“Hope is a practice. It comes from doing.” As the head of Planned Parenthood, Alexis McGill Johnson is regrouping in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to remove the federal right to safe abortion. Johnson is now faced with the challenge to move her team from tears and shock to action. Any leader faced with a worst-case scenario can learn from her vision: “to fight and stay courageous, and maintain ourselves.”

Every company has its own internal factions: engineers vs. designers, East Coast vs. West, IT vs. everybody. The trick is turning factionalism into healthy competition that propels you toward your shared mission. At Motorola, Cisco, and now her start-up Fable, Padma Warrior has tapped into the power of internal divisions. It’s not about separating people into warring camps; it’s about building bridges from our differences, rather than divisions.

For Reid Hoffman, the way to live a meaningful and productive life is to focus on one key area: friendships. Speaking at Vanderbilt University’s 2022 commencement, he shares four lessons on why friendships are crucial for helping us achieve our potential and enact meaningful change.

Most future of work conversations revolve around the “where,” but Upwork CEO Hayden Brown says it’s more important to focus on the “who.” 10% of the workforce at Upwork, the global tech platform for millions of freelance workers, was directly impacted by the war in Ukraine. Hayden’s people-focused approach to the difficult decision of how to manage remote employees there and in Russia is the same mindset she applies to meet the needs of all workers, from people feeling conflict to working mothers.

A diverse network of collaborators is key when making scale leaps. Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel has cultivated a wide network of scientists, business leaders, and government officials across his career. When COVID-19 struck, Bancel called upon this nexus of experts to aid the warp-speed development of the mRNA-based vaccine in the race to save millions of lives.

With the workplace in historic flux, consulting firm PwC is committing a whopping $2.4 billion to create an employee engagement platform offering a radically new level of choice. PwC’s U.S. chair, Tim Ryan, shares why the bold initiative is necessary in the face of the Great Resignation. It’s just one of several evolving crises, Ryan says, that has made leading a business more complex and demanding than ever.

Alyona Mysko, the CEO of a B2B startup in Ukraine called Fuelfinance, walks us through the lessons she’s learned while leading her company in wartime — sometimes working with her team from bomb shelters during the day. All of Ukraine is running like a startup now, she says: Each citizen takes the initiative to pick up what needs to be done.

Eric Friedrichsen, the CEO of Emburse, a B2B software provider, has navigated risks and costs to meet the needs of their tech contractors based in Ukraine — like offering to relocate families, and funding housing costs for colleagues taking refuge in Poland. These choices haven’t come without obstacles. But the benefits are moral, communal, and quantifiable.

Your local community can be the power behind an epic scale story — because smart community investment always maximizes returns. In creating opportunities for new jobs, Chobani’s Hamdi Ulukaya created opportunities for massive scale.

“It’s not about fixing women. It’s about fixing the system,” says Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code and Marshall Plan for Moms. As the author of Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work, Reshma pushes the discourse around the “future of work” to include flexibility, childcare, and an end to the hustle culture — for all of us.

No matter what phase of growth you’re in, you need useful, cost-effective data. Data is essential to scale. Take it from Sheila Lirio Marcelo, the founder and former CEO of Care.com, the two-sided marketplace connecting working families with care providers. Marcelo scaled her business past the competition by getting the right data at the right time. As she says: “Something I coach a lot of entrepreneurs: You can have a great vision and idea, but start with a lot of data and testing.”

“You have to preserve your energy; this year has been about pace,” says restaurateur Danny Meyer, as he catches us up on the past seven-plus months of operating in the midst of pandemic. In the beginning of summer 2021, when Covid rates were plummeting in New York City, he was full of optimism: His restaurants were back to indoor dining, and despite a limited workforce, “progress is progress.” Then came the Delta variant.