Office Hour

Bahram Akradi is the founder and CEO of Life Time, the Minnesota-based chain of upscale “athletic country clubs” – these are gyms you want to hang out all day in, basically. Akradi has always seen — and marketed — Life Time as more than a gym: a kind of lifestyle hub that brings together training, recovery, sport, wellness, food, work, and socializing. You can even get your GLP-1s there, if you’d rather lose weight the new-fashioned way. Life Time has been in rapid expansion mode of late, with around 200 locations nationwide. Its financial performance has been strong, with Q2 revenue up 14 percent year over year, to $866 million, even as its member numbers remain relatively flat. The company is trying to get more money out of each member – we talk a lot about how. In 2025, when we named Life Time a Most Innovative Company, told Fast Company it could fill new clubs with practically no traditional marketing, often drawing waitlists as soon as a location was announced. In this conversation, we’ll ask whether that demand remains as strong—and explore the company’s expansion ambitions, its deliberately premium economics, its quality standards, and what it takes to scale a high-touch experience without diluting it. We’ll also discuss Life Time’s pandemic-era reset, its ambitions in longevity, and whether a business built around sweating in immediate proximity to other humans is truly AI-proof. Fast Company is the world's leading progressive business media brand, with a unique editorial focus on innovation in technology, leadership, and design. Follow us on: https://www.facebook.com/FastCompany/ https://twitter.com/FastCompany https://www.instagram.com/fastcompany/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/fast-company/

Nick Law and Brendan Vaughan delve deep into a big new study Accenture Song's team just published on why so many companies struggle to actually turn their creativity into revenue. In other words, how to apply these ideas in a systemic way, not just have them in a bolt of creative lighting, only to see them fizzle and go nowhere in practice. The number that stopped me in my tracks: 81% of executives say their companies can come up with creative ideas, but only 16% say they consistently turn those ideas into actual growth. Nick unpacks the secrets of that 16%. He also gets into why he thinks most companies have built cultures that are exactly wrong for the AI moment we're in. Oh, and at one point, Nick calculates what a certain Beatles song would be worth in today's dollars — spoiler, it's a lot, for three minutes of work. Even if your colleagues aren’t quite as creative as Paul and John, there’s a lesson in here.

Astro Teller has a legitimate claim to the title of  the “coolest job in tech.” He’s the “captain of moonshots” at X, the Moonshot Factory, which is Alphabet’s in-house incubator for radical technologies aimed at huge global problems. He’s kind of the Willy Wonka of Google. Since 2010, Teller—whose grandfather was the famed physicist Edward Teller—has been turning sci‑fi ideas into projects like self‑driving cars (Waymo), delivery drones (Wing), and many more.  In this episode of Office Hour, we get into how Teller actually runs the Moonshot Factory day-to-day—how his team decides which wild ideas to back, how quickly they kill the ones that don’t work, and how they actually go about trying to turn the survivors into the next Waymo.

If you’ve followed the rise of soccer in the United States – America’s sport of the future since 1971 – you know his voice, you know his humor, you know his unrivaled passion. He is Roger Bennett, the co-founder of the Men in Blazers Media Network. By the way I stole the line about the sport of the future from Rog, who likes to say some version of that at the beginning of his podcasts. We are speaking to Rog at a truly monumental moment for his beloved sport. The World Cup is finally here, running in 16 cities across the United States, Canada, and Mexico – but mostly the United States  Rog insists here, now, finally, with the world’s eyes on America’s stewardship of the  most glorious sporting event on earth – this will be the moment it officially becomes the sport of the now. Not just during the World Cup, but after it. In this episode, we trace the incredible journey of Men in Blazers—from a “janky” (his words) podcast that paid him $250 an episode to a sprawling independent media empire with TV shows, live tours, and a recent Series A venture round of $15 million to expand ahead of this World Cup – the first time Men in Blazers has taken outside funding.  Rog opens up about the business of modern sports media, how major blue-chip brands like Budweiser and Bank of America became characters in his ecosystem, and the fascinating, controversial "Americanization" of the global game.

Four months ago, John Furner took the helm as CEO of Walmart Inc. after a lifetime at the company. Today, he’s steering a “people-led, tech-powered” transformation of the world’s largest retailer, which employs more than 2 million people worldwide. Furner has already centralized Walmart’s historically fragmented tech and product divisions under unified leadership in an attempt to supercharge enterprise-wide products and services—especially AI capabilities. As thousands of Walmart employees descend on Arkansas for the company’s annual Associates Week, Furner sat down for his first in-depth conversation in his new role. He discussed everything from leading through a moment of massive change to turning forklift operators and developers alike into AI builders.