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chr (ANV): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Neurodivergent employees (such as those with autism or ADHD) represent a chronically underutilized talent pool — because few employers have developed the inclusive practices necessary to unlock their full potential. In this talk, we will explore how organizations fail to recognize different ways of working, what that oversight costs them, and how innovative organizations are driving real results through neuroinclusive design. How can leaders think beyond traditional systems and reframe inclusion as both a leadership responsibility and a business advantage? 

Daniel Wendler, Clinical Psychologist, Author, Improve Your Social Skills

Untapped Talent: Why Neurodiversity is a Workforce Advantage

Conferences

I need to ask you all the most important question. This is the most important question you're going to hear all summit. It might even be the most important question you hear all year, because this question could save your life. You ready? Here it is. How do you survive a bear attack? Imagine this, you're out in the wilderness, your phone battery is dead, you can't ask AI what to do, and then behind you, you hear a rustling, you hear a growling, and you turn and there is a bear. What do you do? How do you survive? Well, first of all, this is a metaphor, so bear with me, because this metaphor is going to explain how to unlock one of the biggest sources of wasted talent within your organization. And second, it depends on the bearer. There's actually a series of sayings that explains what you're supposed to do depending on the situation, and it goes like this. If it's black, fight back, because a black bear is not that big, it's not that aggressive. If you pop it in the nose, it'll say, oh, that hurt, and it might leave you alone. If it's brown, lie down, because a grizzly bear is much bigger, it's much more aggressive. If you punch it in the nose, it's going to take that really personal, and so your best bet is to play dead and hope that maybe it eats somebody else instead. But there's one more kind of bear, and it's the polar bear. And in that case, the advice goes like this. If it's white, good night, because a polar bear is an apex predator, it is the deadliest thing on the Arctic ice, and if it decides that you look tasty, you might as well just accept that that's what's going to happen. There's really not a lot that you can do about it if a polar bear wants to turn you into bear chow. But, What if we took our polar bear from the Arctic, where it's having a grand old time eating all the people that didn't come to this talk and learned to avoid it, and for some reason, we decided to give it a ride down to Austin, Texas, where I live and where our summers often reach over 100 degrees for weeks at a time. In that case, our bear would not be doing so well, would it? It would really be struggling in that Texas heat. It might not even survive. And if we saw that happening, if we saw our polar bear struggling to get by in the Texas desert, what would we say? Would we say, that polar bear is lazy, it just needs to try harder. Would we say, oh, that poor polar bear, it, it has polar bear disorder, and so it's, it's just not capable of anything. We, we can only pity it, we can't expect anything good from it. No, of course not. Remember, the polar bear is an apex predator, it's the deadliest of all the bears, so the bear isn't the problem. The problem is the environment. The polar bear is in an environment that isn't set up to meet its needs, and if we want our bear to thrive, we don't need the bear to change. We need to change the environment. We need to get our polar bear some air conditioning. This is the exact same principle that explains how we can unlock the talent of the neurodivergent team members within our organization. Neurodivergent refers to people who have minds that work differently than the norm, people with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, things like that. And it's, uh, it's different than folks who aren't neurotypical, who have minds that function the way that society expects. And because most people are neurotypical, our organizations are designed according to neurotypical needs, which means that people with neurodivergent needs get left out. We design meetings for neurotypical ways of communication, and then autistic people might struggle to speak up and contribute their ideas. We design our workflows for neurotypical ways of allocating attention, and then somebody with ADHD gets lost and struggles to make their full contribution. One way or another, the talent of neurodivergent team members gets left wasted. I should know. I'm autistic and the early stages of my career looked a lot like a polar bear staggering around with heatstroke. I was fired from jobs where I had the talent to contribute, but not the support I needed to unlock that talent. I was rejected from graduate schools that didn't believe an autistic person would ever be capable of becoming a psychologist. But you know what? I did become a psychologist, and I built a great career where I get to speak to audiences like this one all across the country. I'm still just as autistic as I've ever been. The only thing that changed is that I figured out how to get myself environments that worked for me. I was able to build inclusive environments where instead of fighting against neurotypical norms, I was able to focus more on making my unique contribution. But most neurodivergent people are not as lucky as I was, and this represents a staggering waste of talent. Gallup estimates that 15 to 20% of the population is neurodivergent, but 80 to 85% of that group is unemployed or underemployed. That is a huge pool of talent just waiting on the sidelines, looking for an organization where they can make their contribution, and many of them don't find it. A 2025 EY study discovered that neurodivergent people, 92% of them, said that they were unable to reach their full potential at work due to a lack of support or unnecessary barriers, 92%. Is it any wonder that that same study found that over a third of neurodivergent employees planned to leave their job within the next year? It doesn't have to be this way. We can build inclusive workplaces where every kind of mind has what it needs to succeed. And when we do that, something remarkable happens. It unlocks benefits for the entire organization. Accenture found that organizations that lead in inclusivity for neurodiversity and disability are also the companies that win economically. They have higher revenue, higher income, higher profit. This is borne out by the experiences of a number of leading organizations such as Wells Fargo, SAP, Microsoft, that discovered that when they invested in neuroinclusivity programs, they were rewarded with more employee retention, more innovation, more productivity. So neuroinclusivity creates a win-win where taking care of your people also means taking care of your bottom line. And it's a fun way to kind of dunk on your competition because that same Accenture study found. That more than 2/3 of organizations were not achieving leading scores in inclusivity, meaning that if your company becomes a leader in this area, you immediately leapfrog over 2/3 of your competitors and you gain a durable, competitive advantage in attracting the kind of talent that is looking for a place where it can make its best contribution. But of course business is around hard strategic choices, and you might be saying, well, I, I want to invest in this area, but I've got to think about the rest of my team. I've got to think about all the neurotypical folks. I can't focus on just one small group, and to that I would say, aha, you need to hear about universal design because there's a principle, and this is borne out by a lot of research, that when we invest in less typical needs, it ends up benefiting everybody in unexpected innovative ways. If you've ever used the ramp on a sidewalk to push a stroller or a shopping cart or do a sweet skateboard trick or something, you can thank somebody who uses a wheelchair because those were added to sidewalks as part of the disability rights movement to allow wheelchair users to access more spaces. If you've ever watched a video with the sound off but understood it because of the captions, you can thank somebody who's deaf because that technology was invented to help deaf people access videos, but now it helps everybody. And in the same way, if your organization invests in in innovations that help neurodivergent folks, it's going to end up helping everybody. If you rethink how you do your meetings to allow autistic people to communicate better, well, that's probably going to lead to ideas that help everybody communicate better. If you invest in flexible workflows that work better for minds with ADHD, well, those flexible workflows might end up creating benefits for everybody. And you also unlock the innovative potential of your neurodivergent mind. A different EI study found that neurodivergent folks were 55% more likely than neurotypical people to use AI at work, because we need AI tools to help us in those neurotypical environments, and so we're going to be pushing the frontiers, we're going to be finding out what those tools are capable of, and when we learn that, we're going to bring that to the rest of the organization. That's what you get when you invest in neuro inclusivity. So, no matter how you happen to invest, one thing is clear, it is a necessary thing. All you have to do is ask yourself the real, most important question. When somebody on your team is struggling, you need to wonder not, are they lazy, do they need to try harder, are they just not the right fit here? You need to ask, are they a polar bear in the desert? Is there a need that our working environment isn't meeting for this person, and then critically, can we create a workplace environment that does meet that need? Because nobody gets to choose the temperature outside in the desert for the polar bear, but our workplaces, we get to choose what those look like, and we can design them in a way that works for everybody. And this might look different depending on the needs and the structure of your organization. It might look like rethinking your processes like it did for SAP and Microsoft, who discovered that their hiring processes didn't work for autistic people who were struggling during the job interviews. They said, OK, what if we offer people a work sample instead so we can evaluate their capabilities in a way that is inclusive for them. It might look like training your leaders and empowering your managers, like it did for JPMorgan Chase that invested in training programs for their managers to teach those managers how to provide direct, clear feedback to autistic team members in a way that those autistic team members could could use and apply to their work. It might even look like rethinking physically how your environments are set up, like it did for Barclays, that pioneered inclusive measures when they designed their new flagship corporate campus, and they built it from the ground up with features like sensory friendly quiet rooms and low decibel hand dryers, because they realized that it just didn't make sense for their talent to be focused on dealing with an uncomfortable sensory environment when it could be giving its full attention to the work. No matter what it looks like for your organization. One thing is clear. It will be one of the smartest investments that you ever make. Give your polar bears what they need to thrive and be amazed at what your people are truly capable of. Thank you.

In late 2022, Carvana was flirting with bankruptcy after its stock collapsed 99% in just 16 months. Now, the online used-car retailer is staging a stunning comeback, pouring billions into acquisitions, infrastructure, AI, and its signature car vending machines. 

In this episode of Next to Lead, Fortune’s C-suite and Leadership editor Ruth Umoh sits down with Carvana strategy chief Christina Keiser to discuss what it will take to sustain that momentum and how it came back from the brink.

How Carvana survived a 99% stock collapse | Next to Lead

Leadership

The 2026 Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list highlights a major shift toward cultures of listening and well-being. Fortune’s Matt Heimer breaks down how the most successful companies are using AI training and flexible work models to build a future-proof workforce.

From flexible Fridays to AI partners: Synchrony Financial leads the 2026 Fortune 100 Best Companies To Work For list

Careers

The results are in, we now know the 100 best companies to work for in the United States and the top 5, drumroll please, Synchrony Financial, Hilton. Cisco, American Express, and Wegman's. This year's Fortune 100 best companies to work for, it really is, as the name suggests, a ranking of the large American companies that are thought of as great places to work by their own employees. The companies that finished highest this year really leaned in on a kind of humane workplace, whether that meant more flexible work hours, better programs to support people who Have dependents and also good health and well-being benefits across the board. Flexibility really remains the perk that people seem to care about most. Synchrony is number one on this year's list. They are a financial services company that specializes in credit cards. Flexible Fridays is something that their workforce asked for and that management said yes, we should have that. One interesting phenomenon is that in the time since Synchrony made that benefit available, Their earnings have doubled. Some of the companies on our list have very, very high approachability scores. One of the highest is Hilton Hotels, which had a 93% rating. That's especially impressive when you consider that Hilton's workforce spans everywhere from corporate headquarters all the way down to the people who are making meals in the hotel restaurants. Wegman's, the regional supermarket chain, they have a Slack channel called Ask Bob, where all the frontline. Workers in the company can make suggestions to Bob about ways to run the store better and ways to serve their customers better. My colleague Orellana Rosa Royal in the UK wrote about this year's trends, and she really leaned into the fact that these companies, as she puts it, are active listeners. They don't just wait for the workplace and for the workforce to complain and then address the complaints. They regularly solicit feedback about what their workers need. One thing that's very striking about the list is to see how many of these companies are pouring major resources into training tens of thousands of their employees to become more proficient in AI. This is especially a big priority at the business services and consulting firms like Accenture and Deloitte NEY. In any knowledge industry, they know that they need the whole workforce to be proficient in these tools as opposed to worrying about how to run away from AI.

In this session, moderated by Fortune 500 C-Suite Editor Francesca Cassidy and presented in partnership with Syndio, Fortune explored how CHROs at some of the world’s largest companies, including Cisco and WPP, are integrating AI into workforce strategy while strengthening pay governance and transparency. The discussion examined how HR leaders are partnering with CIOs, CFOs and boards to move from reactive compliance to ongoing pay equity monitoring, clearer communication and more data-informed decision-making.

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