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Why Chat May Be King Of The New Mobile Landscape

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Tech giants and hopefuls alike are betting on messaging apps—and conversational interface—as the future of mobile.

Like tens of millions of teens across the world, 15-year-old Emma rarely surfs the web or tries out new apps. Instead, she conducts her digital life through a collection of social apps, from Facebook to iMessage to Instagram to Snapchat. On all of them, she's messaging. "There are always messages for me to check," she says. And though she picks up her phone every 15 minutes or so, her friends still complain that she's slow to respond. We are all becoming like Emma that way: Recent studies show that Americans use their phones to message far more than anything else. Increasingly, companies eager for our attention online have to be part of these conversations. And increasingly, they're doing it through chatbots.

Computer programs that talk with (and like) humans, chatbots appear as voice-controlled assistants (such as Siri or Cortana) and pop up online as customer service "representatives" for major retailers. If you're in Messenger or a number of other messaging platforms, you can connect with bots much as you would with other users. Except the bots aren't people; they're brands like H&M or Whole Foods, and they're there to serve up things like outfit recommendations and recipe ideas, depending on the keywords that you type. They also, crucially, allow retailers, services, and a host of other companies to engage mobile users, like Emma, on the platforms where they're already spending so much time—especially since users' appetites for new apps has dwindled. According to a recent comScore report, half of U.S. smartphone owners download zero apps a month.

The potential for bots to serve as app replacements has inspired companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, and others to bet on messaging as an altogether new way of interacting with the web. New interfaces, after all, tend to have an outsize effect on the tech industry. It was Apple's unveiling of the graphical user interface and the mouse that set IBM on its long retreat from PC dominance. Steve Jobs set things in motion once again with the touch-screen interface. A move toward conversational interface through chatbots could catalyze another profound shift.

Perhaps no one knows this better than Ted Livingston, the founder of the chat app Kik, which has an estimated 300 million users around the world—among them, 40% of American teens, according to the company. Boyish and bro-ish, the 28-year-old Livingston was early to spot the potential of messaging, but has yet to cash in on it. He originally launched Kik in 2009 as a way to let BlackBerry users connect with people on iOS and Android devices. The app took off—until BlackBerry abruptly booted it off its phones (then sued Livingston for infringing on its own closed-messaging service). Rivals such as the now-billion-user WhatsApp gained traction while Livingston retrenched and relaunched. During that nervous, uncertain time, he came up with a plan to distinguish Kik from competitors: He'd turn it into a platform, where users could play games or buy clothes, without ever leaving the app. The idea was foresighted, but requiring people to download mini apps inside of Kik proved clunky. Finally, Living­ston and cofounder Christopher Best decided to let those apps simply talk to users from within Kik. Today, Kik is pinning its future on chatbots. "It seems like chat is going to be at the base of everything we do in a way that even the internet isn't," says Livingston. "What if chat powers the world?"

The rise of chat extends across the globe. In China, a phone's operating system isn't nearly as important as its chat apps. Through WeChat, which has 700 million monthly users, people are able not only to talk to friends about going to a concert, they can also purchase tickets, reserve a dinner table, split the check, and hail a cab—all using automated helpers. Today in China, there are 10 million business accounts on WeChat and millions of apps as well. Businesses often launch with a bot on WeChat—and skip the web page entirely.

Part of the reason chat evolved as it did in China is that the vast majority of Chinese didn't grow up using desktop computers—and didn't grow accustomed to interacting online through browsers and drop-down menus. "The barrier in the U.S. is that people are used to using their phones in certain ways," says Derrick Connell, the corporate vice president for search at Microsoft, whose Chinese-language search bot, Xiaoice, has amassed more than 20 million users across a half dozen social media platforms and chat apps.

The equivalent North American demographic is teenagers. Mobile dominates the lives of Gen-Zers like Emma. That may explain why WeChat's parent company, Tencent, invested $50 million in Kik last year as part of a strategic partnership: Livingston's app is well positioned to mature with teens as they begin interacting with more lucrative services such as banking and shopping. "Tencent said it's either you or Facebook that's going to figure this out, and we think it's going to be you," says Livingston.

Those ambitions bring Livingston into direct competition with Facebook. Though it acquired WhatsApp in 2014 for $14 billion, Facebook has been steadily making Messenger into a billion-user behemoth, starting with its decision in 2014 to turn the service into a standalone app. It's now letting developers create their own bots on Messenger—the clothing company Everlane, for example, lets you track your order via bot. (WhatsApp, for its part, has remained a messaging service, with no business bots.) Facebook has introduced a button for third-party web pages that can bounce users to a bot in Messenger, allowing them to chat with customer service or complete purchases. "We want this to be totally ubiquitous," says Jeremy Goldberg, a product designer at Facebook who works on messaging. "Hopefully, we'll be able to say this is the new 'Like' button." Or a new way to buy things. It's no accident that Facebook's head of messaging isDavid Marcus, who was previously PayPal's president. Chat may represent the best way for Facebook to become something like a digital wallet.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft are also horning in on the time you spend chatting. Apple has started to make iMessages accessible to third-party apps, such as OpenTable and Airbnb, and also more expressive, letting users share hand-drawn notes and custom stickers. Siri, meanwhile, has steadily gained more real estate across its products. This fall saw the release of Google Allo, a chat app with a built-in AI assistant. Leveraging Google's insights into users' search history and preferences, Allo can, for example, automatically suggest restaurant reservations if you're messaging someone about dinner. (Facebook, not to be outdone, is training its digital assistant, M, by painstakingly cataloging millions of real-world conversations.) But the most intriguing play may be from Microsoft, which has been an also-ran in the mobile wars. It is creating a "cognitive services" division that will allow developers who want to create bots for Facebook, Google, or Kik to plug into the company's machine-learning algorithms for help deciphering text and images. In other words, Microsoft is positioning itself to be the plumbing behind chatbots.

The challenge for Kik's Living­ston isn't just the deep pockets and AI capabilities of his competitors: It's the limitations of bots themselves. Developers are still trying to figure out what kinds of bots spark the most engagement. There hasn't yet been a clear hit. (See Building a Better Bot, for the best examples.) For now, the chatbots you find on Facebook and Kik function like choose-your-own-adventure novels, without the adventure. Livingston predicts the breakthrough chatbots may actually feel less human (or AI-heavy) in their interactions and will instead be more lightweight and purposeful. And they'll need to be inherently social: Perhaps Kik's greatest innovation is that it allows users to summon bots directly into conversations they're already having with friends and to share the bots they like through invites. That natural social spreading of bots may solve the discovery problem that has stalled the app economy.

Livingston, for his part, is hoping that this time around, he's not just spotting the next big wave for mobile, but finally catching it. "The future is inevitable," he says. "It's just about who gets there first." The surf is getting crowded.

The Kings Of Chat

A look at the dominant messaging apps around the world.

WeChat: Though more than 90% of its users are Chinese, WeChat has been pushing into India and Southeast Asia.

Line: Japan's popular messaging app just launched its own smartphone plan with unlimited data for Line services.

KakaoTalk: A full 93% of South Korean smartphone users have signed up for this chat app.

WhatsApp: Facebook's new plan to collect data from WhatsApp users has privacy experts concerned.

Kik: Teens love its anonymity, but Kik has come under fire for that same reason.

iMessage: Apple is just starting to build upon iMessage's tremendous user base as the default iOS chat app.

Messenger: Facebook is integrating payments into Messenger so that it might become a mobile commerce engine.

Google Allo: By leveraging Google's unparalleled data, this assistant could become a significant new portal.

Slack: The smash-hit workplace chat app now has integrations with hundreds of services.


4 Parks That Are Making Their Cities More Beautiful--And Sustainable

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Here's how Thomas Woltz and company channel site-specific details into meaningful, large-scale parks.

When the landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz designs urban parks, it looks at two things: cultural history and natural ecological systems. By blending the two, the firm creates public spaces that are deeply rooted in a specific place and that help cities become more environmentally sustainable. Here's how they did it in four cities across the country.

Centennial Park, Nashville

After looking through old records, NBW discovered that city engineers in the 1800s had capped a natural spring under the site to make Nashville's water supply safer during cholera epidemics. NBW managed to track down the spring head and reopened it to naturally irrigate the park.

Memorial Park, Houston

Weaning the 1,560-acre park from potable water involved channeling and filtering runoff from a nearby freeway into five constructed ponds that can be used to feed the park. "We keep the highway from flooding, we can stop irrigating [with drinking water], and we've made a beautiful curved aquatic edge to a great green," Woltz says.

Under Armour Campus, Baltimore

NBW and the global engineering firm BuroHappold are developing a system that draws water from a river to cool the campus's air-conditioning system. A lake planted with native shrubs and perennials blends heavy infrastructure with landscape. "It's, How do we turn utility into an amenity?" Woltz says.

Hudson Yards, New York

"Landscape architecture has been burdened with a graphic approach—a lot of pattern-making that's cool but not about the place," Woltz says. To avoid that cliché, the Hudson Yards plantings are organized in elliptical orbits emanating from an interactive sculpture by British designer Thomas Heatherwick.

Issa Rae: "We Don't Get To Just Be Boring"

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The actress, showrunner, and comedian discusses the drive for diversity in television and finding her voice on HBO's Insecure.

Issa Rae's gawky-yet-relatable humor won her a throng of fans on YouTube and a place on best-seller lists for her memoir, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. Here, she talks about her new HBO show, Insecure, why she loves Seinfeld, and the movement to diversify media.

In Insecure, you play a young woman who is just starting to deal with the realities of adulthood. What makes her tick?

She is complacent and used to doing what is comfortable, which makes her kind of passive-aggressive. She's always wishing for stuff, but doesn't take action. Then, there's a moment where she's just like, "Ya know what? I'm tired of coasting at my job and in my relationship. I want to be a different person." It's about overcoming her own insecurities, and wanting to be . . . more.

Is that autobiographical? Your character is named Issa.

In my mid-twenties, I was comparing myself to peers, going to these Christmas parties where my Stanford classmates would meet up. I have a friend who was about to be a doctor, another who was a 25-year-old diplomat. They'd turn to me and they were like, "So, girl, I saw your YouTube video! Good job, girl!" [Laughs] Bless them for trying to pump me up, but it felt like, Is this what I'm meant to be doing?

[My character in Insecure] is definitely me at my core, but it's not an autobiography by any means. I want people to watch it and feel like, "Oh I know that girl," or "I know that best friend," or "I've dated that guy," or "I've been in this situation!" I just want to create a relatable story that centers around black people being regular people.

What do you mean by that?

I don't want to invalidate anybody's black experience. But it seems to me [on television], we're either extremely magical, or we're extremely flawless. But we don't get to just be boring. Like, it's a privilege to be able to be boring and not answer questions like, "What do you think about this shooting?" and "How are you overcoming all of these obstacles?"

What about the times that I'm just kicking it with friends at brunch? Those are the moments that we want to reflect, in addition to talking about some of the issues that we encounter racially. That stuff plays in the background to our regular lives on the show, but we wanted to be in these characters' worlds first.

What's your favorite TV show?

I have so many. Of all time? I would have to say Seinfeld and Arrested Development . . . and Fresh Prince.

What do you like about Seinfeld?

The nothingness and the storytelling aspect. I get so much glee at the end of the episode when you realize how everything in it intertwines. Like, ohhh, haha, okay, that's why that happened. It was so simple: about life and mediocrity and nothingness.

That ties back to what you said about minorities being able to have shows that are just about boring, daily life.

Can you imagine a black person pitching a show about nothing? "Wait, so there's no struggle? There's no race, there's no—you're black, though, right?" Like, we don't get that. Only a white person could literally walk in the room and be like, "I wanna make a show about nothing," and they'd be like, "Sold!"

How did you make the transition from your YouTube series, The Mis­ad­ventures of Awkward Black Girl, to the very different world of television?

One of the biggest opportunities I got before HBO was [developing a pilot] with Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beers at [pro­duction company] Shondaland. That was my first TV development experience. Shondaland really helped me figure out how strong my voice needed to be, and how certain I needed to be in it.

Who's awkward now?Issa Rae's bumbling, relatable humor has propelled her from YouTube to HBO.[Photos: The Collaborationist; stylist: Ayanna James; hair: Felicia Leatherwood; makeup: Kamaren Williams]

ABC ultimately passed on the pilot. What do you think happened there?

In my eager-to-please, "this is my only chance" mind-set, I wasn't as firm as I should have been [in developing the story]. I wanted to tell a story about dating in L.A. I like to be raw, I like to curse, I like the N-word, I like portraying sex, and I like portraying the discomfort of stuff. I think that's not really fit for network television. And because I wasn't secure in the story, it was easy for me to flip-flop [on what I wanted]. And that's not how you tell a story. When ABC ended up passing on the project, I was devastated, but I understood why. It was on me at the end of the day.

I thought that was my last chance. But then Casey Bloys and Amy Gravitt from HBO called the next month, and they were like, "Hey, we heard you're free now. Do you have any other ideas that you want to explore?"

Did you do any soul-searching after the show wasn't picked up?

Soul-searching? I did a lot of moping. [Laughs] I was just like, Ugh, what am I gonna do? Let me figure out my next moves on the web, because that's always been consistent. Larry Wilmore actually helped me. Once I sold Insecure to HBO, they said, "You need a showrunner." [Wilmore came aboard to consult and cowrite the first episode.] He and I had a lot of conversations, and my soul-searching was saying things out loud, and learning from him and how firm he was in his voice.

He tells it like it is. How did you feel about Comedy Central's decision to cancelThe Nightly Show? You'd been a guest panelist there.

It's their loss. It really plays to that thing that black [professionals] fear: That there is just one spot.

In addition to being executive producer for Insecure, you're also a prolific YouTube producer. On your Issa Rae Productions channel, you've got both your own web series and projects from other creators. How did you get started?

I had acted throughout high school, but then I saw Love & Basketball when I was 16 and thought, Oh, I wanna write movies. I directed plays [at Stanford], then took some time off to learn filmmaking and writing at New York Film Academy. I created my first web series my senior year of college.

I began taking [the YouTube channel] seriously in 2009, with Fly Guys Present the F Word, which featured my brother and his music group in a documentary-type show. I start­­ed building an audience from there, and by the time I did The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl [in 2011], we had 5,000 to 10,000 sub­scribers. The show took the channel to new heights. [The Issa Rae Productions channel now has 214,000 subscribers.]

Crossing over: Last year, Rae turned her YouTube series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, into a memoir.

And even though you've crossed over to cable, you're still using YouTube to help the careers of others. For example, your #ShortFilmSundays channel features a new short film every week.

I'm a fan first, so I'm basically being a curator of content that I love. We put out a call, and we watch these short films and decide which writer/directors we want to highlight. We're giving them a platform and then paying them a small fee to let us showcase it. We ultimately help to fund and share assets with creators. It's community-building. We're championing unheard voices for multiple mediums, and we aren't afraid at all to look for new ones.

Which do you enjoy most, being in front of the camera or behind it?

Behind. A thousand, bajillion percent.

Why is that?

I just love telling the story more than being in the story. I think that plays true to my real life, too. I love listening to people more than I love talking.

We're seeing a wider breadth of more nuanced shows led by people of color—Jane the Virgin, Fresh Off the Boat, Master of None, and now, Insecure. What's the next step in making television more diverse?

It's the executives, it's the crew. It's in making sure that this isn't a flash-in-the-pan moment, by making sure you have a black or Latina executive, for example, who understands the importance of telling these stories. Making sure that everybody is represented behind the scenes is how the momentum will continue.

Prime time: Through Insecure, Issa Rae hopes to normalize the day-to-day lives of people of color.[Photo: John P. Fleenor/courtesy of HBO]


30-second bio: Issa Rae

Hometown: Los Angeles

Notable creative projects:The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, a web series that follows the professional, social, and romantic life of insecure black girl "J"; Fruit, a 10-part podcast drama about a pro footballer exploring his sexuality; The Peak, a content portal for the black intelli­gentsia; and Insecure, an HBO series that follows the professional, social, and romantic life of awkward black girl "Issa"

Big-name collaborators: Pharrell Williams, Shonda Rhimes, Larry Wilmore

On raising $714,000 through GoFundMe for the children of Alton Sterling, after he was killed by Baton Rouge police: "I realized how many other people felt helpless like I did. It's a small step in trying to ameliorate a ter-rible issue."

First role: "I caught the acting bug in like the fifth grade when they cast my black ass as Demetrius, a man, in A Midsummer Night's Dream."

Dexcom's Blood Sugar Monitor Has Been A Life-Changer For This Diabetic

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The device includes a small sensor, placed just beneath the skin of my belly, and displays my blood glucose levels right on my Apple Watch.

We all know about the market for wearable health trackers, but in my case the Apple Watch has become an indispensable health monitor. I've been a type 2 diabetic for about 25 years, and for most of that time I was able to control it through diet, exercise, and oral medications.

But on a trip last March, my blood sugar readings skyrocketed, and no amount of medication or diet would help. When I went to see my doctor, he explained that, over time, oral drugs cease to work for many people, and when they do, it's time to move to insulin. I had been fighting this move for the previous five years, but under the circumstances, I needed insulin to get my blood sugar numbers under control.

The transition to using insulin was a difficult one. It was tough to determine the right amount, based on a carb count and other metrics. I was pricking my fingers up to seven times a day. For a working person who travels a lot, doing this is difficult.

That's why I've been so interested lately in a new category of health monitoring devices emerging with the Apple Watch. I've checked out things like the Withings Blood Pressure Cuff, where the results can be shown directly on the watch display. I've also tried a new Apple Watch band that can record an EKG and display it on the watch.

These worked well enough, so I began searching for a blood sugar monitoring system. That's when I discovered the Dexcom G5, a mobile continuous glucose monitoring, or CGM, system.

I was aware of the company's early models but had read that they had some problems, so I was hesitant to buy in at first. When the newer Dexcom G5 came out, I saw more positive reviews. What sold me was that, in the new model, the readings could be displayed on my iPhone and Apple Watch.

And as luck would have it, the system was covered by my insurance. It requires a prescription, so I asked for one from my doctor.

About two months ago, I received it and started using it to monitor my blood sugars. The system, which attaches to the abdomen, consists of a small sensor and a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) transmitter. A small needle-like prong—the equivalent of two human hairs—embeds just beneath the skin (I hardly feel it going in) and checks my blood sugar fluids every five minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Each sensor lasts seven days.

As Dexcom explains, monitoring blood sugar fluids is a bit different than monitoring actual blood, but doing so yields readings that are accurate to within 5% to 20% of true blood sugar readings.

After two months of using it, I've found that Dexcom readings are indeed pretty close to actual pinprick blood readings. When there is a difference, the Dexcom is off only by 10% to 15%. Those minor discrepancies are a small price to pay for the ability to monitor my blood sugar levels easily and constantly.

I can look at my Apple Watch and see where my blood glucose numbers are at any time. In the past, I had no idea what the numbers were without doing a pinprick blood test.

Another thing that's been transformative is that when I eat something with carbs in it, I know how it has impacted my blood sugar numbers within 15 minutes.

My target blood sugar range is between 80 and 160 Mg/dL (milligrams of glucose per deciliter of blood). I can set the Dexcom Watch app to alert me (with a loud beep) when my numbers stray from that range. I actually try to keep the numbers under 140, and this app really helps me do that.

The Dexcom G5 paired with the Apple Watch could change the lives of people with type 1 diabetes who are insulin dependent. The alarms alone are worth the price. Even for me, a type 2 diabetic, the device has become a tool that I can't live without. Sure, I could go back to pinpricks—but I could never do that all day, every day.

With this new health monitoring device and the Apple Watch, I have one of the most effective tools I have ever used to help me deal with this disease in a proactive way.

Today there are more than 29 million diabetics in the United States, and unfortunately that number is growing. The best thing that could happen is for science to find a cure, but in the meantime, improvements in wearables and apps make dealing with diabetes much more bearable.

Ivanka Breaks Her Silence On The Trump Tape

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The presidential hopeful's daughter makes her first public statement on the now-infamous recording.

It has been two weeks since the Trump Tape—the now-infamous recording of Republican candidate Donald Trump and TV host Billy Bush speaking rather distastefully about women back in 2005—was released to the public. Trump's wife, Melania, has already released a statement and spoken about the tape. Everybody's been talking about it—well, almost everybody. Now it's Trump's daughter Ivanka's turn.

"My father's comments were clearly inappropriate and offensive and I'm glad that he acknowledged this fact with an immediate apology to my family and the American people," Ivanka told Fast Company in a statement.

Read more about how Ivanka and her brand are navigating the choppy waters of this election season here.

These Are The College Degrees That Earn The Highest Salaries

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Most STEM degrees pay graduates the highest wages, but there are other college majors that offer good return on the education investment.

With student loans reaching an all-time high, it's no surprise that many are now questioning whether their education is worth the expense.

The average 2015 college graduate completed their education with $35,051 in student loan debt, according to a study by Edvisor, and a survey by Salary.com found that 35% of 15,000 respondents believe a degree isn't worth the price tag, with another 43% claiming it isn't necessary to succeed in life.

While not all degrees are created equal, and you can always find a career in a field you didn't major in, certain degrees are a better bet for students looking for the highest return on their education investment. In fact, a 2015 report by Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce estimated that the difference in lifetime wages between the highest- and lowest-paying college majors is about $3.4 million.

According to a new study by Glassdoor, an online employer review and careers resource, the top 10 college majors that help graduates earn the most during the first five years of employment are:

  1. Computer Science

    Median base salary: $70,000
    Popular entry-level jobs: Software engineer, Systems engineer, Web developer


  2. Electrical Engineering

    Median base salary: $68,438
    Popular entry-level jobs: Electrical engineer, Systems engineer, Software developer


  3. Mechanical Engineering

    Median base salary: $68,000
    Popular entry-level jobs: Mechanical engineer, Design engineer, Project engineer


  4. Chemical Engineering

    Median base salary: $65,000
    Popular entry-level jobs: Chemical engineer, Process engineer, Project engineer


  5. Industrial Engineering

    Median base salary: $64,381
    Popular entry-level jobs: Industrial engineer, Quality engineer, Production planner


  6. Information Technology

    Median base salary: $64,008
    Popular entry-level jobs: Programmer analyst, Technical support, Systems engineer


  7. Civil Engineering

    Median base salary: $61,500
    Popular entry-level jobs: Civil engineer, Structural engineer, Field engineer


  8. Statistics

    Median base salary: $60,000
    Popular entry-level jobs: Data analyst, Statistician, Data scientist


  9. Nursing

    Median base salary: $58,928
    Popular entry-level jobs: Registered nurse, Licensed vocational nurse, Case manager


  10. Management Information Systems

    Median base salary: $58,000
    Popular entry-level jobs: Network administrator, Help desk analyst, Business analyst


While some of the highest-paying tech employers have expressed an interest in hiring non-STEM graduates, science, technology, engineering, and math degrees still dominate the top 10 and much of the remaining top 50.

But earning a STEM degree, which accounts for 20% of all college degrees, doesn't necessarily guarantee a high salary. According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, petroleum engineers earn as much as $243,000 by mid-career, while environmental engineers earn just over $100,000, and those in mechanical-related technologies and architecture don't crack six figures. "The top 25% of education majors earn more than the bottom 25% of engineering majors," suggests the report, titled "The Economic Value of College Majors."

Furthermore, chasing a degree for the sake of its future earning potential might have an adverse affect on one's career, according to Vince Broady, the CEO of content marketing platform Thismoment and religion studies major at Brown University. "If you don't personally care about what you are doing, you are not going to be competitive at it," he toldFast Company. "You have to have some faith that your education will not be wasted on you. This is about you and your specific situation; you need to make sure that what you learn serves you."

At the bottom of the list of 50 were these degree tracks that led to the lowest-paying jobs:

  • Health Care Administration

    Median base salary: $42,000
    Popular entry-level jobs: Medical assistant, File clerk, Office manager


  • Social Work

    Median base salary: $41,656
    Popular entry-level jobs: Social worker, Mental health counselor, Camp counselor


  • Biology

    Median base salary: $41,250
    Popular entry-level jobs: Lab assistant, Paramedic, Tutor


For those who want to improve the likelihood of getting those student loans paid off sooner, however, Glassdoor's data would suggest that STEM is the safest bet.

GM To Top Tech Talent: Ditch Silicon Valley For Detroit

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By reinventing its culture, the old-line automaker hopes to attract those looking to shake things up, rather than beat them into submission.

When General Motors CEO Mary Barra first visited Cruise Automation, the autonomous systems startup GM acquired last spring for $581 million, she told its staffers, "I want to take your energy and speed, and your way of looking at things, and drive it into the core [of GM]."

That would be some feat for the Detroit automaker famous for one of the most dysfunctional bureaucracies in corporate history. But ever since taking the helm in January 2014, Barra has been on a crusade to radically change that culture.

Her urgency is understandable: GM's business is about to change profoundly, thanks to the convergence of ride-hailing, car-sharing, electric propulsion and autonomous vehicles. GM is no longer only competing for talent with Ford and Chrysler. Now, it must face off with the likes of Uber, Lyft, Apple, Alphabet, nuTonomy, Mobileye, Tesla, Quanergy, and Didi Chuxing.

Top-Down Seismic Shifts

To give GM the kind of cultural fuel injection that would allow it to stand apart from the pack, Barra has launched a series of culture-shaking initiatives across the company, starting with herself and her own executive floor at GM headquarters, in Tower 300 of Detroit's Renaissance Center.

Mary Barra conducts a media briefing prior to the start of the 2016 General Motors Company Annual Meeting of Stockholders.[Photo: Jeffrey Sauger for General Motors]

Barra leads by example. She put herself front and center during GM's ignition-switch crisis, when the company was implicated in over 150 fatalities. And it's evident to anyone who's spent time at the company that she's forged close relationships with president Dan Amman and global product chief Mark Reuss, two contenders for the CEO job she got in January 2014.

According to GM's HR chief John Quattrone, "Mary believes that if we change the behaviors on this floor, people who work for us will see that and emulate it." Once a quarter, the top 16 executives in the company gather offsite for two full days. "All we do is focus on how we behave with each other," says Quattrone. "I don't want to get into a lot of detail. But we talk about conflict. How we manage conflict with each other. We talk about the things that someone does well, and the things that, 'Hey, we think you can improve on.'"

For those just below this core group of 16, Barra launched a program called "Transformational Leadership." Over the course of one year, a group of 35 executives spend a total of five weeks visiting customers in regions like South America and Asia, learning the principles of design thinking at Stanford's d-school, and using what they've learned to come up with strategies GM can use to address "big, disruptive, strategic game changers," says Michael Arena, a Wharton and MIT professor who now serves as GM's chief talent officer. The company's car-sharing initiative, called Maven, came directly out of the work of the first cohort in the program.

General Motors' car-sharing program Maven[Photo: Brian Kersey for Maven]

Culture Clubs

These behavior-changing efforts go all the way down to the rank-and-file. I recently sat in on the two-day summit of a grassroots initiative called GM 2020 that Michael Arena launched in 2014. He partnered with MTV Scratch, a Viacom consulting division that emerged from the music channel, and handpicked 30 millennials from different parts of the company who were tasked with energizing and disrupting GM's culture.

"We quickly realized that we needed the middle of the organization as well," Arena admits. "The millennials have great ideas, but middle managers can get stuff implemented," he explains. "So we had the 30 reverse-invite any middle manager that they would want to play with on a challenge." Once the initial 60 employees were assembled, Barra gave them one simple goal: Let's make GM a place that everyone wants to work at by 2020 (hence the name).

In two years, GM 2020 has over 1,000 employees participating in a variety of ways. Some take "catalyst" classes, where they can learn design thinking. Others self-organize into small groups called co-labs, where they try to solve problems ranging from workplace concerns, to how car interiors should be redesigned to be more convenient for women with purses and a jumble of electronic devices. The program is built to ensure access to top brass. At quarterly get-togethers attended by senior execs, 2020 members describe the work of the co-labs and how they're pushing their solutions through the GM hierarchy.

[Photos: Rick Tetzeli]

The day I visited, 250 people were seated at tables of eight in a large auditorium in Detroit's Center for Creative Studies, a building that once housed the company's design studio. Tables are covered with neon Sharpies, 2020 badges, snacks, and colorful notebooks. GMers filled a highball glass in the middle of each table with ping-pong balls. They scribbled such "wins" as "GM2020," "millennials in the 'D' (D=Detroit)," and "the willingness to change" on the yellow balls. "Opportunities" such as "negative media," "difficult to make changes," and "multitasking in meetings" were written on the white ones.

The room is pretty quiet as everyone pays attention to the group up on the makeshift stage. They're performing an impromptu skit designed to show off one of the seven "behaviors" Barra and others want to drive through the organization. The entire collection: Think Big; Start Small; Scale Fast; Listen Intently; Ask Why; Find a Friend; Follow the Energy; Lean into Conflict; Be Bold, as well as the ping-pong balls are things you'd more typically associate with a startup. While they're antithetical to the old GM culture, they weren't actually borrowed from Lyft, Cruise, or any other place. GM had all of this before the acquisition and investment—ever since Barra took the helm.

When the skit ends, a bouncy moderator wearing a blue 2020 T-shirt asks for comments from the crowd. She gets lighthearted theatrical reviews, as well as a few comments connecting the skit to a variety of workplace issues, like the parking problem at the Warren tech center, or the way some people just whine about problems rather than doing something about them. Their enthusiasm is remarkable, as the rest of the afternoon is filled with a similar mixture of the mundane and high-minded ideals.

Help Wanted, Disruptors Welcome

That vibe also plays against the expected stereotype of a century-old company in the Midwest. But it's one way GM woos new engineers, according to Brittany Palubiski, who heads up GM's university recruiting efforts.

GM is hiring big time. It plans to bring in something like 15,000 new full-time employees this year, including many engineers. That pace is likely to continue for years to come, since roughly one-third of the company's salaried workforce will turn over in the next five years. Meanwhile, the staff at Cruise, which is headquartered in San Francisco, has more than doubled since GM's acquisition, with many of the hires coming from the same schools that feed Silicon Valley's tech ecosystem.

The story Palubiski is selling college students is one she could never have pitched a decade ago: That Detroit is a great place to live, and GM is a company with great opportunities for upward mobility, given that one-third of its workforce will turn over in the next five years. It's also a place where young people can make a difference, a place that's in the midst of defining the nature of transportation in the 21st century and beyond.

The General Motors Renaissance Center[Photo: Jeffrey Sauger for General Motors]

Her boss is Bill Huffaker, who was head of global talent development at Google before joining GM in 2012. "The more I heard about what was happening at GM, the more I was attracted to it," says Huffaker. "I like to fight for the underdog," he adds.

Huffaker believes that GM has opportunities that top engineers can't get in Silicon Valley. "If you're a software engineer who loves cars, this is the place to work," he points out. "We have amazing technology and resources, and the cost of living is good. Plus, this is a company in transition," he continues. "You're going to work on very real problems at great scale."

As a relatively new transplant from the Valley, Huffaker knows that GM has a long way to go. Despite all its efforts to be cool, the company isn't a startup. "If you have that entrepreneur profile, we can't compete with that," he says. But he's encouraged by the progress GM is making, and believes the company is now embracing those looking to shake things up, rather than beat them into submission.

"What I loved about Google was that idea: Anything is possible," says Huffaker, noting, "Here it used to be, 'That's a good idea, but good luck getting it through the purchasing, or the HR, or the IT rulebook.'" If the bankruptcy hadn't happened, Huffaker observes, "People like me wouldn't have been accepted here. There would have been organ rejection."

"We still have a lot of work to do," say Huffaker. "We are a work in progress. But there's an energy that we can solve these problems now."

Chipotle's Mark Crumpacker Talks Chorizo, Comebacks, And Cocaine

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Chief creative officer Mark Crumpacker speaks candidly about coming back from both the company food-safety crisis and his personal one.

"It's great to be back. Obviously what's happened and what's ongoing is something I wouldn't wish on anybody. But stuff happens."

That's Mark Crumpacker, the chief creative officer and marketing lead at Chipotle, upon returning to the restaurant chain after a three-month leave of absence. Following a cluster of food-safety incidents Chipotle experienced in the last 14 months, which devastated the company's business and is the subject of our new Fast Company feature, Crumpacker was indicted for cocaine possession, on June 30. It was a bizarre aside to an already tumultuous time for Chipotle, though many observers saw it as yet another interruption in Chipotle's protracted recovery. On September 8, the company surprised some outsiders by announcing Crumpacker's reinstatement, after he completed a drug rehabilitation program. "I'm really lucky," Crumpacker tells me just two weeks later.

Since returning, Crumpacker's team has launched a new ad campaign, in partnership with Austin-based agency GSD&M, highlighting the "royal treatment" Chipotle gives its ingredients. The company has also completed its nationwide rollout of its newest menu item, chorizo, which Crumpacker says was on the product roadmap before the chain's E. coli issues. "We were like wait a minute, we can't introduce something new before we got all of the food-safety measures in place," he says.

This focus on promoting Chipotle's ingredients post-outbreak is intentional, Crumpacker explains. These efforts, along with the company's previously introduced rewards program Chiptopia and animated film A Love Story, were designed to remind customers what they loved about Chipotle's food in the first place, before its reputation was muddied. "Obviously our marketing is built on this idea of fresh, high-quality ingredients," Crumpacker says. "So [the food-safety issues were] sort of like the ultimate insult to that position."

Before Crumpacker's indictment occurred, these kinds of insights were why I had been eager to speak with him for our profile of Chipotle and its efforts to rebuild itself in the aftermath of a series of foodborne-illness outbreaks. Crumpacker, after all, was central in helping the Mexican fast-casual chain foster a glossy aura around its brand, which became synonymous with fresh ingredients and an ethical value set. Given the damage the food-safety crisis did to the company's reputation, I knew Crumpacker would prove crucial in trying to repair Chipotle's "Food With Integrity" image. What's more, he had known Chipotle's co-CEOs Steve Ells and Monty Moran since college—all three attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and grew up not far from their alma mater—and could offer deep insight into their strategy going forward.

We were originally scheduled to meet at Chipotle's office in New York on July 7. Then, days before Independence Day, news broke of a New York district attorney investigation into a city drug ring. Crumpacker was ensnared in the probe and charged with seven counts of cocaine possession; he was allegedly caught on wiretaps 13 times requesting orders of drugs to his apartment in Manhattan's Union Square neighborhood. As Crumpacker was preparing to surrender to police, Ells and Moran sent out an email explaining to employees that "Crumpacker is apparently under investigation for one or more misdemeanor offenses, and he has been placed on administrative leave from Chipotle while this matter is being investigated."

A naive part of me wondered whether Crumpacker would still make our meeting that coming Thursday. But on July 1, a representative of Burson-Marsteller, the crisis-management PR firm that has supported Chipotle since the outbreaks, told me via phone that our meeting would be indefinitely postponed. My previously scheduled meeting with Ells the following week, however, was still on.

When I arrived then at the company's New York corporate outpost, also near Union Square, I found the lights off in Crumpacker's office, which is adjacent to Ells's. Rows of advertising awards lined his shelves, from the slew of successful marketing campaigns he produced for Chipotle in the past decade. They now sat neglected, lacking their glisten in the darkness, like the preserved childhood bedroom of a high-school track star who no longer lives with his parents.

Though clearly a delicate subject, Ells doesn't wince when I ask during our conversation about Crumpacker, his longtime friend and colleague. "Mark certainly was very influential in helping to develop the brand and giving it voice," he says. "We all really care about Mark. He's on leave so he can take care of himself and make sure he gets everything in order. We don't know how that's going to turn out. But we're supporting him."

I wasn't sure then whether this cocaine news would factor into our story. How was it relevant to Chipotle's food-safety crisis beyond the scandalous-sounding headlines and implications of guilt by association? During the course of my reporting, I even heard rumors that another journalist was digging into a supposed "party culture at Chipotle." But this didn't strike me as a systemic issue, based on my research. Ells, a foodie who is prone to listing off recipe ingredients like he works for Epicurious.com, seems more likely to want to inhale truffle salt. And as one source who has worked closely with Ells and Crumpacker for years tells me, "Listen, I was once employed at a company where there was basically free-flowing cocaine in the bathroom, but in all my years working at Chipotle, I never ever ever ever ever [saw anything like that]. I have never witnessed Mark do anything [cocaine related], and I have been one of his closest friends [for decades]. It came as much of a surprise to me as I think it did for everybody else."

Whatever the case, Chipotle brought Crumpacker back in early September. "We've learned that any mistake Mark may have made in his personal life was not related to, nor did affect, his work," the company said in a statement. "The recent months have been personally challenging for Mark, but he has remained committed to doing what is best for Chipotle."

When I catch up with Crumpacker by phone on September 21, he's hesitant to talk too much about what happened. As a marketing guru, he's perhaps also wary of the optics of the situation, not least given his executive status. If a Chipotle crew member was indicted for cocaine, would the company show him or her the same sympathy? "I've been [working at Chipotle] for eight and a half years," Crumpacker says, when I ask about his reinstatement. "This team knows what I've done and what I'm capable of doing and my commitment. That afforded me the luxury to stay here. When I think if I had had a shorter tenure . . . I don't know."

He tells me it's been a painful period and speaks regretfully of how it unfolded in the media. "Obviously having something so incredibly personal made so public is not something anybody would want, but I'm a particularly quiet, private person," he says. What mattered most to him during this time was the support of his friends and colleagues, most notably Ells and Moran, whose loyalty didn't fade, he adds.

Crumpacker recognizes that his legal woes came at an especially sensitive moment for the company, at the same time it introduced Chiptopia and A Love Story to refashion faith and trust with its consumers. But he says Chipotle's leadership ultimately decided the calculus made sense to keep him on the payroll. "[Steve and Monty] were convinced from the beginning that while there might've been some short-term gain from me maybe stepping aside, they also said, 'Look, in the long run, you've got so much to offer. Why would we take the short-term gain over the long term?'" Crumpacker recalls. "Our board of directors was equally supportive. I know it's not the easiest choice they made."

"Again," he continues. "I just keep using the word 'lucky.'"

Crumpacker is due in court October 18.


Ivanka Trump Doesn't Flinch

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As she leads her brand into its next stage, Ivanka reveals how she's navigating the drama around her father's presidential campaign.

The energy on the 22nd floor of Trump Tower becomes a little giddier when Ivanka Trump enters the small offices that serve as headquarters for the Ivanka Trump collection. It's my third visit to the licensed apparel and accessories company since August, and Ivanka seems a little looser than she has appeared in recent TV interviews, laughing with her staff and double-checking her makeup and teeth before her photo shoot, gamely allowing our photographer to perch her all over the office in search of the best light.

As the initial excitement around her arrival subsides, the staff get back to work. I watch Ivanka as she follows my colleague's instructions from behind the camera. A former model, Ivanka resets her face between shots, momentarily erasing her expression in preparation for her next pose. After the shoot, she calls out to one of her employees to fetch her coffee cup ("I really need it today!" she laughs—she just got back from picking up one of her kids from a short day at school), then resets herself again and sits across from me at a small white conference table, lowering her voice both in volume and pitch. Even her face becomes a little less expressive—not less pleasant, but a little harder to read.

"I learned a long time ago that I can't control the opinions of others or what they project on me. All I can do is live my life, and I've tried to do that," she tells me a few minutes into our interview. It's a classic Ivanka statement, as if to say, I'm perfectly clear about who I am; it's not my fault what other people decide to think. It's easy to understand why she feels that way, and why Ivanka—always poised, always on message—seems to work so hard to keep her image under control.

Now 34, she has been in the limelight since she was a child, thanks in part to the soap opera of her wealthy parents' lives (her mother is former competitive skier and model Ivana Trump). And at the moment her father, Republican nominee Donald Trump, is running arguably the most controversial bid for the White House in American history. For the most part, she has managed to support her father's campaign, co-run The Trump Organization, and lead her own Ivanka Trump brand through the resulting noise. Her ability to engineer—and perhaps neutralize—her image is a skill that has served her well over the course of this year's presidential campaign, during which she has testified on behalf of her father, or at least stood sentry by him, numerous times.

"I mean, it's been a year and a half of enormous scrutiny, of my family, every business, every movement, action," Ivanka concedes. "But I think that, you know, that sort of comes with the territory. And I think I've probably learned a lot through it and I've probably grown a bit tougher in terms of my resilience toward what is our thrown our way because, you know, I've read some very negative stuff," she says, laughing a little, and sighing.

Sometimes the stuff that gets reported isn't just negative, I point out; it's actually shocking. For example, how does one wake up, read in the newspaper that your father is accused of sexually assaulting a minor, and continue to go about your day?

Ivanka doesn't flinch. "The greatest comfort I have is the fact that I know my father. Most of the people who write about him don't. I do," she says matter-of-factly. "So that gives me an ability to shrug off the things that I read about him that are wrong,"

But nothing compares to the uproar directed at Donald Trump this month.

First there was the leaked recording of Trump boasting about groping women, followed by a string of women coming forward to accuse him of sexual abuse. Public pressure on Ivanka has gone into overdrive.

Two weeks after our final interview, I reached out to Ivanka's publicist to get her reaction to the now-infamous 2005 recording of Donald Trump boasting about what amounted to sexual assault. "My father's comments were clearly inappropriate and offensive and I'm glad that he acknowledged this fact with an immediate apology to my family and the American people," Ivanka responded in a statement to Fast Company.

Rarely has Ivanka conceded any wrongdoing by her father. In the past, Ivanka has responded to sexism accusations against her father by calling him "an equal opportunity offender" who has "said plenty of rough things about men over the years." (Her father, for his part, blames the recent wave of accusations on a media conspiracy hell bent on keeping him out of the White House.)

Ivanka is not naive to sexism when she sees it; at one point in our conversation, when I mention that she has been referred to by the press as Trump's "surrogate wife," she cuts me off a little: "Which is deeply offensive. I feel that that's a very sexist thing to say." Meanwhile, the media continues to analyze her father's comments on her physique over the years.

"This has been a surreal experience for me," Ivanka says, straight-backed in her chair, long neck slightly bent toward me as she describes the year and half since she helped introduce her father's candidacy. Often, when Ivanka says something even remotely not-positive about the campaign, she adds a bright side to her statement: "And it's been an amazing one, and I've learned so much." Ivanka smiles when she speaks; she rarely breaks eye contact with me, unless there is some movement in the room—when I move my finger down my iPhone screen to scan my questions, I see her briefly glance at my hand before locking eyes with me again.

Many in the public—and the media—are obsessed with figuring her out, convinced that she secretly doesn't agree with her father's policies, eager for her to finally show her hand. "I mean, I think that Ivanka has a really thick skin," says Abigail Klem, head of brand at Ivanka Trump. "And one would have, if you've grown up in the public eye the way that she has."

Ivanka has built her business on a brand platform that champions working women, so why is calm, polite Ivanka supporting an unpredictable and combative candidate so many professional woman have accused of sexual harassment, they wonder? Is the root of her loyalty pure filial duty? Does she support him because he's rich (though how rich is anyone's guess?) Because she suffers from a form of Stockholm Syndrome? Because the exposure is good for her business? Because deep down, she's actually just like him? Because of her stated reason: that she truly believes he's the best man for the job? Those who question Ivanka's motives may as well stop holding their breath; this is a woman who, in her 20s, wrote an entire book loosely around the theme of holding one's "Trump" card close to one's chest until it's really needed.

Business And Politics

One thing that's become clear is that the Ivanka Trump collection has benefitted from all the attention. Ivanka's appearances on the campaign trail, and in the audience at presidential debates, have doubled as free marketing. The Ivanka Trump collection dress she wore to the Republican National Convention quickly sold out, and working women's issues—the only area in which she has publicly gotten involved with the policies of her father's campaign—are core to her business's branding strategy. Her company caters to working women (and full-time moms) age 25 to 34 under the banner of the company's tagline "Women Who Work."

Net sales of just the clothing arm of the company were up $11.8 million during the first 6 months of 2016 compared to the first 6 months of 2015 as it sold its products online and at department stores, according to public filings from one of Ivanka Trump's major licensing and manufacturing partners. Forbes reported that Ivanka's clothing line generated $100 million in revenue last year, and sales were up $29.4 million from the previous fiscal year. The private company will not confirm specific sales figures, but do say their sales went up 37% last year, and that the growth rate has held pretty steady this year. And the website's traffic is up 50% over last year, thanks in large part to Ivanka's heightened public profile.

The flip side to the success has been a public dissection of her business and personal stance on issues like maternity leave and childcare anytime she stumps for her father. While publicizing Trump's maternity leave and childcare plans, Ivanka claimed his opponent, Hillary Clinton, hadn't come out with a plan of her own (she had). Ivanka also claimed that The Trump Organization offers all employees paid maternity leave (they don't). The 20-odd people who work full time for Ivanka Trump, however, do get eight weeks of paid maternity leave. At least one of Ivanka Trump's major licensing and manufacturing partners, G-III Apparel Group, doesn't offer its employees any paid maternity leave at all—but she tells me she doesn't has any plans to end Ivanka Trump Collection's relationship with G-III anytime soon.

"I don't own that company, I don't control that company," Ivanka says of G-III during our second interview, a phone call as she travels between campaign events in Colorado. "I do control my own business practices and that's why I've chosen to offer an industry-leading eight weeks of paid leave, but obviously I can't control the practices of everyone in the universe I do business with."

Her company is one of just 10% of American businesses that currently offer paid maternity leave. And while Ivanka doesn't offer childcare assistance to its staff (not that such a perk is common anywhere in America), several top-level Ivanka Trump employees with kids say the company is working parent friendly. Editorial director Sarah Warren was allowed to keep her job and work remotely from New Mexico after her husband was transferred to Albuquerque; head of brand Abigail Klem points to the company's flexible work schedule and vacation policy as crucial to her life as a single, working mom.

At least one former employee claims her experience at the company was very different. On Facebook, Marissa Velez Kraxberger, now vice president of creative at Rag & Bone, recently wrote about her experience as the chief marketing officer at Ivanka Trump, a position she left in 2015 after two years at the brand. Kraxberger, who did not respond to requests to comment for this story, claims that paid maternity leave was not originally Ivanka's idea at all. She writes: "when I recently saw a commercial with Ivanka and her father and their 'maternity leave' policy I felt like I was going to be ill. When I first interviewed with Ivanka I was two months pregnant, she called to offer me a job, which I was at the time very excited about, and when I asked about maternity leave she said she would have to think about it, that at Trump they don't offer maternity leave and that she went back to work just a week after having her first child. I somehow was dumb enough to accept the job after agreeing upon having the discussion further down the road about how we would handle the time after my baby was born. Our team—the ones who created #WomenWhoWork and the ones who the hashtag really stood for—fought long and hard to get her to finally agree to eight weeks paid maternity leave."

In a statement, an Ivanka Trump spokesperson told Jezebel that Kraxberger's version of events is a "mischaracterization of how our company developed its industry leading culture and benefits package."

A noteworthy part of Kraxberger's version of events is her claim that Ivanka said she had gone back to work just a week after her first child was born; it's notable because Ivanka is aware of the power of leading by example. In The Trump Card, the business memoir Ivanka wrote back in 2009, she expresses admiration for her friend Rupert Murdoch's habit of visiting the Wall Street Journal newsroom on Sundays (Murdoch owns the paper). Ivanka emulated the practice herself at The Trump Organization, writing "you'd be surprised by how quickly your employees will fall in line behind you when you set this kind of example."

I remind Ivanka that her own mother went back to work just two days after giving birth to Ivanka's elder brother, Donald Jr., and that Ivanka herself appeared on stage with journalist Gayle King just six weeks after giving birth to her third child. Since her father's childcare policy has been criticized for, among other things, not extending benefits to fathers or same-sex partners, I ask: Isn't paternity leave good for ambitious women? Trump responds that her father's plan isn't the final step, but a first step.

"Right now, under U.S. law, there is no paid leave," Ivanka points out. Donald Trump's plan, she says, "represents a very positive step in the right direction."

One thing Ivanka has been adamant about throughout this wild year is that "it's always been very important for me to separate business from politics"—and her staff echo this sentiment. In public and away from her company, for much of the election season, Ivanka has acted more like her father's character witness than a policy maker, though it has long been reported that she is one of her father's most trusted advisors on his campaign. Use the word "advisor" in front of Ivanka, however, and she will quickly correct you. "I am a daughter and an executive who has worked alongside him," she tells me.

But in the eyes of her potential customers, the line between presidential campaign values and Ivanka Trump values may seem more blurred than Ivanka and her employees will ever concede. The Ivanka Trump website is mostly dedicated to life and career advice, and readers are more likely to find an article filled with salary negotiation advice than a post about sexual harassment in the workplace. It has featured photographs of Ivanka wearing Ivanka Trump-label clothing at Trump campaign events. And the "From Ivanka's Desk" section of the website featured her endorsement of her father's maternity and childcare platform which Trump himself has implied she helped influence. ("'Daddy, daddy, we have to do this,'" Trump said at an Iowa campaign event, caricaturing Ivanka. "She is the one that has been pushing so hard for it.")

"Our site traffic is through the roof, our emails...when you look at the numbers, you couldn't pay for this visibility," says editorial director Warren. The company's newsletter database is up 275% over last year, Warren reports. The site focuses on creating what Warren calls "short, snackable," and "actionable" content ("6 Tips for Talking to Your Kids About Money"; "7 Off Duty Habits That'll Make You Smarter") and includes creative touches like print-out guides readers can take with them to, say, job interviews, which are actually pretty handy. This editorial-first approach—also favored by another celebrity-driven brand, Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop—does help set Ivanka Trump apart from other businesses that hawk work-appropriate clothing at working women, like Ann Taylor.

There are articles on the site featuring a range of thought leaders, ranging from MacArthur Grant recipients to startup founders. But some participants have expressed their discomfort at being featured on the site; Glossier CEO Emily Weiss recently tweeted regret over a Q&A published on IvankaTrump.com, writing "it's culled from an old interview; I wouldn't do it today." (Weiss did not respond to a request for comment on this story.)

"Since the beginning of the process, we've kind of drawn an Iron Curtain more or less between the brand and the politics," says Warren. "I don't even know the political affiliation of most of the women on our site because that's definitely not what it's about." She does, however, draw the line at including Hillary Clinton on the site. "Right now, I wouldn't," she says. "I think it would be distracting. I think that that would be featuring someone to make a political statement. Would I feature her down the road? Maybe. But right now, we want to be creating content that is more than just click bait and we want to be encouraging conversations that are about topics beyond politics, that are about bettering yourself as it pertains to your career and to architecting a life that you want to live—and right now, I think it would probably do more harm than good."

Far from campaign podiums, Ivanka Trump's staff insist they don't talk politics among themselves in the office. "When I brought together my team, I didn't ask what their political orientation was, nor do I care," Ivanka tells me emphatically. It's possible Ivanka may be the only person in her company whose presidential endorsement is fully known to the others (although a public records search reveals that there is at least one registered Democrat in the office).

"I know it might sound odd, but we really do try not to talk about the politics, because there is so much noise around it, and we really do try to stay very focused on the values of this brand and around 'Women Who Work,' and trying to service those women," says head of brand Klem, a 12-year Diane von Furstenberg veteran who arrived at Ivanka Trump several years ago as its first full-time employee. "And I think it is very separate from what's happening in the political campaign."

But, she adds, "I will say, I can't wait till the election is over."

The Daughter Card

After doing some modeling as a teenager, Ivanka did a post-college stint at a real estate company, and then went to work for her father at The Trump Organization. She was anointed vice president of real estate development and acquisitions and became the youngest board member of a publicly traded company (Trump Entertainment Resorts) at the age of 24. When Ivanka joined the cast of The Apprentice, she became even more famous. If you look closely, you can see how Ivanka has evolved over the years. "I'm sort of into sabotage," she tells Piers Morgan in one early episode of The Apprentice, her father's reality show. In another archival interview, Ivanka laughingly notes that she does "not pull punches...I'm on the blunt side." But over time her mannerisms have become more controlled, her speech gets a bit more refined. Part of it might just be growing up.

Before she turned 30, she wrote The Trump Card and launched a fine jewelry business. A shoe line followed and she soon expanded her licensing deals to handbags, clothes, accessories, even fragrances and baby gear. She married Jared Kushner, another rich real estate developer's kid who was no stranger to tawdry family headlines. He is now a key participant in Donald Trump's campaign.

Through it all, Ivanka kept her public image firmly under grip, cultivating a hard-working reputation and avoiding social scandal. "People I know who've been in a business setting with her—a colleague or a schoolmate—have all said she is very impressive in person. She's always well prepared, well spoken," says Paige Arnof-Fenn, founder of branding firm Mavens & Mogul and a former vice president of Zipcar.

Brand and public relations experts generally agree that Ivanka's role as a loyal daughter has protected her from some of the blowback from her father's campaign.

"Ivanka's brand has always been built on a really carefully balancing act," says Rajiv Menon, a cultural analyst with the branding consultancy TruthCo. "She's really demonstrated a sense of drive, a sense of ingenuity, and really established something strong with her apparel brand and larger public presence. But with all of that, she's never really lost her sense of family loyalty," he says, pointing out that "in the early 2000s, when she was featured in that documentary Born Rich, she was really public about her love of her family, her pride in her family, and reaffirming the Trump name quite often," Menon says. "And as the campaign has continued, she's maintained that balancing act—but as the campaign has also mutated and turned into what we see now with the tape that was released on [October14], that balancing act becomes a lot more precarious. It becomes much more of a liability for her."

Abigail Klem

Still, in the eyes of the public, "any child or parent is going to to defend their parent or their child," says leadership consultant Greg Ward. "That's her right."

"She would lose points if she didn't stand by her father," says Pace University professor of marketing Larry Chiagouris.

Others argue that family loyalty does not excuse Ivanka's defense of her father's behavior.

"She wants to be the brand of glamorous millennials," conservative blogger (and ardent Donald Trump critic) Jennifer Rubin writes me in an email. "But what young woman wants to be reminded every time she puts on a pair of Ivanka shoes of her father boasting about sexual assault?"

The fact that her father's campaign has been accused of racism, or enabling racism, on multiple occasions certainly hasn't made things easier for Ivanka, as tough as she may be. After Ivanka introduced Donald Trump at the RNC as "colorblind and gender neutral," critics felt her comments simply highlighted how out of touch she is on the issue. It's well-documented that some of the supporters at Donald Trump rallies have been self-proclaimed white nationalists.

"In terms of what you just mentioned," Ivanka tells me, "I categorically reject any people within a community that espouses hatred toward anyone, and my father does and has as well, so this is not support that I would be comfortable with. And I couldn't be comfortable with my father as president of this country if I thought that he could be comfortable with that type of support, and I know that he is not, that's why he's denounced it."

Christina Brown, who runs a fashion and beauty blog for women of color called Love Brown Sugar, says she will not feature Ivanka Trump products on her platform. "Most of the products that I feature on my site, I want to make sure the messaging behind those products and also the people behind the products are people that I align with. I personally do not align with the presidential candidate Trump, and so I would never personally endorse anything that they promote," she says.

Yet calls on Twitter for boycotts of Ivanka's brand don't seem to hurt her business. "Not only can her brand transcend it, but the more people say they're going to boycott her brand, the more they're going to drive [those] who are either middle of the road or pro-Republican to choose the brand," says Pace University's Chiagouris. Ivanka Trump's major retail partners, including Bloomingdales, Zappos, Amazon, Dillard's, Nieman Marcus, Macy's, Lord & Taylor, and Nordstrom show no signs of discontinuing their affiliation.

"If everyone who votes for Trump buys her products, she'd be the wealthiest, most important fashion brand in the world," adds Chiagouris. "Think about that...Those Twitter people? She doesn't need their business."

After Ivanka's speech at the Republican National Convention, even ardent anti-Trumpers like the actress and activist Mia Farrow tweeted "When is Ivanka running for President?" A summer Gallup poll found that Ivanka's favorability rating was about on par with that of Hillary's Clinton's daughter, though Ivanka seems to generate far more public interest than her friend Chelsea, if Google searches are anything to go by. Ivanka has even been touted by various people (including Donald Trump) as a possible future Trump administration cabinet member.

"No, I don't intend to be part of the government," she tells me.

Life After November 8

As the two presidential candidates' campaigns flail aggressively toward Election Day, Ivanka is busy with far more than just campaigning. After all, Ivanka still has two businesses to run, and three kids under the age of 5 to raise (not without help, of course). She's also releasing a new book in the spring called, unsurprisingly, Women Who Work with editorial director Warren; the Ivanka Trump offices are soon moving to a bigger space in Trump Tower, and the company has more partners and more retail deals in the works. In 2017, Ivanka Trump Collection products will be available in over 1,000 stores. After months of mud-slinging and dark revelations on both sides of the political aisle, it's possible Ivanka might be one of the biggest winners of the 2016 election.

"She may come out ahead," "says Chiagouris, because "six months from now, whether Trump's the president or not, I think people will hold her in higher regard than they would have held her six months ago."

The longer-term challenge for her brand, between her wealth and her tightly controlled self-image, is whether she's relatable enough. Through all the stress of the past year, Trump has come off as poised, unflappable, and strictly on message. The Ivanka Trump website is littered with photos of Trump doing something professional—cutting a ribbon on a new Trump property, say, or donning a hard hat—while wearing a crisp dress and rocking flawless hair (on social media, she's a bit more likely to be seen make-up free while caring for a baby).

"One of the things that I would love to see Ivanka do, and we try to showcase a little bit more on our site, is to show the more human, funny side of Ivanka," Klem, her head of brand, tells me. "She's grown up in the public eye, so she is poised all of the time or certainly all of the time where she's being interviewed and all that...so we're trying to get Ivanka to showcase a more sort of silly side of herself. We'll see if that happens," Klem says. "I have encouraged her to highlight the times when things aren't so easy for her or when she felt that she failed."

Let's say Ivanka did do that—talk about the harder moments in her life. Would many people sympathize with a billionaire's daughter? There's a moment in The Trump Card when she recalls wishing, when she was a little girl, that she were like everyone else. Her parents' divorce was front-page fodder for New York tabloids, and photographers often hounded young Ivanka as she walked to the posh Chapin School. A reporter once asked 9-year-old Ivanka if relations with her father had really been, as a New York Post headline declared, the "best sex" his then-new girlfriend Marla Maples had ever had. "What type of person would ask a 9-year-old girl that kind of question? About her own father, no less?" Ivanka wrote in the book.

"From time to time," she wrote, "my sideline interests collided head-on with my parents' desire to provide as much as possible for their children. And somewhere in the pileup was whatever was left of my desire to have a normal childhood. That was always a big deal to me when I was little, to be just like everyone else, the kids whose parents weren't being written about in the tabloids—but, alas, normal wasn't always possible. Not in our house."

The last question I ask Ivanka is whether she has felt that childhood desire, to be like everyone else, since her father's campaign began and the tabloid coverage has kicked into high gear again.

"It's interesting, because anonymity is a very valuable thing. Sometimes, obviously, I wish I—there's tremendous amount of pressure in having your family member run for the highest elected office in the country, arguably the world," she acknowledges. "But visibility to create change and positive change for this country, if [Donald Trump is] elected, is worth any of the other personal challenges that come with the presidential campaign."

She's made it this far, but it's anybody's guess what will happen after November 8. "It was Donald Trump that got her here today, but it's not necessarily going to be Donald Trump that gets her to the next level in a year and five years from today," says Chiagouris.

In the meantime, don't expect you'll ever have Ivanka totally figured out. "Perception is more important than reality," she writes in The Trump Card. "If someone perceives something to be true, it is more important than if it is in fact true. Let the other guy think what he wants. This doesn't mean you should be duplicitous or deceitful, but don't go out of your way to correct a false assumption if it plays to your advantage."

How To Build A Better Chatbot

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Creating a chatbot that people like interacting with isn't easy. Here's what previous bots have done right—and wrong.

Focus On The Basics

The most satisfying bots are ones with clear uses, such as the Whole Foods one on Messenger that prompts users for an ingredient then offers recipes, or the Sephora bot on Kik that offers beauty tips based on skin type.

Disclose Your Limitations

One of users' big problems with bots is knowing what they can do. Google Allo solves that with messages that introduce features and capabilities over time. If a query is too much for the bot, it will say the feature isn't available yet, and suggest ones that are.

Avoid Open-Ended Discussion

CNN's Messenger bot, which was originally designed to answer general questions about the news, often failed to grasp what users were asking. Without any conversational perimeters, Microsoft's Tay bot on Twitter went quickly off the rails, mimicking trolls' racist language. Bots are better when their interactions are constrained to a few choices and quick exchanges with guided prompts.

Establish A Voice

Because the personality of a bot molds the user experience, some of the best, such as the Poncho weather bot for Messenger, take special care to communicate in chummy language—the equivalent of a brightly colored and inviting interface.

Tech Support Scams Are Getting More Sophisticated

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Scammers selling bogus tech support services have moved from cold calls to targeted pop-ups and malware, according to security researchers.

For years, scammers have phoned unsophisticated computer users claiming to be from software companies and internet providers and charging hundreds of dollars to fix nonexistent technical problems.

Last September, Microsoft warned customers not to fall for fraudsters claiming to work for the company, estimating 3.3 million U.S. users would pay $1.5 billion to tech support scammers in 2015 alone. Now, according to security vendor Malwarebytes, such scammers are getting more sophisticated then ever, placing online ads that generate fake error messages adapted to each victim's computer setup.

"The evolution of this scam is leading to more victims and much greater consequences for the general public," the company warned in a report issued this week.

The error messages urge users to call hotlines operated by the scammers for help fixing bogus computer problems, and call center workers charge them inflated prices for basic services like running antivirus scans and clearing software caches, or for essentially nothing at all, says Malwarebytes CEO Marcin Kleczynski.

Often, the scammers use JavaScript to generate a series of popup error windows that make it hard for unskilled users to even close their browsers. And in roughly the last six months, Malwarebytes researchers have seen scammers taking a page from ransomware attackers, installing malware to lock victims out of their computers until they pay to have it removed.

"We're going to see more aggressive techniques," says a Malwarebytes researcher who asked not to be named because he's involved in active investigations of the scams. "In particular, I wouldn't be surprised if they started using ransomware and encrypting people's files."

But unlike with traditional ransomware attacks, where users are openly blackmailed into paying to have their computers repaired, victims of tech support scams may not even realize they haven't paid for real tech support service, says Kleczynski. That's enabled scammers to operate through seemingly legitimate companies in the U.S. and abroad, accepting credit cards for payments without immediately generating suspicious numbers of complaints to banks.

Workers at fraudulent call centers may not even realize they're part of a scam, since they're often isolated from the parts of the company deploying malware or fraudulent ads. And scam operators often deliberately hire employees incentivized not to ask too many questions, even advertising in classified ads that they're willing to hire employees with criminal records who might have a difficult time finding work.

"The upper management is aware that they're hiring people who may not find a job elsewhere and may be easier to manipulate," says the Malwarebytes researcher.

Malwarebytes has worked with the Federal Trade Commission to shut down some scam operations and provided experts to testify in one case in which an alleged scam company called OMG Tech Help agreed earlier this year to surrender its assets to a court-appointed receiver. But even as regulators strike back, other fraudsters continue to take advantage of users who don't know to watch out for the scams, Kleczynski says.

"We've got to keep screaming this from the rooftops," he says.

The scammers have also gotten adept at evading detection, switching IP and web addresses to evade blocking by browser vendors and security software. And to get around filtering by the online advertising networks they use to deploy misleading pop-ups, they'll often purchase legitimate ads for a time, then begin injecting nefarious content.

"These things are embedded in real time," Kleczynski says of internet ads. "You've got criminals serving good advertising for a while and then swapping it out for bad advertising."

Sometimes the scammers will even filter calls from unknown numbers or numbers tied to government investigators or security firms, he says, in an effort to evade detection.

For internet users looking to dodge scams, Kleczynski advises following typical online security advice: Keep operating systems patched and use security software to filter out malware that could be used by scammers; avoid browsing dodgy websites that are more likely to allow unsavory advertisers; and be skeptical of unsolicited messages or calls from anyone claiming to represent companies like Microsoft or Apple.

Microsoft has worked with AARP to help inform seniors about the scams, but elderly users remain more likely to fall for the fraudulent messages and cold calls.

"I would not pick up a random phone call. My grandmother would," Kleczynski says. "I think that just [effectively] selects who's going to be talking to a lot of these scammers."

How This Exec Used Social Media To Turn His Layoff Into A Career Reboot

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New York City's new chief digital officer found a clever way to transform a bad situation into "a global, digital hug."

When he was the chief digital officer at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sree Sreenivasan created the museum's much-lauded app and redesigned its website, attracting millions of digital visitors and helping to increase attendance by young people. Then, in June 2016, the financially troubled museum eliminated his and several other positions due to budget cuts. Rather than be discouraged or come up with a pat storyline about spending more time with the family, the former Columbia University journalism professor turned to his peers. He posted a survey on his personal website and asked his Facebook network a single question: "What should I do next?"

Before that experiment in crowdsourcing his future had ended, Sreenivasan got an offer from another great New York institution: the city itself. Here, he discusses making the most of short-lived unemployment, and his plans to turn New York City into an even greater digital hotspot.

When you learned the Met was letting you go, what was your first reaction? Were you shocked?

It was certainly a surprise to me when it was happening at that moment. The Met had some fiscal difficulties—it's well-publicized—for about two months when this happened.

Those two weeks [after the announcement] I was scrambling, trying to find a job, and it's not easy to find a job, not easy to find a job in the summer, not easy to find a job you want. But I was taking all these meetings. And then suddenly the day came when the note was going to go out to staff, and I knew as soon as it goes—today in a public institution, a memo that's written to staff ends up in the press automatically. When I was at Columbia, I used to write every note to my students as if it was being cc'd to Gawker because it often was, and Columbia Journalism School had its own category in Gawker. So I knew that would happen [and] I wanted to make sure that I also shared it. And, in fact, by the time I forwarded the note that was written internally, it had already been published in [arts journalist] Judy Dobrzynski's blog about culture in the city. So it was pretty funny.

What kind of sacrifices had you made for the job at the Met?

What most people don't understand is that I gave up full free tuition for my kids at Columbia to go work at the Met, and then half-tuition anywhere in the world. And it gets worse than that. It's all pretax dollars. So, one of my friends was so mad I was leaving not for Columbia, but for me, saying your twins, 10 at the time, are leaving $1.1 million dollars on the table. That's kind of crazy.

How did you share the news of your departure with your family?

[The announcement] was going to happen on June 17, and the last set of people I told about this situation were my kids and my parents. My kids because they'd be like, 'Oh, is there no Christmas this year?' And my parents are lifelong Indian bureaucrats who wouldn't understand. And as it turned out, the 17th was my father's birthday, and on his 72nd birthday I had to tell him that his 46-year-old son was unemployed. And it tells you something about the world we live in that I told him and he was very nice and so understanding and everything else. That was on a Friday.

When I went to the office on Monday, somebody said, 'Oh, I loved your dad's note.' I said, "What note?" And she said, 'He replied to you in the comments [of a message Sreenivasan posted on Facebook].' And you know how it is on Facebook on birthdays and things like that, there are hundreds of comments. I missed my own dad's note. And I had to search for it. And then I woke up at 4 a.m. on Tuesday and I finally found it, and I was crying reading this thing and it tells you, this is the world we live in, there's so many ways to communicate, but we can't find the one note you want.

In that same Facebook message you asked people to give you advice on what you should do next. How many people responded?

1,300 people filled in the form.

What were the suggestions?

There were some great suggestions, stupid suggestions, some fun suggestions. People really made the effort. And I'm sorry to say I haven't processed everything yet. Someone else can categorize them. But one of them was start a restaurant. One of them was become a foreign service officer, and I looked into it just for fun. And said, "Okay, if I start today and take the test and pass the exam and then do the training, I'll be 50 years old as a rookie foreign service officer in Azerbaijan trying to do visa stuff. That'll be interesting, but we didn't do that."

Somebody dropped off a pair of Nike shoes because I said I was going to go walking. Someone sent me a check for real money, saying if you run out of dollars or lentils, here's some money. Everybody talks about how bad the internet is and there is so much hate, but I felt like I was in a global, digital hug that I had not expected. It was new to me in a way that was so refreshing.

Ultimately, you didn't take anybody up on their suggestions because you got a job offer from the City of New York to be the new chief digital officer. When did you get that call?

Soon after [the June 17 announcement]. The current chief digital officer, the outgoing CDO is leaving, and so we had a conversation and then I went through the process and here I am.

Are you daunted by the digital needs of New York City? There are nearly 9 million people living here, after all.

I'm following two wonderful women. Jessica Singleton and Rachel Haot. Rachel was the first, and between the two of them, they really set the stage for what we can build on now, and the mayor is very committed to technology. If you check out the New York City Digital Playbook, it explains what the plans are, including communicating more simply with the residents, testing things with the residents, connecting with the residents, and making sure that everybody feels involved.

When most people they talk about a job, I know sort of what you do, but I don't really. It's between you and your boss. Well, our boss decided to tweet what my job is. He said, welcome, I'm going to make New York the most tech-friendly, the most transparent, and most digitally equitable city in the world, which is great and simple and scary. Now somebody can pick this up and say, 'What have you done for me lately?' from these three things, what have you achieved? And it's not even one of, but the most, so it's going to be exciting and New York is the greatest city, so I think if we use our collective energy here, there's so much that can be done.

What are you most excited about when it comes to this new role?

I called myself chief listening officer [at the Met]. I think that's what the CDO job is, because you have to listen for ideas and there are so many good ideas. I don't think New York has a monopoly on good ideas, but people listen to them from everywhere. I've got so much to learn. What is exciting is that the technology team is very strong, there are multiple prongs of the technology infrastructure that's already been built. Now the question is, how do we take that to the next level? Another part of the job is working with startups and getting them interested, excited, committed to being born here, staying here, thriving here.

Let's do a lightning round of questions. First, what do you think is the best recent tech development?

The rise of personal live streaming. It affords people the opportunity to connect with other people, places, and organizations. And the best part about it is there's no post-production.

And the worst?

All the hype around new technology. Everybody's still searching for what's next. They don't give enough importance to the tools they're already using.

What's your favorite social media account at the moment?

National Geographic on Instagram. It's a great example of how you use the platform.

Who would be on your list of the most creative people?

Liza Donnelly, a cartoonist for the New Yorker. She's reinventing cartooning for the 21st century.

How do you stay productive?

I do everything on my phone, as much as I can, so that I'm responding and getting things done throughout the day.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

related video: How Social Media Is Bringing People And Brands Together

China's Dalian Wanda Comes To Hollywood, Gets Ready For Its Close-Up

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The chairman of the Dalian Wanda Group, Wang Jianlin, is asking Hollywood to invest in China—and get back to storytelling.

On Monday evening, the chairman of the Dalian Wanda Group, Wang Jianlin, stood before a group of Hollywood dignitaries and members of the press, and made an impassioned plea. Hollywood, he said, needs to "go back to storytelling!"

"Just depending on technology and special effects," he said, "will not last forever. Tell us a good story."

Although Wang was speaking in Mandarin, his message required no translation for the studio executives and producers who had gathered at LACMA's Bing theater for an elaborate, red-carpet gala in honor of the chairman's visit—one of Hollywood's first glimpses at the man who has been gobbling up American entertainment assets at such a rapid clip that members of Congress recently asked for a DOJ investigation into the company. The Chinese-based conglomerate, whose holdings range from real-estate developments to luxury hotels to sprawling shopping centers and movie complexes, is nearing a deal to buy Dick Clark Productions (producers of the Golden Globe Awards, as well as the Miss America pageant) for about $1 billion. Before that, it made a splash in September when it made what's considered to be a landmark deal with Sony Pictures that lets Wanda invest in select films Sony's developing and market them in China. Last year, Wanda purchased Legendary Entertainment, the production company behind such blockbusters as Godzilla and The Hangover, for $3.5 billion.

Indeed, when Wang, China's richest man, made a joke about Hollywood's fixation with sequels and how there are movies in their "ninth franchise," a round of knowing chuckles passed over the room. Hollywood's power brokers know they're hooked on pre-sold properties, yet they also appreciated the irony of the comment given that action-packed franchises are what has proven to be most successful thus far in the Chinese film market.

Wang came to America to announce a new film rebate program that Wanda is offering in China, as well as details about the company's new, $8 billion state-of-the-art film production facility in Quingdao. But Wang also took the opportunity to offer an olive branch of sorts to Hollywood in an effort to allay fears that have been growing around Wanda's preeminence.

Wang's gentle prodding, and repetition of themes like "storytelling" seemed geared to help bridge the cultural gap that exists between Hollywood and China. He presents himself and his company as amicable partners, or "students" eager to learn from Hollywood, which he characterized as "the professor." And American partners like Thomas Tull, Legendary's CEO, were featured in promotional reels echoing these sentiments. Tull will be shooting the next installments of Pacific Rim and Godzilla at Quingdao, and he took to the stage at the end of the event to sign a document stating his commitment to filming in China, along with other film executives, including Patrick Wachsberger, co-chairman of Lionsgate's Motion Picture Group.

Wang also signaled that the world is changing and China will only play a more significant role in global entertainment in the coming years. He cited statistics about how China is on the verge of eclipsing the U.S. box office as the world's largest. (In 2018, the Chinese box office is expected to reach $10 billion, which is about where the U.S. box office is now.) By 2026, he said, that number will triple.

He also made the business case for American filmmakers adding "more Chinese elements in film." He said, "If you want to profit from this market, you will have to understand the Chinese audience. You have to please them, and win their hearts." Wang made a point of addressing the concerns that China is interested in promoting its own agenda, by adding, "I have no political motivation."

Even more than Wang's words, Monday evening's event made it clear that China's interest in Hollywood is no passing fancy. The line outside of LACMA before the "show," suggested an Apple launch event. Inside, guests were greeted by hostesses wearing sequined gowns before they were led to their designated seats. A Wanda promotional reel showcased the company's lavish hotels, sports properties, and ubiquitous Wanda "plazas." And speakers were brought to the stage to snippets from the pumping scores of Star Wars and Jurassic Park. Afterwards, guests filed into the museum's courtyard for an elegant cocktail party, followed by a VIP dinner.

In this regard, Wang seemed to be heeding his own advice: It remains to be seen if he's won the hearts of Hollywood. But he seems determined to try to please them.

Three Email Habits That Kill Your Whole Team's Productivity

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The way managers communicate sets expectations for how everyone on staff communicates.

Eric, a client of mine, owned and ran a successful service firm with sales of $3.5 million per year and a healthy profit margin. But, he told me, "We're bursting at the seams. I'm working six or seven days a week, putting in 70-plus hours a week, and my team are all regularly working 60-plus hours a week. Is it that I just need to hire more staff?"

He didn't think so, but wasn't sure what else to do. "We've got a solid team here, and I don't want to make it any more complicated," he added. After hashing things out together, it became clear that the overload Eric and his company were experiencing wasn't just a staffing issue. It was more likely a productivity one, starting with how Eric communicated with his staff. Three of his bad email habits were trickling down to everybody else, undermining the entire team's working methods.

Make no mistake: They're widespread in other companies, too. And especially when leaders misuse email, the negative consequences for others can quickly become magnified. Here's what to watch out for.

1. Hyper-Responsiveness

If you're constantly checking your inbox—or even worse, getting push notifications that prod you to—chances are you aren't using email very effectively. Over time, that makes email itself a source of anxiety. My client confessed to feeling uncomfortable as a result of simply not knowing what was in his inbox, and he worried that if he didn't stay on top of it, he would drown in it.

These are fallacies that can quickly become self-fulfilling prophecies. First, it means your attention is constantly getting pulled from higher-value activities so you can handle an incoming message—often a trivial one. As UC Irvine researcher Gloria Mark discovered, it takes the average office worker 20 minutes to return from that interruption to whatever they were doing before.

Hyper-responsiveness to email doesn't just chop your day into a series of small slivers of work punctuated by distraction, it also increases the volume of email you're likely to get. And if you're a leader, that can magnify your entire team's email load proportionately. Think of it this way: The faster you reply, the more responses you'll get in. If you write a total three notes to a team member about the same project in the space of an afternoon, that means they've likely written three, too—one of theirs alternating with one of yours—for a six-email thread. But if you'd just waited to check in until the end of the day or the following morning, you're only writing one note apiece.

One of the best ways to reduce your total email load is to let it "age"—in other words, simply waiting for an hour or two before you reply, or holding your reply for the next day. This allows you to "batch" your time spent responding to email during defined periods, then ignore it the rest of the time so you can focus on other things.

When leaders do this, they give their teams tacit permission to do the same. But it helps to be explicit about it: Discuss hyper-responsiveness with your team and make it clear you consider it a risk to avoid, not a bad habit to indulge.

2. Nighttime And Weekend "Check-Ins"

"Eric, how often do you handle an email that is so important that it couldn't wait until the next workday to respond to?" I asked my client.

"Rarely," he said. "But I like staying on top of my email. I want to know what's in there. And it's easier to send the response right then and there versus having to reread it a second time the next workday." That meant Eric was checking in on his messages after-hours and on weekends, which put pressure on his team members to do the same. Over time, this became part of the company's culture, leaving no one with truly uninterrupted downtime to recharge away from work.

Cutting back on this habit wasn't going to be a cold-turkey kind of thing, I realized. Understanding that Eric felt compelled to check his email and respond immediately, I suggested he start writing his replies right away but use the "delay delivery" feature so the email gets sent the next workday.

If you've had a history of late-night emails to your team, you need to acknowledge it first to yourself and then to your team members. Since it affects them, too, it isn't just a personal quirk you can deal with solo. Bring it up at your next team meeting. Come clean with them about the bad habit and discuss it candidly: When do you and they feel it's important—for the company—for everyone to be available by email? Just make sure you can clearly define the business goals you're serving by whatever timeframe or regularity you agree to; if you can't, think again.

3. Over-CC'ing

"Eric," I said, "I noticed on the agenda I emailed you for this call that you cc'ed two of your team members. May I ask why?"

"Oh, you had asked for some information in advance of our meeting, and I was delegating it out."

"Okay," I said, "That makes sense, but why two people?"

"I always send administrative tasks to two people," he replied. "That way I know at least one of them will handle it."

In your company, do people often feel they have to cc multiple parties, even on mundane emails? Do you notice that people who are only tangentially affected get copied in on the responses to a cc'd email?

You may think you're just keeping folks in the loop. But remember that every email has to be opened, read, mentally processed, and then "handled," even if that just means moving the email to an archive folder or deleting it. Be intentional about when you do and don't cc someone, and work with your team to determine what situations warrant cc'ing and which ones don't. Here's a good rule of thumb: If you want someone to do something with the information you're sharing, include them. Otherwise, think twice.

Your team members may share these email habits or even exhibit some of them that you don't. But as a leader, the way your whole team communicates starts with how you communicate with them.

related video: This CEO's Trick At Getting To Inbox Zero


David Finkel is coauthor of the bestselling SCALE: 7 Proven Principles to Grow Your Business and Get Your Life Back.

Clay Christensen's New Theory Of Innovation Has Everything To Do With Hiring

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If you're trying to innovate by focusing on customer traits, you're doing it wrong.

Business schools spend a great deal of time teaching would-be entrepreneurs and managers about the differences between features and benefits and their importance. Differentiate your product by tinkering with it to make it better or cheaper. Get to know your customer so you can understand how to sell to them.

Not exactly, says Harvard Business School professor and innovation expert Clayton M. Christensen. In his new book, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice, he and coauthors Karen Dillon, Taddy Hall, and David S. Duncan says that customers don't buy products and services as such. Instead, they're hiring them to do a job.

At first, that may seem like a very "insider baseball" distinction. Don't you have to get to know your customer to understand their needs? Yes and no, Christensen says.

Product Or Service For Hire

Let's say you have a customer who has a busy and stressful week at work. On Monday, after she walks through the door at 7 p.m., she exercises. On Tuesday, she pulls out a bottle of Jack Daniels and pours herself a drink. On Wednesday, she reads the Bible, and on Thursday, she uses her Xbox. If you're trying to look at the customer's attributes and connect the dots between these disparate activities and her overall behavior, it's confusing. But when you realize that she's "hiring" these various products to help her unwind, the picture becomes clearer, he explains.

"That's why you need to understand the situations that your customer finds themselves in," says Christensen. That's when they have a "job" and are more likely to buy your product, he says.

Companies that have embraced this model are able to innovate in ways that make it tough to compete. Christensen points to Airbnb as an example. The sleeping-space-for-hire company understands that customers may want to hire a hotel to do a number of jobs: to provide a room with a bed, present a suitable location for a meeting with an important client, or network with other people who are staying there. However, Airbnb is focused on providing a place where people can have a home base to sleep and not be bothered.

"When Airbnb emerged, they were focused on just one of these jobs, and they nailed it," he says.

The Benefits Of A Job Well Done

Such spot-on job performance has its benefits, the authors contend. When you have a deep understanding of the job, you can innovate more specifically to do it well. Rather than broadly guessing at what the customer might want, you can focus on innovation that addresses specific experiences they wish to have and deliver in a more focused manner. When you do that, you enjoy high levels of customer loyalty and repeat business and may even be able to command a premium price.

This offers a competitive advantage to any company that is willing to understand the job rather than the customer. For example, Amazon has turned shopping at disparate locations into a singular, streamlined experience where you can get a staggering number of products in one location and pay for them with one click. That deep understanding came from asking the right questions about the job to be done, Christensen says.

"Just in the shopping experience, if all they do is measure, 'Did we ship it to you on time?' That's a very different experience," he explains. Amazon took it a step further by asking, Christensen adds: "'Did you receive it on time? What was it like to pay for the product, and how hard was it to find the product? What might I buy if I don't buy this? What else could I buy to get the same job done?'" Failure to do so could mean that businesses get better at the wrong things.

Disruption, Redux

This isn't the first time Christensen has brought fresh thinking to the innovation arena. He coined the term "disruptive innovation" in 1995. It "describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves upmarket, eventually displacing established competitors." He addressed the topic again in his 2011 best seller The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business, and described successes and failures of companies like Intel, HP, and Honda in staying on top of their game.

Christensen, who is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and open about his faith, says a practice in the Mormon church was part of the inspiration for his thinking about innovation, especially "jobs for hire."

He describes Mormon services delivered by fellow church members who talk about their own experiences. During the week, members have assignments to help each other. While many people feel the desire to help others but don't know how to do so other than writing a check, Christensen has had to dive in to understand how people need help—in essence, the job that they needed to hire someone to help with, he says. The church's role is to provide that help in a way that strengthens peoples' faith.

"I have responsibility for several other families in our congregation," explains Christensen, "and my job is to be sure that if there are things going on that the rest of us can help with, we help them."

So if there is a measure of divine inspiration in Christensen's latest book, perhaps it's the fact that we all have fundamental jobs we need done and are looking for the best product or service to fill them. Being the best answer/hire for that job ensures loyalty, whether you're providing retail goods, a place to sleep, or connection to a higher power.


Learning How To Keep Staff At 40 Hours Per Week

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New labor laws are expanding who must be paid extra for working more than 40 hours. Here's how managers can keep workweeks under control.

Come December 1, a lot more people must be paid by the hour.

For years, many white collar workers have collected salaries. Their paychecks have not been tied to how many hours they worked. In labor law parlance, such workers were "exempt" from regulations requiring overtime pay (generally time and a half) after 40 hours per week. On December 1, the general bar for exemption, based on federal law, will move from $455 per week ($23,660 per year) to $913 per week ($47,476 per year). Note: These changes only concern federal law. States and cities may have their own rules that employers should be aware of.

This more than doubling is a big deal. Employers will need to ensure compliance, with a lot of eyes on them as they do so. Jeff Gilbreth, a labor and employment partner at Nixon Peabody's Boston office, explains: "It is unusual for developments in labor and employment law to receive such coverage from mainstream media." Slip-ups can mean big liability.

So what are managers to do when supervising people earning in this range? Gilbreth notes that there are a few choices. You can increase people's pay to $913 a week so they stay exempt. You can come up with an estimated average of hours worked, which may be more than 40, and then calculate an employee's hourly rate based on 40 hours at base pay and north of that at overtime rates.

So, for instance, if someone earns $770 per week for 50 hours, this is $14 per hour (40 x 14 = $560, plus 10 x 21 = $210). Of course, this still isn't a set-it-and-forget-it move. "The manager needs to monitor the employee's workload and make sure the estimated number of hours worked is actually occurring in practice," Gilbreth says. Plus, if the hours are too high, the rate becomes too low (and may run afoul of local/state minimum wage laws).

That leaves another option: Try to keep people as close to 40 hours a week as possible to minimize overtime hits. Here are some ways to do just that.

Be Clear That Times Have Changed

"A challenge after December 1 is that many employees who are now non-exempt will not be used to limiting their working time—as exempt employees they worked as much as they needed to get their work done," Gilbreth says. Everyone up and down the line needs to know that throwing hours at a problem is going to be very expensive if the solution involves non-exempt employees.

This can be a good opportunity to change the culture. "People don't know how to evaluate the increasingly complex work that knowledge workers are doing, and so instead of measuring what people do, they jump to measuring how much," says Erin Reid, an associate professor for human resources and management at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University, and a frequent Harvard Business Review contributor. Emphasize that output, not working more hours than colleagues, is the key to advancement.

Embrace Tracking

The reality is that you will have to track hours for lots more people anyway. Why not get the benefits of doing it for everyone, and keep records of what people do (not just the quantity of hours)? This can "motivate employees to be as productive as possible when they are 'on the clock,'" Gilbreth says.

It can also introduce a much-needed dose of reality into organizations. "My research suggests that most white collar workers have a hazy idea of how many hours they work, and an even less clear sense of how much their colleagues work," says Reid. "I have found that people can be quite quick to assert a number—e.g. insisting that they put in 60 hours a week—but when you ask them to break down how they spent a workday, the actual number often looks quite different." Reid has also found incredible gaps between colleagues; at one consulting firm, she notes, some people claimed 70-hour weeks, and others at the same level claimed 50. If they're getting the same amount done, best to study what the 50-hour sorts are doing.

Try Flexible Hours

While it might seem smart to spell out exactly when people should work, that's not the only way to approach the problem. If you're trying to hold people to 40 hours, you want those 40 hours to be as productive as possible. "Companies and managers and employees lose when employees are forced to work when they're tired or unmotivated," says Caroline Beaton, a millennial expert at kununu, a workplace insights platform. A night owl who's useless before 10 a.m. but who's forced to come to work at 8 a.m., is only going to put in six good hours for the eight he's paid, she explains. Allow people to control their hours (with the requirement that people be present during some core hours), and you can potentially increase the productivity ratio.

Streamline And Automate

"At the heart of efficiency is prioritization," says Beaton. "These new laws can be an impetus to evaluate what actually matters in the grand scheme. What's critical to the mission? What's superfluous?" she suggests asking. Get rid of anything that doesn't add value. Automate processes wherever possible, and do skills training to help employees speed up things they do frequently.

Limit Meetings

One survey found that a quarter of workers say they attend five or more unnecessary meetings per week. That can be the difference between a 40-hour workweek and a 45-hour workweek right there. Beyond requiring agendas and timekeepers, "set very clear limits on when meetings can happen," suggests Reid. "For example, organizations can insist that all meetings began and end sometime between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m." The downward pressure a narrow window allows "could be good for productivity in general," says Reid.

Curtail After-Hours Email

One big headache with the new labor laws: Time spent checking and responding to emails and phone calls is officially work time. Because of this, Gilbreth notes that some organizations are considering taking away mobile devices from non-exempt employees come December 1. This would limit the chances that inefficient after-hours email checking turns into a big overtime bill (without enough gained to justify it).

Even if you don't go that far, recognize that "email is a big culprit in the creeping expansion of the workday, and it is a big reason why people feel that they are always on, and eventually burn out," says Reid. So, in general, "do not send or respond to emails after regular work hours." This can encourage more thoughtful communication.

If people want to work flexible hours, encourage setting aside an actual block of time to read and respond to emails, rather than doing it in bits and pieces. Also, responses can be saved as drafts and sent out during regular hours to limit potential overtime hits to other people.

Push Back On Client Expectations

If clients want the moon, they need to pay for covering the overtime bills that will result. Building this into negotiations can help everyone reach clarity on the scope of work, and can help keep hours under control.

Plan The Work

Many long hours are driven by pre-deadline emergencies that could have been avoided with better planning. If managers plan work flows well, allowing space for things to go wrong, this can reduce pressure to go far north of 40 hours in the last weeks before major deadlines.

When that's not possible? "If you know a huge event or project is approaching, make a conscious choice about whether you're going to take the overtime hit or start rationing hours," Beaton says. That way employees can plan their lives, too.

Meet The Leadership Team Driving GM's Recovery

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CEO Mary Barra says, "I don't pretend I have all the answers." Her close-knit core group helps her finds the ones she doesn't have.

For 106 years, General Motors was led by a series of men, many of whom might generously be described as dictators: They had all the answers, and they prescribed the company's strategy. The company's first female CEO runs the show differently.

"I don't pretend I have all the answers," says Mary Barra. "I run the group, but I want everyone's best ideas. We need a diverse team with many different kinds of experience," she explains. "In such a complex business, we will make better decisions if we bring our different points of view and the different ways we think."

One way she does this is by working closely with the three key executives who help her run the company: president Dan Ammann, global product chief Mark Reuss, and CFO Chuck Stevens.

in January of 2014, it didn't take long for her to signal that things were different. She quickly promoted her two chief contenders for the CEO position: Ammann and Reuss. "Everybody said give him 18 months and he's gone," says Mark Reuss, laughing as we chat in his office on the 29th floor of Detroit's Renaissance Center. "But here I am. We're making decisions for the next ten or fifteen years of this company, and by the way, we're all going to be here."

By any measure you choose, the quartet has been successful. Eight years after its infamous bankruptcy, GM is regularly delivering profitable quarters with solid operating margins. Critics laud the quality of its vehicles, and even its innovation: the new Bolt EV, which will launch this winter, has been deemed a credible competitor to Tesla's own offerings.

General Motors Executive Vice President of Global Product Development, Global Purchasing and Supply Chain Mark Reuss (l to r); GM CEO Mary Barra, GM President Dan Ammann and GM Executive Vice President and CFO Chuck Stevens[Photo: Steve Fecht for General Motors]

Work Together But Keep Individual Responsibilities

What makes the core four effective? For starters, each has a distinct role.

Ammann oversees day-to-day operations, while also steering the company's future strategy. He led the company's $500 million investment in Lyft, the No. 2 ride-sharing company, and its $581 million acquisition of Cruise Automation, which makes autonomous systems for cars.

Reuss is "the best car guy in the business," says Barra. An engineer by training who refurbishes vintage Chevys on the weekend, he's the guy who oversees R&D, purchasing, and the manufacturing and design of the company's cars, trucks, and SUVs. "This is the job I always aspired to have," he says.

Stevens is the man who is charged with ensuring that the company satisfies investors with consistent, growing earnings. That's no small order for a corporation that is emerging from decades of turbulence; GM's stock has dropped from$40 to $32 since Barra took over, despite its recent success.

General Motors President Dan Ammann[Photo: Jeffrey Sauger for General Motors]

Just Pick Up The Phone

Barra is the fulcrum, ensuring that the four are in constant communication and aligned on strategy. "Mark and I have had a couple of times where people have told us, 'Well, you two disagree," says Barra. "What we do is just pick up the phone. I'll say, 'So and so says we're disconnected on this, I just wanted you to know.' A lot of times it's either we were misinterpreted, or we were looking at at something from a different lens." She and Amman now travel extensively and make it a point to schedule long phone conversations at least once a week. The constant dialogue is a marked departure from GM's past, when information tended to be siloed away, and communication was so stilted that the company became famous for the "GM nod" (agreeing in a meeting and then doing nothing once it's over).

All four want to eradicate any vestige of that culture. Ammann, the son of a New Zealand dairy farmer, came to GM from Morgan Stanley, and has a visceral aversion to bureaucratic torpor. "I'm not even much of a pauser," he says. Barra, Stevens, and Reuss feel this passionately: they, and their families, suffered in the old GM culture.

Barra's father was a dye-maker for 35 years in a GM factory. Stevens, who sports the hefty gold ring he was given for his 25th anniversary at the company, comes from a family that has clocked over 300 years of service at the company. He went overseas for 15 years because he didn't think he could get anything significant done in Detroit. Reuss's father was booted from the presidency just one year after being appointed. "I never felt we were all aligned," says Reuss, who joined the company in 1986. "I never felt the company was on offense and ready to take the lead. It was all defense," he recalls, "And all of us wondering, 'When are we going to do what's right, and do it the right way?'"

General Motors Executive Vice President Product Development Mark Reuss[Photo:Steve Fecht for GMC]

Stay On Offense

Two years ago they got their chance. GM's directors certainly believe the company is now on the offense. They gave Barra the chairwoman title last January. Still, turning around a corporation like GM takes many years, if not decades.

When Steve Jobs was trying to revive Apple in the late 1990s, he quickly assembled a core team of talented, like-minded execs to tackle the daunting project with him. That core was remarkably resilient, despite the fact that it took five years for the company to truly recover. Jobs's ability to keep that group together, working at peak capability, was in many ways the key to his success.

The challenge Barra has taken on is equally daunting. And like Jobs, the long-term success of her turnaround may well depend on her ability to fully unleash the talents of the execs she's chosen as the core of her company.

related video: A Compostable Car? Meet The Woman Who Wants To See It Happen At Ford

Mary Barra Is Remaking GM's Culture—And The Company Itself

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To keep pace in the race to reinvent transportation, the General Motors CEO is shaking up America's biggest car company.

General Motors CEO Mary Barra was walking the stage at the J.P. Morgan Automotive conference in New York on an early August morning, making a dramatic point-by-point case for the company she leads: that GM, despite all its challenges and varied competitors, just might be the strongest and most well-positioned business in all of automotive transportation.

And how did the audience of investors respond to Barra's pitch? With seeming indifference. Indeed, many of the attendees appeared to be more engaged with their iPhones than the CEO's presentation. It wasn't just that lunchtime was approaching and blood-sugar levels were low, or that the meeting room's drab brown-and-tan decor and muted acoustics had dulled everyone's senses. No, the bigger obstacle was most likely an instinctive skepticism about GM itself—and, perhaps, about Barra, too. General Motors was once an acclaimed titan, the most respected company in America, but those days are long gone. Decades of decline have been punctuated by bankruptcy, a government bailout, and a devastating ignition-switch design flaw that has been implicated in 139 deaths. All of this solidified the notion that GM was a dysfunctional, bureaucracy-ridden has-been. If any business was likely to dominate the future of auto transport, it would be a Silicon Valley darling like Uber, Tesla, Google, or even Apple—all of which have been aggressively investing in disrupting the car business as we know it. They are the ones with the creativity, the talent, and the consumer passion to do something special. Not old-fashioned GM.

As for Barra herself—dressed in a conservative brown suit, speaking with a flat, slightly nasal Michigan accent—her stage presence didn't exactly challenge this story line. The best she could do to liven up her less-than-dynamic delivery was chopping one hand into the other to punctuate her argument. A 35-year lifer at GM, Barra is a product of the exact company and culture that she is tasked with transforming. Perhaps it's no surprise that GM's valuation has dropped by about a quarter since she became CEO, the stock falling from $39 a share to a recent $32. If there is anything unexpected about her as a GM leader, it's that she's a woman (which, unfortunately, hasn't always been viewed as an asset in the testosterone heavy auto world).

But here's the wacky thing: What if all those reasons for doubting GM and dismissing Barra as something less than a Steve Jobs–like revolutionary . . . what if they are all wrong? A case of prejudice and assumption that misses some larger understanding? What if Barra is the perfect leader to reestablish GM as a premium, world-beating brand, outdueling all of those tech cowboys? Now that would be a story for the ages.


GM does have some things going for it, signs that it just might be a winner in the long-haul future of transportation—if things line up the right way. After Barra's J.P. Morgan presentation, I met with her in a conference room upstairs in the bank's offices, one of several meetings I've had with her and her top lieutenants over the past few months. Barra, an electrical engineer, doesn't have the shiny bravado of so many tech-world leaders, but a career spent overseeing factories, supply chains, and GM's entire product portfolio has given her a practicality they sometimes lack. She is much more at ease in person than she was on stage. When she explained that her father, who spent 35 years working as a die maker in a GM factory, taught her the value of hard work, it came off as authentic, not clichéd. She is keenly aware that GM's 223,000 employees will have to behave differently if its plans for the future are to succeed; that she needs to replace a culture of blame and bureaucracy with one driven by accountability, speed, and collaboration. "In this area of rapid transformation, you have to have a culture that's agile," she said. "We still have a lot of work to do."

GM could have gone away in 2009, disappeared. Yet today it is a profit machine, with some $20 billion in cash on its books. It has paid back more than two-thirds of the funds it received from the government, and for the last three consecutive quarters has reported solid results, including more than doubling its earnings in its June filing, to $2.9 billion. Just as critically, over the past year, GM has leaned into ride sharing, autonomous-driving technology, and electric vehicles at a heady pace. With a flurry of deals and product releases more reminiscent of its tech-industry competitors, GM has, in short order, constructed a portfolio of assets dedicated to disrupting its own core business from within.

What if Steve Jobs had been tasked with reviving a post-bankruptcy GM? What playbook would he have adopted? Looking back at Jobs's return to Apple in 1997, he was faced with a financially strapped and dysfunctional operation. His first priority was to stabilize cash flow so he would have the resources to put toward innovation. This, too, was required at GM, and so far it has been successful. Jobs's other priority was to make sure he had the right team in place around him and the right culture upon which to build. It wasn't iPods or iPhones that Jobs obsessed about at that stage. It was the people. Only then could he turn himself to the products in earnest.

Barra has her own, similar obsessions. In Detroit a few weeks earlier, I had watched her deliver a far more impassioned—and successful—presentation in yet another dreary auditorium, in the bowels of Tower 300 of GM's seven-building headquarters complex. This time Barra was speaking to 35 newly promoted mid-level executives, and they eagerly followed every word. "Remember your whole career, how you've been talking about them?" Barra said. "If only they would get it. If only they would work this out. Well, you are now they. If you don't like something, you have to talk to yourself."

Chuck Stevens[Photo: Steve Fecht for General Motors]

Barra knows that she cannot succeed without turning around GM's famously stagnant bureaucracy. This is a place, after all, that has long been known for its "GM nod" (agreeing to something in a meeting and then never doing anything about it) and "GM salute" (pinning blame on somebody else). "Look at what came out in the Valukas Report," CFO Chuck Stevens told me, referring to a 2014 internal investigation of the ignition-switch crisis, which delivered a scathing indictment of GM's management. "No sense of urgency. No accountability or responsibility. A siloed mentality."

That kind of culture will never compete with Google and Uber. Barra has launched a slew of initiatives across the company designed to push GM in a new direction—from a program called GM 2020, which builds cross-functional "co-labs" to address all kinds of problems; to a yearlong "transformational leadership" course for senior execs; to a quarterly two-day off-site that Barra personally leads with her 16 top reports, focused not on strategy but on their own interactions. "Mary believes that if we change the behaviors [of top managers], people who work for us will see that and emulate it," says HR chief John Quattrone. "There won't be this dysfunction that we had before."


Back in June, Barra had gone to San Francisco for her first test ride in one of GM's new Bolt electric cars, which was equipped with the autonomous-driving technology of Cruise Automation, a company GM purchased earlier in the year for $581 million. Barra sat in the back seat with Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt and kept her eyes trained on two things: the busy streets of San Francisco and the technician up front, who was resting his fingertips lightly on the steering wheel, as is required by California regulations. Upstairs, under the broad wood beams of Cruise's airy office, staff members gathered around a video monitor showing the car, which was marked by a flashing green light that moved around a digital map of the city. If something were to go wrong and the driver needed to grasp the steering wheel and quickly take control, the light would turn red, as it had on previous drives when the Bolt had shifted lanes. The crowd—and those two CEO passengers—was eager for that not to happen this time.

The drive was an important moment, symbolically and practically. Barra says GM started down "an evolutionary path" toward re-envisioning the company soon after it emerged from bankruptcy. At that point, under then-CEO Ed Whitacre, GM's efforts at disruption had a me-too, late-to-the-party mien. GM launched its first hybrid car, the Volt, in 2010, significantly lagging behind hybrid pioneers such as Toyota. Still, Barra says, it was an important first step in acknowledging where the company needed to go. Over the next few years, GM began incorporating aspects of self-driving technology into select models, including software that alerts drivers if they veer out of their lane or stops the car if it detects an imminent collision. Many other car companies were also integrating features like this, but at least GM was in the game.

The evolutionary began tilting toward the revolutionary in late 2014. Barra had been appointed CEO earlier that year and pulled together a new group of leaders: former investment banker Dan Ammann, whom she named president; longtime GM exec Mark Reuss, whom she appointed product chief; and CFO Stevens. Together they dug into evolving data about the rise of ride sharing, the ambivalence of urban-dwelling millennials toward car ownership, and the appeal of all-electric vehicles. They looked at the economics: Shared self-driving cars might cut the cost of an average trip in half. And they started thinking about the daily experience of the 86% of Americans who commute to work by car. "Lots of people say they love to drive," says Ammann. "But I haven't met anyone yet who says they love their commute." All those trends threatened the traditional car-selling business. While none of these factors were yet showing up in GM's improving bottom line, Barra's team concluded that without radical change, the road ahead would be rough. So how to turn these looming shifts into an opportunity?

What Barra was trying to do in that August J.P. Morgan presentation was lay out how quickly, radically, and effectively GM has put in place the plan it started hatching at the end of 2014. Spanning the arenas of connectivity, sharing, alternative propulsion, and autonomous technology, GM now has credible assets in each pillar of the business increasingly referred to as personal mobility. The company has, in short order, constructed a five-part portfolio, which arguably gives it as many or more of the necessary pieces to succeed in the driving world of tomorrow as anyone else:

1. The platform. While most people think of wireless connectivity as the purview of Silicon Valley, when it comes to the auto world, GM's OnStar service provides both access and data that no other competitor has available. Historically, OnStar has been used by drivers to create an immediate connection to a live operator who can offer directions or help in an emergency. But moving forward, that platform will be applied to providing remote diagnostics, distributing software updates, and tracking data—not to mention managing autonomous fleets.

2. The partner. On January 4, GM announced a $500 million investment in Lyft, the country's No. 2 ride-share service. The deal gives GM a foothold (it reportedly later passed on buying Lyft outright), allowing it to test, learn, and take advantage if ride sharing takes off even more. Already this year, the companies have worked together on a program called Express Drive, which lets Lyft drivers in seven big cities rent GM cars at heavy discounts, with other collaborations in the works.

General Motors' new car-sharing service, Maven[Photo: John F. Martin/General Motors]

3. The startup. Eleven days after the Lyft investment became public, GM announced that it would launch a proprietary car-sharing service called Maven. A Zipcar-like offering, Maven taps into another possible future of mobility: replacing ownership with sharing. This startup inside GM has some features Zipcar doesn't—an app that lets you book, open, and start the car; free Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, OnStar, and 4G wireless in every car—and it is already operating in seven cities, with plans to expand significantly next year. At the same time, Maven lays the groundwork for a possible future when GM owns and operates a fleet of its own autonomous cars. It is a testing ground that can pivot as the marketplace does, even providing a backup brand that could be tapped for ride sharing in the event of Lyft's demise or its outright purchase by a competitor.

The Chevrolet Bolt EV[Photo: Steve Fecht for General Motors]

4. The car. Barra believes GM's new all-electric Bolt, which goes on sale later this year, will be a landmark product. When she and then-CEO Daniel Akerson initiated the Bolt project in 2013, the goal was to develop a fully electric vehicle that would be fun to drive, affordable, and practical, with a range of at least 200 miles (the minimum needed to make it viable for commuters, research shows). At a cost of just $30,000 (after a $7,500 federal tax rebate) and getting 238 miles from a single charge, the new car will far surpass the specs of competing electrics made by competitors such as Ford and Nissan. While the Bolt is similar in price and range to Tesla's heavily anticipated Model 3, it will be available to consumers much earlier.

5. The technology. GM's initial approach to autonomous driving was to incrementally add features to existing vehicles, gradually making drivers more comfortable with deferring to a computer. But when Ammann nailed down the acquisition of Cruise in March, it marked an investment into the more radical all-at-once strategy being pursued by the likes of Google and Uber. Launched in 2013, Cruise has built a complex array of software and hardware that uses artificial intelligence to pilot a car. While in-house GM engineers were working on their own fully autonomous system, Ammann and Barra came to believe that Cruise was further ahead—and so they jumped. Cruise CEO Vogt has been obsessed with self-driving cars since childhood, and designed his first autonomous vehicle for a state fair at the age of 13. When Vogt started Cruise, his goal was to sell autonomous-driving kits that could be retrofitted to regular cars. After he pivoted to the bigger idea of operating a fleet of autonomous cars, the shift put him right in line with the future as imagined by Ammann. Now GM and Cruise are working together to implement that vision at a huge scale: millions of customers, mostly young and urban, sharing rides in autonomous Bolt EVs.

Of course, Cruise's technology actually has to work, which is why Barra's test drive that June morning was so significant. Inside Cruise HQ, the mood was confident but tense, with little noise beyond the occasional iPhone ping. As the car navigated a particularly heavy stretch of traffic, it had to make a sudden lane shift. Barra and Vogt watched the driver's hands; the Cruise staff watched the telemetrics monitor. The driver never grasped the wheel; the light stayed green.

After the car piloted itself back into Cruise's garage, Barra and Vogt bounded into the office, triumphant. Barra stood in front of the assembled crowd. "If somebody [at GM] says you can't have something, or you can't do something, or it's going to take this much time, and it doesn't make sense to you, challenge them," she told them. "I want to take the energy and speed and how you look at doing things and drive it into the core of GM."


If there's skepticism about GM, it is hardly without foundation. The basic components of autonomous, electric, shared rides are being pursued by many of GM's competitors. Ford, for one, has announced plans to have a fully self-driving car (with no steering wheel) available by 2021, and is building its own stable of mobility-focused products and services. Uber launched a trial fleet of autonomous cars in September that is already ferrying paying passengers around Pittsburgh. Tesla's ability to persuade 400,000 people to put down a $1,000 deposit on a Model 3 just from a press conference is eye-opening.

But what if we train that same lens of skepticism on the tech world? Suddenly, GM's aspirations may not look so far-fetched. After years of development of self-driving cars and billions of dollars of investment, Google has little to show for it. And Apple, according to published reports this summer, may be rethinking its approach to making a car. Despite all of Silicon Valley's astonishing accomplishments, it turns out putting together thousands of pounds of metal and plastic in a way that can safely move human beings at high speeds over great distances is, well, pretty hard to do. "[Google and Apple] generate a lot of cash, and have a lot of resources and talent, but neither one has made cars," says Reuss. "The piece that is not well understood outside of the automotive industry is how hard it is to take technology and integrate it into a car. It seems like you should be able to layer it in and have it work and that would be great. Right. The effort to integrate that into the car is equal to or more than the technology itself. A car has to work right every time, all the time."

Then there's Tesla, which, with its high-profile Model S electric luxury car and the upcoming affordable Model 3, has been at the forefront of transportation's transformations. But the company lost nearly $600 million in the first half of 2016, and two fatal Model S accidents have raised questions about the viability of its technology. While GM is sitting on some $20 billion in cash, Tesla is deeply in debt and seems likely to need a major infusion in order to achieve even its near-term goals. Despite its outsize reputation, Tesla delivered just 50,580 vehicles in 2015, compared to GM's output of nearly 10 million. Elon Musk says Tesla will make 500,000 cars in 2018, but so far this year the company has missed its production goals. "Moving from producing tens of thousands of vehicles to hundreds of thousands of vehicles is a very significant challenge," says Mike Ableson, who heads GM's strategy group. "The Silicon Valley culture of developing fast and iterating fast can be a strength. But if you're going to put this stuff in production, sooner or later you've got to turn it into hardware at high volume. That's the Detroit side of the discussion."

But what if that whole us-versus-them way of looking at it is wrong? Maybe, as the technology improves and consumer trends solidify, GM and the tech world won't prove to be rivals after all. Perhaps they're just different pieces of a larger puzzle—a future where Silicon Valley inspiration and Detroit know-how (and vice versa) converge in ways that yield transformative innovations we can't yet imagine. "I don't think any one company can do this all by itself, automotive or nonautomotive," says Reuss. "That's why you see acquisitions and partnerships happening." In other words, GM could still be part of the mobility of the future even if all of this year's new ventures fall flat.

For now, however, Barra isn't thinking about that. She knows the work she and her team have done so far is just the beginning of a long process with many unforeseeable turns to come, but she's determined to be first across the finish line. And like Steve Jobs and his renowned reality distortion field, the CEO believes that determination is as important as strategy. "Don't confuse progress with winning," she said while onstage at GM's headquarters, discussing the company's autonomous-car efforts. "It's not like, 'Check, check, check, done.' It's, 'Okay, the table is barely set. This is a huge opportunity. So what are we going to do?' " In her vision of GM's revved-up culture, Barra told the group, "best efforts" alone aren't going to cut it. "Are you doing what you can?" she asked. "Or are you doing what it takes to win?"

related video: Ford's CEO On The Future Of Connected And Autonomous Cars

Now GoPro Wants To Win Over The Risk-Averse, Too

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Because every day is an adventure.

With new audiences key to the company's growth—and 43% of customers confirming that content featured on the company's Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts influenced their purchasing decision—GoPro has increasingly been using social media to showcase its cameras' edge in capturing regular life, from weddings to pet tricks. Already, lifestyle footage is boasting a higher average engagement rate than sports content. (Daily mentions by GoPro's 478 "social media influencers" haven't hurt.) The company is also developing a slew of original programs in several categories, including sports, recognizing, for example, that couch surfers thrill to 15-foot waves, too. Here are four markets that GoPro is actively engaging.

Sports

Percentage of GoPro's total social content (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter): 40%
Users' favorite GoPro equipment: The Strap, which mounts a camera to an arm or leg
Targeted content:Road Trip New Zealand, a six-part skateboarding series on YouTube.

Family & Kids

Percentage of GoPro's total social content (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter): 20%
Users' favorite GoPro equipment: The Handler, a hand grip that stabilizes your camera and floats to the surface if you accidentally let go under water
Targeted content:Kids Save the World, a rumored upcoming video series

[Photo: Drew Goldberg]

Travel

Percentage of GoPro's total social content (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter): 25%
Users' favorite GoPro equipment: Head Strap plus QuickClip, which captures hands-free footage while on the go
Targeted content:Beyond Places, reportedly an upcoming show featuring global social media influencers

Animals

Percentage of GoPro's total social content (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter): 15%
Users' favorite GoPro equipment: Fetch, a harness that can mount a camera on a dog's chest or back to capture its point of view
Targeted content: Instagram videos starring canine brand ambassador Loki the Wolfdog

The Untold Story Of How Lip Balm Upstart EOS Outdid Chapstick

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How EOS dared to enter an oversaturated market and became the lip balm of choice for the millennial generation.

For over a century, buying lip balm meant scanning the aisles of a drug store or supermarket for a small, cylindrical tube of Chapstick. The sticks felt clinical, complete with an "active ingredient" list on the packaging. If you wanted to go wild, you could skip the tasteless "original" flavor and spring for cherry or mint.

But seven years ago, pastel-colored orbs of lip balm called EOS began to pop up everywhere. They took over shelf space at Walgreens, then Walmart, then Target. Beauty editors at Cosmo and Allure couldn't get enough of the stuff, raving about flavors like honeydew and grapefruit. And then Miley Cyrus, Christina Aguilera, and Kim Kardashian were spotted whipping balls of EOS out of their makeup bags.

Products from EOS—the acronym for the company's full name, Evolution of Smooth—are splashed all over beauty and fashion magazines. But the company's founders haven't spoken about their business strategy until now. In an exclusive interview with Fast Company, they told us how they created a $250 million company that has, according to consulting and research firm Kline, become the second best-selling lip balm in the country, after Burt's Bees, and outpaces Chapstick and Blistex, which have been around for far longer.

Kline Research says that EOS has singlehandedly driven growth in the oral care category. It currently sells over 1 million units a week and future prospects look promising, since the global lip care market is projected to increase steadily to $2 billion by 2020, driven by demand for natural and organic products, which is EOS's speciality.

"Not necessarily building up information about it was something quite deliberate on our part," Sanjiv Mehra, EOS cofounder and managing partner, explains. Mehra points out that as a small startup, they wanted to focus all their attention on creating products and distributing them. "As we've grown, we believe that it is important for consumers to know a little bit more about the business we are and the values we stand for."

Rethinking The Tube

Nearly a decade ago, Mehra, who had spent his career in consumer packaged-goods companies like PepsiCo and Unilever, joined forces with Jonathan Teller and Craig Dubitsky, who had spent time at startup incubators, to think about how they could shake up the beauty aisle in the drugstore. (Dubitsky left before EOS launched to manage a new oral care company called Hello Products.)

The lip balm category struck them as a prime candidate for innovation, since the vast majority of products on the market "were indistinguishable" from their 100-year-old predecessor, Teller says. Many brands appeared to be driven primarily by cutting costs and competing on price, he points out. "It appeared to us that everybody in this category was being lazy. That was an opportunity."

Lip balm tended to be treated as a unisex commodity, like toothpaste or shampoo. But, as they did in-depth consumer research, they found that the product was overwhelmingly used by women as part of their beauty regime. On sensory panels, users they spoke to explained that they would lose lip balm tubes in their handbags. Many liked the idea of pots of lip balm that were entering the market, but they did not like to apply it with their fingers, because it seemed unhygienic. But one of their most important findings was that they did not find applying lip balm fun or enjoyable. "The products that women depend on every day should deliver moments of delight that elevate these daily routines," Mehra says.

So they set about creating a product that would be tailor-made for women's everyday experiences, using their own funds and startup capital. (They still have not taken in external investment.) They wanted to rethink the lip balm format from the ground up, so they brought in a clay artist who modeled different shapes. "We were trying to to make the product as imaginatively as possible and not create an incremental variant over what was already in market," Teller explains.

Even though they were coming up with a radically different take on the lip balm concept, they didn't want to make something that would be a fad. "We had to do it in a way that was not gimmicky, so that it would stand the test of time," Mehra says. "We had to make a product and a package that would be seen as useful for a very long time." In his mind, this meant that the lip balm had to be effective and consistently pleasurable to use, not just a wacky new addition to the lip balm aisle.

In they end, they decided to think about how the product would engage all five senses, from soft round packaging that felt good in the hands, to the colors of the orbs, to the smells, to the way the flavors tasted, and even to the clicking sound the sphere makes when it closes. They would price the lip balm at about $3, so that it could compete on price with all the other drugstore lip balms, but they decided to use organic ingredients. (Earlier this year, some customers who had a bad reaction to the product brought a class action lawsuit to the company, but it was quickly settled out of court and EOS was not required to change any of its ingredients.)

Throughout it all, they wanted to focus on creating an emotional connection with the user, rather than being simply another commodity. So they picked the tagline, "The lip balm that makes you smile."

Big Dreams

But it wasn't enough to create an innovative new product. How would a startup compete in a market dominated by giants like Chapstick, which is owned by Pfizer, and Burt's Bees, which is owned by Clorox?

Mehra and Teller explain that it wasn't easy getting into stores. Mehra was himself familiar with the process, and they also hired an experienced sales representative. But buyers at drugstores and chain stores didn't know what to make of this new product. Many thought that customers were creatures of habit who were loyal to their existing lip balm brand. "There were a lot of male buyers out there who would say that they didn't understand the product," Mehra says.

This makes sense, since the EOS team had carefully designed the product for female users. But then they were lucky enough to get a meeting with a female buyer at Walgreens who loved the little spheres. They landed their first account with her, and after the successful launch of the product, Walmart and Target later decided to sell EOS on their shelves.

This brought them to their next big hurdle: To compete with the industry leaders, they would have to scale very quickly. They decided early on to invest in their own equipment, rather than relying on a third-party manufacturer. Mehra and Teller remember going to engineering trade shows to see how they could get experts to create machinery for them. Ultimately, they managed to create a production facility that is almost entirely automated from start to finish. This has served them well, since they were able to meet the demands of every new account they landed very quickly.

Marketing To Millennials

Besides getting products on shelves, the cofounders wanted to create a buzz around their new product. They decided that their target audience was millennial women between the ages of 25 and 35 who were style conscious. EOS advertised in the same ways that the older brands did, through magazine and television ads, but they also became experts at influencer marketing, which they believed was a smart way to reach their demographic.

They contacted beauty bloggers who reviewed the product and talked about it on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. They worked with millennial celebrities to get the word out about the lip balm through product placements and endorsements. EOS appeared in Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears music videos, was a headline sponsor for Demi Lovato's world tour, and Taylor Swift became its Asian spokesperson. "We became the largest advertiser in our category," Teller says.

EOS has also worked to build a large social media presence. It now has more than 1.8 million followers on Instagram and nearly 7 million followers on Facebook. A photograph of a new EOS flavor can get over 40,000 likes.

Finally, the brand partnered with other major players on the market. It collaborated with Keds to produce an EOS shoe that came with a matching lip balm. It worked on a limited-edition holiday collection with designer Rachael Roy. It created an Alice in Wonderland collection with Disney that sold out in days and showed up on eBay for hundreds of dollars. (Some are still being sold, starting at $75.)

All of this work has paid off. In seven short years, the brand emerged from an incubator to become a household product. It has even spawned a host of copycats. Blistex and Revo (made by Proctor and Gamble) have spherical lip balms that take a page from EOS's playbook, while Walgreens and Sephora have created their own iterations of it. These days, the company sells over a million lip balms a week, which is more than they sold in their entire first year in business.

For all this success, the company is working hard to continue innovating. It comes up with new collections regularly, so that there is a constant stream of new products on shelves. EOS has also begun to create shaving creams and hand lotions, and plans to enter new categories in the future.

As Mehra and Teller look back, they believe that their unique backgrounds allowed them to take on a giant of their industry. Mehra, having worked at major corporations, understood the ins and outs of big business, while Teller was immersed in startup culture. Says Mehra: "That approach of using an entrepreneurial mind-set and big-company discipline is part of how we do things every day at the company."

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