Fuma Terai is not a Lego designer.
Based in Japan, he is far away from Billund, the small Danish town where all the companys official design work happens. And yet, Terai is responsible for one of Lego’s best sets of the year: Gizmo, the iconic creature from Joe Dante’s 1984 classic Gremlins.
In 2024, Terai submitted an adorable Mogwai as part of 80s design challenge from Lego Ideas, the companys crowdsourcing community platform that turns fan ideas into real sets. More than a year later, his idea is now selling for $110 on Legos website.
Building a Lego set is an exhaustive process that marries creativity and technical precision. Before fans ever see a finished Lego product on shelves, its creation demanded a special negotiation between structural strength and playability, realism and abstraction. Lego designers have always needed to resolve impossible-seeming tensions to bring a set to life, and the creation of Gizmo, with his expressive features and fur, forced this process to its limits.
Chris McVeigh, Lego senior model designer, says creating Gizmolike many other Lego setsrequires playing geometric tricks on the builders mind.
There’s a lot of nuance to the shaping, McVeigh says. How can I round this corner in just the right way? How can I fill it in? How can I fill this in and make it look organic? Where is the abstraction?
10,000 votes and counting
Gizmo, codenamed Project Midnight internally, was born from Legos Ideas platform, which crowdsources ideas for new sets from Legos biggest fans, as part of its 80s challenge. After Terai uploaded his design, it quickly garnered more than 10,000 votesa number that automatically triggers Legos internal review process.
[Screenshot: Lego Ideas]
Monica Pedersen, Lego Ideas’ marketing director, says the first step is for Legos team to check for feasibility: can this physically be built? Are there intellectual property conflicts? Then there is a review of the submitting designeris the fan a good person who can represent the Lego brand? After those questions are answered regional sales teams and retail experts evaluate commercial viability across different markets.
Fuma Terai [Photo: Lego]
We basically screen for design feasibility. Can it be built in real life? Are there restrictions that we cannot adhere to? Pedersen says. Out of 177 product ideas that hit 10,000 votes last year, only five survived this winnowing process.
The redesign challenge
Most of the time, Lego designers take a fans creation and rework it from scratch. One of the things that we decided on fairly early was that we wanted a little bit more nuance to the shaping than what we could see in the fan model, McVeigh says.
McVeigh’s process began with what he calls reference image workmeasuring proportions carefully against the original Gizmo puppet, determining scale through draw-overs, and identifying the key element that would define everything else. To do that, he needs to draw it.
Chris McVeigh [Photo: Lego]
Part of my process is to do drawing. This is something that goes back to my art teacher in high school, who always said that you don’t really understand something until you have drawn it, he tells me. With Gizmo, he only did a couple of sketches, to make sure that he got the scale right.
The eyes became the project’s North Star for the project design for two reasons. First, he needed to get them right to match the characters warmth and personality; Gizmos eyes are what defines him as a charming living creature. This included getting the eyeballs size and look right but also his eyelids.
It was very important to the aesthetic of this model to have these eyelids positioned in a way that they were over the eye, McVeigh says. They could have painted the eyelids on a semi-spheric Lego piece that would act as his entire eye but they wanted to add a bit more dimension.
The eye design set a blueprint for everything else: The key element was really the eye size and the size of the model and everything else just was tied to that, he explains. How the eyes would work was determined very early on with some brick-built mock-ups.
The completed Gizmo uses 1,125 bricks and measures over 8 inches high, 10.5 inches wide, and 3.5 inches deep in standing posesignificantly larger than Terai’s original concept. The size of the build has increased since I submitted my design on Lego Ideas, Terai tells me with satisfaction.
[Photo: Lego]
The art of organic abstraction
For McVeigh, the relative similarity between his first physical prototype and the final product reflects successful upfront digital work. The first built prototype I made doesn’t look that different from the final model, he says. But beneath that surface consistency lay months of refinementstructural improvements, articulation engineering, and the careful balance between organic suggestion and geometric reality.
McVeigh had to find ways to suggest flowing hair and conjure the little Mogwai’s button nose. His job was to solve the three-dimensional problem of organic shapes with bricks. He knows that the magic happens the moment a persons brain translates a cluster of simple plastic forms into the illusion of fur, flesh, or fabric.
[Image: Lego]
Working digitally in Lego’s internal design tool, McVeigh started with a wireframeshoulder points, pelvic points, basic proportionsbefore tackling the model’s greatest challenge: making plastic bricks that suggest organic fur and flesh.
One of the interesting challenges when you’re doing creatures is to give a sense of volume of hair when you are using Lego bricks, McVeigh says. His solution relied on a specific element: a small 2×2 plate with an upturned corner that he had originally developed for Himeji Castle‘s roof edges, a Lego Architecture set released in 2023. I decided to use that to give the effect of wispy hair flowing off the model, he recalls. I wanted to make sure that I use that in several places in the model so that the aesthetic was felt throughout.
[Images: Lego]
This approach exemplifies what McVeigh calls abstractionthe crucial decision of where the model is going to be abstracted, where I know I can’t match something perfectly. And honestly, I think that’s part of what makes the product Lego-like, just that abstraction.
The most challenging abstraction proved to be Gizmo’s nose. McVeigh started with large, flat designs, but they werent feeling quite right. McVeigh made the final change after a colleague’s gentle push: Is there something you could do about the nose?
The original Lego Ideas submission (left) and the final nose design (right) [Photo: Lego]
He started experimenting with half-circle and full-circle plates, the flat rounded plates with 1 x 2 or 2 x 2 Lego studs, the little round protuberances sporting the Lego logo that make pieces stick together. They were hard to put in the model and required a significant redesign, but he really wanted to use them because of how they could capture the impression of nostrils, he tells me.
The final nose solution demonstrates the psychological cleverness underlying Lego design. The 2×2 round plate, with its subtle cutouts on its edge, really sells the idea that it’s a nose by fooling the brain into seeing nostrils where none exist. It’s one of the exciting things about Lego, McVeigh says. The brain fills the blanks.
The final model has two poses: standing and sitting. Players will have to choose which pose in advance, however, as Gizmo wont move on its own. This is sometimes implemented in Lego builds with what McVeigh calls a branch build in the instructions: At some point during the building instructions you will be asked to choose between OK, do you want to build Gizmo standing up or would you like to build him sitting down? The model is not static, however. It features a rotating head, posable ears, articulated hands and arms, and leg rotation.
[Photo: Lego]
From a fans mind to store shelves
Throughot the design process, Terai remained involved as what Pedersen calls an honorary Lego Ideas design member. McVeigh says that every time they showed Terai the progress that they had made, he would just light uphe was just grinning ear to ear.
For McVeigh, capturing Gizmos soul in brick form is a perfect example of the prototypical Lego abstraction process. For Terai, it was a lesson in bringing an idea to life.
Through working with the design team, I was able to see and understand how a product is created from start to finish, Terai says. I saw how they create a product. I have dreamed of designing Lego since I was a child, so it was a wonderful experience to be a part of.
Brittany Poulin and Kate Adams each realized that the other was their work person when they met at their PR job six years ago on a Zoom call. Both zero in on a simple compliment Adams gave Poulin on a Lilly Pulitzer dress as the moment they knew.
I was like, Oh, Poulin recalls. Thank you for recognizing that. Before long, it became apparent that the two shared a bond beyond fashion sense. They had similar backgrounds, common views, former straight-A students, grew up in Catholic households. And most of all, trust in each other.
We never really had that conversation of, Okay, we’re a team. But I will defend her tooth and nail until my dying breath, Poulin says. And I know she’ll do the same for me. Since then, Poulin has traveled from her Orlando homebase to visit Adams in Boston; this past summer, they spent time together at Adams wedding at the Jersey shore.
Lots has been written about the red flags to spot in coworkers: self-centered leeches, narcissists, energy vampires, bad bosses. But what about green flags for people you want to be around? How can you find the coworkers who uplift, advocate, help, and defend? These coworkersthese office alliesare more than simple happy hour pals. Theyre the anti-narcissistic stalwarts that can anchor you in the workplace, and help transform your entire career.
In this story (for Premium members only), youll learn:
How to spot those green flags that someone is a potential workplace ally or BFF
Why this particular type of workplace friendship is vital to your career growth prospects and ultimate happiness
The best thing you can do to make your workplace friendships stronger
BUILDING BONDS
Jim Harter, Gallups chief scientist for Workplace Management and Wellbeing, maintains that having someone whos a close workplace ally can deliver a number of benefits: boosting your confidence, standing up for you, championing you when youre not around, giving you honest advice, helping you network, and giving you a safe space to vent.
Not to mention, having a ride-or-die in your corner helps job performance, provides perspective, and makes you happier overall, among other benefits. Gallup research from 2022 found that employees with workplace best friends are significantly more likely to be more productive, engage team members, and share ideas. Adams says she immediately admired Poulin, who has always been more senior in her work role, for her realness and good judgment when giving advice or speaking to coworkers or clients.
I was like, This is someone I can trust. This is someone I can go to. And people really respect her at work for that, as well, she says. Each says they use the other as a sounding board when theyre trying to navigate a work situation, or to gauge their own reactions and responses.
Navigating the waters of management sometimes can be a little weird, especially, I think, as women too, where you want to be liked and you don’t want to come off as being rude or being bossy, she says. She adds Poulin is honest with her from not just a workplace perspective, but from a friend perspective, too.
IN SEARCH OF GREEN FLAGS
We often stumble into office allyships naturally and without having to tryAdams compliment on that dress just organically blossomed into something more. But experts do cite some things to look for as you scan your workplace horizons for authentic, trustworthy people.
Someone consistently displaying good character is one sign that this is someone you can trust, says workplace risk and culture strategist Kelley Bonner. They’re not just nice because it’s the boss or someone of high position. They’re like this regardless of people’s background and regardless of the setting, she says.
Another green flag? They give credit where credit is due, Bonner says, or speaking up on someone elses behalf when something is unfair, like if a colleague tells an inappropriate joke. It shows consistency and integrity, she says.
Also look for people who leave you feeling good, says friendship expert Shasta Nelson, author of The Business of Friendship. That is, they dont leave you drained, or filled with negativity. At the end of the day, who are the people that leave you feeling most accepted and most liked? she says. Whereas the red-flag opposite is someone who makes you feel like we never quite know where they stand.
Other times, an office ally is someone who just meets you where you are. The number-one way you can connect with somebody, and this is coming from my therapy background, is just validating what it is they’re experiencing,” says licensed psychologist Candice Balluru, founder of The Workplace Psychologist. They may have deep insight into some aspect of your life where you need to be supported, such as being a working parent, or navigating a climb up the corporate ladder.
And not just someone who listens to you vent about the RTO policy and agrees with yousomeone who might take another step with some sort of action, and follows through. Its one thing for a colleague to offer to introduce you to someone who can help, but when they actually make that introductionthat’s a sign that theyre invested in your success, the experts say.
THE POWER OF THESE ALLIES
Harter says that finding people who will be objective and honest with you about work situations is also important in building trust. If trust is built, critical feedback is more likely to be taken as constructive feedback, he says.
So, is the process of seeking out office allies simply looking for the opposite of those toxic coworkers? Not exactly, says Nelson.
It’s not just a bunch of one-off traits. Its the collective of these things being present, and that foundation being built incrementally and safely over time, she adds.
And when you give these friendships room to grow, they can improve your life outside of work, too, says psychologist, professor, and friendship expert Marisa G. Franco, author of the New York Times bestselling book Platonic: How the Science of Attachment an Help You Makeand KeepFriends.
To build true allyship, Franco recommends extending the friendship outside of the office by inviting your coworker to join you for a walk, drink, or meal, which she calls repotting,” term coined by friendship expert Ryan Hubbard. And just as repotting an already thriving plant makes it thrive even more, doing this with your office ally makes your friendship more lasting and sustainable, since youll become comfortable seeing each other in other settings.
That’s going to make for a closer connection than if you’re only at work, she says.
Balluru advises staying open to becoming allies with people who might not be your typical friend outside of the office, as well: Work is a controlled environment where you don’t really get to choose who you work with, she says. That provides opportunities to form friendships across generations, personality types, and other differences.
Adams says the bottom line is to look for people who would get a thumbs-up from people who love you. So while you want to improve your ability to spot your next office allydont let your ability to spot toxicity rust, either.
Look for someone who’s giving off an energy that your mom would be proud of, she advises. Steer away from the bad egg energy.
If you search for your city on a new map and zoom in, you can see pollution drifting from factories, power plants, and ports into your neighborhood. The mapa first-of-its-kind air quality tool from Climate TRACE, a nonprofit coalition cofounded by former Vice President Al Goreshows how pollution moves through cities.
The new interactive tool, launching September 24, is powered by a sophisticated model that tracks local air pollution and weather data and feeds the map. It shows PM 2.5 pollution (responsible for nearly 9 million deaths each year globally) in more than 2,500 cities.
Orange dots indicate sources of pollution, with a stream of smaller dots showing how it moves over the city, shifting course with the wind. Right now, the map presents snapshots of average and bad air days in each city. But it will later offer data in near real time.
[Image: Climate TRACE]
Eventually, we will have it on a daily basis, so that if you have a child with asthma or if you have family members with lung and heart conditions that make them sensitive to air pollution, you can go to your favorite weather app and see exactly what the pollution flows have been through your neighborhood that particular day, Gore says.
Health researchers can use the data to see how pollution is linked to disease at the neighborhood level. Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, for example, has one of the highest levels of air pollution in the world. One community in the area, called Reserve, has a cancer rate 50 times higher than the U.S. average.
[Image: Climate TRACE]
The tool’s visualizations can aid policymakers in making the case for more state regulation and help the worst-polluting sites transition to cleaner tech. (As the Environmental Protection Agency moves to stop collecting some emissions data, Climate TRACE, which stands for tracking real-time atmospheric carbon emissions, can also help partially fill that data gap.) Companies can use its data to identify and replace the worst polluters in their supply chains.
Because the same sources are responsible for both climate emissions and air pollution, highlighting the health impacts also helps build support for climate action. “Connecting those two streams of pollution, and tracing them back to the same combustion process, makes it easier to understand exactly why we have to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels,” says Gore.
[Image: Climate TRACE]
The coalition launched in 2020 to track greenhouse gas emissions using satellite images, other data, and machine learning to estimate the pollution emitted by industrial sites. Last year, the group added co-pollutants like particulate matter and sulfur dioxide to its database, using data on the size and type of each polluting site.
The new tool can help make the issue of air pollution seem more immediate and personal.
“My experience with everyone I’ve showed this to is that it feels abstract until they see themselves in the story,” says Gavin McCormick, cofounder of Climate TRACE. “You can show people on a map where their house is, they can show you where their kid goes to school, and you can see the pollution. I think that’s just kind of making people realize this is happening to them.
When using AI, most of us worry about the technology hallucinatingtelling us lies, misinformation, or nonsense that it presents as fact. But legendary fashion designer Norma Kamali has no such fear.
Over the past two years, Kamali has been using AI extensively in her work. Kamali, who recently celebrated her 80th birthday, partnered with computer scientists to create an AI platform based on her five decades of work as a designer, and she also took an AI course at MIT to better understand how the technology works.
“These scientists asked if they could download my brain,” she says. “They would isolate my intellectual property, brand history, and archive. At first I said, “No way.” But I’ve come to see the possibilities for my brand.”
Kamali has used her AI platform to design pieces for her own collection, including variations of her famous Sleeping Bag Coat. But she says that as she interacts with the AI, some of her favorite moments are when it hallucinates, generating bizarre images that explode with a strange kind of creativity. “The image is always a surprise,” she says. “If I say something like, I’d like to put a fishtail on this swimsuit worn with a sleeping bag coat, the AI goes crazy. It’s beyond gorgeous in the most art tech, fashion way.”
As AI companies continue to refine the technology with the aim of eliminating mistakes, Kamali believes its only a matter of time before hallucinations no longer occur. But she says she’ll be sad when that time comes. In many ways, her open-minded approach to AI is a microcosm of her openness as a designer, which has paved the way to all kinds of unconventional, creative collaborations.
“AI, for me, has been a really joyous experience,” she says. “We’re in this little moment in history that will eventually disappear. But then we’ll find other things to excite us.”
[Photo: Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Fast Company]
Kamali launched her label in 1976 and became an overnight sensation when Farrah Fawcett wore one of her red bathing suits in a poster that same year. It’s ironic to Kamali that she first made her name with a swimsuit because she really didn’t like the version that Fawcett had purchased. “I would use my shop as a lab, making six of a new style to test and see what sold,” she recalls. “I had no idea she had come in and bought that one. I really hated it: I didn’t like the fit or anything about it, and quickly took it out of the shop.”
Kamali is proudest of the moments when she’s been willing to innovate and explore ideas that to others may have seemed unconventional. She’s often proven to be far ahead of her time. In the early 1970s, for example, she created the Sleeping Bag Coat, inspired by a camping trip. The coat became iconic (its on display at MoMA), at a time when most coats were made of wool.
It ended up being a precursor to the puffer coats that are now ubiquitous around the world in cold weather. Another cutting edge-design was her line of Sweats sportswear, which she launched in the 1980s. It was designed to be worn outside of the gym, three decades before the “athleisure” trend would take over modern life.
Kamali hasn’t just been willing to take risks with design, she’s also been willing to try new things at retail. In 2003, Target began collaborating with designers to create more affordable versions of their clothing, starting with Isaac Mizrahi and Michael Graves. Walmart, on the other hand, was not known for being particularly design-oriented. But in the early 2000s, Kamali met with a Walmart buyer who proposed a partnership. Much like with AI, Kamali took a minute to think about it before she embraced it. “I was like, Oh my God, I’ve never been to Walmart,” she recalls thinking.
Then she realized there was a need for smart, fashion-forward clothes at an affordable price point. She grew up going to public schools in New York City, and she knew there were many parents who didnt attend parent-teacher meetings because they didn’t have the right clothes. There were also teachers who couldnt afford to buy professional-looking clothes on their salaries. “I felt that teachers should dignify the position, and look amazing in front of the kids in their class,” she says.
So Kamali created a wardrobe that was everything an adult would need to walk into a school and look polished: a trench coat, a white collared shirt, black trousers, ballet slippers, and pumps. She also worked hard to find manufacturers who could create these products at the best possible quality given the price point, which was less than $20 per item. The popularity of the collection became clear when Kamali noticed that people were reselling these products on eBay for upwards of $200 apiece.
Ultimately, Kamali believes the success of her business has been all about being open to going in unconventional directions, and not following the status quo within the industry. This is another moment when she can redefine her work, and Kamali doesn’t want to miss the chance to engage in new creative outlets. There’s a lot of fear, but there’s so much more opportunity,” she says. “I’m having a wonderful time playing around with [AI] and asking it to play with my ideas.”
Your company has rolled out AI like its a new office uniform. Everyones using it. And unlike most uniforms, people are using it even when they are told not to. As a result, your inbox clears itself, your reports write themselves, and meetings collapse into neat little summaries at the click of a button. You may be even be fantasizing about sending your digital clone to those pointless meetings, and perhaps your colleagues have done so already (which may explain their perfect attendance record).
And yet, theres a difference between outsourcing pointless tasks to AI, and making work better (which also requires you to figure out what to do with the time you save). Plainly put, if you are running faster in the wrong direction you will only get to the wrong place faster. This may explain the recent resurgence of an old paradox, Robert Solows law, which in the late 1980s noted that You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
What are you really using AI for?
Right now, most companies treat AI like an espresso shot for knowledge workers. A jolt to help fire off emails, draft decks, or summarize meetings. It feels like magic, but magic tricks dont grow the bottom line. Saving a few minutes here and there is like sweeping the kitchen when the roof is leaking.
Part of AIs seduction is its smooth, conversational interface. Ask, and you shall receive. But business value doesnt appear by asking polite questions: It usually requires hard structural change. And so far, AIs biggest impact has been making existing processes leaner, often by replacing the interns and juniors who used to do that work. Think of it as corporate liposuction: It trims the fat, but it doesnt build new muscle. To be sure, as the great Peter Drucker noted, there is nothing so useless as to make more efficiently what should not be done at all, which may explain why, in a resurgence of Solows law, AI is everywhere except in the productivity stats.
Cutting costs makes humans twitch
Behavioral economists call it loss aversion: We hate losing more than we enjoy winning. Announce that AI will eliminate jobs, and people panic, even when the math adds up. History, though, shows a different pattern: As old tasks disappear, new ones emerge. Just as the rise of spreadsheets created a need for finance analysts, AI will create demand for data governance, ethics, and human oversight. The long arc of technology bends toward job growth, but the bumps along the way are brutal.
The real promise of AI isnt subtraction, its addition
Netflix recently used generative AI to add an impossible scene to a show, something too costly and complex with traditional methods. Thats the story leaders should chase: holding baseline costs steady and producing something better. AI at its best is not a fancier calculator; its a time machine that lets you create what yesterday was impossible.
So what makes a great AI project?
Right now, too many organizations are wandering around with a hammer, mistaking everything for a nail. A CEOs blanket mandate, everyone must use AI, is like ordering an army to march without telling them where the battle is.
Great AI projects share three ingredients:
Volume: Attack the most common, repetitive activities that drive your business. Shave seconds off the thing done a million times, and youve found your goldmine.
Variability: Raise the floor. Get average performers closer to your best. Its like tightening a symphony so fewer notes are off-key.
Human Glue: Fix the broken joints between systems. AI shines when it eliminates the soul-crushing cut-and-paste that holds organizations hostage.
But heres the kicker: speeding up one cog in a broken machine doesnt make the whole machine run better. Unless you reimagine end-to-end processes (often across teams and departments) youre just moving bottlenecks around, and should really not expect great results.
Data: the ceiling that caps your ambitions
AI is like a gourmet chef: It can cook only with the ingredients you give it. If your data is stale, inconsistent, or scattered across warring silos, dont expect a Michelin-starred meal. Most firms have exquisite data in a few areas (finance, operations), but HR and talent data? Thats like a pantry filled with mystery cans. You know who got promoted, but not why. You feel when a team clicks, but cant quantify it in machine-readable terms. Without proprietary, well-structured data, your competitive advantage is just reheating the same meal as everyone else.
Culture: the silent killer
Even the sharpest AI project can crash into an organizations immune system. A culture obsessed with cost-cutting breeds fear. Misaligned incentives choke collaboration. A weak communication culture makes change management impossible. Remember, 80% of change projects fail, and AI doesnt get a free pass (it is still a change management task, and very much led by humans).
Layoffs may feel like the obvious shortcut, but decades of research show that slashing headcount first is like burning the furniture to heat the house. It buys a little time, but undermines long-term survival. Leaders need to show courage, humility, and clarity. Employees, meanwhile, can choose to be architects of change instead of passive victimsreimagining work, learning new skills, and using AI as a career lever rather than a threat.
Doin Better
Right now, too many firms are playing the corporate equivalent of toddler soccer: everyone chasing the ball, no strategy, lots of shouting. Winning with AI depends on three foundations:
The right technology, deployed against the right problems
The right data, accurate and unique
The right culture, aligned and prepared for change
Everything else is noise.
The lesson is clear: AI is not the main course, it is the fire. It can burn the house down, or it can cook a feast no one thought possible. What separates the two outcomes is not the cleverness of the algorithms, but the imagination of the people deploying them. If leaders see AI only as a knife for trimming costs, they will eventually cut into the bone of their own organizations. But if they see it as a telescope (an instrument that lets us glimpse horizons we couldnt see before) then AI becomes a catalyst for growth, innovation, and human potential. The future wont be won by those who use AI most quickly, but by those who use it most wisely: to create new value, to elevate human talent, and to turn technological possibility into strategic reality.
When people think innovation, they tend to think startup. Theres no question that the most transformative ideas in business often emerge from young ventures: new entrepreneurs building new companies powered by new ideas. At Fast Company, we peer around a lot of corners, trying to identify the most compelling stories emerging from this undiscovered terrain.
But I have a little secret to share. While I love the shock of the new as much as the next business journalist, theres a subset of innovation coverage that I tend to find more surprising and inspiringgreat stories about legacy businesses that are innovating from within. This issue is full of fine examples of this, starting with our cover story on Starbucks and its CEO, Brian Niccol, by global design editor Mark Wilson.
Shortly after taking the Starbucks job a year ago, Niccol launched a back-to-basics strategy. He culled the bloated menu, launched an ad campaign that refocused consumers attention on the quality of the coffee itself, jettisoned those printed drink-order stickers on cups for cute handwritten Sharpie notes, and worked to improve the physical experience of sitting in a Starbucks and enjoying your drink. All of these moves acknowledged that in its pursuit of operational efficiency (including a gold-standard app for pickup orders), the coffee giant had lost some magic.
Niccol has stabilized Starbucks, but the strategy has yet to deliver the results shareholders expect and demand. He insists that its early still, and that his plan for year twoincluding a full redesign of 1,000 storeswill move the numbers in a meaningful way. Wilson explains and analyzes this plan in detail.
Later in the issue, senior staff writer Elizabeth Segran talks to Latriece Watkins, the chief merchant at Walmart and a two-decade veteran of the company. Watkinss delicate task: attracting affluent shoppers to the value chain without alienating its budget-conscious consumer base.
And I interviewed ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro about the sports behemoths new eponymous streaming service, which finally debuted in late August after years of planning and half-measures such as ESPN+. Among the topics we covered was gambling, an increasingly integrated feature of the ESPN experience. Is that innovative? Sure. Is it good for sports (and society)? Almost certainly not.
Theres probably another reason I like to readand publishjournalism about innovation at legacy companies: Fast Company is itself a legacy brand. We turn 30 this fall. In November 1995, Bill Taylor and Alan Webber, whod formerly worked at the Harvard Business Review, launched this sui generis business magazine. It immediately spawned a flurry of imitators, such as Business 2.0, Red Herring, and The Industry Standard. Only Fast Company remains. I like to think that its because we take what we cover so seriouslyand learn from it.
Happy birthday to us! And thank you, as always, for being here.
Media companies have filed so many lawsuits against AI companies over the past two years that the act has become routine. When I report on these in The Media Copilot newsletter, they’re often digest items, adding to the pile of publishers who want fair compensation for the content AI labs have ingested to create large language models (LLMs). There are so many that elaborate infographics are required to keep track of them all.
Penske Media’s copyright lawsuit, however, is anything but typical, and that’s because of its choice of target. The Rolling Stone publisher is going after Google.
Google is in many ways the big fish in the AI world. It’s true that more people use OpenAI’s ChatGPT than they do Google Gemini, but Google has the distinction of being both a frontier AI lab and the current owner-operator of the primary way people get information on the internet. If you count AI Overviews in search, Google is arguably bringing AI to more people than anyone on the planet, period.
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And because of that, the media is starting to feel serious pain. As more Google searches result in answers instead of 10 blue links, people aren’t clicking like they used to, and the referral traffic that publishers depend on is drying up. To add insult to injury, Google uses a single crawler to index websites for both regular search and AI, forcing publishers to allow it to harvest their content for Overviews even while search is sending them fewer and fewer referrals.
The dam is bursting
Still, nobody wants that referral number to go to zero, so virtually no one in the publishing world has dared poke the big G. When News Corp sued Perplexity last year, there weren’t that many AI search engines yet, but there was at least one more: Google. Everything News Corp cited in its complaintthat Perplexity ingested content, used it to build a competing product in its AI answers, and didn’t bother to pursue content licensingcould equally apply to Google, yet no second lawsuit was filed.
Will that change now that Penske Media has made its move? And I don’t mean just for News Corpif the publisher of Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Billboard has looked at the numbers and decided legal action is worth the cost and risk, how many others are coming to the same conclusion? On the other hand, this might play out more like The New York Times v. OpenAI, with other publishers mostly watching from the sidelines, reasoning they could play it safe and still benefit if there’s a decision favorable to the media.
We’ll know the answer to that soon enough, and yes, technically Penske Media isn’t the first content provider to sue Google over AI Overviews; Chegg, an online educator, filed suit against the $3 trillion tech giant back in February. But Penske’s lawsuit does something else: It exposes Google’s claim that AI Overviews send “higher quality” traffic to publishers as a meaningless consolation prize.
Last fall, when the effects of Overviews were just beginning, Google said that people who click on links in the summaries were more intentional users, and thus more likely to engage and even transact with the sites they click on. And that may be true, but it’s telling that Google still hasn’t provided concrete data to back up that claimspecifically how much Overviews reduce click-through rates overall.
And that’s OK, because now we have third-party data on the click-through rates of AI answer engines, and they’re dismal. Pew Research, Similarweb, and TollBit have compared the crawl-to-referral ratios for AI engines to search engines, looking at how many users they actually send versus how often they scrape content (which usually is indicative of a search), and they don’t look good. Click-through from AI search is 90% lower than regular search, per TollBit.
In other words, the drop-off in referrals from AI summaries is so massive that, in almost all cases, the “higher-quality” visitors couldn’t possibly make up for the loss in business from the lost search referral traffic. And remember: Google doesn’t separate its search and AI botsyou either let both crawl your site, or you get nothing.
Google Nero?
Google is rumored to have begun talks with publishers to license content for its AI, which would be a massive shift, and possibly quell the impulse for other publishers to join Penske in the legal arena. However, that would turn Google AI search results into another OpenAI: summaries that included content from publishers big enough to have leverage, leaving smaller players with little recourse but to continue to provide their content to Google for free.
If the two Google crawlers were separate, things would be different. Publishers of any size could opt-out of AI Overviews while maintaining their position in regular search. The fact that Google is considering paying publishers for AI is evidence that the two technologies are governed by different business models. Forcing a site to give up content for both is like a gas station that forces you to get a car wash before it’ll fill up your tank.
Over the past decade, the publishing world has woken up to the predations of Big Tech. The search/social era didn’t turn out well for the industry, and now it wants to choose a different path with AI. Except now tech companies like Google have so much leverage over distriution, the choice has been taken away. Can a lawsuit get it back? Maybe, maybe not. But at least it shows the media is no longer afraid to try.
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A number of people online are declaring that some of the best bosses in the workforce are middle-aged dads who have daughters.
The reason? Male bosses with daughters are more likely to see the world through their daughters eyes, sympathize with womens struggles, and go to bat for them when it comes to promotions and pay raises. Theres research that backs up some of these ideas, and its something more people have noticed anecdotally and started discussing online, Fortune recently reported.
As one TikTok user describes the appeal: Hes no longer the main character in his own life, adding that a girl-dad boss has more awareness around issues like sexism, confidence gaps, unfair expectations. . . . He listens more, hes less reactive, hes got perspective. That self-awareness arc makes for a better leader.
Another proud TikTok user gushed, looking pleased as punch: When your Gen X girl dad mentor at work tells you hes proud of you.
POV: corporate girlies when they find a male manager thats a girl dad, wrote another. In the clip she is celebrating and dancing around the room.
Many in the comments agreed with her sentiment. When they have daughters it changes the game, one person commented. Someone needs to do a case study on why they are the best managers, another suggested.
Its not just hearsaydata has long backed this up.
Having a daughter can also push male CEOs toward greater support for women in the workplace as they become more attuned to the struggles they face, research from the Stockholm School of Economics, Erasmus University, and Jönköping University confirmed. A male CEO having a daughter, rather than a son, correlates with a 4% increase in female directors and an 11% increase in female employees, the research found.
Further research discovered firms at which senior partners had more daughters than sons hired more women partners. They also performed better than their competitors. At firms where senior partners had more daughters, the female hiring rate was 11.87%but at firms where the partners had equal numbers of daughters and sons, it dropped to 9.78%. It dropped even further for those who had more sons than daughters.
Its not only in business that girl dads are making the world a better place. U.S. congressmen with daughters are also found to vote more liberally on womens issues, especially on reproductive rights, as do U.S. federal judges.
The Walt Disney Co. continues to find itself in a crossfire, with Republicans taking shots from the right and Democrats landing blows from the left.
Following a nearly weeklong drama surrounding the suspension and subsequent reinstatement of late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, Disney has announced price hikes for Disney+ streaming subscriptions, escalating tensions as the company contends with both PR backlash and potential subscriber losses.
We all know price hikes for Disney+ arent unusual, but could the timing be any worse?
Journalist Marisa Kabas suggested on Bluesky Monday that Disneys decision to bring Kimmel back might have been rushed due to the planned price increases, citing an unnamed Disney source. Fast Company reached out to Disney for comment.
How much are prices going up, and when do they take effect?
The new rates hit October 21. The ad-supported plan for Disney+ jumps $2, to $11.99, while the no-ads premium plan jumps $3, to $18.99.
The Disney+ and Hulu bundle jumps $2, to $12.99, while the no-ads premium bundle stays at $19.99.
The full list of increases is posted on the Disney+ support page.
Following the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! by ABC last week, high-profile celebrities joined the chorus of critics calling out parent company Disney, loudly venting their frustrations. Tatiana Maslany, star of Marvels She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, urged her followers to cancel subscriptions, while Damon Lindelof, a co-creator of ABCs Lost, took to Instagram to say that he wouldnt work with Disney again if Kimmels suspension wasnt lifted.
Analysts who spoke with Fast Company last week doubted that Disney would feel a long-term financial impact from boycott efforts.
Shares of the Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS) were essentially flat on Tuesday, closing at $112.25.
It’s no secret that Gen Z has a less optimistic economic outlook than older generations. So, it’s no wonder many of them are engaging in so-called “financial nihilism,” applying a gloomy outlook to their financial mindset, resulting in a new and different take on investing.
Zoomers grew up with smartphones, the internet, and social media during difficult times like the 2008 economic crisis and Great Recession, and the subsequent protest movement, Occupy Wall Street. And as such, they’re disillusioned with traditional ways of doing things, which extends to how they invest and conduct their own finances.
What is ‘financial nihilism’?
First coined in 2021 by Demetri Kofinas, the host of the Hidden Forces podcast, “financial nihilism” is a trend that describes how Gen Z and even some younger millennials, who are profoundly disillusioned with the traditional financial system, believing its unfair and unpredictable, are finding it pointless to save for retirement or invest in the stock market, or in bonds, or other conventional ways. That’s given the state of things such as: stagnant wages, the soaring cost of living, massive student debt, and the difficulty of homeownership.
Basically, they believe the American Dream is a scam, and they may have to live with their parents forever without ever owning a home.
Gravitating to crypto, meme stocks, and ETFs
Instead of playing the stock or bond markets in traditional ways, Gen Z is gravitating to more rewarding, but riskier strategies like investing in cryptocurrencies including bitcoin and meme coins, as well as meme stocks and sports betting platforms, CNBC reported.
According to the outlet, Gen Z is the most likely generation to say they were either curious about or planning to invest in cryptocurrencies over the next five years, per a recent U.S. Bank survey.
In short, what we are seeing is a loss of faith in the real value of money and the function of the market.
Perhaps Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson summed it up best when he said: “It’s hard to fault people for wanting to get rich quick if they have lost faith in their ability to get rich slow.”
