthony remarked, “I think I’m trying to win therapy.” We both laughed before he continued, “It’s like I’m implementing insights from our work so you can tell me all the progress I’m making. It’s all about the pat on the head.”
How your family dynamics followed you to work
While Anthony’s parents never told him to go to an Ivy League school or to become a lawyer, he always felt he needed to do those things. In a way, it was their lack of interesthe never got approval for anythingthat led to his endless quest for validation. As the stakes of achievement kept getting higher, he thought, how can my parents deny me approval now? And yet, they did.
Any time I brought up his parents, he would defend them. Anytime he started to speak about how they hurt him, he would backpedal. “I can’t speak badly about my parents. I’m making them sound like monsters.” He stuck with the party line he had learned over the years: “We are a close and happy family.”
But then, a couple of years into our work together, Anthony received a voicemail that altered his life.
He was in a period of real transformation, beginning to advocate for himself in personal and professional relationships, setting boundaries, and leaning into new interests. He was trying to communicate differently with his parents, expressing apprehension about an upcoming family wedding. It would be the first time his son would be exposed to both extended family and that much drinking since his time in rehab. So, he made himself vulnerable, telling his parents his concerns about his son and how they both might react to this potentially stressful event.
His parent’s reaction to his son’s addiction recovery had always been, “He’s all better by now, right?” Their avoidance made Anthony’s skin crawl. But he dug in, trying to be in real relationship, giving them the benefit of the doubt. “I know you guys are really excited about the wedding, and I am too for a lot of reasons, but I’m also nervous . . .”
It soon became clear that they didn’t want to talk about his genuine concerns, so Anthony just got off the phone. Two hours later, he saw his mom calling back and he let it go to voicemail. When he listened to the message, his stomach dropped. It was a mistaken dial. His parents had accidentally recorded a two-minute, vicious snippet of their private conversation about Anthony and left it as a message on his phone.
“Does he think he has to protect his son forever? He just needs to suck it up and get in line for this wedding! And how do we even believe him in this fight with his sister-in-law, when he’s always exaggerated everything?”
Unfawning and breaking the cycle
As Anthony shared what happened, I saw his devastation. “Deep down, I knew all of this was true,” he said to me. “But maybe I needed to hear it. Now I know I wasn’t making it all up.”
After that day, Anthony made a conscious choice to stop living for his parents’ approval. He saw that he couldn’t fawn enough to ever get it. This was all deeply painful, but ultimately freeing. Grief unlocked necessary anger about how long he’d lived his life with a diminished sense of self. And that anger led to change. I call that behavior change “unfawning”and it’s a powerful, healing step in our recovery journey.
When we learn to unfawn, we learn to detach from our old ways of people-pleasing and tune in to the self we had to abandon long ago. Anthony’s parents didn’t change. Knowing they’d never take personal responsibility; he never confronted them. The culture at his firm didn’t change, and he didn’t have to retire early or find a new career.
His son was living his own life, in a new relationship, starting to find his own way. Anthony was doing the same, changing the way he showed up in every area of his life.
One way he took back his power: He started to lean into the “weird stuff” his family had made fun of, but that he had always been drawn to. Battling a lifetime of messaging, this is not what a man does, he spent a week at a men’s wellness retreat. While some guys swapped the more vulnerable activities for golf and networking, Anthony immersed himself in all the taboos he’d avoided out of ridicule for 50 years.
Anthony’s life is a testament to what happens when we stop fawning. Something finally turned. He dropped the script he’d been reading forever, and in letting it go, he found a life that feels unique, creative, and expansive. Unfawning is a kind of growing up. Especially for those who relied on this safety strategy since childhood, we inadvertently stayed small and childlike and we didn’t know it. We were stuck in time. Unfawning means getting reacquainted with the self we tucked awayto discover who we truly are.
Adapted from Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves and How to Find Our Way Back by Dr. Ingrid Clayton, published by Putnam, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
When Stephen, the SVP of sales at a SaaS company, sat down with his top-performing manager, he expected a routine check-in. Instead, Todd admitted that he felt disengaged and unsupported. With 13 direct reports and responsibility for major clients, Stephen saw firsthand how disengagement at the manager level could cascade into risks for client retention, team morale, and overall performance.
This isnt an isolated case. Motivation is slipping at a historic pace. Gallup reports global engagement dropped to 21% in 2024, just the second decline in over a decade, draining $438 billion in lost productivity. This time, managers themselves are at the center of the decline. They drive 70% of team engagement, yet they are being squeezed harder than everexpected to deliver more with less while navigating AI training, role replacement, reorganizations, leaner teams, multigenerational friction, and relentless productivity pressure. The result is burnout, resignations, or hanging-on managers, those who cant quit in a tough job market but are already mentally checked out.
At the same time, expectations are rising. Deloittes 2025 Global Human Capital Trends found that 36% of managers lack confidence in their people management skills, even as employees increasingly expect personalized support tailored to their needs. Others experience quiet cracking, where they stay in a role but emotionally withdraw, leading to a disengagement that spreads quickly across organizations. Traditional motivational levers are no longer enough.
We have seen it firsthand. Kathryn, as an executive coach and keynote speaker, and Jenny, as an executive adviser and learning & development expert, bring frontline insights from coaching senior leaders and building systems that scale. The five strategies that follow demonstrate how leaders can reignite manager motivation, enabling companies to stay focused and compete at the pace of change.
1. Create the Conditions for WinningStarting with Managers
Motivation collapses when people feel set up to fail. Managers are often overloaded with unclear priorities, competing demands, and insufficient resources. To reignite engagement, leaders must remove barriers and clarify what winning looks like.
Gallup research highlights three levers with outsized impact:
Invest in manager training and development.
Equip managers with coaching skills.
Redefine managerial roles with clear expectations and adequate support.
When leaders invest in these conditions, they address managers most immediate concerns. The implicit message is that managers are valued enough to be adequately equipped for impact, not just held accountable for outcomes.
Tools like the Organizational Mattering Scale and Organizational Mattering Map (introduced by Positive Psychology experts) make these linkages visible.
The Scale measures whether employees feel their work contributes to recognition and meaningful achievement.
The Map highlights connections between individual tasks, team collaboration, organizational values, and company outcomes.
When leaders spotlight these connections, managers see their impact more clearly, strengthening engagement and fostering a culture where employees feel both effective and valued.
2. Fuel Effort with Personalized Meaning
Motivation isnt one-size-fits-all. Employees want personalized support, and so do managers. Leaders can spark motivation by connecting daily work not only to the companys mission but also to a managers individual values.
Thats exactly what Stephen did with Todd. He codified the conditions that would restore Todds confidence: a larger travel budget to strengthen client relationships, continued presence at key industry trade shows, resources for pilot projects, flexibility after heavy travel weeks, and a dedicated training budget for his team to upskill in AI and leadership. He also reframed Todds role around his core value of client impactsharing customer feedback that credited Todds leadership with strengthening their business. That simple shift helped Todd reconnect to why the work mattered and reignited his energy.
Conditions for winning go beyond resources and clarity; managers also need growth opportunities, advancement pathways, and visible signals that the company values their long-term potential.
Across the companies we advise, leaders who codify a consistent set of Essential Engagement Conditionsclarity, recognition, development, autonomy, fairness, and well-beingsee stronger performance at scale. Meaning fuels persistence. When impact feels tangible, managers push forward not because they have to, but because they want to.
3. Reinforce Progress Through Recognition
Nothing drains motivation faster than feeling invisible. If meaning connects managers to why their work matters, recognition ensures their contributions dont go unnoticed. Its not only about celebrating big wins, but also about making progress visible. Research on the progress principle shows that small wins fuel motivation and creativity, while the absence of visible progress accelerates disengagement.
The risk of quiet cracking increases when managers feel their efforts go unseen. Thats why recognition should extend beyond outcomes to include effort, growth, and problem-solving under pressure. And it shouldnt come only from senior leaders. Peer forums, cross-functional huddles, and manager roundtables where colleagues acknowledge each others wins reduce isolation and normalize the challenges of leadership.
For Stephen, that meant recognizing Todd not just for results, but for the steady progresspiloting new approaches, building his teams skills, and strengthening client relationships. By valuing effort and learning as much as outcomes, Stephen reinforced that what mattered was progress, not perfection.
Recognition is one of the lowest-cost, highest-return levers leaders have. Use it generously, consistently, and strategically.
4. Empower Autonomy and TrustWihout Slipping into Micromanagement
Few things demotivate faster than being micromanaged. Autonomy is central to motivation yet return-to-office mandates and monitoring tools like AI dashboards tempt leaders to over-control, sending a signal of distrust that corrodes engagement.
Managers thrive when theyre trusted to exercise judgment. At a fintech firm we advised, the COO shifted from detailed weekly reports to a principle-based system: clear outcomes with freedom to decide the how. Productivity rose, and morale followed.
This approach taps two motivational drivers. Self-efficacy, the belief in ones own ability to succeed, grows when managers are trusted to make decisions and learn from experience. Value-expectancy theory shows people are most motivated when they believe their effort leads to valued outcomes. Setting clear goals while allowing flexibility reinforces both confidence and commitment.
Trust itself is a motivator. When leaders empower autonomy, they signal confidence in managers abilities, and managers rise to meet that expectation.
5. Support Well-Being and Resilience
Motivation and well-being are inseparable. Gallup finds that managers report the highest rates of burnout, and when they burn out, their direct reports are 62% more likely to do the same. Stress and exhaustion dont just drain energy; they accelerate quiet cracking and leave organizations vulnerable to turnover and lost capacity.
Leaders must go beyond surface-level wellness perks. The World Economic Forum highlights resilience and mental health as core leadership capabilities, not add-ons. Real support means modeling boundaries, encouraging recovery, and equipping managers with tools to sustain energy. One global bank we coach instituted no-meeting Fridays for its management layer, creating protected space for reflection, deep work, or recovery. The move signaled that well-being wasnt optional; it was part of performance.
Resilient managers dont just sustain themselves; they set the tone for resilient teams. When leaders prioritize well-being, they preserve individual and organizational capacity.
Stephens quick action with Todd underscored this point: when managers feel supported, they stay motivated and so do their teams. Because managers are the single biggest driver of employee engagement, their energy is a force multiplier and the foundation of performance.
Motivated managers are the difference between organizations that struggle and those that thrive. Invest in them, and you invest in your companys future.
The legendary physicist Max Planck once said, A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. That may be a bit extreme, but the point still stands.
The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. To bring about genuine change, you not only have to point the way to a new and better reality, you also need to displace what people already know and are comfortable with. To do that, you need to overcome resistance, both rational and irrational.
More specifically, you need to overcome three forces that support the status quo: the synapses that support our basic neurology, the culture that reinforces norms, and the economics that need to be overcome to do anything new. To drive genuine change, you need to help people not only unlearn old assumptions, but realign the underlying forces that keep things as they are.
The synaptic effect
We tend to think that we experience the world as it is. We see and hear things, store them away as knowledge, and then take new facts into account. But thats not how our brains actually work. In reality, we filter out most of what we experience, so that we can focus on particular points of interest. In effect, we forget most things so we can zero in on what seems to be most important.
The effect is also cumulative. What we think of as knowledge is really connections in our brains, called synapses, which develop over time. These pathways strengthen as we use them and degrade when we do not. Or, as scientists who study these things like to put it, the neurons that fire together, wire together.
So as we go through life and learn the ways of the world, we become less able to imagine other possibilities. Our mental models become instinctive and standard practices become the right way to do things. This effect becomes even stronger and more pervasive if we see our mental models as being responsible for our success.
Thats why unlearning is at least as important as learning. We need to break old synaptic patterns if we are to replace them with new ones. Genuine change can only begin when we recognize that progress isnt just about learning more, but about having the courage to unlearn what once made us successful.
The culture effect
While our previous experiences tend to blind us to new developments, those around us will help reinforce common beliefs. In fact, a series of famous experiments done at Swarthmore College in the 1950s showed that we will conform to the opinions of those around us even if they are obviously wrong.
Thats why the best indicator of things we think and do is what the people around us think and do, and that effect extends out to three degrees of separation. So it is not only those we know well, but even the friends of our friends friendspeople we dont even knowthat affect our opinions and actions.
As Thomas Kuhn pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, new paradigms dont emerge all at once. They first arrive as a series of quirky anomalies that are easy to dismiss as special cases that can be worked around. That usually works pretty well for a while and things go on much as before.
So even if we notice that something is awry, that things arent quite what we thought they were, we will usually brush that thought aside and get back to business. After all, not only do we believe in our present working model, everyone around us does, too. The world is a messy place and every rule has exceptions. We carry on and dont think too much more about it.
In How Minds Change, author David McRaney found that people who were involved in cults or believed in conspiracy theories didnt change their opinions when confronted with new facts, but when they changed their social environment. Just as our synapses favor the status quo, so do the cultures we are embedded in.
The cost effect
Another barrier to adaptation is that change incurs real costs. In one particularly glaring example, the main library at Princeton University took 120 years to switch to the Library of Congress classification system because of the time and expense involved. Clearly, thats an extreme case, but every change effort needs to take inevitable frictions into account.
There are a number of reasons why switching costs can become a significant roadblock. The first is our innate bias for loss aversion. First identified and documented by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, we all have a tendency to avoid losses rather than seek out new gains. The comfort of the status quo can be more powerful than the uncertain promise of transformation.
Another important force is the availability heuristic, which reflects our tendency to overweight information that is most easily accessible. What we experience in the here and now always seems more tangible and concrete than the more distant benefits of change, which many will suspect will never come.
The status quo has often had years or even decades to embed itself into the fabric of institutions. Significant resources have been invested in developing textbooks, standard operating procedures, and best practices to support the old paradigm. To truly embrace something new and different, its not just ideas that need to change, but everything that underlies and supports them.
Change always involves switching costs and, unless the benefits to change are clear, the inertia of the status quo will win out.
Becoming an effective change leader
There is probably no better example of institutional resistance to change than the story of Ignaz Semmelweis. In the 1840s, as a young doctor at Vienna General Hospital, he discovered that simple handwashing could dramatically reduce infections and ave lives. Yet the medical establishment rejected the idea outright.
Millions died needlessly before the germ theory of disease gained prominence two decades later. Since then, the term Semmelweis effect has been coined to describe the tendency for institutions to reject new evidence when it contradicts established beliefs or paradigms. Sadly, it appears not much has changed in the 120 years. That tendency persists.
Viewed through the lens of synaptic, cultural, and cost effects, the story begins to make more sense. Doctors mental models were shaped by the miasma theory, which held that bad air made people sick. High-status physicians felt insulted by the suggestion that they themselves were spreading disease, and system-wide reforms would have required significant costs and disruption.
So we cant just blame institutions. We also need to look at Semmelweis, who was an ineffective advocate for his ideas. Rather than identifying why the medical establishment was unwilling to change, he simply railed against it, sending nasty letters to prominent doctors. They closed ranks against him and things ended badly. He would die in an insane asylum, ironically of an infection he contracted under care.
If you truly believe in change, passion and good intentions arent nearly enough. You need to be an effective advocate. That starts with understanding why we fail to adapt and addressing the barriers that hold us back.
Since opening his eponymous studio in 2020, homeware designer Gustaf Westman has amassed a cult following for his delightfully chunky objects, his knack for color, and his playful eye for reimagining everyday items. His sought-after designs have always come with a higher-end price tagbut now Westman is partnering with Ikea to make his work accessible to the masses.
The new collection, which debuts September 9 on Ikeas website, is part of the companys annual winter launch. It includes items like plates, candleholders, and a vase, all designed under the premise of reimagining the winter holidays for a younger generation. While a plate from Westmans brand retails for around $65 and a bowl is close to $330, the Ikea collection ranges from just $7 to $25.
My stuff is very niche, and it’s not so affordable for people, Westman says. A very fun part of [this collaboration] is that I can reach a much bigger audience, and so many more people will be able to buy the stuff and take it home.
[Photo: Ikea]
A holiday collection for a new generation
This is Westmans first time ever working with another companyand as someone from Sweden, he says, partnering with Ikea is a dream collaboration.
Westman embraced the opportunity to design objects for a less traditional, more playful approach to the holidays. Thats perhaps most embodied by the “Vinterfint serving plate”: a long, tubular platter designed to hold Swedish meatballs.
[Photo: Ikea]
After the plate debuted as a teaser item, Westman says, some commenters were baffled by its form factorhe assures Fast Company that it can be used to serve other items, like sushi or pralines.
More unexpected pieces in the collection include a spiraling pink vase and a series of candleholders with a funky four-pronged base. Other products take more direct inspiration from Westmans own Christmas memories.
[Photo: Ikea]
For example, we did this cup that has a big saucer, Westman says. The idea behind that cup is that my grandma always made a lot of different cookies, and it was basically a logistical problem, like, How am I gonna take these cookies? This cup is solving that problem.
[Photo: Ikea]
Striking the right balance
According to Maria OBrian, the creative leader at Ikea of Sweden who tapped Westman to join the project, the main challenge in bringing the designers vision to life was the fact that his preference for chunky, bulbous shapes stands somewhat in opposition with Ikeas reputation for efficient flat-packing.
[Photo: Ikea]
There’s something so joyful about his form language and use of color, and I think it’s also quite far from the Ikea form language in terms of flat-packing, OBrian says. The playfulness that Gustaf brings is so bold, and we saw that it could challenge us in a positive direction by stretching what we do with shapes and expressions.
Westmans personal favorite piece, the “Vinterfint plate,” is one of the items that embodies this push and pull. The plat features a squared edge with a raised circle in the center, and its low profile makes it easy to stack and store.
[Photo: Ikea]
The plate is very much a dream thing for me to doa very simple product for Ikea, but I make it special, Westman says. How I think about the plate is that its basically a flat square, and someone has dragged up the edges to create the plate. I remember sitting around doing that on paper by squeezing it up.
[Photo: Ikea]
The collection may be geared toward the holidays, but both Westman and OBrian say they didnt want it to scream Christmas. To strike a balance between the festive season and everyday use, they selected a color palette that includes the traditional forest green and bright red alongside a pastel pink and baby blue.
Ultimately, the final product is a collection that balances Westmans unconventional approach to homeware with Ikeas penchant for utilitarian design. Westman says hes enjoyed the experience.
Since Ive only been working alone, its like going back to school, he says. Meeting all these people, going on trips, going to Älmhult, the little Ikea townthat’s been probably the most rewarding.
Every founder wants top-tier talent. But when your company is young, two obstacles loom. The first one is that no one knows you. The second one is that, likely, you cant afford a full-time senior hire. The irony is that this is when you most need experienced leadership, because without it, you risk mistakes that cost more than the salary you were aiming to save.
Why startups should consider senior leaders part time
Bringing in a seasoned executive on a fractional basis is often a better answer than stretching for a junior full-time hire. A senior leader working part time gives you sharper decision-making, clearer priorities, and fewer detours. You get the benefit of years of experience without locking yourself into a payroll commitment you cant sustain. For the right scope of work, five hours a week from someone who has scaled before is worth more than 50 hours from someone learning on the job.
Especially lately, many senior professionals are open to this model. Some want flexibility for family or side projects. Others value variety and like to keep a portfolio of roles. And in a market still shaped by layoffs, part-time income streams feel safer than a single employer. Hence, this arrangement makes sense for both sides, as long as expectations are set early and respected.
How to hire part-time senior talent
The first step is clarity. A vague job description with slogans will not suffice to attract someone experienced. Spell out the outcomes you expect. Instead of help us drive growth, say design and oversee a three-month plan to test five paid acquisition channels. Define how decisions will be made, the reporting line, and what success looks like. This will help them feel the role as something achievable in the time you are offering.
Next, design the role to be respectful of their level. Senior operators will not commit to open-ended advisory calls or endless Slack pings. Set specific projects with clear deliverables, and show them you have thought about how their time will be used and that you understand the value they bring. The more tangible you can make the assignment, the easier it is for them to picture success.
Finally, make it easy to say yes. Offer a paid pilot so both sides can test the fit. Be transparent about budget and timelines. Pay on time, and share how their work will be applied. And, of course, acknowledge their contribution. These details signal professionalism, and when you are still unknown, this matters more than perks.
How to work with fractional leaders once you have them
Hiring is only the beginning. To get value from a fractional leader, you need to create an environment where they can contribute without friction. As Jim Collins once observed, Great people need great things to do, or they will take their creative energies elsewhere. Even part-time, seasoned professionals will disengage if the setup is chaotic or the work is poorly defined.
That means giving them access to the information they need, assigning a clear decision-maker they can work with, and sticking to a predictable cadence of check-ins. Chaos burns trust quickly, even if the hours are limited.
To avoid this, set super clear expectations on both sides. They should know how you prioritize, how experiments differ from commitments, and who owns which decisions. You should know how they prefer to communicate and how they measure success. When the rhythm is established, their time multiplies the impact of your whole team, and the fractional leader can quickly raise the standard of execution and help you move faster.
The bottom line
For an early-stage company, every hire carries risk. But trying to fill a senior role full time before you can afford it is often the bigger risk. A fractional leader can give you the judgment and experience you need to avoid expensive mistakes, while keeping your company nimble. Start clear, keep the scope focused, and follow through on your commitments. Do that, and you will find senior professionals willing to bet on you, long before the market knows your name.
I think models will be better at interviewing than people, said Victor Lazarte, the founder of mobile games company Wildlife Studio, on venture capital podcast The Twenty Minute VC in April.
You’d think that John Kim, the CEO of a San Francisco-based AI recruiting company, would wholeheartedly agree. But you’d be wrong.
“There needs to be a human in the loop for recruiting,” says Kim, CEO of Paraform, which raised $20 million during its Series A funding in June.
That’s good news for recruiters, job seekers, and the companies looking for talent. Businesses are leaning more on AI to reduce hiring, but also putting more focus on finding the best people for the jobs they are filling. Job applicants want to make sure they are getting the kind of treatment that puts them in the best possible position to get a great new role. And recruiters want to sort through the noise in this buyers’ market and do what they do best.
In this piece, premium subscribers will learn:
The best thing human recruiters can do for job seekers and employers that AI cant
How many hours a day recruiters save using a platform like Paraform
Why it’s vital for startups in particular to hire right the first time
Solving startups biggest problem
In 2023, John Kim and his cofounder, Jeffrey Li, surveyed their peers, other founders, and people in their coworking space, thinking up their next startup idea. They asked: whats the biggest problem youre trying to solve? Overwhelmingly, the answer was hiring.
For startups, the first hires can be make or break: A 2023 study found if a startup lost an early employee within six years, headcount drops by 8% and revenue by 12% over the next five years. Ten years later, these companies were still behind their counterparts that retained their early teams.
Initially, Kim and Li built a platform where people could refer their friends for jobs, but found there wasnt much activity, except for one group of users: recruiters. And they werent just any recruiters. They were external recruiters, such as freelancers and recruiters from boutique firms.
When companies are flush in cash, they over-hire recruiters. But recruiters are usually the first to go when there are layoffs, says Kim. (During the tech layoffs that started in 2022 and that bled through 2023, HR and talent sourcing accounted for about 30% of laid-off employees, according to one study of over 1,100 LinkedIn profiles of workers who were laid off.) Working for only one company means a recruiters ability to place candidates is limitedsince youre only hiring for roles at a single place.
However, while independent or boutique recruiters may have more job options for their candidates, they have to grind: They must spend hours sourcing both companies that are hiring and find candidates for those jobs by combing through LinkedIn and Indeed, or attending industry events. These jobs might be on different recruiting platforms, and its up to the recruiter to stay organized.
Kim and Li saw the value in recruiters, particularly for startups, where founders may be short on hiring experience. They believed that hiring requires a human recruiter to understand what a candidate truly needs and whether a role is truly a good fit. We doubled down and decided to build something for them, says Kim. They launched Paraform in 2023.
Today, Paraform is geared toward helping tech startups hire. Companies pay Paraform a fee to post their job openings, and then recruiters can apply to be matched with companies. Once a recruiter is matched to a company, they can then upload a candidates résumé and submit it. The recruiters get financial rewards for referring candidates, getting them to the interview stage, and of course, if the candidate is hired. Paraform removes half of the burden from a recruiters shouldersthey no longer have to source jobs.
Paraform also has a suite of AI tools that make recruiters lives easier. First, theres a tool that transcribes recruiters phone calls with job candidates and provides summary notes. Theres also an AI tool that recommends other jobs on the platform that a candidate might be a good fit for. Kim said the AI increases placements by as much as 25%, and this number continues to grow.
All of this saves me two to three hours a day, says Katelyn Ewe, founder of Brisk Talent, an agency specializing in engineering recruiting for tech startups. Ewe, who has been using Paraform since 2023, finds it easier to use than other AI tools for recruiters, and shes particularly appreciative of the opportunities Paraform gives her access to. Instead of me having to chase companies for job openings to work on, Paraform gives me instant access to their network of clientstop-tier companiesthat I would consider my dream clients,” she says. “This means I dont have to do any cold calls, or meetings for business development.
In addition, Paraform provides a sort of concierge service to recruiters: Its operations team works directly with recruiters to onboard them, provides daily support, and helps the recruiters grow their businesses. Th Paraform team would work with me to recommend companies [with job postings] Id be a good fit for [to find candidates], as well as tips for best practices, says Ewe.
Paraform claims they can help recruiters increase their earnings by three to five times, and place candidates 10 times faster compared to traditional methods.
However, this begs the question: whos to say the AI service couldnt get better and better until it makes 100% of the matches . . . making recruiters unnecessary?
The power of the human recruiting paradigm
Kim is clear that he believes humans are essential for recruiting. “The recruiters are the ones who truly assess culture, fit interpersonal dynamics [and] develop trust with the candidates. We try to do as much as possible to make their lives easier, he says.
That may sound overly optimistic in an age where AI truly is stealing peoples jobs. However, the recruiters using Paraform agree with Kims sentiment: despite the AI doing a lot of heavy lifting, humans bring a lot to the table.
For example: Ewe explains that candidates will often say the right thing; yes, they are excited about the role, yes, they are willing to relocate. But there are thousands of small tells that give away their sincerity that AI could never catch. If a candidate sounds rehearsed, fumbles, pauses a little too long, or doesn’t want to elaborate, thats often a sign that they might not be interested. Or that they are just looking to get an offer that they can then leverage into a raise at their current job.
Say a candidate mentions theyre willing to relocate, but doesnt have family and friends in the area, and doesnt sound particularly enthusiastic about the job. Ewe will then try to dig deeper to gauge the candidates sincerity. She might ask follow-ups: When are you looking to start your next role? Is that based on a lease expiring, or do you own a home? How hard would it be for you to move? She notes the point is to have a natural conversation, where she can learn about the candidates needs and ideal lifestyle.
Maybe AI will be able to do that in the future. Who knows. But I dont think it can do that now, Ewe says.
Taylor King, the CEO of Foundation Talent, a boutique recruiting firm that specializes in finding talent for tech startups in AI and crypto, agrees that its unlikely humans can be replaced by AI. Finding the right team for a place like a tech startup is a complex problem.
If I need to hire a hundred cashiers at Walmart, mortgage loan officers, or entry-level sales people, thats a volume game. You could automate that, he says. But if youre chasing the top AI talentor an engineer who has a million options[candidates] want to talk to a human. He says the real differentiator is the relationship. Good recruiters arent just selling an opportunity, but showing up as a true market expert and trusted agent, who can walk [a candidate] through the next step in their career, King says.
Currently, Paraform has north of 600 companies posting jobs, and about a thousand active recruiters on the platform. Recruiters get about 70% of the fee companies pay Paraform; going forward, Paraform is considering branching out into legal, medical, and financial services.
Ewe and King both say they started using Paraform because they knew theyd be left behind if they didnt understand how to use AI. But Paraform may show the inverse also holds true: that companies who dont understand the values of humans will also be left behind.
AI cant build genuine connections. And Kim hopes recruiters will keep having opportunities to do that. Were shifting the model [for recruiters] Kim says, to fundamentally make them better matchmakers.
According to a new NBC poll of 2,970 adults ages 18 to 29, Gen Z men and women are at oddsnot just about politics but also on how theyre viewed at work and what it means to be successful. For starters, men approve of Trump’s job performance at a far higher rate than women. A hefty 74% of women disapprove of the job Trump is doing, while only 53% of men in the same age bracket do. The genders were the most divided on Trump’s immigration policies, as 45% of men said they approve, while only 21% of women said the same.
They also have different takes on gender and workplace culture. When asked if gender matters when it comes to getting ahead at work, more than two-thirds of men (69%) said gender doesn’t make a difference. Only about half of women (51%) felt similarly, and 44% of women said it helps to be a man. Only 27% of men answered the same way.
One thing that Gen Zers were thought to be less divided on is their staggering rates of anxiety. Previous studies have shown that Gen Z struggles with anxietyabout work, finances, and the economy. However, according to the new poll, Gen Z women are far more anxious than men. While one-third (33%) of women said they feel anxious about the future almost all of the time, only 19% of men said they feel anxious “almost all of the time.”
And when it comes to ideas about their plans for their future, as well as their views on what makes a successful life, Gen Z men and women are vastly different when examined through a political lens. Overall, they had the same top three answers on what defines success: “having a job or career you find fulfilling,” “having enough money to do the things you want to do,” and “having enough money to do the things you want to do.”However, when it came to women who voted for Harris versus men who voted for Trump, the answers were strikingly different. While the male Trump voters valued having children as the most important for personal success, the female Harris voters ranked it as the second-least important out of 13 choices, showing perhaps the starkest divide in the entire poll.
